We’re entering the part of the cycle where it’s really hard to keep up.

Advice would differ depending on how you’re interacting with crypto right now. To holders, one might say don’t over trade. 

To others, it might be: Don’t get too attached to any one trend. When it’s all really cool — stay cooler.

Otherwise:

• BTC is on its way to retesting $101,000 support for the third time since Trump retook office on Monday.

• $271 million net has flowed into Solana bridges over the past week while $402 million net has flowed out of Avalanche, per DeFiLlama.

• Hyperliquid’s TVL has now almost halved since its December peak, falling to $1.85 billion from as much as $3.44 billion.

💰 Show me the yield

Looking for a new narrative? Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, has one for ya: yield-bearing stablecoins. 

Once these stablecoins are better understood, they’re set for takeoff, Boiron said. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up driving “a decent amount of activity in 2025.”

So far, stablecoins (not just yield-bearing ones) are up to a $207 billion market cap, per rwa.xyz data.

It’s not just the yield that’ll draw stablecoin activity, it’s also the regulatory clarity that we’re seeing over in Europe courtesy of MiCA. It’s even looking more and more likely that the US is on the regulatory path as well.

For companies — like fintechs — watching the stablecoin market from the sidelines, it’s hard to not feel the FOMO when looking at Tether’s attestations. And that’s clear from Boiron’s conversations with non-crypto native folks. 

This, shall we call them, new set of players are telling Boiron, “hey, we want our own stablecoin, because we can see how much money we can make off of it, and we've got a boatload of users, it's really easy to push them into that stablecoin and get a lot of volume, and obviously revenue from that as well.” 

“The second part of it is just having better rails for their users, knowing that there's a set of users who are [going to want to] send payments, especially remittances, as of right now, and they actually want to make that available rather than incurring” fees, he continued.

I mean, let’s take a look at Tether’s third-quarter attestation from last year. The firm reported a whopping $2.5 billion net profit in that quarter alone, even if it does bundle unrealized gains on bitcoin with other revenue in its disclosures.

“Everybody sees how profitable Tether is, and they're like, ‘Okay, I can do that with less risk now,’ especially fintechs, right?” He said. Boiron believes we’ll see new entrants that are looking to enter the space because there may be the opportunity to improve the user experience through yield-bearing stablecoins.

This doesn’t mean we’re going to see companies simply launch their own stablecoins. They’ll also adopt other stablecoins as well, Boiron added. 

“They understand that there's a significant distribution of USDC, and a lot of people hold it. They'll, for example, want to make that still available through their application, while also launching their own stablecoin,” he noted.

More than that, Boiron thinks that Polygon Lab's ability to scale and push “massive” amounts of stablecoin volumes onchain means that now is the time for stablecoins to really shine. 

I told Boiron that I thought 2024 was the year of the stablecoin, but I’m beginning to think this is just the start. 

— Katherine

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📅 March 18-20 | NYC

• Ledger co-founder David Balland was reportedly freed from kidnappers yesterday following a rescue operation in Vierzon, France.

• Bitwise has filed to register a potential dogecoin ETF in Delaware, days after Osprey and Rex Shares led for their own DOGE fund.

• Two out of the five South Korean crypto exchanges have now listed TRUMP.

👁️ Eye of the beholder

North Korean hackers. Accidentally throwing out your seed phrase. The IRS, DOJ and SEC. Being forced to interact with customer service departments at exchanges.

As far as scary monsters in crypto go, those would be far up the list. Still, none scarier than the notion that the bull market has peaked without securing generational wealth.

All that has everyone searching for top signals. Hints that the fun is over for another four years.

Trump’s stupidly successful memecoin launch is a decent candidate. Especially so paired with bitcoin’s new all-time high around his inauguration. Was that the top?

It would be easy to agree if crypto was like it was in 2021. Back then, in the midst of the monster bull run, there were really only two memecoins — dogecoin and shiba inu — and both hit enormous peaks along with bitcoin.

Except, DOGE and SHIB didn’t peak at the same time. Looking back, the rotation between them is totally obvious.

DOGE, in blue, exploded from about $1 billion market cap to over $80 billion between January and May 2021, alongside bitcoin’s own rally from $20,000 to over $64,000.

It then drained as bitcoin corrected but never really came back at size. SHIB (in purple) shined instead, rallying from $3 billion market cap to almost $40 billion between September and the end of October — matching bitcoin’s rally almost exactly.

So, in retrospect, the Great Dog Coin Rotation was probably the most obvious top signal for the last cycle.

This time around, it’s much harder to tell.

The most simple read is that memecoins in 2021 topped out alongside bitcoin. So maybe a major rally in memecoins might mark the end in 2025. 

Except, there are just so many new launches — FARTCOIN, GOAT, AI16Z, PENGU, SPX and now TRUMP — making it difficult to spot an actual top for memecoins overall. 

One peak and correction feeds into another and into another. The DOGE-SHIB rotation on steroids. 

To bears, that might sound like a risky game of musical chairs. But to the bulls, it probably sounds just right.

— David

On our minds: The relevance of stablecoins