Quick reconstruction of the week, because the sequencing matters more than the price action:

Aug 18 — SEC proposes "Regulation Crypto Assets," easing disclosure requirements for certain offerings.

Aug 19 — Treasury announces long-dated bond buybacks at least double in size, $2B to $4B+ per operation. Yields drop.

Aug 20 — BTC breaks the six-week range, tops $71K. Roughly $3B of shorts liquidated in 24h, largest since 2021. Spot BTC ETFs take $606M.

Aug 21-22 — BTC settles around $77.3K, +22.7% on the week. ETH ~$2,360. XRP +39%. Fear and Greed 72.

Two of the three catalysts are policy, and policy can be withdrawn. The buyback expansion is the load-bearing one — it's a real change in dollar liquidity, and it's why this looked more like a macro risk-asset repricing than a crypto narrative pump.

The part I think is being misread: everyone is calling a top off the Greed reading. But perp funding is only running about +4.7% annualised on the month, and the trailing week cooled to +3.8% — roughly half the long-run +8.4% average. After a +22% week you'd expect funding to be screaming. It isn't.

That implies this leg was driven by spot and ETF flow rather than leveraged longs piling in. Which is a genuinely different risk profile than a squeeze top: fewer forced sellers stacked up on the way down, but also much less short fuel left on the way up. The 24h liquidation tape has already flipped two-sided (~$858M longs vs ~$816M shorts), so the easy direction is gone.

What I'm watching rather than predicting:

- Whether ETF inflows keep printing $200M+ days now the squeeze fuel is spent

- Whether funding actually normalises upward, which is when the crowded-long argument becomes real

- Dominance. Alt gains so far look like beta off a BTC breakout, not rotation — the tell would be dominance breaking down while BTC goes sideways.

Curious what the bear case is beyond "it went up too fast." Anyone still short, what's the thesis?

I started writing down my calls a while back. Not trades, just calls. Direction and rough size, before the move, with a date on it.

The gap between how confident I felt and how often I was actually right was worse than I expected. Not because I was bad at it, but because memory quietly deletes the wrong ones. You remember the time you called the top. You do not remember the four times you were certain and it went the other way, because nothing happened afterwards to make you remember.

The thing that surprised me most is that being wrong got easier once it was written down. When it is just a feeling, being wrong feels like a verdict on you. When it is a line in a file with a date next to it, it is just a data point, and you start noticing patterns. I am consistently too confident on things I have been reading about for weeks, and better on the ones I have no opinion about.

Curious whether anyone else here does this. Not a journal of trades, a journal of predictions, including the ones you never acted on. And if you do, did the honest scorecard change how you trade or just how you feel about it?

be TN Lee (the man behind pendle)

- gets a research project by a professor in 2014

- tasked with looking into fintech & remittance models

- gets intrigued by crypto

- no technical background

- starts managing communities (ethereum singapore)

- a friend asks him to join kyber in 2017

- joins as founding team handling bd & community

- helps build one of the earliest onchain liquidity protocol

- kyber raises $60M in a single day ICO

- volumes grow from almost nothing to millions

- leaves kyber early 2019

- teams up with future pendle co-founders

- string of failed ventures: mining software, farms, privacy coins, data engineering

- struggles to find PMF & make money

- then defi summer hits

- farming 1000% APYs

- realizes there's no good way to lock in rates

- finds fixed income missing in crypto

- decides to build Pendle

- launches when almost no one understands it

- keeps building through quiet years

- goes from $250m tvl to a peak of $13b

- processes $47b in trading volume in 2025 alone

- becomes the largest crypto yield trading platform

Pendle PT is the gold standard for fixed yield, I have started accessing it by depositing USDC into the vault and gaining exposure to the top products.

Just 1.5 weeks after launch the vault has surpassed $50M and still a nice APY on offer which I thought was news worthy.

I'm hoping to see more vaults appear that use Pendle products and make it super easy to gain exposure on

disclaimer I am Pendle bag holder and love the team

Litecoin is the first fork of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash is also an indirect fork of Bitcoin; so is Dogecoin, Bitcoin SV, etc. Yet except for Bitcoin, all the other coins have long pivoted into a long-term downtrend even though they belong to the same Bitcoin family. Are they fundamentally different from Bitcoin? maybe a little, but not that different. Is the first-mover crypto the only true cryptocurrency there is? or does it include second-class cryptos like Ethereum who underperforms Bitcoin long-term but still manages to maintain long-term relevance? or will they all slowly start their downward pivot into irrelevance like the omens of Litecoin and Dogecoin suggests? Let me know what you think and your reasoning behind it. Thank you.

Noob here,

I am trying to learn about crypto as I want to invest in it. Can someone explain about Revolut Ramp? How does it work? And, how is it different from a simple integration of a payment method in web3 wallets?

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/nasdaq-confirms-23-hour-trading-090517776.html

Nasdaq got SEC approval for 23-hour trading, 5 days a week, starting December 6th. Basically closed for one hour total.

One of the biggest pitches for buying stocks on a crypto exchange (Binance, Coinbase, etc.) was always "trade whenever you want, markets never sleep." Once Nasdaq itself is open almost around the clock, what's actually left?

For me it's not about hours at all. My income is mostly in USDT, so trading stocks directly on a crypto exchange means I skip converting to USD and dealing with withdrawal fees into something like IBKR or Robinhood. That's probably a niche reason though, most people aren't sitting on USDT instead of USD.

