Bitcoin - $76,500 Ethereum - $2,289 Big headline news? - Jerome Powell's final press conference as Fed Chair. Rates held - no change! Yup, we called the chop. Expect to go slightly lower over the summer. Now let me tell you why the "bad news" is actually the setup for this summer. ________________________________________________________________________ 💠#1 - Powell's last words. Today was Jerome Powell's final press conference as Fed Chair. Rates held. No cuts. The vote wasn't even close to unanimous, it was 8-4, with 4 dissenters. Which to me is just additional writing on the wall that an interest rate cut is more likely to happen than not. Powell seemed "hawkish" which is a fancy way of saying, he's willing to be aggressive and accept financial/economic pain to bring inflation down. He kept highlighting the sustained tariff inflation and Iran War oil price shock. Basically, without saying it.. he signaled that the rates are going to stay higher for longer and won't change until the Iran War is basically over AND oil prices stabilize. ________________________________________________________________________ 💠#2 - The consumer is not fine + Iran War Like we said last week...jobless claims are still holding around 214,000 .... technically "stable," according to the headlines but people are hurting. Credit Card Debt is exploding almost at 1.3 trillion and just from personal experience I'm hearing close friends talk about how financially tough its been. Then add on the fact the Iran war isn't resolved, instead it's ramping up again. Trump rejected the Iran proposal and is looking to extend the blockade. Oil will stay above $100 for the summer keeping inflation sticky, which gives the Fed cover to hold rates unchanged, which keeps the squeeze on. We've known this. This is what leads to "the chop" where crypto ranges, doesn't go all the way down.. or all the way up, like a wave BUT that wave is telling. _______________________________________________________________________

Everyone's watching the Fed this week. Rate decision drops tomorrow. Powell's last meeting as Chair. Does he go mamba out and drop some sass with the mic? Does he hang around longer with the building investigation. The big question: will they cut rates? They won't. Rates are staying at 3.5% to 3.75%. But the thing that actually matters already happened 27ish days ago. On April 1st, a rule called the "enhanced Supplementary Leverage Ratio" (eSLR) officially took effect. It kinda sounds like a typo on a government form, but it really might be one of the most quietly impactful financial shifts of the year. Here's what it does in plain English: The 8 biggest US banks are required to hold a capital cushion against everything on their balance sheet. Under the old rule, US Treasury bonds (the safest, most boring IOUs on the planet) counted the same as speculative real estate loans. So banks limited how many Treasuries they held, because each one ate into their cushion. The new rule shrinks that cushion. Banks now need less capital to hold government debt. Follow the chain: - The US government needs to refinance roughly $9 trillion in debt this year - Someone has to buy those bonds - The government just made it cheaper for the biggest banks to be that buyer - More Treasury purchases = more dollars flowing through the system - More dollars flowing = liquidity increasing None of this required a rate cut. Everyone's staring at the interest rate like it's the only dial on the dashboard. The eSLR change quietly turned a different one. Liquidity is entering through the bond market plumbing, not through the rate door. We've seen this move before. In March 2020, the Fed exempted Treasuries from the SLR entirely. Banks loaded up. Markets stabilized. Everyone exhaled. Then inflation hit 9.1%. The 2026 version is quieter. They didn't exempt Treasuries outright. They shrank the buffer, loosened the math. It's all the same direction with just, shall we say, a "softer touch."

Bitcoin - $78,000 Ethereum - $2,300 Big headline news? - Iran Ceasefire extension. Our thesis is holding. Now let's dig into what's actually ahead, because this is where people will start to make mistakes. Also, side note.... did we call the Bitcoin bottom? https://www.skool.com/the-school-of-bits-4553/is-65k-the-btc-bottom?p=b0166570 _________________________________________________________ 💠#1 - The price action feels a little tooo good. Let's hope it doesn't get too hot too fast. BTC is rallying upward almost hitting 80k but to be honest, fast moves like this before May have a history of getting destroyed over the summer. Over the last 10yrs, June avg's basically zero returns for BTC. July can be hit or miss on small gains but the point is.... don't chase a 2-week rally, this is why we advocate for dollar-cost averaging... you should already be in this and stress free. BTC needs to continue a steady climb. Goal is to stay patient. Get through the summer chop. Wait for Q4 signals. _________________________________________________________ 💠#2 - Kevin Warsh Hearing - said exactly what he needed to say. Trump's Fed chair nomiee sat in front of the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday. He said the Fed needs "regime change." He said he'd cut the number of policy meetings. He said Trump never asked him to pre-commit to lower rates, and that he wouldn't have agreed even if asked. My take...the market had priced in a more openly dovish Warsh. What they got was a careful man protecting his credibility before he even has the job. That's actually what you want in a Fed chair. Now we wait to see if he officially gets the job because there's a current holdout keeping the vote locked in - Republicam Thorn Tillis. _______________________________________________________ 💠#3 - The job market headline looks fine.. but consumers don't. Jobless claims came in at 214,000 - so stable and no "alarms" but this isn't the real picture.

