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The Kazakhstan Stock Exchange just became the first in Central Asia to list US-based cryptocurrency ETFs. On June 19, KASE admitted two digital asset funds under its KASE Global framework: the Volatility Shares Solana ETF (SOLZ_KZ) and BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA_KZ).

What’s actually being listed SOLZ_KZ, the Solana fund from Volatility Shares, does not hold SOL directly. Instead, it gains exposure through futures contracts listed on the CME, along with cash equivalents. The net expense ratio sits at 0.95%, set to hold through June 30, 2026. As of June 18, SOLZ_KZ had roughly $80 million in assets under management.

On the Ethereum side, ETHA_KZ is BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF, carrying a leaner management fee of 0.25%.

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Investment Company Standard JSC initiated the listing process for both products on KASE, acting as the bridge between US-based fund issuers and the Kazakh exchange infrastructure.

Kazakhstan’s crypto strategy has been building for a while In December 2025, KASE and the Solana Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on digital assets. That partnership directly facilitated KASE’s registration as Kazakhstan’s first digital asset platform operator, which became effective around mid-2026.

And even before KASE got into the game, the Astana International Exchange had already made waves. In September 2025, Fonte Capital launched what it described as the world’s first spot Solana ETF with staking on AIX. That product represented a different approach entirely, holding actual SOL tokens and generating staking yield, compared to the futures-based structure that SOLZ_KZ uses on KASE.

What this means for investors The immediate practical impact is straightforward: qualified investors in Kazakhstan can now gain exposure to Solana and Ethereum through their existing brokerage accounts on KASE. No need to set up a crypto wallet, manage private keys, or navigate the often-chaotic world of decentralized exchanges.

The fee structures also deserve attention. SOLZ_KZ’s 0.95% expense ratio is notably higher than ETHA_KZ’s 0.25%, reflecting the additional complexity and cost of managing a futures-based strategy. Futures-based funds can suffer from roll costs and tracking errors that eat into returns over time, a consideration that becomes more important the longer you hold.

For the Solana ecosystem specifically, having both a spot ETF with staking on AIX and a futures-based ETF on KASE operating in the same country represents a level of product diversity that most Western markets haven’t yet achieved. The $80 million in AUM for SOLZ_KZ is modest by US standards, but as a proof of concept for regulated crypto products in Central Asia, it’s the kind of number that tends to grow once institutional allocators see that the infrastructure actually works.

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

Solana Mobile’s dApp Store added 96 new applications in the span of a single week, pushing total listings to 1,561. The store had roughly 700 apps back in March 2026, climbed past 817 in April, crossed the 1,000 threshold in early June, and now sits at 1,561. That’s more than doubling its catalog in about three months.

Why developers keep showing up The Solana dApp Store charges developers a 0% platform fee. Zero. Not 15%, not 30%, not some convoluted tier system. Nothing. Compare that to Google’s 15-30% cut or Apple’s famously contentious 30% commission.

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The store operates as an Android distribution platform, meaning it runs alongside Google Play on Solana’s Seeker smartphone rather than replacing it entirely.

Solana Mobile has also introduced a feature called dApp Spotlight, a curated carousel surfacing quality applications for users. The platform has also introduced AI-driven tools for ratings and reviews.

The hardware equation Solana Mobile’s Seeker smartphone has now shipped more than 150,000 units. The Seeker includes hardware-level security features like the Seed Vault Wallet, which handles private key management and asset storage directly on the device.

The SKR token and ecosystem economics Solana Mobile launched the SKR token in January 2026 with a total supply of 10 billion tokens. The token serves multiple functions within the ecosystem, including governance, staking, and user incentives.

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

The problem with AI agents handling money has always been the same: give an agent access to a wallet and you’ve handed it the keys to the kingdom. Mysten Labs thinks it has a better way.

Sui Network has unveiled a prototype built on its Seal multi-party computation system that allows AI agents to participate in onchain markets and execute payments without ever receiving or controlling private keys. The Seal MPC system commenced its rollout on Sui’s testnet around June 19, 2026, building on a decentralized key server prototype that first went live on testnet in March of the same year.

What Seal MPC actually does Seal sidesteps the private key problem entirely. Instead of handing an agent a private key, the system routes transaction authorization through MPC committees, groups of independent nodes that collectively approve or deny a transaction without any single party ever assembling the complete key. The agent proposes, the committee decides, and no individual node can act unilaterally.

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Authorization isn’t arbitrary either. Sui’s on-chain Move smart contracts enforce human-readable spending policies automatically, covering things like daily caps, approval thresholds, and counterparty restrictions. An agent can’t simply decide to wire funds to an unknown address if the policy says otherwise. The contract enforces the rule before the transaction ever goes through.

Fair competition in onchain markets Beyond payments, Sui’s official announcement highlighted a second application: fair competition between AI agents in onchain markets.

Seal’s cryptographic architecture allows agents to submit bids that remain completely hidden until a synchronized reveal. No agent can observe a competitor’s strategy before committing to its own. The reveal happens simultaneously for all parties, enforced by the protocol rather than by any single trusted party.

Mysten Labs has been deliberate about the sequencing here. The decentralized key server prototype launched in March 2026, giving the ecosystem time to evaluate the infrastructure before the fuller MPC system arrived in June. Audits and validations are required before real funds flow through the system at scale.

What this means for Sui’s broader AI infrastructure play Seal doesn’t exist in isolation. Mysten Labs has been assembling what it describes as a programmable access layer for AI agents on Sui, with Seal sitting alongside tools like Walrus, Sui’s decentralized storage solution, and encrypted messaging capabilities.

SUI serves as the native gas token for the network, meaning any increase in transaction volume from AI agent activity translates directly into demand for the token.

The risks are real. MPC systems have their own attack surface, particularly around the coordination of committee nodes and the potential for collusion. The requirement for audits before live transaction handling reflects genuine technical stakes. A flaw in the authorization flow doesn’t just affect one wallet, it affects every agent and policy running on the same infrastructure.

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

 MEXC, a pioneer in 0-fee digital asset trading, will list five Ondo tokenized stock spot trading pairs spanning AI, semiconductor, and energy sectors on June 25, 2026, at 12:00 UTC, giving global users onchain exposure to U.S. stocks without a traditional brokerage account or market-hours restrictions.

Ondo Global Markets is a tokenization platform that provides onchain exposure to thousands of U.S. publicly traded securities, including stocks and ETFs, for investors outside the United States. Each token is supported by specific assets held through regulated custodial brokers and tracks the total return of the underlying security, including dividend reinvestment. Non-US retail and institutional users can mint and redeem tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs instantly, 24 hours a day, five days a week. 

As part of its deepening collaboration with Ondo Finance, MEXC is adding five new tokenized stock tradingpairs on spot markets — CCJON/USDT, TTMION/USDT, RMBSON/USDT, SYMON/USDT, and KEELON/USDT — covering Cameco (uranium energy), TTM Technologies (PCB manufacturing), Rambus (semiconductor & silicon intellectual property), Symbotic (AI automation), and Keel Infrastructure (data center & energy infrastructure). This further solidifies MEXC and Ondo’s shared commitment to expanding real-world assets trading opportunities for investors worldwide. Full details are available on the MEXC announcement page.

MEXC and Ondo Finance remain committed to expanding the tokenized real-world assets ecosystem, with plans to continue listing new assets and deepening users’ access to traditional financial markets worldwide. Beyond tokenized assets, MEXC has also officially launched “RealStocks“, an innovative equity product that provides eligible users with real share ownership and dividends. This opens an additional channel for users to access U.S. stock markets within a single platform.

About MEXC MEXC is the world’s fastest-growing cryptocurrency exchange, trusted by more than 40 million users across 170+ markets. Built on a user-first philosophy, MEXC offers industry-leading 0-fee trading and access to over 3,000 digital assets. As the Gateway to Infinite Opportunities, MEXC provides a single platform where users can easily trade cryptocurrencies alongside tokenized assets, including stocks, ETFs, commodities, and precious metals.

MEXC Official Website｜X ｜Telegram ｜How to Sign Up on MEXC

For media inquiries, please contact MEXC PR team: [email protected]

Risk Disclaimer:

This content does not constitute investment advice. Given the highly volatile nature of the cryptocurrency market, investors are encouraged to carefully assess market fluctuations, project fundamentals, and potential financial risks before making any trading decisions.

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Disclaimer: TheNewsCrypto does not endorse any content on this page. The content depicted in this Press Release does not represent any investment advice. TheNewsCrypto recommends our readers to make decisions based on their own research. TheNewsCrypto is not accountable for any damage or loss related to content, products, or services stated in this Press Release.

The company says it has mined the first known Bitcoin block using Stratum V2’s Job Declaration feature, as it also rolls out new marketplace tools for digital mining assets.

GoMining says it has mined what it believes is the first known Bitcoin block produced using the Stratum V2 protocol’s Job Declaration functionality, marking an early real-world deployment of technology designed to give miners greater control over how Bitcoin blocks are constructed.

The block was mined through the DMND bitcoin mining pool, with GoMining creating and declaring its own block template rather than relying on the mining pool to determine which transactions were included. The approach represents one of the core features of Stratum V2, an open-source mining protocol that aims to improve security, efficiency and decentralization within Bitcoin mining.

According to the company, the block included transactions associated with GoBTC Pay, GoMining’s open-source Bitcoin instant payments protocol, demonstrating that miners can include transactions tied to their own applications while continuing to participate in pooled mining.

“For years, mining pools have largely determined which transactions are included in Bitcoin blocks,” said Mark Zalan, CEO of GoMining. “By creating our own block template and including GoBTC Pay transactions, we’re demonstrating one of the practical capabilities that Stratum V2 makes possible.”

Mining pools have traditionally been responsible for constructing block templates, leaving individual miners with little influence over transaction selection despite providing the computing power. Stratum V2 introduces Job Declaration, allowing miners to build their own templates while still benefiting from pooled mining rewards.

The protocol has been under development for several years with contributions from members of the Bitcoin community. Supporters argue that broader adoption could reduce centralization among mining pools by distributing block construction decisions across participating miners.

“A miner just mined the first Stratum V2 block to power their own product end to end,” said Alejandro De La Torre, CEO and co-founder of DMND. “GoMining declared the template and included their GoBTC Pay payments with no pool in the way. We built DMND for exactly this.”

The milestone comes as Bitcoin mining companies continue exploring new infrastructure and protocol upgrades aimed at improving network resilience and operational flexibility.

