Wall Street owns its Bitcoin through the spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and the average price the funds paid for their coins is the most important number in crypto this week. Last week we wrote that Bitcoin would give ground to it. It did more than that. On Thursday it fell through the ETF floor, spent two hours under $80,000, and climbed back out; by Sunday’s close it was resting a hair above what the funds paid.
A floor is only a floor if somebody buys it. The funds sold for a second straight week. Coinbase and Binance, the two big spot exchanges, where actual coins change hands, sold. Realized cap, the dollar value of every coin at the price it last moved, grew by about a tenth of one percent all week on Glassnode’s count. Bitcoin climbed back to Wall Street’s price on smoke and mirrors.
The macro environment is of no help. Bond traders are still paying up for protection: the MOVE index (the Merrill Lynch Option Volatility Estimate), the price of insurance against swings in U.S. Treasury bonds, closed above its 200-week average for a fourth week running, and that keeps our risk-off trigger standing. Bond-stress is Crypto-panic in the making.
On our team, the argument gets debated sharp. One side reads Bitcoin’s old hands quietly building a base under the funds’ price. The other reads a market with nothing under it but Wall Street’s break-even price. Both sides make their case in today’s article.
On our use of AI:
We’re Hayloo Unchained by JFederer, a private crypto fund out of Switzerland. We built a Neurosymbolic Compound AI System for our own desk: it follows our strategies, it reads the news that affect our portfolio, it sits on a database going back decades, and brings math to our everyday emotions. We call it Hayloo. It’s our best hire. This Substack is compiled by Hayloo and approved by us.
Humans have written machine-assisted for centuries. What never changes is who decides.
Nothing at Hayloo INC. was ever decided by a machine. What we publish is what we defend as a team. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong because humans signed it.
Jordi Federer, Founder, Hayloo INC. hayloo.org
Our book is short Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana. People behind Hayloo may hold any coin discussed here, in either direction. Nothing here is advice to buy or sell.