It's Still a Bull Market, But Not The One You Wanted

Bullish:

• $STABLES - Massive institutional adoption of stablecoins with Western Union, MoneyGram, and major marketplaces implementing stablecoin strategies for capital efficiency and new customer monetization.

  • “2025 was the year of stablecoins, and 2026 is the year of capital markets.”

    Rob·2:26

  • “use stablecoins or get left behind.”

    Rob·9:45

  • “thinks that stable coins are the most amazing thing that he's seen in twenty years of working in payments”

    Jason·27:36

  • “every single one of them will probably have a real announcement this year about Stablecoins because they have global you know, they have they have global customers both on both sides of the marketplace who want to be able to have US dollars”

    Rob·24:27
• $WU - Western Union implementing stablecoins to eliminate billions in daily float costs and launch debit cards to 100 million customers, creating significant capital efficiency.

  • “my stock is trading it. Someone here can pull it up. Don't I forget if he said $3,000,000,000 or 4,000,000,000 or 5,000,000,000. So let's make up the numbers here. $5,000,000,000 stock.”

    Jason·28:18

  • “Boom. He he he now gets all that $1,800,000,000 back and he's gonna buy back their stock.”

    Jason·28:42

  • “Alright. Now he just saved $2,000,000 in the float daily, starts buying back the stock the stock. Start stock starts going back up.”

    Jason·29:22
• $SKY - Sky (formerly Maker) providing credit facilities to traditional mortgage originators like Better, demonstrating real-world adoption of DeFi infrastructure.

  • “Sky is pretty interesting.”

    Jason·12:18

  • “Sky is just an interesting credit facility on chain. And so, like, if if Sky can provide credit for better, this, like, home Yeah. Then I think This”

    Santi·12:48

  • “they provide a they provide a a credit line to this mortgage originator, and and the calculus for them is quite simple, which is they can lower the cost of capital by using Sky.”

    Santi·13:25

  • “Better just they lowers their think they can squeeze out 100 basis points, which is pretty material.”

    Santi·13:38

Bearish:

• $SOL - Solana significantly underperforming with 56% decline while traditional financial services companies implementing crypto infrastructure are outperforming.

  • “Solana is down. And I know this because I'm a Solana holder too, much to my demise, 56 percent.”

    Santi·26:26
• $DEFI - DeFi experiencing quality decline with fewer talented founders entering the space as AI attracts top talent and capital.

  • “DeFi is not the thing that a new Stanford grad wants to do right now.”

    Rob·18:01

  • “feels like the quality of founders is not that high. And I haven't seen anything truly null.”

    Santi·14:56

  • “Like, because in prior cycles, you didn't have AI and the Stanford engineer would eventually come into crypto. I don't think they're gonna come back for a while.”

    Santi·21:00