Speaker 1: Hey, it's Alex with the Token Metrics daily pulse from
Speaker 1: March twenty fifth, twenty twenty six. Got a lot to
Speaker 1: cover today. Circle had a rough one bitcoin ETF money
Speaker 1: is quietly stacking up, and some narrative numbers this week
Speaker 1: are honestly kind of wild. Let's get into it, but
Speaker 1: first a quick word from our sponsor. Okay, So here's
Speaker 1: what's happening. So the headline that everyone's talking about Circle
Speaker 1: stock dropped twenty percent in a single day. One day,
Speaker 1: and the reason the Clarity Act draft has language about
Speaker 1: stable coin yield sharing. Investors saw the words stable coin
Speaker 1: and yield restriction in the same sentence and just sold.
Speaker 1: That's it. That's the whole story. Except here's where it
Speaker 1: gets interesting. Bernstein dropped a note saying the market reddit
Speaker 1: completely backwards. The bill restricts distributors from sharing yield with customers,
Speaker 1: not issuers. Circle doesn't pay yield to users, It collects
Speaker 1: interest on its reserves and keeps it. The bill as
Speaker 1: written doesn't touch that model. If anything, it locks out
Speaker 1: competitors who do share yield. So a twenty percent drop
Speaker 1: on a misread that's either a gift for people who
Speaker 1: did the homework or warning that this stock trades on
Speaker 1: headlines not fundamentals. Probably both, and at the same time,
Speaker 1: same week, same market. Bitcoin ETF inflows came in at
Speaker 1: two and a half billion dollars for the month, nearly
Speaker 1: erasing all the year to date outflows. Bitcoin had a
Speaker 1: rough price stretch, and institutional money didn't blink. They bought
Speaker 1: the dip through regulated wrappers. Someone's panicking, someone else's buying.
Speaker 1: Now where does that leave the broader market? Pretty steady? Actually,
Speaker 1: Bitcoin sitting just under seventy two thousand, up a little
Speaker 1: on the day, nothing dramatic. Ethereum and Solana are basically
Speaker 1: moving in lockstep, both up a touch. Total market cap
Speaker 1: around two and a half trillion. Bitcoin coin Dominance is
Speaker 1: holding your fifty seven percent, which tells you alt coins
Speaker 1: haven't really found their moment yet. Defied total value Locked
Speaker 1: is sitting around one hundred billion volumes healthy at around
Speaker 1: one hundred billion for the day. So the majors are fine. Quiet.
Speaker 1: The actions not in the price chart today, It's in
Speaker 1: the flows and the narratives. Okay, so here's the bigger
Speaker 1: picture on what's actually moving things this week. Let's start
Speaker 1: with those Bitcoin ETF flows, because I don't think this
Speaker 1: is getting enough attention. Two and a half billion dollars
Speaker 1: in a single month, nearly erasing year to date outflows
Speaker 1: through a drawdown. That's the part that matters. Retail tends
Speaker 1: to panic when price drops, institutions accumulate. The ETF structure
Speaker 1: is basically a panic filter. It routes money through advisors
Speaker 1: who think in quarters, not ours. And the question nobody's
Speaker 1: really asking is if flows stayed this strong through a
Speaker 1: rough patch on price, what happens when price starts running again.
Speaker 1: That's the setup worth watching now. Monument Bank in the UK,
Speaker 1: this one caught me off guard a little. They're tokenizing
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty million pounds in retail deposits UK first,
Speaker 1: and here's the detail that actually matters. The deposits stay
Speaker 1: FSCs protected. That's the UK's deposit or protection scheme up
Speaker 1: to eighty five thousand pounds per person. Keeping that protection
Speaker 1: intact while putting deposits on chain is the regulatory unlock
Speaker 1: that every tokenized deposit project has been struggling with for years.
Speaker 1: This isn't a DeFi experiment. This is a bank product.
Speaker 1: If it works and regulators don't clawed back, it becomes
Speaker 1: the template every other UK bank copies. Two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty million pounds is small in banking terms. The precedent
Speaker 1: is not small. Then there's sts Digital. They just launched
Speaker 1: a structured crypto products platform covering four hundred tokens, with
Speaker 1: Kraken as the first distribution partner, targeting banks, family offices,
Speaker 1: high net worth individuals. Structured products are how Wall Street
Speaker 1: packages risk for people who want exposure without holding the
Speaker 1: asset directly think capital protected notes, yield enhanced certificates. The
Speaker 1: fact that this covers four hundred tokens is notable. Most
Speaker 1: institutional crypto products stop at Bitcoin and ethereum. Going deeper
Speaker 1: into the token universe means someone is betting that institutional
Speaker 1: demand for all coin exposure exists and just needs the
Speaker 1: right wrapper. If this gets traction, it creates a new
Speaker 1: demand channel for MidCap tokens that doesn't show up in
Speaker 1: spot ETF flows or decentralized exchange volume at all. And
Speaker 1: then the narrative numbers. Okay, these are genuinely eye catching.
