Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Starting Block is The Block's new flagship daily live show — the breaking news, the context behind it, and the people shaping where crypto goes next. Each episode is a 45-minute live broadcast hosted by award-winning journalist and broadcaster Gareth Jenkinson and powered by The Block's newsroom and research desk.
Welcome back to The Starting Block.
Happy Monday to you.
I hope you had a fantastic weekend
wherever you are around the world
joining us today.
It's the start of the new week.
It's a start of a new month.
We've officially done one month of
The Starting block.
And I will again shamelessly plug
our interview with CZ four
weeks ago, all the way
back when we
sat down with him for a live
interview in Abu Dhabi to kick
off the show. If you wanna check
that out and you haven't yet watched
it, you can go to The Block's
YouTube channel.
And find that interview there.
While you're there, please subscribe.
We're doing our best to put out high
quality interviews and content
across our channels.
And of course, if you've just joined
us on this live stream for the full
time, the first time, like and
retweet the stream so we can get
more people joining us this
afternoon for what promises to be
a really exciting show.
We've got a couple of guests joining
us and some big news
to break down this Monday
morning. If of course you're joining
us in the US, if you're in.
Europe this side of the world it is
the afternoon and there are a couple
of big headlines that have just come
through So we're going to jump in to
the block briefing to start off
today's show Our first
headline crypto exchange BitMart
is pulling the plug on its trading
platform It's already begun
suspending new signups deposits and
orders with all spots and futures
trading set to halt at 1 a.m
UTC on the 26th
of August the platform fully shuts
down at the end of January next year
The users keep login access to view
records and withdraw.
BitMart says the move follows a
review of its operating conditions
and strategy.
The twist here, the exchange's
global CEO says he wasn't even
consulted on the decision.
Users are urged to close positions
and file withdrawals
before the deadline.
I have seen a few concerning tweets
going around about this and
some Bitcoin withdrawals from that
platform.
So definitely go and check out the
news, Do your research
and if you are a user there.
Act quickly and
follow the official announcements to
make sure that you safeguard your
funds and move forward But another
big crypto exchange announcing
that it is closing down It's
been a busy week last seven
days for this kind of news in
the market Our next headline an
apparent hack of crypto payments
firm that triple a keeps getting
worse On-chain investigator specter
says losses from a compromise
of the firm's hot wallets have
climbed to about eleven point eight
million dollars The drain was first
flagged Friday evening at over
$9.3 million with
the funds swapped and bridged to
Ethereum.
By Sunday, another 1.8
million had been pulled across the
Bitcoin and Tron networks.
Most alarming here, 31 hours
after the first outflows, fresh
deposits were still landing in
affected wallets and being swept out
almost immediately.
So if you don't know about that,
just be careful out there.
AAA hot wallet has
been hacked and you definitely
shouldn't be sending funds to that
platform.
Our next story, South Korea's
biggest bank is going on chain for
cross-border payments.
KB Cookman Bank plans to launch a
blockchain-based corporate payment
service next month using Kinexus,
which is JP Morgan's payment
network.
According to Yonhap, it'll be the
first Korean financial institution
to use Kinexis for corporate
imports and export settlements.
The service roles are through the
bank's domestic branches and its
Singapore branch, initially
prioritizing US dollar transfers
across 10 countries.
It's another sign of major banks
leaning into blockchain rails for
real world settlements
and of JP Morgan's Kinexis expanding
its international footprint.
Then decentralized storage project,
storage is heading to bankruptcy
court.
Its storage token dropped around 20%
in a day to roughly
six cents after storage labs
filed for voluntary chapter 11
protection on July 26
in West Virginia.
The company says the filing is about
cleaning up legacy obligations from
early acquisitions and non-core
operations, not shutting down.
It insists the storage network,
customer services and day-to-day
operations will keep running without
interruption pending court approval.
It's the latest name in a wave of
crypto firm shutdowns and
restructurings washing through
the industry in
2026.
Trading in US spot Bitcoin
ETFs is cooling off.
Volume for the week ending Friday
came in around $8 billion,
down 14% from the week before,
and the lowest for a full
five-session week since October
2024, according to
the Blox analysis of SoSoValue
data.
But it's a different story for
Ether. Ether ETFs once again
led the pack on inflows, pulling in
fresh capital even as their bigger
Bitcoin counterparts saw activity
slow down.
The takeaway here, summer trading is
quiet on the Bitcoin side, but
the ether rotation seems to be
building.
Then Robinhood may be about to shake
up its prediction markets lineup,
and this is probably the biggest
story of the day.
