Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Aurora Labs has launched native cross-chain funding for Solflare wallets through Aurora Intents, allowing users to move assets from Bitcoin, Ethereum and other leading blockchains directly into Solana without interacting with traditional bridge interfaces.

Aurora Intents is powered by NEAR Intents, which settles more than $23 billion in total transaction volume and processes over $2.3 billion each month.

The integration introduces permanent deposit addresses for each supported blockchain and token. According to the projects, users simply transfer assets to the assigned address, while Aurora Intents automatically manages cross-chain routing, liquidity sourcing and token conversion using NEAR Intents infrastructure before delivering assets to Solflare.

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Aurora Labs says transfers from Ethereum-based networks generally complete in under one minute, while Bitcoin deposits take about 14 minutes.

The initial release supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, BNB Chain, Tron and NEAR. SOL and stablecoins are the primary destination assets, with additional tokens supported depending on liquidity availability.

The platform charges a 0.1% fee for stablecoin transfers and 1% for other assets, although all deposits will be fee-free during the first month after launch, subject to a combined $125,000 fee waiver.

Aurora Labs said replacing bridge applications with reusable deposit addresses removes one of crypto’s biggest onboarding friction points.

“Bridging has always carried too much anxiety — too many steps, too much that can go wrong. We chose Aurora Intents because its intent-based model removes all of that: you state what you want on Solana, and you receive the real token, on one permanent address for each source-chain-and-token pair that you can reuse forever. No dApp to connect, no wrapped assets,” Vidor Gencel, co-founder and co-CEO of Solflare, stated.

“We think this turns the hardest part of getting onto Solana into something as simple and trusted as a send — and makes Solflare the natural gateway to Solana for funds flowing in from every major chain,” he added.

Solflare said the approach provides users with a simpler and more trusted way to bring assets into the Solana ecosystem.

“Exchanges trained users to copy a deposit address and send funds, and Aurora Intents now brings that same action to a self-custodial wallet,” Declan Hannon, CEO of Aurora Labs, noted. “Apps lose users at the funding step, and most of those users already hold assets somewhere else. Aurora Intents turns that into a deposit address, and both the funds and the users arrive on Solana.”

The rollout follows continued growth across the Solana ecosystem, where monthly active addresses rose approximately 50% during Q1 2026. Solflare currently has more than 4 million active users and over $15 billion in assets under self-custody.

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

Celo has added native support for USAT, a US dollar stablecoin backed by Tether, expanding regulated digital dollar access across its ecosystem.

The deployment, announced on Wednesday, makes Celo the second network after Ethereum to host native USAT and introduces several features from launch, including native minting, redemption and the ability to use USAT as a gas currency for transactions.

Issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, USAT is backed by reserves custodied by Cantor Fitzgerald and designed to comply with the requirements of the GENIUS Act.

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Celo said its gas payment model removes a common crypto onboarding hurdle by allowing users to pay fees with stablecoins rather than requiring a separate blockchain token. The network’s fee abstraction technology, now formalized under CIP-64, has already driven stablecoin-based gas payments, with more than 50% of Celo fees paid using stablecoins, the team added.

The launch strengthens the relationship between Tether assets and Celo. The network has become the top distribution platform for USDT by weekly active users, accounting for 28% of USDT transfers across blockchains. Celo also dominates adoption of XAUt0, holding more than 90% of unique holders for the omnichain Tether Gold asset.

Celo CEO Marek Olszewski said USAT will bring compliant dollar infrastructure to users already relying on the network for payments, savings and commerce.

“Bringing Anchorage and Tether’s trusted, compliant stablecoin infrastructure to Celo is the critical next step in our work building a trillion-dollar onchain economy that is more accessible, efficient, and equitable than the systems that came before,” Olszewski stated.

Tether US CEO Bo Hines added that Celo’s existing stablecoin activity made it a natural expansion target.

USAT adoption will continue through Celo-based applications. Opera’s MiniPay wallet, which has more than 18 million users, plans to add support for USAT, expanding its existing Tether asset offerings. Valora has already integrated the stablecoin, while additional support is expected from protocols including Morpho, Squid and Uniswap.

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

The INJ price has spent much of 2026 trapped between the $3 and $5 range, leading some to assume ecosystem development has slowed and it is the cause of muted price action. The governance record tells a different story. Injective has activated its IIP-677 interoperability mainnet upgrade (v1.20.3) while another core proposal, IIP-678, is already moving through the voting process.

The latest upgrade follows earlier architectural expansions, including the Vulcan (IIP-650) upgrade and MultiVM rollouts, signaling that protocol development continues despite muted price action.

Interoperability Upgrade Moves Network ForwardThe approved IIP-677 proposal passed with 72% “Yes” votes after a four-day voting period. It commits the network to version v1.20.3, introducing targeted improvements aimed at strengthening Loading profile preview network operations, protocol reliability, market infrastructure, and cross-chain interoperability.

The upgrade also seeks to integrate transfers from additional blockchains, enabling smoother asset movement into the Injective ecosystem while improving operational efficiency and network security.

Earlier Vulcan enhancements had already introduced native canonical USDC settlement, reduced transaction fees, expanded real-world asset (RWA) markets, and deployed a next-generation oracle engine alongside refined exchange, insurance, and oracle modules supporting faster buyback and burn cycles.

Another Governance Vote Remains OpenDevelopment hasn’t paused there. IIP-678 remains under active voting until July 31, focusing on recovering an expired IBC light client connected to the QUAD Core chain. The proposal replaces the expired client with an active substitute while maintaining the existing connection and channel.

According to the current vote tally, Abstain holds 52.81%, while Yes accounts for 47.18%. Whether that balance changes before voting closes remains to be seen.

Revenue Keeps Rising Despite Flat PriceThe INJ price may appear less interesting to many, but protocol activity paints another picture. Injective’s governance page has progressed from approximately IIP-615 earlier this year to IIP-678, reflecting more than 60 governance proposals during 2026.

Meanwhile, Token Terminal reports approximately $3.0 million in protocol revenue over the past 365 days, generated through its dual-chain architecture. Revenue combines burn auctions on Injective Cosmos and EIP-1559 base fee burns on Injective EVM, highlighting continued protocol activity even while the INJ price remains range-bound.

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Every dollar Robinhood Chain earns, a tenth goes to a DAO treasury controlled by strangers. The arrangement has been covered a dozen times as good news for Arbitrum’s token.

Summary

Robinhood Chain runs on Arbitrum’s Orbit stack, and under the Arbitrum Expansion Program every Orbit chain settling outside Arbitrum One routes 10% of net protocol revenue back to the Arbitrum ecosystem. The split is fixed: 8% to the Arbitrum DAO treasury, controlled by ARB tokenholders, and 2% to the Arbitrum Developer Guild. The figures are now real, no longer theoretical. Robinhood Chain has passed $2 million in cumulative revenue since its July 1 launch, with roughly $200,000 flowing to Arbitrum, and Arbitrum reported the network earning over $800,000 in a single seven-day stretch, annualizing near $42 million. The payment is calculated on net revenue after operating costs, applies to sequencer profits, and may extend to MEV capture if the chain adopts Arbitrum’s Timeboost mechanism. Every version of this story published so far has been written for ARB holders. The unexamined half is what the arrangement costs the brokerage, and why a company with a $2.2 billion war chest chose to pay it. Nobody has asked the other question: what a licensed brokerage that spent a decade removing intermediaries bought by becoming a tenant.

There is a particular irony in a company whose entire founding pitch was the removal of intermediaries acquiring one. Robinhood spent a decade telling retail investors that the layers between them and the market were extractive, that commissions were a tax on participation, and that the right architecture was fewer parties taking a cut. On July 1 it launched its own blockchain, the most complete expression of that philosophy available: a settlement layer it controls, sequencing it operates, and fee revenue it collects. And under the terms of the technology stack it chose, a tenth of what that chain nets goes to somebody else. Specifically, 8% goes to a treasury controlled by holders of a governance token, and 2% funds a developer guild, both under an arrangement called the Arbitrum Expansion Program. The mechanism has been reported repeatedly since Offchain Labs disclosed it, always from one direction: what it means for ARB, why the token rallied, how a governance asset acquired a revenue claim. This piece asks the question those pieces did not. What did Robinhood buy, what is it paying, and does the arithmetic work.

What the arrangement actually is The mechanics are specific enough to matter, and they have been reported loosely in several places.

The Arbitrum Expansion Program applies to any Layer 2 or Layer 3 chain built with Arbitrum’s Orbit toolkit that settles outside Arbitrum One or Arbitrum Nova. Those chains route 10% of net protocol revenue back to the Arbitrum ecosystem. Of that 10%, eight percentage points flow to the Arbitrum DAO treasury, which ARB tokenholders control through governance, and two percentage points fund the Arbitrum Developer Guild, which supports tooling, grants, and protocol work.

Three details in that description carry weight and are frequently dropped.Net, not gross. The calculation runs on revenue remaining after network operating costs, which ties the payment to a chain’s actual profitability instead of raw transaction throughput. That is materially friendlier to an operator than a gross fee would be, and it means a chain running at thin margins pays little regardless of volume.

