(29/52) Weekly Market Insight | July Week 5 | Macro Tug-of-War

Headline News: Macro Tug-of-War

• Bitcoin prices increased by 1% in the past week, caught in a heavy macro tug-of-war. Escalating US–Iran conflict, energy price spikes, sweeping US tariffs, and surging 10-year Treasury yields drove hawkish rate repricing, suppressing market risk appetite despite stabilizing institutional spot ETF inflows 3 weeks in a row.

Macro-Outlook: TACO Trade

• President Trump announced a series of new trade measures to replace the expiring Section 122 tariffs. The new actions include a 50% tariff on Canadian autos, dairy, and alcohol starting mid-August, a multi-year phased schedule targeting generic pharmaceuticals, and a 10% ‘forced labor’ tariff applied across 60 target countries.
• The US and Iran paused military strikes after Iran halted retaliatory actions following consecutive nights of cancelled US strikes. However, crude oil prices surged 10% in the past week to $90 as the situation remains fragile. Diplomatic channels in Oman reported progress on framework talks for managing access through the Strait of Hormuz.
• Surging energy prices have reignited market inflation concerns, driving market-implied rate hikes up from 32.84 bps last week to 44.88 bps. Concurrently, the US 10-year Treasury yield climbed 13 bps to 4.68%, reaching its highest level since January 2025.
• Meanwhile, 62% probability the interest rate will be kept unchanged in this week’s FOMC meeting.

The Upcoming Economic Calendar includes,

• Monday, July 27, 8:30pm: US Durable Goods Orders in June
• Thursday, July 30, 2:00am: US FOMC Meeting
• Thursday, July 30, 8:30pm: US Adv Q2 GDP, PCE Price Index, Personal Income and Spending in June

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: Stall in the CLARITY Act

• The US Congress received updated CLARITY Act text after President Donald Trump agreed to ethics provisions restricting federal officials from profiting from digital assets in office; however, Senate Majority Leader John Thune noted a vote before summer recess remains unlikely due to lingering disputes over stablecoin rewards and enforcement, causing the prediction market to slash 2026 passage odds to 30%.
• SEC Commissioner cautioned that certain crypto yield vaults and onchain lending products involving active managerial decisions may fall under federal securities laws.
• Strategy co-founded the Bitcoin Security Consortium alongside major financial institutions, committing $15 million over three years to fund long-term Bitcoin network security.
• BitMEX and BitMart announced the permanent shutdown of its trading exchange effective September 23 and January 2027 respectively.
• Movement Labs and Storj Labs filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

• NEAR Protocol activated quantum-safe signing on mainnet, becoming one of the first production blockchains with a NIST-approved post-quantum signature scheme while simultaneously rolling out dynamic re-sharding to automate network scaling.
• Ripple launched Ripple Mint, a unified institutional interface and API platform for minting, redeeming, and managing RLUSD digital dollar liquidity across chains.

Dapps

• Uniswap introduced Permissioned Pools on v4 in collaboration with Superstate and Securitize, establishing a hook standard that enforces protocol-level compliance checks for tokenized institutional assets.
• Morpho launched Morpho Midnight, introducing fixed-rate, fixed-term credit markets as a foundational primitive for onchain finance.
• Pump.fun introduced BOOST mode as its default launch mechanism, reinjecting future liquidity directly into every bonded token to eliminate the tens of millions lost annually to dead liquidity during token migrations.
• Ondo Perps enabled tokenized stock collateral (starting with SPYon and QQQon) to back perps positions with up to 20x leverage for all users, accelerating platform trading volume past $3.8 billion.
• The World Foundation raised $52.5million via WLD (estimated 36% to 40% discount) to scale World ID infrastructure.
• Zama unveiled Zama Confidential RFQ, an onchain trading primitive enabling institutions to swap assets privately without disclosing trade size, asset, or direction.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

• Hyperliquid unveiled its HIP-4 Outcome Markets design, featuring validator-enforced templates and a 500K HYPE staking requirement for deployers that gets slashed for improper resolutions to ensure high-quality permissionless prediction markets.
• Polygon confirmed the Ithaca mainnet hard fork for July 29, introducing automatic failover mechanisms to protect transaction continuity during block producer stalls.
• Telegram planned a summer rollout of native/default non-custodial Gram wallets across all Telegram client apps, giving over 1 billion users access to instant, zero-fee crypto transfers.
• xStocks announced plans to bring global equity markets onchain, starting with tokenized Hong Kong stocks.
• Aave submitted a governance proposal to deploy Aave V4 on Tempo, the stablecoin-focused Layer 1 incubated by Stripe and Paradigm.
• Kaito announced a data partnership with X to bring potential InfoFi use cases back.

Token Unlock

• 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.
• VANA token unlocks on August 16, representing 4.47% of the token supply.
• SOLV token unlocks on August 17, representing 42.7% of the token supply.
• ZRO token unlocks on August 20, representing 7.28% of the token supply.
• KAITO token unlocks on August 20, representing 13.5% of the token supply.