Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Tokenized gold has reached a significant milestone on the XRP Ledger, exceeding $1 million in total trading volume. This development strengthens the XRP Ledger’s position within the rapidly expanding real-world asset (RWA) ecosystem.

XAUa surpasses $1 million in trading volumeTrensik, a platform that monitors verified tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger, reported that the cumulative trading volume of tokenized gold (XAUa) has now surpassed $1 million. While this figure remains small relative to the broader global gold market, it marks growing demand for blockchain-based commodities and rising confidence in tokenized assets on the network.

Unlike traditional gold markets, XAUa allows trading around the clock and enables settlements in seconds directly on-chain. This structure provides investors with continuous access to a digital asset fully backed by physical gold, leveraging the transparency and efficiency of blockchain technology.

With XAUa’s real-world gold backing and 24/7 trading, investors gain faster settlement, global accessibility, and transparent ownership—characteristics often absent in legacy gold markets.

Mini dictionary: Trensik, a platform that tracks verified tokenized real-world assets issued and settled on the XRP Ledger, provides analytics and transparency to monitor the adoption and usage of on-chain assets.

XRPL’s expanding RWA and institutional adoptionThe XRP Ledger is designed as an open-source blockchain with features tailored to the tokenization and transfer of digital assets, including commodities, stablecoins, government bonds, and real estate. Its reputation for low transaction costs, near-instant settlements, and built-in tokenization tools has attracted a variety of projects seeking to bring traditional assets onto blockchain rails.

Tokenized gold, such as XAUa, offers an alternative to direct bullion ownership by removing barriers including custodial costs, transportation, and delayed settlements. Holders access proof-backed tokens intended to be redeemable for physical gold, and these tokens can move globally within seconds.

Recent data shows momentum is growing across the XRP Ledger on multiple fronts. The network has surpassed 8 million registered accounts, indicating greater adoption among retail and institutional participants alike.

MetricRecent ValueSignificanceXAUa trading volume$1 millionTarget reached for tokenized goldXRPL accounts8 million+Network adoption milestoneWhale accumulation70 million XRPIndicator of rising investor confidenceLarge holders, often referred to as whales, have accumulated more than 70 million XRP tokens in the latest period—highlighting optimistic sentiment regarding the ledger’s future development and use cases.

Growing enterprise integrationIn addition to retail growth, the network is seeing progress in enterprise adoption. Made in USA Inc., a supply chain and product authentication platform, has recently acquired a comprehensive XRP Ledger infrastructure stack. This move will support its blockchain-based product verification services, as companies increasingly leverage the ledger for use cases extending beyond payments and simple value transfers.

Industry participants view the $1 million milestone for tokenized gold as a meaningful step for commodity-based assets on XRP Ledger, rather than an endpoint. Combined with sustained increases in account numbers, heightened whale holdings, and expanded institutional engagement, evidence suggests XRP Ledger is solidifying its reputation as a preferred blockchain for RWA tokenization.

With continuous growth across trading volume, account numbers, and enterprise participation, the XRP Ledger is building its presence as a core network for real-world asset infrastructure.

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.

CryptoQuant, a cryptocurrency analysis platform, reported a significant decrease in leveraged positions in the XRP market, noting that the current outlook resembles the market structure that formed before the major price rally in 2024.

According to CryptoQuant analysts, XRP is undergoing a new delegitimization process on Binance. This trend is being tracked through the estimated leverage ratio (ELR), which measures the ratio of leveraged positions in the futures market to the exchange’s XRP reserves.

According to the data, XRP’s ELR level on Binance has fallen to 0.16. This is one of the lowest levels recorded since November 2024 and is approaching the low of 0.15 seen in April 2026. This decline occurs during a period when XRP’s price has corrected by approximately 70 percent from its peak.

The main reason for the decline in ELR was stated to be the decrease in futures positions. The liquidation of some leveraged positions during the price correction led to a decrease in the amount of open interest and a decline in the total leverage level in the market.

CryptoQuant argues that this leverage cleanup is important for the ongoing correction process. According to the analysis, excessive leverage accumulated in the market makes price movements more fragile and unpredictable, while clearing positions can help the market settle on a more stable footing.

A similar process occurred in the XRP market in 2024. While XRP was trading sideways around $0.40, the estimated leverage ratio (ELR) had fallen to 0.05. After the clearance of leveraged positions, the XRP price rose by more than 790%, and the ELR level increased again as leverage re-entered the market during the price rally.

Analysts added that the current market structure does not guarantee a new surge of the same magnitude in XRP. However, it was stated that following the delegitimization cycle is important for investors to evaluate market conditions and potential positioning opportunities.

*This is not investment advice.

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Ethereum’s best marketing line was that using it destroyed it, that every transaction burned ETH and shrank the supply. Then the network solved its scaling problem, activity fled to layer 2s, and the burn collapsed. The scaling worked. The scarcity did not survive it.

Summary

Ethereum’s “ultrasound money” thesis held that EIP-1559 fee burning would outpace new issuance, making ETH deflationary and a superior store of value to Bitcoin. It worked briefly after the 2022 Merge. Then the March 2024 Dencun upgrade moved activity to layer-2 rollups paying near-zero fees, and the daily burn collapsed from thousands of ETH to as low as 50 to 70. ETH has since been mildly inflationary, with net supply growth around 0.2% to 0.8% annually depending on the period, reversing the deflation the thesis promised. The December 2025 Fusaka upgrade added EIP-7918, a blob fee floor designed to restore a minimum burn. Fidelity modeled it would have added roughly $78.6 million in burn across 93% of days since 2024. The deeper tension is unresolved: a cheap, scaled Ethereum burns less than a congested, expensive one, so the network’s success as infrastructure works against its scarcity as an asset. For about eighteen months, Ethereum had the best story in crypto, and the story was a paradox: the more people used the network, the rarer its token became. Every transaction burned a little ETH, and when the network was busy enough, it burned more than it created. Supply went down. The community called it ultrasound money, a deliberate jab at Bitcoin’s “sound money,” complete with a bat emoji and a movement.

For a while, the data backed it up. Then Ethereum did the thing it had promised to do for years, which was to scale, and scaling broke the story. Activity moved to layer-2 networks that pay almost nothing to the base chain, the burn collapsed, and ETH quietly went inflationary again. This is the story of how Ethereum’s greatest technical success dismantled its best economic narrative, and whether a December upgrade can put the pieces back.

What ultrasound money actually meant The mechanism is worth getting exactly right, because the whole debate turns on it.

In August 2021, Ethereum activated EIP-1559, which changed how transaction fees work. Instead of paying miners directly, every transaction now pays a base fee that is burned, permanently removed from circulation. The busier the network, the higher the base fee, and the more ETH destroyed. On its own, that is just a fee-burning mechanism. It became a monetary thesis when Ethereum switched from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in the September 2022 Merge, which cut new ETH issuance by roughly 90%, because the network no longer had to pay energy-intensive miners.

Put the two together, and you get the ultrasound thesis. Issuance dropped to a trickle after the Merge. Burning continued with every transaction. If burning exceeded issuance, total ETH supply would shrink over time, making the asset deflationary. And a deflationary asset with growing demand should, in theory, appreciate. Ethereum would become harder money than Bitcoin, whose supply still grows, hence “ultrasound.” The tracking site ultrasound.money existed to display exactly this: supply ticking down, day by day.

For a stretch after the Merge, it happened. Supply fell back toward and below the level it sat at during the Merge itself. Burns outpaced issuance. The narrative was not hype; it was, for that window, an accurate description of the data. That is what made it powerful, and what made its reversal so awkward.

NEW: Tom Lee calls Robinhood Chain proof that ETH is money

The chain uses Ethereum as native gas, denominates fees in ETH, and settles on Ethereum L1 while generating volume exceeding many established DEXes pic.twitter.com/Ir2hTsaMiu

— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) July 12, 2026 How scaling broke it The break came from Ethereum solving its most famous problem, and the irony is total.

Ethereum’s scaling strategy is to push transactions off the expensive base layer and onto layer-2 rollups, networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base that process transactions cheaply and then post compressed data back to Ethereum for security. The base layer becomes a settlement and data-availability layer; the rollups handle the actual activity. This is the roadmap Ethereum has pursued for years, and it works.

The March 2024 Dencun upgrade was the pivotal moment. It introduced EIP-4844, “blob” transactions, a separate and far cheaper data channel for rollups to post their data. Costs for layer 2s dropped by a factor of 10 to 100. Activity that used to happen on mainnet, paying mainnet fees and burning mainnet ETH, moved to rollups paying blob fees that were, in practice, close to zero because blob space was massively oversupplied relative to demand.

The effect on the burn was immediate and severe. Before Dencun, Ethereum burned thousands of ETH per day during busy periods. After Dencun, daily burn dropped to as low as 50 to 70 ETH. The base layer had lost its primary fee source. With issuance running around 1,700 ETH per day and burn collapsing well below that, the equation flipped: Ethereum began creating more ETH than it destroyed. By various measures across 2025 and into 2026, net annual inflation ran somewhere between roughly 0.2% and 0.8%, depending on the window. ETH supply crossed back above its Merge-era level. The deflation was over.

The mechanism that made ultrasound money true, EIP-1559 burning at scale, had not been removed. It had been bypassed. The activity simply moved to a layer where the burn does not happen in any meaningful amount. Ethereum scaled successfully and, in doing so, severed the link between usage and scarcity that the entire thesis depended on.

The bull case: it still works, just differently The response from Ethereum’s defenders is not denial. It is reframing, and parts of it are genuinely strong.

The first point is that elastic scarcity is the actual feature, not permanent deflation. Ethereum was never designed to deflate forever at a fixed rate. It was designed to burn in proportion to demand, which means it becomes deflationary when the network is busy and mildly inflationary when it is quiet. During periods of high mainnet activity, above roughly 16 gwei average gas, burn still exceeds issuance, and ETH still goes net deflationary, temporarily. The mechanism works exactly as designed; it is just that a scaled network spends more time in the quiet regime. In this reading, ultrasound money was always conditional, and the condition is demand, not a promise.

The second point is that issuance is still radically lower than before. Even mildly inflationary, Ethereum issues roughly 90% less ETH than it did under proof-of-work. Compared to Bitcoin, which currently inflates at around 0.8% annually on a fixed schedule, Ethereum’s roughly 0.2% net inflation in calmer periods is actually lower. Both assets inflate in 2026; Ethereum, by some measures, inflates less. The “harder than Bitcoin” claim survives in a narrow, technical form even without net deflation.

The third point is that the supply figure overstates the sell pressure. Roughly 28% to 30% of all ETH is locked in staking, earning yield and not circulating. The tradeable float, ETH actually available on exchanges, is meaningfully smaller than the headline supply number, and it shrinks as more ETH is staked. A modestly inflating total supply with a large and growing staked portion is a very different pressure than the raw inflation number suggests. Demand from ETFs, treasury companies, and staking can absorb 0.2% inflation without difficulty.

NEW: Ethereum ETFs see 58 million dollars in net inflows on July 14

Fresh capital flowed into spot Ethereum ETFs during the latest session pic.twitter.com/V3vb5Y7x39

— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) July 16, 2026 And the fourth point is simply that the store-of-value case never rested on deflation alone. As long as demand for Ethereum’s blockspace, its role as settlement for stablecoins, tokenization, and DeFi, grows faster than supply, price can rise regardless of whether supply ticks up 0.2% a year. Scarcity was a nice story. Utility is the real thesis.

The bear case: the narrative was load-bearing The skeptical reading is that the ultrasound story was not just marketing, that it was doing real work in the investment case, and that losing it matters more than the reframing admits.

The blunt version comes from the on-chain data and the people watching it leave. Daily network fee revenue on Ethereum fell from near $40 million in early 2025 to a local low around $10 million in 2026. That is not just a burn problem; it is a value-accrual problem. If the base layer captures little fee revenue because activity happens on rollups that pay it almost nothing, then holding ETH is a bet on an asset whose own network is monetizing its users poorly. Some analyses have tied this directly to developer attrition and reduced whale support, framing the end of ultrasound money as the end of a period when ETH had a clean, quantifiable reason to appreciate.

The deeper problem is structural and hard to argue away: a scaled, efficient Ethereum is less deflationary than a congested, expensive one. This is the tension at the center of the whole debate. The very thing that makes Ethereum better as infrastructure, cheap transactions, more capacity, activity on fast rollups, is the thing that reduces the burn. Ethereum cannot simultaneously be the cheap, high-throughput settlement layer it wants to be and the fee-burning deflationary asset the ultrasound thesis needed. Those are in direct conflict, and the roadmap chose scaling. The asset thesis was, in a real sense, sacrificed to the technology roadmap.

Then there is the value-capture question that rollups sharpen. Layer 2s use Ethereum for security and pay it a pittance for the privilege. Robinhood’s own chain is an example: analyses of corporate L2s show the base layer capturing a rounding error of the economics while providing the security that makes the whole arrangement credible. If Ethereum’s future is thousands of rollups settling to it cheaply, then Ethereum is providing enormous value and capturing little of it, and no amount of narrative reframing fixes a value-capture problem that lives in the fee structure.

The fix nobody is talking about Which brings us to December 2025, and the upgrade that was designed, in part, to address exactly this, and that most of the market ignored.

The Fusaka upgrade activated on December 3, 2025. Its headline features were about scaling further, PeerDAS and expanded blob capacity. But buried in it was EIP-7918, the “blob base fee bound,” which is the most direct attempt yet to repair the burn. The problem Dencun created was that blob fees could collapse to near-zero, one wei, when execution costs dominated and blob demand was soft, which meant rollups consumed Ethereum’s capacity almost for free and burned almost nothing. EIP-7918 sets a floor: it ties the minimum blob fee to the execution base fee, roughly the execution base fee divided by 16, so that even in quiet periods rollups pay a meaningful minimum, and a minimum stream of ETH gets burned.

The modeling is striking. Fidelity Digital Assets analyzed what would have happened if EIP-7918 had been active since blobs launched, and found that on 93% of days since the 2024 Dencun upgrade, the adjusted fee would have exceeded the actual fee, generating an estimated additional $78.6 million, roughly 24,641 ETH, in cumulative blob-fee revenue. Blockworks noted that had the mechanism been introduced in June 2025, burnt blob fees would have been nearly 8x higher. The intent is explicit: restore a floor under the burn so that as stablecoins, DeFi, and tokenization migrate to rollups, ETH still captures value from that activity instead of subsidizing it.

The honest caveat is that this is a floor, not a restoration. EIP-7918 prevents the burn from collapsing to zero; it does not recreate the thousands-of-ETH-per-day burn of the congested mainnet era. Whether it produces measurable, sustained deflation depends on how much activity flows through blobs and how high execution base fees run, and the market is still watching. It is a serious, well-designed attempt to reconnect usage and scarcity. It is not a return to 2022.

