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The old meme coins that had been silent for half a year suddenly revived collectively.
After Bitcoin surged past 70,000 this round, the Solana chain also started heating up. Yesterday afternoon, SOL reached $87, and within a day, a batch of old meme coins that were popular last year collectively bounced back, leaving many people stunned. The last time we saw them move together was at the end of last year's altcoin season.
BOME rose 46%, with its price returning to around $0.0011. USELESS went up 25%, PNUT increased by 20%, and TROLL and TRUMP both rose over 19%. Even old faces like MOODENG and WIF moved, with gains ranging from 10% to 20%. Calling them old faces is no exaggeration; most of these coins had dropped to just a fraction in the first half of the year. People chatting about memes in groups had long forgotten them, and even market apps barely pushed their updates.
Interestingly, the ones moving the most aren't new projects. BOME was among the earliest batch of meme coins issued on Solana, PNUT was hyped last year around Trump's election victory, and TRUMP needs no introduction. These coins carry memories; when the market warms up, funds rush first to these old tokens with stories, while new coins are less eye-catching. It's much easier to remember names than contract addresses, which is a natural advantage for old coins. Although their communities have quieted down, the numbers remain, and a single call can bring them back together.
Anyone who has watched the market for a while understands one truth: meme coins have little practical use but are extremely volatile. When the market improves slightly, funds prefer to gamble on high-beta assets, and old memes just happen to fit that role. They don't need new narratives; their names alone can bring people back, something new projects find hard to replicate. When prices rise, everyone talks about nostalgia; when they fall, no one recognizes them.
But thinking about it from another angle, it's quite painful. Those who cut losses and left at the bottom probably feel uneasy watching the charts now. People who cursed meme coins as trash half a year ago are now asking in groups if they can still get in—the rhythm has completely reversed. The worst feeling isn't missing out on profits but seeing the coin take off right after you sell. The market specializes in humbling all kinds of arrogance, especially those who leave just before a rise.
Whether this wave truly means people are coming back or is just an emotional pulse, no one can say for sure. The revival of old memes never means the market is stable; they rise sharply but also fall without warning. If you still hold last year's batch of meme coins, is this a break-even moment or have you already sold? If you've already cleared out, does this rebound concern you at all? Funds are always the most short-sighted, going wherever the action is.Gold quietly broke through $4500, most people haven't noticed yet
This afternoon, gold once stood above $4500 per ounce during intraday trading, with a single-day increase of over 3%, pushing the historical record even higher. Most people’s attention is still glued to the epic short squeeze in Bitcoin last night, leaving no time to watch the other side where the safe-haven asset has silently hit an all-time high. The last time the market quietly broke a record like this was several years ago. Compared to Bitcoin’s volatile swings of thousands of points, gold’s move has been steady and strong, more like someone is positioning in advance rather than chasing the rally.
On Bitget, the gold contract XAUT/USDT saw a trading volume just over $21.18 million in the past 24 hours, a 34% increase compared to before. This growth rate is not small, indicating real money is moving into gold. Usually, at times like this, either institutions are hedging some unseen risks in advance, or people’s patience with the US dollar’s credit is gradually wearing thin. The busier the market looks, the easier it is to overlook what’s happening in the corners.
Interestingly, there is a contrast. Last night, the crypto market just experienced its largest short squeeze day in nearly two years, with liquidations hitting $3 billion across the network, shorts getting wiped out brutally. Everyone was celebrating Bitcoin’s rebound and ETH returning to 2300, with sentiment jumping straight from fear to greed. Yet, during the same period, gold quietly broke a key level, showing that capital choices are actually more divided than the market seems.
Looking back at this week, the dollar weakened, US long-term bond repos doubled, and geopolitical tensions continued, so the logic for safe havens has always been there. For a non-interest-bearing hard asset like gold to hit an all-time high, it’s often not because people expect it to generate yield, but because other options in hand are unsettling. Bitcoin is often called digital gold, but when capital seeks a safe harbor, the old-school gold is still chosen first.
Central banks around the world have been quietly increasing their gold holdings for years, with the story of de-dollarization told for a long time. Central bank gold purchases have been the most stable buying force for gold prices for several years, a force unrelated to retail sentiment. When gold and crypto both rise sharply in the same week, it superficially looks like risk appetite has returned, but behind the scenes, two groups with completely different mindsets are buying. One bets on the continuation of the rebound, the other bets on systemic problems. Crypto’s rise is driven by sentiment and leverage, while gold’s rise is driven by base holdings and faith.
We crypto traders tend to focus only on our own markets. But when an unrelated market quietly hits a historic high, the force behind it might be more worth pondering than just a rally. How long this simultaneous rise in gold and crypto can last, or whether one is quietly overextending, what do you think?The first hires for the so-called self-custody wallet were anti-money laundering officers.
At 8 a.m. this morning, Mike Cagney, co-founder and executive chairman of Figure, released something new called The Wallet Co. It's a mobile wallet that claims to combine the smooth experience of modern fintech with self-custody and native on-chain products.
He listed quite a few features. The cash in the wallet can be spent anytime and even earns interest, it can receive RWA yields, it will include securities-type prediction markets, and the last point is key: every wallet has a built-in AI Agent.
I originally thought this was just another narrative patchwork, but scrolling down, there was a recruitment announcement. The company is openly hiring operations and compliance officers, explicitly requiring experience in KYC, anti-money laundering, payments, and fund flows.
A wallet that puts self-custody in the first line of its slogan is hiring compliance officers as its first batch of employees. Think about that combination.
Coincidentally, on the same day, Bitwise's CEO also tweeted that a new wallet for the tokenized world is about to launch. Neither company comes from grassroots crypto origins; one is backed by the publicly listed Figure and its on-chain lending business, the other is an asset manager overseeing a bunch of ETFs. On the same day, two institutional players simultaneously reached into wallets.
Why are they all crowding this layer? Look at what’s happened in recent days and you’ll probably understand. Circle is no longer renting other chains; its own Arc mainnet will launch next month. Coinbase has directly integrated perpetual contracts into the Base App. AWS now allows AI agents to pay with USDC autonomously, and it’s officially available. These moves all point in the same direction: whoever controls the user confirmation interface controls pricing power and routing rights. Exchanges, issuers, and cloud providers all want to be that interface, so wallets naturally become a battleground.
But I’m more concerned about another issue. The wallet space hasn’t been very peaceful lately. Rabby’s browser extension was recently found to have a silent signing issue, where malicious sites could drain assets under certain conditions. Coldcard’s firmware had a random number vulnerability that led to thousands of bitcoins being stolen. The security account of users managing their own private keys is still not fully understood by the industry.
The current institutional approach is to add features. Add interest-bearing cash, add RWA yields, add securities prediction markets, and add an AI agent that can make decisions for you. This means one product contains your private keys, your yield positions, and a program that can sign orders on your behalf. The more features, the larger the attack surface—this logic goes without saying.
And the compliance officer role is very telling. To include securities prediction markets, to handle payments and fund flows, KYC and anti-money laundering are hard requirements that can’t be bypassed. So this wallet was never designed as a permissionless product from day one; it’s more like a licensed financial application disguised as self-custody.
I don’t think this is a bad thing. Institutional entry improving user experience and compliance is good for the whole industry. But the branding and the core are two different things, and that’s what I’m watching closely. Self-custody was originally a promise about where power resides; now it’s slowly becoming a selling point, a buzzword, a veneer.
So the question is for you. If a wallet contains an AI agent that can sign on your behalf, and there’s a dedicated compliance officer monitoring your fund flows, do you still think this is self-custody? Your private keys—are you really holding them alone?Tomorrow, $1.8 billion worth of options expire, and the critical survival line for Bitcoin is at 66,000.
Bitcoin’s price action these past couple of days has been somewhat uncharacteristic. The day before yesterday, it was bottoming out amid widespread pessimism; last night, it surged straight past 70,000, rising nearly 9% in 24 hours. Behind this big bullish candle, a number that’s easy to overlook is quietly approaching. Tomorrow, a batch of options in the crypto market will settle, with a notional value exceeding $1.8 billion. Many are still digesting the fear from the day before yesterday, and now face the dilemma of whether to chase the rally or not.
Among these, BTC options alone account for $1.57 billion, and ETH options $250 million. More importantly, the max pain prices are $66,000 for BTC and $1,950 for ETH. Max pain simply means the price point where most option holders suffer the biggest losses and sellers earn the most stable profits. There’s a saying in the community that prices tend to be pulled toward the max pain point around expiration because that benefits the market makers who opened the positions the most.
Here’s the issue. Spot Bitcoin is already above 70,000, well above the 66,000 max pain point. This means a large number of call options are in the money, while many put options have become worthless. In the range between 66,000 and 70,000—over a thousand dollars—there are still many open contracts. Option settlement doesn’t happen out of thin air; market makers hedge by trading corresponding positions in the spot market. The further the price is from the max pain point, the more positions they need to close, so every monthly expiration day, the market closely watches that number for good reason.
Some have pulled Deribit data showing the put-call ratio is only 0.65, meaning far more calls are bought than puts, and the market is overwhelmingly bullish. This crowded positioning is usually not a problem, but with $1.8 billion in options expiring simultaneously, it can cause issues. Veteran traders often say privately that the most dangerous times are when everyone feels confident.
The shorts just went through a nightmare. In the past 24 hours, $3 billion worth of liquidations occurred across the network, with shorts accounting for over $2.7 billion—the largest short squeeze day in nearly two years. Whether the liquidated shorts still have the strength to fight back or if this rally has silenced them completely is uncertain. Yet just as the shorts fall, option sellers become a new variable.
I’m not rushing to conclusions. I just want to ask: if the price really gets dragged back near 66,000 tomorrow, will you see it as a buying opportunity on a pullback, or as a signal that the rally is over? At this level, neither bulls nor bears can sleep well, and even friends who trade options have started to speak less.SanDisk has recently experienced intense fluctuations at high levels, becoming a sentiment barometer for the storage sector.
After the stock price surged tens of times from the low point at the beginning of the year, it has repeatedly seen large single-day swings of around 10%, reflecting the market's lack of consensus on pricing for this AI-driven storage supercycle.
The core logic supporting the bulls is clear: explosive demand for AI inference and KV Cache, long-term enterprise SSD contracts (approximately $93.9 billion NBM agreements signed with 8 customers), combined with mid-to-long-term guidance of 80% gross margin and 75% operating profit margin, as well as a commitment to return 100% of excess free cash flow to shareholders.
The daily published models have led some institutions to see a shift from a strong cyclical commodity to a more certain AI infrastructure asset.
However, the bears are equally strong: historical experience shows that high profits in the storage industry are often difficult to sustain long-term, supply will eventually catch up, and price elasticity may quickly decline.
The forward P/E ratio may seem low, but it is based on extremely high profit assumptions, so once demand or pricing slope slows, there is a huge risk of valuation compression.
Peers like Micron and SK Hynix are also under pressure, with the sector overall showing a divergence of "strong performance, weak sentiment."
Behind the high-level volatility is a fierce debate in the market over "structural change vs. traditional cycles." The future NAND price trend and the execution of long-term contracts will be key to resolving these differences. #闪迪高位波动，存储股估值分歧加剧 🚨 BTC surpasses $70,000, capital starts flowing into Altcoins!
Bitcoin is leading the way, ETH breaks $2,200, SOL accelerates, and ETF capital continues to return. If BTC holds steady at $70K, ETH keeps outperforming, and SOL maintains strength, capital could keep flowing from BTC → ETH → SOL → Altcoin → Meme.
🔥 Important question: is this just the beginning of a major altseason?
#BTCBreaks72K #FOMC9To3Split #PopMartEarningsWatch Short sellers shouting about a crash lost 2.7 billion overnight
In the past 24 hours, something quite ironic happened in the entire crypto market. According to CoinGlass data, the total liquidations across the network surged to $3.024 billion, with short liquidations at $2.77 billion and long liquidations only $252 million. Over 170,000 people worldwide were caught up in this liquidation event, with the largest single position liquidated on Hyperliquid's BTC-USD, valued at $48.8 million.
Just a few days ago, social platforms were full of voices shouting that Bitcoin would fall back to fifty or sixty thousand. Many people put real money into short positions, determined to press down this rally. Instead, Bitcoin didn’t fall but rose, surging above seventy thousand, up 8.6% in 24 hours. Those betting on a drop ended up being the worst hit in this rally, with their margin accounts wiped out in an instant.
This is no ordinary fluctuation. The scale of short liquidations this time exceeded the $2.4666 billion on October 11, making it the largest short squeeze in the crypto market in nearly two years. In other words, countless people who bet on a price drop were completely overturned by the market overnight. Looking back, many had the right logic to short, but the timing was wrong; going against the trend reversal at the critical moment means even the right judgment can’t withstand leverage.
What does 3 billion mean? It’s roughly equivalent to the entire annual foreign exchange reserves of many small countries. Yet in the crypto market, it vanished into thin air in 24 hours. The scariest part of a short squeeze is its self-reinforcing nature. As prices rise, shorts’ margin becomes insufficient and they get liquidated; these liquidations turn into buy orders pushing prices even higher, forcing more shorts out, snowballing bigger and bigger. In this wave, longs who laid low at the bottom made a fortune. On Hyperliquid, one address started with zero in March and went long on HYPE with 10x leverage, now holding unrealized profits of $14.58 million. Even the big player Maji got a piece of the pie, though he has quietly started reducing his position recently, clearly more sober than those stubborn shorts. This scissors difference between longs and shorts vividly illustrates the market’s cruelty.
