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Volatility is back. After rallying to $167 on June 11, SOL reversed sharply below $145 as geopolitical shocks rattled risk markets. Israeli airstrikes on Iran and the ensuing global rush to hard assets appear to be the trigger here.



Oil surged. Gold climbed. Solana and Bitcoin stumbled off a cliff.



Early Friday, we saw BTC dip briefly below $103k, triggering over $400 million in long liquidations before rebounding to ~$105k. Solana dropped around 9.6% with $52 million in liquidations, third only to BTC and ETH.



Despite the correction, Solana's core metrics have held. Daily transaction counts remain around 80 million. Compute throughput is stable. Application revenue is steady at $4-7 million/day.



Solana's DEX layer is rotating, with volume down to $2.5-3.5 billion, from over $6 billion in May. Pump.fun continues to dominate meme traffic while SolFi captures SOL-USD pairs. Meta-aggregators like Titan and Kamino Swap are quietly gaining ground, offering better routing via off-chain sources like Pyth's Express Relay, and even as volumes dipped, execution efficiency improved. 



Underneath the rabble, Solana's staking layer is unshaken. The stake rate holds at 65.4%, with net activations still outpacing deactivations. Liquid staking tokens, led by jitoSOL, remain steady near $7 billion. MEV tips from Jito declined post-frenzy, but validator income remains resilient. In other words, no real crisis of confidence is to be seen among active users.



It's easy to see why some might worry superficially, what with SOL currently testing $140 support. A breakdown could open moves to $123 or even $110. But if BTC holds above $100k and oil premiums fade, SOL seems likely to stage a recovery.



Like it or not, the technical binary of reclaiming momentum vs. a deeper correction likely hinges a lot on bitcoin’s next move.



It's a tough one to predict, given that the macro

Solana slides on macro pressure as oil and gold rally

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Oil prices surged while global equities faltered Friday morning, on fears that Israel’s attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities could escalate into a broader conflict. 



Brent crude, a benchmark for global oil prices, gained more than 8% in the early hours of Friday morning. West Texas Intermediate crude rallied as much as 14% before paring some gains, following reports from Iran that oil facilities were not damaged by Israeli airstrikes. 



Gold approached its all-time high as investors moved toward safe-haven assets. 



The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes hovered in the red for most of the session, trading 0.8% and 0.9% lower at 2 p.m. ET. 



Trading like a risk asset, bitcoin was also in the red on Friday — trading 0.6% lower on the day at 2 p.m. ET to hover around $105,200. 



US Treasury yields moved higher Friday morning, signaling investors’ fear that higher oil prices could lead to prolonged elevated inflation. While Treasury prices typically rally on geopolitical uncertainty (remember, prices and yields move inversely), inflationary pressures could impact the Fed’s rate-cutting timeline. 



Speaking of the FOMC, this week’s data (more on that below) makes a solid case that while committee members will probably not touch interest rates next week, a cut — or two — before year end may be in the cards. At least that’s what markets were thinking, but geopolitical tensions have given investors reason to pause. 



Odds of the first 25 basis point cut coming in September were at 59% on Thursday but dipped to 56% Friday morning, per data from CME Group. 



The shift, slight as it is, supports the narrative that traders are selling US Treasurys on fears the Fed may keep interest rates higher should oil prices stay higher. 



Early reports suggest that the situation in the Middle East will not be resolved quickly; Iran has vowed “severe”

Stocks, cryptos lower following Israel strike on Iran

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Coinbase announced a stablecoin payment option on Shopify, as well as an American Express credit card, during yesterday’s State of Crypto Summit. 



Buyers making online purchases from an estimated two million businesses using Shopify may soon see USDC on Base as a payment option when checking out, and will have to approve those payments via a third-party crypto wallet.



Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke said during one talk that what a user sees when buying items through the ecommerce site isn’t the whole story. Clicking the “Pay” button initiates many steps on the backend, and adding a price-volatile crypto token can make that even more complicated.



“Stablecoins are obviously key here,” Lutke said.



That said, Shopify has added different types of crypto payment options before — and even tried out offering bitcoin payments way back in 2013 when it had about 70,000 online stores using its platform. 



Shopify’s site already lists Solana Pay, Crypto.com, Strike, and half a dozen other crypto payment integrations as options for businesses to choose to opt into. It’s just not clear how many Shopify merchants are actually going for these options.




Platforms using @Stripe Connect can now offer stablecoin payments to their users!This means businesses can:🌎 reach more markets💰 at lower costFirst out of the gate is @shopify, enabling millions of their merchants to accept payments in USDC! pic.twitter.com/SDoABDz5uI— Jen (@BackseatVC) June 12, 2025




The USDC on Base payment option is first rolling out in early access, with plans to expand that rollout this year. Lutke said Shopify is also exploring adding 1% cashback, too, as an extra perk. 



Stripe’s tech helped make this happen. Merchants can decide whether they want to keep their earnings in USDC or convert it into their native fiat currency.



Both during the livestream and afterwards across different X

Coinbase unveils Amex card, Shopify integration

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FIFA, Maplestory, Off the Grid, Inversion.



These are among the few high-profile names to have launched (or plan to launch) chains on Avalanche’s tech stack lately.



Why Avalanche and not Ethereum?



The answer starts with Avalanche9000, the network’s largest upgrade that went into effect last December. It was Avalanche’s own version of “The Merge,” which radically overhauled validator economics.



As part of ACP-77, Avalanche validator’s high fixed stake cost requirements (2000 AVAX) were replaced with a low-cost, pay-as-you-go model.



Reduced upfront costs have made it attractive to launch a sovereign Avalanche L1 chain — it’s possibly even cheaper than a Celestia rollup or Cosmos Appchain, based on estimates by Blockworks Research’s EffortCapital.







The cost savings go further. 



Teams bootstrapping an Avalanche L1 can leverage what the C-Chain — Avalanche’s liquidity hub — has already built out.



For instance, Avalanche L1s can offer users the convenience of a CEX ramp via the C-Chain without having to pay a hefty percentage of their token supply to integrate directly.



“That's one of the core value propositions at Avalanche,” Ava Labs chief strategy officer Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo told me. “From a go-to-market perspective, it saves teams a lot of time and millions of dollars in integration fees.”



This goes for most standard chain infrastructure that the C-Chain already has, such as oracles, RPCs, indexers, explorers, NFT marketplaces, etc. — all of which can cost up to an estimated $13 million for an independent L1 to bootstrap themselves.



It all hinges on Avalanche’s “Interchain Messaging” (ICM) protocol, which Avalanche L1s use to easily move assets to and from the C-Chain to take advantage of the aforementioned features.



C-Chain to Henesys (Maplestory’s chain) is today the most active back-and-forth

Why are big games building on Avalanche instead of Ethereum?

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Bitcoin is hard money, in more ways than one.



The never-ending task of keeping BTC safe might be one of the hardest. There are plenty of options — hardware wallets, software solutions and even multi-sigs can do the trick, depending on how they're implemented.



But if you’re legendary Bitcoiner Peter Todd, you might opt for the trusty brain wallet. And luckily for us, he’s told us exactly how he would do it.



(P.S. Catch Peter Todd on stage at Permissionless IV in Brooklyn later this month, as he sits down with Pete Rizzo for an intimate chat to kick off Day 1.)



First, a disclaimer: Todd shared his brain wallet process a long time ago, in August 2012, over a year before BIP-39 was introduced. 



BIP-39 brought mnemonic phrases to Bitcoin and made room for a 25th word to be layered on top, which significantly boosted the level of entropy, keeping private keys safe from brute force attacks.All that only makes Todd’s process more impressive, even if he might use a different method today. He effectively did what BIP-39 does with his mind (and some help from Bitcoin itself).



The method



Here’s how, in Todd’s own words:




"Generate a password that you can remember individually. Personally I use the program pwgen which produces ‘pronounceable passwords.’ I use it in eight-character upper/numerals/symbols mode.



