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Japan’s premier global card network JCB has partnered with leading crypto firm Circle under a memorandum of understanding to explore stablecoin applications across cross-border payments and retail transactions, according to a recent press release.

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The companies will assess the use of Circle’s USDC and payment infrastructure for JCB’s internal fund transfers, while also examining stablecoin payment options for merchants and overseas visitors in Japan.

The agreement expands JCB’s ongoing push into stablecoin payments after launching a separate initiative with Digital Garage and Resona Holdings earlier this year.

Through these collaborations, JCB aims to enhance payment efficiency, reduce cross-border settlement costs, and support the broader adoption of stablecoin payment infrastructure.

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

JPMorgan has lowered its earnings forecasts for Circle and Coinbase, warning that a new revenue sharing agreement with Hyperliquid is weakening the economics behind USDC.

The bank said the arrangement creates a “prisoner’s dilemma” that encourages Circle and Coinbase to compete for USDC distribution at the expense of their own revenue. JPMorgan described the deal as an immediate earnings headwind for both companies and a larger long term threat to Circle.

Hyperliquid holds roughly $6 billion in USDC, representing about 8% of the stablecoin’s circulating supply, according to estimates from JPMorgan.

Under the revised agreement, Coinbase classifies USDC held on Hyperliquid as an on platform balance. Coinbase collects the income generated by the reserves backing those tokens and passes 90% of it to Hyperliquid. The company previously shared nearly all of that income evenly with Circle, JPMorgan said.

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“We think the change in the Hyperliquid relationship showcases the challenge for Circle and Coinbase partnership agreements,” analysts led by Kenneth Worthington wrote in a Tuesday report.

The agreement was announced in May as part of Hyperliquid’s updated Aligned Quote Asset framework. Coinbase became the treasury deployer for USDC on the network, while Circle remained responsible for minting, redemptions and crosschain transfer infrastructure.

Circle also staked 500,000 HYPE tokens as part of the arrangement. USDC remains the main collateral asset across Hyperliquid’s spot and perpetual futures markets.

Hyperliquid processed more than $150 billion in trading volume during July, while its volume relative to Binance reached 11.5%, according to JPMorgan. The bank said the platform’s growing share of the crypto derivatives market has made it an increasingly important distribution channel for USDC.

Previous estimates from Compass Point suggested the agreement could redirect between $135 million and $160 million in annual reserve income toward Hyperliquid. The firm estimated that the arrangement could reduce the combined annual earnings of Circle and Coinbase by between $60 million and $80 million.

JPMorgan also cited weaker crypto trading volumes and asset prices in cutting its forecasts for both companies. Higher interest rates could provide some support for USDC reserve income over the longer term.

USDC circulation has fallen to approximately $73 billion from nearly $80 billion in March. The broader stablecoin market has contracted by about $10 billion since May as crypto trading activity weakened and competition from regulated stablecoin issuers increased.

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

@Circle has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with JCB, Japan's largest card network, to explore using $USDC for cross-border payments and merchant transactions. The announcement, made on July 14, 2026, marks one of the most significant moves yet to bring regulated stablecoin infrastructure into a mainstream Asian payments network.

What the Partnership Covers The deal has two core areas of focus. First, the companies will launch a proof of concept leveraging $USDC to streamline JCB's internal fund transfers, with the broader goal of lowering remittance costs and improving cross-border transaction efficiency. Second, the companies will explore in-store stablecoin payment experiences for merchants and international visitors to Japan, while evaluating technologies that support interoperability and seamless payment experiences across multiple blockchain networks.

JCB, which has 140 million users and 40 million merchants worldwide, and Circle will explore how stablecoins can enhance cross-border treasury operations and payments. The scale of JCB's network means even a limited rollout would represent a material expansion of $USDC's real-world utility.

It is worth noting the current scope of the agreement. The partnership does not immediately mean that consumers will begin using $USDC through JCB cards or payment services. Instead, the initial stage focuses on research, testing, and evaluating possible use cases.

Part of a Broader Push in Japan The JCB deal is not Circle's only move in Japan. Circle has said it would partner with Nomura to develop a $USDC-based foreign exchange settlement service for Japanese businesses as early as 2027. Meanwhile, the initiative comes amid a broader push for stablecoin adoption in Japan, including pilots such as Lawson convenience stores testing yen-denominated stablecoin payments starting in August.

