GM ☕️ 
Some weeks remind you that the loudest voices aren’t always the most stable.

Egos clash, alliances wobble, and timelines catch fire - for reasons that have very little to do with charts.

Still, somewhere beneath the noise, momentum keeps threading forward 🚂 

Here’s what we’re tracking this week:

• 🔥 Trump-Musk divorce puts the market into a rough place

• 🪙 Circle IPO rips, stablecoin game goes main stage

• 💰️ RWA market pumps another 260% as TradFi quietly eats the crypto pill

• ⚔️ ETH Foundation tightens its belt ahead of the big push

The W3oF Degen Portfolio didn’t move much, which, honestly, is fine. This means no new damage.

We’ll take that kind of composure any day. But if you've got something less composed, bring it to the Discord 😉 

Trump-Musk divorce puts the market into a rough place

You don’t need a macro report when two of the world’s loudest men start throwing hands on social media and markets nosedive 🤦‍♂️ 

Elon Musk and Donald Trump went from power couple to bitter exes in the span of one trading day - and market paid the price.

The meltdown started when Musk publicly broke ranks, accusing Trump of tanking the economy with “Trump tariffs” and predicting a full-blown U.S. recession by Q3 👇️ 

Trump, never one to get out-flamed, immediately went full Truth Social mode, bragging about his tax cuts and slamming Congress like it’s WWE.

Everybody understood it would be impossible to shut him up after this 🫠 

Traders, already skittish after months of pump fatigue and ETF hopium hangovers, watched in horror.

The result is nearly $1 billion in positions were flushed in 24 hours 🤯 

Glassnode confirmed that BTC holders with over 155 days of conviction finally cracked - offloading bags just below the $106K mark.

It didn’t stop there. Analysts started war-gaming the Musk vs Trump drama like it’s a new geopolitical axis.

• Some experts predict that this could disrupt regulatory pipelines, slow stimulus talks, and add another layer of risk to an already unstable equities market ✉️ 

Meanwhile, SpaceX got roped in. Trump threatened to cancel Musk’s government contracts. Musk responded by saying he’d start decommissioning Dragon spacecraft “immediately” 🧑‍🚀 

Then he walked it back 🙄 

Collateral damage

Tesla is down 14%, Nasdaq bleeding, and DJT trading like it’s backed by Bitconnect.

BTC dipped below $102K, with more than $300 million in BTC longs alone wiped out in hours.

ETH holders didn’t fare better, catching a 7% slap on the charts. The fear and greed index slid into the 50s, confirming what everyone already felt: the vibe is off ☠️ 

As for what’s next? Traders are praying for quiet.

The rest of us are just expecting the next tweet to nuke the market again.

Circle IPO rips, stablecoin game goes main stage

We already talked about what might happen once Circle finally hit the public markets.
And well - looks like it didn’t disappoint.

The $USDC issuer pulled off one of the cleanest crypto-native IPOs in recent memory. Opened at $69, kissed $104, and still closed strong at $83.23 - up 168% from its $31 IPO price. Looks like Wall Street went feral 🐺 

Circle walked into the NYSE, raised $1.1B like it was nothing, and walked out with an $18.4B market cap. That’s not Coinbase-tier, but it’s way ahead of the SPAC rejects like Fold.

In a market that’s been allergic to risk and allergic to crypto, this was a big win 🫡 

Let’s put things in perspective.

• Coinbase IPO’d in 2021 with an $85B valuation, but then speedran the classic post-IPO nosedive. Robinhood went out at $29B and fumbled. eToro showed up late and SPAC’d itself into irrelevance at $5B. Fold got picked up for $224M and barely made a sound 💵 

• Circle now sits comfortably in the middle valuation wise but obliterated everyone on day-one performance - 168% gain. Coinbase only did 31% on debut. eToro managed 4%. Robinhood actually fell 8% 🤯 

It’s all about timing

Circle hit the NYSE while the rest of the market was breaking out in hives over macro fears. And despite that, Circle still rallied like it was 2021 again.

The IPO injected real liquidity into the crypto bloodstream. IPOs free up capital, VCs raise again, M&A gears spin, and early stage teams finally stop living off Red Bull and overdrafts 💰️ 💰️ 

This is the kind of event that makes suits lean forward and say, “wait…maybe this crypto stuff is good” 🤔 

Because that crowd may not understand DeFi, but they understand 168% in a day.

A little help from the stablecoin wars

Circle’s moment comes just as stablecoin volume is quietly ticking up again. USDC saw a 22% bump in trading. Even Tether’s USDT got in on the action with a 13% rise. Speculative? Absolutely. But it shows the market hasn’t forgotten where the onramps are.

