Speaker 1: Hey, it's Alex with the Token Metrics daily polls for
Speaker 1: March fifteenth, twenty twenty six. Got a lot to cover today.
Speaker 1: Miners losing billions and their stocks going up, Jack Dorsey
Speaker 1: firing nearly half his company, and Bitcoin just sitting there
Speaker 1: waiting for someone to blink. First, But first, a quick
Speaker 1: word from our sponsor. Okay, So here's what's happening. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the headline today is genuinely one of those things
Speaker 1: where you read it twice. Mara, the bitcoin minor, posted
Speaker 1: a one point seven billion dollar quarterly loss, and the
Speaker 1: stock jumped fifteen percent. That's that's actually the whole story
Speaker 1: right there. The loss was mostly paper markdowns on their
Speaker 1: Bitcoin holdings, which fine, that happens when price chops around.
Speaker 1: But the rally that was pure AI speculation. Mara announced
Speaker 1: a deal with Starwood to run AI data centers, and
Speaker 1: the market completely forgot about the mining business. Investors aren't
Speaker 1: pricing in their bitcoin anymore. They're pricing in their GPUs.
Speaker 1: Miners are quietly becoming AI infrastructure plays, and the margins
Speaker 1: on compute are just way better than the margins on hashing.
Speaker 1: This is a real capital rotation happening. In front of us,
Speaker 1: and then on the same day, same day, Jack Dorsey
Speaker 1: announces Block Inc. Is cutting forty percent of its staff
Speaker 1: forty percent. He's calling it smaller and flatter, but read
Speaker 1: between the lines. Stable coins are eating payment margins. The
Speaker 1: whole traditional fintech model is heavy and expensive and crypto
Speaker 1: rails are light and cheap. Block is basically retreating to
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen staffing levels because the economics of payments shifted
Speaker 1: faster than their headcount. Could justify two companies, two very
Speaker 1: different stories, but both of them are saying the same thing.
Speaker 1: The old playbook doesn't work anymore. So where does that
Speaker 1: leave the broader market? Honestly, pretty quiet. Nothing moved enough
Speaker 1: to get excited about. Bitcoins hovering around sixty eight k,
Speaker 1: just above two thousand, Solana's in the high eighties, all
Speaker 1: basically flat on the day. We're talking less than two
Speaker 1: percent moves across the board, so I'm not going to
Speaker 1: bore you with a tick by tick. The bigger picture
Speaker 1: is this, We're in a risk off mood. Leverage has
Speaker 1: been flushing out of the system, which is actually healthy,
Speaker 1: but spot demand is fading. At the same time, Bitcoin
Speaker 1: dominance is sitting above fifty six percent, which tells you
Speaker 1: all coins aren't getting any love right now. Total market
Speaker 1: cap is around two point four trillion DeFi total value
Speaker 1: locked is just under one hundred billion. The market is
Speaker 1: basically in a stare down between spot sellers and passive holders,
Speaker 1: and nobody wants to make the first move. It's one
Speaker 1: of those weeks where the most interesting action is happening
Speaker 1: off chain. All right, So here's what's actually driving the
Speaker 1: narrative right now. First, the poly market insider trading story.
Speaker 1: This one caught me off guard. So Polymarket, the prediction
Speaker 1: market had a market running on a zach XBT investigation,
Speaker 1: and before that investigation went public, certain wallet's positioned perfectly.
Speaker 1: We're talking over a million dollars in profits from what
Speaker 1: looks like information leakage. Here's the irony that's almost too good,
Speaker 1: insider trading on a market literally designed to surface insider information.
Speaker 1: The blockchain doesn't lie. It just quietly shows you who
Speaker 1: knew what and when, and right now it's showing us
Speaker 1: that someone had a very early heads up. This isn't
Speaker 1: just a gambling story. It's a signal that prediction markets
Speaker 1: are becoming serious enough that people are willing to front
Speaker 1: run them. If you're trading niche investigation markets and you
Speaker 1: see volume spike hard with no news attached, the alpha
Speaker 1: is already gone. The news is coming. Next up Magic Eden,
Speaker 1: they're shutting down their Bitcoin and Ethereum virtual machine marketplaces
Speaker 1: to go all in on Solana. This is a bold move.
