OVERVIEW

Altcoin Funding Rates Look Calm. The Last Time They Looked This Calm, They Did Not Stay That Way 🤯

Here’s What’s Happening 👇️

Today’s top trending tickers: ShapeShift FOX Token, KISHU INU, Injective Protocol, The Last Play, and AMP Token

Biggest winners: $CRO ( ▲ 7.84% ) , $ONDO ( ▲ 4.24% ) , $CC ( ▲ 3.73% ) , $SOL ( ▲ 2.63% ) , and $BTC ( ▲ 1.41% )

Biggest losers: $SUI ( ▼ 3.58% ) , $SKY ( ▼ 3.7% ) , $ASTER ( ▼ 2.05% ) , $ZEC ( ▼ 1.61% ) , and $UNI ( ▼ 0.73% )

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

Source: TradingView – Click to enlarge.

NEWS
DeFi Is Up. Memes Are Up. L1s Are Up. The Order Books Are Not. 🔢

Alt funding just flipped from a month of red to single-basis-point green.

Open interest stacked over $2.5 billion in a week, but funding remains in basis points, not the triple-digit annualized froth that has marked every cycle top. Meaning, the cost of being long has not yet bitten. Spot ETFs are still pulling inventory off the market at a half-billion-dollars a day.

This has all the hallmarks of an early rotation, not an exhausted one:

• BTC funding sat deeply negative for weeks before the flip, draining late shorts and frothy longs alike

• Three of the top 30 alts already show genuine spot demand, not just perp bid. If that number doesn’t grow, then it’s time to be suspicious.

• The Altcoin Season Index moved 32 to 47.

• Spot ETF inflows give Bitcoin a floor the 2025 setup never had. And that goes for ETH, too.

Every parabolic alt cycle starts with funding that looks suspiciously well-behaved. The frenzy (historically) comes later. Right now the market has leverage but not euphoria, gentle flows and interest, but not panicked crowding.

We’ve essentially gone from wait mode to hurry-up-and-wait mode.

NEWS
Mining Pools Controlling 75% Of Bitcoin Heroically Agree That Maybe Centralization Is Bad 👍️

Well here’s something that kind of got lost in all the altcoin pamping last week: seven $BTC ( ▲ 1.41% ) mining pools representing roughly 75% of the global hashrate joined the Stratum V2 Working Group on May 7.

Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool, MARA Foundation, Block Inc., and DMND signed on to advance an open protocol that has existed for four years and gone largely unused outside of Braiins and DMND.

Wut’s A Stratum V2?

The protocol these pools use to coordinate with their miners is called Stratum, and the current version dates to 2012. It is unencrypted, inefficient, and gives the pool operator total control over block contents. Stratum V2 is a rewrite, and it does three things the old version cannot.

1. It encrypts the connection between pool and miner, which closes off a surveillance and theft vector.

2. It is faster, which Braiins estimates can boost miner profits by up to 7.4% (their own benchmark).

3. Most important: it includes a feature called Job Negotiation that lets the individual miner, not the pool, decide which transactions go in the block.

Re-read #3. If Job Negotiation gets switched on at scale, pools shrink from “deciders” to “payout processors,” and Bitcoin’s censorship resistance gets meaningfully stronger.

However, Job Negotiation is optional. Pools can adopt the encryption and speed gains without ever giving up template control. For US-based operators like Foundry and MARA, pool-level transaction selection is also how they comply with US sanctions rules. Surrendering that control means surrendering a regulatory lever.

So far, only two of the seven pools (Braiins and DMND) run Stratum V2 in production today. The others agreed to participate in standards meetings, which is a long way from flipping a switch.

The decentralization win only arrives if pools enable Job Negotiation, not just the parts that make them more efficient.

CRYPTOTWITS
Cryptotwits Podcast 🎙️

Talking with $CAW ( ▲ 3.97% )

NEWS
98.27% Of Solana Validators Voted In Favor Of No Longer Voting So Much ☑️

$SOL ( ▲ 2.63% ) ’s Alpenglow upgrade passed governance last September with 98.27% approval, ran its first successful test cluster switch on May 9, and is targeting a mainnet activation date sometime in Q3 2026. So… what is it?

Alpenglow Is Physically Different, Not Just Make Up On A Pig

Think of Solana like an old commodity pit. Before anything gets printed to the tape, every trader on the floor has to agree on the price.

The old way (Tower BFT + Proof-of-History): There’s a wall clock above the pit that never stops ticking (that’s Proof-of-History). Every time a trader wants to vote on a price, they have to push into the ring, scream their bid, and have it chalked onto the big board behind the pit.

The board fills up fast. In fact, about 3 out of every 4 marks on the board are just traders confirming each other’s bids (votes), not actual customer orders. And once price gets enough screams behind it, you wait almost 13 seconds before the clearing house officially settles it.

