Crypto Market July Week 5 Recap: ETH Surges, Tariffs & Key Unlocks

Headline News: A Risk-On Market

Ethereum outpaced Bitcoin last week, posting a gain of 3.06% versus Bitcoin’s 1.87%. This outperformance was fueled by robust weekly inflows of $1.85 billion into spot Ethereum ETFs. Underscoring the market’s liquidity, the total stablecoin market capitalization and total value locked in DeFi reached a new all-time high of $265 billion and $330 billion respectively. In the macro environment, the VIX fell to its lowest level since February 2025, signaling market calm ahead of the August 1 tariff deadline.

Macro-Outlook: A Packed Macro-Week

The US has struck a trade deal with the EU to impose a 15% tariff across EU exports and an agreement on purchasing $750 billion worth of energy from the US. The ECB also held its interest unchanged last week, matched with market consensus.
The White House has confirmed multiple times with the press, that the deadline on August 1 for US tariff policy is firm, with no further extension. The administration indicated it will enforce a new baseline tariff of 15%.
The US durable goods orders declined by 9.3% in June, which is slightly benign compared to market forecasts of 10.8% decline. This was the largest monthly decline since April 2020, due to a decrease in orders for transport equipment.

Upcoming Economic Calendar including,

Tuesday, July 29, 3:00am: US Treasury Refunding Financing Estimates
Tuesday, July 29, 10:00pm: US JOLTs Job Openings in June
Wednesday, July 30, 8:15pm: US ADP Employment Change in July
Wednesday, July 30, 8:30pm: US Q2 Advance GDP and US Treasury Refunding Announcement
Thursday, July 31, 2:00am: US FOMC Meeting
Thursday, July 31, 8:30pm: US Core PCE Price Index, Personal Income and Personal Spending in June
Friday, August 1, 8:30pm: US Non-Farm Payrolls and Unemployment Rate in July
Friday, August 1, 10:00pm: US ISM Manufacturing PMI in July

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: Tokenised Real-Estate, Solana BAM, New InfoFi replaces Airdrop Meta

The SEC staff approved the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund and paused subsequently by the commissioners, similar to Grayscale’s Digital Large Cap Fund. Bitwise’s fund includes BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL, ADA, SUI, LINK, AVAX, LTC and DOT.
21Shares filed an Ondo spot ETF application with the SEC.
Goldman Sachs and BNY are reportedly planning to enable their institutional investors to purchase tokenised money market funds.
JPMorgan is reportedly exploring offering loans backed by Bitcoin and Ethereum.
PNC Bank partnered with Coinbase to offer crypto trading services to customers.
Western Union is exploring using stablecoin for cross-border transfers and fiat conversion.
Christie’s International Real Estate announced becoming the first US real estate broker to conduct property transactions entirely on-chain.
MUFG, the largest Japanese bank, plans to tokenise a high-rise office building in Osaka with a value of over ¥100 billion on its Progmat platform.
The Vietnamese government is reportedly developing a national blockchain, NDAChain, to enhance digital security and transparency across sectors in government affairs, finance and healthcare.
Binance introduced RWUSD, offering native yield from tokenised US treasury at approximately 4.2% on its exchange platform.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

Ethereum average gas limit has reached 45 million, with more than 46% validators support above 45 million gas limit.
Solana has increased its block limit from 50 million compute units (CU) to 60 million CU and aims to increase to 100M CU by the end of 2025. Solana also introduced Solana Attestation Service (SAS) with TypeScript and Rust clients, enabling developers to integrate SAS into dapps.
EigenLayer announced its first step toward multi-chain expansion, launching AVS verification on Base.
Avail partnered with SOON Network to launch svmBNB, a Solana Virtual Machine that runs on Avail and settles on BNB Chain.
Berachain introduced Reward Vault Utilities, enabling BGT distribution without requiring deposit interactions. Built on Proof of Liquidity, these tools let protocols reward users based on any on- or off-chain activity, including novel formats like loot boxes or real-time rewards.
Peaq, the DePIN-focus Layer-1, has launched on Binance Alpha and multiple CEXes such as Bitget, Kraken and Pionex.
TON wallet launched in the US, offering zero fees to convert dollars to crypto.
Chromia introduced a physical AI pilot program, enabling interaction logs stored as vector representations on-chain and indexing, laying the groundwork for evaluating, coordinating, and improving how these systems operate together.

