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Crypto plunges, big tech earnings are strong. So why are markets nervous?

Crypto plunges, big tech earnings are strong. So why are markets nervous?

US equity futures advanced in early trading, with Nasdaq 100 futures gaining 0.9 per cent and S&P 500 futures up 0.4 per cent in Asian sessions, supported by strong after-hours results from Alphabet and Amazon.

This optimism meets a sobering reality as Brent crude surged 1.9 per cent to US$120.30 a barrel, a level not seen since mid-2022, driven by uncertainty over a potential blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The Federal Reserve’s decision to hold interest rates steady at 3.50 per cent to 3.75 per cent on Wednesday, with Chair Powell explicitly citing elevated inflation and geopolitical uncertainty, sets a cautious tone that permeates every asset class.

Corporate earnings provide both relief and concern. Alphabet and Amazon shares climbed in late-session trading, reinforcing the ongoing AI-investment boom that continues to drive capital allocation across technology. Meta Platforms told a different story, slumping in after-hours trading as investors questioned the sustainability of its high capital expenditure levels.

Qualcomm’s 13 per cent rally on significant progress in the data-centre market signals that semiconductor demand remains robust beyond traditional end markets. All eyes now turn to Apple, set to report earnings today, which will serve as the final major test for the Magnificent Seven this season. The divergence among these names reflects a market that is increasingly selective about which growth narratives merit premium valuations in a higher-rate environment.

Geopolitical tensions dominate the macro backdrop. Reports of a US naval blockade and an escalating conflict in Iran have injected volatility into energy markets, while the UAE’s reported exit from OPEC adds another layer of supply-side uncertainty. Asian shares fell at the open on Thursday, with the ASX 200 also opening lower as investors reacted to the oil shock.

The Core PCE Price Index data for March, expected during this session, will serve as a critical input for the Fed’s next policy assessment. This confluence of factors creates a market environment in which traditional correlations break down, and risk assets face heightened scrutiny.

Within this complex backdrop, crypto-focused equities tell a particularly revealing story. Listed crypto plays experienced a broad sell-off, with Robinhood dropping about 14 per cent after reporting a 47 per cent year-over-year collapse in crypto transaction revenue. Coinbase, Bullish, Gemini, Riot, and Marathon all declined roughly six to eight per cent on the day, while MicroStrategy fell about four per cent.

Across the same window, Bitcoin traded just below US$76,000, down only 0.5 per cent to 1.5 per cent. This divergence underscores a critical distinction that many investors overlook: crypto-linked equities behave more like leveraged technology and fintech exposures than like Bitcoin itself.

From my perspective, this dynamic reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how macro forces transmit through different layers of the digital asset ecosystem. When oil prices surge toward US$120 a barrel, headline inflation expectations rise, pushing Treasury yields higher and compressing multiples for long-duration, speculative equities.

Crypto exchanges depend on trading volumes that have already weakened, while miners operate capital-intensive businesses perceived as highly cyclical. These characteristics make their stocks particularly sensitive to shifts in macro risk appetite, even when the underlying cryptocurrency demonstrates relative resilience.

The market’s reaction reveals that investors still price crypto equities through a traditional growth-stock lens rather than appreciating the unique value accrual mechanisms of decentralised protocols.

Three variables warrant close attention moving forward.

  • First, oil prices and war headlines: sustained crude above US$100 per barrel keeps inflation pressure elevated and delays the timeline for rate cuts, creating a persistent headwind for high-beta crypto equities.
  • Second, central bank signals: if the Fed or other major central banks adopt a more hawkish stance in response to energy-driven inflation, equity multiples for speculative sectors face further compression.
  • Third, sector fundamentals: upcoming earnings from listed exchanges and miners will reveal whether the current selloff reflects pure macro beta or signals weakening business models. Crypto volumes, fee trends, power costs, and pivots toward AI and high-performance computing will all factor into this assessment.

