Monday’s 3% rise in XRP looked simple on the surface, but heavy volume told a deeper story. The token pushed decisively past the $1.14 resistance level, only to encounter a wall of selling near $1.16, according to the market update. Now the same $1.14 level that had capped prices is repurposed as a critical support floor, putting short-term traders on watch.
The volume accompanying the breakout suggested genuine participation rather than a low-liquidity spike. In summer’s thinner order books, such moves can be exaggerated, but the fact that sellers immediately emerged at $1.16 indicates overhead supply remains. Traders who missed the initial move are now waiting to see if $1.14 can hold a retest. The token had spent the previous two weeks in a tight consolidation, making Monday’s push the first real test of range-bound exhaustion. If the level holds, the breakout gains credibility. A failure would likely send XRP back toward the $1.10 area where previous consolidation occurred.
Altcoin Momentum Builds XRP’s push came amid a patch of renewed strength across the altcoin landscape. Earlier this year, tokens like SUI saw explosive rallies on the back of institutional catalysts—SUI surged 18% when a Nasdaq-linked staking deal and fintech integration hit the tape. More recently, the weekly leaderboard has been dominated by double-digit altcoin gains, reinforcing a rotation toward projects with tangible narratives, as seen in the week’s top gainers. While XRP’s 3% move is modest by comparison, the technical breakout on volume puts it in a different category—one where the chart, not just news, drives decision-making.
Still, no token escapes the long shadow of regulation, and XRP is no exception. The SEC lawsuit years ago redefined how traders price risk premiums into the token. Now, with banking interests pushing to derail a major U.S. crypto bill just days before a Senate vote, the regulatory mood could shift quickly. A bill that provides clarity for digital assets would likely be a tailwind for tokens caught in legal limbo, and XRP’s support test may be short-lived if political headwinds intensify.
The Support Test For now, the immediate question is technical: will $1.14 hold? The level served as resistance multiple times in recent weeks, so a sustained close above it would signal that buyers are absorbing the selling pressure around $1.16. Traders are watching the four-hour and daily closes. A clean hold could invite momentum chasers and potentially set up a run toward $1.20—though any move would likely need a fresh catalyst to break the current range.
The uncertainty is palpable. Heavy volume on a breakout followed by rejection often leads to a choppy period where neither side wins convincingly. If XRP slips back below $1.14 within the next couple of sessions, the breakout narrative weakens and the token could drift back into its multi-week trading range. Conversely, a successful support test backed by declining sell orders near the highs would mark a structural shift in the order book. Until then, the market is left parsing every tick, waiting to see whether the breakout was a false start or the beginning of a more durable uptrend.
AUTHOR
Brenda is a writer with three years of experience specializing in cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. She graduated from the University of Mombasa with a degree in Psychology. She has worked at Cryptopolitan and Blockchain Reporter.
While Bitcoin and altcoins continue their sideways movement, developments related to MICA, one of the most talked-about topics in the cryptocurrency market, continue to unfold.
The latest news comes from Ripple. The company behind the altcoin XRP announced today that it has received a Crypto Asset Service Provider (CASP) license in Luxembourg under the European Union’s Crypto Asset Markets (MiCA) regulation.
In this context, Ripple announced that it has received full Crypto Asset Service Provider (CASP) authorization from Luxembourg’s CSSF under the EU’s MiCA framework.
This approval follows its preliminary authorization in June and allows Ripple to offer regulated crypto services in all 30 countries of the European Economic Area.
Cassie Craddock, Ripple’s General Manager for the UK and Europe, stated, “This CASP authorization means Ripple is entering the post-MiCA era fully compliant and scalable. The organizations we work with across Europe want to develop digital asset services alongside regulated partners, and Ripple is licensed and ready to meet that demand.”
Ripple also stated that it holds more than 75 regulatory licenses globally.
It’s official: Ripple has received its EU CASP license. We are now fully MiCA-compliant and ready to meet growing European crypto demand https://t.co/I9GRgvfGzH
— Ripple (@Ripple) July 6, 2026
Binance Failed to Obtain a License! In contrast, Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has been unable to obtain a license under the European Union (EU) MICA. As a result, Binance is suspending its trading services in some European countries, including France, due to its lack of a MICA license.
In this context, Binance suspended its spot and margin trading services for users in affected countries starting from May 1st, when the MICA regulations fully came into effect. Currently, users can withdraw cryptocurrencies but cannot make new transactions.
MICA is legislation introduced to create a unified regulatory framework for crypto assets across the EU, and in principle, unlicensed exchanges cannot provide trading services in the region. In this regard, major global exchanges, including Binance, are undergoing licensing processes to meet regulatory requirements.
*This is not investment advice.
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Although XRP has slowed in its recent price rally, stabilizing around the $1.13–$1.14 price range, crypto market traders believe there are still further rallies ahead.
With XRP back in the spotlight, traders on crypto prediction platform Kalshi are pricing in a further price rally for XRP after enduring several months of extreme volatility.
The data shows that 33% of Kalshi traders have forecast that XRP could climb to $1.30 before the end of July as XRP remains steady on the upside.
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XRP retains bullish sentiment The bullish XRP prediction from traders on Kalshi has caught the attention of investors as it is coming amid renewed momentum for XRP.
After dropping as low as $1.01 during the previous week, XRP has rapidly climbed to around $1.14 as of the time of writing, posting an impressive 8.32% gain over the past week.
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The XRP price rally started when the new month began, igniting a fresh surge of bullish sentiment among investors who believe that the $1.30 prediction could just be the start.
Analysts have also mentioned that the recent rally could be an early sign that XRP is attempting to break out from the heavy volatility that has negatively impacted its price movements for several months.
History confirms further XRP rally in JulyApart from the prediction from Kalshi traders, historical data has also backed the forecast, as past yearly performance records suggest that July has often been one of XRP's more favorable months.
Since 2020, XRP has continued to deliver strong July gains, including returns of 35%, 31.2%, 26.3%, and nearly 60% over the past years.
With XRP already breaking out of the prolonged market volatility seen in the past few months, the XRP community strongly believes that there are more price rallies to witness this month.
On the first day of every month, one billion XRP leaves a set of locked contracts on the XRP Ledger, and every month traders argue about what it means. Here is the full machinery: why the escrow was created, how the ledger enforces it, where the released tokens actually go, and how to read the unlock without being fooled by the headline number.
At around 07:30 UTC on July 1, 2026, on-chain trackers flagged three transfers on the XRP Ledger: 200 million XRP, then 300 million, then 500 million, exactly one billion tokens worth roughly $1.04 billion at the time. Nobody at Ripple pressed a button that morning. The release was executed by the ledger itself, under contracts written in December 2017, on a schedule that has repeated on the first of the month for years.
The event has become a monthly ritual. Whale Alert posts the transfers, headlines announce that a billion dollars of XRP has been unlocked, newer holders panic, and veterans point out that most of the tokens will be locked right back up within days. Both camps are reacting to the same mechanism, and most people in both camps could not explain how it actually works: what an escrow is at the ledger level, why Ripple built one, how much XRP truly enters circulation each month, or how long the whole arrangement can continue.
The escrow also sits at the center of XRP’s sharpest ongoing argument. When Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse attacked Strategy’s Bitcoin financing in late June, saying financial engineering does not drive long-term value, critics immediately pointed at the escrow: Ripple funds itself, in part, by selling tokens from this very system every month. Understanding the mechanism is now a prerequisite for understanding the debate.
This guide covers the escrow end to end: the 2017 problem it was built to solve, the transaction types that enforce it, the monthly release and relock cycle, the destinations of the sold tokens, the supply math, the price question, the criticism, and how to track all of it yourself.
The problem the escrow was built to solve When the XRP Ledger launched in 2012, all 100 billion XRP that will ever exist were created at once. There is no mining and no staking issuance; the full supply existed on day one. The founders gifted the majority of it to the company that became Ripple, which used sales of the token to fund operations, partnerships, and ecosystem development.
That arrangement created a permanent shadow over the market. Through 2017, Ripple still held more than half of all XRP in ordinary accounts it could spend at will. Every rally ran into the same objection: nothing stopped the company from selling tens of billions of tokens into strength whenever it chose. The overhang was not hypothetical selling; it was the unlimited possibility of selling, which no buyer could price.
Ripple’s answer, announced in mid-2017 and executed that December, was to lock 55 billion XRP, then worth a dominant share of its holdings, into a chain of escrow contracts enforced by the ledger itself. The contracts were structured as 55 monthly tranches of one billion XRP each, releasing on the first day of each month. Whatever the company did not use in a given month would be returned to new escrows queued at the back of the line.
The design converted an open-ended threat into a bounded, published schedule. After December 2017, the maximum amount of new XRP that Ripple could bring into circulation in any month was one billion tokens, and everyone could verify the limit on-chain. The company gave up flexibility to buy credibility, the same trade a central bank makes when it publishes a policy rule, or a startup makes when it puts founder shares behind a vesting cliff.
It is worth being precise about what the escrow did not do. It did not reduce Ripple’s holdings by a single token, and it did not promise that the company would stop selling. It capped the pace. The distinction between locked supply and destroyed supply still drives confusion today, and it is the root of most bad takes about the monthly unlock.
What an escrow is on the XRP Ledger The escrow is not a legal agreement or a corporate pledge. It is a native feature of the XRP Ledger protocol, which means the lockup is enforced by the same consensus rules that validate every payment on the network. Ripple could not release the tokens early even if it wanted to, short of convincing the validator network to change the protocol itself.
Three transaction types run the system. EscrowCreate locks an amount of XRP into a ledger entry with a source account, a destination account, and release conditions. EscrowFinish delivers the locked XRP to the destination once the conditions are met. EscrowCancel returns the XRP to the source if the escrow expires unfinished. The conditions can include a time before which the escrow cannot be finished, a time before which it cannot be cancelled, and optionally a cryptographic condition that must be satisfied for release.
Ripple’s supply escrows use the time lock: each tranche simply cannot be finished before the first day of its assigned month. Once that date passes, an EscrowFinish transaction moves the billion tokens to Ripple’s operational accounts, which is what the trackers flag every month. The tranches often arrive in pieces, like July’s 200, 300, and 500 million splits, because the original escrows were created as multiple entries.
The receiving accounts are secured with the ledger’s native multisignature scheme, which requires several keys to authorize spending and lets individual signers rotate credentials without moving the funds. That matters because a system holding tens of billions of dollars in value would otherwise be a single point of catastrophic failure.
Escrow was not built only for Ripple’s treasury. The feature was designed for conditional payments and cross-ledger settlement through the Interledger Protocol, and the same primitive now underpins more ambitious plumbing on the network, part of the same toolkit that is turning the ledger into a venue for institutional finance. Ripple’s supply schedule is simply the largest and most famous use of a general-purpose tool.
The monthly cycle: release, spend, relock The headline event, one billion XRP unlocked, is only the first step of a three-part cycle, and it is the least informative one.
Step one is the release. On the first of the month, the time lock on that month’s tranches expires and the tokens move to Ripple’s accounts. This is the moment Whale Alert broadcasts and headlines report. At July 2026 prices the billion tokens were worth about $1.04 billion; at the 2018 peak the same monthly release was worth more than three billion dollars. The dollar figure changes, the token count does not.
Step two is allocation. Ripple decides how much of the billion it actually needs for the month: sales to institutional partners, liquidity for payment corridors, ecosystem investments, and operating expenses. Historically this has been a minority of the release.
Step three is the relock. Within hours to days, Ripple returns the unused majority, typically 600 to 800 million tokens and in some months more, to fresh escrow contracts queued behind the existing schedule. In December 2025, for example, roughly 70 percent of the unlocked tokens went straight back into escrow. The relock transactions are just as public as the release, and experienced observers watch them far more closely than the unlock itself, because the difference between the two numbers is the only figure that matters.
That difference, the net release, has generally run between 200 and 300 million XRP per month across recent cycles. At current prices that is in the range of 200 to 350 million dollars of potential monthly supply, some of which goes to buyers who never touch an exchange. Back-of-envelope, a net release at that pace adds roughly four to six percent to circulating supply per year, a real but bounded inflation rate that the market can model years in advance.
The relock mechanics also explain why the escrow has lasted far beyond its original 55 months. Every returned token extends the queue, so the schedule keeps rolling forward. What was designed as a 55-month runway has become a self-extending conveyor that is still running nearly a decade later.
Where the released XRP actually goes The tokens Ripple keeps each month flow into a handful of destinations, and the mix has shifted with the company’s strategy and its legal history.
The most consequential category is institutional sales. Ripple sells XRP directly to financial institutions and market makers, historically to seed liquidity for its cross-border payment product, where XRP serves as a bridge asset between currencies. These direct sales were the exact activity at issue in the SEC lawsuit: the 2023 ruling found that Ripple’s institutional sales of XRP were unregistered securities offerings, while sales on exchanges to the public were not. The escrow itself was never the legal problem, but it is the reservoir those institutional sales draw from.
The second category is ecosystem funding. Grants to XRP Ledger developers, investments in companies building on the network, regional funds, and partnership incentives are routinely denominated in XRP. The company’s broader 2026 strategy, spanning payments, custody, stablecoins, and its role in projects like the Open USD consortium alongside RLUSD, is financed by a treasury in which escrowed XRP remains the largest asset.
The third category is ordinary corporate operations. Salaries, acquisitions, legal bills, and expansion are paid, directly or indirectly, from the same pool. Ripple has spent heavily on acquisitions in custody and prime brokerage, and token sales remain a funding source a conventional company would have to replace with equity or debt.
One thing Ripple does not do with the escrow is buy XRP back. The company runs buyback programs for its own private shares, not for the token. Community proposals to burn the remaining escrowed supply surface regularly, and Ripple has declined them; chief technology officer emeritus David Schwartz has publicly dismissed the idea that a burn would guarantee a lasting price rally.
The honest framing is that the escrow is a corporate treasury with a public spending speed limit. The tokens fund a company, and the schedule tells the market exactly how fast the funding can flow.
The supply math in 2026 The numbers as of mid-2026 look like this. Total XRP supply stands just below 100 billion, at roughly 99.99 billion, because transaction fees on the ledger are permanently destroyed; about 14 million XRP have been burned since 2012, a rounding error against total supply. Circulating supply is around 62 billion tokens. Ripple’s remaining escrowed stash is estimated near 38 billion XRP, with additional tokens held in its operational accounts.
Divide the escrow by the net release rate and you get the question every long-term holder eventually asks: when does it run out? At 200 to 300 million net tokens per month, current estimates put depletion roughly nine years out if present patterns hold. Schwartz has pushed back on attempts to name an exact year, arguing that no date can be pinned down because depletion depends entirely on how much of each monthly billion the company keeps versus relocks, which in turn depends on operational needs that nobody can forecast a decade ahead.
Both sides of that exchange are correct. The mechanical arithmetic gives a horizon in the mid-2030s; the caveat is that the divisor is a management decision renewed every month. A bull market that lets Ripple fund itself with fewer tokens stretches the runway. A spending surge shortens it. The escrow bounds the maximum pace at twelve billion tokens per year, but the actual pace floats.
The end state is worth thinking about now, because it inverts today’s dynamic. Every month the escrow shrinks, Ripple’s future maximum sell pressure shrinks with it, and the day the last tranche releases, the overhang that the escrow was built to manage is simply gone. Whether that is bullish supply exhaustion or the loss of a disciplined funding machine that kept the company honest is one of the more interesting open questions in XRP’s long-term story, and it gets one month closer on the first of every month.
Does the unlock move the price? The evidence for a reliable unlock effect is thin, and the reason is the schedule’s whole point: an event that everyone can see coming years in advance is an event the market can price in advance.
The release date never surprises anyone. The token amount never surprises anyone. The only genuine information in the monthly cycle is the relock figure, which reveals how much Ripple kept, and even that varies within a well-known band. Short-term traders do report a pattern of mild pressure and elevated volume around the first of the month, a one to three percent wobble is commonly cited, but disentangling that from ordinary volatility in an asset that moves five percent on quiet days is close to impossible.
The July 2026 unlock is a useful case study. The billion tokens released on July 1 landed in a market where XRP had just closed its worst month in recent memory, down nearly 20 percent in June to a 19-month low near $1.01, before recovering to trade around $1.04. Headlines framed the unlock as another weight on a drowning asset. Yet the same week, spot XRP ETFs in the United States were extending a multi-week streak of net inflows even as Bitcoin funds bled, meaning regulated institutional demand was absorbing supply while the escrow released it. The unlock was the loudest supply story and close to the least informative one.
The deeper lesson is the same one that applies to reading ETF creation and redemption data: headline gross numbers mislead, and net figures matter. A billion unlocked is a gross number. Six to eight hundred million relocked is the offset. Two to three hundred million net, sold gradually, partly off-exchange, into a market that trades more than a billion dollars of XRP daily, is the real supply event, and it is modest.
None of that makes the unlock irrelevant. It makes it a scheduled, bounded, transparent form of sell pressure, which is precisely what it was designed to be.
The criticism: a company-shaped hole in a decentralized asset The escrow solves the dumping problem and creates a philosophical one. XRP is the only major cryptocurrency whose monthly supply expansion is decided in a corporate treasury meeting, and critics have never let the point go.
The centralization objection is straightforward. Bitcoin’s issuance is set by an algorithm no company controls. XRP’s effective issuance is set by Ripple’s monthly relock decision. The schedule is transparent and capped, but it is still one firm’s choice, and holders are structurally downstream of that firm’s funding needs. For skeptics, that makes XRP less a decentralized asset and more a corporate instrument with a public float.
The sell-pressure objection got fresh oxygen in June 2026, when Garlinghouse attacked Strategy’s model of issuing preferred stock to buy Bitcoin, calling the slide in its preferred shares a damning indictment and insisting that utility, not financial engineering, drives long-term value. Traders pounced on the symmetry: Ripple funds itself by selling a token it created, from an escrow it controls, into the market it champions. One widely shared critique called the two firms two giants with the same model, each leaning on the asset it defends. The comparison is not perfect, Ripple sells an asset it was granted at genesis while Strategy borrows against one it bought, but the shared feature is real: both companies are structural sellers or leveraged holders of the asset their shareholders and communities want to rise.
There is also a subtler critique: the escrow’s existence proves the concern it was built to address. Companies with no power to crash their own asset do not need to lock 55 billion tokens to reassure anyone. The escrow is both the remedy and the permanent reminder of XRP’s concentrated origins.
Defenders answer that every funding model leans on something, that a published on-chain speed limit is more honest than the opaque treasury sales common across crypto, and that a decade of relock discipline is a track record, not a promise. Both readings fit the same facts, which is why the argument never ends.
How XRP’s schedule compares with other supply systems Placing the escrow next to other issuance mechanisms clarifies what is genuinely unusual about it.
Bitcoin’s supply comes from mining rewards on a halving schedule fixed in the protocol. No entity decides anything; the only discretionary sellers are miners, and when their economics break, the result is the kind of forced miner selling that hit records in early 2026. Bitcoin’s sell pressure is distributed across an industry; XRP’s scheduled component is concentrated in one company but capped by contract.
Ethereum mints new ETH as staking rewards and burns a portion of fees, so net issuance floats with network activity around a low rate. Again, no single seller dominates, and no schedule exists to publish.
The closest relatives to Ripple’s escrow are found in token projects, not commodity-style chains. Foundation treasuries, investor unlock cliffs, and team vesting schedules all release supply on calendars, and unlock-tracking has become a trading discipline of its own. XRP’s version differs in three ways: it is enforced by the base protocol instead of a smart contract or a legal agreement, it has run without a missed or altered month since 2017, and it is refilled by relocking, which makes it self-extending instead of finite by design.
The comparison cuts both ways. Against venture-backed tokens with cliff unlocks that dump double-digit percentages of supply in a day, XRP’s smooth billion-per-month drip with a 70 percent refund rate is conservative. Against Bitcoin’s zero-discretion issuance, it is corporate management. Where an investor lands depends on which reference class they reach for, and both are legitimate.
Tracking the escrow yourself Everything described above is public, and verifying it takes minutes.
The release transactions appear on any XRP Ledger explorer on the first of each month, flagged by monitoring services like Whale Alert within moments. Explorers such as Bithomp and XRPScan label Ripple’s known accounts, so the escrow finishes and the subsequent movements are easy to follow without any special tooling.
The relock is the transaction that deserves the attention. Within roughly 24 to 72 hours of the release, look for large EscrowCreate transactions from Ripple’s accounts returning tokens to new time locks. Subtract that figure from one billion and you have the month’s true net release, the only number in the cycle with information in it. A month where Ripple relocks 850 million reads very differently from a month where it relocks 550 million, and the difference never makes headlines.
Ripple also publishes quarterly reports summarizing its XRP sales and holdings, which provide the company’s own accounting of what the on-chain data shows. Third-party dashboards aggregate escrow balances and project depletion timelines; treat the projections as arithmetic, not prophecy, for the reasons Schwartz gave.
A practical checklist for reading any unlock month: confirm the gross release, wait for the relock, compute the net, compare it with the trailing average of 200 to 300 million, and check whether demand-side flows, exchange volumes, and, since late 2025, ETF creations look adequate to absorb it. If the net is in the normal band, the unlock told you nothing new. If it deviates sharply, that is a real signal about Ripple’s cash needs, and it will be visible on-chain before anyone writes it up.
Frequently asked questions What is the XRP escrow? The XRP escrow is a set of time-locked contracts on the XRP Ledger holding tokens that belong to Ripple. Created in December 2017 with 55 billion XRP, the contracts release a maximum of one billion tokens on the first day of each month, and the ledger protocol itself enforces the lock.
How much XRP is unlocked each month? The contracts release up to one billion XRP monthly, usually in several tranches on the first of the month. Ripple typically returns 600 to 800 million of those tokens to new escrow contracts within days, so the net amount entering circulation has generally been 200 to 300 million XRP per month.
Why did Ripple lock its XRP in escrow? Before 2017, Ripple held tens of billions of XRP in spendable accounts, and the market feared the company could sell unlimited amounts at any time. Locking 55 billion tokens behind a published monthly schedule capped the maximum pace of sales and made the limit verifiable on-chain.
