Astraeus

“So GBTC was the kingmaker arb trade that was free yield all bull market trading at a massive premium. It was used for juicy basis trades but also accepted as collateral in the lending/OTC world. Then it turned tits up, nuking half the industry and trading at a massive discount to BTC itself. However, Grayscale also sued the SEC and dragged them into approving a spot ETF, which ‘unlocked’ this previously locked GBTC (it was a closed fund with no redemption mechanism) that now trades at parity and can be redeemed. Most of the distressed sellers are gone given how long it took and those same distressed sellers were part of the reason the discount was so large in the first place, but GBTC outflows still spook the market even though it’s t+1 and a lot of the outflows are inflows to other cheaper ETFs. This also messes up our sense of net inflows vs outflows if participants are moving between products vs fresh inflows/outflows. Now funding rates are noisy too because of the Ethena effect + they’re buying BTC. Like LUNA. Except it’s not LUNA. It’s a stablecoin. Except it’s not a stablecoin. It’s like a hedge fund running a basis trade and giving you a synthetic sort of dollar, but not really. But it’s composable. Whatever NFA DYOR. Also: NVDA is fighting for its life at support while the S&P 500 has its narrowest breadth of companies responsible for its returns in decades. The earthquakes in Taiwan look like a geological attack on the semiconductor industry while OpenAI is about to launch GPT-5. Every facet of Ansem’s existence is being tokenised - he will either become Mayor of New York or the CIA starts blackmailing him next week. Solana isn’t working and Mert is getting redder and angrier, employing more technical obfuscation and sanctimony than before. Monad just raised ten gorillion dollars and the closest they’ve gotten to parallel execution is their founder’s squat depth. I am FINE.”