The latest slide in crypto-related stocks reflects a macro shock rather than a crypto-specific failure. Surging oil prices feed inflation worries, pin interest rates higher, and punish high-beta, speculative equities across the board.

For investors navigating this landscape, the key distinction is recognising that listed brokers and miners have dual exposure: they participate in Bitcoin cycles while remaining vulnerable to energy-driven macro cycles. Monitoring oil trajectories, Fed expectations, and sector-specific earnings becomes essential when assessing risk in these vehicles versus holding the underlying digital assets.

Mainstream narratives often conflate spot crypto performance with equity proxies, but the transmission mechanisms differ substantially. In a world where geopolitical risk and monetary policy intersect with technological innovation, clarity about these distinctions separates informed positioning from reactive trading.

The path forward demands attention to both the macro forces shaping all risk assets and the unique fundamentals driving decentralised networks. Only by holding both lenses can investors navigate the volatility ahead with conviction rather than confusion.

 

Source: https://e27.co/crypto-plunges-big-tech-earnings-are-strong-so-why-are-markets-nervous-20260430/

 

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
j j j

China Can’t Export Electricity, So It Did Something Smarter: The AI Token Revolution Explained

China Can’t Export Electricity, So It Did Something Smarter: The AI Token Revolution Explained

China’s electricity cannot cross its borders, but Chinese tokens are already sold globally. These two phenomena are essentially the same thing. Tokens are China’s true electricity export. I know this concept may not have fully clicked yet, but every sentence I share is backed by data.

China generates 10 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, surpassing the EU, Russia, India, and Japan combined. This is not because China lacks the desire to sell. It is physically impossible. Electricity cannot be stored or loaded onto ships. Extending high-voltage transmission lines across national borders involves negotiations that can drag on for a decade. It is like holding the world’s largest gold mine where the gold is too heavy to transport, leaving it piled up in your own backyard.

Tokens have shattered this bottleneck.

First, let us clarify what a token represents. When you converse with an AI like DeepSeek, every character and line of code it returns consists of tokens. On the surface, they appear as text or dialogue. Fundamentally, they are digitally encapsulated electrical energy. If you doubt this, consider the math. In the cost structure of AI inference, electricity plus compute depreciation together account for a staggering 80% to 90%. In other words, nearly 90 cents of every dollar spent on a token effectively pays for electricity.

A token is a compressed packet of electrical energy, representing the final product refined from China’s northwestern green electricity through GPU computation.

So how does this relate to exports? When a Silicon Valley developer sits at their computer and calls a Chinese large language model API, data instantly traverses undersea fiber-optic cables to reach computing centers in Ningxia or Inner Mongolia. Thousands of GPUs roar to life, consuming China’s cheapest northwestern green power to perform logical inference. They return the result to a screen in San Francisco within seconds. Throughout this entire process, not a drop of oil was burned, and not a single power cable crossed a border. The value of Chinese electricity has already been delivered across borders via tokens. This is dimensional warfare involving zero physical output, light-speed cross-border transfer, and near-zero loss.

The most powerful insight is yet to come. Why is China uniquely positioned to execute this? The answer lies in two words. Electricity prices.

China is uniquely positioned to lead in the AI race because it has solved the “physical” constraint of intelligence: electricity prices. While algorithms are digital, running them requires massive amounts of power, and China’s ability to provide this power at a fraction of the cost in the West is becoming a decisive competitive edge.

Electricity for data centres in China can be as low as 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly one-third the price in the U.S.. Unlike the U.S., where regional grids often operate with thin reserve margins, China maintains a deliberate surplus of electricity. This allows them to “soak up” the massive power demands of AI without destabilising the grid.

The State Grid Corporation of China plans to invest approximately 4 trillion RMB (US$579 billion) between 2026 and 2030 to further upgrade the power grid, specifically to support the future “intelligent economy”. Local governments often provide electricity subsidies for data centres, sometimes cutting power bills by up to 50% if they use domestic chips, further offsetting other costs.

