Mystery Surrounds Tesla’s Bitcoin Move as Elon Remains Silent

The Breakdown First Five - Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Welcome back to The Breakdown First Five — the 5 most interesting and/or important stories in bitcoin, crypto, and markets to start your day.

5. Major Praxis

Network State Praxis claimed to have raised $525M to fund the construction of a crypto-friendly city. Despite a long list of notable VCs signing up for the libertarian urban construction project, it turns out $500M worth of funding is in the form of a drawdown facility provided by Global Emerging Markets and backed by the tokenized value of the future real estate. No announcement on where the city will be constructed, but some suggest Costa Rica. 

4. Stripe x Paxos

Stripe is the first customer for Paxos new payments platform. The platform will function as a fiat to stablecoin interchange, servicing PaypalUSD, USDC and Pax Dollars. Merchants can convert stablecoin payments into fiat and use the platform to process refunds to crypto wallets. It seems that Stripe is just onboarding the entire stablecoin industry and letting everyone battle it out for dominance in crypto payments. 

3. Metaplanet Spam Buy

Japanese Microstrategy analogue, Metaplanet, keeps buying more Bitcoin. The company has bought another 107 BTC, doubling their holdings in less than two weeks. They now hold $56M worth of BTC. The firm has also rolled up their sale of Bitcoin put options, moving the strike price to $66,000 and clipping a couple of extra BTC in revenue. Seems like the diminutive Bitcoin holding company is putting on a master class in BTC treasury management. 

2. Trump ICO Flops

A broken website and a lack of buyers led to a disappointing ICO for World Liberty Financial. The token project sold around $9M of the $300M worth of tokens allotted to the public sale. Just 5,500 unique wallets bought the token, disappointing given the 100,000 investors claimed to be on the whitelist. Turns out there’s no market for untradable governance tokens.  

1. Tesla Selling?

Is Elon Musk dumping his Bitcoin bags? Yesterday afternoon Tesla moved their entire Bitcoin stash into seven unknown wallets. The carmaker’s 2021 Bitcoin purchase has largely been forgotten, but they still had $770M worth of BTC left. Theories ranged from OTC selling to some obtuse signal that Tesla would be accepting Bitcoin again soon. No explanation from Tesla or Elon only added to the mystery. We might have to wait until Q4 earnings to find out.