JCB itself has been building toward this moment. In January 2026, the credit card issuer partnered with Digital Garage and Resona Holdings to pilot real-world stablecoin applications within Japanese brick-and-mortar stores. The Circle MOU adds a globally recognised stablecoin issuer to that existing framework, broadening the scope of what JCB can offer merchants and international cardholders.

Under this MOU, JCB and Circle will explore collaboration opportunities that combine Circle's stablecoin payment infrastructure with JCB's global merchant network to advance cross-border payments and develop new payment experiences for merchants and customers.

Sources:
CoinDesk: Circle Signs MOU with Japan's Largest Card Network to Explore Stablecoin Payments
Finextra: JCB Signs Stablecoin MOU with Circle
ACN Newswire: JCB Signs Memorandum of Understanding with Circle (Official Press Release)

The two largest retail-facing trading platforms in the US are now competing for your idle stablecoins, and they’ve both picked the same DeFi protocol to do it. Coinbase and Robinhood have each built yield products on top of Morpho, the decentralized lending infrastructure that has quietly amassed over $11B in total value locked.

Two platforms, two philosophies Coinbase launched its onchain USDC lending product via Morpho back on September 18, 2025. The yields are variable, meaning they fluctuate with supply and demand in the lending markets, and the platform has advertised rates reaching as high as 10.8%.

On top of the base lending rate, Coinbase participants can earn MORPHO token rewards. These are claimable periodically, with Coinbase One subscribers reportedly getting enhanced access.

Coinbase has also introduced two risk-tiered vault options curated by Steakhouse Financial: “Prime” and “Higher Yield.” The Prime vault carries lower risk and lower returns, while Higher Yield does what the name suggests, with commensurately more exposure.

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Robinhood took a different path entirely. Its “Robinhood Earn” product started rolling out around July 1, 2026, and it targets an estimated 7% APY on USDG, its own stablecoin. Rather than letting rates float, Robinhood is fixing the yield for a year.

The Robinhood vault operates on the Robinhood Chain and is backed by insurance from Lloyd’s of London.

Why Morpho is the quiet winner Neither platform built its own lending protocol from scratch. Both chose Morpho, which functions as permissionless lending infrastructure that lets anyone create isolated lending markets, or “vaults,” with customizable risk parameters.

Neither platform requires lockup periods. Users can deposit and withdraw based on vault liquidity, with interest accruing instantly.

What this means for investors Coinbase’s variable model rewards active participants who understand DeFi mechanics and are comfortable with rate fluctuations. When lending demand is high, you could earn well above 7%. The MORPHO token rewards add upside, but tokens are inherently volatile.

Robinhood’s fixed 7% is designed for people who want to set it and forget it. The Lloyd’s insurance backing adds a layer of confidence that’s unusual in crypto yield products. But fixed rates carry their own risk for the platform: if market rates drop below 7%, Robinhood is subsidizing the difference. If rates spike well above 7%, users miss out on the upside.

Both Coinbase and Robinhood are publicly traded, SEC-reporting companies offering yield products built on decentralized infrastructure. The fact that regulators haven’t blocked these products, at least so far, suggests a growing tolerance for DeFi integrations when wrapped in compliant, insured, consumer-friendly packaging.

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

https://www.circle.com/blog/circle-and-usdc-expansion-with-hyperliquid

JPMorgan has expressed concerns about the rapid expansion of HyperliquidX, indicating that its growth could undermine the economic model of Circle’s USDC stablecoin. According to a social media report by @DegenerateNews, HyperliquidX’s expanding market presence and significant holdings in USDC are capturing yield revenues typically associated with Circle. Hyperliquid, known for its decentralized perpetual exchange platform, has amassed over $5 billion in USDC and processed significant volumes, suggesting a shift in the stablecoin landscape. This development raises questions about the future competitive dynamics between HyperliquidX and USDC, particularly as Hyperliquid aligns yields with its protocol through mechanisms like HYPE buybacks.

