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“Private markets are the new public markets.”— Matt Levine




Because I was a professional trader for a long time, people have always asked me for investment advice.



At first, I’d try to explain that traders don’t know anything about investing, but then they’d just ask me for trading advice, as if it were the same thing.



(Full disclosure: Traders don’t know much about trading, either. It’s mostly luck.)



Eventually, I stopped trying to explain the difference and started just offering the standard advice instead: Put it all in an US equities index fund. 



For anyone young enough to ride out the volatility, that’s always worked out because the S&P 500 has returned about 8.5% a year since its inception in 1928.



Over a decade or two, 8.5% a year is a lot — compound interest remains the eighth wonder of the world.



But the vast majority of stocks don’t compound at all, which makes things difficult. 



A study by Hendrik Bessembinder found that just 4% of stocks accounted for all of the net returns in US equity markets between 1926 and 2019. 



4%!



The other 96% of stocks, in aggregate, returned nothing.



So, investors who missed out on Amazon (+225,089%), Nvidia (+407,612%) or Microsoft (+825,487%), are unlikely to have achieved that average 8.5% return — or anything close to it.



(Bessembinder also cites the 265 million% lifetime return in Altria, but few of us have a 100-year investing lifetime, so I’m not sure how helpful that is.)



This has always been the rationale for index investing: It’s impossible to pick the small number of stocks responsible for long-term equity returns (let alone resist the urge to sell them), so it’s best to buy them all via an index (and never sell them).



Now, though, those kinds of mega-winners are less likely to be in the index.



Today’s most exciting companies — OpenAI, SpaceX, Epic

Crypto brings private markets to the public

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Bad news first. Solana closed June at $155, which is down 1.2% month over month. That's not catastrophic, considering a broader altcoin slump, but SOL has underperformed BTC and HYPE for the second straight month.



Real economic value (REV) fell 48% in June, DEX volume dropped 35%, and Token Holder Net Income plunged 56% MoM, according to a recent update from Blockworks Research — though it's worth noting Solana still leads across all networks by these metrics.



On the upside, Solana processed over 2.1 billion successful transactions in June, setting a new record. App revenue hit $150 million, up from $133 million in May, which was 35% of all application revenue across chains. The highest-earning apps (Pump and Axiom) pulled in over $76 million in June, driven by memecoins and leverage.



It's now Wednesday, and as promised, the REX-Osprey SOL Staking ETF is live. The price of SOL popped to $161 on the anticipatory lead-up but fell back toward $146 within a day. At the time of publication, SOL prices hover around $152. 



Pump flipped Raydium in DEX volume for the first time, closing June with a 32% share vs. Raydium's 26%. Trading-focused apps now account for nearly 90% of Solana's total application revenue. 



Meanwhile, xStocks — tokenized US equities — went live June 30. There are 11 listings so far (SPYx, TSLAx, MSTRx, etc.), with 40 more in the pipeline. Day-one volume cleared $1.3 million.



Validator income is compressing fast. Jito tips dropped to 51% of total REV, and the validator set shrank by 25% due to Solana Foundation offboarding.



With FCFS and app-specific sequencing on the horizon, revenue for operators may decline further as latency supplants fees as the primary competitive advantage.



In June, Solana apps generated $2.40 in revenue for every $1 in REV, another all-time high. With the pump.fun ICO confirmed (timeline still TBD), don't be

Solana ETF bump fizzles after $161 price spike

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June’s ADP employment report was a remarkable miss. 



Analysts expected the private sector to add 100,000 positions. In reality, private payrolls lost 33,000. 



It’s the first negative print since March 2023, although the figure has declined every month since March 2025. 



Stocks initially opened lower Wednesday but rebounded later on President Trump’s announcement that the US had penned a trade agreement with Vietnam, fueling optimism that other deals will be struck before the July 9 deadline. 



