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 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks on stage during Bitcoin Conference 2023 at Miami Beach Convention Center on May 19, 2023 in Miami Beach, Florida.
(Jason Koerner/Getty Images)
SORTA KINDA NOT REALLY ALL IN

Does RFK Jr. really store “most” of his money in bitcoin? We found out

Some hard numbers on the size of RFK Jr.’s bitcoin stash.

Jack Morse

As an independent candidate for president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. frequently talked up his love of cryptocurrency.

In July, the current nominee to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services said he put “most of his wealth into bitcoin.” That assertion again made headlines this week after Kennedy called bitcoin “the currency of freedom.”

Kennedy officially dropped out of the presidential race on August 23, but an early July ethics disclosure — amended by RFK Jr. on August 7 and 13 — put some hard numbers on his crypto holdings.

According to the US Office of Government Ethics disclosure form, as of the August 7 update, Kennedy had between $500,001 and $1,000,000 worth of bitcoin with Fidelity Crypto. On August 7, the price of BTC was about $55,000.

In June 2023, he had disclosed holding between $100,001 and $250,000 in bitcoin. At that time the coin’s price hovered between $25,000 and $30,000, meaning the increase in his holdings could be due to bitcoin’s price increase, not additional investments in the cryptocurrency.

Also notable in the August filing, Kennedy disclosed owning between $50,001 and $100,000 worth of Marathon Digital, a bitcoin-mining company.

A screenshot of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s financial disclosures.
Not his keys.

Finally, the disclosures also reveal that RFK Jr. has quite a lot of wealth that’s not in bitcoin, including somewhere between $1 and $5 million in a Northern Funds US Government Money Market Fund alone, as well money in many ETFs and real estate.

So, even if you add up the bitcoin holdings and add in his Marathon Digital assets, it’s still a far cry from most of his wealth being in bitcoin.

The price of bitcoin, as well as the share price of bitcoin-mining companies like Marathon Digital, has steadily climbed since Trump’s election win earlier this month. Kennedy endorsed Trump, who ran a loudly pro-crypto campaign, after he left the race.

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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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