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👀 This month's BIG losers

👀 This month's BIG losers

PLUS: JP Morgan thinks bitcoin ETF will happen soon

Alex M.
September 04, 2023

GM everyone. This is 2036, the crypto newsletter that pays you.

Here’s what we’re serving up today 🍲: August was a packed month. Who were the winners, and who were the losers? And what are we watching in September?

Let’s dig in.

🥔 Today’s meat and potatoes

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First up, the WINNERS…🏆

1/ Grayscale 🥇

We talked a lot about Grayscale this month. When the SEC refused to convert their publicly traded bitcoin trust into an ETF, Grayscale sued.

After a two-year legal battle, Grayscale won.

The SEC has no grounds (for now) to refuse Grayscale’s GBTC to be converted into an ETF.

As a result, the GBTC discount narrowed from -27% to -18%.

[$GBTC and its Ether cousin $ETHE are both on our list of arbitrage opportunities below.]

For a full breakdown of what happened with Grayscale, read this.

2/ Base 🥈

Base is Coinbase’s new blockchain that made me feel like a little kid in a toy store again.

Base is a clean slate (new blockchain) with aligned management (built by Coinbase) that offers potential venture returns (100-1000X).

And last week, Base took off. 🚀

Aerodrome is a new decentralized exchange on Base. When they launched, their liquidity pools offered 300%+ Annual Percentage Rates 👀.

This was enough to bring $200M of liquidity to the chain and make Aerdrome the 7th biggest decentralized exchange in crypto.

More protocols will launch soon on Base that’ll offer similar or better returns.

We’ll bring them to you… so stay tuned.

Now, onto the LOSERS…

1/ FriendTech 🍑

Friendtech made headlines this month as people bought and sold shares in their favorite influencers.

We called it the OnlyFans of crypto.

But despite:

a seed round investment from one of the biggest investors in crypto (Paradigm)
onboarding NBA players and OnlyFans creators

… FriendTech seems to have died as fast as it took off.

Daily transactions and daily revenue are both down -96% in the last week.

2/ Bitcoin 🏦

Despite news of a Grayscale win in August, bitcoin didn’t take out new highs.

Instead, the Grayscale pump was fully retraced in just 50 hours.

Historically, September is a bad month for crypto. Some even call it Rektember (ugly name, I know).

spot the worst month

Can we break the bad spell of September doom?

We certainly hope so.

But in Q4…

The US government could sell the bitcoin it recovered from the Silk Road
FTX creditors could sell ∼$500 million of crypto
The trustee of defunct crypto exchange Mount Gox will distribute ∼$4B in bitcoin to creditors.

i.e a lot of sell pressure could be coming.

In the absence of good news, it could be another choppy month.

But after the Grayscale win, the race for the bitcoin ETF is officially on.

First-mover advantages are everything in finance.

$GLD and $IAU are practically the same gold ETF.

Despite $IAU being 40% cheaper, $GLD is twice as big - because it launched two months before $IAU.

So, in September, all our eyes will be on bitcoin ETFs and new high-yielding protocols on Base…👀