Bitcoin ETFs record six consecutive weeks of net inflows for the first time in nine months
A solo Saturday livestream from the Digital Asset News host covering Bitcoin ETF inflows, real-world asset tokenization, AI agent payments, and stablecoin policy.
Summary
The Digital Asset News host opens with a review of the April US jobs report, noting 115,000 jobs added — nearly double expectations — alongside a continued reduction in federal government employment. The central topic is Bitcoin spot ETFs recording six consecutive weeks of net inflows, the longest such streak since a seven-week run in summer 2025, with BlackRock leading the charge. The host also covers BlackRock's expanding push into tokenized real-world assets, the Consensus Miami hackathon's focus on AI agents and payments, and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde's comments on stablecoins. The livestream closes with a Q&A session covering Coinbase's new Bitcoin-backed mortgage loan product, the metaverse's failures, and the host's personal experience being liquidated on a Bitcoin-backed loan through Celsius.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and US Jobs Report
Host: Hello everybody. Welcome to the Saturday livestream. Today is a good day to be in crypto and digital assets, because I think that we beat a lot of the institutions here. Before we get in and talk about exactly what's going on as far as how we front-ran a lot of smart people — congratulations — I just want to go over a couple of things, first of all with the economy. Without the economy, nothing really works.
I actually passed on this story yesterday and wanted to bring it to everybody's attention. The United States is not doing too bad. We added 115,000 jobs in April, nearly doubling the expectations. However, there is a little bit of cooling since March, though the expectations weren't too high.
Looking at the numbers: 115,000 jobs added. The trend in federal government employment has continued to decrease. Now, this is a good thing — the federal government was bloated with too many people having too many jobs. Unfortunately, if you were laid off, I'm sorry, I understand how that works. But let's take a look at who was actually laid off.
The federal job trend is that even though there is a reduction in federal jobs, there is an increase in overall job numbers. The unemployment rate is still a little bit high at 4.3%, but it hasn't moved too much. Job openings remain high at 6.9 million in March.
The key growth areas: healthcare — one of my favorites, my former profession — at 37,000. Transportation and warehousing, because we like to buy things, like to ship things, and warehousing is also pretty good for AI. Then retail trade at 22,000. The weakness is the information sector at negative 13,000 — information is becoming easier and easier, especially with the advent of AI coming in, and we'll cover that in a little bit.
As of 2026, the federal workforce has shrunk by 10 to 12% since the current administration took office. Over 250,000 to 300,000 federal positions were eliminated — the largest year of reduction since the 1990s. Now, people would say, "Well, that's awful. They're laying off people. How dare they?" First of all, the current administration has done some bad things — not the greatest of things. Rugpulling all of us with the World Liberty Financial Token, Melania, and the Trump coin. Let's be honest, it was a rug pull. It was awful. Ask Justin Sun.
Even though that happened, on this part here I've got to tell you, it's a pretty sweet deal. Many of these reductions in government employees stem from voluntary resignations — about 149,000. They just wanted to get out. They probably got a nice package. People actually retired: 105,000. And the involuntary layoffs were only 10,500. So if you weren't too happy with the administration, or you said, "Hey, just give me a nice little parachute package," so much the better. Off to the next thing. That's not a bad deal.
So the economy is doing pretty good.
Bitcoin ETF Inflows: Six Consecutive Weeks
Now let's talk about the big title we had for today's video. Spot Bitcoin ETFs logged the sixth straight week of net inflows for the first time in nine months. You have to ask yourself — maybe some of these institutions know what they're doing.
The ETFs aren't just for institutions, obviously. There's retail there too, but there are different sectors of who is getting into the ETFs: retail, advisors, and institutions. And some of these institutions, like ARK, are buying their own ETF — that's a fact. There's a link in the description. I think it's one of my CryptoKritical videos where we talk about the ETFs and who's actually buying.
US spot Bitcoin ETFs have logged six consecutive weeks of net inflows — the longest streak since a seven-week run totaling $7.57 billion in the summer of 2025. Here's a nice little chart to visualize it. I tend to get really focused on what kind of inflows are happening day-to-day, and you can see that as far as Bitcoin ETF flow, it's been pretty massive. The one leading the charge is BlackRock — I think it's like 14 trillion in assets under management, something like that. Correct me in the comments. But it's a lot.
We can see that over time we've had quite a bit of inflows. However, May 7th and May 8th had a little bit of negative flow. But if we zoom out — and I talk about this but don't always do it — take a look at the Bitcoin spot ETF total cumulative flow going back to January 1st, 2024. Nothing. And then we topped out at roughly around October 2025. Remember those days when Bitcoin was like $125,000? Yeah, good days. And then of course we went down a little bit. But we've seen quite a revival coming in from around end of January, early February, all the way up to today. That is good news. People are starting to believe a little bit more. Let's hope this continues.
