A week of market rotation with BTC giving back 3% dropping to 115k while ETH holding on to 1% gains at 3666. Market cap dropped below 4trn again with a few outperformers like PENGU +25% on renewed NFT hype and ENA +30% on their treasury vehicle news. Capital markets seem still hot but on the coins side already seeing cooling. Bullish and Bitgo filing for IPO, we had CoinDCX India’s largest exchange suffered 44mm exploit, JPMorgan exploring crypto backed lending and Polymarket bought a US exchange to reenter back. Enjoy reading and the ride!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
Well as we are getting further out on the crazy scale here’s a good summary of what has been done on the BTC side to date. We have so many of these vehicles now launching that it’s hard to keep up and more and more people are ringing the alarm bells. But market is hot and so as long as these new vehicles are bid they are mushrooming. We have seen SIZE in ETH to put things into perspective we had more inflows into the ETFs in last month than in the 12 month before that all thanks to treasury companies creating a structural bid. And other tokens are following suite. What’s interesting is that treasury companies are now also bidding up NFTs again it seems more memetic than just the native asset and that’s what you need to get retail involved. Well and while the headlines are suggesting they buying these what actually happened is much more aching to what happens with the other treasury companies are doing. Here Robert Leshner swapped his Punk for preferred stock in the company getting instant liquidity. Meanwhile Ethena is the latest in the ALT space coming up with a SPAC listing and 360mm treasury which is >10% of current market cap of the token WOW. I haven’t looked into details but 100mm comes from locked tokens and so knowing that many many of these ALT coin companies are nothing more than an exit liquidity for locked unvested tokens it leaves a bad taste. Since tokens are traceable but equity is not it’s easy to fund the vehicle in kind and then get liquidity via selling shares. Bets are on how long the music continues playing before the party stops but I get a sense we might be getting close.
Expected to have a ruling this week Roman Storm is still facing jail time for his involvement with the protocol. I’ve written extensively in my previous weeklies (ABC 12 Aug 2022; ABC 19 Aug 2022; ABC 28 Aug 2022; ABC 17 Sep 2022; ABC 18 Aug 2023; ABC 8 Sep 2023; ABC 26 Jan 2024, ABC 28 Mar 2025) and while we got the smart contracts off OFAC sanction list (which was ridiculous in the first place) the devs are still on the hook. It also shows how unfortunately little the prosecution was able to utilize onchain forensics tools to make claims as in one case of a witness. The Department of Justice re-designated an IRS agent, Stephan George, as a tracing expert less than 48 hours before he testified. George reportedly used a “Last In, First Out” method — common in tax accounting but debated for crypto tracing. George admitted under cross-examination that his tracing didn’t prove the scammer personally sent funds to Tornado Cash. The judge left this uncertainty for the jury to assess. It’s still an uphill battle for Roman.
This one raised a bit eyebrows after Blackrock and Fidelity already paved the way for public chains with tokens on Ethereum, Solana and others. Goldman has announced that they are using their private chain for this tokenization raising the question on why? Surely it’s operational efficiencies but we are in 2025 and private permissioned chains seems like something from the last cycle. If there’s no decentralization and permissionlessness then why even bother? You can build your own L2 easily to roll up and have everything interoperable. And while regulation in the US is now shifting favorable the sceptics are still loud.
This partnership with Coinbase enables us to explore where we think the market holds the most promise, where there’s the most demand and frankly where our clients are really most interested in
Emma Loftus — Head of Treasury Management at PNC Financial Services
There’s not a lot of supply of ETH, and so I think ETH probably has a chance to outperform Bitcoin in the next three to six months
Michael Novogratz — Galaxy Digital CEO
It’s too late to launch a new L1. Whatever tech innovation you think you’ve discovered can be bolted to an existing chain or done as an L2. But people keep launching new L1s and raising gobs of money against their token and equity to get rich. Alas, it’s these exact mechanics that will prevent their project from becoming credibly neutral enough to be useful.
Omid Malekan — Professor at Columbia University
All Been Crypto — Week 25 July 2025 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
