OVERVIEW

Halfway To The Next Halving ⏳️

Here’s What’s Happening 👇️

Today felt like crypto putting on a nice jacket over a stab wound. $BTC ( ▲ 1.26% ) ripped through $76K intraday, $ETH ( ▲ 2.62% ) reached its best level in a while around the low-$2.4Ks, and the whole sector briefly looked like it had remembered how trend days are supposed to work.

Then the fade hit. $AVAX ( ▲ 0.58% ) started chewing through yesterday’s +6.98% gains, $SUI ( ▼ 0.03% ) began coughing up its +6.58% bounce, and $SOL ( ▼ 0.25% ) got its nose bloodied before $88 could become a real talking point.

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

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NEWS
Things You Should Know 🧠

• $FIGR ( ▼ 2.22% ) is adding auto loans to Democratized Prime and pushing $WYLDS ( ▼ 0.03% ) from $SOL ( ▼ 0.25% ) to Ethereum, so DeFi tourists can now shop for yield in home equity and car debt alike. Nothing says innovation like stuffing consumer credit into crypto wrappers.

• The Ethereum Foundation launched a $1 million audit subsidy program, covering up to 30% of security review costs through a marketplace of 20-plus audit firms. Which is smart, honestly - because “we’ll patch it after the exploit” has somehow remained a popular business model in this industry.

• $GS ( ▲ 2.12% ) filed for a Bitcoin income ETF that will generate yield by selling options tied to spot Bitcoin products.

• The Frankfurt Stock Exchange operator Deutsche Börse is putting $200 million into Kraken for a 1.5% stake, deepening ties around trading, custody, and settlement.

• $COW ( ▲ 0.95% ) ’s CoW Swap paused its protocol after a domain hijack hit the frontend, though the backend and APIs were reported safe.

NEWS
The $25,000 Rule Is Dead 🥂

OMG IT’S HAPPENING 😨

The SEC just approved FINRA's proposal to eliminate the Pattern Day Trader rule - the 20-year-old regulation that required retail traders to maintain at least $25,000 in their accounts to execute four or more day trades within five business days.

Approved today (April 14, 2026), the rule change replaces the PDT framework with intraday margin standards that tie margin requirements to actual market exposure rather than arbitrary trade counts or equity thresholds.

Under the new system, brokers can monitor accounts in real time and block trades that would create intraday margin deficits - or simply calculate deficits at end of day. Accounts with repeated unsatisfied deficits face a 90-day trading freeze.

FINRA's rationale is straightforward: the original rule was built for a world of commission costs and slower markets. Zero-commission trading and modern risk technology made it obsolete.

Implementation begins 45 days after FINRA's Regulatory Notice, with an 18-month phase-in period for broker-dealers. 🗓️ 

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
Halfway There - And the Clock Is Still Running ⏱️

We are now halfway to the next Bitcoin halving - approximately 105,000 blocks remaining, pointing to April-ish 2028. 📆 

That makes right now the mathematical midpoint of the current cycle. And across the last three halvings, the midpoint has a very specific kind of behavior.

Where Bitcoin was at the cycle midpoint in prior halvings:

• Midpoint between the 2016 and 2020 halvings (November 2018): Deep in the 2018 collapse - price had shed 83% from its all-time high and was weeks away from the cycle low

• Midpoint between the 2020 and 2024 halvings (November 2022): The FTX implosion - effectively the cycle low itself, with Bitcoin at $16,255

• Midpoint between the 2024 and 2028 halvings (April 2026, right now): $74,000 - down 42% from the October 2025 all-time high of $128,198

The current cycle is running the shallowest midpoint drawdown of any comparable period in Bitcoin's history. 📕 

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
What The Data Says About Where We Are Now 📊

• The weekly closing price all-time high was $123,515 on September 29, 2025 - we're 28 weeks from that peak

• At 28 weeks post-peak, current price sits at 60% of that all-time high close - the least damaged of any modern cycle at this same checkpoint

• The closest historical parallel is the 2013–2014 cycle, which sat at roughly 59% of its peak at the same stage

• The Composite Index (used to track short-term price exhaustion) currently reads 79.18 - notably elevated for this point in any prior cycle, suggesting the market has recovered more momentum than expected

• That same indicator at the September 2025 peak registered just 61.8 - the lowest reading at a cycle top in Bitcoin's recorded history, meaning that all-time high was the least "overbought" top on record. Which, at $125k+, that kind of makes sense. 🧠 

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
What History Says Could Happen Next 🤔

Across the last three halvings, the bear market low has landed at a remarkably consistent time: 74 to 78 weeks before the following halving. Applied to the April 2028 halving, that window opens in October or November 2026 - roughly six months from now. 6️⃣

The decline from peak to cycle low has taken 52 to 59 weeks in every comparable cycle. We are 28 weeks in. The historical pattern still has room to run.

• If the pattern holds, the cycle low arrives October–November 2026, approximately 27 to 31 weeks from here

• Once the low is in, the recovery back to the prior all-time high has gotten faster every single cycle: 110 weeks after the 2013 peak, 103 weeks after the 2017 peak, 68 weeks after the 2021 peak

• Projecting that compression forward puts the next all-time high reclaim somewhere in mid-to-late 2027 - potentially months before the April 2028 halving

The halving is not where this trade starts. It never has been. By the time the block reward gets cut in April 2028, the cycle low will be 17 to 18 months in the rearview. The question isn't what happens at the halving - it's whether October 2026 delivers the kind of exhaustion the prior two cycles required before the real recovery could begin.