What’s more intriguing is that the longs profiting from this rebound aren’t so calm either. On-chain data shows that the HYPE whale with 10x leverage who made gains hasn’t moved since adding to his position in April, almost like he’s asleep. But in reality, more people want to take profits as soon as they make a little. Maji has started reducing his position, indicating even veterans worry this rally came too fast and are ready to cash out anytime. After all, a similar short squeeze last year ended with longs stepping on their own feet.
Many people aren’t truly bearish; they just feel uneasy about the rapid rise and want to short a bit to wait for a pullback before running. But the market chose to go up at the most crowded short position. When everyone around you is discussing whether to short, that’s often when shorts are most likely to collectively get wiped out. The market is best at punishing those who take feelings as truth. What you think is a pullback opportunity is actually a trap set by others.
Zooming out, this short squeeze happened amid multiple positive factors stacking up. US debt just broke 40 trillion, the Treasury announced doubling long bond buybacks to suppress yields, and the dollar weakened accordingly. Trump also stated at the White House crypto meeting that he’s considering accumulating a substantial amount of Bitcoin and specifically mentioned bringing Hyperliquid into the US. Once sentiment turns, shorts become the easiest fuse to ignite.
So here’s the question: after this wave of shorts being ground into the dirt, will the short squeeze continue, or will profit-taking trigger a new round of stampede? How long do you think this rebound can last? Bitcoin's Best Single-Day Gain, Yet Retail Investors Frenziedly Sold 40,000 Coins
Bitcoin surged 7.1% yesterday, marking its best day since February this year. The entire community was celebrating, with shorts liquidated nearly $1.9 billion, and the market glowing red. Yet amid the cheers, a group quietly passed on their chips, moving faster than anyone else.
CryptoQuant's analyst Darkfost uncovered a contrast in on-chain data. Yesterday, short-term players who had held for a brief time and just entered the market transferred over 44,300 Bitcoin to exchanges, setting a new record for the largest single-day profit-taking in 2026. They weren't trapped and cutting losses; they ran as soon as they broke even. Bitcoin climbed back above the short-term holders' cost line at $67,100, and this group immediately chose to cash out, unwilling to wait a cent longer.
This is quite counterintuitive. We often say retail investors are the last to catch the falling knife, but in this rebound, short-term retail fled faster than anyone. Unlike institutions waiting for a grand narrative, they exit as soon as they break even, showing more discipline than many expect. Over 40,000 coins is no small amount; at the market price then, it represented nearly $3 billion in concentrated selling pressure, yet it appeared on the very day of the big rally.
There were plenty of catalysts behind this surge. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen doubled the scale of long-term bond repurchases, suppressing long-end yields. Trump mentioned at a White House crypto meeting that he was considering buying a substantial amount of Bitcoin, pushing Congress to pass the Clarity Act, and even wanting to bring Hyperliquid back to the U.S. Any one of these would excite the market, but despite the excitement, the short-term players' actions reveal something else.
They don't believe this is a reversal; more see it as an opportunity to break even. Bitcoin has nearly halved from its peak last October, and breaking even is already a blessing, so they take their profits early. This is the signal we should focus on. When a batch of holders near their cost line desperately offload, it means selling pressure above is not easily absorbed. The rebound may be real, but bottoms are rarely drawn with a single big green candle.
The question is left to the market. Can this fire ignited by news turn into a slow bull market that everyone is willing to hold onto? Or will every rally become an exit for old coins to cash out? What do you think—how is this time different from the fake rebounds in previous months?One day before the Treasury stepped in, someone was frantically buying $120-230 million worth of U.S. Treasuries.
The U.S. federal debt officially surpassed $40 trillion this week, with a fiscal deficit of $432 billion just in July alone. Even more astonishing, interest payments on national debt for the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026 have already exceeded Medicare spending, becoming the second largest federal expenditure after Social Security. Facing rising long-term interest rates, the Treasury took action this week, announcing a significant expansion in the buyback scale of 10- to 30-year U.S. Treasuries. This was originally a market rescue move, and the market did respond positively, with the dollar weakening and both gold and Bitcoin surging.
But what truly sends chills down the spine is another detail. Just one day before the Treasury officially announced the expanded buyback, a fund called ZROZ was suddenly snapped up crazily. This is a Pimco-issued ultra-long duration Treasury ETF that specifically buys zero-coupon Treasuries where principal and interest are separated, making it extremely sensitive to interest rate changes. Its duration is about 28 years, and for every one percentage point drop in yield, its price theoretically can rise by nearly 30%. ZROZ itself only has $1.5 billion in assets, yet it absorbed $123 million in a single day, equivalent to more than 8% of new money flowing in that day.
On Tuesday, ZROZ saw a net inflow of $123 million in one go, directly setting a new historical record since the fund's inception, with a trading volume of 5.2 million shares—almost twice the peak volume seen in 2024. The day after, when the Treasury's big move was announced, ZROZ surged 3.2% on Wednesday, marking its largest single-day gain since November 2024. Given the scale and timing, this hardly looks like retail investor activity.
Buying such a highly sensitive 28-year duration asset precisely one day before the policy announcement reeks of something fishy. Is it pure luck, or did someone have advance knowledge of the Treasury's plans? There's a saying in the market: the closer you are to power, the faster the scythe. The deficit still accounts for about 6% of GDP, and long-term Treasury supply continues to be issued relentlessly. This Treasury buyback seems more like a race against term premium.
More subtly, the market rally brought by this Treasury buyback is not truly a rate cut trade. The Federal Reserve's recently released meeting minutes show several officials still saying that if inflation doesn't come down, rate hikes may still be necessary in the future. In other words, the dollar's recent weakness and Bitcoin's rebound are actually quite fragile.
Who exactly was the mysterious money that positioned itself a day in advance? No one can say for sure now. But one thing is painfully clear: while ordinary people are still debating whether the bull market has arrived, someone has already placed real money bets on the answer. HYPE Listing Insider Whale Has Unrealized Profit of Forty Million USD Over Ten Months
On-chain detective is focusing on a very conspicuous address today. Someone opened a long position right when HYPE was first listed and hasn't moved it for ten months. The current unrealized profit on the account has exceeded forty-four million USD. Even more astonishing is that just the perpetual funding fees paid over these ten months have burned nearly four million seven hundred and ten thousand USD.
This is definitely not a position an ordinary retail investor could hold. HYPE is the platform token of Hyperliquid. When it launched, there were constant rumors within the community about listing insiders—who got allocations early, who knew the cards—making it a favorite topic for the community to dig into. Judging by the position size and timing, this address is clearly not a temporary bandwagon trader but someone who saw the situation clearly from the start.
Hyperliquid has been a benchmark for decentralized perpetuals over the past two years. As the platform token, HYPE’s value is directly tied to trading volume. The platform handles hundreds of millions to over a billion in contract volume daily, with fees used for buyback and burn to form a closed loop. This is why early chips are so coveted. Being heavily positioned at a stage when the price was not fully discovered means the information advantage translates into real money.
The contrast lies here. Many think holding without moving is the easiest way, but this whale has paid over four million USD in funding fees alone, equivalent to giving away four hundred thousand USD to the counterparty every month. Over the full ten months, HYPE went through several rounds of halving-level violent swings; any panic could have wiped out the position. The fact that he has held on until now is not necessarily due to strong mentality but because the cost basis is low enough and the entry point early enough.
Now zooming into the last couple of days. The market surged violently overnight, with HYPE’s single-day gain exceeding 20%. Trump’s statement supporting Hyperliquid’s compliance entry into the US added fuel to the fire. At the peak of this sentiment, the whale’s unrealized profit was revealed, causing the community to explode.
What’s truly intriguing is what comes next. The forty-four million is just an unrealized figure; it doesn’t count until closed. Having paid over four million in funding fees to hold until now, will he continue to ride this wave for free profit or quietly exit amid the hype? Everyone is watching. Someone who positioned early based on listing insider info—will he become a legend or a reverse signal for others? Only the on-chain data will tell.
The blockchain is not a lawless place; every move is recorded. As soon as this address moves next, the market will immediately know the answer. From yesterday to today in the crypto space, I think there's something quite worth discussing. It's not simply about how much $BTC has risen, but that this wave's movement is completely opposite to the market expectations from a few days ago. A few days ago, everyone was focused on a few things: high US Treasury yields, a strong dollar, poor liquidity, and BTC hovering around 63,000 to 65,000. Naturally, many people started leaning bearish. So, there were actually quite a few short positions piled up on the market. Then yesterday, the US Treasury increased the scale of some long-term Treasury buybacks, causing long-term yields to start dropping, and the dollar weakened accordingly. For liquidity assets like BTC, this is the most direct positive catalyst. Meanwhile, the crypto space also encountered a US policy environment that continued moving in a more friendly direction. When these factors combined, BTC first broke through the resistance levels above. The real acceleration actually happened after the breakout. Because there were too many short positions earlier. As the price rose, some shorts stopped out first; then as it rose further, leveraged shorts began to liquidate; the liquidations themselves generated forced buying. So you see a very typical pattern: the rise was fairly normal at first, but the speed actually increased as it went on. This is also why yesterday shouldn't be simply understood as "a sudden influx of many people buying BTC." A significant portion of the gains came from the shorts themselves. The same goes for ETH. Once BTC opens up risk appetite, funds naturally flow to assets with greater volatility, so ETH, SOL, and others start to clearly outperform. At times like this, I generally don't just look at the gains.📊 $ZEC Contract Liquidation Express (August 20)
Short-term shorts were crushed mercilessly, but mid-to-long-term longs suffered a massive bloodbath...
Time Total Liquidations Long Liquidations Short Liquidations
1 hour $2,943.55 $0 $2,943.55
4 hours $135,500 $12,200 $123,300
12 hours $2,796,500 $2,570,200 $226,200
24 hours $3,671,900 $3,348,300 $323,600
From the ZEC liquidation data: shorts dominated the 1-hour period with zero long liquidations, totaling $29,435, probing for a short squeeze; the 4-hour direction confirmed, short liquidations were 10.1 times that of longs, volume jumped to $123,300, shorts strongly controlled the market, launching a nuclear-level short squeeze; the 12-hour direction completely reversed, long liquidations crushed shorts by 11.3 times, volume soared to $2,570,200, a full-scale long liquidation; the 24-hour long advantage continued to expand, long liquidations reached $3,348,300, 10.3 times that of shorts, cumulative liquidations exceeded $3.67 million. The 12-hour liquidations accounted for 76.2% of the 24-hour total, showing high concentration, with most of the long liquidation completed within 12 hours. The long liquidation dominance ratio slightly dropped from 11.3 times at 12 hours to 10.3 times at 24 hours, indicating short squeeze momentum slightly waned but remained extremely high, with a large gap between longs and shorts. The market makers on ZEC executed a fierce turnaround from short squeeze to long liquidation—short-term shorts were targeted and blasted, while mid-to-long-term longs were wiped out. Leverage is recommended to be compressed to within 3x; avoid blindly chasing longs.
🔥 Market Indicator | August 20
Today's three hot topics point to the same theme: the market is moving from "storytelling" to fully "delivering results"—the capital feast of AI infrastructure is entering its first round of return validation.
🏗️ Cloud Providers' Earnings Report: AI Investment Enters Return Validation Period
In Q2 earnings season, the four major cloud providers delivered their first "report card" on AI investment. Amazon AWS revenue reached $42.2 billion, up 37% year-over-year, marking the fastest growth in 18 quarters; Microsoft Azure grew 43% YoY, with annual Azure revenue surpassing $100 billion for the first time; Google Cloud revenue hit $24.8 billion, surging 82% YoY. Combined cloud business revenue of the three reached approximately $116.2 billion, up about 43% YoY.
More importantly, order backlogs. AWS backlog reached $496 billion, with triple-digit YoY growth; Google Cloud backlog was $514 billion; Microsoft's commercial RPO rose 84% YoY to $678 billion—future revenue visibility is improving.
But the cost is also real. Amazon's free cash flow turned from positive $18.2 billion to negative $7.6 billion over the past 12 months; Google’s free cash flow is under short-term pressure. The four companies' quarterly capital expenditures have soared to $151.4 billion.
The market is voting with its feet: rewarding companies that can convert computing power into real cloud revenue, punishing narratives with investment but no returns.
📊 CPI Released Tonight: The Scale for September Rate Hike Hangs in the Balance
At 20:30 Beijing time on August 12, the US July CPI will be released. The market expects overall CPI YoY to fall from 3.5% to 3.4%. Before the data release, CME data shows the probability of a September rate hike remains at 51.2%.
Deutsche Bank expects CPI MoM at 0.15%, core CPI MoM at 0.26%. The Cleveland Fed forecasts July overall CPI MoM to rise slightly by 0.09%, core CPI MoM by 0.21%. If tonight’s data exceeds expectations, the hawkish camp will quickly expand; if moderate, rate hike expectations may further fade.
💰 Nvidia $500 Billion vs Intel $20 Billion: Diverging Paths
On August 10, two chip giants announced financing plans simultaneously.
Nvidia partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, KKR, and others to establish an independent computing power financing platform, aiming to leverage over $500 billion in third-party capital. Jensen Huang stated: "Computing power has now become infrastructure like electricity and the internet." Essentially, this turns GPUs from consumables into financeable infrastructure assets. After the announcement, Nvidia’s stock closed down 2.86%.
