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The Heart Wants What It Wants, And What It Wants Is To Be Destroyed 😻

Love is not love which alters when it finds the chart hath turned against it. I stay. I bleed.

Author

Jonathan Morgan
February 20, 2026

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OVERVIEW

The Heart Wants What It Wants, And What It Wants Is To Be Destroyed 😻

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

Source: finviz

And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

Source: TradingView

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NEWS
The Largest Accidental Stimulus Package of 2026 Was Written By A Chief Justice 🤣 

This morning, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Trump administration's sweeping tariff regime - built on the back of a 1977 emergency law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA - is illegal. 🧑‍⚖️

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. The short version: you can't use a peacetime emergency statute to unilaterally impose the largest tax increase on American households in over thirty years without Congress signing off.

Six justices agreed. Three didn't.

Here's what's actually on the table right now. The government has collected over $160 billion under these tariffs since they were imposed. Estimates put the potential refund liability at up to $175 billion.

The Section 232 tariffs - the industry-specific ones covering steel, aluminum, and select hardware - survived and remain in place. The administration has already telegraphed they're rebuilding the tariff wall under different legal authority.

And the Court's ruling was deliberately silent on whether and how refunds actually get paid.

So… how does this effect crypto? Let’s get into that. 👇️

Real quick before we get into it: not an economist. Not a financial advisor. Just a guy with a newsletter, a year's worth of notes, and theorycrafting. None of this is financial advice - and if you actually needed that disclaimer, I'm a little worried about you, but also honored you're here. Now let's get into it.

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NEWS
The Bullish Case Theories 🐂 

FREE MOONIES

Normally when we talk about liquidity injections, it's the Fed firing up the money printer like a college kid making ramen at 2am - desperate, inflationary, and everyone wakes up feeling worse.

This is different. No Fed meeting required. No rate decision. No Jerome Powell doing his best "we're watching the data" impression. A judge just accidentally became the most bullish macro catalyst of 2026.

The Uncertainty Premium Unwind

Imagine you've been playing poker for a year and there's a drunk guy at the table who keeps flipping the table over randomly. You'd keep fewer chips in play, right? That's what institutional allocators have been doing with risk assets under the tariff regime.

The persistent "will he or won't he" overhead kept real money on the sidelines - you can see it in the elevated VIX readings baked into 2025 like burnt crust on a hotdish (that’s a casserolue for you cultured folks). Even a messy resolution removes a tail risk that's been sitting on the market's chest for over a year.

Crypto, being the highest-beta chaos-absorber in the asset class universe, disproportionately benefits when that weight lifts. It's a pressure valve… one that’s been sealed tight for 18 months.

Stablecoins as the Sleeper Winner

Here's one that's not getting airtime yet. A year of supply chain chaos forced companies to find faster, cheaper ways to settle cross-border transactions. A lot of them quietly - well, not quietly - a lot of them visibly and loudly started experimenting with dollar-denominated settlement rails outside of SWIFT.

What happens if trade normalizes and volume surges back. You know who loves high cross-border trade volume? Tether. Circle. Every stablecoin issuer that's been building that shtuff while everyone was distracted. 😪 

NEWS
The Bearish Case Theories 🐻 

Debt Spike?

The government may owe refunds of up to $175 billion, which has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is either spending cuts (LOL THAT’LL HAPPEN) or more Treasury issuance.

More Treasuries means more supply in the bond market, which pushes yields up, which tightens financial conditions across the board. Bitcoin is essentially the longest-duration asset that exists - it's a cash flow zero with infinite theoretical duration - which means it gets hit hardest when the cost of money goes up. The bear case isn't "tariffs bad, tariffs gone, good."

The bear case is "they just blew a hole in the federal budget the size of a Midwestern cornfield and bond vigilantes are circling." I’m keeping my eye on the 10-year yield today. Not the S&P. The 10-year.

