(20/52) Weekly Market Insight | May Week 5 | Yield Pressure

Headline News: Yield Pressure

• Bitcoin concluded the week largely unchanged, recording a moderate 0.5% decline. Price action was initially pushed down to the $74K level by shifting macro dynamics, notably the US 30-year Treasury yield surging to 5.2% and slightly recovered amid emerging market optimism surrounding a potential US-Iran deal. On the institutional front, spot Bitcoin ETFs experienced a sharp contraction in demand, posting $1.26 billion in net outflows for the week, marking the largest negative flow since January.

Macro-Outlook: Stalled Deal

• The White House indicated that a formal announcement regarding the Iran agreement will be delayed by several days, contrasting with earlier optimism from Trump that a largely negotiated deal was imminent. Anticipation of this agreement drove WTI crude oil down 4.11% last week.
• The FOMC’s April meeting minutes signaled that further policy tightening and rate hikes remain on the table if inflation fails to meaningfully cool. Markets are currently pricing in a 67% probability of at least one rate hike in 2026.

The Upcoming Economic Calendar includes,

• Thursday, May 28, 8:30pm: US Q1 GDP, PCE Price Index, Personal Income and Personal Spending in April

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: Stalled “Innovation Exemption”

• SEC considered introducing an “innovation exemption” that would allow third parties to issue tokenized stocks without issuer authorization and trade them on DeFi platforms. However, the decision was being delayed amid concerns over unauthorized third-party equity tokens and challenges ensuring shareholder rights on blockchain.
• Coinbase launched its Custom Stablecoin platform. Flipcash’s USDF, a Solana-native, USDC-backed stablecoin, is the inaugural partner asset to go live on the network.
• Polymarket partnered with Nasdaq Private Market to give retail traders exclusive exposure to private company valuations through prediction markets.
• ICE and OKX partnered to launch perpetual oil futures based on Brent and WTI benchmarks, offered through OKX in licensed jurisdictions.
• Wintermute launched Armitage, a non-custodial DeFi vault curation platform for institutional onchain yield focused on “hard-to-custody” collateral with no KYC required.
• Deel extended stablecoin payouts to full-time employees across the Eurozone and US (with UK and LATAM coming soon), allowing each employee to choose fiat, stablecoins, or both within a single compliant platform.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

• Sui launched gasless stablecoin transfers on the mainnet, allowing users to send supported stablecoins with zero gas fees and no SUI required.
• Tempo welcomed MoneyGram as its first remittance validator, with plans to integrate stablecoin settlement into live payment flows via Stripe.
• Ripple integrated Prime with EDX Markets to give institutional clients seamless access to spot and perpetual futures liquidity inside its prime brokerage framework, with RLUSD planned as a future settlement and collateral asset.
• NEAR powered Trezu Confidential Treasuries, bringing private payroll, balances, and transactions to teams across 35+ chains via NEAR private sharding and Intents.
• Plume secured a Digital Asset Business Licence from the Bermuda Monetary Authority, becoming the world’s first regulated onchain vault manager.

Dapps

• Lighter launched RFQ in beta on eligible RWA markets, enabling one-click large-position entry/exit with lower slippage via market-maker liquidity responses. Lighter also achieved full ZK circuit source verification by L2BEAT for its Desert verifier, enabling permissionless emergency exits without trusting the protocol.
• Jupiter launched Metis V8 to solve quotation-execution drift through slippage penalties, JIT onchain finalization, sub-2 slot latency infrastructure, and an optional Rapid Quotation Mode for speed-sensitive trades.
• Fetch.ai launched Agent Launchpad, the first agentic token deployment platform where verified Agentverse agents can issue their own tokens via bonding curve on BSC for 120 FET, with 2% FET fees and automatic graduation to PancakeSwap V2 once 30,000 FET liquidity is reached.
• Pump.fun introduced USDC-paired liquidity pools for new coin launches with higher starting market caps of $4,000 and bonding curves of $58,783 for improved stability, fairer distribution, and reduced supply abuse.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

• BNB Chain tested its post-quantum cryptography upgrade using ML-DSA-44 signatures and pqSTARK vote aggregation. The migration passed testing but produced a 40% TPS drop due to signature size increasing from 65 to 2,420 bytes.
• Uniswap proposed expanding v2 and v3 protocol fees to BNB Chain, Polygon, and Celo, enabling additional UNI burns across more chains where fees already live on nine others.
• BNB Chain activated BEP-677, a UI multiplier standard that lets wallets and explorers automatically display token balances reflecting real-world value without changing onchain supply.
• NEAR announced dynamic re-sharding in its upcoming network upgrade, enabling the protocol to automatically add shards as demand grows while also introducing post-quantum-safe signing expected in June 2026.

Token Unlock

• HUMA token unlocks on May 26, representing 7.28% of the token supply.
• WCT token unlocks on May 26, representing 7.64% of the token supply.
• RESOLV token unlocks on May 27, representing 21.6% of the token supply.
• SOPH token unlocks on May 28, representing 6.98% of the token supply.
• KMNO token unlocks on May 31, representing 22.9% of the token supply.
• EIGEN token unlocks on May 31, representing 4.97% of the token supply.
• FF token unlocks on June 1, representing 4.06% of the token supply.
• EDGE token unlocks on June 2, representing 4.25% of the token supply.
• ZAMA token unlocks on June 2, representing 5.21% of the token supply.
• FHE token unlocks on June 10, representing 7.09% of the token supply.
• HOME token unlocks on June 10, representing 23% of the token supply.