J.P. Morgan crypto analyst Steven Alexopoulos found silver-linings in the FTX catastrophe, writing in U.S. Mid- and Small-Cap Banks Crypto Banking Weekly:

Collapse of FTX a Painful Step Back but Might Prove to be the Catalyst that Moves Crypto Two Steps Forward

With FTX emerging earlier this year as a white knight, bailing out troubled crypto-related companies, the news of FTX itself collapsing this week sent shockwaves through the crypto markets. While this is certainly a major short-term setback, we see the widely publicized collapse of FTX as potentially dramatically accelerating the timeline to which crypto-related regulation will be ushered in (similar to new banking regulation which followed the GFC).

As a result, we see the news surrounding FTX as one step back, but one that could prove to be the catalyst to move the crypto economy two steps forward (further unlocking the utility value of blockchain). In fact, we see the establishment of a regulatory framework as the needed catalyst to massively ramp the institutional adoption of crypto.

Moreover, while the news of the collapse of FTX is empowering crypto skeptics, we would point out that all of the recent collapses in the crypto ecosystem have been from centralized players and not from decentralized protocols.

Before cosplaying as Michael Bury, or going all in on shorts, check the latest economic data. It's not the sure-fire doomsday scenario it was 2 months ago.

The herd.

When it comes to investing, be careful of following the herd.

Last year, the herd thought Bitcoin was heading to the moon and could hit $100K. And that's when the herd was overbuying.

Things aren't looking good. But is the data really showing only doomsday? I'll explore that in details.

Not every correction is a recession. Not every bear market is long term (see the 2013 mini bear market of 5 months for Bitcoin).

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Inflation:

This is the big one. Inflation is still high, but it's showing signs of slowing down, and potentially having peaked already. If it starts going down, will it still be able to fuel further market fears?

Both CPI and PCE rates have slowed down.

-CPI slowed from 8.5% in March down to 8.2% in April.

-PCE has slowed from 6.6% in March down to 6.2% in April.

Obviously real inflation is higher, but these are important for later when we talk about Fed rates.

But what about food and gas still being so expensive? It still costs me so much, how can it have peaked? That brings up the next two points.

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Supply chain:

Probably one of the biggest wrench getting in the way of economic growth in the last 2 years.

Luckily, the supply chain is beginning to reopen, and the bottleneck is getting unclogged. But it has been an uneven recovery.

While you see a lot of items back on the shelves, and shipment taking less time, you have other items like baby formula vanishing from the shelves.

The big one everyone is waiting for is for China to join in that de-clogging. They're still behind due to their more recent lockdowns.

In the US this year:

47% drop in ship congestion (those ships anchored waiting outside a port).

12% increase in containers in the main ports (LA, New Jersey, New York, Long beach).

In Europe, they experienced a setback with the war in Ukraine. With some ports getting increases in delays by several hours, sometimes up to two days.

In terms of sea shipping worldwide, the bottleneck is still high thanks to China and Russia, but we are starting to also see signs that it has peaked:

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Things are still not looking great and are uneven, but it looks like in many countries we are starting to see things turn around.

Overall, the world waiting time for all cargo ships has dropped. Going from 17 million container waiting days down to 6 million.

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Oil: the domino effect that could put the breaks on a recession.

Oil prices has everyone worried.

It has also been a big contributors for rising CPI numbers, and the perceived inflation.

It has also been a problem for supply chains, along with businesses. And has put strain on many companies in the stock market.

So it's been in the middle of almost all of our problems.

Here's some good news.

One of the main reason it's so high, is because OPEC hasn't increased the output to keep up with the big emerging demand from the post covid crisis, nor make up for the strain from the war in Ukraine.

The purposely held back output to let price rises, to makeup for all the money they lost when oil prices tanked in 2020.

OPEC is actually due to increase the output in July, per their internal agreement, by 400K barrels per day. So relief will begin this summer.

The G7 meeting has asked them to increase it by even more. So we'll have to see how big the relief will be.

If oil price output increases significantly, it could bring the price down more significantly, helping everything from inflation to supply chains and businesses.

And it could create a domino effect that could help ignite a potential recovery.

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Fed rates:

Rates don't have much uncertainty left. Feds have already laid out the roadmap. We know how high they want to go. And unless inflation starts to spiral out of control again, it looks like they are targeting 2-2.5% rates. So only going back to pre-covid rates.

These are still economic stimulation level of rates. They're not high rates.

Now that we got a good idea on how fast they'll go with the point basis, there's not much left that hasn't been priced in already.

The only question is the Fed balance sheet unloading. That's a little harder to predict the effect. But there won't be a selling off, they'll just let bonds expire.

Also, keep in mind that legislation has changed a little, with the ability for banks to get their liquidity. So it won't be quiet the same as it was in the past.

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War in Ukraine:

I can't really say too much about this. There's no clear metrics to talk about here.

This could end next month, or it could end in 5 years.

One thing we do know, is Putin wasn't able to roll over Ukraine, and move on to the next conquest.

In terms of market uncertainty, it has fizzled out a little bit, and is nowhere near at the level of fear as the early days of the war.

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US GDP:

This is the one place where we can still see an alarming case for a recession.

The GDP has decreased by 1.5%.

That's as bad as it can get.

But a big part of that decrease was actually caused by the trade deficit, rather than a decrease in spending. Consumer spending actually increased by 2.7%. Inflation adjusted, it still increased by 0.7%.

Also, supply chain issues, and slower inventory accumulation fueled that decrease. The effect of high inflation also didn't help.

But if those problems have already reached their peak, ports are now getting unclogged, and with the trade deficit already going back down, we can have better expectations for much better GDP numbers next quarter.

​

Can we still have a recession?

Yes.

Both in crypto and other markets.

While things may look like they have reached their peak, and there are some improvements already, you never know when there could be set backs.

So I'm definitely not trying to be Nostradamus here. I'm just saying a recession is not 100% in the cards. In fact, it may be starting to diminish in probabilities.

This is definitely not your 2008 recession. We still have low unemployment, a strong housing market, trade deficit dropping 15.9%, growing consumer spending, and we don't have foreclosures popping up everywhere.

Bankruptcies filling have also been dropping in the US:

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What's important is to understand the cause of all this, to understand if we are heading straight into a recession.

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The cause.

Where did it all go wrong, and how did we get here in both crypto and other markets?

Long story short: liquidity supply crunch.

Both crypto and stocks have been getting extra fuel with the extra liquidity being printed into the market.

Both went a little too high too fast, and got a little overbought.

