Good morning everybody.
I have to admit something.
I am deep in SpaceX FOMO.
SpaceX is up again pre-market, and here I am sitting on the sidelines like an idiot. I should have aped. I didn’t ape. And that is usually how this works. The things I ape into go down. The things I talk myself out of go straight up. That is basically the emotional cycle of trading.
A buddy texted me yesterday and said this whole SpaceX thing feels like a meme coin launch.
He is right.
It absolutely feels like a meme coin launch.
The difference is that this meme coin has reusable rockets, Starlink, government contracts, AI ambitions, and Elon Musk attached to it.
So maybe it keeps going. Maybe it dumps. Maybe I overcorrect and ape into the next big IPO because I missed this one, and then that one goes straight down.
That is how the market humiliates you.
The Trillion-Dollar Man
Speaking of SpaceX and Elon, the numbers around Musk are becoming almost impossible to understand.
His reported net worth is now somewhere around $1.3 trillion.
And yes, before the defenders show up, I know he does not have $1.3 trillion sitting in a checking account.
That is not the point.
The point is access.
The point is leverage.
The point is influence.
People love to say, “He doesn’t actually have that money.” Fine. But if Elon Musk needed to access $100 billion, I promise you he could get to it in one way or another. That is a different universe than the one regular people live in.
Most people do not understand how much money a billion dollars is because we throw these numbers around constantly.
The federal government spends trillions.
Cities ask for tens of millions to fix roads.
Wars get funded in billions.
After a while, the numbers stop feeling real.
But they are real.
A million dollars is still life-changing money.
A few million dollars can still let a person live comfortably for the rest of their life, depending on where they live.
Ten million dollars is generational wealth.
Twenty or thirty or fifty million dollars means your kids and probably their kids never have to work if the money is handled properly.
A billion dollars is not just rich.
A billion dollars is power.
A trillion dollars is something else entirely.
That kind of wealth does not just buy houses, cars, boats, or private jets. That kind of wealth buys influence. It buys access. It buys the ability to shape markets, elections, companies, infrastructure, and entire industries.
If someone had $300 billion and parked it in Treasuries at five percent, that is roughly $15 billion a year in interest.
Fifteen billion dollars a year.
You could fund every major election in the United States and still have billions left over.
That is the scale we are talking about.
And yet people still respond with, “Well, he doesn’t have it in cash.”
Okay.
Sure.
But that misses the entire point.
BlackRock Turns Bitcoin Volatility Into Income
Back in crypto, BlackRock launched its new Bitcoin income product this week.
The structure gives investors Bitcoin exposure while using options to generate income. That means institutions can earn from Bitcoin volatility, but there is a tradeoff. If Bitcoin rips higher, selling calls can cap the upside.
That is the deal.
You get yield.
You give up some moon.
This is also part of a bigger pattern we have been talking about for a while. ETFs, derivatives, and institutional products do not just bring new money into Bitcoin. They also smooth out volatility. They turn Bitcoin into something Wall Street can package, hedge, sell, and manage.
That is not necessarily bad.
But it is different.
The old Bitcoin was chaos.
The new Bitcoin is becoming a financial product.
Institutions Want DeFi Without Showing Their Hand
Zama, Morpho, and Steakhouse launched what The Block described as the first confidential DeFi yield product on Ethereum.
The idea is simple.
Institutions want DeFi yield, but they do not want the whole world watching their balances, positions, and strategies in real time.
That is one of the great contradictions of DeFi.
Transparency was one of the selling points.
Now transparency is also one of the biggest problems for large institutions.
If you are a fund, a bank, or a trading desk, you probably do not want your competitors watching every move you make on-chain. So confidential DeFi makes sense.
It also shows where this industry is going.
The institutions are not coming in exactly the way crypto idealists imagined. They are not showing up to embrace radical transparency and open financial systems out of principle.
They are showing up because there is yield, infrastructure, settlement, and money to be made.
And they want privacy while they do it.
The Fed Is Back On Stage
The Fed decision comes out today at 2 p.m.
Markets expect no change.
But markets always say that until they get surprised.
If the Fed really wanted to shock everyone, it could come out and start cutting harder than expected. I do not think that happens, but if it did, risk assets would move fast.
Bitcoin, tech stocks, AI names, SpaceX-adjacent mania, all of it would react.
For now, the market seems to be pricing in no major change.
We will see.
Congress Wants To Ban A U.S. CBDC
The Block reported that House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement on language that would ban a U.S. central bank digital currency.
