GM ☕️ 
Most people wait for clarity before they act - but that only works when something is willing to spell itself out for you 👀 

This week isn’t one of those. It’s the kind where things move quietly, just enough to matter if you’re paying close attention - but too subtly to chase if you’re not 🤝 

Here’s what we’ve been watching:

• 🪙 RWA is PUMPING – why are the new platforms so successful?

• 🌊 SUMMER FLIP: The market’s moving again

• 🩸 The billionaire who bit back – and why you might have to

• 💰️ Celsius comes for Tether’s 39,500 BTC – it's getting expensive

The W3oF Degen Portfolio matched the tone - holding in place like it knows something’s coming 🧙 

Modest increase, no HUGE moves this week, but no mistakes either.

And of course, we’re still tuned in. If you are too, the Discord is open 😉 

RWA is PUMPING - why are the new platforms so successful?

The RWA play used to be something you’d pitch at a panel because your protocol didn’t have a token or any users yet. Fast forward to now, and it’s one of the only subsectors actually doing numbers 🪙 

We're not talking about hypothetical yield in a pie chart deck or some BS real world pilot with a one year cliff or whatever - this time, it's real inflows, visible demand, and onchain assets that people actually want.

From meme casinos to real yield

• This week, Ondo Finance became the biggest tokenized Treasury player on Ethereum. Over $480 million now sits in its short-term Treasury product, and the bulk of that came in this month. Not stables, actual U.S. Treasuries, tokenized and distributed via their OUSG token 💵 

• OUSG itself is essentially a wrapped share in BlackRock’s ultra-short bond ETF, pushed onchain via a structure involving Securitize and a handful of regulatory concessions. You need to be KYC’d and verified to mint/redeem, but it trades freely on DEXes – and that’s what matters 🤓 

Meanwhile, Backed Finance, the Swiss-based shop that quietly tokenized everything from Google stock to Euro bonds, just crossed $100 million in TVL across its product suite. Their bIB01 and bIBTA tokens - synthetic versions of short term U.S. debt - have been pumping in volume as funds seek safe yield that doesn't require an IBKR login.

They’re also one of the few protocols offering tokenized European government bonds, which gives them a leg up with non US allocators who’ve had enough of FX risk.

You want exposure to NVDA, but you can’t get it? You can now trade a synthetic wrapped token backed by a real share, sitting in a licensed custodian somewhere in Europe. Because, to be fair, like most of the world still can’t, even if they wanted to, due to laws or banks or other issues 🤔

But here’s the ultimate the workaround. And it’s working ⚙️ 

So… why now?

It’s not like the idea is new. Tokenizing RWA was a VC pitch since 2018, and most of them flopped. But this time, we’re seeing traction. A few reasons why:

• Rates matter again. In a world where T-bills yield 5% and your DeFi pool yields 2 to 3% on best day when it’s not getting rugged altogether, the calculus has changed. Everyone from DAOs to family offices is chasing base yield - and these platforms give them compliant access with low friction 🤏 

• Stablecoin fatigue. Holding stables never felt too safe to regular users, despite the fact that it actually was. Circle froze someone’s USDC assets, Maker dumped their reserves, Tether printed another $100B. You know the usual FUD 🙄 Tokenized Treasuries, on the other hand, would feel like an upgrade even to the most suspicious conspiracy theorists. Because you know where the yield is coming from 🪙 

• Post rug trauma. Investors are usually looking for things that exist. RWAs have the added bonus of, you know, not being made up.

• Infrastructure matured. Tools like Fireblocks and Coinbase Prime made it possible for real asset managers to actually touch this stuff. Five years ago, your treasurer would’ve been fired for even googling “DeFi” 🤷‍♂️ 

The data says it all

Let’s look at the numbers:

• Ondo’s OUSG TVL rose from under $200M to nearly $500M in a matter of weeks.

• Backed’s AUM climbed past $110M, with bIB01 and bIBTA leading the pump.

• xstocks volumes, though still niche, have spiked 4x or 500% since March, according to internal data pulled from their platform dashboards.

• Coinbase and BlackRock are both indirectly involved in the Ondo and Backed pipes – this isn’t a retail meme. These are TradFi firms using onchain rails for actual capital markets access.

And yet, no one’s really talking about it

The irony seems to be that the only people who seem to care are DAOs trying to diversify treasury exposure and a few crypto native wealth managers. The Twitter crowd is still watching Elon tweet about dogs with hats while the largest onchain bond ETF just doubled in AUM 📈 

There are no memes and no Discord cults either. Which leads to the real question: what happens when this becomes retail facing?

Because you can be sure it’s coming. Big exchanges are already sniffing around RWA wrappers. A16z just dropped another blog post about tokenized everything. And next generation smart wallets could bring these instruments directly to ‘the click of a button’ crowd 👀 

You think RWAs are pumping now? Wait till they get a ticker in that top spot next to your favorite pepe inu or whatever🔨 

It’s a strange twist really - crypto, born to escape TradFi, is now making it more accessible. The same ecosystem that memed away valuation and shrugged off earnings reports is now obsessed with risk free yield and bond durations 🥸 

But maybe that’s the point. RWAs onchain aren’t a betrayal of crypto. They’re an upgrade for old finance.

And this time, they’re finally sticking 📌 

SUMMER FLIP: The market’s moving again

After weeks of lethargy and retail despair, the crypto market finally stretched its legs. Altcoins blinked green across the board. Meme coins barked back to life. Even DeFi posted a modest resurrection 💰️ 

The pump before the siesta

• Cardano led the bounce with an 8% daily jump, Ethereum followed at 6.5%, and even Litecoin - yes, still alive - rallied 9% 🤨 

• SOL, XRP, and BONK all made appearances on the leaderboard, while Uniswap printed a clean 9% bounce. Market wide heatmaps glowed like Christmas in July 🎄 

This wasn’t just a coincidence. On July 2nd, the market absorbed a sharp spike in ETF inflows - $407.7M in a single day, up from $342M the day before.

BTC dragged itself above $110K, but this wasn’t a BTC only party. ETH and friends moved in tandem, powered by renewed interest across the entire derivatives sector 👇️ 

ETFs added fuel. But it was speculative interest that lit the match.

According to CryptoQuant, speculative interest exploded 10% over 24 hours. That's leveraged longs, degens on max pain, and whales quietly arming themselves 🐋 

Santiment warned that this kind of FOMO surge doesn’t last, and apparently, we’ve heard this song before - just before a sharp reversal 🤔 

Meanwhile, Swissblock analysts noted that demand was still “missing” from the spot market. According to them, there’s no organic push - just a derivative driven cope train with questionable brakes 📉 

So why now?

The macro calendar is ghost town quiet. No major Fed decisions. No geopolitical panic (for now). But that also creates the perfect vacuum for over leveraged moves and thin liquidity pumps 🍏 

Traders saw an open lane and took it.

According to analysts, the setup now looks like a fakeout waiting to happen. Spot demand is weak. The move was fast and sloppy. And with nothing major on the macro radar, the market may fall back into its low volume, low energy pattern within days - unless another wave of ETF inflows keeps the crowd interested 😶 

But still, there’s something worth watching: altcoin breadth.

For the first time in weeks, the rally wasn’t confined to a single narrative. It touched everything - from majors to memes to ancient corpses like LTC. That doesn’t mean the bottom’s in, but it does suggest traders are starting to rotate again. If that rotation continues, summer could surprise 👀 

Even if the bulls are half asleep.

The billionaire who bit back – and why you might have to

Other communities used to laugh at crypto bros for being keyboard cowboys. But that line got crossed a while ago - somewhere between the first kidnapped NFT holder and the first severed finger in a Ziploc bag 🤐 

What we’re watching now is the final form of wealth transfer paranoia: you can’t rob a bank anymore, so you rob a guy with a seed phrase.

Australian billionaire crypto investor Tim Heath is the latest high net target. Or rather, the latest one to bite back. Literally 🐺 

• He bit off part of his kidnapper’s finger mid attack after being ambushed outside his apartment in Estonia by men posing as painters. The kind of story you'd think only happens in narco shows is now just…crypto Tuesday 🤯 

The attack wasn’t random.

• The would be kidnappers used GPS trackers, burner phones, and a fake Azerbaijani passport. There was even a decoy sauna location. This wasn’t some desperate crackhead move. This was organized, coordinated, and clearly learned behavior 🥷 

• A “$5 wrench attack” as everyone loves to call it - a callback to a XKCD comic, where no matter how secure your code is, it still could be ‘unlocked’ with a $5 wrench and a few threats to the kneecaps 🔧 

Heath’s courtroom testimony confirmed what many in the space have whispered for years: the wealth isn’t safe behind cold wallets if the body holding the keys isn’t.

He now claims over €3.2 million in damages - including investing €2.7 million in personal security 💶 

• This isn’t a one off. Another famous case was when Ledger cofounder David Balland was kidnapped in January alongside his wife.

• The kidnappers cut off his finger and sent it as proof 😲 A separate case in NYC saw another man tortured for access to his Bitcoin. Europe’s cybercrime units are now treating crypto targeted physical assaults as an emerging threat category.

(Still want your ENS to show your real name?)

At the end of the day, privacy isn't just a feature - it's a habit. And in this environment, it might be the only thing standing between you and a wrench 🧠 

Some in the space flash wallets like trophies, post screenshots like targets, then wonder why someone’s waiting outside their door with a hammer and a duffel bag 🔨 

Maybe it's time to stop broadcasting every gain and start treating security like part of the strategy.

Celsius comes for Tether’s 39,500 BTC – it's getting expensive

A ghost from the crypto lending bubble just knocked on Tether’s door. And it brought paperwork.

• Celsius, the bankrupt lender still scraping together funds to fill the hole in its books, is suing Tether for ~$4 billion 💰️ 💰️ 

• Why? Because Tether dumped 39,500 BTC it held as Celsius collateral right before things collapsed - allegedly with knowledge that Celsius was circling the drain. Celsius wants it back. Or at least, the gains 🫠 

That sale, by the way, turned out nicely for Tether.

• It recovered $1.6 billion by selling that Bitcoin just before the bottom fell out. Celsius’s claim is that this wasn’t just good timing - it was a breach of contract 📜 

• They say Tether cashed out while pretending to still be a creditor and partner, and that the sale was done without proper warning or permission.

The judge agrees, too. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York is letting Celsius proceed with the lawsuit, saying the complaint holds water - at least enough for trial 👨‍⚖️ 

• Celsius claims that Tether’s behavior contributed to the chaos - offloading Bitcoin into a fragile market while publicly playing nice 🙃 

• And it's not just Tether in the line of fire. The court filing also names the British Virgin Islands subsidiary that executed the trades, pulling the curtain on how jurisdictional games might no longer be enough to dodge U.S. courtrooms.

Celsius is trying to claw back anything it can - mostly to fill a multi billion dollar hole left by the kind of yield chasing lunacy that defined 2021 2022 💸 

But now it’s clawing at Tether, the biggest and most controversial player in the stablecoin game, and a firm that’s gotten very good at staying just outside the blast radius.

This isn’t a standard post bankruptcy cleanup.

It’s a shot at the perimeter walls that Tether has kept around itself for years. Celsius is accusing it of playing both sides - posing as a lender while acting like a liquidator.

If the court agrees, it could open the door for more lawsuits against the quiet profit taking that went on during the crypto collapse, and at these prices (20k vs ~120k) it could get very expensive 🤔 

Other worthy reads

Traders are rallying behind BNB?

“A Crypto x AI Stack Snapshot” by Legion:

ETHCC Takeaways, by Andy:

MEMES

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better Web3 is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

Brought to you by Ambire: The Only Web3 Wallet That You’ll Need!