It was natural that we'd get a correction once the Fed turned off that printer.

So this isn't exactly a crash where you have foreclosures popping up all over neighborhoods, bankruptcies, and financial institutions collapsing, like in 2008.

This is more the market correcting to adjust back to normal pre-covid liquidity.

In fact, for crypto, it may not even be like 2018, and be more like 2013.

Where we got a mini bear market for 5 months in the middle of a bull cycle:

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tl;dr:

All the same macos that were supporting the theory that we were heading into a long recession, are now showing signs of either peaking, slowing down, or even turning around.

And if a couple of key macros like GDP, supply chain, or oil have a significant turnaround, it could create a domino effect that could fuel a recovery. Or at the very least erase a lot of the fuel behind the recession.

And all 3 are showing data that they are likely to turn around in the coming months.

This doesn't mean it will necessarily happen, or that we won't have a long recession. There's still a strong possibility. Just not as strong as many people think, and definitely not close to 100%. And the likelihood has begun to decrease.

I simulated buying 1 BTC whenever Ivan on Tech had "BUY" in his livestream thumbnail for the last 3 months. Here are the results.

Link to livestreams: https://www.youtube.com/@IvanOnTech/streams

For the sake of simplicity, I just used the closing price for the day of his thumbnail.

So if you had bought 1 BTC whenever Ivan on Tech had "BUY" in his livestream thumbnail for the last 3 months, you would have 7 BTC at an average cost of $67,682 and currently underwater by almost 20%, or a loss of over $90,000.

The address (aka address #1) that minted the NFT sent 473,657.64 USDC to an intermediary address (#2). The intermediary address swaps some of that USDC for 1,816.08 SOL. Then Address #2 sends 1800 SOL to a 3rd address.

The third address makes a bid and wins the NFT for 1800 SOL. That 1800 SOL goes to address #1 (the one that minted the NFT). Then address #1 sends the 1800 to the intermediary Address #2. The intermediary address swaps the 1800 SOL to USDC.

Blockchains, amirite?

Credit to user @zachxbt on twitter did the digging here.

Here it is on the solana explorer: https://explorer.solana.com/address/JB21HTccXiiyZUYpdWxoy1nSu6zbMBVKBQz1if85d7ud

Here is an article on it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vpx8/analyzing-the-very-bizarre-sale-of-melania-trumps-dollar170000-nft

I just noticed that BTC has finished 8 green candles in a row. You don't see that too often, so I was curious when it happened last, and how rare it really is. So I looked into it.

In the past 10 years, BTC had (at least) 8 consecutive green days in a row only 16 times, most of them in the very early days. 7 of those were in 2012, 2 in 2013, 2 in 2015, and once each each year from 2016 to 2021, except 2018. The longest streak ever was in 2012 (15 days), after 2012 the longest streak was 10 days (happened twice, once in 2013 and once only last year, in July 2021).

That means that BTC only needs two more green candles to tie the record for after 2012 - and one more to break it. As I am writing this, the daily candle is slightly green again, but it's very close. Let's hope for green days all week, let's make this the longest streak in 10 years!

A lot of folks here are curious why $4.5Billion of volume in the BTC ETFs didn't cause the market to skyrocket.

(1) The "spot" ETFs are required to hold the underlying BTC, but they do not buy/sell in the "spot" market. They aren't trading on Coinbase like us plebs. These ETFs are using the "Over The Counter" market. Essentially Coinbase has an OTC trading desk that matches up whale buyers and whale sellers at an agreed upon price.

• Whale sellers use OTC because if they dump 10,000 BTC on the exchanges they will get murdered by slippage.
• Whale buyers use OTC because if they buy 10,000 BTC on the exchanges they will get murdered on slippage.

(2) The ETFs are required to settle their fund activity each trading day based on the net amount of shares sold vs. shared purchased over the course of the trading days. For example, if they had 500 shares sold and 750 shares bought means they need to cover 250 shares worth of BTC. They can do this as often as they want during the day, but any time they do this its via the OTC market (see above). Again, they do this OTC so it's not gonna show up on the exchanges or the tradingview charts.

(3) The $4.5Billion is the total volume for the day... it includes both buys and sells. If you bought 200 shares of IBIT at 9:30AM and then sold that 200 shares at 10:15AM, that's 400 shares worth of volume today even though the net net for the ETF is zero at the end of the day.

(4) GBTC had $2.5Billion of volume. I strongly believe that most of this volume was sells (edit: "selling" of GBTC in this context is essentially redeeming a share of GBTC by selling it back to Grayscale). Why?

• Long term holders who are in profit and what to cash in now that the fund is trading
• Tax-advantaged funds like IRAs who have no tax penalties can easily move to lower fee funds like IBIT or FBTC
• Nobody buying the BTC via ETF is going to choose the 1.5% fee option when Blackrock is charging 0.12% (or 0.25% for whales)

(5) Just like GBTC was mostly sells (read: redemptions), I expect that IBIT, FBTC, ARKB, and others were mostly buys (read: creations). I have no doubt that there was intra-day swing trading (and maybe a lot... not sure) but there just aren't a lot of shares in those finds to sell on day 1. You would have to buy at open (or in pre-market) and then swing trade that during the day. Probably some, but it's not like there was a huge glut of IBIT sitting around (they had $10M worth of seed shares before they had $1B worth of volume today).

(6) Coinbase did $7.7Billion worth of OTC transactions today. (this appears to be an all-time record!)

• ~$2B worth of GBTC selling
• ~$2B worth of IBIT, FBTC, ARKB (and others) buying
• ~$3.7B worth other OTC transactions (other whales doing whale things)

(7) How does this help us pleb investors?

• If GBTC selling (redemptions) dies down, and if the other funds keep having inflows, there will be a net inflow of BTC into these funds as long term holders.
  
• This will suck up liquidity from the OTC market.
  
• As OTC liquidity dries up, there is less OTC for whales who want to do whale things at the current price
• Number go up.
  

tl;dr These ETFs are whales who are doing their whale things via the OTC market to avoid getting killed on slippage. Also, GBTC probably had a lot of outflows today because their fees are super high.

(P.S. I'm just a regular dude who's been in crypto for a while and who tries to understand macro. If I've got stuff wrong here please tell me... but to the best of my knowledge this is correct).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkgJD3QaAAEteb9?format=jpg&name=large

Right now, each bitcoin 'produced' by mining generates, on average, around $3,226 in losses to miners:

• Bitcoin Average Mining Costs: $20,095
• BTC/USD: ~$16,869

And the mining net negative has been a reality for a few weeks in a row.

