Market Snap
Market Wrap for the week
There can only be one place to start – seven consecutive trading days of inflows into the spot BTC ETFs, totalling just shy of $3bn, which is nice.
BTC started the week trading just above $80k, posting a weekly high of $87.2k on Wednesday. Currently we see a 4.5% gain for the week, which we happily take. Within the universe of coins that the CC closely monitors there were two outstanding performers – PYTH, an oracle coin, is up 44% and ONDO, a tokenisation platform, is up 31% following its tie-up with BlackRock, a topic we covered yesterday.
Outside of cryptos, the 10-year Treasury is now sitting at its highest yield since 2007 at 5.16%. It is interesting that neither BTC nor gold has reacted badly, both proving resilient in the face of ever-increasing rate expectations, confounding sceptics and critics alike.
My personal view is that this is because the smart money knows that all fiscally incontinent Western governments will have to resort to manipulating the long end of the curve once again as interest costs on the ever-growing debt burden increasingly crowd out other forms of government spending. In the UK we saw a move in that direction when the Bank of England finally agreed to stop selling long-end gilts and thus not crystallising losses that fall on the taxpayer. Meanwhile the US’s determination to propagate USD-denominated stablecoins compliant with the GENIUS Act will not only embed dollar hegemony but will also lead to unprecedented demand for short-dated Treasuries, lowering issuance at the long end, suppressing yields all along the curve.
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The week in review
We see that the implementation and application of the EU’s world-leading crypto regulatory package, MiCA, is an open invitation for TradFi to take up the mantle of accelerating the crypto revolution, an invitation that is being gratefully seized upon.
What I failed to appreciate is that not only is MiCA itself designed to shore up TradFi’s regulatory moat that deters new competition, but that senior bureaucrats such as Convicted Criminal Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, are happy to wade in to exercise power they do not have in order to weaponise that regulatory moat.
Stablecoins dominated elements of this week’s news with a tie-up between Circle Inc. and Binance with the former launching its own Layer-1 (or perhaps Layer-1 and a half) designed to meet the demands of the agentic economy. The US Fed joined in with proposals for implementing the demands of the GENIUS Act on issuers of private stablecoins. Gentle reminder – always use USDC, not USDT, where you can for the benefit of the entire crypto ecosystem.
Finally, tokenisation of RWAs continues apace with new products created in a collaboration between BlackRock and Ondo Finance. This story will run and run.