June saw crypto equities explode in market relevance. Circle’s IPO surged 10x within weeks, joining a wave of tokenized asset initiatives across Coinbase, Robinhood, and Kraken. At the same time, the U.S. Senate passed the GENIUS Act, pushing stablecoins further into mainstream finance as the sector’s market cap hit $250 billion. On-chain credit is also accelerating, with Maple Finance’s TVL climbing to $1.75 billion and earnings soaring, an institutional wave clearly underway.
Bitcoin has become increasingly institutional with a growing number of treasury companies spinning up and seeing great demand. There are now 116 public companies holding 809,000 BTC, which is nearly 4% of the total supply. Currently, the largest of these are Microstrategy holding 2.85%, Marathon Digital Holdings with 0.23% and Twenty One Capital with 0.18% of the total supply. Since April alone 100,000 BTC has been added with more than 25 companies disclosing their new holdings. Now, over 30% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply is held by just 216 centralized entities, with BlackRock holding an astonishing 3% of the total supply in their ETF. Another sign of asset class maturity is that DEXs have captured a record 25% share of total spot trading volume in June, narrowing the gap with centralized exchanges. The trend highlights deepening user trust in permissionless trading rails as regulatory clarity and better UX attract new capital to on-chain liquidity venues.
Aside from digital assets, crypto stocks have been increasingly popular lately. Publicly traded companies like Circle, Coinbase and Robinhood saw impressive growth numbers this year and specifically in June. Specific new features include Coinbase’s announcement to launch perpetual futures in the U.S., likely on the back of last month’s acquisition of Deribit, whilst the Coinbase app rose to rank 317 in the global App Store. Robinhood has also been expanding aggressively into the crypto space, with their acquisition of Bitstamp (first announced last year) being finalized and announcing their preparation to roll out tokenized stocks and private equity on a new Ethereum Layer 2 for its European users. However, the biggest standout this month was Circle’s highly anticipated IPO; CRCL started trading at $31 and peaked at just under $300 within three weeks, a 10 multiple move from the IPO price which reignited optimism for more crypto startups eyeing the public markets. Circle also applied for a U.S. National Trust Bank license, aiming to expand USDC’s reach within the traditional banking system. The major success of Circle’s IPO has inspired other crypto companies to pursue the same path towards an IPO. On this front, Gemini confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, and OKX is reportedly considering its own U.S. listing following its April relaunch. This wave of traditional stock trading activity has spilled over to crypto-native platforms too, with Bybit now offering stock trading natively on their exchange. In addition to that, Hyperliquid has set the plan for their HIP-3 markets in motion, an initiative to permissionlessly create new markets with a large focus being on trading off-chain assets like stocks on-chain by tokenizing equities and enabling seamless settlement through their decentralized trading rails. Kraken also launched xStocks to offer eligible non-U.S. clients the trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs on-chain, which should enable a more seamless, self-custodial, and DeFi-native way of trading and holding these traditional assets.
Stablecoins continue to make leaps in terms of development and global attention. This month the U.S. Senate voted to advance the GENIUS Act, a bill that aims to create a comprehensive federal framework for regulating payment stablecoins. The total stablecoin market cap surged to a new all-time high of $250 billion, now representing 1.1% of the entire U.S. dollar supply. Major institutions were also moving fast to stake their claim, with names like Walmart and Amazon both exploring the launch of their own stablecoins, while Deutsche Bank and Bank of America confirmed to be working on similar initiatives. Société Générale plans to issue a dollar-pegged stablecoin on Ethereum and Solana, and China’s JD.com will apply for stablecoin licenses in major markets worldwide. Meanwhile, Ant Group is seeking stablecoin permits in Hong Kong, while DTCC is exploring tokenized settlement rails, and JPMorgan filed a ‘JPMD’ trademark pointing to its own stablecoin ambitions. To cap it off, Mastercard deepened its stablecoin integrations through new partnerships with Paxos, Fiserv, and PayPal, showing just how far the stablecoin wave has entered mainstream payments infrastructure.
JPMorgan is also furthering their push into digital asset finance with plans to offer clients loans secured against crypto ETFs, a move that bridges traditional collateral models with on-chain markets. Kraken expanded its institutional reach by rolling out a full-service prime brokerage and launched Kraken-Pay, its new peer-to-peer payments app. Also on the path of growth is Stripe’s latest acquisition of wallet provider Privy, bringing self-custody closer to mainstream fintech rails, enabling features like tap-to-pay and account-to-account crypto transfers directly within apps. DeFi lender Spark boosted its community with a 300 million SPK token airdrop as deposits climbed near all-time highs, and the XRP Ledger rolled out its long-awaited Ethereum-compatible sidechain on mainnet, bridging XRP’s liquidity with EVM-based DeFi apps for the first time.
Portfolio company Resolv completed its mainnet launch, airdropping a significant portion of their total supply to its users as an early loyalty reward. The TVL in Resolv’s RLP and USR pools have been holding quite steady throughout these events, with their TVL currently sitting at $340 million. Maple Finance has been showing incredible performance in the past few months; especially in June the protocol saw spikes in traction and attention withTVL rising to $1.75 billion and annualized earnings have increased to an astonishing $6.3 million. Bitcoin rollup company Citrea published a clear ₿app Manifesto laying out its goal to bring real Bitcoin use back on-chain with simple, non-custodial Bitcoin-based apps that don’t rely on wrapped BTC or middlemen. Alongside this, Citrea also revealed it’s building the first Bitcoin bridge secured by Bitcoin’s own consensus rules, designed to connect BTC directly to a programmable global platform. Lastly, MegaETH-based DEX GTE publicly announced their $15 million Series A led by Paradigm. GTE’s testnet also saw significant upgrades, now featuring a live BTC market with major HFTs active, and will soon add ETH and SOL while graduating launchpad tokens to its Spot CLOB to demonstrate its fully integrated exchange model.
