Crypto + Macro Stuff I'm Looking At Today
...
- Fed leaves rates unchanged (thoughts on this below), also gets rid of 'forward guidance'
- $QQQ at $722
- Crypto at $2.298T market cap
- SpaceX $SPCX now at $2.55T market cap (thus bigger than all of crypto combined) and the 8th largest asset worldwide
- $ETH at $209B market cap is now the 107th largest asset worldwide
- Gold down to $4,290
- Oil down to $76.48 (still haven't closed short, but getting closer)
- Coinbase announced a bunch of stuff yesterday, including a massive tokenized stocks initiative + AI-powered app/advisor thing + more
- Saylor's $STRC at its lowest level yet YTD
- $HYPE still killing it and outperforming pretty much everything else
- Seeing interesting debate on Aave vs Morpho on the TL, and basically bullish sentiments re: Aave declining, for better or worse
- Perps protocol Satori Finance has shut down
- Plasma One from $XPL launching next week, seeing lots of attention on this on the TL
- MegaETH Terminal rewards will apparently be distributed next week
- $AERO has been surging and catalyzing lots of excitement
- Illinois governor JB Pritzker launches punitive/aggressive new anti-crypro law charging a tax on all transactions including wallet transfers, could honestly see this happening nationally if the wrong person is elected president in 2028
- World cup driving big attention on prediction markets such as Polymarket, Kalshi, predictdotfun, InsightXHQ, trylimitless, opinionlabsxyz, etc
- Gacha/TCG boom continues
- Fastest-growing chains on the weekly by TVL (with at least $10M TVL as per DefiLlama) are Stable, X Layer, Tempo, Bittensor, and World Chain
Conclusion
Per the above, the major story of the day is the Fed leaving rates unchanged...
As, once again, this was Warsh's first FOMC Meeting as incoming Fed chair...
So...
If Trump was emphatic about wanting rates lower, and in Warsh's first meeting the Fed did not lower them... what does that mean?
To my mind there are three possibilities that popped up at first:
1) Trump is just pathologically incapable of appointing people who will do what he wants... this was arguably the biggest problem in his first admin (along with outsourcing all decision-making to Kushner)... and it's very possible he just did the same exact thing by appointing Warsh, and Warsh will basically just become a new Jerome Powell who Trump constantly complains about...
2) Warsh pushed to cut but couldn't overcome opposition from the other board members or etc...
3) The plan is still to cut rates, but they are going to wait a bit, because they know the Iran business is coming to an end and inflation data will start coming down, meaning they'll have more room to cut as a result...
Now...
After typing out the above...
I just watched the entire press conference while working out...
And after watching it I think the answer is a little bit of all three possibilities...
I did not take Warsh's tone as particularly hawkish...
It seemed to me he's going to basically try to be a good Fed chair, make some improvements, try to keep Trump reasonably happy, but not do anything too crazy either...
So yeah, we shall see...
Still would not be surprised if we get some cuts over the rest of this year, but I think optics will be better for that once its no longer his first meeting, and once the Iran situation has ended and inflation is visibly coming down...
But yeah...
Never a dull day in crypto, that is for sure lads!
And no matter what happens we shall keep taking massive daily action, and eventually get our victory over global boomerdom, and begin putting all these myriad evils to right 🫡
In my honest opinion the shift from a fiat based system to a Bitcoin standard involves
-the emergence of fiat denominated credit secured against bitcoin
-also giving yield to the fiat depositors to attract more people to bitcoin economy
This represents a natural step in hyperbitcoinization
Platforms like Maple are helping Satoshi's big vision to come to reality
i am bullish in $BTC, bullish in $SYRUP as well
Tokenization is bringing more capital onchain.
The yield layer underneath has to be real.
Incentive yield burns.
Treasury yield caps.
Credit yield compounds.
Maple’s dollar yield assets are built for it.
Demand is so strong again that pool utilization of syrupUSDT and syrupUSDC are back to ATH
(pool utilization means the percentage of a lending pool's capital that is currently deployed in active loans rather than sitting idle)
wen $SYRUP ATH again though?
Maple maxxing