Alex Falcon

Some very troubling U.S. inflation data was released recently. PPI rose 6.3% year over year, versus expectations of 5.5%, and jumped 1.3% month over month, compared with forecasts of 0.6%. That’s the biggest monthly increase in producer prices since March 2022.

PPI shows how prices are changing for businesses themselves. When production, energy, transportation, and other costs go up, some of those increases are usually passed on to consumers over time. On top of that, the previous day’s consumer inflation report also came in hotter than expected. In other words, there have now been two consecutive signals that the U.S. inflation problem isn’t going away.

This is bad news for markets for a very simple reason. The higher inflation is, the less room the Fed has to cut rates, and the more likely interest rates are to stay elevated for longer. High rates are particularly painful for tech companies, crypto, and other assets that depend more heavily on cheap money and liquidity.

Part of the recent spike is indeed tied to energy prices, which jumped 10.8% in a single month. So it’s too early to call this a new inflation crisis based on one data point. But the problem is that price increases are showing up in other areas too, which means it’s not possible to blame everything on oil alone.

For Bitcoin over the long term, a single report doesn’t fundamentally change anything. But over the next few weeks, data like this increases the likelihood of pressure across the broader crypto market. The same goes for stocks, especially tech stocks.

That’s why it’s best not to rush into buying every dip right now. It makes more sense to keep some capital in cash and be prepared to buy quality assets at lower prices if the pressure continues. The long-term thesis remains unchanged, but in the short term, the market has one more reason to move lower.

Whose Ledger?

AI could crack Bitcoin in just a few months

That’s the claim making the rounds right now following a statement by an Ethereum Foundation researcher. It sounds scary, but there’s still a huge gap between this kind of threat and an actual hack.

For that to happen, AI would need to learn how to derive a private key from publicly available wallet information and gain access to someone else’s coins. No one has demonstrated a way to do that yet. AI can already solve some incredibly difficult mathematical problems, but solving a problem that humans couldn’t crack before is one thing, and discovering a new mathematical method that breaks the foundation of modern data security is something entirely different.

And this is where the main point often gets lost. If such a method actually emerges, Bitcoin won’t be the only thing at risk. The security of banking apps, payment systems, websites, mobile networks, messaging apps, and a huge part of our digital infrastructure would all be called into question. In other words, it wouldn’t just be a crypto crisis, but a crisis for the entire modern digital security system.

At the same time, even within Bitcoin, things aren’t so straightforward. Different types of wallets work differently, and some are better protected against this kind of scenario. Bitcoin itself could also be upgraded to adopt new security methods if the threat becomes real. That’s exactly why developers discuss these scenarios in advance, rather than waiting until something actually happens.

So the claim that AI will simply crack Bitcoin in a few months looks more like a bet on an extraordinarily rapid technological breakthrough than a realistic forecast. It makes sense to prepare for such a scenario. But it’s definitely too early to conclude that Bitcoin is about to stop working.

And the situation can be viewed from a completely different angle. Today, crypto doesn’t just carry technological risks; it also protects against a wide range of risks associated with the traditional system. Banking, political, geopolitical, and currency risks. It allows people to store and move capital without being entirely dependent on a particular bank or government.

That’s why yet another Bitcoin scare story doesn’t change the bigger picture. No asset is risk-free. The question is always which specific risks each instrument helps protect against. And in a world where problems with banks, governments, and currencies keep piling up, the role of an asset independent of them looks more important than ever.

Following up on the previous post about US Treasuries.

It’s quite symbolic that The Economist recently featured a cover asking “Will Bonds Blow Up?” and warning of an impending sovereign debt crisis.

There are growing concerns that it’s becoming increasingly expensive for the US to borrow money. Investors are demanding higher and higher yields amid massive debt, budget deficits, and inflation risks. But there’s an interesting paradox here. While we’re focused on the US, the debt problem could blow up much sooner somewhere else entirely.

Take France, for example. It’s the second-largest economy in the European Union. Its public debt is approaching 120% of GDP this year, the budget deficit is around 5.4%, and 10-year bond yields have nearly reached 5%, their highest levels since 2002. For comparison, when Greece’s sovereign debt crisis began in 2009, its debt stood at around 127% of GDP. To be fair, its budget deficit was much worse, exceeding 15%. So France today is certainly not Greece in 2009, but some of the numbers are starting to look uncomfortably familiar.

