(24/52) Weekly Market Insight | June Week 22 | Chaotic Peace Deal

Headline News: Chaotic Peace Deal

• Bitcoin retraced 3.73% last week and is consolidating between the $60K and $65K range, as expectations of tighter US monetary policy through 2026 firmed. The dollar index climbed above 101, its highest in a year, adding short-term pressure to dollar-sensitive assets such as Bitcoin and gold. US equities looked past the move, with investor positioning still heavily concentrated in AI trades.

Macro-Outlook: Hawkish Fed

• The US and Iran signed a Memorandum of Understanding for 60-day ceasefire, reopenning Strait of Hormuz and continuous negotiation about nuclear programs. However, military operation between Hezbollah and Israel in Lenanon remain active, President Trump threathened to strike Iran if it didn’t restrain the proxies in Lenanon. The Iranian delegation walked out of Switzerland in-person talks, and declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. The WTI oil prices opened near 2% higher on Monday.
• The Fed held the interest rate steady, with a notably hawkish dot plot showing half of officials projecting at least one rate hike this year and only one projecting a cut. New Fed Chair Warsh stated the Fed will operate in ample reserve policy, and build 5 task forces to research on potential changes in Fed’s communication, data collection and more. The task forces are expected to deliver research results and recommendations at the end of 2026.
• The probability of rate hikes by the end of the year increased from 48.7% to near 90%.
• US retail sales increased by 0.9% in May, well above the market expectations of 0.5%. The sales increased the most in gasoline stations and miscellaneous store retailers.

The Upcoming Economic Calendar includes,

• Thursday, June 25, 8:30pm: The US PCE Price Index, Durable Goods Orders, Personal Income and Personal Spending in May, and Final Q1 GDP

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: STRC Price Hit All-Time-Low

• Coinbase unveiled new system upgrades, including options trading for crypto and stocks, tokenised equities, pre-IPO perpetuals, and more.
• Strategy’s variable-rate perpetual preferred stock STRC hit a record low of $82 on last Thursday driven by a liquidation cascade.
• ECB President Lagarde reportedly opposed Binance’s entry into the EU market in discussions with the Greek government, potentially influencing Greece’s stance and leaving France as Binance’s last viable MiCA licensing option in Europe. Binance has about a week before mandatory MiCA requirement to operate in EU on July 1.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

• Plasma One went live, offering early users the Core tier free for the first year with benefits including up to 10% cashback on AI, airlines and more on the Platinum card, exclusively open to XPL holders during the launch window.
• Plume partnered with Bybit to launch institutional fixed income vaults, allowing users to deploy idle stablecoins into PIMCO and CMBI-backed products such as mortgage-backed securities, high-yield corporates, and APAC investment-grade bonds with yields uncorrelated from crypto price movements.
• Andre Cronje, Michael Kong and David Richardson resigned from the Sonic Labs board. Cronje said he would be focusing on Flying Tulip, his DEX protocol, moving forward.
• Secret Network’s Axelar bridge was drained of $4.67 million in an infinite-mint exploit that went unnoticed for seven days due to a vulnerable forked CW20-ICS20 contract with core security checks removed.

Dapps

• Zama launched the first DeFi yield venue for confidential USDC (cUSDC) in partnership with Morpho and SteakhouseFi, enabling institutions to earn yield on encrypted positions without revealing holdings or strategies on Ethereum.
• Curve Finance launched LlamaLend V2 on Optimism, opening new isolated markets powered by LLAMMA for borrow, lend and loop strategies, with OP rewards for eligible positions distributed via Merkl.
• Flex went live as an immutable, isolated fixed-rate money market where borrowers choose their fixed rate and liquidity adjusts via redemptions to maintain high utilization and reliable lender exits, with the first yvUSD/USDC market now operational.
• Panoptic upgraded to v2, enabling any Uniswap pair to be upgraded into a lending market, with the wSPCXx/USDC example currently offering 11% yield on SPCX for lenders and direct borrow/lend available.
• Hylo introduced its V2 xAsset Engine on Solana, bringing structurally superior leveraged tokens (xAssets) across crypto, equities, commodities and yield-bearing assets with event-driven rebalancing and liquidation-resistant design.
• Lighter enabled Atomic Orders, allowing users to long and/or short multiple markets in a single transaction for fast execution of basket strategies.
• Kaito AI expanded its influence mapping platform with a revamped Social Card now covering stock trading, AI and crypto, functioning as a live, shareable name card that users can claim and use to accumulate influence across verticals.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

• Jito’s high speed routing trading exchange, JTX, is expected to be launched in private beta in early July. 80% of JTX’s revenue will flow back to the Jito DAO.
• Base detailed its Beryl network upgrade which targeted the mainnet on June 25, featuring the B20 native token standard with built-in compliance tooling, a reduction in withdrawal delay from 7 to 5 days, and Reth V2 optimizations for lower node disk usage and higher throughput.
• Aster updated its tokenomics that 99% of daily platform fees are now automatically used for ASTER buybacks and burns, with burns executed biweekly until total supply falls from 8 billion to 3 billion, while permissionless listing fees fund additional veASTER staking rewards.
• Ethereum research detailed SPHINCS minus, an efficient stateless post-quantum signature verification scheme for the EVM achieving practical ~127K–150K gas costs via keccak256 optimizations without requiring precompiles or protocol changes. Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade has reached the final stage on the testnet.

Token Unlock

• H token unlocks on June 25, representing 14.8% of the token supply.
• XPL token unlocks on June 25, representing 4.94% of the token supply.
• TAKE token unlocks on June 25, representing 7.15% of the token supply.
• SAHARA token unlocks on June 26, representing 30.9% of the token supply.
• WCT token unlocks on June 26, representing 9.01% of the token supply.
• RESOLV token unlocks on June 27, representing 21.6% of the token supply.
• MEGA token unlocks on June 30, representing 1.84% of the token supply.
• EIGEN token unlocks on July 1, representing 4.97% of the token supply.
• KITE token unlocks on July 1, representing 2.53% of the token supply.
• FF token unlocks on July 1, representing 3.3% of the token supply.
• EDGE token unlocks on July 2, representing 4.25% of the token supply.
• ZAMA token unlocks on July 2, representing 5.21% of the token supply.