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The last time Nvidia reported earnings, revenue set a record—data center revenue was nearly doubling, and the company’s guidance for the next quarter was also higher than the market consensus. After the close that day, the stock price dropped.

This isn’t the first time. There’s nothing obviously wrong with the earnings report itself. The market stopped pricing it based on how much they expect to make in that particular quarter. Next Wednesday after the U.S. stock market closes, Nvidia will report the quarter ended July 26. The company’s guidance is around $91 billion, plus or minus 2%, with institutional consensus slightly higher than that number. Binance spot $NVDAB has been tracking the U.S. stock market closing prices these past few days. The weekend is just waiting for this earnings report. And what I care about has little to do with whether revenue beat expectations.

Let’s go back to that previous quarter’s report—the line that’s easiest to skip. Revenue was $81.6 billion, up 85% year over year. Everyone saw that. Look at the next line: net profit was $58.3 billion, even higher than operating profit for the quarter. The extra portion goes into other income: $15.9 billion, and most of it is Nvidia’s unrealized gains over those three months on publicly traded stocks it holds. In a manufacturing company’s GAAP earnings, the GAAP EPS ends up higher than non-GAAP.

In Nvidia’s income statement, there is now a piece dedicated to the market value of the AI companies it has invested in.

And it keeps adding to it. In the same quarter, the company spent $18.6 billion buying non-public securities. In the same period last year, it was only a small fraction of that. The scale of non-public equity on the balance sheet nearly doubled within a quarter.

This line has moved to a new level recently. On August 17, Nvidia filed an 8-K. The company signed a set of residual value guarantee agreements with SB Energy, a unit of SoftBank, tied to a large AI data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, where the tenant is an entity affiliated with OpenAI. Nvidia’s payment obligations under these agreements have a cumulative maximum cap of $105 billion.

The terms themselves are more worth reading than the headline number. The guarantee takes effect only after the landlord completes the delivery conditions, which the company expects to begin in 2028. If OpenAI defaults on bankruptcy or fails to pay rent, only then does Nvidia have to make up the difference between the guaranteed minimum lease value and the actual proceeds from disposal and recovery. One of the termination scenarios is that OpenAI receives a qualifying rating. In addition, it commits that any advance payments Nvidia makes will be fully repaid by OpenAI. The first version of this arrangement was much larger: the number reported by the media at the end of July was $250 billion. Over the following weeks, investor complaints about revolving financing were made public, and only later did it settle at $105 billion.

With this filing, what used to be argued about only through rumors can now be discussed based on the actual terms. Bears have been repeating this for a year: before those several-hundred-billion-dollar AI data center lease obligations are formally put into use, they sit off-balance-sheet. Once they get concentrated onto the balance sheet, the situation could resemble Cisco in the year 2000. Michael Burry has been the loudest voice for this view. On the accounting front, he isn’t wrong—the 8-K was filed for the portion of obligations arranged off the balance sheet.

But I don’t agree with equating it directly to Cisco. $105 billion is a capped maximum amount. It doesn’t equal expected spending. It only gets triggered if OpenAI defaults, and the advances must be repaid by OpenAI once the rating requirement is met—the guarantee is automatically released when the rating criteria are satisfied. This looks more like Nvidia lending its own credit to a customer that hasn’t yet obtained an investment-grade rating, in exchange for the campus’s land, power, and compute bays. Calling it a ticking time bomb, or calling it a purely commercial arrangement, both amount to laziness.

What makes me think the demand side still holds up is another set of numbers. As of April 26, Nvidia’s manufacturing, supply, and capacity commitment totaled $119 billion, of which $95 billion needs to be paid off within the remaining time of this fiscal year. This is the company putting real money behind orders upstream—harder than any adjective you’d hear on an earnings call. If they’re willing to sign this many orders for capacity years ahead of a few quarters, it shows they believe those goods will be sold.

On August 26, I’ll start by flipping through the guidance for the third quarter. The numbers for the second quarter have already been boxed in by that $91 billion figure. What the market lacks is the metric for the next quarter. Gross margin is another place to look. The company’s guidance for Q2 is around 75%. During the ramp-up period for the new architecture, gross margin is typically pressured. Whether it can hold that line matters more than selling an extra few billion—because it indicates how much pricing power it still has with customers. Going further into the commitments section, it’s also critical which direction the $119 billion moves. That determines whether the company continues to ramp up or whether it signals something it sees and chooses to reduce. And there is the finalized text of the residual value guarantee: in the 8-K, the agreement form is listed as an exhibit, submitted together with the 10-Q for this quarter—meaning next Wednesday’s filing. Across the entire earnings cycle, this is the only truly new piece of material.

There is one more metric that’s easy to overlook. When the company gives $91 billion guidance, it assumes that China data center compute business revenue is zero. If that assumption stays unchanged, the China market looks more like an option layered on top of the current guidance—any loosening would only add upside. But once the assumptions change, the market’s full-year model needs to be revised accordingly.

On the risk side, I don’t want to be vague. This company’s customer concentration keeps rising. In the prior quarter, three direct customers accounted for 21%, 17%, and 16% of total revenue, respectively—compared with only two customers exceeding that threshold in the same period last year. The top three also represent an even higher proportion within accounts receivable. And these same customers are also spending heavily on developing their own chips. In late May, Joseph Moore of Morgan Stanley maintained a Buy rating, and the reason is exactly here. He argues that for those hyperscale vendors developing their own ASICs, the next two years will actually be when Nvidia’s growth is fastest—because a shortage of compute makes everyone scramble for chips first before negotiating roadmaps. The logic will start to loosen first once compute capacity is no longer tight.

There are two things that could overturn my view: either third-quarter guidance is clearly below the market’s current expectations, or supply commitments pivot downward in the new quarter’s financial statement. If either happens, the thing to worry about is that demand itself is already loosening first. How the accounting is recorded would then be secondary.

Before next Wednesday, the market will likely keep circling the revenue number. If you want to spend a little time, you can read the 10-Q filed alongside the earnings report—especially the commitments section and the residual value guarantee provisions in their original wording. #英伟达财报 is often the clearest indicator of where the risk truly sits—precisely in those parts that nobody reads.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Ministry of Finance did something rather unusual: it went into the market to buy its own long-dated Treasuries. By Friday’s close, the bond market returned the favor—promptly reversing it. Yields on the long end were back to where they stood before the Ministry’s move. Meanwhile, in the same set of trading days, crypto here didn’t give anything back at all.

First, let’s look at what the Ministry of Finance announced. In an announcement dated August 19, it singled out two maturity buckets—10 to 20 years and 20 to 30 years—and raised the single-transaction cap for buyback liquidity support from $2 billion to at least $4 billion. The policy starts on September 9 and runs until November 4, covering the refinancing season. The official rationale was to provide more liquidity support on the long end.

$BTC that day climbed from the 64,000s straight up to above 70,000, and the market instantly gave the move a name: the Ministry of Finance was stepping in to prop up the market.

“Propping up the market” is an early read. The Ministry of Finance can’t create money. The cash it has only comes from two sources: taxes and borrowing. To buy back long-dated Treasuries, it has to make up the funds with newly issued short-term debt. Once the full circle is completed, the market ends up with no more money than before—it has merely swapped long-duration paper for short-duration paper.

This round of action changes long-end supply and demand, but overall liquidity doesn’t actually change. Even at the maximum scale—say, $30 billion per quarter in buybacks—spread over a stock of $4 trillion in outstanding debt, it’s barely enough even to count as a rounding error.

The bond market’s reaction was more honest than the reactions on Twitter. The 30-year yield closed the day before the announcement at 5.28%, was pushed down to 5.19% on the announcement day, and then finished Friday at 5.27%. After three days of a round trip, it was basically as if nothing happened.

In a Thursday report, the FT put it plainly: this intervention by Bessent didn’t manage to soothe investors’ nerves. The Wall Street Journal, in the same day, quoted its Federal Reserve reporter Nick Timiraos saying that long-bond yields had given back all or part of the downward move brought by the buybacks. The amplified buybacks don’t even begin until September 9. For those three days, the market’s trading is purely a reaction to the paper announcement.

Crypto didn’t “give it back.” $BTC is at $78,568, up 5.52% in 24 hours. I personally ran the numbers off a Binance weekly chart: the increase for the whole week was 24.6%. Lining up all 400 weekly candles from the end of 2018 to now, only four are more explosive. The last time something at this level appeared was March 2023. $ETH and $SOL over the same period were up roughly 30%—more than even BTC.

Even gold rose the same week by 5%.

At this point, that popular explanation can’t hold. If the reason for this rally is that the Ministry of Finance pushed yields down, then since yields weren’t actually pushed down, the rally should have already been reversed. It wasn’t. That means the market wasn’t buying the “yield decline” story.

I lean toward another interpretation: the market is buying the fact that the Ministry of Finance had to take this action in the first place. On Thursday, Jeffrey Currie, head of global commodities research at Goldman Sachs, spelled this out: a sovereign that has to go into the market to buy its own bonds to set prices has already implicitly admitted that the market won’t give it that price.

With the 30-year yield still sitting at 5.27% and debt only just crossing $4 trillion, the Ministry of Finance blinked first. Following this line of thought, the question becomes where the money is likely to hide—and the answer points toward the “dilution” side. Gold and crypto rising in the same direction in the same week is itself evidence that this rally isn’t crypto’s own separate story.

The counter-argument also needs to be laid out. On August 19—the same day—the White House held a crypto summit. Trump directly urged the Senate to pass the CLARITY Act, and the heads of Coinbase, Robinhood, and Kraken were all in attendance. This is real, tangible policy-positive news—and it did happen on that same day.

But it can’t explain why gold rose at the same time, nor why after August 20 and 21 when the bond market had fully digested the buyback-positive news, crypto could still keep climbing for two more days. The bill itself was still stuck in the Senate; only after the Senate reconvenes on September 14 is there an actual window. Right now, it’s just a promise.

Beyond the magnitude of the rally, there’s another layer. This move puts the Fed in an uncomfortable position. In a July 29 press conference, Waller explained why the Fed wouldn’t hike rates. The reason wasn’t that inflation had fallen. His exact words were: “In these 42 days, we haven’t done much, and the market has done quite a bit.” He also said that during this period between meetings, financial conditions tightened—giving the Fed some confidence that it can achieve price stability. The bond market did the work of adding the hike for him, so he didn’t have to move.