Intel announced a $20 billion common stock issuance, the largest single equity financing since its 1971 IPO. The stock closed down 4.06% on the announcement day. Both paths point to the same conclusion: the AI chip competition has escalated from a technology race to a capital race.
💎 Summary
Three events paint the same picture: cloud providers prove AI demand is real with 43% revenue growth, but $151.4 billion quarterly capital expenditure reminds the market that the burn rate has never slowed; the ZEC contract market shows a fierce turnaround from short squeeze to long liquidation—short-term shorts were targeted and blasted, mid-to-long-term longs wiped out, with cumulative liquidations exceeding $3.67 million; every basis point of tonight’s CPI may decide the direction of the September rate hike scale; Nvidia and Intel’s simultaneous $500 billion and $20 billion financing plans announce that the AI race has officially entered a "capital-intensive" new phase. When industry logic, macro narratives, and capital strategies converge on the same day, the market is moving from "storytelling" to fully "delivering results." #BTC突破72000美元，本轮上涨能否延续？
#美联储7月FOMC纪要9比3，官员加息分歧仍在
#财报观察员：泡泡玛特增长换挡，多IP能否接力？ #财报观察员: Pop Mart's growth shifts gears, can multiple IPs take over?
The leader has something to say
Pop Mart's half-year report is out. Revenue reached 17.17 billion, up 23.8%, profit was 5.04 billion, only up 10.1%. Revenue is growing faster than profit, efficiency is declining.
The growth engine is switching. The China market grew 47.3%, while Asia-Pacific and the Americas dropped 9.7% and 16.5% respectively. THE MONSTERS, which owns LABUBU, saw revenue fall 7.5%, while Star People increased nearly sixfold, becoming the second largest IP. IPs are shifting gears, but whether new IPs can take over from the old ones still needs time to verify.
Overseas business is cooling down, profit margins are falling, and inventory turnover is slowing. Whether multiple IPs can continue growth is key to sustaining valuation.
For Bitcoin, this is not directly related. But Pop Mart represents the sentiment of a type of consumer stock; if the Hong Kong stock market weakens after the earnings report, risk appetite contraction will indirectly transmit over. Bitcoin is still fluctuating around 68000, waiting for a pullback to find a position.
The above analysis is time-sensitive, orders must have stop-loss set, good luck. $BTC $ETH $SOL The valuation restructuring of AI infrastructure is strongly siphoning global venture capital, with data and computing power expenditures by US tech giants squeezing the premium on crypto assets, and cross-market liquidity accelerating its tilt toward Silicon Valley's physical infrastructure.
From the capital distribution perspective, Nvidia paid Mercor tens of millions of dollars in data service fees last quarter, directly driving Mercor's financing valuation to $20 billion. This indicates that high-certainty AI data infrastructure is prioritizing top-tier risk appetite funds in the US stock and private equity markets.
In terms of driving factors, nearly $500 billion in cumulative debt and credit financing in the AI sector constitutes the dominant force. This directly raises the high-yield threshold for cross-market capital, causing the DeFAI and AI Agent narratives in the crypto market to face strict pricing tests when seeking liquidity injections.
When US dollar liquidity is tightly linked to capital expenditures of US tech stocks, the US tech infrastructure sector attracts the vast majority of marginal incremental funds, putting high-risk crypto assets lacking physical revenue support at a disadvantage in capital allocation.
The bullish scenario trigger condition is that if the $500 billion AI financing demand is quickly absorbed by the traditional US credit market and the Federal Reserve's interest rate policy brings liquidity abundance. At this time, the marginal capital overflow from Silicon Valley infrastructure will rotate back to the crypto market's AI narrative sector. It is necessary to closely monitor the trading volume of the US AI sector and changes in crypto net inflows; if the trading volume related to crypto AI agents continues to shrink, the bullish scenario fails.
The bearish scenario trigger condition is that high valuations at the $20 billion level for data infrastructure like Mercor continue to absorb credit funds, and US interest rates remain high. This will cause liquidity to stay in the US stock and Silicon Valley AI industry chain, leading to a decline in crypto market levels. It is necessary to observe the capital expenditures of US tech stocks and the outflow speed of crypto assets; if traditional venture capital pauses investment in the manual annotation industry, the bearish scenario fails.
The condition for scenario failure is a breakthrough in AI automated self-annotation technology, causing the artificial data premium that supports the $20 billion valuation to be rapidly squeezed out. This will trigger a re-pricing of the US AI infrastructure capital chain, with marginal funds flowing back from the US stock industry chain to other high-beta assets.
The most important observation variables in the next 7 days are: the net capital inflow scale of the US AI data service sector and the actual impact of the US dollar index changes on the flow of risk appetite funds.
#黄金重回4500美元，机构分歧加剧 #白宫峰会：特朗普称曾讨论购入BTC Full Day Review
In the past 24 hours, BTC moved from $64,375.30 to $71,962.90, closing up +11.79%, with a volatility range of 11.98 percentage points.
The highest point was $72,080.00, the lowest point was $64,369.50, with a trading volume of $1.25B, at least 5 rounds of battles between bulls and bears.
Across the market, 126 assets rose and 21 fell, with rising assets accounting for 85.7 percentage points, showing a clear profit-taking sentiment.
Sector Overview:
TeleFi/Memecoin sector average 0.00%, representative assets: $NOT flat, $DOGS flat
GameFi sector average 0.00%, representative assets: $AXS flat, $SAND flat
Other sectors average 0.00%, representative assets: $ENS flat, $MASK flat
Established/Litecoin-related sector average 0.00%, representative assets: $LTC flat, $BCH flat
Total market trading volume was $3.28B, a change of -12 percentage points compared to the previous 24 hours.
Strongest asset $BOME +61.96%, weakest asset $ACE -11.80%, with a strength gap of 73.8 percentage points.
Overall: BTC closed positive, sectors showed divergence but overall sentiment is not bad; next, we will see if trading volume can continue to keep up.
Market data comes from OKX public API and does not constitute any investment advice.
The principle is clear, the rest depends on execution. Yushu plummets while on-chain contracts exceed $100 million in trading volume
Today there was quite a surreal scene. On the A-share market, Yushu Technology's stock price once dropped over 17% intraday, falling from over 700 yuan, with a total daily turnover reaching 6.7 billion yuan. Yet on the same trading day, the perpetual contracts for Yushu Technology listed on trade.xyz on-chain saw a 24-hour trading volume surpassing $100 million.
On one side, there is the real stock diving hard; on the other, people in the crypto world are using it to open contracts and bet against each other. These two things happening to the same company give a completely different vibe.
trade.xyz is a platform for US stocks and popular asset perpetual contracts, closely connected to the Hyperliquid chain. Yushu, a robotics company that recently went public on the A-share market and surged over 400% on its listing day, has been forcibly brought onto the blockchain as a tool for anytime long or short positions. In the past 24 hours, its largest single liquidation was $446,000, and it was a long position that got liquidated.
This reveals something quite interesting. Those willing to open contracts on Yushu on-chain are not really focused on how many robots the company sold this quarter, but rather on whether its story is noisy enough and its volatility large enough. A real stock is being treated like a meme coin on-chain.
Even more subtle is the rhythm. When Yushu surged nearly fivefold in half a day after listing, everyone was amazed at how crazy the robotics concept was. Just a few days later, the stock has started to pull back, but the on-chain contract volume has hit a new high. The sentiment in the stock market and the on-chain casino seem like two completely disconnected clocks.
We have previously written about Binance and Robinhood bringing US stocks on-chain and turning them into perpetual contracts. Yushu’s case pushes that trend further: in the future, not only Tesla and Nvidia but even newly listed A-share companies might be made into on-chain contracts, trading 24/7 without closing.
But the risks here are also clear. The total open interest of on-chain contracts is clearly declining, currently just over $30 million, indicating that those chasing in are not that committed. Stocks have price limits and regulatory backstops; on-chain contracts have none. A 17% drop in the stock is painful enough, but on-chain 10x leverage volatility can wipe someone out within an hour.
The question is left to you. When a company’s stock is brought into the crypto casino, is it being priced or consumed? Who will be the next to be brought on-chain?Pop Mart announced its 2026 first-half performance today: revenue of ¥17.173 billion, a year-on-year increase of 23.8%; profit attributable to shareholders was ¥5.038 billion, up only 10.1% year-on-year, below market expectations. Gross margin was 69.7%, slightly down.
The THE MONSTERS series, represented by LABUBU, generated revenue of ¥4.45 billion, down 7.5% year-on-year, with popularity clearly returning to normal; meanwhile, Star People surged, with revenue of ¥2.65 billion, a staggering 580% increase, becoming the fastest-growing IP.
CRYBABY, DIMOO, SKULLPANDA, HIRONO, and others also recorded double-digit growth respectively. In the first half, 11 artist IPs generated over ¥100 million in revenue, with 6 surpassing ¥1 billion.
The Chinese market remains strong, with revenue of ¥12.2 billion, up 47.3%; however, Asia-Pacific and the Americas declined by 9.7% and 16.5% respectively, mainly due to the fading overseas online traffic dividend and cooling core IP popularity.
This is a typical "growth gear shift" earnings report. After LABUBU moved from a super hit to a mature phase, the company is now relying on a multi-IP matrix to take over.
The breakout of Star People validates the incubation capability, but whether it can continue to take over and form a new stable pillar still depends on the performance of new products in the second half and the re-acceleration overseas. Whether multiple IPs can truly take over will be the key to determining if the valuation can be maintained. #财报观察员：泡泡玛特增长换挡，多IP能否接力？ A 9–3 split at the FOMC is something I’d pay attention to. The final rate decision matters, but seeing three policymakers disagree tells us there’s clearly more debate happening inside the Fed than the headline decision might suggest.
Personally, I find the disagreement more interesting than the vote itself. If inflation, employment and growth were all pointing clearly in the same direction, you’d probably expect policymakers to be more aligned. $BTC
#BTCBreaks72K
#PopMartEarningsWatch Everyone says the bull market is back, retail investors rush in while institutions quietly accumulate Ethereum.
Last night, the crypto market shifted dramatically overnight, Bitcoin surged straight to 70,000, and Ethereum rose over 20% in a single day. The group chat was full of calls for a bull comeback. But amid this celebration, one set of data is worth watching closely. Ethereum spot ETFs have seen net inflows for three consecutive days, with $189 million flowing in just yesterday alone, making it one of the most solid buying signals in this rebound.
Leading the accumulation is BlackRock. Its ETHA product had a single-day net inflow of $122 million, with total historical net inflows now exceeding $11.8 billion. Fidelity’s FETH is also strong, adding over $36 million in one day. These two veteran institutions aren’t hyping their buys in chat groups, but their purchase orders never stop. This quiet buying actually speaks volumes.
Looking at the combined data over these three days is even more striking. During the early August downtrend, Ethereum ETFs actually experienced consecutive net outflows, which many interpreted as institutions abandoning ship. But as soon as prices bounced, the buying returned immediately—and with more intensity than when they left. This pattern of selling on the dip and chasing on the rise is typically a retail investor’s hallmark, but now it’s showing up in what should be the more composed institutional products, which is quite intriguing.
Here’s where it gets interesting. At the same time, a whale who dumped 2,000 Bitcoin in the early morning continues to reduce holdings, and the retail fear and greed index has jumped to 62, the highest since last October, clearly signaling greed. On one side, some are selling into the rally, while on the other, institutions are quietly accumulating through ETF channels. These two actions side by side tell a different story.
Why are institutions choosing this moment to buy Ethereum? The underlying logic of this rebound is clear: the U.S. Treasury expanded long-term bond repurchases, reigniting liquidity expectations, and the SEC introduced the Reg Crypto Assets proposal, opening a compliant path for public token financing. As the largest smart contract platform, Ethereum naturally becomes the easiest target for institutional entry. With a clear compliance path, funds are confident to come in.
More importantly, it’s about timing. ETFs only disclose holdings changes after market close each day. Retail investors focus on the intraday price swings, while institutions watch the sustained inflows over three days. By the time we react, their positions are already well established.
Three consecutive days of net inflows don’t guarantee the trend will continue, and even the highest historical net inflows can’t prevent single-day pullbacks. But while everyone debates whether the bull market is truly back, it’s worth seeing who is voting with real money. Do you think these institutions are buying halfway up the mountain, or are they once again ahead of retail investors?The panic index jumped from fear to greed in one day
Alternative's data just updated, and today the cryptocurrency Fear and Greed Index jumped to 62, officially entering the greed zone. Yesterday, this number was still at 46, which belongs to the fear side. Such a sharp turn from fear to greed in one day is historically uncommon.
What’s even more striking is that 62 is the highest point since October 2025. In the past half year, market sentiment has never been this exuberant.
How is this index calculated? It tracks six dimensions: volatility accounts for one quarter, market trading volume one quarter, social media buzz and market surveys each account for 15%, Bitcoin’s dominance in the overall market accounts for 10%, and Google search trends account for 10%. In other words, it doesn’t just look at price, but also how much people are talking and searching.
Last night’s short squeeze crushed the shorts, wiping out tens of billions in short positions across the network, and Bitcoin surged close to 70,000 in one go. Sentiment follows price, which is normal. But what’s worth pondering is that the sharp rise in the index is mainly driven by the hard indicators of volatility and volume; social media buzz has increased, but survey data hasn’t fully caught up yet. The body reacts faster than the brain.
