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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.
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@Ethereum core developers have taken a significant step toward removing one of the most persistent friction points in crypto: the requirement to hold $ETH just to move assets on-chain.
The Problem EIP-8141 Solves EIP-8141 targets that problem directly.
Where $RLUSD Fits In The update opens the door to regulated stablecoins, including Ripple's $RLUSD, being used for gas settlement alongside $USDC and $USDT.
EIP-8141 would bring this capability natively into the base protocol, making stablecoin gas payments a standard feature rather than an opt-in workaround.
Sources:
CoinDesk: Ethereum Commits to Letting Users Pay Gas Fees Without Holding Ether
Crypto.news: Ethereum EIP-8141 Could Remove Need for Users to Hold ETH for Gas
Ripple: Ripple USD (RLUSD) Stablecoin
European natural gas markets climbed more than 4%, breaching €74/MWh for the first time in three years Tehran intends to establish a maritime restricted zone near the Strait of Hormuz after American military strikes targeted Iranian tankers Approximately 20% of worldwide LNG shipments pass through the Strait of Hormuz, predominantly originating from Qatar Gas reserves across Europe stand at merely 62%, trailing the five-year seasonal norm by 17 percentage points Market expectations point to a 25 basis point interest rate increase from the ECB amid 3.3% inflation driven by energy costs Natural gas prices across Europe experienced a sharp rally Monday, touching heights unseen since the final weeks of 2023. The primary Dutch futures contract advanced to approximately €73.80 per megawatt-hour, approaching the previous week’s summit of €74.32.
Dutch TTF Natural Gas Calendar (TTF=F) Across the Channel, British wholesale gas markets registered a 2% increase, hovering around 182.50 pence per therm, approaching the 2023 zenith of 183.95 pence.
The upward momentum follows intensifying military confrontations between Washington and Tehran in Persian Gulf waters.
Middle East Standoff Puts LNG Transit at Risk Iranian authorities revealed intentions to establish a restricted naval zone adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz within days. The announcement follows weekend operations by American military forces that struck and incapacitated three Iranian petroleum tankers.
BREAKING: Iran launches anti-ship ballistic missiles from Chabahar, southeastern Iran, toward vessels under US Navy escort in the US-backed southern Omani corridor of the Strait of Hormuz, per initial reports.
For the first time, the US Navy is escorting vessels during daylight,…
— The Hormuz Letter (@HormuzLetter) September 7, 2026
The Pentagon justified the military action as a response to Iranian ballistic missile launches targeting two US Naval vessels operating in regional waters.
The strategic waterway facilitates approximately one-fifth of international liquefied natural gas shipments, with Qatar serving as the primary source. Any interruption to maritime passage through this chokepoint would sever a critical supply artery feeding European markets.
European energy companies now find themselves in direct competition with Asian purchasers for Atlantic basin LNG cargoes to compensate for potential supply disruptions.
Market participants remain vigilant as the tit-for-tat military actions demonstrate no indication of de-escalation.
Depleted Storage Levels Compound Winter Concerns The geopolitical crisis arrives at an inopportune moment for European energy infrastructure. Underground storage inventories currently sit at approximately 62% capacity, significantly below the five-year historical average by roughly 17 percentage points.
Unusually warm temperatures throughout Southern European regions during summer months elevated gas consumption for power generation. Scheduled maintenance on Norwegian pipeline infrastructure and postponed Qatari LNG shipments further constrained storage replenishment efforts throughout August.
Should LNG imports face disruption during autumn months, energy analysts caution that Europe may confront severe price volatility and potential supply allocation measures during peak winter demand.
Meanwhile, Brent crude oil continues trading above $90 per barrel, compounding overall energy cost pressures.
Central Bank Policy Meeting Draws Attention Escalating energy expenses are amplifying inflationary pressures throughout the eurozone economy. Consumer price inflation registered 3.3% in August, with energy components surging 14.3% on an annual basis.
The European Central Bank convenes Thursday for its policy meeting. Financial markets have almost completely priced in a 25 basis point interest rate increase under President Christine Lagarde’s leadership.
Elevated energy input expenses are constraining both European industrial operations and household budgets, complicating the central bank’s monetary policy calculus.
The convergence of depleted inventories, supply chain vulnerabilities, and accelerating inflation has created substantial anxiety in European energy markets as the heating season approaches.
According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin Monitoring, a news-driven trader scooped up the Hakimi token within one second of Binance releasing its contract listing announcement. The trader paid a total of 40.8 BNB (≈$31,000) in node bribes and gas fees, then sold most of his position to net roughly $378,000 in profit. The announcement was published at 13:55:12; within that same second, the trader paid 35.3 BNB (≈$26,800) in bribes to the BNB48 Club node, used a private RPC channel to buy 9.89 million Hakimi tokens for 264.7 BNB (≈$200,000) at an average price of ~$0.02 per token, plus an extra 5.5 BNB (≈$4,200) in gas fees. After other traders piled in to drive up the token’s price, the news-driven trader sold most of his position in batches at an average of ~$0.058 per token.
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A Wisconsin utility just put real money behind fusion energy, and the reason has less to do with scientific curiosity than with keeping the lights on for AI data centers.
Realta Fusion, a Madison-based startup developing magnetic mirror fusion technology, announced a partnership with Madison Gas and Electric (MGE) to jointly develop a 200-megawatt electric fusion power plant in Wisconsin. The facility is designed to power roughly 150,000 homes and is targeting operation sometime in the 2030s.
MGE isn’t just signing a future power purchase agreement. The utility made a direct equity investment in Realta, described as “meaningful,” and will provide engineering support, equipment, and assistance with permitting and financing. That makes this one of the earliest examples of a regulated utility embedding itself in a fusion company’s cap table during the technology’s development phase, not after it’s proven.
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Why utilities are suddenly interested in fusion Data centers consume enormous amounts of power, and their expansion shows no sign of slowing. For utilities like MGE, which serves approximately 170,000 customers in southern Wisconsin, the math is straightforward: future load growth requires future generation capacity, and the clean kind is preferable.
MGE has pledged to achieve net-zero carbon electricity by 2050. Solar and wind help, but they’re intermittent. Fusion, if it works at scale, offers something neither can: baseload, carbon-free power that runs around the clock without weather dependency.
Realta’s technical edge and recent milestones Realta Fusion pursues a path called magnetic mirror fusion, which differs from the tokamak designs favored by better-known competitors. Where tokamaks confine plasma in a donut-shaped chamber, magnetic mirrors use linear geometry to trap and compress it.
In June 2026, Realta hit a milestone that lent credibility to that argument. The company became the first commercial fusion entity to convert plasma kinetic energy directly into electricity.
The company is also building out the “Realta Forge” research and development facility at the site of a former Oscar Mayer plant in Madison. The project is backed by up to $55 million in state and local incentives and is expected to create over 600 jobs. The facility will house prototype fusion devices and serve as the proving ground for technology intended to scale into the planned 200 MWe power plant.
The competitive landscape for fusion energy Realta is far from the only fusion startup attracting utility and investor attention. Companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion Energy, and TAE Technologies have collectively raised billions in private capital. Commonwealth Fusion has backing from Bill Gates and Google, while Helion signed a power purchase agreement with Microsoft in 2023.
What sets the Realta-MGE deal apart is the structure. Most utility involvement in fusion has been limited to offtake agreements, essentially a promise to buy power if and when it’s available. MGE’s equity stake and hands-on engineering role represent a deeper commitment.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
3 September 2026 | 13:40 Robinhood Chain has led DefiLlama’s revenue ranking, but its $4 million day reflects gas, trading and token launches, not proof that stock tokens drove the surge alone.
Key Takeaways Robinhood Chain led DefiLlama’s revenue ranking. Gas fees supplied chain revenue. Trading apps generated large user fees. App revenue is separate from chain revenue. Stock-token demand remains hard to isolate. A revenue lead, not a Robinhood earnings report All DefiLlama figures are live rolling 24-hour readings and can change after publication. At the time of writing, DefiLlama’s live revenue ranking placed Robinhood Chain first with $4.01 million in 24-hour chain revenue, ahead of Canton at $1.69 million and Tron at about $874,000.
DefiLlama chains revenue dashboard ranking top networks. The result needs context. DefiLlama’s chain-revenue metric is not Robinhood Markets’ corporate income. It measures revenue retained by the network after Ethereum execution and data costs, as well as the share allocated through the Arbitrum Expansion Program.
Robinhood’s public mainnet is an Ethereum-compatible Layer 2 built with Arbitrum technology. It was designed to support tokenized assets and open DeFi activity, but the revenue dashboard measures what people paid to use the network, not which Robinhood product created each transaction.
Most of the chain’s revenue came from gas Users pay ETH to send transactions and interact with applications on Robinhood Chain. Those payments cover Layer 2 execution and the cost of posting data back to Ethereum. The network recorded $4.45 million in gross transaction fees—ETH paid for Robinhood Chain gas, during the same 24-hour period.
That gap is why fees and revenue should not be treated as interchangeable. Fees show what users spent; revenue estimates what the chain retained after its specified costs.
$4.45M
Chain fees
The gross amount users paid in ETH to transact on the network.
$4.01M
Chain revenue
The net amount DefiLlama attributes to the chain after listed costs and revenue sharing.
$4.32M
App revenue
Revenue retained by applications on the chain, measured separately from network revenue.
The Arbitrum Expansion Program receives 10% of Robinhood Chain’s net revenue, with 80% directed to the Arbitrum DAO treasury and 20% to a developer fund, according to DefiLlama’s methodology.
Trading and launches are generating the largest fees The application-level breakdown shows where users spent the most. DefiLlama’s fee dashboard listed Uniswap as the largest source of user-paid application fees, at about $8.92 million. That is a swap-fee total paid by traders, not $8.92 million of revenue retained by Uniswap.
Pons and GMGN also stand out. Pons collects launch and swap fees, while GMGN charges users who trade through its bot. Together, the data points to crypto-native activity, swaps, token launches and automated trading, as a major source of the day’s onchain spending.
What users were paying for
Application
Activity measured
Fees, 24h
Revenue, 24h
Uniswap
Swap fees paid by traders
$8.92M
$348.8K
GMGN
Trading-bot fees
$2.65M
$2.22M
Pons
Token launches and swaps
$5.95M
$1.11M
The application figures belong to their respective protocols. They should not be added to Robinhood Chain’s $4.01 million of net chain revenue because they measure a different layer of the ecosystem.
The dashboard does not isolate Stock Token demand Robinhood built the network to support tokenized stocks, exchange-traded funds and other real-world assets. Its live dashboard showed about $196 million in active RWA market capitalization, $1.40 billion in DEX volume and $304.6 million in perpetual-futures volume when checked.
Those readings show substantial activity, but they do not reveal how much of the day’s gas or application fees came from Stock Tokens. The available data therefore cannot support a claim that tokenized equities caused the revenue surge. What it does show is that trading infrastructure is currently producing large amounts of fee-paying usage around the chain.
Why the Arbitrum connection matters Robinhood Chain’s revenue is also relevant beyond its own network because a portion flows back into Arbitrum’s ecosystem. That relationship is part of the chain’s design, which Coindoo explored in its analysis of Robinhood Chain’s growth within the Arbitrum ecosystem.
The contrast with Arbitrum Nova’s move into reduced support is clear. Robinhood Chain is generating fee-paying activity while Nova’s user and DeFi activity declined before its support model was reduced.
What would show the surge is lasting A single 24-hour lead does not establish a durable business. The next signal will be whether chain revenue remains high after launch and trading activity cools, while DEX volume, stablecoin balances and RWA activity continue to rise together.
Readers can follow the live revenue ranking, fee breakdown and Robinhood Chain metrics. A sustained mix of network fees and real-world-asset activity would be stronger evidence than one day of activity dominated by crypto-native trading.
Author
Kosta has reported on cryptocurrency markets and blockchain infrastructure since 2020, bringing over six years of hands-on experience in the crypto industry built through daily tracking of markets, trends, and emerging blockchain developments. Specializing in Bitcoin on-chain analysis, institutional ETF flows, and digital asset price action, his work at Coindoo has been cited by other news agencies and consistently covers market developments with a focus on data-driven reporting across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. Over the years, Kosta has contributed to multiple crypto media outlets in different regions, authoring over 6,000 articles across the sector. His reporting spans cryptocurrency markets and the broader fintech industry, tracking not only price action but also the technological and regulatory forces shaping the ecosystem. To support his analysis, Kosta actively leverages on-chain data and metrics from leading platforms such as Santiment, Glassnode, and CryptoQuant, enabling deeper, evidence-based market insights. He believes in the power of transparency and the data that underpins the blockchain ecosystem. His academic background in Marketing Management from Denmark further complements his analytical approach, adding a strong understanding of communication strategy and content positioning to his work.
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.
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European natural gas prices climbed to their highest level in over 3 years, as renewed US strikes on Iran deepened concerns over prolonged disruption to energy flows from the Persian Gulf.
Europe’s benchmark, Dutch front-month futures, surged to 73.85 euros per megawatt-hour in early European trading. It has gained roughly 25% over the past month. At press time, it stood at 72.2 euros.
Dutch Front Month Futures Chart. Source: TradingViewFollow us on X to get the latest news as it happens
Storage Shortfall Leaves Europe ExposedThe front-month contract has not traded this high since the end of 2022, according to the Wall Street Journal. The rally reflects a supply problem that predates this week’s escalation.
EU gas stocks were 63% full in the final week of August. That sits well below the 80% average for late August in recent years.
Storage operators normally refill throughout the summer, when both demand and prices are lower. Gas analyst Greg Molnar said continued injection at the current pace could leave EU gas storage at just 72 bcm.
That would put inventories 20%, or 19 bcm, below the five-year average. It would also mark the lowest storage level since 2013.
“Low storage levels are naturally increasing the risk of heightened winter price volatility,” he said.
Energy Costs Reach Consumer PricesThe shock has already landed in the eurozone inflation data. Inflation rose 3.3% in the year to August, up from 2.9% in July. Energy inflation drove the move, accelerating to 14.3%. Core inflation eased to 2.4%.
Escalation around the Strait of Hormuz has also clouded prospects for a recovery in regional liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Roughly 20% of global LNG shipments cross the waterway.
Analysts at ING said Europe currently outbids Asia for cargoes once shipping costs are counted. However, they expect competition between the two regions to intensify if Qatari volumes remain absent through year-end.
Goldman Sachs analysts said the benchmark may need to move above 100 euros per megawatt-hour should Middle East exports normalize only gradually through 2027. Meanwhile, Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop told CNBC that a cold winter could drive prices into the 90-120 euro range.
The squeeze is spilling into risk assets. Asian equities slid after strikes on Iran, while Bitcoin (BTC) reacted to the same escalation.
