Cryptocurrency prices are broadly rebounding on Thursday, following a dominant sell-off largely attributed to geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Bitcoin (BTC) has risen and trades near $63,000, while Ethereum (ETH) pares losses around $1,750 as bulls aim for a short-term breakout above $1,800.
Meanwhile, despite Ripple’s (XRP) broader bearish outlook, the remittance token trades near $1.10 resistance, up from its short-term support range between $1.05 and $1.07.
Crypto sentiment dampens amid mounting geopolitical tensionsThe United States (US) and Iran continued to launch attacks at each other for the second consecutive day on Thursday, amid mounting pressure on the fragile ceasefire between the two countries, according to a CNN report.
The US military said it hit 90 targets along the Iranian coast overnight. In retaliation, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard reported that they launched attacks on US military bases in Kuwait and Bahrain.
US President Donald Trump has issued a warning that attacks could “get much worse” if Iran continues to strike ships transiting through the Strait of Hormuz. The CNN report added that an Iranian top negotiator said that the strait “will only open with ‘Iranian arrangements,’ not American threats.”
Sentiment in the broader crypto market remains constrained, as wars rarely favor risk assets. The Fear & Greed Index is embedded in the Extreme Fear territory at 22 on Thursday, up only marginally from 20 the day before. This indicates that risk appetite is on the back foot, with investors preferring to stay on the sidelines until geopolitical tensions stabilize. Therefore, recoveries are unlikely to make notable progress in the short term.
Crypto Fear & Greed Index | Source: AlternativePrice analysis: Bitcoin rebounds but struggles to build momentumBitcoin retains a capped tone as it holds well beneath the 50-day, 100-day and 200-day Exponential Moving Averages (EMAs). Still, the recent reclaim of the downward resistance trendline, whose break area now comes in near $58,689, suggests bears are losing some immediate control.
At the same time, the Relative Strength Index (RSI) hovering just below the midline and a positive Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) histogram together hint that downside momentum is fading rather than accelerating.
BTC/USDT daily chartInitial resistance is aligned with the 50-day EMA at around $65,452, followed by the 100-day EMA at approximately $69,089, with the 200-day EMA near $75,193 forming a more strategic barrier that would need to be overcome to revive a broader bullish trend.
On the downside, the first meaningful cushion is seen around the descending resistance line, now acting as support near $58,689. A sustained drop back through this zone would re-open room for a deeper corrective phase toward the psychological $60,000 level, while holding above it keeps scope for further consolidation beneath the overhead EMA cluster.
Altcoins technical outlook: Ethereum and XRP hold key support levelsEthereum sits above $1,700 while still capped beneath a dense layer of moving averages, keeping the near-term bias bearish despite improving momentum. Still, the MACD indicator stays in positive territory with the line above the signal and a constructive histogram, while the RSI hovers just above 50, hinting at steady but not aggressive buying interest.
ETH/USDT daily chartImmediate resistance lies at the 50-day EMA near $1,801, which is the first hurdle bulls must reclaim to extend the recovery. Above that, the 100-day EMA around $1,960 acts as a subsequent barrier, followed by the more significant 200-day EMA close to $2,243 that defines the broader bearish structure. Although there are no nearby technical supports on the daily chart, psychological and prior price lows at $1,700, $1,600 and $1,500 would serve as interim floors. A daily close above the 50-day EMA would be the first signal that selling pressure is starting to ease.
On the other hand, XRP maintains a bearish near-term tone with the spot price well beneath the 50-day, 100-day and the 200-day EMAs. However, the recent rebound from oversold territory is modest, with the RSI hovering in the mid-40s, suggesting only a mild recovery in momentum, while the Parabolic SAR at $1.03 sits below spot and hints at a still-intact but fragile attempt to stabilize after the latest decline.
XRP/USDT daily chartInitial resistance is seen at the descending trendline area near $1.14, followed by the 50-day EMA around $1.17. A daily close above these levels would be needed to ease downside pressure and open the way toward the 100-day EMA at $1.28 and the more distant 200-day EMA near $1.49.
Looking down, the Parabolic SAR at $1.03 marks the first notable layer of support. A break below this level would likely reinstate stronger selling pressure and expose the prior lows on the chart.
(The technical analysis of this story was written with the help of an AI tool. Know more.)
Bitcoin, altcoins, stablecoins FAQs Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, a virtual currency designed to serve as money. This form of payment cannot be controlled by any one person, group, or entity, which eliminates the need for third-party participation during financial transactions.
Altcoins are any cryptocurrency apart from Bitcoin, but some also regard Ethereum as a non-altcoin because it is from these two cryptocurrencies that forking happens. If this is true, then Litecoin is the first altcoin, forked from the Bitcoin protocol and, therefore, an “improved” version of it.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to have a stable price, with their value backed by a reserve of the asset it represents. To achieve this, the value of any one stablecoin is pegged to a commodity or financial instrument, such as the US Dollar (USD), with its supply regulated by an algorithm or demand. The main goal of stablecoins is to provide an on/off-ramp for investors willing to trade and invest in cryptocurrencies. Stablecoins also allow investors to store value since cryptocurrencies, in general, are subject to volatility.
Bitcoin dominance is the ratio of Bitcoin's market capitalization to the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies combined. It provides a clear picture of Bitcoin’s interest among investors. A high BTC dominance typically happens before and during a bull run, in which investors resort to investing in relatively stable and high market capitalization cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. A drop in BTC dominance usually means that investors are moving their capital and/or profits to altcoins in a quest for higher returns, which usually triggers an explosion of altcoin rallies.
Initial claims for US unemployment benefits came in at 215,000 for the latest reporting period, barely budging from the prior week’s 217,000.
The numbers behind the non-event The 2,000-claim decline keeps the four-week moving average parked in the low-to-mid 210,000s, a range that has held remarkably steady through late June and early July. Claims briefly ticked up to 226,000 in mid-June, a reading that came in slightly above forecasts. Even that modest spike didn’t signal any meaningful deterioration.
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The June non-farm payroll report showed the US economy added 57,000 jobs, a figure that exceeded most forecasts.
Why a flat labor market moves crypto prices Bitcoin pushed above $60,000 in early July following the stronger-than-expected employment data. The move wasn’t driven by any crypto-native catalyst, no ETF approval, no protocol upgrade, no whale accumulation. It was pure macro.
The Fed factor and what comes next Analysts broadly anticipate the Federal Reserve will begin easing monetary policy later this year, a view that the combination of stable jobless claims and modest job growth only reinforces.
Bitcoin and Ethereum tend to benefit most directly from rate cut expectations because they’re the assets institutional investors are most comfortable buying. Smaller altcoins and DeFi tokens can lag or diverge based on protocol-specific developments.
A sustained reading below 220,000 on initial claims would likely cement rate cut expectations heading into the second half of the year.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Strip Bitcoin and Ethereum out of the crypto market and what remains has shed almost a quarter of its value in the first half of 2026, falling to $666 billion while liquidity retreats into a handful of survivors. This is not a crash; crashes end. It is something slower and stranger: a depression in the long tail of crypto, with its own causes, its own refugees, and its own short list of assets that refuse to participate.
Summary
The ex-Bitcoin and ex-Ethereum crypto market lost nearly 23% in the first half of 2026. Liquidity is retreating from the long tail into Bitcoin, stablecoins, and a few assets with stronger revenue mechanisms. The current altcoin downturn looks more like a slow structural depression than a fast liquidation crash. Token supply glut, ETF-driven institutional access, and the rise of perpetual trading have weakened broad altcoin demand. The main survivors are tokens with real fee flows, buybacks, or utility that does not depend purely on retail speculation. The number that best describes crypto in mid-2026 is not Bitcoin’s price. It is this one: the total market capitalization of every cryptocurrency except Bitcoin and Ethereum fell 22.84% in the first half of the year, down to $666.58 billion as of July 2. Bitcoin, for all its drama, a 21-month low of $58,188 in late June, a bounce back above $62,000, trades within a wide band it has occupied before. The long tail is somewhere it has not been in years: bleeding steadily, month after month, with no single catastrophic day to blame and no capitulation candle to mark a bottom.
The individual charts are grim in a way indexes flatten. Ethereum, the second pillar, just closed three consecutive red quarters for the first time in its history, down 28% in the second quarter alone to trade near $1,740, roughly 65% below its August 2025 peak. Solana sits in the high $70s to low $80s. Worldcoin fell 80% over seven months; Pi Network printed all-time lows 96% below its peak; MicroStrategy’s stock, the market’s favorite leveraged proxy, was the worst performer in the entire Nasdaq-100 last year and trades 85% below its 2024 high. The Fear and Greed Index touched 12 this month, readings last seen at the bottom of the previous cycle, and sentiment surveys read like obituaries.
And yet, scattered across the wreckage, a short list of assets is behaving as if none of this is happening: a perp exchange token near all-time highs, a lending token up 40% in a month on a buyback, a supposedly dead layer-1 up 31% in a week. The pattern of who is exempt is as informative as the destruction itself. This piece maps the altcoin depression properly: how the damage is distributed, the three structural forces that caused it and distinguish it from an ordinary bear market, the anatomy of the exceptions, the honest bull and bear cases for what comes next, and the historical precedents that both camps are quoting at each other.
The shape of the damage
Start with what the aggregate number hides. A 23% half-year decline in the ex-BTC-ETH market sounds survivable until it is decomposed, because the aggregate is propped up by its largest and most defensible members, stablecoins, exchange tokens, the top handful of layer-1s, which means the decline in the actual long tail is far deeper. Move down the capitalization table and the drawdowns compound: mid-caps routinely 60-80% below their 2025 highs, the memecoin complex down by more, and the sub-$100 million tier functionally illiquid, with tokens drifting on a few thousand dollars of daily volume. The market has not fallen uniformly; it has hollowed out from the bottom.
The flows data explains the mechanism. Capital is not so much leaving crypto as retreating inward along the risk curve: into Bitcoin, into stablecoins, whose aggregate supply has kept growing through the drawdown, and into a few narrative fortresses. Bitcoin dominance has ground higher all year, the ETF complex institutionalized a version of crypto exposure that simply does not include the long tail, and the marginal retail buyer, the historical engine of altcoin seasons, is conspicuously absent, with new-wallet and app-download metrics at multi-year lows. When markets are healthy, liquidity spreads outward toward risk; when they are frightened, it retreats toward quality and exits through the same narrow doors it entered. The first half of 2026 has been eighteen consecutive weeks of the second pattern.
Two aggravating events bracketed the half. The macro turn, a hot inflation print, Bank of America forecasting three rate hikes into 2026’s back half, and gold and AI equities absorbing the speculative appetite crypto once monopolized, reset the discount rate on every long-duration asset, and nothing has longer duration than a token whose cash flows are hypothetical. And the ETF reversal removed the market’s newest demand engine precisely when it was needed: after absorbing supply for eighteen months, spot Bitcoin funds bled $4.51 billion in June alone, their worst month on record, roughly $7 billion across May and June, converting the structure that had validated the asset class into a source of daily sell pressure and headline gloom that the long tail, which never even had ETFs, absorbed by proxy.
A tour of the casualty list Abstractions need faces, and the depression’s casualty list is best understood as concentric rings around the majors.
The first ring is the large-caps that were supposed to be safe. Ethereum’s three consecutive red quarters, the first such streak in its existence, ending with a 28% second-quarter loss, did more damage to the market’s psyche than any memecoin implosion, because ETH was the institutional asset, the one with ETFs, staking yield, and a corporate buyer base, and it fell 65% from its peak anyway. Solana, the cycle’s performance champion, trades in the high $70s, its ecosystem activity, notably resilient, decoupled from its token price in exactly the way bulls once promised could not happen. XRP holds near $1.10 with the most institutionally credentialed story in the sector and a chart that ignores it.
The second ring is the narrative tokens, and here the numbers turn brutal: Worldcoin down 80% across seven months, Pi Network at all-time lows 96% below peak, the two of them jointly holding the most commercially promising identity thesis in crypto and jointly demonstrating that theses without token mechanisms no longer receive the benefit of the doubt. The AI-agent complex, the restaking complex, the modular complex, each of 2024-25’s manufactured metas has round-tripped, their tokens down 70-90% while, in several cases, their underlying usage grew, the market’s new discipline applied without sentiment.
The third ring is the equity shadow market, where the depression is arguably deepest: MicroStrategy 85% off its high and the treasury-company complex trading at or below the value of its own coins, the crypto IPO class down 42-89% with its pipeline frozen, and the mining sector repricing around AI-datacenter pivots because coin economics alone no longer support the multiples. When the leveraged wrappers, corporate, listed, and structured, all compress toward or below net asset value simultaneously, the market is making a single statement across every instrument: it will pay for crypto’s contents, and it will no longer pay a premium for containers.
And beneath all three rings lies the true dead zone, the thousands of sub-$100 million tokens where the depression is not a price level but a liquidity condition: order books measured in thousands of dollars, market-making contracts lapsing, volumes that round to zero. No index captures this stratum because indexes weight by capitalization, but it is where most tokens actually live, and its condition is the honest answer to what the altcoin market is in mid-2026: not cheap, not expensive, but in the majority of cases simply unpriced, waiting for either a buyer or a delisting.
Why this is a depression and not a crash
Crypto has crashed many times, and this is not what those looked like. Crashes are violent, leveraged, and fast: a cascade, a weekend of liquidations, a V-shaped aftermath. The 2026 altcoin market is experiencing something with different physics, a slow structural repricing driven by three forces that do not resolve with a bounce.
The first is terminal supply glut. The token-creation machinery built in 2024-25, led by Pump.fun’s million-plus launches but including every launchpad, points program, and airdrop meta, produced assets far faster than the market produced holders, and the professionalized unlock calendar keeps delivering supply into weakness: more than $776 million of scheduled unlocks this week alone, with the sector’s largest single cliff landing Saturday. Every project financed in the 2021 and 2024 vintages is now vesting into a market with no marginal buyer, which functions as a standing tax on the entire asset class. Previous altcoin winters ended when new demand met fixed supply; this one must end against supply that grows on a schedule.
The second is the rerouting of institutional access. The ETF era was supposed to legitimize crypto broadly; what it actually did was create a compliance-approved lane for exactly two assets, soon a handful more, and drain the legitimacy premium from everything outside the lane. An allocator who wants crypto exposure in 2026 buys the funds; the reflexive spillover into altcoins that characterized retail-driven cycles has no institutional equivalent, because no pension committee rotates winnings into mid-cap layer-1s. The long tail has been structurally decoupled from the asset class’s own adoption story, and the decoupling is visible in every chart pair: Bitcoin flat on the year at this writing, the ex-majors index down by a quarter.
The third is the migration of the speculative economy itself. The activity that once expressed itself as altcoin buying now expresses itself as perpetual-futures trading, where the same directional appetite generates volume and fees without anyone holding a token overnight, the instrument having become the market’s true center of gravity. Decentralized perp venues’ share of open interest has nearly quadrupled year over year to 13.5%, volumes concentrate in venues rather than assets, and the professionalization is self-reinforcing: why own a token’s drawdown risk when its volatility can be rented by the hour? The long tail’s former buyers did not leave the casino; they moved from owning the chips to trading the table.
The stablecoin paradox and the macro vise Two forces frame the depression from outside, and both are widely misread.The first is the stablecoin paradox: through six months of risk-asset destruction, aggregate stablecoin supply grew, and it now stands as one of the largest pools of capital inside the crypto perimeter. Bulls read this as dry powder, an army of dollars parked on-chain awaiting redeployment, and the reading has a real mechanism behind it, since capital that intended to exit crypto entirely would have redeemed to banks instead of rotating to Tether and Circle. Bears read the same data as infrastructure, not intent: stablecoins grew because they became payment rails, collateral, and settlement instruments for uses that have nothing to do with buying altcoins, the yield-bearing plumbing of a parallel dollar system, and mistaking plumbing for a bid is how every failed bottom call of the past year was constructed. Both readings are partially right, which is the paradox: the money is there, and nothing about its presence obligates it to arrive.
The second frame is the macro vise, and it deserves respect as a cause rather than an excuse. The asset class that grew up entirely inside a low-rate world is now pricing Bank of America’s projection of three hikes into late 2026, December hike odds above a third on CME’s tracker, and a Federal Reserve meeting on July 29 that markets treat as a live risk event. Long-duration speculative assets reprice first and hardest under tightening, and the long tail of crypto is the longest-duration asset class ever invented. Layer onto that the attention competition, AI equities absorbing the thematic capital and the narrative oxygen that altcoins monopolized in prior cycles, and gold absorbing the debasement trade, and the depression acquires its external half: even a structurally healthy altcoin market would be fighting the tape, and this one is not structurally healthy. The Fear and Greed Index at 12 measures the collision of the internal and external stories, and its historical record, extreme readings preceding reversals, is the single most cited statistic in every bull’s arsenal, cited, as bears note, at 20 as well, and at 15, all the way down.
The depression also has a geography worth noting: it is unevenly distributed across chains as well as capitalizations. Solana’s application economy has held activity remarkably well even as SOL fell, Ethereum’s layer-2 complex has kept throughput growing while its tokens bled, and several ecosystems have effectively bifurcated into functioning networks with failing tokens, the clearest evidence yet that usage and token value have decoupled at the base layer too. The decoupling reads bearish today and cuts ambiguous tomorrow: networks that stay busy through a depression retain the raw material, users, developers, fee flows, from which mechanisms can later be built, while quiet chains with quiet tokens have neither.
The exceptions, and what they share Against that backdrop, the survivors form a pattern too consistent to be luck, and the pattern is cash flow with a mechanism attaching it to the token.
Hyperliquid is the archetype: a perp exchange near all-time highs in a bleeding market, because 97% of its enormous fee revenue mechanically buys its token every block, a structural bid this publication dissected in May. Aave rallied roughly 40% in a month after switching on fee-funded buybacks. The pattern extends to venues, launchpads, and protocols whose revenue is real and whose tokenomics route it to holders, and it conspicuously excludes projects with identical revenue and no routing: the market has stopped paying for adoption stories and started paying, narrowly and skeptically, for distributions. Call it crypto’s dividend repricing; in a depression, only the assets that pay you to hold them get held.
The second class of exceptions is idiosyncratic reversal from the dead zone, Cardano’s 31% weekly bounce from multi-year lows being the current specimen, and these are better read as the volatility of abandonment than as recoveries: when a major asset’s holder base has been reduced to conviction and neglect, small demand produces large moves in both directions. The third class is the RWA-and-infrastructure complex, tokenized Treasuries growing straight through the drawdown and the perp venues annexing equities and commodities, which is not altcoin strength at all but the market routing around altcoins entirely, building things institutions want on rails the long tail happens to share, proof-of-human networks being the cautionary counter-example of vast userbases that never found the mechanism.
The exceptions also share a negative property worth stating: none of them is a bet on the altcoin market recovering. Hyperliquid’s buyback runs on trading volume that exists in every market weather; Aave’s fee stream runs on lending demand that persists through drawdowns; the RWA complex runs on institutional needs that have nothing to do with retail speculation. The survivors are, almost by definition, the assets that found a customer other than the crypto cycle itself, which inverts the sector’s old logic completely. In previous cycles, the long tail was leveraged exposure to crypto’s growth, the beta on the beta; in this one, the only long-tail assets working are the ones that de-correlated from that growth entirely. The depression, seen through the survivors, is not punishing altcoins for being risky. It is punishing them for being redundant, for offering exposure to an asset class that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the ETFs now deliver with less risk, and rewarding, narrowly, whatever offers something else. That is a harsher filter than any bear market, because bear markets end, and redundancy does not.
The bear case, the bull case, and the precedents The bear case says this is not a cycle but a verdict. The long tail was an artifact of zero rates, retail mania, and the absence of regulated alternatives; all three conditions are gone, the supply overhang is permanent, and the correct comparison is not crypto 2018 but small-cap altcoins after 2018, thousands of which never recovered because nothing required them to. On this reading, the 23% half is not a drawdown to be recovered but a repricing toward a world where perhaps a few dozen tokens have durable claims on value and the rest converge, slowly, on their terminal worth. The absence of capitulation is itself the tell: markets that cannot crash cannot bottom.
The bull case answers with the same history read differently. Every previous altcoin winter, 2015, 2018-19, 2022, featured identical obituaries, identical dominance grind, identical proclamations that this time the long tail was structurally dead, and each resolved when a demand catalyst met a market positioned exactly like this one: Fear and Greed at cycle-bottom readings, funding negative, sentiment surveys unanimous, and the sellable supply, per the flows data, increasingly transferred from weak hands to strong. The catalysts are even legible in advance: the CLARITY Act’s resolution would extend regulated access beyond the ETF duopoly, three specific fights currently deciding it; a Fed pivot would reprice duration assets in unison; and the halving-cycle clock that bulls treat as scripture points to exactly this phase, maximum despair, preceding rotation. The 23% number, on this reading, is what the bottom of an accumulation phase looks like from inside it.