BlackRock's Tokenized Real-World Asset Push
Not only did we beat a lot of individuals into crypto, but we also beat BlackRock as far as tokenization of real-world assets. It looks like they are deepening their push with new on-chain fund offerings. The world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, filed paperwork to expand its tokenized fund lineup as real-world assets grow 200% year-over-year. Not too bad.
BlackRock filed for a new tokenized treasury reserve fund with Securitize, who looks like they're doing everything with everybody as far as tokenization of real-world assets. The asset manager proposed to create on-chain shares for a $7 billion money market fund — that's the second in the doing. The move adds to BlackRock's growing bet on tokenized finance as the sector surpasses $30 billion, tripling in one year.
We actually talked about this a couple of days ago. It's something I knew was happening in the background but kind of let it off the radar. Even Larry Fink was talking about this in March, just a couple of months ago. He said, "If history is any guide, tokenization today is roughly where the internet was in 1996." I remember those days when Amazon sold $16 million worth of books — because that's what Amazon was originally for. Jeff Bezos said, "I know people want books and I'm going to give it to them." Then he started to figure out, oh no, they want a lot of other stuff too — groceries, robot vacuums, a ton of different things. So that's when they diverged. Imagine Amazon just being books now. That's ridiculous.
Fink also stated, "Three of today's Magnificent Seven tech giants hadn't even been founded in 1996. Tokenization could advance at the pace of the internet — faster than most — with enormous growth."
As a reminder, people ask, "What are the advantages?" The great thing about tokenization is that you can tokenize anything — any kind of asset. It could be equities, stocks, gold, commodities, land, houses, real estate. You get 24/7 global liquidity — just put it on chain. Fractional ownership, so if you don't have $10 million to buy a nice huge building, you can get fractional ownership and say, "Hey, I've only got 500 bucks." Great — join the other 10,000 people and we'll all buy it and all get some kind of dividends and yield, hopefully. Lightning-fast settlement, lower cost, transparency, everybody knows what it is. And of course, this is great for new investors, especially in private credit if you want to give out loans.
The same tokens being used for payments — Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, and now Polygon — are the same tokens being used for tokenization, except you've also got to add XRP and Canton. And don't just take my word for it. There's a great website called RWA.xyz — stands for Real World Assets. Looking at the global market overview, Ethereum is leading the pack, then BNB, Solana, Stellar, Liquid, Polygon. Canton is amazing at $358 billion, Provenance at $17 billion, Ethereum at $16 billion, and so on. Real-world assets are taking over.
AI Agents and Payments at Consensus Miami
Speaking of real-world assets, we also have to talk about payments and AI agents. The Consensus event, I think, is wrapping up — this just happened in Miami. There was a hackathon, and the big thing being done at the hackathon was AI agents and payments.
AI agents dominated the hackathon. A thousand developers from crypto ecosystems like Base from Coinbase and Solana, alongside engineers from — and this is interesting — Microsoft and Google were there. Spanning autonomous payments, consumer apps, hardware generation, drones, and prediction markets.
It was interesting because this year the center of gravity shifted towards AI. Coinbase sponsored challenges around X402 — if you don't know what X402 is, it is a protocol created by Coinbase and Stripe and a couple of other big organizations for online payments that are cheap, fast, and AI-agentic. Solana and Solana Mobile pushed towards mobile-first apps, probably because of their phone, the Solana Seeker, which makes a lot of sense.
Here's who won. I found this interesting because it shows what we can actually do with these hackathons.
First place was Fly Practis, and they won $50,000. Fly Practis is a real-time drone intelligence platform designed for military operations — they describe it as Palantir but in real time, using AI-powered coordination and live battlefield intelligence.
Second place was an HII platform that turns text prompts into hardware — not software, hardware. So you're telling me that you can input a prompt saying "make me a mainframe with this type of chip and this type of backing" and it'll do it? AI agents manage everything from physics calculations and component sourcing to 3D CAD generation and assembly documentation. There's a big difference between what is being said and what can actually be done, but that's pretty amazing.
Third place is called Clan World — be really careful around that word. A team experimenting with AI-native coordination and community-driven applications.
Then the Solana Seeker phone category. They won up to $75,000. There's one called Parabola — a decentralized prediction and estimation market built on Solana. Low-hanging fruit, but good for them. Snacker was an AI-powered food intelligence app that lets shoppers scan products to identify health risks. That's pretty good. And then Rhythm, focused on productivity and accessibility — a mobile routine support app built on some blockchain, aimed at helping users with executive dysfunction complete daily tasks.
