Ben Strack
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Previously @Blockworks_. I write journalism and fiction (not at the same time). Ben_Strack on telegram. Sports are fun.
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Articles by Ben Strack
SEC guidance maintains ‘thoughtful approach’ to tokenized securities - Fund Directions
How your fund board will benefit Fund Directions is a resource that ensures mutual fund independent directors have access to the information they need to carry out their oversight duties to shareholders. In addition to providing developing news, analysis of industry trends and viewpoints from the industry, Fund Directions provides a community where trustees can connect. Contact us to learn more ...
🟪 Hard money is bad money
Historians date the start of globalization with surprising precision: June 24, 1571 — the day Manila was founded as the capital of the Spanish East Indies. There was trade between continents before then, of course. But it was only with the founding of Manila that “a regular and lasting maritime connection established between the four great continents,” according to a history instructively subtitled The Origin of World Trade in 1571.
Inside Bitwise's milestone solana ETF launch
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . After a decade of fund issuers trying to offer US bitcoin ETFs, those launches in January 2024 were a huge deal. Ether ETFs then hit US markets six months later. Today marks yet another date to remember, with the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) going live on the New York Stock Exchange. "This is one of the big assets; it's on the Mount Rushmore of crypto," Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan told me.
đȘ The meme is the medium
Marshall McLuhan categorized electric light as a form of communication â or âpure informationâ â citing Romeo and Juliet as an authority to substantiate his claim. Romeo, he reasons, might have been speaking of 20th-century television when he declared that light âspeaks, yet says nothing.â McLuhan uses that line to establish that light is a âmessage without content,â which lays the necessary groundwork for his famous aphorism: the medium is the message.
Bitwise slated to launch milestone US solana ETF Tuesday
Bitwise's proposed solana ETF is set to go live on the NYSE Arca Tuesday - marking the latest milestone in a pivotal year for crypto. The firm revealed the upcoming launch Monday evening, calling its Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) the "first US ETP to have 100% direct exposure to spot SOL." Staking of the product's SOL will be powered by Helius, Bitwise said. Source: X The announcement came just hours after Bitwise wrote "Big week incoming" in an X post, fueling speculation of ETF developments.
Big crypto week ahead? What to watch for in the 'Uptober' homestretch
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . As we detail what to watch on this week's crypto/macro front, let's first look back to some telling economic data. Friday's CPI report showed overall and core inflation increased 3% over the 12 months ending in September. This impacted risk assets, with S&P 500 futures rising to a new record and bitcoin reclaiming the $111,000 level. BTC continued to climb early Monday, hovering 6% higher than a week ago by midday.
BlackRock to keep focus on BTC, ETH ahead of crypto ETF 'explosion'
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . New US crypto ETF launches remain on pause given the ongoing government shutdown. This just means there's more time to make sense of what the upcoming product wave will look like - and how the world's largest asset manager will (or won't) participate.
🟪 Bitcoin is freedom tech
MarĂa Corina Machado received the news that she’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while confined to an undisclosed location. The “Iron Lady of Venezuela” and “Latin American Joan of Arc” has been in hiding since Nicolás Maduro threatened her with "maximum justice” in the wake of the 2024 election that made clear she’s the rightful president of Venezuela. Machado reports that she’s survived assassination attempts and a kidnapping since then, but has refused to leave the country.
Citi, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs lay out crypto visions
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . My colleague Macauley Peterson wrote more about that . Conferences like last week's Digital Asset Summit remind us of the broader world that crypto is percolating. The attendance of some of the largest banks and asset managers (and what they're working on) seems a solid indication of where we're headed. Citi was in the building, with research analyst Sophia Bantanidis giving the DAS crowd a talk on stablecoins.
ūüü™ Citi's crystal ball
Citi has raised its base-case projection for stablecoin issuance to $1.9 trillion by 2030, up from $1.6 trillion earlier this year, with a $4 trillion bull case and a $0.9 trillion bear case.
