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Chainlink whales have increased their activity as LINK attempts to recover from a broader market decline, with large holders reportedly accumulating more than 14 million tokens in less than a month.

Summary

Chainlink whales accumulated over 14 million LINK as large transactions increased sharply during recent weeks. LINK trades near $8.54, with improving RSI and MACD signals supporting its latest recovery attempt. Falling exchange reserves reduce available selling supply, though LINK must reclaim $9–$10 for stronger momentum. LINK traded near $8.54 at the time of writing, down about 0.6% over the past 24 hours. The token had a market capitalization of roughly $6.39 billion and daily trading volume of about $175.24 million. Its 24-hour trading range stood between $8.53 and $8.72, according to crypto.news market data.

Chainlink whale activity rises as large holders accumulate LINK Onchain data shared by crypto analyst Ali Martinez showed that Chainlink whale activity had increased over the past two weeks. More than 20 transactions valued above $1 million each were recorded during one recent session, which Martinez described as evidence of “growing interest from large holders.”

Separate data shared by the analyst showed that large holders accumulated more than 14 million LINK in less than a month. Their combined holdings reportedly rose from below 170 million tokens to around 182 million to 183 million LINK during the period. 

Whale accumulation can reduce available market supply when holders keep their tokens rather than moving them to exchanges, but it does not guarantee that prices will rise.

Whales have accumulated more than 14 million Chainlink $LINK over the past three weeks.

Large-scale accumulation like this often reflects growing confidence from major holders and is worth keeping an eye on. pic.twitter.com/edk7bVHsZQ

— Ali Charts (@alicharts) July 23, 2026 The latest activity follows earlier accumulation seen across the Chainlink network. Wallets holding more than 1,000 LINK recently reached their highest level of the year, while addresses controlling at least 100,000 LINK rose to a record 805, as previously reported.

LINK price shows short-term recovery signals The daily chart shows LINK trading inside a broader downtrend after falling from earlier highs near $26–$28. The token has spent recent months largely moving within the $7–$10 region as buyers and sellers compete around the lower end of its longer-term range.

Short-term technical indicators have improved. The MACD line stood near 0.1866, above its signal line at about 0.1267, while the positive histogram pointed to improving momentum. The relative strength index was near 60.43, above both the neutral 50 level and its moving average of about 58.31.

Chainlink (LINK) price chart, source: crypto.news The readings suggest buyers have gained some control without pushing LINK into overbought territory. However, price still faces resistance between $9 and $10. A sustained move above that area could strengthen the recovery structure, while another rejection may keep LINK inside its current consolidation range.

Recent price action has followed a similar setup. LINK rose after Mantle moved its $2.5 billion Super Portal to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol. 

Falling exchange reserves tighten available LINK supply Chainlink exchange reserves have also moved lower, according to CryptoQuant data. The total has fallen to about 125.4 million LINK, compared with levels commonly ranging between roughly 165 million and 190 million during parts of 2024 and 2025.

Lower exchange balances can mean fewer tokens are immediately available for sale. However, declining reserves alone do not prove that demand will increase. LINK continues to trade near the lower part of its multi-year price range, so stronger buying pressure would still need to appear in the price structure.

Chainlink (LINK) exchange reserves, source: CryptoQuant Derivatives data also presents a mixed picture. CoinGlass data showed trading volume rising 1.95% to about $233.74 million, while open interest slipped 0.91% to roughly $445.28 million. The combination suggests more trading activity without a matching increase in outstanding leveraged positions.

Chainlink has seen similar periods of tightening supply before. Declining exchange reserves and whale purchases have repeatedly formed part of the bullish case for LINK, though price performance has not always followed immediately.

Chainlink ecosystem activity supports the broader market case Chainlink continues to expand its role in blockchain infrastructure despite LINK’s weak longer-term price performance. Santiment has ranked the network among the leading real-world asset projects by development activity, placing it alongside Hedera at the top of the sector in recent rankings.

Institutional integrations have also continued. Mantle recently migrated its $2.5 billion Super Portal to Chainlink CCIP, while Aave selected Chainlink infrastructure for automated vault rebalancing. The number of Ethereum wallets holding LINK has also passed 900,000.

Meanwhile, U.S. investors now have regulated exchange-traded exposure to LINK. According to SoSoValue data, U.S. spot Chainlink ETFs recorded $2.68 million in net inflows on July 22, lifting cumulative net inflows to $127.83 million. 

Total trading volume reached $2.99 million for the day, while total net assets stood at $114.78 million. The first U.S. Chainlink ETF received approval to trade on NYSE Arca in December 2025, expanding institutional access to the asset.

Some analysts have set much higher long-term targets. Crypto Patel has pointed to continued ETF demand and suggested LINK could eventually reach between $50 and $100 during another strong market cycle. Those targets remain analyst projections rather than confirmed price outcomes.

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

Pons has unveiled its V2 upgrade plan, introducing an ETH-based bonding curve, Uniswap V4 integration, creator payouts in ETH, and support for tokenized real-world asset trading pairs as Robinhood Chain’s competition among token launchpads continues to intensify.

Summary

Pons has announced its V2 upgrade with an ETH based bonding curve, Uniswap V4 integration, and creator payouts in ETH. The update will support custom trading pairs including tokenized assets such as USDG, NVDA, AAPL, and HOOD while removing trading restrictions for regular wallets. The release comes as Robinhood Chain’s launchpad market continues to evolve after Noxa’s exit and growing competition among rival platforms. According to an announcement published by the Pons team, the update is scheduled for next week and will redesign how tokens launch, trade, and transition into decentralized liquidity pools on Robinhood Chain. The team said the contracts are still undergoing audits with two partners, meaning every feature remains subject to change until deployment.

Pons said the latest version was shaped by user feedback gathered during the platform’s first weeks of operation. The team also said it had stabilized the protocol with infrastructure partners after dealing with several attacks following its launch and plans to continue building products for Robinhood Chain traders.

Bonding curve and new trading model One of the biggest changes in Pons V2 is the replacement of its previous launch model with an ETH-denominated bonding curve.

The team said trading restrictions will remain configurable only for developer wallets while all other wallets will be able to trade freely. According to Pons, the change is intended to eliminate failed transactions experienced by third-party trading applications under the earlier version.

Developers will also be able to launch tokens against custom trading pairs instead of ETH alone. The announcement listed assets including USDG, NVDA, AAPL, and HOOD as examples, allowing deployers to create markets tied to tokenized real-world assets or other supported tokens.

The expansion comes as Robinhood Chain continues building infrastructure around tokenized financial products. As crypto.news previously reported, Robinhood has already introduced transferable stock tokens backed one-for-one by underlying shares while positioning the Ethereum Layer 2 network as infrastructure for tokenized securities and decentralized finance.

Earlier this week, a FalconX research primer found that Robinhood Chain had accumulated approximately $431 million in total value locked, nearly $400 million in stablecoin market capitalization, and close to $9 billion in cumulative decentralized exchange volume within three weeks of launch. The report also found that more than 80% of decentralized exchange activity still comes from memecoin trading despite the network’s long-term focus on tokenized assets.

New fee structure and automatic graduation Pons also plans to redesign how creators and the protocol collect fees.

According to the announcement, V2 will use Uniswap V4 pools and Hooks so creators receive payouts in ETH by default instead of accumulating fees in the launched token. The protocol said fee conversion will occur within the liquidity pool, allowing creators to avoid receiving small balances of memecoins that might otherwise be sold on the open market.

Deployers seeking exposure to their own tokens will need to purchase them through the market like other participants rather than receiving them automatically through protocol mechanics.

Liquidity migration has also been redesigned. Instead of launching directly into Uniswap V3 pools, new tokens will remain on the bonding curve until reaching 4.2 ETH, the same graduation threshold used previously.

Once that level is reached, the protocol said an automated two-step process will transfer liquidity into a permanently locked full-range Uniswap V4 position. If a token is paired with an asset other than ETH, the accumulated ETH will first be swapped into the selected quote asset before the liquidity pool is created.

According to the team, permanently locking the resulting liquidity position is intended to prevent liquidity from being withdrawn after graduation.

Creator payouts and governance features Alongside ETH payouts, Pons said creators will have the option at deployment to receive protocol fees in another supported asset, including stablecoins or tokenized real-world assets such as USDG.

The team said the feature allows deployers to receive more predictable payouts or gain exposure to different assets instead of relying entirely on their token’s market performance.

Governance tools are also being updated. Pons said V2 will introduce a CTO feature protected by a three-day timelock after an oversight in the V1 contracts prevented protocol administrators from changing the fee recipient. According to the announcement, the delay is intended to give communities advance notice and time to react if a malicious attempt is made to take control of a project.

Another planned addition is an optional transaction tax applied to token purchases and sales. The protocol said integration partners could use the collected fees for yield generation or other holder incentives through reflection-style token models.

Competition grows after Noxa’s exit The update arrives as Robinhood Chain’s launchpad market continues to evolve following the departure of its earliest market leader.

As crypto.news previously reported, Noxa halted new token launches on July 11 after generating more than $12 million in protocol fees and supporting over 60,000 token launches, accounting for roughly 75% of all deployments on Robinhood Chain. The platform later became unavailable before announcing that future trading fees would be redirected entirely to token creators.

Noxa’s shutdown was followed by declines in several of the chain’s most actively traded memecoins, including CASHCAT, while rival launchpads such as flap.sh, trensh.today, bankr, and Pons began competing for displaced activity.

Although Robinhood Chain has continued attracting users and liquidity, FalconX said speculative memecoin trading remains the network’s largest source of decentralized exchange volume. The addition of custom RWA trading pairs alongside updated memecoin launch mechanics positions Pons to participate in both areas of the ecosystem as Robinhood Chain expands its on-chain financial products.

The Pons team said the V2 contracts are expected to be deployed next week after ongoing audits are completed, with token launches initially taking place through the platform’s ponsfamily.com domain.

Bitcoin financial products startup Lombard Finance (BARD) is launching a new product called the Bitcoin Onchain Credit Strategy with global trading firm Flow Traders (Euronext: FLOW) as a pilot partner. 

The offering will enable Flow to borrow stablecoins for market-making without posting its own onchain collateral. Instead, bitcoin deposited into Lombard’s Bitcoin Earn yield product will act as the collateral coverage through an underwriting setup run on Cap’s private-credit platform, according to an announcement on Thursday.

"Liquidity providers like Flow Traders use stablecoin financing to efficiently support their digital asset trading operations," Global Head of Digital Assets at Flow Traders Michael Lie said. "Lombard’s Bitcoin Onchain Credit Strategy connects Bitcoin holders with institutional financing activity, driven by real institutional demand and less correlated to DeFi market conditions."

Bitcoin-Backed Stablecoin Borrowing Bitcoin Earn is Lombard’s bitcoin yield product designed to enable users to deposit tokens like LBTC, BTC.b, WBTC, or native BTC into a single vault, currently operated by professional managers Sentora and powered by Veda infrastructure, in exchange for BTCe receipt tokens, according to its documentation.

Bitcoin Earn operates as a so-called meta-vault, or fund-of-funds architecture, for bitcoin yield, where the Bitcoin Onchain Credit Strategy operates as just one allocation sitting inside it.

The vault has attracted over $1 billion in deposits from more than 38,500 users total, and compounds returns BTCe, and also can earn rewards paid in BARD tokens.

With the new Bitcoin Onchain Credit Strategy, Lombard depositors can now earn yield directly from the underwriting premiums Flow Traders pays, arguably offering a more stable return driven by real institutional demand over the typical DeFi setups on Aave, Morpho and others.

The announcement notes Cap’s automated marketplace for private credit “uses smart contracts rather than manual intervention to allocate access to capital,” helping to ensure “each loan is independently vouched for and guaranteed and allows for unique use cases such as Lombard’s Bitcoin Onchain Credit Strategy.”

The announcement notes Lombard has tapped Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to secure cross-chain deposits of BTC.b directly from Avalanche into an Ethereum vault.

Lombard is the provider behind Ledger’s "bitcoin yield" feature, and also provides infrastructure for Binance and Bybit. The startup acquired Avalanche’s bridged bitcoin asset and infrastructure BTC.b last October. 

Founded in 2024, Lombard previously raised $17 million in seed funding led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Franklin Templeton, Bybit, YZi Labs (previously Binance Labs), and others.

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© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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While the Shiba Inu (SHIB) price remains near the critical level of $0.000004249, a major withdrawal of 1.16 trillion tokens worth approximately $4.95 million has been recorded from Coinbase's Ethereum infrastructure. 

According to Arkham Intelligence, the entire amount was distributed across three completely new wallets that were apparently created specifically for these transactions and hold no other assets apart from the received SHIB.

How Coinbase just moved over a trillion SHIB to empty walletsOn-chain data explains why this multimillion-dollar transfer completely bypassed the spot market and had no impact on exchange order books. Two transactions — involving 348 billion and 242 billion SHIB — were sent directly from verified Coinbase Prime Custody addresses, a service that exclusively serves large corporate clients.

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Distributing assets across new, separate addresses outside the trading platform is a standard technical process for a custodian, required for internal security and liquidity management.

On-chain data tracks 1.16 trillion SHIB routing to new isolated wallets, Source: Arkham IntelligenceAt the same time, the origin of the largest portion — 573 billion SHIB that left the platform — remains unclear. It was transferred from wallet "0xa59...447", which has no exchange labels in Arkham's system. This address may belong either to an unmarked internal Coinbase structure or to a large private holder withdrawing the assets.

Why is this happening right now?The token is trading close to the psychological support level of $0.00000400, while the weekly RSI of 33–35 indicates that the asset is deeply oversold. A move below this support level would expose SHIB to the risk of falling toward its lows from previous years.

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The fact that 1.16 trillion SHIB is being separated within the custody system precisely near a local bottom points to the locking in and preservation of positions. 

The transfers were deliberately conducted within the exchange's infrastructure, bypassing spot order books, which made it possible to move a large amount without causing price fluctuations and to keep the price above the critical threshold.

Grayscale’s filing for a proposed Worldcoin ETF has revealed that the 100 largest wallets control roughly 90% of the circulating WLD supply.

Summary

Grayscale’s proposed Worldcoin ETF filing says the largest 100 wallets hold about 90% of the circulating WLD supply. The filing states that governance remains largely under the World Foundation while World Chain continues to rely on centralized infrastructure. The disclosures come days after Grayscale sought SEC approval to launch a spot Worldcoin ETF that would hold WLD directly. According to a recent SEC registration statement filed by Grayscale for its proposed Grayscale Worldcoin ETF, the largest 100 wallets held approximately 90% of all WLD in circulation as of the filing date. The disclosure appeared in the fund’s risk factors, where the asset manager outlined ownership concentration and governance risks tied to the token that would back the proposed exchange-traded fund.

The filing comes only days after Grayscale sought approval to list the product on Nasdaq under the ticker GWLD, offering investors direct exposure to Worldcoin through a traditional brokerage account instead of requiring them to purchase and store the token themselves. 

If approved, the trust would hold WLD directly, use the CoinDesk Worldcoin Benchmark Rate to determine its net asset value, and rely on BitGo Bank & Trust as custodian, while The Bank of New York Mellon would serve as administrator and transfer agent.

The ownership data disclosed by Grayscale differs from Worldcoin’s original vision for token distribution. 

