Bloomberg today: “The rally is occurring amid a broader risk-on shift. This risk-on turn followed last week’s FOMC meeting where the Fed [...] removed some uncertainty about the rate path for the rest of the year.” — Carlos Guzman (@Carlos_Guzman), VP of Research at GSR

We went back through 2,300+ token launches since 2013 to look at how launch structure has changed and what that’s meant for performance. One thing stands out pretty clearly: higher valuations and thinner floats have often been a bad combination for buyers.

Two of the world's most forward-thinking and successful fintech companies (Nubank and Robinhood) are putting crypto rails at the center of their global expansion strategy. Excited to see where this takes the industry in terms of adoption. It finally seems like companies have graduated from merely experimenting and are now building real products that leverage all the benefits blockchains have to offer.

Wall Street's real currency was never speed — it was trust. @xinsong86 built @GSR_io the same way: hard lines, regulation treated as an edge, the kind of culture tier-one banks want to work with. In crypto, that's not caution — it's the moat. Watch:

"Something's just broken with the pricing model." We talked with @andyyy about why memecoins still out-earn RWAs, Hyperliquid's push to rival the CME and Nasdaq, and average token floats at launch collapsing from 80% to 30% since 2017. Watch episode 2 of The Desk here:

I'm excited to announce The Desk, a new project from the research team at GSR that hosts short, data-focused interviews with the best minds in crypto's capital markets. First episode drops tomorrow right here on X.

This was a fun exercise in envisioning what finance, powered by stablecoins, will look like in 2035. We spent some time thinking about how stablecoins, crypto more broadly, and AI will democratize finance over the next decade, with a particularly large impact for emerging markets. Check out our piece! I also very much recommend reading through the rest of the perspectives collected here by @finerymarkets.

This is definitely a great case study for the crypto value accrual debate. I personally draw the opposite conclusion from the numbers. Robinhood was not locked into Ethereum. They could have spun up their own L1, or gone with a cheaper DA layer and paid Ethereum next to nothing. Near-free settlement was likely part of why Ethereum won the deal in the first place. Blockchains are still early in adoption, and right now the priority is onboarding apps, users, assets and liquidity until the network effects are real and sticky. Once Robinhood has years of state, tooling and liquidity sitting on Ethereum, the latter gains some pricing power. Raising prices before that stickiness exists risks having the next Robinhood build somewhere else, or driving Robinhood itself away. The other thing is that fee capture arguably can't carry ETH's valuation anyway. ETH trades at around a $230B market cap, more or less McDonald's, and McDonald's earned $8.6B last year. The entire L2 sector paid Ethereum about $10M for settlement in 2025. Even a 75/10/15 split takes Ethereum's lifetime cut of Robinhood Chain from $1,538 to roughly $120K. You'd need thousands of Robinhood Chains to move the needle. At a generous 30x, $230B implies about $7.5B a year in earnings, hundreds of times what L2s pay today. Bitcoin meanwhile sits around $1.3T with zero cash flow. ETH's current valuation only makes sense as money/store of value. The shorter path to justifying a higher valuation is competing with Bitcoin for primacy in that role. Charging L2s more won't move a $230B valuation, and it could cost Ethereum the next Robinhood.

Spoke with @decryptmedia about the current market situation. Crypto markets are feeling the brunt of the macro chaos while tech equities prove more resilient. The biggest questions for the space right now are whether $BTC will find sustained support at $60k like it did in Feb/March, and what it will take to reignite the retail interest that has migrated over to equities.

Ripping the band-aid off. This looks more symbolic and precedent-setting than anything else, but actual substantial selling might follow if market conditions don’t improve, mnav remains compressed, and dividend obligations become pressing

Hard to overstate how much expectations for US monetary policy have changed in recent weeks. Tech stocks have brushed it off amid the AI euphoria, but it’s likely to continue being a major drag on risk assets and crypto until the situation in Iran gets resolved.

"CLARITY is coming." This week's market bulletin focuses on pre-IPO onchain markets, key macro updates, changes in ETF flows, and what pending U.S. legislation could mean for crypto's capital markets. Link to the report in the next post. Authors: @slatersanter @carlos_guzman