Crypto et al. Has Done It All

Everyone says that Zhang et al. are the research gods who have published a paper on every topic on earth.

You think those guys are big shots?

Have you met Crypto et al? The craziest, most speculative, and versatile guy to ever do it all!

Finance? Pfft, eats it for breakfast.

Candles, Bollinger bands, social media, technical analysis, social analysis, market sentiment, hypertension, insomnia, payments, policy, AI, inflation, stagnancy, main character syndrome… Let me just stop you already. Crypto et al. has done it all!

Now, let’s see what more the crazy guy has been up to this week.

Because we all allegedly have opinions.

Just a Dude Who Invests@DudeWhoInvests

So let me get this straight... The stock market is falling, Gold is falling, Crypto is falling, Home prices are falling, Silver is falling, The KOSPI is falling, Bond yields are rising, Where the hell is all the money actually going now?

4:37 AM · Jul 17, 2026 · 52.1K Views

126 Replies · 6 Reposts · 260 Likes

(How we’re reading the market this week)

BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy and a handful of other major players have pledged $15 million towards preparing Bitcoin for the eventual threat posed by quantum computing. Not because someone secretly built a machine that’s about to crack every wallet by next Tuesday, but because the people responsible for safeguarding trillions of dollars’ worth of digital assets have decided that dealing with something later because the threat does not exist yet isn’t much of a security strategy.

The funny thing is, by crypto standards, $15 million isn’t exactly headline money. We’ve seen more capital disappear into frog coins with a whitepaper that consisted of “trust me, bro.” So this isn’t really about the size of the cheque but about the names attached to it.

When companies that collectively hold and secure an enormous chunk of Bitcoin start coordinating around something, markets tend to pay attention because institutions rarely spend money solving problems they don’t believe they’ll eventually have to face.

To be clear, nobody is saying quantum computers are about to wake up tomorrow and drain every Bitcoin wallet on Earth. The technology simply isn’t there yet. Most researchers (including Zhang and his pals) still believe practical quantum attacks are years, if not decades, away. Bitcoin also isn’t sitting still waiting for the attack. Developers have been discussing quantum-resistant cryptography for years, and there are multiple upgrade paths should the need become urgent.

Infrastructure doesn’t become resilient by reacting at the last minute. The internet wasn’t built after billions of people logged on. Banks didn’t invent vaults after the robbery. The strongest systems survive because they prepare long before the emergency arrives.

This is another reminder that Bitcoin has graduated from “interesting internet money” into infrastructure that institutions fully expect to exist decades from now. You don’t build contingency plans for something you think is temporary.

If you’ve attended, watched or accidentally wandered into any tech conference this year, you’ve probably heard the phrase “AI agents” approximately seventeen thousand times.

Apparently they’re going to book our flights, negotiate contracts, order groceries, pay subscriptions, manage businesses and probably remind us to call our mothers.

This week, Coinbase decided to lean all the way into that future by unveiling a suite of tools designed to make crypto-native AI agents easier to build. The idea is that if AI is eventually going to perform economic activity on our behalf, it needs money, wallets, payment rails and a way to interact with blockchains without asking a human to click “Confirm Transaction” every twelve seconds.

On paper, it’s actually one of the strongest use cases crypto has going for it.

Traditional banking wasn’t exactly designed for autonomous software. AI agents can’t walk into a branch with a passport. They can’t fill out KYC forms without ironically needing another AI agent to help them. Crypto, meanwhile, doesn’t particularly care whether the wallet belongs to a person or a machine. If programmable software is going to transact with programmable money, the pieces fit together surprisingly well.

The math, as they say, is indeed mathing.

The problem is that narratives often arrive years before adoption does.

Right now, the AI economy still consists mostly of infrastructure announcements, developer tools and conference demos that somehow always work perfectly on stage. Every company wants to become the platform where autonomous commerce happens. Coinbase is building. Ledger is building. Startups are building. Every week someone else announces they’re creating the operating system for the agent economy.

Which is fantastic.

It also means nobody actually knows what the standard looks like yet.

Remember the metaverse? Remember DAOs replacing companies? Remember when every fridge was supposed to mint NFTs? Exactly.

