The crypto market first rises and then falls, as the U.S. stablecoin bill and Decentralized Finance regulation make breakthroughs.

This week, the Crypto Assets market experienced a trend of rising first and then falling. At the beginning of the week, the strong performance of Bitcoin and Ethereum drove the overall market to rise, especially the Decentralized Finance zone which saw a significant short-term pump under the stimulus of favorable regulatory news. However, on Friday, the sudden escalation of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East triggered panic in the market, causing most alts to generally fall by about 10%. In addition, a company's prospectus submitted to the SEC was misinterpreted by the market as a major shareholder reducing their holdings, leading to a big dump of its stock price by 70%, which to some extent dragged down the performance of Ethereum.

This week's focus includes the progress of stablecoin-related policies, updates on the Aster project, and changes in regulatory policies.

In terms of stablecoins, the U.S. Senate has passed a procedural vote on the "GENIUS Stablecoin Act," which could complete the legislative process as early as next Monday. This will become the first comprehensive federal legislation in the U.S. aimed at crypto assets. High-level government officials have expressed support for the bill, and Trump even hopes to sign the stablecoin legislation before August.

As a result, other countries and regions have also accelerated their layout in the stablecoin field. The ruling party in South Korea has proposed the "Basic Law on Digital Assets," aimed at allowing local companies to issue stablecoins. The governor of the Bank of Korea will also meet with executives from commercial banks to discuss the development of won-backed stablecoins.

In traditional financial institutions, given that the total trading volume of stablecoins in 2024 has exceeded the total of Visa and Mastercard, more and more companies are beginning to consider integrating stablecoins into their payment systems.

Regarding the Aster project, the decentralized exchange has completed the airdrop snapshot for Au points. As an important project within a certain trading platform ecosystem, Aster is considered a high-performance DEX benchmarked against Hyperliquid. It is now confirmed that AST will replace APX, but the specific conversion ratio has not yet been announced.

In terms of regulatory policy, the SEC chairman gave an important speech at the "DeFi and the American Spirit" roundtable. He emphasized that the design concepts of DeFi align with the American spirit, clarified that PoW and PoS network activities do not fall under the jurisdiction of federal securities law, supported users' rights to self-custody, and directed the exploration of an "innovation exemption" framework.

In addition, the SEC has required the issuer of the proposed spot SOL ETF to submit a revised S-1 form, which could indicate that the ETF will be approved within 3-5 weeks. The market has entered the ETF speculation cycle related to the relevant tokens, especially in the context of regulatory easing. The SOL ETF may be approved as early as October 2025, which could bring favourable information for the SOL coin and quality assets within the ecosystem such as projects like Raydium, Orca, Jito, and Sanctum.