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Solana reclaims the $200 level as the total value locked for its DeFi ecosystem reaches a three-year high

Crypto treasury firms focused on solana hold in total 3.4 million tokens, with Upexi, DeFi Development Corp., and Sol Strategies taking the top spots.

Sage D. Young

solana is leading market gains in the last 24 hours, increasing nearly 15% to around the $200 mark. The token’s trading volume in the period has also jumped, standing at $13.4 billion, more than double yesterday’s $6.1 billion figure, per CoinGecko. However, solana is still more than 30% away from its all-time high of $293 set at the beginning of the year. 

The cryptocurrency’s price action comes as total value locked denominated in solana tokens for the network’s decentralized finance ecosystem has climbed to a three-year high to over 58 million tokens, data from DefiLlama shows.

The $200 level “matters because tokens trade like commodities and a big slice of crypto liquidity sits in systematic and momentum strategies,” according to Matthew Graham, managing partner at crypto investment firm Ryze Labs. 

“Clear a round number and hold it and you trigger the reflexive loop where flows chase price and price pulls in more flows. If the other large caps start breaking out too, this might finally be the alt season everyone’s been calling for since forever,” Graham told Sherwood News. 

Meanwhile: 

  • Solana treasury firms are collectively holding 3.4 million tokens, the highest amount ever for these public companies, with Upexi, DeFi Development Corp., and Sol Strategies leading the pack, according to analytics from The Block.

  • DeFi Development Corp. released a letter to shareholders on Tuesday, stating that the company has a balance of 1.3 million solana tokens worth about $264.9 million and earns about $63,000 per day in solana-denominated revenue. 

  • Upexi announced on Tuesday forming an advisory committee with Arthur Hayes, the chief investment officer of family office fund Maelstrom. Hayes was the cofounder and former CEO of global cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, which pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act last year by willfully failing to implement an adequate anti-money-laundering program. However, US President Donald Trump pardoned Hayes in March, more than three months after BitMEX was ordered to pay a fine of $100 million.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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