Speaking on the All Things Markets podcast with Anthony Scaramucci on July 11, Novogratz offered a measured upgrade of the market’s condition: “Crypto trades better this month than it did las
Speaking on the All Things Markets podcast with Anthony Scaramucci on July 11, Novogratz offered a measured upgrade of the market’s condition: “Crypto trades better this month than it did last month.” The improvement comes off a low base, he cautioned, but the on-chain record from the launch he singled out suggests the enthusiasm at the market’s edges is measurable.
The volume recovery Novogratz describes arrives with a caveat he supplied himself: 20-30% growth from June’s depressed levels restores activity, not the highs. His reading of Washington carries the same calibration. On the market structure legislation working through the Senate, he said the odds are “50-50 right now,” a figure that happens to sit almost exactly where prediction markets price the CLARITY Act’s 2026 passage and well below the 60% that Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger gave in a CoinDesk interview a day earlier. The gap between industry insiders now spans twenty points on the same bill, which is itself a measure of how much the August calendar, rather than the policy substance, has become the variable.
Novogratz’s sharpest observation concerned Robinhood’s new network, which he said posted roughly three times Hyperliquid’s first-day usage, framing the brokerage as a distribution machine with “15 million customers in the U.S.” The on-chain record backs the direction of the claim and raises it. Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum layer-2 on the Arbitrum stack that went live July 1, crossed $1 billion in cumulative DEX volume within a week, drew roughly 350,000 wallet addresses and 17 million transactions, and on July 8 posted $560-570 million in daily DEX volume, briefly overtaking Hyperliquid as the top decentralized exchange by that metric. Hyperliquid was no soft target: it had just posted the highest single-quarter revenue ever recorded by a DeFi protocol.
The composition of that volume complicates the distribution thesis without breaking it. The July 8 spike was driven largely by CASHCAT, a memecoin that emerged organically on the new chain and alone accounted for roughly $98 million of the daily total, while the tokenized stocks the chain was built to showcase held only about $12.6 million in on-chain assets across more than 100 listed securities.
The speculative intensity of this volume is further underscored by reports emerging July 12 of an anonymous trader who successfully converted an $838 position into over $1 million within 20 days by front-running the CASHCAT surge. Such extreme, rapid-fire returns, while outlier events, illustrate exactly why the chain’s initial volume is being driven by high-risk ‘degens’ rather than the institutional tokenized-equity flows the platform was architected to capture.
Distribution clearly works; what it is distributing, so far, is speculation rather than tokenized finance. The counterweight is the quieter data: ETH bridged to the network passed $100 million in week one and DeFi TVL topped $234 million, flows that look more like capital being deployed than tokens being flipped.
READ MORE:
Bitcoin’s Bottom Hunt: What 4 Market Signals ShowNovogratz’s explanation for crypto’s soft first half matches what the price data has implied for months: AI and SpaceX absorbed the marginal speculative dollar. “When Momo sells off, crypto does a little better,” he said, describing the inverse correlation as evidence of rotation between the two trades. He is notably unromantic about the reverse flow. Asked about a potential SpaceX secondary offering releasing billions to holders, he expects the proceeds to leak into high-end real estate and elite discretionary spending rather than back into digital assets, because SpaceX equity sits with a small group of concentrated holders who already own what they want to own.
Scaramucci relayed the more bullish version as an anecdote from an unnamed contact: “We liquidated our crypto to buy SpaceX, and then we’re going to be selling our SpaceX to buy crypto.” The two views are not reconcilable, and only one of them will show up in the flow data if a secondary happens. On the macro overhang that spent early July pressuring risk assets, Novogratz was dismissive in the bullish direction, characterizing the US-Iran situation as “the death throes of this war,” with markets having largely moved past the Strait of Hormuz headlines that knocked Bitcoin lower on July 8.
The checkable claims resolve on different clocks. The volume recovery shows up or fades in July’s monthly exchange data; the 50-50 legislative call gets graded against the Senate’s pre-recess window; and the Robinhood thesis has the clearest test of all, whether the chain’s tokenized-equity balances start growing into the memecoin volume, or the launch week goes down as 15 million customers discovering a new casino rather than a new financial system.
The information provided in this article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice.
The post Galaxy’s Novogratz: Crypto Improves as AI Trade Loosens Its Grip appeared first on Coindoo.
