this week, Meta announced plans to launch a power trading business, Atem, to manage the power costs of their massive data center footprint

this marks a new era of vertical integration and with it, a new era for commodity and compute markets

a deep dive, with charts ofc 👇 1/ the oil industry is an excellent primer on what i believe will happen to the energy to compute value chain over the next decade

standard oil started as a refiner but rockefeller realized to control profit margins, he needed to own the supply of oil and the transport of oil

1/ thoughts on the 100th GPU supply aggregation incentivized w a token protocol

everyone is aggregating supply but there is no demand

the dePIN angle only covers supply

but cost isn't the driving BUY factor for demand side... 2/ priorities for people sourcing GPU compute:
- availability
- security
- scalability
- cost

not a single compute buyer will choose a distributed clusterfuck with mediocre performance over hyperscalars or neoclouds

1/ @CrucibleCap Q1 VC report, sharing for those curious about the process of investing. we use @attio.

sourcing - we get a LOT of inbound, mostly on this site and LinkedIn. we only track investable deals in our mandate and valuation range. this is why we write / post! 2/ the number of deals through our pipeline has stayed pretty consistent quarter over quarter - we generally will do 1-2 meetings and then decide quickly if we want to dig in or not

1/ are we so back? not so fast

joined @sonalibasak and @timsteno for some lunchtime tea 🍵 on the latest in crypto markets

video here:

receipts below bloomberg.com/news/videos/20… 2/ first off - flows

its been a rough Q1 for ETFs flows

the sell off was driven by short term holders selling at a loss. let's see what comes out in the Q1 13F filings - our mercenaries may have been top buyers after all. love that for us!

1/ quick slide rip from my @Blockworks_ DAS talk - Believe in Something

this is where it all began. everything we talked about ten years ago when we started building the world's first bitcoin investment firm has come to pass.

so why isn't bitcoin a million dollars? 2/ if we take out bitcoin and ethereum, this is the last five years of crypto markets

the names may have changed but the numbers haven't

this is a big problem. there's no growth.

1/ just wrapped my quarterly report for @CrucibleVC

our playbook is simple

as a GP, every quarter i quantify and qualify our ability to run this playbook. we double down on what works, experiment / re-visit with what isn't working.

let's dig into the data and tools👇 2/ we use @attio to manage our pipeline

step one is analyzing the funnel - both raw #s and relative %s

with a small team, quality > quantity. low conversion % signals top of funnel is too broad. high conversion may signal you're not seeing enough deal flow.

1/ gave a talk last week on "energy, compute, crypto" - the three pillars of the modern economy and the converge of three trillion dollar investment themes

sharing the slides and full deck - let's rip 👇 2/ compute rules capital markets

Nvidia was the big story in 2024, but Broadcom cracked the top 10 too and TSMC cemented its place alongside the rest of the Mag 7

expect 2025 to continue this trend as energy and compute carry capital markets

1/ ok i think i have finally sort of gotten to the root of my issue with DePIN as a category

data gathering / observability is step one but it is in and of itself not a valuable exercise. generating tons of new data doesn't unlock billions of $ from buyers for this data. 2/ the bottleneck isn't data but rather actionable insight

the real value in data is *understanding whats going on* and then *doing something* with all of that data that generates economic value, either through unlocking revenue (top line) or lowering cost (bottom line)

1/ quick rip on why @Polymarket matters and why the future of information is markets

markets are efficient at pricing information. if you have information or insight that others don't, there's a huge opportunity to generate alpha. alpha generation requires information edge. 2/ the last few months show distrust of main stream media (MSM) and formal, credentialed sources of information is at an all time high.

so where is information coming from?
- citizen reporters on X
- indie media / podcasts

and markets will price the signals generated

1/ melts and kaledora, sitting in a tree
talking about commodities

thanks to @EV3Research @MoneroMahesh @DAnconia_Crypto for hosting me and @kaledora @OstiumLabs for bringing the rizz

slides and commentary 👇 below the jump 2/ history of oil and what it can teach us about DePIN

standard oil - rockefeller started by horizontally integrating and rolling up refineries, and then realized operating leverage would come from controlling the upstream inputs and the downstream transport and retailing

1/ quick notes and data points from the discussion @kellyjgreer and i had at @PubKey_NYC last night

