(27/52) Weekly Market Insight | July Week 3 | Resumption of ETF Inflow - ChainUp: Leading Provider of Digital Asset Exchange & Custody Solutions

Headline News: Resumption of ETF Inflow

Over the past week, Bitcoin remained essentially flat with a marginal 0.23% increase, as Bitcoin spot ETFs resumed net inflow of $197M. However, price action has been tightly range-bound on thin summer liquidity as traders cautiously await highly anticipated US inflation report before making any decisive moves.

Macro-Outlook: End of Ceasefires

Over the past week, oil prices surged by more than 4% as the collapse of a US-Iran interim agreement and escalating military exchanges near the Strait of Hormuz abruptly reintroduced a significant geopolitical risk premium into global energy markets.
The FOMC minutes delivered a hawkish surprise to the market. Despite the weaker jobs data earlier in the month, the Fed’s willingness to entertain further hikes signals that inflation, rather than employment, remains their primary concern. The possibility of rate hikes in September increased from 54% to 72%.
US ISM services PMI registered 54 in June, perfectly matching market expectations, marking the 24th consecutive month of expansion for the services sector.
The second-quarter earnings season has unofficially begun, spearheaded by major US financial institutions.

The Upcoming Economic Calendar includes,

Tuesday, July 14, 8:30pm: US Inflation Rate in June
Wednesday, July 15, 8:30pm: US PPI in June
Thursday, July 16, 8:30pm: US Retail Sales in June
Thursday, July 16, 8:30pm: US Initial Jobless Claims
Friday, July 17, 10:00pm: US Preliminary University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment in July

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: Markets Overlooked Strategy’s Sales

SEC plans to release a crypto safe harbor proposal as early as this month to establish a framework for on-chain financial activities, potentially offering tokenized securities and DeFi projects a compliance path to build without immediate fear of enforcement.
Clarity Act faces a shrinking window to pass Congress before the midterms, having missed its July 4th target with the next key legislative deadline rapidly approaching on August 7th.
Strategy sold 3,588 BTC for $216 million to fund dividends on its STRC. This $216 million sales was not considered part of the $1.25 billion Bitcoin monetization program.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

Ripple has received full Crypto Asset Service Provider (CASP) authorization under the EU’s MiCA framework from Luxembourg, allowing the firm to seamlessly “passport” its regulated services across all 30 EEA countries ahead of full enforcement.
NEAR Protocol announced that Confidential Intents are now generally available, allowing builders using the NEAR Intents 1Click Swap API to offer confidential cross-chain execution natively.

Dapps

Aave introduced Stable Vaults, an all-in-one comprehensive solution designed for seamlessly embedding fixed-rate stablecoin yield directly into any financial product.
Jupiter Protocol rolled out its GUM private beta, launching a platform aimed at making on-chain trading accessible and intuitive enough for everyday users rather than just power users by enabling easy cross-chain trading in a single interface.
Ondo launched Ondo Perps for Pre-Alpha users, offering up to 20x leverage on equity perpetuals using tokenized stocks as collateral across major traditional markets.
Pump.fun added support for trading trending Robinhood tokens directly on their application, allowing users to trade seamlessly in SOL without the friction of bridging.
Tether is bringing USDT back to the Bitcoin network natively via the RGB protocol v0.11.1, utilizing client-side validation and Lightning Network compatibility to enable near-instant transfers while leveraging Bitcoin’s base layer security and minimizing on-chain footprints.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

Bitcoin node runners are being urged to signal readiness for BIP-110, a proposed softfork that aims to reject arbitrary data storage on the network to reaffirm Bitcoin’s primary function as money, essentially blocking BRC20 and Runes transactions. Bitcoin prominent figures Adam Back and Michael Saylor have publicly opposed the BIP-110 softfork proposal, warning that policing transactions conflicts with permissionless principles.
BNB Chain released its 2026 H2 Tech Roadmap, which outlines plans to double mainnet throughput alongside the development of a new, parallel Layer 1 blockchain designed for agentic trading. Targeted for an early 2027 mainnet launch, this new chain aims to deliver a centralized exchange-like execution experience featuring sub-50ms transaction preconfirmations, over 100,000 TPS, and no public mempool to effectively mitigate front-running and sandwich attacks.
Uniswap proposed activating protocol fees on select v4 pools through a dynamic V4 Fee Controller system rather than a fixed blanket percentage, allowing governance to seamlessly adjust fee rules across different pool families and direct the collected revenue toward burning UNI tokens.
Maple proposed MIP-021, a rules-based system to utilize 10% to 30% of its monthly revenue (scaling directly with revenue size) to publicly buy back SYRUP tokens.
Arbitrum revealed through Offchain Labs that 10% of fees collected from Arbitrum L2s, including the newly live Robinhood Chain, will be directed back into the Arbitrum ecosystem with 8% going to the treasury and 2% to development.