The Weekly: Three Areas of Growth in On-Chain Markets

New Institutional Report, written in collaboration with Clear Street. Institutional DeFi needs a common language for risk. Led by Re7 Founder and CIO Evgeny Gokhberg and built on our own methodology, A Framework for Decomposing DeFi Risk in the Age of AI breaks exposure into chain, protocol and asset layers and explores how AI is reshaping risk monitoring.

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Evgeny Gokhberg joined 1000x Podcast: What It’s Like Running A Billion-Dollar Market-Neutral Fund In Crypto.

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Bloomberg TV: Building the rails between TradFi and digital assets

Re7’s Founder & CIO Evgeny Gokhberg hosts a conversation with Tim Renew, CEO of BCB Group, on the infrastructure connecting traditional finance with digital assets.

“The best way to think about it is the plumbing between the traditional financial systems and digital assets. BCB Group is building the infrastructure to make that process simpler.”

Watch the full episode below.

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Weekly Summary

We cover:

• Accelerating adoption across three emerging on-chain markets.

• Bearish sentiment diverging from stabilising market technicals.

• A pivotal week for macro data, central banks and Big Tech earnings.

Three Areas of Growth in On-Chain Markets

Beyond traditional crypto markets, three emerging areas are seeing accelerating adoption: AI inference, tokenised collectibles and pre-IPO trading. Each demonstrates how blockchain infrastructure is expanding access to new and existing markets.

1. AI Inference: Demand for Cheaper Compute

AI token consumption continues to accelerate, creating demand for infrastructure that connects users with cheaper inference capacity. For example, Dolphin.ai operates a marketplace where users can access AI models from competing providers.

Inference exchanges such as Surplus take this further, allowing suppliers to compete to fulfil inference requests, routing demand towards lower-cost capacity while improving supplier utilisation.

As AI adoption scales, these marketplaces and exchanges are making inference cheaper and more accessible, creating a growing market for the infrastructure connecting supply and demand.

2. Tokenised Collectibles: Trading Card Volumes Accelerate

On-chain trading card spending has accelerated, with weekly volumes approaching $100 million, compared with less than $20 million at the start of the year.

Pokémon’s 30th anniversary has supported renewed interest, while integrations across Pump.fun, Jupiter and other Solana applications have expanded distribution.

These platforms combine familiar collectibles with crypto-native mechanics: instant pack openings, verifiable ownership and immediate liquidity through stablecoin buybacks.

Low transaction costs are helping transform a fragmented market into a more liquid and accessible one.

3. Pre-IPO Markets: Bringing Private Companies On-Chain

Pre-IPO perpetual futures volumes have surged to approximately $650 million weekly, reflecting demand for exposure to private companies traditionally inaccessible to retail investors.

These products allow investors to speculate on private company valuations without owning the underlying shares. Blockchain infrastructure enables global access, continuous trading and price discovery in historically illiquid markets.

Demand for exposure to high-profile private companies, particularly in AI, is creating new opportunities for exchanges to monetise these markets through trading fees.

Market

Is This The Bottom?

With the midterms fast approaching, crypto has edged lower following Saturday’s $600m in long liquidations, although Bitcoin has so far held the $80k level.

Markets face a busy week, with the FOMC, ECB and BoJ meetings, alongside GDP and PCE data, before month-end options expiry on Friday - topped with Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft earnings.

BTC/USD (daily).

Despite persistently bearish investor sentiment, broader markets are showing signs of stabilisation at key technical levels.

The US AI trade has held above its late-summer lows despite funding concerns and record short positioning by hedge funds driving the Nasdaq’s worst trading day since June.

Nasdaq futures (daily).

Meanwhile, semiconductors are showing signs of seller exhaustion.

iShares PHLX SOX semiconductor sector index (daily).

With consensus positioning heavily bearish while technicals and other market indicators increasingly favour buyers, the setup for a contrarian rally is becoming more compelling.

State of Yields

Yields have expanded slightly across the board in light of recent market volatility:

Stablecoin lending yields:

• ~3.86% on Aave (USDC) — 2 bps higher than last week.

• ~5.12% on Aave (USDe) — 40 bps higher than last week.

• ~5.18% on Maple (syrupUSDC) — no change from last week.

Fixed-rate DeFi lending: yield premium in fixed markets:

• Pendle sUSDAi: ~9.18% (Oct 2026 – Feb 2027 maturities).

• sUSDe: ~4.95% —30 bps lower than last week.

ETH yield benchmarks:

• Lido staking: ~2.26% — 2 bps higher than last week.

About Re7

Re7 Capital is a research-driven digital asset investment firm specialising in DeFi yield and liquid alpha strategies.

Re7 Labs is an on-chain asset management and risk curation firm bringing institutional-grade rigour to DeFi.

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