Cointelegraph Markets & Research

Strategy back above 1x mNAV despite announcement of intention to sell up to $1.5b to defend $STRC.

What do you think happens next?

🔎 RESEARCH: Goldfinch Prime is shutting down because “crypto investors don’t want private credit”. But the original Goldfinch protocol is still running. The question nobody is asking is what shape it is actually in.

Goldfinch launched in 2021 backed by a16z and Coinbase Ventures to fund real-world loans in emerging markets including Nigeria, Kenya, and Southeast Asia. Warbler Labs, the core development firm led by co-founders Blake West and Mike Sall, built and managed the product.

Over its lifetime, the protocol originated ~$113.3m in loans across 24 pools. Of those 24 pools, 13 are fully repaid, returning ~$29.8m in principal. The remaining eight pools hold $53.82m in outstanding principal. Zero are performing on original terms. Two are in outright default: Addem Capital at $8 million and Lend East at $7.45 million. Six are in restructuring: Almavest Baskets 4, 5, 6, and 7, Cauris Fund 2, and the standalone Cauris pool, totaling $38.37 million.

The first public crack came in 2023 when Tugende, a Kenyan motorcycle taxi financier, defaulted on a $5m loan after diverting $1.9m to its Ugandan subsidiary. The default triggered a 3.95% write-down of the Senior Pool NAV. Lend East stopped paying entirely in early 2024. Addem Capital made a partial payment in April 2025 and remains in default with $8 million outstanding. Both have very limited social media presence.

The protocol's dashboard reports a 19.95% total loss rate, but depositors like @edwardmorra_btc who entered in September 2021 has recovered only 30% of principal after four years. He estimates a further 10% may arrive over the next one to two years. That puts his maximum recovery at 40 cents on the dollar (60% loss).

Making depositors whole on principal alone requires recovering the full $53.82m from eight borrowers who are not paying on original terms. Adding foregone interest at the original blended rate of ~11% annually and opportunity cost at a 4% risk-free rate over a three-year recovery horizon brings the total required to approximately $71m. The six restructuring pools currently make monthly payments of $51,000 to $102,000 per pool. At that velocity, recovering $53.82m will take between 8 and 15 years.

Already, Warbler Labs has absorbed $10m in an attempt to contain the damage. It spent $7 million of its own balance sheet repaying lenders, returned $1 million in protocol revenue toward repayments, and sold $2 million in GFI treasury tokens for the same purpose. GFI trades at $0.066 today, down 99.8% from its January 2022 high of $32.94. Market cap stands at $6.18 million (~$38k liquid) against $53.82 million in outstanding loans.

When an RWA protocol experiences underwriting risk at this scale, the damage extends beyond one pool. It makes the next serious borrower look suspicious and the next good product harder to trust.

Underwriters building in this category should be building the credibility floor for an entire asset class that is still earning its right to exist. Every dollar lost to weak underwriting is a dollar that makes depositors more skeptical. The sector needs more underwriters who understand that the hard part of credit has nothing to do with onchain.

🚨 RESEARCH: $11.85 billion in crypto options expires this Friday.

Bitcoin has $10.16 billion worth of options expiring across 162,000 contracts. With Bitcoin currently at $61,750, the max pain level sits at $72,000, which is roughly 15% above where Bitcoin trades right now.

Max pain is the price where the most options expire worthless, meaning option sellers collect the most. Because max pain is above the current spot, any pull from expiry points upward, not downward.

Most of the big call bets are stacked at $80,000, $90,000, and $100,000, all well above current price. Those positions are deep out of the money and will expire worthless if Bitcoin stays where it is.

Ethereum has $1.69 billion in options expiring. ETH is currently at $1,648. Max pain sits at $2,000, roughly 20% above current spot. The book is heavily stacked with calls at $2,100 and $2,500, both above where ETH trades now. If ETH stays flat or drifts lower through Thursday, those calls expire worthless on Friday, and wipe out a disproportionate amount of open interest.

The traders who bought them lose their premium.

The key point is that max pain for both assets sits above the current spot price. The pressure from expiry this week points upward.

🇰🇷 RESEARCH: South Korea’s worst KOSPI session in years is connected to crypto in a way most people are missing.

Since their late-May launch, single-stock leveraged ETFs tracking semiconductor companies have accumulated $9.1 billion in assets. Retail investors hold 92% of that exposure, while their margin debt has more than doubled over the last 12 months.

Yesterday, Financial Supervisory Service Governor Lee Chan-jin publicly stated that existing oversight measures were insufficient to contain the risks of these products.

That triggered Samsung and SK Hynix to fall 12.31% and 12.47%, respectively. Those two stocks represent roughly 48% of KOSPI market value and drove approximately 70% of the index’s 2026 gains.

Leveraged ETFs rebalance daily. Falling prices force them to sell the underlying asset, which pushes prices lower and forces even more selling.

South Korea is where the AI hardware trade is most concentrated and most leveraged. When that trade cracks in Seoul, every other high-risk asset class feels it immediately. Domestic ETFs have lost more than 25%, while the Hong Kong equivalent has fallen over 23%.

The crypto connection runs through the Korea Premium Index. South Korea is one of the most active retail crypto markets on earth. Korean demand has historically been strong enough to push Bitcoin to a premium on Upbit and Bithumb relative to global prices, the so-called Kimchi Premium.

In recent weeks, that premium has inverted.

Korean retail had been rotating out of crypto and into domestic AI and semiconductor equities. Now, both markets are caught in the same broader retreat from risk assets. If more positions collapse, margin calls could force investors to liquidate whatever liquid assets remain, further deepening the selloff.

More AI and semiconductor companies will release earnings reports in the next few days. If those reports show signs of weakening demand, it could signal a mid-term peak for the tech sector and deepen the ongoing correction.

Tokenized stock trading volume reached a record $5.3B last month, while Solana surpassed $10B in all-time tokenized equity transfer volume for the first time.