G mfin M fellas!

The vibes from the pub this week are significantly better than the vibes two weeks back. I do not want to say we are truly back, but it's nice to recover some of those losses. 

Outside of market shenanigans, we had a pretty eventful week in terms of news. Some of it was good, and some of it was not so good. From the Trump saga to hacks, to Mt.Gox to some positive regulatory news. We got a bit of everything. 

Alright, enough chit-chat. Let’s get straight into it. 

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FIGHT! FIGHT!

“Many men, wish death upon me.” 

Embracing the powers of 50 cent himself, Trump dodged an assassination attempt by mere inches as the bullet knicked his ear. 

He fell to his knees and, after the coast was clear, got back to his feet and gave us the hardest picture of all time. 

Seeing how pro-crypto Mr.Trump is, the market rallied a lot in response to this news. 

But things only got better from there. After surviving this assassination attempt, Trump went on to announce who his VP will be. 

He announced JD Vance as his vice president. 

Why is this bullish? Well, because JD Vance has been a crypto bull for a while. He has publicly tweeted about the importance of crypto many times, he owns around $200K worth of crypto, and Coinbase tagged his wife in their SEC lawsuit. 

But wait, there’s more. 

Trump also confirmed that despite everything that happened, he will still be attending the Bitcoin conference that’s coming up in Nashville. 

This man is going to take us to Valhalla!

Good Regulation all of a sudden

To go with the Trump bullishness, we have also seen a sudden 180 from all regulators. 

The SEC is the biggest example. After completely destroying Paxos with regulation, they’ve all of a sudden decided that the case is not worth pursuing and dropped it. 

On top of that, they’ve also made certain that they will be relaxed on crypto firms from now on. 

If we go to the other side of the pond, then Russia is also taking a pro-crypto stance. 

They announced that they will be implementing cryptocurrency payments for international trade. Given the scope of Russia’s international trade, this is huge news. 

ICYMI

• Find everything and more on blocmates.com 

Hack City 

Now, on the not-so-good news, we had a couple of pretty bad hacks. 

Most recently, the Indian crypto exchange WazirX had its multisig wallet hacked, costing it around $230M in losses. The exploiter instantly sold all the stolen assets into ETH but has not moved the ETH since. 

Just a couple of days before this hack, the LiFi aggregator was hacked, resulting in roughly $11M in losses. 

Hacks and exploits are normal for crypto natives, but it's been a while since we’ve seen a major one. 

Unfortunately, this week, we were graced with two. 

Looking forward

In terms of what I’m looking at, my plans haven’t changed much from two weeks ago. 

I'm long ETH and ETH beta. The ETF is expected early next week, and we should see some fireworks. 

Something to keep in mind, however, is that Mt.Gox has started distributing funds to the creditors, so maybe we aren’t out of the woodwork just yet. We might get some short-term volatility and retest the range lows, but there is nothing to worry about longer-term. 

In terms of alts, the only one I’m looking at is BTRFLY because their token migration to DINERO happens on Monday, July 22nd. 

Other than that, I have nothing else to say. Enjoy your Friday lads. Get yourself a cold one because mine just arrived.