The information flow moves too quickly, causing in-depth analytical articles to be drowned out by trending topics. The "Weekly Editor’s Picks" column pulls out these valuable, insightful pieces from the flood of news, helping you filter out the noise and focus on meaningful perspectives and inspiration.
Macroeconomic situation
After Hormuz reopened, what trades are markets betting on?
The conflict has largely shifted from a military to a diplomatic level. The market is transitioning from "war shock" to "supply recovery."
After the strait reopened, the market is shorting crude oil risk premia, going long on aviation, cruise, and tourism sectors, going long on Asian energy importers, going long on bond duration, and shorting inflation expectations. LNG, fertilizer, and chemical chains are also being repriced.
Investment and Entrepreneurship
Ray Dalio: When AI giants dominate the U.S. stock market, I choose not to bet on direction—only to do one thing.
Technological advancement itself does not equate to equal attractiveness of related stocks. Major technological cycles in history have often gone through phases of excitement, overcrowding, volatility, and cleanup.
As a few tech companies account for an increasingly high weight in the index, investors should be cautious about whether they are unintentionally holding concentrated exposures with high correlation and high risk. Instead of continuing to chase a few leading stocks, a more prudent approach is to build a diversified portfolio of high-quality, low-correlation assets and adjust volatility levels according to your own risk tolerance.
Crypto 2029: The Ultimate Prediction of the Four-Year Cycle in the Crypto Industry
The three sectors—non-publicly offered perpetual contracts, stablecoins, and asset tokenization—while logically sound and with fully validated market demand, are severely constrained by external regulatory forces outside the industry.
By 2029, what remains in the public eye will be the core infrastructure built by the crypto industry through successive speculative cycles—the asset trading market.
Decoding BTC Cycles: Three Key Bottoming Signals Align—Could Q4 Be a Critical Turning Point?
When BTC stands above $120,000, everyone is willing to believe it will go even higher; but when it falls back near $60,000, and on-chain valuations, cycle positioning, the percentage of long-term holders, and macro variables all point to a bottom zone, confidence in the market is at its lowest.
The current market area is closer to a window for phased positioning, requiring patience, discipline, and confidence.
After SpaceX’s debut: A $2.1 trillion market cap—still worth chasing?
SpaceX jumped past $150 billion, with its market capitalization settling at $2.1 trillion on its first day of trading. SpaceX's current revenue simply cannot support such a massive valuation.
Starlink is currently SpaceX's only profitable business. Space launches are SpaceX's flagship offering.
In addition to the mismatch between actual business performance and valuation, the disproportionately high retail investor allocation in the IPO may also be suppressing SPCX’s stock price. Musk allocated 20–30% of SpaceX’s IPO shares to retail investors; the larger the retail ownership, the greater the inherent volatility. Retail investors may buy indiscriminately due to FOMO, and sell impulsively at the slightest price movement. Thus, retail investors primarily impact volatility, not the ultimate price appreciation.
For investors following SpaceX, the following two key dates are particularly important:
- Approximately 15 trading days after the IPO (expected around July 6–7), SpaceX is highly likely to be added to the Nasdaq-100 Index, at which point top-tier funds will purchase the stock;
- SpaceX Q2 earnings report released (mid to late August).
The higher it rises, the riskier it becomes? Systemic risks behind SpaceX’s soaring valuation
A gamma squeeze is a feedback loop in which options market makers are forced to buy shares to hedge their positions, further driving up the stock price. If SpaceX follows this path and continues to be propelled by the strength of its narrative, limited float, and Elon Musk’s personal influence, it could evolve from a high-valued stock into a systemic variable across the entire market.
The more dangerous aspect lies in indexing and passive investing. When a company’s market capitalization becomes large enough, it is included in major indices and passively held by ETFs, pensions, retirement accounts, sovereign wealth funds, and institutional portfolios. At this point, the bubble is no longer just the gamble of a few traders—it enters the long-term asset allocation of ordinary investors. The higher it rises, the harder it becomes for the market to avoid it; and the harder it is to avoid it, the more capital is likely to continue flowing into it.
The article explores a structural paradox in modern capital markets: when market mechanisms themselves amplify narratives, leverage, and liquidity to the point of overwhelming fundamentals, can "price discovery" still hold true?
If you're still attached to altcoins, just go for HOOD.
Under multiple positive factors, HOOD has recently risen.
For a prolonged period, cryptocurrency-related revenue has been a significant component of Robinhood’s total revenue, and HOOD’s stock price has shown strong correlation with cryptocurrency markets. However, recent indicators suggest that Robinhood is beginning to reduce its dependence on cryptocurrency business and move away from this correlation. Its stock trading, prediction markets, Pre-IPO offerings, and newly added underwriting services are still expected to drive future revenue growth.