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Key Takeaways JPMorgan’s statement suggests that HyperliquidX’s growth is seen as a threat to Circle’s USDC economic model. HyperliquidX’s substantial USDC holdings and activity indicate a shift in stablecoin yield dynamics. Market pricing suggests a potential increase in confidence in Hyperliquid, with odds for its price reaching $100 by year-end adjusting accordingly. What to Watch Watch for Hyperliquid’s continued expansion and its impact on USDC’s market dominance. Developments such as major partnerships, technological advancements, or changes in institutional investor behavior could influence market perceptions. Observers should watch for any strategic moves by Circle to counter Hyperliquid’s influence on the stablecoin ecosystem. Additionally, fluctuations in the Hyperliquid market price will provide further indications of how these dynamics are evolving.

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Term Structure

Contract Odds Δ since publish Volume 24h December 31 31% — — View market → January 1 2027 5.7% — — View market → January 1 2027 4% — — View market → January 1 2027 66.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 9.2% — — View market → January 1 2027 4.5% — — View market →

The tokenization of real world assets has stopped being a single chain story. Stocks, ETFs, and other traditional finance products are being issued and traded across an expanding set of networks, and wallets are increasingly the layer expected to keep pace. KuCoin Web3 Wallet is extending its reach into that landscape with newly added support for Robinhood Chain, giving users a self-custodial entry point into the network and the tokenized asset ecosystem forming around it.

The update allows users to add Robinhood Chain within the wallet, manage compatible assets natively, and access ecosystem applications as they become available. Notably, KuCoin Web3 Wallet arrives early here, among the first Web3 wallets to support the network, which gives its users visibility into an ecosystem still in its formative stage rather than one already consolidated around a handful of dominant players.

This is not an isolated move. It extends a pattern that has been building for months: support for tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, the rollout of xStocks, the addition of in-wallet perpetuals, and continual multi-chain expansion. Taken together, these updates describe a wallet trying to position itself less as a place to park crypto and more as a general purpose interface for onchain finance broadly, crypto native and traditional finance linked assets alike.

The Robinhood Chain integration is also a useful data point for anyone tracking where RWA activity is actually forming. Beyond the tokenized products one might expect given the name recognition involved, the chain has already shown signs of organic, community driven activity, including user created assets and early onchain interactions that were not centrally orchestrated. That kind of grassroots activity is often a leading indicator of ecosystem growth, suggesting Robinhood Chain is developing real usage patterns rather than sitting idle after launch.

What ties this back to the broader industry conversation is fragmentation. As more tokenized assets, applications, and financial use cases move onchain, they are doing so across a growing number of chains that do not natively interoperate, forcing users to piece together access through multiple wallets and bridges. Wallet providers are increasingly being asked to solve that problem at the access layer, since most users have neither the time nor the expertise to manage it themselves. Folding new networks like Robinhood Chain into a single multi-chain wallet, rather than treating each as a separate destination, is a direct response to that pressure.

The practical effect lands differently depending on who is using it. Web3 native users get another avenue into RWA and stock token activity without leaving their existing self-custodial setup. Traditional finance investors testing the waters of onchain finance get something closer to familiar market exposure, translated into a format they can hold and manage themselves rather than through an intermediary. Both groups benefit from the same underlying shift: fewer walls between where an asset lives and where a user can actually reach it.

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Chainlink’s (LINK) base of wallets is expanding on Ethereum (ETH) while its price continues to face market headwinds.

New Santiment data puts the count at a record 900,000, and a wave of fresh integrations suggests the growth is not accidental.

Chainlink Adoption Grows While Price LagsThe figure marks an all-time high for non-empty LINK wallets on Ethereum, with more than 20,000 added over the past month. Data from Santiment shows the additions came without a price breakout. 

“That kind of holder growth is usually a sign of long-term confidence,” Santiment said.

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Chainlink Non-Empty Wallet Growth. Source: X/SantimentThe context makes the trend notable. LINK trades near $7.9, down roughly 49% over the past year and about 85% below its 2021 peak. Sentiment remains weak, yet the base of wallets continues to grow rather than shrink.

“LINK’s holder base growing during weak market conditions is a strong signal. Price may still need market-wide momentum, but adoption is clearly moving in the right direction,” Santiment added.

Chainlink (LINK) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto MarketsAave Deepens CCIP RelianceSantiment tied the growth to Chainlink’s widening role as market infrastructure, citing its use across DeFi, tokenized assets, data feeds, and cross-chain settlement. The firm said institutional tokenization, adoption of the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), and capital-market integrations are expanding.

