How the Mighty Have Fallen. But That’s Crypto, Baby! – Week In Review

This editorial is from this week’s edition of the newsletter Week in Review, sent to subscribers on Friday. Subscribe to the newsletter to get this weekly editorial the second it’s finished. The newsletter also includes the biggest stories of the week with a comment on each story.

The stock market pushed higher once again this week, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq in the green, and the Dow Jones staging a massive rally to new all-time highs as of Friday morning. The dollar continues to show strength. Luke Gromen believes a “too strong” dollar will trigger foreign selling of U.

S. assets. In the digital assets realm, Bitcoin recovered some of its losses but remains in a clear weekly downtrend, currently trading at $61,438 after tradfi markets’ close.

Despite Bitcoin spending last week scraping its lowest levels since October 2024, there is hope. Every time BTC has closed two consecutive red 6-month candles, a three-year uptrend has followed, and the second one closes in days. Or how about John Bollinger highlighting a developing ‘W’ pattern in BTC?

The bottom-callers are getting louder. Bluntz says the same weekly bear divergences that nailed the SOL top now cut the other way, and that if you’re bearish on Solana down here you are impaired. AltcoinPsycho, who publicly bought near the SOL bottom last cycle in one of the highest-PnL trades of his career, says we have another chance to do it again, and he’s heavily accumulating spot.

That’s all well and good for Solana, but what about Bitcoin? Well, there was the largest single on-chain accumulation of Bitcoin ever recorded. A good sentiment sign came when billionaire Jeremy Grantham disparaged Bitcoin and crypto on CNBC, saying, “What does crypto do?

What’s the use of crypto… There’s no there there.” Later he added, “proof of unnecessary work shouldn’t be worth a bucket of warm spit.”

Joe Kernen, who had been cordial up to that point, knocked the billionaire down a few pegs by pointing out his abysmal track record for the past couple decades. The markets have also been humbling Bitcoin main character Michael Saylor who has been reeling since May when Strategy inexplicably bought back $1.5 billion worth of 0% convertible senior notes due 2029.

This week Strategy’s unveiled a new Digital Credit Capital Framework, which finally addresses the STRC dividend payment issue. It achieves this through a new $2.55 billion USD reserve policy.

The framework also authorized up to $1 billion in preferred “Digital Credit” buybacks plus $1 billion in MSTR common buybacks, and a BTC Monetization Program permitting conditional Bitcoin sales of up to $1.25 billion to fund reserves, dividends, and repurchases. Stretch (STRC) got a 50 bps dividend bump to 12%, effective for July, hopefully pushing STRC back toward its $99–$100 par.

Reactions were mostly positive, mainly because STRC is sorted, but some are upset with details. For example, buybacks. In fact Mr.

Saylor posted in 2021 that companies repurchasing stock with cash weaken their business, and those buying back stock with debt actually impoverish it. The biggest issue is with Strategy’s enshrined option to sell Bitcoin. OG X poster Light believes they’ve already started.

JPMorgan warned that turning crypto’s biggest buyer into a potential seller introduces a two-way flow risk the market now has to price. Once you write down the conditions under which you’ll sell, traders will game the probability of those conditions being met every time STRC wobbles near par. Hopefully that will not happen, and (as Jordi Alexander predicts) we will not be talking about Mr.

Saylor or Strategy in six months. And then there’s noise on CT ( Crypto Twitter) about a new memecoin season. Ansem is participating in a Solana memecoin based on his persona.

Many celebrated (some in the unseemly ways of past memecoin frenchies), notably exchanges and tracking platforms that benefit from trading activity. Others did not. One prominent poster said: we’ve got some more retail to kill, or perhaps we should shoot ourselves.

The legendary duck sums up the side against this stuff: KOLs extracted the entire space to zero and are now launching celebrity coins again to extract some more. This feels like crypto’s version of Groundhog Day. If a “ memecoin szn” happens without liquidity entering the space predominantly for productive purposes, it means 6 more weeks (months, years?)

of the market nuking. Historically speaking, being the memecoin main character has a short shelf life. If anyone can persist, it should be Ansem, but the odds are not great.

There was another memecoin story, one with implications outside of crypto. Trump disclosed more than $1.2 billion in crypto earnings in his annual filing.

Even seasoned crypto degens habituated to this stuff were surprised. TXMC, max-cynical from day one, admitted the man has a way of exceeding expectations, while Dyme, who was willing to forgive a little grift as the cost of pro- crypto policy, drew the line at “ludicrous