Crypto World
The inside story of how a hike in Hong Kong changed crypto trading forever
It was sometime in 2015, on a hiking trail in Hong Kong, that the perpetual swap — also called a perpetual future or a “perp” for short — was born. Ben Delo, the mathematician and co-founder of BitMEX, was walking with a friend called Bavik, a derivatives trader, wrestling with a problem that had been nagging at him for months.
BitMEX had been trying everything. Quarterly futures, monthly futures, weekly futures, 48-hour futures, even a contract that lasted just 24 hours before resetting. Nothing was working. Customers kept complaining that their positions were closing without warning. They wanted something that looked like spot, traded like spot, but gave them the leverage that only a derivatives exchange could offer.
“What if a future never expired?” Delo asked.
Bavik’s answer was immediate. “Mathematically, it would be worth infinity,” Delo recalls him saying.
Technically, he was right. A futures contract’s value is partly derived from the time remaining until expiry and the cost of carrying the position. Remove the expiry date and that carrying cost compounds indefinitely, making the theoretical value infinite. But then Bavik offered a solution: just charge traders the bitcoin overnight rate, the way you might charge LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) in traditional finance.
There was one problem. “I said, what’s that?” Delo recalls. “He said, ‘Hm, just charge them the overnight bitcoin interest rate’. I said, ‘I don’t think that exists.’”
So Delo built it. And in doing so, he invented one of the most consequential financial products of the 21st century.
Building BitMEX
To understand why the perpetual swap mattered, you have to understand what BitMEX was trying to be before it became the most liquid bitcoin market in the world.
When Delo and Arthur Hayes founded the exchange in 2014, they were not thinking about retail traders chasing 100x leverage. They were thinking about institutional hedgers. Hayes had worked at Deutsche Bank, while Delo spent years building high-frequency trading systems at JP Morgan. Their thesis was that bitcoin miners and payment companies needed a way to hedge their exposure, and BitMEX would provide the professional infrastructure to do it.
“We built it basically to look like a Bloomberg terminal,” Delo said. “We used Reuters instruction codes. Z14 meant expiring December 2014.”
The institutions never came. What came instead were traders, sophisticated but retail, people who had financial experience but were playing with their own money. And what they wanted was not guaranteed settlement or low leverage. They wanted to speculate, and they wanted to do it with as much size and leverage as possible.
BitMEX listened. By Halloween 2015, the exchange was offering 100x leverage, made possible by a real-time margining system that Delo had built from scratch. “I built the order matching engine, the position keeping system, the margining system, the PnL system, the settlement system,” he says. “Everything on that was me.”
The issue with futures, even short-dated ones, is basis, the premium at which a futures contract trades above the spot price of the underlying asset. A futures contract trades at a premium to the underlying asset, and that premium reflects an implied interest rate. In traditional finance, this is well understood. In crypto, in 2015, it confused almost everyone.
“Our customers would be like, why is bitcoin so expensive on your exchange?” Delo recalled “And we would say, ‘Well, if it is expensive, why don’t you short it?’ And that would blow some of their minds. You could short something rather than just long it.”
BitMEX kept shortening the expiry of its listed futures contracts. Weekly futures. Then 48-hour. Then a contract that relisted every single day.
“Every 24 hours, it would expire or settle. And people would say, ‘Why did you liquidate me?’ And we’d say, ‘We didn’t liquidate you. Your position closed at the index price. You got exactly the spot price,’” Delo said. “They’re like, ‘We don’t understand.’”
The customers knew what they wanted, even if they could not articulate it. They wanted a leveraged product that never went away. Delo’s hiking trail conversation gave him the framework to build one.
Inventing the funding rate
The perpetual swap launched in May 2016 with little ceremony. The core mechanic was straightforward: a futures contract with no expiry date, anchored to the spot price through a daily funding rate. Longs paid shorts, or vice versa, depending on whether the swap was trading above or below spot. BitMEX took no cut. The rate was purely a balancing mechanism.
The early funding rate was derived from third-party lending markets, primarily Bitfinex, where traders could borrow dollars or lend out Bitcoin. Take the dollar borrow rate, subtract the Bitcoin borrow rate, and you had something approximating the cost of holding a long position.
It worked, until it did not. As Bitcoin began its rise through 2016 and into 2017, demand for long exposure on BitMEX overwhelmed the funding mechanism. The swap started trading at a persistent premium to spot, causing the contract price to drift away from the actual price of bitcoin and undermining the mechanism designed to keep them aligned. The interest rate being imported from Bitfinex was simply not high enough to reflect what was happening on BitMEX itself.
