Hi all, happy Wednesday! 

South Korea's markets fell 10% and crypto came off with it. BTC held best among the majors at -2.0%, roughly in line with gold, while perps (-6.2%), L2s (-6.1%), and DeFi (-5.9%) anchored the bottom. The only green on the board was equities — crypto miners ripped +4.5%, extending a trade that's now up ~73% on the year even as spot churns sideways. 

Below that, we cover Synthetix retiring sUSD — a fixed 4-SNX conversion that hands holders a locked, diluted claim rather than their dollar back.

After the 10% decline in the South Korean markets, risk came off across the board, sorted cleanly by beta. BTC held up best among majors at -2.0%, roughly in line with gold (-2.1%) and inside the NASDAQ's -2.8%, but losses steepened the further out the risk curve you looked: Perps (-6.2%), L2 (-6.1%), and DeFi (-5.9%) anchored the bottom. The only green on the board came from equities. Crypto miners ripped +4.5% while the broader crypto equity cohort held flat-to-positive, a notable divergence from spot tokens.

Crypto miners have been the standout trade of 2026, and the YTD chart shows why yesterday's +4.5% pop was just a continuation. The index sits up roughly +73% on the year after a volatile journey to get there: a +30% January run, a full round-trip back to flat through February and March (bottoming near -20% at the end of Q1), then a near-vertical re-rating that began in mid-April and carried the cohort to a +88% peak in late May. Even after fading off those highs, miners remain the highest-beta expression of the AI-and-energy narrative bleeding into crypto and the only sector still printing triple-digit-adjacent gains while spot tokens churn sideways.

Under the hood, that headline index return masks a dispersion of nearly 170 points between the top and bottom components, and the split is almost entirely a function of who has converted idle power capacity into signed hyperscaler contracts. The leaders have effectively stopped being miners and now trade as power-and-compute landlords, valued on long-dated AI colocation revenue rather than hashprice.

Core Scientific already books roughly two-thirds of its revenue from CoreWeave colocation, TeraWulf has ~522 MW under contract behind a Google backstop, and IREN's five-year Microsoft deal carries an ~85% project-level EBITDA margin. That contracted, BTC-decoupled cash flow is what the market is paying up for. 

The trailing names are the inverse, either no credible pivot (the small pure-plays like SOS, pinned near -30% all year) or a pivot still priced as optionality rather than revenue. CleanSpark is the cleanest example of the latter. It controls 1.8 GW of contracted power but uses only ~808 MW, still earns effectively 100% of revenue from BTC mining, and its Meta talks to lease the Sandersville site remain unsigned. That leaves the laggards tethered to mining economics that have turned punishing. 

And the macro footprint of that pivot shows up directly in the network. Bitcoin hashrate has rolled over from its ~1.1B peak last November to roughly 900M by mid-June. With hashrate down ~20%, this is the first sustained contraction in years. The same capacity decision driving the equity dispersion above is quietly loosening the network's security budget underneath it.

— Marc

Blockworks is now tracking BNB Chain, one of the largest blockchain ecosystems in crypto with over $18.5 billion in stablecoins and other RWAs.

Since launching in 2020, the EVM-compatible L1 has delivered consistent upgrades and rock-bottom fees, while staying one of the most used blockchains in crypto.

The new dashboard offers 14 pages of data, allowing users to explore the most in-depth BNB Chain dashboard in the industry. With more than 100+ charts, we cover activity, burns, fees, TPS, TVL, stablecoins, DeFi leaders, and more.

Synthetix sUSD: The Unpeggening

Synthetix is retiring sUSD. On June 19, holders were given seven days to either sell the stablecoin or hold it for conversion into SNX; a snapshot this Friday, June 26 freezes the token and marks its deprecation. It's an abrupt end for one of crypto's oldest stablecoins.

Under SIP-423, each sUSD converts to a fixed 4 SNX (sUSD valued at $1, SNX at $0.25). But the SNX is locked for a year and vests over a second, so whether sUSD holders who originally acquired the token near $1 will be made whole depends on the trajectory of SNX.