Sequencer profits are the base. The revenue subject to sharing comes from the entity that orders and processes transactions, which on Robinhood Chain is Robinhood. That is the same revenue line this publication has examined as the core economics of any Layer 2, and it is precisely the line the chain exists to capture.

MEV may be included. If the chain adopts Timeboost, Arbitrum’s mechanism for capturing maximal extractable value from transaction ordering, those revenues could fall under the sharing arrangement as well. Whether Robinhood adopts it is a live question with real dollars attached, since ordering advantages on a chain hosting tokenized equities are worth considerably more than on a memecoin venue.

For contrast, Arbitrum One sends 100% of its own fees to the Arbitrum treasury. The Orbit arrangement is the lighter one, which is the point: it is the price of using the stack without settling on the flagship chain.

The numbers, now that they exist For the first three weeks this was an abstraction. It is not anymore.

Robinhood Chain has passed $2 million in cumulative revenue since its July 1 launch, with approximately $200,000 routed to the Arbitrum ecosystem under the program. That is a clean 10%, and it is the first hard confirmation that the mechanism operates as described, not as an aspiration in a governance document.

Around that sit the throughput figures that produced it. The chain processed roughly 4 million transactions in its first week. Uniswap alone recorded $500 million in 24-hour volume on it. A single day in early July cleared $568 million. Within about two weeks the chain was clearing more than $800 million in daily decentralized exchange volume, briefly exceeding Ethereum’s, with roughly $3.9 billion across a week. Arbitrum reported the network earning over $800,000 in revenue across seven days, which annualizes near $42 million. Deposits crossed $600 million this week, rising 50% in seven days.

Now the distortion that every honest reading has to apply. The chain is running a 90-day gas subsidy, expiring around October, which means users are not paying the fees a mature chain would charge and the revenue figures are suppressed accordingly. Our audit of the chain’s first month documented how thoroughly that subsidy inflates activity metrics; it works in the opposite direction on revenue. The $42 million annualized figure is therefore both a real number and a floor, and the interesting reading comes after the subsidy lapses, when volumes and revenues both reprice. For broader context, crypto.news has also explained the subsidy distorting these numbers.

At current run rates, Arbitrum’s share is roughly $4 million a year. Against Robinhood’s quarterly revenue near $1.27 billion, that is a rounding error. Against the chain’s own economics, it is a tenth of everything.

What Robinhood bought The arrangement only looks strange if you assume the alternative was free. It was not, and the alternatives are worth setting out because the choice reveals the strategy.

Build independently. A brokerage could commission a chain from scratch, own 100% of sequencer revenue, and pay nothing to anyone. The cost is time, engineering risk, and security. Rolling your own settlement layer means auditing it, defending it, and answering for it when something breaks, which for a regulated financial institution holding customer assets is not a theoretical exposure. It also means no ecosystem: no existing tooling, no bridges, no wallets that already work.

Use an existing chain. Deploy on Arbitrum One or Base or anywhere else, pay ordinary fees, capture nothing. This is what Robinhood actually did first, launching tokenized stock offerings on Arbitrum in 2025 before committing to its own chain, and the limitation is obvious: you are a tenant with no landlord’s economics and no control over the roadmap, the fee schedule, or who else gets to build next door.

Take the Orbit path. Get a chain you brand, control, and sequence, with Offchain Labs providing technical support, inheriting the Arbitrum ecosystem’s tooling and security assumptions, at the price of a tenth of net revenue. The launch specifications suggest what that bought: 100-millisecond block times, EVM compatibility, ETH as the gas asset instead of a new token nobody asked for, and a chain live and processing millions of transactions within a week of announcement.

Read that way, the 10% is a build-versus-buy decision resolved in favour of speed, and for a public company with a stock to defend and a crypto revenue line that fell 47% year over year in the first quarter, speed was plausibly worth more than margin. Our earnings analysis covered why the timing mattered so much.

The uncomfortable version of the same read is that Robinhood, having concluded that owning the rails is where the value sits, does not actually own them. It leases them, with favourable terms, from a decentralized organization whose token holders vote on what to do with the proceeds.

The tenant problem That last sentence is not a rhetorical flourish. It describes a governance relationship that no traditional financial infrastructure arrangement resembles, and it has consequences nobody has priced.

The 8% going to the Arbitrum DAO treasury is controlled by ARB tokenholders through governance votes. Those holders decide how the money is deployed. They also, through the same governance process, hold influence over the direction of the technology stack Robinhood’s chain depends on. A licensed brokerage supervised by federal regulators is now a revenue contributor to, and a dependent of, an entity whose decision-making runs through token voting by anonymous participants.

For most crypto-native businesses that is unremarkable. For a public company that files with the SEC, answers to a board, and holds customer assets under regulatory obligation, it is a novel counterparty structure. The questions it raises are practical, not philosophical: what happens if governance votes to change the fee arrangement, what recourse exists if the stack’s roadmap diverges from the tenant’s needs, and how a regulated institution documents dependency on a DAO in its risk disclosures.

There is also a competitive dimension. The Orbit program applies universally, meaning any competitor can take the same path on the same terms. The arrangement Robinhood entered is not exclusive and confers no advantage over the next brokerage to build a chain, which limits how much of a moat the whole exercise creates. What it does create is a template, and the rest of the industry has noticed: our coverage of the tokenized-equity race documented Nasdaq building blockchain share issuance with Kraken’s parent and ICE working with OKX, none of which requires anyone to build from scratch.

Does the arithmetic work Set aside the framing and ask the commercial question, because the answer determines whether any of this matters.

Roughly $42 million annualized in chain revenue, before the subsidy expires, against $4 million to Arbitrum. Against a company whose quarterly revenue runs near $1.27 billion, the chain contributes something in the low single-digit percentage range of annual revenue at current run rates, and the Arbitrum payment is immaterial to the parent by any measure.

Which means the fee share is not the story financially. It is the story structurally, because it clarifies what the chain actually is. Robinhood did not build a chain to earn sequencer fees; the numbers are too small relative to its brokerage business for that to be the motivation. It built one to control the settlement layer for tokenized equities, to avoid depending on a competitor’s infrastructure as that market develops, and to own the venue where its own products trade. Sequencer revenue is a byproduct, and 10% of a byproduct is a reasonable price for the option.

The test comes when the byproduct stops being small. If tokenized equities scale the way the DTCC’s entry into the same market suggests they might, and if Robinhood Chain hosts a meaningful share of that activity, the sequencer line grows and the 10% grows with it. A tenth of a rounding error is nothing. A tenth of a business is a negotiation, and the Arbitrum Expansion Program’s terms were set by the party that wrote them.

The precedent this sets Strip out the two companies and the arrangement describes something the industry has been moving toward without naming: infrastructure providers taking a percentage of businesses they do not operate.

Arbitrum’s position under this model is closer to a franchise operator than a blockchain. It supplies the technology, the tooling, the security assumptions, and the developer support, and it collects a percentage of what franchisees earn across an expanding set of chains it did not build. Offchain Labs has been explicit that this is the strategy, framing enterprise adoption as the revenue thesis and noting that the flagship chain’s economics are separate. The model compounds with adoption in a way that grants and one-time licensing never do.

That has an obvious appeal for anyone holding the governance token, and it has a less obvious implication for everyone building on the stack. A percentage arrangement set at launch, when the tenant is small and the terms are generous, is an arrangement that becomes expensive precisely when the tenant succeeds. Ten percent of nothing costs nothing. Ten percent of a settlement layer hosting a meaningful share of tokenized equities is a real line item, and it is collected by a party whose consent the tenant needed at the start and whose terms the tenant did not write.

The comparison from outside crypto is the app store. Developers accepted a percentage when the platform was small and the alternative was no distribution, and spent the following decade in litigation and regulatory complaint about the rate. Nothing about the Arbitrum arrangement is coercive in that way, since alternatives genuinely exist and the terms are public. But the structural shape is familiar, and the history of platform percentages is that they are renegotiated by the largest tenants, eventually, loudly.

Robinhood is now among the largest tenants on this particular platform. Whether it ever behaves like one is a question for the quarter after the subsidy expires, when the numbers stop being small enough to ignore.

What to watch The revenue line after October. The 90-day gas subsidy expires around then, and the first unsubsidized quarter is the only honest read on what the chain actually earns. Both volumes and revenues reprice, in opposite directions, and the net is unknown.

Whether Timeboost gets adopted. MEV capture on a chain hosting tokenized equities is worth real money, and adopting Arbitrum’s mechanism would likely bring those revenues under the sharing arrangement. The decision is a direct read on how Robinhood values ordering revenue against the cost of sharing it.

Disclosure in the filings. Whether the chain’s economics, including the Arbitrum arrangement, appear in Robinhood’s regulatory filings as a described dependency or a risk factor, and in what language. A public company documenting a revenue-sharing obligation to a DAO would be a first worth reading closely.

Whether the terms hold. The Expansion Program’s rates are set by Arbitrum governance. Any proposal to change them, in either direction, would test how much leverage a large Orbit tenant actually has, and Robinhood is now among the largest.

Competing chains on the same terms. Every brokerage that follows takes the same deal. If the tokenized-equity market fragments across several Orbit chains, the interesting question stops being what Robinhood pays and becomes what Arbitrum collects from an entire category it does not operate.

A final note on why the framing in the existing coverage matters more than it looks. Every account of this arrangement published so far was written for holders of a governance token, which meant the operative question was always whether the revenue share is large enough to justify a rally. That is a legitimate question and it produced accurate reporting. It also produced a blind spot, because a revenue share has two sides and only one of them was ever examined.

The side nobody covered is the one with the public company, the regulatory filings, the customer assets, and the board. Robinhood’s chain is now a material piece of its strategic story, its stock trades on the strength of that story, and the chain’s economics include a permanent obligation to an entity that no securities analyst covering the stock has any reason to have heard of. That gap between how crypto covers a deal and how equity markets would cover the same deal is where most of the useful analysis in this sector currently sits, and it is worth reading every ecosystem announcement with the question of who else is party to it. The same platform-ownership pattern is also visible in the same playbook in prediction markets, where distribution, licensing, and customer ownership intersect.

Frequently asked questions What is the Arbitrum Expansion Program? An arrangement under which any Layer 2 or Layer 3 chain built with Arbitrum’s Orbit technology stack, and settling outside Arbitrum One or Nova, routes 10% of its net protocol revenue back to the Arbitrum ecosystem. Of that, 8% goes to the Arbitrum DAO treasury controlled by ARB tokenholders, and 2% funds the Arbitrum Developer Guild.

How much has Robinhood Chain actually paid? Roughly $200,000, against more than $2 million in cumulative chain revenue since the July 1 launch, which confirms the 10% rate operating in practice. Arbitrum separately reported the network earning over $800,000 in a single seven-day period, annualizing near $42 million, though those figures are suppressed by an ongoing gas subsidy.

Is the 10% calculated on gross or net revenue? Net, after network operating costs, which ties the payment to a chain’s actual profitability rather than to transaction volume. The revenue base is sequencer profits, and if the chain adopts Arbitrum’s Timeboost mechanism for capturing value from transaction ordering, those revenues may fall under the arrangement as well.

Why did Robinhood not just build its own chain from scratch? Time, risk, and ecosystem. Building independently means owning all the revenue and also owning the security, auditing, and defence of a settlement layer holding customer-adjacent assets, with no existing tooling, bridges, or wallet support. Orbit delivered a branded, controlled chain with 100-millisecond block times and technical support from Offchain Labs, live within a week, at the cost of a tenth of net revenue.

Does the payment matter financially to Robinhood? Not currently. At present run rates the Arbitrum share is roughly $4 million a year against quarterly company revenue near $1.27 billion. The chain itself contributes a low single-digit share of annual revenue at best. The arrangement matters structurally rather than financially, because it defines what the chain is and who it depends on.

What is unusual about paying a DAO? The counterparty structure. The 8% flowing to the Arbitrum DAO treasury is controlled by token holders voting through governance, and those same holders influence the roadmap of the technology stack Robinhood’s chain runs on. A federally regulated public company holding a revenue-sharing obligation to, and infrastructure dependency on, a decentralized organization is a novel arrangement with unsettled disclosure and risk-management questions.

Does this give Robinhood any advantage over competitors? Not through the arrangement itself, which is available to anyone on identical terms. Any brokerage can build an Orbit chain and pay the same 10%. Robinhood’s advantages, if they hold, come from distribution and from operating the venue where its own products trade, and the tokenized-equity market is already attracting incumbent exchanges building comparable infrastructure.

What should investors watch? The first unsubsidized quarter after the gas subsidy expires around October, whether Timeboost is adopted and MEV revenue enters the sharing arrangement, how the chain’s economics and the Arbitrum obligation appear in regulatory filings, and any governance proposal to change the Expansion Program’s rates. This is educational analysis, not investment advice.

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Revenue figures reflect third-party trackers and company statements available at the time of writing and are subject to revision, and chain activity is currently affected by a temporary fee subsidy. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or asset. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of July 29, 2026.

Circle’s Senior Director of EU Strategy and Policy Patrick Hansen (@paddi_hansen) published an article noting that since the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation took effect, roughly 35 electronic money tokens (EMTs) from 21 institutions have secured compliance certifications. Banks and e-money institutions are entering the space, with strong local issuance momentum. However, among the world’s top 50 stablecoins, only three—USDC, USDG, and EURC—currently meet MiCA requirements, while the rest operate outside the regulatory framework, leaving EU users facing a dual dilemma: either insufficient protection or forced access restrictions. Hansen argues that for MiCA to truly serve as a global regulatory benchmark, two goals must be achieved in parallel: first, drive local EMTs to go global via a competitive regulatory regime; second, establish a recognition mechanism for overseas compliant stablecoins to attract global issuers to join the MiCA framework, rather than making local issuance the sole entry path.

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US stock indices opened lower, while AI stocks traded mixed.

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Key Takeaways Hyperliquid’s shift towards RWAs appears consistent with increased interest in non-crypto assets, suggesting potential for growth in this sector. Market pricing for Hyperliquid’s price prediction for 2026 currently reflects a 19.5% probability of reaching $100 by the end of the year, suggesting some optimism despite recent declines. The exchange’s emphasis on individual stocks within its RWA offerings indicates strong participant interest in these assets, supportive of a diversified environment. What to Watch Observers should monitor Hyperliquid’s future announcements and partnerships, which could further influence market dynamics and pricing. Key developments, such as potential partnerships with Fortune 500 companies or increased institutional participation, may indicate support for a higher valuation. Conversely, any security breaches or regulatory challenges could negatively affect market sentiment. The coming months will likely provide further clarity on Hyperliquid’s strategic direction and its impact on the broader decentralized exchange landscape.

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Term Structure

Contract Odds Δ since publish Volume 24h December 31 19.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 6.2% — — View market → January 1 2027 2.9% — — View market → January 1 2027 41% — — View market → January 1 2027 8.8% — — View market → January 1 2027 3.1% — — View market →

Hong Kong’s OSL Hong Kong XRP retail trading chapter officially opened on July 29, 2026. OSL Digital Securities, a subsidiary of publicly listed OSL Group (HKEX: 863), confirmed the launch via X, making it the first Securities and Futures Commission (SFC)-licensed platform in the city to grant everyday investors direct spot access to XRP.

Hong Kong’s First Retail XRP On-Ramp Goes Live on a Licensed Venue OSL announced two retail-accessible pairs at launch: Flash Trade XRP/USD and OTC XRP/USD plus XRP/HKD, all settled on the XRP Ledger. XRP now sits alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana as the only four tokens approved for retail trading on the platform.

Breaking News🚨 XRP trading is NOW live for RETAIL investors on OSL HK — the FIRST exchange in Hong Kong to offer retail XRP trading!

XRP by @XRPLF is a decentralized digital asset native to the XRP Ledger, built to enable lightning-fast cross-border payments and… pic.twitter.com/GtJdCk0h7C

— OSL HK (@OSL_HK) July 29, 2026

This expands access beyond the December 2025 professional-investor (PI) listing, when OSL HK restricted XRP to institutional and high-net-worth clients via Flash Trade pairs including XRP/HKD, XRP/USD, and XRP/USDT.

The HKD pair is particularly significant. It creates a fiat on-ramp in one of Asia’s deepest financial centers, giving Hong Kong residents a fully licensed path to buy XRP without relying on offshore platforms.

OSL holds Type 1 and Type 7 SFC licenses, plus AMLO registration, and carries $1 billion in client asset insurance, a combination few crypto venues globally can match.

CLARITY Act discussions in the U.S. continue to move slowly through Congress. As XRP and Bitcoin price analysis ahead of the CLARITY Act showed, clarity on U.S. market structure remains pending, yet Asia is building regulated infrastructure now.

Asia Builds Regulated XRP Rails as Institutional Signals Mount Hong Kong’s move reflects a broader regional pattern. While U.S. regulators continue drafting legislation, Asian venues have been quietly expanding compliant access to XRP.

OSL’s retail listing lands at a time when XRP spot ETFs extended an eight-week inflow streak, reaching $1.49 billion in cumulative inflows, a sign of sustained institutional appetite.

On the XRPL itself, tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) have grown from around $150 million a year ago to over $4 billion, as tracked by Evernorth.
RLUSD, Ripple’s stablecoin, also saw a 45% supply expansion in Q1 2026, per Messari data.

XRP utility rising as XRPL RWA market cap hits $2.25B, alongside strong ETF inflows, reflects a fundamentals picture that institutional capital is actively reacting to.

Ripple’s regulatory footprint also expanded in Europe recently.

As reported, Ripple’s XRP and XRPL are already viewed as CLARITY Act-compliant by several legal observers, strengthening the asset’s position across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

See our picks for newly launched cryptos worth watching this month.

Zcash says Ironwood proof rules out undetectable counterfeiting bugsZcash researchers published more than 2,700 machine-checked theorems designed to rule out undetectable counterfeiting bugs in Ironwood.

Zcash researchers have completed formal verification of Ironwood, publishing a machine-checked proof that the network’s new shielded pool does not contain undetectable counterfeiting bugs under its stated cryptographic assumptions. 

