Hi all, happy Thursday! 

The board is colored red this week, as both equities and crypto sold off on Wednesday. While the S&P 500 traded down −0.14% with the VIX hitting an intraday high of 21, crypto’s downside beta brought it even lower. 

Plus, another wallet launches a token this week, but do they really need to?

With equities stalled near highs, crypto’s weakness continues as BTC made a new 52-week low of $72,800. Breadth continues to be poor, with every sector recording negative returns on the week except for perps, buoyed by HYPE’s notable relative strength. L1s and Revenue leaders are among the hardest hit, each trading down nearly −20% on the week. 

Bears control the trend, and risk is not back on the table, at least for now. The absence of regulatory clarity has put a ceiling on the short-term upside case, and the CLARITY Act’s stall in the Senate has brought this ceiling lower. While the odds of this bill passing within 2026 cratered to 40% at the end of January, they have since climbed back up to 69%, granted on paltry volume. Resolution on this legislation could remove the market’s prevailing uncertainty and unlock the next leg higher.

Mirroring the weakness in price, AUM in BTC and ETH ETFs continues a modest decline amidst prevailing outflows. These vehicles will likely need to find their floor in AUM to support a trend change to the upside. Contrary to the outflows exhibited in BTC and ETH ETFs, SOL ETFs show resilience, with AUM as a share of market cap just 2 bps off its highs. Despite inflows to these vehicles, SOL has still made new 52-week lows, breaking down beneath $90.

With the crypto selloff making fresh lows and bears controlling the low-timeframe trend, we can zoom out to approximate where we might find “deep value.” One such metric is realized price, which measures the value of all BTC at the time they were last moved onchain to approximate an aggregate onchain cost basis. Historically, bear market lows are characterized by the market price trading at a discount to realized price. While we may look for deep value here, the metric unfortunately doesn’t provide support until $55,000, another 23% lower.

— Luke

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Rainbow’s CCA is clean; its token thesis isn’t

Rainbow’s RNBW launches today as the project wraps up a well-executed onchain auction. The Continuous Clearing Auction on Uniswap is objectively one of the cleaner issuance mechanisms we’ve seen as of late: permissionless, fully onchain, no single-block scramble, and 100% of proceeds recycled into liquidity. In a market where TGEs have begun to erode trust, this is a welcome reset. However, good market structure does not automatically justify the existence or long-term value of the asset being sold.

The auction mechanics themselves are almost doing the bearish work for us. Demand has clustered tightly around the $0.10 starting price, committed volume is modest at ~$395,000, and there has been little evidence of price-insensitive buying. Despite a $100 million FDV headline, the implied circulating market cap at launch is closer to ~$19 million, reflecting how cautious bidders remain around new consumer tokens. That gap reflects a market that has learned, painfully, that clean launches do not solve weak value accrual.

The core question is whether wallets need tokens at all. Historically, the answer has been no. The most successful wallets have scaled by being invisible infrastructure — monetizing through swaps, integrations and partnerships without asking users to underwrite governance or hold balance sheet risk. Wallets win on trust, UX and reliability, none of which are obviously enhanced by a volatile, tradable token. Introducing one risks importing the same misalignment that has plagued many app-layer tokens over the past cycle.

Rainbow’s framing around “trade, earn, claim” and turning users into owners sounds directionally aligned with where crypto wants to go, but it glosses over a hard reality: Revenue rebates and rewards do not equal durable ownership. Rainbow’s current ETH Rewards program is clearly funded by the team, but does not disclose hard rules that tie the reward pool to specific revenue streams or wallet cash flows. Unless RNBW accrues enforceable claims on cash flows or meaningfully constrains how value is captured elsewhere in the stack, the token risks becoming a soft loyalty point with speculative optionality rather than a true economic primitive. That distinction matters, especially in a market that has aggressively repriced vague-alignment narratives.

There is also a structural tension between wallets as products and tokens as financial assets. Wallets need to ship quickly, experiment with monetization, and sometimes change fee structures or integrations without months of token-holder signaling. Tokens, by contrast, create expectations of predictability, fairness, and long-term commitment to specific economic flows. Those incentives often pull in opposite directions. Many teams resolve this by quietly sidelining the token over time, which has not ended well for holders.

Taken together, RNBW looks less like a claim on wallet dominance and more like a live experiment in whether consumer crypto can rehabilitate the app-token model. The CCA is a genuine improvement in how tokens come to market, and Rainbow deserves credit for that. But structurally-fair issuance does not fix the harder problem: Wallets may simply be better businesses without tokens. 

If that remains true, RNBW’s clean launch will be remembered as good execution attached to a thesis the market never fully bought into.

— Nick 

1. Why The Laws of Startup Physics Have Changed

Ben Horowitz reflects on the transformative role he and Marc Andreessen have played in reshaping venture capital through Andreessen Horowitz, emphasizing their mission to impact not just the tech sector but society at large through innovation and public sector collaboration, such as work with the Las Vegas Police Department. 

Horowitz discusses how AI is accelerating the pace of entrepreneurship, creating both immense opportunity and risks, and how this technological wave redefines investment strategies, inequality and the very structure of company building. Throughout the conversation, Horowitz shares personal influences — especially from his father and mentor Andy Grove — and insights on culture, management, and how Andreessen Horowitz scaled into a modern institutional force.

2. Why AI agents will use crypto rails

AI agents won’t adopt crypto because it’s novel, writes Xavier Meegan, but because crypto rails are structurally aligned with how agents operate: always-on, global, programmable and interoperable. 

As agents shift from making recommendations to executing tasks, they become a new class of economic actors by discovering opportunities, coordinating workflows, paying for services, and managing risk continuously. The real constraint is trust, not model quality: Users need guarantees that agents act within defined rules, can be verified, and won’t misuse access or credentials.

Recent agent adoption shows how fast execution-focused agents can gain traction, but also how fragile today’s trust models are when agents operate inside opaque, permissioned systems. Crypto infrastructure offers a neutral alternative: permissionless settlement, atomic “do + pay” execution, global interoperability, and verifiability. In an agent-driven economy, crypto becomes the settlement substrate that allows autonomous systems to coordinate, transact and prove outcomes across open ecosystems.

3. Building the Onchain Super App

Shiao Shao, the new president of Jupiter, discusses his transition from a career in institutional finance at BCG and KKR to leading one of the most important onchain platforms on Solana, explaining how infrastructure maturity, institutional adoption, and the shift toward application-layer value creation motivated his move. 

He outlines Jupiter’s ambitious roadmap to scale its user base and product suite — including mobile expansion, stablecoin development (JUPUSD), global payments infrastructure, institutional partnerships (with Coinbase, Robinhood, etc.), and omnichain functionality — while emphasizing a focus on usability, self-custody, and delivering real-world utility. Shao believes the future of finance is onchain and open. He positions Jupiter as a full-stack, super-app platform driving mass adoption through relentless shipping, platform synergies, and user-first experiences.

Crypto’s premier institutional conference is back this March 24–26 in NYC.

Don’t miss SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins’ keynote on Day 1.