The Ceiling Every In-House Market Maker Eventually Hits Every technical founder has had this thought at least once: "we could just build the market maker ourselves." I get it. I've watched a few teams try it, and the quoting logic really is the easy part – it's what comes after that nobody budgets for. There's a real, defensible case for self-provisioning, and I don't dismiss it. But there's also a specific moment where "just staff it" quietly turns into a permanent headcount problem, and most teams hit it faster than they expect. In my new Medium article, I break down where the self-build case genuinely holds, where it caps out, and how the buy-side options actually differ depending on whether you're the market maker or the one hiring one. 👉 Read the full article: https://medium.com/the-investors-handbook/three-ways-to-buy-back-liquidity-and-who-each-one-is-for-d7023458af26 #BTC Price Analysis# #Bitcoin Price Prediction: What is Bitcoins next move?#
A Dogecoin ETF Is Already Shutting Down 😬 Less than a year after launching, Bitwise is shutting down its Dogecoin ETF. I think failed crypto ETFs are going to become just as interesting as successful ones. Getting an ETF approved gives an asset distribution. It doesn't create demand. If investors don't put enough money into the product, the economics of keeping it alive eventually stop making sense. That's a useful reality check as more altcoins chase ETFs. Bitcoin proved people wanted $BTC exposure through brokerage accounts. That doesn't automatically mean investors want every crypto asset packaged the same way. An ETF wrapper opens the door. Someone still has to walk through it. #Macro Insights# #Altcoin Season#
Stablecoins Could Save Merchants $3.8 Billion a Year South Korea's National Assembly Budget Office estimates stablecoin payments could eventually save domestic merchants as much as $3.8 billion annually, largely by reducing payment-processing costs. That’s probably a more useful stablecoin adoption metric than transaction volume. A merchant doesn't really care that $USDT or another stablecoin settles on a blockchain. They care whether accepting a $100 payment leaves them with $99 instead of $97. If stablecoins genuinely start competing on merchant economics, crypto payments become much less about convincing consumers to “pay with crypto.” They become a question of whether merchants eventually start preferring the cheaper rail underneath the payment. #Macro Insights# #Altcoin Season#
Robinhood Chain Is Suddenly Generating $6M in Fees a Day Robinhood Chain just hit a record $6 million in daily fees, while DEX volume roughly doubled. The Block reports that its fee generation has recently moved above networks including Solana and BNB Chain. That makes Robinhood’s blockchain experiment considerably more interesting than when it was simply another announced L2. For an $ETH -linked Layer 2, the real test eventually has to be whether people actually transact, trade and pay for blockspace. Having millions of brokerage customers gives Robinhood something most new chains spend years trying to manufacture: distribution. Now we get to see how valuable that advantage really is. Building another blockchain isn't particularly difficult anymore. Giving millions of people a reason to use it is. #ETHBlockchain #ETHFoundation
Visa Is Using DeFi Data to Decide Who Gets Credit 💳 This one feels like two financial worlds colliding. Visa has combined its own payments data with on-chain lending information to help determine working-capital eligibility for businesses using stablecoin cards. Instead of judging a company purely through traditional banking history, on-chain financial activity can become another input into the credit decision. That could become an important second-order use case for protocols such as #AAVE . Public blockchain history doesn't only show that someone owns assets. It can potentially show borrowing behavior, collateral positions, repayment history and liquidity - financial information that normally sits inside separate institutions. There are obvious privacy questions here, and a wallet history isn't automatically the same thing as creditworthiness. But the broader idea is interesting: DeFi might end up producing financial data that traditional lenders actually want to use. That would be a very different kind of bridge between crypto and banking. #Macro Insights# #Altcoin Season#
DeFi Found a Different Way to Handle Liquidations Most lending protocols have a pretty brutal rule: collateral falls far enough, liquidation happens. Curve takes a different approach with soft liquidations, gradually converting collateral as a loan approaches dangerous territory rather than waiting for one hard liquidation threshold. If conditions improve, the process can potentially reverse. I find this interesting for $CRV because crypto lending has spent years optimizing rates and capital efficiency while the actual liquidation experience has remained fairly primitive. Markets don't always move smoothly. A five-minute wick can liquidate someone who would have been perfectly solvent an hour later. Gradual liquidation doesn't eliminate risk, and it introduces its own trade-offs. But it's a good reminder that “your collateral hit X price, therefore sell everything” isn't the only way an on-chain lending market can work. #Macro Insights# #Altcoin Season#