The Wall Street Journal reports the
brokerage is in talks with
crypto.com to add its prediction
market contracts directly into
the Robinhood app.
That would let users trade yes or no
event contracts from crypto.
Com without ever leaving their
platform.
The catch here, it would put
Robinhood in more direct competition
with Kelsey.
Kalshi rather its current partner
for events contract Robin Hood
already sources from Kalsi
interactive brokers forecast X
and Rothera
Prediction markets have become one
of the hottest battlegrounds in
retail trading and Robin Hood
clearly wants more of the action
And is actively looking for more
partners leading the way in the
industry and then a big story to
Finish off the segment and there
won't be a headline for this one,
but you can go into X and find the
story On Monday afternoon,
Michael Saylor announced that
strategy has boosted its US
dollar reserve by $525
million, giving the company
about 2.1 years of
dividend coverage.
Notably, its Bitcoin stack held
steady at 843,775
BTC, so still
no new buy, while the US dollar
now stands at $3.75
billion.
The TLDR here, strategy looks
to be shoring up cash to cover
dividends on its preferred shares
rather than adding to its Bitcoin
position right now, right at the
bottom of the bear market.
Does seem like a pragmatic approach
to make sure that investors
and creditors are
feeling comfortable that dividend
payments can continue for
a fairly long period of time, two
years worth of roadmap right now
with this latest beefing
up of the US dollar cash reserves.
That's it for the
block. Briefing, we'll be moving
into the market pulse.
And it's a great pleasure to welcome
another guest from our good friends
at Bitwise.
I've got Kam Benbrick, who is
the head of on-chain research to
chat to us about a new report that
they dropped last Friday.
Kam, first things first, thanks so
much for joining us on the show.
How are you doing?
Of course, I'm doing great.
Thank you so much.
For inviting me.
Yeah, it's good to have you here.
Talk to us about this report.
I had a brief one, so I haven't
had a chance to read the entire
report, but you were telling me
that this is obviously a
quarterly report that Bitwise will
be putting out from here on out.
So obviously a very, very big
interest from institutional clients
in staking.
And this is exactly what this report
is.
Give us the TLDR of the
big takeaways from this report
Yeah, definitely.
So regarding this report, indeed,
it's the first ever staking report
at Bitwise, and the idea is to
publish that on a recurring basis,
on a quarterly basis.
And what we are doing
myself on
the on-chain side is we're also
supporting staking services.
So we are offering staking for four
different type of providers.
And the idea behind this report is
really that on the daily
basis, we have questions
from different clients.
On the different networks that we
support, that bitwise we were
supporting a bit more than 50
networks, Ethereum, Solana,
Hyperliquid, and many others.
And those clients want to understand
a bit what's happening on
chain, what's the
evolution of the staking yield over
time.
And they also want to know a bit
about the impact
of upgrades or
changes that
will happen that happen that are
happening on the network.
To understand a bit more what's the
impact on the network itself, but
also the impact on staking.
And for this report, we are covering
six networks.
So we're covering Ethereum, Solana,
Hyperliquid, Avalanche,
Nier, and Tempo.
And really the big takeaway from
this report is that we've seen
a big divergence between
network fundamentals and
the market sentiment.
Because obviously, you know,
prices...
Are down compared to 2025.
But what we're seeing on chain is
first that blockchain becomes
cheaper, and second is that
the on-chain activity is actually
increasing.
So we're seeing this big divergence
and this is on
most of the networks that we're
covering on that report.
And to give you some examples,
we've seen activity increasing on
Ethereum, We've seen activity
increasing on Solana,
activity increasing on networks like
Avalanche.
And we've seen block space
becoming cheaper.
And to give you some numbers,
the cost of transactions on
a network like Ethereum
was divided by three in one
year.
The cost of a transaction on the
network like Solana was divided six
in one years.
For a network, like Avalanche, it
was divided 20.
So there is a lot of engineering
work being done
at the moment for the networks
to become more scalable.
For the networks to be able to
handle more transactions per second.
And really, the idea is just to
offer a better on-chain experience
for users so that
when more and more users
are coming on-chains, those networks
will be ready to
handle the activity.
Yeah, I mean, looking at the key
takeaways from the report,
obviously, these staking ratios
are high across all the networks
that you've mentioned.
So like 68% on Solana, 45%
on Nia, 44% on
Hyperliquid, Avalanche at 41%.
We've got a record 40.2
million ETH, which is 33%
of the supply, which is now
staked.