Interestingly, this kind of sentiment indicator is often a paradox of lagging yet leading. Price moves first, the index follows, and by the time the index surges to a level everyone can see, the most profitable phase is often already over. It’s more like a mirror reflecting the collective heartbeat of the crowd, not the direction itself.
However, 62 is still some distance from extreme greed. The truly dangerous zone is above 75, which is usually near a phase top. Right now, it’s more like just poking its head out from suppression, not yet firmly standing. For a market suppressed by a bear market for nearly half a year, sentiment recovery naturally takes time; a jump to 62 in one day is more like a spring releasing pent-up energy rather than a new trend being confirmed.
Facing such a sentiment reversal, the biggest test is controlling your impulses. Historically, when sentiment rushes into the greed zone, it often means short-term expectations are already quite full. The higher the index, the more excited the participants, and the thinner the safety cushion for latecomers. We don’t predict price movements, just want to remind you that when friends who usually don’t talk about crypto start asking if you’re paying attention, that might be the time to stay calm.
It only takes one day for the market to go from fear to greed, but it may take longer to return from greed to rationality. Whale's $600 million sell-off divergence signal within the month
Early this morning, BTC just recovered from this epic short squeeze, and the retail investor groups were full of bullish voices. But just as everyone rekindled their hopes, an old address moved its position again.
Data monitoring shows that address bc1qsy sold 2,000 BTC early today, worth about $136.5 million at the time. More striking is its pace: over the past entire month, this address has cumulatively sold 9,513 BTC, with a total value of about $623.4 million. While the market cheered the rebound, it has been steadily offloading.
This contrast is particularly glaring. Yesterday, the entire network liquidated over $2.7 billion in short positions, the largest short squeeze day in nearly two years. BTC was forced up to around $69,000, just shy of $70,000. Yet, amid this strong rebound, the old money address quietly sold off.
The sentiment side tells a completely different story. Alternative's Fear and Greed Index jumped to 62 today, officially entering the greed zone, the highest point since October 2025. The day before, it was still at 46. The market shifted from fear to greed overnight, and many began to believe the worst was over.
But on-chain, some are moving in the opposite direction. On one side, retail investors are excited again, with ETFs seeing net inflows for three consecutive days. BTC spot ETFs alone absorbed $517 million yesterday, with BlackRock's IBIT taking in $285 million; on the other side, large addresses are reducing holdings. Even more interestingly, almost simultaneously, BIT withdrew 894 BTC from Binance, worth about $61.93 million, quietly transferring it to a cold wallet. Some are moving BTC into exchanges to sell, others are withdrawing to hold—this divergence is hidden in these opposite on-chain moves.
It's not just this address hesitating. The whale who set ten major targets flipped from long to short today, opening a short position of 1,894 BTC at an entry price of $69,826, with a stop loss set at $70,400. Even this figure, often seen as a market barometer, is shorting at the peak of the rebound.
We always focus on candlesticks for answers but tend to overlook those silent large addresses. They don't tweet or signal trades; they quietly transfer chips late at night. By the time most react, the market may have already changed from what it looks like today.
Whether this round is a bear market rebound or a true bull return, no one can give a definitive answer. But one thing is clear: while groups are showing off profits, someone is moving BTC into exchanges. Do you think this wave is your opportunity, or a stepping stone built for you as others retreat?The founder of F2Pool says the bear market is over, but the data says it's still surrendering
At 2 a.m. today, Wang Chun, co-founder of F2Pool, posted a sentence on social media: The bear market is over. Just these four words, with no buildup, no data, like an old miner who has been in the industry for nearly ten years suddenly making a decision late at night.
Interestingly, Wang Chun is not the type to just shout trading calls. During the most panicked time in the market this June, he put real money in, gradually buying about 70,600 ETH at low prices, which was worth over a hundred million dollars at the time, and also bought more than 900 WBTC. He really dared to catch the falling knife. When the market warmed up in July, he transferred over 36,000 ETH and 160 WBTC to Binance, pocketing about 3.4 million dollars in profit. Buying low and selling on the rebound, his timing was quite precise.
So when he said at dawn that the bear market was over, many people's first reaction was: This guy just reduced his position, now he's bullish again—is he trying to get others to take over? Some also think that someone who runs a mining pool and deals with hash rates daily knows better than anyone what's happening on-chain, so if he dares to make this conclusion, there must be some judgment behind it.
But on the same day, another authoritative report poured cold water. Glassnode's weekly report released at dawn said Bitcoin is still in the surrender phase. Their logic is that the cost basis for short-term holders has dropped to about $68,500, below the real market average of $75,800, indicating recent buyers and more active investors are trading below cost. Moreover, a key indicator, the 90-day moving average of realized profit and loss ratio, is currently at 0.75; historically, only when this value falls below 0.5 does it indicate selling pressure is truly exhausted. In other words, the confirmation of the real bottom is still some distance away.
More subtly, Glassnode specifically pointed out that the Coinbase premium index is still negative, meaning demand in the U.S. spot market has not yet returned. The price rebound looks lively, but the buyer structure may not be solid.
For ordinary holders like us, this kind of divergence is the most frustrating. When the market rises, we fear missing out; when the data cools down, we fear a bull trap. Who to trust? No one dares to be sure.
On one side, the mining pool boss confidently says the hardest times are over; on the other, on-chain data calmly reminds you that surrender is not over. This kind of split is very typical. The market has just bounced out of a deep pit, and everyone is eager to find that confirmation signal for the bottom, but reliable signals often conflict with each other.
Wang Chun dares to say it because he bought in June and has his cost basis. Glassnode is cautious because the data hasn't given a clean turning point yet. Both may be telling the truth, just from different time scales.
So the question arises: when the most active group has already started calling the end, but the calmest data is still waiting for confirmation, who should we listen to? This round, do you trust people or trust the chain?Automatically locking for ten minutes causes coins in Rabby to disappear
This morning, a message exploded in the community: the security team V12 tweeted that the Rabby Wallet browser extension contains a silent signature extraction vulnerability. Simply put, if you connect to a malicious DApp, set the auto-lock time to ten minutes, stay on the page for about ten minutes, and then unlock the wallet again, the coins inside might be gone.
This detail is quite frightening. Auto-locking for ten minutes is almost the default or a convenient setting everyone has used; no one would think it's dangerous. But precisely this seemingly harmless habit, combined with a carefully crafted phishing site, becomes the key to emptying the wallet.
The Rabby team responded later, saying the vulnerability was actually fixed in the update on August 11, and everyone just needs to update the extension to the latest version; the mobile app is unaffected. They also emphasized that the triggering conditions are extremely limited: you must connect to a malicious website and manually set the auto-lock to ten minutes. So far, no one has been found to have been exploited.
But here lies the problem. The vulnerability was fixed on August 11, but the news only broke today, nearly ten days later. During these ten days, how many people would proactively check if they have the latest version installed? Especially those veteran users who run a dozen plugins and constantly interact on-chain, many probably don’t even know if they are still using the old version. The fix and everyone’s safety are separated by a huge gap.
Many people are used to setting the auto-lock longer, thinking it saves them from entering the password repeatedly and feels more secure the longer it locks. But this incident precisely shows that the more convenient a setting is, the more likely it hides gaps others are watching.
What’s even more worth pondering is this kind of silent signature attack. Unlike the usual confirmation pop-ups, it can quietly send authorization without you noticing. Users think they just connected to a website, but behind the scenes, permissions may have already been stolen. By the time they realize it, assets have been transferred to unknown addresses and can’t be recovered. This kind of incident has repeatedly occurred in the wallet community over the past few years, almost becoming an unavoidable shadow in the self-custody era.
I’ve been thinking about one question. We always say self-custody and controlling your private keys is true security, but in reality, the security boundary is no longer just that mnemonic phrase; it’s in every confirmation button you click and every seemingly trivial setting. Rabby reacted quickly and patched in time this time, but who will be the next wallet hiding a similar logical vulnerability?
Ultimately, the most dangerous things are never those labeled as dangerous, but the habits you use every day without ever doubting. When was the last time you checked for extension updates? The person shouting the hardest calls lost 2 billion less overnight
Last night, Ethereum suddenly surged nearly 20%, and many people were watching their contracts counting money. But the one with the biggest overnight change in their account wasn't some leveraged whale, but a publicly listed company.
Data shows BitMine holds 5.81 million ETH at an average cost of $3,366. That surge last night reduced its unrealized loss by nearly 2 billion dollars overnight. Sounds like a windfall, but look at another number: its unrealized loss still stands at 6.65 billion dollars.
In other words, that night only lowered the water level from the neck to the chest.
Behind this position is Tom Lee. Over the past year, he’s probably the most openly biased on Wall Street, repeatedly stating in roadshows, interviews, and social platforms that Ethereum is an undervalued asset and that institutions will eventually come. Every time the market dips, his company buys more, gradually raising the average cost to 3,366.
This is the most awkward part of the treasury company's playbook. They don’t buy coins with spare cash; they keep issuing stock and raising funds to buy coins, then present the coin holdings per share as a KPI to investors. When the coin price rises, the stock price rises even more, financing channels open wide, and buying becomes easier. When the coin price falls, this cycle backfires, the cost basis can’t be shaken off, and no one wants to finance anymore.
That same night, another set of numbers appeared. Nearly 3 billion dollars were liquidated across the entire network in 24 hours, with short positions liquidated at 2.7 billion, surpassing the previous record on October 11, making it the largest short squeeze in nearly two years.
The interesting part is here. The liquidated shorts and Tom Lee are actually doing the same thing—both betting on direction. The difference is they use dozens of times leverage, deciding life or death in hours; he uses equity and balance sheets, enduring slowly until the cost basis is caught up.
And the push that night didn’t actually come from Ethereum itself. The US Treasury doubled the scale of long-term bond buybacks, and at the White House crypto meeting, a bunch of regulatory pivot signals were released. The dollar weakened, Bitcoin moved first, then Ethereum, squeezing shorts out layer by layer. In other words, what saved him was macro and policy, not the logic he’s been preaching for a year.
Now he’s still over a thousand dollars away from the cost basis.
Let’s think about it: is this news of losing 2 billion less overnight a sign of a turnaround, or just a breather for deep-pocketed players in a short squeeze? If the market cools down again after the squeeze, do you think he will continue to add or hold back for now? During the crash, five addresses withdrew fifty million BTW tokens
At 1:36 AM today, a series of actions on-chain stunned many people. Five unrelated wallet addresses consecutively withdrew BTW tokens worth over 51 million USD from Bitget within less than nine hours.
BTW is not a well-established mainstream coin; it only launched in February and basically rose through community hype and exchange exposure, with no real use cases, purely driven by narrative and sentiment. However, this month it once surged more than sevenfold, leading many in the community to directly call it a "demon coin." The crazier a coin rises, the more it tends to make people uneasy.
The most awkward part is the timing. These withdrawals were concentrated between 1:30 AM and just after 3:00 AM, while BTW’s price started dropping sharply from 0.67 USD at 11:40 PM last night to 0.31 USD, a decline of over half. During the steepest drop, someone was moving large amounts out.
I checked the subsequent data; these tokens total about 150 million BTW. After withdrawal, they have neither been transferred out nor sold, just quietly sitting in the addresses. Whether this is repositioning before dumping or simply withdrawing early due to fear of exchange issues, no one can confirm yet.
The community has already started reconciling. Some say the methods of these five addresses are too coordinated, as if one team is splitting their holdings. Others think that moving over 50 million quietly during a crash is beyond the capacity of ordinary retail investors, likely indicating whales with information advantage behind it. Notably, all these tokens came from a single platform, Bitget, and such concentration on one exchange is inherently risky. If the platform tightens liquidity, prices could be more fragile than expected.
In this recent market cycle, there are many demon coins like BTW that rise irrationally and fall without warning, with many people losing half their principal before they even realize it. Ultimately, on-chain withdrawals alone don’t prove anything, but they reveal one fact: when a group of addresses chooses to quietly move huge amounts during the worst liquidity and most panic-driven moments, the small positions held by ordinary players are never part of their consideration.
The script for small coins like BTW is very typical. First, a fierce pump attracts people in; once retail investors rush in, everyone is uncertain whether to run. Now, these 51 million USD worth of tokens are hanging in limbo; whether they sell or not may directly determine the direction in the coming days.
What do you think? Are these five addresses here to harvest profits or just to hedge early? Such midnight moves often speak more honestly than any analyst’s calls.JPMorgan Pierces the Veil of US Treasury Repo
On Wednesday this week, the Treasury suddenly doubled the scale of long-term bond repurchases, officially stating it was to provide stronger liquidity support to the market. In plain terms, it was an attempt to push down long-term Treasury yields. But on the very same day the policy was announced, Wall Street’s oldest bank stepped forward to pour cold water on the move.
JPMorgan strategist Jay Barry and his team wrote a report that was very straightforward. They believe the market will likely see the Treasury’s unexpected effort to suppress long-term financing costs as lacking credibility. Without fiscal reform today, relying solely on repurchases to prop things up over time may actually push both term premiums and yields higher.
This is interesting. On one hand, the Treasury is desperately trying to cool down interest rates; on the other, the largest bank among insiders openly says this approach is unreliable. JPMorgan exposed an awkward fact: the US economy is near full employment, yet the fiscal deficit remains high at around 6%. Simply buying bonds treats the symptoms, not the root cause.