If the crypto market re-enters a bull phase in the future, Robinhood’s crypto trading revenue is likely to surge as well, allowing HOOD to continue benefiting from industry growth.
Missed the coin stock wave, South Korean crypto exchanges forced to “chase memecoins”
Amid a weakening crypto market and Korean crypto investors shifting toward stock trading, South Korean exchanges experienced a collective decline in Q1 2026 performance, compelling them to urgently implement measures to reverse the downturn. However, unlike overseas exchanges that can transform into “everything exchanges” by listing numerous tokenized stocks to meet crypto traders’ demands, South Korea classifies tokenized stocks as securities, thereby prohibiting crypto exchanges from engaging in such trading. Additionally, South Korean crypto exchanges are not permitted to offer cryptocurrency futures, derivatives, or spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
South Korea’s regulatory measures, designed to protect investors, have now pushed crypto exchanges toward the most speculative corners of the market. After being banned from generating revenue through derivatives, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets, exchanges, seeking to boost trading volume, are increasingly inclined to list “meme” tokens that attract attention and are highly speculative.
Web3 and AI
AI subprime crisis? $1.8 trillion in off-balance-sheet exposure is becoming a time bomb in this wave of speculation.
Nearly $1 trillion in purchase commitments, over $800 billion in unexecuted lease contracts, and tens of billions in supplier financing arrangements collectively form approximately $1.8 trillion in off-balance-sheet exposure—liabilities that lie outside the balance sheet but genuinely lock in future cash outflows. The market has not yet fully priced in these risks.
Morgan Stanley warned that the leverage ratio of hyperscale cloud companies has surged from 0.9x to 1.8x in just two quarters, with capital expenditure growth consistently outpacing revenue and free cash flow growth, while the full impact of depreciation pressure has yet to materialize.
Meanwhile, private credit institutions such as Apollo and Blackstone are shifting leverage to the supply chain level through SPVs (special purpose vehicles), creating highly cyclical and opaque financing structures. If the commercialization of AI falls short of expectations, or if corporate clients widely switch to cheaper alternatives, the fragility of the entire financing chain will be sharply exposed.
Only a few days into the World Cup, some AI prediction models have achieved legendary status, while others have failed spectacularly.
Large models such as Qwen, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Copilot can not only answer questions like "Which team is more likely to win?" but also provide predictions on the scoreline, potential upsets, red card risks, key player performances, and match trend analysis.
For prediction market participants, AI-powered pre-match simulations are becoming an additional layer of insight alongside odds, news, team statistics, and market sentiment.
Who took your AI monthly fee? A diagram breaking down the computing power supply chain behind $20.
Claude $20 subscription cost breakdown chart, allocating a single AI monthly fee to model companies, cloud computing, GPUs, electricity, and supply chain.
AI subscriptions incur ongoing inference costs and cannot directly adopt the high-margin assumptions of traditional SaaS.
Underlying Assets: OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, NVIDIA (NVDA), TSMC, SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, data centers, and power infrastructure.
Prediction markets
The first stock in the prediction market concept has emerged!
Kalshi previously announced a partnership with U.S. online brokerage Robinhood, under which Robinhood would leverage Kalshi to offer its users access to prediction markets, allowing them to place bets on events in politics, economics, sports, and more. However, recently, this relationship has undergone some subtle changes. Robinhood has gradually realized that what may be truly scarce is not the market itself, but the user access it tightly controls. Robinhood holds a critical resource—distribution capability.
After approximately six months of accelerated development, the Rothera product began to take shape, and Robinhood finally made the move that was almost inevitable—gradually redirecting orders that previously flowed to Kalshi into its own controlled system. Robinhood specifically chose the World Cup as the ideal launch platform for Rothera.
If the past few years in the prediction market industry were defined by the competition between Polymarket and Kalshi, the next few years may be defined by a battle over distribution channels.
Also recommended: "The World Cup Has Started: A Review of the Market’s Biggest Wins and Losses."
CeFi & DeFi
IOSG: First real-world test of three perpetual mechanisms on the day of SpaceX's listing
How can the market price something without a public spot price? This is the core challenge that the entire Pre-IPO perpetuals category aims to solve.
In the SpaceX case, trade.xyz captured the on-chain market (approximately 96.5% of trading volume) not because its oracle was smarter, but because near-zero funding rates made holding the asset almost cost-free, it launched alongside an IPO catalyst, priced per share, and integrated with cross-exchange arbitrage.