The honest synthesis is narrower than either slogan. Both camps are describing real mechanisms; the question is which applies to which stratum. The structural forces, supply glut, institutional rerouting, speculation’s migration to perps, are genuine and will not reverse with sentiment, which argues the bear case is right about the median token. The positioning extremes, the survivor pattern, and the catalyst calendar are equally genuine, which argues the bull case is right about the market’s investable core. A depression, unlike a crash, does not end for everyone at once: it ends first for the assets with cash flow and mechanisms, later for the assets with users and stories, and never for the rest. The 23% figure will eventually be revised by a recovery; how much of the long tail participates in that revision is the actual bet, and the first half of 2026 has been the market showing, asset by asset, exactly how it intends to grade it.
A word, finally, on how to actually navigate a depression, because the historical playbook differs from the crash playbook most participants trained on. Crashes reward buying panic and selling relief; depressions reward selection and patience, and punish both panic-buying and generalized bottom-fishing, since the defining feature of the regime is that most of what looks cheap is cheap for a reason and will get cheaper or simply stay dead. The discipline the survivors’ pattern suggests is uncomfortable but legible: hold the market’s investable core to whatever extent one holds the asset class at all; demand a mechanism, revenue routed to holders, structural buybacks, genuine fee claims, before treating any long-tail position as investment rather than trade; treat narrative without mechanism as rental property, entered and exited with the attention cycle; and respect the unlock calendar as a standing map of scheduled supply, because in a market without a marginal buyer, the vesting schedule is the price forecast. None of this is exciting, which is rather the point: depressions transfer wealth from participants who need excitement to participants who can do without it.
The last observation belongs to the long view. Crypto has now run this experiment enough times for the shape to be familiar: a technology wave mints an asset class, the asset class overproduces claims on the future, the claims deflate for years while the technology quietly compounds, and the next wave is built by whoever kept working through the deflation. The 2026 altcoin depression is that middle phase executing on schedule, and its most reliable historical property is also its least appreciated: the assets that lead the next cycle are rarely the ones that led the last, and are frequently being built, unlisted and unpriced, during exactly this kind of silence. The $666 billion question is not when the long tail recovers; it is which fraction of the current long tail has anything to do with what recovers, and the honest answer, on every precedent available, is: less than its holders hope, and more than its obituaries allow.
For the record, the numbers to watch from here are few and public: the ex-majors market capitalization itself, whose trend break above the H1 downchannel would be the first structural all-clear; Bitcoin dominance, whose rollover has preceded every genuine altcoin rotation on record; the weekly unlock calendar against long-tail volumes, the supply-demand scissors in one glance; and the count of tokens with live buyback or fee-distribution mechanisms, the survivor class’s census, which grows every month and quietly defines what the next cycle’s investable universe will look like. Depressions end without announcements. They end in data series, and these four will carry the announcement when it comes.
However it resolves, the first half of 2026 has already earned its place in the asset class’s institutional memory, the six months in which the market stopped grading crypto on its future and started grading it, token by token, on its books.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Digital asset markets are volatile and you can lose your entire investment. Figures are current as of July 9, 2026, and may change. Always do your own research.
Ethereum’s price has been struggling to break past the $1,826 resistance in the short term, repeatedly returning to test main support near $1,580. With the price boxed in between these two critical levels, the broader market continues to search for direction amid heightened volatility.
Short-term resistance centers on $1,826Following a recent attempt to rebound, Ethereum slipped again below $1,826, an area that remains pivotal for short-term price action. The ongoing pressure highlights the importance of converting this region back into solid support for buyers to regain control of the narrative.
Charts indicate that $1,826 has repeatedly served as a major breakout level. When Ethereum trades below this threshold, upward movements tend to weaken, increasing the likelihood of continued consolidation. Analyst Cryptorphic notes that as long as Ethereum remains under $1,826, a cautious outlook prevails, and a more constructive structure will only emerge if the cryptocurrency reclaims this key level.
Cryptorphic emphasizes the critical importance of the $1,826 region for buyers, stressing that Ethereum must retake this area in order to regain a stronger technical position.
Ethereum’s position beneath its moving averages further intensifies resistance pressure. The upper band around $1,800, coupled with the $1,826 mark, creates a concentrated area where selling remains pronounced. Unless this resistance is decisively broken, attention could shift back to the support zone between $1,625 and $1,621.
On the other hand, should Ethereum manage to clear $1,826 and hold above it, traders may see a clearer sign of renewed buying strength, with the potential for a near-term recovery gaining momentum.
$1,580 emerges as key level on broader timeframesLooking at the weekly chart, $1,580 stands out as a more significant technical threshold. Ethereum has treated this region as a strong demand area several times in recent years, making the current test especially notable for participants monitoring the long-term trend.
According to Ali Charts, historical reactions at $1,580 have driven substantial upside moves: a 149% surge in October 2023 and a 203% expansion following an April 2025 test. This track record has put special focus on the present price action as traders wait to gauge the outcome of the latest retest.
LevelTechnical significance$1,826Primary short-term resistance that needs to be reclaimed$1,625–$1,621Immediate support range to watch if resistance holds$1,580Main weekly support, crucial for broader trend structureA recent bounce has brought Ethereum back into the $1,800 range, but repeated tests of this horizontal support raise concerns that buying liquidity could be depleted over time, thus weakening the foundation. As a result, market watchers are closely tracking whether Ethereum can close above $1,580 on higher timeframes, a factor that may determine the next major move.
Ali Charts observes that holding the $1,580 level keeps the potential for another upward expansion alive, while losing this support would likely erode prospects for a sustained recovery.
As long as Ethereum trades above $1,580, the recovery scenario remains on the table. However, a clear breakdown of this support would increase the risk of a deeper pullback, putting the existing bullish case under greater strain.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.
Circle’s EURC launch on Base is a small but important stablecoin infrastructure move. It brings a native euro-denominated token to one of the most watched Ethereum layer-2 networks at a time when European regulation is becoming much more concrete.
That combination matters. Base needs more native liquidity tools, and Circle needs to show that its MiCA-compliant strategy can translate into useful distribution across active networks.
For more details, visit the official Circle platform.
TL;DR Circle launched native EURC on Base.The rollout gives the Ethereum layer-2 a euro-denominated stablecoin aligned with Circle’s MiCA strategy.It adds another liquidity building block for Base as regulated stablecoin competition intensifies. Why EURC On Base Matters Most crypto liquidity is still dollar-denominated, but euro stablecoins are becoming more important as MiCA changes the European operating environment. A native EURC deployment gives Base users a cleaner way to move euro liquidity without relying only on bridged or wrapped assets.
For developers, native stablecoins can matter because they reduce friction in payments, DeFi, and trading pairs. For users, they make the network feel more complete.
Circle’s MiCA Advantage Circle has been positioning itself as one of the stablecoin issuers most prepared for Europe’s new rulebook. EURC on Base fits that strategy because it combines regulatory positioning with distribution on a fast-growing chain.
The broader stablecoin market is becoming more regional and more regulated. That means issuers with clear licenses and compliant products may be able to capture share where unregulated tokens face restrictions.
Base Gets Another Liquidity Piece For Base, the launch adds to an ecosystem already trying to build depth across DeFi, payments, and consumer applications. Stablecoins are the settlement layer for much of that activity.
If EURC finds real usage, it could help Base become more attractive to European users and projects looking for euro-denominated on-chain rails.
The Part That Matters The useful way to read this story is not as a standalone headline about Circle, but as part of the wider pressure building around Stablecoins coverage this week. Markets have been jumping quickly from one catalyst to the next, so the cleaner value for readers is in separating the actual development from the instant reaction around it. In this case, the source material gives us a concrete event to work from, rather than a loose rumour or a recycled social-media talking point.
That distinction matters because crypto readers are being asked to process a lot at once: ETF flows, regulatory actions, exchange listings, protocol upgrades, wallet movements, and political signals. A story like this is most useful when it helps them understand where EURC fits into that broader map. It does not need to be inflated into a guaranteed price call to be worth covering. It simply needs to explain what changed, who is affected, and why the market is paying attention today.
The caveat is also important. Even clean source-backed developments can be overinterpreted when traders are hunting for a fast narrative. A listing does not automatically create lasting demand, a regulatory update does not immediately settle every legal question, and an on-chain movement does not always translate into a finished sale. The better read is to treat the development as a fresh data point and then watch whether follow-up activity confirms the direction of travel.
For NewsBTC readers, that means keeping the focus on what can actually be verified from the source and avoiding the temptation to turn every update into a sweeping market verdict. The story is strong enough on its own terms: it gives investors and traders another piece of context around Stablecoins, while leaving room for the next filing, dashboard update, wallet movement, governance vote, or exchange notice to decide whether the angle grows into something bigger.
This article is based on information from Circle.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Nearly every transaction on Ethereum’s layer-2 networks passes through a single machine, run by a single company, called a sequencer. It orders trades, sets the pace of the chain, earns the fees, and can go dark or say no. This guide explains what sequencers actually do, why the most decentralized ecosystem in crypto runs its fast lanes through central operators, what can and cannot go wrong, and the roadmaps racing to fix it.
Summary
Ethereum layer 2 networks rely on centralized sequencers that order transactions, collect fees, and can temporarily halt network activity during outages. Sequencers cannot steal user funds because Ethereum secures transaction validity, but they can influence transaction ordering, censorship, and network availability. Rollup developers are working toward decentralized sequencing models to reduce reliance on a single operator while preserving Ethereum’s security and scalability. Table of Contents
Rollups in one section, and the sequencer’s jobWhat the sequencer can do to you, and what it cannotThe outage record: what centralization has actually costThe economics: why giving it up is hardThe fixes: three roads to a neutral sequencerHow to read an L2’s actual trust profileFrequently asked questions Here is an uncomfortable fact about the scaled, modern Ethereum: when you swap on an Arbitrum exchange, mint on Base, or pay on Optimism, your transaction is received, ordered, and confirmed by one machine, operated by one company. That machine is the sequencer, and it occupies a position of quiet, enormous power: it decides which transactions enter the chain and in what order, it collects the network’s fee revenue, and when it stops, as major sequencers have during outages, the entire network simply pauses, every app frozen at once.
The layer-2 rollups are how Ethereum scaled, moving execution off the congested base chain while inheriting its security, and they now carry a majority of the ecosystem’s activity. That success makes the sequencer the most consequential piece of centralized infrastructure in an ecosystem whose founding promise is decentralization, and the tension is not a secret; it is an engineering roadmap, with every major rollup publicly committed to fixing it and none finished. Meanwhile the base layer itself is being redesigned around adjacent ideas, with the coming Glamsterdam upgrade enshrining proposer-builder separation into the protocol, which will reshape the environment sequencers operate in.
This guide covers the sequencer honestly: what a rollup is and what job the sequencer does inside it, the specific powers a centralized sequencer holds and their real-world failure record, the crucial distinction between what a sequencer can and cannot do to your funds, the economics of sequencing and why operators are slow to give it up, the decentralization designs, shared sequencing, based sequencing, sequencer sets, competing to replace the single machine, and how to evaluate any L2’s actual trust profile today.
Rollups in one section, and the sequencer’s job A rollup is a blockchain that executes transactions on its own fast, cheap environment, then posts compressed records of everything it did to Ethereum, inheriting the base chain’s security for its history. Optimistic rollups post results and allow a challenge window for fraud proofs; validity rollups post cryptographic proofs that the results are correct. In both designs, Ethereum is the court of final record, and the rollup is a high-throughput execution venue whose state can always, in principle, be reconstructed and verified from the data it posts down below.
Someone, though, has to run the fast venue in real time: receive the flood of incoming transactions, decide their order, execute them, hand users instant confirmations, and batch the results down to Ethereum. That someone is the sequencer. It is best understood as three roles fused: the mempool and matching engine that orders the flow, the block producer that executes it, and the shipping department that posts batches to the base chain. The ordering role is the powerful one, because in any financial system, transaction order is money: who gets the arbitrage, whose liquidation lands first, who buys before the price moves. On Ethereum’s base layer that power is fragmented across thousands of validators and an entire adversarial supply chain built to capture it; on almost every major rollup today, it belongs to one operator, appointed by the team, running the official sequencer.
Why did the most decentralization-obsessed ecosystem in software ship its scaling layer this way? Because centralized sequencing is fast, simple, and safe to bootstrap: one machine gives instant confirmations, no consensus overhead, clean upgrade paths, and a single throat to choke during the inevitable early bugs. The architects’ wager was that sequencing could be centralized temporarily because the rollup design strictly limits what the sequencer can do, a wager the next two sections examine from both sides.
What the sequencer can do to you, and what it cannot The sequencer’s powers are real, and enumerating them precisely matters more than the usual hand-waving in either direction.
What it can do. It can censor: refuse to include your transaction, whether by policy, error, or legal compulsion, and regulated operators have compliance obligations that make selective exclusion more than hypothetical. It can order: place its own or favored transactions ahead of yours, extracting the value that ordering confers, invisibly and profitably; most major operators publicly forswear this, and the forswearing is a policy, not a protocol guarantee. It can stop: sequencer outages have repeatedly frozen major rollups for hours, halting every application simultaneously, a failure mode with no analogue on the base chain, where thousands of validators mean the chain simply does not stop. And it can set the pace and price of inclusion, since it is the sole gateway to the network’s blockspace in real time.
What it cannot do, and this is the rollup design’s genuine achievement: it cannot steal. The sequencer cannot forge a transaction spending your funds, because every transaction requires your signature and the fraud or validity proofs posted to Ethereum would expose any invented state. It cannot rewrite settled history, because the history lives on the base chain. And, critically, it cannot permanently trap you, because well-built rollups include an escape hatch: a mechanism to force-include transactions directly through Ethereum, bypassing the sequencer entirely, so that even a fully censoring or dead sequencer can only delay users, not imprison their funds. The delay is real, force inclusion is slow and clumsy, but the distinction between a chokepoint that can inconvenience you and a custodian that can rob you is the entire difference between the rollup model and a centralized exchange, and it is why the ecosystem tolerated centralized sequencing at all. The trust profile resembles a bridge with a strong trust-minimized design rather than a multisig one: concentrated operationally, constrained cryptographically.
The honest risk summary, then: your assets on a major rollup are secured by Ethereum; your access, timing, and fair ordering are secured by one company’s machine, policies, and legal situation. For a casual user the distinction rarely bites. For a trader whose profits live in ordering, for a protocol whose execution quality depends on fair ordering and whose liquidations must land on time, and for anyone in a jurisdiction a compliant operator might be told to exclude, the sequencer is the trust assumption that matters most and is audited least.
The outage record: what centralization has actually cost The sequencer risk is not theoretical, and the incident record is the best syllabus for what single-operator infrastructure means in practice. Every major rollup has suffered sequencer downtime: hours-long halts from surging inscription traffic, stalls from software bugs in batch posting, freezes during upgrades that went sideways. The pattern across incidents is consistent and instructive. Funds were never lost, the base-chain security model held every time, and the networks resumed with their histories intact, which is the design working as promised. What stopped, each time, was everything else: trading froze mid-move, liquidation engines could not reach positions as prices moved, arbitrage broke against live markets elsewhere, and users learned that force-inclusion, the theoretical escape hatch, was in practice too slow and too technical to matter inside an incident measured in hours.
The subtler lessons sit in the second-order effects. During one prominent outage, the network’s applications discovered their own emergency procedures assumed a working sequencer: pausing markets, updating oracles, and even communicating with users all routed through the machine that was down. During another, the resumption itself became a trading event, as hours of queued transactions landed in a burst against stale prices, a miniature of the reconciliation dynamics every gap-prone market knows. And across all of them, the operator’s incident response, status pages, engineer availability, post-mortems, was the de facto governance of a multi-billion-dollar economy for the duration, performed by a company under no protocol obligation to perform it well.
The record’s summary is fair to both sides of the argument: the constrained-power design has truly protected funds through every failure, and the single-machine design has just as surely imposed correlated, economy-wide halts that a decentralized system would not, which is precisely the trade the roadmaps exist to unwind.
It is also worth placing the sequencer inside the rollup’s full trust stack, because it is the most visible dependency but not the only one. A rollup’s security rests on three legs: the data it posts to Ethereum, which is what makes reconstruction possible and which the blob-fee era made radically cheaper; the proof system, fraud or validity, that polices state correctness, several of which still run with training wheels, security councils and permissioned challengers standing in for mature proofs; and the sequencer, which governs liveness and ordering. Independent frameworks grade rollups across all three, and the grades routinely surprise users who assumed the marketing: networks celebrated as trust-minimized frequently carry upgrade keys and council powers that outrank the sequencer question entirely. The sequencer is the right place to start reading an L2’s trust profile. It is the wrong place to stop.
The economics: why giving it up is hard Sequencing is not just power; it is revenue, and the revenue explains the pace of decentralization better than any technical obstacle. A sequencer collects the difference between what users pay for L2 transactions and what it costs to post their data to Ethereum, a margin that widened dramatically when Ethereum’s blob-based data pricing collapsed posting costs, plus whatever ordering value it chooses to capture or auction. For a major rollup this is a nine-figure annual business, and it currently flows to the operating company or foundation, funding development and, in several cases, constituting the primary revenue behind the network’s token.
Decentralizing the sequencer means distributing exactly this revenue, and the designs on the table are, among other things, proposals about who gets paid. That is not cynicism; it is the correct lens for evaluating the roadmaps, because a decentralization plan that never specifies where sequencing revenue goes is a plan that has not confronted its hardest question. It also frames the user’s side of the bargain today: centralized sequencing quietly subsidizes the networks users enjoy, the same revenue-and-token linkage question running through every fee-generating protocol, and every step toward neutrality redistributes a pie someone currently owns.
The numbers behind the revenue argument are worth one concrete paragraph. An L2’s gross margin is the spread between user fees collected and data costs paid to Ethereum, and the blob-fee era transformed that spread: posting costs for major rollups collapsed by orders of magnitude while user fees, though lower, fell less, leaving the large networks operating at gross margins that most software businesses would envy. Public dashboards track the arithmetic in real time, revenue in, data costs out, and the residual accrues today to whoever runs the sequencer. That residual funds engineering, subsidizes user fees during growth pushes, and, for token-bearing networks, constitutes the cash flow every valuation argument ultimately references.
Decentralization designs must answer where it goes: to a staked sequencer set as yield, to a shared network as service fees, to Ethereum validators under based sequencing, or to users as rebates, and each answer creates and destroys different constituencies. The engineering of neutral sequencing was largely solved on whiteboards years ago; the political economy of its revenue is the part still being negotiated, which is the single most clarifying fact about why the timelines are what they are.
The fixes: three roads to a neutral sequencer Three families of designs compete to replace the single machine, each trading different things.
The first is the sequencer set: replace one operator with a permissioned or staked committee running consensus among themselves, rotating leadership, so that censorship requires collusion and outage requires correlated failure. It is the incremental path, and its critics note that a small committee of known entities is a smaller improvement than it appears, particularly against legal compulsion, which scales to committees easily.
The second is shared sequencing: independent networks whose business is providing decentralized ordering as a service to many rollups at once, with the added promise of atomic cross-rollup composability, transactions that execute across multiple L2s together or not at all, recreating some of the seamlessness the multi-rollup world fractured. The trade is a new external dependency and, again, the revenue question: a shared sequencer wants paying customers, and rollups guard their margins.
The third and most Ethereum-native is based sequencing: hand ordering back to Ethereum itself, letting the base chain’s validators sequence L2 transactions as part of block production. It maximally inherits Ethereum’s neutrality and censorship resistance, at the cost of Ethereum’s pace, confirmations at base-layer speed rather than the instant feel users have learned, though pre-confirmation designs aim to restore the speed. Based sequencing’s fortunes are entangled with the base layer’s own evolution: the Glamsterdam upgrade’s enshrined proposer-builder separation restructures exactly the block-production pipeline that based rollups would plug into, which is why sequencer roadmaps and Ethereum’s core roadmap now read as one document with two authors.
No major rollup has completed any of the three. The public commitments are real, staged plans, published designs, testnets, and the timelines have slipped for years, because the current arrangement works, earns, and only embarrasses its operators when something breaks. The realistic forecast is a long middle period of committees and hybrid designs, with full neutrality arriving network by network, unevenly, this decade.
A note on terminology prevents one common confusion: the sequencer is not the prover, and decentralizing one does nothing for the other. The prover, in validity rollups, generates the cryptographic proofs of correct execution; the sequencer orders and executes. A network can decentralize sequencing while proving remains one machine, or the reverse, and the two roles fail differently: a dead prover delays finality on Ethereum while the chain keeps running, a dead sequencer halts the chain while finality of past batches stands. Roadmap language blurs the roles constantly, and reading which one a decentralization milestone actually addresses is a small skill that pays for itself.
How to read an L2’s actual trust profile For a user or builder choosing among rollups today, the sequencer question compresses into a practical checklist. Who runs the sequencer, and under what legal jurisdiction? Does the network have working force-inclusion, and what is its delay, the number that bounds worst-case censorship? What is the outage history, and did funds ever depend on the operator’s goodwill during one? Is there a published ordering policy, first-come-first-served, private mempool, auction, and any mechanism enforcing it beyond reputation? What stage is the decentralization roadmap actually at, running code versus blog post? And where does sequencing revenue go, because that answer predicts the roadmap’s pace better than the roadmap does.
