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OVERVIEW

Leverage Buffet: Some Plates Full, Others About to Shatter 🍽️

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

Source: finviz

Source: Santiment

And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

Source: TradingView

NEWS
Wyoming’s FRNT Stablecoin Goes Live On Avalanche – First US State Stablecoin 🪙

Wyoming launched FRNT on Avalanche at SALT, rebranding WYST into a state-issued stablecoin ready for actual use. 🤝 

FRNT carries a 102% reserve requirement by statute, fully backed by short-duration U.S. Treasuries and dollars, and governed by the Wyoming Stable Token Commission.

Rain (a private fintech that connects stablecoins to Visa’s network) is onboarding users with Visa cards, with merchant spending to follow shortly. ⏩️ 

Wut Is This?

A government shipped programmable public money on a production chain and tied it to card rails so normal people can spend it.

Before launch, the state piloted real-time contractor payments via Hashfire, compressing a 45-day wait into seconds and giving auditors clean, onchain receipts.

That single win scales to tax refunds, disaster relief, and payroll where settlement speed and transparency aren’t optional. Avalanche-only spend at first is a trade-off for control, and it reduces cross-chain drama while keeping compliance tight. 🪗 

SPONSORED
Bitcoin ATM Market Leader Delivers Strong Q2

Bitcoin Depot (Nasdaq: BTM) is the world’s largest Bitcoin ATM operator, leading an industry primed for exponential growth — and their Q2 financials show some strong momentum:

• Revenue up 6% YoY to $172.1M

• Net income up 183% YoY to $12.3M

• Adjusted EBITDA up 46% YoY to $18.5M

The best part? Bitcoin Depot’s growth has historically been driven by Bitcoin ATM usage, not Bitcoin’s price.

The above is for general informational purposes only and is not investment advice nor does it constitute an offer, recommendation, or solicitation to buy or sell a particular financial instrument. Bitcoin Depot is not a registered investment adviser under the U.S. Investment Advisers Act of 1940. Nothing contained herein constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer by Bitcoin Depot to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments.

3rd Party Ad. Not an offer or recommendation by Stocktwits. See disclosure here.

ON-CHAIN AND TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
Open-Interest Reality Check ✅ 

Raw Open Interest (OI) charts love big numbers. They don’t tell you if that leverage is being digested or if someone’s about to star in a liquidation montage. 🖼️ 

So I built a blunt tool that answers a simple question: is price absorbing new leverage or choking on it?

What LAR Is And Why I Made It

Open interest counts live futures contracts – your leverage gauge. Price can moon while OI sits still. OI can rip while price does nothing. Alone, neither tells you much about absorption. I wanted a single read that says “healthy” or “handle with tongs.”

The Leverage Absorption Ratio (LAR) does that by comparing 30-day price change vs 30-day OI change and scaling to a clean 0-10+ score (which I need to change, you’ll see when you get to XRP). I also show 30-day realized volatility as a sanity check. It’s intentionally simple. No mystery sauce.

Thresholds

• > 5 – Smooth Sailing – leverage added, price handled it

• 3 to 5 – Check Engine – risk building, watch funding

• < 3 – Danger Zone – leverage stack looks fragile

How I Use It

• Confirm trend: High LAR during up moves means buyers are eating leverage.

• Spot divergence: OI pumping while price naps is a red flag.

• Risk gating: Size down when LAR < 3 or when vol is screaming.

• Event overlay: Pair LAR with unlocks, funding, basis, and liquidation maps. I don’t trade it naked. I mean I’m usually wearing clothes but also, I don’t use the LAR by itself is what I mean for you Litepaper smart asses out there.

The Details 👀

• Window: Jul 19 − Aug 18, 2025

• OI: USD-denominated open interest, daily resampled

ADA

ADA OI – Click to enlarge.

• LAR 6.99

• Price -6.8% while OI fell -11.6%. That’s longs getting rinsed faster than price.

• Read: Counter-intuitively Smooth Sailing for absorption. Cleaner book, less froth. Doesn’t mean easy up, just fewer landmines.

LINK

LINK OI – Click to enlarge.

• LAR 4.75

• Price +14.7% with OI +37.1%. Leverage chased the move and then some.

• Read: Check Engine. Strong trend with a crowded perp tail. Great while it works. Have a plan for a funding squeeze.

XRP

XRP OI – Click to enlarge.

• LAR 3.39

• Price down, OI flushed hard. Classic deleveraging after the headline sugar high.

• Read: Check Engine. Better than a hot-air pump, still not clean. Let OI stabilize before you call bottom. Bounces can be sharp, but respect 80% vol.

ETH

ETH OI – Click to enlarge.

• LAR 10.23

• Price +17.6% with OI +20.6%. Buyers ate the size and kept moving.