Sound money versus ultrasound money, honestly compared Because the entire thesis was built as a shot at Bitcoin, it is worth putting the two monetary models side by side without the tribalism, since the comparison is more interesting than either camp admits.

Bitcoin offers fixed scarcity. The supply schedule is written into the protocol, capped at 21 million coins, and halves on a predictable timetable roughly every four years. A holder knows today, with certainty, what Bitcoin’s issuance will be in 2030 and 2040. That certainty is the entire product. Bitcoin does not react to demand, does not burn, does not adjust; it simply issues on schedule toward a hard cap, and its current inflation runs around 0.8% annually, trending toward zero over decades. The trade-off Bitcoin holders accept is that the base layer offers little native utility and no yield. You hold it for the certainty, and you give up productivity in exchange.

Ethereum offered, and to a degree still offers, elastic scarcity. Supply responds to network demand: high usage burns more and can push ETH net deflationary; low usage burns less and lets mild inflation through. The appeal was a token that becomes scarcer precisely when it is most used, tying the asset’s scarcity to the network’s success. The trade-off, which the L2 era exposed, is that elasticity cuts both ways.

A demand-responsive supply is only deflationary when demand is high on the layer that burns, and Ethereum deliberately moved demand to layers that do not burn. Bitcoin’s rigidity, often criticized as inflexible, turned out to be the thing that made its monetary promise keepable. Ethereum’s flexibility, often praised as sophisticated, turned out to be the thing that made its monetary promise conditional.

The honest scorecard is that these are different products for different buyers, not better and worse versions of the same thing. Bitcoin sells certainty and asks you to forgo utility. Ethereum sells utility and asks you to accept that its scarcity depends on how that utility is used. The ultrasound-money era was the brief window when Ethereum appeared to offer both, certainty of deflation and utility of a working network, and that window closed not because Ethereum failed but because it succeeded at scaling.

A holder choosing between them in 2026 is really choosing between guaranteed scarcity with no yield and demand-driven scarcity with staking yield and network utility. Framed that way, the loss of ultrasound money is less a defeat than a clarification: Ethereum was never going to be Bitcoin, and the burn was hiding how different the two bets actually are.

What this means for holding ETH Strip away the narrative fight and the practical question is whether the ultrasound story mattered to the price, and the uncomfortable answer is that it is hard to tell, because ETH has underperformed through the entire period regardless.

The clean way to see it: the ultrasound thesis was strongest right after the Merge, and it has been dismantled steadily since Dencun in March 2024. Over that same window, ETH has been a persistent underperformer against both Bitcoin and its own former highs. Either the market was pricing the loss of the deflation narrative, or the market never cared about the narrative and ETH’s problems lie elsewhere, in L2 value leakage, in competition from Solana, in the sheer difficulty of the modular roadmap. Both readings are defensible, and they point to different conclusions about whether fixing the burn fixes the price.

The most honest framing is that ultrasound money was a proxy for a real question that has not gone away: does Ethereum capture value from its own success? When the network was congested and expensive, the answer was visibly yes; the burn made it legible. When the network scaled and cheapened, the answer became murky, and the burn stopped telling the story. EIP-7918 is an attempt to make the answer legible again by putting a floor under value capture.

Whether it works will show up not in the marketing but in two numbers over the next year: net ETH supply, and base-layer fee revenue. If both turn up meaningfully, the thesis has a second life. If they do not, then ultrasound money was a phase, not a property, and Ethereum’s investment case has to stand on utility alone, which is a harder, slower, less tweetable argument than the one that shrank the supply.

Frequently Asked Questions What is Ethereum ultrasound money? It is the thesis that Ethereum’s ETH token would become deflationary and a superior store of value to Bitcoin. It rests on two mechanisms: EIP-1559, activated in 2021, which burns a portion of every transaction fee, and the 2022 Merge, which cut new ETH issuance by roughly 90%. When burning exceeds issuance, total supply shrinks. The term was a play on Bitcoin’s “sound money” branding.

Is Ethereum still deflationary in 2026? Not on a net basis, in normal conditions. After the March 2024 Dencun upgrade shifted activity to cheap layer-2 rollups, the burn collapsed, and ETH became mildly inflationary, with net supply growth around 0.2% to 0.8% annually depending on the period. During bursts of high mainnet activity, it can still turn temporarily deflationary, but the sustained deflation of the immediate post-Merge period ended.

Why did layer 2s break the burn? Because they moved activity off the base layer, where transactions burned meaningful ETH, onto rollups that pay near-zero fees. The Dencun upgrade introduced cheap “blob” transactions for rollups, cutting their costs 10 to 100 times. Blob space was oversupplied, so blob fees fell close to zero, and the daily burn dropped from thousands of ETH to as low as 50 to 70. The activity continued; the burn did not follow it.

Does this mean ETH is a worse investment? Not necessarily, and defenders make several counterpoints: issuance is still about 90% lower than under proof-of-work, roughly 0.2% net inflation in calm periods is actually below Bitcoin’s, nearly a third of ETH is locked in staking and off the market, and the real case rests on demand for blockspace rather than deflation. Critics counter that base-layer fee revenue collapsed too, raising a genuine value-capture problem.

What is EIP-7918? A change introduced in Ethereum’s December 2025 Fusaka upgrade that sets a minimum price for blob transactions, tied to the execution base fee, roughly that fee divided by 16. It prevents blob fees from collapsing to near-zero during quiet periods, ensuring a minimum stream of ETH is burned. Fidelity modeled that it would have added roughly $78.6 million in cumulative burn across 93% of days since 2024 had it existed earlier.

Did Fusaka restore ultrasound money? No, it put a floor under the burn rather than restoring the deflation of the post-Merge era. EIP-7918 stops the burn from collapsing to zero and improves value capture as activity migrates to rollups, but it does not recreate the thousands-of-ETH-per-day burn of the congested mainnet period. Whether it produces sustained net deflation depends on blob activity and execution fees, and remains to be seen.

Is Ethereum still harder money than Bitcoin? In a narrow technical sense, sometimes. In calm periods, Ethereum’s roughly 0.2% net inflation can run below Bitcoin’s roughly 0.8% fixed-schedule inflation. But Bitcoin offers predictable, protocol-guaranteed scarcity indefinitely, while Ethereum’s supply is elastic and responds to demand, so it can inflate more during quiet, scaled periods. They offer different kinds of scarcity: fixed and certain versus elastic and demand-driven.

What should I watch to know if the thesis recovers? Two numbers over the next year: net ETH supply growth, and Ethereum base-layer fee revenue. If EIP-7918 and rising rollup activity push net supply back toward flat or negative while base-layer revenue climbs from its roughly $10 million lows, the value-capture story recovers. If supply keeps growing and fee revenue stays depressed, ultrasound money was a temporary phase, and ETH’s case rests on utility and demand alone.

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. It describes monetary mechanics and network upgrades whose effects are uncertain and still developing. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Always do your own research. Figures on supply, burn, and inflation move continuously and are accurate as of July 17, 2026.

There is $1.6 trillion in Bitcoin sitting idle, earning nothing, doing nothing. Charles Hoskinson has a plan to put it to work on Cardano, and the plan quietly requires every transaction to burn a little ADA. Whether that saves Cardano or exposes its central problem is the whole question.

Summary

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has laid out a strategy to bring Bitcoin into Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem through a platform called Pogun, targeting the roughly $1.6 trillion in idle Bitcoin. Pogun rolls out in three phases across 2026: a non-margin credit market in the second quarter, a yield application in the third, and a BitVM-based trust-minimized bridge in the fourth. The mechanism that matters for ADA holders: every transaction in the system requires ADA for fees, paid invisibly by Bitcoin users, creating a demand driver that Cardano’s token has lacked. It leans on Midnight, Cardano’s privacy partner chain, for confidential transactions, and on Cardano’s EUTXO architecture, which shares design lineage with Bitcoin’s own UTxO model. The sharp objection, raised by Cardano’s own community: if Bitcoin can be lent, earn yield, and settle without users noticing ADA, why hold ADA at all? The plan may build against its own token. Cardano has a problem it has had for years, and it is not a technology problem. ADA trades around 94% below its 2021 high, the network’s DeFi activity has long lagged its ambitions, and its founder spends a meaningful share of his time denying rumors that he is quitting. What Cardano has never lacked is engineering and ideas.

What it has lacked is a reason for capital to show up. Charles Hoskinson’s answer, laid out across 2026, is audacious: stop trying to attract crypto capital to Cardano and go get Bitcoin’s instead. There is roughly $1.6 trillion in Bitcoin sitting idle in wallets, earning nothing, and Hoskinson wants to route a slice of it through Cardano’s infrastructure, with every transaction quietly paying fees in ADA. It is the most concrete demand thesis Cardano has produced in years. It also contains a contradiction its own community has already spotted.

The idle-Bitcoin thesis The premise starts with a real and large number. Something on the order of $1.6 trillion in Bitcoin sits in wallets doing nothing productive. Bitcoin is superb as a store of value and poor as a financial instrument: it does not natively lend, earn yield, or plug into decentralized finance without wrapping, bridging, or handing custody to an intermediary. That gap, enormous dormant capital with no native way to work, is what every “Bitcoin DeFi” project is chasing, and Hoskinson has decided Cardano should chase it hard.

His framing, delivered publicly in May 2026 and reiterated through the year, is that Bitcoin holders would be able to access lending, yield, and privacy tools through Cardano without surrendering control of their assets. A dedicated team, described at various points as around 19 people, is building it. The pitch to Bitcoin holders is straightforward: keep your Bitcoin, but make it productive, through infrastructure that does not require you to trust a centralized custodian.

The pitch to Cardano holders is different and more important to the ADA investment case. Hoskinson has been explicit that the entire system runs on ADA underneath. In his own words, every single transaction requires ADA to happen; the Bitcoin user pays a fee in ADA but does not see it. The idea is to make ADA the invisible fuel of a Bitcoin-DeFi economy, generating persistent, usage-based demand for the token regardless of whether anyone is speculating on ADA itself. For a token whose central weakness has been the absence of a demand driver, that is the whole game.

What Pogun actually is Pogun is the platform that operationalizes the thesis, and its structure is more concrete than Cardano’s roadmaps usually are.

It rolls out in three phases across 2026. The first, targeted for the second quarter, is a non-margin credit market: lending against Bitcoin without the liquidation-cascade risk that leveraged lending carries. The second, targeted for the third quarter, is a yield-focused application that lets Bitcoin holders earn returns.

The third, targeted for the fourth quarter, is a BitVM-powered bridge, a trust-minimized way to move Bitcoin onto Cardano infrastructure without the custodial risk that has plagued wrapped-Bitcoin products. Input Output Group sought treasury funding for the effort, with figures around 12.3 million ADA cited, as part of a larger proposal slate that also funded the Leios scaling upgrade.

The architecture leans on two Cardano-specific pieces. The first is Midnight, Cardano’s privacy-focused partner chain, which launched its mainnet in early 2026 and serves as the confidential coordination layer, letting Bitcoin holders use DeFi tools without exposing their positions publicly. Hoskinson has framed Midnight as proof of Cardano’s partner-chain model, specialized chains operating alongside the main network while drawing on its security.

The second is Cardano’s EUTXO accounting model, which shares design lineage with Bitcoin’s own UTxO model. That shared lineage is not incidental; it is part of the technical argument that Cardano is a more natural home for Bitcoin DeFi than account-based chains like Ethereum, because the two systems think about transactions in a similar way.

The sequencing is deliberate. The team has described building the credit market and liquidity first, so that by the time the consumer-facing products launch, there is already a functioning market underneath them instead of an empty shell waiting for users.

JUST IN: Cardano enables thousands of onchain signature checks at lower cost

Plutus smart contracts can now verify signatures natively using BLS12 381 cryptography pic.twitter.com/9Mqk9B6J9V

— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) July 18, 2026 The bull case The strongest version of this argument is that Cardano has finally identified the right target and built a credible, differentiated way to reach it.

The demand mechanism is genuinely elegant. Cardano’s problem was never capability; it was that ADA had no structural reason to be in demand beyond speculation and staking. Embedding ADA as the mandatory fee layer of a Bitcoin-DeFi economy creates exactly the kind of usage-based demand that speculation cannot provide, and that does not evaporate when sentiment turns. If Bitcoin DeFi on Cardano generates real volume, ADA demand rises mechanically with it, transaction by transaction, whether or not anyone is bullish on ADA as a trade. That is a far healthier demand base than the memecoin-and-narrative cycles driving other chains.

JUST IN: Cardano reduces reliance on creator input output

Key infrastructure will be handed to external teams with community oversight starting in August pic.twitter.com/72NTpukLYb

— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) July 18, 2026 The target is also the right one. Every serious chain is chasing Bitcoin DeFi because the prize, a fraction of $1.6 trillion in dormant capital, is the largest untapped pool in crypto. Cardano bringing brokerage-grade patience, a privacy layer, and UTxO compatibility to that chase is a real differentiator against the wrapped-Bitcoin approaches that have dominated and repeatedly failed on custody and trust. A BitVM bridge that reduces custodial risk addresses the exact failure mode, hacked or insolvent custodians, that has burned wrapped-Bitcoin users before.

And it fits Cardano’s identity rather than betraying it. Cardano’s whole brand is methodical, research-driven, security-first engineering, often criticized as too slow. Bitcoin holders are, as a group, the most conservative and security-conscious in crypto. A careful, peer-reviewed, custody-minimizing approach to Bitcoin DeFi is arguably better matched to Bitcoin holders than the move-fast culture of other DeFi ecosystems. For once, Cardano’s slowness could be a feature aimed at exactly the audience that values it.

The bear case The skeptical case starts with a question a Cardano community member asked Hoskinson directly, and it is devastating in its simplicity: what would be the point of holding ADA over Bitcoin? Are we building against our own core token?

The concern is real and structural. If the system is designed so that Bitcoin users pay fees in ADA without seeing it, then the design goal is explicitly to make ADA invisible. A Bitcoin holder using Pogun holds Bitcoin, earns yield in Bitcoin, and never needs to acquire, hold, or think about ADA. The fees are abstracted away. If ADA is successfully hidden from the user, then ADA is a backend utility token that the end user has no reason to hold as an investment, which means the demand is limited to whatever float the protocols need to operate, not the broad holder demand that supports a token’s price.

Making ADA the invisible plumbing is good for usage and potentially bad for ADA as an asset people want to own. Hoskinson’s answer, that transactions require ADA regardless, addresses mechanical demand but not the deeper question of why anyone holds ADA rather than the Bitcoin it is helping to mobilize.