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Key Takeaways The Dutch TTF gas benchmark jumped above €70/MWh, marking the highest level since March 2026 Military confrontation between US and Iran near the Strait of Hormuz has escalated, with US strikes on Iranian positions prompting missile attacks on American bases in Jordan Approximately 20% of worldwide LNG shipments transit through the Strait of Hormuz, which remains largely inaccessible Gas inventories across Europe stand at merely 62-64% of capacity, significantly trailing the five-year average for this season Analysts at Goldman Sachs project potential prices reaching €100/MWh should Middle Eastern supply disruptions continue through 2027 Natural gas markets in Europe surged to their loftiest levels in half a year this week following renewed military action between Washington and Tehran, sparking concerns over liquefied natural gas availability through critical Persian Gulf shipping lanes.
The front-month Dutch TTF benchmark contract touched €70.85 per megawatt-hour during Monday’s trading session, followed by an additional 1.3% gain on Tuesday to settle at €71.30. Meanwhile, Britain’s NBP wholesale gas benchmark leaped 6.4% to 175.40 pence per therm as market participants returned following a bank holiday.
Dutch TTF Natural Gas Calendar (TTF=F) The price acceleration followed weekend operations by American military forces targeting Iranian missile installations on Larak Island positioned near the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran’s response included launching ballistic missiles toward US military installations in Jordan.
US President Donald Trump has issued warnings of additional military action targeting Iranian critical infrastructure, while diplomatic initiatives aimed at reopening commercial navigation through the strategic waterway have achieved minimal progress.
The Strategic Importance of the Strait of Hormuz The Strait of Hormuz represents one of the planet’s most vital energy transit points. Approximately 20% of global liquefied natural gas commerce flows through this narrow passage, with substantial volumes originating from Qatari export facilities.
BREAKING: Brent crude oil prices surge above $92/barrel after two oil tankers are struck in the Strait of Hormuz.
Markets are pricing-in another wave of inflation. pic.twitter.com/E8bgCHfaRd
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) September 1, 2026
The channel remains virtually impassable to commercial traffic, severing a vital supply line for LNG carriers bound for European and Asian markets. QatarEnergy has notified Italian utility Edison that force majeure provisions suspending LNG shipments will remain in effect until early November due to ongoing hostilities.
The contract between Edison and Qatar typically accounts for roughly 10% of Italy’s yearly gas requirements. Edison has confirmed it is securing alternative supply sources.
Inadequate Storage Compounds the Crisis Europe was confronting supply challenges even before the current military escalation. Continental gas storage infrastructure held just 62-64% of total capacity, based on figures from Gas Infrastructure Europe. This represents approximately 17 percentage points beneath the five-year seasonal norm for this period.
Germany and the Netherlands face potential shortfalls in meeting their respective storage objectives of 70% and 80% ahead of the November 1 deadline. Elevated prices have hampered injection activities because the spread between summer and winter valuations has frequently proven insufficient to justify storage economics.
Sebastian Heinermann, who serves as managing director for German gas storage trade group INES, cautioned that inadequate storage combined with severe winter conditions could leave Germany unable to satisfy typical consumption requirements.
European energy companies now find themselves in fierce competition with Asian purchasers for available spot LNG shipments, driving up both shipping costs and cargo valuations.
Analysts from Goldman Sachs cautioned in recent commentary that should Middle Eastern energy shipments normalize only incrementally throughout 2027, December 2026 TTF valuations would probably need to exceed €100/MWh.
Escalating gas valuations are simultaneously contributing to wider inflationary pressures. Eurozone headline consumer price inflation climbed to 3.3% on an annualized basis in August, propelled predominantly by energy expenses. The European Central Bank convenes on September 10, with market participants anticipating another 25-basis-point rate hike.
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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.
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Ethereum developers have issued an alert for L1 contract users on the ETH mainnet as the Glamsterdam upgrade progresses.
In a recent post, the Ethereum Foundation gave a heads-up for anyone maintaining L1 contracts ahead of the Glamsterdam upgrade scheduled for Q4 2026.
Heads-up for anyone maintaining L1 contracts:
→ The Glamsterdam upgrade will include gas repricings (EIP-8037, EIP-8038) that shift state creation and access costs.
→ Most contracts are unaffected, but a small set may break or degrade without updates. Affected contracts rely on…
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— Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn) August 25, 2026 The Glamsterdam upgrade will include gas repricings (EIP-8037, EIP-8038), which will shift state creation and access costs.
While most contracts are unaffected, Ethereum developers warn that a small set may break or degrade without updates. Affected contracts rely on assumptions that the new schedule changes, such as hardcoded gas values.
EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, both anticipated for inclusion in the Glamsterdam upgrade, will modify the cost of creating and accessing state, allowing gas costs to better reflect the actual work required for each operation.
Replaying historical mainnet transactions under the new schedule reveals that a tiny set of smart contracts rely on assumptions the new schedule shifts, potentially causing these contracts to break or degrade without preventative upgrades.
The bulk of highlighted concerns are resolved with an increase in the gas limit, and the large majority of smart contracts remain unaffected, while direct outreach to the most-affected builders is already underway.
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Gas prices for state operations were last adjusted in the Berlin fork in 2021, following which Ethereum's state has grown significantly.
Repricing state operations to reflect their actual cost is a prerequisite for increasing the gas limit further. The new schedule is derived from a performance target that supports roughly a 3x increase in base throughput.
About GlamsterdamEthereum's upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade aims to pave the way for the next generation of scaling. Glamsterdam is named from the combination of "Amsterdam" (execution layer upgrade) and "Gloas" (consensus layer upgrade).
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Following the Fusaka upgrade, Glamsterdam focuses on scaling the L1 by reorganizing how the network handles transactions and manages its huge database, substantially changing how Ethereum generates and verifies blocks.
The gas turbines needed to power the massive data centers behind every chatbot query and image generation prompt are stuck in a manufacturing queue that now stretches into the next decade.
US data center power demand is projected to more than double, climbing from 31 GW in 2025 to roughly 66 GW by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs estimates. The global turbine manufacturing industry can produce somewhere between 60 and 70 GW per year. Total orders already exceed 110 GW.
A backlog measured in years, not months GE Vernova, one of the world’s dominant turbine makers, reported a gas power equipment backlog of 116 GW as of Q2 2026. That’s up from 100 GW just one quarter earlier. The company is now offering delivery slots as far out as 2031.
Siemens Energy paints a similar picture. The company sold 100 gas turbines in 2024 and nearly doubled that to 194 in 2025. Around 60% of its recent turbine orders are connected to data center projects.
Turbine prices reflect the squeeze. According to Wood Mackenzie, costs have surged by more than 195% since 2019. Manufacturers have started charging reservation fees just to hold a place in line.
Capital costs for combined-cycle power plants have roughly doubled in recent years as a direct consequence of the supply crunch.
The grid can’t keep up either Even if turbines materialized overnight, the electrical grid itself has its own capacity problem. Hyperscalers and data center developers have tried to sidestep this by building behind-the-meter generation, essentially private power plants that feed directly into a facility without touching the broader grid. Those private setups still need the same gas turbines everyone else is fighting over.
PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization that manages the grid across 13 eastern US states, saw its July 2026 capacity auction fall 6,831 MW short of its reliability target. That was the third consecutive year the auction missed the mark.
Goldman Sachs forecasts US data center capacity additions of 13.6 GW in 2026 and 36.3 GW in 2027.
Geopolitics and competition for supply US tech companies aren’t the only ones placing orders. The Middle East has become a significant source of turbine demand, as Gulf states invest heavily in both AI infrastructure and broader power generation, adding another layer of competition for a finite manufacturing pipeline.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit has announced it will add trading support for four assets: Biconomy (BICO), BubbleMaps (BMT), Nillion (NIL), and Ether.fi Gas (GWEI). All four assets will be listed with BTC and USDT trading pairs. Specifically, BICO, NIL, and GWEI will be deposited via the Ethereum network, while BMT will use the Solana network. Trading is scheduled to open at 13:00 Korea Standard Time on August 21, with deposit services set to activate within two hours of the announcement’s release. Upbit stated that following the new assets’ listing, buy orders will be restricted for roughly five minutes, and only limit orders will be supported for approximately two hours—other order types are temporarily unavailable. If liquidity is insufficient before or after the listing, the trading opening time may be delayed.
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SEC: Notice of Filing of a Proposed Rule Change to List and Trade Shares of 3x Gold ETF, 3x Silver ETF, 3x Bitcoin ETF, 3x Ether ETF, 3x Crude Oil ETF, and 3x Natural Gas ETF, each a Series of the VS Trust, under BZX Rule 14.11(e)(4) (Commodity-Based Trust ... Comments Due: 21 days after date of publication in the Federal Register Submit a Comment on SR-CboeBZX-2026-065
Six of the seven Adani-branded stocks slipped on Tuesday even after a US judge dismissed the criminal charges against founder Gautam Adani.
Prosecutors had indicted Adani and seven other executives in November 2024, with the Indian billionaire himself facing counts of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud and substantive securities fraud.
US Judge Dismisses Adani Bribery and Fraud Criminal CaseThe indictment alleged the defendants promised more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials to win solar energy contracts. Prosecutors said Adani and others then misled US investors to obtain funds.
The Justice Department signaled in May that it would drop the case. Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter argued the matter was primarily foreign, hard to prove, and inconsistent with current department priorities.
Brooklyn US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis granted the rare request. However, Garaufis made his unease plain in the ruling.
“The irregularities in the decision to dismiss the indictment are concerning…McCotter appears to have eschewed the professional opinions of innumerable officials from various federal offices and replaced them with his singular judgment,” he wrote.
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I welcome the US court’s decision with humility and deep respect for the judicial process.
Throughout this challenging period, our faith in truth, fairness and the rule of law remained unwavering.
My deepest gratitude to those who never lost faith in us, in the system and in…
— Gautam Adani (@gautam_adani) August 10, 2026 Meanwhile, the market barely reacted. The selling was broad but shallow, with no stock in the branded complex moving more than 2%.
AWL Agri Business led the declines with a 1.66% drop to ₹192.87, followed by Adani Power at 1.06% and Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone at 1.01%.
Adani-Linked Stock Performance on Tuesday. Source: BeInCryptoLosses were milder further down the group. Adani Green Energy, Adani Enterprises, and Adani Energy Solutions each shed less than 0.8%, with the flagship Adani Enterprises closing at ₹2,988. Adani Total Gas alone finished higher, edging up 0.74% to ₹665.
That the dismissal failed to spark even a modest relief rally points to a market already looking past the courtroom.
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If you’re an energy company whose exports depend on a narrow waterway that sits at the center of basically every Middle Eastern geopolitical crisis, eventually you start looking at alternatives. ADNOC Gas, the listed gas arm of Abu Dhabi’s state oil giant, is doing exactly that: exploring a new LNG export facility in Fujairah, on the UAE’s eastern coast, which would allow shipments to bypass the Strait of Hormuz entirely.
The initiative, which entered a design competition and bidding phase in June 2026, targets a capacity of 4 million tonnes per annum (mtpa). That’s a meaningful addition for a company that currently runs its LNG operations from Das Island, squarely on the wrong side of the strait from a security perspective.
Why Hormuz matters, and why ADNOC wants to avoid it ADNOC has already started hedging against this vulnerability on the crude oil side. The company operates the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, also known as the West-East pipeline, which connects onshore oil fields to the Fujairah export terminal. That pipeline was recently reported to be nearly 50% complete in terms of planned expansion work. A Fujairah-based LNG facility would extend the same geographic logic to gas exports.
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Recent disruptions in the region have made the case more urgent. ADNOC Gas posted a Q1 2026 net income of $1.1 billion, a result the company described as resilient despite production adjustments forced by Hormuz-related shipping challenges.
The $20 billion gas expansion plan The Fujairah LNG terminal isn’t a standalone project. It sits inside a much larger strategic push by ADNOC Gas to invest more than $20 billion in expanding its gas processing capacity by approximately 30% by 2029.
Fujairah’s growing role as an energy hub Fujairah has been quietly building its credentials as an alternative energy export corridor for years. Located on the Gulf of Oman rather than the Persian Gulf, the emirate offers direct access to the Indian Ocean and global shipping lanes without requiring transit through the strait.
The emirate already hosts one of the world’s largest bunkering ports. ADNOC’s crude oil pipeline terminal there has been operational for years, handling exports that can reach Asian markets without any Hormuz exposure. Adding LNG infrastructure would turn Fujairah into a dual-commodity export hub.
What to watch going forward The design competition launched in June 2026 will narrow down engineering firms and construction partners for the facility. Projects of this scale typically take four to six years from initial design to first LNG cargo, meaning a mid-2030s start date is a reasonable baseline if the project proceeds on schedule.
The competitive landscape for LNG supply is getting crowded. Qatar is in the middle of a massive expansion of its North Field, targeting 126 mtpa of capacity. The US remains the world’s largest LNG exporter, with new Gulf Coast terminals coming online. ADNOC’s 4 mtpa addition is relatively modest in that context, but the routing advantage through Fujairah could command a premium from buyers who value supply security.
ADNOC Gas’s $1.1 billion quarterly profit gives it the financial headroom to pursue ambitious projects without straining its balance sheet.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Quick Summary Dutch natural gas futures climbed more than 2% Monday, reaching approximately €56.90 per megawatt-hour with a 2.9% increase Final agreement between Iran and Oman regarding Strait of Hormuz shipping routes remains unresolved Iran states complete waterway reopening depends on fulfillment of further U.S. requirements European Union gas reserves stand at approximately 56%, below typical mid-August levels Tight market conditions persist due to competition with Asian purchasers for available LNG shipments Natural gas prices across Europe experienced an upward swing Monday following diminished prospects for swift resolution of Strait of Hormuz shipping constraints. Dutch benchmark futures for the front month advanced 2.9% to settle near €56.90 per megawatt-hour. Meanwhile, British wholesale gas contracts registered a 2.6% increase, reaching 139.50 pence per therm.
Dutch TTF Natural Gas Calendar (TTF=F) The upward movement followed Iran’s indication that an arrangement with Oman concerning alternative shipping corridors through the strait was nearing completion, before subsequently attaching additional stipulations that postponed full access. Iranian officials stated the strategic waterway would remain restricted until supplementary U.S. conditions were satisfied. Furthermore, Tehran rejected the possibility of engaging in direct negotiations with Washington.
The inconsistent messaging left commodity traders without the anticipated supply certainty they had been expecting.
Middle East LNG Transit Remains Restricted The Strait of Hormuz serves as a critical passage for liquefied natural gas shipments originating from Middle Eastern producers. With navigation continuing to face obstacles, deliveries from significant exporters such as Qatar are experiencing delays. This situation is intensifying pressure on worldwide supply precisely when European nations should be replenishing their storage infrastructure.
🇺🇸🇮🇷 BREAKING: Trump ready to declare victory over Iran without a nuclear deal.
Trump is willing to walk away if Tehran fully reopens the Strait of Hormuz.