Speaker 1: Deep in decentralized physical infrastructure up nearly forty three percent
Speaker 1: over seven days. Meme coins up forty two percent. AI
Speaker 1: tokens up thirty eight percent. When three unrelated Marria arraatives
Speaker 1: all ripped by similar percentages in the same week, it's
Speaker 1: usually not thesis driven. It's a rising tide capital rotating
Speaker 1: into whatever got beaten down hardest. The more interesting signal
Speaker 1: is what's not moving. DeFi and smart contract platforms are
Speaker 1: up around eleven percent. That's less than a third of
Speaker 1: the speculative categories. The market is chasing beta, not building
Speaker 1: positions in infrastructure. Fun while it lasts, but historically this
Speaker 1: is the part of the cycle where the speculative stuff
Speaker 1: peaks first quick hits before we move on. Irish police
Speaker 1: crack the first of twelve bitcoin wallets from a four
Speaker 1: hundred million dollar drug seizure. Five hundred bitcoin wallets seized
Speaker 1: back in twenty nineteen. That's a forensic story as much
Speaker 1: as a crypto story. Cipher Digital stock jumped about nine
Speaker 1: percent on a fifteen year hyperscaled data center lease, another
Speaker 1: mining company pivoting toward AI. Compute and equity markets keep
Speaker 1: rewarding that move. Ripple joins single Poors MS pilot program
Speaker 1: with its rilusd stable coin. Getting into a central bank
Speaker 1: pilot is the kind of regulatory credibility that takes years
Speaker 1: to build, and AVE Labs proposed a version four reinvestment
Speaker 1: module to activate idle liquidity and lift yields for lenders.
Speaker 1: If it works, it improves returns without needing new depositors,
Speaker 1: which is a more sustainable path than just chasing total
Speaker 1: value law. All right, before we get into the risks,
Speaker 1: quick word from our sponsor. Okay, we're back. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about what to watch for. So what should you actually
Speaker 1: be watching out for right now? Three things on my radar. First,
Speaker 1: regulatory misread contagion circle dropped twenty percent on a misinterpretation
Speaker 1: of one bill If that kind of hair trigger selling
Speaker 1: hits other fintech adjacent crypto names. On the next headline,
Speaker 1: the sector reprices on fear, not fundamentals. The Clarity Act
Speaker 1: is still being drafted. There will be more head lines. Second,
Speaker 1: narrative driven leverage without structural support deepin meme coins and
Speaker 1: AI tokens all up thirty eight to forty three percent
Speaker 1: in a week, while DeFi and layer ones lagged by
Speaker 1: more than three times. That spread is a classic sign
Speaker 1: of leverage chasing momentum when it unwinds the speculative names
Speaker 1: fall faster and further than the rally suggests. Third Bitcoin
Speaker 1: holding near seventy two thousand on rising open interest in
Speaker 1: a choppy macro environment, leveraged longs are accumulating at elevated prices.
Speaker 1: A macro shock that resets sentiment could trigger a cascade
Speaker 1: of liquidations at levels that look like support. An hour
Speaker 1: before and looking ahead, here's what's on my radar for
Speaker 1: the next few days. The Clarity Act goes through committee
Speaker 1: markup this week. The specific language around distributor versus issuer
Speaker 1: yield restrictions will either confirm or reverse the circle cell
Speaker 1: off thesis. Every table coin issuer is watching this closely.
Speaker 1: Tomorrow March twenty six, there's a polymarket resolution on Bitcoin
Speaker 1: above sixty two thousand. It's sitting at nearly one hundred
Speaker 1: percent probability, so the resolution itself isn't the story. Watch
Speaker 1: whether it triggers any positioning shifts in adjacent bitcoin price markets.
Speaker 1: For the weeks ahead and by March thirty first, there's
Speaker 1: about a thirty percent probability that micro strategy gets removed
Speaker 1: from the MSCI index. That's real money hedging, a real
Speaker 1: outcome if it happens passive funds that track the index
Speaker 1: become forced sellers of mstare and that creates indirect pressure
Speaker 1: on bitcoin at month. Then, by the way, if you
Speaker 1: want the full written breakdown the sources, the watchnext signals,
Speaker 1: all of it, check out our newsletter 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.