This is yet another "big week" for crypto. Hacks, upgrades, fees, and more are covered in this edition of our weekly market bulletin. Take a minute to skim over it and stay up to date with everything in crypto. Link is in the next post. Authors: @carlos_guzman @slatersanter

We're looking forward to attending the Asia Onchain Finance Summit this week hosted by Hong Kong Ethereum Community Hub (@ethereumhkhub). We'll discuss how institutional finance is evolving onchain and a lot more.

Our CEO Xin Song (@xinsong86) told CoinDesk: "The convergence of traditional finance and digital assets is happening faster than ever, and we have to reinvent ourselves to meet the market where it is."

This is definitely a great case study for the crypto value accrual debate. I personally draw the opposite conclusion from the numbers. Robinhood was not locked into Ethereum. They could have spun up their own L1, or gone with a cheaper DA layer and paid Ethereum next to nothing. Near-free settlement was likely part of why Ethereum won the deal in the first place. Blockchains are still early in adoption, and right now the priority is onboarding apps, users, assets and liquidity until the network effects are real and sticky. Once Robinhood has years of state, tooling and liquidity sitting on Ethereum, the latter gains some pricing power. Raising prices before that stickiness exists risks having the next Robinhood build somewhere else, or driving Robinhood itself away. The other thing is that fee capture arguably can't carry ETH's valuation anyway. ETH trades at around a $230B market cap, more or less McDonald's, and McDonald's earned $8.6B last year. The entire L2 sector paid Ethereum about $10M for settlement in 2025. Even a 75/10/15 split takes Ethereum's lifetime cut of Robinhood Chain from $1,538 to roughly $120K. You'd need thousands of Robinhood Chains to move the needle. At a generous 30x, $230B implies about $7.5B a year in earnings, hundreds of times what L2s pay today. Bitcoin meanwhile sits around $1.3T with zero cash flow. ETH's current valuation only makes sense as money/store of value. The shorter path to justifying a higher valuation is competing with Bitcoin for primacy in that role. Charging L2s more won't move a $230B valuation, and it could cost Ethereum the next Robinhood.

Our own Managing Director of Asset Management Andy Baehr (@baehr) talks with NYSE's (@nyse) J.D. Durkin (@jd_durkin) about summertime sentiment in crypto's capital markets, the Clarity Act, and more. Watch their full conversation here:

Excited to be hosting the Injective Summit in Washington, D.C. this Thursday. I’ll be moderating a discussion with leaders from Invesco, Grayscale, and Pantera Capital on what Wall Street is most excited about as institutional adoption of digital assets accelerates. We’ll also hear from members of Congress on why U.S. leadership in digital assets and financial innovation matters. Looking forward to some great conversations. See you in D.C. 🇺🇸

S&P Global is paying attention to DeFi vaults. Key takeaways from its latest primer: • Vaults are becoming the on-chain equivalent of managed funds. • They improve operational efficiency but introduce new risk considerations. • While crypto-native today, they're poised to become *core infrastructure* for tokenized real-world assets and institutional capital.

We believe the next generation of digital asset markets will be built on confidentiality, transparency, and control. That's why GSR is proud to work with Zama (@zama) as one of the first depositors into the Steakhouse (@steakhousefi) Confidential Prime USDC Vault.

Today we’re announcing the $57M acquisitions of Autonomous and Architech. Advisory, liquidity, and capital markets infrastructure are disconnected services that operate in silos. Through our acquisition of Autonomous and Architech, we're changing that.