Dogecoin (DOGE) remained in a narrow trading range on Monday, July 20, 2026, as the price consolidated within a symmetrical triangle pattern. The token’s price hovered at $0.07170, slipping 1.32% over the past 24 hours. Despite the minor daily decline, Dogecoin’s trading volume jumped by 48.55% to $415.24 million, signaling intensified activity as buyers and sellers await the next decisive move. In the past week, DOGE has lost 0.99%, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Analysts highlight triangle formation and key supportAnalyst Crypto With Gopal reported that DOGE has tightened inside a symmetrical triangle structure, with the price making higher lows while facing persistent selling at a descending resistance trendline. The momentum is compressing as Dogecoin nears the apex of this pattern, with increasing pressure from both buyers defending support and sellers maintaining resistance.
Another market watcher, Crypto TXG, stated that Dogecoin has consistently held onto the $0.07150 support, bouncing from that level. However, these recoveries have yet to reach the resistance marked at $0.087. Instead, DOGE has repeatedly tested the same support, remaining trapped in a consolidation phase for several days.
DOGE’s price continues to trade within a very tight range as both buying and selling pressures intensify. Analysts note that the decisive move will depend on whether the price breaks out above resistance or falls below support, which could set the tone for the next trend.
The outcome of this formation is likely to determine the market’s direction. A breakout above resistance may ignite an upward wave, while a breakdown could result in further sideways movement or increased bearish pressure.
CoinGlass heatmap data shows that DOGE is currently trading in a narrow liquidity band between $0.071 and $0.0745. Notably, the most prominent upside liquidation zones are concentrated from $0.0738 to $0.0745. If buying interest increases, these zones could become focal points for price action.
Support LevelCurrent PriceResistance LevelDaily Change (%)Trading Volume$0.07150$0.07170$0.087-1.32%$415.24 millionTechnical indicators show weak momentumRecent declines briefly swept liquidity near $0.071 before a short-lived bounce, indicating that buyers are still defending lower levels. However, the absence of considerable follow-through could leave the door open for another test of the $0.0708 to $0.0712 range before any recovery attempt.
From a technical perspective, the Relative Strength Index (RSI) stands at 36.50, with its moving average at 36.58. Since RSI remains below 50, sellers are considered to be in control. A significant shift in sentiment would require the RSI to climb above the 50 threshold.
The Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) indicator reveals only a slight easing of downward momentum. The MACD line is currently at -0.0021838, while the signal line sits at -0.0025619. The histogram is slightly positive at 0.0003782, but technical analysts suggest that DOGE needs stronger confirmation from price structure and volume before a meaningful direction is confirmed.
Mini dictionary: Symmetrical triangle — A chart pattern in technical analysis marked by converging trendlines of higher lows and lower highs. This formation often signals a period of consolidation before a breakout in either direction, depending on which trendline is breached.
The coming days are expected to be pivotal for DOGE, with market participants closely monitoring support and resistance levels as the symmetrical triangle approaches a resolution.
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.
Bitcoin climbed beyond the $65,000 mark on Monday after Senator Cynthia Lummis announced the CLARITY Act had cleared committee and advanced to the full Senate floor, marking a key step toward U.S. crypto market structure legislation.
Notable Statistics Coinglass data shows 79,479 traders were liquidated in the past 24 hours for $245.39 million. SoSoValue data shows net inflows of $132.3 million from spot Bitcoin ETFs on Friday. Spot Ethereum ETFs saw net inflows of $36.7 million. In the past 24 hours, top gainers include Pump.fun, Virtuals Protocol and Pi. Notable DevelopmentsTrader NotesTrader KillaXBT noted Bitcoin is testing a key low-timeframe resistance after breaking above recent highs ahead of the new weekly open.
A rejection at current levels could signal a red week and reduce the chances of a move to sweep the $67,000 highs, making this area critical for maintaining bullish momentum.
Michael van de Poppe expects Bitcoin to rally toward the $80,000–$85,000 range over the next two to three months. He argued that the move would align with the 50-week moving average, which has historically acted as resistance during the first major rally after a bear market ends.
Trader and investor Virtual Bacon says the CLARITY Act’s House approval shifts the focus to a Senate floor vote before the August recess.
While its passage would be a major long-term catalyst for altcoins by enabling exchange products and new market narratives, they argue it won’t trigger an immediate rally, with Bitcoin needing to confirm the next bull market first.
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Cardano just crossed a milestone that has nothing to do with price charts. The Van Rossem hard fork went live on July 18, 2026, at approximately 21:44 UTC, pushing the network to Protocol Version 11 and, more importantly, proving that its community governance system actually works in production.
The upgrade cuts smart contract execution costs, introduces new built-in functions for the Plutus development framework, and updates the network’s cost model. ADA responded with a roughly 5% price bump following activation, outperforming the broader crypto market.
What the Van Rossem hard fork actually changes The core of this hard fork targets Plutus, Cardano’s smart contract framework. The upgrade adds new built-in functions to Plutus, and the cost model, which determines how much computational resources smart contracts consume, has also been updated. In practical terms, running apps on Cardano just got cheaper.
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Node security also received enhancements. This was the first hard fork ratified entirely through Cardano’s Voltaire governance framework. The ratification happened on July 13, 2026, following a four-week decision period. The final tally showed 68.57% DRep support, clearing the threshold needed to proceed. DReps, or Delegated Representatives, are Cardano’s version of elected governance participants, holders who either vote directly or delegate their voting power to representatives they trust.
A tribute and a transition The upgrade carries the name of Max van Rossem, a Cardano community contributor who passed away earlier in 2026. By June 15, node readiness had reached approximately 84%, indicating that stake pool operators and infrastructure providers were largely aligned well before the ratification vote.
The Van Rossem fork is being positioned as a stepping stone toward the Dijkstra era, Cardano’s next major development phase. Named after computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, this era will focus on scaling the network to better support DeFi applications, NFTs, and real-world asset tokenization.
What this means for investors The 5% ADA price increase following the hard fork activation is encouraging but hardly conclusive. The real question for ADA holders is whether cheaper smart contract execution translates into actual usage growth.
Cardano has delivered upgrades before—the Alonzo hard fork that enabled smart contracts in 2021 and the Vasil upgrade in 2022. The Dijkstra era roadmap targets DeFi and real-world asset tokenization, two of the fastest-growing sectors in crypto.
For traders with shorter time horizons, the metrics to watch are on-chain transaction volume, smart contract deployment counts, and total value locked in Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem. Investors should also keep an eye on the pace at which Dijkstra-era proposals move through Voltaire governance, as the speed of follow-on upgrades will indicate more about Cardano’s trajectory than any single hard fork.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Cardano hard fork marks first upgrade approved without Input Output in charge (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)Summary
Cardano’s Van Rossem hard fork activated on July 18, moving the network to protocol version 11 and lowering smart contract execution costs while preparing for a future scalability upgrade.The upgrade is the first in Cardano’s history to be proposed, debated and ratified entirely through its onchain governance system, rather than by founding developer Input Output, marking a shift in who controls protocol changes.While everyday ADA transactions remain unchanged for now, the fork enables cheaper, more capable smart contracts and lays procedural and technical groundwork for the planned Ouroboros Leios scaling upgrade expected in 2026.Cardano activated its Van Rossem hard fork on Saturday, moving the mainnet to protocol version 11. The technical changes lower smart contract costs and lay groundwork for an upcoming scalability overhaul.
But a more consequential change is who directed the upgrade. For the first time in Cardano's history, it wasn't Input Output, the engineering firm that designed and built the blockchain.
Every previous Cardano hard fork was coordinated top-down by the network’s founding entities, chiefly Input Output, but Van Rossem was initiated, debated and ratified entirely through Cardano's onchain governance system, the framework introduced in the so-dubbed Voltaire era that lets stakeholders vote directly on protocol changes.
It is the first Cardano upgrade approved end-to-end by the network's own participants rather than its creators.
Onchain data from Cardanoscan shows the network moved from version 10 in epoch 643 to version 11 in epoch 644, with the action enacted activated Saturday, July 18 at 21:44 UTC after ratification on July 13. Passage required sign-off from three separate bodies, and the tallies show how differently each treated it.
Delegated representatives — or stakeholders that ADA holders elect to vote on governance proposals on their behalf, similar to representatives in a parliament — voted 78.97% in favor against a 60% threshold.
The constitutional committee, a body of elected members that rules only on whether a proposal complies with the Cardano Constitution rather than on its merits, found the hard fork compliant, with all seven members agreeing where five were required.
(Cardanoscan)Interestingly, the pool operators who actually run Cardano's infrastructure approved the community's first self-directed hard fork by the narrowest of its three margins, with 53.02% of operators voting to approve the upgrade, a reminder that decentralized governance means the founders' preferred outcome is no longer guaranteed.
Under Cardano's constitution, the upgrade also required at least 85% of stake pools by active stake to run compatible node software before ratification. Network telemetry showed adoption well ahead of that, with roughly 93% of block production already on version 11 heading into activation.
What is version 11On the technical side, version 11 is an intra-era hard fork, meaning it stays within Cardano's current governance-focused era and does not change the structure of transactions, so the work required to upgrade is minimal for the wider ecosystem.
It adds new capabilities to Plutus, the platform developers use to write Cardano's smart contracts, unifying the built-in functions available across the platform's three versions so older applications gain newer features.
The upgrade also tightens several of the ledger's validation rules, including one guaranteeing that no two stake pools can reuse the same cryptographic identity key.
"As well as Plutus improvements and Plutus Cost Model enhancements, this upgrade lays the foundation for the next upgrade, the Dijkstra era hard fork, which will introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano," Input Output wrote in a development report on Friday.
Ouroboros Leios is a scaling proposal for the proof-of-stake consensus model that Cardano runs. It is expected later in 2026 and aimed at sharply increasing transactions per second without weakening the protocol's security guarantees.
Van Rossem is the procedural groundwork for Ouroboros, both in the ledger changes it ships and in the precedent it sets: that Cardano can now upgrade itself by vote.
The hard fork is named for Max van Rossem, a Cardano governance contributor who helped shape the network's constitution and died in October 2025.
What the hard fork means for a Cardano userThere are no visible changes for someone casually holding or spending ADA. Transactions work the same way, wallets do not need updating and the fee to send ADA is unchanged. The upgrade does not alter how the network looks or feels to use.
The benefits arrive through the apps that can be built on Cardano over time. The Plutus changes lower the costs of running a smart contract — the code behind any onchain service — from DeFi protocols to NFT marketplaces.
A user pays a fee every time they interact with one of those apps, and part of that fee reflects how much computation the contract demands. Cheaper execution means those apps can charge less per transaction, though the savings are not automatic, since developers have to rebuild their contracts to capture it.
Over time, the larger shift is over who controls what comes next. On most blockchains, a founding company or core team sets the roadmap and users take what they are given.
Van Rossem showed that Cardano's holders can approve a protocol change themselves, without the founders directing the change. For investors holding ADA, that is the difference between owning a token on a network someone else steers and having a formal vote in where it goes. Whether that is worth more than faster, top-down development is a separate debate, but it is a real change in who holds the wheel.
Meanwhile, the upgrade a user will actually feel is still ahead. Van Rossem lays the groundwork for Leios, the scaling change meant to sharply increase how many transactions Cardano can process. That is what would deliver faster confirmations and more capacity when the network is busy.
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Cardano price remained under pressure on Monday despite the activation of the network’s van Rossem hard fork, leaving ADA traders focused on whether the token can break through its next major resistance zone.
Summary
Cardano remains near $0.16 as weak momentum limits gains following the van Rossem hard fork. ADA must reclaim $0.17 and $0.19 before the broader downtrend shows clearer signs of reversing. Positive funding offers support, but a sub-one long-short ratio shows traders remain cautious about recovery. ADA was trading near $0.162 at the time of writing, down around 2% over 24 hours. The token has remained broadly flat over the past month after a long decline from levels near $0.90 to $1.00. Its market capitalization stands near $6.06 billion, while daily trading volume is around $240 million.
The latest price action comes just after Cardano moved to Protocol Version 11 through the van Rossem hard fork. The network upgrade improved parts of the Plutus smart contract framework and prepared Cardano for future scaling work, but it has not yet produced a sustained ADA price rally.
Cardano price struggles to hold above $0.16 The ADA/USDT daily chart remains in a broader bearish structure. Cardano has fallen sharply from its 2025 highs and recently settled into a narrow range around $0.16. The latest consolidation has slowed the decline, but buyers have yet to establish a clear sequence of higher highs and higher lows.
ADA is also trading below the middle Bollinger Band near $0.1688. The upper band sits around $0.1887, while the lower band is close to $0.1489. This places the price in the lower half of its current volatility range. A sustained move above $0.17 would improve the short-term setup, while a renewed decline could put the $0.15 area back in focus.
Cardano (ADA) price chart, source: crypto.news The Relative Strength Index stands at 45.62, slightly below its moving average of 47.10. The reading shows that momentum has recovered from more extreme selling conditions but remains below the neutral 50 mark. Buyers therefore have not yet gained firm control of the daily trend.
This weak structure follows months of pressure on ADA. Cardano fell below $0.20 in June as its broader market decline continued. Earlier technical analysis also identified weak momentum indicators as ADA struggled to establish durable support.
Van Rossem hard fork fails to trigger an immediate ADA rally Cardano activated the van Rossem hard fork on July 18, taking the mainnet to Protocol Version 11. The upgrade became the network’s first hard fork approved and ratified entirely through its onchain governance system.
The upgrade adds Plutus improvements and changes to the cost model used for smart contract execution. It also prepares the technical foundation for the planned Dijkstra era and Ouroboros Leios, which aims to increase Cardano’s transaction capacity. As crypto.news reported, the upgrade went live after moving through Cardano’s governance process and earlier testnet stages.
However, ADA has so far shown little sustained response to the network event. The token remains near the same price area it occupied before activation. That price behavior suggests traders are still weighing broader market conditions and technical resistance alongside the protocol upgrade.
The hard fork can improve the network’s underlying technology without automatically driving immediate demand for ADA. For the price setup, traders are now watching whether activity following the upgrade can support stronger buying pressure over a longer period.
Mixed derivatives data keeps traders cautious Derivatives indicators also show a divided market. ADA funding rates recently turned positive, with the rate at about 0.0061%. Positive funding generally means traders holding long positions pay those holding shorts, showing that positioning has shifted somewhat toward the bullish side.
Source: CoinGlass However, the ADA long-to-short ratio remained near 0.90. A reading below one means short positions continue to outnumber longs under that measure. The two indicators therefore point in different directions, with improving funding but continued caution among derivatives traders.
The mixed positioning follows heavy short interest ahead of the hard fork. ADA traded near $0.1628 before the upgrade as traders increased bearish positions even while large holders accumulated tokens. Liquidity was concentrated around $0.16 and $0.17, making those levels important for the next move.
The $0.16 area has continued to act as an immediate support zone after the fork. Losing that level could expose ADA to the lower Bollinger Band near $0.149. Holding it would give buyers another opportunity to test the resistance immediately above the current range.
ADA needs to reclaim $0.17 to target $0.19 The first technical level for Cardano bulls is the $0.168 to $0.17 area, which aligns closely with the middle Bollinger Band and a previous liquidity zone. A daily move above that range would return ADA to the upper half of its recent trading channel.
Beyond that, the $0.188 to $0.19 area represents the next major resistance zone. The upper Bollinger Band sits near this level, making a break above $0.19 a stronger signal that the short-term structure is changing. RSI would also need to climb above 50 to show firmer momentum from buyers.
Until those conditions develop, ADA remains in a consolidation phase inside a much larger downtrend. The van Rossem upgrade provides a new network catalyst, while development toward Leios gives Cardano another technical milestone to watch. However, price confirmation still depends on buyers pushing through nearby resistance.
The latest Cardano price prediction shows ADA moving sideways as traders wait to see if it can break past its tight resistance zone. Meanwhile, the Hyperliquid price prediction points to potential gains, but only if the token can successfully push above $76.
Stealing the spotlight from these slow-moving assets, BlockDAG (BDAG) is dominating the list of top crypto gainers as its massive buyback offer enters its final hours. This is the absolute last chance for buyers to secure BDAG coins at just $0.00000033 before the window slams shut permanently. By grabbing coins now, buyers can later sell at the $0.03 buyback price, locking in an incredible 95x ROI potential.
Cardano Price Prediction Points to Tight Resistance Table of Contents
Cardano Price Prediction Points to Tight ResistanceHyperliquid Price Prediction Shows Consolidation PhaseBlockDAG: Final Chance to Grab 95x ROI at Just $0.00000033Final Call The latest Cardano price prediction shows that ADA is moving in a very tight range. The token currently trades around $0.1590 after losing its upward speed beneath major technical barriers. The 20-day exponential moving average near $0.1650 is the biggest hurdle for buyers to clear right now.
If buyers can push past $0.1650 with high volume, the price could climb toward $0.1761 and later target $0.1865. However, failing to protect current support levels could push the price down to $0.1525. A major drawback for the network is its weak derivatives data, with open interest dropping to just $388 million. This shows that leveraged traders are still highly cautious and lack confidence in the coin’s short-term future.
Hyperliquid Price Prediction Shows Consolidation Phase The current Hyperliquid price prediction indicates that HYPE is sitting in a consolidation phase. The token trades around $62.31 as investors wait for a clear market signal. Traders are watching the crucial $73 to $76 resistance zone to see if a breakout can occur.
A successful climb past $73 would signal fresh buying pressure, while passing $76 could start a larger rally. Despite efforts to grow the network infrastructure, the asset faces noticeable drawbacks. The price is still locked in a downward direction because of a cautious crypto market. If the token fails to cross the $76 barrier soon, the boring sideways movement will likely continue, leaving short-term holders trapped in a declining market structure.
BlockDAG: Final Chance to Grab 95x ROI at Just $0.00000033 Every great opportunity reaches a point where waiting is no longer an option, and BlockDAG is now at that stage. The final countdown has begun for BlockDAG’s $0.03 buyback offer, leaving buyers with one last opportunity to benefit from one of the project’s biggest incentives. Those who enter now can still purchase BDAG at just $0.00000033, receive their coins immediately, and remain eligible for the current buyback before this chapter comes to an end. Once the deadline passes, the $0.03 buyback will no longer be available.
