GM, frens! ☕️

It’s easy to get discouraged in a space that moves faster than your wins do. One week you’re early, the next you’re forgotten - and everything in between feels like a test of patience.

But here’s the truth: no one who kept going ever really lost 🤔 

Here’s what we’re watching this week:

• 💰️ Tariffs again? Yeah, and your bags care

• 🫣 Mid cap ETF rollout falls flat

• 👎️ Wallet UX is trash… here’s the fix

• 🦅 Crypto access gets a path as the CFTC resets

• 💵 BlackRock points its $500M BUIDL at Polygon - a jolt for a chain that was sleeping

The W3oF Degen Portfolio been through bigger weeks.. But also survived worse ones.

Come trade some patience for perspective in our Discord 🙃 

Tariffs again? Yeah, and your bags care

Every week it’s the same talk: tariffs are on or off again, export controls.. it’s very tiresome, isn’t it? 🥱 

Still, prices in this market move on those news more than most want to admit.

When tariff risk cools, crypto breathes. When it heats up, the dollar tightens its grip and risk assets wince.

So if you’re trading coins, you’re dealing with trade policy whether you like it or not 👇️ 

Why tariffs land on your chart

Prices → inflation risk → rates → the dollar

• Tariffs raise input costs. Higher costs keep central banks wary. Wary banks keep rates higher for longer.

• A stronger dollar follows, and that pressures BTC/ETH because global liquidity gets pricier. Flip it → the headlines hint at deescalation → you get softer inflation risk, friendlier rate path, easier dollar 🎊 

• Rates: tariff policy is upstream of the Fed dots, and the dots steer crypto multiples 🪙

Mining is an import business
ASICs, GPUs, network gear, power electronics all cross borders. Tariff spikes hit miners’ capex and delivery timelines, which can dent hash growth and shuffle breakevens. Relief in trade headlines stabilizes the upgrade cycle and keeps hash economics predictable.

FX tremors interrupt the flows

• Trade wars shake the yuan and emerging currencies. When local currency confidence thins, cross border demand for BTC and dollar stablecoins goes way up.

• Calm the friction and that urgency fades. Stress it and the demand light up again. Either way, FX volatility is a crypto liquidity story 💵 

Stablecoins sit where invoices settle

• Freight moves on dollars, as we all know, and more of those dollars now live as stables.

• Fewer tariff shocks = steadier corporate adoption and cleaner compliance. More shocks = spikier demand as firms dodge settlement frictions. This is where policy meets payments, and why stablecoin regulation tracks are always the main headlines.

Reading the latest framework talk

• The recent Asia talks took the 100% blanket tariff scare off the table for now. That removes a blunt inflation accelerant and eases the path for a friendlier dollar 💰️ 

• Markets translate that into: less tail risk, better breadth for risk assets, room for ETH/alt beta to catch up instead of hiding under BTC’s umbrella.

Bottom line

Tariff talk is boring until it impacts the market 💣️ 

If the tariff wars properly heat up, expert traders tell us to expect way choppier price action, tighter funding, and a market that leans toward BTC while smaller caps would lag.

If talks drift toward a deal or finalizing that framework, risk opens a little and ETH with the larger caps usually moves first. Big brain traders also recommend watching the dollar index for pressure or relief, the 10-year Treasury for the cost of money, and spot ETF plus stablecoin flows for real demand 🧠 

If those read friendly alongside cooler tariff headlines, the path of least resistance tilts bullish. If they all lean the other way, we should be planning for a heavier tape and be patient.

Guess his name DAY 5

For all those who’ve been participating in the Ambire treasure hunt on X, here is your final clue. Run, don’t walk to Discord (channel #secret) and try to guess his full name. There will be rewards for the fastest thinkers out there:

Mid cap ETF rollout falls flat

They finally rang the bell for three fresh crypto tickers - Solana, Litecoin, Hedera - hitting U.S. exchanges in form of ETFs ✉️ 

If this was a sequel to the Bitcoin/ETH premieres, you’d expect an amazing show 🤯 

Instead, we got a disappointing B-movie reception: disappointing volume and spreads that made market makers go home early.

