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SummaryMicrosoft's RPO surged 99% year over year to $627 billion, with approximately $157 billion expected to convert into revenue within 12 months.AI monetization extends beyond inference, driving strong growth across Cosmos DB, OneLake, Azure infrastructure, storage, compliance, and enterprise data services.AI ARR reached $37 billion, up 123% year over year, while Azure is guided to deliver approximately 40% constant-currency growth next quarter.Microsoft's multi-model AI strategy and Maia/Cobalt silicon should reduce inference costs, supporting long-term margin expansion despite elevated infrastructure investments.Risks include a projected $190 billion FY26 CapEx program, declining cloud gross margins, regulatory scrutiny, and increasing competition following OpenAI's reduced exclusivity. tupungato/iStock Editorial via Getty Images

Investment Thesis Microsoft's (MSFT) narrative has changed dramatically over the last few quarters. The question now is not whether Microsoft can monetize AI but how much monetization has been locked in already. MSFT is

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Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - July 2, 2026) - Myriad Uranium Corp. (CSE: M) (OTCQB: MYRUF) (FSE: C3Q) ("Myriad" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that Phase II drilling at the Copper Mountain Uranium Project in Wyoming has commenced.

Highlights

Phase II drilling is now underway at the Copper Mountain Uranium Project in Wyoming. The first four holes will test mineralization at Lucky Cliff, a high-priority target area drilled by Union Pacific in the late 1970s and never followed up with modern techniques (see Figure 3).

Any mineralization confirmed at Lucky Cliff will be outside the 1982 U.S. DOE Bendix Engineering Report "Assessment Area" ("the Bendix Report") previously reported here (see Figure 1).

Once the holes at Lucky Cliff are complete, the Phase II program will turn to drilling areas, other than Canning, that are associated with historical resource estimates totalling 26.63 Mlbs eU3O8 contained in 44.1 Mt at an average grade of 171 ppm eU3O8, which are not being treated as current mineral resources or mineral reserves (see note about Historical Estimates below).

Canning contains roughly half of the historically estimated resources at Copper Mountain and was the focus of Myriad's highly successful 34-hole Phase I drill program in late 2024 (release here).

Phase II will also test new targets identified by our recent geophysics (release here), which have undergone verification by ground truthing using a hand-held gamma spectrometer.

The final stage of Phase II will be infill drilling to support a current mineral resource estimate under NI 43-101.

In 1982, Bendix Engineering for the U.S. Dept. of Energy reported an exploration target for Copper Mountain of 245 to 655 Mlbs eU3O8 contained within 1,111 Mt to 2,971 Mt (at 100 ppm eU3O8) and 222 Mt to 594 Mt (at 500 ppm eU3O8). Reported here and here (see Figure 1 and details below).

The potential tonnages and grades of the Bendix exploration target are conceptual in nature and are based on previous drill results and there has been insufficient exploration to define a current mineral resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource. See the section titled "Copper Mountain Exploration Target" below for more details.

Myriad's CEO, Thomas Lamb, commented: "Our aim for Phase II drilling will be to confirm mineralization, not just at the historically estimated areas of Copper Mountain, but also at entirely new targets identified through our successful geophysics programs and subsequent ground truthing. We also hope that Phase II, once complete, will provide support for a compelling current mineral resource estimate."

Mr. Lamb continued: "Beyond Phase II drilling, Myriad has a fast-moving and exciting 12 months ahead.

Our merger with Rush is in the final steps of completion and will consolidate 100% ownership of Copper Mountain. This will have many benefits, including increasing our market cap, attracting institutional investor interest, simplifying operational decision-making, and broadening access to financing.We plan to uplist to a major U.S. exchange.8VC-backed Subatomic will be advancing the Red Basin, NM project, in which we hold a 10% free carried interest (release here). Exploration of our Breccia Pipe Project in Arizona, which includes the Wate Pipe's high grade historical resource estimate, will commence (release here)."

Figure 1: Target positions relative to the Bendix Assessment area.

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:
https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/6301/303712_caea8a6de484c9fa_002full.jpg

Nasco Industrial Services and Supply (NISS) has deployed a Boart Longyear LF90D surface diamond core drill rig to Copper Mountain. The LF90D is a powerful, highly mobile surface diamond core drill rig known for its deep coring capacity and reliable hydraulic systems. It features a telescopic mast designed for both 3-metre (10 ft) and 6-metre (20 ft) rod pulls (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Boart Longyear LF90D surface diamond core drill rig tramming to the project area at Copper Mountain.

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:
https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/6301/303712_caea8a6de484c9fa_003full.jpg

Lucky Cliff

Lucky Cliff is located about 2000 metres (6,500 feet) north of the Canning deposit, along the Myrtle's Fault trend. The target area was selected by Union Pacific as a drill target on the basis of favourable geological and geochemical criteria. Several strong N45°E structural trends are present, and the associated rock types are similar to those found at other mineralized occurrences in the project area. A close-spaced (500-foot center) stream sediment sampling program undertaken by Union Pacific identified several highly anomalous (to 118 ppm) zones, and follow-up work was designed to test these anomalies. Ground-truthing of radiometric anomalies by Myriad following the helicopter survey completed late last year identified one point above the target area with a surface measurement of 193.2 ppm eU, using a calibrated RS-230 Handheld Gamma-Ray Spectrometer. Handheld spectrometer readings are preliminary and indicative only, may be affected by environmental and geometric factors, are not assay results and may not be representative of uranium concentrations in rock samples.

At least twenty holes were drilled by Union Pacific in the late 1970s. At least 10 holes intersected mineralisation in excess of 100 ppm eU3O8 from depths as shallow as 20 ft (6 m). LK-9 intersected 355 ft of 0.027% eU3O8 starting at 59 ft (including 207 ft of 0.032% eU3O8). LK-11 intersected 31 ft of 0.020% at 21.5 ft and 59.5 ft of 0.025% at 83.5 ft. Other intersections in this target area included 15.5 ft of 0.055% eU3O8 at 55 ft in hole LK-10. Higher grades are associated with a mafic dyke intruding the main fault zone through the target area. There is no historic resource estimate for Lucky Cliff. Reported widths are historical downhole widths and true widths are unknown. Equivalent ("e") uranium grades were determined by AEC gamma probes using appropriate calibration factors. No original assay certificates or complete QAQC records have been reviewed by the Company or the Qualified Person for these historical drill results.

Figure 3: Planned drilling at Lucky Cliff. The purple shaded areas represent anomalous surface uranium measurements from Myriad's recent helicopter radiometric survey.

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:
https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/6301/303712_caea8a6de484c9fa_004full.jpg

Copper Mountain Exploration Target

In 1982, Bendix Field Engineering Corp. ("Bendix") identified an exploration target of 245 to 655 Mlbs eU3O8 contained within 1,111 Mt to 2,971 Mt (at 100 ppm eU3O8) and 222 Mt to 594 Mt (at 500 ppm eU3O8). This was based on previous exploration on the property by Union Pacific Corp. and Bendix own work, including data from over 1,370 historic drill holes. The exploration target and methodology were detailed in two reports by Bendix titled "An Exploration Systems Approach to the Copper Mountain Area Uranium Deposits, Central Wyoming (September 1982)" and "Copper Fountain, Wyoming, Intermediate-Grade Uranium Resource Assessment Project Final Report (September 1982)", respectively. The exploration target potential was derived from geologic reconnaissance and geochemical, geophysical, petrologic, borehole, and structural data interpretations that were used to develop a genetic model for uranium mineralization in these environments. Development of a structural scoring system and application of models in a high-confidence control area established the basis for estimations of the uranium target in the total assessment area covering approximately 39.6 square miles. The volume of the modeled areas determines the potential tonnage statement in the exploration target. The grade range given in the exploration target is determined with consideration to the drill results within the modeled exploration target area and consideration of the geological setting in an established exploration camp. The potential tonnages and grades are conceptual in nature and are based on previous drill results that defined the approximate length, thickness, depth and grade of the portion of the historic mineral resource estimate. There has been insufficient exploration to define a current mineral resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource. Further details are available in the current NI 43-101 Technical Report.

Historical Resource Estimates

The historically estimated resources totalling 26.6 Mlbs eU3O8 contained in 44.1 Mt at an average grade of 171 ppm eU3O8 (using 100 ppm cut-off) were compiled from internal progress reports produced by Union Pacific subsidiary, Rocky Mountain Energy Company. In particular, a report titled "Copper Mountain Exploration Project Report" prepared by Southard, G.G., et. al., (1979) for Rocky Mountain Energy Company. The estimates were completed using polygonal methods based on modelled mineralization geometries. The historic resources were classified as Inferred and Indicated using U.S. Bureau of Mines categories at the time and do not necessarily correspond with the resource categories defined by current NI 43-101 definitions and guidelines. Details of the historical resource estimates are available in the current NI 43-101 Technical Report.

While Myriad Uranium has determined that the historical estimates described in this news release are relevant to the Copper Mountain Project Area and are reasonably reliable given the authors and circumstances of their preparation, and are suitable for public disclosure, readers are cautioned to not place undue reliance on these historical estimates as an indicator of current mineral resources or mineral reserves at the Project Area. A qualified person (as defined under NI 43-101) has not done sufficient work to classify any of the historical estimates as current mineral resources or mineral reserves, and Myriad Uranium is not treating the historical estimates as a current mineral resource or mineral reserve. Also, while the Copper Mountain Project Area contains all or most of each deposit referred to, some of the resources referred to may be located outside the current Copper Mountain Project Area. Furthermore, the estimates are decades old and based on drilling data for which the logs are, as of yet, predominantly unavailable. The historical resource estimates, therefore, should not be unduly relied upon.

Inherent limitations of the historical estimates include that the nature of mineralization (fracture hosted) makes estimation from drill data less reliable than other deposit types (e.g. those that are thick and uniform). From Myriad Uranium's viewpoint, limitations include that the Company has not been able to verify the original data itself and that the estimates may be optimistic relative to subsequent work which applied a "delayed fission neutron" (DFN) factor to calculate grades. On the other hand, DFN is controversial, in that the approach is viewed by some experts as too conservative. Nevertheless, it was applied in later resource estimations by Union Pacific relating to Copper Mountain. To verify the historical estimates and re-state them as current resources, a program of re-drilling is required to generate new data that can be used to establish the correlation and continuity of geology and grades between boreholes with sufficient confidence to estimate mineral resources.

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by George van der Walt, MSc., Pr.Sci.Nat., FGSSA, a "Qualified Person" as defined under NI 43-101. Mr. van der Walt is a Principal Consultant with The MSA Group (Pty) Ltd, an independent consultancy. A Qualified Person has not done sufficient work to verify historic exploration results or to classify the historical estimates referred to in this news release as current mineral resources or mineral reserves, and Myriad is not treating such historical estimates as current mineral resources or mineral reserves.

About Myriad Uranium Corp.