The second problem is execution and timeline. Cardano has a long history of ambitious roadmaps that arrive late or underdeliver relative to the promise. Pogun’s phases are targeted across 2026, and Cardano’s governance has been visibly deadlocked, with treasury votes for exactly this kind of initiative facing friction and Hoskinson warning that rejecting research funding could drive engineers away. A plan that depends on multiple new components, Midnight, the BitVM bridge, the credit and yield layers, all shipping and integrating on schedule, is a plan with substantial execution risk in an ecosystem that has struggled to convert roadmap into adoption before.

The third problem is competition. Cardano is not alone in chasing Bitcoin DeFi; it is late to a crowded race. Bitcoin layer-2s, wrapped-Bitcoin protocols on Ethereum, and Bitcoin-native DeFi efforts are all pursuing the same idle capital, several with more liquidity, more developers, and more existing integrations than Cardano has managed to attract. Cardano’s DeFi TVL has sat around $1.1 billion at times, a fraction of Ethereum’s or Solana’s, which raises the question of why Bitcoin holders would route their capital through the ecosystem that has struggled most to attract capital in the first place. Being a natural technical home for Bitcoin DeFi does not help if the liquidity and developers are elsewhere.

LATEST: Bitcoin is heading natively to Cardano. The Cardinal protocol aims to wrap BTC UTXOs into Cardano native assets with a one-to-one peg, unlocking liquidity for Cardano DeFi without custodians pic.twitter.com/hEhZzGzefV

— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) April 28, 2026 The token question at the center Everything about this plan comes back to one unresolved tension, and it is worth stating plainly because it is the crux of whether Pogun helps ADA or merely helps Bitcoin.

Cardano is trying to solve its demand problem by making ADA essential but invisible. Those two properties are in tension. Essential means every transaction needs ADA, which creates mechanical demand proportional to usage. Invisible means users never consciously hold or value ADA, which suppresses the discretionary demand that actually drives a token’s price above its pure utility floor. A token that is essential-but-invisible tends to trade at its utility value, the minimum float the system needs to function, rather than at the premium that comes from people wanting to own it. Ethereum resolved this tension by making ETH visible and desirable as an asset in its own right, through staking, through the ultrasound narrative, through being the reserve asset of its own economy. Cardano’s Pogun design points the other way, toward ADA as backend infrastructure.

The optimistic resolution is that sufficient usage makes even utility-value demand large. If Bitcoin DeFi on Cardano processes enormous volume, the mechanical ADA demand could be substantial even if no one holds ADA for love of it. The pessimistic resolution is that Cardano will have built a successful piece of Bitcoin infrastructure whose value accrues to Bitcoin holders and Pogun’s operators, while ADA captures only the thin utility margin, which is not the outcome ADA holders are hoping for when they cheer a Bitcoin-DeFi announcement.

Which resolution wins depends on numbers that do not exist yet, because the products are still launching. The second-quarter credit market and third-quarter yield app are the first real tests. If they generate meaningful Bitcoin volume and ADA demand rises visibly with it, the thesis has legs. If they launch quietly into the same low-liquidity environment that has characterized Cardano DeFi, then Pogun becomes another well-engineered Cardano initiative that did not move the token, and the community member’s question, why hold ADA over Bitcoin, will have answered itself.

Why Cardano needs this to work To understand why Hoskinson is betting so heavily on Bitcoin DeFi, you have to understand how much pressure Cardano is under, because Pogun is not an opportunistic add-on. It is a response to an existential question the market keeps asking.

The pressure is visible in the numbers and the noise around them. ADA trades roughly 94% below its 2021 high, deep in the ranks of large-cap tokens that led the previous cycle and never recovered. Cardano’s DeFi total value locked, around $1.1 billion at times, is a fraction of Ethereum’s or Solana’s despite Cardano having been live since 2017 and commanding one of the most committed communities in crypto. Hoskinson has spent 2026 denying rumors that he is leaving the project and calling them fiction, which is not a thing founders of thriving networks typically have to do. And the governance apparatus, the CIP-1694 on-chain system Cardano is genuinely proud of, has been deadlocked over treasury proposals, with Hoskinson warning that rejecting research funding could push engineers out.

Underneath all of it is a criticism Hoskinson himself has accepted in his own framing: Cardano’s problem is not technology. He has said explicitly that it is not a node problem, not a problem of imagination, not a problem of execution capability, but a problem of governance, coordination, and ultimately getting capital and users to show up. That is a striking admission from a founder, and it reframes Pogun. Bitcoin DeFi is not just a product; it is Hoskinson’s answer to the accusation that Cardano builds impressive technology that nobody uses. If he can route Bitcoin’s enormous, idle capital base through Cardano, he solves the adoption problem and the demand problem at once, and he does it without needing to win the crypto-native DeFi users who have consistently chosen other chains.

That is why the stakes are higher than a normal roadmap item. Cardano has tried narratives before: smart contracts, then DeFi, then real-world assets, and none produced the adoption inflection the community keeps waiting for. Bitcoin DeFi is the biggest swing yet, aimed at the biggest target, and it arrives at a moment when patience with the slow-and-steady thesis is visibly thinning. If Pogun works, it vindicates the entire methodical approach. If it lands quietly like its predecessors, it will be much harder to argue that the next initiative will be different. Hoskinson has effectively staked the credibility of Cardano’s whole strategy on reaching an audience that has never been Cardano’s, which is either the boldest possible move or a sign of how few options remain.

What to watch Three concrete markers will tell you which way this breaks.

The first is whether the Pogun phases actually ship on their 2026 timeline. The credit market was targeted for the second quarter and the yield app for the third; slippage on those dates, in an ecosystem already criticized for slow delivery, would be an early negative signal. Shipping on time, with working products, would be a genuine and somewhat unexpected positive given Cardano’s track record.

The second is Bitcoin volume through the system, not ADA price. The entire thesis rests on attracting idle Bitcoin, so the metric that matters is how much Bitcoin actually flows into Pogun’s credit and yield products once they are live. ADA price will be noisy and driven by the broader market; Bitcoin TVL on Cardano is the clean read on whether the idle-Bitcoin thesis is working.

The third is whether ADA demand becomes visible in the data as usage grows. This is the crux question made measurable. If Bitcoin volume rises and on-chain ADA demand rises with it in a legible way, the essential-and-invisible design is working as a demand driver. If Bitcoin volume rises and ADA does nothing, then the community’s fear was correct, and Cardano will have built valuable infrastructure for someone else’s asset. Hoskinson has made the boldest, most concrete bet of Cardano’s recent history. The next two quarters start to settle whether it was aimed at the right target or against his own token.

Frequently Asked Questions What is Cardano’s Bitcoin DeFi plan? It is a strategy, led by founder Charles Hoskinson, to bring Bitcoin into Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem and tap the roughly $1.6 trillion in idle Bitcoin. The centerpiece is Pogun, a platform letting Bitcoin holders lend, borrow, and earn yield through Cardano infrastructure without surrendering custody. Crucially, every transaction in the system requires ADA for fees, creating usage-based demand for Cardano’s token.

What is Pogun? A three-phase Bitcoin DeFi platform rolling out across 2026: a non-margin credit market in the second quarter, a yield-focused application in the third, and a BitVM-based trust-minimized bridge in the fourth. It integrates Midnight, Cardano’s privacy partner chain, for confidential transactions, and builds on Cardano’s EUTXO architecture, which shares design lineage with Bitcoin’s UTxO model. Input Output Group sought around 12.3 million ADA in treasury funding for it.

How does this benefit ADA holders? Through embedded demand. Hoskinson has stated that every transaction in the system requires ADA for fees, paid by Bitcoin users who may not even notice. If Bitcoin DeFi on Cardano generates real volume, ADA demand rises mechanically with it, independent of speculation. For a token whose main weakness has been the lack of a structural demand driver, that is the core of the investment argument.

What is the main criticism? That the design makes ADA essential but invisible, which are properties in tension. If Bitcoin users pay fees in ADA without seeing it, they have no reason to hold ADA as an investment, so demand may stay limited to the minimum the protocols need instead of the broad holder demand that lifts a token’s price. A community member asked Hoskinson directly what the point of holding ADA over Bitcoin would be, capturing the concern that Cardano may be building against its own token.

How is this different from wrapped Bitcoin? Wrapped Bitcoin typically requires trusting a custodian to hold the underlying Bitcoin, a model that has failed through hacks and insolvencies. Pogun’s fourth phase is a BitVM-based bridge designed to be trust-minimized, reducing reliance on a custodian. Combined with Cardano’s UTxO compatibility with Bitcoin and the Midnight privacy layer, the pitch is a more secure, more private way to make Bitcoin productive than existing wrapped approaches.

Why does Cardano think it can win Bitcoin DeFi? Three arguments: its EUTXO architecture shares design lineage with Bitcoin’s UTxO model, making it a technically natural fit; its methodical, security-first culture matches Bitcoin holders’ conservatism; and its Midnight privacy chain offers confidentiality that Bitcoin holders value. The counterargument is that Cardano is late to a crowded race with lower liquidity and fewer developers than competitors, which may outweigh any technical fit.

When does Pogun launch? Its phases are targeted across 2026: the credit market in the second quarter, the yield application in the third, and the BitVM bridge in the fourth. Given Cardano’s history of ambitious roadmaps arriving later than promised, and ongoing governance friction over treasury funding, whether these dates hold is itself a meaningful signal to watch.

Will this fix ADA’s price? Unknown, and it depends on the essential-versus-invisible tension. If Bitcoin volume through Pogun is large, mechanical ADA demand could be substantial even without holders wanting ADA for its own sake. If volume is modest, or if ADA is so well hidden that demand stays at the minimum float the system needs, the plan could succeed as Bitcoin infrastructure while doing little for ADA as an asset. The next two quarters of launches are the first real test.

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. It describes a development roadmap whose components are still launching and whose outcomes are uncertain. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of July 17, 2026.

Chainlink (LINK) is drawing attention in the crypto sector as new institutional partnerships and expanding use cases spark debate over its long-term price trajectory. Despite trading at $8.25 with a daily trading volume of $213.52 million and a market cap of $6.17 billion, LINK faces diverging opinions about its potential for significant price growth.

Institutional adoption strengthens Chainlink’s positionRecent integrations within the Chainlink ecosystem demonstrate heightened interest from major players in the blockchain industry. Chainlink, recognized for its decentralized oracle solutions and bridging services between blockchains and real-world data, has enhanced its network utility through key collaborations and technology rollouts.

Jumper and Glacis Labs have adopted Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to enable seamless cross-chain transfers. This technical integration underlines Chainlink’s drive to be at the center of blockchain interoperability and the facilitation of tokenized assets.

Mini dictionary: CCIP (Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol), a protocol developed by Chainlink, enables the transfer of data and assets between different blockchain networks, helping decentralized applications operate across multiple chains securely.

In addition, Caliber, a company specializing in real estate investment management, has selected Chainlink’s Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) to support regulatory compliance for real estate tokenization. This move reflects an ongoing trend among institutions to leverage Chainlink for regulatory integration, security, and streamlined asset management on blockchain structures.

Mini dictionary: Automated Compliance Engine (ACE), a compliance solution from Chainlink, automates regulatory checks and controls for tokenized assets, helping businesses integrate compliance mechanisms into their blockchain operations.

Investor debate over price outlookWhile institutional use has grown, crypto analyst OTC Trades identified an ongoing debate among traders regarding LINK’s price prospects. Some argue that current price action, with LINK oscillating near $8.25 and previously peaking around $11, shows diminished volatility and momentum compared to earlier bull markets. Skeptics contend the token’s limited upside may hinder any rapid move towards new record highs unless a strong market catalyst appears.

On the other hand, supporters highlight Chainlink’s core strengths, including increasing adoption of its oracle and cross-chain technologies, consistent ecosystem growth, and the crucial role it plays in real-world asset tokenization. They point to these fundamentals as reasons for sustained or renewed price appreciation, even if gains may develop more gradually than in prior cycles.

Chainlink’s ecosystem has expanded through new integrations such as Jumper, Glacis Labs, and Caliber, cementing its role in driving blockchain interoperability and institutional adoption.

LINK price momentum and future prospectsAfter a period of relative stability, LINK has shown the formation of a bullish reversal in its price structure. As the broader crypto market—led by BTC—starts to turn upward, analysts suggest the positive sentiment could accelerate LINK’s rebound. Investors are now watching whether the surge in CCIP adoption and further institutional partnerships will translate into higher demand for LINK, potentially pushing the price towards key resistance levels.

The sustainability of this momentum will depend on continued advances in network integration and market trends. Whether buyers can retest the $11 range will be shaped by both macro crypto trends and Chainlink’s ongoing ability to secure major partnerships.

MetricCurrentRecent HighLINK Price$8.25$11Trading Volume (24h)$213.52 million–Market Capitalization$6.17 billion–As interest in blockchain interoperability and real-world asset tokenization grows, Chainlink continues to position itself as a key infrastructure provider supporting the evolution of the decentralized ecosystem.

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.

Robinhood Chain launched, filled with memecoins, briefly ranked third among DEXs, and the “Solana killer” talk started immediately. Then you look at the actual numbers. Solana has 27 times the value locked and 2 million more users. This is not a flippening. It is a fair fight over the wrong metric.

Summary

Robinhood Chain launched July 1 and drew roughly $185 million in value locked and over $3 billion in first-week DEX volume, briefly ranking among the top DEXs by volume and prompting Solana comparisons. Solana dwarfs it on every durable metric: around $4.93 billion in value locked, $1.91 billion in daily DEX volume, more than 2 million active addresses, and roughly $3 million in daily app revenue. The gap on value locked is about 27 to 1. On active users, it is larger. Volume alone, the one metric where Robinhood looked competitive, is the least durable measure and is inflated by a memecoin frenzy and a gas subsidy. The real bull case for Robinhood is not flipping Solana on-chain. It is distribution: roughly 28 million existing customers and a decade of retail brand equity that no crypto-native chain can match. The honest verdict is that Robinhood will not flip Solana on DeFi metrics any time soon, but the two are not actually competing for the same thing, which makes the flippening question the wrong one. Within days of Robinhood Chain going live, the comparison wrote itself. A memecoin frenzy sent the chain’s DEX volume past $3 billion in a week; it briefly cracked the top three networks by daily DEX volume, and crypto Twitter did what crypto Twitter does: it declared a Solana killer.

The parallel was tidy. Solana also grew through a memecoin boom, so surely Robinhood was running the same playbook toward the same destination. Then you pull the actual data, and the tidy story falls apart. Solana has roughly 27 times Robinhood Chain’s value locked and millions more users.

