Earnings Anxiety

Just when the recent soft inflation data hinted that the prospect of rate hikes may have receded, the Iran war ramps up again, oil goes north of $100 and suddenly this week’s FOMC meeting has markets feeling anxious. Today’s forward guidance previews the dilemma the Fed finds itself in and looks ahead to some more massive earnings calls coming down the pipe that could decide the direction of the AI trade.

Over in the cryptoverse meanwhile, two retail behemoths are vying for dominance of the on-chain economy. Coinbase and Robinhood now both have their own proprietary chains and are both finding that gaining meaningful traction is harder than it appears. We break down the battle between Base and Robinhood Chain and look at how both ecosystems have struggled to get to grips with the realities of building in crypto.

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📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

The week delivered three major developments that pulled the market in different directions simultaneously. Bitcoin ended the week pretty much where it started though, which understates the turbulence below the surface. Meanwhile, Brent crude crossed $100 a barrel on Thursday for the first time since late May, driven by Houthi attacks on tankers in the Red Sea and Trump threatening a "massive attack" against Iran. That erased weeks of post-ceasefire deflation in a single session and reopened every macro question the June CPI print had temporarily resolved.

Elsewhere, earnings season delivered a verdict this week that the market had been building toward for months. Alphabet posted one of the best quarters in Big Tech history and yet the stock fell 5% after-hours. The reason: Alphabet raised its 2026 capex guidance to as much as $205 billion, well above the consensus, and flagged even higher spending in 2027. Free cash flow turned negative.

In the same session, Tesla reported record revenue but missed on earnings, with capex more than doubling to $5.8 billion and free cash flow at negative $1.1 billion.Two of the most important companies in the world both reported stellar top-line growth and both burned cash to achieve it. But markets are no longer rewarding growth - they want evidence that the spending will produce returns on investment before too long.

But this makes things tricky for central bankers. When hyperscalers collectively commit to spending north of $700 billion annually on infrastructure, that creates sustained demand for power, construction, and components that are all inflationary. Oil at $100 compounds this. The Fed now faces a growth story (AI is clearly here to stay) and an inflation story (oil and AI infrastructure demand) simultaneously. The 2-year Treasury yield hit a 17-month high this week precisely because markets are pricing in a Federal Reserve that is trapped between those two forces.

In crypto, the Clarity Act faced new obstacles over the week, with three Democrat senators publicly opposing the current version on ethics grounds tied to Trump's personal crypto exposure. The Senate floor vote that was targeted before August recess looks increasingly unlikely to materialise on schedule. This does not kill the bill but it extends the timeline and delays all the positives that passage would represent.

In sum then, the near-term picture for Bitcoin is genuinely difficult. Oil at $100 removes the disinflation tailwind that the June CPI provided. Earnings season is telling us that the AI capex cycle is accelerating, not moderating, which is inflationary at the margin. The Clarity Act is delayed. The path to $65,000-$68,000 that looked plausible two weeks ago requires macro conditions - softer oil, Fed on hold, Clarity Act momentum - that are all moving in the wrong direction simultaneously. The base case for the coming week is continued range-trading between $61,000 and $65,000. A clean break above $65,000 on volume would change the picture. Without it, the bear case for another test of $60,000 remains live.

🏆 Tale of Two Exchanges 🏆

It's been an interesting few weeks over at crypto's two biggest retail on-ramps.

The chief executives of both Robinhood and Coinbase have been spending most of July trying to better connect with crypto natives, more specifically those on crypto X. To give you the broad strokes, this involved changing profile pictures, following launchpad founders, and posting about memecoins in a way that would have been unthinkable for either of them a year ago.

This might seem out of character at first glance, but this is in fact a rather deliberate effort from both teams. You see, while the exact circumstances differ between the two, both companies have realised that for their respective chains to gain meaningful adoption, they need to first win over the people who actually live onchain.

After all, despite their massive cache of retail CEX users, neither company has managed to turn that cohort into meaningful onchain activity. For proof of this, look no further than Base creator Jesse Pollak’s confessional post from last week. Notably, Pollak described Q1 2026 as "a punch in the face" and admitted that his multi-year bet on onchain social, Farcaster, Zora, mini apps and creator coins, had "disintegrated completely."

He stated that this oversized focus on onchain social had resulted in the chain falling behind competitors in key areas like perps and prediction markets, both of which have dominated CT mindshare over the past year. Pollak stated that he was “definitively wrong” about where adoption would come from.