Odds of a 25bps interest rate cut later this month increased to 23.8%, up from 20.7% yesterday. Fed Chair Powell has said time and time again that it’s the data that will determine the timing of the next cut. 



Tomorrow, we’ll get the weekly initial jobless claims and the June employment report from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. For initial claims, analysts project 240,000 first-time filers for the week ended June 28. If the figure comes in as expected, it’ll be especially positive for the labor market; signs of increased layoffs will be negative for markets. 



The BLS report is expected to show the economy added 110,000 nonfarm payrolls. Unemployment is projected to come in a hair higher at 4.3% vs. 4.2% in May. 



Here’s hoping those prints come in more in-line with expectations, but we won’t hold our breath. As a reminder: US markets have an abbreviated trading day on Thursday and will be closed on Friday for the July Fourth holiday.







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The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.



Supply Shock: Bitcoin,

June ADP report shows massive miss in private-sector jobs

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Community-focused gaming startup Moku has hired Kathleen Osgood as its chief business officer to cement the firm as a key player in crypto-powered AI gaming.



Osgood was previously Ronin builder Sky Mavis’s Director of Business Development for over three years, and was Jump Capital’s Director of Market Development before that.



Osgood told me in an interview that she’ll be focused on bringing new partnerships, market-makers, and institutions to the a16z Speedrun-backed studio.



“Web3 gaming is broken. Nearly everyone is trying the same model,” Osgood wrote in a post announcing her new role. “It’s not about more games. It's about a different way to earn from games.”



In September, Moku raised $5.35 million in funding from Sky Mavis, a16z Games’ Speedrun, Framework Ventures, 32-bit Ventures, and over a dozen angel investors, plus others.



Moku began in 2021 as a launchpad and engagement platform to organize the Ronin community around different projects, but now has its own Ronin-based NFT collection of 8,888 cutesy characters and a flagship game, Grand Arena. The Mokis look a bit like bear-raccoon hybrids, and wear a range of different accessories and outfits. The floor price for a Moki Genesis NFT is about 219 RON, which is about $96.







“It’s built for AI,” Osgood told me of the upcoming game. “I think a lot of the problem in Web3, and people are seeing, is there are a lot of bots, and there isn’t a sticky audience.”



“Moku is turning it on its head and being like, we’re going to build a game for AI, and we’re going to create this whole AI system,” she said.



Essentially, Grand Arena players can bring select NFTs they own into the game as cards and have them battle each other in a hands-off way where the human player is primarily a spectator. NFT owners can also earn royalties on their assets when they’re used

Moku Chief Business Officer shares why crypto gaming is broken — and how to fix it

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You can finally trade traditional stocks on a blockchain!



That’s thanks to “xStocks”, the new tokenized stocks product brought to you by Kraken and Backed Finance (and soon Robinhood).



24/7 trading, instant settlement, tokens composable with decentralized finance, dividend payments flowing directly to your wallets and — best of all — a legal claim on the underlying stock.



Nice! Maybe my mom will finally understand the industry I work in.



But wait…there are nuances.



Anybody with a wallet can buy xStocks on Solana, yes.



But only qualified, KYC’d, non-US Kraken investors will be able to mint and redeem the underlying tokenized xStocks.



That’s because Backed issues each asset out of a Liechtenstein-domiciled SPV (special purpose vehicle). The SPV buys (or sells) the underlying shares on a regulated exchange during US market hours after a mint or burn request.



That takes us to the liquidity and price peg problems with tokenized stocks.



Stocks trade Monday to Friday, from 9:30 a.m. ET to 4 p.m. 



But tokenized stocks trade 24/7.



While Wall Street is open, a primary-market arbitrage keeps xStocks pegged to the cash price.



What happens to the peg when the trading day closes?



If Tesla finishes Friday at $300 and TSLAx changes hands at $290 on Sunday, price convergence only happens when someone is willing to burn tokens for shares after the market reopens.