Does the monthly unlock crash the XRP price? There is little evidence of a consistent price effect. The schedule is known years in advance, most unlocked tokens are relocked, and the net release is small relative to daily trading volume. Short-term volatility around the date exists but is hard to separate from XRP’s normal price swings.
How much XRP is left in escrow? As of mid-2026, estimates place the remaining escrowed balance near 38 billion XRP. The figure declines by whatever Ripple keeps each month and is publicly visible on XRP Ledger explorers that track the company’s escrow accounts.
When will the XRP escrow run out? At recent net release rates, projections cluster around nine more years, but no exact date is possible. Depletion depends on how much of each monthly billion Ripple relocks, a decision the company makes month by month based on its operational needs.
Can Ripple unlock the escrowed XRP early? No. The time locks are enforced by the XRP Ledger protocol, not by a company policy. An escrow cannot be finished before its release date under the network’s consensus rules, so early access would require a protocol change accepted by the validator network.
What happens to unlocked XRP that Ripple does not use? Unused tokens are placed into new escrow contracts queued at the back of the schedule, a step visible on-chain as EscrowCreate transactions in the days after each release. This relocking is why the escrow has lasted far beyond its original 55-month design.
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. Always do your own research. Information current as of July 6, 2026.
TLDR A $1,000 investment in the first spot XRP ETF is now worth about $457. Brazil’s XRPH11 has declined 54.3% since its April 2025 launch. U.S. spot XRP ETFs now manage about $1.05 billion in assets. XRP traded near $1.14 after gaining 8.5% over the past week. A $1,000 investment in the spot XRP ETF launched in Brazil now holds an estimated value of about $457. The fund has lost more than half its value since its April 2025 debut. Meanwhile, XRP traded near $1.14 after posting an 8.5% weekly gain.
Brazil’s Early XRP ETF Records Sharp Decline Brazil introduced the first regulated spot XRP ETF on April 25, 2025, through Hashdex’s XRPH11 fund. The product launched with about $40 million in assets under management. It invested almost all holdings in physical XRP.
The spot XRP ETF tracks the “Nasdaq XRP Reference Price Index” through direct XRP exposure. The fund started trading at higher levels before entering a sustained decline. As of July 3, XRPH11 traded at 9.14 Brazilian reals, or about $1.74.
The spot XRP ETF has declined 54.3% since launch based on market data. Therefore, a $1,000 investment has fallen to about $457. Assets under management also dropped to roughly $22 million to $25 million.
U.S. Products Expanded the XRP ETF Market Brazil’s spot XRP ETF remained relatively small within the global crypto exchange-traded product market. The country represented less than 1% of worldwide crypto ETP assets. Consequently, the fund generated limited buying pressure for XRP.
The spot XRP ETF market changed after several U.S. products launched in November 2025. Funds from Canary Capital, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale, 21Shares, and REX-Osprey entered the market. Those products attracted substantially larger investment flows.
The spot XRP ETF market in the United States now manages about $1.05 billion in assets. Collectively, those funds hold nearly 971 million XRP. Combined net inflows have exceeded $1.4 billion since launch, including $118 million during May 2026.
XRP Price Stayed Within a Narrow Trading Range Canada also expanded the spot XRP ETF market through the Purpose XRP ETF. The fund launched during June 2025 and now manages about 72 million Canadian dollars. That product increased regulated investment access outside the United States.
The broader XRP market still traded within a narrow range despite growing institutional participation. Prices moved mostly between $1.15 and $1.40 during recent months. Market performance largely matched broader cryptocurrency trends.
The spot XRP ETF story shows stronger institutional participation without a matching price recovery. XRP traded at $1.14 at press time after gaining about 1% daily. The token also recorded an 8.5% gain over the previous week.
The cryptocurrency market is experiencing widespread weakness on Monday, with Bitcoin (BTC) sliding under the $63,000 mark amid ongoing risk aversion. Major altcoins, including Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP), are following suit, trending lower toward key support levels at $1,700 and $1.10, respectively.
Persistent capital outflows weigh on Bitcoin and EthereumRisk sentiment in the crypto market remains significantly subdued, weighed down by macroeconomic headwinds, geopolitical uncertainties, and a dearth of clear catalysts. Despite the crypto Fear & Greed Index ticking up to 24 on Monday, from an average of 12 last week, appetite for risk assets has not improved.
Crypto Fear & Greed Index | Source: AlternativePersistent outflows from US-listed Bitcoin spot Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) underscore waning institutional interest, with $527 million withdrawn last week alone. This marks the eighth consecutive week of net redemptions, reinforcing the ongoing bearish narrative.
Despite the outflows, cumulative inflows remain positive at $51 billion, while net assets under management average $74 billion.
Bitcoin ETF flows | Source: SoSoValueEthereum spot ETFs present a similar grim picture to Bitcoin, with outflows totaling $14 million last week, down from $273 million the previous week. According to SoSoValue, ETH ETF outflows have persisted for the eighth consecutive week, reflecting ongoing institutional investor caution.
Despite the current market headwinds, cumulative inflows hold steady at $11 billion, with total assets under management at $9 billion, signaling that conviction among long-term investors remains resilient.
Ethereum ETF flows | Source: SoSoValueInterest in XRP spot ETFs holds steady, outperforming both Bitcoin and Ethereum to post nearly $12 million in inflows last week. With nine straight weeks of inflows, interest in XRP-related digital investment products remains intact despite the headwinds and broader risk-off sentiment.
Cumulative inflows hold steady at $1.49 billion while net assets under management average $988 million, according to SoSoValue data.
XRP ETF flows | Source: SoSoValuePrice analysis: Bitcoin trades under increasing pressureBitcoin remains capped below a dense ceiling of moving averages, with the 50-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at $65,739 and the 100-day EMA at $69,453 reinforcing a broader downtrend defined by the resistance trendline near $71,371.
The Crypto King holds just above the Bollinger middle band around $61,936, suggesting tentative near-term support, while the Relative Strength Index (RSI) hovers around 49, pointing to neutral momentum despite a still-positive Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) histogram, which hints that bullish pressure is not yet strong enough to reclaim the overhead structure.
BTC/USDT daily chartOn the topside, initial resistance emerges at the Bollinger upper band near $65,513, followed by the 50-day EMA around $65,739 and the 100-day EMA close to $69,453. Beyond these levels, the downtrend break zone at $71,371 and the 200-day EMA near $75,529 form a broader supply region.
On the downside, immediate support is lies at the Bollinger middle band around $61,936, with further demand near the lower Bollinger band at approximately $58,359. A sustained break below these levels would expose the pair to a deeper leg lower within the prevailing bearish bias.
Ethereum bears tighten grip amid deepeningEthereum trades at $1,756, keeping a bearish near-term bias as price holds below key EMAs. The 50-day EMA at $1,805 and the SuperTrend line around $1,805 form a tight resistance cluster just overhead, while the 100-day and 200-day EMAs at $1,972 and $2,256 respectively sit well above the market, reinforcing a broader downtrend.
Still, momentum has improved, with the MACD line above its signal and in positive territory and the RSI hovering slightly above 50, hinting that recent buying pressure is attempting to challenge this overhead supply.
ETH/USDT daily chartOn the topside, immediate resistance is defined by the $1,805 zone, where the SuperTrend and 50-day EMA converge. A sustained break above this area would expose the next hurdle at the 100-day EMA near $1,972, ahead of the more substantial 200-day EMA barrier around $2,256.
The smart contracts token remains vulnerable to persistent headwinds, with traders likely watching price behavior around the $1,700–$1,750 band for signs of whether the nascent momentum can persist or the dominant bearish trend reasserts itself.
XRP eyes short-term support as headwinds intensify XRP remains capped in the near term, with price holding below the 50-day EMA at $1.18 and well under the 100-day and 200-day EMAs at $1.29 and $1.50 respectively, reinforcing a broader bearish structure despite the recent bounce.
The MACD has turned positive and is edging higher, while the RSI hovers around the neutral 50 line, suggesting improving but still fragile momentum as price oscillates between the Bollinger Bands’ midline and upper layers.
XRP/USDT daily chartOn the topside, initial resistance is seen at the upper Bollinger Band near $1.20, with the 50-day EMA at $1.18 acting as a nearby dynamic barrier that needs to be reclaimed to ease downside pressure. Above these barriers, the 100-day EMA at $1.29 and the 200-day EMA at $1.50 define subsequent resistance layers. Looking down, the Bollinger middle band around $1.10 provides the first notable support, ahead of the lower band near $1.01, where a break would likely reopen the bearish leg toward lower levels.
(This article was created with the help of an Artificial Intelligence tool and reviewed by an editor. 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.
The Evernorth trademark has been publicly recorded in the Cayman Islands, marking another milestone in the development of the Ripple-backed XRP Digital Asset Treasury (DAT).
Based on a recent update, the trademark filing was handled by HSM IP Ltd., a Cayman-based intellectual property firm that frequently manages trademark registrations for companies operating in the jurisdiction.
Evernorth Registers Trademark in Cayman Islands Evernorth Trademark Covers Digital Asset Financial Services According to the Cayman Islands Gazette, the Evernorth word mark (No. T0004840) has been registered under Classes 36 and 42, covering a wide range of digital asset-related financial and technology services.
Under Class 36, the trademark protects services related to digital asset portfolio creation and management, financial advisory and consulting for digital assets, digital asset treasury management, financial custody solutions, and investment strategy information for publicly traded investment funds.
Meanwhile, Class 42 focuses on the technological infrastructure supporting these offerings. Specifically, it includes software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms for blockchain validation, digital asset portfolio management software, electronic payment processing, authentication software, digital asset storage, and electronic data storage solutions.
Notably, the trademark registration remains valid until April 1, 2036, giving Evernorth nearly a decade of legal protection for its brand and related services.
Why the Cayman Islands Matter for the XRP DAT The Cayman Islands registration aligns with Evernorth’s broader corporate structure and long-term strategy. The XRP Digital Asset Treasury is currently pursuing a business combination with Armada Acquisition Corp. II, a Cayman-domiciled Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC).
Establishing the trademark in the Cayman Islands complements this structure, as the jurisdiction is widely used by global investment vehicles due to its tax neutrality, asset protection framework, and efficient intellectual property and global licensing regime.
Consequently, the trademark filing strengthens the legal foundation for Evernorth’s institutional XRP treasury initiative as the company moves closer to becoming a publicly traded entity.
Evernorth Expands Institutional XRP Strategy Beyond securing its intellectual property, Evernorth continues to expand its institutional XRP strategy. The company already holds approximately 473 million XRP, making it one of the largest corporate holders of the cryptocurrency.
Rather than operating as a passive investment vehicle, Evernorth plans to actively grow its XRP reserves. Its strategy includes institutional lending, liquidity provisioning, and participation in decentralized finance (DeFi) yield opportunities to generate additional returns on its holdings.
At the same time, Evernorth is advancing its public listing plans. The company has submitted multiple amendments to its S-4 registration filings as it seeks a Nasdaq listing under the ticker XRPN, which would provide institutional investors with regulated exposure to XRP.
Additionally, Evernorth has strengthened its leadership team by appointing four new board members, including Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty, further reinforcing its ties to the XRP ecosystem and its long-term institutional ambitions.
DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.
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TL;DR
XRP's Binance Scarcity Index jumped to 0.77 in early July, the highest reading since summer 2024, as whales pull coins into non-custodial wallets while price holds near $1.14.A BitGo-custodied wallet moved 114.9 billion SHIB, worth about $502,230, into a previously inactive cold wallet, a signal of accumulation rather than sell pressure.Strategy CEO Phong Le published a manifesto calling Bitcoin a "guarantor of monetary freedom," even as the company sold 3,588 BTC for $216 million across two tranches.Bitcoin fell below $62,000 as the miner stress index hit 0.00, matching capitulation lows from 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2022.Markets are watching the July 7 NY Fed inflation expectations and July 8 FOMC minutes as the next directional catalyst.Binance records XRP's deepest scarcity since 2024XRP entered the third quarter of 2026 with a sharp imbalance in its supply structure. According to fresh on-chain data from CryptoQuant, published this Monday, Binance has recorded a historic draining of XRP order-book liquidity.
The specialized Binance XRP Scarcity Index made a vertical jump to 0.77 in the first days of July — the highest level of liquidity shortage since the summer of 2024.
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Analysts at Arab Chain stress that the worsening scarcity is isolated in nature. While XRP's spot price is trading near $1.14, attempting to hold above local resistance after a push to $1.159, the freely circulating supply of coins is shrinking quickly.
XRP Binance Scarcity Index from January 2024 to July 2026, Source: CryptoQuantThe trend shift is being driven by large holders: around the turn of the half-year, whales minimized new deposits and intensified withdrawals to non-custodial wallets, effectively removing tokens from the market.
Historically, this kind of reserve drain at the start of July has acted as a strong leading indicator. Selling pressure declines, while the situation in the order books tightens like a spring, and since July traditionally opens a period of higher activity for XRP, any local inflow of buyer demand — against the backdrop of continued inflows into XRP ETFs — could trigger a sharp price impulse.
The nearest target for the start of a rally is the $1.17–$1.20 zone, while in the case of market cooling, the asset could return to firm support at $1.10.
BitGo whale hides 114 billion Shiba Inu coins in a new walletWhile the crypto market opens July 2026 in prolonged consolidation, major players have begun hidden maneuvers. A whale used the BitGo custody service and withdrew 114.9 billion SHIB through the WalletSimple platform in two transactions, according to Arkham.
This entire massive token volume settled at a completely new address that had previously been inactive. At the current rate on July 6, 2026, which is holding near $0.0000044 per token, the wallet balance is valued at approximately $502,230.
Fresh wallet '0x873366' absorbing 114.9 billion SHIB from BitGo, Source: ArkhamAccording to on-chain tracker data, SHIB tokens were transferred directly to a cold address, bypassing the hot wallets of centralized trading platforms.
This route means there is no immediate pressure on the meme coin's market order book. For the current market phase, this is a classic marker of preparation for a large over-the-counter deal or a transfer of assets into long-term storage by a major fund.
Further activity from this wallet is worth watching especially closely for Shiba Inu token holders.
Strategy manifests freedom while the market counts its million-dollar salesAt the start of the new week, Strategy CEO Phong Le published the "Bitcoin is Freedom" manifesto, calling the first cryptocurrency "the United States of money." The executive drew a parallel between the blockchain's algorithmic code and the U.S. Constitution, arguing that the protocol replaces bureaucracy and official interventionism with transparent rules, decentralized consensus, and limited issuance.
According to Le, the network reproduces a model of capitalism with free competition and protection of property rights without being tied to geography.
However, the loud rhetoric about Bitcoin's long-term resilience coincided with a large corporate move into cash, adding sharpness to the piece. Fresh corporate reporting for the past week showed that, at the turn of the quarter, Strategy reduced its reserves by 3,588 BTC, selling coins in two tranches: 1,363 BTC at the end of June and another 2,225 BTC between July 1 and July 5.
Dynamic of Bitcoin price amid statement from CEO Le and recent announcement of BTC sale, Source: TradingViewThe sale brought the company $216 million in total, increasing its dollar reserves to $2.55 billion as of July 5, 2026.
At the start of the third quarter of 2026, Strategy still holds its position as the largest whale, with a balance of 843,775 BTC, while the value of its digital assets at the end of Q2 stood at $49.67 billion. At the same time, the audit revealed an accumulated unrealized loss of $8.31 billion.
The contrast between the CEO's statements about Bitcoin as a "guarantor of monetary freedom" and sales aimed at protecting financial metrics triggered skepticism among observers. On the news of growing sales from Strategy, Bitcoin fell below the psychological $62,000 mark.
Pressure from a key institutional player clearly triggered a wave of local sell-offs, forcing traders to reassess risks while corporate leadership discusses the global freedom of blockchain.
Crypto market outlook: Saylor and miner capitulation pressure Bitcoin near July's key trendlinesBitcoin is testing the strength of the $62,000 support zone, reacting to a confirmed breakdown of the local long-term trend amid news of BTC sales by Michael Saylor. The market has frozen ahead of the FOMC minutes, which will determine whether the current sell-off turns into a full move toward $58,000 or launches a V-shaped reversal.
Key checkpoints:
BTC/USD technical breakdown: The price impulsively broke below the support line near $62,500 with a vertical red candle, briefly dropping to $62,118. The main horizontal volume area, according to the VRVP POC, was traded higher — in the $62,600–$62,850 range — turning this zone into local resistance. Meanwhile, the RSI(14) fell to 37.73, confirming the development of downside momentum.Absolute miner capitulation: The miner stress index fell to 0.00, matching the lows of 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2022. The realized profit/loss ratio is at a 43-month low. The total amount of BTC held at a loss reached 10.5 million, which has historically pointed to the formation of a macroeconomic bottom.Macroeconomic trigger on July 7: The release of the NY Fed's consumer inflation expectations for June. A decline in the figures would strengthen the probability of Federal Reserve monetary easing after weak NFP data showed only 57,000 new jobs.FOMC minutes on July 8: The release of the Fed minutes will define the medium-term trend. Dovish rhetoric would trigger a short squeeze, while hawkish signals would send the price to test the key $60,000–$62,000 support zone. You Might Also Like
Travel-focused crypto platform Travala has announced that payments for more than 2.2 million hotels and accommodation options in 230 countries can now be made using XRP. This feature enables XRP holders to directly make reservations with their crypto assets across a wide range of destinations, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Thailand and Singapore.
XRP launches direct booking eraWith this new integration, users can now pay for their stays with XRP, bypassing both traditional banks and credit card networks. Travala noted that bookings are confirmed quickly after payment, contributing to an efficient reservation experience for crypto-savvy travelers.
Travala reported that over 2.2 million hotels worldwide are now available for booking with XRP, eliminating the need for banks and ensuring swift booking approvals.
Travala stands out as a prominent travel booking platform powered by cryptocurrency. The platform aggregates hotels, resorts, apartments and short-term rental options, supporting numerous digital assets in addition to conventional payment methods.
Mini dictionary: RLUSD refers to a dollar-based stablecoin structure linked to the Ripple ecosystem. The XRP Ledger is the blockchain network that records XRP transactions.
Everyday use cases for XRP expandThis advance marks another step showing that XRP is not limited to cross-border payments and institutional finance. Known for its fast settlement speed and comparatively low transaction fees, the digital asset is becoming more visible as a practical option for daily spending.
The launch comes at a time of growing activity in the XRP ecosystem. In May, activity on the XRP Ledger reached record levels, with on-chain transactions up 65% compared to the same period last year.
TitleDataNumber of accommodation optionsOver 2.2 millionCountries covered230XRP Ledger transaction growth65% annuallyThe increase across the XRP Ledger has been driven in part by higher transaction volumes from crypto exchange Bitstamp and growing interest in Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin. These factors indicate that the usage of XRP is extending beyond mere investment, shifting toward tangible application scenarios.
XRP continues to deliver concrete use cases across various sectors, ranging from institutional settlement deals and stablecoin transfers to global travel bookings.
Commercial adoption of crypto payments gains momentumTravala’s integration provides XRP holders with wide access to the travel market and highlights the growing presence of crypto assets in consumer services. The use of digital assets for everyday purchases signals an acceleration in commercial adoption of cryptocurrency within the sector.
With this move, XRP is strengthening its position among cryptocurrencies delivering practical functionality beyond speculative trading. The ability to complete travel reservations directly with XRP gives the asset greater visibility as a payment option for daily use.
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.
Brad Garlinghouse called Strategy’s sliding preferred shares a damning indictment of financial engineering. Traders answered with an uncomfortable observation: Ripple also funds itself from the asset it champions, one billion escrowed XRP at a time. The feud between crypto’s two most leveraged evangelists says more about both companies than either intended.
Summary
Brad Garlinghouse criticised Strategy’s Bitcoin treasury model, prompting traders to argue that Ripple also relies on regular XRP sales from escrow to fund its operations. The report says both companies depend on recurring market demand for the assets or securities they sell, although their funding structures and financial risks differ significantly. Strategy’s model faces pressure from fixed dividend obligations, while Ripple’s escrow based funding is presented as more flexible but remains dependent on sustained demand for XRP. In the last days of June 2026, with Strategy’s flagship preferred stock trading roughly 25 percent below its $100 par value, Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse decided to say what he thought about it. Financial engineering, he argued across a CNBC appearance and a run of posts, does not drive long-term value; utility does. The slide in Strategy’s preferreds was, in his words, a damning indictment of a model built on perpetually selling paper against Bitcoin.
The crypto market being what it is, the counterattack arrived within hours, and it did not come from Strategy. It came from traders pointing at Ripple’s own balance sheet. One widely shared critique put it in five words: two giants, same model. Ripple, the observation went, funds its operations by selling XRP released from escrow every month, tokens it received for nothing at the network’s genesis. Strategy funds Bitcoin purchases by selling preferred shares and debt against coins it bought on the open market. Both companies are, structurally, perpetual sellers of claims connected to the asset their communities want to appreciate.
The comparison is not perfect, and the imperfections are where it gets interesting. But the fact that it landed at all, and stung, reveals something true: the two loudest corporate evangelists in crypto both run treasuries that lean on their chosen asset, and each has built a machine that only works while the market keeps buying what the machine sells. Garlinghouse’s attack on Saylor was accurate. So was the response.
This is an autopsy of the feud: what Garlinghouse actually said, what is really breaking at Strategy, how Ripple’s own funding machine works, where the symmetry holds and where it fails, and why the fight matters for holders of both assets.
What Garlinghouse said, and why now The Ripple chief executive’s late-June comments were unusually pointed for a man who spends most of his public time on regulatory diplomacy. Utility drives long-term value, he argued, and financial engineering does not; companies that exist to hold an asset, funded by issuing securities against it, are running a trade, not a business. The specific exhibit was Strategy’s preferred stock complex, and above all STRC, the retail-focused instrument that had slipped to around 25 percent below its $100 par before a partial recovery toward $84.