Worldcoin’s whitepaper said most WLD tokens would eventually be claimed by individuals who verified themselves as unique humans through the project’s identity system. Grayscale instead warned that a relatively small group of early adopters currently controls a substantial share of the tokens already released.

The registration statement adds that it is “reasonably likely” that early holders own a significant portion of the circulating supply, making WLD more concentrated than its long-term distribution goals suggest.

One of the largest addresses identified in public blockchain data belongs to the bridge connecting Ethereum and World Chain, meaning part of the concentrated holdings may represent assets deposited by multiple users rather than a single owner. Even so, Grayscale’s filing presents the overall concentration level as a material risk for prospective investors.

Filing outlines governance and decentralization risks Beyond token ownership, the filing also describes several parts of the World Network that remain under centralized control.

According to Grayscale, governance of the network continues to be substantially guided by the World Foundation despite previous plans to decentralize decision-making over time. The filing states that WLD may eventually be used for governance, although the mechanisms required to support that transition remain new and untested at scale.

The disclosure contrasts with earlier statements from the project, which had promoted proof-of-personhood as a foundation for one-person-one-vote governance. Grayscale’s prospectus says governance has not yet reached that stage and continues to rely largely on the World Foundation.

The filing also identifies operational risks linked to the blockchain itself. World Chain currently depends on a centralized sequencer, while upgrade functions remain under the coordinated control of a limited group associated with the World Foundation, Tools for Humanity, and Optimism, the Ethereum layer-2 infrastructure supporting the network.

Grayscale further states that the Orb devices used to verify users are still manufactured and distributed mainly by or under the direction of Tools for Humanity. The filing also notes that the World Foundation continues to exercise significant influence over the protocol, the WLD treasury, and ecosystem grants.

ETF proposal arrives after recent ecosystem developments The governance disclosures accompany Grayscale’s broader proposal to launch the first U.S. exchange-traded fund holding WLD directly.

Under the proposed structure, the trust would function as a passive investment vehicle without leverage or derivatives. Authorized participants would create and redeem shares in blocks of 10,000, known as baskets, either by delivering WLD directly or through cash transactions facilitated by liquidity providers. Grayscale has not yet disclosed the management fee, seed investment, or the number of WLD represented by each share, leaving those details for future amendments.

The SEC filing does not guarantee regulatory approval, and Nasdaq cannot list the product unless regulators approve the registration process.

The proposed ETF follows several developments that have increased attention on Worldcoin during recent months. In June, Robinhood added WLD to its trading platform, giving the token access to a larger retail audience. 

Despite the listing, WLD fell nearly 15% on the day as traders focused instead on allegations reported by third parties involving Sam Altman and entities connected to the Worldcoin ecosystem, alongside continuing criticism of the project’s biometric identity verification system and token distribution model.

One crypto analyst says Hedera’s HBAR is approaching a critical test, with a potential $268 million token release looming in the current quarter. The figure comes from Hedera’s own Treasury Management Report. The latest forecast shows 4.07 billion HBAR scheduled for release in Q3 2026. Around 3.88 billion HBAR is tied to the ecosystem development program. This funding goes primarily to the Hedera Foundation.

The Release Story Is Not That SimpleThe analyst stressed that “released” does not mean sold. According to Hedera’s definition, tokens are considered released when they move from accounts controlled by the Hedera Council to accounts controlled by another party, often the Foundation. Those tokens can still be held for months or quarters.

The analyst also noted that Hedera does not itself define or use the term “circulating supply.” Therefore, the supply figures reported by different trackers may rely on their own definitions.

The latest forecast would represent the second-largest quarterly release in Hedera’s history, behind Q1 2023. However, past forecasts have not always matched actual movements. A projected 4 billion HBAR release in Q2 ultimately saw only 186 million HBAR move. The previous quarter forecast 3.72 billion HBAR, while actual movement was around 383 million.

The analyst says this leaves two possibilities: the Foundation may be deliberately slowing distribution, which could reduce immediate selling pressure. Alternatively, the forecast column may be unreliable.

Treasury Is Nearly SpentIf the latest forecast is completed, around 47.5 billion of the 50 billion pre-mined HBAR would be distributed. This would leave just 2.4 billion, or less than 5%, unreleased. However, the original distribution schedule runs until roughly 2033. Moreover, Hedera only publishes one forecast quarter at a time.

The analyst also challenged claims that a previous HBAR release triggered a 700% rally. HBAR rose from roughly $0.05 to $0.39 between September and December 2024, but the 3.97 billion HBAR release came afterward in Q1 2025, followed by an 83% decline to around $0.0612.

The Bigger Question Is Network RevenueThe analyst’s biggest concern is whether Hedera can eventually fund itself through network fees. Current fees were around $1,354 per day, or roughly $1.5 million annually, against a market capitalization near $3 billion.

Fees are not burned. They are distributed to staking rewards, node rewards and the network treasury. Hedera also raised a major transaction fee from 0.1 to 0.8 in January to improve long-term sustainability.

Overall, the analyst remains open to the bullish case, noting that released tokens are not automatically sold and fees could grow rapidly. But the core takeaway is clear: after eight years of Treasury-funded operations, Hedera must increasingly prove that its network activity can pay the bills itself.

Story Ends Here

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Litecoin [LTC] is preparing to introduce smart contracts through LitVM, an EVM-compatible layer-2 that extends the network without changing its base layer.

Rather than modifying Litecoin’s base layer, LitVM will be executing transactions off-chain before settling them back on Layer-1. As a result, it will be preserving the network’s established security model.

Meanwhile, the LiteForge public testnet has already processed over 140 million transactions across 11 million addresses. The milestone suggests that the developers have been actively exploring the network.

Source: X Still, according to DeFiLlama data, Litecoin’s DeFi ecosystem holds only $700,000 in total value locked. This implies that the application growth is yet to match technical progress.

That gap indicates LitVM’s architecture expands Litecoin’s capabilities. Even though broader ecosystem activity must grow before those technical advantages translate into meaningful network utility.

LiteForge gains traction before mainnet As the LitVM mainnet launch closes in, attention is now shifting to LiteForge’s testnet. Since April 2026, LiteForge has attracted over 4.4 million wallets and processed well over 63 million transactions.

Source: Business Insider Those figures indicate strong participation, although testnets often experience elevated activity from experimentation and incentives. Moreover, DeFi applications, AI agents, and cross-chain tools show developers are testing Litecoin’s expanded functionality.

Can LitVM deliver for Litecoin? As LitVM moves closer to mainnet, attention shifts from early participation to its potential impact on Litecoin’s broader economy. If deployment succeeds, LTC could expand beyond payments by serving as a gas token, collateral asset, liquidity source, settlement layer, and yield-generating asset.

Those additional functions would diversify network demand instead of relying mainly on transaction payments. However, the Q4 2026 launch remains a development target rather than a fixed milestone.

Moreover, smart contracts and cross-chain bridges introduce new security risks that require rigorous audits before large-scale adoption. Even then, technical readiness alone may not sustain growth without active developers, committed liquidity, and consistent user participation.

Investors should therefore monitor mainnet progress, bridge security, and ecosystem capital after launch. Together, those indicators will better reveal whether LitVM creates lasting economic value for Litecoin rather than simply adding new technical features.

Final Summary Litecoin expands beyond payments through LitVM, strengthening its long-term utility. However, LTC faced its biggest test as LitVmoved toward their mainnet.

July 22, 2026 at 5:00 PM EDT

Updated on

July 22, 2026 at 6:27 PM EDT

It was billed as cryptocurrency’s big moment, President Donald Trump’s first legislative victory in his drive to make the US the “crypto capital of the world.”

Surrounded by lawmakers and industry executives in the East Room of the White House, Trump signed the Genius Act into law a year ago this month, celebrating it as a step toward bringing digital assets into the mainstream of American finance.

By providing the first set of federal rules for a type of crypto known as stablecoins, the legislation aimed to inspire public confidence in a $300 billion marketplace. It promised protections against fraud by forcing companies to open their books. And it gave Congress a chance to follow through on attempts to address one of crypto’s most longstanding concerns — the persistent use of stablecoins among criminals, terrorists and sanctions evaders — by bringing companies under the watch of US regulators, whether they’re based in the US or not.

But in interviews and a court filing, an inside account of the negotiations surrounding the law has emerged: In the months before and after Trump took office, his advisers Howard Lutnick and Bo Hines worked behind the scenes to loosen those safeguards and shape the law in ways that benefited the world’s dominant stablecoin issuer, Tether. Among Trump’s advisers, Lutnick and Hines played the most formative roles in a legislative process that ultimately included measures favorable to Tether, according to people familiar with the discussions. The people, like dozens of others who provided details of negotiations surrounding the Genius Act for this story — crypto industry executives, lobbyists and current and former US government officials — requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the talks.

US President Donald Trump signed the Genius Act in the White House on July 18, 2025. He hailed the bill as a “giant step to cement American dominance of global finance and crypto technology.” Photographer: Al Drago/BloombergBefore Lutnick became Trump’s commerce secretary, he was chairman and chief executive officer of the Wall Street investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, which manages Tether’s assets. From that position, he acted as a crisis manager throughout 2024, countering bad publicity about Tether and seeking to influence lawmakers on legislation the company opposed, according to congressional lobbying records, allegations contained in a federal court filing and one person who was briefed on those efforts.

After Trump took office, Hines was the closer. The then-29-year-old White House aide, a North Carolina entrepreneur and crypto investor who ran unsuccessful congressional campaigns as a Republican in 2022 and 2024, became the administration’s self-described “bully” on the bill. As negotiations neared the finish line, Hines said that a provision Tether wanted was a “red line” for the White House, according to three other people familiar with the matter.

This account of how the legislation took shape shows the previously unreported steps that first Lutnick, then Hines took that benefited Tether, which controls about 60% of the global stablecoin market. And it sheds new light on the ways that the administration’s policymaking has aligned with its appointees’ financial interests. Both Hines and Lutnick have received significant benefits from the company.

Over an 18-month period that began in 2024 and ended shortly after the passage of the Genius Act, Tether executives:

Sold the rights to a multibillion-dollar stake in their company to Lutnick’s financial services firm in April 2024 for $600 million, a price that Tether’s chairman described to a business associate as “bloody cheap.”

Invested $775 million in December 2024 in Rumble Inc., a money-losing technology company that has a partnership agreement with the unprofitable firm that runs Trump’s Truth Social platform and counts several Trump associates as investors.

Hired Hines for an executive position in August 2025, roughly one month after the bill was signed.

Made a loan to a trust benefiting Lutnick’s children as they were purchasing their father’s multibillion-dollar business interests in October 2025.

As part of a federal ethics agreement required of cabinet appointees, Lutnick had pledged to sell his stake in Cantor Fitzgerald and to recuse himself from matters that might present a conflict of interest. A spokesperson for the Commerce Department did not answer detailed questions for this story but said Lutnick complied with the terms of that agreement; divested from his holdings, including Tether; and “was not involved in any matters relating to the Genius Act’s stablecoin provisions.”

Hines didn’t respond to detailed requests for comment. Neither did the White House.

Tether said in a statement that the company “strongly rejects any suggestion that its engagement with policymakers regarding stablecoin legislation was improper” and that it regularly interacts with regulators, legislators and law enforcement officials “lawfully, transparently, and alongside a broad range of market participants.” The company also said the Genius Act provides no “special advantages to Tether,” arguing that the new US regulatory plans will “apply across the industry to any issuer seeking to operate under the framework.”

The bill drew intense lobbying from all corners of finance, including crypto exchanges, credit card companies and community banks. But Tether is by far the industry’s dominant issuer — its biggest competitor is half its size — and it had the most at stake during the 2025 discussions.

Since the law was signed, Tether, which operates from El Salvador, has continued to grow. It launched a new US token to reach American consumers and comply with the rules. Yet its core product remains the world’s most widely used stablecoin — and a go-to currency for terrorists, North Korean hackers and sanctioned entities in both Iran and Russia, according to reports compiled by industry researchers and government officials. Under the Genius Act’s provisions, that coin, known as USDT, may never be subject to regulation by US authorities.

The Genius Act’s final form contained provisions that benefited Tether and differed from federal lawmakers’ previous attempts to regulate stablecoins, which offer users convenience and pseudo-anonymity — meaning their actual identities are hidden even though their alphanumeric wallet addresses remain permanently public on the blockchain.

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In 2023 and 2024, members of Congress proposed bipartisan legislation that aimed to push foreign companies such as Tether to submit to US regulatory scrutiny — including anti-money-laundering rules — if they wanted to sell stablecoins in the US.

The Genius Act relaxed that requirement. A provision that critics call the “reciprocity loophole” would allow Tether’s USDT to be regulated by El Salvador, where the company is building a new headquarters, if the US Treasury secretary determines the Salvadoran regulatory scheme is comparable to the US approach. Rules governing such determinations are still being drafted.

Another change limited stablecoin issuers’ responsibility for ensuring that their tokens aren’t misused by criminals, terrorists or sanctions evaders. That language, known as the “defi loophole,” means that companies like Tether aren’t responsible for tracking their products on secondary markets known as decentralized finance, or “defi,” platforms. Unlike those who buy tokens through banks or exchanges, such users can trade directly on the blockchain without identifying who they are or how they intend to use the funds.

The legislation also created a three-year grace period for selling stablecoins in the US before their issuers have to comply with its terms. As lawmakers negotiated the bill’s final details, some Democrats proposed a tighter time frame, 18 months, but Tether wanted three years, according to people familiar with its position. At that point, Hines stepped in.

In negotiations, he told people that Tether was important to the White House and Republicans should stand firm. Keeping the three-year grace period was a “red line,” Hines said, according to three people familiar with his conversations.

Bo Hines, whom Trump named executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets, took a leadership role in pushing the Genius Act through Congress. Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/BloombergSome financial experts warn that these provisions may undermine US attempts to fight money laundering by criminals and sanctioned entities while complicating Trump’s stated goal of making the US the world’s leader in digital currencies.

Timothy Massad, a former assistant secretary at the US Treasury Department during President Barack Obama’s administration, said the failure to close these so-called loopholes might put US crypto companies at a competitive disadvantage by allowing foreign issuers to sidestep costly anti-money-laundering regulations. It could also weaken the dollar, he said.

“If we want the dollar to remain the strong reserve currency of the world, we shouldn’t enable terrorists and sanctioned individuals and criminals to move dollars anonymously,” said Massad, who also served as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2014 to 2017.

Every form of currency is vulnerable to misuse for illicit transactions. But since it introduced USDT in 2014, Tether has faced regular questions about the scrutiny it brings to its customers. In response, the company had argued that its location overseas meant it could resist what it described as US regulatory overreach. But that position evolved over time, and in December 2023, Tether announced a policy of voluntarily freezing wallets of any people or entities sanctioned by the US Treasury.

Investigators continued to find evidence that USDT was being used for such activities as the fentanyl trade in Mexico and Russian sanctions evasion. A January 2024 UN report called USDT “a preferred choice” for crypto money launderers in Southeast Asia. That year, President Joe Biden’s National Security Council debated whether to ban Tether from selling its token in the US, according to two people familiar with the talks, who asked not to be named to discuss a sensitive matter.

Ultimately, that proposal was disregarded after law enforcement officials argued that they could track illicit finance through USDT transactions. Over time, federal law enforcement officials have praised Tether for becoming more helpful in freezing tokens used by bad actors.

“The company has built one of the most effective law enforcement cooperation programs in global finance,” Tether’s spokesman said in response to questions. The company said it’s committed to deterring financial crime, and the Genius Act will strengthen such efforts.

