A small team working out of Larkspur, California, thinks they’ve cracked one of the oldest problems in commodity investing: how do you own oil without dealing with the messy, expensive machinery of futures contracts? Their answer is to stick it on Ethereum.
Energy Substantiation Partners is launching $WTIC, an ERC-20 token where each unit represents one barrel of physical West Texas Intermediate crude oil, backed 1:1 by independently verified energy receipts. In English: it’s a stablecoin, but instead of being pegged to the dollar, it’s pegged to a barrel of the stuff that makes the world go round.
How $WTIC actually works The mechanics are straightforward, at least by crypto standards. Minting a $WTIC token requires a USDC deposit plus a 0.10% fee. Each token is substantiated by what the company calls Volumetric Energy Receipts, which are held by an independent custodian and audited on a monthly basis.
Token holders can redeem their $WTIC daily for either USDC or, if they’re feeling particularly ambitious, actual physical delivery of crude oil. The token is priced against the daily WTI benchmark, and the company claims zero tracking errors against that price.
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That last detail is the real selling point. Anyone who has ever held a commodity ETF knows the pain of “rollover costs,” the fees that accumulate when a fund has to continuously sell expiring futures contracts and buy new ones. The United States Oil Fund (USO), the most well-known oil ETF, has historically suffered significant tracking drift from the actual price of crude for exactly this reason.
$WTIC sidesteps that entirely by being backed by physical barrels rather than paper derivatives. It also trades 24/7, which means no waiting for the NYMEX to open if oil prices spike on a Sunday night due to geopolitical chaos.
The team and the governance question The project is led by CEO JP Thieriot and Executive Chair Donald Putnam, with a core team that includes Wil Harris, Lucas Harris, Chris Ericksen, and Katie Oates.
Wayne Christian, a sitting Texas Railroad Commissioner, serves on the company’s board. The Texas Railroad Commission, despite its quaint name, is the state’s primary regulator of the oil and gas industry. Having an active regulator of the oil sector sitting on the board of a company that tokenizes oil is, to put it diplomatically, a governance arrangement that has raised eyebrows.
As of April 2026, public scrutiny has centered on potential conflicts of interest stemming from Christian’s dual role. Texas produces more crude oil than any other US state, and the Railroad Commission holds significant authority over permitting, production, and environmental compliance.
The broader RWA tokenization wave Energy Substantiation isn’t operating in a vacuum. The real-world asset tokenization market has been one of the fastest-growing sectors in crypto, with major players like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Ondo Finance already tokenizing Treasury bills and other fixed-income products on-chain.
Energy Substantiation’s approach, using audited Volumetric Energy Receipts and independent custodians, represents an attempt to solve that verification problem. The company says its process allows energy suppliers to monetize their inventories without disrupting operations.
The roadmap doesn’t stop at crude oil. The company plans to launch two additional tokens by Q3 2026: HHC, backed by Henry Hub natural gas, and BRNTc, backed by Brent crude.
What this means for investors The compliance framework matters too. Energy Substantiation says it conducts sanctions screenings and maintains audit trails. During the oil price collapse of April 2020, WTI futures briefly traded negative. A token backed by physical barrels wouldn’t face the same dynamic, since physical oil always has some positive value, but the redemption mechanisms would face their first real stress test during exactly the kind of market dislocation that tends to break new financial products.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Cryptocurrency prices are broadly rebounding on Thursday, following a dominant sell-off largely attributed to geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Bitcoin (BTC) has risen and trades near $63,000, while Ethereum (ETH) pares losses around $1,750 as bulls aim for a short-term breakout above $1,800.
Meanwhile, despite Ripple’s (XRP) broader bearish outlook, the remittance token trades near $1.10 resistance, up from its short-term support range between $1.05 and $1.07.
Crypto sentiment dampens amid mounting geopolitical tensionsThe United States (US) and Iran continued to launch attacks at each other for the second consecutive day on Thursday, amid mounting pressure on the fragile ceasefire between the two countries, according to a CNN report.
The US military said it hit 90 targets along the Iranian coast overnight. In retaliation, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard reported that they launched attacks on US military bases in Kuwait and Bahrain.
US President Donald Trump has issued a warning that attacks could “get much worse” if Iran continues to strike ships transiting through the Strait of Hormuz. The CNN report added that an Iranian top negotiator said that the strait “will only open with ‘Iranian arrangements,’ not American threats.”
Sentiment in the broader crypto market remains constrained, as wars rarely favor risk assets. The Fear & Greed Index is embedded in the Extreme Fear territory at 22 on Thursday, up only marginally from 20 the day before. This indicates that risk appetite is on the back foot, with investors preferring to stay on the sidelines until geopolitical tensions stabilize. Therefore, recoveries are unlikely to make notable progress in the short term.
Crypto Fear & Greed Index | Source: AlternativePrice analysis: Bitcoin rebounds but struggles to build momentumBitcoin retains a capped tone as it holds well beneath the 50-day, 100-day and 200-day Exponential Moving Averages (EMAs). Still, the recent reclaim of the downward resistance trendline, whose break area now comes in near $58,689, suggests bears are losing some immediate control.
At the same time, the Relative Strength Index (RSI) hovering just below the midline and a positive Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) histogram together hint that downside momentum is fading rather than accelerating.
BTC/USDT daily chartInitial resistance is aligned with the 50-day EMA at around $65,452, followed by the 100-day EMA at approximately $69,089, with the 200-day EMA near $75,193 forming a more strategic barrier that would need to be overcome to revive a broader bullish trend.
On the downside, the first meaningful cushion is seen around the descending resistance line, now acting as support near $58,689. A sustained drop back through this zone would re-open room for a deeper corrective phase toward the psychological $60,000 level, while holding above it keeps scope for further consolidation beneath the overhead EMA cluster.
Altcoins technical outlook: Ethereum and XRP hold key support levelsEthereum sits above $1,700 while still capped beneath a dense layer of moving averages, keeping the near-term bias bearish despite improving momentum. Still, the MACD indicator stays in positive territory with the line above the signal and a constructive histogram, while the RSI hovers just above 50, hinting at steady but not aggressive buying interest.
ETH/USDT daily chartImmediate resistance lies at the 50-day EMA near $1,801, which is the first hurdle bulls must reclaim to extend the recovery. Above that, the 100-day EMA around $1,960 acts as a subsequent barrier, followed by the more significant 200-day EMA close to $2,243 that defines the broader bearish structure. Although there are no nearby technical supports on the daily chart, psychological and prior price lows at $1,700, $1,600 and $1,500 would serve as interim floors. A daily close above the 50-day EMA would be the first signal that selling pressure is starting to ease.
On the other hand, XRP maintains a bearish near-term tone with the spot price well beneath the 50-day, 100-day and the 200-day EMAs. However, the recent rebound from oversold territory is modest, with the RSI hovering in the mid-40s, suggesting only a mild recovery in momentum, while the Parabolic SAR at $1.03 sits below spot and hints at a still-intact but fragile attempt to stabilize after the latest decline.
XRP/USDT daily chartInitial resistance is seen at the descending trendline area near $1.14, followed by the 50-day EMA around $1.17. A daily close above these levels would be needed to ease downside pressure and open the way toward the 100-day EMA at $1.28 and the more distant 200-day EMA near $1.49.
Looking down, the Parabolic SAR at $1.03 marks the first notable layer of support. A break below this level would likely reinstate stronger selling pressure and expose the prior lows on the chart.
(The technical analysis of this story was written with the help of an AI tool. Know more.)
Bitcoin, altcoins, stablecoins FAQs Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, a virtual currency designed to serve as money. This form of payment cannot be controlled by any one person, group, or entity, which eliminates the need for third-party participation during financial transactions.
Altcoins are any cryptocurrency apart from Bitcoin, but some also regard Ethereum as a non-altcoin because it is from these two cryptocurrencies that forking happens. If this is true, then Litecoin is the first altcoin, forked from the Bitcoin protocol and, therefore, an “improved” version of it.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to have a stable price, with their value backed by a reserve of the asset it represents. To achieve this, the value of any one stablecoin is pegged to a commodity or financial instrument, such as the US Dollar (USD), with its supply regulated by an algorithm or demand. The main goal of stablecoins is to provide an on/off-ramp for investors willing to trade and invest in cryptocurrencies. Stablecoins also allow investors to store value since cryptocurrencies, in general, are subject to volatility.
Bitcoin dominance is the ratio of Bitcoin's market capitalization to the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies combined. It provides a clear picture of Bitcoin’s interest among investors. A high BTC dominance typically happens before and during a bull run, in which investors resort to investing in relatively stable and high market capitalization cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. A drop in BTC dominance usually means that investors are moving their capital and/or profits to altcoins in a quest for higher returns, which usually triggers an explosion of altcoin rallies.
Initial claims for US unemployment benefits came in at 215,000 for the latest reporting period, barely budging from the prior week’s 217,000.
The numbers behind the non-event The 2,000-claim decline keeps the four-week moving average parked in the low-to-mid 210,000s, a range that has held remarkably steady through late June and early July. Claims briefly ticked up to 226,000 in mid-June, a reading that came in slightly above forecasts. Even that modest spike didn’t signal any meaningful deterioration.
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The June non-farm payroll report showed the US economy added 57,000 jobs, a figure that exceeded most forecasts.
Why a flat labor market moves crypto prices Bitcoin pushed above $60,000 in early July following the stronger-than-expected employment data. The move wasn’t driven by any crypto-native catalyst, no ETF approval, no protocol upgrade, no whale accumulation. It was pure macro.
The Fed factor and what comes next Analysts broadly anticipate the Federal Reserve will begin easing monetary policy later this year, a view that the combination of stable jobless claims and modest job growth only reinforces.
Bitcoin and Ethereum tend to benefit most directly from rate cut expectations because they’re the assets institutional investors are most comfortable buying. Smaller altcoins and DeFi tokens can lag or diverge based on protocol-specific developments.
A sustained reading below 220,000 on initial claims would likely cement rate cut expectations heading into the second half of the year.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Strip Bitcoin and Ethereum out of the crypto market and what remains has shed almost a quarter of its value in the first half of 2026, falling to $666 billion while liquidity retreats into a handful of survivors. This is not a crash; crashes end. It is something slower and stranger: a depression in the long tail of crypto, with its own causes, its own refugees, and its own short list of assets that refuse to participate.
Summary
The ex-Bitcoin and ex-Ethereum crypto market lost nearly 23% in the first half of 2026. Liquidity is retreating from the long tail into Bitcoin, stablecoins, and a few assets with stronger revenue mechanisms. The current altcoin downturn looks more like a slow structural depression than a fast liquidation crash. Token supply glut, ETF-driven institutional access, and the rise of perpetual trading have weakened broad altcoin demand. The main survivors are tokens with real fee flows, buybacks, or utility that does not depend purely on retail speculation. The number that best describes crypto in mid-2026 is not Bitcoin’s price. It is this one: the total market capitalization of every cryptocurrency except Bitcoin and Ethereum fell 22.84% in the first half of the year, down to $666.58 billion as of July 2. Bitcoin, for all its drama, a 21-month low of $58,188 in late June, a bounce back above $62,000, trades within a wide band it has occupied before. The long tail is somewhere it has not been in years: bleeding steadily, month after month, with no single catastrophic day to blame and no capitulation candle to mark a bottom.
The individual charts are grim in a way indexes flatten. Ethereum, the second pillar, just closed three consecutive red quarters for the first time in its history, down 28% in the second quarter alone to trade near $1,740, roughly 65% below its August 2025 peak. Solana sits in the high $70s to low $80s. Worldcoin fell 80% over seven months; Pi Network printed all-time lows 96% below its peak; MicroStrategy’s stock, the market’s favorite leveraged proxy, was the worst performer in the entire Nasdaq-100 last year and trades 85% below its 2024 high. The Fear and Greed Index touched 12 this month, readings last seen at the bottom of the previous cycle, and sentiment surveys read like obituaries.
And yet, scattered across the wreckage, a short list of assets is behaving as if none of this is happening: a perp exchange token near all-time highs, a lending token up 40% in a month on a buyback, a supposedly dead layer-1 up 31% in a week. The pattern of who is exempt is as informative as the destruction itself. This piece maps the altcoin depression properly: how the damage is distributed, the three structural forces that caused it and distinguish it from an ordinary bear market, the anatomy of the exceptions, the honest bull and bear cases for what comes next, and the historical precedents that both camps are quoting at each other.
The shape of the damage
Start with what the aggregate number hides. A 23% half-year decline in the ex-BTC-ETH market sounds survivable until it is decomposed, because the aggregate is propped up by its largest and most defensible members, stablecoins, exchange tokens, the top handful of layer-1s, which means the decline in the actual long tail is far deeper. Move down the capitalization table and the drawdowns compound: mid-caps routinely 60-80% below their 2025 highs, the memecoin complex down by more, and the sub-$100 million tier functionally illiquid, with tokens drifting on a few thousand dollars of daily volume. The market has not fallen uniformly; it has hollowed out from the bottom.
The flows data explains the mechanism. Capital is not so much leaving crypto as retreating inward along the risk curve: into Bitcoin, into stablecoins, whose aggregate supply has kept growing through the drawdown, and into a few narrative fortresses. Bitcoin dominance has ground higher all year, the ETF complex institutionalized a version of crypto exposure that simply does not include the long tail, and the marginal retail buyer, the historical engine of altcoin seasons, is conspicuously absent, with new-wallet and app-download metrics at multi-year lows. When markets are healthy, liquidity spreads outward toward risk; when they are frightened, it retreats toward quality and exits through the same narrow doors it entered. The first half of 2026 has been eighteen consecutive weeks of the second pattern.
Two aggravating events bracketed the half. The macro turn, a hot inflation print, Bank of America forecasting three rate hikes into 2026’s back half, and gold and AI equities absorbing the speculative appetite crypto once monopolized, reset the discount rate on every long-duration asset, and nothing has longer duration than a token whose cash flows are hypothetical. And the ETF reversal removed the market’s newest demand engine precisely when it was needed: after absorbing supply for eighteen months, spot Bitcoin funds bled $4.51 billion in June alone, their worst month on record, roughly $7 billion across May and June, converting the structure that had validated the asset class into a source of daily sell pressure and headline gloom that the long tail, which never even had ETFs, absorbed by proxy.
A tour of the casualty list Abstractions need faces, and the depression’s casualty list is best understood as concentric rings around the majors.
The first ring is the large-caps that were supposed to be safe. Ethereum’s three consecutive red quarters, the first such streak in its existence, ending with a 28% second-quarter loss, did more damage to the market’s psyche than any memecoin implosion, because ETH was the institutional asset, the one with ETFs, staking yield, and a corporate buyer base, and it fell 65% from its peak anyway. Solana, the cycle’s performance champion, trades in the high $70s, its ecosystem activity, notably resilient, decoupled from its token price in exactly the way bulls once promised could not happen. XRP holds near $1.10 with the most institutionally credentialed story in the sector and a chart that ignores it.
The second ring is the narrative tokens, and here the numbers turn brutal: Worldcoin down 80% across seven months, Pi Network at all-time lows 96% below peak, the two of them jointly holding the most commercially promising identity thesis in crypto and jointly demonstrating that theses without token mechanisms no longer receive the benefit of the doubt. The AI-agent complex, the restaking complex, the modular complex, each of 2024-25’s manufactured metas has round-tripped, their tokens down 70-90% while, in several cases, their underlying usage grew, the market’s new discipline applied without sentiment.
The third ring is the equity shadow market, where the depression is arguably deepest: MicroStrategy 85% off its high and the treasury-company complex trading at or below the value of its own coins, the crypto IPO class down 42-89% with its pipeline frozen, and the mining sector repricing around AI-datacenter pivots because coin economics alone no longer support the multiples. When the leveraged wrappers, corporate, listed, and structured, all compress toward or below net asset value simultaneously, the market is making a single statement across every instrument: it will pay for crypto’s contents, and it will no longer pay a premium for containers.
And beneath all three rings lies the true dead zone, the thousands of sub-$100 million tokens where the depression is not a price level but a liquidity condition: order books measured in thousands of dollars, market-making contracts lapsing, volumes that round to zero. No index captures this stratum because indexes weight by capitalization, but it is where most tokens actually live, and its condition is the honest answer to what the altcoin market is in mid-2026: not cheap, not expensive, but in the majority of cases simply unpriced, waiting for either a buyer or a delisting.
Why this is a depression and not a crash
Crypto has crashed many times, and this is not what those looked like. Crashes are violent, leveraged, and fast: a cascade, a weekend of liquidations, a V-shaped aftermath. The 2026 altcoin market is experiencing something with different physics, a slow structural repricing driven by three forces that do not resolve with a bounce.
The first is terminal supply glut. The token-creation machinery built in 2024-25, led by Pump.fun’s million-plus launches but including every launchpad, points program, and airdrop meta, produced assets far faster than the market produced holders, and the professionalized unlock calendar keeps delivering supply into weakness: more than $776 million of scheduled unlocks this week alone, with the sector’s largest single cliff landing Saturday. Every project financed in the 2021 and 2024 vintages is now vesting into a market with no marginal buyer, which functions as a standing tax on the entire asset class. Previous altcoin winters ended when new demand met fixed supply; this one must end against supply that grows on a schedule.
The second is the rerouting of institutional access. The ETF era was supposed to legitimize crypto broadly; what it actually did was create a compliance-approved lane for exactly two assets, soon a handful more, and drain the legitimacy premium from everything outside the lane. An allocator who wants crypto exposure in 2026 buys the funds; the reflexive spillover into altcoins that characterized retail-driven cycles has no institutional equivalent, because no pension committee rotates winnings into mid-cap layer-1s. The long tail has been structurally decoupled from the asset class’s own adoption story, and the decoupling is visible in every chart pair: Bitcoin flat on the year at this writing, the ex-majors index down by a quarter.
The third is the migration of the speculative economy itself. The activity that once expressed itself as altcoin buying now expresses itself as perpetual-futures trading, where the same directional appetite generates volume and fees without anyone holding a token overnight, the instrument having become the market’s true center of gravity. Decentralized perp venues’ share of open interest has nearly quadrupled year over year to 13.5%, volumes concentrate in venues rather than assets, and the professionalization is self-reinforcing: why own a token’s drawdown risk when its volatility can be rented by the hour? The long tail’s former buyers did not leave the casino; they moved from owning the chips to trading the table.
The stablecoin paradox and the macro vise Two forces frame the depression from outside, and both are widely misread.The first is the stablecoin paradox: through six months of risk-asset destruction, aggregate stablecoin supply grew, and it now stands as one of the largest pools of capital inside the crypto perimeter. Bulls read this as dry powder, an army of dollars parked on-chain awaiting redeployment, and the reading has a real mechanism behind it, since capital that intended to exit crypto entirely would have redeemed to banks instead of rotating to Tether and Circle. Bears read the same data as infrastructure, not intent: stablecoins grew because they became payment rails, collateral, and settlement instruments for uses that have nothing to do with buying altcoins, the yield-bearing plumbing of a parallel dollar system, and mistaking plumbing for a bid is how every failed bottom call of the past year was constructed. Both readings are partially right, which is the paradox: the money is there, and nothing about its presence obligates it to arrive.
The second frame is the macro vise, and it deserves respect as a cause rather than an excuse. The asset class that grew up entirely inside a low-rate world is now pricing Bank of America’s projection of three hikes into late 2026, December hike odds above a third on CME’s tracker, and a Federal Reserve meeting on July 29 that markets treat as a live risk event. Long-duration speculative assets reprice first and hardest under tightening, and the long tail of crypto is the longest-duration asset class ever invented. Layer onto that the attention competition, AI equities absorbing the thematic capital and the narrative oxygen that altcoins monopolized in prior cycles, and gold absorbing the debasement trade, and the depression acquires its external half: even a structurally healthy altcoin market would be fighting the tape, and this one is not structurally healthy. The Fear and Greed Index at 12 measures the collision of the internal and external stories, and its historical record, extreme readings preceding reversals, is the single most cited statistic in every bull’s arsenal, cited, as bears note, at 20 as well, and at 15, all the way down.
The depression also has a geography worth noting: it is unevenly distributed across chains as well as capitalizations. Solana’s application economy has held activity remarkably well even as SOL fell, Ethereum’s layer-2 complex has kept throughput growing while its tokens bled, and several ecosystems have effectively bifurcated into functioning networks with failing tokens, the clearest evidence yet that usage and token value have decoupled at the base layer too. The decoupling reads bearish today and cuts ambiguous tomorrow: networks that stay busy through a depression retain the raw material, users, developers, fee flows, from which mechanisms can later be built, while quiet chains with quiet tokens have neither.
The exceptions, and what they share Against that backdrop, the survivors form a pattern too consistent to be luck, and the pattern is cash flow with a mechanism attaching it to the token.
Hyperliquid is the archetype: a perp exchange near all-time highs in a bleeding market, because 97% of its enormous fee revenue mechanically buys its token every block, a structural bid this publication dissected in May. Aave rallied roughly 40% in a month after switching on fee-funded buybacks. The pattern extends to venues, launchpads, and protocols whose revenue is real and whose tokenomics route it to holders, and it conspicuously excludes projects with identical revenue and no routing: the market has stopped paying for adoption stories and started paying, narrowly and skeptically, for distributions. Call it crypto’s dividend repricing; in a depression, only the assets that pay you to hold them get held.
The second class of exceptions is idiosyncratic reversal from the dead zone, Cardano’s 31% weekly bounce from multi-year lows being the current specimen, and these are better read as the volatility of abandonment than as recoveries: when a major asset’s holder base has been reduced to conviction and neglect, small demand produces large moves in both directions. The third class is the RWA-and-infrastructure complex, tokenized Treasuries growing straight through the drawdown and the perp venues annexing equities and commodities, which is not altcoin strength at all but the market routing around altcoins entirely, building things institutions want on rails the long tail happens to share, proof-of-human networks being the cautionary counter-example of vast userbases that never found the mechanism.
The exceptions also share a negative property worth stating: none of them is a bet on the altcoin market recovering. Hyperliquid’s buyback runs on trading volume that exists in every market weather; Aave’s fee stream runs on lending demand that persists through drawdowns; the RWA complex runs on institutional needs that have nothing to do with retail speculation. The survivors are, almost by definition, the assets that found a customer other than the crypto cycle itself, which inverts the sector’s old logic completely. In previous cycles, the long tail was leveraged exposure to crypto’s growth, the beta on the beta; in this one, the only long-tail assets working are the ones that de-correlated from that growth entirely. The depression, seen through the survivors, is not punishing altcoins for being risky. It is punishing them for being redundant, for offering exposure to an asset class that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the ETFs now deliver with less risk, and rewarding, narrowly, whatever offers something else. That is a harsher filter than any bear market, because bear markets end, and redundancy does not.
The bear case, the bull case, and the precedents The bear case says this is not a cycle but a verdict. The long tail was an artifact of zero rates, retail mania, and the absence of regulated alternatives; all three conditions are gone, the supply overhang is permanent, and the correct comparison is not crypto 2018 but small-cap altcoins after 2018, thousands of which never recovered because nothing required them to. On this reading, the 23% half is not a drawdown to be recovered but a repricing toward a world where perhaps a few dozen tokens have durable claims on value and the rest converge, slowly, on their terminal worth. The absence of capitulation is itself the tell: markets that cannot crash cannot bottom.
The bull case answers with the same history read differently. Every previous altcoin winter, 2015, 2018-19, 2022, featured identical obituaries, identical dominance grind, identical proclamations that this time the long tail was structurally dead, and each resolved when a demand catalyst met a market positioned exactly like this one: Fear and Greed at cycle-bottom readings, funding negative, sentiment surveys unanimous, and the sellable supply, per the flows data, increasingly transferred from weak hands to strong. The catalysts are even legible in advance: the CLARITY Act’s resolution would extend regulated access beyond the ETF duopoly, three specific fights currently deciding it; a Fed pivot would reprice duration assets in unison; and the halving-cycle clock that bulls treat as scripture points to exactly this phase, maximum despair, preceding rotation. The 23% number, on this reading, is what the bottom of an accumulation phase looks like from inside it.
The honest synthesis is narrower than either slogan. Both camps are describing real mechanisms; the question is which applies to which stratum. The structural forces, supply glut, institutional rerouting, speculation’s migration to perps, are genuine and will not reverse with sentiment, which argues the bear case is right about the median token. The positioning extremes, the survivor pattern, and the catalyst calendar are equally genuine, which argues the bull case is right about the market’s investable core. A depression, unlike a crash, does not end for everyone at once: it ends first for the assets with cash flow and mechanisms, later for the assets with users and stories, and never for the rest. The 23% figure will eventually be revised by a recovery; how much of the long tail participates in that revision is the actual bet, and the first half of 2026 has been the market showing, asset by asset, exactly how it intends to grade it.