Replace-and-Escalate: The Switcheroo Nobody's Talking About

The Trump administration already said before the ruling came down that they had a replacement plan ready to go. They lost the battle but they kept their playbook on the desk. The new tariff regime - built on Section 232, Section 301, or direct Congressional authorization - is going to be legally bulletproof and harder to challenge in court.

Currently (1400 EST), markets are rallying on the assumption that the trade war is winding down. The smarter assumption is that it's getting restructured. If the replacement lands and it sticks - no legal challenge, no Supreme Court Hail Mary - we’re in a world of permanent tariff overhang with no judicial off-ramp.

Inflation Whiplash Keeps the Fed in the Corner With a Dunce Cap

The tariff removal triggers an import surge - businesses are already talking about stockpiling before the next round drops. That surge hits the consumer price data somewhere around Q2-Q3.

Just as inflation was looking like it might finally behave, we get a demand-pull spike from a flood of cheap imports hitting shelves simultaneously. Now the Fed has zero cover to cut. If those expectations get repriced out because Powell (or whoever else is in charge) is standing at the podium sweating through his shirt again, that unwind is not gentle.

The "What If They Just Don't Comply" Wildcard

This one nobody wants to say because it sounds crazy, except the last year has recalibrated what crazy looks like. Kavanaugh literally wrote in his own dissent that the refund process is going to be a "mess."

If Treasury slow-walks refunds, administration finds creative ways to delay implementation, or if this turns into a genuine constitutional standoff between the executive and judicial branches - that's not the fun kind of chaos that Bitcoin feeds on. 🧠 

AAVE
The Builders Are Leaving, And Aave Labs Only Has Itself To Blame 🥹

BGD Labs is walking out the door, and if you want to understand why, just look at who's been rearranging the furniture without asking. 🚪

After four years of building the technical backbone of one of DeFi's most important protocols, BGD Labs announced they won't renew their Aave DAO engagement when their contract expires April 1, 2026.

Fitting date, honestly. Because the situation they're describing reads like a bad joke.

BGD Labs is - or was - the core engineering team responsible for Aave's critical infrastructure. I’m talking Aave v3, the governance systems, the safety mechanisms, the chain expansions. If Aave is the car, BGD built the engine, the brakes, and most of the things you don't see but absolutely need.

They operated as an independent service provider to the Aave DAO, the decentralized governance body that controls the protocol.

Aave Labs, formerly Avara Labs, is a separate company with a different mandate - or at least it used to be. They pivoted recently from building across multiple products into positioning themselves as the central force driving Aave's future, spearheading the development of Aave v4.

That shift is where things get ugly.

Rather than letting v4 stand on its own merits, Aave Labs - armed with brand ownership and enough voting power to muscle proposals through governance - has spent considerable energy talking down v3.

They (Aave Labs) want to freeze improvements now, redirect all DAO service providers toward v4 before it's even live, and eventually kneecap v3's parameters to herd users into migrating. Deliberately worsening a working product to make the new one look good by comparison.

The builders leave. The suits stay. I feel like I’ve seen this before. 🤔 

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

💵 Alchemy Pay Integrates USA₮, Tether's New "Checking Account" Stablecoin

Alchemy Pay now supports USA₮, Tether's U.S.-focused stablecoin issued under the GENIUS Act framework. Users in 173 countries can buy it with Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, and local bank transfers across 50+ fiat currencies. Alchemy Pay.

🤖 Algorand Publishes a Guide on Not Shipping Vulnerable AI-Generated Contracts

Algorand's security post distinguishes "vibe coding" (accept all, paste errors until it works) from "agentic engineering" (AI assists, you architect and review). The risk: Web3 vulnerabilities drain funds immediately and irreversibly, unlike Web2 breaches where you can dispute charges and claw back money. Use agent skills, keep keys out of reach, test like an attacker, and remember that "vibe code responsibly" means you're actually doing agentic engineering. Algorand.

