Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

USD1 Goes Live Across Zebec's Full Platform@Zebec_HQ has integrated @worldlibertyfi's $USD1 stablecoin into its entire ecosystem, covering payrolls, payments, and yield. The move positions $USD1 as a core settlement asset within Zebec's financial infrastructure and extends the stablecoin's real-world utility beyond trading and DeFi.

According to CryptoNews, $USD1 is now supported natively inside the Zebec Super App, meaning teams can use the stablecoin directly within the existing platform without bridging to another network or switching tools. Users with @ZebecCards can also receive payroll spend in $USD1, and the integration provides direct access to WLFI markets from within Zebec.

Zebec has also indicated it plans to add further yield solutions later this year, signalling that the $USD1 integration is a starting point rather than a finished product.

What USD1 Brings to Zebec's InfrastructureTimes of Blockchain reports that the rollout reaches more than 65,000 workers across the US and global markets, giving staff the ability to receive, use, and move $USD1 via wallets and cards issued by Zebec. Employees can also access funds through Zebec-issued cards, linking blockchain settlement with everyday payment rails.

$USD1 is custodied by BitGo Trust Company and backed by cash and short-duration US Treasury bills held through government money market funds. Launched in March 2025, the stablecoin had grown to a circulating supply near $4.5 billion by Q1 2026, making it one of the fastest-growing fiat-backed stablecoins in the market.

For Zebec, the integration also aligns with the platform's broader institutional ambitions. Zebec completed its final ZBCN token unlock in March 2026, shifting to a deflationary revenue-funded buyback model, and has been expanding its payroll infrastructure across multiple blockchains. The addition of $USD1 reinforces its position as a multi-chain payroll and payments platform targeting enterprise-scale adoption.

Sources:
CryptoNews: World LibertyFi's USD1 Is Now Live In The Zebec Super App
Times of Blockchain: Zebec Expands USD1 Daily Payroll to 65K+ Global Workers
Eco: USD1 Stablecoin by World Liberty Financial

Michael Saylor, the man who turned a mid-tier software company into the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin piggy bank, is doing something he swore he’d never do: selling Bitcoin.

But before anyone panics, here’s the thing. Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, plans to sell roughly 0.2% of its Bitcoin holdings per month while simultaneously buying back five to ten times that amount.

The tactical sell that isn’t really a sell During Strategy’s Q1 2026 earnings call on May 5, Saylor laid out the new playbook. The company, which held over 818,000 BTC at the time of the call, would begin modest monthly sales to generate cash for dividends on its STRC perpetual preferred stock.

“Even if we were to sell one Bitcoin, we’d be buying 10 to 20 more Bitcoin.”

Between May 26 and May 31, Strategy executed its first Bitcoin sale since 2022, offloading exactly 32 BTC for approximately $2.5 million at an average price of roughly $77,135 per coin. That 32 BTC represents about 0.004% of the company’s total holdings.

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By early June 2026, Strategy’s Bitcoin stash had grown to over 843,000 BTC, with later filings confirming 846,842 BTC. The company’s average cost basis sits between $75,000 and $75,700 per coin, reflecting years of aggressive accumulation dating back to 2020 when Saylor first pivoted the company’s treasury strategy toward Bitcoin.

Why sell at all? The short answer: preferred stock dividends need to be paid in dollars, not satoshis. Strategy has been raising capital through various instruments, including its STRC perpetual preferred stock, which come with cash dividend obligations requiring actual fiat currency.

Rather than focusing purely on total Bitcoin held, Saylor wants investors to evaluate how much Bitcoin each share of Strategy stock represents. If the company sells 0.2% of its Bitcoin monthly but buys back five to ten times that amount through capital-raising efforts, the Bitcoin-per-share ratio actually increases over time.

Saylor emphasized during the earnings call that Strategy plans to be a “net buyer of Bitcoin in every month and every quarter going on forever.”

What this means for investors For Bitcoin market participants, the immediate impact of Strategy’s sales is negligible. Thirty-two BTC in a market that trades billions of dollars daily is a rounding error.

Strategy isn’t reducing its position. The company added over 25,000 BTC between the May 5 earnings call and early June, pushing from 818,000 to over 843,000 BTC.

For Strategy stockholders specifically, the Bitcoin-per-share metric that Saylor keeps highlighting deserves close attention. If the company can consistently grow that number, the stock functions as a leveraged Bitcoin proxy with yield.

Strategy’s average cost basis of roughly $75,000 per BTC means the company is currently sitting on unrealized gains, but a sustained Bitcoin downturn could turn those modest monthly sales into more significant liquidations if dividend obligations remain fixed while Bitcoin’s price drops. Strategy has one asset, one thesis, and 846,842 BTC — a position worth well over $60B at current prices.

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

Ethereum [ETH] has rallied 11.7% over the past week, but it is possible that short-term holders were preparing to exit the market.

Source: Glassnode The exchange net position change had been negative since mid-May, but posted a positive bar on its histogram on Sunday, July 5.

Negative net position change implies a net outflow of assets from exchange-affiliated addresses. A shift toward positive indicates that net inflows were greater in volume.

This inflow can be interpreted as readiness for selling from holders, though it need not provide an immediate bearish price reaction.

Recently, AMBCrypto pointed to a discrepancy between trader and developer activity. Alongside the monthly TD Sequential buy signal, bulls had hopes of a move toward $2,000.

That optimism faded as Bitcoin [BTC] faced rejection from the $63k area, unable to assail the $64k local supply zone in earnest. This rejection has caused an Ethereum price slide below $1,800.

Ethereum bullish hopes misplaced? Source: CryptoQuant Crypto analyst Darkfost drew attention to the severe decline in Open Interest. From a record high of $33.9 billion in October 2025, to just $11.2 billion, the corrective leg of the cycle has shaken market conviction.

Examining the liquidation volume bubble map showed a high volume of long liquidations towards the end of June, rivaling the size of the October long liquidations.

Source: CryptoQuant The Coinbase Premium Index has been negative since late April, another sign of bearish market sentiment. U.S.-based investors have not been taken in by the recent price bounce toward $1.8k.

The large volume of short liquidations showed that many traders had been positioned for further downside before the recent rally forced them to exit. A small corrective bounce amid a wider downtrend has caused $314.5 million in short liquidations so far in July.