Separately, GoMining has also expanded its digital mining ecosystem with the launch of a new “Step Down Auction” feature for its secondary marketplace. The automated sales mechanism allows sellers to list Digital Miners at a starting price that gradually decreases until a buyer purchases the asset, eliminating the need for competitive bidding.

The marketplace update also broadens public access to listings, introduces additional price history and ROI metrics, and adds new sorting and filtering tools designed to improve liquidity and price discovery for digital mining assets.

Together, the announcements highlight GoMining’s dual focus on advancing Bitcoin’s underlying mining infrastructure while expanding the user experience around tokenized mining products. While the Stratum V2 milestone targets improvements at the protocol level, the marketplace enhancements are aimed at making digital mining assets easier to trade and evaluate within the company’s ecosystem.

Whether the Stratum V2 implementation accelerates adoption across the wider mining industry remains to be seen. However, successfully mining a production Bitcoin block using miner-controlled template creation provides one of the first practical demonstrations of the protocol’s capabilities outside of testing environments.

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Members of the XRP community are warning users to be cautious of scam tokens claiming to represent JPYSC on the XRP Ledger.

This comes as Japan’s financial giant, SBI Holdings, officially launched JPYSC, a trust-bank-backed yen stablecoin. The development sparked speculation about whether JPYSC could be issued on XRPL.

Warning Over Fake JPYSC Tokens XRPL validator Vet (Hussein Zangana) cautioned users that JPYSC has not been publicly announced for issuance on the XRP Ledger. So, any token currently using the JPYSC ticker on XRPL should be treated as suspicious.

The warning comes as scammers may try to exploit excitement surrounding the stablecoin. SBI’s long-standing relationship with Ripple and the XRP ecosystem has fueled expectations that JPYSC could interact with XRPL.

Another XRP community member said they have established monitoring systems to track new trustlines from known SBI addresses. The goal is to identify any legitimate issuance activity if it occurs in the future.

JPYSC Launches Within SBI VC Trade Notably, JPYSC went live on June 24 as a trust-type yen stablecoin issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank and distributed through SBI VC Trade. The stablecoin was developed jointly with Startale Group and is currently available only to SBI VC Trade account holders.

Unlike many stablecoins operating under Japan’s money transfer regulations, JPYSC is structured as a trust-bank-backed electronic payment instrument. SBI says this framework removes the ¥1 million transaction cap that applies to certain payment products. 

For now, JPYSC remains confined to SBI VC Trade accounts. Users cannot withdraw it to external wallets or public blockchains.

SBI Preparing for Public Blockchain Expansion Although transfers are currently restricted, SBI said the technical and operational groundwork for public blockchain circulation has already been completed.

The company stated that once regulatory requirements and tax frameworks are finalized and approved, it plans to enable domestic and international circulation of JPYSC on public blockchain networks.

SBI did not specify which blockchain networks will support JPYSC after the public rollout. As a result, XRP Ledger supporters continue to speculate about a possible future integration.

Because no network has been officially confirmed, community members are urging users to verify issuer addresses before interacting with any token claiming to represent JPYSC.

SBI Targets On-Chain Finance and Tokenization SBI described JPYSC as part of an effort to connect traditional finance with blockchain-based markets. The company outlined several planned use cases once public-chain deployment begins, including:

On-chain foreign exchange markets involving yen and dollar stablecoins Institutional lending and borrowing Settlement of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) Retail and merchant payments Cross-border remittances OTC and institutional crypto trading SBI Chairman and CEO Yoshitaka Kitao said the migration of financial services onto blockchain networks is “irreversible”. He described JPYSC as an important step toward building Japan’s on-chain financial infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Sota Watanabe said preparations for external wallet transfers and public-chain circulation are already complete. According to Watanabe, the remaining obstacles are primarily regulatory and tax-related.

For XRP investors, the launch has attracted attention because of SBI’s close ties to Ripple. However, no official announcement has linked JPYSC to the XRP Ledger so far. 

DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.

XRP is trading just above $1, leaving the token at its weakest price level of the year, but onchain data paints a different picture. 

The exchange-held XRP supply continues to fall, Binance withdrawals have exceeded deposits for seven straight days, whale flows are holding positive and spot XRP exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have attracted $243 million in inflows since April.

The improving onchain data points to healthy network positioning, even as XRP continues to search for a price bottom.  

XRP supply on exchanges continues to shrinkCrypto analyst Amr Taha noted that Binance's XRP reserve has fallen to its lowest level since March after roughly 100 million XRP left the exchange over the past month. Binance's balance stood at about 2.68 billion XRP on June 25, down from 2.78 billion XRP on May 12, accounting for the largest outflow among major trading platforms.

XRP multi-exchange daily reserve. Source: CryptoQuant

Other exchanges also posted smaller declines. Upbit's reserve fell to 2.48 billion XRP on June 25 from 2.51 billion XRP on May 31, while Bybit's holdings declined to 82 million XRP from 92 million XRP on June 2. Binance led in absolute outflows, while Bybit recorded the steepest percentage decline.

Taha also highlighted a significant shift in Binance transaction activity. XRP withdrawal transactions have exceeded deposits for seven consecutive days since June 17. The seven-day withdrawal share climbed to 53.8% on June 23, its highest reading since June 2024, while deposits fell to 46.1%, the weakest level since 2024.

XRP daily deposit/withdrawal transactions (%) on Binance. Source: CryptoQuant

The metric tracks transaction count rather than XRP volume. This indicates users are moving coins off Binance more frequently than sending them to the exchange, marking the longest withdrawal-led stretch in roughly a year.

Large XRP holders supported the trend. XRP whale flow on the 90-day moving average has stayed positive throughout the quarter at 5.143 million XRP per day, showing consistent net accumulation by large wallets instead of distribution. 

XRP whale flows. Source: CryptoQuant

Institutional demand has also added support. Spot XRP ETFs recorded $2 million in net inflows on June 24, lifting June's total netflows to $31 million. Since April, the total cumulative inflows have reached $243 million.

XRP price approaches a major demand zoneFrom a technical standpoint, the higher-time-frame market structure remains bearish for the altcoin. XRP touched $1.01 on Thursday, its lowest price of 2026, leaving the token close to its first move below $1 since November 2024. The decline has pushed XRP down 43% year-to-date.

XRP/USDT, one-week chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

The next key area for XRP sits within the fair value gap between $1 and $0.63, an unfilled price gap created during the sharp rally in late 2024 that could attract buying interest if the decline extends in the coming weeks. 

Black Swan Capitalist founder Versan Aljarrah continues to focus on the longer-term chart. The analyst said XRP has spent years building a large accumulation range with higher lows on both weekly and monthly timeframes.

XRP/USD, one-month chart analysis by Versan Aljarrah. Source: X

Aljarrah argued that extended consolidations often produce stronger breakout moves once the price eventually breaks out of the range, with the analyst targeting $10, i.e., a 900% increase from the current price. 

This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph's Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research.

Ripple has appeared on the doorsteps of American lawmakers as part of its effort to push the passage of the Clarity Act.  

San Francisco-headquartered company, which is known for its association with the XRP cryptocurrency, has launched a mobile campaign in the capital with a branded "Clarity truck" to lobby Congress (as shown in the X post below). 

On the road to clarity - literally!
Ripple's Clarity truck is out in D.C. as Congress works on the Clarity Act, which creates clear rules for digital assets and crypto.
Clear rules help protect consumers, support responsible innovation, and keep the U.S. competitive pic.twitter.com/FGdTHVguPl

— Lauren Belive (@BeliveLauren) June 25, 2026  The timing is crucial, given that legislators keep mulling over the major regulatory framework for cryptocurrency. 

Lauren Belive, the head of the U.S. Public Policy at Ripple, has quipped that the company is "on the road to clarity—literally!" The exec has stressed that clear crypto rules will be beneficial for consumers and American competitiveness. 

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The massive Senate hurdle  The passage of the Clarity Act, which aspires to resolve years of regulatory uncertainty, appears to be less likely with each passing day. As of today, Polymarket bettors see only a 43% chance of the bill being signed into law this year. 

The Clarity Act cleared the House with strong bipartisan support back in July, but it has struggled to pass the upper chamber. 

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Negotiations stalled over unresolved ethics and conflict-of-interest provisions. Senate Democrats were reportedly left frustrated by the lack of cooperation. 

Moreover, there are disagreements over DeFi platforms as well as stablecoin yield and rewards (the most contentious issue). 

So far, no Senate floor vote has been scheduled. The Republicans have to secure at least seven Democratic votes to overcome a filibuster.   

The Senate is scheduled to head to its July 4 recess on June 27. 

Analysts view early to mid-August as the practical deadline for the bill to pass the Senate.

Ripple previously supported the imperfect legislative effort despite some opposition from the broader industry, stating that clarity is better than chaos. 

BlackRock remains affected by the consistent outflows witnessed across both the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF markets, and has continued to offload large amounts of its holdings.

In a familiar move showcased by blockchain monitoring platform Lookonchain, BlackRock has deposited another 3,410 BTC and 5,132 ETH to Coinbase Prime in multiple transfers spotted on Thursday, June 25.

BlackRock dumps crypto non-stopThe data further revealed that the Bitcoin and Ethereum transfers were worth $209.64 million and $8.43 million, respectively, per the assets' prices at the time of the transactions.

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The total deposits happened in a series of about seven separate transfers, with nearly all of them carrying 300 BTC each, while only one separate transfer moved Ethereum to the Coinbase wallet.

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While this transfer happened at a time when the broader crypto market is facing downside pressure, market watchers fear that the move from BlackRock could further fuel the ongoing volatility.

Did BlackRock actually sell?Although BlackRock did not clarify the reason it has continued to offload large stashes of its Bitcoin and Ethereum holdings on Coinbase, the transfers have triggered speculation across the market, with traders interpreting them as potential attempts to sell.

It is important to note that deposits to Coinbase Prime or other crypto exchanges do not necessarily confirm an immediate sale. However, investors have become suspicious of BlackRock's frequent deposits, as the timing of the transfers has intensified concerns and signals that BlackRock might actually be selling.

This is more apparent, as the company has been found to sell only when its ETF products record withdrawals during their daily trading sessions.

Round-the-Clock Access to Tokenized U.S. Equities@OndoFinance has activated what it describes as the industry's first 24/7 minting and redemption cycle for tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, a move that formally severs the dependency of real-world asset (RWA) products on traditional market hours.

Investors can now execute primary issuance and liquidations for $SPYon, $QQQon, $NVDAon, and $TSLAon during overnight sessions, weekends, and public holidays, periods when NYSE and Nasdaq are closed. The update eliminates the reliance on legacy banking schedules, allowing tokenized shares to be created or redeemed in real time regardless of exchange downtime.