Write that password down. Yes this is heresy; you'll securely destroy it later. 



Memorize that password. This is a lot easier than you think. I find if I spend five minutes a day memorizing a password I can recall it easily in a week or so, and have probably memorized it pretty much permanently after a month or two. Remember studying in university? Use those techniques. Flashcards are very effective; an important part of memorization is being forced to recall what you are trying to memorize. 



Repeat until you have five different

How Peter Todd stored bitcoin in his brain wallet

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As regulation becomes clearer and the number of national banks rumored to have stablecoin plans grow, it seems like much of America’s financial sector is coming to grips with a future involving stables. But compared to these well-heeled and technically-savvy TradFi institutions, local banks and credit unions — where a sizable percentage of Americans do their banking — are almost certain to lag behind in this trend.



To help narrow this gap, Beam and Braid are partnering to offer stablecoin infrastructure to community banks and credit unions in the US, Lightspeed has learned exclusively.



The program will open with seven partner banks across the American northeast and midwest, Beam founder and CEO Dan Mottice told me. At a basic level, Braid offers a set of APIs that allow smaller banks to modernize their product lines — like adding real time payments or new card network capabilities, for instance — and Beam is providing the stablecoin-specific infrastructure.



In exchange for these capabilities, the banks will pay a licensing fee plus transaction fees on the stablecoin flows, a Beam representative said.



Mottice, who was previously product lead for Visa’s crypto arm, founded Beam in 2022. Under the prior SEC regime, the stablecoin company primarily conducted business outside of the United States, in regions where dollar access was desirable (like Latin America and Africa).



When the crypto-friendly Trump administration came to office, Mottice and Co. began trying to pre-empt new US-based market opportunities that might emerge, Mottice told me. One segment that came to mind was community banks, many of which feel like they missed out on the fintech wave of the 2010s and may be keen on becoming early adopters of a newer financial innovation in stablecoins. This is especially important as these banks’ depositor bases age, and as sthey face the task of

Beam and Braid to offer stablecoins to smaller banks

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Yesterday, Coinbase hosted its annual State of Crypto summit. There were lots of announcements to unpack, especially if we’re talking about consumers.



I want to focus on remarks from a chat between Coinbase’s Brett Tejpaul and BlackRock COO Rob Goldstein, who gave some insight into how the world’s largest asset manager is thinking about crypto. 



While he didn’t give a timeline (other than stating that BlackRock has been studying crypto since roughly 2017), he did say that BlackRock saw “incredible utility with regards to stablecoins.”



“And…we saw a real requirement for the underlying assets to be managed, not sort of like a money market fund, but in a money market fund,” he added. 



The other leg of its strategy was all about access, Goldstein said, something that came with IBIT. He noted that IBIT, even before its success, was geared at being a “bridge strategy” designed to allow folks to gain exposure to bitcoin without ever buying bitcoin itself.



“An interesting fact about IBIT that I think is quite remarkable is that of the 25 largest ETFs in the world, the youngest one — aside from IBIT — is 12 years old. IBIT is 18 months old,” he said.



Then you have BUIDL…and, well, it seems like BlackRock’s played their hands right so far when it comes to success as a bridge. 



However, Goldstein noted that parts of the financial system are ripe for innovation — a fact I think we can all agree on.



“The frictions that still exist are much more oriented towards funds. There is a legacy ecosystem that's been built over the past several decades that just has a lot of cost in it, it's slow, it doesn't scale that well, and I think that's a natural place for innovation and disruption, just through technology and tokenization,” he said. 



But it really was Goldstein’s last point that made me realize just how bullish BlackRock is on

‘There’s so much opportunity’ in crypto: BlackRock COO

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Next week is the Fed's FOMC Day, and it feels like it’s going to be a highly contentious one.



On one hand, you have President Trump pressing Chair Jerome Powell to cut rates by 100bps as soon as possible:







On the other hand, you have the FOMC toeing the line; they’re in a “wait-and-see” mode. This is because they don’t want to react in either a dovish or hawkish direction until they have a better idea of where the tariff policy will net out.