Source: Glassnode The Ethereum holder accumulation ratio tracks the proportion of active users who are increasing their holdings, compared to those who are decreasing. Lower ratios indicate bearish momentum, and tend to mark periods of distribution and profit-taking.

The drop in the holder accumulation ratio since May suggested the current distribution has not ended.

Final Summary Ethereum was up by 11% over the past week of trading, triggering over $300 million in liquidations within a week. Other onchain metrics showed that the current distribution trends were likely to cause a deeper ETH price slide.

Cardano has reached one of the final technical checkpoints before the Chang hard fork, with node version 9.0.0 now released by IntersectMBO.

For more details, visit the official GitHub platform.

TL;DR Cardano node 9.0.0 has been released on GitHub.The upgrade is tied to the final preparation stage for the Chang hard fork.Chang is expected to move Cardano closer to on-chain governance. For ADA holders, this is not just a routine software update. Node releases are how Cardano’s governance roadmap becomes operational. The Chang hard fork has long been framed as the step that brings more formal decentralized governance into the network’s live structure.

Why Node 9.0.0 Matters Blockchains do not upgrade because a roadmap says they should. They upgrade when node operators, stake pool operators, exchanges, and infrastructure providers actually move to compatible software. That is why a major node release is worth watching.

Node 9.0.0 supports the technical path toward bootstrap governance thresholds. In plain English, it helps prepare the network for the governance machinery that Chang is supposed to activate. The more operators adopt the release, the closer the network gets to the conditions needed for the hard fork.

Governance Becomes The Test Cardano has always leaned heavily into research, process, and formal governance. Critics argue that this can make the ecosystem slow. Supporters argue that it is exactly what gives the chain durability. Chang will test that thesis in public.

The market response may still depend on broader ADA sentiment, but the development signal is straightforward: Cardano’s next major governance upgrade is moving from planning into execution.

This report is based on the Cardano node 9.0.0 release on GitHub.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Tether, the company behind USDT, is preparing to issue the stablecoin natively on Bitcoin through the RGB protocol version v0.11.1. Deployed by the UTEXO software lab, USDT is set to return to the chain where it first launched in 2014 via the Omni-Mastercoin Layer. 

UTEXO, the company leading the commercial rollout, has positioned itself as the issuer and distributor of this Bitcoin-native USDT in partnership with Tether.  “Finally, after eight years of development—if not more—we are the company that is launching USDT over Bitcoin with strong support from Tether,” said Viktor Ihnatiuk, UTEXO co-founder, in an exclusive interview with Bitcoin Magazine. 

The RGB protocol combines its novel client-side validation with the Lightning network for instant, private settlements, while anchoring security to Bitcoin’s UTXO model. Users can expect to be able to handle USDT on native Bitcoin addresses as well as send and receive it over the Lightning network with compatible wallets. 

The RGB protocol on Bitcoin also offers significant privacy features to USDT users as the asset benefits from Bitcoin’s UTXO model, which standardizes fresh addresses for every transaction compared to the account-based address reused commonly in EVM blockchains like Tron, Ethereum or Solana. Address reuse is the first mistake of onchain privacy, yet most altcoins built their interfaces to reuse addresses, despite the risk it poses to users. RGB’s integration with the Lightning network further protects user privacy by moving USDT via the offchain payments network, which leaves few marks on the public blockchain. The deep integration with Tether also means that there are fewer middleman companies charging extra fees or collecting data. 

On the topic, Vktor emphasized that, “We built Utexo so that USDT could move on Bitcoin the way money is supposed to move: instantly, privately, with no surprises on costs. Our partners integrate our API once and can route USDT on the most resilient open network ever built, with full control over cost structure.”

UTEXO vs TRON UTEXO emerged from a joint venture involving Viktor’s Boosty Venture Studio, Fulgur Ventures, and Tether Investments. The goal was straightforward: bring RGB to mainnet after years of delays under prior development teams. The protocol had been in active development since at least 2016, but failed to be ready for the 2017 bull market, giving the TRON blockchain dominance over USDT volume and usage throughout the developing world, a dominance which it still retains. 

UTEXO of specifically building “the last mile” of software needed for wide USDT deployment across the Bitcoin ecosystem, which includes a software development kit, APIs, mid-level protocols, UI design work and even a mint bridge that is live today at mint.utexo.com. This bridge lets users move USDT across popular blockchains with “deterministic low fees” and no middlemen thanks to its direct integration with Tether as the primary mint. The RGB protocol layer was developed by Bitfinex R&D Strategist Federico Tenga.

“Right now if you want to swap USDT to Bitcoin you need to pay high fees for all these wallets who charge you a one percent wallet fee plus a swap provider charge of one percent plus, and you have slippage one percent as well, so you pay three percent, and also you wait forever until the swap happens” Viktor told Bitcoin Magazine, adding that; “with USDT and Bitcoin over Lightning, for the first time you have two main assets on one chain, you can swap instantly without any slippage. You can swap decentralized USDT to Bitcoin and back on-chain. The price is almost the same as spot markets in Binance.”

Networks like Tron that are primarily used to move USDT also add extra fees, swap commissions and friction to the user experience. They require a different address type, with fees paid in an asset like TRX, which is only ever used to move the stablecoin. With most of the monetary volume in the crypto market concentrated in Bitcoin and Tether, having to buy an altcoin just to pay fees ends up feeling like red tape. 

Bitcoin, as the payment rails of USDT, also comes with blockchain levels of security that other chains simply can not offer. While USDT will always be fundamentally centralized in Tether as a corporation, the rails can also add risk, for example, if a contentious fork occurs or major bugs are found on novel blockchain systems. Bitcoin, being the oldest and most conservative blockchain, delivers a quality assurance of sorts that can not be matched by other chains. 

RGB traces its roots to Peter Todd’s single-use seals back in 2014 and was formalized in 2016 by Giacomo Zucco and Riccardo Casatta. The RGB acronym, originally derived from “Riccardo Giacomo Bitcoin,” was later rebranded “Really Good Bitcoin”. Tether explored the protocol early but faced delays with the previous team. Had RGB shipped on schedule around 2019, the stablecoin landscape and broader DeFi industry might have developed differently around Bitcoin’s UTXO model instead of Ethereum’s account-based system.