Even so, throughout the debates over the Genius Act — and since then — USDT has remained a frequent choice for illicit users.

Throughout 2025, the sanctioned Central Bank of Iran purchased $507 million of Tether’s USDT, according to Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm widely used by leading digital assets companies and traditional banks. That July, the same month Trump signed the act, Elliptic found that almost $2.5 billion worth of Tether’s USDT was received by wallets linked to Russian companies that, according to the Treasury Department, provide “cross-border settlement platforms for sanctions evasion.”

This year alone, more than $4 billion worth of the token was used in illicit marketplaces favored by Chinese scam networks — which perpetrate crimes including crypto cons known as pig butchering, impersonation frauds and sextortion — according to data by Elliptic.

And in the US, federal prosecutors across the country have filed scores of claims since July 2025 seeking to seize at least $172 million worth of USDT that they said was used unlawfully, according to court records.

Tether has more than twice as many tokens in circulation as its biggest competitor, Circle Internet Group Inc., but has fewer than half as many employees and uses contractors to conduct some of its analysis of suspicious transactions. Tether declined to answer specific questions about the size of its compliance department. But the company said it “works directly and regularly with over 340 law enforcement agencies across 67 jurisdictions to identify, freeze, and help recover assets linked to illicit activity.”

“This is not theoretical compliance but measurable, operational cooperation that no financial institution, including many traditional banks, can match,” said the company spokesman.

Lutnick’s CampaignsWhen Lutnick’s firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, began managing Tether’s reserves in 2021, the investment banker had already known Trump for decades. By that time, Trump was a one-term president, seeking a return to the White House. Tether was a hugely profitable company with an image problem. In 2024, Lutnick campaigned hard for them both.

Despite the importance of assuring buyers that its tokens are backed by safe assets, Tether has never published an independent audit detailing its reserves. In 2021, the company and a related exchange paid $61 million to settle claims brought by federal regulators and New York State (where it is banned from operating) that Tether misled investors about its reserves. Tether acknowledged no wrongdoing in the settlements. As written, the Genius Act will require stablecoin issuers to publish annual audits. Tether announced this year that it had hired an auditor, though it hasn’t disclosed any plans for releasing an audit.

Howard Lutnick, who was chairman and chief executive officer of Cantor Fitzgerald at the time, at the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2024. Source: BloombergAmid questions about Tether’s reserves, Lutnick came to the company’s public defense. In January 2024, he traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and declared on Bloomberg TV: “They have the money they say they have.”

The following month, Lutnick traveled to El Salvador, where he met with Tether’s chairman, Giancarlo Devasini, and the country’s crypto-friendly President Nayib Bukele, the self-styled “world’s coolest dictator.” Last year, Tether announced plans to relocate its headquarters to the country’s capital, San Salvador.

And in April 2024, Cantor Fitzgerald acquired the right to a 5% stake in Tether through a $600 million convertible bond — a transaction that wasn’t publicly reported until November, after Trump won the presidency. The price was a remarkable discount, based on Tether’s own accounting: In 2024, it reported profit of about $13 billion, which suggests the company was worth at least $130 billion, according to a benchmark of publicly listed financial firms. At that level, Cantor’s $600 million stake was worth more than $6 billion on paper.

Devasini called the price Cantor paid “bloody cheap,” according to Cory Klippsten, a Bitcoin entrepreneur who met with Tether executives and Lutnick in 2024.

Klippsten was involved in a business partnership with Tether that ultimately broke down, and the sides wound up in litigation. In court filings, Klippsten has accused Tether executives of poaching his employees, code and other trade secrets and reneging on a deal; Tether has accused Klippsten of improperly using Tether’s investment as collateral in a separate transaction. As part of the litigation, Klippsten is seeking to depose Lutnick and review documents about Cantor Fitzgerald’s relationship with Tether. An attorney for Lutnick said in court that the commerce secretary had no role in the dispute and that the request is meant to “harass and embarrass” Lutnick.

In a March court filing, Klippsten said he had taken contemporaneous notes detailing his conversations with Devasini. He recounted some of those notes in filings — including the “bloody cheap” remark. The filing describes Cantor’s convertible bond as “implicit compensation for acting as Tether’s advocate in Washington and the media.”

Stalled LegislationMembers of Congress had developed their own concerns. In late 2023, Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming co-signed a letter urging the Justice Department to determine whether Tether was “providing material support and resources” to terrorism organizations, including Hamas, during the deadly attacks that October in Israel. In April 2024, Lummis and Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York introduced a bill that could have required any stablecoin issuer doing business in the US to submit to US anti-money-laundering restrictions and disclosure requirements.

At the time, Lummis made clear that to enter the US market, Tether would have to comply with US rules. “So Tether, if it chooses to remain offshore, if it’s happier with a different regulator, that’s a business choice for them,” she told CoinDesk shortly after announcing the new legislation. “But if they want the US Good Housekeeping seal of approval on their product, and we hope they will, that they’ll come into compliance in the US.”

That July, Lutnick took another opportunity to defend Tether at the 2024 Bitcoin conference in Nashville, where Trump gave the keynote address. “We would never, ever be associated with a company that has anything to do with jihad,” Lutnick said, his voice rising in anger as he reminded the audience that more than 650 Cantor employees, including his brother, had died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attack on the World Trade Center. “And it disgusts me.”

Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, in July 2024. Photographer: Brett Carlsen/BloombergAfter that speech, Trump — who had pivoted from crypto skeptic to crypto supporter in 2024 as he and his family members prepared to invest in the industry — invited Lutnick to join him on his campaign plane and asked him to be co-chairman of his transition committee. They flew to Minnesota, where Lutnick warmed up the crowd on stage before then-Senator JD Vance of Ohio, another vocal crypto advocate, spoke.

Trump’s surging candidacy buoyed the mood among Tether executives, according to Klippsten. “They have HOPE right now,” his notes say. “They could fly to NYC. Go on CNBC. That’s what Trump is offering them.”

Lutnick traveled in 2024 to Washington, where Cantor Fitzgerald’s lobbyists were engaging with members of Congress on stablecoin bills circulating in the House and Senate. He had a meeting with North Carolina Representative Patrick McHenry, then-chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, to discuss how a new law would affect a foreign company like Tether, according to a person familiar with the talks. McHenry didn’t respond to requests for comment. Lutnick also met with Lummis in September, although a spokesperson for the senator said the discussion focused on a potential Trump transition team and only briefly touched on her concerns about Tether and financial crimes.

The spokesperson said that Lummis “was never urged to back off of her support” for her bill, “nor was she pressured in any manner by Secretary Lutnick or those around him to make changes.”

One of Klippsten’s notes, recounted in a court filing, says that Devasini, Tether’s chairman, told him: “According to Howard, he managed to kill every bill about stablecoins, crypto, etc. There’s still some days before Congress comes to a halt. Howard says don’t expect anything upsetting.”

The bills went nowhere. The next year, both Lummis and Gillibrand voted for the Genius Act, including its provision allowing for “reciprocal” regulation by foreign countries. A spokesman for Gillibrand declined to comment on her vote. A spokesperson for Lummis said it’s not unusual for senators to “vote for something that doesn’t perfectly reflect their preferred way of regulating.” This year, Lummis is leading Senate discussions on a bill that would establish a regulatory framework for the rest of the crypto industry, beyond stablecoins.

After Trump’s November 2024 victory, Cantor helped arrange a new investment for Tether that put the stablecoin issuer more firmly into Trump’s business orbit. Around Christmas, the company invested $775 million in Rumble, the conservative video streaming company that hosts Trump’s Truth Social media platform and provides it with cloud infrastructure and advertising services.

The investment came at an unusual time; Rumble had run up $338 million in losses that year. The company, which bills itself as a “freedom-first” alternative to livestreaming and video content, counted several Trump allies who eventually joined his second administration among its investors: Vice President Vance; former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino; and former White House special adviser for AI and crypto David Sacks.

Tether’s investment set off a temporary spike in Rumble’s share price, and it closed on Dec. 26 at $16.27, a 126% gain since the day of the announcement. Rumble, which has rebranded itself as RUM Group Inc., devoted almost 68% of Tether’s investment, $525 million, to share buybacks from “certain members of key management.” Since then, Tether has gradually increased its equity stake in Rumble; it now amounts to roughly $875 million.

“Tether’s investment in Rumble reflects our shared values of decentralization, transparency and fundamental right to free expression,” Tether’s chief executive officer, Paolo Ardoino, said at the time. The company said roughly $250 million of its infusion would go for “growth initiatives,” including a crypto payments platform.

As Trump’s second administration took shape, the White House handed responsibility for shepherding stablecoin legislation to a former college football player whose introduction to cryptocurrency came when he played in the 2014 Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl.

‘Hi, Bo!’As a Washington newcomer, Bo Hines didn’t have a resume to match the crypto industry leaders and congressional staffers he met with regularly. But at 6-foot-1 and 205 pounds, he had other attributes welcome in Trump’s White House: a camera-ready jaw line, a staunch belief in the MAGA agenda and a documented refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. Also, during the fall of 2024, a business he operated with his father donated $1 million in billboard advertising to a political action committee supporting Trump’s campaign.

As the president’s choice to head the new administration’s council on digital assets, Hines worked on a range of issues, from establishing a federal stockpile of digital currencies to recommending new guidelines for regulation of crypto. A top priority was the Genius Act.

By early February 2025, the bill was circulating in Washington. Later that month, as crypto executives and lawmakers gathered at Washington’s Willard Hotel to discuss the bill, a surprise visitor showed up, according to two people who attended: Tether’s Ardoino. He told his fellow attendees that his company was serious about deterring money laundering, the people said.

In March, Ardoino posted photos of himself at the US Capitol and the White House. He told the New York Times that he’d been careful not to speak with Lutnick after Lutnick’s February confirmation as commerce secretary, to avoid any conflicts of interest.

That same month, Tether hired a Washington lobbyist who’d been representing Cantor Fitzgerald on stablecoin-related issues since 2024: Jeff Miller. Miller served in leadership roles for both of Trump’s inauguration committees, and his firm had become one of Washington’s most successful during Trump’s first term. Throughout 2025, Miller Strategies was paid $570,000 — with $480,000 from Cantor and $90,000 from Tether. “It’s very important that our voice is properly heard,” Ardoino told Bloomberg TV.

Hines, meanwhile, settled into his job. He argued that lawmakers had no right to oppose the president’s wishes, said people familiar with the matter, and pressured them to reach speedy agreements. He also began signaling that he considered concerns about the illicit use of digital tokens to be overblown. “You’re a pretty dumb criminal if you want to use digital assets to do something nefarious because that can be traced publicly in many cases,” he said during an April interview with Bitcoin Magazine.

The earliest drafts of the Genius Act troubled Tether’s competitors and Democratic lawmakers because it walked back restrictions that had been written into the 2024 versions of stablecoin legislation.

In May, a group of Democrats — including those seen as moderates on crypto — revolted, temporarily blocking the measure from advancing. In a closed-door meeting with other Democrats, two people familiar with the matter said, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York implored his colleagues to review records the Biden administration’s National Security Council had compiled about Tether’s practices and make certain the Genius Act provided strong enough safeguards to deter money laundering by US adversaries.

That month, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren urged other Democrats to reject the latest version of the bill, which she said loosened the rules to further benefit Tether.

Senator Elizabeth Warren questioned the Genius Act’s provisions. Source: Senator Elizabeth Warren/YouTubeHines brushed such concerns aside, according to people familiar with the discussions. He often invoked Trump, saying that the president wanted a deal done soon. Republican legislative leaders pressed on with the bill.

A late hurdle was the timing of the bill’s provisions. During private negotiations, Hines insisted that Republicans refuse to drop the three-year grace period — even though Democrats were seeking to cut it in half. In meetings, he said that Tether wanted three years, said three people familiar with the matter.

Ultimately, Hines prevailed. The July bill signing ceremony brought many of the bill’s important supporters together at the White House.

“Where’s Bo Hines?” Trump asked from the dais, scanning until he spotted him in the front row. “Hi, Bo! And Bo was a great football player, right? Bo was a great football player, one of the better players in college football so I know you from that also.” (Hines was a standout receiver for the North Carolina State Wolfpack in 2014; he subsequently transferred to Yale University, where shoulder injuries hampered his football career.)

Hines stood to a round of applause and sat down. To his immediate right, also in the front row, was Tether’s CEO, Ardoino. One month later, Tether announced that it was hiring Hines as an adviser. Soon thereafter, he was promoted to chief executive of Tether’s new US product called USAT. This new token accounts for just a fraction of Tether’s business, with roughly $186 million of them in circulation. Hines told a crypto conference last year that he expects both USAT and USDT to meet Genius Act standards.

Also seated in the signing ceremony’s front row, between Hines and Vice President Vance, was Lutnick. Trump called on him to stand for applause, praising his work on tariff negotiations. “You have done a great job, Howard,” the president said.

Three months later, Lutnick completed the sale of Cantor Fitzgerald to trusts benefiting his children. The day after it closed, a document was filed in New York that showed Tether had loaned one of those trusts an undisclosed sum of money.

Lutnick has declined to reveal what his children paid for his holdings or whether the loan they received from Tether was used to finance the transaction. That year, Tether had been speaking to investors about a $500 billion capital raise. At that valuation, Cantor Fitzgerald’s potential 5% stake in the company would have been worth $25 billion on paper.

(Updates to say in 15th paragraph that Tether's statement came directly from the company.)

The exploit targeted a bridge operated by derivatives exchange AFX and emptied nearly all of the USDC locked in the contract, according to security firm Blockaid. Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder said the network's native bridge was not affected.

AFX Trade, a derivatives exchange that settles trades in USDC, was exploited for approximately $24.15 million on July 22 after an attacker targeted a bridge the protocol operates on Arbitrum, according to security firm Blockaid.

Blockaid said it detected the exploit at 21:30 UTC and published the transaction on Arbiscan. "The exploit was specific to a bridge that AFX operates," the firm wrote, adding that it is working with the Arbitrum team "to respond to the incident, to engage with the affected protocol, and to help them contain the stolen funds."

The attacker moved the funds to Ethereum and swapped them for 12,467 ETH at an average price of $1,937, according to onchain analytics account Lookonchain, which linked to the exploiter's address on Arkham.

AFX had not published a statement on its X account as of the time of writing. The Defiant reached out to AFX for comment.

Arbitrum Says Native Bridge UnaffectedSteven Goldfeder, co-founder of Arbitrum developer Offchain Labs, said the exploit did not compromise Arbitrum's own infrastructure.

"We're aware of a report of a bridge hack on Arbitrum and are investigating. We can confirm that the transaction in question originated from a third party protocol, and the Arbitrum native bridge has not been hacked or exploited in any way," Goldfeder wrote. "We will coordinate with the third party team and will report more details when we have them."

Nearly All Bridge Deposits DrainedThe AFX bridge contract on Arbitrum held about $24.2 million in USDC before the attack, according to DefiLlama, meaning the exploit drained nearly all of the funds locked in the contract. Deposits in the bridge had grown from about $19.3 million in mid-June.

AFX, short for Anti-Fragile Exchange, describes itself as a sovereign Layer 1 blockchain built for decentralized derivatives, offering USDC-margined perpetuals with up to 100x leverage on crypto assets, equities, ETFs and commodities, according to its website. User deposits enter the protocol through the Arbitrum-based bridge contract that was targeted in the attack.