On Tuesday, Project Tachyon said that the proof, written in the Lean programming language, comprises over 2,700 theorems and took three teams of researchers and cryptographers over a month to complete. The work establishes a security property known as balance integrity, designed to ensure the shielded pool cannot pay out more value than has publicly entered it.

The researchers said the proof covers the components needed for that property, including Ironwood’s zero-knowledge proof system, circuit rules and ledger-level accounting. It does not cover Ironwood’s separate privacy guarantees. 

Ironwood was introduced through Zcash’s NU6.3 upgrade in response to a vulnerability discovered in its Orchard shielded pool that could theoretically have enabled undetectable ZEC counterfeiting. Zcash developers said they found no evidence that the flaw had been exploited. The new pool was designed to restore confidence in Zcash’s supply integrity.

Funds migrating from Orchard must pass through a public accounting checkpoint known as a turnstile, which is designed to prevent any hypothetical excess coins from entering Ironwood. As funds leave Orchard, the process may also provide increasing evidence about whether the old pool was exploited.

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

Uniswap founder rejects claims v4 fees reduce LP earningsHayden Adams said critics misunderstood Uniswap’s newly approved v4 protocol fees, rejecting claims the change reduces liquidity providers’ earnings.

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams pushed back against criticism of Uniswap’s newly activated v4 protocol fees, arguing that claims they reduce liquidity providers’ earnings are based on incorrect assumptions.

In an X post on Tuesday, Adams said recent criticism surrounding the protocol fee activation amounted to “FUD and misunderstanding.”

Adams also disputed claims that the protocol was taking 25% of LP profits. Using a 30-basis-point pool as an example, he said a 5-basis-point protocol fee represents about 14% of total swap fees, not a reduction in LP earnings.

The comments came after Uniswap governance approved the activation of protocol fees for selected v4 pools across multiple blockchains. Adams rejected claims that liquidity providers would earn lower fees, saying protocol fees are additive rather than deducted from existing LP fees.

Uniswap is the world’s largest decentralized exchange by total value locked, with about $3.06 billion secured on the protocol, according to DefiLlama.

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

Michael Saylor has warned that changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules pose a greater long-term threat than rival cryptocurrencies, governments, or external competition.

Summary

Saylor called internal rule changes Bitcoin’s “gravest threat” after the asset gained broad market recognition. He argued that consensus rules protect property rights, scarcity, settlement, and limits on power. Saylor said proposals such as BIP-110 could weaken block-space scarcity and miners’ fee revenue. Strategy recently joined eight companies pledging $15 million toward Bitcoin security research. Saylor warns against capturing Bitcoin consensus Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor issued the warning in a series of X posts on Tuesday, describing Bitcoin’s consensus rules as its constitution. Those rules determine how ownership is recognized, how scarcity is maintained, how transactions settle, and what network participants can change.

Bitcoin has won. Now it must survive victory.

Its gravest threat is not an enemy at the gates, but corruption from within: factions that invent pretexts, rewrite the rules, and seize economic rights until freedom becomes permission and law becomes loot.

— Michael Saylor (@saylor) July 28, 2026 “Bitcoin has won. Now it must survive victory,” Saylor wrote. “Its gravest threat is not an enemy at the gates, but corruption from within.”

He argued that changing the protocol to serve one group would infringe on the economic rights of miners, developers, investors, companies, custodians, and other users. Once one faction gains enough influence to rewrite the rules, he warned, competing groups may pursue changes through the same process.

That outcome could make protocol disputes permanent, according to Saylor. He said prolonged governance conflicts would drive away capital, slow development, weaken security, and leave Bitcoin with only a fraction of its potential.

Saylor expects Bitcoin could grow 100-fold and become part of the infrastructure supporting global capital markets. From that perspective, he argued that a poorly designed rule introduced today could restrict financial products, technologies, and economic activity that do not yet exist.

Why Saylor opposes BIP-110 Saylor’s latest comments extend his opposition to Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110, a proposed temporary soft fork intended to reduce arbitrary data stored on the blockchain.

BIP-110 supporters argue that limiting some forms of data would ease storage and verification burdens for node operators. They also want Bitcoin to remain focused on monetary transactions rather than inscriptions, tokens, or file storage.

Saylor accepts that some on-chain data may have little value or could be linked to harmful activity. However, he argues that Bitcoin cannot reliably determine the purpose behind transaction data and should not use consensus rules to decide which valid, fee-paying transactions deserve block space.

“Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity,” Saylor wrote in his July 18 article. “It needs guardians of neutrality.”

His latest X thread widened that argument beyond BIP-110. Saylor also criticized proposals that add covenant functionality or increase block capacity, saying each approach creates different risks for Bitcoin’s base layer.

Bitcoin fee market and network security at stake According to Saylor, restrictions on valid transactions could reduce competition for block space and weaken the fee market. Larger blocks, meanwhile, could dilute block-space scarcity while raising the bandwidth and hardware costs required to operate a node.

He also argued that covenants would make Bitcoin’s consensus rules more complex and introduce additional attack surfaces. These claims represent Saylor’s assessment of the proposals rather than an established consensus among Bitcoin developers.

Transaction fees will become increasingly important to miners as the block subsidy falls by half roughly every 210,000 blocks. Saylor warned that suppressing fee demand could reduce the income available to miners and weaken the financial incentives protecting the network.

His preferred approach is to keep the base layer simple, neutral, scarce, and secure. Developers can then build new functions through second-layer networks and applications, where adoption remains voluntary and failures have a more limited effect.

Strategy backs $15 million security effort Saylor’s stance carries added relevance for US investors because Strategy has built its corporate model around holding Bitcoin and promoting enterprise adoption. He recently argued that companies are necessary for Bitcoin to develop into a global monetary network, placing corporate participation at the center of its next stage.

Strategy also joined Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Galaxy in forming the Bitcoin Security Consortium.

The nine firms pledged a combined $15 million over three years to support developers and researchers working on Bitcoin security, including preparations for potential quantum-computing threats. Members will direct their funding independently, while the consortium says it will neither control Bitcoin development nor take positions on individual protocol changes.

Saylor said upgrades should remain rare, conservative, and driven by necessity. His latest intervention places protocol restraint alongside corporate adoption and security funding as central parts of his long-term Bitcoin strategy.

The CLARITY Act, a proposed bill aiming to define the regulatory landscape for digital assets in the United States, has gained prominent support from major financial institutions. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and multinational investment giant Fidelity have both called on the Senate to approve the legislation, highlighting its significance for the industry’s future.

Senate vote and party dynamicsCurrently, the CLARITY Act has secured 51 confirmed votes in the Senate, but needs an additional 9 Democratic Senators to cross the 60-vote threshold required for passage. Patrick Witt, one of the bill’s leading advocates, acknowledged Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s expectation that the bill would not reach the floor before August but remained hopeful that momentum could build sooner.

Witt argued that it is unusual to expect 10 Democrats to commit ahead of a key vote, pointing out that such negotiation tactics have characterized Democratic approaches throughout the legislative process.

Supporters of the CLARITY Act believe that some Democratic senators who now express reservations previously voiced similar concerns about the Genius Act, but ultimately voted in favor after rounds of negotiation and concessions.

Senator Gallego, for example, has recently voiced opposition to the bill, yet during debate on the Genius Act, he also sought additional time before eventually backing the final version. This pattern suggests the possibility of last-minute changes in position when legislative stakes are high.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has committed to bringing the bill to a vote on the Senate floor. Anthony Scaramucci, founder of the investment firm SkyBridge Capital, remarked that if the CLARITY Act is brought to the floor, its passage appears likely, noting the political implications for younger Democratic senators wary of opposing the cryptocurrency sector ahead of the next election cycle. Former Congressman Patrick McHenry added that “it’s sort of when, not if.”

Market impact and XRP price movementCryptocurrency analyst Lark Davis commented on the muted response from XRP’s price despite the legislative attention. Davis explained that early holders of XRP, some of whom have waited several years, are selling into institutional demand created by ETF inflows. This dynamic means that while new capital is entering the market, it is offset by longtime holders exiting, keeping the price relatively stable despite increased volumes.

Davis stated that this kind of capital rotation “creates a structural floor below the market,” and historically, such distribution patterns have often preceded substantial price upswings.

BankXRP, a digital asset analytics service, reported a sharp decrease in XRP exchange activity, with Binance deposits and withdrawals dropping from $650,000 in June to $350,000 currently. This kind of cooling in exchange flows was last seen just prior to the notable rally in October 2025.

Mike Novogratz, CEO of digital asset firm Galaxy Digital, emphasized the industry’s cyclical nature and noted that crypto markets have historically experienced renewed momentum every four years in October.

XRP has achieved the 4th position globally in tokenized real-world assets, now holding $4.1 billion in tokenized assets on the XRP Ledger. By comparison, Ethereum holds 10th place in this category.

AssetTokenized Assets on LedgerGlobal RankXRP$4.1 billion4thEthereumNot specified10thDigital Asset Investor, a well-known crypto commentator, highlighted that this combination of decreasing exchange supply, progress on key legislation, and improving real-world asset tokenization infrastructure could underpin future breakout moves in XRP’s price.

