| GM. This is The Crossover. |
| Bitcoin’s biggest corporate buyer is sitting on a loss this morning, and the drop that put it there arrived on a Sunday night when crypto was the only market open. |
Bitcoin fell below Strategy's $75,451 average cost
Bitcoin fell through $75,451 on Sunday night. That is the average price Strategy, Michael Saylor's company, says it paid for its 849,327 bitcoin. At Sunday's price the pile was worth about $63.58 billion, against the $64.08 billion the company paid for it.
Every hourly reading we have taken since 22:00 UTC on Sunday has been below that line. Bitcoin is $74,516 this morning, down 1.6% in 24 hours, and today's daily reading is its lowest since 21 August.
Strategy owns more bitcoin than any other company, and for most of this cycle its buying was the floor other buyers stood on. Its last disclosed purchase was announced a week ago today: 811 coins for $65.5 million, in a week when it spent $208.2 million buying back its own preferred shares.
It usually files its purchases on a Monday morning, and as of 04:21 UTC today nothing had been filed. A paper loss doesn't force the company to sell anything. It owns the coins outright, and traders on Polymarket, the prediction market, put the chance of its lenders forcing a sale this year at 2%.
Saylor's case to shareholders has been that the company's bitcoin is worth more than it paid for it, and this morning it isn't.
On Wednesday MSCI, which builds the indexes that index funds copy, publishes its list of companies that mostly hold assets rather than run a business. If Strategy is on it, the funds that track MSCI's indexes would have to sell its shares after 30 November. Polymarket traders put the chance of that at 85%.
If you hold bitcoin, the buyer who was always there is now below its own cost on every coin and has gone quiet. A purchase filing this morning would mean it is still buying below its own average. No filing would mean the year's steadiest buyer has stepped back for now.
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Ask Viv
What Is Blockchain?
Blockchain comes up in almost every crypto story and is rarely explained. In this Ask Viv, Viv starts from your bank’s record of your own money and works out to what changes when a network of computers keeps that record together instead. He covers where the name comes from and how the network agrees on what is true with nobody in charge. He ends on the limit: where one organization already runs the system, an ordinary database may be faster, cheaper and simpler.
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Nvidia's board opened a probe and crypto fell first
On Sunday Nvidia's board said it is investigating chief executive Jensen Huang's relationship with a woman. US intelligence officials have identified her as a Chinese spy. Huang keeps his job, the company said.
US stock markets were shut, so the first prices came from crypto. Nvidia perpetual futures (bets on its share price made with borrowed money) fell 4% over the day on Hyperliquid, by The Block's count.
A tokenized Nvidia share briefly traded under $182, CoinGecko said. Within the hour bitcoin fell 1.9% and ether fell 5.1% on our readings, from $2,224 to $2,110. Hyperliquid has since closed out one trader's bet on ether rising, 56,667 ETH bought with borrowed money.
The two accounts behind that bet have lost about $44.8 million.
A weekend stock headline now lands on your coins before it lands on the stock. Nvidia's own shares start trading at 14:30 UTC.
Buterin says the ETH burn was never a floor
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder, wrote on Sunday that ETH should be valued as a store of value rather than a fee-burning token. "ETH as fee-burning token never was as strong as it seemed," he wrote.
The burn is the part of every Ethereum fee that is destroyed instead of paid to anyone. The pitch was that enough burning would shrink the supply and hold up the price. He says most of the 2021 to 2023 burn came from crypto trading on Ethereum itself, which shrank with the price.
This year Ethereum has burned about 19,200 ETH, against 1.48 million in 2022, by The Block's count. He wants the burn kept, and says holders shouldn't mind if it stays small.
Ether is $2,130, down 4.6%, its lowest daily reading since August. If you hold ETH because the burn would make it scarce, Ethereum's co-founder says that was never the reason.
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⚖️ The Odds
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🔭 What to Watch
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📈 The Tape
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Strategy usually files its bitcoin buys on a Monday morning, and this is the first Monday it would be filing from below its own average cost.
TC
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| This is The Crossover. We read the filings and count the hours; what you do with your own coins is your call and nobody else’s. We know what Saylor paid, not what he does next. |
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