ūüü™ Luck of the draw
Welcome back to The Breakdown. Today we’ve called in David Canellis from the Empire newsletter to give us the latest on the prediction market battle between Kalshi and Polymarket. Notwithstanding the dominance of bitcoin, crypto has proven itself to be the exact opposite of a winner-takes-all space. In fact, the question needs to be: Can you imagine if FTX was the only CEX in crypto? Let’s get into it. I’m not here to tell you that crypto only has room for one prediction market app.
Tokenization's 'Trojan horse' moment
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . Stablecoins and tokenization (shocker!) remained a big theme at DAS London's Day 2. Upon the umpteenth mention of these segments, Inversion founder Santiago Roel Santos got real with the industry members watching. But first, Algorand Foundation CEO Staci Warden kicked off the main stage festivities by calling tokenization crypto's killer app.
🟪 Crypto gets auto-liquidated
When people make leveraged bets on stocks, they deposit margin with a broker, who then buys and holds the stock the customer has asked to bet on. If the bet moves too far against them, the broker will liquidate it by selling the stock in the market before they start losing money in excess of the margin. This weekend, we learned that’s not how it works in crypto.
Soundbites and sentiment from DAS London Day 1
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . This version of DAS London felt extra timely as stablecoins proliferate, tokenization developments multiply, DATs keep buying their desired tokens and more US crypto ETFs wait in the wings. Not to mention the latest crypto turbulence, which spurred a historic level of liquidations Friday - making this gathering feel even more fitting, in a way.
đȘ Can money buy Ethereum?
In the past few months, a new class of public companies has raced to amass billions in crypto. The largest, after Michael Saylorâs bitcoin-focused Strategy, is BitMine Immersion (BMNR) chaired by Wall Street strategist Tom Lee, which now holds about 3.75% of ETHâs supply, according to Blockworks Research data. That begs the question: will digital-asset treasuries (DATs) turn their balance sheets into protocol leverage?
đȘ Product delivery
0xResearch returns to its analyst roots. Daily alpha and insights now coming directly from our research team. Investment research, market commentary, and unfiltered data-driven takes in your inbox. Iâm old enough to remember when a Bloomberg Terminal was a stand-alone box wedged onto a cluttered trading desk between a dual-receiver phone and a clacking machine for time-stamping order tickets.
🟪 Shutdown woes
Perhaps the most direct impact the government shutdown is expected to have on the crypto industry is that new spot crypto ETFs will be delayed. The Securities and Exchange Commission said that during the shutdown, staff will not review or approve registration statements or issue notices of effectiveness. An “extremely limited number” of SEC staff will be monitoring emergency email addresses and phone lines for each commission division, the guidance added.
ūüü™ Friday charts
Sir John Templeton‚Äôs adage about the four most dangerous words in investing first appeared in a 1987 New York Times article warning that the bull market in stocks was getting long in the tooth: ‚ÄúIt is late and investors must be very cautious.‚ÄĚ Incredibly, the article ran just eight days before Black Monday ‚ÄĒ the worst day in stock market history.
đȘ Banking is a patchwork of metaphorical messages
When the telegraph was introduced, the idea of encoding information within currents of electricity was so foreign to people that it could only be explained in more familiar language: Telegraphs were presented as a way to send a message over a wire. As documented in an 1873 edition of Harperâs New Monthly Magazine, this caused some confusion: One woman refused to believe that a telegram sheâd received was from her son because it wasnât in his handwriting.
đȘ The perks and perils of never knowing you're wrong
In 2008, a surgery patient at the highly regarded Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston awoke from anesthesia, looked down at her bandages and asked why they were on the wrong side of her body. She had gone into surgery expecting an orthopedic procedure to be done on her ailing right leg and woke up to find out it had been done on her left.
