What Happened in Crypto This Week: From Interests Freeze to a $260B Crypto Correction

A very eventful week went by, from an interest rate decision to a complete market reversal, July’s farewell came with a lot of surprises. 

Monday

We started off Monday strong at the institutional level. Metaplanet, a large player in the Bitcoin treasury game in Asia, achieved 450% yields while cementing a new multi-million dollar Bitcoin purchase. On the same date, we saw news of a new BNB Treasury on the NASDAQ by 10X Capital and CEA. 

BlackRock’s Ethereum ETF (ETHA) cracked the top 0.4% of ETFs by trading volume on Monday, after going through a stellar month in July. 

Tuesday

The day started with reports of new delays to crypto-related ETF filings. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission affirmed that several requests, like Truth Social’s Bitcoin ETF and Grayscale’s Solana Trust, were pushed into later in the year. 

Meanwhile, Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest continues to increase its exposure to cryptocurrencies, even if by proxy. The firm made yet another multi-million-dollar purchase of BitMine, the leading ETH treasury corporation today. Ark also partnered with SOL Strategies in a collaboration that designates SOL Strategies as the new Solana staking provider for Ark’s Digital Asset Revolutions Fund. 

Wednesday

While Bitcoin showed early signs of a dip, the second quarter’s Growth Domestic Product print showed renewed strength, beating the forecast, growing by 3% in Q2. This growth was fueled by a collapse in imports due to tariffs, masking a more worrisome outlook of growing consumer prices. 

Also on Wednesday, OpenZeppelin launched Contracts MCP, a server that replaces AI-generated smart contracts with secure, verified code. It works across platforms like Claude, Gemini, and VS Code, ensuring every prompt returns production-ready results using OpenZeppelin standards.

Finally, arguably the most awaited event of the week, the Federal Reserve opted to keep interest rates unchanged for the fifth consecutive time, crushing the U.S. President’s hopes of lower rates in the short term. 

Thursday

We provided our readers with this quick summary of everything the new Digital Assets Report by the White House had to offer. As a guideline for how crypto should be regulated and how industries should interact with cryptocurrencies, the reports will likely serve as the foundation for upcoming legislation.

On the same date, AllUnity launched its new MiCA-compliant Euro stablecoin, the first fully-backed digital euro compliant with the new regulations’ guidelines. 

Also on Thursday, GK8, part of Galaxy, launched secure institutional access to Solana DeFi protocols like Orca and Jupiter. Using its uMPC custody infrastructure, clients can interact with Solana apps directly from their custodial accounts. 

Still on the topic of institutional SOL, REX Shares announced that the first-ever round of SOL ETF staking rewards was scheduled to be distributed. 

Finally, Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, disclosed a very successful earnings report, not only locking in revenue but also beating the earnings-per-share forecast by 46,671%. 

Friday

Metaplanet continued to increase its Bitcoin allocation strategy, announcing a new massive plan to acquire 210,000 BTC by 2027. The move would position the Japanese firm as one of the largest Bitcoin holders, only behind Strategy. 

On this date, the cryptocurrency market saw its most significant retraction in over a month. Bitcoin hit as low as $114K, while other currencies also followed through. Over $230 billion got erased from the total crypto market cap in just 24 hours, as investors rushed to flee risk positions amidst growing uncertainty. 

The new tariffs going into effect unquestionably had a say in making investors weary, but the largest culprit for the sudden risk aversion can be attributed to a very weak payroll data report. Now, with the notion that the job market is not doing as well as it was thought — the odds of an interest rate cut by September have gone up dramatically.