With midterms three months away and gas prices still elevated, Trump is seeking a victory narrative, per WSJ. https://t.co/MwotL6TPET pic.twitter.com/1MpCpUizim
— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) August 9, 2026
Storage facilities throughout the European Union currently hold roughly 56% of total capacity as mid-August approaches. This represents a notable shortfall compared to historical benchmarks for this calendar period. Market observers and energy specialists indicate this deficit elevates vulnerability as the winter demand period approaches.
Elevated summer temperatures throughout southern European regions have compounded the challenge. Increased heat has driven up electricity consumption for cooling systems, resulting in greater natural gas combustion for power production rather than inventory accumulation.
European Buyers Face Asian Competition for LNG Supply European purchasers now find themselves in direct competition with Asian consumers for accessible spot market LNG deliveries. This competitive dynamic is sustaining elevated pricing and complicating efforts by European utilities to establish adequate storage reserves ahead of the heating season.
Market specialists indicate pricing will continue responding sensitively to developments emerging from the Iran-Oman-U.S. diplomatic efforts. Without a concluded agreement and complete strait reopening, supply ambiguity appears set to persist.
Iranian representatives confirmed negotiations remained viable but acknowledged limited advancement. Officials provided no specific timeframe regarding when discussions might reach conclusion.
The Dutch benchmark contract had declined during the previous week before Monday’s reversal. The rebound positions it once again above the €56 per megawatt-hour threshold, a benchmark closely monitored by market participants.
Currently, European energy trading reflects expectations that Hormuz transit disruptions will extend through the immediate future at minimum.
Key Takeaways Dutch front-month natural gas futures climbed 0.5% Friday to approximately €57.50/MWh while posting a weekly decline of about 2.5% Consecutive weekly price drops attributed to tentative diplomatic advances regarding Middle Eastern shipping routes LNG tanker movement through the Strait of Hormuz continues facing significant constraints amid ongoing negotiations European Union gas reserves stand at only 55-57% capacity as August begins, substantially below the 71% five-year historical average Iranian naval operations near the strait combined with vessel passage requirements continue fueling supply risk concerns Natural gas prices across Europe registered modest gains on Friday yet concluded a second consecutive week of declines, reflecting the ongoing tension between diminishing geopolitical anxieties and a fundamentally constrained physical supply environment coupled with renewed Persian Gulf uncertainties.
The Dutch TTF front-month contract, Europe’s benchmark gas futures instrument, advanced 0.5% to settle near €57.50 per megawatt-hour during Friday’s session. However, this intraday uptick proved insufficient to reverse the week’s overall trajectory, with prices ending approximately 2.5% lower compared to the preceding Friday’s close.
[[IMG_2]]Dutch TTF Natural Gas Calendar (TTF=F) The consecutive weekly retreats emerged as diplomatic initiatives focused on restoring normal shipping operations through the Strait of Hormuz removed some speculative risk premium from the marketplace. Both Oman and Qatar have undertaken mediation responsibilities in discussions designed to create secure maritime passage through this critical chokepoint, prompting energy market participants to reduce the elevated risk premiums that had surged during late July.
A parallel downturn in international crude prices throughout the previous fortnight additionally contributed to relieving some upward pressure across European energy commodity markets.
Transit Corridors Remain Compromised Notwithstanding the diplomatic advancements, liquefied natural gas carrier traffic navigating the Strait of Hormuz remains subject to substantial operational limitations. Transportation bottlenecks are delaying the delivery of summer spot market shipments from critical Middle Eastern export facilities, most notably from Qatar.
🇮🇷 Iran just dropped a draft plan that basically says: “We’ll open Hormuz when we’re good and ready… and on our terms.”
They’ve lined up a new route with Oman, but only if the U.S. lifts its blockade first.
American and Israeli ships? Banned. Anything they call “hostile”?… pic.twitter.com/UVGWbw2Ica
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) August 7, 2026
Iranian government-controlled media outlets confirmed Friday that naval units had executed operations targeting what authorities characterized as “hostile assets” in the strait’s vicinity, subsequent to reported explosions occurring on Qeshm Island. Tehran has additionally signaled intentions to prohibit vessels affiliated with the United States and Israel from utilizing the waterway while demanding financial compensation from nations it designates as adversarial as a precondition for permitting passage.
These circumstances propelled prices back beyond the €57/MWh threshold on Friday, recapturing the majority of declines registered during the week’s earlier trading sessions.
Inventory Deficit Compounds Market Strain Continental Europe’s natural gas storage infrastructure is commencing August with fill levels ranging from just 55% to 57% of total capacity. Historical five-year average inventory levels for this seasonal period typically register around 71%, positioning European energy providers significantly behind normal preparedness benchmarks as the winter heating season approaches.
Abnormally elevated summer temperatures throughout southern European regions have exacerbated the storage capacity shortfall. Prolonged heat waves have intensified electricity demand for gas-fueled power plants supplying cooling systems, consequently reducing the volume available for seasonal storage injection.
European procurement entities are presently engaged in direct competition with Asian purchasing interests for accessible LNG spot market volumes on the international marketplace. Industry observers anticipate this competitive dynamic will establish a robust price floor beneath European natural gas valuations.
Market analysts indicate prices will maintain heightened sensitivity to any deterioration in Middle Eastern diplomatic progress. While negotiations persist, the underlying physical market environment remains structurally tight, imposing limits on potential downward price movement even as geopolitical risk factors demonstrate preliminary signs of moderation.
The latest development reported as of Friday involved Iran’s documented naval activities in the Qeshm Island vicinity, which reversed European gas prices upward following a temporary mid-week softening.
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, August 6th, 2026, Chainwire
Gas has been above $4 a gallon nationally since April. Grocery prices remain 23% higher than three years ago, and the average credit card interest rate has topped 20% for the better part of two years.
Against that backdrop, CoinZoom, a leading global fintech and payments platform, reported growth in a product that addresses the squeeze directly.
Card transactions grew at a similar rate, with the average number of transactions per active cardholder roughly tripled over the same period. On average, each CoinZoom debit card user earned $150 a month in the first half of 2026 in rewards on their card spending.
The company says the growth reflects a consumer calculation that is straightforward in a high-inflation environment: a card that returns meaningful rewards on ordinary spending is worth switching to.
“At 5% back, a family spending $2,000 a month on everyday purchases earns up to $100 in rewards,” said Todd Crosland, CoinZoom’s founder and CEO. “At today’s gas prices, that covers roughly two full tanks. For most households, that’s a real number.”
The card’s growth comes as Americans are paying materially more for basic goods than they were several years ago. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that consumer prices for food at home rose roughly 23% between 2022 and 2025. Gas, which crossed $4 nationally in April for the first time since 2022, is averaging $4.09 per gallon this week, according to the American Automobile Association, a 30% increase from the same week last year.
Traditional debit cards, held by most American households, generally offer no rewards on spending. Rewards credit cards offer cashback and points programs, but the average credit card interest rate now exceeds 20%, which consumer advocates note typically erases rewards value for users who carry a balance month to month.
CoinZoom’s debit card growth is part of a wider movement toward stablecoin-funded debit cards that has accelerated significantly in 2026. Monthly payment volume on crypto-linked cards climbed from $233 million in May 2025 to $614 million in May 2026 industrywide, according to Paymentscan, a data and analytics firm, a 163% increase in twelve months. Cumulatively, tracked payment volume on such cards has reached nearly $8.2 billion.
“People are looking for ways to make their money go a little further at the end of the month,” added Crosland. “If a debit card can help fill the gap with an extra tank of gas or stretch far enough for a few everyday treats for your family, that’s meaningful. That’s what we’re here to do.”
About CoinZoom
CoinZoom is a US-based financial platform enabling anyone to send, spend, save, and invest without barriers. To support the benefits of blockchain technology, CoinZoom offers flexible funding options including Apple and Google Pay, debit and credit cards, and instant cash deposits at multiple retail locations in the US. Its unique international peer-to-peer payment system, ZoomMe, is part of its cash-to-crypto ecosystem for its customers in 169 countries, allowing them to deposit and send cash or crypto, around the globe instantly for free – saving millions of dollars in remittance fees. The CoinZoom Crypto Debit card provides flexibility in spending by allowing users to spend USD or crypto at over 175M merchants globally while earning up to 5% back in crypto on each purchase. The CoinZoom platform was built with a multi-layered security approach, and the team’s decades of experience in financial technology security are equally important in safeguarding customer funds and personal information. CoinZoom is a U.S. registered Money Services Business with FinCen and holds a SOC2 Type II Certification, which is highly regarded as the most rigorous test for best practices and diligence around securing customer data. CoinZoom is also a U.S. registered Money Transmitter, and has subsidiaries in Australia, Latvia, Ireland, and Bermuda. CoinZoom Australia PTY LTD is registered as a Digital Currency Exchange with AUSTRAC.
PANews August 5 news, according to Cailian Press, the market rebounded amid volatile trading, with the three major indexes opening low and closing high. As of the close, the Shanghai Composite Index rose 1.47%, the Shenzhen Component Index rose 1.86%, and the ChiNext Index rose 1.32%. Zhongji Innolight's trading volume exceeded 67.5 billion yuan, breaking its previous historical volume record of 59.77 billion yuan set on July 30, 2026. Trading volume expanded significantly, with total turnover on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges reaching 2.66 trillion yuan, an increase of 446 billion yuan from the previous trading day.
On the market, hot sectors rotated rapidly, with over 3,700 stocks rising across the board. By sector, the intelligent driving concept surged, with Suoling Shares, Zhejiang Shibao, Xingmin Zhitong, and Shanzigao Ke hitting their daily limit up. The AI application segment strengthened repeatedly, with Xinkapu and Boyan Technology hitting limit up. The computing power leasing concept remained repeatedly active, with Litong Electronics achieving a three-board streak over four trading days. The semiconductor industry chain rebounded, with Jinhaitong hitting two consecutive limit-up boards, and Heyuan Gas, Dawei Shares, and Zhongjuxin hitting limit up. The precious metals concept showed active performance, with Sichuan Gold hitting limit up. The computing power hardware sector partially recovered, with Yangtze Optical Fibre and Huashengchang hitting limit up. On the downside, the oil and gas concept trended weaker, with Tongyuan Petroleum fluctuating lower.
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) criticized the Trump administration’s energy messaging after President Donald Trump celebrated rising U.S. oil exports, arguing that fuel prices remain a major concern for Americans amid tensions with Iran.
Greene Challenges Trump’s Oil Victory MessageOn Saturday, Greene responded to Trump’s Truth Social post saying that U.S. oil exports were "SURGING" under his leadership and declaring America was "the King of Oil."
In a post on X, Greene wrote, "The national price of gas is $4.10 and diesel is $5.36."
She added, "Your illegal senseless war on Iran is crushing the very people that voted to end foreign wars, lower inflation, and lower the price of gas."
She also criticized Trump’s communications strategy, saying, "Trump team, posting shit like this from our multibillionaire POTUS is stupid."
Trump’s post focused on U.S. energy dominance, with the president writing, "Because of President Donald J. Trump, Oil Exports are SURGING!
The image accompanying the post stated, "Now, the U.S. is the King of Oil!"
Global Energy Markets Faced Rising Supply RisksLast month, Trade tensions, Middle East conflicts and shipping disruptions had increased pressure on global energy markets.
President Trump’s 50% tariffs on Canadian goods had raised concerns over U.S. energy security, although Canadian crude oil exports remained exempt.
Canada supplied a significant share of U.S. oil imports, making it a key energy partner.
Meanwhile, Houthi threats to blockade Saudi Arabia and escalating U.S.-Iran tensions fueled concerns over disruptions to major shipping routes, including the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Strait of Hormuz.
U.S. forces carried out strikes against Iranian targets as Trump said the actions were aimed at protecting commercial shipping.
Previously, Trump said oil was "flowing like never before" after efforts to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, while announcing restrictions on Iranian-linked vessels and new trade deals with Gulf nations.
At the same time, a global refining shortage, tighter inventories and limited spare refining capacity raised concerns about future supply shocks.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
Photo courtesy: Shutterstock
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Creating a seamless user experience that allows users to smoothly interact with your product is one of the greatest challenges when building blockchain applications. Users can drop off at wallet creation, get stuck finding gas, abandon flows during approvals, or get confused by how to send transactions from one chain to another.
That’s where ZeroDev comes in.
As part of the full-stack product suite developed by Offchain, ZeroDev provides businesses like EdgeX, Glider, and Ethereal one place to build, launch and scale programmable accounts.
By signing up with the code ARBZERODEV, teams building on Arbitrum can access 3 free months of the ZeroDev Growth Plan until the offer expires on August 22, 2026.
Claim Offer
Instead of asking your users to manage seed phrases, gas tokens, and transaction approvals, ZeroDev developed a key set of features to help builders reduce that complexity:
Smart Accounts
Replace seed phrases, repeated signing, and rigid EOA flows with recoverable accounts, programmable permissions, gas sponsorship, and chain-aware execution.Ultra Relay
Sponsor fees, support flexible gas payments, and keep smart account transactions moving without forcing users to acquire native tokens first.Embedded Wallet
A single wallet interface for businesses to use programmable smart accounts, gas sponsorship, and account abstraction, helping teams launch faster with fewer integrations.Orchestration
Coordinate funding, permissions, policy, and execution across chains. Bring together Smart Routing Address flows, smart accounts, chain abstraction, and programmable transaction patterns without exposing the complexity to users.Smart Routing Address
Provide your users a persistent address for deposits from CEXs, onramps, and supported chains, then route funds to the intended target without making users manage bridge logic.The result is a simpler path from user acquisition to activation, retention, and scale.
Why user experience is still a key battlegroundIn many ways, the blockchain infrastructure problem is largely solved by the Arbitrum Platform with its low-cost, fast, and deeply customizable execution environment. But the user experience challenges at the application layer have space for improvement. Every additional step between signup and value creation introduces several key friction points:
User Step
Potential Drop-Off
Create wallet High Save seed phrase High Bridge funds High Acquire ETH for gas High Approve transactions Medium Switch networks Medium Retry failed transaction High For most applications, these aren’t purely technical challenges. They’re growth challenges. The Arbitrum Platform provides a high-performance execution environment. ZeroDev complements that with an account infrastructure layer that can remove several of these user-facing obstacles.
Where ZeroDev works well with ArbitrumZeroDev is strongest when an application built with the Arbitrum Platform needs more seamless onboarding. Below are five examples of where Arbitrum and ZeroDev can apply to practical use cases.
PaymentsPayment products cannot afford the friction brought forth by today’s crypto UX. If a sender or recipient has to stop and figure out gas, bridges, seed phrases, or network switching, the product can feel limiting. ZeroDev can help your payment application feel closer to a fintech flow:
Smart accounts for user-owned payment accountsGas sponsorship so users can transact before holding ETHERC-20 gas payments so fees can be paid in stablecoinsBatched transactions for approve, transfer, and settlement flowsSession keys for recurring payments, limits, or automationSmart routing for cross-chain payment experiencesIf implemented correctly, this can result in fewer failed transactions, fewer support issues, and fewer moments where a user has to understand the infrastructure before they can use the product.
