GM and happy Friday.

Yesterday’s tape was less about broad crypto beta and more about infrastructure catching a bid. Crypto equities led on regulatory relief and stablecoin exposure, Perps outperformed on continued HYPE accumulation, and Solana’s next test is whether its execution edge can extend beyond SOL-USDC into less liquid pairs and larger clips.

Crypto equities led the cross-sector board over the last 24 hours, with the Crypto Equities Index up 10.02% and the 2025 Crypto Equity Cohort up 9.02%. Perps followed at +6.39%, while DeFi gained 4.62% and Solana Eco rose 2.48%. Traditional risk assets were positive but much more muted, with the NASDAQ 100 up 0.98% and the S&P 500 up 0.62%. BTC lagged at -1.20%.

Within crypto equities, GEMI stood out as the market continued to price in this week’s CFTC relief motion from May 27, which moved to unwind the prior judgment against Gemini and removed a key regulatory overhang. GEMI finished up 10.94%, giving the stock the cleanest single-name catalyst in the 2025 crypto equity basket.

Similarly, strength in Perps continues to be led by Hyperliquid, where multiple accumulation vehicles, including ETFs, the Assistance Fund, and DATs, continue to buy even above previous all-time highs. Hyperliquid Strategies bought $82.6M of HYPE last week, adding 1.45M HYPE, or 0.65% of circulating supply. HYPE ETFs added another 894K HYPE, worth $50.9M, while the Assistance Fund added 248K HYPE, worth $14.1M. Combined, these channels absorbed roughly 2.59M HYPE, or 1.16% of circulating supply, in one week. 

— Shaunda

Prop AMMs Beyond SOL-USDC

Solana has proven its execution edge on SOL-USDC. The harder test is whether that model travels to other pairs. The opportunity is a unified execution layer for any asset; the constraint is whether each market can attract enough flow, reference pricing, and maker depth to support tight quotes.

The early evidence is mixed but directional. Jupiter-routed cbBTC/USDC has moved from competitive to outright price improvement, with both buy-side and sell-side medians recently below zero, meaning better fills than the pre-fill Binance reference even before Binance fees.

However, WETH/USDC is less clean. Solana beats Binance's base retail tier, but the sell-side median still sits around or above Binance VIP 9.

So how does Solana extend that edge from SOL-USDC to every pair and clip size?

Jito's Maker Priority Plugin gives enrolled prop AMMs a dedicated 50 ms lane for oracle updates, turning placement variance into deterministic quote refreshes and lowering adverse-selection risk on thin pairs, where makers can defend stale quotes with less spread cushion. The data below shows Jito-BAM slots becoming more deterministic since the Maker Priority Plugin launched, posting the lowest oracle-update placement variance of any builder.

HumidiFi's paid onchain coverage takes a novel approach to push this further, tightening realized spread proxies from roughly 48 bps to 16 bps on DBR and 26 bps to 10 bps on PENGU once quoting began.

Solana's roadmap should reinforce the trend. Alpenglow cuts finality from roughly 12.8 seconds to the 100 to 150 ms range in late 2026, while Constellation adds more predictable inclusion and ordering through 50 ms cycles and multiple proposers, both compressing the stale-quote premium makers price into quotes.

If regulatory clarity brings tokenized real-world assets onchain and Solana's infrastructure keeps improving, then consistent execution across every asset and clip size turns Solana from competing with other crypto venues into competing for global trading flow. Its permissionless architecture makes execution an open design space where market structure evolves through live competition, however, too much decentralization without infrastructure consistency can cut the other way.

— Sam

1. Do Liquidity Rewards on PMs Work? ... Only if They're Huge!

Liquidity incentives on prediction markets can improve top-of-book depth and tighten spreads, but the effect only becomes meaningful when rewards are large relative to existing liquidity. The data suggests low-intensity programs often do little, while sponsorships begin showing stronger median uplift around 0.1% to 1% of pre-book liquidity per day and rewards only show clear double-digit median uplift in the 3%+ bucket. Even then, outcomes remain noisy, with market attention, resolution risk, exogenous information flow, and pre-existing liquidity conditions often explaining more than incentive size alone. The takeaway is that rewards can help, but they are not a complete liquidity solution; better prediction market liquidity likely requires deeper market-structure improvements, not just larger subsidies.

2. Why I Sold My ETH

David Hoffman argues that the “ETH is money” thesis did not fully fail, but has largely played out. He remains bullish on Ethereum as a network, but believes ETH the asset is unlikely to be structurally rerated because Ethereum’s architecture gives value back to apps, L2s, stablecoins, and users rather than aggressively capturing it for ETH holders. The core claim is that ETH could only become a dominant monetary asset if Ethereum maintained overwhelming market share, sustained fee dominance, and coordinated its L1, L2s, governance, brand, and roadmap better than competitors. Instead, blockspace has commoditized, L2s and applications capture more margin, stablecoins and other tokenized assets benefit from Ethereum’s utility, and the “strong crypto” narrative that supported ETH in 2021 has weakened. The takeaway is not bearishness on Ethereum, but a distinction between Ethereum’s success as open financial infrastructure and ETH’s ability to capture that success as an investable asset.