Specs Chat | Sponsor Us | Follow Valko

⌐◪-◪ → JPMorgan, the largest Bank in the United States, just disclosed they own $625k in spot Bitcoin ETF shares — continuing Jamie Dimon’s series of mixed signals on crypto:

• Jan ‘24: Jamie Dimon says "Bitcoin is worthless”

• May ‘24: JPMorgan discloses they own Bitcoin ETFs

JPMorgan was not alone in its reveal either. Wells Fargo, the third largest bank in the United States, also disclosed spot Bitcoin ETF holdings and Japan’s Microstrategy Metaplanet just published a whitepaper detailing their Bitcoin corporate treasury strategy.

While this is certainly headline-worthy due to JPMorgan’s size, $625k is tiny for them. For context: the top 3x $IBIT holders hold $60-$100M shares — Aka JPMorgan has a lot of room to grow, we have awakened the sleeping giant.

First banks, then corps, then states, then nations.

Gradually, then suddenly.

⌐◪-◪ → El Salvador just launched a website to track their Bitcoin holdings as the country continues buying 1 Bitcoin every day.

You can check out the tracker → here.

Now anybody with a computer and internet connection can instantly verify how much Bitcoin the country holds.

Think about how powerful this is for a second…

It completely eradicates the need for trust between a nation and its people regarding its national reserves.

Meanwhile, in the US, we have no way to verify our reserves — instead, we have to trust our cabal of auditors, regulators, lawyers, politicians, etc track things accurately and honestly.

Imagine if checking our national reserves was as easy as checking Uniswap’s daily DEX volume. Think about what that would mean for us and the world.

⌐◪-◪ → The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) wants to ban betting on political events.

They are concerned that opening these markets to speculation may:

1. “degrade the integrity of the uniquely American experience of participating in the democratic electoral process”

2. push the CFTC, a financial market regulator, into a position far beyond its Congressional mandate and expertise

They’re basically worried that such markets could turn them into election cops.

The irony here is that they’re proposing new controls (banning political markets) to allegedly protect us from their future control (as election cops).

It feels a bit backward, but maybe it check out. I’m all for free markets, but I also understand how the financialization of our vote could be a very slippery slope.

Meanwhile, Polymarket bettors have $125M riding on who the next President will be.

Join Specs Chat!

Designed to make you a better crypto investor, builder, and operator.

💬 Chat with Valko and other experts
📚 Access additional hand-curated resources
😊 Make friends, share memes, have fun

Join now while it’s still free.