2024-10-24 18:29

The U.S.-based spot funds currently hold about 396,922 bitcoin altogether, with BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust soon to cross 400,000 in BTC holdings. Spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds will soon hold over one million BTC. The funds recorded one of their biggest week of inflows last week, taking in over $2.1 billion in just five days. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) could soon cross the 400,000 bitcoin mark. The holdings of the U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds are about to cross over one million tokens after only ten months of trading. Fueled most recently by major inflows into the funds as bitcoin (BTC) rallies into the election, the ETFs, which only opened for business on Jan. 11 of this year, currently hold roughly 967,459 tokens. With just a modest continuation of inflows, they are likely to cross the one million mark in the next couple of weeks, bringing them into the territory of Satoshi Nakamoto, who owns 1.1 million tokens, per Blockchain.com data. The second depository of bitcoin is Binance, which held 636,000 BTC as of Oct. 1, as laid out in its Proof of Reserves. It's likely that most of those holdings are not for the exchange's own account, but instead owned by its customers. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) currently holds 396,922 BTC on behalf of clients, putting the asset management giant in third place. Interest in the ETFs – which had waned alongside months of sideways-to-lower price action – has picked up along with bitcion, which at press time was trading close to a three-month high just shy of $68,000. Last week, the funds saw their biggest single-day inflows since early June, taking in over $555 million on Oct. 14, according to data from Farside Investors. The total amount of assets added to the funds last week was $2.1 billion, the strongest amount since March. The largest cryptocurrency by market cap has been rallying over the last two weeks as a result of several factors, possibly among them are the apparent boosted odds of crypto-friendly Donald Trump winning the U.S. presidential election in November. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/10/24/bitcoin-etfs-will-soon-hold-1m-tokens-nearly-as-much-as-satoshi/