As such, bringing USDT back to Bitcoin is a core motivation for UTEXO. Viktor minced no words on the matter: “For the first time in eight years or nine years, USDT is coming back home. We have no chance to fail. If we fail, no one will think about Bitcoin as a settlement layer anymore.”

USDT on Bitcoin via RGB is expected to be launched within weeks, possibly this July, with wallets like Tether Wallet among others announcing support, and exchanges across the world announcing integrations.

Former Tether chief investment officer Richard Heathcote is seeking to sell part of his 1.26% stake in the stablecoin issuer, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter.

Heathcote stepped down as Tether's chief investment officer in March to take an advisory role after overseeing the stablecoin issuer's investment portfolio. Bloomberg reported the planned sale involves only part of his 1.26% ownership stake.

Tether issues USDt (USDT), the world's largest stablecoin by market capitalization. With a circulating supply of roughly $184 billion, USDT accounts for roughly 59% of the stablecoin market, according to DefiLlama data.

The planned sale could offer a rare look at ownership in Tether, which remains privately held despite becoming one of the crypto industry's most profitable companies.

The sale also comes as Tether navigates regulatory pressure in Europe. USDT has been delisted by a growing number of MiCA-authorized platforms after Tether opted not to comply with the European Union's crypto framework, with Revolut announcing this month that it will remove the stablecoin from its platform.

Crypto companies weigh IPOs While Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has said outright that the stablecoin issuer does not need to go public, several other crypto companies are reportedly mulling initial public offerings (IPOs).

Kraken has taken several steps toward a public listing. Fortune reported in September 2025 that the crypto exchange had raised $500 million at a $15 billion valuation, fueling expectations that the exchange was preparing for an IPO.

Source: Paolo Ardoino

The company also announced it had confidentially filed a draft registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering in November 2025. However, Bloomberg later reported that the IPO plans could be pushed back until 2027 following layoffs tied to the company's expanding use of artificial intelligence.

South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb also announced in April that it is delaying its IPO until after 2028 as it works to strengthen its accounting policies and internal controls following earlier regulatory setbacks.

Magazine: The end of anonymity? AI could unmask crypto’s hidden identities

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Jul 6, 2026, 4:00 p.m.

1 min read

Visa stablecoin data shows fiat-pegged token monthly activity increased to a record $1.79 trillion in June. ((Media/Visa)Summary

Circle’s USDC accounted for about 70 percent of adjusted stablecoin transaction volume in the first half of 2026, widening its lead over Tether’s USDT, which held roughly 25 percent.Adjusted stablecoin transaction volume hit a record $1.79 trillion in June 2026, up 63 percent from May and 125 percent from June 2025, contributing to $8.82 trillion in volume for the first six months of the year.Growing adoption of stablecoins by banks and financial institutions, including new USDC services from Standard Chartered and BNY, reflects a broader shift toward established fiat-pegged digital asset networks.Circle’s USDC stablecoin widened its lead over competitor Tether’s USDT by transaction volume during the first half of 2026, according to fresh data from Visa’s onchain dashboard.

In June alone, stablecoin activity increased to a record $1.79 trillion in adjusted transaction volume, up 63% from May's $1.1 trillion and 125% from about $795 billion in June 2025. Visa removes bot activity, exchange transfers and other blockchain transactions that do not reflect real economic activity before calculating adjusted volume.

These figures come as banks and other financial institutions expand their use of stablecoins for payments, settlement and treasury operations. Standard Chartered and BNY recently added services around Circles’s USDC rather than building their own infrastructure which also reflects a broader shift toward using established stablecoin networks as activity and demand for fiat-pegged digital assets increases.

The first six months of the year totaled $8.82 trillion in adjusted stablecoin transaction volume. That is more than the $5.8 trillion recorded during all of 2024 and $2 trillion less than the record $10.8 trillion reported in 2025.

USDC accounted for about 70% of adjusted transaction volume during the first half of 2026. USDT represented roughly 25%..

In 2020, USDT made up nearly 90% of adjusted transaction volume. USDC accounted for less than 10%. By 2022, USDC accounted for about 45% of adjusted transaction volume.

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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.

Paxos says the SEC has ended its investigation into BUSD without recommending an enforcement action, giving the stablecoin sector a rare piece of regulatory relief in the United States.

For more details, visit the official Paxos platform.

TL;DR Paxos says the SEC will not recommend enforcement in its BUSD investigation.The decision removes a major legal question around one of the market’s former top stablecoins.The closure comes as stablecoin regulation is becoming more formal in the U.S. and Europe. The BUSD case mattered because it sat at the intersection of stablecoin issuance, exchange branding, and U.S. securities law. If regulators had pushed a broad enforcement theory, it could have complicated the entire stablecoin market.

A Cleaner Outcome For Paxos Paxos framed the closure as confirmation that its dollar-backed stablecoin activity should not have been treated as a securities violation. That does not create a universal safe harbour for every issuer, but it does weaken the idea that regulated fiat-backed stablecoins automatically belong in the same bucket as speculative tokens.

The decision also lands at a moment when stablecoins are being pulled into clearer legal frameworks. Europe is already enforcing MiCA rules. U.S. lawmakers continue to debate stablecoin legislation. Issuers want clarity, but they also want to avoid regulation through enforcement.

What It Means For The Market BUSD itself is no longer the giant it was during Binance’s peak stablecoin push. The bigger point is precedent and tone. A closed investigation tells the market where the SEC chose not to go, and that can be almost as important as where it chooses to act.

For stablecoin issuers, the message is not that risk has disappeared. Reserve structure, disclosures, redemption rights, and distribution partners still matter. But Paxos now has one of the cleaner outcomes the sector could have hoped for: a formal end to a high-profile probe without an enforcement recommendation.

This article is based on information from Paxos.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

A HyperSwap user lost about $12,300 after clicking a fake airdrop link on X, approving one wallet request, and unknowingly giving a scammer control of his funds.

BeInCrypto reconstructed the attack with the victim using public blockchain records. The records show a fast phishing operation inside the Hyperliquid ecosystem. 

The scammer took the victim’s position on HyperSwap, withdrew the funds behind it, converted them into HYPE, and moved the money to Ethereum in less than two minutes.

