GM to all of you nutcases. It’s Crypto Nutshell #916 waddlin‘ on by… 🐧🥜

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What we’ve cooked up for you today…

What’s in the Crypto Nutshell Portfolio?

BREAKING: Circle Stock Dives as Coinbase, BlackRock and Visa Back Open USD Stablecoin

Circle just got hit by its own friends…

On Tuesday, a 140-company juggernaut - Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Google, and Circle's own partner Coinbase - unveiled a new stablecoin called Open USD.

Circle's stock (CRCL) dropped about 16%, to a four-month low.

And it's now down roughly 39% in a month.

Here's why the market flinched…

Open USD goes straight for Circle's money machine.

Circle earns its living the boring way. (For those that don’t know, Circle is the company behind the USDC stablecoin)

It holds the cash backing USDC in US Treasuries and pockets the interest. Simple, and wildly profitable.

Open USD flips that.

Free minting, no volume caps, and it hands the reserve yield back to the businesses using it, minus a small fee.

No single company owns it either. Governance sits with a board of partners.

It's built to undercut the exact thing Circle gets paid for.

Then there's the betrayal…

Coinbase co-founded USDC with Circle and still splits its reserve economics with them, a deal reportedly up for renewal in August. And it just threw its weight behind the rival.

But before anyone writes Circle's obituary…

Big logos aren't a network.

Paxos already tried this exact model, sharing yield with heavy-hitter backers, and its coin sits at $3B against USDC's $73B. One analyst dubbed the whole thing "logo spray and pray."

Others called the selloff overblown, arguing Open USD is a solution hunting for a problem, and that these consortiums tend to break as fast as they form.

The incumbents mostly shrugged.

Circle's CEO welcomed the competition. Tether's boss was blunter: "Player 2 has entered the game."

So is this the USDC killer? Probably not tomorrow.

The stablecoin fight has moved on from who mints the coin… to who keeps the yield and owns the rails.

And in a market some see hitting $4 trillion by 2030, that's a big prize up for grabs. 🚀

HODLing Bitcoin is what most people do. Rich people do this instead.

You deposit $10,000 in a bank and get paid 0.5% interest. They lend YOUR money at 7%, 10%, even 20% on credit cards. The bank always wins.

Coinbase runs the same playbook. They earn billions on customer deposits while you earn nothing. Tan Gera, CFA, shows how to flip that equation and become the bank yourself – collecting the spread on the digital assets you're already holding, even in this market.

Learn how in this video

^{Performance varies. Yields not guaranteed. Not investment advice. Past results don't predict future returns.}

Every Bitcoin bear market is shallower than the last. Brian Armstrong just shared the data that proves it, and added the perfect one-liner.

Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the United States. When he weighs in on market structure, it carries weight.

Here's what he posted, quoting data from River:

Look at the trend. Each bear market drawdown gets less severe as the wave of high-conviction buyers grows stronger every year.

The pattern is unmistakable. Every cycle, the floor gets higher. Every cycle, the pain gets shallower. Why? Because each year brings a stronger base of buyers who simply refuse to sell, the institutions, the treasuries, the sovereigns, the long-term holders absorbing every dip.

Armstrong's take on this drawdown?

And he's right. A 53% correction would have been a gentle pullback in any previous era. The 2011 crash erased 93% of Bitcoin's value. This one cut it in half and the market is treating it like the end of the world.

This is exactly what maturing looks like. As Bitcoin grows from a speculative experiment into global capital infrastructure, the volatility compresses. The drawdowns shrink. The hands get stronger.

The bears keep calling it a brutal winter. The data says it's the mildest one yet.

A cool breeze. Nothing more. ❄️

Today we’ll be taking a look the overall stablecoin supply.

Stablecoins are the backbone of crypto liquidity, used for seamless trading and instant cross-border transactions.

The chart below tracks the aggregate change in the total stablecoin market cap.

$265.48 billion in stablecoins now sit on-chain. (Two weeks ago: $266.91 billion)

Down $1.43 billion in a fortnight - the third straight contraction, but the smallest of the run.

The last two fortnights shed around $2.7 billion each. This time it's half that. Supply is still draining… just slower. After back-to-back heavy drawdowns, the bleed is starting to ease rather than accelerate.

On the year, the picture's still soft. Supply slipped below its 2026 starting point last edition, and it's drifted a touch further under since. The cushion that ran through spring is gone.

But context matters: $265.48 billion is an enormous pool of on-chain capital, and a shrinking drawdown is a very different signal from a widening one.

Three down fortnights in a row - but the third is the gentlest. Early signs of the drain exhausting… or just a pause before the next leg? The slowdown is the thing to watch. 🔥

Trump Discloses Over $1.2 Billion in Crypto Earnings, $50M in Bitcoin Holdings. The president’s annual financial disclosure report was released on Tuesday and made crypto one of his biggest reported income sources.

Nasdaq expands distribution of its market data into blockchain infrastructure. The exchange operator will offer its TotalView data feed through Pyth’s marketplace as financial firms increasingly build applications on blockchain rails.

SEC seeks public comment on regulating next generation of ETFs. The request seeks feedback on how emerging ETF structures and investment strategies should be regulated as issuers roll out increasingly specialized products.

OKX AI unveils marketplace for agents to find work and get paid in stablecoins. The marketplace is pitched as an Upwork-style system for AI agents, with OKX’s fintech infrastructure and stablecoin payments in the background.

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