First Mover Americas: GBTC Discount Narrows to Lowest Since May 2022

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The discount to net asset value (NAV) for the $19 billion-plus Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) continues to narrow in the wake of asset manager BlackRock’s application to open a spot bitcoin ETF in the United States. The discount to NAV fell to as low as 26% at one point last week – the trimmest level since May 2022 – and currently sits at about 27%, according to data from Ycharts. BlackRock’s move for a spot bitcoin ETF set off a number of filings and re-filings for similar funds from a number of other industry actors, including from fellow asset management giant Fidelity.

Crypto data firm Arkham Intelligence stirred controversy Monday by announcing a new service aimed at unmasking the owners of digital wallets, angering privacy-focused crypto advocates. It turns out Arkham has already been leaking its own customers’ private information, a revelation that also seems to have emerged Monday, putting a spotlight on the companys own approach to user privacy just as it was rolling out a service meant to unmask crypto wallet owners on a massive scale. The issue stems from the way Arkham set up its weblink referral program. Users of Arkham’s wallet tracking dashboard can invite others onto the platform by sharing their unique referral URL. Those URLs appear to end with a meaningless jumble of characters. In reality, they’re an easy-to-decipher version of the user’s email address written in Base64, which is trivial to decode.

Bitcoin (BTC) could rise to $50,000 by the end of this year and up to $120,000 by end-2024, Standard Chartered Bank said in a research report on Monday. The British multinational bank in April had put out a $100,000 forecast for the end of 2024, noting at that time the banking crisis, among other factors. "We now think this estimate is too conservative, and we therefore see upside to our end-2024 target," yesterday’s report said, this time pointing to increased miner profitability as among the bullish catalysts.

Chart of the Day

• The 30-day simple moving average of the number of bitcoin moved from miner wallets to centralized exchanges surged to a record high of 2581.98 BTC on Monday.
• In other words, miners have transferred over 77,000 BTC ($2.3 billion) to exchanges in the past 30 days, adding to selling pressure in the market.

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- Omkar Godbole

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