Note: HyperSwap is an exchange that runs on the Hyperliquid blockchain. HyperSwap has its own team, and Hyperliquid does not manage it — just as the creators of Ethereum do not manage applications like Uniswap running on it.

The Trap Started With a Fake X Account The victim used HyperSwap. Like other decentralized exchanges, it lets users trade directly from their wallets without a company holding their funds.

The victim had supplied money to a HyperSwap liquidity pool. In simple terms, he had deposited crypto, so other users could trade against it. In return, he could earn fees.

On HyperSwap V3, that position was represented by NFT #178549. This was not a picture or collectible. It was more like a digital receipt. Whoever controlled that NFT controlled the funds linked to the position.

The victim told BeInCrypto he saw a post on X promoting an airdrop. An airdrop is a token giveaway, often used by crypto projects to reward users.

The Scammer’s Post Using a Fake X Account with a Very Similar Username to the Official HyperSwap Account The post appeared to come from HyperSwap. It did not. It came from an impostor account with a handle that closely resembled the real HyperSwap account, HyperSwapX, which is linked from the project’s official website.

The victim followed the link and connected his wallet. He believed he was checking whether he qualified for the airdrop. Instead, he approved a transaction that gave the scammer permission to move his HyperSwap position.

That approval was the key moment.

One Approval Gave the Scammer Control Crypto wallets often ask users to approve transactions. Some approvals are harmless. Others give another address permission to move valuable assets.

To most users, the warning can look routine. A fake site can make a dangerous approval look like a normal step in claiming tokens.

That appears to be what happened here.

At 20:21:51 UTC on June 29, the scammer used the earlier approval to transfer NFT #178549 out of the victim’s wallet. The victim did not sign anything at that moment. The scammer had already secured permission.

The scammer’s address was 0x880C95246D7525b84902E6c040818a7C72d3Aa77. HyperEVM explorer records flagged it as Fake_Phishing3746335, with a “Phish / Hack” tag reported by HashDit.

The NFT moved to another scammer-controlled wallet. Once that happened, the attacker controlled the liquidity position.

Twenty-five seconds later, the scammer withdrew the funds behind the NFT. The position contained about 3,935 USDC and 116.6 WHYPE. Together, they were worth roughly $12,300 at the time.

Theft transaction in hyperevmscan: On June 29, 2026, the address marked as Fake_Phishing3746335 transferred the victim’s NFT (0x39f2…0f9E) to his wallet The Money Was Moved Fast After withdrawing the funds, the scammer prepared to move them away from HyperEVM.

First, the wallet gave permission to LI.FI, a legitimate cross-chain bridge and swap service. A bridge lets users move crypto from one blockchain to another.

There is no evidence that LI.FI took part in the theft. The scammer used it after stealing the funds.

The scammer then converted the stolen USDC and WHYPE into about 175.9 HYPE. Seconds later, the HYPE was bridged from HyperEVM to Ethereum.

The destination was 0xFa47eef42fB2C63DCEA0cAC2295a58036052932D. On Ethereum, that wallet received the funds and almost immediately moved 7.035 ETH onward in one transaction.

The wallet had been created shortly before. It was used once and left almost empty. That pattern is common in laundering chains, where stolen funds pass through temporary wallets to make tracing harder.

From the NFT transfer to the bridge transaction, the active theft took about 84 seconds.

A Wider Phishing Pattern The scammer’s wallet appeared to be part of a broader operation.

Explorer records reviewed by BeInCrypto showed the address had been active for about 33 days. It was also linked to roughly 25 other addresses. That suggests the attacker may have targeted more than one user.

The link to the fraudulent resource has been hanging in messages since June 26 For victims, the problem is practical. Blockchain records can show what happened. They rarely stop it from happening in real time.

Once a user signs a bad approval, the scammer can act quickly. Once funds move across chains, recovery becomes even harder.

The victim later tried to report the suspicious link and get it removed. He said he felt ignored and began to suspect the HyperSwap team had failed to act.

The on-chain evidence reviewed by BeInCrypto points to a phishing attack from an impostor account. The fake X account was separate from HyperSwap’s official account. The official HyperSwap account and official contract were not shown to have carried out the theft.

However, the victim’s experience highlights a serious weakness in the ecosystem. Users can be attacked through fake social media accounts, drained through confusing wallet approvals, and left with few clear options after the money is gone.

During a conversation with BeInCrypto journalists, the victim stated that they tried various ways to warn the Hyperliquid team about the scam, but received no response.

According to the victim, the only active communication channel with HyperSwap was Discord. At the time of writing, the link to it is invalid. So he tried to get the problem across to the ecosystem team where the project works, but that attempt was unsuccessful.

The screenshot shows our interlocutor trying to reach Hyperliquid support via Discord. In this case, the Hyperliquid command ignores the user’s request to send a message about the found vulnerability and prompts him to contact HyperSwap himself. Overall, the scammer’s method was simple. A fake account promoted a fake airdrop. A fake site secured wallet approval. A flagged phishing wallet took the victim’s HyperSwap position, emptied it, and moved the funds to Ethereum.

The loss was about $12,300. The theft took less than two minutes.

The victim suggested that HyperSwap employees may be involved in the theft or are deliberately hiding it. However, BeInCrypto could not find any exact information to support those claims. 

Solana price has held above key technical support even after slipping 1.7%, while U.S.-listed spot Solana ETFs have continued attracting fresh inflows as Bitcoin and Ethereum funds recorded weekly withdrawals.

Summary

Solana held above key support as $5.75 million in spot ETF inflows contrasted with Bitcoin and Ethereum fund outflows. Solana ranked second in weekly spot trading volume, while non-vote transactions topped 1 billion for the first time. Rising active users, strong DApp revenue, and bullish technical indicators continue to support Solana’s recovery. After climbing more than 15% last week, Solana (SOL) price met selling pressure near the $80 level, where traders again defended resistance amid the broader market pullback. Even after the recent recovery, the token remains about 73% below its all-time high of $294.33 reached on Jan. 19, 2025.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin fell 1.65% during the same period, dragging the total cryptocurrency market capitalization down 1.47% to $2.14 trillion.

ETF demand has stayed positive despite market weakness Fund flow data showed Solana diverging from the two largest cryptocurrencies during the latest reporting period. Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded net outflows of $527 million between June 29 and July 2, extending their losing streak to eight consecutive weeks. Spot Ethereum ETFs also registered net outflows totaling $13.67 million.

