Hey, it's Alex with the Token Metrics Daily Pulse for February twenty fourth, twenty twenty six. Got a lot to cover today. It's one of those days where the price charts look like they're taking a map, but underneath the surface, the actual plumbing of the financial world is being ripped out and replaced. Grab your coffee, But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Okay, so here's what's happening. Let's
get into it. So here's the big story. Stripe just hit a valuation of about dollar one hundred and fifty nine billion, and you know why. It's because they're stable. Coin volume quadrupled while everyone's staring at Bitcoin's price, Stripe is quietly building the financial Internet. But on the flip side, Bitcoin's US demand signal has been negative for forty days straight. That's a record. It's a weird split. The rails are growing like crazy, but the prices are just sleeping. Now
here's where it gets interesting. The markets were pretty quiet today, mostly just chopping around. Bitcoin is sitting around sixty four thousand, two hundred and eighty one dollars and Ethereum is hovering near one thousand, eight hundred and sixty dollars. A look at the narratives. Meme coins are actually up about eight percent this week, while everything else I'm talking AI tokens,
RWA and Deepen is bleeding. AI tokens are down over ten percent and Deepen is down nearly twenty It's a classic rotation where the only thing people want to touch is pure speculation. Okay, so here's the bigger picture. Kraken just launched twenty four to seven perpetuals trading for tokenized US stocks with twenty x leverage. That's a game changer. Now you can trade in video or Apple in the middle of the night using crypto rails. It blurs the
line between a crypto exchange and a traditional brokerage. And speaking of things that don't sleep, the SEC just approved twenty four to seven trading for wisdom trees. Tokenized money marks could fund the old way of waiting days for a trade to settle is dying. T plus zero is officially here. Well. And then there's the Ethereum Foundation. For years they just sold their tokens to pay the bills, but now they're staking seventy thousand ethereum for the first time.
That's a massive signaling shift. They're basically saying that staking is now the risk free rate for the whole ecosystem. It's a move from being a passive observer to an active participant. Also, keep an eye on pay Onaneer. They're planning to launch their own bank and the stable coin following that PayPal playbook. The big fintech players are all in on stable coins now. So what should you actually be worried about? All right, before we get into the risks,
quick word from our sponsor. Okay, we're back. Let's talk about what to watch for. Well, the demand vacuum is real. With forty days of negative demand in the US, there's just no fresh capital stepping in to defend these levels. If bitcoin breaks sixty three thousand dollars, we might see a quick flush down to sixty thousand dollars plus. The Salana ecosystem is feeling some jitters after step Finance announced they're winding down following a dollar twenty nine million hack.
It's a grim reminder that smart contract risk is always lurking in the background and looking ahead. Keep an eye on Adam Back's blockstream mining note. They're pushing for a public listing that could happen as early as April. That would give us a new liquid way to play the bitcoin mining space. Also, the Ethereum fossil upgrade is coming. It's all about censorship resistance, which honestly might cause some friction with US regulators down the road. That's the pulse
for today. If you got something out of this, send it to a friend who's into crypto. That's the best way to support us. This is educational content, non investment advice. Always do your own research. I'm Alex, See you next time.