Hereโs what weโve got for you today:
- โ๏ธ The market that won't break.
- ๐๏ธ The Milk Road Show: Wall Street Is Locked and Loaded on Cryptoโฆ Itโs Not If, Itโs When.
- ๐ช The CLARITY Act is in a zombie state.
THE MARKET THAT WON'T BREAK (UP OR DOWN) ๐คทโ๏ธ
This morning was weird.
I got on our weekly โwhat weโre watchingโ call and realized I had nothing to ask John.
Usually I turn up with a list. This time, every question I had would've gotten the same answer it got in March.
Bitcoinโs around $63Kโฆ Ethereum pinned around $1,900โฆ Solana in the low 70โsโฆ
Itโs been like this for ~6 months now. What gives??
"The bears can't break the bulls and the bulls can't even mount a rally," John said. "It's weak sauce in both directions."
Bad news has been hittingโฆ but having little-to-no effect:
- The Senate went into recess without voting on the CLARITY Actโฆ
- Tech sold off when the AI trade briefly unwound a few weeks backโฆ
- Strategy has been selling BTC below cost price to fund dividendsโฆ
This time last year, any one of those headlines would have shaved 20% off the market.
This time, hardly a wobble.
My worry is that if bad news can't move this thing along, good news might not either.
Everyone who wanted out is likely already out (stemming the sell pressure), but at the same time, there aren't any buyers to push things up.
The good news is, the economy underneath all this is acceleratingโฆ
One Account. Every Market. No Closing Bell.
Markets don't wait for Monday. News breaks Saturday morning, and most traders can only watch.
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THE MARKET THAT WON'T BREAK (UP OR DOWN) P2 ๐คทโ๏ธ
The traditional driver of risk assets is waking up.
The ISM manufacturing index, a monthly survey of factory purchasing managers, just hit 55.6 (and anything above 50 = economic growth, which typically = growth in risk assets, like crypto).
Weโve now had seven straight months of expansion, with July marking the strongest levels since May 2022.
So if the ISM is up, which has traditionally pushed crypto up, whyโre we flat??
Short answer: there's a speculative bull market on, but the money is piling into AI instead of crypto.
Bitcoin got its bull market, topped out mid-range without hitting โfull euphoria,โ and the liquidity (fresh cash) that usually finds its way into alts went to Nvidia's customer base instead.
So what narratives could bring some of the spotlight back to crypto?
The two main candidates for us:
1. Agents paying agents.
Cloudflare says bots overtook humans on the web in June, and its CFO thinks machine traffic could outnumber us 1,000 to 1 within five years.
Card rails that take 30 days to settle and charge $0.30 per transaction arenโt going to work for high volume, sub-cent microtransactions.
2. The tokenization of everything.
Around $340B of traditional assets sit onchain today, and Standard Chartered's Geoff Kendrick sees $4T by the end of 2028.
The product pitch that will drive this adoption: low-to-no-fee trading, on all assets, anywhere in the world, 24hrs a day.
But all of the above could take a minute to arrive, luckily, if youโre impatient (like me), we have this in the near term:
On Wednesday, Trump is hosting crypto and AI executives at the White House, and John is guessing/hoping a part of the meeting will be dedicated to getting the CLARITY Act the support it needs to pass in September.
Prediction markets currently give the bill 20% odds of passing this year, down from 82% in February.
Johnโs internal prediction market (his brain) gives it closer to 75% odds of passing.
If heโs right, the market could be in for one helluva surprise when the Senate returns September 14.
Fingers/toes/eyes crossed heโs right!
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD ๐ช
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Scott Melker: There's no more dangerous belief in investing than thinking you'll sell now and buy back lower.
Saylor: "There's a 2% property tax on houses in Floridaโฆ if you buy a house, you pay 2% of the value every year." Every 36 years, you've paid the full cost of the house in tax.
Matt Hougan: The CLARITY Act is in a zombie state - and it might stay that way forever.
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