Bitcoin - $81,160 ETH rose to around $23,430 Markets rallying. Month-to-date, BTC is up around 2.6%, following a strong April (+11.87%) that helped lift overall sentiment in the market. The Fear & Greed Index has recovered from a low of 12 last months to around 47 so closer to neutral. Big Headline News? - Iran War Deal Imminent Overall picture market picture though? It's looking like a good start to May with lots of positive news but it feels... temporary. Plus we're hitting the upper trendline of the channel I showcased in the previous market update. It feels like we'll head down from here but if not, what would cause a reversal and a breakout? I'm looking for these 3 things: 1. Iran War Deal Completed 2. Clarity Act Passed 3. Dollar Strength Index (DXY) down. (weaker dollar -> higher BTC price and vice versa) ___________________________________________________________________________ Big Institutional Moves backing the rally: - Goldman Sachs disclosed a nearly $108M position in spot SOL ETFs, and total AUM across Bitwise, Fidelity, and Morgan Stanley for Solana products has surpassed $1 billion. Crypto.com - a16z Crypto raised $2.2B for its fifth fund, down from its record $4.5B fourth fund, promoting CTO Eddy Lazzarin to general partner. Cryptointegrat - Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) reported a $12.54B net loss in Q1 driven by a $14.46B unrealized markdown on its Bitcoin holdings, while holding 818,334 BTC. Cryptointegrat - Coinbase is cutting ~14% of its workforce, citing crypto market volatility and a shift to AI-native operations. Cryptointegrat CLARITY Act Progress: This is the big story right now. Over the weekend, lawmakers struck a compromise on the CLARITY Act, with Circle shares surging nearly 20% on the news. The key update: language was added restricting crypto companies from paying savings account-style yield on passive stablecoin deposits, preserving that function for traditional banks but stablecoin reward programs were preserved under certain conditions. CNBC

You probably didn't hear about this. Most people didn't. DTCC processes roughly $2.4 quadrillion in securities transactions every year. Quadrillion with a Q. They're the plumbing underneath Wall Street. When you buy a share and it actually shows up in your account, that's DTCC making it happen. They just announced a few industry bombshells: - July 2026: First live trades of tokenized securities go into production - October 2026: Full commercial launch - Assets covered: Russell 1000 stocks, major ETFs, U.S. Treasury bonds - SEC backing: 3-year no-action letter, granted December 2025 - The big dogs helped build it: BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Coinbase, and 50+ other firms Ir's real calendar timelines with Real engineering resources. So think about what just happened. The single most entrenched institution in traditional finance looked at blockchain technology and committed to rebuilding on top of it. With a budget. With the SEC's written blessing. With every major bank in the room. And once you're building on blockchain, one question always comes up eventually: which one is the most secure, most decentralized, most battle-tested? That question has had the same answer for 17 years. "Blockchain, not Bitcoin" was the safe line for a long time. A way to sound informed while ignoring the asset that proved the technology works. That's getting harder to say with a straight face when the company that clears every trade on Wall Street is building on the same foundation. What do you know about different blockchains? What makes the blockchain a game changer in your opinion? We wanna hear your thoughts...

Bitcoin - $76,500 Ethereum - $2,289 Big headline news? - Jerome Powell's final press conference as Fed Chair. Rates held - no change! Yup, we called the chop. Expect to go slightly lower over the summer. Now let me tell you why the "bad news" is actually the setup for this summer. ________________________________________________________________________ 💠#1 - Powell's last words. Today was Jerome Powell's final press conference as Fed Chair. Rates held. No cuts. The vote wasn't even close to unanimous, it was 8-4, with 4 dissenters. Which to me is just additional writing on the wall that an interest rate cut is more likely to happen than not. Powell seemed "hawkish" which is a fancy way of saying, he's willing to be aggressive and accept financial/economic pain to bring inflation down. He kept highlighting the sustained tariff inflation and Iran War oil price shock. Basically, without saying it.. he signaled that the rates are going to stay higher for longer and won't change until the Iran War is basically over AND oil prices stabilize. ________________________________________________________________________ 💠#2 - The consumer is not fine + Iran War Like we said last week...jobless claims are still holding around 214,000 .... technically "stable," according to the headlines but people are hurting. Credit Card Debt is exploding almost at 1.3 trillion and just from personal experience I'm hearing close friends talk about how financially tough its been. Then add on the fact the Iran war isn't resolved, instead it's ramping up again. Trump rejected the Iran proposal and is looking to extend the blockade. Oil will stay above $100 for the summer keeping inflation sticky, which gives the Fed cover to hold rates unchanged, which keeps the squeeze on. We've known this. This is what leads to "the chop" where crypto ranges, doesn't go all the way down.. or all the way up, like a wave BUT that wave is telling. _______________________________________________________________________