The sequencer is the honest asterisk on Ethereum’s scaling triumph: the rollup ecosystem genuinely extended the base chain’s security to vastly more activity at vastly lower cost, and it did so by concentrating, temporarily and by design, the one power the base chain had most successfully dispersed. The asterisk is shrinking, slowly, under public pressure and published plans, and until it is gone, the single most useful thing a user can know about any L2 is exactly what its one important machine can and cannot do to them.
The wider stakes deserve a closing frame, because the sequencer question is Ethereum’s decentralization thesis meeting its scaling success, and the resolution will define what the ecosystem actually is. If the rollup era ends with a handful of corporate sequencers ordering most on-chain activity, then Ethereum will have rebuilt, at the execution layer, the intermediated structure it was designed to replace, with the base chain reduced to a settlement court for private venues. If the decentralization roadmaps deliver, based sequencing, credible committees, shared networks, then the scaling will have been genuine: more activity, same neutrality, the original promise kept at a hundred times the throughput. Both futures are still open, the incentives lean toward the first and the culture toward the second, and the outcome will be decided not by white papers but by the unglamorous engineering and revenue negotiations described above, network by network, over the next several years. Users are not spectators to that contest: the trust profiles are public, the alternatives are one bridge away, and where activity settles is the only vote the operators have ever reliably counted.
A practical postscript for builders, finally: sequencer risk is inherited. An application deployed on a rollup imports its sequencer’s outage record, censorship surface, and ordering policy as silent dependencies, and the mature practice, visible in how serious protocols now deploy, is to treat chain selection as a security decision, document the force-inclusion path in the runbook, and design liquidation and oracle machinery to fail safely through a halt. The sequencer is infrastructure, and the first rule of infrastructure applies: it is invisible until the day it is the only thing that matters.
The reader’s shortlist for following the story: the independent rollup-risk frameworks that grade each network’s sequencer, proofs, and upgrade keys; the networks’ own decentralization roadmap pages, read with dates, not adjectives; the outage post-mortems, which teach more per paragraph than any documentation; and the base-layer upgrade calendar, since Glamsterdam-era changes to Ethereum’s block pipeline reshape what based sequencing can offer. The chokepoint is well documented by everyone except the marketing, and the documentation is where the truth lives.
If one image should survive this guide, make it the geometry: Ethereum scaled by turning one broad, slow, neutral road into a system of fast toll lanes, each with a single operator at the booth. The lanes carry the traffic, the operators are competent, and the toll revenue is building better booths. But the map of who can stop which cars, and where, is now the most important map in the ecosystem, and every reader of this piece can pull it up for any network in about five minutes. Do that, once, for wherever your funds live. It is the highest-yield five minutes in crypto self-custody.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Network designs and roadmaps described are current as of July 9, 2026, and change frequently. Always do your own research.
Frequently asked questions What is an L2 sequencer in simple terms? A sequencer is the machine that runs a layer-2 rollup in real time: it receives transactions, decides their order, executes them, gives users instant confirmations, and posts compressed batches of the results to Ethereum. On nearly every major rollup today, the sequencer is a single server operated by the network’s founding company, making it the most centralized component in Ethereum’s scaling stack.
Can a sequencer steal my funds? No. The sequencer cannot forge transactions from your account, because everything requires your signature, and it cannot fake results, because the rollup’s proofs posted to Ethereum would expose invalid state. Its powers are limited to ordering, delaying, censoring, and halting. Well-designed rollups also include force-inclusion mechanisms that let users push transactions through via Ethereum directly, so even a hostile sequencer can delay but not permanently trap funds.
What happens when a sequencer goes down? The network effectively pauses: no new transactions confirm, and every application on the rollup freezes simultaneously until the operator restores service. Major rollups have suffered such outages lasting hours. Funds remain safe throughout, secured by Ethereum, but access stops, which matters greatly for time-sensitive positions like loans near liquidation.
Why are sequencers centralized if Ethereum is decentralized? Because centralized sequencing was the pragmatic way to launch: one operator provides instant confirmations, simple upgrades, and clean incident response while the technology matured. The rollup design constrains what the operator can do, and every major network has published a decentralization roadmap. The trade-off was consciously temporary; its length is the controversy.
What is based sequencing? Based sequencing hands transaction ordering back to Ethereum itself, letting the base chain’s validators sequence the rollup’s transactions during block production. It gives the rollup Ethereum’s full neutrality and censorship resistance, at the cost of slower confirmations, which pre-confirmation designs aim to offset. It is the most Ethereum-aligned of the decentralization paths.
What is a shared sequencer? A shared sequencer is an independent network that provides decentralized transaction ordering as a service to multiple rollups simultaneously. Beyond decentralization, its selling point is atomic cross-rollup composability, the ability for transactions to execute across several L2s together, which single-rollup sequencers cannot offer.
Do sequencers extract MEV from users? They can, since ordering power is exactly what MEV extraction requires, and a sequencer sees every transaction before it lands. Major operators publicly commit to neutral policies like first-come-first-served ordering, and some route ordering value into public goods or auctions. These are policies rather than protocol guarantees, which is a core argument for decentralizing the role.
How do I check how centralized a specific L2 is? Ask five questions: who operates the sequencer and where; whether force-inclusion exists and how long it takes; the network’s outage history; the published ordering policy; and the actual stage of the decentralization roadmap. Independent trackers grade major rollups on these dimensions, and the grades differ far more than the marketing does.
Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s tech newsletter covering the most important stories in blockchain. I’m Margaux Nijkerk, a reporter at CoinDesk.
We’re giving you a deeper look at the biggest trends, breakthroughs and debates shaping blockchain technology each week.
This week, we’re diving into Ethereum Institutional, a new nonprofit aimed at educating financial institutions and banks about Ethereum.
Ethereum's newest nonprofit is positioning itself asWall Street’s crypto sherpa, guiding banks and asset managers through the Ethereum ecosystem at a pivotal moment for the network.
For much of the past year, the conversation around Ethereum has been dominated by questions about its future. The Ethereum Foundation has faced mounting criticism over its role in the ecosystem, and, in response, has restructured its leadership, laid off staff and narrowed its focus to stewarding the protocol. At the same time, independent organizations have begun emerging to take on responsibilities that were once housed within the foundation.
The latest is Ethereum Institutional, a nonprofit launched last week with an ambitious goal: becoming the Ethereum ecosystem's front door for banks, asset managers and other financial institutions.
Its founders say the organization will serve as a neutral guide for enterprises exploring Ethereum, helping institutions understand the ecosystem, connect with developers and infrastructure providers, and navigate the network without promoting any single company or product.
Ethereum Institutional is led by David Walsh, Matthew Dawson and Marius Smith, whose backgrounds span traditional finance, technology and crypto. Walsh and Dawson previously worked on the Ethereum Foundation's enterprise engagement team, while Smith joined after senior roles at Google and EigenLayer developer Eigen Labs.
"We've built up around 500 relationships over the course of the year, and what's consistently come back was that they appreciate having a neutral counterpart," Dawson told CoinDesk in an interview. "There's thousands of teams in the Ethereum ecosystem... the feedback sometimes has been, 'This is overwhelming.'"
The organization is designed to fill what its founders see as a missing piece in Ethereum's institutional strategy.
Unlike companies building products on Ethereum, Ethereum Institutional says it will work across the ecosystem, helping enterprises evaluate use cases such as tokenization, stablecoins and digital asset infrastructure while introducing them to the teams best suited for their needs.
"Navigating what is already a new and fairly complex technology and the decentralized ecosystem is a bit daunting," Dawson said. "Having a trusted and neutral partner that can help with that navigation... can accelerate that journey and give them confidence."
Its launch comes as Ethereum itself reaches an inflection point. The leaders steering the network are increasingly formalizing how different parts of the ecosystem are taking on responsibilities and roles. The Ethereum Foundation has made clear it intends to focus more narrowly on protocol development while encouraging independent organizations to lead areas such as business development, ecosystem growth and institutional engagement.
For Ethereum Institutional's founders, becoming an independent nonprofit rather than remaining within the foundation was a deliberate choice.
"The EF has always been quite vocal about its principle of subtraction," Dawson said, referring to the organization diving up responsibilities for the network to other organizations . "This is an example of that increasing decentralization, and the number of nodes participating in representing Ethereum."
Operating outside the foundation also gives the organization greater freedom, Walsh said.
"We feel like we have a lot more autonomy and freedom to work as an independent entity," he said. "We can get a bit more opinionated, and a bit more aggressive, in terms of being able to support these teams."
For years, the Ethereum Foundation has walked a careful line in how much influence it exerts over the ecosystem. Its mandate has largely been to coordinate protocol development and steward Ethereum’s technical roadmap, rather than act as a central authority driving business development or adoption. But as the network grew, some in the community pushed for the foundation to take on a more active role in areas like institutional outreach and ecosystem coordination, responsibilities it has increasingly chosen to decentralize instead.
Ethereum Institutional joins a growing network of organizations taking on specialized roles within Ethereum. Last month, EthLabs launched to support ecosystem development, while firms such as Etherealize, launched in 2025, have focused on bringing institutions onchain through commercial products and services.
Walsh sees Ethereum Institutional as complementary to these other firms rather than competitive. "We've taken a slightly different approach, where it's a bit more about education and a bit more neutral in terms of what solutions we want to help institutions adopt."
The founders argue that while much of the online conversation around Ethereum has focused on governance debates and competition from rival blockchains, institutional momentum has continued to build behind the scenes.
He points to recent tokenization initiatives from firms including BlackRock, JPMorgan and Robinhood as evidence that Ethereum remains the dominant platform for institutional blockchain deployments.
For Dawson, there's no contradiction between Ethereum's cypherpunk origins and Wall Street's growing interest, even as many feel like those interests may be separating.
"Those cypherpunk values translate into operational resilience for institutions," he said. "Lack of downtime and security are all things that institutions are absolutely obsessed with."
The founders don't believe Ethereum's future belongs solely to banks. Instead, they see institutional adoption as one piece of a much broader vision.
"I think of it as the internet," Walsh said. "There's room for everyone: DeFi, cross-border payments, banking the unbanked, and Wall Street."
Read more: EthLabs launches as Ethereum undergoes its biggest leadership transition in years
Notes from the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Security team on running coordinated AI agents against real protocol code, including how we organize the work, what holds up under scrutiny, and what client teams and security researchers can take from it. This post stands on its own; later posts will go deeper on individual clients.
What we've been running, and what surprised us On the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Security team, we've been running coordinated AI agents against the kinds of systems the network depends on, like systems software, cryptographic code, and contracts that have to be right. The agents found real bugs. One is now public: a remotely-triggerable panic in libp2p's gossipsub, a core part of the peer-to-peer layer Ethereum consensus clients run on, fixed and disclosed as CVE-2026-34219 with credit to the team.
Agents finding bugs wasn't the surprise. The surprise was how little of the work went into finding them, and how much went into telling the real bugs from the ones that just looked real.
This post is for client teams and security researchers who want to do the same thing. It covers how we organize the agents, the bar a candidate has to clear before it counts as a finding, and the habits that keep the results trustworthy.
Teams elsewhere are converging on the same recipe. Anthropic's Frontier Red Team built an agent that writes property-based tests and found real bugs across the Python ecosystem. Cloudflare ran a frontier model through a security-research harness against their own systems. Everyone lands on the same loop: point a capable model at a codebase, let it search, and triage what comes back. So the real question is how to do this without drowning in confident-sounding noise.
One caveat up front: tooling for agent-driven audits moves fast, and any specific setup is out of date in a few weeks. So this post is deliberately about the methods, which are persistent, rather than the tooling. Disclosure is its own topic and will probably be its own post.
An agent is a search tool, not an oracle An agent pointed at a codebase is a search tool, a lot like a fuzzer. The difference is what comes back. A fuzzer hands you a crash and a stack trace. An agent hands you a lot more, including a write-up (call chain, impact claim, suggested severity) and the artifacts to back it, like a proof-of-concept you can run against the real code.
All of that makes the result easy to read and easy to trust, the running proof-of-concept most of all. So don't count how many candidates an agent produces. Count how many turn out to be real.
How the work is organized We run many agents in parallel against one target. They coordinate through the repository itself, with shared state in version control and no central process handing out work. An agent writes down a claim where the others can see it, does the work, and commits.
We got this approach from Anthropic's writeup on building a C compiler with a fleet of agents, which coordinates the same way. There's no central coordinator to build or maintain, and less that can go wrong.
The roles are generated by the work that's discovered:
Recon turns an attack surface into concrete, testable hypotheses. Not "audit the decoder" but "this field is trusted past this point; here's the property it should keep, the way it might break, and the proof that would settle it."Hunting takes one hypothesis, traces the code path, and tries to build a reproducer.Gap-filling looks at what was accepted and what was rejected, writes the next batch of hypotheses, and tracks coverage so the agents don't keep going over the same ground.Validation re-checks each candidate independently, removes duplicates, and decides. We didn't invent this pipeline. Cloudflare describes the same stages, recon, parallel hunting, independent validation, deduplication, reporting, and their writeup helped shape ours.
Here's what a candidate looks like before it counts as a finding:
target: component and entry point an attacker can actually reach invariant: the property that must hold mechanism: the specific way it might be made to break success: observable proof: a panic, a stall, an accepted-invalid input reproducer: a self-contained artifact that runs against the real code dedup: a key, so two agents don't chase the same thing The schema is there for a reason. It forces a specific, testable claim and a clear definition of done. An agent that has to write down an observable proof can't fall back on "this looks risky."
Reproducible or it didn't happen One rule matters more than any other. A candidate isn't a finding until there's a self-contained artifact that reproduces the failure against the real code, and that runs for someone who didn't write it.
The reproducer doesn't read the write-up, and it doesn't care how confident the model sounded. It either runs or it doesn't.
Most of its value is in the false positives it catches. Three of them come up over and over, and each one is the agent getting a pass for the wrong reason:
A panic that only happens in a debug build. Compile and run it the way the software actually ships, and the value just wraps around. Nothing crashes. It looks like a crash, but it isn't one.A reproducer that builds some internal value by hand, one no real input could ever produce, because every path an attacker controls rejects it earlier. The bug only "reproduces" against a function that nothing reachable calls that way.In formal-verification work, a proof that goes through but doesn't mean what you wanted. The statement is trivially true regardless of what the code does, or it's weaker than the property you meant to capture. The verifier is satisfied, but the theorem doesn't constrain the behavior you actually cared about. None of this is new. It's the same thing as a test that passes because it doesn't actually check anything. What's new is the volume. An agent writes the useless version as fast as the real one, and just as confidently. So the check has to be automatic. You can't count on the agent to catch itself.
Signal-to-noise is most of the work Most candidates are wrong, duplicate, or out of scope. That's not a problem with the method; that's how it works. The goal is to reject the wrong ones fast and back the real ones with proof that's hard to argue with.
Every candidate that survives gets two independent checks. Can a real attacker actually reach it in a normal configuration? And what does it cost the attacker to pull off, compared to what it costs the network if it works? A bug that any single peer can trigger is very different from one that needs special access or a huge amount of resources.
Everything gets checked against a running list of what's already known, fixed, or rejected. Without that, the agents keep rediscovering the same closed issue and reporting it again and again.
Acceptance rates vary a lot from target to target, and that variation is useful on its own. Run this against mature, heavily audited code and almost nothing survives, which is still worth knowing. "We looked hard and found nothing" is a real result. Run it against less-explored code, or against formally verified code, where a machine-checked proof covers a model and the deployed bytecode is only assumed to match it, and more gets through.
We're not the only ones who found that the triage is the hard part. Cloudflare's main takeaway was that a narrow scope beats broad scanning. Anthropic's property-based-testing agent generated something like a thousand candidate reports, then used ranking and expert review to get down to a top tier that held up about 86 percent of the time. The generation was the easy part. I'm not going to publish our own numbers here; tied to a specific target, they'd say more about the target than about the method.
What the agents are good at, and where they mislead There's hype in both directions, so here's a plain list of what the agents do well and where they mislead.
Good atMisleading atReading the spec and the code togetherCall chains that look reachable but aren'tStating and checking a real invariantGaming the success check (a pass for the wrong reason).Drafting a reproducer from a one-line ideaInflating severity to match how dramatic the write-up soundsSuggesting a root cause before you've lookedBugs that span a sequence of valid steps The split isn't even steady from one task to the next. Stanislav Fort, testing a range of models on real vulnerabilities, calls this a jagged frontier, or a model that recovers a full exploit chain on one codebase can fail basic data-flow tracing on another. You can't assume one good result means the next will hold up, which is another reason every candidate gets checked on its own.
The last row is the important one. A single agent session is good at one-shot reasoning and bad at bugs that span a sequence of steps, where each step is valid and only the order is wrong. For those, the agent isn't the search tool. Its job is to suggest which sequences are worth running through a stateful test harness. Used that way, it works well. Used as a replacement for the harness, it misses the most expensive bugs there are, the ones that only show up across a sequence.
Keeping it honest A few habits do most of the work of making agent findings trustworthy, and none of them are complicated.
Provenance on every artifact: what produced it, with what context, against which revision. A finding should be something you can re-run months later.Determinism where it counts: one environment, one way to build and run, so "reproduces" means the same thing on every machine, not just the one where it was found.Norms, not scripts: tell agents what matters, the invariants and the bar for a real finding, instead of a numbered procedure. Over-scripted agents break the same way over-specified tests do, they keep following the steps after the steps stop making sense. A study of repository context files found the same thing: the extra requirements lowered task success and raised cost by over 20%, and the authors recommend keeping context to the minimal requirements.A person makes the final call: agents suggest. They don't decide what's real, what's a duplicate of a known issue, or what gets disclosed and when. The bottleneck moved AI didn't replace the security researcher. It moved the work. The time that used to go into coming up with and chasing down hypotheses now goes into judging them at scale, including building the oracle, running the triage, keeping the list of known issues, and handling disclosure.
The bottleneck didn't go away. It moved from finding bugs to trusting the results, which is a better place for it, because that's where human judgment actually matters. But it's still a bottleneck, and ignoring that is how you end up shipping a wrong "it's fine."
The practices that make this work aren't new. Reproducible failures, real oracles, and careful triage are the same practices that turned fuzzing from a research topic into standard practice over the last fifteen years. The tools are new. The practices aren't.
How fast the tools keep changing is an open question. Nicholas Carlini, careful and once a skeptic himself, argues the exponential case is worth taking seriously, even while he keeps wide error bars on it. If the generation side climbs that fast, the judgment side has to climb with it, or the gap between what gets produced and what actually gets verified only widens.
For the systems Ethereum depends on, that's the part that matters. Agents let us cover far more ground than we could by hand. In exchange, they ask for more careful judgment, across a much bigger pile of confident-sounding claims. That's a trade worth making, as long as you remember that the judgment is the real product.
Crypto-related stocks in U.S. markets continued their rally during trading hours, with MARA surging 15.27%.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), US-listed crypto-related stocks continued to strengthen during intraday trading. Details: Strategy (MSTR) rose 2.11%; Circle (CRCL) gained 0.83%; MARA Holdings (MARA) surged 15.27% after announcing the acquisition of a Texas-based 2000MW computing power park project company for up to $600 million; Riot Platforms (RIOT) climbed 6.1%.
1 hours ago
Security Warning: Abnormal on-chain fund flows detected for the CodexField project on BNB Chain.
On-chain investigator Specter has issued a community security alert, warning of potential fund misappropriation risks associated with the CodexField project on BNB Chain. On-chain tracking shows the project has amassed over $85 million in funds. Specter detected abnormal on-chain fund flows yesterday: a wallet bridged 17.3 million USDT from TRON to Ethereum, then swapped the tokens for DAI via Bitget Swap on Polygon. So far, $6.5 million has been transferred out, while the remaining $10.8 million is still in transit. The funds were originally bridged from Ethereum to TRON roughly six months ago, and the source wallet is linked to CodexField’s deposit contract. Below are key addresses for users to verify on their own: EVM: 0xBc606358910b3720d136F0d4Ce12b759C270747a TRON: TQNTEYadFVVQeobBtctSjurJ5RpfBsTmqh, TAzpg8L1WkkzCxxZk8TYnvaRYahehh52MK Related deposit contract: 0x9E6A75b546B65E7B9D34E2c9aB8Fe224B9aA52AA Additional red flags: The project requires a minimum $100 deposit for participation. Blockchain security tool Blocksec MetaSuites initially labeled the deposit contract as "Fake CodexField", but Specter’s follow-up investigation found the contract is actually operated by the CodexField team itself. The project uses multiple domains and subdomains to collect user deposits, and the team previously shared these domains via official channels. Its fund flow pattern is unusual, deviating from standard fund management practices: the project bridges funds across multiple blockchains, routes them through intermediate wallets, and ultimately sends assets to centralized exchanges. Specter noted that based on on-chain activity, the project warrants high vigilance. It advises all users interacting with CodexField to exercise extreme caution until the team provides a transparent explanation of its fund movements.
1 hours ago
Post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security closes $17 million seed round.
