The stock market pushed higher once again this week, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq in the green, and the Dow Jones staging a massive rally to new all-time highs as of Friday morning. The dollar continues to show strength. Luke Gromen believes a “too strong” dollar will trigger foreign selling of U.S. assets.

In the digital assets realm, Bitcoin recovered some of its losses but remains in a clear weekly downtrend, currently trading at $61,438 after tradfi markets’ close. Despite Bitcoin spending last week scraping its lowest levels since October 2024, there is hope. Every time BTC has closed two consecutive red 6-month candles, a three-year uptrend has followed, and the second one closes in days. Or how about John Bollinger highlighting a developing ‘W’ pattern in BTC?

The bottom-callers are getting louder. Bluntz says the same weekly bear divergences that nailed the SOL top now cut the other way, and that if you’re bearish on Solana down here you are impaired. AltcoinPsycho, who publicly bought near the SOL bottom last cycle in one of the highest-PnL trades of his career, says we have another chance to do it again, and he’s heavily accumulating spot. That’s all well and good for Solana, but what about Bitcoin? Well, there was the largest single on-chain accumulation of Bitcoin ever recorded.

A good sentiment sign came when billionaire Jeremy Grantham disparaged Bitcoin and crypto on CNBC, saying, “What does crypto do? What’s the use of crypto… There’s no there there.” Later he added, “proof of unnecessary work shouldn’t be worth a bucket of warm spit.” Joe Kernen, who had been cordial up to that point, knocked the billionaire down a few pegs by pointing out his abysmal track record for the past couple decades.

The markets have also been humbling Bitcoin main character Michael Saylor who has been reeling since May when Strategy inexplicably bought back $1.5 billion worth of 0% convertible senior notes due 2029.

This week Strategy’s unveiled a new Digital Credit Capital Framework, which finally addresses the STRC dividend payment issue. It achieves this through a new $2.55 billion USD reserve policy. The framework also authorized up to $1 billion in preferred “Digital Credit” buybacks plus $1 billion in MSTR common buybacks, and a BTC Monetization Program permitting conditional Bitcoin sales of up to $1.25 billion to fund reserves, dividends, and repurchases. Stretch (STRC) got a 50 bps dividend bump to 12%, effective for July, hopefully pushing STRC back toward its $99–$100 par.

Reactions were mostly positive, mainly because STRC is sorted, but some are upset with details. For example, buybacks. In fact Mr. Saylor posted in 2021 that companies repurchasing stock with cash weaken their business, and those buying back stock with debt actually impoverish it. The biggest issue is with Strategy’s enshrined option to sell Bitcoin. OG X poster Light believes they’ve already started.

JPMorgan warned that turning crypto’s biggest buyer into a potential seller introduces a two-way flow risk the market now has to price. Once you write down the conditions under which you’ll sell, traders will game the probability of those conditions being met every time STRC wobbles near par.

Hopefully that will not happen, and (as Jordi Alexander predicts) we will not be talking about Mr. Saylor or Strategy in six months.

And then there’s noise on CT ( Crypto Twitter) about a new memecoin season. Ansem is participating in a Solana memecoin based on his persona. Many celebrated (some in the unseemly ways of past memecoin frenchies), notably exchanges and tracking platforms that benefit from trading activity. Others did not.

One prominent poster said: we’ve got some more retail to kill, or perhaps we should shoot ourselves. The legendary duck sums up the side against this stuff: KOLs extracted the entire space to zero and are now launching celebrity coins again to extract some more. This feels like crypto’s version of Groundhog Day. If a “ memecoin szn” happens without liquidity entering the space predominantly for productive purposes, it means 6 more weeks (months, years?) of the market nuking.

Historically speaking, being the memecoin main character has a short shelf life. If anyone can persist, it should be Ansem, but the odds are not great.

There was another memecoin story, one with implications outside of crypto. Trump disclosed more than $1.2 billion in crypto earnings in his annual filing. Even seasoned crypto degens habituated to this stuff were surprised. TXMC, max-cynical from day one, admitted the man has a way of exceeding expectations, while Dyme, who was willing to forgive a little grift as the cost of pro- crypto policy, drew the line at “ludicrous”.

None of this memecoin nonsense helps the institutions, the suits, or anyone within a stone’s throw of tradfi take crypto seriously. Thank goodness the memecoin shenanigans were offset by real projects doing interesting things, precipitating quality discussions.

The best of these was around Venice raising a $65 million Series A. Venice’s VVV token rallied on the news, but fell after digesting the token-equity split conundrum. Can a project with a representative token grow in value while equity and shareholders exist?

