The information flow is too fast, and in-depth analysis articles are easily drowned out by hot topics. The "Weekly Editor's Picks" column fishes these judgment-worthy pieces out of the ocean of information, filtering out the noise, leaving you with insights, and sparking inspiration.
Macro Landscape
With the Strait of Hormuz Reopened, What Trades Is the Market Betting On?
The war conflict has largely shifted from the military phase to the negotiation phase. The market is switching from "war shock" to "supply recovery".
With the strait reopened, the market is shorting crude oil risk premiums, going long on airlines, cruise lines, and the tourism chain, going long on Asian energy importers, going long on bond duration, and shorting inflation expectations. LNG, fertilizers, and the chemical chain are also being repriced.
Investment & Entrepreneurship
Ray Dalio: When AI Giants Dominate the U.S. Stock Market, I Choose Not to Bet on Direction, But to Do One Thing
Technological progress itself does not equate to the stocks being equally attractive. Major historical technology cycles have often gone through phases of excitement, crowding, volatility, and shakeout.
When a handful of tech companies occupy an increasingly high weight in the index, investors need to be wary of whether they are unintentionally holding a concentrated, high-risk exposure with high correlation. Compared to continuing to chase a few leaders, a truly more robust approach is to build a diversified portfolio composed of high-quality, low-correlation assets and adjust the volatility level according to one's own risk tolerance.
Crypto 2029: The Ultimate Forecast for the Crypto Industry's Four-Year Cycle
The three tracks of private perpetual contracts, stablecoins, and asset tokenization, while their product logic is sound and market demand sufficiently validated, have their development speed severely constrained by external policy forces outside the industry.
By 2029, what will remain in the public eye are the core products that the crypto industry has been truly building all along through successive speculative cycles — asset trading markets.
Data Deciphers the BTC Cycle: Three Major Bottom Signals All Light Up, Will Q4 Be the Key Turning Window?
When BTC stands above $120k, everyone is willing to believe it will go higher; but when it falls back to around $60k, with on-chain valuation, cycle positioning, long-term holder ratios, and macro variables all pointing to the bottom area, what the market lacks most is confidence.
The current zone is more akin to a window for phased accumulation requiring patience, discipline, and faith.
Post-SpaceX's Debut: A $2.1 Trillion Market Cap, Is It Still Worth Chasing?
SpaceX opened at $150, with its market cap settling at $2.1 trillion on its debut. At its current stage, SpaceX's revenue cannot support its massive valuation.
Starlink is SpaceX's only profitable business at present. Space launch is SpaceX's main claim to fame.
Beyond the mismatch between actual business and valuation, the excessive proportion of retail IPO allocation might also be a reason suppressing SpaceX's share price. Musk allocated 20~30% of SpaceX's IPO shares to retail investors. A larger retail holding proportion inherently represents greater volatility; retail can buy in recklessly due to FOMO, and also sell off emotionally at the slightest fluctuation. Therefore, retail truly affects volatility, not the final gains.
For investors watching SpaceX, the following two time points are particularly important:
- Approximately 15 trading days post-IPO (estimated around July 6-7), SpaceX has a very high probability of being included in the Nasdaq index, at which point top-tier funds will start buying the stock;
- SpaceX Q2 earnings report release (mid-to-early August).
The Higher It Rises, The More Dangerous? The Systemic Risks Behind SpaceX's Valuation Frenzy
Gamma squeeze, i.e., a feedback loop where option market makers are forced to buy shares for hedging, further pushing up the stock price. If SpaceX replicates this path and continues to be pushed higher by its own narrative strength, limited float, and Musk's personal influence, it could evolve from a highly valued stock into a systemic variable for the entire market.
The more dangerous part lies in indexation and passive investing. When a company's market cap is large enough, it gets included in major indices and is held passively by ETFs, pension funds, retirement accounts, sovereign funds, and institutional portfolios. At that point, a bubble is no longer just a gamble for a few traders; it enters the long-term asset allocation of ordinary investors. The higher it rises, the less the market can avoid it; and the less it can avoid it, the more funds may continue to flow into it.
The article discusses a structural paradox in modern capital markets: when market mechanisms themselves can amplify narratives, leverage, and liquidity to the point of overwhelming fundamentals, can "price discovery" still hold?
For Those Still Obsessed with Altcoins, Just Go All In on HOOD
HOOD has risen recently due to multiple positive catalysts.