The one metric where Robinhood looked competitive, raw volume, is the flimsiest number on the board. This piece is about whether Robinhood Chain can flip Solana, and the short answer is no, not close, and the more interesting answer is that flipping Solana was never the right frame.

The scoreboard Start with the numbers, because the numbers settle most of the argument before it starts.

Solana, as of mid-July 2026, carries around $4.93 billion in total value locked, does roughly $1.91 billion in daily DEX volume, has more than 2 million active addresses, and generates about $3 million in daily application revenue. These are the metrics of a mature, heavily used layer-1 with a deep DeFi ecosystem, years of accumulated liquidity, and a large, sticky user base.

Robinhood Chain, roughly 2 weeks after launch, sits at around $185 million in value locked, having posted more than $3 billion in DEX volume across its first week. Depending on the day and the source, its TVL has been quoted between $185 million and $312 million, with the higher figure heavy on stablecoin deposits. Active addresses are counted in the hundreds of thousands cumulatively, not the millions active.

Line the durable metrics up, and the gap is stark. On value locked, Solana leads by a factor of roughly 27 to one against the lower Robinhood figure, and still around 16 to 1 against the higher one. On active users, the gap is larger still. On application revenue, Solana’s ecosystem earns real fees across a diverse set of protocols; Robinhood Chain’s revenue is concentrated in memecoin trading and inflated by incentives. There is exactly one metric where Robinhood looked competitive in its first fortnight, and that is raw DEX volume, where a memecoin frenzy briefly pushed it into the same conversation as networks many times its size.

That single metric is doing all the work in the flippening narrative, and it is the metric that deserves the least trust.

Why volume is the wrong number Volume is seductive because it is large and it moves fast, and it is misleading for the same reasons.

Robinhood Chain’s $3 billion first week was overwhelmingly memecoin trading. CASHCAT alone generated roughly $98 million in a single day, about 17% of the chain’s entire DEX volume, and the broader wave of Robinhood-themed tokens, Cash Dog in Hood, Little John, Hoodrat, drove most of the rest.

Memecoin volume is the most transient category of on-chain activity there is. It arrives with attention and leaves with it, and it leaves no infrastructure behind. A chain doing $3 billion in memecoin volume this week can do a fraction of that next month, as the 33% single-day CASHCAT drop after its launchpad exited already showed.

Then there is the subsidy. Robinhood Chain ran a 90-day gas fee subsidy from launch, which makes transactions artificially cheap and inflates transaction counts and, indirectly, trading activity. Any volume comparison during the subsidy window is measuring a promotion as much as organic demand. The honest read of that number will only be available once the subsidy expires and users start paying real costs.

Value locked, by contrast, is sticky. It represents capital that has chosen to reside on the chain, in lending protocols, liquidity pools, and asset-management strategies, and it does not evaporate with a memecoin’s attention cycle. Solana’s ~$4.93 billion in TVL is the accumulated result of years of protocols, integrations, and users committing capital. Robinhood’s ~$185 million is a 2-week-old figure heavily weighted toward stablecoin deposits and speculative liquidity. TVL is the metric that predicts whether a chain is durable. Volume is the metric that predicts whether it is currently trending. They are not the same, and the flippening narrative relies entirely on the second.

The bull case for Robinhood The strong case for Robinhood Chain does not run through on-chain metrics at all, and the people making the flippening argument are looking in the wrong place because the actual advantage is off-chain.

Robinhood has roughly 28 million customers across 38 countries and more than a decade as one of the largest retail investment platforms in the United States. That is a distribution asset no crypto-native chain possesses. Solana had to acquire its users one at a time through the slow, expensive work of crypto adoption.

Robinhood already has tens of millions of funded accounts belonging to people comfortable trading both stocks and crypto, and it can put its chain in front of them inside an app they already use. If even a modest fraction of that base becomes active on-chain, the user numbers change quickly. Brand equity and distribution are exactly what earlier tokenization projects lacked, and Robinhood has both in abundance.

The memecoin-as-ignition argument also has real historical support. Solana itself grew through a memecoin cycle: BONK, WIF, and the Pump.fun era, before it produced serious infrastructure and institutional adoption. Base followed a similar arc. Speculative trading bootstraps the liquidity, the market makers, the tooling, and the attention that serious applications later need. In this reading, Robinhood Chain’s memecoin phase is not a failure to attract real activity; it is the normal first stage, and judging a 2-week-old chain by its TVL is like judging Solana by its 2021 numbers.

And Robinhood is playing a different game entirely. Its chain is built for tokenized stocks and real-world assets, a category Solana is also chasing but where Robinhood brings brokerage licenses, custody relationships, and regulatory infrastructure that a crypto-native chain has to build from scratch. If the RWA thesis plays out, Robinhood competes on ground where its traditional-finance credentials are an advantage, not on the DeFi metrics where Solana is years ahead. The flippening question assumes the two chains want to be the same thing. They may not.

The bear case for Robinhood The skeptical case is that Robinhood Chain has attracted exactly the kind of activity that does not convert, and that the gap to Solana is not a head start Robinhood can close but a structural difference it may never close.

The mercenary-liquidity problem is the core of it. Memecoin traders are loyal to activity, not to chains. They arrived on Robinhood Chain because that is where the new-launch action was, and they will leave for the next chain offering quicker profits without a second thought. The Noxa launchpad that powered the entire boom generated roughly $12 million in fees and then stopped accepting launches and went dark within 11 days of the chain’s launch. That is not the behavior of infrastructure settling in; it is the behavior of an extraction cycle moving through. When the memecoin attention leaves, the question is what remains, and right now what remains is roughly $12.8 million in actual tokenized real-world assets, the thing the chain was built for.

The convert-the-traffic problem compounds it. Robinhood’s 28 million customers are a distribution asset only if they can be moved on-chain, and there is no evidence yet that memecoin degens and Robinhood’s retail stock traders are the same people or that 1 becomes the other. The chain’s current users may have almost no overlap with the tokenized-asset investors Robinhood hopes to serve. Distribution is potential, not conversion, and the conversion has not been proven.

Then there is the structural point that on-chain metrics are not a race Robinhood is quietly winning. Solana continues to outperform Robinhood Chain across essentially every DeFi metric despite the new chain’s loud debut, and Solana is not standing still. It has its own institutional momentum, its own tokenized-asset push, its own SBI partnership for on-chain financial markets in Japan. Robinhood is not catching a stationary target. It is entering, 2 weeks old, a competition against a network with a multi-year head start that is itself accelerating. Closing a 27-to-1 TVL gap against a moving, growing competitor is a different proposition than the volume charts suggest.

The Base comparison nobody makes The flippening debate fixates on Solana, but the more instructive comparison is Coinbase’s Base, because Base is the closest thing to a control group for exactly what Robinhood is attempting, and it complicates both the bull and bear cases.

Base launched in 2023 as a corporate-backed Ethereum layer 2, built by a licensed, publicly traded American financial company with a large existing user base, aimed at bringing mainstream users on-chain. That is Robinhood Chain’s template almost exactly. And Base’s early growth, like Robinhood’s, ran heavily through memecoins before it developed into a more diversified ecosystem. So Base is the case study for whether a corporate chain can convert a speculative launch into durable activity, and the answer it offers is genuinely mixed.

On the bull side, Base did convert. It built real DeFi, real stablecoin activity, and real applications on top of the initial speculation, and it became one of the larger L2s by several measures. Coinbase’s distribution, tens of millions of users, mattered, and the memecoin phase did function as ignition rather than as the whole story. That is the precedent Robinhood is betting on, and it is a real one: a corporate chain did turn a speculative launch into something lasting.

On the bear side, Base did not flip Solana either, and it had a 2-year head start on Robinhood plus a parent company that was crypto-native from birth. If Base, with Coinbase’s crypto-specific expertise and a longer runway, sits alongside Solana instead of above it, the idea that Robinhood Chain will vault past Solana looks even less plausible. And Base has its own value-capture questions as an Ethereum L2, the same ones that apply to Robinhood Chain, where the base layer captures little of the economics. Base shows the corporate-chain model can work; it also shows that working means becoming a significant chain, not dethroning the incumbent. That is the realistic ceiling for Robinhood Chain too: not flipping Solana, but earning a durable place alongside it, and only if it converts the way Base did rather than fading the way most launch-frenzies do.

What a flippening would actually require The word “flippening” gets thrown around loosely, so it is worth being precise about what would have to happen for Robinhood Chain to actually surpass Solana, because the specifics show why the headline math is not close.

Flipping Solana is not one event; it is a set of them across separate metrics, and they do not move together. On total value locked, Solana holds roughly $4.93 billion against Robinhood Chain’s ~$185 million, a gap of about 27 times. Closing that does not mean matching Solana’s memecoin volume for a week. It means persuading serious capital, lending markets, stablecoin issuers, restaking protocols, and asset managers to park billions on a corporate L2, which is a trust-and-time problem that speculative volume does nothing to solve. TVL is sticky precisely because it represents commitment, and commitment is the thing a memecoin wave cannot manufacture.

On active addresses, Solana runs above 2 million against a far smaller base on Robinhood Chain, and the composition matters more than the count. Solana’s addresses span DeFi users, NFT traders, payment apps, and memecoin degens across a mature ecosystem. Robinhood Chain’s early activity is concentrated in memecoin speculation and a gas subsidy that inflates the raw transaction figure. An address trading CASHCAT once is not equivalent to an address running a lending position, a payment flow, and a staking allocation. The headline number can converge while the underlying engagement stays a chasm apart.

On application revenue, Solana generates around $3 million daily from a diversified base of protocols. Robinhood Chain’s revenue is thin and skewed toward the launchpad-and-memecoin complex that already showed it can evaporate in days when Noxa went dark. Sustainable app revenue requires applications people use for reasons other than speculation, and building that catalog is measured in years of developer adoption, not weeks of viral trading.

Then there is the structural ceiling nobody in the flippening conversation mentions: Robinhood Chain excludes US persons from its flagship products. Stock Tokens are barred to Americans, wallet perpetuals are barred to Americans, and the chain’s entire regulated-RWA thesis is aimed at a user base that cannot legally touch its marquee offerings from Robinhood’s home market. Solana has no such wall. A chain competing for global L1 dominance with its largest potential market fenced off from its best products is running the race with a weight the incumbent does not carry.

Put those together, and the flippening is not a single line for Robinhood Chain to cross. It is four separate lines, on four metrics that move at different speeds for different reasons, at least one of which is capped by regulation. Memecoin volume, the one number Robinhood Chain can actually post, is the least sticky and least predictive of the set. That is why the honest answer to the headline is not “not yet.” It is “not close, and the gap is wider than the volume charts make it look.”

The verdict So will Robinhood Chain flip Solana? On the metrics that matter, no, and not close, and not soon.

The value-locked gap is roughly 27 to 1. The user gap is larger. The revenue gap is structural. The only metric where Robinhood was competitive is raw volume, which is the least durable measure available, is dominated by transient memecoin trading, and is inflated by a temporary gas subsidy. A chain does not flip a mature layer-1 by winning the one number that evaporates when attention moves on. Every durable indicator points to Solana remaining well ahead for the foreseeable future.

But the question contains a flawed assumption, and that is the more useful thing to say. “Flip Solana” treats the two chains as competitors for the same prize, and they may not be. Solana is a general-purpose, crypto-native layer-1 with a deep DeFi ecosystem built by and for crypto users. Robinhood Chain is a corporate settlement layer built by a licensed brokerage to bring tokenized stocks and real-world assets to a retail base that already trades on Robinhood. Their overlap right now is memecoins, which is precisely the activity neither of them was built for and which will belong to whichever chain is currently paying attention. The lasting competition, if there is one, is over tokenized real-world assets, and that race has barely started.

The honest framing is this. Robinhood will not out-DeFi Solana; that is not a contest it is positioned to win and probably not one it is trying to win. What Robinhood can do is convert a slice of 28 million existing customers into on-chain users of tokenized-asset products, on rails where its brokerage credentials matter more than its DEX volume. If it does that, it does not need to flip Solana, because it will be winning a different game. If it does not, the memecoin volume fades, the chain settles back to its $12.8 million of real assets, and the flippening talk looks like what it probably is: a volume chart mistaken for a verdict. The number to watch is not DEX volume and not the gap to Solana. It is whether tokenized real-world assets on Robinhood Chain grow, and Robinhood’s July 29 earnings are the first real look.

Frequently Asked Questions Is Robinhood Chain bigger than Solana? No, and the gap is large. As of mid-July 2026, Solana holds around $4.93 billion in total value locked against Robinhood Chain’s roughly $185 million, a gap of about 27 to 1. Solana also has more than 2 million active addresses and around $1.91 billion in daily DEX volume from a mature ecosystem. Robinhood Chain briefly matched Solana on raw DEX volume during a memecoin frenzy, but trails badly on every durable metric.

Why do people compare Robinhood Chain to Solana? Because Robinhood Chain’s DEX volume surged past $3 billion in its first week, briefly ranking among the top networks, and because Solana famously grew through a memecoin cycle of its own before maturing. The parallel is that both bootstrapped with speculation. The comparison relies heavily on volume, which is the least durable metric and, for Robinhood, is inflated by memecoin trading and a temporary gas subsidy.

Could Robinhood Chain flip Solana eventually? On DeFi metrics, it is unlikely any time soon, given a 27-to-1 value-locked gap against a competitor that is itself growing. Robinhood’s real advantage is off-chain: roughly 28 million existing customers and strong retail brand equity. If it converts a meaningful share of that base into on-chain users of tokenized-asset products, it could become large without ever matching Solana on DeFi, because it would be competing on different ground.

Why is DEX volume a misleading metric? Because it is transient and easily inflated, Robinhood Chain’s volume was overwhelmingly memecoin trading, which arrives and leaves with attention and builds no lasting infrastructure. A 90-day gas subsidy also made transactions artificially cheap during the launch window. Value locked, which represents capital committed to the chain’s protocols, is a far better predictor of durability, and on that measure Solana leads decisively.

What is Robinhood Chain actually built for? Tokenized stocks and real-world assets. It launched as an Ethereum layer 2 with Stock Tokens as the flagship product, targeting a retail base that already trades equities on Robinhood. Its competitive advantage is brokerage licenses, custody relationships, and regulatory infrastructure. The memecoin activity that drove its early volume is not the use case it was designed for, and only about $12.8 million in real-world assets currently sit on it.

What happened with CASHCAT and the memecoins? CASHCAT, a token named after Robinhood’s original working name, surged to a roughly $156 million market cap and at one point generated about 17% of the chain’s daily DEX volume. It spawned a wave of Robinhood-themed tokens. The launchpad driving the boom, Noxa, earned around $12 million in fees, then went dark within 11 days, and CASHCAT fell more than 33% in a day, illustrating how quickly memecoin activity can leave.

