🤑 Behind the curtain

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Strategy’s starting the week strong, announcing a new bitcoin buy that pushes the company’s holdings over 531,000 bitcoin. 

The firm announced that it snapped up 3.4K of bitcoin last week at an average purchase price of $82K. 

I’m sure there’s something to be said about Michael Saylor buying the dip — even if it was just a small one — but I’ll leave that to someone with a spicier take.

Elsewhere:

• Bitcoin’s at $84K, up slightly over the past day, after dropping to $83K on Sunday.

• Global crypto funds saw outflows of $795 million last week, per data from CoinShares. 

• DeFi TVL is at $91B, an 8% drop in the past week, according to data from Blockworks Research.

🚗 Under the hood

Last week, Meanwhile announced a whopping $40 million raise co-led by Framework Ventures and Fulgur Ventures. 

However, the raise is a bit more significant than was initially reported. 

"This is the largest equity investment that Framework Ventures has ever made,” Framework’s Michael Anderson exclusively told me. 

If you're not familiar, Meanwhile is a bitcoin life insurance company valued at $190 million after their Series A announcement. Oh, and here’s an interesting factoid: They only have 10 employees. 

“We've written all our own technology.” Zachary Townsend, Meanwhile’s CEO, explained.

I asked Townsend whether or not the firm would consider creating a US-based subsidiary, as its current subsidiary is fully licensed and regulated by Bermuda. Through that license, I should note, Meanwhile’s able to offer its services in a variety of countries including the US, UK and Canada. 

Townsend explained that it’s on the cards in the future to build an “onshore life insurance company that interacts with our offshore company to offer Bitcoin products to folks in the US,” but it’s going to take a lot more than a friendly regulatory environment to make that happen. 

“Insurance is regulated on a state-by-state basis, and obviously there are states that are more crypto-friendly versus states that are less crypto-friendly. I think doing the particular thing we do, which is having everything in Bitcoin, which we consider […] safer would be quite difficult in the United States in the near term,” he noted.

Townsend explained Meanwhile has some plans to put the $40 million raised to use.

“Expanding globally is also an expansion of the products we offer and what those customers are interested in,” Townsend explained. “Sometime this year, [we’re] going to launch something that looks like an annuity in Bitcoin. So that would be … you put Bitcoin into an account, there's a yield or rate of return in many countries that return [of] the account’s tax advantages.”

Meanwhile’s whole life product is a “massive unlock in terms of anyone who [wants] to be able to put Bitcoin into the policy when it's lower [and] … anybody who does that will be able to borrow Bitcoin out of their life insurance policy over their lifetime,” Anderson said. 

Townsend said Meanwhile’s product fit has found success in places like Argentina, Nigeria and Turkey, where folks may not want to take out insurance because of the limitations of the currencies. 

“So much of the world has inflation risk, currency risk, regime risk [...] and cross-border risk, so no matter where you live, the idea of having life insurance in this global, decentralized store of value is incredibly attractive,” he said.

Meanwhile has somehow made it — dare I say fun — to look under the hood of an insurance firm? Never knew that was even possible.

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• Tether’s emerged as a big crypto lender after the sector was wiped out last cycle. 

• JPMorgan’s blockchain Kinexys is making moves and is now offering GBP payments.

• The SEC and Binance, at the end of last week, asked the court to extend their case’s pause.

🎲 Place your bets

I have some good news: The Forward Guidance guys — Felix Jauvin and Quinn Thompson — still feel pretty good about bitcoin. 

But I also have some bad news: Thompson’s not super keen on alts here. 

In this morning’s episode of Empire, we had two worlds colliding as Empire’s Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Santos spoke to Thompson and Jauvin about the macro outlook and, of course, crypto. 

Aside from Thompson’s astute point that he’s finding levels in crypto to be “interesting” but not necessarily worth throwing “a dart on the dartboard,” Jauvin’s points about bitcoin’s potential performance caught my attention. 

“ I'm bullish Bitcoin and crypto on a mean reversion basis, but for an explosion past all time highs on — let's focus on Bitcoin, 'cause I do think our asset class is getting old enough where we start piecing those apart separately,” he explained. To sum it up: Folks would have to bet against President Trump’s investment thesis if we want bitcoin to jump past all-time highs.

Basically, Jauvin argues that some of the things that aren’t great for macro — like the bond market and US dollar losing faith, and the Federal Reserve being forced to act — would be fantastic for bitcoin. 

“These are factors that bitcoin was born for,” he noted. 

It’s not stopping Jauvin from remaining bullish on things like stablecoins and the underlying technological advances pushing crypto forward, though. 

“ People want alts to leverage Bitcoin a lot. You almost might be better off if you look at the stats and run the ratios of risk leveraging your Bitcoin,” Thompson explained.

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On my mind: The week ahead

Katherine:

We don’t really know what’s in store for us this week, though it could be shaping up to be a slightly shaky week. Obviously, we’ll be keeping an eye on OM and Mantra after Sunday’s crash (ICYMI: OM fell by nearly 90%).

“We have determined that the OM market movements were triggered by reckless forced closures initiated by centralized exchanges on OM account holders,” JP Mullin posted on X. 

No doubt we’ll be revisiting the role of centralized exchanges in the wake of what happened with OM, but we’ll also be carefully looking at how this even happened in the first place. The 0xResearch newsletter will have some coverage later today.

Outside of that, I’m watching equities again (shocker) to gauge the reaction, and — of course — always keeping a close eye on crypto and bitcoin. 

With the tariff pause in effect, some might be hoping for less volatility but don’t bet on it. Crypto always keeps us on our toes. Who knows what lies ahead.