He also reached for history. Michael Saylor had spent years dismissing XRP, at one point in 2022 calling it an unregistered security that would be regulated out of relevance, a comment the Ripple community has never forgotten and the SEC case ultimately did not vindicate. Garlinghouse returning fire in Strategy’s weakest quarter was, among other things, a settling of accounts four years in the making.
The timing was not random. Strategy’s model is under its most sustained pressure since the company began accumulating: Bitcoin spent June grinding to 21-month lows near $57,750 before a modest bounce, and the mathematics of the treasury trade turned openly ugly. The company holds 847,363 BTC at an average cost near $75,650, which at June’s lows put the position more than $10 billion underwater on paper for the first time in the current cycle. The market value of the company converged with the value of its coins, with the closely watched mNAV ratio touching 0.99, meaning the equity briefly priced the entire corporate structure at less than the Bitcoin inside it.
For a company whose whole premise is that its securities deserve a premium to their Bitcoin backing, an mNAV below one is not a data point. It is the thesis inverting.
Garlinghouse chose his moment the way prosecutors choose theirs, when the defendant is already bleeding.
Four years of accumulated grievance The feud reads as sudden only to observers who missed its long fuse. Saylor and Garlinghouse have been running opposed theories of crypto value since 2020, and each man’s theory requires the other’s asset to be a mistake.
Saylor’s Bitcoin maximalism was never quiet about XRP. His 2022 dismissal of the token as an unregistered security destined for regulatory oblivion came during the darkest stretch of the SEC lawsuit, when Ripple’s survival was an open question and the token was delisted across American platforms. The comment did not age well in its specifics; the 2023 ruling found XRP itself was not a security in exchange sales, the case settled, and by late 2025 the token had spot ETFs trading in New York. But it cemented a personal dimension that ordinary corporate rivalry lacks. In the XRP community’s memory, Saylor kicked them at the bottom, and Garlinghouse’s June offensive was received there less as analysis than as overdue payback.
The structural rivalry deepened as the companies converged on the same buyers. Strategy’s pitch to institutions is Bitcoin exposure through familiar securities; Ripple’s pitch, increasingly, is regulated crypto infrastructure, custody, stablecoins, prime brokerage, sold to the same treasurers and asset managers. Each chief executive now spends his public life arguing that institutional capital should flow through his door, which makes every stumble by one a sales document for the other. When Strategy’s preferreds slid, Ripple’s sales narrative improved by exactly that much, and Garlinghouse’s decision to narrate the slide personally was, among other things, marketing with a decade of receipts attached.
There is also a generational symmetry neither would enjoy hearing. Both men are the last of crypto’s founder-evangelist chief executives still running at full volume: survivors of multiple cycles, personally synonymous with their assets, and increasingly graded by markets that have stopped awarding style points. The 2026 bear market is auditing both legacies at once, which is why a single CNBC hit escalated so fast.
Neither side is arguing about a preferred stock. They are arguing about which of two life’s works the next cycle vindicates.
What is actually cracking at Strategy Strategy’s machine has three moving parts: buy Bitcoin, issue securities against the story, use the proceeds to buy more Bitcoin. The genius of the design in a bull market is reflexivity; every part reinforces the others. The problem in a bear market is the same reflexivity running in reverse.
The preferred stock complex is where the stress concentrates, because the preferreds are the instruments that carry mandatory-feeling obligations. STRC and its siblings pay rich fixed dividends, marketed to income investors as a way to earn double-digit yield on a Bitcoin-adjacent instrument. Those dividends must be paid in cash, and Strategy’s operating software business generates only a sliver of the required amount. The rest comes from issuing more securities, which works while prices cooperate and compounds the obligation when they do not. Analysis circulating from CryptoQuant put the company’s cash and equivalents against its dividend run rate at roughly 14 months of coverage, a runway, not a crisis, but a runway that shortens every quarter the capital markets stay closed to new issuance at acceptable prices.
The company’s response has been to reframe. A newly published Digital Credit framework recasts the preferred complex as a deliberate credit structure rather than an equity kicker, alongside disclosures of a cash position near $3.8 billion intended to reassure preferred holders that dividends are funded regardless of Bitcoin’s path. The reframing had an effect; STRC bounced from its lows toward $84. But a bounce toward 84 cents on the dollar is still a market pricing meaningful doubt into a par instrument, and the underlying arithmetic, fixed cash obligations against a volatile treasury asset, is unchanged.
The bond market’s verdict has been quieter but harsher than the equity market’s. Instruments marketed on the premise that Bitcoin’s ascent makes their coupons safe are being repriced on the premise that the coupons must survive Bitcoin’s descent, which is a different underwriting question entirely, and one the complex was never really sold to answer.
None of this means Strategy is broken. The company has survived worse drawdowns, holds an asset with a history of violent recoveries, and has never been forced to sell a coin. What has cracked is the premium, the market’s willingness to pay more than one dollar for a dollar of Strategy’s Bitcoin, and the premium was the engine. A treasury company at mNAV 1.0 is just a fund with expenses and a dividend bill.
Ripple’s machine, examined honestly To weigh the two giants claim, the Ripple side of the ledger needs the same unsentimental treatment.
Ripple received the bulk of XRP’s fixed 100 billion supply at the network’s creation. In December 2017, it locked 55 billion of those tokens into ledger-enforced escrow, releasing a maximum of one billion per month, a system whose mechanics are worth understanding in full because it is the load-bearing structure of the company’s finances. Each month, Ripple keeps a portion of the release, typically returning 600 to 800 million tokens to new escrows, and the kept portion, generally 200 to 300 million XRP, funds institutional sales, ecosystem investment, and operations.
Strip away the terminology and the structure is this: a private company holding tens of billions of tokens it did not buy, selling a bounded stream of them into the market, every month, for going on a decade. The July 1 release moved one billion XRP, worth about $1.04 billion, through the machine on schedule. The sales are real supply that holders absorb; back-of-envelope, the net release adds an effective inflation of several percent per year to circulating XRP. When Garlinghouse says utility drives value, critics answer that whatever the utility, the most reliable flow in the XRP market is Ripple selling.
The company’s defense is disclosure and discipline. The schedule is public, protocol-enforced, and has never been broken; the relock rate shows restraint; the sales increasingly go to institutional buyers off-exchange; and the proceeds built an actual business, spanning payments, custody, a stablecoin, and the institutional finance stack growing on the XRP Ledger. Ripple processed some $16 trillion in payments volume last year by its own telling, though almost none of it moved through digital assets, a caveat that critics note does heavy lifting.
The war chest the machine built is the part critics skip. A decade of escrow-funded operations left Ripple with cash, an investment portfolio, and acquisition capacity that let it buy its way into prime brokerage and custody during the bear market, spending when leveraged competitors were retrenching. Whatever the model’s fairness, its output is a company that does not need favorable markets to survive them, which is precisely the resilience Strategy’s structure lacks. The same tokens that fund the machine also hang over it: Ripple still holds tens of billions of XRP inside and outside escrow, a treasury whose paper value swings billions with every large move in the token, and whose eventual disposition is the largest known variable in XRP’s long-term supply.
The honest summary: Ripple’s funding model is a slow, transparent, rule-bound liquidation of a genesis grant. That is neither fraud nor utility. It is a financial structure, the very category Garlinghouse aimed at Saylor.
Where the symmetry holds The two companies rhyme in more ways than either community likes to admit.
Both are structural sellers of claims tied to their asset. Ripple sells the asset itself from escrow; Strategy sells securities collateralized by the story of the asset. In both cases, the community holding the asset provides the bid that the corporate machine sells into, and in both cases the machine’s health depends on that bid persisting. The dynamic is familiar from every corner of crypto where a large holder must sell to operate, from foundations to the miners whose forced selling set records this year: the entity most invested in the asset’s success is also its most dependable source of supply.
Both are bets that a corporate structure can capture value from a decentralized asset. Saylor’s claim is that Strategy transforms Bitcoin into yield-bearing instruments the traditional market can buy, and deserves a premium for the packaging. Ripple’s claim is that a company can build enough utility around XRP that the token appreciates despite the company’s own selling. Each asks holders to believe the corporate layer adds more than it extracts.
Both have concentrated key-man risk and evangelist chief executives whose personal credibility is a balance sheet asset. And both, crucially, have never been tested by the one scenario their critics model: a market that stops absorbing the machine’s output for years rather than months. Strategy has never had to sell Bitcoin into weakness; Ripple has never faced a market that could not soak up its net release. The 2026 bear market is the closest either has come, which is exactly why the feud erupted now.
Where the symmetry breaks The differences matter as much as the rhyme, and they cut in both directions.
Ripple’s advantages are structural. It sells an asset it was granted, not one it bought with leverage, so there is no cost basis to defend and no margin for a drawdown to destroy. Its obligations are discretionary; the company can slow sales, and owes nobody a dividend. Its escrow is a ceiling, not a floor, and a decade of relocking is a real track record of restraint. Strategy, by contrast, carries fixed cash obligations against a volatile asset, the classic shape of every leveraged treasury accident in financial history. On pure survivability, the comparison flatters Ripple.
Strategy’s advantages are about alignment. Saylor bought his Bitcoin; every coin on the balance sheet was paid for at market, and shareholders chose the leverage knowingly. Ripple’s XRP cost it nothing, which means every sale is nearly pure proceeds, and the buyers funding the company are, in the main, believers in the token the company was given. Critics of Ripple find that arrangement more troubling than Strategy’s, not less: Saylor is levered alongside his holders, while Ripple is structurally the counterparty to its own community. The SEC agreed in part, finding in 2023 that Ripple’s institutional XRP sales were unregistered securities offerings, litigation Strategy never faced for buying an asset regulators treat as a commodity.
There is also a difference in what failure looks like. If Strategy’s model fails, the damage is concentrated: preferred holders and shareholders eat losses, and Bitcoin absorbs a large forced seller. If Ripple’s model fails, meaning the market permanently stops absorbing escrow releases at viable prices, the company slows the machine and lives off its accumulated war chest and businesses, from custody to its stablecoin and consortium positions. One machine is fragile and aligned; the other is durable and extractive. Pick your indictment.
What breaking would actually look like Since both communities spend the bear market gaming the other machine’s failure, it is worth specifying, mechanically, what failure would require for each. The exercise is clarifying, because neither breaking point is where the rhetoric puts it.
Strategy does not break at any particular Bitcoin price. An unrealized loss, even the ten-figure one June produced, forces nothing by itself. The machine breaks at the intersection of three conditions: capital markets closed to new issuance at tolerable terms, the cash runway for preferred dividends exhausted, and Bitcoin still depressed when the runway ends. The CryptoQuant-style coverage math, roughly 14 months at recent burn, is therefore the number to watch, along with every successful or failed issuance that extends or shortens it. If the company reaches the runway’s end with markets still shut, the choices collapse to suspending preferred dividends, which detonates the income story the complex was sold on, or selling Bitcoin, which detonates the never-sell story the equity was sold on. Either detonation is survivable as finance and devastating as narrative, and Strategy is, before anything else, a narrative company.
Ripple’s machine breaks differently, because its obligations are soft. The company cannot be forced to sell escrow releases into a bid that is not there; it can relock more, spend reserves, and wait. What actually breaks the model is a demand-side regime change that outlasts the war chest: exchange volumes, institutional sales, and ETF absorption persistently below the net release for years, forcing the company to choose between starving its operations and visibly capitulating on price. The tell would appear first in the monthly relock data, months where Ripple returns far more than 800 million because it cannot place the difference, and in the ETF creations that have so far run inflows even through the June collapse. Ripple’s breaking point, in other words, is measured in years of demand drought, whereas Strategy’s is measured in months of dividend runway. That asymmetry, more than any quote from either chief executive, is the real difference between the giants.
The shared vulnerability is the reflexivity of reputation. Each machine runs on the founder’s credibility with a specific buyer base, income investors for Saylor, the XRP faithful and institutional partners for Garlinghouse, and credibility is the one input that cannot be relocked or refinanced once spent. Public feuds draw down exactly that account, which is the best argument that this fight, entertaining as it is, was unwise for both.
What the feud is really about Beneath the personal history, Garlinghouse and Saylor are arguing about the only question that matters for corporate crypto: what entitles a company to trade at a premium to the assets it touches?
Saylor’s answer is packaging and leverage: transform a volatile commodity into instruments with yields, durations, and risk profiles that traditional capital can hold, and the transformation deserves a spread. The 2026 drawdown is testing whether that spread survives an mNAV of one, and the original exchange that started this feud happened precisely because the test is live.
Bitcoin will evolve by changing less at the protocol layer and mattering more everywhere else.
The base layer will harden.
The capital markets will deepen.
Digital Credit will expand.
The world will build on Bitcoin. $BTC https://t.co/2ptwt4XJdu
— Michael Saylor (@saylor) July 6, 2026 Garlinghouse’s answer is utility and adoption: build payment corridors, custody, stablecoins, and bank integrations, and the token underneath appreciates on fundamentals. The awkwardness is that after a decade of building, XRP trades near $1.15, down roughly 70 percent over a year, while the company thrives, a divergence that suggests corporate success and token appreciation are far more loosely coupled than the utility thesis promises.
The stakes extend well past the two companies, because each man is the reference implementation for a sector. Strategy spawned an entire class of digital asset treasury companies, dozens of firms across Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, and beyond, that copied the playbook of issuing securities to accumulate tokens, and the whole class has compressed toward or below net asset value in the 2026 drawdown. If the original cannot hold a premium, the copies have no argument at all, and the capital markets window that funded the sector’s accumulation closes for everyone at once. Ripple, meanwhile, is the reference case for the token-issuer-as-operating-company model, the template every foundation and labs entity with a treasury full of its own token quietly studies. How the market ultimately judges a decade of escrow-funded operations sets the discount rate on every project financed the same way.
Neither man can point at the scoreboard right now. Strategy’s premium has evaporated; Ripple’s token has detached from its company. Both models produced billion-dollar enterprises, and both have so far failed, in this bear market, to produce what their communities actually bought in for.
The question holders should actually ask For all its entertainment value, the feud offers one genuinely useful lens to holders of either asset: identify the machine, then ask what keeps it fed.
Strategy’s machine is fed by capital markets. The question for its investors is not whether Saylor believes, but whether new buyers of preferreds and converts keep showing up at prices that let the dividends get paid without selling coins. Watch issuance windows, coverage runway, and the mNAV, because those are the machine’s vital signs, and the recent bounce in STRC is the market betting, tentatively, that the framework holds.
Ripple’s machine is fed by the XRP market itself. The question for its holders is not whether the company wins customers, but whether the demand side, exchange flow, institutional sales, the new ETFs that have been quietly absorbing supply, keeps outrunning a permanent, transparent seller. Watch the monthly net release against those flows, because that ratio, not partnership headlines, is what the last decade says actually governs the float.
Two giants, same model was meant as a gotcha, and it worked because it was half true. The fuller truth is sharper: two giants, two machines, one shared dependency. Both run on belief that renews monthly, and in a market like this one, belief is the scarcest collateral either company holds.
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. Always do your own research. Information current as of July 6, 2026.
Recent social commentary has brought attention to official records showing that South Korean lawmakers and other public officials own significant amounts of XRP.
Although the disclosures first became public around March 2025, market participants have recently started discussing the data, as they assess the cryptocurrency holdings of government officials.
For context, South Korea now requires public officials to regularly disclose their assets, and those disclosures now include cryptocurrencies. The country expanded these rules after a series of regulatory changes and high-profile crypto-related controversies.
South Korea’s Disclosure Rules Notably, South Korea has one of the world’s most active cryptocurrency markets, and the country has continued to strengthen oversight as digital assets become more widely used.
As part of this effort, authorities expanded public asset disclosure rules to cover virtual assets. Data released around March 2025 showed that lawmakers held substantial amounts of XRP.
Among those disclosures, Seoul City Councilor Kim Hye-young reported the largest cryptocurrency portfolio during the reporting period.
Her family’s virtual asset holdings were worth about 1.76 billion Korean won, or roughly $1.14 million. The portfolio included 16 different cryptocurrencies.
Kim Hye-young’s Family Held More Than 522,000 XRP The filing showed that Kim Hye-young’s spouse owned 519,004 XRP, while her eldest son held another 3,336 XRP. Together, the family’s XRP holdings came to 522,340 XRP.
The disclosure also included several other digital assets. Her spouse reported holding 0.01226935 ETH and 472 DOGE in addition to XRP. Kim Hye-young also disclosed personal cryptocurrency holdings, including 0.00144591 BTC.
Seoul City Councilor Choi Min-gyu reported the second-largest cryptocurrency portfolio. His virtual assets were valued at about 1.62 billion Korean won, or around $1 million. His holdings included 409,551 XRP, 9,402 Arbitrum (ARB), and 4,701 Cardano (ADA), along with several other altcoins.
Hundreds of Officials Reported Crypto Assets The broader disclosure figures came from the Public Officials Ethics Committee, which published changes to officials’ property filings for 2025 around March 27, 2025.
The data showed that 411 of the 2,047 officials required to file disclosures reported owning cryptocurrencies. This represented about 20.1% of all officials covered by the reporting rules.
The total value of those crypto holdings reached 14.4 billion Korean won, or over $9.4 million. On average, each official who disclosed digital assets reported holdings worth around 35 million Korean won, equal to roughly $25,000.
The records also showed that XRP ranked among the cryptocurrencies most commonly held by officials and their family members.
South Korea expanded these disclosure requirements after earlier controversies, including the case involving lawmaker Kim Nam-guk and his large undisclosed cryptocurrency holdings.
Before the reforms, officials did not always have to report virtual assets. Lawmakers began proposing changes as early as 2023 to close those gaps in the disclosure rules.
U.S. Lawmakers Report Much Smaller XRP Holdings Meanwhile, in the United States, lawmakers disclose financial assets under the STOCK Act, which covers investments such as stocks and cryptocurrencies. Public filings generally show much smaller XRP holdings than those reported in South Korea.
Representative Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania disclosed cryptocurrency purchases made in late 2024, including XRP and Solana around Dec. 11, 2024, before later buying Bitcoin.
His reported holdings fell within the required disclosure range of $1,000 to $15,000 for each asset. Meanwhile, more recently, White House official Ian Kelley confirmed holding XRP in an official disclosure.
DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.
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Ripple today announced it has received authorization of its Crypto Asset Service Provider (CASP) license from Luxembourg's Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF).
This follows the preliminary approval announced in June 2026 and confirms Ripple as fully MiCA-compliant, with its crypto payments solution now available to financial institutions, corporations, and companies in all 30 European Economic Area nations.
The CASP license, when combined with Ripple's existing EU Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence, will allow European banks, fintechs, and corporations to access Ripple's entire cryptoasset and stablecoin payments infrastructure, enabling them to collect, exchange, and pay out through a single integration for the first time.
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Ripple UK CEO Cassie Craddock celebrated the milestone in an X post. "We're fully licensed in Europe and excited to keep building on the incredible momentum of recent months. Let's go," Craddock wrote.
We're fully licensed in Europe and excited to keep building on the incredible momentum of recent months. Let's go!🚀 https://t.co/LVKKKgpKVX
— Cassie Craddock (@CraddockCJ) July 6, 2026 The executive noted a demand among the institutions Ripple works with across Europe to build their digital asset services alongside regulated partners, and the company is now licensed and ready to meet that demand.
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Alongside its EU EMI license, Ripple's CASP approval places it among the few digital asset providers with full MiCA authorization, adding to a global portfolio of over 75 regulatory licenses.
XRP, RLUSD set to benefitThe RLUSD stablecoin and XRP underpin Ripple's solutions, which span global payments, custody, liquidity, and treasury management.
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The CASP license approval will let Ripple expand its cryptoasset services to financial institutions and businesses across all 30 countries of the European Economic Area. As a result, the RLUSD stablecoin and XRP are set to benefit immensely.
The license also positions Ripple to delve into broader crypto-asset activities in Europe as it continues to meet rising European demand for digital asset services and infrastructure. Europe is already a key market for Ripple's products, with some of the world's major financial institutions among its customers.
XRP could climb to higher price levels if the XRP Ledger (XRPL) keeps its share of the market and Citi’s $5.5 trillion tokenization forecast becomes reality.
This idea recently gained traction after comments from Roger Bayston, Head of Digital Assets at Franklin Templeton, in the latest Evernorth interview.
Citi’s $5.5 Trillion Projection Still Conservative During the conversation, Asheesh Birla, CEO of Evernorth, mentioned the tokenization report from Citi released in early June.
For context, the report projected that tokenized securities on blockchain could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030. Birla asked for Bayton’s view on whether the figure might be too high or too low.
In response, Bayton said the estimate may be too low. He explained that when you compare it to the overall size of global capital markets, $5.5 trillion would still represent only a small portion.
The Franklin Templeton executive pointed out that the financial system is gradually being rebuilt, with blockchain now acting as a more efficient foundation for how these markets operate.
XRPL Market Share and Growth Implications Right now, the XRP Ledger holds about 2.28% of the total tokenized market, which equals roughly $4 billion in value. This comes as XRP currently trades at around $1.13.
If Citi’s $5.5 trillion projection becomes reality by 2030 and XRPL keeps its 2.28% share, the network could hold about $125.4 billion in tokenized assets. This would be a major jump from the current $4 billion.
This potential growth could have implications for XRP’s price. To assess this, we asked Google Gemini for a hypothetical estimate.
Responding, Google Gemini explained that there remains no single formula that directly links the value of assets on a blockchain to the price of its native token. As a result, it used three different models to estimate possible outcomes.
XRP Valuation Models The AI chatbot first presented an estimated market cap-to-tokenized value ratio of about 17.51 for XRP, based on a $70.06 billion market cap and $4 billion in tokenized assets.
In the first model, it assumed this relationship grows at the same rate. Using a growth multiplier of 31.35x, based on the increase from $4 billion to $125.4 billion, the model produced a projected XRP price of $35.43. This would also put the market cap at around $2.196 trillion.
XRP Linear Scaling Valuation Model | Google Gemini In the second model, Gemini looked at how markets might behave as they mature. It suggested that speculative pricing could reduce over time as real utility becomes more important.
