Your morning briefing - crypto, DeFi, and market intelligence
Today is the last day of March. The 6th consecutive red monthly close is locking in as I write this, BTC sitting at $66,500 after recovering from Monday’s lows. Tomorrow is Liberation Day - April 2 tariff announcement - which is the event the whole market has been positioning around for the past two weeks. Not a clean backdrop for a monthly close.
The overnight session was dominated by two themes: Powell walking the Fed back from the rate-hike cliff, and oil refusing to cooperate. WTI closed above $100 for the first time since 2022. Those two forces - bond relief + energy inflation - largely cancelled each other out, leaving crypto directionless into the close. Let’s dig into what moved overnight.
🌅 Morning Edition
1. Oil Above $100 Overwhelms Powell’s Soothing Words - Crypto Gives Up Gains
Powell spoke at Harvard Monday evening and basically said the Fed isn’t panicking about oil-driven inflation yet - “well anchored” expectations, no imminent hikes. 10-year yields dropped 9bps to 4.35%, and rate-hike probability for 2026 fell from 25% to 5% on CME FedWatch. That’s meaningfully positive for risk assets. Unfortunately oil didn’t get the memo - WTI closed at $105/bbl, first close above $100 since 2022. Nasdaq -0.75%, S&P -0.4%, BTC back near $66,500. The geopolitical energy shock is now running faster than monetary policy can absorb it.
2. Nearly Half of All BTC Is Underwater - Bitcoin Impact Index Hits 57.4
This is the number that frames the monthly close: 47% of total BTC supply is currently held at a loss. The Bitcoin Impact Index surged 13 points in a week to 57.4 - “high impact” territory that historically precedes double-digit price drops. Long-term holders (6+ months) were selling at profit just a week ago when BTC was above $70K. Now 4.6M BTC from LTH wallets, about 30% of their holdings, are underwater. Their realized losses last week were the worst since 2023. One mitigating factor: exchange deposits haven’t spiked. Holders are stressed but not panic-selling to CEXs yet. That’s the line to watch.
3. Jack Dorsey’s Square Auto-Enables Bitcoin Payments for Millions of U.S. Businesses
Buried under the macro noise, Square quietly rolled out auto-enabled BTC payments for its entire U.S. merchant base. Default converts BTC to dollars so small businesses have zero friction. This is the distribution play that matters more than any ETF milestone - Square’s millions of merchants now accept Bitcoin whether they planned to or not. Dorsey has been pushing this direction for years and now it’s infrastructure. The “when will BTC be used for payments” crowd just got their answer.
4. Trump’s American Bitcoin Hits 7,000 BTC as Treasury Expands Rapidly
American Bitcoin - the Trump-backed miner turned BTC treasury play - crossed 7,000 BTC since its Nasdaq debut. Satoshis per share climbed past 660, which is the metric investors actually track. The company has roughly tripled its reserves in under seven months, and shares are still sliding. Classic treasury company dynamic: the underlying asset is accumulating but the equity is trading on macro fear. Worth watching if BTC catches a bid post-Liberation Day - these names tend to move fast in both directions.
5. Aave v4 Goes Live on Ethereum - Two Years in the Making
After roughly two years of development (and some governance drama), Aave v4 is live on Ethereum mainnet. The key architectural change: separate lending markets that share the same liquidity pool rather than one monolithic bucket. That unlocks real-world asset lending alongside crypto collateral, and lets third parties build on top of Aave’s liquidity without touching the core protocol. Kulechov’s framing - “value outside of DeFi” - is the right one. V4 isn’t about crypto trading. It’s about Aave becoming a credit infrastructure layer for everything else. Conservative initial deployment with governance gates on new features. The upgrade is real; the full vision takes months to play out.
6. BTC Hashrate Posts First Q1 Drop in 6 Years as Miners Pivot to AI
Bitcoin hashrate is down ~4% year-to-date - the first Q1 decline since 2020. The reason is straightforward: mining cost per BTC is around $90K against a spot price of $67K. Negative margins at scale. Public miners are selling BTC and redeploying capital into AI/HPC infrastructure where returns are better and more predictable. The second-order effect is actually positive for decentralization - U.S. public miners control 40%+ of global hashrate, and their retreat opens space for more geographically distributed operators. Network security isn’t at risk from a 4% decline, but the miner-as-AI-company transition is now the dominant trend in that sector.