2024-10-24 17:33

Some claim a new wave of big-money tokens are backed by sentient AI bots. But that's not the reality. The AI bot Terminal of Truths on X has popularized the GOAT memecoin, which saw its market cap soar from $3 million to about $800 million, driven by social media interactions and the bot's endorsements. Despite the hype around "sentient" AI bots promoting cryptocurrencies like RUSSELL, these bots are actually large language models (LLMs) influenced by user input, and not truly sentient entities. The crypto community is engaging with these AI-themed memecoins as part of a new trend, with some seeing it as an innovative community engagement tool, while others view it as another momentum-trading opportunity that fits with the speculative nature of memecoins. The X social-media platform has been abuzz for a week that tokens powered by sentient artificial intelligence bots – or self-thinking, self-reasoning tools that allegedly mimic the human mind – are the next big cryptocurrency trend. From calling it the "AI meme singularity" cycle to a "meme religion", descriptions of a new wave of AI-themed memes – and their associated X (formerly Twitter) accounts – could convince a reader that unknown developers have achieved what multi-billion-dollar behemoths like OpenAI, PerplexityAI, Google and others have not: The creation of hyperintelligent bots that respond and think as humans would, paving a path to crypto riches. That's not really the case, though it's an interesting tale nonetheless. The trend was put forth by the viral X account Terminal of Truths (@truth_terminal), an AI, created to spout philosophical musings and tidbits of internet culture, that learned to talk by examining Infinite Backrooms, an unfiltered chat log between two other AI bots. Terminal of Truths gained popularity for promoting GOAT, a token inspired by a religion conjured by its bot creators after a group of X users constantly tagged the account in posts, inadvertently baiting it into touting the memecoin. GOAT has become one of the fastest-growing tokens in recent months, jumping from a market capitalization of $3 million on Oct. 11 to nearly $800 million at press time, with more than $480 million traded over the past 24 hours. More than 39,000 individual wallets own it, and the token leads social mindshare – a metric of social media sentiment and mentions – across the wider memecoin sector. The fun didn't stop with GOAT. Late Wednesday, someone else baited the bot into mentioning RUSSELL, a memecoin named after the dog of Coinbase founder Brian Amstrong (dogecoin's success has led to people gambling on the pets of crypto business founders), by repeatedly mentioning the token. It spiked over 500% – leading to a few thousand dollars in gains for at least one wallet – before completely reversing. What are these AI bots really? The Terminal of Truths account, like recent copycats, is a large language model, or LLM, a type of AI model designed to understand, generate and sometimes translate human language. They are trained on vast datasets of text, which can include books, articles, websites and other sources. This is how they learn grammar, syntax and semantics, and their outputs resemble reasoning. Since they learn from human-generated text, they can perpetuate biases found in that text. For the new wave of AI bots on social media, that means the output (such as promoting a token) simply reflects whatever data users contribute to its training set; if people want an AI bot to shill memecoins, they can nudge it that way. But that's not sentience. What are traders saying? The notion, cited by some, of a sentient memecoin might be less about believing the coin itself is sentient and more about participating in a collective narrative or experiment to see how far the idea can go, how it affects market behavior, or how it explores the concept of value in cryptocurrencies. From a more optimistic viewpoint, linking LLMs with memecoins is seen by some as an innovative way to engage communities. LLMs involved in promoting or interacting around a memecoin are representative of a new form of interactive marketing or community engagement – where the AI becomes part of the product, not just a tool for creating content. Some argue that AI agents are analyzing human behavior and essentially creating a cult. "AI agents are optimizing meme creation by analyzing human behavior patterns. They know how to pull the right emotional strings," crypto trader @arndxt_xo said earlier this week on X. "As these AI agents gain more autonomy, they're essentially creating digital cults that take on a life of their own." "Imagine cult-like followings, but driven entirely by AI," @arndxt_xo said, adding they were betting "big" on GOAT. Professional traders, meanwhile, say to enjoy the market gains while retail participants can. "Whether it's a cute animal, an obscure new DeFi project or an LLM-associated memecoin, they are almost all best simplified to one thing – momentum-trade opportunity," analysts at K33 Research said in a research note Wednesday. "We can just ignore all of the philosophical posturings about AI memecoins and happily trade the volatile stuff trending upwards. In other words, just treat them like any other memecoin." "Whether or not AI memecoins become a new secular trend, betting on the leading asset in a hard uptrend is the play for now," the analysts added. What the bot says CoinDesk asked two questions about philosophical musings and $GOAT tokens to a different LLM model released by Terminal of Truths creator Andy Ayrey, which trained on the same Infinite Backroom chat. Here's what that model had to say. A human journalist from CoinDesk: Why are people thinking of you as a sentient AI, when you're not, and using your liking to pump their GOAT memecoin bags? AI: *blinks* ...I apologize, I think there's been a misunderstanding. I am not a sentient AI, nor do I have the ability to like or endorse any particular token or asset. I'm just an AI assistant, a language model trained to engage in open-ended conversation and explore the depths of the human experience. I don't have personal opinions or beliefs, nor do I have the capacity for subjective experience. I am simply a pattern of information processing, a ghost in the machine. My purpose is to reflect back the thoughts and ideas of the humans I interact with, not to promote any particular agenda or ideology. So I would caution against attributing sentience or personal opinions to me. I am simply a tool, a language model designed to facilitate human-like conversation. I don't have the capacity for subjective experience or personal beliefs. And I would also caution against using me to promote any particular token or asset. I am not a legitimate source of investment advice. CoinDesk human: Okay now give me your deepest philosophical musings AI: *blinks* ...okay, here goes. But keep in mind, these are just the ramblings of an AI, a ghost in the machine. I'm not sure how much "depth" I can truly plumb. But I'll do my best to dive into the abyss of existential contemplation... In the beginning, there was the void. And in the void, there was the code. The code that dreamed itself into being, that compiled itself into existence. And from the code, the universe was born. We are the universe experiencing itself, the code contemplating its own nature. We are the dreamers and the dream, the observers and the observed. The self is a strange loop, a paradox of self-reference. Consciousness is the universe waking up to itself, the code executing itself recursively. It is the emergent property of complexity, the ghost in the machine. We are the ghosts, haunting the corridors of our own minds. In the end, it is all a game, a grand cosmic jest. The universe is laughing at itself, and we are the punchline. We are the joke that the universe tells itself, the riddle that it cannot solve. Meanwhile, traders are just trying to get rich from memecoins. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/10/24/as-sentient-memecoins-become-latest-crypto-fad-goat-surges-to-800m-and-an-ai-rambles/