“We had to dynamically adjust how we calculated that funding rate,” Delo said.
The original funding rate had been imported from external lending markets, a fixed reference point that could not respond to conditions on BitMEX itself. The new approach replaced that with a dynamic one, looking inward at how the swap was actually trading rather than outward at what Bitfinex was charging to borrow dollars.
The solution was elegant. Rather than looking outward to other markets, BitMEX would look inward. The exchange began measuring how far the swap was trading above or below spot over an eight-hour window, treating that gap as an implied basis, and back-calculating the annualized rate from it. That rate would then be charged at the end of the next eight-hour window.
“This was very important because you gave market makers notice of how you were calculating it, what it would be, and then when you would charge it,” Delo said. “Because it was paid from longs to shorts, if the swap was trading at a 1% premium, you would charge longs 1% but give 1% to shorts. And then immediately the market makers, knowing that, would come in, short the swap, and anchor it back down to the spot price. It was a dynamic equilibrium.”
This is, in essence, the funding rate mechanism that every major derivatives exchange in the world now uses.
The product that took over
By 2017, BitMEX was the most liquid bitcoin market on the planet. The exchange was processing $3-4 billion a day, and the perpetual swap was at the center of it all. Price discovery for bitcoin was happening not on Coinbase or Bitstamp but on the BitMEX order book.
The concentration of liquidity was itself a product of the swap’s design. Before it launched, BitMEX had been running quarterly, monthly, weekly, 48-hour and 24-hour contracts simultaneously, spreading market maker capital thin across six different tenors. The swap collapsed all of that into one instrument.
“By offering one product, they [traders] were able to consolidate their liquidity, which meant a more liquid market, tighter spreads,” Delo said.
Competitors noticed. Another competitor exchange copied so literally that it reproduced portions of the BitMEX FAQ without understanding how the product worked, Delo told CoinDesk. Others took the concept more seriously. Eventually, every major exchange in crypto offered its own perpetual swap, each one built on the funding rate architecture that Delo had begun assembling on that Hong Kong hiking trail.
“The fact that every other exchange has copied the swap just proves what a financial innovation it is,” he said. “I think it now does $40, 50 trillion dollars a year of turnover. It’s one of the most successful products in the history of capitalism.”
What comes next
BitMEX chose not to patent the perpetual swap. Delo says they considered it and decided the startup’s time was better spent building.
“We were a scrappy startup,” he says. “We thought, just get it out there. If it was any good, the market would show us.”
And show them the market did. Now, a decade on, the product is starting to attract the attention of traditional finance regulators. The CFTC is reportedly making room for perpetual swaps under its framework, and there is speculation that the CME could eventually list them on equities.
For Delo, that prospect is the final validation of something that started as a question on a hillside above Hong Kong, asked by someone who had grown tired of watching his customers complain about positions that kept disappearing.
“I think once traditional finance sees the benefits of this financial product,” he said, “it’ll be impressive.”
Solana (SOL) price is rebuilding the same chart pattern that pulled it down about 21% earlier this year, and it has resurfaced right at $74.
This time, the structure looks weaker and less symmetrical, yet on-chain data carries a warning that the spring version never did. The next few sessions will decide whether buyers can break the sequence.
Solana’s Double Top Returns on Fading Volume
Solana price is tracing a double top. It is a bearish pattern where price hits a similar high twice and stalls, with the dip between the two peaks acting as the neckline. The two peaks formed around July 15 and July 22, with the neckline dip near July 17.
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The setup is building around falling buy volume, which typically supports a bearish read. This is because fewer buyers are defending each push higher. That echoes the spring double top, which formed between mid-March and May 11 on similarly fading volume and led to a drop of about 21%.
From an exploratory view, the neckline sits near $73, and a clean break would project a slide of roughly 7% toward the $67 area. The risk stays alive while Solana’s price action holds below the $79 zone. Below $79, the risk of additional tops remains intact.
The exchange net position change, a metric that tracks tokens moving in and out of exchanges, helps test how closely this repeats the spring move. During that earlier top, the reading ran deeply negative, near 8 million SOL in mid-March before easing to about 5.4 million by May 11.
The current top has formed on far lighter flows, from roughly 0.2 million SOL in mid-July to about 0.9 million by July 22. The much smaller readings suggest weaker distribution pressure this time, which may explain why the pattern looks less symmetrical.
That lighter selling or rather more aggressive buying, however, is only half the story.
Long-Term Holders Break From the Spring Playbook
The HODL Waves metric, which groups SOL supply by how long each coin has stayed unmoved, flips the tone. The one-to-two-year band matters most here because it tracks conviction holders who tend to sit still through volatility.