However, doing nothing is also a policy decision. 



Currently, there’s a 97% implied probability for the Fed to pause, so there’s almost no expectation for it to cut next week:



Source: CME



However, next week will also have a dot plot meeting wherein we’ll receive an update on the Fed’s summary of economic projections (SEP). If the Fed wanted to signal a dovish tilt, the SEP is what will be used to signal that. 



To gauge whether that will be the case, let’s take a look at some of the most recent economic data that will drive the FOMC’s thinking next week.



The Fed has insisted on being data-dependent while trying to navigate an inflation rate above its 2% target for multiple years now. Looking at the Taylor Rule — a historically accurate model for gauging how tight or loose monetary policy is based on the Fed’s dual-mandate of maximum employment and stable prices — the Fed should be cutting right now, but isn’t:







Labor



This week we saw a huge uptick in continuing jobless claims, emphasizing just how hard it is to get a job when you lose one.



Source: Augur Infinity



Although we have not seen the same surge in the unemployment rate nor for initial jobless claims, this uptick further validates how little companies are hiring right now. But they’re not at the point of layoffs, either. We are in a regime of attrition right now.



This is a precarious place to be. By

Is the Fed risking a policy mistake by sitting on their hands?

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Eight months after its early access public launch, Off The Grid is preparing to release on Steam.



The game is currently available as a free-to-play title via the Epic Games Store on PC and on latest-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles’ respective game shops. 



We don’t have the exact Steam launch date yet, but Delphi Ventures Founding Partner Piers Kicks, whose firm invested in Gunzilla Games, said yesterday that the shooter is coming to Steam in a “few weeks” (so likely in the last week of June). 



The game remains on Epic’s list of “Most Played” games, suggesting it’s doing well, and holds a player rating on Epic of 3.9 out of a possible 5.



Gunzilla CEO Vlad Korolev said last month that Off The Grid has consistently had over 10,000 new players daily since launch.



Off The Grid falls behind its non-crypto shooter peers when it comes to attention on Twitch, however. In the past month, OTG saw less than a million total hours watched, with an average of 28 Twitch streamers broadcasting the game at any given time. The game sees a total average of about 1,400 concurrent viewers on Twitch.



Those numbers don’t compare to games like Counter-Strike 2 (over 75 million hours watched, with 105,000 average total viewers in that same period) or Apex Legends (17.3 million hours, with 24,000 average total viewers), though.



That makes OTG the 157th most-watched game on Twitch by total watch hours in the past month.



Wallets don’t equal players



First things first: We don’t have exact Off The Grid player count numbers yet, and it’s not accurate to interpret a wallet count as a player count. This is in part because OTG’s crypto elements are optional, but also because we live in a world where bots and AI agents can control wallets (and users can have more than one wallet).



Still, the number of crypto wallets engaging with Off The Grid has grown (roughly

Off The Grid active wallets hold steady ahead of Steam launch

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Spark, the DeFi protocol behind SparkLend and Spark Savings, has launched Ignition. This long-awaited airdrop campaign is designed to reward early ecosystem contributors and kick off decentralized governance via the SPK token.



The campaign will reach approximately 50,000 participants, spanning users of Aave, Pendle, Centrifuge, Morpho, Unichain, Lido and OP Mainnet, according to the Spark team. Eligibility is determined based on prior engagement with SparkLend or by holding select stablecoins, including USDS, sUSDS, DAI, sDAI and xDAI (the gas token of Gnosis Chain). Token recipients can check eligibility and claim their SPK at token launch via Ignition’s official portal.



The token itself is not yet live, and no launch date has been announced — so watch out for phishing attempts!



The scope of eligibility is strikingly broad: Users who held stablecoins or interacted with platforms like Aave, Morpho, Pendle or Fluid as far back as 2023 — when Spark launched — may qualify. Users qualify from holding tokens and DeFi positions on Ethereum mainnet, L2s like Base, Arbitrum and Optimism, and even Gnosis and Polygon.