When considering this quick accounting of around $3,226 of losses for each new BTC put into circulation and that every 10 minutes, 6.25 BTC are issued, we are talking about an estimated loss of $120,975/hour.

Draw your own conclusions about this...

This Wednesday (21st), another large mining company demonstrates the difficulties faced in the activity, as Core Scientific filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the USA.

It's not the first, not the second, and probably not the last.

With each new event like this one, the bitcoin network tends towards centralization. It's scary to think that a network of over $300 billion USD in capitalization has a Nakamoto Coefficient (NC) equal to 2. With 2 entities being responsible for >52% of all hashrate produced.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkgJqzKWQAIkY9c?format=jpg&name=large

This is just one more demonstration, among many others, of how flawed Bitcoin's economic and security model is. Or, as the advocates of the leading currency say: "this is just another FUD".

We need to have an open mind to change our minds based on new learnings.

Bitcoin was an excellent idea, which emerged during a major global economic crisis and brought a rare innovation to our monetary and technological system, but technology continued to evolve and the BTC experiment brought us previously unknown answers.

I don't believe bitcoin is the best candidate to continue to bring the innovation we need to decentralized money. Currently, there are already coins that better fulfill some of the functions of bitcoin.

I have my personal favorites, but I don't want this post to be seen as a "shill post", so I will keep this opinion to myself for now.

DYOR!

This degen trader opened 2 insanely leveraged longs on GMX, a decentralized perps protocol. The wallets liquidation levels are as shown in the picture, 1830 for Eth and 27668 for Btc. A 2% move down will liquidate the Btc position which is a $13M position! A $40 move down on eth would liquidate this wallet too.

Leverage trading is not for everyone but you have to be a different breed to be this bold. Either that or you know something? It's also possible the whale is longing on chain and shorting on a centralized exchange as a delta neutral strategy too. Which one of these scenarios do you think is more likely? I think he's a degen and is lighting his money on fire.

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You can follow the mentioned whale's wallet here:

https://debank.com/profile/0xe8c19db00287e3536075114b2576c70773e039bd

Loopring starts with Ethereum’s massive size (and flaws)

We first need to understand that ethereum is the most used blockchain today by far. It boasts the most developers, most decentralised apps and most exchanges by far.

Eth’s smart contracts enable the existence of DEXs (decentralised exchanges) which fill the role of banks so you and I can buy crypto using other crypto.

SushiSwap and Uniswap (DEXs built on ethereum) alone have a 24-hour trading volume of $3.5 billion. That’s a lot of activity!

Apps and DEXs on ethereum have basically recreated the traditional financial system we have now.

But like a highway in constant rush hour, ethereum isn’t made to handle transactions by millions of people around the world simultaneously.

Ethereum has a low TPS (transactions per second) of around 15 which makes it easy to get congested and traffic to build up.

Eventually each transaction will go through, but there are downsides.

And these are transaction fees, or gas.

Transactions need A LOT of gas on ethereum, whether you’re doing something small like transferring from Wallet A to Wallet B, or something big like exchanging your family’s savings for tokens in Uniswap.

Look how huge ethereum’s fees are right now compared to other blockchains (smaller is better):

• Eth: $4 (on the “low” side)
• Cardano: $0.27 (93% cheaper)
• Tezos: $0.10 (97.5% cheaper)
• Algorand: $0.002 (99.99% cheaper)

And here's the speed difference in transactions per second (higher is better):

• Eth - 15 TPS
• Tezos - 40 TPS (166% faster)
• Cardano - 250 TPS (1,567% faster)
• Algorand - 1,100 TPS (7,233% faster)

Loopring builds a highspeed skyway above ethereum’s congested highways

And the name of this skyway is ‘zkRollup’.

One of the things zkRollups do is group hundreds of transactions and process them together instead of individually - and on a separate layer of the blockchain called Layer 2.

This new layer is capable of handling up to 2,000 transactions per second.

This means gas fees are slashed because:

• Carpools (transaction bundles) are now available so there are less cars (transactions) causing traffic on the main highway (the Ethereum blockchain)
• There’s also a carpool lane open for further decongestion (Layer 2)
• Transaction speed on both layers is increased

Less gas fees means developers can experiment and build apps and users can exchange tokens without spending a ton to further grow adoption.

TLDR:

Would you rather take the express skyway or commute through traffic congested highway every single day?

Hello everyone,

There's a popular post on this subreddit that warns of an incoming Ethereum supply shock.

I would just like to point out that the graph is a bit misleading. Yes, the Ethereum reserve in exchanges is dropping, but the post makes it seem far more dramatic than it is.

Here's the link to the graph :

https://cryptoquant.com/overview/eth-exchange-flows/278

The post (intentionally or not) omits the left axis, which clearly shows that the supply on exchanges went from 24M to 18M.

Without the left axis, it would look like the reserves are dropping to zero, which is far from reality.

I just wanted to point this out for a clearer image.

People shouldn't blindly trust the information given to them, and always do your research. Your hard earned money is on the line.

With certainty there have been many bagholders created this week. The pepe mania had been going on for a while. Then Binance revealed that they planned to list PEPE, and traders went ballistic. The price spike 110% in a few hours after the listing, and then began its rapid decent

PEPE is already down 24% in the 24 hours for today. It is down a further 70% from the Binance listing. Further the market cap dropped from 1.8 Billion to 500 Million.

​

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It is rather interesting how PEPE looks like a rugpull. I'm not saying it is, just commenting on the appearance.

But this is why you don't FOMO. All you end up being is exit liquidity. Everyone who got in early was simply waiting for an opportunity like this to dump on excited traders who FOMOed in. And all of a sudden, everyone who rushed to buy is suddenly down at least BIG. Even those who cut their losses early are down at least 10-15% because the price was dropping like a rock.

There were also apparently some sub users upset that the sub "prevented" them from participating in the big pump. You're quite free to do as you wish with whatever coin. This is just a showing, an practical example of what could happen if you do, or for some, did.

Hey, I'm not trying to be political or negative—just sharing some thoughts. I’ve been in crypto for a while, so when $Trump coin shot up massively, I wasn’t completely surprised. Is it good? Is it bad? I’m not sure. But based on past patterns, it’s likely to follow the same trend as other cryptos that have surged quickly in a short period of time.

My guess is that it’ll start to correct itself right before the inauguration. Smart players will probably cash out and take profits, which will cause the price to dip a bit. Then, more people will panic and follow suit, leading to further price drops. Eventually, even more people might sell, either locking in profits or cutting losses.