What makes this opportunity stand out is the gap between today’s entry price and the current buyback value. Buying BDAG at $0.00000033 and having the ability to sell back at $0.03 creates a potential 95X return, a level that is becoming increasingly difficult to find as projects mature. With the countdown nearly over, many buyers are choosing to secure their position before this limited-time offer disappears for good.
BlockDAG’s momentum is also being driven by continuous development, including ecosystem expansion, stronger community growth, and new platform upgrades that continue attracting attention. Combined with the final buyback window and its low entry price, the project is giving early participants a compelling reason to act now rather than later. For anyone searching for the top crypto gainers today, BlockDAG offers a combination of real utility and huge upside potential that makes it the hottest pick right now.
Final Call While the latest Cardano price prediction points to slow consolidation and the Hyperliquid price prediction relies on a difficult technical breakout, these networks lack immediate momentum. Mainstream tokens are leaving investors waiting for uncertain signals rather than delivering rapid returns.
However, BlockDAG breaks away from this slow pattern by offering a definitive, time-sensitive wealth opportunity, making it a standout pick among today’s top crypto gainers. Its massive buyback offer is entering its final hours, giving buyers one last opportunity to secure BDAG at just $0.00000033 and later sell it at $0.03, locking in a potential 95x ROI.
Ultimate Sale: https://purchase.blockdag.network
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Disclaimer: This is a Press Release provided by a third party who is responsible for the content. Please conduct your own research before taking any action based on the content.
Michelle DG
Michelle is an editor at CoinCentral & Blockonomi, covering the latest trends in crypto, blockchain, and digital finance. With a sharp eye for detail and a passion for emerging technologies. [email protected]
In brief Cardano activated the Van Rossem hard fork on July 18, reaching protocol version 11 with zero downtime. It's the network's first major upgrade ratified entirely through on-chain community governance, without any centralized company directing the process. The fork lowers Plutus smart contract execution costs and bundles five technical improvements, including new cryptographic tools and a security fix requiring every stake pool to use a unique cryptographic key. Cardano has hard forked, implementing the Van Rossem upgrade over the weekend and transitioning the network to protocol version 11.
It’s not the first time Cardano has executed a hard fork—but it is the first time it’s done so without the intervention of the blockchain’s founding development company, Input Output. That makes how it happened at least as important as what the upgrade does.
A hard fork—a permanent, mandatory update to a blockchain's core rules, applied simultaneously across every computer running the network—is a pretty serious deal. Throughout Cardano’s history, it’s been Input Output that’s decided on these kinds of network changes.
Van Rossem, which sets the stage for improved scalability and lower costs on the network, is the first major Cardano upgrade ratified entirely through on-chain governance, meaning elected community members, server operators, and an oversight committee voted it live.
The fork carries the name of Max van Rossem, a Dutch Cardano contributor who passed away in October 2025. A developer, elected representative, node operator, and constitutional delegate, Van Rossem helped design the very governance system that just activated this upgrade.
Three separate bodies signed off. Delegated representatives known as “DReps”—community members elected to vote on behalf of Cardano holders, similar to elected delegates in a parliament—approved it at 77.63%, clearing the 60% threshold. Stake pool operators—the companies and individuals running the servers that keep Cardano running—backed it at 52.7%, just above the required 51%.
The Constitutional Committee, a seven-member board that verifies upgrades comply with Cardano's founding document, also approved the proposal. Cardano has been building toward this governance model since the Chang hard fork in 2024, which first introduced on-chain voting, followed by the Plomin hard fork in early 2025, which gave token holders real decision-making power.
What the upgrade actually doesVan Rossem is an intra-era upgrade—a targeted improvement that doesn't rebuild Cardano's core structure. Its main goal is lowering Plutus execution costs. Plutus is Cardano's smart contract programming language—the code engine behind every DeFi app, NFT marketplace, and on-chain payment tool built on the network.
Cheaper execution means developers can run more complex apps for less.
The upgrade bundles different technical proposals, including new cryptographic tools for verifying digital signatures faster and a security fix requiring every stake pool to use a unique cryptographic key—closing a known attack path.
Now that van Rossem is live, what changes for builders?
Protocol Version 11 adds constant-time array indexing, native Value handling, faster list traversal, and new cryptographic primitives.
Built-ins now work across Plutus V1, V2, and V3. Transaction shape stays the same. https://t.co/lpUO158oJA
— Input Output Group (@IOGroup) July 20, 2026
For everyday users, nothing changes today.
Last week, Input Output (the firm that built Cardano's core codebase) announced it would hand off development to outside specialist teams starting in August. Van Rossem is the first upgrade executed under that transition.
The next target is Ouroboros Leios—Cardano's planned overhaul of how it processes transactions, targeting 30 to 65 times current throughput with a stated goal of exceeding 1,000 transactions per second. Van Rossem is a technical prerequisite.
Cardano (ADA) price: Flat but not fallingAs exciting as this news may be for Cardano fans, the markets don’t seem to think the hard fork provides enough hopium to move the needle just yet.
Cardano, which trades as ADA ,has been essentially flat for three days, hovering around the $0.1662 mark at a $6 billion market capitalization. Bulls are pushing, but the overall weight is still bearish—the hard fork announcement appears to have steadied prices and prevented a retest of deeper support.
The 50-day exponential moving average (a trend-tracking line weighted toward recent price action) sits below the 200-day, a classic bearish configuration. RSI—a momentum score from 0 to 100, where above 70 signals overbought and below 30 means oversold—reads 48.8, which is considered neutral. ADX, which measures trend strength, sits at 16.1, weak, though its directional component has shifted from bearish to bullish—an early signal traders watch for potential turning points.
Whales holding between 100,000 and 100 million ADA tokens pushed their balances to the highest level since 2023, per Santiment data. Smaller holders reduced exposure.
Charlies Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder, expects Leios to reach mainnet before the end of 2026, and the public testnet (dubbed Musashi Dojo) launched June 23.
Daily Debrief NewsletterStart every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
In brief Cardano activated the Van Rossem hard fork on July 18, reaching protocol version 11 with zero downtime. It's the network's first major upgrade ratified entirely through on-chain community governance, without any centralized company directing the process. The fork lowers Plutus smart contract execution costs and bundles five technical improvements, including new cryptographic tools and a security fix requiring every stake pool to use a unique cryptographic key. Cardano has hard forked, implementing the Van Rossem upgrade over the weekend and transitioning the network to protocol version 11.
It’s not the first time Cardano has executed a hard fork—but it is the first time it’s done so without the intervention of the blockchain’s founding development company, Input Output. That makes how it happened at least as important as what the upgrade does.
A hard fork—a permanent, mandatory update to a blockchain's core rules, applied simultaneously across every computer running the network—is a pretty serious deal. Throughout Cardano’s history, it’s been Input Output that’s decided on these kinds of network changes.
Van Rossem, which sets the stage for improved scalability and lower costs on the network, is the first major Cardano upgrade ratified entirely through on-chain governance, meaning elected community members, server operators, and an oversight committee voted it live.
The fork carries the name of Max van Rossem, a Dutch Cardano contributor who passed away in October 2025. A developer, elected representative, node operator, and constitutional delegate, Van Rossem helped design the very governance system that just activated this upgrade.
Three separate bodies signed off. Delegated representatives known as “DReps”—community members elected to vote on behalf of Cardano holders, similar to elected delegates in a parliament—approved it at 77.63%, clearing the 60% threshold. Stake pool operators—the companies and individuals running the servers that keep Cardano running—backed it at 52.7%, just above the required 51%.
The Constitutional Committee, a seven-member board that verifies upgrades comply with Cardano's founding document, also approved the proposal. Cardano has been building toward this governance model since the Chang hard fork in 2024, which first introduced on-chain voting, followed by the Plomin hard fork in early 2025, which gave token holders real decision-making power.
What the upgrade actually doesVan Rossem is an intra-era upgrade—a targeted improvement that doesn't rebuild Cardano's core structure. Its main goal is lowering Plutus execution costs. Plutus is Cardano's smart contract programming language—the code engine behind every DeFi app, NFT marketplace, and on-chain payment tool built on the network.
Cheaper execution means developers can run more complex apps for less.
The upgrade bundles different technical proposals, including new cryptographic tools for verifying digital signatures faster and a security fix requiring every stake pool to use a unique cryptographic key—closing a known attack path.
Now that van Rossem is live, what changes for builders?
Protocol Version 11 adds constant-time array indexing, native Value handling, faster list traversal, and new cryptographic primitives.
Built-ins now work across Plutus V1, V2, and V3. Transaction shape stays the same. https://t.co/lpUO158oJA
— Input Output Group (@IOGroup) July 20, 2026
For everyday users, nothing changes today.
Last week, Input Output (the firm that built Cardano's core codebase) announced it would hand off development to outside specialist teams starting in August. Van Rossem is the first upgrade executed under that transition.
The next target is Ouroboros Leios—Cardano's planned overhaul of how it processes transactions, targeting 30 to 65 times current throughput with a stated goal of exceeding 1,000 transactions per second. Van Rossem is a technical prerequisite.
Cardano (ADA) price: Flat but not fallingAs exciting as this news may be for Cardano fans, the markets don’t seem to think the hard fork provides enough hopium to move the needle just yet.
Cardano, which trades as ADA ,has been essentially flat for three days, hovering around the $0.1662 mark at a $6 billion market capitalization. Bulls are pushing, but the overall weight is still bearish—the hard fork announcement appears to have steadied prices and prevented a retest of deeper support.
The 50-day exponential moving average (a trend-tracking line weighted toward recent price action) sits below the 200-day, a classic bearish configuration. RSI—a momentum score from 0 to 100, where above 70 signals overbought and below 30 means oversold—reads 48.8, which is considered neutral. ADX, which measures trend strength, sits at 16.1, weak, though its directional component has shifted from bearish to bullish—an early signal traders watch for potential turning points.
Whales holding between 100,000 and 100 million ADA tokens pushed their balances to the highest level since 2023, per Santiment data. Smaller holders reduced exposure.
Charlies Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder, expects Leios to reach mainnet before the end of 2026, and the public testnet (dubbed Musashi Dojo) launched June 23.
Daily Debrief NewsletterStart every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
The hard fork that pushed Cardano to version 11 over the weekend wasn’t just another scheduled upgrade. It was the first time the network’s upgrade decision sat entirely in the hands of its community rather than the company that originally built the chain. According to the original report, the Van Rossum hard fork activated on Saturday after a community-led vote, rewiring Cardano’s governance on a practical level almost five years into the blockchain’s lifecycle.
The upgrade itself moves the chain to Cardano Node 11, a technical milestone that would normally draw limited outside attention. What matters more is who pulled the trigger. For years, Input Output Global—the development firm behind Cardano—steered upgrade decisions alongside the Cardano Foundation and Emurgo. This time, the community had the final word. It’s not a change that happened overnight. Cardano’s roadmap has been inching toward collective decision-making through its Voltaire era, but seeing an actual mainnet hard fork pass through community ratification turns a white-paper ideal into operational fact.
A Hard Fork, a Community Mandate Van Rossum is not a radical fork in terms of new features. The version bump to Node 11 comes with performance enhancements and fixes that are important for the network’s validator set, but the headline is procedural. The upgrade proposal was put forward as part of Cardano’s ongoing decentralized governance framework, and the approval required a quorum of stake pool operators and delegated ADA holders. Reaching consensus without IOG acting as the default tiebreaker shifts the network’s center of gravity.
The implication for ADA holders is direct. Voting rights tied to staked holdings have existed in theory for a while, but having them actually shape a protocol-level decision sends a signal that participation carries real weight. Even so, voter turnout figures and SPO engagement rates are hard to measure from a single upgrade. What’s clear is that the Cardano ecosystem just demonstrated its governance architecture can sustain a mainnet decision without a centralized coordinator stepping in.
The Voltaire Vision Becomes Operational Cardano’s transition through its Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire phases framed governance as the final frontier. The Van Rossum fork pushes Voltaire from infrastructure readiness into execution. This matters because earlier governance votes—like those on Project Catalyst—focused on treasury allocation, not protocol upgrades. Network parameter changes and hard forks carry higher stakes. A misstep on a protocol vote can split the chain or stall development. By testing community decision-making on a relatively low-risk version bump, Cardano has taken a cautious first step that avoids the volatility of contentious forks seen on other chains.
It also places Cardano alongside a small but growing cohort of Layer 1 blockchains experimenting with on-chain governance. Tezos built its identity around it. Polkadot’s OpenGov gives stakeholders veto power. Even Ethereum’s social layer has long relied on informal rough consensus. Cardano now belongs to a group where code upgrades must pass a formal vote rather than a developer call. That structural change could influence how projects building on Cardano think about their own upgrade paths and the durability of their smart contracts.
Cardano has been among the networks that regularly appear in developer activity rankings, and sustained developer interest will be crucial if governance becomes more demanding. A distributed vote only works if enough technically literate participants stay engaged with proposals, debates, and parameter changes. The Van Rossum experience offers a small-scale test case. The next challenge is scaling that engagement when the stakes are higher.
What Comes Next for ADA Holders The upgrade itself does not change ADA’s monetary policy or staking rewards, but it does alter the expectation of what holding ADA entitles someone to do. A token holder who previously viewed staking as passive yield generation now has a clearer path to influence network direction, assuming the governance framework gains momentum. The real question is whether the community can sustain coordination. Cardano has a large, globally distributed user base, and mobilizing enough of it to vote on each major change will require tooling, transparency, and credible formal processes that hold up under disagreement.
There is also a risk that active governance attracts well-resourced actors who attempt to steer parameters in their favor. The absence of central mediation means the system’s legitimacy will be tested not just by its successes but by how it handles contested votes and close outcomes. For now, the Van Rossum activation passed smoothly, but governance fatigue or apathy could surface if the cadence of votes accelerates without corresponding user education.
What makes this fork notable beyond Cardano’s own ecosystem is the running experiment in shrinking the gap between protocol design and community ownership. Blockchains often talk about decentralization while keeping upgrade authority heavily concentrated. The Van Rossum hard fork is a small but concrete data point that self-governance is moving from rhetoric to routine. The outcome will be scrutinized not just by ADA holders but by other networks designing their own governance primitives.
AUTHOR
Brenda is a writer with three years of experience specializing in cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. She graduated from the University of Mombasa with a degree in Psychology. She has worked at Cryptopolitan and Blockchain Reporter.
20 July 2026 – Tether, the largest company in the digital assets industry, announced today that Tether Gold (XAU₮) has been recognized as an Accepted Spot Commodity within ADGM, the international financial center of Abu Dhabi. The recognition allows firms in ADGM to offer XAU₮, subject to their own relevant regulatory permissions and approval to use Accepted Spot Commodities.
The approval follows continued close engagement with ADGM to demonstrate the resilience, transparency, and compliance-focused approach of Tether’s operations, and gives firms in ADGM a clearer path to offer services involving XAU₮ within a regulated framework. It also marks another step in Tether’s expanding presence in the UAE, where digital asset policy continues to move from experimentation toward practical, institution-ready use cases.
XAU₮ brings physical gold on chain in a simple, transferable form. Each full XAU₮ token represents one troy fine ounce of gold on a London Good Delivery bar, giving users and institutions a way to access the enduring value of gold with the speed, portability, and transparency of blockchain technology.
“The UAE continues to show real leadership in digital asset regulation, and Tether is proud to keep building alongside that progress,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. “By bringing XAU₮ into its Spot Commodities framework, ADGM is creating new room for firms with the relevant regulatory permissions to work with a token backed by physical gold. This is an important step for tokenized real-world assets and for the growth of practical, regulated digital finance in the Middle East.”
“ADGM continues to advance a trusted, well-regulated environment that enables responsible innovation across digital assets and tokenised real-world assets,” said Arvind Ramamurthy, Chief Market Development Officer at ADGM. “The recognition of XAU₮ as an Accepted Spot Commodity further strengthens the breadth of products and services available to firms operating from ADGM, supporting the continued scaling of business activity within ADGM and Abu Dhabi’s growing financial ecosystem.”
The recognition of XAU₮ builds on the Financial Services Regulatory Authority’s previous recognition of USD₮ as an Accepted Fiat Referenced Token and expands the range of Tether products that authorized firms in ADGM can support. Additionally, it shows how direct engagement between regulators and digital asset companies can help bring real-world assets on chain in a way that supports compliance, transparency, and market integrity.
Demand for tokenized real-world assets continues to grow as institutions look for more efficient ways to access, move, and manage traditional assets. Tokenized real-world assets now represent more than $31 billion in distributed asset value, up from roughly $6.6 billion a year earlier. XAU₮ brings that model to gold, combining physical backing with the speed and portability of a digital token.
Tether will continue working with regulators, licensed firms, and partners in the UAE and across the region to support responsible digital asset adoption.
About Tether Gold (XAU₮)
Tether Gold (Gold) is a digital asset offered by TG Commodities Limited. One full XAU₮ token represents one troy fine ounce of gold on a London Good Delivery bar. The token can be traded or moved easily at any time, anywhere in the world, and can be transferred to any on-chain address from the purchaser’s Tether wallet, where it is issued after purchase. The allocated gold is identifiable with a unique serial number, purity, and weight, and is redeemable in the form of physical gold.
Important Note:
This press announcement is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy Tether Gold (XAU₮). TG Commodities S.A de C.V. will only sell or redeem XAU₮ pursuant to its gold token terms of sale and service available (as of the date of this press release) at https://gold.tether.to/legal
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
Zilliqa asks exchanges to pause ZIL transfers after suspected cold wallet theftZilliqa said exchanges paused ZIL deposits and withdrawals after an exchange partner’s cold wallet was compromised, with the amount stolen still undisclosed.
Zilliqa, a layer-1 blockchain network, said it is investigating a security incident involving an exchange partner after ZIL was stolen from a cold wallet.
In an X post on Monday, Zilliqa said it had asked exchanges to temporarily pause ZIL deposits and withdrawals as a precaution while it investigates the incident.
Zilliqa did not disclose the amount of ZIL stolen, identify the affected exchange partner or explain the possible cause of the incident. “We understand the community will have questions. We will share further updates as soon as we have verified information,” it said.
