Goldman Sachs Fast Tracks Crypto Pivot, Kalshi Perpetual Futures & More

Welcome back!

This is J264G and this week I’ve got these titbits for you:

• Bitcoin ETF: Goldman Sachs to launch Bitcoin Premium Income ETF. 

• Perpetual Futures: Kalshi may be launching perpetual futures soon.

• Private Markets: PreStocks trading volume has surpassed $750mn. 

Crypto’s gone from rebel asset to boardroom agenda item faster than anyone expected. Case in point: Charles Schwab continues to lean into its Bitcoin era.

Now, let’s jump right into this week’s newsletter!

Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

After Hours

For decades, Monday morning at 9:30am Eastern carried a certain ceremony: prices were discovered, bells were rung, anchors intoned gravely about futures. 

That ritual is now theatre.

By the time Wall Street's opening auction clears on Monday, the price of almost everything worth trading has already been renegotiated a hundred times over. Not in Chicago pits or London dark pools, but onchain. That’s because onchain markets reprice through Saturday night earnings leaks and Sunday geopolitical shocks with a brutal indifference to the NYSE's trading calendar. 

And increasingly, that 24/7 tape is the real tape. 

Which is why smart money is quietly migrating to platforms like Phantom, where equities, indices, FX, and commodities can be traded via trade.xyz every hour of every day. Meaning, a teenager in Taipei can short the S&P at 3am on Sunday while a managing director in Greenwich is three glasses into a Barolo, blissfully long and blissfully unaware.

The weekend is asymmetric. Asymmetry is alpha. The rest is arithmetic.

But that won't last.

Institutions are not behind; they are merely assembling. The same desks that once mocked Bitcoin now run crypto prime brokerages. The same compliance teams that blacklisted DeFi are writing the memos that will onboard their pension clients to tokenised equities. And the weekend trade is where the next structural edge lives, and structural edges in this business rarely outlast the second wave of institutional capital.

That is precisely the point: the institutions are coming—not to close the frontier, but to pave it.

Chart Of The Week

News Bites

Bitcoin ETF: Goldman Sachs has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch its first Bitcoin-linked exchange-traded fund. The proposed “Bitcoin Premium Income ETF” would provide exposure to Bitcoin while generating income through options strategies.

Perpetual Futures: Kalshi has announced the launch of a new product, scheduled for April 27. A teaser featuring a looping visual has prompted speculation that the offering may involve perpetual futures, a structure pioneered in crypto markets. However, no formal details have been confirmed just yet.

New Entrants: In a move to expand its regulated derivatives offering in the United States, Kraken’s parent company, Payward, has agreed to acquire Bitnomial for up to $550mn. The transaction will utilise Bitnomial’s CFTC status to introduce prediction markets, perpetual futures, and options to US users. Separately, executives at both Charles Schwab and Citadel Securities have indicated interest in prediction markets. 

Private Markets: PreStocks, which offers retail investors exposure to private companies including SpaceX, Anthropic, and Anduril, reports that the trading volume on its platform has surpassed $750mn. The platform leverages special purpose vehicles to acquire underlying exposure via secondary markets or private transactions, before issuing tokenised representations on Solana. 

CLARITY Act: The Senate Banking Committee had been expected to mark up the CLARITY Act during the week of April 20–25, but the timeline seems to have been pushed back. A markup is now anticipated in May as negotiators work to finalise a compromise between banking and crypto stakeholders. Discussions continue to centre on the treatment of stablecoin yield, which remains a key point of contention.

Crypto Bull: Kevin Warsh, the leading candidate for chair of the Federal Reserve, has disclosed a portfolio including investments in Solana (SOL), Polymarket, and SpaceX. The disclosures were made as part of financial transparency requirements tied to the nomination process.

Caught In 4K

Weekly Take

Keks & Giggles

And that's a wrap!

You can reach me anytime over on 𝕏 or drop me a line. 

Talk soon!

J264G

_{DISCLAIMER
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research. Lastly, please be advised that we discuss products and services from our partners from which our team members may hold tokens/equity.}