Recently, I keep seeing a bunch of people staring at stablecoin supply and ETF net inflows, then wrapping it up in one sentence: “Funds are coming in, so it should go up.” Please—correlation doesn’t equal causation… more stablecoins could be used for market making, could be revolving capital via borrowing and lending, or it might just be a shell sitting there, waiting. And that bit of off-exchange money for ETFs isn’t like floodgates have opened—plus, the in-and-out rhythm is pretty annoying to track. Don’t see numbers moving and automatically start inventing a storyline.

Even more absurd: big on-chain transfers, or an exchange shifting funds between hot and cold wallets, get interpreted as “smart money positioning early.” To put it plainly, a lot of it is just internal rebalancing, risk-control migrations, or a project team moving houses, or even simply switching to a different custodial address. If you truly want to track the money, first clean up the backdoors—things like authorizations and proxy contracts—otherwise you might think you’re riding the wave, but in reality you’re handing others unlimited authorization and sending money for them.