Zilliqa was launched in 2017 as a blockchain designed around sharding, a technology that splits transaction processing across multiple groups of nodes to improve scalability. The project was co-founded by researchers Amrit Kumar and Xinshu Dong, with the network’s mainnet going live in January 2019.
Zilliqa’s native token, ZIL, is used for transaction fees and smart contracts on the network. According to CoinGecko, ZIL was trading at around $0.0025 at the time of writing, down 7.1% over the past 24 hours.
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.
Zilliqa asks exchanges to pause ZIL transfers after suspected cold wallet theftZilliqa said exchanges paused ZIL deposits and withdrawals after an exchange partner’s cold wallet was compromised, with the amount stolen still undisclosed.
Zilliqa, a layer-1 blockchain network, said it is investigating a security incident involving an exchange partner after ZIL was stolen from a cold wallet.
In an X post on Monday, Zilliqa said it had asked exchanges to temporarily pause ZIL deposits and withdrawals as a precaution while it investigates the incident.
Zilliqa did not disclose the amount of ZIL stolen, identify the affected exchange partner or explain the possible cause of the incident. “We understand the community will have questions. We will share further updates as soon as we have verified information,” it said.
Zilliqa was launched in 2017 as a blockchain designed around sharding, a technology that splits transaction processing across multiple groups of nodes to improve scalability. The project was co-founded by researchers Amrit Kumar and Xinshu Dong, with the network’s mainnet going live in January 2019.
Zilliqa’s native token, ZIL, is used for transaction fees and smart contracts on the network. According to CoinGecko, ZIL was trading at around $0.0025 at the time of writing, down 7.1% over the past 24 hours.
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.
Zilliqa has asked cryptocurrency exchanges to temporarily suspend ZIL deposits and withdrawals after an exchange partner suffered a suspected cold wallet compromise.
Summary
Zilliqa asked exchanges to halt ZIL transfers after a partner’s cold wallet was reportedly compromised. The network has not disclosed the stolen amount, affected exchange, or suspected cause of theft. ZIL fell about 9% as transfer suspensions and unanswered questions weighed on short-term market sentiment. The layer-1 blockchain project said ZIL had been stolen from the affected wallet and that it had started investigating the incident with the unnamed partner. Zilliqa has not disclosed how many tokens were taken, their value or how the attacker gained access to the wallet.
“We understand the community will have questions. We will share further updates as soon as we have verified information,” Zilliqa said.
The project also asked users to rely on its official channels while investigators establish what happened.
The announcement points to a compromise involving an exchange partner rather than a confirmed breach of the Zilliqa blockchain itself. However, the team has not yet released a technical review or identified the affected company, leaving the exact attack method unknown.
Exchanges pause ZIL deposits and withdrawals Zilliqa said it contacted exchanges and requested temporary restrictions on ZIL transfers as a precaution. The measure limits the ability to deposit or withdraw the token through participating trading platforms while the investigation continues.
We have been made aware of a security incident involving one of our exchange partners, in which ZIL was stolen from a cold wallet.
The incident is under active investigation, and we are working with the relevant parties to establish the root cause and full scope. As a…
— Zilliqa (@zilliqa) July 20, 2026 Bitget separately announced that it would suspend deposits and withdrawals on the Zilliqa network from July 20 at 18:15 UTC+8. The exchange cited “wallet maintenance” and said it would announce a reopening time later. Bitget did not publicly link its maintenance notice to the theft in the announcement.
The transfer restrictions do not stop the Zilliqa blockchain from processing transactions between onchain addresses. Instead, participating exchanges can prevent users from moving ZIL into or out of their platforms until they complete their own checks or receive further information.
Meanwhile, ZIL faced fresh selling pressure following the security announcement. CoinGecko data showed the token trading near $0.00254 at the time of writing, down about 9% over 24 hours. Market prices can change quickly while details about the incident remain limited.
Cold wallet compromise raises questions over the theft Cold wallets keep private keys away from constantly internet-connected systems and are widely used by exchanges to store larger crypto balances. However, cold storage does not remove every security risk. Problems involving signing devices, private-key access or internal operational controls can still expose assets.
A major example came in February 2025, when Bybit lost about $1.4 billion after attackers compromised a cold wallet transaction process. As crypto.news previously reported, the incident showed that attackers can target the systems and people involved in authorizing transactions even when assets sit in offline storage.
More recent security cases have also shifted attention toward wallet access and key management. Crypto.news reported in May that a roughly $520,000 incident connected to Polymarket activity was linked to a compromised private key used for an internal operations wallet rather than the platform’s core contracts.
Zilliqa has not said whether the latest theft involved a stolen private key, compromised signing system or another type of security failure. It has also not said whether the stolen ZIL has moved to other wallets or reached centralized exchanges.
Until investigators release wallet addresses or transaction records, the amount stolen and the movement of the funds cannot be independently assessed from Zilliqa’s public statement alone.
Zilliqa waits for verified findings before releasing details The latest incident comes after Zilliqa faced several technical problems in previous years, although those events involved network operations rather than a disclosed exchange wallet theft.
As previously reported by crypto.news, Zilliqa announced a permanent fix in September 2024 after a bug interrupted block production. The network had also dealt with other disruptions involving block generation and node synchronization during that period.
Those earlier technical problems have not been publicly connected to the current exchange partner incident. Zilliqa’s latest statement specifically describes the event as the theft of ZIL from a cold wallet controlled by a partner.
The project launched its mainnet in 2019 and became known for using sharding to divide transaction processing across groups of nodes. ZIL serves as the network’s native asset and is used for transaction fees and smart contract activity.
For now, the main unanswered questions concern the identity of the affected exchange, the amount of ZIL stolen and the method used to compromise the wallet. Zilliqa has not provided a timeline for completing its investigation or said when exchanges should restore normal transfers.
Zilliqa (ZIL), one of the most popular altcoins during the previous bull run, announced that one of its exchange partners suffered a security breach and that ZIL assets held in a cold wallet were stolen.
The Layer 1 blockchain reported that a security incident involving ZIL and its exchange partner led to the theft of ZIL from a cold wallet, and that the investigation is ongoing.
With this announcement, the ZIL team requested that all exchanges temporarily suspend ZIL deposit and withdrawal transactions to prevent further damage and stop the movement of stolen funds through exchanges.
The company has not yet publicly disclosed the name of the exchange affected by the security breach or the amount of ZIL stolen. The team stated that the investigation is ongoing and that they are actively investigating the incident and coordinating with relevant parties to determine the cause and extent of the security breach.
Zilliqa stated that it will provide further updates as verified information becomes available and advised users to rely only on official Zilliqa channels for relevant information.
Previously, the South Korean exchange Bithumb had also temporarily suspended ZIL deposits and withdrawals due to suspected security concerns.
Although the price of ZIL dropped after the incident, it subsequently recovered.
*This is not investment advice.
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A security incident at one of Zilliqa’s exchange partners has forced the network to ask all centralized platforms to halt ZIL deposits and withdrawals, freezing liquidity for the native token of one of the industry’s earliest sharding blockchains. The breach, first reported by WuBlockchain in the original report, targeted a cold wallet, raising immediate questions about how an offline storage system could be compromised.
The Zilliqa team confirmed that the stolen funds were ZIL tokens held in a partner exchange’s cold wallet, but neither the name of the exchange nor the precise amount taken has been disclosed. In a public statement, the project said it is working with the affected party and other stakeholders to determine the root cause and full scope of the loss. The decision to temporarily pause all centralized exchange deposits and withdrawals is a containment measure, aimed at preventing the attacker from moving or selling the stolen assets through regulated order books.
A Confirmed Breach, Few Details The absence of key details means traders and liquidity providers are operating in the dark. Cold wallet thefts are rare because they typically require physical access, insider compromise, or a sophisticated attack on the custody infrastructure that eventually connects the wallet to hot systems for processing withdrawals. Zilliqa did not say whether the cold wallet belonged to a large-tier exchange or a smaller regional partner, leaving wide uncertainty over the potential market impact.
The chain, launched in 2017, has faced its share of technical and adoption hurdles despite being an early adopter of sharding. Projects that have been around for nearly a decade often rely on a handful of exchanges for liquidity, so a breach at even one partner can ripple through the market. ZIL is listed on several major exchanges, and the deposit freezes mean that arbitrageurs and market makers cannot rebalance positions, which could widen spreads or lead to brief dislocations once trading resumes.
Cold Wallets Are Not Always Cold Cold wallets are supposed to be impervious to internet-based attacks because their private keys are stored offline. But recent history shows that even offline environments are vulnerable. In 2024, WazirX lost over $230 million after a multi-signature cold wallet was drained in what investigators believe was a combination of social engineering and compromised offline signers. While no connection to that event exists here, the pattern of cold wallet breaches is unsettling a market that has spent years being told that offline storage equals safety.
What makes this case particularly opaque is that Zilliqa’s disclosure labels the victim as an “exchange partner,” which likely means a third-party custodian or liquidity provider using Zilliqa’s infrastructure. The lack of transparency is not necessarily suspicious—forensic investigations often require silence—but it adds to the anxiety. If the exploit was due to a vulnerability in Zilliqa’s own transaction signing or multisig logic, it would be a systemic risk. If it was a purely operational failure at the exchange level, the damage might be more contained.
As institutions globally push for clearer custody rules—a debate captured by legislation like the GENIUS Act in the U.S., where banks are trying to kill the biggest crypto bill—incidents like this provide ammunition for those demanding that exchanges be held to bank-grade security standards. The incident also comes at a time when some altcoin foundations are aggressively marketing their chains to institutional staking services. Notably, Sui’s recent price surge was driven partly by institutional staking demand, as detailed in BlockchainReporter’s coverage. Cold storage failures erode the trust that such institutional interest is built on.
Market Freeze and Ecosystem Reaction ZIL’s on-chain activity remains unaffected; the blockchain itself processes transactions as normal. The freeze only applies to centralized exchange interfaces, which still account for the bulk of retail volume. Decentralized exchanges like ZilSwap continue to operate, although liquidity is limited compared to major CEX venues. The incident is unlikely to cause a protocol-level downgrade, but it will test how the Zilliqa community and its remaining validators handle the reputational hit.
Meanwhile, developer activity on Zilliqa has been subdued relative to competing chains. According to recent data, networks like Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain dominate by developer activity, as shown in BlockchainReporter’s weekly ranking. For a chain that once positioned itself as a high-throughput alternative, the combination of a security shock and a shrinking developer footprint leaves it in a precarious spot.
What Comes Next Zilliqa’s investigation will likely focus on whether the cold wallet’s signing process was subverted, whether a multisig threshold was bypassed, or whether physical media holding keys were accessed without authorization. Until that report surfaces, exchanges will keep deposit channels closed, effectively quarantining the ZIL that sits in their hot and cold wallets. That quarantine may last days or weeks, depending on the complexity of the forensic work and the legal implications if the exchange partner is subject to regulatory oversight in multiple jurisdictions.
For traders, the main risk is not necessarily a large-scale dump of stolen ZIL—centralized platforms are now gate-locked—but rather the overhang of uncertainty. When an investigation reveals systemic flaws, the affected asset can trade at a discount to broader market moves. For now, ZIL holders are waiting for clarity on a theft that should not have happened in the first place: a cold wallet breach, from a partner whose name they do not yet know.
AUTHOR
Brenda is a writer with three years of experience specializing in cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. She graduated from the University of Mombasa with a degree in Psychology. She has worked at Cryptopolitan and Blockchain Reporter.
HTX Research Head and Lead Analyst Andy Liu recently guested at Huobi’s Expert Lecture Hall, delivering a presentation themed “Q3 2026 Outlook: The New Order of the Crypto Market Amid Global Liquidity Repricing”. He noted that BTC is no longer merely a native crypto asset, but a proxy for global U.S. dollar liquidity. The three core variables driving BTC’s performance in Q3 are: liquidity for direction, ETFs for elasticity, and the U.S. dollar for risk. On Ethereum, Andy Liu highlighted that the current issue facing Ethereum is not whether its ecosystem is growing, but whether that growth can translate into value for ETH. In the medium to long term, Ethereum remains one of the most critical settlement and application infrastructures in crypto. However, in the short term, ETH must re-prove that ecosystem growth can be converted into ETH value. Thus, the core assessment for ETH in Q3 is: regulation for direction, DeFi for elasticity, and fees and burns for confirmation.
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@trondao has registered 394 million total accounts, the latest in a rapid series of user milestones that underline the network's position as one of the busiest payment blockchains in the world. On-chain data shows daily active accounts rose 4.64% in 24 hours to reach 4,646,026, a figure driven largely by persistent stablecoin activity across emerging markets.
Stablecoins Remain the Core EngineThe account surge is not happening in isolation. The network processed $2.0 trillion in cumulative USDT transfers in Q1 2026 alone, reinforcing TRON's role as the primary settlement rail for the world's largest stablecoin. TRON now hosts more than $86 billion in stablecoin supply, with USDT accounting for 98.37% of that total, and the chain processes an average of $23 billion in daily USDT transfers.
With median transfer fees of just $0.09 compared to Ethereum's $3.73, and confirmation times of three seconds versus twelve, TRON offers a practical middle ground: fast and cheap enough for everyday transfers, yet established enough to handle billions in daily volume. That cost structure is a key reason the network continues to attract users in regions where traditional banking infrastructure is limited or expensive.
Emerging Markets Fuel the Growth Geographically, activity is weighted toward Asia, accounting for nearly $341 billion annually, with emerging markets including Turkey, Indonesia, and India contributing significant volume, reflecting TRON's appeal where transaction costs drive demand for efficient infrastructure.
Regions with high adoption of mobile-based financial services show particularly strong engagement with TRON, as the platform's design aligns well with the needs of users in emerging economies where access to low-cost, cross-border financial infrastructure is paramount. On-chain data also shows the network has been adding roughly one million new accounts in under a week , a pace that has pushed total accounts from 391 million to 394 million in a matter of days.
The growth in active addresses carries more analytical weight than raw account totals. Blockchain analysts note that active accounts are a more valuable metric than total accounts, since total figures can include millions of inactive or abandoned wallets, while active accounts measure real economic behaviour. A jump of nearly 4.7% in a single day points to genuine transactional demand rather than passive wallet creation.
Sources:
Messari: State of TRON Q1 2026
Arkham Intelligence: TRON Stablecoin Ecosystem Report
Crowdfund Insider: Nansen Q1 2026 TRON Report
Adrian Wall, Senior Director of US Policy at TRON DAO, is sounding the alarm on Capitol Hill’s pace. Appearing on the Thinking Crypto podcast in July 2026, Wall argued that the CLARITY Act needs to pass before the August recess, or the US risks watching its crypto industry migrate to friendlier jurisdictions.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, formally known as H.R. 3633, would establish structured federal oversight for digital commodities and related assets.
Where the bill stands The CLARITY Act has already cleared some major hurdles. It was introduced in the House on May 29, 2025, and passed with bipartisan support on July 17, 2025, by a vote of 294 to 134.
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The Senate Banking Committee advanced its version of the bill on May 14, 2026, with a 15-9 vote. It was then placed on the Senate calendar on June 1, 2026, where it now sits waiting for floor action.
President Trump has publicly endorsed the legislation, urging the Senate to act and framing it as essential to maintaining US competitiveness in digital assets. A House Financial Services Subcommittee hearing took place in New York on July 17, 2026, keeping the conversation alive as the legislative window narrows.
What the CLARITY Act actually does The bill’s primary goal is resolving one of crypto’s oldest headaches: figuring out which federal agency has jurisdiction over which digital assets. The CLARITY Act draws clearer lines between digital commodities and digital securities, assigning oversight responsibilities accordingly. It creates a pathway for tokens that may start as securities to eventually be treated as commodities once they become sufficiently decentralized.
Opponents, particularly some Democratic lawmakers, have pushed back on consumer protection provisions, arguing the bill doesn’t go far enough to shield retail investors from fraud and market manipulation.
Why this matters for investors Wall’s urgency on the podcast reflected a broader industry sentiment. The window for legislative action before Congress leaves for August recess is narrow, and the crypto industry has seen promising momentum followed by legislative inertia before.
The CLARITY Act’s bipartisan House passage by a vote of 294 to 134 and its 15-9 committee advancement in the Senate represent concrete legislative progress. Whether the Senate can convert that momentum into law before the recess clock runs out is the question that matters most for US crypto markets heading into the second half of 2026.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
DeFi on Stellar is no longer experimental: protocols are live, they lock hundreds of millions of dollars worth of value, and they operate at a scale that impacts thousands of users. That's a milestone worth recognizing. It's also a moment that requires more of many teams in the ecosystem.
This post defines a set of practices SDF believes should be standard for any DeFi protocol on Stellar that holds, lends, swaps, or otherwise touches user funds. Some teams already do most of this. Some are working toward it. We're putting it in writing because builders have told us they want a clearer picture of what good looks like, and because the ecosystem is healthier when expectations are explicit rather than assumed.
None of the suggestions are novel. Most of them reflect what mature DeFi teams already do across other ecosystems, adapted to the realities of building on Stellar. We're publishing it so the conversation can be more concrete: this is what we mean when we talk about responsible DeFi on Stellar.
Why standards, why nowThree things have shifted in the last year.
First, Stellar's DeFi ecosystem is in a different place than it was twelve months ago. More users are active onchain, more value is sitting in lending pools and AMMs, and more protocols are composed with each other. Practices that were reasonable for an early-stage experimental pool don't work for a production protocol holding tens of millions of dollars of user funds.
Second, the attacker side has gotten faster, cheaper, and more capable. Vulnerability discovery, exploit-code generation, social-engineering at scale, and reconnaissance against deployed contracts have all moved from "skilled specialist with weeks of time" to "competent operator with a good toolchain." AI-assisted analysis is now being run against published audit reports to find what auditors flagged but teams didn't fully remediate, and against open-source contract code to surface patterns that have been exploited elsewhere. The result is that oracle manipulations, novel flash-loan patterns, governance takeovers, and admin-key compromises are no longer rare events at the frontier of DeFi: they're a baseline operational risk for any protocol of meaningful size. A team that ships without thinking through these possibilities is not innovating; it's externalizing risk onto its users.