What’s even more alarming are the numbers underneath. The US national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. A market survey shows nearly 60% of respondents believe the US debt situation will only worsen until it triggers a real crisis. The more the Treasury repurchases, the more new debt is issued. This hole can’t be filled by doubling repurchases alone.
So what is the Treasury aiming for? By pushing down long-term yields, corporate borrowing costs fall, and mortgage rates for residents can ease, which in the short term can stabilize the situation. But this operation deviates from the Treasury’s own established principles of regularity and predictability. JPMorgan’s concern is that if investors conclude the government is becoming opportunistic in debt management, they will demand higher term premiums, causing yields to reverse and rise.
What’s worse is the context in which this round of repurchases was introduced is not easy. The market had been betting on a quick Fed rate cut, but the latest meeting minutes show officials are already discussing the possibility of rate hikes. The Treasury’s preemptive move carries a sense of impatience.
Actually, similar scenarios have played out before. When a government promises discipline but secretly loosens operations, the market’s initial trust can hold for a while, but once supply truly becomes uncontrollable, the backlash comes quickly. The question now is not if trouble will happen, but which straw will break the camel’s back first.
For us, this matter is not just entertainment. Bitcoin surged near $70,000 these days, and many credit the White House crypto meetings and regulatory easing. But another overlooked driver is the dollar weakening caused by this Treasury repurchase wave. The logic is simple: when US Treasury yields are suppressed, the dollar weakens, and capital flows into risk assets.
But JPMorgan worries about the exact opposite. If yields don’t fall but rise instead, and the dollar strengthens again, Bitcoin’s recent rebound, which relies on liquidity, will be at risk. When liquidity tightens, can the story continue? A cycle of issuing new debt to repurchase old debt—how long can it last? That’s for everyone to judge.
These days, screens are full of screenshots of explosive rallies, and the numbers of liquidated short positions are frightening. Everyone’s sentiment is clearly heating up. But it’s precisely at times like these that we should listen to the calm voices. A major bank openly undermining the policy is itself a signal, indicating the underlying divisions are greater than we see on the surface.The presidential concept coin soared with just one sentence from TRUMP
This morning, TRUMP held a crypto meeting at the White House. During the meeting, he made a strong statement, saying that the U.S. would start discussing accumulating large-scale Bitcoin and crypto reserves, and urged Congress to advance the CLARITY Act. As soon as he finished speaking, the TRUMP coin named after him surged 26% in 24 hours, and the MELANIA coin named after his wife also rose 13%.
What’s most intriguing about this isn’t how much it rose, but who rose. In the past, when we talked about presidential market trends, it mostly referred to indirect expectations like interest rate cuts or a weaker dollar. But this time, funds almost openly rushed toward assets most deeply tied to TRUMP himself. The TRUMP coin has no cash flow or protocol revenue; it’s purely a vessel for a name and sentiment. Its ability to rise a quarter in a single day shows that the market is currently betting not on a project, but on a person.
More subtle is WLFI. This is a crypto project deeply involved with the TRUMP family. It only rose 0.66% in 24 hours today but went up 11% over seven days. Compared to the TRUMP coin’s explosive surge, WLFI seems to be steadily building a long-term narrative. One is responsible for short-term speculative sentiment, the other for telling a long-term story. These two strategies are laid out plainly.
Zooming out a bit, the entire market actually saw broad gains today. Bitcoin touched $70,000 at one point, and Ethereum rose nearly 20% in 24 hours. In just the past 24 hours, the total liquidation volume across the network hit $2.98 billion, ranking as the eighth largest liquidation event in history. Amid such a massive volume, the presidential concept coin’s rise isn’t the most extreme, but it’s the most eye-catching because other coins’ gains are at least supported by macro logic, while this one took off almost solely on one sentence.
The community is now split into two camps. Optimists say that the president personally putting crypto into the national policy agenda is unprecedented endorsement, and policy implementation will sooner or later bring real capital inflows. The cautious focus on a faint but clear line: a sitting president’s public statement directly boosting the price of tokens related to his own family would raise conflict-of-interest questions in any mature market.
We throw the question back. When a White House statement can make a coin rise a quarter in one afternoon, is this a signal that crypto is being accepted by the mainstream, or that this market is still far from the word "value"? Could the position you hold just be a pawn in someone else’s narrative?What was bought for 8 billion is not a company but a toll gate
Last night, a letter addressed to investors circulated fiercely in the community. The letter was written by the three leaders of Stripe, and the most eye-catching sentence was that they consider January 1 this year as the beginning of a singularity.
What they meant was not that AI has surpassed humans, but that they saw several long-term curves bending at the same point in time. The most obvious one is the sudden uptick in the speed of new company formations. A company that helps the whole world collect payments sees this change before anyone else because every new company opening needs to first set up a payment channel.
The numbers are indeed impressive. Net income in the first half of this year increased by 41% year-over-year, and free cash flow rose by 43%. 88% of the companies on the Forbes AI 50 list use Stripe, including OpenAI and Anthropic, while the remaining 12% mostly have not yet commercialized. What deserves our attention even more is another sentence: the revenue contribution from AI companies and crypto companies has more than doubled compared to a year ago.
The real pivot is yet to come. Stripe says that the two most important digital flows for enterprises in the future are capital and intelligence. In the past, it helped companies manage money; next, it wants to manage AI calls—deciding whether a task is worth running, which model to dispatch, and ultimately who pays the bill. To fill this gap, it acquired OpenRouter, calling it its largest acquisition ever. Axios reported the price exceeded 8 billion USD, mainly paid in stock. OpenRouter's token consumption has grown about 9% weekly on a compound basis this year, a visibly thickening pipeline.
The most unusual point is that despite such impressive financials, it insists that continuing to stay private is an advantage. The reason is that AI makes the future harder to predict, and it does not want to sacrifice long-term decisions for short-term market pressure. Over the years of expansion and acquisitions, its total shares outstanding are actually fewer than three years ago. Since the Series D round ten years ago, the private equity per-share price has increased at an annualized rate of about 31%.
Looking at this letter from our side, the feeling is a bit complex. Bitcoin just forced a short squeeze from deep waters, wiping out billions in shorts overnight, with many people watching liquidation prices and funding rates day by day. Meanwhile, those collecting toll fees are quietly thickening their revenue structure. The amount crypto companies pay Stripe has doubled, indicating that the transaction fees paid by exchanges, wallets, and stablecoin businesses we are familiar with are increasing.
Circle’s self-developed public chain Arc is launching its mainnet in September, shifting from tenant to landlord; Stripe is spending its largest sum ever to buy an AI routing gateway. The underlying logic of these two events is the same: whoever controls the scheduling power has the pricing power. Price fluctuations are volatility; routing rights determine revenue sharing.
Every day we calculate whether our positions can withstand the next spike, but they calculate who will collect toll fees ten years from now. In this round, who do you think will really pocket the money—the people holding the coins, or the ones standing at the toll gate?The White House crypto summit just ended, but Coinbase moved its headquarters to the Middle East
Just two days ago, Trump invited a group of crypto bigwigs to the White House for a meeting, saying that the U.S. wants to be the world’s crypto capital and bring projects and funds back home. Coinbase’s CEO Armstrong even boldly declared that once the CLARITY Act passes in mid-September, a new market rally should come.
But before those words cooled down, Coinbase itself took a key step by setting its international tokenization hub in Abu Dhabi.
According to Fortune, Coinbase chose Abu Dhabi, UAE, as its international tokenization center, planning to put more traditional financial assets on-chain. Simply put, it means turning real-world assets like stocks and bonds into on-chain tokens, and the core operations of this business are not placed in New York or San Francisco, but in the Middle East. Whoever sets up the platform for traditional finance on-chain first will earn the fees and liquidity first.
Here’s the interesting part. On one side, Washington just shouted "welcome home," while on the other, the exchange quietly placed the most future-oriented part of its business overseas. Abu Dhabi has been improving its digital asset regulatory framework in recent years, with friendly policies and clear processes, making it as attractive as the U.S. for institutions wanting to do RWA (Real World Assets). In fact, in the past year or two, many crypto institutions have already treated the Middle East as their second home, moving exchanges and funds there.
We often say crypto should be decentralized and borderless, but when it comes to implementation, money and licenses are often more honest than slogans. Coinbase’s move doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bearish on the U.S., but at least it shows that in its eyes, wherever the rules get established first, that’s where the business will grow first.
Zooming out a bit more. Stablecoin giant Circle just announced a few days ago that its public chain Arc will launch in September, aiming to be a settlement layer for financial assets. On one side, the issuer is building its own chain, and on the other, the exchange is moving its tokenization headquarters to the Middle East. What everyone is really competing for is the same piece of the pie — the infrastructure for putting traditional assets on-chain.
So here’s the question. While the U.S. is still bickering over legislation, will those traditional assets that truly want to go on-chain gather first in the Middle East? By the time U.S. regulation becomes clear, will the tokenization dividends that should belong to Wall Street have already been preemptively claimed by someone else?It is often said that the Federal Reserve is independent, but this time it was revealed that it frequently communicates with the President.
On the morning of August 20, four members of the Senate Banking Committee jointly sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh, demanding that he disclose all communication details between himself and President Trump. The lead signatory was Senator Van Hollen. The letter was straightforward: they wanted not just a summary after the fact, but the verbatim records of every call.
The trigger for this was a report by The Wall Street Journal's chief economic reporter Timiraos, who is known as the Fed's mouthpiece and is always well-informed. He revealed that after Warsh took office, he maintained frequent calls with Trump, but the Fed's publicly available schedule showed no records of calls during that period. On one hand, they chatted privately often; on the other, there were no records publicly. This selective transparency made the senators uneasy.
What they really worry about is not just casual chats. The glaring issue is whether there is any boundary left between a country's monetary policy leader and the head of the executive branch. If the chairman's phonebook is full of the president's numbers, it is hard for outsiders to believe that the next rate hike or cut is based on data rather than a word from the other end of the line.
Trump later denied the related reports, saying he only had a brief conversation with Warsh a few days ago. White House National Economic Council Director Hassett tried to smooth things over, saying the two have long had economic discussions but the president does not pressure the Fed. The Fed's response was also very official, saying it still delays disclosure of the chairman's schedule according to established rules. But the more standard the official language, the more it feels like something is being left unsaid.
Interestingly, the timing of this revelation is very coincidental. Just these days, the crypto market had just come out of a sharp rebound, with Bitcoin once surging close to $70,000. Many interpreted this rally as a sign of easing coming, that money would become cheaper. But just as the market was betting on the Fed turning dovish, the Fed's own meeting minutes showed that several officials actually favored a rate hike at the last meeting, with three directly voting against and advocating a 25 basis point increase.
On one side, the market is betting on easing; on the other, the Fed internally wants to tighten, and now there's the added suspicion of a hotline between the chairman and the president. These three things combined give the impression that the Fed's independence, once considered sacrosanct, is now under a microscope.
For those of us watching the market closely, the most important thing is not who called whom, but that once this line is pulled open, the lifeline of interest rates becomes more susceptible to political winds. When Bitcoin is rallying enthusiastically, the biggest fear is often a sudden reversal of expectations. Historically, every time the Fed's independence has been questioned, the market's first reaction is to reprice risk assets, and crypto, which lives on liquidity, is most sensitive to interest rate expectations.
So the question is left to you: when the halo of the Fed's independence begins to fade, can your positions really withstand a reversal of expectations? ##BTC breaks through $72,000, can this rally continue?
I won’t sleep tonight, watching this big bullish candle closely. Here are some numbers first:
$BTC broke above $71,000 on 8/20, surging over 10% in 24h
$3.264 billion liquidated across the network in 24h, 185,000 people liquidated — a single-day record since 2021
Short liquidations account for 92%, short-to-long ratio is 10:1, over $1 billion forcibly liquidated in one hour. What’s driving this rally? Old Zhou slams the table: pure short squeeze, not retail chasing longs. Previously, after six months of consolidation, shorts piled up positions around $60,000, with options downside protection also concentrated there. Then one bullish candle pierced through the liquidation dense zone — shorts were forced to cover in a chain reaction, pushing the price higher and higher. 92% of shorts liquidated means this is a "shorts being crushed" scenario, not a "longs charging" one. But how long can the short squeeze last? Let’s look at the relay. Old Zhou shows you three green lights:
🟢 First light: ETF took over on the breakout day. On 8/19, spot ETF net inflow was $517 million, a 3-month high — IBIT alone took in $285 million. On 8/13 there was still a net outflow of $130 million, but on the day of the rally institutions rushed in, this isn’t chasing highs, it’s real money passing the baton.
🟢 Second light: On-chain whales are quietly accumulating. CryptoQuant data shows that in the past 60 days, big players have net increased holdings by 43,000 BTC, starting to accumulate from around $60,000 — for several monthsTrump just sang bullish on Bitcoin and then immediately blasted the Federal Reserve
This week, Trump invited a group of crypto executives to the White House, speaking confidently about ending the crypto war and America becoming the world’s crypto capital. But in the midst of this rally, he turned around and fired at the Fed.
On Wednesday, he publicly criticized the Fed’s interest rate policy, saying that economic data is clearly improving, yet rates remain too high. The U.S. should be paying much lower financing costs. He cited Switzerland as an example, where the benchmark rate is only 0.5%, while the U.S. is around 3.5%, which he said is unreasonable. He also mentioned that the 30-year Treasury yield has surged to 5.3%, a nearly 20-year high, and the average mortgage rate has returned to about 7%. He even said Fed Chair Powell is doing a good job but then complained that political factors are involved in the board, implying someone is deliberately holding rates high.