Zcash’s ETF Just Bought 3% of the Entire Supply 👀 This is one of those ETF numbers where the percentage matters more than the dollar figure. Grayscale’s new Zcash ETF has crossed $500 million in assets just two weeks after listing. More interestingly, it now holds over 550,000 $ZEC , roughly 3% of the circulating supply. Bitcoin ETFs can absorb billions without making an enormous dent in available BTC. Smaller assets are different. If an investment product consistently removes even a few percentage points of circulating supply, its flows can become relevant to the actual market structure of the token. Of course, that works both ways. ETF inflows can tighten available supply. ETF outflows can eventually put some of that supply back. For altcoin ETFs, I think “what percentage of the token does the fund own?” might become a much more useful metric than AUM alone. #Macro Insights# #Altcoin Season#
😏 Before Moving VIP Status, I Compared More Than Just the Fees August gave me so many $BTC trading setups that by the end of the month I’d unexpectedly made it into a VIP tier. It actually gave me some great perks like: lower trading fees, higher limits, priority support, better conditions for active trading etc Of course, I was happy with all of that. But I’d also heard that VIP programs can differ quite a lot from one exchange to another, with each platform offering its own extra benefits. So I became curious about what else was out there… 🧐 🔥 For example, a VIP program with 150 sub-accounts on WhiteBIT really caught my attention. But apart from that - it also promised to transfer my current VIP from another exchange without building it from zero: https://bit.ly/4xcKT9d I liked the idea, but still was cautious: what if the tier they gave me would be lower than I expected? ☠️ So before moving my $BTC activity there, I spoke with a VIP manager to compare my existing fees, limits, requirements, and benefits with the WhiteBIT setup. Only after seeing the numbers next to each other did I feel I had enough information to move further, as I could see the conditions and make the decision based on specific facts, not general promises 🤝 At the end of the day, VIP is not about the badge. It’s about whether its conditions actually work better for your trading setup. Disclaimer: This is not financial or investment advice. DYOR before making any decisions. Use at your own risk. #BTC Price Analysis# #Bitcoin Price Prediction: What is Bitcoins next move?#
Bitcoin Is Doing Something It Usually Gets Criticized for Not Doing Oil has moved above $100, equities are falling, and $BTC has actually moved higher alongside gold, reaching around $79,700 today. That’s interesting because Bitcoin's “digital gold” narrative usually gets tested precisely when markets become uncomfortable. During plenty of previous risk-off periods, BTC simply behaved like a high-beta tech asset and sold off with everything else. One day obviously proves nothing. But these are the days worth saving and comparing later. If $BTC increasingly reacts to geopolitical and inflation shocks alongside gold rather than equities, that tells us considerably more about its changing investor base than another “Bitcoin is digital gold” debate ever will. #BTC Price Analysis# #Bitcoin Price Prediction: What is Bitcoins next move?#
Solana Is About to Make a Transaction 3x Bigger 👀 Solana is increasing its maximum transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes, giving developers more than three times as much room inside a single transaction. That means things like large cryptographic proofs, complex multisig operations and certain confidential transfers that previously needed several transactions can potentially happen in one. I find this more interesting than another $SOL TPS record because it's a different kind of scaling. Speed tells you how many cars a highway can handle. Transaction size determines what each car can actually carry. As blockchains mature, I suspect the competition moves increasingly from “who processes the most transactions?” toward “what can developers actually fit inside those transactions?” #Macro Insights# #Altcoin Season#
$AVAX Is Getting a Very Different Kind of Adoption South Korean conglomerate Hanwha has reportedly developed a tokenized-securities platform using Avalanche, as South Korea prepares its regulatory framework for security tokens. This is the type of $AVAX news I find more useful than another partnership announcement because there's a fairly obvious question to ask later: did securities actually get issued and traded on it? Enterprise blockchain projects used to generate impressive lists of pilots that quietly disappeared six months later. Tokenization is reaching a stage where “Company X is experimenting with blockchain” shouldn't be enough anymore. The interesting numbers will be assets issued, investors onboarded, settlement volume and whether anyone is still using the infrastructure a year later. Production is a much higher bar than partnership. #Macro Insights# #Altcoin Season#