A word, finally, on how to actually navigate a depression, because the historical playbook differs from the crash playbook most participants trained on. Crashes reward buying panic and selling relief; depressions reward selection and patience, and punish both panic-buying and generalized bottom-fishing, since the defining feature of the regime is that most of what looks cheap is cheap for a reason and will get cheaper or simply stay dead. The discipline the survivors’ pattern suggests is uncomfortable but legible: hold the market’s investable core to whatever extent one holds the asset class at all; demand a mechanism, revenue routed to holders, structural buybacks, genuine fee claims, before treating any long-tail position as investment rather than trade; treat narrative without mechanism as rental property, entered and exited with the attention cycle; and respect the unlock calendar as a standing map of scheduled supply, because in a market without a marginal buyer, the vesting schedule is the price forecast. None of this is exciting, which is rather the point: depressions transfer wealth from participants who need excitement to participants who can do without it.
The last observation belongs to the long view. Crypto has now run this experiment enough times for the shape to be familiar: a technology wave mints an asset class, the asset class overproduces claims on the future, the claims deflate for years while the technology quietly compounds, and the next wave is built by whoever kept working through the deflation. The 2026 altcoin depression is that middle phase executing on schedule, and its most reliable historical property is also its least appreciated: the assets that lead the next cycle are rarely the ones that led the last, and are frequently being built, unlisted and unpriced, during exactly this kind of silence. The $666 billion question is not when the long tail recovers; it is which fraction of the current long tail has anything to do with what recovers, and the honest answer, on every precedent available, is: less than its holders hope, and more than its obituaries allow.
For the record, the numbers to watch from here are few and public: the ex-majors market capitalization itself, whose trend break above the H1 downchannel would be the first structural all-clear; Bitcoin dominance, whose rollover has preceded every genuine altcoin rotation on record; the weekly unlock calendar against long-tail volumes, the supply-demand scissors in one glance; and the count of tokens with live buyback or fee-distribution mechanisms, the survivor class’s census, which grows every month and quietly defines what the next cycle’s investable universe will look like. Depressions end without announcements. They end in data series, and these four will carry the announcement when it comes.
However it resolves, the first half of 2026 has already earned its place in the asset class’s institutional memory, the six months in which the market stopped grading crypto on its future and started grading it, token by token, on its books.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Digital asset markets are volatile and you can lose your entire investment. Figures are current as of July 9, 2026, and may change. Always do your own research.
Ethereum’s price has been struggling to break past the $1,826 resistance in the short term, repeatedly returning to test main support near $1,580. With the price boxed in between these two critical levels, the broader market continues to search for direction amid heightened volatility.
Short-term resistance centers on $1,826Following a recent attempt to rebound, Ethereum slipped again below $1,826, an area that remains pivotal for short-term price action. The ongoing pressure highlights the importance of converting this region back into solid support for buyers to regain control of the narrative.
Charts indicate that $1,826 has repeatedly served as a major breakout level. When Ethereum trades below this threshold, upward movements tend to weaken, increasing the likelihood of continued consolidation. Analyst Cryptorphic notes that as long as Ethereum remains under $1,826, a cautious outlook prevails, and a more constructive structure will only emerge if the cryptocurrency reclaims this key level.
Cryptorphic emphasizes the critical importance of the $1,826 region for buyers, stressing that Ethereum must retake this area in order to regain a stronger technical position.
Ethereum’s position beneath its moving averages further intensifies resistance pressure. The upper band around $1,800, coupled with the $1,826 mark, creates a concentrated area where selling remains pronounced. Unless this resistance is decisively broken, attention could shift back to the support zone between $1,625 and $1,621.
On the other hand, should Ethereum manage to clear $1,826 and hold above it, traders may see a clearer sign of renewed buying strength, with the potential for a near-term recovery gaining momentum.
$1,580 emerges as key level on broader timeframesLooking at the weekly chart, $1,580 stands out as a more significant technical threshold. Ethereum has treated this region as a strong demand area several times in recent years, making the current test especially notable for participants monitoring the long-term trend.
According to Ali Charts, historical reactions at $1,580 have driven substantial upside moves: a 149% surge in October 2023 and a 203% expansion following an April 2025 test. This track record has put special focus on the present price action as traders wait to gauge the outcome of the latest retest.
LevelTechnical significance$1,826Primary short-term resistance that needs to be reclaimed$1,625–$1,621Immediate support range to watch if resistance holds$1,580Main weekly support, crucial for broader trend structureA recent bounce has brought Ethereum back into the $1,800 range, but repeated tests of this horizontal support raise concerns that buying liquidity could be depleted over time, thus weakening the foundation. As a result, market watchers are closely tracking whether Ethereum can close above $1,580 on higher timeframes, a factor that may determine the next major move.
Ali Charts observes that holding the $1,580 level keeps the potential for another upward expansion alive, while losing this support would likely erode prospects for a sustained recovery.
As long as Ethereum trades above $1,580, the recovery scenario remains on the table. However, a clear breakdown of this support would increase the risk of a deeper pullback, putting the existing bullish case under greater strain.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.
Circle’s EURC launch on Base is a small but important stablecoin infrastructure move. It brings a native euro-denominated token to one of the most watched Ethereum layer-2 networks at a time when European regulation is becoming much more concrete.
That combination matters. Base needs more native liquidity tools, and Circle needs to show that its MiCA-compliant strategy can translate into useful distribution across active networks.
For more details, visit the official Circle platform.
TL;DR Circle launched native EURC on Base.The rollout gives the Ethereum layer-2 a euro-denominated stablecoin aligned with Circle’s MiCA strategy.It adds another liquidity building block for Base as regulated stablecoin competition intensifies. Why EURC On Base Matters Most crypto liquidity is still dollar-denominated, but euro stablecoins are becoming more important as MiCA changes the European operating environment. A native EURC deployment gives Base users a cleaner way to move euro liquidity without relying only on bridged or wrapped assets.
For developers, native stablecoins can matter because they reduce friction in payments, DeFi, and trading pairs. For users, they make the network feel more complete.
Circle’s MiCA Advantage Circle has been positioning itself as one of the stablecoin issuers most prepared for Europe’s new rulebook. EURC on Base fits that strategy because it combines regulatory positioning with distribution on a fast-growing chain.
The broader stablecoin market is becoming more regional and more regulated. That means issuers with clear licenses and compliant products may be able to capture share where unregulated tokens face restrictions.
Base Gets Another Liquidity Piece For Base, the launch adds to an ecosystem already trying to build depth across DeFi, payments, and consumer applications. Stablecoins are the settlement layer for much of that activity.
If EURC finds real usage, it could help Base become more attractive to European users and projects looking for euro-denominated on-chain rails.
The Part That Matters The useful way to read this story is not as a standalone headline about Circle, but as part of the wider pressure building around Stablecoins coverage this week. Markets have been jumping quickly from one catalyst to the next, so the cleaner value for readers is in separating the actual development from the instant reaction around it. In this case, the source material gives us a concrete event to work from, rather than a loose rumour or a recycled social-media talking point.
That distinction matters because crypto readers are being asked to process a lot at once: ETF flows, regulatory actions, exchange listings, protocol upgrades, wallet movements, and political signals. A story like this is most useful when it helps them understand where EURC fits into that broader map. It does not need to be inflated into a guaranteed price call to be worth covering. It simply needs to explain what changed, who is affected, and why the market is paying attention today.
The caveat is also important. Even clean source-backed developments can be overinterpreted when traders are hunting for a fast narrative. A listing does not automatically create lasting demand, a regulatory update does not immediately settle every legal question, and an on-chain movement does not always translate into a finished sale. The better read is to treat the development as a fresh data point and then watch whether follow-up activity confirms the direction of travel.
For NewsBTC readers, that means keeping the focus on what can actually be verified from the source and avoiding the temptation to turn every update into a sweeping market verdict. The story is strong enough on its own terms: it gives investors and traders another piece of context around Stablecoins, while leaving room for the next filing, dashboard update, wallet movement, governance vote, or exchange notice to decide whether the angle grows into something bigger.
This article is based on information from Circle.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Nearly every transaction on Ethereum’s layer-2 networks passes through a single machine, run by a single company, called a sequencer. It orders trades, sets the pace of the chain, earns the fees, and can go dark or say no. This guide explains what sequencers actually do, why the most decentralized ecosystem in crypto runs its fast lanes through central operators, what can and cannot go wrong, and the roadmaps racing to fix it.
Summary
Ethereum layer 2 networks rely on centralized sequencers that order transactions, collect fees, and can temporarily halt network activity during outages. Sequencers cannot steal user funds because Ethereum secures transaction validity, but they can influence transaction ordering, censorship, and network availability. Rollup developers are working toward decentralized sequencing models to reduce reliance on a single operator while preserving Ethereum’s security and scalability. Table of Contents
Rollups in one section, and the sequencer’s jobWhat the sequencer can do to you, and what it cannotThe outage record: what centralization has actually costThe economics: why giving it up is hardThe fixes: three roads to a neutral sequencerHow to read an L2’s actual trust profileFrequently asked questions Here is an uncomfortable fact about the scaled, modern Ethereum: when you swap on an Arbitrum exchange, mint on Base, or pay on Optimism, your transaction is received, ordered, and confirmed by one machine, operated by one company. That machine is the sequencer, and it occupies a position of quiet, enormous power: it decides which transactions enter the chain and in what order, it collects the network’s fee revenue, and when it stops, as major sequencers have during outages, the entire network simply pauses, every app frozen at once.
The layer-2 rollups are how Ethereum scaled, moving execution off the congested base chain while inheriting its security, and they now carry a majority of the ecosystem’s activity. That success makes the sequencer the most consequential piece of centralized infrastructure in an ecosystem whose founding promise is decentralization, and the tension is not a secret; it is an engineering roadmap, with every major rollup publicly committed to fixing it and none finished. Meanwhile the base layer itself is being redesigned around adjacent ideas, with the coming Glamsterdam upgrade enshrining proposer-builder separation into the protocol, which will reshape the environment sequencers operate in.
This guide covers the sequencer honestly: what a rollup is and what job the sequencer does inside it, the specific powers a centralized sequencer holds and their real-world failure record, the crucial distinction between what a sequencer can and cannot do to your funds, the economics of sequencing and why operators are slow to give it up, the decentralization designs, shared sequencing, based sequencing, sequencer sets, competing to replace the single machine, and how to evaluate any L2’s actual trust profile today.
Rollups in one section, and the sequencer’s job A rollup is a blockchain that executes transactions on its own fast, cheap environment, then posts compressed records of everything it did to Ethereum, inheriting the base chain’s security for its history. Optimistic rollups post results and allow a challenge window for fraud proofs; validity rollups post cryptographic proofs that the results are correct. In both designs, Ethereum is the court of final record, and the rollup is a high-throughput execution venue whose state can always, in principle, be reconstructed and verified from the data it posts down below.
Someone, though, has to run the fast venue in real time: receive the flood of incoming transactions, decide their order, execute them, hand users instant confirmations, and batch the results down to Ethereum. That someone is the sequencer. It is best understood as three roles fused: the mempool and matching engine that orders the flow, the block producer that executes it, and the shipping department that posts batches to the base chain. The ordering role is the powerful one, because in any financial system, transaction order is money: who gets the arbitrage, whose liquidation lands first, who buys before the price moves. On Ethereum’s base layer that power is fragmented across thousands of validators and an entire adversarial supply chain built to capture it; on almost every major rollup today, it belongs to one operator, appointed by the team, running the official sequencer.
Why did the most decentralization-obsessed ecosystem in software ship its scaling layer this way? Because centralized sequencing is fast, simple, and safe to bootstrap: one machine gives instant confirmations, no consensus overhead, clean upgrade paths, and a single throat to choke during the inevitable early bugs. The architects’ wager was that sequencing could be centralized temporarily because the rollup design strictly limits what the sequencer can do, a wager the next two sections examine from both sides.
What the sequencer can do to you, and what it cannot The sequencer’s powers are real, and enumerating them precisely matters more than the usual hand-waving in either direction.
What it can do. It can censor: refuse to include your transaction, whether by policy, error, or legal compulsion, and regulated operators have compliance obligations that make selective exclusion more than hypothetical. It can order: place its own or favored transactions ahead of yours, extracting the value that ordering confers, invisibly and profitably; most major operators publicly forswear this, and the forswearing is a policy, not a protocol guarantee. It can stop: sequencer outages have repeatedly frozen major rollups for hours, halting every application simultaneously, a failure mode with no analogue on the base chain, where thousands of validators mean the chain simply does not stop. And it can set the pace and price of inclusion, since it is the sole gateway to the network’s blockspace in real time.
What it cannot do, and this is the rollup design’s genuine achievement: it cannot steal. The sequencer cannot forge a transaction spending your funds, because every transaction requires your signature and the fraud or validity proofs posted to Ethereum would expose any invented state. It cannot rewrite settled history, because the history lives on the base chain. And, critically, it cannot permanently trap you, because well-built rollups include an escape hatch: a mechanism to force-include transactions directly through Ethereum, bypassing the sequencer entirely, so that even a fully censoring or dead sequencer can only delay users, not imprison their funds. The delay is real, force inclusion is slow and clumsy, but the distinction between a chokepoint that can inconvenience you and a custodian that can rob you is the entire difference between the rollup model and a centralized exchange, and it is why the ecosystem tolerated centralized sequencing at all. The trust profile resembles a bridge with a strong trust-minimized design rather than a multisig one: concentrated operationally, constrained cryptographically.
The honest risk summary, then: your assets on a major rollup are secured by Ethereum; your access, timing, and fair ordering are secured by one company’s machine, policies, and legal situation. For a casual user the distinction rarely bites. For a trader whose profits live in ordering, for a protocol whose execution quality depends on fair ordering and whose liquidations must land on time, and for anyone in a jurisdiction a compliant operator might be told to exclude, the sequencer is the trust assumption that matters most and is audited least.
The outage record: what centralization has actually cost The sequencer risk is not theoretical, and the incident record is the best syllabus for what single-operator infrastructure means in practice. Every major rollup has suffered sequencer downtime: hours-long halts from surging inscription traffic, stalls from software bugs in batch posting, freezes during upgrades that went sideways. The pattern across incidents is consistent and instructive. Funds were never lost, the base-chain security model held every time, and the networks resumed with their histories intact, which is the design working as promised. What stopped, each time, was everything else: trading froze mid-move, liquidation engines could not reach positions as prices moved, arbitrage broke against live markets elsewhere, and users learned that force-inclusion, the theoretical escape hatch, was in practice too slow and too technical to matter inside an incident measured in hours.
The subtler lessons sit in the second-order effects. During one prominent outage, the network’s applications discovered their own emergency procedures assumed a working sequencer: pausing markets, updating oracles, and even communicating with users all routed through the machine that was down. During another, the resumption itself became a trading event, as hours of queued transactions landed in a burst against stale prices, a miniature of the reconciliation dynamics every gap-prone market knows. And across all of them, the operator’s incident response, status pages, engineer availability, post-mortems, was the de facto governance of a multi-billion-dollar economy for the duration, performed by a company under no protocol obligation to perform it well.
The record’s summary is fair to both sides of the argument: the constrained-power design has truly protected funds through every failure, and the single-machine design has just as surely imposed correlated, economy-wide halts that a decentralized system would not, which is precisely the trade the roadmaps exist to unwind.
It is also worth placing the sequencer inside the rollup’s full trust stack, because it is the most visible dependency but not the only one. A rollup’s security rests on three legs: the data it posts to Ethereum, which is what makes reconstruction possible and which the blob-fee era made radically cheaper; the proof system, fraud or validity, that polices state correctness, several of which still run with training wheels, security councils and permissioned challengers standing in for mature proofs; and the sequencer, which governs liveness and ordering. Independent frameworks grade rollups across all three, and the grades routinely surprise users who assumed the marketing: networks celebrated as trust-minimized frequently carry upgrade keys and council powers that outrank the sequencer question entirely. The sequencer is the right place to start reading an L2’s trust profile. It is the wrong place to stop.
The economics: why giving it up is hard Sequencing is not just power; it is revenue, and the revenue explains the pace of decentralization better than any technical obstacle. A sequencer collects the difference between what users pay for L2 transactions and what it costs to post their data to Ethereum, a margin that widened dramatically when Ethereum’s blob-based data pricing collapsed posting costs, plus whatever ordering value it chooses to capture or auction. For a major rollup this is a nine-figure annual business, and it currently flows to the operating company or foundation, funding development and, in several cases, constituting the primary revenue behind the network’s token.
Decentralizing the sequencer means distributing exactly this revenue, and the designs on the table are, among other things, proposals about who gets paid. That is not cynicism; it is the correct lens for evaluating the roadmaps, because a decentralization plan that never specifies where sequencing revenue goes is a plan that has not confronted its hardest question. It also frames the user’s side of the bargain today: centralized sequencing quietly subsidizes the networks users enjoy, the same revenue-and-token linkage question running through every fee-generating protocol, and every step toward neutrality redistributes a pie someone currently owns.
The numbers behind the revenue argument are worth one concrete paragraph. An L2’s gross margin is the spread between user fees collected and data costs paid to Ethereum, and the blob-fee era transformed that spread: posting costs for major rollups collapsed by orders of magnitude while user fees, though lower, fell less, leaving the large networks operating at gross margins that most software businesses would envy. Public dashboards track the arithmetic in real time, revenue in, data costs out, and the residual accrues today to whoever runs the sequencer. That residual funds engineering, subsidizes user fees during growth pushes, and, for token-bearing networks, constitutes the cash flow every valuation argument ultimately references.
Decentralization designs must answer where it goes: to a staked sequencer set as yield, to a shared network as service fees, to Ethereum validators under based sequencing, or to users as rebates, and each answer creates and destroys different constituencies. The engineering of neutral sequencing was largely solved on whiteboards years ago; the political economy of its revenue is the part still being negotiated, which is the single most clarifying fact about why the timelines are what they are.
The fixes: three roads to a neutral sequencer Three families of designs compete to replace the single machine, each trading different things.
The first is the sequencer set: replace one operator with a permissioned or staked committee running consensus among themselves, rotating leadership, so that censorship requires collusion and outage requires correlated failure. It is the incremental path, and its critics note that a small committee of known entities is a smaller improvement than it appears, particularly against legal compulsion, which scales to committees easily.
The second is shared sequencing: independent networks whose business is providing decentralized ordering as a service to many rollups at once, with the added promise of atomic cross-rollup composability, transactions that execute across multiple L2s together or not at all, recreating some of the seamlessness the multi-rollup world fractured. The trade is a new external dependency and, again, the revenue question: a shared sequencer wants paying customers, and rollups guard their margins.
The third and most Ethereum-native is based sequencing: hand ordering back to Ethereum itself, letting the base chain’s validators sequence L2 transactions as part of block production. It maximally inherits Ethereum’s neutrality and censorship resistance, at the cost of Ethereum’s pace, confirmations at base-layer speed rather than the instant feel users have learned, though pre-confirmation designs aim to restore the speed. Based sequencing’s fortunes are entangled with the base layer’s own evolution: the Glamsterdam upgrade’s enshrined proposer-builder separation restructures exactly the block-production pipeline that based rollups would plug into, which is why sequencer roadmaps and Ethereum’s core roadmap now read as one document with two authors.
No major rollup has completed any of the three. The public commitments are real, staged plans, published designs, testnets, and the timelines have slipped for years, because the current arrangement works, earns, and only embarrasses its operators when something breaks. The realistic forecast is a long middle period of committees and hybrid designs, with full neutrality arriving network by network, unevenly, this decade.
A note on terminology prevents one common confusion: the sequencer is not the prover, and decentralizing one does nothing for the other. The prover, in validity rollups, generates the cryptographic proofs of correct execution; the sequencer orders and executes. A network can decentralize sequencing while proving remains one machine, or the reverse, and the two roles fail differently: a dead prover delays finality on Ethereum while the chain keeps running, a dead sequencer halts the chain while finality of past batches stands. Roadmap language blurs the roles constantly, and reading which one a decentralization milestone actually addresses is a small skill that pays for itself.
How to read an L2’s actual trust profile For a user or builder choosing among rollups today, the sequencer question compresses into a practical checklist. Who runs the sequencer, and under what legal jurisdiction? Does the network have working force-inclusion, and what is its delay, the number that bounds worst-case censorship? What is the outage history, and did funds ever depend on the operator’s goodwill during one? Is there a published ordering policy, first-come-first-served, private mempool, auction, and any mechanism enforcing it beyond reputation? What stage is the decentralization roadmap actually at, running code versus blog post? And where does sequencing revenue go, because that answer predicts the roadmap’s pace better than the roadmap does.
The sequencer is the honest asterisk on Ethereum’s scaling triumph: the rollup ecosystem genuinely extended the base chain’s security to vastly more activity at vastly lower cost, and it did so by concentrating, temporarily and by design, the one power the base chain had most successfully dispersed. The asterisk is shrinking, slowly, under public pressure and published plans, and until it is gone, the single most useful thing a user can know about any L2 is exactly what its one important machine can and cannot do to them.
The wider stakes deserve a closing frame, because the sequencer question is Ethereum’s decentralization thesis meeting its scaling success, and the resolution will define what the ecosystem actually is. If the rollup era ends with a handful of corporate sequencers ordering most on-chain activity, then Ethereum will have rebuilt, at the execution layer, the intermediated structure it was designed to replace, with the base chain reduced to a settlement court for private venues. If the decentralization roadmaps deliver, based sequencing, credible committees, shared networks, then the scaling will have been genuine: more activity, same neutrality, the original promise kept at a hundred times the throughput. Both futures are still open, the incentives lean toward the first and the culture toward the second, and the outcome will be decided not by white papers but by the unglamorous engineering and revenue negotiations described above, network by network, over the next several years. Users are not spectators to that contest: the trust profiles are public, the alternatives are one bridge away, and where activity settles is the only vote the operators have ever reliably counted.
A practical postscript for builders, finally: sequencer risk is inherited. An application deployed on a rollup imports its sequencer’s outage record, censorship surface, and ordering policy as silent dependencies, and the mature practice, visible in how serious protocols now deploy, is to treat chain selection as a security decision, document the force-inclusion path in the runbook, and design liquidation and oracle machinery to fail safely through a halt. The sequencer is infrastructure, and the first rule of infrastructure applies: it is invisible until the day it is the only thing that matters.
The reader’s shortlist for following the story: the independent rollup-risk frameworks that grade each network’s sequencer, proofs, and upgrade keys; the networks’ own decentralization roadmap pages, read with dates, not adjectives; the outage post-mortems, which teach more per paragraph than any documentation; and the base-layer upgrade calendar, since Glamsterdam-era changes to Ethereum’s block pipeline reshape what based sequencing can offer. The chokepoint is well documented by everyone except the marketing, and the documentation is where the truth lives.
If one image should survive this guide, make it the geometry: Ethereum scaled by turning one broad, slow, neutral road into a system of fast toll lanes, each with a single operator at the booth. The lanes carry the traffic, the operators are competent, and the toll revenue is building better booths. But the map of who can stop which cars, and where, is now the most important map in the ecosystem, and every reader of this piece can pull it up for any network in about five minutes. Do that, once, for wherever your funds live. It is the highest-yield five minutes in crypto self-custody.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Network designs and roadmaps described are current as of July 9, 2026, and change frequently. Always do your own research.
Frequently asked questions What is an L2 sequencer in simple terms? A sequencer is the machine that runs a layer-2 rollup in real time: it receives transactions, decides their order, executes them, gives users instant confirmations, and posts compressed batches of the results to Ethereum. On nearly every major rollup today, the sequencer is a single server operated by the network’s founding company, making it the most centralized component in Ethereum’s scaling stack.
Can a sequencer steal my funds? No. The sequencer cannot forge transactions from your account, because everything requires your signature, and it cannot fake results, because the rollup’s proofs posted to Ethereum would expose invalid state. Its powers are limited to ordering, delaying, censoring, and halting. Well-designed rollups also include force-inclusion mechanisms that let users push transactions through via Ethereum directly, so even a hostile sequencer can delay but not permanently trap funds.
What happens when a sequencer goes down? The network effectively pauses: no new transactions confirm, and every application on the rollup freezes simultaneously until the operator restores service. Major rollups have suffered such outages lasting hours. Funds remain safe throughout, secured by Ethereum, but access stops, which matters greatly for time-sensitive positions like loans near liquidation.