Third, Stellar's DeFi ecosystem now has enough interconnection that one protocol's failure can ripple through several others. A compromised oracle, a drained liquidity pool, or a cascade of forced liquidations don't stay contained. Standards are partly a tool for protecting users of an individual protocol, but they're also a tool for protecting the rest of the ecosystem from any single protocol's mistake.
We don't think the answer is heavy-handed gatekeeping. Stellar is permissionless and should stay that way. But permissionless access does not mean protocols that hold user funds should operate without mature security and risk practices. These are the standards SDF expects serious DeFi teams to work toward, and what follows is what we'd like to see become normal.
Security audits that actually mean somethingA third-party security audit by a recognized firm is table stakes for any protocol that handles user funds. The baseline:
A completed audit before any material user funds are accepted, conducted by a firm with a demonstrated track record in the relevant primitive (lending, AMM, derivatives, bridging, etc.). The audit report should be published, not just summarized in a tweet, and it should include a full summary of findings, the remediated status of all discovered vulnerabilities, and the specific version of the code that was reviewed.
Audit-to-deployment parity. The code running in production should be the code that was reviewed. When teams deploy meaningful changes after the last audit, those changes should be disclosed, and a re-audit (or at minimum a scoped follow-up review) should be initiated before changes are pushed to mainnet.
Audit cadence tied to change, not the calendar. A protocol that ships frequently needs a security partner that reviews frequently. A protocol that's largely static after launch still benefits from periodic re-review as the threat landscape evolves.
When the absence of an audit is unavoidable—for early experiments, hackathon projects, or genuinely pre-product code—that status should be communicated unmistakably to users, and the protocol should not be marketed as production-ready.
A standing channel for disclosure: bug bountiesAn audit is a point-in-time snapshot. It tells you the code was sound as of a particular version on a particular date, reviewed by a particular set of eyes. It says nothing about the vulnerability discovered six months later, or the researcher who finds a bug next week and has to decide what to do with it. Live protocols need a way to receive that information safely, and a live protocol without one is trusting that whoever finds the next bug chooses to report it rather than exploit it or sell it.
The baseline:
A published vulnerability disclosure policy that tells a researcher exactly where to send a report, what's in scope, what to expect in response, and a commitment not to pursue good-faith reporters. This should be trivially discoverable—linked from the docs and the site, not buried in a Discord channel.
A standing bug bounty program, scaled so the reward for a critical finding is meaningful relative to what an attacker could extract by exploiting it instead. A bounty that pays a fraction of the exploitable value is not really competing for the researcher's decision.
A triage and remediation process with committed timelines, so reports don't sit unread. A researcher who gets no acknowledgment for two weeks is a researcher who stops reporting—or reports somewhere you'd rather they didn't.
A risk posture scaled to what you holdAudits are necessary but not sufficient. A protocol holding tens of millions of dollars in user funds must operate with a security and operational risk posture commensurate with the sheer scale of the assets it manages. What this looks like in practice depends on a protocol's size, stage, and structure, but the components are broadly the same:
Written risk procedures that describe how the team identifies, evaluates, and responds to security and operational risks. These should include a risk appetite statement outlining what the team is willing to accept, what it isn't, and how those lines are enforced.
Written vendor and partner risk management policy, including a clear-eyed view of every external dependency. Which oracles a protocol relies on, which bridges, which off-chain services, what happens if any one of them is wrong or compromised, and what the team would do in the first hour after a failure.
Security procedures for the team itself, including key custody arrangements, multisig thresholds, hardware-wallet practices, code-review requirements, and deployment controls.
For protocols at scale, we encourage independent validation of these controls—SOC 1 / SOC 2 reports or a functionally equivalent third-party attestation. The point isn't the certificate; it's the discipline of being audited by someone who isn't on the team.
Economic risk: modeling and parameter governanceNot every DeFi failure is a code exploit. Some of the most damaging losses come from economic design that was sound under normal conditions and broke under stress: collateral that couldn't be liquidated fast enough in a sharp drawdown, incentives that unwound in a bank-run dynamic, a parameter that was safe in isolation and dangerous in combination with another. Code audits rarely catch these, because the code did exactly what it was written to do. The design was the vulnerability.
Protocols whose safety depends on economic parameters—lending markets, AMMs, stablecoins, derivatives—should treat that design with the same rigor as the code:
Stress testing and scenario modeling against sharp price moves, liquidity crunches, and correlated drawdowns, not just steady-state conditions. The relevant question is not whether the system works on an average day but whether it survives its worst plausible one.
Concentration limits on collateral, liquidity, and counterparty exposure, so a single asset, pool, or actor can't put the whole protocol at risk.
Liquidation simulations that confirm positions can actually be unwound at scale, under stress, with the liquidity that would realistically be available—not the liquidity present on a calm day.
Oracle manipulation modeling that asks what an adversary could do by moving a price feed, and how much it would cost them relative to what they'd gain.
A parameter-change review process. Changes to risk parameters—collateral factors, interest-rate curves, liquidation thresholds—should go through documented review and, for non-urgent changes, the same timelock and disclosure discipline as any other privileged action. A parameter tweak can drain a protocol as effectively as a code bug.
Financial resilience: budgeting for when things go wrongThe DeFi protocols that recover from incidents tend to be the ones that planned for them financially before they happened. That planning has two parts.
First, a capital buffer. As a directional benchmark, we encourage protocols to set aside approximately 5% of total user-facing liabilities as a first-loss resource. For a protocol with $100M TVL, that's something on the order of $5M in liquid assets earmarked to absorb shocks before they reach users. The exact figure is less important than the principle: the team should know, in advance, how much it can absorb without users taking the hit, and where that capital lives. For decentralized protocols, this might take the form of a treasury allocation, a governance-controlled safety module, or an equivalent mechanism appropriate to the protocol's structure.
Second, insurance where it makes sense. It is not a substitute for security, but it is a meaningful tool, and we'd like to see more Stellar protocols evaluating it seriously.
Together, a capital buffer and insurance are how a protocol says, in advance, that the cost of a bad day will not fall entirely on its users.
Infrastructure hygieneSome of the largest losses in DeFi history have resulted from compromised dependencies: manipulated oracles, hacked bridges, leaked keys. Every team needs to pay attention to infrastructure hygiene, which looks like this:
For protocols that consume price oracles: price deviation guards, time-weighted averages, multi-source consensus, and circuit breakers that pause sensitive functions when something looks wrong. Trust no single price feed for liquidation decisions if you can avoid it.
For protocols that operate bridges or cross-chain logic: documented assumptions about every chain you touch, and a written response plan for the day a counterparty chain has a problem.
For admin keys and protocol governance: multisig with meaningful thresholds and geographically distributed signers; hardware key storage; clearly documented and rehearsed procedures for emergency action. The convenience of a single key is not worth what it costs when it's compromised.
For circuit breakers and emergency pauses: build them, test them, and know who can pull the lever. A protocol that cannot pause a compromised contract is a protocol that watches its users lose funds in real time.
Governance and upgrade controlsMost Stellar DeFi protocols retain some privileged power: an admin key that can pause the system, a governance process that can change parameters, an upgrade path that can replace the contract logic users are trusting. These capabilities are often necessary. They are also, in the wrong hands, the fastest way to drain a protocol—a governance takeover or a compromised admin key doesn't need to find a bug, because it already holds the keys. The bar here is that privileged power is constrained, documented, and observable:
Public documentation of every privileged role —what it can do, who holds it, and how it's constrained. Users and integrators should be able to see the full set of powers that exist over a protocol without reading the source or trusting a verbal assurance.
Multisig with meaningful thresholds and geographically distributed signers, hardware key storage, and a defined, rehearsed process for signer rotation when someone joins, leaves, or is compromised. The convenience of a single key is not worth what it costs when it's compromised.
Timelocks on non-urgent privileged changes, so users can see a change coming and exit if they disagree with it. A protocol that can alter the rules with no delay is asking users to trust that it never will.
Clearly scoped emergency powers. Emergency actions—pausing, freezing, halting—should be narrowly defined and limited to what's needed to stop an incident, not a backdoor to arbitrary control. Document what emergency powers exist, who can invoke them, and what they can and cannot do.
Quorum requirements and governance-attack mitigations for onchain governance: sensible proposal thresholds, voting delays and periods, and defenses against flash-loan-funded vote capture and other governance manipulation. Governance that can be borrowed for an afternoon is not a safeguard.
Incident response, already wired upThe worst time to figure out incident response is during an incident. The teams that handle exploits well—the ones that recover trust and that sometimes recover funds—are the ones that had a playbook before the call came in. At minimum, that means:
Real-time onchain monitoring and alerting. You can't respond to what you don't detect. Protocols should actively watch their own contracts for abnormal activity—anomalous withdrawals, unexpected price or balance movements, unusual call patterns, oracle deviations, sudden drops in reserves—with automated alerting that reaches an on-call human fast. Whether built in-house or through a monitoring provider, the goal is minutes to detection, not hours, and the ability to trigger a pause on the strength of an alert. Many of the worst outcomes in DeFi weren't caused by the exploit alone but by the hours that passed before anyone noticed.
A designated incident lead and a documented escalation path before anything has gone wrong. Every team member should know whom they call at 3 a.m. and what that person is empowered to do.
A preliminary incident report within roughly 48 hours of detection, documenting affected addresses, estimated losses, and preliminary root cause. This is for users, for the broader ecosystem, and for any partners who need to make decisions based on what happened.
A full post-mortem, published, with enough technical detail that other Stellar builders can learn from it. The temptation to bury an incident is real and we understand it; the long-term cost of doing so is much higher than the short-term embarrassment of being transparent.
Active cooperation with blockchain analytics firms and, where appropriate, law enforcement. Funds get recovered when the right people see the right transactions early.
A user restitution plan that the team can actually execute, including verified addresses, communication channels, and a clear timeline.
User transparencyEverything above is easier to trust when users can verify it. Much of DeFi still asks users to take a protocol's safety on faith—or to reconstruct it themselves from block explorers and GitHub. A protocol that accepts meaningful user funds should be able to point to a single place where an ordinary user, or a protocol composing with it, can see what's true. We'd like to see a public risk page—linked from the docs and the app—that consolidates:
The audit history, with links to the full published reports and the code versions they covered.
Known risks and current limitations, stated plainly. Every protocol has them; the trustworthy ones say so.
The privileged roles and upgrade paths that exist over the protocol, consistent with the governance documentation above.
External dependencies —the oracles, bridges, and off-chain services the protocol relies on—and what each one being wrong or compromised would mean for users.
The status of financial backstops, including the capital buffer and any insurance coverage, so users know what protection actually exists rather than assuming.
Incident history, including links to past post-mortems. A protocol that's been through an incident and handled it well has earned the right to show that.
None of this is exotic; it's the information users would need to make an informed decision, gathered in one place instead of scattered or withheld. Transparency is not just good practice—it's how an ecosystem builds the kind of trust that survives a bad day.
A note on decentralized protocolsSome of what's above assumes a team that can be identified and held accountable. Many of the best Stellar protocols are, or aspire to be, more decentralized than that. We see the tension, and we don't think it's a reason to lower the bar.
For decentralized protocols, the question is whether functionally equivalent controls exist. Governance processes that produce real accountability. Technical safeguards that don't depend on a person being on call. Treasury arrangements that survive contributor turnover. Transparency mechanisms that let users see what's true without having to take anyone's word for it. The form of the control may differ; the substance should not.
Where this goes from hereNone of this is a checklist we expect every protocol to satisfy on day one. Maturity takes time. New teams will be earlier on this curve than established ones, and that's appropriate. What we'd like to see is movement: every protocol on Stellar working visibly toward a higher standard, and a community where teams talk to each other about how to get there.
SDF will keep contributing to this in the ways we can: convening security roundtables, supporting access to recognized auditors for early-stage teams through our Audit Bank, publishing what we learn from incidents the ecosystem has lived through, and engaging with the broader DeFi security community on standards that work. We'd love to build these practices together with you. We also believe that any protocol that accepts meaningful user funds should be able to explain which controls are in place, which are missing, what risk that creates for users, and when the gaps will be closed.
If you're a builder on Stellar and you'd like to talk about how any of this applies to what you're working on, please reach out. The strongest DeFi ecosystem is one where these practices are normal, not exceptional. And we know Stellar is positioned to get there.
Chainlink Steps In as Core Infrastructure for United Stables@Chainlink has been named the official data oracle and cross-chain infrastructure provider for @UTechStables, with the partnership aimed at broadening the reach of the $U stablecoin across decentralised finance on @BNBCHAIN.
The move gives the $U ecosystem access to Chainlink's price feeds, cross-chain messaging, and interoperability tooling. For a stablecoin focused on unified liquidity, reliable and tamper-resistant data infrastructure is a core requirement. Chainlink's network has enabled tens of trillions in transaction value and underpins a large share of DeFi activity globally.
What United Stables Is Building With $UAccording to BNB Chain, $U is the first stablecoin on BNB Chain to adopt a stablecoin-inclusive reserve model, allowing USD-backed stablecoins such as USDT, USDC, and USD1 to be used directly as minting collateral. The approach consolidates existing liquidity rather than competing for it. Crypto Briefing reports that $U is deployed on both BNB Smart Chain and Ethereum, offering immediate multi-chain access from launch.
All reserves are held in segregated accounts, verified through on-chain Proof-of-Reserve, and subject to independent quarterly audits. From day one, $U integrates with DeFi protocols including PancakeSwap, Aster, Four.meme, and ListaDAO, covering trading, liquidity provision, staking, and lending.
The Chainlink integration positions @UTechStables to scale $U across protocols within the BNB Chain ecosystem and, over time, beyond it. BNB Chain's total stablecoin supply has doubled to approximately $14 billion, and the network has consistently led all blockchains in monthly active addresses and transaction count for stablecoins. The Chainlink partnership gives $U the infrastructure backbone to compete in that growing market.
Sources
BNB Chain Blog: United Stables Launches $U as a Native Stablecoin on BNB Chain
Crypto Briefing: U Stablecoin Launches on BNB Chain and Ethereum
GlobeNewswire: $U Stablecoin Launches on BNB Chain and Ethereum by United Stables
Spain’s national football team touched down in Madrid on July 20 at approximately 2:30 p.m. local time, fresh off a 1-0 World Cup final victory over Argentina. An estimated one million fans packed Plaza de Cibeles to greet them. Head coach Luis de la Fuente and captain Rodri hoisted the trophy above the crowd.
Ferran Torres scored the only goal in the 106th minute of extra time. But beyond the confetti and the open-top bus, this World Cup has quietly become the most crypto-integrated global sporting event in history, and Spain’s triumph is sending ripples through digital asset markets.
The crypto infrastructure behind the 2026 World Cup Kraken became FIFA’s Official Crypto Exchange Supporter on June 9, 2026, marking the first time the governing body of world football entered into an official crypto partnership.
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Chainlink provided oracle services that powered prediction markets covering all 104 matches in the expanded tournament format. Chainlink’s technology served as the trusted data bridge that let decentralized prediction platforms verify real-world match results on-chain, allowing bettors and participants to settle positions without relying on a centralized intermediary.
Chiliz is the blockchain infrastructure company that operates fan-token platforms for major European clubs, including several Spanish teams. Fan tokens are digital assets that give holders voting rights on minor club decisions and access to exclusive perks.
Why Spain’s win matters for fan tokens Spain’s victory is expected to create a surge in activity around CHZ-linked assets and tokens tied to major Spanish clubs. The players who just won the World Cup play for Barcelona, Real Madrid, and other clubs that sit at the center of the European fan-token ecosystem.
Institutional implications and what to watch Kraken’s FIFA partnership establishes a template for similar deals across other global sporting events. Each partnership normalizes crypto in front of audiences that might never visit a DeFi protocol but who will notice that a crypto brand is printed on their stadium cup.
For investors watching the fan-token space specifically, the key metric to track over the coming weeks is whether trading volumes for Spanish club tokens sustain elevated levels or revert quickly to pre-tournament baselines.
Chainlink processing oracle data for 104 matches is a real-world stress test for decentralized data feeds. Kraken occupying prime sponsorship real estate at the world’s biggest sporting event is a distribution channel for crypto awareness. And Chiliz sitting at the center of a fan-token ecosystem that just received a major catalyst from Spain’s victory is positioned to capture whatever spending follows.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
A transfer involving 3.89 million Chainlink [LINK] worth $32.58 million drew fresh attention to Chainlink after Whale Alert flagged the transaction. The tokens moved from a Coinbase Institutional wallet to an unknown wallet, encouraging speculation about strategic positioning among large holders rather than immediate exchange selling.
Such transfers often reflect changes in custody or portfolio management rather than outright distribution. However, the movement still highlighted growing institutional participation around LINK.
Large transactions frequently influence market sentiment because traders monitor them for signs of accumulation or distribution. As a result, the transfer placed Chainlink back on investors’ watchlists while the market assessed whether whale activity would support the ongoing recovery.
Exchange inflows returned after months of out flows Chainlink’s spot netflows shifted into positive territory after recording an inflow of approximately $620.18K.
The change marked a notable departure from the prolonged period of exchange outflows that had previously reduced available selling supply. Positive netflows indicate that more tokens reached exchanges than left them during the latest session.
However, the relatively modest inflow suggested that exchange-bound supply remained limited instead of overwhelming the market. Even so, the latest reading reflected a change in short-term market behavior, making exchange activity an important metric for assessing LINK’s next directional move.
Source: CoinGlass Can bearish futures sentiment derail LINK’s recovery? Derivatives traders maintained a cautious stance despite improving activity in the spot market.
At press time, the 90-day Futures Taker CVD remained seller-dominant, indicating that aggressive market participants continued executing more sell orders than buy orders.
This imbalance suggested bearish conviction persisted among leveraged traders even as institutional wallet activity attracted attention. However, the divergence between spot positioning and futures activity created uncertainty around LINK’s short-term outlook.
Spot participants appeared willing to absorb supply, while futures traders continued favoring downside exposure. Such contrasting behavior often preceded stronger volatility because either buyers eventually overwhelmed sellers or derivatives sentiment pulled prices lower.
Source: CryptoQuant Chainlink tests resistance as RSI continues improving At the time of press, Chainlink [LINK] traded around $8.35 after extending its recovery from the $7.00 support region.