Recently, Aave (AAVE) selected Chainlink’s CCIP to power vault rebalancing, deposits, and transfers inside its mobile app. 

It is one of several recent adopters. Chainlink’s latest adoption update logged eight integrations of its standard across four services and four chains, with users including Commertize, Mantle, Poppie Finance, and YuzuMoney.

CCIP now spans 35 chains and supports 76 cross-chain tokens. Tokenized-asset value on the protocol climbed 36.5% to $330.21 million over 30 days, per RWA.xyz data recorded on July 14.

That tension defines the current setup. Adoption signals point one way, price points another, and the coming quarters will test whether usage eventually pulls the token with it.

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In March 2000, Michael Saylor, now executive chairman of Strategy, saw his fortune drop by more than $6 billion in a single day after MicroStrategy’s shares plunged more than 60%. This event left him at the center of the dot-com crash and became a notable moment in corporate history.

Saylor’s Transformation and Strategy’s Bitcoin BetStrategy, formerly MicroStrategy, is a US-based software and business intelligence firm known for holding the largest Bitcoin reserve among publicly traded companies, with 843,775 BTC. The company became an industry model when it adopted Bitcoin as its main treasury asset in 2020, inspiring similar moves by other listed firms.

Saylor described fiat cash reserves as a “melting ice cube” and initiated Strategy’s first $250 million Bitcoin purchase on August 11, 2020. At that time, public companies rarely held Bitcoin, and Saylor’s approach was widely regarded as a significant risk rather than conventional financial strategy.

Despite doubts, Bitcoin’s rising price fueled Strategy’s market value, positioning the company as a de facto proxy for Bitcoin exposure on Wall Street. As a result, its Bitcoin holdings today are valued at more than $54 billion.

Shift in Strategy and Market ReactionsOn June 29, Strategy revealed a new capital structure allowing it to sell Bitcoin to fund dividends on preferred stock, increase its cash reserves, and repurchase securities. This marked a notable departure from its previous stance of exclusively accumulating BTC. Days later, the company sold 3,588 BTC—the largest sale since designating Bitcoin as its principal reserve asset.

This move drew concern among investors who for years had believed that Strategy would not sell its holdings. Supporters characterize the change as the natural evolution of a multinational enterprise with a sizable digital treasury, while critics highlight growing risks due to mounting obligations and reliance on external financing.

Strategy’s willingness to sell Bitcoin is less a departure from accumulation than a practical reality of managing a complex corporate balance sheet, according to Drew Forman, senior vice president and head of strategy at Talos. He sees it as “a pragmatic evolution of a more complex treasury strategy.”

After the dot-com era, Saylor spent nearly two decades out of the limelight until reemerging with Strategy’s Bitcoin-focused approach. The company’s financial reporting standards are seen as stricter now compared to the accounting scandal that led to a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2000.

Currently, Saylor leads Strategy as it manages convertible debt and perpetual preferred stock balances. As of late May 2026, Strategy held $6.7 billion in convertible notes and $15.5 billion in preferred stock, much of it raised to buy additional Bitcoin.

Mini dictionary: Preferred stock – A class of ownership in a corporation with a fixed dividend that has priority over common stock dividends but usually does not confer voting rights.

AssetAmount heldOutstanding (May 2026)Bitcoin843,775 BTC$54 billion (approximate)Convertible notesN/A$6.7 billionPreferred stockN/A$15.5 billionCritics and Contrasting ViewsSome analysts argue that Strategy’s model only remains stable if Bitcoin continues to appreciate and investors keep supplying new capital. They caution that, under prolonged market downturns, reliance on debt and equity issuance could create a “death spiral.”

Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU Stern, questioned Saylor’s aggressive approach to risk and highlighted the lack of fundamental earnings supporting Strategy’s valuation. David Trainer, CEO of investment research firm New Constructs, believes that although the company’s mechanics differ from its dot-com-era collapse, the underlying risk persists due to Strategy’s structure as a highly leveraged proxy for a volatile asset.

Trainer warned that if the investor premium for holding exposure through Strategy disappears, the company’s advantages could vanish, forcing it to sell Bitcoin, seek costlier financing, or halt expansion.