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

📶 Helium's New Orleans Network Handled a 550% Surge During Mardi Gras

Helium's French Quarter deployment absorbed 143,000 unique subscribers on Fat Tuesday - up from a typical Tuesday average of 22,000 - while carrier networks presumably melted under parade traffic. The LongFi team expanded coverage along parade routes before Carnival, and the network held through the city's biggest week without calls failing or texts stalling. Ash Wednesday traffic dropped 50% overnight, proving the surge was pure event compression rather than organic growth. Helium.

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

🌉 SKALE Portal 5.0 Gets a Design Refresh and Multi-Network Support

SKALE Portal 5.0 ships with a new UI, dark/light mode, smoother bridge flows, and support for SKALE Expand deployments across EVM ecosystems starting with SKALE on Base. The chain page now shows all the config details developers actually need - Chain ID, MTM status, owner info - instead of making you hunt for them. It's a "major refresh focused on clarity," which is tech speak for "we finally fixed the UX." SKALE Network.

📱 Decentraland Is Going Mobile

Decentraland is building a standalone mobile client for 2026, targeting the 5.78 billion mobile users who aren't going to download a desktop app to hang out in a virtual world. Mobile already accounts for 15% of weekly active users despite no official support, no App Store listing, and no marketing. Q1 ships social basics; Q2 adds voice chat and DMs; H2 focuses on replayable social experiences that work in short sessions. Decentraland.

🏀 Messari Says Flow Is Pivoting From NBA Top Shot to Consumer DeFi

Messari published a report analyzing how Flow's 40 million consumer accounts from NBA Top Shot, Disney Pinnacle, and Ticketmaster become the distribution layer for DeFi products. Crescendo brought EVM equivalence; Forte added on-chain automation for recurring transfers and savings sweeps; Peak Money is the consumer app that hides all the DeFi complexity. Flow.

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

📊 Truflation Adds Another Data Source to Its Employment Index

Truflation now aggregates 8 data sources for its employment index - 5 independent and 3 government - relying on a single BLS survey is how you miss nuances and get blindsided by government shutdowns. The index shows labor markets cooling to 3-year lows on new payrolls while total employment stays elevated post-pandemic. Multi-source redundancy: because the most market-moving number in finance shouldn't depend on one phone survey. Truflation.

🔗 Polkadot's Hyperbridge Paused, Fixed, and Nobody Lost Anything

Hyperbridge had a technical mismatch that stopped cross-chain transfers while the system waited for valid proofs - which is exactly what secure infrastructure is supposed to do when something looks wrong. The community fixed it in the open, access is restored, and your assets never moved until the system was certain they were safe. The bridge paused rather than risked your funds; that's the feature, not the bug. Polkadot.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Protocol News 🏦

🔐 Secret Network and DataHaven Partner for Confidential Compute Plus Verifiable Storage

Secret Network handles encrypted smart contracts; DataHaven handles encrypted storage with tamper-proof integrity proofs - together they form a complete privacy pipeline from computation to memory. The pitch: confidentiality protects use, verifiability protects truth, and now you can have both without choosing. Secret mainnet is live; DataHaven testnet is live. Secret Network.

👻 Ghostminter Lets Anyone Launch Tokens on Casper in a Few Clicks

Ghostminter is a token launchpad for Casper where you can create fan tokens, in-game currencies, governance tokens, or membership passes without a full-stack team or complex infrastructure. Tokens graduate to CSPR.trade for liquidity, so your project isn't isolated on day one. The barrier to launching a token is now "imagine it". Casper Network.

⚙️ Aragon Argues DAOs Should Automate Everything That Doesn't Need Human Judgment

Aragon is building "policy plugins" that execute recurring actions - payroll, buybacks, treasury allocations - without requiring a governance proposal every time. Their idea is proposals should be reserved for genuinely novel decisions, not reimplementing choices already made. Once you define the policy, the system runs it deterministically; which, now that I think about it, makes perfect sense and how things currently work on-chain with these kinds of things is absolutely stoopid. Aragon.

LINKS
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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in AVAX, ADA, PUDGY, WLC, IMX, XTZ, NEAR, HBAR, ALGO, INJ, LTC, LINK, ZEC, XLM, and FET. 📋