Pod Insights Equity Podcast Equity Monday: Bitcoin ETFs, Carta’s latest mess, and let’s go to the Moon About this episode Here’s what we got into on the show today:
Stocks and Crypto: Tech stocks aren’t moving too much this morning as the market digests the Boeing mess. In crypto-land, the price of bitcoin is up.
Bitcoin ETFs: And this is why. A rush of new filings this morning showed that bitcoin spot ETFs are targeting a very low-fee structure as they compete for investor dollars. These investment vehicles are expected to get approved this week, or at least some of them, so expect a little market turbulence ahead.
Carta is once again in trouble: Carta, which makes cap table software for startups, is in trouble after some of its sales people used internal information to try and broker trades without customer consent. Guess how well that is going over.
The ULA managed to get its rocket into the sky! This is great news for space launch competition. And for going back to the Moon.
And the GPT store is supposed to come this very week.
All that and more, we promise. Talk to you in two days!
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Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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Transcript 0:10 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Crunches podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. This is Alex. Good morning. Today is January 8th, 2024. It's the first real week of the year, so if you are just knocking off the cobwebs and getting back into work, don't worry, you are not alone. On the equity front, don't forget that this week we'll see the first of our rejiggered Wednesday episodes. They are going to be shorter, punchier, more filled with startup and venture news. Look for that. Get ready, get excited. I am. Today on the show, we have stocks and crypto. Bitcoin ETFs are probably finally actually really coming this week, we think.
0:50 Speaker 00 The latest drama at Carta, a key rocket launch, and OpenAI's GPT store is supposed to launch this week. Let's go.
1:01 Speaker 00 Starting off as we do with the world of money, if you spin that globe and take a look at the stock market over in Asia, shares are mostly down today. What's driving that? Well, the fall of Zhongji in China is a major negative catalyst. Look that up if you want. In Europe, shares are down, but not by much. And here in the US, tech stocks are flat in pre-market trading. And the big news is actually not a tech story, but it's the latest set of issues at Boeing, an American company that appears unable to build airplanes that stay in one piece as they fly these days. This comes after the company had issues with planes that did not stay in the sky. Not a great look. Shares of Boeing are off about 7.5% in pre-market trading.
1:44 Speaker 00 Now, on the earnings front, only one name you need to know, Taiwan Semiconductor, better known as TSM, will drop its numbers on Thursday. And if you are into banking, well, a lot of reports there will drop on Friday, just in case you wanted to know. And then there was crypto where the news is good and not so good at the same time. Bitcoin is up about 5% in the last week. That's the good news. The less good news is that other major cryptocurrencies are flat down over the same time period. This leads to a very obvious question. What is driving the diverging performance of different blockchain tokens? Well, I think the answer here is upcoming Bitcoin ETFs, which I promise we'll get into in just
2:27 Speaker 00 one moment. Now elsewhere in crypto, spot trading levels are at their strongest point in the last year. This is helping a lot of people inside the world of crypto. Data from the block, for example, indicates that Coinbase saw just under $70 billion worth of trades in December. That's up from $50 billion in November and about $31 billion in October. That's some rapid gains. Coinbase's stock is up on that news and we expect it will drive more venture capital activity in crypto before you know it.
2:59 Speaker 00 And now time for my favorite part of the show. As I tell you every week, it's big news that matters. I don't want to jinx it, everybody, but I'm pretty sure that this is Bitcoin ETF week. After so very much back and forth and drama, we do appear to be nearing the end game for the launch of Bitcoin spot ETFs. In short, if a bunch of products get approved this week, as we expect, we will see American consumers offered a pathway to owning Bitcoin inside their regular investment accounts. And providers are lining up to feed at what they clearly hope will be lots of demand. There's so much hope for demand that we are seeing a fee war break out amongst the companies working to get
3:40 Speaker 00 their own Bitcoin spot ETFs into the market. What does that mean for you? Well, you're going to be able to buy Bitcoin from a spot ETF, once they are approved, for a fee of as low as 25 bips, or about 0.25%. And some of the offered ETFs, according to documents that dropped this morning, are going to offer a fee break until they reach a certain AUM threshold. What does that mean? Well, that some of the Bitcoin ETFs that we are looking at are offering lower fees to begin with. And then, once they reach a total amount of assets managed, say $5 billion, the prices will go up. But again, people want to earn that early demand. Will this all prove enticing? Sure, I guess.
4:23 Speaker 00 But an open question is how much demand there will be for owning Bitcoin as a managed investment product instead of on one's own. On one hand, the pro side, it's easier than handling the stuff yourself. There's less cyber risk. You don't have to worry about clicking on the wrong link and draining your account. And hell, it's in your Fidelity or Vanguard account. What's easier than that? On the other hand, how not decentralized is it to get the world's largest financial players aboard to help people purchase a little exposure to an asset class through traditional finance rails? So much for a new system. Bitcoin is rallying lately thanks to adjoining the ranks of the boring and understood assets of the world. What happened to not your keys, not your coins?