However, while Pre-IPO perpetuals excel at pricing, their handling of corporate events remains primitive. Corporate actions—particularly post-conversion stock splits—have no on-chain infrastructure: trade.xyz has not disclosed any rebase mechanism, while Ventuals outsources this to a third-party data provider that has already failed once (an outdated split data feed triggered a 45% market crash). The bottleneck is not price discovery, but the mundane layer of corporate action processing: traditional markets spent a century standardizing it, yet no one on-chain has rebuilt it yet. Whoever can reliably deliver this will fill the final gap between these markets and the ones they aim to replace.
STRC is severely depegged—what risks is the market pricing in?
STRC has dropped to approximately $89, yielding a simple current yield of about 12.9% based on an annualized dividend of $11.50.
The market disagreement is not about whether the strategy can immediately afford dividends, but about how to discount BTC reserves, high-yield financing, on-chain leverage, and competition from similar products.
Underlying assets: STRC, MSTR/Strategy, SATA, BTC, Pendle, and related on-chain yield products.
STRC has de-pegged by 11%. Can Strategy’s perpetual motion still keep spinning?
The market pricing of STRC reflects not only investors' sentiment toward this preferred stock but also their confidence in Strategy's overall capital management model.
In Strategy’s balance sheet expansion loop, STRC is not merely a conventional financing tool, but the most powerful engine driving Strategy’s current capital flywheel. Through the闭环 of “issuing more STRC ➡️ raising fiat currency ➡️ purchasing BTC ➡️ increasing the company’s net assets ➡️ enhancing trust in STRC,” Strategy has successfully built what appears to be an infinitely self-reinforcing capital flywheel. However, the critical precondition for this flywheel to operate smoothly is that STRC must maintain its value near its face value of $100.
The failure of the dividend adjustment effect indicates that the risks priced into the market have exceeded STRC’s yield itself. First, there are surface-level technical factors: some market participants believe the recent decline is largely due to a concentrated liquidation of arbitrage capital. Deeper concerns center on Strategy’s liquidity reserves.
Annualized returns of 15%-25%—is the BlackRock Bitcoin Yield ETF an opportunity or a trap?
BITA leverages BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin fund, IBIT, to generate steady option premium income for investors by selling covered call options, at the cost of forgoing part of Bitcoin’s potential upside. This income-focused Bitcoin fund is designed for investors and institutions seeking stable cash flow, addressing the challenge institutions face in holding non-yielding assets.
Fund cash flows will provide the final answer. If BITA and IBIT continue to absorb Bitcoin while Bitcoin holds steady in the $65,000 range, it indicates that institutional buying pressure is sustainable; conversely, if yield-focused ETFs merely divert existing funds from spot funds, the bearish view of a "yield trap" will be validated.
Ethereum and Scaling
Sharplink CEO: A Million Ethereum Developers—Who Can Compete?
Ethereum’s core advantage is not speed, but its unparalleled depth and breadth of talent; its true moat lies in the long-term ecosystem built on composability, standardization, and trusted neutrality; these builders are focused on cutting-edge issues like scalability and quantum resistance, continuously reinforcing Ethereum’s position as the default operating system of the financial internet.
Weekly Hot Topics Crash Course
Policies and Macroeconomic Markets
Iranian media released the detailed terms of the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, including the reopening of the Hormuz seafood market and the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian funds;
The United States and Iran have announced an immediate and permanent cessation of all military actions on all fronts;
The U.S.-Iran agreement has been finalized, causing cryptocurrencies and gold to surge while oil prices plummet;
The Federal Reserve held rates steady as expected but adopted a generally hawkish stance, with significant revisions to its policy statement;
Bipartisan U.S. lawmakers jointly propose legislation to pressure: prohibit presidential pardons or sentence reductions for SBF;
Anthropic: Suspends access for foreign citizens to Fable 5 and Mythos 5; Amazon accused of being the "backing force" behind regulatory intervention;
SpaceX acquires Cursor;
LiuLiu Mei (06658.HK) surged on its first day of trading due to its abbreviation sounding like "LLM" (Large Language Model) (retrospective);
Opinions and Voices
Arthur Hayes: AI is draining the market; Bitcoin will struggle to reach $100,000 by year-end;
a16z Crypto: The crypto industry enters the "Show Me" era, shifting from narrative-driven to data-verified approaches;
Strive Vice President: If Strategy cannot pay STRC dividends, Bitcoin may perish;
Institutions, large corporations, and leading projects
BTTInferGrid builds a decentralized AI inference computing network...
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