BTC Nashville Giveaway, a $600M Wedding, LLM Deflation

One of the world’s richest families, the Ambani family, continues to single-handedly outspend many nations with their youngest son’s wedding costing a whopping $600M. Idiots.

They could have spent $6B if they bought Bitcoin and waited 2 years.

This Week in Crypto

Look at that beautiful string of weekly inflows. Co-incidentally (well, not really), the price ripped up through 60k as soon as the Germans were done selling. They netted a tidy €2.6B from the sales, and they seem to not believe their luck. Well, my bet is that they won’t believe their eyes when they see what they would have got had they waited 12 more months.

I would not want to be the German official who signed off on selling their Bitcoin if this rumor turns out to be true (it is pure speculation right now):

The long-awaited ETH ETF is due to (finally) start trading next week, after a few weeks of minor delays. Interestingly, an SEC commissioner says staking for ETH ETFs may be on the table down the line.

• Investors are clamoring for crypto exposure and Wall Street can’t seem to keep up. VanEck is currently moving onto Solana with their Solana ETP and others following.

• If this trend continues, it would not be far-fetched to imagine an ETF consisting of yield-bearing crypto tokens or even a meme-coin ETF.

Crypto equities have had a nice resurgence upon lively legacy markets and a Bitcoin recovery. Miners, Microstrategy, Galaxy Digital, and Coinbase have all performed well in recent weeks. Did you buy the dip anon?

BTC Nashville is next week - and the Arch team will be there in force. Stop by the booth if you are attending!

We are also giving away a free industry pass (worth $2600!) to one lucky newsletter subscriber who follows us on Twitter and DMs us.

This Week in TradFi

The US economy continues to show signs of cooling, which sets the stage for rate cuts towards the end of this year.

• Last week’s CPI report showed that June 2024 CPI fell 0.1% MoM.

• Even though the labor market is softening, retail spend is still unchanged, demonstrating the resilience in consumer spending.

• Tech stocks took a beating this week as investors look to reposition in stocks that will have an outsized benefit from rate cuts.

The Eurozone joins the US in waiting until September for further rate cuts. The ECB decided to hold rates steady in their July meeting this week, coming off the heels of their first rate cute last month. The ECB president, Christine Lagarde, was vague on the specific plan for rate cuts but mentioned that September was “wide open”. The Euro fell on the announcement.

Asia has had quite opposite environments in its leading two economies - India and China.

• India’s stock market has been ripping with the SENSEX index up ~12.5% YTD.

• India’s yearly growth forecast is ~7%, and it is actually on track to deliver this growth!

• China’s economy has been struggling from all the real estate sector bankruptcies to the large Debt-to-GDP ratio and more.

• The CCP held a meeting they have every 5 years this week, “plenum”, where they re-affirmed lofty growth goals but struggled to provide any specific implementation details.

We’ll continue to keep tabs on the rate cuts for the US as well as the recovery efforts of China.

This Week in Tech

OpenAI comes out with another big announcement this week - the launch of GPT-4o mini, which is their most cost-efficient small model. This will help enable a variety of AI use cases that were simply not available given the cost of using other models. The costs of these models is certainly coming with every new release and each cost improvement helps enable a new wave of AI applications.

It makes sense that there will be various models at different price points based on functionality and needs (voice applications need low latency whereas other use cases such as coding assistants may need larger context windows). This is no different than various other infrastructure segments, such as databases, bandwidth, and cloud service providers.

As the cost of implementing AI decreases, we expect to see it embedded in many software products.

As usual, below are some fundraising announcements, M&A, and tech personnel changes that caught our eye:

• Coast, a fintech company focused on the transportation industry, raised a $40M Series B led by Iconiq Growth.

• Altimeter raised $553M for its seventh fund for venture investments.

• Anthropic AI and Menlo Ventures announced Anthology Fund, a $100M fund that will invest in pre-seed and seed companies that use Anthropic’s models.

• Kandji, an Apple device management company, raised $100M from General Catalyst in a mix of equity and debt.

• AMD acquired Silo AI, Europe’s largest private AI Lab, for $665M

Arch is building a next-gen wealth management platform for individuals holding Alternative Assets. Our flagship product is the crypto-backed loan, which allows you to securely and affordably borrow against your crypto. We also offer access to bank-grade custody, trading, and staking services, powered by BitGo.

Disclaimer: None of the above is financial advice, seriously.