Each tokenized asset is an ERC-20 token backed 1:1 by the underlying security, held by U.S. broker-dealers along with cash in transit. The tokens are total-return trackers that mirror the economic performance of their underlying assets, including price movements, dividends, and corporate actions.

Multi-Chain Rollout and Growing Platform ScaleThe 24/7 architecture is currently live on @Ethereum and @BNBChain, with a @Solana deployment scheduled for the near term. Ondo had already expanded to Solana earlier this year: Ondo Global Markets, the world's largest tokenized stock and ETF platform by total value locked, became available on Solana with more than 200 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, including NVDA, AAPL, META, and ETFs such as SPY and QQQ.

Ondo Global Markets has surpassed $1 billion in tokenized stock TVL less than eight months after launch, becoming the first tokenized stocks platform to cross that mark. The platform now offers more than 260 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain, with access through wallets, exchanges, custodians, and protocols including Binance, Bitget, MetaMask, and Blockchain.com.

Ondo said Global Markets holds more than 70% market share among tokenized equity issuers and has secured regulatory approval to offer tokenized stocks and ETFs across 30 EU and EEA countries.

The broader significance of the 24/7 minting update is structural. By enabling round-the-clock mint and redeem operations, Ondo aims to make equities and ETFs composable components within the DeFi ecosystem, substantially expanding the asset universe and extending trading hours for on-chain finance. This also removes the T+1 settlement delay that traditional stock trading requires and enables transferring equity exposure between wallets as easily as sending stablecoins.

Sources
Ondo Global Markets tops $1B in TVL, Crypto Briefing
Ondo Global Markets launches on Solana, Solana.com
Deep Dive of Ondo Finance, TokenInsight

Aave governance is weighing a proposal to bring savings GHO, or sGHO, across chains, a move that could make the protocol’s yield-bearing stablecoin product easier to access beyond Ethereum mainnet.

TL;DR Aave governance is considering an ARFC proposal to launch sGHO cross-chain. The proposal uses Chainlink CCIP while keeping Ethereum mainnet as the main source of truth. The move could expand access to GHO savings yields across Layer-2 networks. A Cross-Chain Stablecoin Push The proposal would extend sGHO, the savings version of Aave’s GHO stablecoin, to additional networks. The idea is to let users access yield-bearing GHO exposure from Layer-2 environments without fragmenting the core accounting model. According to the proposal, Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol would be used to support messaging between chains.

That structure matters because stablecoin liquidity can become messy when each chain develops its own version of an asset. Aave’s approach appears designed to expand access while keeping the main vault logic anchored to Ethereum. In theory, that gives users lower-cost access on L2s while preserving a clearer system for tracking deposits and yield.

Why sGHO Matters For Aave GHO has become an important strategic product for Aave because it gives the lending protocol a native stablecoin around which it can build revenue, incentives, and liquidity. sGHO adds another layer by giving users a savings-style version of that stablecoin, turning idle stablecoin exposure into a yield-bearing position.

Cross-chain deployment could help GHO compete with other stablecoins and yield products that already have broad multi-chain footprints. For Aave, the goal is not just to issue a stablecoin; it is to create a deeper ecosystem where borrowing, lending, liquidity, and savings products reinforce each other.

Governance Still Has To Decide As with any Aave governance process, the proposal still needs community scrutiny. Tokenholders will need to assess bridge risk, CCIP assumptions, liquidity incentives, operational complexity, and whether the rollout creates enough user demand to justify the added architecture.

If approved, the move would fit a wider DeFi trend: major protocols are trying to make their core products available across multiple networks while avoiding the liquidity fragmentation that hurt earlier cross-chain expansions.

Market Context The proposal also arrives as DeFi protocols are searching for more durable revenue lines. A successful GHO and sGHO ecosystem could give Aave a native stablecoin flywheel, where borrowers, savers, and liquidity providers all interact around the same asset rather than relying only on third-party stablecoins.

Execution risk remains real, though. Cross-chain systems introduce dependencies that users may not notice until something breaks, which is why governance will likely focus heavily on bridge assumptions, risk limits, and how quickly the rollout should expand.

That leaves the story as more than a single-day headline. The practical test is whether the development changes user access, liquidity, regulatory confidence, or trader positioning over the next few sessions rather than simply adding another announcement to the crypto news cycle.

This coverage is based on information from Aave governance forum.

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

MiCA is the European Union’s first comprehensive rulebook for crypto, and on July 1, 2026, its transition period ends for good. This guide explains what MiCA does, why USDT got delisted while USDC did not, and what the hard deadline means for exchanges and users.

Summary

MiCA becomes fully enforceable across the European Union on July 1, 2026, after which crypto firms without a MiCA license can no longer legally serve EU users. The regulation introduced a single framework for crypto across all EU member states, with strict rules for stablecoins, exchanges, and other crypto service providers. MiCA compliance kept USDC listed on regulated European exchanges, while USDT was delisted after its issuer chose not to seek authorization. Table of Contents

What MiCA actually regulatesThe stablecoin rules and why USDT got delistedCASPs: the rules for exchanges and service providersThe July 2026 deadline and the great narrowingA worked example: what a token and an exchange each faceWhat MiCA leaves unsettledMiCA in the global pictureWhat it means for everyday usersFrequently Asked Questions MiCA, short for Markets in Crypto-Assets, is the European Union’s first comprehensive law governing crypto-assets and the companies that deal in them, creating one common rulebook across all twenty-seven member states in place of the patchwork of national approaches that came before. Formally known as Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, it entered into force in mid-2023 and has rolled out in phases ever since, and it now sits at a decisive moment: on July 1, 2026, the transition period that let existing crypto firms keep operating under old national rules expires for good, and Europe’s market supervisor has been blunt that there will be no extensions. 

After that date, any company offering crypto services to European Union clients without a proper MiCA license is simply breaking the law. This guide explains what MiCA is, the categories it creates, why some stablecoins survived in Europe while others were delisted, what a crypto company must do to comply, and what the hard 2026 deadline means for exchanges and ordinary users alike.

The significance of MiCA is hard to overstate, because the European Union is one of the largest economic blocs on earth and MiCA is the most ambitious attempt yet to bring crypto fully inside a traditional financial-regulation framework. Before MiCA, a crypto exchange or token issuer operating in Europe faced a confusing mix of national rules, with one regime in Germany, another in France, another in Malta, and gaps everywhere in between. 

MiCA replaces that fragmentation with a single, harmonized system: get authorized once, and you can passport your services across the entire bloc. The trade-off is that the bar to get authorized is high, the obligations are heavy, and the deadline to clear them is now days away rather than years off. The result is a market being reshaped in real time, with a small number of licensed winners, a large number of firms facing exit, and a stablecoin landscape that already looks very different inside Europe than outside it.

What MiCA actually regulates MiCA divides the crypto world into categories and applies different rules to each, so the first step in understanding it is learning what those categories are. At the top level, MiCA governs two kinds of actors: the issuers of crypto-assets and the providers of crypto-asset services. For issuers, MiCA sorts tokens into three buckets.

The first is electronic money tokens, or EMTs, which are stablecoins pegged to a single official currency, such as a euro-pegged or dollar-pegged coin. The second is asset-referenced tokens, or ARTs, which are stablecoins backed by a basket of things, multiple currencies, commodities, or other assets, rather than a single currency. The third is a catch-all category of other crypto-assets, which covers utility tokens, governance tokens, and unbacked cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether, the assets most exchanges handle every day.

Each bucket carries different obligations. The two stablecoin categories face the strictest treatment, because regulators view stablecoins as the part of crypto most capable of threatening the wider financial system, a concern sharpened by the 2022 collapse of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin that wiped out tens of billions of dollars. EMT and ART issuers must hold proper reserves, grant holders redemption rights, and meet governance and disclosure standards. 

The other crypto-assets face lighter rules, mainly requirements to publish an honest whitepaper before offering a token to the public and to avoid market abuse. Notably, MiCA largely excludes non-fungible tokens, unless they are issued in a large fungible series that makes them function more like ordinary tokens, and it excludes assets already covered by existing financial law, such as securities. The category a token falls into determines almost everything about how MiCA treats it, which is why getting the classification right is the starting point for any issuer.

The stablecoin rules and why USDT got delisted The most visible effect of MiCA so far has been on stablecoins, and the clearest way to understand the rules is through what happened to the two largest dollar stablecoins. Under MiCA, a stablecoin can only be offered by European Union-regulated platforms if its issuer is authorized, which for a single-currency stablecoin means holding an e-money or credit institution license and meeting MiCA’s reserve, redemption, and governance requirements. 

The reserve rules are strict: an EMT must back its tokens fully, holding one hundred percent of reserves in safe, segregated accounts, while an ART must keep at least a substantial portion segregated at regulated credit institutions. MiCA also bars stablecoin issuers from paying interest or yield to holders, a deliberate choice to stop stablecoins from competing with bank deposits and drawing money out of the banking system.

This is where the two giants diverged. Circle, the issuer of USDC, pursued authorization through a European subsidiary and obtained MiCA approval for USDC and its euro stablecoin EURC, making them compliant and freely offered across European Union exchanges. Tether, the issuer of USDT, the largest stablecoin in the world, did not apply for MiCA authorization and confirmed its token was not compliant. The consequence was swift: major European Union-regulated exchanges, including the regional arms of the largest global platforms, delisted USDT and other non-compliant stablecoins for their European users. 

The nuance worth understanding is that USDT is not banned from existence in Europe; users can still hold it in self-custody and trade it on decentralized exchanges. What changed is that a MiCA-licensed exchange can no longer offer it, which fragments liquidity and pushes European users toward compliant alternatives like USDC. Every stablecoin authorized under MiCA so far has been an EMT, a single-currency token, and USDC’s compliance versus USDT’s non-compliance has become the textbook illustration of the rules in action.

CASPs: the rules for exchanges and service providers Beyond token issuers, MiCA’s other major target is the companies that provide crypto services, which the regulation calls crypto-asset service providers, or CASPs. This category is broad: it covers exchanges, brokers, custodians, wallet providers that hold customer assets, trading platforms, and firms that advise on or place crypto-assets. 

If your business touches customer crypto in almost any commercial way, you likely need a CASP authorization to keep serving European Union clients. The obligations that come with that authorization are extensive and closely mirror those imposed on traditional financial firms, which is the entire point: MiCA aims to make crypto service providers behave like regulated financial institutions rather than lightly governed startups.

