Trumped & Tokenized

Daily Updates:

• President Donald Trump and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell went back and forth over the costs of a renovation on the Fed’s Washington headquarters on camera yesterday. 
• Trump toured the Fed building alongside Powell – making him only the fourth President to visit the Federal Reserve. 
• During their side-by-side in front of the camera, Trump said: “It looks like it’s about $3.1B. It went up a little bit, or a lot. The $2.7B is now $3.1B”. 
• Powell, very visibly shocked by the comment, turned around and responded “I’m not aware of that, I haven’t heard that from anybody at the Fed”.   
• President Trump then showed Powell a piece of paper outlining where the $3.1B figure came from, to which Powell interrupted “You’re including the Martin renovation. You just added a third building. That’s a third building … it was built five years ago”.
• While next to Powell, Trump also told a reporter “Well I’d love him to lower interest rates” before tapping the Chairman on the back – “We would be helped if interest rates would come down, but we’re going to see how the board rules on that soon”. 

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• After that public disagreement, Trump downplayed the clash when speaking to reporters and said “I didn’t think it was tense. I thought we had a good meeting”. In reference to firing Powell he said “To do that is a big move, and I just don’t think it’s necessary”, despite floating the idea only a few weeks ago.

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• During an AI summit on Wednesday, Trump suggested that he would not drop below a baseline 15% tariff rate on nations that are yet to agree a trade deal with the US ahead of his August 1 deadline. 
• “We’ll have a straight, simple tariff of anywhere between 15% and 50%” Trump said, while adding a couple nations will “have 50% because we haven’t been getting along with those countries too well.”

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• Over the past 24 hours, BTC has dropped 2.5% and is now trading at $115K – a level it last traded at two weeks ago. Since its all-time high of $123K during the beginning of “Crypto Week”, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has fallen more than 6%. 
• Spot BTC ETFs reversed a three-day trend of outflows yesterday, purchasing $226.7M worth of bitcoins. 
• Despite the pullback from all-time highs, we are yet to see the implied volatility on 7-day BTC options drop below 30%. This is something we saw earlier in the month on July 4, and July 8, as BTC traded rangebound at $108K. 
• However, over the past 24 hours, volatility smiles for all tenors less than 60 days are now firmly skewed towards OTM puts. 7-day OTM put options currently trade with a 5 percentage point volatility premium to 7-day OTM call options. 
• Furthermore, earlier today, the spot yield on 7-day BTC futures sharply dropped from close to 11% to -1.05%, the first time it has fallen below zero since June 23, 2025.

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• After falling for most of last evening, ETH’s spot price bounced earlier today from $3,500 to $3,650. Once more, a trend which has become more apparent in July this month than any other time since the launch of the two products, ETH Spot ETFs saw larger inflows than BTC yesterday, recording $231.2M. 
• Short-tenor ETH options continue to trade with a ~2x premium to short-tenor BTC options and ETH’s term structure of volatility is compressed at outright levels of volatility between 66% and 69%. 

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• US equities closed yesterday’s trading session with another record high, with the S&P 500 now up nearly 30% from its April lows. US treasuries fell for a second day and the 10-year treasury yield rose 3bps to 4.41% on the back of signs that the US economy continues to remain on solid footing. 
• US jobless claims fell for a sixth consecutive week, marking the longest stretch of straight declines since 2022. Initial claims decreased by 4,000 to 217,000 for last week, the lowest since mid-April 2025. 

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• Yesterday, VeChain, a sustainable layer-1 blockchain, announced a partnership with Franklin Templeton, a global asset management giant, to integrate its BENJI platform.
• This enables VeChain-based enterprises to access BENJI, a tokenized gateway to the $780M Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), backed by cash, government securities, and repos. Each BENJI token represents one fund share, targeting a stable $1 value, and offers a new enterprise-grade stablecoin option.

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• Today, Christie’s, a leading global auction house known for its crypto-forward approach, launched a dedicated crypto-only real estate division. The new Christie’s International Real Estate team includes crypto experts, legal advisors, and analysts focused on facilitating property transactions exclusively in cryptocurrency. 
• CEO Aaron Kirman said the move follows several major crypto-backed deals, including a $65M Beverly Hills home bought with Bitcoin. With $1B in listings now open to crypto, Christie’s expands its digital asset services, building on its NFT auctions and Ethereum-based platform launched in 2022.

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• The TON Foundation and Kingsway Capital Partners are seeking a partnership to raise $400M in pursuit of a treasury company that will hold the native token of the Telegram Open Network blockchain, Toncoin. 

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• Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI has announced a partnership with onchain prediction market Kalshi to integrate the chatbot Grok onto the platform. This will provide AI-generated insights and real-time context on events.

This Week’s Calendar:

Charts of the Day:

Figure 1. BTC at-the-money implied volatility across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes

Figure 2. ETH at-the-money implied volatility across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes

Figure 3. BTC 25-delta put-call skew ratio across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes

Figure 4. ETH 25-delta put-call skew ratio across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes

Figure 5. BTC Spot Yields across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes