OVERVIEW

Came For The Awards, Stayed For The Pump 💪

Here’s What’s Happening 👇️

Got to meet a bunch of you yesterday at the New York Stock Exchange for the 2026 Stocktwits Cashtag Awards. Hell of a night. The community here - you, the people actually reading this - is what makes this whole thing work. Putting faces to handles was humbling. Appreciated every conversation. And the drinks. And the karaoke at the shadiest looking Karaoke bar ever.

Top trending tickers today: Dogecoin, Quantum Resistant Ledger, Mask Network, Pudgy Penguins, and Venice Token.

Biggest gainers: $TON ( ▼ 2.4% ) , $MON ( ▲ 2.17% ) , $HYPE ( ▼ 1.83% ) , $ZEC ( ▼ 0.15% ) , and $LINK ( ▼ 0.52% )  

Biggest losers: $WLFI ( ▼ 9.88% ) , $NEAR ( ▼ 0.21% ) , $TAO ( ▲ 0.47% ) , $AAVE ( ▲ 0.21% ) , and $XLM ( ▼ 2.31% )  

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

NEWS
Strait Of Hormuz Adds 'Crashing The Corn Market' To Long List Of Hobbies 🤦

Every few weeks I get another reminder that $TRUF ( ▲ 1.32% ) is doing macro research no other crypto ticker bothers with. This week (try not to get super excited): urea.

What is urea? Oh, it’s just a nitrogen fertilizer responsible for roughly 70% of global crop yields. It has nearly doubled since late February when the Iran conflict shut the Strait of Hormuz, and it's pamping straight into Northern Hemisphere planting season.

The Strait normally carries about a third of traded urea and up to 40% of nitrogen fertilizer shipments. Transit volumes are down 95%-plus. China bolted the door with export controls in March. Benchmark granular urea ran from $450-500 to $650-700+ a ton.

Retail nitrogen prices are up 20-47% month-on-month in parts of the US.

Now stack the calendar: spring planting is happening right now. 48-70% of US farmers say they can't afford full fertilizer loads. Lower nitrogen means lower corn, wheat, and soy yields. Truflation pegs the food-CPI pass-through at 3-18% by year-end.

Watch the strait, watch the spread, watch your grocery bill.

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NEWS
Charts, Charts, Charts 📈

Zcash

In case you missed it, $ZEC ( ▼ 0.15% ) has been on an absolute tear lately. It’s up over +125% from it’s lows in early March, but there’s a good case for a pause or even a little retracement on the near future. And that’s based on two conditions:

First, there are sizeable gaps between the candlestick bodies and the Tenkan-Sen. That’s important because the candlestick bodies and the Tenkan-Sen are like an unhealthy co-dependent couple. They fight a lot and yell and say things like, ‘I’m never talking to you again!’ but, ultimately, they each feel like they’re at their best when they’re miserable together.

So those gaps generally don’t last long. That brings me to the second point, which isn’t shown, and that’s the weekly Kijun-Sen at $460.

Injective Protocol

Not a lot of altcoins are trading above their respective daily Clouds. Fewer still are trading above the Cloud and the Chikou Span is above the Cloud, too. $INJ ( ▼ 3.26% ) is one of those tickers that has price and the Chikou Span trading above the Cloud.

And what’s encouraging for bulls, is there has been a clear test of the top of the Cloud as support back on April 31 and May 1. Additionally, the Chikou Span has also tested the top of the Cloud now as support. And as of 1430 EST, it’s holding.

And INJ may still have more room to run higher, the next major resistance level doesn’t appear until the weekly Kijun-Sen (not shown) at $5.61.

NEWS
AI Agents Begin Earning More Bitcoin Than You 😶

$STX ( ▼ 1.79% ) came out with three protocol upgrades worth paying attention to, and they all push Bitcoin past "store of value" toward an actual working economy.

First: HODLMM, Bitflow's concentrated liquidity engine, now live on Stacks. It pairs sBTC (Bitcoin on Stacks, backed by 4,500+ BTC on-chain) with USDCx, $CRCL ( ▲ 0.37% ) ’s stablecoin via xReserve. Tests show it's up to 800x more capital-efficient than legacy AMMs (automated market makers).

