ROLLUP: Strategic Bitcoin Reserve | White House Digital Summit | Saylor's New $21B Bitcoin Bid | HyperLiquid Exploit?

Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly roll-up. Each week I'm bringing on a different guest to help me go through the news. And this week I have the pleasure of being joined by Jordy Alexander. Happy Friday, Jordy. Great to have you here.

Good to have you here. Happy Friday.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a pretty volatile week, I would say. Um let me just run through some macro market facts figures, and then we can kind of react to them uh once I'm done. Uh SP 500 has erased $5 trillion of total wealth since its peak. Uh the Dow Jones has slid 500 points on Tuesday after Trump announced and then walked back new tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum amid ongoing economic uncertainty, after closing down 890 points on Monday, so over a thousand point drop in the first two days of this week. On March 6th, uh President Trump suspended tariffs on US MCA compliant goods from Canada and Mexico until April 2nd, affecting about 38% of Canadian and 50% of Mexican goods. However, on March 12th, that's yesterday at the time of recording, he imposed a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, which prompted immediate retaliatory measures from Canada and the European Union. Uh, Americans have flipped their sentiment views on President Donald Trump handling of the economy since the end of his first term, according to this new polling, amid a moot brewing trade war with America's neighbors and the stock market decline. So American investors not really feeling it anymore, kind of fed up. Um, in addition to all of that, market volatility in the traditional markets and in crypto uh have really almost never been higher. Uh, the VIX uh hit a 1.5 million contracts last week. That's the sixth highest record record on reading volumes, have doubled over the last few weeks uh with all of this rise in market uncertainty. Uh so this the markets are super volatile. In addition to that, um investors, market uh markets have kind of um uh baked in some increase of probabilities of a US recession. Five-year treasury is now pricing in 52% chance of a recession within the next 12 months, up from 40 to 45% in November. So markets looking at a recession. Um, in addition to that, though, so there's some good news too. Uh February CPI inflation falls to 2.8% below expectations of 2.9%. So court uh inflation and uh CPI inflation coming down. Um, in addition to all of that, though, Nvidia is about 25% off its all time highs. The SP 500 is down almost 10%, and really investor appetite has swung very quickly from extreme greed to extreme fear in just a few matters of days.

There's a lot of different macro news happening all over the place. Uh like NVIDIA, 25% off the all time highs, volatility, super high, inflation coming down, investors just kind of fed up with whatever Trump's strategy is or lack thereof. Jordi, how do you even begin to understand or interpret or just really analyze everything that's going on in the macro markets?

I mean, two separate things. One is like,

are the prices now,

you know, fairly priced, overpriced, underpriced? And I think even the I'm not a technical charts guy, but something that we

think about from first principles is like

what's the the normal trend of growth for an economy or for you know stocks.

And uh it's pretty clear that we haven't had a draw drawdown, you know, in forever. It's been you know a few years since the

Inflation spike a couple of years a few years ago when it was the last one.

And you know, if you if you zoom out and you look at like uh the trend line,

we're kind of like at a more reasonable

place. Like if you kind of like uh just draw a diagonal that that's avoiding the spikes, we're we're at a reasonably priced, which is good. I think we were

uh a little bit

over our skis.

Um you know the problem with like having decent inflation is that people stop using their savings account and and uh

And using like bonds, and they started going into especially in the US, right? Like

people treat the SP 500 as like their savings account.

And um, you

know, normies don't like to have a 10% drawdown on all their money. It's it's not something that's good. Obviously, Trump has

um told people to

bear with him um in in this period.

The stuff now that he's doing with um fighting every country at the same time,

it's very counterintuitive. It's certainly like from a games player perspective, like you usually like.

Fight your battles one at a time.

You can't beat everybody at the same time. And what we're seeing is

it's given the Canadians and the Europeans and everybody kind of more

um,

you know, more courage to fight back because they're like, well,

if we all fight back, then we can coordinate collectively. Yeah. Collectively. So it seems like a mistake on his side, but I have to say, like,

sometimes the chaos seems to,

you know, he he gets out of the chaos and things work out. So I I wouldn't say that it's like

a deathly blunder or anything like that. It's just

it's a bit of chaos.