While doubts linger about the sustainability of this financial model, Strategy’s impact on corporate treasury management is evident. Many companies have followed its lead, treating Bitcoin as an institutional asset that requires active governance and risk management.

The future of Strategy hinges on whether its capital structure can withstand future market turbulence, rather than the outcome of the next bullish run in digital assets.

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.

Silver Down 52% From All-Time High as Hormuz Oil Shock Fuels Fed Hike Bets

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) price is up 2% on Tuesday, testing the breakout of its 50-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at $1.95. On-chain data show early signs of a deflationary mechanism, with the capture rate rising to 30% over 30 days and 24% of revenue being shifted toward buybacks. A 7% jump in NEAR futures Open Interest and a positive funding rate reflect retail support amid a near-term recovery phase.

Technically, NEAR must sustain a daily close above its 50-day EMA at $1.95 to extend its recovery toward $2.54.

Early signs of deflationary tokenomicsNEAR Intents, a new transaction primitive on NEAR Protocol, has increased revenue per similar transaction volume, indicating greater efficiency and fueling its buyback program. Typically, an increase in buybacks leads to greater demand for the token due to thinner supply and improved sentiment.

In a recent X post, NEAR Protocol announced that its all-time trading volume surpassed $22 billion, with lifetime revenue of $4.05 million. However, the capture rate – the share of NEAR captured as revenue – has jumped 30% over the last 30 days, with Net Revenue Yield (NRY) rising over 4% in June, up from around 1.50% in April. This increase in NRY suggests a higher percentage of revenue generated from swap volume, reaffirming the heightened revenue associated with Intents efficiency. 

In addition, 24% of captured revenue feeds the buyback flow over the last 30 days, indicating early signs of a deflationary start. 

On the retail side, CoinGlass data show that NEAR futures Open Interest (OI) is up 7% to $431.67 million over the last 24 hours, indicating a surge in the notional value of active positions. The positional buildup shows a bullish bias, with the funding rate at 0.0101% on Tuesday, indicating buyers are willing to hold long positions at a premium.

NEAR on-chain data.

NEAR derivatives data. Source: CoinGlassWill NEAR price rise above $2?NEAR Protocol shows a steady recovery on Tuesday, inching closer to the $2.00 mark. The recovery is testing a breakout of a crucial resistance barrier, which includes the overhead trendline near the 50-day EMA at $1.95 and the 50% retracement at $1.96, measured over the $1.24-$3.08 upswing. A decisive close above the zone could test the 78.6% Fibonacci retracement level at $2.54, projecting an upside potential of roughly 20%.

Momentum stays supportive, with the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) rising above its signal line with renewed positive histograms, as the Relative Strength Index (RSI) rises toward to the neutral 50 mark, hinting at room for further upside move.

NEAR/USDT daily price chart.On the downside, initial support is seen at the reclaimed support trendline level near $1.87, reinforced by the 200-day EMA at $1.79.

(The technical analysis of this story was written with the help of an AI tool. Know more.)

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has responded after Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings partnered with the Solana Foundation to build an on chain financial market in Japan. 

The deal has fueled the criticism across the Cardano community, with many ADA supporters questioning why one of Cardano’s strongest markets is now backing a rival blockchain.

Why Are Cardano Holders Upset?SBI recently announced its partnership with the Solana Foundation to develop stablecoins and tokenize real-world assets in Japan. The announcement quickly frustrated Cardano supporters because Japan has played a major role in Cardano’s history. 

During Cardano’s early fundraising, nearly 90% of ADA’s initial token sale was completed by Japanese investors, making Japan one of the project’s biggest supporters from the beginning.

Following SBI’s announcement, Cardano community member Brandolf called the move:

“This is a blow in the face of the whole Cardano community.”

Many users also questioned why Cardano was unable to secure such a major partnership in one of its strongest markets.

Also Read : Charles Hoskinson Says Cardano Must Move Beyond Crypto to Survive

Hoskinson Says “It’s Not His Job Alone”Responding to a community user on X, Hoskinson rejected the criticism, saying that commercial partnerships require organizations with funding and a clear mandate.

“Why would it be? We started there, but we need commercial representation to make these deals.”

