(30/52) Weekly Market Insight | August Week 1 | Lowest Activities in 3 Years

Headline News: Lowest Activities in 3 Years

• Bitcoin declined 2.81% last week as surging yields pressured liquidity-sensitive risk assets. Market fatigue was further evidenced by muted institutional activity, with BTC spot ETFs recording slightly negative weekly net inflows and DAT companies sitting near zero, alongside trading volumes plunging to a three-year low.

Macro-Outlook: Discrepancy on War, Rates and AI Valuation

• The US and Iran entered the 6th month of military conflict as President Trump initially ordered new strikes, before subsequently cancelling the attack after agreeing to deal with perimeters for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. However, the Iranian media outlet reported the agreed deal was false.
• The US Petroleum Reserve dropped by 3.8 million barrels to 308 million barrels, hitting its lowest level since March 1983 after 18 consecutive weekly declines.
• The Federal Reserve kept the target interest rate range unchanged, with three officials dissenting in favor of a 25 basis point hike. The implied rate hikes in 2026 dropped from 44.88bsp last week to 33.8bsp, or about 1.35 hikes. There is a 65% probability of a rate hike in the next FOMC meeting in September.
• US Bond Market saw the 30-Year Treasury yield surge to 5.27%, its highest level since 2007.
• The US and Japan conducted JPY-buying intervention. The Dollar index fell by 1.64% last week.
• US durable goods increased by 0.3% in June, lower than the market expectations of 2.5%. Advanced US Q2 GDP also decreased to 1.5%, lower than the market expectations of 2.1%.
• The US personal income in June increased by 0.2%, slightly lower than the market expectation of 0.3%. Meanwhile, the US personal spending increased by 0.3% in June, matched expectations.
• The US PCE price index in June decreased to 3.7%, matched the market expectations and the index swung to negative 0.1% when compared to previous month.
• According to Bloomberg, AI companies beat Q2 earnings estimates by +27% to +71% across chipmakers and cloud infrastructure providers, reinforcing the AI market expansion. However, the Nasdaq index only increased by 0.52% last week.

The Upcoming Economic Calendar includes,

• Wednesday, August 5, 10:00pm: US Services PMI in July
• Friday, August 7, 8:30pm: US Non Farm Payrolls and Unemployment Rate in July

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: SEC To Provide Clarity Before CLARITY

• SEC Chair Paul Atkins stated the agency is ready to issue crypto market rules under existing authority if Congress fails to pass the CLARITY Act.
• KB Kookmin Bank, South Korea’s major financial institution, announced plans to launch a blockchain-based cross-border corporate payments service next month across 10 countries utilizing JP Morgan’s Kinexys platform.
• Circle acquired over 680 patent families comprising nearly 1,000 issued blockchain patents from IBM, positioning itself as the largest US holder of blockchain IP to support USDC, Arc, and agentic finance.
• Binance US announced plans to apply for CFTC Designated Contract Market (DCM) status in August to offer prediction markets to U.S. users.
• About $88.6 million worth of Bitcoin was drained from the Coldcard-generated addresses. The attack also caused Bitcoin metrics such as Long Term Holders spent volume surged abnormally.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

• NEAR Protocol integrated NEAR Intents into LayerZero’s Stargate for cross-chain liquidity, while also launching NEAR AI staking to allow users to pay for confidential inference and autonomous AI agents without cloud credentials.
• Zcash activated its Ironwood upgrade, introducing a new shielded pool with quantum-recoverable notes and supply verification turnstiles.
• Stacks activated the PoX-5 hardfork consensus upgrade, laying the technical foundation for native Bitcoin Staking.
• AO, Layer 1 backed by the Arweave team, announced the migration of the AO token to HyperBEAM (new node software) alongside a re-architected minting mechanism for its financial layer.

Dapps

• Ondo Finance unveiled the Ondo Network, a high-performance execution layer separating enclave-based privacy and verification from settlement to power Ondo Perps and open financial markets.
• Injective activated a mainnet upgrade with lower block times and optimized INJ staking, while also unveiling Injective Mint for institutional-grade tokenized asset issuance.
• Uniswap introduced the Launches tab in its Web App for Robinhood Chain launchpads, while also rolling out Uniswap Earn for real-time yield on USDC, USDT, and ETH via Morpho vault integration.
• 1inch’s Aqua0 launched its private beta, enabling single-deposit cross-chain liquidity across pools using 1inch Aqua and Uniswap v4 hooks.
• Fluid introduced Liquidity as a Service (LaaS) to help institutions and asset issuers efficiently bootstrap onchain DEX liquidity.
• Kaito AI introduced Kaito Katalyst, a performance-based creator reward layer where 20% of token reward pools accrue directly to KAITO stakers on Pendle.
• Kamino launched AUTO on Solana, introducing the first permissionless RWA backed by near-prime US auto loan yields originated by Agora Data.
• Jupiter Protocol launched Jupiter Spot V2, unifying Swap and Terminal into a single interface featuring real-time market news, sector heatmaps, X social signals, and whale tracking.
• Reflect introduced Reflect Tranches on Solana, creating a universal tranching layer to divide yield-bearing assets into protected and high-yield tranches.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

• Aave proposed to deprecate 50 low-adoption asset reserves and began winding down deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos to minimize economic and technical risk surfaces.
• Hyperliquid and Circle revenue share deal will go live on August 26, potentially introducing an additional $100 million in HYPE buyback annually.
• Solana’s SIMD-550 proposal, which aims to reduce the annual inflation rate from 15% to 30%, is expected to start voting this week.
• Sonic proposal of burning 50% of team treasury is currently live for voting. The proposed burning amount is estimated at about 1.5% of S token supply.

Token Unlock

• 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.
• SCR token unlocks on August 22, representing 5.8% of the token supply.