The attack follows a string of exploits targeting protocols on Arbitrum in July. On July 15, perpetuals exchange Ostium halted trading after an attacker manipulated its oracle system to drain up to $18 million in USDC from its liquidity vault.

Markets showed little immediate reaction. ETH was trading at about $1,928, roughly flat over 24 hours, while ARB was down 0.3% at $0.0806, according to CoinGecko. ARB set an all-time low of $0.0705 on June 26.

Injective, a notable player in the crypto space, has just wrapped up a significant technical transition: the migration of its INJ token from Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard to a native version on its own blockchain, the Injective EVM. This shift, completed by July 22, 2026, marks a major step for the platform’s ecosystem, with Coinbase leading the charge in supporting this new format over its predecessor.

The transition, which started on July 20, allowed Coinbase users to experience a seamless 1:1 conversion of their holdings. Post-migration, you can now trade directly on the native Injective network, effectively making the ERC-20 version a relic of the past. Coinbase’s decision to end its support for ERC-20 INJ deposits and withdrawals emphasizes this new chapter for the token.

What’s the big deal with the migration? This isn’t just a switch for tech’s sake. The move to the native Injective EVM chain means better access to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and increased liquidity for users. If you’ve ever been frustrated with cross-chain compatibility and transaction times, this development might just make your day.

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Injective has been laying the groundwork for this since its native EVM launched back in November 2025. The migration aligns with a series of strategic moves, including a partnership with Robinhood, which could make Injective’s offerings accessible to a broader audience. These were highlighted at the Injective Summit in Washington, D.C., last month.

Why investors should be paying attention Let’s talk money. For investors, the implications are clear: streamlined technology often paves the way for an increase in user engagement and transaction volume. This could positively affect INJ’s market performance, injecting a jolt of enthusiasm into its price trajectory.

The combined support from platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood offers a nod of credibility and could attract more institutional interest. So, expect the usual suspects in the market—like improved liquidity and heightened trading activity—to play their part in shaping INJ’s future.

Optimists in the market view this as a chance for Injective to increase its footprint. With enhanced technical capabilities and more robust user engagement, the blockchain aims to stand out in an increasingly crowded DeFi space.

Anticipating the next moves While it’s too early to build castles in the sky about INJ’s potential valuation jumps, aligning strategic improvements with increased adoption often spells good news. As traders transition from the old ERC-20 standard, any uptick in liquidity could have investors hitting the buy button.

Naturally, there are risks. Technological transitions come with their own set of challenges and uncertainties. Yet, the early signs from the migration suggest that Injective is on a solid path toward cementing its position as a DeFi leader.

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

A brief panic rippled through the Arbitrum ecosystem on July 15 when on-chain watchers flagged a suspicious $24 million USDC withdrawal that looked, at first glance, like a bridge exploit. It wasn’t. Arbitrum’s native bridge remains intact, and the real victim was Ostium, a decentralized exchange focused on real-world asset trading that got drained through a compromised oracle key.

The distinction matters enormously. A bridge hack would signal systemic risk across the entire Layer 2 network. An oracle manipulation attack on a single protocol, while painful, is a contained problem. But the roughly $24 million that walked out the door still represents a significant blow, both to Ostium and to confidence in oracle-dependent DeFi protocols.

How the attack worked The attacker gained access to a compromised oracle signer private key, specifically one tied to a PriceUpKeep role within Ostium’s system. The falsified reports contained future-dated price entries. The system treated these bogus reports as legitimate, which allowed the attacker to generate phantom profits on positions. Those fake gains were then withdrawn as very real USDC from Ostium’s liquidity vault, known as the OLP.

The damage was substantial. Estimates place the total loss between $18 million and $24 million USDC, with some on-chain analysis pinpointing the figure at approximately $23.75 million across multiple transactions. Given that the OLP vault held roughly $63 million in total value, the attacker managed to siphon off about 28% of the entire pool.

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On-chain security firm Blockaid detected the suspicious activity and alerted the community. Ostium responded by halting all trading operations and freezing affected positions while launching a full investigation.

Why the bridge confusion happened The initial alarm bells rang because the stolen funds were transferred from Arbitrum to Ethereum, which naturally drew attention to bridge infrastructure. But the transfers used authorized routes, primarily through MetaMask, and were validated by the network’s validators as legitimate transactions. The bridge did exactly what it was designed to do: process valid withdrawal requests. The problem was upstream, in how those funds were illegitimately obtained in the first place.

That said, the ARB token still took a hit, declining approximately 4% in the aftermath.

Ostium’s track record and what’s at stake Ostium isn’t a fly-by-night protocol. The platform had previously raised $27.8 million in funding and processed over $50 billion in cumulative trading volume. That pedigree makes the exploit more surprising, not less.

What makes this particular incident notable is that it wasn’t a flash loan attack or a price manipulation scheme using on-chain liquidity pools. It was a key compromise. Someone either stole, phished, or otherwise obtained access to a private key that had elevated privileges within the oracle system.

What this means for investors For Arbitrum holders, the good news is straightforward: the network’s core infrastructure wasn’t breached. The 4% ARB decline looks more like a knee-jerk reaction than a fundamental repricing of risk.

For Ostium liquidity providers, the situation is considerably grimmer. Losing 28% of a vault’s value in a single incident is the kind of event that permanently reshapes a protocol’s risk profile.

Investors should be scrutinizing how protocols manage oracle infrastructure with the same intensity they apply to smart contract audits. Look at how many signer keys exist, what privileges they carry, whether multi-signature requirements are enforced, and what happens if one key is compromised.

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

Polymesh v8 is live on Mainnet: permissionless onboarding, frictionless transfers, account-level asset holding, EVM smart contracts, and Confidential Assets on Testnet.

Polymesh v8 is now live on Mainnet. It's the largest upgrade to the network since launch, and it touches most of the core systems: onboarding, settlement, asset holding, smart contracts, and hardware wallet support. Much of it is aimed at removing long-standing friction for users and developers while keeping the identity and compliance model that Polymesh is built around.

Simpler onboardingUntil now, joining Polymesh meant going through a CDD Provider. You completed identity verification and received a CDD claim before you could do much of anything. In practice this often meant sitting through two onboarding flows: one for the chain, and another for the application or asset you actually wanted to use.

v8 removes the CDD claim requirement. Any account can now register an identity (DID) for itself directly on-chain, with no intermediary involved. CDD Providers have been renamed to DID Registrars, and they still work the way you'd expect: they can onboard identities on behalf of users who want a managed experience, and businesses that need verified-identity workflows can continue to layer those on with claims.

For new users and developers this is a much shorter path onto the network. For institutions, nothing is lost. Registrar-based onboarding is still there for anyone who wants it.

Automatic receiver affirmationIn previous versions, settlement instructions waited on the receiver's affirmation by default. This prevents unwanted transfers, but it adds a step before assets can settle, and it tends to surprise anyone coming from other blockchain ecosystems where transfers simply land in your account.

In v8, receiver affirmation is automatic by default. When assets are sent to you, they settle without you having to approve them first. Workflows that need explicit receiver approval can opt back in on a per-identity basis, which some institutional flows will want to do.

If you build applications on Polymesh, this deserves a close look. Any code that assumes incoming transfers require the receiver's approval should be reviewed.

Assets held directly on accountsPolymesh has always organized holdings through identity-owned portfolios. In v8, accounts (signing key public addresses) can also hold assets directly, both fungible tokens and NFTs, with no portfolio involved. A new transfer method moves funds between any combination of accounts and portfolios without creating a settlement instruction.

Portfolios remain fully supported and are still the right model for institutional setups that need shared control through secondary keys. Developers can now choose whichever ownership model fits their application.

v8 also adds allowances: an account can authorize another account or a smart contract to move a set amount of its assets within limits it defines. Anyone who has worked with ERC-20 tokens will recognize the approve-and-spend pattern. It makes delegated and contract-driven workflows possible without handing over signing authority.

EVM smart contractsv8 brings EVM compatibility to Polymesh through a new dual-VM contract engine. Solidity contracts can run either as native PolkaVM bytecode or as standard EVM bytecode in a full EVM environment. A new Ethereum JSON-RPC proxy lets MetaMask, ethers.js, and other standard Ethereum tooling talk to Polymesh contracts directly.

Solidity developers can now build and deploy on Polymesh with the tools they already know. This release lays the groundwork; direct access from contracts to Polymesh's native identity, compliance, and settlement features is a major focus of ongoing development, and we'll share more as that work progresses.

Confidential Assets on Testnetv8 introduces Confidential Assets, currently on Testnet. They use zero-knowledge proofs to keep the sender, receiver, asset, and amount of a transfer private, while retaining the auditor and mediator controls that regulated markets require.

Confidential Assets are available on Testnet today for experimentation and feedback. They are disabled on Mainnet while development, testing, and auditing continue. We'll publish more on this in the coming weeks.

Better hardware wallet supportv8 adds a metadata-hash-based signing scheme that lets generic signers, including the generic Polkadot Ledger app, decode and display full Polymesh transaction details. Your Ledger can now show you exactly what you're signing, and because verification runs against the runtime's own metadata, it keeps working as the network evolves. The dedicated Polymesh Ledger app is being updated to support the same scheme. Existing accounts and derivation paths continue to work.

Under the hoodv8 also retires several custom components in favor of standard, widely audited Polkadot SDK implementations, including the balances and staking systems. Most users won't notice a difference day to day, but Polymesh now benefits directly from upstream improvements and security review across the broader Polkadot ecosystem, and works better with standard tooling.

What to do nextIf you're a user, the easiest way to see the difference is to onboard fresh. Creating an identity and holding an asset is now a much shorter process.

If you're a developer or run infrastructure against the chain, be aware that v8 is a major release with real breaking changes. Call indices, event shapes, and storage layouts have moved. We've published a full migration changelog covering every pallet; start there before you upgrade.

Thank you to everyone who tested, filed issues, and ran nodes on Testnet throughout the v8 cycle. We're looking forward to seeing what you build.

Read the full v7.4 → v8.0 changelog on the developer portal

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Gas on AztecGas on Aztec is known as Fee Juice and is used to pay for transaction costs. This is the same as $ETH on Ethereum. Some apps will handle transaction costs for you under the hood, but if you are using a browser extension wallet, you will not be able to send transactions without it. Fee Juice can be obtained by bridging the $AZTEC token on Ethereum to the Aztec Network L2. This means that under the hood, all activity that happens on Aztec is underpinned by the $AZTEC token bridged into the network. Some bridges like Shield (by human.tech) handle this for you, allowing you to allocate a portion of your bridged transaction to convert into Fee Juice and land in your wallet automatically.

Public vs Private AssetsAssets and transactions on the Aztec Network can be either public or private. If you bridge publicly, your tokens will arrive as public, traceable tokens visible to all. Privately bridging, on the other hand, will give you private assets that are visible only to you. These assets can then be sent privately to another user or wallet without ever revealing who you are, what tokens were sent, how many, or who the recipient is.

Public vs Private GasLike tokens on the Aztec Network, Fee Juice (gas) can also be public or private. The reason for this is that even if what you are sending is private, the gas you spend to execute that transaction could still be visible if you are using public Fee Juice, potentially revealing transaction patterns and activity. Private Fee Juice keeps your entire transaction footprint hidden. When you send a private transaction, you can use private Fee Juice, and when you send a public transaction, you can use public Fee Juice, which means your transaction costs are always aligned with the type of transaction you're making.

Fee Juice in AppsAztec has native fee abstraction, which means apps could let you pay for transactions in any token you want, or cover your fees entirely. Apps like Nyx may choose to cover part or all of a user's transaction costs, or allow you to pay in tokens that are convenient for you. This means you will most likely never see Fee Juice in an app; instead, you'll pay in whatever makes sense for what you're doing, on your terms. Similarly, you might never even see an Aztec wallet at all, because the app itself becomes your interface that you connect to using your MetaMask wallet.

Fee Juice in Browser WalletsIf you're using a browser extension like Azguard, you'll manage Fee Juice directly in your wallet alongside your private and public balances, converting between tokens as needed to cover transaction costs.

When you bridge tokens in, you'll need enough Fee Juice to cover the cost of your first transaction, then you'll need to monitor how much Fee Juice you have available to make transactions. Browser wallets will allow you to send either publicly or privately to other users and will default to using either public or private Fee Juice depending on the type of transaction. Both private Fee Juice and public Fee Juice will appear by default in your token list.

Wrapping upHow you handle Fee Juice depends on where you're transacting: apps can abstract it away entirely and let you pay in any token, while a browser wallet like Azguard puts it in your hands to manage across public and private balances. Match your gas to your transaction, keep private activity private down to the fee, and you move on your terms.

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Aztec Network

Aztec Network

21 Jul

•

xx min read

Introducing Alpha V5The Aztec Network today activated Alpha V5, a major protocol upgrade passed by token-holder governance and executed onchain. Alpha V5 reduces private-transaction proving times by more than 2x compared to the previous version, lowers the cost of a fully private transaction by roughly 50%, resolves the critical issues found in V4, and sees the first wave of apps go live. Users can now send private transactions and earn yield on Aave simply by connecting their Ethereum wallets on Nyx, bridge from Ethereum to Aztec using Shield or TRAIN, privately collect NFTs on RavenHouse, or play Dark Forest Aztec, a hidden-information strategy game in a universe that lives entirely onchain. 

"Alpha V5 continues Aztec's work at the frontier of client-side proving, with cryptographic breakthroughs that cut proving times by more than half this release," said Zac Williamson, Co-founder, Aztec Foundation. "We believe Aztec is now the fastest system in the world for proving a fully private transaction entirely on a user's own device, and every release moves the industry closer to private transactions at public transaction speeds."

As the only decentralized privacy L2, Aztec is the credibly neutral privacy layer for Ethereum. Aztec allows anyone to write smart contracts that include both private and public aspects – every private transaction is proven on the user's own device, so no operator, sequencer, or intermediary can see the data. The Alpha V5 proving improvements come from cryptographic advances that make this client-side proving faster than any prior release. The network remains in alpha, but with V5 it is ready for teams to begin building and deploying applications.

Performance - 2.5 second fully private transactions Making private transactions practical comes down to how quickly a proof can be generated on a user's own device, without offloading that work to a server that would learn what the user is doing. On Alpha V5, proving a private token transfer natively now takes approximately 2.5 seconds on a consumer laptop, down from 5.2 seconds on V4, and about 6.8 seconds in a browser, down from 12.5 seconds. Across every measured transaction flow, client-side proving times improved by approximately 2x compared with V4.

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Bench machine: an M2 MacBook (12 cores, throttled to 8). "Native" runs Aztec's C++ proving binary; "WASM" runs the same prover in a browser engine (Node on V8).‍

Alpha V5 lowers ECDSA signature-verification cost by approximately 2x, speeds up Poseidon2 hashing by approximately 3x, and reduces the protocol circuit gate count by approximately 50% (gate count is the number of individual operations a proving circuit must perform, and it is the main driver of how long a proof takes to generate). Each of these lowers the amount of work a device performs to prove a transaction, and the reduction in gate count in particular compounds across every proof the network generates.