By contrast, U.S.-listed spot Solana ETFs attracted $5.75 million in net inflows over the same period. The inflows indicated that investors continued adding exposure despite weakness across the wider digital asset market.

Capital also moved into several other altcoin investment products. XRP ETFs recorded $17.19 million in net inflows, while HYPE ETFs added another $4.32 million during the week.

Away from fund flows, on-chain activity continued to strengthen. According to SolanaFloor, Solana ranked second in global spot crypto trading volume for the second consecutive week, processing $12.25 billion across centralized and decentralized exchanges. That total remained ahead of Bybit’s $10.57 billion, although Binance retained the top position among exchanges during the reporting period.

SolanaFloor also reported that weekly non-vote transactions surpassed one billion for the first time. Unlike validator voting activity, non-vote transactions represent actual network usage generated by users, decentralized applications, and traders. The sharp rise at the beginning of July points to heavier activity across the ecosystem.

Technical structure still favors buyers above key support Network participation has accelerated alongside the recovery. According to Artemis data, Solana’s weekly active addresses climbed from 16.8 million to 29.7 million in just two weeks, an increase of roughly 12.9 million wallets, or about 76.8%. The rebound followed slower activity during June as users returned to decentralized applications across the network.

Source: Artemis Separate ecosystem rankings also kept Solana at the top of several blockchain activity metrics. The network led all Layer 1 and Layer 2 chains in both 24-hour and seven-day decentralized application revenue while also recording the highest decentralized exchange trading volume over those periods. Polygon, Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain and Hyperliquid followed behind across the tracked categories.

Price action continues to support the improving network data. On the daily chart, Solana remains above its 20-day, 50-day and 100-day moving averages, while the MACD indicator is still in bullish territory despite momentum easing after last week’s rally.

Solana daily price chart — July 6 | Source: crypto.news On the 4-hour chart, the Supertrend indicator continues to hold below price near $78.30, and Chaikin Money Flow has stayed slightly above zero, indicating modest buying pressure.

Solana price 4-hour chart — July 6 | Source: crypto.news The latest consolidation has left immediate resistance around the recent high near $84, while the Supertrend level near $78 and the Fibonacci support around $76 remain the first areas buyers may need to defend if selling pressure returns. Together with steady ETF inflows and rising network activity, those technical levels suggest Solana’s recovery remains intact unless those support zones give way.

Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.

BonkDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization tied to the Solana-based memecoin BONK, said Monday it was the target of a malicious governance proposal that drained an estimated $20 million worth of BONK tokens from its treasury, according to a post on its official X account. The DAO said the…

BonkDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization tied to the Solana-based memecoin BONK, said Monday it was the target of a malicious governance proposal that drained an estimated $20 million worth of BONK tokens from its treasury, according to a post on its official X account.

The DAO said the attack routed through a governance vote rather than a smart-contract bug, a vector that has hit other protocols this year, including a June governance takeover at Balancer-linked TOP token pools that drained $1.58 million.

BonkDAO said it has already identified the exchange wallets used to buy BONK ahead of the proposal being submitted, a pattern suggesting the attacker positioned tokens before pushing the malicious vote through. The DAO is "actively working with exchanges, bridges and Solana Foundation to best manage the situation," per its statement.

Law Enforcement NotifiedBonkDAO said law enforcement has been notified and that it continues working with "relevant parties to recover funds and identify those responsible," according to the same post. The DAO did not name a suspect or disclose the specific governance mechanism exploited to pass the proposal.

The disclosure came directly from BonkDAO's verified X account, with no on-chain transaction hash, security-firm tracing report, or third-party confirmation yet available. BONK is among the largest Solana memecoins by market capitalization, and a governance-level treasury drain of this size marks one of the larger DAO exploits reported this year via the proposal-attack vector rather than a code vulnerability.

Germany’s seized Bitcoin stash is back at the centre of the market conversation after wallets linked to the country’s Federal Criminal Police Office moved another large tranche of BTC toward major exchanges.

For more details, visit the official Arkham platform.

TL;DR Arkham-tracked wallets tied to Germany’s BKA have continued sending Bitcoin to exchanges.The flows are being watched closely because exchange deposits can signal potential selling pressure.The story is less about one transfer and more about how much supply the market can absorb. The important detail is where the coins are going. Transfers to Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp, and other exchange-linked destinations are not the same as cold-storage reshuffling. They usually make traders ask whether more supply is about to hit the order books.

A Government Wallet Becomes A Market Signal State-held Bitcoin does not move like ordinary whale supply. The wallets are visible, the balances are large, and the market tends to react before anyone can say with certainty whether coins have actually been sold. That is why the German wallet has become one of the most watched addresses in crypto this week.

The selling risk comes at an awkward time for Bitcoin. Spot ETF demand has been choppy, macro traders are still watching rate-cut expectations, and older supply events such as Mt. Gox repayments are also sitting in the background. Put together, the market is dealing with a cleaner version of an old problem: even bullish structure can wobble when too much BTC appears to be heading toward exchanges at once.

What Traders Should Watch The next question is whether these transfers become actual sell orders, and whether buyers are deep enough to absorb them without a sharper move lower. Exchange inflows alone do not prove a sale has happened, but they do tighten the window between potential supply and market impact.

For now, the BKA-linked wallet is not just an on-chain curiosity. It is a live supply story, and Bitcoin traders will keep watching every move until the exchange flows slow down or the market proves it can take the pressure.

This report is based on wallet data from Arkham Intelligence.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Sui has crossed the $1 billion total value locked mark on DeFiLlama, giving the Move-based network a clearer claim to serious DeFi liquidity.

For more details, visit the official DeFiLlama platform.

TL;DR Sui’s DeFi TVL has moved above $1 billion, according to DeFiLlama data.Lending and native DeFi protocols are helping drive capital onto the chain.The milestone strengthens Sui’s pitch as a high-performance smart contract network. TVL is an imperfect metric, but it remains one of the easiest ways to see where capital is willing to take smart contract risk. For Sui, crossing $1 billion is a meaningful marker because it moves the chain further away from early-stage experimentation and closer to the conversation around durable DeFi ecosystems.