Dapps

Jito introduced Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM), enabling encrypted the mempool to prevent MEV attack, application-specific sequencing and attestation of the transactions being executed accordingly.
Sanctum acquired Ironforge, a Solana RPC service provider, expanding its business model into transaction infrastructure, guaranteeing transactions priority and maximum uptime. Sanctum subsequently introduced Gateway, enabling optimise and increase likelihood of transaction inclusion on the network.
Kaito officially announced the launch of Capital Launchpad, a KYC-required token launchpad based on social reputation and other onchain metrics. All fees generated by this launchpad will potentially be distributed gKAITO soon. Espresso will be the first protocol launch on Capital Launchpad, raising at $400 million valuation and a 2-year vesting schedule with a 1-year cliff.
Similarly, Cookie partnered with Legion launched the Attention Capital Market (ACM), offering users to SNAPS (by acquiring mindshare) or cSNAPS (commiting capital preferred by protocols) to participate in token sales. Almanak, a DeFAI protocol, is the first protocol to be listed on ACM.
Pendle listed Hyperwave’s hwHLP, offering the first liquid HLP yield market on the platform with approximately 15% fixed APY.
PancakeSwap launched Infinity Farms on Base, enabling seamless liquidity mining on Base.
Polymarket acquired QCEX, a CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse, to regain legal access to the US market. Polymarket is also reportedly considering issuing its own stablecoin or pursuing a revenue sharing agreement with Circle to capture the potential yield from stablecoin held on its platform.
Firelight launched liquid staking Ripple, stXRP on Flare Network, enabling stakers to participate in DeFi activities on Flare Network while receiving staking rewards.
Private chat and crypto payment mobile app, TOMI, has launched on iOS and Andriod.
Bonk has burnt 500 billion BONK with the revenue generated from Let’s Bonk launchpad. Let’s Bonk launched a mobile app as well.
Centrifuge V3, its tokenisation management platform, is now live on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Plume, with cross-chain functionality powered by Wormhole.
DeBridge announced the deBridge Reserve Fund, using 100% protocol earning to buyback DBR and other major crypto assets to form diversified treasury holdings.

Upcoming Alpha and Governance

The White House is expected to announce the Digital Assets Report on July 30.
Ethereum is celebrating its 10-year anniversary on July 30.
Ika, MPC network which features cross-chain transactions and wallet abstraction, is expected to launch its IKA token on July 29.
Spheron Network, a decentralised computing protocol, is expected to launch its SPON token on July 29.
Ethena introduced StablecoinX Inc, a merged entity of TLGY and SC Assets, raising $360 million to purchase ENA as its corporate treasury. The $260 million proceeds received by Ethena Foundation will be used to purchase ENA across public traded venues over the coming weeks. The foundation also has the right to veto any sales of ENA by StablecoinX.
Resolv announced activating the fee switch from 2.5% of daily protocol profits to the Foundation treasury on July 31 and subsequently increasing to 10% on August 21.
Zircuit introduced a new AI Trading Engine, providing real-time AI signal trading strategy and seamless cross-chain execution on EVM chains and Solana. The closed beta will be rolled out by the end of July and public launch in August 2025.
Fluid introduced Fluid DEX Lite, a gas-efficient DEX designed to capture the MEV volume and bootstrapped via a credit line from the Fluid Liquidity Layer. Fees generated by DEX Lite will be distributed to the LP on Liquidity Layer and additional fees flow to DAO treasury.
Jupiter is expected to launch Jupiter Lend this week.
Injective is expected to launch Ethernia EVM Mainnet Beta this week.
WalletConnect proposed redesigning its staking mechanism from immediate decay of stakeweight after staking to full stakeweight until user chooses to unstake.
Lido released roadmap to release Lido v3 in Q4 and Staking Router v3, consolidating validators, enhancing deposit and stake allocation mechanisms, in the first half of 2026.
Pump.fun cofounder stated the protocol is not going to conduct any airdrop in the near future.
Maple Finance proposed MIP-018, increasing SYRUP buyback by 20% to 25% from protocol revenue.