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According to data from The Block, in the days leading up to the World Cup final, the total open interest (OI) of Kalshi and Polymarket combined has decreased by 20% from a peak of about $2 billion in early July. When smoothed weekly, the total OI rose from about $1.2 billion at the end of May to nearly $1.8 billion in the week of July 5, before falling back to about $1.5 billion in the week of July 19.The decline in trading volume was even more severe: Kalshi's sports trading volume dropped from a peak of about $9 billion in the week of July 5 to about $4 billion (a decrease of about 55%), while Polymarket fell from about $2.3 billion to $740 million (a decrease of nearly 70%). During the event, sports-related trading accounted for about 80% of the total trading volume on both platforms. On July 19, Spain defeated Argentina 1-0 to win the World Cup.According to statistics from DeFiOasis, approximately 194,000 addresses participated in Polymarket's World Cup champion market trading, of which about two-thirds incurred losses, with 54 addresses making over $100,000 (including 5 over $1 million), and 43 addresses losing over $100,000. It is expected that the activity in the prediction market will remain low until the next major catalytic event (the U.S. midterm elections in the fall).

Glassnode Chief Research Analyst CryptoVizArt stated that the cost basis distribution heatmap for short-term holders shows that during Bitcoin's rebound from $57,000, a new round of chips transferred to new buyers occurred in the $62,000 to $65,000 range.He believes this structure has two sides. On one hand, buyers are actively accumulating during the upward process, which may form a new cost basis support, providing conditions for Bitcoin to further test levels of $66,000 and above. On the other hand, this round of chip accumulation is more concentrated at the tail end of a local rebound. If Bitcoin cannot effectively break through $66,000, the risk of the market forming a phase top will increase. $66,000 is a key short-term position for judging the above two scenarios.

According to a report by businesswire, AI and tokenized financial infrastructure Alpaca announced the completion of a new round of financing totaling $135 million, led by Peak XV, with follow-on investments from Elefund, BNP Paribas's venture capital arm Opera Tech Ventures, and Unbound among others. To date, its total financing has reached $435 million.The new funds will be used to accelerate the construction of its AI-native brokerage infrastructure and API-first prime brokerage business, helping fintech companies, banks, brokerages, wealth management institutions, and crypto financial platforms to build investment products in both traditional and on-chain markets, and to connect with more global crypto exchanges, asset tokenization platforms, and financial institutions.

According to Tiger Research and RootData based on research of 9,416 investment transaction data from the first half of 2018 to 2026, the capital inflow in the cryptocurrency market reached $13.3 billion in the first half of 2026, which is basically on par with the total of $13.2 billion for the entire year of 2024. However, the number of financing rounds was only 435, a decrease of 78% from the peak of 1,978 rounds in 2022, indicating that market funds are accelerating towards a few large transactions.The report points out that the current cryptocurrency investment market is dominated by a few large crypto-native VCs focused on leading investments, as well as venture capital departments of exchanges with liquidity and marketing support, while medium-sized institutions are being rapidly squeezed out. In terms of financing structure, the number of seed round transactions decreased by 88% from 2022 to 81, while financing in Series A and later stages accounted for 75.2% of total investments, with Series A financing amounting to $745.8 million, exceeding the total amount of all seed round financing of $423.3 million during the same period.In terms of sectors, payments and stablecoins, centralized exchanges, and prediction markets have become the most concentrated areas of capital. The payments and stablecoins sector attracted $2.85 billion in funding in the first half of 2026, but about 84% of this was driven by mergers and acquisitions such as Mastercard's acquisition of BVNK and Payward's acquisition of Reap; the investment share in the CEX sector rose to 18.2%, while prediction markets rose to 17.5%. In contrast, the number of financing rounds in the gaming sector plummeted from 141 rounds in 2024 to only 5 rounds, a decrease of 96%. Additionally, traditional financial institutions participated in 54.5% of all investment transactions in the first half of 2026.It is reported that Tiger Research is an independent research institution established in 2022, covering the Asian digital asset market, with business operations in South Korea, Japan, China, and Indonesia, publishing institutional-level research content in five languages, with over 100,000 monthly readers and more than 200 institutional clients.

Cryptoquant indicates that its 365-day PnL index signal continues to decline, showing that the current BTC cycle may not have reached its peak yet. BTC is currently trading at approximately $62,656, down about 50% from its historical high of around $126,000 in October 2025.Cryptoquant's bull-bear cycle indicator turned green on May 12, 2026, marking the first bullish signal since March 2023. Cryptoquant stated that this indicator had shown false positives in 2022, and the green signal itself does not guarantee a sustained upward trend. A major whale bought BTC worth $98,900,000 at the low of $59,734 on June 5 and made a profit of $3,500,000 within two days after the market rebound. BTC has since maintained above $60,000, trading at approximately $62,550 at the time of writing.

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost posted on X that since Bitcoin reached its all-time high in October 2025, the cumulative net selling pressure in the Meme coin sector on the Binance platform has exceeded $1 billion, with a cumulative net trading volume reaching -$1.21 billion.Darkfost stated that this reflects the significant selling pressure faced by high-risk assets in the crypto market, and it also indicates that the Meme coin sector has been notably impacted during the market correction, while reminding investors that there is a high risk of capital loss in this area.