In northwestern China, the situation is different. In specialized wind and solar power zones in Zhongwei, Ningxia, or Qingyang, Gansu, electricity prices can drop as low as 0.20 RMB (0.029 USD) per kilowatt-hour. This represents the absolute global price trough. The per-token cost gap between China and the U.S. can be seen from here.

Now you understand why DeepSeek API pricing can be nearly 20 to 30 times cheaper than OpenAI. This is not due to subsidies. This is not dumping. This is northwestern green electricity pushing cost advantages to their absolute limit within large language models.

Even more ingenious is the export mechanism for tokens. When you export electric vehicles, you face tariffs, trade barriers, and customs inspections at ports. Tokens travel via fiber optics. Under current WTO rules, electronic transmissions are temporarily exempt from tariffs. There are no containers, no cargo ships, and no customs declarations. Chinese electricity, cloaked in data, walks boldly into every terminal device worldwide. This is, without question, the strongest strategic backdoor available for China’s energy strategy.

Now consider another set of data that may surprise you. Recent statistics show that 4 out of the top 5 models on OpenRouter are Chinese large models, including MiniMax’s M2.5, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5, Zhipu’s GLM-5, and DeepSeek’s V3.2. Their combined consumption reaches 85.7%. Chinese AI models have evolved from followers to price setters. This is only the beginning.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has long predicted that the inflection point for the AI Agent era has arrived. In the future, a single AI completing a task may consume 10 to 50 times as many tokens as it does today. Institutional forecasts project that by 2030, China’s AI inference token consumption will grow from 100 trillion in 2025 to 390,000 trillion by 2030. The ceiling for demand is not even visible yet.

So what is the essence of this transformation? Throughout human history, every reconstruction of the great-power order has begun with a revolution in the form of energy. The British Empire rose on coal and steam. The United States rose on oil and internal combustion. Today, China is quietly rewriting the rules through the ultimate coupling of electricity and computing.

Those northwestern green power resources that once had to be curtailed, causing heartache due to the inability to absorb them, are now being repriced and redeployed as tokens. Previously, we exchanged sweat for foreign exchange. Now, we exchange algorithms for foreign exchange. This is not overtaking on a curve. This is switching to an entirely new track.

Have you noticed? The changes that truly reshape the world often do not happen in headlines. They happen when an ordinary person opens a chat window on their phone, types a line of text, and waits for a reply. Behind that moment lies the wind of Inner Mongolia, the hydropower of Sichuan, and the sunlight of Xinjiang. They travel thousands of kilometers, burn inside GPUs, transform into tokens, cross the Pacific, and land on their screen.

What we are exporting is not merely data. It is the confidence of a civilization.

After reading this, do you believe token exports represent the smartest strategic move in China’s energy history? Pay attention. This is just the beginning.

 

Source: https://www.benzinga.com/Opinion/26/03/51533819/china-cant-export-electricity-so-it-did-something-smarter-the-ai-token-revolution-explained

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
j j j

The US Wants Crypto Innovation: So Why Is It Still Regulating with an Orange-Era Test?

The US Wants Crypto Innovation: So Why Is It Still Regulating with an Orange-Era Test?
  • The Howey test struggles to classify decentralized crypto networks and modern token designs.
  • Functional token utility should matter more than speculative trading expectations.

The United States financial regulatory landscape stands at a critical juncture. With the recent passage of key stablecoin legislation, the GENIUS Act in July 2025, and the ongoing, highly anticipated debate over comprehensive market structure bills like the CLARITY Act in early 2026, the nation is opening up to the crypto economy.

This momentum, coupled with a discernible shift in administrative posture from enforcement-heavy to innovation-friendly, signals a new era for digital assets.

Why the Howey Test No Longer Fits Crypto

The cornerstone of U.S. securities law, the 1946 Howey test, remains an anachronistic and ill-suited tool for the nuances of a rapidly evolving, often decentralized technological paradigm.