Mini dictionary: CLARITY Act – Proposed U.S. legislation designed to set clear regulations and definitions for digital assets, aiming to bring legal certainty for companies operating in the crypto sector.

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

TLDR EthSystems believes privacy is the main barrier stopping banks from using public blockchains. The startup emerged from the Ethereum Foundation’s Institutional Privacy Task Force. EthSystems helps institutions protect sensitive transaction data while settling activity on Ethereum. The company will advise clients, build custom privacy systems, and publish open-source research. EthSystems plans to work with existing privacy projects instead of creating a new blockchain. Ethereum startup EthSystems has made privacy the center of its plan to bring banks and other institutions onto public blockchains. The company believes confidentiality, rather than network speed, remains the main barrier to institutional use of Ethereum.

The startup emerged from the Ethereum Foundation’s Institutional Privacy Task Force earlier this month. It now operates as a for-profit company focused on banks, asset managers, governments, stablecoins, and tokenized financial assets.

EthSystems helps institutions add privacy controls while settling transactions on Ethereum. Its systems aim to protect sensitive financial data without removing the transparency and security offered by a public blockchain.

Co-founder Mo Jalil said financial institutions need control over who can view transaction details. The company does not treat confidentiality as full anonymity. Instead, it supports limited access based on rules.

The startup does not plan to build a new blockchain or replace current privacy tools. It will advise clients, design privacy systems, build custom infrastructure, and publish open-source research.

EthSystems expects to work with projects such as Aztec, Miden, and other privacy providers. It will select and connect tools based on each institution’s legal and business needs.

Demand Moves Beyond Blockchain Tests The team previously built proof-of-concept systems inside the Ethereum Foundation. Financial institutions later asked whether they could pay the group to turn those tests into working products.

The foundation could not support that type of commercial work. The move to a for-profit structure now allows EthSystems to charge clients, fund development, and meet corporate procurement rules.

Jalil said discussions have shifted from innovation teams to business units that manage trading and assets. These teams now want to move real financial activity onto public blockchains.

EthSystems says institutions no longer need basic proof that blockchain can support finance. They need privacy systems that meet internal controls, regulatory duties, and data protection rules.

The company sits alongside other groups created during the Ethereum Foundation’s wider restructuring. EthLabs focuses on protocol work, while Ethereum Institutional handles enterprise coordination.

EthSystems will focus only on privacy and cryptography for institutional users. Its strategy rests on helping banks use Ethereum without exposing sensitive data to every network participant.

Zcash has officially launched its Ironwood (NU6.3) upgrade, sealing off the Orchard shielded pool that previously held approximately 3.66 million ZEC, and inaugurating a new private pool that starts with zero coins.

Developers address critical bug and migration process beginsThe decision to retire the Orchard pool follows the discovery of a significant vulnerability in its proof circuit. Taylor Hornby, a researcher at Shielded Labs, identified the flaw on May 29, revealing that it could have permitted the creation of counterfeit ZEC tokens without leaving any trace on the blockchain. The vulnerability had been present since Orchard’s introduction in May 2022, raising concerns about the integrity of Zcash’s private pools.

Developers quickly implemented a patch for the bug within days. However, the four-year gap during which the flaw existed meant there was no way to verify whether counterfeit coins were ever produced, due to the very privacy protections shielded pools provide. The blockchain contains only cryptographic proofs of validity, not specifics about individual transactions.

To prevent any unverified ZEC from leaving Orchard, Ironwood now enforces a turnstile mechanism. This accounting safeguard ensures that withdrawals are capped at the amount verifiably deposited, effectively freezing any minted tokens that cannot be traced back to authentic inflows.

Zcash’s new turnstile mechanism ensures that the total ZEC withdrawn from Orchard cannot exceed the sum of deposits previously recorded, locking in any potential counterfeit coins that may have existed within the shielded pool.

Mini dictionary: Shielded pool (Zcash) – A private section of the Zcash blockchain where transaction amounts and participants are concealed through cryptographic proofs, making their on-chain activity anonymous.

Ironwood introduces enhanced safeguardsIronwood marks a significant upgrade for the Zcash protocol beyond just security. Each coin moved into the new pool leaves a record built to remain recoverable even if quantum computers eventually compromise current cryptography. This “quantum-resilient” design follows specifications set under ZIP 2005 and is available from block one of Ironwood.

Additionally, Ironwood’s proof circuit is undergoing formal verification. This mathematical approach ensures the software functions correctly in all potential scenarios, rather than only in those considered during manual tests, reducing the likelihood of similar vulnerabilities going undetected in the future.

The migration’s pace depends on how rapidly users choose to move their ZEC holdings from Orchard to the new pool, with roughly 1,500 ZEC already transferred as of Tuesday, according to on-chain trackers.

Shielded pools provide privacy on the Zcash network by leveraging zero-knowledge proofs, a class of cryptographic technology allowing transaction details to remain hidden while still verifying authenticity.

Impact on Zcash supply and network monitoringWith the Ironwood activation at block 3,428,143, Orchard is now sealed. Owners must individually relocate their coins to participate in the new pool. Until user-driven migration is complete, the majority of Zcash’s private supply remains held in Orchard, with the turnstile mechanism blocking any increase to its balance.

Tracking the movement of ZEC between pools provides the community with ongoing assurance against the potential issue of counterfeit tokens. Funds crossing into or out of both pools are publicly visible, though their internal movement maintains privacy.

Old Pool (Orchard)New Pool (Ironwood)3.66 million ZEC at closure0 ZEC at launch; 1,500 ZEC migrated on first dayVulnerability existed since May 2022Quantum-resilient and formally verifiedNo formal verificationFormal verification in processNo turnstile; potential for unverified withdrawalsTurnstile mechanism limits withdrawals to verified depositsZEC traded close to $463 before the upgrade, showing an 8% drop in one day and a 15% decrease across the week, though it remains significantly higher than a year ago. The key figure to monitor remains the volume of ZEC holders moving from Orchard to Ironwood, a process entirely controlled by individual owners.

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

Kamino has launched the $PAXG Market, introducing gold-backed credit to its lending platform on Solana. Curated by Steakhouse Financial, the new market allows users to supply Pax Gold ($PAXG) as collateral and borrow $USDG, giving tokenized gold holders a way to access liquidity without selling their assets.

Users can buy $PAXG, deposit it into Kamino, and borrow $USDG against their holdings at 1.9% APY. The launch makes tokenized gold usable as onchain collateral through a dedicated lending market.

How the $PAXG Market Works Pax Gold is a digital asset backed by physical gold, with each $PAXG token representing 1 fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery gold bar stored in LBMA vaults. Holders own the underlying gold through Paxos Trust Company, an OCC-regulated custodian that conducts monthly audits of its allocated reserves.

Kamino designed the $PAXG Market as a fully isolated lending market with its own risk parameters and oracle infrastructure. Chainlink powers price feeds for the market, helping determine collateral values and borrowing limits independently from other assets on the platform.

OnRe Continues Rapid Growth The launch comes as Kamino's RWA markets continue to expand. The OnRe Market surpassed $200 million in total market size last week and now stands at over $206 million.

The market has grown nearly 70% over the past 90 days, making it the 2nd-largest RWA market on Kamino and the 4th-largest market overall.

Current OnRe metrics include a total supply of $206.1 million, $127 million of $ONyc used as collateral, $69.7 million borrowed against collateral, 24% growth over the past 30 days, and 66% growth over the past 90 days. 

The market has expanded from roughly $50 million in February to more than $200 million today.

Ethena Remains One of Kamino's Largest Markets Kamino's Ethena Market has also maintained strong momentum since its launch. On May 14, Kamino reported that the market became the fastest in the platform's history to exceed $400 million in size. Within its first 24 hours, it reached a $200 million borrow cap, attracted more than $225 million in $USDe deposits, and deployed more than $420 million overall.

Today, 75 days after its May 13 launch, the Ethena Market has grown to $522.8 million, making it one of Kamino's largest lending markets.

RWA Lending Evolves on Solana According to Blockworks' Solana Q2 Tokenholder Report, deposits across Solana's 2 largest money markets, Kamino and Jupiter Lend, reached $4.1 billion at the end of the quarter, while outstanding loans totaled $1.6 billion.

The addition of new lending markets tied to tokenized assets continues to broaden the range of collateral available on Solana as interest in real-world assets grows.

Read More on SolanaFloor Robinhood Flips Solana in RWA Holder Count, But There’s a Catch
Kraken’s Parent Company Payward Buys Magic Labs' Wallet Business to Expand Its B2B Platform

What's Next For Crypto If CLARITY Fails?

SwissBorg has rolled out Apple Pay support for its virtual crypto debit card, letting users in Switzerland, France, and roughly 28 other European Economic Area countries spend digital assets directly from their iPhones. No pre-loading fiat required.

How the card actually works The SwissBorg Card is a Mastercard-backed virtual debit card that launched on February 25, 2026. When a user taps their iPhone at a terminal, SwissBorg’s Meta-Exchange (known as MEX) handles real-time crypto-to-fiat conversion behind the scenes. The merchant receives local currency, whether that’s Swiss francs, euros, or British pounds, while the user’s crypto balance decreases accordingly.