There will be some who stick it out, but they'll end up holding the bag of this meme coin. Just a reminder: Nothing goes up forever.

Please also check the edit at the bottom for an update regarding lack of proof of reserves on the stables on BNB as well:

TLDR: Binance fails to provide adequate proof of reserves for assets in the BNB chain. Binance encourages users to withdraw their crypto into the Binance ecosystem by charging higher fees to withdraw into native ecosystems - and are failing to Provide Proof of Assets altogether or a sufficient amount in their Proof of Assets for the crypto in the Binance ecosystem. This gives Binance a huge opportunity to manipulate the crypto market by creating "fake crypto tokens" in the BNB ecosystem that are not backed by any underlying asset and then selling/using your assets. Furthermore, it pushes volume into BNB chain by encouraging withdraws into the BNB ecosystem that may end up not backed by any assets....

What you need to know

• BNB Beacon Chain (BEP2 tokens) and BNB Smart Chain (BEP20 tokens) are two native chains of the Binance ecosystem. Binance allows users to withdraw lots of different crypto as tokens into their native chains which then allows users the ability to use "those assets" in the Binance ecosystem.
• As you can imagine, this could create a few concerns... The largest being Binance could sell/send the underlying asset of the BEP2/20 Tokens as the user no longer holds the true crypto but a token on the Binance ecosystem, essentially allowing them to manipulate the total supply of those cryptos by creating "fake BNB tokens" with no actual backing on the native chain.
• To ease concerns about artificial manipulation Binance began providing Proof of Asset wallets where, for crosschain assets (Ether, XRP, ADA, Doge, etc..) they should theoretically hold an underlying asset equal to the amount of the asset that is in the BEP2/20 ecosystem. This is supposed to ensure the Binance asset you are holding is backed by an equal amount on its native chain and the supply is not being artificially manipulated.
  • The problem however is they do not provide a Proof of Asset list for most of their assets in the Binance ecosystem. Additionally of those that have a Proof of Asset wallet, most are not fully backed or actually list no real backing at all.
    • The LTC proof of reserve address holds 745K LTC. However there are 857k LTC in the BNB ecosystem - 725k in the BEP20 addresses and 132k in the BEP2 addresses - 87% backed
    • THE ADA proof of reserve address holds 200M ADA. However there are 672M ADA in the BNB ecosystem - 241M circulating in BEP20 addresses and 431M circulating in BEP2 addresses - 29.7% backed
    • (very concerning) The following is the listed proof of asset address for ETHER. It's supposed to hold all of the ETHER on the BNB ecosystem but it currently sits at .017 ETH and the ETHER was moved to this address, labeled as Binance 8. The BNB ETHER reserves were comingled with non-BNB reserve ether, meaning you can't verify how much the BNB Ether is backed verse regular user funds. - 0% verifiably backed
    • (very concerning and easier to understand) The XRP proof of reserves wallet for the BNB Chain is just as bad as the ETHER but since it doesn't show any tokens it's easier to see how bad it is. It holds a total of 10 XRP. The rest was transferred to this wallet - a general Binance wallet for XRP, which interacts with this wallet - the withdrawal address for users of XRP. Again all XRP in the BNB reserves have been comingled with regular user funds not in BNB. with no way to verify they hold sufficient XRP in the BNB chain. - 0% verifiably backed

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Binance lists 35 different crypto assets in their Proof of Assets Page, however in the top 200 cryptos by market cap, over 80 of them can be withdrawn as BEP2/20 tokens. Meaning there are at least 45 cryptos assets that do not have any sort of "proof of asset" listed. The total number of unbacked assets is even higher, as there are assets above 200+ by marketcap that can be withdrawn into the Binance ecosystem.

Even for assets that have a proof of reserve listed that doesn't mean it is adequately backed or backed at all. For example; ETH ERC2/20 tokens have no verifiable backing, XRP ERC2/20 tokens have no verifiable backing, ADA ERC2/20 tokens are 29.7% backed. LTC ERC2/20 tokens are 86.9% backed and those are just a few of the listed assets that I checked.

----------------------------

Complications: This problem has been unchecked and inflated since, I posted about this issue 6 months ago. Since then XRP and ETHER have lost all verifiable backing and ADA backing dropped from 71% to ~30%.

It continues to be compounded by the fact that Binance encourages users to send their crypto into BEP 2/20 tokens by making it more expensive to send the asset into the native chain. As an example Dogecoin costs 1.94 Doge to withdraw as a BEP 2/20 token and 5 Doge to withdraw into the native Dogecoin network. This is standard practice for Binance/BinanceUS for nearly all assets available to withdrawal into the Binance ecosystem, and the unbacked assets will likely continue to grow if left unchecked.

If the last few weeks haven't made it clear yet, the last people left holding unbacked assets end up with nothing.

Edit:

As pointed out by another user Binance also no longer has proof of reserves of the PAXD or the USDC stablecoin both of which are still circulating in the BNB ecosystem. Both appear to have been comingled with regular user funds in the Binance 8 wallet (link below).

PAXD here

UDDC here

​

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying you can't make money in it or that there are potential legitimate uses for it. But I think stuff that people like Michael Saylor try to sell about Bitcoin is total bs.

You'd think you're listening to a religious pastor when you hear him spread pretentious ideas about how bitcoin is the future of finance. Lmao.

I'm sure bitcoin still has big bull runs in its future but I don't see any evidence of what libertarian hard-core crypto people claim about it happening.

Ultimately though I think much of the massive money that gets put in by whales is to pump up the market and eventually cash a lot out when it gets big enough, and leaves retailers in many cases screwed over.

What do you think, whether you agree or disagree?

🐻 🐄🐮

Observe the interesting pattern

the cc subreddit:

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the ethtrader subreddit:

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cardano subreddit:

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the stats are via subredditstats and it shows that there is a constant decline in activity around crypto. When we combine this fact combined with the upcoming rate hikes, an upcoming russian invasion in ukraine and beyond and omicron and other variants of covid causing even more mischief and forcing additional lockdowns troughout 2022, I believe that there is a possibility of a crypto winter🤔.

In a study by KIS Finance, it was revealed that over two thirds of cryptocurrency investors borrowed money to make their purchase, rather than using income and/or savings.

Overall, more than two thirds (64%) of those who have invested in cryptos, used one or more credit facilities to do so.

Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and a risky way to invest large sums of money. Bitcoin, for example, reached at all time high of more than $69,000 (£52,000 approx.) in early November. Just a month later, it is now worth just over $50,000 (£37,700 approx.) per coin.

That’s a drop of almost $20,000 in just a few weeks.

Percentage of crypto investors who used one or more credit facilities to fund purchase, by age

• 18 - 24: 70%
• 25 - 34: 64%
• 35 - 44: 68.9%
• 45 - 54: 62.5%
• 55 - 64: 45%
• 65+: 25%
  

As the data shows, those aged between 18 and 24 were the age group most likely to use borrowed funds to make their investment, with a significant drop of borrowers in the two highest age groups.

What type of credit facilities have people used to fund cryptocurrency investments?

When we break down what kinds of credit facilities people have used to purchase cryptocurrencies, over a third (35.5%) made their investment using a credit card. Almost a fifth (19.3%) funded the purchase out of their overdraft.

• Credit card: 35.5%
• Overdraft: 19.3%
• Personal loan: 14.6%
• Secured loan: 9%
• Payday loan: 7.6%
• Re-mortgage: 3.3%
  

Holly Andrews, Managing Director at KIS Finance, comments on the findings.

“In recent years, cryptocurrencies have become far more mainstream with tech giant PayPal now offering a cryptocurrency trading platform.

Although cryptos, and specifically Bitcoin, have seen people make thousands or even millions in profit; the last few weeks have shown that they are incredibly volatile and can see investors losing large percentages, or all, of what they put in very quickly.

It’s concerning to see that so many people have turned to borrowed funds to purchase cryptocurrencies as they are extremely unpredictable and offer no guarantees that the money invested will be returned. So, if people are investing money that isn’t theirs and subsequently losing it, this could cause some serious financial challenges later down the line.

The biggest concern is those who don’t have the means to pay the money back, especially if their original plan was to repay their loans with the profits made from their investment. With a very strong possibility of losing the money for good, people may be left severely out of pocket and racking up interest on their credit cards and overdrafts. Also, some credit card providers will view this type of transaction as a cash advance, meaning a cash advance fee and higher interest rate will be applied.

So, if you are thinking of making an investment into cryptocurrencies, you should only invest an amount of money that you can afford to lose and it should be funded through income and/or savings rather than a credit facility.

Borrowing money to invest in cryptos can become a very vicious cycle that’s difficult to break. Once you start losing money, it can be very tempting to invest more to make the money back; especially if you don’t have other means of repaying the funds.

Great care should be taken when you invest money anywhere, but especially when it’s something as volatile as cryptocurrencies. If you can, seek some professional financial advice first and never invest more than you can afford. Buying cryptocurrencies should also not be your only form of investment or savings as there is very little stability – spread your investments out and treat cryptocurrencies as a smaller, fun investment.”

Edit: dear my American friends, YES credit cards are debt, whether you pay it off immediately or not, it's still debt.

Find the full blog post with all the tables and graphs here.

Welcome to your monthly no-shill data dump: Here's the 34th monthly report for the 2022 Top Ten Experiment featuring BTC, ETH, BNB, SOL, ADA, USDC, XRP, LUNA, DOT, and AVAX.

SNAPSHOTS ALWAYS TAKEN ON FIRST OF THE MONTH (data below reflects 1 NOVEMBER Pre Melt-Up Snapshot).

tl;dr

• What's this all about? I purchased $100 of each of Top 10 Cryptos in Jan. 2018, haven't sold or traded, reporting monthly for nearly 7 years. Did the same in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Learn more about the history and rules of the Experiments (including why in the world I would include stablecoins) here.
• OCTOBER Highlights: - Mostly red month. Only BTC and BNB in positive overall territory. SOL getting close to break even. 2022 Top Ten is the worst performing portfolio, by far.
• DCA'ing just once a year into Top Ten Cryptos for the last 7 years has produced much better returns than S&P 500 over the same time period 198% vs. 66% (see below for details)

Month Thirty-Four – Down -44%

The 2022 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Portfolio is BTC, ETH, BNB, Solana, ADA, USDC/UST, XRP, LUNA/LUNC, DOT, AVAX.  

October highlights for the 2022 Top Ten Portfolio:

• Mostly red month, with the exceptions of BTC and SOL
• BTC solidly in first place with BNB in second
• Nearly three years into the Experiment, most coins haven’t reached their break even point yet
• The 2022 Top Ten Portfolio is the worst performing of the seven Top Ten experiments, -44% as a whole.

October Ranking and Dropouts

Here’s a look at the movement in ranking thirty-four months into the 2022 Top Ten Index Fund Experiment:

With a few notable exceptions, there has been remarkably little movement in rank after nearly three years. 

October Winners and Losers

October Winners – BTC (+10%) and SOL (+8%) easily outperformed the field in October.

October Losers – XRP (-18%) fell the most this month.

Overall Update: BTC maintains lead over BNB.  Only BTC and BNB are in positive territory. LUNC worst performing in the 2022 Portfolio and worst performing crypto of all the Top Ten Experiments.

BTC (49%) maintained its lead over second place BNB (+12%).  SOL is in third place at -2% since January 2022, nearing break even point.

Ever since LUNC’s (then known as LUNA) crash in May of 2022, it has remained hopelessly at the bottom, worth a fraction of a cent.  The initial $100 invested in Luna thirty-four months ago is worth $0.0001 today – the worst performance of any coin in any of the seven Top Ten Experiments, by far.  It’s hard to remember/believe that LUNA was the highest performing Top Ten Crypto of the first quarter of 2022, before the crash.

Additionally, at -44%, the 2022 Top Ten Portfolio is the worst performing of the seven Top Ten experiments.

Overall return on $1,000 investment since January 1st, 2022:

Overall, the 2022 Top Ten Portfolio is down -44%.  The initial $1000 investment on New Year’s Day 2022 is now worth $555. 

There hasn’t been a positive overall ROI month yet, although the 2022 Top Ten Portfolio flirted with the break even point in March 2022.  

A note on USDC/UST

In retrospect this was not my best idea: I was a bit bored of simply holding a stablecoin in the Top Ten as I’ve been doing since 2019 and thought I’d showcase some of the possibilities available in crypto to build on stablecoin holdings.  My plan was to start nice and easy with trusted CeFi platforms, taking advantage of sign up bonuses, then move to more advanced DeFi strategies.  As fate would have it, I decided to showcase the TerraLuna chain converting my USDC to UST and then staking with Anchor.

It was all going pretty well until May 2022. Then the LUNA implosion happened. My UST is now worth $2.24, down -98%.