5:07 Speaker 00 If these spot ETFs take off, it will be hard to reconcile the ethos of crypto with its lived reality. So long as number goes up, I doubt that there will be too much whining. But it's amazing to see how we've gone from Bitcoin in the early days being a neat way to send money sans permission, to later a religion, and then today to fodder for a crop of fresh spot ETFs. And now we have to talk about Carta again. Over the weekend, Carta got into yet another controversy, this time not over harassment allegations or suing its former CTO, but instead TechCrunch reports that a prominent customer accused Carta of misusing sensitive information that startups entrust to the
5:51 Speaker 00 company in pursuit of its own goals. The claim has raised wider questions about how Carta operates, even as the company argues that the incident was isolated. Now, rewind the clock. This row dates back to Friday, when Finnish CEO Kari Sarnen posted on LinkedIn that he had received surprising news about Linear, the project management software company he co- Founded four years ago and that raised $35 million in funding last fall. Now Linear is a Carta customer, as many startups are. And according to Saranen, earlier on Friday, without his consent or knowledge, a representative from Carta reached out to an angel investor in his company, telling that person that Carta had a "firm by order"
6:35 Speaker 00 from an interested party at a specific price. Now, Carta has blamed this situation on a rogue employee, effectively, with one of its board members, Matt Murphy, telling TechWings that, "There was a breach of this protocol from an employee on the Carta X team that has been dealt with and which we learned from." The protocol in question, of course, is data segregation between the cap table side of the company and the part of the company that wants to deal secondary transactions. Saranen, however, said the issue was not novel and has happened to other companies that he has heard from. The issue here, I think, is not just how this happened once, or precisely how many times it has happened in the past, but how much can startups trust Carta to be a fair defender of their information and cap tables in the future,
7:20 Speaker 00 when it also has incentives to use that information to try and make money off secondary market transactions? Don't forget that Carta X, Carta's secondary market trading service, started executing transactions back in 2021. Not a new product. In other words. Carta is a strange one. It's at once a very successful company, has a large customer base, lots of venture investment, and a unicorn valuation. And yet it manages to keep shooting itself in the foot. So why no shakeup to its management? I think it's because the company's CEO, Henry Ward, is one of its founders, and VCs are very, very loath, even today, to oust founders in case they wind up losing out on later deal flow. Anyways, expect to hear more about this as the week goes along.
8:05 Speaker 00 And Carta, after we get through this, please just do normal business. Thank you.
8:12 Speaker 00 In happier news, a launch was successful this morning from the United Launch Alliance. It's set up its very first Vulcan Centaur rocket. Now, if you don't know United Launch Alliance, or ULA, it's a joint Boeing and Lockheed Martin program, and CNN reports the company was sending a rover to the moon. I love space, I love rockets, I love going to the moon. I rate this all as a very, very cool. Now, why bring it up on the podcast? Well, I think today's launch shows that ULA is going to be, to some degree, competition for SpaceX, a private company that we care about. Nothing sharpens products like competent rivals, so here's hoping that ULA's launch
8:53 Speaker 00 this morning makes SpaceX and the larger space launch industry cheaper, faster, and safer.
9:01 Speaker 00 Skating on towards a close, do not forget that this is the week in which we are supposed to get the launch of a store for custom GPTs from OpenAI. In an email viewed by TechCrunch, OpenAI said that developers building GPTs will have to review its updated usage policies and GPT brand guidelines to ensure that their own GPTs are compliant before they're eligible for listing in the upcoming store, which is called, shockingly, the GPT Store. They'll also have to verify their user profile and ensure that their GPTs are published as, quote, "public." Now, recall that this launch was delayed after OpenAI went through a massive leadership shakeup last year, which saw Sam Altman fired from the company, only to come back in mere
9:45 Speaker 00 days while also seeing its board overhauled to better suit his goals. And keep in mind that the launch of the GPT Store will come as OpenAI is being sued by The New York Times over copyright infringement matters. I don't think that lawsuit's going to slow the company down, so look for this on techcrunch.com. Once it launches, we'll have all that you need.
10:08 Speaker 00 And that's our show for this fine and cold and snowy Monday morning. Don't forget, if you want even more equity between now and Wednesday, when we drop that new awesome show, well, we are EquityPod over on X and Threads. If you need even more of me, I'm Alex over on X, and we have two sister shows, Chain Reaction and Found. Chain Reaction is all things crypto, while Found is all about founder stories and how they built what they did. All right, we'll talk to you soon. We'll talk to you on Wednesday. Bye.
10:38 Speaker 00 Equity is hosted by myself, editor in chief of TechCrunch Plus, Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch senior reporter, Mary Ann Azvedo. We are produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator, and a big thank you to the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
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