Does Robinhood’s user base guarantee success? No. Roughly 28 million customers is a distribution advantage, but distribution is potential, not conversion. There is no evidence yet that Robinhood’s retail stock traders will become active on-chain users, or that the memecoin traders currently driving activity overlap with the tokenized-asset investors the chain targets. Converting existing customers into on-chain users is the unproven step the entire strategy depends on.

When will we know if the strategy is working? Watch the tokenized real-world asset figure on the chain, currently around $12.8 million, rather than DEX volume or the gap to Solana. If real assets grow substantially while memecoin activity fades, the traffic is converting, and the strategy is working. Robinhood’s second-quarter earnings on July 29 should offer the first real look at Stock Token adoption, and liquidity behavior after the gas subsidy expires will be the next test.

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. It compares blockchain networks and company strategies, not the merits of any token. Memecoins are highly speculative, and most participants lose money. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy any asset or use any platform. Always do your own research. On-chain figures move quickly and are accurate as of July 17, 2026.

Shiba Inu’s deflationary momentum intensified over the past 24 hours, with 6.75 million tokens sent to dead wallets. This action pushed the daily burn rate up by 140% compared to the previous day, highlighting the community’s continued commitment to reducing SHIB’s circulating supply.

Burn milestone and supply reductionSince its launch, Shiba Inu has permanently destroyed 410,840,395,512,922 tokens by sending them to unusable null addresses. This ongoing strategy has resulted in 41.08% of SHIB’s original 1 quadrillion token supply being removed from circulation. Currently, 58.92% of the initial supply remains, demonstrating the significant impact of these regular token burns.

MetricAmountTotal Supply Burned410.84 trillion SHIBPercentage Burned41.08%Current Supply58.92% of initialThe pace of SHIB burns remains consistent, with over 21,000 cumulative burn transactions now recorded. Data shows that these collective efforts, carried out by members of the Shiba Inu community, have reached 21,193 individual transactions, reflecting an ongoing reduction in supply through a decentralized mechanism.

Short-term burn statistics and price movementsIn the last seven days, the SHIB community removed 43.75 million tokens from circulation, while the thirty-day tally stands at 267.58 million tokens. Despite these supply reductions, the price performance has shown modest fluctuations. Over the latest 24-hour period, SHIB edged up by 0.96% to $0.00000417, though it still trades 4.87% lower on the weekly timeframe.

PeriodSHIB BurnedPast 24 Hours6.75 millionPast 7 Days43.75 millionPast 30 Days267.58 millionOver 410 trillion SHIB have now been sent to dead wallets, meaning 41.08% of the original supply is permanently removed, while over 21,000 separate burn transactions have been completed by the community.

Macro factors and regulatory developmentsShiba Inu’s recent price movement followed mixed signals from wider economic data. The latest US producer and consumer price index readings came in softer than expected, while jobless claims for the week ending July 11 totaled 208,000, lower than forecasted figures. The University of Michigan’s latest consumer sentiment index rose to 54.4, surpassing the Dow Jones consensus forecast of 50.5.

Japan implemented major amendments to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA) on July 15, 2026. The updated legislation distinguishes cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum from securities and instead classifies them as investment products.

The revisions seek to strengthen investor protection while enhancing engagement from banks, securities firms, asset managers, and institutional investors in Japan’s crypto market.

Shiba Inu is already included on the Japan JVCEA Green List, a status that simplifies listing on regulated domestic platforms. With this regulatory update, SHIB could see improved access and visibility in Japan’s evolving digital asset landscape.

Mini dictionary: JVCEA Green List – A registry maintained by the Japan Virtual and Crypto Assets Exchange Association (JVCEA) that includes cryptocurrencies approved for listing on domestic exchanges, allowing for easier regulatory compliance and onboarding in the Japanese market.

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.

Arbitrum (ARB), a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, is attracting greater market attention as bullish indicators mount and buying interest increases. Stronger technical signals and expanded infrastructure developments are supporting expectations for a potential upward price movement.

Bullish momentum builds as technicals improveARB is currently priced at $0.08794 with a 24-hour trading volume of $83.15 million and a market capitalization of $560.21 million. The cryptocurrency has displayed stability in the last 24 hours, and its price structure suggests potential for a reversal. Market participants have observed growing signs that ARB could be entering an early bull phase, buoyed by advances in technical patterns and persistence above key daily moving averages.

Crypto analyst Michael van de Poppe noted that technical indicators across several timeframes are strengthening, highlighting bullish divergences relative to both the US dollar and Bitcoin. The formation of a higher low in the ARB price is viewed as supporting evidence that buyers are maintaining control.

Analysts point out that, despite recent consolidation, Arbitrum has defended a key support zone and continues to register increased trading volume, reflecting upward pressure from traders and speculators.

The accumulation phase may be underway, with increased participation suggesting that ARB could be in the initial stages of a new market cycle.

WalletConnect and Arbitrum partnership boosts ecosystemWalletConnect, a widely adopted communication protocol for connecting decentralized applications with mobile wallets, has expanded its integration with Arbitrum. This cooperation aims to make on-chain application development faster and more cost-effective for organizations operating on the Arbitrum network.

The enhanced partnership allows for more seamless wallet interactions, improved user experiences, and lower transaction fees. Developers can now more efficiently deliver services to end users due to these improvements.

Arbitrum supports an ecosystem with over $17 billion locked in its protocols and liquidity exceeding $4 billion in stablecoins, making it a prominent option for larger enterprises seeking blockchain solutions.

Transaction fees on Arbitrum remain below $0.01, further contributing to its suitability for deploying scalable decentralized applications.

Mini dictionary: WalletConnect, a protocol that enables easy and secure connection between decentralized applications and cryptocurrency wallets without requiring users to reveal private keys.

MetricValueCurrent ARB price$0.0879424-hour trading volume$83.15 millionMarket capitalization$560.21 millionTotal value locked (TVL)$17 billionStablecoin liquidity$4 billionAverage transaction feeLess than $0.01Market outlook remains cautiously optimisticDespite optimistic forecasts and new integrations, ARB’s price continues to face downward pressure. Broader market trends, however, are showing signs of improvement, and analysts suggest that a reversal could occur if favorable conditions persist.

Significant resistance levels remain, but renewed accumulation by large holders and expanding ecosystem partnerships—such as the growing collaboration with WalletConnect—are cited as potential catalysts for a new uptrend.

Expectations for increased bullish sentiment rest on persistently high trading volumes, enhanced network partnerships, and signs of continued whale accumulation, all of which support the prospect of a trend reversal for ARB.

Nonetheless, market participants continue to monitor Arbitrum’s progress closely in light of the volatile nature of the cryptocurrency sector.

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

The SEC has approved a NYSE Arca rule change that raises position and exercise limits for options on BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, giving institutional traders more room to hedge and express larger views around the spot Bitcoin ETF market.

The change increases limits for IBIT options from 250,000 contracts to 1,000,000 contracts, according to the SEC release. That is a fourfold increase, and it reflects how quickly Bitcoin ETF options have become part of the market’s trading infrastructure.

This is not the kind of update that grabs attention like a new ETF launch. But for market structure, it matters.

Options limits decide how large positions can become. Larger limits can support deeper institutional trading, more complex hedging, and better liquidity around ETF-linked Bitcoin exposure.

Reference: SEC

TL;DR The SEC approved a NYSE Arca rule change raising IBIT options limits. Position and exercise limits move from 250,000 to 1,000,000 contracts. The change gives larger traders more room to hedge Bitcoin ETF exposure. Bitcoin ETFs Are Becoming Trading Infrastructure The first phase of the spot Bitcoin ETF story was access.

Investors wanted to know whether they could buy Bitcoin exposure through ordinary brokerage accounts. Asset managers wanted products that could fit inside existing portfolios. Advisers wanted a structure that did not involve exchanges, wallets, private keys, or direct custody.

That phase is now maturing.

The next phase is market structure. Once an ETF becomes liquid, traders want options, hedging tools, arbitrage routes, and larger position limits. Those pieces make the product more useful for institutions that manage risk actively rather than simply buying and holding.

IBIT has become one of the most important Bitcoin ETF products in the market, so options activity around it matters. If traders can hold larger options positions, they can manage larger underlying exposures, hedge portfolio risk more efficiently, or build more sophisticated volatility strategies.

That does not mean the change is automatically bullish for Bitcoin. Options can be used for bullish, bearish, and neutral strategies. But it does mean the market around Bitcoin ETFs is becoming deeper.

Why Position Limits Matter Position limits exist to prevent excessive concentration and reduce market-manipulation risk.

If limits are too low, large institutions may find the product less useful. If limits are too high, regulators may worry about market integrity. Raising the limit suggests the exchange and regulator believe the product can support larger activity without creating unacceptable risk.

For IBIT options, moving from 250,000 to 1,000,000 contracts is a meaningful shift.

It allows larger traders to operate with more flexibility. A fund with substantial Bitcoin ETF exposure may need options to hedge downside. A market maker may need room to support liquidity. A volatility trader may want to build positions that were previously constrained by the lower cap.

The result can be a more efficient options market.

Better options liquidity can also improve the underlying ETF market because traders have more ways to manage risk. In mature asset classes, options are a normal part of the ecosystem. Bitcoin ETFs are now moving closer to that model.

A Sign Of Institutional Normalisation The larger point is that Bitcoin is increasingly being absorbed into traditional market infrastructure.

Spot ETFs brought Bitcoin into regulated fund wrappers. Options brought a derivatives layer around those wrappers. Higher position limits now give larger institutions more operational room.

This is exactly how financial markets mature. First comes access, then liquidity, then hedging, then more complex institutional strategies.

For Bitcoin, that is a major shift from earlier cycles, when much of the market was concentrated on offshore exchanges, spot exchanges, and crypto-native derivatives venues. Those venues still matter, but the ETF market has changed the balance.

More regulated options activity could also affect volatility. In some cases, deeper options markets help smooth risk because traders can hedge more efficiently. In other cases, options positioning can create sharp moves around expiries, strikes, and dealer hedging flows.

Either way, Bitcoin traders will increasingly need to watch ETF options data alongside spot flows.

The SEC approval does not guarantee higher Bitcoin prices. It does not remove volatility. It does not change the underlying supply schedule. But it does make the institutional Bitcoin market more functional.

That may be the most important takeaway. Bitcoin ETFs are no longer just products people buy for exposure. They are becoming part of a larger trading and risk-management system.

This article is based on SEC release SR-NYSEARCA-2026-76 and Federal Register materials.

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

Japan has taken a decisive step in cryptocurrency regulation by approving a new framework that reclassifies XRP and other digital assets as financial instruments. This move contrasts with ongoing debates in the United States over the proposed CLARITY Act, which aims to provide regulatory clarity for digital assets.

Japan’s new crypto classification sets stage for XRP ETFX Finance Bull, a well-known cryptocurrency commentator active on social media, described the development as a meaningful shift for XRP and the wider crypto market. He stated that Japan’s action illustrates progress beyond mere legislative debate and demonstrates a concrete commitment to integrating cryptocurrencies within the nation’s financial system.

According to X Finance Bull, the updated regulatory treatment of digital assets creates a legal foundation for the launch of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tied to XRP and potentially other cryptocurrencies. He described this milestone as a transition from long-discussed ambitions to tangible implementation, especially given Japan’s status as the world’s third-largest economy.

Japan has approved its own framework reclassifying $XRP and other digital assets as financial instruments, marking a clear shift from theory to action. An XRP ETF now moves from an aspiration to an imminent reality in Asia’s leading market.

This shift stands in contrast to the United States, where policymakers continue to debate digital asset legislation. While the CLARITY Act remains under discussion in Congress, Japan’s financial authorities have moved forward with a completed and actionable regulatory model.

ETF filings progressing with support from SBI GroupOne of the central points in X Finance Bull’s analysis concerns the preparations underway for cryptocurrency ETFs in Japan. He pointed to SBI Group, one of the country’s largest financial conglomerates and a longstanding partner of Ripple, as the organization leading these efforts.

SBI Group’s early preparations for an XRP ETF reportedly began well before the latest government approval. The commentator noted that this indicates strategic, long-term planning and confidence in the regulatory trajectory. SBI Group’s collaboration with Ripple over several years may have given it the head start needed to introduce new investment products as soon as policy allowed.

This approach sets the current situation apart from prior announcements or speculative headlines, as institutions like SBI appear positioned to capitalize on regulatory changes swiftly.

Mini dictionary: SBI Group, headquartered in Tokyo, is a major Japanese financial services company engaged in banking, asset management, and fintech, and has been a key partner of Ripple in promoting blockchain adoption throughout Japan and Asia.

Potential impact on XRP adoptionX Finance Bull also emphasized the potential advantages of an XRP ETF for Japanese investors. He explained that by offering regulated financial products, such as ETFs, investors could gain exposure to XRP using familiar brokerage accounts or retirement plans.

Citing the experience of spot cryptocurrency ETFs in the United States, he claimed that XRP funds there have attracted approximately $1.48 billion in investments, even during challenging market periods. This, according to the commentator, demonstrates how structured ETF offerings can broaden participation in the cryptocurrency sector.

Japan’s tax structure may further support market growth. The current flat 20% tax rate on crypto gains stands out as a more straightforward regime compared to other jurisdictions, simplifying the process for investors.

CountryCrypto Tax RateStatus of XRP ETFJapan20% flat ratePreparations underwayUnited StatesVaries (up to 37% for capital gains)No XRP ETF approvedRipple’s close ties with Japanese institutionsThe commentator underscored the significance of Ripple’s relationship with SBI Group. He mentioned that RLUSD, a stablecoin, is already available via SBI VC Trade, and SBI Ripple Asia operates technical infrastructure on the XRP Ledger. These initiatives reflect ongoing efforts to support token issuance and digital asset integration in Japan.

Overall, these developments suggest Japan is prioritizing infrastructure for institutional-grade digital asset products, rather than simply adjusting existing regulations. Analysts suggest the combination of governmental support, ETF readiness, and established partnerships positions Japan as a notable environment for crypto adoption, with XRP poised to benefit from the country’s proactive approach.

SBI has been working with Ripple to build digital finance platforms in Japan for years, providing a robust foundation as the country moves toward institutional crypto adoption.

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.

XRP withdrawal activity on Binance has climbed to its highest level in at least two years.

According to a new on-chain analysis by CryptoQuant contributor Amr Taha, the exchange is now recording a significantly larger share of withdrawal transactions than of deposits.