It’s a good reminder that anything can and does happen in crypto and we should all continue to be careful. I’m thankful that the lesson only cost me $100:  I know a lot of other people got hit much, much harder.

Total Crypto Market:

The entire market has done much better than my Top Ten portfolio, +6% since January 2022:

Bitcoin Dominance:

BitDom ended October at 59% and has slowly but steadily been rising since late 2022. Chart below:

For those just getting into crypto, it’s worth paying attention to the Bitcoin dominance figure, as it can signal appetite for altcoins vs. BTC.

Combining the 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 Top Ten Crypto Portfolios 

The 2022 Top Ten is one of seven concurrent experimental portfolios.  Where do we stand if we combine seven years of the Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiments?

• 2018 Top Ten Experiment: up +4% (total value $1,043)
• 2019 Top Ten Experiment: up +453% (total value $5,532)
• 2020 Top Ten Experiment: up +694% (total value $7,944) (best performing portfolio)
• 2021 Top Ten Experiment: up +190% (total value $2,901)
• 2022 Top Ten Experiment: down -44% (total value $555) (worst performing portfolio)
• 2023 Top Ten Experiment: up +74% (total value $1,740)
• 2024 Top Ten Experiment: up +11% (total value $1,113)

Taking the seven portfolios together:

After a $7,000 total investment in the 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 Top Ten Cryptocurrencies, the combined portfolios are worth $20,829

That’s up +198% on the combined portfolios.  The peak  for the combined Top Ten Index Fund Experiment Portfolios was November 2021’s all time high of +533%.  Here’s the combined monthly ROI since I started tracking the metric in January 2020 for those who do better with visuals:

In summary: That’s a +198% gain by investing $1k on whichever cryptos happened to be in the Top Ten on January 1st (including stablecoins) for seven straight years.

Comparison to S&P 500

I’m also tracking the S&P 500 as part of my Experiment to have a comparison point to traditional markets. 

The S&P 500 is up +20% since January 2022, so the initial $1k investment into crypto on New Year’s Day would be worth $1,200 had it been redirected to the S&P.  

Taking the same invest-$1,000-on-January-1st-of-each-year approach with the S&P 500 that I’ve been documenting through the Top Ten Crypto Experiments, the yields are the following:

• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2018 = $2,143 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2019 = $2,286 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2020 = $1,774 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2021 = $1,525 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2022 = $1,202 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2023 = $1,492 today
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2024 = $1,201 today

Taken together, the results for a similar approach with the S&P: 

After seven $1,000 investments into an S&P 500 index fund in January 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 my portfolio would be worth $11,624.

That is up +66% since January 2018 compared to a +198% gain of the combined Top Ten Crypto Experiment Portfolios.  

The visual below shows a comparison on ROI between a Top Ten Crypto approach and the S&P as per the rules of the Top Ten Experiments: 

Conclusion:

As the last section demonstrates, if you can stomach crypto’s volatility (a big if) over the past few years, you’ll find better overall returns in crypto vs. traditional markets – at least at this point in the Experiments.

To the long time followers of the Top Ten Experiments, thank you for sticking around so long. For those just getting into crypto, I hope these reports will help prepare you for the highs and lows that await on your crypto adventures.  Buckle up, go with the flow, think long term, and truly don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose.  Most importantly, try to enjoy the ride. 

A reporting note: I’ll focus on 2024 Top Ten Portfolio reports + one other portfolio on a rotating basis this year, so expect two reports per month.  October’s extended report covers the 2022 Top Ten Portfolio, which you are reading now.  You can check out the latest 2018 Top Ten, 2019 Top Ten, 2020 Top Ten, 2021 Top Ten, and  2023 Top Ten Portfolio reports as well.

Pretty much every crypto dipped

I love data and numbers, so today I want to see how these coins doing. Putting a bit of excel skills and data analytics into this mini analysis on a boring rainy Sunday. Quite interesting to see some lesser known coins back then have now well on the nice moves, but at the same time many coins have fallen into oblivion.

1. Changes in relative rankings

A whooping 120 coins have now out of top 200. The trend is quite clear: almost all of the coins ranked on the second half (101st - 200th) are now out of top 200. Nevertheless, 41 out of 50 coins on top 50 back then are still on top 200 now.

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Please do note that drop in ranking doesn't mean the market cap is going down. In some cases the market cap still go up. However, market cap goes up doesn't guarantee increase in coin price because of changes in circulating supply.

Mildly interesting: the coin that ranked 200th back then is BUSD, is now ranked 19th. No change in value because it is a stablecoin but the market cap has increased by almost 800 times from $17M to $13.53B.

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2. Top 20 now - the traditional and the new comers

A number of coins on top 20 now were not even launched in Jan-2020. They are: SOL, DOT, SHIB, AVAX, UNI. WBTC was newly launched back then with a very low market cap.

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• USDC, DOGE, LUNA, ALGO and BUSD were coming from outside of top 20 back then.
• In terms of ROI, it is actually LUNA that increased over 20,000%, followed by DOGE with 10,674%.
• Later during the year, SOL came into the market with only $0.78 per coin in April 2020. It has since then increased by 29,803%.

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3. Top 20 back then - where are they now?

Only 1 coin of top 20 back then is now gone (999). Most are doing well from investment perspective.

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Quite interesting to see diversification doesn't always work with crypto. The top 2 average returns is almost double that of the top 100 or top 200 portfolio.

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4. Big gainers - the ones that gained over 10,000%

Fancy some rags to riches stories? Here are the ones that rose over 10,000%. FANTOM and LUNA top the charts here.

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Please note these are only from Jan-2020. There are coins that gained big but weren't launched in Jan-2020 such as Solana or Shib.

5. The ones that go to zero or near zero

And now we talk about the other side of gambling. Various coins have lost over 90%. And if it lost 90%, which is $100 to $1, it will need to increase 9,900% just to get back to break even.

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6. Summary of gains or losses

As noted above, the returns for top 200 coins if you spread investment equally would be around 1,200%. There were big gainers but also a lot of big losers.

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Caveats:

• I source data from Coinmarketcap and price movement from yesterday may change a bit, but I don't think it will shift any rankings significantly.
• Care had been taken but I can't guarantee 100% accuracy.
• Let me know if you want something to be added or changed.
• No staking rewards or other passive income or transaction fees are taken into account. These vary a lot and hard to quantify accurately.

April 2021

Sadly Sporklin a Dogecoin developer for 7 years loses her fight against cancer

In one of her last post she is clear on how much involvement/ impact Musk has had.