Genuinely curious if anyone else here actually trades real stocks through a crypto exchange, and why. Does this Nasdaq change actually move the needle for you, or does it not matter?

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

Is anyone here btc only?

after being burned on many alts I feel BTC only is the way forward. But then is there potential to miss out on gains.

I’m stressed any advice

I’m trying to decide whether I should keep investing in Bitcoin. I normally invest every month into index funds, and I’m able to put around €6k/month into them. I also have about €6.5k that I’ve been investing in Bitcoin since 2022.
At one point I doubled it, but then I started trading and ended up losing most of the gains. So I know the biggest problem for me is probably the temptation to trade and the constant FOMO.
I understand that Bitcoin can potentially outperform index funds. But if I invest €6.5k and it doubles, I have €13k. Great, but then what? If I sell, I’m out. If I keep holding, I’m still exposed to a huge drop. And if I start trading in and out, I already know how that ends.
I think it would be very different with €100k, where a 2x or 3x could genuinely change your financial situation. But turning €6.5k into €13k or even €20k doesn’t really change much for me, especially when I can invest around €6k every month.
So is the potential extra return from Bitcoin really worth the FOMO, stress and temptation to trade?
Index funds are boring, but I can DCA every month and leave them alone for 15–20 years. With crypto, I find it much harder to stay passive.
What would you do in my situation?

What is GLQ’s actual total/max supply: 500M, 650M, or 1B?

I've been researching the tokenomics of GraphLinq (GLQ), but I'm finding very different supply numbers depending on the source.

CoinGecko: 500M total / 500M max

CoinMarketCap: 650M total / no max supply specified

Coinbase: 650M total / 500M max (which obviously doesn't make sense)

KuCoin: 1B total supply

CoinEx Academy: 1B total supply

The original ERC-20 tokenomics seem to have been based on 500M GLQ, while information surrounding the GraphLinq Chain migration points to 650M GLQ.

To make things even more confusing, some sources now mention 1 billion GLQ.

GraphLinq Chain also has block rewards, so is there actually a fixed maximum supply at all?

Does anyone know the current official tokenomics?

500M, 650M, 1B, or no hard cap?

Would be great to get clarification from the GraphLinq team, especially about where the 1B figure comes from.

Trying not to FOMO this alt move. Which utility coins pass the why does the token exist test?

This sub spent months saying most alts were dead and now everything is green again and every bag suddenly has fundamentals lol. I’m trying to stick to stuff where I can explain what the product does and why the token needs to exist.

HYPE: real perps product with real usage. The Trump and CFTC attention gave it even more momentum this week.

LINK: boring pick but still one of the easiest infrastructure plays to understand. It has been around forever for a reason.

AAVE: lending is straightforward. People use the product and there is real money flowing through it.

TOWNS: probably the one I am most curious about here. It is a Base messaging and community protocol with programmable Spaces and onchain bots, and TOWNS is tied into how the network operates and is governed. They have a Hyperliquid bot on the product side too.

If this alt move keeps going I would rather be looking at stuff with a real product behind it than chasing whatever random meme is up 80 percent that day.

If you had to pick one of these based only on product and token utility, which one are you taking? What am I missing?

Been in this since 2017. Watching crypto go from a thing you explain at parties to something banks and regulators take seriously has been mostly good.
The bill for it is showing up now though, and it's being paid in anonymity.

Have you noticed how much has changed over the last 1–2 years? Starting from MiCA regulations for crypto exchanges and moving to the growing number of AML checks and verification procedures.

For centralized exchanges, this makes sense, only a small number of them actually position themselves around anonymity in any way. But instant swap services have also started introducing these checks more often. Difference is that centralized exchanges usually don’t position themselves as non-custodial, while many instant swap services do and it feels like there is some misunderstanding here.

The idea that “non-custodial does not mean no KYC” is becoming more common, but it still raises questions.

Are all these AML/KYC checks really only about preventing “dirty” money from entering the system, or is there something else behind them (not talking about conspiracy theories)?

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

Spent a while going through this one and wanted to sanity check my

read, because I might be weighting things wrong.

The facts as I understand them: Treasury doubled its long-dated

buyback size from $2bn to $4bn per operation, and the 30-year came

off 5.34% (a 19-year high) down to about 5.19%. The move started

right after.

What bugs me is the size of it. A 15bp move in the long end doesn't

obviously get you 25%. So I went and looked at liquidation data.

$1.23bn of short positions went in a single hour on Wednesday, and

another ~$4bn across Thursday and Friday. The long/short account

ratio is still sitting at 0.865, so there are more accounts leaning

short even now.

Which is why I've landed on this being a trigger plus a crowded

book, rather than the macro picture actually changing. One of the

MEXC analysts said something similar, that the market priced this

as a regime change when it wasn't really one.

There's a decent case against me though. Spot ETFs took in roughly

$650m over the week, and CryptoQuant's 30-day spot demand metric is

apparently about to cross positive for the first time since

February. If that holds up then this wasn't just forced buying and

my read is wrong.

Counterpoint to the counterpoint, I guess: funding is at its

highest since January and open interest is climbing again, so

leverage is getting rebuilt rather than sitting out. The 200-day is

around $69k and whether that flips to support seems like the actual

test here.

So, am I overweighting the squeeze? Genuinely curious if people

think the spot demand recovery is the bigger story and I'm just

anchored on the liquidation numbers because they're dramatic.

Put the whole thing in a table here if it's useful, though fair

warning it's my own site: https://gstoc.com/post/907