Making Sense of Crypto.
Within a year of institutional adoption and even the President of the United States launching a Solana memecoin, my crypto prices are down. This has many market participants confused, especially those who have not studied four-year cycles or who believed that institutional adoption, the removal of regulatory headwinds, and steady inflows from ETFs would abolish or significantly dampen market cycles. Cycles come and go. Build around the things that won’t change. It’s Different This Time
These might be the most dangerous four words in my trading and investing. The crypto cycle peaked following the inauguration of pro-crypto President Donald Trump and the launch of Trump family memecoins TRUMP and MELANIA. The meme coin craze that month resulted in a record-breaking 72,000 user-deployed Pumpfun tokens in a single day, an unsustainable explosion in token supply echoing the peak of the 2021 NFT craze. Rather than representing sustainability of the sector, this was a clear warning that the##btctre sector had reached unprecedented levels of attention, onboarding nearly all willing and available participants. The peak mania wasn’t confined to memecoins. 2025 saw the IPO of USDC issuer Circle, and Coinbase stock reaching its record high from 2021; almost trading at a valuation above established TradFi derivatives exchanges of systemic importance like CME Group. DeFi saw the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial launch an Aave fork and a stablecoin, and an on-chain exchange - Hyperliquid - achieved such standout success that a number of well-funded competitors backed by elite crypto VC firms or tier 1 exchanges like Binance entered the market. New types of “ponzi” were created, mostly off-chain this cycle, with Digital Asset treasury companies issuing equity and debt to buy up single-digit percentages of popular Layer 1 tokens like $BTC , $ETH , and $SOL . MSTR created several structured products to raise money to acquire another 1% of the Bitcoin supply.