Buyers reclaimed the $8.18 level and pushed the price toward immediate resistance near $8.35, although that area continued limiting further advances.
A successful break above this zone would likely expose $9.00, while sustained buying could later bring $10.00 into focus. However, rejection at current levels could encourage another retest of $8.18 before buyers attempted another advance.
Meanwhile, the Relative Strength Index (RSI) climbed to 57.71 as of writing, remaining above its Moving Average near 54.58. The indicator reflected strengthening buying pressure without entering overbought territory.
As a result, the technical structure favored continued recovery, provided buyers reclaim nearby resistance with stronger participation.
Source: TradingView To conclude, institutional wallet activity increased attention around Chainlink, while spot netflows shifted back into positive territory. However, seller-dominant futures positioning continued to signal caution.
If buyers clear the $8.35 resistance, LINK would likely challenge $9.00 next. Otherwise, another pullback toward $8.18 would remain the more likely short-term outcome.
Final Summary Institutional wallet activity increased, while positive netflows reflected more LINK returning to exchanges. LINK approached a key resistance, but bearish futures traders continued limiting the recovery.
Prediction markets just got their biggest stage yet. Chainlink has been named the exclusive oracle infrastructure behind ADI Predictstreet, the official prediction market partner of the FIFA World Cup 2026, enabling near-instant settlement and automated payouts across every single match of the tournament.
That’s 104 matches, 48 teams, 16 host cities across North America, and a projected audience north of 6 billion fans.
How it works under the hood The integration relies on Chainlink’s Runtime Environment, or CRE. CRE is the framework that lets Chainlink automate the entire lifecycle of a prediction market, from creating the bet to resolving it to settling payouts, without any human middleman touching the process.
Every market on the Myriad platform will pull verified FIFA data through Chainlink’s oracle network. When a match ends, the result flows through the oracle, triggers the smart contract, and pays out winners. No waiting for manual verification. No disputed outcomes sitting in limbo while some back-office team reviews footage.
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The technical architecture here matters because prediction markets live and die on trust. Chainlink’s oracle network has been the backbone of decentralized finance for years, having facilitated over $30 trillion in transaction value across DeFi protocols.
Why FIFA, and why now The 2026 World Cup is a uniquely massive event. It’s the first tournament to feature 48 teams, up from 32 in previous editions. It’s spread across the US, Canada, and Mexico. And the sheer volume of matches, 104 in total, creates an enormous surface area for prediction market activity.
Every data point feeding into the smart contract is verifiable on-chain. Every payout logic is encoded before the match starts. There’s no house discretion on edge cases, no terms-of-service clause that lets a platform claw back winnings.
Chainlink Labs executives emphasized that this partnership establishes new industry standards for sports prediction markets, aiming to integrate decentralized oracle technology into the mainstream sports betting ecosystem.
What this means for LINK and the broader market From an investor perspective, this partnership is one of the highest-profile real-world use cases Chainlink has landed. The LINK token’s value proposition has always been tied to network usage: more protocols and platforms using Chainlink oracles means more demand for the token that secures the network.
Industry analysts predict substantial network effects that could drive increased on-chain activity for the LINK token, although initial reports on direct price impacts remain sparse.
There are risks worth flagging. Regulatory scrutiny around prediction markets varies wildly by jurisdiction, and a FIFA-branded product will attract attention from regulators who might otherwise ignore smaller platforms.
Traders should keep an eye on on-chain metrics for LINK during the tournament window, specifically transaction counts and unique callers to Chainlink’s CRE contracts.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Exchange supply falls 12% in a monthMore than 15.7 million $LINK left centralized exchanges over the past month, a 12% drop in the supply parked on trading venues, according to on-chain analytics firm @SantimentData. On Sunday alone, a further 1.04 million tokens exited exchanges in a single day.
The key metric here is the Exchange Flow Balance, which measures the net amount of $LINK flowing into or out of wallets connected to centralized exchanges. When the indicator sits below zero, outflows dominate, a trend that can signal investor accumulation rather than selling pressure. The sustained negative reading means fewer coins are sitting ready to sell, compressing the readily available supply on the market.
DTCC goes live with Chainlink at the centerThe supply shift arrives during a significant month for @chainlink's institutional credentials. On July 15, 2026, @The_DTCC processed its first live production trades using tokenized versions of DTC-held assets, calling it its largest tokenization production event by breadth of assets, use cases, and participants. Live trades covered tokenized stocks, ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries, with the tokenized versions preserving the same legal ownership rights as the underlying securities.
The initiative involved over 30 major financial institutions, including BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Vanguard. The driving force behind the transactions was Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and Runtime Environment (CRE). JPMorgan posted tokenized shares of the Invesco QQQ Trust ETF as collateral to meet margin requirements at CME Group.
DTC secured a No-Action Letter from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission before the pilot began, authorizing it to operate a tokenization service for real-world assets it custodies, meaning the July trades ran as regulated production activity rather than a sandbox test. DTCC now plans to open the service more broadly in October 2026, expanding eligible participants and asset classes.
The pairing of shrinking exchange supply and a growing institutional footprint points to holders positioning around utility rather than an exit. Whether that dynamic translates into price momentum will depend on how broadly the DTCC service scales and how deeply @chainlink becomes embedded in the next phase of Wall Street's tokenization push.
Sources
CoinDesk: DTCC moves tokenized securities into live trading
Crypto Briefing: Chainlink orchestrates live trade with JPMorgan's tokenized stock collateral
Tradeweb: DTCC turns tokenization into reality
Coinbase is rolling out perpetual futures contracts for Circle Internet Group (CRCL), Robinhood Markets (HOOD), and MicroStrategy (MSTR), with trading set to go live on or after 9:00 am UTC on July 21, 2026.
What’s actually launching The new contracts will be available to eligible non-US customers, consistent with Coinbase’s existing approach to its stock perpetual futures product. Traders can access up to 10x leverage on single-stock contracts, meaning a $1,000 position can control $10,000 worth of exposure.
All three contracts are cash-settled in USDC, Circle’s dollar-pegged stablecoin. That detail is worth noting given that CRCL, Circle’s own stock ticker, is one of the assets being listed. Coinbase is essentially letting traders speculate on the issuer of the settlement currency using the settlement currency itself.
The 24/7 trading window is a meaningful differentiator from traditional equity markets. When a major Bitcoin move happens at 2 am on a Sunday, holders of MSTR perpetuals can react immediately rather than waiting for Monday’s opening bell.
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Why these three stocks matter MicroStrategy, under Michael Saylor’s leadership, has become the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, essentially transforming itself into a leveraged Bitcoin proxy.
Robinhood has steadily built out its crypto business, becoming one of the primary on-ramps for retail traders entering the digital asset space. The company’s revenue is increasingly tied to crypto trading volumes.
Circle Internet Group, the company behind USDC, went public and represents a pure-play bet on stablecoin adoption. CRCL saw a 5.5% gain in a single trading session amid Bitcoin’s strength earlier in 2026.
Coinbase’s bigger derivatives play This launch builds on groundwork Coinbase laid in March 2026, when it first introduced stock perpetual futures for non-US users. Adding CRCL, HOOD, and MSTR is the next step in that rollout.
The timing aligns with a period of significant momentum for crypto-linked equities. Bitcoin surpassed $80,000 earlier in 2026, with companies like MicroStrategy and Circle seeing their stock prices respond accordingly.
What this means for traders and investors In traditional equity markets, standard margin accounts typically offer 2x leverage, with portfolio margin sometimes stretching to 4x or more for qualified investors. At 10x, these perpetuals sit closer to the leverage profiles found on crypto-native platforms.
One risk to watch: the correlation between these stocks and Bitcoin can break down during periods of company-specific stress. A regulatory action against Circle, a Robinhood earnings miss, or a change in MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin strategy could decouple these assets from broader crypto trends, catching leveraged traders off guard.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Crypto has been rescued by the US government exactly once, and the rescue was aimed at something else. The mechanism was an obscure override in banking law, and understanding how it worked in March 2023, and why it may never work that way again, is the closest thing to reading crypto’s actual safety net
Summary
The systemic risk exception is an override in US banking law: normally the FDIC must resolve failed banks at the least cost to its insurance fund, but with extraordinary sign-offs it may spend more to prevent broader financial instability. Invoking it requires a two-thirds vote of the FDIC board, a two-thirds vote of the Federal Reserve board, and the Treasury secretary’s determination in consultation with the president, one of the highest procedural bars in financial regulation. In March 2023 it was invoked for Silicon Valley Bank, making all depositors whole including the uninsured, at a cost to the insurance fund of roughly $16 billion to $17 billion, recovered through special assessments on banks. Circle held $3.3 billion of USDC reserves at SVB; the coin fell to roughly 87 cents over the weekend and recovered when the depositor guarantee landed. Crypto’s only bailout was a side effect of a banking rescue. The channel is narrowing by design: issuers moved reserves away from bank deposits, and watchdogs now warn that a future exception covering a bank heavy with stablecoin reserves could cost more than SVB did, which is exactly why regulators want the exposure shrunk. For one weekend in March 2023, the second-largest stablecoin in the world traded like a distressed bond. USDC, marketed as a dollar in digital form, touched roughly 87 cents, because $3.3 billion of the reserves behind it were trapped inside a bank that had just failed. By Monday morning the peg was back, and the crypto industry drew a comforting conclusion: when things get bad enough, the government steps in. The conclusion is half right and dangerously incomplete. The government did step in, through a mechanism called the systemic risk exception, and it was not stepping in for crypto. Understanding what that mechanism is, the extraordinary process it requires, what it actually did that weekend, and why the same rescue is being engineered out of repeatability, is the closest thing available to an honest map of crypto’s safety net. This guide is that map.
The rule the exception overrides The systemic risk exception only makes sense against the rule it breaks, and the rule is a scar from an earlier crisis.
After the savings-and-loan disaster of the 1980s drained the deposit insurance system, Congress passed the FDIC Improvement Act of 1991, and at its center sat a discipline called least-cost resolution. When a bank fails, the FDIC must choose the resolution path that costs its Deposit Insurance Fund the least. In practice that usually means insured depositors are paid in full, up to the statutory limit, and uninsured depositors, everyone above the limit, stand in line as creditors of the receivership, recovering whatever the failed bank’s assets eventually yield. The rule exists to make large depositors police their banks: if money above the insurance cap is genuinely at risk, sophisticated customers have reasons to watch where they keep it, and banks that take wild risks lose big deposits before they blow up.
Congress knew the discipline could occasionally be catastrophic, a failure large enough or connected enough that letting uninsured depositors take losses would spread panic to healthy banks. So it built one exit: the systemic risk exception, permitting the FDIC to abandon least-cost and protect broader classes of creditors, including all uninsured depositors, when the cheap path would have serious adverse effects on economic conditions or financial stability.
Then it made the exit door heavy. Invoking the exception requires a written recommendation by two-thirds of the FDIC’s board, a matching two-thirds of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, and a determination by the Treasury secretary made in consultation with the president, with after-the-fact accountability including review of the determination. Three institutions, supermajorities in two, and the White House in the loop: American financial law contains few switches harder to flip, which is the point. The exception is designed to be used the way it reads, exceptionally.
March 2023: the weekend it flipped Silicon Valley Bank failed on Friday, March 10, 2023, in the fastest large-bank run in American history, tens of billions of withdrawal demands in a day, driven at smartphone speed by a depositor base of startups and funds that all read the same warnings at the same time. The failure’s signature problem was concentration above the cap: the overwhelming majority of SVB’s deposits were uninsured, held by companies that used the bank for payroll and treasury. Under least-cost resolution, those depositors faced haircuts of unknown size and timing, and by Saturday the question consuming regulators was not SVB but Monday: whether uninsured depositors at every similar bank would conclude their money was unsafe and run next.
Among those uninsured depositors was Circle, with $3.3 billion of USDC’s reserves, roughly 8% of the total, on deposit at SVB. The disclosure landed Friday night, and the stablecoin market did the arithmetic instantly: if the SVB money took, say, a 20% haircut, the coin was worth visibly less than a dollar. USDC broke, trading down to roughly 87 cents, redemption queues formed, and the depeg transmitted through DeFi, where USDC served as core collateral and as backing for other stablecoins, turning one bank’s failure into a system-wide crypto stress test in under 48 hours. For readers new to the mechanics, crypto.news has also explained the anatomy of the USDC break.
On Sunday evening, the switch flipped. The FDIC and Federal Reserve boards voted, the Treasury secretary determined, and the government announced that all SVB depositors, insured and uninsured alike, would have full access to their money Monday morning, with the identical treatment applied to the simultaneously failed Signature Bank. The Fed added the Fed authority this is often confused with, a new broad lending facility so other banks could borrow against securities at face value rather than fire-selling them. Crucially, the announcement drew a line: depositors were protected, while shareholders and certain bondholders of the failed banks were wiped out, this was a depositor guarantee, not a rescue of the banks as firms. The cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund from protecting uninsured depositors, later tallied around $16 billion to $17 billion, was recovered the way the statute prescribes, through special assessments levied on the banking industry.
USDC’s peg was restored by Monday. Circle’s $3.3 billion was simply there again, whole, because Circle was a depositor and every depositor had been made whole.
Reading the rescue correctly Everything important about this episode lives in the details the celebratory version skips.
The decision-makers were not looking at crypto. The systemic risk determination was about the American regional banking system: the fear that uninsured depositors at dozens of healthy-enough banks would run on Monday, converting one failure into a cascade. USDC’s exposure appeared in the weekend’s inputs mainly as evidence of how far SVB’s depositor base reached, not as an object of policy. The stablecoin was rescued the way a car parked next to a burning building is saved by the fire department: thoroughly, and incidentally.
The mechanism could not have reached crypto directly even if regulators had wanted it to. The exception overrides least-cost resolution of a failed insured bank; it has no application to a failing stablecoin issuer, which is not a bank, holds no insured deposits, and sits entirely outside the FDIC’s resolution machinery. Had the causality run the other way, Circle failing with SVB healthy, there was no switch to flip. The one rescue in crypto’s history worked only because the point of failure happened to be inside the traditional perimeter.
And the episode cut both ways for the industry’s reputation. It proved the deepest link between how reserves connect coins to banks and banking, and it showed regulators exactly what that link costs: a coin’s stability had become an unpriced pass-through of a bank’s uninsured-deposit risk, and the public backstop had absorbed it by accident. Nobody in Washington filed that under precedent to repeat. They filed it under exposure to close.
A note on scale completes the picture, because the exception’s economics are part of why its future use is contested. The Deposit Insurance Fund that absorbed the roughly $16 billion to $17 billion cost is not taxpayer money in the direct sense; it is funded by assessments on insured banks, and the special assessment that recouped the SVB and Signature costs was levied, by design, disproportionately on the largest banks. That structure is why the banking industry itself is a stakeholder in how the exception gets used: every invocation is a bill sent to banks that did nothing wrong, which is both the system’s discipline, the industry insures itself, and the source of its political friction. Now scale the stablecoin version. The sector’s reserves exceed $300 billion, and even a fraction of a major issuer’s backing sitting as deposits at one failing bank could produce an uninsured-depositor guarantee dwarfing 2023’s, with the cost assessed on banks to protect, in economic substance, the customers of a non-bank competitor that pays no assessments at all. That asymmetry, banks funding the accidental backstop of an industry built to disintermediate them, is the sharpest version of the Better Markets warning, and it explains the otherwise puzzling alliance of bank lobbies and consumer watchdogs pressing regulators to keep stablecoin reserves out of bank deposits. The exception’s door is heavy, and the parties who pay when it opens are now watching what stands outside it.
The weekend, hour by hour The compressed timeline of March 10 to 13, 2023 is worth walking in sequence, because the mechanics of how a bank failure became a stablecoin crisis and back again are clearest at ground level, and because the sequence is the template for reading any future episode.
Friday, March 10. California regulators closed Silicon Valley Bank mid-morning and appointed the FDIC receiver, the standard Friday choreography of American bank failure, except at unprecedented speed and size for the era. The default path was least-cost resolution: insured depositors whole within days, uninsured depositors, the vast majority at SVB, issued receivership certificates for the excess, of uncertain value and timing. Through the afternoon, the exposure disclosures began. Circle’s landed that evening: $3.3 billion of USDC reserves at the failed bank.
Saturday. The stablecoin market traded the disclosure. USDC broke decisively below its peg, reaching roughly 87 cents, and the mechanics of the depeg mattered as much as its size: redemptions through Circle were constrained by the banking system being closed for the weekend, so price discovery happened entirely on secondary markets, in an information vacuum, with holders unable to distinguish a weekend liquidity discount from a genuine solvency haircut. The stress propagated through DeFi, where USDC collateralized lending markets and backed other stablecoins, notably DAI, which depegged in sympathy. A crypto-native observer watching only crypto saw a stablecoin crisis; the actual variable was a receivership in Santa Clara.
Sunday, March 12. The systemic machinery engaged, aimed at Monday’s banking open, not at crypto. The FDIC and Federal Reserve boards delivered their supermajority recommendations, the Treasury secretary made the determination in consultation with the president, and the announcement guaranteed all depositors of SVB and Signature Bank, with shareholders and certain debtholders wiped out. Simultaneously the Fed unveiled its new broad lending facility for banks, term funding against securities at par, the modern 13(3)-era answer to fire sales. Circle communicated that its exposure would be recovered in full and that the peg would restore when banking rails reopened.
Monday, March 13. Depositors had access. Circle’s $3.3 billion was whole, redemptions resumed through functioning banks, and USDC returned to parity within the day. Total elapsed time from failure to restoration: roughly 65 hours, most of them a weekend.
Read as a template, the sequence teaches four things. Stablecoin depegs driven by reserve exposure trade on disclosure and rumor while the actual determinants, receivership outcomes, official decisions, move on institutional time, so weekend prices are sentiment, not settlement. The transmission runs through whatever fraction of reserves sits at the failed institution, which is why the single most predictive number in any repeat is the issuer’s disclosed bank-deposit concentration. The rescue decision, when it came, was made by banking regulators weighing banking contagion, with crypto’s fate a dependent variable, and any future episode should be read the same way: watch what the FDIC and Fed fear for banks, not what they say about crypto. And the entire arc, break to restoration, required the failure to sit inside the insured perimeter, which is the fact every subsequent reform has been quietly working to make irrelevant.