XRP Institutional Utility Valuation Model | Google Gemini If the ratio drops to 10x the underlying asset value, XRP’s market cap could reach $1.254 trillion, giving a price of $20.23. Meanwhile, if it drops further to 5x, the market cap would be $627 billion, with XRP priced at $10.11.
The third model assumed that XRP’s value would only increase by the exact amount of new assets added to the network. With an increase of $121.4 billion in tokenized assets, the total market cap would rise from $70.06 billion to $191.46 billion. Under this scenario, XRP would be priced at about $3.09.
XRP Pure Value Absorption Valuation Model | Google Gemini Key Drivers Gemini also highlighted two major factors that could affect these estimates. The first is XRPL’s deflationary system, where a small amount of XRP is burned with each transaction. If activity grows alongside a $125.4 billion ecosystem, the supply could drop, which may push the price higher.
The second factor is liquidity velocity. Specifically, if XRP is widely used to move value across borders, transaction activity would increase.
While this could mean people hold XRP for shorter periods, it would also require larger liquidity pools. This could lead institutions to hold significant amounts of XRP, reducing the available supply and supporting higher prices.
In the end, these projections remain theoretical. Still, they show that XRP’s price could range from $3.09 to $35.43 depending on how adoption, market structure, and real-world use develop by 2030.
DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.
While XRP holders everywhere else argue about ETF flows and price charts, one country quietly turned the token into working infrastructure. Regulated prepaid money on the XRP Ledger, a Deloitte-attested stablecoin, tokenized bonds paying XRP bonuses, and a financial giant that pays shareholder dividends in the token. This is what the utility thesis looks like when someone actually builds it.
Summary
Japan has built the world’s most extensive real world XRP ecosystem through SBI with licensed prepaid tokens, RLUSD distribution, tokenized bonds, and shareholder rewards. SBI Ripple Asia’s regulated prepaid token framework opens access to Japan’s 30 trillion yen prepaid payments market using the XRP Ledger. Japan is proving XRP’s infrastructure utility through regulated adoption even as the token’s market price remains driven largely by ETF flows and speculation. In March 2026, a Japanese travel company began selling prepaid payment tokens to ordinary consumers, issued on the XRP Ledger, under a license from Japan’s Financial Services Agency. No press cycle followed, no price candle marked the moment, and most XRP holders outside Japan never heard about it. It was, nonetheless, a first that the token’s global community has waited more than a decade for: real, regulated, consumer-facing money moving on the ledger, in the world’s third-largest economy, under the full supervision of a G7 regulator.
The company behind the license, SBI Ripple Asia, is one arm of a structure with no parallel anywhere else in crypto. SBI Holdings, the Tokyo financial conglomerate spanning brokerage, banking, insurance, and asset management, has spent a decade wiring Ripple’s technology and the XRP token into the machinery of Japanese finance: a joint venture for payments, an exchange business distributing RLUSD with audited reserves, tokenized corporate bonds that pay bonuses in XRP, bank remittance corridors, loyalty-point conversion, and, in a flourish no Western public company has matched, XRP paid out to SBI’s own shareholders as a benefit.
The result is a natural experiment the rest of the XRP world should study closely. Everywhere else, the token’s story in 2026 is financial: ETF flows, escrow releases, a price near $1.15 that has lost roughly 70 percent in a year. In Japan, and effectively only in Japan, the story is operational. One country took the utility thesis literally, and the gap between that country and everywhere else has become the sharpest lens available on what XRP actually is.
This is the anatomy of the SBI empire: how the alliance was built, what each piece does, what the 30 trillion yen prepaid experiment means, and what Japan proves, and fails to prove, about the token underneath.
JUST IN: Japan tokenizes prepaid payments on the XRP Ledger with SBI and Tobu Top Tours issuing tokens for the 30 trillion yen prepaid market pic.twitter.com/1zYYC57IeE
— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) April 19, 2026 A decade of patient wiring The SBI-Ripple relationship is old by crypto standards, and its age is the point. SBI Ripple Asia was founded in 2016 as a joint venture to bring Ripple’s settlement technology to Japanese and Asian financial institutions, back when the pitch was replacing correspondent banking messaging. SBI Holdings became one of Ripple’s largest outside shareholders, and its chief executive, Yoshitaka Kitao, one of the token’s most senior corporate evangelists anywhere, a position he has held through two bear markets that silenced most of his peers.
What distinguishes the Japanese build-out is that it advanced through the regulator, not around it. Japan’s Payment Services Act and its licensing regimes for exchanges, stablecoins, and prepaid instruments are among the strictest in the world, drafted in the shadow of Mt. Gox. Every piece of the SBI-Ripple stack exists because it cleared that bar: the exchange arm is licensed, the stablecoin distribution is licensed, and the newest layer, prepaid tokens, required SBI Ripple Asia to register as a prepaid payment instrument issuer, which it completed on March 26.
The strategy compounds slowly and survives drawdowns, which is precisely what the rest of the XRP ecosystem has struggled to do. While the token’s price detached from Ripple’s corporate success everywhere else, a divergence now so stark that the company’s own funding machine has become the subject of open debate, the Japanese structure kept adding licensed capabilities through the decline. Bear markets kill speculative adoption; they barely register against regulatory roadmaps measured in years.
The depth of commitment shows in details that would be unthinkable at a Western firm. SBI has distributed XRP to its own shareholders as a shareholder benefit, a program renewed in 2026 with distributions beginning May 1, effectively paying dividends in the token to hundreds of thousands of Japanese retail investors. Whatever one thinks of the token, no other public financial conglomerate on earth compensates its owners with it.
The regulator that Mt. Gox built None of the SBI structure is intelligible without Japan’s regulatory history, because the country’s crypto framework was forged by catastrophe earlier and more thoroughly than anywhere else on earth.
Tokyo hosted the industry’s first systemic disaster: the 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox, then the world’s dominant Bitcoin exchange, which vaporized hundreds of thousands of customer coins and put crypto on the front page of every Japanese newspaper as a consumer-protection failure. The political response was not prohibition but codification. Japan amended the Payment Services Act to license exchanges years before Western peers had any framework at all, then tightened again after the 2018 Coincheck hack, building a regime of segregated custody, cold-storage mandates, listing reviews, and capital requirements that made Japanese licenses among the hardest and most valuable in the industry.
The same instinct produced the world’s first comprehensive stablecoin law, in force since 2023, which restricted issuance to banks, trust companies, and licensed money transfer agents, and the prepaid instrument framework that SBI Ripple Asia’s March registration slots into. Where American crypto policy spent a decade as litigation and Europe’s arrived only with MiCA, Japan built its rulebook early and then, crucially, stopped changing it. Predictability, not permissiveness, is the Japanese advantage: a firm that plans a five-year build on the Payment Services Act can trust the act will still be there.
That environment selected for exactly the kind of player SBI is. The compliance costs that strangle startups are a rounding error for a conglomerate; the decade-long timelines that venture capital cannot tolerate are ordinary corporate planning in Tokyo; and the regulator’s preference for long-standing, capitalized, domestically accountable issuers hands incumbents the field. Japan did not set out to build the world’s best jurisdiction for a Ripple alliance, but a decade of post-Gox rulemaking produced precisely that, and SBI was the institution positioned, and patient enough, to notice.
The history also explains the strategy’s export problem, which shadows everything that follows: the model works because the rules are stable and the champion is native. Neither condition can be shipped.
The prepaid breakthrough: 30 trillion yen in reach The March registration is the piece with the largest addressable prize, because Japan’s prepaid economy is enormous and structurally ready for tokenization.
Japanese consumers hold prepaid value everywhere: transit cards, convenience store balances, gaming credits, gift instruments, corporate points. The market’s annual scale runs around 30 trillion yen, roughly $200 billion, and it operates under the Payment Services Act’s prepaid instrument framework, a regime that already accommodates digital value issued against fiat. SBI Ripple Asia’s registration lets it issue those instruments as tokens on the XRP Ledger, converting a paper-and-database industry into on-chain balances without asking regulators for anything novel.
The first live deployment made the strategy legible: Tobu Top Tours, the travel arm of the Tobu railway group, launched a prepaid token for travel spending, issued and redeemed under the PSA framework, running on XRPL mainnet. A tourist’s prepaid travel balance is now a ledger asset, transferable and programmable within the license’s limits, settling on the same infrastructure that carries XRP itself.
Two properties make this bigger than one travel product. First, it is a template, not a bespoke integration; the registration covers a category, and every subsequent issuer, a retailer, a game publisher, a transit operator, can reuse the same rails. Second, it seeds the ledger with regulated, yen-denominated value at consumer scale, the raw material for the payments network Ripple has promised for a decade. Prepaid tokens do not require anyone to hold or even know about XRP, but they generate transaction flow, wallet adoption, and institutional operating experience on the ledger, the boring accumulation that the XRPL’s institutional finance stack needs far more than another partnership announcement.
The realistic caveat: 30 trillion yen is the market’s size, not SBI’s share, and incumbent prepaid giants will not concede it because a competitor found a better database. Japan’s cashless economy is already crowded with entrenched closed-loop systems, QR wallets with tens of millions of users, transit cards tapped billions of times a year, point programs woven into every retail chain, and each incumbent owns its float, its data, and its customer relationship precisely because its system is closed. The XRPL pitch to those players is interoperability and issuance cost, real advantages that nonetheless ask incumbents to open ecosystems they profit from keeping shut.
SBI’s likelier early wins are exactly what Tobu Top Tours represents: mid-sized issuers in travel, gaming, and regional retail for whom building proprietary rails never made sense, aggregated one license at a time. The breakthrough is the license and the template. The land grab is still ahead, and it will be fought store by store against some of the stickiest payment habits on earth.
RLUSD with a Japanese passport The second pillar arrived five days after the prepaid registration. On March 31, SBI VC Trade, the group’s licensed crypto exchange, began distributing Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin to Japanese customers, making it among the first foreign-issued stablecoins to enter Japan through the front door of its regulatory regime.
The distribution came with reserve attestations by Deloitte showing approximately $1.568 billion in assets backing roughly 1.49 billion RLUSD in circulation at the time of the review. In a country where the yen-stablecoin framework is strict enough that domestic issuance has moved slowly, a dollar token with a Big Four attestation and a licensed local distributor is a product with genuine institutional reach, and one whose paperwork alone signals which market it was dressed for.
RLUSD’s Japanese beachhead matters to the global picture more than its size suggests. Ripple’s stablecoin strategy, from its role in the Open USD consortium to its positioning against Circle and Tether, depends on proving RLUSD can win regulated distribution that rivals cannot easily replicate. Japan is the proof case: Tether has never cleared Japanese listing requirements, and the market’s stablecoin shelf is nearly empty. Being early on an empty, heavily regulated shelf is how USDC won Europe under MiCA, and SBI is running the same play for RLUSD in Asia.
The alliance stacked a third pillar the same quarter: tokenized corporate bonds. SBI issued 10 billion yen of its START digital bonds through BOOSTRY’s blockchain platform, retail-accessible instruments paying 1.85 to 2.45 percent, sweetened with XRP bonuses for bondholders through 2029. A conglomerate paying bond incentives in XRP is marketing, but it is also plumbing: it normalizes the token inside conventional Japanese retail finance, one coupon at a time.
The rest of the web Around the three pillars runs a mesh of smaller commitments, individually minor and collectively the texture of real adoption.
Banking: Tottori Bank, a regional institution, uses Ripple-powered rails for remittances, continuing the original SBI Ripple Asia mission of wiring Japanese regional banks into modern settlement. The corridor work is the oldest and least glamorous layer of the stack, and in some ways the most telling: regional bank integrations survive on reliability metrics and audit trails, not conference keynotes, and a rail that has cleared retail remittances under FSA supervision for years is the kind of reference customer that no marketing budget can buy. The regional banking sector, with its aging customers, thin margins, and heavy reliance on slow legacy transfer systems, has always been the most natural Japanese customer for the technology.
Consolidation: SBI has been in talks to fold Bitbank, one of Japan’s larger independent crypto exchanges, into its orbit, a move that would concentrate even more of the country’s licensed trading infrastructure inside the group. In a market where licenses are the moat, buying licensed capacity is buying distribution.
Loyalty: Rakuten’s vast points ecosystem connects to crypto conversion paths that include XRP, linking the token to one of the most widely held loyalty currencies in the country. Points-to-crypto is a small pipe, but it is a pipe pointed at tens of millions of ordinary consumers.
Venture and events: Ripple has committed a $500 million fund for Japanese and Asian corridor development, and the ecosystem’s confidence shows in the calendar: XRP Tokyo 2026, staged with participation from investors including a16z, made the city the token’s de facto global capital this year. Even the group’s hedging tells a story; SBI signed a memorandum with Fasset that contemplates multi-network token issuance, a reminder that the conglomerate’s loyalty is to its strategy, not to any single ledger.
Talent and standards flow through the same mesh. Japanese engineers trained on XRPL integrations inside SBI subsidiaries seed the domestic developer base; the group’s participation in industry associations shapes how Tokyo writes the next round of token rules; and every licensed deployment produces compliance playbooks that shorten the path for the deployment after it. None of this appears in any adoption dashboard, and all of it is why institutional ecosystems, once rooted, prove so hard for competitors to displace.
Ripple, for its part, keeps feeding the region: its acquisition of BC Payments Australia on March 11 extended licensed payment capacity in the neighboring corridor, the kind of unglamorous license-shopping that built the Japanese position in the first place.
JUST IN: Rakuten Wallet launches $XRP as a listed asset and payment method starting from April 15, allowing users to buy with Rakuten Points and spend at over 5 million merchants in Japan pic.twitter.com/cYTZajrmyO
— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) April 13, 2026 Kitao’s long bet Institutional strategies this durable usually trace to one person, and in this case the person has never hidden. Yoshitaka Kitao built SBI out of the SoftBank orbit in the late 1990s into one of Japan’s most aggressive financial groups, and he adopted the Ripple thesis early, publicly, and with a conviction that has outlasted every cycle since. He has used shareholder meetings to talk price targets, put XRP into the group’s shareholder benefit program, and steered corporate development, the joint venture, the exchange arm, the mining and Web3 subsidiaries, around the thesis for a decade.
The bet’s texture is worth appreciating. Kitao committed a regulated, listed conglomerate to a foreign startup’s token in 2016, when the token had no legal clarity anywhere, then held the position through the SEC lawsuit that made XRP untouchable in America, through delistings, through an 80 percent drawdown, and through the 2026 slide. Japanese corporate governance gives a founder-chairman latitude that few Western boards would extend, and Kitao has spent that latitude on patience. The feud now raging between Ripple’s and Strategy’s chief executives over whose model creates value has a quiet third participant: the only major institution that took the utility thesis and actually financed a decade of it.
The dependence runs both directions. For Ripple, SBI is not one partner among many; it is the distribution, licensing, and political capital behind effectively every Japanese achievement the company can point to, which is why Ripple’s regional commitments, the $500 million corridor fund, the Tokyo flagship events, concentrate there. For SBI, Ripple’s technology and token are a differentiator no domestic rival can copy quickly, a moat made of licenses and relationship-years.
Which is also the risk. Kitao is in his mid-seventies. The strategy’s continuation is a succession question as much as a market one, and conglomerates have a long history of new management quietly unwinding a founder’s signature enthusiasms. The Fasset memorandum’s multi-network language, and the group’s general drift toward network-agnostic tokenization, read naturally as institutional hedging around exactly that mortality, corporate and personal. The empire is real. It is also, in the end, one man’s conviction wearing a conglomerate’s balance sheet.
What Japan proves, and what it cannot The Japanese experiment is the strongest evidence anywhere for the utility thesis, and its limits are just as instructive as its successes.
What it proves: the technology clears real regulatory bars. The XRP Ledger now carries licensed consumer prepaid money, a Deloitte-attested stablecoin, and tokenized bonds inside a G7 regulatory perimeter. The perennial skeptic’s claim that no serious regulator would ever bless the stack is, as of this spring, simply false. It also proves the institutional patience model works: a decade of joint-venture building through the regulator produced compounding capabilities that no bull-market partnership spree ever has.
What it cannot prove: that any of this accrues to the token’s price. Prepaid tokens settle in yen value; RLUSD is a dollar instrument; tokenized bonds pay yen coupons. XRP itself is the bridge and gas asset of the ledger they run on, and holders’ monthly reminder of the supply side arrives from escrow regardless of how many travel tokens Japan issues. The uncomfortable arithmetic of 2026 is that the year of Japan’s breakthroughs was also the year XRP fell to $1.01 lows, because the flows that price the token, ETF creations, exchange speculation, escrow absorption, dwarf the ledger’s operational activity and will for years.
The 2026 market backdrop makes the divergence vivid. Spot XRP ETFs launched in the United States in November 2025 to a $1.3 billion opening surge, saw their first outflows in the spring, then settled into a steady multi-week inflow streak even as Bitcoin funds bled through June, leaving roughly a billion dollars under management. Those flows, plus the escrow’s net release, plus exchange speculation, are the entire visible price formation of XRP, and not one of the three has anything to do with a travel token in Saitama. Japanese adoption enters the price, if ever, through a channel so long and indirect, ledger activity to institutional confidence to allocation decisions, that no honest analyst would model it inside a single cycle.
There is a second, subtler limit: the Japanese stack mostly does not need XRP the asset even where it uses XRPL the network. Prepaid instruments are yen claims; RLUSD is a dollar stablecoin with its own reserve economics; bond bonuses denominated in XRP are marketing budget, not settlement demand. The ledger burns trivial XRP in fees and uses it as a bridge only where a corridor chooses it. The utility thesis, stated carefully, was always that ledger adoption would eventually require the asset at scale. Japan is proving the adoption half at a pace no other country matches, and leaving the requirement half exactly as unproven as it was.
The honest framing is that Japan has built the world’s best answer to the wrong question, if the question is next quarter’s price, and the world’s only serious answer to the right one, if the question is whether XRP’s infrastructure ever hosts a real economy. Both questions have constituencies, and they talk past each other daily.
The lonely experiment The sharpest fact about the SBI empire is its solitude. Nothing comparable exists in the United States, where XRP’s 2026 story is entirely financial, ETFs, escrow, and litigation memories. Nothing comparable exists in Europe, where Ripple’s presence is licenses without a champion. The model requires a specific, rare configuration: a large domestic financial group with equity in Ripple, a regulator with clear token frameworks, and an executive willing to spend a decade on it. Japan had all three. No second country currently has two.
The near-misses elsewhere underline how demanding the recipe is. The Gulf states have friendly regulators and sovereign capital, but no domestic conglomerate has married its balance sheet to the token; Ripple’s licenses there are doors without a house behind them. Korea has retail enthusiasm and, soon, won-denominated stablecoins, but its regulatory posture toward foreign-token infrastructure remains cautious, and its chaebol have their own chains to champion. The United States has the ETFs and now the legal clarity, but American institutions buy exposure, not plumbing; nobody is issuing licensed consumer money on XRPL between the coasts. Each jurisdiction supplies one ingredient. Only Japan supplies all three, and it took ten years even there.
That solitude cuts both ways. It makes Japan the indispensable proof case, the one jurisdiction the utility thesis can point to without hedging. It also makes the thesis fragile in a way believers rarely price: a strategy embodied in one conglomerate and one 70-something evangelist is a strategy with key-man and key-country risk. If the SBI experiment stalls, succession, strategy drift, or simply the gravitational pull of that Fasset-style multi-network hedging, there is no second Japan behind it.
For now, the experiment is accelerating, not stalling: three new licensed pillars in a single spring, a consumer market of $200 billion newly addressable, and a shareholder base literally paid in the token. Whether that ever moves a chart is the question the rest of the XRP world obsesses over. Japan, characteristically, is not waiting for the answer. It is issuing the next token and the one after that.
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. Always do your own research. Information current as of July 6, 2026.
XRP may be close to a major breakout against Bitcoin after years of underperformance.
The XRP/BTC trading pair is approaching a key technical turning point. If the breakout happens, XRP could significantly outperform the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
The bullish outlook comes as XRP continues to consolidate below a long-term descending trendline. That resistance has capped rallies since the token’s 2018 peak. XRP is currently trading at $1.13, up 9% from the previous week’s low of $1.009.
This strength is also visible on the XRP/BTC chart, which has gained 2.7% over the past week, suggesting XRP is outperforming Bitcoin during the ongoing recovery.
XRP/BTC Breakout Could Lead to 10x Surge Notably, the long-term XRP/BTC chart highlights a descending resistance line that has remained in place since 2018. Now, the pair is nearing the apex of the pattern, suggesting a breakout may be getting closer.
The chart shows XRP/BTC trading around 0.000018 BTC while testing the upper boundary of the multi-year downtrend. XRP is also facing a major resistance zone near its 2018 highs. If XRP eventually returns to that level, the pair could gain more than 1,040%.
In other words, XRP could outperform Bitcoin by roughly 10 times during the breakout. This would put XRP’s price around $13 by the time Bitcoin reaches its next all-time high, with the XRP/BTC ratio rising to around 0.0001800 from approximately 0.00001807 today.
XRP/BTC Chart Price Will Be the Main Catalyst Meanwhile, this outlook has sparked optimism in the XRP community. One user on X asked what would drive XRP into the double-digit price range if it rallies before Bitcoin sets a new all-time high. The investor wondered whether utility, spot ETFs, regulatory clarity, or retail demand would be the primary catalyst.
Community figure Celal Kucuker argued that price itself would be the biggest catalyst. He said that once XRP starts making higher highs against Bitcoin, improving market sentiment would attract more buyers.
Other bullish developments could support the rally, but they would likely act as secondary catalysts rather than the initial trigger.
Years of Compression May Set Up a Strong Move Another market participant noted that XRP has traded below its 2018 valuation relative to Bitcoin for several years. He suggested that such a prolonged period of weakness could eventually end with a sharp breakout.
Others agreed with the view, noting that markets often produce stronger moves after extended periods of compression. Essentially, the XRP/BTC pair has been building energy for years, and that could make any confirmed breakout more significant.