Stablecoin market cap nears $300B as line between TradFi and DeFi is 'fading'
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . The stablecoin market is approaching the $300 billion mark as we're seeing more signs of TradFi's broader shift to blockchain rails. For those keeping track at home, the roughly $290 billion stablecoin market cap is up 18% from 90 days ago and has more than doubled since the start of 2024. We've seen traditional payment giants integrating stablecoins into the financial mainstream of late.
🟪 Bitcoin isn’t software
Bitcoin developers have been feuding in public this week — a spectacle that must make some newly arrived converts from TradFi uneasy. The debate over a seemingly esoteric detail — the byte cap on OP_RETURN outputs — has gotten so heated you might think the trustworthiness of the entire Bitcoin network hangs in the balance.
The bigger picture for DATs as consolidation begins
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . Not all digital asset treasury companies (aka DATs) will last forever. Some just won't be able to hack it. Others will, as we saw this week, get gobbled up by a competitor. But there's a bigger picture for this segment that we should be mindful of.
Crypto ETF swell approaching after Grayscale's latest launch
In yesterday's edition of the Forward Guidance newsletter, Felix Jauvin broke down Wednesday's Fed rate cut. But it's also important that we shed some light on the other big thing that went down on Sept. 17. That would be the SEC approving general listing standards for commodity-based trust shares (a.k.a. crypto ETPs). This was not an unexpected approval by any means, as we knew the SEC was working through this. But the timing seemed to surprise some people, coming a bit earlier than expected.
🟪 Let insiders trade
​​Ten months ago, FBI agents raided Shayne Coplan’s Manhattan apartment, ostensibly in search of evidence that the prediction market he founded, Polymarket, had illegally allowed US residents to place bets on the US election. Two weeks ago, the CFTC gave Polymarket the green light to allow those very same US residents to place bets on whatever they like. This is quite the turn of events — and it’s not just about elections or politics.
Finished, or early days?
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . We focused on bitcoin's trajectory yesterday. But I didn't want to leave out ether and how institutional interest in the asset has driven recent momentum. Just look at the pace at which companies are buying ETH and the simultaneous influx of capital into ETFs holding the asset, particularly compared to BTC.
🟪 Friday charts
Larry Ellison will never be featured in a habits-of-billionaires listicle. In the 2000s, while running one of the most important companies in the world, he typically strolled into the office at 1:30 in the afternoon. When he did arrive, he wasn’t always fully engaged. “He had a reputation for being easily bored by the process of running a business,” according to his biographer.
Weighing Figure's growth potential after Nasdaq debut
Figure went public yesterday, and Gemini was set to follow suit today. Somewhat related (you'll see), we were reminded of how the biggest asset managers could help fuel a tokenization boom. Let's hone in on Figure, which just debuted on the Nasdaq. Shares of FIGR opened at $36 on Thursday - 44% above its $25 IPO price. The stock was trading around $33.20 at 1:30 p.m. ET. Making another appearance in this newsletter (after I cited his COIN vs. HOOD report) is Blockworks Research's Marc Arjoon.
ūüü™ Thursday links
Bond investors are generally considered more sophisticated than stock market investors (there‚Äôs more math involved, for one thing) ‚ÄĒ and no one has ever accused professional bond investors of being less sophisticated retail stock market investors. But a recent paper that does the math on Strategy‚Äôs valuation suggests they might be.
What's next for crypto markets as Fed rate cut expectation holds?
No one is really arguing whether the Federal Reserve will cut rates next week. The conversation has become: by how much? And how will that impact crypto markets? It's perfect timing for such a question, as more data dropped today. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 0.4% in August (on a seasonally adjusted basis) - up from a 0.2% rise in July. It rose 2.9% for the 12 months ending August, slightly up from the 2.7% annualized figure last month.
ūüü™ How I stopped worrying and started to love a politicized Fed
When Fed Chair Paul Volcker raised short-term interest rates to as high as 22%, angry construction workers sent him two-by-fours in the mail in protest. They had no other use for them, they explained, because his rate hikes were stopping them from building houses for people. It was a fair point. The recessions Volcker induced with rate hikes are credited with ending inflation in the US ‚ÄĒ but they probably shouldn‚Äôt be because raising interest rates can only slow inflation in the near term.
