WTI crude oil (CLQ26) fell to a 4.25-month low on Thursday, pressuring ethanol prices and encouraging Brazilian mills to allocate more cane to sugar production and less to ethanol. New York raw sugar (SBV26) fell 0.93%, while London white sugar (SWQ26) briefly hit a 9.75-month high before giving back most gains. The report also cites bullish backdrops including below-normal monsoon rainfall in India and the formation of an El Niño, but says the oil-driven supply shift is the dominant near-term headwind.

U.S. farmers are expected to plant 42.7 million acres of wheat in 2026, down 6% from the prior year and the lowest level since 1877. Winter wheat is forecast at 31.5 million acres, down 5% year over year, as drought, freeze damage, high input costs and uncertainty in export markets curb plantings. USDA’s first 2026/27 outlook put the season-average farm price for wheat at $6.50 per bushel. While stocks are currently sufficient to keep flour mills running, prolonged drought and elevated costs could tighten supplies and lift prices further.

Ripple said its institutional services platform, Ripple Prime, is now available to eligible institutional clients in the United States, enabling over-the-counter (OTC) spot transactions across multiple digital assets including XRP and RLUSD. The service is supported by Ripple’s in-house market-making and compliance infrastructure and is aimed at licensed entities such as banks and hedge funds, not retail users. Ripple described the move as XRP’s first standardized OTC access channel for mainstream U.S. financial institutions, while adding RLUSD—its U.S. dollar stablecoin that is not yet widely circulated—alongside XRP.

By mid 2026, SWIFT is testing an XRP-based bridge liquidity setup through Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity. Santander is using One Pay FX to apply the system across Latin America and Southeast Asia. Standard Chartered has publicly tested and deployed an XRP-based settlement corridor. The move marks XRP’s first entry into SWIFT’s co-validated cross-border payments infrastructure in live business use cases, with no other tokens or alternative technologies cited.

USDA reported weekly wheat export sales of 300,060 MT for the week ending June 25, the lowest of the marketing year so far and down 48.79% from the same week a year earlier. Saudi Arabia issued a tender to purchase 655,000 MT of wheat for delivery this fall. At midday, Chicago SRW and Minneapolis spring wheat futures were lower, while Kansas City HRW wheat futures were higher. U.S. markets will close for the July 4 Independence Day holiday, setting up a three-day weekend.

Solana Incubator’s Cohort 4 Demo Day is scheduled around July 3, 2026, with five teams presenting projects spanning agentic AI, DePIN, quantitative trading, yield optimization and asset tokenization. GENSYN and PIN were listed as symbol candidates, tied to agentic AI infrastructure and a DePIN-track project, respectively. The event is positioned as a routine ecosystem-building activity under Solana’s official incubator program, with no new listings, token unlocks or regulatory changes.

PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. grid operator, expects electricity demand to reach 166,147 megawatts on Thursday, a level not seen in nearly 20 years. It has secured an emergency order from the Energy Department that could allow transmission operators to curtail usage by data centers and other large customers with backup generation if needed. PJM also obtained temporary relief from certain environmental permit restrictions for power plants through July 3 to help meet surging demand. Wholesale power prices have jumped in parts of the region, including northern Virginia, as temperatures neared 100 degrees.

In its Q2 2026 report, the IOTA Foundation said it is now fully focused on scaling the TWIN digital trade network and activated the Starfish consensus protocol on April 23 to improve mainnet stability. The update package also included a Protocol Version 29 security upgrade and performance work such as StarfishSpeed and the P-COOL transaction-flow optimization. The foundation reported trade-infrastructure deployments and pilots across Kenya, Nigeria and Morocco, work in the United Kingdom on international supply-chain integration, and an Argentina government project using IOTA technology for transplant processes. It also cited npm download data showing 18,222 weekly installs for a TWIN core package and 3,711 for an IOTA-specific module, indicating rising developer activity.