Apps - send, receive, and earn privately on EthereumAlpha V5 launches the first wave of apps on a network where privacy is built into the protocol rather than managed by an operator. On other networks that claim privacy, transactions still pass through an operator or node that reads them in plaintext, or depend on a viewing key that a third party holds, so users rely on someone else to protect their data and to decide when it gets disclosed. On Aztec, every private transaction is proven on the user's own device, so the app, the sequencer, and any operator never need to see the underlying data. Nyx is one of these apps, allowing users to privately send transactions and privately earn yield on Aave. 

"On Ethereum, everything you do is public. That's why we built Nyx: a private account governed by your Ethereum wallet", said Nikhil, Co-founder of Nyx. "Now you can send, receive and earn in private. Nyx was the first app live on the Aztec Alpha, and we're excited to expand participation to more users with the added stability of Alpha V5."

Other apps on Alpha V5 include Azguard and Nethermind (wallets), Shield, TRAIN, and RavenHouse (bridges), and the Aztecscan block explorers. Also launching is Dark Forest Aztec, a game where users explore a universe, control planets, manage planetary energy, expand territory, and launch attacks through strategic play with private state and hidden actions.

Dark Forest Aztec private universe-building gameplayLower costs, higher security Transaction fees on Aztec come from two main sources: the cost of proving a transaction and the cost of verifying the rollup proof on Ethereum. Alpha V5 reduces both. It lowers the network's proving-cost parameter by 50%, and it reduces the L1 gas required to verify a rollup proof by approximately 40%. Because rollup proofs are verified on Ethereum and that cost is shared across all transactions in a batch, the L1 reduction lowers fees for every user, while the lower proving-cost parameter reduces the per-transaction proving fee directly. Together, these bring the average cost of a fully private token transfer to under a $0.05 transaction cost.

Alpha V5 also hardens the network on several fronts. It resolves critical vulnerabilities found in Alpha V4 along with additional bugs discovered since launch. Aztec's bug bounty program on Cantina also drew more than 234 security researchers to participate. The network remains in alpha, and further bugs may surface as usage grows, but each release has closed the issues found in the last and strengthened the protocol against new ones. With the critical V4 issues resolved and these safeguards in place, Alpha V5 is stable enough for teams to begin building and deploying applications.

AvailabilityAlpha V5 is live now, view the Alpha V5 landing page for a full list of features, performance updates, and live apps to explore. 

About AztecAztec is the only decentralized, privacy-first Layer 2 on Ethereum. Developers write private and public logic in the same smart contract, and private functions are executed and proven on the user's own device, so no operator sees the underlying data. The protocol is upgraded through onchain governance, and the network settles to Ethereum. For more information, visit aztec.network.

Aztec Network

Aztec Network

30 Jun

•

xx min read

Inside an Aztec TransactionOn Ethereum today, each transaction reveals everything publicly. The token you moved, the size, the timing, the wallet it came from, every action you take. Given the limitations of this type of transparent network, the industry is now focusing on bringing privacy onchain as a top priority. The response to this has mostly been to enable private transactions that shield transfers in various ways. But when we look at how privacy works on Web2, it’s clear that users and developers need granular privacy controls: the ability to decide what is public or private and who is able to see different types of data.

Aztec was built so that one transaction can carry two halves. A private half that runs on your own device and never leaves it, and a public half that the network runs in the open. Apps can choose which aspects are private or public, and users can choose what they want to reveal and when.

This article will follow an example transaction on Aztec: a vote in an onchain election built on Aztec, where who you are and which candidate you chose stay private, while the running tally for each candidate stays public for anyone to verify.

Public and private in one movePicture the vote you cast in our example as two aspects that seamlessly weave together. In the first step, you act in private: an app records your vote on your device and hands the network a proof that the vote is valid without revealing it. In the second, the network acts in public: it checks that proof, then adds one to the chosen candidate's public tally. It is one transaction: one part stays with you, one part goes to the network. Both parts end up recorded onchain, in two separate state trees, one private and one public. The walkthrough below follows how these two aspects work together and what this means for how your transaction lands onchain. 

It starts on your deviceYou open the voting app and connect an Aztec wallet. That first step looks like any onchain app. The difference is inside the wallet. An Aztec wallet carries a private execution environment, the PXE, pronounced "pixie", which runs on your phone or in your browser. The PXE is where the private half of your transaction executes, and where the proof of that work gets made, on your hardware, under your exclusive control.

Every account on Aztec is a smart contract rather than a bare key. That design, account abstraction, allows a wallet to authorize a transaction however its owner chooses without writing an identity onto the network for everyone to read. The wallet is the front door, and on Aztec you can decide if the door is open or closed, who you share your information with. 

The private half runs on your deviceThe voting app is a smart contract with two kinds of functions. The private functions run first, and they run inside your PXE. Your identity and the candidate you picked are the private inputs, and they stay on your device.

The only thing to leave your device is a proof confirming the legitimacy of your vote. Aztec's client-side proving system, Chonk, takes the private execution and produces a zero-knowledge proof: a compact cryptographic receipt that your vote followed the rules, that you are eligible, and have not voted before, while revealing nothing about who you are or who you voted for. Think of it as a sealed ballot the network can confirm is valid without opening it. The network learns only that a legitimate vote happened. It does not learn how you voted, or even which account voted. 

This is the part that used to be too slow to be practical. Generating a proof on a phone was the bottleneck every privacy app hit. Aztec’s Chonk is purpose-built for fast proving on low-memory devices, both natively and in the browser, so the private half runs on the device in your hand instead of on someone else's server.

The public half runs in the openSome elements of a vote should be public. The tally is shared infrastructure, the number everyone relies on to trust the result. Thanks to programmable privacy on Aztec, the app marks that part public. Public functions live on the network and run in the open, the way functions do on Ethereum.

On Aztec, private and public logic live in the same contract, and the developer decides which is which, function by function and variable by variable. Programmable privacy is a dimmer, not a switch. The voting app turns it up on the individual ballot and turns it down on the running tally. That boundary is a design decision written into the contract, and it is the thing no transparent chain and no fixed-privacy chain can offer.

The network checks the proof and runs the public partYour vote leaves your device as a bundle: the zero-knowledge proof of the private half, plus the call to the public function that updates the count. It goes to Aztec's sequencers, a decentralized set of thousands of independent operators, with more than 3,500 of them running the network today.

The sequencers do two jobs at once. They verify the proof of your private vote, confirming it is valid and eligible without seeing the choice behind it, and they run the public function that adds one to the chosen candidate and updates the public tally. Your ballot stays sealed. The count goes up by one for everyone to see. The same proof guarantees you cannot vote twice, even though no one learns which ballot is yours.

Two state trees, both onchainAztec has two main state trees, and both live onchain. One holds private state, the other holds public state, so the full record of what happened sits on the network rather than on any one person's laptop. The two trees store each record in two different ways depending on if it needs to be private or public. 

The private tree uses a UTXO model, the same note-based design used by Zcash. In this model, state is written as commitments: each entry is a sealed record that a valid vote was cast, with the voter and the choice kept private. Just like with Zcash or Bitcoin, you do not edit a private entry in place. You write a new one, and the design stops the same vote from being cast twice (old state is nullified). The vote stays private, and the record of a legitimate vote happening is onchain for the network to check.

The public tree uses an account-based model, the same shape Ethereum uses: values that update in place, readable by anyone. This is where each candidate's tally lives.

One transaction wrote information to both trees. The private tree recorded that you voted, sealed. The public tree recorded the new totals, in the open. Everything is onchain. The difference between the two trees is how much each one reveals.

Every private app on Aztec writes into that same private tree. A vote, a payment, and a payroll run all land in one shared record of activity, so each user's privacy grows stronger as the network grows, instead of splitting into a separate pool for every app.

A block is proposed, and Ethereum records itAztec is an L2 on Ethereum, so everything settles to Ethereum L1. A sequencer on Aztec gathers transactions into a proposed block. Other sequencers validate it before it goes to Ethereum's pending chain. At that point the block sits on Ethereum, ordered and recorded, waiting for its proof. The network has agreed on what happened and the proposed block is just waiting a final proof. 

Anyone can prove itProving a block is its own job, and on Aztec, it belongs to no one in particular. A decentralized, permissionless set of provers competes to take a full epoch, a 32-block stretch of the chain, and compresses it into a single zero-knowledge proof of the entire epoch. Anyone with the hardware can run a prover and bid for the work. There is no privileged operator, no committee you have to trust, no outside network holding a key.

That openness is the whole point of a privacy layer. A system that protects your data but routes it through one trusted server has only moved the exposure rather than removed it. Aztec keeps proving permissionless and your private inputs on your device, thereby avoiding any exposure.

The economics land in the voter's favor too. As an L2 network, Aztec spreads the cost of that one L1 proof across thousands of transactions in the rollup, so a vote costs pennies, not the millions of gas a private proof would cost verified alone on Ethereum.

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Settled on Ethereum, verifiable by anyoneA prover then posts the epoch proof to Ethereum's proven chain, and the Aztec state is final. Ethereum verifies one proof and inherits the correctness of everything inside it. Aztec extends Ethereum and settles to Ethereum, so your hybrid transaction carries Ethereum's security without carrying Ethereum's enforced transparency.

Anyone can now verify that the result is valid and that every counted vote was legitimate. No one can see how any individual voted. The tally is on the shared ledger where it belongs, and your ballot stayed yours the whole way through.

What this unlocksFor the voter, their ballot was never a broadcast. The candidate you chose stayed yours, with no record tying your wallet to a name for anyone to read later, and you can still check that your vote was counted and the result is honest. You took part without your choice becoming data for systems built to act on it.

For a founder, the election app in this walkthrough is easy to implement without needing to build extensive custom code. Secret ballots with a public, verifiable count, in one contract, is a product category that opens up only because the boundary is programmable. You can build governance, elections, and polls where people vote without fear and the result still proves itself. And of course you can build anything that requires both public and private state to work seamlessly together. 

For an infrastructure provider, the same machinery serves clients who need a result they can stand behind without exposing the people who produced it. Selective disclosure lets a client prove exactly what a counterparty needs to see, the count and the integrity of the process, and protect everything else, on their own terms. That is a guarantee a transparent chain cannot make.

A real vote needs two things at once: a secret ballot and a count anyone can check. A transparent chain makes you give up the first to get the second. On Aztec, you get both. The tally settled on Ethereum for anyone to verify, and how you voted stayed yours. The infrastructure is in place, what will you create with it? 
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->Review the Aztec Basics ->Head to the docs and start building today
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Aztec Network

Aztec Network

23 Jun

•

xx min read

The Devil's Bargain - Privacy Without Credible Neutrality Crypto is in a long night. It is no secret that the industry is facing challenging circumstances and there has been a clear consolidation of the industry. Right now we are seeing a focus on real traction, demonstrable value projects shipping practical solutions that will meaningfully reach users. 

Some of that discipline is overdue. However, in times like these the properties that made crypto structurally different begin to look expendable. Decentralization slows you down. It makes upgrades harder. It makes institutional sales harder. It removes the control surfaces that the existing financial world knows how to buy.

We used to accept those costs as the price of building something durable. But, in a famine, they look like unaffordable affectations. Discarding them wholesale, however, is like selling the land out from under our feet.

Permissionless, uncensorable transaction networks with rich composability - this is the clay from which our industry was grown. The long term commercial health of our industry depends on preserving these properties in an age of privacy and institutional adoption.

These trade-offs become more challenging and pernicious when privacy is involved. Privacy is the narrative for crypto in 2026, and for good reason. It’s the missing piece that will deliver the traction and real use-cases that the industry so desperately needs. 

The challenges of decentralization multiply under the constraints of privacy and what we are seeing in the industry is not a pivot, but a complete capitulation of all of the differentiable value that made crypto valuable.

I have spent nearly a decade building a network that marries programmable privacy with decentralization. A network where users keep their data, where applications are composable with one another, where transactions can settle without a privileged party learning everyone’s business or deciding which products are allowed to exist. That required new cryptography, new programming models, new state architecture, new wallets, and a fairly insane number of tradeoffs that are invisible until you try to build the thing yourself. There are easier products to ship. 

A centralized privacy service can give institutions something legible quickly, replicating how the existing financial sector works: a responsible operator, a viewing key, a way to block transactions, a way to explain the whole thing to a risk committee. Some of these products will be useful. Some will be good businesses. But they are not the thing we came here to build.

The Devil’s BargainInstitutional and enterprise adoption is one of the core growth areas in this crypto-winter and the playbook is simple: use the language of crypto as a skin-suit to sell products and services that pattern match onto existing financial rails, with their need for complete visibility, censorship, centralized network operators and all of the liabilities this incurs.

This is a tempting bargain because it shortens the path to adoption. It gives buyers and regulators a shape they understand. A company. A contract. A switch. But the moment you accept that bargain, the system changes character. It may still be encrypted. It may still contain proofs. It may still call itself private. But, it now behaves like and is an operated service. 

There is a party with privileged knowledge and privileged control. Builders must shape themselves around it. Institutions negotiate with it. Regulators may pressure it. Attackers target it. Users ultimately depend on it. By a backdoor I mean something specific: a network or protocol-level viewing key where the product developer does not control who can see their users’ data, especially when paired with network-level controls that can block transactions or ban smart contracts entirely. I do not mean application-level controls. I do not mean user-authorised disclosure. I do not mean a dapp deciding that users must prove something before using it. Regulated applications will need rules. The issue is that the disclosure boundary of your application belongs to somebody else, and the same layer that sees can also decide whether your users are allowed to transact. In short, users lack a platform that has credible neutrality.

The Platform RiskPrivacy on top of centralized rails is fatal. If one party can see everything and stop anything, that party may be treated as responsible for seeing and stopping.

This compounds into substantial platform risk. If an entity builds on top of such a system they must surrender visibility and control to the network operator to satisfy their liabilities without consideration for yours. Decentralization and ultimately credible neutrality is the difference between whether you own durable infrastructure or are renting a service whose rules can change on a whim. Worse, you cannot “just build things”. For novel transaction flows approval must be sought and granted. Tell me, would Ethereum have grown if every smart contract deployment required approval from the Ethereum Foundation?

Privacy needs the same freedom. A private credit market, for example, touches identity, collateral, repayment history, payment flows, liquidation logic, lender disclosures, auditor access and borrower privacy. If every component lives inside a different permissioned service, each with its own operator and viewing assumptions, that is a bureaucratic friction that negates blockchain’s core value proposition; composability.

A decentralized and credibly neutral privacy network prevents the settlement layer from becoming the single place where all surveillance and censorship obligations naturally accumulate. It allows product developers to scope their code to satisfy their own narrow requirements without consideration for the obligations of a centralized operator.

Building for credible neutralityA lot of today’s privacy narrative treats architecture as if it were a detail. It is not. You cannot take a transparent ledger, staple confidentiality onto the edge, add a viewing key for comfort, and expect to get programmable private infrastructure.

If the state model is not private from the ground up you get wrappers, third party tools, data custodians, ad hoc disclosure paths and a pile of assumptions that every application drags into the next. Developers do not get a normal programming model where private contracts can call private contracts and users keep state on their own devices. They do not get composability.

The difference matters. In a real private execution environment, users generate transactions locally. They do not outsource their intent to a third party who learns what they are doing. Private contracts interact through a state model designed for privacy. The network settles proofs without becoming the party that knows everyone’s business. Privacy is part of the architecture.

This is why Aztec has taken so long. We built something that makes programmable private state and decentralised settlement live inside the same system. That means proving systems that run on consumer hardware, a transaction architecture built around local private execution, and a programming model where privacy is idiomatic and just works out of the box.