Asset TokenizationInstitutions managing private credit, funds, real estate, and loyalty systems need more than the infrastructure to tokenize their managed assets and expand them into programmable markets. They also need the top-down user experience around those tokenized assets to feel more familiar for investors and operators that may not be crypto-native.
ZeroDev can help with the operational layer:
Embedded smart account onboardingGas sponsorship for minting, claiming, transfers, and redemptionsBatched compliance and asset actionsPolicy controls for transfer and redemption flowsSession keys for distributions or recurring operationsCross-chain routing when users, liquidity, or assets span networksEmbedded FinanceEveryday users looking to spend, save, earn, or transfer money across borders do not want to think about RPCs, gas, nonce errors, approvals, bridges, or which chain they are on. They want the app to work in the most seamless way possible.
ZeroDev can provide embedded financial applications the ability to simplify unnecessary complexity, while still keeping user activity onchain:
Passkey or social loginGas sponsorshipERC-20 gas paymentsTransaction batchingAccount recovery patternsSession keys for subscriptions, recurring investments, or automated actionsChain abstraction for cross-chain flowsThis is a strong fit for stablecoin wallets, savings apps, DeFi frontends, crypto-enabled neobanks, rewards products, cashback apps, and subscription payment experiences.
ExchangesFor DEX frontends, derivatives, trading bots, and portfolio automation tools, your traders do not want to manage idle ETH, repeat approvals, or expose full wallet access to every automation layer. ZeroDev helps trading apps build cleaner execution flows with:
Session keys for limited trading permissionsBatched approve, swap, and settle actionsERC-20 gas paymentsSponsored onboarding or high-value tradesAutomation permissions for bots, agents, and strategiesCross-chain routing for multi-chain liquidity accessA special offer for ArbitrumBy signing up with the code ARBZERODEV, teams building on Arbitrum can access 3 free months of the ZeroDev Growth Plan until the offer expires on August 22, 2026.
The offer includes:
100,000 creditsGas sponsorship accessBundler infrastructureTo use this offer, sign up for a ZeroDev account, navigate to Billing, subscribe to the Growth plan, and enter your credit card information (you will not be charged). After you've entered your payment information, apply the code ARBZERODEV to activate the discount.
Claim the offer today
The future of onchain UXThe next generation of applications won't ask users to learn wallets, bridges, gas mechanics, or account management. They'll simply deliver products.
The Arbitrum Platform provides the execution environment. ZeroDev provides the account abstraction and user experience layer. Together, they can help teams move faster, reduce user friction, and build applications that feel more familiar.
Start Building with ZeroDev
Talk to the ZeroDev team
Disclaimer:
The information provided is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, investment, technological, or any other form of advice. Please conduct your own independent research and consult with a qualified professional before making any decisions. This content does not constitute an endorsement or sponsorship of any third-party product, service, project, or entity mentioned. All trademarks, logos, and brand names are the property of their respective owners, and all rights are reserved by such owners.
Key TakeawaysUnderground Reserves Near 15-Year BottomRegional Instability Constraining International SupplyMonetary Policy Expectations Under PressureGet 3 Free Stock Ebooks Natural gas prices across Europe reached four-month peaks Friday, with TTF benchmark rising 0.4% Markets are experiencing their fourth consecutive weekly rally — the longest upward trend since May 2025 Equinor cautioned that Europe will likely miss its 80% storage target ahead of winter Current storage capacity stands at approximately 54%, marking the second-weakest level in a decade and a half Military operations in Iran and Houthi disruptions are constraining LNG deliveries via the Strait of Hormuz Wholesale natural gas prices in Europe remained elevated near four-month peaks on Friday, extending their rally into a fourth successive week.
The TTF front-month contract traded on the Dutch exchange, serving as Europe’s primary benchmark, advanced 0.4%, while Britain’s comparable futures contract climbed 0.3%. This week alone has witnessed an approximately 8% increase in gas values, with July’s cumulative surge exceeding 42%.
This represents the longest sustained upward momentum European gas markets have experienced since May of the previous year.
Underground Reserves Near 15-Year Bottom Earlier this week, Equinor, the continent’s leading domestic natural gas provider, announced that storage facilities throughout Europe are currently filled to just 54% of total capacity. This figure falls short of the five-year seasonal norm and represents the second-weakest position recorded over the past fifteen years.
The energy giant’s chief executive stated that the continent is improbable to achieve its objective of replenishing underground reserves to 80% capacity prior to the commencement of the winter heating period. This benchmark exists as a buffer against potential supply disruptions during colder months.
Entering winter with depleted reserves increases market vulnerability to significant price volatility should weather conditions deteriorate.
Regional Instability Constraining International Supply This week marked the thirteenth straight evening of American military operations targeting Iran. President Donald Trump issued warnings to Tehran and its Houthi proxies in Yemen regarding additional military responses should assaults on Red Sea maritime traffic persist.
🇾🇪 Insurance costs for shipping through the southern Red Sea doubled in a single day.
The jump came after Houthi forces hit at least one tanker overnight, with some companies now paying twice what they paid yesterday.
War risk premiums are the fastest signal in this whole… pic.twitter.com/w7OG07YfWT
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) July 23, 2026
The ongoing hostilities have disrupted shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz, severing a segment of international LNG transportation from Persian Gulf facilities.
With reduced availability from Persian Gulf sources, Asian purchasers have been successfully outcompeting European utilities in securing available LNG shipments. This competitive dynamic is redirecting cargoes away from European regasification facilities during a critically vulnerable period.
Elevated temperatures throughout Europe have simultaneously increased electricity consumption for air conditioning, compounding the strain on natural gas availability.
Monetary Policy Expectations Under Pressure Escalating energy expenses are contributing to intensifying inflationary pressures throughout the European region.
Financial markets are progressively incorporating scenarios where elevated utility costs could postpone anticipated interest rate reductions. Central banking authorities may need to maintain restrictive monetary policies for extended periods if energy-influenced inflation remains persistent.
The convergence of supply interruptions, insufficient storage capacity, and robust demand provides market participants with minimal indication that prices will moderate in the near term.
The TTF futures contract continues trading close to its strongest position since March, and without an imminent resolution to Middle Eastern tensions, the prospect facing European consumers approaching autumn remains precarious.
Marathon Digital has launched a small Bitcoin mining pilot in Utah powered by landfill methane gas, and while the project is not huge, it is a useful example of where mining infrastructure may be heading.
The project, built with Nodal Power, uses off-grid landfill methane to generate electricity for Bitcoin mining. Marathon’s announcement describes the facility as a 280 kW pilot, or 0.28 MW, with reported uptime of 92% and power costs around $0.03 per kWh.
That is not a massive hashrate deployment.
But scale is not really the point here. The point is that Marathon is testing whether waste methane, which would otherwise be an environmental liability, can be turned into a low-cost power source for mining.
That is the kind of energy story Bitcoin miners need more of, especially as political and environmental scrutiny around mining continues.
TL;DR Marathon Digital and Nodal Power launched a 280 kW landfill methane Bitcoin mining pilot in Utah. The project uses off-grid landfill gas to generate electricity. The facility is small, so the environmental impact should not be overstated, but the model is strategically interesting. Bitcoin Mining Needs Better Energy Narratives Bitcoin mining has always been tied to electricity.
That makes it easy to criticize and sometimes hard to explain. Critics focus on energy consumption, grid pressure, and emissions. Miners respond by pointing to stranded power, renewables, demand response, and the ability to monetize energy that would otherwise be wasted.
Both sides can be selective.
The reality is that mining’s environmental profile depends heavily on where the power comes from, how the facility interacts with the grid, and whether the project solves a real energy problem or simply consumes cheap electricity.
That is why landfill methane projects are interesting.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. If it escapes into the atmosphere, it creates environmental harm. Capturing it and using it for electricity can turn a waste problem into an energy source. If that electricity is off-grid and would not otherwise be used efficiently, Bitcoin mining can act as a flexible buyer.
That is the theory Marathon is testing.
Small Pilot, Bigger Implications A 280 kW project is tiny compared with large industrial mining sites.
Some major facilities run at tens or hundreds of megawatts. So this Utah deployment should not be presented as a major shift in Marathon’s overall energy footprint. It is a pilot, and a small one.
But pilots matter because they test operational viability.
Can the gas supply be reliable? Can the generators run efficiently? Can mining equipment operate with enough uptime? Are maintenance costs manageable? Does the power price stay competitive? Can the model be repeated at other landfill sites?
Those are practical questions, not marketing questions.
The reported 92% uptime and roughly $0.03 per kWh power cost suggest the pilot has enough promise to watch. If those economics can be repeated, landfill gas mining could become a useful niche for miners looking for cheap energy and stronger environmental positioning.
Why Off-Grid Power Is Attractive Off-grid power matters because it reduces the argument that miners are competing directly with households or businesses for electricity.
If a mining facility uses power that is stranded, wasted, or difficult to deliver to the grid, the economics look different. Mining becomes a buyer of last resort, or a way to monetize energy at the source.
That flexibility has always been one of Bitcoin mining’s stronger arguments.
Miners can locate near energy rather than near customers. They can shut down quickly if needed. They can operate in remote areas. They can turn irregular or stranded energy into revenue.
Landfill methane fits that model because the fuel source is location-specific and often underused.
If Bitcoin mining helps capture and consume methane that would otherwise be vented or flared, the environmental conversation becomes more complicated than “mining uses electricity.”
The Industry Still Needs Proof At Scale The challenge is scale.
One pilot does not transform Bitcoin mining’s environmental record. It does not prove every landfill gas project will work. It does not erase concerns about mining facilities that rely on fossil-heavy grids.
Marathon and other miners need to show that these models can scale, remain profitable, and produce measurable environmental benefits.
That last part is important. If miners want credit for emissions reduction, they need credible measurement. How much methane was captured? What would have happened without the project? How much electricity was produced? What emissions were avoided?
Without those numbers, the story can become vague.
Mining Is Becoming An Energy Infrastructure Business The bigger shift is that Bitcoin miners increasingly look like energy infrastructure operators, not just data-center companies.
They negotiate power contracts, work with stranded energy, participate in grid programs, evaluate generation sources, and compete with AI data centers for access to electricity. The winners may not simply be the miners with the newest machines. They may be the miners that understand energy markets best.
Marathon’s landfill gas pilot fits that direction.
It is small, but it shows the kind of practical experimentation that could shape the next mining cycle. Instead of only chasing cheap grid power, miners are looking for energy problems they can help monetize.
That may be the strongest long-term argument for Bitcoin mining.
Not that every mining operation is clean. Not that energy concerns do not matter. But that mining can sometimes turn wasted or stranded energy into economic value.
The Utah pilot will not settle the debate. It does, however, give the industry a better kind of example to point to.
This article is based on Marathon Digital’s announcement of its Utah landfill methane gas Bitcoin mining pilot.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Gas on AztecGas on Aztec is known as Fee Juice and is used to pay for transaction costs. This is the same as $ETH on Ethereum. Some apps will handle transaction costs for you under the hood, but if you are using a browser extension wallet, you will not be able to send transactions without it. Fee Juice can be obtained by bridging the $AZTEC token on Ethereum to the Aztec Network L2. This means that under the hood, all activity that happens on Aztec is underpinned by the $AZTEC token bridged into the network. Some bridges like Shield (by human.tech) handle this for you, allowing you to allocate a portion of your bridged transaction to convert into Fee Juice and land in your wallet automatically.
Public vs Private AssetsAssets and transactions on the Aztec Network can be either public or private. If you bridge publicly, your tokens will arrive as public, traceable tokens visible to all. Privately bridging, on the other hand, will give you private assets that are visible only to you. These assets can then be sent privately to another user or wallet without ever revealing who you are, what tokens were sent, how many, or who the recipient is.
Public vs Private GasLike tokens on the Aztec Network, Fee Juice (gas) can also be public or private. The reason for this is that even if what you are sending is private, the gas you spend to execute that transaction could still be visible if you are using public Fee Juice, potentially revealing transaction patterns and activity. Private Fee Juice keeps your entire transaction footprint hidden. When you send a private transaction, you can use private Fee Juice, and when you send a public transaction, you can use public Fee Juice, which means your transaction costs are always aligned with the type of transaction you're making.
Fee Juice in AppsAztec has native fee abstraction, which means apps could let you pay for transactions in any token you want, or cover your fees entirely. Apps like Nyx may choose to cover part or all of a user's transaction costs, or allow you to pay in tokens that are convenient for you. This means you will most likely never see Fee Juice in an app; instead, you'll pay in whatever makes sense for what you're doing, on your terms. Similarly, you might never even see an Aztec wallet at all, because the app itself becomes your interface that you connect to using your MetaMask wallet.
Fee Juice in Browser WalletsIf you're using a browser extension like Azguard, you'll manage Fee Juice directly in your wallet alongside your private and public balances, converting between tokens as needed to cover transaction costs.
When you bridge tokens in, you'll need enough Fee Juice to cover the cost of your first transaction, then you'll need to monitor how much Fee Juice you have available to make transactions. Browser wallets will allow you to send either publicly or privately to other users and will default to using either public or private Fee Juice depending on the type of transaction. Both private Fee Juice and public Fee Juice will appear by default in your token list.
Wrapping upHow you handle Fee Juice depends on where you're transacting: apps can abstract it away entirely and let you pay in any token, while a browser wallet like Azguard puts it in your hands to manage across public and private balances. Match your gas to your transaction, keep private activity private down to the fee, and you move on your terms.
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Aztec Network
Aztec Network
21 Jul
•
xx min read
Introducing Alpha V5The Aztec Network today activated Alpha V5, a major protocol upgrade passed by token-holder governance and executed onchain. Alpha V5 reduces private-transaction proving times by more than 2x compared to the previous version, lowers the cost of a fully private transaction by roughly 50%, resolves the critical issues found in V4, and sees the first wave of apps go live. Users can now send private transactions and earn yield on Aave simply by connecting their Ethereum wallets on Nyx, bridge from Ethereum to Aztec using Shield or TRAIN, privately collect NFTs on RavenHouse, or play Dark Forest Aztec, a hidden-information strategy game in a universe that lives entirely onchain.
"Alpha V5 continues Aztec's work at the frontier of client-side proving, with cryptographic breakthroughs that cut proving times by more than half this release," said Zac Williamson, Co-founder, Aztec Foundation. "We believe Aztec is now the fastest system in the world for proving a fully private transaction entirely on a user's own device, and every release moves the industry closer to private transactions at public transaction speeds."
As the only decentralized privacy L2, Aztec is the credibly neutral privacy layer for Ethereum. Aztec allows anyone to write smart contracts that include both private and public aspects – every private transaction is proven on the user's own device, so no operator, sequencer, or intermediary can see the data. The Alpha V5 proving improvements come from cryptographic advances that make this client-side proving faster than any prior release. The network remains in alpha, but with V5 it is ready for teams to begin building and deploying applications.
