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Hi all, happy Tuesday!
Early in a busy news week, Monday trading was led by Ethereum and Solana beta and DeFi rather than BTC, as markets mused over the pending US-Iran agreement and a BOJ hike to 1%.
Plus, how Sunrise and Backpack are testing whether Solana can carry the next wave of tokenized equities, from HYPE to SpaceX's SPCX.
Risk assets ripped on Monday as markets digested an initial US-Iran agreement, and the move was led decisively by ETH and SOL names rather than BTC. Solana Eco (+9.6%), DEXs (+8.2%), Ethereum Eco (+7.8%), Lending (+7.5%), and Privacy (+7.2%) topped the cross-sector board, while BTC lagged the rally at +1.0% and equities posted solid-but-smaller gains (Nasdaq 100 +2.5%, S&P 500 +1.6%). This was an altcoin-led, BTC-light tape — close to the inverse of the BTC-led recoveries that defined the prior week.
The catalyst was the US-Iran "Islamabad Memorandum," digitally signed by Trump and Vance, with Iran's Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf signing for Tehran.
The framing matters more than the headline, though. It is an agreement whose text remains undisclosed and explicitly leaves the hard problems — Iran's nuclear program, uranium stockpiles, and sanctions relief — unresolved.
This is not a “deal” so much as a vague outline for the start of negotiations, to be worked out during a 60-day extension of the ceasefire. The divergence between the parties is already visible: Iran's deputy foreign minister said the nuclear talks can only begin once the US releases billions in frozen Iranian funds — a claim the US dismissed.
The reality on the water remains little changed. A senior administration official said the MOU provides for "immediate" reopening, then immediately qualified that it takes time because there are mines in the strait. Open in principle, closed in practice. Still, the price of crude oil settled at its lowest since early March on the news.
Monetary policy added an overnight cross-current. The Bank of Japan hiked 25 bps to 1.00%, its highest rate since 1995, in a 7-1 vote with one board member dissenting for a hold. So far, the yen has barely budged, and the Nikkei rose modestly — consistent with a move that was fully priced in.
For crypto, a higher BOJ rate is, at the margin, a tightening of global liquidity, although there’s no sign of a disorderly carry unwind that would hit risk assets.
The cleanest sub-story was UNI, which led the Ethereum Eco cohort (and, by extension, the DEX strength) after Standard Chartered initiated coverage with a Monday note targeting UNI at $100 by end-2030 — roughly 40x from here.
The call piggybacks on the thesis that tokenized assets active in DeFi grow similarly in the coming years as onchain assets scale from ~$340B to ~$4T by 2028, with Uniswap as the default venue for trading naturally correlated tokenized pairs that TradFi can't pool on its own. UNI traded up ~9% on the day. The caveat is that the path to $100 leans heavily on fee capture thanks to December's UNIfication upgrade.
On the downside, the laggards were a near-inversion of last week's leaders. AI (-1.2%) and Bittensor Ecosystem (-2.9%) — the prior week's standouts on the TAO-led +24% run — gave back ground, while Crypto Miners (-3.0%) and the 2025 Crypto Equity Cohort (-1.7%) underperformed even as token sectors ripped.
— Macauley
Solana’s Tokenized Equity Test
Sunrise has quickly become a key infrastructure team behind Solana’s expansion into foreign tokens and RWAs. Incubated by Wormhole Labs, Sunrise describes itself as Solana’s “day-one asset gateway”: a coordination layer that brings assets to Solana with a canonical mint, launch-day liquidity, and distribution across wallets, DEXs, and aggregators.
Toly’s original vision for Solana was a decentralized Nasdaq: a global, permissionless venue where any asset could trade. Back in November, I argued that MON was the first real proof point that Solana had the infrastructure, liquidity, and tooling to support that vision. MON launched on Solana through Sunrise with deep day-one liquidity, becoming the first major example of a non-native asset trading on Solana at CEX-like scale.
Since then, Sunrise has expanded well beyond MON, adding more than 15 assets, with the strongest traction so far concentrated in HYPE, BP, and now SPCX. As of June 14, the Sunrise-issued token supply on Solana surpassed $500M, with BP accounting for roughly $443M of that total. HYPE followed at around $46M, while SPCX reached approximately $8M within days of launch.
