Market Metrics

Total Crypto Market Cap: down 1.5% to $2.4T
Total AI Sector Market Cap: flat 0.0% to $28.5B

Top Movers (7 days):

📈 GraphLinq Chain (GLQ): up 26.2% to $0.08868
📈 TARS Protocol (TAI): up 20.4% to $0.1893
📈 Zignaly (ZIG): up 20.4% to $0.09512

Mindshare Check:

The AI sector currently accounts for 18.81% of the total crypto market’s narrative mindshare. The lowest we have seen it in a long time due to it being flipped by the VanEck Solana trust (ETF?) news.

Daily News

🟠 We highlighted key takeaways from some of the most important X spaces this week, featuring updates from Talus, Aizel Network, Lumerin, and Zignaly. Check that out here.

🟠 There are a number of AI token catalysts coming up towards the tail end of the year, mostly around DeAI day in Brussels at ETHCC. We pointed them out here.

🟠 Covalent raised $5 million in strategic funding led by RockTree Capital, with additional investors including CMCC Global, Moonrock Capital, and Double Peak Group, aiming to expand into Asia and enhance long-term blockchain data availability. CQT experienced a 12.67% increase after the announcement was made.

🟠 Zignaly proposed establishing the ZIGChain Foundation with a donation of 100,000,000 ZIG, alongside a pre-mainnet Staking Program with 125,000,000 ZIG. A Tokenomics Upgrade is planned, and community members can vote on the SnapShot proposal on July 5th,

🟠 Virtuals Protocol and Nillion are partnering to enhance private data storage and inference for personalized AI agents. This collaboration will enable developers to create AI agents for gaming and entertainment with secure data handling, ensuring users' personal information remains private.

Highlight of the Week

🧠 NEAR Mindshare On Top

NEAR is at the top of traders’ minds this week as it takes the top spot in AI token mindshare, beating out FET and ICP. Onchain data is also looking very promising, with TVL steadily rising over the course of the past 12 months.

How come? We are glad you asked…

🟠 Frax Finance has partnered with NEAR Protocol to expand their multi-chain vision, bridging over $5.5M FRAX to NEAR DeFi projects. The team plans to also launch frxNEAR, a NEAR stablecoin and liquid staking derivative and will integrate NEAR's data availability into Fraxtal, Frax's liquidity hub.

🟠 Flipside posted a banger onchain data report on NEAR showing the protocols significant growth, with a 258% increase in TVL, 163% rise in transaction volume, and 18 million new addresses.

🟠 Spencer Noon also posted a comprehensive thread showcasing the similar findings as what the Flipside report revealed. Check it out here.

💥 Blast Airdrop Flop

This week we saw the highly anticipated Blast layer 2 airdrop finally come to fruition in a spectacularly terrible fashion (expected). Blast has been one of the most talked about airdrop opportunities for the past 6 months, with much of the chatter on the crypto side of Twitter being almost exclusively related to ways to game the system and extract the largest airdrop. Many people emptied their entire wallets onto the chain and spent weeks or even months glued to their screen relentlessly clicking and transacting on the chain to try and get a bigger airdrop.

However, as we know, when the herd collectively decides that they are going to get rich off a particular opportunity, whether it is investing in a token, piling their money into a new DeFi-ponzi scheme or farming an airdrop, we know the opposite is usually the case. Blast is a prime example of this playing out, with the majority of people actually leaving Blast with a net negative ROI in ETH terms despite receiving free money!

We’re mentioning this because we want to highlight the fact that taking ‘consensus trades’ is usually not a profitable strategy. We know that over 95% of investors lose money, so when taking a trade that you think will be profitable, be extremely cautious if 95% of other people agree with you.

Study contrarian trades anon 🥷 

Meme of the Day

Our honest reaction after seeing VanEck file for a Solana ETF.