TL;DR

• Crypto lender ‘Ledn’ processed more than $690M in loans to institutional clients in Q1, while retail is yet to arrive (which means the best is yet to come for crypto).

Full Story

Alright, time for some ‘canary in the coal mine’ data.

If you don’t know what that is, it’s because we just made it up…kinda.

(If nothing else, we gave it a name).

Here’s what it means:

Say you want to predict whether house prices are going to stay steady, go up, or go down. You could look at how many homes have been sold recently — but past/present performance doesn’t necessarily indicate future results.

So you might instead look for some ‘canary in the coal mine’ data.

Like, for example: how many home loans were taken out in the previous quarter (which indicates buyer intent).

This is like the crypto version of that.

The crypto lending firm Ledn processed more than $690M in loans in Q1, which was almost 5x the value of the previous three months.

(Making it the company’s most successful quarter yet).

And ok, ok — buying crypto is way faster than buying a house — which means most of this capital has probably been pumped into the market already…

But here’s why this data is still super relevant:

Ledn says the vast majority of these loans were made to institutional clients.

You know those crazy hockey stick ‘up and to the right’ crypto charts that you see each bull run? You know what/who makes the charts do that?

It’s not institutions. It’s retail buyers.

Institutional buyers tend to get in 6-12 months before retail shows up.

Which indicates much of the bull market madness is still yet to come!

(Now, who wants a running chest bump?)