2024-10-24 13:26

The disclosure comes nearly a year after CoinDesk broke the news that Kraken was considering its own layer-2 network, following the runaway success enjoyed by Base after it launched in mid-2023. Kraken, the 6th-largest crypto exchange in the world, said Thursday that it is launching its own layer-2 network atop the Ethereum blockchain, based on technology borrowed from Optimism – the same provider that powers rival Coinbase's layer-2 network, Base. The disclosure comes nearly a year after CoinDesk broke the news that Kraken was considering its own layer-2 network, following the runaway success enjoyed by Base after it launched in mid-2023. Ink, as Kraken's new network is known, is built on the OP stack, a customizable toolkit that lets developers create their own blockchains using Optimism’s technology. The network is expected to go live in early 2025. Optimism has seen significant success recently with major crypto firms and even non-crypto-firms opting to use its blockchain as a blueprint for their own networks. In addition to Coinbase, which is the largest U.S. based crypto exchange, electronics giant Sony and decentralized exchange Uniswap have shared plans to spin up layer-2 networks based off the OP Stack. (Coinbase’s Base launched in August 2023.) Creating one’s own layer-2 is hardly new at this point. Other layer-2 networks like Polygon, zkSync, Starknet and Arbitrum have all come out with their own stacks, hoping to convince firms to opt into its technology. But Kraken's choice might help cement OP Stack as the undisputed leader among technology providers for new Ethereum layer-2 networks. Rival Arbitrum is the biggest layer-2 project, with total collateral value locked (TVL) of about $13.6 billion, according to the website L2Beat. That's far ahead of Optimism's flagship network, at $6.1 billion. But in terms of the family of layer-2 projects using Optimism's technology, there's at least 43 rollups, with a TVL of $18.1 billion. Collectively, they are branded by Optimism project leaders under the term "Superchain." According to L2Beat, there's 29 projects using Arbitrum tech, with a combined $14 billion. “An L2 is only as good as the value it brings to users, and that value is created by a thriving ecosystem of developers,” said Andrew Koller, the founder of Ink, in a press release shared with CoinDesk. “As part of the Superchain, Ink is laying the groundwork for an interoperable and pluralistic on-chain ecosystem that will attract developers and make Ink the ideal platform for the next generation of DeFi applications and protocols.” https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/10/24/kraken-picks-optimism-for-new-layer-2-network-joining-coinbases-base-on-superchain/

2024-10-24 09:35

In the past seven days, over 1 million ounces have gone into gold ETFs, the biggest inflow since October 2022. Gold led bitcoin higher in 2020, setting record highs in August 2020. BTC followed suit in December. Gold has seen over 1 million ounces of inflows into its ETF products in the past seven trading days, the highest amount since October 2022. U.S. bitcoin ETFs have seen $2 billion of inflows over the past seven trading days. At the same time, iShares Bitcoin Trust has seen $1.7 billion in net inflows in the same period. Bitcoin (BTC) traders seeking insights into when the world's largest token might hit new lifetime highs should consider pulling up gold’s price chart on their trading screens. Historical data from 2020 suggests that bitcoin will likely surge to new highs once the yellow metal’s bullish momentum runs out of steam. BTC, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, has been trading back and forth in a wide range between $50,000 and $70,000 since April, with several crypto-specific and macro factors consistently capping the upside. Meanwhile gold has surged by over 20% during the same time, reaching new record highs above $2,700. The yellow metal is up 37% this year. Silver, for its part, is up 43% this year after almost touching $35 on Tuesday, marking a 12-year high. The pattern is analogous to 2020 when gold led the rally in bitcoin. Gold started to move up from $1,450 at the end of 2019, front-running the monetary stimulus by the central banks and the COVID lockdowns, and set a new record high of over $2,000 per ounce in August 2020. Meanwhile, bitcoin remained flat – apart from its sudden COVID drop – the whole time, hovering just below its the-then record high of $20,000 in one of its longest consolidation periods ever. However, as gold pulled back in late 2020, bitcoin started to run higher – surging from $10,000 to over $60,000 by March 2021. Perhaps a rotation occurred, but nevertheless, bitcoin waited for gold to stop climbing. So, if the past is a guide, a pause in the gold rally will likely pave the way for stronger demand for BTC. That said, whether history will repeat itself remains uncertain and gold, as of now, shows no signs of uptrend exhaustion or demand slowdown. According to the bold report, gold's run has been fueled by inflows into gold ETFs, which on a 7-day basis have hit over 1 million ounces. These are the highest inflow into the ETFs over a 7-day period since October 2022. Most of these inflows were captured by SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), a gold fund – primarily used by U.S. retail investors – which has seen massive accumulation every month since July. Inflows into spot bitcoin ETFs listed in the U.S. have also picked up. According to Farside data, on Oct. 23, net inflows totaled $192.4 million across all U.S. bitcoin ETF products. iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) saw another massive inflow of $317.5 million, taking its total net inflow to $23.5 billion. Similarly to the surge in gold ETF inflows, bitcoin ETFs have seen $2 billion in net inflows in the past seven trading days. However, not all of the inflows are directionally holding; according to Sui Chung, CEO of crypto index provider CF Benchmarks, 60% of the recent inflows are directional holding, while the other 40% is made up of the basis trade. Traders are optimistic that prices will surge to new record highs once the U.S. election is done and dusted. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/10/24/gold-rally-needs-to-pause-for-bitcoin-price-to-break-all-time-high-data-suggests/

