What happened
Joe Weisenthal, the Bloomberg columnist and Odd Lots co-host, published a 12-point case Tuesday for why the current crypto drawdown is the worst he has tracked. The piece extends a February column where he gave 10 reasons. "Well everything I cited then still holds," he wrote, adding that two additional factors have since pushed the picture into darker territory. He shared the newsletter on X, where it ricocheted through crypto Twitter within hours.
The headline framing is that crypto's weakness is no longer a function of broad risk-off sentiment. It is happening while adjacent speculative trades are exploding. Weisenthal pointed to a chart of the Goldman Sachs non-profitable tech basket climbing sharply, with Kevin Gordon at the Schwab Center for Financial Research saying the basket is "mooning again" in a way that resembles 2021. The Goldman US quantum computing basket has also moved materially higher.
Weisenthal named specific equities to make the point sting. SK Hynix is up more than 250% year to date. Micron is up more than 260%. "First, other people are making SO MUCH MONEY," he wrote, invoking a 2017-era New York Times headline: "Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You're Not."
Why it matters
Weisenthal is not a perma-bear and not a crypto outsider. He has covered the asset class on Odd Lots for years and his framing tends to land with the institutional macro crowd that allocates to BlackRock's IBIT and Fidelity's FBTC. When a Bloomberg columnist with that audience tells them crypto is structurally losing the attention trade to AI and quantum, that is the read flowing into Monday morning investment committee meetings.