Friday, June 16, 2023

Crypto theatre, the macro end-game begins, and NFT art is not dead

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi Berra ||

Hi all, and happy Friday! I hope that this weekend you get to carve out some time to touch grass, look at the sky and appreciate the world continuing to turn, oblivious of the building market tension. Things are getting so interesting that it’s easy to forget to take a breather.

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Programming note: Due to a conflict, the daily email will skip publication on Monday, June 19th – back in your inbox on Tuesday!

WHAT I’M WATCHING

A whopping political message. Yesterday, BlackRock – the world’s largest asset manager by AUM – filed for a spot BTC ETF. This is astonishing. It’s also extremely unlikely, but that’s not the point. More on this below.

The market reaction. Not surprisingly, BTC bounced on the back of this. Also not surprisingly, it didn’t bounce by much. More on this below.

Pressure on Gensler. This is building. It’s not just the BlackRock filing, which is a very strong message. It’s also the FOIA request filed by the Blockchain Association for information regarding the SEC and digital assets platform Prometheum. More on this below.

NFT art. It turns out that the market is far from dead. Gone are the days of eye-watering zeroes in NFT prices, but Sotheby’s auction yesterday of some of the pieces from the collapsed Three Arrows Capital collection closed with higher-than-expected prices for most, with one piece selling for $6.2 million. The media often makes this mistake: just because the hype is gone, that doesn’t mean a concept is over. It means that it can evolve in a more natural environment, with the evolution driven by those that care about the utility rather than the speculation.

The Value Prop. Blockchain development team Polygon Labs has released a database of blockchain-based applications, divided into activity categories, and I am really excited about this. It will help us keep track of who is doing what, and where. The publication feels especially timely and relevant now, with dampened speculative activity shifting attention to utility and growth. I haven’t had time to dig deep into the information yet, but so far it seems to offer an illuminating and motivating look at just how far the ecosystem has come.

MARKETS

A new phase

It feels like we’re entering the end game. This is a period in any cycle just before trends turn, and is usually characterized by chaos and conflict.