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Bitcoin Twitter (or Bitcoin X) is having a moment after a 13F filing by Goldman Sachs (GS) disclosed higher stakes in a handful of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), but the facts are less than meets the eye.
First and foremost, ownership of the ETFs isn't exactly a bet by the Goldman trading floor on the price of bitcoin (BTC). The stakes are almost surely held by the bank's asset management arm, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, for its clientele. Secondly, while the filing — which is a snapshot of ownership as of Dec. 31, 2024 — shows a $288 million stake in the Fidelity Bitcoin ETF (FBTC) and a $1.3 billion stake in BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), it also shows put option positions with nominal value of more than $600 million (along with a small call option position). An put option gives the holder the right, but not the obligation, to sell that asset at a predetermined price. It can be seen as protection against price drop, representing a bearish stance.
"This position by Goldman Sachs, similar to many other banks and hedge funds, is not a net long position," said CoinDesk Senior Analyst James Van Straten. "This is a strategy that reflects the basis trade, also known as the cash and carry trade, balancing potential profits and risks for bitcoin price fluctuations. The ETFs recently had options approved on them so this is most likely directional hedging."
With the deadline for the fourth-quarter 13F disclosures fast approaching, similar filings — along with misleading headlines — are surely on the way for JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and other large wealth-management operations. |
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In El Salvador, about two hours away from the capital, up in the mountains, lies a town named Berlín. It’s a mid-sized city by Salvadoran standards, with a population of roughly 20,000. It has a bank, law firms, police, food stores, hardware stores, bars, restaurants, hotels, pharmacies, clinics, churches — and one of the largest Bitcoin circular economies in the world.
Walking down any street, you find all kinds of local businesses accepting bitcoin (BTC) payments, from fruit vendors to motorcycle repair shops. If you live full-time in Berlín, you can pay for almost all of your expenses in bitcoin. Bitcoin acceptance isn’t solely to attract curious foreigners, though that dynamic certainly exists. Whereas El Zonte — the surfing village known as Bitcoin Beach, home to El Salvador’s very first Bitcoin circular economy — has grown into a tourism hotspot, Berlín is still relatively unknown, and its expat community is very small (only 14 to 20 people depending on the month, according to the Bitcoin Community Center). What makes Berlín different is that Salvadorans themselves have begun using bitcoin for their everyday purchases. That’s a big deal. Back in 2021, when President Nayib Bukele made bitcoin legal tender — giving it the same status as the country’s official currency, the U.S. dollar — and rolled out a government-backed wallet named Chivo, there was an expectation in crypto that Salvadorans would quickly adopt Bitcoin and transact with the digital currency on a nationwide level.
More than 70% of the population, at the time, had no access to banking services. Forget loans and mortgages; most people didn’t even have savings accounts. Bitcoin, it was said, would drastically reduce the fees incurred by Salvadorans working in the U.S. and sending remittances to their families. It could also, theoretically, protect Salvadorans from the inflation of the U.S. dollar, which in 2022 reached its highest point in roughly 40 years.
That’s not what happened. The vast majority of the population stayed away from all things Bitcoin. In 2023, 88% of Salvadorans hadn’t used the cryptocurrency, according to a survey by the Central American University. Critics argued that El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment had failed.
But the idyllic town of Berlín, located to the west of the Tecapa volcano, more than 1,000 meters above sea level, offers a different story. |
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Goldfinch Prime: A New Leader In The Emerging RWA Opportunity The tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market is experiencing a rapid surge, with VanEck projecting it will exceed $50 billion by 2025. In traditional finance, private credit loans provide non-bank financing, mainly to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This lending process has now evolved in the RWA space, creating on-chain private credit secured by real-world collateral. Continue reading |
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WLF Starts Multi-Token Reserve |
The Trump-family backed World Liberty Financial launched its token reserve to back various crypto ecosystems, the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol said in an X post on Wednesday.
World Liberty said it will diversify its token holdings and engage with traditional finance firms to invest their tokenized assets into the reserve. The protocol did not disclose any details on which tokens the reserve would invest in, but did say it will have a particular focus on DeFi.
Last week, World Liberty Financial co-founder Chase Herro said the protocol will start a "strategic reserve" of crypto assets.