There's a CEO who has spent $61 billion buying a single asset. The same asset...over and over. For 5 straight years. His name is Michael Saylor. He runs a publicly traded company called Strategy (used to be called MicroStrategy). On paper, it's a tech firm. In practice, the company does one thing now: buy Bitcoin and hold it. That's basically the entire business model. If you follow crypto at all, you've probably seen the headlines. "Saylor buys more Bitcoin." Again. And again. To a lot of people, he looks like a billionaire with a gambling habit and a podcast mic. Fair reaction. Whether you've heard of him or not, what his company did this week is worth understanding. Between April 13 and April 19, Strategy purchased 34,164 Bitcoin. One week. $2.54 billion. Third-largest single buy in the company's history. And he's already signaling another one is coming. Here's why the coin count matters more than the dollar amount...Let's walk through the math, because the numbers tell a different story than the headlines: - There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. That's a hard cap coded into the protocol. Nobody votes to change it. - Over 20 million have already been mined. Less than 1 million are left, and the rate of new coins slows every 4 years. - An estimated 2.3 to 4 million are permanently gone. Lost keys, dead wallets, hard drives sitting in landfills in Wales. - That leaves roughly 16 to 17.7 million in active circulation. Strategy now holds 815,061 Bitcoin. Nearly 4% of every Bitcoin that will ever exist, bought over 5 years for about $61.56 billion ($75,527 average per coin). And they just pulled 34,000 more off the market in a single week. What's crazy is they're now not the only ones doing this. - BlackRock's Bitcoin fund (IBIT) took in $906 million of new investor money last week alone (week of April 17) - Morgan Stanley launched their own spot Bitcoin trust (MSBT) on April 8, and it's already drawing capital - Fidelity runs its own spot Bitcoin ETF, steadily absorbing supply - Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company holds over $1 billion in BlackRock's IBIT shares - Norway's Government Pension Fund has indirect Bitcoin exposure equivalent to roughly 9,573 BTC through equity holdings in companies like Strategy and Coinbase - Michigan and Wisconsin state pension systems have allocated to Bitcoin ETFs directly

Everyone's watching the Fed this week. Rate decision drops tomorrow. Powell's last meeting as Chair. Does he go mamba out and drop some sass with the mic? Does he hang around longer with the building investigation. The big question: will they cut rates? They won't. Rates are staying at 3.5% to 3.75%. But the thing that actually matters already happened 27ish days ago. On April 1st, a rule called the "enhanced Supplementary Leverage Ratio" (eSLR) officially took effect. It kinda sounds like a typo on a government form, but it really might be one of the most quietly impactful financial shifts of the year. Here's what it does in plain English: The 8 biggest US banks are required to hold a capital cushion against everything on their balance sheet. Under the old rule, US Treasury bonds (the safest, most boring IOUs on the planet) counted the same as speculative real estate loans. So banks limited how many Treasuries they held, because each one ate into their cushion. The new rule shrinks that cushion. Banks now need less capital to hold government debt. Follow the chain: - The US government needs to refinance roughly $9 trillion in debt this year - Someone has to buy those bonds - The government just made it cheaper for the biggest banks to be that buyer - More Treasury purchases = more dollars flowing through the system - More dollars flowing = liquidity increasing None of this required a rate cut. Everyone's staring at the interest rate like it's the only dial on the dashboard. The eSLR change quietly turned a different one. Liquidity is entering through the bond market plumbing, not through the rate door. We've seen this move before. In March 2020, the Fed exempted Treasuries from the SLR entirely. Banks loaded up. Markets stabilized. Everyone exhaled. Then inflation hit 9.1%. The 2026 version is quieter. They didn't exempt Treasuries outright. They shrank the buffer, loosened the math. It's all the same direction with just, shall we say, a "softer touch."