Today, four SNX at spot ($0.2255) is worth about $0.90, yet sUSD trades at $0.2607 — the market is discounting the locked claim by roughly 71%. The "soft floor" near $0.25 is the present value of a two-year-locked SNX claim. Converting effectively buys SNX at ~$0.065 against a $0.2255 spot — a steep price for accepting two years of illiquidity and price risk.

“No one’s pretending like this is a good situation — this is obviously a terrible situation that we are in — but this is a consequence of decisions that go all the way back to 2021-2022,” Synthetix co-founder Kain Warwick said on a June 15, community call.

The 420 pool

How did a stablecoin end up here? In early 2025, Synthetix pooled SNX staking and forgave ~$60M of staker debt over 12 months to avert a liquidation spiral. It worked — and in doing so removed the peg's only real defense. sUSD's stability had always depended on stakers buying discounted sUSD to burn against their debt at par; forgive the debt and that bid disappears. Warwick said as much: the depeg followed because "the primary driver of sUSD buying (debt management) has been removed." Consequently, sUSD slid from ~$0.84 in April 2025 to below $0.70 by early 2026 and never recovered.

If you didn’t have debt in the protocol, holding sUSD offered a too-good-to-be-true APR paid in SNX after a 1-year lock. That was one in a series of escalating fixes, including a staking requirement that ratcheted from 50% of debt toward 100%, exchange-fee buybacks, a market-making vault, and basis-trade vaults. As recently as February 2026, Synthetix still promised sUSD was "the foundational stablecoin of the Synthetix ecosystem" and promised a re-peg by early Q2. Yet, four months later, it chose deprecation.

For holders, three options:

• Sell now at ~$0.26 for certainty.

• Convert and accept a two-year-locked SNX claim — a leveraged bet that SNX clears well above ~$0.065 at unlock.

• Convert and hedge by shorting SNX. This is harder than it sounds: with SNX perp funding on Hyperliquid at −19.38% annualized, shorts pay longs — so the hedge costs ~19%/yr to keep on, for the full two-year lock. And open interest is only ~$567K, so any real size pushes funding more negative, against you. Workable at minnow size, perhaps, but challenging to implement on such a long time-frame (illiquidity, liquidation risk, etc.).

There's a further thin, conditional backstop: if Synthetix's new mainnet exchange clears >$10M in revenue within two years (~$96k/week sustained), 25% can redeem claims at 1 USDT — but the exchange is only in a private alpha phase, and even clearing the hurdle leaves 75% with the protocol. The conversion mints ~70M new SNX (four per sUSD on ~$17.5M outstanding) — locked, then vesting into circulation over 2027–28.

The hurdle is measured on Synthetix's own exchange, not Infinex, the Warwick–linked frontend spun out of Synthetix. But Infinex’s trajectory is sobering — net revenue down ~90% since December.

But there is no alternative, according to Kain. “The only way to get out of this is to continue to build the exchange,” he said, adding on the call, “it’s gonna be a tough grind out of the bear market but everyone’s prepared to do it, so hopefully we come out on the other side.”

The takeaway: The conversion to SNX is better than nothing, but it’s a far cry from recovering a dollar. Holders of sUSD exit from a failed stablecoin into a locked, diluted bet on its issuer.

— Macauley

The EF is Downsizing 

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is slashing its budget by roughly 40% to transition into a long-term, endowment-based organization, aiming to reduce its annual spending from 15% to a sustainable 5% by 2030. Rather than dismissing the cuts as corporate efficiency, Vitalik Buterin candidly acknowledged the loss of core talent and outlined major sacrifices required to fund Ethereum's ambitious "Strawmap" upgrade, including replacing multi-client redundancy with AI-assisted formal verification, winding down the Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) unit, and scaling back Devcon. Ultimately, Vitalik favors a "soft lean-and-done" future for Ethereum. He proposed that once the roadmap is complete, the protocol should mimic Bitcoin by focusing strictly on security and ossification to ensure long-term capture resistance.

What the EF is for

In a widely praised X post, EF interim Executive Director Bastian Aue (Aerugo) details the execution behind Ethereum's new mandate: harden CROPS — censorship-resistance, open-source, privacy, security — at every layer. Toxic MEV is the next cypherpunk war. Unconditional privacy first, compliance second. Compensation shifts to ETH. Spinouts face scrutiny, not continuity checks. Partisan, uncompromising, explicitly not for sale.