Data & Insights: World Cup Dominance, BTC Too

BTC Front and Center

• Bitcoin's share of spot trading volume has climbed from roughly 50% in June 2025 to approximately 67% now. ETH and SOL have both ceded share over the same window, with ETH's compression the more pronounced of the two.
  • This indicates de-risking within crypto rather than risk-seeking. BTC is the lowest-beta, most liquid asset in the complex. A rising BTC share means capital and trading activity are consolidating around the most defensive exposure vehicle available on-chain, not extending further out the curve into higher-beta assets.
  • This is directionally consistent with the ETF-side divergence covered elsewhere this week: ETFs showing real net redemptions. Spot volume share and ETF flows are independent mechanisms; one is trading activity, the other is allocated capital, but both currently point in the same direction.
• Anecdotally, traders have signaled that they are rotating attention and capital toward entirely different narratives, including AI and robotics equities. This lines up with the rather sharp decrease in private market investment in crypto, while investment in AI and robotics seems to have picked up the slack. 
• The open question is whether BTC's rising share reflects a durable repricing of risk tolerance across the asset class or a cyclical low in altcoin risk appetite that reverses once volatility compresses. The answer likely depends on whether other chains and protocols can materialize catalysts before broader risk appetite returns.

ETH AUM Tumble

• Spot Ethereum ETF AUM has fallen from roughly $16 billion at the start of 2026 to approximately $7 billion, a decline of more than 50% year to date. While part of the decline is explained by Ethereum's -37% performance YTD, the ETFs still shed roughly $1.9B YTD via outflows.
  • The drawdown lines up with Bitcoin's growing share of spot trading volume, which now sits near 67%, compressing the share of activity available to ETH, SOL, and other large-cap tokens.
• Bitcoin ETFs have also seen a net outflow of $5.4B, suggesting this could be a broader category exit rather than a BTC/ETH rotation story. ETF flows are structurally stickier than spot volume or open interest; the vehicle selects for allocators making a discrete, often mandate-driven decision to hold regulated exposure, not capital cycling on short-term signals.
  • Against that, the $5.4B figure is roughly 4.5% of the ~$120B starting AUM base, a materially smaller proportional redemption than ETH ETFs saw on the $1.9B/$16B figure (~12%).
• Ethereum-focused digital asset treasury companies, including BitMine, remain notable holders of ETH outside the ETF wrapper. This provides a partial, informal counterweight to ETF outflows, though the scale of DAT accumulation has not been sufficient to offset the broader AUM decline.

Last RWA Standing

• Real-world asset TVL has climbed to roughly $25 billion, more than doubling from about $11 billion a year ago and pulling back only modestly from a recent peak near $27 billion. This growth stands out amongst other categories that have suffered a different fate.
  • RWA is currently the only major DeFi category still adding capital. Lending, liquid staking, DEXs, and restaking have all posted net outflows over the same stretch, making the RWA chart an outlier rather than part of a broader recovery.
• Aggregate DeFi TVL has fallen from roughly $170 billion to $133 billion over the past 12 months, a decline that follows an October peak near $275 billion. Against that contraction, RWA's climb illustrates capital consolidating into the one segment tied to yield and infrastructure off-chain rather than token emissions.
  • Tokenized treasuries and private credit carry yield is sourced from real-world instruments, insulating them from the incentive-driven boom-bust cycles that built up TVL in lending and restaking and are now unwinding it.
• The resilience reinforces RWA's position as the clearest institutional on-ramp narrative left standing, one built on a yield thesis rather than speculative token appreciation.
• A key metric we’re watching is yield spread. With more neobanks and competition from fintechs, if on-chain rates compress or real-world yields grow, RWA's advantage narrows. 

World Cup Runneth Over

• Sports accounted for over 80% of Polymarket's and Kalshi’s daily volume in the last few days, the largest category on both venues by a wide margin.
  • Polymarket's weekly average sports share climbed from less than 50% in early May to ~80% by the end of last week.
  • The Sports category also set a single-day volume record of ~$388 million on July 1st, with three of its five highest-volume days ever landing in the first week of July.
• The obvious driver is the FIFA World Cup, which has been running for a few weeks now and entered its single-elimination knockout rounds on June 28.
  • The tournament, co-hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, has likely concentrated the audience in Polymarket and Kalshi's core markets, and the effect is evident in the volume mix.
  • Though the two venues arrived at dominance from different starting points, with Polymarket only recently seeing sports become the majority of its book.
  • As recently as early May, the category traded roughly even with crypto, politics, and everything else combined.
  • Kalshi, by contrast, has been sports-heavy for months.
• Speaking of Kalshi, their total weekly volume ramped from ~$3.6 billion at the end of May to over $10 billion in the last week of June, with Sports alone contributing ~$8.4 billion of that.

Core Strength

• Hyperliquid's total open interest (OI) surpassed the $10 billion mark for the first time since October 2025.
  • For context, the platform’s OI had been anchored near $9 billion for most of 2026.
  • Despite the recent rise in total OI, the figure is still a far cry from its peak of ~$15 billion, despite HIP-3 sitting near its record highs of ~$3 billion.
  • Surprisingly, the recent increase in total OI came entirely from the core crypto perps book, not from HIP-3.
  • HIP-3 OI was essentially flat over the last week, while Hyperliquid’s crypto OI rose by ~20% to $7.1 billion.
• In terms of volume, Hyperliquid’s total monthly volume for June clocked in at ~$267 billion, up ~34% MoM.
  • From this volume, during active trading days (Monday-Friday), HIP-3 has been responsible for 30-44% of total volume, despite holding under a third of OI.
  • The majority of HIP-3 trading activity has been concentrated in equity names such as SK Hynix, Micron, the S&P 500, SpaceX and SanDisk.
  • It will be worth watching in the coming weeks whether total platform OI can maintain and break above $10 billion, and whether HIP-3 OI can break above $3 billion.