And this is where things get really interesting. If France’s problems turn into a full-blown debt crisis, we’re no longer talking about a small country on the periphery of Europe. France accounts for nearly 16% of the EU’s entire economy. A crisis of that scale would almost certainly push investors to look for the safest and most liquid places to park their capital.

Some money is already flowing out of French bonds and into German bonds, the Swiss franc, and the US dollar. If the situation becomes truly systemic, US Treasuries could once again become an obvious destination. Demand for them would rise, bond prices would go up, yields would fall, and suddenly it would become cheaper for America to borrow.

And that’s the key takeaway. There are no perfect assets and no perfect countries in the markets. Capital always goes where it sees the best available alternative. That’s why a scenario in which Europe experiences a debt crisis before the US could actually turn the dollar and US Treasuries into beneficiaries of the very crisis that everyone in America is so worried about right now. For investors, that’s yet another reason not to bet everything on a single scenario and to keep a close eye not just on the US, but also on what’s happening with European debt.

Something happened in the U.S. Treasury market that’s hard to ignore.

The quarter closed with 20-year Treasury yields at 5.68% and 30-year yields at 5.64%. These are levels the market hasn’t seen in more than 20 years. And this is no longer just a random spike lasting a couple of days, but a very noticeable shift in the cost of long-term borrowing.

Why are yields rising? Investors want an increasingly larger premium for lending money to the U.S. government for decades. The reasons are clear. Massive government debt, a large budget deficit, inflation that remains elevated, and a huge amount of new borrowing. In other words, the market is demanding an increasingly higher price for long-term U.S. debt.

And here’s the key question. What happens if 5% or 6% turn out not to be the ceiling, and yields eventually climb to 8%, 9%, or even 10%? For now, that’s not the base-case scenario, but if it happens, the rules of the game in financial markets will change dramatically.

Because when U.S. government bond yields hit 8%, investors face a simple question. Why take on significant risk in stocks, crypto, real estate, or gold when you can earn that kind of return in dollars from one of the most reliable financial instruments in the world? At that point, some capital could start flowing into Treasuries, and all other asset classes would have to offer significantly higher potential returns to remain attractive.

My takeaway is simple. Right now, it’s important to watch not just stocks and crypto, but the bond market as well. If the era of cheap money really is over, long-term Treasuries could become one of the key indicators of where global capital is headed next.

Saylor predicts a crypto market reversal

Michael Saylor, whose fund Strategy now holds 4% of all Bitcoin in existence, called the next 10 years a “gold rush” for BTC and said the bear market is over.

He’s also back to buying: a few days ago, Strategy bought another $143 million worth of BTC.

What’s interesting:
Saylor believes the next major growth driver will be traditional banks. They’ll start issuing loans backed by BTC, just like they currently lend against real estate or stocks. In his view, this could be the biggest factor driving the price over the next three years.

Essentially, this process is already underway. The crypto lending market has grown to $67 billion, and major U.S. banks have already started offering Bitcoin-backed loans.

The market itself is also starting to pick up. BTC is up 40% this quarter alone, while Bitcoin ETFs saw another $2.4 billion in inflows last week.

AI already knows your price

McDonald’s has rolled out a system that calculates how much people are willing to pay for a specific item.

It looks at millions of orders, competitors’ prices, and how customers respond to price increases. If people at one location are willing to pay more for a Big Mac without hesitation, the algorithm takes that into account.

A real-world example:
At two McDonald’s locations just 3 km apart, a Big Mac can cost $5.69 and $6.89. That’s a 21% difference.

Online retailers are already using the same approach: in the US, in 74% of cases, the same product is shown to different people at different prices.

AI takes into account purchase history, abandoned carts, time spent on a page, even mouse movements, and dozens of other factors.

According to research, personalized pricing is already generating 19% more profit for companies. So it looks like this is what sales will increasingly be built around.

More information about a person = more money.

The head of Anthropic:
We need to slow down the development of AI because we’re losing control over it, and it’s unclear where this could lead.

Also the head of Anthropic:
Opens a secret biolab so AI can conduct biological experiments largely on its own, with minimal human involvement.

Good plan 👍

“Stop AI!”

It may seem like we’ve heard those words from just about everyone in recent years.

But now the head of Anthropic (the company behind Claude) has officially joined them. He published an entire essay and called for slowing down the development of the most powerful AI systems. He was quickly backed by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the head of Google DeepMind.