A centralized service can skip much of this. It can hold the key, run the prover, approve the flow and call the result privacy. It gets to market faster because it is not trying to arrive at the same place.

The edgeAdding decentralization does not make obligations disappear. Applications, issuers, frontends, custodians and regulated businesses will continue to exist in a web of obligations and responsibilities. Anyone pretending otherwise is unserious.

The question is where those obligations live. If they are pushed into the settlement layer, the settlement layer is no longer credibly neutral. It needs visibility into everyone and controls over everyone. 

The better answer is selective disclosure. Users and applications should prove specific facts to specific parties for specific purposes. A regulated application may need to know that a user passed a check, that a transaction satisfies a policy, or that an auditor can inspect a particular flow. None of that requires the base network to hold a permanent key into everyone’s activity.

This will be harder to explain to the existing world. New infrastructure always fails to fit the categories built for the old infrastructure. Bitcoin did not arrive as a neatly regulated bank product. Ethereum did not wait for every lawyer to understand smart contracts. Stablecoins and DeFi forced institutions, regulators and users to develop new language around rails that kept existing.

If the standard for privacy infrastructure is to plug into the old world without changing anything, the answer will always be a service with a backdoor. And the result will be to catch crumbs falling from the tables of the old world.

The market worth buildingThe market we should be building is, well, a market. A private financial system that compounds: assets, liquidity, identity, credentials, credit and applications interacting through a shared settlement layer without forcing users to surrender their data to whoever sits in the middle. 

Traditional finance is built out of vertically integrated information silos. Those silos are its moat. Banks, exchanges, custodians, payment processors and data brokers all benefit from controlling the information that flows through them. A global private settlement layer attacks that advantage directly. It lets liquidity and credentials move while outsourcing information custody to neutral cryptographic infrastructure. 

A company wants a moat. A settlement layer wants surface area. A permissioned privacy provider can ration access, raise fees, exclude applications, shape disclosure rules and define acceptable use around its own risk tolerance. These are products pretending to be networks, and not durable financial infrastructure. What bothers me is this compounding category confusion. Networks adding protocol-level viewing keys and transaction controls are using the same language as decentralised programmable privacy, and commentators are treating them as variations of the same thing. They are not.

We have spent nine years walking the hard road. Now, just as we are close, the market has lost faith. Everyone is reaching for whatever lifeline looks immediate. Some of those lifelines will be real. Some will make money. But if crypto responds to its long night by rebuilding financial privacy as permissioned services, then we will have survived by surrendering the property that made the industry worth building.

Markets can grow when the platform is removed from the position where it can dictate the rules. It would be perverse to forget that lesson while building privacy, the domain where control over information matters most.

The land we tillCrypto is in a famine. The land is struggling. We could sell our land for a pittance and survive the season. But the famine will pass, and when it does the land will blossom again. Without the land we are nothing.

We have struggled immensely to create a permissionless network that can marry privacy with decentralisation: an indestructible network whose users cannot be surveilled and whose transactions cannot be censored. This is the soil we have to grow our crops. To surrender a backdoor or a centralized operator for temporary relief is to sell our land for the price of a stablecoin. And we cannot sell the land.

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Aztec Network

Aztec Network

2 Jun

•

xx min read

Who controls your privacy off-switch?Privacy has become a baseline requirement for L1s and L2s who care about bringing real-world users onchain. Users don't want their activity broadcast to competitors or the general public, but applications operating at scale also need some form of auditability, whether for regulators, compliance requirements, or tax reporting. Selective disclosure resolves that tension: privacy by default, with the ability to prove specific facts when required. What separates these networks is not whether they offer that switch, but who gets to hold it.

Aztec, Canton, Starknet, Tempo, and zkSync all offer some form of privacy with selective disclosure, but under the hood they make fundamentally different architectural decisions about who can see your data and who can turn your privacy off. Those decisions determine whether your privacy stays under your own control or sits behind a switch that someone else operates.

Three questions reveal where these networks actually diverge:

Who sees your data?Who can prove the network followed its own rules?Who controls when something gets disclosed?The answers determine whether your privacy off-switch is held by a policy, by an operator's good behavior, or by you alone through a cryptographic proof. As you'll see in this post, there are legitimate reasons to use each one with different tradeoffs. Aztec is the only network, however, where that switch stays in the user's hands, answering all three questions without putting a permissioned set of operators or a standing viewing key in control of your privacy. That gives developers the flexibility to build apps that comply with applicable laws while still keeping full privacy under the user's control.

This article will compare the privacy approaches of Aztec, Canton, Starknet, Tempo, and zkSync to give developers insight into the privacy tradeoffs of each network.

TL;DRHere’s how each network handles the selective disclosure privacy off-switch, and who has control over your privacy: 

Aztec: Only you can see your data, client-side proofs settled to Ethereum let anyone verify every transaction without trusting an operator, and the off-switch stays in your hands, allowing you selectively share information.Canton: Participant nodes read your data in plaintext, no outside party can verify the global ledger, and your off-switch sits with those nodes rather than with you, since disclosure depends on them staying honest.Starknet: No operator ever sees your plaintext because proofs are generated client-side, and those proofs verify the rules, but your off-switch is a standing viewing key that a designated auditor can use to decrypt and trace your entire history on request.Tempo: The zone operator sees every transaction in plaintext, mainnet validity proofs let anyone verify the zone ran correctly, and the operator holds the off-switch, so you are private from the public but not from the operator.‍ zkSync: The operator reads every transaction in plaintext while a validity proof on Ethereum proves it cannot forge state, and the operator holds the off-switch over who sees what, giving you privacy from the outside world but not from the operator.The Comparison In One View

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Comparing your privacy off-switch Each of these networks offers privacy with selective disclosure, but each rests on a different network design with its own tradeoffs. We have ordered them by who holds your privacy off-switch, starting with designs where a third party controls access to your data and ending with designs where that control stays with you. At the top, the switch sits behind a policy promise and an honest operator, and further down it is replaced by proofs that the user generates and controls.

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CantonCanton keeps data private by controlling viewing permissions for the various actors on its network. A transaction splits into per-participant views, so each party receives only the sub-transactions that name it, and the parts it is not entitled to never reach it. The sequencer and mediator move those views without reading them, which is real privacy against those roles.

However, the data is still read in plaintext by the participant nodes that host the relevant parties, and in the common regulated-asset pattern where the issuer is a signatory on its own token, the issuer's node sees every transfer. The harder gap is verification, because no third party can reconstruct the global ledger, so correctness rests on the confirming nodes staying honest and their keys staying safe. In practice the off-switch sits with those nodes rather than with you, since you cannot see when your data is read and cannot stop it.

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TempoTempo is designed for payments and uses validity proofs to verify that each zone is executing correctly, while still giving the zone operator full plaintext visibility into every transaction within that zone. Privacy comes from Tempo Zones, which are parallel execution environments connected to the Tempo mainnet.

By design, the zone operator has visibility into all transactions within the zone, while users see only their own and the public sees only a proof that the zone is valid. Token issuers set compliance controls, allowlists, blocklists, and freezes, enforced across zones. The mainnet checks each zone's validity, so execution is verified, while the operator still reads every transaction in plaintext and holds the off-switch over what is revealed. Your privacy is from the public, not from the operator.

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zkSync PrividiumzkSync Prividium adds the verifiability piece that Canton lacks. Every batch produces a validity proof settled to Ethereum, so a compromised operator cannot forge state or mint tokens from nothing without also forging a proof, which it cannot do. The tradeoff is that the operator processes every transaction in plaintext and decides who sees what, which means the off-switch stays with the operator and your privacy is from the outside world rather than from the operator itself.

This tradeoff has legitimate uses in high-trust institutional environments. If Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo are transacting on a shared network, a zone where BofA's infrastructure processes BofA-originated transactions satisfies internal control requirements while still delivering genuine ZK privacy from the other banks and the rest of the world. Where this model breaks down is in lower-trust environments where giving an operator full plaintext access and the switch that comes with it holds back product design possibilities. 

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Starknet STRK20Starknet's STRK20 breaks from relying on an operator for privacy. It shields ERC-20 balances and transfers in a privacy pool, and every private transaction carries a zero-knowledge proof generated client-side, so no operator sees your plaintext in order to build it.

Disclosure is where STRK20 diverges from Aztec. To join the Starknet Privacy Pool, you register an encrypted viewing key onchain, and it sits there for the life of your participation. On a regulatory request, a designated auditing entity can decrypt that key and trace your complete transaction history, forwards and backwards. StarkWare calls this ‘not a backdoor’ but a carefully scoped access mechanism, and the safeguard is a policy promise that the auditor decrypts only when required. The privacy is cryptographic, but the off-switch is a standing key that someone else holds and can flip whether or not you are watching.

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AztecOn Aztec your private state lives as encrypted private data that only you can decrypt. The contract developer can choose what state is public and what is private, and whether your encrypted private data is emitted onchain as a private log or shared off-chain instead.

Your transactions get proven client-side on your own device, so no sequencer or operator sees your unencrypted private data. Those proofs settle to Ethereum, which gives the same integrity anchor marketed by Prividium, with every transaction verified and no forged state, but without a single operator who reads your data. The base protocol decentralizes sequencing, proving, and governance, so there is no operator to choose and trust in the first place.

Disclosure is your choice too: you decide who learns your private data, and whether they learn it in encrypted or decrypted form. To grant discovery without readability, you share an app-specific tagging secret that lets an auditor find your data in encrypted form without being able to decrypt and read it. This is enough to prove things calculated from that data, such as a tax basis or a profit and loss figure. Granting permission to actually read the data works differently. There's no per-contract read key you can hand out, because decryption uses your master viewing key, which would unlock all your data across every contract. So instead of sharing a key, you share the data itself, plus a proof that your plaintext is what encrypts to the on-chain ciphertext.

Aztec has true selective disclosure in that you can selectively share it, and nothing else you don’t need to. This is app specific, meaning that private data discoverability access on one app does not grant access on another. Most importantly, the off-switch stays in your hands, and you never need to trust the network to handle access to any of your private data and activity.

This is not just conceptual: here is a working proof-of-concept of this model on Aztec. PrivPNL takes you from private DEX trades through a tagging-key disclosure to a browser-generated ZK proof of your PnL. The auditor verifies a proof while the prover only has to reveal the amount they owe, and your portfolio stays private.

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Users need to hold their own off-switch, not a promise to look awayCanton keeps the switch with the participant nodes that read your data in plaintext, so disclosure rests on those nodes staying honest rather than on anything you control. Tempo similarly gives the off-switch to a zone-based node operator, but allows you to verify the correctness of transactions using validity proofs. Prividium hardens that promise with a proof settled to Ethereum, a real improvement, but the operator still reads every transaction and still decides who sees what. This can work well for large institutions, but small to medium sized enterprises are left with the same privacy as their current banks unless they run their own Prividium nodes. STRK20 moves the switch into a standing viewing key and asks you to trust that a designated auditor reaches for it only when needed. In each of these models the real question is not whether your privacy can be switched off, but who gets to do the switching, and whether you would even know it happened.

Aztec takes the operator and the standing key out of the question entirely. You keep the data, you generate the proof, and you disclose the result, one fact at a time and only when you choose to. The off-switch never leaves your hands, and no operator, auditor, or node can reach it on your behalf. This is one of the benefits of a network that offers fully programmable, privacy-preserving smart contracts that put you in control. 

Selective disclosure is how privacy survives contact with a regulator, and the model you pick decides who can open your history when you are not looking. On Aztec, that answer is no one but you.‍

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Let's BuildDive into the technical details: Try a live demo of selective disclosure on Aztec and read the technical article on how it was built. 

‍Integrate with Aztec: Reach out if you are interested in integrating privacy into your project.

@BinanceWallet has kicked off Trade and Win Season 4, a two-week on-chain trading competition run in partnership with @Virtuals_io and built entirely around the AI agent ecosystem on the @RobinhoodChain.

What the Competition Involves The campaign runs from July 22 to August 5, 2026. Participants trade eligible tokens launched through the @Virtuals_io protocol, with all activity required to take place on-chain via the Binance Web3 interface. Rankings are determined by realized profit and loss (PnL), and the top performers share a prize pool of 60,000 $USDG.

This is the first season of the Trade and Win series to focus exclusively on a single external blockchain, marking a deliberate push by Binance into the Robinhood Chain ecosystem. The move comes weeks after @BinanceWallet added Robinhood Chain filters to its Meme Rush token discovery feature, adding support for Robinhood Chain projects including Virtuals Protocol on July 18 and 19, roughly two and a half weeks after Robinhood Chain's mainnet went live on July 1.

Why Robinhood Chain Is Attracting Attention Robinhood Chain is a layer-2 blockchain built on Arbitrum and designed for tokenized real-world assets and decentralized finance applications. Its public mainnet launch brought tokenized stock trading live in more than 120 countries and introduced Robinhood Earn, a decentralized lending product offering an estimated 7% yield on USDG, as Robinhood expands beyond its brokerage roots into crypto, tokenized assets, and AI-powered trading.

@Virtuals_io has moved quickly to establish itself on the new network. Between 2,100 and 2,400 individual AI agents went live on the chain within roughly two weeks of that integration, generating trading volume in the range of $77 million to $100 million. The $VIRTUAL token saw a roughly 20% price increase tied to the Robinhood Chain integration milestones.

For Binance, anchoring a high-profile trading competition to Robinhood Chain at this early stage serves a dual purpose: it draws its own user base onto a fast-growing network while giving @Virtuals_io tokens a concrete incentive layer. Whether trading volumes hold beyond the promotional window remains the key question for both ecosystems.

Sources:
Crypto Briefing: Virtuals Protocol agents now discoverable on Binance Wallet's Meme Rush after Robinhood Chain integration
CoinDesk: Robinhood rolls out public blockchain as it expands deeper into crypto
Robinhood Newsroom: Robinhood Chain Mainnet launch announcement

Movement has joined the Mesh Alliance Program (MAP), Mesh's industry-wide interoperability initiative designed to simplify the growing complexity of crypto payments. Movement joins more than 50 partners that connect through Mesh's shared infrastructure, giving every app built on Movement a direct path to the hundreds of accounts where users already hold funds.

Accessing onchain liquidityFor Movement, Mesh closes the gap that stops most users before they start: getting money onto the network. Any app built on Movement can embed Mesh, let a user connect an account they already hold, and pull that balance onchain in a couple of taps. No withdrawal form. No wallet address to copy. No network to pick.

Movement adds one thing on top. A user holding MOVE, or any other token, on an exchange can deposit and receive a stablecoin on Movement instead. The asset the user holds and the asset the app needs do not have to match. The conversion happens inside the deposit.

Motion Wallet ships with Mesh firstMotion Wallet is Movement's self-custodial wallet. Keys stay on the user's device. It ships with the Mesh integration first. A user opens Motion Wallet, connects an exchange account through Mesh, and funds the wallet in a few taps. The same pattern is open to every partner building on Movement.

Remittance corridor realityRemittances to low and middle-income countries reached $685 billion in 2024. Those transfers settle in 278ms on Movement. But settlement speed only matters once the money is on the network, and that first step is where most products lose their users.

Most people in the markets Movement's partners serve already hold a balance on an exchange. They have the money. What they lack is a way to move it into an app without a withdrawal process that loses them halfway through. The markets Mesh is expanding into next, across Latin America, Asia, and Europe, are the same corridors Movement's partners are building for.