QIZ Security, a crypto posture and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) management platform, announced the completion of a $17 million seed funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital. The capital will be used to accelerate product R&D and market expansion. QIZ Security was co-founded by Ben Volkow, Lenny Ridel, and Itan Barmes; the team has years of experience in cybersecurity, enterprise services, and post-quantum transformation, with Barmes previously leading Deloitte’s global quantum cybersecurity readiness team. Its platform helps enterprises identify and assess crypto asset risks and implement remediation measures, and is currently applied in industries including finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. It has also established partnerships with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, and IBM, among others.
1 hours ago
Hyperliquid recommends that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally recognize that on-chain protocols are not required to register, and non-custodial wallets do not serve as financial intermediaries.
Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and Phantom have jointly submitted comments to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in response to the agency’s request for feedback on whether existing rules keep pace with the evolution of financial technology, proposing to explicitly extend the distinction between "building tools" and "operating regulated businesses" to on-chain markets. The comments note that software engineers have been developing matching engines for regulated futures trading platforms for decades, and the CFTC has never classified them as trading platform operators. However, developers in the digital asset sector have long lacked such clarity, forcing many to opt for offshore development. The current CFTC, led by Chairman Selig, is working to address this gap and carve out room for innovation for fintech firms in digital asset and derivatives markets. The two entities put forward three key recommendations: First, explicitly confirm that merely publishing on-chain protocol software itself does not require registration — a factor often decisive for engineers when choosing where to develop. Second, establish a clear path for the CFTC’s registration bodies to operate regulated functions using on-chain infrastructure, enabling trading platforms and clearinghouses to replace decades-old legacy systems with transparent infrastructure. Third, formalize Phantom’s recent no-action letter into official rules, eliminating the need for self-custody wallet providers to apply for approved exemptions on a case-by-case basis. HPC and Phantom stress that self-custody and transparent on-chain systems can embed investor protection directly into technology, while regulated intermediaries retain responsibility for issues that technology cannot resolve independently. This approach will bring the next generation of financial markets within reach of U.S. consumers.
1 hours ago
Micron raises its U.S. investment plan to $250 billion, betting on demand for AI memory chips.
Micron Technology plans to increase spending on its new U.S. factory to $250 billion to meet the surging demand for memory chips driven by the global artificial intelligence boom. The move adds $50 billion to Micron’s previously announced $200 billion commitment to expanding domestic U.S. chip manufacturing, covering projects in New York, Idaho, and Virginia. The expenditure is expected to run through 2035, and will help the company achieve its target of producing 40% of its DRAM products in the U.S. within the next decade.
1 hours ago
Analysis: Market FUD sentiment toward SOL hits its highest point in 2026, a typical bullish signal.
Crypto research firm Santiment notes that market FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) surrounding SOL has hit its highest level in 2026, a development that typically signals a bullish indicator. Currently, Solana is facing a toxic mix of negative sentiment: trading volume has fallen to its lowest level of 2026, while negative comments have just spiked to their highest daily mark this year. Much of the frustration stems from the fact that despite Solana’s strong narrative around tokenized stocks and real-world asset (RWA) activity, its price has failed to deliver meaningful returns for traders. This is where it gets interesting: when sentiment is excessively negative and trading activity is thin, large holders (whales) often encounter less retail selling resistance if they choose to push prices higher. At a time when traders least anticipate a rebound, SOL may be in this low-attention, high-FUD zone, primed for rapid, sharp price fluctuations.
After several weeks marked by high volatility, Ethereum shows signs of recovery that revive investors’ expectations. The second most important cryptocurrency has rebounded from its low recorded in June and again attracts analysts’ attention. Several technical indicators and the growing interest of institutional players support a favorable short-term scenario. However, some signals still call for caution, as the market remains divided between the prospect of a new rise and the risk of a temporary pullback.
In brief Ethereum has rebounded 17% from its June low and is currently trading around 1,750 dollars. Several analysts believe that breaking current resistances could pave the way back to 2,000 dollars, or even 2,500 dollars. Ethereum spot ETFs have recorded their longest streak of increases since April, supported by a renewed interest from institutional investors. Despite this positive momentum, an RSI at 70 places Ethereum in overbought territory, raising the risk of a short-term correction. Ethereum Consolidates Its Rebound Following Its June Low The market shows signs of recovery after several weeks of weakness. Ethereum is now trading at levels closely watched by analysts, who observe several technical thresholds that could influence the next trend.
Here are the key figures reflecting the magnitude of this new development:
Ether price at the time of writing: 1,745 dollars. 8% increase over one week. 17% rise since the June low. Resistance located between 1,820 and 1,850 dollars. Double bottom pattern formed below 1,800 dollars. After testing its resistance zone, the asset was rejected. Despite this, several observers believe that staying above the current support is an encouraging signal for the future. Ted, an analyst active on X, considers that a sustained breakout of this resistance could pave the way for a rise to 2,000 dollars.
Meanwhile, Poseidon believes that the double bottom pattern formed by Ethereum is a configuration generally interpreted as a favorable signal for continuing the rebound. The analyst goes further by estimating that the price could reach 2,500 dollars before September if this momentum continues.
Institutional Flows Strengthen the Bullish Outlook The renewed interest from institutional investors accompanies this market improvement. Data shows that ETH-backed spot ETFs have recorded five consecutive days of gains. This is their longest positive streak since April, a factor closely watched by markets.
Ethereum spot ETFs register a new series of net inflows, signaling renewed interest from institutional investors as ETH price tries to consolidate its rebound. Source: SoSoValue
This dynamic reflects an increase in exposure from pension funds, hedge funds, and other institutional investors. As a result, several major asset managers have increased their ETH purchases to meet this demand. This movement supports Ethereum’s outlook, as these purchases can help strengthen the momentum observed over the past weeks.
Ali Martinez also reminds that the support around 1,580 dollars has already played a decisive role in previous cycles. He writes in a post on X:
Ethereum is once again testing the historical importance of its support at $1,580. Over the past three years, this level has established itself as the main demand zone, stopping corrections before triggering powerful rallies: +149% in October 2023, +203% in April 2025, and then a recent rebound towards the resistance at $1,800. As long as the $1,580 threshold is preserved, the bullish outlook remains intact and a similar scenario is entirely plausible.
Ali Martinez, analyst. Source: X / @alicharts According to him, this level had stopped significant corrections before supporting rises of 149% in 2023 and 203% the following year. These precedents feed expectations of a new upward phase.
Technical Indicators Still Call for Caution Despite this more favorable context, several elements call for vigilance. The Ethereum relative strength index (RSI) has reached the threshold of 70. In technical analysis, this level generally corresponds to an overbought situation, which can trigger a short-term correction.
The RSI moves on a scale from 0 to 100. Levels below 30 are usually associated with rebound opportunities, while levels near 70 may announce a market breathing phase. This reading does not necessarily indicate a lasting reversal but highlights a risk of additional volatility.
Some analysts argue for a more cautious scenario. KALEO believes that Ethereum could still experience a dip to 1,000 dollars before starting a much more marked upward movement. According to this hypothesis, this correction phase would precede a potential return to 5,000 dollars in the longer term.
The market thus remains divided between favorable technical prospects and short-term caution signals. If Ethereum maintains its key support levels and benefits from continued institutional flows, the upcoming sessions will confirm whether the $2,000 target can be reached or if a new consolidation phase is required before a more sustainable recovery.
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Ghiles A.
Journaliste et rédacteur web passionné par l’univers des cryptomonnaies et des technologies Web3. J’y traite les dernières tendances et actualités afin de proposer un contenu de haute qualité à un large public du secteur.
DISCLAIMER
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.
AI Agents Enter the Security LabThe @ethereumfndn security team has been running coordinated AI agents directly against Ethereum's core protocol code, and the experiment has produced tangible results. Among the confirmed findings was a flaw at the peer-to-peer (P2P) network layer, which has since been patched and publicly disclosed as a CVE. The Ethereum Foundation published a detailed account of the exercise on its blog on July 9, 2026.
The effort is part of a broader push to harden Ethereum's Layer 1 infrastructure ahead of a busy period of protocol upgrades. The Foundation has also been funding AI-powered protocol security research through its grants program, which aims to move tooling beyond basic static analysis into protocol specification auditing and active vulnerability detection.
The Signal-to-Noise ProblemThe more instructive finding, however, was not the bugs themselves. It was the volume of noise that surrounded them. The AI agents produced a large number of confident-sounding reports, and the majority turned out to be wrong, duplicated, or pointing to code paths that are unreachable in practice.
That dynamic is not unique to Ethereum. Across the broader security industry, AI-assisted discovery is driving a sharp rise in reported vulnerabilities, but the subset that genuinely requires action remains far smaller. The challenge has shifted from finding bugs to sorting them. Triage, validation, and response are now the bottlenecks, and human capacity for that work remains limited.
The lesson from the Ethereum Foundation's exercise reflects that reality. AI can scan a codebase at a scale no manual team could match, but the credibility of any finding still depends on an experienced human reviewer at the end of the pipeline. Getting that balance right will likely define how effective AI-assisted security becomes across the broader blockchain ecosystem.
Separately, the Foundation raised its maximum bug bounty from $250,000 to $1,000,000 for critical protocol vulnerabilities, with reports acknowledged within 48 hours and an initial assessment completed within one week. That expanded program signals how seriously the Foundation is treating protocol security as a strategic priority.
Sources:
Ethereum Foundation Blog: Triage Is the Product
Ethereum Foundation ESP: AI-Powered Protocol Security Research Grant
Ethereum Foundation Bug Bounty Raised to $1 Million
In This Article What the Ethereum Paper Actually ProposesHoskinson's Prior Art ArgumentCardano Community Reaction and the Convergence ArgumentLeios and What Comes Next for Cardano Ethereum researchers have published a paper proposing native UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) support for the network’s execution layer, and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson responded on X with a pointed claim: Cardano has been running this model for over a decade, and Ethereum is arriving late without acknowledgment.
In a July 7 tweet, Hoskinson said: “It’s not like I’ve been literally working on this topic for over 10 years of my life and launched a cryptocurrency that was number three on CoinMarketCap with millions of users to deploy it.”
This war of words between Cardano and Ethereum comes as ADA is outperforming ETH on the day, up +0.7% over the past 24 hours, compared to Ethereum’s +0.4% over the same timeframe.
It's not like I've been literally working on this topic for over 10 years of my life and launched a cryptocurrency that was number three on coinmarketcap with millions of users to deploy it. It's literally a crime in the Ethereum inner circles to mention Cardano. EUTXO is the… https://t.co/3F3l6cg0JE
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) July 7, 2026
What the Ethereum Paper Actually Proposes The research document identifies a structural cost in Ethereum’s account model: every time a new address receives ETH or an ERC-20 token for the first time, it generates permanent state storage that accumulates indefinitely as the user base grows.
The paper proposes using native UTXOs specifically for simple payment transactions that do not require persistent account storage, projecting a roughly 99.8% reduction in permanent state for those payments.
The key mechanical distinction is that a UTXO is created once, spent once, and then removed. It leaves no residual footprint on the network’s state. Critically, the proposal does not replace Ethereum’s existing account model; smart contract activity would continue operating exactly as it does today.
This is a targeted patch for a specific scalability problem, not a wholesale architectural shift. The paper has not been formalized as an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) and carries no confirmed implementation timeline.
Double top or Double bottom
Which one will play out for $ETH? pic.twitter.com/L3arwnGl3I
— Ted (@TedPillows) July 9, 2026
Hoskinson’s Prior Art Argument Hoskinson stated on X that he has spent over ten years developing Cardano’s eUTXO (Extended Unspent Transaction Output) model, which showcases a scalable proof of concept.
Unlike Bitcoin’s UTXO, Cardano’s design incorporates datums, redeemers, and script context, allowing smart contracts to function as deterministic local state machines without needing to access the global blockchain state.
This determinism is key, as a transaction’s validity relies solely on its inputs, leading to predictable fees and enhanced parallelism across UTXO sets, while minimizing front-running risks.
Hoskinson highlighted that Cardano achieved the third position on CoinMarketCap, with millions of users testing this model’s viability.
It’s important to note that the ten-year timeline pertains to research and design, while Cardano’s smart contract functionality, fully utilizing eUTXO, launched with the Alonzo upgrade in September 2021 and was developed through IOHK’s research pipeline.
(SOURCE: DefiLlama)
DISCOVER: Best Meme Coin ICOs to Invest in 2026
Cardano Community Reaction and the Convergence Argument Dori, a figure in the Cardano community, asserted that Ethereum’s permanent state growth creates structural weaknesses by increasing node storage costs and concentrating validation power.
He linked Ethereum’s account model to issues like MEV, reentrancy attacks, and limits on parallel transaction processing, suggesting that eUTXO design effectively addresses these problems.
From a neutral perspective, both Ethereum and Cardano tackle similar challenges of state locality and transaction processing, albeit through different approaches. Other projects, like Ergo and Nervos CKB, have also adopted UTXO-style models.
The debate over blockchain architecture focuses on trade-offs relevant to specific use cases. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s account model offers an advantage in synchronous DeFi composability, which is crucial for complex multi-step financial transactions.
EXCLUSIVE: Earn $10 USDC Via Binance Sign-Up
Leios and What Comes Next for Cardano $ADA Big rally the past week and the stand-out within the majors.
Usually coins like these moving does tend to be a decent sign for overall altcoin risk appetite, but I'd want to see a follow up leg to properly confirm this.
One leg up is generally met with a decent amount of… pic.twitter.com/0iUDYQF0Xt
— Daan Crypto Trades (@DaanCrypto) July 6, 2026
The debate lands at a moment when Cardano is pursuing its most significant throughput upgrade yet. Hoskinson has said the planned Leios upgrade could increase Cardano’s transaction throughput by up to 60 times, a level he argues would put the network’s processing speed on par with the XRP Ledger.
He also flagged that progress depends on governance approval from the Cardano community, introducing a procedural dependency that makes the timeline uncertain.
If Leios delivers on that projection, it would substantially close the performance gap that has historically been cited as a constraint on ADA-based DeFi adoption.
Whether Ethereum’s native UTXO research ever moves from paper to protocol, the conversation it has sparked is already doing work, forcing a precise comparison of two mature blockchain architecture philosophies that have been talking past each other for years.
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Alex Ioannou
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Alex is a seasoned cryptocurrency trader and market analyst with over seven years of active experience in the digital asset space. Since entering the markets in 2017, Alex has specialized in identifying emerging "meta" trends and high-volatility narratives. Notably, Alex... Read More
Tether recently passed Ethereum in market cap. As of this writing Tether is back to being slightly smaller again. But they are within a few % of each other. What does it mean that Tether is now as large as, or larger than, everything in web3 save Bitcoin? Does it mean anything at all?
At the same time what does it mean that stablecoins have grown more or less continuously over the past decade while the non-stablecoin majors (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB, Ripple, Tron, etc) have done essentially nothing for years now?
It Is Not About SecurityWe should start with what it does not mean. Many web3 schemes rely on one asset to provide "economic security" for another. For example, a common oracle design is for correctness to be voted by some DAO and the oracle to fix prices to settle various kinds of bets and trades. This is a simplified version of things like Chainlink and the details of any particular scheme do not matter here.
This class of scheme can only work when the value of the DAO voting tokens significantly exceeds the size of the trades or bets getting settled off the oracle. We can easily see that. How? If it costs $100 to take over the DAO and you can then settle $1 million in bets the entire thing is insecure. It is not hackable in a technical sense; it is economically insecure. This is when the software works as intended but the economic mechanisms and incentives give a clean way for someone to push the system into "bad" outcomes. "Bad" pretty much always means self-serving with an element of objectively incorrect.
Ethereum does not provide economic security for Tether. Tether also circulates on Tron and any number of other blockchains. And none of them provides economic security for Tether. Yes, in theory if you managed to take over a blockchain where Tether circulates you might be able to double-spend or expropriate other user's Tether for a little while. But Tether Ltd – the company running the token – could just seize, freeze and re-issue those tokens somewhere else.
Tether the company could remove all the Tether tokens from the blockchain you compromised and put them somewhere else. This is true if the blockchain has a market cap of $1 or $1 trillion. Tether the company just has to pay gas for the admin transactions and control is absolute. Even if you manage to so completely take over a blockchain that you can block Tether's admin smart contract interactions the Tether company can just renounce that blockchain and refuse to redeem any tokens there ever again. There would presumably need to be some scheme to allow innocent third parties to get their money on a different blockchain – maybe via a strange fork or some other off-chain proof of ownership process – but the Tether team could manage that at their leisure. Taking over the blockchain will not give you access to Tether the company's USD and reserve balances.
Admittedly Tether needs blockchains to circulate on. So it depends on there being a supply of usable and safe-enough blockchains. That is about it though. Security lies primarily with Tether. So long as there are reliable blockchains out there somewhere for Tether to use the token is useful. Being reliable probably means those blockchain's native tokens are worth a meaningful amount of money. But seeing as the token value does not secure Tether in any meaningful sense there is no reason you cannot have $100 billion of stablecoins on a blockchain with a native token market cap of only a few billion USD. Maybe a few hundred million USD. A blockchain where the native token is worth $1 million is not likely to have meaningful DeFi on it. It is unlikely users want to hold many billions of USDT on such a tiny blockchain. But there is nothing that makes it unsafe if users want that.
It Is Not About Problems With EthereumTether's growing market cap vs Ethereum also says nothing about Ethereum's value. Yes, an increase in Tether market cap means more (or richer) people want to use it. But this does not mean, for example, that there is more demand for Tether use than Ethereum use. Tether is a stable store of value to the extent Tether the company keeps the reserves in the assets they are supposed to. Ethereum tokens are, vaguely, a claim on future Ethereum blockchain utilization and demand for block space. If people love Ethereum and blockspace becomes cheap because it becomes plentiful that impacts the ETH price. If people love using Tether that increases the amount of Tether not the price.
Demand to store value in Tether has nothing to do with how effective, or well positioned, Ethereum is as a web3 platform. The easiest way to see this is to imagine two diametrically opposed scenarios where Tether's market cap wildly exceeds Ethereum's. The first scenario is that people roughly abandon Ethereum. If something much better comes along the token price will drop a lot. But people might still want to use Tether a lot.
The second scenario is that some breakthrough occurs such that Ethereum blockspace becomes cheap and plentiful and the community decides it is acceptable to let the nominal price of blockspace fall in the face of a massive expansion in network capacity. Maybe this is some kind of revolution in L2 design. Maybe a ZK advance makes scaling easier. Whatever.
In one case nobody wants to use Ethereum. In the other case everyone wants to and can use Ethereum. Both scenarios can lead to a massive drop in Ethereum market cap. This might occur next to an explosion in Tether market cap or a massive drop. What happens to Tether depends on user preferences for Tether. The Tether bit is not about Ethereum.
It Is About Use CasesThe biggest use case in web3 is permissionless USD transfer. We wrote about the novelty of this use case four years ago. By now it is clear this is the main use case for web3 products. There is a longstanding joke about people that say they are "in it for the tech" really only caring about the money. And there is a lot of money in permisssionless USD transfers! But there really is not a lot of technology. You do not need fancy protocols or complicated math to run a permissionless stablecoin. Tether in fact started off on a Bitcoin-linked blockchain called Omni that you can think of as an issuer selling Bitcoin ordinals for USD and then redeeming those ordinals for USD. That is not exactly right but it is close enough. You can build a working stablecoin off Bitcoin with very little software. Just designate a bunch of individual satoshis as redeemable for USD and you have a rough-but-functional stablecoin to the extent you keep the backing USD safe.
This use case is easy so long as you have a trusted issuer. The trustless version has all kinds of problems. But if you add a simple trust assumption on top of simple old Bitcoin you can meet this use case. Technology is not essential. Tether is a simple smart contract with simple technology. Nobody claims technology is the secret sauce.
That tells you something about demand for other platforms in general. Ethereum may or may not the most popular platform now. But it is manifestly adequate to handle stablecoins. Any working blockchain is sufficient to handle stablecoins. Which smart contract platform gets the inflows does not have anything to do with how far Tether can grow. Stablecoins demand so little of the blockchains they run on that the basic technological structure of reserve-backed stablecoins has not changed for years.
Now if we were talking about Tether market cap on Ethereum vs on Tron vs on Arbitrum or whatever other blockchain: that might say something about those blockchain's relative values. If permissionless USD transfer is the dominant use case then blockchains that host ecosystems which are good at permissionless USD transfer are likely to accrue a lot of value and Tether market cap. This is not hard to understand. But those blockchains can fight it out. So long as Tether is useful, Tether can grow and grow in market cap overall.
More Data PointsEthereum is by far the largest smart contract blockchain by market cap. So long as that remains true Ethereum's market cap is a good proxy for the whole sector. This is not deep analysis. As of this writing Bitcoin makes up about 60% of total web3 market cap and Ethereum makes up about half of what is left ex the stablecoins. That means all the other platforms share the remaining 50%.
So we can say the total value of smart contract blockchains is 2x Ethereum or something like that. As a rule of thumb this is fine. The value of these blockchains, and this sector, has gone nowhere for years now. But stablecoin market cap, led by Tether, has grown a lot.
