GM!
Today’s top news:
Crypto majors rebound 1-2% ahead of FOMC; BTC at $77.5k Paul Tudor Jones calls Bitcoin the strongest inflation hedge, better than gold Pump Fun burns $370M in tokens, announces new programmatic buy back Robinhood’s HOOD stock falls 10% on earnings miss, falling crypto revenue Polymarket in active discussions with CFTC to lift ban on US users 🟠 Paul Tudor Jones Calls Bitcoin Strongest Inflation HedgeHis comments on equities were a bit different. He said that current S&P 500 valuations remind him of the 2000 dot-com bubble. The stock market cap relative to GDP is near historic extremes. He warned it will be “really hard to make money” in stocks over the next decade, and added that a major market correction would worsen the federal deficit by collapsing capital-gains tax revenues and destabilizing the bond market.
The driver of the miss is straightforward: crypto transaction revenue fell 34% quarter-over-quarter to $134 million, and 47% year-over-year, tracking Bitcoin’s 22% price decline over the same period.
The miss is notable because the rest of the business held up. Prediction markets, futures, and index options all posted record volumes in Q1. Equities and options grew double digits. Unfortunately, HOOD’s revenue remains tightly correlated to BTC price action, and the stock has tracked BlackRock’s IBIT more closely than the S&P 500 for most of 2026. The Q2 recovery in crypto prices, if it holds, should show up in the next print
At the same time, Pump announced a new programmatic buy-and-burn for PUMP tokens using 50% of revenue. They will use an irreversible smart contract locking 50% of all net revenue from the Bonding Curve, PumpSwap, and Terminal into automatic open-market purchases and burns for the next year. The remaining 50% will fund operations and growth.
Zoomed out, Pump.fun has seen tremendous success. In the past few years, Pump has:
Raised $500 million in 12 minutes through its $PUMP token sale Surpassed $1 billion in lifetime platform revenue Generated hundreds of billions in trading volume.But despite allocating 100% of revenue to buybacks, the team said a trust deficit developed around what those bought-back tokens would eventually be used for. The hope is that this new burn removes that uncertainty permanently (or at least for the next year).
The current process is fully manual with document submissions reviewed by staff. The new system will flag incomplete applications, speed up feedback, and reject filings that aren’t materially complete. Current staff are being trained on Microsoft Copilot while in-house swap data and market surveillance tools are in development.
Selig identified the joint CFTC/SEC digital asset taxonomy guidance as the most consequential crypto action of his tenure, and put prediction market participants “on notice” about the agency’s enforcement posture. Notably, the SEC has roughly six times the CFTC’s staff, while the CFTC’s mandate is expanding rapidly to cover crypto, prediction markets, and derivatives. The hope is that AI can help make up for that resource gap…
Polymarket is in active discussions with the CFTC to lift the ban on U.S. traders from its main international exchange, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
The restriction has been in place since a 2022 settlement in which Polymarket paid a $1.4 million fine and agreed to exit the US market after operating an unregistered event contract facility. A separate US-only Polymarket platform received CFTC clearance in November following the company’s acquisition of a registered exchange, but that platform has yet to fully launch.
