GM all and happy Thursday!

Risk assets sell off into Thursday’s open as the ongoing conflict in Iran and recent testimony from Kevin Warsh raise investors’ concerns and uncertainty. However, crypto majors and sectors show growing relative strength  and outperformance against equity indices. 

Below, we discuss GAIB Select, the protocol’s bet on tokenized pre-IPO exposure, and where the product fits into the current regulatory landscape.

Crypto indices showed broad strength and recovered over the past week, with BTC up 4.1% and outperforming equity indices. Notable winners include the Privacy Index (+15.5%) led by DCR (+25%) and ZEC (+22.7%) and Revenue Leaders (+10.2%) with strength attributable to ETHFI (+14.1%). 

After a mixed session on Wednesday, markets weakened overnight heading into Thursday’s open, with Nasdaq 100 futures down -1% and BTC retracing by a similar amount. While Tuesday’s soft CPI print eased fears of a hawkish rate path and countered the concerns of the ongoing conflict in Iran, Kevin Warsh’s appearance at the semiannual monetary policy testimony before Congress may have walked back this bullish impulse. In his testimony, Warsh cautioned that recent favorable inflation data may understate underlying price pressures, especially if AI investment, energy, or technology costs begin spreading more broadly. Additionally, he continued withholding forward guidance, leaving investors uncertain about the Fed’s reaction function.

ETF flows paint a mixed picture, with strong outflows on Tuesday largely countered during the Wednesday session. Regardless, recent weeks show a slight shift back towards accumulation, contrary to the environment of prevailing outflows exhibited over May and June. Should majors continue to outperform equity indices, investors should look for ETF AUM to set a durable floor and buoy ongoing outperformance.

A new BTC treasury company was announced, led by Lyn Alden and others from Ego Death Capital. Orange Juice is pitching a new spin on the treasury playbook: buy profitable small and mid-sized businesses, improve their operations, hold them permanently, and funnel a portion of retained earnings into BTC. Unlike public treasury companies that depend heavily on repeated debt or equity issuance, the model aims to build a diversified base of operating cash flow that can fund Bitcoin accumulation more organically. The company launched with $40 million and is initially targeting U.S. businesses generating $1 million to $10 million in annual cash flow, while positioning itself as a founder-friendly alternative to traditional private equity’s leveraged, time-constrained exit model. The thesis is differentiated, but execution will hinge on disciplined acquisitions and whether management can improve a collection of operating businesses without letting the treasury narrative overshadow the commercial prudence.

Consistent with the bearish doldrums onchain, Ostium halted trading Wednesday after an attacker exploited its oracle infrastructure to manufacture fake profits and drain an estimated $20 million from the protocol’s OLP liquidity vault on Arbitrum. Trader funds and open positions remain frozen while the team investigates, though liquidity providers appear to be bearing the immediate loss. The episode is another reminder of the tail risks associated with onchain financial products and services, a risk that will need to be addressed to see compounding growth and adoption of the onchain financial system.

— Luke

GAIB trades yield for beta

GAIB opened subscriptions for GAIB Select on July 13, its vehicle for tokenized pre-IPO exposure to private technology companies. The first offering, preBYTE, gives a claim on ByteDance equity at a $604 billion subscription valuation, with a $4 million allocation cap, a $1,000 minimum, and a two-week commitment window that closes July 27. Fees run 10/0/0: a 10% subscription charge, no management fee, no carry. OpenAI and Anthropic sit next in the queue.

To read Select, start with what GAIB has been. The protocol built its name on credit. AID, its synthetic dollar, mints against USDC and holds a reserve of GPU financing deals, treasury bills, and stable assets. Stake AID and you get sAID, a vault token that represents a share of GAIB's compute financing portfolio and pays a yield near 11%. GAIB raised $5 million pre-seed in December 2024 from Hack VC, Lightspeed Faction, and others, took $10 million from Amber Group in July 2025, and launched mainnet in October. AID supply runs near $20 million, sAID holds about $19 million staked, and the vault carries $18.9 million in active GPU financing across three facilities, with a $140 million pipeline still at term sheet or diligence.

