🔎10 big things to watch this week

A compilation of crypto catalysts, airdrop strategies and alpha threads

Aug 18, 2025

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

10 crypto events to watch this week
Avail’s solution for liquidity fragmentation
Lighter: The next Hyperliquid-like airdrop?
7 alpha threads

Let’s dive in👇

Today’s email is brought to you by Avail - The Horizontally Scalable Base Layer for Rollups, Appchains, and dApps

Explore how Avail Nexus solves liquidity fragmentation!

Crypto catalysts to watch this week

Jupiter Lend public release - The public launch of Jupiter Lend on Solana, a product built by Fluid in collaboration with Jupiter, is scheduled for August
Resolv's fee switch - Resolv's fee switch rollout will be completed on Aug. 21. The protocol fees will be used for buybacks and to drive value to the RESOLV token
Hyperliquid x Ethena - Ethena has recently teased the upcoming launch of its perpetual DEX called Hyena built on top of Hyperliquid
INFINIT V2 public beta launch - INFINIT V2, which will enable executing complex DeFi strategies in 1 click, will go live in public beta tomorrow on Aug. 19
LFJ’s Token Mill release - LFJ (prev. known as Trader Joe) will release an innovative token launcher called Token Mill on Solana this week
Cap release - Cap, a first-of-its-kind stablecoin protocol, will be released on Ethereum L1 on Aug. 18 - today 👀
DeFi projects’ major announcement - Several dApps, including 1inch and Orca, teased a major announcement for August 19
Macro events - FED Chair Jerome Powell will give a speech this week on the Fed's policy framework + FOMC Minutes will be released on Aug. 20
Zelensky’s meeting with Trump - Zelensky will meet Trump in Washington to discuss ending the war in Ukraine on Aug. 20
Brazil’s Bitcoin reserve hearing - Brazil Parliament will hold a hearing on a potential national BTC reserve on Aug. 20

Note: I invested in Avail

The cross-chain liquidity engine for tokenization

Stablecoins are already a $273  billion market, and by 2030, tokenization is expected to become a multi-trillion dollar sector.

The problem? Liquidity today is fragmented as there are hundreds of chains.

Without cross-chain functionality, every dApp eventually hits a growth ceiling.

Enter Avail Nexus - the universal liquidity router built to enable tokenized assets and stablecoins to function as if they were natively multichain

Nexus enables multichain liquidity for any asset/dApp without fragmenting liquidity.

Here’s why this is a big deal:

For on-chain users, Avail Nexus removes the biggest headache in Web3: moving assets between chains, as Nexus fully abstracts the bridging process for them whenever they interact with a dApp
For dApp developers, Avail Nexus takes care of the heavy lifting: They just need to integrate Nexus SDK into the frontend, and Avail will take care of everything on the backend to unlock full cross-chain functionality

The Avail network is powered and secured by the $AVAIL token, which can be staked to earn from the over fifty partners building on top of it.

With Avail Nexus, any chain-limited asset or dApp can easily go cross-chain.

Check out how tokenized assets can leverage Avail Nexus!

🪂Lighter: The next Hyperliquid-like airdrop?

One of the main airdrops I’ve been farming recently is Lighter.

Lighter is a perpetual DEX with zero trading fees, which already has a daily trading volume of several billion dollars even though it’s still in closed beta.

The interesting part is that up to 50% of Lighter’s future token will be airdropped to early users, according to what the team said during an AMA in July.

This is why I’m saying this might be the next Hyperliquid-like airdrop.

Lighter is currently in an invite-only phase, but if you want to give it a try, you can use my invite: https://app.lighter.xyz/trade/ETH?referral=V51Q7P1M8HFQ

(Only 50 people can use it until it expires, so first-come first-served)

A few other things you should know:

You can earn Lighter points by generating trading volume (traders with a positive PNL earn ~30% more points on average)
USDC depositors in the Lighter LLP vault earn up to 75% APR from traders’ losses and liquidations (however they don’t get points)
Lighter points are currently being valued at 8$ per point OTC
Earning points is getting harder as Lighter grows (A total of 250,000 points is distributed to traders each week, regardless of how many people use it)

Will the Lighter token trade at a over $10b valuation post-launch like HYPE?

I highly doubt it. But the fact that its team plans to airdrop up to 50% of their token supply makes this a great opportunity in my opinion.

And besides this, Lighter is a good product in terms of user experience.