The Breakdown First Five - Friday, August 16, 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. Trump Jr Defiant

The controversial Trump family DeFi project took another step towards launch with Don Jr driving followers to sign up for a Telegram group to receive official updates. Called the “Defiant Ones”, few details are known about the intended use. Eric Trump has been discussing tokenized real estate, debanking and collateral for loans, but we have no idea. Response from the crypto community has been tepid after getting burned on Trump-related memecoin rugs. 

4. Binance Back in India

Concluding a 7 month ban, Binance is now fully registered and available in India. The exchange paid a $2.2M fine in July for breaches of anti-money laundering laws. A total of eight platforms had been banned and blocked in January and forced to come in and register. It was extremely unclear whether licenses would be handed out given the government’s hostile posture towards the industry. Those fears didn’t materialize and crypto seems to be back in India.

3. Kim Dotcom Extradition

New Zealand courts have approved an order to extradite Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom to the US. Dotcom was charged with copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering in 2012 and has been fighting extradition ever since. He claims that New Zealand law protects internet companies from copyright infringement from their users. Dotcom believes he was persecuted by the Obama administration for supporting wikileaks and will continue to fight.

2. Face Melting Volatility

The SEC has signed off on the highest volatility ETF in US market history, a 1.75x leveraged Microstrategy fund. Analysts suspect that 2x leverage was rejected as too much. The fund has an average 30 day volatility 12 times higher than the S&P 500. Demand was clearly there, with the ETF doing $22M in volume on its first day.

1. New IMF Environmental FUD

The IMF has dropped their latest round of mining FUD in an attempt to push a global carbon tax. The proposed tax would see Bitcoin miners taxed 85% on electricity usage. Data used for the report actually found that Bitcoin emissions were actually trending lower, so the IMF used an entirely hypothetical worst case scenario that showed emissions skyrocketing. They also tied in growth of emissions from AI data centers. Just a bad faith argument all round.