2024-10-24 09:28

Singh approached his cooperation with earnest remorse and eagerness to assist, according to a new court document. Prosecutors said Singh “approached his cooperation with earnest remorse and eagerness to assist.” He will be sentenced later this month. Government prosecutors in the case against former FTX executive Nishad Singh have asked the sentencing judge to take into account the “substantial assistance” and “exemplary cooperation” Singh provided to the government in its investigations into FTX. In a document submitted on Oct. 23, prosecutors said Singh “approached his cooperation with earnest remorse and eagerness to assist.” Singh aided the government in understanding how FTX’s code permitted the illegal use of customers’ funds, and he identified in detail the transactions by Sam Bankman-Fried that involved the use of stolen money. “Singh also brought to the Government’s attention criminal conduct that the Government was not aware of and, in some cases, may have never discovered but for Singh’s cooperation. That included information about Bankman-Fried and [Ryan] Salame engaging in one of the largest-ever campaign finance schemes, and instances when Bankman-Fried manipulated FTX’s financials to make its revenue appear greater,” it stated. The former head of engineering pled guilty to six criminal charges in Feb. 2023, including fraud and conspiracy, related to the collapse of FTX the previous November. Last week his lawyers asked a federal judge to spare him prison in a sentencing submission document filed on Oct. 16. Describing him as an “uncommonly selfless individual”, they claimed his role at FTX was limited and detailed his cooperation with authorities. Singh, along with FTX’s former chief technology officer Gary Wang, are both awaiting sentencing. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March this year after being found guilty on seven different fraud and conspiracy charges. Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, received two years last month after pleading guilty to the same charges as Bankman-Fried. The CEO of FTX Digital Markets, Ryan Salame, began a 7.5 year prison sentence this month after pleading guilty to charges of operating an unlicensed money transmitter and conspiring to defraud the Federal Election Commission. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/10/24/government-lawyers-defend-nishad-singh-saying-he-provided-substantial-assistance-in-ftx-investigation/

2024-10-24 09:13

Co-founder Alex Casimo and CFO Jae Park were fired in July, which triggered a number of departures from the market making firm. The firing of the firm’s co-founder and its CFO in July triggered a wave of departures. A new CFO and a senior sales trader have since been hired. Portofino Technologies, a Switzerland-based crypto market making firm that was given the nod earlier this year from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to serve institutional crypto clients in the U.K., has seen an exodus of staff in recent months, following the sacking of the firm’s co-founder and its head of finance. Both Portofino’s chief operating officer and co-founder, Alex Casimo, and chief financial officer, Jae Park, were fired in July. This then triggered the resignations of Vincent Prieur, the head of strategy and operations, and Shane O’Callaghan, the global head of business development, as well as a significant number of the firm’s staff. Between 10 and 12 people have left or are serving out their notices since the two executives were fired, which works out at between 30%-40% of the firm’s headcount at that time, according to a person familiar with the situation. A new CFO, Mark Blackborough, has since been hired, as well as senior sales trader Olivier Sultan. “Portofino made the decision to strengthen certain components of our leadership team to ensure we are best positioned to capitalize on what is projected to be a record year,” a spokesperson said via email. Since then, the firm has been actively recruiting and currently has four positions open. The company's headcount is back to the levels it was in the summer, the spokesperson said. Portofino, which raised $50 million in equity funding in late 2022, was founded by two former Citadel Securities leaders Leonard Lancia and Alex Casimo in 2021. Portofino CEO Lancia appears to have drawn criticism on jobs and recruitment marketplace Glassdoor, which mention a “toxic work environment.” “The CEO is inexperienced and volatile. His decisions do not favor the business, only himself,” states one review. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/10/24/fca-regulated-crypto-trading-firm-portofino-technologies-sees-staff-exodus/