Then again, the number of times there’s been a halving can be counted on one hand - so not exactly a massive data set to work off of. But it’s fun to use what we’ve got. 👍️ 

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NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
AI, Stablecoins, & Privacy News 🕵️

🤖 0x Built a Swap Skill for AI

0x AI is an open-source skill that gives agents one standard workflow for approvals, quotes, submission, error handling, and safety checks across the 0x Swap and Gasless APIs on 20-plus EVM chains. It supports AllowanceHolder, Permit2, and Gasless flows, queries docs in real time, and bakes in rules like “never approve the Settler contract” so your agent does not learn security the hard way. That saves developers from rebuilding the same swap spaghetti every time another bot wants to turn USDC into something more exciting. 0x.

🚀 World Wants a Lift Off Because the Internet Forgot How to Tell Humans from Everything Else

World says nearly 18 million people across 160 countries have now verified their humanness, and it is using its April 17 Lift Off event to show what comes next. It includes a new World ID protocol, more integrations, bot-resistant governance, deepfake defense, developer tools, and the usual big talk about scaling the “real human network.” Worldcoin.

🧬 Story’s Data Rails Hit Testneth

Confidential Data Rails on Story let data stay encrypted until onchain rules are satisfied, so developers can use private datasets without dumping them into the open and praying. The big targets are private data marketplaces, cross-organization threat intel, and sovereign data workflows where the useful data exists but the trust model is broken. Story Protocol.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) News 🪙

🛢️ Truflation’s April Bounce Says Disinflation Took a Smoke Break

U.S. inflation on Truflation hit 1.84% on April 13, up from 1.26% at the start of the month, with gasoline doing its usual "hold my beer" routine. Clothing, recreation, household goods, short stays, education, and communications all re-accelerated, while natural gas, vehicle purchases, and food kept leaning softer. The fun part is that food may not stay calm if oil keeps turning fertilizer into the next invoice from hell. Truflation.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Metaverse, NFT, & Gaming News 🎮️

⚽ Nexo Bought a Better Jersey Sponsorship and Called It Regional Expansion

Nexo partnered with the Argentine Football Association as the team’s official regional digital asset partner across South America ahead of the 2026 World Cup. The deal follows Nexo’s Buenbit acquisition, leans into its Argentina buildout, and comes with ticket giveaways, signed shirts, and player content because crypto still believes fandom is a distribution channel. Nexo.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending News 🏦

📊 Recurring Orders and Concentrated Liquidity Look Similar Until You Notice One Is Farming Volume and the Other Is Hunting Price

Bancor’s comparison says concentrated liquidity recycles funds symmetrically around the current price, while recurring orders split buying and selling into separate ranges to express a cleaner buy-low, sell-high view. One strategy thrives when price chops inside a band, the other wants meaningful swings and directional intent instead of endless little swaps for tourists. Same chart art, very different motives - because onchain strategies also enjoy pretending they are interchangeable when they absolutely are not. Bancor.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Protocol News 🏦

🎼 Kaspa’s Toccata Fork Brings Programmability Without Turning the Base Layer Into a Science Fair

The coming Toccata hard fork adds Silverscript for native covenant programming and zk infrastructure for based applications, with feature freeze expected April 15 and mainnet now targeted for roughly June 5 to 20. The idea is to add structured programmability, proof-based bridges, and zk building blocks without pretending the network is already at fully composable verifiable programs. Kaspa.

🛰️ Etherlink’s March Was a Mix of Bugfixes, Metals, and the Usual DeFi Attrition

March brought Tez402 pay-per-request payments, a fast-governance 6.2 bugfix rollout, Superlend’s market wind-down, Metals.io’s launch with uranium and gold, new dashboard coverage from The Tie, and a builder push through the Tezos EVM hackathon and TezDev. Tezos.

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

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

• MANTRA blew up - $OM ( ▼ 6.56% ) collapsed from about $6.5B in market cap to under $500M.

• Vitalik said Ethereum needed better philosophy - because apparently apps melting brains and wallets needed a bit more moral furniture.

• Do Kwon’s trial got pushed back - moved to February 2026.

• Kraken started rolling out U.S. stock and ETF trading - one more step toward turning crypto apps into all-purpose finance malls.

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

• This one was a weekend data issue.

• Total crypto market cap was down 13.27% from the all-time close - but still up 50.96% YTD and 110.79% YoY.

• Altcoins were still way off the highs - down about 30.11% from the all-time close, while altcoins ex-ETH were down 32.12%.

• Most crypto sectors had a weak week - Proof-of-Work held up best at -0.1%, while DEX (-7.7%), Lending (-6.2%), and DeFi (-5.7%) got smacked.

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

April 14

• 1360 - 1,000 English soldiers are killed by hail in France during the Hundred Years’ War.

• 1775 - the first American abolition society founded in Philadelphia.

• 1865 - President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.

• 1891 - B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Father of the Indian Constitution’ is born.

• 1912 - The RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg.

• 1988 - The Soviet Union withdraws from Afghanistan.

• 2004 - Better late than never? 600 years after the 1204 event, the ecumenical patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church accepts an apology by Pope John Paul II for the sacking Constantinople.

• 2010 - The Eyjalfjallajokull volcano errupts in Iceland, interrupting nearly all air traffic in the EU. Largest commercial airline interruption in Europe since WWII.

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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. 📋