Bitcoin pulled back a notch or two overnight, breaking back below the US$27k mark. Is the asset about to crash, like CNBC’s Jim Cramer seems to hope it will?

The as-seen-on-TV US financial analyst has flipped on crypto ever since he made a boatload from it and supposedly paid off a house from its gains a couple of years ago. But he’s been firmly in the Warren Buffett/Charlie Munger Bitcoin-hating camp for a while now.

The former hedge fund manager and host of CNBC’s Mad Money said midweek:

“I can’t go out with gold because gold is not good; I can’t go out with Bitcoin because I can’t be in something where Mr Bitcoin is about to go down big.”

Cue “bottom is in” comments…

Mr Bitcoin? Guess he’s referring to Sam Bankman Fried, the founder of the FTX firm currently on trial in a New York federal court over multiple financial fraud charges.

We were about to write, that’s a pretty lazy nickname for someone more known to deal in altcoins and stablecoins, but then we saw this…

It’s still a pretty ordinary nickname for SBF, though. Here’s a better one (probably) courtesy of “Coffeezilla”…

More on SBF and Ellison in a sec, but first…

 

Legendary US investor Paul Tudor Jones still digs Bitcoin

Also appearing on CNBC this week has been the billionaire hedge fund legend Paul Tudor Jones, who said he’s a buyer of Bitcoin (and gold) due to the prevailing winds of macroeconomic  (rising US government debt) and geopolitical turmoil (Israel v Hamas) – two forces that continue to throw doubt over everything in the world of investing this year.

“I would love gold and bitcoin together,” Tudor Jones said.

“I think they probably take on a larger percentage of your portfolio than they would [historically] because we’re going to go through both a challenging political time here in the United States and we’ve obviously got a geopolitical situation.”

Tudor Jones also said the current scene “might be the most threatening and challenging geopolitical environment” that he’s ever seen, with the US “probably in its weakest fiscal position since World War Two”.

“It’s a really challenging time to want to be an equity investor in US stocks right now,” he added.

 

Caroline Ellison testifies at SBF trial

The SBF trial, by the way has just seen his former girlfriend and partner in the collapsed FTX crypto exchange/Alameda business, Caroline Ellison, testify in front of jurors and break down in tears with remorse over her part in the debacle.

Among other things, Ellison expressed her anxiety about the possibility of customers withdrawing their funds from FTX amid the “liquidity crush” at related hedge fund company Alameda.

Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, welled up when describing life at FTX in the thick of its troubles, noting that Bankman-Fried had directed her to illegally appropriate FTX customers’ funds and lie to lenders.

“This was kind of something I’d been dreading for so long… and I just, I felt a sense of relief that I didn’t have to lie anymore… that I could take responsibility,” Ellison said.

Not sure what they’re paying the courtroom sketch artists, by the way, but it’s either way too much or way too little. We can’t decide…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.09 trillion, down a fraction since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Since we started typing this column, and also ever since Jim Cramer’s latest call for Bitcoin to crash and burn, the crypto market has been recovering just a tad. It’s still down a slightly larger tad overall over the past 24 hours… but keep talking Jim, please, do keep talking…

 

Uppers and downers

Some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

 PUMPERS (11-100 market cap position)

• Kaspa (KAS), (market cap: US$932 million) +5%

• GALA (GALA), (market cap: US$357 million) +3%

• Frax Share (FXS), (market cap: US$394 million) +3%

• Chainlink (LINK), (market cap: US$4.1 billion) +2%

 

SLUMPERS

• Radix (XRD), (market cap: US$428 million) -8%

• THORChain (RUNE), (market cap: US$473 million) -6%

• Rollbit Coin (RLB), (market cap: US$413 million) -5%

 

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

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