Myriad Uranium Corp. holds a 75% interest in the Copper Mountain Uranium Project in Wyoming, USA, with a definitive agreement in place to acquire the remaining 25% via the acquisition of Rush Rare Metals Corp. Copper Mountain hosts multiple historic uranium deposits and past-producing mines, including the Arrowhead Mine (approximately 500,000 lbs U₃O₈ produced). Union Pacific conducted extensive exploration and development in the district during the late 1970s, including approximately 2,000 boreholes and advanced mine planning, before the uranium market downturn in 1980. Union Pacific is estimated to have invested approximately C$125 million (2026 dollars) in the project, generating significant historical resource estimates.

A news release detailing a comprehensive assessment of Copper Mountain's uranium endowment by Bendix Engineering for the US Department of Energy published in 1982 can be viewed here.

Myriad holds a 10% free carried interest in the Red Basin Uranium Project, recently sold to 8VC- and Overmatch-backed Subatomic Industries. Red Basin carries significant historical resource estimates from extensive drilling by Occidental Oil in the late 1970s, and also hosts vanadium, which has been designated a strategic and critical mineral by the U.S. government. Note the caution on historical estimates below.

Myriad's 100%-owned Breccia Pipe Project in Arizona comprises at least 23 breccia pipes that are prospective for uranium and REEs. One of the pipes, the Wate Pipe, was previously owned and explored by Energy Fuels and is the subject of a historical resource estimate. The Breccia Pipe Project has been optioned to Wedgemount Resources (release here).

Note: A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the Copper Mountain, Red Basin, and Breccia Pipe Project historical estimates as current mineral resources or reserves and Myriad is not treating historical estimates as current resources or reserves. Myriad intends to conduct further work to determine whether the historical estimates can be verified and, if appropriate, supported by current mineral resource estimates.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking information" that is based on the Company's current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections. This forward-looking information includes, among other things, the Company's business, plans, outlook and business strategy. The words "may", "would", "could", "should", "will", "likely", "expect", "anticipate", "intend", "estimate", "plan", "forecast", "project" and "believe" or other similar words and phrases are intended to identify forward-looking information. The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect, including with respect to the Company's business plans respecting the exploration and development of the Company's mineral properties, the proposed work program on the Company's mineral properties and the potential and economic viability of the Company's mineral properties. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Such factors include, but are not limited to: inability to verify historical data, no assurance of defining mineral resources, permitting, drilling delays and changes in economic conditions or financial markets; increases in costs; litigation; legislative, environmental and other judicial, regulatory, political and competitive developments; and technological or operational difficulties. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect our forward-looking information. These and other factors should be considered carefully, and readers should not place undue reliance on such forward-looking information. The Company does not intend, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to, update or revise any forward-looking information whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.

The CSE has not reviewed, approved or disapproved the contents of this news release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/303712

Source: Myriad Uranium Corp.

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Under Pressure: The 2026 Exposure Gap Report reveals that as AI-driven attacks compress the window to respond, the defining security capability is no longer detection, it is knowing which exposures can actually be exploited

, /PRNewswire/ -- Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP), a pioneer and global leader in cyber security solutions, today released Under Pressure: The 2026 Exposure Gap Report, which finds that the proportion of critical vulnerability exposures more than doubled over the past year, even as fewer than one in twelve proved urgent enough to require immediate action.

Automation and AI-assisted attack tools are reshaping both the scale and pace of exposure. Threat actors can now test exposed systems, credentials, phishing infrastructure, and known weaknesses across more organizations and at greater speed than manual triage can match. The result is a widening exposure gap, the distance between visibility, prioritization, and safe remediation, and a shorter window for defenders to act before exposure becomes impact.

Key findings from the 2026 Exposure Gap Report:

Vulnerabilities surged: 42.6% of all critical exposures were vulnerabilities, more than double the 18.7% recorded a year earlier, making them the single largest category of critical exposure in 2026. The prioritization gap: Only 7.8% of vulnerability alerts warranted Critical or High attention after exploitability validation, meaning more than 90% did not require the same immediate remediation focus. Risk concentration: 76% of all critical exposures came from just two categories, vulnerabilities and internal information disclosure, concentrating risk around exploitable weaknesses and exposed information assets. Phishing on the rise: Phishing websites grew to 10.5% of critical exposures, up sharply from 1.0% a year earlier, one of the fastest-growing exposure types of the year. Action at scale: Organizations acted on 85.9% of recommended fixes across the industries analyzed, showing that exposures are being closed at scale when prioritization and response workflows are in place. "Attackers are now testing more exposures, across more organizations, at greater speed than security professionals can manually keep pace with. The organizations that stay ahead are the ones that can quickly separate the small set of genuinely exploitable risks from the noise, then remediate them safely without disrupting operations. That is what exposure management delivers, and it is fast becoming a core measure of operational readiness," said Yochai Corem, VP and General Manager of Exposure Management at Check Point Software Technologies.

The report also shows that fast, safe remediation is achievable. A meaningful share of organizations resolved critical exposures within one hour, led by Utilities at 30%, and the fastest sector posted a median remediation time of just 12.6 hours, evidence that even sensitive, high-stakes environments can close exposures quickly.

Exposure profiles varied sharply by sector. Vulnerabilities dominated in Utilities and Government, accounting for 78.2% and 56.4% of critical exposures respectively, while internal information disclosure led in healthcare at 63.6% and Financial Services at 42.7%. Healthcare proved the most challenging environment, recording the slowest median remediation time at 158.8 hours despite a strong fix-implementation rate, reflecting the constraints of legacy systems, clinical uptime requirements, and change control. These differences underline why exposure management priorities must be tailored by industry.

Check Point Exposure Management connects discovery, evidence-based prioritization, exploitability validation, control assessment, and safe remediation in a single workflow, helping organizations close the exposure gap before attacker opportunity becomes business impact.

Under Pressure: The 2026 Exposure Gap Report was unveiled today at Check Point Engage in Paris. The full report is available to download at Exposure Management Gap Report - Check Point Exposure Management.

Follow Check Point on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, YouTube and our Corporate Blog. 

About Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.  
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (www.checkpoint.com) is a pioneer and global leader in cyber security solutions, protecting more than 100,000 organizations worldwide. Its mission is to secure enterprises' AI transformation. With a prevention-first approach and an open ecosystem architecture, Check Point helps organizations block advanced threats, prioritize exposures, and automate security operations across complex digital environments. The unified architecture simplifies protection across hybrid networks, multi-cloud environments, digital workspaces, and AI systems. Structured around four strategic pillars, Hybrid Mesh Network Security, Workspace Security, Threat Exposure Management, and AI Security, Check Point delivers consistent protection and visibility across multivendor environments, enabling organizations to reduce risk, improve efficiency, and accelerate innovation without increasing complexity. 

Notes to Editors: Q&A

What is the 2026 Exposure Gap Report?
Under Pressure: The 2026 Exposure Gap Report is Check Point Software Technologies' research study into how organizations discover, prioritize, and remediate security exposures. It was released on July 2, 2026, and unveiled at Check Point Engage in Paris.

What is the "exposure gap"?
The exposure gap is the distance between visibility, prioritization, and safe remediation — the gap between when a security exposure becomes known and when it is actually fixed. As AI-assisted attacks accelerate, that window is shrinking.

What did the report find about critical vulnerabilities?
Vulnerabilities made up 42.6% of all critical exposures in 2026, more than double the 18.7% recorded the year before, making them the single largest category of critical exposure.

How many vulnerability alerts actually require urgent action?
Only 7.8% of vulnerability alerts — fewer than 1 in 12 — warranted Critical or High attention after exploitability validation. More than 90% did not require immediate remediation focus.

What are the biggest sources of critical exposure?
76% of all critical exposures came from just two categories: vulnerabilities and internal information disclosure.

Is phishing a growing exposure category?
Yes. Phishing websites grew to 10.5% of critical exposures in 2026, up sharply from 1.0% the year before — one of the fastest-growing exposure types measured.

Are organizations able to keep up with remediation?
Yes. Organizations acted on 85.9% of recommended fixes across the industries analyzed, showing exposures can be closed at scale with the right prioritization and workflows in place.

How fast can organizations remediate critical exposures?
The fastest sector posted a median remediation time of 12.6 hours. Utilities led in same-hour resolution, with 30% of critical exposures resolved within one hour.

Which industry is slowest to remediate, and why?
Healthcare recorded the slowest median remediation time, at 158.8 hours, despite a strong fix-implementation rate — reflecting legacy systems, clinical uptime requirements, and change control constraints.

What does Check Point recommend organizations do?
Move from detection-first to exposure-first security: validate which exposures are genuinely exploitable, prioritize based on evidence rather than alert volume, and remediate safely without disrupting operations.

What is Check Point Exposure Management?
A capability within Check Point's Exposure Management pillar that connects discovery, evidence-based prioritization, exploitability validation, control assessment, and safe remediation in a single workflow.

Legal Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements 
This press release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements related to our expectations regarding our products and solutions, our expectations regarding future growth, the expansion of Check Point's industry leadership, the enhancement of shareholder value and the delivery of an industry-leading cyber security platform to customers worldwide. Our expectations and beliefs regarding these matters may not materialize, and actual results or events in the future are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those projected. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are also subject to other risks and uncertainties, including those more fully described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2026. The forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to Check Point as of the date hereof, and Check Point disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. 

SOURCE Check Point Software Technologies

Johannesburg, South Africa, July 2nd, 2026, Chainwire

Africa’s largest crypto exchange by trade volume expands its derivatives architecture, integrating Hyperliquid to offer access to perpetuals on equities, indices, precious metals, commodities, forex, and crypto.  This marks the first time a major regulated exchange has natively integrated an on-chain Layer-1 protocol to source liquidity and execute trades across global cross-asset perpetuals. Perps on VALR are set to go live on the web on Monday, 6 July, with mobile app availability to follow shortly after. VALR has announced the imminent launch of ‘Perps’, a new cross-asset class perpetuals product that introduces more than 200 markets to the platform. This expansion enables users to express directional views by going long or short with leverage across a comprehensive selection of global equities, commodities, precious metals, stock indices, forex pairs, and crypto assets. The launch adds to VALR’s established derivatives infrastructure, which pioneered the exchange’s initial perpetuals offering in 2023.

