📈 This Week in Markets
💬 Tweets of the Week
🔥 JUST IN: Standard Chartered raises $ETH forecast to $7,500 by end-2025 from $4,000, and to $25,000 by 2028.
— #Cointelegraph (#@Cointelegraph)
9:00 AM • Aug 13, 2025
If you do anything today, please listen to this 3-min clip on what @SharpLinkGaming Co-CEO @joechalom refers to as The ETH Opportunity...
FYI, Joe is the former Head of Digital Assets Strategy at @BlackRock, who drove the creation of IBIT, ETHA, and BUIDL.
"The more assets
— #DeFi Dad ⟠ defidad.eth (#@DeFi_Dad)
3:46 PM • Aug 15, 2025
⏩ Quick Hits + 🔥 Hot Takes
Fintech firm Stripe is developing a new high-performance, payments-focused layer 1 blockchain called Tempo. Additionally, Circle has announced plans to launch Arc. Both are based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) programming language.
Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based chains benefit Ethereum (ETH), becasue assets will easily be able to move between those chians, Ethereum, and other EVM based chains or Layer-2s.
Stripe continues to buy the pieces to launch a global payments blockchain, including a stablecoin issuer and a wallet. Additionally, they’ve launched stablecoin payments in partnership with Shopify.
Stripe has the proven ability to execute, and to build for builders & developers, and a large built-in customer base eager to move to lower-cost solutions. I expect this chain will gain significant traction within Stripe’s payment stack.
Circle has more of an uphill battle, as they do not own relationships with end users. However, as the issuer of the most popular GENIUS Act compliant stablecoin, they own the supply of tokens.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the US won’t be buying more bitcoin, but later backtracked in a post on X.
A top reply on X came from Nic Carter: “blink twice if you are under duress sir”.
There’s no way to sugar-coat it. This is bad news for Bitcoin bulls who were hoping for the US to purchase 5% of outstanding bitcoin through the BITCOIN Act.
Only time will tell whether the US’s failure to buy BTC is smart, or short-sighted Other countries are increasing their exposure. For example, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund reportedly boosted its BTC exposure by 83% in Q2, primarily though exposure to Strategy ($MSTR).
🔦 Digital Asset Spotlight: WTF is a DUNA?
Uniswap made news that represents a massive (though admittedly academic) win for the industry. It is laying the groundwork for “turning on its fee-switch”, i.e. pushing revenue back to token-holders, by taking steps to become a Wyoming DUNA.
A DUNA is a Decentralized Unincorporated Non-Profit Association. Think of it as a “Digital LLC”. The DUNA is a new creation, and one that is expected to be widely adopted.
I expect its creation will be as important to tokenization as the LLC structure was for capital formation.
One of the largest problems for token projects to date has been that there has been no good legal structure for launching projects in the United States that allow for profits to return to tokenholders. DUNAs aim to solve this issue, among many others (like how to pay taxes, and are participants individually liable?).
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Thanks for reading this week.
Don’t speculate, validate.
- Validator Digital
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