Why the accident is being engineered out Three developments since March 2023 have narrowed the accidental-bailout channel, and each is worth registering because together they answer the question every holder actually cares about: would it work that way again?
Reserves moved. The proximate lesson issuers drew was that concentrated uninsured bank deposits are the weak joint, and reserve portfolios restructured accordingly, toward Treasury bills, government money market funds, and custody arrangements, with bank deposits reduced to operational cash. The GENIUS Act hardened the direction into law with full-reserve requirements in high-quality liquid assets. The less reserve money sits as uninsured deposits, the less a bank failure can transmit into a peg, and the less a future depositor guarantee would have any stablecoin to save.
The watchdogs did the arithmetic. Better Markets and others have warned that a future systemic risk exception covering a bank holding a major issuer’s reserves could cost the insurance fund more than SVB’s roughly $17 billion, socializing a stablecoin’s back end across assessed banks at a scale the 2023 episode only sketched. That warning is the political immune response to the accident: the argument now on the table is precisely that stablecoin reserve exposure should not be allowed to grow into something the exception would one day be pressured to cover.
And the doctrine hardened. The Fed chair who owned crypto just ruled out saving it, while the FDIC has separately confirmed that stablecoin holders have no deposit insurance of their own, no pass-through, no coverage, a creditor’s claim on the issuer and nothing more. Crypto.news has also examined why holders had no direct protection. The official architecture being built instead, GENIUS’s holder-priority rule and reserve requirements, is a resolution regime: machinery for letting an issuer fail in an orderly way, which is the exact opposite of machinery for rescuing one. The unfinished state of that rulebook, after regulators missed July’s statutory deadline, is the honest asterisk on the whole structure.
The synthesis is clean enough to carry. The systemic risk exception remains on the books, as heavy-doored as ever, and it protects one thing: depositors of failed insured banks, when three institutions and the White House agree that letting them take losses would endanger the system. Stablecoins touched that protection once, through a $3.3 billion accident of account location, and the years since have been a coordinated project, by issuers, by Congress, by regulators, to make sure the next stablecoin crisis is resolved inside crypto’s own machinery rather than caught in banking’s net. Whether that machinery is finished when the test comes is the open question of 2026, and it is the right one to watch, because the fire department has now said clearly which building it covers.
Frequently asked questions What is the systemic risk exception in one sentence? It is the override in US banking law that lets the FDIC abandon its normal obligation to resolve a failed bank at the least cost to the insurance fund, and instead protect broader groups such as all uninsured depositors, when the cheap path would threaten financial stability.
Who has to approve it? Three parties, at one of the highest bars in financial regulation: at least two-thirds of the FDIC’s board, at least two-thirds of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, and the Treasury secretary, who makes the determination in consultation with the president. The multi-institution supermajority design exists to keep the exception truly exceptional.
What happened with Silicon Valley Bank in 2023? SVB failed on March 10, 2023 after the fastest major bank run in US history, with the vast majority of its deposits above the insurance limit. Fearing Monday runs on similar banks, regulators invoked the exception on Sunday and guaranteed all depositors, insured and uninsured, at SVB and Signature Bank, while wiping out shareholders. The uninsured-depositor protection cost the insurance fund roughly $16 billion to $17 billion, recovered via special assessments on banks.
How did that rescue USDC? Circle held $3.3 billion of USDC’s reserves, about 8%, as deposits at SVB. When the failure was disclosed, USDC fell to roughly 87 cents as markets priced a possible haircut on that exposure. The depositor guarantee made Circle whole along with every other depositor, and the peg recovered by Monday. USDC was saved as a depositor of a rescued bank, not as a stablecoin.
Could the exception be used to rescue a stablecoin issuer directly? No. The mechanism applies to the resolution of failed insured banks, and a stablecoin issuer is not a bank and holds no insured deposits. If an issuer failed while its reserve banks stayed healthy, the exception would have nothing to attach to. The 2023 episode worked only because the point of failure sat inside the traditional banking perimeter.
Why might it not work the same way next time? Because the channel is being closed from three directions. Issuers moved reserves out of uninsured bank deposits into Treasury bills, government money funds, and custody, so a bank failure transmits less into any peg. Watchdogs such as Better Markets warn that covering a reserve-heavy bank could cost more than SVB did, building political resistance. And regulators, including the Fed chair this month, have explicitly disclaimed crypto rescues while constructing a resolution regime instead.
What protects stablecoin holders now, if not this? Under the GENIUS Act: full reserves in high-quality liquid assets and a priority rule paying stablecoin holders ahead of other creditors in an issuer’s failure, a strong first claim on the reserve pool. Holders have no deposit insurance and no pass-through coverage, as the FDIC has confirmed. The implementing rules for the new regime remain unfinished after agencies missed the July 2026 statutory deadline, which is the main open risk in the structure.
What should someone watch to judge the safety net today? Three things. Reserve disclosures, specifically how much of an issuer’s backing still sits as bank deposits versus Treasuries and government funds. The GENIUS rulemaking’s completion, since holder priority is only as fast and certain as the redemption and resolution mechanics behind it. And official rhetoric under stress: whether the next mid-sized crypto failure is actually allowed to fail, which is the only true test of the no-rescue doctrine. This is educational information, not financial advice.
Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. It describes past official actions and current law, neither of which guarantees any future action, and regulatory details remain subject to change. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of July 20, 2026.
According to monitoring by Onchain Lens, a Hyperliquid whale carried out new on-chain operations today after earning over $1 million in profits, staking 115,000 HYPE (worth roughly $7.2 million). The address currently holds: 115,000 staked HYPE, 100,000 HYPE in available balance, and $1.1 million in USDC. For today’s trades, the whale closed two short positions: a $3.5 million short on $MU, netting $439,100 in profit; and a $2.42 million short on $SKHX, generating $581,900 in gains. The address still holds a large cumulative asset size, with the market closely monitoring its subsequent trading moves.
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Every time the internet has taken on a new kind of participant, it has exposed a payment rail that wasn't built for it. Card networks were built for a person standing at a register. They were stretched to cover a browser tab, and it worked, barely, with fraud tooling and checkout friction bolted on for decades. Agentic AI is the next participant, and it is not a person with a browser tab. It is software that can decide, in milliseconds, to call a hundred different paid services on someone's behalf, evaluate what came back, and call a hundred more. Nothing about the existing rails was built to carry that. The question worth asking isn't just whether agents can pay at all – x402 already answers that – it's which underlying chain should the payment settle on, because at agent scale, that choice stops being a footnote and starts being the constraint.
What agent-scale volume demands A human making an online purchase generates one transaction and can tolerate a few seconds of uncertainty while it clears. An agent completing one task might generate dozens of transactions, a pricing lookup, a verification check, a compute call, a follow-up, each individually worth a fraction of a cent, each needing to clear before the agent's next decision depends on it. That shift changes what “good enough” looks like for a settlement layer. Three properties stop being nice-to-haves and start being requirements:
Finality must be immediate and certain, not probable. Cost must stay negligible and predictable at extremely high transaction counts, not just cheap on a good day. And settlement must be independently verifiable, since the party on the other end of an agent-to-agent transaction usually isn't a human who can just call and ask what happened.
Finality: certain, not eventually certain Most blockchains give you a transaction that's provisionally included and then becomes more final as more blocks are added on top of it, which is a reasonable trade-off for a lot of use cases, but it introduces a window where an outcome is probable rather than guaranteed. For an agent economy, that window is a real problem. If an endpoint has to wait for several confirmations before it can be sure a payment is settled, it either releases the paid resource on faith or adds latency back into a system whose whole value proposition was removing latency.
Algorand's Pure Proof-of-Stake consensus produces blocks that are final the moment they're certified, roughly every 2.8 seconds, with no probabilistic settling period and no reorganization risk once a block is confirmed. A transaction is either in a certified block, or it doesn't exist. That's a meaningfully different guarantee than “final after enough confirmations have piled up,” and it's the difference an x402 facilitator needs: an endpoint can release its resource the moment settlement is certified, not the moment it's statistically unlikely to be reversed.
Cost that stays predictable at volume Cheap is easy to claim. Cheap and predictable under load is harder, and it's the property that matters once you're running millions of sub-cent transactions instead of thousands of dollar-sized ones. Many chains price transactions through an auction, gas fees that rise and fall with network demand, which is a fine model when a transaction is worth ten dollars and a fee spike costs you fifty cents. It's a broken model when the transaction itself is worth two cents and the fee occasionally exceeds the payment. Atomic, honestly priced micropayments only work if the cost of moving the money doesn't compete with the price of the thing being sold.
Algorand's fee model is flat rather than auction-based; a fixed fraction of a cent per transaction, with a network built to handle up to 10,000 transactions per second. That combination of fixed cost and high throughput headroom is what lets a builder price a reminder at two cents and a booking at five cents and actually keep the difference, instead of watching network conditions eat the margin on the smallest, most frequent actions, which are exactly the actions an agent economy runs the most of.
Settlement that doesn't require trusting a middle layer The third requirement is easy to overlook because humans rarely need it: when something goes wrong, or when an audit needs to happen, or when a dispute needs resolving, someone needs to be able to independently verify what actually settled, without taking a sequencer's word for it or waiting on a rollup's fraud-proof window to close. Algorand's consensus produces a single, publicly verifiable ledger with deterministic finality by design, not a fast “soft” confirmation followed by a slower “real” one settling elsewhere later. For an agent economy that's going to need real accounting, which endpoint got paid, how much, for what, at what time, that distinction between one settlement and two staggered ones is not academic. It's the difference between a ledger you can point an auditor at and a ledger you have to explain.
What this means for what you build None of the properties above matter in the abstract, they matter because of what they let a developer ship. If finality is instant and fees stay flat and negligible at volume, the right unit to build is not an application, it's an endpoint: one narrow, honestly priced capability that an agent can call, evaluate, and pay for in a single exchange. Four patterns cover most of what's worth building.
Charge for data: sell access to a dataset, a report, a market signal, or a verification result, one request at a time. Charge for compute: let an agent pay only when it runs a model, executes code, or completes an inference call. Charge for actions: let an agent pay to trigger something real, sending a message, booking a resource, generating a file. Charge for verification: sell trust itself, proof, a reputation check, a validation an agent should run before it acts on someone's behalf.
What ties all four together is that they're cheap, frequent, and only worth building if the settlement layer underneath doesn't eat the margin or introduce a delay the agent must wait out. That's the specific reason the finality and fee properties described above aren't a side benefit, they're what makes the endpoint pattern viable at all.
But an endpoint by itself rarely solves anything. A pricing lookup is a fact, not an answer. A single inference call is a capability, not a decision. Real utility, the kind someone actually keeps paying for, almost always comes from orchestration: taking several narrow, atomic endpoints, sometimes several you built yourself, sometimes several built by entirely different teams, and combining them into a response to a question a person or another agent actually had. The endpoint is the unit worth building. The solution is what you get when several of them work together toward a problem someone needs solved.
Poe, Quora's consolidated interface for chatting with several AI models through one product, is a useful case to look at here. This is not because anything about it is done wrong, but because its own published policies show clearly what a team has to build when the models it is bringing together don't have a native way to charge per use and settle right away. That infrastructure is a reasonable, well-built answer to a real constraint, and it is worth going through in some detail because of how differently the same product can look once that constraint is no longer there.
To let users move between models in one place, Poe has users prepay into a points balance, spread across fixed subscription tiers. Poe's own help center says unused points do not carry over between billing periods unless a plan says otherwise, and that points bought ahead of time expire one year after purchase (Poe Purchases FAQs). On the creator side, developers who build bots on the platform are paid on a periodic cycle rather than right away: Poe's Creator Monetization FAQ says earnings become payable once they reach ten dollars, with payment sent thirty to forty-five days after the end of the month they were earned in, routed through Stripe (Poe Creator Monetization FAQs). Building and keeping up that accounting, the points ledger, the subscription tiers, the payout calendar, is a fairly big piece of infrastructure sitting next to the actual product, and it is what any team has to build today when there is no settlement layer underneath that can charge and pay out per use, instantly.
Now picture the same kind of product built the other way around: as an orchestration layer sitting on top of several atomic x402 endpoints, each one a separate model, priced and settled on its own. A client asks one question. The orchestration layer decides which endpoints that question actually needs, calls each of them, pays each one the moment it answers, and puts together what comes back into a single response. This version works out better for everyone involved, not only for the team building it: the aggregator does not need to build or maintain its own financial system on the side, the model providers behind each endpoint get paid the moment their work is used instead of waiting on a monthly cycle and a minimum threshold, and the end user never carries a prepaid balance that can sit there unused or quietly expire. None of that flow needs a points system or a payout calendar, because every leg of it settles by itself, in seconds, at a cost too small to matter. The product is the judgment applied in the middle, not the settlement machinery underneath it, and that is only possible because the settlement layer underneath can be trusted to just work, every time.
Now picture the same kind of product built the other way: as an orchestration layer sitting on top of several atomic x402 endpoints, each one a distinct model, priced and settled on its own. A client asks one question. The orchestration layer decides which endpoints the question needs, calls each one, pays each one individually the moment it responds, and assembles what comes back into a single answer. Nothing about that flow requires a points balance, a subscription tier, or a monthly payout run, because every leg of it settles on its own, in seconds, at a cost too small to matter. The product is the judgment applied in the middle, not the settlement machinery underneath it, and that's only possible because the settlement layer underneath can be trusted to just work.
This is the argument for building endpoints on Algorand: not that a single endpoint is valuable in isolation, but that instant, cheap, verifiable settlement is what makes it worthwhile to build several of them and let something else orchestrate them into a real solution. That's the concrete version of the abstract argument above: the difference between a builder having to construct financial infrastructure from scratch and a builder being able to skip that step entirely and just build the product.
Where this is already running This isn't a hypothetical fit. Algorand added full x402 support on Mainnet in February 2026, with ecosystem startup GoPlausible operating a facilitator that verifies and settles payments natively on the Algorand Virtual Machine. Every one of the properties above, instant finality, flat low fees, single-ledger verifiability, is already what's carrying those settlements today, not a roadmap item.
It's also worth being honest about where the broader x402 ecosystem stands; daily transaction volume across the whole protocol, on every chain, is still small relative to the attention agentic commerce is getting, and a meaningful share of it is still test traffic and early experimentation rather than mature, sustained demand. That's not a weakness in the thesis; it's exactly why the base layer choice matters more right now than it will later. The rails get chosen while the volume is still forming, not after. Builders shipping x402-powered endpoints today, including through the Global x402 Challenge, are making that choice in real time, and the properties that matter at agent scale, certain finality, predictable cost, verifiable settlement, are the ones worth building on.
Disclaimer: The content provided in this blog is for informational purposes only. The information is provided by the Algorand Foundation and while we strive to keep the information up-to-date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability, or availability with respect to the blog or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained in the blog for any purpose. The content of this blog is not intended to be legal, financial, or investment advice nor is it an endorsement, guarantee, or investment recommendation. You should not take any action before conducting your own research or consulting with a qualified professional. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk. All companies are independent entities solely responsible for their operations, marketing, and compliance with applicable laws and regulations. In no event will Algorand Foundation nor any affiliates be liable for any loss or damage including without limitation, indirect, or consequential loss or damage, or any loss or damage whatsoever arising from loss of data or profits arising out of, or in connection with, the use of this blog. Through this blog, you may be able to link to other websites which are not under the control of the Algorand Foundation. We have no control over the nature, content, and availability of those sites. The inclusion of any links does not imply a recommendation nor endorse the views expressed therein. Any statements about future plans, integrations, or protocol upgrades are forward-looking and subject to change.
Brett Harrison wants to pump the brakes on the AI-will-replace-traders narrative. The founder and CEO of Architect Financial Technologies laid out a detailed case in a recent Medium post arguing that large language models, the technology behind ChatGPT and its competitors, are fundamentally ill-suited for building the kinds of trading systems that actually make money in high-frequency environments.
Coming from someone who spent 11 years at Jane Street leading algorithmic trading system development, the critique carries more weight than your average LinkedIn hot take about AI.
The core problem: markets aren’t language Harrison’s central argument is elegantly simple. LLMs are built to process and generate language. Financial market data is, by its very nature, not linguistic. It’s stochastic, meaning it involves randomness and probability distributions that behave nothing like the patterns found in human text.
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He’s not dismissing AI entirely, though. Harrison acknowledges that LLMs can be genuinely useful for specific supporting tasks. Code generation, for instance. Feature selection, the process of identifying which variables matter most in a model, is another area where LLMs can add value. Harrison argues that LLMs should never be relied upon for building core quantitative trading models or for real-time operations like continuous market monitoring. High-frequency trading operates on timescales of microseconds to nanoseconds. LLMs, which require meaningful computation time to generate responses, simply cannot operate at those speeds.
Why Harrison’s background matters here He studied computer science at Harvard with a focus on AI, then spent over a decade at Jane Street, one of the most respected quantitative trading firms in the world. After that, he served as president of FTX US before departing in 2022, prior to the exchange’s spectacular collapse under Sam Bankman-Fried.
In early 2023, Harrison launched Architect Financial Technologies with backing from notable crypto-native investors including Coinbase and Circle. The firm raised a $5 million seed round in January 2023, then followed up with a $35 million funding round in December 2025. The company’s ambition is to build trading infrastructure that brings crypto-style market design, things like perpetual futures, into the traditional finance world.
Rather than pursuing fully autonomous AI trading, the firm is focused on building robust infrastructure, including a regulated perpetual futures exchange, that blends human expertise with technological innovation.
What this means for investors and the broader market For investors evaluating AI-focused trading platforms, Harrison’s argument serves as a useful filter. Companies claiming that LLMs alone can generate alpha, the excess returns above a benchmark, deserve extra scrutiny. The technology has genuine applications in finance, but those applications are narrower and more specialized than the marketing materials suggest.
