Speaker 1: Hey, it's Alex with the Token Metrics Daily Pulse for
Speaker 1: April eighth, twenty twenty six. Big day today, We've got
Speaker 1: a new bitcoin etf shaking up the market, a geopolitical
Speaker 1: cease fire, moving prices, and some security stuff on Solana
Speaker 1: that honestly everyone should know about. Let's get into it,
Speaker 1: but first a quick word from our sponsor. Okay, So
Speaker 1: here's what's happening. Okay, So here's the headline. Bitcoin just
Speaker 1: spiked above seventy two thousand dollars. That's a jump of
Speaker 1: over five percent. Today, Ethereum is right there with it
Speaker 1: up more than eight percent. What's driving this A conditional
Speaker 1: cease fire announced between the US and Iran, which means
Speaker 1: the market is basically telling us that geopolitical tension was
Speaker 1: the biggest thing it was worried about, and the moment
Speaker 1: that pressure eased, money came rushing back in. Now the
Speaker 1: other big story today, Morgan Stanley's bitcoin etf ticker MSBT
Speaker 1: went live this morning and they're charging just zero point
Speaker 1: one four percent in fees. That's the lowest in the market.
Speaker 1: Blackrocks ibid it charges zero point twenty five percent. So
Speaker 1: Morgan Stanley just showed up with a cheaper product and
Speaker 1: a seven trillion dollar wealth management machine behind it. That's
Speaker 1: not just competition, that's a direct challenge to blackrocks dominance.
Speaker 1: So where does the broader market stand right now? Bitcoin
Speaker 1: is at seventy two thoy eighty four dollars up five
Speaker 1: point three seven percent. Ethereum is at about twenty two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty six dollars, up eight point zero nine percent.
Speaker 1: And that kind of alt out performance where Ethereum beats
Speaker 1: Bitcoin on a big up day usually means risk appetite
Speaker 1: is genuinely back, not just a short squeeze. Solana is
Speaker 1: pushing past eighty four dollars up nearly seven percent. Total
Speaker 1: crypto market cap is sitting around two point five four
Speaker 1: trillion dollars. Bitcoin Dominance, which is basically Bitcoin's share of
Speaker 1: the whole crypto market, is whole steady at about fifty
Speaker 1: six point eighty six percent, and total value locked in
Speaker 1: decentralized finance protocols is around ninety six billion dollars. Bottom line,
Speaker 1: it's a risk one day across the board. All right,
Speaker 1: Let's dig into what's actually happening and why it matters.
Speaker 1: Starting with that Morgan Stanley ETF. We're talking about a
Speaker 1: firm that manages the retirement accounts of a huge chunk
Speaker 1: of corporate America seven trillion dollars in assets, now putting
Speaker 1: its own bitcoin product on the shelf at the lowest
Speaker 1: fee in the market. Why does that matter? Because Morgan
Speaker 1: Stanley has tens of thousands of financial advisors who previously
Speaker 1: had to go out of their way to recommend BlackRock's IBIT.
Speaker 1: Now they can just recommend the house product. That's the
Speaker 1: real story. It's not just a cheaper etf it's distribution.
Speaker 1: Blackrock built the market. Morgan Stanley just showed up to
Speaker 1: take share. The fee gap zero point one four versus
Speaker 1: zero point two five percent sounds small, but at institutional scale,
Speaker 1: that difference is enormous. Watch the first week flow numbers closely.
Speaker 1: Now back to that ceasefire. Here's what's interesting. Bitcoin didn't
Speaker 1: just go up, It went up while oil went down.
Speaker 1: The takeaway is that crypto is training like a risk
Speaker 1: asset right now, not a safe haven. When geopolitical tension eases,
Speaker 1: money flows into stocks and crypto, not out of them.
Speaker 1: But this ceasefire is conditional and only two weeks long.
Speaker 1: That's not peace. That's a pause. And those buyers who
Speaker 1: loaded up on nearly eight hundred and fifty thousand bitcoin
Speaker 1: between sixty thousand and seventy thousand dollars, they're now sitting
Speaker 1: on gains. Whether they hold or sell into this strength
Speaker 1: is the question nobody's asking loudly enough yet. On the
Speaker 1: regulatory front, two stories that point to the same thing.