Ultimately, the journey for XRP to climb above $10 remains challenging, as the token is currently trading at $1.13 while the market remains in a bearish phase. However, this outlook could play out when the next bull cycle emerges.
DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.
XRP may be showing early signs of a shift in momentum in its monthly RSI from a downtrend to an uptrend after months of persistent weakness.
This is according to a market outlook from EGRAG Crypto, a prominent market analyst. In an X post on July 5, he noted that the latest move is not simply another short-term bounce, but the start of a distribution phase targeting higher levels for the monthly XRP RSI.
In the commentary, EGRAG highlighted a macro momentum pattern that has appeared during previous XRP market cycles. He also identified how the monthly RSI briefly slipped below a historically important support zone.
XRP Fell Below Historic RSI Support Zone EGRAG stated that the RSI fell to the 40 region, an area it has not visited before in its history. This happened in June, when XRP’s RSI fell to a low of 40.59.
This saw the altcoin’s oscillator break below a historic support zone that has repeatedly coincided with major cycle bottoms. In previous market cycles, the indicator formed a clear 1-2-3 bottoming structure before momentum shifted higher. The monthly RSI retests the support level around 43.66 three times, forms a durable bottom, then starts to recover higher.
In the first circle, the monthly RSI dipped to 44.25, forming 1 in December 2019, then fell to 43.75 in March 2020, forming 2. It then concluded the accumulation with a final dip to 44.01 in June 2020.
During the second circle, the XRP oscillator dipped to 43.90 in June 2022, 43.95 in August 2022, and 44.42 in December 2022. This formed the 1, 2, and 3 bottoming patterns, respectively.
XRP Monthly Oscillator/EGRAG Crypto This time, however, the oscillator dropped below that historical range. Rather than viewing the move as outright bearish, EGRAG believes the steeper dip may represent a temporary deviation designed to shake out weaker market participants before momentum begins recovering. EGRAG called this the manipulation phase.
Notably, the oscillator is rebounding after touching the 40 region, currently sitting at 42.5. The recovery suggests that momentum is starting to shift back to positive.
XRP RSI Following the AMD Model Meanwhile, EGRAG further discussed the current development with the application of the Accumulation, Manipulation, and Distribution (AMD) model. He noted that this model can also apply to the monthly oscillator instead of price analysis alone.
According to the analyst, the expected accumulation phase was around the historical support zone, but the XRP RSI broke below it. That was the manipulation, which he believes precedes a decisive break higher.
For this to happen, EGRAG outlined several important levels. A recovery above 43.66 would represent the first sign of improving momentum, while clearing 46.50 would strengthen the bullish case. However, the analyst views a monthly close above the 50 level as the most significant confirmation that XRP’s macro momentum has shifted.
Notably, a rising RSI, especially on higher timeframes, shows that upside momentum is returning to the market. Such a scenario would have bullish implications for the XRP price, potentially sending it higher.
DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.
In brief Vitalik Buterin published an updated "Lean Ethereum" roadmap, which he calls the network's third major iteration following 2022’s Merge. The plan would replace “almost every major piece of the protocol” over three to four years, enshrining recursive STARK proofs and swapping quantum-vulnerable cryptography for quantum-safe alternatives. Buterin said privacy is now a "first class goal" and floated a future Ethereum holding far more data through new, more scalable types of state. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out an updated vision for the blockchain's next several years, billing it as the most sweeping rebuild since the network ditched mining and declaring that Ethereum is "reinventing itself."
In a tweet on Saturday, Buterin shared his takeaways from a recent gathering of Ethereum researchers in Berlin, along with a refreshed "strawmap," a draft roadmap published at strawmap.org. He framed "Lean Ethereum," first sketched out in 2025, as the protocol's third major iteration, on par with the 2022 Merge that moved Ethereum to proof-of-stake. Almost every major component will be replaced over three or four years, he said, without forcing existing apps to migrate.
Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April.
The updated strawmap is at https://t.co/HZEerH1xxI, and I attached a picture of it to this post.
My… pic.twitter.com/KPGayHSySf
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 4, 2026
State changeThe centerpiece is a change in how the network checks itself. Instead of every node re-executing every transaction, Ethereum would verify a compact cryptographic proof of the chain using recursive STARKs, a form of zero-knowledge proof that Buterin wants "enshrined" as a core protocol component.
He also floated a simpler consensus with one or two-round finality, multidimensional gas pricing, and, eventually, a shift beyond the EVM toward an instruction set such as RISC-V.
Quantum safety, privacy and data storageGuarding against the threat posed by Q-Day has climbed the agenda, Buterin said, with anything cryptographically vulnerable due to be swapped for quantum-safe alternatives, and work on quantum-resistant "blobs" already months along.
Privacy, he wrote, is now a "first-class goal" rather than an add-on, factored into pieces like the mempool and the state tree, and the whole effort would rest on formal verification.
The most disruptive piece concerns data storage. Buterin sketched a 2030 network holding roughly 2TB of today's flexible "dynamic" state alongside 100 terabytes of a new, more scalable but restrictive type, well suited to tokens, NFTs, and much of DeFi, if less so to complex contracts like decentralized exchanges. Rewriting an ERC-20 token onto the new storage would not be mandatory, he said, but could cut its fees more than tenfold.
None of it arrives at once. Buterin said the coming Hegotá fork will likely be Ethereum's last before the "Lean" era begins, with a large gas-limit increase expected at the nearer-term Glamsterdam upgrade and further gains in capacity and speed over roughly five years.
The plan lands at a lean moment for the Ethereum Foundation itself, which recently cut staff and tightened its budget, while previous Ethereum upgrades faced repeated delays before implementation.
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Bitmine chairman Tom Lee on the Mainstage at Consensus Miami 2026 (CoinDesk)Summary
Bitmine Immersion bought 42,197 ether last week, worth about $74 million, continung its buying spree.Chairman Thomas Lee attributed ETH's recent outperformance of bitcoin and Bitmine's continued accumulation to rising investor optimism that the proposed Clarity Act will pass and bring greater regulatory certainty to crypto, especially Ethereum.Bitmine now holds 4.8% of ether supply, inching closer to its goal to corner 5% of the asset's supply.Bitmine Immersion (BMNR), the largest Ethereum (ETH) treasury company, stepped up its buying pace last week, purchasing 42,197 ether (ETH) as chairman Thomas Lee pointed to improving prospects for U.S. crypto legislation as a catalyst for the asset.
The latest purchase, worth roughly $74 million based on ether's current price of around $1,750, lifted the company's holdings to 5.74 million ETH, according to a Monday update. The stash is now worth about $10 billion and represents 4.8% of Ethereum's circulating supply, inching closer to the firm's goal of cornering 5% of the asset's supply.
The company also held 206 bitcoin, $527 million in cash and marketable securities, plus stakes in Beast Industries and Eightco Holdings, bringing its total crypto, cash and investment holdings to $11.1 billion.
The acquisition marks an increase from the prior week's purchase of 27,084 ETH, though it remains below the six-figure weekly buying pace BitMine maintained earlier this year.
Bitmine buys as Strategy sellsBitmine's continued buying contrasts with a shift at Strategy (MSTR), the largest digital asset treasury and corporate bitcoin holder, which sold about $216 million worth of BTC to raise cash. The sale marked a rare reduction in Strategy's bitcoin holdings and underscored the funding pressures the company faces amid the crypto market downturn and increased dividend obligations.
Strategy selling BTC while Bitmine sold BTC may have contributed to ether outperforming bitcoin through last week by 6%, even though the gains came after a near-continuous downtrend since August.
Lee, however, tied the recent strength in ETH relative to BTC to growing optimism that the proposed Clarity Act could become law.
"Investors have become more optimistic about the passage of the Clarity Act," he said, noting that prediction markets now assign roughly a 50% probability to the legislation passing, the highest level in two weeks.
"We believe regulatory clarity is an important milestone, enabling crypto, particularly smart contract platforms like Ethereum, to benefit as crypto becomes part of our everyday life," Lee said. He pointed to Ethereum layer-2 networks processing USDC transactions for companies including Shopify and Visa as examples of blockchain technology moving into mainstream payments.
The company has also staked more than 4.8 million ETH through its MAVAN staking platform and related infrastructure, generating recurring staking income alongside its treasury strategy. At current prices, those staked holdings are worth roughly $8.5 billion.
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Building the Zcash Machine: Tachyon and Quantum Readiness
Building the Zcash Machine: Tachyon and Quantum Readiness
Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold.
Jun 30, 2026
Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold.
Why it matters:
Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold.
While @Saylor continues to prioritise $BTC, Tom Lee (@fundstrat) is taking a different path, steadily building one of the most significant Ethereum positions in public markets.
Bitmine's total $ETH treasury has now reached 5.74 million tokens, equivalent to 4.8% of the entire global $ETH supply. The milestone puts the company 95% of the way toward its stated "Alchemy of 5%" objective and cements its standing as the world's largest public Ethereum treasury.
Closing In on the 5% TargetThe "Alchemy of 5%" goal has served as Bitmine's guiding benchmark since the company began aggressively accumulating $ETH. Reaching 4.8% is a meaningful threshold, signalling that the firm is now in the final stretch of a target that, if achieved, would give a single public company ownership of one in every twenty Ether tokens in circulation. That level of concentration in a public treasury is without precedent in the Ethereum ecosystem.
MAVAN Staking Infrastructure Driving YieldBitmine has not simply parked its holdings. The firm has transitioned 4.8 million $ETH into its proprietary MAVAN (Made in America Validator Network) staking infrastructure. The network currently generates an annualised yield of 2.68%, which translates into a projected $277 million in yearly staking rewards. By running its own validator network rather than delegating to third-party providers, Bitmine retains greater control over its staking operations and keeps more of the yield in-house.
The combination of scale and self-operated infrastructure positions Bitmine as more than a passive holder. It is now one of the more consequential institutional participants in Ethereum's proof-of-stake network, with a rewards stream that could meaningfully contribute to the company's financials if $ETH prices hold or appreciate.
Whether the firm crosses the 5% threshold will be closely watched by both Ethereum investors and those monitoring corporate crypto treasury strategies more broadly.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies said its Ethereum holdings reached 5,742,237 ETH, bringing the company closer to its goal of owning 5% of Ethereum’s total supply.
Summary
Bitmine now owns 5.74 million ETH, equal to 4.8% of Ethereum’s total supply today overall. Most of its ETH is staked, making validator rewards central to Bitmine’s treasury model now. Russell 1000 inclusion may widen institutional exposure, but ETH price volatility remains a key risk. The company said the holdings equal 4.8% of the 120.7 million ETH supply.
The latest Bitmine holdings update placed its combined crypto, cash, marketable securities and “moonshots” at $11.1 billion. The total includes 206 BTC, $527 million in cash and marketable securities, and equity stakes in Beast Industries and Eightco Holdings.
Crypto.news has tracked Bitmine’s steady ETH buying this year. A recent report said Bitmine had already pushed its Ethereum treasury above 5.7 million ETH after adding 27,084 ETH in the previous weekly update.
Tom Lee links ETH bet to regulation Bitmine chair Tom Lee said rising odds for the CLARITY Act had improved sentiment around Ethereum use cases. He said clearer rules could help smart contract platforms as crypto moves deeper into payments and financial services.
“Over the past few days, investors have become more optimistic about the passage of the Clarity Act,” Lee said.
He added that Ethereum layer-2 networks already process USDC activity for firms such as Shopify and Visa.
The company calls its 5% ETH supply goal the “Alchemy of 5%.” Crypto.news previously examined what Bitmine’s 5% Ethereum strategy could mean for ETH, noting that large treasury buying can reduce liquid supply while also creating concentration risk.
Bitmine said it is now 95% of the way toward that 5% target. If Ethereum supply stays near 120.7 million ETH, a 5% position would require about 6.04 million ETH.
Staking supports Bitmine’s model Bitmine said 4,879,157 ETH is now staked, worth about $8.8 billion at $1,800 per ETH. That means about 85% of its ETH position is earning validator rewards through staking.
The company said its own staking operations generated a seven-day annualized yield of 2.68%. It projected annualized staking revenue of about $235 million based on the current amount staked.
Bitmine had staked about 86% of its ETH pile before its Russell 1000 entry. That report noted that staking income has become a core part of Bitmine’s public-market strategy.
Bitmine also promotes MAVAN, its Made in America Validator Network. The company says MAVAN was first built for its own Ethereum treasury but may later serve institutional investors, custodians and ecosystem partners.
BMNR adds Russell 1000 exposure Bitmine was added to the Russell 1000 Large-cap Index on June 26. Lee said the move could bring “hundreds and possibly thousands” of new institutional investors into BMNR’s shareholder base.
Crypto.news had covered the Russell 1000 setup around Bitmine before the inclusion, noting that index membership can put BMNR in front of passive funds and large asset managers.
The company also completed a Series A preferred stock offering in June. As crypto.news reported, Bitmine’s BMNP preferred stock plan carried a 9.5% annual dividend rate and tied investor confidence to the ETH treasury model.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies expanded its Ethereum treasury by 42,197 ETH over the past week, raising its total holdings to 5.74 million ETH, or approximately 4.8% of the total ETH supply, according to a Monday press release.
The company’s balance sheet assets, including crypto, cash, marketable securities and strategic investments, have surpassed $11 billion. In addition to Ether, Bitmine owns 206 Bitcoin, $527 million in cash and marketable securities, and investments in Beast Industries and Eightco Holdings valued at a combined $251 million.
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“We continue to maintain a steady pace of accumulation throughout 2026,” Chairman Thomas “Tom” Lee said in a statement. “We believe we are in the early stages of crypto spring. Bitmine is expected to reach the ‘alchemy of 5%’ sometime in 2026.”
On the regulatory outlook, Lee said investors have become increasingly optimistic about the Clarity Act, adding that clearer rules could boost Ethereum as blockchain technology becomes more deeply integrated into everyday financial services.
Alongside its treasury update, Bitmine highlighted its inclusion in the Russell 1000 Index, the completion of a $273.8 million preferred stock offering in June, and progress with its MAVAN institutional staking platform.
As of July 5, the company had 4.88 million ETH staked, with projected annual staking revenue of approximately $235 million.
Bitmine’s crypto treasury ranks second globally behind Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings.
Unlike Bitmine’s continued accumulation, Michael Saylor’s company sold 3,588 Bitcoin for approximately $216 million last week, marking its second Bitcoin sale this year and its largest disposal to date.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
A viral social media post claiming Ethereum controls 87% of the global stablecoin supply has sparked debate within the XRP community.
However, the chart behind the claim excluded Tron, one of the largest stablecoin networks. The discussion comes as stablecoin activity reaches new highs. At the same time, Ripple’s RLUSD continues to gain traction on the XRP Ledger.
Ethereum and Tron Control 81% of the Market Notably, a crypto user shared Artemis data claiming Ethereum now controls 87% of the stablecoin supply. Longtime XRP critic on X, @ScamDetective5, used the post to further criticize XRP, saying, “The XRP Ledger is not even on the map.”
However, an Artemis dashboard that includes all major blockchains tells a different story. Ethereum remains the largest stablecoin network, with $162.7 billion in circulating supply. This gives it a 52.4% market share, not 87%.
Tron ranks second with $89.4 billion in circulating supply, accounting for 28.8% of the market. Together, Ethereum and Tron host more than 81% of the global stablecoin supply.
Other major networks include:
BNB Chain: $16.6 billion (5.4%) Solana: $16.2 billion (5.2%) HyperEVM: $5.7 billion (1.8%) Base: $4.6 billion (1.5%) Arbitrum: $4.3 billion (1.4%) Polygon PoS: $3.9 billion (1.3%) XRP Ledger: Approximately $1.2 billion (0.4%) The dashboard puts the total stablecoin supply at $312.7 billion.
Source: Artemis Stablecoin Transaction Volume Reaches New High Notably, the market share debate comes as stablecoin adoption continues to grow. According to Visa’s Allium-powered analytics, adjusted stablecoin transaction volume hit a record $1.79 trillion in June. That was up 63% from May and 125% compared with the same month last year.
Visa’s methodology removes bot activity, treasury rebalancing, and repetitive smart contract transactions. The goal is to better measure genuine economic activity.
USDC led June’s transaction volume at $1.21 trillion, accounting for about 67% of the total. USDT followed with $576 billion, or roughly 32%. PYUSD processed another $2.42 billion.
Among blockchains, Base narrowly led June’s transaction volume at $565 billion. Ethereum followed closely with $562 billion, while Tron processed about $320 billion.
The data suggests stablecoins are seeing increased use for payments, decentralized finance, and cross-border transfers despite broader market uncertainty.
RLUSD Gains Ground on the XRP Ledger While the XRP Ledger remains a small player in the broader stablecoin market, Ripple’s RLUSD recently reached an important milestone.
In late June, RLUSD’s circulating supply on the XRP Ledger surpassed its supply on Ethereum for the first time. That made XRPL the largest network hosting Ripple’s stablecoin.
Current figures from the RLUSD Tracker show that the XRP Ledger holds about $848 million in RLUSD. Ethereum holds a far lower figure at $727 million.
Across both networks, RLUSD’s circulating supply has grown to nearly $1.6 billion. The figures indicate growing adoption within Ripple’s ecosystem, even as Ethereum and Tron continue to dominate the overall stablecoin market.
DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.
Tom Lee also weighed in on the potential impact of the CLARITY Act on the crypto market, and ETH in particular.
The Tom Lee-chaired Bitmine Immersion Technologies continues with its Ethereum accumulation strategy, even though it has eased off the gas pedal compared to several weeks ago when it made multiple 100,000 ETH purchases.
In its latest announcement, it said it had added 42,197 ETH over the past week and now controls 4.8% of Ethereum’s circulating supply of 120.7 million tokens.
Closing In on 5% The latest treasury update published minutes ago indicated that the firm held 5,742,237 ETH as of July 5, valued at over $10 billion at prices of around $1,800. However, the token has slipped to $1,740 as of press time, meaning that the company’s unrealized losses are up to $9-$10 billion again.
In addition to its Ethereum fortune, Bitmine also holds 206 BTC, $527 million in cash and marketable securities, and strategic investments in Beast Industries and Eightco Holdings worth a total of $251 million.
Chairman Tom Lee continues to favor ETH over BTC, especially if the CLARITY Act passes in the United States, which many analysts believe will help the altcoin more. Additionally, he remains a firm believer in the upcoming ‘crypto spring’ as the bear market phase has almost been exhausted.
“Over the past week, we acquired 42,197 ETH, increasing our pace from the prior week. We continue to maintain a steady pace of accumulation throughout 2026. We believe we are in the early stages of crypto spring. Bitmine is expected to reach the ‘alchemy of 5%’ sometime in 2026,” stated Lee.
Bitmine remains the second-largest crypto accumulator, trailing only Strategy. However, the gap between the two has been slightly reduced over the past week as the Saylor-led company sold over 3,500 BTC.
Staking Business The statement further stated that Bitmine continues to allocate a significant portion of its ETH holdings to staking to generate substantial revenue. It has already staked nearly 4.9 million tokens, or about 85% of its total holdings, through its own institutional platform, MAVAN.
You may also like: Bitmine Buys Another 27,000 ETH Despite Market Slump, Nears 5% of Ethereum Supply Bitcoin (BTC) Dips Below $62K, Ethereum (ETH) Plunges 6% Daily: Market Watch 5 Reasons Why Bitcoin Just Crashed Below $63K as Liquidations Top $500M Based on a current staking yield of 2.68%, the company projects annualized staking rewards of approximately $235 million. If it deploys all of its ETH fortune, then the numbers could rise to $277 million.
Key HighlightsBMNR Shares Recover From Morning WeaknessETH Holdings Approach Landmark 5% ThresholdBitcoin Holdings and Staking Operations Provide Additional ContextGet 3 Free Stock Ebooks BMNR gains momentum following disclosure of $11.1B in cryptocurrency, cash and strategic investments
Company’s 5.74M ETH holdings bring it closer to achieving 5% Ethereum supply ownership by 2026
Ethereum staking portfolio grows to 4.88M ETH as validator infrastructure expands
Addition to Russell 1000 index opens doors for broader institutional investment flows
Company forecasts $235M in yearly staking income from current Ethereum position
Bitmine Immersion Technologies has positioned its substantial Ethereum holdings as the cornerstone of its corporate strategy following disclosure of $11.1 billion in total assets. Shares of BMNR finished trading at $14.36, marking a 1.48% increase, before climbing to $14.43 during pre-market hours. The advance came despite initial session weakness, with the stock recovering to post positive gains.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies, Inc., BMNR
BMNR Shares Recover From Morning Weakness Bitmine disclosed comprehensive holdings totaling $11.1 billion across digital assets, liquid funds, securities and equity positions. The breakdown included 5,742,237 ETH, 206 Bitcoin, and $527 million in cash and marketable securities. Additional strategic investments encompassed a $180 million position in Beast Industries and $71 million in Eightco Holdings.
The firm has structured its operations around sustained cryptocurrency accumulation paired with institutional market access. Consequently, BMNR stock performance now correlates with both traditional equity dynamics and Ethereum price action. The company’s inclusion in a major market index has further broadened its appeal to institutional capital.
On June 26, Bitmine secured placement in the Russell 1000 Large-cap Index through the annual rebalancing process. Management anticipates increased holdings from passive investment vehicles and exchange-traded funds following this designation. This milestone arrived shortly after the company completed a preferred equity offering in June.
ETH Holdings Approach Landmark 5% Threshold Bitmine confirmed its Ethereum stake now represents 4.8% of total network supply. This calculation uses a baseline of 120.7 million ETH in circulation. The company applied a $1,800 valuation per token for its holdings assessment.
During the previous seven days, the firm added 42,197 ETH to its reserves, maintaining its aggressive 2026 acquisition timeline. Company leadership indicated the 5% Ethereum supply threshold remains achievable within 2026. This benchmark continues to define Bitmine’s treasury management and staking infrastructure priorities.