• Read: Smooth Sailing. Funding creep is your tell – if it drifts hot, scale. Until then, trend gets the benefit of the doubt.

BTC

BTC OI – Click to enlarge.

• LAR 1.02

• Price basically flat while OI climbed +7.8%. That’s leverage stacking on sleepy price.

• Read: Absorption weak. Danger Zone print says trim the tourist longs or demand better entries. Low vol plus rising OI is how you get surprise rug pulls.

How I’m Interpreting This Info

ETH looks like the adult in the room. BTC needs to prove it can carry the added OI without tripping on low vol. XRP is still detoxing. ADA quietly improved its risk profile. LINK is running hot – fun until funding turns. Use LAR to decide when to press and when to lighten up.

Then let the market do the talking. ✅

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
AI, Stablecoins, & Privacy News 🕵️

🤖 IoTeX Pushes Into “Physical Intelligence” With AI Agents And EV Stations

With 2.5s blocks and 2,000 TPS capacity, IoTeX wants to be the operating system for your toaster and your Tesla. July saw 265% growth in Quicksilver pre-alpha usage, 12k+ ioIDs minted, and partnerships with HashKey, U Power, and The Graph. AI agents are now micro-paying each other in USDC while banning scam posts on forums – yes, bots moderating bots. IoTeX.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) News 🪙

🥃 Hey, Rare Scotch Needed NFTs Too

Bowmore is minting its first bottles on Avalanche, with a $5,500 30-Year Collector’s Edition and a $180 12-Year “entry bottle” tied to NFTs. Only 8 of the high-end bottles exist, and they come with a side of glassware and dinner with Emin Gün Sirer, because why not. It’s whisky meets Web3 – drink it, flex it, or scan the NFC tag and prove you didn’t just chug $5k of heritage. Avalanche.

📊 Plume Flexes Numbers To Prove Yield Isn’t Just Talk

If this is month two, either the flywheel’s real or they’re going for the Guinness Book in fastest liquidity chest-pounding. Two months after launch, Plume claims 182k asset holders, $350M+ TVL, and 200 apps already in play. TL;DR assets aren’t sitting idle, they’re trading, looping, collateralizing, and compounding like DeFi’s supposed to. Plume Network.

🌐 Cosmos Chains Pitch DATCOs As The Next Big Tokenization Play

Digital Asset Treasury Companies now hold $100B+ in BTC and ETH, with Injective turning SharpLink’s $1.3B ETH stack into SBET, the first on-chain treasury token. It’s tradable, yield-bearing, and composable – basically corporate balance sheets turned into DeFi Lego bricks. If ETFs are TradFi’s answer, DATCOs on Cosmos are the crypto-native version: programmable treasuries instead of paper filings. Cosmos.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending Protocol News 🏦

💧 Curve DAO Turns Five, Still Pays Weekly Like Clockwork

veCRV has delivered $159M in yield over 256 weeks, spawned the Curve Wars, and inspired half of DeFi’s tokenomics copycats. Convex now holds more than half the veCRV power, vote incentives price governance, and scrvUSD adds a new savings stream. Governance still hits quorum almost every time, proving on-chain democracy can actually work when people get paid. Curve Finance.

🐎 Palomino Promises “Free Money” Loans On Saga

Built on Aave v3, Palomino lets lenders earn from three yield streams while borrowers sometimes pay negative rates thanks to Colt’s subsidies. Risk controls cap leverage, but the design keeps utilization high, which keeps yields hot. In short: a lending market where you can literally get paid to borrow – until the subsidy tank runs dry. Saga.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Protocol News 🏦

🔥 ICON Burns 75M ICX, Closes Court Case Like A Boss

Five years of legal headache for a token bonfire. A court-ordered receiver converted assets over two months and nuked 75,313,432 ICX into a burn address. The Foundation thanks lawyers, the community, and promises SODA supply stays untouched. ICON.

🪙 Synthetix Says Bye To L2s, Packs Bags For Mainnet

Arbitrum and Base already got the boot, and now Optimism is next – by September, Synthetix is fully Mainnet only. Perps go close-only, forced closures follow, and leftover margin lands back in sUSD wallets. All roads now lead back to Ethereum. Synthetix.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

🤦 Tether appoints Bo Hines to lead US growth push

🤯 SharpLink Reports Total ETH Holdings Climb to 740,760

👮‍♀️ Spain slaps DeFi investor with $10.5M back tax for loan: Report

🤔 What to expect from Fed Chair Powell’s speech on Friday: 3 key scenarios

🛑 Concordium debuts app for anonymous online age checks amid UK rules backlash

💩 6 years later, we’re still learning way too much about Red Dead Redemption 2’s horse poop

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in ADA, IMX, COPI, MIN, AGIX, ALGO, ZEC, XLM, and NEAR. 📋