Speaker 1: Six major Swiss banks, including UBS, launched a Swiss Franc
Speaker 1: stable coin sandbox, and South Korea is drafting legislation to
Speaker 1: bring stable coins and real world asset tokenization under its
Speaker 1: financial laws, which means the old fight between regulators and
Speaker 1: crypto is basically over and traditional finance one now they're
Speaker 1: building a UBS backed stable coin isn't an experiment, it's
Speaker 1: a bank deciding that programmable money is real infrastructure. The
Speaker 1: second order effect here is what this means for existing
Speaker 1: stable coin issuers like Circle and Tether. If a bank
Speaker 1: can issue a regulated stable coin with full government backing,
Speaker 1: the competitive advantage for unregulated issuers gets a lot narrower fast.
Speaker 1: And then there's the White House Council of Economic Advisors,
Speaker 1: which just published a study saying stable coin yield products
Speaker 1: pose minimal risk to small banks. They ran the numbers
Speaker 1: and found that banning yield bearing stable coins would only
Speaker 1: boost community bank lending by zero point zero two percent,
Speaker 1: basically a rounding error. Why this matters, The banking lobby
Speaker 1: has been using the small bank argument to fight stable
Speaker 1: cooin yield in Congress. The White House just pulled that
Speaker 1: argument out from under them. For companies like coinbase building
Speaker 1: yield products on stable coins, this is a significant policy greenlight. Finally,
Speaker 1: some security news that's worth paying attention to. On Solana,
Speaker 1: a decentralized exchange called Stabble warned users to pull their
Speaker 1: funds out after discovering a suspected North Korean developer had
Speaker 1: been working inside the protocol. This isn't a hack from
Speaker 1: the outside, it's an infiltration from the inside, which means
Speaker 1: the attacker didn't need to break the code, they got
Speaker 1: hired to write it. The obvious question is how many
Speaker 1: other protocols have the same problem right now and don't
Speaker 1: know it yet. Separately, in the Tornado Cash case, that's
Speaker 1: the privacy tool whose developers were prosecuted. The DOJ rejected
Speaker 1: arguments to dismiss the case. The takeaway is that the
Speaker 1: legal argument that writing privacy software isn't a crime, is
Speaker 1: still losing in court, and that has a chilling effect
Speaker 1: on every developer building privacy tools in crypto. Right now,
Speaker 1: all right, before we get into the risks, quick word
Speaker 1: from our sponsor. Okay, we're back. Let's talk about what
Speaker 1: to watch for. So what should you actually be watching
Speaker 1: out for? Three things? First, that cease fire. It's conditional
Speaker 1: and it's only two weeks if it falls apart. The
Speaker 1: same geopolitical sensitivity that push bitcoin to seventy two thousand
Speaker 1: cuts the other way fast. The buyers who jumped in
Speaker 1: on this news have every incentive to sell into strength
Speaker 1: if the situation deteriorates. Second, look at the narrative leader board.
Speaker 1: DPEN tokens think decentralized infrastructure projects are up thirty percent
Speaker 1: in seven days. AI tokens are up twenty four percent.
Speaker 1: Those are big numbers, and they usually show up when
Speaker 1: capital is chasing momentum rather than real fundamentals, which means
Speaker 1: late stage rotations like this look fine until they suddenly don't.
Speaker 1: And Third, those security incidents on Solana. If Stable wasn't isolated,
Speaker 1: and there's a real chance it isn't, another insider compromise
Speaker 1: in the Solana ecosystem in the next thirty days would
Speaker 1: seriously shake confidence in how these protocols hire and manage
Speaker 1: their teams. Looking ahead to the next week or so,
Speaker 1: here's what I'm watching. First, those first week flow numbers
Speaker 1: for the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin ETF. That'll tell us whether
Speaker 1: their advisor network is actually routing client money into MSBT
Speaker 1: or whether this is a product launch without a real
Speaker 1: salesforce behind it. Second, the Iran Ceespire deadline. That two
Speaker 1: week window ends around April twenty. Second, if it holds,
Speaker 1: crypto gets a sustained macrotail wind. If it breaks early,
Speaker 1: expect a sharp reversal. And Third, any movement on the
Speaker 1: Genius Act in the US Senate, with the White House
Speaker 1: clearing stable coin yield and the FDIC proposing a supervised
Speaker 1: framework for stable coin issuers. Senate progress this week could
Speaker 1: lock it in the US regulatory structure for stable coins,
Speaker 1: and that affects pretty much everyone building in this space.
Speaker 1: That's the daily Pulse for April eighth, twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: If you found this useful, share it with someone who's
Speaker 1: trying to make sense of crypto. That's genuinely the best
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Speaker 1: full written breakdown with all the sources. This is educational content,
Speaker 1: not investment advice. Crypto is higher risk. Always do your
Speaker 1: own research. I'm Alex Cynx, Time