Science & Environment
Sydney reopens beaches after tar ball scare
AFPBeaches in the Australian city of Sydney have reopened for swimmers after being closed earlier this week when thousands of mysterious black tar-like balls washed ashore, prompting health concerns.
Officials say tests found the balls to be formed from chemicals similar to those in cosmetics and cleaning products but it is still unclear where they came from.
Eight beaches including Bondi – the city’s most famous – were closed and a massive clean-up ordered amid fears the black deposits were toxic.
New South Wales’s Environment Minister, Penny Sharpe, said investigations were continuing to establish the source of the pollution and who was responsible.
The state’s maritime authority said the balls were not highly toxic to humans but should not be touched or picked up.
“Based on advice from the Environment Protection Authority, we can now confirm the balls are made up of fatty acids, chemicals consistent with those found in cleaning and cosmetic products, mixed with some fuel oil,” said New South Wales Maritime Executive Director Mark Hutchings.
EPAThe New South Wales Environment Protection Authority (EPA) said laboratory testing was continuing, to try to determine where the balls came from, Reuters news agency reports.
“It is still somewhat of a mystery and may take a few more days to determine origin,” said EPA Executive Director Stephen Beaman.
The tar balls were “not harmful when on the ground but should not be touched or picked up”, Mr Hutchings was quoted as saying by Australian broadcaster ABC.
“If you see these balls, report them to a lifeguard. If you or your family accidentally touches one, wash your hands with soap and water or baby oil.”
Day trips to the Moon, living on Mars, space elevators… when it comes to the future of space exploration, some possibilities might be closer than we think!
Made by BBC Ideas in partnership with the Royal Society, external
Animated by Jess Mountfield, narrated by Dr Becky Smethurst at the University of Oxford
An ion trap helped create a quantum defect in two places at once
ANDREW BROOKES, NATIONAL PHYSICAL LABORATORY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Exotic quantum rifts have been created with charged atoms, and they exist in a superposition of being in two places at once. This is a first step towards better understanding the behaviour of such quantum defects in everything from materials to an entire universe.
Defects are ubiquitous – think of tears in textiles or cloudy imperfections in shiny crystals – but in quantum systems, they can have the extra property of being topological. That means the overall structure of the…
Science & Environment
BlackRock’s ETF chief says 75% of its bitcoin buyers are crypto fans new to Wall Street
Marquee at the main entrance to BlackRock headquarters building in Manhattan.
Erik Mcgregor | Lightrocket | Getty Images
SALT LAKE CITY — A year ago, Samara Cohen believed there was so much pent-up demand for bitcoin that she and her team at BlackRock launched one of the first-ever spot bitcoin exchange-traded products in the U.S. Now investors are flocking in, and a lot of them are crypto enthusiasts who are new to Wall Street.
Cohen, who heads up the asset manager’s exchange-traded funds and index investments as chief investment officer, told CNBC that BlackRock now sees the demand was for a better way to access bitcoin. “It was for the ETF wrapper,” she told CNBC on stage at the Permissionless Conference in Utah.
The total market cap of all eleven spot bitcoin ETFs now tops $63 billion, with total flows of nearly $20 billion. In the last five trading days alone, spot bitcoin ETFs have seen net inflows of more than $2.1 billion, with BlackRock accounting for half of those sales.
The spike in trading volume comes as bitcoin hit its highest level since July this week, trading above $68,300. Bitcoin ended the third quarter up around 140% from the same quarter a year ago, outpacing the S&P 500, as these spot token funds and the crypto market cap move higher in lock-step. Crypto-aligned stock Coinbase closed up about 24% this week, its best week since February.
Cohen told CNBC that part of the strategy for attracting customers to its funds was teaching crypto investors about the benefits of exchange-traded products (ETPs).
13F filings, which offer quarterly reads on equity positions taken by large investors, show that 80% of the buyers of these new spot bitcoin products in the U.S. are direct investors. Of the 80% of direct investors, Cohen told CNBC that 75% had never before owned an iShare, one of the best-known and largest ETF providers on the planet.
“So we went into this journey with the expectation that we needed to educate ETF investors on crypto and on bitcoin specifically,” said Cohen. “As it turns out, we have done a lot of education of crypto investors on the benefits of the ETP wrapper.”
Before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission green-lit spot bitcoin funds in January, investors had a few ways to buy and custody cryptocurrencies. A centralized exchange like Coinbase was among the most user-friendly options for U.S investors. But the blockbuster debut of bitcoin ETPs has laid bare to Cohen and others across Wall Street, that crypto exchanges weren’t giving digital asset investors everything they needed.
BlackRock’s IBIT vs. bitcoin YTD
It helps that the U.S. is a huge market for digital assets. New data from Chainalysis shows that North America remains the biggest crypto market globally, accounting for nearly 23% of all crypto trading volume. The blockchain analytics platform estimates that between July 2023 and July 2024, there was $1.3 trillion in on-chain value received.
Venture firm a16z found in its recently released State of Crypto report that more than 40 million Americans hold crypto.
So far, adoption has mostly been through wealth management clients asking advisors to add new spot crypto products to their portfolio.
In August, Morgan Stanley was the first big bank to allow its 15,000 financial advisors to pitch bitcoin ETFs from BlackRock and Fidelity to clients with a net worth over $1.5 million. Other firms are still performing in-house due diligence before allowing their armies of FAs to start actively pitching the funds.
“Wealth manager allocators have not been allocating,” VanEck CEO Jan van Eck told CNBC in Utah. “I mean, they’re barely even warming up.”
Van Eck drew parallels to the European market, where the company has 12 token-based products trading in Europe.
