The Breakdown First Five - Monday, March 11, 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. Memecoin Mania

Well, that escalated quickly. Another weekend of frenzied degeneracy culminated in plans to put a memecoin on the Las Vegas Sphere. The memecoin mania has caused many industry figures to ponder what exactly we’re doing here. Others noted that the SEC has all but outlawed useful crypto assets, paving the way for a dogcoin glut. Is this a top signal? Maybe, but we’re yet to see a high profile celebrity slinging memes like we did in 2021. 

4. Coinbase Ethereum ETF Meeting

Coinbase attended a meeting with the SEC to explain their correlation data. Coinbase had filed a comment to show that spot and futures markets in Ethereum are tightly correlated, the silver bullet argument that won Bitcoin ETF approval. Rumblings from the SEC is that staff are not particularly convinced and aren’t moving rapidly as they did with Bitcoin. May 23 is the final deadline for VanEck’s product. Lack of SEC engagement makes approval questionable. 

3. ETF Flippening

IBIT is now bigger than Microstrategy. The New 9 are larger than GBTC. This is the new Bitcoin economy. The Bitcoin ETFs now hold 4% of supply. They passed $100B in total volume. Blackrock has seen $10B in inflows, a feat that took QQQ over a year. Wall Street is here and they’re buying as much Bitcoin as they can. 

2. Ackman Taking a Look 

Legendary hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is taking a fresh look at Bitcoin. His analysis of how miners impact electricity supply was all wrong, but Bitcoin twitter was ready to correct it. The main point was that fresh all time highs are giving skeptics a reason to rethink their priors. With Blackrock on board with the most successful ETF of all time, it’s starting to become harder to explain a zero allocation. 

1. Fresh All Time Highs At $71k

After multiple fleeting all time highs last week, Bitcoin cemented its high over the weekend and launched over $71,000 to begin Monday. There is no longer any question, there’s no exchange outages, Bitcoin traded above $69,000 for 20 hours on Sunday and is opening its highest weekly candle ever. Up here it’s pure price discovery and the order books are thin. Going to be a big week.