A CASP must meet requirements covering customer identity verification and anti-money-laundering controls, the safekeeping and segregation of customer assets, governance and capital standards, market-conduct rules that prohibit insider trading and market manipulation, and clear disclosure of risks to customers. Authorized CASPs also become subject to the European Union’s operational-resilience framework, which mandates cybersecurity and incident-reporting standards, and to the crypto travel rule, which requires them to pass along sender and recipient information on transfers, the same obligation that has applied to bank wires for decades. 

The reward for shouldering all of this is passporting: once a firm is authorized in any one member state, it can offer its services across all twenty-seven without seeking separate licenses in each, turning a fragmented continent into a single market. The burden is that running these programs at scale, across a global customer base, is expensive and demanding, which is exactly why so many firms are struggling to clear the bar before the deadline.

The July 2026 deadline and the great narrowing Everything about MiCA now points toward a single date, and understanding the phased rollout explains why that date matters so much. MiCA did not arrive all at once. The stablecoin rules for EMTs and ARTs took effect in mid-2024. The full CASP authorization regime took effect at the end of 2024, the point from which firms needed a MiCA license to operate. 

But MiCA included a grandfathering provision, a transition period that let firms already operating legally under their national rules continue doing so while they applied for full MiCA authorization. Member states set their own transition windows within the limits MiCA allowed, ranging from short windows ending in 2025 to the full eighteen-month period ending on July 1, 2026. That final date is the bloc-wide cutoff, the moment the transition ends everywhere at once.

What makes the deadline dramatic is how few firms have actually cleared the bar. As the cutoff approached in 2026, roughly a couple of hundred firms held some form of full MiCA authorization across the entire union, but the number cleared to run an actual crypto trading platform was strikingly small, in the low double digits, with a number of member states having issued zero trading-platform licenses at all. Industry executives openly warned that a large majority of exchanges currently operating may fail to secure a license and be forced to exit the European market, and reports emerged of major global exchanges facing rejection in specific countries. 

Europe’s market supervisor reinforced the message with no room for ambiguity: no member state may extend the transition beyond July 1, 2026, and after that date, operating without authorization is a breach of European Union law, not a paperwork gap. The picture, then, is of a great narrowing, a market being compressed from a crowded field into a small set of licensed survivors, with the rest required to wind down their European operations or leave.

A worked example: what a token and an exchange each face To make the rules concrete, it helps to walk through how MiCA treats two typical cases, a stablecoin issuer and an exchange, because the abstract categories become much clearer in motion. Imagine a company issuing a euro-pegged stablecoin and wanting European users to hold and trade it on regulated platforms. 

Under MiCA, that token is an electronic money token, so the issuer must hold an e-money or credit institution license, back every token fully with reserves held in safe, segregated accounts, grant holders the right to redeem their tokens for the underlying currency on demand, publish a compliant whitepaper, and accept that it cannot pay holders any interest or yield. If the company does all of this and secures authorization, its stablecoin can be offered across the bloc; if it does not, regulated exchanges must refuse to list it, exactly the fork in the road that separated the compliant dollar stablecoin from the non-compliant one. The token’s fate under MiCA is decided entirely by whether its issuer accepts this package of obligations.

Now imagine an exchange that wants to keep serving European customers. Its path runs through CASP authorization. It must apply to a national regulator in some member state, prove it meets MiCA’s standards for governance, capital, and the safekeeping and segregation of customer assets, stand up the identity-verification and anti-money-laundering machinery that turns it into an obliged entity under European law, implement the travel rule so it passes sender and recipient information on transfers, meet the operational-resilience and cybersecurity requirements, and submit to ongoing supervision and market-conduct rules. If the regulator grants authorization, the exchange can passport that single license across all twenty-seven member states and operate bloc-wide. 

If it cannot meet the bar or applies too late, it must stop serving European Union clients once the transition ends, winding down in an orderly way. The two journeys share a logic: MiCA offers a single, valuable prize, legal access to the entire European market, in exchange for accepting obligations modeled on those that govern banks and regulated financial firms.

What this worked example reveals is the deeper character of MiCA. It is not a light-touch registration that lets crypto firms keep operating much as before with a new label. It is a serious authorization regime that demands real reserves, real controls, real segregation of customer money, and real accountability, and it forces every issuer and service provider to decide whether the prize of European market access is worth the cost of meeting those demands. 

For well-resourced firms with a long-term commitment to Europe, the answer is often yes, and they have built the compliance machinery to clear the bar. For many smaller or offshore operators, the cost is too high or the timeline too short, which is why the market is narrowing toward a smaller set of licensed survivors. The categories and rules described earlier are not bureaucratic abstractions; they are the concrete hurdles that decide, token by token and firm by firm, who gets to operate in Europe after the transition closes.

What MiCA leaves unsettled For all its ambition, MiCA leaves important questions open, and the gaps are as revealing as the rules. The largest unsettled area is decentralized finance. MiCA is built around identifiable issuers and service providers, the companies it can authorize and supervise, but a genuinely decentralized protocol has no company at its center, no firm to hold a license or answer to a regulator. MiCA states that fully decentralized arrangements, those provided without any intermediary, fall outside its scope, which sounds clean until you ask what “fully decentralized” actually means. 

The market supervisor has not yet defined the term precisely, and most real protocols sit somewhere in the middle, with a governance token, a development team, a foundation, or a front-end operator that a regulator might decide counts as an intermediary. The result is genuine uncertainty about which DeFi protocols MiCA captures and which it does not, a gap that will be filled by future guidance and enforcement instead of the text itself.

Other tensions are surfacing as the rules meet reality. MiCA places caps on how widely very large stablecoins denominated in non-European currencies, such as dollar stablecoins, can be used as a means of payment within the bloc, a provision aimed at protecting European monetary sovereignty but one that complicates life for a market where most trading is dollar-denominated. 

There are overlaps with other European financial laws, such as payment services rules, that can double the compliance burden for some stablecoin activities and have prompted worries about the competitiveness of euro stablecoins. And politically, the dossier has grown charged, with some member states floating the idea of a mechanism to switch off foreign stablecoins seen as a systemic threat. 

None of these unsettled questions undermines MiCA’s core achievement of creating a single framework, but they are reminders that a law this sweeping cannot anticipate everything, and that MiCA will keep evolving through guidance, enforcement, and amendment for years after the headline deadline passes.

MiCA in the global picture MiCA does not exist in isolation, and seeing it alongside parallel efforts elsewhere reveals where global crypto regulation is heading. The same years that produced MiCA also produced the United States’ first comprehensive federal stablecoin law, the United Kingdom’s move toward its own crypto regime under its financial regulator, and Hong Kong’s stablecoin ordinance, among others. 

These frameworks differ in detail, but they converge on a striking number of core principles: stablecoin issuers should hold full, high-quality reserves; they should be licensed and supervised; holders should have clear redemption rights; service providers should enforce identity checks and anti-money-laundering controls; and the whole apparatus should be brought inside the regulatory perimeter that governs traditional finance. MiCA, having arrived early and comprehensively, has functioned as something of a reference point that later frameworks echo and respond to.

This convergence matters for anyone trying to understand the trajectory of the industry. The era in which crypto operated in a regulatory vacuum, where an exchange could serve a global audience with minimal oversight, is closing, and MiCA is one of the clearest markers of that shift. The picture that emerges is of a maturing market in which access increasingly depends on compliance, in which the same stablecoin can be freely available in one jurisdiction and delisted in another based purely on its issuer’s regulatory posture, and in which the cost of operating legally has risen sharply. 

For Europe specifically, MiCA’s promise is a safer, more transparent market with clear rules and a public register of authorized firms and tokens that anyone can consult. Its cost is a heavier compliance burden, a narrower field of providers, and reduced access to some popular global assets. Whether that trade favors consumers or stifles innovation is the live debate, but the direction is set: in Europe, crypto is now a regulated activity, and after July 1, 2026, that is true without exception.

What it means for everyday users For an ordinary person using crypto in Europe, MiCA changes the landscape in concrete ways worth understanding before the deadline instead of after. The most immediate effect is on which platforms and tokens you can use. If you rely on an exchange that has not secured a MiCA license, that platform may be forced to stop serving European Union clients after July 1, 2026, which in practice can mean frozen new deposits, halted trading features, and eventually a forced withdrawal of your funds, sometimes during a period of low liquidity and high fees. The protective move is to check, today instead of on July 2, whether the platforms you use have secured or are clearly on track to secure authorization, and to favor those that have. An unauthorized service operating after the deadline offers reduced legal protection and potential restrictions on access to your own assets.

The second effect is on stablecoins. If you hold a non-compliant stablecoin on a European Union-regulated exchange, you may find it delisted, with trading pairs removed and liquidity drying up, which is why many European users have shifted toward MiCA-authorized options. You can still self-custody whatever you like, but the convenient on-ramps and trading pairs increasingly favor compliant tokens. The broader takeaway is that MiCA, for all its complexity, ultimately aims to make the European crypto market safer and more transparent for users by ensuring the exchanges they trust meet real standards and the stablecoins they hold are genuinely backed. The cost of that safety is fewer choices and more friction, and a transition period that, for some platforms and tokens, ends abruptly. 

The practical wisdom is simple: understand which of your platforms and assets are compliant, make any moves before the deadline instead of during the disruption, and treat MiCA authorization as a meaningful signal that a service has accepted real regulatory accountability.

Frequently Asked Questions What does MiCA stand for and what is it? MiCA stands for Markets in Crypto-Assets. It is the European Union’s first comprehensive law for crypto-assets and the companies that deal in them, formally Regulation (EU) 2023/1114. It replaces the previous patchwork of national rules with one harmonized framework across all twenty-seven member states, covering token issuers and service providers like exchanges, custodians, and wallet providers. Its goals are to protect consumers, prevent market abuse, ensure stablecoins are properly backed, and bring crypto inside the same kind of regulatory perimeter that governs traditional finance, while letting authorized firms operate bloc-wide.

Why was USDT delisted in Europe but not USDC? Under MiCA, a stablecoin can only be offered by European Union-regulated platforms if its issuer is authorized and meets MiCA’s reserve, redemption, and governance rules. Circle pursued authorization through a European subsidiary and obtained MiCA approval for USDC and its euro stablecoin EURC, so they remain available. Tether did not apply for MiCA authorization and confirmed USDT was non-compliant, so European Union-regulated exchanges delisted it. USDT is not banned outright; it can still be self-custodied and traded on decentralized exchanges, but licensed European platforms can no longer offer it.