SPK tokens, however, will be claimable only on Ethereum Mainnet, regardless of the network where eligibility was earned. The claim window is expected to run for six weeks following token launch, after which unclaimed SPK will be redirected to the “Overdrive” phase.



Overdrive is the second planned campaign phase following Ignition, and establishes a staking-based rewards program allowing recipients to stake their SPK for additional yield. Participants from Spark Savings may receive boosted allocations during Overdrive, depending on their prior activity. That’s one way in which Spark aims to reward long-term alignment and meaningful participation across its financial stack.



“This airdrop campaign marks a key milestone in Spark’s roadmap

Spark airdrop lights the fuse on decentralized governance

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Today’s retrospective will be a trauma-bonding experience for anyone who was too busy playing Plants vs. Zombies or StarCraft 2 to stack sats in 2010.



At this point 15 years ago, the premier Bitcoin faucet was in full swing.



Gavin Andresen, one of Satoshi's first collaborators, had only been a member of Bitcointalk for two weeks when he announced he would give away free bitcoin.



“For my first Bitcoin coding project, I decided to do something that sounds really dumb: I created a web site that gives away Bitcoins,” he wrote.



Anyone who entered a Bitcoin address and solved a captcha would soon soon receive 5 BTC, worth about five cents apiece at the time. Today, 5 BTC would trade for more than half a million dollars.







Gavin filled the faucet with 1,100 of his own bitcoin to start, or about $55 in US dollar terms, and said he would add more once he was sure the system worked as intended. Those same coins would fetch nearly $118 million at current prices.



“Why? Because I want the Bitcoin project to succeed, and I think it is more likely to be a success if people can get a handful of coins to try it out. It can be frustrating to wait until your node generates some coins (and that will get more frustrating in the future), and buying Bitcoins is still a little bit clunky.”



At first, the faucet was restricted to dishing out 5 BTC per IP address, leading one user to pull out 50 BTC in minutes using Tor, which can quickly generate new IP addresses within the browser itself. In good faith, that user sent the coins back to the faucet. 



“He's giving it away, it's an honor system, so don't take more than you need,” wrote Laszlo Hanycez. 



Gavin then made it so each bitcoin address could only ever receive one faucet donation “to make it a teeny-tiny bit harder to cheat. I don't want to blacklist anybody coming from Tor, though — I think a lot

We're all still early — but not early enough for the free bitcoin faucet

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30% of bitcoin is now held by centralized entities. 



Pretty wild, especially if you rewind to the past couple of years and remember how much of a dream it was to even think that we’d get something like a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.



But it also might be a good thing, from a volatility perspective, a report from Gemini and Glassnode noted. 



“With 30.9% of bitcoin’s circulating supply now held in centralized treasuries — including governments, ETFs, public companies, and centralized exchanges — the market has undergone a structural transformation toward institutional maturity,” the report said.



“As adoption has broadened, particularly across sovereign and regulated financial entities, annualized realized volatility across all time frames — from 1-week to 1-year — has declined consistently since 2018.”



We’re now more likely to see “more sustained and orderly rallies” versus the spikes we used to see. 



That 30% figure means that there are 216 entities holding BTC, the report noted.



Source: Gemini and Glassnode



While no one holds a candle to the amount of bitcoin held by exchanges, it’s surprising (and yet also not surprising, if you know what I mean?) that public companies are the most numerous. 



I believe the pale yellow is a typo and should say ETF/Funds. 



Yep, you read that right, 101 companies. 



Those firms hold a total of 765,300 bitcoins, which is a hefty amount, but they are still only third behind ETF/Funds, which hold 1.3 million bitcoins. Exchanges easily take the lead with over 3 million bitcoin. 



“Across nearly all institutional categories — excluding private companies — the top three entities control between 65% to 90% of total holdings, underscoring the dominance of early adopters in the Bitcoin treasury space,” the report said. 



“This pattern is particularly stark in the DeFi, public company,