What the Ministry of Finance is doing now is exactly aimed at dismantling that tightening. If it truly dismantles it, then Waller would lose the very reason he quoted himself—rate-hike pressure would return to the Fed’s hands. As it stands, it looks like the tightening wasn’t dismantled; with the long end still hanging around 5.27%, he can continue using the market as a shield.

No matter which route you take, it doesn’t lead to a “looser policy” script.

The push toward rate hikes is also building. At the July meeting, the three regional Fed presidents voted for a hike; it was the most consistent disagreement since September 2016. The minutes published the same day said that most participants believed that if inflation doesn’t fall, a rate hike may be necessary. Market pricing for September hikes is roughly one-third. Meanwhile, tensions in Iran haven’t eased; oil has been climbing all week, and this line also adds to the inflation case.

Where might my judgment be wrong? Let’s set a check point. If after the September 9 buybacks truly kick off, the 30-year yield stabilizes below 5% while gold turns downward, then this rally really was a liquidity story, and the “dilution pricing” interpretation should be discarded. Conversely, if the long end continues to hover in the 5-handle and both gold and crypto keep strengthening together, then the nature of this rally would be set.

Next Friday, at 10 a.m. Eastern time, Waller will deliver his first remarks since taking office at Jackson Hole. This year’s theme is “the impact of financial innovation on payments and policy.” Only 19 days remain until the September 16 rate meeting. You can watch whether he continues to credit the market with tightening financial conditions. If he changes his tune and says financial conditions have already turned looser, then everything that has risen this week must be recalculated. #JacksonHole

Robinhood finished filing its financial reports by the end of July, and the market had already settled the story within a few hours: for the first time, forecasted-market revenue outpaced crypto, and this brokerage finally doesn’t have to rely on coin prices for a living. Over the next month, sell-side reports and the bullish crowd on Twitter basically repeated that same line.

Revenue really did set a record. But when you line up the events contracts from the two quarters, the way they rose doesn’t match the way the number of contract units rose.

In Q2, event contract revenue was $156 million—more than a tenfold year-over-year increase. In the same quarter, crypto trading revenue was $100 million, down by nearly 40% year-over-year. Other than crypto, nearly every line at Robinhood hit record highs: stocks, options, net interest, and Gold card subscriptions all climbed steadily upward—CFO commentary in the report was essentially firing on all cylinders.

The problem is the denominator. In Q1, customers traded 8.8 billion event contract units, generating $147 million. In Q2, units surged to 13.6 billion, but revenue increased by less than 10%. Money left for the company per contract fell from 1.67 cents to 1.15 cents.

We need to give a discount here. The $147 million in Q1 was reported under the accounting line “other transaction revenue,” mostly made up of event contracts; actual event contract revenue would have been lower than that. So the decline in revenue per unit was slightly less than 30%, but the direction was unchanged: units were climbing, while the unit price was falling.

Why did the unit price fall? Two things in June explain most of it. Robinhood launched Rothera in June—a regulated exchange with a licensing-approved venue and its clearinghouse—jointly operated with Susquehanna and run independently. And in the same month, the World Cup kicked off. According to Bernstein’s statistics, the World Cup accounted for 93% of Robinhood’s forecast-market trading volume from June through early July. Sports contracts had very high ticket counts but extremely thin revenue per trade; customers cycled back and forth dozens of times a day, and the company took only a little each time. Over on Polymarket, they also pushed down taker fees and offered rebates to limit-order makers—so overall take rates across the whole segment kept falling.

Put together, most of the earnings from the event contracts leg now comes from the tollbooths on sports events.

Legal risk therefore became more concrete. On June 17, Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman filed a lawsuit against Kalshi and Polymarket. His argument was that the sports contracts offered in his state require a state license—and both companies lacked one. Robinhood, Coinbase, and Webull were named together as distributors, and similar lawsuits have already been laid out across more than a dozen states. On April 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that the federal Commodity Exchange Act takes precedence over relevant state law—essentially issuing a “get-out-of-jail” card for the industry. But there are moves going the other way too: at the end of March, lawmakers introduced a bill in Congress to remove sports and entertainment event contracts from the hands of regulators. The ceiling for this leg is now drawn by courts and Congress, not by the product team.

Looking back at the crypto line. Crypto was $100 million, down 40% year-over-year, and the crypto notional amount shown in the app fell by 35% as well, landing at $18.0 billion. But that was a quarter when Bitcoin slid steadily from its mid-year highs, and volume was already contracting. The environment has since changed. In the past three days, $BTC went from 64,725 to 77,325; as turnover expanded in sync, the volume trend has clearly turned.

So I don’t buy this “passing the baton” narrative. The market’s pricing of Robinhood is that it’s a growth brokerage shedding the crypto cycle. Bernstein estimates its forecast-market revenue could reach $586 million this year. I’d rather read this earnings report the other way around: forecast markets are shifting from a scarce business into a more competitive, share-taking one. Volume is still rising, but unit price has been pressured down by competition across the venue and by the structure of sports contracts. Meanwhile, the crypto leg was marked down at the bottom of the cycle—its elasticity hasn’t disappeared, it just didn’t have its turn that quarter.

One more accounting point I’d like to flag. In Q2’s diluted EPS of $0.62, $0.14 mainly came from a one-time gain related to the Robinhood Ventures fund no longer being consolidated. Excluding that, EPS would be $0.48. Comparing $0.62 with market expectations would make this quarter look better than it really was.

The third-quarter report in late October will test this view. Watch two lines: whether revenue per contract unit can stabilize near 1.1 cents, and whether contract units in August and September collapse after the World Cup ends in mid-July. If revenue per unit stops falling and starts climbing again, and units also continue trending upward, then I’d be wrong—this leg would be holding the pricing power, not merely catching a single event.

On the market side: on Binance spot, $HOODB is quoted at $100.19, roughly matching the pre-market quote in U.S. stocks, and it barely moved over the day. Within the same 24-hour window, $COINB rose 7.9%. The elasticity in this Bitcoin rebound was first “assigned” to the purely-crypto brokerage market. If crypto trading volume really can come back like this, then that leg—written off as a drag—might actually be the first place for incremental upside to show up at Robinhood in Q3. If you want to track this line, you can compare the two firms’ moves side by side on the same chart and look at them together.

In Saylor’s update last Monday, there was no mention of buying. What he talked about was how many more days the duration of the U.S. dollar reserves had been extended, how many basis points STRC’s credit spread had tightened, and how many preferred shares had been repurchased in the week. In the past few years, every Monday this company’s fixed routine was to announce how many more bitcoins it had accumulated. But in the same spot this time, what’s laid out reads like a cash management report submitted by the Treasury.

Go back week by week through Strategy’s quarterly 8-K filings and look at the final bitcoin purchase. It stops in the week in mid-June. After that, through August 16, the buy column in eight consecutive weekly reports has been blank. In the meantime, there were also transactions in the opposite direction: two bitcoin sales from late June to early July, and two more sales from late July to early August—four trades totaling 6,916 bitcoins. Now the position stands at 840,447 bitcoins.

The footnotes to the 8-K also spell out where the money went. Last week the company issued common stock via an ATM, netting $333.7 million—none of it went into bitcoin. That money was split into three parts: $52.4 million to pay STRC dividends, $132.2 million to repurchase STRC in the open market, and the remaining $149.1 million went directly into U.S. dollar reserves. In the prior week, after selling that batch of coins, the proceeds were also all used to repurchase STRC.

U.S. dollar reserves are now $4.8 billion, down from about half that amount at the beginning of July. The company has already defined this pot of money in writing—meant to support preferred-share dividends and debt interest. Stopping bitcoin buys, continuing to issue shares, and stacking up cash—these three actions point to the same move: Strategy is thickening the safety cushion on its liabilities side.

Why is this happening? In his investor Q&A on August 17, Saylor laid out the rules himself. His trigger line is 1.0 times mNAV. If the share price trades above that line, issuing common stock to pay STRC dividends is worthwhile: the assets you get back for selling each share are more than what gets diluted. If it falls below the line, the same action turns into pure dilution—at that point, it should buy back common shares. The moderator of that Q&A, Natalie Brunell, later condensed the whole thing into a single sentence: fix the credit, and you fix the equity.

Following that line, the machine’s input variables have already changed. It used to consume the upside in bitcoin; now it consumes the premium of MSTR relative to net assets. STRC’s dividend was increased starting in July to an annualized 12%, paid every half-month. This bill isn’t affected by how bitcoin is trading—on the due dates, it has to be paid. As long as the premium remains, the issued funds can both feed the dividends and buy bitcoin; once the premium disappears, the issuance capacity is only enough to keep dividend payments and the preferred-share price propped up first.

This logic isn’t unique to just one company. For all companies that stockpile bitcoin by issuing shares, the wheel’s driving force comes from the same place: the premium of the stock price relative to the assets in hand. When the premium exists, issuing shares is like letting existing shareholders pick up bitcoins for free—bitcoin rises, the premium expands, then more issuance, and the loop climbs endlessly. When the premium disappears, the same loop turns the other way: issuance becomes dilution, and management is left with selling assets and shrinking the balance sheet. Strategy reached this stage earlier than its peers because its liabilities side is more complicated—four series of preferred shares plus convertible notes, and each layer requires cash to be set aside. If you understand what it has been doing over these eight weeks, you’ll have a pretty good sense of what other bitcoin-hoarding companies will face next.

As for the claim that Saylor is dumping, that’s wrong. Of the 840,447 bitcoins fewer than at the June peak, the missing portion is less than 1%. If you spread the total sell volume across bitcoin’s average daily trading volume, it’s almost invisible and has virtually no direct impact on price. The company is also supplying counterevidence to the market itself: among the top fifteen institutional shareholders, twelve added to their positions in the second quarter. That is company-provided data; at minimum, it suggests that institutions willing to buy MSTR haven’t collectively retreated.

The other half—I disagree with that. This week, bitcoin rallied from above $63,000 to above $74,000. The spot price is 74,472 dollars ($BTC ). Up 7.87% over the past 24 hours. In this rally, the buyer with the largest market-wide footprint, the one least sensitive to price and least in need of timing, didn’t show up. Marginal buying has changed hands—replaced by whom is something no one yet has been able to answer clearly with data.