Stablecoin market cap blockchain-by-blockchain may grow relative value among blockchains. Or not. But in aggregate we have compelling multi-year evidence one does not drive the other. And there are more data points. Products like Blackrock's BUIDL and other tokenized money-market funds offer a product adjacent to Tether. Circle's USDC is a product adjacent to Tether. None of these products passes much value to the blockchains they run on. Again the most compelling argument we can make is just to tap the sign: these products have grown in aggregate while the underlying native token market caps have not gone up.
Interpreting MeaningThere is a consistent story here. Users want permissionless USD products. And they are happy to trust the issuers of those products. In fact users do not seem to care very much about the details of the issuers. Tether, objectively, looks less trustworthy than Blackrock or PayPal. And yet Tether's product is wildly larger. Over and over a traditional player arrives on the stablecoin scene and talks a lot about leveraging a their stellar reputation to build a popular product. And nobody takes a meaningful slice of utilization away from Tether. Circle is the only other large product out there and it has consistently lagged essentially forever. Circle has also had some close calls which, as the company is supposed to offer a stable value, will keep it out of the top tier of reputations for a long time.
Users do not really care who the issuer is so long as the token is widely accepted. Users also do not really care about the blockchain they are using. One person owns most of the tokens and controls governance (Tron)? Fine. The entire thing has been just a multisig for years (Polygon)? Fine. The blockchain promises self custody but then it turns out a Security Council can seize your money (Arbitrum)? All good. Somehow the blockchain is both complicated and run by a single company that admits control in public but not to regulators (Base)? Sure whatever. Users do not care.
Users want permissionless USD. Tether is available on 14 blockchains as of this writing. Circle's USDC is available on more than 30 blockchains as of this writing. The issuers will use whatever blockchains users want. Empirically it is clear the issuers do not really care. And the users do not really care.
The only two things with any real brand value are Tether and Bitcoin. Circle's USDC also has some. And users will use these products on seemingly any platform. What does it mean that a stablecoin issued by an obscure offshore company with a spotty history on the honesty front can become the second largest digital asset by market cap? Is it important that for much of the time that stablecoin has existed it was primarily issued on a single smart contract blockchain seemingly controlled by a single individual (Tron)? That all means users care about the permissionless USD use case more than any of the details underneath how it works.
If governments are giving licenses to some permissionless USD products – for example the entire Genius Act thing around permisisonless USD stablecoins in the United States – it means the permissionless must be acceptable. So long as permissionless USD products get official seals of approval we should expect the entire space, licensed and unlicensed, onshore and offshore, to grow and grow. Possibly well beyond the values of the smart contract platforms on which they run.
Crypto-related stocks in U.S. markets continued their rally during trading hours, with MARA surging 15.27%.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), US-listed crypto-related stocks continued to strengthen during intraday trading. Details: Strategy (MSTR) rose 2.11%; Circle (CRCL) gained 0.83%; MARA Holdings (MARA) surged 15.27% after announcing the acquisition of a Texas-based 2000MW computing power park project company for up to $600 million; Riot Platforms (RIOT) climbed 6.1%.
45 minutes ago
JPMorgan: The biggest risk for Bitcoin is not Strategy’s sell-off, but blockchain adoption that bypasses public chains and tokens.
JPMorgan Chase’s analyst team noted that the market views Strategy’s Bitcoin sale plan as a key risk for the crypto sector, but it is not a major structural threat to Bitcoin. The more fundamental risk lies in tokenization, payments, and settlements increasingly taking place on permissioned infrastructure that does not rely on public blockchains. If this trend continues, the entire crypto ecosystem could face a "structural downgrade"—marked by slower transaction activity, reduced liquidity, and weaker capital inflows—ultimately weighing on Bitcoin. The analysts stated bluntly: "In our view, a more significant risk stems from the way blockchain is adopted in traditional finance, which continues to bypass public, permissionless networks." The analysts explained that institutional adoption so far has clearly favored permissioned chains, as they offer advantages in privacy, KYC/AML controls, governance, throughput, legal accountability, and regulatory certainty, posing a competitive threat to public blockchains like Ethereum. If tokenized deposits are widely adopted—especially in non-transferable forms favored by regulators—it could reduce demand for stablecoins in institutional payments and settlements; SWIFT’s blockchain initiative and central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects such as the digital euro and digital renminbi further strengthen regulated alternatives. In the roughly $500 billion tokenized real-world assets market, while Ethereum currently holds a certain share, this likely reflects early-stage experimentation rather than the market’s long-term structure. As institutional adoption grows, issuance, custody, settlement, and lifecycle management will likely be conducted more on private or permissioned infrastructure that meets requirements for identity, confidentiality, and operational resilience, with public blockchains used only for distribution and limited secondary trading.
45 minutes ago
Post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security closes $17 million seed round.
QIZ Security, a crypto posture and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) management platform, announced the completion of a $17 million seed funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital. The capital will be used to accelerate product R&D and market expansion. QIZ Security was co-founded by Ben Volkow, Lenny Ridel, and Itan Barmes; the team has years of experience in cybersecurity, enterprise services, and post-quantum transformation, with Barmes previously leading Deloitte’s global quantum cybersecurity readiness team. Its platform helps enterprises identify and assess crypto asset risks and implement remediation measures, and is currently applied in industries including finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. It has also established partnerships with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, and IBM, among others.
45 minutes ago
Hyperliquid recommends that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally recognize that on-chain protocols are not required to register, and non-custodial wallets do not serve as financial intermediaries.
Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and Phantom have jointly submitted comments to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in response to the agency’s request for feedback on whether existing rules keep pace with the evolution of financial technology, proposing to explicitly extend the distinction between "building tools" and "operating regulated businesses" to on-chain markets. The comments note that software engineers have been developing matching engines for regulated futures trading platforms for decades, and the CFTC has never classified them as trading platform operators. However, developers in the digital asset sector have long lacked such clarity, forcing many to opt for offshore development. The current CFTC, led by Chairman Selig, is working to address this gap and carve out room for innovation for fintech firms in digital asset and derivatives markets. The two entities put forward three key recommendations: First, explicitly confirm that merely publishing on-chain protocol software itself does not require registration — a factor often decisive for engineers when choosing where to develop. Second, establish a clear path for the CFTC’s registration bodies to operate regulated functions using on-chain infrastructure, enabling trading platforms and clearinghouses to replace decades-old legacy systems with transparent infrastructure. Third, formalize Phantom’s recent no-action letter into official rules, eliminating the need for self-custody wallet providers to apply for approved exemptions on a case-by-case basis. HPC and Phantom stress that self-custody and transparent on-chain systems can embed investor protection directly into technology, while regulated intermediaries retain responsibility for issues that technology cannot resolve independently. This approach will bring the next generation of financial markets within reach of U.S. consumers.
45 minutes ago
Micron raises its U.S. investment plan to $250 billion, betting on demand for AI memory chips.
Micron Technology plans to increase spending on its new U.S. factory to $250 billion to meet the surging demand for memory chips driven by the global artificial intelligence boom. The move adds $50 billion to Micron’s previously announced $200 billion commitment to expanding domestic U.S. chip manufacturing, covering projects in New York, Idaho, and Virginia. The expenditure is expected to run through 2035, and will help the company achieve its target of producing 40% of its DRAM products in the U.S. within the next decade.
45 minutes ago
Analysis: Market FUD sentiment toward SOL hits its highest point in 2026, a typical bullish signal.
Crypto research firm Santiment notes that market FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) surrounding SOL has hit its highest level in 2026, a development that typically signals a bullish indicator. Currently, Solana is facing a toxic mix of negative sentiment: trading volume has fallen to its lowest level of 2026, while negative comments have just spiked to their highest daily mark this year. Much of the frustration stems from the fact that despite Solana’s strong narrative around tokenized stocks and real-world asset (RWA) activity, its price has failed to deliver meaningful returns for traders. This is where it gets interesting: when sentiment is excessively negative and trading activity is thin, large holders (whales) often encounter less retail selling resistance if they choose to push prices higher. At a time when traders least anticipate a rebound, SOL may be in this low-attention, high-FUD zone, primed for rapid, sharp price fluctuations.
Robinhood Chain has done what few Layer 2 networks manage in a full year, all in eight days. The Arbitrum-powered network logged $500 million worth of trading volume on Uniswap on July 8th.
With $100 million in total value locked (TVL) and nearly 200,000 cumulative addresses, it makes the second-biggest Uniswap deployment by 24-hour trading volume, trailing only Ethereum mainnet.
DeFiLlama data shows that the total value locked (TVL) on the platform surpassed $106 million, marking an increase of 159% within a 24-hour period.
Ethena and Morpho Drive the TVL Surge Morpho is the lending protocol that runs the estimated 7% annual percentage yield (APY) on USDG deposits for Robinhood Earn, with almost $90 million of Robinhood Chain’s total value locked (TVL) held on the platform.
Ethena’s $50 million single-day deposit into a vault managed by Steakhouse Financial on Morpho is the driving force behind the 159% increase.
Ethena’s $50 million single-day deposit on a Steakhouse Financial-managed USDG vault on Morpho is driving the 159% surge. That’s because the figure in the headline is more indicative of DeFi-native institutional capital than the 27 million retail users that Robinhood has.
From the start, all of Uniswap’s versions (v2, v3, and v4) and UniswapX shipped on the Robinhood Chain. The Uniswap chain’s first week saw cumulative volume reach over $250 million, with a single-day surge to $500 million on July 8. Unwrapped Ethereum (WETH), memecoins, and tokenized stock tokens like NVDA, AAPL and GOOG led volume.
ARK Invest had already moved on the broader crypto stock narrative before this launch, as it was reported earlier this week that ARK Invest bought crypto stocks. A sign that institutional appetite for RWA-adjacent plays was building heading into Robinhood’s mainnet debut.
Robinhood Chain TVL Growth (July 1–8, 2026 Vlad Tenev’s Meme Pivot and What Comes Next Earlier, Robinhood’s CEO Vlad Tenev stated that the company had its sights set on real-world assets and tokenized equities. On July 8, he posted part of that back on X: “As we develop Robinhood Chain into the best chain for RWA… it’s a great chain for memes, too.”
While we’re building robinhood chain to be the best chain for RWA … it works great for memes too
— Vlad Tenev (@vladtenev) July 8, 2026
On the same day, Pump.fun introduced direct support of Robinhood Chain tokens, allowing users to trade SOL without having to bridge. The integration was met with instant traction, with Memecoin CASHCAT gaining a significant boost in popularity.
According to a fresh SEC filing, Tenev converted and sold 375,000 Class B HOOD shares at prices between $112.22 and $118.13, pocketing approximately $43.6 million. The sale, executed under Rule 10b5-1, occurred as HOOD had already rallied more than 40% over the prior month, partly on the chain’s launch momentum.
UNI, the native token of Uniswap, rallied by as much as 14% due to the surge in volume. The chain operates with 100 millisecond blocks as compared to the 12-second average on Ethereum, and Chainlink is offering oracle infrastructure for tokenized equities. Robinhood is also waiving gas fees for the first 90 days, which is having an impact on activity.
As traders watch to see if Robinhood Chain’s early success can lead to sustainable revenue post-fee generation, $HOOD and the wider Crypto Stocks to watch are now getting more attention.
In January 2026, the SEC’s guidance highlighted tokenized debt securities, which are the type of securities Robinhood is structured around, for increased scrutiny. Even within a single protocol, TVL risk exists: any disparity in the rotation of liquidity from Morpho’s could cause the headline figures to come in very tight.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
Grayscale Investments, one of the largest asset management companies in the market, shared eight cryptocurrencies that stand out in the current market cycle and the key use cases each represents.
Grayscale, sharing from account X, identified eight key use cases for the current cycle: “Digital currency, World Computer, Global payments, High performance, 24/7 on-chain commerce, Tokenization and oracles, Next-generation infrastructure, Mass customization.”
Grayscale, which also identifies the prominent cryptocurrencies in these areas, included Bitcoin and 7 altcoins, including Ethereum and XRP, in its list.
At this point, Grayscale argues that Bitcoin’s fixed supply, institutional investor interest, and adoption as a reserve asset have made it a cornerstone of the cryptocurrency market.
“Bitcoin (BTC) → Digital money
Ethereum (ETH) → World Computer
XRP → Global payments
Solana (SOL) → High performance
Hyperliquid (HYPE) → 24/7 on-chain trading
Chainlink (LINK) → Tokenization and oracles
SUI → Next-generation infrastructure
Avalanche (AVAX) → Mass customization”
Looking at the table, Grayscale describes Ethereum as a global infrastructure for smart contracts and decentralized applications, while highlighting XRP for cross-border money transfers.
According to the company, Solana attracts developers with its high transaction capacity and low-cost infrastructure, while Chainlink stands out with its oracle infrastructure, which plays a critical role in the tokenization of real-world assets.
HYPE, the token of the Hyperliquid ecosystem, has recently stood out among projects offering 24/7 on-chain derivatives trading and a decentralized trading experience.
Finally, while Sui (SUI) stands out with its next-generation Layer-1 architecture focusing on scalability and user experience, Avalanche is considered a significant alternative in enterprise use cases.
*This is not investment advice.
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Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
Crypto-related stocks in U.S. markets continued their rally during trading hours, with MARA surging 15.27%.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), US-listed crypto-related stocks continued to strengthen during intraday trading. Details: Strategy (MSTR) rose 2.11%; Circle (CRCL) gained 0.83%; MARA Holdings (MARA) surged 15.27% after announcing the acquisition of a Texas-based 2000MW computing power park project company for up to $600 million; Riot Platforms (RIOT) climbed 6.1%.
1 seconds ago
JPMorgan: The biggest risk for Bitcoin is not Strategy’s sell-off, but blockchain adoption that bypasses public chains and tokens.
JPMorgan Chase’s analyst team noted that the market views Strategy’s Bitcoin sale plan as a key risk for the crypto sector, but it is not a major structural threat to Bitcoin. The more fundamental risk lies in tokenization, payments, and settlements increasingly taking place on permissioned infrastructure that does not rely on public blockchains. If this trend continues, the entire crypto ecosystem could face a "structural downgrade"—marked by slower transaction activity, reduced liquidity, and weaker capital inflows—ultimately weighing on Bitcoin. The analysts stated bluntly: "In our view, a more significant risk stems from the way blockchain is adopted in traditional finance, which continues to bypass public, permissionless networks." The analysts explained that institutional adoption so far has clearly favored permissioned chains, as they offer advantages in privacy, KYC/AML controls, governance, throughput, legal accountability, and regulatory certainty, posing a competitive threat to public blockchains like Ethereum. If tokenized deposits are widely adopted—especially in non-transferable forms favored by regulators—it could reduce demand for stablecoins in institutional payments and settlements; SWIFT’s blockchain initiative and central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects such as the digital euro and digital renminbi further strengthen regulated alternatives. In the roughly $500 billion tokenized real-world assets market, while Ethereum currently holds a certain share, this likely reflects early-stage experimentation rather than the market’s long-term structure. As institutional adoption grows, issuance, custody, settlement, and lifecycle management will likely be conducted more on private or permissioned infrastructure that meets requirements for identity, confidentiality, and operational resilience, with public blockchains used only for distribution and limited secondary trading.
1 seconds ago
Security Warning: Abnormal on-chain fund flows detected for the CodexField project on BNB Chain.
On-chain investigator Specter has issued a community security alert, warning of potential fund misappropriation risks associated with the CodexField project on BNB Chain. On-chain tracking shows the project has amassed over $85 million in funds. Specter detected abnormal on-chain fund flows yesterday: a wallet bridged 17.3 million USDT from TRON to Ethereum, then swapped the tokens for DAI via Bitget Swap on Polygon. So far, $6.5 million has been transferred out, while the remaining $10.8 million is still in transit. The funds were originally bridged from Ethereum to TRON roughly six months ago, and the source wallet is linked to CodexField’s deposit contract. Below are key addresses for users to verify on their own: EVM: 0xBc606358910b3720d136F0d4Ce12b759C270747a TRON: TQNTEYadFVVQeobBtctSjurJ5RpfBsTmqh, TAzpg8L1WkkzCxxZk8TYnvaRYahehh52MK Related deposit contract: 0x9E6A75b546B65E7B9D34E2c9aB8Fe224B9aA52AA Additional red flags: The project requires a minimum $100 deposit for participation. Blockchain security tool Blocksec MetaSuites initially labeled the deposit contract as "Fake CodexField", but Specter’s follow-up investigation found the contract is actually operated by the CodexField team itself. The project uses multiple domains and subdomains to collect user deposits, and the team previously shared these domains via official channels. Its fund flow pattern is unusual, deviating from standard fund management practices: the project bridges funds across multiple blockchains, routes them through intermediate wallets, and ultimately sends assets to centralized exchanges. Specter noted that based on on-chain activity, the project warrants high vigilance. It advises all users interacting with CodexField to exercise extreme caution until the team provides a transparent explanation of its fund movements.
1 seconds ago
Post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security closes $17 million seed round.
QIZ Security, a crypto posture and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) management platform, announced the completion of a $17 million seed funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital. The capital will be used to accelerate product R&D and market expansion. QIZ Security was co-founded by Ben Volkow, Lenny Ridel, and Itan Barmes; the team has years of experience in cybersecurity, enterprise services, and post-quantum transformation, with Barmes previously leading Deloitte’s global quantum cybersecurity readiness team. Its platform helps enterprises identify and assess crypto asset risks and implement remediation measures, and is currently applied in industries including finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. It has also established partnerships with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, and IBM, among others.
1 seconds ago
Hyperliquid recommends that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally recognize that on-chain protocols are not required to register, and non-custodial wallets do not serve as financial intermediaries.
Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and Phantom have jointly submitted comments to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in response to the agency’s request for feedback on whether existing rules keep pace with the evolution of financial technology, proposing to explicitly extend the distinction between "building tools" and "operating regulated businesses" to on-chain markets. The comments note that software engineers have been developing matching engines for regulated futures trading platforms for decades, and the CFTC has never classified them as trading platform operators. However, developers in the digital asset sector have long lacked such clarity, forcing many to opt for offshore development. The current CFTC, led by Chairman Selig, is working to address this gap and carve out room for innovation for fintech firms in digital asset and derivatives markets. The two entities put forward three key recommendations: First, explicitly confirm that merely publishing on-chain protocol software itself does not require registration — a factor often decisive for engineers when choosing where to develop. Second, establish a clear path for the CFTC’s registration bodies to operate regulated functions using on-chain infrastructure, enabling trading platforms and clearinghouses to replace decades-old legacy systems with transparent infrastructure. Third, formalize Phantom’s recent no-action letter into official rules, eliminating the need for self-custody wallet providers to apply for approved exemptions on a case-by-case basis. HPC and Phantom stress that self-custody and transparent on-chain systems can embed investor protection directly into technology, while regulated intermediaries retain responsibility for issues that technology cannot resolve independently. This approach will bring the next generation of financial markets within reach of U.S. consumers.
1 seconds ago
Micron raises its U.S. investment plan to $250 billion, betting on demand for AI memory chips.
Micron Technology plans to increase spending on its new U.S. factory to $250 billion to meet the surging demand for memory chips driven by the global artificial intelligence boom. The move adds $50 billion to Micron’s previously announced $200 billion commitment to expanding domestic U.S. chip manufacturing, covering projects in New York, Idaho, and Virginia. The expenditure is expected to run through 2035, and will help the company achieve its target of producing 40% of its DRAM products in the U.S. within the next decade.
Micron Technology has become the stock that AI bulls and crypto natives are both fighting over. The memory chipmaker’s shares have climbed roughly 197% year-to-date in 2026, recently trading around $949, as insatiable demand for high-bandwidth memory chips collides with a supply picture so tight that every unit produced through the end of 2026 is already spoken for under binding contracts.
And now, for the first time, you can trade a tokenized version of Micron stock on Ethereum and Solana. Traditional finance and DeFi are officially sharing a lunch table.
The AI memory bottleneck powering Micron’s run The large language models and data centers powering the current wave of artificial intelligence require high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, in enormous quantities. Micron happens to be one of a small handful of companies capable of manufacturing these chips at scale.
UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri raised his price target on Micron to $1,625 in May 2026, up from $535. The rationale centers on AI-driven memory shortages that Arcuri expects to persist until at least Q2 2028.
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Micron’s HBM4 capacity is fully contracted through 2026, with tight supply conditions anticipated to extend well beyond 2027. The company has committed $27 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2026 alone to expand production.
Analyst 12-month price targets currently range between $600 and north of $1,500, reflecting a wide but uniformly bullish consensus.
Tokenized Micron stock hits Ethereum and Solana In June 2026, tokenized versions of Micron stock launched on two major blockchain networks. MUon debuted on Ethereum, while $MU went live on Solana. Both allow investors to gain on-chain exposure to Micron’s equity without touching a traditional brokerage account.
Tokenized stocks trade 24/7, settle almost instantly, and can be composed into DeFi strategies alongside stablecoins, lending protocols, and yield products.
Micron’s deeper crypto connection Micron has a long history of supplying GDDR memory for GPUs used in cryptocurrency mining. Every Ethereum miner who ran rigs before the network’s transition to proof-of-stake was, in some indirect way, a Micron customer.
