Crypto's giants gushing

XRP jumped 8% in a brazen, in-plain-sight heist of the fourth spot on the list of the largest digital assets by market capitalization, displacing stablecoin Tether (USDT). As for the rest of the Big Ten, the most enormous of digital coins as a pack are awash in green. The 8-9-10 gang, Uniswap (UNI), Litecoin (LTC) and ChainLink (LINK), each were on the upswing to the tune of roughly 3% over the past 24 hours as of Friday morning at 7:15 a.m. (EST) although by 8:30 a.m. that trio slightly slumped.

Heading into the weekend, Big Daddy Bitcoin (+2.5%) will look to finish flush, above $59K, so as to notch another in-the-green week.

No. 66 largest coin, Bitcoin Gold (BTG), meanwhile, has surged 9% over the past day and is on a pace to turn in a +200% week. On Tuesday, Cointelegraph reported on a new Bitcoin fund from BTG Pactual in collaboration with the Winklevoss twins’ Gemini exchange, and how this inadvertently created ticker confusion, but a happy accident for the oft-forgotten Bitcoin fork with the symbol that harkens to the Brazilian investment bank. It's worth emphasizing, these two entities have nothing to do with one another.

Scaling trust, championing sharding, Harmony (ONE) – even before ETH 2.0 – was nicknamed ETH 2.0. But it has been sliding steadily in the wrong direction ever since hitting a high of $0.1911 at the end of March a month in which ONE rocketed 700%. It has hemorrhaged mojo over roughly the past one week. Today, as of 9 a.m. (EST), the No. 81 coin by market-cap fell 1.5%.

With non-fungible tokens exploding, there's been a huge spike in traffic to NFT marketplaces. Naturally so, with the WWE about to drop a token series showcasing The Undertaker.

Crypto exchanges, meanwhile, are experiencing record volume with all eyes on the pending Coinbase go-public.

Just when the hype surrounding crypto and NFTs couldn't get more feverish, there comes the needless, yet somehow intriguing collaboration between David "DJ DAVI" Khanjian and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. 

A well-known electronic dance music producer based in L.A. by way of Armenia, Khanjian somehow wound up giving a few pro bono music master classes to Armstrong, a super fan who instinctively took to hypnotic beats as a hobby during the pandemic. Their minted tracks came together as Armstrong was learning. All proceeds of the NFT sale will go to DJ DAVI. After Coinbase goes public next week, as much as $15 billion in proceeds will go to Armstrong.

Disconcerting signs of inflation in China pushed stocks lower in Europe even as such fears in the U.S. seemed to have abated, with bond yields falling.

Isn't anyone worried about U.S. inflation? Hell yes.

Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies, earlier this week said in a client note, on the coming economic reopening, that investors "should be prepared for the biggest inflation scare in America since the early 1980s."

Many Wall Street minds are preoccupied with the mid-to-late 1920s, when the phrase "roaring economy" first entered our lexicon. That era, perhaps sans bathtub gin and flappers, could be on the verge of replaying, according to central finance overlord Jamie Dimon, chief of JPMorgan Chase and who just penned a 66-page annual letter to shareholders. 

Owing to a combination of “excess savings, deficit spending, vaccinations and euphoria,” Dimon wrote, “the U.S. economy will likely boom.”

A zero-rate, stimulus-slathered economy rebounding from more than a year of pandemic isolation should create, at a minimum, some near-term inflationary shock waves, Jefferies’ Wood said,  perhaps not quite a Venezuelan-esque death spiral but more of a speed bump en route to, in the medium-term, some wildly liberated, Roaring Twenties' style exuberance.