The listing mechanics worked. But that’s the boring part. The exciting part (insane inflows, price pumping) didn’t show. Day one interest certainly didn’t look like an explosion 🤷‍♂️ 

So why the chill reception?

• Capital is already spoken for. Most professional mandates have two crypto buckets - BTC and ETH. Everything else competes for scraps, and scraps don’t move an ETF on launch day.

• Some suggest that if you’re some committee member, you wouldn’t burn your last risk chip on “SOL/LTC/HBAR mix” during a headline heavy week 🪙 

• Crowded shelves. The U.S. now has a mini aisle of digital asset products. Adding three more doesn’t magically unlock a new audience. It just gives existing participants more things to collect 🤕 

• Narratives aren’t synchronized. Of the trio, Solana has the clearest “why now” (the onchain degen energy) and liquid perps to hedge. Litecoin still works, but the pitch often boils down to “hey bros it’s been around forever” which isn’t a crazy selling point. Hedera has corporate pilots and a steady community, yet big funds are clearly looking for something more hyped up.

But truth be told, what actually matters over the next few weeks is creations after seed capital, block trades from real allocators, and spread compression as liquidity providers get comfortable 💸 

If those three improve, an underwhelming premiere can still turn into a sleeper hit. If they don’t, the funds will sit on the shelf like limited edition cereal nobody asked for 🫠 

Zooming out, the launch is still a milestone for the industry.

ETFs are how traditional money prefers to own things - familiar wrappers. Getting our assets into that shape matters - even if the first day felt like crap 🤌 

The BTC and ETH rollouts proved it: wrappers arrive > inflows are lumpy > one macro headline later, everyone acts like they loved the idea from day one 🤦‍♂️ 

For now, let’s call this “necessary infrastructure with an unglamorous start” - the kind of thing you appreciate later, after the first awkward week fades and the market maker nerds stop squeaking.

Wallet UX is trash… here’s the fix

One thing that most users in the space agree with is that crypto UX still feels like it’s 1997. It’s extremely clumsy. You approve here, bridge there, pay gas on the wrong chain, and pray the tab you clicked isn’t going to glitch out, all while absolutely NOTHING is being done to address it🤦‍♂️ 

If a “modern” wallet exists, it should hit a few basics 🤓 👇️ 

• First, one identity that grows up with you. If you already have an address of your own, you shouldn’t need to get rid of an addy your contacts know just to get smarter features 🔑 

• Second, the chores should collapse. Swaps, signatures, approvals, bridges etc. belong in one flow. If a move needs three steps (approve, execute, send) it’s logical that the wallet should batch it and simulate the outcome before you sign, so there are no surprises hiding in the calldata 🧠 

• Third, gas should stop being homework. Let users fund a single pot in stablecoins and spend it across networks. The day your USDT is stuck on Base while you need to pay gas with ETH is the day you start shopping for a new chain / wallet.

The UI should also clearly show your positions, NFTs, human readable history, and have a clean way to repeat routine actions.

And when you connect to apps, basic hygiene - phishing checks, verified catalogs, sane approvals - all should be built in, not bolted on ✔️ 

But what if we told you that THERE IS a wallet that checks those boxes 👀 

• Ambire’s extension lets existing EOAs adopt smart features through EIP-7702 without changing address 🔒️ 

• It folds swap/bridge into one action, batches and simulates transactions, pays gas from a cross-chain Gas Tank in USDC, tracks DeFi and NFTs, and adds guardrails for approvals and app connections 🤯 

You even accrue $stkWALLET while using it.

If your current setup feels like tab juggling with extra fees, this is what a grown up wallet workflow looks like 🫡 

Crypto access gets a path as the CFTC resets

The stuff that decides whether crypto moves forward isn’t yapping on twitter, it’s the rules 🤓 

Who can clear what. What counts as collateral. How custody plugs into futures. What constitutes a damn security, in the end? 🤡 Or in short, the machinery that allows real money show up, or keeps it parked somewhere far away on the side.

This week, a nomination landed that could touch all of that: Michael Selig for the CFTC chair.

