Almost a year of never missing a single Monday, and I let this one go. The reason is simple and I'm not going to dress it up: I was at a wedding in Tuscany, the summer is sliding into that dead middle stretch, and I made a call that a Sunday night off was fine.

…I think the call was correct, and not just for me.

Don't misread that. I take this seriously. I've written this every week for almost a year and never missed an edition before this one. But the same logic that let me close the laptop is the logic that's about to define this entire summer.

This is a boring market right now. The book is stuffed with limit orders. Nothing significant moves unless a human decides to move it - and I mean a real human decision, someone choosing to walk into the market and eat thousands of BTC at once.

Those clips don't happen by accident. They don't happen on autopilot. They need a person fully present, fully engaged, fully in the seat. Fully sober.

And that person is not in the seat. He's in Italy with an Aperol Spritz, telling himself he'll deal with it when he's back from holiday.

So I'll say it plainly: the summer is going to be extremely slow, and we bottom this thing out in October. The same way I skipped my newsletter, the big players are skipping their conviction trades. They're not present, and a market with nobody present doesn't go anywhere fast.

The tape agrees with me. BTC is grinding in the low $60Ks, down enormously year-on-year, with the SpaceX mega-listing quietly draining liquidity out of every speculative instrument on the board. Speculative futures leverage has fallen to its lowest level of the quarter as participants shift focus toward mainstream financial developments. That's not a bottom. That's purgatory. And purgatory in summer favors the downside.

But enough on the tape. The real story of these two weeks isn't price.
So let's get into what I actually learned.

First stop: the Hedgeweek awards gala in London, which I attended.

Here's the tell. For the first time, this ceremony combined the European Awards and the Global Digital Assets Awards into a single night. All the years before, digital assets stood on its own. This year - folded in with TradFi.

Now, you could read that as crypto graduating into the grown-up room. And there's truth to that. But look closer at the mechanics of the decision, because that's where the honesty is: by merging the two, they got to hand out more awards and sell more tables - to roughly the same number of bodies in the room.

Even the conferences are experiencing a bear market. There just aren't that many participants left actively present in digital assets right now. Smart way to run the event? Absolutely. Congrats to them, genuinely. But don't miss what it's telling you about how thin this corner of the market has gotten.

And yet - the merge of those two ceremonies is the perfect symbol for the single most important thing happening in this industry right now.

TradFi and crypto are converging in front of our eyes. And the bridge they're crossing on is called RWAs.

I'll tell you the number-one thing I'm hearing from allocators right now. It's not "where's BTC going." It's not "who's got the best Sharpe."

It's: "Who is trading RWAs?"

Every conversation. Commodities especially. Real-world tokenized assets are stealing the show, and the buy side has noticed.

And they have reason to. The data is loud:

Prime brokerages are launching tokenized stocks and full-suite access to FX, equities, and commodities. There is, increasingly, no such thing as "crypto-only."

The market is moving into international, multi-asset territory - but this time, unlike the old CFD world, it's truly institutional. The old CFD model - broker as your counterparty, prices set in a black box, accounts frozen at will - is being replaced by transparent, peer-to-peer perpetual order books. CFDs are being swapped out for genuine RWA exposure.

Everyone is asking who's trading RWAs.

Almost nobody actually is.

That's the truth of where we are. The demand has arrived. The supply has not. And that gap is the whole story.

Think about why. The TradFi teams - the ones with genuinely good strategies on MetaTrader 5 or some CFD broker - have never traded on Binance. They've never touched a crypto futures venue. Even the ones with real edge haven't made the transition to these new rails yet. They don't see the opportunity. It's being whispered to them slowly, but they haven't moved.

And the crypto-native teams? They can't just flip a switch either. Developing a real strategy takes a long time. These TradFi-perp and RWA markets have only been live on the major exchanges for months. Binance only debuted gold and silver perpetuals in January 2026. Crude oil perps went from zero to $6.9 billion in weekly volume during the Iran escalation in March. You cannot build a robust, verifiable, multi-year systematic edge on a market that's existed for a single quarter. It needs time to season. It always does.

So we have this strange standoff: allocators circling, asking for a trade that barely anyone can yet deliver at institutional quality.

That gap is the opportunity. If you're early into it, you own it before the field shows up.

And by the way - this trend isn't new to readers of this letter. We called it early this year. The future of the best-performing teams is multi-asset. Not crypto-only. The strongest books carry some crypto, some commodities, some RWAs, some other asset classes entirely - cross-trading so they don't live or die by a single four-year cycle.

Crypto firms keep failing for exactly this reason: they have no way to earn in the dead stretch of a cycle, only in the high-volatility moments.

When the opportunities dry up, they shut down - and the allocators scale down right alongside them. Which is precisely what we're watching happen this summer.

Here's an angle most people are missing entirely.

When everything becomes one connected, multi-asset system, something changes for Bitcoin specifically. Right now you technically can't use BTC as collateral to trade stocks, gold, oil, and every other asset class under one roof.

As the worlds merge, that becomes native.

Binance's Multi-Asset Mode already lets you post Bitcoin or Ethereum as collateral to trade gold. A direct bridge between a crypto portfolio and the commodities market.

Sit with what that means. Bitcoin stops being just a directional bet and becomes a universal, highly collateralizable base asset. Something you can park behind any strategy in any market. That pulls in interest from people who never cared about crypto as a trade but absolutely care about a clean, liquid, 24/7 asset they can collateralize against everything else.

The two asset classes aren't just coexisting. Through RWAs, they're fusing into one. And BTC sits right at the center of the fused system.

Before I oversell the convergence - let me kill one piece of hype dead.

Tokenized stocks, as a tradable instrument for a serious quant SMA, are not there yet. The liquidity is brutal. The entire tokenized-stock sector crossed roughly $1 billion in market cap in March 2026 - up from about $20 million fifteen months earlier - but it's still microscopic against the roughly $1.1 trillion a day that turns over in US equities.

Thin secondary markets, concentrated ownership, wide spreads, hard execution. You can move a little size in a name or two. Most of these tokens are functionally illiquid. There is no real edge in trading them at institutional scale today.

This will change - but it takes time. Probably a year-plus of plumbing. And the plumbing is already being laid: the DTCC's tokenization service is scheduled for a limited launch in July 2026 and full rollout in October, with over 50 institutional participants including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan — while the SEC has already approved Nasdaq and NYSE rule changes permitting tokenized-securities trading, with first trades expected in Q3 2026.

So: not now. But sooner than the skeptics think.

Last thing, and it's the most actionable.

The smartest people I talk to have already concluded there is no significant edge coming in crypto over the next four or five months. We probably take another low first. So they're not waiting around for it.

They're moving toward TradFi. And they're doing it in a way I've genuinely never seen before. TradFi is opening up opportunities that simply weren't accessible to this crowd a year ago. We've got strong TradFi strategies on the books too, whether through Interactive Brokers or the CFD venues - real, verifiable edges that don't care what BTC does this summer.

That's the play through the quiet months. Not staring at a dead crypto tape praying for a move that needs a human who's on a beach sipping Pina Colada lol.

Diversify your opportunity set off the single cycle, position into the convergence early, and be standing - with a track record - when the rest of the field finally figures out what "who's trading RWAs?" actually requires.

If you want to know those TradFi opportunities, tell us in the comments or reach me at [email protected].

That's the edition. And I'll make you a promise: no more missed weeks.

Back on schedule.

Welcome to everyone who joined recently - glad you're here.

Stay patient. Stay alive.

See you next week.

Quants.Space is an institutional discovery engine for systematic and discretionary trading strategies — 130+ independent, world-class quantitative and discretionary trading teams, each with vetted track records and unique alpha sources, plus a dedicated Emerging Managers sector for early-stage teams. Our mission is simple: connect institutional capital and allocators directly with best-in-class teams, all within a secure Separately Managed Account (SMA) framework. If you're an allocator active in the SMA space, or a team opening SMA capacity for institutional tickets, get in touch at [email protected].