BTC ETF Outflows, Fed Tensions, & SpaceX Filing

Hope you all grabbed a slice for Bitcoin Pizza Day earlier this week!

This Week in Crypto

Unfortunately, Bitcoin pulled back this week heading into Pizza Day -

• Thursday marked the 16th anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day - the occasion in May 2010 when developer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC, then worth roughly $41, for two Papa John’s pizzas. At this week’s prices, that BTC is worth over $767 million.

• The anniversary unfortunately arrived in a difficult week for price action. Bitcoin hit a high of $79,050 on May 16 before pulling back, and was trading at $75,400 on Friday - the highest level of market fear seen in more than 3.5 months, according to Santiment.

  • Near-term pressure from hot inflation data, ongoing U.S.-Iran tensions, ETF outflows, and leveraged long liquidations continued to weigh on price action throughout the week.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded outflows across six consecutive trading sessions, totaling $1.26B.

• BlackRock’s IBIT drove $61.45M in outflows on a single day, with Fidelity FBTC contributing another $10.12M.

The SEC shelved its proposed “innovation exemption” - a framework that would have allowed crypto firms to offer tokenized versions of traditional stocks.

• Nasdaq had already received SEC approval in March 2026 for its own tokenized securities proposal built on the DTCC's enterprise blockchain; the innovation exemption would have created a parallel crypto-native market, potentially fragmenting liquidity across dozens of third-party token issuers for the same underlying stock.

• Bitcoin dipped immediately upon the news, and Coinbase shares fell around 4.4%.

This Week in TradFi

The Fed released minutes from the April 28-29 FOMC meeting this week, revealing an unusually fractured committee.

• The meeting produced an 8-4 split, the most divided the FOMC has been since 1992.

• Markets now assign a 63% probability that the Fed will hike rates by end of 2026, when just weeks ago the curve still leaned toward one cut before year end.

Nvidia reported record revenue of $81.6B for Q1 fiscal 2027, up 85% YoY and 20% sequentially.

• Data center revenue hit $75.2B, up 92% from a year ago.

• Q2 revenue guidance came in between $89.18B and $92.82B.

• And… the stock fell anyway. The bar for Nvidia has now been set so high that merely reporting one of the most profitable quarters in the history of American capitalism is just not enough.

The 30-year and 10-year Treasury yields both hit 52-week highs early in the week, reaching 5.197% and 4.687% respectively.

• The S&P and Nasdaq fell for a third consecutive session on Monday as yields pressured equities, with market breadth weak and gains concentrated in technology and energy.

• Wednesday brought relief: stocks jumped as oil prices and yields slid on optimism around Iran ceasefire progress.

This Week in Tech

The biggest personnel news of the week: Andrej Karpathy has joined Anthropic.

• Andrej Karpathy, one of the best known AI researchers in the world and a founding member of OpenAI, announced Tuesday that he’s joining Anthropic.

• He's working on pre-training under team lead Nick Joseph, and will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research.

• Karpathy is one of the few researchers who can bridge the gap between LLM theory and large-scale training practice. His résumé includes co-founding OpenAI, leading Tesla's Full Self-Driving and Autopilot programs, returning to OpenAI for a year, and then leaving to start Eureka Labs, an AI education startup.

• And probably the best tidbit for his resume: he is also the person who coined the term "vibe coding.”

AI giveth and AI taketh away: Meta laid off 8,000 people to pay for AI Capex.

• Meta executed its planned 8,000-person reduction this week, roughly 10% of its workforce, as part of an efficiency drive to offset AI infrastructure costs.

• The company has raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance by up to $10 billion, reaching as high as $145 billion.

• So far in 2026, there have been almost 110,000 layoffs at 137 tech companies.

SpaceX filed its offering statement on May 20, revealing tiny revenues and large losses.

• Elon Musk will exercise virtually total control; he cannot be removed from office by shareholder vote and is free to name a board dominated by insiders.

• The IPO market cap is expected to hit $1.5 trillion or more, which one Fortune analyst noted requires investors to base their enthusiasm "almost exclusively on great things to come."

Days after Google rolled out its revamped, even more AI-focused search experience at I/O 2026, users discovered that searching for the words "disregard," "stop," or "ignore" no longer displays a definition.

• The search system apparently interpreted these words as prompt instructions rather than dictionary queries.

• Whether the irony of a search engine that can't find the meaning of "ignore" was lost on anyone in Mountain View is, at press time, unknown.

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

• Beauty booking startup Fresha announced an $80M investment from KKR, valuing the company at more than $1B.

• Hark, an AI lab building models and hardware for a personal assistant, has raised a $700M Series A, valuing the company at $6B.

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.