I think that's what people have really um coalesced around in when it comes to interpretation of what Trump is doing. And

the analysis is well, he's just being chaotic. There's no genius behind the curtain. Uh he's just being Trump. He's just being chaotic. He's flip-flopping all over the place. And that's just because he's reacting kind of instinctively, uh, just reflexively to what countries are responding to him about. And there's no there's no long term plan, there's no master plan. And I think investors are kind of just fed up about that. Markets hate uncertainty, and Donald Trump is being very uncertain, but maybe markets are just repricing themselves.

Back down to just like what would what prices would be expected to be found if we had a very chaotic leader.

Yeah, I you know, I I think he's good in chaos. Like he he naturally thrives in it and he's he has good instincts. And so I wouldn't like put it as like,

you know, Trump is is being completely insane and has no clue what he's doing.

Um

he can navigate it. But yeah, like

the people who I see on Twitter are like, oh this is 4D chess and this is a master plan and yeah

I I I I I think those people are maybe like uh a bit too polarized and can't see clearly.

Maybe one way to interpret it, because you said he he thrives in chaos. So maybe there is no 40 chess, maybe there is no master plan. But if we understand that Trump does well in chaos, maybe his plan is to just create chaos because that is an environment that he has, he feels like he has an advantage in.

That is very well put. I think so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's get into uh some crypto markets because crypto markets definitely don't feel good right now. Uh again, I'll just kind of read off some facts and figures. Total crypto market cap is down to $2.8 trillion. That is a total of $1 trillion from the all-time high of $3.8 trillion, where we were just seemingly so recently in uh maybe January, November of last year, right after the election. Uh Bitcoin has fallen to a new yearly low, hitting $76,000. Uh ETH yesterday fell down to $1,760, which is just crazy. The ETH uh ETH BTC downtrend uh looks pretty terrible. Uh it has been going, as we know, it has been going down for coming up on two and a half, almost three years straight now. But recently in the last one or two quarters, it seems to have really accelerated downwards. It's at we are currently at a 0.022 on the ETH BTC ratio. It has not been this low since like May of 2020, in the middle of DeFi summer. Um, ETH is not the only one. If you actually kind of look, I I was looking at these charts. This is the ETH Bitcoin ratio um that I was just talking about. But then also if you look at the ETH uh the sole Bitcoin ratio, you kind of see the same pattern showing up. Sol Bitcoin has um lost a ton of its gains since it uh that it got in like late 2023. Uh the trend looks the same to me. So I just I just put these charts up on Twitter just because I think it's interesting to flip back and forth between them and see how they look pretty similar. Um uh and maybe one more take to add is uh I thought this tweet from Travis Kling was pretty good. He tweets out important part of what's going on with crypto right now. One, we brought very few new entrants into the space this cycle relative to the prior two cycles. Two, the new entrants that we did get are mostly the worst kind. And then he just uh named some market influencers over the last uh cycle or so. Three, crypto cannot attract new top talent right now because our reputation is truly atrocious. And four, the multi cycle cycle veterans that are still left are mostly very tired and very jaded. Tough setup, but those are the facts. Uh, do you agree with this interpretation? Uh markets market sentiment is terrible, Twitter sentiment is terrible. Uh, what's your overall like autopsy of the current uh state of the crypto meta?

Um I think like these are broadly correct, but there's a few things that are exaggerated. Um, you know, one, I think

on the top talent part,

no one I mean, if there's like something to build and there's money to make, the top talent will come. You know, if they move to some other industry, it's just because

uh, you know, the the bank for their time is is more lucrative there. But

Um, I I I kind of disagree with that, and I think that

um even the AI

uh talent is starting to, you know, dabble in crypto and look at it for being a piece of the puzzle.

So

Mm.

yeah, I I I see I see uh Mike here, he disagrees on number three, and

um yeah, I don't think that's relevant.

Um

and number two, like in terms of like the influencers, that's