Actually, Treasury Secretary Yellen had already taken action. A few days ago, she announced doubling the long-term Treasury buyback size from $2 billion per operation to $4 billion, clearly trying to suppress long-term rates. But Trump felt this was not enough and decided to personally pressure the Fed. This kind of fiscal and monetary policy contradiction is rare in any administration.
Interestingly, the Fed has actually been cutting rates since the second half of last year, with six cuts in total, but Trump still thinks it’s too slow. Saying the economy is good while complaining about high rates reveals his real anxiety.
The contrast is hidden inside. Trump just said cryptocurrencies greatly relieve the pressure on the dollar, but then he pressures for rate cuts, fundamentally fearing the interest burden on $40 trillion of U.S. debt. On one hand, he praises crypto as the new favorite, on the other, he fears the old debt being crushed by high rates. Both narratives actually aim for the same demand: cheap money.
The Fed is not buying it. The July meeting minutes showed more than one regional Fed president leaning toward rate hikes, believing inflation must be controlled by tightening. The president calls for cuts on stage, while the central bank wants hikes behind the scenes. This kind of opposition is rare in the market.
For us, this drama is more relevant than it seems. The low rates Trump wants have always been the fuel for risk assets, and this crypto rebound partly bets on that expectation. But if the Fed is truly tied to inflation and moves to tighten, relying on a rally sparked by a single speech leaves a weak foundation.
What we should watch most now is not what pretty words Trump says again, but who will give in first in this tug-of-war between him and the Fed. Whether money is cheap or not is the real key to this rally.The most eye-catching data in the market last night was definitely the short liquidations: within 24 hours, about $1.42 billion worth of BTC short positions were liquidated, and the total short liquidation across the entire market approached $2.74 billion. The numbers are huge, and the sentiment is very heated.
But I think simply attributing this rally to "shorts getting squeezed" is somewhat putting the cart before the horse.
What’s really worth noting is that the market’s trend condition had already improved before the price surged significantly. In other words, short liquidations are more like the gas pedal, not the engine.
Many people tend to chase the rally when they see a short squeeze, thinking "the shorts are gone, it’s about to take off." But a liquidation is essentially a forced buy after leverage is cleared; it can push the market faster, but not necessarily sustain the move longer. What truly determines whether BTC can hold its ground is spot buying support, whether capital continues to flow back, and if the market continues to form higher lows after the breakout.
So going forward, I will focus more on two questions:
1. Can BTC hold key support after the rally, rather than quickly falling back to the previous consolidation range?
2. Can trend indicators maintain strength continuously, rather than just briefly warming up during the liquidation wave?
If the price is only propped up by liquidations, the market may soon enter a high-level divergence; but if buying remains on dips and trend signals don’t reverse, this wave is more likely the start of a new upward move.
The market never lacks "short squeeze narratives," but what’s lacking is the ability to judge, when sentiment is hottest, whether this is a trend start or just a leverage-fueled fireworks show $BTC
(This is only a personal market observation and does not constitute investment advice)Even Google has started borrowing money, fueling a computing power frenzy sustained by debt
Google, a company with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash on its books, did something surprising this week: it issued bonds in Australia. It’s not because they lack money, but after calculating, they found borrowing is more cost-effective than using their own cash.
Behind this is a whole set of quietly changing rules. We used to think AI was a money-printing machine—whoever had the strongest model would rake in huge profits. But the reality is, what really supports this computing power race isn’t profit, it’s debt. Public data shows that global AI-related debt financing has already piled up to about $489 billion, and Alphabet’s Australian dollar bonds are just the tip of the iceberg.
What’s more intriguing is where the money goes. Most of this borrowed money isn’t for paying salaries but is poured into data centers, buying Nvidia chips, and building those power-hungry computing clusters. In the same week, Marvell signed a massive chip purchase-for-equity deal with Google worth up to $12.2 billion. The more these giants compete, the bigger the bills get.
The problem is, this massive supply is flooding the bond market. The 30-year US Treasury yield has been pushed to its highest level since 2007, and borrowing costs are visibly climbing. Bank of America has outright listed shorting AI bonds as the best current hedge strategy, essentially saying this bubble has grown too big to ignore.
What does this have to do with our crypto circle? Just a few days ago, Bitcoin staged an epic short squeeze, swallowing $1 billion in shorts within an hour, pushing the price to $70,000. But zooming out, the real competition for the same pool of risk capital is precisely these AI giants borrowing crazily. The higher bond yields go, the more tempting it is to keep money in safe assets, weakening the flow into high-volatility markets.
On one side, the crypto world cheers an 8% rebound; on the other, tech giants quietly borrow hundreds of billions in debt to burn on computing power. Which story will stand the test of time? It’s hard to say now. When the bills from this wave of bond issuance come due, will the market show a different face? We’ll see then.For every $500 million worth of chips Google buys, it gets an additional batch of stock.
Last night, an 8-K filing was submitted to the SEC system, detailing something rarely seen in the semiconductor circle.
Marvell agreed to issue stock warrants to Google, allowing Google to purchase up to 58,970,907 shares of its own stock at a price of $206.58 per share, totaling about $12.2 billion if fully exercised.
The key is not the number itself, but the vesting method. These warrants are not fully granted upon signing; only about 1.4 million shares are released in the first year. The rest are divided into 240 batches, and Google unlocks one batch for every $500 million of custom chips it purchases from Marvell, continuing through Marvell's fiscal year 2033.
In other words, the more chips Google buys, the more Marvell stock it receives.
In the normal business world, suppliers chase after big clients, often willing to lose money. This time, it's reversed: the big client places orders and simultaneously holds equity in the supplier. You can think of it as Google adding a rebate to its purchase orders, but instead of cash, the rebate is stock.
These chips will be integrated into Google's TPU ecosystem, including AI inference accelerators, storage controllers, network interface controllers, memory interface controllers, and near-memory computing chips. The commercial agreement was actually signed on July 29. Once announced, MRVL's pre-market price surged over 10%, and during the morning session, it jumped as much as 14%.
Interestingly, the same company experienced a single-day plunge of 19.8% in March 2025, its worst day in over twenty years, due to market doubts about the solidity of its AI orders. More than a year later, by handing over equity to customers, it regained certainty.
My first reaction to this news was not envy but familiarity. This structure should resonate with those of us in the crypto world: the big client is both buyer and shareholder, and the purchase amount directly determines the pace of equity unlocking. Demand and valuation are tied together. This closed loop looks great when things are going well—revenues rise, stock prices rise, and both parties profit. But if the purchasing pace slows down one day, it becomes hard to tell whether that revenue is genuine demand or a cleverly designed self-sustaining cycle.
Looking at the bigger picture: just last night, Bitcoin was squeezed up to $70,000, and Ethereum surged nearly 20% in a single day—the market is very hot. But in the real battle for long-term capital, AI has already upgraded its playbook to locking customers with equity. This year, we've seen mining farms converted to data centers, computing power traded as futures, and institutions extending credit lines to AI companies, one after another.
So here’s the question: AI locks in its demand with equity, but what do we rely on to lock in liquidity on our side? Do you think this client-becomes-shareholder closed loop is a sign of industry confidence, or is it just risk being pushed down the road? How should the tokens of a profitable project be repriced?
A long-neglected question is now being seriously addressed by institutions: the project is really making money, so how much is its token actually worth?
Arca's Chief Investment Officer recently laid this out clearly. He said that the digital asset space has spent fifteen years trying all kinds of fancy token valuation methods, but the next truly important innovation might just be the approach stock investors have long used: making money, increasing profits, allocating capital well, and ultimately letting token holders share in the gains. The words are simple, but they hit the core issue.
In the past, a project would issue tokens with grand stories, and token prices were supported solely by expectations and sentiment, no one cared if the project was losing money. Now it's different—on-chain protocols can actually generate cash flow, like fees from decentralized exchanges, commissions from staking protocols, interest spreads from lending protocols. These real revenues finally give traditional metrics like profit and buyback-and-burn a meaningful role.
The contrast is clear. Retail investors still rely on charts, while institutions have picked up the price-to-earnings ratio as their measure. Protocols with stable income and chains that reliably capture fees have more solid token value. Decentralized exchanges and staking protocols with strong fee capture can already show real quarterly revenues, and institutions using P/E ratios to value them is far more reliable than valuing a project based only on Twitter followers. Valuation logic is moving from castles in the air down to solid ground, and the gap between pie-in-the-sky tokens and money-printing machines will widen.
Of course, implementation is not that simple. On-chain income is volatile, tokens and equity are not the same, and rules about dividends—whether to distribute and how—are still undecided. More importantly, making money on-chain doesn’t mean token holders actually get a share; many protocols’ revenues go into treasuries or team pockets, unrelated to token holders. This measure can quantify income but not how much ends up in your pocket.
So for ordinary token holders, don’t get carried away just because the project’s financials look good. First ask how that money relates to your tokens. If you can’t answer, even a low P/E ratio is just empty joy. No matter how precise the institution’s measure is, it can’t gauge your greed or fear. That’s why the same financial report can be seen as an opportunity by some and a trap by others. Valuation is never just calculated; it’s a game of strategy.
What do you think— which chain will be the next to be revalued by institutions using the P/E ratio?BTC rose 11% breaking through 70K USD, gold increased by 4%
The 30-year US Treasury yield is approaching 5.4%, the US Treasury Department urgently repurchased
[The market seems to have started speculating on the narrative of US debt crisis + BTC + gold]
The 30-year US Treasury yield at 5.4% is the highest since 2007
This indicates that lending money to the US government requires the market to charge higher risk compensation
[The US Treasury Department can't sit still]
On August 19, it announced raising the single repurchase limit of US Treasuries from 2 billion USD to at least 4 billion
After the news came out
The 30-year yield dropped from around 5.33% back to about 5.20%
The 10-year also fell from 4.71% to 4.64%
This magnitude is equivalent to the market indeed sneezing
[This is a desperate measure that does not solve the problem]
Where does the US Treasury get the money to repurchase US Treasuries?
Isn't it still borrowed from the market?
Everyone is originally worried about nearly 40 trillion USD of US debt weighing down
It’s unlikely to be repaid in the future
They sell US Treasuries to control risk
Demanding higher interest compensation
Now instead of trying to increase income, reduce expenses, and improve debt repayment ability
They take borrowed money to rush into the market to buy their own debt
Simply trying to artificially lower interest rates
So others can borrow money more cheaply
Why should that be?A plumber's word made this coin rise ten thousand times
The most magical thing in the crypto world often happens in a single sentence. On August 11, trader Frank DeGods casually mentioned the word plumber on social media. That word became the name of a certain meme coin, which then surged to a ten-thousand-fold increase, all without a whitepaper or roadmap.
No team, no product, the project party might even be nonexistent. PLUMBER was ignited by just one word, the community went viral on Crypto Twitter, retail investors rushed in, and the price multiplied over a hundred times within days. This kind of thing is not uncommon on Solana, but a ten-thousand-fold increase still stunned people, especially since there was no decent performance to support it from zero to ten thousand times, and no substantial data could be found on-chain.
What’s even more intriguing is the on-chain data. These coins often lack decent liquidity; the pools are as thin as paper. Tens of thousands of dollars can create a straight bullish candle line. The group cheers, seemingly like big money entering, but it might just be a few wallets trading back and forth. Later retail investors click the link and buy at a falling price, while the earlier ones have already cashed out.
Looking at the bigger picture, meme launchpads produce nearly two thousand new coins daily. Statistics show that 99% go to zero, with a median drop of 97%. PLUMBER’s ten-thousand-fold surge is an extremely rare survivor bias; among a thousand coins, it’s the one, while the other 999 are forgotten, let alone profitable.
Compare it with other memes this week: DOGO rose 57% in one day, JIMOTHY surged over three times after Elon Musk posted a raccoon video, and FRONG was born by accident on the Robinhood chain. Each has a story, each is priced by attention, not value. Attention comes fast and goes fast; when the hype fades, thin pools mean you can’t even exit quickly.
We must recognize that meme coins profit from emotional arbitrage, not company profits. What comes fast goes fast. When you see a ten-thousand-fold increase, the whales might already be selling while you’re still trying to figure out why it’s rising.
Some treat memes as the crypto market’s thermometer; the crazier the rise, the more active the scene. But a high temperature could also mean a fever, not health. Don’t mistake hype for a trend. Wait until the pool is thick and you can exit safely before considering participation.
Do you know anyone who rushed in just because of a single word? Regulatory easing reopens compliant token financing channels
After being suppressed for more than half a year, token financing channels seem to be opening again. This week, the SEC proposed a new draft rule for crypto asset issuance, aiming to exempt certain digital asset issuers from registration requirements, effectively providing projects with a legal fundraising channel without having to hide overseas to issue tokens.
This reversal is quite striking. In previous years, the SEC was the most troublesome opponent for the crypto industry, frequently issuing subpoenas and lawsuits, making fundraising a precarious endeavor for projects, always fearing being classified as securities. Now the tide has turned; regulators are proactively offering a safe harbor, creating a complete path for tokens to move from legal fundraising to exemption from securities regulation. Such a shift in attitude was unimaginable two years ago.