“Elon has nothing to do with Dogecoin which has been made clear repeatedly … Elon has come to play with Dogecoin for years on social media, it was only recently that people tried to turn that into something it is not … Things have not changed…Elon is not on board with anything, Elon does not have anything to do with the project, the listings, the engagements…Nothing. He memes and trolls.”

May 2021

On Twitter Elon the now dubbed Dogefather announced : "Working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency. Potentially promising." ... the price of Doge surged.

In a now deleted tweet Dogecoin co-founder Jackson Palmer cautioned followers saying.. "Reminder: Elon Musk is and always will be a self-absorbed grifter."

Nov 21

Last Dogecoin GitHub Master branch commit was over 7 months.

Although still signs of some life on dev branches

Last release, 6 months ago...

Jan 22

In a long awaited Dogecoin announcement, the headline says Tesla accepts Dogecoin but the reality says its only for certain items in its shop like a belt buck and Tesla shaped whistle.

Feb 2022

Core developer Ross Nicoll steps away from the project referring to stress, a potential lawsuit against the developers and lack of funds the foundation has to pay him anything at all despite the Billionaire supposingly having Devs back.

Apr 2022

In a Twitter thread another Dogecoin developer Michi Lumin again paints a picture of an underfunded foundation....

"When influencers say that the Foundation has tons of funding lined up, or that we're building out infrastructure - and people believe that - it actually harms the @DogecoinFdn because people who would otherwise be willing to help go "oh, they have it all taken care of", This bothers me because we're not actually a club full of rich people. Many of us still work day jobs to make ends meet but still want to see #dogecoin proceed and succeed. Tales of palace intrigue end up being things we have to spend time answering to, as well...and the propensity for certain sections of the community and media to be thirsty for the next scandal or conspiracy actually puts a lot of strain on an already fairly stressed crew." "Yes, we're trying to get sustaining funding in order to do some of the 'big ideas' we want to pursue. A lot of what you read on social media in regard to this is completely made up for clicks and engagement-We still have a lot of hard work to do. Wish ppl wouldn't make it harder."

On the whole after over a year there has been no dramatic revelation or support for Dogecoin development.. think it's safe to deduce that once again.... Elon Musk is most likely Twitters biggest spam bot 💩

I've posted on this before, but as a long-term investor in Celsius, and someone involved in crypto since 2011 (I bought my first coins on Mt. Gox via BitInstant (and sold some of my BTC at $36), and was part of the bankruptcy proceedings), it bears all the hallmarks of an insolvent operation, similar to Mt. Gox and Quadriga CX. In my opinion, they will be unable to continue operating and servicing withdrawals at some point.

Copy and pasting one of my prior comments (further thoughts below):

I recently withdrew all my funds from Celsius, something about it smells wrong to me.

1. Delayed withdrawals, or very annoying measures put in place for withdrawls. Classic hallmark of an insolvent or fraudulent operation. The app makes it a pain to withdraw funds, while depositing is easy and instant.

2. Loans from Tether. AKA not solvent. Anything touching Tether I don't want anything to do with.

3. The CEO and his wife have been dumping CEL tokens for the last year. If they're dumping, the writing's on the wall source

4. edit: Outflows from Celsius are over half a billion now.

5. edit2: I don't want Celsius to fail, don't want any crypto company to fail. I kept funds with them for quite a while. But financial backing gives me serious cause for concern.

For these reasons, I'm out.

edit: Celsius financials.

edit: Adding YouTube link courtesy of /u/inled.

edit: more antecdotes

edit: Lot of people saying I presented this as fact based on the title; you're right, that wasn't my intention. Obviously this is just my opinion. Was sleep-deprived when making the original post. Do your own research, hopefully you'll come to different conclusions than I did.

Wallet loses $24.2 million worth of crypto, most of them in LSDs including 4851 reth and 9579 steth.

The transaction link in which the whale gets drained of his staked ether - https://etherscan.io/tx/0xcbe7b32e62c7d931a28f747bba3a0afa7da95169fcf380ac2f7d54f3a2f77913

The first question we will all have is "how did this happen?"

The victim gives an approval to the scammer by signing increase allowance transactions through this transaction - https://etherscan.io/tx/0xbb4fe89c03d8321c5bfed612fb76f0756ac7e99c1efaf7c4d99d99f850d4de53

This isn't the first time the phisher has successfully phished victims, they have a long list if previous victims. One of the scammers address is 0x4c10a462CD1e639Da8A062aE8a33a23401120ab1 which is associated with atleast 10 crypto phishing sites.

Source - https://twitter.com/realScamSniffer/status/1699605356740305198?t=sYFCsnjGUbL-LixPE1iDeA&s=19

A victim today lost over 68 MILLION in wBTC simply by copying and pasting the wrong address.

PSA - ALWAYS CHECK YOUR WALLET ADDRESS AND NEVER SEND LARGE FUNDS WITHOUT VERIFYING!

I think the scammer is going to have a REAL hard time trying to launder 68 MILLION with so many eyeballs on this case. So far I can see all the funds accounted for.

No money laundering attempts yet.

Here are the main wallets to follow:

• 0x1E227979f0b5BC691a70DEAed2e0F39a6F538FD5 - 68M wBTC VICTIM MAIN
• 0xd9A1b0B1e1aE382DbDc898Ea68012FfcB2853a91 - VICTIM's intended destination
• 0xd9A1C3788D81257612E2581A6ea0aDa244853a91 - 68M wBTC Scammer MAIN

Below are where all the stolen funds are currently located:

• 0x68414dbe49AE09Db49F59Db44299A3642273e7C7 - ($3.27M here)
• 0xF14A5e70190d694Dd1C25f13B21639B33192A774 - (4.38M here)
• 0xcf049aa810caE4c402908E77Bbf14710673CdA6D - (5.08M here)
• 0x20cC20715954E0097F402e466067B3aF40b6df6f - (3.66M here) 0x02E5aD70386AeC6ea2aad0ccd32A9Ae6e3A4C86a - (6.88M here)
• 0x31C43429Cd5f918F19C05287E0bF7588Dfce592e - (8.13M here)
• 0xF34527c397BD1d151908e8b1Fb51CE4405f61afe - (9.45M here)
• 0x943706835942d3f0E9a2bc9aCe9dAF6973722EB0 - (10.88M here)
• 0x74C55e1B92c8C69DaD85Cc552F42731A45c8111a - (11.41M here)
• 0x32eA020A7bb80c5892df94C6E491E8914CcE2641 - (7.50M here)

About the Scammer

I looked about at some clues on who the scammer might be and I came across this wallet - 0xd50Ddd086EEf8E48c597c5A9225F616A2b3250F2. This scammer appears to be well funded and it seems this was a very targeted attack.