That doesn’t mean this narrative is wrong, though. Quite the opposite.

Unlike some of crypto’s previous obsessions, AI agents actually solve a real problem. Machine-to-machine payments are difficult with legacy financial systems, and crypto genuinely offers an elegant alternative. The technology has logic behind it.

What’s still missing is scale.

Until AI agents are moving billions of dollars in real economic activity instead of generating impressive keynote presentations, this remains a story about potential rather than proof.

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There was a time when hackers compromised social media accounts to spread misinformation, steal passwords or demand ransom.

Crypto looked at that business model and said, “What if...token launch?”

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s X account was compromised this week and promptly used to promote a fraudulent memecoin because, apparently, even cybercriminals understand that launching a random token is significantly easier than building an actual business.

The posts looked convincing enough for exactly as long as it takes Crypto Twitter to collectively lose all critical thinking.

Within minutes, traders piled in. Bots amplified the posts. Speculators started posting screenshots. Someone probably tweeted “life-changing opportunity.”

Then reality, as it has an annoying habit of doing, arrived.

The scam was exposed, the posts disappeared, and the token followed shortly after, leaving behind the usual collection of wallets wondering how they had once again become exit liquidity for people they’d never even met.

At this point, it’s difficult to know whether the most impressive part is the hackers or the market itself.

We’ve lived through fake ETF approvals, hacked influencer accounts, celebrity memecoins, presidential memecoins, AI-generated livestream scams and approximately four hundred “official token launches” that turned out to be anything but official.

Yet every fresh scam somehow finds enough buyers to produce a respectable chart before gravity remembers it exists.

Hope, as always, remains crypto’s most renewable resource. Because of it, the memecoin economy now operates with incredible efficiency. Hack an account. Announce a token. Watch bots scrape the post. Let CT do what CT does best. Wait for FOMO to outperform due diligence. Exit. Repeat.

It’s practically an automated business model at this point.

Of course, nobody who buys these tokens believes they’re buying the top. Everyone thinks they’re buying before everyone else.

Statistically, however, “everyone else” can’t all be early. Somebody has to become the liquidity.

This week, unfortunately, that somebody was once again reminded that maybe, just maybe, every token announced from a compromised account promising generational wealth isn’t the opportunity of a lifetime.

Who could’ve guessed.

(Our favourite CT X posts we saw this week.)

Layah Heilpern@LayahHeilpern

So crypto is now pricing in a chance the Fed hikes rates this month. No cuts, but hikes! Yeee we're not out of this bear market just yet...

2:03 PM · Jul 23, 2026 · 22.6K Views

47 Replies · 5 Reposts · 218 Likes

Dr Martin Hiesboeck@MHiesboeck

Prepare for the biggest bull market crypto has ever seen.

10:30 PM · Jul 20, 2026 · 761K Views

554 Replies · 1.03K Reposts · 8.59K Likes

EthereanVibin | 0xVibin.eth@EthereanVibin

$ETH is about to carry the entire crypto market on its back and simultaneously send all your favorite coins to infinity We’re entering the first inning of the greatest crypto bull market ever Everyone loves Ethereum, even if they don’t realize it

12:43 AM · Jul 22, 2026 · 8.44K Views

23 Replies · 24 Reposts · 424 Likes

𝚃𝚒𝚖𝚎 𝚃𝚛𝚊𝚟𝚎𝚕𝚎𝚛@TheTimeTraveler

Clarity Act Bill states that any crypto token that does not reach a certain threshold of market cap, they will be removed immediately. Goodbye 90% of the DeFi market. Leaving only a few options left.

3:15 PM · Jul 23, 2026 · 39.8K Views

30 Replies · 64 Reposts · 730 Likes

Matt Hougan@Matt_Hougan

The next bull market in crypto will be less about hype and more about HYPE.

3:55 PM · Jul 21, 2026 · 33.1K Views

42 Replies · 40 Reposts · 686 Likes

In all thy being, be cooler than your AI agent. In all thy getting, get a 2FA for your digital accounts. Don’t give anyone a chance to be Robin your crypto Hood (pun heavily intended).

Have a great weekend.

Until next week,

WAGMI,

Obi.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is not financial advice. Do your own research. Seriously.

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