For years, the official line on Bitcoin went something like: "It's for criminals, it's a scam, it's going to zero, insert more screeeeeeeeching" Elizabeth Warren called it a threat. The SEC sued everyone in sight. The Fed acted like it didn't exist. And if you watched the FTX collapse, saw billions vanish, and heard "crypto" in the same sentence as "fraud" for two straight years, then that skepticism DEFINITELY made sense. The loudest voices in the room were either selling something or stealing something. So here's what makes the next part interesting. While the lawsuits were flying, the money was moving underneath. BlackRock filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF. Fidelity built custody infrastructure. Congress started drafting legislation to regulate Bitcoin as a legitimate asset. The politics shifted because the money shifted first. Then came the executive order. The facts: - On March 6, 2025, the White House signed an executive order creating the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. - The US government holds roughly 198,000 BTC, worth over $17 billion. The largest known state holding on earth. - That Bitcoin is explicitly not to be sold. Held as a long-term reserve asset. - Treasury and Commerce are developing budget-neutral ways to acquire more. - The White House has signaled the full reserve architecture will be announced by mid-2026. Why this matters: - The country that issues the world's reserve currency is stockpiling a scarce, permissionless asset it cannot print. - The reserve is still an executive order. The next president could erase it with a signature. - If Congress codifies it into law (the NDAA is the likely vehicle), those BTC become a permanent national asset backed by statute. - If the US codifies it, every central bank on earth has to answer the same question Switzerland is already asking: do we need one too? The part worth sitting with: Governments hold reserves for one reason. Insurance against the failure of the thing they print. Gold served that role for a century. A nation building a Bitcoin reserve is a nation hedging its own currency.

There's a CEO who has spent $61 billion buying a single asset. The same asset...over and over. For 5 straight years. His name is Michael Saylor. He runs a publicly traded company called Strategy (used to be called MicroStrategy). On paper, it's a tech firm. In practice, the company does one thing now: buy Bitcoin and hold it. That's basically the entire business model. If you follow crypto at all, you've probably seen the headlines. "Saylor buys more Bitcoin." Again. And again. To a lot of people, he looks like a billionaire with a gambling habit and a podcast mic. Fair reaction. Whether you've heard of him or not, what his company did this week is worth understanding. Between April 13 and April 19, Strategy purchased 34,164 Bitcoin. One week. $2.54 billion. Third-largest single buy in the company's history. And he's already signaling another one is coming. Here's why the coin count matters more than the dollar amount...Let's walk through the math, because the numbers tell a different story than the headlines: - There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. That's a hard cap coded into the protocol. Nobody votes to change it. - Over 20 million have already been mined. Less than 1 million are left, and the rate of new coins slows every 4 years. - An estimated 2.3 to 4 million are permanently gone. Lost keys, dead wallets, hard drives sitting in landfills in Wales. - That leaves roughly 16 to 17.7 million in active circulation. Strategy now holds 815,061 Bitcoin. Nearly 4% of every Bitcoin that will ever exist, bought over 5 years for about $61.56 billion ($75,527 average per coin). And they just pulled 34,000 more off the market in a single week. What's crazy is they're now not the only ones doing this. - BlackRock's Bitcoin fund (IBIT) took in $906 million of new investor money last week alone (week of April 17) - Morgan Stanley launched their own spot Bitcoin trust (MSBT) on April 8, and it's already drawing capital - Fidelity runs its own spot Bitcoin ETF, steadily absorbing supply - Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company holds over $1 billion in BlackRock's IBIT shares - Norway's Government Pension Fund has indirect Bitcoin exposure equivalent to roughly 9,573 BTC through equity holdings in companies like Strategy and Coinbase - Michigan and Wisconsin state pension systems have allocated to Bitcoin ETFs directly