Movement CEO, Torab Torabi explains, "Until now, if you wanted to move money in crypto, you had to do all the heavy lifting yourself. Set up a wallet, keep balances on a couple of exchanges, bridge between networks, then paste in a 40-character address and hope the money actually showed up. Nobody liked doing that. We put up with it because there wasn't a better option. This is the pain point that Mesh alleviates. Your money moves from wherever it is to where you needs to be. The bridging happens underneath, where you as the user never have to deal with it. If we want the next billion people moving funds onchain, it has to be that simple."

Full CEX deposit support on Movement targets Q3 2026. Once network support is live across exchanges, the integration takes one to three weeks. The alliance is open to every partner building on Movement.

Move is for Money.

*This post is informational only and does not constitute an offer or solicitation of any digital asset, security, financial instrument, investment product, or stablecoin, or financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. Mesh's products and services are operated solely by Mesh, subject to Mesh's terms and applicable law. Products built on Movement Network by independent partners are operated by those partners subject to their own terms, eligibility criteria, and jurisdictional availability, and may not be available to US persons or in jurisdictions where prohibited. Product descriptions reflect publicly available information and have not been independently verified. Forward-looking statements reflect current expectations and are not guarantees.

Bitcoin [BTC] spot ETF net flows have measured a cumulative $930.39 million since July 14. Data from SoSoValue showed that the BTC spot ETFs have seen net inflows since the 14th of the month.

It was the first time since May that the inflows streak was maintained for over five successive days.

Pessimism reigns supreme despite ETF flow shift Technical indicators flashed a long-term buy signal for Bitcoin. Yet, liquidity posed a serious challenge to any attempt at recovery, AMBCrypto reported.

A price breakout without fresh liquidity in the form of stablecoin netflows was not indicative of a macro bottom for BTC.

Source: CryptoQuant Crypto analyst Darkfost observed that the Coinbase Premium Gap has been negative since the 6th of May. This represented the highest level of pessimism in two years.

Coinbase premium refers to the difference in Bitcoin prices between Coinbase Advanced, where institutions and professionals trade, and Binance, which is retail-dominated.

A negative trend implies steady selling pressure from smart money, despite the attempted rallies toward $70k over the past month.

The analyst concluded that investors would choose to limit risk when macroeconomic or geopolitical factors were unstable, as they have been in recent months.

Leverage is gradually leaving the Bitcoin market The price of Bitcoin has gradually been rising since July 1, when the price reached a swing low of $57,800. The gains since then have been accompanied by a decline in realized volatility.

Source: Axel Adler Jr. Crypto analyst Axel Adler Jr. used the 1-week realized volatility, smoothed by the 30DMA, compared to Bitcoin’s price and its 200DMA.

Since 2016, 92% of trading days have seen higher realized volatility than the current levels.

The falling realized volatility alongside rising prices meant that the most recent price bounce came without any sharp price swings.

Source: Axel Adler Jr. The Open Interest to market capitalization ratio measures if the derivatives share is rising or falling compared to price trends. It shifted negatively in early July and has been negative for 21 consecutive days.

The decline suggests derivatives leverage has continued falling even as Bitcoin recovered, reducing the immediate risk of a large liquidation-driven move. Compared to a month ago, the threat of a liquidation cascade was lower due to these factors.

The analyst concluded that the market is in a low-activity phase. A sustained price move beyond $66k-$72k, alongside further derivatives reduction, is needed to give a major signal of market recovery.

Final Summary Bitcoin ETF inflows were improving, and its realized volatility was falling. The derivatives leverage was in decline as prices advanced higher, but a breach of $66k-$72k is needed to majorly reduce the threat of further bearishness in the long-term.

Cover image via depositphotos.com Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. The financial and market information provided on U.Today is intended for informational purposes only. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. Conduct your own research by contacting financial experts before making any investment decisions. We believe that all content is accurate as of the date of publication, but certain offers mentioned may no longer be available.

American institutional investors have begun reallocating capital into spot XRP ETFs while actively taking profits in the DeFi segment. According to SoSoValue, daily net inflows into XRP funds reached $5.66 million, while Hyperliquid (HYPE) funds lost $698,040.

Wall Street's shift in priorities comes amid rapid progress in the U.S. Senate on the historic CLARITY Act. The bill, passed by the House of Representatives in July 2025, transfers oversight of digital commodities to the CFTC while leaving the SEC in control only of tokens classified as securities.

Why XRP is gaining traction ahead of the CLARITY ActOptimism surged after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the bill was on the "1-yard line" before approval. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and White House officials also confirmed progress in negotiations, easing disagreements over ethics provisions.

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A special Senate briefing will take place behind closed doors in the near future, with the goal of accelerating an official vote before lawmakers leave for recess. Despite opposition from Democrats, prediction markets now estimate the bill's chances of success at 50%–70%.

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For investors, buying XRP ETFs is a beta bet on the American company Ripple, which develops payment solutions based on the XRP Ledger blockchain. Full legal clarity under the CLARITY Act would give the company's infrastructure more room to expand, including the scaling of its new RLUSD stablecoin.

In the long term, this ripple effect could sharply increase transaction activity across XRPL and trigger mass adoption of XRP by large businesses. Major capital is clearly moving into regulated assets ahead of the curve, restructuring portfolios around the future rules of the market.

Wall Street prefers policyYesterday's crypto ETF data clearly illustrates this trend. While Bitcoin continues to attract most of the capital, recording its sixth consecutive day of growth, and Ethereum steadily holds its position, a clear divide has emerged in the altcoin market.

XRP is attracting funds at roughly the same pace as Solana. However, while capital in Solana remains at high levels because of the network's strong performance in the real-world asset tokenization sector, the DeFi-focused Hyperliquid segment is losing ground.

Investors are actively withdrawing money from BlackRock's iShares HYPE fund. Capital flows into Bitwise's fund have completely stalled, while Grayscale recorded only a symbolic daily transaction.

Total US Spot XRP ETF net inflow over the last 30 days, Source: SoSoValueThis outflow continued a negative trend for Hyperliquid, whose ETFs already suffered substantial losses last week. The rest of the market is currently at a standstill: investors showed only minimal interest in Litecoin and Dogecoin, while capital flows into BNB, LINK, HBAR, AVAX, and DOT funds stopped completely.

An official date for the Senate vote has not yet been set, but fund data confirms that major U.S. buyers no longer want to play regulatory roulette and are already choosing assets tied to American jurisdiction.

US spot Ethereum ETFs have recorded a third consecutive day of net inflows, giving ETH traders another sign that institutional demand is improving after a choppy stretch for the products.

Farside Investors data shows the Ethereum ETF group brought in $37.47 million in net inflows on July 21. BlackRock’s ETHA led the day with $52.79 million in net inflows, while Fidelity’s FETH posted $15.32 million in net outflows.

That split matters. The headline number was positive, but the flow picture was not evenly distributed across issuers. BlackRock continued to attract capital, while Fidelity saw money leave the product.

For Ethereum, the short-term message is still constructive. A third straight day of net inflows suggests demand is not isolated to a single session. But it is also too early to call it a durable trend.

TL;DR US spot Ethereum ETFs recorded $37.47 million in net inflows on July 21. BlackRock’s ETHA led with $52.79 million in inflows. Fidelity’s FETH saw $15.32 million in outflows, showing the demand is still uneven across issuers. Ethereum ETF Demand Is Improving, But Unevenly Ethereum ETFs have had a more complicated start than Bitcoin ETFs.

Bitcoin’s spot ETF launch quickly became one of the market’s dominant demand stories. Ethereum’s products have had to fight harder for attention, partly because ETH sits in a different part of the market structure. It is not only a monetary asset or store-of-value trade. It is also tied to staking, DeFi, stablecoins, Layer 2 networks, and smart contract activity.

That makes the ETF story more nuanced.

Investors are not just asking whether ETH is “digital gold.” They are asking whether Ethereum remains the core settlement layer for crypto finance and whether an ETF is the cleanest way to express that view.

A third day of inflows helps answer part of that question. It shows that investors are still allocating through the ETF wrapper, even after periods of weaker demand.

But the issuer split is important. BlackRock pulling in more than $50 million while Fidelity saw outflows suggests capital is concentrating around the largest and most liquid products. That is common in ETF markets. Larger issuers often attract the deepest flows because institutions prefer liquidity, brand familiarity, and tight trading conditions.

For smaller or less dominant products, that can make the competitive environment harder.

Why BlackRock’s ETHA Matters BlackRock’s ETHA remains one of the key products to watch because BlackRock has already shaped the Bitcoin ETF market.

When BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF began attracting large flows, traders treated that as a major sign of institutional demand. The same logic applies to Ethereum, although the scale is different.

If ETHA continues to lead inflows, the market may start viewing BlackRock’s Ethereum product as the main institutional gateway into ETH exposure.

That would not automatically mean ETH price strength. ETF inflows are only one part of the market. Spot demand, derivatives positioning, staking dynamics, macro liquidity, and broader risk appetite all matter.

Still, ETF flows are visible, trackable, and easy for traders to use as a sentiment gauge.

That is why a positive three-day streak gets attention.

Fidelity Outflows Keep The Picture Balanced The Fidelity outflow is the part of the data that prevents the story from becoming too bullish.

A healthy ETF market can still have mixed flows across issuers. Money can move from one product to another, or investors can reduce exposure in one fund while adding elsewhere. But outflows from a major issuer show that demand is not broad-based across the full category.

That is a reminder to keep the data in proportion.

The Ethereum ETF group had a positive day. BlackRock led strongly. The streak extended. But this is not the same as saying all Ethereum ETFs are seeing synchronized demand.

The market will need more sessions before the trend becomes more convincing.

ETH Traders Need More Than Three Days For ETH traders, the key question is whether ETF demand can become persistent.

A few days of inflows can support sentiment, especially when they come during a market that is already watching institutional products closely. But sustained inflows over several weeks would carry more weight.

The ETF story also needs to be read alongside Ethereum’s broader fundamentals.

Ethereum transaction activity, Layer 2 usage, stablecoin settlement, DeFi liquidity, and staking demand all feed into the market’s long-term view of ETH. ETFs give traditional investors access to the asset, but they do not replace the need for Ethereum itself to remain useful on-chain.

That is why the ETF data is important but not complete.

For now, the July 21 inflow number is a positive signal. BlackRock’s ETHA continues to show institutional pull, and the group has extended its inflow streak to three days.

The next test is whether that demand can continue without relying on one issuer to carry the category.

This article is based on Farside Investors Ethereum ETF flow data and supporting SoSoValue ETF data.

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

A bug that sat quietly in Zilliqa’s Ledger hardware wallet app for seven years just went from dormant to devastating. The flaw, present in every version of the app since its 2019 launch, allowed attackers to recover users’ private keys from publicly available on-chain data.

Zilliqa detected active exploitation on July 19, 2026. Two days later, the team isolated the root cause and immediately suspended all native ZIL transactions.

What went wrong, and for how long The vulnerability lives in how the Ledger app generates nonces for EC-Schnorr signatures during native ZIL transactions. The most significant 64 bits of the ephemeral nonce were fixed at zero, stemming from a mishandling of a 32-byte copy from a 40-byte randomness buffer.

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That partial predictability is a death sentence for cryptographic security. An attacker with access to just five or more affected signatures, all of which are visible on-chain to anyone who cares to look, could use a technique called lattice reduction to mathematically reverse-engineer a user’s private key.

This is not a flaw in Zilliqa’s blockchain itself, nor in Ledger’s core hardware security. It’s a bug in the companion app, the software layer that connects the Ledger device to the Zilliqa network. Zilliqa’s SDKs, including zilliqa-js, gozilliqa-sdk, and pyzil, remain completely unaffected. EVM-compatible transactions processed through the Ledger are also fine, since those use a different signing routine.

The fallout so far Upbit, one of the largest crypto exchanges in South Korea, designated ZIL as a cautionary asset and halted both deposits and withdrawals. Other exchanges are reportedly monitoring the situation.

Zilliqa’s response has been a mix of crisis management and damage control. The team confirmed the root cause was isolated on July 21, and they are now collaborating directly with Ledger to develop a fix.

The company has been explicit in its guidance to affected users. Compromised keys need to be retired entirely, not transferred. If an attacker has already derived your private key, they can front-run any transfer you attempt. The recommended path is to generate entirely new keys through a secure method and treat the old ones as permanently burned.

What investors should watch The immediate concern for ZIL holders is whether the suspension of native transactions will be brief or prolonged. A fix requires coordination between Zilliqa and Ledger. Until a patched app is released, audited, and verified, native transactions will likely remain frozen. With Upbit already halting deposits and withdrawals, trading volumes for ZIL are under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously.

For anyone holding ZIL on a Ledger device, the priority is straightforward: do not attempt to move funds using the compromised app. Wait for official guidance from Zilliqa on the key retirement process.

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

Tokenized stocks, the blockchain-native versions of traditional equities, have surged to a record market capitalization of $2.3B as of mid-July 2026. That figure has roughly doubled since March, when the sector first crossed the $1B threshold.

BNB Chain has emerged as the clear frontrunner in this race, capturing approximately 30% of the total market share. With cumulative trading volumes surpassing $5B by late June and over 700 tokenized stocks and ETFs available on the chain, Binance’s network has become the de facto home for on-chain equities.

Who’s actually building this market Three names dominate the tokenized stock leaderboard, and they’re not exactly obscure players. Ondo Global Markets leads the pack with around $955M in issued on-chain equities, making it the single largest issuer in the space. That’s nearly half the total market, concentrated in one protocol.

Kraken’s xStocks comes in second with approximately $507M in equity value, while Binance’s own bStocks accounts for roughly $334M. Together, these three platforms represent the vast majority of the tokenized stock market’s capitalization.

BNB Chain’s appeal in this sector comes down to basics: lower transaction fees and higher throughput compared to Ethereum and Solana. When you’re trying to replicate the experience of buying Apple or Tesla stock but on a blockchain, nobody wants to pay $15 in gas fees for a $50 fractional share. Both Ethereum and Solana maintain meaningful positions in the tokenized equity space, but BNB Chain’s cost advantage has proven decisive so far.

The available selection on BNB Chain includes tokenized versions of major companies like AAPL and TSLA, essentially giving users a crypto-native way to gain exposure to traditional blue chips. Think of it as Robinhood meets DeFi, except the settlement layer is a blockchain instead of the DTCC’s legacy infrastructure.

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The DTCC enters the chat Speaking of the DTCC, here’s where things get genuinely interesting. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, which processes virtually every securities transaction in the US, conducted its first live trades of tokenized US securities on July 15, 2026.

For context, the DTCC settles roughly $2.2 quadrillion in securities annually. Its entry into tokenized trading isn’t just a proof of concept. It’s a signal that the largest financial plumbing organization in the world sees blockchain-based settlement as a viable path forward.

This matters because tokenized stocks have historically lived in a regulatory gray zone. When the entity responsible for clearing most US equity trades starts processing tokenized versions of those same securities, it lends a degree of institutional legitimacy that no amount of DeFi protocol marketing could achieve on its own.

The growth trajectory also benefits from features that traditional brokerages struggle to match. Tokenized stocks trade 24/7, not just during the roughly six and a half hours that US exchanges are open. They enable fractional ownership at granular levels, and they integrate directly with DeFi protocols for lending, borrowing, and yield generation.