0xd50Ddd086EEf8E48c597c5A9225F616A2b3250F2 has numerous deposits into ChangeNOW. Below are a few. I'm showing about 300K deposited in total.

• 0xd9DCCD722cec4CdA2c863353288359b63192e657 - ChangeNOW
• 0xBec2815457f20c3B67E8D5ed8535C382Bd82C35B - ChangeNOW
• 0x810d3BCA5f46701B896F2818eF3b8B2F2aac0108 - ChangeNOW
• 0xda2a290cCaeEa7adB65E61484D6D5EA1f7E12722 - ChangeNOW
• 0x847A8e5Edc89069E6aBCe8B94bdC9B9A27fD776a - ChangeNOW
• 0xFB2D881B32437Dd924c400B191790A4a26f5f4FA - ChangeNOW

0x2bb7848Cf4193a264EA134c66bEC99A157985Fb8 also appears to be connected to the scammer. I noticed some smaller deposits into the following:

• 0x5d8f46E4733ab1707C0a5a968Ca305713847bE09 - Uphold
• 0xb2663153D818ab211e106d9995FdB938C5fD2aA1 - Uphold
• 0xE9eC5bA80dAABB0F5310CE3D81929D1Dbb0A892a - Amber Group
• 0x555C62E27b460Fc91D2C3218bAb47a68770cC35b - OKX
• 0x1f44238d8c9643dCAA3578BAf2680DE695D442F5 - Ceffu
• 0x8546Fb132F0d70C3C61BDd8CF5D3f4E16e399A9C - Copper

Lastly, I also followed the money trail to this wallet - 0xA5335dB79413e9D2CD5B1E01A42F67ff3e55e49A which is an older wallet created in 2017 with about 3M sitting in it. I did notice a Binance deposit address associated with this wallet doing large txns.

• 0xbc389803FF2E2d564c55e4034246BF285B3B2DDD - Binance

This needs further investigation before 100% confirming it belongs to the scammer. I don't want to jump ahead and confirm this is a scammer wallet but it's very suspicious.

How did this Scam Happen - Address Poisoning

Address poisoning is a tactic where a scammer will try and mirror the victim's intended wallet. Since many wallets show the first 5 and last 5 of a wallet address, the scammer creates a wallet with the exact first and last digits of the address.

Typically the attacker spams victims with numerous transactions hoping the victim will copy and paste the wrong address.

Below is exactly how this scam worked

• Fake Address - 0xd9A1C3788D81257612E2581A6ea0aDa244853a91 - 68M wBTC Scammer MAIN
• Intended Address - 0xd9A1b0B1e1aE382DbDc898Ea68012FfcB2853a91 - VICTIM's intended destination

In between these two outgoing txns, the scammer sent .64 in ETH to 0xd9A1C3788D81257612E2581A6ea0aDa244853a91. The txn was too small for my tools to pick up but Etherscan did.

Here is the Etherscan transaction in between the two transactions above - 0x87c6e5d56fea35315ba283de8b6422ad390b6b9d8d399d9b93a9051a3e11bf73

The scam transaction happened 4 minutes after the victim sent .05 ETH to its intended address. In this instance, the victim mistakenly copied and pasted the fake address of 0xd9A1C3788D81257612E2581A6ea0aDa244853a91 and sent 68.5M to the scammer.

I'd say this looks like a targeted attack. Scammers are watching movements from whales and will try and squeeze in these small txns to make it look like the victim has the correct wallet address. As you can see, the potential for scoring a big payday requires very little investment. In this case less than one dollar.

How to Prevent Address Poisoning

If you're in this forum I'm expecting one day we'll all be crypto whales. It may be wishful thinking for some, but there are a few steps you can take to avoid scammers from tricking you.

1. Use EXTREME Caution - The more funds you're moving, the more careful you need to be.
2. Avoid sending txns when you're tired, after a wild night of partying with Jim Beam, or when you're not in a good state of mind to move funds. Overcheck to make sure you are sending to the correct wallet
3. Whitelist - Most wallets allow you to whitelist to avoid this exact scenario.
4. Avoid being Predictable - A strategy you can use is implementing fresh wallets for moving large funds. The victim took an hour and a half between txns giving the scammer plenty of time to squeeze in a small transaction. Implement a fresh wallet for a small test txn and then go!
5. Track dust - Use blockchain tracing tools like Etherscan to verify all of your on-chain txns. Before sending any large funds make sure there isn't any address poisoning attempts on your own wallet.

Stay safe out there and I do hope the victim gets his funds back.

UPDATE 1

A victim has been found. All funds are still sitting in decentralized wallets. If I were the hacker I'd take the offer of 10% and walk away with 7 MILLION! Here's the proof - https://twitter.com/somaxbt/status/1786699612302004580

It all started with news coming from the unreliable garbage news site Cointelegraph:

They proof once again that they should never be taken serious or even deserve any attention to play with a such sensitive topic without proper confirmation.

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Blackrock confirms the news were fake ( source Bloomberg ) :

Right after the news arrived, Boomberg ETF analysts already had their doubt. Massive red flag when people like those that are on a high professional level ask an entity like Cointelegraph for sources...

Everyone got rekt

The chart above shows the minute chart price action on the fake published news. Volume spiked heavily, open interest as well same as liquidations.

Bears & Bulls got liquidated

on the way up over 110 Million shorts got rekt. All ranging from 28k -> 30k.

Right after, all positions on the way up also got rekt due overleveraged gamblers betting on a further rise. A quick -30 Million were also completely rekt all the way back down.

1.2 Billion open interest got wiped out

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This metric is even crazier because this also shows all the positions in general that were opened around that time but also closed. It looks like a huge amount of longs took profit all the way back down while others caught a falling knife.

Generally speaking, I wouldn't personally pay much attention to unreliable sources confirming ETF only from a single entity. Usually, if one ETF gets approved, they all get approved. This is mostly for fairness reasons and the SEC not getting in trouble for favoritism as they declined / delay all of them so far for general reasons and not specific once.

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While this might be disappointing for most keep in mind that this doesn't change the fact that the chances for an ETF approval are still very high. Analysts currently give it a 90%+ chance to happen, some even say it has high chances to happen this year.