Hong Kim

PUBLIC AUDITABILITY and PRIVATE OWNERSHIP can safely coexist with Bitcoin.

This is a unique superpower of Bitcoin.

Bitwise will continue to champion this unique property in our bitcoin ETFs.

To be clear, publishing addresses isn't a panacea. You still need auditors for attestation on the liability side. You need to be mindful of operational business privacy concerns.

But for public investment vehicles like bitcoin ETFs where all of this information (e.g. custodian, daily inflows/outflows, etc) is already public, the bias should be greatly towards publishing your addresses. It increases public confidence for your products and for the network as a whole.

Below is a screenshot of a webpage that mempool dot space (a popular bitcoin block explorer) built for our bitcoin ETF (BITB), completely independent of Bitwise, utilizing our published addresses: bitwise.mempool.space/wallet/BITB

Anyone can verify that the aggregate balance of bitcoin in our addresses on the mempool page match what is disclosed on our site: bitbetf.com

You might think this is trivial. You already trust KPMG (KPMG is our auditor for BITB) so who is this helping? Well, every six months there's a crisis of confidence in bitcoin ETFs with claims that the ETFs don't have the bitcoin. That the ETFs are lending out the bitcoin. All of this is completely unproductive noise that our space would be able to move past if public investment vehicles like bitcoin ETFs took additional steps to publish their addresses. We're 1 year into launch and BITB is still the only US bitcoin ETF that publishes its addresses.

We believe publishing bitcoin addresses for BITB serves the interest of public investors and the Bitcoin network and ecosystem as a whole and we're committed to this practice at Bitwise.

-- BITB Disclosures & Prospectus: http://bitbetf.com/welcome. BITB is not an investment company registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 and is not afforded its protections. BITB is not suitable for all investors. BITB is subject to significant risk and heightened volatility.

Extremely excited to have the legendary Jonathan Bier joining Bitwise as an advisor.

He is the author of “The Blocksize War”, the man behind the famous BitMEX Research blog and previous Developer Grants program, and someone who’s cared for Bitcoin incredibly deeply for so long. I personally respect him a lot.

Jonathan will advise us on how to best support team Bitcoin!

Today, Bitwise is donating $150,000 to support Bitcoin open-source developers, who work tirelessly to secure and maintain the network.

When the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) launched, we committed to donating 10% of its gross profits each year. We’re delighted to make good on that promise with this first annual donation.

Three fantastic non-profit organizations with established track records—Brink,

, and

—will allocate the funds. We’re grateful for the work they do.

Thank you to the investors who’ve chosen Bitwise and BITB among many options. This donation is made possible because of your choice. We hope you’re as proud as we are to support Bitcoin open-source developers!

was reflecting on when i fell off the habit of opening nostr everyday and it was when i changed the sorting algo on primal to “trending 24hr”

at the time i was traveling with limited time and thought it would help see the important notes at a glance but i think what actually happened was that nostr became more like an impersonal news site to me (akin to hacker news) and less of a social app that i spend time with ppl everyday

changed the algo back to chronological notes from ppl i follow. we’ll see if this does the trick!

excited to share today that bitwise acquired etc group!

they are an exceptional team that manages the largest spot bitcoin ETP in europe (BTCE)

this deal:

• brings bitwise's bitcoin ETP AUM >55,000 btc (>$3B)
• expands our market to EU

grateful and excited for what's ahead —

yes bitwise is launching an ethereum etf

i'm bitcoin first but not bitcoin only and if that's upsetting i'll take the heat. replies / dms open.

fwiw i think bitcoin and ethereum are completely different things. i know it can be super annoying when eth maxis are like "eth is even more sound than bitcoin!" but nobody takes that seriously. bitcoin is undeniably king as decentralized non-government money and that's not really up for debate

imo the question is around whether bitcoin wants to swallow the full range of public computing needs or leave room for the non core use cases (everything outside of sovereign money). i mean, stablecoins are undeniably a thing. non-custodial trading (uniswap) is also undeniably a thing.

i'm very happy that bitcoin hasn't morphed to make any of those things too easy on bitcoin. making stablecoins easier means making general token issuance easier. making non-custodial trading easier on bitcoin means more MEV risk on bitcoin. i'm happy that those experiments are playing out outside of bitcoin. maybe where i differ with many bitcoiners is that i am happy that those experiments are still happening.

anyways, happy to discuss this more. didn't want to seem like i'm hiding from this issue.

notifications is still my top pain point with

. it needs to be grouped! don't need individual full scroll notifications for each like!

last week on my citadel dispatch rip with

i talked about how unbelievable it is that the BANKING LOBBY pushing for the equal treatment of bitcoin advocating for repeal of things like SAB 121 (unfair accounting treatment of bitcoin that makes it financially not viable for banks to service bitcoin)

well, since the rip we've really been seeing the full force of that political power shift. the bill that repeals SAB 121 went through both house and the senate.

so stuff like unfair accounting treatments or bans of regulated entities to touch or service bitcoin, those things i have increasing confidence will be sorted out soon (which is good news b/c it means more ppl will be able to buy bitcoin with less friction; imagine opening your normal banking app and being able to buy bitcoin there).

the real fight now that remains in a tough place that we need to really focus our energy on feels like protecting our ability to interact with bitcoin the asset and network in a non-custodial way which governments are increasingly focused on pushing out while financial firms are trying to move closer to bitcoin.

it was a crazy week so didn't have time to post earlier but was really happy to see the peer-to-peer rights fund come together this week. everyone should check it out and donate! bitcoin policy institute doing incredible work. https://p2prights.org/

let me know if you have any questions / thoughts after listening to this rip!

we talked a lot about:

• importance of dev donations and how we thought about our program
• the good and bad of a bitcoin ETF and how we really need in-kind redemptions to make it better
• the evolving political landscape and how ETFs have changed the incentives for tradfi banks etc
• importance of nostr and ecash

crazy week

going on citadel dispatch tomorrow! come watch and ask questions 🙏

ecash is how we win

i’m going to be at the MIT bitcoin expo this weekend (to talk about bitcoin etfs and our dev donation program)

who else is coming? would love to meet folks

i find myself trying to post on nostr first as a nod to the network even if i later cross post to X

we put care into designing bitwise’s bitcoin etf donation mechanism

features:

• no strings attached donations
• to established non profit orgs rather than individuals to be further arm’s length from devs
• three orgs (open sats, brink, hrf) rather than one to reduce bias and increase reach
• recurring annual donation tied to 10% of profit of the etf to increase transparency and predictability -long term commitment (10 years)

yes you can dunk on it as “wall street money” but not all wall street money is the same and we put effort into reducing potential for harm while still funding devs

my view is that every actor benefiting from bitcoin should bias towards funding devs while being mindful of harm donors can create (lmk if bitwise can be doing better here! open to feedback for sure but disagree with the idea that etf profits as a funding source is fundamentally corrupt or bad)

receiving some questions about this. i’m not knowledgeable about the matter since i don’t believe matt is referring to bitwise’s bitcoin etf here.

fwiw we’re still very much committed to donating 10% of profits of our bitcoin etf to open source bitcoin devs (via opensats, brink, and hrf) as announced.

is there a zap limit? or just whatever LN liquidity allows?

cannot stop thinking about ecash send help

this podcast ep was so good.

few new ecash things that clicked for me:

• you can deterministically generate secrets for the ecash tokens from a seed so that ecash can be backed up and restored with similar UX to bitcoin
• the multi-source multi-destination atomic LN tx thing is just next level for practical privacy and censorship resistance holy shit