Hold on tight, the Ethereum ETFs are here.

My family and I were all down for the count for the last week with a summer cold/flu/vid. No one tells you about sick kids before you start a family — it doesn’t matter how sick, feverish or tired you are, if the baby is awake and crying at 3am, you are awake and crying at 3am.

So instead of the normal Positive Skew analysis, today we’re going to jump around a bit and discuss the current state of things.

It feels like every week something else insane happens — maybe that’s just the Twitter/Insta/TikTok feed gradually consuming all of our lives. Maybe not.

But the pace of this bull cycle is accelerating — bitcoin is back in the mid $60k’s and sentiment is lining up for another hockey stick move higher.

Or maybe that’s my confirmation bias? 😅 

Next week we’ll return to the normal long form analyses. I’m prepping a deep dive into why crypto is not like stocks, and why you have to update your mental model if you want to succeed on-chain.

The Ethereum ETFs are Here! Expectations and Outcomes

The day has arrived.

Later today, a short 194 days after the first-of-its-kind bitcoin ETFs began trading, Wall Street will now have a second group of crypto-backed ETFs to shill to their clients, institutions, funds, and anyone else with a retirement account in the U.S. of A.

The Ethereum ETFs are here.

Long term, this is insanely bullish. Short term? We’ll find out over the coming days and weeks.

The bitcoin ETF launch was widely predicted to be a sell the news event. That was obviously wrong in retrospect. Flows were record setting. Prices, up only.

Will ETH come out of the gate just as hot?

Can boomers digest even more crypto in their retirement accounts?

Some are even asking, “what the fuck is an ethereum?”

This time there are some key differences that could change how things play out. Bitcoin is a much larger asset than Ethereum. At the time of writing Bitcoin’s market cap is about 3.1x higher than ETH. But more significant to the price action, there’s also a lot less ETH traded every day.

It’s supply and demand. There’s simply less ETH to go around. So if ETF buyers show even a modest demand for these ETFs, even if that demand is far less in absolute terms than what we saw with bitcoin, the price of ETH could spike aggressively higher.

Industry leaders are all over the map making predictions. A good representative prediction, just from what I’ve seen, is Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan predicting $15 billion of flows over the next 18 months (compared to a similar number for Bitcoin over its first 5 months) and new all time highs by year-end.

My definitely-not-financial-advice price prediction is $5,000 ETH by October 1. End of year could be pushing $7,500.

Click the poll below and let me know what you think. I’ll share the results next week.

When the market speaks memes, listen

It’s an old adage that traders should watch the assets that fall the least on pullbacks and accelerate the fastest when the bids return.

In crypto, this is even more true. Crypto is all about momentum, and the assets that fight through the dips with the most ease are the ones worth owning.

And in true crypto fashion, the meme coins are leading the way after the wild political ride of the past 2 weeks.

Beginning with the Trump assassination attempt and picking up steam all the way through the Biden withdrawal, meme coins remain the hottest niche in crypto.

Political memes emerged left and right, and they all seemed to be roaring higher. Dog memes, cat memes, frog memes, Elon Musk memes… it almost hasn’t mattered what the coin is purporting to mock.

Meme coins are the purest form of the crypto casino — and you’ll never find odds like these in Vegas.

Special shoutout to any POPCAT holders this week! POPCAT may go down as my biggest miss of 2024. I bought a decent bag of this infinitely popping meme-cat back in the Q1 mania, sold it, and it has subsequently 10x’d.

Over this past weekend, while I sat awake on the couch, feverish and holding a crying baby, POPCAT briefly popped over $1 billion market cap.

So congrats to all the POPCAT investors out there — keep poppin’!

(And also please take profits every now and then!!)

A Bitcoin Strategic Reserve? Wut?

There’s rumors flying that former President Trump may announce his intention to form a strategic reserve of bitcoin this week at a stump speech in front of the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville on Saturday.

Similar to how a government may stockpile assets to help with disaster preparedness or against a geopolitical threat, the theory is that a bitcoin reserve would hedge the US from future dollar debasement or international efforts to de-dollarize and move to credibly neutral forms of payment (like Bitcoin).

Several Trump supporters, including Elon Musk, have changed their Twitter profile pics to the laser eyes meme (a nod to Bitcoin for those out of the loop).

It seems more likely to me that this is political pandering and won’t actually happen, but who knows. It’s 2024 and nothing makes sense anymore.

Mark Cuban has weighed in, stoking the bitcoin fire with a theory that Trump’s sudden popularity in Silicon Valley is really just a veiled bitcoin game being played at the highest level.

Crazy times indeed. Needless to say, if Trump does announce a strategic reserve, that’s wildly bullish and you should ride the momentum regardless of your political leanings.

Portfolio Update

I consolidated my meme coin holdings down to just two, WIF and BILLY. I’ll dive back in to new coins opportunistically, but for now I’m concentrating my meme dollars into the two cutest dogs on Solana.

That’s all for this week — I appreciate your patience. We’ll be back to regularly scheduled crypto degeneracy next week!

Market Vibes