Strategic Infrastructure Integration with Hyperliquid The new product is delivered through an integration of Hyperliquid, a high-performance decentralised blockchain. Using Hyperliquid’s permissionless infrastructure, VALR users can open and manage positions directly on VALR, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Advanced Cross-Asset Market Exposure The inclusion of over 200 new markets marks a major development in the diversity of assets available through a single digital platform and marks the first time that a major regulated exchange has natively integrated an on-chain Layer-1 protocol to source liquidity and execute trades across global cross-asset perpetuals. The newly available contracts span multiple global asset classes, enabling traders to express their views on macroeconomic events and capitalise on volatility:

Global Equities and Benchmarks: Perpetual contracts on trending global enterprises and pre-IPO markets, including SpaceX, NVIDIA, Tesla, Apple, SK Hynix, Samsung, and Palantir Technologies, alongside exposure to leading global equity indices such as the S&P 500 and other international indices. Commodities and Precious Metals: Exposure to vital energy markets, including Brent Crude Oil, WTI Crude Oil, and Natural Gas, metals such as Gold, Silver, Platinum, and Copper. Foreign Exchange: Institutional currency pairs including EUR/USD, GBP/USD, and USD/JPY. Crypto Assets: Comprehensive coverage of the digital asset ecosystem, ranging from foundational protocols like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, to a wide selection of alternative layer-1 and layer-2 networks, decentralised finance tokens, and high-volume tokens. Gianluca Sacco, Chief Operating Officer at VALR, said:

“With this launch, we’re putting over 200 perpetuals markets directly inside the VALR app. 24/7 access to crypto, commodities, currencies, and equities – both listed and pre-IPO – all through the regulated exchange our customers already trust. Perps are how crypto traders take a view on price – a market now exceeding hundreds of billions of dollars in daily volume. We believe they will become how people trade every market. Our integration of Hyperliquid will give our users the deepest on-chain liquidity available anywhere. For VALR customers in South Africa and beyond, this is access to the markets that matter, in real-time.”

About VALR Founded in 2018, headquartered in Johannesburg, and backed by leading investors including Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Fidelity’s F-Prime Capital, VALR is the leading digital asset exchange and infrastructure provider on the African continent, offering a comprehensive suite of products, including Spot Trading, Spot Margin, Perpetuals, Staking, Lending, Borrowing, OTC services, VALR Invest, Crypto Bundles, and VALR Pay. Licensed by South Africa’s FSCA, and with a provisional licence from the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, VALR serves over 1.9 million registered users and 1,900 corporate and institutional clients worldwide. The exchange is dedicated to advancing a just financial future that upholds human dignity and the unity of mankind. For more information, visit valr.com.

About Hyperliquid Hyperliquid is a decentralised layer one blockchain best known for perpetuals and spot trading. It is the largest and most liquid decentralised exchange, with support for crypto and real-world assets, such as oil and precious metals. In addition, the ecosystem supports borrowing, lending, and a full-fledged EVM.

Risk Disclosure

Futures trading is provided by VALR DAM Pty Ltd, a licensed Financial Services Provider (FSP #54897) and Over-the-Counter Derivatives Provider.

VALR Perps order management, order execution, liquidation, margin requirements, position management, mark prices, and funding rates are managed by, and provided through, certain third-party liquidity provider(s). VALR acts only as an intermediary that enables account holders to access the services offered by such third-party liquidity provider(s) and disclaims any liability arising from or in connection with the acts, omissions, services, pricing, liquidity, order execution, system availability, or operational failures of such third-party liquidity provider(s).

Use of VALR Perps involves risk; please refer to VALR’s Risk Disclosures and Futures Terms of Service.

Metaplanet, Japan’s most prominent publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company, pulled in $10.75 million in revenue from its Bitcoin income business during the second quarter of fiscal year 2026. That figure, announced on July 2, lands right in line with the company’s own forecast of roughly $11 million.

The Bitcoin income operation now represents the core of Metaplanet’s entire revenue engine. The Bitcoin income business launched in Q4 2024.

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How Metaplanet actually makes money from Bitcoin Metaplanet generates revenue primarily through premiums collected from cash-secured Bitcoin options. The company sells options contracts on its Bitcoin holdings, collecting fees (premiums) from buyers regardless of whether those contracts are exercised.

This strategy drove 95% of the company’s revenue growth in FY2025, according to the company’s disclosures.

The bigger picture: full-year guidance and Bitcoin ambitions Metaplanet’s guidance for the full fiscal year 2026 projects total revenue of approximately 16 billion yen, which translates to roughly $103 to $104 million. Operating profit is expected to land around 11.4 billion yen, or about $73 to $74 million. The vast majority of that revenue is expected to come from the Bitcoin income segment.

As of March 31, 2026, Metaplanet held 40,177 BTC on its balance sheet. The company has publicly stated its goal of holding more than 100,000 BTC by the end of 2026 and is targeting 210,000 BTC by the end of 2027. 210,000 BTC represents 1% of Bitcoin’s total fixed supply of 21 million coins.

Diversifying beyond options premiums In June 2026, the company acquired Siiibo Securities for approximately 2.1 billion yen, or about $13 million. The acquisition is designed to let Metaplanet offer Bitcoin-linked yield products to a broader investor base.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

Robinhood has launched its Ethereum Layer 2 mainnet alongside tokenized stock trading and perpetual futures, expanding its blockchain based financial services beyond the testnet stage.

Summary

Robinhood has launched its Ethereum Layer 2 mainnet with tokenized stocks and decentralized finance features. Eligible users in more than 120 countries can trade tokenized stocks through Robinhood Wallet on supported decentralized exchanges. Robinhood Wallet now offers perpetual futures through Lighter, with eligible users earning LIT token rewards based on trading activity. According to an announcement during the company’s “The World is Flat” event in London, Robinhood has unveiled the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 network built with Arbitrum technology, while introducing tokenized stocks and decentralized perpetual futures trading as part of its latest international product rollout.

Speaking during the launch, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev and other executives described the announcement as the company’s most ambitious global expansion and product strategy so far, with a focus on combining traditional financial products with decentralized finance infrastructure.

Robinhood Chain moves from testnet to mainnet Robinhood Chain has been launched as a permissionless, AI native Ethereum Layer 2 network designed for real world assets. Built using Arbitrum’s technology stack to institutional standards, the network includes integrations with Alchemy, BitGo, and Chainlink, while also supporting built in DeFi features such as lending and borrowing.

The company said Uniswap will deploy a dedicated automated market maker as the chain’s primary public liquidity protocol, while Pleiades will launch its own automated market maker to serve as the primary proprietary trading venue.

The mainnet launch follows Robinhood Chain’s public testnet debut in February. At the time, Tenev said the network processed more than four million transactions during its first week, with developers already experimenting with tokenized stock assets and decentralized financial applications. The testnet was built to let developers evaluate tools and infrastructure before the production rollout.

Tokenized stocks and perpetual futures expand offering Alongside the blockchain launch, Robinhood introduced a new version of Stock Tokens that allows eligible users to trade tokenized equities around the clock directly on Robinhood Chain. According to the company’s disclosures, the tokens can also be used as collateral across decentralized finance applications and deployed into lending pools.

Robinhood said the new Stock Tokens are tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited. While they provide economic exposure to the underlying shares, holders do not receive legal ownership or beneficial rights in the underlying stocks.

Eligible users in more than 120 countries can access the assets through Robinhood Wallet, with spot trading available on decentralized exchanges including Uniswap, Rialto, Lighter, 1inch and Arcus, which was developed by the team behind dYdX. The company said the product is unavailable to users in the United States and remains restricted in several other jurisdictions, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and sanctioned regions.

Robinhood also renamed its earlier tokenized equity product as Classic Stock Tokens. Those assets, first introduced during the company’s Cannes event in June 2025, will continue to operate inside the Robinhood Europe app after the launch of the new on chain version.

Attention also turned to Robinhood Wallet, which now offers eligible users in selected jurisdictions access to perpetual futures through Ethereum-based decentralized exchange Lighter. According to the company’s disclosures, the product is not available in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and other restricted markets.

Robinhood said Lighter has allocated $11 million worth of its native LIT tokens to the Robinhood community. Eligible users will earn trading points on perpetual futures transactions that convert into LIT tokens, with trades executed through Robinhood Wallet receiving double the points compared with trades placed directly through Lighter’s web application.

Super Micro Computer (SMCI) logo is seen in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

SummaryCompaniesU.S.-listed Super Micro says two Taiwan employees detained in a probe regarding sale of its AI productsSuper Micro says two other Taiwan staff released on bailTaiwanese prosecutors are investigating the alleged illegal export to China of advanced AI serversTAIPEI, July 2 (Reuters) - Super Micro (SMCI.O), opens new tab said on Wednesday that two workers at its Taiwan unit had been ‌detained pending a court hearing and two others released on bail after being questioned by Taiwanese prosecutors investigating the alleged illegal export of advanced AI servers containing Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab chips.

The servers are made by Super Micro and contain Nvidia chips, which are subject to U.S. export controls prohibiting export to ​China.

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The four workers were among six people questioned earlier this week when Taiwan's Keelung District Prosecutors' Office said ​it had launched a second round of searches in the probe.

The six people were questioned over ⁠alleged document forgery and breach of trust, it said, adding searches were conducted at 12 locations, including the homes ​of six suspects and the offices of three companies.

The companies searched were Super Micro Taiwan, Albatron Technology (5386.TWO), opens new tab, Super Micro's distributor in ​Taiwan, and Chief Telecom (6561.TWO), opens new tab, a data centre operator.

In a letter to customers issued in the United States on Wednesday, Super Micro Chief Revenue Officer Matthew Thauberger said the four employees had been questioned on June 29 in connection with what he described as a Taiwanese investigation ​regarding the company's sale of products to a technology company in Taiwan.

"Two of the four employees have been detained pending ​a hearing, and the other two have been released on bail," Thauberger wrote in the letter.

"Super Micro is not a target of this investigation," ‌he ⁠said, adding that the company had been working with Taiwanese authorities for several months.

Thauberger said the company had provided Taiwan authorities access to the employees' desks and electronic devices and had immediately placed all four employees on administrative leave, pending the outcome of the investigation.

In May, Taiwanese prosecutors launched the first round of the investigation, detaining three people suspected of illegally exporting Super Micro's ​high-end AI servers, equipped with ​the Nvidia chips. Those ⁠three remain in detention.

In a statement issued in May, Super Micro said it had been cooperating with Taiwan authorities in an investigation into the alleged diversion of its AI servers to ​the restricted Chinese market. The cooperation had led to the seizure of 50 servers, the ​company said, ⁠adding that they had been deceptively acquired after being sold to an authorised reseller.

In March, the U.S. Justice Department charged three people associated with Super Micro, including one of its co-founders, with helping smuggle at least $2.5 billion worth of U.S. AI technology to China in ⁠violation of ​U.S. export laws.

Semiconductor powerhouse Taiwan is the world's largest producer of advanced ​chips used in AI applications.

Taiwan has tightened export controls in recent years to prevent advanced technology and know-how from reaching China, which claims the democratically ​governed island as its own territory despite Taiwan's strong objections.

Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree and Michael Perry

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Robinhood Taps Chainlink for Official Oracle InfrastructureRobinhood has formally adopted Chainlink as the official data and cross-chain oracle infrastructure for Robinhood Chain, its newly launched Ethereum Layer 2 network. The integration covers Robinhood Chain and all Robinhood-issued assets, including Stock Tokens like NVDA, GOOG, and AAPL. The announcement came alongside the public mainnet launch of Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 network built using Arbitrum's technology stack.

Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain built on Arbitrum technology, designed to support tokenized real-world assets and onchain financial services. The company described Robinhood Chain as permissionless, AI-native, and purpose-built for real-world assets, with day-one partners including Uniswap, Pleiades, Alchemy, BitGo, and Chainlink.

What Chainlink Brings to the NetworkChainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), Data Streams, and Data Feeds are now live on Robinhood Chain mainnet from day one, delivering verifiable data for tokenized real-world assets and unlocking secure interoperability across the multi-chain ecosystem. Chainlink provides data feeds, interoperability tools, and compliance standards needed for advanced tokenization use cases. Oracles connect smart contracts to external data sources, which is essential for applications like tokenized stocks that require real-time pricing data from traditional markets.

Robinhood also launched new Stock Tokens, enabling eligible users to trade 24/7 directly on Robinhood Chain, as well as deploy those assets into lending pools and use them as trading collateral across the broader DeFi ecosystem. With the mainnet now live, Robinhood Wallet users in more than 120 countries can trade Stock Tokens, though availability varies depending on local regulations.

Gaetan Thabot, Director of Product at Robinhood Crypto, said the company chose Chainlink because its institutional-grade security and reliability are already trusted by the world's largest financial institutions to scale onchain ecosystems.

Sources:
PR Newswire: Robinhood Chain Launches and Adopts Chainlink
The Block: Robinhood Chain Goes Live on Mainnet
FinanceFeeds: Robinhood Opens 24/7 Stock Token Trading on Its New Layer 2 Chain

Key Points U.S. Treasury’s OFAC designated 134 digital currency addresses connected to ISIS-K operations, comprising 131 TRON wallets and 3 Monero addresses These addresses processed more than $1.4 million in incoming transactions since 2023 and dispatched over $880,000 in outgoing transfers Tether immediately froze all wallet holdings on the 131 TRON-based addresses after the official designation OFAC simultaneously sanctioned two Brazilian citizens and four business entities connected to PCC criminal organization, responsible for laundering over $30 million through digital currencies Blockchain analytics companies such as Chainalysis have integrated the sanctioned addresses into their tracking systems On July 1, 2026, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), an agency within the U.S. Treasury Department, expanded its sanctions registry to include 134 digital wallet addresses associated with ISIS-Khorasan, the terror group’s branch operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Tether Freezes USDT in All 131 ISIS-K-Linked TRON Wallets

OFAC updated its sanctions list for ISIS-K, adding 134 crypto wallet identifiers, including 131 TRON addresses and three Monero addresses. Chainalysis said the TRON addresses had received more than USD 1.4 million since… pic.twitter.com/53AgCBUGKr

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) July 2, 2026

The designation encompasses 131 addresses on the TRON network and 3 on Monero. Following the announcement, Tether immediately took enforcement action by freezing assets held in all 131 TRON wallets.

ISIS-K received its initial designation as a Specially Designated Terrorist Group in September 2015. The organization maintains operations throughout Afghanistan, Pakistan, and certain Central Asian territories, conducting violent attacks against civilian populations in multiple nations.

The terror group’s propaganda division, known as al-Azaim Media Foundation, has leveraged cryptocurrency fundraising campaigns to secure operational funding. These solicitation efforts have been distributed through various websites and encrypted messaging services, accepting donations in TRON, Monero, and Bitcoin.

Transaction Activity in Sanctioned Addresses The 131 TRON wallets included in this enforcement action accumulated incoming transfers exceeding $1.4 million from 2023 onward. During the same timeframe, these addresses dispatched outgoing transactions totaling more than $880,000.

Blockchain forensic investigation reveals the wallets interacted with legitimate cryptocurrency platforms. Multiple addresses also transferred funds to cryptocurrency exchange services operating in Syria, based on data from Chainalysis.

This enforcement action represents the latest in a series of OFAC measures against ISIS cryptocurrency financing. In 2023, the agency sanctioned a Maldives-based ISIS-K operative whose TRON wallets maintained connections to Iranian crypto exchanges. A month prior to this current action, OFAC sanctioned a Syrian network of money service operations used to convert funds for ISIS financial facilitators.

PCC Criminal Network Faces Concurrent Sanctions In a coordinated enforcement measure issued the same day, OFAC imposed sanctions on two individuals from Brazil and four corporate entities linked to Primeiro Comando da Capital, commonly referred to as PCC.

PCC represents a major Latin American criminal enterprise headquartered in São Paulo with operational presence within the United States. According to OFAC’s findings, the organization processed more than $30 million in narcotics-related revenue, utilizing digital currencies to transfer illicit proceeds from the United States to Brazil.

This marks OFAC’s third enforcement action targeting PCC. The organization initially received its designation in December 2021. A subsequent action in March 2024 targeted a specific individual engaged in financial laundering activities for the criminal network.

According to monitoring conducted by TRM Labs, the aggregate transaction volume across all 134 newly sanctioned addresses exceeds $2 million.

Blockchain compliance providers, including Chainalysis, have confirmed integration of the designated addresses into their surveillance platforms, enabling financial institutions to conduct exposure assessments.

For digital asset service providers and banking institutions, these designations mandate immediate revisions to sanctions screening protocols and transaction surveillance infrastructure.

Aave V4 just opened its first specialized liquidity hub, and it’s built entirely around one stablecoin ecosystem. The Global Dollar Hub, sometimes called the Paxos Hub, went live with PT-USDG (September 2026) as its inaugural collateral asset, giving users a new way to borrow stablecoins against fixed-rate Pendle principal tokens.

This is the first real-world test of Aave’s hub-and-spoke architecture, a modular system introduced in March 2026.

How the Global Dollar Hub actually works Users deposit PT-USDG-24SEP2026, a Pendle principal token that matures in September 2026, as collateral. In return, they can borrow USDC and USDT directly from the hub. USDG itself is available too, but through a cross-hub credit line sourced from Aave’s Core Hub.

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The governance machinery behind this moved at a deliberate pace. A proposal for onboarding PT-USDG-24SEP2026 was posted on May 19, 2026. Before that, a predecessor token, PT-USDG-28MAY2026, had been proposed back in March 2026 and listed on Aave V3.

Why USDG and why now USDG is a regulated stablecoin issued by Paxos on behalf of the Global Dollar Network. It launched in November 2024 and crossed $1 billion in market cap by December 2025. Fully backed by cash and cash equivalents, it’s designed to check the boxes that institutional compliance teams care about.

Pendle splits yield-bearing assets into principal and yield components, letting users trade future yield separately. A principal token like PT-USDG-24SEP2026 essentially locks in a fixed rate until maturity.

Rather than lumping all assets into one giant pool, the hub-and-spoke model isolates risk. Each hub operates with its own parameters. If something goes wrong in the Global Dollar Hub, it stays in the Global Dollar Hub.

What this means for investors The Global Dollar Hub creates a fairly specific opportunity set. Users comfortable with stablecoin-on-stablecoin strategies can borrow against fixed-rate collateral, effectively arbitraging the spread between their PT yield and borrowing costs.

The risk to watch is maturity concentration. PT-USDG-24SEP2026 has a fixed expiration date. As September 2026 approaches, the hub will need new collateral tokens to maintain relevance, which means ongoing governance cycles and potential gaps in coverage.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

Solana’s tokenized real-world asset ecosystem has hit a new all-time high of $3.3 billion, cementing the network’s position as the third-largest blockchain for RWA value. That’s a nearly fourfold increase from roughly $873 million at the start of the year.

The milestone puts Solana behind only Ethereum at $15.9 billion and BNB Chain at $4.0 billion. With a 10.39% market share in the RWA space, Solana is no longer a rounding error in the tokenization conversation.

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A trajectory that keeps steepening Solana’s RWA value climbed 27.92% over the previous 30 days, with 692 distinct assets now living on-chain. The network reached roughly $873 million in RWA value back in January 2026. By the end of Q1, that figure had ballooned to somewhere between $1.66 billion and $2.01 billion. The previous all-time high of $2.8 billion was set in May 2026.

Institutional players are already here Citigroup ran a pilot program for tokenized Bill of Exchange settlements on Solana back in February 2026. The pilot highlighted Solana’s low transaction fees and rapid processing speed as core advantages for institutional users.

Ondo Finance, which specializes in tokenized stocks and treasuries, has emerged as one of the key contributors to Solana’s RWA ecosystem. Kamino, another notable player, focuses on RWA-oriented DeFi markets. Together with support from the Solana Foundation and data infrastructure from platforms like rwa.xyz, the ecosystem supports a range of tokenized assets spanning treasuries, equities, and various financial instruments.

What this means for investors Solana’s 27.92% monthly growth rate and its position as the third-largest RWA blockchain changes the competitive dynamics. Ethereum maintains nearly five times Solana’s total RWA value, providing deeper liquidity pools and more composability options. Solana’s network has also historically dealt with outage concerns, and any significant downtime during institutional settlement processes could damage the trust that has taken months to build.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

ATLANTA & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE: ICE), one of the world's leading providers of financial market technology and data powering global capital markets, and NATIVX, the public exchange for compute, today announced plans to launch GPU compute futures contracts based on NATIVX's COIL Index, which tracks the price of tokenized, energy-normalized compute and connectivity.

"Driven by the transformative force of AI, compute has quickly become an important asset class and is uniquely situated to benefit from the additional pricing transparency and risk management that comes from futures markets," said Trabue Bland, SVP of Futures Markets at ICE. "The new contracts will offer price discovery for customers globally through a hedgeable index that will benefit from trading alongside ICE's natural gas and power futures contracts."

COIL is designed to track tokenized GPU compute prices in an energy-normalized index that is built around maximizing constituent capacity. It reflects compute and connectivity, normalized to one stable unit and auditable at every step. The new futures contracts will be U.S. dollar denominated and cash-settled.

"AI's continued growth depends on turning compute from a fragmented, unpredictable operating cost into transparent and manageable market infrastructure,” Cole Crawford, Founder and Chairman of NATIVX. “Compute is now an asset class, and like every asset class, it needs a public price and a market. By combining our energy-normalized index with ICE's global futures marketplace, we're giving the world's largest new commodity the transparent and regulated venue it has been missing."

GPU compute and energy are deeply intertwined — power represents a significant input cost in running large-scale compute infrastructure, and fluctuations in electricity prices directly impact the economics of AI workloads. By normalizing compute prices to a consistent energy unit, the COIL Index strips out the noise introduced by regional power cost disparities, giving market participants a clearer basis for comparison.

Listing these contracts alongside ICE's established power and natural gas futures creates a uniquely integrated hedging environment where operators and consumers of compute can manage their GPU exposure in the same venue where they already hedge their underlying energy costs, while energy market participants gain a direct window into one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand in the world.