Performance - 2.5 second fully private transactions Making private transactions practical comes down to how quickly a proof can be generated on a user's own device, without offloading that work to a server that would learn what the user is doing. On Alpha V5, proving a private token transfer natively now takes approximately 2.5 seconds on a consumer laptop, down from 5.2 seconds on V4, and about 6.8 seconds in a browser, down from 12.5 seconds. Across every measured transaction flow, client-side proving times improved by approximately 2x compared with V4.
Bench machine: an M2 MacBook (12 cores, throttled to 8). "Native" runs Aztec's C++ proving binary; "WASM" runs the same prover in a browser engine (Node on V8).
Alpha V5 lowers ECDSA signature-verification cost by approximately 2x, speeds up Poseidon2 hashing by approximately 3x, and reduces the protocol circuit gate count by approximately 50% (gate count is the number of individual operations a proving circuit must perform, and it is the main driver of how long a proof takes to generate). Each of these lowers the amount of work a device performs to prove a transaction, and the reduction in gate count in particular compounds across every proof the network generates.
Apps - send, receive, and earn privately on EthereumAlpha V5 launches the first wave of apps on a network where privacy is built into the protocol rather than managed by an operator. On other networks that claim privacy, transactions still pass through an operator or node that reads them in plaintext, or depend on a viewing key that a third party holds, so users rely on someone else to protect their data and to decide when it gets disclosed. On Aztec, every private transaction is proven on the user's own device, so the app, the sequencer, and any operator never need to see the underlying data. Nyx is one of these apps, allowing users to privately send transactions and privately earn yield on Aave.
"On Ethereum, everything you do is public. That's why we built Nyx: a private account governed by your Ethereum wallet", said Nikhil, Co-founder of Nyx. "Now you can send, receive and earn in private. Nyx was the first app live on the Aztec Alpha, and we're excited to expand participation to more users with the added stability of Alpha V5."
Other apps on Alpha V5 include Azguard and Nethermind (wallets), Shield, TRAIN, and RavenHouse (bridges), and the Aztecscan block explorers. Also launching is Dark Forest Aztec, a game where users explore a universe, control planets, manage planetary energy, expand territory, and launch attacks through strategic play with private state and hidden actions.
Dark Forest Aztec private universe-building gameplayLower costs, higher security Transaction fees on Aztec come from two main sources: the cost of proving a transaction and the cost of verifying the rollup proof on Ethereum. Alpha V5 reduces both. It lowers the network's proving-cost parameter by 50%, and it reduces the L1 gas required to verify a rollup proof by approximately 40%. Because rollup proofs are verified on Ethereum and that cost is shared across all transactions in a batch, the L1 reduction lowers fees for every user, while the lower proving-cost parameter reduces the per-transaction proving fee directly. Together, these bring the average cost of a fully private token transfer to under a $0.05 transaction cost.
Alpha V5 also hardens the network on several fronts. It resolves critical vulnerabilities found in Alpha V4 along with additional bugs discovered since launch. Aztec's bug bounty program on Cantina also drew more than 234 security researchers to participate. The network remains in alpha, and further bugs may surface as usage grows, but each release has closed the issues found in the last and strengthened the protocol against new ones. With the critical V4 issues resolved and these safeguards in place, Alpha V5 is stable enough for teams to begin building and deploying applications.
AvailabilityAlpha V5 is live now, view the Alpha V5 landing page for a full list of features, performance updates, and live apps to explore.
About AztecAztec is the only decentralized, privacy-first Layer 2 on Ethereum. Developers write private and public logic in the same smart contract, and private functions are executed and proven on the user's own device, so no operator sees the underlying data. The protocol is upgraded through onchain governance, and the network settles to Ethereum. For more information, visit aztec.network.
Aztec Network
Aztec Network
30 Jun
•
xx min read
Inside an Aztec TransactionOn Ethereum today, each transaction reveals everything publicly. The token you moved, the size, the timing, the wallet it came from, every action you take. Given the limitations of this type of transparent network, the industry is now focusing on bringing privacy onchain as a top priority. The response to this has mostly been to enable private transactions that shield transfers in various ways. But when we look at how privacy works on Web2, it’s clear that users and developers need granular privacy controls: the ability to decide what is public or private and who is able to see different types of data.
Aztec was built so that one transaction can carry two halves. A private half that runs on your own device and never leaves it, and a public half that the network runs in the open. Apps can choose which aspects are private or public, and users can choose what they want to reveal and when.
This article will follow an example transaction on Aztec: a vote in an onchain election built on Aztec, where who you are and which candidate you chose stay private, while the running tally for each candidate stays public for anyone to verify.
Public and private in one movePicture the vote you cast in our example as two aspects that seamlessly weave together. In the first step, you act in private: an app records your vote on your device and hands the network a proof that the vote is valid without revealing it. In the second, the network acts in public: it checks that proof, then adds one to the chosen candidate's public tally. It is one transaction: one part stays with you, one part goes to the network. Both parts end up recorded onchain, in two separate state trees, one private and one public. The walkthrough below follows how these two aspects work together and what this means for how your transaction lands onchain.
It starts on your deviceYou open the voting app and connect an Aztec wallet. That first step looks like any onchain app. The difference is inside the wallet. An Aztec wallet carries a private execution environment, the PXE, pronounced "pixie", which runs on your phone or in your browser. The PXE is where the private half of your transaction executes, and where the proof of that work gets made, on your hardware, under your exclusive control.
Every account on Aztec is a smart contract rather than a bare key. That design, account abstraction, allows a wallet to authorize a transaction however its owner chooses without writing an identity onto the network for everyone to read. The wallet is the front door, and on Aztec you can decide if the door is open or closed, who you share your information with.
The private half runs on your deviceThe voting app is a smart contract with two kinds of functions. The private functions run first, and they run inside your PXE. Your identity and the candidate you picked are the private inputs, and they stay on your device.
The only thing to leave your device is a proof confirming the legitimacy of your vote. Aztec's client-side proving system, Chonk, takes the private execution and produces a zero-knowledge proof: a compact cryptographic receipt that your vote followed the rules, that you are eligible, and have not voted before, while revealing nothing about who you are or who you voted for. Think of it as a sealed ballot the network can confirm is valid without opening it. The network learns only that a legitimate vote happened. It does not learn how you voted, or even which account voted.
This is the part that used to be too slow to be practical. Generating a proof on a phone was the bottleneck every privacy app hit. Aztec’s Chonk is purpose-built for fast proving on low-memory devices, both natively and in the browser, so the private half runs on the device in your hand instead of on someone else's server.
The public half runs in the openSome elements of a vote should be public. The tally is shared infrastructure, the number everyone relies on to trust the result. Thanks to programmable privacy on Aztec, the app marks that part public. Public functions live on the network and run in the open, the way functions do on Ethereum.
On Aztec, private and public logic live in the same contract, and the developer decides which is which, function by function and variable by variable. Programmable privacy is a dimmer, not a switch. The voting app turns it up on the individual ballot and turns it down on the running tally. That boundary is a design decision written into the contract, and it is the thing no transparent chain and no fixed-privacy chain can offer.
The network checks the proof and runs the public partYour vote leaves your device as a bundle: the zero-knowledge proof of the private half, plus the call to the public function that updates the count. It goes to Aztec's sequencers, a decentralized set of thousands of independent operators, with more than 3,500 of them running the network today.
The sequencers do two jobs at once. They verify the proof of your private vote, confirming it is valid and eligible without seeing the choice behind it, and they run the public function that adds one to the chosen candidate and updates the public tally. Your ballot stays sealed. The count goes up by one for everyone to see. The same proof guarantees you cannot vote twice, even though no one learns which ballot is yours.
Two state trees, both onchainAztec has two main state trees, and both live onchain. One holds private state, the other holds public state, so the full record of what happened sits on the network rather than on any one person's laptop. The two trees store each record in two different ways depending on if it needs to be private or public.
The private tree uses a UTXO model, the same note-based design used by Zcash. In this model, state is written as commitments: each entry is a sealed record that a valid vote was cast, with the voter and the choice kept private. Just like with Zcash or Bitcoin, you do not edit a private entry in place. You write a new one, and the design stops the same vote from being cast twice (old state is nullified). The vote stays private, and the record of a legitimate vote happening is onchain for the network to check.
The public tree uses an account-based model, the same shape Ethereum uses: values that update in place, readable by anyone. This is where each candidate's tally lives.
One transaction wrote information to both trees. The private tree recorded that you voted, sealed. The public tree recorded the new totals, in the open. Everything is onchain. The difference between the two trees is how much each one reveals.
Every private app on Aztec writes into that same private tree. A vote, a payment, and a payroll run all land in one shared record of activity, so each user's privacy grows stronger as the network grows, instead of splitting into a separate pool for every app.
A block is proposed, and Ethereum records itAztec is an L2 on Ethereum, so everything settles to Ethereum L1. A sequencer on Aztec gathers transactions into a proposed block. Other sequencers validate it before it goes to Ethereum's pending chain. At that point the block sits on Ethereum, ordered and recorded, waiting for its proof. The network has agreed on what happened and the proposed block is just waiting a final proof.
Anyone can prove itProving a block is its own job, and on Aztec, it belongs to no one in particular. A decentralized, permissionless set of provers competes to take a full epoch, a 32-block stretch of the chain, and compresses it into a single zero-knowledge proof of the entire epoch. Anyone with the hardware can run a prover and bid for the work. There is no privileged operator, no committee you have to trust, no outside network holding a key.
That openness is the whole point of a privacy layer. A system that protects your data but routes it through one trusted server has only moved the exposure rather than removed it. Aztec keeps proving permissionless and your private inputs on your device, thereby avoiding any exposure.
The economics land in the voter's favor too. As an L2 network, Aztec spreads the cost of that one L1 proof across thousands of transactions in the rollup, so a vote costs pennies, not the millions of gas a private proof would cost verified alone on Ethereum.
Settled on Ethereum, verifiable by anyoneA prover then posts the epoch proof to Ethereum's proven chain, and the Aztec state is final. Ethereum verifies one proof and inherits the correctness of everything inside it. Aztec extends Ethereum and settles to Ethereum, so your hybrid transaction carries Ethereum's security without carrying Ethereum's enforced transparency.
Anyone can now verify that the result is valid and that every counted vote was legitimate. No one can see how any individual voted. The tally is on the shared ledger where it belongs, and your ballot stayed yours the whole way through.
What this unlocksFor the voter, their ballot was never a broadcast. The candidate you chose stayed yours, with no record tying your wallet to a name for anyone to read later, and you can still check that your vote was counted and the result is honest. You took part without your choice becoming data for systems built to act on it.
For a founder, the election app in this walkthrough is easy to implement without needing to build extensive custom code. Secret ballots with a public, verifiable count, in one contract, is a product category that opens up only because the boundary is programmable. You can build governance, elections, and polls where people vote without fear and the result still proves itself. And of course you can build anything that requires both public and private state to work seamlessly together.
For an infrastructure provider, the same machinery serves clients who need a result they can stand behind without exposing the people who produced it. Selective disclosure lets a client prove exactly what a counterparty needs to see, the count and the integrity of the process, and protect everything else, on their own terms. That is a guarantee a transparent chain cannot make.
A real vote needs two things at once: a secret ballot and a count anyone can check. A transparent chain makes you give up the first to get the second. On Aztec, you get both. The tally settled on Ethereum for anyone to verify, and how you voted stayed yours. The infrastructure is in place, what will you create with it?
->Review the Aztec Basics ->Head to the docs and start building today
Aztec Network
Aztec Network
23 Jun
•
xx min read
The Devil's Bargain - Privacy Without Credible Neutrality Crypto is in a long night. It is no secret that the industry is facing challenging circumstances and there has been a clear consolidation of the industry. Right now we are seeing a focus on real traction, demonstrable value projects shipping practical solutions that will meaningfully reach users.
Some of that discipline is overdue. However, in times like these the properties that made crypto structurally different begin to look expendable. Decentralization slows you down. It makes upgrades harder. It makes institutional sales harder. It removes the control surfaces that the existing financial world knows how to buy.
We used to accept those costs as the price of building something durable. But, in a famine, they look like unaffordable affectations. Discarding them wholesale, however, is like selling the land out from under our feet.
Permissionless, uncensorable transaction networks with rich composability - this is the clay from which our industry was grown. The long term commercial health of our industry depends on preserving these properties in an age of privacy and institutional adoption.
These trade-offs become more challenging and pernicious when privacy is involved. Privacy is the narrative for crypto in 2026, and for good reason. It’s the missing piece that will deliver the traction and real use-cases that the industry so desperately needs.
The challenges of decentralization multiply under the constraints of privacy and what we are seeing in the industry is not a pivot, but a complete capitulation of all of the differentiable value that made crypto valuable.
I have spent nearly a decade building a network that marries programmable privacy with decentralization. A network where users keep their data, where applications are composable with one another, where transactions can settle without a privileged party learning everyone’s business or deciding which products are allowed to exist. That required new cryptography, new programming models, new state architecture, new wallets, and a fairly insane number of tradeoffs that are invisible until you try to build the thing yourself. There are easier products to ship.
A centralized privacy service can give institutions something legible quickly, replicating how the existing financial sector works: a responsible operator, a viewing key, a way to block transactions, a way to explain the whole thing to a risk committee. Some of these products will be useful. Some will be good businesses. But they are not the thing we came here to build.
The Devil’s BargainInstitutional and enterprise adoption is one of the core growth areas in this crypto-winter and the playbook is simple: use the language of crypto as a skin-suit to sell products and services that pattern match onto existing financial rails, with their need for complete visibility, censorship, centralized network operators and all of the liabilities this incurs.
This is a tempting bargain because it shortens the path to adoption. It gives buyers and regulators a shape they understand. A company. A contract. A switch. But the moment you accept that bargain, the system changes character. It may still be encrypted. It may still contain proofs. It may still call itself private. But, it now behaves like and is an operated service.
There is a party with privileged knowledge and privileged control. Builders must shape themselves around it. Institutions negotiate with it. Regulators may pressure it. Attackers target it. Users ultimately depend on it. By a backdoor I mean something specific: a network or protocol-level viewing key where the product developer does not control who can see their users’ data, especially when paired with network-level controls that can block transactions or ban smart contracts entirely. I do not mean application-level controls. I do not mean user-authorised disclosure. I do not mean a dapp deciding that users must prove something before using it. Regulated applications will need rules. The issue is that the disclosure boundary of your application belongs to somebody else, and the same layer that sees can also decide whether your users are allowed to transact. In short, users lack a platform that has credible neutrality.
The Platform RiskPrivacy on top of centralized rails is fatal. If one party can see everything and stop anything, that party may be treated as responsible for seeing and stopping.
This compounds into substantial platform risk. If an entity builds on top of such a system they must surrender visibility and control to the network operator to satisfy their liabilities without consideration for yours. Decentralization and ultimately credible neutrality is the difference between whether you own durable infrastructure or are renting a service whose rules can change on a whim. Worse, you cannot “just build things”. For novel transaction flows approval must be sought and granted. Tell me, would Ethereum have grown if every smart contract deployment required approval from the Ethereum Foundation?