Select breaks from that thesis. sAID underwrites depreciating hardware that throws off contracted payments, the kind of exposure a credit desk can model. A preBYTE token is equity beta on a single private company, no cash flow, no coupon, tied to a liquidity event that may sit years out or never arrive. GAIB markets both products under one banner, exposure to the AI economy onchain, but the risk shapes share little. 

GAIB built the structure to answer a real objection. In July 2025 Robinhood offered EU users tokens tracking OpenAI and SpaceX, and OpenAI disavowed them within days, stating the tokens were not equity and that any share transfer required an approval it never granted. GAIB routes around that. Participants subscribe to a GAIB-managed Cayman SPV, the SPV subscribes into a Cayman ELP, and the ELP holds the shares through partner fund managers with cap-table access. No share changes hands at the token layer, so the issuer has nothing to void. GAIB calls this substantial mitigation. It also names OpenAI and Anthropic as issuers that may still treat transfers as void, so the risk it built the structure to solve stays on its own risk page.

Now weigh the cost. The 10% subscription fee is heavy for a passive holding vehicle, and GAIB collects it up front regardless of how the position resolves. Buyers wear the full downside beneath it. The valuation is a number GAIB sets from secondary references at launch and locks, with no continuous NAV during the hold, so holders cannot mark the position against anything they can see. Between the token and the shares sit a Panama issuer, a Cayman SPC, a Cayman ELP, and unnamed partner managers, each a counterparty whose failure impairs recovery. GAIB is roughly a year into operating and has never carried a pre-IPO position through IPO, lockup, and redemption, because no offering has reached that point. The product asks buyers to trust a multi-year settlement promise from a protocol with no settlement history on this instrument. Access also excludes US persons and sanctioned jurisdictions, cutting the largest retail base by design, a nod to the line SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce drew in July 2025 when she said tokenized securities remain securities.

The generous read is that GAIB has genuine cap-table access through its financing network and can source allocations retail cannot reach, priced for the privilege. The skeptical read is that a young credit protocol is charging a 10% entry fee to package illiquid venture beta it has never had to redeem, and calling it access. Non-US buyers who want ByteDance, and soon OpenAI and Anthropic, will decide whether the sourcing justifies the fee and the layers of trust beneath it. Buyers will subscribe for the names on the marquee regardless.

— Nick

How to sell to agents

Lucas of Merit Systems open-sourced @agentcash/router, a package that wraps any API in the x402 and MPP payment standards to make endpoints discoverable and payable by agents. Merit built its 44 origins on the library, which have settled roughly 765K transactions and $40K in revenue across 2026, and the router handles USDC billing at both fixed and metered prices, auto-publishes openapi.json and llms.txt discovery docs, registers endpoints to x402scan and mppscan, and grants wallet-based identity in place of accounts. Lucas frames the tooling as the agentic-commerce analog to Stripe and Shopify, arguing that a coding agent can take a live API from zero to its first paying customer in under 30 minutes.

The DeFi Lending Endgame

The article argues that DeFi lending is becoming commoditized as borrowing rates and protocol take rates converge, leaving scale and distribution as the main competitive advantages. Aave remains the sector’s strongest operator and largest source of economic profit, but its valuation already assumes continued growth, making it a hold until Aave V4 and GHO materially improve earnings. Morpho is gaining market share by charging no protocol fees, but the author views its valuation as unsustainably high because any fee switch large enough to justify the price could undermine its growth. Longer term, the biggest opportunity may belong to platforms that control stablecoin liquidity and customer distribution rather than lending protocols alone.

Is there anything left to build in crypto?

Wintermute argues the useful question moved from what crypto can do to what the rest of the world needs crypto for, and lands on the machine economy: autonomous agents that hold context, transact, and settle without a human in the loop. The firm's case rests on permissionless, programmable rails fitting machine actors better than legacy systems built around human accountability, a bet it concedes stays unproven at scale, pointing to a May 2026 Morse-code prompt injection that pushed Grok to sign a $150K-$200K onchain transfer and a February 2026 oracle bug that left $1.78M in bad debt on Moonwell. Wintermute places the open ground in the connective layer between agents, robots, and labs (authorization, agent identity, neutral payment routing across x402, MPP, and AP2) rather than the crowded model and hardware markets, then ties the thesis to its R[3]sidency x Construct accelerator run with Fabric Ventures, Solana, and Coinbase.