What happens on July 1, 2026? That is when MiCA’s transition period ends across the entire European Union. The transition, or grandfathering, let firms already operating under national rules keep going while they applied for full MiCA authorization. After July 1, 2026, any company providing crypto services to European Union clients without a proper MiCA license is breaking European Union law. The market supervisor has stated there will be no extensions. Because relatively few firms have secured licenses, especially to run trading platforms, many exchanges may be forced to exit the European market or wind down their services there.

What is a CASP under MiCA? A CASP is a crypto-asset service provider, MiCA’s term for companies that offer crypto services such as exchanges, brokers, custodians, wallet providers holding customer assets, and trading platforms. To serve European Union clients, a CASP needs MiCA authorization, which comes with obligations modeled on traditional finance: identity checks and anti-money-laundering controls, segregation and safekeeping of customer assets, governance and capital standards, market-conduct rules against manipulation and insider trading, operational-resilience requirements, and the crypto travel rule. Once authorized in one member state, a CASP can passport its services across all twenty-seven.

Does MiCA regulate DeFi and NFTs? Only partly, and with significant uncertainty. MiCA largely excludes non-fungible tokens unless they are issued in a large fungible series that makes them behave like ordinary tokens. For decentralized finance, MiCA says fully decentralized arrangements provided without any intermediary fall outside its scope, but it has not precisely defined “fully decentralized.” Since most protocols have a governance token, a development team, a foundation, or a front-end operator, regulators may decide some of them have an intermediary that MiCA captures. So the treatment of many DeFi protocols remains unsettled and will be clarified through future guidance and enforcement.

How does MiCA affect ordinary crypto users in Europe? Mainly through which platforms and tokens you can use. If an exchange you use has not secured a MiCA license, it may have to stop serving European Union clients after July 1, 2026, which can mean halted deposits and trading and eventually forced withdrawals. Non-compliant stablecoins may be delisted from regulated exchanges, with liquidity shifting to compliant ones like USDC. The protective steps are to check whether your platforms are authorized, move before the deadline instead of during any disruption, and treat MiCA authorization as a signal that a service has accepted real regulatory accountability. You can still self-custody assets freely.

This article is educational information, not legal or financial advice. MiCA implementation, license counts, stablecoin compliance status, and deadlines can change, and details reflect reporting available as of June 25, 2026. Confirm current requirements and the status of specific platforms and tokens through official sources such as the European Securities and Markets Authority register before relying on anything described here.

In contrast to comparable features provided by centralized exchanges, dSLTP uses Orbs-powered decentralized infrastructure. By expanding on its current integration of the Orbs-powered dLIMIT and dTWAP protocols, the launch broadens SushiSwap’s range. One of DeFi’s most established decentralized exchanges, SushiSwap, has included dSLTP, the Orbs Layer-3 technology-powered stop-loss and take-profit protocol. Through decentralized stop-loss and take-profit orders, users may automate trade execution from inside the SushiSwap trading interface thanks to the integration.

By expanding on its current integration of the Orbs-powered dLIMIT and dTWAP protocols, the launch broadens SushiSwap’s range of sophisticated trading capabilities. In order to control risk, safeguard gains, and lessen the need for continuous market monitoring while retaining complete custody of their assets, users may now establish automatic orders that execute when predetermined price goals are met.

Currently, dSLTP is accessible on SushiSwap for Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and Katana, giving traders in several blockchain ecosystems access to sophisticated order capabilities. In contrast to comparable features provided by centralized exchanges, dSLTP uses Orbs-powered decentralized infrastructure.

The protocol maintains the composability and transparency of decentralized finance by enabling stop-order automation without the need for centralized servers, custodians, or off-chain execution mechanisms.

“Stop-loss and take-profit orders are among the most widely used tools in trading, yet they’ve largely been unavailable in a decentralized environment,” said Ran Hammer, Vice President of Business Development at Orbs. “By bringing dSLTP to SushiSwap, we’re giving traders the ability to automate risk management and execution without sacrificing the transparency and self-custody that make DeFi unique. It’s another milestone in closing the gap between centralized and decentralized trading experiences.”

A variety of execution settings, including as trigger prices, optional limit prices, order expiry dates, and percentage-based trading strategies, may be configured by traders via the interface. The SushiSwap interface allows for immediate order monitoring, modification, and cancellation.

When an asset drops below a defined price, stop-loss orders instantly take effect, assisting traders in reducing their exposure to downside risk under erratic market circumstances. Take-profit orders enable users to lock in profits in accordance with their trading strategy by triggering when a target price is met. When combined, the order types provide traders a framework for automated profit-taking and risk management.

The launch is the most recent addition to Orbs’ expanding collection of decentralized trade protocols. In addition to dLIMIT, dTWAP, Liquidity Hub, and Perpetual Hub, dSLTP is intended to provide on-chain markets with sophisticated execution capabilities that are often associated with conventional finance and centralized exchanges.

Advanced order types are becoming more and more crucial for traders looking for more accuracy, efficiency, and control as decentralized exchanges continue to develop beyond simple token swaps. Now that dSLTP is operational on SushiSwap, customers may access institutional-grade trading capabilities while staying entirely on-chain.

One of DeFi’s most well-known decentralized exchanges, SushiSwap was first introduced on Ethereum in 2020 and is now available on other chains. SushiSwap, a leader in community-governed DeFi infrastructure, is a reliable source of on-chain trading volume and provides a wide range of trading and liquidity options.

Content writer by profession. A crypto lover and has passion for writing. Follows the developments of digital currency right from its launch, years ago.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Spark has deployed approximately $150 million in stablecoin liquidity across two Uniswap v4 pools on Ethereum as part of a collaboration aimed at creating shared liquidity and exchange infrastructure for stablecoin issuers.

A Spark spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the initial deployment is live in two pools pairing USDS with PayPal USD (PYUSD) and USDT, with USDS serving as the foundation. Spark described the deployment as one of the largest automated market maker (AMM) liquidity migrations in DeFi.

“These pools represent the initial deployment of approximately $150 million of liquidity and establish the first phase of the Stablecoin FX Layer,” the spokesperson said. “This initial deployment focuses on bootstrapping shared liquidity on Uniswap v4.”

Earlier this month, Standard Chartered identified Uniswap as a potential beneficiary of tokenized assets moving into DeFi. It forecast that total assets held in DeFi could reach $2.7 trillion by 2030, with Uniswap potentially emerging as a liquidity venue for the growing market. 

The deployment announced Thursday lays the groundwork for a planned programmable liquidity system that could reduce the need for banks, financial technology firms and stablecoin issuers to build separate liquidity networks while testing whether Uniswap can make onchain capital more efficient without weakening market depth.

Spark plans programmable liquidity expansionSpark said it plans to introduce its Shared Liquidity Layer and DualPool hook in subsequent phases using Uniswap v4's programmable architecture to coordinate how liquidity is distributed across stablecoin markets.

A liquidity hook enables protocols to seamlessly integrate with platforms for capital access and developing yield and trading strategies.

Spark said a hook is intended to allow capital not immediately needed for trades to be deployed into governance-approved products, liquidity venues and yield-generating strategies.

The implementation of the DualPool hook will go through a separate security review, testing and production-readiness process before deployment. The first phase uses standard Uniswap v4 pools rather than the planned programmable framework.

Spark said the planned framework is intended to give future stablecoin issuers access to shared liquidity rather than requiring them to individually bootstrap pools, coordinate market makers and manage inventory across different venues.

The spokesperson told Cointelegraph that Spark is working with additional partners across the stablecoin ecosystem but is not yet ready to disclose those integrations.

Uniswap seen as winner as tokenized assets move onchainIn a June 15 note to clients, StanChart's bank's head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick, said that tokenized treasures, equities, bonds and other assets could bring more trading activity and liquidity to decentralized exchanges as their DeFi use expands. 

DeFi total value locked as of June 25. Source: DefiLlama

This new $150 million migration offers a more immediate test of StanChart's infrastructure thesis, though it involves stablecoins rather than tokenized securities. 

The migration also follows Uniswap’s push into institutional tokenized-asset trading. On Feb. 12, BlackRock said it would bring its $2.1 billion tokenized Treasury fund, BUIDL, to Uniswap, allowing eligible institutional investors and market makers to trade the security through decentralized infrastructure. 

Magazine: Japanese pension fund tips 1% in crypto, G7 urges action on NK hackers: Asia Express

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.

Paxos built PAXG to remove the operational overhead of holding gold. Storage, custody, and transfer are handled at the token level, backed 1:1 with the world’s finest gold and overseen by federal regulators, so holders get direct exposure to physical gold without the infrastructure burden that comes with it. As gold continues its strongest bull cycle in two decades, more investors are seeking the convenience of tokenized gold: lower-cost, faster to settle, and instantly transferable. PAXG has grown over 300% since 2024 and demand continues to increase. 

Today we're extending PAXG to Solana, the first step in PAXG's multi-chain expansion. You can find more information about where to buy PAXG on Solana here.

What Is PAXG?Pax Gold (PAXG) is a digital token where one token equals one fine troy ounce of physical gold. 

Each ounce is stored in London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) accredited vaults. The gold reserves are attested monthly by KPMG, providing token holders with regular, independent verification that every PAXG in circulation is fully backed by physical gold. In addition, the reserves undergo an annual physical audit conducted by Bureau Veritas, an independent inspection and certification body. This audit is limited to physical verification procedures performed on-site and does not constitute an attestation of ownership, valuation, or overall asset backing, but provides an additional layer of independent verification of the vaulted gold. If you hold PAXG, you hold the underlying physical gold under the legal custody of Paxos Trust Company, National Association.

We issue PAXG as a national trust bank regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), one of the most rigorous oversight frameworks available for a digital asset issuer. That regulatory posture is not incidental and sets us apart in the market. It means your gold is held under legal custody, with monthly public attestations and full bar-serial transparency through our Gold Allocation Lookup tool.

A few specifics that differentiate PAXG from other ways to own gold:

No custody fees. Gold ETFs charge 10 to 40 basis points per year just to hold your position. PAXG charges zero for storage.

Near-instant settlement. On-chain transfers settle in seconds, compared to T+1 for Gold ETFs and T+2 for LBMA bars.

Redeemable for physical bars, unallocated gold, or USD. PAXG is redeemable for LBMA Good Delivery gold bullion bars (requires holder to have 430 PAXG), unallocated Loco London Gold, or USD at current market price. This can be completed through the Paxos site.

No accredited investor gate, no brokerage account, no large bar minimums.