For a considerable period, cryptocurrency-related revenue has been a significant component of Robinhood's total revenue, and HOOD's stock price movement has shown a strong correlation with crypto. However, recent signs indicate Robinhood is breaking through its dependence on crypto business and positively decoupling from this correlation. Its stock trading, prediction markets, Pre-IPO, and newly added underwriting businesses are still expected to support its earnings growth.
If the crypto market returns to a bull market in the future, Robinhood's crypto trading revenue will likely explode in sync, allowing HOOD to still enjoy the红利 brought by industry growth.
Missing the Stock Token Wave, Korean Crypto Exchanges Forced to "Trade Shitcoins"
Against the backdrop of a weak crypto market and Korean crypto investors shifting to stock trading, Korean exchanges collectively saw declining Q1 2026 performance, forcing them to urgently take measures to reverse the trend. However, unlike overseas exchanges that can transform into "everything exchanges" by listing large batches of tokenized stocks to meet crypto traders' needs, Korea classifies tokenized stocks as securities, thereby prohibiting crypto exchanges from such trading, and also forbids Korean crypto exchanges from trading crypto futures, derivatives, or spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Regulatory measures in Korea aimed at protecting investors are now pushing crypto exchanges into the most speculative corner of the market. With revenue sources and new product lines like derivatives, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets all banned, to boost platform trading volume, exchanges are inclined to list "shitcoin" tokens that can attract attention and are more speculative.
Web3 & AI
An AI-Style Subprime Crisis? $1.8 Trillion in Off-Balance-Sheet Exposure, Becoming a Time Bomb for This Frenzy
Nearly $1 trillion in purchase commitments, over $800 billion in non-cancellable lease contracts, and hundreds of billions in supplier financing arrangements collectively constitute approximately $1.8 trillion in off-balance-sheet exposure—these liabilities sit outside balance sheets but genuinely lock in future cash outflows. The market has not yet fully priced in the above risks.
Morgan Stanley warns that the leverage ratio of hyperscale cloud enterprises has surged from 0.9x to 1.8x in just two quarters, with capital expenditure growth consistently outpacing revenue and free cash flow growth, while the real impact of depreciation pressure has yet to arrive.
Meanwhile, private credit institutions like Apollo and Blackstone are transferring leverage to the supply chain level through SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles), forming a highly circular, hard-to-penetrate financing structure. If AI commercialization falls short of expectations, or enterprise customers shift en masse to cheaper alternatives, the fragility of the entire financing chain will be exposed.
World Cup Just Started, Some AI Prediction Models Are Deified, Others Crash
Large models like Qwen, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Copilot can not only answer "which team is more likely to win" but also provide score predictions, upset possibilities, red card risks, key player performance, and match flow analysis.
For prediction market participants, AI's pre-match simulations are becoming another layer of reference beyond odds, news, team data, and market sentiment.
Where Is Your AI Monthly Fee Divided? A Chart Dissects the Supply Chain Behind $20
A Claude $20 subscription cost breakdown chart, splitting an AI monthly fee towards the model company, cloud compute, GPU, electricity, and supply chain.
AI subscriptions have ongoing inference costs and cannot directly apply traditional SaaS high-margin assumptions.
Related targets: OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, NVIDIA (NVDA), TSMC, SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, data centers, and the power chain.
Prediction Markets
The First Prediction Market Concept Stock Appears!
Kalshi previously announced a partnership with U.S. online broker Robinhood, with the latter using the former to provide prediction market trading services to its users, allowing bets on political, economic, sports events, etc. Recently, this relationship has undergone subtle changes. Robinhood gradually realized that what is truly scarce might not be the market itself, but the user access it firmly controls. Robinhood holds a key resource — distribution power.
After about half a year of accelerated development, the Rothera product gradually took shape, and Robinhood finally made the almost inevitable move — gradually shifting orders originally destined for Kalshi into its own controlled system. Robinhood specifically chose an ideal launch battlefield for Rothera — the World Cup.
If the theme of the prediction market industry in the past few years was the market battle between Polymarket and Kalshi, the theme for the coming years might turn into a channel war.
Also recommended: "World Cup Kicks Off, Counting Those 'Big Wins' and 'Big Losses' in Prediction Markets".
CeFi & DeFi
IOSG: On SpaceX's Listing Day, the First Real Test for Three Perpetual Mechanisms
Without a public spot price, how does the market price something? This is the core problem the entire Pre-IPO Perpetual category aims to solve.
In the SpaceX case, trade.xyz captured the on-chain market (about 96.5% of the volume), not because the oracle was smarter, but because near-zero funding fees made holding the position almost cost-free, it launched with the IPO catalyst, and pricing per share enabled cross-exchange arbitrage.
