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GM fellas and fellitas! 

Emiri is back at his second home, the pub. The first pint for this Friday has been ordered, so while I wait for that, let’s do a little recap of the week shall we? 

Market-wise, it was a pretty dull week. Chop, chop, and more chop. But news wise we had some pretty good news for the industry which keeps getting overshadowed by a shitty market. I guess once our memecoins start pumping again we will care more about the bullish news? Idk anymore. 

Alright, so let’s get into it, let me cover the top topics of the week and show you the good stuff happening behind the scenes. 

🏦 Crypto x IRL 

Ever since the suits started making their way into crypto, a lot of crypto stuff has started to gain adoption in the real world so to say. 

In the news this week we had a little more of that. 

Let’s start with USDC. Although they will never compare to my GOAT, Mr.Paolo, and his USDT, they had a pretty positive development this week. 

Apple recently granted developers third-party access to its payments technology. Due to this, Circle announced that soon, you can make tap-and-go payments with USDC through your iPhone.

That’s pretty wild if true. However, the countries in which this will be allowed are limited. 

In other payments news, Metamask, the bang average crypto wallet service, has recently announced that they will be launching a debit card with Mastercard. 

When I first read the headline, I was like, wtf is going on with Metamask? But when I looked into it a bit more, it’s actually pretty based. 

You can basically spend your self-custodied funds from your Metamask wallet. USDC, USDT, and ETH payments will be eligible for this card, but it has to be through the Linea Network, at least for now. 

It’s a smart way to bring back the users they lost to Rabby, but since it’s not available in my country, I will still not be coming back to Metamask. 

Oh wait, my pint has just arrived. 

Give me a second 

glug glug glug

Ahhh, alright, where were we. 

Oh yeah, crypto x IRL. 

The third tidbit is not nearly as big as the other two, but Crypto.com, after making purchases like the Staples center, has now become the official crypto sponsor of the Champions League. 

I love football and watch every game, but it’s something about seeing a crypto sponsor on the kits that pisses me off. I don’t have a good reason for it.  

💶 Institutional movements 

In a similar line to the above news events. There’ve also been some interesting institutional movements that have taken place this week. 

Goldman Sachs, who were initially crypto haters, have recently announced that they have been bidding. 

They revealed recently that they have roughly $420M in exposure to the BTC ETF. Of course, compared to the size of the company this is nothing, but it’s still a sign of a start that institutions are looking for some form of crypto exposure. 

Now I just need them to buy my ETH bags. 

In even more institutional news, we can see Larry Fink going full cryptard, looking to expand absolutely everywhere. 

There is speculation that building a blackrock L2, similar to the likes of Base, is on the cards for Blackrock’s crypto strategy. 

My best assumption would be that they use this L2 as a way to leverage their name and get in-roads into attracting a major chunk of stablecoin liquidity to their L2. Other than that, I don’t see what’s in it for them. 

Lastly, we have more of a crypto-native institution in Coinbase making big moves. 

They announced the launch of wrapped BTC product called cbBTC. 

The reason for this is because there were issues around wBTC, the most popular BTC wrapper on Ethereum, where the custodian has now been bought up by three different companies who will be handling it together. 

Coinbase is looking to seize on this mini turmoil and take charge of the wrapped BTC market. 

It’s a pretty good move in my opinion. 

👨‍⚖️ Lawsuit Galore!

Recently, it has felt like not a week has gone by without regulatory scrutiny and lawsuits. I guess the ripple effects of 2022 are still present.

Let’s start with our good friends at the SEC. 

They seem to be changing their target every week. Sort of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks type of situation. 

Now their target is crypto VCs A16Z and USV for their involvement with Uniswap. 

Uniswap Labs were served a wells notice by the SEC earlier on and the VC’s involved with Uniswap are no being questioned. 

I guess we’ll see what comes of it, probably nothing. 

On the other side, we have the 2021 cycle heroes 3AC and Terraform Labs going at each other's necks. 

Ironically enough, they are suing Terraform Labs for price manipulation lol. 

They are seeking $1.3 billion from a company that is completely bankrupt and defunct. Considering that 3AC was hit the hardest by the LUNA collapse, they should know how hopeful this ask is. 

Nonetheless, this should be an entertaining lawsuit. 

🫡 What to look forward to

That’s pretty much it from the news front. 

But what to look forward to in terms of the market? I got nothing for you chief. We’re in this boring no man's land where if we get bad macro numbers we could plummet, but if all the Japan stuff subsides, we should be clear. 

Something bullish to keep in mind is that, as an industry, we’ve had to absorb a lot of sell pressure over these past few months. 

Lots of seized BTC selling from different governments, lots of bankrupt companies selling, Grayscale unwinding, and much much more. All of this into an illiquid summer, and we’re still around $60K BTC is still pretty bullish to me. 

I have no short-term read on the market, I’ve mostly consolidated my positions, and am very cash-heavy. Have a couple of high-conviction alts I'm holding on to, but other than that, I’m just waiting on my hands to see what’s worth bidding on right now. 

Still have to spend time researching this. 

With that, I have now finished my first pint, and the second one has just arrived. So, I will sign off for the day and go about my Friday. THE PREM IS BACK BABY. 

Hopefully you enjoyed this, and I will see you two weeks from now.

See ya.