GeckoPulse: How Do You Stay Hidden...the Right Way?

DeFi’s Cloak of Invisibility

Ever wondered whether your transactions are truly private?

Layer-2 network Scroll has 'pre-announced' its new privacy infrastructure, Cloak.

The new feature utilizes zero-knowledge technology to ensure that private transactions are auditable, allowing institutions to perform confidential transactions while maintaining compliance.

In a nutshell, transactions are sent to a permissioned sequencer to be verified through ZK-proofs, where the data can only be viewed by the sender and the sequencer.

With Cloak, developers can retain control of their applications with tools for auditing ZK transactions in real time.

The initial build of Cloak is now live on the Scroll testnet, with a full launch slated to go live in the near future.

Since the announcement, Scroll's native SCR token has plunged by 9.8% from $0.30 to $0.28 today.

The Next Chapter for Grayscale

Grayscale has launched a new investment fund for Story Protocol’s native IP token.

Similar to its other single-asset trusts, the Grayscale Story Trust will hold only IP and is open to both institutions and accredited investors.

The fund currently holds just over $33M in assets under management, with close to 1.75M outstanding shares.

The price of IP rose to a peak of $6.53 after the announcement, but has since plunged back to $5.86 as of the time of writing.

Ending July on a High

Despite seeing little movement throughout the past month, Bitcoin is up by 11.4% in July, rising from $106.5K to $118.5K.

The world's largest cryptocurrency also achieved a new all-time high of $122.8K in mid-July.

According to CoinGlass data, BTC open interest across exchanges is much higher than before, climbing by 18.7% from $71.5B to $84.9B in July.

The past month has also proven to be a miraculous turning point for Ethereum, as sentiment has continued to improve since early May.

The price of ETH rose by 57.2% in July, breaking past the $3K mark to end the month at the $3.8K level.

With ETH's resurgence, signs of life have also returned to popular altcoins, and particularly NFTs.

Based on Cryptoslam data, NFT trading volume rose by 47.6% in July from $389M to $577M.

Floor prices of popular collections such as CryptoPunks, Pudgy Penguins, and Moonbirds have also seen significant movement.

Going Dark … Temporarily

The Polygon network has suffered an unexpected outage shortly after the implementation of its recent Heimdall upgrade.

The one-hour disruption was caused by a validator leaving the mainnet, which triggered a consensus bug, which halted the production of new blocks on the primary PoS layer.

However, the team noted that the underlying Bor layer that was responsible for block creation was not affected, which meant that transactions were still being executed.

In any case, the issue has since been resolved, with all RPC services and front-end services returning to normal.

Shortly after the outage was first detected, the price of Polygon’s native POL token dipped by 3.7% from $0.218 to $0.21, but has since rebounded to $0.22 as of the time of writing.

In Other News…

Visa Expands Stablecoin Support. Payments giant Visa has expanded its stablecoin settlement support to include PYUSD, USDG and EURC across L1s Avalanche and Stellar Network. Visa’s stablecoin support was previously limited to Solana and Ethereum.

The PUMP Comeback?! Amid the market correction this week, PUMP stood out, spiking 18% thanks to Pump.fun’s aggressive buyback program. X user “Adam_Tehc” reported that 98% of yesterday’s revenue generated by Pump.fun went towards token buybacks.

The Gift of Bitcoin. Nasdaq-listed firm Fold, is partnering up with gift-card provider Blackhawk network to introduce Bitcoin gift-cards. The partnership will potentially open up the gift-cards to over 400K retail locations.

Project Crypto. US SEC Chair Paul Atkins announced numerous policy initiatives aimed at bringing crypto activity back to the US. Calling it “project crypto”, Atkins intends to greenlight and make exemptions to various crypto activities. This could see US residents legally be able to participate in airdrops or ICOs in the future.

Big Plans for Coinbase. Alongside their most recent earnings release, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced future plans to introduce tokenized equities and a predictions market through a teaser video on X.

Meteora S1 Points Checker Live. The official points checker for Meteora, a Solana-based DeFi dApp, is released. S1 ended on 30 June and includes all liquidity provision activities from 2024 through 2025. TGE for the MET token through an airdrop is expected to happen soon.

Samourai Founders Face 5 Years Imprisonment. William Lonergan Hill and Keonne Rodriguez, the founders of Bitcoin mixer Samourai pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitter. Samourai is a crypto mixer similar to that of Tornado Cash but for Bitcoin.

Celebrating 10 Years of Ethereum. Consensys and Ethereum founder Joe Lubin rang the closing bell at the Nasdaq on Wednesday, commemorating Ethereum’s 10 year anniversary.

White House Crypto Report Is Out. A comprehensive 168 page report on digital assets is now available. The report was commissioned by Trump in January 2025, to lay out recommendations for a regulatory framework for crypto. The report recognizes the future of crypto but has not made any significant mention about a national strategic Bitcoin reserve.