May flowers

Inflation is cool. Bitcoin's calm. Ethereum and Dogecoin each climbed impressively, calm, cool and collected. The latter has gained 36% since last Wednesday. DOGE is now nearly 24 cents. The last time the original memecoin was a quarter was back in February.

As for Ethereum, it hit $2,700 last night. ETH is +42% on the week.

Streaking noteworthily back into the Top 100 is Raydium (RAY), the Solana-run DEX hot on the heels of a banger of a first quarter, and which is now the 98th-largest digital asset, with a market capitalization of $1.08B, slightly ahead of No. 99 Floki (FLOKI). Some recently reported Raydium highlights: record-smashing Q1 volume overall (much of it tied to the launch of the Solana-based TRUMP memecoin in January) and an eye-popping 130% surge in the volume of AI tokens changing hands when measured as a percentage of the DEX's total volume, and when compared to Q1 of last year.

Crypto is hardly a secret garden after several years of booms and busts and memorable episodes. Some coins have wilted, while others have flourished. Usually, it stays volatile. Even when the going is good, there can be a nagging sense of .... oh, that reminds us, Grass is greener.

The decentralized bandwidth-sharing network's native asset, GRASS, clustered within the whole AI field, just shot up 38% in one day. GRASS, with a market cap of roughly $600M, is the 146th-largest coin.

Yesterday, investors took in a key macro puzzle piece in the form of the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) read-out for the month of April 2025. The monthly headline CPI number landed below expectations. 

April '25 CPI rose 0.2%, per the federal government's Bureau of Labor Statistics. The consensus forecast was for an increase of 0.3%. In March, CPI declined 0.1%. Taken together, and for all the talk of tariff-related inflation brewing, the past couple of months reflect benign inflationary pressure.

Most macro analysts expect the Fed to maintain a "watch and wait" attitude toward rates, relying on a hold 'em policy until the full story of tariff tumult unfurls in the next few months.

After the CPI number came out, Bitcoin’s spot price budged, barely. As of 8:20 a.m. (EST), BTC was $104,071, per CoinGecko. That reflects a +0.4% increase relative to 24 hours ago.

In that same span, the total crypto market cap fell 0.6% to $3.49T.

Okay, so CPI data suggests inflation's cooling. Conceivably, this could bode well for "risk" assets such as Bitcoin. But is Bitcoin even a risk asset? Is it even a coin? Can we please go ahead and just call it a commodity?

“Bitcoin isn’t just another commodity," David Lawant, head of research at FalconX, told Decrypt.

The best way to understand the biggest crypto is to consider it as "emerging digital gold," Lawant said.

Okay, got it. Gold connotes a certain scarcity, and also a time-tested allure. Digitalization is a concept we all can grasp firmly, easily, as we do our phones.

We're wary about "emerging." This term smacks of "expect some growing pains." Fair enough; BTC is, after all, a seventeen-year-old.

And you know, lately, BTC has emerged as quite the headstrong young buck in a world turned topsy-turvy.

Perhaps BTC is still coming into its own as a hedging asset. Stocks have popped off again. Bond markets seem to be the adult in the room. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury keeps ticking higher. Real yields (or the inflation-adjusted return on safe assets, such as U.S. Treasury bills) are likely to remain higher relative to non-yielding assets, such as BTC and gold. However, this dynamic might not necessarily represent the kind of headwind for commodity/hedge assets as compared to high-real-yield environments in the past, Lawant explained.

“As institutions start to grasp [BTC's] unique properties," he added, "the price action should be driven more and more by the asset’s maturing identity.”