Earlier this year, Bitmine introduced MAVAN as an enterprise-focused validator platform. The infrastructure supports the company’s own Ethereum reserves while targeting external institutional clients. A significant portion of Bitmine’s ETH currently operates through MAVAN alongside partner staking services.
Bitcoin Holdings and Staking Operations Provide Additional Context The company’s digital asset portfolio includes 206 Bitcoin, though Ethereum dominates its cryptocurrency balance sheet strategy. Bitmine currently holds the distinction of operating the world’s largest Ethereum treasury and ranks second globally among all crypto treasuries.
By July 5, the company’s staked Ethereum position reached 4,879,157 ETH according to internal data. At the company’s $1,800 valuation, this staked allocation represents approximately $8.8 billion. The staked holdings account for roughly 85% of Bitmine’s entire Ethereum position.
Management projects annualized staking income of $235 million based on current committed assets. The company estimates full-year rewards could reach $277 million when applying a 2.68% yield rate. As regulatory frameworks evolve, Bitmine maintains its focus on Ethereum staking and treasury expansion as fundamental business pillars.
Oliver Dale
Editor-in-Chief of Blockonomi and founder of Kooc Media, A UK-Based Online Media Company. Believer in Open-Source Software, Blockchain Technology & a Free and Fair Internet for all. His writing has been quoted by Nasdaq, Dow Jones, Investopedia, The New Yorker, Forbes, Techcrunch & More. Contact [email protected]
Influenced by news that Strategy sold Bitcoin to pay dividends, STRC rebounded to break above $90.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), Strategy’s preferred stock STRC has rebounded above $90, trading at $90.125, with a 2.57% intraday gain. Earlier reports noted that Strategy sold 3,588 Bitcoin last week, generating $216 million in proceeds to pay dividends on its digital credit securities. As of July 5, the company’s Bitcoin reserves fell to 843,775 coins, alongside $2.55 billion in U.S. dollar reserves.
7 minutes ago
BlackRock Withdraws 7,546 ETH From Coinbase Prime, Worth Around $13.2 Million
According to monitoring by Onchain Lens, BlackRock just purchased and withdrew 7,546 ETH from Coinbase Prime, worth approximately $13.2 million.
7 minutes ago
Four wallets are holding 2x longs on $DEXE on @Aster_DEX, with a combined unrealized profit of ~$1.32M.
The $DEXE price keeps climbing today. Four wallets are holding 2x longs on $DEXE on @Aster_DEX, with a combined unrealized profit of ~$1.32M. The highest return has reached 104.57%.
According to monitoring by Onchain Lens, publicly listed Bitcoin mining firm Riot Platforms has deposited 500 BTC, valued at around $30.9 million, with NYDIG Custody, likely for sale.
7 minutes ago
Tom Lee: Rising ETH/BTC exchange rate indicates investors expect improved visibility of crypto use cases.
Chairman Tom Lee of BitMine, the largest Ethereum treasury, stated in a post that despite widespread market skepticism toward ETH, the rise in the ETH/BTC exchange rate shows investors are anticipating an improvement in the visibility of cryptocurrency use cases, which is a positive sign for the market.
7 minutes ago
Jiang Zhuoer: Strategy’s approved 20,000 BTC for sale will likely be fully sold.
Jiang Zhuoer, founder of BTC mining pool BTC.TOP, posted that U.S. crypto asset firm Strategy has sold 3,588 BTC for $216 million. This marks Strategy’s first large-scale BTC sell-off, carried out despite holding $2.55 billion in cash reserves — enough to cover 17.6 months of interest payments — and voluntarily selling more BTC than required to meet its interest obligations. This move signals the breakdown of Strategy’s long-held "never sell BTC" narrative. Jiang said he does not understand the reason behind Strategy’s current large-scale sell-off, noting that even if it lacks U.S. dollars, it could continue raising funds by issuing additional common stock. While this would reduce BTC holdings per share, he argues that preserving the "never sell" narrative and related beliefs is far more important than per-share BTC metrics. If Strategy fails to repurchase BTC at lower prices after the sell-off, it will also lead to a decline in per-share BTC holdings. Jiang added that Strategy’s willingness to bear this cost can only be interpreted as its preparation to conduct significant BTC swing trading. Jiang further stated that the 20,000 BTC already approved by Strategy’s board will almost certainly be sold in full. He believes that during the upcoming bull market phase, the market may witness a sell-off by an entity holding hundreds of thousands of BTC.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin laid out an updated "Lean Ethereum" roadmap in a post on X Saturday, describing a three-to-four-year overhaul he called the network's third major protocol iteration since the 2022 Merge. The plan follows a researcher meeting in Berlin and would replace direct…
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new set of takeaways on "Lean Ethereum," the multi-year plan to rebuild most of the network's protocol, in a post on X on July 4.
Buterin said the update follows a meeting of Ethereum researchers in Berlin two weeks earlier, which continued discussions held with client teams in Svalbard in April. The revised roadmap, known as the strawmap, was published alongside the post.
Buterin called Lean Ethereum "the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second," adding that "almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced" over three to four years. He said the rollout is designed, like the 2022 Merge, to minimize disruption to existing applications.
Lean EthereumAccording to Buterin's post, the plan replaces direct transaction re-execution with verification through recursive STARKs, a cryptographic proof system he said would become "an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol."
Other listed changes include swapping quantum-vulnerable cryptography for quantum-safe alternatives, decoupling the available chain from finality to enable one- or two-round finality, introducing multidimensional gas, altering what types of state the network supports, and changing client architecture.
Buterin also said Hegotá — referred to in the post by its internal codename H-star — is "probably Ethereum's last thematically 'pre-Lean' fork." Starting with the following fork, internally named I-star, most future upgrades will carry what he called "a very strong 'Lean' feel."
Quantum Safety and Privacy Buterin wrote that quantum safety "has shifted up a LOT in priority," making a quantum-safe design for blobs — the temporary data storage layer-2 networks rely on — "urgent." He said that work has been ongoing for months. The Defiant has previously reported on Ethereum researchers' efforts toward this goal, including a post-quantum key registry and the Ethereum Foundation's post-quantum research hub.
Privacy, Buterin said, "is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal." He said that when designing new elements such as Frames, the mempool, or additions to the state tree, researchers now ask how "quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions" would pass through them, and at what overhead.
Buterin also tied the plan to formal verification, saying it would allow the protocol to become more comfortable with canonicalization — defining protocol pieces directly as bytecode in a specific language. He pointed to evm-asm, which he said is being written in part to serve as a canonical proof system for the EVM.
State RedesignButerin described changes to Ethereum's state, the running record of account balances and contract data, as "probably the single most disruptive part of the plan." He said there is growing consensus around keeping today's flexible "dynamic" state largely unchanged while scaling it only moderately, and adding a new, more restrictive type of state designed to scale much further without requiring block builders to sync or store all of it.
As an example, Buterin described a possible Ethereum in 2030 holding 2 terabytes of present-day-style dynamic state alongside 100 terabytes of the new, more scalable state type. He said the new format would suit ERC-20 tokens, NFTs and many DeFi applications, but not "highly central" objects such as Uniswap contracts or onchain order books.
No application would be required to migrate, Buterin said, but doing so could be "very cost-effective": rewriting an ERC-20 token to use a new UTXO-based storage design currently under exploration could cut its transaction fees by more than 10x. He listed keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state and temporary state as current ideas for the new state types, and said the design will need extensive feedback from application developers, including those building privacy-focused applications.
Buterin separately flagged the incentive structure behind storing a much larger total state size as a "first-class research area," noting that simply requiring each node to store a fixed percentage of data doesn't explain why they would be willing to serve it.
On execution, Buterin said Ethereum will eventually need a virtual machine beyond the EVM — at minimum something like leanISA to support recursive STARKs — with leanISA and RISC-V as the leading contenders. His stated preference is for the EVM to become a high-level compiler feature while the protocol interacts directly with RISC-V or leanISA, though he said that shift "is still far away."
Buterin closed the post by saying gas limit increases, blob increases and slot-time decreases will recur over roughly the next five years, with a large gas limit increase expected alongside the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade.
Mixed ReactionsReaction on X centered on the roadmap's ambition and its timeline. Dankrad Feist, an Ethereum Foundation researcher whose work on data sharding gave danksharding its name, wrote that the strawmap "has lots of REALLY COOL features" and that "fully proven STF and scaling to Gigagas with finality in seconds gets me excited," but argued the three-to-four-year timeline "is very slow." He said the Foundation "should be ambitious and get it done in ~1 year," calling that "realistically possible now with LLMs."
Matt Liston pushed back on compressing the timeline publicly, writing that while a two-year delivery "seems between possible and likely," it "would be irresponsible" for Buterin or the Foundation to communicate a one-to-two-year expectation, adding that "underpromising" is the safer approach.
DeFi analyst Ignas framed the plan as "bullish for $ETH... if only the EF shipped on time," pointing to the Merge, which he said was "'six months away' for about four years." He wrote that the roadmap "addresses all (except one) key feedback" from the market — L1 reclaiming execution from layer-2 networks, privacy, quantum resistance and faster finality — but said Ethereum's tokenomics remain unaddressed, calling it a "non-issue if reduced fees attract more txs/users." Ignas also said the most significant parts of the plan arrive in 2028 and beyond, with finality targeted for 2029, and warned that delays help competitors such as Tempo and Canton compete for institutional and real-world-asset adoption.
Seven ForksThe strawmap was first introduced in February by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, outlining seven forks through 2029 organized around five "north star" goals: a fast L1, a "gigagas" L1 capable of roughly 10,000 transactions per second, a "teragas" L2, a post-quantum L1, and a private L1. The Defiant reported on the original strawmap at the time.
Buterin's update lands roughly a week and a half after the Ethereum Foundation cut its annual budget by about 40% and eliminated 54 roles, or 20% of its staff, as part of a restructuring meant to turn the nonprofit into a leaner, endowment-style organization. Buterin has said the Foundation's technical ambitions for the strawmap remain intact despite the reduced budget.
In brief BitMine added more than $73 million in Ethereum last week, pushing it closer to 5% of the total circulating supply. The firm now holds more than 5.74 million ETH, 4.87 million of which is staked for yield. Shares of BMNR, which were recently added to the Russell 1000 index, are up more than 5% since market open. Publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies added around $73 million in ETH last week while Strategy, its leading Bitcoin counterpart, dumped $216 million in BTC to pay dividend obligations.
BitMine now maintains a treasury of 5,742,237 ETH—more than 4.7% of the Ethereum circulating supply—valued at nearly $10 billion, as ETH changes hands at $1,752.
The latest acquisition represents a step up from last week’s $43 million acquisition as BitMine Chairman Tom Lee—an investor in Dastan, the parent company of Decrypt—maintains the view that a period of crypto prosperity is just beginning, pointing to increased odds of the passage of the Clarity Act as another piece of evidence.
“Over the past few days, investors have become more optimistic about the passage of the Clarity Act with prediction markets now seeing approximately 50% probability, the highest odds in two weeks,” said Lee in a statement.
“We believe regulatory clarity is an important milestone, enabling crypto, particularly smart contract platforms like Ethereum, to benefit, as crypto becomes part of our everyday life,” he added.
Odds of the bill’s passage this year sit around 48% on Polymarket as of Monday morning, up 4% in the last week, but down 34% from a February high of around 82% in support of passage before the end of 2026.
Shares in BitMine reflect some additional investor optimism on Monday, jumping more than 5% shortly after market open to trade around $15.14 per share. The stock’s recently addition to the Russell 1000 index is expected to significantly impact the institutional ownership of the firm’s shares, according to Lee.
"Being added to the Russell 1000 is expected to add hundreds and possibly thousands of additional institutional investors as equity owners of BitMine," he said.
In addition to its ETH purchase, the firm has increased its staked ETH to 4,879,157 or nearly 85% of its entire stack, bringing its projected annualized staking revenue to $235 million.
ETH has gained more than 10% in the last week to change hands around $1,752, but remains 65% off its all-time high of $4,946.
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In brief BitMine added more than $73 million in Ethereum last week, pushing it closer to 5% of the total circulating supply. The firm now holds more than 5.74 million ETH, 4.87 million of which is staked for yield. Shares of BMNR, which were recently added to the Russell 1000 index, are up more than 5% since market open. Publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies added around $73 million in ETH last week while Strategy, its leading Bitcoin counterpart, dumped $216 million in BTC to pay dividend obligations.
BitMine now maintains a treasury of 5,742,237 ETH—more than 4.7% of the Ethereum circulating supply—valued at nearly $10 billion, as ETH changes hands at $1,752.
The latest acquisition represents a step up from last week’s $43 million acquisition as BitMine Chairman Tom Lee—an investor in Dastan, the parent company of Decrypt—maintains the view that a period of crypto prosperity is just beginning, pointing to increased odds of the passage of the Clarity Act as another piece of evidence.
“Over the past few days, investors have become more optimistic about the passage of the Clarity Act with prediction markets now seeing approximately 50% probability, the highest odds in two weeks,” said Lee in a statement.
“We believe regulatory clarity is an important milestone, enabling crypto, particularly smart contract platforms like Ethereum, to benefit, as crypto becomes part of our everyday life,” he added.
Odds of the bill’s passage this year sit around 48% on Polymarket as of Monday morning, up 4% in the last week, but down 34% from a February high of around 82% in support of passage before the end of 2026.
Shares in BitMine reflect some additional investor optimism on Monday, jumping more than 5% shortly after market open to trade around $15.14 per share. The stock’s recently addition to the Russell 1000 index is expected to significantly impact the institutional ownership of the firm’s shares, according to Lee.
"Being added to the Russell 1000 is expected to add hundreds and possibly thousands of additional institutional investors as equity owners of BitMine," he said.
In addition to its ETH purchase, the firm has increased its staked ETH to 4,879,157 or nearly 85% of its entire stack, bringing its projected annualized staking revenue to $235 million.
ETH has gained more than 10% in the last week to change hands around $1,752, but remains 65% off its all-time high of $4,946.
Daily Debrief NewsletterStart every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
A major decentralized finance transaction on the Ethereum network ended with an estimated $2 million loss after a large swap was routed through a low-liquidity pool. According to blockchain analytics group Lookonchain and security firm GoPlus Security, the user exchanged 1,126.44 ETH—worth about $2.01 million at the time—in a single transaction.
Price impact from pool route deepened lossesInstead of receiving assets close to the original amount, the trader ended up with just 5,776 LIT tokens, valued at around $14,200. GoPlus Security clarified that the loss was not caused by a hack or a standard front-running scenario. Rather, it resulted from a backrunning arbitrage mechanism operating within the same block, exploiting price inconsistencies caused by the trade. GoPlus Security is widely recognized for its work on blockchain and smart contract risk assessment.
GoPlus Security emphasized that this was not a security breach or typical front-running, but rather price manipulation from a backrunning arbitrage opportunity occurring within the same block.
The ill-fated swap was routed through the AVAIL/WETH pool on Uniswap V3. With extremely limited liquidity in this pool, the large ETH order instantly pushed the AVAIL token price far above its actual market value. This forced the trader to purchase the token at a dramatically inflated price, resulting in severe losses.
Backrunning arbitrage within the same block draws attentionThe transaction continued across additional trading routes. After the AVAIL tokens were swapped for USDC, the trader then bought LIT on Uniswap V4. However, due to unfavorable price execution along each step, almost the entire value of the original ETH was wiped out.
As explained by GoPlus Security, after the large swap disrupted prices in the AVAIL/WETH pool, a backrunning participant acquired AVAIL at or near the fair market value from another source. That trader then sold the tokens into the artificially inflated pool, extracting more than 1,072 WETH as profit.
Glossary: MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) refers to the extra profit gained from prioritizing and ordering transactions during block production. A “backrunner” is a participant who quickly moves in to profit from temporary price swings caused by a large order.
On-chain data showed that roughly 1,018 ETH was subsequently sent to Titan Builder as a block producer payment.
Low liquidity raises risk for large tradesBlockchain records reveal that about 1,018 ETH was later paid to Titan Builder as a block builder fee. This highlights how MEV participants can seize pricing imbalances during block production to generate significant revenue. Titan Builder stands out as a key transaction organizer within the Ethereum block-building ecosystem.
The incident has reignited debate about the risks associated with processing large orders through pools with limited liquidity. When a sizable transaction passes through such markets, even a single order can cause rapid and extreme price fluctuations. While arbitrageurs often restore price equilibrium after the fact, users may end up paying far above the true market value during these episodes.
Ultimately, this example underscores the need for smarter routing technologies in decentralized trading. Systems that avoid illiquid pools and better estimate transaction costs on a route-by-route basis could help prevent similar costly errors in the future.
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.
Influenced by news that Strategy sold Bitcoin to pay dividends, STRC rebounded to break above $90.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), Strategy’s preferred stock STRC has rebounded above $90, trading at $90.125, with a 2.57% intraday gain. Earlier reports noted that Strategy sold 3,588 Bitcoin last week, generating $216 million in proceeds to pay dividends on its digital credit securities. As of July 5, the company’s Bitcoin reserves fell to 843,775 coins, alongside $2.55 billion in U.S. dollar reserves.
7 minutes ago
BlackRock Withdraws 7,546 ETH From Coinbase Prime, Worth Around $13.2 Million
According to monitoring by Onchain Lens, BlackRock just purchased and withdrew 7,546 ETH from Coinbase Prime, worth approximately $13.2 million.
7 minutes ago
Four wallets are holding 2x longs on $DEXE on @Aster_DEX, with a combined unrealized profit of ~$1.32M.
The $DEXE price keeps climbing today. Four wallets are holding 2x longs on $DEXE on @Aster_DEX, with a combined unrealized profit of ~$1.32M. The highest return has reached 104.57%.
According to monitoring by Onchain Lens, publicly listed Bitcoin mining firm Riot Platforms has deposited 500 BTC, valued at around $30.9 million, with NYDIG Custody, likely for sale.
7 minutes ago
Jiang Zhuoer: Strategy’s approved 20,000 BTC for sale will likely be fully sold.
Jiang Zhuoer, founder of BTC mining pool BTC.TOP, posted that U.S. crypto asset firm Strategy has sold 3,588 BTC for $216 million. This marks Strategy’s first large-scale BTC sell-off, carried out despite holding $2.55 billion in cash reserves — enough to cover 17.6 months of interest payments — and voluntarily selling more BTC than required to meet its interest obligations. This move signals the breakdown of Strategy’s long-held "never sell BTC" narrative. Jiang said he does not understand the reason behind Strategy’s current large-scale sell-off, noting that even if it lacks U.S. dollars, it could continue raising funds by issuing additional common stock. While this would reduce BTC holdings per share, he argues that preserving the "never sell" narrative and related beliefs is far more important than per-share BTC metrics. If Strategy fails to repurchase BTC at lower prices after the sell-off, it will also lead to a decline in per-share BTC holdings. Jiang added that Strategy’s willingness to bear this cost can only be interpreted as its preparation to conduct significant BTC swing trading. Jiang further stated that the 20,000 BTC already approved by Strategy’s board will almost certainly be sold in full. He believes that during the upcoming bull market phase, the market may witness a sell-off by an entity holding hundreds of thousands of BTC.
7 minutes ago
American Bitcoin adds 500 BTC to its holdings, bringing its total BTC holdings to 8,000.
Bitcoin mining firm American Bitcoin, backed by the Trump family, has increased its holdings by 500 BTC, bringing its total position to 8,000 BTC.
Bitmine (NYSE: BMNR) stock price is up by 4.28% today, July 6, to trade at $14.98 at the time of writing. These gains come after Bitmine announced that it bought an additional 42,197 ETH, with this purchase taking place during the same week that Strategy sold 3,588 BTC.
Bitmine’s Ethereum Holdings Reach 5.74 million ETH Bitmine has disclosed that it now holds 5,742,237 ETH after buying 42,197 coins between June 29 and July 3. The Ethereum treasury company now holds 4.8% of the entire Ethereum supply.
The recent purchase has also increased the amount of ETH that Bitmine has staked to 4,879,157 coins, with this staked amount being 85% of the Ethereum it holds. Bitmine notes that the staked ETH generates a yield of around $235 million every year.
Bitmine’s purchase has stirred gains for the BMNR stock because it moved from an opening price of $14.39 to $15.04 at the time of writing.
But while BMNR stock gained, Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) dropped by 1.17% after Strategy sold 3,588 BTC to buy back the STRC stock.
The divergence between the two crypto stocks suggests that investors could be betting on a HODL strategy by crypto treasury companies.
BMNR Stock Outlook as Bulls Target Key Resistance Level The price of BMNR stock is testing the resistance of $15 after its 4% gain. The last time that Bitmine shares traded above this obstacle of $15 was on June 23.
If BMNR closes above $15, the next obstacle lies at the 50-day EMA level of $15.88, with a move above this EMA set to suggest that the trend is shifting in favor of bulls.
The RSI reading of 53 also supports a bullish BMNR stock forecast. This RSI has moved from a reading of 31 on June 30 to 53 on July 6, suggesting that the momentum is now favoring bulls.
BMNR Stock Price If bulls weaken their grip and investors that want to book profits after the recent gains begin to sell, the crypto stock could move to the support level of $13.
Bitmine’s Chairman Tom Lee Flips Bullish on Stocks in July The gains seen with the BMNR stock price come as the chairman of Bitmine, Tom Lee, says that US stocks are going to rise in July 2026.
Lee was speaking in an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, where he opined that the companies that will report their Q3 earnings in July are going to surpass Wall Street expectations, and this could cause stock prices to rise.
He also added that the S&P 500 index could rise from the current 7,500 points and reach 8,000 points in 2026.
Bitmine will release its earnings for the period between April 2026 and June 2026 on July 29, and Wall Street expects the company’s revenue to reach $45 million.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled a multi-year roadmap that places native privacy, quantum resistance, and protocol simplification at the center of Ethereum’s next major upgrade, describing it as the network’s largest transformation since The Merge.