Speaker 1: The whole last cycle was about ding everywhere, being multi chain,
Speaker 1: capturing every ecosystem. Magic Eden is doing the opposite. Their
Speaker 1: betting that being the undisputed king of Solana is worth
Speaker 1: more than being a mid tier player on five chains.
Speaker 1: It's vertical integration over horizontal sprawl, and honestly it might
Speaker 1: be right. The multichain narrative has been losing steam against
Speaker 1: the idea of deep liquidity on a single chain. If
Speaker 1: their Salona volume holds up or grows, this was genius.
Speaker 1: If total volume collapses, they cut the wrong limb, and
Speaker 1: then there's bitcoin itself. Look, the on chain data from
Speaker 1: glass Note is pretty clear. We're in the chop zone.
Speaker 1: Bitcoin's been trading between sixty k and sixty nine K
Speaker 1: and neither side has conviction. Leverage got flushed. That's the
Speaker 1: good news. But spot demand is fading and in a
Speaker 1: staredown like this, gravity usually wins without a fresh catalyst.
Speaker 1: The monthly close at the end of February is going
Speaker 1: to matter. Closing below sixty K would confirm the bearish thesis.
Speaker 1: Breaking sixty nine k with rising open interest would flip
Speaker 1: the script entirely. Quick hits before we move on, MetaMask
Speaker 1: just launched a crypto debit card with MasterCard in the US,
Speaker 1: which is actually a big deal for self custody going
Speaker 1: mainstream world Liberty Financial. The Trump linked project is tying
Speaker 1: voting power to Staking as their stable coin supply tops
Speaker 1: nearly five billion dollars. The XRP Ledger Foundation patched a
Speaker 1: critical bug before it hit mainenet, caught by an AI
Speaker 1: tool and a security engineer, which is a good story.
Speaker 1: Circle shares are reportedly hitting ninety dollars in private markets,
Speaker 1: with analyst noting it's diverging from general crypto volatility, and
Speaker 1: South Korean police lost one point four million dollars in
Speaker 1: confiscated bitcoin, two officers arrested. Custody is hard for everyone, apparently.
Speaker 1: All right, before we get into the risks, quick wordf'm
Speaker 1: our sponsor. Okay, we're back. Let's talk about what to
Speaker 1: watch for. So what should you actually be watching out
Speaker 1: for right now? Three things on my radar. First, leverage
Speaker 1: flush isn't done. Bitcoin sliding on risk off mood suggests
Speaker 1: there's still more deleveraging to work through. Don't assume the
Speaker 1: bottom is in just because we've already had a rough
Speaker 1: few weeks. Second, minor capitulation risk Mara's one point seven
Speaker 1: billion dollar loss is a reminder of how brutal mining
Speaker 1: economics get when price drops. If Bitcoin loses sixty K,
Speaker 1: miners become forced sellers. That's a feedback loop. You don't
Speaker 1: want to be on the wrong side of. Third regulatory friction.
Speaker 1: The Warren versus occ battle over cryptobanks is still simmering,
Speaker 1: The political heat isn't cooling down, and any escalation there
Speaker 1: could spook institutional flows at exactly the wrong time. Synthesis
Speaker 1: stay defensive cash is king until Bitcoin reclaims sixty nine
Speaker 1: K or funding rates go negative. Negative funding would actually
Speaker 1: signal a washout bottom. Neither of those has happened yet.
Speaker 1: And looking ahead two dates to circle, Ethereum's monthly options
Speaker 1: expirey is coming up fast and prediction markets are only
Speaker 1: pricing in about an eight percent chance of Ethereum getting
Speaker 1: above twenty one hundred into that expiry that's bearish positioning.
Speaker 1: Then the bitcoin monthly close at the end of February
Speaker 1: that's sixty K level is the line in the sand.
Speaker 1: Watch those too closely. By the way, if you want
Speaker 1: the full written breakdown, the charts, the on chain data,
Speaker 1: all of it, check out our newsletter at tokenmetrics dot com.
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Speaker 1: with someone who's trying to make sense of all this.
Speaker 1: This is educational content, not investment advice. Always do your
Speaker 1: own research. I'm Alex. See next time.