What investors should actually worry about Multiple analysts project that peak market conditions for memory chips could arrive around 2027-2028, with a potential normalization or outright downturn by 2029. The reasoning is classic semiconductor cyclicality: competitors will eventually catch up, new fabrication capacity will come online, and the supply-demand imbalance will narrow.
The $27 billion capex commitment looks smart today. It could look very different if demand softens and capacity sits idle.
For crypto investors specifically, the tokenized stock products introduce their own set of considerations. Regulatory clarity around tokenized equities remains a patchwork globally. The tokens themselves depend on custodial arrangements and issuer reliability that vary by platform.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Wall Street giant Wells Fargo revealed massive crypto holdings via exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and stocks. The banks revealed exposure to Bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH), Solana, Strategy (MSTR), Bitmine (BMNR) and other crypto stocks.
Wells Fargo Reveals Bitcoin, ETH, Solana ETFs Exposure In its latest SEC filing, $2.5 trillion AUM Wells Fargo disclosed 6.5 million shares in BlackRock Bitcoin ETF (IBIT). It also revealed a new call position and an increase in put position in IBIT amid growing uncertainty during the US-Iran war.
IBIT holdings dropped by 75,102 shares compared to the Q4 quarter. Moreover, the Wall Street giant cut its exposure to the Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF (BTCO), Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF, and the Fidelity Bitcoin ETF (FBTC).
While Wells Fargo decreased holdings in IBIT, Bitcoin exposure increased in Grayscale Bitcoin Mini ETF, Bitwise’s BITB, and GBTC. Notably, BITB holdings climbed 24% quarter-on-quarter.
Meanwhile, Wells Fargo boosts Ethereum ETF holdings with a 65% rise in BlackRock Ethereum ETF (ETHA) shares. The bank now holds more than 1.10 million ETHA shares worth $17.56 million.
In addition, the banking firm holds 257,157 Bitwise Ethereum ETF, 4,637 Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF, and 623 VanEck’s ETHV shares.
Also, Wells Fargo disclosed new exposure to Solana ETFs. It scooped 13,280 in Grayscale’s GSOL and 1,638 in Fidelity Solana Fund (FSOL).
Holding in Strategy’s MSTR, Bitmine, and other Crypto Stocks On the crypto stocks side, Wells Fargo significantly ramped up its position in Michael Saylor’s Strategy (MSTR). The bank boosted its MSTR shares by 125% to almost 726,000 shares, adding an estimated $41.5 million in exposure. Notably, Strategy plans sell Bitcoin, but Grayscale claims Strategy’s Bitcoin sales are good for markets.
It also revealed new holdings in the Trump family’s American Bitcoin Corp (ABTC) and Strive (ASST). This move highlights a preference for established Bitcoin treasury companies over direct mining or trading firms.
The bank significantly increased its holdings in Bitmine Immersion’s BMNR from 2,323 to 21,547 stocks. This makes an 828% rise in Ethereum treasury exposure to $426K.
Robinhood (HOOD) shareholdings jumped from 65% to 2.56 million shares. Wells Fargo also opened put option positions for almost $116K. As CoinGape reported earlier, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev sold HOOD shares earlier this week.
In contrast, the bank sharply reduced its stake in Galaxy Digital by about 97% and 25% in Coinbase (COIN). This signals a strategic shift away from certain crypto stocks.
Also Read: 11 Best Crypto Copy Trading Platforms in July 2026
Wells Fargo has expanded its exposure to Strategy while reducing part of its BlackRock Bitcoin ETF position, according to its latest regulatory filing that also shows larger investments across Ethereum and Solana-linked products.
Summary
Wells Fargo increased its Strategy stake by 125% while trimming its BlackRock Bitcoin ETF holding. The bank boosted Ethereum ETF exposure, added Solana funds, and expanded positions in Bitmine and Robinhood. SEC filings also show reduced stakes in Coinbase and Galaxy Digital despite broader crypto market exposure. According to the bank’s latest filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the $2.5 trillion asset manager increased its holding in Michael Saylor’s Strategy (MSTR) by 125% to nearly 726,000 shares, adding roughly $41.5 million in exposure.
At the same time, the filing shows the bank reduced its position in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) by 75,102 shares compared with the previous quarter, while also opening a new IBIT call position and increasing its put exposure during a period of heightened market uncertainty linked to the U.S.-Iran conflict.
Bitcoin ETF exposure has been rebalanced rather than cut outright Although Wells Fargo trimmed its IBIT position, the filing indicates it did not reduce its Bitcoin exposure across the board. The bank also lowered its holdings in the Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF (BTCO), the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF, and the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC).
However, it added to positions in the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), and Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB), with its BITB stake rising 24% from the previous quarter.
Ethereum-linked investments moved in the opposite direction. Wells Fargo increased its holdings in BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) by about 65%, taking its position to more than 1.10 million shares valued at approximately $17.56 million, according to the filing.
The bank also reported ownership of 257,157 shares of the Bitwise Ethereum ETF, 4,637 shares of the Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF, and 623 shares of VanEck’s Ethereum ETF (ETHV).
The filing also disclosed the bank’s first reported positions in Solana investment products. Wells Fargo purchased 13,280 shares of Grayscale Solana Trust (GSOL) and 1,638 shares of the Fidelity Solana Fund (FSOL), adding Solana exposure alongside its existing Bitcoin and Ethereum allocations.
Crypto stock buying has favored treasury companies Beyond exchange-traded funds, Wells Fargo increased investments in several crypto-related companies. Its position in Bitmine Immersion (BMNR) climbed from 2,323 shares to 21,547 shares, an increase of about 828%, lifting its exposure to the company’s Ethereum treasury strategy to roughly $426,000.
The filing also shows new positions in American Bitcoin Corp. (ABTC), the Trump family-backed Bitcoin treasury company, and Strive Asset Management’s treasury vehicle (ASST). At the same time, Wells Fargo expanded its Robinhood (HOOD) holding by 65% to about 2.56 million shares while opening put option positions valued at nearly $116,000.
Robinhood has recently attracted interest from other institutional investors as well. As crypto.news reported on June 27, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest bought approximately $25.54 million worth of shares across Coinbase, SpaceX, Circle, Bullish, and Robinhood through several of its exchange-traded funds. Robinhood was one of the companies added during that round of purchases.
Not every crypto-linked stock received additional capital. Wells Fargo cut its stake in Galaxy Digital by roughly 97% and reduced its Coinbase (COIN) position by about 25%, according to the SEC filing, indicating the bank adjusted individual equity holdings while continuing to maintain exposure across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and crypto treasury companies.
Cover image via U.Today Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. The financial and market information provided on U.Today is intended for informational purposes only. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. Conduct your own research by contacting financial experts before making any investment decisions. We believe that all content is accurate as of the date of publication, but certain offers mentioned may no longer be available.
With the introduction of Robinhood Chain, a new Layer-2 network created with Arbitrum technology, Cashcat (CASHCAT) has rapidly emerged as one of the most talked-about memecoins in the cryptocurrency space. Some traders are wondering if CASHCAT could become for Robinhood Chain what Shiba Inu became for Ethereum, given the token's quick ascent, increasing whale activity, and compelling story.
The most recent catalyst was a wallet called 'Ansem-2,' which spent about $233,000 in a matter of hours to obtain 2.79 million CASHCAT tokens. The wallet is connected to a Solana address that is said to contain millions of dollars' worth of ANSEM tokens and has made significant profits from prior trades involving memes. It remains to be seen if this purchase will be successful, but it has certainly drawn attention. The SHIB comparison is not wholly irrational.
The story, community involvement, and timing of Shiba Inu's rapid expansion were more important than its practicality. The ingredients in CASHCAT seem to be similar. With the official launch of Robinhood Chain on July 1, a completely new ecosystem without a well-known flagship memecoin was created. Traders have historically rushed to find the "native meme" of a new blockchain before it is widely adopted. Additionally, CASHCAT benefits from a well-known narrative.
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The token has a stronger identity than the numerous animal-themed tokens that are introduced every week because it makes use of the "Cash Cat" lore connected to Robinhood's branding heritage. The arrangement has produced a potent speculative cycle when combined with high trading volume and growing social media attention. SHIB and CASHCAT, however, differ significantly.
During one of the most exciting periods in cryptocurrency history, Shiba Inu first appeared and went on to develop a sizable community, ecosystem, and brand awareness. The main focus of CASHCAT is still the narrative trade associated with the Robinhood Chain hype. The fact that there is no formal connection between Robinhood and CASHCAT poses the greatest risk. Although the chain was started by Robinhood, the company has not endorsed the token.
Furthermore, there are several CASHCAT tokens on various blockchains, which raises the possibility of traders purchasing the incorrect asset and causes confusion. One thing that SHIB had at the start makes CASHCAT a potential successor to SHIB. However, billion-dollar valuations are rarely sustained indefinitely by narratives alone.
Ethereum picks up momentumWhen compared to many other significant digital assets that are still struggling below crucial resistance levels, Ethereum is exhibiting what may be its strongest recovery attempt in months. While the broader market remains uncertain, ETH has managed to reclaim short-term momentum and is beginning to separate itself from weaker performers. On the daily chart, Ethereum recently bounced from the $1,500 region after a sharp sell-off in June.
ETH has successfully recovered above its 50-day moving average and is currently challenging the 100-day EMA around the $1,800 level, in contrast to many other altcoins that were unable to maintain their gains. This is a significant difference. The majority of large-cap cryptocurrencies are still stuck below short- and medium-term resistance levels. But Ethereum is putting them to the test.
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Additionally, after the June low, the asset produced a higher low, indicating that buyers are progressively re-entering the market. The RSI supports this view. Momentum is now comfortably above neutral territory after recovering from oversold conditions, suggesting that bullish pressure is increasing without reaching overbought levels.
In the past, this kind of setup frequently emerges in the early phases of more significant trend reversals. Ethereum's relative performance is another positive sign. Assets like XRP and numerous speculative altcoins are still having trouble below significant resistance levels, but ETH has shown a stronger capacity to withstand selling pressure and attract new demand.
This indicates that Ethereum is still one of the healthier assets in the current market climate, but it does not imply that a bull market has returned. The next obstacle is located close to the $1,950-$2,000 area, where the 200-day moving average and earlier support levels meet.
The bullish outlook would be greatly strengthened by a successful break above that zone, which could pave the way for a more extensive recovery phase. Among the major cryptocurrencies, Ethereum seems to be at the forefront of the current recovery. Although the trend has not completely reversed yet, ETH's current rebound appears to be the most convincing when compared to most other assets attempting the same move.
Will Bitcoin bounce?One of the most significant technical turning points for Bitcoin in recent weeks may be near. Even though the market is still under pressure and Bitcoin is currently trading close to $62,000 following a recent rejection, a number of indicators point to an impending attempt at a reversal. The most notable development is Bitcoin's ability to hold above the local lows established during June.
Buyers intervened forcefully to stop a further collapse following the steep sell-off that drove Bitcoin below $60,000. Since then, the asset has experienced a series of higher lows, indicating a progressive weakening of selling pressure. Additionally, the daily chart shows Bitcoin continuously testing the 50-day EMA around $63,000. Bulls have yet to secure a clear breakout, but the gap between price and short-term resistance is getting smaller.
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After prolonged compression, markets frequently produce stronger moves, and Bitcoin seems to be entering this phase. This interpretation is reinforced by momentum indicators. The RSI has recovered from oversold conditions and is now moving toward neutral territory. It shows that panic selling has mostly subsided and the market is starting to stabilize, even though it is not yet exhibiting significant bullish momentum.
The cluster of moving averages above price continues to be the primary barrier. Bitcoin is still trading well below the 200-day moving average, which is close to $75,000, and below the 100-day EMA, which is around $66,000.
Whether the current recovery turns into a true trend reversal or just another relief rally will probably depend on those levels. Additionally, volume merits consideration. Although it hasn't been strong enough to cause a breakout, recent buying activity has been adequate to maintain support. A surge in participation would significantly improve the chances of Bitcoin reclaiming higher levels.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
Ethereum price today: $1,740Onchain activity indicates that bulls have returned to action at a modest pace.ETH ETFs posted four straight days of inflows, but volume stays weak.ETH is testing the 20-day EMA after a rejection at the 50-day EMA near $1,800.Ethereum (ETH) has slowly seen a return of bullish dominance over the past few days after a lengthy period of bearish pressure. However, buying pressure remains weak despite registering nearly a 10% gain since the beginning of the month.
The Net Unrealized Profit/Loss (NUPL) metric has eased from -0.46 to -0.30, indicating that while recent price gains have reduced investors' losses, their holdings remain underwater. A larger price gain, fueled by strong buying pressure, will be needed to lift those holdings back into profit territory.
ETH NUPL. Source: CryptoQuantWhales or wallets with a balance of 10K-100K ETH saw inflows of roughly 100K ETH over the past week, but their balance remains largely unchanged on the three-week timeframe. On the other hand, retail wallets holding 100-1K and 1K-10K ETH saw negligible changes in their balances, with their holdings remaining largely unchanged over the period.
Meanwhile, US spot ETH exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have posted four consecutive days of net inflows for the first time since early May, per SoSoValue data. The inflows across the four days totaled $91.5 million, not strong enough to spark a major upward price surge.
A similar move is observed in the Coinbase Premium Index, which measures the sentiment of US investors. The metric has retreated from a low of -0.169 to -0.076, indicating that while US demand has improved compared to previous weeks, it remains weak overall. Notably, the index hasn't spent more than 50 days in positive territory since the beginning of the year.
ETH Coinbase Premium Index. Source: CryptoQuantHistorically, the Coinbase Premium Index and spot ETH ETF inflows have to stay elevated to spark a major upward price move.
On the derivatives side, open interest has remained flat over the past week, indicating caution among leveraged traders, who have yet to commit capital to the market despite recent price gains.
Ethereum Price Forecast: ETH tests 20-day EMAEthereum saw $61.6 million in liquidations over the past 24 hours, led by $51.5 million in long liquidations.
The move comes as ETH maintains a bearish near-term bias, holding below the 50- and 100-day Exponential Moving Averages (EMAs) at $1,803 and $1,965, respectively. Price is clinging just above the 20-day EMA support at $1,714. Momentum shows easing buying pressure with the Relative Strength Index (RSI) and Stochastic Oscillator (Stoch) declining toward 51 and 70, respectively.
On the downside, the 20-day EMA at $1,714 offers immediate support, ahead of more substantial floors at $1,524 and $1,404, while a deeper slide would expose the longer-term base near $1,155.
ETH/USDT daily chartOn the topside, initial resistance is the cluster formed by the 50-day EMA at $1,803 and the $1,806 horizontal line. A sustained break above this area would be needed to open the way toward $1,909 and the 100-day EMA at $1,965, with higher hurdles appearing at $2,018 and $2,107.
(The technical analysis of this story was written with the help of an AI tool. Know more.)
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
According to its official page, Polymarket has launched a derivatives trading feature, currently supporting 10 assets including BTC, ETH, SOL, HYPE, gold, silver, the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, WTIOIL, and SPCX, with a maximum leverage of 20x.
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SMIC surpassed Kweichow Moutai in market capitalization.
According to Bitget data, SMIC’s A-share price rose nearly 15%, pushing its total market capitalization to 1.49 trillion yuan. Kweichow Moutai is currently down 1.43%, with a total market cap of 1.48 trillion yuan. (Jinshi)
10 minutes ago
Bitcoin breaks through $63,000
According to HTX market data, Bitcoin has broken through the $63,000 mark, with a 0.74% rise in the past 24 hours.
10 minutes ago
US tech stocks are experiencing one of the most volatile periods in history, with the volatility ratio of the Nasdaq 100 to the S&P 500 hitting a 23-year high.
The Kobeissi Letter noted in a post that tech stocks are experiencing one of the most volatile periods in history. The ratio of the Nasdaq 100 Volatility Index (VXN) to the S&P 500 Volatility Index (VIX) has risen to 1.7, its highest level in 23 years. This marks the first time the ratio has topped 1.5 since 2018. By comparison, the metric peaked at around 1.6 during the 2008 financial crisis. Currently, VXN stands at 28 points, while VIX is at 16 points – the latter is 43% lower than the former. VXN has remained above the 20-point threshold for five consecutive months, the longest such stretch since the 2022 bear market. Markets are pricing in significant volatility risk for tech stocks.
10 minutes ago
A crypto whale closed a $100 million BTC short position, earning a profit of $5.28 million.
According to monitoring by Onchain Lens, a whale closed a $100 million Bitcoin (BTC) short position, earning a profit of $5.28 million. Wallet address 0xcf9 opened the short on June 2 at $68,859 and closed it one hour ago at $62,314, holding the position for 36 days.
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Nvidia will collaborate with Hugging Face to develop open-source robotics models.
NVIDIA has announced a partnership with Hugging Face to co-develop open-source foundation models for robotics, combining its GPU ecosystem and CUDA technology, along with Hugging Face’s extensive model library and developer community, to significantly lower the barriers to AI training and deployment for robotics. (Jinshi)
Ethereum advocates are confident that the fundamentals are bullish, but investors in the asset remain extremely bearish.
“The Summer of Ethereum Love is gaining steam,” said co-founder Joseph Lubin on Wednesday. The Consensys exec said this was due to credibly neutral steward organizations like Ethlabs launching to accelerate ETH’s capabilities through parallel efforts beyond the embattled Ethereum Foundation.
He highlighted Ethereum’s 11-year 100% uptime, censorship resistance, permissionlessness, and global neutrality as core advantages for corporations and governments building sovereign network platforms.
“Ethereum’s and ETH’s long-term high-value proposition is powerfully coming into focus for many major financial institutions. They are building on Ethereum.”
Execs Bullish, Traders Bearish The big endorsement came in response to a post on X by Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom, who said that Ethereum is entering a new phase, with “organizations focused on infrastructure, go-to-market, and more are launching to accelerate the growth of the coming institutional supercycle.”
The Summer of Ethereum Love is gaining steam:
– New credibly neutral steward organizations to magnify capabilities and accelerate through parallel tracked activities. These will grow and others will emerge.
– Impactful reports and a new organization to help the incumbent… https://t.co/388IWUqgoc
— Joseph Lubin (@ethereumJoseph) July 8, 2026
Two Ethereum-focused organizations, Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional, have been launched recently, backed by EF developers and Ether treasury companies.
However, despite all of the bullish sentiment coming from executives, investors, and traders don’t agree or appear split on the underlying asset.
CryptoQuant analyst ‘Darkfost’ said on Thursday that there are two very different reactions behind the ETH panic. “The crypto market is currently going through a phase of total indecision.”
You may also like: Charles Hoskinson Says Ethereum Is Adopting Cardano Ideas Without Credit Bitmine Buys Another 42K ETH as 5% Supply Goal Comes Within Reach Staking Surge Tightens Supply, But Negative Sentiment Still Dominates Ethereum “Assets like ETH find themselves in a particularly fragile position,” due to swings in the US-Iran conflict and the threat of Fed rate hikes this year.
“In this climate, the slightest market fluctuation is enough to trigger panic moves, as was the case when ETH came to test the $1,500 level.”
However, the analyst also observed exchange flows that exhibit a “dual movement” which “reflects a split in how market participants are reading the situation.” Some are giving in to panic and selling, while others see it as an opportunity to increase their ETH exposure, they said.
ETH Price Weakens Panic and selling have prevailed again over the past 24 hours as the asset lost 1.8%, falling to $1,720 during the Thursday morning Asian trading session.
ETH has hit resistance at $1,800 three times this week, each time being rejected. It is now back at a weekly low and poised to drop below $1,700 unless broader market momentum returns. Zooming out, the asset is at a bear market bottom, down 65% from its peak.
“ETH has spent years below the 2021 high, failed multiple reclaim attempts, reset sentiment, and returned to the same exhaustion zone for the third time,” said analyst ‘Cryptollica.’
This is “not early distribution,” but “late compression,” they said before adding that if this zone holds, “the next move will surprise people still reading it as weakness.”
Bitcoin slipped to near $62,000 mark on Thursday as geopolitical risks weighed on market sentiment, while ETF inflows offered support. The cryptocurrency was trading at $62,038 mark.
Ethereum was down 1% to trade at $1,733 mark. Bitcoin also declined 1% in the past 24 hours. Among the major altcoins, BNB, XRP, Solana, Tron, Hyperliquid, Dogecoin, and Cardano fell up to 3%.
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Akshat Siddhant, Lead quant analyst, Mudrex said Bitcoin is trading around the $62,000 level as renewed geopolitical tensions, following President Trump’s announcement ending the ceasefire, have pushed investors toward a risk-off stance and at the same time, Japan’s 10-year government bond yield has climbed to a 30-year high, prompting a broader rotation of capital across global markets.
He further said that despite these headwinds and persistent inflation concerns, spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $143 million in net inflows, providing support to prices and the $60,000 level now remains a critical support zone.
The global crypto market capitalisation edged down 1% to $2.14 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap. The fear and greed index slightly drops to 25, while the market sentiments remain under fear, said CoinDCX Research Team.
In the past week, Bitcoin and Ethereum were up 2% and 6.5% respectively. Among the major altcoins, BNB, XRP, Tron, Hyperliquid, and Cardano rallied up to 8% whereas Solana and Dogecoin fell 0.9% and 0.7% respectively.
