GM and happy Thursday!

Uncertainty in monetary policy, AI hyperscalers, and the Iran conflict dragged risk assets lower over the past week, while BTC shows relative strength. Can this relationship hold when risk assets set their low and move back to the upside?

Below, we track META's climb up the CEX ladder to Upbit and weigh whether MetaDAO's futarchy launchpad is a moat or a blueprint, with Umia porting the same MetaLeX scaffolding to Base and Ethereum.

Markets went decisively risk off over the past week as the Nasdaq 100 traded negative for 5 consecutive days. This selloff puts the Nasdaq now -11.5% off of its all time high. Interestingly, this selloff is concentrated in semis, memory, and megacap tech, the leaders over the past few months. The S&P 500 Equal Weight index ($RSP) has continued to trade near highs. The VIX moved up to 20 while the VXN cleared 30. 

The move to the downside is paired with macro uncertainty, which markets never enjoy. Kevin Warsh delivered his second FOMC conference on Wednesday, where the committee voted 9-3 to leave the target rate unchanged at 3.5%-3.75%. Over the past few weeks, oil traded up 39% from its recent low on the back of the ongoing conflict in Iran, now sitting 25% above that level, adding fears of inflationary pressure and demand destruction. 

Despite the selloff in legacy indices and recent equity leaders, BTC and crypto majors show relative strength over this period, with BTC down -3.36% over the past week while the Nasdaq 100 is down -5.8%. Crypto Equities (-8.5%), Miners (-27%), and longer-tail crypto sectors are the hardest hit, dragged down by the broader move in equities and AI hyperscalers, coupled with decaying odds CLARITY will pass this year. Regardless, BTC is showing relative strength, up 10% since the start of July while the Nasdaq 100 is now down -8.8%. The question is, can this downside alpha flip to upside alpha when equity strength returns?

— Luke

MetaDAO climbs the CEX ladder

Traders bid META up to a $7.20 intraday high in Wednesday trading before letting it fade below $5.00, a gain of roughly 20% against volume near $9.2M Wednesday morning. The buying followed Upbit's listing of the token across KRW, BTC and USDT pairs, the third rung on a centralized-exchange ladder that already ran through KuCoin in early May and Coinbase later that month. Korean venues tend to pack a burst of retail demand into the opening hours of a new pair, and the same-day pullback fits the sell-the-news arc that has trailed most 2025 and 2026 Upbit debuts.

The rally owes more to distribution than to protocol income. META has added 21% on the week and 58% on the month, yet MetaDAO's Q1 2026 holder report put quarterly protocol revenue at $556K, down close to 80% from Q4's $2.52M. Its own treasury runs thin: Its live transparency dashboard shows about $1.25M in treasury value, most of it protocol-owned USDC in the Futarchy AMM. Supply sits fully unlocked at 22.7M.

Others are now circling the model. Umia, an EVM-native launchpad, sells itself as the fix for the ways tokens strand their holders: a noncustodial treasury the team cannot touch beyond a fixed monthly allowance, decision markets whose resolved outcomes bind the operating team under the legal wrapper, and IP, team and treasury folded into one MetaLeX-built entity so the venture and its token cannot drift apart.

Strip the framing and it is the MetaDAO playbook ported to Base and Ethereum, down to the shared MetaLeX scaffolding, with an AI framing aimed at "agentic ventures" that raise and ship before a VC round closes. Founder Francesco Mosterts told CCN in April that the technical and legal build was done and targeting a mid-Q2 launch, though Umia has yet to publish a confirmed raise. We read the pairing as a category test: MetaDAO holds a live token, a $108M market cap and two marquee raises behind it, including Umbra, which cleared its target many times over and traded near 5x its $0.30 ICO price. 

Both projects have filed Token Transparency Framework disclosures. MetaDAO runs a Marshall Islands DAO LLC that holds the IP and a Wyoming service company, Organization Technology, on a $240K monthly agreement, with futarchy governing a noncustodial treasury. Umia runs a Cayman segregated portfolio built on the same MetaLeX BORG framework that MetaDAO pays 7% of revenue to use, plus a Delaware lab, Chainbound, on its own service agreement, with decision markets governing a noncustodial treasury. 

MetaDAO's filing describes an origin few tokens can claim: a November 2023 launch of 1M capped META, 10K airdropped and 970K burned, with capital raised later through futarchy-approved rounds from Paradigm, Variant, 6MV and others totaling north of $13M. Supply is now uncapped and minted only by proposal. 

Umia's filing sets out the opposite starting point, being 50M UMIA fixed at genesis with a 35% public auction alongside roughly half the supply held by insiders: 20.3% to Chainbound's warrant-holding backers, 20% in a price-milestone performance reserve, and 5% each to team and service providers. 

It’s worth watching whether META keeps a higher floor once the Korean flow drains. Coinbase's May listing bought US access, and META still sits about 56% under its October high. If the futarchy launchpad is a real moat, MetaDAO's brand and Solana liquidity should hold share as Umia and others port the mechanics to other chains. 

— Nick

Hyperliquid Priority Fees: Internalizing HFT Revenue

Priority fees have generated $5.07M since Hyperliquid enabled them on April 13, and the trailing 30 days run at a $33.5M annualized pace, 6.7% of revenue against the roughly 80% that ordering-related fees represent on Ethereum and Solana. Devens models write-side capture rising from 14% to 50% of a $133M annual edge pool and read-priority seats expanding past today's two Dutch-auction slots, taking priority-fee revenue from a $32M run rate to $87M and total annualized revenue from $498M in July to $979M by December. Adoption stays thin and concentrated, at 194 write-priority and 3.5 read-priority users a day against 89.7K DAU with the top 10 wallets covering 69.4% of fees, leaving the upside dependent on broader participation rather than proven demand. From Blockworks Research analyst Shaunda Devens.

Raydium Q2 Token Holder Report

Raydium's Q2 net revenue fell 64.0% QoQ to $2.19M and 87.7% YoY, tracking a Solana-wide contraction that pulled spot DEX volume down 44.3% to $160.83B and cut the protocol's share among the four largest AMMs to 16.6% from 18.2%. Tokenized-asset volume climbed 273.8% to $2.09B, or 21.2% of spot volume, lifting Raydium to 34.4% of Solana's tokenized-asset spot volume and past memecoins as its leading category for the first time since 2023, while CLMM's net-revenue share rose to roughly 55% from 33% and buybacks slowed to $1.72M against a $199.1M cumulative total. The mix reads more durable than a year of memecoin dependence, though the launchpad still rests on Bonk Fun at 96.2% of LaunchLab volume and the tokenized-asset thesis has not cleared a full market cycle. From Blockworks Research.

Will Every Failed Crypto Idea Work?

On this episode of The Chopping Block, the speakers argue that crypto’s strongest near-term opportunities are practical financial applications, especially stablecoins, payments, capital formation, prediction markets, and infrastructure used quietly by banks, fintechs, and AI agents. The panel debates whether failed crypto ideas such as NFTs, DAOs, creator tokens, decentralized social, and on-chain reputation will eventually return, concluding that revival requires a clear user need, better execution, and a credible “why now,” rather than simply attaching a blockchain or token to an existing product. They also explore how AI could reshape machine-to-machine payments and online monetization, while emphasizing that decentralization is not inevitable and that successful products must solve real customer problems rather than rely on ideology or speculative incentives.