The Breakdown First Five - Tuesday, July 18 2023

Welcome back to The Breakdown First Five — the 5 most interesting and/or important stories in bitcoin, crypto, and markets to start your day.

5. Whale wakes up

A wallet that received 61,000 ETH eight years ago during the ICO has transferred the entire dormant balance to Kraken. The ether was purchased at 31 cents with the stash now worth $116M. No other transactions have been recorded since the ICO. It’s impossible to know what the Ethereum whales intentions are, but speculation focused on either staking or dumping.

4. Deltec cash seized

The US Secret Service have seized up to $58M from Bahamian Crypto bank Deltec. The bank has been the subject of speculation and scandal for years, most recently being linked to the FTX empire. Court documents unsealed on Monday claimed the funds were seized in connection to “international criminal money laundering syndicates operating cryptocurrency investment and other wire fraud scams.” Funds were seized from a custodial account in NYC.

3. Bitcoin ETPs heat up

Bitcoin exchange traded products experienced massive inflows in the month since Blackrock kickstarted a new narrative with its ETF application. Bitcoin funds received $757M or the equivalent of 196,824 in BTC. That’s the strongest four week period of flows since the launch of the first US based Bitcoin ETP in October 2021. That futures based ETF, Proshares’ BITO, also hit an all time high in AUM in Bitcoin terms, now holding the equivalent of 4,425 BTC.

2. Trust Gone

The receivership of Prime Trust has been approved by a Nevada Judge pending a court hearing in August. The Nevada regulator will now take over day to day operations at Prime Trust and conduct a thorough examination of the firm’s finances to determine the best course of action moving forward. The regulator said Prime Trust had a massive shortfall in funds, holding only $3M in cash to satisfy over $85M owed to customers.

1. RFK proposed the Bitcoin Standard

Presidential hopeful RFK Jr has proposed moving the US back to a hard money standard by backing treasury issuance with gold, silver and even Bitcoin. The proposal was to start slow by issuing just 1% of T-bills with a hard currency backing in an attempt to “restore strength back to the dollar”. RFK Jr also proposed an exemption from capital gains tax for Bitcoin sales to make it “more difficult for governments to weaponize currency”.

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Thanks for reading -NLW