It’s day 10 of President Trump, season two.

Perhaps a US strategic bitcoin reserve isn’t coming any time soon. It could be that a state sets one up first. Or an EU country like the Czech Republic.

So, whatever the opposite of doomscrolling might be, we’re all doing it right now — refreshing headlines for hints of new catalysts. Sounds like bull market behavior to us.

Meanwhile:

• BTC has retaken $105,000 and is now ahead over the past week and month. Current price: $105,300, about 3% below its all-time high.

• TRUMP continues to consolidate at a $5.4 billion market cap, down 23% in the past week.

• Ethereum is now under 9,000 ETH away from returning to pre-Merge supply levels. At current usage rates, that could be in four days.

💪 Tech maximalism

Can you still be in crypto “for the tech?”

The idealist in me would like to say yes — but it’s an increasingly tricky question to answer.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain, in the most general sense, are money technologies. That’s quite different from something like media software, where being in it “for the tech” can be more easily expressed by keeping the software free to use.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the creator of VLC media player, has over the years refused tens of millions of dollars from advertisers in order to do exactly that. 

In crypto, it’s not so clear. If you’re in crypto for the “tech,” you’re also in it for the “money.”

Take Bitcoin. Those who’ve built out the protocol have helped provide uncensorable technology to send and receive money peer-to-peer. 

And it would be impossible to send “money” peer-to-peer if bitcoin was worth zero in fiat terms. The money is the technology and vice versa. 

Ethereum is slightly different. Its smart contracts can support non-financial use cases, so someone developing on Ethereum might be building software as a public good — like VLC media player — with no intention to make money from it.

That culture is fast becoming untenable with modern crypto markets. Vitalik, for instance, has faced renewed pressure to morph into a “wartime CEO” whose primary purpose is to maximize tokenholder value (i.e. pump the price of ETH). 

To some, Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation have focused too much on “the tech.” Prioritizing decentralization and a commitment to onchain public goods — nifty use cases with no obvious path to value accrual at the base asset, such as Fileverse, Ethereum’s answer to WeTransfer, which doesn’t have its own native token.

Maximizing value for Ethereum tokenholders would otherwise look more like funneling all energies towards apps that have a better shot at boosting the price of ETH, which has lately lagged rival SOL.

A difficult task in the Ethereum world. The most profitable apps in the current meta (launchpads, DEXs and prediction markets) have mostly been pushed onto layer-2s like Base and Polygon, a sidechain — too far away to directly impact ETH.

Still, Ethereum has clearly made Vitalik wealthy, perhaps similarly so to Linux founder Linus Torvalds, another superstar dev with legitimate cred when it comes to “being in it for the tech.”

It’s this divide that’s fast becoming a chasm. A Richard Stallman-esque stubbornness for FOSS sensibilities is a tough sell to a crypto market trained to hunt for the next 1000x, especially coming from those who have already “made it,” so to speak.

There’s no easy fix. The reality is that focusing on tech — functional use cases over money-making ideas — may simply come at a cost of less market attention. 

— David

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• Trump Media is potentially eyeing investments in crypto as well as ETFs and separately managed accounts.

• The new Pudgy Penguins L2, Abstract, is struggling to find footing with new users and hasn’t attracted that much liquidity despite its recent launch.

• Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick can get behind stablecoin audits, he said, as he defended Tether in a Senate hearing.

🎟️ Enter if you dare

We’ve been talking a lot about institutions and their interest in crypto now that the environment is more crypto-friendly.

Or, perhaps we should say more crypto-tolerant based on Fed chair Jerome Powell's tone shift. He acknowledged yesterday that banks can serve crypto customers so long as risks are managed.

Anyway, there’s another angle I wanted to dig into after Powell’s press conference and Trump Media’s announcement that it’ll potentially put money to work in crypto.

Maple CEO Sid Powell told me that one potential area for institutional entry is lending. He says he’s receiving a lot of calls from TradFi firms exploring the possibility. 

“I think the reason lending and borrowing works for them is that private credit is one of the fastest growing sectors in TradFi. It's worth over one and a half trillion dollars and … they understand loans and borrowing as products, so it's less of a leap” for them to enter crypto, Powell explained.

It’s likely we see more activity in the bitcoin margin loan space given the contraction that happened after so many lenders failed, and the familiarity that TradFi firms have with the space. 

The market is “very liquid” and therefore “very manageable from a risk perspective.”

“We've also spoken with a couple of alternative credit shops … bigger names from traditional finance, who've also expressed interest in the sector,” Powell continued.

“I think that'll be one of the first places they start for those reasons: bitcoin is a very large asset that you can use as collateral. It's very liquid, and it's very similar to traditional equities margin lending.”

Just like the TruthFi announcement yesterday, interest is great. 

But we need to see money at work before we get really bullish.

— Katherine

On our mind:  “Excuse me ma'am, do you have a minute to get onchain?”