Has Bitcoin Bottomed?

On the face of it, the outlook for risk assets isn’t great. Bond yields are rising, as is inflation, and many expect the Fed to begin hiking interest rates in the near future.

When it comes to Bitcoin however, many are pointing towards various on-chain indicators which suggest that the plunge down to around $62,000 in February could have been the bottom for this cycle. Others however point out that the spot Bitcoin ETFs are experiencing record outflows. Uncertainty is the name of the game.

Elsewhere, excitement continues to build around the massive upcoming IPOs for SpaceX and OpenAI, while the robotics sector is also attracting significant amounts of attention and investment. You can read more about our robot future below.

😮 IP Oh No! 😮

In days gone by, us retail plebs had about as much chance of getting pre-IPO exposure to massive private companies as Elizabeth Warren has of being offered a keynote at Bitcoin 2027. But, the tokenised pre-IPO market is growing rapidly and nowadays getting exposure to the likes of SpaceX and OpenAI before they hit public markets is no longer a pipe dream.

But the catch is in the fine print: exposure is not the same as ownership. It’s a crucial difference, because with ownership comes things like shareholder rights; with exposure such protections are conspicuous by their absence. Such risk was demonstrated by the 38-46% collapse of tokenized OpenAI and Anthropic shares after corporate disavowal.

In today’s video, we look at the pre-IPO market and why, despite the obvious benefits it brings, it’s still a risky space to be operating in. We look at the so-called ‘liquidity trap’ that threatens to snare unwary investors, we assess the regulatory landscape around tokenised pre-IPO stocks, and we reveal why the upcoming SpaceX IPO could make or break this sector.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation measure just came in at 3.8% for April, its highest reading since May 2023. Core PCE came in at 3.3%. These are the numbers of an economy where rate hikes are very much on the table.

This matters for crypto more than most market participants might appreciate. The last few weeks have seen Bitcoin fall from $82,000 to below $73,000, which represents a significant correction by any measure. The dominant explanation in the market has been macro headwinds: elevated yields, inflation surprises, and the general repricing of risk that happens when the bond market starts telling a different story from the equity market. That explanation is correct as far as it goes, but it understates how difficult the current environment is.

For those who don’t spend their time watching Treasury yields: the US 30-year has been trading at levels not seen since 2007 for most of the past two weeks. The global bond market has been in a sustained selloff, driven by inflation fears from the Iran war energy shock, concerns about US fiscal deficits, and growing uncertainty about whether central banks are adequately prepared to respond. When long-dated yields are at these levels, every asset that requires a discount rate in its valuation model faces pressure. That includes growth equities. It also includes Bitcoin.

Interestingly though, Bitcoin's on-chain data continues to suggest the February $62,000 low was a significant support level. The realised cap has stabilised, meaning the aggregate cost basis of the market is not deteriorating further. Research shows that the current pattern does not resemble the 2014, 2018, or 2022 bear market rallies in duration or structure. The 200-day moving average is trending down, not up, which in previous bear markets was a precondition for the explosive reversals. That precondition is absent. This does not mean the cycle low is behind us with certainty. But it does mean the base case should not be a repeat of 2022's 80% collapse.

There's just one small problem, and that's that Bitcoin spot ETFs have now recorded nine consecutive days of net outflows, the longest streak since the products launched in January 2024. Roughly $2.8 billion has left in three weeks. This is institutional selling, not retail panic, and it tells you something about how portfolio managers are treating crypto in a rising-yield environment. When the 10-year Treasury offers 4.6% with no credit risk, the opportunity cost of holding a volatile asset with no yield becomes tangible.

On the regulatory front, something genuinely significant happened this week that has received less attention than it deserves. The CFTC approved the first regulated US platform to offer bitcoin perpetual futures, a market structure that has previously been the exclusive domain of offshore venues like Hyperliquid. The CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, which runs the New York Stock Exchange, publicly called Hyperliquid "bigger than Nasdaq" by trading volume and disclosed his team has met its founders.

Speaking of which, the SpaceX IPO prospectus is now public. Nvidia's market cap has crossed $5.5 trillion. Three memory chip makers have simultaneously crossed $1 trillion. The AI and technology capital cycle continues to attract enormous quantities of investment, and that cycle is competing with crypto for the attention and allocation of institutional investors in a way that was not true in 2020 or 2021.

In sum then, we are in one of the more uncomfortable periods of the current cycle. The macro environment is genuinely difficult: inflation is reaccelerating, rate cuts are off the table, and the Fed may be moving toward hikes rather than cuts before the year is out. Bitcoin is below $74,000 and has been breaking support levels rather than building on them. ETF outflows suggest institutional patience is being tested.

Against all of this, the on-chain case for the February low as the cycle bottom remains intact, and the regulatory environment continues to improve in meaningful and durable ways. Our directional call is cautiously constructive over the medium term, but the near-term picture is genuinely uncertain, and the macro backdrop will need to stabilise before risk appetite returns to crypto in force. Position accordingly.

🤖 We Want Robots  🤖

Robots have fascinated humanity for more than a millennium now. From Greek tales of bronze giants crafted by the god Hephaestus, to records of early mechanical devices like water-powered automatons in ancient China and Egypt, the dream of creating autonomous machines has been carried through generations of human civilization.