There’s yet a more unflattering layer. The company’s disclosed average cost basis for all its holdings is $75,385, and today bitcoin’s intraday high has already touched above that line. The nearly seven thousand coins it sold from late June to early August all transacted at prices just above the $60,000s. That doesn’t have much to do with judgment. Preferred-share dividends are a bill with fixed dates: no matter when bitcoin comes back, the bill won’t wait.

The next developments that could change the machine’s operating conditions come from the index side. On August 14, MSCI opened a consultation. The proposal would exclude companies whose core operating asset ratio is less than half from the global investable market index, and using May data for backtesting, Strategy would be removed from ACWI IMI. This round of screening deliberately avoids using the words “digital assets,” treating all assets neutrally. Feedback ends at the end of September, results are due in mid-October, and if approved the change takes effect in the November index review. Strategy has already publicly responded: the index provider’s job is to measure the market, not to decide what assets a company is allowed to hold. #Bitcoin

When most companies are cut out by the index, the trouble stays in liquidity. This company will transmit the impact all the way to the financing end, forcing passive capital to sell and push down mNAV—and mNAV is the switch that controls this financing machine.

My view is that this eight-week pause is structural. As long as the premium of common stock relative to net assets can’t return above the line, there’s no reason for the buyback-by-issuance to restart; the money raised will continue to flow first to dividends and the preferred-share price. Under what circumstances would I change my view? If mNAV stays at or above 1.0x for the long term, if STRC’s market price holds above par, and the buy column in the weekly reports shows up with numbers again—then these eight weeks would just be a temporary brake period during a cash-flow squeeze.

Tokenized $MSTRB is quoting $116.55 today, up 8.93% over the past 24 hours, running ahead of bitcoin. People willing to pay a premium for leveraged exposure are still there. In the coming weeks, keep an eye on the footnotes in each Monday’s 8-K about ATM usage—the lines of small print will tell you what this company is thinking earlier than the position numbers. #MSTR

A company announced it would sell a tranche of debt, and the stock price was hammered down by a large margin that same day—this happens in the U.S. stock market every week. Nebius is worth spending extra time on, because after you read through the pages of the terms in the announcement, you’ll find that the place where the market hits the stock doesn’t match where you should really be looking. The information is hidden in the interest-rate spread between two bond tranches, and that spread is already talking about more than just this one company’s situation.

First, let’s lay out the facts. Nebius rents out AI compute capacity. It builds its own data centers, buys GPUs, and sells its compute power under long-term contracts to customers that want to do training and inference. The founder is Arkady Volozh. On August 19, before the market opened, the company announced it would issue two series of convertible senior notes: one maturing in 2030 and the other maturing in 2034. The stock slid steadily throughout the day, closing down 10%. During the session it dipped even further. By that evening’s pricing, the offering size was increased to $5 billion. In the same announcement, it also included an exchange arrangement to swap some of the older notes maturing in 2029 and 2031 for Class A common stock. This was the third convertible-debt deal in less than a year.

A big chunk of that drop was mechanical. The company even spelled it out in the announcement: holders participating in the exchange, after receiving shares, may sell them directly in the public market, or they may unwind the hedging positions they previously set up for these convertibles. For convertible-arbitrage institutions, the strategy is always to buy the bonds while shorting the stock at the same time. When the exchange and the new bond pricing are squeezed into the same day, stock supply and short hedges will surge together. You can’t tell, just by looking at the size of the drop, how much came from valuation judgments versus how much came from this flow. If you only look at how much the stock fell, you’ll end up drawing skewed conclusions.

The terms themselves are more worth focusing on than the magnitude of the selloff. The 2030 tranche pays 0.50% coupon, and the 2034 tranche pays 4.50%, and at maturity the latter must be repaid at 125% of the original principal. Same company, same day, same term sheet: borrowing money for four years or less is almost like getting it for free; borrowing for eight years costs the price of a high-yield bond. Back in March, for that round of convertibles, both tranches’ coupons were still below 3%. Five months later, Nebius’ revenue is rising and contracts are increasing, yet the cost of long-dated funding has been pushed up dramatically.

Put this into the macro backdrop and it all fits. This week, the yield on the 30-year U.S. Treasury rose to 5.31%, the highest level since 2007. Barclays’ Anshul Pradhan decomposed the rise in long-end yields into higher fiscal deficits, higher term premium, and AI-related issuance competing for the same pool of buyers as Treasuries. The same institution estimates that this year’s net corporate bond supply will increase noticeably, and a substantial portion comes from technology companies financing data centers. There just aren’t many lenders willing to lend for more than ten years; AI infrastructure is absorbing that funding, so whatever remains naturally gets more expensive. Nebius’ 4.50% 2034 bond is a specific readout of how this environment lands on an individual issuer.

So why can it still get a 0.50% coupon on the short tranche? Convertibles sell equity options. The conversion price was set more than 40% above the stock price on the announcement day. Investors accept an almost zero coupon in exchange for the right to convert after the stock price rises. CoreWeave in the same sector took a different route: unsecured high-yield debt is priced purely on credit, with no option to sell—so the coupon has to be much higher. Nebius currently stands on the side where it can use equity to get low interest. That is the dividing line between it and peers that have already been priced as highly leveraged assets.

What supports that position is the order book, not the narrative. In its Q2 earnings, Nebius had a contract backlog of $40 billion. The biggest source of funding this year is customer prepayments. New signed contracts cause customers to pay up front for a large part of the construction costs. It also did an asset-backed financing in July, with collateral being the cash flows from contracts of a certain investment-grade customer. Customers pay first, the company builds the facilities next—this kind of money is cheaper than any kind of debt. That is the real reason convertibles can be pushed down to a 0.50% coupon. Along this #AI算力 pathway, companies that can secure large prepayments versus those that can’t will see their financing curves diverge ever more.

The risks are on the other end, too—also very specific. In Q2, quarterly capital expenditures were $5.66 billion. This $5 billion funding deal this time roughly covers just a bit more than one quarter of construction. The burn rate determines that the company has to keep coming back to the market. Every time it returns, it must re-paper the terms at the long-end pricing of that moment—and long-end pricing is moving in a direction unfavorable to it.

My view is this. The market read this announcement as yet another bout of dilution. That reading isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s too shallow. I agree with the seller-side premise: the contract backlog and customer prepayments are real, and this company doesn’t finance itself by storytelling. I disagree with the conclusion that follows from that—because the financing channel is still open, the problem isn’t severe. What got “more expensive” in the terms is the 2034 tranche, which indicates that the funding providers are willing to bet on the stock price within the next five years, but are less willing to bet on its ability to repay eight years later. These are two completely different kinds of trust, and the market separated them by the price it offered this time.

In what situation would I be willing to admit I was wrong? I can say it plainly. If the next round of financing still manages to secure coupons close to zero within five years, and customer prepayments continue to cover a larger portion of capital expenditures, then it would mean that what’s expensive this time is only the duration—not much to do with the company itself—and my line would have to be adjusted. Conversely, if it’s forced to switch to secured high-interest debt, or if the share of prepayments declines, the “route” CoreWeave took—where borrowing gets more and more expensive—would be right in front of it.

Back to the tape. Over the past day, $CRWVB moved mostly sideways, and peers in the same sector weren’t hammered along with it. $NBISB current price is $221.24, down 5.59% over the last 24 hours, almost back to the level of the close on August 19. This is the pre-market period in U.S. trading; liquidity is thin, so don’t treat this readout as if the market has already digested everything. $ORCLB in the same timeframe edged up modestly; the name with traditional business as a base has actually been steadier when long-end rates are rising.

Next to watch is the terms of the next financing, not the intraday volatility of the stock. Look at what maturity the company chooses, and where the coupon lands in those tiers. These two numbers explain the true cost of funding for the AI compute business better than any single intraday selloff ever could.

In the on-site video of that White House event, there’s a part that’s easy to gloss over. Someone asked the President whether the U.S. government would actually buy a substantial amount of Bitcoin and other crypto assets. He didn’t give a plan or a timeline. The gist was that this has been something people keep talking about; he’d probably rely on Paul and that whole group to make the decision first and then tell him. Paul was Paul Atkins, the chair of the U.S. SEC, and he was seated right next to him.

A few hours later, the headlines across various fast-news outlets all standardized to: the United States is considering making a major buy of Bitcoin—and the market basically moved in line with that headline.

I cross-checked that answer with the executive order dated March 6, 2025 that established a strategic Bitcoin reserve. That document spells out that the reserve would be filled with Bitcoin seized by the Treasury, and it authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Commerce to create a budget-neutral accumulation plan, on the condition that it doesn’t add extra costs to taxpayers. The government can buy—but it has to do it in a way that doesn’t cost money. That authorization has been sitting there for seventeen months, and the President’s “consideration” said last night has not moved forward even one step.

The other half—the part about other crypto assets—can’t survive scrutiny either. The same executive order writes different rules for reserves other than Bitcoin: aside from seized proceeds, the government will not go out and acquire any new assets for that portion. The half-sentence that most excited people in the headlines is precisely the one with the least basis.

If the surge last night was driven by expectations of buying into the reserve, Bitcoin should have been the one to rise the most.

What actually happened is the opposite. As of 11:00 this morning, $ETH is quoted at $2,233, up 16.84% over the past 24 hours; meanwhile $BTC is quoted at $69,072, up 7.34% over the same period. Ethereum’s relative price versus Bitcoin surged 9.69% on a single day yesterday, but before that, across the entire prior week, this ratio was basically a flat line. What the market did was to lift the price of altcoins relative to Bitcoin across the board by one rung.

To explain that one-rung move, you need to go back one day.

On August 18, the U.S. SEC released a proposal called Regulation Crypto Assets. It opened two exemption routes for token funding—under the larger tier, projects could raise no more than $75 million within twelve months. The second half of the proposal was even tougher: it provided a safe-harbor path for tokens. The founding team would permanently stop the key managerial contributions promised in investment contracts. If the network can run on its own, then the token can shed its securities status. The conditions for meeting this are written in a way that can be verified point by point. What used to require a lawsuit to reach that conclusion now becomes a checklist.

Bitcoin has never needed this path; its commodity-like attributes haven’t been seriously challenged. What needs this path is everything else.