However, while Pre-IPO Perpetuals are good at handling price, they remain primitive at handling events. Corporate actions, especially a one-time stock split after conversion, have no pipeline on-chain: trade.xyz announced no rebase mechanism, Ventuals outsourced this to a single data supplier, which already had an incident (an outdated split data causing its market to flash crash 45%). The bottleneck isn't price discovery, but that boring "corporate actions" processing layer: traditional markets spent a century standardizing it, on-chain hasn't rebuilt it yet. Whoever can credibly deliver it will plug the last gap between these markets and the ones they aim to replace.
STRC Severely Depegs, What Risk Is the Market Pricing?
STRC fell to around $89. Based on an $11.5 annual dividend, the simple current yield is about 12.9%.
The market disagreement isn't about whether MicroStrategy will immediately be unable to pay dividends, but about how to discount the BTC reserves, high-interest financing, on-chain leverage, and competition from similar products.
Related targets: STRC, MSTR/MicroStrategy, SATA, BTC, Pendle, and related on-chain yield products.
STRC Depegs 11%, Can MicroStrategy's Perpetual Motion Machine Keep Turning?
The market's pricing of STRC not only reflects investors' attitude towards a preferred stock but also reflects market confidence in MicroStrategy's entire capital operation model.
Within MicroStrategy's balance sheet expansion loop, STRC is not just an ordinary financing tool but the most powerful engine of its current capital flywheel. Through the loop of "issuing more STRC ➡️ raising fiat ➡️ buying BTC ➡️ boosting company net assets ➡️ elevating STRC trustworthiness," MicroStrategy successfully built a seemingly infinitely loopable capital flywheel. However, the key prerequisite for this flywheel to run smoothly is that STRC must trade near its $100 par value.
The failure of the dividend's corrective effect means the risk the market is now pricing has gone beyond STRC's yield itself. First are superficial technical factors. Some market participants believe the recent decline largely stems from concentrated stampedes during deleveraging by arbitrage funds. Deeper concerns lie in MicroStrategy's liquidity reserve situation.
15%-25% Annualized, Is BlackRock's Bitcoin Yield ETF an Opportunity or a Trap?
BITA, based on BlackRock's spot Bitcoin fund IBIT, sells covered call options to earn stable option premium income for investors, at the cost of sacrificing some of Bitcoin's potential sharp upside. This yield-focused Bitcoin fund is designed for investors and institutions seeking stable cash flow, addressing the pain point that institutions cannot hold zero-yield assets.
Fund flow data will provide the final answer. If BITA and IBIT continue to absorb Bitcoin while Bitcoin stabilizes above the $65k range, it indicates genuine institutional buying has persistence; conversely, if the yield ETF merely diverts funds from the spot fund, the bearish "yield trap" thesis will be validated.
Ethereum & Scaling
Sharplink CEO: A Million Ethereum Developers, Who Can Compete?
Ethereum's core advantage is not speed, but that it gathers the largest and deepest talent pool; its true moat lies in the long-term ecosystem built by composability, standard-setting, and credible neutrality; these builders are focusing on cutting-edge issues like scalability and quantum resistance, continuously solidifying Ethereum's position as the default operating system for the financial internet.
Weekly Hot Topics Recap
Policy & Macro Markets
Iranian media releases detailed terms of U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, including reopening the Strait of Hormuz and releasing $24 billion of Iran's frozen funds, etc.;
U.S. and Iran announce immediate, permanent cessation of military operations on all fronts;
U.S.-Iran agreement confirmed reached, crypto and gold surge, oil plunges;
Fed holds rates steady as expected but overall hawkish, policy statement heavily revised;
Bipartisan U.S. lawmakers jointly propose pressure: ban presidential pardon or sentence reduction for SBF;
Anthropic: Suspends access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals, Amazon accused of being "behind-the-scenes driver" sparking regulatory intervention;
SpaceX acquires Cursor;
LiuLiuMei (06658.HK) soars on debut due to ticker homophone "LLM" (Large Language Model) (Retrospective);
Opinions & Voices
Arthur Hayes: AI Drains the Market, Bitcoin Unlikely to Reach $100k by Year-End;
a16z crypto: Crypto Industry Enters Show Me Era, Narrative-Driven Shifts to Data Verification;
Strive VP: If MicroStrategy Cannot Pay STRC Dividend, Bitcoin May Perish;
Institutions, Large Companies & Leading Projects
BTTInferGrid Builds Decentralized AI Inference Computing Power Network......
Attached is the portal to the "Weekly Editor's Picks" series. See you next issue~
