Happy Friday, folks! Today we revisit CARDS, five weeks after flagging that the token had outrun Collector Crypt's growth. That setup has inverted: the token halved while the business kept compounding, and at 2.6x annualized revenue the question is now value accrual, not valuation. Meanwhile, the forced seller behind the week's AI carnage got taken out, and miners squeezed 9.7% as AI equities caught a relief bid yesterday.

Yesterday we saw a real relief bid, though it landed more in the equity complex than in tokens. DEXs (+10.1%) and Crypto Miners (+9.7%) led the crypto sector, followed by the 2025 Crypto Equity Cohort (+4.2%) and the Ethereum ecosystem (+3.9%). In traditional markets, the Nasdaq 100 snapped its losing streak with a 3.4% gain, while BTC rose 1.3%. The DEX move was driven mostly by UNI, which gained 11.0%, after Hayden Adams clarified that v4 protocol fees fund UNI burns without cutting LP economics. Memes (-7.7%) and the Solana ecosystem (-6.3%) sat out the bounce entirely.

Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness, the ~$20B fund that was up 439% net of fees through June, hit margin calls on levered AI bets this month and was forced to unwind its entire public book, with Citadel absorbing the bulk of the portfolio on Thursday. That took the market's biggest forced seller out in one print, and Microsoft surging 9% after Azure topped $100B in annual revenue gave shorted AI infrastructure names room to squeeze.

Crypto miners were among the clearest beneficiaries of the rebound in AI equities. IREN gained 12.8%, followed by Bitdeer (11.0%), Hut 8 (10.2%), and MARA (10.1%), while most of the index rose between 8% and 11%. These names trade as levered AI datacenter plays first and bitcoin proxies second, with Hut 8's new $9.8B Texas lease and IREN's $2.8B in AI cloud contracts signed just this month.

However, one strong day does not erase a weak month. The miner index remains down -6.2% over the past 30 days, led lower by Bitdeer (-27.8%), TeraWulf (-23.2%), and Argo (-21.6%). Greenidge (+62.3%) is the lone outlier, largely reflecting a thin float.

— Sam

The most expensive input to a frontier AI model has become data whose origin labs can prove and attribute.

What remains is either proprietary and bespoke, or undocumented and legally risky, and the cost of getting provenance wrong runs into the billions in litigation exposure.

Read the full report from Blockworks Research to uncover the three catalysts most likely to drive the next 12 to 18 months.

The CARDS Setup Has Inverted

A little over a month ago, I wrote that CARDS had outrun the underlying growth of Collector Crypt. The token had appreciated 123% over 30 days, compared with a 74% increase in gacha spending. CARDS traded at $0.31 and has since fallen to $0.13, a 56.9% decline.

This drawdown has inverted the original setup. The token is back at its mid-May price, while the underlying business is materially larger.

The gap reflects a rotation in market attention rather than a comparable change in Collector Crypt’s fundamentals. Gacha dominated the June trade, but attention shifted after Robinhood Chain launched in early July. Capital moved to the next trade, taking CARDS with it.

That rotation has created a useful like-for-like comparison. When CARDS last traded at $0.13 in mid-May, Collector Crypt generated approximately $3.3M in daily gacha spending, $174K in daily net revenue, and served 420 daily active users. At the same token price today, the platform generates $5.1M in daily spending, $278K in daily net revenue, and serves 876 daily active users. Daily spending is 56% higher, net revenue is 60% higher, and daily active users have more than doubled.

However, that growth has not continued in a straight line. Average daily spending declined 27.3% in July, from $7.0M to $5.1M, while spending per active user fell 40.2% to $5,781. Even after that pullback, July spending remained 56% above May and 80% above April, while daily active users reached a monthly record.

At a $257.9M FDV and approximately $100M of annualized net revenue, CARDS trades at 2.6x annualized revenue. That multiple sits well below HYPE at 117x, UNI at 83x, AAVE at 35x, and JUP at 26x.

The discount is substantial, but it reflects real structural constraints. Only 388.5M of the 2.0B token supply is circulating. The remaining 80.6% creates a significant dilution overhang that could weigh on CARDS even if Collector Crypt’s operating performance remains strong.

Value accrual is also still limited. Over the past 30 days, Collector Crypt spent approximately $290K repurchasing CARDS, while users purchased $1.7M of CARDS-denominated packs. These mechanisms create incremental demand for the token, but buybacks are discretionary and neither mechanism gives holders a direct claim on Collector Crypt's revenue or cash flows.

The team has stated that it prioritizes the CARDS token over its equity and appears to be waiting for greater regulatory clarity before formalizing stronger accrual. Clear token value accrual may therefore depend partly on the passage and implementation of the CLARITY Act. Management preference, however, is not an enforceable economic right.

CARDS is now a more compelling setup than it was five weeks ago. The token has fallen by more than half while Collector Crypt’s underlying business has continued to expand. That divergence creates valuation upside, but the rerating case still depends on converting protocol growth into durable tokenholder value. Until that link is stronger, CARDS remains a cheap token attached to a growing business rather than a clear claim on its economics.

— Jake Koch-Gallup

Introducing Permissioned Pools on Uniswap v4 

Uniswap Labs argues that Permissioned Pools extend Uniswap v4 to support compliant trading of regulated assets without sacrificing the protocol's permissionless architecture. The new hook standard enables issuers to enforce onchain compliance rules, such as wallet allowlists, directly at the pool level while preserving access to AMM liquidity and DeFi composability for approved participants. The announcement positions Permissioned Pools as foundational infrastructure for the next wave of tokenized assets, with launch partners including Superstate, Securitize, and Dowgo helping bring regulated funds, equities, and securities onchain.

Lowering the barriers to quoting on Solana

Flint Trade introduced its prop AMM infrastructure, built to absorb the technical burden that keeps makers from quoting on Solana: program development, RPC architecture, transaction landing, and priority fee markets. Over half of Solana DEX volume routes through aggregators; Flint sits between that taker flow and makers, who bring only a pricing and risk model.

Makers pick a quoting style (oracle offsets, order lists, linear distributions) and quote into a shared venue where pro-rata matching rewards sharper pricing without letting a step of latency shut them out. The opportunity is substantial: Solana accounts for roughly 54% of global spot DEX volume and 35.1M monthly active addresses.