The funding trajectory of Architect itself tells a parallel story. The jump from a $5 million seed to a $35 million round suggests growing investor confidence not in AI-does-everything approaches, but in infrastructure plays that thoughtfully combine traditional finance expertise with crypto-native innovation. Perpetual futures, a staple of crypto exchanges, represent a massive derivatives market that traditional finance has barely begun to tap.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Aave Picks Chainlink CCIP As Default Standard For Cross-Chain sGHO Aave governance has moved to make Chainlink CCIP the default standard for cross-chain sGHO transfers, reinforcing the role of security-focused infrastructure in DeFi’s next phase.
The Aave governance proposal focuses on launching sGHO cross-chain and using Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol as the default option. The wider Delivery Infrastructure, known as a.DI, still uses a multi-bridge architecture for redundancy, but CCIP is positioned as the standard route for this specific cross-chain flow.
That distinction matters.
DeFi has spent years learning that bridges are one of the most sensitive parts of the stack. Cross-chain systems can unlock liquidity and improve user experience, but they also introduce risk. Aave’s decision shows that major protocols are increasingly treating cross-chain communication as a security decision, not just a convenience feature.
TL;DR Aave governance has selected Chainlink CCIP as the default standard for cross-chain sGHO. The proposal sits inside Aave’s broader a.DI cross-chain infrastructure. The move highlights DeFi’s growing focus on secure cross-chain messaging. Why Cross-Chain Infrastructure Matters For Aave Aave is one of DeFi’s most important lending protocols.
As DeFi spreads across multiple networks, Aave needs infrastructure that can move information and value safely between chains. That is especially important for GHO and sGHO, where liquidity, accounting, governance, and risk controls have to remain consistent across environments.
Cross-chain expansion is useful, but it is also dangerous if handled poorly.
Many of crypto’s largest exploits have involved bridges or cross-chain infrastructure. The reason is simple: bridges often sit between different consensus systems, custody models, liquidity pools, and message-passing mechanisms. If something goes wrong, the losses can be large and fast.
For a protocol like Aave, the bridge standard is therefore not a minor technical choice.
It affects user trust, governance execution, stablecoin liquidity, and the way the protocol expands beyond one network.
Why Chainlink CCIP Was Chosen Chainlink has positioned CCIP as a security-first cross-chain messaging and transfer standard.
The pitch is that major protocols need more than a basic bridge. They need risk controls, decentralized oracle infrastructure, and a model that can support large-scale cross-chain communication without relying on a single fragile route.
Aave’s proposal reflects that direction.
Using CCIP as the default route for sGHO suggests Aave wants a standard that can support cross-chain expansion while reducing operational risk. At the same time, the validation materials make clear that the broader a.DI system remains multi-bridge. That means CCIP is not the only infrastructure in the architecture, and alternative bridges are not simply being switched off.
That is the right nuance.
In complex DeFi systems, redundancy matters. A default route can provide consistency, while a multi-bridge design can help avoid dependence on one provider.
GHO Needs Stronger Distribution The GHO stablecoin has always needed distribution to grow.
A stablecoin’s success depends on more than minting. It needs liquidity, integrations, cross-chain availability, lending demand, and confidence in how it is managed. Making sGHO easier to move across networks can help expand its utility.
That is where CCIP can matter.
If users and protocols can move sGHO more safely between chains, Aave can support broader GHO adoption without forcing activity to remain concentrated in one environment. That can improve liquidity and make GHO more useful across DeFi.
But the stablecoin market is competitive.
USDC, USDT, DAI, and newer stablecoin models already dominate much of the liquidity conversation. GHO needs clear advantages to gain share. Cross-chain accessibility is one part of that, but not the whole story.
Aave still has to build demand for GHO itself.
DeFi Is Becoming More Infrastructure-Led The proposal also shows where DeFi is heading.
Early DeFi growth was often about yield, liquidity mining, and fast deployments. The next phase is more infrastructure-heavy. Protocols need safer cross-chain communication, more formal risk controls, better governance execution, and deeper integrations between networks.
That is a more mature market.
It may not produce the same kind of retail excitement as meme-token speculation, but it is the work required for DeFi to support larger amounts of capital.
Aave choosing CCIP as the default standard for sGHO is part of that shift. It shows that leading protocols are thinking carefully about how to expand without repeating the bridge failures of earlier cycles.
For Chainlink, the decision strengthens CCIP’s role as a core infrastructure product. For Aave, it gives sGHO a clearer cross-chain path. For DeFi users, it may eventually mean a smoother experience moving between networks.
The important point is not that every bridge problem is now solved. It is that major protocols are becoming more selective about the infrastructure they trust.
This article is based on the Aave governance forum and Chainlink CCIP materials.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Uniswap’s liquidity providers have racked up $18 million in fees on the Robinhood Chain since the Layer 2 network launched its public mainnet on July 1. Uniswap crossed $1 billion in cumulative trading volume on Robinhood Chain by July 10, just nine days after launch. Daily trading volume peaked at nearly $500 million, fueled in large part by tokenized stock trading and Robinhood’s existing user base discovering DeFi for the first time.
How Robinhood Chain became a DeFi magnet overnight Robinhood Chain launched with Uniswap already deployed as the primary automated market maker. Uniswap deployed v2, v3, v4, and UniswapX simultaneously on day one, meaning the chain had functioning liquidity infrastructure from the moment it went live.
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Over $70 million in ETH was bridged to the platform during its first week of operation alone. Uniswap’s total value locked on Robinhood Chain surpassed $106 million shortly after launch.
Governance moves signal long-term commitment By mid-July, proposals emerged to extend the protocol fee structure to cover activity on Robinhood Chain. One particularly notable discussion centered on routing fees from Uniswap v4 through a mechanism called TokenJar, which would be used for burning UNI tokens on the Ethereum mainnet. The governance discussions also touched on fee activation for v2 and v3 deployments.
Beyond governance, Uniswap has introduced on-chain auctions on the platform and pursued partnerships designed to expand the Robinhood Chain ecosystem.
What this means for investors For UNI holders specifically, the governance proposals around fee activation and token burning deserve close attention. If the protocol fee switch gets turned on for Robinhood Chain, it would add a significant new revenue stream to the Uniswap protocol. The $500 million daily volume peaks represent substantial fee-generating potential.
Robinhood brought roughly 23 million funded accounts to the table when it entered crypto. The $106 million in TVL and billion-dollar volume milestone suggest that when you reduce friction and pair decentralized infrastructure with a familiar brand, retail traders are willing to make the jump.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Uniswap just moved more than $15 billion in trading volume in a single week. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the annual GDP of Iceland, except it happened on a protocol that nobody technically owns and that runs 24/7 without a lunch break.
The figure places Uniswap well ahead of every other decentralized exchange by volume. But what’s making this milestone particularly interesting isn’t just the raw number. It’s the convergence of new chain integrations, institutional partnerships, and governance moves that suggest the protocol is entering a fundamentally different phase.
What’s driving the volume surge Uniswap v4 has been steadily onboarding new networks, and one of the more notable additions is Robinhood Chain, which recorded $6 billion in trading volume as of July 19. That’s a single chain contributing nearly 40% of the protocol’s weekly haul.
In late June, Spark migrated $150 million in liquidity to Uniswap v4. Moves like that don’t just add depth to order books. They signal confidence from major DeFi players that v4’s architecture, with its hook-based customization and improved capital efficiency, is worth building on.
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Governance gets aggressive on UNI burns Between July 19 and July 26, Uniswap’s governance process advanced votes focused on activating protocol fees across multiple chains, with the explicit goal of using those fees to support UNI token burns.
Protocol fees get collected from trading activity across chains, then channeled into buying and burning UNI. With $15 billion flowing through the protocol weekly, even a small fee percentage translates into substantial burn pressure.
Uniswap Labs also allocated a $20 million annual growth budget for UNI at the start of 2026, giving the team resources to fund ecosystem development, incentive programs, and strategic partnerships without constantly going back to governance for spending approvals.
The institutional bridge keeps widening The involvement of entities like BlackRock in Uniswap’s ecosystem represents a quiet but significant evolution. Traditional finance isn’t just buying Bitcoin and parking it in cold storage anymore. It’s engaging with DeFi infrastructure directly, using decentralized liquidity pools for tokenized asset trading.
The Robinhood Chain integration is particularly telling. Robinhood has spent years building a retail brokerage audience, and now that audience has a direct pipeline into Uniswap’s liquidity.
What this means for investors Protocol fees tied to volume create a direct link between Uniswap’s usage and UNI’s scarcity. If weekly volume stays anywhere near $15 billion and fees are activated even at modest rates, the annualized burn could become a significant percentage of UNI’s circulating supply.
The risk side of the equation centers on regulatory uncertainty and smart contract exposure. Uniswap has already faced scrutiny from the SEC in prior years. The protocol’s decentralized nature provides some insulation, but the Labs entity behind it remains a potential target. Meanwhile, v4’s hook system introduces new smart contract surface area that hasn’t been battle-tested at this scale for very long.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Dfinity Adds Open SaaS to Its Growing Cloud RoadmapThe @Dfinity Foundation is pushing further into enterprise territory. Alongside its upcoming Cloud Engines product, founder Dominic Williams has announced that the Internet Computer ($ICP) protocol is preparing to launch an "Open SaaS" suite, a collection of dozens of on-chain services designed to let users run full enterprises directly on the blockchain.
According to Williams' post on X, every user will be able to customize their own SaaS service using AI, with the offering described as free to use forever and straightforward to install. The announcement adds another layer to what has become an ambitious product push from @Dfinity in 2026.
Cloud Engines Lay the FoundationThe Open SaaS suite builds on top of Cloud Engines, @Dfinity's sovereign cloud infrastructure product. A Cloud Engine is a dedicated private subnet within the ICP ecosystem, configurable to a specific specification, allowing users to choose their own security, performance, and resilience parameters. The technology gives enterprises real control over their infrastructure while maintaining tamper-proof hosting guarantees.
The Internet Computer's underlying cloud runs software that supports AI agents generating apps, websites, and SaaS on demand, with generated apps allowing users to make arbitrary requests via fluid AI experiences because AI can see the data inside and dynamically create logic on the fly. The Open SaaS announcement appears to operationalize that vision into a product anyone can deploy.
Sentiment around the project has strengthened after @Dfinity teased its upcoming Cloud Engines initiative, an announcement many view as a major step toward expanding $ICP's role in AI and decentralized cloud infrastructure. The global cloud infrastructure and platform services market is estimated at roughly $781 billion in 2025, and @Dfinity's Mission 70 white paper explicitly frames ICP as a platform that could address a major portion of that market through Cloud Engines and its "self-writing cloud" approach.
For the broader ICP ecosystem, the Open SaaS suite signals that @Dfinity is moving beyond developer tooling and into products that could attract mainstream enterprise users, with onchain services, AI customization, and a zero-cost entry point as the core selling points.
Sources:
Internet Computer Official Site
Coinpedia: ICP Price Climbs as DFINITY Expands AI Cloud Vision
Incrypted: DFINITY Foundation Announces New Economic Model for Internet Computer
Spain’s 1-0 defeat of Argentina in Sunday’s World Cup final didn’t just end a tournament. It kicked off what might be the most consequential week for sports-adjacent crypto since the last bull run.
While over a million fans are expected to flood Madrid’s streets on Monday for a victory parade, a parallel celebration is playing out on-chain. Fan tokens, NFT collectibles, and prediction market settlements are all processing the aftermath of the beautiful game’s biggest moment.
The blockchain infrastructure behind the 2026 World Cup Kraken was announced as FIFA’s Official Crypto Exchange Supporter on June 9, 2026. That title sounds like corporate word salad, but the role goes beyond banner ads. It positions the exchange as the primary crypto partner among the tournament’s traditional sponsor roster.
FIFA built its FIFA Collect platform on Avalanche, generating over 85,000 blockchain addresses for digital collectibles and NFT ticketing. In English: FIFA created a mini economy on Avalanche’s network where fans could own verifiable digital memorabilia tied to the tournament.
Chainlink, meanwhile, served as the exclusive oracle provider for ADI Predictstreet’s prediction markets covering all 104 tournament matches. Oracles are the bridges that feed real-world data, like match results, into smart contracts.
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The contrast with the 2022 Qatar World Cup is worth noting. That cycle was dominated by aggressive, often reckless crypto sponsorship deals. The 2026 approach looks more like functional integration than flashy branding.
Fan tokens and the national pride trade Chiliz operates the leading fan-token platform for major European football clubs, including multiple Spanish teams. There’s no official Spanish national team token, but that almost doesn’t matter. When a country wins the World Cup, the halo effect hits club-level tokens hard.
National pride drives interest in Spanish football broadly. Fans who might never have interacted with a fan token suddenly want a piece of the action. Trading volumes spike. Prices follow, at least temporarily.
The risk is that these spikes tend to be exactly that: spikes. Fan tokens have historically struggled to maintain value outside of major event windows.
What this means for investors For Avalanche, having FIFA Collect running on its network with over 85,000 blockchain addresses is the kind of real-world adoption metric that demonstrates regular football fans interacting with blockchain technology, many of them probably without even knowing it.
Chainlink’s oracle role across 104 matches demonstrates something similar. Being the exclusive provider for the world’s most-watched sporting event is a résumé line that opens doors to future partnerships across sports, entertainment, and beyond.
Kraken’s measured partnership approach also signals maturity in how crypto companies think about sports marketing. The exchange didn’t plaster its name on every surface or promise free Bitcoin to goal scorers. It took a supporting role, which suggests the industry has learned something from the 2022 sponsorship blowups.
For traders watching the fan-token space specifically, Chiliz-linked tokens for Spanish clubs are the obvious plays, but volume is the metric to watch more than price. Sustained volume after the initial spike would suggest genuine user acquisition rather than a one-day sugar rush.
Fan tokens remain speculative assets with thin liquidity compared to major cryptocurrencies. Regulatory scrutiny around sports-linked digital assets continues to evolve across European jurisdictions.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Avalanche [AVAX] is among the top chains by activity, but its price action continues to struggle just like other cryptos.
Notably, the number of transactions on Avalanche’s C-Chain has increased significantly since last year. Furthermore, while the stablecoin market cap is rising, indicating that liquidity is growing on the chain, AVAX’s price continues to lag.
As per on-chain data, the number of average daily transactions on Avalanche has exploded in the past year. To be specific, they have been moving consistently up since Q2 of 2025.
In April and May of 2025, daily transactions on AVAX stood at around 300K per day. The spike on the 13th of July took Avalanche’s transactions to 6.2 million, which equates to an increase of nearly 20x in a year.
Source: DefILlama However, this metric has not been steady, with traffic down 9% in the past 24 hours, clocking 2.620 million as of writing.
However, despite the decline in transactions, the burn rate increased by almost 4%. About 135.65 AVAX were burned permanently, an increase from 130.51 AVAX the previous day.
Total supply on Avalanche up by double-digits Moreover, Avalanche broke into the top-10 stablecoin networks. This is after AVAX’s stablecoin supply inreased by more than 43% in just a week, reaching a total of over $2 billion. However, at press time, it has dropped to $1.90 billion.
Source: Artemis However, according to DefiLlama, the AVAX stablecoin market cap has declined by 11% this week to around $1.59 billion . All in all, the data shows chain activity on Avalanche is thriving organically, but it’s leaving the price of the native token behind.
Here’s why AVAX price is lagging The daily price-action chart is making new lower levels. For instance, it consolidated between $8.369 and $10.483 from February to June before breaking below the $8 support. Again, it has entered another stall as it trades between $6.231 and $7.100 since the beginning of June.
The overall downtrend is evident from the CVD. In fact, 22.82K AVAX were sold in 24 hours despite momentum being on the buyers’ side.
Source: AVAX/USDT on TradingView The market structure is bearish, which explains why the token is falling despite its thriving network activity. Again, the broader crypto market is weak, and AVAX is not an exception to this trend.
Final Summary Avalanche’s daily transactions spike by nearly 20x in a year alongside its stablecoin market cap. AVAX price is making new lower lows, with the price now stalling between $6.231 and $7.100 since June.
The biggest World Cup in history is also shaping up to be the most controversial. FIFA’s 2026 tournament, spread across 16 cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico, expanded the field from 32 to 48 teams and added 104 matches to the schedule.
Dynamic ticket pricing has pushed some final-match tickets to $11,000. State attorneys general have launched investigations, and lawsuits are piling up. Meanwhile, US travel restrictions affecting nationals from 39 countries have made it physically impossible for some fans, and even some staff, to attend matches on American soil.
The $11,000 seat and the empty one next to it The backlash has been loud enough to attract legal scrutiny, with multiple state attorneys general examining whether the pricing practices violate consumer protection laws.
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By December 2025, the Trump administration’s entry restrictions covered nationals from 39 countries. For fans from Iran and Haiti, among others, attending matches in the US isn’t a question of budget. It’s a question of border policy. Iran qualified for the tournament, meaning a national team could theoretically play in a country where its own supporters are barred from entering.
Crypto steps onto the pitch On June 9, 2026, Kraken was named FIFA’s Official Crypto Exchange Supporter, a partnership that includes promotional events and fan experiences across North America and Europe.
Avalanche’s blockchain technology is powering FIFA Collect, a platform for digital collectibles and a new ticketing model. The goal is straightforward: use blockchain’s transparency to combat the ticket scalping and fraud that have plagued previous tournaments. Every ticket on a blockchain has a verifiable chain of custody. Scalpers can’t counterfeit what’s cryptographically secured, and resale rules can be baked directly into smart contracts.
Prediction markets go mainstream During June 2026 alone, World Cup-related prediction market trading volume exceeded $50 billion. Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have dominated activity, turning match outcomes into tradeable contracts.
For Polymarket, which gained significant attention during the 2024 US presidential election cycle, the World Cup represents a chance to prove that its model works beyond political prediction. Kalshi operates as a regulated exchange in the US, benefiting from CFTC oversight in a space where regulatory clarity remains rare.
What this means for crypto investors Kraken’s FIFA partnership validates the sponsorship playbook that exchanges have been testing with smaller sports properties. The Avalanche integration suggests that layer-1 blockchains are finding enterprise use cases that don’t require retail users to understand gas fees or wallet management. Platforms that have already secured regulatory approval, like Kalshi, are better positioned to weather regulatory scrutiny than their decentralized counterparts.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
More than 80,000 people showed up to FIFA World Cup watch parties carrying tickets built on blockchain. Not a single one had to think about wallets, gas fees, or private keys.
