TL;DR

• The US dollar index continues to fall, but the stock market remains strong, as the relationship between the top is neither linear nor one-way.
• This week’s incoming data includes the US labour market report, ISM PMI, factory orders and trade data.
• Reports indicate that Robinhood is entering the Layer 2 space, with Arbitrum (ARB) surged by 38% last week.
• Byreal, built by Bybit and focusing on Solana, has launched its first token, Fregmetric.
• Sahara AI was listed on Upbit and Binance, with its price showing short-term stability.
• Galaxy launches $175M venture fund to bridge traditional finance and crypto.
• Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto co-launch Shelby, a programmable hot-storage protocol for real-time Web3 data.
• World Liberty Sells $100M in $WLFI to UAE Fund Aqua1.
• Most funded projects are in the infrastructure sector.

Macro Overview

The US dollar index continues to fall, but the stock market remains strong, as the relationship between the top is neither linear nor one-way.

The performance of the equity market is relatively independent of the US dollar. A weaker dollar does not necessarily mean a decline in the US stock market, nor does a decline in the stock market necessarily lead to a weaker dollar. The key reason is that, the US dollar index reflects the relative growth differential between the US and other countries, the stock market is more dependent on domestic fundamentals. A weaker dollar often reflects a narrowing “growth differential” between the US and other countries, but if U.S. domestic growth remains strong, the stock market can still rise. A weaker dollar is more indicative of capital outflows from the bond market rather than the stock market.

The current market concerns are not about fundamental factors but more about long-term concerns over the credibility of the US dollar. This is also why, after reciprocal tariffs were announced, the dollar weakened and a “triple drop” in equities, bonds, and the currency appeared. But changes in the dollar’s credibility system will not happen overnight. Although overseas investors are currently less willing to hold US assets than before, the dollar still accounts for 58% of global reserve currencies. The development of stablecoins could also potentially reinforce the process of dollarization.

The non-farm payrolls data for June will be published on Thursday ahead of the Independence Day holiday. Based on PMI analysis, economists predict that recently US companies hired at the quickest pace in just over a year in response to higher workloads, which could bring a positive payroll reading this month. Other official data, including the factory orders and trade data will also be released this week, which will be focused as analysts weigh up the impact of tariffs.

The dollar index dropped significantly last week, and the Euro has shown strong demand. The signs of ceasefire in the Middle East and deescalation of tariff conflicts reduced the demand for dollars as a safe-haven choice.

The total assets dropped $18.86bn last week, which mainly comes from the mortgage backed securities in the Fed’s asset base.

As Trump delayed his tariff actions on the European Union and the US-China trade war tension eased, the gold price faced a consecutive second week drop to below $3,300.

Crypto Markets Overview

1. Main Assets

As of Monday, BTC priced at around $100,000 and Ether stood at $2500, suggesting an increase of 6.4% and 11% respectively. SOL marked at 151, up 12.3%, with the SOL/ETH ratio holding steady at 0.06.

Overall, the market focused on Byreal, a new token launchpad introduced by Bybit, launching its first project “Fragmetric”. Likewise, from the market rumor, Robinhood has accessed Arbitrum and Solana to talk about the potential collaboration on the assets-issuance side, especially on-chain stocks.

2. Total Market Cap

Last week, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization stood at $3.29 trillion. Excluding BTC and ETH, the altcoin market cap was $835.3 billion,suggesting a significant decline of 6.3% and 5.9%, respectively.

3. Top 30 Crypto Assets Performance

Source: Coingecko and Gate Ventures, as of 30th June 2025

Most of the top 30 tokens recorded an increase last week, with AAVE up 16% and UNI surging 14%. Reports that Robinhood is entering Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem have sparked renewed market interest in the sector. As a result, Layer 2-related tokens posted significant gains this week, with Arbitrum surging 38% and Optimism rising by around 20%.

4. New Token Launched

Last week, the most notable tokens issued were Sahara AI and Newton network, both launched on Binance.

• Sahara AI is dubbed as Scale AI in Web3, launched on Binance and Upbit. Its last fundraising valuation stood at 400m, co-led by Yzi Labs, Polychain and Pantera. Its FDV was approximately $1B.
• Newton is a unification layer, launched by Magic Labs and Polygon Labs. Its Market cap was $91m with 424m FDV. Magic Labs totally raised over 80m from Paypal, Placeholder and Northzone.

The Key Crypto Highlights

1. Galaxy launches $175M venture fund to bridge traditional finance and crypto

Galaxy Digital has announced the final close of its first external venture fund at $175M, surpassing its original $150M target. The fund aims to support startups at the convergence of crypto and traditional finance, with a focus on stablecoins, DeFi, and infrastructure. Galaxy itself acts as both a limited partner and general partner in the fund, which began fundraising in 2024 and initially closed $113M Jul-2024. Investors include institutional LPs such as family offices and funds-of-funds tied to Galaxy’s asset management arm.

The fund has already deployed ~$50M into early-stage projects, including Monad, Ethena… The fund’s strategy avoids corporate venture-style synergy plays, instead prioritizing return-driven investments at the earliest stages. Galaxy, now a Nasdaq-listed company, manages around $7B in AUM and operates across asset management, mining, and ETFs, including a Bitcoin ETF with Invesco and plans for a Solana ETF. The venture unit provides strategic overlap with Galaxy’s broader operations by connecting portfolio companies to its institutional client base.

2. Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto co-launch Shelby, a programmable hot-storage protocol for real-time Web3 data

Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto have introduced Shelby, an independent, decentralized hot-storage network built to serve latency-sensitive Web3 applications such as live video streaming, AI data pipelines, decentralized social media and DePIN feeds. Unlike traditional decentralized storage-typically optimized for cold, archival data, Shelby provides sub-second read/write speeds by combining a global fleet of high-performance nodes, a dedicated fiber backbone and edge caching.

The protocol uses Aptos mainnet for coordination, leveraging 30,000 TPS throughput, 600-millisecond finality and near-zero fees, yet its architecture is multi-chain compatible and will extend to Ethereum and Solana. All data interactions remain verifiable on-chain, while a programmable access layer supports token-gated permissions, usage-based billing, DRM and tipping without compromising performance. The network addresses the fact that video and live content comprise more than 80% of global internet traffic, a workload that legacy cloud and existing decentralized storage struggle to handle simultaneously. Early ecosystem partners such as Metaplex, Story Protocol and Pipe are already exploring integrations. A developer-exclusive testnet is scheduled for Q4–2025, with a public testnet to follow.

3. World Liberty Financial (WLFI) has announced a $100M token sale to UAE-based Web3 investment fund Aqua1.

The deal marks a significant capital infusion as the project works toward enabling WLFI token trading. Financial disclosures indicate the project has made over $57M from WLFI token sales to date, further intensifying scrutiny around the project’s regulatory and geopolitical implications.

Aqua1, the acquiring entity, is a Web3-native fund focused on global crypto market expansion. According to its statement, the purchase is part of a long-term strategy to support blockchain-based financial infrastructure and liquidity growth. Aqua1 previously participated in high-profile deals, including a $2B stablecoin-based transaction involving Binance and Abu Dhabi’s MGX firm using WLFI’s USD1 stablecoin.

Key Ventures Deals

1. Kalshi raises $185M from Paradigm, Sequoia to scale regulated prediction markets

Kalshi, the regulated prediction market platform, has raised $185M in a new funding round led by Paradigm, pushing its valuation to $2B. Other backers include Sequoia, Multicoin, Bond Capital, Neo, and Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao, reflecting broad institutional interest in the emerging event contract sector. Project amid heightened competition in the sector. Rival platform Polymarket is reportedly finalizing a $200M raise at over $1B valuation, or Robinhood has also launched its own prediction market hub

Kalshi allows users to trade event-based contracts tied to real-world outcomes across politics, sports, entertainment, and economics. The platform has seen accelerating traction since gaining regulatory approval to list political event contracts, including U.S. presidential election markets, after a court ruling against the CFTC in 2023. Supporters argue that Kalshi’s markets offer a more accurate gauge of public sentiment and probability than traditional polling methods, by placing financial incentives behind predictions. Critics, however, warn of the potential for such platforms to operate as legalized gambling, a characterization Kalshi disputes.

2. Digital Asset raises $135M to scale privacy-enabled Canton network for Real-World Assets

Digital Asset, the company behind the Canton Network, has raised $135M in a strategic round led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets, with participation from a broad mix of traditional finance and crypto institutions including BNP Paribas, Circle Ventures, Citadel Securities, DTCC, Paxos, and others.

Canton is a privacy-centric blockchain infrastructure purpose-built to enable institutional-grade use of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). Digital Asset’s modular privacy architecture allows interoperability between private and public asset types on a single chain while ensuring compliance and confidentiality for institutional deployments. The protocol supports configurable privacy, allowing issuers to determine visibility settings for each asset, ranging from fully public (like Ethereum) to fully private assets that remain undiscoverable without permission. Previously, the Canton Network piloted tokenized RWA applications with firms like Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon, focusing on assets such as bonds, MMFs, insurance contracts, repos, and commodities.

3. OpenRouter secures $40M to scale LLM routing platform, hits $500M Valuation

OpenRouter, an AI infrastructure startup simplifying access to large language models (LLMs), has secured $40M in combined seed and Series A funding. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with backing from Sequoia and industry angels, pushing the company’s valuation to $500M. Founded in 2023 by former OpenSea CTO Alex Atallah, OpenRouter acts as a routing and marketplace layer for LLMs, aggregating access to models from top providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.

The business model relies on a credit-based system, charging a small fee per inference request. This approach helps developers and enterprises replace fragmented in-house model gateways with a single API and contract, boosting reliability and ease of integration. With over 1M developers using the platform and an annualized inference spend surpassing $100M, OpenRouter has rapidly become an essential backend for AI applications. It supports plug-ins across major tools including VSCode, Zapier, and Cloudflare, and offers access to cutting-edge models like GPT-4.1 through early lab partnerships.

The number of deals closed in the previous week was 24, with Data having 8 deals, representing 32

% for each sector of the total number of deals. Meanwhile, Infra had 7 (29%), Social had 1 (4%), Gamefi had 2 (8%) and DeFi had 6 (25%) deals

The total amount of disclosed funding raised in the previous week was $723M, 17% deals (4/24) in previous week didn’t public the raised amount. The top funding came from Infra sector with $350M. Most funded deals: Kalshi $185M; Digital Asset $150M

Total weekly fundraising rose to $723M for the 4rd week of Jun-2025, an increase of +265% compared to the week prior. Weekly fundraising in the previous week was up +62% year over year for the same period.

About Gate Ventures

Gate Ventures, the venture capital arm of Gate, is focused on investments in decentralized infrastructure, middleware, and applications that will reshape the world in the Web 3.0 age. Working with industry leaders across the globe, Gate Ventures helps promising teams and startups that possess the ideas and capabilities needed to redefine social and financial interactions.

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