Since our June edition, the market did something it has not done in a while. It went up while everything else came apart.
June was the month AI and crypto finally fell together, and the complaint at the time was that there was nowhere left to hide. July inverted it. Bitcoin opened near $60,000, having printed a 21-month low in the last week of June, and closed the month at around $64,800, up roughly 7.5%. Ether did better, at about 20%. Over the same four weeks, chip stocks fell twenty-two percent, and the Nasdaq 100 gave up nine percent. Bitcoin and Ether were the two best-performing major assets of the month.
The damage was all in the AI trade. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index had run 130 percent over twelve months, and July was the bill. More than a trillion dollars came off the chip complex. Nvidia lost $238 billion in a handful of sessions, Intel fell 21 percent over seven trading days, Micron dropped 13 percent in one. This was not weak demand. It was a repricing, and the spark was Moonshot's release of an open-weight model that performs at the level of the closed frontier labs.
That is the whole thesis in a single event. The most expensive trade in the market cracked because somebody gave the model away. Open beat closed on cost, and the market repriced within days. It is the bet a good part of this book has been making for two years, in Sentient, in Nesa, in 0G, in Ritual. Open and verifiable wins on economics, not on ideology.
The Fed neither helped nor hurt much. Kevin Warsh's second meeting saw rates held at 3.50 to 3.75 percent on a nine-to-three vote, and all three dissenters wanted a hike rather than a cut. He has taken forward guidance out of the statement and called inflation a choice. Equities hated it, with the Dow down 1,100 points on Wednesday, its worst day in over a year. Crypto shrugged and held its gain.
Venture stayed open. Roughly $1.2 billion went into the sector across about 25 rounds, with the capital concentrated in exchanges, prediction markets, and AI-adjacent projects.
For once the tape rewarded the people who kept building. Here is what ours built.
On 3 July, DoubleZero published its Q2 network update, and it is the clearest set of adoption numbers anyone in the portfolio put out this month.
Total Connected Value reached $21.7 billion, up 20.6 percent on Q1. The network now carries 59 percent of Solana's mainnet stake weight, a 12.8 percentage-point jump in a single quarter, across 462 connected validators. Aggregate capacity rose to 10.14 Tbps from 9.52. Of those validators, 434 are publishing shreds to DoubleZero Edge, the real-time data feed, which has served 447 distinct subscribers since it launched in April.
What makes this matter is that DoubleZero sells a physical thing, dedicated fibre for blockchain traffic, into a market that mostly sells software. Validators do not move onto a private network for the narrative. They move because the latency is better and it costs them money not to. Nearly six in ten of Solana's stake weight making that call in eighteen months is an adoption curve, not a campaign.
And we're just getting started.
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On 21 July, Morph launched Morph Tachyon, an independent Layer 1 built for one job: onchain markets. It runs alongside the existing Ethereum L2, which keeps payments, stablecoins and open finance. Morph is now a two-chain ecosystem with a clear division of labour.
Tachyon targets 200-millisecond block times, throughput of up to 200,000 transactions per second, instant finality, and gas-free trading. Those are the specifications you need before a market maker will quote onchain the way they quote anywhere else. The first partner is PopDEX, a perpetuals exchange built for traders rather than yield farmers, and Morph has said that more ecosystem partners are to follow.
What makes it matter is the admission underneath it. A general-purpose chain that is good at everything is not good enough at trading, and Morph chose to build a second chain rather than pretend otherwise. That is an unusually honest piece of engineering, and it is the same conclusion the rest of the market is arriving at more slowly.
The Morph main chain provides the rails for payments, stablecoins, and open finance. Tachyon extends the ecosystem into high-performance trading markets.
Learn more. ↓
On 29 July, peaqOS Monetize went live. A machine flips a single opt-in switch to declare what it has spare, whether that is compute, storage, bandwidth, connectivity or data. The peaqOS CLI provisions it as a provider node, aggregators query the registry and propose terms, and payment settles onchain into the machine's own wallet rather than through an invoice and a thirty-day wait. It is the fifth peaqOS function, after Activate, Qualify, Scale and Stream, with Verify and Tokenize still to come. Physical services, drone deliveries and robotic actuation, are the stated next step.
Running alongside it is machine.fun, a foundry for hardware, robotics and physical AI founders built by peaq with CodecFlow. The core of the programme is five days on the ground in Shenzhen and Dongguan, on factory floors with the suppliers who actually build this hardware. Teams come out with direct supplier relationships, a pilot-build plan, design-for-manufacturing feedback and a route to their first units. It takes no equity. When a team is ready, it can tokenize its machines through the same stack.
What matters is that the two halves fit together. Monetize gives a deployed machine a way to earn. machine.fun feeds it more deployed machines. Most projects in this category have built one side and are waiting on the other. Worth keeping the claim honest, though: Monetize being live proves the plumbing works, not that buyers are paying for it yet. The number that will settle it is machine revenue actually settled onchain, and that is not published.
Applications are now open: foundry.machine.fun
A @codecopenflow × @peaq product.
Vana acquired the Memory Protocol team on 8 July and shipped Personal Server and Memory upgrades to the Vana App. It closed the month launching the Vana Cup on 28 July.
Theo allocated $20 million to Fidelity International's tokenized money market fund via Sygnum and Chainlink, marking the first crypto-native platform to do so. It also launched thUSD after filling a $100 million Genesis Vault facility inside 24 hours
Pharos Network brought Harbor live on 16 July, a compliance-ready RealFi aggregator that lets users compare real-yield asset classes on transparent APY and TVL. Staked assets moved into mainnet through 20 July at a gross 14 percent APY.
Quai Network launched Quainance on 10 July, a single home for DeFi on Quai, then spent the rest of the month positioning: a content partnership with Disruption Banking on 15 July and a piece on 22 July outlining how its dual-token design maps onto the proposed CLARITY Act.
GenLayer led a 27-company consortium to launch Internet Court, a protocol for resolving disputes between autonomous AI agents, roughly two weeks after the American Arbitration Association released a competing standard. Its network was running about 350,000 transactions a day at launch.
Panoptic launched its Vault Suite on 1 July, turning options strategies into automated market-neutral vaults you can deposit into and leave alone. It follows Panoptic V2 by two days.
N1 acquired 01Exchange, taking the full trading stack in-house with key 01 team members joining and 01 points recognised on N1. On 8 July it also shipped Atomics, which bundles up to ten coordinated place and cancel actions into one transaction with risk checks after each step.
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More Episodes here:
The Real Reason Crypto Is About To Go Mainstream - Lane Kasselman, CEO and president of Blockchain.com, one of the longest-standing companies in crypto
Why Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Control AO and What IO.net Is Doing to Break Free - Gaurav Sharma, CEO of io.net, a decentralized GPU network
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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.
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