'tis the season of the most hated rally - bitcoin is ripping and macro folks are not happy about it

jamie dimon and elizabeth warren seem especially mad 😠 max cope incoming 2/ bitcoin pricing is driven by FLOWS

it's tempting to get lost in piles of analysis but as we'll discuss later on, the key to understanding is looking at open positions, trade volume, inflows and outflows

sentiment doesn't matter until it's expressed as a trade

1/ a short summary of a recent talk on silicon, satoshis, and superpowers

power in our world is changing. a decade ago, oil and gas companies and banks ruled markets. now it's tech companies and financialization runs rampant (>100x P/E ratios etc) 2/ as our lives become increasingly digitized, value creation is happening on a new frontier, and a handful of industries and companies are well positioned to capitalize on this shift

1/ so financial institutions are building the products & services to access bitcoin. but where will the inflows come from?

imho, the biggest untapped market for Bitcoin is tax-advantaged retirement accounts

the US retirement market is $35T and has doubled in the last decade 2/ today, there are a few ways to put bitcoin in a tax-advantaged retirement account

i use @choicebyKT+ DAiM, but @Fidelity, bitcoin IRA, @InvestWithAlto + others offer solutions too

trusts are easy to access but expensive + can trade at a sizable discount or premium

1/ last week's @BlackRock spot Bitcoin ETF filing was big news!

but, it's not the only story. many of the largest financial institutions in the US are actively working to provide access to Bitcoin and more.

a quick glance - $27 trillion of client assets here! 2/ this is by no means a complete overview of all the offerings available, but its always helpful to zoom out and look at the bigger picture

while "the institutions are coming" has been more of a trickle than a wave, we're seeing the bridges being built in real time

1/ startups - please don't stop sending investor updates! if you don't send them monthly or quarterly, start now

it shouldn't take more than an hour to write a short summary and provide key data points

a simple template 👇
meltemdemirors.com/_files/ugd/0fd… 2/ your investors are in the market day in, day out talking to companies and other investors. they see things you don't.

by sending concise, thoughtful updates, you engage them as thought partners and stay "top of mind"

i read updates. i respond to them. they make me smarter!

1/ stuff i'm thinking about right now (hence quiet and mostly off social) - a brain dump with links 2/ web3 infra business models very analogous to web2, hence business metrics end up converging over time

limited examples of scalable token-driven models that work, most successful co's are web2 / centralized models

tomtunguz.com/spot-the-diffe…

1/ thanks to @farokh and the @RugRadio community for having me on the show today! i enjoyed discussing NFT market structure and why i don't care for utility or roadmaps with my JPEGs 🙅‍♀️

links to things discussed below 👇

https://twitter.com/farokh/status/1557011467320295424

2/ blog post on NFT market microstructure and how it may evolve over time - don't worry, u will be able to explain market microstructure if u just skim it lightly

bonus: you can collect the post as an NFT if you are so inclined, thanks to @viamirror

meltem.mirror.xyz/Qc2jR5ggGznGrU…

1/ i prep talking points to help me gather + aggregate data, organize my thinking, and develop a cogent, fact-based narrative

here is a dive into this week's notes, with sources, for those of you who find it interesting or are working on doing this for yourself👇 2/ first i focus on market data by segment - i split it into retail, institutions & funds, and traders & market makers

for retail, @skewdotcom publishes social sentiment data

@glassnode breaks down bitcoin holder cohorts - shrimps (<1 BTC) accumulating aggressively rn!

1/ crypto market cap data is confusing

let's simplify by grouping things together

bitcoin, ethereum, and fully collateralized, dollar asset backed stablecoins (effectively the on-chain banking sector) make up the majority of the market today 2/ more interesting in looking at velocity, or trading volumes as a % of market cap, to understand where the turnover is in current markets

stablecoins have by far the highest velocity (we'll break this down further), followed by Tron (why?), Solana, and Ethereum

1/ an explainer on asset liability mismatch and why crypto firms are especially susceptible to this phenomenon due to issues around duration matching and risk management

tl;dr the finänce explanation for celsius, 3AC, and many others struggling

this is a balance sheet ⚖️ 2/ unlike tradfi, in crypto, most debt doesn't have a fixed term and requires over-collateralization (you have to post more collateral than the value of your borrowing)

in the last month, a lot of long term debt suddenly became short term debt or even worse, got called

1/ crypto sentiment is tricky to untangle, especially in the echo chamber that is crypto twitter

at @CoinSharesCo, we use data to inform our view on the market. here are some data points that provide helpful context. 2/ from our weekly fund flows report - last week, investors added to #bitcoin positions, with $126M in net inflows into publicly traded bitcoin products

with 2 consecutive weeks of net inflows across all crypto products, investors are buying the dip 🍲

jbutterfill.medium.com/volume-83-digi…