Data & Insights: Strategy's Collapse, RWA's Rise

Still Out STRC’d 

• Strategy’s preferred stock STRC has had volume stall, now trading less than a million dollars a day, a steep drop from its peak where it was doing north of $10 million.  
  • STRC closed Friday at $86, the first close of the monthly VWAP that Strategy will use to determine the management recommendation of how much to raise the dividend for STRC. 
• The preferred stock has yet to trade above $90 this month, well off the $100 target the company has cited as its range. With 5 trading days left this week, it's likely that the VWAP will come in below $95, and Strategy will recommend a dividend raise of at least 0.5%. 
  • As a reminder, if the VWAP trades between $95-$98.99, the management recommendation is a raise by at least 0.25 percentage points.
    Each 25bp increase adds roughly $26 million to Strategy's annual obligations, so the minimum move would run around $53 million a year, stacking onto a rate that's already gone from 9% at launch to 12% across seven hikes.
• Strategy has shown it's been willing to defend STRC by selling equity even at compressed mNAV to fund STRC’s dividend.

Rolled Down

• Total value locked in Ethereum L2s has slid back to roughly $5 billion, a level last seen in 2023. This undoes most of the buildup from 2024 where mindshare was focused on the successful launches of L2s like Optimism, Arbitrum, and ZKsync. 
  • Optimistic rollups such as Optimism, Base, and Arbitrum have continued to eat up most of the TVL, commanding $4.8b or 96%
• The retreat in TVL has lined up with a rough stretch for Ethereum too. The Ethereum Foundation has lost several senior leaders since the start of the year, including co-executive directors and broader foundation layoffs. 
• Meanwhile, traditional finance, which was supposed to validate Ethereum’s institutional thesis, has largely looked for alternatives in addition to Ethereum. Examples include DTCC, which is tokenizing Treasuries against a $100 trillion custody base and JPMorgan, which has brought JPM Coin onchain across multiple public blockchains.
• Stablecoins remain the exception. USDC and USDT still settle predominantly on Ethereum and its L2s. This stablecoin base has kept Ethereum central to crypto's tradfi bridge so far, but it's a fine line to hang institutional relevance on, given how much the network commanded a year ago.

Stablecoins are Stable

• Total stablecoin supply has held just under $300 billion through most of 2026, up only a measly $3 billion or 1% this year. 
  • The composition has not shifted either. USDT remains the dominant stablecoin with 64% of supply, and USDC at 26%. Ethereum and Tron between them continue to host roughly 80% of all stablecoin value.
• A flat stablecoin supply has been a base case for 2026. Redemptions haven't outpaced issuance enough to meaningfully deplete the base, so the capital sitting in stablecoins reads as parked rather than fleeing. 
  • While growth would be the more bullish outcome, stablecoins holding their ground despite compressed DeFi yield this year suggests the base isn't purely yield-chasing capital. A meaningful chunk of supply may be sitting there for settlement and access reasons that don't require an incentive to stay put. 
  • Crypto ETFs may also be absorbing fresh money as ETF creations move dollars into custodied ETH and BTC directly, not into onchain stablecoin balances first.
• Stablecoin supply growth has historically tracked fresh onchain capital formation, largely degen and speculative activity chasing yield or new token launches. Months of flat supply are consistent with onchain data pointing to a slowdown of activity. This could be exacerbated by the adoption of ETFs, as investors are given fewer reasons to be onchain. 
• In order for stablecoin supply to grow once more, we likely need a new catalyst, narrative, or yield source to pull the sidelined capital back into motion. 

It Ain’t All Good in the Hood

• Total value locked (TVL) in Robinhood Chain currently stands at ~$325 million in less than a month since mainnet went live, without a single down day.
  • Despite TVL continuing to compound every single day over the past month, every throughput metric peaked in the chain’s second week and has continued to grind lower since.
  • DEX volume averaged ~$553 million per day last week, down 27% compared to the prior week
  • The number of active accounts averaged ~275K per day, also down by 7% week-over-week.
• The chain’s turnover, which is measured by dividing DEX volume by TVL, fell from 9.25x on the second week of July, to just 1.68x by last Friday.
  • This means capital is arriving faster than it is being traded, an indication that recent deposits into the chain have been more yield-motivated rather than trade-motivated.
  • This is likely due to Robinhood Earn, which offers an estimated 7% APY on USDG.
  • Trading volume per active account has also declined to just $2K over the past week, compared to a peak of ~$2.8K just two weeks ago.
• The declines in Robinhood Chain’s activity metrics should not be a surprise considering the initial growth catalyst was a post from CEO Vlad Tenev saying the chain works well for memes, six days after he had described memecoins on CNBC as largely a dead end
  • The tweet prompted a “mini memecoin season” on the chain, with the most notable example being the memecoin CASHCAT, named after Robinhood's original mascot, which rose between 700% and 962% that day, but has been on a gradual decline since.
• Robinhood reports Q2 earnings this Wednesday, which will be worth watching what the company has to say regarding the chain’s first month, and their plans on the prioritization of RWA projects and use-cases on the chain, as initially intended.

Summa Cum Launch

• pump.fun's graduation rate reached 6.7% last Friday, roughly 8x higher than the average rate all throughout June.
  • This spike wasn’t a blip either, as it averaged ~4.7% across the previous four days, against ~2.5% the week before.
• This recent increase in pump.fun’s graduation rate lined up directly with BOOST, its new default launch mechanism that directly incentivizes higher graduation rates.
  • BOOST targets what pump.fun calls “dead liquidity” i.e. the roughly 20% of migration liquidity that was previously locked permanently inside the PumpSwap pool upon graduation.
  • With the new BOOST update, that capital now gets deployed into a series of automatic market buys during the first five minutes after migration, with every token acquired burned afterwards.
  • BOOST operates entirely after a token has already bonded, so it doesn’t mechanically lift the share of tokens that reach the threshold.
  • It instead directly incentivizes traders to bid bonding tokens harder because an immediate post-migration liquidity injection or “instant buy pressure”, and a supply burn, are guaranteed upon migration.
• It will be worth watching whether the heightened graduation rates from BOOST will be a temporary “shiny new thing” blip or a permanent occurrence going forward.
  • Though the fundamental changes in participants’ behaviors and incentives for pre-bond tokens points to the latter being more likely.
• Meanwhile, pump.fun’s native token, PUMP, is up by over 10% YTD per the time of writing, making it one of the best performing cryptocurrencies of the year so far, beating out BTC’s -25% YTD performance.
  • It is worth noting that the entirety of PUMP’s relative outperformance has occurred only recently, as the token is up nearly 60% in the last month alone.
  • It currently trades at a ~$850 million market cap, with a fully diluted valuation of over $1.8 billion.