The Breakdown First Five - Wednesday, February 14, 2024

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. Blockchain Association: “It’s Important to Take This Seriously”

Regardless of whether Elizabeth Warren’s crypto anti-money laundering bill has a chance to pass, the Blockchain Association thinks it’s important to take it seriously. The crypto lobbyist has written another letter to Congress opposing the bill, backed by 80 national security and military veterans. They claim crypto infrastructure would be forced offshore due to impossible compliance, risking the “nation’s strategic advantage” and having little impact on illicit crypto use. 

4. Solana Tops BNB for Fourth Place

Solana briefly overtook BNB as the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, the first major challenger to Binance’s smart contract platform since BNB claimed the position in March of 2021. Despite its first major outage in almost a year and questions about the legitimacy of TVL metrics, Solana has been surging ahead this month, recording a 20% increase in the past week compared to BNB’s 10% gain. 

3. Fairshake Begins the Fight

Fairshake, the $80M crypto SuperPAC, have run their first set of attack ads targeting Katie Porter. They claim that Porter, famously against corporate donations, has accepted money from “big pharma, big oil, and the big bank executives.” SuperPACs are not allowed to coordinate with candidates, so usually focus on negative campaigning. Fairshake spent $2.9M to influence this California senate race and it looks like they’re only just getting started. 

2. Bullish Options

Options traders are building positions for some ambitious price targets. Last weekend Derebit saw significant volume at $65,000, $70,000 and even $75,000 strike prices. The last time we saw this kind of activity was in October, when bulls were purchasing out of the money calls at $30,000 and $40,000. We all know what happened next. Expiries are clustered between April and June, implying heavy bets on a halving price pop.

1. Bitcoin at a Trillion

With an early morning pump bringing the price above $51,500; Bitcoin is once again a trillion dollar asset class. Bitcoin has only spent a few months with its market cap above this level. The last time was in December 2021, as the last bull market began to unravel. The first time Bitcoin hit a trillion dollars the halving was already 9 months in the past. This time around we still have 60 days until the block reward gets cut. 

Thanks for reading -NLW