Morning Minute — reworked for a crypto audience
By Tyler Warner (opinions mine). Catch our new daily news show: five minutes, top stories — available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Top story: Bitcoin slips after Powell’s likely final FOMC
Bitcoin sold off Wednesday as markets digested what is likely Jerome Powell’s last Federal Open Market Committee meeting as Fed chair. The FOMC voted 8–4 to hold the policy rate at 3.50–3.75%, with four dissents sending a clear message to incoming leadership: the committee won’t be monolithic.
Powell surprised markets by saying he will remain on the Fed’s Board of Governors beyond May 15 for an unspecified period, citing ongoing legal fights with the Trump administration that have required court action. He also framed the macro backdrop as unusually difficult — four near-simultaneous supply shocks (COVID, the Ukraine war, tariffs, and tensions with Iran) that can push inflation and unemployment higher together. After his remarks, the market-implied odds of a 2026 rate cut plunged to about 1% (from roughly 25% a week ago), a development that tightened financial conditions and pressured risk assets including Bitcoin.
Big Tech earnings: AI and cloud justify capex — but Meta lags
Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta reported Q1 results Wednesday. The headline: AI capital spending is starting to pay off, cloud growth is accelerating, and the long-running “is capex worth it?” question is tilting positive — with one notable exception.
- Alphabet was the standout: Google Cloud revenue jumped 63% year-over-year to $20.1 billion, its fastest growth since 2022, driven by enterprise AI adoption. CEO Sundar Pichai said enterprise AI became the primary cloud growth driver in Q1.
- All four megacaps beat earnings overall, but share reactions varied.
- Meta raised its already-large 2026 capex guidance by another $10 billion and beat revenue, but its stock fell 6–7% in after-hours trading after missing user-growth expectations (Meta cited internet disruptions in Iran). The market appears to be parsing growth tradeoffs between heavy AI investment and near-term user metrics.
Crypto corner: Meta quietly returns to crypto payouts
Meta has started paying select creators in USDC, marking a careful return to crypto payments roughly four years after abandoning Libra. The rollout is small and specific:
- Payouts currently limited to creators in Colombia and the Philippines.
- USDC is distributed on Solana and Polygon; creators can link MetaMask, Phantom or Binance wallets to their Facebook payout account.
- Stripe handles backend payments and crypto-specific tax reporting.
- Meta is explicit it is not issuing its own stablecoin and is not providing an on-ramp/off-ramp — creators must convert USDC to local fiat via third-party exchanges themselves.
Sky Protocol posts record quarter (but token lags)
Sky Protocol — the new brand for MakerDAO — reported its best quarter since inception. The $13 billion protocol generated nearly $124 million in gross revenue and about $61 million in net revenue in Q1 2026, driven by growing institutional interest in on-chain yield and Sky’s real-world-asset collateral model. Revenue streams included loan stability fees, liquidation fees, and peg-stability module fees.
Despite the milestone, the SKY governance token slipped about 2.4% — a reminder that protocol revenue and token market performance don’t always move in lockstep unless tokenomics explicitly convert revenue into token-holder value (e.g., buybacks, burns, or distributions).
Retail crypto adoption: Steak ’n Shake’s Bitcoin experiment is working
The 91-year-old burger chain Steak ’n Shake began accepting Bitcoin across all U.S. locations in May 2025 and has since seen a meaningful business impact:
- Same-store sales “rose dramatically.”
- Payment processing fees dropped roughly 50% compared to credit cards through Lightning Network payments.
- Customer-paid Bitcoin goes straight into a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve rather than being cashed out.
- The company formalized a $10 million treasury purchase in January, added another $10 million in April, and now holds about 210 BTC.
- In March it began paying hourly employees a 21-cent-per-hour Bitcoin bonus funded from the reserve, and it recently launched a Bitcoin-themed milkshake.
COO Dan Edwards frames the program as self-reinforcing: Bitcoin payments boost sales, Bitcoin revenue funds upgrades and bonuses, improved stores attract more customers — and the treasury grows. Steak ’n Shake’s experiment offers one of the clearest recent case studies in merchant-level crypto adoption and treasury strategy.
That’s the Morning Minute. More analysis and context in the show — five minutes, all the top stories.
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