Coiners have been worried that the end of the free-money era would blunt bitcoin's next rally.

The big picture: True, bitcoin is a risk asset, which tends to do better when interest rates are low, and poorer when rates are high — but ending there would oversimplify what factors are driving price of the world's oldest cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin has a limited history. It was born during the reign of zero interest rate policy, known as ZIRP, and doesn't have a long record of stacking cakes without it.

• Many folks are now keenly focused on things like inflation prints, to divine whether the U.S. is in position to cut rates, which should give BTC a bigger boost.

Between the lines: "ZIRPlessness," however, might matter less to bitcoin than one might think.

• "Bitcoin has never been a yield network," Noelle Acheson, author of Crypto is Macro Now newsletter, said, explaining how higher rate policy makes DeFi yields look relatively riskier. That presents a bigger drag for ether than bitcoin, she notes.
• Crypto shop Pantera Capital echoed: "As interest rates have risen over the past couple years, blockchain has been able to rally."

Case in point: BTC posted new records in the first quarter.

• Plus, see Roaring Kitty's return and what that may say about the current economy.

In terms of U.S. rate policy, most seem to think a cut will come later, rather than sooner, but if the economy shows signs of weakening, maybe Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell will have more leeway, Acheson said.

The intrigue: Whereas monetary policy uncertainty might keep bitcoin moving sideways in the near term, some think geopolitical tension is a booster.

• "Where there was speculation on bitcoin at low interest rates, now there's kind of safety in bitcoin at high interest rates," Ryan Rasmussen, a researcher at Bitwise Asset Management, said.
• 🧵 That bitcoin-as-safe-haven narrative is one that Hong Kong issuers of spot bitcoin ETFs have told Axios is important to their clients.

What we're watching: Where bitcoin's next boost could come from is uncertain — easing in Europe or Asia or in the U.S., or from greater potential reach from product distribution, or a large investor coming in, Acheson said.

The bottom line: At large, bitcoin is a macro asset and tied to the short-term trades of macro investors, but what moves the price of bitcoin is narrative, "more than correlation, or valuations, and to be honest, interest rates, although [what people say] about interest rates do matter," Acheson said.

Bitcoin stands to get a boost from TradFi paperwork.

Between the lines: Filings are rolling in from institutional investors that detail their recent holdings, and they're unveiling buyers of the January-launched spot bitcoin ETFs.

• They included big hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies and random ones, registered investment advisers and even Wisconsin's pension fund.
• The institutional buy-in of bitcoin is so notable, at least one meme-stock trader seems to be associating 🍊 with Wall Street. (Scroll for more👇)

Flashback: Tracking these filings, known as 13Fs, is sport — people like to try to borrow investment wisdom from Pershing Square's Bill Ackman, Citadel's Ken Griffin or Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett.

• 📸 Try, because 13Fs are filed quarterly, and are an incomplete, backward-looking snapshot of holdings over a period of time.
• Hedge funds, mutual funds, trusts, pension funds, insurance companies and RIAs file these on a lag.

Zoom in: Some folks made a lot of hay about big banks holding bitcoin ETFs and were gently chided for mistaking market makers' holdings for bets, but the natives weren't wrong to be enthused.

💭 Our thought bubble: If traditional finance behaves predictably, as it does, the next quarter's 13F filings will very likely include new names, inspired by this quarter's buyers.

• Fund managers tend to herd and copy.

Worthy of your time: Bitwise's Matt Hougan is bullish about 13Fs for a different, but equally compelling reason specific to adviser behavior.

Bitcoin's not expensive right now by one measure.

Zoom in: The bitcoin or hashrate yardstick is a metric used to determine whether the price of the world's largest digital asset is expensive or inexpensive.

• ✌️ Generally, a ratio above 2 indicates a relatively more expensive BTC.

Between the lines: Think what the price-to-earnings ratio is for stocks.

• Take the total market cap of bitcoin and divide by the hashrate (energy required to expand and secure the network).
• When buying stocks, one generally wants to buy when P/E ratios are lower relative to history, or peer stock ratios, or the market or by whatever level some financial analyst deems appropriate.

Flashback: The metric was flashing a neutral signal in the first three months of the year, per Fidelity Digital Assets Q124 report, saying bitcoin was considered "cheap" for zero days in the quarter.

• "This should be carefully considered because a higher standard deviation of the mean has historically preceded bull markets," according to that report.
• The yardstick was at 3 or above right before the 2021 peak.

💭 Our thought bubble: Take it with a grain of salt.

• 🔭 Per Wintermute chief Evgeny Gaevoy's observation: Charts, graphs and pattern-watching are just "astrology for men."

💵 Haun Ventures founder Katie Haun confirmed that the firm invested in late-stage crypto survivors Fireblocks and Chainalysis. (Axios)

🫥 Lawyers for Ryan Salame are asking the court for a lenient sentence of 18 months after the former FTX executive pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy to make unlawful political donations. (CoinDesk)

🇺🇸 Stablecoin issuer Circle is shifting its global headquarters to the U.S. from Ireland. (CoinDesk)

🎰 Betting market Polymarket's Series B funding round included Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. (Decrypt)

The reappearance of the meme-stock trade looked like a threat to crypto, until crypto coined those too.

Between the lines: 🧸 Roaring Kitty looked bearish for crypto because Keith Gill and his crew would divert capital and attention to stonks.

• A controversial manosphere influencer named Andrew Tate claimed he pulled money out of bitcoin and put it into GameStop to "take down" Wall Street.

The intrigue: Crypto's answer to that: Simply coin stocks👆

What we're watching: There's a slew of them out there already — memecoins with tickers like GME, AMC and NVDA.

These aren't to be mistaken for tokenized stocks — they don't represent shares in the company nor are they reflective of underlying fundamentals.

• 🤔 GME-options traders aren't exactly driven by fundamentals either.