The Fed dropped its easing bias and half the FOMC penciled in rate hikes. Zach Pandl on what Kevin Warsh's first meeting means for Bitcoin, gold, and Strategy.
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Kevin Warsh held rates steady at his first FOMC meeting but removed the committee's easing bias — and nine of eighteen participating members wrote down a rate hike for 2026, a bigger shift than markets expected.
Zach Pandl, Head of Research at Grayscale Investments and a former Goldman Sachs economist, joins Steven Ehrlich to discuss. Pandl argues that rising real rates are a constraint equity markets are not pricing correctly, and that AI euphoria makes the downside case, not blunts it.
The conversation covers the SpaceX IPO's low-float mechanics, why perpetual futures outperformed tokenized stocks around the IPO, Strategy's preferred equity cracking below $90, and why speculative flows explain gold and Bitcoin's recent turbulence better than fundamentals. Pandl closes with a buy-the-dip case for both stores of value and argues the DeFi revenue story, anchored in Hyperliquid and Aave, will define the second half of 2026.
Host:
Steven Ehrlich, Head of Research, SharpLink
Guest:
Zach Pandl - Head of Research at Grayscale Investments
Timestamps
🏛️ 02:32 The Warsh era begins: what the Fed just signaled without saying it
📈 14:39 Rising rates and irrational markets: where this breaks down
💹 16:47 The SpaceX IPO and a crypto déjà vu moment
🎓 22:56 Fidelity's message to crypto's next generation
🏆 25:55 Perpetual futures just proved something important about the SpaceX test
❄️ 27:27 Pandl just made the crypto winter official—here's why
⚠️ 31:30 The problem with Bitcoin as collateral (and no one's talking about it)
🥇 37:03 Gold and Bitcoin diverge: what the Iran conflict reveals
💰 40:01 The DeFi revenue shift nobody saw coming