Privacy needs the same freedom. A private credit market, for example, touches identity, collateral, repayment history, payment flows, liquidation logic, lender disclosures, auditor access and borrower privacy. If every component lives inside a different permissioned service, each with its own operator and viewing assumptions, that is a bureaucratic friction that negates blockchain’s core value proposition; composability.
A decentralized and credibly neutral privacy network prevents the settlement layer from becoming the single place where all surveillance and censorship obligations naturally accumulate. It allows product developers to scope their code to satisfy their own narrow requirements without consideration for the obligations of a centralized operator.
Building for credible neutralityA lot of today’s privacy narrative treats architecture as if it were a detail. It is not. You cannot take a transparent ledger, staple confidentiality onto the edge, add a viewing key for comfort, and expect to get programmable private infrastructure.
If the state model is not private from the ground up you get wrappers, third party tools, data custodians, ad hoc disclosure paths and a pile of assumptions that every application drags into the next. Developers do not get a normal programming model where private contracts can call private contracts and users keep state on their own devices. They do not get composability.
The difference matters. In a real private execution environment, users generate transactions locally. They do not outsource their intent to a third party who learns what they are doing. Private contracts interact through a state model designed for privacy. The network settles proofs without becoming the party that knows everyone’s business. Privacy is part of the architecture.
This is why Aztec has taken so long. We built something that makes programmable private state and decentralised settlement live inside the same system. That means proving systems that run on consumer hardware, a transaction architecture built around local private execution, and a programming model where privacy is idiomatic and just works out of the box.
A centralized service can skip much of this. It can hold the key, run the prover, approve the flow and call the result privacy. It gets to market faster because it is not trying to arrive at the same place.
The edgeAdding decentralization does not make obligations disappear. Applications, issuers, frontends, custodians and regulated businesses will continue to exist in a web of obligations and responsibilities. Anyone pretending otherwise is unserious.
The question is where those obligations live. If they are pushed into the settlement layer, the settlement layer is no longer credibly neutral. It needs visibility into everyone and controls over everyone.
The better answer is selective disclosure. Users and applications should prove specific facts to specific parties for specific purposes. A regulated application may need to know that a user passed a check, that a transaction satisfies a policy, or that an auditor can inspect a particular flow. None of that requires the base network to hold a permanent key into everyone’s activity.
This will be harder to explain to the existing world. New infrastructure always fails to fit the categories built for the old infrastructure. Bitcoin did not arrive as a neatly regulated bank product. Ethereum did not wait for every lawyer to understand smart contracts. Stablecoins and DeFi forced institutions, regulators and users to develop new language around rails that kept existing.
If the standard for privacy infrastructure is to plug into the old world without changing anything, the answer will always be a service with a backdoor. And the result will be to catch crumbs falling from the tables of the old world.
The market worth buildingThe market we should be building is, well, a market. A private financial system that compounds: assets, liquidity, identity, credentials, credit and applications interacting through a shared settlement layer without forcing users to surrender their data to whoever sits in the middle.
Traditional finance is built out of vertically integrated information silos. Those silos are its moat. Banks, exchanges, custodians, payment processors and data brokers all benefit from controlling the information that flows through them. A global private settlement layer attacks that advantage directly. It lets liquidity and credentials move while outsourcing information custody to neutral cryptographic infrastructure.
A company wants a moat. A settlement layer wants surface area. A permissioned privacy provider can ration access, raise fees, exclude applications, shape disclosure rules and define acceptable use around its own risk tolerance. These are products pretending to be networks, and not durable financial infrastructure. What bothers me is this compounding category confusion. Networks adding protocol-level viewing keys and transaction controls are using the same language as decentralised programmable privacy, and commentators are treating them as variations of the same thing. They are not.
We have spent nine years walking the hard road. Now, just as we are close, the market has lost faith. Everyone is reaching for whatever lifeline looks immediate. Some of those lifelines will be real. Some will make money. But if crypto responds to its long night by rebuilding financial privacy as permissioned services, then we will have survived by surrendering the property that made the industry worth building.
Markets can grow when the platform is removed from the position where it can dictate the rules. It would be perverse to forget that lesson while building privacy, the domain where control over information matters most.
The land we tillCrypto is in a famine. The land is struggling. We could sell our land for a pittance and survive the season. But the famine will pass, and when it does the land will blossom again. Without the land we are nothing.
We have struggled immensely to create a permissionless network that can marry privacy with decentralisation: an indestructible network whose users cannot be surveilled and whose transactions cannot be censored. This is the soil we have to grow our crops. To surrender a backdoor or a centralized operator for temporary relief is to sell our land for the price of a stablecoin. And we cannot sell the land.
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Aztec Network
Aztec Network
2 Jun
•
xx min read
Who controls your privacy off-switch?Privacy has become a baseline requirement for L1s and L2s who care about bringing real-world users onchain. Users don't want their activity broadcast to competitors or the general public, but applications operating at scale also need some form of auditability, whether for regulators, compliance requirements, or tax reporting. Selective disclosure resolves that tension: privacy by default, with the ability to prove specific facts when required. What separates these networks is not whether they offer that switch, but who gets to hold it.
Aztec, Canton, Starknet, Tempo, and zkSync all offer some form of privacy with selective disclosure, but under the hood they make fundamentally different architectural decisions about who can see your data and who can turn your privacy off. Those decisions determine whether your privacy stays under your own control or sits behind a switch that someone else operates.
Three questions reveal where these networks actually diverge:
Who sees your data?Who can prove the network followed its own rules?Who controls when something gets disclosed?The answers determine whether your privacy off-switch is held by a policy, by an operator's good behavior, or by you alone through a cryptographic proof. As you'll see in this post, there are legitimate reasons to use each one with different tradeoffs. Aztec is the only network, however, where that switch stays in the user's hands, answering all three questions without putting a permissioned set of operators or a standing viewing key in control of your privacy. That gives developers the flexibility to build apps that comply with applicable laws while still keeping full privacy under the user's control.
This article will compare the privacy approaches of Aztec, Canton, Starknet, Tempo, and zkSync to give developers insight into the privacy tradeoffs of each network.
TL;DRHere’s how each network handles the selective disclosure privacy off-switch, and who has control over your privacy:
Aztec: Only you can see your data, client-side proofs settled to Ethereum let anyone verify every transaction without trusting an operator, and the off-switch stays in your hands, allowing you selectively share information.Canton: Participant nodes read your data in plaintext, no outside party can verify the global ledger, and your off-switch sits with those nodes rather than with you, since disclosure depends on them staying honest.Starknet: No operator ever sees your plaintext because proofs are generated client-side, and those proofs verify the rules, but your off-switch is a standing viewing key that a designated auditor can use to decrypt and trace your entire history on request.Tempo: The zone operator sees every transaction in plaintext, mainnet validity proofs let anyone verify the zone ran correctly, and the operator holds the off-switch, so you are private from the public but not from the operator. zkSync: The operator reads every transaction in plaintext while a validity proof on Ethereum proves it cannot forge state, and the operator holds the off-switch over who sees what, giving you privacy from the outside world but not from the operator.The Comparison In One View
Comparing your privacy off-switch Each of these networks offers privacy with selective disclosure, but each rests on a different network design with its own tradeoffs. We have ordered them by who holds your privacy off-switch, starting with designs where a third party controls access to your data and ending with designs where that control stays with you. At the top, the switch sits behind a policy promise and an honest operator, and further down it is replaced by proofs that the user generates and controls.
CantonCanton keeps data private by controlling viewing permissions for the various actors on its network. A transaction splits into per-participant views, so each party receives only the sub-transactions that name it, and the parts it is not entitled to never reach it. The sequencer and mediator move those views without reading them, which is real privacy against those roles.
However, the data is still read in plaintext by the participant nodes that host the relevant parties, and in the common regulated-asset pattern where the issuer is a signatory on its own token, the issuer's node sees every transfer. The harder gap is verification, because no third party can reconstruct the global ledger, so correctness rests on the confirming nodes staying honest and their keys staying safe. In practice the off-switch sits with those nodes rather than with you, since you cannot see when your data is read and cannot stop it.
TempoTempo is designed for payments and uses validity proofs to verify that each zone is executing correctly, while still giving the zone operator full plaintext visibility into every transaction within that zone. Privacy comes from Tempo Zones, which are parallel execution environments connected to the Tempo mainnet.
By design, the zone operator has visibility into all transactions within the zone, while users see only their own and the public sees only a proof that the zone is valid. Token issuers set compliance controls, allowlists, blocklists, and freezes, enforced across zones. The mainnet checks each zone's validity, so execution is verified, while the operator still reads every transaction in plaintext and holds the off-switch over what is revealed. Your privacy is from the public, not from the operator.
zkSync PrividiumzkSync Prividium adds the verifiability piece that Canton lacks. Every batch produces a validity proof settled to Ethereum, so a compromised operator cannot forge state or mint tokens from nothing without also forging a proof, which it cannot do. The tradeoff is that the operator processes every transaction in plaintext and decides who sees what, which means the off-switch stays with the operator and your privacy is from the outside world rather than from the operator itself.
This tradeoff has legitimate uses in high-trust institutional environments. If Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo are transacting on a shared network, a zone where BofA's infrastructure processes BofA-originated transactions satisfies internal control requirements while still delivering genuine ZK privacy from the other banks and the rest of the world. Where this model breaks down is in lower-trust environments where giving an operator full plaintext access and the switch that comes with it holds back product design possibilities.
Starknet STRK20Starknet's STRK20 breaks from relying on an operator for privacy. It shields ERC-20 balances and transfers in a privacy pool, and every private transaction carries a zero-knowledge proof generated client-side, so no operator sees your plaintext in order to build it.
Disclosure is where STRK20 diverges from Aztec. To join the Starknet Privacy Pool, you register an encrypted viewing key onchain, and it sits there for the life of your participation. On a regulatory request, a designated auditing entity can decrypt that key and trace your complete transaction history, forwards and backwards. StarkWare calls this ‘not a backdoor’ but a carefully scoped access mechanism, and the safeguard is a policy promise that the auditor decrypts only when required. The privacy is cryptographic, but the off-switch is a standing key that someone else holds and can flip whether or not you are watching.
AztecOn Aztec your private state lives as encrypted private data that only you can decrypt. The contract developer can choose what state is public and what is private, and whether your encrypted private data is emitted onchain as a private log or shared off-chain instead.
Your transactions get proven client-side on your own device, so no sequencer or operator sees your unencrypted private data. Those proofs settle to Ethereum, which gives the same integrity anchor marketed by Prividium, with every transaction verified and no forged state, but without a single operator who reads your data. The base protocol decentralizes sequencing, proving, and governance, so there is no operator to choose and trust in the first place.
Disclosure is your choice too: you decide who learns your private data, and whether they learn it in encrypted or decrypted form. To grant discovery without readability, you share an app-specific tagging secret that lets an auditor find your data in encrypted form without being able to decrypt and read it. This is enough to prove things calculated from that data, such as a tax basis or a profit and loss figure. Granting permission to actually read the data works differently. There's no per-contract read key you can hand out, because decryption uses your master viewing key, which would unlock all your data across every contract. So instead of sharing a key, you share the data itself, plus a proof that your plaintext is what encrypts to the on-chain ciphertext.
Aztec has true selective disclosure in that you can selectively share it, and nothing else you don’t need to. This is app specific, meaning that private data discoverability access on one app does not grant access on another. Most importantly, the off-switch stays in your hands, and you never need to trust the network to handle access to any of your private data and activity.
This is not just conceptual: here is a working proof-of-concept of this model on Aztec. PrivPNL takes you from private DEX trades through a tagging-key disclosure to a browser-generated ZK proof of your PnL. The auditor verifies a proof while the prover only has to reveal the amount they owe, and your portfolio stays private.
Users need to hold their own off-switch, not a promise to look awayCanton keeps the switch with the participant nodes that read your data in plaintext, so disclosure rests on those nodes staying honest rather than on anything you control. Tempo similarly gives the off-switch to a zone-based node operator, but allows you to verify the correctness of transactions using validity proofs. Prividium hardens that promise with a proof settled to Ethereum, a real improvement, but the operator still reads every transaction and still decides who sees what. This can work well for large institutions, but small to medium sized enterprises are left with the same privacy as their current banks unless they run their own Prividium nodes. STRK20 moves the switch into a standing viewing key and asks you to trust that a designated auditor reaches for it only when needed. In each of these models the real question is not whether your privacy can be switched off, but who gets to do the switching, and whether you would even know it happened.
Aztec takes the operator and the standing key out of the question entirely. You keep the data, you generate the proof, and you disclose the result, one fact at a time and only when you choose to. The off-switch never leaves your hands, and no operator, auditor, or node can reach it on your behalf. This is one of the benefits of a network that offers fully programmable, privacy-preserving smart contracts that put you in control.
Selective disclosure is how privacy survives contact with a regulator, and the model you pick decides who can open your history when you are not looking. On Aztec, that answer is no one but you.
Let's BuildDive into the technical details: Try a live demo of selective disclosure on Aztec and read the technical article on how it was built.
Integrate with Aztec: Reach out if you are interested in integrating privacy into your project.
Fifteen West African nations just put their names behind a $25 billion gas pipeline stretching from Nigeria to Morocco. The project, formally endorsed at an ECOWAS summit in Freetown, Sierra Leone on July 20, represents one of the largest cross-border energy infrastructure bets Africa has ever made.
The African Atlantic Gas Pipeline, or AAGP, is designed to move up to 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year across an estimated 5,660 to 7,000 kilometers of pipeline.
What the deal actually involves The pipeline is a joint venture between Nigeria’s NNPC Limited and Morocco’s ONHYM, the two national energy entities tasked with making this thing real. The agreement calls for the establishment of a dedicated project company.
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First gas flows are targeted for 2029. Full development is expected to span more than 20 years.
The project didn’t materialize overnight. A feasibility study kicked off back in 2017, followed by a memorandum of understanding in 2022. The Freetown signing reportedly came ahead of a Q4 2026 target that Nigeria and Morocco had set for themselves.
The AAGP also aligns strategically with other continental energy ambitions, including the Trans-Saharan pipeline project, which would connect Nigeria’s gas reserves to Algeria.
Why Europe is paying attention The AAGP is positioned as an alternative source, offering West African gas a direct route to European buyers. Morocco provides geographic proximity to European markets.
But pipelines of this scale are notoriously difficult to deliver on time and on budget. The $25 billion price tag is an estimate, and mega-infrastructure projects have a well-documented tendency to blow past initial budgets.