But since market makers can’t hedge a Sunday fill until the bell rings on Monday, they’ll have to protect themselves by quoting wide spreads and small size, as Dragonfly Capital’s Rob Hadick pointed out in an excellent tweet.



This is somewhat echoed by Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy, who acknowledges that market makers “are generally not the biggest fans of providing liquidity on AMMs, let alone on weekends.”







This probably won’t matter so much for smaller

The good and bad of tokenized stocks

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Satoshi stood on the shoulders of giants when they built Bitcoin.



Bitcoin could’ve only arrived in 2009 after the World Wide Web came along in 1989, which was only so accessible due to the advent of the microprocessor in the early 1970s. 



All three innovations are echoes of the telegraph.



I’m here to tell you that Sony’s Walkman may have been just as important.



The release of the first Sony Walkman wasn’t exactly on this day. It was yesterday, in 1979, that Sony began selling the TPS-L2 in Japan — a blue, pocket-sized portable cassette player that became a worldwide cultural phenomenon within just two years.



Legend has it that Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka had tasked Sony’s tape-recorder department with designing a device for listening to the opera on a long-haul flight.



A skunkworks team of crack engineers got to work. They pulled apart the Sony TCM-100B, or the Pressman, a portable cassette recorder that could be used with one hand, released only a year earlier. 



The Pressman was already popular with journalists and businesspeople for taking voice memos and could playback recordings from an in-built speaker at 1.5x speed. 



Bank of America’s innovation chart pinpoints where certain inventions are located on the history of human population. The chart puts Bitcoin on par with the polio vaccine and DVDs, but the Walkman isn't on it.



Within four months and led by engineer Kozo Ohsone, Sony’s team replaced the Pressman’s speaker and record circuits with a stereo amp, producing a prototype in the same chassis. A portable, stereo cassette player, paired with a lightweight set of headphones. 



Despite internal protests from non-believers at Sony, it took only eight weeks for the first batch of 30,000 Walkmans to sell out in Japan, and by the end of 1980, two million units had been shipped worldwide.



While there had been earlier

What the Sony Walkman and Bitcoin have in common

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Any time you have Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi and 6MV’s Mike Dudas on the same stage, you know you’re in for a good (and insightful) time. 



They didn’t disappoint last week when they shared a stage with Selini Capital’s Jordi Alexander and Blockworks Research’s Boccaccio. 



Qureshi noted that right now, crypto markets are in a weird spot. 



“I’ve never seen this place where crypto markets are kind of staid and rational and reasonable, and they’re kind of [sitting on the] sidelines. And public markets are just a bullion, they’re insane. 



“No one understands what’s going on. Nobody can explain anything. So it’s a weird moment, and I can’t imagine it’s going to persist for that long, but that’s where we are right now. All of the energy is in public markets and not in crypto markets,” he said.



Which makes a lot of sense. Look at the demand for Circle, for example. Or any of the crypto treasury companies. 



This doesn’t mean that crypto VCs are in for a total loss, however. 



“One of the things that people often forget about crypto VCs is that we do both…Roughly on a cost basis, when we invest into startups, about half of our investments are into equity and about half of them are into tokens. And so it’s weird that the tokens are doing not-so-great, and the equities are doing kind of weirdly amazing. But it’s like, okay, cool. We're exposed to both,” he explained. 



For Dudas, though, it means that he’s seeing more projects lean into valuing the token. 



“We’re in a real moment of flux where I think it’s a good thing, in that people realize that equity can have value…but you should have a line of sight to some credible token value accrual,” he told the crowd at Permissionless last week. 



So both of these tied together have put crypto in a bit of an awkward position right now. But it doesn’t seem like

'Crypto markets are in a weird spot' while public markets heat up

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"Which is the bigger number? Five or one?"— Robert Baratheon, Game of Thrones




Distribution matters in business. Often more than the thing being distributed.



Google, for example, always had the best algorithms for searching the internet, but the now-ubiquitous service didn’t catch on until Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to get it widely distributed.