My big question here, especially on
ETH is, Where do you see a
lot of institutions leaning here?
Is it into staking ETFs or,
you know, some of these big
corporate treasury companies like
Bitmine and Sharp Link?
Is the bulk of money going into the
staking ETS now or is it gonna
be a real battle between staking
ETFs and the likes of Bitmime
and SharpLink?
Yeah, so it's really both.
In the case of Ethereum, as you
said, right now, we have one third
of the two-type supply being staked,
and this is the highest ratio
ever.
And when we looked at
where the inflows are coming from
on-chain, it's coming from
institutions and it's coming from
both entities
like SharpLink or
Bitmine that are just
staking directly on-chains, or
also from asset managers like
Blackhawk that launched their
staking ETF this year.
That also via
this ETF are staking.
So it's really coming from both.
Yeah, this is what we're seeing on
chain.
And right now the
entry queue on the Ethereum is at
40 days.
So it means that if ever
you want to natively
stake some ETH, you have to wait
40 days to start receiving
staking rewards.
It shows that there is a lot of
demand right now for staking
Is that not a bit of a problem for
Ethereum and maybe a reason why some
institutions are looking to
invest in Solana and some of these
higher
utility alternative
chains like Hyperliquid, Avalanche,
Nier, just because
the queue is way shorter to actually
start staking tokens and earn some
rewards.
Yeah. So in the case of
institutions, given that, you know,
it depends on the clients, you know,
some institutions like Bitmine and
SharpLink are very bullish in ETH,
so they will just, you know, keep
staking.
For the ETFs, it depend on the
demand as well.
And what we're seeing right
now on Ethereum is just that,
even though there is an entry queue
of 40 days, you still have some
alternatives, especially for people
that...
That are doing activities on chain
that would like to get exposure to
the staking yield, you can use
some different protocols.
You can get exposure through
liquid staking protocols as well
so that you can at
least get some rewards because
rewards on liquid
stake protocols are socialized and
even though the yield
is decreasing because there's just
so much demand for
staking, you can
still get exposure to some rewards.
And then you also have
institutions that are looking
elsewhere as well.
But as you said,
the staking ratios are quite high
on multiple networks.
In the case of Solana,
the stacking ratio is extremely
high. It's at 68% at the
moment. And the reason for that is,
first of all, because the stacking
yield is very high on Solana.
So the stacking is decreasing.
But you can still get
around a bit more than 6%
right now annualized on your soul.
So it's quite attractive.
That's why the staking ratio is very
high.
On networks like NIR,
we've seen in one year
the stake in yields
decreased by 50%, but
we still see a lot of very
high staking ratios, which means
that people that are staking
believe in the network.
And want to get exposure to offer
economic security to this network
and get exposure to to
the network and gets us technical
rewards.
Yeah, I was actually going to
just about to probe this a little
bit more because I do think at the
end of the day, the actual yield
percentage has a big
impact in who
puts their money where.
Is it more a case of just that,
like people chasing the yields, or
do you think that there are a lot of
savvy institutions now that actually
care about the protocol that
they're staking value in and want
to be a part of that?
Is that also an important
consideration?
Yeah, it's definitely an important
consideration.
So based on what
we're seeing right now coming
from our clients, usually
our clients are
staking, yes, because there is a
yield. And it's also
to offer an additional economic
security to the network.
And if ever they don't
stake, they will be deleted, meaning
that they are losing
on tokens and on the rewards.
So we were saying
a structure that is kind of both.
We see clients that
want to get exposure to staking
mostly because they want to secure
the network and get exposure for the
yield. But we're also seeing
people that would like
to get the exposure to both the
staking yield, but also get exposure
on-chain activity and would like
do actions on-chains.
And for those types of clients,
you have solutions like liquid
sticking. They can
get exposure to the underlying
staking yield, but they can also
use that token to
do different things
on DeFi.
They can provide liquidity,
they can deposit and borrow against
that collateral, so we're
definitely seeing both.
For those that don't necessarily
want to take too much risk,
they will only get exposure on the
staking, and that's it.
But for those that like to get
additional yield on top of the
stacking yield.
We're definitely seeing activity
on-chain and clients doing
additional activity on
chain.
We had a Solana ETFs kind of
rollout a few months back and I
remember chatting to Matt Hugen
about how big an unlock this
was, especially for institutional
investors.
Do you think that there is kind of
like a clear cut winner here or is
Ethereum still leading the pack when
it comes to institutions wanting to
stake value on any specific
network?
Yeah, so I think both
cases are interesting.