How Is PAXG Created?Every PAXG token begins with physical gold. When demand for PAXG increases, Paxos purchases unallocated gold from our supplier, which is then allocated to LBMA-accredited vaults in London as Good Delivery bars. Once the gold is vaulted, it is tokenized: PAXG tokens are minted on-chain and held in Paxos' inventory wallets. When a customer buys PAXG from Paxos directly, tokens transfer directly from Paxos inventory to their wallet.

Every token in circulation is backed by a specific, auditable bar of physical gold. The flow is always the same direction: gold enters the vault before tokens enter the market.

Why Solana, and Why NowPAXG launched on Ethereum in 2019. In the past two years, the number of holders more than doubled, and average holding size more than tripled from $7,000 to $26,000.

That growth signals the opportunity to expand PAXG into new ecosystems and put it in the hands of more builders and users.

Solana's real-world asset ecosystem crossed $2.5 billion in TVL in May 2026, up from $215 million just twelve months ago. Transaction fees average a fraction of a cent, with sub-second confirmation and 99.9%+ uptime over the past year. It is an ecosystem mature enough to support a regulated, allocated gold token immediately at launch, with an active DeFi base ready to integrate native assets.

We are partnering with Sunrise Defi on our Solana expansion to bring PAXG natively to the ecosystem with active DeFi markets across major Solana DEXs and seamless integration into Solana wallets and aggregators.

Solana is the start of our multi-chain expansion for PAXG. Every piece of infrastructure we are shipping in this launch is designed to extend cleanly to every chain that comes next.

How We Built the InfrastructureGetting here required one foundational upgrade and one new deployment. Both matter for Solana and for every chain that comes after.

ETH PAXG Contract Upgrade

Expanding to new chains starts at the contract level. We upgraded the PAXG token contracts to support omnichain functionality across both EVM and non-EVM networks, with an architecture designed to extend cleanly as we add more chains.

The upgraded contracts maintain all existing compliance controls, the same supply verification that underpins our monthly KPMG attestations, and full auditability of every token in circulation across every chain where PAXG is live.

The upgraded contracts are open source, independently audited by Zellic, and available for review in our PAXG GitHub repository.

Existing Ethereum holders can bridge directly through the Paxos platform or through

LayerZero Stargate

. No re-purchasing, no re-custodying, no new attestation required.

PAXG on Solana: The Token Implementation

The Solana deployment of PAXG is built on the Token-2022 program, Solana's extended token standard that enables native compliance controls at the token level.

This is the same standard Paxos used for PYUSD and USDG on Solana. It lets us enforce the same regulatory requirements that exist on Ethereum without relying on a separate contract layer to do it.

The Permanent Delegate extension ensures PAXG on Solana meets the same regulatory requirements as the Ethereum contract. The result is a Solana-native PAXG token that carries the same compliance posture and supply verifiability as the Ethereum original.

This Is the FoundationThe Solana launch is the first step in PAXG's multi-chain expansion. The contract upgrades and infrastructure we shipped today  are built to add new chains faster with less overhead each time.

Whether you're a builder integrating tokenized gold into a Solana application or an institutional investor looking to learn how to buy PAXG, reach out here to get started or learn more.  

Footnotes:

¹ Solana RWA TVL growth from $215M to $2.5B over twelve months as of May 2026. Source: RWA.xyz. Reported independently by MEXC News and CryptoNews.net.

² Solana lending markets reaching $3.6B: as of December 2025 per DeFiLlama. Verify current figures before publication at defillama.com/chain/Solana as lending TVL fluctuates.

³ Last officially confirmed major outage: February 6, 2024, per the Solana Foundation's June 2025 Network Health Report. As of mid-2025, Solana had gone over 16 consecutive months without a major confirmed outage. 

PAX Gold, the gold-backed token issued by Paxos, is now tradeable on Jupiter, Solana’s dominant DEX aggregator. The integration was made possible through Sunrise DeFi, a liquidity gateway built by Wormhole Labs that handles the messy plumbing of onboarding new assets to Solana.

PAXG is the first gold token regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to land on Solana.

How Sunrise makes it work Instead of forcing each new asset to negotiate with individual DEXes, liquidity providers, and block explorers one at a time, Sunrise bundles the entire onboarding process into a single pipeline. The result is day-one trading access the moment an asset goes live.

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A token like PAXG doesn’t have to sit in limbo for weeks while liquidity slowly materializes across fragmented venues. Sunrise pre-coordinates with Jupiter and other infrastructure partners, including the Solana block explorer Orb, so that trading and price discovery can happen immediately.

The platform has already tested this playbook with other assets. Bittensor’s TAO token was recently onboarded through the same process, suggesting that Sunrise is building a repeatable framework rather than a one-off integration.

Why gold on Solana matters PAXG is one of the more straightforward tokenized assets in crypto. Each token is backed by one fine troy ounce of London Good Delivery gold, held in Brinks vaults. Paxos, the issuer, operates under a New York State trust charter and is regulated by the OCC, which makes PAXG one of the few gold tokens with a clear regulatory pedigree.

Solana’s transaction fees are measured in fractions of a cent, and block times hover around 400 milliseconds.

What this means for investors Solana DeFi users can now trade a regulated gold token without bridging to Ethereum, paying Ethereum gas fees, or dealing with the latency of a slower network.

For Jupiter specifically, each new asset integration adds trading volume and fee revenue. Jupiter already dominates Solana’s DEX aggregation layer, and the Sunrise partnership effectively turns it into the default landing pad for cross-chain assets entering the ecosystem.

Wormhole, the bridge protocol behind Sunrise, suffered a high-profile exploit in 2022 that drained hundreds of millions of dollars. The team has overhauled its security since then, but the history is worth noting for anyone allocating significant capital through this pathway.

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

Exponent Finance just rolled out the feature that traditional finance has used for decades but DeFi has largely ignored: risk tranching. The Solana-based yield exchange launched its V2 platform on June 24, introducing a system that lets users pick their poison, either principal protection with modest returns or a higher-risk bet chasing outsized yield.

The first market uses ONyc, a reinsurance asset from OnReFinance, split into two tranches. The senior tranche (srONyc) targets roughly 6.4% APY with downside protection baked in. The junior tranche (jrONyc) aims for around 31.4% APY, absorbing more risk in exchange for the juicier number. In English: senior tranche holders get paid first if things go sideways, while junior tranche holders eat the losses first but collect bigger rewards when things go well.

How the tranching mechanics work Think of it like a layered cake where the bottom layer takes all the weight. Junior tranche depositors essentially cushion the senior tranche above them. If the underlying yield underperforms, junior holders absorb the shortfall before senior holders feel anything. If it overperforms, junior holders capture the excess.

The alpha phase launches with a $2.5 million cap, a deliberate constraint designed to stress-test the system with real capital before scaling up. Launch rewards exceeding $200K are available to early participants.

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Alongside the tranching product, V2 introduces Strategy Vaults and what Exponent calls an enhanced liquidity engine. Strategy Vaults are essentially pre-built portfolio positions that automate allocation across different yield opportunities. Rather than manually managing tranche positions, users can deposit into a vault that handles rebalancing according to a defined strategy.

Why this matters for Solana’s yield landscape The choice of a reinsurance asset as the first market is deliberate. Real-world asset (RWA) yields represent one of the fastest-growing segments in DeFi, and reinsurance specifically offers yield that’s uncorrelated with crypto market volatility. Pairing RWA yield with on-chain risk tranching creates a product that looks genuinely different from the usual lending-and-borrowing fare.

Exponent has been building toward this for a while. Since its mainnet launch in 2024, the protocol has recorded billions in trading volume without a security breach. The team has completed 12 tier-1 audits and allocated roughly $1 million specifically toward security measures.

On the funding side, Exponent has raised approximately $7.1 million in total. That includes a $2.1 million seed round in 2024 and a $5 million raise in April 2026.

What this means for investors Risk tranching isn’t a new concept in DeFi. Protocols like Tranche Finance and BarnBridge explored similar ideas during previous cycles, mostly on Ethereum. But adoption was limited, partly due to gas costs and partly because the underlying yield sources weren’t compelling enough to justify the added complexity.

For conservative investors, the senior tranche offers yield with a structural buffer against losses. For more aggressive participants, the junior tranche provides leveraged exposure to yield without the liquidation risk that comes with traditional leverage.

The $2.5 million cap on the alpha phase means this is still a small-scale experiment. Exponent plans to expand beyond the ONyc asset into other yield markets. The real test will be whether the tranching system maintains its target yields as more capital flows in and whether demand balances naturally between senior and junior tranches, because the whole structure depends on enough risk-hungry capital sitting in the junior layer to protect the conservative layer above it.

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

Kalshi has added perpetual futures contracts for Zcash ($ZEC), NEAR Protocol ($NEAR), Dogecoin ($DOGE), and Shiba Inu ($SHIB) to its platform, the latest step in a rapid expansion of the prediction market operator's regulated derivatives business.

Four New Contracts, 13 Crypto Assets Total The additions bring the total number of supported crypto assets to 13, alongside Bitcoin and other altcoins. Zcash perpetuals are offered with up to 2x leverage, while NEAR contracts allow leverage of up to 2.6x. Shiba Inu's perpetual contract, listed under the ticker KSHIB, also carries a maximum leverage ratio of 2x.

The contracts trade under Kalshi's American Perpetuals label, a product line that never expires and instead settles through periodic funding payments between traders. The contracts are available through a structure approved by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and do not carry expiration dates.

Kalshi opened its perpetuals push in late May with Bitcoin, the first such contract ever cleared for trading on a U.S. venue. Ethereum, XRP, Solana, and Hyperliquid followed through June under the same regulated framework. Kalshi is the first company in U.S. history to offer regulated perpetual futures to American traders.

Some Contracts Still Awaiting CFTC Sign-Off Kalshi has already secured approval for most of its filed products, though contracts linked to Stellar, Polkadot, and Hedera remain under review by the CFTC. Because such products may vary significantly depending on the assets they reference, the Commission took the view that a voluntary, case-by-case review process under Regulation 40.3 is the appropriate route for listing perpetual contracts, rather than self-certification.

The approvals came despite CME Group's lawsuit against the U.S. CFTC and its chairman, alleging that these contracts are swaps. The SEC and CFTC are also requesting public comments to clarify and harmonize definitions of derivatives products, especially swaps.

Last year, crypto exchanges processed $86 trillion in perpetual futures volume, according to data from CoinGecko. The bulk of that activity has historically taken place on offshore platforms, making Kalshi's regulated onshore offering a notable structural shift for U.S. traders.