Summary
Vitalik Buterin has proposed Ethereum’s biggest protocol overhaul since The Merge with a multi-year roadmap. The plan prioritizes native privacy, quantum-resistant cryptography, and more efficient transaction verification. The roadmap remains a draft, with the Hegotá fork expected to be the final upgrade before the Lean Ethereum era. According to a roadmap published on Strawmap.org and shared by Buterin on X over July 6, the proposed changes are expected to be introduced over the next three to four years following discussions among Ethereum researchers in Berlin.
If we want to make the Lean Ethereum consensus chain aggressively more "lean", and add strong validator privacy (ZK-unlink deposit from staking activity from withdrawal, and re-anonymize stakers every day), here is a path:https://t.co/Gdee7tE53R
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 6, 2026 The document outlines coordinated upgrades spanning nearly every layer of the network and presents what Buterin describes as Ethereum’s third major evolution after its transition to proof-of-stake in 2022.
Native privacy becomes a core protocol feature Instead of leaving privacy to applications built on Ethereum, the roadmap proposes making it a built-in property of the protocol itself. The document evaluates key components, including Frames, the transaction mempool, and future state designs, according to whether they can support intermediary-free, quantum-safe privacy while keeping computational costs low.
Building on ideas first outlined in May 2026, Buterin’s latest proposal expands an earlier privacy roadmap into a network-wide redesign. What previously focused on incremental improvements has now developed into a long-term architectural plan covering the protocol’s core infrastructure.
Among the document’s strongest statements is Buterin’s observation that “quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority.” The roadmap identifies work on quantum-safe blob designs, which support Ethereum’s rollup-based scaling model, as an urgent priority.
According to the proposal, several cryptographic systems currently used by Ethereum, including BLS signatures, KZG commitments, and ECDSA, would eventually be replaced with post-quantum alternatives. The direction aligns with the post-quantum cryptography standards finalized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2024.
Protocol redesign targets faster verification and smaller overhead Alongside cryptographic upgrades, the roadmap introduces changes intended to simplify how Ethereum validates transactions. Rather than requiring every node to re-execute every transaction, the proposal recommends recursive STARK-based verification, where one prover performs the intensive computation while the rest of the network verifies a compact cryptographic proof.
The proposal also continues work first discussed by the Ethereum Foundation earlier this year. In February 2026, the Foundation released an initial strawmap examining quantum threats facing Ethereum, while Buterin separately detailed the network’s quantum security risks. The latest roadmap develops those earlier discussions into a more detailed implementation strategy.
Meanwhile, the technical proposal arrives as the Ethereum Foundation continues internal restructuring. The organization has reduced its workforce by roughly 20%, eliminating about 54 positions, while also cutting its budget by a targeted 40%. Recent departures have included protocol contributors Hsiao-Wei Wang, Tomasz Stańczak, Tim Beiko, and Barnabé Monnot.
Community discussion on X has largely focused on the roadmap’s technical detail rather than broad ambitions. Several participants noted that the draft identifies specific signature schemes, cryptographic replacements, and state-size objectives instead of relying on high-level goals.
For now, the roadmap remains a working draft rather than a finalized implementation schedule. According to the document, the upcoming Hegotá fork is expected to be the final major network upgrade before Ethereum enters what Buterin describes as the Lean Ethereum era, where privacy, scalability, and quantum resistance are treated as core protocol requirements rather than optional additions.
Dogecoin (DOGE) price nears $0.0770 on Monday, maintaining a broadly consolidative tone for the last three days after Friday’s 4% rebound. The first-ever meme coin is losing retail interest as DOGE derivatives volume drops, while on-chain data shows early signs that large-wallet investors, commonly referred to as whales, are expanding their holdings.
Technically, Dogecoin’s mild recovery should clear the $0.0770 resistance, potentially extending toward $0.085.
Whales renew support for DOGE as retail stands on the sidelinesDogecoin is seeing mixed retail interest, even as large-wallet DOGE investors expand their holdings. CoinGlass data show that DOGE futures Open Interest (OI) is largely stable at $1.03 billion on Monday, suggesting that DOGE contract holders have adopted a wait-and-see approach over the last 24 hours. The funding rate of 0.0089% reflects broadly bullish sentiment among traders, who are buying long positions at a premium.
However, the volume has plunged by more than 5% during the same period, suggesting that trading activity has declined and reaffirming the wait-and-see approach among traders.
DOGE derivatives data. Source: CoinGlassOn the whales' front, investors with over 1 billion DOGE now hold 73.85 billion tokens, up from 72.73 billion tokens on Thursday. However, the sideways movement in the holdings of this cohort of whale holders over the last two days aligns with the consolidation in spot price and a steep drop in whale transactions to 12 on Sunday, down from 47 on Friday.
At the same time, the percentage of total supply in profit has increased to 38.51% from 23.7% last week, implying a recovery that is driving more demand for the meme coin.
DOGE supply distribution data. Source: SantimentDogecoin’s recovery approaches key resistanceDogecoin struggles to clear the $0.0770 resistance level, which has capped the rebound from $0.0700. DOGE remains below the 50-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at $0.0854 and the 200-day EMA near $0.1105, keeping the broader trend capped in a bearish trend.
If DOGE clears the $0.0770 level, it could open the path toward the 50-day EMA at $0.0854. The meme coin should surpass the EMA to signal a definitive bullish trend reversal.
A mildly positive Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) histogram, as the average lines trend upward after a bullish crossover on Thursday. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) hovers around 41, suggesting weak upside momentum and reinforcing the view that rebounds are likely to struggle while these moving averages sit overhead.
DOGE/USDT daily price chart.On the downside, initial support comes in at $0.0700, ahead of a more important horizontal floor at $0.0642, where buyers would need to step in to prevent a deeper slide in the daily structure.
(The technical analysis of this story was written with the help of an AI tool.)
Dogecoin, zincir üstü verilerde yaşanan dikkat çekici hareketlilikle yeniden yatırımcıların radarına girdi. Son günlerde artan ağ aktivitesi, teknik göstergeler ve vadeli işlem piyasasındaki gelişmeler, memecoin için volatilitenin yükselebileceğine işaret ediyor. Özellikle kripto para piyasası genelinde risk iştahının yeniden artmasıyla birlikte analistler, Dogecoin’de önemli fiyat hareketlerinin yaşanabileceğini değerlendiriyor. Ancak teknik göstergeler henüz tek yönlü bir tablo ortaya koymuyor.
Dogecoin Ağ Aktivitesi Neden Hızla Arttı? Kripto analisti Ali Martinez, temmuz ayının başlamasıyla birlikte Dogecoin ağındaki aktif adres sayısında dikkat çekici bir yükseliş yaşandığını belirtti. Glassnode verilerine göre aktif adres sayısı yaklaşık 50 bin seviyesine ulaştı.
Aktif adres, belirli bir zaman diliminde en az bir zincir üstü işlem gerçekleştiren benzersiz cüzdanları ifade ediyor. Bu metrikte görülen artış, kullanıcı ilgisinin yükseldiğini ve ağ kullanımının güçlendiğini gösteriyor.
Martinez, bu hareketliliği “bir şeyler oluyor” sözleriyle yorumlarken, önümüzdeki dönemde fiyat oynaklığının belirgin şekilde artabileceğine dikkat çekti.
Teknik Göstergeler Dogecoin İçin Ne Söylüyor? Teknik analiz tarafında farklı sinyaller öne çıkıyor. TradingView verilerine göre MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) göstergesi Dogecoin için “Al” sinyali üretmiş durumda. Bu gösterge, 12 ve 26 periyotluk üstel hareketli ortalamaları karşılaştırarak olası trend değişimlerini belirlemeye yardımcı oluyor.
Buna karşın Bull Bear Power göstergesi ise “Sat” sinyali vermeye devam ediyor. Alıcı ve satıcı gücünü ölçen bu indikatör, piyasada satış baskısının tamamen ortadan kalkmadığını gösteriyor.
Öte yandan Göreceli Güç Endeksi (RSI) nötr bölgede bulunuyor. Bu da piyasa analizi açısından Dogecoin’in ne aşırı alım ne de aşırı satım bölgesinde yer aldığını ortaya koyuyor.
Balinalar Ve Vadeli İşlem Verileri Ne Anlatıyor? Dogecoin’e yönelik ilginin yalnızca spot piyasayla sınırlı kalmadığı görülüyor. Coinglass verilerine göre Binance’teki en büyük yatırımcılar arasında uzun (long) pozisyonların oranı son günlerde belirgin şekilde yükseldi.
Aynı dönemde Dogecoin vadeli işlem piyasasındaki açık pozisyon (Open Interest) da haftalık bazda yüzde 7,6 artarak 1 milyar dolar seviyesini aştı. Açık pozisyon büyüklüğündeki yükseliş, spekülatif piyasaya yeni sermaye girişinin gerçekleştiğine işaret ediyor.
Bu tablo, büyük yatırımcıların token üzerinde yükseliş beklentisini artırdığı şeklinde yorumlansa da tek başına fiyat artışının garantisi olarak görülmüyor.
Dogecoin Fiyatında Sırada Ne Var? Haberin hazırlandığı sırada Dogecoin 0,07727 dolar seviyesinde işlem görüyor. Son 24 saatte yaklaşık yüzde 1,78 değer kaybeden memecoin, yıl başından bu yana ise toplamda yüzde 34’lük düşüş yaşadı.
Buna rağmen zincir üstü aktivitedeki artış, açık pozisyonların yükselmesi ve bazı teknik göstergelerin olumlu sinyaller üretmesi, yatırımcıların Dogecoin’i yeniden yakından takip etmesine neden oluyor. Ancak göstergelerin birbirinden farklı sinyaller vermesi nedeniyle yatırım kararı almadan önce hem teknik analiz hem de zincir üstü verilerin birlikte değerlendirilmesi önem taşıyor.
Bu içerik kesinlikle yatırım tavsiyesi niteliği taşımamaktadır. Piyasalar yüksek risk içermektedir ve yatırım kararlarınızı almadan önce kendi araştırmanızı yapmanız önemlidir.
Son Dakika kripto para haberleri için hemen tıkla.
Konu ile ilgili yorumlarınızı bize yazabilirsiniz. Ayrıca, bu tarz bilgilendirici içeriklerin devamının gelmesini isterseniz, bizleri Telegram, Youtube ve Twitter kanallarımızdan takip edebilirsiniz.
Dogecoin has climbed above a long standing downward trend line, a move that now sees this level acting as a critical support. Investors are watching closely: if buyers manage to defend this zone, analysts believe DOGE could gather strength and target the 0.12 dollar region. At the same time, experts caution that there’s no clear sign of a lasting reversal against Bitcoin just yet.
Ongoing compression on the DOGE/BTC chartThe monthly DOGE/BTC chart shows Dogecoin remains locked in a lengthy consolidation phase when measured against Bitcoin. After two powerful bull surges in previous cycles, DOGE has continued trading below a major long-term descending resistance. This pattern suggests a new bullish wave may not be immediate and could instead depend on broader market inflows.
According to Cryptollica, the anticipated breakout for DOGE/BTC in 2024 has failed so far, with the pair still squeezed near major long-term support. That’s why there’s not enough evidence to claim a fresh Dogecoin bull run against Bitcoin is underway.
Cryptollica points out that Dogecoin typically thrives during periods when appetite for risk is rising and capital shifts into more speculative assets, a dynamic that usually requires either weakening Bitcoin dominance or a stronger ETH/BTC structure.
The analyst notes that subdued interest, weak confidence, and investors holding unrealized losses were also featured ahead of past strong rebounds. Yet, these similarities alone don’t guarantee a new breakout. In this scenario, the most important threshold is clearly the long-term descending resistance—should Dogecoin manage a sustained move above it, outperformance against Bitcoin could once again be in play.
Support retest dominates the daily DOGE/USDT chartOn the daily DOGE/USDT chart, technicals are looking slightly more constructive. After correcting from its May peaks, DOGE broke upward through its long-term downward trend line and is currently retesting this same area as support. Technicians emphasize the significance of these “retests” to determine if a former resistance is turning into reliable support.
Mini glossary: Capital rotation means investors move funds from one type of asset to another with higher risk or return potential. In crypto, this is often seen as money flowing from Bitcoin into altcoins.
Celal Kucuker highlights that Dogecoin currently offers one of the cleanest altcoin setups from a technical standpoint, and that the key signal lies in whether this trend line support continues to hold. The chart’s first major support sits at 0.0713 dollars, and keeping the price above this zone is regarded as critical to preserving the bullish setup.
Celal Kucuker believes the main focus for Dogecoin should be on whether the trend line functions as support; if it holds, the rally could gain momentum more rapidly than expected.
Under the bullish scenario, 0.0905 dollars is identified as the first major target, with the broader objective landing near 0.1187 dollars. This higher region is close to the important 0.12 dollar resistance and could offer another key inflection point.
IndicatorLevelSignificanceSupport0.0713 dollarsMonitored to maintain recovery structureFirst target0.0905 dollarsShort term upside areaMain target0.1187 dollarsZone near 0.12 dollar resistanceNo confirmation yet for a completed turnaroundStill, the current structure is far from confirmed. If DOGE fails to maintain its footing above the trend line, momentum could stall and price action might slip back into a sideways pattern. Thus, in the near term, the critical signal will be how buyers handle this ongoing support test.
In summary, the daily chart is showing firmer signs of improvement, while the long-term trend versus Bitcoin calls for patience. For Dogecoin to move decisively higher, not only must technical supports hold, but risk appetite for altcoins must also pick up across the market.
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.
Hyperliquid (HYPE) is arguably one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies in 2026. The exchange and its native token have seen incredible growth over the last year. The upswing is especially commendable given the larger bearish market environment. Hyperliquid (HYPE) has now overtaken Dogecoin (DOGE) to become the ninth-largest cryptocurrency project by market cap. HYPE’s price has risen by 3.4% in the daily charts and 13.3% in the weekly charts, according to CoinGecko data. Hyperliquid (HYPE) is currently down by just 8.8% from its all-time high of $76.87. Let’s discuss why the cryptocurrency has gained such traction this year and if it can hit a new peak soon.
Source: CoinGeckoWhy Is Hyperliquid Surging?Source: CoinCodexHyperliquid’s (HYPE) surge came after a rise in the the sue of the Hyperliquid exchange. Oil futures saw massive trade volume in 2026 amid heightened Middle East tensions. Unlike other exchanges that were closed for a certain period of the day, Hyperliquid was open 24/7. This made is extremely popular among traders. The exchange’s popularity was further propelled by its low fees. As a result, Hyperliquid’s native token, HYPE, climbed to an all-time high of $76.87 on June 16, 2026.
Hyperliquid continues to garner users to its platform as its native token overtakes Dogecoin (DOGE). The surge in the number of users and also returning clients has directly led to a surge in the exchange’s native token. Hyperliquid also uses a majority of its fees for buy backs. The surge in fee collection from increased trading on the platform has led to higher buy backs, consequently leading to a supply dip.
Will The Asset Hit Another All-Time High?Hyperliquid (HYPE) delivered incredible gains in bearish times. Therefore, it is difficult to predict the asset’s trajectory. The larger cryptocurrency market seems to be rebounding from its recent dip. The rally comes amid softer jobs data for June 2026. The low jobs may have led to a re-thinking of the Federal Reserve’s chances of raising interest rates.
Also Read: XRP Makes a Comeback, Rising 10% in a Week: Is $1.50 the Next Stop?
If the market continues its upswing Hyperliquid (HYPE) could hit a new all-time high very soon. However, bearish forces loom overhead and fresh volatility could change the tide ever so quickly.
Cardano (ADA) is showing early signs of recovery, following a long period marked by a persistent downtrend. After surpassing the resistance line that defined this decline, ADA’s price action has hinted at renewed upward momentum. Improvements in technical indicators and increased interest from buyers are fueling expectations that recent weakness could be coming to an end.
Technical breakout in focusAt the time of writing, Cardano is trading at $0.1896. The cryptocurrency has recorded a 24-hour trading volume of $1.10 billion, and its market capitalization stands at $6.91 billion. Despite signs of a bullish turnaround, ADA has slipped 3.29% in the same period, indicating that caution still dominates the market outlook.
Cryptocurrency analyst BATMAN highlights that ADA has managed to break out of the downward channel it had been stuck in for an extended period. According to BATMAN, this breakout above the 200-day exponential moving average lends even greater significance to the move. Cardano is recognized as a blockchain network focused on smart contracts and decentralized application infrastructure.
Analyst BATMAN notes that ADA’s exit from its downtrend channel, followed by establishing itself above the 200-day exponential moving average, strengthens the technical picture and suggests buyers may be regaining control.
A classic bullish divergence on the relative strength index (RSI) adds further attention to the positive signals. This technical structure is seen as an early indication that selling pressure is weakening, and buyers could soon take the lead.
Key indicators and pivotal levelsMaintaining levels above the 200-day exponential moving average has shifted what was previously a resistance area to a new support zone for ADA. As long as the price stays above this threshold, the likelihood of renewed upward efforts from buyers increases.
During today’s trading, ADA fluctuated within a range of $0.18517 to $0.19481, eventually settling at $0.18909. The cryptocurrency also held above the mid-Bollinger band at $0.15936, while making attempts to test the upper Bollinger band near $0.18806.
IndicatorLevelInterpretationCurrent price$0.1896Key area after breakoutIntraday low$0.18517Short-term supportIntraday high$0.19481Short-term tested upper regionMid Bollinger band$0.15936Intermediate support above priceUpper Bollinger band$0.18806Strength confirmation if surpassedExperts say that ADA’s attempts to test the upper Bollinger band point to increased buying pressure. However, they also emphasize that the recovery could gain more traction only if Cardano closes above this level.
MACD turns in buyers’ favorThe MACD indicator also supports the improved technical outlook for ADA. The MACD line has climbed to 0.00723, moving above the signal line at minus 0.00279. Additionally, the histogram has strengthened to 0.01002, signaling a rise in upward momentum.
Analysts believe that if ADA maintains its position above the 200-day exponential moving average and closes above the upper Bollinger band, buyers may set their sights on higher price targets.
Over the next few trading sessions, market observers will be watching to see if this breakout leads to a sustained trend reversal. Conversely, if buying interest fades and the price slips below significant support levels, Cardano could move sideways before any new attempt at a rally.
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.
Cardano has begun to show signs of recovery after weeks under intense selling pressure. According to on-chain data, the number of active participants within the network is on the rise, suggesting that investor confidence is gradually strengthening once again.
Wallet growth steals the spotlightData from Santiment indicates that, since June 23, the number of ADA wallets with a positive balance has increased by 14,783. Over the same period, the price of ADA climbed from roughly $0.14 to approach $0.20—representing a rally of more than 35%.
To clarify the background: Santiment is a platform providing on-chain analytics, social sentiment, and network activity metrics for the cryptocurrency market. The number of nonzero wallets is viewed as a core indicator, showing whether more addresses are holding a specific asset.
This rebound follows one of Cardano’s weakest performances in recent memory. Negative sentiment in the broader market had weighed on ADA for an extended period, dragging the token down to its lowest price zones in years.
Nonetheless, the increase in wallet activity indicates that investors have chosen not to exit the ecosystem entirely—instead, they are leaning toward accumulating. The rising number of addresses holding ADA at low prices suggests that long-term investors have continued to build positions even through the downturn.
Resistance levels on the technical chartsStronger network participation could mean Cardano’s user base is expanding beyond short-term trading. This trend is seen as a sign that the network is regaining trust and stability after the rough patch.
Technical indicators also point to some improvement. The abrupt decline that began in May slowed once buyers managed to defend the support range between $0.145 and $0.150. Following this, the price bounced back to test resistance between $0.19 and $0.20.
Market analyst V pointed out that Cardano was among the first major cryptocurrencies to break out from its downward channel. V added that if the current move evolves into an Elliott Wave impulse structure, it would offer even stronger confirmation of the shift.
According to analyst V, a short-term pullback may occur after the initial surge, but as long as support holds, the upward attempt may continue. If ADA stays above $0.20, the $0.21 to $0.22 zone could become the next major target.
Two metrics at the core of lasting recoveryThe next phase for Cardano will largely hinge on buyers’ ability to sustain the upward momentum. Both price action and the expanding number of active wallets are closely followed by the market. An expanding user base within the network stands out as a key signal that confidence in the Cardano ecosystem is starting to make a comeback after a difficult stretch.
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.
Cardano (ADA) is trading slightly lower on Monday, finding support around the key technical level at $0.186. ADA pauses its gains at the start of this week after posting a massive 31% rally in the previous week. Despite the pullback, derivatives data suggests traders remain cautiously optimistic, while momentum indicators indicate that the uptrend remains intact if ADA holds the key support zone.
Cardano traders remain cautiously optimisticDerivatives data for Cardano shows cautious optimism among traders. ADA’s futures Open Interest (OI) surges to $515 million on Sunday, the highest level since the end of May and steadies around $472 million on Monday. This rise in OI reflects increasing investor participation and projects a bullish outlook.
Cardano open interest chart. Source: CoinglassIn addition, the funding rates data also shows improving sentiment. CoinGlass’ OI-Weighted Funding Rate data for ADA flipped positive last week and surged to 0.0080% on Monday. This positive rate indicates that longs are paying shorts and projects a bullish sentiment.
Cardano funding rates chart. Source: CoinglassDespite rising Open Interest and positive funding rates, Cardano’s long-to-short ratio shows a bearish bias. The ratio reads 0.68 on Monday, nearing its lowest level in over a month. This ratio, being below one, reflects bearish sentiment in the market, as more traders are betting on the asset’s price to fall.
Cardano long-to-short ratio chart. Source: CoinglassCardano Price Forecast: Momentum indicators support further gainsCardano price trades at $0.188 on Monday, up over 31% in the previous week. ADA has reclaimed the 50-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at $0.186, but remains well below the 100-day EMA at $0.218 and the 200-day EMA at $0.289, keeping the broader bias capped despite the latest rebound.
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) hovers near 61, while the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) holds in positive territory, which together hints at improving upside momentum within a still broader bearish structure.
