ETHCC week in Cannes was red hot summer and unlike during most conferences price actually went up. BTC now close to ATH again at 110k +2% Wow and ETH at 2500 +6% WoW. Main outperformers were MEME coins PENGU +75% mad it into to 100 and BONK and FART also +25%, wild times we are going through. In the news, Polygon’s new DeFi chain Katana went live on mainnet with 170mm TVL locked and TOP the main app developer on TON have raised 28.5mm at a 1bn valuation, Lido enabled dual governance Allegedly Deutsche Bank is planning to launch Crypto Custody Services next year and there was a class action suite raised against MSTR for allegedly misleading investors. AND of course we are tokenizing everything now with equities in focus this week having multiple large announcements from big industry players. Enjoy reading!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
The biggest theme this week was tokenized Equities, we had a multitude of announcements all timed around ETHCC. Interestingly with different flavors and set ups.Gemini said they’ll issue on Arbitrum. Backed put together a whole consortium under the xStock Alliance issued on Solana with Bybit, Kraken supporting and based on Chainlinks oracles and leveraging their CCIP for cross chain transferability. And of course RobinHood revealing their own L2 via Arbitrum to offer stocks to European investors and even tokenize Private Equity. They made a big hype around offering access to OpenAI and SpaceX in token form only to have OpenAI come out and basically discredit the effort. The episode shows the thin line between what equity tokens can do and what not. First of all the whole tokenized shares is not new, FTX had it and even before, it’s not a technological hurdle but more a regulatory. And that’s why we are seeing so much ‘progress’ now because the US seems to be more favorable towards financial innovation involving digital assets. That allows breathing room for guys like Robinhood to come out boldly and offer such tokens, even though they might be considered unregistered securities. There are no doubt efficiencies for having tokenized shares for settlement and 24/7 transferability but you’ll still need KYC compliance and investor protection so to what extend these are available in DeFi is still to be seen. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing goes full circle and we are tokenzing BTC treasury companies. Wait MSTR is pretty much already on everyone’s list for tokenizing, brace yourselves.
The next one on the major token ETFs went live this week. The first SOL ETFs not with as much enthusiasm as the BTC or even ETH ETFs but still decent pick up. The novel feature here is that staking was allowed making it the first staking approved ETF in the US. SSK took in 12mm AUM first day which took SOLZ the futures ETF a solid 3month. So institutional appetite is there and I believe it’s only a matter of time till we have other staking ETFs. Ironically treasury companies have already done staking and with the risk appetite in the market it’s going to be interesting where demand really lies then as they all give access to fundamentally the same exposure.
ZachXBT unveiled his findings from onchain data linking a few hundred web3 jobs back to North Korea. These people pose with fake locations and infiltrate vis anonymous IDs into Web3 projects, surely they might actually deliver what they signed up for but clearly the fact that the funds are traceable back to the nation state means they are operating for the government. Zach finds that since beginning of the year there were 16.6mm in payments to these agents. Of course often the refer each other and more than once they also rug the project but it shows us two things very clearly. First how truly global and interconnected the Web3 space is when north korean devs can work ‘anonymously’ side by side with devs from US and other nations. Second how in times of increasing institutional adoption this free space without KYC will most certainly crowd out opportunities for such anon contributors. Be alert and extra suspicious when dealing with anons on the Web.
Dual governance isn’t perfect, but it solves important problems:
* Extra independent defense layer against the system taking particularly harmful actions
* Explicit involvement of Ethereum users as stakeholders, as opposed to purely informal vibez-based “alignment”
Great work!
Vitalik Buterin — Ethereum Founder
These “OpenAI tokens” are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it. Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval — we did not approve any transfer. Please be careful.
OpenAI Twitter Account
A particular arc in crypto I’ve seen over and over again that may not exist in any other industry is someone who does not work in crypto but does something crypto-related that gets crypto people excited then becomes the ultimate CT engagement farmer. I can just imagine all their original non-crypto followers being like, What happened to you?!
Larau Shin — Crypto Podcast
All Been Crypto — Week 4 July 2025 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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