The contracts are expected to be launched later this year, subject to completion of relevant regulatory processes.

About Intercontinental Exchange

Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE: ICE) is a Fortune 500 company that designs, builds, and operates digital networks that connect people to opportunity. We provide financial technology and data services across major asset classes helping our customers access mission-critical workflow tools that increase transparency and efficiency. ICE’s futures, equity, and options exchanges -- including the New York Stock Exchange -- and clearing houses help people invest, raise capital and manage risk. We offer some of the world’s largest markets to trade and clear energy and environmental products. Our fixed income, data services and execution capabilities provide information, analytics and platforms that help our customers streamline processes and capitalize on opportunities. At ICE Mortgage Technology, we are transforming U.S. housing finance, from initial consumer engagement through loan production, closing, registration and the long-term servicing relationship. Together, ICE transforms, streamlines, and automates industries to connect our customers to opportunity.

Trademarks of ICE and/or its affiliates include Intercontinental Exchange, ICE, ICE block design, NYSE and New York Stock Exchange. Information regarding additional trademarks and intellectual property rights of Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. and/or its affiliates is located here. Key Information Documents for certain products covered by the EU Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products Regulation can be accessed on the relevant exchange website under the heading “Key Information Documents (KIDS).”

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 -- Statements in this press release regarding ICE’s business that are not historical facts are “forward-looking statements” that involve risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of additional risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see ICE’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, including, but not limited to, the risk factors in ICE’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, as filed with the SEC on February 5, 2026.

About NATIVX

NATIVX is the public market for compute and connectivity, the exchange where capacity is priced, traded, and settled against the COIL Index. Based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, NATIVX publishes the COIL index, including its COIL-T (training), COIL-I (inference), COIL-G (graphics), and COIL-CO (connectivity) sub-indices, and operates the exchange on technology licensed from Synova Global. Learn more at NATIVX.exchange.

About Synova Global

NATIVX is built on technology licensed from Synova Global, its underlying technology provider. Synova Global develops the core index, exchange, and settlement technology; NATIVX publishes the COIL index and operates the public exchange on that licensed foundation.

Category: Exchanges

SOURCE: Intercontinental Exchange

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Empowering investors, brokers, owners, and occupiers with the data and analytics needed to succeed in France’s estimated €300 billion commercial real estate market

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CoStar Group (NASDAQ: CSGP), an S&P 500 company and the global leader in real estate marketplaces, information, analytics and 3D digital twin technology today announces the official launch of the CoStar platform in France – bringing its commercial real estate intelligence platform to one of Europe’s largest markets. The launch builds on CoStar Group’s acquisitions of BureauxLocaux and Business Immo and significant investment in local proprietary research to create one of the most comprehensive commercial property databases ever built for the French market.

For the first time, investors, brokers, owners, corporate occupiers, and lenders in France can use a single platform to access curated property records, live availabilities, verified sale/lease comparables, exclusive industry news and real-time market analytics built from the ground up for the French market.

The launch was made possible by CoStar Group’s investment of more than $5 billion in proprietary data and technology over four decades to build a proprietary global database that is unmatched in the industry. Globally, the CoStar platform draws on:

9 million properties tracked 8 million commercial tenants and 2 million owners connected to properties 7 million lease activities and 5 million sales comparables 15,000 analytical reports covering markets and submarkets Industry news articles linked directly to properties and people. From launch in France, CoStar will deliver one of the most comprehensive commercial real estate datasets in France spanning office, logistics, and hospitality sectors across the country’s major metropolitan areas – including Greater Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. CoStar clients immediately benefit from more than 290,000 properties tracked, 385,000 commercial tenants, 90,000 availabilities, 75,000 lease activities and sales comparables, over 134 market and submarket analytical reports, and market-leading real estate news.

“France is one of the most important real estate markets in the world, and we are delighted to bring to France the same platform that has transformed how commercial real estate is transacted in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. French brokers, investors, owners and occupiers will now be able to source opportunities faster, underwrite more robustly and make decisions with greater confidence,” said Andy Florance, Founder and CEO of CoStar Group. “Commercial real estate operates across borders, and CoStar’s subscriber base of over 320,000 CRE professionals around the world will now find it easier to evaluate opportunities in France, while French CoStar subscribers will be able to access opportunities abroad.”

Sandra Roumi, General Manager France of CoStar Group: "French real estate is entering a new era. Our ambition is clear: to support the real estate ecosystem with the highest standards in data quality, transparency, and technology. CoStar Group is investing heavily to build, alongside the French market, a new generation of tools and services designed to support performance, confidence, and growth."

About CoStar Group

CoStar Group (NASDAQ: CSGP), an S&P 500 company, is the global leader in commercial real estate information, analytics, online marketplaces, and 3D digital twin technology. Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, CoStar Group has delivered 60 consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth, generating $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025. The company has invested more than $5 billion in building its proprietary database, employs over 1,500 researchers worldwide, and operates in more than 15 countries. CoStar Group is dedicated to digitizing the world’s real estate, empowering all people to discover properties, insights, and connections that improve their businesses and lives.

CoStar Group’s major brands include CoStar, a leading global provider of commercial real estate data, analytics, and news; LoopNet, the most trafficked commercial real estate marketplace; Apartments.com, the leading platform for apartment rentals; Homes.com, the fastest-growing residential real estate marketplace; and Domain, one of Australia’s leading property marketplaces. CoStar Group’s industry-leading brands also include Matterport, a leading spatial data company whose platform turns buildings into data to make every space more valuable and accessible; STR, a global leader in hospitality data and benchmarking; Ten-X, an online platform for commercial real estate auctions and negotiated bids; and OnTheMarket, a leading residential property portal in the United Kingdom.

CoStar Group’s websites attracted 131 million average monthly unique visitors in the first quarter of 2026, serving clients around the world. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, CoStar Group is committed to transforming the real estate industry through innovative technology and comprehensive market intelligence. From time to time, we plan to utilize our corporate website as a channel of distribution for material company information. For more information, visit CoStarGroup.com.

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A view shows a Microsoft logo at Microsoft offices in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, France, March 25, 2024. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

July 2 (Reuters) - A consortium including Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab and telecom startup Lightstorm plans to build a new undersea cable linking India with Malaysia and Singapore ​as technology firms compete to expand AI and cloud infrastructure ‌in India, one of the world's fastest-growing data markets.

The consortium, whose other members include Tata Communications (TATA.NS), opens new tab, Singapore Telecommunications (STEL.SI), opens new tab, Singapore's ASEAN Cableship and Japan's NEC Corporation, will construct ​the I-2SEA cable to support AI, cloud and hyperscale workloads, ​the companies said on Thursday.

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They did not provide additional details ⁠including the investment size.

The network will span 3,600 km and have landing ​stations in Machilipatnam in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where ​Meta (META.O), opens new tab and Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab have announced data centers.

The cable is expected to be operational in the fourth quarter of 2029, Lightstorm Group CEO and Managing Director Amajit Gupta ​told Reuters in an interview.

The I Squared-backed company currently connects 19 AI ​and cloud zones across India through terrestrial fiber cable networks, with the new network ‌expected ⁠to bring this number up to 29, Gupta said.

India's operational data center capacity could double from the current 1.4 gigawatts by 2027, based on projects under construction, and increase five-fold by 2030 if planned projects are ​fast-tracked, Macquarie Equity ​Research said in ⁠a report last October.

Undersea cables carry roughly 95% of the world's internet traffic. India currently has 17 active ​submarine cables with a maximum potential capacity of 960 ​terabits ⁠per second, and at least 10 more have been publicly announced, according to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research firm.

Separately, Lightstorm plans to list in India in ⁠mid-2027, ​Gupta said, without disclosing any other details. ​The company was seeking a valuation of up to $1.5 billion in March, according to a media report, opens new tab.

Reporting ​by Abhirami G in Bengaluru; editing by Chandini Monnappa and Sonia Cheema

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

2026 has been a banner year for one segment of the AI sector.

Semiconductor stocks have soared, driven by the massive AI infrastructure build-out and shortages in products like memory chips. As a result, the iShares Semiconductor ETF, which tracks major chip stocks, has doubled through the first half of the year.

However, AI stocks with exposure to software have mostly underperformed, as the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF, which holds the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks, is down 16%, significantly underperforming the S&P 500.

While some of those stocks deserve to be down, others have gotten thrown out with the bathwater, and one that looks oversold at this point is Axon Enterprise (AXON +5.95%), a law enforcement technology known for making TASER conductive electrical weapons, body and dashboard cameras, and a suite of software to help law enforcement agencies manage and process data like evidence, records, and investigations.

Historically, Axon has been a big winner on the stock market. The stock is up around 100,000% since its 2001 IPO when it was just a one-product company named TASER, but lately it's struggled. A nine-year streak of gains was snapped last year when the stock fell 6%, and it's been down most of this year as well, now off 30% from its peak in Aug. 2025.

For AI investors looking to rotate away from chip stocks for stocks that look oversold, Axon looks intriguing at the current price.

Let's take a closer look at Axon and what it's doing with AI.

Image source: Axon Enterprise.

An overlooked AI stock While some software stocks have reported slowing growth due to either maturing markets or disruption from AI-native products like Anthropic's Claude Code, that isn't the case with Axon.

Revenue grew 34% in the first quarter on 125% net revenue retention, showing existing customers increased their software spend with the company by 25% over the last four quarters. It also raised its full-year revenue growth guidance from 27%-30% to 30%-32%, a clear sign of confidence from management.

While its core products like TASERs, cameras, and software continue to deliver solid growth, the company is also rapidly innovating with AI and other cutting-edge technologies.

Revenue from AI products rose more than 700% from a year ago. Those include Draft One, a generative-AI tool that writes first drafts of police reports based on body camera footage and audio, and software that can answer policy questions during arrests. Other AI products include Axon Assistant, a voice companion that can provide real-time translation and secure research capabilities, and Axon Vision, which scans video footage and tracks human forms to automatically prioritize or edit footage for review.

Axon has also moved into the drone market with the help of its 2024 acquisition of Dendrone, which has enhanced its drone-as-first-responder vertical and its counter-drone security business. Revenue from counter-drone products was up more than 300% in the first quarter.

Overall, the company balances a healthy core business with innovative growth opportunities in new technologies like AI.

Today's Change

(

5.95

%) $

33.35

Current Price

$

593.96

Will Axon keep climbing? Axon stock has soared this week, following a disclosure on Monday that President Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of the stock in February. That news, which also included a report that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) solicited a $220 million TASER contract, portends more growth for the company from the federal segment, and Trump's ownership could give it favorable treatment as well.

Axon isn't cheap, trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of close to 100 based on adjusted earnings, and a price-to-sales ratio of 15. However, the company combines strong growth, solid margins, and significant upside potential with AI and its mission of making the bullet obsolete.

The catalyst from Trump's purchase of the stock also shows there's plenty of room for growth if investor sentiment swings back in its favor.