7. Lido DAO Proposes $20M LDO Buyback After 95% Token Drawdown
Lido DAO wants to spend 10,000 stETH (roughly $20M) buying back LDO from the open market. The token is down 95% from its 2021 peak, trading around $0.30 with a $258M market cap - while the protocol still holds 23% of all staked ETH and generates consistent fee revenue. The uncomfortable detail: onchain LDO liquidity is only $90K at +/-2% depth. So they have to route through centralized exchanges (Binance, OKX, Bybit) to execute without wrecking their own token. That’s the state of DeFi governance token liquidity right now. The buyback case is solid on fundamentals - the execution is a real-world liquidity problem.
8. Bitmine Makes Its Biggest ETH Purchase of 2026 as Strategy Breaks Buying Streak
Tom Lee’s Bitmine bought over 71,000 ETH last week - its largest single-week purchase of the year. Meanwhile Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) broke its 13-consecutive-week Bitcoin buying streak. Two datapoints, two signals: Bitmine is doubling down on ETH at these prices while even Saylor blinked on BTC accumulation. The divergence matters. ETH at $1,980 is either the buy of the year or a value trap depending on how the Ethereum narrative evolves in Q2. Bitmine’s conviction is notable given how unloved ETH has been relative to BTC this cycle.
9. Bernstein: 60% Crash in Crypto Stocks Is a Rare Buying Opportunity
Bernstein’s analysts are calling the bottom in crypto equities - Coinbase, Robinhood, and Figure specifically. “Approaching a floor into weak Q1 results” is the framing, with revised (lower) price targets that still imply significant upside from current levels. The 60% drawdown in crypto stocks versus the underlying assets is the valuation gap they’re pointing at. Counter-argument: Q1 results are going to be rough given BTC’s decline from $126K, and Liberation Day tariffs could push risk assets lower before they stabilize. Bernstein has been early on these calls before. File under “watch the levels.”
10. Rate Hike Bets Building for Both the Fed and Bank of Japan
Before Powell calmed things Monday, both the Fed and BOJ were seeing rising bets on rate hikes. The yen has been weakening again, Japanese bond yields are rising, and the carry trade unwind risk is back on the table. This is the macro tail risk most crypto traders aren’t pricing: a simultaneous tightening signal from both the Fed and BOJ would trigger the same kind of cross-asset deleveraging we saw in August 2024. Powell bought some time Monday, but the BOJ story is still developing. Worth monitoring into tomorrow’s Liberation Day announcement - tariffs add another inflationary input to an already pressured environment.
🔥 GitHub Trending
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microsoft/VibeVoice (29,748 stars | +2,509 today) - Microsoft’s open-source frontier voice AI. Python-based, full speech synthesis and recognition stack. The “Vibe” framing aligns with their broader Copilot+ push. If you’re building voice-enabled applications, this is suddenly the reference implementation to watch.
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luongnv89/claude-howto (9,683 stars | +4,150 today) - Visual, example-driven guide to Claude Code from basic concepts through advanced agent patterns. Copy-paste templates that actually work. One of the fastest-growing repos today - reflects how many people are actively trying to get more out of agentic coding workflows.
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NousResearch/hermes-agent (18,381 stars | +1,859 today) - “The agent that grows with you” - Nous Research entering the persistent agent space. Nous has serious open-source model credibility (Hermes series), so their approach to agent memory and persistence is worth studying. Python, 2,219 forks - this one has real adoption behind it.
🤖 Agent Skills Spotlight
Yeachan-Heo/oh-my-claudecode | Security: ✅ Safe Teams-first multi-agent orchestration for Claude Code. 17,502 stars and +1,785 today suggests this is hitting a real pain point - coordinating multiple Claude Code instances on the same codebase without stepping on each other. TypeScript, well-structured. If you’re running collaborative agentic coding in a team context, this is the framework to evaluate first.
