Speaker 1: Hey, it's Alex with the Token Metrics Daily Pulse for
Speaker 1: April twenty sixth twenty twenty six got a lot to
Speaker 1: cover today. Meme tokens up thirty five percent in a week,
Speaker 1: black Rock hitting a milestone that honestly felt impossible not
Speaker 1: long ago, and a blockchain that rewrote three hours of
Speaker 1: its own history. Let's get into it, but first a
Speaker 1: quick word from our sponsor. Okay, So here's what's happening.
Speaker 1: Bitcoin is sitting around seventy eight thousand dollars, basically not moving,
Speaker 1: and yet everything around it is running hard. Mean tokens
Speaker 1: up thirty five percent and seven days roll ups up
Speaker 1: thirty one percent, DeFi up nearly twenty percent. Bitcoin dominance
Speaker 1: is holding above fifty eight percent, but underneath that calm surface,
Speaker 1: money is rotating fast into the most speculative corners of
Speaker 1: the market. Bitcoin is the anchor. Everything else is doing
Speaker 1: laps around it. Quick look at the majors Ethereum around
Speaker 1: twenty three hundred, Solana just under ninety dollars, both basically flat.
Speaker 1: The story isn't in the majors today, it's in the narrative.
Speaker 1: Tracker memes leading at thirty five percent analytics Tokens up
Speaker 1: thirty three, roll ups at thirty two, Game FI up
Speaker 1: twenty two. Here's what's unusual when meme tokens run infrastructure
Speaker 1: narratives usually sit it out. This week, both are moving together.
Speaker 1: That could mean genuine risk appetite across the board, or
Speaker 1: it could mean the rotation is so broad that nobody's
Speaker 1: being selective, which is its own kind of warning. Side
Speaker 1: One thing from prediction Market's worth flagging seventy five percent
Speaker 1: probability on a European Central Bank rate hike this year.
Speaker 1: If Europe titans while the Fed holds, the dollar strengthens,
Speaker 1: and risk assets feel it globally, something to keep in
Speaker 1: the back of your mind. All right, let's get into
Speaker 1: what's actually driving all this black rocks. Bitcoin ETF just
Speaker 1: crossed a milestone that didn't exist eighteen months ago. The
Speaker 1: world's largest asset manager built a product and watched it
Speaker 1: grow faster than almost any ETF in history. The question
Speaker 1: has officially shifted from will institutions come to who's ready
Speaker 1: for them when they show up coinbasis. John Diagostino made
Speaker 1: that case this week, arguing the exchange stands alone as
Speaker 1: crypto's full service, prime broker custody, execution, lending staking, all
Speaker 1: under one roof. The ETF milestone and the prime brokerage
Speaker 1: claim are the same story told from two angles. Institutional
Speaker 1: money is here, the infrastructure to handle it is being
Speaker 1: built in real time. Now, prediction markets, they're in a
Speaker 1: three front regulatory war right now. The CFTC, a federal regulator,
Speaker 1: is suing New York State to protect prediction markets it
Speaker 1: considers federally licensed. Thirty eight state attorneys general are backing
Speaker 1: Massachusetts in a parallel case arguing the opposite, And Brazil
Speaker 1: just banned polymarket, Calshi and every other prediction platform outright.
Speaker 1: The Brazil ban is the most concrete out a major
Speaker 1: market simply gone. The US fight is slower, but the
Speaker 1: direction from state governments is clear. Prediction markets built their
Speaker 1: thesis on being hard to regulate. That thesis is under
Speaker 1: serious pressure. This one caught me off guard. Lightcoin rewrote
Speaker 1: thirteen blocks of its own history about three hours of
Speaker 1: transactions to undo its first major exploit of its privacy layer,
Speaker 1: called mweb. Then the team said publicly this wasn't a
Speaker 1: zero day vulnerability, and then developers found the GitHub commit
Speaker 1: that proved it was, so you've got a security failure
Speaker 1: and a transparency failure in the same week. Light cooin
Speaker 1: has spent a decade being the boring, reliable bitcoin alternative.
Speaker 1: Boring and reliable just took a hit. On the DeFi side,
Speaker 1: ave Kelp and Layer zero are asking the Arbitrum Dow
Speaker 1: to release seventy one million dollars in frozen ethereum tied
Speaker 1: to the RASF Bridge exploit recovery. The exploit already happened,
Speaker 1: the funds are sitting frozen. Now comes the governance vote,
Speaker 1: which is basically defi's version of a bankruptcy proceeding slow
Speaker 1: public and dependent on tokenholders voting the right way. If
Speaker 1: this passes cleanly, it's a proof point that DeFi can
Speaker 1: self correct if it gets bogged down. It's another reason
Speaker 1: institutions hesitate. And finally, two stories that are actually the
Speaker 1: same story. Trump defended crypto legislation at a private event
Speaker 1: that included Mike Tyson and Tether's CEO. The Tether CEO's
Speaker 1: presence tells you the priority stable coin legislation. Meanwhile, Alchemy
Speaker 1: CEO argued this week that crypto was never really built
Speaker 1: for humans. It was built for AI agents autonomous software
Speaker 1: executing transactions without a human in the loop. If that's right,
Speaker 1: the whole debate about mainstream adoption has been aimed at
Speaker 1: the wrong audience. Political legitimacy and AI agent infrastructure are
Speaker 1: converging faster than most people realize. All right, before we
Speaker 1: get into the risks, quick word from our sponsor. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back. Let's talk about what to watch for. Three
Speaker 1: things on my risk radar. First, mean tokens up thirty
Speaker 1: five percent while bitcoin barely moves Historically, that's the signature
Speaker 1: of a late cycle rotation retail chasing momentum into the
Speaker 1: most speculative assets right before liquidity dries up. It's fun
Speaker 1: until it isn't. Second, prediction market legal fragmentation. The CFTC
Speaker 1: and state regulators are actively suing each other over the
Speaker 1: same platforms. Any defive protocol with prediction market exposure is
Speaker 1: sitting on a legal land mine with an unknown fuse. Third,
Speaker 1: the light coin reorg sets a precedent. A chain rewriting
Speaker 1: three hours of history to fix a bug raises uncomfortable
Speaker 1: questions about other chain's willingness to do the same under pressure,
Speaker 1: and what that means for settlement finality. Looking ahead, the
Speaker 1: one thing I'm want watching most closely US stable coin legislation.
Speaker 1: Trump's private event with Tether's CEO in the room wasn't
Speaker 1: a coincidence. If this gets to a Senate floor vote
Speaker 1: in the next thirty days, it becomes the most significant
Speaker 1: US crypto regulatory development of twenty twenty six. A federal
Speaker 1: stable coin framework changes the entire operating environment for dollar
Speaker 1: denominated crypto. Watch for any movement on a floor vote timeline.
Speaker 1: That's the pulse for April twenty sixth. If you want
Speaker 1: the full written breakdown, all the sources, the prediction market data,
Speaker 1: the narrative tracker numbers. The newsletter is at tokenmetrics dot com.
Speaker 1: It's all there. This is educational content, not investment advice.
Speaker 1: Always do your own research. I'm Alex, See you next time.