The coming days compress a series of macro and crypto-native catalysts into a tight window, setting up a volatile backdrop for digital assets.
For risk assets, the minutes matter because they transform a terse statement and cautious press conference into something closer to a running narrative: if the text shows broad concern over weakening growth and labor, traders will infer a dovish lean; if the committee emphasized persistence of inflation and tariff spillovers, they’ll see a hawkish tilt. Market lore tends to hold—dovish minutes often coincide with lower yields and a softer dollar, while hawkish minutes have the opposite effect—but the reaction will hinge on how clearly the minutes reveal the balance of risks that produced July’s “hold.”
Two days later, on Friday, August 22, attention shifts to the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, the so-called Super Bowl of central banking. Chair Jerome Powell is slated to deliver remarks at 10:00 a.m. ET (16:00 CEST), with this year’s theme—“Labor Markets in Transition: Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy”—placing the jobs-inflation trade-off squarely in focus. Jackson Hole speeches have repeatedly reset policy expectations; investors will listen for whether Powell leans into slowing growth risks or stresses inflation stickiness as guidance into September.
In DeFi, AaveDAO is poised to receive a significant token grant from World Liberty Financial (WLFI). Aave governance materials describe an arrangement under which Aave would receive approximately 7% of the total supply of WLFI tokens, alongside a share of protocol fees, in exchange for integrating and supporting a WLFI-branded Aave v3 market. Pre-market quotations for WLFI have implied a very large fully diluted valuation; one mid-July analysis tallied a ~$16 billion FDV, which—if used as a notional yardstick—would peg a 7% slice at roughly $1.1 billion.
At press time, the total crypto market cap fell to $3.84 trillion.