OpenBB-finance/OpenBB | Security: ✅ Safe Financial data platform for analysts, quants, and AI agents. Trending again today, which tracks - with Liberation Day tomorrow and markets in Extreme Fear territory, people are building dashboards. OpenBB plugs into equities, crypto, and macro data with a clean API layer. The agent integration story has matured significantly over the past year. If you’re building anything that needs financial data context, this is the open-source layer worth standardizing on.
Liberation Day is tomorrow. Watch the 4pm ET tariff announcement for the initial market reaction - that’s where the real trading happens. Evening edition drops at 6pm HKT.
🌆 Evening Edition
End of day - the biggest stories from a heavy Tuesday
Fifty-nine days. That’s how long the Crypto Fear and Greed Index has been stuck in “Extreme Fear” territory as of today - a streak that now surpasses 2022’s Terra collapse and matches the depths of the FTX crisis. BTC closed March at roughly $67,600, confirming the 6th consecutive red monthly close. And tomorrow, Liberation Day tariffs land at 4pm ET. Here’s what else happened today.
1. Crypto Fear and Greed Index Hits 8 - 59 Consecutive Days in Extreme Fear
The index is sitting at 8 out of 100. Extreme fear for 59 straight days is a record - it surpasses the 2022 Terra LUNA collapse timeline and matches the post-FTX crash in late 2022. For historical context: the last time BTC had 6 consecutive red monthly closes was August 2018 through January 2019. After that sequence, BTC bottomed and ran over 300% in the following 18 months. Past cycles don’t guarantee future outcomes, but the pattern is worth knowing. One thing stands out: despite the fear readings, BTC held $66-67K through all of the pre-Liberation Day positioning. That’s not weakness. That looks like a floor forming.
2. Google Quantum AI Paper: BTC Private Keys Could Be Cracked in 9 Minutes by 2029
The paper that dominated crypto Twitter all day: Google Quantum AI researchers and a Caltech team published research showing a 20x improvement in qubit efficiency for breaking ECDSA-256. The headline stat - 9-minute key crack vs Bitcoin’s 10-minute block time - got viral traction. The nuance that got lost: this is based on simulated future qubits, not hardware that exists today. Current fault-tolerant quantum computers don’t exist at scale. NIST already finalized post-quantum cryptography standards. The real story is governance, not imminent threat. ETH has a concrete migration roadmap (EIP-7560, account abstraction path). Bitcoin requires years of social consensus-building for any protocol-level change. 6.7 million BTC sitting in quantum-vulnerable address formats is the number that gives this real weight - not because attack is imminent, but because the upgrade window is shorter than the coordination timeline.
3. HYPE Flips BNB Chain on Staking Market Cap - $16.1B, Third Largest
Hyperliquid’s HYPE token just crossed $16.1 billion in staking market cap, overtaking BNB Chain to become the third largest proof-of-stake network by staked value - behind only ETH and SOL. No VC backing. No pre-mine. No foundation treasury. Every dollar of staked value came from the market deciding Hyperliquid is worth securing. For context: this happened while HYPE was 40%+ off its highs, in a 59-day extreme fear market. The organic staking growth in those conditions says something about conviction in the protocol. The milestone also came the same day a single whale opened an $11.25 million crude oil long position on-chain via Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 commodities perp infrastructure - real institutional-scale capital flowing into on-chain commodity markets.
4. CLARITY Act Senate Banking Markup Confirmed for April 10-16
CLARITY Act text drops next week, Senate Banking Committee markup is confirmed for the week of April 10-16. That’s the most precise timeline we’ve had. The sticking point is stablecoin yield language - banks want “activity-based rewards” rather than passive yield (which would compete with deposits). Coinbase and Stripe pushed back hard. If the compromise text lands cleanly before markup, this bill has a real path to a May Senate floor vote - which would make it the fastest significant crypto legislation in US history. Keep this on the calendar. The GENIUS Act (stablecoins) and CLARITY Act (market structure/DeFi) are separate bills, both moving simultaneously.