On the day the proposal landed, the market barely reacted—Ethereum was up 0.22% at the close. The real launch happened after the White House event began last night, when the first high-volume bullish “big green candle” appeared around before 11:00 p.m. Beijing time. In the same event, the President specifically mentioned Hyperliquid, saying the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is pushing to make it enter the U.S. in a compliant, legal way. On OKX, HYPE moved from about $59.40 at the August 18 close to a little over $69 now; in two days it climbed about 16%.

Up to here is the list of things that got repriced last night: what exactly these assets count as under U.S. law. #CLARITY法案 is doing exactly that—it determines which tokens fall under securities regulation and which fall under commodities regulation. The SEC’s proposal is the technical add-on to the same issue. Bitcoin got lifted along the way; Ethereum is actually the target.

In the event, Coinbase’s Armstrong steered the conversation to September 15, when the Senate would vote on a motion to advance the bill. It sounds like a countdown.

But four days earlier, Galaxy’s research head Alex Thorn had just cut the probability of the bill becoming law within the year to 10%, and the reason had nothing to do with the White House commotion. The Senate only reconvenes on September 14, leaving a window of just two or three weeks. The ethical provisions involving officials in crypto hadn’t been ironed out, and the banking industry had been pressuring nonstop on stablecoin yield. Nothing in last night’s event resolved any of it.

Even the basic arithmetic of procedure doesn’t favor optimism. To advance the motion, 60 votes are needed; the Republicans have to get them, meaning at least seven Democrats must cross over. And at least two known Republican senators oppose the motion on substantive terms. In the conditions proposed by the Democrats, the ethical provisions directly target the President’s family’s crypto business. Once the President personally steps to the front of the stage, that knot becomes even harder to untangle.

So that’s how I interpret the jump last night. The part about the government buying coins contains almost no new information, so you can cross it out. The part about securities status is real, and the direction is correct. But the market has raised the probability that the September 15 vote will pass to a position far beyond what the procedural arithmetic supports. The SEC’s proposal still has to go through sixty days of public comment. In the middle, it can be narrowed; the next commission can also change it. The law itself can’t. This round of market action will ultimately be settled in the Senate—not in the White House.

What could overturn this view, and what would make it clear? If last night was only short-covering, then the perpetual funding rates should already be extremely tight now—but Bitcoin and Ethereum are still sitting near their benchmarks, more like spot assets swapping hands. If the relative price ratio before September 15 were to give back most of yesterday’s 9.69% and the funding rates never really rose, then it would mean that the structural change I’m seeing doesn’t exist; only positions moved.

If you follow this line, the relative price ratio might be more informative than looking only at the dollar price of any single coin. Over the next few weeks, it will answer for you: is the market really paying for a rewrite of regulatory identity, or is it only paying for a press-conference performance.

Storage chips are arguably the most profitable theme in this year’s US equities, and up until mid-August there hasn’t been much controversy. On Tuesday night, the bond market was the one that moved first. There was no bad news from the demand side, and no cloud provider came out to cut orders.

The day before’s script was completely the opposite. Musk publicly mentioned that memory is becoming a bottleneck, the storage supply chain rallied across the board, and Micron surged to near its intrayear high. One trading day later, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 4.98%, Micron dropped 7.02%, and the ADRs of SanDisk and SK Hynix fell even harder, nearing 10%. On the same day, the yield on the 30-year US Treasury briefly rose above 5.33%, the highest in 19 years. On the Binance spot side, $MUB quoted at 949.19, down 1.76% in 24 hours; $NVDAB and $SMHB also fell more than that—dumping was concentrated in storage and didn’t spread across the entire compute supply chain.

The explanation given by the US stock market is valuation compression. Higher interest rates raise the discount rate; the farther a company’s profits are in the future, the harder it gets hit. Storage has risen the most this year, and therefore it also falls the hardest. That view is correct only halfway. Micron is up 255% year-to-date—sounds like a bubble—but its forward P/E ratio is only 6x, and its gross margin last quarter was 84.9%. You don’t need a story to justify a price like this.

Where I disagree is in the second half. Treating interest rates only as the discount rate would miss a new “connection” that has just grown out during this storage cycle—interest rates are now also a demand variable.

In the past couple of years, the money cloud providers spent on compute and memory mostly came from cash they generated themselves. This year has changed. By FactSet’s definition, the share of interest-bearing debt in capital expenditures for these five cloud providers was 9% in fiscal 2024; by mid-year, based on trailing twelve months, it has already become 32%. Total capital expenditures for the same group of companies in the current fiscal year are expected to exceed $690 billion; aside from Google and Microsoft, free cash flow for the other firms is projected to drop to around zero, or even turn negative.

For the hand buying Micron stock, one out of every three dollars is borrowed. The cost of borrowing has just hit a 19-year high—this isn’t just something that exists in valuation models.

The credit market started pricing this earlier than the stock market. Oracle’s 5-year credit default swaps jumped to 203 basis points, the most expensive in 18 years, up nearly half over the course of the year. Meta’s protection cost also roughly doubled. The outstanding notional size of CDS for large tech companies set a record—Oracle alone accounts for more than half. People buying this protection likely don’t believe Oracle will default; what they want is a hedge tool that can be entered and exited at any time, to bet on whether the #AI资本开支 chain will snap.

The evidence for the bulls is also solid. Bank of America on August 17 reiterated its buy rating on Micron. The reason: information disclosed by the SanDisk analyst day suggests this storage upcycle has a structural component, unlike the ordinary upcycles of the past two years. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra is even more explicit: he says the timing when supply will catch up with demand is still not visible. In this quarter, DRAM contract prices are close to doubling; Micron’s 2026 HBM capacity has already been sold out under fixed-price contracts—these are all on the books.

On the other side, Steve Eisman—who became famous for shorting 2008 mortgage loans—told CNBC that as soon as cloud providers start cutting capital expenditures, the market will move straight down. When you apply that line to storage, it lands even harder. Cloud providers’ capital expenditures are storage’s orders.

For Tuesday’s selloff, I think it was rational—only the market attached the wrong label to it.

The orders for 2026 are already locked in. Fixed-price contracts won’t disappear just because bond yields move up by dozens of basis points. What changes is the 2027–2028 segment—those orders depend on customers continuing to issue debt to be bought. How long can the storage upcycle last? Whether the investment-grade credit market is willing to keep “tying the door shut” to it now—this structure has not appeared in prior storage cycles.

It isn’t hard to overturn this view. If, after financing costs rise to this level, cloud providers continue to raise capital expenditure guidance, it suggests they can still comfortably absorb the money; then interest rates revert to playing their role as only a discount-rate variable. If Oracle’s CDS curve starts moving back, it would imply that the credit market has loosened its stance, and the reasoning above would be invalid.

There’s another angle I might be narrowing too much. Storage is a cyclical stock; a gross margin of 84.9% hasn’t been sustained long-term at this level in this industry. Once supply catches up, the “knife-edge” position will shift from valuation to earnings itself. Interest rates are just the noisiest variable right now—other variables are queued up behind it.

The next point in time that can give the answer is Nvidia’s earnings report on August 26. The revenue numbers probably won’t look bad. What to watch is how management describes customers’ purchasing cadence and payment terms in the guidance—whether this is a demand-side problem or a financing-side problem will show up in the wording. If you want to track this theme, you can also add Oracle’s CDS quotes and the 30-year Treasury yield to your watchlist—they will likely move before the chip company’s quarterly report does.

BlackRock released a research note yesterday, putting a label on this round of Bitcoin’s decline. The world’s largest asset manager said that the drawdown from historical highs this time is a position adjustment. As an emerging substitute for global currencies and a diversification tool, Bitcoin’s core investment logic has not changed.

The line circulated on Twitter all day, and people who got trapped as well as those watching from the sidelines each heard what they wanted to hear. But defining the cause is one thing; “position adjustment” and the behavior pushed out by weakening buy pressure are completely different. If the issue is simply in the chip/position structure, then it’s essentially the same asset at a 50% discount—what has been dropped will eventually have to be repaid. If, on the other hand, the side with buy demand really shrank, then after the “half-price” adjustment it becomes a new reasonable position; it won’t wait for a fix. So this statement should be broken apart and tested.

BlackRock listed crypto-native leverage as a main driver, and this point holds up in the data. In October 2025, open interest in the overall Bitcoin futures market briefly exceeded $90 billion. On October 10, when Washington announced a new round of tariffs on China, forced liquidations wiped out about $20 billion in open interest within a single day. That selloff was a positioning accident and had little to do with Bitcoin’s story itself.

This level today already looks nothing like what happened back then. Binance’s BTCUSDT perpetual funding rate in the latest period is 0.0024%, and over the past month it has stayed around this range. Longs basically don’t have to pay any premium to hold positions. Open interest for the same contract is equivalent to $6.8 billion; over the past month it has been mostly flat, and leverage has not rebuilt. The current price at $BTC is around $64,400, up 0.46% over the last 24 hours. The historical high was $126,199 in October 2025, implying a drawdown of 49%. The low of this leg was touched on July 1 at $57,800, after which the market has continued to trade in a tight range.

So I agree with BlackRock’s diagnosis of the underlying cause for the first half of this decline. In the first part, leverage and positioning were indeed clearing, and there’s no sign that anyone collectively changed their mind about the long-term Bitcoin story.

The problem lies in the second half. The term “position adjustment” hides an unfulfilled implication: after clearing is complete, the price should move back, because buyers are still waiting where they were. This part can’t be backed by data right now.

The US spot Bitcoin ETF fund flows have already completed a round trip within two weeks. The week from August 3 to August 7 saw net inflows of $854 million—the best week since April 17. The bulk of the money that went in was BlackRock’s own IBIT, and the market at the time interpreted it as institutions returning. Immediately after that, the week from August 10 to August 14 saw net outflows of $390 million, the largest single-week outflow since the end of June. Put together, the two weeks show that buy pressure has not yet formed continuity.

The signals from Glassnode are even colder. Bitcoin spot trading volume has fallen to the lowest level since 2019, and exchange deposit/withdrawal volumes have retreated to the quietest position in recent years. They describe this state as participants’ indifference, which is common in the middle of a bear market. I cross-checked with Binance’s own data and the direction is consistent: the monthly spot trading value of BTCUSDT is down more than 60% compared with last October, and after most of August has passed, it is still following the same rhythm.