From science fiction novels to movies, we’ve grown up seeing characters like the Terminator, R2-D2 from Star Wars, WALL-E, and the sentient machines in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot series capture our imagination. After all, who wouldn’t love (and fear) walking, talking and thinking machines that exist to serve every human need.

In fact, the word ‘Robot’ comes from the Slavic word ‘Robota,’ which roughly translates to ‘forced labour.’ Contextually, it referred to the work a medieval peasant was obliged to do for their lord.

In many ways, this robot business may just be man’s attempt to play God. In fact, when you mention “robotics,” the first image that pops up for most people is of a ‘humanoid’ robot: a machine that looks, talks, moves and maybe even thinks like us. That’s straight out of the Book of Genesis.

While humanity has been perpetually unsuccessful in this venture, technological developments over the past century have now put us closer than ever to realising this vision of robots.

We’ve managed to harness electricity at scale, create microprocessors, develop sophisticated sensors and actuators, and integrate AI and machine learning algorithms that enable autonomy and human-like interactions. Many estimate that functional humanoid robots could be mass-produced sometime over the next couple of decades – led by efforts from the likes of Boston Dynamics, NVIDIA, Unitree, Figure and 1X.

In fact, some believe the robotics market could be as large, if not larger, than the AI market. At the CES 2025 event last year, Nvidia's Jensen Huang revealed that the company was now exploring "physical AI" – AI-powered systems for robotics, autonomous vehicles, and digital manufacturing. He claimed that the “ChatGPT moment for general robotics is right around the corner.”

Analysts from Morgan Stanley project $5 trillion in annual humanoid robot revenue by 2050, while Goldman Sachs anticipates the global market for humanoid robots could reach $38 billion by 2035. This optimism is reflected in the money pouring into companies working on robotics.

To give you a few examples, Figure AI raised more than $1 billion in its Series C last September at a $39 billion post-money valuation. That’s a roughly fifteenfold jump from its early-2024 mark, with Nvidia, Intel Capital, Brookfield, Salesforce and Qualcomm Ventures all in the round. Similarly, Apptronik raised  $935 million at roughly $5.3 billion valuation in Series A round backed by Google and Mercedes-Benz. Skild AI also recently tripled its valuation to more than $14 billion in seven months on a SoftBank-led round.

Keep in mind that these are young companies. The pace at which their valuations have been repriced is a sign of the deep conviction investors seem to have about the growth of the segment in the years ahead.

That said, companies like Figure, 1X, Apptronik and Skild are all private - they don’t trade on the public stock market. The secondary venues that trade their shares, the Forges and EquityZens and Hiives, are exclusively for accredited investors. In the US, this refers to someone with a $200,000 income or a million-dollar net worth, excluding their home. In other words, exposure to the growth of robotics is out of reach for the average retail investor.

Thankfully, there are two teams working to solve this lack of access for us plebs. The first is Robostrategy – an actively managed closed-end fund that listed on the Nasdaq earlier this month. Trading under the ticker $BOT, the fund is run by former Mechanism Capital co-founder Andrew Kang.

Notably, Robostrategy gives retail investors indirect exposure to private robotic companies by taking a page out of the Strategy playbook. Instead of Bitcoin, $BOT holds a concentrated portfolio of private, pre-IPO and public robotics names like Figure AI, Apptronik, Dyna Robotics, Standard Bots and Dexmate. Like $MSTR, it issues shares when the stock trades at a premium to net asset value and then deploys that capital into robotics and physical-AI companies. This creates a flywheel that allows it to accumulate more private market equity in promising robotics companies.

The second is XMAQUINA, a crypto-native project positioned as a robotics investment DAO. The project raised more than $10 million through a series of genesis auctions backed by Borderless Capital, Moonrock, Fundamental Labs and others. It has since used a large portion of that to buy small equity positions in real robotics companies; each held through a special purpose vehicle that sits on the company's cap table.

According to official documentation, XMAQUINA holds a total of $6.9 million worth of equity positions across different robotics companies. It also holds $19M in crypto assets and $3M in cash, bringing its total treasury value to roughly $30M. It’s worth noting here that roughly 99% of its $19M crypto asset holdings are its own DAO token $DEUS.

If we’ve learnt anything from the FTX days, it’s to discount holdings of your own token when calculating the true value of your treasury. In other words, the real NAV of XMAQUINA is $10M. At a $50M FDV, its $DEUS token is trading at a 5x premium to NAV. If you take the market cap route, we’re only at 1.2x premium to NAV. This has led to speculation that $DEUS is relatively undervalued when compared to $BOT.

If you ask us, $BOT is the more regulated, heavier and safer vehicle between the two. It has a $2B equity facility and a named CEO with a track record, while XMAQUINA has just a few million dollars of actual robotics equity under a ~$50M FDV token. $DEUS also doesn’t offer the same guarantees that a regulated security like $BOT does.

That said, $DEUS is more widely accessible for investors outside the U.S. equity market. Not to mention, $DEUS’s model is more community directed than $BOT. The token holders ultimately determine which companies the project invests in. $DEUS also currently offers a 39% yield on staking. At the end of the day, it comes down to personal preferences. For now, both are worth watching closely.

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📖 Quote of the Week 📖

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Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.