Liquidity Is The Real Test Fast blockchains are common. Sustainable liquidity is rarer. Users can rotate through incentive programs quickly, especially when yield campaigns are generous. The question for Sui is whether capital stays after the first wave of rewards and novelty fades.

The current growth points to rising activity in lending, trading, and native protocols. That matters because a chain needs more than one flagship app to feel alive. The healthier version of Sui’s growth story is not just that TVL crossed a number, but that more capital is being deployed across several functions.

What Comes After The Milestone The next test is depth. Sui needs liquidity that supports real usage, not just headline TVL. Stablecoin availability, reliable lending markets, strong bridges, and developer retention will decide whether this becomes a lasting DeFi base.

For now, the $1 billion level gives Sui a stronger seat at the table. Move-based chains have been fighting for attention against Ethereum L2s, Solana, and other high-throughput networks. Sui now has a clearer data point to show that capital is paying attention.

This report is based on DeFiLlama data for Sui.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Alex Van de Sande, a co-founder of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), proposed Monday that the ENS DAO delegate 5 million ENS tokens from its dormant community treasury to individual participants.

Alex Van de Sande, a co-founder of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), proposed Monday that the ENS DAO delegate 5 million ENS tokens from its dormant community treasury to individual participants, a step he said would end the DAO's reliance on what he called “just a 1-of-1 multisig.”

“Currently, one delegate has enough quorum to not only execute any proposal, but also to outvote the next 50 other delegates,” Van de Sande said in the proposal, in an apparent reference to ENS co-founder Nick Johnson.

Van de Sande filed the idea as a formal draft, "Reform DAO governance by delegating 5M ENS tokens," in the Meta-Governance section of the ENS DAO's discourse forum. In a post on X, he said participants would not own or be able to sell the delegated tokens, which belong to the DAO, and floated adding another 5 million tokens next year, an undelegation trigger after six months of inactivity, and a full sunset of the arrangement after two years.

Van de Sande said the proposal draws on unclaimed supply from ENS's original airdrop five years ago, which set aside half its tokens as a "community treasury" to be distributed over five years. That window has now lapsed with little of the allocation distributed, he said.

Part of a Wider FightThe proposal follows weeks of conflict over control of ENS DAO's treasury and governance. On June 19, ENS Labs COO Katherine Wu published a temp-check proposal to shift the DAO's operational wallet, ENS holdings and Karpatkey-managed Endowment to a five-seat ENS Foundation board, as The Defiant reported.

Three days later, Johnson said he would self-delegate his ENS to back the measure, a move delegates said gave him effective control of the outcome. Rotki founder Lefteris Karapetsas wrote on the forum that Johnson had "delegated ~50% of the voting supply to himself, essentially becoming the DAO," and Security Council member Brantly Millegan called the proposal "the equivalent of treasury capture by ENS Labs," The Defiant reported.

The dispute widened in late June when Johnson, using that same delegated voting power, blocked an onchain vote to renew the DAO's Security Council, a multisig empowered to cancel malicious proposals already in the timelock queue. Johnson controls an estimated 3.26 million ENS tokens, roughly half of all ENS currently delegated to any address. Christoph Jentzsch, who wrote code for the original 2016 "The DAO," responded by proposing on X that ENS DAO dissolve itself outright, calling the DAO "broken," The Defiant reported.

Both the Foundation temp check and the Security Council renewal remain unresolved. Van de Sande's plan would not change that dispute directly — it draws on a separate, dormant pool of DAO-held tokens — but it lands amid an active debate over whether ENS's governance concentrates too much power in one delegate.

Key Takeaways Approximately 1 million purchasers of the TRUMP memecoin — representing two-thirds of all participants — experienced collective losses of $3.81 billion by June’s conclusion The former president collected more than $630 million from the cryptocurrency token despite its 97% decline from all-time highs Early, well-informed investors secured $4 billion in gains before the market collapse World Liberty Financial token participants also faced significant setbacks, with 85% of monitored wallets recording $83 million in combined losses Despite SEC’s 2025 decision to cease memecoin oversight, civil litigation remains a possibility according to legal scholars The self-branded cryptocurrency was introduced just seventy-two hours ahead of Trump’s January 2025 inauguration ceremony. After reaching a high exceeding $73 per token, the price has plummeted to approximately $1.70 — representing a decline surpassing 97%.

Trump Price Blockchain analytics provider Nansen reports that 988,905 digital wallets — approximately 66% of all participants — experienced financial losses on the cryptocurrency. The aggregate damage amounts to $3.81 billion through late June 2026.

Trump’s official financial disclosure document, published in June’s final week, revealed earnings exceeding $630 million specifically from the TRUMP cryptocurrency. His overall cryptocurrency-related income for the previous year surpassed $1.4 billion.

2/3 of retail investors lost money on the $TRUMP memecoin…

According to the New York Times, close to 1 million people lost a combined $3.81 billion on Trump's memecoin, which launched in early 2025.

The meme is still worth more than $400M but is well down from all-time highs… pic.twitter.com/Nx8P07r9uJ

— BSCN (@BSCNews) July 6, 2026

Nansen characterized the situation as one where “a limited group of initial purchasers secured massive profits while the widespread retail participant base shouldered the financial burden.” Approximately 500,000 early and knowledgeable investors collected a total of $4 billion in earnings.

The token’s design enabled Trump to generate revenue through transaction fees independent of price fluctuations. Following the launch, Trump actively promoted the cryptocurrency through multiple posts on his Truth Social platform.

Nicholas Pinto, who supported Trump in the 2024 election and lost approximately half of his $500,000 stake, shared with the New York Times: “It is almost a legal scam.”

The White House rejected this assessment. Press representative Anna Kelly stated that Trump “proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world” and emphasized that all decisions were executed “in the best interest of the American people.”

World Liberty Financial Participants Experience Similar Outcomes Nansen’s analysis extended to World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency enterprise associated with Trump and his three sons. The platform offers a token designated as WLFI, initially priced at 1.5 cents before increasing to 5 cents.

Among nearly 27,000 monitored wallets, 85% registered losses accumulating to $83 million. The remaining participants gained a combined total of $23 million.

The cryptocurrency has depreciated 82% since becoming accessible on secondary trading platforms in September. A representative for World Liberty attributed the decline to wider market downturns.

