“Crypto is the future.”

Safe to say Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev is all in, though he thinks the path to unlocking the “crypto revolution” is through tokenization and real-world assets. Either way, Robinhood’s planning to ramp up its crypto offerings. 

Funny how CT became super bearish right as TradFi ramped up its bullishness on crypto. Maybe we can meet in the middle?

Elsewhere:

• BTC caught support at just under $82,500 overnight before bouncing more than 4% to $86,200.

• Almost $2.4 billion in longs have been liquidated on CEXs in the past three days, according to CoinGlass.

• The amount of ETH staked has fallen by nearly 1.13 million ETH ($2.66 billion) since November, or around 3%.

🙏 Sin economies

At this point, it feels like the SEC is checking its list and dismissing investigations into crypto companies daily. 

In some regards, it feels like the industry is finally free but the catch is that there’s yet nothing concrete for founders and projects to fall back on when it comes to rules and regulations.

Though, as Avalon’s Sean Pinnock told me in an X Spaces Wednesday, founders and devs based in the US can still breathe a sigh of relief.

Speaking of that Spaces: Yesterday, The Drop’s Kate Irwin and I hosted our first collaborative chat focused on, well, gaming. If you’re curious about it and weren’t able to join, you can listen to a recap here. 

Anyway, Real Agency HQ’s Jonah Blake had some thoughts not only about where we stand but where we go from here. Unfortunately for those who equated friendlier regulation with their bags being pumped, that might not be the case. Something which shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise given how the market’s been acting lately. 

What Blake means specifically is that having a regulator who’s not willing to file lawsuits left and right isn’t automatically going to mean that everyone jumps right back into some of the big narratives from last cycle, like gaming. 

Abstract’s Phin Totten said that his team noticed a rotation of Solana traders playing Onchain Heroes, an idle RPG, but they didn’t enter past that game. For Totten, that’s a sign that we’re still early and the “time investment to return isn’t there” yet. 

Blake compared crypto to a sin economy, like gambling or porn. Before you balk — as I admittedly did — it’s not necessarily a bad thing given the revenue that those types of economies churn out, it’s more about the mindset of those interacting with said economy, and how devs build.

Now, I want to clarify here that I don’t think all of crypto falls into this category. Especially not these days. 

So let’s center Blake’s point on memecoins, with its gambling mentality, and how that impacts subsectors like gaming. 

“We’ve curated an industry that’s very built around this speed of wealth accrual,” Totten said. “It’s about the path of least resistance to money.” 

This is directly impacting the way that games are being developed right now, given the frustrations around the amount of time it took a lot of Web3 games to launch. For now, it’s likely that we’ll see a lot of those types of games being built around the speed mentality for the sake of optimizing for the audience, Totten continued.

Will this always be the case? The optimist — and avid gamer — in me hopes not. But there’s just no point in trying to trot out a game that might not have an audience… yet. 

And perhaps that’s going to be the key difference this cycle: Folks are building for the audience.

— Katherine

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

DAS NYC Tickets Are Moving Fast — So Should You

The biggest names in crypto, finance, and policy are coming to NYC. VIP passes? Gone. The agenda? Live. With less than 30 days to go, the time to secure your spot is now.

Markets move. The smartest money moves first.

Groups of 4-9 still save 15%.

📅 March 18-20 | NYC

• The SEC and Justin Sun are exploring a potential resolution to the civil fraud case filed by the regulator, which would benefit the public, the SEC said. 

• We’re all in this together: The FBI is asking folks to help block the laundering of Bybit’s stolen ETH by North Korea.

• House Democrats are set to introduce legislation that would prevent political officials from launching memecoins, ABC reported.

💪 Market forces

Whether you’re a believer in a V-shaped recovery from here, or you think we’re headed lower before an even bigger bounce back, you’d be forgiven for yearning for change on the other side.

Well, we’re getting a decent glimpse at how green the grass might be.

In the past five days, about $400 billion has been wiped from crypto’s total market cap, sending it from over $3.3 trillion to $2.9 trillion. That’s officially below the November 2021 peak. 

Sounds exciting! Could crypto have purged itself of all things toxic about this cycle by sending vapid memes, vaporware ChatGPT wrappers and low-float VC coins on their way to zero?

Too early to say. But for all the noise, we can still see hints at what the market expects to pop during the next potential phase of the bull market.

Of the 77 cryptocurrencies in the top-100 by market cap which aren’t stablecoins, liquid staking tokens or otherwise wrapped assets, all but seven coins have lost value since Sunday following the Bitget hack two days earlier.

Those losses range from nearly 20% in the case of TKX, TRUMP and Bitget’s BGB, to barely negative returns for OP and APT.

Among the worst hit are coins tied to protocols that boast some of the highest levels of economic activity in the space right now, including AAVE, LDO, SOL and ETH. Like Keynes said, “markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” 

More telling is the small set of coins to go in the opposite direction: BERA and SKY (formerly MKR) are up 10% and 9.5% apiece while TIA is ahead by 3%. 

Perhaps there’s not much to read into BERA, considering its mainnet launched only three weeks ago. But this could be a sign that corners of the market are looking for a fresh ecosystem narrative. 

As for SKY, it could be benefitting from the increasingly tense air of strict stablecoin regulation in the US — with decentralized offerings set to take up greater mindshare moving forward.

And then there’s the extreme overperformance of IP, which is up 40% over the past five days and by far the strongest top-100 coin. 

IP is the native token for a16z-backed PIP Labs’ Story Protocol, which it positions as a chain for tokenizing intellectual property. Its mainnet went live alongside the token less than two weeks ago and its price has only gone up since. 

In any case, if I had to bet on the next big narratives for the rest of the cycle, mine would be twofold: fundamentals for sure, and really, really good market makers.

— David

On our minds: Gaming