Fed’s Doing “Stealth” Rate Cuts? Bitcoin Bros Go Wild and Larry David Can’t Stand It

What to know:

By Omkar Godbole (All times ET. Or who knows, maybe Fed Time. What does it matter?)

Bitcoin bulls—they never stop, do they? If they’re not talking about the price “mooning,” they’re obsessing over Fed interest-rate cuts and “liquidity easing.” I mean, these guys get excited about the Fed like a kid with a new box of cookies. The dream? Rates go back to zero, just like 2020-21, and then, supposedly, everybody gets super rich… except me. Where’s my bull run, huh? 🤷‍♂️

Now, the geniuses at the New York and San Francisco Fed say there’s a 9% chance the benchmark rate falls to “zero lower bound” in the next seven years. Nine percent! “Significant over the medium to long term,” they say. Long term? Honestly, I might not even have patience for the next season of Curb, never mind seven years.

Short term, the odds rates hit zero in two years? Just 1%. One percent! You know what else happens only 1% of the time? Me eating a salad. But hey, all it takes is another “black swan event”—like, oh I don’t know, an asteroid made of NFTs smashing into Wall Street—and suddenly the Fed’s handing out zeros like it’s Oprah. For now, we’re stuck at 4.25% and all the traders are fighting over a single 25 bps rate cut like it’s the last bagel at brunch.

The Fed is apparently pulling off “stealth rate cuts.” They change a ratio here, free up a little money there—suddenly there’s cash sloshing around for banks to buy Treasurys. It’s like a magic trick, but the only thing disappearing is my faith in traditional finance, and I didn’t have much of it to begin with. Alexander Blume, some CEO, says Treasury’s buyback program is also trying to drown us in cheap money. Big surprise! The government finds a new creative way to dilute everything… like the plot of most late sequels.

No wonder the big traders smell the volatility like I smell onions in a restaurant. They’re piling into $130K bitcoin call options, which seems, frankly, insane. ETFs keep seeing positive inflows (bravo, you bought something that rhymes with “pet peeves”), and apparently there are bullish bets on XRP too. Good luck with that. 🙃

Elsewhere, Bit Digital—you ever heard of them? Me neither—finished some “strategic Treasury shift” to ETH after raising $172 million. Sure, why not. Dubai’s now got a QCD Money Market Fund, Qatar National Bank’s involved, and Australia’s DigitalX just raised money to buy more bitcoin. Is this news or someone’s fantasy football league for crypto?

Patrick Hansen at Circle—circle of what, I have no idea—says 53 companies got their MiCA licenses in six months. Apparently, that means people want “compliance-friendly products.” Have these people ever used a crypto wallet? Tether, the world’s biggest stablecoin issuer, still hasn’t gotten around to getting their license. Maybe they’re just waiting in line. It’s like the DMV, but for money that only exists on the internet.

Meanwhile, Japan’s 30-year bond hit 3.11%. You know what that means? Neither do I. But “renewed volatility” is the phrase of the day, so stay “alert.” Like everyone isn’t already nervously checking their portfolio every five minutes. 🤦‍♂️

Conferences

The CoinDesk Policy & Regulation conference (formerly “The Conference That Must Not Be Named”) is Sept. 10 in D.C. Regulatory folks and crypto people crowding together so they can argue about “oversight.” I’d pay good money just to watch them try to agree where to eat. Space is “limited” (wow, shocker), and there’s a discount code CDB10 for 10% off. Use it by July 17 or start a GoFundMe for your ticket, what do I care.

July 10-13: Mallorca Blockchain Days (Palma, Spain). Because nothing says “blockchain” like sangria.
July 16: Invest Web3 Forum (Dubai) – where the malls are air-conditioned but your money still sweats.
July 20: Crypto Coin Day 7/20 (Atlanta) – Home of Coke, and hopefully not crypto-winter.
July 24: Decasonic’s Web3 Investor Day 2025 (Chicago). Wait—2025? They’re really planning ahead for disappointment.
July 25: Blockchain Summit Global (Montevideo, Uruguay). Tango and tokens in one trip.
July 28-29: TWS Conference 2025 (Singapore). Because Asia never sleeps. Literally. Jet lag city.