If you're looking to diversify your AI holdings away from chip stocks and other traditional tech stocks, Axon looks like a great choice.

Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore.

Welcome to the latest edition of  "Inside India" — your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world's fastest-growing large economy.

India's 15-minute delivery boom is reshaping one of the world's fastest-growing e-commerce markets. The service, expected to account for nearly 40% of online retail sales in the country by 2030, is currently led by local players, but Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart are mounting an aggressive challenge. The stakes extend beyond growth — they're fighting to stay relevant in a market that's redefining consumer expectations.

Any thoughts on today's newsletter? Share them with the team.

The big storyThe under-15-minute delivery, or quick commerce, companies in India have achieved something remarkable: they disrupted the biggest disruptors. But the fight isn't over yet.

Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart, the e-commerce giants that once ended the dominance of physical retail stores in India, were late to enter the quick commerce space but are now mounting an aggressive challenge against the sector's incumbents.

E-commerce companies are not just chasing market share in a new format – they need to offer quick commerce services to remain relevant to consumers, experts told CNBC, adding that India is an important long-term growth market where they need to tap into shifts in consumption habits.

So, during Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy's visit to India last week, quick commerce was undoubtedly in focus.

On June 24, Jassy visited a micro fulfilment center in Mumbai and said in a post on X that the global e-commerce major now has ambitions to become India's "largest delivery-in-minutes network."  

On its app, Amazon Now in India is offering cash back of up to 25% for the first five orders and waiving platform fees and delivery charges as it seeks to rapidly onboard customers and deepen adoption of the service.

The U.S company plans to offer Amazon Now services in more than 300 cities, compared to Blinkit, which is India's dominant quick commerce company with more than 2,200 dark stores serving over 200 cities as of March 2026.

The other challenger, Flipkart, also said last week that its quick service offering, Minutes, has over 1,000 micro fulfilment centers across more than 130 cities.

"For Amazon and Flipkart, this isn't simply about entering another retail format — it's about ensuring they remain relevant if instant fulfilment becomes the preferred mode of e-commerce," Aakash Agrawal, associate director at Anand Rathi Investment Banking, told CNBC.

The frenzied adoptionQuick commerce is a post-pandemic phenomenon in India that began with under-15-minute delivery of fresh produce and fast-moving consumer goods but has gradually expanded to include smartphones, small electronic gadgets and appliances, beauty products, pharmacy and more.

It has rewired consumer habits to prioritize delivery of online products within minutes rather than days. Food delivery companies like Eternal and Swiggy, with their localized logistics networks, were among the first to scale up in this space in India, even though it is start-up Zepto that is often credited with being the first to launch quick commerce in 2021.

While fresh produce, staples, and FMCG goods are the most frequently ordered products on quick commerce platforms, according to experts, small electronic items, kitchen appliances, and travel accessories are also popular across Amazon, Flipkart and their more established rivals.

Amazon is also setting up 100 urban fulfilment centers that will stock apparel, electronics, jewelry, shoes, luggage, watches, wireless accessories, musical instruments and furniture for quick commerce orders. 

According to an April report by Bain & Company, India is the "global leader" in quick commerce adoption, with nearly 17% of its e-commerce gross merchandise value flowing through these platforms.

By 2030, the quick commerce opportunity in India is expected to reach between $65 and $70 billion, up sixfold from 2025, the report said, adding that it will account for up to 40% of total online retail sales by gross volume and nearly half of incremental sales.

Both Amazon and Flipkart are already experiencing the frenzy of quick commerce adoption in India and are expected to take market share from competitors with a weaker financial profile, experts said.

"Prime members triple their shopping frequency once they start using it [Amazon Now], and we've seen orders double every quarter since launch," Jassy said in his post, adding that quick commerce is now the "fastest-growing ecommerce business unit in India" for the company.

A Flipkart spokesperson told CNBC that the e-commerce firm is seeing a sharp rise in adoption of quick commerce outside of metro cities, with Gen Z being the "fastest-growing cohort," accounting for 40% of the customer base.

With the entry of Flipkart and Amazon, the competitive intensity of the quick commerce market has increased, experts said, adding that it will eventually shrink to two to three companies in the next few years as cash burn ends.

Blinkit, the quick commerce platform of Eternal, is the only quick commerce company that has proved profitability at the operating level over the last two quarters. It reported adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of 370 million rupees ($3.8 million) in the March quarter and of 40 million rupees in the previous quarter.

"Our view is that Blinkit is definitely going to be one of those two or three players," Aditya Soman, senior research analyst at CLSA India, told CNBC's Inside India on Tuesday.

But the slot for two more winners in the quick commerce race remains wide open. 

Need to knowAmazon adds new funding, lifting India AI and cloud investment to $48 billion
Amazon plans to invest an additional $13 billion to expand artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure in India, taking its total investment in the country to $48 billion between 2026 and 2030. These funds will be used to expand AWS data center capacity in Mumbai and Hyderabad.

One of India's largest gold exporters paid its managing director just $180 a month, probe reveals
Indian authorities uncovered multiple accounting and operational irregularities at one of the country's largest gold companies, Rajesh Exports, according to an investigation released Wednesday, weeks after market regulators raised concerns over the company's reported revenue.

Coming up

July 1-3: Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi visits India.

July 3: HSBC composite final PMI for June.

ServiceNow (NOW +6.57%) has been one of the hardest-hit large-cap software stocks in 2026. After setting a split-adjusted 52-week high of $211.48 last summer, shares of the enterprise workflow software company have fallen about 50%, to around $105 as of this writing. The cause wasn't the business, but rather a marketwide fear that artificial intelligence (AI) would disrupt the software industry, letting customers swap pricey subscriptions for AI agents that do the same work.

Lately, that fear has eased, and the stock has climbed nearly 30% off its low. So is this beaten-down software leader finally a buy, or has the bounce already run too far?

Image source: Getty Images.

An AI winner, not a victim The bull case starts with how little the AI scare actually shows up in ServiceNow's results.

ServiceNow's first quarter of 2026 was strong by pretty much every measure. Subscription revenue rose 22% year over year (19% in constant currency) to $3.67 billion. And current remaining performance obligations (cRPO) -- contracted revenue the company expects to book over the next 12 months, and a useful read on near-term demand -- climbed 22.5% to $12.64 billion. Bigger deals, specifically, grew faster still: ServiceNow closed 16 transactions worth more than $5 million in net new annual contract value in the quarter, up nearly 80% from a year earlier.

More important for the AI debate, AI is landing as a tailwind, not a threat. Now Assist, ServiceNow's suite of generative AI features, is tracking toward about $1.5 billion in annual contract value for 2026 -- well above management's original $1 billion target. And customers spending more than $1 million a year on Now Assist grew more than 130% year over year.

"There has never been a tailwind for ServiceNow like AI," said CEO Bill McDermott on the company's first-quarter earnings call.

There's also a structural reason the AI-disruption worry may be overdone here. About half of ServiceNow's net new business now comes from pricing that isn't tied to user seats -- consumption-based models built around tokens, infrastructure, and connectors, McDermott said. The bear case assumes AI shrinks headcount, and with it the seats software vendors bill against. But when customers pay for how many workflows run on the platform, more automation can mean more usage, not less.

ServiceNow has leaned into that position. In January, it signed a multi-year agreement to make OpenAI's models a preferred option across the more than 80 billion workflows that run on its platform each year. The recent rebound in software stocks even has a tidy catalyst: in late June, the White House reportedly asked OpenAI to limit its most powerful new model to a small group of vetted partners, cooling fears that frontier AI would instantly commoditize enterprise software.

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The valuation still isn't a bargain Here's the harder part. Even after a sell-off this steep, ServiceNow doesn't look cheap. The stock trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of about 24 and a price-to-sales ratio of about 7. Both have compressed sharply -- the price-to-sales figure sat closer to 8 earlier this year, and far higher in years past. But neither is a bargain for a business whose growth, while strong, is gradually slowing from the high-20s rates of a few years ago.

Even more, the company's outlook looks good. For all of 2026, management guided for subscription revenue of about $15.75 billion, up more than 20%, and ServiceNow turns much of that into cash, posting a 44% free cash flow margin in the first quarter.

Still, this is a high-risk stock. The AI uncertainty that crushed shares this year hasn't been resolved so much as quieted, and another scare could send software names lower again.

So, with shares still down about 50% from their 52-week highs, a small position could make sense for investors who want exposure to a software company that is monetizing AI rather than being displaced by it. But I'd keep it modest. Shares aren't cheap enough yet to make this an easy call. And in a corner of the market moving this fast, paying up for even a strong business still carries plenty of risk.

A sign hangs in front of the world headquarters of Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., October 23, 2019. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

CompaniesJuly 1 (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved expanded use of Vertex Pharmaceuticals' (VRTX.O), opens new tab gene therapy in children as ​young as two with inherited blood disorders, including ‌sickle cell disease, the first such treatment cleared for this age group.

Casgevy, a one-time treatment made from a patient's own blood stem ​cells, was previously approved for patients aged 12 ​and older with sickle cell disease or transfusion-dependent ⁠beta thalassemia.

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Here are further details: -

Sickle cell disease is a ​painful, inherited blood disorder in which the body makes sickle-shaped ​hemoglobin, preventing red blood cells from properly carrying oxygen to the body's tissues.

In a trial of children aged five to under 12 ​with sickle cell disease, all eight evaluable patients had ​no severe vaso-occlusive crises or painful episodes for at least 12 straight ‌months ⁠within the first 24 months of infusion.

In beta thalassemia, eight of nine evaluable children achieved transfusion independence for 12 consecutive months, with a median duration of 20.1 months.

The ​FDA granted approval ​to Vertex ⁠in 53 days after filing under the Commissioner's National Priority Voucher, its new fast-track ​program designed to shorten review time for a ​drug ⁠application.

In 2023, the FDA approved Vertex's and Genetix Biotherapeutics' gene therapies for sickle cell disease in patients 12 years and older.

Other ⁠long-term ​treatment options for sickle cell disease ​include bone marrow transplant, which requires matching donors, and the chemotherapy drug ​hydroxyurea.

Reporting by Puyaan Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

The biggest question surrounding Joby Aviation (JOBY 1.12%) has never been whether electric air taxis can fly. It's whether regulators would approve them.

That question became a little easier to answer after Joby began flying its first FAA-conforming production eVTOL aircraft, a major step toward obtaining Type Inspection Authorization (TIA). If you're unfamiliar, TIA is one of the final stages before full FAA certification for commercial operations.

The company has now logged more than 50,000 miles of test flights, and management continues targeting commercial service this year. A lofty goal, to be sure. But does it make the stock a buy?

The regulatory risk is falling For years, FAA certification has been the single largest overhang on the stock.

With production-conforming aircraft now flying, Joby has moved beyond testing prototypes and into validating the aircraft that regulators will ultimately certify for passenger service. That's a much different stage of development than we were looking at just a year ago.

