Bitcoin Halving Should Be Priced In: Castle Island Ventures Founding Partner

You’re seeing the market lose some steam. There was so much excitement. How do you see the having playing out and ultimately impacting prices? Yeah, I guess I’ll be the contrarian voice on here because I mean the having is a perfectly forecastable event as it has been since Bitcoin’s inception as it was last time. And you know, just theoretically speaking an informational event that everybody knows is coming cannot possibly be an informational shock. So should be priced in. What really matters is the demand side, not the supply side to having represents an issuance reduction on an annual basis of 83 basis points. That’s pretty marginal at this point. So I would say the factors that really matter for the Bitcoin price are aggregate liquidity conditions, #1 ETF flows which have been weak actually, both of those things putting pressure on the price, you know, catalyst like that, whereas the halving is something that everybody understands. So it shouldn’t really be a factor in terms of price formation here. Well, demand is a good thing to talk about here for a moment because you saw that exuberance in the Bitcoin ETF, but what happens if that starts to taper off into the year now that the initial rush is gone? Yeah, that’s what we’ve seen and you know the the flows have been pretty flat in the last couple weeks. If you look at the 13 F filings, we’re not yet seeing major allocators, you know allocating to the ETFs. You haven’t yet seen it being incorporated into model portfolios. That’s something I would look forward to in the next three to six months. It appears based on those filings that it’s actually mainly sort of retail investors piling in and certainly that’s what led the rally from the kind of 30,000 range to sort of the 6070 thousand range. Which has been very impressive. I mean we’re seeing, you know, these have been the hottest ETF launches of any asset class probably in history. But you know we have seen a softening and the outflows from GBDC continue to be a factor there. And you know the ETF in Hong Kong I think is is probably not as much of a factor as well that fast follow against the domestic ETFs here because Mainland Chinese citizens will probably not be able to buy that. So the ETF for now is is less positive for Bitcoin.