🤔 What would Satoshi say?

Jack Ma’s Ant International is looking to get stablecoin permits in Hong Kong and Singapore, Bloomberg reported.

It’s a move that will broaden Ant’s horizons slightly. If you’re not totally familiar, Ant handles a lot of transactions as a fintech firm. 

Between this news and Stripe’s acquisition of crypto wallet provider Privy yesterday, we continue to see more and more firms push into crypto.

🏢 Structural changes

30% of bitcoin is now held by centralized entities. 

Pretty wild, especially if you rewind to the past couple of years and remember how much of a dream it was to even think that we’d get something like a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

But it also might be a good thing, from a volatility perspective, a report from Gemini and Glassnode noted. 

“With 30.9% of bitcoin’s circulating supply now held in centralized treasuries — including governments, ETFs, public companies, and centralized exchanges — the market has undergone a structural transformation toward institutional maturity,” the report said.

“As adoption has broadened, particularly across sovereign and regulated financial entities, annualized realized volatility across all time frames — from 1-week to 1-year — has declined consistently since 2018.”

We’re now more likely to see “more sustained and orderly rallies” versus the spikes we used to see. 

That 30% figure means that there are 216 entities holding BTC, the report noted.

While no one holds a candle to the amount of bitcoin held by exchanges, it’s surprising (and yet also not surprising, if you know what I mean?) that public companies are the most numerous. 

Yep, you read that right, 101 companies. 

Those firms hold a total of 765,300 bitcoins, which is a hefty amount, but they are still only third behind ETF/Funds, which hold 1.3 million bitcoins. Exchanges easily take the lead with over 3 million bitcoin. 

“Across nearly all institutional categories — excluding private companies — the top three entities control between 65% to 90% of total holdings, underscoring the dominance of early adopters in the Bitcoin treasury space,” the report said. 

“This pattern is particularly stark in the DeFi, public company, and ETF/fund categories, where pioneers have shaped the early trajectory of adoption.”

There is a bit of a shift happening behind the scenes as well, where exchanges and also DeFi protocols are seeing their balances decline overall. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, however, because the report notes that the shift is moving the bitcoin over to ETFs and funds as they gain popularity. 

“The total bitcoin held by this spot trading sector has remained relatively stable, ranging between 3.9M-4.2M BTC since June 2021. This stable range suggests that the drop in exchange balances does not imply shrinking supply, but rather a structural reshuffling of custody,” it said.

Times have changed, but I’m not mad about this development. Though we could, perhaps, do with fewer bitcoin treasury companies if you ask me.

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• Strategy launched yet another preferred stock on Nasdaq, STRD. 

• Singapore’s unlicensed crypto exchanges may have to consider relocating after the country gave them a final warning.

• Is it time to call the top? Coinbase said it planned to list Fartcoin.

The banks really are all-in on stablecoins. Yesterday, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan affirmed that BoA’s currently working on an individual stablecoin as well as one in collaboration with other banks. 

If this isn’t news to you, then good, you’ve been paying attention. Moynihan has previously teased that his bank is very interested in getting a stablecoin off the ground. And rumors and reports have been swirling around a joint stablecoin for a while now. But this is one of the first times we’re getting real confirmation that this is happening behind the scenes. 

All of this hinges on the passing of the GENIUS stablecoin bill in DC, though. While odds look good, we shouldn’t count our eggs before they hatch.