Don't forget, just on the 14th of this month, the SEC canceled a scheduled meeting to discuss crypto asset issuance rules, which disappointed the market. Now the draft is back, indicating internal debates have not stopped, and the pattern of easing then tightening will likely continue. Unlike the already implemented GENIUS stablecoin legislation, this draft targets token issuance itself, covering a broader scope and affecting the entire primary market, not just the stablecoin niche.
How exactly will it be relaxed? The draft provides two exemption paths: one for small-scale issuances and another for qualified projects. The core is to clearly regulate token issuances that would otherwise require securities registration. For the market, this means the primary market could become lively again, projects no longer need to detour, and retail investors have a chance to participate under a more transparent framework instead of just taking over tokens in private groups.
But don't get too excited yet. Exemption does not mean no regulation; projects still must disclose required information and respect boundaries. Also, the draft is still a draft; after public consultation, revisions, and implementation, the timeline remains uncertain. Historically, SEC crypto rules have often been pending; how broad this opening will be and who will oversee it depends on detailed rules. It's too early to talk about full deregulation.
The impact on us traders is direct: reopening compliant token issuance channels will activate primary market funds, but more new assets also mean sharper blades. In the short term, sentiment will be boosted; in the long term, only those who can truly execute within the rules will survive, while projects that only make empty promises will still be eliminated.
Do you think this easing truly unbinds the industry, or is it just replacing the reins with a finer one?The boss of the world's largest exchange is betting the bull market on a single bill
The boss of the world's largest compliant exchange made his position clear today. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted a vision chart on social media, expressing hope that the CLARITY Act will receive strong bipartisan votes on September 15, followed by what he calls "Uptober," kicking off the next round of the cryptocurrency bull market.
This sounds like a call to action, but it carries significant weight. Coinbase is the exchange with the most users in the U.S., and the boss publicly tying the bull market to a single bill is essentially putting the entire industry's expectations on the table. His wording was "just as prophesied," with a tone full of certainty, even specifying the exact month.
But reality is not so straightforward. The CLARITY Act still has a long procedural path; the September 15 vote is only one step. Bipartisan negotiations, Senate amendments, and final implementation could all cause delays. Earlier, the American Bankers Association already stated support for the bill's passage but wants the stablecoin reward provisions tightened, as banks fear stablecoins will drain deposits. You see, even insiders are not united, so the final version of the bill will likely differ from the current draft.
More delicately, there's the Trump side. The White House recently had a meal with giants like Coinbase, Kraken, and Ripple, verbally calling for an end to the war on crypto, yet the Trump family's own crypto business has already earned over $1.4 billion this year. The overlap between policymakers and stakeholders means the market will sooner or later have to reprice this entanglement; when the positive effects are realized, they might also be fully priced in.
To add, the CLARITY Act aims to clarify the jurisdiction between the SEC and CFTC, defining Bitcoin and similar assets as digital commodities and assigning some tokens to commodity regulation, no longer fully governed by securities law. This is a real moat for Coinbase; with license certainty, institutions will dare to enter the market in force. But political cycles wait for no one; before the midterm elections in November, any bill could be used as a bargaining chip. Whether the September vote passes smoothly is uncertain.
For us, whether this bill is a genuine positive or an early overextension of expectations is unclear now. But one thing is certain: the fact that the exchange boss dares to publicly bet on it shows that the channel for compliant funds to enter is indeed opening. In the short term, don't take this as a battle cry; in the long term, you can track regulatory implementation as an industry watershed. The September vote is worth marking on your calendar.
Do you trust Armstrong's prophecy more, or do you think this is just another case of managing expectations?Eight surrender red lights are on, but institutions advise retail investors not to bottom-fish
Let's start with a data point that hits hard. VanEck's latest report says that among the twelve Bitcoin surrender indicators they track, eight have already slipped into the extreme zone. This is not some individual's panic call; it's a health check list compiled by institutions themselves, based on on-chain data and holding structures, so it can't be easily dismissed as fabricated.
These eight red lights cover old indicators like price retracement, miner profitability, and the proportion of holders at a loss. What's more painful is that in the past three months, all twelve indicators have been triggered at least once. Historically, when eight to twelve indicators light up simultaneously, Bitcoin's average return over the next ninety days is 12.8%, and over 180 days is 32%, both below the long-term average. In other words, the lights turning on doesn't mean an immediate reversal tomorrow; rather, it indicates the market is still in deep waters, so don't rush to treat the signal lights as a starting gun.
Here's the contrast. Most people see eight red lights and instinctively think the bottom has arrived and rush to buy. But VanEck itself pours cold water, saying this cluster of signals is better suited to judging the cycle position and is not a bottom-fishing signal. Bitcoin has already dropped about 49% from last October's high, and the 30-day realized volatility has fallen to 27.2%, only about 30% of the long-term average. The market seems drained of energy, so quiet it's eerie, but quiet often precedes big moves.
Miners are having an even harder time. Network daily revenue has dropped about 46% year-over-year, mining difficulty has fallen 18.3% from last November's peak, one of the largest declines since China's mining ban in 2021. A batch of inefficient mining machines has already shut down and exited. Whether miners will become the last straw to break the price is worth watching. Their retreat is both a cost clearance and a potential source of selling pressure.
Interestingly, just before the report was released, Bitcoin violently surged from around $63,000, liquidating over $1 billion in shorts within an hour, like a short squeeze. But VanEck's data reminds us that such pulses are not the same as a true cycle bottom. The rebound can be fierce, but bottom confirmation is slow, and the two are often confused by emotions.
For those of us trading swings, this data boils down to one sentence: the market is still clearing out, but volatility is suppressed. The lower the volatility, the harder the directional move will be later. In the short term, don't mistake low volatility for safety; in the long term, start paying attention to layout windows for cycles over a year.
Do you think these eight red lights represent the last stretch of darkness before dawn, or just a mid-journey pause to catch a breath? Bitcoin squeezes $1 billion shorts in one hour
In that one hour at dawn, Bitcoin surged directly from 68,000 to 70,000, the bullish candle on the screen was so steep it hardly seemed real. It then fell back to around 69,800, but the intraday gain still stubbornly clung above 8%. What’s truly frightening isn’t the price, but the string of liquidation numbers on-chain. According to Bloomberg statistics, in just sixty minutes, over $1 billion worth of Bitcoin short positions were forcibly liquidated, marking the largest short squeeze since 2021. Those who had bet on Bitcoin falling for half a year were kicked out by the market within an hour.
This situation is somewhat absurd. In recent months, the most crowded trade in the market was shorting Bitcoin. Everyone thought the macro environment was bad, regulations were uncertain, and mining farms were doomed; short positions piled up layer upon layer. Then the U.S. Treasury suddenly announced doubling the scale of long-term bond repurchases, from $2 billion per operation directly to $4 billion, and the yield on the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond also fell by about nine basis points. Liquidity expectations changed instantly. On top of that, Trump invited major industry players like Coinbase and Kraken to the White House for talks, signaling a push for a friendlier regulatory framework. These two forces combined, and the shorts found themselves on the wrong side.
As the price rose, shorts had to buy back to cover, and this buying pushed the price higher, forcing more to liquidate, like a snowball rolling downhill. According to Coinglass data, in the past 24 hours alone, shorts on BTC and ETH were liquidated for over $600 million and $360 million respectively. If the entire crypto market is included, the total liquidation amount in this round approaches $1.3 billion, with over 100,000 traders taking losses, more than 90% of whom were shorts. Crypto stocks also collectively took off, with Strategy rising nearly 13%, and Coinbase up over 9%. The whole market felt like a tightly wound spring suddenly released.
But amid the excitement, no one can really answer the key question. Is this rebound supported by real money stepping in, or is it just a short-covering rally forced by liquidations? If it’s the latter, once the forced buy orders run out, can the price hold above the 70,000 mark? No one has a clear answer. Do you think you’ve bottomed out this wave, or are you caught in the middle again? A company that helps NVIDIA label data is worth $20 billion
The recent capital moves in the AI circle have been quite astonishing. According to The Information, NVIDIA is negotiating an investment with a data labeling company called Mercor, which is currently pushing a financing round with a valuation soaring to $20 billion, with existing shareholder General Catalyst in talks to lead the investment.
You might not have heard of Mercor, but what it does is very straightforward: hiring people to tag images and text, feeding this to AI models as training data. This tough job has mainly served closed-source giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which doesn’t sound glamorous at all. Moreover, it labels not only text but also tasks that teach AI to understand images and videos. This business has a low entry barrier but cannot do without humans; the top-tier models rely even more on manual quality control.
The turning point lies with NVIDIA itself. It plans to launch the open-source model Nemotron, aiming to compete with the world’s most advanced open-source models. Data quality directly determines success or failure, which is why it is investing heavily to build labeling capacity. Last quarter alone, NVIDIA paid Mercor tens of millions of dollars and also used companies like Turing and Scale, while maintaining its own internal data team. The chip giant has ironically become a major backer of labeling companies, which is quite a contrast.
What’s even more intriguing is where the money flows. Mercor’s $20 billion valuation round would have been unthinkable six months ago. Back then, the market was worried about an AI bubble burst, but now capital is queuing up to pour in. Looking further back, Google borrowed heavily to build computing power, OpenAI raised tens of billions in credit before going public, and AI debt financing has already piled up to nearly $500 billion. The massive funds machines need to consume are competing for the same risk appetite capital as our crypto space. Don’t forget, crypto itself is desperately telling AI stories, but the real cash is flowing solidly to Silicon Valley’s labeling factories.
This is actually an old story. Every time there’s a tech frenzy, the real money is often made not by the stars on stage but by the shovel sellers. In AI, the shovel is data labeling; in crypto, meme-based shovel-selling platforms recently made tens of millions monthly. When the hype dies down, who’s left exposed is unknown, but those collecting tolls at the base layer already have full accounts.
Interestingly, crypto is also riding the same wave. Arthur Hayes just returned pushing FLOP as fuel for AI Agents, with various DeFAI narratives on everyone’s lips. But at the real money table, the lowest-level work like data labeling has already surged to a $20 billion valuation.
We retail investors watch daily which meme might rise, while capital quietly bets on AI’s most unnoticeable infrastructure. The excitement belongs to others, and our liquidity is being quietly moved away. When this wave passes, how much water remains in the crypto space might be the most important thing to ponder next.The most heavily shorted crypto stocks have all gone crazy with gains
During the hour when Bitcoin surged to $70,000, a group of people in the US pre-market were more panicked than anyone else. They weren't retail investors, but professional short sellers who had bet months ago that crypto stocks would collapse.
On Wednesday, the crypto market saw its biggest rebound since March. Bitcoin rose nearly 8% in a single day, briefly touching $70,000 intraday, while Ethereum soared nearly 20%, marking its largest single-day gain since March. Just Bitcoin shorts were liquidated for over $1 billion within an hour, the most intense short squeeze since 2021. Throughout the day, nearly $2 billion worth of positions across the crypto market were forcibly liquidated, the vast majority being shorts.
Riding this momentum, several of the most heavily shorted stocks on Wall Street collectively took off. Strategy closed up nearly 12% that day, at one point surging over 13%, with its stock price rising above $103; Coinbase gained 9%, Circle nearly 10%, and even BitMine, which holds the most Ethereum, rose about 10%.
What really tormented the shorts was how tightly these stocks were tied to the coin prices. Strategy holds about 840,000 Bitcoin, making it the publicly listed company with the largest Bitcoin holdings globally, and its stock price almost mirrors Bitcoin's. BitMine holds about 5.82 million Ethereum, making it the closest publicly listed pure Ethereum exposure. When coin prices rise, shorts are forced to buy back to cover, which in turn pushes the stock prices higher, creating a self-reinforcing rally. The fund managers who originally bet on these stocks going to zero ended up fueling the rebound.
There was also a macroeconomic push behind this. The US Treasury just announced it would at least double its long-term bond repurchase scale, raising it from $2 billion per operation to $4 billion, causing the 30-year Treasury yield to fall immediately. Market liquidity expectations loosened suddenly, and risk assets collectively warmed up. On the same day, Trump met with crypto giants like Coinbase and Kraken at the White House and hinted that the SEC is drafting friendlier issuance rules. With all these positive factors stacking up, the shorts were completely panicked.
The rebound in Coinbase and Strategy was especially driven by short covering. Both were heavily shorted stocks, and when prices reversed, those betting against them had no choice but to buy back. However, even after this rally, these companies are still down for the year; one day's bounce hasn't filled the previous losses.
Now everyone is focused on the same question: can Bitcoin truly hold above $70,000, or is this rally ultimately just a collective short squeeze? The market calls this kind of rise a short squeeze, but short squeezes are always a double-edged sword. Those who bet on crypto stocks going to zero got squeezed hard this time. When a rebound relies on short covering rather than genuine buying power, how long can this excitement last? What do you think?The trigger for this surge was Trump's speech at the White House summit. He said the US is considering a large purchase of Bitcoin and crypto assets — but he's been saying this for four years, and it hasn't materialized yet.
He also mentioned hoping the "Clarity Act" can pass quickly to maintain the US's leading position in the crypto field.
Interestingly, he specifically named a certain exchange as promising for entering the US market, and as a result, that token surged 20% immediately!
Then he wanted to ask the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates again. After he spoke, the market took off, open interest quickly piled up, funding rates dropped simultaneously, ultimately triggering an extremely fierce long squeeze.