What this means for investors The movement toward a final investment decision will be the next major milestone to watch. The ECOWAS endorsement removes a significant political hurdle, and the involvement of national oil companies on both ends suggests this isn’t just aspirational.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Key Highlights Monday saw the national average gasoline price reach $4.0030 per gallon, marking the first breach of the $4 barrier since June Fuel costs have surged over 30% following late February military strikes by the U.S. and Israel on Iranian targets A temporary peace agreement in June temporarily reduced prices below $4, though hostilities reignited in early July On Monday, Brent crude jumped 3.2% to reach $90.95 per barrel while U.S. crude increased 2.8% to $84.04 Current U.S. fuel reserves are approximately 1.5 million barrels beneath the five-year average, intensifying upward price pressure American motorists are once again confronting $4-per-gallon fuel costs, primarily driven by escalating military tensions between the United States and Iran.
According to data from the American Automobile Association, Monday’s national average for regular unleaded gasoline climbed to $4.0030. This represents a significant increase from $3.14 per gallon recorded during the same period last year.
The initial breach of the $4 threshold occurred in late March when Iran began blocking commercial traffic through the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz. This critical maritime passage facilitates the transport of approximately 20% of the world’s oil supply.
A temporary respite came in June when Washington and Tehran reached a memorandum of understanding aimed at de-escalation. However, this fragile agreement disintegrated in early July, with military operations resuming shortly thereafter.
Following the breakdown of peace talks, crude oil prices spiked approximately 16% over the past week. The correlation between retail gasoline and crude oil prices remains strong, as crude represents the primary input cost for refined fuel products.
Crude Markets Respond to Conflict Escalation Monday trading saw Brent crude, the global pricing benchmark, advance 3.2% to settle at $90.95 per barrel. Meanwhile, West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. standard, gained 2.8% to close at $84.04 per barrel.
The Strait of Hormuz continues to be the epicenter of market anxiety. Any impediment to shipping through this narrow channel creates immediate ripple effects across worldwide energy markets.
🇺🇸NOW: PRESIDENT TRUMP ADDRESSES ESCALATING IRAN CONFLICT
"We are now doing a FAR bigger job, we were on a little job stopping them from having a certain capability"
"But now, we're just ENDING it"
"Ending any chance where they can have a nuclear missile.
"If you look at it,… pic.twitter.com/QE4lEMEwz5
— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) July 20, 2026
Additional upward pressure on energy costs stems from intensified Ukrainian military operations targeting Russian petroleum processing facilities, which have substantially diminished Russia’s refining capabilities.
Supply Shortages Compound Price Increases Last week’s figures show U.S. gasoline inventories at 210.5 million barrels, falling roughly 1.5 million barrels short of the five-year seasonal average. These diminished reserves leave the market more vulnerable to supply disruptions.
Regional variations in fuel pricing persist due to differing state taxation policies, local supply dynamics, and transportation expenses. Several states have maintained prices above $4 for extended periods.
The $4-per-gallon threshold represents a critical psychological and economic benchmark for American households. Elevated fuel costs create cascading effects throughout the economy, increasing transportation expenses for consumer goods and groceries.
Rising pump prices have emerged as a significant political challenge for President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans. With November midterm elections approaching, Republicans must defend narrow legislative majorities while addressing voter concerns over inflation.
During the June ceasefire period, Trump publicly voiced dissatisfaction that retail gas prices weren’t declining proportionally to crude oil reductions.
It’s important to note that the $4 figure represents a nationwide average. Consumers in traditionally high-cost regions such as California have been confronting prices significantly above this level for several months.
Without prospects for renewed diplomatic engagement, industry analysts anticipate sustained elevated prices at filling stations. Monday’s sharp escalation in Middle East hostilities propelled crude prices upward, immediately translating into higher costs for American drivers.
Strait of Hormuz Tanker Attack Sends European Gas Prices Soaring to Highest Point in MonthsKey TakeawaysVessel Incident Sparks Immediate Market ResponseRising Insurance Premiums Compound Market PressureGet 3 Free Stock Ebooks Key Takeaways Natural gas benchmarks in Europe jumped more than 3.4% on Monday, reaching peaks not seen since late March An attack on a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz sparked a fire, triggering market concerns Approximately 20% of worldwide LNG shipments travel through this strategic waterway Crude oil markets advanced 2.2%, pushing oil-indexed gas contracts upward War-risk insurance costs surged dramatically, directly impacting European wholesale gas valuations A vessel fire in the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz has propelled European natural gas valuations significantly higher, sparking renewed anxiety over the security of global LNG supply chains.
The front-month Dutch gas futures contract, serving as Europe’s primary benchmark, advanced 3.45% during Monday’s trading session. Britain’s wholesale gas contract climbed 3.52% in parallel. Both indices touched their strongest points since March 23.
Dutch TTF Natural Gas Calendar (TTF=F) Vessel Incident Sparks Immediate Market Response The upward price movement followed news that a commercial tanker was engulfed in flames after being struck in the Strait of Hormuz. This narrow waterway represents one of the planet’s most critical corridors for energy transportation.
Roughly 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas shipments transit through the Strait of Hormuz. The majority of these deliveries originate from prominent Gulf region producers. Any potential disruption to this passage immediately heightens concerns across European energy trading floors.
European nations have grown increasingly dependent on seaborne LNG deliveries in recent times. This shift occurred as Russian pipeline gas volumes plummeted dramatically in the aftermath of the Ukraine conflict. The region now relies substantially on imported LNG to maintain residential heating and industrial operations.
Crude oil prices similarly advanced during the session, gaining 2.2%. This upward movement elevated oil-linked gas contracts in tandem, compounding the overall price momentum.
Rising Insurance Premiums Compound Market Pressure Market participants indicated that LNG shipments continue to navigate through the strait, though under enhanced security protocols. The risk environment has fundamentally shifted, despite cargo movements remaining intact for now.
War-risk insurance premiums have escalated substantially. Insurance providers are incorporating the elevated risk associated with active security threats in the region. These additional expenses translate directly into higher European wholesale gas prices.
The timing presents challenges for European energy companies. They are entering a phase when supply interruptions could produce disproportionate effects on continental pricing structures.
Energy markets are now monitoring intensely whether conditions in the Strait of Hormuz deteriorate further. Any prolonged interruption to LNG transit through the waterway could elevate prices substantially beyond current levels.
The Dutch front-month futures contract serves as the principal pricing benchmark for European gas commerce. Monday’s rally represented a multi-month peak and demonstrated how rapidly geopolitical developments can transform energy market dynamics.
At present, LNG deliveries remain operational, but the market has already incorporated risk premiums. Energy traders and utility companies will maintain close surveillance of developments in coming days.
Monday’s market movement underscored how vulnerable European energy systems remain to Middle Eastern events, especially along strategic shipping passages such as the Strait of Hormuz.
Sui has launched gas-free stablecoin transfers, a move that goes directly at one of the most annoying pieces of crypto payments: needing the network’s native token just to move dollars.
For experienced crypto users, gas is normal. For everyone else, it is friction. A user may have USDC or another stablecoin in a wallet, but if they do not also hold the chain’s native token, they can get stuck. They cannot send funds, make a payment, or move assets without first acquiring gas.
That is a terrible experience for payments.
Sui’s new stablecoin transfer feature is designed to remove that issue by allowing users to send supported stablecoins without holding SUI for transaction fees. The available source material points to implementation through Sui’s Move API, with gas set at zero and the fee burden handled away from the end user.
That sounds technical, but the user-facing idea is simple: stablecoins should move more like money and less like a puzzle.
Reference: Sui
TL;DR Sui has launched gas-free transfers for supported stablecoins. Users can move assets such as USDC without first holding SUI for fees. The change could make Sui more competitive in stablecoin payments and consumer crypto apps. Why Gas Still Breaks Crypto UX Stablecoins are one of crypto’s clearest product-market fits.
They are used for trading, settlement, payments, remittances, DeFi collateral, and dollar access in markets where banking rails are slow or unreliable. But even stablecoins can feel awkward when the user has to understand gas.
The problem is especially obvious for new users. Someone may receive stablecoins and assume they can send them immediately. Then the wallet tells them they need the native asset to pay fees. Now they have to find SUI, ETH, SOL, TRX, or another gas token before they can do anything.
That is not how normal payments work.
Nobody expects to hold a separate “fee token” to send pounds from a banking app or dollars from a payment wallet. Crypto users have learned to tolerate that because they understand blockchains. Mainstream users have not, and probably should not have to.
Gas-free stablecoin transfers are an attempt to hide that complexity.
If Sui can make stablecoin movement feel more like a normal payment action, the network becomes easier to use for wallets, apps, merchants, and everyday transfers.
Stablecoin Competition Is About Convenience Now Sui is not the first network to chase stablecoin payments, and it will not be the last.
Ethereum has the deepest liquidity and most established DeFi ecosystem. TRON has become a major stablecoin transfer network because of its low fees and wide USDT usage. Solana has pushed hard into fast, low-cost consumer payments. Base is trying to combine Ethereum alignment with cheaper transactions and app distribution.
That means Sui needs a real reason for users and developers to care.
Gas-free stablecoin movement is a practical answer. It does not rely on abstract network claims. It solves a visible user problem.
The supported stablecoin list is important as well. According to the cleaned pack, supported assets include USDC, USDsui, suiUSDe, AUSD, FDUSD, USDB, and USDY. That gives the feature a wider stablecoin base than a single-asset implementation.
For developers, the more interesting part may be the infrastructure model. If apps can build payment flows where the user never has to think about gas, Sui becomes easier to integrate into consumer-facing products.
That could matter for wallets, games, DeFi front ends, subscription tools, and cross-border payments.
The Real Test Is Usage The launch is promising, but the market will judge it by adoption.
Gas-free transfers sound useful, but the feature needs real volume. Users have to adopt it. Wallets and apps have to integrate it cleanly. Stablecoin liquidity has to remain deep enough that the experience feels reliable.
The competitive bar is high. Users already move stablecoins across other networks, and many do not care which chain wins as long as the transfer is cheap, fast, and easy. Sui has to prove that removing gas friction is enough to pull activity into its ecosystem.
There is also a sustainability question. If end users are not paying gas directly, someone else is absorbing or sponsoring those costs. That can work well, but the economics need to make sense over time, especially if volume scales.
Still, the direction is right.
Crypto payments will not become mainstream if every transaction requires users to understand the mechanics underneath. The winning experience probably looks boring: open app, send dollars, done.
Sui’s gas-free stablecoin feature moves in that direction. It is not a guarantee that Sui becomes a dominant payments chain, but it gives the network a cleaner user-experience argument at a time when stablecoin competition is becoming more serious.
This article is based on information from Sui Network.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Dana Gas has announced the shutdown of its main production facilities at the Khor Mor field in Iraq due to credible security threats amid rising regional tensions. This facility is a critical source of natural gas for the Kurdistan Region’s electricity grid. The suspension comes as tensions related to the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict continue to disrupt Iraq’s oil sector, already impacted by previous closures and attacks. The current halt in operations threatens to significantly affect the region’s electricity supply, which depends heavily on output from Khor Mor.
Market participants appear to interpret this development as a potential catalyst for increased crude oil prices, particularly in the context of ongoing disruptions in Iraq’s oil production. The WTI Crude Oil market has seen active movements, with the likelihood of prices hitting higher targets in July showing varied shifts in percentage probabilities. The ongoing geopolitical tensions are a key factor driving these market reactions, as they could lead to further supply disruptions.
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The pricing of WTI Crude Oil futures suggests a cautious outlook, with a 22.4% chance that prices will hit $90 by the end of July, reflecting a notable increase from previous estimates. This is consistent with concerns about sustained regional instability and its impact on global oil supply. However, the probability of reaching higher targets, such as $130, remains low at 1%.
Key Takeaways Markets suggest that the shutdown at Dana Gas’s Khor Mor field could lead to increased oil prices, reflecting concerns about supply disruptions. The probability of WTI Crude Oil hitting $90 in July has increased to 22.4%, indicating heightened market sensitivity to regional tensions. Ongoing geopolitical developments, particularly involving U.S.-Iran tensions, are critical drivers of current market expectations. What to Watch Market participants will closely monitor any announcements from key geopolitical actors, such as the U.S. and Iran, which could influence oil supply dynamics. Reports of further disruptions or resolutions in the conflict could significantly impact WTI Crude Oil pricing. OPEC+ decisions regarding production levels and updates on the Strait of Hormuz’s openness will also be pivotal in shaping market expectations.
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Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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NEAR Governance Vote To Scrap Gas Rebates Puts Developer Incentives Under Review is a useful reminder that crypto coverage is not only about token prices. Sometimes the more important story is the infrastructure, regulation, security, or product layer sitting underneath the market noise.
The immediate point is straightforward: nEAR governance voted to scrap developer gas rebates. That gives readers something concrete to work with, rather than another vague sentiment update.
TL;DR NEAR governance voted to scrap developer gas rebates. The change affects developers who relied on protocol gas distributions. It raises a broader question about how chains should reward app builders. Why This Matters Now The timing matters because NEAR is already part of a wider conversation across the market. Traders want to know whether the development changes liquidity or risk. Builders want to know whether it changes what can be deployed. Compliance teams want to know whether it changes how platforms operate.
In that sense, the story is bigger than one headline. It sits inside the ongoing shift from speculative crypto cycles toward more practical questions: who can use these systems, how safe are they, and whether the underlying incentives actually work.
The best way to read it is with discipline. It is not a guarantee of immediate upside, and it should not be treated as one. But it does add a fresh data point to the way the market is thinking about NEAR.
The NEAR Angle For NEAR, the important part is the specific mechanism. If this is a security issue, the risk sits in dependencies and user protection. If it is a listing or product launch, the question is access and liquidity. If it is a governance or research proposal, the question is whether the idea can survive implementation.
That is where this update becomes useful. It is not just a label attached to a trend. It gives readers a way to understand what might actually change if the development gains traction.
Crypto has a habit of turning every announcement into a broad market claim. This one deserves a narrower read. The value is in seeing how it affects the users, developers, institutions, or traders closest to the issue.
The Risk Side There is also a caution attached. Source material can confirm that a development exists, but it cannot prove that adoption will follow. A proposal still needs support. A product still needs users. A chart still needs confirmation. A compliance tool still needs integration.
That is why the responsible reading is not to oversell the story. The stronger takeaway is that this adds to a pattern. The crypto market is steadily becoming more professional, more technical, and more sensitive to real operational details.
Readers should also watch for follow-up signals. That could mean developer feedback, exchange support, regulatory response, wallet adoption, liquidity data, or simply whether market participants continue reacting after the first headline fades.
What Comes Next The next stage will decide whether this remains a narrow update or becomes part of a larger market theme. In crypto, that difference matters. Plenty of stories look important for a few hours and then disappear. The ones that last usually show up again through usage, liquidity, enforcement, governance, or developer adoption.
For now, this gives the market another piece of information to weigh. It is specific enough to be useful, but still early enough that readers should keep the caveats in view.
That makes it worth covering without pretending it settles anything. The story is a signal, not a final verdict.