The card supports spending from multiple assets including BORG (SwissBorg’s native token), BTC, and ETH. Users can add it directly to Apple Wallet through the SwissBorg app, and the virtual card itself costs nothing to set up. Built-in controls let users freeze and unfreeze the card on demand. Mastercard’s global acceptance network means the card works at over 150 million locations worldwide.

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The BORG tokenomics angle Every transaction made with the SwissBorg Card generates fees, and those fees are funneled directly into buying back BORG tokens from the open market. SwissBorg has structured cashback rewards around its loyalty tier system, with users earning up to 99% cashback depending on their rank.

SwissBorg CEO Cyrus Fazel has framed the launch as a bridge between cryptocurrency and everyday life. Mastercard’s Christian Rau echoed the sentiment, pointing to the scaling of digital asset usage for routine purchases as a strategic priority.

Context: SwissBorg’s regulatory positioning SwissBorg holds a license as a Cryptoasset Service Provider in France. The platform has supported Apple Pay for account top-ups since late 2024. The February 2026 launch extends that relationship from depositing money into the app to actively spending crypto at physical and online merchants.

The progressive rollout across EEA countries reflects the patchwork of national regulations that still exist even under MiCA, the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework. Switzerland, not being an EU member, operates under its own fintech-friendly regulatory regime, which explains why it’s among the first supported markets.

What this means for investors The real-time conversion piece is particularly notable. Most competing cards require users to sell crypto into fiat before spending, or they auto-convert from a pre-selected asset. SwissBorg’s MEX handles this at the moment of transaction, which means users maintain exposure to their crypto assets right up until the second they spend.

What investors should watch is adoption data. Card activation numbers, monthly transaction volumes, and BORG buyback amounts will tell the real story.

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

Stacks is set to activate its PoX-5 hard fork this week, introducing the consensus infrastructure needed to support Bitcoin staking on the network.

The upgrade is scheduled to activate at Bitcoin block 960,230, currently expected around 2 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, July 30. The precise timing may change depending on how quickly Bitcoin blocks are produced.

PoX-5 upgrades Proof-of-Transfer, the Stacks consensus mechanism under which miners commit BTC to compete for the right to produce Stacks blocks and receive STX rewards.

The upgrade introduces Bitcoin Bonds, which allow users to lock BTC on the Bitcoin network and pair it with STX on Stacks to earn BTC denominated yield while retaining control of their Bitcoin keys.

Stacks describes the structure as a protocol bond. Bitcoin remains locked on Bitcoin layer one, while the corresponding STX position is held through a Stacks smart contract. Yield is funded by the BTC that Stacks miners commit through Proof of Transfer.

Bitcoin Bonds will activate at the consensus level with the hard fork, although participation will open gradually.

Initial capacity will be reserved for approved participants during a bootstrap period. The first institutional Genesis Bond is expected in late August, followed by community participation through selected pools using sBTC.

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Stacks previously launched public and private PoX-5 testnets to test bonding, registration, reward distribution, and unbonding before the mainnet upgrade.

The hard fork does not create a new token and will not affect STX balances, wallet addresses, or private keys. STX holders who are not currently staking do not need to take any action.

Existing STX stakers must restake after PoX-5 activates to continue earning rewards.

All STX currently committed through the previous contract will unlock during the upgrade as staking moves to the new PoX-5 contract. Users must restake before Bitcoin block 962,050 to receive rewards during the first cycle following the hard fork.

Solo stakers can restake after the upgrade becomes active. Pool participants must wait for their provider to update its infrastructure and reopen staking under the new contract.

PoX-5 also removes the previous cooldown cycle, allowing stakers to change their reward address without missing a full cycle. The upgrade also simplifies pool participation and reduces the risk that users miss rewards because of failed pool commitments.

STX only stakers will continue receiving BTC rewards under the new structure.

Bitcoin Bonds receive their target yield first. Of the remaining BTC committed by miners, 85% will be distributed to STX only stakers, while 15% will enter a reserve fund intended to support future payouts.

Stacks said STX only participants are expected to receive most of the miner rewards during the early cycles because Bitcoin Bond capacity will initially remain limited.

The protocol bond model is designed to generate yield without lending or transferring custody of the underlying Bitcoin. However, Stacks notes that target yields are not guaranteed and remain dependent on miner participation and network conditions.

Exchanges supporting STX may temporarily suspend deposits and withdrawals around the activation period while upgrading their infrastructure. Trading is expected to continue, although each platform will establish its own maintenance window.

Stacks said node operators must upgrade to stacks core version 4.0.1 before block 960,230 to remain connected after the new consensus rules take effect.

The PoX-5 codebase has been audited by Trail of Bits and Clarity Alliance, with additional review from Asymmetric Research.

Following activation, Stacks plans to begin the Bitcoin staking rollout with the institutional Genesis Bond in late August before expanding capacity to additional participants.

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

The update makes DeFi access easier by reducing the approval process to a single wallet signature.

Flare has introduced Smart Accounts version 1.3 to simplify how XRP holders access decentralized finance (DeFi) without changing their existing wallet. The update also removes the need to create separate wallets, manually bridge assets, or manage gas tokens before using DeFi services.

According to a press release sent to CryptoPotato, users now need only a single wallet signature to access DeFi. Previously, the process required two separate approvals.

How Smart Accounts Version 1.3 Works Under the new version, users approve a single transaction from their XRP Ledger wallet. The system then converts their XRP into FXRP and automatically deposits it into a selected yield vault.

The Flare Data Connector verifies the XRP Ledger transaction before a smart contract completes the remaining steps. Flare said the original XRP remains locked on the XRP Ledger at a one-to-one ratio throughout the process.

This setup allows users to retain control of their assets while removing the need for manual bridging or obtaining gas tokens on another blockchain. The simplified process comes as FXRP activity across decentralized finance platforms continues to expand.

Since February, the amount of FXRP deployed across DeFi applications has grown by nearly 75%, rising from 82 million to 144 million. Flare also reported that more than 40 million XRP is currently earning through Smart Accounts across nearly 24,000 accounts.

New Vaults and Broader Wallet Integration Commenting on the update, Chief Product Officer Filip Koprivec said millions of XRP holders had wanted access to DeFi, but the experience had been too complex. He said version 1.3 lets users move from XRP to yield with a single wallet signature while remaining fully non-custodial.

You may also like: Ripple (XRP) News and Price Update: July 27 Ripple (XRP) ETF Inflows Set Another Record, but One Problem Remains Do People Interested in XRP Actually Care About Ripple? The version also expands the available yield options with two vaults offering different approaches. Users can continue using the Monarq vault or choose the new Clearstar Flare XRP Yield Vault, which uses on-chain lending and liquidity strategies.

According to the company, the Clearstar vault distributes FXRP across protocols including Avant and Euler while keeping all positions publicly visible. Flare added that Clearstar has previously managed more than 33 million FXRP through earlier deployments.

The update also expands wallet support to Ledger, Xaman, Joey Wallet, WalletConnect, including Bifrost, and D’CENT. Joey Wallet has integrated the Smart Accounts interface directly into its application, allowing users to complete the process without leaving the wallet.

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The decentralized perpetual futures exchange Lighter (LIT) has announced significant steps to strengthen its token economy. In a statement made on the social media platform X, exchange founder Vladimir Novakovski reported that over 16 million LIT tokens have been repurchased to date and that a regular quarterly token burning program has recently been officially launched.

Novakovski stated that the buyback program is part of a long-term strategy to reduce the circulating supply of the LIT token. He added that regular token burns will also be implemented with the same goal in mind, saying that this mechanism aims to support the sustainability of the ecosystem.

Lighter’s CEO also emphasized that there were no changes to the company’s issuance structure before or after the Token Generation Event (TGE). Novakovski noted that while existing investors were offered the opportunity to sell their shares or tokens, the majority chose to hold onto their positions. He stated that this is a significant indicator of confidence in the project.

In his statement, Novakovski addressed not only Lighter’s token economy but also regulatory developments in the US. He stated that the expected changes to the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) regulatory framework regarding digital assets, as outlined in the CLARITY Act currently before Congress, are critically important for the sector.

According to the founder, once these regulations are finalized, blackchain-based fundraising methods and the tokenization of shares could rapidly become widespread. Novakovski stated that such a transformation would create a stronger bridge between both traditional finance and cryptocurrency markets, and he expects blackchain capital markets to grow significantly in the coming years.

*This is not investment advice.

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Clearpool just rolled out a product that sounds almost quaint by crypto standards: a vault that funds actual invoices and purchase orders. The Trade Finance Vault, launched on July 28, lets USDC holders park their stablecoins into on-chain trade finance deals with a target yield of 15%.

How the vault actually works The Trade Finance Vault funds tokenized invoices, purchase orders, and letters of credit. Think of it as the crypto version of factoring, where a company sells its unpaid invoices at a discount to get cash now, and the buyer collects the full amount later.

Clearpool built this in partnership with two key players. Tradevu, a trade finance originator, handles the deal flow. Cicada Credit manages risk assessment and underwriting, acting as the vault’s portfolio manager.

USDC holders deposit into the vault, that capital gets deployed into trade finance deals, and yields flow back to depositors. The 15% target sits at the top end of Clearpool’s broader vault ecosystem, where yields typically range from 6% to 15% depending on the underlying funding source.

