Grayscale is back in the headlines. This time Fir Tree Capital Management is suing Grayscale Investments with the goal of erasing the current 43% GBTC discount by lowering fees and resuming redemptions.
The trust has roughly 850,000 retail investors who have been “harmed by Grayscale’s shareholder-unfriendly actions,” says Fir Tree. They claim that Grayscale refuses to redeem shares because doing so would cut into profits. Last year, Grayscale collected $615.4M in fees.
Grayscale is owned by Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group, which also runs Genesis Global Trading. Both names have been active in headlines recently as speculations run rampant surrounding further contagion from the FTX fallout. Genesis also recently released a client letter suggesting no imminent solution to withdrawal freeze.
Daily Bullets:
- Fir Tree Capital Management is suing crypto investment fund Grayscale Investments
- Polygon strategic token sale of 2021 distribution in a three-year unlock period started from late Nov. 2022
- Judge authorized subpoenas to 3AC co-founders to turn over any recorded property or finances information
- Mazars concluded that Binance’s Bitcoin reserves are fully collateralized with a collateralization ratio of 101%
- SBF hired prominent attorney Mark S. Cohen - who recently defended socialite sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell
- Crypto tax startup Koinly cut 14% of its staff
- Microsoft and cybersecurity firm Volexity warn of new version of AppleJeus malware
- Binance.US eliminated fees on spot ETH trading
- DEX platform Hashflow partnered with crypto bridge service Wormhole
- Activation of the Aave <> StarkNet Bridge
- ConstitutionDAO will once again participate in Sotheby's auction of a copy of the United States Constitution
- Decentranland will allow users who own virtual LAND to officially rent out their property
- Old-school media player from the ‘90s Winamp now supports Ethereum and Polygon-based music NFTs
- Use Telegram accounts without a SIM card using blockchain-powered anon numbers on the Fragment platform
- Zodia Custody new service, Interchange, to protect client assets from exchange insolvency
- Nigeria reduced cash withdrawals to $225 a week to attempt to push CBDC
Now for a more expanded and detailed look at the day for those who like sources:
Crypto News:
- Polygon strategic token sale of 2021 raised $450M from Marquee investors in a private token sale. The first batch of vesting & distribution in a three-year unlock period started from late Nov. 2022
- Hedge fund Fir Tree Capital Management is suing crypto investment fund Grayscale Investments for information to investigate potential mismanagement and conflicts of interest and push Grayscale to address the large discount it trades at relative to the bitcoin it holds by lowering fees and resuming redemptions
- Crypto tax startup Koinly has cut 14% of its staff, attributed to a bear market made worse by the collapse of FTX
- Microsoft and cybersecurity firm Volexity have traced a new version of AppleJeus malware to the hackers behind the Ronin exploit and numerous other online heists. Potentially the North Korean Lazarus Group
- New era of privacy. You can have a Telegram account without a SIM card and log in using blockchain-powered anonymous numbers available on the Fragment platform
- Marathon Digital, one of the largest publicly traded bitcoin miners, expects to recover only $22M of the $50M it deposited with bankrupt bitcoin miner and data center provider Compute North
- London-based crypto custodian Zodia Custody is rolling out a new service, Interchange, to protect client assets from exchange insolvency - will enable clients to keep their assets in Zodia Custody and then mirror them on exchanges for trading
- Wirex, a banking alternative built for Web3, has listed 52 new tokens on their app bringing the total number of cryptocurrencies to 130, and traditional currencies to 13
Economic/Government/Regulatory:
- A federal judge authorized the issuance of subpoenas to Three Arrows Capital co-founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies. Liquidators can now force them to turn over any “recorded information, including books, documents, records, and papers” relating to the firm’s property or finances
- The United States House Committee on Ethics slapped Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) with a $15,237 fine for violating rules protecting against conflicts of interest by promoting a cryptocurrency he had invested $150,000 in
- Nigeria drastically reduced the amount of cash individuals and businesses can withdraw to $225 a week to attempt to push its “cash-less Nigeria” policy and increase the use of the eNaira — Nigeria’s Central Bank Digital Currency
- An alleged participant in the OneCoin $4B ponzi scheme, Frank Schneider is facing charges of wire fraud and money laundering, according to a 2020 indictment unsealed this week
- New crypto regulations in Kazakhstan: miners can purchase electricity from the common power grid only if there is a surplus, new crypto taxes; planned ban on advertising of crypto transactions
- The Argentine government has created a national committee to develop public policies and technological solutions around blockchain
Exchange News:
- Mazars concluded that Binance’s bitcoin reserves are fully collateralized, following a proof-of-reserves and proof-of-liabilities verification with a collateralization ratio of 101%
- SBF hired prominent attorney Mark S. Cohen - who recently defended socialite sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell- to represent him. He’s unsure how he would pay the legal fees
- Binance.US eliminated fees on spot ETH trading for all customers six months after it first cut such fees for bitcoin
- Binance generates 90% of its revenue from transaction fees
- Binance will remove and cease trading on the following trading pairs - CVC/BTC, CVC/USDT, ROSE/BNB, SLP/BNB
- MultiversX (EGLD) to be listed on Coinbase
- Taylor Swift was in talks to sign a $100M sponsorship deal with FTX that reached late stages before collapsing in spring
DeFi News:
- Over $30M worth of APE tokens deposited into staking contract on first day
- Chainlink - over $75M worth of LINK tokens staked in the first 24 hours