Trump’s financial disclosure indicated earnings just below $800 million from the World Liberty Financial venture. A Trump-affiliated entity receives 75% of all WLFI token sales irrespective of market valuation.

Potential Legal Consequences Remain Uncertain The Securities and Exchange Commission declared in February 2025 its intention to discontinue memecoin transaction investigations, potentially restricting immediate regulatory intervention concerning Trump.

The TRUMP memecoin platform featured a disclaimer characterizing the token as an “expression of support” rather than an investment vehicle.

Nevertheless, Stephen Gillers, who teaches legal ethics at NYU, indicated that such disclaimers might not prevent future civil litigation from investors who sustained financial losses.

During a CNBC interview addressing potential conflicts of interest, Trump maintained there was “nothing illegal” and “nothing wrong” regarding his cryptocurrency earnings, stating that others managed his investment activities.

American Bitcoin Corp just added another 500 BTC to its treasury, pushing total holdings to 8,000 BTC. For a company that held roughly 5,401 BTC at the end of 2025, that’s a nearly 50% increase in about six months.

ABTC, a subsidiary of Hut 8 Corp that trades on Nasdaq, has been on a buying-and-mining spree that’s hard to ignore. The firm ranked as the 17th-largest public Bitcoin holder as of May 2026, and this latest addition likely nudges it a few spots higher on that leaderboard.

The accumulation playbook ABTC’s strategy combines mining output with strategic treasury purchases to build its stack. During Q1 2026 alone, the firm mined 817 BTC.

The holdings trajectory tells the story. At the end of 2025, ABTC sat at approximately 5,401 BTC. By mid-May 2026, that number had climbed to 7,500 BTC, representing roughly 30% growth in the first quarter and change of the year. Then came a bump to 7,300 BTC (reported alongside Q1 results), followed by additional purchases that brought the total to 7,500 BTC by mid-May. Now, with this latest 500 BTC addition, the company crosses the 8,000 BTC threshold.

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ABTC operates nearly 90,000 mining units as of May 2026.

The Trump connection and corporate maneuvering Eric Trump serves as co-founder and chief strategy officer. The company came into existence in 2025 following a merger with Gryphon Digital Mining.

ABTC executed a reverse stock split of 1-for-15, effective July 6, 2026. Every 15 shares got consolidated into one share, which mathematically boosts the per-share price. ABTC framed the move as addressing stock volatility and maintaining its Nasdaq listing.

Financing the machine ABTC has utilized financing through Bitmain, one of the world’s largest mining hardware manufacturers, and has pledged Bitcoin as collateral for miner acquisitions.

When you pledge your Bitcoin to buy more miners to mine more Bitcoin, you’re creating a feedback loop that works beautifully in bull markets. In bear markets, collateral calls, declining mining revenue, and hardware depreciation can compound quickly.

What this means for investors ABTC’s jump from 5,401 BTC to 8,000 BTC in roughly six months reflects a company that’s treating this as a land grab. The 17th-largest public Bitcoin holder designation puts ABTC among a cohort where most publicly traded companies hold zero Bitcoin.

The reverse stock split signals that the equity side of the business has faced pressure, even as the Bitcoin treasury has grown substantially. The Bitmain financing arrangement, where pledging Bitcoin to acquire miners creates leverage, amplifies both upside and downside. If Bitcoin prices decline meaningfully, ABTC could face margin pressure on those collateralized positions while simultaneously seeing reduced mining profitability.

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

President Donald Trump on Monday said he would not rule out the possibility of adding Bitcoin to the administration’s new Trump Accounts, telling reporters that “something could happen” when asked whether the government-backed savings programme could invest in the crypto asset, according to Reuters.

Trump Accounts are a federally backed savings and investment programme designed to give children an early stake in the US economy.

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The US Treasury has rolled out the nationwide launch of the Trump Accounts app, introducing full account functionality for families participating in the investment programme. Parents can now fund their accounts, monitor balances, review investment performance and manage contributions through the platform.

The app also includes 15 interactive financial education lessons covering key investment concepts, while adding features such as recurring deposits, linked bank accounts and personalised financial guidance. Treasury said the initiative is designed to expand stock ownership among young Americans and promote long-term financial security.

Officials said Trump Accounts are free to open, with contributions permitted from employers, charitable organisations and government programmes in addition to parents.

More than 50 companies have pledged to offer employer contributions, and enrolled families will be able to begin tracking investments from July 6.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

BitTorrent has unveiled a long-term BTT token buyback and burn program that will use 100% of revenue from its decentralized services for quarterly market purchases starting in the third quarter of 2026.

Summary

BitTorrent will use all revenue from its decentralized services to buy back BTT every quarter starting in the third quarter of 2026. Repurchased BTT tokens will be permanently burned, with on chain transaction details published after each quarterly burn. The company said additional revenue from BTTInferGrid is expected to increase the funds available for future BTT buybacks. According to BitTorrent’s official announcement, all revenue generated by its decentralized services will be allocated to buying back BTT tokens on the open market every quarter, with the repurchased tokens permanently removed from circulation through scheduled burns.

📢 Announcement on the Launch of BTT Buyback Program

We are excited to announce the launch of BitTorrent’s long-term BTT Buyback Program starting in Q3 2026.

As part of this initiative, 100% of revenue generated from BitTorrent’s decentralized services will be allocated to… pic.twitter.com/h0hAMDLrRV

— BitTorrent (@BitTorrent) July 6, 2026 The company said the first round will begin with buybacks during the third quarter of 2026. The corresponding token burn is scheduled for the middle of October, when BitTorrent also plans to publish the total number of tokens destroyed, the percentage of total supply affected, and the on-chain transaction hash verifying the process.

Each quarterly burn report will be released during the middle of the first month of the following quarter, allowing users to independently verify the transactions on-chain, according to the announcement.

Under the program, the funding source will come entirely from revenue generated by BitTorrent’s decentralized services rather than treasury reserves or newly raised capital. The company added that revenue available for future buybacks is expected to increase following the launch of BTTInferGrid, which it said will contribute additional income to the ecosystem.

Instead of holding the repurchased tokens, BitTorrent said all acquired BTT will be transferred to a designated burn address, permanently removing them from circulation after each quarterly buyback cycle.