The key is not to confuse coverage with certainty. NEAR stories can move quickly, especially when they touch security, regulation, listings, infrastructure, or price levels. The useful approach is to track the next confirming detail rather than assume the first update carries the whole market story. That is how traders avoid chasing noise and how readers separate a genuine development from another passing headline.
This report is based on information from thedefiant.io.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Gasoline prices in New York have reportedly surged by 40% since former President Trump initiated actions against Iran, according to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. This increase allegedly amounts to an additional $2.2 billion in expenses for New Yorkers. However, verified data suggests a 21% rise in prices, with the average cost per gallon now at $4.075. The national average has seen a 54% increase, partly driven by recent geopolitical tensions following Trump’s announcement ending the Iran ceasefire. Gasoline futures and crude oil prices have responded by climbing significantly in the past week.
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The prediction market for crude oil reaching a new all-time high by September 30 currently shows low probability, with a 5.8% chance. This figure reflects a slight reduction from 7% just 24 hours ago, despite the recent geopolitical developments. By December 31, the market suggests a higher probability of 12.5%, indicating expectations that current tensions could have more significant impacts on oil prices later in the year.
Key Takeaways The claim suggests New Yorkers’ gas costs have increased by 40%, though verified data indicates a 21% rise. Market pricing suggests a modest likelihood of crude oil reaching new highs by September, with higher expectations for later in the year. Recent geopolitical actions involving Iran appear consistent with potential upward pressure on oil prices. What to Watch Observers will monitor whether ongoing geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and Iran result in significant oil supply disruptions, which could push prices higher. Key developments from OPEC regarding production cuts or increases will also be crucial indicators. Any major announcements or policy changes by prominent figures such as OPEC’s Mohammad Sanusi Barkindo or Saudi Arabia’s Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud could shift market expectations further. Markets appear to be particularly sensitive to these geopolitical and supply-side factors through the end of the year.
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Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Key Takeaways Tehran announced an indefinite closure of the Strait of Hormuz amid escalating tensions with U.S. military forces Brent crude oil prices jumped 4.4% in immediate market reaction European natural gas prices climbed 3.5–4%, reaching their highest point in a month Bond yields across the Eurozone remained elevated near multi-week peaks on inflation worries Current European gas storage stands at 47%, down from 56% recorded at the same time in the previous year Tehran’s announcement to seal off the Strait of Hormuz has sent tremors through global energy markets, driving significant increases in both oil and natural gas prices while intensifying inflation anxieties throughout the European continent.
The blockade was announced as indefinite following renewed military confrontations between Tehran and American forces during the weekend. Despite U.S. Central Command’s statements that commercial vessels can still navigate the area, the mere declaration triggered substantial market volatility.
BREAKING: The US has struck Kharg Island's western jetty pumping station and multiple pipelines supplying Kharg's pumping stations, with fires visible on NASA FIRMS satellite imagery.
This is the first US strike specifically targeting oil infrastructure at Kharg, Iran's primary… pic.twitter.com/lhO9DqGa2Q
— The Hormuz Letter (@HormuzLetter) July 13, 2026
Brent crude experienced a 4.4% surge following the initial reports. As one of the planet’s most strategically important petroleum shipping corridors, any disruption to the Strait of Hormuz creates instant pressure on energy costs globally.
Natural Gas Markets Reach Monthly Peak Wholesale natural gas prices throughout Europe experienced significant upward movement on Monday. The Dutch benchmark front-month contract increased 3.5% to settle at 50.37 euros per megawatt-hour. Meanwhile, the British equivalent climbed 4%, tracking closely with European prices.
Dutch TTF Natural Gas Calendar (TTF=F) Approximately one-fifth of global liquefied natural gas trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, including the majority of Qatar’s LNG shipments. An extended blockade would sever a critical supply artery for European energy consumers.
European nations are presently working to replenish their natural gas reserves in preparation for the 2026/2027 winter heating season. Current storage levels hover around 47% of total capacity, notably lower than the 56% recorded during the corresponding period last year. This shortfall makes Europe considerably more vulnerable to supply disruptions than it was a year ago.
Should Gulf LNG shipments face prolonged interruption, European importers would encounter intensified competition from Asian markets, driving costs even higher across the board.
Government Bond Markets Signal Inflation Concerns Yields on European government bonds maintained positions near their highest levels in more than a month throughout Monday’s trading. Germany’s benchmark 10-year Bund yield stood at 3.05%, with the 2-year yield positioned at 2.68%.
These elevated figures persisted because surging energy costs typically fuel inflationary pressures, which diminish the attractiveness of fixed-income securities. Last week witnessed the most substantial weekly increase in German bond yields observed in five weeks.
The primary concern among investors is that the European Central Bank might need to halt its interest rate reduction trajectory if energy prices continue fueling inflation. Financial markets have already adjusted expectations, pricing in fewer ECB rate cuts than anticipated just weeks earlier.
ECB Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel is scheduled to deliver remarks later Monday. Schnabel has consistently maintained a more hawkish stance within the ECB’s Governing Council. Any commentary she provides regarding inflation risks stemming from the Gulf crisis could generate additional market movement.
Diplomatic initiatives aimed at de-escalating regional tensions had demonstrated some positive momentum in recent weeks. However, those efforts now appear to have stalled following the latest military confrontations, leaving energy markets in a state of uncertainty with no immediate path toward resolution.
NextDecade Corporation (NEXT) has quietly recovered toward $8 while the market fixates on the Strait of Hormuz. The reason is a building gas supply shock, and this overlooked LNG stock sits directly in its path.
NEXT Share Price: Google FinanceMost investors are trading the crisis through oil tankers. That trade, however, is already crowded. The longer prize, by contrast, sits with American gas exporters.
What the Tanker Trade MissesThe tanker trade is simple. Investors buy the companies that own the ships hauling crude oil. When Hormuz turns dangerous, rerouting and war insurance push tanker rents higher, so those shares climb.
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That move, however, is late. Analysts at Evercore previously cut Frontline and DHT Holdings to hold, citing reversion risk. The easy money has likely gone. Even as the US-Iran standoff flares again, tanker rate spikes tend to fade fast.
The trade also misses the deeper wound. Iran’s strikes damaged close to 20% of Qatar’s liquefaction supply at Ras Laffan during early 2026. Unlike shipping delays, broken plants do not recover when a ceasefire holds.
A Qatari LNG tanker was struck while exiting the Strait of Hormuz 🇶🇦🚨
🚢 The laden ship (Al Rekayyat) was traversing the Omani route when it was hit by a projectile. The tanker was dark at the time
⚠️ This threatens Qatar's plans to rapidly revive LNG exports from Ras Laffan pic.twitter.com/sMMJEJoWGU
— Stephen Stapczynski (@SStapczynski) July 7, 2026 Indeed, Iran’s navy closed the strait again on July 12. Tanker crossings have plunged to near 33 a day, versus about 130 before the war.
Why LNG Is the Real PrizeLiquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is gas chilled into liquid form. That cooling shrinks its volume about 600 times, which lets tankers carry it across oceans.
Qatar is a top supplier, and about one fifth of the world’s LNG passes through Hormuz. As a result, buyers now scramble for supply from safer regions.
An armada of US LNG shipments are heading to Asia
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
The near-closure of Hormuz has forced Asian LNG importers to scramble for alternatives. US supply has largely filled the gap
West>East LNG flows via Cape of Good Hope is at a seasonal high (+80% from last year) pic.twitter.com/4JbdIDMYwS
— Stephen Stapczynski (@SStapczynski) July 6, 2026 The United States fits that need. It is the biggest LNG exporter and sits an ocean away from Iran. Meanwhile, Shell expects global LNG demand to rise about 65% by 2050.
NextDecade is building the Rio Grande LNG plant in Brownsville, Texas. The site holds about 48 million tonnes of yearly capacity under development, with first cargoes due in early 2027.
That timing lands just as the shortage bites. The firm could become a top-four US exporter early next decade. In July, XRG, the investment arm of Abu Dhabi’s state oil producer ADNOC, boosted its stake.
Wall Street, however, has barely moved. Citi set a Buy rating and an $11 target on May 13 and has not changed it since, showing how overlooked a stock NEXT is. That stale call predates the latest closure, so the case has strengthened while the number sat still.
Citi Called A Buy: TipRanksToday, the stock trades near $7.99, roughly 40% below that target.
What the Money Flow and Options SignalMoney flow is turning. The Chaikin Money Flow fell from a mid-May peak to a June 18 low, then recovered to near minus 0.03.
The last time it crossed above zero, on April 30, the stock rose about 7% into mid-May. Another cross would repeat that signal, and price has already recovered while flow lags.
NextDecade Chaikin Money Flow Near Zero: BeInCryptoOptions traders lean bullish too. Last week the put-call volume ratio sat near 0.27, with open interest near 0.21. Both low readings mean far more bets on gains than on losses.
Still, that can shift fast. NextDecade reports second-quarter results on July 30, which may confirm construction progress and new contracts.
NEXT Options Positioning: BarchartUltimately, the tanker trade priced the crisis in days, because shipping rates spike then fade. The LNG trade works on a longer clock. Qatar’s plants take years to rebuild, so buyers need new supply well into the decade.
That is why NextDecade matters. Its Texas plant starts shipping in 2027, just as that gap widens. Yet the market still values it like a pre-revenue project, which keeps this hidden LNG stock overlooked.
Robinhood Chain is gaining ground fast. Just 11 days after its July 1 mainnet launch, the Arbitrum-based Ethereum Layer 2 processed 7.6 million transactions in a single day. That puts it within striking distance of Coinbase’s Base, which logged 9.2 million transactions the same day. The pace of that climb has caught the attention of on-chain analysts and HOOD stock investors alike, as Robinhood’s blockchain ambitions move from launch hype to live metrics.
Gas Subsidy Drives Explosive Growth on Robinhood Chain The driver behind the numbers is deliberate. Robinhood is covering all network fees for users through the first 90 days of mainnet. That brings the cost of transacting to near zero, drawing in retail traders, DeFi participants, and memecoin activity that would otherwise stay on competing chains.
According to on-chain data made by MSBIntel and verified by Token Terminal, Robinhood Chain has 7.6M transactions per day, and its daily protocol fees were approximately $4,000. Base is still ahead with 9.2M. However, there is a convergence of the gap.
BREAKING: Robinhood Chain processed 7.6 million transactions yesterday, nearing Base’s 9.2 million, eleven days after mainnet, per Token Terminal.
Base users pay for every transaction; Robinhood covers gas on its chain through a 90-day subsidy, with daily fees near $4,000. pic.twitter.com/sWLM0yRV0z
— MSB Intel (@MSBIntel) July 10, 2026
BREAKING: Robinhood Chain has nearly matched Base's daily transaction count in just 1.5 weeks.
Yesterday, Robinhood Chain processed 7.6 million daily transactions, compared with 9.2 million on Base.@vladtenev vs. @brian_armstrong game is on! pic.twitter.com/m4GqyMXzwD
— Token Terminal 📊 (@tokenterminal) July 10, 2026
Additionally, Robinhood Chain’s Base single-day volume exceeded $500 million as it took over the number 2 position among Uniswap deployments. Ethereum mainnet was the only one higher. Robinhood earlier flipped Base to No. 2 Spot on Uniswap, Trails Only Ethereum, a milestone that signals real liquidity activity, not just speculative churn.
The growth curve is similar to that of Base, which had been subsidizing fees, built on an established user base, and integrated with DeFi apps on day one, like Uniswap and Chainlink. Robinhood Chain adds one variable that Base was missing in its launch: direct access of 23 million brokerage users and tokenized equities that are live in more than 120 countries.
HOOD Stock Watchers Track L2 Metrics as Tokenized Finance Race Heats Up Every meaningful step taken on the chain by Robinhood has had a bearing on HOOD stock prices. The first Layer 2 announcement has caused the stock price to rise 10%.
The Robinhood agentic trading launch drove a slight 7% spike in the HOOD stock price after transactions on Robinhood Chain surged, continuing the same point as the launch that Robinhood is shifting from a brokerage to an on-chain financial infrastructure company.
Chainlink’s 95 tokenized stocks, which currently include NVDA, AAPL, and GOOG, were powered by Uniswap’s liquidity, Morpho’s lending, and Chainlink’s oracle pricing. Earlier this week, Robinhood announced a Layer 2 blockchain on Arbitrum.
The price of HOOD stock surged ~10% after the initial Robinhood Chain L2 announcement, which brought significant early investor excitement and provides context for the market’s pricing of the buildout. As of the July 10, 2026 close, HOOD traded at $111.97, down 2.73% on the day.
Google Finance HOOD Price Sustainability questions remain. This 90-day gas subsidy will expire at the end of September 2026. In April 2026, FalconX estimated its Robinhood Chain would collect approximately $1.1 million in fees in six months, but the subsidy is stopping this.
Once free gas runs out, volume will reset again, and the long-term traction will depend on real-world asset flows being greater than the memecoin spike during the launch week.
Next is early August with its Q2 2026 earnings, which will be the first to include live mainnet activity. That report will be pivotal for investors in determining whether Robinhood Chain’s early buzz is reflective of the infrastructure revenue narrative of the market.
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Stablecoins are useful, but crypto still has a simple payment problem: users do not want to think about gas. BNB Chain’s push toward gas-free stablecoin transfers is aimed directly at that friction point, especially for wallet users who are not interested in managing network fees every time they send money.
That makes this more than a small feature update. It touches one of the reasons crypto payments still feel awkward for normal users.
For more details, visit the official Binance platform.
TL;DR BNB Chain is pushing gas-free stablecoin transfer rails through a wallet partnership.The goal is to reduce friction for everyday payments and onboarding.Fee delegation could make stablecoin transfers feel less intimidating for retail users. Why Gas-Free Transfers Matter For experienced users, gas fees are just part of crypto. For everyone else, they are confusing, annoying, and easy to get wrong. If a wallet can hide or delegate that cost in a safe way, stablecoin payments become much easier to understand.
BNB Chain’s approach sits inside a broader industry trend toward account abstraction, fee sponsorship, and smoother wallet UX. The goal is to make the chain feel less like infrastructure and more like a usable payment network.
The Retail Adoption Angle Stablecoins already have product-market fit in many parts of the world. The challenge is making them accessible without forcing users to learn every detail of blockchain mechanics.
Gas-free transfers can help with that. They lower the psychological barrier and reduce failed transactions caused by users not holding the right gas token.
The Caveat Behind The Convenience The important question is how fee delegation is managed and funded. Someone still pays for blockspace. The user experience may be simplified, but the economics have to be sustainable.
If BNB Chain and its partners can solve that balance, gas-free stablecoin transfers could become a meaningful step toward everyday crypto payments. If not, it risks being a temporary subsidy. Either way, the direction of travel is clear: crypto wallets are trying to remove friction wherever they can.
A Useful Way To Frame It The useful way to read this story is not as a standalone headline about BNB Chain, but as part of the wider pressure building around Binance 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 Trust Wallet 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 Binance, 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 report is based on information from Binance.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