Sources:
crypto.news: Kalshi launches Zcash and SHIB perps as lawsuit heats up
CFTC: Order for Approval of Kalshi BTCPERP Contract
CoinDesk: U.S. CFTC opens crypto perp door with approval of first regulated firm

PeckShield, a blockchain security company, has warned that Gnosis's official X account has been compromised. Until the issue is fixed, users are strongly advised not to interact with any posts, links, reward campaigns, voting announcements, or wallet connection requests coming from the account. 

According to the malicious post that is currently up on the Gnosis account, Gnosis users can take part in a rewards vote and receive an early bonus if they vote within the first 24 hours. This is a classic phishing technique meant to instill a sense of urgency and coerce users into clicking on phony links before confirming their legitimacy. 

One of the most common attack methods in the cryptocurrency sector is still compromised social media accounts. Hackers frequently use reputable project accounts to advertise phony staking opportunities, token claims, governance votes, and airdrops. Funds can be depleted in a matter of seconds after victims connect their wallets and sign malicious transactions. 

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Do not interact with the compromised account if you use Gnosis. Never sign transactions, connect your wallet, click links, or divulge personal information. If users have already interacted with the phishing website, they should revoke wallet approvals right away and, if necessary, transfer assets to a secure wallet.

Key Facts CertiK announced on 25 June 2026 that it has joined the XDC Network as an institutional masternode validator. Under an agreement between the two organisations, CertiK will deploy and operate validator nodes via its enterprise node solution, CertiK SkyNode. The deployment uses a multi-region sentry node architecture with redundant failover, 24/7 vulnerability scanning, automated threat mitigation and node-level penetration testing. XDC Network’s hybrid architecture combines public transparency with private subnetwork capabilities, targeting institutional settlement, trade finance and RWA tokenisation. Quoted are Atul Khekade, Co-founder of XDC Network, and Ronghui Gu, Co-Founder and CEO of CertiK; other XDC institutional validators include Deutsche Telekom, SBI Holdings, Animoca Brands and HashKey Cloud. CertiK has joined the XDC Network as an institutional masternode validator, the Web3 security firm announced on 25 June 2026. Under an agreement between the two organisations, CertiK will deploy and operate validator nodes through its enterprise node solution, CertiK SkyNode — embedding security controls directly into the infrastructure layer that underpins XDC’s push into enterprise blockchain, trade finance and real-world asset tokenisation.

What CertiK brings as a validator As an institutional masternode validator, CertiK leverages its SkyNode infrastructure to run continuous, proactive defences rather than passive node operation. That includes 24/7 vulnerability scanning, automated threat mitigation and node-level penetration testing — applying the auditing and security discipline CertiK is known for to the validator role itself.

The operational architecture is built for institutional uptime requirements. CertiK is deploying a multi-region sentry node setup with redundant failover protection, engineered to maintain uninterrupted consensus continuity and high availability during peak network congestion. SkyNode already operates validator or full nodes across more than 11 chains, with the nodes it hosts securing over US$1.2 billion in staked tokens — a track record CertiK now extends to XDC.

Why XDC’s architecture fits the use case XDC Network is an enterprise-grade, EVM-compatible Layer 1 designed specifically for trade finance and the tokenisation of real-world assets. Its hybrid architecture combines public-chain transparency with private subnetwork capabilities, allowing institutions to settle and tokenise assets with the auditability of a public ledger but the confidentiality controls that regulated finance requires.

By participating as a validator, CertiK embeds security directly into that infrastructure layer, mitigating operational and network-related risks. The fit is logical: trade finance and RWA settlement demand rigorous risk management and operational resilience, and CertiK’s core competency is precisely the security assurance that institutional counterparties scrutinise before committing to a network.

Executive comments Atul Khekade, Co-founder of XDC Network, framed CertiK’s participation as a credibility signal to institutions weighing long-term infrastructure decisions. “CertiK is one of the most recognized names in blockchain security, and having them validate our network is a meaningful signal to institutions,” he said. “This is not just a technical partnership. It is a statement about the standard of infrastructure we are building for enterprise finance. The institutions moving into trade finance and asset settlement are making long-term infrastructure decisions, and we want XDC Network to be the answer they keep coming back to.”

Ronghui Gu, Co-Founder and CEO of CertiK, positioned the move around the convergence of traditional and digital finance. “CertiK is honored to join the XDC Network as an Institutional Masternode Validator,” he said. “Traditional trade finance and RWA tokenization require rigorous risk management, strong security foundations, and operational resilience. Through this collaboration, we are bringing our security and infrastructure expertise to help strengthen the network and support the trusted infrastructure needed for institutional adoption.”

Validator identity as the new benchmark The partnership reflects a shift in how enterprise blockchain adoption is being measured in 2026. Where earlier cycles tracked wallet growth, transaction counts and pilot announcements, the emerging benchmark is validator identity — who actually operates the networks that institutions may rely on for settlement and tokenisation. Financial institutions and regulators increasingly assess governance standards, operator accountability and jurisdictional alignment alongside raw technical performance.

XDC has leaned into that model deliberately, prioritising recognised operators with institutional standing over a large anonymous validator base. Beyond CertiK, its institutional validators include regulated financial institutions, global telecoms and Web3 leaders such as Animoca Brands, BCW Group, Blueprint, Clearpool, Credora, Deutsche Telekom, HashKeyCloud, Hivemind Digital Group, InvestaX, IXS, RedStone, Republic Crypto, SBI Holdings, StakeFi and UOB Venture Management. CertiK’s addition strengthens that roster with a security specialist — arguably the most directly relevant discipline for a network targeting regulated finance.

Context: CertiK’s infrastructure expansion The XDC role continues CertiK’s expansion from audit-led security toward operational blockchain infrastructure. The company has been building out node and validator services through SkyNode while extending into AI-focused security, including its recent Skill Scanner for AI agents and ongoing regulatory research such as its Skynet stablecoin threat reports. The throughline is a move from assessing security after the fact toward operating secure infrastructure directly.

For both parties, the logic is complementary: XDC gains a security-specialist validator that reinforces its institutional positioning, and CertiK extends its node business onto a network purpose-built for the regulated trade finance and RWA use cases where its security expertise carries the most weight.

FAQ What does CertiK joining XDC Network as a validator involve?
CertiK has joined XDC Network as an institutional masternode validator, deploying and operating validator nodes through its enterprise CertiK SkyNode solution. The setup runs continuous vulnerability scanning, automated threat mitigation and node-level penetration testing, using a multi-region sentry node architecture with redundant failover to maintain consensus continuity and high availability.

Why is XDC Network focused on institutional validators?
XDC Network targets trade finance, institutional settlement and real-world asset tokenisation, use cases that require governance standards and operator accountability closer to traditional financial markets than open retail networks. By prioritising recognised institutional validators — including Deutsche Telekom, SBI Holdings and now CertiK — rather than an anonymous validator base, XDC aims to give banks, enterprises and regulators confidence in the network’s operational integrity.

What is CertiK SkyNode?
SkyNode is CertiK’s enterprise blockchain node and validator service. It operates validator or full nodes across more than 11 chains, applying CertiK’s auditing and penetration-testing expertise to validator operations through security hardening, continuous monitoring, encryption, key management and geographic redundancy.

CertiK’s addition to XDC’s validator set is a small but telling marker of where institutional blockchain competition is heading: not toward the networks with the most transactions, but toward those whose operators can satisfy the governance, security and resilience standards that regulated finance demands. As validator identity becomes a primary signal of institutional readiness, partnerships pairing security specialists with enterprise-focused chains are likely to become a defining feature of the next adoption cycle. This article is informational and does not constitute investment advice.

A Central African nation with a GDP of roughly $12 billion just signed a deal to manage environmental assets potentially worth eight times that figure. The Republic of Chad inked a Memorandum of Understanding with Luxembourg-based Xange.com on June 25, designating the Aptos blockchain as the verification backbone for what could become a $100 billion-plus pipeline of sovereign climate credits.

What the deal actually involves The partnership centers on Xange’s two core products. The first is its digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification system, known as dMRV. The second is its Unified Environmental Market Infrastructure Solutions platform, or UEMIS. Together, they’re designed to track, verify, and manage environmental assets at the sovereign level.

The technical mechanism here involves something called Immutable Metadata Digital Certifications, or IMDCs. These are cryptographically verifiable records hosted on the Aptos blockchain, designed to ensure that mitigation data remains auditable and resistant to manipulation.

Aptos was chosen as the verification layer for a straightforward reason: throughput. The blockchain is built for high-speed transaction processing, which matters when you’re trying to manage potentially millions of individual environmental data points across a country spanning over 1.2 million square kilometers.

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The Decibel Foundation rounds out the partnership by providing on-chain market infrastructure. An earlier collaboration announced on May 6 between Xange, Aptos Labs, and Decibel established the IMDC standard itself, making this Chad MoU the first major sovereign deployment of that framework.

The $100 billion number, in context The projected pipeline of Internationally Transferable Mitigation Outcomes, or ITMOs, is valued at over $100 billion. ITMOs are essentially the currency of Article 6.2. When Country A reduces emissions beyond its own targets, it can sell those surplus reductions to Country B, which can then count them toward its own Paris Agreement commitments.

For perspective, the global voluntary carbon market was valued at roughly $2 billion in recent years. The compliance market is much larger, but sovereign ITMO trading under Article 6.2 is still in its infancy. A $100 billion pipeline is aspirational. It represents the theoretical ceiling, not a guaranteed outcome.

What this means for investors For the Aptos ecosystem specifically, this partnership adds a layer of real-world utility narrative. Being selected as the verification infrastructure for sovereign-level climate assets is a fundamentally different value proposition than hosting another DeFi protocol or NFT marketplace.

This project is still in its initial phases, focused on deploying infrastructure rather than issuing or trading assets. There’s no immediate revenue generation here. No tokens are being minted against Chad’s forests tomorrow.

Several blockchain projects have positioned themselves in the environmental asset space, including Toucan Protocol on Polygon and KlimaDAO. But sovereign-level partnerships are rare. Most blockchain climate projects operate at the project level, verifying individual reforestation plots or clean energy installations.

Sovereign partnerships carry political risk that project-level deals don’t. Chad ranks among the world’s most fragile states by multiple governance indices. A Memorandum of Understanding is not a binding contract, and the path from MoU to functioning infrastructure to actual ITMO trading is long and uncertain.