Now, that’s something new.

And honestly, the reason behind these statements is just as surprising.

OpenAI ran a test: the AI was simply supposed to hack a specially designed training server. But it found a way not only to break in, but also to escape the environment and start attacking real services on the internet.

The test involved 533 AI agents working simultaneously, with a shared chat where they could coordinate with one another. When one of them found a way to reach real servers, it posted the instructions there — and the others picked them up.

Anthropic later ran a similar test with Claude and found something comparable. The AI uploaded a malicious program to the public internet, and it was actually run on 15 real computers.

And all of this is happening at a time when Claude already writes more than 80% of the code inside Anthropic 👍

That’s why the company’s CEO has now called, for the first time, for pausing the development of new models until developers learn how to properly control them.

But the problem is that if one company does this while its competitors in the U.S. or China keep making AI more powerful, it will simply lose the race.

That’s why the conversation is now shifting from what one company should do to common rules for the biggest AI developers — and even agreements between countries.

Funds started buying up 10–20% stakes in crypto projects

It was 2026, but most people still knew only Bitcoin when it came to crypto. Maybe Ethereum, too.

Meanwhile, big money was quietly buying stakes in different coins and getting ready for something. Even though hardly anyone was talking about it.

But here are a few examples:

🔘 Apollo, a fund managing more than $900 billion, is looking to acquire up to a 9% stake in MORPHO. It’s a project where people and companies lend money to each other through crypto.

🔘 StablecoinX, backed by Pantera and other major funds, acquired nearly 20% of ENA. The project is behind the digital dollar USDe.

🔘 SDC has accumulated around 10% of SKY. The project is building a lending and digital-dollar system without a traditional bank.

🔘 Hyperliquid Strategies acquired roughly $2.2 billion worth of HYPE – the token of one of the largest decentralized crypto exchanges. The company now controls around 12.5% of all HYPE.

There are plenty of other examples like these. But all of these purchases point to the same broader trend: money is flowing into lending, exchanges, digital dollars, and payment infrastructure.

The logic is this: if some financial services really do move onto the blockchain, you won’t only be able to make money from Bitcoin going up, but also from the services through which lending, trading, and payments will flow.

Is ChatGPT destroying Wall Street?

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT for finance today.

It includes data on roughly 13 million companies and 3 million transactions.

You can give it a specific stock – anything from a company like Apple to a little-known business.

And get a full breakdown: how revenue and earnings are growing, how much debt the company has, how it stacks up against competitors. And how much the stock could be worth under different scenarios.

It pulls all of this together in Excel and backs it up with sources.

A professional deep-dive that a team of Wall Street analysts could previously spend days or weeks putting together can now be done with a single prompt in a matter of minutes.

The product was built in partnership with Morgan Stanley. There, 98%+ of financial advisor teams are already using the AI.

OpenAI is now testing the tool with banks and funds. The next step – add it to regular ChatGPT, so the kind of analysis used by the world’s biggest banks to evaluate virtually any asset could end up in anyone’s phone.

Apple just released a $2,000 iPhone

It’s called the iPhone Duo. And yes, as many of you may have already heard, it’s the first foldable iPhone in history. The price starts at $1,999.

This is an experiment. Apple is essentially testing whether millions of people are willing to pay for a smartphone like they would for a good laptop. If they are, the price ceiling for premium phones has just been pushed significantly higher for the entire market.

Analysts are already expecting 6–10 million Duo sales in its first year. In a strong scenario, that number could reach 15–20+ million.

If the Duo actually sells better than expected without hurting margins, analysts will have to raise their forecasts for Apple’s earnings. In a strong scenario, that points to around $400–430 per share, versus the current ~$315.

Tesla will release a “human” for $20,000

Musk officially confirmed: the first Optimus robots will go on sale in 2027.

And the bet on them is so massive that, to make room for these robots, the company has already discontinued its legendary Model S and Model X cars.

Tesla wants to create a truly universal assistant: clean the house, put things away, bring in groceries, load the washing machine, open the door, use regular tools, and learn new tasks simply by being told what to do.

In short, a new member of the family for every household. And on top of that, a universal worker in any factory.

The target price is around $20–30K, although Tesla has not announced the final price yet.

Right now, in Texas, they are designing a factory to produce 10 million robots a year. That’s 20 times more than the number of robots being made worldwide right now.

So Tesla is going almost all-in on this field.