Taha said Binance’s share of XRP withdrawal transactions reached 54.5% on July 17, the highest level since July 2024. Meanwhile, deposit transactions fell to 45.4%, the lowest reading since the same period and below the previous low of 46.7% recorded on June 20, 2025.

XRP Deposit/Withdrawal chart The widening gap between withdrawals and deposits has expanded to 9.1 percentage points, up from 6.5 points on June 20, 2025. According to Taha, this makes the current imbalance roughly 40% wider than the previous comparison.

Binance Outpaces Broader Exchange Trend The broader centralized exchange market is showing a similar pattern, though Binance’s shift is more pronounced.

Across all centralized exchanges, withdrawal transactions accounted for 53.01%, nearly matching the 53.09% recorded on June 20, 2025, while deposit transactions stood at approximately 46.9%.

Binance’s withdrawal share is now 1.49 percentage points higher than the all-exchange average. Its 9.1-point withdrawal-deposit gap is also nearly 49% wider than the roughly 6.1-point gap observed across all centralized exchanges.

The figures suggest Binance users are moving XRP off the exchange at a faster rate than the broader market, although the data reflects the number of transactions rather than the size or value of transferred funds.

Previous Pattern Preceded 66% XRP Rally Taha pointed to a historical parallel that has drawn attention from market participants.

After similar transaction levels were recorded on June 20, 2025, XRP’s price climbed from approximately $2.11 to $3.50 by July 21, delivering a gain of nearly 66% in about one month.

At the time of the analysis, XRP was trading near $1.09, around 48% below its June 2025 comparison price and nearly 69% below the subsequent $3.50 peak.

However, Taha cautioned against interpreting the data as a direct bullish signal. The metrics track the proportion of deposit and withdrawal transactions, not the volume of XRP being transferred or net exchange flows.

As a result, the shift reflects a change in transaction composition rather than definitive evidence of capital leaving exchanges or a guarantee that price will follow the same trajectory.

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

Ethereum (ETH) price is up slightly by 1.82% today, July 18, after the Chair of the US House Administration Committee, Bryan Steil, opined that the CLARITY Act bill could pass in the coming week. The bill’s passage will see ETH being classified as a digital commodity, a move that could bolster retail and institutional demand for the biggest altcoin.

ETH price traded at $1,845 at the time of writing. It is currently testing the support at the 50-day EMA, but bulls remain in control as this support holds.

US House Chair Eyes CLARITY Act Passage Next Week While speaking in an interview with FOX Business, U.S. Representative Steil has said that the Senate could pass the CLARITY Act bill in the week between June 20 and June 24.

Steil says that this will be the week when the bill will go to the Senate floor for voting, and if senators vote in favor of it, the US might “set the gold standard” for regulating crypto assets like Ethereum and potentially drive price gains.

Steil’s remarks come shortly after reports that the final text for the CLARITY bill will also be released next week. This new text might include changes on ethics and stablecoin yields.

Steil’s remarks have increased the likelihood of the bill passing. Data from Polymarket shows that the odds that the CLARITY Act will pass in 2026 have increased from 30% on July 17 to 42% at the time of writing.

Ethereum Price Prediction as Bears Test Key Support Level Ethereum price is testing the 50-day EMA support of $1,812 ahead of the crucial vote on the CLARITY Act bill that could officially classify ETH as a digital commodity if it passes.

If ETH price remains above this support, it could draw buyers that might push it to the 100-day EMA of $1,939. The buying pressure might come from the Senate passing the CLARITY Act.

The RSI reading of 57 also supports a bullish long-term Ethereum price prediction. This RSI is also making higher highs, suggesting that bulls are tightening their grip.

This bullish momentum might not only push ETH to the 100-day EMA of $1,939, but it could also trigger a move to $2,244. This is according to a previous Coingape Ethereum price analysis that detected a bullish double-bottom pattern forming on ETH’s daily chart.

ETH/USDT: 1-day chart (Source: TradingView) But if ETH closes below this support of $1,812, the price might drop to the 20-day EMA of $1,791. That drop might be caused by the US Senate failing to get enough votes to push the CLARITY Act forward, a move that may trigger a bearish Ethereum price prediction.

Ethereum ETFs Post Highest Weekly Inflows Since April Data from SoSovalue shows that there were $105 million inflows to spot Ethereum ETFs in the week between July 13 and July 17. This $105 million is the highest inflow that the ETFs have seen since April 2026.

Ethereum ETF Flow Data (Source: SoSoValue) The inflows suggest that institutions are getting more exposure to Ethereum price ahead of the CLARITY Act vote that would increase the regulatory clarity around ETH.

If the CLARITY Act passes, these spot ETF inflows could increase as institutions that were shying away because of regulatory uncertainty start buying ETH.

The institutional demand also comes amid an increase in Ethereum’s DeFi TVL that has increased from $36 billion on July 1 to $40 billion on July 17, per DeFiLlama.

This marks the first time that the TVL on Ethereum has gone above $40 billion since May 2026.

Ethereum has regained an upward trajectory for the first time in a year, coinciding with rising institutional adoption in tokenized finance. The network registered $327.3 million in tokenized exchange-traded fund (ETF) inflows over the past 12 months, securing a dominant lead over rival blockchains.

Ethereum’s upward price trendAnalyst Michaël van de Poppe highlighted that Ethereum has entered a new uptrend following nearly a year of sideways movement. He assessed the current market pullback as a relatively normal correction within this structure and expressed optimism about Ethereum’s potential for further gains if buyers defend key support levels.

$ETH is ready for another move higher, and the current consolidation appears to be a routine correction rather than a bearish phase. Michaël van de Poppe emphasized that he does not see a convincing reason for a bearish outlook on Ethereum, stating the asset has now entered an uptrend for the first time in twelve months.

According to van de Poppe, Ethereum’s correction does not alter the underlying positive momentum. Market observers are now watching whether ETH can stabilize and build the foundation for a fresh rally. The continued recovery phase remains in focus as analysts monitor price stability after volatility.

Record tokenized ETF inflows boost Ethereum’s dominanceValidation provider Everstake reported that Ethereum recorded the largest inflows into tokenized ETFs in the last year, adding $327.3 million to its total market capitalization. This amount was nearly four times that of Solana and more than five times that of BNB Chain over the same period.

Everstake stated that Ethereum is becoming the home of tokenized finance, supported by significant inflows into tokenized ETFs. The network’s $327.3 million in ETF inflows outpaces Solana’s and BNB Chain’s combined total, underlining Ethereum’s leading role in this sector.

Tokenized ETFs are blockchain-based representations of traditional exchange-traded funds, offering market participants access to ETF exposure using decentralized infrastructure. Their growing popularity reflects increasing institutional attention to tokenized asset markets, with liquidity and network maturity influencing the choice of blockchain platforms.

NetworkTokenized ETF Inflows (12 months)Ethereum$327.3 millionSolanaApprox. $82 millionBNB ChainApprox. $65 millionMini dictionary: Everstake is a blockchain infrastructure company specializing in staking and validation services across multiple proof-of-stake networks, supporting both institutional and retail clients.

Institutional interest centers on Ethereum’s infrastructureEverstake noted that institutional investors consistently prioritize deep liquidity, robust infrastructure, and established developer activity when choosing blockchain networks. Ethereum offers all three, contributing to its continued appeal as a platform for tokenized finance products, stablecoins, and on-chain markets.

Analysts say these fundamentals have kept Ethereum at the center of institutional blockchain strategies. As the uptrend continues, traders are also closely monitoring developments in tokenized ETF inflows among the major chains.

Ongoing growth in tokenized assets and decentralized finance may help reinforce Ethereum’s network role, especially as competition with Solana and BNB Chain intensifies.

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.

[PRESS RELEASE – San Francisco, CA, July 17th, 2026]

Crowdsourced Hedge Fund Completes Third Open-Market Purchase as Contributor Network and Assets Continue to Grow

Numerai, the decentralized hedge fund powered by crowdsourced machine learning, today announced the completion of a third strategic purchase of Numeraire (NMR), acquiring an additional $1.2 million of the token from the open market. The purchase brings Numerai’s total NMR buybacks to $3.2 million within one year.

The buyback reflects Numerai’s continued investment in the staking system that aligns thousands of independent data scientists toward improving the firm’s Stake-Weighted Meta Model, the machine learning model that powers Numerai’s hedge fund. Contributors stake NMR on their models, earning additional NMR when their predictions perform well on future market data and losing it when they do not. The resulting Stake-Weighted Meta Model continues to outperform Numerai’s internal benchmark models, demonstrating the value of aligning incentives with predictive performance.

Since announcing its first strategic buyback in July 2025, Numerai’s network has expanded significantly. Active accounts have more than doubled over the past year, submissions continue to increase, and the platform has introduced new infrastructure including Numerai Skills, Numerai Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Atomic Blockchain Staking, enabling increasingly autonomous participation by AI systems.

The underlying hedge fund has also continued to grow. According to the company, Numerai now manages approximately $700 million in assets, up from approximately $560 million at the end of 2025.

Numeraire is a fixed-supply Ethereum token capped at 11 million NMR. Because tournament rewards and staking incentives are distributed from Numerai’s treasury, the company is replenishing its holdings through open-market purchases. Before this buyback, approximately 3.1 million NMR remained in Numerai’s treasury.

Unlike the previous two announcements, this buyback had already been completed before today’s announcement. As with prior purchases, the transaction was executed on the open market through Coinbase Institutional at or near the bid price over several weeks to minimize market impact.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. This content does not represent an offer to purchase or sell any security or the interests of any account managed by Numerai GP, LLC or its affiliates. Such an offer may only be made to persons who qualify to invest and in jurisdictions in which such an offer is legal.

About Numerai

Numerai is a San Francisco-based hedge fund and data science platform founded in 2015. Through a global competition and open API, thousands of data scientists submit stock market signals that are aggregated into a single Meta Model used to trade global equities. Numeraire (NMR) is used to stake and reward models that improve the fund. Numerai’s mission is to build the world’s last hedge fund through open, competitive machine intelligence.

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https://web3.bitget.com/en/academy/what-is-hype-hyperliquid-token-crypto-price-prediction

Hyperliquid, a decentralized perpetuals exchange and Layer 1 blockchain, has achieved a significant milestone by surpassing $1.2 billion in cumulative fees since its launch in 2024. This figure has been reported by Grayscale and highlights the substantial revenue generated by the protocol. Hyperliquid employs a buy-back-and-burn model, directing the majority of its fees to an Assistance Fund that reduces the supply of HYPE, its native token, through buybacks. This approach has created a deflationary pressure on the token, potentially increasing its market value.

The HYPE token currently trades near $60 and plays a crucial role in securing the network and facilitating transactions on the HyperEVM platform. With over 45 million tokens, or approximately 14.5% of the initial supply, removed from circulation, the buy-back-and-burn mechanism is seen as a major factor driving the token’s value. This strategy aligns the token’s value with the protocol’s revenue, making the tokenomics of Hyperliquid a subject of interest among market participants.

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Markets are currently assessing the impact of these developments on the likelihood of Hyperliquid reaching a $100 price target by the end of 2026. As of now, the odds are priced at 30% for this scenario, suggesting that while there is optimism, significant growth is still required to reach this target.

Key Takeaways The milestone of $1.2 billion in fees suggests strong growth and sustainability for Hyperliquid, consistent with positive sentiment around its future potential. The buy-back-and-burn model appears to create deflationary pressure on the HYPE token, which may support a rise in its price. Current market pricing indicates a 30% probability for Hyperliquid to reach $100 by December 31, 2026, reflecting cautious optimism. What to Watch Observers should monitor Hyperliquid’s ongoing fee generation and the effectiveness of its buy-back-and-burn model in enhancing token value. Key developments, such as major partnerships or listings on prominent exchanges, could drive sentiment and pricing. Conversely, any security issues or negative regulatory news might impact the market’s outlook. The evolving performance of Hyperliquid and its tokenomics will be crucial in shaping market expectations and pricing consistency with the $100 target scenario.

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Term Structure

Contract Odds Δ since publish Volume 24h December 31 30% — — View market → January 1 2027 6.2% — — View market → January 1 2027 4% — — View market → January 1 2027 65.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 9.1% — — View market → January 1 2027 3.6% — — View market →

Michael Saylor built his reputation on a simple thesis: buy Bitcoin, keep buying Bitcoin, never sell. CryptoQuant thinks it’s time to complicate that playbook.

On June 23, the on-chain analytics firm published a report urging Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, to pump the brakes on its aggressive accumulation strategy. The core argument is less about Bitcoin and more about basic financial hygiene: the company’s liquidity position has deteriorated to a point where buying more Bitcoin before shoring up cash reserves is a meaningful risk.

The numbers that are making analysts nervous Strategy’s USD cash reserves dropped 38% in 2026, falling to roughly $1.1 billion by mid-June. At the same time, annual dividend obligations on its STRC preferred shares have quadrupled to approximately $1.2 billion per year.

The dividend coverage ratio tells the story most clearly. Strategy went from having over seven years of dividend runway to just 14 months, essentially in the span of one market cycle. CryptoQuant’s head of research, Julio Moreno, specifically recommended that the company rebuild reserves to around $2.8 billion, which would represent 24 months of coverage, before resuming any Bitcoin purchases.

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STRC preferred shares were trading around $82.50 in mid-June, roughly 17.5% below par value.

CryptoQuant estimates that Strategy is sitting on approximately $10.6 billion in aggregate unrealized Bitcoin losses, with every purchase made between 2024 and 2026 currently underwater relative to prevailing market prices.

847,000 Bitcoin and a structural dilemma Strategy currently holds roughly 847,000 Bitcoin, a position that makes it the dominant force in corporate treasury Bitcoin ownership. CryptoQuant pegs Strategy’s share at approximately 76% of all Bitcoin held by corporate treasury entities globally.

CryptoQuant explicitly advised against selling to improve cash reserves, noting that divesting at current loss levels would simply crystallize the damage rather than fix the underlying problem. The firm’s preferred solution is to focus on raising capital through dividends or new share issuance rather than liquidating Bitcoin holdings.

The recommendation to develop a model for potential sales during future market rallies is the sharpest departure from Saylor’s public doctrine. Saylor has been categorical about never selling Bitcoin. CryptoQuant is suggesting the company needs at least a contingency plan, a set of conditions under which selling would be the rational move, even if that plan is never triggered.

What this means for the broader market CryptoQuant’s warning is partly about Strategy specifically and partly about the model it represents. A number of companies have followed Saylor’s playbook, adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets as a treasury reserve asset. If the originator of that strategy runs into a liquidity wall, it raises questions about whether smaller imitators have stress-tested their own positions.