In English: you can buy a sliver of a Tesla share at 2 AM, use it as collateral in a lending protocol, and earn yield on it simultaneously. Traditional finance would need about four intermediaries and three business days to approximate something similar.

Scale and perspective Look, $2.3B is meaningful growth, but context matters. The global equities market is worth well north of $100 trillion. Tokenized stocks currently represent a rounding error in that context, roughly the market cap of a mid-tier regional bank.

But the trajectory is what deserves attention. Doubling from $1B to $2.3B in roughly four months suggests the sector is hitting an adoption inflection point. The involvement of Kraken and Backed, which are expanding trading opportunities across multiple chains, indicates that infrastructure is scaling to meet demand rather than the other way around.

Ondo Global Markets has been particularly aggressive, offering numerous US stocks and ETFs through its platform. This breadth of selection matters because tokenized stocks are only useful if investors can actually access the names they want to own.

For investors watching this space, the competitive dynamics between chains could prove as important as the overall market growth. BNB Chain’s current dominance isn’t guaranteed. Ethereum’s institutional credibility and Solana’s speed improvements could shift market share in coming quarters, particularly if fee structures become more competitive.

The bigger question is whether tokenized stocks remain a crypto-native phenomenon or evolve into a mainstream alternative to traditional brokerage accounts. The DTCC’s involvement suggests the latter is at least plausible. If traditional clearinghouses begin routing meaningful volume through tokenized rails, the $2.3B market cap that looks impressive today could end up looking quaint.

The risk side of the equation isn’t trivial, though. Regulatory frameworks for tokenized securities remain fragmented across jurisdictions. The securities themselves introduce counterparty risk tied to the issuers, and smart contract vulnerabilities could expose holders to losses that traditional stock ownership doesn’t carry. Investors treating tokenized stocks as equivalent to their traditional counterparts should understand they’re also inheriting blockchain-specific risk layers that don’t exist in conventional markets.

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

Flash Trade, a decentralized perpetual trading platform operating on the Solana network, experienced an exploit resulting in the unauthorized withdrawal of $98,000 in USDC. The incident took place on July 22 at 00:21 SGT and was linked to a validation flaw in the MagicBlock software development kit (SDK) used by the platform.

MagicBlock SDK flaw triggers unauthorized withdrawalThe exploit was traced to a vulnerability within the #[ephemeral] Anchor macro in the MagicBlock SDK, which handles callback processes for integrator smart contracts during undelegation requests. The flaw allowed an attacker to bypass undelegation checks by submitting a fabricated account designed to mimic a genuine user deposit.

Within a single transaction, the attacker’s account was used as the buffer for a sibling undelegation instruction. While the system correctly verified that the buffer was a signer owned by the delegation program, it failed to check that the buffer’s seeds matched the correct program-derived address. This oversight provided an opening for the exploit and resulted in the unauthorized withdrawal.

MagicBlock responded by reviewing other integrations that used the affected macro and notifying impacted projects. A patched version of the SDK, 0.16.2, now addresses the missing validation and is being recommended for immediate adoption by all integrators.

Mini dictionary: MagicBlock is a blockchain infrastructure company specializing in software tools and SDKs that enable fast and secure smart contract integration on Solana and other networks.

On July 22 at 00:21 SGT, Flash experienced an attack that resulted in a 98,000 USDC withdrawal from the platform. Flash’s batching and monitoring systems surfaced the activity immediately, and the team paused deposits and withdrawals within minutes.

According to statements from MagicBlock, the company has already worked with affected ecosystem participants to prevent similar incidents and is encouraging early upgrades to the patched SDK version.

Flash Trade reported that its new monitoring and batching systems flagged the unauthorized withdrawal within minutes, allowing the team to react quickly. All trading, deposits, and withdrawals were immediately paused as a precaution while the incident was investigated in coordination with MagicBlock.

Normal trading functions resumed within a few hours, but deposits and withdrawals remained offline for approximately 24 hours during a reconciliation process aimed at confirming all platform balances and ensuring user fund integrity. The team emphasized that this suspension was intentional to guarantee a full and accurate reconciliation.

Flash Trade and MagicBlock have jointly contributed to a reimbursement fund covering the entire affected amount, ensuring that users bear no losses resulting from the exploit.

Both Flash Trade and MagicBlock affirmed that they would fully cover the unauthorized withdrawals, guaranteeing that no user funds would be lost. The prompt response and full reimbursement have drawn praise from the broader Solana community.

Industry reaction and security recommendationsArmani Ferrante, CEO of Backpack, an established digital asset wallet provider, commented publicly on the incident. Ferrante identified the exploit as an example of system design weaknesses in margin trading platforms, suggesting the need for a structural overhaul. He recommended implementing an isolated, formally verified custody contract combined with a 24-hour withdrawal timelock to provide platforms with more time to halt suspicious transactions in the event of a compromise.

Such mechanisms, Ferrante argued, would help contain damage from attacks affecting oracle systems, wallet compromises, and margin manipulation. He recognized Flash Trade’s rapid response, noting the importance of proactive security measures in reducing potential losses.

MagicBlock, following the incident, has pledged ongoing collaboration with blockchain integrators, auditors, and independent security researchers to improve the resilience of their SDK offerings and support the wider ecosystem in mitigating such vulnerabilities moving forward.

PlatformExploit DateAsset AffectedAmount LostUser Funds Covered?Flash TradeJuly 22, 2026USDC$98,000Yes (fully covered)Wanchain Cardano BridgePrevious monthsNIGHT515 millionN/ADisclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

Uniswap [UNI] continues drawing renewed attention. This comes after exchange balances recorded their largest decline of 2026. Around 8.4 million UNI left trading platforms within 24 hours, ending weeks of relatively stable exchange flows.

Normally, large outflows from exchanges are indicative of investors moving assets to self-custody or DeFi applications. Therefore, this removes the tokens from the potential for immediate supply.

In UNI’s case, the timing also coincides with renewed focus on its fee and burn narrative, Robinhood Chain launch, tokenized asset support, and Spark’s $150 million v4 liquidity migration. This could encourage longer holding periods.

Source: Santiment However, exchange outflows alone do not necessarily guarantee sustained accumulation. This is because later on, tokens can return to exchanges if market sentiment weakens.

Nevertheless, when combined with increasing network activity, continued decreases in exchange outflows would likely validate increased conviction among holders.

Alternatively, a reversal in exchange flow trends would indicate that the recent optimism was short-lived rather than the start of a larger trend towards accumulation.

UNI attracts fresh whale accumulation Following the drop in the exchange supply of UNI, there was also a new increase in the accumulation by a HODLer. A four-year-old wallet built a new 82.891K UNI position worth roughly $305,000, completing the purchase in three transactions at an average price of $3.68.

Source: Arkham The timing of the accumulation was notable. This is because UNI had already gained 3.33% over the past week and 23.59% over the last month. Thus, it appears that UNI’s price movement was improving even before the accumulation began.

Source: Arkham Moreover, the accumulation indicates that the wallet was responding to strengthening market conditions rather than attempting to catch a falling asset. Nevertheless, one transaction cannot determine a larger trend since even shorter-term increases in price can reverse.

If additional long-term wallets continue accumulating while UNI extends its recent gains, the improving price structure would carry stronger conviction across the market.

That aside, on-chain activity presents a mixed picture for Uniswap’s accumulation narrative.

However, both new wallet creation and unique trader growth have generally slowed down. Meanwhile, protocol fees support over 107 million UNI burned, strengthening token economics.

All this together, lasting trading activity, rather than parked capital, will determine whether tighter supply translates into sustained demand and broader price strength across upcoming market cycles instead of temporary momentum alone.

Final Summary Uniswap saw record exchange outflows, but sustained demand will determine whether accumulation continues. UNI attracted fresh whale buying, while stronger network activity could confirm a lasting recovery.

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For years, tokenization of real-world assets has promised to unlock liquidity in traditionally illiquid markets. Private credit, a multi-trillion-dollar asset class run mostly through opaque bilateral agreements, should be a prime beneficiary. Yet most tokenized credit issuances have been primary placements. Investors who onboarded early ended up holding positions with no clear exit. A transaction announced Tuesday suggests that template might finally be fracturing.

According to the original report, Ocean RWA Finance, Symphony Digital Assets and Alpha Jaguar Capital completed what they describe as the first institutional secondary trade in tokenised private credit on Avalanche. The counterparties settled a tokenized credit position, though the precise size and terms were not disclosed. The group framed the transaction as an “early blueprint” for how secondary markets might function in this corner of decentralized finance.

Why Secondary Trading Matters The tokenized asset sector recently crossed the $20 billion mark on-chain, as detailed in BlockchainReporter’s Weekly Tokenization Roundup, but a large share of that value sits in primary issuances and stablecoin collateral. Functional secondary markets remain absent for most tokenized private credit instruments. Without the ability to trade positions mid-tenor, institutional investors face the same illiquidity they would in traditional private debt markets—defeating part of the on-chain value proposition.

A demonstrated secondary trade, even one OTC transaction, provides a template for price discovery and settlement mechanics. It shows that a legal and operational pathway exists for moving a tokenized credit exposure from one regulated entity to another without unwinding the underlying loan. That is the basic plumbing that market makers and eventual automated pools will need.

Avalanche Draws Institutional Plumbing The choice of Avalanche as the settlement layer is not incidental. The network’s subnet architecture permits institutional participants to run permissioned environments with customizable compliance rules while still anchoring to a public chain. That design has made it a venue for several RWA pilots. Developer activity on Avalanche has been climbing, with the chain recently ranking among the top networks in BlockchainReporter’s Top 10 Blockchains by Developer Activity This Week.

Ocean RWA Finance, the transaction’s lead arranger, operates a regulated tokenization platform that integrates on-chain settlement with off-chain legal enforcement. Symphony Digital Assets and Alpha Jaguar Capital are institutional allocators active in digital fixed-income markets. The fact that these firms completed a secondary trade without a centralized exchange intermediary hints at a market structure where bespoke OTC desks and peer-to-peer protocols coexist for sizeable positions.

What the Blueprint Leaves Unanswered One secondary trade does not make a liquid market. The deal was executed as a bilateral transfer between known counterparties, not through a public order book or automated market maker. How price was determined and what kind of spread the seller accepted remain unknown. The wider question is whether a cluster of such trades can grow dense enough to attract third-party market makers willing to hold inventory.

Regulatory posture adds uncertainty. Tokenized private credit instruments sit at the intersection of securities law and credit regulation. Jurisdictional ambiguity could slow the emergence of secondary platforms, particularly if regulators treat such tokens as investment contracts requiring trading venue licenses. The Avalanche trade was conducted between regulated entities, but replicating that model at scale across multiple geographies is a heavier lift.

The other open variable is fragmentation. Multiple chains are hosting tokenized credit issuances, and liquidity could splinter across Avalanche, Ethereum layer-2s, Cosmos app-chains, and proprietary platforms. Standardized token formats and cross-chain messaging will be necessary if secondary markets are to consolidate rather than fracture.

Still, the direction of travel is hard to ignore. Private credit tokenization has moved from proof-of-concept to primary issuance and now to secondary transfer. Each step reduces the friction that has kept institutional capital cautious. The Ocean RWA Finance deal is a small trade in the arithmetic of a $20 billion sector, but its function as an early operational blueprint might matter more than its size. For allocators watching whether tokenized credit can evolve beyond locked-up capital, the blueprint just became a working draft.

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U.S. Solana exchange-traded funds (ETFs) saw significant investor interest with $5.83 million in net inflows recorded on July 21, marking the highest daily inflow in two weeks. This surge was concentrated entirely in the Bitwise BSOL fund, highlighting the fund’s appeal among participants despite a broader trend of smaller or stagnant inflows. The overall assets under management (AUM) for all U.S. Solana ETFs stand at approximately $912.73 million, with cumulative net flows reaching $1.16 billion. This development comes after a period of subdued activity in the Solana ETF market, potentially indicating renewed confidence among market participants.

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Key Takeaways The $5.83 million net inflow into Solana ETFs appears to suggest a renewed interest in the Solana market, driven primarily by the BSOL fund. This inflow marks the largest daily increase in 14 days, indicating a potential shift in participant sentiment. The total AUM of U.S. Solana ETFs remains robust, reflecting consistent engagement despite previous flat inflow periods. What to Watch Market participants will be closely monitoring whether this inflow pattern continues, as sustained interest could impact Solana’s price trajectory. Key factors to watch include further ETF inflow data, potential regulatory developments, and innovations within the Solana ecosystem that could drive demand. Observers will also be attentive to any announcements from key figures like Anatoly Yakovenko or developments related to Solana-based financial products approved by regulatory bodies. These elements could be consistent with scenarios where Solana’s price increases, potentially reaching or surpassing the $90 mark in July.

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Term Structure

Contract Odds Δ since publish Volume 24h August 1 2026 7.5% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.2% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.1% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.9% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.6% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.4% — — View market → August 1 2026 1.6% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.4% — — View market → August 1 2026 2.6% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.1% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.7% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.1% — — View market → August 1 2026 22% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.1% — — View market → August 1 2026 0.1% — — View market →

Melee Markets, an emerging Solana prediction market application, has revealed the mechanics behind its Parimutuel Market Maker model. 

Designed to enable permissionless prediction market creation, Melee’s PMM architecture represents an ambitious departure from the order book model made popular by heavyweights like Polymarket and Kalshi.

With Melee approaching its mainnet launch, prediction markets sit at a critical inflection point as traders eagerly await the next landmark event following the Football World Cup.

The Parimutuel Market Maker After raising $3.5M in last year’s September pre-seed, Melee Markets is closer than ever to its mainnet launch, bringing permissionless prediction markets to Solana DeFi. Originally touted as “pump.fun meets PolyMarket”, Melee Markets has published further details on its novel design, the Parimutuel Market Maker.

Unlike existing prediction markets, which rely on orderbooks and professional market makers, Melee claims its PMM pools enable permissionless market creation and profitable passive liquidity provision.

In the simplest terms, Melee’s PMM is a passive liquidity pool that, similar to rival prediction markets, resolves to one of several mutually exclusive outcomes. Market participants can join presales to obtain pool shares and provide initial liquidity, with resolution share prices changing dynamically based on trading activity.

Open positions continuously grow based on counterparty liquidity rewards and on spread captured by an instant cashout vault, creating what Melee Markets calls a rising minimum-return floor.

According to simulated tests on 126 ‘15 Minute BTC Up-or-Down’ markets, Melee’s PMM model returned higher profits in 65.1% of winning positions when compared against traditional market structures. Melee attributes this edge to counterparty rewards, highlighting that heightened volatility resulted in greater outcomes for participants.

Prediction Markets Seek Continuation Following World Cup Melee Market’s drive towards mainnet launch comes in the wake of one of the biggest events in the prediction market calendar. According to Artemis Data, the 2026 FIFA World Cup drove trading volumes on venues like Kalshi to new all-time highs. In the tournament’s first week, prediction markets collectively witnessed over $17B in trading volume.

With the great speculative event behind us, prediction markets may face a quieter period over the coming weeks and months until the US midterm elections. Onchain data suggests prediction market trading on Solana may be slowing down, with World.xyz spot volumes dropping after recording all-time highs during the World Cup Final.

Between onchain venues like World.xyz, and creative new mechanisms like Melee Market’s PMM, Solana DeFi is one step closer to challenging the dominance of established platforms and joining the race in one of crypto’s biggest verticals.

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