Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) Profile picture
Jun 17, 2023 12 tweets 4 min read Read on X
1/12

Ok, one last bullish BlackRock tweet to round out the weekend.

People don't realize that BlackRock really made the gold market as we know it today.

Pre-BlackRock it was a $1T market.

Now it's about $13T.

So how did they do it? Image
2/12

BlackRock has an army of advisors around the world who receive commission for pushing their products.

And while they've got a lot of brands for their funds, they are most known for "iShares" which offers 3 of the 5 largest gold ETFs in the world.
3/12

BlackRock has tools to let its advisors earn a 3% advisory fee on the products they sell, as well as to add on custom advisory fees.

Depending on the jurisdiction of the offering and advisor, there can also be trailing fees. Image
4/12

But in most places the fees are for new products sold.

And, due to various regulations can be more lucrative for alternative assets than standard shares.

But when BlackRock introduced their gold product, they began to add it to their model portfolios for advisors. Image
5/12

Advisors, eager to push the product and get commission on a new asset class began to tell Boomers that gold was the perfect component to round out a portfolio and hedge against inflation and other risks.

This led to a boon in gold investment demand. Image
6/12

While much of global demand for gold is still purpose driven (Jewelry and tech) this push grew the investment sector of demand to almost 25%, which led to a second order effect of increasing the amount of gold central banks were buying. Image
7/12

Because people valued gold, central banks in turn valued gold and rapidly increased demand for it.

All driven from this push. Image
8/12

Gold had exchange traded products prior to this - in fact as far back as 1961 there was a gold ETF in Canada.

And, State Street launched their SPDR gold ETF in 2004, which is the largest of all the gold ETFs.
9/12

But BlackRock through its army of advisors pushed the narrative that gave gold broader legitimacy in a portfolio.

It's network told millions of users that you *needed* gold to have a well balanced financial safety net.
10/12

After doing this for a two decades, we now find that young wealth managers and economists who have climbed to seats in central banks and sovereign wealth funds, view the "gold as portfolio safety" narrative as a no-brainer.
11/12

The same will hold true with crypto.

We have existing non-US ETFs and US ETPs.

BlackRock will arm advisors to educate millions of consumers on allocating X% of their portfolio to crypto and change the narrative entirely.
12/12

Then as the dollar declines, and a new generation of wealth managers, bankers and economists who grew up in the digital era ascend to the chairs of central banks - where do you think they will turn to for reserves?

What will they invest the future of their country in? Image

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More from @adamscochran

Oct 20
1/4

Elon Musk’s PAC is now serving up fake ads and text that claim to be from Harris, with fake and conflicting ads.

Even the starkest of Trump supporters have to agree this is heinous and illegal. Image
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2/4

The constant screeching claiming that anything critical about your candidate is “fake news” and then literally making fake ads to trick the American people, is nothing short of audacious hypocrisy.
3/4

An inability to denounce this, is just a confession that democracy doesn’t matter to you.

You’re willing to throw out truth and process, so long as you get your own way.

The DoJ should throw the book at Musk, and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.
Read 5 tweets
Oct 18
10/11

J) 5 of the "Fake Electorate" packages that Trump's team had tried to hand over to Pence, used the exact same template for vacancy filling pages.

These pages do not normally have a standard across states, showing coordination. But the source proof is still under seal. Image
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11/11

So Trump and his team *in their own words*:

-Knew they lost
-Knew it was not legal for Pence to over turn
-Knew the states did not have fraud issues
-Researched "alternative electors" a month in advanced of those claims
-Knew the documents were unofficial
-Took part in the transfer process
-And attempted to pass off forged documents directly to the VP
-Because of a pre-meditated plan to steal the election.

The first volumes represent 1889 pages of evidence, 70% still under seal.

This is just from the 30% unsealed, and there are more volumes to go.

The case could not be more clear.

And as a reminder, Trump's team refused to dispute the authenticity of any of this evidence, they only ask for it to be delayed as it would "hurt their client" during the election.
3/11

B) They have iMessages confirming they were trying to deliver the unsealed fake documents to Pence. Image
Read 10 tweets
Oct 18
1/11

So the first 3 volumes of Smith's evidence against Trump are released. About 70% still sealed, but, pretty damning stuff, which is all either their own messages, or testimony from Republican staff under oath:
2/11

A) A member of Trump's team directly attempted get a Pence aide to hand Mike Pence documents their team knew was fake, uncertified, and lacked chain of custody. Image
3/11

B) They have iMessages confirming they were trying to deliver the unsealed fake documents to Pence. Image
Read 12 tweets
Feb 19
1/16

Right now most of the AI projects seem to be shovels and picks, which is great to sell when people are mining.

But no one is mining yet.

The comparable in our space is Bittensor vs Ritual.
2/16

But, outside its the fact we have tons of models on HuggingFace, StableDiffusion, OpenAI, Gemini, LLaMa, Mixtral, Smaug, MidJourney, etc but not a lot of people using them for any specific commercial gain at scale.
3/16

Sure, perhaps some SaaS tooling sells you AI stuff, or some guy automates a bunch of spam blogs on it and makes some affiliate revenue.

But it doesn't really have 100% complete high value cases yet.
Read 16 tweets
Jan 26
1/8

So Justin Sun's HTX/Huobi has suddenly turned off their proof-of-reserves system, at the same time as a few other concerning things are happening. Image
2/8

Their live reporting on DefiLlama shows only about $120M in ETH assets despite their last audit claiming closer to $300M in raw ETH. Image
3/8

TUSD is deeply struggling to hold its peg, while a large user is using TUSD on Binance to mass buy BTC and aggressively TWAP ETH.
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Read 9 tweets
Jan 26
1/8

As we move into the L3/Appchain era, a lot of providers are focused on a race to the bottom of fees, or maximizing platform flexability.

But, the winner is probably just whoever has the most pre-made features that are easy to activate.
2/8

Should every L3 have deep in-house technical expertise to customize their launch? Maybe, but its probably overkill.

But beyond that, most won't.

I think of it like WordPress.

Some people will customize it and need access to code. Some will use pre-built assets.
3/8

Right now, every rollup and rollup provider is like "You can do X and integrate Y"

And you can, but not off the shelf. Not today.

Step one is probably getting it down to a JSON config file, similar to what @avax has for their EVM subnet.
Read 9 tweets

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