Citigroup’s report dated July 1 was speaking from the buy-demand side. They cut their 12-month target price for Bitcoin from $112,000 to $82,000, and at the same time set their assumption for net inflows into future one-year spot crypto ETFs to zero. The reason: weakening investor interest, ETF flows turning negative, and stalled US digital asset legislation. This is already Citigroup’s second cut this year. If you isolate the “set to zero” assumption, it actually doesn’t clash with BlackRock’s story. BlackRock explains where the selling pressure is coming from; Citi calculates how much buy demand is left. The two sides are talking about the same thing—just from different angles.

There’s another layer readers need to keep in mind. BlackRock isn’t a commentator on the sidelines. IBIT is the largest spot Bitcoin ETF in the world, and in that best week for the market, most of the money went into—its own account. This doesn’t mean the report’s content is invalid; the portion about leverage has already been tested with data just now. It’s just that when an institution gives a long-term characterization of an asset class it manages, readers have reason to demand something harder than characterization.

Putting both sides together: BlackRock’s explanation of what has already happened is accurate, but its inference about what will happen next is missing one link. Once leverage has cleared, it only ensures that further declines are no longer driven by forced liquidations—it does not guarantee that prices will move back on their own. The missing link is continuous spot buying pressure. Until now, neither trading volume nor ETF flows have provided it. Until it appears, #Bitcoin is more likely to keep grinding within this range.

What could overturn this view? If over the next three to four weeks ETFs show consecutive net inflows, and if spot trading volume rises from that 2019-like level, it would suggest that buy demand really is returning, and the paragraph above should be invalidated. Conversely, if open interest starts moving clearly higher while spot trading volume stays pinned to the floor, then any rise would be driven by leverage—something that has already been demonstrated last October in terms of how such a rally ends.

There’s one more variable to watch tonight. The Federal Reserve’s July meeting minutes will be released tomorrow early morning Beijing time. In that meeting, the rate was held at 3.50% to 3.75%, and three regional Fed presidents voted against a rate hike. If the minutes’ hawkish wording exceeds market expectations, then among the volatility factors BlackRock listed itself, the Fed would become the dominant variable again. This can’t be solved by internal clearing within the crypto market.

In the next few weeks, you can watch whether the two lines—ETF weekly flows and spot trading volume—start to turn in sync, which may be more useful than staring at the price.

In the quarterly holdings report that Druckenmiller’s family office filed, a Nasdaq-listed company appeared that is linked to Hyperliquid—something it hadn’t previously held. The filing was submitted on Friday as scheduled. On Monday at the open, that stock jumped up by a noticeable amount. Overnight, English-language headlines in one voice turned it into a legendary macro trader betting on Hyperliquid. That statement isn’t entirely wrong, but it drops several key assumptions—assumptions that ultimately determine how much weight this position should carry.

First, let’s look at what he bought. The company is called Hyperliquid Strategies, Nasdaq ticker PURR. Its core business is holding and collateralizing $HYPE . The family office’s reported ending market value is $23.15 million, accounting for 0.44% of its entire portfolio. There’s a trap to get around first: on the Hyperliquid blockchain, there is also a PURR token with the same name, which has nothing to do with this stock. People in the English-speaking market have already mixed the two together. Second, these kinds of filings only disclose long positions in U.S. stocks. A macro trader’s on-chain holdings or whether they short to hedge simply aren’t covered in the document. Inferring that big money started allocating to HYPE by using this to connect two separate things is a logical jump.

The time aspect also needs to be made clear. The report reflects positions as of June 30, but it wasn’t made public until mid-August. In the two-month gap, he may have added to the position—or he may have exited completely. What the outside world sees is always an expired snapshot. In the same quarter, he also opened a batch of new positions, and the overall portfolio expanded significantly. PURR was just one of the names. At 0.44%, this is a probing allocation for someone of his size—orders of magnitude smaller than the weight he has historically put behind positions he truly leaned into.

Next, look at the company’s books. Its most recently disclosed fiscal-quarter reported net income is $152.5 million. The number looks impressive at first glance. But when broken down, only $2.6 million comes from collateralized income; the rest is almost entirely unrealized gains from HYPE price appreciation—leaving little, if anything, on a per-share basis. Push three quarters earlier and the company as a whole was still losing money. It almost doesn’t generate operating cash flow on its own, and the market has understood that. Its current market cap is under $900 million, yet the holdings it disclosed at the end of April were 20 million HYPE tokens—which, at current token prices, are already worth more than $1.1 billion. What the market is willing to pay for this company is less than the value of the pile of coins it holds. This year, several crypto treasury companies have traded below their net asset value, and PURR is only one of them.

So that purchase looks more like buying a discounted exposure to a bucket of HYPE rather than a sign of strong conviction in any particular narrative.

The second line concerns Hyperliquid’s expansion into the prediction market—and this matters far more for HYPE’s long-term valuation than any single holdings report, besides being the easiest area to get distorted by mismatched wording. HIP-4 is an event contract framework that launched on May #Hyperliquid . It lets people bet on outcomes in the real world—such as BTC price and macro data—on-chain in a fully collateralized manner. Galaxy’s research said that in its first month, it captured roughly 20% of the daily trading volume in BTC prediction markets combined on Hyperliquid and Polymarket. Another metric is that on launch day, its share of the entire prediction-market order book was under 1%. Both numbers are true—the difference is in the denominator. The first counts only BTC binary contracts and compares them only to Polymarket; the second includes Kalshi and all non-crypto event categories as well. Which one someone cites basically reveals what they’re trying to prove.

The expansion pace also has hard constraints. Builders deploying event contracts on HIP-4 must first collateralize 500,000 HYPE and then lock it in long-term. That threshold limits how quickly the category slate can grow. In the first phase, what can be traded is still mainly crypto price binary markets. Categories that could truly expand the market—sports, macro data, and the like—have to wait for the next phase of permissions.

The most weighty bullish statement on the long side came from Matt Hougan, investment director at Bitwise. Over the past couple of days he posted on X that people think Hyperliquid is a crypto app; back then, people also thought Amazon was a bookstore. The remark clearly carries an agenda, and Bitwise itself has issued a spot HYPE ETP.

On the direction, I’m on his side. Hyperliquid consolidates perpetuals, spot, and event contracts into the same matching engine and the same liquidity setup. There’s currently no second company with this structure. Using an exchange valuation framework to value it may indeed end up undervaluing it. But I don’t agree that Druckenmiller’s position should be used as supporting evidence. This is a probing allocation. The report is also of a two-month-old snapshot, and it only shows the U.S.-stock side—so it can’t support conclusions that large.

The real test is the next phase of HIP-4. If non-crypto categories start producing truly substantive trading volume and open interest, the Amazon analogy would hold up. If, three months later, the tradable markets are still only those few BTC binary contracts, then the claim that prediction markets are becoming the “second pillar” of the ecosystem would need to be reeled back.

HYPE perpetuals on Binance are a little above $59, and they’ve barely moved over 24 hours—so this news hasn’t left any footprint on the token price. Instead, it was the PURR stock that jumped on Monday, with all the attention concentrated on the stock side. This money bought a U.S.-listed container, while the on-chain setup is still one layer removed from it.

Rather than obsessing over who entered, it’s better to check after some time what categories can actually be traded on HIP-4 and how many open positions there are in each category. The category list is more honest than the holdings report—it at least reflects what’s true right now.

The US stock market hasn’t opened yet, but storage chip stocks have already been bought up. This weekend, the U.S.-stock capital on Binance almost only took one direction: SanDisk, Micron, Western Digital, and Hynix all surged across the board, while the broader market didn’t move along. Before Monday’s open, someone specifically added to positions in storage.

Counting from the Friday U.S. stock close, $SNDKB is up 8.6%, leading the sector; $MUB has broken through the $1,000 level, and the tokenized versions of Western Digital and the storage-theme ETFs have also each risen by nearly 5 points. SanDisk traded over $43 million in volume over the weekend, surpassing SpaceX to rank first among all bStocks; meanwhile, $SPYB just went sideways. These orders are essentially betting on one thing: storage stocks will gap up on Monday.

To understand this bet, you need to look back at how wild this sector has been over the past month or so.

This year, storage has been the most frenzied line in the AI trade. Data centers’ appetite for memory is growing faster than capacity can. Prices have been soaring nonstop, and JPMorgan even coined a term for this phenomenon: chipflation. The DRAM market rose by 30% quarter-over-quarter for two straight quarters. Samsung itself has said that the supply shortage could last until 2028. Micron has gained more than two times within the year, and at one point it was the most crowded long trade in all U.S. stocks.

SanDisk’s position in this cycle is somewhat special. It’s a pure-play flash memory maker. In the first half of the AI rally, HBM and DRAM were the focus, so money flooded into Micron and Hynix, leaving flash as the “lagging second.” Then the shift happened this year: data centers started stacking enterprise SSDs for AI training and inference, and a flash shortage also emerged. SanDisk, once considered a latecomer, squeezed its way from catch-up mode to become a leader. And again this weekend, it is the one charging at the front. The supply side also helped: during the prior down-cycle, flash makers cut capital expenditures to the bone. New capacity ramps up over years, so when demand suddenly turned strong, the shortfall proved harder to fill than people expected.

At the end of July, this line hit the brakes hard. The market feared the cycle was topping. Micron, Hynix, and SanDisk all fell more than 20% from their highs, slipping into a technical bear market, and calls for the overall AI trade to pull back briefly took the lead. But after the dump, only a few days passed—SanDisk rebounded 26% in a single day, leaving the shorts who rushed to chase downside hanging in midair.

On August 13, an investor day reignited the rally. SanDisk management laid out growth models for fiscal years 2028 to 2030: revenue would maintain an annual growth rate in the high single digits to low double digits; gross margin targets were drawn straight around the 80% range; and any excess cash would be returned to shareholders. The stock jumped another 14% that day. The old playbook for memory stocks is that manufacturers go on a wild expansion spree at the peak of the cycle, then crush prices, and investors have taken enough losses from that pattern over decades. This guidance is management signaling in plain sight: no expansion this time—divide out the money. The aggressive buying on Binance this weekend is buying into the continuation of that message.

