SEC Delays Further

Daily Updates:

• Just as we saw yesterday, BTC once again approached $107K during an early morning rally in Asian trading hours, before paring those gains back towards $105K. 
• The whipsawing in spot prices has raised short term volatility expectations, which have rebounded from their May 16 lows to above 40% at a 7-day tenor. 
• BTC’s derivatives markets are exhibiting a stronger bullish outlook than ETH’s, as BTC’s short tenor put-call skew remains tilted towards OTM calls by 2.45%, relative to the neutral skew of 7-day ETH options. Perpetual swap funding rates for BTC continue to show a willingness for leveraged long exposure, at an 8-hourly rate of 0.017% compared to a flat rate for ETH. 
• S&P 500 buyers bought yesterday’s stock market dip after Moody’s downgraded US debt from their highest Aaa level to Aa1 — that meant SPX was able to rebound from its lows and end the day 0.09% higher, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 closing at a similar gain. 
• The sixth consecutive day of closing higher on Wall Street also came alongside a bounce in US treasuries, which had initially sold off yesterday morning. That selloff saw the 10Y and 30Y treasury yields temporarily breach 4.5% and 5.0% respectively, though they ended the day lower at 4.44% and 4.90%. 
• Yesterday, the US Senate voted 66-32 to advance the GENIUS Act – legislation to establish the first regulatory framework for issuers of cryptocurrency stablecoins. The bill gained bipartisan support as 16 Democrats voted to advance the bill, along with a majority of Senate Republicans. This comes after the bill was rejected less than two weeks ago by Senate Democrats. 
• The U.S. SEC has once again postponed its decision on a new round of crypto ETF proposals – this time multiple spot Solana (SOL) ETFs. Asset Managers, including Bitwise, 21Shares, VanEck, Canary Capital, and Fidelity are among the firms that were affected by this delay, which was announced on May 19, 2025.
• This decision reflects the SEC’s broader cautious approach toward approving crypto-based ETFs that are not linked to more stabilised assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

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• China’s major commercial state banks cut their deposit interest rates for the first time this year,  in an effort to drive Chinese consumers to spend more. The one- and two-year fixed deposit interest rates were reduced by 15 basis points to 0.95%.
• Additionally the PBOC announced that the 1Y LPR (loan prime rate) and 5Y LPR, a benchmark determined by banks, had been lowered by 10 basis to 3.0% and 3.5%, respectively. Most new and outstanding loans in China are based on the one-year LPR, while mortgage rates often track the five-year rate.
• Stocks in Hong Kong, measured by the Hang Seng Index, closed 1.49% higher following the interest rate cut announcements. That has further widened the outperformance of Hong Kong stocks relative to mainland Chinese stocks, with the former up nearly 21% year-to-date, compared to the CSI-300 Index, which is up a slight 2% YTD.

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• StraitsX, a leading payments infrastructure provider in Southeast Asia’s digital asset ecosystem, has announced its expansion of the reach of its Singapore dollar-backed stablecoin, XSGD, by launching it on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), which aims to meet the rising demand for regulated multi-chain stablecoins that enable fast, cross-border payments.
• XSGD was originally introduced in 2020, and is fully backed 1:1 by reserves held with DBS Bank and Standard Chartered. Currently, there are over 14 million XSGD tokens in circulation and alongside XRPL, XSGD is also issued on Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Hedera, and Zilliqa.
  
  
• BounceBit, a crypto infrastructure platform bridging centralized and decentralized finance, has launched a Bitcoin derivatives strategy by leveraging BlackRock's  tokenized money market fund, BUIDL.
• Designed for both institutional and retail investors, the strategy comprises two main elements: The first component involves BounceBit opening a long position in spot BTC while simultaneously shorting BTC futures. The second component involves a short position in Bitcoin put options. 

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• Solana has integrated the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) on-chain, enabling asset transfers and cross communication across other protocols and Ethereum Layer 2s with the CCIP. Solana is the first non-Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain to onboard the CCIP technology.
• Solana-focused blockchain infrastructure firm Anza has proposed a new consensus mechanism for Solana. Named Alpenglow, the proposed upgrade aims to improve median block finality speed to around 150 milliseconds by replacing Solana’s current gossip-based communication and Proof of History (PoH) model with direct messaging and erasure-coded data sharing.

This Week’s Calendar:

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Charts of the Day:

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