Crypto and AI are becoming fast friends.

Like any burgeoning friendship, it’s built on similar interests. They both want to develop and implement world-changing tech.

And they’ve already been slotted into the same group because your grandpa fears and distrusts them both equally.

But as crypto millionaires make massive AI acquisitions, is this the beginning of a decades-long friendship — or the start of something else entirely?

Espresso Shots

☕️ Six-Figure Bitcoin by 2025

Research firm Bernstein predicts that the potential approval of a Bitcoin spot ETF in the next two years could send Bitcoin to $150,000 by 2025.

The prediction came in the form of a note from Analyst Gautam Chhugani, who wrote that the next Bitcoin halving event would force “losing miners” to be “washed out,” while the remaining miners would stick around for a skyrocketing BTC price by 2025, according to reporting from CNBC.

“You may not like Bitcoin as much as we do, but a dispassionate view of Bitcoin as a commodity, suggests a turn of the cycle,” Chhugani continued. “A good idea is only as good as its timing - SEC approved ETFs by world’s top asset managers (BlackRock, Fidelity et al), seems imminent.”

We’re totally surprised that the firm is bullish, as we just assumed they’d be Bernstein bears.

☕️ SBF Biography Inadmissible in Court

Judge Kaplan has decided that the contents of Michael Lewis’s new book, “Going Infinite,” can’t be used in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial.

“There is a conversation described in Michael Lewis' book that is sourced to the defendant,”  U.S. Assistant Attorney Danielle Sassoon said, as reported by Decrypt. “We consider [it] a false exculpatory and inadmissible hearsay.”

Michael Cohen, SBF’s lawyer, intended to read an excerpt from the book to the jury, including a conversation between Bankman-Fried and Zane Tackett, FTX’s former Head of Institutional Sales, but the exchange was deemed prejudicial hearsay by Judge Kaplan.

Meanwhile, Michael Lewis’s publishers are considering “Inadmissible in court” as a blurb for the book jacket.

☕️ Standard Chartered Expands in Hong Kong

Standard Chartered is backing the launch of Zodia Custody, a digital custodian, as the firm launches its services in Hong Kong.

This comes amidst greater Asian-Pacific expansion as Zodia has also spread its operations to Australia and the digital asset market in Singapore.

Hong Kong may be a crucial foothold in the Asian Market as the city continues to establish itself as a hub.

“The Hong Kong government and the regulators see digital assets as the future and also want Hong Kong to be a hub,” Julian Sawyer, Zodia’s CEO, told CNN.

Yes, Zodia continues to expand, but Northern Californian police still have yet to apprehend the enigmatic “Zodia Killer.”

Polled Brew

Spilling the Beans

Crypto Billionaire: ‘All-In on AI’ 🤖 🪙

The growing partnership between AI and crypto has been no secret.

Not only do they both represent growing — sometimes controversial — cutting-edge industries, but their coupling has already resulted in a surge of AI tokens.

But maybe the relationship goes far deeper than that.

Crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb just purchased $500 million worth of Nvidia computing chips with the intent to lease that computing power to AI projects.

McCaleb is pretty close to founding father status when it comes to crypto.

No, he’s certainly not our beautiful and pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto. But McCaleb’s been in the right place at the right time for some of crypto’s pivotal moments.

Back in 2007, McCaleb purchased the domain name Mt. Gox, with the intent to establish an online trading platform for “Magic: The Gathering” cards.

If you remember “Magic” you were either smart enough to figure out how to play, or, like us, you liked trading cards and thought a zombie wizard would make a pretty good bookmark for your “Captain Underpants” comics.

No, Mt. Gox ended up becoming much more than a place to exchange rare MTG cards. Over time, it evolved into the biggest Bitcoin exchange in the world. And McCaleb sold the platform in 2011 before a heist brought Mt. Gox to its knees in 2014.

But McCaleb’s crypto story doesn’t stop there.

McCaleb also played an instrumental role in the founding of the XRP protocol and Ripple. McCaleb would again, cash out and go on to found Stellar.

McCaleb’s penchant for navigating the crypto market with tremendous success and always coming out remarkably unscathed has made him somewhat of a controversial figure.

But his influential presence in crypto is undeniable.

But now, McCaleb is turning his sights to AI. And he’s not the only one.

Crypto firms, as well as Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX, are buying up GPUs like there’s no tomorrow.

GPUs are graphics processing cards, which rather than being used to smooth out “League of Legends” on a gaming PC, are being put to use powering deep learning on AI models.

And we’ve seen this sort of rapid, industrial adoption before. These buying patterns are eerily reminiscent of the crypto-mining hype that powered the Bitcoin Boom of 2013.

So yes, in some ways this isn’t a new development. History is repeating itself. But is this an established enough pattern to drive the next crypto or AI boom?

We’re certainly hopeful.

Crypto and AI are complementary industries. As crypto pours money into AI, those investments come back to crypto in the form of yes, AI tokens, but also AI-driven analytics, predictive tools, and new crypto use cases we can’t even fathom yet.

Yeah, we ship AI and crypto. 

And as two industries intertwine, we’ll take their beautiful bastard offspring, probably called Bot-Coin or Naka-Motors, into our arms and cover their cold, metallic foreheads with kisses.

Crypto 101

GPU: A Graphic Processing Unit. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with “graphics card,” but a graphics card is actually the physical unit that houses the GPU.

The Last Sip

The Last Sip: Though some people may refer to the Bernstein research firm as the Bernstein bears, that’s just a result of the mandala effect. Technically it’s pronounced Bernstain.

Stay Caffeinated,

Coffee & Crypto Team

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