“It’s exactly what we see in Europe,” he said. “Very few private banks have really approved investment in bitcoin or ethereum or anything else in a major way.” Van Eck said his company has about $2 billion in its European crypto ETPs, and that a lot of the volume is from individual investors.
Wall Street needs rules from lawmakers on Capitol Hill before it gets more comfortable with crypto.
ETFs create transparency
Cohen thinks that in a lot of ways, ETFs and blockchain technology are solving for similar things.
“ETFs have been a decentralizing force in TradFi markets that have brought a lot more access and transparency, and importantly, really accelerated in growth during the post crisis 2008, 2009 period,” said Cohen, referring to traditional finance markets.
“I find it incredibly meaningful to look at the fact that the bitcoin whitepaper was published on October 31, 2008, and then you have the G20 leaders from around the world meeting to discuss the aftermath of the financial crisis and how do you create more transparency through public reporting,” Cohen continued.
BlackRock took on less risk by using counterparty clearing and multilateral trading. In TradFi markets, those moves created huge tailwinds for ETFs.
“Then at the same time, DeFi is becoming a reality over the intervening 15 years,” she said.
“Was this a win for Bitcoin? Was this a win for ETPs? To me, the answer is: It’s a win for investors, to the extent we can effectively marry these ecosystems which are solving for the same goals.”
Donald Trump’s crypto project, World Liberty Financial, published a 13-page document on Thursday, describing its mission, how tokens can be allocated, and indicating that the Republican presidential nominee and his family could take home 75% of net revenue.
In what it calls the “World Liberty Gold Paper,” WLF said the Trump family will receive 22.5 billion “$WLFI” tokens, currently valued at $337.5 million, based on the price of 1.5 cents per token at launch this week.
Trump, who’s in a virtual dead heat with Vice President Kamala Harris as the election reaches its closing stages, has spent months pumping his crypto project, previously branding it as “The DeFiant Ones,” a play on DeFi, short for decentralized finance.
On Tuesday, the project launched the WLFI token and said in a roadmap that it was looking to raise $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in its initial sale. As of Thursday, only $12.9 million worth of the token have been sold, according to its website.
The paper released on Thursday shows that Trump and his family assume no liability. It indicates that none of them are directors, employees, managers or operators of WLF or its affiliates, and said the project and the tokens “are not political and have no affiliation with any political campaign.”
Neither WLF nor the Trump campaign immediately responded to a request for comment.
Crypto projects typically release white papers before they launch their coins, offering a guide so that investors can learn more about the mission, goals and how future tokens get allocated. WLF’s paper says that a Delaware-based company named DT Marks DEFI LLC, which is connected to the former president, is set to receive three-quarters of the net protocol revenues.
WLF bills itself as a crypto bank where customers will be encouraged to borrow, lend and invest in digital coins. The document released Thursday defines net protocol revenue as income to WLF from “any source, including without limitation platform use fees, token sale proceeds, advertising or other sources of revenue, after deduction of agreed expenses and reserves for WLF’s continued operations.”
Some $30 million of the the initial revenue is earmarked to be held in a reserve intended to cover operating expenses and other financial obligations.
The remaining 25% of net protocol revenue is set to go to Axiom Management Group, or AMG, a Puerto Rico LLC wholly owned by Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman, two of the co-founders.
Folkman previously had a company called Date Hotter Girls and reportedly helped develop crypto project Dough Finance. Herro worked on Dough and launched another crypto trading business a decade ago called Pacer Capital, which appears to now be defunct.
AMG has agreed to allocate half of its rights to net protocol revenues to a third LLC called WC Digital Fi, which is an affiliate of Trump’s close friend and political donor, Steve Witkoff, as well as to “certain of his family members.” Witkoff’s son, Zachary, is also listed as one of the co-founders of the project.
Folkman previously said just 20% of WLF’s tokens would be allotted to the founding team, which includes the Trump family. The paper spells out the breakdown of anticipated coin allocation, with 35% of total supply allocated to the token sale, 32.5% to community growth and incentives, 30% to initial support allocation, and 2.5% to team and advisors.
The document specifies in the fine print that these “anticipated token distribution amounts are subject to change.” It’s unclear which categories include Trump and his family.
The paper calls Trump the “chief crypto advocate.” His three sons are all “Web3 ambassadors.”
Crude oil futures rose slightly Thursday after a four-day losing streak as fears of a supply disruption in the Middle East eased and a surplus looms over the market next year.
Although Israel has held back from retaliating against Iran so far, the situation “could change at a moment’s notice,” said Aditya Saraswat, Middle East research director at Rystad Energy.
“In a widespread regional war scenario, Iran and Israel’s conflict could severely impact gas exports and lead to delays in oil development projects,” Saraswat said in a note Thursday.
Here are Thursday’s energy prices:
- West Texas Intermediate November contract: $70.40 per barrel, up 1 cent, or 0.01%. Year to date, U.S. crude oil has fallen down nearly 2%.
- Brent December contract: $74.24 per barrel, up 2 cents, or 0.03%. Year to date, the global benchmark has declined more than 3%.
- RBOB Gasoline November contract: $2.0358 per gallon, down 0.22%. Year to date, gasoline has pulled back more than 3%.
- Natural Gas November contract: $2.374 per thousand cubic feet, up 0.3%. Year to date, gas has declined more than 5%.
Israel has reportedly told the U.S. that it will refrain from hitting Iran’s oil facilities in retaliation for the Islamic Republic’s Oct. 1 ballistic missile attack. The oil market sold off steeply Tuesday on reports that Israel will limit its strike to military targets in Iran.
An attack on oil facilities, however, could disrupt 1.4 million bpd of Iran’s production, Saraswat said. A full-blown war could lead to Iran choking the Strait of Hormuz, jeopardizing 12 million bpd of oil and “driving up prices sharply,” the analyst said.
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