The disagreement between bulls and bears is sizable right now. The bulls have already laid out their case: the shortage is real, capacity can’t be expanded in the near term, and the manufacturers have set rules for themselves this time. The bears also carry weight. BTIG’s Klynski warned that this AI pullback might not be over yet. Another, more specific sell-side view: memory prices will peak within the next two quarters. If it really gets there, then Micron’s low-looking P/E—because it appears cheap—would actually be a trap; in a cycle stock, when profits are at the top, valuations often look the lowest. Over the past several decades, this industry’s script has indeed always been the same: shortage, price hikes, expansion, oversupply, collapse—no round without exception.

I’m on the bull side, but only about half a step. The mid-term logic is supported by real data—supply gaps and manufacturer discipline. But after Micron has doubled and doubled again within a year, volatility at this spot can only get worse. The kind of “clean-out” at the end of July—where it dropped 20% in half a month—would likely come again. The weekend’s upside also deserves an extra discount: it ran up from a smaller-cap venue on Binance, where depth is limited, and sentiment readings are more reliable than pricing reads. Put together, this feels more like a holder’s market: if you already have inventory, keep holding; chasing from flat cash now means you’re taking the risk of that top-of-cycle tug-of-war. When it’s my turn to act, I won’t chase Monday’s gap up. At this level, patience is worth more than speed. I’ve also written down the conditions for admitting I’m wrong in advance: DRAM or NAND spot prices turn from month-over-month increase to month-over-month decline, or if any major maker’s capex comes in above expectations—then the whole logic is void.

No need to wait too long to verify. Monday night’s U.S. market open will determine whether SanDisk’s gap-up magnitude matches the 8.6% move that the Binance weekend board delivered—these bids will be proven right away as either a head start or an overshoot. And there are two more tests ahead: Nvidia’s earnings report next week, and the Jackson Hole meeting at the end of the month. Once Nvidia clarifies its capex guidance, the order expectations for HBM and enterprise SSDs will find footing. At Jackson Hole, what the market wants to confirm is whether the rate-cut path will still keep growth stocks in the game. If you’re holding storage positions, you can mark these two dates on your calendar.

Last Friday, two institutions that control tens of trillions of dollars together added to the same stock. Vanguard added $MSTR to $3.1 billion, up 13% from the previous quarter. In one go, Invesco added more than 40%, bringing it to $860 million. Around the same time, the longtime bear Peter Schiff urged everyone to sell Bitcoin along with this company.

It’s the same one: Michael Saylor’s Strategy—formerly MicroStrategy. Its tokenized stock on Binance, $MSTRB , is now trading at just over $94, and over the weekend with U.S. markets closed, it basically didn’t move.

What this company does can be summed up in one sentence: borrow money, issue shares, and then convert almost all that money into $BTC to hold—effectively a leveraged Bitcoin position. The most valuable part of what it held in the past wasn’t actually the coins. It was the premium the market was willing to pay on top. At its most extreme, its market cap could reach 1.4 times the net value of the Bitcoin it held—that was the number in May. When you buy it, you’re buying Bitcoin plus a portion of market sentiment.

That premium is now being worn down. Institutions that track companies like this have estimated that the multiple has already been squeezed down to just above 1, essentially trading close to net asset value. The market’s pricing for Strategy now is roughly what its 840,000 Bitcoin holdings are worth—meaning the extra “faith” premium isn’t being priced in anymore.

Saylor’s own actions tell the story even more clearly. He has been selling Bitcoin for two straight weeks. His most recent sale was 1,690 coins, at an average price of a bit over $64,000, while his original cost basis when he built the position was $75,000 per coin—he sold at a loss. The money from selling coins isn’t being used to buy the dip. It’s for repurchasing a preferred stock called STRC, which will later support interest payments to be issued. The “buy and never sell” line he’s repeated for years—he’s loosened that himself.

My view is pretty direct: once the premium is pressed down to 1x, the significance of holding $MSTRB versus simply holding $BTC is cut by more than half. The premium is the real product of this stock. When the premium disappears, what you’re holding is dilution from issuing new shares—and potential passive selling pressure if it gets kicked out of the MSCI index—while getting only an exposure roughly equivalent to Bitcoin.

If Vanguard and Invesco are adding, I’m more inclined to read it as betting on a bottom around 1x that won’t get worse, rather than betting it will surge back to 1.4x.

If what you really want is Bitcoin exposure, at this level, holding Bitcoin directly is cleaner. The only exception is if you’re specifically betting that the premium will mean-revert—that’s a different bet, and it has little to do with Bitcoin itself.

Next Monday, there’s one thing to watch: whether Saylor continues selling Bitcoin to fund share buybacks. If he stops, it means the cash side has calmed down; if he keeps selling, then this machine effectively transitions from buying Bitcoin to supporting the share price. #MSTR #Bitcoin reserve

Binance’s biggest drop leaderboard: #2 $COW . In one day, it fell by 20%. It’s also currently sitting at #4 across the entire market for the most negative funding rate.

Put into plain language: the bears keep smashing the price downward. During the process, every four hours they have to pay longs. After the dump, they then say “good job for cooperating.”

It looks like charity, but in reality this is the most cost-effective deal of the past two days.

Before 4:00 PM on August 15, $COW was a zombie order book nobody was looking at—the price just bounced around 0.10 for five days. Then that single 4-hour candlestick directly pulled it from 0.1024 to 0.1649. Trading volume surged immediately and never stopped all day.

The rest doesn’t need guessing. After the peak, it slowly bled downward to a low of 0.1183. The current contract price is 0.1223, down 20% over the past 24 hours.

The timing of the funding rate is especially interesting. During the pump, the funding rate was still positive at +0.005%. Once the price hit its top, the next level instantly dropped to -1.9141%. After that, every subsequent settlement has been negative—previous level: -0.4496%, and now it’s set at -0.392%. The bears have been bleeding money all day.

In the same period, the price moved from 0.1480 to 0.1223. They paid a full day’s toll and got this whole move in return—money well spent, willingly.

At first, I thought the order book was too thin, causing the funding rate to float around. But the open interest numbers don’t support that. On the afternoon of August 15, open interest was only 10.75 million $COW . Now it’s 59.83 million—more than five times—and up to now it hasn’t rolled back. It’s still pinned near the top funding levels. The real distortion from a thin book is when the open interest is so small it’s basically negligible, and the funding rate goes haywire. Here, the position size is built up for real—none of it has left.

The tricky part is this: the long/short accounts are split around 0.9478. Of the accounts holding shorts, 51.34% are short accounts—four hours ago it was 50.12%. The price has already dropped by 20%, yet people are still crowding into shorts on the other side, paying the toll while they squeeze in.

Based on the current open interest of $7.33 million and a funding rate of -0.392%, during the midnight settlement tonight, the shorts will have to pay out about $29,000.

I won’t guess the direction. I only know that on the spot side for #COW , over the past 24 hours it has moved only $16.25 million. On the contract side, it’s several times that. Whose game it is has already been written all over the numbers.

The funding level at midnight is the only thing worth watching tonight. If the funding rate moves back toward zero, it means the first batch of shorts locked in profits and is leaving. If it gets pulled back to the -1% level again, then it’s a new batch queuing up to short from this position—and this level is already not far from the 0.10 from five days ago.

I’m betting the funding rate will return toward zero. If I get slapped in the face, I’ll admit it under this post tomorrow.

Four days ago, the short positions of $KAITO had to pay $1.03 million in rent

Today, for the same batch of positions, they paid $75,000

I bet on the wrong side for this trade

In the piece from August 12, I wrote that before the unlock, the shorts would not withdraw, and the funding rate would continue to go deeper. By August 20, it would be left with a smaller but tougher-looking bucket

The funding rate didn’t go deeper—it kept moving back toward recovery

Recently, the eight most relevant levels are -0.1204%, -0.0973%, -0.0975%, -0.0730%, -0.0587%, -0.0830%, -0.0761%, -0.0800%

From that single-day extreme of -1.2214%, it has converged by about 93%

For every $10,000 short, the daily rent dropped from $480 to $47

The position side also went the other way. Open positions rose from 34.757 million tokens to 44.39 million—an increase of nearly 10 million tokens in just over four days

I thought people were running out, but actually they were moving in

Where I was wrong, I figured out today: I treated an extreme as the starting point of a trend

Negative funding rates usually revert on their own. Arbitrage positions eat them up, and only a few can keep deepening all the way

What really matters to record is the combination of the position direction and the funding-rate direction

If positions are falling and the funding rate is extremely negative, that means the shorts who can’t afford the rent are exiting. The remaining holders are forced to pay even higher. What looks “tough” is actually dispersing

If positions are rising while the funding rate is still extremely negative, that’s the real crowding—and the fuel for a short squeeze

August 12 was the former case, but I read it as the latter

There’s another detail I only calculated today

The number of tokens is up by nearly 10 million, but in USD terms, this “bucket” shrank from 21.54 million to 16.10 million—down by a quarter

Yes, the bucket has gotten smaller, but whether it’s “hard” has completely flipped

This isn’t rescuing me—I bet on the funding rate, and the funding rate went the opposite way

Price did drop: from 0.6196 when I posted that piece to 0.3627 now, down 41.5% in four days

The direction was right, but what I bet on was the funding rate. I didn’t write a single word about the price line

I picked the wrong target based on my criteria—the drop I saw afterward has nothing to do with me

Now the contract is 0.3627, down 6.279% over 24 hours. Intraday, it swings between 0.3387 and 0.3913. Contract trading volume is $45.40 million

There are four days left until the batch unlock on August 20

This time I won’t report the unlock volume. The sources I found don’t match—the gap is close to half. If I can’t confirm it, I won’t write it

My new judgment is nailed down right here:

Before the unlock, I bet the funding rate won’t go back into the deep-water zone

From tomorrow through the moment of unlock on August 20, in every settlement tier, if any tier’s funding rate falls below -0.30%, then I’ll count it as me being wrong again. Over the last four days, the deepest funding rate has only been -0.1596%. This one needs to go twice as deep

If none of the tiers break -0.30%, then it means I read it correctly this time

If, in the middle, you see tiers turning positive, that would mean the shorts are cleared even more cleanly than I bet

In the article from four days ago, I wrote with extra certainty

This time I’ll write fewer adjectives

$64,452 and $1,423,608. These are two coins that were delisted by Binance from the same batch tomorrow—each coin’s total trading volume for the past 24 hours. The difference between them is 22-fold.