Some believe that token-equity splits like this aren’t defensible in crypto anymore. and more bluntly, tokens with equity do not work. Dankrad piled on with the legal asymmetry: Equity holders have enforceable protections; token holders have trust me bro, we’ll keep buying and burning. Not to mention the fact that the company has a fiduciary duty to maximize value for exactly one of those groups.

Algod agreed with basically all of it: bootstrap through the token, then funnel the value to equity. Voorhees, defending himself online, flipped the critique around: 99.9% of tokens designed to date have failed and will keep failing.

Whoever’s right, the broader vibe shift is unmistakable. NEAR’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin declared token burns a very ineffective way to generate value and is drafting a proposal to move NEAR toward a fixed supply. Crypto participants are growing up. There’s a class action lawsuit against Magic Eden over misleading ME token promises, and crypto natives are creating dashboards to track token revenue versus token emissions. We’re speedrunning tradfi, currently reinventing discounted cash flow analysis from first principles!

Speaking of tradfi, there were several big crypto-related announcements this week. A whole bunch of legacy finance and web2 companies banded together for a new stablecoin called Open USD (OUSD), with zero-fee minting, no volume caps, and nearly all reserve yield shared back to partners instead of retained by a single issuer.

Omid Malekan was not impressed. Scott Melker pointed out that these 140-plus firms in finance just organized to capture that yield for themselves. Pledditor called it an Old Boys Club coming in to topple the moats Tether and Circle built.

Elon Musk announced X Money, the financial leg of X, reportedly launching with 6% APY, up to $10 million in FDIC sweep insurance, unlimited 3% cash back and a physical metal Visa card. Austin Campbell ran the sober evaluation: The 6% APY is promotional and won’t survive contact with math, but $10 million of FDIC coverage, a built-in P2P network riding X’s social graph, and 3% cash back is a genuinely serious fintech product. Notably absent thus far is anything related to crypto.

X Money will have a hard time catching up with other fintech super apps such as Robinhood, which launched its own chain, an Arbitrum-Orbit L2 purpose-built for tokenized assets. Yano was impressed that apps are paying to join the chain versus the opposite. Distribution is king. Case in point: Dydx went from being the leading perp DEX to an L2, to now being an app (with a new name, Arcus) on Robinhood Chain.

How the mighty have fallen. But that’s crypto, baby!

-David Sencil

Evolution of the Perpetuals Market

Cryptocurrency exchange VALR announced it is preparing to roll out a major expansion of its derivatives offering with the launch of “Perps,” a cross-asset perpetual futures product that will introduce more than 200 new markets.

The upgrade allows customers to take leveraged long or short positions across global equities, commodities, precious metals, stock indices, foreign exchange pairs and crypto assets within the VALR app.

According to a company announcement, the move builds on VALR’s initial perpetuals launch in 2023 and arrives during a period of rapid evolution in the global perpetuals market. Over the past several months, perpetual futures have surged in scale and diversity, with decentralized venues gaining ground and traditional-asset perpetuals accelerating in adoption.

Industry data shows that perpetual futures now dominate derivatives activity, regularly exceeding hundreds of billions of dollars in daily volume and expanding into tokenized equities, commodities and forex. Decentralized perpetual exchanges — led by Hyperliquid — have grown into sophisticated competitors, capturing rising market share as on-chain liquidity deepens.

VALR’s new product is powered by an integration with Hyperliquid. It allows users to open and manage positions directly on VALR while trades execute via Hyperliquid’s permissionless infrastructure. According to the company, this marks the first time a major regulated exchange has natively integrated an on-chain protocol to source liquidity for cross-asset perpetuals.

The expanded suite includes perpetual contracts on global equities such as SpaceX, NVIDIA, Tesla, Apple, SK Hynix, Samsung and Palantir Technologies, as well as benchmarks such as the S&P 500. Also included are Brent and WTI crude oil, natural gas, gold, silver, platinum and copper. Forex pairs such as EUR/USD, GBP/USD and USD/JPY, alongside digital currencies, round out the offerings.

VALR representatives said the breadth of markets will allow traders to express macro views and capitalize on volatility across sectors, ranging from energy shocks to equity earnings cycles and crypto-native catalysts.

The launch comes as perpetual futures undergo a structural shift. Centralized exchanges have historically dominated liquidity, but decentralized perpetuals have grown sharply, with Hyperliquid helping push decentralized exchange market share to new highs. At the same time, traditional-asset perpetuals — including commodities and equities — have expanded rapidly, moving from niche experiments to multibillion-dollar weekly markets as traders seek 24/7 access to real-world assets.