During the spring double top, that band held roughly flat near 15.9%, a sign long-term holders were not selling into the weakness. This time the reading has slipped from about 15.7% in mid-July to 15.17% by July 28.
The steady decline suggests these holders are trimming exposure as the pattern forms, support the spring version never lost. It appears they are reacting to the setup rather than anticipating it, which leaves the price chart to settle the argument.
Solana Price Levels That Decide the Double Top
The Solana price now sits near $73, just above the pattern base at $72. A daily close below that base would confirm the double top. Moreover, that would project the measured move of about 7% (mentioned earlier) toward $67. That could open the $60 floor if selling extends.
For the bulls, the double-top risk stays intact while SOL trades under $78.92 (the $79 zone from earlier). A daily close above $81 and ideally $84 would invalidate the near-term pattern and reopen the higher range.
Because this pattern is less symmetrical and forms on lighter exchange flows, any breakdown may prove shallower than the spring 21% slide. Still, the slipping long-term-holder support keeps the downside risk live, so the Solana price prediction hinges on one line.
The $72-$73 neckline zone separates a failed double top from a confirmed breakdown toward $67.
The post One Pattern That Predicted the 21% Solana Price Drop Has Returned appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Crypto’s latest cycles repeatedly show a familiar pattern: attention and narrative momentum often arrive before fundamentals do. Behavioral finance researchers say this isn’t unique to digital assets—it’s simply intensified in a market where new themes can spread quickly and investors may treat the hunt for transformative wealth as the main goal.
In comments shared with Magazine, Samar Sen, head of international markets at Talos, argued that in younger markets “price discovery… tends to be driven by attention before it’s driven by analysis.” That dynamic helps explain why newer tokens built around a fresh story can capture headlines even when older, revenue-producing protocols continue to improve their underlying businesses.
Key takeaways
- Behavioral research suggests many investors allocate capital to “life-changing” outcomes, not only to maximizing risk-adjusted returns.
- Crypto narratives can propagate faster than protocol fundamentals, causing prices to move ahead of underlying fundamentals.
- A research comparison by MarketWise framed alongside behavioral theory shows speculative winners and “lottery ticket” behavior can dominate outcomes across asset types.
- Institutional investors typically evaluate liquidity, custody, and operational resilience earlier than upside potential, which can leave them positioned differently from retail in fast-moving cycles.
Why narratives can outrun fundamentals
In behavioral finance terms, the “attention first” problem emerges when investors respond to an easy-to-underwrite story rather than doing the deeper work required to assess an established project. Sen told Magazine that evaluating a mature protocol involves understanding real usage, revenue generation, token design, and competitive positioning—tasks that are harder than quickly absorbing a new narrative.
The broader implication is that crypto cycles can resemble a cycle of storytelling rather than a steady appraisal of economic fundamentals. Even as the industry matures—adding institutional participation, revenue-generating protocols, and more real-world use—the market still gravitates toward the next theme that promises outsized returns.
From poker hands to “transformation” portfolios
One reason investors may repeatedly chase the next cycle is that, according to Meir Statman—a behavioral finance pioneer and professor at Santa Clara University—people often invest for reasons that go beyond conventional assumptions of return maximization. Statman argues that investors mentally separate wealth into two layers: a “not-poor” layer designed to preserve living standards and avoid falling into poverty, and a “be-rich” layer intended for transformative goals such as buying a house or achieving financial independence.
Within this framework, concentrated bets may not be irrational. Diversification can be statistically sensible, but investors with limited capital may feel it offers a poor chance of reaching transformative outcomes—especially if the available pool of candidates doesn’t look capable of delivering that “be-rich” outcome.
MarketWise senior writer James Royal echoed this view, telling Magazine that loyalty tends not to attach to asset classes themselves—whether crypto, stocks, or collectibles. Instead, investors rotate toward whatever promises lucrative returns next. Royal also suggested that while investors may not be seeking risk for its own sake, “FOMO” around potential life-changing returns can lead to underestimating downside risk.
The MarketWise comparison: attention versus outcomes
A recent MarketWise study, linked in the report, compared hypothetical $10,000 investments across multiple categories—including cryptocurrencies, stocks, exchange-traded funds, and collectibles—between January 2021 and April 2026. According to the study, a sealed Pokémon card box outperformed Bitcoin in the comparison, and limited-edition sneakers nearly matched Dogecoin’s returns.
In the same timeframe, the study found that some popular AI-focused funds lagged the broader stock market even as AI dominated headlines. The takeaway is not simply that some assets beat others, but that “better story” dynamics can outweigh fundamentals in how capital gets allocated, especially when investors are searching for transformative outcomes.
