🪱 Early bird gets the worm

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$1.25 billion.

That’s the amount Ripple’s shelling out for Hidden Road, a crypto-friendly prime broker. 

If we’re going by the press release, it seems like Ripple had three big motivations for shelling out a hefty sum: It wants to grow RLUSD, its stablecoin, by giving it “real utility” when Hidden Road leverages it across its products post-acquisition. It also wants to “migrate post-trade activity across XRP Ledger.”

Oh, and $1.25B is just the start for Ripple’s investment into Hidden Road, given that it vowed to “inject billions of capital” to scale the business. 

Sounds like someone’s bullish. 

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s just under $80,000, up 3.9% in the past day. ETH’s up 5.7% to $1,500. 

• CoinMarketCap’s crypto fear and greed index sits at 19, slightly higher than it was yesterday, but still on the cusp of extreme fear.

• Total crypto market cap is hanging on to $2.5T, a slight increase from Monday, according to Blockworks Research.

🖼️ The big picture

Apollo is doubling down on its push into real-world assets. 

And, yes, I know we’ve been talking about RWAs a lot, but there are different layers to what’s being built in this space right now. We have institutions jumping in and out of FOMO, but then there is a group that is arguably crypto native and using this more bullish period to expand their footprints in crypto. This is the latter. 

You see, Apollo is betting on Plume, the RWA network. 

Here’s what I can tell you: Apollo made a strategic investment of around seven figures (the team at Plume wouldn’t disclose the full amount). The investment follows Plume’s $20 million Series A that was announced at the end of last year. 

And, perhaps most importantly, Plume co-founder Teddy Pornprinya told me that the mainnet launch is slated for this quarter. I pushed to get a better sense of the timing, but Pornprinya only affirmed that it was “imminent.”

The team and Apollo have been working closely on ACRED, which is Apollo’s offering with Securitize, as well as “other initiatives.”

Apollo’s investment marks the first time it has made an investment into a specific RWA chain. Pornprinya called Plume an RWAfi, which piqued my curiosity. 

While Plume’s generally known for its RWA work, Pornprinya said they have a core focus on the DeFi side of things, hence the “RWAfi” labeling.

There are “three core focus areas for us, one is on the infrastructure technology side, two is on distribution, and three is on composability — which is essentially leveraging our DeFi native team to build these different use cases,” he said.

To make RWAs more attractive to users onchain, you have to make it more crypto, Pornprinya told me. Hence the focus on developers and, of course, aiding builders on the go-to-market side of things — a notoriously challenging part of being in crypto. 

Pornprinya told me that, in his experience, Apollo is one of the more crypto-native institutions, especially with Christine Moy leading its charge into digital assets. Instead of evaluating where to go in crypto — like many institutions currently are — Apollo’s “pretty open” to getting involved on the “permissionless side of things” and innovating with RWAs.

“It's no longer just holding a tokenized asset and just making passive yield from it. It's taking that asset, throwing it into the DeFi ecosystem, and making more use of that asset and unlocking more liquidity for additional opportunities,” Pornprinya said.

By the numbers, Plume has roughly 200 projects currently working with them. They launched an eight-week testnet over the summer, which had roughly 18 million wallets, four million of which were unique. Mind you, that was eight months ago but it makes me curious about the numbers we can expect out of the mainnet once it launches.

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• SBI Holdings is weighing selling a minority stake in B2C2, according to Bloomberg. 

• The US Department of Justice is scrapping its crypto investigations unit. 

• Galaxy Digital is getting closer to a US listing, as it eyes a potential debut on the Nasdaq in May.

🐠 Just keep swimming

So much for any hope around an altcoin resurgence. 

Unfortunately, as folks have taken risk off the table in the wake of the tariffs, they’ve also moved further away from altcoins. 

Since the announcement, liquidity “for the top ten altcoins and ETH decreased by 12% and 8%, respectively, indicating a more cautious stance,” Kaiko Research noted. 

All of this shows that capital is being sidelined right now as folks figure out how to approach this precarious market — a market that may be heading toward a cliff of sorts after China responded to President Donald Trump’s threat about new, additional 50% tariffs against the country. China has promised to fight the US on the tariff front, which could set us up for more market tension, given that China was handed a Tuesday deadline (that’s today!) to scrap its retaliatory tariffs.

While CT initially hoped that crypto would be protected from tariffs, that doesn’t seem to be the case, and the correlation is definitely back. However, while equities continue to grapple with the potential impacts of a trade war, folks over in crypto don’t have to deal with the same level of panic. 

I have a feeling we’re just going to continue assessing market conditions this week, but it hasn’t seemed to change the rather bullish stance folks in crypto have adopted despite the doomposting over on CT.

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