[News Brief] Apr 22, morning | Possibility Raised That the U.S. Federal Reserve May Increase Interest Rates This Year

Expectations have emerged that the U.S. Federal Reserve could raise its benchmark interest rate this year.

According to @WatcherGuru, the market is discussing the possibility of a Fed rate hike within the year. A rate hike could lead to tighter liquidity and a stronger dollar, which may act as a headwind for risk assets such as cryptocurrencies.

Robinhood has launched the public mainnet of its layer-2 blockchain, 'Robinhood Chain,' Odaily reported.

With the mainnet launch, Robinhood now supports tokenized stock trading in more than 120 countries. It also unveiled 'Robinhood Earn,' a decentralized lending product based on USDG that offers yields of around 7%.

Robinhood is expanding beyond its traditional securities brokerage business into cryptocurrencies, tokenized assets, and AI-powered trading.

According to CoinDesk, the European Union began its evaluation and amendment process on the 1st following the full implementation of MiCA, its regulatory framework for crypto assets.

The first areas under review are stablecoin-related rules and the cross-border equivalence mechanism. MiCA is a regulatory framework designed to unify the rules for issuing, trading, and providing services related to crypto assets within the EU.

ENS community member Christoph Jentzsch has proposed the voluntary dissolution of ENS DAO. The move follows controversy over alleged governance capture involving ENS co-founder Nick Johnson's exercise of voting power and expanded treasury control by the foundation.

According to PANews, Jentzsch wrote on X that “ENS DAO has already collapsed” and argued that the ENSv2 universal router key should be burned and the remaining funds distributed so ENS can transition into public infrastructure.

Jentzsch, who wrote the code for 'The DAO' in 2016, said he currently runs Tokenize.it and holds no official position in ENS governance.

The proposal came after controversy surrounding Nick Johnson’s use of roughly half of the protocol’s active voting power to block an extension of the security council, followed by support for expanded treasury control by the ENS Foundation.

According to reports, Nasdaq-listed Avalanche Treasury Corp. (AVAT) warned in its SEC quarterly filing that there is substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.

AVAT shares fell 93% over the past month, dropping from above $10 in early June to below $0.73 on June 29. The company went public through a merger with Mountain Lake Acquisition Corp. on June 11.

AVAT had originally planned to build a $1 billion AVAX position, but the acquisition cost of approximately $265 million for its AVAX purchases has now declined to about $123 million in value.

The company has staked about 7.8 million of its 13.8 million AVAX holdings as collateral for loans. Its first-quarter operating loss exceeded $26 million, most of which stemmed from fair value losses on its AVAX holdings.

Odaily, citing on-chain analyst Yu Jin, reported that 7.055 million WLD flowed into Binance over the past seven hours.

The amount was worth about $2.66 million. Following the inflow, the price of WLD fell 8%, from $0.395 to $0.365.

BTC has risen above $61,000. According to OKX, BTC was trading at $61,077.50, up 1.55% on the day.

PANews reported this on the 2nd, citing OKX market data. The move is being interpreted as a break above a key psychological level in short-term price action.

According to Odaily, ETH fell below $1,600 on OKX.

ETH is currently trading at $1,599.71, with its 24-hour gain narrowing to 1.81%.

According to Whale Alert, 1,044 BTC were transferred from Kraken to an anonymous wallet at around 11:04 on July 2.

The transfer was worth approximately $62,795,084. Large transfers from exchanges to external wallets may be interpreted as custody moves or over-the-counter transactions.

Odaily reported that Ethereum Institutional, a nonprofit organization created by former Ethereum Foundation members, will launch in 2026 to provide free advisory services to banks and asset managers seeking to enter the Ethereum ecosystem.

Ethereum Institutional will serve as a single point of contact for institutions across Ethereum, layer-2 networks, and related applications.

The organization was founded by David Walsch, Marius Smith, and Matthew Dawson. It was incubated by the Ethereum Foundation before becoming independently operated.

Ethereum Institutional said it will not charge advisory or consulting fees and adopted a nonprofit structure to avoid bias toward any specific vendor or product.

It also plans to work with ETHD Labs, Etherealize, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to connect institutional demand and explain Ethereum’s utility to the banking sector. ETHD Labs will focus on turning that demand into technical products.