The system running underneath those tickets is built on Avalanche, specifically a dedicated Layer-1 chain that Ava Labs and FIFA built together and simply call the FIFA blockchain. The goal from day one was infrastructure that works invisibly, where fans get verifiable, fraud-resistant tickets and never have to know or care that a blockchain is involved.
How the FIFA ticketing system actually works FIFA’s approach uses two distinct digital entitlements: a Right-to-Buy (RTB) and a Right-to-Ticket (RTT). Think of an RTB like a reservation at a restaurant that you can sell to someone else before you ever sit down. It gives the holder the verified right to purchase a ticket, without being the ticket itself.
FIFA separates the right to get a ticket from the ticket itself, and both layers live on-chain where they can be tracked, verified, and transferred, but where fraud, bots, and scalpers have a much harder time operating.
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As of mid-June 2026, FIFA has issued more than 100,000 RTBs, including over 50,000 bundled Club World Cup tickets. Combined secondary-market volume from the RTB and RTT system has crossed $25 million.
The actual match-day tickets are still fulfilled through traditional infrastructure. Blockchain handles the rights management layer upstream, quietly.
FIFA’s longer road to blockchain FIFA did not arrive at Avalanche overnight. The organization previously ran its FIFA Collect digital collectibles platform across multiple blockchain networks before eventually consolidating on Avalanche.
Ava Labs, the company behind Avalanche’s development, has been pushing the dedicated subnet, now called a Layer-1 chain, architecture as the right model for enterprises that want blockchain’s benefits without sharing network congestion with the rest of the crypto ecosystem. A purpose-built FIFA chain means FIFA controls the validator set and governance rules, while still inheriting Avalanche’s consensus mechanism and security architecture.
The FIFA blockchain launched in 2025, giving the system roughly a year of operational runway before the 2026 World Cup cycle hit full stride.
What this means for Avalanche and the broader market For Avalanche as a network, a FIFA partnership is about as high-profile a real-world use case as exists in crypto right now. FIFA’s 2026 World Cup is projected to be one of the most-watched sporting events in history, expanding to 48 teams and spanning the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
The $25 million in secondary-market volume generated so far comes from the rights layer, before most of the primary tournament games have even been played.
The broader market implication cuts across the ticketing industry. Live event ticketing is a sector with well-documented problems: bot purchases, fraudulent resales, and opaque pricing have frustrated fans and organizers for decades. FIFA’s multi-year commitment and the decision to build a dedicated chain rather than use a shared network suggests a longer-term architectural bet, not a marketing experiment.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Spain are world champions. Again. A single goal from Torres in the 106th minute gave Spain a 1-0 victory over Argentina in the 2026 FIFA World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19, with 80,663 fans inside the ground watching one of the most tightly contested finals in recent memory.
President Donald Trump joined FIFA President Gianni Infantino on the pitch for the trophy presentation, a moment that drew a distinctly mixed response from the crowd. Cheers and boos, in roughly equal measure.
The match itself Torres finally broke the deadlock in the first period of extra time, and Spain held on for the final whistle.
FIFA added a new wrinkle to the winners’ ceremony this year: championship rings, borrowing a page from American sports culture to mark the occasion. Given that the tournament was hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the aesthetic choice made a certain kind of sense.
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Where crypto quietly won the tournament Kraken served as the Official Crypto Exchange Supporter for the 2026 World Cup. That title is not just a banner on a stadium wall. It placed a major crypto exchange alongside Coca-Cola and Adidas in the official sponsor tier, a placement that would have seemed implausible five years ago.
Avalanche’s blockchain handled FIFA’s ticketing infrastructure for the tournament. The goal was reducing ticket scalping, a problem that has plagued major sporting events for decades. Instead of resellers flipping tickets on secondary markets at three times face value, blockchain-based ticketing creates a verifiable, controlled transfer process.
The prediction market number that deserves a second look Kalshi reported $22.42 billion in volume specifically tied to World Cup prediction markets. Polymarket exceeded $10 billion in total monthly records during the same period. Combined with activity across other platforms, total prediction market volume linked to the tournament crossed $50 billion.
Prediction markets are not traditional sports betting. They are contracts that pay out based on real-world outcomes, and in the United States they occupy a legal gray zone that has been slowly clarifying over the past few years. Kalshi and Polymarket have both fought regulatory battles to expand what they can offer American users.
For crypto investors, the implication is straightforward. Prediction markets require settlement infrastructure, often on-chain. They require stablecoins or tokenized assets for collateral. They require liquidity providers. Every dollar of prediction market volume is, at some level, a dollar that touched crypto rails to get there.
Kraken’s sponsorship deal gives it brand recognition among a global, non-crypto-native audience. Avalanche’s ticketing role gives it a reference case for enterprise blockchain adoption that sales teams will be citing for years.
The risk worth watching is regulatory. A $50 billion prediction market tied to a single sporting event will not go unnoticed by the CFTC, which has jurisdiction over event contracts in the US. The agency has historically taken a cautious approach to expanding prediction market access.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
The last time the stablecoin market contracted this sharply in a single month, Terra-Luna was imploding and crypto was entering a year-long winter. That was May 2022. Now, four years later, the market is doing something similar in size, minus the existential crisis.
The total stablecoin market cap fell by approximately $7.7 billion in June 2026, the largest monthly dollar decline since that infamous collapse. That drop pulled the aggregate market down roughly $10 billion from its May 2026 peak, leaving the total sitting around $312 billion.
Where the money went Tether’s USDT fell by roughly $6 billion, sliding from approximately $190 billion in May to around $184 billion. Circle’s USDC dropped from nearly $80 billion at its March 2026 peak to approximately $73 billion. Together, those two contractions account for the bulk of the headline number.
In percentage terms, the overall pullback clocks in at around 3%. For context, the 2022 bear market wiped out roughly 26% of stablecoin supply at its worst.
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Why this matters for crypto markets Stablecoins are the plumbing of crypto. They are the primary trading pairs on most exchanges, the dominant form of on-chain liquidity, and the default settlement layer for everything from DeFi protocols to institutional OTC desks.
When stablecoin supply contracts, that liquidity has to come from somewhere else, or it simply does not show up. Reduced stablecoin supply generally translates to lower trading volumes, tighter on-chain liquidity, and a market that has less dry powder available to absorb selling pressure or fuel new buying.
Paul Howard, an analyst at Wincent, described the current decline as a small fluctuation within an overall growth trajectory, signaling that investors are not in panic mode.
The broader stablecoin market has grown from under $50 billion in early 2020 to over $300 billion at peak supply.
New competition is changing the landscape While USDT and USDC absorbed the headline losses, newer regulated stablecoin issuers have been quietly gaining traction. The GENIUS Act and other regulatory clarity efforts in the US have opened the door for banks, fintechs, and payment processors to enter the stablecoin space with compliant, government-approved products.
That competition will not displace Tether overnight. USDT’s roughly $184 billion market cap gives it a gravitational pull that no newcomer can challenge in the short term.
For Circle, the dynamic cuts both ways. USDC is the preferred stablecoin for regulated institutions and compliance-conscious DeFi protocols, which should benefit from the regulatory clarity trend. But the same environment that legitimizes USDC also legitimizes every bank-issued stablecoin trying to carve into its market.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
FOMO, the social trading app built on Solana, just posted its highest weekly revenue on record. In the seven days ending July 16, 2026, the platform generated approximately $1.39 million, a number that puts it in third place among all Solana protocols by weekly revenue, behind only Pump.fun.
To put that growth in context: FOMO was pulling in roughly $150,000 per week in late 2025. That is not a typo. The platform nearly 10x’d its weekly revenue in roughly eight months.
How FOMO actually makes money The platform earns through transaction fees on self-custodial swaps and builder code fees from Hyperliquid perpetual contracts. No governance token, no inflationary emissions.
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Of the $1.39M generated last week, approximately $1.34M came directly from Solana DEX activity. The concentration is notable. FOMO is, at its core, a Solana-native product that has found a repeatable revenue engine on one chain before expanding the thesis elsewhere.
$94M raised, 625,000 users, $4B in volume FOMO has raised a total of $94 million across three rounds. The journey started with a $2 million angel round in February 2025, followed by a $17 million Series A led by Benchmark in November 2025. Then, in June 2026, the company closed a $75 million Series B that valued it at $550 million.
On the user side, FOMO has crossed 625,000 accounts and has logged over $4 billion in cumulative trading volume since launching roughly a year before mid-2026. The platform has also recorded over 110 million social interactions in that same period.
The core premise is straightforward: combine a social feed with a trading interface, let users follow and copy top performers, and watch trading activity compound as social dynamics kick in.
At $1.39M per week, the platform is approaching an annualized revenue run rate that starts to make the $550 million valuation feel less like a bet and more like a multiple.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Grayscale staking ETF holders are set to receive staking rewards as direct cash payments under new SEC filings submitted by the asset manager on July 17, 2026. The amendments cover both the Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF (ETHE) and the Grayscale Solana Staking ETF (GSOL), shifting from a model where rewards only boosted net asset value (NAV) per share.
Cash Distributions Replace NAV Compounding for ETHE and GSOL Holders The shift marks a meaningful change for investors in both funds. Previously, staking rewards accumulated inside the trust and were only visible as a gradual rise in share NAV.
Earlier this year, Grayscale already tested the model for Ethereum, distributing $9.39 million ($0.083 per share) from ETHE staking rewards earned in late 2025.
That distribution, which was covered as part of the previous Ethereum staking rewards distribution and inflows, paved the way for expanding the same framework to Solana.
Under the updated structure, staking rewards will be liquidated into USD and paid out to shareholders at least once per quarter.
Grayscale retains the option to distribute more frequently. Net proceeds are calculated after deducting sponsor fees, expenses, and staking fees.
GSOL, which was launched on NYSE Arca in late October 2025 after the Grayscale Solana ETF (GSOL) launch, currently stakes nearly 100% of its SOL holdings.
As of mid-July 2026, the fund holds approximately $97 million in assets and generates roughly 6.10% gross annualized staking rewards. Net yield after fees comes in near 5.03%.
Fee reductions effective June 25, 2026, also improve shareholder economics. The sponsor fee for GSOL dropped to 0.19% from 0.35%, while the staking fee fell to 7% of gross rewards from 23%.
These cuts mean a larger share of yield reaches investors directly.
For those tracking the evolution of this product, Solana ETF options and inflows highlighted growing institutional demand for yield-enabled crypto exposure even before this distribution update.
What This Means for Investors as Grayscale Expands Its Staking ETF Strategy The quarterly cash distribution model transforms Grayscale’s staking products from pure price-exposure vehicles into yield-generating assets.
Investors now receive visible, predictable income, a feature that mirrors traditional dividend-paying funds more than typical spot ETFs.
It also raises Grayscale’s competitive profile in the Grayscale staking ETF space.
Competing products that only reinvest staking rewards into NAV lack the transparent income flow that income-focused retail and institutional investors often prefer.
Stronger demand for both funds could support underlying ETH and SOL prices through increased buying activity from authorized participants.
This move fits into a broader strategic push detailed in the background on GSOL development, which showed the product was years in the making through investor dialogue.
It also aligns with Grayscale’s wider staking ambitions, including its broader Grayscale staking ETF trend seen in its updated S-1 filing for a HYPE ETF that also incorporates staking.
Investors should note that staking yields are variable. Distribution amounts will fluctuate based on network conditions, validator performance, and ETH or SOL prices at the time of reward liquidation.
Tax treatment, likely ordinary income, should be reviewed with a professional advisor. The products are not registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940.
Changes are expected to take effect around August 7, 2026, following the mandatory 20-day shareholder notice period triggered by the July 17 SEC filing.
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In brief Cross-chain bridge Allbridge has paused its Core protocol after an attacker stole about $1.65 million from its Solana stablecoin liquidity pools. The attacker used a $1.12 million flash loan from lending protocol Kamino to skew the pools' internal pricing, then extracted assets cheaply and bridged them to Ethereum. Allbridge told liquidity providers to withdraw and asked traders who profited from the resulting imbalance to return funds. Cross-chain bridge Allbridge has paused its protocol after an attacker drained roughly $1.65 million from its Solana liquidity pools in a flash loan attack, according to blockchain security firms and the project itself.
Allbridge lets users move assets between blockchains that don't natively communicate, and its Core product uses pools of native stablecoins such as USDC and USDT rather than minting wrapped tokens. On Sunday, the team said it had "paused the protocol as a precaution" while investigating, and urged liquidity providers to pull funds from affected pools.
Allbridge Core is experiencing a security incident.
We have paused the protocol as a precaution while we investigate.
If you have liquidity in affected pools, please withdraw now.
The resulting pool imbalance created a temporary positive arbitrage window. If you took advantage… pic.twitter.com/Ovg7yT35SM
— Allbridge (@Allbridge_io) July 19, 2026
In a follow-up tweet, Allbridge noted that its team was "preparing a detailed breakdown" and post-mortem report, adding that "There is no threat to users liquidity right now" as it works to relaunch Core without liquidity pools.
How it happenedAllbridge confirmed an earlier tweet from security firm PeckShield putting the loss at around $1.65 million, which noted that the attacker had bridged the funds from Solana to Ethereum.
Fellow firm CertiK detailed the method, which saw the attacker borrow $1.12 million through a flash loan from Solana lending protocol Kamino, before running a rapid series of stablecoin swaps to distort the internal accounting that prices assets in Allbridge's pools.
With the pools mispriced, the attacker swapped a few thousand dollars of USDT for about $2.24 million in USDC before bridging the proceeds to an Ethereum address and scattering them across others. It isn't clear how much remains within reach.
The manipulation left Allbridge's pools lopsided, briefly letting other traders buy up the mispriced assets—a "temporary positive arbitrage window," as the team put it. The DeFi platform asked anyone who profited from that window to send the money to a designated address, saying it would "go directly toward compensating affected LPs." Its "goal is to return all affected funds," the team added.
Not the first timeIt's the second time Allbridge has been caught this way. In April 2023, a similar flash-loan exploit drained around $573,000 from its BNB Chain pools; the project later said it recovered most of the funds and reworked how it calculates liquidity and withdrawals. Allbridge raised $2 million in 2022 to expand the bridge and fund security audits.
Bridges and the liquidity pools that feed them have long been among DeFi's most-targeted infrastructure. More than $840 million was lost to DeFi hacks in just the first five months of 2026, with cross-chain systems repeatedly producing some of the largest single losses. Just last month, a bridge between Axelar and Secret Network was drained of $4.67 million after attackers exploited an "infinite mint" bug in a custom token contract.
Allbridge's protocol remains paused, and how much of the $1.65 million can be clawed back will hinge on tracing the bridged funds—and on whether the arbitrage traders it appealed to actually send the money back.
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Prediction market agent platform insiders.bot has officially announced its Token Generation Event (TGE) on the Robinhood Chain. Its token will be named $IN. Insiders.bot is one of Polymarket’s officially authorized trading platforms, and was previously backed by HackQuest and Solana. In addition, the platform has announced partnerships with prediction market-related projects including APRO Oracle and Billioin Live Streaming Platform, and its official roadmap will be launched on the 21st. Official information indicates that insiders.bot is expected to soon complete integrations with prediction market platforms such as Kalshi, World.xyz, Predict.fun, and Limitless.
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Native Markets Discontinues USDH, Will Continue to Support 1:1 Redemptions and Exchanges in the Coming Months
According to official announcements, Native Markets has announced that the USDH official website has been sunset. Over the coming months, users will still be able to redeem and exchange USDH for U.S. dollar assets at a 1:1 ratio via the redemption page provided by the Bridge. Native Markets stated that the final exit procedures for USDH and related information will continue to be made available through the USDH official website.
3 hours ago
Hackers Attack Kenya's Presidential Official Website, Demand 5 Bitcoin Ransom
Kenya's government is investigating the hacking incident targeting President William Ruto's official website. On July 18, attackers briefly altered the president's official site page and demanded a ransom of 5 BTC, threatening to leak undisclosed data if not paid. Kenya's Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communication and Digital Economy stated that the government has activated its cybersecurity response mechanism and is conducting a forensic investigation in collaboration with relevant agencies. There is currently no evidence indicating unauthorized access to or leakage of sensitive data, and government digital services remain operational.
3 hours ago
Bitcoin mining firm LM Funding rebrands as PowerCompute, shifting focus to AI computing power infrastructure.
Bitcoin mining company LM Funding America (NASDAQ: LMFA) announced it will rebrand to PowerCompute Inc. and adopt a new stock ticker "PWCM" effective July 22. The company stated that the rename marks its strategic transformation, as it leverages its existing 26 megawatts (MW) of owned power infrastructure to expand into high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure businesses. Currently, the firm operates two facilities in Oklahoma and Mississippi, U.S., with 26 MW of power capacity, and plans to provide infrastructure services to AI computing clients. It will also continue holding Bitcoin assets as part of its balance sheet.
3 hours ago
U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve stocks have fallen to their lowest level since 1983.
U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) crude oil inventories fell by approximately 5.1 million barrels last week, dropping to 311.4 million barrels, the lowest level since 1983.
3 hours ago
Morgan Stanley: As memory shortage intensifies, DRAM prices may rise by at least 25% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter.
Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore noted that following discussions with multiple data center procurement personnel last week, the current tight memory supply shows no signs of easing. DRAM and other memory products are expected to rise by at least 25% on a comparable basis from the second quarter to the third quarter, a figure higher than previous forecasts from Morgan Stanley and third-party institutions. Moore added that the memory shortage could further deteriorate in 2027 and 2028, as AI demand is consuming massive DRAM capacity, squeezing supplies for other sectors such as PCs and smartphones. Morgan Stanley further holds that the current market is not only grappling with surging memory demand driven by AI, but insufficient memory supply itself is emerging as a key bottleneck limiting AI expansion.
3 hours ago
The US military said it has forced seven commercial vessels to divert course and disabled one to restrict access to Iranian ports.
U.S. Central Command said that as of July 20, U.S. military forces have forced seven commercial vessels to alter their routes and disabled one merchant ship to prevent vessels from entering or leaving Iranian ports. (Jinshi)