The risk of intermediate Bitcoin cycle peaks is a specific concern Moreno flagged. If Bitcoin rallies hard and then corrects before Strategy has rebuilt its cash position, the company could find itself caught between the need to service preferred dividends and a Bitcoin treasury worth less than the peak valuations it was carried on.

Strategy’s ability to issue new equity or preferred shares at favorable terms depends heavily on market confidence. If that confidence erodes, the capital raise option that CryptoQuant sees as the cleanest solution becomes more expensive precisely when the company needs it most.

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

A new proposal, Solstice, aims to make one of the most significant changes to Filecoin’s reward system since the network launched. It would reshape how storage providers earn rewards and how the network supports services that bring paying customers and data to Filecoin.

The basic idea is straightforward: instead of requiring providers to complete a special approval process to earn higher rewards, network consensus providers would receive full rewards automatically. At the same time, a portion of block rewards would be programmatically directed toward the services that attract customers, onboard data, and work directly with storage providers.

The Filecoin Improvement Proposal (FIP) 0118 is still a draft and is open for community feedback at: Create fip 0118-solstice.md by irenegia · Pull Request #1270 · filecoin-project/FIPs

Background on the Current System Today, Filecoin uses a program called Filecoin Plus, or Fil+. The original goal was to reward storage providers for storing useful, verified data rather than simply adding empty capacity to the network.

In practice, Fil+ has introduced a significant amount of operational overhead. To qualify for enhanced rewards, clients need to apply for datacap, which acts as a credit confirming that their data is legitimate. That process involves reviews, approvals, and compliance checks.

Over time, this has made the onboarding sectors pipeline slower and more complex. It has also created opportunities for gaming. The FIP 0118 argues that Fil+ verification has become a weak signal of useful data, so rewards do not always reach the storage providers creating the most value for the network.

Solstice builds on what Fil+ set out to do, rewarding useful storage, and replaces the verification step with a direct signal of customer activity: onchain payment volume. It supports both sides of the marketplace. Storage providers keep earning block rewards for securing and supplying storage, while a share of rewards goes to the services bringing paying customers to the network.

What Would Change The proposal introduces two major changes.

First, the Fil+ system would be removed. Every new sector onboards on equal footing, earning consensus rewards in proportion to the storage it commits, with no verified and unverified tiers. Existing sectors keep their current power and terms.

Second, a portion of Filecoin's block rewards would automatically be redirected to fund services that help drive paid network usage. Today, block rewards go entirely to the storage provider that wins the block. Under Solstice, part of that reward would instead go to a new role in the network, Service Orchestrators, who are responsible for bringing paying customers to the Filecoin network.

In simple terms, miners continue earning rewards for providing consensus and securing the storage network, while a portion of rewards would also fund the sales, service, and integration layer that brings more paying customers to the network. More demand means more value flowing to the providers already serving it.

The Opportunity for Storage Providers The timing of this proposal matters as much as the mechanics. Several forces are converging in the broader market right now, that point toward exactly the kind of infrastructure Filecoin storage providers have already built.

Data growth is outpacing centralized infrastructure. AI, enterprise, and machine-generated workloads are driving demand beyond available cloud capacity and into new geographies, while power grid constraints delay roughly one fifth of planned data center development. The same AI adoption is also shifting what buyers need from storage: verifiability, provenance, and durability, not capacity alone. Filecoin answers both. Its global network of independent providers added more than 59 PiB of raw storage in a single day, and its cryptographic proofs verify what is stored and that it stays stored.

These trends are already producing real deals. Aurora, an SP, is deploying Filecoin-powered storage across 100 megawatt AI compute data centers in Europe, built for multi-petabyte workloads. 375ai and Akave, another SP using Filecoin, with edge infrastructure across more than 40,000 retail, industrial, and logistics locations in the United States, is using Filecoin backed storage as the durability layer for its verifiable AI data pipeline.

What Solstice does is give the network, for the first time, a protocol level mechanism to reward the service layer that captures this demand. The service stream creates funding that rewards one measurable thing: bringing paying customers to Filecoin and routing their workloads to storage providers. For storage providers, that means the go-to-market work gets done by specialists at scale, keeping them focused on operating their infrastructure, and subsidized by the block reward.

For more on the macro tailwinds shaping this moment, see: Why Macro Trends Are Moving in Filecoin's Favor.

Governance Tiers and Functions Solstice introduces two new governed contracts, the Stream Weights Actor and the Service Rewards Actor, that parameterize the built-in reward actor (f02), which does the actual splitting.

Stream Weights Actor (SWA). The SWA controls how each block reward is divided among streams. At launch there are two: the consensus stream, paid to the winning miner each epoch, and the service stream, paid to registered Orchestrators. The SWA manages the weight schedule: consensus share ramps from 95% down to a 50% floor, and service share steps up from 5% in 5 percentage point increments, but only when quarterly on-chain Filecoin Pay volume clears a verifiable USD target. Whatever share leaves consensus but has not been earned by the service stream is burned. Every discretionary SWA change requires a published FIP, sign-off from both Safes operating the first decision-making surface, and a seven day hold enforced at the L1. f02 itself queues and delays the write, so no weight can shift without the community having time to see and object. Gate step-ups are mechanism-executed and not cancellable.

Service Rewards Actor (SRA). The SRA determines how the service stream is split among registered Orchestrators. Each quarter it computes each Orchestrator's share from their verified Filecoin Pay volume and writes the wallet-to-share map directly into f02, which pays each Orchestrator wallet every epoch. The SRA never holds funds and is never on the value path. It also maintains the Orchestrator registry: which entities are admitted, which (payer, operator) pairs are attributed to each Orchestrator, and which stablecoin and Filecoin Pay contract addresses count toward volume. Registry changes require both Safes operating the second decision-making surface and a cancellation hold, but no FIP.

Service Orchestrators. Orchestrators are the registered entities whose on-chain payment activity drives the service stream. Their protocol interaction is narrow: they register the (payer, operator) pairs whose Filecoin Pay volume counts toward them, post their quarterly volume figure to the SRA in stablecoin and FIL components recomputable by anyone from public settlement events, and receive their share of the service stream each epoch directly from f02. They are not a decision-making surface. At launch a single Orchestrator is registered; the second decision-making surface can admit more over time, with permissionless registration as the Phase 2 goal.

Together: f02 splits every block reward by the current weights; the SWA sets those weights and governs when the service share can grow; the SRA determines how that share is divided based on measured volume; and Orchestrators generate the client demand that justifies the funding increasing over time.

What This Means for Storage Providers Storage providers are the direct beneficiaries as Filecoin’s service economy grows. The shift Solstice makes is about accelerating the demand side of the network that makes providing storage capacity on the network highly attractive.

The most significant community-advocated change is that the Fil+ system goes away. No more datacap applications, allocator reviews, or compliance overhead. Every sector onboards on equal footing with full rewards from day one. For providers who have spent years navigating that pipeline, this alone is a meaningful operational improvement.

The bigger opportunity is what the service stream funds. As that client pipeline grows, so do the deals and direct revenue storage providers earn from serving real customers. Revenue for storage providers increases because paying customers are coming to the network.

For providers running newer storage proof systems; such as Proof of Data Possession (PDP) for hot data and retrieval workloads; Solstice removes a meaningful barrier. Service funding is not tied to any specific proof system. Whether a storage provider runs PoRep, PDP, or whatever the market demands, the incentive structure accommodates it.

At launch the service portion is 5% of each block reward, with 95% flowing directly to miners as the consensus share. Over roughly nine quarters the consensus share steps down on a published schedule toward a 50% floor, opening up more room for service funding. That room does not fill automatically: the service portion steps up only when payment volume flowing through Filecoin Pay clears a verifiable on-chain target for that quarter. When the target is met the step-up executes automatically, no governance approval required. When it is not, the service portion holds and the gap is burned, permanently removing those tokens from supply.

This means the burn rate is directly tied to revenue: as the network wins more real paying business, more of the issuance flows to service funding and less is burned. Every step up is therefore evidence that the revenue opportunity for SPs is growing alongside it, and every missed step tightens supply instead of distributing funds the network has not yet earned.

Read the full proposal at Create fip 0118-solstice.md by irenegia · Pull Request #1270 · filecoin-project/FIPs. The discussion is open until later this month. After the feedback period, the authors will incorporate community input into the draft and progress through the FIP process.

Fluxers! Welcome back to another ecosystem update! On Wednesday, July 15, we had an AMA, and in today’s blog, we are going to recap everything, so let’s dive in. 

High-Level Ecosystem Shifts To start off, Flux is restructuring its operations around a leaner, more community-driven model. The core team remains in place, but the project expects less direct corporate involvement from InFlux, greater community participation, and a transition of its corporate focus from the United Kingdom to the United States. 

Next up, we will soon be sending notifications to FluxNode operators still running legacy nodes, stating that if they do not update to PoUW v2, they will be brought offline. Essentially, operators running legacy nodes will be given a deadline to migrate to the currently supported node environment. Nodes that remain on the legacy system after that deadline will be banned from FluxCloud. 

Additionally, we plan to implement community referral codes and profit sharing. For example, if a Fluxer helps bring 30 new machines to the network, they would receive a portion of that revenue by entering their personal code on any deployments they make. 

Expanding further on revenue sharing, Flux is exploring partnerships in which it supplies infrastructure and development support in exchange for a share of the participating company’s revenue or business. The community would be asked to approve how proceeds from these arrangements are incorporated into PNR. 

FluxAI Developments Flux is building its own Large Language Model (LLM), and we will train it on FluxEdge GPUs. Our aim is not to compete with ChatGPT or Claude; we want to build an LLM that is highly specific to Flux and does not train on user data. 

This specialized LLM will operate for particular FluxAI and customer applications. The team emphasized that FluxAI is designed around business privacy and does not harvest customer data in the manner associated with many mainstream AI platforms. 

PNR Update Next, Progressive Node Rewards (PNR) are almost ready. With PNR, there will be an allocation specifically for node operators for what we refer to as “flex time,” where if your machine runs workloads at a higher rate, you will be compensated accordingly. 

PNR differs from conventional mining economics. In a proof-of-work system, increasing competition can reduce an individual miner’s share of a largely fixed block-reward pool. Under the proposed PNR model, increased paid workload demand would instead expand the amount distributed to eligible node operators. 

For PNR, as demand increases, payouts rise; conversely, when demand wanes, payouts decrease. When PNRs are implemented, node operators will be paid in proportion to their machines’ runtime depending on whether assigned workloads scale up or down.

Building out a PNR pay structure that dynamically adjusts to network demand requires extensive development. The team has largely finalized its proposed approach to PNR and hopes to introduce it during Q4 2026, subject to development progress, publication of a governance proposal and community approval.

Flux Foundation Update The Flux Foundation will adopt a bounty-payout feature that operates like a job marketplace. Flux community members can post a job they need completed with a bounty, and other community members can complete it to earn FLUX. Part of the Foundation’s yield-generating infrastructure will be allocated to fund the bounty program. 

Conclusion This AMA reinforced that Flux is entering its next phase with a sharper focus on sustainability, community participation, and real-world adoption. 

From restructuring operations and strengthening FluxAI to developing Progressive Node Rewards, referral incentives, and community bounties, the goal is to create an ecosystem in which contributors, operators, developers, and community members can all benefit from the network’s growth.

Many of these initiatives are still being developed and will require further technical work, governance proposals, and community approval before they are fully implemented. 

However, the direction is clear: Flux is working toward a leaner, more decentralized ecosystem that rewards meaningful participation and ties node-operator earnings more closely to genuine platform demand. The future runs on Flux. 

Circle’s euro-backed stablecoin EURC has roughly doubled in market capitalization since the start of the year, climbing from approximately $205 million to around $430 million. The token’s circulation now sits at approximately €378 million as of mid-July, with its share of the euro stablecoin market ballooning from about 17% a year ago to north of 40%.

MiCA did the heavy lifting MiCA’s full enforcement in late 2024 and early 2025 created a compliance gauntlet that most euro stablecoin issuers couldn’t survive. The most notable casualty was Tether’s EURT, which exited the market rather than meet the new regulatory requirements.

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Circle secured a French Electronic Money Institution license back in 2024, giving it a single regulatory passport to operate across the entire EU and European Economic Area. The supply numbers tell the story cleanly. EURC’s token supply grew from roughly 309 million at the end of 2025 to approximately 390 million in early 2026, nearly tripling in a compressed timeframe.

Multi-chain expansion and Base launch Circle has been deploying EURC across multiple blockchain networks, including Ethereum and Solana. The most recent expansion landed on July 9, when EURC went live on Coinbase’s Base network.

Daily active addresses for EURC hit an all-time high of 1,760 shortly after the Base launch. The broader euro stablecoin market has reached record highs approaching $900 million as of mid-2026, with EURC commanding roughly 40–50% of that total.

What this means for investors The institutional character of this growth is worth noting. The supply expansion and market cap gains appear driven by enterprise-level integrations rather than grassroots consumer adoption. The company has reportedly been building payment integrations with partners like Visa and exploring point-of-sale terminal support through Ingenico, which would push EURC into physical retail environments.

With the overall euro stablecoin market still under $1 billion, it remains a fraction of the dollar stablecoin market, which is measured in the hundreds of billions.

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

HSBC wins Bank of England approval to enter Digital Securities SandboxThe Bank of England approved HSBC Orion to go live in its Digital Securities Sandbox, with the first Digital Gilt Instrument transaction expected in the first quarter of 2027.

HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks, has received approval to operate in the United Kingdom’s Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), allowing its digital assets platform, HSBC Orion, to support the issuance, servicing and settlement of digital securities.

The bank announced Tuesday that HSBC Orion will operate as a digital securities depository within the DSS, a regulatory environment designed to test new technology for securities markets. HSBC said it is the first company approved by the Bank of England to go live in the sandbox.

HSBC’s platform will support digitally native bond issuance, including the UK’s planned digital sovereign bond — Digital Gilt Instrument (DIGIT) — and corporate bonds. HSBC said HSBC Orion has enabled more than $5 billion in digital bond issuances globally.

HM Treasury said Thursday that the first DIGIT transaction is expected by Q1 2027, adding that HSBC and London Stock Exchange Group also signed a memorandum of understanding to develop connectivity that supports investor access to the pilot issuance.

Launched in 2024, the DSS is operated by the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority to test distributed ledger technology for issuing, trading and settling securities in a live regulatory environment.

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.

Foundry Digital, a prominent Bitcoin mining pool operator based in Rochester, New York, announced it will allow its mining clients to determine the pool’s signaling stance on the controversial BIP-110 proposal. Clients will cast their votes using their respective hashrate, directly influencing the pool’s action regarding the upgrade.

BIP-110: Restricting non-monetary dataBIP-110, short for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110, aims to address the rising volume of arbitrary and non-monetary data being stored on the Bitcoin network. If implemented, the proposal would initiate a soft fork, resulting in backward-compatible rule changes that cap the amount of such data included in transactions.

The proposal is also known as the “reduced data temporary soft fork.” Key rules include limiting most new outputs to 34 bytes, reestablishing an 83-byte limit on OP_RETURN outputs, and prohibiting data pushes above 256 bytes.

Mini dictionary: OP_RETURN, a script opcode in Bitcoin transactions, allows users to store small amounts of arbitrary data on the blockchain, often used for metadata or simple messages.

Supporters contend that these measures would reinforce Bitcoin’s design as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Conversely, critics argue the proposal transforms a policy debate into a technical consensus change and could lead to the exclusion of transactions that pay network fees.

“It’s one of the more actively debated proposals in Bitcoin right now, and miners play a direct role in whether it activates,” Foundry stated, stressing the importance of miner participation in network governance.

Among the high-profile opponents are MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor and Blockstream co-founder Adam Back, who have publicly raised concerns about the implications for transaction validation.

How voting will workFoundry outlined that each participating miner’s vote will be weighted according to their average hashrate on the pool over a 10-day period from July 6 to July 15. The company expects the voting window to remain open until the blockchain reaches block 961,632, projected for early August. At this point, the soft fork’s fate is likely to be decided.

Initially, Foundry’s default position is to signal “No” for BIP-110. However, should “Yes” votes exceed 51% of the hashrate during the voting window, Foundry will shift to signaling “Yes” on all of its future blocks. Any accounts that do not participate are automatically considered “No” votes. Meanwhile, miners retain the right to change their vote as long as the window remains open, with individual choices remaining confidential and only overall results shared.

Market observers note the significance of Foundry’s decision, as the company currently controls roughly one-third of the network’s total hashrate. Analysts at BGeometrics have suggested that the combined actions of leading pools like Foundry and Antpool could decisively move daily signaling metrics into a range capable of determining the soft fork’s fate.

Supporters believe BIP-110 can help Bitcoin function as true peer-to-peer money, while critics worry it may introduce contentious network changes and prevent certain fee-paying transactions from confirming.

ProposalMain Rule ChangeAdvocatesOpponentsBIP-110Limits arbitrary data in transactions; caps OP_RETURN at 83 bytesBitcoin developers, some minersMichael Saylor, Adam BackA final signaling window near block 961,632 will require Foundry to declare its majority-supported position before the activation timeline closes. The outcome will depend on where the majority of hashrate-weighted votes fall at the end of the period.

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.

While federal lawmakers continue to argue over the finer points of digital asset legislation, US states have quietly started putting real money into Bitcoin. Texas executed its first purchase of roughly $5 million in Bitcoin through the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) ETF in late November 2025, making it the first state to actually fund and buy Bitcoin for a strategic reserve.

The purchase came from a $10 million allocation approved under SB 21, which Governor Greg Abbott signed into law in June 2025. Texas acquired its Bitcoin at prices ranging between roughly $87,000 and $91,000 per coin. New Hampshire and Arizona both enacted their own strategic reserve laws months earlier, and over 30 additional states have introduced similar bills as of mid-2026.

The state-level Bitcoin land grab New Hampshire got its law on the books first. HB 302, signed in May 2025, authorized investments in Bitcoin and qualifying digital assets up to certain portfolio limits. Arizona followed almost immediately with HB 2749, also signed in May 2025, which took a slightly different approach by leveraging unclaimed property and seized assets to build its digital holdings.

Texas’s approach of routing the purchase through BlackRock’s IBIT ETF is notable. Rather than setting up custodial infrastructure from scratch, Texas went with the most liquid and institutionally familiar wrapper available.

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More than 30 states have introduced Bitcoin reserve-style bills, reflecting bipartisan interest in treating Bitcoin as a reserve asset alongside traditional holdings like gold and bonds.

California’s Digital Financial Assets Law became operative on July 1, 2026, imposing licensing requirements on crypto businesses operating in the state. New York continues refining its BitLicense standards.

Washington’s half-finished homework In March 2025, the Trump administration established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve through executive order, funded with forfeited Bitcoin already held by government agencies.

In July 2025, the GENIUS Act was signed into law, creating a comprehensive regulatory framework for payment stablecoins. The legislation included reserve requirements, audit mandates, and supervisory guidelines.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, commonly called the CLARITY Act, has advanced through various stages but still hasn’t become law as of mid-2026.

What this means for investors When state treasuries start buying Bitcoin, it changes the asset’s narrative in ways that matter for every market participant. These aren’t hedge funds chasing alpha or retail traders following social media hype. These are government entities making deliberate allocations through regulated vehicles, framed as fiduciary decisions about public funds.

Texas’s $10 million is a rounding error in a state budget that runs into the hundreds of billions. These are test cases, designed to establish legal precedent and operational frameworks that can scale.

Investors watching this space should pay attention to three things: which states move from legislation to actual purchases, whether the CLARITY Act reaches the president’s desk before year-end, and how state-level reserves perform relative to traditional holdings in their first full reporting cycles.

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

Evernorth, a crypto treasury company, has assembled more than 470 million XRP as part of an ambitious plan to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker “XRPN” through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger. Dr. Kamilah Stevenson, a wealth educator with expertise in digital assets, highlighted the company’s growing XRP holdings as a signal of increasing institutional conviction in the cryptocurrency.

Institutional strategy behind EvernorthEvernorth’s core model centers on holding XRP on its balance sheet for shareholders, essentially transforming the company into a corporate vault for the digital asset. Once the company is publicly listed, purchasing its shares would give investors indirect exposure to the XRP pool, similar to how some public companies have structured their balance sheets around Bitcoin holdings.

Unlike firms that simply speculate on crypto prices, Evernorth’s stated mission is to remove XRP from circulation and warehouse it for the long term. Dr. Stevenson emphasized that this is a balance-sheet allocation, not a short-term trading play, with all transactions and holdings disclosed in public regulatory filings.

Stevenson noted the distinctive nature of Evernorth’s approach, drawing a comparison to similar strategies used by companies that focus exclusively on Bitcoin. Her analysis pointed out that Evernorth’s model offers institutional investors a new avenue to gain exposure to XRP through equity markets.

Backing and regulatory processMajor industry names have committed to Evernorth, including Ripple—the company behind the XRP Ledger—SBI, Pantera Capital, Kraken, and Arrington Capital. These backers have reportedly pledged more than $1 billion in capital to support the corporate structure.

Evernorth’s proposed Nasdaq listing remains incomplete, as the process still requires regulatory approval and consent from shareholders. Stevenson underlined that the plans are currently in the filing stage with relevant authorities and that no trading of XRPN shares can take place until permissions are secured.

Publicly available filings are being used to transparently document Evernorth’s operations, a process designed to provide both investors and regulators with confidence in the company’s strategy.

Mini dictionary: Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) – A SPAC is a publicly listed company created for the purpose of acquiring or merging with another company to facilitate taking that company public without a traditional initial public offering (IPO).

Company/BackerRole/ContributionRippleStrategy backer, technology providerSBI (Japan)Strategic investment, capital providerPantera CapitalInstitutional investorKrakenExchange support, possible liquidity partnerArrington CapitalVenture backer, capital commitmentImplications for individual investorsDr. Stevenson, who has significant experience educating on wealth strategies in crypto markets, cautions that Evernorth’s strategy is not directly instructive for retail investors. She distinguishes between the financial engineering available to corporations and the personal risk that comes from borrowing heavily to invest in volatile assets like XRP.

She urges smaller investors to focus on tax-efficient structures, such as maintaining digital assets in tax-advantaged accounts like Roth IRAs. This approach, Stevenson argues, enhances wealth preservation and asset protection without resorting to high leverage or risky borrowing practices.

The goal for individuals, according to Stevenson, should be disciplined asset accumulation and risk management, rather than attempts to mimic sophisticated corporate treasury operations. She also highlights the importance of regulatory compliance and prudent financial planning in the context of crypto wealth management.

Evernorth’s approach to XRP is structured for long-term balance-sheet strength rather than speculative trading, reflecting a conviction-based corporate strategy that public investors will soon be able to access if the listing moves forward.

In summary, while Evernorth’s trajectory may offer institutions and investors a unique channel into XRP exposure, Stevenson makes clear that regulatory processes remain ongoing and retail strategies should prioritize sustainable wealth management over aggressive financial engineering.

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.

A Colorado-based wealth manager has disclosed a new investment in the Canary XRP ETF. 

It is yet another institutional firm that has gained exposure to XRP through recently launched exchange-traded funds.

According to a Form 13F-HR filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on July 17, Gallacher Capital Management LLC reported holding 86,744 shares of the Canary XRP ETF ($961,126 as of June 30).

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Institutional XRP ETF holdings keep growingGallacher's disclosure follows several other recent 13F filings showing fresh institutional exposure to XRP-linked investment products.

On July 16, registered financial advisor Vista Finance reported owning 129,958 shares of the Franklin XRP Trust ETF, with a market value of roughly $11.45 million at the end of the second quarter. 

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A day earlier, CPR Investments, a Michigan-based registered investment adviser, disclosed a new position in the ProShares Ultra XRP ETF. According to its SEC filing, the firm held 36,619 shares valued at approximately $363,627.

T. Rowe Price launches ETF with XRP exposureIn the meantime, yet another product with XRP exposure was recently launched in the US. 

Earlier this week, Wall Street giant T. Rowe Price, which oversees roughly $7 trillion in assets under management, rolled out its first actively managed cryptocurrency ETF.

Trading under the TKNZ ticker, the fund provides diversified exposure to several major digital assets, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and XRP. The ETF debuted with approximately $15 million in assets and carries a 0.75% management fee.

The entry of the financial giant into the ETF space is viewed as yet another sign of growing mainstream adoption. 

Ethereum outsourced scaling to L2s. Now native proof verification and fast finality can bring them back into the fold.

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One of the critiques of Ethereum's rollup era is that Layer 2s were supposed to be extensions of Ethereum, but they've drifted into being de facto chains that just buy data availability from the L1.

It's a fair critique, even if there's room for nuance.

Yet over the past 18 months, two research arcs have been maturing that could dissolve this argument entirely. The first arc is native rollups, i.e. packaging L2 blocks as proof-carrying transactions that Ethereum verifies directly.

How Native Rollups Scale Ethereum | Uma Roy & Justin Drake on Bankless

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This concept has bounced around the Ethereum community in recent years (originally known as "enshrined rollups"), and then the EIP-8079 draft formalized an initial approach in November 2025. To understand why it matters, consider how things work now.

Today, every rollup deploys and maintains its own verifier contracts on L1, i.e. bespoke stacks of code that prove the L2's blocks are valid. These verifiers are complex, gas-heavy, and risky to upgrade. For example, Taiko's stack alone spans six contracts.

In contrast, L2BEAT's Head of Research Luca Donno has estimated that major rollups could shed in the ballpark of ~39% of their onchain verifier code under a native approach:

Specifically native rollups would delete that extra load by making Ethereum the verifier, and L2s built this way would inherit L1 security and every future EVM upgrade automatically, with no migration scrambles required. And this architecture is no longer just theory, either.

Earlier this year, the ethrex client team released a full demo of an L2 settling to L1 via re-execution and with working deposits and withdrawals. And per L2BEAT's new dedicated Native Rollups tracker page, ecosystem-wide development milestones are slated through 2027, including a devnet targeted for this December.

All that said, the second key arc here is fast finality. Right now, Ethereum blocks arrive every ~12 seconds, though finality, i.e. the point where a block becomes practically irreversible, takes roughly 15 minutes. That lag caps how "final" any L2 settling to Ethereum can feel.

Ensuring that we have an expressive proof verification interface, native to the Ethereum protocol, should be one of our highest design goals.

Paired with fast finality, it will be a powerful force in the world. https://t.co/kYTpTAwcIm

— punk5736 (@punk5736) July 16, 2026 The fix has long been on the roadmap in the form of single slot finality research, and breakthroughs are nearing.

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For instance, researcher Francesco D'Amato, one of the minds behind Ethereum's SSF and PeerDAS work, just announced his move from the Ethereum Foundation to Ethlabs with a stated mission of making Ethereum "finalize much faster, as soon as possible."

This vision is also not a distant dream. D'Amato's fast confirmation rule, already running on Glamsterdam's devnets, was replayed against a full year of mainnet data and produced zero false confirmations while delivering 1-slot confirmation more than 95% of the time.

Goal is fast *finality* asap, but in the meantime fast confirmation (https://t.co/vFVtjqULOa) is already here and gives a *very strong* confirmation in seconds, 98% faster than finality! Now on Glamsterdam devnets https://t.co/o3cez3gQ6s pic.twitter.com/5LYQgBSWcI

— Francesco (@fradamt) July 16, 2026 In other words, near-instant strong assurances are demonstrably achievable without sacrificing safety.

Now, of course, native rollups and fast finality are great in their own rights, but combined they're transformative. Native verification makes L2 blocks something Ethereum personally checks, and fast finality will make these checks land in seconds rather than minutes.

In this paradigm, an L2's state could finalize with full L1 security almost immediately, i.e. not like a separate chain posting data to Ethereum but more like Ethereum simply having more blockspace.

Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot recently pushed this framing even further, noting that the L1 itself will likely eventually verify its own blocks via proofs, effectively becoming "a rollup of itself." If this pans out, the L1-vs-L2 distinction will blur into a matter of how composable everyone's state is, and more composability on Ethereum should accrue more value to Ethereum.

Riffing on this, many analogies collapse when you consider that L1 is likely to eventually turn into a rollup/L2 of itself.

So it's not the fundamental nature of a rollup to not be "value accretive" to ETH or Ethereum.

And the right lens to think about it is state, and one's… https://t.co/OBXRkXvXIH

— Barnabé Monnot | barnabé.eth (@barnabemonnot) July 15, 2026 To be sure, it will take time for these advances to actualize and synergize. EIP-8079 is still just a draft, and so on. The earliest this full meld could come together is likely late 2027. And there's also the sovereignty angle to consider. Today's major L2s differentiate partly through their custom stacks, so some may simply decline tighter integration.

Overall, then, the big open question is how much tighter technical coupling will translate into how much economic flowback for Ethereum. For his part, Monnot summed up the optimistic case well:

"The more external domains/sequencers have the ability to compose with L1 state, e.g., leveraging its liquidity, the more value accrues to it, vs 'islands of state' bootstrapping their own economies without Ethereum's added value."So Ethereum may have spent years outsourcing its scaling, yes, but now it's definitively building the machinery to bring its offspring back into the fold, faster and more unified than ever before. Keep these arcs and their potential on your radar accordingly.

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