BTC Gains, Private Credit Worries, & Avocado Failure

Arch cofounder Himanshu Sahay and Head of Marketing Knyck Sutherland sat down with Wojtek Pawlowski to discuss the future of verifiable, transparent digital finance services. You can watch (or listen!) to the full podcast here:

This Week in Crypto

Finally something good to say! Bitcoin is on its fifth consecutive day of gains and rose to $72,000 this morning - on track for its first weekly gain since January.

• Bitcoin actually outperformed gold over the past week, climbing about 12% while gold fell nearly 2% - flipping the recent trend of BTC lagging traditional safe havens.

• Nearly $700M has flowed into Bitcoin ETFs so far in March.

March 2026 also carried a milestone that only happens once in Bitcoin’s lifetime - the mining of the 20 millionth BTC, leaving just 1 million left to ever exist.

• Institutional desks have been using this dust to off their scarcity pitch decks and retail fomo is apparently reactivating. 

More regulatory non-news:

• The SEC and CFTC signed a Memorandum of Understanding to coordinate crypto regulation. Good news in theory! But hard to say anything real when it’s literally just two agencies agreeing to talk to each other. 

• Meanwhile the CLARITY Act, which passed the House last July, is in active Senate negotiations, with prediction markets pricing a 72% chance of it becoming law this year.

Wells Fargo also wants in on the action - 

• Wells Fargo filed a trademark for WFUSD, signaling a potential dollar-pegged stablecoin play. 

• But it’s not confirmed - crypto users speculated that JPMorgan may be launching a stablecoin after it filed for a trademark for JPMD last June. 

  • But the firm soon after revealed a tokenized deposit token using the JPMD ticker, not a dollar-backed stablecoin.

This Week in TradFi

If you were hoping for a calm, uneventful week in the markets - wrong newsletter.

• The week opened with the Dow coming off its worst weekly slide in nearly a year, until President Trump announced the Iran war was pretty much over, triggering an immediate rally. 

  • As a result, the S&P closed up 0.83% on Monday.

• However, by Thursday, the Dow had shed another 739 points, and the S&P dropped 1.52% - both posting new 2026 closing lows. 

Q4 GDP was revised sharply downward to just 0.7% annualized growth - well below the prior estimate of 1.4%.

• For context, Q3 came in at 4.4%

• Meanwhile, the PCE inflation gauge rose 0.3% in January, and CPI came in at 2.4% YoY. 

In the week’s most eyebrow-raising headline, Morgan Stanley capped withdrawals from its private credit funds, sending its stock down a little over 4% on Thursday. 

• Private credit has been one of the hottest corners of finance for two years running, so gating redemptions is the kind of signal that makes other private credit investors suddenly very interested in checking their own redemption terms.

All eyes are on the Fed’s March 18 FOMC meeting, where rates are widely expected to stay put. 

• The real question is whether Powell signals any dovish lean given slowing growth - or doubles down on inflation caution given $95+ oil.

This Week in Tech

The biggest tech story of the week is that Meta’s next flagship AI model, internally codenamed “Avocado”, got delayed from this month to at least May after internal tests showed it couldn’t keep up with competitors. 

• This is notable less because of the delay and more because of what came next - Meta's leadership reportedly discussed temporarily licensing Google's Gemini to power Meta's AI products in the interim.

• It seems a little embarrassing that Zuckerberg has spent $14B+ on building an AI super team and committed up to $135B in capex for 2026 - but is apparently considering renting his arch-rival’s AI while his own model gets its act together. 

• No final decision was made, but the fact that it was discussed at all says something about where Meta stands in the AI arms race right now.

• For more context: Avocado beat Meta's previous model and outpaced Google's Gemini 2.5, but couldn't match Gemini 3.0 (released in November) on reasoning, coding, and writing.

A brief recap of the OpenAI-Pentagon-Anthropic drama:

• Earlier this month, the Pentagon signed a deal with OpenAI for military AI use, a move that sparked significant backlash, while a Pentagon official reportedly said Anthropic could "pollute" the military supply chain, effectively blacklisting it from defense contracts.

• The AI industry's relationship with the defense sector is now one of the defining fault lines in tech, with companies facing trade-offs between federal revenue and their stated safety missions.

• No clean resolution here, just a drama that will continue unfolding.

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

• Atlassian has followed Block’s footsteps and cut 10% of its workforce, around 1600 people.

• AI agent startup Wonderful has raised a $150M Series B at a valuation of $2B. 

• A former Apple engineer has raised $5M for a note-taking pendant that only records your voice.

• Vibe-coding company Replit has raised a $400M Series D at a $9B valuation. 

Arch is building a next-gen wealth management platform for individuals holding Alternative Assets. Our flagship product is the crypto-backed loan, which allows you to securely and affordably borrow against your crypto.

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