🇺🇸Trump: I hear the Fed will cut rates in September

Not sure if legal but welcomed news. Haha.

✉️SIT Brief — July 31, 2025

Good morning, it's a blockbuster day in markets, policy, and crypto. Let’s dive in:

📊Macro Watch
US Q2 GDP Advance Estimate
⟶ Consensus: 2.4%
Bank of Canada Rate Decision
⟶ Expected to hold rates steady
US Treasury Quarterly Refunding Announcement
⟶ All eyes on Bessent’s next move
FOMC Meeting & Press Conference
⟶ Rates are unchanged
⟶ Powell vs. Trump press clash — Trump says rates will drop in Sep.

🤑Earnings Spotlight
Meta (META)
⟶ Updates on Superintelligence team, capex, and potential open-source strategy shift

Microsoft (MSFT)
⟶ OpenAI partnership update, capex breakdown, revised guidance expected

Robinhood (HOOD)
⟶ Insights on crypto plans + ecosystem integration roadmap

🧠Policy & Regulation
White House Crypto Framework Report (2:30PM EST)
⟶ Expected to call on SEC to formalize tokenization approach
⟶ Lays groundwork for market structure legislation

⚖️Legal & Milestones
Tornado Cash Trial
⟶ Developer Roman Storm enters court proceedings

🥳Ethereum’s 10-Year Anniversary
⟶ The Ecosystem celebrates a decade of smart contract evolution

🚨ICYMI Roundup
✅SEC OKs in-kind redemptions for BTC & ETH ETFs
😖eToro to tokenize equities on Ethereum 😮‍💨
🛡Samourai founders shifting to guilty plea
💣Qubic may trigger 51% attack on Monero
💰Plasma raises $373M via ICO
💻Interactive Brokers explores stablecoin integration
🐙Kraken aims for $500M raise, $15B valuation

The American tarriff party is just getting started! Trump has signed a new executive order. 🇺🇸🇺🇸

Latest reciprocal tariffs includes:

1. Canada: 35%
2. Switzerland: 39%
3. South Africa: 30%
4. Taiwan: 20%
5. Vietnam: 20%
6. Cambodia: 19%
7. Thailand: 19%
8. Malaysia: 19%
9. Indonesia: 19%
10. Turkey: 15%
11. Venezuela: 15%
12. Singapore: 10%

#Trump #SG #USA #Tarrifs

🇷🇺🇺🇸 Russian President Putin to meet with US President Trump next week 👍

Meeting next Friday will be in Alaska 🐻‍❄️🐻‍❄️🐻‍❄️🐻‍❄️

🇺🇸Fed Chair Powell set to speak this Friday, Aug. 22 at 10:00 A.M. ET on economic outlook and framework review.

IYKYK 🍞

US Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates for the first time in 2025, flagging slower job gains and risks to employment.

It cut the benchmark lending rate by 25 basis points, while pencilling in 2 more cuts this year. 🎸🎸🎸

https://str.sg/D5qf

⚡️ Stocks and ETFs are coming to Wallet

Crypto Wallet users will soon be able to trade shares of major U.S. companies — from Apple, Tesla and Nvidia to the S&P 500. 📈

A "Stocks & ETFs" section will soon appear in Wallet, where shares can be bought in a digital form — even in small fractions.

Unlike traditional exchanges, trading in Crypto Wallet will be available 24 hours a day, 5 days a week, with no dependency on U.S. market hours. Tokenized dividend payouts will also be available for eligible stocks ↗️

Interesting developments which may likely force traditional markets to change trading hours.

If interested, join the waitlist 📢💎

NFA. All investment in equities and crypto assets are risky.

🇮🇷 Iran’s parliament approves removing 4 zeros from its national currency after years of inflation.

Another reason why FIAT currencies ain’t it 💀

🤑Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Publishes Article on GKR Protocol, Enabling Extremely Fast ZK-EVM and ZK-ML Proof Systems with Significant Efficiency Gains.

A major development in the zero-knowledge (ZK) space 🔍

On October 20th, Vitalik published a deep-dive article on the GKR protocol (Goldreich–Kahan–Rothblum), a method for accelerating ZK proofs. His focus was on enabling ultra-fast proof systems for:

ZK-EVM: Zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine, which allows private and scalable smart contract execution.

ZK-ML: Zero-knowledge machine learning, enabling privacy-preserving ML computations.

⚙️ Key Innovations in the Protocol

Batch × Multi-layer Computation: Instead of committing to every intermediate layer, the GKR protocol only requires commitments to inputs and outputs. This slashes overhead and boosts efficiency⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾.

Poseidon2 Optimization: Using Poseidon2 hashing with batch processing, the overhead drops dramatically—only 15x compared to 100x for traditional STARKs, and potentially under 10x in practice⁽³⁾

Sumcheck Reduction: Techniques like Gruen’s trick reduce the number of sumchecks per round, streamlining the recursive proof process⁽³⁾.

🧪 The improvements make ZK systems more practical for real-world use:
Blockchain scalability
Private smart contracts
Secure ML inference
Efficient hashing and neural network verification

[1] Vitalik releases GKR tutorial article: support for ultra-fast ZK proof ...
[2] Vitalik has published a post introducing the GKR protocol, which ...
[3] Vitalik published an article introducing the GKR protocol, which can ...

🟨📈Gold's Strategic Reshuffle of Global Reserves Hits Milestone

Deutsche Bank (DB) reveals a seismic shift in global reserve composition. The share of total FX+gold reserves has surged to a record 30%, a dramatic increase from 24% a few months ago.

Concurrently, the US dollar's share contracted from 43% to 40%.

This shows a fundamental strategic reallocation by central banks, confirming the dedollarization trend.

🔸Tipping Point: DB provided a critical price target. For gold's reserve share to eclipse the USD, the price must reach >$5,790/oz. At that level, both assets would hold 36% share of global FX+gold reserves.

🔸Central Bank Sentiment: The World Gold Council's latest survey shows 43% of central banks plan to increase gold reserves, up significantly from 29% a year prior. 95% of reserve managers expect global central bank gold holdings to rise next year.

🔸Key Distinction - FX+ Gold vs. Total Assets: The 30% figure is crucial. It measures gold against foreign currency reserves, the assets available for currency defense.

For example:
- European Central Bank's gold share of FX+gold reserves is 83%, while its share of total assets is only 18%.

- Similarly, the US's gold share of FX+gold is 96%, versus 15% of total assets.

BOTTOM LINE:
Central banks are bolstering non-USD, hard asset buffers. The move into gold is a strategic campaign with significant runway ahead. The structural bid for gold continues.