ETF Inflows, Nvidia Earnings, & OpenAI Funding

February is finally over! Could not come soon enough. Here’s hoping for a much better March!

This Week in Crypto

The macro chaos that kicked off February kept dragging into this week -

• But by Wednesday, crypto staged a real bounce, with altcoins leading the charge.

• SOL and ADA each climbed roughly 4.5%, while tokens like MORPHO and ETHFI jumped more than 10% in a single day.

• Bitcoin flirted with $70K before pulling back to around $68K, so the brief psychological milestone remains just out of reach. 

Some ETF math you’ll actually like!

• U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs just had their best week in six months, hauling in $1.1B in three days.

• This comes after ETFs had flipped to net sellers earlier in February.

And this week’s biggest news: the administrator winding down Terraform Labs filed a lawsuit against Jane Street this week, alleging the trading giant engaged in insider trading to profit from - and actively hasten - the collapse of the Terra/LUNA ecosystem.

• The claim is essentially that while everyone else was losing their shirts in the May 2022 death spiral, Jane Street was quietly positioned to clean up.

• The case is in very early stages, but "Jane Street allegedly front-ran the LUNA collapse" is a sentence that will probably live rent-free in crypto discourse for a while.

This Week in TradFi

The S&P 500 is on track for its worst monthly performance since last March.

• The index has been pinned in a 6,800 to 7,000 trading range with no clean breakout in either direction.

• Meanwhile gold hit $5,189/oz this week, and the 10-year Treasury is sitting around 4.06%. 

Nvidia reported one of the most profitable quarters in corporate history this week - $43B in net income in a single three-month stretch.

• And… the company’s stock dropped 5%. 

• This is the AI scare trade in action - the market is so anxious about whether AI spending will pay off that even Nvidia can’t catch a break.

• Six of the eight trillion-dollar tech companies are now in the red for 2026, with Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla all down double digits. 

The Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s emergency tariffs last week, which created new chaos, as the administration announced it would pursue tariffs under different legal authorities. 

• Steve Madden promptly withdrew its 2026 earnings guidance, citing tariff uncertainty, becoming the first major company to formally throw up its hands. 

This Week in Tech

OpenAI closed a $110 billion fundraising round this week, which is a sentence that would have seemed like satire just a few years ago.

• The round reportedly values the company at $730B, larger than the GDP of several countries. 

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the two companies are "close" to finalizing a separate investment partnership, which has been in various states of being almost done since September.

Block announced it’s cutting nearly 40% of its workforce - about 4,000 employees.

• Investors immediately rewarded the company with a 20% stock surge.

• Dorsey’s note to staff cited AI tools changing “what it means to build and run a company”.

• Block also raised its full-year guidance in the same announcement, projecting 18% gross profit growth for 2026. 

As usual, below are some fundraising announcements, M&A, and tech personnel changes that caught our eye:

• Stripe announced another tender offer, valuing the company at $159B, a 74% increase since its last tender offer. 

• Former Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal has raised $54M for a new wearable startup Temple at a valuation of about $190M. 

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Disclaimer: None of the above is financial advice, seriously.