Joby was also recently selected to participate in the White House-backed Air Taxi Pilot Program, which will allow early operations across multiple U.S. states. This is while the company is now preparing to launch service in Dubai, where vertiports are already under construction. Those are significant milestones.

Valuation still demands perfection The fact is, the stock already reflects considerable optimism. Joby currently carries a market capitalization of roughly $8.5 billion despite generating very little revenue today. However, that's not unusual for an emerging aerospace company. 

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But concerns regarding execution remain. Launching an entirely new form of transportation requires FAA certification, manufacturing scale, charging infrastructure, pilot training, customer adoption, and favorable economics -- all at the same time.

So even after certification, profitability could still be years away.

A lot has to go right Certification is only one milestone. Joby plans to produce four aircraft per month by 2027, but scaling manufacturing while maintaining safety standards is one of the hardest challenges in aerospace. At the same time, the company must prove that customers are willing to pay enough to support a profitable business model. And we just don't know how that will play out yet.

Image source: Getty Images.

Not a low-risk investment Joby has unquestionably reduced one of the biggest risks facing its business. That's an important development, and it makes the path toward commercialization considerably clearer than it was a year ago.

Still, I wouldn't call the stock an obvious buy. The market is already assigning an $8.5 billion valuation to a company that has yet to establish a commercial air taxi business. That leaves relatively little room for execution mistakes.

If Joby delivers on certification, launches service on schedule, and proves demand exists, today's valuation could eventually look reasonable. But until those pieces fall into place, I'd view the stock as an intriguing technology story with loads of potential but not a low-risk investment.

GE Vernova (GEV - Free Report) closed at $1,134.35 in the latest trading session, marking a -3.45% move from the prior day. This change lagged the S&P 500's daily loss of 0.22%. Meanwhile, the Dow lost 0.03%, and the Nasdaq, a tech-heavy index, lost 0.66%.

Coming into today, shares of the the energy business spun off from General Electric had gained 21.16% in the past month. In that same time, the Oils-Energy sector lost 4.76%, while the S&P 500 lost 1.21%.

The investment community will be closely monitoring the performance of GE Vernova in its forthcoming earnings report. The company is scheduled to release its earnings on July 22, 2026. The company is forecasted to report an EPS of $3.16, showcasing a 69.89% upward movement from the corresponding quarter of the prior year. Alongside, our most recent consensus estimate is anticipating revenue of $10.78 billion, indicating a 18.29% upward movement from the same quarter last year.

For the annual period, the Zacks Consensus Estimates anticipate earnings of $30.59 per share and a revenue of $45.34 billion, signifying shifts of +72.92% and +19.09%, respectively, from the last year.

Investors should also pay attention to any latest changes in analyst estimates for GE Vernova. These latest adjustments often mirror the shifting dynamics of short-term business patterns. As a result, we can interpret positive estimate revisions as a good sign for the business outlook.

Our research shows that these estimate changes are directly correlated with near-term stock prices. Investors can capitalize on this by using the Zacks Rank. This model considers these estimate changes and provides a simple, actionable rating system.

The Zacks Rank system, stretching from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), has a noteworthy track record of outperforming, validated by third-party audits, with stocks rated #1 producing an average annual return of +25% since the year 1988. Over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate has moved 1.07% higher. GE Vernova is currently a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

From a valuation perspective, GE Vernova is currently exchanging hands at a Forward P/E ratio of 38.41. This denotes a premium relative to the industry average Forward P/E of 18.22.

It's also important to note that GEV currently trades at a PEG ratio of 2.13. The PEG ratio is similar to the widely-used P/E ratio, but this metric also takes the company's expected earnings growth rate into account. The Alternative Energy - Other industry currently had an average PEG ratio of 2.18 as of yesterday's close.

The Alternative Energy - Other industry is part of the Oils-Energy sector. With its current Zacks Industry Rank of 155, this industry ranks in the bottom 37% of all industries, numbering over 250.

The Zacks Industry Rank assesses the vigor of our specific industry groups by computing the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks incorporated in the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

Be sure to use Zacks.com to monitor all these stock-influencing metrics, and more, throughout the forthcoming trading sessions.

The Sei Giga Whitepaper V2 is a major update to the original Giga Whitepaper published in May 2025. It introduces significant performance improvements and new features to Sei Giga, redesigning Sei Network from first principles into a blockchain with the ideal architecture for onchain trading.

Read the full whitepaper at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14914

What's New in V2The updated whitepaper addresses the questions the original left open. Where v1 described how Giga achieves speed and throughput, V2 adds how it will solve for privacy and fairness.

Faster FinalityThe new whitepaper introduces even faster performance for Giga's Autobahn consensus protocol. It now targets sub-250ms finality, down from the 400ms target in the original whitepaper. This will be delivered while maintaining 200,000+ transactions / 5 gigagas per second throughput across the network’s decentralized validator set.

Pre-Execution Privacy and MEV ResistanceThe new whitepaper introduces Sedna, a private transaction layer.

Transactions on Sei Giga will be encoded into fragments and distributed across multiple proposer lanes. This will ensure that no proposer will see the full contents of a transaction until ordering is finalized, giving the network pre-execution privacy. In short, a trade will never be visible until it is executed.

It also introduces a deterministic mechanism for ordering transactions across proposer lanes. This will make transaction ordering transparent, predictable, and secure against manipulation by any individual proposer.

Ultimately, Sedna will almost completely remove the MEV and censorship risk that affects every other smart contract blockchain. 

The original Giga breakthrough: multi-proposer consensusIn traditional blockchains, one validator at a time is chosen to propose a block. That validator collects transactions, builds the block, broadcasts it, and then everyone votes on it across multiple rounds before it's finalized. Everything happens in sequence. You can't start the next block until the current one finishes the full propose-vote-vote-commit cycle. The speed of the entire chain is bottlenecked by one proposer at a time and multiple rounds of back-and-forth messaging.

Autobahn throws out that sequential model. Instead of one leader proposing blocks while everyone else waits, every validator will run its own "lane" and continuously stream batches of transactions in parallel. Each validator will propose independently and get a lightweight proof that its data is available from a small quorum of peers -- without requiring everyone to download everything upfront. A designated leader will then periodically take a snapshot called a "tip cut" that will capture the latest batch from every lane and commit them all at once through a streamlined two-phase vote.

This is what will enable Sei Giga’s immense throughput. Instead of being limited to however many transactions one validator can fit into one block per round, every validator will produce data simultaneously, and the consensus layer will synthesize their outputs together, sorting them deterministically by priority fee. The raw throughput ceiling will go from "one proposer's bandwidth" to the aggregate bandwidth of the entire validator set.

The Optimal Design for Institutional TradingBlockchains offer significant advantages over traditional trading venues. These include near instant settlement, shared liquidity, composability and 24/7 markets. However, in spite of these advantages, traditional traders are yet to adopt blockchain technology at scale. 

For a trading environment to be successful, it has to be predictable. Trading on layer one blockchains today, because of the risks posed by MEV and possible censorship from block builders, is not predictable. This makes today’s blockchains fundamentally unsuitable for institutional traders. 

When trading has taken off onchain, it has done so on venues which make the tradeoff of adopting centralized designs in order to make market structure more predictable. However in doing so, these exchanges expose themselves to the same centralization risks that affect legacy trading venues. 

Sei's Giga upgrade will take the completely novel approach of introducing a multi-proposer architecture, and combining it with a private transaction dissemination layer. The result will be the first layer one blockchain that is actually suited for trading at scale. Sei Giga will offer pre-execution privacy, fair transaction ordering, MEV resistance, and censorship resistance while ensuring high throughput and near instant settlement. 

Sei Giga will be the blockchain for trading.

What's NextSei Labs is well underway with the Giga Upgrade. Progress towards Giga can be followed on Sei Labs’ Giga Roadmap. 

The whitepaper's future work section outlines several areas of active development:

Full transaction fee mechanism Autobahn consensus upgradesNew tokenomics for the SEI token The Giga upgrade will be the most complex blockchain upgrade since Ethereum's Merge. The network will transition to the full Giga protocol without regenesis and without taking any element of the network offline.

Read the full whitepaper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14914

Disclaimer: The roadmap is subject to change based on development progress, market feedback, and other factors. Actual timelines, figures, and outcomes may vary.

Ethena, the protocol behind the USDe synthetic dollar, is integrating its product suite into Robinhood Chain, the newly launched Ethereum Layer 2 network that went live on July 1. The partnership positions Ethena’s yield-bearing assets within Robinhood’s freshly minted collateral ecosystem, bringing decentralized finance tools to one of the largest retail trading platforms in the US.

The collaboration arrives alongside Robinhood Earn, a decentralized lending product that lets users lend USDG stablecoins through self-custody wallets directly within the Robinhood app. The estimated annual percentage yield sits at around 7%.

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How Robinhood Earn actually works The lending infrastructure runs on Morpho, an established decentralized lending protocol, with Robinhood Chain serving as the settlement layer underneath. Ethena joins a roster of supporting partners that includes Steakhouse, Spark, and Maple.

Losses stemming from cyber incidents or smart contract vulnerabilities are covered through policies from Lloyd’s of London and RELM. Users interact with the product through self-custody wallets available in the Robinhood app.

Robinhood Chain and the bigger picture Robinhood Chain itself is built using Arbitrum technology, making it an Ethereum Layer 2 solution. The testnet launched in February 2026, and the public mainnet followed on July 1. The chain’s primary focus is tokenized real-world assets and financial services, with permissionless access and no native token planned.

This mainnet launch is part of a broader push Robinhood has been executing since 2025. The company has rolled out tokenized US equities in Europe, expanded its wallet services, and laid groundwork for perpetual futures offerings.

For Ethena specifically, the partnership extends a relationship that’s been building. Ethena’s ENA token has been trading on Robinhood since late 2025.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

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Alibaba Group Holding and its U.S.-based payment processor, Ant Group subsidiary AUS Merchant Services, have agreed to pay $600 million to resolve U.S. Justice Department allegations that they failed to prevent illegal sales on Alibaba’s eCommerce platforms.

The Justice Department alleged that Alibaba.com and AliExpress.com failed to prevent merchants’ sales and imports of illegal pharmaceuticals, controlled substances, listed chemicals and pill presses into the United States, thereby violating the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA), the department said in a Wednesday (July 1) press release.

The payments are part of a non-prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, according to the release.

Reached by PYMNTS, an AUS Merchant Services spokesperson said in an emailed statement: “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to fully resolve this matter. We have made continuous improvements to our compliance program and will continue to do so to ensure compliance with laws and regulations in all markets where we operate.”

Alibaba Group Holding did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Alibaba said in an emailed statement that the settlement will bring “stricter compliance to the sale of products in the United States by third-party merchants on its eCommerce platforms.”