Gianluca Sacco, VALR’s chief operating officer, said the launch places “over 200 perpetuals markets directly inside the VALR app,” offering round-the-clock access to crypto, commodities, currencies and equities — including pre-IPO companies — through a regulated platform.

“Perps are how crypto traders take a view on price — a market now exceeding hundreds of billions of dollars in daily volume,” Sacco said. “We believe they will become how people trade every market. Our integration of Hyperliquid will give our users the deepest on-chain liquidity available anywhere.”

The upgrade traces back to a discovery on May 29. Security researcher Taylor Hornby, working under contract for Shielded Labs, found a soundness flaw inside the Orchard shielded pool’s elliptic curve code. The bug lived in a piece of the halo2_gadgets crate handling point multiplication. A prover could swap in the wrong base point and still get the circuit to accept an invalid proof.

That flaw mattered because Orchard hides sender, receiver and amount by design. A counterfeit note created inside the pool would look identical to a real one. The bug had sat in the code since Orchard went live in May 2022 as part of the NU5 upgrade.

Rapid Patch, No Confirmed Losses

Zcash’s core engineers, including Daira-Emma Hopwood, Kris Nuttycombe and Jack Grigg, confirmed the issue within hours of Hornby’s report. A soft fork disabled new Orchard actions around June 1 to contain exposure. A hard fork, NU6.2, followed on June 3 with a corrected verifying key, restoring full Orchard functionality.

Orchard transactions paused for roughly a day during the rollout. Transparent and Sapling transfers kept running the whole time. Zcash Open Development Lab and Shielded Labs both say they found no evidence that the bug was ever exploited, and the network’s turnstile accounting, which tracks value entering and leaving each pool, showed no signs of unauthorized minting.

There’s a catch developers can’t patch away. Orchard’s privacy means nobody can prove a negative. No cryptographic method exists to confirm counterfeiting never happened, only that it probably didn’t.

Ironwood Closes the Gap

Announced June 6, Ironwood is the fix for that remaining uncertainty. It ships as NU6.3 and was built by ZODL alongside Tachyon, Valar Group, the Zcash Foundation and Shielded Labs.

The upgrade opens a new Ironwood shielded pool built on the patched Orchard circuit, now backed by ongoing formal verification and added independent audits. At the same time, the old Orchard pool gets sealed. Wallets will block new deposits into it, internal transfers between users inside the pool get disabled, and funds can only leave through the turnstile toward Ironwood or a transparent address.

That sealing is the actual fix. Once the legacy pool stops taking new value and stops circulating internally, any theoretical counterfeit notes get boxed in. Anyone running a full node can then add up balances across the active pools and confirm the total supply lines up with what the protocol allows, without waiting on developer assurances or a full migration.

Ironwood also carries ZIP 2005, a set of note format changes meant to support recovery in a future quantum computing scenario. It doesn’t make Zcash quantum-secure today, but it lays the groundwork for a smoother transition later.

Timeline and What Users Need to Do

Testnet activation for Ironwood landed around July 3 and 4. Zebra, the Rust client maintained by the Zcash Foundation, and Valar Group’s independent implementation are both running release candidates against it.

Mainnet activation is targeted for around July 21, tied to a zcashd end-of-support block. Developers say hashrate signaling looks ready, and existing testnet time gives wallets enough runway, so a delay isn’t currently on the table.

Node operators on older zcashd builds will need to move to Zebra or an updated client before that date. Wallets are expected to prompt users to migrate shielded funds out of the old Orchard pool with minimal friction, often a single approval.

Market Response

ZEC’s price tells its own story of the past six weeks. The token fell more than 50% from around $630 down to the $250 to $300 range once the vulnerability became public, then rebounded sharply once the patch and Ironwood plan landed.

As of July 4, ZEC trades at $462.33, up 13.3% over the past seven days, even after a flat 24-hour session. Zooming out, the coin is up more than 1,000% over the past year, a stretch that includes both a run to a 52-week high near $744 in November 2025 and the Orchard scare in late May.

Investor Chamath Palihapitiya has publicly flagged Ironwood’s supply verification model as a meaningful step for the coin, adding outside attention to what started as a bug fix.

For now, the work left is coordination. Formal verification results are due before mainnet, and wallet, exchange, and infrastructure providers still need to ship updated support in the next two and a half weeks.