Thus far, the breakout has held. Through Thursday’s close, U.S. equities have also been flat to slightly positive, owed almost entirely to Nvidia’s nearly 9% Thursday surge, which offset Monday’s semis selloff.

After bitcoin’s major move last week, many are wondering what’s next. Tether appears to expect continuation, minting three billion USDT last Friday alone. Others are warning this is exactly the substantial bounce strong enough to make everyone scream the bull market is back just before the next leg down.

Being bearish here is plausible, but it’s important to disregard people with a long track record of being very wrong, such as Bloomberg analyst Mike McGlone, who several weeks ago called for bitcoin to head towards $10K for the eighth time in five years.

Bullishness is now the base case, but for the first time this year, it’s a pleasure to report on potential interim top signals. Pitbull announced his next album is called “Pitcoin”. And Kylie Jenner is on Pump.fun, meaning the celebrity grifters are officially back.

The macro story of the week was a continuation of the Treasury’s pivotal announcement last week. Stanley Druckenmiller caused quite a stir by seemingly quarreling with Treasury Secretary Bessent, his former protégé, in the op-ed section of the Wall Street Journal. The Treasury’s actions, coupled with the public rebuke, made Felix of Forward Guidance disappointed, having believed Druckenmiller’s disciples, former market wizards, would be as magically adept within the organs of government.

Felix’s co-host on Forward Guidance’s Roundup, Quinn Thompson, saw Treasury’s actions and Mr. Druckenmiller’s subsequent admonition as “a nothing burger.” Ram Ahluwalia agreed with Mr. Druckenmiller that rate-sensitive sectors like homebuilders and utilities had already stopped going down in lock step with the long end. No intervention was necessary.

The talk around Mr. Druckenmiller’s op-ed quickly turned from its content to the op-ed itself. Haseeb Qureshi, among many others, accused the op-ed of being AI-generated. Asked about it, Mr. Druckenmiller said, “Of course I used AI.” He continued, “There’s a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major… I’m not embarrassed by it.”

In other macro geopolitical news, Josh Mandell floated sanctions on a top-ten Chinese bank as the next potential bitcoin (and gold) catalyst. The rules-based order continues to fray. The Justice Department is reportedly preparing to activate a long-dormant maritime war court to streamline military capture of Iranian oil tankers. Meanwhile, op-ed pages are suddenly full of people becoming aware of how trade can be used as a weapon of sorts in the great game of geopolitics.

James Seyffart counted up the asset management M&A of recent months and suspects it is only the beginning. This lends more credence to Lorenzo Valente’s July prediction that the same is about to happen in crypto. Possibly spurred by tradfi.

Tradfi continues to mix with crypto. Coinbase rolled out crypto-backed mortgages for U.S. consumers using bitcoin as down-payment collateral. Turning to ETFs, BlackRock has now done $5 billion of tax-deferred bitcoin-to-ETF swaps, available for as little as $1 million, with Robbie Mitchnick citing kidnappings, ransom, and custody failures as the pitch. It’s an effective marketing angle precisely due to the horrific wrench attacks and devastating custody failures such as Coldcard.

Elsewhere in ETF land, Grayscale’s Zcash Trust converted to the first ZEC ETF on August 25, and Bitwise is set to offer ETF-like automated portfolios of tokenized stocks. Bitwise’s Solana staking ETF is doing great, reporting roughly $45 million of inflows in the first two days of the week, approaching $1 billion in AUM. The Solana ETF also reported the highest-volume day in the fund’s history.

Turning to strictly crypto stories, the most profitable narrative of this young bull run looks to be tokens that accrue value. HYPE printed another all-time high at $85, spurred by ETFs buying, PURR buying, and fees growing. The mainstream media also keeps mentioning Hyperliquid. Bloomberg’s Muyao Shen covered the 24/7 oil markets on Trade.xyz when the U.S. and Israel struck Iran on a Saturday and every major oil market was closed.

The token value accrual playbook is being emulated. Ethena dropped a Uniswap-unification-style announcement, headlined by a foundation buyout of locked tokens from certain major seed investors who sold. Everyone seemed to be on board with Ethena’s new direction. This post describes the token accrual playbook succinctly:
“One by one, we are unfucking the tokens.”

One bummer on the Ethena announcement. As usual, somebody knew early.
Nic Carter published “A Second and Final Eulogy for Bitcoin Maximalism,” cataloging how the orthodoxy has failed again and again. Omid Malekan called it masterfully written and offered his own fantastic tell: maxis are simply boring, which is hard to pull off in a field this exciting.

Bitcoin maxis, still reeling from the Coldcard debacle, received new bad news. A critical vulnerability in Core Lightning had Blockstream developers urging users to shut down CLN nodes immediately. It almost seems like the ossified developer ecosystem of Bitcoin is suffering more than other, more active blockchain ecosystems because it deliberately deprioritizes development.

In stablecoins, Justin Sun attacked World Liberty Financial’s USD1, basically calling the Trump family-backed stablecoin a scam coin. Speaking of questionable activities, Kraken was hit by nearly 12,000 HTX-linked transfers, triggering compliance reviews and temporarily locking some customers out. HTX, the exchange tied to Justin Sun!
Whatever one thinks of Mr. Sun, his chain has some of the best distribution in all of crypto. Mert Mumtaz marveled at Tron’s moat among people not in crypto or in America: “no matter who I pay — a flower shop, a moving guy, a zyn dude, a concierge, (future) mother in law — they ALWAYS send their Tron address.”

Distribution is a major problem for Cardano. Austin Campbell quipped this week that Cardano has tens of users. Let’s see if Tim Draper, known for early investments in Tesla and Coinbase, can help. He’s backing the next wave of builders in the Cardano ecosystem.

In memecoins, the average hold time for a token on Solana is down to 42 seconds. Though this is greatly affected by bot behavior, even at an order of magnitude bigger, it’s quite a short time. Despite the high time preference of memecoiners, who are drawn to Pump.fun and Fomo like moths to a flame, there was a thoughtful postmortem on product-market fit and timing of a predecessor to this kind of app, called Vector. There was another long article on social trading apps about how they are likely to be a breakout consumer application. Naturally, influencer KOLs loved it, but one of the biggest OGs in the space wasn’t impressed.

In AI x crypto, a Bittensor subnet was hacked and lost everything just as it faced delisting. Jason Calacanis, undeterred, isn’t watching the price of TAO but rather people realizing the value of AI sovereignty.

In prediction markets, the fall of Polymarket is being studied, with the volume numbers suggesting Kalshi is eating its lunch.

Finally, Phantom is ending Sui support on September 24. Funds remain under your control, but best to move them to another app before then.

-David Sencil