Why are sequencers centralized if Ethereum is decentralized? Because centralized sequencing was the pragmatic way to launch: one operator provides instant confirmations, simple upgrades, and clean incident response while the technology matured. The rollup design constrains what the operator can do, and every major network has published a decentralization roadmap. The trade-off was consciously temporary; its length is the controversy.
What is based sequencing? Based sequencing hands transaction ordering back to Ethereum itself, letting the base chain’s validators sequence the rollup’s transactions during block production. It gives the rollup Ethereum’s full neutrality and censorship resistance, at the cost of slower confirmations, which pre-confirmation designs aim to offset. It is the most Ethereum-aligned of the decentralization paths.
What is a shared sequencer? A shared sequencer is an independent network that provides decentralized transaction ordering as a service to multiple rollups simultaneously. Beyond decentralization, its selling point is atomic cross-rollup composability, the ability for transactions to execute across several L2s together, which single-rollup sequencers cannot offer.
Do sequencers extract MEV from users? They can, since ordering power is exactly what MEV extraction requires, and a sequencer sees every transaction before it lands. Major operators publicly commit to neutral policies like first-come-first-served ordering, and some route ordering value into public goods or auctions. These are policies rather than protocol guarantees, which is a core argument for decentralizing the role.
How do I check how centralized a specific L2 is? Ask five questions: who operates the sequencer and where; whether force-inclusion exists and how long it takes; the network’s outage history; the published ordering policy; and the actual stage of the decentralization roadmap. Independent trackers grade major rollups on these dimensions, and the grades differ far more than the marketing does.
Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s tech newsletter covering the most important stories in blockchain. I’m Margaux Nijkerk, a reporter at CoinDesk.
We’re giving you a deeper look at the biggest trends, breakthroughs and debates shaping blockchain technology each week.
This week, we’re diving into Ethereum Institutional, a new nonprofit aimed at educating financial institutions and banks about Ethereum.
Ethereum's newest nonprofit is positioning itself asWall Street’s crypto sherpa, guiding banks and asset managers through the Ethereum ecosystem at a pivotal moment for the network.
For much of the past year, the conversation around Ethereum has been dominated by questions about its future. The Ethereum Foundation has faced mounting criticism over its role in the ecosystem, and, in response, has restructured its leadership, laid off staff and narrowed its focus to stewarding the protocol. At the same time, independent organizations have begun emerging to take on responsibilities that were once housed within the foundation.
The latest is Ethereum Institutional, a nonprofit launched last week with an ambitious goal: becoming the Ethereum ecosystem's front door for banks, asset managers and other financial institutions.
Its founders say the organization will serve as a neutral guide for enterprises exploring Ethereum, helping institutions understand the ecosystem, connect with developers and infrastructure providers, and navigate the network without promoting any single company or product.
Ethereum Institutional is led by David Walsh, Matthew Dawson and Marius Smith, whose backgrounds span traditional finance, technology and crypto. Walsh and Dawson previously worked on the Ethereum Foundation's enterprise engagement team, while Smith joined after senior roles at Google and EigenLayer developer Eigen Labs.
"We've built up around 500 relationships over the course of the year, and what's consistently come back was that they appreciate having a neutral counterpart," Dawson told CoinDesk in an interview. "There's thousands of teams in the Ethereum ecosystem... the feedback sometimes has been, 'This is overwhelming.'"
The organization is designed to fill what its founders see as a missing piece in Ethereum's institutional strategy.
Unlike companies building products on Ethereum, Ethereum Institutional says it will work across the ecosystem, helping enterprises evaluate use cases such as tokenization, stablecoins and digital asset infrastructure while introducing them to the teams best suited for their needs.
"Navigating what is already a new and fairly complex technology and the decentralized ecosystem is a bit daunting," Dawson said. "Having a trusted and neutral partner that can help with that navigation... can accelerate that journey and give them confidence."
Its launch comes as Ethereum itself reaches an inflection point. The leaders steering the network are increasingly formalizing how different parts of the ecosystem are taking on responsibilities and roles. The Ethereum Foundation has made clear it intends to focus more narrowly on protocol development while encouraging independent organizations to lead areas such as business development, ecosystem growth and institutional engagement.
For Ethereum Institutional's founders, becoming an independent nonprofit rather than remaining within the foundation was a deliberate choice.
"The EF has always been quite vocal about its principle of subtraction," Dawson said, referring to the organization diving up responsibilities for the network to other organizations . "This is an example of that increasing decentralization, and the number of nodes participating in representing Ethereum."
Operating outside the foundation also gives the organization greater freedom, Walsh said.
"We feel like we have a lot more autonomy and freedom to work as an independent entity," he said. "We can get a bit more opinionated, and a bit more aggressive, in terms of being able to support these teams."
For years, the Ethereum Foundation has walked a careful line in how much influence it exerts over the ecosystem. Its mandate has largely been to coordinate protocol development and steward Ethereum’s technical roadmap, rather than act as a central authority driving business development or adoption. But as the network grew, some in the community pushed for the foundation to take on a more active role in areas like institutional outreach and ecosystem coordination, responsibilities it has increasingly chosen to decentralize instead.
Ethereum Institutional joins a growing network of organizations taking on specialized roles within Ethereum. Last month, EthLabs launched to support ecosystem development, while firms such as Etherealize, launched in 2025, have focused on bringing institutions onchain through commercial products and services.
Walsh sees Ethereum Institutional as complementary to these other firms rather than competitive. "We've taken a slightly different approach, where it's a bit more about education and a bit more neutral in terms of what solutions we want to help institutions adopt."
The founders argue that while much of the online conversation around Ethereum has focused on governance debates and competition from rival blockchains, institutional momentum has continued to build behind the scenes.
He points to recent tokenization initiatives from firms including BlackRock, JPMorgan and Robinhood as evidence that Ethereum remains the dominant platform for institutional blockchain deployments.
For Dawson, there's no contradiction between Ethereum's cypherpunk origins and Wall Street's growing interest, even as many feel like those interests may be separating.
"Those cypherpunk values translate into operational resilience for institutions," he said. "Lack of downtime and security are all things that institutions are absolutely obsessed with."
The founders don't believe Ethereum's future belongs solely to banks. Instead, they see institutional adoption as one piece of a much broader vision.
"I think of it as the internet," Walsh said. "There's room for everyone: DeFi, cross-border payments, banking the unbanked, and Wall Street."
Read more: EthLabs launches as Ethereum undergoes its biggest leadership transition in years
Notes from the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Security team on running coordinated AI agents against real protocol code, including how we organize the work, what holds up under scrutiny, and what client teams and security researchers can take from it. This post stands on its own; later posts will go deeper on individual clients.
What we've been running, and what surprised us On the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Security team, we've been running coordinated AI agents against the kinds of systems the network depends on, like systems software, cryptographic code, and contracts that have to be right. The agents found real bugs. One is now public: a remotely-triggerable panic in libp2p's gossipsub, a core part of the peer-to-peer layer Ethereum consensus clients run on, fixed and disclosed as CVE-2026-34219 with credit to the team.
Agents finding bugs wasn't the surprise. The surprise was how little of the work went into finding them, and how much went into telling the real bugs from the ones that just looked real.
This post is for client teams and security researchers who want to do the same thing. It covers how we organize the agents, the bar a candidate has to clear before it counts as a finding, and the habits that keep the results trustworthy.
Teams elsewhere are converging on the same recipe. Anthropic's Frontier Red Team built an agent that writes property-based tests and found real bugs across the Python ecosystem. Cloudflare ran a frontier model through a security-research harness against their own systems. Everyone lands on the same loop: point a capable model at a codebase, let it search, and triage what comes back. So the real question is how to do this without drowning in confident-sounding noise.
One caveat up front: tooling for agent-driven audits moves fast, and any specific setup is out of date in a few weeks. So this post is deliberately about the methods, which are persistent, rather than the tooling. Disclosure is its own topic and will probably be its own post.
An agent is a search tool, not an oracle An agent pointed at a codebase is a search tool, a lot like a fuzzer. The difference is what comes back. A fuzzer hands you a crash and a stack trace. An agent hands you a lot more, including a write-up (call chain, impact claim, suggested severity) and the artifacts to back it, like a proof-of-concept you can run against the real code.
All of that makes the result easy to read and easy to trust, the running proof-of-concept most of all. So don't count how many candidates an agent produces. Count how many turn out to be real.
How the work is organized We run many agents in parallel against one target. They coordinate through the repository itself, with shared state in version control and no central process handing out work. An agent writes down a claim where the others can see it, does the work, and commits.
We got this approach from Anthropic's writeup on building a C compiler with a fleet of agents, which coordinates the same way. There's no central coordinator to build or maintain, and less that can go wrong.
The roles are generated by the work that's discovered:
Recon turns an attack surface into concrete, testable hypotheses. Not "audit the decoder" but "this field is trusted past this point; here's the property it should keep, the way it might break, and the proof that would settle it."Hunting takes one hypothesis, traces the code path, and tries to build a reproducer.Gap-filling looks at what was accepted and what was rejected, writes the next batch of hypotheses, and tracks coverage so the agents don't keep going over the same ground.Validation re-checks each candidate independently, removes duplicates, and decides. We didn't invent this pipeline. Cloudflare describes the same stages, recon, parallel hunting, independent validation, deduplication, reporting, and their writeup helped shape ours.
Here's what a candidate looks like before it counts as a finding:
target: component and entry point an attacker can actually reach invariant: the property that must hold mechanism: the specific way it might be made to break success: observable proof: a panic, a stall, an accepted-invalid input reproducer: a self-contained artifact that runs against the real code dedup: a key, so two agents don't chase the same thing The schema is there for a reason. It forces a specific, testable claim and a clear definition of done. An agent that has to write down an observable proof can't fall back on "this looks risky."
Reproducible or it didn't happen One rule matters more than any other. A candidate isn't a finding until there's a self-contained artifact that reproduces the failure against the real code, and that runs for someone who didn't write it.
The reproducer doesn't read the write-up, and it doesn't care how confident the model sounded. It either runs or it doesn't.
Most of its value is in the false positives it catches. Three of them come up over and over, and each one is the agent getting a pass for the wrong reason:
A panic that only happens in a debug build. Compile and run it the way the software actually ships, and the value just wraps around. Nothing crashes. It looks like a crash, but it isn't one.A reproducer that builds some internal value by hand, one no real input could ever produce, because every path an attacker controls rejects it earlier. The bug only "reproduces" against a function that nothing reachable calls that way.In formal-verification work, a proof that goes through but doesn't mean what you wanted. The statement is trivially true regardless of what the code does, or it's weaker than the property you meant to capture. The verifier is satisfied, but the theorem doesn't constrain the behavior you actually cared about. None of this is new. It's the same thing as a test that passes because it doesn't actually check anything. What's new is the volume. An agent writes the useless version as fast as the real one, and just as confidently. So the check has to be automatic. You can't count on the agent to catch itself.
Signal-to-noise is most of the work Most candidates are wrong, duplicate, or out of scope. That's not a problem with the method; that's how it works. The goal is to reject the wrong ones fast and back the real ones with proof that's hard to argue with.
Every candidate that survives gets two independent checks. Can a real attacker actually reach it in a normal configuration? And what does it cost the attacker to pull off, compared to what it costs the network if it works? A bug that any single peer can trigger is very different from one that needs special access or a huge amount of resources.
Everything gets checked against a running list of what's already known, fixed, or rejected. Without that, the agents keep rediscovering the same closed issue and reporting it again and again.
Acceptance rates vary a lot from target to target, and that variation is useful on its own. Run this against mature, heavily audited code and almost nothing survives, which is still worth knowing. "We looked hard and found nothing" is a real result. Run it against less-explored code, or against formally verified code, where a machine-checked proof covers a model and the deployed bytecode is only assumed to match it, and more gets through.
We're not the only ones who found that the triage is the hard part. Cloudflare's main takeaway was that a narrow scope beats broad scanning. Anthropic's property-based-testing agent generated something like a thousand candidate reports, then used ranking and expert review to get down to a top tier that held up about 86 percent of the time. The generation was the easy part. I'm not going to publish our own numbers here; tied to a specific target, they'd say more about the target than about the method.
What the agents are good at, and where they mislead There's hype in both directions, so here's a plain list of what the agents do well and where they mislead.
Good atMisleading atReading the spec and the code togetherCall chains that look reachable but aren'tStating and checking a real invariantGaming the success check (a pass for the wrong reason).Drafting a reproducer from a one-line ideaInflating severity to match how dramatic the write-up soundsSuggesting a root cause before you've lookedBugs that span a sequence of valid steps The split isn't even steady from one task to the next. Stanislav Fort, testing a range of models on real vulnerabilities, calls this a jagged frontier, or a model that recovers a full exploit chain on one codebase can fail basic data-flow tracing on another. You can't assume one good result means the next will hold up, which is another reason every candidate gets checked on its own.
The last row is the important one. A single agent session is good at one-shot reasoning and bad at bugs that span a sequence of steps, where each step is valid and only the order is wrong. For those, the agent isn't the search tool. Its job is to suggest which sequences are worth running through a stateful test harness. Used that way, it works well. Used as a replacement for the harness, it misses the most expensive bugs there are, the ones that only show up across a sequence.
Keeping it honest A few habits do most of the work of making agent findings trustworthy, and none of them are complicated.
Provenance on every artifact: what produced it, with what context, against which revision. A finding should be something you can re-run months later.Determinism where it counts: one environment, one way to build and run, so "reproduces" means the same thing on every machine, not just the one where it was found.Norms, not scripts: tell agents what matters, the invariants and the bar for a real finding, instead of a numbered procedure. Over-scripted agents break the same way over-specified tests do, they keep following the steps after the steps stop making sense. A study of repository context files found the same thing: the extra requirements lowered task success and raised cost by over 20%, and the authors recommend keeping context to the minimal requirements.A person makes the final call: agents suggest. They don't decide what's real, what's a duplicate of a known issue, or what gets disclosed and when. The bottleneck moved AI didn't replace the security researcher. It moved the work. The time that used to go into coming up with and chasing down hypotheses now goes into judging them at scale, including building the oracle, running the triage, keeping the list of known issues, and handling disclosure.
The bottleneck didn't go away. It moved from finding bugs to trusting the results, which is a better place for it, because that's where human judgment actually matters. But it's still a bottleneck, and ignoring that is how you end up shipping a wrong "it's fine."
The practices that make this work aren't new. Reproducible failures, real oracles, and careful triage are the same practices that turned fuzzing from a research topic into standard practice over the last fifteen years. The tools are new. The practices aren't.
How fast the tools keep changing is an open question. Nicholas Carlini, careful and once a skeptic himself, argues the exponential case is worth taking seriously, even while he keeps wide error bars on it. If the generation side climbs that fast, the judgment side has to climb with it, or the gap between what gets produced and what actually gets verified only widens.
For the systems Ethereum depends on, that's the part that matters. Agents let us cover far more ground than we could by hand. In exchange, they ask for more careful judgment, across a much bigger pile of confident-sounding claims. That's a trade worth making, as long as you remember that the judgment is the real product.
Crypto-related stocks in U.S. markets continued their rally during trading hours, with MARA surging 15.27%.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), US-listed crypto-related stocks continued to strengthen during intraday trading. Details: Strategy (MSTR) rose 2.11%; Circle (CRCL) gained 0.83%; MARA Holdings (MARA) surged 15.27% after announcing the acquisition of a Texas-based 2000MW computing power park project company for up to $600 million; Riot Platforms (RIOT) climbed 6.1%.
1 hours ago
Security Warning: Abnormal on-chain fund flows detected for the CodexField project on BNB Chain.
On-chain investigator Specter has issued a community security alert, warning of potential fund misappropriation risks associated with the CodexField project on BNB Chain. On-chain tracking shows the project has amassed over $85 million in funds. Specter detected abnormal on-chain fund flows yesterday: a wallet bridged 17.3 million USDT from TRON to Ethereum, then swapped the tokens for DAI via Bitget Swap on Polygon. So far, $6.5 million has been transferred out, while the remaining $10.8 million is still in transit. The funds were originally bridged from Ethereum to TRON roughly six months ago, and the source wallet is linked to CodexField’s deposit contract. Below are key addresses for users to verify on their own: EVM: 0xBc606358910b3720d136F0d4Ce12b759C270747a TRON: TQNTEYadFVVQeobBtctSjurJ5RpfBsTmqh, TAzpg8L1WkkzCxxZk8TYnvaRYahehh52MK Related deposit contract: 0x9E6A75b546B65E7B9D34E2c9aB8Fe224B9aA52AA Additional red flags: The project requires a minimum $100 deposit for participation. Blockchain security tool Blocksec MetaSuites initially labeled the deposit contract as "Fake CodexField", but Specter’s follow-up investigation found the contract is actually operated by the CodexField team itself. The project uses multiple domains and subdomains to collect user deposits, and the team previously shared these domains via official channels. Its fund flow pattern is unusual, deviating from standard fund management practices: the project bridges funds across multiple blockchains, routes them through intermediate wallets, and ultimately sends assets to centralized exchanges. Specter noted that based on on-chain activity, the project warrants high vigilance. It advises all users interacting with CodexField to exercise extreme caution until the team provides a transparent explanation of its fund movements.
1 hours ago
Post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security closes $17 million seed round.
QIZ Security, a crypto posture and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) management platform, announced the completion of a $17 million seed funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital. The capital will be used to accelerate product R&D and market expansion. QIZ Security was co-founded by Ben Volkow, Lenny Ridel, and Itan Barmes; the team has years of experience in cybersecurity, enterprise services, and post-quantum transformation, with Barmes previously leading Deloitte’s global quantum cybersecurity readiness team. Its platform helps enterprises identify and assess crypto asset risks and implement remediation measures, and is currently applied in industries including finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. It has also established partnerships with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, and IBM, among others.
1 hours ago
Hyperliquid recommends that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally recognize that on-chain protocols are not required to register, and non-custodial wallets do not serve as financial intermediaries.
Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and Phantom have jointly submitted comments to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in response to the agency’s request for feedback on whether existing rules keep pace with the evolution of financial technology, proposing to explicitly extend the distinction between "building tools" and "operating regulated businesses" to on-chain markets. The comments note that software engineers have been developing matching engines for regulated futures trading platforms for decades, and the CFTC has never classified them as trading platform operators. However, developers in the digital asset sector have long lacked such clarity, forcing many to opt for offshore development. The current CFTC, led by Chairman Selig, is working to address this gap and carve out room for innovation for fintech firms in digital asset and derivatives markets. The two entities put forward three key recommendations: First, explicitly confirm that merely publishing on-chain protocol software itself does not require registration — a factor often decisive for engineers when choosing where to develop. Second, establish a clear path for the CFTC’s registration bodies to operate regulated functions using on-chain infrastructure, enabling trading platforms and clearinghouses to replace decades-old legacy systems with transparent infrastructure. Third, formalize Phantom’s recent no-action letter into official rules, eliminating the need for self-custody wallet providers to apply for approved exemptions on a case-by-case basis. HPC and Phantom stress that self-custody and transparent on-chain systems can embed investor protection directly into technology, while regulated intermediaries retain responsibility for issues that technology cannot resolve independently. This approach will bring the next generation of financial markets within reach of U.S. consumers.
1 hours ago
Micron raises its U.S. investment plan to $250 billion, betting on demand for AI memory chips.
Micron Technology plans to increase spending on its new U.S. factory to $250 billion to meet the surging demand for memory chips driven by the global artificial intelligence boom. The move adds $50 billion to Micron’s previously announced $200 billion commitment to expanding domestic U.S. chip manufacturing, covering projects in New York, Idaho, and Virginia. The expenditure is expected to run through 2035, and will help the company achieve its target of producing 40% of its DRAM products in the U.S. within the next decade.
1 hours ago
Analysis: Market FUD sentiment toward SOL hits its highest point in 2026, a typical bullish signal.
Crypto research firm Santiment notes that market FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) surrounding SOL has hit its highest level in 2026, a development that typically signals a bullish indicator. Currently, Solana is facing a toxic mix of negative sentiment: trading volume has fallen to its lowest level of 2026, while negative comments have just spiked to their highest daily mark this year. Much of the frustration stems from the fact that despite Solana’s strong narrative around tokenized stocks and real-world asset (RWA) activity, its price has failed to deliver meaningful returns for traders. This is where it gets interesting: when sentiment is excessively negative and trading activity is thin, large holders (whales) often encounter less retail selling resistance if they choose to push prices higher. At a time when traders least anticipate a rebound, SOL may be in this low-attention, high-FUD zone, primed for rapid, sharp price fluctuations.
After several weeks marked by high volatility, Ethereum shows signs of recovery that revive investors’ expectations. The second most important cryptocurrency has rebounded from its low recorded in June and again attracts analysts’ attention. Several technical indicators and the growing interest of institutional players support a favorable short-term scenario. However, some signals still call for caution, as the market remains divided between the prospect of a new rise and the risk of a temporary pullback.
In brief Ethereum has rebounded 17% from its June low and is currently trading around 1,750 dollars. Several analysts believe that breaking current resistances could pave the way back to 2,000 dollars, or even 2,500 dollars. Ethereum spot ETFs have recorded their longest streak of increases since April, supported by a renewed interest from institutional investors. Despite this positive momentum, an RSI at 70 places Ethereum in overbought territory, raising the risk of a short-term correction. Ethereum Consolidates Its Rebound Following Its June Low The market shows signs of recovery after several weeks of weakness. Ethereum is now trading at levels closely watched by analysts, who observe several technical thresholds that could influence the next trend.
Here are the key figures reflecting the magnitude of this new development:
Ether price at the time of writing: 1,745 dollars. 8% increase over one week. 17% rise since the June low. Resistance located between 1,820 and 1,850 dollars. Double bottom pattern formed below 1,800 dollars. After testing its resistance zone, the asset was rejected. Despite this, several observers believe that staying above the current support is an encouraging signal for the future. Ted, an analyst active on X, considers that a sustained breakout of this resistance could pave the way for a rise to 2,000 dollars.
Meanwhile, Poseidon believes that the double bottom pattern formed by Ethereum is a configuration generally interpreted as a favorable signal for continuing the rebound. The analyst goes further by estimating that the price could reach 2,500 dollars before September if this momentum continues.
Institutional Flows Strengthen the Bullish Outlook The renewed interest from institutional investors accompanies this market improvement. Data shows that ETH-backed spot ETFs have recorded five consecutive days of gains. This is their longest positive streak since April, a factor closely watched by markets.
Ethereum spot ETFs register a new series of net inflows, signaling renewed interest from institutional investors as ETH price tries to consolidate its rebound. Source: SoSoValue
This dynamic reflects an increase in exposure from pension funds, hedge funds, and other institutional investors. As a result, several major asset managers have increased their ETH purchases to meet this demand. This movement supports Ethereum’s outlook, as these purchases can help strengthen the momentum observed over the past weeks.
Ali Martinez also reminds that the support around 1,580 dollars has already played a decisive role in previous cycles. He writes in a post on X:
Ethereum is once again testing the historical importance of its support at $1,580. Over the past three years, this level has established itself as the main demand zone, stopping corrections before triggering powerful rallies: +149% in October 2023, +203% in April 2025, and then a recent rebound towards the resistance at $1,800. As long as the $1,580 threshold is preserved, the bullish outlook remains intact and a similar scenario is entirely plausible.
Ali Martinez, analyst. Source: X / @alicharts According to him, this level had stopped significant corrections before supporting rises of 149% in 2023 and 203% the following year. These precedents feed expectations of a new upward phase.
Technical Indicators Still Call for Caution Despite this more favorable context, several elements call for vigilance. The Ethereum relative strength index (RSI) has reached the threshold of 70. In technical analysis, this level generally corresponds to an overbought situation, which can trigger a short-term correction.
The RSI moves on a scale from 0 to 100. Levels below 30 are usually associated with rebound opportunities, while levels near 70 may announce a market breathing phase. This reading does not necessarily indicate a lasting reversal but highlights a risk of additional volatility.
Some analysts argue for a more cautious scenario. KALEO believes that Ethereum could still experience a dip to 1,000 dollars before starting a much more marked upward movement. According to this hypothesis, this correction phase would precede a potential return to 5,000 dollars in the longer term.
The market thus remains divided between favorable technical prospects and short-term caution signals. If Ethereum maintains its key support levels and benefits from continued institutional flows, the upcoming sessions will confirm whether the $2,000 target can be reached or if a new consolidation phase is required before a more sustainable recovery.
