A Shaky Close Before a Historically Strong July

The market remained on edge this week, with Bitcoin dropping below $60k, down 5.9%, and Ethereum sliding to $1.5k, down 4.8%, as macro pressure kept building and the US-Iran situation remained unresolved. The standout, however, was Solana. While the rest of the top 10 sold off, SOL bucked the trend entirely, gaining 7%. If you read last week's newsletter, you will remember we flagged the underlying strength building in the Solana ecosystem, highlighted by more than 20,000 dormant wallets returning in a single day, and that has since translated directly into demand for SOL. We also saw several of the strong revenue-generating alts push higher, including LIT, Morpho, and HYPE.

We now move into July, which is historically a positive month for Bitcoin in midterm election years, 2022 returned 16.8% and 2018 returned 20.9%. With the macro backdrop still uncertain but pockets of genuine strength emerging beneath the surface, there is plenty to unpack below.

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Open USD — TradFi Just Went All In on Stablecoins

The biggest story this week was the launch of Open USD, a new stablecoin, and the partner list alone tells you everything. It is genuinely massive, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, BNY, Stripe, Coinbase, Google, Shopify, DoorDash and over 140 other partners. Most notably for us in Australia, all four of our big banks are on it — Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB and ANZ.

What makes it different comes down to three core design principles. First, build for scale — businesses can mint and redeem Open USD at no cost and with no artificial limits on volume. Every token is fully backed, a business deposits one US dollar and receives one Open USD in return, and can redeem it back for that dollar at any time. The dollars sit in reserve backing the token one-to-one. What is new is that the minting and redeeming happens with no fees, whereas the incumbents typically charge to convert in and out at scale. Second, earn by default — partners receive all of the earnings from the reserves backing the token, less a small management fee, rather than the issuer keeping all the float as Circle and Tether do today. Third, govern collaboratively, it is run by an independent company whose board is made up of the partners themselves, so decisions are made for the collective rather than a single entity.

The market reaction saw Circle ($CRCL) dump 17% on the news, as investors read it as a direct threat to the USDC model. But the bigger signal for us is what it says about the direction of travel. When the largest banks, payment networks, and asset managers on earth all line up behind tokenised dollars at once, it confirms that institutions and allocators are taking stablecoins and tokenised assets very seriously. This is exactly the massive repricing and adoption curve for tokenisation and stablecoins that we have been positioning around, and it is playing out in real time.

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Saylor Adopts Active Management

Michael Saylor has been one of the biggest weights on the market in recent weeks. The very real threat hanging over his positions, Bitcoin, MSTR, and the STRC preferred stock has had the market on edge, and because Bitcoin is priced on forward looking sentiment, a lot of participants were anticipating the worst: a forced-selling collapse that would cascade through the entire market. This week, Saylor moved to address that, putting out a new framework built around more responsible and active management across all of Strategy's financial products.

The core shift is a formal move away from the strict "never sell" posture that has defined Strategy for years. The new "Digital Credit Capital Framework" introduces active capital management, including limited and capped Bitcoin sales. Under a new BTC Monetisation Program, Strategy can now sell up to $1.25 billion in Bitcoin specifically to replenish its USD reserve (now sitting at $2.55 billion), fund dividends and interest, and support buybacks of both its credit products and MSTR. Crucially, the priority is defending STRC, they raised its annual dividend to 12% and stated plainly that the objective is to get it trading back at $99-100 over time, backed by a buyback program of up to $1 billion. Bitcoin remains the primary treasury asset and they still intend to be net buyers overall, but the rigid ideology has been replaced with pragmatism.

This is a sensible and necessary evolution, even if it dents the "diamond hands forever" narrative. The strict never-sell stance was always going to be tested the moment the structure came under real pressure, and rather than let that pressure build toward a disorderly outcome, Saylor is getting ahead of it with structured, capped, and transparent management. Removing the fear of a chaotic forced sale is arguably a positive for the broader market, as that overhang was a genuine source of anxiety.

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Hyperliquid Becoming More Than a Crypto Exchange

Most people still think of Hyperliquid as a crypto perps exchange, but the latest data tells a much bigger story. Seven of the top ten markets by volume on the platform are now traditional finance markets, things like equity indices, commodities, and stocks, a direct result of HIP-3, the upgrade that lets Hyperliquid list traditional assets alongside crypto, with over 40% of all trading volume now driven by these HIP-3 markets. Hyperliquid no longer depends on crypto conditions to generate revenue. When crypto goes quiet, people are still trading the S&P, gold, and oil on the platform. HYPE can go up with or without crypto, and that breaks the usual correlation that ties every crypto token to the mercy of Bitcoin.

The second shift is over 30% of Hyperliquid users now come from frontends other than the main app. Because Hyperliquid is built as open infrastructure, other developers can build their own trading platforms on top of its liquidity and order book, bringing their own users with them. Rather than acquiring every user itself, a growing share of its activity is funnelled in by an entire ecosystem of third-party apps. That is the classic sign of a platform becoming genuine infrastructure rather than just an app. Combine that with the fact that around 99% of revenue goes straight into buying back HYPE, and you have a token capturing the growth of something that increasingly looks less like a crypto exchange and more like a 24/7 exchange for everything.

LIT Lighter performance 

When we published our Lighter vs Hyperliquid breakdown last month, the core call was simple: the valuation gap between LIT and HYPE was too wide relative to what the metrics justified. A month on, that gap is closing fast. LIT is up 47% since the report while HYPE has pulled back 12% (a 59% outperformance) and LIT's share of HYPE's market cap has moved from 1.98% to 3.04%. In our Alpha portfolio, the position is up 95%, a live trade transparent to our pro members at uptradealpha.com. This is exactly the kind of rotation setup we flagged: capital moving into the earlier-stage, better-value name in the same narrative lane once the market leader gets stretched.

Adding fuel to the move, speculation is building around a potential integration of Lighter's DEX into Robinhood's offering, with Robinhood having backed Lighter in its last funding round and clear alignment between the two. If that plays out, it's a direct distribution pipeline into millions of retail accounts, and a validation of the regulatory-readiness edge we highlighted in the original report. We were on this narrative back in January, when we spoke about the possibility of this happening and a stronger partnership occurring between Robinhood and Lighter. Even if nothing is announced, this speculative narrative has been enough to fuel major momentum at the moment. 

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Trump's Crypto Empire — Over $1 Billion in a Single Year

President Trump's official 2025 financial disclosure, released by the US Office of Government Ethics on June 30, revealed that his crypto ventures brought in at least $1.2 to $1.4 billion in income last year, by far his largest income source, dwarfing everything else in his business empire. For context, his Mar-a-Lago resorts brought in around $77 million and his Virginia golf club around $25 million. 

The money came from two main sources. His memecoin business, run through CIC Digital, generated around $636 million, almost entirely from royalties under a licensing deal tied to the $TRUMP token and related products. The second was World Liberty Financial, the crypto and DeFi company co-founded with his sons and the Witkoff family, which brought in more than $588 million from token sales. A further $197 million came from selling equity in a related stablecoin company. The Trump family extracted well over a billion dollars while giving token holders almost nothing in return. This was not a classic rug pull, but the end result is arguably worse dressed up nicer. The structure was engineered so the upside flowed to the Trump entities from day one, through royalties, licensing fees, and a 75% cut of net revenue from WLFI token sales, while the tokens themselves have collapsed more than 80% from their highs. The family cashed out real dollars early and regardless of price, and the outside buyers who funded all of it are left holding underwater positions.

We specifically warned that WLFI was a purely governance token, with the value flowing straight to the founding entity rather than to token holders, and that the tokenomics gave holders no real mechanism to capture the value being generated. This disclosure makes that crystal clear, hundreds of millions in revenue went to the Trump side, and virtually none of it was ever designed to reach the people holding the token. It is the founder-friendly playbook scaled with one of the most powerful brands on earth, and it is the cleanest possible example of the theme we hammer constantly: understand who actually captures the value and who is left carrying the risk, because in structures like this it is never the token holder. All legally disclosed and above board, but a brutal lesson in reading where the money truly flows.

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Live Q&A with the Research Desk - Market Outlook

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Join UpTrade Alpha analysts Kane and Ben for a live session breaking down where the market currently stands.

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We'll run real-time technical analysis on the majors and key names we're watching, share our latest market commentary, and open the floor for your questions. Bring whatever's on your mind — specific charts, the macro picture, or anything you want a second read on.

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📅 Wednesday, 8 July 2026 · 🕒 8:30am AEST / 6:30pm ET

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