As recounted in an Acquired podcast released yesterday, Google’s co-founders bet the company by guaranteeing AOL $100 million it didn’t have in exchange for the right to show ads to AOL’s users.



(Yes, I listen to three-hour Acquired podcasts the first day they drop. What of it?)



They also aggressively pursued revenue-sharing agreements, sometimes paying websites more than 100% of the ad revenue they generated (because Page and Brin recognized the long-term value of expanding their distribution).But Google’s real coup was the “toolbar” that it paid PC makers and software providers to bundle with their products.  







This expanded Google’s distribution far beyond the early web-adopters who knew to go straight to the Google.com homepage for the best search algorithm.



This was critical because web search is a bizarro business in which the law of supply and demand is flipped on its head — the more ads Google sold, the more it could charge for them.



This unique dynamic of “increasing returns to scale” (as the Acquired co-hosts call it) made web search a winner-takes-all market.



It also ensured that whoever got the most users first would win that market, however good or bad their tech was.



We might soon learn if the same applies in crypto.



When one is the greatest number



Robinhood does not have the best tech in crypto — not yet, at least. 



After announcing its new offering of tokenized stocks yesterday, CEO Vlad Tenev said Robinhood would be issuing the new

The new crypto debate: Monolithic distribution vs. modular tech

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Nick Manannikov just graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School. Sitting in a restaurant a stone’s throw from his new alma mater, Manannikov is somewhat surprised by this fact.



“Somehow” he graduated, Manannikov told me, but for most of the past year, the long-haired teen has been building a business running Solana RPCs and validators. It involved lots of work calls and business during the school week and, this being crypto, a number of flights to conferences, including two month-long stints at Salt Lake City’s mtnDAO.



But while Manannikov may not be remembered much for his presence in the classroom, he is leaving his high school something it didn’t have before — a dedicated Solana validator.



Manannikov’s crypto company Shark Labs helped BTHS’ crypto club launch the validator, which is meant to give students “hands-on experience with running the nodes.” The high school node oversees roughly 15,000 staked SOL.



Manannikov came to the US as a political refugee right before high school. His family was forced to flee Russia on two days’ notice after his father refused business demands made by figures with government connections, Manannikov told me. 



After moving to the US, Manannikov combined an interest in coding with a flair for making money. He and a couple friends ran bots on the Kick streaming platform to claim giveaways the app was running to boost usage. He also got into crypto, first through NFTs and later through memecoins.



After turning a hefty profit sniping a Solana NFT collection called “Deez Nuts,” Manannikov decided to parlay his earnings into launching an RPC business, which became known as Shark Node. The startup has been successful enough that Manannikov decided to pursue it full time in lieu of college. He shares an office space on Broadway, and the business is profitable, Manannikov told me.



In the fall, Shark

Brooklyn teen deploys Solana node for his high school

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Most trade deals are apparently still in limbo, but the 90-day pause on the majority of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs is expiring soon. July 9, to be exact. 



Here’s what we know about where we stand and how tariffs continue to impact markets and monetary policy. 



In a Fox News interview recorded Friday and released Sunday, Trump said that while he doesn't intend on extending the pause, he “could.” 



Bloomberg and Reuters, both citing sources familiar, reported this morning that the European Union is willing to accept a trade agreement with the US (pending a few adjustments). The European Commission has agreed to a 10% tariff on several industries but asked for lower levies on a few sectors: pharmaceuticals, alcohol, semiconductors and commercial aircrafts, per Bloomberg. 



A Canada-US deal is looking more promising after the former said it would abandon a proposed digital services tax (Trump last week called that a “direct and blatant attack” on the US). White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told Fox yesterday that trade talks would resume “immediately.” Reuters reported that the US and Canada plan to have a deal penned by July 21. 



China and the US entered a separate agreement in June to pause certain levies until Aug. 9, so next week’s deadline does not apply to Chinese imports. 