So in the case of Ethereum, we're
definitely seeing demand and
interest coming from institutions,
mostly because Ethereum right now
is doing a lot of work to
scale a bit further.
So we've seen, for example,
I would say the unit
of gas per block
increasing from 30 million to
60 million.
And the reason for that is for
the Ethereum blockchain itself to
handle more transactions per second.
And the target is to increase that
even further to 200 million
units of gas per block so
that they can process more
transactions per second, you know,
we're seeing companies building
on top of the Ethereum Blockchain.
And we have clients that are
asking questions. We're seeing now
the Robinhood chain that launched
this month. So there's definitely
some interest in Ethereum.
And Ethereum has this
idea to become credibly
neutral.
So we have two upgrades that are
coming later this year and early
2027 to make
the network even more decentralized
and censorship resistant, and
companies like that.
In the case of Solana,
it's a bit different in the sense
that Solana really
wants to focus on trading.
Currently processing, there's a lot
of trading activity happening on
Solana. And what we've seen in
Q2 of 2026 is
that there is a lot of volume right
now coming from tokenized equities.
So in one year, the volume
coming from tokenized equity
went from one million
in June 2025 to
more than three billion in June
2026.
So we are definitely seeing a lot
of trading demand and
trading activity on Solana.
And we are seeing
just the internal
capital market thesis
just live in
front of us.
So yeah, these are two
different, I
would say strategies, but that
can fit for different types of
clients.
Well, you have to extend the
research report next quarter
to include chains like Robinhood
chains and some L2s that are really
pumping up the volume because, I
mean, this is something that I asked
Joe Lubin about a couple of years
ago when Ethereum really
leaned in hard to the L2
space and I was kind of like, why
would I stake 32
ETH at the base there when I can
earn way much, way more, way
higher percentage interest
as a validator on
an L2.
And it does kind of seem like if
there's that much network
usage and fees being generated
by protocols like Robinhood chain,
you have to look very carefully at
them as well and throw them in the
mixer.
Yeah. Yeah.
So we're definitely planning to
cover Robinhood chain in the next
quarter. We've already seen a lot of
questions from our clients about the
Robinhood chain. So this is
definitely something that we will
cover.
And regarding the staking yield on
Ethereum, it's really, you know,
Ethereum is this base layer that
wants to be credibly neutral.
And in order to have
a decentralized and safe
network for those companies
like be able to build
on top of it.
You need to have some
sort of security guarantees and
a network to be decentralized.
And that's why, you know, companies
like Coinbase with base or Robinhood
with Robinhood chain
decided to build on top of it.
Yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
When you're looking at your next
quarterly report,
what do you think institutions are
going to be looking at?
And how much do you some of these
stats will change?
Because as you mentioned, the
metrics alone of the
protocols have improved
drastically in terms of the
reduction in fees and the
fees of the blockchains.
Do you see any big
changes happening in terms network
usage? Because I think.
Between Hyperliquid, NIA,
and Avalanche alone,
especially Avalanche, I guess, their
RWA tokenization.
There's gonna be a real head-to-head
here between the likes of Avalance
and Solana, perhaps going forward.
How do you see this playing out?
Yeah, so on those different
blockchains, we see a lot happening
over the coming months, and we
expect a lot of questions from our
clients. In the case of Ethereum,
we want to know more about
the upgrades.
So, we have GlamsterDAM
that is happening later this year,
and the idea of GlamesterDAM is we
have this proposer-builder
separation on Ethereum.
So you have builder on one side that
are creating the blogs.
And then they send that to
validators and validators are
processing the transactions.
And the element that link the
builders to the validators is
the relay.
And that component is centralized.
So with Glam-Stardom, the idea is to
implement ePBS, which will be a
decentralized version that is
happening on chain to connect
builders with validators.
So we have clients
who will be interested in learning
more about that upgrade.
We'll have EGOTA happening
early 2027.
So we also have questions about
this. In the case of Solana,
definitely our clients are
interested in learning more about
the Appenblot upgrade,
which is this new consensus on
Solana and the idea is to
reduce time to finality.
So right now for a transaction
to be finalized on Solona,
it takes around the 12 seconds.
It will be in the order of
100 seconds. Few 100 milliseconds
with App and Glow,
which will be massive.
And we will also have a new
upgrade as well, which is
to decrease the slot time on Solana.
So right now, it's 400 milliseconds.
The idea is to increase that to 200
milliseconds, so that it
improves the trading experience.
And hopefully, with those
changes, we'll see even more
activity happening on Solona.
