After a promising first quarter that felt like spring, the second one was characterized by some retracements especially outside the Cryptocurrency Sector. Bitcoin kept the whole market afloat on the back of another wave of asset management giants entering the space. BlackRock's filing for a Bitcoin spot ETF has revitalized the market and triggered a rally for Bitcoin. The collective assets under management of entities that recently filed for an ETF totals approximately $15.39 trillion, a massive pool of assets that opens up to crypto if approved. While Ethereum and its smart contract platform peers performed rather flat, other key Sectors such as DeFi, Utility and Culture slowed down and gave back some of their first quarter gains. As I experienced firsthand attending EthCC in Paris, the largest annual Ethereum community conference, the market performance does not necessarily reflect the progress happening at the protocol and infra level. While other bear markets led to apathy and low attendance, this year’s EthCC had impeccable energy a vibrant community, and an innovation pace at all-time highs. The key topics ranged from MEV, L2s, Account Abstraction, Distributed Validator Technology, Shared Sequencing and Verifiable Credentials to novel DeFi applications. Among Mantle, Linea, Starknet Appchains or Chainlink CCIP, other notable reveals and go-lives included Gnosis Pay, Lens V2 and Uniswap X. Overall, we observe substantial progress and breakthroughs across the industry. Most of DeFi’s key metrics are up in the second quarter and allow for excitement. As such, total active loans grew a13, decentralized exchanges brought more users on-chain and gained share of the total trading volume from centralized exchanges, staked assets went ballistic and are up almost 2 across the staking ecosystem while derivative volumes grew by ∼5%.

Read more in this edition of our Bitcoin Suisse Investment Navigator.