A report released by the Bank of Korea on July 13 pointed out that the global semiconductor market is still in a state of supply shortage, and the chip supercycle driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to last for a long time, which refutes market concerns that the chip cycle has peaked.The central bank's analysis states that the current chip cycle is different from previous ones, primarily driven by competitive investments made by companies to respond to the fundamental changes in the industrial ecosystem brought about by AI. At the same time, due to the current market being dominated by customized products such as high bandwidth memory (HBM), the pace of supply expansion is more constrained than in the past.Recently, concerns over excessive investment in AI infrastructure and potential oversupply of memory chips have triggered a sell-off in tech stocks, with significant declines in the stock prices of South Korean chip giants such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. In response, the Bank of Korea stated that although there remains uncertainty regarding the speed of AI technology adoption and profit prospects, major investment banks such as JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley generally predict that the global semiconductor market will maintain strong momentum at least through next year.

According to Bloomberg, the stock price of American Bitcoin, co-founded by Eric Trump, has fallen over 95% from its peak, with the market value of his approximately 6% stake shrinking by more than $600 million over the past 10 months.The company implemented a 1-for-15 reverse stock split this week to maintain its Nasdaq listing qualification, with the stock price hitting a record low on Wednesday. American Bitcoin continues to adhere to its Bitcoin mining and accumulation strategy, adding another 500 BTC on Monday, bringing its holdings to over 8,000 BTC; in the first quarter, it recorded an impairment of $117.2 million on its Bitcoin reserves, resulting in an operating loss of $118.2 million.

According to Jinshi reports, Nomura Securities believes in its latest report that the core contradiction in the global storage industry is still a severe supply shortage, and the AI-driven structural demand growth has not yet peaked.Recently, investors' concerns about oversupply have been clearly exaggerated, and the market's extreme reaction may provide a window for reassessing valuations in the storage sector. Nomura Securities bluntly stated in the report that the market's worries are greatly overstated; the cycle for semiconductor investment to translate into actual capacity is extremely long. South Korea's investment plan of up to 480 trillion won will take at least 5 to 10 years to translate into actual capacity, and the high-profit HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) is squeezing general storage capacity, which is leading to a serious supply shortage in the market.Nomura Securities emphasized that Meta's decision is by no means a turning point for the reduction in demand for AI-related hardware. On the contrary, due to the current shortage of computing power leading to an upward trend in the price of a single token, Meta's entry into the computing power market is expected to stabilize token prices downward.

Founder of Strategy, Michael Saylor, made his first public statement after the release of the digital credit capital framework: "Stronger credit, stronger equity, more Bitcoin." Michael Saylor's declaration seems to provide a motivational explanation for the launch of the digital credit capital framework, which aims to ultimately achieve a strategic logic of holding more Bitcoin by strengthening the credit and equity structure.

According to the latest report from Tiger Research, as of June 18, 2026, the number of active job openings in the cryptocurrency industry is only 2,932, a significant decrease of over 97% from the estimated peak of about 130,000 in 2022.The report shows that the wave of layoffs in the cryptocurrency industry continues in the first half of 2026. March was the month with the highest concentration of layoffs, with several companies including Gemini, Crypto.com, Algorand, OP Labs, PIP Labs, and Messari announcing layoffs at the same time. Some companies were acquired at low prices after multiple rounds of layoffs; for example, Messari was acquired by Blockworks for about $10 million in June 2026 after experiencing three rounds of layoffs, while its previous valuation had reached $300 million.In terms of recruitment structure, positions in centralized exchanges (CEX) account for the highest proportion, reaching 30.8% (904 positions), mainly contributed by OKX, Bybit, and Binance. The stablecoin and payment sector accounts for 13.4%, but is highly concentrated in two companies, Tether and Ripple.In addition, the demand for AI skills in job postings continues to rise, with the proportion of cryptocurrency job postings mentioning artificial intelligence skills increasing from 23% in early 2025 to 53.1% in March 2026.

CryptoQuant analyst Axel Adler Jr. stated that Strategy's preferred stock MSTR has fallen 78% from its peak, while Bitcoin has dropped 51% from its peak. The average cost basis for Strategy's 847,363 BTC holdings is $75,651, with a total cost of $64.1 billion. The current BTC price has fallen below this cost line for the first time since the bear market of 2022. The additional decline of MSTR relative to BTC has reached about 28 percentage points, approaching the upper end of the historical range, but has not yet touched the extreme of an 89% retracement from the 2022 low.Meanwhile, Strategy's purchasing strategy has clearly shifted to a defensive stance: the weekly BTC purchase volume has been cut by about two-thirds, with less than 11% of the $335.5 million raised through stock issuance used to buy BTC, and the remainder transferred to dollar reserves. At the end of May, Strategy also conducted its first net sell since 2022, selling 32 BTC to pay STRC dividends. Adler pointed out that the main risk currently lies in BTC remaining below the treasury cost line of $75,000, which would block the financing channel for ATM issuance by compressing the MSTR premium. However, nearly all of Strategy's debt is in convertible bonds, with no additional margin risk; the baseline scenario is the loss of marginal buyers rather than cascading liquidations. The real pressure point lies in the company's transition from selling stock to systematically selling BTC itself to pay preferred stock dividends and debt interest.

According to market news, Galaxy Research stated on the X platform that Bitcoin miners are giving up one after another, with mining difficulty dropping more than 20% from its historical peak. This is the largest decline in mining difficulty since 2021.

Crypto KOL Ansem posted on platform X, stating that the market may significantly underestimate the upward elasticity brought by the supply-demand mismatch of SpaceX's circulating stock, and believes that the current consensus bearish sentiment may lead to more short squeezes. SpaceX has now become the top stock ranked by both trading volume and options trading, but the market has a shortsighted understanding of its business progress in diversification (including AI and other verticals), overly focusing on current revenue performance. This structural cognitive bias may drive the company to challenge the global market value ranking by the end of this year.However, Ansem cautioned investors that the share lock-up period for SpaceX in August may become a phase "local top" triggering factor.