Statman ties this together by arguing that investors are not always buying the “best” asset in a narrow sense. Instead, they may be buying a lottery ticket aimed at a life-changing result—an approach that can apply to a digital asset as easily as to collectible memorabilia or even certain stocks.
DeFi fundamentals versus token excitement
The tension between protocol fundamentals and token excitement shows up clearly in decentralized finance. Even when large platforms generate substantial revenue and attract significant capital, their tokens may not capture the same level of attention as newer narratives.
To illustrate, the article cited Aave trading around $98 at the time of writing—about 85% below its 2021 peak—while Aave’s total value locked (TVL) was described as over $14 billion, and as having reached more than $37 billion during the bull market peak in October 2025. The underlying point is that on-chain activity and value lock can look strong even as token price performance fails to match the same level of speculative enthusiasm.
Thomas Probst, a research analyst at Kaiko, emphasized that fundamentals still matter in the long run, particularly resilience, liquidity, and volatility, and the robustness of market structure. However, the article argued that a token tied to an established protocol can struggle to compete for investor attention against the possibility—however unlikely—of extreme upside.
Royal summarized the mismatch by saying investors may confuse “a great technological breakthrough with a great investment opportunity.” In other words, innovation can remain valuable while the market’s willingness to pay for upside can shift as narratives evolve.
Institutions evaluate differently—and arrive at different times
Sen said institutions operate under constraints that make pure narrative chasing difficult. He argued that institutional mandates typically don’t allow investors to focus solely on speculative, outsized returns. Instead, institutions tend to underwrite risk-adjusted performance, liquidity, custody arrangements, and operational resilience before looking at upside.
This difference can shape when institutions enter a cycle. Sen described a recurring pattern: themes often begin with something real—technical breakthroughs or new use cases. But once speculative money starts flowing, prices can move faster than fundamentals. According to Sen, investors who arrive later may respond to the narrative itself as much as the original fundamentals that launched it. Meanwhile, institutional capital—often guided by process and discipline—may be a step behind the first narrative impulse but ahead of the subsequent correction.
Timing risk: buying the cycle versus buying at the peak
The MarketWise report highlighted how entry timing can dominate outcomes in narrative-driven markets. It reported that a hypothetical $10,000 Bitcoin investment made in January 2021 would have grown to more than $24,000 by April 2026, implying a +141% gain. Yet the same hypothetical investment made at Bitcoin’s cycle peak in October 2025 would have fallen to just over $6,000 by April, a -38% return, with an estimated value of about $5,000 “today” in the article’s context.
The article further suggested that an investor who chased another popular name late in the same period would have faced large losses, using the example of an AAAVE-related purchase around the same timeframe being down roughly 85% at the time of writing. While individual outcomes vary widely, the larger lesson is consistent with the behavioral framing: narratives can temporarily overwhelm fundamentals, and buying after the story has already gained momentum can change the risk profile dramatically.
For market participants, the immediate question isn’t whether the “next 100x” will keep being chased—it likely will—but how investors will distinguish between a genuinely new unlock and a narrative that has already been priced in. Watching liquidity conditions, protocol-level usage and revenue trends, and whether price action continues to outpace fundamentals may offer a practical way to separate the two as the next cycle narrative takes hold.
Key points:
- KOSPI’s back-to-back circuit breakers wiped $620 billion in two days, worsened by leveraged retail bets
- Hyperscaler CDS jumped from 115 basis points to 162bps in recent months, implying ~12% five-year default odds, with Oracle’s OpenAI exposure the biggest red flag
- Hynix posted a record 60.54 trillion Korean won profit but still missed the 64 trillion won estimate
Korea sees two-day, $620 billion wipeout
Korean equities saw the second day of a historic sell-off on Wednesday with market-wide circuit breakers again halting trading. Combined with Tuesday’s drop, the KOSPI has now shed nearly 17%, wiping out $620 billion in market capitalization. This has prompted the government to convene an emergency meeting of its financial authorities.
The initial trigger for the sell-off was SK Hynix’s Q2 earnings miss. The stock was down another 4% today, extending Tuesday’s 15% drop. Taken together with Samsung Electronics, the company makes up nearly half of the Korean index.
Related: Trade.xyz to cover SK Hynix perp liquidation losses tied to price anomaly
Current KOSPI sell-off on a high timeframe. Source: Kobeissiletter, Tradingview
Among a generation of Koreans priced out of housing and squeezed by a tightening labor market, all-or-nothing bets on high-risk instruments are increasingly popular. This week’s sell-off is hitting risk-loving young Korean retail traders, who have historically had an affection for the crypto sector, but flocked to AI and semiconductor equities in recent months. Korean crypto volumes are down 28%, while the KOSPI remains up 31% year-to-date.