OpenSea Is Going Back to Solana Four Years Later OpenSea has added Solana NFT trading, more than four years after it first experimented with supporting the network. The timing is interesting because NFTs aren't exactly enjoying their 2021 moment anymore. But maybe that's precisely why this matters for $SOL . During the NFT boom, supporting another chain was mostly about chasing volume. Today, NFT infrastructure has to compete for users in a much quieter market where having the right distribution, fees and trader experience matters considerably more. Crypto products also have a habit of treating chain support like a permanent decision: integrate once, tick the box, move on. In reality, ecosystems change. Liquidity moves. User bases move. A chain that wasn't worth prioritizing four years ago can look completely different today. Sometimes adoption isn't about being first. It's about still being relevant when companies come back for another look. #Macro Insights# #Altcoin Season#
Bitcoin Just Had a $2.26 Billion Reminder About Shorting a Bull Market 😅 Last Wednesday, roughly $2.26 billion in crypto shorts were liquidated in a single day as $BTC broke higher. Bitcoin ultimately finished the week up around 23%, while trading activity across major centralized exchanges roughly doubled. This is one of those numbers that sounds like $2.26 billion of new money suddenly bought Bitcoin, but liquidations don't really work like that. When a leveraged short reaches its liquidation level, the position has to be closed by buying back the asset. Enough shorts getting forced out at once can therefore create additional buying pressure, which pushes prices higher, hits the next group of shorts, and potentially starts the process again. That's why some of crypto's most violent rallies happen when lots of traders are positioned for prices to fall. The catalyst starts the move. The positioning can make it much bigger. #BTC Price Analysis# #Bitcoin Price Prediction: What is Bitcoins next move?#
The London Stock Exchange Is Starting to Look a Little Like a Crypto Exchange 🔥 The London Stock Exchange is working with Kraken parent Payward on something that would have sounded pretty strange five years ago: tokenized UK stocks designed to trade alongside digital assets, with the new market targeted for 2027 pending regulatory approval. The tokens are expected to be backed 1:1 by actual shares and available globally in small denominations. What catches my attention isn't really the tokenization part anymore. We've seen enough tokenized stocks to know that technically wrapping equities on blockchain rails is possible. It's the market-hours problem. Crypto trained an entire generation of investors to expect that markets are simply... open. Saturday night, Christmas morning, 3 a.m. -$ETH doesn't care. Traditional equities still operate around opening bells, closing auctions, weekends and settlement infrastructure inherited from a very different technological era. Now major exchanges are experimenting with extending those markets rather than asking crypto investors to adapt back to the old schedule. I’m not convinced every stock needs to trade 24/7. But once investors get used to assets that do, convincing them that Nvidia absolutely must stop trading because it's 4 p.m. in New York starts sounding increasingly strange. #ETHBlockchain #ETHFoundation
$SOL Fees Just Hit a Record, Which Changes the Conversation a Bit 👀 For years, one of the easiest criticisms of Solana was that activity was cheap precisely because blockspace wasn't particularly valuable. Now $SOL network fees have hit a record, at the same time validators have voted to accelerate the decline in token inflation. Those two things are interesting together. Proof-of-stake networks need to pay validators somehow. If issuance falls faster, transaction fees eventually become more important to the economics of securing the network. So I’d watch fees for a different reason now. Not simply “is Solana busy?” but “can real network demand gradually replace inflation as part of the validator business model?” That's a much more important test than another transaction-per-second record. #Macro Insights# #Altcoin Season#
Sebuah Reli Bitcoin dan Reli Emas Mulai Terlihat Mencengangkan Serupa 🤔 Emas naik sekitar 16% pada bulan Agustus, sementara $BTC naik kira-kira 24%. Keduanya mendapat manfaat dari periode ketika investor semakin khawatir tentang utang pemerintah, pasar obligasi, dan daya beli mata uang fiat. Itu tidak berarti Bitcoin tiba-tiba menjadi emas. Volatilitas, basis investor, dan struktur pasar mereka masih sepenuhnya berbeda. Namun saya merasa menarik ketika kedua aset mulai merespons masalah yang sama. Untuk sebagian besar sejarah Bitcoin, reli BTC mudah dijelaskan lewat katalis khusus kripto: halving, leverage, aktivitas bursa, regulasi, spekulasi. Semakin ke sini, Anda juga harus memantau imbal hasil Treasury, pinjaman pemerintah, dan dolar. Mungkin tanda terbesar bahwa $BTC sedang menjadi aset makro bukanlah institusi yang membelinya. Tanda itu justru para trader Bitcoin yang tiba-tiba perlu punya pendapat tentang pasar obligasi. 😅 #BTC Price Analysis# #Bitcoin Price Prediction: What is Bitcoins next move?#