CoinSwitch Markets Desk said Bitcoin slipped to around $61.5K after Trump declared the US-Iran ceasefire "over” and the turmoil raised odds of a September Fed rate hike, adding pressure on risk assets like crypto. $61K remains a crucial level, with traders expecting a reversal once talks resume.
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What other analysts say
Riya Sehgal, Research Analyst, Delta Exchange
Crypto markets are in a macro-led risk-off phase. Bitcoin’s fall toward the $61,500–$62,000 zone reflects pressure from U.S.–Iran escalation, rising crude oil, higher bond yields, Japan bond-market stress, and Strategy-related Bitcoin sale concerns. ETF flows are supportive but limited. BTC spot ETFs saw around $21.4 million of inflows, while Ethereum ETFs saw around $26.9 million.
Nischal Shetty, founder, WazirX
Bitcoin trades near $62,014, with the daily technical outlook remaining cautious as the market consolidates. Moving averages indicate near-term weakness, while balanced momentum signals suggest traders are awaiting the next major catalyst.
Vikram Subburaj, CEO, Giottus
The broader crypto market cap stood near $2.14 trillion. Bitcoin dominance held around 58%. This indicates that traders remain defensive. They are not yet rotating aggressively into altcoins. On-chain signals remain mixed. Long-term holders appear to have resumed gradual accumulation, with net buying estimated in the 50,000-100,000 Bitcoin range.
(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)
Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP bounced after US President Donald Trump said that Iran had called him and wanted to make a deal. US stock futures also turned green following the completion of strikes confirmed by the US Central Command on Thursday.
President Trump Claims Iran Seeks Deal After Second Set of Strikes Stocks and crypto markets reacted positively to President Trump’s latest comments that Iran called him, saying “they want to make a deal so badly.” However, he is unsure about making a deal with Iran again amid ceasefire violations and strikes against US forces in the Middle East.
“I just don’t know if they’re worthy of making a deal. I don’t know that they’re going to honor the deal. That’s the problem,” Trump said. The White House is preparing for a multi-day or even weeks of strikes against Iran over the Strait of Hormuz control.
Bitcoin and XRP bounced after the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said U.S. forces completed strikes on nearly 90 Iranian military targets. These included air defense systems, coastal surveillance sites, missile and drone storage areas, naval assets, and logistics infrastructure
The strikes come after previous operations targeting Iranian military capabilities following attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. CENTCOM says its forces remain on alert and ready to respond.
Meanwhile, sources told CoinGape that Iranian officials rejected Trump’s claim that they are “begging for a deal,” stating that the Trump administration is repeatedly asking Iran to hold back and request talks.
Iran’s IRGC even attacked and hit US military infrastructure in Kuwait’s Camp Arifjan and Ali Al-Salem base in retaliation. It also carried out strikes on the US Fifth Fleet HQ and Sheikh Isa base in Bahrain in a joint missile and drone operation, as per Tasnim.
BREAKING: Iran's IRGC announces it has attacked and hit US military infrastructure in Kuwait's Camp Arifjan and Ali Al-Salem base, along with the US Fifth Fleet HQ and Sheikh Isa base in Bahrain in a joint missile and drone operation, per Tasnim.
The IRGC calls this the "first…
— The Hormuz Letter (@HormuzLetter) July 9, 2026
Bitcon and XRP Climb Higher Bitcoin (BTC) and XRP bounced from recent lows as traders saw Trump’s remarks on Iran as signs of negotiations. BTC dipped near $61,500 earlier amid renewed US-Iran war tensions, but buy-the-dip sentiment triggered a bounce above $62,500.
XRP also recovered, holding near $1.09 after sliding from $1.16 amid US-Iran ceasefire violations. This rebound also comes amid positive developments, including Ripple signing XRP jersey patch deal with Kansas Jayhawks.
In addition, FOMC Meeting Minutes revealed that Fed officials support holding interest rates steady for longer, despite a rate hike still on the table. Bitcoin and XRP trading volumes remain in the red as traders await macro and clear technical catalysts.
Bitcoin has started July on a solid footing, consistent with its historically strong seasonal performance. Supportive comments from President Trump, including remarks that the US is “taking over crypto” and SEC pro-crypto rules changes, have helped sentiment. BIT predicted Bitcoin faces initial resistance at $65,955.
#BTC
If history repeats, things are likely going to pick up for Bitcoin and its Summer relief rally in the second half of July$BTC #Bitcoin
— Rekt Capital (@rektcapital) July 8, 2026
If you want to easily, efficiently, and quickly swap one crypto to another crypto, check out these 10 Best Crypto Swapping Sites.
Robinhood (@RobinhoodCrypto) Chain has rapidly established itself as a major force in decentralized finance, recording $500 million in 24-hour trading volume on Uniswap (@Uniswap) on July 8. The milestone makes it Uniswap's highest-volume deployment outside of Ethereum mainnet, just days after going live.
A Fast Start for a New Chain Robinhood Chain launched its public mainnet on July 1, 2026, built on the Arbitrum (@arbitrum) technology stack with 100-millisecond block times. The chain is designed for tokenized real-world assets and 24/7 financial services, with Stock Tokens tracking listed equities such as NVIDIA, Alphabet, and Apple available through Robinhood Wallet in more than 120 countries. The volume figure on July 8 was roughly 10 times higher than what the chain recorded the previous day, pointing to a sharp acceleration in user activity.
Trading was driven by a mix of wrapped Ethereum (WETH), memecoins, and tokenized stocks. Uniswap deployed all of its major protocol versions from day one, including v2, v3, v4, and UniswapX, establishing itself as the chain's primary automated market maker from the outset. According to the official Uniswap blog, Uniswap serves as the primary public AMM on Robinhood Chain with support across the Uniswap web app, wallet, and API from launch day.
Broader Context The launch is part of a wider push by Robinhood into on-chain financial infrastructure. Alongside Uniswap, day-one ecosystem partners include Chainlink for oracle infrastructure, as well as Alchemy and BitGo for additional DeFi services. The chain also introduced Robinhood Earn, a lending product targeting an estimated 7% APY on dollar-backed USDG, built on the Morpho protocol.
For Uniswap, the deployment adds another revenue-generating venue to its growing multi-chain footprint. The $UNI token rose between 11% and 14% around the time of the chain's launch as traders priced in higher protocol usage.
The key question going forward is whether the chain can sustain meaningful volumes beyond its launch week. The $500 million single-day figure is notable, but longer-term activity levels and total value locked will be more telling indicators of whether Robinhood Chain becomes a durable fixture in DeFi.
Sources:
Uniswap Blog: Uniswap is Live on Robinhood Chain
Robinhood Newsroom: Robinhood Chain Mainnet Launch
Crypto Briefing: Robinhood Chain Hits $500M in 24-Hour Uniswap Volume
TL;DR Bitcoin ETFs recorded $84.86 million in net outflows on July 8, signaling continued caution among institutional investors. Spot Ethereum ETFs attracted $70.48 million in net inflows, extending their positive streak to five consecutive trading days. The contrasting ETF flows suggest institutional capital is showing stronger interest in Ethereum than Bitcoin in the short term. Analysts continue to monitor ETF activity as a key indicator of institutional sentiment and broader crypto market direction. U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) returned to negative territory on July 8, recording $84.86 million in net outflows after signs of improving investor sentiment earlier in the week. The latest figures suggest institutional demand for Bitcoin remains uneven as investors continue responding to broader macroeconomic uncertainty and crypto market volatility.
While Bitcoin products lost assets, spot Ethereum ETFs attracted $70.48 million in net inflows, extending their positive run to five consecutive trading days. The sustained inflows point to renewed institutional interest in Ethereum, even as Bitcoin funds continue to experience intermittent selling pressure.
The latest ETF flow data follows a difficult period for Bitcoin investment products. Just last week, spot Bitcoin ETFs posted more than $526 million in weekly net outflows, ending one of the weakest stretches of the year before briefly recovering with several days of fresh inflows. However, Wednesday’s withdrawals indicate investors remain cautious rather than fully returning to the market.
Ethereum Continues to Outperform in Institutional Flows Ethereum has recently shown stronger momentum among institutional investors. The latest $70.48 million in inflows builds on several consecutive days of positive demand, suggesting investors are becoming increasingly comfortable with ETH exposure despite ongoing market volatility.
Market participants have pointed to Ethereum’s expanding role in tokenization, decentralized finance, and institutional blockchain infrastructure as factors supporting demand. At the same time, several asset managers continue to increase their focus on Ethereum-based investment products, helping sustain inflows even as Bitcoin funds fluctuate.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, remains sensitive to macroeconomic developments. Investors continue to monitor interest rate expectations, global geopolitical risks, and overall risk appetite, all of which have contributed to inconsistent ETF flows in recent weeks.
Ethereum and Bitcoin ETF Flows Remain a Key Market Indicator Spot ETF activity has become one of the clearest gauges of institutional sentiment toward digital assets. Strong inflows typically signal growing confidence from professional investors, while sustained outflows often reflect a more defensive approach.
Although Bitcoin ETFs experienced another day of redemptions, the relatively modest size of the withdrawals compared with previous weeks may indicate that selling pressure is beginning to stabilize rather than accelerate. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s five-day inflow streak suggests capital is selectively rotating toward assets that investors believe offer stronger near-term opportunities.
With Bitcoin trading around the $62,000 level and market conditions remaining highly sensitive to economic developments, ETF flow data is expected to remain one of the most closely watched indicators for institutional participation in the crypto market over the coming weeks.
Key Highlights Ethereum has rallied approximately 10% throughout July, yet underlying demand signals remain subdued Binance holdings expanded by 221,000 ETH from late June onward, adding to tradable inventory Large holder transaction volumes have fallen to “Whale Left” territory according to CryptoQuant metrics Spot Ethereum ETFs in the United States recorded consecutive inflows over four sessions, accumulating $91.5 million A decisive move above $1,803 resistance (the 50-day EMA) is necessary for ETH to target $2,400 Ethereum has managed to climb roughly 10% since July began, yet the upward momentum appears increasingly precarious. Evidence from various market indicators suggests buyer participation exists but lacks conviction.
Ethereum (ETH) Price The Net Unrealized Profit/Loss (NUPL) indicator has improved from -0.46 to -0.30, signaling that while holders remain underwater on their positions, losses have contracted somewhat compared to previous levels.
Spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds in the United States experienced their first streak of positive net flows since early May, recording four straight days of capital entry. SoSoValue data confirms these combined inflows reached $91.5 million.
While encouraging on the surface, historical patterns indicate sustained ETF capital influx over extended periods is required to catalyze significant price appreciation. Current activity falls short of that threshold.
Crypto analyst Ash Crypto noted on X that ETH has retreated 6% from recent peaks following rejection at the 50-day moving average. He highlighted critical support zones at $1,670 and $1,500, emphasizing that reclaiming the MA 50 and breaking through $1,850 are essential steps toward reaching $2,400.
$ETH down 6% from recent high after rejection from resistance and the daily MA 50.
Next Supports:
– $1,670
– Strong support at $1,500
ETH needs to jump back above the MA 50 and $1,850 for further bullish momentum toward $2,400. pic.twitter.com/eCWlrcEBhO
— Ash Crypto (@AshCrypto) July 8, 2026
Large Holder Activity Contracts Data from CryptoQuant reveals that average whale transaction size declined from approximately 1,500 ETH per trade in mid-May to roughly 1,000 ETH currently, entering territory the analytics platform designates as “Whale Left.”
This retreat by institutional and high-net-worth participants reduces the volume of substantial orders flowing through markets. The resulting environment leaves pricing more vulnerable to smaller transactions, potentially amplifying near-term price swings.
Addresses containing between 10,000 and 100,000 ETH did absorb approximately 100,000 ETH during the previous week. However, total balances in this cohort have remained essentially unchanged across the past three weeks, indicating accumulation has not intensified.
Growing Supply on Trading Platforms Binance’s Ethereum reserves expanded from 3.64 million ETH to 3.87 million ETH since late June concluded—a notable addition of 221,000 ETH representing one of the more substantial reserve buildups observed in recent months.
Source: CryptoQuant Expanding exchange inventories signal greater availability of ETH for immediate market transactions. While this doesn’t guarantee imminent selling, it introduces additional supply-side pressure into a market already demonstrating fragility.
The Coinbase Premium Index, which measures sentiment among United States-based traders, has recovered from -0.169 to -0.076. Despite improvement, the negative reading indicates American buyers continue transacting at discounts relative to international markets.
ETH currently trades in the $1,740 to $1,777 range, maintaining position above the 20-day EMA situated at $1,714. Open interest in derivatives markets has remained stagnant, suggesting leveraged participants are adopting a wait-and-see approach.
On July 8, spot Bitcoin ETF flows in the United States returned to negative territory, with ETFs seeing net outflows of 84.86 million dollars for the day. Despite some modest signs of recovery earlier in the week, the numbers revealed that institutional investors remain cautious when it comes to Bitcoin.
Divergence between Bitcoin and Ethereum funds widensOn the same day, spot Ethereum ETFs attracted 70.48 million dollars in net inflows, extending their positive streak to five consecutive trading days. Recent data indicates that, at least in the short term, institutional capital is showing greater interest in Ethereum than in Bitcoin.
Data for July 8 shows net outflows of 84.86 million dollars from spot Bitcoin ETFs, contrasted by inflows of 70.48 million dollars into spot Ethereum ETFs. Notably, Ethereum has now logged five straight days of positive inflows.
An ETF, or exchange-traded fund, allows investors to gain exposure to an asset’s price movements without holding the asset directly. Spot ETFs, as distinct from futures-based products, track the real-time market price of the underlying asset rather than derivatives contracts.
Bitcoin fund weakness persists following last week’s routThe recent trend in Bitcoin investment products has already been under considerable strain. Cumulative net outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs exceeded 526 million dollars last week. Though there were several days of inflows that briefly slowed the exodus after a historically weak period, the renewed pullback on July 8 suggests that many investors are reluctant to re-enter the market with confidence.
Volatility in Bitcoin has been fueled by ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty. Shifting interest rate expectations, global geopolitical tensions, and changing risk appetites are among the key drivers of ETF flows in recent weeks.
Institutional interest in Ethereum gathers momentumEthereum has shown stronger momentum with institutional inflows over the last week. The latest 70.48 million dollar addition builds on a series of consecutive positive days, indicating that, despite market volatility, some investors are carving out larger positions in ETH.
Market participants cite Ethereum’s expanding role in tokenization, decentralized finance (DeFi), and institutional blockchain infrastructure as key factors fueling demand. The growing interest from asset managers in Ethereum-based products is helping to sustain inflows even as Bitcoin funds experience turbulence.
Spot ETF movements continue to be one of the most closely watched indicators for measuring institutional sentiment toward digital assets.
ETF flows offer insight into market directionSpot ETF figures have become a crucial barometer for reading how professional investors view digital assets. Robust inflows are often interpreted as a sign of growing confidence, while sustained outflows point to a defensively oriented market stance.
Though Bitcoin ETFs posted another day of net outflows, the retreat was less dramatic than in previous weeks, suggesting that selling pressure may be stabilizing rather than intensifying. In contrast, Ethereum’s five-day inflow streak reveals that capital is being selectively deployed into areas perceived to offer more compelling short-term opportunities.
With Bitcoin trading around 62,000 dollars, ETF flows are expected to remain a leading indicator of institutional participation in the ever-sensitive and rapidly shifting crypto market in the weeks ahead.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.
A crypto user has lost nearly $1 million after approving a malicious Ethereum transaction that gave scammers access to drain almost the entire wallet balance, adding to hundreds of millions of dollars in phishing losses recorded this year.
Summary
A crypto user lost nearly $1 million after approving a malicious Ethereum transaction that allowed scammers to drain the wallet. Phishing scams caused $723 million in losses across 248 incidents in 2025 as approval based attacks continued targeting crypto users. The latest theft follows another multimillion dollar onchain loss, highlighting separate risks from phishing approvals and flawed transaction routing. According to blockchain security platform Scam Sniffer, the victim lost 999,999 Tether (USDT) in an Ethereum phishing token approval scam on Wednesday after signing a malicious approval request.
— Scam Sniffer | Web3 Anti-Scam (@realScamSniffer) July 9, 2026 On-chain data showed the attackers first attempted to withdraw a rounded $1 million through multicall transactions, but the transfer failed because the wallet held slightly less than that amount.
Seconds later, the attackers adjusted their script and successfully withdrew the wallet’s exact remaining balance.
“The script recalculated and pulled the exact remaining balance,” Scam Sniffer said.
Phishing approvals continue draining crypto wallets Security researchers say approval phishing remains one of the most common social engineering attacks in crypto because users unknowingly grant unlimited spending permissions while believing they are approving a harmless transaction.
According to blockchain security firm CertiK, phishing scams caused $723 million in losses across 248 incidents during 2025. In these attacks, victims are typically tricked into signing malicious token approvals, allowing attackers to move funds from their wallets without requiring another signature.
The latest incident follows another major wallet compromise reported earlier this month. In that case, a crypto holder lost about $1.65 million after connecting to a fake exchange and signing a malicious smart contract.
“The approval gave attackers unlimited access, enabling an automated sweeper to drain funds,” researcher Ryan Coleman said on Friday.
A wallet holder lost $1.65M after connecting to a fake exchange and signing a malicious contract. The approval gave attackers unlimited access, enabling an automated sweeper to drain funds. Always verify contracts and revoke unused token approvals. pic.twitter.com/MbwJx2CHSe
— Ryan C. Coleman (@RyanColeXBT) July 3, 2026 The latest phishing loss comes only days after another high-profile onchain incident highlighted a different risk facing crypto users. Earlier this week, a trader lost nearly $2 million after a decentralized exchange routed an Ether swap through a low-liquidity pool, allowing a same-block arbitrage trade to extract most of the transaction’s value.
According to GoPlus Security, the loss was caused by transaction routing rather than phishing, prompting researchers to urge users to review execution paths carefully before confirming onchain transactions.
Scam Sniffer advised users to carefully review every signature request, avoid rushing approvals and use scam detection tools or browser extensions before signing wallet transactions.
Leading cryptocurrencies fell alongside stocks on Wednesday as the U.S. strikes against Iran threaten peace negotiations.
Crypto Market ShakesBitcoin slipped under $61,500, then climbed back above $62,000 overnight. Ethereum oscillated within the $1,700 region, even as the 24-hour trading volume saw an uptick. XRP and Dogecoin sank lower.
Over $330 million was liquidated from the cryptocurrency market in the last 24 hours, with $261 million in bullish long positions alone wiped out, according to Coinglass data.
Nearly $400 million in Bitcoin longs risked liquidation if the apex cryptocurrency falls to $60,000.
Bitcoin’s open interest slid 1.40% over the last 24 hours. Smart money sentiment, which refers to the collective outlook and capital allocation of institutional investors, turned "extremely bearish” on Binance.
Top Gainers (24 Hours)
The global cryptocurrency market capitalization stood at $2.15 trillion, contracting 1.67% over the last 24 hours.
Stocks Dive As Iran Strikes IntensifyStocks slipped further on Wednesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 576.76 points, or 1.09%, to end at 52,348.39. The S&P 500 lost 0.28% to close at 7,482.71. The Nasdaq Composite was the outlier, rising 0.2% to close at 25,870.65.
President Donald Trump reposted news of strikes on Iran’s southeastern city of Chahbahar on his Truth social, saying, “This is in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran. If it happens again, it will get much worse.”
Earlier in the day, he declared that the tentative ceasefire and memorandum of understanding with Iran is "over," sending markets reeling.
Bitcoin To Struggle In Short Term?On-chain analytics firm Santiment highlighted a sharp jump in “war-related crypto chatter,” anticipating increased volatility in the days ahead.
“If tensions keep rising, Bitcoin and altcoins may struggle short term, but if fear spikes too far too fast, it can also set up sharp relief rallies when headlines cool,” Santiment added.
Ali Martinez, a widely followed cryptocurrency analyst and trader, identified $63,000 as the major wall bulls need to break.
“Many holders who bought near $63,000 may use a return to their cost basis as an opportunity to exit at breakeven, adding selling pressure around this zone,” the analyst added.
Martinez also flagged downside risks, including potential declines to $46,000 or $37,870 if Bitcoin loses $59,000 as support.
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Robinhood’s freshly launched Layer-2 blockchain just posted the kind of debut numbers that make other chains quietly close their analytics tabs. On July 8, Uniswap recorded $500 million in 24-hour trading volume on Robinhood Chain, making it the highest-volume Uniswap deployment outside of Ethereum mainnet itself.
Robinhood Chain went live on its public mainnet around July 1-2, built on the Arbitrum technology stack with 100-millisecond block times. Uniswap deployed aggressively from day one, rolling out v2, v3, v4, and UniswapX across the new chain. Within the first week, Uniswap processed over $250 million in volume on Robinhood Chain alone.
Then came July 8, when the 24-hour volume figure surged to $500 million. The volume was largely driven by two categories: wrapped Ethereum (WETH) and memecoins. Throw in tokenized versions of equities like NVIDIA, Apple, and Google, and you’ve got one of the more eclectic order books in DeFi.
