_{Brought to you by:}

Bitwise’s Matt Hougan thinks the market’s being a little dramatic in its response to President Donald Trump’s announcement that XRP, SOL and ADA could join bitcoin and ETH in the strategic reserve.

CT overthinking something? No, doesn’t sound like the crypto community at all.

We’re awaiting some clarity on the aforementioned strategic reserve, though Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reportedly teased that we’ll get details Friday. 

Patience is a virtue, I guess.

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s back over $90,000 to start the morning, an 8% increase. ETH’s up 5% to $2,200. 

• Ordinal transactions were up for the fourth month in a row in February, increasing roughly 50% month over month to 4.1 million, according to Blockworks Research.

• Total liquidations sit at $538 million in the past 24 hours, per data from Coinglass.

🪙 Token pickers market

Unlike what I’m seeing on CT, I don’t need to convince any of y’all that crypto looks good in the long term. 

You all know this because, dang, we’ve never been in such a bullish position (stop looking at current price action, and close the tab please).

Ryan Connor of Blockworks Research says we’re seeing fundamentals play a role in crypto. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because he said a similar thing literally a month ago. 

There are a few examples of this — get ready for some alpha — but my big takeaway is that we’re starting to see some parts of crypto act like stocks. And it’s really kicking off, more so than what we discussed last month.

Geodnet is one such example, Connor said. His team at Blockworks Research has been “pounding the table” on it since November because “they're building out an RTK network globally. It's seeing real revenue. It's seeing ARR revenue. That revenue is steadily climbing up … it is completely untethered from this self-reflective crypto capital market,” he explained. 

Most importantly: It hasn’t moved on crypto volatility in the past few months. 

For Connor, that’s perhaps the most important snippet because it shows that folks aren’t taking profit just because of the current market conditions and reaffirms the “fundamental story.”

Grass is another such example. It’s a “business that's not correlated to crypto capital markets, and that thing's up 20-40% since February 16, when this drawdown in crypto markets really started accelerating. So again, just another example of a pocket of the market that's generating real income, uncorrelated to” the volatility we’re seeing across crypto.

If you’re looking for more tokens that buck the trend, then it’s all about figuring out what makes the token tick, Connor said. That’s how he and his team think about it. A lending protocol, for example, would be lending out to something like a crypto-native fund. The fund’s investments go up, it’s good for the protocol. A more negative environment makes that situation slightly trickier. 

The thing is that crypto’s not just about the vibes anymore. 

That’s not going to stop me from monitoring them, because I think — like retail investors in the stock market — it helps establish a sense of where we are and what people are interested in. But the reality is the market itself won’t keep reacting to vibes unless we stay focused on things like memecoins (which I’m clearly skeptical about). 

“We have a market that is maturing. And while it might have paid to be a vibes-based trader in the past, it helps to have different skills. Now this is a market [focused on revenues and business strategy] and less so about marketing and what people are thinking,” which means it might be time to stop doomscrolling CT. 

In this day and age, it’s all about being savvy.

P.S. Help us build a better Empire and complete our short audience survey. Thank you!

Brought to you by:

ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization. Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance. With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack — an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.

Learn more at ZKsync.io/empire.

• Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian threw his hat in the ring as a potential TikTok buyer, but here’s the catch: He wants to bring it onchain. 

• Blockstream has reportedly raised billions (with a B) for new funds, including two that focus on lending, per Bloomberg.

• Just keep buying: El Salvador president Nayib Bukele bought more bitcoin as his country signed on for an Extended Fund Facility with the International Monetary Fund.

🎮 Ready, set, play

If we see a big resurgence in Web3 gaming, it’s probably going to look a lot different. And perhaps that’s for the best. 

The Drop’s Kate Irwin told me that she’s seen a shift away from more traditional video games that have a “hidden” crypto element that’s optional, and more of an acceptance that the primary audience for Web3 games are, well, degens.

“Instead of trying to convert the Fortnite gamers of the world, they're now trying to convert the non-gamers who are just crypto traders, and convince them to play a game that is basically just trading with a with a gaming layer on top that's kind of a thin veneer in a lot of these titles,” Irwin explained.

Traditional gamers, she added, don’t like crypto. They’re not buying into the games with an NFT element or anything like that. So why keep trying to cater to an audience that isn’t interested?

It explains why, in The Drop’s first official newsletter, Irwin highlighted one such project that’s making the switch: THNDR. It’s swapping over to more of a casino-style game rather than focusing on play-to-earn projects. 

The overall shift isn’t surprising, though, because the industry may have “overestimated” its potential and games like Off the Grid won’t be enough to bring in an audience still cautious about crypto. After all, it’s only been a few years since FTX’s collapse and while we — the folks who either stayed or joined post-FTX — have moved on, it’s understandable that non-crypto folks just don’t get it yet. 

For me, I’ll be watching carefully to gauge when we start seeing more of an uptick in venture capital funding. More VC activity is one of the tells I use when looking at what parts of crypto are picking up interest.

Brought to you by:

ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization. Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance. With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack — an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.

Learn more at ZKsync.io/empire.

On our minds: Altcoins