USDC might still be second banana by market cap, but it’s first in regulatory PR and now first to IPO. And that counts.

Especially when lawmakers are trying to figure out whether to regulate these tokens like banks, real money, or radioactive material 🤡 

It’s also a proof that not everything has to be a meme coin or airdrop to matter.

Oh and yeah, prepare for the obvious IPO meta that’s incoming.

RWA market pumps another 260% as TradFi quietly eats the crypto pill

While the rest of crypto kept pacing around the $100k BTC mark and praying for another meme rotation, tokenized real world assets just added $15 billion in under six months. A 260% market growth.

It’s a very boring corner of crypto. But also the one that’s most real.

According to Binance Research, the RWA market went from $8.6B at the start of the year to over $23B by June 💰️ 

That’s not from vapor. That’s tokenized credit, Treasuries, and debt instruments moving onchain like it’s the most normal thing in the world 🤓 

Yield is back

The big winner here is tokenized private credit - 58% of the market by itself.

U.S. Treasury debt chips in another 34% 🤌 

So yeah, forget the dog coins. This stuff is suddenly the main character. And no wonder. In a rate heavy world where everyone’s hunting yield without getting wrecked, RWAs have become the grown up corner of the space.

Institutions are slowly realizing they can put boring instruments on transparent rails, settle them faster, and cut a few middlemen while they’re at it. It’s not sexy, but it prints 🙃 

The SEC, for once, didn’t ruin everything

On May 29, the SEC dropped new guidance for crypto securities 📜 

Nothing revolutionary, but a step toward sanity. Clearer frameworks, fewer question marks, and more confidence for the bigger players to start showing up without their lawyers chain smoking in the parking lot 🚬 

• There’s also a Senate bill in the works - the GENIUS Act - that aims to properly define the rules for stablecoin collateralization. If it sticks, it could do for RWAs what the ETFs did for non natives: remove excuses.

It’s less about vibes now and more about treasury strategy 🗺️ 

Long term diversification, capital efficiency, and making sure you don’t look like a boomer fund manager by Q4 👴 

ETH Foundation tightens its belt ahead of the big push

The Ethereum Foundation isn’t waiting for a bull market miracle. It's tightening the screws now.

This week, the Foundation announced revamped treasury rules and, sadly, a fresh round of layoffs - an uncomfortable but maybe necessary step ahead of what they’re calling a “critical” 18 month window ⌛️ 

The real focus is the next year and a half - 18 months of budgeting, strategic shuffling, and cutting whatever fat might still be hanging around. Like some sort of fiscal intermittent fasting 🧠 

The new treasury model will link spending directly to ETH holdings and selloffs.

• They’re also shifting to annual reevaluations of operational costs, based on a percentage of treasury size and - get this - community sentiment. Yes, CT finally gets a say in how the money gets spent 👀 Well, sort of.

Behind the spreadsheet reshuffle is a bigger move: accountability.

• The Ethereum Foundation is clearly trying to reassure both the dev community and the public that it’s not just watching its wallet but actually using it wisely.

• Quarterly and annual reports, spending disclosures, and all the transparency bells and whistles are being promised. Which of course, is never a bad thing 🙂 

Earlier this week, EF confirmed that it had let go of members of the PR&D (Protocol Research & Development) team 👇️ 

• Some roles got repurposed under a new “Protocol” division, while others were straight up cut. Names weren’t shared, but the message was clear - Ethereum doesn’t have time for organizational bloat.

• The new structure splits leadership across three core priorities: scaling Ethereum’s base layer, expanding blob space (data sharding), and improving UX.

• Tim Beiko, Ansgar Dietrichs, Alex Stokes, Francesco D’Amato, Barnabé Monnot, and Josh Rudolf are all in the driver’s seat now. And Dankrad Feist is stepping in as strategic advisor across all three areas 🤓 

Crypto has a short memory, but Ethereum’s roadmap doesn’t. The next year and a half is packed: Dencun and Pectra’s successes need to hold and the L2 ecosystem can’t just be a sandbox forever. Nothing gets delivered if the foundation wastes precious time and resources on something else.

So now it’s discipline time. Not glamorous, but maybe essential 🙊 

After all, the last thing this ecosystem needs is to be caught unprepared during the next wave of demand.

Other worthy reads

Adoption is increasing in the meantime:

Rules that haven’t changed much overtime, but seem to get forgotten very often, a reminder by Hoeem:

A wholesome story from crypto hacking space (for once):

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!