Texas Buys The Dip

Last week Texas bought $5 million of BlackRock’s IBIT as the first slice of a $10 million Bitcoin Strategic Reserve program approved in June. For now, they’re using the ETF sort of as a placeholder or bridge while the state treasury sets up the plumbing to hold coins directly. The bitcoin fund would join just two other traditional holdings under the state’s trust, including nearly $700 million in SPY. IBIT’s hodler list now spans the state of Texas, an Abu Dhabi sovereign fund, and Harvard’s endowment – pretty unusual company for a relatively new ETF, as Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas pointed out. Read more →

Robinhood (HOOD) and Susquehanna are making waves in the prediction market industry this morning after buying a majority stake in LedgerX (the derivatives exchange once owned by FTX) together. The deal will give the companies direct control of the infrastructure needed to sell prediction-market contracts on their own terms (i.e., without Kalshi or Polymarket).

Robinhood, through its current partnership with Kalshi, reported in its latest quarterly earnings that prediction markets were already a 9-figure business line. Susquehanna, on the other hand, serves as a market maker for Kalshi. So…. what’s this mean for Kalshi, you might ask? It’s a good question, especially as more than 50% of the company’s business comes from Robinhood. Right now, we don’t know, but yesterday’s news about Galaxy stepping up as a market maker for Kalshi is making more sense. Read more →

“South Korea’s Google,” Naver has agreed to acquire the country’s largest crypto exchange, Upbit, in an all-stock deal valued at ~$10.3 billion. Rumors are that Upbit will target a Nasdaq IPO once the merger is complete.

South Korea is one of the world’s most active retail trading hubs, with more than a third of the country’s 18 million people trading crypto. Upbit boasts a market share of more than 80%. Read more →

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