I was like, what the heck is executive dysfunction? I was in the medical field for 20 years and I'd never heard of it. I had to look it up. And when I show this to you, tell me if this isn't you. Executive dysfunction: focusing too much on just one thing — executive dysfunction. Being easily distractable — executive dysfunction. Daydreaming or spacing out when you shouldn't be — executive dysfunction. Struggling to switch between tasks, problems with impulse control, and trouble starting difficult or boring tasks — executive dysfunction. Well, I don't want to apply labels, but that's pretty much everybody I know.
Lastly, Coinbase and AWS — Amazon Web Services — tracking. They won $45,000. Dairy Price allows people to get data and information for dairy products. Sure. Second place was Agent Pay, which gives users tap-approval over AI agent transactions. And third place was Giggy — a marketplace where users can hire AI agents to perform research tasks. Payments are locked in crypto escrow on Base by Coinbase while the agents themselves can pay for premium APIs through X402-powered transactions. That'll probably work out pretty well.
So payments, AI agents, and everything going forward — pretty interesting.
Christine Lagarde on Stablecoins and the Euro
To finish up with payments and talking about people who just don't get it — Christine Lagarde, who is the president of the European Central Bank, has just made a statement that stablecoins are not an efficient way to strengthen the international role of the euro. She might actually be right on that one, because I think stablecoins can be dominated by backing of the US dollar. The best solution, she says, remains deeper capital market integration through the savings and investment union and a stronger safe asset base. Keep printing that money.
But I will say she did say something that was pretty much spot-on. She talks for about 30 minutes or so in a video I think I linked in the description. One of the big takeaways was this: she says the biggest risk is the migration of retail deposits into non-bank stablecoins, and because of that it could weaken bank lending — otherwise known as fractional reserve lending. And you know what? She's 100% right. As we don't put money into banks, they can't lend that money out. She's 100% correct, and I see why the European Central Bank doesn't want stablecoins.
Just to finish this up — people will say, "Well, why wouldn't centralized stable coins do pretty well versus a private or decentralized stablecoin?" Just so you know, even if a stablecoin is on a decentralized platform like Solana, Tron, Ethereum, Binance, or Polygon, they're still able to freeze it. USDC and Tether do it all the time. And if it's an open transaction, it's a pretty easy way to track.
If they do a centralized stablecoin, first of all, it's KYC and AML compliant — know your customer, anti-money laundering. It's private, because what happens in banking stays in banking and they don't want people to know all the transactions, which I get. There's also a great feature for centralized stablecoins: if something screws up or somebody gets hacked, you can hit a nice little undo button. Whoops, we messed up — we'll just take those funds back. And it's also fast and cheap.
I know people would say it's the evilest thing of all time. Trust me, centralized stablecoins are going to be a thing. People are going to use them, and that's just how it is.
However, the banks and institutions will still need the liquidity of the open decentralized chains and stablecoins, because they need all these people. There are only so many institutions and banks to go around, and if you have a walled garden, you need to get out there for that liquidity. It's global interoperability. What if someone's got a dollar and the other one's got a euro or a renminbi or a yuan? They don't want to deal with that. They want something that can go interoperable between everything, that is fast and open 24/7, 365 days a year — and some people don't even need a bank, just an internet connection and a smartphone.
That's why I think payments is such a big sector. As time goes on, it's just going to be a hybrid, and that's where I see things going.
Q&A: Coinbase Bitcoin-Backed Mortgages, Metaverse Failures, and More
There was one more story I want to talk about, which I'll cover tomorrow. Coinbase is rolling out Bitcoin-backed mortgage loans with no margin calls. In the comments, let me know — would you give up your Bitcoin to do a mortgage-backed loan? It's not cheaper than any of the banks can give you. It's actually 50 to 75 basis points higher. Would you do it? That's what Coinbase is rolling out, and they believe you're going to do it.
I wouldn't do it either. I did it one time with Celsius. I bought a property in Puerto Rico and I got margin called and ponied up the Bitcoin. Then, while I was away — I was taking a trip in the UK for a guys' conference over at Coin Bureau — I just missed some calls and they liquidated me. That sucks. And that became a taxable event, which was also a big problem. They liquidated me at around $40,000 for Bitcoin. So it happened, but I still wouldn't do it again because of what I've gone through. I will never take a loan against my Bitcoin. I'll do it against like Tron or something crazy like that, but not the other stuff.
For the collateral on the Coinbase product — we'll cover this tomorrow — you need 250% of what you need. And it's not the whole loan, it's just the down payment. So let's say you get a $100,000 house. Typical down payment is 20% — if you're an FHA loan or a VA loan, you're looking at $20,000. So you need $20,000. Okay, give us roughly $50,000 in Bitcoin, and once you put it in, it's locked at that price. Then you pay it off over time.