- DEX platform Hashflow partnered with Wormhole, a crypto bridge service, to enable users to swap crypto tokens across several blockchain networks including Ethereum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Arbitrum
- Ankr deploys $15M to make whole users as Helio stablecoin recovers after exploit
- Mercurial, a DeFi platform that allows users to lend and borrow stablecoins on the Solana blockchain, is revamping its brand, community, and token distribution due to association with FTX and Alameda
- Activation of the Aave <> StarkNet Bridge lets you hold and trade Aave aTokens on StarkNet while still accruing Aave rewards from Ethereum
- ConstitutionDAO will once again participate in Sotheby's auction of a copy of the United States Constitution. Last time it raised $47M in a week
NFT/Gaming/Metaverse News:
- Video game company Atari now allows holders of its NFT collection, Atari NFT, to print framed prints and posters through a new collaboration with print-on-demand company Pixels
- ImmutableX-powered NFTs from web3 games such as Gods Unchained, Guild of Guardians, Illuvium, Embersword and Planet Quest now available on Gemini-owned NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway
- National Basketball Association Hall of Famer, Scottie Pippen, partners with Web3-based entertainment company Orange Comet, to produce the “SP33” digital sneaker collection of 1,000 pairs of shoes based on Pippen’s career
- Electronic musicians Aoki and Justin “3LAU” Blau will use their Ethereum CryptoPunks NFTs as their alter egos to release new music under the name Punx
- Metaverse platform Decentranland new platform feature allows its users who own virtual LAND to essentially become landlords. Owners can now officially rent out their property to other users on the platform for predefined periods of time
- Old-school media player from the ‘90s Winamp now supports Ethereum and Polygon-based music NFTs in its latest desktop update. Winamp was originally released in 1997 and is most widely remembered as the dominant Windows media player of the day
- Financial media website Investopedia published a detailed run-down of NFT tax law in the United States emphasizing that people should probably hire a tax professional
Fundraises:
- Crypto accounting, tax and compliance platform Bitwave raised $15M in a Series A funding round led by Hack VC and Blockchain Capital. Other venture capital firms including SignalFire, Valor Equity Partners, Arca, Pulsar Trading and Alumni Ventures Blockchain Fund
- Perennial, a DeFi protocol for trading derivatives, raised $12M in a seed funding round. Polychain Capital and Variant co-led the round, with Archetype, Coinbase Ventures, Scalar Capital, Robot Ventures and others participating
- Syncfy, a leading open finance platform in Latin America, today announced $10M in seed funding led by Point72 Ventures
- The Mirror, a game development platform that lets indie developers build virtual worlds, raised $2.3M in pre-seed funding led by Founders Found, the Silicon Valley venture fund that backed Stripe, Airbnb and Lyft
- Liquid Factory raised $1.25M to launch a privacy network auction-style NFT marketplace, co-led by KuCoin Labs and Republic Capital. Other investors: IDG capital, CDH VGC, Lapin.Digital, Ascensive Assets, and Acheron Trading
- Crypto infrastructure firm Blockstream is looking for a fresh injection of capital at a significantly lower valuation (~70% lower) than it raised at last year - previously valued at $3.2B
Early Stage Projects:
- Introducing StarkNet v0.10.3 to testnet, includes increased performance improvements & the removal of deprecated Deploy transactions
- Optimism Retroactive Public Goods Funding Round 2. In February 2023, 10M OP will be distributed to the people and projects powering the public goods that make Optimism possible
- Announcing: The Gitcoin Protocol Alpha Tests
- Starknet.id Mainnet launch - register a domain to starknet mainnet directly from your Ethereum wallet
- CLever USD partnership with Frax Finance - clevUSD token
- The Gnosis Chain Merge - will transition from its Proof-of-Authority legacy to PoS
- Introducing rwa.xyz - Analytics on real-world assets
- Holdr launches with $HLDR on Dec 14th - first Balancer Friendly fork on Aurora
Data:
TL;DR: Looking into Grayscale data, we can see revenue has slumped since last year’s October/November peak, BTC holdings for the trust peaked in February of 2021 at 654.75k BTC and has nominally dropped to ~ 633k BTC. Daily volume is extremely low however it has seen a small bump in November at the daily discount is -43% to the price of actual BTC. The Fir Tree lawsuit aims to get information to investigate potential mismanagement and conflicts of interest and push Grayscale to address the large discount.
Grayscale Revenue and BTC Holdings:
GBTC Volume and Discount:
AUM:
Research/Reads:
- Glassnode - A Capital Reset - source
- Layer 2 Economics - The Business Model of Ethereum's Scaling Solutions - source
- The State of CBDCs in 2022 - source
- Binance Research - Web3 Social: Road to Mass Adoption - source
- Regulating the crypto assets landscape in Japan - source
Crypto Twitterverse:
There is circumstantial evidence that $5B AUM @ambergroup_io is insolvent, in distress, or rugging.
Unconfirmed 🇨🇳Chinese social media reports from @TechFlowPost support the on chain evidence of them dumping assets due to distress: twitter.com/TechFlowPost/s…
🧵👇— CryptoCondom (@crypto_condom)
Dec 6, 2022
Chainlink Staking went live 19 hours ago.
$LINK marines have flooded the contract with their deposits exceeding 11M Chainlink tokens.
Meaning, over $77.7M of $LINK has been deposited in the contract currently.
The first, and largest, deposit so far was 500k LINK or $3.64M.
— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel)
Dec 7, 2022
Because I'm incredibly autistic, I exported all the Alameda investments (more than 470!) from the FT piece. The total amount invested is roughly $5.3 billion.
The largest investments are:
1) Genesis Digital Assets
2) Anthropic
3) Digital Assets DA AG
4) K5
5) IEX— Larry Cermak 🫡 (@lawmaster)
Dec 6, 2022
Did we miss anything or is there anything you want to discuss? We’d Love to hear your feedback and engage with the community! Feel free to leave a comment and let us know your thoughts on the Crypto market!
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