At the beginning of June, it looked like the slow summer season was gradually approaching the markets, but appearances can be deceiving.    

In the first week, news broke that well-known venture capital firm (a company that invests in startups) DWF Labs would purchase $12 million worth of Floki (FLOKI) memecoin tokens to support the project's growing ecosystem. DWF Labs to Buy $12M of Floki Tokens From Project's Treasury, Open Market (coindesk.com) 

It may seem like an odd move for an investment firm to buy a memecoin, but it fits the narrative that memecoins are gradually becoming an integral part of the crypto world. They are fulfilling the role of a retail gateway while building communities. In this case, FLOKI is also preparing its own Metaverse game, so it's not as "empty" a token as many others.  

In case you're going to trade meme tokens, though, be warned that this is also the most volatile space and currently the most saturated with scams.   

Curve founder in depth again

Almost a year ago I wrote about the CRV token problems, StayKing results for August 2023 | Probinex because the founder of Curve used CRV tokens as collateral to get a loan in DeFi and failed to repay that loan. Crypto stars like Justin Sun and Jun Du eventually came to his rescue. Huobi co-founder Jun Du buys 10 million CRV from Michael Egorov | The Block  

At the time, I thought Michael Egorov, the founder of Curve, would take precautions, but the situation repeated itself in June. 

This time no one came to his rescue, his  so Egorov lost his pledge and as a result CRV dropped 30% at one point. The lesson here is that no matter how experienced you are in the crypto world, consistent risk control is extremely important.   

Stablecoin issuers and US Treasuries

If you listen to our Probinex Talks podcasts, we mention there how crypto is getting closer and closer to traditional finance and vice versa. Here's one interesting thing. Stablecoin issuers are currently the eighteenth largest holders of US Treasuries.

This fact further underscores why regulation is coming in all major legislatures as America's, as well as in Europe  or in the Middle East. The amount of assets circulating in cryptocurrencies and stablecoins is so high that legislators simply cannot ignore them because they are already very big players in the market. 

Mt. Gox clients to receive stolen assets

Officials of the defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox said on Monday, June 24, that in the first week of July, after years of constantly shifting deadlines, the exchange will begin distributing assets stolen from clients in a 2014 hacking attack. 

I suspect that repayment may increase selling pressure in the bitcoin (BTC) market, as early investors will receive assets worth much more than they were worth before 2013.

On the other hand, this is the second news of this type this year (after the bankrupt FTX FTX says it will return money to most of its customers : NPR), where lenders will end up with more money than they ever had originally on the exchange. (EDIT: text was written in late June, early July saw a bigger drop in the market, which is attributed in part to this initiative)  

Will Solana also see an ETF?

And finally, another positive news, especially for altcoin fans. Vaneck filed for the first Solana cryptocurrency ETF in late June. Document (sec.gov) (exchange traded fund).  

In response to this application, the price of Solana skyrocketed by 8%. This is the first application for a spot ETF for this cryptocurrency in the US. However, it must be said that the possibility of this ETF being approved is much smaller. First of all, this is the company's first application. Solana also has a much smaller market capitalization than bitcoin or ethereum, and so the SEC will probably not like the fact that it is easier to "manipulate" its price. Overall, Solana has been on the market for a short time, so analysts see the possibility of approval more likely in 2025 and probably only if the SEC leadership changes. 

 And how has our portfolio progressed?  

In terms of price, June was basically all downwards all the time. This price development does not suit our strategy, which we have currently devised for trading futures, and this part of the portfolio produced a loss. (Futures are derivative trading instruments that allow you to trade with leverage, i.e. borrowed money, and so you need less capital for trades. Futures can therefore multiply returns, but also losses).  

Our Defi portfolio, consisting mainly of altcoins and more speculative positions, suffered even more, and we closed some positions there at a loss as well. It turned out that we were right, because then in early July the market took an even bigger drop.

If you read my articles you know that we were slightly in profit on the spot portion of our portfolio, especially BTC and ETH. All of these positions were taken care of with a protective stop-loss order in a positive outcome. As the market declined, these stop-losses were gradually filled and the positions were closed in slight profits.    

The profits from the closed spot positions were thus used to cover the losses produced by our futures trades and the Defi portfolio. 

The market is currently at a crossroads and we are also reassessing the direction of our portfolio. We hold a large stock of stablecoins that we are ready to use and deploy into the market if strength shows up. Should that not be the case, we are prepared to defend the stablecoin based portfolio and possibly use various DEFI instruments to value them.    

As Earnio split all of its revenue last month between client profits and affiliate rewards (some of the rewards were supplemented by the project from its own resources), and our portfolio management did not produce any profit this month either, we are not distributing any revenue for June 2024 this time.    

This makes the importance of the VIP guarantee for Diamond package holders, who will receive up to $100 in rewards per package, all the more important. There are currently only 313 of these packages left out of the final total of 1,000, so the opportunity to secure the guarantee is gradually dwindling.