On that note, Pollak is stepping back from running the Base app and handing it over to Jordan Fish (aka Cobie), the trader and podcaster whose Echo fundraising platform Coinbase acquired last year for around $375 million. While it’s still too soon to say if this leadership restructure is the fix we need, Cobie’s new role at Base has been received positively by the community.

To Cobie’s credit, he’s as crypto native as anyone can get. His track record at previous ventures also proves that he’s got a clear sense of what the market wants at any point in time. And for what it’s worth, he seems cognizant of the chain’s pain points. Notably, in a reply to an X post questioning the competency of Base leadership, Cobie conceded that Coinbase has been distant from crypto-native users for a long time, and that "CB/Base has burned a lot of user goodwill… through some unforced errors." At the same time, he stated that he believes this damage is salvageable, even though the timeline for redemption admittedly remains uncertain.

Over at Robinhood meanwhile, their embrace of onchain culture and CT seems more serendipitous. Notably, it marketed its newly launched L2 chain (Robinhood Chain) as being the destination for real-world assets and agentic trading - two verticals it believes will dominate the future of onchain products. In fact, in a CNBC interview following the launch, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev boldly stated that tokenised RWAs were the durable direction and that it was time to “move past Bitcoin and memecoins.”

Funnily enough, just days after that interview, Vlad made an X post welcoming memecoin trading on the chain with open arms. This might seem confusing until you realise the post was prompted by an influx of capital that had migrated to the chain due to a memecoin named $CASHCAT posting a triple-digit percentage rally in just 24 hours.

Vlad had witnessed the reflexive adoption that comes with embracing crypto degen culture. In fact, some reports claim that Robinhood Chain has overtaken Base in daily active users less than three weeks after launch.

Unsurprisingly, the actual share of money parked in RWAs on the chain is just a fraction of its TVS. Data from RWA.xyz also shows that Robinhood’s share of the tokenised RWA market is dwarfed in comparison by players like Ondo Finance and Kraken's xStocks. Granted both competitors have been around much longer, it doesn’t change the fact that the adoption of tokenised RWAs on Robinhood might take longer than anyone expects, especially as it remains bottlenecked by ongoing regulatory uncertainty.

In the meantime, the only way for Robinhood to bootstrap its onchain liquidity is to court the degens. After all, it made its name in the TradFi market by catering to retail investors. Cultural traction has always been its distribution advantage.

With that said, embracing onchain culture comes with downsides. Notably, over the past few weeks, we’ve had a number of memecoins and tokens pump with every direct and indirect interaction coming from the X accounts of the CEOs of both exchanges.

On the Coinbase side, we saw a memecoin named $BRIAN rally almost 37x after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong merely changed his profile picture last week. Similarly, a number of tokens on Robinhood Chain pumped just from Vlad following their project X accounts. Two of the most popular ones are $INDEX and $PONS, tokens connected to utility projects on the chain.

That said, this level of influence also makes them targets for bad actors. Notably, we saw someone hack Tenev's X account at the end of last week. They then used it to launch a fake memecoin called Vladhood, describing it as the "official Robinhood chain mascot" and falsely claiming it would be listed in the Robinhood app. While Robinhood's communications account swiftly alerted the community to the hack, the token had already done $22 million in volume in just a few hours, running more than 90,000% from launch and picking up over 5,000 holders.

So, where does this leave us?

Well, bad actors aside, it’s become clear that centralised behemoths are increasingly focused on expanding their onchain presence. For now, it seems like they must pander to crypto native users to bootstrap their initial liquidity. After all, it’s clear that their existing centralised retail distribution isn't enough to generate traction for their onchain products in the short term. In other words, we expect more endorsements for degen experiments from these players, at least for the foreseeable future.

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🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* Kraken Review 2026: Fees, Safety, Stocks, xStocks and Who It Is Best For
* How to Start Crypto Trading: A Beginner's Step-by-Step Guide
* USDC vs USDT: Which Stablecoin Is Safer and Better in 2026?
* The Real Security Threats Facing Your Hardware Wallet (And How to Prevent Them)
* Bybit Earn Review 2026: Products, Rates, Risks and Who It Is Best For
* KuCoin Trading Guide 2026: How to Trade Crypto Step by Step
* How to Run a Bitcoin Node in 2026: Step-by-Step Setup and Wallet Connection

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

"Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria" - Sir John Templeton

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.