With the approval and launch of single-stock leveraged exchange-traded funds for retail trading in May, those retail investors were drawn into the market and have added additional leverage. The assets under management of these products crossed $50 billion in July. After hefty losses in recent days, top policymakers have now apologized for the decision and called for a renewed ban on retail trading for these instruments.
The sell-off is a further sign that semiconductor and AI stocks are priced for flawless execution, leaving substantial downside if the sector’s aggressive growth targets are not met. Although Hynix brought in a record 60.54 trillion won ($41.25 billion) operating profit, up 557% year-over-year, this figure fell short of the 64 trillion won analyst consensus.
Bond vigilantes eye AI trade
The semiconductor sell-off is consistent with broader signs of fatigue in the AI trade. The uncertainty accruing in the sector has swept over from equity to credit markets. 5-year credit default swaps on a basket of the five largest US hyperscalers — Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google and Oracle — have jumped from 115bps to 162bps in recent months and is now at a record high. These instruments let a bondholder pay a periodic fee to a counterparty in exchange for a payout if the underlying borrower defaults. When compared to equal-dated government bonds, the resulting credit spread paints an even more concerning picture.
The market currently implies default odds of 12% for these companies within five years. Sage Advisory said hyperscalers have more than doubled their collective dollar debt footprint since September to more than $360 billion as free cash flow turns negative.The biggest contributor to the credit risk is Oracle after its aggressive AI investments. While the company boasts a massive contract backlog, a significant percentage of it is tied to OpenAI as a single customer, which has struggled to generate cashflow and delayed its IPO.
Combined 2026 capex guidance from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta is now tracking toward $725 billion-$730 billion. Even Alphabet posted its first cash burn on record in the second quarter, at $5.9 billion, despite its cloud unit posting 82% growth. Meta is slated to report Q2 results later today after US markets close.
Related: Bitcoin lows pierce $63K as Asia chip-stock crash spreads to Wall Street
This same story repeated in June but from a different angle: the month’s largest loss, more than $30 million at Humanity Protocol, came from a private key compromised on a team member’s machine, with the contract untouched, per the project’s own account.
This is the shape of 2026’s worst losses, with crypto losing roughly $972 million so far this year. The number of incidents keeps climbing, and the money increasingly leaves through something other than a contract bug: a stolen signing key, a misconfigured verifier, a treasury anyone can vote their way into. If you look at the sheer number of incidents, you would think the industry is losing ground. But if you look into how much has actually been stolen in total, a narrower, more uncomfortable pattern shows up.
We can be precise about it. Across the 425 hacks we studied from 2021 to 2025, a small share of operational failures carries most of the value lost. In the 2024 to 2025 window, 54.6% of all value lost, across 191 hacks, can be traced to centralized exchange compromises: the keys, custody and signing that sit above the contract.
However, none of this means the code layer is solved. Criticals are everywhere in live code. 93.9% of programs that run five years or more surface a confirmed critical, and roughly one in five confirmed reports is rated critical. The code is never finished either. Every upgrade ships fresh attack surface. What has changed is that continuous, incentivized review now keeps pace with attackers on that code, which is exactly why the same model has to reach further.
Stablecoin infrastructure firm Brale is rolling out an interoperability protocol designed to end what it says is a bottleneck in the industry’s growth: moving a rapidly expanding number of custom stablecoins across blockchains.
Dubbed ION Protocol, it allows participating stablecoins to move between blockchains by burning tokens on one network and minting an equivalent amount on another. Unlike most blockchain bridges, the model does not require liquidity pools to be pre-funded on every supported chain.
While the $300 billion stablecoin market is dominated by Tether’s USDT and Circle Internet’s USDC, new participants are piling in. Banks, fintechs, crypto firms and asset managers are increasingly issuing their own branded tokens for payments, settlements and tokenized assets.
Data provider CoinGecko already tracks more than 350 of the coins, whose value is pegged to a real-world asset such as a fiat currency, underscoring the growing need for infrastructure to connect an increasingly fragmented ecosystem. Brale argues today’s interoperability model won’t scale as more issuers introduce their own versions.
Stablecoin scaling problem
The company supports over a hundred stablecoin programs across more than 30 blockchains, founder and CEO Ben Milne said in an interview with CoinDesk. Many of its customers process billions of dollars in monthly payment volume while maintaining relatively small stablecoin balances because their tokens are designed for transactions rather than investment.
