Nancy Pelosi made an AI play pre-DeepSeek drama and yet still came out on top. Despite the bloodbath earlier this week, Pelosi’s trade is up roughly 70%. 

Pelosi’s trades, at the very least, can act as a North Star for what to watch and we’re inclined to think there might be smoother sailing for AI tokens…at least for a couple of weeks.

At the very least, we’re hoping for a calmer weekend as we (finally) end January. We’ll see you bright and early Monday as we kick off a new monthly candle.

⚔️ The trenches

Crypto’s “wartime” shtick isn’t an exaggeration. 

It’s brutal out here even in a bull market — as recently-pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht has apparently just found out.

As there are very real conflicts happening around the world right now, gaming might be the better analogy. 

There are two major types of online multiplayer experience: player vs. player (PvP) — Street Fighter, StarCraft, CounterStrike — and player vs. environment (PvE) — Helldivers 2, Diablo 4, World of WarCraft.

Ulbricht (or at least whoever is in control of his Solana donation wallet) recently suffered a quintessential PvE experience in crypto:

• Someone sent the wallet 50% supply of a pump.fun coin, ROSS, worth $15 million.

• The wallet moved to sell $12 million ROSS on Raydium but mispriced it after creating the wrong type of liquidity pool.

• An MEV bot detected the arbitrage opportunity and intercepted trades, dumping the tokens via the existing liquidity pool for $600,000 and crashing the price by 90%.

• Ulbricht’s donation wallet received nothing in return.

It’s been characterized as a $12 million loss, but that isn’t really true. The tokens were free, so any cash generated from selling would’ve been pure profit. 

The wallet still held 10% of the supply as of Thursday evening, currently worth about over $1 million.

And ok, the MEV bot is controlled by a real person. But considering this particular fumble was mostly due to a misconfigured liquidity pool, I’d say this incident was pure PvE.

Meanwhile, in an adjacent corner of crypto, there’s someone going all out on the PvP experience.

Coinbase director Conor Grogan earlier this week pointed to a single address responsible for launching around 18,000 different tokens via pump.fun.

Every day, the person controlling that address appears to “wake up and create on average ~a dozen of tokens an hour until they go to bed, and then do it again, every day. They've done this for months,” Grogan wrote on X, who commented it seems the launches are manual and not automated.

The implication is that whoever controls the address is dumping the coins on whoever might buy them, rugging each time — total PvP behavior.

So far, the address has executed nearly 6.8 million trades with a 55.6% win rate, so they’re probably profitable. 

It could also be they’re farming a potential future pump.fun airdrop, in which case the profits would be effectively compounded if they’re eligible. 

You might not like it, but this is what peak crypto performance looks like in 2025.

On the other hand, it’s hard to blame Ulbricht, if it really is him controlling the wallet. When was arrested there were just 36 cryptocurrencies and only 16 had a market cap over six figures. 

Something tells me he’ll catch up quickly.

— David

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“I think all of the traditional equities markets are now looking at crypto over the weekends because it’s the only market that’s open,” Empire’s Jason Yanowitz said on the Round Up this week.

And you know what? I agree. 

Crypto markets, especially now that they’re trading more in line with traditional equities data, are a good tell for traders who are trying to gauge market moves before Monday’s opening bell. 

For anyone who hasn’t been active in equities — either watching, reporting or trading — you might not know that, at least in the past, folks would eagerly wait to see how premarkets for major indices (which opened late on Sundays) handled weekend events. Just a few years ago, it was one of the only strong tells in how to prepare yourself for Monday morning outside of staying awake for the European markets.

So the change to crypto is, subtly, a big deal and shows just another layer of adoption. 

Specifically, Santos and Yanowitz were talking about the crypto market’s reaction to DeepSeek, which started well before the open this past Monday. 

Analysts told us earlier this week that much of the crypto-related selling pressure really bubbled down to “too much excitement.” But it’s not hard to make the connection that crypto getting caught up in an AI-related selloff could be bad for a company like Nvidia without putting all of the context clues together. 

Yet I’m curious to get your take: Is this another crypto use case or just a sign of the times? I’m personally torn.

And now you know.

Speaking of adoption, I have an announcement to bring up. ICYMI Thursday, Securitize and Apollo Global announced Apollo Diversified Credit Securitize Fund (ACRED), which essentially gives a “tokenized access point” to Apollo Diversified Credit Fund, as Apollo partner Christine Moy told me. 

“It's a multi-asset approach that leverages Apollo's expertise across corporate direct lending, aspect finance, performing credit, dislocated credit and structure credit, with the ability to scale allocations up and down based on the market environment for the best risk, reward, balance and leveraging,” she explained. 

Basically, it’s opening a door for the more crypto-native institutional base. And they’re doing it with Securitize, who helped bring BUIDL to life alongside BlackRock.

Apollo, which has plenty of experience dipping its toes in crypto, is looking to take advantage of the changing environment to team up with crypto talent. 

For Securitize’s Michael Sonnenshein, it’s showing that the bigger institutions are getting pretty comfortable with RWA tokenization. 

At this point, Sonnenshein said, it’s becoming clear to asset managers that “crypto as an asset class is not going away” and it’s starting to evolve toward previously existing asset classes instead of crypto just hanging out in its own little bubble. 

Moy noted that there’s been “market demand” and “strong interest” in tokenizing private credit, which then democratizes said market. 

“It's a higher yielding complement to the stablecoins, tokenized treasuries markets, but it's also a diversifier for the higher, more volatile crypto-native yield products,” she said. 

I guess the theme today — and perhaps this week — is adoption doesn’t have to be sexy (unless that’s how you view private credit markets. In which case, go off), it has to be useful.

— Katherine

Last week, we asked: “Do you trust that everything will go right with the US crypto stockpile?”

47% of you said, “Too early to say,” while 35% responded with “As long as the numbers go up, I don’t care.” Can’t fault honesty!

This week, we want to know: