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MoneyConf 2018 - Day One
Anthony Pompliano (Harry Murphy/Getty Images)

Anthony Pompliano announces $1 billion SPAC deal to jumpstart ProCap Financial, a new bitcoin treasury firm

Sequans Communications also disclosed a $384 million investment to roll out its bitcoin treasury initiative today.

Sage D. Young

Entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano announced today a $1-billion deal with a special purpose acquisition company (that is, a SPAC) to establish ProCap Financial Inc. as a publicly-traded, bitcoin-native financial services company. 

Pompliano said on X, “The company will be a publicly traded entity on Nasdaq at the conclusion of the proposed business combination between my private company ProCap BTC, LLC and Columbus Circle Capital Corp I, a publicly traded SPAC.” 

According to the press release, the two entities raised $516.5 million in equity and $235 million in convertible notes to create the new firm, “the largest initial fundraise in history for a public bitcoin treasury company.”

Sequans Communications, a supplier of 5G semiconductors, also announced a bitcoin treasury initiative Monday. The firm is issuing and selling $195 million in equity securities and $189 million in a principal amount of convertible secured debentures, and will partner with US-based company Swan Bitcoin to help with its treasury strategy operations. 

The announcements of ProCap Financial and Sequans Communications come as more corporate firms initiate digital asset treasuries, such as Trump Media and GameStop.

Even though Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the pioneer in bitcoin treasuries, has seen extraordinary gains in the price of its shares, the pivot to bitcoin may be losing its luster.

“I don’t think it’s set to lose its appeal anytime soon. It’s still another risk asset which, if you believe price predictions, will benefit your balance sheet in the long-term,” Nicolai Søndergaard, a research analyst at blockchain analytics firm Nansen, told Sherwood News. 

However, Maksim Tkachuk, an analyst at on-chain data platform Santiment, expressed a cautionary skepticism. “There’s only so many failed companies and mattress salesmen that bitcoin can accommodate without toppling,” he told Sherwood.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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