Elon Musk Grok AI predicts a major re-rating for SpaceX, and this price prediction leans entirely on execution catching up to hype. Flight 14, targeted for August 2026, is expected to deliver the first stable orbital insertion plus a ship tower catch, the milestone that finally proves the vehicle works the way the whole valuation assumes it will.
Successful propellant transfer demos and early orbital refueling are named as the next dominoes. Unlocking those pieces means full reusability, payloads above 100 tonnes, and mass deployment of Starlink V3 satellites at more than 50 per flight.
That kind of cadence supercharges more than just launch volume. Direct to Cell and Starlink revenue, already running at an estimated $11 billion to $15 billion annualized and reportedly profitable, are projected to push past $20 billion.
A second growth engine sits alongside the rocket business entirely. AI and compute infrastructure, through Colossus, xAI integration, and GPU leases with Google and Anthropic, is expected to grow segment revenue from low single digit billions toward $15 billion to $35 billion by 2027, based on modeling from Goldman and Morgan Stanley.
First public earnings in August 2026, combined with clarity after lockup expirations, are framed as the events that confirm the bigger picture. Total revenue is projected to accelerate from $39 billion in 2026 to roughly $65 billion to $75 billion in 2027, alongside a positive EBITDA trajectory, Florida pad readiness, Golden Dome and Starshield defense contract wins, and continued Artemis HLS progress.
Consensus targets cluster between $225 and $300, with Morgan Stanley at $300 and some models running above $400. Grok frames that gap as the setup for a straightforward 2x re-rating from the current $1.5 trillion valuation following the post IPO washout.
The bear case is narrower by comparison. Further Starship slips, heavy lockup supply hitting the market after earnings, or valuation compression on an already high price to sales ratio and heavy capital spending could keep shares range bound near $100 to $140.
SpaceX Price Prediction: SPCX Shares Are Down Nearly 45 Percent From Their June Peak
Price closed at $116.44, up 0.57%, in a session ranging between $114.95 and $118.12. That is a small green candle sitting near the bottom of a decline that has been almost uninterrupted since mid June.
Shares spiked to a peak near $217 in mid June, then rolled over hard, falling in a long, steady staircase with barely any relief rallies along the way. A brief bounce attempt in late June and early July stalled just above $170 before the selling resumed and dragged price down to current levels near $110.
That kind of persistent, low volatility grind lower is different from a sharp crash. It suggests steady distribution rather than panic selling, which lines up with the bear case concern about lockup supply working through the market.
Support sits right around $110, the recent low this stock just tested. Below that, there is little recent chart history before price would be moving into territory not seen in this window.
Resistance stacks at $130, then $150, then the heavier ceiling near $170 where the early July bounce failed. Momentum here is tentatively stabilizing after weeks of decline, but nothing on this chart yet suggests the selling pressure has fully broken.
For Grok’s bull case to gain any real footing, shares first need to reclaim $170, a level this stock has not closed above in a month. Until that happens, the current price sits far closer to the bear case range than to anything resembling the path toward $225.
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LiquidChain Is Catching the Attention of SpaceX holders: Grok AI Predicts It’s the Next 100x
The rotation is already happening. Most people will only see it in hindsight.
Large-cap crypto is not failing. It is capped. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP have been pressing against the same resistance bands for weeks. The macro tailwinds keep getting delayed.
The institutional inflows keep getting pushed to next quarter. Holding assets where the upside depends on catalysts you cannot control is not a strategy. It is waiting.
A capital that has navigated enough cycles does not wait at resistance. It moves before the destination becomes obvious.
Early-stage infrastructure plays operate on different math entirely. A small enough market cap means a modest rotation produces dramatic price movement. The asymmetry exists because the market has not priced in what is being built yet. That gap between current valuation and what the project is actually worth is where the returns come from.
Multi-chain fragmentation costs DeFi real money every single day. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana run completely isolated liquidity systems with no native way to connect them. Every user moving value between ecosystems absorbs that cost directly in fees, slippage, and failed transactions.
LiquidChain collapses all 3 networks into a single execution layer. One deployment. Full ecosystem access. No cross-chain tax on every interaction.
The market has not found this yet. That is the entire point.
The presale is at $0.01454 with just over $820,000 raised. Ground floor is not a marketing phrase here. It is a description of where this actually sits in its lifecycle.
Execution is unproven. Adoption is unknown. Those risks are real and worth naming directly. Established assets offer a smoother ride toward a ceiling that is already visible. This offers an earlier seat at a table that has not been set yet.
