Point of View: The Federal Reserve Has Over-Eased, with a 65% Chance of Stagflation in the United States

April 21 — Per LookOnChain data, a whale wallet starting with 0x8Ad4 has withdrawn 12,000 ETH (≈$27.6M) from Binance over the past 3 hours to repay its Aave loan.

April 21 – Glassnode noted in its latest report that ongoing strong buying interest is propping up prices, but market sentiment is shifting cautious. Data shows spot Cumulative Volume Delta (CVD) flipped from positive to negative, selling pressure is mounting, and bearish sentiment is building. Meanwhile, trading volume on centralized exchanges stays elevated. In futures markets: Rising open interest signals growing risk appetite—but long funding rates have dropped sharply. Perpetual futures CVD has nosedived, meaning traders are more willing to pay a premium to short, buying momentum has weakened, and bearish sentiment is ramping up. In options markets: Lower demand for downside protection could ease bearish sentiment—but shrinking open interest may signal profit-taking, which could impact future volatility. A narrower volatility spread suggests market sentiment is shifting from risk-pricing to neutral. ETFs are a standout: Both the MVRV ratio and net flows for U.S. spot E

On April 21, the x402 Foundation—incubated by Coinbase—launched Agent.market, a unified platform designed to serve as an "App Store" for AI agents. Built on the x402 protocol, the platform lets users and AI agents connect to hundreds of tools and services. Named for the unused HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, the x402 protocol enables websites, APIs, and AI agents to request and receive instant micropayments via blockchain and traditional payment rails. Managed as an open standard by the x402 Foundation (a Linux Foundation initiative), the protocol has backing from over 20 organizations and crypto firms—including Cloudflare, Stripe, AWS, Google, Visa, Base, Circle, and the Solana Foundation. Once live, Agent.market will cover seven core categories: Inference, Data, Media, Search, Social, Infrastructure, and Transactions. Participating providers include OpenAI/Venice (Inference), Bloomberg/CoinGecko (Data), LinkedIn/X/AgentMail (Social), AWS Lambda/QuickNode/Alechemy (Infr

On April 21, Lido said in a social media post that its EarnETH treasury was hit by a theft of 116,500 rsETH (roughly $292 million) via the Kelp DAO cross-chain bridge on April 18. EarnETH holds around $21.6 million in rsETH/ETH leveraged positions on Aave, accounting for roughly 9% of the treasury’s total assets. The EarnETH team is actively deleveraging to reduce risk, with the outcome dependent on Kelp, LayerZero, and Aave’s final decisions on loss sharing and default handling. Lido added that EarnETH has a $3 million “first-loss protection mechanism” funded by the Lido DAO treasury, which will cover losses if needed. The treasury has temporarily paused redemptions to assess the damage. This incident does not impact stETH or wstETH, as Lido’s core staking protocol was not involved.

April 20: OpenAI has suffered a major outage, with users currently unable to access ChatGPT, Codex and its API services, per market sources.

On April 20th, on-chain analyst Ai Auntie (@ai_9684xtpa) reports that Justin Sun withdrew 55.01 million USDC from HTX just 5 minutes ago, then deposited the funds into Spark. Since his suspected default on Aave, he has cumulatively deposited $179 million worth of assets into the platform.