In the case of Hyperliquid, our
clients are more interested in
learning more about, you know,
HIPFOR, which is this new prediction
market component on HyperliQUID.
Right now, it's a permission, but it
will become permissionless over the
coming months.
And also, this
new line of
revenue coming from USDC.
You know, right now, there is around
5 to 6 billion sitting
on HyperLiquid in USDC, and
the idea is with this partnership
with Circle and Coinbase.
To use up to 80%
of the underlying yield
to buy by hype.
So that's a new revenue line that
is completely different from trading
activity and that will be used to
buy and burn hype.
So our clients will also be
interested in that.
In the case of Avalanche, definitely
real world assets.
You know, the traction of LWA is
on an ecosystem
like Avalanche.
We're seeing Progma,
which is the largest tokenized
platform in Japan,
that decided to create their own
Avalanche layer one.
And they're bringing around $2
billion in tokenized
assets on the Avalanch ecosystem.
So, yeah, these are the kind of
questions that we have over the
coming weeks and months, and we're
planning to
report on the next quarterly
report.
My final question to you, when it
does come to all of the clients a
bit wise and the questions that
they're asking you, do you
ever get that sort of question of,
where do we invest our money and
which protocol do we support and
which has the most likelihood of
winning this race?
I mean, I'm sure you guys try to be
as balanced as possible in the
advice that you're giving them, but
everyone's probably going to be
some sort of a protocol maxi.
I mean it's no secret, I love
Bitcoin. And you can see my studio
around me, but.
How do you go about navigating this?
Because I don't think that
it's a zero-sum game and it's
winner-take-all mentality.
How do balance what you're giving
your clients? And is it a case of
producing reports like this?
So here's the stats, here's the
metrics, you decide what
you want to support.
Yeah, so that's a great question.
So I will just talk about
the staking side and what I'm seeing
on my side.
So usually, the type of
clients that are staking, they
already have a quite strong
conviction on the
tokens that they want to
stake.
And it's more about they would
like to learn more about the network
itself and get more insight and get
more data.
And on our side, given that we are
running data infrastructure,
given that we're able to collect a
lot of data.
It's a way for us
with the client to collect the data,
get some insight and share that
insight with them.
And then they can just based
on that insight, they decide what to
do. But usually they already have
a conviction into one specific
ecosystem.
They stake because they
believe in that ecosystem for
major long-term, but they want
to keep receiving data and insights.
And those are mostly the
best. People place to
get that inside are those that are
running the infrastructure and see
what's happening on chain.
So, yeah, this is usually what we
do. Beautiful.
Cam, thank you so much for taking
the time to join us today.
We've dedicated a lot of time to
talk to this. I actually just had a
brief back and forth with the team
from Alpaca and we're only gonna
have Yoshi with us on Friday.
So we're gonna, we've dedicated the
show to the report and we
gonna leave it at that.
So I wanna thank you and the Bitwise
team for joining us today Thank you
so, much. Thank you for your time.
It was a pleasure joining.
Thank you. Thank you, thank so much,
Cam. And thank you for joining this
afternoon.
Wherever you are, I hope you have a
good Monday. We've got a jam pack
show.
A week of shows coming up
with some big-name guests joining
us. I'm just going to bring up our
guest list very quickly so I can
have a quick reminder.
We've got Alex Fanevic from Nansen
joining us tomorrow.
I'm really looking forward to that.
It's been quite a few months since
Alex and I last spoke.
He is, of course, the co-founder of
Nansen AI,
one of the big protocols and
infrastructure providers in
the space for traders to
find alpha. So we've got him coming
tomorrow. And then we've got Sergey
Kunz from.
One Inch joining us on Wednesday.
And then we will have Yoshi Yokokawa
on Friday joining us from Alpaca
to talk about this $435 million
raise.
And they've raised over half a
billion dollars in 2026 alone.
So really looking forward to that
show on Friday.
That's what we've got coming up.
Please set a reminder on your
calendar, we do broadcast every
day at 8.30 a.m.
Or 2.30 p.m.,
if you're here in Europe like me.
Come and join us. I promise you'll
have a good time.
We've got the best news in the
markets. We've got the best market
updates.
And we have our hot seat interviews
where we put the biggest names in
the industry on the spot and ask
them the questions that matter.
So please do join us next time.
If you enjoyed the show, like and
retweet it. If you're joining us
on YouTube, please go ahead and
subscribe to the Blocks channel.
We'll be back tomorrow with another
show. Until then, take care of
yourself.