Bitcoin Bulletin
Excerpt from Rocketfuel's State of Crypto Report - May 1, 2025
Whew, we’re past probably the worst of the market volatility, at least for the next quarter.
One thing I worry about is a supply shock that causes inflationary spikes maybe in Q3 of this year, but for now it looks like the market isn’t taking the tariff wars seriously anymore, which means that we have a little bit of calm for now.
We’re entering a “trading zone” which means we probably see prices swing a lot but within range. Also if markets do come back we’ll finally get some crypto news worth reporting on.
During the bear market of the last few months, crypto projects went into hibernation, you can see how Wayfinder decided to go live anyway and they got punished for it.
Nevertheless, this is a traders market and I’ll probably follow the guidance I wrote earlier in the newsletter, but five projects that do stand out to monitor this month are:
Solana (SOL) - We’re hanging with SOL, it’s outperformed the other top 20 coins last month (actually aligned with BTC), but also has a lot of other projects migrating over as ETH figures things out. We just had 1inch move over in addition to Virtuals and Polymarket. SOL is still under $150 right now, and we think it should chart its path to $200 assuming tariff wars don’t continue to wreak havoc on markets…
*Not financial advice.
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Bitcoin Bulletin
Bitcoin quietly rallied back to $94k after touching below $75k briefly. As noted in our 2025 predictions, we thought tariff worries would probably dip BTC to exactly that number in Q1, but we were about 6 days off! Nevertheless, we think the worst is over for now, which means that we can focus on BTC trying to touch new highs again in 2025.
Strategy hasn’t stopped buying BTC, they were buying every week but missed the week when BTC touched the low point, and continued buying on 4/14 and 4/25, for about 10k BTC total, casually half a billion BTC...
Strategy now holds roughly 538k in BTC, which is more than 5% of the supply of all Bitcoins to ever be created. It’s worth roughly $45B!
Other companies are taking note, we’ve already talked about some examples like Metalab pivoting over to acquiring more Bitcoin, but a new entity called Twenty One is being set up by Tether and Softbank specifically to become a Bitcoin holding company. I mean, it sounds like “Bitcoin-native” is just an excuse for holding lots of Bitcoin...
Jack Mallers, co-founder and also creator of Strike, will lead as the CEO, and the main goal will be to raise $585M, this will also include a mix of convertible notes (debt that can become equity) and PIPE financing. Ultimately this will be used to buy 42k Bitcoins which would be the 3rd largest holder.
While not related to Bitcoin, SOL Strategies is doing the same thing, they’ll raise $400M as a convertible note and buy a bunch of SOL and stake it. As of now, there’s still a bit of curiosity if these kinds of companies, which are essentially asset holding companies, have any risk of collapse in the event of a drawdown.
Bitcoin is actually pretty well positioned right now, there’s a few scenarios where it performs well:
If tariffs go away, market recovers, Bitcoin goes back above $100k
If tariffs stay, dollar weakens, Bitcoin goes back above $100k
If recession hits, spending tightens, Bitcoin likely falls back below $80k
As you can see Bitcoin is not a stablecoin, and ironically neither is the US dollar if this moment isn’t managed right, but it seems like probability wise Bitcoin isn’t a terrible holding if you’re trying to hedge against the dollar.