Hey Income Traders,
The Fed hiked last week for the first time since 2023. Brent crude topped $109 a barrel, and the 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.01% on decision day. Bitcoin just cleared $85,000 for the first time since January.
Crypto's supposed to be a liquidity trade (an asset that climbs when cheap money floods the system and sinks when the Fed drains it). Tighten money and crypto dies. That's the playbook everyone's been handed for a decade.
This time Bitcoin went the other way. It bottomed at $75,584 on Sept. 15th, the day the Senate killed the CLARITY Act (the bill that would've written the rulebook for U.S. crypto markets). The Fed moved the next afternoon, and Bitcoin has climbed about 14% since.
Most of the crypto world has this backwards. If crypto only rises when the printing press runs, it's a leveraged bet on the Fed. Real innovation grows through tight money too: the iPhone hit shelves in June 2007 with the fed funds rate at 5.25%, and people still camped outside Apple stores to buy one.
The user changed. For 15 years the industry built blockchain rails humans didn't really need, like instant settlement (money that lands in seconds instead of days), payments worth fractions of a cent, and collateral that follows code. The ideas were good, but the chains turned into ghost cities.
4 Tests Before Any Stock Makes the List
Inside the Option Pit Dividend Portfolio, the 10 to 15 names Hans Albrecht trusts for the next 10 years
Hans runs every candidate through 4 tests before it earns a spot in the Dividend Portfolio. The names that pass go into a live portfolio backed by weekly reports, a monthly call, and alerts.
Tap here to get the full list
AI agents need all of it. An assistant that books a flight, moves a dinner reservation and pays for takeout from a capped wallet can't wait three days for a wire to clear. It wants an account with a hard spending limit, privacy when it negotiates, and settlement in seconds.
The ghost cities are getting tenants. Circle (CRCL) opened Arc, its own blockchain for dollar payments, on Sept. 16th, the same day as the Fed decision. Arc lets users set up agent wallets with spending limits, and BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard and DTCC help run the network.
Circle says its USDC stablecoin (a crypto token pegged one-for-one to the dollar) already carries 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume.
I build around the must-happens and let the might-happens sort themselves out. AI compute demand will rise hard for years, and I'd put the odds of anything else near zero. Agentic AI (software that acts on its own instead of just answering questions) will be one of the biggest stories of the next 12 months, maybe the biggest.
People slow everything down. We sleep, and we let the email sit until tomorrow. An agent works through a week of back-and-forth in a couple of minutes.
At that speed, an agent needs trust, verification, a way to pay and instant settlement. Who is this agent, and can its payment clear right now? Blockchains were built to answer exactly that, and it's why I'm holding crypto exposure through this tightening instead of selling it.
The early money's already moving. That same week, Zcash (ZEC) pushed toward $1,400 and Near (NEAR) jumped 16 percent in a day as privacy coins ran well ahead of the rest of crypto. Zcash is up more than 2,400 percent in a year, and Near pitches its network as a way for AI agents to move money across chains.
Private markets see it too. The company behind Instinct, a text-message assistant that books dinner reservations and negotiates bills, raised money at a $2.25 billion valuation in August. It's now reportedly in talks at $10 billion.
I hold this two ways. Bitcoin's the 30-year asset, the collateral big money gets comfortable with first. Ethereum (ETH) and the agent-native networks are the growth leg, and more growth brings more competitors, so I size those like a venture fund: small bets, knowing a few winners pay for the rest.
Bitcoin got turned back between $81,200 and $82,300 four times from Aug. 25th to Sept. 4th. On Sept. 21st it blew through that zone and tagged $87,397, so the old ceiling now has to work as a floor. A slip back under $80,000 that lasts through October tells me the timing's off, even if the thesis isn't.
Until then, I'm staying with it, and I'm watching $82,000 into October.
Here for a good time AND a long time,
Hans