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The total value locked on the chain also crossed $100 million within that first week. Roughly $90 million of that TVL sat in Morpho’s lending protocol, suggesting that users weren’t just swapping tokens. They were actively borrowing and lending.
The chain is designed to facilitate continuous trading of tokenized real-world assets — fractional shares of big tech companies alongside crypto tokens, 24/7, without waiting for the NYSE to open. Chainlink is providing oracle infrastructure for the network, which is critical when you’re pricing tokenized equities. Morpho’s dominance in the TVL breakdown also tells a story, with nearly $90 million flowing into its lending protocol within days of launch.
Uniswap’s governance token, UNI, climbed between 11% and 14% amid the launch excitement and volume surge. In the weeks following the launch, daily trading volumes on Robinhood Chain began settling into the tens of millions, a significant step down from the half-billion-dollar peak.
The $500 million figure is eye-catching, but the more important metric to watch is where volumes and TVL settle over the next 30 to 90 days. For UNI holders specifically, the Robinhood Chain deployment adds another revenue-generating venue to Uniswap’s growing multi-chain footprint. Robinhood’s reported push into the European market suggests the company sees regulatory tailwinds abroad that could accelerate adoption further.
Regulatory scrutiny around tokenized securities remains intense in the US, and a single enforcement action could chill activity on the chain overnight. The concentration of TVL in a single protocol, Morpho, also represents a vulnerability. Investors watching this space should track whether new protocols deploy on Robinhood Chain in the coming weeks and whether the TVL diversifies beyond its current narrow base.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Grayscale, a leading digital asset investment firm, highlighted 8 crypto with the most important narratives shaping the market today. Each asset carries a distinct story driving adoption, developer activity, and investor interest.
Here is a closer look at each narrative, its current price, and how far it sits from its all-time high.
Every asset has its narrative:$BTC → Digital money$ETH → World Computer $XRP → Global payments$SOL → High performance $HYPE → Onchain trading 24/7$LINK → Tokenization & oracles$SUI → Next gen infrastructure$AVAX → Mass customization
— Grayscale (@Grayscale) July 8, 2026 What the 8 Grayscale Crypto Narratives Actually MeanEach crypto carries a distinct narrative, from Bitcoin’s digital money to Ethereum’s world computer, driving adoption and investor interest across the market.
Bitcoin (BTC) – Digital MoneyBitcoin remains the original narrative of decentralized digital money and a hedge against fiat debasement. Its fixed supply and growing institutional adoption through ETFs and corporate treasuries reinforce its role as a store of value.
Furthermore, it anchors the entire crypto market as the reserve asset. BTC trades around $62,000, roughly 51% below its all-time high near $126,000, yet long-term conviction stays strong.
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Bitcoin (BTC) Price Performance. Source: BeInCryptoEthereum (ETH) – The World ComputerEthereum powers smart contracts and decentralized applications, earning it the title of the programmable world computer. Its dominant DeFi and NFT ecosystems, combined with staking and Layer-2 scaling, sustain relevance despite fierce competition.
Moreover, ongoing upgrades and institutional flows continue to support the network. ETH trades near $1,732, about 65% below its all-time high close to 4,878 dollars from the 2025 cycle.
Ethereum (ETH) Price Performance. Source: BeInCryptoXRP – Global PaymentsRipple’s XRP focuses on fast, low-cost cross-border payments for financial institutions. Regulatory clarity in the United States has meaningfully boosted its utility and adoption potential.
As a result, banks and payment providers increasingly view it as a viable settlement infrastructure. Trading around $1.09, XRP sits roughly 72% below its all-time high near $3.84, with upside tied to expanding payment adoption.
XRP Price Performance. Source: BeInCryptoSolana (SOL) – High PerformanceSolana stands out for its high-throughput blockchain, enabling fast, cheap transactions ideal for memecoins, DeFi, and consumer apps. Despite past network outages, its ecosystem continues to expand through new projects and institutional interest.
Furthermore, ETF launches and treasury strategies have added fresh demand. SOL trades near $77, about 74% below its all-time high of $293, yet developer activity remains consistently strong.
Solana (SOL) Price Performance. Source: BeInCryptoHyperliquid (HYPE) – Onchain Trading 24/7Hyperliquid powers a high-performance Layer-1 optimized for decentralized perpetual futures and spot trading. It has captured a major share of the on-chain derivatives market while generating substantial real revenue.
Moreover, consistent fee buybacks remove tokens from circulation, increasing scarcity and supporting the price. HYPE trades near $67, only about 13% below its all-time high of $76.70, showing remarkable resilience versus peers.
Hyperliquid (HYPE) Price Performance. Source: BeInCryptoChainlink (LINK) – Tokenization and OraclesChainlink provides essential oracle services, connecting blockchains to real-world data and powering the tokenization of assets. As real-world asset tokenization gains traction across finance, its role in infrastructure becomes increasingly critical.
Furthermore, partnerships with major banks strengthen its long-term positioning. LINK trades near $7.59, roughly 85% below its all-time high close to $53, but is positioned for RWA-driven growth.
Chainlink (LINK) Price Performance. Source: BeInCryptoSui (SUI) – Next-Generation InfrastructureSui offers a high-speed, object-centric blockchain designed for scalability in gaming, DeFi, and next-generation applications. Its performant architecture has attracted meaningful developer interest as an alternative to older networks.
Moreover, its technical foundations remain strong despite recent price weakness. SUI trades near $0.70, about 87% below its all-time high of around $5.35, reflecting the broader altcoin correction.
Sui (SUI) Price Performance. Source: BeInCryptoAvalanche (AVAX) – Mass CustomizationAvalanche enables custom subnets for tailored blockchain solutions, appealing to enterprises and specialized use cases. This flexibility supports mass adoption across gaming, finance, and institutional sectors seeking dedicated infrastructure.
Furthermore, subnet-driven growth offers a distinct path toward real-world deployment. AVAX trades around $6.42, roughly 95% below its all-time high near $146, with recovery tied to institutional adoption.
Avalanche (AVAX) Price Performance. Source: BeInCryptoGrayscale’s emphasis comes as the crypto market transitions toward fundamentals such as usage, revenue, and regulatory clarity. Most assets fell sharply from their 2025 peaks. However, their distinct value propositions position them for potential recovery, provided execution follows the narrative.
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Aptos just posted its biggest single-day transaction count of the quarter. The Layer-1 blockchain processed over 16 million transactions in a single day in early July, a number that doubles as evidence that its April governance overhaul is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
That governance upgrade was, frankly, a big deal. Aptos raised gas fees tenfold, instituted a hard supply cap of 2.1 billion APT, cut staking rewards, and mandated that 100% of transaction fees be burned. The Aptos Foundation also permanently locked 210 million APT.
The numbers behind the milestone Despite the tenfold gas fee increase, average transaction costs held at $0.0005.
In June 2026, Aptos recorded 83.7 million transactions in a single week, its strongest weekly performance of the year.
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The token burn numbers are becoming material. In the 30 days leading up to this report, 235,200 APT were burned. Since the mainnet launched in October 2022, cumulative burns have reached 1.4 million APT.
Monthly emissions from staking sit at roughly 1.6 million APT. The current burn rate is offsetting approximately 15% of that.
Staking rewards were also trimmed as part of the April upgrade, coming down to approximately 2.6%.
Why the governance changes matter beyond the headline The April 2026 upgrades essentially borrowed a page from Ethereum’s EIP-1559 playbook, where base fees are burned rather than paid to validators or a treasury, creating a direct mechanical link between network demand and token supply reduction.
The hard cap of 2.1 billion APT puts a ceiling on total supply that did not exist before. Combined with the Foundation’s decision to permanently lock 210 million APT, the circulating supply trajectory has changed in a way that is difficult to reverse.
Aptos launched its mainnet in October 2022 with a Move programming language and a parallel transaction execution model. The April governance vote addressed the economic side of that equation.
What investors should watch from here Monthly emissions of 1.6 million APT remain higher than the current burn rate, meaning the net supply is still growing. The crossover point, where burns exceed new issuance, depends entirely on sustained or growing transaction volumes.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
Yesterday, the total net inflow into U.S. Ethereum spot ETFs stood at $70.5 million.
According to Farside's monitoring, U.S. Ethereum spot ETFs recorded a total net inflow of $70.5 million yesterday, among which Fidelity's FETH had a net inflow of $69.2 million.
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Goldman Sachs: China's AI has become one of the most notable growth narratives in today's tech sector.
In the report titled "Investment Strategy: Long China's AI Value Chain", Goldman Sachs analyst Louis Mille wrote: "China's AI industry has officially come into our focus." This is attributed to "an unprecedented combination of massive state support, surging global demand, and structural capital rotation, which has made China's AI one of the most compelling growth stories in today's tech sector." Goldman Sachs put forward three key points to support its investment thesis: a severe mismatch between the market capitalization of Chinese AI firms and their market potential, leaving ample valuation upside; China's AI industrial chain has unique competitive advantages undervalued by the market; and the Chinese AI sector has outperformed other Chinese assets, with capital being structurally incrementally allocated to it.
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For the first time, the US Federal Reserve has listed AI investment as one of its three major inflation risks.
The Federal Reserve released its meeting minutes on Wednesday, with officials at last month’s gathering generally agreeing they would need to raise interest rates if inflation remains persistently high this year. At the same time, they also concurred that rates could be held steady if upward price pressures fade quickly. Notably, Nick Timiraos—known as the “New Fed Wire” reporter—spotted an interesting detail in the documents: Fed officials are increasingly focusing on an inflation driver barely mentioned in debates just months ago: the boom in AI investment. Per the minutes, this is categorized as one of three key forces pushing inflation higher, alongside the Middle East conflict and tariffs—factors that could keep prices elevated and prompt the Fed to pivot to rate hikes. The minutes, released three weeks behind schedule, reflect growing concerns over inflation outlooks. More officials pointed out that robust business investment in AI infrastructure is a new force that could sustain price pressures. The minutes noted: “Several participants commented that price pressures have become more broad-based, with a large share of goods and services… experiencing significant increases.”
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Sony plans to launch its stablecoin issuance business in 2027, having secured conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national trust bank.
Sony has obtained conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national trust bank in the United States. The company plans to launch its subsidiary Connectia Trust this month, with an aim to kick off U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoin issuance and management operations in 2027.
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Yesterday, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded a net outflow of $84.9 million.
According to Farside’s monitoring, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded total net outflows of $84.9 million yesterday, with BlackRock’s IBIT alone seeing total net outflows of $59.1 million.
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10% of fees from Robinhood Chain and other Arbitrum Layer 2 (L2) networks will be allocated to the Arbitrum ecosystem, while 8% will flow to the token holders' treasury.
Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder stated that 10% of fees generated by Robinhood Chain and other Arbitrum Layer 2 (L2) networks will flow to the Arbitrum ecosystem. Of that total, 8% will go to a treasury controlled by ARB token holders, while 2% will be earmarked for development funding. This mechanism gives the ARB token holder treasury a steady revenue stream, with the relevant funds potentially used for ecosystem grants, token buybacks, or staking rewards in the future. Should Robinhood Chain’s trading volume continue to grow, it could further strengthen the Arbitrum ecosystem’s revenue-generating capacity.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
Ethereum has been testing the crucial $1,800 resistance level in recent days, drawing attention from market observers. On-chain data indicates that around 4.3 million ETH were transacted at this price point in previous sessions. This high level of trading activity has turned $1,800 into a pivotal threshold for determining the cryptocurrency’s short-term direction.
The $1,800 level shapes near-term momentumIf buyers can reclaim control over the $1,800 zone, technical charts point to subsequent resistance levels at $1,980 and $2,079. Clearing these hurdles would suggest a stronger recovery is underway and some of the selling pressure has been mitigated.
Analyst Ali Charts highlights the significance of this high-volume area near $1,800. Some investors who bought here may take profit as prices rise, while others could wait for a more decisive breakout to maintain their positions.
Ali Charts’ data reveal that nearly 4.3 million ETH changed hands around $1,800, making this region one of the most critical short-term thresholds for Ethereum.
Glossary: URPD refers to on-chain distribution data that shows the volume of assets traded at specific price levels. As it reveals areas of investor concentration, it is widely used to evaluate support and resistance zones.
Conversely, failure to overcome the $1,800 barrier could trigger a loss of momentum. In such a scenario, Ethereum may retreat to areas with lower trading volume, with the $1,237 level emerging again as the first major support line.
Cautious outlook prevails in broader analysisMore cautious assessments continue to dominate the technical outlook. The analyst team at More Crypto Online notes that Ethereum has yet to confirm a sustained long-term bottom with a strong technical formation. According to their analysis, it may be premature to declare that the broader downtrend is over.
On the daily chart, Ethereum is trading near both a significant Fibonacci resistance zone and its long-term downward trendline. In the short term, following $1,815, resistance is identified at $1,926, $2,045, and $2,226 as further key levels to monitor.
More Crypto Online emphasizes that while the current bullish move is notable, it does not in itself confirm a full trend reversal. A more robust structure is needed to signal a weakening in the larger downtrend.
On the downside, $1,554 is tracked as the next crucial support level. If Ethereum fails to hold after a rejection at resistance, the bearish setup may gain renewed strength.
The analyst adds that historic correction rates and RSI behavior do not completely rule out the possibility of a deeper bottom, with risks potentially extending as low as the $1,000 region. For a more optimistic picture to emerge, analysts point to the need for a clear five-wave upward structure on higher timeframes.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.
Ethereum has been trying to recover from its early June sell-off, but the rebound is getting rejected from a technically significant resistance area. While short-term momentum still remains constructive, both the daily structure and the Coinbase Premium Index suggest buyers still have work to do before confirming a broader trend reversal.
Ethereum Price Analysis: The Daily Chart The daily chart shows ETH trading around $1.74K after bouncing from the major demand zone at $1.5K. That area once again attracted buyers and produced a sharp recovery, allowing the asset to attack the $1.85K region once more.
Despite the rebound, Ethereum remains below the long-term descending trendline that has capped it since last year. The recovery has also stalled beneath the resistance at $1.85K, which almost aligns with the trendline and represents the first major barrier buyers must overcome.
Adding to the bearish higher-timeframe picture, the price continues to trade below both the 100-day and 200-day moving averages, with the 200-day MA positioned considerably higher near the $2.2K area. This indicates that the broader trend remains bearish despite the recent recovery.
A decisive daily close above the $1.85K resistance could trigger a move toward the next supply zone around $2K to $2.2K, where the moving averages are also located. Until then, the current advance appears to be a recovery within a larger downtrend rather than a confirmed trend reversal. On the downside, losing the $1.5K support would expose the market to a much deeper decline and an overextension of the bearish trend.
ETH/USDT 4-Hour Chart The 4-hour chart highlights improving short-term market structure following the strong impulsive rally from the $1.5K region. ETH successfully reclaimed the previous short-term highs around $1.6K, which now acts as bullish order block support following the breakout.
The latest price action shows Ethereum consolidating below the $1.85K resistance zone after failing to extend higher. Recent candles indicate mild profit-taking, while the RSI has cooled from overbought conditions and has fallen back toward the midline, suggesting bullish momentum has weakened in the short term without completely disappearing.
As long as the price holds above the $1.65K order block, the current pullback appears to be a healthy correction within the ongoing recovery. A successful breakout above $1.85K would likely open the path toward the psychological $2K region.
However, failure to defend $1.65K could shift momentum back in favor of sellers and increase the likelihood of another test of the $1.5K support area.
Sentiment Analysis The Coinbase Premium Index continues to provide a cautious backdrop. The indicator remains below the neutral zero line, with the latest reading around -0.07, indicating that ETH is still trading at a discount on Coinbase relative to other major exchanges.
Historically, sustained positive readings have reflected stronger buying activity from U.S.-based institutional participants. In contrast, the current negative premium suggests institutional demand remains relatively subdued despite Ethereum’s recent rebound.
The chart also shows repeated failed attempts to establish a lasting positive premium throughout recent months, implying that rallies have generally lacked consistent institutional accumulation. While the latest recovery in the index hints at improving sentiment, it has yet to reclaim positive territory, making it difficult to argue that large U.S. buyers have returned in force.
For the broader recovery to gain greater conviction, a breakout above the $1.85K resistance accompanied by the Coinbase Premium Index moving back into positive territory would provide stronger confirmation that institutional demand is beginning to support the advance. Until then, Ethereum’s recovery appears constructive but remains technically vulnerable to renewed selling pressure.
Despite months of market volatility, Ethereum and Bitcoin holders continue showing little interest in returning coins to exchanges. This does represent much more than decreased investor trading enthusiasm.
Persistent withdrawals continued reducing the amount of liquid supply available on the market.
As of press time, the total number of Bitcoins stored on exchanges was at an all-time low for any time period since 2017. At the same time, the total number of Ethereum [ETH] stored on exchanges was also at an all-time low for any time period since 2015.
Source: Santiment Simultaneously, ongoing negative Netflows indicate that institutional and longer-term holders prefer to store their coins using self-custody models such as ETFs or corporate treasuries rather than storing them on exchanges.
Therefore, this migration will remove additional coins from potential sales. Yet in turn, it will provide even less selling pressure in the short term to further increase the conviction behind buying. While lower exchange balances may result in lower prices for investors, they do create scarcity.
If demand continues recovering, limited liquid supply could amplify price discovery and support a more structurally driven market cycle.
Long-term holders reinforce Bitcoin’s supply floor Behind the continued decline in exchange balances, Bitcoin [BTC] Long-Term Holders are steadily absorbing the circulating supply. That behavior reflects growing conviction rather than defensive positioning, as experienced investors continue accumulating during market weakness.
Long-Term Holder Net Position Change has returned to positive territory, confirming a shift from distribution toward renewed accumulation.
Meanwhile, HODL Waves and rising illiquid supply show older coins remaining dormant despite recent volatility.
That behavior further reduced Bitcoin’s availability for active trading. On top of that, the Accumulation Trend Score indicated continued buying across smaller and medium-sized wallets.
Supply held by Long-Term Holders approached 15 million BTC.
By contrast, Short-Term Holder supply declined to roughly 16.75 million BTC. The shift suggested Bitcoin continued moving from shorter-term participants into stronger conviction holders.
Source: Glassnode Even so, tightening supply alone may not sustain Bitcoin’s recovery.
A lasting uptrend would still require stronger buying demand to absorb available liquidity. Without that support, Bitcoin could struggle to maintain momentum despite increasingly scarce exchange balances.
Final Summary Bitcoin [BTC] and Ethereum [ETH] exchange supply continues tightening, reinforcing long-term accumulation. Bitcoin needs stronger demand to sustain its recovery amid shrinking supply.
Russia has taken another step toward easing restrictions on cryptocurrency payments. The Financial Markets Committee of the State Duma has approved the updated draft law “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights” for its second reading. If passed, the regulation would legalize the exchange of certain cryptocurrencies for others and permit crypto asset payments in specific situations.
Broader scope for crypto paymentsThe latest version of the bill would allow investors to use digital assets for the purchase of securities outside of public offerings. In addition, it lays a legal foundation for swapping between different cryptocurrencies and for using crypto to pay transfer fees on various blockchain networks.
The Russian Federation will permit the use of digital currencies and digital rights as means of payment for securities, other digital currencies, or digital rights.
The Russian ruble, including the digital ruble, remains the country’s only official payment instrument. However, the bill previously granted exceptions for crypto mining rewards and sanctioned international trade activities, and the latest amendments have further broadened the scope of these exemptions.
Criteria for market entry remain in placeBasic requirements for listing cryptocurrencies on regulated Russian markets remain unchanged. A digital asset must have had an average market value exceeding 5 trillion rubles over the past two years, a daily average trading volume above 1 trillion rubles, and at least five years of trading history on a licensed foreign platform.
Currently, only leading assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum meet these thresholds. Nonetheless, the updated text gives the Board of Directors of the Bank of Russia the authority to approve cryptocurrencies that do not fulfill all three criteria.
The bill’s definition of digital currency may mean that major stablecoins such as Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC will not qualify as digital currencies. The language specifies that a digital currency should not have a mandatory issuer.
Expanded access for qualified investorsUnder the new framework, trading platform operators will be able to offer nearly any cryptocurrency to professional investors without prior approval from the central bank. Restrictions remain for retail, or non-qualified, investors, who can purchase only highly liquid crypto assets pre-approved by the monetary authority.
Previously, this group was limited to annual purchases of up to 300,000 rubles in cryptocurrency and could do so through only a single intermediary. Nonetheless, the new regulation somewhat widens access, as under the current structure only highly qualified investors in Russia can acquire digital assets in practice.
The draft law introduces a licensing regime for service providers such as exchanges, brokerages, custodians, and depositories. Furthermore, intermediaries and portfolio managers will be able to conduct transactions with foreign exchanges to link the Russian crypto market to global platforms.
Financial Markets Committee Chair Anatoly Aksakov announced that the committee had approved the bill.
Initially, draft law number 1194918 8 was slated to take effect on July 1. However, proposed amendments delayed the process, pushing the implementation date back to September 1. The regulation now awaits approval by the Federation Council and the signature of Russian President Vladimir Putin to become law.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.
