When Gensler left the SEC in January 2025, Bitcoin was at 109k. Today Bitcoin is at 75k.
One major reason the crypto markets have suffered is because market participants started to lose faith in the industry itself.
After Gensler left, it essentially just opened the floodgates to the grifting age of crypto, where influencers and politicians were launching memecoins and rug-pulling their followers each and every day, without fear of any repercussions. This led to a massive misallocation of capital into useless assets that drained liquidity from the industry.
While people celebrated Gensler leaving, it actually marked a turning point in the industry, with Bitcoin only marginally going higher before entering a bear market.
Now that people celebrate Powell's removal as chair of the Federal Reserve, it makes me think history will repeat itself once again.
People celebrate it in the short-term, but as we look back on this era in a few years, I imagine it will mark a major turning point in credibility at the Fed. If the Fed just becomes another cabinet of the executive branch, it may lead to a lack of trust in the institution itself.
Perhaps many will look back in a few years and realize that markets were better off with Powell than without him.
All the Trump admin had to do was use a few million (from the billions they’ve extracted) to hire a market maker to keep $TRUMP coin alive.
Instead they chose to rug pull and let it slowly flounder to zero 🤦♂️
Nobody wants to say this, so I will.
Trump's memecoin is the currently the biggest obstacle to crypto regulation right now.
The CLARITY Act is stalling because of it. Democrats are using his gala dinners and billions of evaporated retail wealth as ammunition to demand ethics clauses that could delay or kill the bill entirely.
The "pro crypto president" is actively sabotaging the legislation this industry needs most, just to further fill his own bags.
And the reason nobody in crypto calls this out?
Because half the industry's most important people were at that dinner on Saturday. Smiling, clapping and kissing the ring of the man whose memecoin is single-handedly delaying the regulation they claim to be fighting for.
And as long as nobody speaks up, nothing will change.
taking a serious step back from crypto is realising just how all-consuming an obsession it has become over the last 4-5 years.
working out, hiking, gardening, reading, picking up new skills, watching films i've not got round to seeing, picking up old hobbies, reconnecting with people - all of this has been good for me - but i have realised that doing this so intensively for so long has done something profound to my neurochemistry.
the absolutely insane cognitive demands of trading all day every day, prioritising everything about learning how to get better onchain, markets, wallets, TA, FA, liquidity, studying trends, researching narratives, endless exhaustive discussion of the above with my trading circles etc. etc. - it feels like i've blasted my brain with so much dopamine and cortisol from the myriad highs and lows over this market cycle, that it has become quite hard to actually experience anything 'normal' with a true sense of presence and engagement like i used to. you become so used to constantly running numbers over in your head, calculating projections, assessing mistakes and trying to plan out a refined approach to do it better next time, even when you're not sat in front of a chart or a terminal - that when you aren't looking at anything at all, you start to remember what it's like to do anything else with full, unmitigated attention.
i generally feel quite blank, albeit neutral in my engagement with my day-to-day life as i further detach myself from this space, and ramping up the intensity of what i'm doing doesn't seem to have much proportionate effect. the truth is that not many other things come close (certainly in my life) to that cognitive demand in terms of how obsessive and all-consuming it eventually became for me. i'm sure many of you can relate to this, but how many of you truly 'switch off' from crypto in any absolute way for a longer period of time? i have literally zero idea what price bitcoin is right now, what value my portfolio is - and the truth is, it feels really good to not know any of this, despite the underlying knowledge that my networth is cooked, bull run failed once again etc.
i will have to return to trading at some point as i can't live off the money i have forever, and i still have some big financial goals that i am not willing to give up on yet. but this time away has really highlighted for me just how much it took out of me, or rather, how much it fundamentally changed me as a person, to put myself in a position to make life-changing money.
Let me explain what just happened 👇
5 minutes before the President announced a halt to attacks on Iran… someone placed a $1.5 BILLION bet on stocks going up and dumped $192 million in oil.
5 minutes…
These trades were 4 to 6 times larger than anything else in the entire market. Whoever did this wasn’t guessing. You don’t risk $1.5 billion on a hunch.
There was zero public indication this announcement was coming. No leaks. No press. Nothing. The only people who knew were in the room when the decision was made.
Someone in that room picked up a phone.
And within minutes they made more money than most Americans will earn in a thousand lifetimes. In a single trade. On a war that cost you $4+ a gallon gas and $16 billion in tax dollars.
American citizens funded this war. Politicians are profiting from it.
This is not the first time. Every major announcement from this administration has had massive suspicious trades right before it dropped. Tariff reversals. Policy shifts. War decisions.
This is the most blatant insider trading operation in the history of American politics. It’s not even close. And it’s happening over and over in broad daylight.
You would go to federal prison for trading on a tip from your cousin. These people are front running war decisions with billion dollar bets and nobody will ever ask a single question.
Nobody will be investigated. Nobody will be charged. By tomorrow this will be buried under the next satisfying headline. Just like last time. And the time before that.
The game is rigged. And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore…
My first full AI music video is out now 🎥
This was actually very fun to make😃
I used a mix of Veo 3.1, Seedance, Kling 3.0 and Grok for the video clips. Kling was used for the lip sync.
I wrote the music and mix/mastered the song myself, the vocals were created with Suno.
The single and music video for “Run Away” is now streaming on all major streaming services 🎶
The link to the full music video is in our bio 🎥 🍿
The music video was made entirely with AI tools. The singer and main characters are AI generated, and the guitarist is an AI generated version of @tydigital13, who is the creator of this project.
#veo3 #klingai #seedance2 #GrokVideo
100% agree
Especially if AI job loss plays out like everyone is saying it will. Real estate (and probably stocks) will enter a deflationary downtrend that might last decades.
I think exact timing will vary by country, but it increasingly feels like real estate will soon enter terminal decline.
Main drivers: preference for liquid & portable assets, population decline, affordability crisis.
Imagine how much money these government officials have made from posting BS tweets to enrich themselves these last few years.
And we all just continue to let it happen day in and day out.
We’re cooked 🤦♂️
The past 30 minutes have been wild.
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted that a US Ship had officially gone through the Strait of Hormuz.
Markets loved it, oil tanked, the idea that war was coming to an end started to have some legitimacy.
Then, he deleted the tweet, which got markets to think things aren't actually going well.
Now, Karoline Levitt confirms that a US Ship has NOT gone through the Strait and oil is now pumping again: