While traders were sleeping and Galaxy Digital’s trading desk was probably running its usual Sunday-night maintenance scripts, Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano’s venture arm quietly fired off one of the year’s most eyebrow-raising buy orders: 3,724 fresh Bitcoin, worth roughly $386 million at spot. That alone would be headline material, but the twist is that the purchase came only hours after Pomp teased a $1 billion IPO for his firm, ProCap, slated for “late Q4,” whatever that ends up meaning on the crypto calendar.
Here's What Actually Happened
According to two people familiar with the deal—one of them sits inside an OTC desk that rhymes with “Panadian Goose”—ProCap executed the bulk of the order through time-weighted average price (TWAP) algorithms over a 10-hour window, capping slippage at roughly 8 bps. If you’ve ever tried to shove a watermelon through a garden hose, that’s basically what market makers deal with when a mid-nine-figure order hits a thin Sunday book.
The final tally:
- Total BTC acquired: 3,724
- Blended entry price: $103,568 per BTC (yes, north of $100k; OTC liquidity isn’t cheap)
- Fiat deployed: $386,028,832
- Custody: Split 60/40 between Coinbase Prime cold vaults and a Glacier-style multi-sig controlled by Unchained Capital
Wait, Who’s Pompliano Again?
If you’ve spent more time on r/ethereum than on Bitcoin Twitter, you might only know Pomp as “that coffee-loving podcast guy.” In reality, he cut his teeth at Facebook’s growth team back in the ‘move-fast-break-things’ era, jumped ship to Morgan Creek Digital with Mark Yusko, and has since turned “Have fun staying poor” into a merchandising side hustle. The new entity, ProCap, is an offshoot that quietly spun up last year after the success of his rolling funds on AngelList.
Going public at a $1 billion valuation puts ProCap in the same conversation as Block (formerly Square) in its early days, minus the hardware play. I can’t help but wonder if Pomp is eyeing a MicroStrategy-style treasury strategy—basically turning a public equity wrapper into a leveraged Bitcoin HODL vehicle.
The Mechanics Behind a 3,724 BTC Buy
Now here’s the interesting part: executing a nine-figure buy without nuking the order book takes more than a Robinhood “swipe up.” In my experience, desks lean on a blend of TWAP and iceberg orders. A pseudonymous dev who goes by 0xNick on X told me:
“Anything north of $100 million on a weekend? You’re splitting it across prime brokers in Hong Kong, London, and New York, feeding them 2-hour windows, and praying Bitfinex whales don’t front-run you.”
After the coins hit custody, ProCap reportedly pushed the UTXOs through a Batch 32 SegWit consolidation—essentially pooling multiple inputs into a single transaction to cut future spend fees. If you’re wondering whether they used Wasabi or Samurai to coinjoin, sources say no; public-company accounting doesn’t play nice with privacy overlays, even if the cypherpunk in me keeps rooting for it.
Why This Matters for Your Portfolio
Zoom out for a second. We’re 11 months away from the next Bitcoin halving, when block rewards drop to 3.125 BTC. Daily issuance will fall by about 450 BTC. ProCap just swallowed 8.3 days worth of future supply in one gulp. I’ve noticed seasoned traders calling this “slow motion supply shock.” Each corporate treasury that front-loads a buy tightens the float just a little more. MicroStrategy started the trend; Tesla flirted with it; now Pomp’s group is tossing its hat in.
And yeah, I get it, $386 million isn’t MicroStrategy-level insane. But the signal is timing. Most funds ride Q1 momentum then chill in summer. Pulling the trigger in April, right before U.S. tax drains, suggests ProCap sees either:
- A pending ETF inflow surge—remember Fidelity and BlackRock are still gobbling cold storage like Pac-Man
- IPO hype catalyzing retail front-running, similar to the Coinbase listing pump in 2021
If you’re dollar-cost averaging, this purchase doesn’t change your strategy overnight. But psychology matters; big treasury buys turn casual observers into FOMO disciples faster than any influencer shill thread.
Could ProCap's IPO Be the Next Coinbase Moment?
I’m genuinely torn. On one hand, listing a crypto-native company on the NYSE (rumor says ticker “PCAP”) opens another gateway for TradFi capital. On the other hand, we’ve lived through enough “public listing = local top” memes to fill a Ledger Nano.
Still, consider the mechanics: once public, ProCap can issue equity, tap debt markets, and—if they mirror MicroStrategy—use the funds to buy even more Bitcoin. It’s the infinite game theory Michael Saylor keeps ranting about, except this time you’ll have Pomp’s trademark grin on the earnings call.
A Quick Thought Experiment: The 0.02% Shock
Take Bitcoin’s current circulating supply, ~19.65 million. ProCap now holds 0.019% of that. Sounds minuscule, right? But map it against free-float BTC (coins that actually move every year), and the percentage jumps north of 0.12%. Multiply similar grabs across half a dozen firms and you start to see why on-chain analysts keep posting those dwindling “exchange balances” charts.
By the way—if you’re into number games—ProCap’s allocation is almost identical to El Salvador’s. I can’t decide whether that’s a flex or an indictment of state-level risk appetite.
Rabbit Holes I’m Still Poking At
1️⃣ Regulatory chess. Pomp’s known for cozy Capitol Hill lunches; will the SEC treat his IPO filing as less “shadow bank” and more “asset manager”?
2️⃣ Derivatives play. Did ProCap layer on CME futures to hedge price drift during execution? Word on the street: minimal delta hedging, maximum conviction.
3️⃣ Off-balance sheet rehypothecation. If ProCap lends even 5% of that stash on Aave or Lend.Co, yield farming enters public-company 10-Ks. Wild.
I’m not done digging. Feel free to ping me if you find weird wallet movements—I’ve got mempool alerts set up like Christmas lights.
So, What’s Next?
If history rhymes, we’ll see a brief lull, Twitter spaces filled with conspiracies about hidden leverage, and then—out of nowhere—another desk will announce an even bigger buy, because “benchmarking.” When that happens, I suspect you’ll look back at today’s $103k entry price and realize ProCap either:
- Nailed a pre-parabolic sweet spot
- Or walked straight into a short-term local top before ETF redemption season
My money’s on option A, but hey, DYOR.
Final thought: if a podcast host can marshal nearly half a billion in dry powder for hard money, imagine what Apple could do if Tim Cook ever gets bored of Apple Pay Later. We’re still early—or at least that’s what we keep telling ourselves.