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Journaliste et rédacteur web passionné par l’univers des cryptomonnaies et des technologies Web3. J’y traite les dernières tendances et actualités afin de proposer un contenu de haute qualité à un large public du secteur.
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The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.
AI Agents Enter the Security LabThe @ethereumfndn security team has been running coordinated AI agents directly against Ethereum's core protocol code, and the experiment has produced tangible results. Among the confirmed findings was a flaw at the peer-to-peer (P2P) network layer, which has since been patched and publicly disclosed as a CVE. The Ethereum Foundation published a detailed account of the exercise on its blog on July 9, 2026.
The effort is part of a broader push to harden Ethereum's Layer 1 infrastructure ahead of a busy period of protocol upgrades. The Foundation has also been funding AI-powered protocol security research through its grants program, which aims to move tooling beyond basic static analysis into protocol specification auditing and active vulnerability detection.
The Signal-to-Noise ProblemThe more instructive finding, however, was not the bugs themselves. It was the volume of noise that surrounded them. The AI agents produced a large number of confident-sounding reports, and the majority turned out to be wrong, duplicated, or pointing to code paths that are unreachable in practice.
That dynamic is not unique to Ethereum. Across the broader security industry, AI-assisted discovery is driving a sharp rise in reported vulnerabilities, but the subset that genuinely requires action remains far smaller. The challenge has shifted from finding bugs to sorting them. Triage, validation, and response are now the bottlenecks, and human capacity for that work remains limited.
The lesson from the Ethereum Foundation's exercise reflects that reality. AI can scan a codebase at a scale no manual team could match, but the credibility of any finding still depends on an experienced human reviewer at the end of the pipeline. Getting that balance right will likely define how effective AI-assisted security becomes across the broader blockchain ecosystem.
Separately, the Foundation raised its maximum bug bounty from $250,000 to $1,000,000 for critical protocol vulnerabilities, with reports acknowledged within 48 hours and an initial assessment completed within one week. That expanded program signals how seriously the Foundation is treating protocol security as a strategic priority.
Sources:
Ethereum Foundation Blog: Triage Is the Product
Ethereum Foundation ESP: AI-Powered Protocol Security Research Grant
Ethereum Foundation Bug Bounty Raised to $1 Million
Dogecoin is back in a familiar place: close enough to a breakout level to get traders interested, but not far enough through it to make the move feel settled. The $0.12 area is becoming the line many DOGE watchers care about because it would offer a cleaner sign that the recent recovery has more room to run.
That does not mean a breakout is guaranteed. Dogecoin has a long history of building attention quickly and then fading just as quickly. The useful question is whether this move has enough follow-through behind it.
Loading Tweet… View original post on X
TL;DR Dogecoin traders are watching whether DOGE can extend its recovery toward the $0.12 area.The setup depends on whether recent support reclaim turns into follow-through.The X-sourced market angle should be treated as analysis, not a guaranteed breakout call. https://x.com/kabosumama/status/2074954593470906570
Why The $0.12 Zone Matters Technical levels are never magic, but they can become important when enough traders are watching them. For DOGE, the $0.12 region offers a simple test: can buyers turn the recent support recovery into a stronger trend, or is the move just another relief bounce?
That is especially relevant because memecoin moves often depend on both liquidity and attention. If traders see a clean reclaim, the social side of Dogecoin can amplify the move. If the level fails, the excitement can disappear quickly.
The DOGE Market Is Still Sentiment Heavy Dogecoin remains one of the most sentiment-sensitive large-cap crypto assets. That makes chart structure useful, but only when it is paired with volume, open interest, and broader market support.
A strong Bitcoin backdrop can help DOGE stretch further. A weak market can turn even a promising setup into noise. That is why traders should read this as a developing structure rather than a confirmed outcome.
What Comes Next For The Setup The next move depends on whether DOGE can hold above its reclaimed support and push into resistance with real demand. A brief wick is not enough. Traders will want sustained buying and signs that leveraged positioning is not doing all the work.
For now, DOGE has given bulls something to watch. Whether it turns into a proper breakout depends on the market’s willingness to keep chasing risk.
The Practical Angle The useful way to read this story is not as a standalone headline about Dogecoin, but as part of the wider pressure building around Dogecoin coverage this week. Markets have been jumping quickly from one catalyst to the next, so the cleaner value for readers is in separating the actual development from the instant reaction around it. In this case, the source material gives us a concrete event to work from, rather than a loose rumour or a recycled social-media talking point.
That distinction matters because crypto readers are being asked to process a lot at once: ETF flows, regulatory actions, exchange listings, protocol upgrades, wallet movements, and political signals. A story like this is most useful when it helps them understand where Doge Price fits into that broader map. It does not need to be inflated into a guaranteed price call to be worth covering. It simply needs to explain what changed, who is affected, and why the market is paying attention today.
The caveat is also important. Even clean source-backed developments can be overinterpreted when traders are hunting for a fast narrative. A listing does not automatically create lasting demand, a regulatory update does not immediately settle every legal question, and an on-chain movement does not always translate into a finished sale. The better read is to treat the development as a fresh data point and then watch whether follow-up activity confirms the direction of travel.
For NewsBTC readers, that means keeping the focus on what can actually be verified from the source and avoiding the temptation to turn every update into a sweeping market verdict. The story is strong enough on its own terms: it gives investors and traders another piece of context around Dogecoin, while leaving room for the next filing, dashboard update, wallet movement, governance vote, or exchange notice to decide whether the angle grows into something bigger.
This report is based on the X-sourced market analysis linked above.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Dogecoin continues to show weakness against Tether, with its price lingering below a long term descending trend line. According to market analysts, the area around $0.047 has emerged as a key liquidity zone, and a lack of a decisive breakout is deepening bearish sentiment. Investors are watching closely for signals that could change the course.
Sustained downward pressure on the USDT pairLooking at the weekly chart for Dogecoin, a series of lower highs and lower lows dominate, supporting the view that the main direction is still downward. Analyst Stefan points out that until DOGE decisively reclaims the $0.11 mark, downward liquidity areas are likely to stay in focus for the market.
The first notable region in the chart is around $0.047, marked as a potential area of equal lows. If the decline continues, this level stands out as the next possible turning point for Dogecoin.
Stefan emphasizes that there is currently no structure to support aggressive upside targets for Dogecoin, with the price remaining on the wrong side of the trend line. This keeps the spotlight on the underlying liquidity areas.
Below $0.047, two historical price zones demand attention: $0.041 and $0.028. Should DOGE fail to hold the primary liquidity target, these deeper support regions could become even more significant as investors search for a bottom.
On the other hand, there is a clear threshold that could undermine further losses. Stefan suggests that if Dogecoin sees strong volume and climbs above the $0.11 level, the current bearish outlook might lose validity.
LevelSignificance$0.11Breakout threshold that could weaken bearish sentiment$0.047Primary liquidity and first key target area$0.041Historical support below the first target$0.028Deeper historical support zoneCritical support in the DOGE/ETH pair in focusDogecoin’s performance against Ethereum is also under the microscope. The DOGE/ETH ratio is now trading near a crucial relative support zone that could decide whether the memecoin can once again outperform Ethereum.
Two major long term areas are clearly seen in the DOGE/ETH chart. The lower green band has historically provided significant support, while the upper red band has acted as resistance during periods when Dogecoin outperformed Ethereum.
This technical level is critical not just for price action, but for determining the relative strength between the two assets. As analyst Polaris_xbt notes, the DOGE/ETH pair serves as an indicator for investors pondering which asset to favor. This ratio measures whether Dogecoin is gaining strength over Ethereum.
Glossary: Relative strength measures an asset’s value compared to another asset, rather than on its own. If the DOGE/ETH ratio rises, Dogecoin is performing better than Ethereum.
Polaris_xbt observes that maintaining this support area could pave the way for a new phase of relative strength for Dogecoin, while a breakdown would tip the balance in favor of Ethereum.
If the support holds, Dogecoin may surpass Ethereum in the next rotation. Conversely, if the level gives way, Ethereum will likely retain its position as the stronger asset for now. Should momentum shift back toward Dogecoin, the upper red zone could once again serve as an important target on the charts.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.
In This Article What the Ethereum Paper Actually ProposesHoskinson's Prior Art ArgumentCardano Community Reaction and the Convergence ArgumentLeios and What Comes Next for Cardano Ethereum researchers have published a paper proposing native UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) support for the network’s execution layer, and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson responded on X with a pointed claim: Cardano has been running this model for over a decade, and Ethereum is arriving late without acknowledgment.
In a July 7 tweet, Hoskinson said: “It’s not like I’ve been literally working on this topic for over 10 years of my life and launched a cryptocurrency that was number three on CoinMarketCap with millions of users to deploy it.”
This war of words between Cardano and Ethereum comes as ADA is outperforming ETH on the day, up +0.7% over the past 24 hours, compared to Ethereum’s +0.4% over the same timeframe.
It's not like I've been literally working on this topic for over 10 years of my life and launched a cryptocurrency that was number three on coinmarketcap with millions of users to deploy it. It's literally a crime in the Ethereum inner circles to mention Cardano. EUTXO is the… https://t.co/3F3l6cg0JE
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) July 7, 2026
What the Ethereum Paper Actually Proposes The research document identifies a structural cost in Ethereum’s account model: every time a new address receives ETH or an ERC-20 token for the first time, it generates permanent state storage that accumulates indefinitely as the user base grows.
The paper proposes using native UTXOs specifically for simple payment transactions that do not require persistent account storage, projecting a roughly 99.8% reduction in permanent state for those payments.
The key mechanical distinction is that a UTXO is created once, spent once, and then removed. It leaves no residual footprint on the network’s state. Critically, the proposal does not replace Ethereum’s existing account model; smart contract activity would continue operating exactly as it does today.
This is a targeted patch for a specific scalability problem, not a wholesale architectural shift. The paper has not been formalized as an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) and carries no confirmed implementation timeline.
Double top or Double bottom
Which one will play out for $ETH? pic.twitter.com/L3arwnGl3I
— Ted (@TedPillows) July 9, 2026
Hoskinson’s Prior Art Argument Hoskinson stated on X that he has spent over ten years developing Cardano’s eUTXO (Extended Unspent Transaction Output) model, which showcases a scalable proof of concept.
Unlike Bitcoin’s UTXO, Cardano’s design incorporates datums, redeemers, and script context, allowing smart contracts to function as deterministic local state machines without needing to access the global blockchain state.
This determinism is key, as a transaction’s validity relies solely on its inputs, leading to predictable fees and enhanced parallelism across UTXO sets, while minimizing front-running risks.
Hoskinson highlighted that Cardano achieved the third position on CoinMarketCap, with millions of users testing this model’s viability.
It’s important to note that the ten-year timeline pertains to research and design, while Cardano’s smart contract functionality, fully utilizing eUTXO, launched with the Alonzo upgrade in September 2021 and was developed through IOHK’s research pipeline.
(SOURCE: DefiLlama)
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Cardano Community Reaction and the Convergence Argument Dori, a figure in the Cardano community, asserted that Ethereum’s permanent state growth creates structural weaknesses by increasing node storage costs and concentrating validation power.
He linked Ethereum’s account model to issues like MEV, reentrancy attacks, and limits on parallel transaction processing, suggesting that eUTXO design effectively addresses these problems.
From a neutral perspective, both Ethereum and Cardano tackle similar challenges of state locality and transaction processing, albeit through different approaches. Other projects, like Ergo and Nervos CKB, have also adopted UTXO-style models.
The debate over blockchain architecture focuses on trade-offs relevant to specific use cases. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s account model offers an advantage in synchronous DeFi composability, which is crucial for complex multi-step financial transactions.
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Leios and What Comes Next for Cardano $ADA Big rally the past week and the stand-out within the majors.
Usually coins like these moving does tend to be a decent sign for overall altcoin risk appetite, but I'd want to see a follow up leg to properly confirm this.
One leg up is generally met with a decent amount of… pic.twitter.com/0iUDYQF0Xt
— Daan Crypto Trades (@DaanCrypto) July 6, 2026
The debate lands at a moment when Cardano is pursuing its most significant throughput upgrade yet. Hoskinson has said the planned Leios upgrade could increase Cardano’s transaction throughput by up to 60 times, a level he argues would put the network’s processing speed on par with the XRP Ledger.
He also flagged that progress depends on governance approval from the Cardano community, introducing a procedural dependency that makes the timeline uncertain.
If Leios delivers on that projection, it would substantially close the performance gap that has historically been cited as a constraint on ADA-based DeFi adoption.
Whether Ethereum’s native UTXO research ever moves from paper to protocol, the conversation it has sparked is already doing work, forcing a precise comparison of two mature blockchain architecture philosophies that have been talking past each other for years.
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Alex Ioannou
On-Chain Journalist
Alex is a seasoned cryptocurrency trader and market analyst with over seven years of active experience in the digital asset space. Since entering the markets in 2017, Alex has specialized in identifying emerging "meta" trends and high-volatility narratives. Notably, Alex... Read More
Cardano’s road to the Chang hard fork is now deep in the practical maintenance stage. The release of Node 9.0.2 is not the kind of update that generates glossy marketing, but it is exactly the kind of technical cleanup that matters before a major governance transition.
For Cardano, these last-mile releases are important because Chang is not just another routine upgrade. It is tied to the network’s move toward more formal decentralized governance, which means validator readiness and script reliability carry real weight.
For more details, visit the official GitHub platform.
TL;DR Cardano developers released node version 9.0.2.The hotfix addresses governance and script-related issues ahead of the Chang hard fork.The update is recommended for mainnet staking pool operators. Why A Hotfix Is Worth Covering The release notes point to fixes around script verification and governance-related stability. That makes the update relevant to staking pool operators, developers, and anyone watching whether Cardano can move into the next phase without unnecessary technical friction.
Crypto markets often prefer big milestones, but networks usually get there through smaller patches. A hotfix can be the difference between a smooth hard fork path and one cluttered with avoidable issues.
The Chang Context Chang has become a central part of Cardano’s current narrative because it is meant to push the network further into on-chain governance. That sounds abstract until the software has to support it under real-world conditions.
Node 9.0.2 sits inside that preparation window. It signals that developers are still tightening the implementation before the network asks operators to coordinate around the upgrade.
What ADA Holders Should Take From It This is not a guaranteed price catalyst. A bugfix release rarely is. But it is a sign that Cardano’s technical process is still active and focused on getting the governance transition right.
For a project often criticized for moving slowly, the more important question is whether it keeps moving carefully. This release suggests the final hard fork preparation remains in motion.
Why The Timing Matters The useful way to read this story is not as a standalone headline about Cardano, but as part of the wider pressure building around Cardano coverage this week. Markets have been jumping quickly from one catalyst to the next, so the cleaner value for readers is in separating the actual development from the instant reaction around it. In this case, the source material gives us a concrete event to work from, rather than a loose rumour or a recycled social-media talking point.
That distinction matters because crypto readers are being asked to process a lot at once: ETF flows, regulatory actions, exchange listings, protocol upgrades, wallet movements, and political signals. A story like this is most useful when it helps them understand where Node 9.0.2 fits into that broader map. It does not need to be inflated into a guaranteed price call to be worth covering. It simply needs to explain what changed, who is affected, and why the market is paying attention today.
The caveat is also important. Even clean source-backed developments can be overinterpreted when traders are hunting for a fast narrative. A listing does not automatically create lasting demand, a regulatory update does not immediately settle every legal question, and an on-chain movement does not always translate into a finished sale. The better read is to treat the development as a fresh data point and then watch whether follow-up activity confirms the direction of travel.
For NewsBTC readers, that means keeping the focus on what can actually be verified from the source and avoiding the temptation to turn every update into a sweeping market verdict. The story is strong enough on its own terms: it gives investors and traders another piece of context around Cardano, while leaving room for the next filing, dashboard update, wallet movement, governance vote, or exchange notice to decide whether the angle grows into something bigger.
This report is based on the Cardano node release notes.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Cardano price held above $0.16 on Thursday as ADA traded near $0.170 after a modest daily gain. The token increased 1.75% in 24 hours and gained 4% in the last week. The action comes after a broader crypto market rebounded after the recent consolidation and heavy risk-off selling.
Crypto Market Rebound Strengthens ADA Above Key Support The overall crypto market value increased by 1.26% to reach 2.17 trillion as buyers were back to key assets. Analysts attributed the recovery to new institutional buying of Bitcoin and improved optimism about the next Cardano network upgrades.
Bitcoin price surged above $63,000 in a short-term resistance test amidst renewed geopolitical stress. Ether also rebounded to around $1,750, and bulls were looking at a potential upward shift to $1,800. XRP price was in a narrow range around $1.03.
The market has been cautious since the United States and Iran are still in tension. CNN reported new assaults on either side, which contributed to the pressure on global risk assets. This context had traders stuck on support, resistance, and the long-term breakout trend of Cardano.
EMURGO Exits Cardano Governance Role After SecondFi Wallet Exploit Cardano founding entity EMURGO has left the Pentad governance group after the SecondFi wallet exploit. The organization announced that it is now high time to recover affected user funds.
Cardano Founding Entity Exits Pentad Governance Role After SecondFi Exploit
Cardano founding entity EMURGO is stepping away from the Pentad governance group to focus on recovering funds lost in the SecondFi wallet exploit.
The attack drained around 16 million $ADA from 374… pic.twitter.com/49ei8deWSm
— BSCN (@BSCNews) July 9, 2026
According to the report, the attack drained about 16 million ADA from 374 wallets. EMURGO indicated that user recovery will be prioritized in this process over its role in governance. The relocation puts one of the founding groups at Cardano in a new light, as the ecosystem reacts to the event this week.
Cardano Derivatives Show Rising Open Interest Amid Lower Market Activity Cardano derivatives indicators reflected variable trading with traders lowering volumes but holding positions open. Trading volume fell 33.48% to $392.69 million, while open interest rose 1.16% to $411.82 million.
Source: Coinglass data Options volume dropped 92.94% to $6,590, and options open interest slipped 0.27%. In the meantime, the long-short ratio was 24 hours at 0.9459. Account ratios of Binance and OKX remained over 2.4 with more robust long positioning amid less vigorous activity in the derivatives market.
Cardano Price Holds $0.16 as ADA Eyes Reclaim of $0.20 At the time of writing, the ADA price was at $0.169 on the four hour chart. After losing momentum around $0.20, Cardano was still over the support of $0.160.
The RSI was around 40, with weak momentum and not oversold. In the meantime, the MACD remained marginally negative, indicating that buyers require more convincing.
Source: Tradingview Should ADA reclaim $0.180, it may next have a target of $0.20. Breaking above $0.20 can open the space to $0.220 according to the future Cardano outlook. However, failure to hold $0.160 could expose ADA to $0.140.
Seven-Minute Settlement on AvalancheHyundai Card has completed its first real-world proof-of-concept (PoC) for stablecoin-based cross-border payments, using Tether's $USDT on the Avalanche network. Hyundai Motor America converted $20,000 into USDT, which was transferred to its Mexico office and then converted back into dollars. The entire process, from payment to settlement verification, took an average of seven minutes, compared with the three to four hours typically required for conventional bank transfers.
Three partners made the pilot possible. Tether provided the stablecoin, Avalanche served as the blockchain rails for the transfer, and Axiym, a blockchain payment infrastructure provider, handled the connectivity between all parties.
Hyundai Card noted that the test marks the first stablecoin-based cross-border transfer PoC by a Korean card company using stablecoins for an actual intercompany remittance. The project also involved building the operational framework needed to manage potential issues during live cross-border transactions, including a review of accounting, tax, legal and internal control requirements while designing the settlement structure for transactions between overseas units.
Europe Next, With Visa and Circle on BoardA second PoC will begin later this month among Hyundai Motor subsidiaries in Europe, with additional global partners including Circle and Visa set to join. Moving value across European offices means dealing with euros, pounds, and potentially other local currencies, introducing foreign exchange conversion costs, which is precisely what Hyundai Card wants to evaluate.
The pilot adds to a growing list of institutional tests of stablecoin payment rails. For large corporates managing frequent intercompany flows across borders, the speed and cost gap versus traditional transfers is hard to ignore. Following the trials, Hyundai Card said it plans to explore broader applications of stablecoins, including settlements, treasury management and fund transfers across Hyundai Motor Group's global operations.
Sources:
The Block: Hyundai Card completes its first real-world stablecoin pilot with Avalanche, Tether
Korea Herald: Hyundai Card tests stablecoin transfer for Hyundai Motor units
Korea Times: Hyundai Card tests stablecoin in live cross-border corporate payment
Hyundai Card announced that it has successfully completed its first real-world pilot study in the stablecoin-based cross-border payment space.
According to the company’s statement, a real money transfer using USDT was carried out between Hyundai Motor’s subsidiaries in the US and Mexico as part of a proof-of-concept (PoC) process conducted in collaboration with Tether and Avalanche. Thus, the test moved beyond being merely a theoretical blockchain experiment and became a practical application based on the actual need for internal company payments.
According to the shared information, Hyundai Motor America converted $20,000 to USDT and sent it to its unit in Mexico via the Avalanche network. The amount was then converted back to dollars.
The entire process was completed in approximately seven minutes. Hyundai Card highlighted that a similar transaction in traditional interbank international transfers can take three to four hours, noting that the stablecoin-based structure provides significant efficiency in terms of time.
Company officials stated that the real importance of the pilot study lies in its reliance on a real commercial use case. The statement explained that the transaction was conducted to address the need for genuine internal reconciliation among Hyundai Motor’s overseas subsidiaries, and therefore the results have practical value.
Hyundai Card reportedly played a leading role in areas such as regulatory reviews, legal and tax controls, internal audit evaluations, and the design of the transfer structure within the scope of the project. Blockchain payment infrastructure company Axiym was also among the parties participating in the PoC process.
Hyundai plans to launch its second stablecoin pilot later this month. This new Proof of Concept (PoC) will be conducted among Hyundai subsidiaries in Europe, with participation from Visa and USDC issuer Circle. The second phase will test real stablecoin transfers based not only on the dollar but also on various local currencies. The company aims to more comprehensively measure the cost efficiency of stablecoin-based international payments through this process.
*This is not investment advice.
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Crypto-related stocks in U.S. markets continued their rally during trading hours, with MARA surging 15.27%.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), US-listed crypto-related stocks continued to strengthen during intraday trading. Details: Strategy (MSTR) rose 2.11%; Circle (CRCL) gained 0.83%; MARA Holdings (MARA) surged 15.27% after announcing the acquisition of a Texas-based 2000MW computing power park project company for up to $600 million; Riot Platforms (RIOT) climbed 6.1%.
55 minutes ago
JPMorgan: The biggest risk for Bitcoin is not Strategy’s sell-off, but blockchain adoption that bypasses public chains and tokens.
JPMorgan Chase’s analyst team noted that the market views Strategy’s Bitcoin sale plan as a key risk for the crypto sector, but it is not a major structural threat to Bitcoin. The more fundamental risk lies in tokenization, payments, and settlements increasingly taking place on permissioned infrastructure that does not rely on public blockchains. If this trend continues, the entire crypto ecosystem could face a "structural downgrade"—marked by slower transaction activity, reduced liquidity, and weaker capital inflows—ultimately weighing on Bitcoin. The analysts stated bluntly: "In our view, a more significant risk stems from the way blockchain is adopted in traditional finance, which continues to bypass public, permissionless networks." The analysts explained that institutional adoption so far has clearly favored permissioned chains, as they offer advantages in privacy, KYC/AML controls, governance, throughput, legal accountability, and regulatory certainty, posing a competitive threat to public blockchains like Ethereum. If tokenized deposits are widely adopted—especially in non-transferable forms favored by regulators—it could reduce demand for stablecoins in institutional payments and settlements; SWIFT’s blockchain initiative and central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects such as the digital euro and digital renminbi further strengthen regulated alternatives. In the roughly $500 billion tokenized real-world assets market, while Ethereum currently holds a certain share, this likely reflects early-stage experimentation rather than the market’s long-term structure. As institutional adoption grows, issuance, custody, settlement, and lifecycle management will likely be conducted more on private or permissioned infrastructure that meets requirements for identity, confidentiality, and operational resilience, with public blockchains used only for distribution and limited secondary trading.
55 minutes ago
Security Warning: Abnormal on-chain fund flows detected for the CodexField project on BNB Chain.