Trading activity has also accelerated meaningfully, with Sunrise spot volume reaching new highs in June. HYPE remains the primary driver, averaging more than $520M in weekly volume so far this month.
The newest and perhaps most important proof point is SPCX. Launched last Friday through Sunrise in partnership with Backpack Securities, SPCX generated roughly $36M in trading volume over its first weekend. As traditional market overnight trading begins, SPCX has already surpassed $100M in onchain volume since launching on Solana via Sunrise, including activity outside standard US market hours.
The Sunrise and Backpack partnership helps solve two sides of the tokenized asset problem. Sunrise is solving the Solana-side problem: canonical issuance, liquidity, and DeFi distribution. Backpack is solving the brokerage connectivity problem: giving eligible users a path between tokenized equity exposure and traditional securities custody.
That matters because tokenized equity products can look similar in practice, even when the legal rights they confer are materially different. Most tokenized equity products to date have been wrappers designed to expand global access rather than provide direct equity ownership. Products such as xStocks use structures like Swiss Tracker Certificates, where holders receive economic exposure to the underlying stock but are creditors of the token issuer, not shareholders of the company itself. That means no direct claim on the underlying equity and no traditional shareholder rights such as voting.
Backpack’s structure is also more nuanced than the marketing suggests. Its novelty is not that the onchain token itself is equivalent to direct shareholder ownership. In Backpack’s structure, the traditional brokerage leg is where users receive a UCC Article 8 security entitlement under New York law, held through regulated brokerage infrastructure. Once tokenized, that brokerage entitlement is extinguished: the token is issued by a BVI entity (Trek Nexus Markets Ltd.) that holds the shares on a bare trust pooled by asset, with a Backpack affiliate — not the user — as the registered beneficiary. The user holds a tokenized claim on a pooled position, not direct ownership of a specific share.
The real differentiator is the off-ramp. Eligible users can move from the tokenized version back into a traditional brokerage account, where the position is reconstituted as a traditional securities entitlement. In other words, Backpack’s value add is less about making the token itself identical to a share, and more about creating a functional two-way bridge between tokenized equities and traditional securities custody.
That is still meaningful. Tokenized stocks do not need to replicate every feature of traditional equities to scale. What they need is credible issuance, clear redemption paths, liquid onchain markets, and integration into the rest of crypto’s financial stack. SPCX is an early example of what the market could look like when brokerage connectivity, tokenized distribution, and onchain liquidity are stitched together.
The question now is whether this expands beyond a handful of successful launches. As IPO activity picks up, the set of assets that could eventually come onchain is getting larger. For Sunrise and Backpack, SPCX is the first real test of whether Solana can support that next wave with meaningful liquidity from day one.
— Carlos
Nick Carpinito from Blockworks Research published a note on Helium arguing that while the network itself is stronger than ever — at roughly 2.8M daily active users and $17.9M in annualized onchain revenue — the token setup has changed materially after Nova Labs sold its consumer MVNO business and proposed HIP 149, which would mint about 141M HNT (roughly 77% of circulating supply) into a Nova-controlled treasury over 36 months to fund growth. The piece says the old bull case — offchain business revenue flowing into HNT — has effectively broken, and that the investment question is now whether this large new issuance can be justified by turning carrier expansion into enough incremental burn to offset dilution. It views retiring Proof-of-Coverage and moving to rewards based on actual traffic as a structural improvement for network health but argues HNT holders now face a more balanced setup: genuine usage momentum on one side and substantial dilution plus execution risk on the other.
Sumpac published a piece arguing that the core problem with tokenized RWAs in DeFi is not on the way in but on the way out: positions can often be built atomically while onchain inventory lasts, but unwinds remain constrained by the slow offchain settlement of the underlying asset, creating a structural timing mismatch. The article maps who absorbs that mismatch into three buckets — credit facilities (market makers or shared-liquidity systems fronting cash and taking duration risk), liquidity buffers (dedicated capital, either shared or issuer-funded, that honors fast redemptions up to a cap), and users themselves (who simply wait through redemption).
The second half shows how protocols like 3F and infiniFi package these primitives into one-click looping and liquidation infrastructure, effectively turning slow redemption risk into a priced service rather than an invisible bottleneck. The broader point is that DeFi can make RWAs composable only if someone is explicitly paid to warehouse the gap between instant onchain exits and delayed offchain settlement.
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