Selig isn’t a random pick. He’s a crypto savvy lawyer who’s worked the policy side and advised on digital-asset market structure, custody, and derivatives. In other words, someone who actually speaks the language regulators keep pretending they’ve already mastered 👨‍💼 

Why this chair matters for crypto is simple.

• The CFTC oversees futures, options and a growing slice of spot-market conduct via enforcement. It greenlit BTC and ETH futures years ago, sits over CME’s crypto contracts, and has pushed hard on jurisdiction where tokens look a lot like commodities 💰️ 

• A chair who understands how crypto wallets, margin, paymasters, and cross margining interact with real markets changes the tone of rulemaking and the temperature of enforcement.

Industry reaction was fast and, for once, mostly optimistic. Devs want two things - clarity and consistency. They’re tired of this BS, and rightfully so 😩 

Charles Hoskinson also chimed in with a thumbs up, saying he had full confidence in Selig’s ability and leadership. This tells you there’s a big slice of crypto’s engineering class hoping this goes 👇️ 

The space expect three tracks if Selig is confirmed.

• One, housekeeping. Cleaning up the patchwork of past actions, tightening how the CFTC coordinates with DOJ and state AGs on fraud while separating that work from legitimate market structure proposals.

• Two, more formal guidance on what lives under CFTC remit when tokens trade like commodities, plus stronger guardrails for derivatives venues that list those exposures 📌 

• Three, the map. Clearer lines with the SEC so token projects and exchanges know which rulebook to build against 📜 

None of this waves a magic wand over prices. It does change the timeline for real businesses to move from “pilot” to “production” in the U.S, though 👷 

As for Selig the person, the résumé fits the brief: policy work tied to digital assets, prior advisory roles, and a track record of writing and speaking specifically about crypto market structure. If you wanted a chair who can read a term sheet and expect him to understand what’s a deployed smart contract in the same afternoon, this is roughly the template.

So the TLDR here is, CFTC that knows the difference between casino and infrastructure is going to be good for everyone who actually builds 🛠️ 

BlackRock points its $500M BUIDL at Polygon - a jolt for a chain that was sleeping

Polygon hasn’t exactly owned the headlines this year.

Narratives rotated to L2s with hotter growth, SOL stole the spotlight, and that POL rebrand didn’t translate into any hype. Even die hards would admit the feed went a little silent 😶 

Now comes a different kind of stimulant: fat institutional bags that land onchain 👀 

BlackRock’s tokenized fund, BUIDL, just parked roughly $500M on Polygon - something even Polygon’s co founder highlighted publicly, calling it a legitimate, onchain deposit tied to BlackRock’s deployment.

• BUIDL is BlackRock’s cash equivalent fund that lives onchain and pays yield via tokenized shares. It launched on Ethereum earlier as one of Wall Street’s cleaner experiments in RWA meeting public blockchains 💰️ 

• The Polygon allocation signals two things at once: 1. the fund isn’t married to just a bunch of pre-agreed networks and 2. Polygon still clears BlackRock’s bar for throughput, fees, and infra partners around custody/transfer (that was always Polygon’s pitch - pragmatic cheap setup for large flows) 🤔 

A fair question is whether this is the start of big Polygon revival 🙃 

And actually. here we’ll know by copycats: that is, if you see more tokenized money funds, treasuries, and settlement programs route to Polygon in the next quarters, then BUIDL was the anchor ⚓️ 

Either way, for a chain many wrote off as yesterday’s news getting picked by the world’s largest asset manager to host real dollars is a clean way to reenter the conversation at the very least.

And yes, it’s funny: after a year of trying to build hype with “new chain” meta and various tricks and shenanigans, the thing breathing life back into Polygon might be the most basic comprehensible thing - insanely huge bags from richest of the rich 🤷‍♂️ 

Other worthy reads

Onchain Revenue Report by 1kx:

“ERC-8004: The Trust Layer for AI Agent Payments” by Blockflow

“If I had $10,000 in crypto…” playbook by Route2Fi

MEMES

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better Web3 is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

Brought to you by Ambire: The Only Web3 Wallet That You’ll Need!