Since our May edition, sentiment has turned hard. May was uneasy. June was a proper risk-off month, and for once, the story was almost entirely macro, not crypto.
At its center was the Fed. Kevin Warsh ran his first meeting as Chair on June 17 and used it to reset expectations. Rates held at 3.50 to 3.75 percent, but the projections did the talking. The committee's median now points to a rate hike by year-end rather than the cuts the market had been counting on, and the Fed lifted its own inflation forecast at the same time. With headline inflation still running above 4 percent, the "cuts are coming" trade that had carried risk assets since spring was taken off the table in a single afternoon.
The rest of the world did not help. Trade and tariff policy stayed unsettled and hard to price, and the one clear positive, the de-escalation of the Iran conflict and oil sliding back down, was not enough to offset a hawkish central bank. Capital that had been willing to take risks spent June looking for the exit.
Here is the part that matters for anyone in our corner of the market. This time, AI and crypto fell together. For months, money rotating out of crypto had found a home in AI stocks. In late June, that trade cracked. Chip names sold off sharply, the "AI bubble" headline went mainstream, and the moment AI itself wobbled, there was nowhere left to hide. Bitcoin broke below $60,000 for the first time since 2024 and ended the month near $58,500, with record outflows from the ETFs and a stalled market-structure bill in Washington adding to the mood.
We have seen this movie. Sentiment overshoots in both directions, and the best entry points rarely feel good at the time. When the link between AI and crypto is this tight on the way down, it tends to be just as tight on the way back up, and the teams that keep building real infrastructure through a drawdown are usually the ones that come out owning the next cycle.
On June 24, Nesa's NES token opened to public trading. Binance Alpha featured it, with same-day spot listings on Bitget, KuCoin and DigiFinex, and XT.COM following on June 28. Nesa is a Layer 1 blockchain built for one job, running AI models privately and provably.
Most AI today runs on servers you have to trust. You send your data in, you get an answer back, and you have no way to check what happened in between. Nesa runs the model across a decentralized network and uses two techniques, trusted execution environments and zero-knowledge machine learning, to prove the answer is real without exposing the data behind it. The mainnet went live on May 9, and NES is the token that pays for queries, secures the network, and rewards the nodes doing the work.
What makes this matter is timing. Every company now wants to use AI, and most of them hold data they cannot safely hand over to someone else's server. A network that can run inference privately and prove it is exactly the missing piece. The listing gave Nesa its first real price discovery and a wide base of holders on day one. One thing to keep an eye on: the fully diluted valuation sat near $215 million against a much smaller circulating market cap, so there is unlock supply ahead, but the product is live and the thesis is clean.
On June 17, XION, the consumer chain built by Burnt Labs, rebranded as Verona and changed what it aims to be. The old pitch was making crypto invisible to everyday users. The new one is narrower and more current, becoming the verification and intelligence layer for AI agents.
In plain terms, Verona wants to be the place an AI agent goes to get information it can trust. Portable, cryptographically verified, privacy-preserving data an agent can reuse across apps without re-checking it every time. The rebrand came with real weight behind it, not just a new logo. Flagship app EarnOS announced an $18.5 million raise, a new consumer product called ero launched on the platform, and the team put a $30 million brand budget behind the push. Existing XION tokens convert one-for-one to VERONA.
Why it is worth featuring: this is a clear read on where a serious team thinks the next market is. A group with roughly $36 million raised to date and backers like Animoca, Multicoin and HashKey does not repoint its entire brand on a whim. Whether "verified data for agents" becomes a category or a footnote, Verona is now one of the cleanest pure-play bets on it in our book. Rebrands carry risk, and the market's first reaction was cautious, but shipping a raise and a product alongside the announcement gives this more substance than most name changes.
This comes alongside our flagship's launch of 'ero' and its $18.5M fundraise.
For five years, we've been building an internet people can believe in. Now, we're doing the same for AI.
RISEx, the fully onchain perpetuals exchange built on RISE Chain, spent June scaling. By June 12 it was running 13 perp markets doing around $44 million in daily volume, and it has now passed $500 million in cumulative volume since its invite-only mainnet opened this spring. To push that further, it launched a two-week trading competition, "The Final Call," on June 30.
A perps exchange lets people trade leveraged futures, the product that drives most of crypto's trading volume, except here the entire order book lives onchain rather than on a company's private servers. RISEx runs it with sub-three-millisecond execution and gas-sponsored trades, so it feels like a normal exchange while settling transparently. The engine comes from the BSX Labs team RISE acquired, a group that has run more than $15 billion in order-book volume, backed by Blockchain Capital and Coinbase Ventures.
The reason to watch it is what has not happened yet. RISEx has a live product, real and growing volume, and a credible team, but no token. Onchain perps are one of the most competitive categories in crypto right now, and the projects that build real usage before a token are the ones worth tracking. The competition is a straightforward way to prove the volume flywheel works. If it does, the token event still ahead is the obvious next chapter.
The ultimate showdown before we transition into the highly anticipated Season 1 of points.
Every single action you take in The Final Call secures retro points and wins you a share of prize pool and more rewards.
The flight to Season 1 is almost ready for takeoff.
More details here: go.rise.trade/4gcSPlW
peaq listed on Upbit on June 19, opening PEAQ/BTC and PEAQ/USDT spot markets and fresh Korean liquidity.
IO.net marked its third anniversary on June 11 by launching its Incentive Dynamic Engine and running its first ever $IO token burn, alongside a record 4 billion daily AI inference tokens and its largest enterprise contract to date at around $8 million.
Sentient launched a $42 million grant and investment program for open-source AGI on June 24, with partners including Alibaba Cloud, Franklin Templeton, Princeton and IISc.
Anoma released AnomaPay V1 to the public on June 2, bringing private multichain payments to Ethereum with roughly 15-second confidential transfers.
Pharos opened PROS/USDT trading on HTX on June 22, then launched its Incubation Program on June 29 with RWA project Faroo as its first pick at a $10 million valuation.
Lava Network signed its first real-world-asset mandate on June 10, a tokenization sandbox agreement with BHL Group for a planned 40,000-unit Caribbean residential development.
0G Labs brought GLM-5.2, one of the largest open coding models, live on its 0G Private Computer for private, verifiable inference on June 18.
Dealflow Podcast tells the stories of the builders and investors shaping Web3 and AI, and how they turn bold ideas into real products.
"If something is already hot in crypto, an early-stage investor is probably too late." - Brad Holden, PL Ventures.
More Episodes here:
Three Scenarios for Humanity and Why peaq Is Building Toward the Only Good One - Martin El-Khouri, peaq
Silicon Valley's Top Crypto Lawyer on What Founders Get Wrong About Tokens, Investors, and the Law - Ryan McRobert
Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/14bQxsIGlDeBZLVfaBsr5r
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DealFlowPodcast
MH Ventures is an early-stage firm backing frontier Web3 technologies, digital assets, and the builders of the decentralized economy. Through Fund I, we partnered with founders redefining infrastructure, DeFi, and digital coordination. As we prepare to launch Fund II, our focus is unchanged: conviction, utility, and long-term value.
Partnering, building, or want to talk? Reach the team.
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