And somehow this is inside a housing bill.
Because of course it is.
CBDC opposition has become a major part of crypto politics in the United States. A lot of lawmakers do not want a retail Fed-issued digital dollar. They would rather see private stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits become the rails.
I understand the argument against CBDCs.
I really do.
But I am not convinced private stablecoins are automatically better.
A government-controlled digital dollar has obvious problems.
But a privately controlled digital dollar issued by banks or corporations also has obvious problems.
I may be in the minority here, but I think private-sector money rails could become even more dangerous in some ways. If your money lives inside corporate terms of service, compliance systems, blacklists, frozen accounts, and fractional reserve games, I am not sure that is freedom.
It may just be a different cage.
The UK Wants Softer Stablecoin Rules
In the UK, lawmakers are urging the Bank of England to soften proposed stablecoin rules.
They argue that strict holding caps and reserve requirements could hurt the development of sterling-backed stablecoins.
I do not buy that argument.
What they really want is room for fractional reserve behavior.
They want to issue digital tokens while playing with the real money behind them.
That might be profitable.
It might even be inevitable.
But let’s not pretend it is some pure innovation argument. A lot of this is about who gets to hold the reserves, who earns the yield, and who controls the rails.
Nigeria Shows Why Stablecoins Matter
The IMF says stablecoin adoption in Nigeria is testing the limits of the country’s monetary and regulatory frameworks.
That is a very important story.
In places with weak currencies, banking friction, inflation, and demand for dollars, stablecoins are not just trading tools.
They become parallel money rails.
That is where stablecoins start becoming much more than crypto infrastructure.
They become usable money.
Not theoretical money.
Not white paper money.
Real money that people use because their local system is failing them.
That is one of the strongest use cases in crypto right now.
Is The Real Money In The Plumbing?
Reuters reported that some stablecoin analysts believe the biggest opportunity is not the stablecoin itself, but the infrastructure around it.
Wallets.
Custody.
Compliance.
Settlement.
Payment processors.
Bank integrations.
The rails.
I understand the argument. If everybody is using stablecoins, then the companies building the infrastructure can make a lot of money.
But I am not totally convinced that the tokens themselves are somehow less interesting.
Tether is allegedly one of the most profitable companies in the world.
How much more profitable do you need to be?
Yes, the plumbing matters. The rails matter. The wallets matter. The payment processors matter.
But if you are the one issuing the stablecoin, holding the reserves, and earning the yield, that looks like a pretty damn good business too.
Crypto Prices
Bitcoin is sitting at $64,850, down 1.9%.
Ethereum is at $1,760.
BNB is at $608.
XRP is at $1.19.
Solana is at $72.24.
Tron is at $0.32.
Hyperliquid is down 5.3%, sitting at $71.41.
Dogecoin is at $0.086.
My Take
I had a dream last night that Elon Musk made Dogecoin the currency of SpaceX.
That is where my brain is right now.
In the dream, SpaceX is building satellites, data centers in space, and some kind of future spacefaring economy. Elon gets up and says, “We need a way to transact.” Then he picks Dogecoin.
Doge goes from a $14 billion market cap to a $1.4 trillion market cap.
Basically a 100x.
Eight-dollar Dogecoin.
Would that be insane?
Yes.
Would it also be the most Elon thing imaginable?
Also yes.
And that is the weird place crypto is in right now.
The rails are being built.
The banks are involved.
The institutions are here.
Stablecoins are the talk of the town.
BlackRock is building Bitcoin income products.
Ethereum is getting confidential institutional yield.
Governments are fighting over CBDCs.
But I keep coming back to the same question.
When does Bitcoin get its moment?
When does Ethereum become the backbone?
When does Dogecoin, or any crypto asset, actually get implemented into something massive that normal people use?
Because right now, I do not want to say the industry feels dead. That is too strong.
But I do think it feels unresolved.
The infrastructure is here.
The money is here.
The banks are here.
The products are here.
But what is the thing that makes ordinary people care?
What is the thing that makes crypto unavoidable?
Maybe it is stablecoins.
Maybe it is tokenized assets.
Maybe it is Bitcoin as treasury money.
Maybe it is Ethereum as settlement infrastructure.
Maybe Elon wakes up one day and makes Doge the currency of Mars.
I have no clue.
But something has to happen.
Because if all we are doing is building rails for banks to issue digital dollars, then the industry changed a lot more than people want to admit.
Happy Hodling, Everyone.