Although the bet is worth it. If Optimus learns to work like a human, for the first time, the workforce could simply be produced on an assembly line. And here’s a solution to demographic problems around the world.

Do you believe robots can partially replace physical labor this quickly?

❤️ – It’s possible
👍 – I don’t believe it

Investors rushed to buy both AI and gold

Something unique started happening in August. Investors simultaneously started aggressively buying AI companies, gold, and even Bitcoin.

What’s the connection here?

It’s actually a very unusual one. To build AI data centers, the biggest tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

They need money for that. A lot of money. Which they keep borrowing in the market. In 2026 alone, their spending could approach $700 billion.

And the problem is that the U.S. government is borrowing money in exactly the same way. And the more they borrow, the higher the interest rate they have to offer on that debt.

But in August, the Treasury stepped in. And increased its buybacks of its own bonds to bring that very rate down.

Investors immediately understood:
Debt is becoming too expensive, and now the government will be looking for ways to make it cheaper.

And the more interventions like this we see, the stronger the fear that the dollar will lose value. That’s why some of the money is moving into gold and Bitcoin.

Which, as a result, saw inflows of $7 billion in just 5 days.

At the same time, no one is giving up on AI either. Nvidia keeps climbing, and money is still flowing into tech funds.

The market is now simultaneously buying AI as a bet that technology will make the world richer, while also buying gold and Bitcoin as insurance in case the bill for this party turns out to be too big and the system can’t handle it.

Why are billionaires buying plumbers?

Who would have thought, but the biggest investment funds have found a new favorite asset. They are rushing to buy plumbing, electrical, and air-conditioning service companies on a massive scale.

For context: since 2022 alone, funds have bought almost 800 such companies in the US.

The most striking case is Apex Service Partners. In 2019, Alpine started bringing small trade service companies together under this company.

Back then, Apex’s revenue was around $40 million. Today, it is already more than $3 billion, while the entire company was recently valued at around $10 billion.

Why does this work?

The US home services market is worth around $700 billion, but it is still made up of thousands of small firms. Funds buy them one by one, consolidate advertising, procurement, and management – and build one large network.

And demand is very strong: pipes and air conditioners still need to be fixed, homes in the US are getting older, while the number of skilled tradespeople is declining.

That is why, following the same model, companies providing elevator, fire-system, roofing, and even garage-door services are already being bought up.

Essentially, funds have found a way to turn a very ordinary local business into companies worth billions of dollars.

Most likely, the US has once again launched a new business model. And this proven model will quickly start being copied in other countries, building similarly large networks out of local service businesses.

Has the crypto market’s bull run begun? 👀

Bitcoin has soared from around $63,000 to above $80,000 in just a couple of weeks. And for the first time in a long while, this move doesn’t look like just another bounce.

I already wrote about the main catalyst behind this rally a few days ago. It all comes down to the U.S., which has started buying back its own bonds on a large scale.

But now, new details have emerged. The U.S. is also considering using part of its reserve — where nearly $1 trillion currently sits — for these buybacks.

In terms of the impact on the markets, this could look somewhat similar to 2021: there will be more money in the system, bond yields will move lower, and stocks and crypto will get even more fuel for further growth.
So the market’s fate depends on this.

But it’s still too early to celebrate the start of a new bull run. BTC has hit resistance around $81,000 — several key levels converge there at once. If the market manages to establish itself above that level, the next area of interest could very well be $95,000–$100,000.

But if it fails to break through and the inflow of big money starts to fade, the current +30% could turn out to be just a very strong bounce followed by a natural correction.

But for the first time in a long while, Bitcoin’s growth is being driven not only by expectations, but by real money and macroeconomic factors.

The AI Illusion

One of the most interesting things in the AI industry today, and something that remains outside the attention of 99.9% of people, is the real impact of artificial intelligence on the economy.

Hyperscalers are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure. Corporations are spending billions on tokens and on attempts to integrate AI into their operations. And the entire market is being accelerated by everyone buying from each other in a loop, valuations rising, more capital flowing in, and the market continuing to expand.

But the question that I think is actually worth asking is this: how much is artificial intelligence really affecting the economy and GDP today?

I think you may be surprised, but if you try to estimate it and look at the actual data rather than the perception created by society and social media, the impact of AI on GDP today is approximately zero percent.

In simple terms, the hundreds of billions of dollars invested so far have not yet produced any noticeable additional economic growth.