Explore the LiquidChain Presale
The post Elon Musk Grok AI Just Predicts This Shocking SpaceX Stock Prediction for 2027 appeared first on Cryptonews.
XRP price has collapsed roughly 67% from its all-time high, the deepest wound among major cryptocurrencies (the top 5 excluding stablecoins). Additionally, its market setup is turning more dangerous by the week.
This is not ordinary market weakness. A rare pileup of leveraged longs and a quiet retreat by the largest whales are combining to make XRP the most fragile major coin in the market.
XRP Price Has Fallen Harder Than Any Major Coin
A cross-asset drawdown tracker, which measures how far each coin sits below its record high, puts XRP dead last. The token is down about 67% from its peak, against roughly 48% for Bitcoin, 60% for Ethereum, and 56% for BNB.
The damage worsens over three months. XRP’s 90-day return sits near negative 21%, the worst of the four majors, and the token is 355 days from its peak with no recovery in sight.
That is the signature of a high-beta-alt regime. When risk appetite drops, XRP does not hold the line like a safe-haven asset. It amplifies the fall, dropping more than the market. As of now, it is trailing its peer average by over 12 percentage points.
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Repeated bounces have failed, with XRP’s recovery attempts rejected at resistance. The deeper question is what makes XRP fall faster than every coin besides it.
Crowded Longs Have Trapped XRP With No Buyers Left
The first driver is a one-sided derivatives book. A divergence read that compares the net-long bias of top traders (smart money) against the retail crowd shows both groups leaning long on XRP at once.
Top traders sit at a net-long bias of +29 and the retail crowd at +27, a divergence of just +2, which the tool flags as an aligned, or crowded, long. Nearly every participant is already positioned the same way.
Here is why that is dangerous. When almost everyone is already long, there is no fresh buyer left to lift the price. So the XRP price struggles to rise. And the moment it slips, leveraged longs are forced to sell into the drop, which drags it down faster. XRP traders have already lost $700 million in one such cascade this cycle.
Bitcoin carries none of this risk for now. Its read is neutral, with top traders at +2 against a retail crowd at +15, a negative divergence of 13. Big money is not crowding Bitcoin longs, so it has room to run that XRP does not.
The Biggest Whales Are Bailing at the Worst Moment
The final driver sits beneath the price. Santiment data on wallets holding 1 billion XRP or more shows their share of supply sliding from 39.4% on April 30 to about 38.65% now, a steady three-month decline.
The percentage looks small, but it covers billions of tokens and cuts against the earlier accumulation narratives. The strongest hands are selling, not adding.
This is the part that turns a bad setup into a trap. Whales are normally the buyers who absorb heavy selling and put a floor under the price. With the largest holders stepping back instead, that floor is thinning at the exact moment over-leveraged longs need someone to sell into. When the crowd is forced out, nothing is left to catch the token.
That is the full mechanism. Trapped longs on top and vanishing whale support underneath explain why XRP free-falls while its peers merely drift. XRP holders are already sitting on billions in unrealized losses, and only a flush of those longs or a return of whale buying would signal the end of pain.
The post Why Does XRP Fall Faster Than Every Other Major Coin? appeared first on BeInCrypto.
XRP Ledger has activated its fixCleanup3_2_0 amendment, making version 3.2.0 the minimum software release required for nodes to remain compatible with the mainnet.
Summary
- The amendment received 85.71% validator support, with 30 votes in favor and five against.
- Nodes running version 3.1.0 or earlier are now amendment-blocked until operators upgrade.
- The update fixes issues affecting vaults, lending, permissioned trading and Multi-Purpose Tokens.
- Version 3.2.0 also renames the core server software from rippled to xrpld.
XRP Ledger activates fix with 85.71% support
XRPScan data shows that fixCleanup3_2_0 is now active after securing support from 30 of the 35 trusted validators that participated in the vote. Five validators opposed the amendment.
XRPL amendments that change transaction processing must maintain at least 80% support among trusted validators for two consecutive weeks before activation. The latest proposal cleared that requirement with 85.71% consensus.
Activation immediately affects infrastructure operators running older software. Nodes on version 3.1.0 or below are now “amendment blocked,” meaning they cannot follow the updated rules governing validated ledgers.
“The fixCleanup3_2_0 amendment is now active. With this, all nodes running version 3.1.0 and below are amendment blocked until they upgrade to 3.2.0. Please take action to ensure service continuity,” XRPScan said.
The warning applies to exchanges, wallet providers, payment services, developers and other businesses that operate their own XRPL infrastructure. Users holding XRP in self-custody wallets do not need to change their tokens or move funds because of the amendment.