On-chain investigator Specter has issued a community security alert, warning of potential fund misappropriation risks associated with the CodexField project on BNB Chain. On-chain tracking shows the project has amassed over $85 million in funds. Specter detected abnormal on-chain fund flows yesterday: a wallet bridged 17.3 million USDT from TRON to Ethereum, then swapped the tokens for DAI via Bitget Swap on Polygon. So far, $6.5 million has been transferred out, while the remaining $10.8 million is still in transit. The funds were originally bridged from Ethereum to TRON roughly six months ago, and the source wallet is linked to CodexField’s deposit contract. Below are key addresses for users to verify on their own: EVM: 0xBc606358910b3720d136F0d4Ce12b759C270747a TRON: TQNTEYadFVVQeobBtctSjurJ5RpfBsTmqh, TAzpg8L1WkkzCxxZk8TYnvaRYahehh52MK Related deposit contract: 0x9E6A75b546B65E7B9D34E2c9aB8Fe224B9aA52AA Additional red flags: The project requires a minimum $100 deposit for participation. Blockchain security tool Blocksec MetaSuites initially labeled the deposit contract as "Fake CodexField", but Specter’s follow-up investigation found the contract is actually operated by the CodexField team itself. The project uses multiple domains and subdomains to collect user deposits, and the team previously shared these domains via official channels. Its fund flow pattern is unusual, deviating from standard fund management practices: the project bridges funds across multiple blockchains, routes them through intermediate wallets, and ultimately sends assets to centralized exchanges. Specter noted that based on on-chain activity, the project warrants high vigilance. It advises all users interacting with CodexField to exercise extreme caution until the team provides a transparent explanation of its fund movements.
55 minutes ago
Post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security closes $17 million seed round.
QIZ Security, a crypto posture and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) management platform, announced the completion of a $17 million seed funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital. The capital will be used to accelerate product R&D and market expansion. QIZ Security was co-founded by Ben Volkow, Lenny Ridel, and Itan Barmes; the team has years of experience in cybersecurity, enterprise services, and post-quantum transformation, with Barmes previously leading Deloitte’s global quantum cybersecurity readiness team. Its platform helps enterprises identify and assess crypto asset risks and implement remediation measures, and is currently applied in industries including finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. It has also established partnerships with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, and IBM, among others.
55 minutes ago
Hyperliquid recommends that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally recognize that on-chain protocols are not required to register, and non-custodial wallets do not serve as financial intermediaries.
Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and Phantom have jointly submitted comments to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in response to the agency’s request for feedback on whether existing rules keep pace with the evolution of financial technology, proposing to explicitly extend the distinction between "building tools" and "operating regulated businesses" to on-chain markets. The comments note that software engineers have been developing matching engines for regulated futures trading platforms for decades, and the CFTC has never classified them as trading platform operators. However, developers in the digital asset sector have long lacked such clarity, forcing many to opt for offshore development. The current CFTC, led by Chairman Selig, is working to address this gap and carve out room for innovation for fintech firms in digital asset and derivatives markets. The two entities put forward three key recommendations: First, explicitly confirm that merely publishing on-chain protocol software itself does not require registration — a factor often decisive for engineers when choosing where to develop. Second, establish a clear path for the CFTC’s registration bodies to operate regulated functions using on-chain infrastructure, enabling trading platforms and clearinghouses to replace decades-old legacy systems with transparent infrastructure. Third, formalize Phantom’s recent no-action letter into official rules, eliminating the need for self-custody wallet providers to apply for approved exemptions on a case-by-case basis. HPC and Phantom stress that self-custody and transparent on-chain systems can embed investor protection directly into technology, while regulated intermediaries retain responsibility for issues that technology cannot resolve independently. This approach will bring the next generation of financial markets within reach of U.S. consumers.
55 minutes ago
Micron raises its U.S. investment plan to $250 billion, betting on demand for AI memory chips.
Micron Technology plans to increase spending on its new U.S. factory to $250 billion to meet the surging demand for memory chips driven by the global artificial intelligence boom. The move adds $50 billion to Micron’s previously announced $200 billion commitment to expanding domestic U.S. chip manufacturing, covering projects in New York, Idaho, and Virginia. The expenditure is expected to run through 2035, and will help the company achieve its target of producing 40% of its DRAM products in the U.S. within the next decade.
Tether recently passed Ethereum in market cap. As of this writing Tether is back to being slightly smaller again. But they are within a few % of each other. What does it mean that Tether is now as large as, or larger than, everything in web3 save Bitcoin? Does it mean anything at all?
At the same time what does it mean that stablecoins have grown more or less continuously over the past decade while the non-stablecoin majors (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB, Ripple, Tron, etc) have done essentially nothing for years now?
It Is Not About SecurityWe should start with what it does not mean. Many web3 schemes rely on one asset to provide "economic security" for another. For example, a common oracle design is for correctness to be voted by some DAO and the oracle to fix prices to settle various kinds of bets and trades. This is a simplified version of things like Chainlink and the details of any particular scheme do not matter here.
This class of scheme can only work when the value of the DAO voting tokens significantly exceeds the size of the trades or bets getting settled off the oracle. We can easily see that. How? If it costs $100 to take over the DAO and you can then settle $1 million in bets the entire thing is insecure. It is not hackable in a technical sense; it is economically insecure. This is when the software works as intended but the economic mechanisms and incentives give a clean way for someone to push the system into "bad" outcomes. "Bad" pretty much always means self-serving with an element of objectively incorrect.
Ethereum does not provide economic security for Tether. Tether also circulates on Tron and any number of other blockchains. And none of them provides economic security for Tether. Yes, in theory if you managed to take over a blockchain where Tether circulates you might be able to double-spend or expropriate other user's Tether for a little while. But Tether Ltd – the company running the token – could just seize, freeze and re-issue those tokens somewhere else.
Tether the company could remove all the Tether tokens from the blockchain you compromised and put them somewhere else. This is true if the blockchain has a market cap of $1 or $1 trillion. Tether the company just has to pay gas for the admin transactions and control is absolute. Even if you manage to so completely take over a blockchain that you can block Tether's admin smart contract interactions the Tether company can just renounce that blockchain and refuse to redeem any tokens there ever again. There would presumably need to be some scheme to allow innocent third parties to get their money on a different blockchain – maybe via a strange fork or some other off-chain proof of ownership process – but the Tether team could manage that at their leisure. Taking over the blockchain will not give you access to Tether the company's USD and reserve balances.
Admittedly Tether needs blockchains to circulate on. So it depends on there being a supply of usable and safe-enough blockchains. That is about it though. Security lies primarily with Tether. So long as there are reliable blockchains out there somewhere for Tether to use the token is useful. Being reliable probably means those blockchain's native tokens are worth a meaningful amount of money. But seeing as the token value does not secure Tether in any meaningful sense there is no reason you cannot have $100 billion of stablecoins on a blockchain with a native token market cap of only a few billion USD. Maybe a few hundred million USD. A blockchain where the native token is worth $1 million is not likely to have meaningful DeFi on it. It is unlikely users want to hold many billions of USDT on such a tiny blockchain. But there is nothing that makes it unsafe if users want that.
It Is Not About Problems With EthereumTether's growing market cap vs Ethereum also says nothing about Ethereum's value. Yes, an increase in Tether market cap means more (or richer) people want to use it. But this does not mean, for example, that there is more demand for Tether use than Ethereum use. Tether is a stable store of value to the extent Tether the company keeps the reserves in the assets they are supposed to. Ethereum tokens are, vaguely, a claim on future Ethereum blockchain utilization and demand for block space. If people love Ethereum and blockspace becomes cheap because it becomes plentiful that impacts the ETH price. If people love using Tether that increases the amount of Tether not the price.
Demand to store value in Tether has nothing to do with how effective, or well positioned, Ethereum is as a web3 platform. The easiest way to see this is to imagine two diametrically opposed scenarios where Tether's market cap wildly exceeds Ethereum's. The first scenario is that people roughly abandon Ethereum. If something much better comes along the token price will drop a lot. But people might still want to use Tether a lot.
The second scenario is that some breakthrough occurs such that Ethereum blockspace becomes cheap and plentiful and the community decides it is acceptable to let the nominal price of blockspace fall in the face of a massive expansion in network capacity. Maybe this is some kind of revolution in L2 design. Maybe a ZK advance makes scaling easier. Whatever.
In one case nobody wants to use Ethereum. In the other case everyone wants to and can use Ethereum. Both scenarios can lead to a massive drop in Ethereum market cap. This might occur next to an explosion in Tether market cap or a massive drop. What happens to Tether depends on user preferences for Tether. The Tether bit is not about Ethereum.
It Is About Use CasesThe biggest use case in web3 is permissionless USD transfer. We wrote about the novelty of this use case four years ago. By now it is clear this is the main use case for web3 products. There is a longstanding joke about people that say they are "in it for the tech" really only caring about the money. And there is a lot of money in permisssionless USD transfers! But there really is not a lot of technology. You do not need fancy protocols or complicated math to run a permissionless stablecoin. Tether in fact started off on a Bitcoin-linked blockchain called Omni that you can think of as an issuer selling Bitcoin ordinals for USD and then redeeming those ordinals for USD. That is not exactly right but it is close enough. You can build a working stablecoin off Bitcoin with very little software. Just designate a bunch of individual satoshis as redeemable for USD and you have a rough-but-functional stablecoin to the extent you keep the backing USD safe.
This use case is easy so long as you have a trusted issuer. The trustless version has all kinds of problems. But if you add a simple trust assumption on top of simple old Bitcoin you can meet this use case. Technology is not essential. Tether is a simple smart contract with simple technology. Nobody claims technology is the secret sauce.
That tells you something about demand for other platforms in general. Ethereum may or may not the most popular platform now. But it is manifestly adequate to handle stablecoins. Any working blockchain is sufficient to handle stablecoins. Which smart contract platform gets the inflows does not have anything to do with how far Tether can grow. Stablecoins demand so little of the blockchains they run on that the basic technological structure of reserve-backed stablecoins has not changed for years.
Now if we were talking about Tether market cap on Ethereum vs on Tron vs on Arbitrum or whatever other blockchain: that might say something about those blockchain's relative values. If permissionless USD transfer is the dominant use case then blockchains that host ecosystems which are good at permissionless USD transfer are likely to accrue a lot of value and Tether market cap. This is not hard to understand. But those blockchains can fight it out. So long as Tether is useful, Tether can grow and grow in market cap overall.
More Data PointsEthereum is by far the largest smart contract blockchain by market cap. So long as that remains true Ethereum's market cap is a good proxy for the whole sector. This is not deep analysis. As of this writing Bitcoin makes up about 60% of total web3 market cap and Ethereum makes up about half of what is left ex the stablecoins. That means all the other platforms share the remaining 50%.
So we can say the total value of smart contract blockchains is 2x Ethereum or something like that. As a rule of thumb this is fine. The value of these blockchains, and this sector, has gone nowhere for years now. But stablecoin market cap, led by Tether, has grown a lot.
Stablecoin market cap blockchain-by-blockchain may grow relative value among blockchains. Or not. But in aggregate we have compelling multi-year evidence one does not drive the other. And there are more data points. Products like Blackrock's BUIDL and other tokenized money-market funds offer a product adjacent to Tether. Circle's USDC is a product adjacent to Tether. None of these products passes much value to the blockchains they run on. Again the most compelling argument we can make is just to tap the sign: these products have grown in aggregate while the underlying native token market caps have not gone up.
Interpreting MeaningThere is a consistent story here. Users want permissionless USD products. And they are happy to trust the issuers of those products. In fact users do not seem to care very much about the details of the issuers. Tether, objectively, looks less trustworthy than Blackrock or PayPal. And yet Tether's product is wildly larger. Over and over a traditional player arrives on the stablecoin scene and talks a lot about leveraging a their stellar reputation to build a popular product. And nobody takes a meaningful slice of utilization away from Tether. Circle is the only other large product out there and it has consistently lagged essentially forever. Circle has also had some close calls which, as the company is supposed to offer a stable value, will keep it out of the top tier of reputations for a long time.
Users do not really care who the issuer is so long as the token is widely accepted. Users also do not really care about the blockchain they are using. One person owns most of the tokens and controls governance (Tron)? Fine. The entire thing has been just a multisig for years (Polygon)? Fine. The blockchain promises self custody but then it turns out a Security Council can seize your money (Arbitrum)? All good. Somehow the blockchain is both complicated and run by a single company that admits control in public but not to regulators (Base)? Sure whatever. Users do not care.
Users want permissionless USD. Tether is available on 14 blockchains as of this writing. Circle's USDC is available on more than 30 blockchains as of this writing. The issuers will use whatever blockchains users want. Empirically it is clear the issuers do not really care. And the users do not really care.
The only two things with any real brand value are Tether and Bitcoin. Circle's USDC also has some. And users will use these products on seemingly any platform. What does it mean that a stablecoin issued by an obscure offshore company with a spotty history on the honesty front can become the second largest digital asset by market cap? Is it important that for much of the time that stablecoin has existed it was primarily issued on a single smart contract blockchain seemingly controlled by a single individual (Tron)? That all means users care about the permissionless USD use case more than any of the details underneath how it works.
If governments are giving licenses to some permissionless USD products – for example the entire Genius Act thing around permisisonless USD stablecoins in the United States – it means the permissionless must be acceptable. So long as permissionless USD products get official seals of approval we should expect the entire space, licensed and unlicensed, onshore and offshore, to grow and grow. Possibly well beyond the values of the smart contract platforms on which they run.
Tether is again making it clear that it does not want to be viewed only as a stablecoin issuer. Its $25 million investment in telecom infrastructure pushes the company deeper into the world of physical networks, decentralized connectivity, and strategic capital deployment.
That shift matters because Tether now sits on one of the largest capital bases in crypto. What it chooses to fund increasingly tells the market something about where stablecoin profits and reserves-adjacent capital may flow next.
For more details, visit the official Tether platform.
TL;DR Tether invested $25 million in a decentralized mobile connectivity protocol.The move extends the company’s growing interest in infrastructure outside stablecoin issuance.It also shows how large stablecoin issuers are becoming broader capital allocators. Why Telecom Fits The Pattern This is not Tether’s first move beyond plain dollar tokens. The company has shown interest in Bitcoin mining, AI, real-world assets, and infrastructure plays. Telecom fits that broader pattern because it touches access, payments, and emerging-market connectivity.
A decentralized mobile network can also connect with the DePIN narrative, where token incentives are used to build or coordinate real-world infrastructure. That gives Tether a route into a sector that is still early but highly thematic.
Stablecoin Issuers As Capital Allocators The bigger story is that stablecoin companies are no longer just payment rails. They are becoming large financial actors with the ability to fund projects, buy stakes, and shape infrastructure markets.
That creates opportunity, but it also brings scrutiny. The more Tether invests outside its core business, the more investors and regulators will ask how those investments fit with transparency, reserves, and risk management.
What To Watch Next The key question is whether these investments become strategic ecosystem pieces or simply a diversified portfolio. If they support payments, connectivity, and distribution, they could strengthen Tether’s role in emerging-market finance.
For now, the investment shows the stablecoin giant is still widening its field of ambition. It is not just issuing USDT; it is trying to buy into the infrastructure around digital money.
The Bigger Market Read The useful way to read this story is not as a standalone headline about Tether, but as part of the wider pressure building around Stablecoins coverage this week. Markets have been jumping quickly from one catalyst to the next, so the cleaner value for readers is in separating the actual development from the instant reaction around it. In this case, the source material gives us a concrete event to work from, rather than a loose rumour or a recycled social-media talking point.
That distinction matters because crypto readers are being asked to process a lot at once: ETF flows, regulatory actions, exchange listings, protocol upgrades, wallet movements, and political signals. A story like this is most useful when it helps them understand where Telecom fits into that broader map. It does not need to be inflated into a guaranteed price call to be worth covering. It simply needs to explain what changed, who is affected, and why the market is paying attention today.
The caveat is also important. Even clean source-backed developments can be overinterpreted when traders are hunting for a fast narrative. A listing does not automatically create lasting demand, a regulatory update does not immediately settle every legal question, and an on-chain movement does not always translate into a finished sale. The better read is to treat the development as a fresh data point and then watch whether follow-up activity confirms the direction of travel.
For NewsBTC readers, that means keeping the focus on what can actually be verified from the source and avoiding the temptation to turn every update into a sweeping market verdict. The story is strong enough on its own terms: it gives investors and traders another piece of context around Stablecoins, while leaving room for the next filing, dashboard update, wallet movement, governance vote, or exchange notice to decide whether the angle grows into something bigger.
This report is based on information from Tether.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to influence blockchain design in ways that extend far beyond chatbots or trading assistants. Networks are now being built specifically for autonomous software that can execute transactions, interact with smart contracts, and make decisions without constant human involvement.
That shift became clearer with BNB Chain’s latest roadmap. The network has unveiled plans for a new Layer-1 blockchain focused on AI agents and high-frequency trading.
While the infrastructure is still under development, AI crypto projects like MemeToro ($MT) are already building applications around AI-driven blockchain activity, making the two developments part of the same broader industry trend.
BNB Chain Is Building for Autonomous Software The new blockchain will become the fourth major network within the BNB ecosystem, operating alongside BNB Smart Chain, opBNB, and Greenfield.
Rather than replacing existing infrastructure, it introduces another execution layer designed specifically for AI-driven applications. The network will continue using BNB as its native asset while routing final settlement back to BNB Smart Chain.
Performance is the main objective.
Developers are targeting sub-50 millisecond transaction preconfirmations, sub-second finality, and throughput above 100,000 transactions per second. A public testnet is expected before the end of 2026, while the mainnet is currently planned for early 2027.
The Focus Has Shifted From Consensus to Execution For years, blockchain development largely centered on improving consensus mechanisms and increasing throughput.
BNB Chain now argues that execution has become the next major bottleneck. According to David Z., Chief Technology Officer at BNB Chain:
“The industry spent years solving for consensus and storage bottlenecks, but our execution engines still translate code sentence-by-sentence. Building an L1 optimized entirely for JIT compilation marks the transition from the human DeFi era to the automated agentic economy.”
Instead of redesigning consensus, the new network introduces techniques such as just-in-time compilation and execution optimizations that allow smart contracts to process instructions more efficiently.
The goal is to help autonomous applications respond almost instantly instead of waiting on slower execution engines.
MemeToro Is Building the Application Layer While BNB Chain focuses on infrastructure, MemeToro ($MT) is developing applications designed to operate within an AI-driven environment.
Its AI Agent continuously analyzes market narratives, social conversations, and cultural trends before supporting automated no-code memecoin launches.
The ecosystem also extends beyond token creation.
Users can participate in decentralized prediction markets, interact through SocialFi features, and access behavioral finance tools that encourage ongoing engagement rather than one-time participation.
These products are not replacing blockchain infrastructure.
Instead, they represent the type of consumer-facing applications that increasingly benefit from faster execution and lower latency.
AI Agents Need More Than Faster Transactions Speed is only one part of the equation.
Autonomous software also requires predictable execution, continuous availability, and the ability to perform multiple blockchain actions without waiting for manual approval. That is why infrastructure providers and application developers are increasingly moving in parallel.
A faster blockchain has limited value if no applications use it. Likewise, sophisticated AI applications eventually benefit from infrastructure that reduces delays and improves execution reliability.
This relationship is becoming one of the defining themes of blockchain development heading into 2027.
Infrastructure and Applications Are Beginning to Evolve Together The race to build AI-ready blockchains is no longer limited to one ecosystem. Networks across the industry are redesigning their infrastructure as autonomous software becomes a larger part of blockchain activity.
That perspective also helps explain where projects like MemeToro ($MT) fit. Rather than simply launching another AI-themed token, the platform is experimenting with how autonomous agents can participate inside blockchain ecosystems.
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The race to build faster blockchains is no longer just about processing more transactions. It is increasingly about preparing networks for autonomous AI agents that can trade, launch assets, and execute financial decisions without waiting for human input.
BNB Chain’s newly announced AI-focused Layer-1 reflects that shift, introducing infrastructure designed specifically for machine-speed execution.
MemeToro ($MT), which already centers its ecosystem around AI-powered memecoin launches, the announcement raises an important question: what happens when both the blockchain and the application are built for autonomous agents?
BNB Chain Is Designing Infrastructure for the Agent Economy BNB Chain’s latest roadmap introduces a new Layer-1 blockchain that will operate alongside BNB Smart Chain, opBNB, and Greenfield rather than replacing them.
The network continues using BNB as its native asset while relying on a bridge that settles activity back to BNB Smart Chain. Instead of redesigning consensus, developers have focused on improving execution.
The goals are ambitious.
The roadmap targets transaction preconfirmations below 50 milliseconds, sub-second block finality, and throughput exceeding 100,000 transactions per second, with longer-term ambitions reaching one million TPS.
According to David Z., Chief Technology Officer at BNB Chain:
“The industry spent years solving for consensus and storage bottlenecks, but our execution engines still translate code sentence-by-sentence. Building an L1 optimized entirely for JIT compilation marks the transition from the human DeFi era to the automated agentic economy.”
The message is clear: blockchain infrastructure is increasingly being designed for software, not just people.
Why Machine-Speed Changes Fair Launches Traditional fair launches assume human participation.
Users connect wallets, approve transactions, and manually compete for early allocations. Even experienced traders are limited by reaction times measured in seconds. Autonomous AI agents operate very differently.
They monitor markets continuously, execute predefined strategies instantly, and react far faster than any manual participant.
As transaction confirmation times shrink below 50 milliseconds, human speed becomes less relevant. Instead, launch quality depends on how the underlying rules manage automated participation.
That changes the conversation around fairness.
Future launch platforms may need to think less about preventing individual bots and more about creating systems where automated participants compete under transparent, predefined conditions.
Where MemeToro Fits Into That Direction MemeToro’s ecosystem has already been designed around AI participation rather than manual workflows.
Its AI Agent analyzes market narratives, online discussions, social trends, and cultural signals before supporting automated no-code memecoin launches.
Instead of asking users to deploy contracts manually, the platform simplifies much of the launch process through automation.
That philosophy aligns with the broader direction BNB Chain is taking.
While BNB is building infrastructure capable of supporting autonomous execution, MemeToro ($MT) focuses on how those autonomous systems interact with users inside a consumer-facing application.
The two projects solve different problems, but they address the same emerging market.
One improves blockchain execution.
The other explores what autonomous blockchain applications may look like once that infrastructure exists.
Faster Infrastructure Doesn’t Automatically Create Better Markets Speed alone is not enough to guarantee better launches.
If AI agents become the dominant participants in token creation and trading, platforms will also need mechanisms that prevent a handful of highly optimized systems from controlling early liquidity.
Recent industry discussions increasingly focus on this challenge. As autonomous software replaces manual trading, fairness depends less on who clicks first and more on how launch rules distribute opportunities across different participants.
Infrastructure can make markets faster. Applications still determine whether those markets remain accessible.
This is where projects experimenting with AI-driven launch models may have an opportunity to contribute beyond simple transaction speed.
The Next Competition Won’t Be Between Blockchains Alone BNB Chain’s latest roadmap is about more than increasing transaction speeds. It reflects a broader industry move toward infrastructure designed for autonomous software rather than only human users.
MemeToro ($MT) fits into that conversation because they are already experimenting with AI-driven applications. Instead of focusing only on faster transactions, the platform explores how AI agents can launch assets and interact with blockchain ecosystems.
Whether this approach becomes the industry standard will depend on adoption over the next few years. What is already becoming clear, however, is that future competition will likely focus on how well blockchain infrastructure and AI-powered applications work together.
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Stablecoins are useful, but crypto still has a simple payment problem: users do not want to think about gas. BNB Chain’s push toward gas-free stablecoin transfers is aimed directly at that friction point, especially for wallet users who are not interested in managing network fees every time they send money.
That makes this more than a small feature update. It touches one of the reasons crypto payments still feel awkward for normal users.
For more details, visit the official Binance platform.
TL;DR BNB Chain is pushing gas-free stablecoin transfer rails through a wallet partnership.The goal is to reduce friction for everyday payments and onboarding.Fee delegation could make stablecoin transfers feel less intimidating for retail users. Why Gas-Free Transfers Matter For experienced users, gas fees are just part of crypto. For everyone else, they are confusing, annoying, and easy to get wrong. If a wallet can hide or delegate that cost in a safe way, stablecoin payments become much easier to understand.
BNB Chain’s approach sits inside a broader industry trend toward account abstraction, fee sponsorship, and smoother wallet UX. The goal is to make the chain feel less like infrastructure and more like a usable payment network.
The Retail Adoption Angle Stablecoins already have product-market fit in many parts of the world. The challenge is making them accessible without forcing users to learn every detail of blockchain mechanics.