While much of Washington is busy at the negotiating table, Fed Chair Jerome Powell spent Tuesday morning speaking at the European Central Bank forum in Portugal. The ECB’s Christine Lagarde said she’s very satisfied that the region’s inflation has reached its 2% target. 



“I’m not saying mission accomplished, but I am saying target reached,” she said — adding that though there’s increased uncertainty ahead, the central bank is well equipped for the “tormented waters.” 



If Powell, who spoke on a panel with

Tariff deadline approaches as Powell says trade policies delayed rate cut

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During Robinhood’s big crypto announcements in France this week, including an Arbitrum L2 chain of its own, the consumer trading app also unveiled a multiyear sponsorship with French soccer team OGC Nice that kicks off in the 2025/2026 season. 



The Robinhood logo will appear across the front of team shirts, plus training and warm-up kits. Expect branded content and digital collabs, as well. 



Robinhood will also be part of a dedicated web series with OGC Nice about financial accessibility, according to a message from a spokesperson.



“France is fast cementing its position as a global fintech hub — and it plays an important role in our international footprint,” said Robinhood Crypto SVP and GM Johann Kerbrat in a statement. 




L'OGC Nice et @RobinhoodApp annoncent un partenariat pluriannuel de sponsoring pour la face avant du maillot ⤵︎— OGC Nice (@ogcnice) July 1, 2025




“This partnership represents a personal and meaningful moment for me as a lifelong football fan who studied and began my career in Nice, but it also demonstrates our commitment to growing our presence as Robinhood expands across the EU. It presents an opportunity to connect with a passionate fan base and introduce new audiences to a cutting-edge suite of financial products,” Kerbrat said.



Robinhood made some big announcements for EU customers this week including over 200 tokenized stocks and ETFs, plus perpetual futures. Prospective perp traders will have to fill out an application to be approved, though.



The duration and financial terms of Robinhood’s deal with the Ligue 1 soccer team haven’t been publicly disclosed.



The soccer and sports worlds more broadly aren’t strangers to crypto partnerships, of course. FC Barcelona unveiled an NFT avatar and crypto wallet play last month, for instance. 



Robinhood has sponsored a few NBA teams in the past including the Washington

Robinhood sponsors French soccer team OGC Nice

The SEC is set to allow an index ETF holding crypto assets beyond bitcoin and ether to start trading in the US, marking another regulatory win for issuers in the segment.



NYSE Arca filed last year to list shares of Grayscale Investments’ Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC) as an exchange-traded product. The securities regulator on Tuesday essentially approved that proposal.



GDLC launched as a private placement in 2018 and began publicly trading on OTC Markets the following year; it has roughly $775 million of assets under management. While 91% of the fund’s assets are allocated to bitcoin and ether, it also holds XRP, solana (SOL) and cardano (ADA).  



Spot crypto ETFs have so far been limited to holding the two largest crypto assets. US spot bitcoin and ether ETFs launched in January 2024 and July 2024, respectively. Products holding a combination of BTC and ETH — issued by Hashdex and Franklin Templeton — hit the market in February.    



Read more: Crypto indexes offer ‘biggest opportunity’ as SEC decision looms: Hashdex CIO



Various industry observers and executives expected this approval. 



Grayscale ETF head David LaValle said on Nate Geraci’s Crypto Prime podcast in May that he anticipated a multi-token offering would be the next crypto ETF to launch — noting “good conversations” with the NYSE and SEC.



Bloomberg Intelligence analysts James Seyffart and Eric Balchunas wrote in a note last month that they expected the SEC to greenlight the conversions of GDLC — as well as the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund (BITW) — to ETFs by the July 2 deadline.



BITW, which holds 10 crypto assets, also has a heavy combined weighting (nearly 90%) to BTC and ETH. 



“Having only small allocations to alternative coins might help their conversion bids even if the SEC hasn’t individually approved each asset for an ETF,” the Bloomberg analysts previously explained. 



Geraci, president of The ETF Store, had shared a similar view in an X