Fund giant-crypto exchange collab another bid to 'reimagine' finance
I started covering Franklin Templeton half a dozen years ago while on the asset management beat at a B2B finance pub. I wasn't aware of the term TradFi back then and knew little about crypto. The $1.6 trillion money manager is still very relevant to my transformed beat. You might remember my July interview with Sandy Kaul, during which she said all Franklin Templeton products are likely to end up onchain. She promised there'd be more to come.
🟪 Should blockchains be single-purpose?
Great businesses start as scalpels, not Swiss Army knives. By choosing one thing to do, companies are more likely to get great at that one thing — and customers are more likely to know that’s the thing they do. Here, for example, is Yahoo’s homepage, circa 1999: There’s a lot going on there — search, auctions, news, email, instant messaging — and Yahoo wasn’t particularly good at any of it.
Inside the S&P 500's HOOD inclusion, MSTR rebuff
A crypto company plots a US public listing (yes, again). And one wading deeper into the space is likely to benefit from an "index effect" that boosts visibility and demand. This is a follow-up of sorts to the crypto public listing update I wrote last week. That was after American Bitcoin shares hit the Nasdaq and Gemini took another step toward its IPO. I also compared Coinbase and Robinhood, noting the latter company was potentially set to join the S&P 500.
🟪 World Liberty Financial is perfecting TradFi
Property rights are not sacrosanct in traditional finance. Even in the US stock market — where shareholder rights are treated with near-religious reverence — a company’s management can sometimes forcibly divest an unwanted shareholder of their shares. In 2009, for example, the struggling software firm Selectica used a poison pill defense to cut a single shareholder’s stake in half.
The ongoing TradFi bids to enhance markets via blockchain tech
A Monday Nasdaq filing seems to affirm what many of you may have read previously: Tokenization could transform finance sooner than many think. In a proposal to the SEC, the exchange seeks to let firms and investors tokenize the equity securities and ETPs they currently trade on the Nasdaq. More specifically, the approach would allow participants the choice (upon entering an order) to have the Depository Trust Corporation (DTC) clear and settle trades in tokenized form.
ūüü™ Friday charts
When ATMs became commonplace in the 1990s, people naturally thought most bank tellers would soon be out of a job. They weren‚Äôt. The number of tellers per branch did in fact go down, from 23 to 13. But, as Benjamin Todd notes, ATMs made bank tellers more productive (because they were freed up to do higher-value work) and bank branches more profitable. So banks opened more branches ‚ÄĒ so many more that the total number of bank tellers actually rose.
Nasdaq's reported guidance to DATs 'unlikely to stifle overall demand'
Because companies accumulating crypto (aka digital asset treasuries, or DATs) have created quite the buzz this summer, it's worth addressing reported guidance such firms are getting from a major exchange. The TL;DR, you ask? Nasdaq told companies listed on its exchange that their shareholders, "under certain circumstances," would need to approve plans to raise money to buy crypto, Yueqi Yang reported. I got ahold of a rep at Nasdaq, who declined to comment.
🟪 Reverse-takeover DATs
The half-life of a market opportunity is a function of the frictions involved in exploiting it. A business opportunity like selling GPUs might last forever because GPUs and the proprietary software needed to run them are hard to make. A financial opportunity like arbitraging a stock across exchanges might last just a fraction of a second because trading on stock exchanges is easy. Digital asset treasury companies (DATs) are somewhere in between.
Listing updates, COIN vs. HOOD
Buzz around crypto-linked stocks has proved unrelenting. As shares of such companies continue to hit major exchanges, a few more could also join one of the best-known indexes. Shares of American Bitcoin - a self-labeled "bitcoin accumulation platform" backed by the Trump Family - became available on the Nasdaq today after a stock-for-stock merger with Gryphon Digital Mining. ABTC opened at $9.22, shot up to above $14 and was back near its opening price by 1:30 p.m. ET.