Gas-free transfers can help with that. They lower the psychological barrier and reduce failed transactions caused by users not holding the right gas token.
The Caveat Behind The Convenience The important question is how fee delegation is managed and funded. Someone still pays for blockspace. The user experience may be simplified, but the economics have to be sustainable.
If BNB Chain and its partners can solve that balance, gas-free stablecoin transfers could become a meaningful step toward everyday crypto payments. If not, it risks being a temporary subsidy. Either way, the direction of travel is clear: crypto wallets are trying to remove friction wherever they can.
A Useful Way To Frame It The useful way to read this story is not as a standalone headline about BNB Chain, but as part of the wider pressure building around Binance coverage this week. Markets have been jumping quickly from one catalyst to the next, so the cleaner value for readers is in separating the actual development from the instant reaction around it. In this case, the source material gives us a concrete event to work from, rather than a loose rumour or a recycled social-media talking point.
That distinction matters because crypto readers are being asked to process a lot at once: ETF flows, regulatory actions, exchange listings, protocol upgrades, wallet movements, and political signals. A story like this is most useful when it helps them understand where Trust Wallet fits into that broader map. It does not need to be inflated into a guaranteed price call to be worth covering. It simply needs to explain what changed, who is affected, and why the market is paying attention today.
The caveat is also important. Even clean source-backed developments can be overinterpreted when traders are hunting for a fast narrative. A listing does not automatically create lasting demand, a regulatory update does not immediately settle every legal question, and an on-chain movement does not always translate into a finished sale. The better read is to treat the development as a fresh data point and then watch whether follow-up activity confirms the direction of travel.
For NewsBTC readers, that means keeping the focus on what can actually be verified from the source and avoiding the temptation to turn every update into a sweeping market verdict. The story is strong enough on its own terms: it gives investors and traders another piece of context around Binance, while leaving room for the next filing, dashboard update, wallet movement, governance vote, or exchange notice to decide whether the angle grows into something bigger.
This report is based on information from Binance.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Artificial intelligence is becoming capable of writing code, analyzing markets, and even interacting with blockchains. Yet there is one thing it still cannot do on its own: open a bank account or pay with a credit card. That limitation has become one of the biggest obstacles to autonomous AI systems.
Rather than viewing it as a problem, many blockchain developers see it as an opportunity. BNB Chain’s new AI-focused blockchain and projects like MemeToro ($MT) are being built around a future where software interacts directly with other software using crypto instead of traditional banking.
Why AI Can’t Simply Use Visa or Mastercard Human financial systems were never designed for machines.
Banks require identity verification, legal ownership, and regulatory compliance before issuing accounts or payment cards. An AI model cannot independently satisfy those requirements because it is software rather than a legal person.
Even if an AI assistant wanted to purchase cloud computing or pay another online service, it cannot simply request a credit card.
Traditional payment rails depend on human approval at almost every step.
That creates friction for autonomous systems that may need to complete thousands of small transactions every day.
Stablecoins Are Becoming the Alternative Instead of relying on banks, developers are increasingly turning toward blockchain payments.
Protocols like x402 allow AI systems to pay for computing resources and online services directly using stablecoins. At the same time, financial companies are exploring machine-to-machine payment networks designed specifically for autonomous software.
This changes how payments work.
Instead of asking a human to approve every transaction, AI agents can settle payments directly on-chain according to predefined rules.
That makes cryptocurrency more than an investment asset. It becomes the payment layer that allows software to interact with software.
Where MemeToro Fits Into This Direction MemeToro is being built around AI participation rather than traditional financial workflows.
Its ecosystem centers on an AI Agent that helps automate blockchain interactions, creating an environment where autonomous software becomes part of the user experience instead of simply assisting behind the scenes.
As AI-powered blockchain activity grows, platforms like MemeToro ($MT) could naturally benefit from payment systems that are also designed for autonomous software.
Instead of depending on legacy banking infrastructure, future AI ecosystems may increasingly operate through blockchain-native assets and decentralized networks.
That aligns with the broader direction the industry is already moving toward.
Stage 3 is now more than 80% sold, with over $64,000 raised at the current token price of $0.00154. Once the current stage closes, the token price increases to $0.00171 in Stage 4.
The Future May Be Machine-to-Machine Commerce The conversation around AI is gradually expanding beyond smarter software and faster blockchains. A much bigger question is emerging: how will autonomous systems actually pay each other?
That is where blockchain may play one of its most practical roles. While traditional finance still depends on human identity and manual approval, decentralized payment networks allow software to exchange value directly using programmable assets.
BNB Chain’s new AI-focused blockchain reflects that long-term vision by building infrastructure designed for autonomous applications instead of only human users. MemeToro ($MT) represents another part of the same trend by exploring how AI agents can participate inside consumer-facing blockchain ecosystems.
Neither project solves the entire machine economy on its own, but together they illustrate how crypto is evolving beyond speculation toward infrastructure that could eventually support software-driven commerce on a much larger scale.
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Crypto-related stocks in U.S. markets continued their rally during trading hours, with MARA surging 15.27%.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), US-listed crypto-related stocks continued to strengthen during intraday trading. Details: Strategy (MSTR) rose 2.11%; Circle (CRCL) gained 0.83%; MARA Holdings (MARA) surged 15.27% after announcing the acquisition of a Texas-based 2000MW computing power park project company for up to $600 million; Riot Platforms (RIOT) climbed 6.1%.
45 minutes ago
JPMorgan: The biggest risk for Bitcoin is not Strategy’s sell-off, but blockchain adoption that bypasses public chains and tokens.
JPMorgan Chase’s analyst team noted that the market views Strategy’s Bitcoin sale plan as a key risk for the crypto sector, but it is not a major structural threat to Bitcoin. The more fundamental risk lies in tokenization, payments, and settlements increasingly taking place on permissioned infrastructure that does not rely on public blockchains. If this trend continues, the entire crypto ecosystem could face a "structural downgrade"—marked by slower transaction activity, reduced liquidity, and weaker capital inflows—ultimately weighing on Bitcoin. The analysts stated bluntly: "In our view, a more significant risk stems from the way blockchain is adopted in traditional finance, which continues to bypass public, permissionless networks." The analysts explained that institutional adoption so far has clearly favored permissioned chains, as they offer advantages in privacy, KYC/AML controls, governance, throughput, legal accountability, and regulatory certainty, posing a competitive threat to public blockchains like Ethereum. If tokenized deposits are widely adopted—especially in non-transferable forms favored by regulators—it could reduce demand for stablecoins in institutional payments and settlements; SWIFT’s blockchain initiative and central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects such as the digital euro and digital renminbi further strengthen regulated alternatives. In the roughly $500 billion tokenized real-world assets market, while Ethereum currently holds a certain share, this likely reflects early-stage experimentation rather than the market’s long-term structure. As institutional adoption grows, issuance, custody, settlement, and lifecycle management will likely be conducted more on private or permissioned infrastructure that meets requirements for identity, confidentiality, and operational resilience, with public blockchains used only for distribution and limited secondary trading.
45 minutes ago
Post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security closes $17 million seed round.
QIZ Security, a crypto posture and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) management platform, announced the completion of a $17 million seed funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital. The capital will be used to accelerate product R&D and market expansion. QIZ Security was co-founded by Ben Volkow, Lenny Ridel, and Itan Barmes; the team has years of experience in cybersecurity, enterprise services, and post-quantum transformation, with Barmes previously leading Deloitte’s global quantum cybersecurity readiness team. Its platform helps enterprises identify and assess crypto asset risks and implement remediation measures, and is currently applied in industries including finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. It has also established partnerships with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, and IBM, among others.
45 minutes ago
Hyperliquid recommends that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally recognize that on-chain protocols are not required to register, and non-custodial wallets do not serve as financial intermediaries.
Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and Phantom have jointly submitted comments to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in response to the agency’s request for feedback on whether existing rules keep pace with the evolution of financial technology, proposing to explicitly extend the distinction between "building tools" and "operating regulated businesses" to on-chain markets. The comments note that software engineers have been developing matching engines for regulated futures trading platforms for decades, and the CFTC has never classified them as trading platform operators. However, developers in the digital asset sector have long lacked such clarity, forcing many to opt for offshore development. The current CFTC, led by Chairman Selig, is working to address this gap and carve out room for innovation for fintech firms in digital asset and derivatives markets. The two entities put forward three key recommendations: First, explicitly confirm that merely publishing on-chain protocol software itself does not require registration — a factor often decisive for engineers when choosing where to develop. Second, establish a clear path for the CFTC’s registration bodies to operate regulated functions using on-chain infrastructure, enabling trading platforms and clearinghouses to replace decades-old legacy systems with transparent infrastructure. Third, formalize Phantom’s recent no-action letter into official rules, eliminating the need for self-custody wallet providers to apply for approved exemptions on a case-by-case basis. HPC and Phantom stress that self-custody and transparent on-chain systems can embed investor protection directly into technology, while regulated intermediaries retain responsibility for issues that technology cannot resolve independently. This approach will bring the next generation of financial markets within reach of U.S. consumers.
45 minutes ago
Micron raises its U.S. investment plan to $250 billion, betting on demand for AI memory chips.
Micron Technology plans to increase spending on its new U.S. factory to $250 billion to meet the surging demand for memory chips driven by the global artificial intelligence boom. The move adds $50 billion to Micron’s previously announced $200 billion commitment to expanding domestic U.S. chip manufacturing, covering projects in New York, Idaho, and Virginia. The expenditure is expected to run through 2035, and will help the company achieve its target of producing 40% of its DRAM products in the U.S. within the next decade.
45 minutes ago
Analysis: Market FUD sentiment toward SOL hits its highest point in 2026, a typical bullish signal.
Crypto research firm Santiment notes that market FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) surrounding SOL has hit its highest level in 2026, a development that typically signals a bullish indicator. Currently, Solana is facing a toxic mix of negative sentiment: trading volume has fallen to its lowest level of 2026, while negative comments have just spiked to their highest daily mark this year. Much of the frustration stems from the fact that despite Solana’s strong narrative around tokenized stocks and real-world asset (RWA) activity, its price has failed to deliver meaningful returns for traders. This is where it gets interesting: when sentiment is excessively negative and trading activity is thin, large holders (whales) often encounter less retail selling resistance if they choose to push prices higher. At a time when traders least anticipate a rebound, SOL may be in this low-attention, high-FUD zone, primed for rapid, sharp price fluctuations.
Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming one of the biggest priorities in blockchain development. Instead of building faster networks only for human users, developers are now designing infrastructure that allows autonomous AI agents to trade, make payments, and interact with smart contracts almost instantly.
That is exactly what BNB Chain’s new AI-focused Layer-1 aims to achieve. While the blockchain is still scheduled for a late-2026 testnet and an early-2027 mainnet, projects like MemeToro ($MT) are already building AI-powered ecosystems today.
As a result, many investors are beginning to connect the two developments.
BNB Chain Is Preparing for an AI-First Future The newly announced Layer-1 will become the fourth blockchain within the BNB ecosystem, operating alongside BNB Smart Chain, opBNB, and Greenfield.
Rather than replacing existing infrastructure, the new chain is being built specifically for autonomous AI agents and high-frequency blockchain activity.
The technical roadmap includes several major upgrades.
These include sub-50 millisecond transaction preconfirmations, sub-second finality, 100,000+ transactions per second, and a mempool-free architecture powered by TxStream.
Developers have also introduced BNB Agent Studio, allowing AI agents to be deployed in less than 15 minutes using the BNBAgent SDK.
Instead of preparing only for today’s decentralized applications, BNB Chain is building infrastructure for the next generation of blockchain software.
MemeToro Already Operates Around AI Agents While BNB Chain develops the infrastructure, MemeToro ($MT) is building the application layer.
Its AI Agent continuously analyzes social conversations, market narratives, cultural trends, and online sentiment before supporting automated no-code memecoin launches.
The platform extends well beyond token creation.
Users can also participate in decentralized prediction markets while interacting with SocialFi features and behavioral finance tools that reward long-term engagement.
That makes MemeToro ($MT) one of the projects already experimenting with AI-driven blockchain applications before dedicated AI infrastructure becomes widely available.
Rather than changing direction to follow the industry, its development roadmap already aligns with where blockchain infrastructure is heading. MemeToro combines several features inside one connected ecosystem instead of focusing on a single product.
Stage 3 is now more than 80% sold, with over $64,000 raised toward the current stage allocation. The token remains available at $0.00154, before increasing to $0.00171 once Stage 4 begins.
What Could Influence the Launch Price? Predicting the exact price of any newly listed cryptocurrency is impossible. Exchange liquidity, overall market conditions, investor sentiment, and ecosystem adoption all influence how a token performs after listing.
For MemeToro ($MT), the biggest variables are likely to be different from many traditional memecoins.
Rather than depending only on community excitement, adoption of its AI-powered launch platform, prediction markets, and staking ecosystem could become important drivers once public trading begins.
The continued expansion of AI-focused blockchain infrastructure may also increase attention on projects already operating in that sector.
Still, investors should remember that presale pricing and future market pricing are not the same thing.
The Opportunity Depends on Execution BNB Chain’s roadmap shows that AI agents are becoming an increasingly important part of blockchain development. Faster execution, dedicated AI infrastructure, and new developer tools all point toward a market where autonomous software plays a much larger role than it does today.
That does not automatically make every AI project successful. Platforms will still need to deliver working products, attract users, and continue building after fundraising ends.
For MemeToro ($MT), that execution phase is still ahead. The project already fits naturally within the broader direction BNB Chain is taking, but long-term success will ultimately depend on whether its ecosystem gains meaningful adoption after launch.
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One of the biggest frustrations in decentralized trading has always been the public mempool. Before a transaction is confirmed, it sits in a public queue where bots can see it, copy it, and often execute first. This has fueled sandwich attacks, front-running, and expensive gas wars across many blockchain networks.
BNB Chain now wants to remove that advantage completely. Its upcoming AI-focused Layer-1 replaces the traditional public mempool with TxStream, a new transaction system designed for faster and more private execution.
For projects like MemeToro ($MT), which focus on AI-assisted token launches, that change could create a much healthier environment for future users.
Why the Public Mempool Became a Target The public mempool was originally created to help transactions wait for confirmation.
Over time, however, it also became a valuable source of information for automated trading systems.
Specialized bots continuously monitor pending transactions, looking for profitable trades before they are finalized. They can increase gas fees, jump ahead of retail investors, and even place trades before a new token officially becomes available.
For ordinary users, that often means paying more while receiving fewer tokens than expected during popular launches.
As blockchain activity increased, the mempool gradually evolved from a useful waiting room into a battleground.
TxStream Changes How Transactions Move BNB Chain’s solution is surprisingly simple. Instead of placing pending transactions inside a public queue, TxStream sends them directly to the active block producer.
Without a public waiting area, many traditional front-running strategies lose the information they depend on.
The network adds another layer of protection by rotating validators every 200 milliseconds, making it extremely difficult for any single validator to build long-term advantages from transaction ordering.
Alongside that, PriorityLane reserves dedicated block space for critical network operations such as oracle updates, cross-chain bridges, and liquidations, helping maintain consistent execution even during periods of heavy activity.
According to MEXC Research:
“What we are seeing with BNB’s TxStream architecture is an acknowledgment that public mempools have become predatory environments. Removing them shifts the developer landscape away from defensive gas-war programming and toward raw execution performance.”
Why This Matters for MemeToro MemeToro ($MT) roadmap centers on making memecoin launches simpler and more accessible.
As token creation becomes easier through AI-powered automation, launch quality becomes increasingly dependent on the blockchain underneath.
A network that reduces front-running naturally complements platforms trying to improve launch experiences. Instead of constantly designing around mempool exploits, developers can spend more time improving the products themselves.
That allows MemeToro ($MT) to focus on user experience while the underlying infrastructure helps reduce one of crypto’s oldest trading problems.
Core System Functions:
Real-Time Data Analysis: Scans continuous feeds of global news and digital communities to identify rising cultural topics. Automated Creative Output: Generates all essential visual and structural assets, including logos, marketing banners, and the core token concept. Pre-Launch Verification: Displays a comprehensive preview of the generated materials and token mechanics for user evaluation prior to the official launch. Fair-Launch Deployment: Deploys the completed token instantly to the public market without pre-allocations or team advantages. The infrastructure is powered by the MemeToro ($MT), which is currently available during the active presale phases.
MemeToro Is Built for Long-Term Participation The project also extends beyond token launches by giving users multiple ways to stay involved after new assets go live.
Some of the platform’s highlights include:
AI-assisted no-code token creation 35% APY staking opportunities Prediction markets across multiple sectors 71% of the supply allocated to the public Fixed supply of 1.2 billion $MT Only 2% reserved for the core team The presale continues to build momentum.
Stage 3 is now more than 80% sold, with over $64,000 raised at the current token price of $0.00154. After this round is completed, the token price increases to $0.00171 during Stage 4.
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Zipper Goes Live on Stellar Mainnet@StellarOrg has activated the Protocol 27 upgrade, codenamed Zipper, on the Stellar mainnet. The mainnet upgrade vote took place on July 8, 2026, completing a rollout that included testnet deployment on June 18 and a series of SDK, RPC, and core releases stretching back to early June.
The upgrade centres on a single but consequential change: making authentication delegation a first-class feature on Stellar, meaning one account can officially authorise another to act on its behalf. Before Zipper, delegation existed on Stellar only as an accidental side effect. Developers who tried to use it faced a tangle of manual steps, extra simulation passes, and bloated transaction sizes, so most teams avoided it entirely. Zipper makes delegation a proper, first-class feature that is dramatically simpler to implement correctly.
What Changes for Developers and UsersCheaper transactions and more flexible account designs, including social recovery, delegated signing keys, and modular multisig, become practical to build. Transactions also become smaller and cheaper because all delegated signers bundle into a single authorisation entry instead of requiring separate ones.
The upgrade also closes a security gap in the Soroban smart contract environment. Signature payloads now explicitly bind to the top-level account address, preventing cross-account replay attacks. CAP-0071-02 adds address-bound Soroban credentials (V2), closing a narrow replay vulnerability.
Soroban developers building smart accounts, including wallets, multisig schemes, and account abstraction, will see the most direct benefit. Developers building applications where multiple accounts may share keys, or who want to adopt a more conservative security posture, should plan to migrate to SOROBAN_CREDENTIALS_ADDRESS_V2 after the Protocol 27 upgrade.
Protocol 27 also lays the groundwork for what comes next. The Stellar Development Foundation has confirmed that Protocol 28 will bring contract-based authentication to classic Stellar accounts, and the delegation mechanism in Zipper is a direct prerequisite for that. For $XLM and the broader Stellar ecosystem, Zipper is less a final destination and more the foundation for the next wave of smart account capabilities.
Sources
Stellar Development Foundation: Zipper Protocol 27 Upgrade Guide
CryptoWisser: Zipper Protocol 27 Is Now Live on Stellar Mainnet
Cover image via U.Today Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. The financial and market information provided on U.Today is intended for informational purposes only. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. Conduct your own research by contacting financial experts before making any investment decisions. We believe that all content is accurate as of the date of publication, but certain offers mentioned may no longer be available.
Stellar (XLM) is experiencing a surge in trading activity in the last 24 hours, with volume up by more than 303%. Trading volume for XLM is up 303% in the last 24 hours to $873 million, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
This is noteworthy as most major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, saw a drop in volume over the last 24 hours, falling 20% and 15% respectively. Dogecoin's trading volume fell by nearly 26% in the same timeframe. Stellar's 303% volume surge while its price fell, however, remains an outlier.
Stellar (XLM) Trading Volume, Image by CoinMarketCapThe main trigger behind the volume increase is not evident, but some factors might have contributed. Stellar's third major protocol upgrade has taken place so far in 2026, with a corresponding rise in trader activity.
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The 303% increase in volume for Stellar indicates a sudden surge in trader activity. Increased liquidity helps market participants carry out larger trades with less price slippage and promotes a healthier trading environment.
Zipper upgrade goes liveThe Zipper (Protocol 27) has been deployed on Stellar's mainnet. The protocol upgrade introduces authentication delegation for custom accounts and address-bound smart contract address credentials.
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The upgrade introduces authentication delegation for custom accounts (CAP-0071-01), which adds a first-class protocol mechanism for custom (smart contract) accounts to delegate their authentication logic to other addresses. It also introduces two new host functions and a new credential type. These are, however, additive changes, with existing contracts and credential types remaining valid.
A new credential type introduced by the upgrade allows all delegated signers and their (potentially nested) signatures to be bundled into a single authorization entry. This eliminates the need for a separate authorization entry per delegated signer, reducing transaction size and simplifying simulation.
Address-bound Soroban address credentials (CAP-0071-02) included in the upgrade introduce a new credential type that uses the same signature payload introduced in CAP-0071-01.
Stellar’s native cryptocurrency, XLM, has seen a sudden and dramatic spike in trading volume over the past 24 hours. According to CoinMarketCap data, XLM’s trading volume shot up by 303 percent to reach $873 million in a single day. This surge stands out all the more given that XLM’s price actually declined during the same period, making the volume increase particularly noteworthy among investors and analysts.
A movement that defies the general marketWhile most major cryptocurrencies experienced sluggish trading activity, XLM moved in the opposite direction. Over the last 24 hours, Bitcoin’s trading volume dropped by 20 percent, Ethereum saw a 15 percent decrease, and Dogecoin volume slipped around 26 percent. Against this backdrop, Stellar’s explosive trading surge marked an unusual development and set it apart from broader market trends.
Stellar is widely recognized as an open source blockchain network designed for cross border payments and asset transfers. Although the root cause of this latest spike is yet to be precisely identified, some observers speculate that heightened investor interest may be linked to the rollout of Stellar’s third major protocol update of 2026.
CoinMarketCap’s statistics reveal that XLM trading volume hit $873 million within 24 hours, representing a 303 percent surge.
Protocol 27 launches on the mainnetStellar’s development team has officially activated the Protocol 27 upgrade—known within the community as “Zipper”—on the mainnet. This update introduces a series of new features, including delegated authentication authority for specialized accounts and address-linked smart contract credentials, setting new standards for security and flexibility on the network.
With delegated authentication authority, special accounts are now able to transfer their transaction approval rights to other addresses, particularly supporting smart contract-based accounts. The update adds two major new functions and a novel credential type to the system. Importantly, existing contracts and credential types remain valid, ensuring backward compatibility while expanding capabilities.
Glossary: Delegated authentication authority allows an account to assign its transaction approval rights to another address, following certain rules. Soroban is the smart contract platform for the Stellar network.
New credential format reduces transaction sizeThe upgrade’s new credential structure enables all signers and their associated signatures to be compiled within a single authorization record for delegated authority. This eliminates the need to create separate authorization entries for each signer, which in turn reduces the size of each transaction and streamlines the simulation process for network operations.
Protocol 27 also introduces address-linked Soroban address credentials, utilizing the same signature payload structure. These technical changes are expected to help streamline the management of complex account structures on Stellar, making the network more efficient even as capabilities grow.
Rising liquidity allows market participants to execute larger transactions with lower price impact, contributing to a healthier trading environment.
The sharp rise in trading volume signals renewed short term interest and participation in the XLM market. High liquidity particularly benefits investors by minimizing the price fluctuations of large trades, helping to enhance order execution conditions and foster a more resilient trading ecosystem.
Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.
Santiment’s May 2026 report ranks Chainlink, DeepBook, and Lido DAO as the top three DeFi projects by development activity, measured by meaningful GitHub events over the previous month. Chainlink reclaimed the top spot, with DeepBook close behind in second and Lido DAO climbing to third.
What Santiment is actually measuring Santiment’s methodology filters out noise. The analytics platform focuses on notable GitHub events while excluding low-value actions like forks and minor commits that can artificially inflate activity numbers.
Chainlink and DeepBook have appeared at the top of Santiment’s development activity reports repeatedly since 2025. That’s sustained engineering investment over more than a year.
The three pillars: oracles, liquidity, and staking Chainlink’s position at the top is almost expected at this point. The oracle network has been a perennial leader in developer activity, and for good reason. Oracles are the connective tissue between blockchains and the real world. Every DeFi protocol that needs external price data, weather feeds, sports scores, or any off-chain information ultimately depends on oracle infrastructure.
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DeepBook’s second-place ranking tells a different but equally important story. The project operates as a fully on-chain central limit order book and shared liquidity layer built on the Sui blockchain, supporting spot and margin trading with rapid settlement.
