All Been Crypto — Week 4 April 2025

All Been Crypto — Week 4 April 2025

Apologies this weeks weekly coming in a bit earlier as I’m traveling tomorrow. But we are coming hot on heels of liberation day, a major macro event where Trump slammed his tariffs on pretty much everyone. Of course markets sold off and so did crypto we are down -5% BTC back to 83k and -10% ETH at 1800 with systematic sellers on newer projects like IP and MOVE -20% the ‘major’ in the green was EOS +40% as market pricing in their rebranding. In the news of course we had more institutional buying of BTC with MARA looking to raise 2bn for more BTC purchases and Tether disclosed purchase of 8888 Bitcoin in Q1 bringing their total holdings to 7.8bn. While Saylor’s MSTR showed a 22k BTC purchase just shy of 2bn last week. Solan made a key hire snatching Kristin Smith the CEO of the Blockchain Association as their new President of Solana Policy Institute. Trump pardoned Arthur and the other BitMex co-founders and Galaxy settled with NY court for 200mm over their dealings in LUNA. There’s an ongoing story about FDUSD’s issuer First Digital involving Justin Sun, Trumps son Eric entering BTC mining and Circle filed for IPO. There’s a clear divergence between institutional view on the market and the more crypto native. I feel the beef between Gward and Dragonfly about the shape of VC token investments is a good reflection of current overall sentiment. Enjoy reading!

Bat Tai Chi — [email protected]

HEADLINES:FDUSD depegging after HK court docs released

Another day another FUD/scandal this time on the stablecoin side. We learn from released court docs that the Techteryx the entity behind TrueUSD had a >400mm hole from 2023 to early 2024 and his Excellency generously stepped in and stabilized TUSD during that period. Now he came out putting the blame of missmanged reserves on First Digital Trust the issuer of FDUSD. Now there’s concern on FDUSD which briefly depegged almost 10% and still trading below par atm. There’s a press conference schedule for 2pm HKT today (Thursday 3 April 2025) and so well hear more about specific allegations. First Digital came out with a statement calling the allegations false information and Binance just published an attestation report that FDUSD is backed 1:1. Of course we know Biance is main beneficiary of FDUSD which de facto repace BUSD after they got debanked by Paxos. So that’s why it’s great popcorn coz this can be seen a proxy challenge between Justin and CZ. Watch closely how things unfold next couple of hours.

American Bitcoin

Yes you heard it right Trump wanted them all to be mined in the US and now his son Eric Trump is heeding the call. He’s launching American Bitcoin a new mining operation under the Hut 8 umbrella. The unit emerged as a merger between Hut 8’s mining operations and a Trump family owned company called American Data Centers. American Bitcoin will mainly focus on bitcoin mining while building a strategic bitcoin reserve a la MARA playbook. The company will be led by CEO Matt Prusak, with Eric Trump serving as the chief strategy officer. Expecting some favourable policies for the administration if even his son is getting into the game and of course shouldn’t be too difficult to get funding despite miners stocks not having done too well YTD mostly because of BTC drop from 100k.

Circle officially filed for IPO

It was not a secret anymore that Circle is going public this year but the accelerated timeline might surprise a few. The regulatory backdrop in the US is very positive with two stablecoin bills currently being debated in the House. There seems to be bipartisan support to get something on the way so Circle is seizing the opportunity and tapping capital markets looking at 5bp valuation. Why this warrants this weeks headline is not just because the first of likely many crypto IPOs this year but also because the filing revealed a couple of interesting facts on the company. We learned that Circle had acquired the remaining 50% of Centre Consortium from Coinbase in 2023 for 210mm (see ABC 25 Aug 2023). The consortium was responsible for issuing USDC which now is solely under Circle. In terms of financials they were profitable the last two years but 2024 profits declined >40$ vs 2023 due to the fact that their distribution expenses went up significantly including a 60mm upfront fee to Binance. Rate cuts are a headwind but the number of USDC outstanding has increased leading to higher overall topline (which is basically just US Tbill yield). The big question mark of course is Tether which has grown even more rapidly and aligned some key players in the current US administration basically securing themselves a legal get out of jail card.

QUOTES:It could undermine America’s economic advantage if investors begin seeing bitcoin as a safer bet than the dollar

Larry Fink — Blackrock CEO

There are no plans for the government to use Dogecoin or anything as far as I know. The names are similar, but they’re doing two very different things. We’re just literally trying to make the government 15% more efficient

Elon Musk

There’s a lot of signal thru the noise in what EricTrump disclosed on MariaBartiromo — bc he revealed the breadth of debanking by naming 5 large banks that targeted his family. There’s no way SecScottBessent keeps in place the tools used/abused by the Biden federal regulators to effectuate debanking. The tools are already being dismantled at the OCC & FDIC, tho the Fed is the outlier & lags behind the other federal banking agencies (ie, all the Fed’s debanking tools are still in place & still being actively used to debank esp crypto behind closed doors). Seems a big clash over Fed bank supervision & regulation is inevitable…

Caitlin Long — CEO of Custodia Bank

All Been Crypto — Week 4 April 2025 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.