In the past 12 hours, the total liquidation amount across the network exceeded $1.76 billion, which is quite staggering!
Actually, volatility has been suppressed during this period. Historical patterns tell us: the more volatility is squeezed, the stronger the subsequent market moves will be, and this time it perfectly proved true.
But now, there's a very abnormal huge gap on the liquidation map: the liquidity below far exceeds that above! If the price drops to around $55,000, long liquidations will exceed $7 billion; whereas if it surges to $78,000, short liquidations are only about $3 billion. This huge disparity indicates that if the main force wants to liquidate downward, the profit margin and selling pressure below are obviously much greater. Currently, the price is challenging the "bull market support zone," a tough barrier. Although the range has been broken, the 4-hour candle close confirmation is meaningless; what really matters is whether this week's weekly candle can close steadily above the resistance line. There are still a few days left this week; if it holds, the market will continue strongly; if not, this will be a typical false breakout.
Looking deeper, in every past bear market, Bitcoin's "iron bottom" was only truly established after breaking below both short-term and long-term realized cost bases. These two cost lines currently lie roughly between $50,000 and $55,000. This means that although this rebound looks good, we may not be completely out of danger yet — a similar sharp rally happened in 2022 but was ruthlessly crushed afterward. So, although this rise is indeed driven by Trump's speech, from a technical perspective, we are still in the bear market bottoming phase. Without more confirming signals, I won't blindly conclude that the bottom has been reached.
I previously precisely bottomed a long position at $58,000 and will continue to hold it. I've held it for a long time; many people have sold out along the way, but of course, I hope it keeps flying upward. My defensive pyramid orders have been laid all the way down; you can learn about my strategy internally. I'm also ready to add more at the bottom if the price breaks down and retests the lows. This week's weekly close is the indicator I will watch most closely next.
Ethereum has also risen in sync and looks ready to explode on the charts, but I think the safest strategy now is to keep steady daily investments in the currently undervalued range. I don't rule out the possibility it might hit new lows along with Bitcoin.
That's all for today. If you found this useful, remember to like and follow Forbes says Bitcoin can solve the dollar's Triffin dilemma
Forbes recently published a long article proposing a big thesis: Bitcoin might solve the dollar's Triffin dilemma and become a global neutral reserve asset. It sounds like a hype call, but the logic behind it is worth unpacking. After all, this isn't some random site; it's a reputable financial media seriously discussing this, not just blowing smoke.
The Triffin dilemma refers to the fact that the dollar serves both as the global trade settlement currency and as the domestic credit currency, which is hard to balance. In the long run, it inevitably causes tension: if too much is issued, the world complains; if too little is issued, the US economy collapses first. Forbes suggests that Bitcoin, an asset not tied to any country's credit and with a fixed total supply coded in, could act as a neutral chip that no one controls, patching the international reserve system and allowing countries not to all crowd onto the dollar boat.
Looking at on-chain data, this idea has some basis. In recent years, central banks and institutions worldwide have started discussing BTC as a reserve allocation option. The proportion of long-term holding addresses on-chain is also rising, indicating that some money truly regards it as digital gold rather than just a speculative chip. The proportion of holders keeping it for over a year remains high, showing these holders do not intend to move it.
But don't get too excited. This is more of a long-term narrative, not a market move happening tomorrow. In the short term, Bitcoin is still driven by macro interest rates and liquidity; big terms like the Triffin dilemma are far from the trading floor. To truly treat it as a reserve asset, hurdles like regulation, volatility, and custody remain unresolved. Institutional purchases are still small-scale tests, nowhere near replacing anyone. Ultimately, whether Bitcoin can be a reserve depends not on how well articles are written but on whether central banks are willing to actually put it on their balance sheets. Right now, it's still small-scale testing, far from being a true global reserve. Don't be dazzled by grand narratives.
Long-term, you can trust this direction; short-term, don't use it as a reason for a surge. From another perspective, Forbes daring to raise this topic shows that mainstream finance circles have begun seriously discussing Bitcoin within the reserve asset framework. This itself is a change. Ten years ago, no one compared it with the dollar system; now it’s on the table thanks to real institutional money entering this cycle. Whether it succeeds is another story, but the narrative level is rising. For long-term holders, this is far more important than tomorrow’s price moves; direction matters more than price points.
Do you think Bitcoin can really become a global reserve, or is this just another pretty story? The parent company behind BONK only has enough cash to last 9 days
For those still holding BONK, this is a must-read. Odaily checked the parent company behind BONK, which stands behind a market cap of about $22 million, and found that the company only has enough cash on hand to last 9 days. Yes, nine days, not nine months. At the current burn rate, by the end of the month, they might not even be able to keep the lights on, let alone pay salaries.
This contrast is heartbreaking. The coin price is propped up by community sentiment, with a market cap still over $20 million, but the people truly supporting this project have just over a week's worth of cash left in their pockets. Meme coins rely on attention; once the narrative cools down and buying stops, the parent company won’t even be able to pay salaries. What will support the coin then? Love? But love doesn’t pay the bills.
Don’t underestimate this signal. The lifeline of a meme coin has never been technology, but the continuous willingness of people to buy in. The parent company having only 9 days of cash means it has no capacity to develop, market, or build an ecosystem—it can only rely on market conditions to survive. When the market is good, everything’s fine; when it cools, the first to collapse are these thinly capitalized tokens because no one is injecting more money, and the price crashes on its own.
Of course, some bet on it being acquired or another hype wave to extend its life. Such things have happened in the meme space before; last year, some dog-themed coins had a brief revival thanks to a narrative boost. But betting on survival and betting on your own insight are two different things. Short-term emotional trading is fine, but don’t treat these tokens as long-term holds to cling to. Even leaving a tiny portion in your portfolio is already too much; a total wipeout could happen in a day.
Looking more broadly, BONK is not an isolated case. Many meme coins are supported by small teams; when the market is good, everyone calls them treasures, but when it cools, even operations can’t be maintained. The parent company having only 9 days of cash is far more common in the meme space than people think. So this isn’t bad news for just one coin—it’s a warning to everyone holding meme coins as major positions. You’re betting on the narrative, not the company. Don’t mistake a gust of wind for a foundation; when the wind stops, you’ll see who’s swimming naked. So when looking at meme coins, don’t just check if the community is lively—check how much ammunition the parent company has left. The excitement is someone else’s; the ammunition is yours. A project with no money on the books is just paper-thin no matter how lively it seems. When the market is good, everyone looks like a genius; when the tide recedes, you see who’s swimming naked. This saying is most true in the meme space.
How many more months can the parent company behind the meme you hold keep burning cash?Retail investors are frantically buying put options while still bullish on the underlying
Recently, retail investors in the US stock market did something quite unusual. According to data from Vanda Research, the volume of put options bought for the 12 most popular stocks this year is nearly double that of the first quarter. This defensive bet accounts for 110% of net cash inflows, up from 26%. In plain terms, retail investors are verbally bearish but still pouring money in, buying more puts than the stocks themselves, which on paper looks like panic.
Don’t be fooled by appearances. Buying a lot of put options doesn’t necessarily mean true bearishness; often, they are used as insurance or purely to bet on volatility. The report says the underlying bullish setup hasn’t changed; retail investors are just buying protection for their long positions, while also using leveraged ETFs and prediction markets to chase higher returns. When it comes to actually closing positions, they’re reluctant—typical tough talk but soft hands.
This mentality is the same as in the crypto space. Bitcoin recently bounced from 65,000 to 70,000, scaring people into buying hedges, but when it comes to exiting, few are willing to leave. The market’s biggest fear isn’t bearishness but everyone verbally fearing a drop yet not selling, which can cause a stampede once the trend reverses. When liquidity is good, it’s fine; when fragile, a single trigger can spook everyone and drag the whole market down.
The macro backdrop also matters. The US Treasury has directly increased long-term bond repurchases, causing the 30-year Treasury yield to fall 9 basis points from its high to 5.19%. With liquidity easing, risk assets collectively catch their breath. Retail investors buying puts now seem more like buying tickets for a possible pullback, not deserting. If a real crash happens, they might be the first to rush in and buy bargains, turning into bottom-fishing troops. This fearful-but-buying mindset actually indicates the market hasn’t hit a despair bottom yet; true bottoms often occur when even hedging is too lazy to buy. The fact that people are still willing to pay for insurance means money is still in the market and not completely lost hope.
Looking at the longer term, this fearful-but-buying behavior often appears during market bottoming phases. At the real bottom, everyone shouts “it will fall” but doesn’t actually sell; when the market turns, these people become the ones igniting the rally. Vanda’s data also shows put buying is concentrated in these 12 popular stocks, indicating fear is very specific, not a broad collapse. Localized anxiety with no overall crash is actually a relatively healthy state, more stable than widespread panic.
Are you secretly hedging yourself, or stubbornly holding on to the end? What does it mean that Shanghai included Web3 in its five-year plan?
Sometimes, domestic frontline moves are more worth pondering than a piece of overseas regulatory news. In Shanghai's recently issued Digital Shanghai 15th Five-Year Plan, it explicitly states the intention to carry out research on the Web3.0 innovation pilot mechanism, and specifically calls for innovation in third-generation internet applications, promoting artificial intelligence, the metaverse, embodied intelligence, and Web3 in the same sentence with considerable weight.
This is interesting. On one hand, token trading is not openly allowed; on the other hand, a top-tier frontline city includes Web3 as infrastructure in its five-year blueprint. The contradiction is clear: regulators want control over underlying technology and industrial discourse power, not to encourage retail investors to rush in and speculate. This approach is similar to early support for the internet and AI—first controlling financial risks, then holding the technology tightly, and only opening up when the timing is right, managing the pace very steadily.
For us, the signal is more critical than the literal words. A city of Shanghai's scale engaging in research on Web3 pilot zones effectively leaves a door open for compliant on-chain applications and enterprise-level blockchain. Future projects involving settlement, data rights confirmation, and stablecoin peripheral infrastructure will have more room to land than now, and talent and capital will more easily gather along this line. After all, when policy direction changes, money follows. Ultimately, including Web3 in the plan does not mean token prices will rise; it affects the industrial soil for the next three to five years. Those who truly want to plan ahead should focus on which types of applications will be approved first, not just the few points on today's market.
But don't misunderstand. The plan does not mention token speculation once, nor does it open any door for retail investors. Anyone hoping to use this as an opportunity to pump prices should stop early. Short-term speculators should not treat this as a bullish signal to act recklessly; long-term technical developers can pay attention to whether Shanghai will issue specific pilot zone rules, such as which scenarios will be approved first and which institutions can enter early—that is the real opportunity.
Looking ahead, Shanghai including Web3 in the official plan means more than just adding a slogan. It sends a signal to local developers and enterprises that this line is a long-term asset in policy vision, not a passing trend. The real bottleneck remains the implementation details and pilot scope; whoever gets the entry ticket first will occupy the ecological niche early. All regions are competing for this position; Shanghai has moved, and other cities will likely follow. No one wants to lose this piece of the pie.
Do you think this move truly loosens restrictions on Web3, or is it just a different way of tightening control over the ecosystem?13F Data Shows Institutions Increasing ETH Holdings Against the Trend, Outperforming BTC
The Q2 institutional holdings report is out, and after going through it, it feels quite counterintuitive. Most institutions not only didn’t cut positions during the downturn but actually increased their crypto asset holdings against the trend, and the asset they added the most wasn’t Bitcoin, but ETH. The report states that ETH exposure comprehensively outperformed BTC, both in terms of holding proportion and quarterly growth, with ETH surpassing BTC. This is completely different from last year’s blind accumulation of BTC, indicating that institutional preferences have quietly shifted.
In simple terms, smart money is rebalancing. Last year, everyone treated BTC as the only answer; now they are moving positions toward ETH, betting that as the Ethereum ecosystem’s fees, staking, and ETF channels gradually smooth out, ETH will have greater upside potential than Bitcoin. In Q2, ETF fund flows and institutional behavior were somewhat decoupled; institutions were buying at their own pace, not simply following retail investors’ subscription trends. This shows these players are adding based on their own models, not chasing hype.
What does this mean for our market? If ETH can continue to outperform BTC in this rally, then the altcoin season signs are not just empty talk. Many who have been waiting in altcoins are anticipating this moment. But don’t get carried away—institutional accumulation is a slow quarterly process, not a buy today, pump tomorrow scenario. Using the ETH/BTC ratio as a short-term reference is much more reliable than focusing on a single coin. The ratio often turns before prices do, providing an early signal.
The long-term logic is clearer. Institutionalization of crypto has deepened significantly over the past two years. The 13F filings show more traditional asset managers including digital assets in their portfolios, with even pension funds and endowments cautiously allocating some. The market may still be shaking on a bear market framework in the short term, but institutional moves at the bottom area often carry more information than retail panic—they are voting with real money, not just shouting bullish.
Looking back at this cycle, institutions have quietly shifted from only recognizing Bitcoin last year to reallocating toward ETH this year, mainly betting on improved liquidity after Ethereum spot ETFs get approved. Data doesn’t lie—where real money flows is where the long-term story holds. What we retail investors should learn most is not to blindly follow trading calls but to watch where the big money moves and then decide which side to take. Don’t just be led around by a single line. Institutional rebalancing is slow, but its direction is more valuable than retail sentiment.
In this wave, do you trust the direction of institutional rebalancing more, or do you think they are just taking the bag?