Volatility came back to life last week as BTC dropped 9% in under 24 hours, hitting its lowest level since June. Today’s Data Debrief is taking a broader view of the market, revisiting some of the key trends shaping the market this summer.

This week we recap a slow summer, examining volatility, liquidity, and volumes.

Last week, the U.S. SEC delayed its decision on the Ark 21Shares Bitcoin spot ETF application and said it will appeal the Ripple court ruling, Coinbase officially launched its Base Blockchain. The U.S. Fed added Hedera-based Dropp to its list of FedNow service providers.

The DeFi sector continues to reel from the Curve exploit, although more than 70% of funds have been returned. In non-exploit news, Coinbase exceeded analyst expectations with Q2 revenues, a wave of companies filed for ether ETFs, and Tether is now one of the largest Bitcoin holders.

Curve Finance is back as the center of attention in DeFi just a few weeks after CEO Michael Egorov’s large CRV-backed loans drew scrutiny. This time, however, the inciting incident was an exploit.

It was a landmark week for crypto regulation after the House Financial Services Committee advanced a crucial bill that could provide clearer guidelines for the industry if passed. In other news, Curve Finance experienced an exploit, crypto ETPs saw record inflows, and the Bank of Italy tapped Polygon for an institutional DeFi pilot.

Worldcoin’s launch was one of the most unique and controversial in recent years. Much of the controversy stems from the understandable skittishness with Worldcoin’s goal (creating a global identity network) and sci-fi-like methods of achieving this goal (eyeball scans). This has been nicely summarized by the MIT Technology Review here. I’ll instead focus on why this launch was unique by analyzing tokenomics, trading, and liquidity.

The SEC finally responded to the Ripple ruling, asserting the case was “wrongly decided,” contributing to a slight pullback for altcoins amid a wider rally. This week, we explore Bitcoin dominance, centralized exchange concentration, the Arkham token launch, and bearish bets against BNB.

This week we have a special edition of our research dedicated to EthCC. The Kaiko team gave three technical presentations exploring market concepts, looking at Uniswap V3 LP trading strategies, market manipulation on centralized exchanges, and the importance of liquidity data in DeFi.

Markets are soaring after a judge ruled in (partial) favor of Ripple’s case with the SEC. Meanwhile, Celsius’ CEO was arrested for fraud, Binance laid off 1,000 workers, and Multichain is shutting down.

This week, we explore the state of stablecoin market structure to better understand their systemic importance to cryptocurrency markets. We’ll focus on the top five stablecoins by market cap: USDT, USDC, BUSD, TUSD, and DAI.

Despite a drop in overall crypto activity, BTC has traded consistently above $30k for the longest stretch of time since early 2022, bolstered by the possibility of a Blackrock spot ETF approval. Meanwhile, Binance lost several key executives and Gemini filed a lawsuit against DCG.

This week we examine stETH’s liquidity and leverage in light of its increasing usage on DeFi protocols.

Crypto markets closed the quarter on a positive note despite trade volumes remaining at historical lows. Last week MicroStrategy confirmed that it  bought 12.3k BTC throughout Q2, Coinbase was named as the surveillance partner for Fidelity and other BTC spot ETFs.

This week we provide a Q2 update to our crypto asset liquidity ranking. The recent SEC lawsuits have directly impacted the liquidity of assets identified as securities, and our ranking breaks down the changes. We then compare each asset’s liquidity score to its market cap.

Crypto markets are booming following a wave of ETF applications in the U.S., a welcome bullish catalyst in a much-battered region.