He simply said that if the community wants more partnerships, it should use Cardano’s treasury to fund organizations responsible for signing commercial agreements.

“If you want them, then pay for them. Use the treasury to finance an initiative and seal deals.”

Why would it be? We started there, but we need commercial representation to make these deals. If you want them, then pay for them. Use the treasury to finance an initiative and seal deals. Or have learned helplessness over social media and earn bonus points for blaming Charles

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) July 13, 2026 Also Read : Charles Hoskinson says More Cardano Projects Will Die in 2026

EMURGO Talk Sparks Fresh QuestionsThe discussion soon shifted toward EMURGO, Cardano’s Tokyo-based commercial arm. Brandolf argued that EMURGO already exists to build business partnerships and regional blockchain projects in Japan.

Hoskinson responded that neither EMURGO nor the Cardano Foundation is under a contract that forces them to pursue specific commercial deals.

“They aren’t going to do it, and, like the CF, there is no contract to compel them. Stop complaining and assign it to someone else.”

ADA Price Slides 11.5%Meanwhile, Cardano’s price has remained under pressure, falling 11.5% over the past week from around $0.1893 to nearly $0.1585.

Looking ahead, $0.1640 is the first key resistance level to watch. If ADA fails to break and hold above this level, the selling pressure could continue, pushing the price back toward its July 1 low near $0.1427.

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Four Banks Raised Robinhood’s Target in Eight Days: What Do They See Coming?

Stephen “Cap” Newnham, who leads the Solana community group Superteam UK, said he will run as an independent candidate in the Aug. 13 parliamentary by-election in Clacton against Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.

On Tuesday, Newnham outlined five campaign pledges, including support for local entrepreneurs, digital and artificial intelligence education, financial literacy in schools and onchain political transparency. He announced his intention to stand as an independent candidate on July 9.

Newnham’s fourth pledge, “You should own your pension,” argues that existing structures like self-invested personal pensions and small self-administered schemes allow savers to choose where their assets are held. He also pledged full transparency, with donations and meetings published in plain English and onchain. 

The campaign has not detailed a role for blockchain technology in managing pension assets or proposed changes to pension law. A blockchain could make published records more difficult to alter, but it would not by itself ensure that every donation or meeting had been disclosed.

Cointelegraph contacted Newnham for more information about his proposals but had not received a response by publication.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Newnham studied economics at the University of Edinburgh before joining the Solana ecosystem. He leads Superteam UK and has co-authored a report on blockchain and the future of work with Coinbase’s Stand With Crypto campaign and the DLT Science Foundation.

Superteam UK said the Cap for Clacton community was established to help retain technical talent in Britain by supporting founders and developers building on Solana, arguing that many entrepreneurs leave the country in search of better funding and startup opportunities abroad.

Farage funding scrutiny shapes contestThe candidacy brings an explicit crypto platform into a contest triggered when Farage resigned from Parliament on Wednesday and opted to recontest his Clacton seat amid a parliamentary standards investigation into whether Farage should have declared a 5 million pound ($6.7 million) personal gift from crypto investor Christopher Harborne. Farage has said he was not required to declare the gift because it was received before he entered Parliament. 

Farage has faced additional scrutiny over reported financial support from crypto entrepreneur George Cottrell and allegations that his financial relationships intersected with his advocacy on digital asset policy. Farage has denied wrongdoing and said he followed parliamentary rules.

National poll favors Count BinfaceAt the time of writing, Democracy Club lists 11 prospective candidates, including Newnham, Farage and satirical candidate Count Binface, though the council is not expected to confirm the official field until July 17. 

On Friday, an Ipsos survey of 1,000 British adults found 33% would prefer Binface to win, compared with 21% for Farage, but the national poll did not measure voting intentions among Clacton residents. 

Early survey results on the upcoming by-election. Source: Ipsos

Despite the unconventional field, the result is being closely watched because of Farage’s involvement and the scrutiny surrounding his decision to force a new vote.

Magazine: Thai scammer’s $122M wallet, Japan embraces crypto credit: Asia Express

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

A Solana ecosystem leader is running for UK Parliament. Stephen “Cap” Newnham, who heads Superteam UK, announced his candidacy for the Clacton by-election on July 14, 2026, putting himself directly opposite Nigel Farage with a platform that reads less like a traditional campaign manifesto and more like a web3 whitepaper.