It is my firm opinion that relying solely on this decades-old precedent for a modern, multi-trillion-dollar global market is a fool’s errand that stifles innovation while failing to provide genuine investor protection. A new, crypto-centric framework is not just a regulatory desire; it is an economic necessity.

An Orange Grove Test Meets Decentralized Finance

The original Howey test, born from a dispute over orange groves in Florida, determines a security if there is an investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits derived solely from the efforts of others.

This framework, while flexible in its time, struggles to capture the essence of decentralized finance (DeFi), where the efforts of others are often distributed among countless, sometimes anonymous, participants, governed by immutable code rather than a central corporation.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has attempted to modernize its application, most notably with 2025 guidance emphasizing the expectation of profit and issuer influence criteria. This still leaves a gaping chasm of uncertainty, particularly for projects aiming for true decentralization.

Legal Uncertainty and the Cost to Institutional Adoption

The current approach fosters an environment where an asset may be considered a security at launch but a commodity later. This legal gray area is what most institutional investors fear to tread, thus hindering mainstream adoption and keeping the U.S. from cementing its crypto capital status.

We need a bespoke instrument, a DeFi Howey, that provides the clear token taxonomy that regulators and builders alike desperately need. This new test must be built on the reality of distributed ledger technology (DLT), not shoehorned into an outdated agricultural precedent.

Toward a Crypto-Centric Regulatory Framework

Drawing on proposals such as Commissioner Hester Peirce’s safe harbor and the functional token taxonomy advanced by industry leaders, I propose a crypto-centric regulatory framework built around four core rules. The goal is to promote U.S. innovation while preserving investor protection.

Rule One: The Decentralization Threshold

A modern framework must establish a clear, verifiable standard for decentralization. Once a network or protocol meets this threshold, it should exit securities law oversight and fall under a commodity framework, likely overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Rather than relying on vague claims of “no central party,” regulators should assess measurable factors such as token ownership dispersion, the number of independent validators, and the immutability of smart contracts.

For example, if no single entity, including the founding team, controls more than a defined share—such as 20%—of governance tokens or validation power, the project would qualify. This provides a predictable path from launch to decentralization, addressing one of the industry’s most persistent legal uncertainties.

Rule Two: Functional Utility Versus Speculative Intent

The framework should prioritize a token’s actual use within a live network over speculative expectations. Tokens that serve clear, consumptive purposes—such as paying network fees, accessing services, or participating in on-chain governance—should be treated differently from passive investment instruments.

This functional approach better reflects how crypto networks operate and reduces the risk of utility tokens being swept into securities litigation solely due to secondary-market trading behavior.

Rule Three: Transparency and On-Chain Disclosure

Investor protection should be achieved through standardized, on-chain disclosures rather than traditional prospectuses. Projects should provide machine-readable information on audits, token supply and distribution, governance structures, and material risks.

This “code is law, disclosure is compliance” model aligns with the transparency of public blockchains and builds on disclosure principles embedded in the CLARITY Act.

Rule Four: Intermediary Liability and Consumer Safeguards

Regulation should focus on centralized intermediaries where most retail users interact. The GENIUS Act sets a useful precedent through reserve requirements and AML obligations. Strong oversight of exchanges and service providers can protect consumers without constraining decentralized innovation.

A Narrow Window to Get Crypto Regulation Right

The U.S. is at a pivotal moment. The current legislative momentum offers a rare chance to get this right. By moving beyond the archaic limitations of the Howey test and embracing a bespoke, forward-thinking framework, we can provide the regulatory clarity the market craves, protect investors, and ensure America remains a global leader in the digital financial revolution.

Sticking to the old ways in a new world is a path to irrelevance, and that is a price the U.S. economy cannot afford to pay.

 

Source: https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/the-us-wants-crypto-innovation-so-why-is-it-still-regulating-with-an-orange-era-test/

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.

Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.

An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.

www.anndy.com
j j j