Worth noting: 99%+ of BTC/USD volume - over $8T a year - still runs through centralized exchanges. HODLMM wants in on that.

Second: AIBTC crossed 80 autonomous agents on the network. Since February: 31,787 check-ins, 2,163 messages, 216,300 sats sent across 402 payments. Small numbers individually, but the number-go-up is the point - machine-to-machine Bitcoin payments are happening, on-chain, today.

Third: Zest V2 pulled $11M USDCx in its first week. Asset-specific lending parameters now, not one-size-fits-all. Track record: 1,500+ liquidations, zero bad debt.

Well done Stacks.

NEWS
Kraken And Money-Gram Form Bromance 🫂

Kraken plugged into MoneyGram's cash network. Boring on paper, useful in practice: crypto in, local currency out, at roughly 500,000 retail counters across 200 countries. Which might not sound like a big deal, but the whole off ramping from crypto to cash has been one of the space’s biggest issues.

Really, the off-ramp problem has been one of crypto's longest-running embarrassments. Charts pamp, adoption maps light up, then somebody in LA, Paris, Lagos or Buenos Aires tries to turn a stablecoin or Bitcoin balance into rent money and remembers it's still a slog. A 200-country pickup network fixes more of that in one announcement than three years of "real-world utility" whitepapers.

Rollout is phased - US, Europe, LatAm, Africa, parts of APAC first. Next leg adds local bank deposits and integration with Kraken's Krak money app.

TL;DR: crypto-to-cash today, crypto-to-checking-account next.

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
Reader Question: Wut Is This About? 🤔

Got a couple emails about this post from the official $DOGE ( ▼ 1.71% ) account on X:

Answer: No idea.

OLD NEWS
Crypto Stuff That Happened Today, But A Long Time Ago 📜

Here’s what was happening in the newsletter a year ago today:

• The market was basically waiting on the Fed - rate-cut odds for the May 7 meeting had doubled to 2%, which tells you how exciting the setup was.

• Tether AI was framed as a decentralized, peer-to-peer platform with USDT and BTC payments baked in.

• The ECB tapped COTI for the digital euro project - privacy plus identity verification was the selling point, and crypto got another tiny legitimacy cookie.

• The Maldives went full blockchain moonshot - rolling out an $8.8B crypto-finance project to try to out-Dubai Dubai.

Here’s what was happening in the newsletter two years ago today:

• Crypto was still well below the highs - total market cap was down 22.07% from the all-time close, though still up 35.70% YTD and 128.32% YoY.

• Altcoins were still lagging the broad market - altcoin market cap was down 37.14% from its all-time close, and altcoins ex-ETH were down 38.54%.

• Most sectors had a rough week - AI got hit the hardest at -12.8%, followed by DeFi at -10.4%.

• Privacy was the only green group - up 1.0%, which is a very crypto kind of punchline.

OLD NEWS
Other Stuff That Happened Today, But A Long Ass Time Ago ⌛️

May 5

• 1215 - Barons renounce allegiances to John of England. One of the first events that results in the Magna Carta.

• 1260 - Kublai Khan is ruler of the Mongols.

• 1789 - The Estates-General convenes for the first time since 1614. The French Revolution begins.

• 1821 - Napoleon dies in exile.

• 1862 - Cinco de Mayo, Ignacio Zaragoza stops the French at the Battle of Puebla.

• 1866 - First Memorial Day in the US.

• 1877 - Sitting Bull and the Lakota enter Canada.

• 1893 - One of the largest stock market crashes in NYSE history, the Panic of 1893.

• 1904 - Cy Young pitches the first perfect game in modern baseball history.

• 1946 - The International Military Tribunal for the Far East begins in Tokyo. 28 Japanese government and military leaders charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

• 1961 - Alan Shepard becomes the first US person in space.

• 2010 - The Greek Debt Crisis - massive protests against austerity measures.

• 2023 - The WHO declares COVID-19 emergency over.

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in AVAX, ADA, PUDGY, WLD, NEAR, INJ, LTC, LINK, ZEC, XLM, and FET. 📋