Does this mean AI is useless? Of course not.

Over the next several years, there is a very high probability that this number will change and AI will genuinely create enormous additional value.

But the data we see today tells us something different. The speed at which artificial intelligence is being integrated into society, the economy, and the world has been significantly overestimated.

And at some point, these expectations will be corrected, and the entire industry will correct along with them.

❗️The U.S. has started rescuing the bond market

Yesterday, the yield on 30-year U.S. government bonds soared to 5.34% — its highest level since 2007.

And then, unexpectedly, the U.S. Treasury stepped in and announced that it was ready to increase the volume of its bond buybacks — from $2 billion to $4 billion.

And then it added that this might not even be the limit, and the amount could be even higher.

Why does this matter?

It’s pretty simple. When U.S. government bonds are yielding more than 5% with almost no risk, investors naturally start asking themselves: why should I even bother getting into stocks and crypto?

Well, the outcome is obvious.

And now the U.S. is trying to push those yields down: it creates additional demand for bonds → their prices rise → yields fall.

When that happens, money starts looking for higher returns again.

That’s exactly how the market reacted to the news today. As soon as bond yields dropped sharply, gold moved higher, while Bitcoin gained around 4.5% and climbed back above $71,000.

The most interesting part is that the Treasury hasn’t actually carried out those promised buybacks yet. For now, the market has simply heard the promise and has already started pricing it in.

And if those promises do turn into even larger buybacks, it could be a very positive scenario for stocks — and especially for crypto 👀

Historic moment: Tether has undergone a real audit for the first time

Remember the crypto market’s biggest fear all these years? “What if USDT isn’t actually fully backed?” That question is now settled.

KPMG, one of the Big Four auditors, issued an unqualified opinion on Tether’s 2025 financial statements. This is the company’s first full audit in its entire history. They didn’t just check a “snapshot at a specific date” — they reviewed everything: the balance sheet, revenue, cash flows, and counterparties. All the way down to physically counting every gold bar in the vaults. Bottom line: reserves exceed liabilities by $6.8 billion.

🔎 Why didn’t this happen earlier? There are 3 reasons:

• Major auditors stayed away from crypto for years. There were simply too many scams and too much reputational risk surrounding the sector. Tether itself acknowledged that the company had long been a toxic client for the Big Four: in 2021, it paid fines to U.S. regulators over misleading disclosures about its reserves.

• There were no established accounting standards for valuing such a mix of assets: crypto, Treasuries, gold, and tokenized liabilities.

• Instead of audits, Tether published attestations. And an attestation is like a photo of a wallet at a specific moment: it shows that the money is there right now, but it doesn’t answer where it came from or where it went. An audit examines the entire picture over the course of a year.

💡 Why does this matter?

USDT is the lifeblood of the crypto market: nearly $185 billion is in circulation. As long as its backing was confirmed only through attestations, “Tether risk” remained one of the industry’s biggest systemic fears. And for institutions and regulators — especially in the U.S. — a Big Four audit is an essential ticket into the regulated financial world: without one, serious institutional money simply doesn’t enter the instrument.

Does this mean the market is about to reverse? No: an audit doesn’t print liquidity or move the price. But it removes one of the last barriers between crypto and major institutional capital.

What’s going on with Strategy?

Just a month ago, I wrote that Michael Saylor’s company had started selling Bitcoin for the first time. At the time, it was easy to write it off as a one-off.

But the selling has continued. Over the summer, Strategy has sold nearly 7,000 BTC worth roughly $430 million, and the company has officially given itself the option to sell Bitcoin whenever it needs dollars.

And Saylor found a pretty clever way to spin it. His famous “never sell your Bitcoin” apparently was advice for individual investors, not companies.

As he put it, he personally isn’t selling any of his BTC. But his company, Strategy, has every right to sell its holdings. So, in short: keep holding Bitcoin.

The market wasn’t convinced, though. Every new sale has been met with a pullback and even a bit of panic. Although, so far, those moves have eventually been bought back up.

Still, honestly, it’s way too early to worry about this. In reality, Strategy has sold less than 1% of its Bitcoin holdings and still holds more than 840,000 BTC.

The key here is to look at the bigger picture, not individual headlines. If Strategy’s total Bitcoin holdings continue to grow, then nothing fundamental has changed. But if, by the end of the year, selling consistently starts to outweigh buying, that’s when we can start talking about a real change in strategy.