Crypto just had its biggest week since election night. Every sector we track except miners gained double digits, US spot ETFs took in more than in any week this year, and equities sat the rally out entirely. Oddly, so did Saylor.

We examine where the rally ranks against every big week since 2024 and what followed the last time BTC moved this much. We also dig into Uniswap's push into tokenized equities, where permissioned pools could finally bring regulated assets onchain.

Crypto decoupled from equities last week. Twenty-four of the 25 indices gained at least 10%, with BTC up 23% to roughly $77,800 and ETH up 28% to about $2,440, despite the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both closing the week lower.

The setup came Tuesday, when the SEC proposed a framework giving crypto issuers a clearer path to raising capital. The breakout came Wednesday, when the Treasury said it would at least double its buyback operations in long-dated debt and Trump, hosting crypto executives at the White House, pressed Congress to pass the Clarity Act. Roughly $1.4B in short liquidations accelerated the move once it started.

The week ranks as the third-largest 7-day gain since the start of 2024 and the largest since election week. Notably, Strategy sat it out: Saylor bought 12k and 79k BTC into the two prior +20% weeks and added nothing this time. History leans constructive regardless, as every spike of this class since July 2024 traded higher three months later, by 30% on average.

ETF demand flipped with the tape, and US spot crypto products took in $2.4B, the largest week of 2026 with $1.65B into BTC and $551M into ETH, after roughly $140M of net outflows the week before, and buying increased every session through Friday, reaching its highest daily level of the year.

— Shaunda

Uniswap’s Next Volume Engine

One of Uniswap’s biggest long-term opportunities is making its volumes less dependent on crypto market cycles. Tokenized equities, funds and commodities could expose Uniswap to trading driven by earnings, macro events and portfolio rebalancing rather than crypto sentiment alone.

Tokenized assets accounted for 11% of spot DEX volume in July, showing that demand is there. However, many of these assets cannot trade through fully permissionless pools. Issuers of tokenized funds and securities often need to enforce KYC, investor eligibility and transfer restrictions before making their assets available onchain.

Uniswap’s new Permissioned Pools could help solve this. Built using v4 hooks, they allow compliance checks to be enforced at the pool level, including whether a wallet is approved to trade or provide liquidity. With Superstate and Securitize involved in developing the standard, Uniswap has a clearer path to onboard regulated assets without asking issuers to give up the controls they require.

However, getting regulated assets onchain is only the first unlock. The larger opportunity comes from allowing them to trade against more than just dollars.

Hayden Adams recently highlighted how Nvidia could trade against SPY, gold against silver and individual stocks against the sectors they tend to follow. Since these assets are correlated, LPs take on less inventory risk and professional market makers spend less on hedging than they would in a dollar pair. Investors could still enter through USDC, with routing moving the trade through a deep USDC-SPY pool before reaching Nvidia-SPY.

This would mean every stock no longer needs its own deep dollar market. Passive LPs could provide liquidity to correlated pairs, while professional market makers focus on a smaller number of bridge pools carrying most of the flow. Hooks could make these markets more competitive through dynamic fees and strategies that lend idle liquidity when it is not being used for swaps.

The model is beginning to take shape on Robinhood Chain. Tokenized stocks paired against SPY are generating around $2M to $3M in daily volume, with some trades moving directly between stocks without touching dollars. These pools account for roughly 4% to 6% of daily tokenized stock DEX volume on Robinhood chain. The numbers are still small, but they show that correlated pairs can attract real activity.

If this continues to scale, tokenized assets could become a more stable source of volume for Uniswap. That would not completely separate Uniswap from crypto cycles, but it could reduce how heavily its revenues depend on them.

The biggest competition is likely to come from Hyperliquid, which is building tokenized spot markets into a broader trading platform.

xStocks recently launched five equities and ETFs on HyperCore, including NVDAx, SPYx and QQQx. Early traction has been limited, with $4.38M of spot volume over the past 14 days compared with Uniswap’s $523.7M. 

However, Hyperliquid can offer these assets alongside HIP-3 perpetuals and HIP-4 outcome contracts with option-like payoffs. Traders could buy a stock, hedge it with a perp and build more complex positions without leaving the platform.

Permissioned HIP-3 deployments on testnet also show how regulated operators could restrict access to approved wallets, offering a potential response to Uniswap’s Permissioned Pools. Hyperliquid therefore has the pieces to compete on both compliance and product breadth, even if its spot volumes remain far behind today.

While Uniswap has the early lead, it is still too early to call a winner, and tokenized spot markets should be large enough to support more than one venue. For Uniswap, the opportunity is to use v4 to make these assets cheaper to trade and easier to provide liquidity for. If it succeeds, tokenized assets could give Uniswap a source of volume that keeps growing even when activity across crypto cools.

— Kunal

The Data Layer of Physical AI and Robotics

Shoal Research argues that training data may be the most valuable bottleneck in robotics because demonstrations must be physically performed and cannot simply be scraped from the internet. The report highlights Eastworlds, Virtuals Protocol’s robotics division, which uses teleoperated robots in real commercial settings to generate training data, record corrections and eventually train more autonomous models. It argues that owning the robot fleet, operators, paid deployments and data pipeline creates a stronger moat than selling raw recordings alone. However, falling data prices, simulation, in-house collection by robot makers and the risks of coordinating contributors through token incentives remain key challenges.

The Anatomy of a Stablecoin Card Swipe

The article explains how stablecoin cards preserve the existing card experience while replacing the slowest part of the system: settlement. Traditional issuers must prefund bank accounts, wait through banking hours and maintain separate pools of capital across currencies and jurisdictions. Stablecoin settlement instead allows them to pay networks such as Visa and Mastercard daily from a single global balance. Rain argues this frees idle capital, reduces reliance on correspondent banks and makes global card programs viable for smaller neobanks, marketplaces and fintechs. Merchants still receive local currency and users retain familiar rewards, making stablecoins an invisible infrastructure upgrade rather than a new payment experience.