6/4/24: Wisconsin Loves Bitcoin 🧀🐱🐘

Author

Valko
June 04, 2024

Top News

  1. Wisconsin pension fund buys $163M BTC in trailblazing move

  2. Roaring Kitty faces E*Trade ban as GameStop holdings surge 48%

  3. Thailand approves the first spot Bitcoin ETF

Specs’ Breakdown

1. Wisconsin pension fund buys $163M BTC in trailblazing move

⌐◪-◪ → The State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB) just purchased $164M Bitcoin via BlackRock’s IBIT and Grayscale’s GBTC.

This is a big move for a few reasons:

  • 1st State pension fund to purchase BTC

  • Pensions usually don’t invest in young ETFs

  • Proof ETFs unlocked a massive pool of capital

SWIB is probably testing the waters and will likely increase its position over time. For context, at the end of 2023, SWIB managed $156B, which means their BTC allocation is a measly 0.1% of their portfolio — lots of room to grow.

The first domino has fallen, expect more to follow.

2. Roaring Kitty faces E*Trade ban as GameStop holdings surge 48%

⌐◪-◪ → The notorious Roaring Kitty — the man behind the GameStop meme stock frenzy — might get banned on E*Trade, which is owned by Morgan Stanely.

This move could backfire in two ways:

  1. It ruins trust between E*Trade and retail investors, which may lead to a massive loss in customers/trading volume

  2. It ruins trust between TradFi and retail investors in general, proving the need for DeFi’s permissionless infrastructure

Furthermore, it could mean massive losses for Roaring Kitty as his “Pump and Dump” strategy relies on selling the top, which might not be possible if they ban his account. I can’t imagine transferring securities between brokerages is all that fast either.

Roaring Kitty is about to have the same decentralization epiphany Vitalik had when Blizzard removed his beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell in WoW.

And on that day he realized what horrors centralized services can bring.

3. Thailand approves the first spot Bitcoin ETF

⌐◪-◪ → BOOM! Thailand just approved its first spot Bitcoin ETF, joining the ranks of the U.S., the U.K., Hong Kong, South Korea, and Australia — which started trading today.

We might be entering a new era for mankind, where the leading global financial power is no longer a single empire, country, religion, or bank, but rather Bitcoin — the world’s first public digital payments infrastructure.

Money was always destined to be owned by the people.

Everything Else

⛓️ Crypto & DeFi

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  • Fold adds new feature and team member to better bank bitcoiners

  • Notcoin surges 219% as TON reenters top 10

  • Cryptoqueen was murdered by drug kingpin: BBC

  • Connext rebrands to Everclear, introduces 'clearing layer'

  • Solana saw nearly half a million tokens launched last month

  • Blast passes on cheap fees to users without bundling

  • Trump conviction barely dents election odds: prediction markets

  • Bitcoin hash rate plummets: steepest 7-day decline since July 2021

  • Coinbase Layer 2 activity hits all-time highs amid wallet speculation

🏦 Wall Street & VC

🏛️ Legal & Regulatory

  • Dapper Labs agrees to $4M settlement in class action securities suit

  • Epoch Times CFO charged with $67M crypto fraud

  • Binance to limit unregulated stablecoins in EU due to new crypto rules

🌎 Rest of the World

🖼️ NFTs & Metaverse

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