The Defiant

Olivia Capozzalo & Camila Russo
July 25, 2025

Happy Friday, Defiers!

Here’s what’s happening today

TL;DR

Bitcoin slid below $116K while Galaxy sent over $1.5B in BTC to exchanges
Christie’s International Real Estate just opened a dedicated crypto division
Memecoin launchpad wars continue after pumpfun ICO: PUMP plummets as BONK rallies
Brazilian fintech VERT is using XRP Ledger to tokenize private credit
Bitcoin’s four-year price cycles are over, analysts from Bitwise and CryptoQuant argue
FEATURE: Crypto ventures now make up a key part of the Trump family fortune
Investment policy statements: Ending misalignment and empowering long-term vision in decentralized organizations [SPONSORED]
DIA's Infra Gardens Event Recap: Building the Future of Crypto & DeFi [MEDIA PARTNERSHIP]

Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.

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Alephium’s Danube Upgrade Is Live — The Web3 We Were Promised, on Proof-of-Work

Alephium, the only scalable Layer 1 powered by Proof-of-Work and native sharding, has launched its landmark Danube upgrade. Danube delivers the performance and simplicity users expect with 8-second block times, seedless onboarding, invisible sharding, and a smoother smart contract experience. It’s Web2-grade UX, running on a decentralized, energy-efficient PoW chain.

Danube marks Alephium’s biggest step toward the Web3 we were promised — scalable, secure, and actually usable.

📈 Markets in the last 24 hrs:

TICKER	VALUE	24H
Bitcoin	$115,948	-2.26 %
Ethereum	$3,692.65	1.24 %
XRP	$3.11	-0.70 %
BNB	$772.5	0.76 %
Solana	$180.35	-2.83 %

MessariPortals	MINDSHARE Rank	MINDSHARE % Change (7d)
		-37.04%
		-37.88%
		-47.44%
Powered by Messari Portals

Let’s get into it:

BTC Stumbles as ETH Flies

If you were looking for a neat, single-direction trade this week, the market politely laughed in your face. Bitcoin and Ether parted ways, NFTs stole the show, memecoins staged their own soap-opera, and real-world assets crept further on-chain. Buckle up.

BTC slipped roughly 3% on the week, grinding below $116K. A major culprit: on-chain sleuths watched Galaxy Digital funnel 17,000 BTC — about $1.7 billion — from dormant whale wallets to exchanges, flooding order books and knocking spot prices lower. Right after Galaxy chief Mike Novogratz went on CNBC to say BTC would underperform ETH…

The selling arrived just as U.S. spot-Bitcoin ETFs logged a week of net outflows. Both Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan and CryptoQuant’s Ki Young Ju say the classic four-year cycle won’t apply anymore as ETF flows, institutional buyers and rate policy are set to drive prices going forward.

Ether decisively broke ranks, adding 2% to reclaim the high-$3.7K zone. Fuel came from U.S. spot-ETH ETFs, which pulled in a record $726M on July 16 and kept a 13-day inflow streak alive with another $534M this Tuesday, more than one hundred times the network’s daily issuance. Wall Street is piling on: The Ether Machine sealed $1.5B in commitments for a Nasdaq-bound SPAC that plans to warehouse 400,000 ETH and juice staking yields for shareholders.

PUMP and RWAs

In today’s biggest news, pumpfun’s flagship token PUMP cratered to 40% below its $4B ICO valuation after founder Alon Cohen punted the long-promised airdrop. Meanwhile, ecosystem darling BONK is also down on the week, but still up a blistering ~145% for the month, buoyed by a new revenue buyback loop. The launchpad wars continue raging.

Christie’s International Real Estate unveiled a crypto-focused division that has already handled a $65M Beverly Hills sale paid entirely in digital assets, part of a $1B pipeline aimed at high-net-worth buyers. In Brazil, securitization firm VERT tokenized a BRL 700M ($130M) agribusiness receivables deal on the XRP Ledger, the largest single RWA issuance yet on that chain, and a sign that Latin America’s private-credit boom is heading straight for blockchains.

Galaxy’s mega-sell underscores how a handful of firms can still jolt Bitcoin’s price, even as analysts argue the old halving-driven boom-bust playbook is fading. Ether’s week — with ETF demand, new treasury vehicles and a spill-over NFT rally — shows investors are beginning to value the digital oil/global settlement layer narrative.

And in the background, the steady march of assets coming on-chain continues.

With love,

Cami, founder of The Defiant

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🎬WATCH

The Global Shift to Bitcoin: What It Means for the Future of Finance

In the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, Cami sat down with Bitcoin OG and founder of Bitcoin Layer 2 Hemi, Jeff Garzik.

Jeff shares his journey from contributing to Bitcoin in its earliest days to building innovative scaling solutions for Bitcoin. The conversation covers macroeconomic trends driving Bitcoin adoption, the evolution of decentralized finance, and how Hemi is shaping the future of Bitcoin DeFi.