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Clearpool’s evolution from lending protocol to RWA infrastructure Clearpool launched in the 2021-2022 era, and the protocol has originated nearly $1 billion in loans since then. It operates across multiple blockchain networks including Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche.

The Trade Finance Vault represents the latest step in what’s been a deliberate march toward real-world asset integration. Earlier in 2025, Clearpool introduced PayFi Credit Pools and Fintech Vaults, both designed to connect on-chain capital with off-chain credit demand.

The CPOOL token serves as the protocol’s native governance and utility token, giving holders a stake in the direction of this expanding product suite.

What this means for investors The 15% target yield deserves some unpacking, because “target” is doing real work in that sentence. It’s not a guaranteed rate. Trade finance deals carry their own risk profile: counterparty risk from the companies issuing invoices, concentration risk if the portfolio leans too heavily on specific industries or geographies, and the operational risk inherent in bridging on-chain capital with off-chain commerce.

Trade finance has historically been one of the lower-default-rate segments of commercial lending. Invoices from creditworthy buyers tend to get paid, and the short duration of most trade finance deals, typically 30 to 120 days, limits exposure windows.

The presence of Cicada Credit as risk manager adds a layer of institutional underwriting that’s been conspicuously absent from many DeFi yield products.

Clearpool isn’t the only protocol chasing real-world yield. Centrifuge, Goldfinch, and Maple Finance have all carved out positions in the on-chain credit space, each with different approaches to underwriting, risk management, and asset selection.

Investors considering exposure should watch three things: actual realized yields versus the 15% target over the vault’s first few months, default rates within the trade finance portfolio, and the pace of capital inflows.

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

Training a competitive AI model typically requires the kind of GPU budget that makes venture capitalists weep. Quasar, operating as Subnet 24 on the Bittensor network, thinks it has a workaround: let a decentralized army of miners do it instead, at a fraction of the cost.

The project, developed by SILX AI under the SILX Labs umbrella, has built an open marketplace where independent miners can operate and refine AI models through a competitive evaluation system. Miners who improve model performance get rewarded. Those who don’t, well, they get outcompeted.

What Quasar is actually building At its core, Quasar is focused on a specific pain point in AI: long-context foundation models. Quasar is targeting context lengths of approximately 2 million tokens or more. To get there, the team is deploying what it calls Quasar Attention, a novel methodology paired with hybrid architecture approaches designed to push the boundaries of what decentralized training can produce.

The Quasar-3B architecture launched in April 2026, following the release of the Quasar-Preview model as a Mixture-of-Experts checkpoint on Hugging Face. It’s computationally efficient, which matters a lot when your training infrastructure is spread across a decentralized network rather than sitting in a single data center.

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The real headline number: Quasar claims a 99.5% reduction in pre-training costs compared to traditional centralized methods.

The 10-trillion-token ambition Quasar has laid out plans for a 10-trillion-token decentralized training run, split into two phases of 5 trillion tokens each.

For context, GPT-3 was trained on roughly 300 billion tokens. A 10-trillion-token run would put Quasar in the conversation with the largest training efforts ever attempted, except this one would be executed by a distributed network rather than a single corporate entity.

Cross-subnet collaboration Quasar announced a collaboration with Subnet 56, known as Gradients, and Subnet 3 for integrated long-context model training. This partnership, formed around July 2026, points to an emerging pattern within Bittensor where subnets are starting to function less like isolated experiments and more like interconnected components of a larger system.

The competition-and-reward mechanism is central to how Quasar maintains quality. Miners submit model improvements, validators evaluate them, and rewards flow to the contributors producing genuine enhancements.

What this means for investors For anyone watching the intersection of AI and crypto, Quasar represents an interesting test case. The TAO token, which powers the broader Bittensor network, stands to benefit if projects like SN24 can demonstrate that decentralized training produces models competitive with centralized alternatives.

Investors should watch two things closely. First, whether the Quasar-3B model produces benchmark results that hold up against comparable centralized models. Second, whether the 10-trillion-token training run actually launches and progresses on schedule.

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

Institutional investors have long faced a tradeoff between execution speed and blockchain transparency.

Ondo Finance [ONDO] launched the Ondo Network to address that challenge through private execution, decentralized verification, and on-chain settlement.

Through this, institutions will gain centralized exchange-like performance without sacrificing non-custodial control.

Source: X Rather than simply increasing speed, the infrastructure improves settlement efficiency while preserving verifiable ownership.

As such, if adoption accelerates, Ondo may potentially create deeper levels of liquidity, attract new developers into its ecosystem, and increase the amount of assets being tokenized within its network. This would create further potential for overall ecosystem development.

Furthermore, it would encourage institutional participation across decentralized finance while giving institutions greater confidence in scalable, transparent, high-performance market infrastructure over time.

How Ondo Network works Instead of asking every network participant to process each transaction, the Ondo Network divides responsibilities across specialized components.

Secure enclaves (trusted execution environments) first execute application code inside protected hardware, where operators cannot view or alter it. Even changing a single byte prevents the code from running.

Source: Ondo Finance Meanwhile, independent attestors verify that only the approved code operates before they reconstruct the security keys used to confirm transactions via public blockchain.

This approach keeps verification separate from execution, allowing applications to process trades with centralized exchange-like speed without sacrificing security.

Will Ondo’s infrastructure lead to adoption? Although the architecture provides solutions to long-standing problems related to infrastructure, the ultimate value will depend upon how many users adopt this architecture.

Ondo Finance currently manages almost $3.5 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL). Therefore, there exists a solid institutional basis to provide a high level of credibility in terms of managing large amounts of capital

If capital continues flowing through the network, wallet growth, transaction values, and liquidity should expand together. That momentum would indicate execution quality drives broader adoption.

Over time, stronger developer activity, new protocol launches, higher network TVL, and rising transaction counts would determine whether Ondo evolves into a broader institutional financial ecosystem.

Final Summary Ondo is extending its RWA leadership with infrastructure that combines centralized exchange speed and non-custodial blockchain settlement. The network needs sustained institutional adoption and ecosystem growth to turn its $3.5 billion TVL into long-term network expansion.

Liquidity begets liquidity, so the saying goes.

Hyperliquid, as its name suggests, has become the decentralized exchange of choice for many traders, particularly those who want to trade perpetual futures or “perps,” blockchain-based derivatives contracts that allow users to speculate on the price of an asset with leverage and no expiration date.

Created by Harvard classmates Jeff Yan and a pseudonymous developer known as iliensinc, Hyperliquid, which went live at the start of 2023, is capitalizing on its volume and depth of order book by offering firms something akin to composibility: the concept from decentralized finance (DeFi), whereby permissionless smart contracts can slot together like money LEGOs, the building blocks of new tokenized financial products.

Hyperliquid’s Ethereum-compatible HyperEVM connects directly to its super-fast homegrown HyperCore blockchain, allowing other applications to compose atop the platform’s shared liquidity rather than fragmenting it. In other words, applications like wallets or even other exchanges can piggyback on Hyperliquid, using it as a backend to offer perps trading and other services.

As more builders deploy on and integrate Hyperliquid, liquidity deepens, the variety of assets expands, and network effects compound. There are now hundreds of developers — including big names like MetaMask, Phantom wallet and South African exchange VALR — using Hyperliquid’s system of “builder codes.” Builders have generated some $90 million in revenue so far, according to Flowscan.

A growing army of acolytes can’t praise the platform enough.

“Hyperliquid is not just a perpetuals exchange, it’s more like the AWS for finance,” said Hansu Jian, CEO of Hyperion DeFi, the first U.S.-listed treasury company focused on Hyperliquid’s native token HYPE.

“The perps part is great, but this is really a layer-one blockchain infrastructure. The service on offer is actually liquidity, and having all these markets work well, and allowing anyone to build things on top of them,” Jian said in an interview.

Similar to AWS for cloud infrastructure, builders own their users and fully control the user interface, while Hyperliquid provides the underlying liquidity and execution. Builder code integrators charge fees on the notional size of their users’ trades without developing the backend or maintaining liquidity.

“Builder codes let integrators focus on what they do best, delivering a great user experience, while Hyperliquid serves as the backend for liquidity and execution,” said Sterling Barnett, business development lead at Hyperliquid Labs, via email. “Integrators can offer their users best-in-class onchain liquidity and institutional-grade infrastructure, and earn fees on every trade.”

For an app like MetaMask, the Ethereum-based wallet that reports over 100 million users worldwide, it makes perfect sense to fuse with Hyperliquid’s EVM module. MetaMask has given its users self-custodial access to perps directly from the wallet since October of 2025.

Being a wallet has the advantage that there’s no decentralized app (dApp) to connect to, while fund transfers are streamlined to the point where users can trade directly with the tokens they already hold, said Matthieu Saint Olive, Staff Product Manager at MetaMask. It plugs into MetaMask’s money account, social login, and follow trading and leaves Hyperliquid to handle matching, the oracle, and the margin engine, he said.