The one with the lower trading volume is $ACX, up just +0.34% in the past 24 hours. The price barely moved: the highest was 0.04181 and the lowest was 0.04080. All day it stayed within a band about 2.5% wide. The one with the higher trading volume, $VANRY , dropped 26.10% over the same period.

On the Aug 3 announcement, six names were hit at once: ACX, HFT, PIVX, PYR, VANRY, and VIC. They were also delisted on the same day—that is, tomorrow. The “death date” is identical, yet the 24-hour percentage drop ranked them more than thirty positions apart. $PIVX at the bottom is -37.50%, VIC -35.79%, $VANRY -26.10%, PYR -17.65%, HFT -15.22%, and $ACX is the only one still in positive territory.

With the same announcement and the same date, you basically can’t explain this gap by fundamentals alone. You have to look at how many people are still in the market.

$ACX had 1,807 trades in the past 24 hours, with an average of a bit over $35 per trade. This number means there’s basically nobody left on the order book—if nobody is dumping, the price naturally can’t fall. $PIVX is the opposite: starting August 9, it had eight consecutive bearish candles. On that day it opened at 0.0272, and now it’s 0.0090. All along, people kept selling—yet there were counter-parties absorbing the sells the whole way.

Liquidity dies first; price follows later.

People who have held coins that get delisted probably understand this feeling. I used to do the same thing—I’d only remember to place orders on the last day. When I looked at the order-book price, it seemed fine. I put in an order and nothing happened for half a day. In the end, I tossed a random amount in roughly based on the buy-one price. The execution price and the price shown on the screen were completely different. The “price doesn’t move” effect one day before delisting is an illusion—it only means nobody is trading. It doesn’t mean you can actually get out at that price.

$ACX is now 0.04102. It looks more dignified than any other coin in the same batch. But all day it only had a little over 1,800 trades. After tomorrow’s delisting, Binance will close that exit, and whatever liquidity remains will only get thinner. $PIVX is now 0.0090—down ugly—but at least every single trade reflects a price that can truly execute.

At this same time tomorrow, I’ll tally the trade counts and trading volumes again for the six coins, to see whether on the execution day of the delisting $ACX ’s trade count keeps dropping further—or whether people concentrate their selling before the door closes. These two outcomes point to totally different things. The data from today’s half day isn’t enough to tell which one it is.

$63.78$ million traded today on an RWA public chain that normally only sees one or two million dollars move per day—turnover was even higher by 50% than the total daily trading volume of $SOL .

This coin is $PLUME , the chain doing real-world asset tokenization on-chain. The volume was built up over three days: on Aug 12 it moved just $1.66$ million on Binance spot for the whole day; on the 13th, $9.43$ million; on the 14th, $18.03$ million; and on the 15th it shot straight to $92.58$ million—55x in three days. During the same period, $PLUME ’s price went from $0.01141$ to $0.0130$ now, while Binance spot’s 24-hour volume fell 1.81%. The money really came in, but the price is almost stuck in place.

The headliner can be checked. On the night of Aug 14, Korea’s Shinhan Asset Management signed an MOU with Plume to pilot a won-denominated tokenized fund. Shinhan has $133.6$ trillion KRW under management—its scale is definitely intimidating. But the original text of the announcement is quite straightforward: for this round, they’re only doing a concept validation. They won’t issue or distribute, and it will be run inside a segregated structure in a third jurisdiction. They even use contracts and technical measures to block direct access by Korean residents. Put into plain words: a technical drill—product doesn’t land, and Koreans themselves can’t buy it.

The order book is more honest than the news. On Aug 15, all $92.58$ million piled into just a few hourly candles—one of them alone gobbled up $22.78$ million, a quarter of the entire day. That K-line closed at $0.01296$, slightly lower than the previous one’s $0.01305$. With over twenty million dumped in, the price didn’t budge at all. My read is that buy and sell are equally thick, with chips changing hands in place.

The derivatives side is colder. The funding rate now is +0.0013%—nobody owes anyone money in either direction. Across the whole network there are 447 million $PLUME $ held, which comes to about $5.8$ million USD; on the contracts, the daily trading volume is $19.36$ million, less than a third of spot. Spot volume is lively, but nobody is willing to take leverage and bet it will keep running higher—this contrast is more glaring than the price itself.

Volume is already backing off. In the most recent five hours, $PLUME spot traded a total of $1.95$ million—averaging under $0.4$ million per hour. Spread across all of Aug 15, it averaged $3.86$ million per hour. That’s down 90%.

This wave, I’m bearish. A round of volume driven by the news can’t be sustained, and price can’t follow. On Aug 18 when the books are reconciled, there are two thresholds: can daily trading volume stay above $50$ million USD, and can the price hold above $0.0132$? I’m betting neither will hold.

If I get slapped in the face, I’ll admit it right here under this post. I’ve seen too many MOU cases—when people sign, it always feels like the beginning of a story; after signing, most of the time nothing really happens.

$14.26 million was the money dumped into $ACE during that one hour at 13:00 on August 15. In the same hour, $BTC matched $13.45 million on Binance spot.

For a small coin priced a little over twenty cents, the money absorbed in one hour was even more than $BTC , with 174,000 trades versus 18,000. In the past 24 hours, $ACE had $73.8 million in spot trading volume, with 1.287 million trades, ranking first across Binance’s entire market. $ACE is now priced at $0.135, down 31% in 24 hours.

Lined up candle by candle on the hourly chart, the whole story is written on the order book.

13:00 was the fiercest candle of the day, opening at $0.2205, topping out at $0.3498, closing at $0.2730, with all $14.26 million and 174,000 trades packed into those sixty minutes. Up to that point, it was still normal momentum chasing.

The key point is in the next three candles.

At 14:00, 15:00, and 16:00, it closed at $0.2734, $0.2747, and $0.2720, flat as a line. But the money flowing in and out over those three hours totaled $17.68 million, which was $3.42 million more than the hour when it ran up. The price did not move, but money kept changing hands; someone was quietly passing the bag.

The 17:00 candle opened at $0.2718 and dropped as low as $0.1931. Then at 20:00 it was slammed from $0.2033 to $0.1611, and this morning at 09:00 there was another candle from $0.1574 to $0.1364.

I don’t think the money that rushed in at 13:00 and the money that dumped at 17:00 was the same group. The ignition hour was fast and fragmented, with 174,000 trades averaging only $82 per trade; a crowd was fighting to get in. The real sellers were in those three flat candles, with a cost basis around $0.273. People who bought there are now holding $0.135, down more than half.

On the #ACE contract side, the funding rate is the rent shorts pay longs every four hours; the more negative it is, the tighter the short squeeze. At 12:00 on August 15, settlement was still -0.0073%, and by 20:00 it had reached -1.5721%. After that, it converged across three steps: -1.3464%, -1.0236%, and -0.6802%, looking like the shorts were about to unwind. But the 12:00 live reading was still -1.0773%, and it turned back again.

Last night I thought extreme negative funding would naturally converge and shorts would ease first; now I’m only half changing that view. During those three converging steps, the price still slid from $0.1817 to $0.1574. What was suppressing this move was spot sell pressure; the contract shorts were just paying and watching from the sidelines. This morning at 09:44, open interest dropped 5.4% in five minutes, and Binance marked it as long liquidations. Open interest was 74.43 million units, and just that -1.0773% tier alone meant shorts had to pay a little over one hundred thousand dollars.

The test is set in stone here: come back at 16:00 CST on August 17 and check. If the funding rate is still below -0.50% and open interest is still above 60 million units, the crowding has not cleared and $0.135 still needs to test lower. If the funding rate gets back above -0.20%, then I read it wrong.

I’m watching the $0.273 line. If even one of the people who took inventory during those three flat hours wants to get back to breakeven, volume will appear first.

$26.17 for $490.06—today on Binance spot, $TUT and $BTC each average the amount per trade execution.

The side that traded more frequently is the cheaper one. $TUT ’s today’s spot trading volume is $48.96 million, with 1.871 million trades; the number of trades for $TUT ranks first in Binance’s market. $BTC 175.9万笔, ranks second. The trading volume on the $BTC side is 17.6 times that of the first.

In the same exchange, on the same day, the two order books are occupied by two completely different groups of people.

$TUT ’s current price is $0.07436, down 28.14% today, and it has touched a low of $0.06129 intraday. $TUT is the Web3 education project on BNB Chain; after the surge on August 9, it has been paying back its debt ever since.

First, take responsibility.

On the morning of August 10, I wrote an article $TUT and fixed two criteria: if the contract’s open interest denominated in the base asset drops below 260 million tokens, that counts as fuel burned out; if it rises above 390 million tokens, that counts as new money taking over. When I wrote that article, the reading was 301 million tokens.

In the past 48 hours up to now, the open interest oscillated between 269.6 million and 337.4 million tokens; neither of the two lines was touched. Now it’s 331.7 million tokens. In the same period, the price fell from just over 20 cents to over 7 cents—more than 60% down.

After the entire round of the market played out, my two switches I set up never triggered even once. I stepped into the same hole again—the criteria were nailed down, but the “nailing” was in a place the market couldn’t reach.

Look one layer further down. The base-asset open interest of 301 million tokens increased to 331.7 million tokens—yet the number of coins actually went up. But when converted to USD, 60.6 million became 24.67 million, leaving only about 40%. On the contracts side, nobody exited—the positions being held were still the same batch of positions, but each token had become cheaper.

Today’s funding rate had a four-tier settlement: +0.0050%, +0.0050%, +0.0050%. At the 16:00 tier it was raised to +0.0315%. Longs have been paying shorts—though only a little. The long-to-short account ratio is 0.7406, the lowest point in the last 24 hours; there are more accounts taking short positions.

Laying the small orders side by side makes it clearer. EPIC has one trade at $31.24; BICO at one trade $24.90; BANANAS31 at one trade $19.40; $ETH at one trade $234.72. The $26.17 of $TUT falls right in the middle of that group of small-cap coins that dropped the most today.