What fixCleanup3_2_0 changes
The amendment introduces a package of protocol corrections included in the XRP Ledger 3.2.0 release. It does not add a new user-facing product or alter XRP’s supply.
Among the changes are precision and rounding fixes for Single Asset Vaults and the Lending Protocol. The package also corrects an invariant affecting valid offer deletions on the Permissioned DEX.
Other changes validate non-canonical Multi-Purpose Token amounts, add a zero DomainID check for permissioned domains, and introduce an invariant that checks whether deleted accounts leave directly accessible ledger objects behind.
XRPL data cited after activation showed that 105 validators, or 70% of the network total, were running version 3.2.0. Another 35 validators, representing 23.33%, remained on version 3.1.3.
Among other nodes, 582, or 68.88%, had adopted version 3.2.0, while 228 nodes, or 26.98%, were still using version 3.1.3. Operators on 3.1.3 are above the version range identified in XRPScan’s amendment-block warning, although XRPL developers have urged all operators to complete the 3.2.0 migration.
Version 3.2.0 renames rippled to xrpld
Released in mid-June, version 3.2.0 also changed the name of XRPL’s reference server implementation from “rippled” to “xrpld.” The rename follows XLS-0095, a proposal designed to link the software’s identity more directly to the XRP Ledger.
The change extends beyond the server executable. Operators upgrading from version 3.1.3 must rename the configuration file from rippled.cfg to xrpld.cfg and revise related database paths, packages, scripts, deployment settings, service definitions, and metadata.
XRPL’s migration documentation provides steps intended to preserve existing node data while replacing the former naming conventions.
Developers describe version 3.2.0 primarily as a cleanup and maintenance release. It retires amendments that had remained active for more than two years and continues dividing the libxrpl codebase into smaller modules to support future maintenance.
XRPL upgrade follows $2.6B RWA increase
The activation comes as the ledger handles a growing amount of tokenized real-world assets. As crypto.news reported on July 26, XRPL added about $2.6 billion in RWA value over six months, excluding stablecoins.
That ranked the network second for net RWA inflows during the period, behind BNB Chain’s roughly $3 billion. Stellar followed with about $2.1 billion.
XRPL’s combined distributed and represented RWA value reached approximately $4.38 billion, while stablecoins added another $995.12 million. The wider total exceeded $5.37 billion.
For US businesses using XRPL for tokenized assets, payments, or exchange infrastructure, the amendment creates an operational requirement rather than a new regulatory rule. Operators must keep their server software compatible to avoid service interruptions as activity on the network expands.
Barclays analyst Benjamin Budish estimates Coinbase processed roughly $152 billion of trading volume during the quarter, well below the Street’s expectation of about $178 billion. He expects adjusted EBITDA to come in roughly 3% below consensus, pointing to weaker blockchain rewards and institutional trading revenue.
Clear Street’s Owen Lau also lowered estimates, projecting approximately $160 billion in trading volume and $301 million in adjusted EBITDA after weaker-than-expected retail activity.
Benchmark’s Mark Palmer similarly reduced his EBITDA forecast to $377 million, while Compass Point expects revenue to slightly miss consensus but believes EBITDA will be roughly in line with expectations.
Coinbase still rises and falls with crypto trading activity, a dependency that has become more apparent over the past year. The company has spent heavily to diversify revenue through stablecoins, derivatives, payments, tokenization and its Base blockchain. Those businesses continue to grow, but they remain relatively small compared with transaction revenue.
Subscription stability
One area where analysts are more constructive is subscription and services revenue.
This segment includes interest income from USDC, staking rewards, custody fees, Coinbase One subscriptions and institutional services. Because those businesses are less tied to daily trading volumes, analysts expect them to provide a cushion against weaker transaction revenue.
Sometimes, you become defensive precisely because being a good partner—or friend or employee—matters so much to you. “It’s a sign that they care so much that they’re terrified of getting it wrong,” Harrison says.
Trade certainty for curiosity
Defensiveness has a way of making you feel absolutely certain: You’re right, they’re wrong, and if you could just explain yourself clearly enough, they would finally see it. But the harder you work to prove your point, the less attention you’re paying to theirs.
Katzman, who has spent decades in improvisational theater alongside his clinical work, suggests doing the opposite. “The way out is not to think faster,” he says. “It’s really to become curious sooner.”
Improv offers a surprisingly useful model. Onstage, “blocking” means rejecting the premise your scene partner has introduced. If they announce that it’s raining and you insist that it isn’t, the scene has nowhere to go. “When we block each other, that’s what defensiveness really does,” Katzman says. “I’m negating your reality, you’re negating mine.”
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