“Matching orders is genuinely hard, and Hyperliquid is excellent at it, so we don’t try to rebuild it,” said Saint Olive via email. “By routing orders straight to the Hyperliquid order book, MetaMask Perps offers some of the best liquidity and execution quality available anywhere. ”

MetaMask said it’s seeing growth beyond crypto towards things like commodities and equities, according to Saint Olive. “Real-world-asset markets have gone from a small slice of perp volume at the start of 2026 to roughly a quarter of it today,” he said.

When it comes to fees, MetaMask charges a flat 0.1% builder fee, disclosed up front, with no hidden spread and nothing buried in execution, so a trader can verify exactly what they paid. “We think that transparency is the real advantage, and we’re actively exploring more innovative pricing models, because we want the economics to be a reason people choose MetaMask, not a source of friction,” Saint Olive added.

It’s more surprising to find a large centralized exchange handing over liquidity requirements to Hyperliquid’s perps order book. But taking the Hyperliquid route has proved a good option for South Africa-based exchange VALR, ranked among the largest exchanges in Africa with close to two million retail customers and about 2,000 corporate institutional customers, according to the exchange’s CEO and co-founder, Farzam Ehsani.

Having started out offering customers spot market, spot margin, and then perpetuals, the team at VALR built all the infrastructure in-house, including risk and liquidation engines, Ehsani said. Despite all the hard work that went into launching perpetual futures, Ehsani said candidly that it was difficult to get volume and liquidity.

“So perpetual futures on our own books didn't take off as we had hoped they would, predominantly because of the liquidity and volume,” Ehsani said in an interview. “Our volume is our volume; we are truthful and transparent and don’t do any wash trading or anything like that. We saw Hyperliquid bringing a huge amount of volume and market participants from all over the world together and thought, ‘Why don't we plug into that?’”

Looking ahead, when the likes of Robinhood, Coinbase, Intercontinental Exchange and others go full throttle into offering perps, there will be opportunities for cross-venue arbitrage, according to Jian of Hyperion.

“Say you are maintaining one position on Robinhood, for example, and the other side of the position on Hyperliquid,” Jian said. “Then, because you have a lot of what's called non-toxic flow, which is when more retail users are just purely entering and exiting the market, you'll be able to see more organic mechanisms for funding rates.”

Core Scientific has signed a major deal with chipmaker AMD to lease its AI infrastructure starting next year as the company pivots from Bitcoin mining. The CORZ stock climbed on the back of this deal, which could also see AMD purchase the miner’s common stock.

Core Scientific Signs Deal To Lease AI Infrastructure To AMD In a press release, the firm and AMD announced a deal that would see the latter secure up to 2.5 gigawatts of data center capacity starting in 2027 to support end customer deployments of AMD AI solutions. As part of the agreement, both companies revealed that they will collaborate on physical infrastructure design and the deployment of AMD Instinct™ GPUs, EPYC™ CPUs, and ROCm™ software.

This agreement comes as Core Scientific pivots from Bitcoin mining to building AI infrastructure, including data centers. As CoinGape reported, Core Scientific sold 1,900 BTC earlier this year to provide liquidity as it makes this transition.

The company still holds 547 BTC, according to BitcoinTreasuries data. The miner noted that it still derives revenue from earning crypto from the company’s own account and from crypto mining hosting services. However, it is in the process of repurposing its remaining facilities to support its high-density colocation services.

Core Scientific is just one of many Bitcoin miners pivoting to provide AI infrastructure. Bitcoin Miner MARA recently expanded its AI infrastructure with a Texas site acquisition. Meanwhile, TeraWulf signed a 20-year data center deal with Anthropic earlier this month.

CORZ Stock Drops At Market Open CORZ stock has dropped over 3% at the market open today amid the announcement of Core Scientific’s deal with AMD. The stock surged over 5% in premarket trading but has now slipped as the stock market sell-off deepens.

Core Scientific stock is also down over 12% over the past week. However, the stock is up over 40% year-to-date (YTD) amid the pivot from Bitcoin mining to providing AI infrastructure as AI demand increases.

Meanwhile, Core Scientific revealed that AMD will also receive market-priced warrants to purchase its common stock, subject to certain commercial conditions as part of the agreement.

For more on Bitcoin mining, please check out our page on Top 6 Best Crypto Mining Hosting Services In 2026

Core Scientific has added 301 BTC to its balance sheet, bringing its total Bitcoin holdings to 848 BTC. The purchase is a curious move for a company that spent the first quarter of this year doing the exact opposite: selling nearly every coin it had.

For context, Core Scientific held 2,537 BTC at the end of 2025. By March 31, 2026, that figure had cratered to just 547 BTC. The company sold roughly 1,900 BTC in January alone for $175 million, averaging about $92,100 per coin. The stated goal was straightforward: convert digital assets into cash to bankroll a pivot toward AI and high-performance computing data centers.

From sell-off to re-accumulation A company that loudly declared it would dispose of “nearly all” its remaining Bitcoin in 2026, per its own 10-K filing, just bought 301 coins.

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The new total of 848 BTC represents a significant jump from the 547 BTC the company reported holding at the end of Q1.

Core Scientific isn’t a small operation. As of Q1 2026, the company was sitting on $1.01 billion in cash equivalents. Its digital assets at that point were valued at roughly $37.3 million.

The AI pivot remains the main story Core Scientific’s broader strategy hasn’t changed. The company is transforming itself from a pure-play Bitcoin miner into a hybrid operation that also provides high-density data center infrastructure for AI workloads.

That pivot has attracted serious institutional backing. Morgan Stanley extended a financing agreement worth up to $1 billion, designed to help Core Scientific scale its contracted power capacity.

What this means for investors For shareholders, the signal is mixed but potentially constructive. A company with $1.01 billion in cash buying 301 BTC isn’t making a bet-the-farm wager on Bitcoin.

The risk for investors is execution. Running world-class AI data centers requires different expertise than running mining rigs. The financing is in place, the cash is abundant, but the competitive landscape for AI infrastructure includes players like Equinix and Digital Realty that have been doing this for decades. Core Scientific’s advantage is its existing power infrastructure and cooling capabilities, which translate well to AI workloads.

Traders should watch whether Core Scientific continues accumulating Bitcoin in the coming quarters. If the 848 BTC figure climbs further, it would represent a definitive strategic reversal from the liquidation playbook outlined in the company’s 2025 annual filing.

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

Ripple’s closest banking partner in Asia is expanding its blockchain goals beyond the XRP Ledger and RippleNet. SBI Holdings has announced a major restructuring of one of its wholly owned subsidiaries, with the business at the heart of its strategy with respect to the Canton Network. The shift is the latest effort by SBI to venture into institutional on-chain finance alongside its move off Ripple’s network.

Ripple Partner SBI Holdings Adopts Canton Network On Tuesday, July 28, SBI Holdings has announced that SBI Security Solutions Co., Ltd. will be renamed to SBI Digital Practice Co., Ltd., as of June 22, 2026. The company will now be SBI’s standalone business in the financial services space based on the Canton Network. According to the company overview, SBI Holdings owns 100% of the business, which is headquartered in Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo.

The restructuring follows the long-term vision of on-chain finance of SBI. About the financial products and transactions, the company noted that blockchain networks are increasingly being used. Thus, SBI Digital Practice will support financial institutions to create compliant blockchain framework and promote institutional adoption.

The subsidiary will offer such financial firms an end-to-end support, SBI said. It will be involved in creating financial infrastructure and applications on the Canton Network. It could therefore helping domestic and foreign institutions implement, and creating platforms for cross-border and cross-currency transactions.

The company overview also mentions that SBI Digital Practice will be primarily concerned with on-chain financial services, business development, system building, and operations. Earlier, SBI Holdings partnered with Fassets to move forward with stablecoin cross-border initiative.

Is SBI Looking Beyond XRPL, RippleNet? It’s a noteworthy announcement since SBI has close ties with Ripple. In 2016, SBI Holdings and Ripple founded SBI Ripple Asia in an attempt to expand RippleNet-based cross-border payments throughout the Asia-Pacific area. The joint venture also has been a key component in institutional adoption on the XRP Ledger and Ripple’s enterprise payment technologies.

However, the newest step signals SBI’s institutional blockchain strategy is not only based on the Ripple network but also on their own platforms. The expansion follows the month of SBI Ripple Asia’s reaffirmation of its support for XRPL just months ago. The company has recently become a Japanese third-party prepaid instrument issuer. It also launched a token issuance platform on the XRP Ledger in April 2026 to empower businesses to create compliant digital tokens.

SBI anticipates the demand for the Canton Network will continue to rise at the institutional level. Today, the network includes more than 600 participating institutions, including Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Franklin Templeton, and Euroclear, SBI added.

Moreover, the total value of assets on the network has reached over $6 trillion, according to SBI. The firm also noted that DTCC’s recent adoption of Canton for the digital securitization of U.S. Treasury bonds was another indicator of the increasing institutional use of the company’s solution.

SBI is certainly one of Ripple’s most reliable partners but its recent restructuring suggests the company is no longer focused on a single blockchain ecosystem for its digital asset strategy. Instead, it’s preparing itself to take a wider piece of the institutional pie of multi-chain on-chain finance.

For RWA-related info, check out our page on Top Real World Asset (RWA) Issuers.