Back to $94K

Daily Updates:

• BTC has surged to $94K, a level it last traded above in late February. On Monday we saw signs of a dislocation between BTC and US risk-on equities when the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 both ended the day down 2% while BTC rallied. Yesterday we saw BTC continue to move up, but this time in line with SPX and NDX which both rallied 2% and later in line with US equity futures. 
• Since reaching a local bottom of $74K on April 7, two days before President Trump announced a 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariffs, BTC has rallied 27%. However it remains 14% below its $109K ATH. 
• The relief rally in crypto gained momentum as Trump spoke to reporters at the White House, offering promising signs of a trade deal between the US and China and defusing recent tensions around his recent challenges to the independence of the Fed. 
• Trump said of the tariffs on imports from China that “145% is very high and it won’t be that high. It will come down substantially but it won’t be zero. It used to be zero”. 
• Earlier in the day, Treasury Secretary Bessent had told a closed-door investor summit that a de-escalation would be needed between both sides as neither side would be able to sustain a tariff war.
• Echoing this, Trump also said he will not play “hardball” with China — instead the US will be “very nice” but “ultimately they’ll [China] have to make a deal because otherwise they’re not going to be able to deal in the United States”. 
• With regards to Chair Powell, Trump told reporters that he has “no intentions” of firing Jerome Powell, “none whatsoever” but would like to see the Chair be “more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates”. However if Powell does not lower rates Trump added “is it the end? No, it’s not, but it would be good timing”.
• Those comments yesterday follow a recent Truth Social post where Trump said “Powell has always been ‘Too Late’”.
  

• ETH has seen the biggest move among the top 10 crypto tokens by market cap, up over 10% on the day and briefly reclaiming $1.8K. That sharp spot move has caused an inversion in its term structure as front end volatility shot up by 9 points in response to a high demand for short-dated optionality — something we have seen often over the past two months, but more commonly in response to bearish moves in spot, rather than this time’s rally.
• To add to that surprisingly bullish sentiment, short-tenor skew for ETH also reached its highest levels since March 30, marking the first time so far in April where 7-day skew has significantly tilted towards demands for calls. In fact, options markets for shorter expiries are currently pricing in a more bullish outlook for ETH than for BTC, a stark contrast to what we have seen for most of this year. 
• In another sign of the changing sentiment, BTC Spot ETFs had inflows of $912.7M – the seventh largest daily net inflow since their January 2024 launch, while ETH Spot ETFs reversed a two-week slump of outflows yesterday, bringing in $38.8M. 

• Altcoins also benefitted from the relief rally with both Solana and XRP up +8%, ADA +10% and SUI significantly outperforming at +25% in the last 24 hours.

• Bleap, a wallet application built on Ethereum’s Layer 2 chain, Arbitrum, has partnered with Mastercard to enable stablecoin payments and broader wallet integration. Supporting USDC, USDT, USDA, and EURA, Bleap aims to bridge public blockchains with centralised systems while retaining the user’s asset self custody.
• Ripple’s USD-pegged stablecoin RLUSD, backed by dollar deposits and short-term Treasuries, is now live on Aave’s V3 Ethereum Core market allowing users to lend and borrow the token with a 50M RLUSD supply cap and 5M borrow cap.

• Cantor Fitzgerald, SoftBank, Tether and Bitfinex are partnering together to launch 21 Capital, a Bitcoin investment vehicle.
• According to the Financial Times, 21 Capital will be seeded with $3B worth of Bitcoin: $1.5B from Tether, $900M from SoftBank, and $600M from Bitfinex.
• The investment vehicle backed by Brandon Lutnick, the son of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, will convert the above bitcoin investments into shares in 21 Capital at $10 per share and will also raise a $350M convertible bond and a separate $200M private placement of equity to buy additional bitcoin.

This Week’s Calendar:

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