Oh, and the macro charts? They are positively stomach-churning. Ethereum, the once grand champion of altcoins, has barely managed to drag itself over the $2,000 threshold, as if crawling past its 2021 peak in some sort of wounded triumph. Yet here it stands, more than 60% away from its all-time high, teetering on the edge of a precipice. How delightful!
Take the recent Middle East tango-traditional markets were out cold, but crypto? Oh, it was doing the cha-cha with volatility! Bitcoin funding rates went negative faster than a Brooks comedy at a serious film festival. Meanwhile, derivatives were the real stars, with Perpetual Futures volume hitting $92 trillion in 2025. Spot trading? Pfft, that’s so last century!
Strategy (Nasdaq: MSTR), the company with the largest corporate stash of bitcoin, casually tweeted on X (because, of course, that’s where all major financial revelations happen) on March 6 that some of the planet’s heftiest asset managers are holding its stock. That’s right, the kind of investors who could probably buy a small country without blinking.
I recently discussed the inherent issues with traditional finance on The Crypto Beat. I explained that established institutions, like Morgan Stanley with its combined trading and custody services, are fundamentally conflicted. Unlike crypto-native companies, these traditional firms have built-in conflicts of interest that aren’t easily resolved – it’s not just a matter of compliance, but a core problem with how they operate.
In a post that surely sent hearts aflutter, Luke proclaimed this to be a textbook bull flag after an 8-month consolidation. A pole height measured move points to $11, while the 1.618 Fib extension whispers of $11.20. Oh, the precision! But let’s not forget, a 700% rally from the current price is like expecting a snail to win a sprint. Possible? Perhaps. Probable? Well, that’s a different kettle of fish.
A New York federal judge has allowed a large group of investors to move forward together with their lawsuit against Tether and Bitfinex. Judge Katherine Polk Failla’s decision means these investors won’t have to file separate lawsuits; they can proceed as a class action.
Though a mere seven pages-a whisper compared to the verbose tomes of yesteryear-it brims with grandiloquent notions of cyber offense and deterrence. Implementation, one might observe with a wry smile, is treated as an afterthought, perhaps left for someone less busy counting electoral votes or retweeting.
The most conspicuous sign of this transformation is the meteoric rise of perpetual futures on conventional assets. Imagine a perpetual motion machine of trading, where commodities, equities, and macro assets twirl endlessly, unbothered by office hours or lunch breaks. Unlike conventional markets, which politely close their gates at five, crypto exchanges keep the lights on, as if mocking the concept of “business hours” with a sly grin.
CryptoQuant’s omniscient analyst Maartunn (who, according to reports, has a near‑perfect memory of every ad on a vending machine) has posted on X that the metric measuring the top ten depot inflows against the total exchange inflow has finally decided to let the whales bite back.
The latest dip is a combination of several “fun” macroeconomic hits: rising oil prices, a disappointingly weak U.S. jobs report, and, of course, a wave of liquidations across the crypto derivatives market that hit like a tsunami. Traders, apparently a tad bit too confident with their leverage, were forced to pay the piper, sending prices lower. The whole scene screams: “Risk-off, folks. Time to panic!”