Lido DAO rounding out the top three reflects the enduring importance of liquid staking in the DeFi landscape. Lido allows users to stake their assets while receiving liquid tokens in return, meaning their capital isn’t locked up and can still be deployed across DeFi protocols.
What this means for investors No major market reactions were associated with the May report, and that’s entirely normal.
For LINK holders, the takeaway is straightforward: Chainlink continues to invest heavily in its technology stack. Oracle services are increasingly recognized as foundational to DeFi, and Chainlink’s persistent lead in development suggests it intends to maintain its dominant position in that category.
DEEP token holders should note that DeepBook’s ranking validates the project’s role as critical infrastructure for the Sui ecosystem. As Sui’s DeFi landscape matures, the protocol powering its core trading functionality stands to benefit from network effects.
LDO investors are looking at a project that continues to draw developer interest despite liquid staking being a relatively mature category. Lido’s climb to third place suggests the team isn’t coasting on existing infrastructure but actively building new capabilities.
One risk worth flagging: development activity measures effort, not outcomes. A team can be incredibly active on GitHub and still fail to ship products that gain traction. These rankings are a necessary but not sufficient condition for long-term success. They tell you who’s building. They don’t guarantee who will win.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Mantle is migrating its $2.5 billion Super Portal from LayerZero to Chainlink's CCT standard to enhance security and control over token transfer settings.Migrations to Chainlink CCIP so far include Kelp and Lombard, both of which brought over $1 billion, as well as Solv Protocol, Virtuals, Re and Kraken’s tokenized assets.The Mantle migration will occur from July 9 to the 15, enabling the project to expand MNT token transfers to additional blockchain networks while securing assets via oracles.More than $7.2 billion in cross-chain and wrapped assets have migrated from LayerZero to Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) since May, with Mantle becoming the latest project to replace LayerZero for high-value token transfers.
Mantle said it is migrating its Super Portal, which it co-developed with Bybit, from LayerZero's Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard to Chainlink's Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard.
LayerZero and Chainlink CCIP both let token holders move assets between blockchains, a basic requirement as crypto markets spread across competing networks.
The infrastructure matters because bridges between different blockchains have become one of crypto’s largest security risks, with a single failure able to expose hundreds of millions of dollars in user assets.
The portal enables transfers of the MNT token between Ethereum and Solana, with support for additional blockchain networks planned.
The migration includes MNT, the native token of Mantle's network, which has more than $2.5 billion in value locked. Mantle's move pushes the total value of announced migrations from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP above $7.24 billion.
The shift began after the $292 million Kelp bridge exploit earlier in the year, which increased scrutiny of LayerZero-powered bridge configurations. Kelp later announced it would migrate more than $1.5 billion in assets to Chainlink CCIP.
Since then, Solv Protocol migrated $700 million in tokenized bitcoin, Re moved $475 million, Kraken transferred $330 million in wrapped assets, Lombard migrated more than $1 billion, Virtuals Protocol moved $700 million and Yuzu Money transferred $54.5 million.
Mantle said its Super Portal will be suspended during the migration, which is scheduled to take place between July 9 and July 15. Existing MNT on Ethereum and Solana, along with MNT activity on Byreal and Bybit, will remain unaffected.
"As tokenized financial assets move from concept to scale, the infrastructure that carries them across chains cannot be an afterthought," Emily Bao, a key advisor at Mantle, said in a statement.
Under the new setup, Chainlink CCIP will secure MNT transfers using its decentralized oracle network. Mantle said the migration also gives it direct control over token pools and transfer settings under the CCT standard as it expands MNT to additional blockchain networks and tokenized asset markets.
@Mantle_Official has confirmed it is migrating its Super Portal from @LayerZero_Core to @Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), the latest in a string of high-profile departures from LayerZero that now totals over $7.2 billion in migrated value.
A Growing Exodus From LayerZero The backdrop to Mantle's move is a security incident that rattled the cross-chain sector. The shift accelerated after a $292 million exploit drained 116,500 rsETH from Kelp DAO's LayerZero-powered bridge in April 2026. The Kelp DAO exploit was not a failure of LayerZero's core smart contracts, but of its flexible security model. LayerZero allows applications to select their own Decentralised Verifier Networks (DVNs), off-chain actors responsible for validating events on a source chain before triggering an action on a destination chain. In the Kelp DAO case, the DVN was configured as a 1-of-1 set, meaning a single compromised verifier was sufficient to authorise fraudulent transfers.
That incident prompted a broad reassessment of cross-chain infrastructure across DeFi. Mantle joins Kelp DAO and Lombard Finance in the move to CCIP. Lombard migrated its over $1 billion in bitcoin-backed assets from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP after a security review following the Kelp DAO exploit. Other protocols including Solv, Re.xyz, and Kraken have made similar moves. Johann Eid, chief business officer at Chainlink Labs, described the trend as "a continued flight to safety across the industry."
Why Protocols Are Choosing CCIP Chainlink's CCIP operates on a different, less flexible model. Each cross-chain lane is secured by a set of at least 16 independent, Chainlink-operated node operators, creating a high threshold for collusion or compromise. CCIP also integrates a separate Risk Management Network that monitors for anomalous activity and enforces value-based rate limits on each lane, acting as a circuit breaker to cap potential losses. Chainlink recently completed a SOC 2 Type 2 examination for CCIP, a compliance certification typically associated with enterprise cloud providers and financial infrastructure companies, making it the only major oracle and interoperability provider with that tier of certification. SOC 2 Type 2 means an independent auditor spent months verifying that Chainlink's security controls actually work as advertised over a sustained period.
For Mantle, the decision aligns with a broader platform strategy. The project said it is "thrilled to adopt the Chainlink standard," with its head of BD, Mark Veer, adding that the integration "enhances Mantle's cross-chain capabilities and strengthens our alignment with Chainlink's extensive ecosystem." Chainlink CCIP has supported over $28 trillion in cumulative on-chain transaction value and averages approximately $90 million in weekly token transfers.
Meanwhile, LayerZero has since removed support for 1-of-1 DVN configurations and announced plans to move most routes toward stricter 5-of-5 verifier setups. The protocol maintains significant volume, but the reputational damage from the Kelp DAO incident continues to shape infrastructure decisions across the sector.
Sources:
Mantle official blog: Mantle Adopts the Chainlink Standard
CoinDesk: Crypto firms move $4 billion in assets to Chainlink
Crypto.news: Chainlink CCIP draws $4B from LayerZero exodus
Crypto-related stocks in U.S. markets continued their rally during trading hours, with MARA surging 15.27%.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), US-listed crypto-related stocks continued to strengthen during intraday trading. Details: Strategy (MSTR) rose 2.11%; Circle (CRCL) gained 0.83%; MARA Holdings (MARA) surged 15.27% after announcing the acquisition of a Texas-based 2000MW computing power park project company for up to $600 million; Riot Platforms (RIOT) climbed 6.1%.
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JPMorgan: The biggest risk for Bitcoin is not Strategy’s sell-off, but blockchain adoption that bypasses public chains and tokens.
JPMorgan Chase’s analyst team noted that the market views Strategy’s Bitcoin sale plan as a key risk for the crypto sector, but it is not a major structural threat to Bitcoin. The more fundamental risk lies in tokenization, payments, and settlements increasingly taking place on permissioned infrastructure that does not rely on public blockchains. If this trend continues, the entire crypto ecosystem could face a "structural downgrade"—marked by slower transaction activity, reduced liquidity, and weaker capital inflows—ultimately weighing on Bitcoin. The analysts stated bluntly: "In our view, a more significant risk stems from the way blockchain is adopted in traditional finance, which continues to bypass public, permissionless networks." The analysts explained that institutional adoption so far has clearly favored permissioned chains, as they offer advantages in privacy, KYC/AML controls, governance, throughput, legal accountability, and regulatory certainty, posing a competitive threat to public blockchains like Ethereum. If tokenized deposits are widely adopted—especially in non-transferable forms favored by regulators—it could reduce demand for stablecoins in institutional payments and settlements; SWIFT’s blockchain initiative and central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects such as the digital euro and digital renminbi further strengthen regulated alternatives. In the roughly $500 billion tokenized real-world assets market, while Ethereum currently holds a certain share, this likely reflects early-stage experimentation rather than the market’s long-term structure. As institutional adoption grows, issuance, custody, settlement, and lifecycle management will likely be conducted more on private or permissioned infrastructure that meets requirements for identity, confidentiality, and operational resilience, with public blockchains used only for distribution and limited secondary trading.
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Security Warning: Abnormal on-chain fund flows detected for the CodexField project on BNB Chain.
On-chain investigator Specter has issued a community security alert, warning of potential fund misappropriation risks associated with the CodexField project on BNB Chain. On-chain tracking shows the project has amassed over $85 million in funds. Specter detected abnormal on-chain fund flows yesterday: a wallet bridged 17.3 million USDT from TRON to Ethereum, then swapped the tokens for DAI via Bitget Swap on Polygon. So far, $6.5 million has been transferred out, while the remaining $10.8 million is still in transit. The funds were originally bridged from Ethereum to TRON roughly six months ago, and the source wallet is linked to CodexField’s deposit contract. Below are key addresses for users to verify on their own: EVM: 0xBc606358910b3720d136F0d4Ce12b759C270747a TRON: TQNTEYadFVVQeobBtctSjurJ5RpfBsTmqh, TAzpg8L1WkkzCxxZk8TYnvaRYahehh52MK Related deposit contract: 0x9E6A75b546B65E7B9D34E2c9aB8Fe224B9aA52AA Additional red flags: The project requires a minimum $100 deposit for participation. Blockchain security tool Blocksec MetaSuites initially labeled the deposit contract as "Fake CodexField", but Specter’s follow-up investigation found the contract is actually operated by the CodexField team itself. The project uses multiple domains and subdomains to collect user deposits, and the team previously shared these domains via official channels. Its fund flow pattern is unusual, deviating from standard fund management practices: the project bridges funds across multiple blockchains, routes them through intermediate wallets, and ultimately sends assets to centralized exchanges. Specter noted that based on on-chain activity, the project warrants high vigilance. It advises all users interacting with CodexField to exercise extreme caution until the team provides a transparent explanation of its fund movements.
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Post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security closes $17 million seed round.
QIZ Security, a crypto posture and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) management platform, announced the completion of a $17 million seed funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital. The capital will be used to accelerate product R&D and market expansion. QIZ Security was co-founded by Ben Volkow, Lenny Ridel, and Itan Barmes; the team has years of experience in cybersecurity, enterprise services, and post-quantum transformation, with Barmes previously leading Deloitte’s global quantum cybersecurity readiness team. Its platform helps enterprises identify and assess crypto asset risks and implement remediation measures, and is currently applied in industries including finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. It has also established partnerships with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, and IBM, among others.
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Hyperliquid recommends that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally recognize that on-chain protocols are not required to register, and non-custodial wallets do not serve as financial intermediaries.
Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and Phantom have jointly submitted comments to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in response to the agency’s request for feedback on whether existing rules keep pace with the evolution of financial technology, proposing to explicitly extend the distinction between "building tools" and "operating regulated businesses" to on-chain markets. The comments note that software engineers have been developing matching engines for regulated futures trading platforms for decades, and the CFTC has never classified them as trading platform operators. However, developers in the digital asset sector have long lacked such clarity, forcing many to opt for offshore development. The current CFTC, led by Chairman Selig, is working to address this gap and carve out room for innovation for fintech firms in digital asset and derivatives markets. The two entities put forward three key recommendations: First, explicitly confirm that merely publishing on-chain protocol software itself does not require registration — a factor often decisive for engineers when choosing where to develop. Second, establish a clear path for the CFTC’s registration bodies to operate regulated functions using on-chain infrastructure, enabling trading platforms and clearinghouses to replace decades-old legacy systems with transparent infrastructure. Third, formalize Phantom’s recent no-action letter into official rules, eliminating the need for self-custody wallet providers to apply for approved exemptions on a case-by-case basis. HPC and Phantom stress that self-custody and transparent on-chain systems can embed investor protection directly into technology, while regulated intermediaries retain responsibility for issues that technology cannot resolve independently. This approach will bring the next generation of financial markets within reach of U.S. consumers.
40 minutes ago
Micron raises its U.S. investment plan to $250 billion, betting on demand for AI memory chips.
Micron Technology plans to increase spending on its new U.S. factory to $250 billion to meet the surging demand for memory chips driven by the global artificial intelligence boom. The move adds $50 billion to Micron’s previously announced $200 billion commitment to expanding domestic U.S. chip manufacturing, covering projects in New York, Idaho, and Virginia. The expenditure is expected to run through 2035, and will help the company achieve its target of producing 40% of its DRAM products in the U.S. within the next decade.
The layer-2 race is not only about speed and low fees anymore. It is also about how easily assets and messages can move between chains. Chainlink’s CCIP integration with zkSync Era lands directly in that part of the market.
For developers, interoperability is not a luxury feature. It can determine whether an application is trapped inside one ecosystem or able to connect to a wider pool of users and liquidity.
For more details, visit the official Chainlink platform.
TL;DR Chainlink integrated CCIP with zkSync Era.The move gives developers another route for cross-chain messaging and token transfers.It strengthens the idea that interoperability is becoming core infrastructure for layer-2 networks. Why zkSync Needs Interoperability zkSync Era already competes in a crowded Ethereum scaling landscape. To stand out, a layer-2 network needs more than cheaper transactions. It needs tools that let builders connect safely to other environments.
CCIP is Chainlink’s attempt to provide a standard cross-chain messaging layer. By bringing it to zkSync Era, the integration gives developers a more familiar route for building applications that need to communicate beyond one network.
The Chainlink Strategy Chainlink has spent years moving beyond price feeds. CCIP is part of that broader push to become infrastructure for secure cross-chain activity. Integrations like this help reinforce that positioning.
The challenge is that cross-chain infrastructure is judged on reliability. Bridges and messaging layers have been high-risk areas in crypto, so developer trust is not won by announcements alone. It has to be earned through performance.
What It Means For Builders For builders on zkSync, the new integration can make cross-chain applications easier to design. That could include liquidity movement, governance messaging, multi-chain DeFi, and token transfer systems.
The broader takeaway is that interoperability is becoming a central part of the layer-2 value proposition. The chains that make it easiest to build across ecosystems may have an edge.
The Reader Takeaway The useful way to read this story is not as a standalone headline about Chainlink, but as part of the wider pressure building around Chainlink coverage this week. Markets have been jumping quickly from one catalyst to the next, so the cleaner value for readers is in separating the actual development from the instant reaction around it. In this case, the source material gives us a concrete event to work from, rather than a loose rumour or a recycled social-media talking point.
That distinction matters because crypto readers are being asked to process a lot at once: ETF flows, regulatory actions, exchange listings, protocol upgrades, wallet movements, and political signals. A story like this is most useful when it helps them understand where CCIP fits into that broader map. It does not need to be inflated into a guaranteed price call to be worth covering. It simply needs to explain what changed, who is affected, and why the market is paying attention today.
The caveat is also important. Even clean source-backed developments can be overinterpreted when traders are hunting for a fast narrative. A listing does not automatically create lasting demand, a regulatory update does not immediately settle every legal question, and an on-chain movement does not always translate into a finished sale. The better read is to treat the development as a fresh data point and then watch whether follow-up activity confirms the direction of travel.
For NewsBTC readers, that means keeping the focus on what can actually be verified from the source and avoiding the temptation to turn every update into a sweeping market verdict. The story is strong enough on its own terms: it gives investors and traders another piece of context around Chainlink, while leaving room for the next filing, dashboard update, wallet movement, governance vote, or exchange notice to decide whether the angle grows into something bigger.
This report is based on information from Chainlink.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Mantle is moving its Super Portal, developed with Bybit, to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), replacing LayerZero as the cross-chain infrastructure securing transfers of the MNT token across Mantle’s more than $2.5 billion ecosystem.
The company said the migration strengthens security through Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network and institutional-grade safeguards while giving Mantle direct control over its cross-chain token infrastructure under the Cross-Chain Token standard. The Super Portal will be suspended temporarily during the transition, with no action required from users.
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Emily Bao, a key advisor at Mantle, said the decision would provide institutional-grade security for MNT transfers as tokenized assets gain wider adoption.
“As tokenized financial assets move from concept to scale, the infrastructure that carries them across chains cannot be an afterthought,” Bao noted.
Mantle said the new infrastructure will enable MNT to expand across more blockchain networks as demand grows for cross-chain movement of tokenized assets.
Chainlink’s CCIP has gained momentum after several crypto projects such as Virtuals and Lombard migrated away from LayerZero in the wake of a high-profile DeFi exploit. The transition has resulted in more than $7.2 billion worth of cross-chain and wrapped assets moving onto Chainlink’s network since May.
“We’re continuing to see an industry trend of leading protocols upgrading their cross-chain infrastructure to meet the requirements of institutional adoption,” Johann Eid, Chief Business Officer at Chainlink Labs, stated. “Mantle’s migration to Chainlink CCIP reflects the growing recognition that secure-by-default infrastructure is critical for any cross-chain deployment to succeed at scale.”
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
The multi-billion-dollar renovation of crypto’s cross-chain plumbing just picked up speed. More than $7.2 billion in total value has now migrated from LayerZero to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), a wave that now includes Mantle, the Ethereum layer-2 network, as its most recent participant. The flows were detailed in the original report on the migration event.
The movement isn’t a one-off. Projects Kelp and Lombard each brought over $1 billion when they made the switch earlier. Solv Protocol, Virtuals, Re, and tokenized assets from Kraken have also shifted their cross-chain messaging to CCIP. The sheer scale turns a series of protocol decisions into something that looks like a structural preference pivot—not just a change of vendor, but a bet on which interoperability standard will anchor the next phase of on-chain finance.
For users and developers, the practical difference between LayerZero and CCIP sits deep in the stack. LayerZero built its reputation on lightweight, oracle-and-relayer architectures optimized for speed. Chainlink’s CCIP, by contrast, leans on the same decentralized oracle networks that already secure billions in DeFi value, adding an extra layer of risk management, active monitoring, and a heavier compliance-friendly footprint. When protocols like Mantle decide to migrate, they are implicitly choosing that security model over the more minimalist alternative.
Tokenized assets and the compliance overlay One detail that deserves attention is the presence of Kraken’s tokenized assets among the migrations. Real-world asset (RWA) projects and institutional tokenization efforts are heavily exposed to regulatory risk, and the choice of cross-chain rail matters. CCIP’s architecture includes programmable token transfers and configurable rate limits, features designed to meet the oversight expectations of regulated entities. As the weekly tokenization roundup showed, the RWA market crossed $20 billion on-chain recently, and with institutional settlement experiments accelerating, the infrastructure layer that handles cross-chain messages for these assets becomes a competitive moat.
That doesn’t mean LayerZero is frozen out. The protocol still powers a large volume of general-purpose bridging and messaging. But the departure of heavy hitters—projects that collectively account for billions in user deposits and transaction flow—narrows the band of use cases where LayerZero remains the default. It also reshapes how liquidity providers assess bridge risk, a factor that could feed back into rates and insurance costs across DeFi platforms.
Interoperability competition resets The migration cluster reflects a broader reset in the interoperability layer. For years, the narrative was about connecting every chain to every other chain as cheaply as possible. Now the conversation is about security guarantees, exploit recovery, and deep integration with existing oracle pricing feeds. Chainlink has spent over a year building out CCIP’s security model exactly along those lines, and the inflow of value suggests that protocols are willing to pay for that overhead.
Developer activity data supports the idea that infrastructure battles are being fought at the protocol level. According to a recent Top 10 Blockchains by Developer Activity This Week report, Ethereum and its layer-2 ecosystem continue to dominate weekly commits, and that’s where CCIP is getting most of its traction. It’s not simply about which bridging protocol developers build with; it’s about which one gets embedded into the standard stack of high-value applications.
Still, uncertainty remains. There is no public, real-time dashboard that cleanly compares the security incidents, liveness failures, or fee structures of all major cross-chain protocols over a multi-year window. The decision to migrate is often opaque, driven by commercial agreements, risk committee assessments, or token incentive deals that outsiders cannot see. So while the headline number—$7.2 billion—is striking, it measures total value that moved, not a controlled test of technical superiority.
Regulatory noise and infrastructure choices There’s also a regulatory dimension that doesn’t show up in migration announcements. In Washington, the last-minute maneuvering around landmark crypto legislation, as covered in a recent report on the Senate bill campaign, is forcing protocols to think about compliance design ahead of hard mandates. A cross-chain infrastructure that already integrates monitoring, rate limiting, and decentralized validation aligns more neatly with a future where regulators demand real-time visibility into asset flows. That doesn’t prove causation in the migration wave, but it provides the backdrop against which decisions are being made.
What comes next will test whether this clustering effect accelerates. If more mid-tier protocols follow Mantle, the network effect could tip further. If a major lending protocol or stablecoin issuer migrates, the conversation shifts entirely. For now, the interoperability map of DeFi has a new gravity well, and it is sitting squarely inside Chainlink’s orbit.
AUTHOR
Max delves deep into the cryptocurrency realm, with a passion for altcoins and NFTs. Convinced of crypto's transformative potential, he envisions a decentralized financial future. Max's background in the financial sector grants him unique insights into global monetary systems. In his leisure, Max embraces the thrill of adventures and is an avid sports enthusiast, finding balance and rejuvenation away from work.
The migration to Chainlink CCIP strengthens the security of MNT as it moves across chains, laying the foundation for Mantle’s strategy for powering the future of tokenized finance at scale.
DUBAI, UAE, July 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Mantle, the premier distribution layer connecting traditional finance and on-chain liquidity, today announced the migration of its Mantle Super Portal, co-developed with Bybit, from LayerZero to Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). This upgrade brings the industry’s highest level of cross-chain security to MNT, the token underpinning Mantle’s $2.5B+ ecosystem, marking a significant step forward in hardening the infrastructure that moves value across the Mantle ecosystem.
With billions lost to cross-chain exploits, bridging infrastructure has emerged as one of the most security-sensitive surfaces in the industry, concentrating both the largest volume of value in transit and the greatest exposure to risk. Following a review of its cross-chain infrastructure to bolster higher ecosystem security, Mantle selected Chainlink CCIP as the solution that met its rigorous security requirements. Built on a defense-in-depth architecture, CCIP features:
Robust cross-chain security: CCIP establishes a strong security floor for all cross-chain transfers through the default use of Chainlink’s robust Decentralized Oracle Network (DON) infrastructure. Decentralized node infrastructure: Every CCIP bridge lane is secured by 16 independent, high-quality, and security-reviewed node operators. Advanced risk management: CCIP features native rate limits that act as circuit breakers to limit contagion during extreme scenarios. Institutional security standards: CCIP is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, meeting the strict enterprise-grade security standards required by major institutions. As the value moving through the Super Portal accelerates, the security standard required to secure rises with it. Mantle’s migration to Chainlink CCIP reflects a calculated decision to meet that standard, driven by security and risk considerations, and to align with a broader industry shift towards secure-by-default infrastructure.
The Super Portal will be temporarily suspended during the migration, tentatively scheduled for 9 to 15 July 2026. As with any infrastructure migration of this scale, the window may extend slightly beyond this estimate to ensure a complete and secure transition. No action is required from users: existing MNT on Ethereum and Solana is unaffected, as are all interactions involving MNT on Byreal and Bybit, and transfers will resume automatically once the migration is complete.
A Security Upgrade for the Mantle Super Portal
The Mantle Super Portal, developed in collaboration with Bybit, is Mantle’s cross-chain hub for moving MNT between ecosystems. It currently connects MNT between Ethereum and Solana, with further routes planned as Mantle expands.
With this migration, MNT has deprecated LayerZero OFT and adopted the Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard, with all transfers through the Super Portal now secured by Chainlink CCIP. Under the CCT standard, all transfer controls are configured by Mantle, providing full autonomy and ownership over its smart contracts and cross-chain token pool.
Beyond strengthening security, the migration establishes the foundation for MNT to interoperate across a wider range of chains, venues, and markets as Mantle grows, complemented by Bybit’s support for MNT deposits and withdrawals on Solana.
Chainlink CCIP is widely adopted across the blockchain industry to secure cross-chain transfers of high-value assets, as it is built on the same battle-tested Chainlink infrastructure that secures approximately 70% of DeFi and has enabled $32+ trillion in onchain value.
“As tokenized financial assets move from concept to scale, the infrastructure that carries them across chains cannot be an afterthought,” said Emily Bao, Key Advisor at Mantle. “Deprecating our legacy bridging solution and migrating the Super Portal to Chainlink CCIP brings every MNT cross-chain transfer in line with the security standards of the world’s largest financial institutions. It is the level of assurance the next phase of on-chain finance demands.”
