Hey there Blockchain Bingers!

You’re tuned in to the Hodl Report, where we recap the week’s crypto drama - better than a season finale of your favorite show! 📺💥

This week we cover:

• Macro markets bull run commentary 🐂

• Noteworthy news from the week 📰

• Coinbase's new project 🪙

• A Goldman Sachs' surprise 🎁

This week in crypto?

The markets have been as exciting as watching paint dry, with prices doing the sideways shuffle.

🦗 Cue the crickets 🦗

Bitcoin and friends are stuck in a range, just chillin' like they’re on a never-ending coffee break. ☕😴 Not much action, but hey, sometimes no news is good news, right?

At least our wallets aren’t crying this week! 😅💸

While the crypto markets may be doing the Macarena in slow motion, there’s one thing you can always count on—Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy scooping up more Bitcoin like it’s on a Black Friday sale. 🛒💸

Check out the chart below to see every time they’ve backed up the truck to load up on Bitcoin—226,500 and counting! It’s like watching a Bitcoin love story unfold, one buy order at a time. 📈💍

Four years ago, MicroStrategy made the bold move to adopt Bitcoin as their treasury reserve asset, and let’s just say it’s been paying off like they found the cheat code to the S&P 500. 🎮💰 They've been outpacing most of those traditional stocks like a Lambo in a race against a Prius. 🏎️💨

But get this—Saylor and his squad jumped on the Bitcoin bandwagon almost 10 years after the launch. If you were an early adopter, you might still remember the good ol’ days when Bitcoin faucets were handing out 5 BTC like candy on Halloween. 🎃🍬 All you had to do was solve a captcha! Yep, back when 5 BTC wouldn’t even buy you a pizza, but now… well, let’s just say you’re not getting change from a pizza guy for that! 🍕💸

In other news, the U.S. just dropped some macro data that’s sweeter than a surprise airdrop!

Inflation is cooling down. We’re talking July PPI inflation dipping to 2.2%, below the expected 2.3%, and CPI inflation sliding to 2.9% - even lower than the anticipated 3.0%!

Translation: The chances of rate cuts just got a boost, and the market’s betting on it! Even Polymarket is giving us the nod of approval. 💪👇

Get ready, because it looks like the crypto pump is revving up its engines!

We’ve got all the ingredients for a tasty bull market brew:

• Inflation is cooling off 📉

• Rate cuts are just around the corner ✂️

• Fresh liquidity is about to flood the market 💧

• And with US elections on the horizon, the current administration will ensure the economy is booming before November 📈

Buckle up, because this crypto train might just be heading straight to the moon! 🌕🚀

1. Polymarket partners with Perplexity AI: Predictions marketplace Polymarket is teaming up with Perplexity’s AI-powered search engine to provide probability predictions and event summaries for betting markets leading up to the final day and summaries once betting markets have resolved.

2. New debit card allows spending directly from MetaMask: Popular self-custody wallet MetaMask has teamed up with Mastercard and Baanx to launch a debit card allowing users to spend directly from their wallets. The limited pilot will launch in the EU and UK to allow purchased made with balances of USDT, USDC and wETH held in their MetaMask wallets on layer 2 network Linea.

3. 5 new funds launched by Grayscale in past 3 months: While the interest in these new funds that only invest in the specified crypto asset hasn’t been particularly exceptional, these funds now exist to allow traditional investors access to invest in Bittensor (TAO), Sui (SUI), MakerDAO (MKR), Near (NEAR) and Stacks (STX) without having to deal with crypto wallets, exchanges and custody themselves.

4. El Salvador’s Bitcoin City receives record investment: A Turkish company will invest $1.62 billion (the country’s largest private investment in history), to fund the construction of El Salvador’s planned Bitcoin City and its two seaports. Bitcoin city is pitched as a tax-free city funded by Bitcoin mining which will be powered by its regional volcanoes instead of the power grid.

5. Marathon Digital to stamp Bitcoin mined blocks with “Made in USA”: Following Trump’s claims in his talk at the recent Bitcoin Nashville Conference that he wants all the remaining Bitcoin to be “Made in USA.”, large-scale Bitcoin mining operator Marathon Digital will stamp all blocks they mine accordingly.

On Wednesday, Coinbase dropped a little teaser on X about a new tokenized Bitcoin product they’re cooking up called “cbBTC.”

Here’s the deal: Tokenized Bitcoin works a lot like stablecoins, but instead of being tied to dollars, it’s backed 1:1 by actual Bitcoin sitting in custody. So, these tokens keep their price pegged to the real thing, like your favorite stablecoins but with more Satoshi swagger.

Why not just use the real thing? Well, tokenized Bitcoin (or wrapped Bitcoin) allows it to be used on other blockchains that have additional decentralized functionality like trading/swapping, lending/borrowing and yielding interest.

The biggest player in the tokenized Bitcoin game right now is wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), which is an ERC20 token.

Not long after Coinbase’s post, Base’s lead developer, Jesse Pollak, jumped in on X and hinted that they’re planning to build a “massive Bitcoin economy” on Base. Translation: Expect some Bitcoin-powered DeFi magic coming your way soon. 🪄

But here’s where it gets spicy: Coinbase’s timing is perfect. 🌶️There’s been some recent buzz (and a little bit of drama) in the crypto community over WBTC due to a partnership with BiT Global, which has ties to none other than Justin Sun, a guy who’s racked up quite the controversial rap sheet in the crypto space.

Looks like Coinbase might be using this moment to make a power move in the tokenized Bitcoin market. So, keep an eye out - things are heating up! 🔥👀

Guess what dropped on Tuesday? It turns out Goldman Sachs—yep, the same Goldman that’s been side-eyeing Bitcoin for years - now owns a whopping $418M in U.S. Bitcoin ETF shares! 🤑

The big reveal came through an SEC-mandated 13F filing (fancy talk for “they had to spill the beans”). Any investment firm with over $100M in equity assets has to show their cards every quarter, and Goldman’s latest filing covers their moves in Q2 2024. That means they were buying up BTC when it was cruising between $55K and $71K.

But here’s the kicker: Goldman’s been talking smack about Bitcoin for years! Just this April, as they were secretly loading up on BTC, their Wealth Management CIO, Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, told the Wall Street Journal that they didn’t see Bitcoin as an “investment asset class” and that they weren’t “believers in crypto.” Oh, and apparently their clients weren’t into it either. 🙄🤥

Talk about a plot twist! One minute they’re giving Bitcoin the cold shoulder, and the next, they’re secretly stacking sats. Sure, $418M might be chump change for a firm sitting on $2.81T in assets, but it’s still pretty wild to see yet another financial giant bending the knee to the king of crypto. 👑