Token Talk

By Shaurya Malwa

Sei Network’s total value locked went from $60 million to $626 million—a bigger glow-up than me at my high school reunion (and that’s saying something). 🚀
All this activity picked up after regulators in Japan gave the green light. You get a license, you get an all-time high. No license? No hype for you.
SEI price doubled in June, thanks to a government stablecoin pilot. So now we have stablecoins that go up and down! Makes perfect sense, right?
Don’t get too excited. SEI’s down 78% from its March peak and trading at $0.2649. Wild swings. More ups and downs than a failed relationship.
If it drops below $0.25, people say it could revisit $0.20. Who needs Netflix when you have this much drama?

Derivatives Positioning

BNB, TRX, SOL, XLM, AVAX—negative funding rates. People betting on them to fall because, you know, pessimism is the only thing truly decentralized.
BTC, ETH, XRP futures? Mildly bullish. So… a little optimism, but not enough to throw a parade.
Deribit traders loading up on $130K bitcoin calls. You do you, dreamers.
ETH block flows: someone’s betting big on $3,200 ETH calls in September, but hedging with $2,100 puts in July. Basically, they’re not sure, but want to look busy.

Market Movements

BTC: up 0.54% to $108,467.33 (or as we say, the price of a used studio in Brooklyn) (24hr: -0.23%)
ETH: up 0.74% to $2,552.44 (24hr: -0.28%)
CoinDesk 20: up 0.69%. No one really knows what this means but it’s up, so everyone’s happy.
BTC funding rate on Binance: 0.0036% (annualized 3.9157%). It’s not much, but it’s honest work.
Ether CESR Composite Staking Rate: up 4 bps at 2.97%. Whatever that is, it moved.

DXY? Down 0.14%. No one’s crying over this.
Gold futures: down 0.22% to $3,335.30. Maybe time to pawn grandma’s necklace?
Silver: unchanged at $36.93. Silver: it’s always the bridesmaid.
Nikkei 225, FTSE, Hang Seng—all up slightly. DJIA, S&P 500, Nasdaq—down. Markets up, markets down. You get the deal. Yawn.
US 10-Year Treasury rate: up a mind-boggling 2 bps to 4.415%. Hold onto your hats.
E-mini futures—some are up, some down, most unchanged. Like my enthusiasm for this paragraph.

Bitcoin Stats

BTC Dominance: 65.3% (unchanged since the invention of math)
ETH/BTC ratio: 0.02352 (it moved a whole 0.18%)
Hashrate: 884 EH/s, whatever that means—but it’s a lot. Very impressive. 🎩
Hashprice: $58.87… not enough to retire yet.
Total fees: 4.04 BTC / $438,326. Getting rich, one block at a time.
CME Open Interest: 148,445. More contracts than people at my cousin’s wedding.
BTC priced in gold: 32.6 oz—because who doesn’t love new ways to complicate things?
BTC vs gold market cap: 9.22%. Still playing second fiddle. Sorry, Satoshi.

Technical Analysis

Solana’s SOL token is forming a triangle on the chart. Traders sit around waiting for “direction cues,” which is the fancy way of saying “no idea what’s happening.”
Breakout might bring big gains, or maybe heartbreak. That’s crypto, baby!

Crypto Equities

MSTR: $395.67 (down 2.06%), rebounds to $399.01. Tough day at the Microstrategy casino.
Coinbase: $357.1 (up 0.37%). Next stop: selling t-shirts with their logo on it, like the rest of us.
Circle, Galaxy, MARA, Riot, Core Scientific, CleanSpark—half up, half down. Reminds me of my fantasy football team.
CoinShares Valkyrie ETF: $24.89 (down 4.38%). Was it ever up?
Semler, Exodus—all over the place. Like my faith in these markets.

ETF Flows

Spot BTC ETFs

Daily net flows: $216.5 million. Let’s just call it “magic internet money.”
Cumulative net flows: $49.84 billion. If I had that, I’d buy a small country. Or at least a nice car.
Total BTC holdings: about 1.25 million. Not bad.

Spot ETH ETFs

Daily net flows: $62.1 million
Cumulative net flows: $4.48 billion. Still losing to BTC. Better luck next year, Vitalik.
Total ETH holdings: around 4.18 million.

Overnight Flows

Chart of the Day

US spot ETH ETFs netted 61,000 ETH in fresh inflows. Eight winning weeks in a row. That’s called “a streak,” folks. Even my barber is impressed.
Bullish outlook. Apparently the second-largest crypto isn’t nearly as boring as the name “ether” suggests.