🟪 WLFI: The token is the product
World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token became transferable for the first time on Monday, making the Trump family roughly $5 billion wealthier. On paper, at least. The 22.5 billion tokens that World Liberty granted to the Trump family’s DT Marks DEFI LLC are restricted, so they can’t be sold for the time being. But the Trumps don’t need to: When World Liberty sells the WLFI tokens it created, 75% of the proceeds go to DT Marks DEFI LLC. This is…unusual.
Where crypto markets stand heading into historically-notorious September
September is here, marking the non-technical end of summer, back to school and - oh yeah - the worst month (historically) for bitcoin. Some have attributed lower market returns in the year's ninth month (not just for BTC, but for the S&P 500, too) to post-summer rebalancing. Investors - inside and outside the crypto segment - return from vacations, re-evaluate portfolios and, perhaps, choose to lock in gains/cut losses, putting downward pressure on prices.
🟪 Friday charts
I’m old enough to remember when the Fed worried the US government wasn’t borrowing enough money. In 1998, the US collected $70 billion more in taxes than it paid out in expenses, creating its first budget surplus in nearly 30 years. By 2001, the US Treasury was so flush with cash it chose to retire government debt by buying Treasury bonds from the market (not with printed money like when the Fed does it, but with taxpayer money).
How CME crypto futures records reflect broader altcoin demand
As the crypto market (and the investor base within it) continues to evolve, the latest demand for derivatives can help us define some broader segment trends. With CME Group's crypto derivatives lineup breaking records of late, I thought it was worth catching up with Giovanni Vicioso, the company's crypto products head. You already know that increasing institutional adoption and a clearer regulatory environment has fueled more trading activity this year.
🟪 Europe’s monetary Star Wars moment
When President Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in a televised address from the Oval Office, it was met with derision. Scientists explained that a plan to shoot down Soviet missiles from space using lasers and particle beams was simply impossible with 1980s technology. The press sarcastically renamed his plan “Star Wars,” because it sounded as fictional as the soon-to-be-released Return of the Jedi.
A deeper look at the industry's crypto market structure demands
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . Seeing 112 organizations sign their name in support of the same issue is pretty rare. Chances are it's probably pretty important. A Wednesday letter drafted by the DeFi Education Fund called on policymakers to "provide robust, nationwide protections for software developers and non-custodial service providers in market structure legislation." It was addressed to Sens.
đȘ Will crypto be judged on substance or form?
The thing about pancakes is that theyâre really just cake: flour, eggs, sugar, and butter, topped with more sugar. But because theyâre flat and branded as breakfast, itâs socially acceptable to eat them in the morning. This is kind of weird: Even your anything-goes dad wouldnât serve you leftover birthday cake for breakfast, but he wouldnât think twice about making you pancakes. Lawyers and accountants recognize this as a question of substance vs.
Conditions are setting up a possible 'altcoin autumn'
Those who got into the crypto space via bitcoin are likely having trouble ignoring all the other crypto token names they come across. Bitcoin's digital gold narrative has resonated with retail investors and institutions alike. Though BTC's price has dropped of late (trading below $110,000 on Tuesday, down nearly 7% over the past month), it's up ~70% from a year ago.
đȘ Should Ethereum maximize profits?
Andrew Keys is an Ethereum OG whose credentials include attending the first-ever Ethereum meetup in 2014 and making ETH worth more than a dollar.
Checking in on crypto markets as the Jackson Hole dust settles
This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, . A couple days after Fed Chair Jerome Powell's widely watched Jackson Hole speech feels like a great time for a high-level update - particularly as macro's effect on crypto markets has increased over time. We still don't know what the Fed will do at its Sept. 17 meeting. But to many, Powell's comments had a dovish tilt, leaving the door open for an interest rate cut next month.
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