I didn’t find the cause. I went through the unlock calendar and announcements, and there were no matching unlock schedules in August. Today at 15:41, the official account posted that Aster went live with perpetuals and platform updates, which doesn’t match this liquidation pattern. So for this part, I can only show the order book, not the reasoning.

Change the way I set the criteria—set them at levels the market can reach tomorrow. On August 13 at 16:00, using the same standard, I’ll measure $TUT ’s spot average order again: if it’s above $30, it means large orders are back; if it drops back below $22, it means the small lots are still chewing away, one bite at a time. Those two numbers appeared on August 9 and also this morning; they’re not numbers I just made up on the spot.

There’s one more number I can’t measure. Behind the 1.871 million trades, how many truly distinct accounts are there? The exchange doesn’t publish it, and I flipped through various sources today but couldn’t find a replaceable metric. Tens of thousands of people each place a few trades, and a few programs place over a million orders—their shapes on the order book are identical. But these two things imply completely opposite realities.

$1.823 was pushed to $3.463—pretty much almost doubled. And $PROM finished that move within the four hourly candles this morning.

Yesterday noon I wrote two lines for myself here, and even added a note saying that today would be reachable. In the end, neither line got touched. This morning I woke up and was basically ready to give up.

The original text was: “If the position coin balance stands above 2 million coins, and the fee rate stays below 0, then my squeezed short is considered valid. If any two consecutive hourly fee rates flip positive, to +0.0100% or higher, I admit I was wrong.” The deadline was set for 01:00 last night.

When it expired last night, the position was sitting around 1.57 million coins—still more than 20% short of 2 million—and the fee rate hadn’t flipped positive either. Both lines missed. I didn’t deliver even the last settlement result from that post.

Then this morning at 08:00, $PROM started from $1.823. It closed at $2.395 at 09:00. The 10:00 candle directly drove it to $3.252. At 11:00 it touched $3.463, then got smashed back to $2.666. Now the spot is $2.694, up 25.9% in 24h. It’s third on the market’s daily gainers list for coins safety. On the contracts side it’s reporting $2.65.

Position numbers: 1:57 a.m. was 1.579 million coins, 09:00 was 1.836 million coins, and at 11:00 it surged to 2.838 million. Now it’s 2.708 million.

That 2-million-coins line arrived less than 12 hours late, and then it blasted through by 36% in one go.

As for the fee rate in the same period: it didn’t just fail to flip positive— it went deeper and deeper. #PROM was changed by Binance yesterday to settle once every hour. At 10:00 it was -0.0037%, at 11:00 -0.3028%, at 12:00 -0.5536%, at 13:00 -0.7394%. Now I have a $10,000 short order hanging; just for the 13:00 hourly window alone, it’s going to cost 74 bucks. The long/short ratio in the account fell back from 0.6661 in the morning at 10:00 to 0.9798—shorters are pulling out.

So the call I made yesterday was right in itself. The direction, the structure, and the squeeze form were all correct. The points I got were zero.

The problem was the expiry time. The “valid” condition requires new capital to stand above 2 million coins. That has to rely on people outside re-depositing funds into it. But I only gave it a 12-hour window, including a 12-hour sideways, drifting-down period. Pairing a condition that needs capital to reassemble with a window like this makes it almost destined to miss the expiry. The line wasn’t wrong—I set the stopwatch early.

Plainly put: the threshold and the window together determine whether a line has meaning. Last time I failed because I set the threshold outside the actually-tested range. This time I failed because the time window locked in before the condition even happened.

The new line is written again. The window is extended to 48 hours, through 13:00 on August 14. The direction I’m betting on hasn’t changed—I still think the short side is more dangerous.

Valid: The position keeps above 2.5 million coins, and meanwhile any one hourly fee rate is still at -0.20% or lower. The shorts haven’t run; they’re still paying the longs hour by hour, and that wave above becomes the second segment.

Invalid: The position drops back below 2 million coins, or the fee rate returns above 0 for three consecutive hourly intervals. If any one of these happens, the shorts have already closed, and my side ends. Both lines are still within shooting range for now.

What makes me uncomfortable is that moment at 01:00 last night. Seeing the number 1.57 million, I had already mentally marked this order as a worthless ticket. Seven hours later, all the money came back.

104 million US dollars is the rent paid over the past 24 hours by the short side of $KAITO . In the same day, on Binance spot, everyone combined only managed to trade 2.85 million US dollars. The rent is roughly one-third of the entire spot trading volume.

How did this number come about? I’ll lay out the methodology so you can apply it to measure any coin with abnormal funding rates.

At this moment, the Binance Perpetual contract KAITOUSDT has a position size of 34.757 million tokens, with a mark price of $0.61986. Multiply them together to get a notional position of 21.54 million US dollars. It settles once every four hours, with six tiers per day. In the past six tiers, the rates were -0.7105%, -0.6482%, -1.0158%, -0.6709%, -0.5412%, and -1.2214%, totaling -4.8080%. When the funding rate is negative, the money flows from the short side’s pocket to the long side’s pocket. 21.54 million multiplied by 4.808% equals $1.036 million.

Translated to a personal account: if you’re currently short with a notional of 10,000 US dollars, based on the way it moved over the past day, you’d pay out 480 per day—paid every day.

Yesterday morning, I nailed down two lines here in writing. If any tier returns to above -0.40%, that means shorts start to withdraw—I said I was wrong. If any tier drops below -1.10%, that means shorts are adding more—I said I was right.

This morning at 08:00, the tier that settled at -1.2214% pierced through the first tier in the six tiers’ range—still the new extreme for this cycle. I got this one right.

But the open interest is dropping. 24 hours ago it was 37.90 million tokens; now it’s 34.757 million—down 8.3%. People are moving out, but the price they keep paying for rent is getting higher. The first batch leaving probably can’t withstand this rent. Those still in it are the ones who know they’ll pay nearly 5% per day and keep paying anyway.

In the whole market, the second-highest negative funding rate is $RVN at -0.4400%. It would need to get more than twice as expensive to catch up to $KAITO at its current level.

As for why anyone would keep paying: on August 20 at 12:00 UTC, $KAITO had a confirmation unlock. For the amount, four sources provided three different figures. Tokenomist and TradingView both list 32.60 million tokens, roughly 7.63% of the already released amount. Messari gives 20.70 million. cryip.co converts it to 34.68 million in USD terms. CCN says it’s more than 23.00 million tokens. The two sources with the biggest difference are apart by 11.9 million tokens—close to 60%. I can’t tell who’s correct, so I’m putting all four here. When you pick a source for your own calculations, just keep that in mind.

Someone is willing to keep holding a short position, topping up daily the equivalent of 5% of principal. The short they’re holding is for that batch of chips 8 days later. In this price, there’s an event with a fixed date.

My view today remains the same: before the unlock actually lands, the funding rate won’t return to positive. The current contract price is $0.6196, down 5.14% over the past 24 hours, using the Binance perpetual contract funding-rate calculation.

The new two lines are drawn based on the actual range from the past 24 hours: the shallow end is -0.5412%, and the deepest is -1.2214%. The lines need to be constrained within this range to be meaningful. Today’s remaining five tiers—12:00, 16:00, 20:00, plus tomorrow morning’s 00:00 and 04:00: if any tier returns to above -0.50%, that means shorts start loosening their grip—I said I was wrong. If any tier drops below -1.20%, it means it’s still moving deeper—I said I was right.

Tomorrow morning I’ll come back to close this line. Countdown D-8, with rent moving day by day. This table chimes once every four hours.

One trade of $14.62 turned into one of $23.54. The ruler I placed has been lifted by more than sixty percent in a day. In the same period, $EPIC on Binance spot is down 13.6% over 24h; the current price is $0.406。

As the ruler rises, the market moves downward。

Last night at 22:12, I locked in a criterion: the spot average order amount (i.e., 24h trading volume divided by the number of trades) for $EPIC —only after it returns above $40 will any rebound be the kind of rebound that’s just built from a pile of small change. I set three tiers; tonight at 22:00 the settlement will happen. If it’s below $20, I’m right. If it’s above $40, I’ve been overturned. The middle section is the gray zone—if it lands in the gray zone, I’ll say it plainly: it’s the gray zone。

$23.54. Gray zone。

I could’ve framed this number as good news: the size of one trade has grown by sixty percent. It sounds like big money is coming back to take the bag. But once you split the numerator and denominator, it doesn’t sound so good。

The denominator collapsed by 80% over the day; the number of trades dropped from 1.94 million to 385,000. The numerator fell by less than 30%, and Binance spot trading volume right now is $9.07 million。

The drop below is faster than the drop above, so the average order amount naturally climbs. The group trading in “small change” left first; the remaining people look a bit more decent on average per trade—nothing more than that。

Hourly it’s even clearer. From 19:00 to 21:00, the average climbed steadily from $26.35 to $30.82. During the same period, only about 100k to 200k trades per hour happened, with the trade count fluctuating between 6,000 and 8,000. The numbers look prettier, but the order book is getting thinner。

The place where I need to be held accountable tonight is the ruler itself. This indicator—the average order amount—lies when the overall volume shrinks. It can’t tell whether someone started placing big orders, or whether the people placing small orders just stopped playing. This is a pit I dug myself: when I set the $40 threshold yesterday, I never even considered that the denominator would break first。

At the same second, you can use $HOME as a reference. One trade of $96.36—that’s four times $EPIC ’s. The trade count is only a bit over 200k, yet the order book is more than twice as thick as $EPIC ’s. More money, fewer people, bigger orders—that’s what the average order amount is supposed to look like. Over at $BTC , one trade is $525.62. This $23.54 for $EPIC is something that was squeezed out。

Tomorrow, August 12 at 22:00, I’ll reset the watch at the same time and focus on the denominator again. Only when the trade count is back above 500k and the average order amount holds above $20 can you say that real money has come in to take over. If the trade count keeps falling below 300k, then even if the average climbs to $30, I still won’t admit it—that would mean the market is basically running out of breath。

I wrote down another line: the retail long/short ratio moved from 0.8212 last night to 1.0173 tonight. The longs added people, but the price still fell all day. These two lines are splitting right now—let’s look at them together tomorrow。

The ruler is something I drew myself. The first time I brought it out to use, my own denominator humiliated me. It’s embarrassing—but it’s still better than pretending to understand and then being wrong.