According to the Justice Department press release, Alibaba admitted that over a nearly nine-year period from January 2016 to December 2024, it maintained policies restricting the sale of prohibited products on its eCommerce platforms but failed to prevent merchants from selling prohibit products in 80,000 transactions involving imports to the U.S. that had a combined gross merchandise value of over $200 million.

Per the release, AUS admitted that over a nearly four-year period from January 2020 to December 2023, its transaction monitoring systems did not always identify transactions involving payments from high-risk jurisdictions or multiple payors on a single invoice, and its anti-money laundering compliance program failed to prevent some Alibaba merchants from using its services to facilitate the sale and importation of prohibited products.

As part of the non-prosecution agreement, Alibaba agreed to pay a criminal monetary penalty of $125 million and to forfeit $200 million, AUS agreed to pay a criminal monetary penalty of $85 million and to forfeit $190 million, and both companies agreed to enhance their compliance programs and to continue cooperating with the Justice Department.

“Companies operating online marketplaces — whether based in the United States or abroad — must implement appropriate safeguards to prevent bad actors from exploiting their platforms,” Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said in the release. “If they fail to do so, the Department will hold them accountable.”

As MU stock was falling, President Trump posted on Truth Social calling Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU | MU Price Prediction) “one of the HOTTEST anywhere in the World” and celebrating a “HISTORIC $250 MILLION Investment in TRUMP ACCOUNTS” pledged by CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, tied to America’s 250th anniversary. He signed off with “THIS IS THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA!”

However, the stock went down down 10.67% on the day.

That is a rare thing in markets. A sitting president singling out one company for a shower of praise usually moves the stock, at least for an afternoon. On Wednesday, it moved nothing.

Why a presidential endorsement moved the stock zero Micron came into today priced for something close to perfection. The stock is up 754% over the past year and 227% year to date, with a market cap sitting around $1.17 trillion. When a stock has already tripled in six months, the marginal buyer needs a reason bigger than a Truth Social post to chase it higher.

The Q3 fiscal 2026 earnings report on June 24 was that reason, and it already ran. Revenue landed at $41.456 billion, up 345.72% year over year, beating consensus by 17.60%. Non-GAAP EPS came in at $25.11 against a $20.28 estimate, the seventh consecutive beat. GAAP gross margin jumped to 84.6% from 37.7% a year earlier. Management guided Q4 to $50 billion in revenue and $31.00 in EPS.

You can read the press release exhibit filed with the SEC for the full breakdown. Investors bought the news the hour it hit and have been trimming ever since.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Micron Technology didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

What is actually driving Micron down today Memory chips are getting sold across the board. SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) fell 9.91%, Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) dropped more than 10%, and other AI-adjacent names are lower. The semiconductor ETF iShares Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SOXX) is coming off a 6.19% weekly gain, and today looks like the profit-taking day that inevitably follows a vertical move.

There is also insider tape to reckon with. Mehrotra sold $32.7 million of stock on June 26 under a 10b5-1 plan, with shares near a 52-week high. That is programmatic selling by rule, but at these prices it lands harder. Prediction markets on Polymarket priced the odds of a down day today at 98.5% before the open. Traders saw this coming.

What the Trump post actually adds to the thesis The $250 million commitment to Trump Accounts is a corporate goodwill gesture with political theater attached. It does not change the shape of Micron’s income statement. The thing that matters, and Mehrotra keeps saying it, is the shift to multi-year contracts. On the earnings call he told analysts that “the memory industry has been structurally transformed by the proliferation of AI” and that Micron has signed 16 Strategic Customer Agreements covering roughly 25% of total revenue over their terms, projected to reach approximately $100 billion in cumulative floor-price revenue across 14 of those deals.

Micron is also holding $22 billion in customer cash deposits and letters of credit against take-or-pay commitments. HBM4 shipments have already crossed $1 billion, and Mehrotra said the ramp is tracking twice as fast as HBM3E 12-high.

Micron’s fundamental case is intact, arguably strengthened, by the Q3 results and the SCA structure. What today shows is that stocks trading at trillion-dollar valuations after 800% runs need real capital flows, not applause. When the buyer of last resort is a president typing in all caps, the marginal seller wins.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Micron Technology didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

HIP-3 is a Hyperliquid network upgrade launched in October 2025 that allows permissionless deployment of perpetual futures markets by staking 500,000 HYPE tokens. Open interest across HIP-3 markets grew from roughly $790 million in January 2026 to a peak of $3.2 billion by June, according to Grayscale. TradeXYZ, the leading HIP-3 builder, accounts for more than 90% of all HIP-3 open interest with tokenized equities, indices, and commodities. Seven of Hyperliquid’s top ten markets by volume are now tokenized equities or commodity futures rather than traditional cryptocurrency pairs. Grayscale compared Hyperliquid’s infrastructure model to Amazon Web Services, calling it a platform where developers create products while HYPE captures value from every trade. Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 upgrade has quietly transformed a decentralized perpetuals exchange into what Grayscale Research described as “more like Amazon Web Services than a stock exchange” in a June 2026 research note cited by Stocktwits. 

Since launching on October 13, 2025, HIP-3 has enabled permissionless deployment of perpetual futures markets for assets that include NVDA, TSLA, gold, crude oil, and the S&P 500. Open interest surpassed $3.2 billion in June 2026, and on peak days, HIP-3 markets accounted for nearly 48% of Hyperliquid’s total trading volume. 

This article explains the mechanics of HIP-3, how open interest functions on the platform, and what the growth trajectory means for the broader DeFi derivatives market.

How HIP-3 Works: Permissionless Market Deployment HIP-3 enables any participant who stakes 500,000 HYPE tokens, worth approximately $25 million at current prices, to deploy their own perpetual futures exchange on HyperCore, Hyperliquid’s main trading layer.

Deployed markets operate alongside native Hyperliquid pairs but are not covered by the platform’s shared liquidity vault, known as HLP. Instead, deployers manage their own liquidity, according to a detailed CoinGecko analysis published in May 2026. 

Deployers earn half of the trading fees generated on their markets. HIP-3 markets charge roughly double the native fee rate, starting at 0.09% for takers versus 0.045% on native pairs. A “Growth Mode” feature introduced in November 2025 allows deployers to reduce fees by 90% to accelerate adoption, according to OAK Research. 

All HIP-3 markets are margined in USDC, priced against off-chain oracles, and trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This always-on structure proved especially relevant during the U.S.-Israeli-Iranian conflict, when high-impact market events developed outside traditional trading hours.

Open Interest Growth: From $790 Million to $3.2 Billion The growth trajectory has been steep. Open interest on HIP-3 markets stood at roughly $790 million in January 2026, crossed $1.43 billion by late March, surpassed $2 billion in April, and reached $3.2 billion in early June, according to a Grayscale research note. 

Since launch, HIP-3 markets have processed over $200 billion in cumulative trading volume. TradeXYZ, a perpetuals platform built by the Hyperunit team, dominates the vertical, accounting for more than 90% of total HIP-3 open interest. 

The platform offers exposure to U.S. equities such as NVDA, TSLA, GOOGL, and AMZN, a synthetic Nasdaq-style index called XYZ100, and commodities, including gold and silver, benchmarked to COMEX front-month futures. Non-crypto assets achieved 60% trader retention in late March 2026, indicating sustained engagement rather than speculative activity.

Analysis: The retention figure is significant. In most DeFi product launches, initial activity spikes and then decays within weeks. A 60% retention rate suggests that HIP-3 is solving a structural problem, 24/7 market access, rather than offering a novelty.

The fact that seven of Hyperliquid‘s top ten markets by volume are now non-crypto assets represents a category shift from a DeFi derivatives protocol toward a global macro trading venue.

Revenue, HYPE Buybacks, and the SpaceX Catalyst Hyperliquid generated $2.3 million in daily fees at peak HIP-3 activity, funding $11 million in HYPE token buybacks. The HYPE token outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum by over 70% in Q1 2026, according to 99Bitcoins reporting.

The SpaceX initial public offering in June 2026 provided another catalyst. TradeXYZ launched a SpaceX pre-IPO perpetuals market on May 18, 2026, which surpassed $50 million in open interest before SpaceX officially filed its S-1 two days later. 

Moon Rock Capital co-founder Simon Dedic stated in a post on X that the access issues retail traders faced around the SpaceX Nasdaq debut “make the case for trading exposure to high-profile private companies via onchain perpetual futures on Hyperliquid.”

In March 2026, the first S&P 500 perpetual futures product launched on Hyperliquid after S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed the index to a HIP-3 deployer, according to Grayscale.

Regulatory Implications HIP-3 markets offering tokenized equity derivatives operate without KYC requirements, creating a direct conflict with securities regulations in most jurisdictions. The SEC has not issued specific guidance on permissionless perpetual futures tied to U.S. equities. As HIP-3 open interest approaches levels that attract institutional market-making firms, regulatory scrutiny is likely to intensify.

What’s Next for HIP-3? Grayscale’s research note positioned $5 billion in open interest as the inflection point at which HIP-3 markets attract professional market-making firms from CME and CBOE. The launch of HIP-4, which introduces outcome-based prediction market contracts on Hyperliquid, adds a new dimension.

Pending U.S. crypto market structure legislation could either validate or constrain the model. Participants should monitor regulatory developments and the platform’s approach to compliance.

FAQs What is Hyperliquid HIP-3?
HIP-3 is a Hyperliquid network upgrade from October 2025 that lets builders deploy permissionless perpetual futures markets by staking 500,000 HYPE tokens.

How much does it cost to deploy a HIP-3 market?
Deployers must stake 500,000 HYPE tokens, worth approximately $25 million at current prices, to launch a perpetual futures market on HyperCore.

What is open interest on HIP-3?
HIP-3 open interest peaked at $3.2 billion in June 2026, growing from roughly $790 million in January, according to Grayscale research data.

What assets can be traded on HIP-3?
HIP-3 supports tokenized equities like NVDA and TSLA, commodities including gold and oil, indices such asthe  S&P 500, and pre-IPO stocks.

What is TradeXYZ?
TradeXYZ is the leading HIP-3 deployer built by the Hyperunit team, accounting for more than 90% of total HIP-3 open interest across all markets.

How do HIP-3 fees work?
HIP-3 markets charge roughly double native Hyperliquid rates, with half going to the deployer. Growth Mode can reduce these fees by 90%.

What is HIP-4?
HIP-4 is Hyperliquid’s outcome-trading upgrade, launched in May 2026, introducing fully collateralized prediction-market contracts that settle at 0 or 1.

References What is Hyperliquid’s HIP-3? How it works and use cases, OAK Research, June 2026 Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 & HIP-4: Tokenized Stocks and Prediction Markets, CoinGecko, May 2026 Hyperliquid Emerges As Superior Alternative After SpaceX IPO Lockup Chaos, Stocktwits, June 2026 Hyperliquid Fees Explained: Perps, Spot & HIP-3, Datawallet, May 2026