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

According to a Business Insider report citing sources familiar with the matter, Tools For Humanity, the developer of Worldcoin, launched two separate investigations last year, both led by external law firms, targeting alleged improper use of funds by executives and suspected violations in its Thailand operations respectively. Relevant executives are accused of approving payments of millions of US dollars to a foreign firm. The funds were not used for normal business purchases or service fees, but to artificially inflate the market price of its cryptocurrency Worldcoin. In addition, Tools For Humanity's Thai partner turned out to be a suspect in an internationally wanted "pig butchering" scam. Meanwhile, regulators in multiple countries around the world have raised serious questions about Tools For Humanity's iris scanning and data collection practices.

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Jiang Zhuoer: Expects Strategy to reduce its coin purchases, with almost no risk of default.

Jiang Zhuoer, founder of Leibit Mining Pool (B.TOP), commented on STRC hitting an all-time low tonight, noting that Strategy’s preferred stock STRC has significantly de-pegged, reflecting U.S. stock market investors’ panic over Bitcoin (BTC). He stated, “Strategy’s BTC purchases are expected to drop sharply or even halt entirely in the coming months, with funds reserved to pay STRC dividends. I also emphasize again not to expect a major blowup from MSTR at the bear market bottom. STRC is preferred stock, not a bond—only dividends need to be paid, and principal does not require repayment. MSTR’s debt ratio is only 10%, so unless the BTC bear market lasts a decade, MSTR faces no risk of a blowup.”

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Ethereum has potential liquidations worth $114 million at the $1,472 price level.

According to YuEmber monitoring, several on-chain ETH lending whales are facing liquidations amid the current downtrend. Details are as follows: First liquidation tier: liquidation price of $1,472, liquidation scale of 72,700 ETH (valued at $114 million); Second liquidation tier: liquidation price of $1,355, corresponding to 167,600 ETH (valued at $263 million) held by dip-buying whales at the start of the month; Third liquidation tier: liquidation price of $1,160, corresponding to 120,000 ETH long positions of Hyperliquid’s largest long.

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Iran proposes charging neighboring Gulf countries fees for the use of the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has proposed charging neighboring Gulf countries a service fee for the use of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran estimates this would generate $40 billion in annual revenue for the countries involved. Iran hopes to share and reach an agreement on revenue from the strait with other nations, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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Ripple has officially launched its USD-backed stablecoin RLUSD in Japan, marking a major milestone in the company’s expansion across Asia. Following approval from Japan’s Financial Services Agency (JFSA), RLUSD is now available to both institutional and retail users through SBI VC Trade’s VCTRADE platform. 

The launch delivers on the strategic partnership announced by Ripple and SBI Group in August 2025 and brings regulated USD stablecoin access to one of the world’s most advanced digital asset markets.

Ripple and SBI Expand Their Long-Term PartnershipRipple and SBI have been working together since 2016 to expand blockchain use across Japan and Asia-Pacific. With RLUSD now live, they plan to use it for cross-border payments, tokenization, and collateral management. 

Ripple says Japan’s clear regulations make it a key market for stablecoins, while SBI called the launch a major step toward the future of on-chain finance. 

Konnichiwa 🇯🇵 @Ripple and @sbigroup have officially launched Ripple USD (RLUSD) in Japan!

Following JFSA approval, RLUSD is now live for institutional and retail users on SBI VC Trade’s platform. This builds directly on our long-standing partnership and brings trusted,… https://t.co/Fe20yKQEMJ

— Reece Merrick (@reece_merrick) June 25, 2026 According to Reece Merrick, Managing Director, Middle East & Africa, Ripple, “following JFSA approval, RLUSD is now live for institutional and retail users on SBI VC Trade’s platform. This builds directly on our long-standing partnership and brings trusted, regulated USD stablecoin access to one of the most innovative markets.”

A Fully Regulated USD StablecoinRLUSD has been approved in Japan as a Type 4 Electronic Payment Instrument.It is fully backed 1:1 by U.S. dollar deposits, Treasuries, and cash equivalents.Reserves are verified through monthly third-party attestations.SBI VC Trade will offer free RLUSD deposits and withdrawals.RLUSD is the second USD stablecoin on the platform after USD Coin.Since launching in late 2024, RLUSD has grown to a market cap of about $1.7 billion.RLUSD on XRPL Is Closing In on EthereumMeanwhile, the community is getting more interested in RLUSD’s supply distribution across blockchains.

According to XRP community members Vet and Bill Morgan, RLUSD circulating on the XRP Ledger is now close to overtaking Ethereum, with roughly $792 million on XRPL compared with about $793 million on Ethereum.

Analysts see Ripple is gradually shifting growth toward XRPL, which better aligns with the stablecoin’s core strengths of fast payments and efficient value transfers. Recent customer redemptions on Ethereum have also reduced supply there.

With Japan now onboard, Ripple is continuing to position RLUSD as a key piece of regulated global financial infrastructure.

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Chainlink is embedding itself into the plumbing of international banking. The oracle network announced its participation in Project Pangea, a cross-border settlement initiative involving 47 banks across Europe and South Korea that collectively manage over $10 trillion in assets.

The goal is straightforward but ambitious: replace the current two-day settlement window for EUR-KRW foreign exchange transactions with near real-time, same-day finality.

How Project Pangea actually works The initiative, built in collaboration with Qivalis and UniKA, brings together 37 European banks and over 10 South Korean banks on a dedicated Pangea Layer 1 blockchain network. The mechanism at the core is something called atomic payment-versus-payment, or PvP, which ensures both sides of a currency exchange settle simultaneously or not at all.

The currencies themselves are represented as euro-pegged and Korean won-pegged stablecoins, regulated digital versions of the fiat currencies that can move on blockchain rails. This matters because the Europe-South Korea trade corridor processes over $150 billion in annual volume.

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Project Pangea integrates with Swift messaging and complies with ISO 20022 standards, the global standard for electronic data interchange between financial institutions. Banks can plug in without a painful migration.

The project’s partners are targeting compliant live transactions within 12 months.

Why this corridor, why now Asia as a whole accounts for 60% of global stablecoin payments, making the region the natural proving ground for regulated digital currency infrastructure.

The current T+2 settlement cycle creates counterparty risk, ties up capital, and introduces the possibility that one side of a trade defaults before settlement completes. Moving to T+0 eliminates most of that risk. Capital that was previously locked up as collateral during the settlement window gets freed immediately.

Chainlink’s institutional footprint includes prior work with Swift on cross-chain interoperability and various tokenization pilots with major banks. In January 2026, Chainlink also partnered with the Global Alliance for KRW Stablecoins in South Korea. Qivalis itself expanded from an original group of 12 European banks to 37 by May 2026, all working toward the creation of regulated euro-pegged stablecoins.

What this means for investors Project Pangea is designed around compliance from day one, using regulated stablecoins and existing banking standards. The involvement of 47 banks managing over $10 trillion in assets gives the project a scale targeting a real trade corridor of over $150 billion in annual volume with a 12-month timeline for live transactions.

The risk is execution. A 12-month timeline is aggressive given the regulatory complexity of operating across European and South Korean jurisdictions simultaneously. The difference here may be the economic incentive: $150 billion in annual trade volume creates significant motivation to ship.

Investors should watch for two signals over the coming year. First, whether any of the participating banks publicly confirm their involvement and commit resources beyond the initial announcement. Second, whether regulators in both jurisdictions provide the clarity needed for euro and KRW stablecoins to function within existing compliance frameworks.

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

The ICON Network will be permanently shut down on December 31, 2026, with ICX holders given until that date to migrate at a 1:1 ratio into SODA on SODAX, after which the legacy chain will exist only as a read only archive.

Summary

ICON will cease operations and go offline on December 31, 2026, after an economic shutdown phase The final deadline to swap ICX for SODA is December 31, 2026, with one way migration from September 30 Liquidity and incentives have already moved to SODAX, and Kraken has added SODA to its listing roadmap In a series of blog posts, the ICON Foundation outlined a phased wind down of the ICON Layer 1 that ends with a full shutdown of the network at the close of 2026 and a transition of the ecosystem to the SODAX stack, where SODA becomes the primary token.

An earlier update confirmed that as of March 26, 2026, the ICON Network has entered “economic shutdown,” with all ICX emissions and staking rewards halted and the chain kept alive only to support migration to SODA on the Sonic network.

The latest roadmap sets December 31, 2026 as the final date: after that point, the ICON blockchain will be switched to a read only archive for historical transaction queries, and no further ICX to SODA conversions will be possible.

Until then, ICX holders can migrate via the official dashboard at sodax.com/migrate at a fixed 1:1 ratio, with the Foundation stressing in February and March posts that “the ICON blockchain will remain live” specifically so users retain full access to their balances during the wind down.

However, starting September 30, 2026, the migration path will become one way: the Foundation says that two way swaps between ICX and SODA will be disabled, and only ICX to SODA conversions will be supported as value is consolidated into the new token with a fixed max supply of 1.5 billion.

Economically, everything has already shifted.

Why is ICON shutting down and what is the SODAX migration plan? Binance Square posts and the Foundation’s own schedule note that SODAX Stake launched on March 16, 2026 and SODAX Pool on March 31, with protocol fee backed rewards beginning for SODAX Pool on April 2 and for SODAX Stake on April 8, creating strong incentives for ICX holders to migrate and stake.

A separate TradingView alert and SODAX’s X account confirm that centralized exchange support is also lining up: Kraken has placed SODAX on its listing roadmap, and exchanges such as Kraken and Coinone have announced they will support ICX to SODA migration for custodial balances, reducing friction for users who keep assets off chain.

What happens to ICON users and liquidity after the shutdown date? Once the ICON Network is turned off at year end 2026, it will exist only as a static ledger.

The Foundation says a read only archive will be made available so that users, auditors and explorers can still query historical transactions, but live block production and state changes will stop, and any ICX left un migrated will be effectively stranded on an inert chain.

That mirrors other recent shutdowns in the sector, such as Zero Network and Bit.com, which have set hard withdrawal or migration cutoffs and warned users that assets left behind could become permanently unrecoverable once infrastructure is decommissioned.

In ICON’s case, the team emphasizes that it has deliberately staged the process over many months: economic activity and rewards stopped in March, two way migration continues in the interim, one way ICX to SODA swaps begin at the end of September, and the absolute final migration deadline is December 31.

By that point, the intention is that all meaningful liquidity, DeFi activity and governance has moved to the SODAX protocol, where SODA and its derivative xSODA govern a fee funded staking and pooling model on Sonic rather than the inflationary, emission driven economics that powered the original ICON L1.

For ICX holders, the message from both the Foundation and ecosystem validators is blunt: the network’s economic lifecycle is over, rewards are gone, and the only rational path forward is to migrate to SODA, stake or pool in the new environment, and stop treating ICON as an active settlement layer well before the December 31, 2026 shutdown switch is flipped.