(28/52) Weekly Market Insight | July Week 4 | Cooler Inflation

Headline News: Cooler Inflation

• Despite renewed geopolitical escalation in the Middle East, Bitcoin demonstrated structural resilience, advancing 1.49% over the past week. This upside was catalyzed by a softer inflation print that compressed September rate hike probabilities by 8 percentage points. Furthermore, market structure improved as spot ETF momentum reversed from recent outflows, securing $75.67 million in positive net inflows to support the bid.

Macro-Outlook: Mouting Casualties

• The US and Iran are entering a ninth consecutive night of back-and-forth strikes. The US has launched multiple waves of munitions hitting over 100 Iranian military targets. Iranian’s IRGC has retaliated by targeting US military bases and allied infrastructure across the Gulf.
• The WTI crude oil price surged by 14%, to $81 last week.
• The US inflation rate decreased to 3.5% in June, coming in below market expectations of 3.8%. Meanwhile, PPI also decreased to 5.5% in June, well below market expectations of 6.2%. This cooler-than-expected annual print confirms the broader disinflationary trend remains fully intact, heavily driven by collapsing energy prices at the headline level.
• The implied rate hikes in 2026 decreased from 37.13bps to 32.84bps.
• The US retail sales rose 0.2% in June arriving in line with market expectations, but marking a deceleration from May’s upwardly revised 1.0% increase. However, excluding gas stations and autos, core sales rose a solid 0.7%.

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview

• The UK and US governments issued a joint statement aiming to establish comparable regulatory outcomes for stablecoins and cross-border payments, emphasizing that stablecoins should be backed 1:1 by high-quality liquid assets with segregated reserves to protect holders during insolvency.
• Lawson, Japan’s top-three convenience store chain, announced a partnership with HashPort to trial yen-denominated JPYC stablecoin payments via mobile barcodes this August, marking the country’s first stablecoin payment trial fully integrated with a traditional POS system.
• DTCC launched a massive tokenization pilot with nearly 40 major financial players, including BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs, to test tokenizing stocks like Microsoft, QQQ, and short-term US Treasuries, ensuring the tokens retain identical ownership and dividend rights.
• SBI Holdings acquired a majority equity stake in Coinhako, a prominent, licensed crypto platform in Singapore, signifying a deep push by the Japanese financial giant into Southeast Asian markets.
• Visa announced the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), enabling financial institutions, fintechs, and payment providers to access, mint, store, redeem, and manage stablecoins in a single Visa-managed environment.
• Strategy raised $466.7 million by selling 4.8 million MSTR shares last week, boosting its USD reserve to $3 billion without selling any Bitcoin. BTC holdings remain at 843,775 with no new purchases made during the period.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

• The previously Ethereum privacy working group launched EthSystems, a newly launched for-profit company, focused on providing bespoke consulting and developing open-source privacy infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of confidential systems for institutional Ethereum.
• MoneyGram partnered with Stellar Network to become one of the network validators.
• Cardano activated the Van Rossem hard fork to Protocol Version 11, introducing cost-model improvements to lower smart contract execution fees.

Dapps

• JTX launched its spot markets natively on Solana, initially granting access to the top 1,000 waitlisted users to trade memes, tokenized equities, and major assets.
• Pendle simplified its user experience by turning historically complex, multi-hour DeFi strategies including PTs looping, into accessible single-click executions.
• Jupiter Protocol introduced Jupiter Gacha, an innovative feature allowing users to pull and natively trade authenticated, graded physical Pokémon and One Piece cards fully onchain.
• Aave launched its V4 deployment on Avalanche, its first V4 expansion beyond Ethereum mainnet.
• Ethena integrated USDe and sUSDe on the Monad network, enabling USDe to be collaterised on Aave on Monad.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

• Jito activated JIP-38, committing 100% of the DAO’s revenue share from JTX to programmatic buybacks and burns of JTO for at least one year.
• Uniswap governance is currently voting on two major proposals that would turn on protocol fees for the first time across select v4 pools on seven chains, as well as v2 and v3 pools specifically on Robinhood Chain.
• Derive.xyz teased the imminent launch of V3, which is positioned to be their most significant platform upgrade yet, potentially introducing multiple RWA markets.

Token Unlock

• SCR token unlocks on July 22, representing 5.79% of the token supply.
• RESOLV token unlocks on July 27, representing 21.6% of the token supply.
• EIGEN token unlocks on August 1, representing 4.97% of the token supply.
• ZAMA token unlocks on August 2, representing 5.21% of the token supply.
• PROVE token unlocks on August 5, representing 119.7% of the token supply.
• ADI token unlocks on August 9, representing 7.18% of the token supply.
• BB token unlocks on August 13, representing 10.9% of the token supply.
• CYBER token unlocks on August 15, representing 7.47% of the token supply.
• ZKC token unlocks on August 15, representing 5.16% of the token supply.