It's tariff season. Markets are pricing in Trump's protectionism. Equities have dumped. Crypto markets hesitated over the weekend, but are now following suit. Crypto liquidations are soaring. Is anyone going shopping yet? Let us know for what and why at 0x.newsletter@blockworks.co.

dYdX MegaVault 30D vs. 90D performance:

Source: dYdX

The dYdX MegaVault quietly tweaked its UI this week — switching the default view from a 30-day to a 90-day P&L chart. The timing is hard to ignore: Over the past month, the vault is down -$467k, while the 90-day view still shows a gain of $1.04m+.

The move didn't go unnoticed. "Love how the [MegaVault] has had a bad month so they just changed the stats page to be the last 90 days by default," joked one trader on X.

The MegaVault is a yield-generating strategy that deploys user deposits to market-make on dYdX's perpetuals exchange, aiming to earn trading fees and liquidity rewards. Like Hyperliquid's HLP, the vault has been comfortably profitable since inception, but as the page warns, "P&L will vary based on market conditions and there's a risk of losing some or all of the USDC deposited."

While this tweak doesn't change the underlying performance, it does subtly reframe user sentiment. Nudging users to zoom out may help soften short-term drawdown pain — and keep capital sticky. The vault's $21m in TVL is down from a January peak of $74m.

The MegaVault still boasts a 20% estimated APR. Not bad if you can afford to park part of your higher risk stablecoin allocation for a while.

— Macauley Peterson

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A story in charts

When Trump said "tariff" was the most beautiful word in the dictionary, he neglected to mention that beauty is subjective.

Since Trump's "reciprocal" tariff announcements on April 2, the S&P 500 is down about 10.6%.

Even gold, typically considered to be uncorrelated with equities, took about a 6.4% dive on the tariff news.

Crypto markets held up over the weekend, much to everyone's surprise.

Many theories were offered for explanation.

Some suggested crypto assets showed resistance on anticipated rate cuts and quantitative easing, some said the equities selloff on Friday was simply institutional outflows, and Galaxy's Alex Thorn posited that BTC was simply "tariff-proof."

Yet, after this brief flirtation with the idea that crypto assets would decouple from equity markets, it turned out to be pure hopium.

As the weekend drew to a close, bitcoin took a 6% nosedive on noon Sunday from $82.5k to its current trading levels of $77.2k. In the same time period, ETH took a harder tumble of 15.7%.

Down, but not a panic yet, according to CF Benchmarks' head of product Thomas Erdösi. He notes that "CME basis remains firm above 6%, and the demand for downside protection, as seen in the 25-delta skew, underscores cautious sentiment without signaling panic."

Total crypto market cap wiped thus far? About $0.23 trillion or 8.6%.

At bitcoin's current price of $77k, that is about a steep 27.2% drawdown from January's all time-highs of $106k, but still a relatively light drawdown compared to past years. The pink part of the Glassnode chart demonstrates yesterday's drawdown relative to the last cycle.

Based on CoinGlass data, total estimated liquidations of crypto assets in the last 24 hours equaled to about $1.42b. BTC saw about $479m while ETH saw $418m in liquidations.

On the April 6 and 7, Aave v3 on Ethereum saw a total $91.85m in liquidations and accumulated zero bad debt, based on Blockanalitica data.

It wouldn't be crypto if you weren't looking for opportunities in a downturn.

Based on the four-hour chart of CoinGlass' relative strength index (RSI) heatmap, notable tokens in the $400m to $500m market cap range showing relative strength include the AI memecoin FART (RSI: 51), the DePIN token GRASS (RSI: 54) and the DeFi token PENDLE (RSI: 47).

All three tokens are trading within the neutral RSI band, outperforming a broader market skewed toward oversold conditions. This may suggest bullish upward momentum as these tokens diverge from downside pressure everywhere else.

— Donovan Choy

On the latest 0xResearch podcast, the team dove into who's actually buying DeFi and governance tokens in today's market — and why.

Hating on Crypto (With Love) | Felix Jauvin & James Christoph

"Tokens are on the minds of these funds," said Ryan Connor. "They'll start at half a percent, then 1%, maybe 5% — just not on degen timeframes." Panelists noted that while many retail buyers are sidelined, some venture and hedge funds are actively building positions in liquid tokens, such as Aave and Sky (formerly Maker).

That shift is partly driven by performance pressure. "Some of these venture funds have really underperformed since 2021," Connor added. "Tokens are probably looking attractive to them where they have LPs getting a little impatient."

The panel debated whether LPs would tolerate VCs buying fully liquid assets like Aave. "It's a weird value prop," said one skeptical TradFi guest going by "James." "You're locking up capital for 10 years…to buy Hyperliquid tokens?"

But signals are shifting. "People are actively building out these lists of tokens they need to get into," noted Danny K, pointing to a renewed interest in DeFi incumbents.

While memecoins dominated the zeitgeist, the quieter structural trend of institutional token accumulation might define the next phase.

— Macauley Peterson