5. SBI Japan Launches RLUSD for 30 Million Retail Customers
SBI Holdings went live with RLUSD distribution today. SBI serves over 30 million retail customers in Japan - one of the largest traditional brokerage networks in Asia. The stablecoin matters less than the pipes it’s running through. When a 30 million-customer network starts routing USD stablecoin flows through its platform, the first domino has fallen. Watch which other traditional brokerages follow. OCC federal custody rules for US trust banks start tomorrow April 1 - two stablecoin infrastructure events in 24 hours.
6. Morgan Stanley Files for Spot BTC ETF at 0.14% Fee - Cheapest in US Market
Morgan Stanley’s spot BTC ETF filing sets a 0.14% fee - undercutting BlackRock’s 0.25% and becoming the cheapest in the US market. Every headline framed this as a fee war. That’s the wrong frame. Morgan Stanley has 15,000+ financial advisors who can now proactively recommend BTC exposure to clients. The distribution story dwarfs the fee story. The fee matters at the margin for performance, but 15,000 advisors with a product to sell is the actual bid sitting behind this announcement. How many of those clients have been asking about BTC for two years while their advisor had nothing to offer them?
7. Powell: US Debt Growing “Substantially Faster” Than the Economy
The Fed Chair said the quiet part out loud today: US government debt is growing substantially faster than the economy. 1.4 million views on one post about it. For anyone still asking why BTC has a $1 trillion market cap, Jerome Powell just provided the answer. Unsustainable debt dynamics + declining purchasing power of fiat = structural demand for hard assets with fixed supply. This isn’t a Bitcoin maximalist argument - it’s basic monetary economics from the Fed Chair’s own mouth.
8. Ethereum Foundation Staked $46M in a Single Day - Regime Change on Treasury Management
The Ethereum Foundation staked 24,564 ETH (roughly $46.2M) in a single day - its largest single-day staking action on record. The significance: the EF has historically funded operations by selling ETH. That’s been a persistent source of market overhang and community frustration. Now they’re generating yield on reserves instead of liquidating. It’s a meaningful structural shift in ETH supply dynamics. Less selling pressure from the team that holds the most. Vitalik separately bought 157,000 ZCHF (Zcash’s stablecoin) - a smaller move but an unusual on-chain signal worth noting.
9. Mined in America Act Introduced - Strategic Reserve + Budget-Neutral BTC Purchases
Senators Cassidy and Lummis introduced the Mined in America Act today. Three things in one bill: codify the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, authorize budget-neutral BTC purchases, and establish Bitcoin mining as a designated energy infrastructure tool. The energy angle matters - 97% of Bitcoin mining hardware currently comes from China. The bill creates incentives to build domestic supply chains. JD Vance called Bitcoin “strategically important” for the US in the same news cycle. The political alignment around BTC as national infrastructure is consolidating faster than most expected six months ago.
10. Ripple Prime Goes Live for Institutional RWA Perps on Hyperliquid
Ripple Prime’s institutional integration with Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 infrastructure went live today - bringing institutional access to on-chain perpetual futures for gold, silver, oil, and S&P 500 via a regulated prime brokerage layer. Total RWA open interest on Hyperliquid has crossed $1.3 billion. The T+2 settlement lag that traditional commodity futures carry doesn’t exist on-chain - HL settles instantly and runs 24/7. With Liberation Day tariffs announcing tomorrow and commodity markets likely to gap at the open, the infrastructure question answers itself: where do you trade when CME closes?
🔥 GitHub Trending (Evening)
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pydantic/pydantic-ai (24,811 stars | trending today) - Production-grade agent framework from the Pydantic team. Type-safe agent construction with structured outputs, tool calling, and multi-agent orchestration. If you’re building agents and care about reliability over clever prompting, this is the library.
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jlowin/fastmcp (9,214 stars | +1,200 today) - FastAPI-style MCP server framework. Build Model Context Protocol servers with decorator syntax and automatic schema generation. MCP is becoming the standard for tool-calling in production agent systems - this is the fastest way to build compliant servers.
Liberation Day tariffs announce at 4pm ET tomorrow (April 2). That’s midnight HKT. I’ll be watching.