The markets… Bitcoin year has been one to write home about. The OG crypto kicked off 2024 with a rally following the SEC’s begrudging approval of 11 spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds. That led to a record-high BTC price of nearly $74K in March, with the coin now about $68K. Institutional investors were watching. Nearly 1K firms disclosed they had invested in spot bitcoin ETFs last quarter, and the top 10 spot BTC ETFs by market cap have ~$54B in assets. Meantime, mega players like the state of Wisconsin’s pension fund and Morgan Stanley invested more than $160M and $270M into spot bitcoin ETFs, respectively.
The miners… As traditional finance (aka TradFi) embraced bitcoin, the crypto was undergoing a shift of its own: the halving. The preprogrammed event slashed miner block rewards, leaving publicly traded cos like Marathon Digital and Riot Platforms facing the possibility of diminished revenues. Instead, they reported increased Q1 revenues on the year driven by BTC’s higher price. This week, Riot proposed a $950M acquisition of fellow miner Bitfarms. If it goes through, the resulting company would be the world’s largest BTC miner.
The movement… Bitcoin’s not sitting still. A new token standard dubbed “Runes” rolled out in April, sending miners’ transaction fees soaring before they (and the revenues) crashed back down to earth. Now a proposed update to the crypto’s underlying code could allow for ethereum-like on-chain smart contracts, which may bring new use cases (think: DeFi) and fresh $$ to the chain.