The new way (Votor): The exchange decides traders no longer have to scream into the ring. They flash hand signals to the trader next to them. One dude collects every signal in the pit, bundles them into a single chit, and posts just that one chit on the board. Instead of 1,000 traders screaming 1,000 bids, you get one tiny summary.

And because the signals happen off the board and everyone agrees fast, the print clears in about 150 milliseconds. That’s about as long as it takes you to blink. The old way took 12,800 milliseconds. Roughly 85 times faster.

The board now has way more room for actual orders, and the print hits the tape almost instantly. But let’s wait and see how this performs when it eventually goes live.

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NEWS
Circle’s Best Number Isn’t In The Earnings Release 🪙

$CRCL ( ▲ 15.91% ) ’s Q1 2026 results are a study in divergence. Revenue grew 20%, transaction volume grew 263%, and net income fell 15%. Float trade is fading, velocity is… well gaining velocity.

• The asset stopped being parked and is being spent. Circulation up 28% to $77B. On-chain volume up 263% to $21.5T. USDC is turning over 2.6x faster than a year ago. T

• Adjusted EBITDA up 24% papers over a worsening margin story. Net income fell 15% on revenue up 20%. Reserve return rate dropped 66 bps. Distribution costs ate 62% of reserve income.

• Other revenue doubled and nobody noticed. $21M to $42M YoY. The only income line that isn’t a derivative of Fed policy, and the only one arguing Circle is becoming a platform instead of a money market fund with a logo.

• The ARC Token cap table is the real headline. $222M at $3B FDV. ICE, Apollo, BlackRock, Janus Henderson, ARK, Standard Chartered Ventures. A TradFi syndication in a token wrapper. Circle excluded ARC economics from guidance, meaning even they won’t underwrite the upside.

• USDC owns activity, not supply. 63% of stablecoin transaction volume per Visa. Tether still dwarfs USDC in circulation. Flow over stock is the argument Circle has wanted to make for two years.

• USYC is now the largest tokenized money market fund on the planet. Circle is hedging itself against the disintermediation of itself. The Hashnote deal is working.

• GAAP OpEx up 76%, adjusted up 32%. The gap is post-IPO stock comp. Circle also rewrote its adjusted EBITDA definition this quarter to strip more SBC payroll tax. Worth flagging.

CRYPTOTWITS
Stream Signals 📢

A handful of Stocktwits posts worth pulling out of the scroll. 👇️ 

<blockquote align="center" class="stocktwits-embedded-post" data-origin="https://stocktwits.com" data-id="653009600"

$BTC.X $MSTR$STRC
Yup.
Some monster coins buys coming.
Saylor baited the market.
Journalism majors that write for business sites fueled it, not getting clues. lol.

<blockquote align="center" class="stocktwits-embedded-post" data-origin="https://stocktwits.com" data-id="653007331"

$BTC.X 4hr OBV

<blockquote align="center" class="stocktwits-embedded-post" data-origin="https://stocktwits.com" data-id="652991552"

@3Kyle033@3Kyle033 Look at this $INJ.X bot wall (155.35 vs 155.34). Eric is desperate to hide the $2.70+ NAV. The proof is right here!

<blockquote align="center" class="stocktwits-embedded-post" data-origin="https://stocktwits.com" data-id="652990923"

$BMNR rubbish, real deal long term is CRCL

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

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

• This was another data-dive issue – more market dashboard than actual story.

• Lending was the best-performing sector – up 13.8%, with Proof-of-Stake (+12.7%), Smart Contracts (+12.6%), and DeFi (+12.1%) right behind it.

• Everything was green – even the laggards were still positive, with Privacy the weakest at +2.1%.

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

• This was also a data-dive issue – same format, slightly uglier report card.

• Crypto was still well below the highs – total market cap was down 22.09% from the all-time close, though still up 35.84% YTD and 103.39% YoY.

• Altcoins were lagging again – altcoin market cap was down 37.20% from its all-time close, and altcoins ex-ETH were down 37.90%.

• AI absolutely smoked everything – up 19.7% on the week, which is funny given how often that sector later acted like it had never seen a chart before.

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

May 11

• 330 – Constantinople (formerly Byzantium, known today as Istanbul) becomes the new capital of the Roman Empire.

• 1751 – Ben Franklin founds Pennsylvania Hospital.

• 1812 – John Bellingham assassinates British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval.

• 1934 – The Great Dust Bowl (the historical dust storm, not a college football game) hits hard.

• 1858 – Minnesota becomes the 32nd US state.

• 1960 – Adolf Eichmann is captured.

• 1969 – The comedy group Monthy Python forms. There was much rejoicing.

• 1995 – The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is signed by 170 nations.

• 1997 – IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeats Garry Kasparov.

• 2000 – Astha Arora becomes India’s official 1 billionth citizen.

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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. 📋