On the topside, initial resistance is aligned at the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement at $0.195, ahead of a more congested band formed by the 50% retracement at $0.213, the 100-day EMA at $0.218 and the descending trendline break level around $0.219. Further north, the 61.8% Fibonacci retracement at $0.231 and horizontal barriers at $0.236 and $0.245 precede stronger supply near the 78.6% Fibonacci retracement at $0.256 and the 200-day EMA at $0.289, with another resistance marker at $0.299.
On the downside, immediate support is provided by the reclaimed 50-day EMA at $0.186, followed by the 23.6% Fibonacci retracement at $0.173; a break lower would expose the horizontal floor at $0.150 and the Fibonacci anchor near $0.138.
(The technical analysis of this story was written with the help of an AI tool.)
Cardano (ADA) is currently priced at $0.18. Indicators hint that the uptrend may weaken. July 6 opened with mixed sentiment in the market, and both red and green charts were found across the assets. Among them, Cardano (ADA) is struggling to regain its lost momentum. It has lost a modest 1.94% in value, currently trading at around $0.1863. It can be considered under pressure as bears pave the way.
If it succeeded in attracting the bulls into the charts, it’s easy to escape the downside trading pattern. It is worth noting that the technical structure may turn firmly bearish, with the price trend confirming that negative momentum continues to dominate the broader ADA market.
At press time, Cardano’s price is holding above the daily low at around $0.1855, and its daily high is noted within the $0.1933 range. Moreover, the daily trading volume of the asset has plunged by 43.15%, reaching the $490.51 million zone. Consequently, the Coinglass data has reported that the ADA market has seen a liquidation of $1.72 million.
Key Support and Resistance Levels to Watch for Cardano Cardano’s 4-hour price pattern shows that if the bears turn powerful, the crucial support might be at $0.1841, followed by a level below $0.1817. A continued downside brings in a deeper zone between $0.1748-$0.1801 are notable areas that determine whether the asset stalls here or continues to fall.
On the flip side, once the bulls show up, the first recovery level of ADA could be at around $0.1886. Assuming a push on the upside happened, the price would hit $0.1908. A potential move above the $0.1969 mark confirms that buyers are gaining control and may target the next resistance levels.
What is the Technical Pattern of ADA Pointing to? Cardano’s recent momentum reveals that the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) line is situated below the signal line. With both lines above the zero line, it suggests that the uptrend is weakening, even though the broader trend remains positive.
This setup hints at a slowdown in buying pressure and may lead to consolidation. However, as long as both indicators stay above the zero line, the overall uptrend remains intact.
Furthermore, the daily Relative Strength Index (RSI) reading found at 61.09 indicates healthy bullish momentum within the ADA market. As it is sitting above the neutral level, 50, the buyers continue to have the upper hand.
At the same time, it remains below the overbought zone, and there is still room for the uptrend to extend if the buying interest remains strong.
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Cardano's $ADA has posted four straight days of gains, with the token rising more than 30% over the past seven days. That performance stands out against the broader altcoin market, where most other top-20 tokens recorded weekly gains of between 1% and 18%.
Retail Wallets Recovering After June Lows The price rebound has coincided with a notable uptick in new network participants. According to on-chain analytics firm Santiment, Cardano added 14,783 non-empty ADA wallets between June 23 and July 4, a signal analysts have taken as early evidence of returning retail confidence.
U Today reported that ADA fell to $0.138 on June 25, a level last seen in December 2020, before recovering sharply. Santiment described the move as a price decoupling after "peak FUD" created rifts in the community the prior month.
The wallet growth follows a bruising June for the asset. Crypto News noted that the pressure had been building for weeks, with ADA dropping below $0.20 on June 4 amid failed funding votes, cancelled ecosystem plans, and warnings from founder Charles Hoskinson about possible project failures. Santiment noted that "retail support has been one of ADA's strongest traits" through difficult market periods.
Key Resistance and What Comes Next The $0.20 level is now the immediate test for bulls. Analysts note that a clean move above that mark would open the door toward the daily 200-day moving average near $0.27. Failure to hold it, however, could leave the token exposed to a fresh pullback.
Wallet growth alone does not confirm a sustained recovery. A broader return of trading volume, improved DeFi activity, and higher transaction demand would be needed to support a durable move higher. For now, the data points to a market moving away from last month's fear, though the degree of conviction behind that shift remains to be tested.
Sources:
U Today: Cardano Quietly Rallies 32% With 14,783 New ADA Wallets Joining Network
Crypto News: Cardano adds 14,783 wallets as ADA rebounds toward $0.20
Every sharp parabolic rally can easily be written off as another hype cycle.
At first glance, Cardano [ADA] seems to fit that narrative. After three consecutive red quarters, each posting average losses of more than 40%, ADA had become one of the weakest-performing major altcoins this cycle. But is that trend finally starting to reverse?
From the technical standpoint, ADA has kicked off Q3 with a strong 30% rally, outperforming the broader altcoin market. More notably, its gains are over 2.3x larger than Ethereum’s [ETH] so far this quarter, suggesting that capital may be rotating back into ADA as momentum begins to build.
Source: TradingView (ADA/USDT) But zooming into the charts, things start looking a bit different.
On the daily timeframe, ADA has already pulled back more than 2% in under 48 hours after pushing above the $0.20 level, a resistance it also failed to clear back in mid-June. That repeated rejection keeps a breakdown firmly in play. Pair that with a near-parabolic run over the past week, and it’s not surprising to see traders taking profits instead of chasing higher prices.
At first glance, that makes it easy to label ADA’s rally as just another hype cycle. The fundamentals don’t help that case either. Cardano’s total value locked (TVL) has dropped nearly 68% over the past year. According to DefiLlama, TVL has fallen from $276.19 million to around $89.16 million today, a sharp decline that suggests on-chain liquidity has yet to catch up with the recent price action.
Taken together, the charts and on-chain data make ADA’s recent 2% pullback look like the start of a deeper correction. But markets are all about timing. And right now, the timing suggests FOMO is still in play.
On-chain data strengthens ADA’s bullish case Cardano’s strong start to Q3 could be the first sign that momentum is finally shifting back in ADA’s favor.
The technicals, however, still have one job to do: flip resistance into support. Currently, $0.20 remains the key level to watch. A clean break above it could be enough to bring FOMO, with $0.25 acting as the next major hurdle. If that level gives way, a move toward $0.30 starts looking increasingly realistic.
The broader backdrop is also turning supportive. Altcoin momentum continues to build, and July has historically been one of the strongest months for the sector. That makes ADA’s recent cooldown look more like a healthy reset than a trend reversal, putting the focus on what the on-chain data is saying.
Source: Santiment According to Santiment, Cardano has added 14,783 new non-empty wallets since its June 2023 low.
The timing is key. Just weeks ago, ADA was at the center of peak FUD, with concerns over ecosystem growth and technical weakness. Yet wallet growth continued to climb even as TVL kept slipping.
That’s an interesting divergence. Liquidity may still be lagging, but user participation isn’t. If anything, it suggests conviction is quietly building beneath the surface, increasing the odds that price eventually catches up. If ADA can reclaim $0.20, the path toward $0.30 starts looking much more realistic.
After several weeks marked by strong selling pressure, Cardano shows signs of stabilization. The latest blockchain data reveals a gradual return of holders, while ADA shows a notable rebound over the last seven days. This recovery comes after a period of high uncertainty, fueled by falling prices and debates around the ecosystem. Even though the market remains cautious, the recent evolution of indicators shows that some retail investors are gradually taking positions on the network again.
In Brief Cardano has gained 14,783 new non-empty ADA wallets since its low point on June 23, a sign of a gradual return of holders. ADA shows a 33.09% increase over seven days, despite a slight decline of 1.3% in the last 24 hours. According to Santiment, the rebound came after a FUD peak, marked by panic and misinformation within the community. The $0.20 threshold remains the key level to cross to confirm the continuation of the short-term rebound. Despite this recovery, Cardano still faces uncertainties related to its ecosystem, notably following several funding difficulties and the cancellation of the Cardano Summit 2026. Cardano Gradually Regains Holders After June’s Low Market sentiment seems to be gradually improving around Cardano. Data published by Santiment Intelligence shows a resumption of growth in the number of holders on Cardano. Since the low point recorded on June 23, the network has welcomed an additional 14,783 non-empty ADA wallets. This evolution marks a change after several weeks of decline and reflects the return of some users to the blockchain.
At the same time, the ADA price has regained a more favorable momentum. According to Santiment, the asset has approached the $0.20 threshold again for the first time in about a month. After reaching its lowest level on June 29, the price has risen up to 35%, illustrating a renewed interest after a long period of weakness.
Coingecko data indicates that Cardano was trading around $0.1894 at the time of writing. In the last 24 hours, the token was down by 1.3%. However, its weekly performance remained largely positive with a gain of 33.09%, while its market capitalization was around $7.05 billion.
This recovery is not enough to erase the previous correction. Nevertheless, it shows that some retail investors are gradually returning after several weeks of low volatility, ongoing concerns, and many discussions about network development.
ADA Benefits From Renewed Confidence After a Peak in FUD According to Santiment, ADA’s recovery comes after a period marked by a high level of FUD, mixing panic and misinformation within the community. This phase contributed to increasing selling pressure before several indicators began to improve. The growth in the number of holders accompanies a slight rebound in market capitalization.
The previous decline was particularly pronounced. On June 4, ADA fell below the $0.20 threshold, a level not seen in more than five years. This correction occurred within a broader market weakness context, to which several ecosystem-specific difficulties were added.
Among the factors mentioned by Sentiment were funding votes that did not succeed and the cancellation of several projects, as well as warnings from founder Charles Hoskinson about risks the project might face. Despite this delicate context, social activity around ADA increased after the price drop.
Data also shows that the number of active addresses reached its highest level in four months. This evolution indicates that users continued to interact with the network, even during the correction period, which reflects ongoing activity despite the market downturn.
An Encouraging Rebound, but Challenges Remain The latest statistics suggest that Cardano holders did not massively leave the network after the June drop. The increase in the number of non-empty wallets suggests that new users, or former investors, are now holding tokens on the blockchain.
Santiment also reminds that retail investor support has often been a strength of Cardano during difficult market periods. This characteristic is observed again with the gradual return of holders after the recent low.
However, these indicators do not yet confirm a lasting recovery. A newly created wallet may contain a small amount, while the number of holders does not provide information on the possible arrival of larger investors. For ADA, the $0.20 threshold now represents an important technical level. A clear crossing would strengthen the scenario of a short-term rebound, while a failure could expose the token to a new phase of weakness.
Moreover, the ecosystem continues to face several uncertainties. Recent project closures, funding tensions, and the cancellation of Cardano Summit 2026 maintain doubts. At the same time, technical development continues with the launch in March of Midnight’s federated mainnet, a sidechain focused on privacy related to the project.
The return of holders and the weekly progress of over 30% show that buyers are gradually coming back after the June low. Nevertheless, the token still trades below the psychological $0.20 threshold and remains far from its previous peaks. The next developments in the number of holders and the market’s ability to confirm this level will be the main elements to watch in the coming weeks.
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Ghiles A.
Journaliste et rédacteur web passionné par l’univers des cryptomonnaies et des technologies Web3. J’y traite les dernières tendances et actualités afin de proposer un contenu de haute qualité à un large public du secteur.
DISCLAIMER
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.
Cardano (ADA) price is down by 4% today, July 6, to trade at $0.18 at the time of writing. This drop makes ADA the biggest loser among the top ten largest cryptos by market cap as ongoing long liquidations weigh on the price.
But amid the ongoing decline, Charles Hoskinson has mapped out how Cardano is going to challenge the XRP Ledger in terms of speed, a plan that could aid ADA’s price recovery if it pans out.
Hoskinson Says Cardano Will Match XRPL’s Speed After Leios Hoskinson was speaking in an interview with David Gokhshtein, where he said that the Leios upgrade will increase the speed of the Cardano network by 60 times, and this could make it as fast as the XRP Ledger.
“Leios will be a 60X in terms of throughput inside the system. So, we’re good. We’re as performant as XRP. We’re okay,” Hoskinson said.
In the same interview, Hoskinson admitted that Leios could bring more users to Cardano, and this will increase the network’s Total Value Locked (TVL) as well as the transaction volumes.
Prior to this interview, Hoskinson had warned that the DeFi TVL on Cardano could collapse if the governance members do not vote to approve the upgrades. His sentiments came after two projects on Cardano: TapTools and JPG Store, shut down.
Cardano Price Outlook as Bears Defend 50-day SMA Resistance The price of Cardano has gained by 28% from $0.14 on June 30 to $0.18 on July 6. But this uptrend paused when the price reached the 50-day SMA resistance of $0.188.
Cardano needs to move above this resistance and make three straight closes above it for the uptrend that began on June 30 to continue.
The RSI reading of 59 supports a bullish long-term Cardano price forecast because it suggests that bulls have a good grip.
If ADA moves above $0.18, the next target for price will be the 100-day SMA level of $0.23.
ADA/USDT 1-day Chart (Source: TradingView) However, if selling pressure increases because of some traders booking profits after the price rose by 28% in seven days, ADA could drop to the support level of $0.15.
Cardano’s Long/Short Ratio Surges as Traders Flip Bearish on Price Data from Coinglass shows that Cardano’s long/short ratio has dropped to 0.88. This is the lowest point that this ratio has dropped to since June 30.
This declining ratio suggests that many traders are betting that the price of Cardano will drop after its rise paused at the 50-day SMA level of $0.18.
Cardano Long/Short Ratio (Source: Coinglass) Cardano’s open interest has also dropped by 10% today, July 6, to $460 million at the time of writing. This drop comes after $1.42 million in long liquidations.
The declining OI and the long liquidations are creating room for short sellers to dominate the Cardano market. But this could end up making the price rise if spot buyers return and push Cardano higher, forcing the short sellers to also buy in order to close their positions.
Cardano DeFi TVL Sheds 104M ADA Data from DeFiLlama shows that the TVL on the Cardano network has dropped from 566 million ADA on June 30 to 462 million on July 6.
Cardano DeFi Activity This TVL has shed 104 million ADA within one week, and these unlocked tokens could find their way back into circulation and add to the bearish headwinds that are facing Cardano price.
The DEX volumes on Cardano have also seen a similar decline, after moving from $12 million on July 4 to $$982,000 on July 6.
EMURGO said SecondFi will not return to normal operations after its recent Cardano wallet security incident.
Summary
SecondFi will not resume normal operations after the Cardano wallet incident, even after audits finish. EMURGO is preparing checker tools, migration routes and a recovery fund for affected users. Earlier crypto.news reports said the exploit drained 16 million ADA from 374 affected wallet addresses. The company said its future work on SecondFi will focus only on asset recovery for users who were affected.
The update marks a change from earlier recovery expectations. SecondFi kept a two-week recovery plan after a Cardano wallet exploit drained about 16 million ADA from 374 addresses.
EMURGO said “SecondFi will not resume normal operations” even after outside audits finish. The company asked all users to migrate away from SecondFi through official methods, including safer wallet routes.
The company said unaffected users remain safe based on current information. Still, it said users should leave the platform because the recovery process now takes priority over product operation.
Audits and patch work continue EMURGO said it has hired multiple independent firms to review the event and the underlying code. It said those reviews remain active and warned against publishing early findings before investigators complete their work.
The company said releasing early results could create inaccurate information. It added that a patch has been submitted to close the identified vulnerability while teams continue to review the full event.
As crypto.news earlier reported, SecondFi traced the breach to its native Cardano web wallet generation software. The project paused affected services while it worked with security firms on a wider review.
SlowMist founder Cos had warned that possible user losses could be higher if some tracked addresses were confirmed as attacker wallets. SecondFi’s own public estimate placed the known affected amount near 16 million ADA.
Users to receive checker and migration tools EMURGO said its team is working on three short-term priorities. These include asset safeguarding, a recovery fund, wallet status checks, and safe migration routes for users who need to move away from SecondFi.
The company said it plans to launch a quarantined site this week. The site will help users check wallet status and take migration steps. EMURGO said it submitted the tool for app store approval and will release it after approval.
The team also plans to launch secure wallet export functionality soon after. That feature will help users migrate to a hardware wallet or another platform. EMURGO also said an in-person migration workshop will take place in Tokyo.
The company warned users to follow official SecondFi channels only. SecondFi users faced fake recovery account risks after the exploit, with scammers targeting users through false support links.
Recovery system still needs audit EMURGO said it is working with Cardano ecosystem participants on an on-chain recovery system. The company said the system must be auditable and persistent before it can support the safe return of affected assets.
The company also said an external audit of the recovery system is required before it can return funds. It said speed matters, but safety remains the main priority because threat actors know about the vulnerability.
Moreover, the recovery process places SecondFi among several crypto projects that moved slowly after security incidents to protect users. As crypto.news recently reported, Taiko used a staged restart plan after a bridge attack, with outside experts reviewing fixes before wider access returned.
EMURGO said it will publish a fuller account of “who, what, and why” after incident reports and code reviews are complete. Until then, SecondFi’s role is limited to asset recovery and helping users migrate away from the platform.
Cardano (ADA) is showing fresh bullish momentum after erasing nearly four weeks of losses in just five days.
The recovery follows a rebound from a multi-year support zone. This price area previously served as a major resistance level during the 2020-2021 bull market.
Now, market watchers believe the latest move could mark the start of a new multi-year uptrend. Under this bullish scenario, ADA could climb as high as $13.52 by 2028.
Cardano Rebounds From Key Long-Term Support Notably, Cardano’s long-term chart confirms ADA hit a critical support zone after its strongest bearish cycle since 2021. The previous bear market bottom formed in December 2022. ADA later confirmed a double bottom in June 2023.
This present cycle followed a different timeline. Cardano peaked in December 2024 at $1.3187 before falling to its latest low in June 2026 at $0.1387. With ADA trading at $0.1824, it has rebounded by over 31%.
The recent recovery developed within a support zone that held for about five weeks. Interestingly, this same price range acted as major resistance in 2020. Buyers needed nearly six months to break above it before Cardano entered its previous bull market.
With that former resistance now acting as support, the long-term trend has turned bullish.
Cardano Chart by TheCryptoBasic A Longer ADA Bull Market Is Possible Now, Cardano’s next bull cycle could last longer than previous ones. While a one-year rally remains possible, at least a two-year timeline is more realistic.
Essentially, rather than another prolonged bear market, future cycles will resemble Bitcoin’s recent price action, meaning shorter corrections followed by upward momentum.
Moreover, the crypto market has matured since the last cycle, with the rise of ETFs, institutional participation, and regulatory clarity from the SEC. Accordingly, future bull runs could last longer while major downturns become less severe.
Key Price Targets Stretch to $13.52 Notably, several technical levels could serve as milestones if Cardano’s recovery continues. The first target is $1.32, where the rally could temporarily slow. The next major resistance sits at $2.05, which may attract stronger selling pressure.
A move back to the previous all-time high region near $3.1 would mark the next major long-term objective.
Beyond that, there is a potential rally to $7.76, representing roughly 4,200% gains from current levels. The most bullish target stands at $13.52 by 2028, implying an estimated 7,400% increase if the technical outlook plays out.
Cardano ADA chart by MasterAnanda on TradingView DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.
Cardano is showing signs of life after nearly 15,000 new wallet holders joined the ecosystem in a few days, even as its price rebounded from recent lows.
According to an analysis shared by Santiment Intelligence, the number of non-empty ADA wallets has increased by 14,783 since June 23, reversing a short-lived decline in holder count. At the same time, Cardano (ADA) has climbed toward the $0.20 level for the first time in roughly a month after rebounding sharply from its recent bottom.
The combination of rising wallet activity and improving price action suggests retail participation is returning after weeks of market uncertainty. Furthermore, ADA has climbed several places higher in the crypto market cap ranking to reflect the recent price growth.
Cardano Holder Count Surges Amid Price Rebound The Santiment data shows the total Cardano holder count starting to recover after falling through much of June. Since reaching a local low on June 23, the network has added 14,783 non-empty wallets, lifting the total holder count back above 4.62 million.
Cardano Non-Empty Wallet Rise/Santiment A rising holder count means more adoption. The situation confirms that buying pressure is returning for Cardano, as users saw the June dip as an opportunity to buy lower.
Meanwhile, this has seen ADA stage a notable recovery from its recent lows. The asset rose by roughly 45% from its June 25 bottom of $0.138 to the $0.20 level before retracing slightly.
Notably, last week’s 32% rebound marks its strongest weekly upward move since late February 2025, when it rallied 47%. Nonetheless, the token remains well below prices seen earlier this year.
Santiment noted that Cardano has historically maintained a loyal retail community even during prolonged market downturns. As such, the latest increase in wallet addresses may indicate that smaller holders are returning as market sentiment stabilizes.
Cardano Climbs to 14th Place in Crypto Market Cap Ranking The price shift has also impacted ADA’s position in the cryptocurrency ranking by valuation.
Following the 38% dip in June, Cardano dropped to the 18th asset by market cap. However, as prices started to outperform Bitcoin and other major large-cap assets, ADA started to move in the rankings.
It briefly moved five spots to the 13th spot before the current pullback saw it lose that spot to Stellar again.
With a market cap of $6.71 billion, ADA now ranks 14th, climbing above the Dai stablecoin, Canton, Chainlink, and Monero. Meanwhile, the current momentum is now fueling optimism that Cardano will reclaim the 10th place in the cryptocurrency market cap ranking.
Cardano Reclaims 14th in Market Cap Ranking/CoinMarketCap Sentiment Slowly Shifts After Weeks of Uncertainty Cardano faced heavy selling pressure throughout June as bearish sentiment intensified across the ecosystem.
Several factors fueled the weakness, including ADA falling to price levels not seen since 2020, public comments from Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson about ecosystem shortcomings, and community debate around efforts to move Cardano discussions away from X.
Together, those developments weighed on confidence and contributed to the decline in both price and holder activity. Growing FUD also climbed as Cardano’s social dominance rose considerably.
However, the recent recovery in wallet growth suggests confidence may be gradually returning. Santiment added that if the number of holders continues to rise while ADA establishes support around the current levels, it could signal that the period of FUD marked a local capitulation rather than the beginning of another prolonged decline.
DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.