“We’re continuing to see an industry trend of leading protocols upgrading their cross-chain infrastructure to meet the requirements of institutional adoption. Mantle’s migration to Chainlink CCIP reflects the growing recognition that secure-by-default infrastructure is critical for any cross-chain deployment to succeed at scale.” Johann Eid, Chief Business Officer, Chainlink Labs
Building the Secure Foundation for Tokenized Finance
As tokenized equities, money market funds, and other regulated assets increasingly move on-chain, the infrastructure carrying them is being held to the standards of traditional finance. Securing the Super Portal with Chainlink CCIP reinforces Mantle’s position as the distribution layer connecting traditional finance and on-chain liquidity, where security of this caliber is a precondition and builds toward Mantle and Bybit’s continued commitment to grow MNT through further integrations, opportunities, and use cases.
Mantle’s vision of a full-stack RWA layer, built on bedrock liquidity, aligns directly with Chainlink’s evolution into an all-in-one oracle platform powering real-world asset tokenization, collateral mobility, and composability across chains. That alignment extends into the infrastructure itself as Chainlink secures the flow of value, Mantle secures the rails it moves on.
As the ecosystem grows, Mantle will continue to deploy the most secure infrastructure available across its stack, matching the protection of every asset to the value it carries.
About Mantle
Mantle positions itself as the premier distribution layer and gateway for institutions and TradFi to connect with on-chain liquidity and access real-world assets, powering how real-world finance flows. With over $2B+ in community-owned assets, Mantle combines credibility, liquidity and scalability with institutional-grade infrastructure to support large-scale adoption. The ecosystem is anchored by $MNT within Bybit, and built out through core ecosystem projects like mETH, fBTC, MI4 and more. This is complemented by Mantle’s partnerships with leading issuers and protocols such as Ethena USDe, Ondo USDY, and OP-Succinct.
For more information visit mantle.xyz.
For more social updates, please follow: Mantle Official X & Mantle Community Channel
For media enquiries, please contact: [email protected]
About Chainlink
Chainlink is the industry-standard oracle platform bringing the capital markets onchain and the market leader powering the majority of DeFi. The Chainlink stack provides the essential data, interoperability, compliance, and privacy standards needed to power advanced blockchain use cases for institutional tokenized assets, lending, payments, stablecoins, and more. Since inventing decentralized oracle networks, Chainlink has enabled tens of trillions in transaction value and now secures the vast majority of DeFi.
Many of the world’s largest financial services institutions have also adopted Chainlink’s standards and infrastructure, including Swift, Euroclear, Mastercard, Fidelity International, UBS, S&P Dow Jones Indices, FTSE Russell, WisdomTree, ANZ, and top protocols such as Aave, Polymarket, Lido, Lighter, and many others. Chainlink leverages a novel fee model where offchain and onchain revenue from enterprise adoption is converted to LINK tokens and stored in a strategic Chainlink Reserve. Learn more at chain.link.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
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Stablecoin issuer Circle has come under scrutiny from US prosecutors over allegations that it has resisted court orders and law enforcement requests aimed at recovering crypto stolen through scams, according to officials in Wisconsin and New York.
The dispute centers on a Wisconsin fraud case in which Circle froze approximately 381,000 USDC but later declined to comply with a court order directing it to invalidate those tokens and issue replacements to law enforcement.
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Circle has denied wrongdoing, arguing it lacked the technical ability to carry out the order, that the complaint should be dismissed, and that prosecutors failed to pursue alternative solutions.
Law enforcement officials say the case underscores the growing challenge of combating crypto-enabled fraud, as funds can be transferred across blockchains before courts can intervene.
Prosecutors have also questioned Circle’s policy of freezing assets only through a formal legal process, while industry experts argue the company could implement technology similar to rival Tether’s system for burning and reissuing stolen tokens.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood said the firm’s research views stablecoins as monetary networks that become stronger as adoption grows, driven by trust, collateral use and integration across financial platforms.
Wood said those network effects have helped Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC establish dominant positions in the stablecoin market.
Referring to research by Director of Digital Assets at Arc Invest, Lorenzo Valente, she said newer entrants such as Open USD (OUSD) are unlikely to overtake market leaders.
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In @ARKInvest’s view, stablecoins are monetary networks with effects that compound over time, thanks to trust, collateral utility, and integrations. The network effects of USDT and USDC have been powerful. @LorenzoARK explains convincingly why OUSD is unlikely to displace them. https://t.co/qEUimwpsiK
— Cathie Wood (@CathieDWood) July 9, 2026
Open Standard, led by Stripe-owned Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams, introduced OUSD late last month.
The stablecoin is supported by more than 140 companies, though Samsung Electronics, Shinhan Financial Group and other South Korean companies said they never formally agreed to participate in the consortium.
Launch backers like BlackRock, Visa, Stripe, Google, Coinbase and DBS said the initiative aims to lower the cost of stablecoin adoption by removing issuance and redemption fees, sharing most reserve income with participants and establishing independent governance. OUSD is expected to launch later this year and is intended to reduce reliance on centralized issuers while expanding institutional access.
The announcement comes as competition in the stablecoin market intensifies. The sector has grown to nearly $308 billion, and major payments companies have stepped up investment through acquisitions and new blockchain-based settlement services.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
This is a general announcement. Products and services referred to here may not be available in your region. Terms and conditions apply. Fellow Binancians, Binance Pool is excited to celebrate Binance 9th Year Anniversary (9YA) with an exclusive campaign for our miners*. Mine BTC, BCH, LTC & ETC on Binance Pool during the Promotion Period and share 4,000 USDC rewards! Promotion Period: 2026-07-10 00:00 (UTC) to 2026-08-09 23:59 (UTC) How to Participate: During the Promotion Period, eligible miners can complete the following steps to participate and qualify for both Reward Pools A and B: Complete identity verification (KYC).Mine BTC/BCH/LTC/ETC on Binance Pool with a verified mining account.Increase your average hashrate compared to your baseline period*.Eligible users will be ranked by Hashrate Gain within their respective groups. Refer to the BTC mining FAQ and the Activity Terms below for more information. This Promotion is open to all eligible Binance Pool users during the Promotion Period, including existing and new users*. Reward Pool A: 9 USDC Welcome – New Miner Bonus During the Promotion Period, eligible new miners* who maintain the minimum Average Daily Hashrate for their respective token will each receive 9 USDC, as per the table below: TokenMin. Avg Daily HashrateReward per Eligible UserNo. of Eligible UserReward PoolBTC≥ 150 TH/s9 USDC100900 USDCBCH≥ 200 TH/s9 USDC25225 USDCLTC≥ 30 GH/s9 USDC25225 USDCETC≥ 20 GH/s9 USDC20180 USDC Note: *New miners are defined as users who have not registered a Binance Pool mining account before 2026-07-10 00:00 (UTC).Average Daily Hashrate = (User's Hashrate × Number of Days Mined) / 31 daysThe calculation is based on the full 31-day Promotion Period regardless of when a user begins mining. Users who start later will have a lower average daily hashrate.Rewards are distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. Reward Pool B: BTC Hashrate Leaderboard Eligible users will be placed into a reward group based on their BTC Hashrate Gain (TH/s) during the Promotion Period. Within each group, the top 5 users with the highest BTC Hashrate Gain during the Promotion Period will receive rewards: GroupIndividual BTC Hashrate Gain During Promotion Period (TH/S)Rewards per Eligible User150 < Individual Hashrate Gain ≤ 2509 USDC each2250 < Individual Hashrate Gain ≤ 50019 USDC each3500 < Individual Hashrate Gain ≤ 1,00029 USDC each41,000 < Individual Hashrate Gain ≤ 4,00039 USDC each54,000 < Individual Hashrate Gain ≤ 9,00099 USDC each6> 9,000299 USDC each Note: *If two or more users have the same Hashrate Gain within a group, rankings will be determined by the higher campaign average hashrate. Hashrate Gain Calculation: Hashrate gain is calculated based on each eligible user’s average hashrate:Campaign Average Hashrate: The user’s average BTC hashrate during the Promotion Period.Baseline Average Hashrate: The user’s average BTC hashrate from 2026-06-09 00:00 (UTC) to 2026-07-09 23:59 (UTC).Hashrate Gain (TH/s) = Campaign Average Hashrate − Baseline Average Hashrate*If a user had no BTC hashrate during the baseline period, their Baseline Average Hashrate will be treated as 0. Join the Promotion Now! Terms and Conditions: These terms and conditions (“Activity Terms”) govern users’ participation in the activity above (“Activity”). By participating in this Activity, users agree to these Activity Terms, and the following additional terms: (a) Binance Terms and Conditions for Prize Promotions; (b) Binance Terms of Use; and (c) Binance Privacy Notice; all of which are incorporated by reference into these terms and conditions. In the case of any inconsistency or conflict between these Activity Terms, and any other incorporated terms, the provisions of these Activity Terms shall prevail, followed by the following in this order of precedence, and to the extent of such conflict: (a) Binance Terms and Conditions for Prize Promotions; (b) Binance Terms of Use; and (c) Binance Privacy Notice.This activity may not be available in your region. Users are responsible for informing themselves about and observing any restrictions and/or requirements imposed with respect to the access to and use of Binance services in each country from which the services are accessed. Eligible users must be logged in to their verified Binance accounts whilst meeting the aforementioned criteria during the Promotion Period in order for their participation to be counted as valid. Users must have their accounts verified to be eligible for any rewards.This Promotion is not open to Binance VIP users.Users benefiting from any fee discount, rebate, or preferential fee arrangement are not eligible for this Promotion. The standard fee rate is 4%.The results dashboard will be published within 14 working days after the Promotion Period ends, displaying the final rankings and reward distribution details.USDC token rewards will be distributed to eligible users’ Spot Accounts within 14 working days after the Promotion ends.Binance reserves the right to disqualify a user’s reward eligibility if the account is involved in any dishonest behavior (e.g., wash trading, illegally bulk account registrations/logins, self dealing, or market manipulation). Binance further reserves the right to disqualify any participants who tamper with Binance program code, or interfere with the operation of Binance program code with other software.At Binance's sole discretion, user participation will be considered without effect and users will automatically be excluded, disqualified and prevented from accumulating benefits, in cases where it is identified: Any violations of Binance's Terms of Use and its Compliance Policies, as well as attempted or proven fraud, human and/or through the use of technology; Manipulation of results or failure to fulfill the requirements and provisions set forth in these Activity Terms; Completion, by the user, of incorrect, outdated, mistaken information or filled with untrue information, and may also be liable for the crime of ideological or documental falsehood; Registrations and participations for which any technological means have been used or there are indications of their use, whether electronic, computerized, digital, robotic, repetitive, automatic, mechanical and/or analogous, with the intention of automatic and/or repetitive reproduction of registrations, identical or not, which will also result in the nullity of all registrations and participations made by the user who has used one of the aforementioned means or for one of the aforementioned purposes, even if not all registrations or participations have resulted from the use of such means and/or were carried out with such purpose.Binance reserves the right at any time in its sole and absolute discretion to determine and/or amend or vary these terms and conditions without prior notice, including but not limited to canceling, extending, terminating, or suspending these activities, the eligibility terms and criteria, the selection and number of winners, and the timing of any act to be done, and all Participants shall be bound by these amendments.There may be discrepancies between this original content in English and any translated versions. Please refer to the original English version for the most accurate information, in case any discrepancies arise. Thank you for your support! Binance Team 2026-07-09 USDC is an e-money token issued by Circle Internet Financial Europe SAS (https://www.circle.com/). USDC’s whitepaper is available here. You may contact Circle using the following contact information: +33(1)59000130 and [email protected]. Holders of USDC have a legal claim against Circle SAS as the EU issuer of USDC. These holders are entitled to request redemption of their USDC from Circle SAS. Such redemption will be made at any time and at par value.
Crypto-related stocks in U.S. markets continued their rally during trading hours, with MARA surging 15.27%.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), US-listed crypto-related stocks continued to strengthen during intraday trading. Details: Strategy (MSTR) rose 2.11%; Circle (CRCL) gained 0.83%; MARA Holdings (MARA) surged 15.27% after announcing the acquisition of a Texas-based 2000MW computing power park project company for up to $600 million; Riot Platforms (RIOT) climbed 6.1%.
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JPMorgan: The biggest risk for Bitcoin is not Strategy’s sell-off, but blockchain adoption that bypasses public chains and tokens.
JPMorgan Chase’s analyst team noted that the market views Strategy’s Bitcoin sale plan as a key risk for the crypto sector, but it is not a major structural threat to Bitcoin. The more fundamental risk lies in tokenization, payments, and settlements increasingly taking place on permissioned infrastructure that does not rely on public blockchains. If this trend continues, the entire crypto ecosystem could face a "structural downgrade"—marked by slower transaction activity, reduced liquidity, and weaker capital inflows—ultimately weighing on Bitcoin. The analysts stated bluntly: "In our view, a more significant risk stems from the way blockchain is adopted in traditional finance, which continues to bypass public, permissionless networks." The analysts explained that institutional adoption so far has clearly favored permissioned chains, as they offer advantages in privacy, KYC/AML controls, governance, throughput, legal accountability, and regulatory certainty, posing a competitive threat to public blockchains like Ethereum. If tokenized deposits are widely adopted—especially in non-transferable forms favored by regulators—it could reduce demand for stablecoins in institutional payments and settlements; SWIFT’s blockchain initiative and central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects such as the digital euro and digital renminbi further strengthen regulated alternatives. In the roughly $500 billion tokenized real-world assets market, while Ethereum currently holds a certain share, this likely reflects early-stage experimentation rather than the market’s long-term structure. As institutional adoption grows, issuance, custody, settlement, and lifecycle management will likely be conducted more on private or permissioned infrastructure that meets requirements for identity, confidentiality, and operational resilience, with public blockchains used only for distribution and limited secondary trading.
40 minutes ago
Security Warning: Abnormal on-chain fund flows detected for the CodexField project on BNB Chain.
On-chain investigator Specter has issued a community security alert, warning of potential fund misappropriation risks associated with the CodexField project on BNB Chain. On-chain tracking shows the project has amassed over $85 million in funds. Specter detected abnormal on-chain fund flows yesterday: a wallet bridged 17.3 million USDT from TRON to Ethereum, then swapped the tokens for DAI via Bitget Swap on Polygon. So far, $6.5 million has been transferred out, while the remaining $10.8 million is still in transit. The funds were originally bridged from Ethereum to TRON roughly six months ago, and the source wallet is linked to CodexField’s deposit contract. Below are key addresses for users to verify on their own: EVM: 0xBc606358910b3720d136F0d4Ce12b759C270747a TRON: TQNTEYadFVVQeobBtctSjurJ5RpfBsTmqh, TAzpg8L1WkkzCxxZk8TYnvaRYahehh52MK Related deposit contract: 0x9E6A75b546B65E7B9D34E2c9aB8Fe224B9aA52AA Additional red flags: The project requires a minimum $100 deposit for participation. Blockchain security tool Blocksec MetaSuites initially labeled the deposit contract as "Fake CodexField", but Specter’s follow-up investigation found the contract is actually operated by the CodexField team itself. The project uses multiple domains and subdomains to collect user deposits, and the team previously shared these domains via official channels. Its fund flow pattern is unusual, deviating from standard fund management practices: the project bridges funds across multiple blockchains, routes them through intermediate wallets, and ultimately sends assets to centralized exchanges. Specter noted that based on on-chain activity, the project warrants high vigilance. It advises all users interacting with CodexField to exercise extreme caution until the team provides a transparent explanation of its fund movements.
40 minutes ago
Post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security closes $17 million seed round.
QIZ Security, a crypto posture and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) management platform, announced the completion of a $17 million seed funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital. The capital will be used to accelerate product R&D and market expansion. QIZ Security was co-founded by Ben Volkow, Lenny Ridel, and Itan Barmes; the team has years of experience in cybersecurity, enterprise services, and post-quantum transformation, with Barmes previously leading Deloitte’s global quantum cybersecurity readiness team. Its platform helps enterprises identify and assess crypto asset risks and implement remediation measures, and is currently applied in industries including finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. It has also established partnerships with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, and IBM, among others.
40 minutes ago
Hyperliquid recommends that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally recognize that on-chain protocols are not required to register, and non-custodial wallets do not serve as financial intermediaries.
Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and Phantom have jointly submitted comments to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in response to the agency’s request for feedback on whether existing rules keep pace with the evolution of financial technology, proposing to explicitly extend the distinction between "building tools" and "operating regulated businesses" to on-chain markets. The comments note that software engineers have been developing matching engines for regulated futures trading platforms for decades, and the CFTC has never classified them as trading platform operators. However, developers in the digital asset sector have long lacked such clarity, forcing many to opt for offshore development. The current CFTC, led by Chairman Selig, is working to address this gap and carve out room for innovation for fintech firms in digital asset and derivatives markets. The two entities put forward three key recommendations: First, explicitly confirm that merely publishing on-chain protocol software itself does not require registration — a factor often decisive for engineers when choosing where to develop. Second, establish a clear path for the CFTC’s registration bodies to operate regulated functions using on-chain infrastructure, enabling trading platforms and clearinghouses to replace decades-old legacy systems with transparent infrastructure. Third, formalize Phantom’s recent no-action letter into official rules, eliminating the need for self-custody wallet providers to apply for approved exemptions on a case-by-case basis. HPC and Phantom stress that self-custody and transparent on-chain systems can embed investor protection directly into technology, while regulated intermediaries retain responsibility for issues that technology cannot resolve independently. This approach will bring the next generation of financial markets within reach of U.S. consumers.
40 minutes ago
Micron raises its U.S. investment plan to $250 billion, betting on demand for AI memory chips.
Micron Technology plans to increase spending on its new U.S. factory to $250 billion to meet the surging demand for memory chips driven by the global artificial intelligence boom. The move adds $50 billion to Micron’s previously announced $200 billion commitment to expanding domestic U.S. chip manufacturing, covering projects in New York, Idaho, and Virginia. The expenditure is expected to run through 2035, and will help the company achieve its target of producing 40% of its DRAM products in the U.S. within the next decade.
Criminal Complaint Against Circle Puts USDC Freeze Policy Under a Microscope
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Ahmed Balaha is a journalist and copywriter based in Georgia with a growing focus on blockchain technology, DeFi, AI, privacy, digital assets, and fintech innovation.
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A criminal complaint filed by Wisconsin prosecutors against Circle, the company behind USDC, has put an uncomfortable question back in the spotlight. Why does the world’s second-largest stablecoin issuer appear far less willing than Tether to help law enforcement recover stolen crypto?
An ICIJ investigation published on July 8 points to three issues driving the debate. Circle insists it only freezes funds after receiving valid legal orders, disputes claims it can simply burn and reissue stolen tokens, and rejects allegations from New York prosecutors that it profits by leaving frozen assets untouched. Meanwhile, critics say that the policy leaves scam victims waiting while their money disappears.
The case started with a romance scam in Walworth County, Wisconsin. A resident identified only as “Victim #1” was convinced to buy USDC and send about 381,000 tokens to what turned out to be a fake investment platform. After investigators traced the funds, a judge ordered Circle to freeze the wallet. The company did so without delay.
Months later, the court took the next step. It ordered Circle to invalidate those frozen tokens and issue the same amount of fresh USDC to the Walworth County Sheriff’s Office. Circle refused, saying it does not have the technical ability to burn and reissue USDC held inside someone else’s wallet. Prosecutors responded with a criminal complaint, an unusual move against a company of Circle’s size.
Circle later asked the court to dismiss the case. It argued the Wisconsin court lacked jurisdiction and said prosecutors ignored alternative proposals it had offered to compensate the victim. Walworth County prosecutor Thomas Binger said the dispute shows how quickly scammers can move funds compared with the pace of the legal system.
ICIJ: Circle Faces Criminal Complaint in Wisconsin Over Refusal to Recover Scam Victim Funds
An ICIJ investigation reported that law enforcement authorities in Wisconsin and New York accused Circle of refusing to assist in freezing or recovering scam victims’ USDC. Wisconsin… pic.twitter.com/QZv7PNN0Du
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) July 9, 2026 The Wisconsin case is not the only one raising questions. Earlier this year, New York prosecutors told U.S. senators that Circle generally requires court orders before freezing USDC and has not consistently returned stolen funds after courts approved their release. Since stablecoin transfers settle within seconds, investigators argue valuable time is often lost before legal paperwork is complete.
Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio
The Debate Over Frozen FundsNew York prosecutors also made a more serious allegation. They argued Circle continues earning interest on reserve assets backing frozen USDC, giving the company little financial incentive to return those funds quickly. Circle has not accepted that claim.
Blockchain researcher Yury Serov estimates that at least 119 million USDC is currently frozen. Those tokens cannot move, but they remain backed by reserve assets unless another process removes them permanently.
Circle’s technical explanation has also drawn criticism. Joshua Cooper-Duckett of Cryptoforensic Investigators told ICIJ the company could update its smart contracts to support burning and reissuing tokens held in third-party wallets. Circle did not answer when asked whether it could make those changes.
One detail from the court filings caught investigators’ attention. Circle disclosed it had already discussed a victim compensation process with federal prosecutors that involved permanently freezing stolen tokens before issuing replacement USDC. The company did not explain whether that arrangement applies outside federal cases.
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Circle USDC vs. Tether’s Model and the 30x GapThe difference between Circle and Tether is hard to ignore. AMLBot data shows Tether froze about $3.3 billion in USDT across more than 7,200 wallets between 2023 and 2025. Circle froze about $109 million in USDC over the same period, a 30 times gap by value.
Part of that difference comes from Tether’s burn and reissue process. After freezing stolen USDT, the company can destroy those tokens and issue clean replacements to law enforcement or victims.
Tether says it has already reissued around $1.1 billion and frozen $4.7 billion linked to illicit activity. Circle does not currently offer the same public process for third-party wallets, although its court filings show it has discussed similar arrangements with federal authorities.
The companies also draw the line in different places. Tether has said it sometimes acts before courts become involved if law enforcement requests help. Circle says it only responds through formal legal process, arguing that the approach protects users from wrongful or politically motivated freezes. Investigators counter that by the time those orders arrive, stolen crypto is often long gone.
Milwaukee County detective Scott Simons told ICIJ he has worked on more than a dozen cases where Circle either declined an early freeze request or where the court order came too late. For many victims, he said, the answer is simply that the money is gone.
Don’t Miss Out on Our $1,000 USDT Airdrop on ByBit
Ethena Labs just removed one of the biggest friction points in its synthetic dollar ecosystem. Onboarded mint users can now mint and redeem USDe using USDC at zero fees, eliminating the basis-point toll that previously ate into every conversion.
The change applies exclusively to whitelisted participants who have cleared KYC and KYB checks and signed Ethena’s Mint User Agreement. Everyone else still gets their USDe the old-fashioned way: through secondary markets, exchanges, or partner platforms like Morpho vaults.
What actually changed and why it matters Before this update, direct minting and redemption of USDe was already restricted to vetted counterparties, primarily market makers and institutional participants. But even those approved users were paying fees on the conversion. Now that cost drops to 0 bps.
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Ethena has also indicated it will update fee schedules for transactions involving non-whitelisted assets, with the new rates visible on public dashboards. So while USDC conversions are now free, other collateral types may still carry costs.
USDe’s positioning in the stablecoin landscape USDe is a delta-neutral synthetic dollar built on Ethereum, which means it maintains its peg not by holding dollars in a bank account but by combining crypto collateral with offsetting derivatives positions. The result is a token that tracks the dollar without directly depending on fiat reserves.
This makes it fundamentally different from USDC, which is backed 1:1 by cash and cash equivalents held by Circle.
Ethena’s integrations extend across both DeFi and CeFi. The protocol works with platforms including HTX for direct mint and redeem functionality, and Morpho for vault-based strategies.
What this means for investors and the broader market The restriction to KYC’d and KYB’d users is worth noting. Ethena is clearly threading the needle between DeFi accessibility and regulatory compliance. For institutions and compliant funds, this is a non-issue. For the permissionless-maximalist crowd, it’s another reminder that the biggest DeFi protocols are increasingly operating within traditional compliance frameworks.
A delta-neutral strategy is only as good as the funding rates it captures from derivatives markets. In periods of sustained negative funding, USDe’s value proposition gets tested in ways that free minting can’t solve. Investors eyeing this development should watch not just the fee structure, but the underlying health of the derivatives markets that keep USDe’s engine running.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
