Robinhood’s planned Layer 2, built to host tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, launched its mainnet on July 1 and generated about $3.6 million in revenue in its first month. The piece walks through the early ecosystem, which is still led by meme coins and launchpads, while capital has started to rotate toward stock-linked and RWA projects such as CashCat, STONKBROKER, PONS, Lighter and Morpho. It also details reported market caps, TVL figures, contract addresses, incentive structures and the role of Robinhood’s main app and wallet in distribution.

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams says tokenization should not be viewed only as an infrastructure upgrade for existing markets. In an essay translated by ChainCatcher and carried by PANews, Adams argues that putting assets onchain makes markets programmable, changing which markets can exist, who provides liquidity, and which assets can trade directly against each other. He says automated market makers, or AMMs, have already proved where they work best: first in long-tail assets that professional market makers ignored, then in stablecoin pairs where passive strategies and lower capital costs squeezed out traditional firms. Adams points to Uniswap’s own scale, saying the protocol has processed more than $4.6 trillion in cumulative volume and helped lift decentralized exchanges’ spot share from less than 1% of centralized exchanges to more than 20%. He frames the next step around “correlation pairs,” where assets that tend to move together can support deeper liquidity with lower inventory risk for liquidity providers. In his view, tokenized markets could eventually organize around pairs such as NVDA/SPY, with a smaller number of high-volume bridge pairs like SPY/USD connecting the wider system. He also cites an early example already live onchain: 10 tokenized stocks trading directly against SPY through Uniswap pools on Robinhood Chain. Those pools handled $33 million in volume in their first 12 days and drew more than 11,000 users, with much of the activity taking place outside U.S. stock market hours.

Pendle has gone live on X Layer, debuting a USDG yield market that lets users and institutions earn returns on the network. Through PT-USDG, they can lock in fixed yields; through YT-USDG, they can trade expectations around future yield levels. LPs earn trading fees plus incentives. To seed early participation, Pendle will provide $20,000 in incentives to Pendle LPs on X Layer during the first month. Using PT-USDG as collateral on Aave adds an extra APY boost. The yield market is also set to be integrated into OKX Earn.

PANews columnist 0xLoki laid out a personal list of U-denominated yield strategies and token launch opportunities that he says he is currently using, arguing that the combined return can reach more than 10% annually, with additional upside from launch participation. The piece puts Binance Wallet first and walks through several products one by one, including Bitway, Unitas, Zerobase, Huma, USDD on Ethereum, and the now-closed R25, noting their APY levels, redemption windows, and relative priority. It also covers exchange-based yield products on Binance, OKX Europe, BIT, and several other venues, while noting that promotional rates on some platforms can be unstable. On-chain, the author says he is selective, pointing to USD1-related campaigns, small-size points farming such as TowenSquare on Monad, bStocks LP positions, and short-term LP opportunities tied to new Binance Alpha listings. The final section compares launch platforms including Kraken, Legion, Echo, MetaDAO, Futarddotio, and the launchpads of MEXC, Bitget, and Gate, with comments on project quality, oversubscription, KYC requirements, and allocation odds.

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams responded to community criticism on Aug. 6, saying the 1% liquidity pool fee adopted by some token launch platforms is roughly equivalent to a 2% buy-sell spread. He called it their main revenue extraction method, arguing it raises trader costs and makes the initial liquidity pool less efficient as the token scales. Adams contrasted that with Uniswap's pools.trade, which charges 0.25% and automatically reinvests fees, saying it better supports long-term liquidity. He also noted launchpad LP capital often comes from zero-cost locked assets, so it faces no price risk requiring a high fee.

Uniswap Labs said on Aug. 6 that Pools.trade, a token launch platform on Robinhood Chain, is now live. The team said community users had already discovered an early version of the smart contracts before the official interface went online and generated more than $150 million in trading volume, which it said showed clear demand for the product. To support both those early test contracts and the formal release, Uniswap Labs upgraded its website and indexing systems at the same time, a change that slightly delayed the launch. The company said Pools.trade does not charge an additional launchpad fee and only keeps the standard protocol fee used across Uniswap v4 pools. It also supports auto-compounding liquidity, a feature the team said will later be extended to regular Uniswap LP positions. Every token launched through the platform uses permanently locked liquidity. Pools.trade offers two launch formats: instant launches and crowd-sale launches based on a simplified CCA mechanism that Uniswap Labs described as fairer and more resistant to bundling attacks. On day one, the platform was integrated with the Uniswap web app, wallet, trading API, third-party trading APIs, and external platforms including Bitget, GMGN, OKX Wallet, and FOMO. The product remains in beta.

Bloomberg reported that the venture capital market is undergoing a sharp structural split as money keeps flowing into a handful of elite artificial intelligence startups. The report said five companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Waymo and Nscale — accounted for 78% of all venture deal value in the first quarter of this year, showing how heavily capital has clustered around a small group of AI names. That concentration has favored investors that backed AI early, including Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, while making it much harder for smaller and newer fund managers to compete. Bloomberg said many of those firms are now dealing with fundraising pressure, weaker performance and fewer exit options. The divide is also showing up in fundraising data. New management firms, defined in the report as those running three funds or fewer, raised about $62 billion last year, down roughly 60% from the $163.4 billion raised during the 2022 pandemic-era peak. Even experienced managers raised only $84 billion last year, or about one-third of their 2022 total. Bloomberg added that many limited partners are under liquidity pressure and are prioritizing returns from existing investments over fresh capital commitments.

a16z crypto argues that DUNA, short for decentralized unincorporated nonprofit association, could become a viable legal structure for internet-native organizations that do not fit neatly into traditional corporate forms. In a long essay tracing the history of business organization from medieval merchant networks and commenda arrangements to corporations, cooperatives, and LLCs, the firm says the core challenge has remained the same for centuries: how to let people with different incentives, limited information, and no preexisting trust coordinate around a shared goal. The article says corporations solved many of the coordination and capital formation problems of earlier eras, but they also rely on centralized management and create classic principal-agent conflicts. DAOs offered a different path by using software rules and collective governance, yet they have struggled with low participation, power concentration, uncertain legal status, and securities law risk in the United States. a16z says the lack of legal recognition also leaves DAO participants exposed to potentially unlimited personal liability. Against that backdrop, the firm presents DUNA as a legal wrapper designed for decentralized governance. It says Alabama, West Virginia, and Wyoming have authorized the structure, with Wyoming passing its law in March 2024. According to the essay, DUNA provides legal personhood, limited liability, perpetual existence, and state recognition, and has already been adopted by groups including Uniswap Governance and Nouns DAO.