Crypto Market Surge & Airdrops
256: The New Market Paradigm
Alright alright folks.
Happy thirsty Thursday — especially for those of you who are subscribed to Arb Letter premium and printed absolute bands during that godly crypto pump yesterday.
Today I am feeling generous so we’re going to do a comprehensive geopolitics and financial markets overview for all subscribers with a touch of crypto alpha woven in to summarize the week and yesterday’s insane developments for all subs. If you missed the paid post this week I’ve plugged it below — dozens of people subscribed to figure out how to position for the coming bull market.
If you’re not subscribed to get all posts — I highly suggest you do so — it’s literally $5/month, close to the lowest amount Substack allows creators to charge — and it’s simply table stakes to account for the 10+ hours I spend each week writing these alone, as well as a buy in for the proven strategies I talk about here in crypto and select equity picks. That’s it. Ask anyone who has subscribed for awhile — I called BTC, ETH, and many other picks well before the recent rallies.
If you don’t think $5/month is worth getting advance knowledge of laughable entries on major cryptos as well as unbiased information on geopolitics, the best market resources, and direction of US politics so be it — can’t help you. People spend 50x more on degenerate parlays and coffee that net them nothing weekly.
When we talk about actual value and alpha it’s not free for every chump on the street. I spend hundreds each month on crypto, market, and trading resources to ensure I am at the forefront of the knowledge and alert curve. The premium library has over 250+ articles, guides, and crypto pieces.
End of rant.
If you were alive and awake yesterday you probably heard or saw a godly rally in crypto — the recently approved BTC ETFs saw record inflows amounting to nearly $7.5 Billion US dollars.
Think about that. That’s one day of inflows.
Crypto has overshadowed chatter on the equity markets and diverted a good amount of attention away from politics and the world stage — but there are some updates worth touching on.
Markets/Crypto
Crypto has dominated headlines the last two weeks with some insane pumps/. Bitcoin is over $60,000 and Ethereum is over $3,200. Select alts and memecoins have seen some initial pumps. It’s clear to anyone paying attention at this point that the institutional demand is far outweighing available supply in the market for BTC. With an ETH ETF on the horizon it should be obvious what the next play is in crypto.
Doubters ande critics are going to look really silly in the months to come. We are going much much higher. There will be volatility and vicious pullbacks to be had but long term crypto had proven that it will be around for many years to come.
Equities are less exciting — although the S&P 500 hits a new all time high of 5,116 and is now trading 1,000 points above its October 27th low (Kobeissi Letter).
Tim Buckley to step down as CEO of $7.2 trillion asset manager Vanguard. Likely that folks weren’t happy Vanguard is getting lapped by other firms on the Bitcoin front.
BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF now holds over $10 billion worth of assets ($BTC)
Ark Invest and 21Shares announced a partnership this week to use Chainlink's technology to allow investors to verify the Bitcoin ETF's holdings directly.
The Head of the Swiss Central Bank is stepping down (Macro Edge)
Nvidia passes Saudi Aramco to become 3rd-largest company in the world by market cap (SI)
Nancy Pelosi's option $NVDA calls have made her nearly $1,910,000 in 100 days (Unusual Whales)
Crypto is at the top of everyone’s mind. Not only have BTC and ETH surged dramatically in past weeks but other coins fueled by retail returning are mooning including Floki, WIF, PEPE, Doge, and others.
The Coinbase crash we saw this week is indicative of large amounts of people going online to check their wallets or access their accounts again after a long bear market. What’s interesting about this pump is that we have no indication of rate cuts — the Fed’s fight is still very much alive and yet crypto — an asset class that crashed alongside equity markets over a year ago is decoupling in a major way.
One dynamic to really harp on here is supply vs. demand. Most long term BTC holders have always been aware of the mathematical implications of Bitcoin supply and how this dynamic makes Bitcoin one of the hardest forms of money and stores of value on a longer time frame.
This dynamic is being exacerbated dramatically with the arrival of large institutions who are gobbling up all available supply by the day. We are not even at the halvening in April when rewards for miners will yet again be chopped in half — reducing available supply in the market.
Meme coins and alts are going crazy today — it would appear the crypto market is about to lift off and defy all logic — don’t get left behind. There will be plenty of drastic pullbacks and corrections — but the institutions have shown their hands.
More and more institutions are going to get FOMO and ape in as we start to climb and the halvening approaches.
Blast Airdrop Opportunity
If you haven’t been following
who has done a great job of tracking active airdrop opportunities, I am going to touch on my experience so far with one of them: Blast. People are asking if I was hacked on instagram because I offered up some invites — no I am not hacked. Most probably don’t even know what yield or airdrops are…..50% of the Blast Airdrop is allocated to Blast Points. Your wallet will earn Points automatically every block based on your ETH/WETH/USDB balance. This is reflected in realtime on your Blast.io Airdrop dashboard.
To increase your Points, you can bridge more to Blast.
Your Points earnings will grow over time as your wallet balance increases due to the native yield on Blast (~4% for ETH/WETH and 5% for USDB) as well.
So far it’s been a fun way to learn more about airdrops, earn some yield on a small bag of ETH, use different dapps (decentralized apps), and do some farming. I particularly enjoy the Wasabi and YOLO games. YOLO has a few games including one where you can bet ETH on the short term direction of BTC/ETH.
I am a small player compared to others who got in much earlier — but so far I’ve doubled my ETH in YOLO and managed to do quite a few missions on Galaxe and related Blast partners (which should help for the airdrop).
I have 2 invites left to join Blast. In a completely transparent and non shill way these are limited.
If you are interested and can move on this today please send me an email at arbitrage.andy@gmail.com with the subject: BLAST. Only email me if:
You are willing and able to deposit/bridge some ETH today (if you don’t it wastes the invite and neither myself or you will get any bonus or boost)
You have metamask or a similar wallet to link to Blast to deposit
You understand risk of dapps
You understand you may have to eat gas fees for transactions
You understand you can withdrawal your ETH at any time but you will forfeit your yield and points for the Blast airdrop.
No airdrop is ever fully guaranteed but Blast is one of the more highly anticipated and popularized ones.
Several folks got codes from me last night but didn’t deposit which is annoying — there’s no pressure obviously but you’re wasting an invite someone else could use to gain 4% yield on their ETH and increase chances of an airdrop award in May from Blast.
Do your own research always. This is not a shill — if you have some ETH laying around and want to have some fun, earn some extra yield and shot at some rewards in May come on in.
Move fast on this — as I have limited invites.
You can monitor and see all airdrops HERE.
THIS IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT OF BLAST OR THE DAPPS ON THE PLATFORM. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH AND INVEST THROUGH YOUR OWN RISK THRESHOLD.
Geopolitics
While the crypto market dominates headlines the world is getting nuttier.
Joe Biden and the current regime in the US continue to give us plenty of entertainment — from Hunter Biden’s laughable defense in court of his illicit business dealings (Joe Biden got $40K in China funds according to his brother James), Joe Biden’s comment on the Hawaii fires in which he alluded to one particular home with a blue roof that was spared (IYKYK), to embarrassing updates from our armed forces this feature length film is getting more and more ridiculous by the day.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden arrived at the border in Texas at the same time this week. President Biden was seen struggling along with Border Patrol agents who needed to slow down just so he could keep up with them, leaning on one of them at one point. Trump met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
Hunter Biden acknowledged Joe was ‘the big guy’ in $5M China deal, NY Post reports
Blaze Media Investigative Journalist Steve Baker has been taken into FBI custody for his J6 reporting, media company says. Absurd.
UK PM Sunak said this week that: "Islamist extremists and the far right... are two sides of the same extremist coin."
The CDC had finally dropped it’s "5-day isolation time" for COVID advice — the guidelines are now the same as for the flu and other respiratory illnesses.
The Chinese Defense Ministry said this week: "The U.S. has already become the biggest driving force in militarizing space and turning it into a battlefield; it has become the biggest threat to space security" (TASS)
House Speaker Mike Johnson is set to release 5,000 additional hours of January 6 footage.
Nicaragua files application against Germany at the International Court of Justice for 'facilitating the commission of genocide' through Berlin's support for Israel (Spectator Index)
Reuters has reported that President Biden will announce that the United States will air drop aid into Gaza
The University of Florida (UF) fired all staff in positions related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, effective immediately.
Chinese space, nuclear development is ‘breathtakingly fast,’ DOD officials warn - Defense One
During a recent speech to the U.S Air Force, Transgender Col. Bree F., demanded that everyone utilize pronouns in their email correspondence as a way to help enhance “winning war fighting strategies”.
Yeah — that really happened. This comes the same week the US Army announced that it is cutting about 24,000 jobs, most of which are already vacant positions—as part of a restructuring plan to “generate new capabilities and re-balance its force structure,” according to information shared with Forbes, as it continues to struggle to meet recruitment goals (Forbes).
What happened to this great nation?
We used to parade John Basilone — a snake eater marine who gunned down dozens of Japanese on Guadalcanal across the country — now we have this? And we wonder why recruitment is abysmal and Tier I fighters are dropping out of our military like flies?
Enjoy the weekend folks — one thing is for sure — wild things are going to keep happening in 2024, in markets, politics, and across the world.
We’ll be back with some geopolitical posts next week and a crypto post reviewing which alts and meme coins are poised to hit ATHs.
Cheers
Andy
I need to move my blast points over to mainet. The gas fees were crazy yesterday.
Happy to share my own invite here as well, too any who will use them. Taking an invite and not bridging ETH is bullshit. Don’t do it. Not trying to overstep Andy‘s customer reach here but reply with your Twitter handle and I DM one to you.
Great article! In the event that $PEPE reached .25, do you think any exchange could pay that out? Or would they shut it down like $HOOD a few years ago.