US April tariff revenue hits record high! Is the mining cost less than $37,000?
Macro interpretation: The current global financial market is experiencing an unprecedented complex situation, where the phased results of the China-US tariff agreement and the dollar trust crisis form a hedging effect. This special tension in the macro economy injects new momentum into the cryptocurrency market. It is noteworthy that the latest data from the US Treasury shows that April tariff revenue surged to $16 billion, with a daily record of over $500 million, which implicitly reveals the pressure of restructuring the global trade system. This pressure is reshaping the pricing logic of crypto assets through multiple transmission mechanisms.
From the perspective of the miner economic model, the $36,800 single-coin mining cost line has become an important anchor point in the market. The current BTC price has a premium space of 182% over the cost line, which actually constitutes a 'margin of safety' similar to traditional commodities. Interestingly, this profit level corresponds historically with the starting point of the bull market in November 2022, and the repair capability of the miner community after the halving shock may determine the subsequent market elasticity. The trend of intense competition in computing power is noteworthy, with an annual capital expenditure of billions of dollars forming a moat for computing power. This technological arms race is fundamentally different from the 2017 ASIC miner iteration wave; the current growth in computing power is more due to institutional investors' premium recognition of network security.
The trust crisis in dollar assets is catalyzing the migration of funds. The bearish sentiment towards the dollar, as shown in a Bank of America survey, has reached a 19-year high, resonating with UBS's downgrade of US stock ratings. This demand for asset reallocation has shown a structured characteristic in the crypto market: institutions like MicroStrategy continue to increase their holdings, leading to a contraction in the circulating supply, while Coinbase's inclusion in the S&P 500 index marks the formal entry of crypto assets into mainstream allocation visibility. It is noteworthy that the entry of traditional institutions brings not only incremental funds but also reshapes market volatility patterns; the CME Bitcoin futures open contracts have reached a historical high, indicating that the application of risk management tools is smoothing short-term price fluctuations.
Geopolitical games inject special variables into the crypto market. The erratic tariff policy of the Trump administration has objectively strengthened the 'digital gold' narrative of Bitcoin. After the 'buy the dip' call on April 9, the S&P 500 index's 14% rebound and its weakening correlation with BTC indicate that crypto assets are beginning to show independence. This trend is particularly evident in the ETH market, where the technical breakthroughs brought by the Pectra upgrade have pushed the price to stabilize at $2,400, and the narrowing of put skew in the options market indicates that institutional investors are establishing strategic positions. It is noteworthy that the BTC dominance falling below 63% may herald the arrival of altcoin season, but the density of technical upgrades in mainstream tokens during this cycle has significantly increased, which is fundamentally different from the pure concept speculation of 2017.
The subtle changes in monetary policy expectations are forming long-term benefits. JPMorgan's judgment on the 30 basis point interest rate cut space in Chinese monetary policy, combined with adjustments in the Federal Reserve's balance sheet reduction rhythm, is creating new types of safe-haven demand in the tug-of-war over global liquidity. The 3% intraday volatility in gold prices stands in stark contrast to the stability of BTC's range, and this interplay may suggest that the value storage function of 'digital gold' is gaining broader recognition. From the perspective of capital flow, the surge in demand for back-end options exposes institutional investors' long-term layout thinking, and the steepening evolution of the volatility curve suggests that the market is accumulating energy for a major breakthrough.
The resonance effect of multiple factors at the current moment may be nurturing a qualitative change in the market. The hard constraints of miner costs, technological support for computing power growth, the ongoing erosion of dollar credit, and the normalization of geopolitical risks together constitute the fundamentals for Bitcoin to break through previous highs. Historical experience shows that when the mining capital expenditure curve and the price curve form a golden cross, it often indicates the arrival of a bull market's main upward wave. Currently, the annual computing power investment scale of $12 billion has far exceeded the levels of the 2017 cycle, and this 'computing power premium' may be reconstructing Bitcoin's value discovery mechanism. Against the backdrop of widening gaps in the traditional financial system, the 'institutional substitution' property of crypto assets may usher in a key window for value re-evaluation.
Data analysis:
CoinAank data shows that on May 13, 2025, the open contract size on the Hyperliquid platform exceeded $6.7 billion, setting a historical record in the decentralized finance (DeFi) derivatives market.
Behind this milestone, Hyperliquid continues to consolidate its market dominance through the innovative combination of its high-performance Layer-1 blockchain architecture and perpetual contract DEX. On the technical level, its HyperBFT consensus mechanism achieves sub-second latency and processing capabilities of over 200,000 orders per second, attracting high-frequency traders; in terms of product design, the atomic closing mechanism, risk control model, and fees as low as CEX levels replicate the efficient experience of centralized exchanges on-chain. It is noteworthy that the platform's open contract volume accounted for only 10% of Binance in 2024, but through token incentives, EVM ecological expansion, and the increased trading demand brought about by market volatility, its market share surged to an industry-leading level within a year.
This data breakthrough has multiple implications for the crypto market. First, Hyperliquid validates the possibility of decentralized derivatives protocols challenging centralized exchanges (CEX) in terms of liquidity and scale, with its open contracts accounting for 66.2% of the total size of the top ten DEXs, which may accelerate the migration of capital from traditional CEX to on-chain. Second, the platform distributes profits to the community through a token economic model (such as HYPE tokens), promoting innovation in DeFi governance models. However, it should be noted that excessive reliance on a single protocol may lead to systemic risk concentration, such as the recent trust crisis caused by oracle mechanism defects that led to a 25% drop in token prices in a single day. Overall, the rise of Hyperliquid marks a key point in the transition of the derivatives market infrastructure to a decentralized paradigm, and its technological iteration and ecological expansion will become an important window for observing DeFi competitiveness.
