Big week for newsletter content!

One full market update, one mini update, and the August monthly issue. And now, my weekly rundown.

I guess somebody's been a busy beaver. “Value,” as the content gurus say. I’ll go easy on the content this week, just the usual market update.

Take your time getting to the August monthly issue. Read it when you can!

Start with the updates. You should have those in your inbox. If you missed them, here are the links:

• Mini-update

• Full Update

In those updates, I talked about prices, metrics, a reality about sentiment that nobody seems to talk about, and a chance to apply the quadrant altcoin strategy.

(As always, a disclaimer about the quadrant strategy and chart: it’s only for when you put new money into the market. Given this is a volatile, speculative market, do you put new money into BTC or alts? Don’t use it for rebalancing, timing, trading, or projecting any expectations).

Mark, how long will we suffer through Act 2 of the market cycle?

We don’t know.

On average, Act 2 lasts 300 days. We’re only 160 days into it. Patience!

I realize when you came into crypto, your mind conjured up images of wealth and prosperity. That will come, in time. Cryptocurrency is a marathon masquerading as a sprint.

Let’s not worry so much about the timing. If you’re on the premium plan, you know what I’m looking for before I can get too excited about the market.

If you’re not on the premium plan, upgrade now.

Once you upgrade, you’ll also get:

• 👀 Direct contact with me.

• 📈 Video and written market analyses so you can make better investment choices.

• 🧐 Exclusive altcoin reports and special content to stay ahead of the competition.

Scroll down for some content you may enjoy.

The curious case of disappearing USDC

Bottom line: in this article, Blockworks gives you a few potential reasons that USDC, the transparent, audited, tightly-regulated stablecoin, continues to lose market share to USDT, the opaque, unaudited, not-regulated stablecoin.

My take: each of the reasons seem, er, reasonable. I’m inclined to believe criminals and money launderers prefer USDT because it’s beyond the reach of US regulators and normal people, especially in Asia, have no need (or way) to redeem it, so they use whatever everybody else is using (i.e., USDT). The US government can shut down USDC in an instant and Circle has to KYC everybody who mints or redeems. That’s quite a disincentive for core stablecoin users. People in the US sold their USDC for money-market funds and people outside the US sold their USDC for USDT (possibly with Bitcoin as a conduit for the transaction).

Why we care: when you have no evidence for your beliefs, it’s better to look at a range of possibilities than to default to “Tether = BAD” or “Tether FUD = nonsense.”

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Relax and enjoy the ride!