It has already accumulated various tokens, including TRON's TRX, USDC, Ether (ETH) and staked ETH, as well as MOVE and ONDO tokens, according to data from Arkham Intelligence. |
Franklin Templeton For Solana |
Franklin Templeton has made the OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX), the third-largest tokenized money market fund, available on Solana in another signal of growing interest in the blockchain.
The fund is already available on Ethereum, Coinbase’s Base, Aptos and Avalanche, which were all added last year. The Stellar network functions as the primary blockchain. The asset manager announced the expansion on Wednesday. Solana has emerged as the leading venue for new tokens (mostly memecoins) and decentralized trading. It now accounts for over 90% of all new tokens appearing on decentralized exchanges (DEX), according to a Pantera Capital report. That's up from 1% in late 2023.
“Even when innovation doesn’t start on Solana, it eventually finds its way there,” Cosmo Jiang and Eric Wallach wrote in the report. FOBXX, which started in 2021, has grown to a $594 million market capitalization, according to data by rwa.xyx. It lags behind Hashnote’s Short Duration Yield Coin (USYC) and BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL).
Tokenization is one of the fastest-growing sectors in crypto adoption as institutions increasingly bring traditional financial assets like bonds, commodities and funds into the blockchain economy for more efficient operations and faster settlement. It's a multitrillion dollar market opportunity, reports from BCG, McKinsey and Brevan Howard have forecast.
Smart-contract network Ethereum leads ecosystem for tokenization efforts with a 52% market share representing $3.8 billion worth of tokenized real-world assets. It is followed by Ethereum layer-2 ZKsync Era, rwa.xyz data shows. Solana, at $135 million, ranks seventh.
Franklin Templeton's expansion to Solana is the latest sign of increasing interest in the network for tokenization efforts. Real-world asset platform Securitize expanded its offerings, including BUIDL, to the network in late January.
Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of hedge fund SkyBridge, in a Tuesday interview touted Solana's speed and efficiency, saying that it will "win the race" in the tokenization world. |
Interview: Adam Back Wants CBDCs Dead |
By Leah Callon-Butler If you asked a cypherpunk in the 1990s about their worst-case scenario for the future of money, they probably would have described something very close to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). The fight against financial surveillance was fundamental for Bitcoin’s early instigators, and CBDCs go against everything they stand for: privacy, decentralization and individual sovereignty. In “The Cypherpunk Manifesto” (1993), Eric Hughes argued that cryptography should protect individual freedoms, not be a tool for centralized control. Bitcoin, born out of concerns over financial censorship and systemic instability, represents an alternative to traditional monetary systems. While central banks typically operate with a degree of independence from governments, CBDCs raise questions about financial privacy and the potential for increased state oversight over transactions. As such, CBDCs are the antithesis of Bitcoin. CBDCs, which are being adopted and trialled throughout the world, have been marketed as a tool for financial inclusion. But, to most Bitcoiners, they are a Trojan horse for reinforcing state control rather than granting individuals true financial ownership. They represent the exact kind of Big Brother system that cypherpunks fought to prevent. This is why Adam Back — one of the all-time most influential figures in Bitcoin, the inventor of HashCash, and the founder of Blockstream — has been vocal about the dangers of CBDCs and the role of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) in promoting them. He sees this for what it is: a power-play by global elites, many of whom either misunderstand — or actively oppose — Bitcoin. If Bitcoin was designed to take control away from the state, CBDCs are designed to return it. According to Back, a speaker at Consensus Hong Kong, CBDCs did not emerge as a natural evolution of money; they were a reactionary move by regulators — a panic response to the threat of private-sector digital currency. He pointed to Facebook’s Libra as the moment that freaked the central banks out, when we caught up for a chat on Google Meets. "Regulators saw that a company with a billion-plus users could launch corporate electronic cash, and they realized they might lose control. So they tried to get ahead of it with their own government electronic cash,” Back said. “But the problem is, it's systemically impossible for them to create something that the average person would want to use because they have such control-oriented ideas."
Adam Back is a speaker at Consensus Hong Kong. Register today and save 15% with the code CoinDesk15.
Read the full interview here. |
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