His pitch: pension reform and onchain transparency for government.

From hackathons to hustings Newnham’s crypto credentials are substantial. As the lead of Superteam UK, a decentralized talent network operating within the Solana ecosystem, he has helped facilitate over £1 million in earnings for UK-based talent through Solana-related opportunities. The projects associated with Superteam UK have collectively raised more than $40 million.

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Globally, the Superteam network has distributed over $1.7 million in what it calls “community GDP,” flowing through bounties, grants, and job placements.

Before leading Superteam UK, Newnham won a Solana hackathon and served as marketing manager at Flight3. He also serves as CEO of BOO Ventures, described as a multi-chain web3 DAO.

His recent social media activity has leaned into themes of “building back Britain” while also referencing Breakpoint London, Solana’s marquee developer conference.

Onchain transparency meets pension reform The two pillars of Newnham’s platform, pension reform and onchain transparency, are more connected than they might initially appear. The transparency angle is straightforward in concept: use blockchain technology to create verifiable, tamper-proof records of government spending, voting, and decision-making.

For Solana specifically, having a prominent community leader running for Parliament on a platform that essentially advertises onchain governance adds a layer of mainstream visibility that hackathons and token launches cannot provide.

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

HomeCryptoMARKETSSBI Holdings and Solana Foundation launch a collaboration to build onchain finance in Japan, covering stablecoins, tokenized assets, and cross-border settlement.

Japan's SBI Holdings and the Solana Foundation are teaming up to build an onchain financial market from Japan, a move both organizations are framing as a landmark step for digital finance, not just in Japan, but globally.

SBI Holdings and the Solana Foundation announced the strategic collaboration on July 13, 2026. 

As part of the collaborayiom, SBI R3 Japan Co., Ltd. plans to change its trade name to SBI Solana Global Co., Ltd. (a tentative name), and will pursue a new growth strategy alongside existing shareholders SBI Holdings and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG).

Why Japan, and why nowStablecoins and tokenized real-world assets have been expanding rapidly across global markets, with onchain finance, where financial assets are issued, distributed, and settled directly on blockchain networks, increasingly viewed as the next generation of financial market infrastructure.

Solana is a layer-1 blockchain known for high throughput, low transaction costs, and one of the largest ecosystems in the industry, making it a natural technical foundation for this kind of infrastructure.

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Japan brings something different to the partnership: deep pools of financial assets, a broad base of market participants, and a legal framework that has moved further ahead than many other jurisdictions in preparing for digital assets. 

The collaboration is designed to connect those domestic strengths with Solana's global network, linking Japan's financial market directly to global liquidity. 

The stated goal is to establish Japan as a core hub for onchain finance across Asia.

What SBI Solana Global will actually buildThe new entity plans to pursue several initiatives, all built on Solana:

Supporting the issuance and distribution of stablecoins, including a yen-denominated stablecoin known as JPYSC.Supporting the structuring and distribution of tokenized real-world assets, including corporate bonds, commercial paper, funds, and real estate.Developing cross-border settlement infrastructure.Providing onchain financial services for institutional investors.Developing next-generation payment infrastructure built for the AI-agent era.By offering integrated support spanning technology, issuance, distribution, and settlement, SBI Solana Global aims to accelerate the growth of an onchain financial market rooted in Japan.

What comes nextSBI Group and Solana say they plan to expand this collaboration beyond Japan, working toward broader integration with markets across Asia and globally as the two organizations build out new financial infrastructure for the onchain era.

Confirmo has rolled out an automated stablecoin-based subscription payment service designed to help businesses simplify recurring billing using wallets, exchanges, and enterprise platforms. The new solution delivers automated, scheduled payments for subscription companies, software-as-a-service providers, and trading platforms across the global digital asset sector.

Enterprise subscription payments with stablecoinsThe platform, named Subscribe, enables enterprises to process recurring transactions in stablecoins without the need for separate blockchain infrastructure or complex new systems. Businesses can maintain their current payment configurations while adding support for automated digital asset payments.

Subscribe initially supports USDC, issued by Circle, and USDG, provided by Paxos, operating on both the Solana and Polygon blockchains. This integration extends recurring payment functionality to users transacting in these two stablecoins across multiple blockchain networks.