Rates right now — I don't know if it's 6.25%, 6.5%, 7% — let's just say it's 7%. And now it's like, okay, yours is going to be 7.1%, 7.125%. I wonder how long they give you — if it's 5 years or 10 years, that's a pretty good deal for Coinbase because they can essentially take that Bitcoin and custody it for you. I wonder what the terms are — if they can do any kind of loans Celsius-style, or if they just hold it. At 7.1% on the amortization timetable over 15 years, that's a lot of interest. Pretty good for them.
You can also use stablecoins — they have a deal with Circle and USDC. But not at 250%; I think it's 125%. The advantage? If you use Circle, you get the yield at 3.25%. Again, I'm not going to do that.
Someone says: if you can't afford the 20% to put down, you shouldn't be buying a house. It's debatable. If you've got everything tied up and you're like, "I'll just use this," and you know you're going to hold on to it, it just depends on the time frame.
Someone asks when Bitcoin is going to reach the all-time high again. I don't know. This last cycle was pretty good. We actually hit an all-time high before April 20th, which was the halving date — the first time that's happened in previous cycles. The next halving we're looking at is in 2028. Maybe it could be 2027.
On NFTs — they may not be worth anything, but they are definitely good to learn about. Yeah, and the metaverse was going to be such a big thing that everybody was investing into it in the crypto space. Even Mark Zuckerberg got really into it and changed his whole company's name from Facebook to Meta. I don't think it's working out so far, but who knows.
I remember wanting to buy land in the Sandbox near Snoop Dogg. That was a good time. Everybody was getting into the metaverse and buying plots of land, and Snoop Dogg gets into it, and you see BitBoy — remember that guy? BitBoy bought a big chunk of land and talked about it on his channel. I remember Mark Cuban coming out and saying this is the dumbest thing he'd ever heard of in his entire life. He's big into real estate as well. He said, "Why would you buy something that can just be recreated digitally ad nauseam for as much as you want?" And people would say, "Well, there's the valuation of community." Once you start hearing the word "community," watch out. He was absolutely correct. I don't know of any decentralized metaverse that actually came out on top.
Meta's Reality Labs division, responsible for the metaverse and VR development, has incurred operating losses exceeding $80 billion since late 2020. What's a couple billion between friends?
The pioneers are the ones you'll know because they're the ones that run forward and have arrows in their backs. That's pretty much how it is. Like the big AI push — everybody said you've got to get an AI, you've got to use it. I got into that for a bit. I tried OpenClaw — disaster. This was like January or February when it first came out. I was going through it and it was just the glitchiest piece of trash I'd ever put in. Now it's a little bit better. I tried the Hermes agent, and now I've just decided that Claude Code is just the best if you want to do anything with AI agents and make things run.
I've been playing with this for like two or three weeks. I have it set up to write grant proposals for an animal shelter I'm working with, do all of my CPA stuff, get everything together as far as receipts, profit and losses, revenue, everything I have for my finances for the company. And it's also redoing the entire website I have for our short-term and medium-term rentals, and we're putting an AI agent into it. I don't really do anything — I just let that thing do it. It's the way that you put the prompts in and stay on top of it. It's pretty slick. And guess what? It's not glitchy as hell.
On the Bitcoin strategic reserve — apparently in the next two or three weeks, we're going to hear some major information about some other Bitcoin strategic reserve. Funny timing as the midterms come up.
Someone says their house cost them like $35,000 and they got a home equity line of credit to remodel it. That's the way to do it. Get something dirt cheap, remodel everything, live in it while you're doing it, and then have this beautiful place afterwards.
Someone says their wife wants to pay off her house and they have a 2.8% mortgage. I told her she was insane. Obviously, that's not a good idea.
On Coinbase and AWS — they won $45,000. Dairy Price allows people to get data and information for dairy products. Agent Pay gives users tap-approval over AI agent transactions. And Giggy is a marketplace where users can hire AI agents to perform research tasks.
On the Starlink front — if you have bad internet, it's great. I get 200 megabytes download and roughly 40 or 50 upload, which is more than you need, at $65 a month. Installation is free. That's the first thing.
The second thing: if you own rental properties and you've got tenants, whether short-term, medium-term, or long-term, sometimes the internet goes out. There's a $65 device you buy from Amazon — you plug it in, then plug in your router, and it connects and senses the connection. If something goes out, it just turns off for about 30 seconds and then pops right back on. The same thing you would do manually. We have that in our Puerto Rico place. If your router is somewhere in your basement or someplace bad, go to Amazon and look for it. It's called a power router device, I think.
On Masterworks — yes, I still have two of them. A Basquiat and I forgot the other one, but I get emails every week from them. Still there. I'll probably do well. When I talked about fractionalized artwork, I knew this wasn't a short-term play. I always expected it to be like 10 or 15 years. So I just let it go.
On inflation being transitory — I remember Janet Yellen saying that. Good times.