The announcement described the initiative as a long-term mechanism that ties token buybacks directly to operating revenue while providing publicly verifiable records of every burn.

BitTorrent and its products, including BitTorrent and µTorrent, serve more than 100 million active users and have been installed on over one billion devices. The platform became part of the TRON ecosystem after TRON acquired BitTorrent and its products in July 2018, adding blockchain capabilities to its decentralized file-sharing network.

Justin Sun-linked firms remain in focus The latest announcement comes weeks after another company linked to crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun drew attention over compliance-related actions. 

In June, HTX delisted the USD1 stablecoin after stating that World Liberty Financial had frozen certain on-chain addresses associated with the exchange, prompting HTX to suspend USD1 trading and convert eligible balances into USDT at a one-to-one ratio. 

World Liberty Financial said at the time that it maintained risk-based sanctions compliance controls, while HTX disputed any connection between the sanctioned Huobi Global S.A. entity and its current exchange operations.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs traded in the United States recorded $526.64 million in net outflows between June 29 and July 2. With this latest development, the streak of withdrawals from these products has now reached its eighth consecutive week. This marks the longest continuous weekly outflow period seen since spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in the US.

Outflows continue in Bitcoin and Ethereum fundsThe cautious approach from institutional investors, combined with weaker momentum in Bitcoin, was clearly reflected in ETF data. According to SoSoValue, the total net assets of US spot Bitcoin ETFs fell to around $74.37 billion. In the same period, Bitcoin traded near $61,500. During June alone, outflows from these products totaled approximately $4.5 billion, underlining the sustained pressure in the market.

Wu Blockchain reported that US spot Bitcoin ETFs saw nearly $527 million in net outflows over the period from June 29 to July 2, bringing the outflow streak to eight consecutive weeks.

Spot Ethereum ETFs mirrored this trend. In the same timeframe, Ethereum ETFs experienced $13.67 million in net redemptions, also marking their eighth straight week of outflows. The simultaneous withdrawals from funds tied to the two largest digital assets signal that investor appetite for risk remains subdued across the sector.

Diverging trends in altcoin ETFsWhile Bitcoin and Ethereum products continued to lose assets, certain altcoin ETFs bucked the trend by attracting fresh capital. Spot Solana ETFs posted $5.75 million in net inflows for the week. XRP ETFs stood out with $17.19 million in new investments, representing the strongest performance in the altcoin ETF category. Hyperliquid ETFs also saw positive flows, gaining $4.32 million in net inflows despite a noticeable slowdown compared to previous weeks.

Glossary: SoSoValue is a data platform commonly used to track ETF flows and market metrics in digital asset markets. Net inflow refers to the difference between money entering and exiting a fund.

This divergence suggests that, rather than exiting the crypto ETF market entirely, some investors are reallocating capital toward alternative digital assets. Although Bitcoin remains the predominant option among institutional vehicles, select interest in altcoin-based products appears to be holding steady.

Brief signs of recovery prove short-livedDespite a weak weekly outlook, there were limited signs of recovery at the period’s close. On July 2, US spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted over $221 million in daily net inflows, breaking a 10-day outflow streak. However, this single-day shift was not deemed sufficient to reverse the broader eight-week trend.

Market observers attribute the prolonged outflows to macroeconomic uncertainty, rising interest rate expectations, and diminished risk appetite. With pressure persisting on Bitcoin, it appears institutional investors continue to scale back their exposure by redeeming ETF shares.

In the period ahead, ETF flows are expected to serve as a key gauge of institutional sentiment. Sustained net inflows could suggest renewed confidence in Bitcoin, while ongoing outflows may indicate demand will remain muted until broader market conditions improve.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

Circle printed roughly $3.5 billion worth of USDC on Solana last week, with a single $1 billion mint hitting the chain on June 16 alone.

Gross USDC issuance on Solana has already blown past $64 billion for 2026, and we’re barely into July.

What’s driving the demand USDC on Solana serves a sprawling set of use cases: DeFi trading, cross-border payments, and institutional settlements. The network’s low fees and high throughput make it a natural fit for the kind of rapid-fire transactions that stablecoin users actually need.

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Each token represents a dollar (or dollar-equivalent reserve) deposited by a customer who wants digital dollars on-chain. When $3.5 billion gets minted in a week, it means $3.5 billion in fresh demand showed up at the door.

The June 16 mint of $1 billion USDC in a single transaction is particularly notable. Transactions of that size typically signal institutional or enterprise-level activity, not retail users swapping tokens on a DEX.

The institutional angle is getting real Circle has enhanced its mint and burn capabilities with BNY Mellon, one of the world’s oldest and largest custodial banks. That partnership covers both Solana and Ethereum environments, giving institutions a familiar custody framework for handling USDC at scale.

Circle hasn’t issued any public statement about the specific June minting events. The data comes from on-chain tracking platforms that monitor blockchain transactions in real time.

What this means for investors With $64 billion in gross USDC issuance on Solana in 2026 alone, the network has established itself as a legitimate alternative for high-volume stablecoin operations.

For SOL holders, more USDC liquidity on the network means more transaction fees, more DeFi activity, and more reasons for developers to build on Solana. Stablecoin volume is one of the most reliable indicators of real economic activity on a blockchain, as opposed to speculative token trading that can evaporate overnight.

Tether’s USDT still commands the largest market share globally, but USDC’s growth on Solana, powered by Circle’s regulatory-first approach and institutional partnerships, is carving out a distinct lane.

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

Source: Binance EN

This is a general announcement. Products and services referred to here may not be available in your region. Fellow Binancians, Starting at approximately 2026-07-06 12:00 (UTC), Binance will suspend the deposits and withdrawals of token(s) on the Moonriver (MOVR) network to support its network upgrade to ensure the best user experience. The network upgrade will take place at the block height of 16,960,935, or approximately at 2026-07-06 13:00 (UTC). Please note: The trading of token(s) on the aforementioned network will not be impacted.Binance will handle all technical requirements involved for all users.Deposits and withdrawals for token(s) on the aforementioned network will be reopened once the upgraded network is deemed to be stable. No further announcement will be posted.There may be discrepancies between this original content in English and any translated versions. Please refer to the original English version for the most accurate information, in case any discrepancies arise. For more information, please refer to the announcement from the project team. Thank you for your support! Binance Team 2026-07-06