Polkadot’s $37M Advertising Spend Under Scrutiny

The Breakdown First Five - Wednesday, July 3, 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. Kraken Goes Nuclear

Kraken is considering expanding into nuclear energy, at least as a power source for their data centers. The crypto exchange has been looking into SMR companies to build their own co-located power alongside Kraken data centers, giving redundancy to grid power. Rising demand for AI compute has made the US power supply look a little lean, pushing many large tech firms into considering energy sovereignty as an imperative. 

4. Biggest Hedge Funds in Bitcoin

13 of the top 25 hedge funds in America are trading Bitcoin. New research from River found that more than half of the largest hedge funds have exposure to Bitcoin via the ETFs. Point 72, Schonfield and Millenium are all playing with size, while Bridgewater was a notable fund abstaining from the trade. These positions are likely all hedged or flat so probably don’t have a large price impact, but they show the hedge funds are set up and comfortable with Bitcoin.  

3. Binance Precedent Rushed to Court

Just days after a judge ruled that BUSD and BNB aren’t securities when sold in secondary markets, the precedent has been added to existing crypto cases. Coinbase said this was a clear example of the SEC’s “novel and sweeping, yet still indeterminate, view of the securities laws.” Ripple used the ruling to push for more clear guidance on the status of crypto tokens from the court, stating it was the most “significant aspect” of their case.

2. Pump.fun Sucks in Cash

Memecoin launchpad Pump.fun briefly topped the leaderboards for project revenue, eclipsing Ethereum with $2M in daily revenue yesterday. The wild stat was just a blip, but the platform has sticky adoption with insane huge revenues averaging $740,000 per day for a month straight. This comes as the platform shoves 10,000 memecoins into the market daily, most of which go straight to zero. Is this a genuine crypto use case or just the dumbest casino ever invented?

1. Pocket Watching Polkadot

The industry became fixated on Polkadot’s budget after it was revealed the protocol governance had spent $37M on advertising and outreach since January. Influencer spend was $5M alone. The treasury has $275M, mostly in DOT tokens, which a community report claimed would only cover two years of spending. Others disputed that claim, suggesting the treasury was functionally infinite due to the capture of token inflation.