Customers can authorize recurring payments via hundreds of digital wallets compatible with WalletConnect, granting broad user access. By including both self-custody wallet options and exchange accounts, the service allows for flexibility in payment methods. Merchants benefit from automated settlements that follow predetermined billing dates, supporting seamless revenue management across global customer bases.

Confirmo has stated that subscription pricing remains denominated in US dollars, which serves to minimize exposure to the volatility common in the cryptocurrency markets. This approach helps businesses plan more predictable revenues and potentially reduce the expense of international transaction processing.

NetworkSupported StablecoinsPayment MethodsSolanaUSDC, USDGSelf-custody wallets, exchange accountsPolygonUSDC, USDGSelf-custody wallets, exchange accountsMerchants can view all scheduled and completed payments directly within the Confirmo dashboard, allowing them to manage both recurring subscriptions and other stablecoin payment activities from a single interface.

Mini dictionary: Confirmo is a fintech company focusing on automated blockchain payment solutions for businesses, offering services to help enterprises integrate digital asset transactions into their standard payment flows.

Development supported by FTMO partnershipConfirmo worked with FTMO, a proprietary trading firm, to design and test the subscription platform before commercial release. By involving FTMO as a design partner, Confirmo adapted Subscribe to address practical requirements of businesses facing operational challenges with cross-border and recurring stablecoin payments.

The service aligns with a wider industry trend to expand the use of stablecoins beyond trading activities toward payment automation, cross-border settlements, and recurring billing solutions.

Anna Kratky Strebl, Group CEO at Confirmo, stated that Subscribe equips merchants with a transparent, efficient approach for managing recurring revenue and offers consumers the convenience of using familiar digital wallets and accounts.

Confirmo emphasized that recurring payments are visible and managed from an integrated dashboard, providing transparency and control over subscription revenues. The company aims to offer reliable payment infrastructure to a growing digital asset user base worldwide.

Recent reports project the global subscription market to reach $1.2 trillion by 2030, underlining increasing demand for flexible and robust billing tools among businesses. The expansion of digital asset ownership further supports the case for blockchain-based solutions in enterprise payment operations.

Through the Subscribe platform, Confirmo intends to make enterprise-grade stablecoin payment automation more accessible, enabling companies to streamline international commerce and adapt to the evolving digital financial landscape.

Confirmo’s latest product demonstrates the company’s focus on delivering scalable, stablecoin-powered payment systems as subscriptions and digital assets gain traction in the wider economy.

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.

On July 13, one of Japan’s largest financial conglomerates rewired its blockchain strategy in a single press release. SBI Holdings announced that the Solana Foundation will take an equity stake in SBI R3 Japan, the joint venture it shares with Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, and that the entity will be renamed SBI Solana Global. 

Summary

SBI Holdings and the Solana Foundation formed SBI Solana Global to support yen stablecoins, tokenized assets, and institutional blockchain services in Japan. The venture gives Solana one of its strongest institutional partnerships in Asia, though key commercial details and launch timelines remain undisclosed. The announcement had little immediate impact on SOL price as markets continued waiting for products and measurable on chain adoption. The new company’s mandate reads like a full-stack blueprint for moving Japanese finance onto a public blockchain: yen stablecoin issuance and distribution, tokenization of corporate bonds, commercial paper, funds, and real estate, cross-border settlement rails, institutional on-chain services, and payment infrastructure for AI agents. For Solana, it is the deepest institutional embrace the network has received in Asia. For SBI, a company that spent nearly a decade as Ripple’s most committed champion in the region, it is a pivot loaded with signal. The question the market spent July 14 arguing about is which signal: validation of Solana as institutional infrastructure, or a reminder of how much distance separates a memorandum from a market.

The price answered with a shrug. SOL traded near $76 as the announcement circulated, slipping roughly 3.5 percent in line with a broader risk-off session, its market capitalization holding above $44 billion. That muted reaction is itself the story.

A G-SIB-adjacent joint venture with equity participation from the Solana Foundation would have produced a double-digit candle in any prior cycle. In this one, it landed on a market that has learned to discount institutional announcements until they ship products, and the gap between the announcement’s strategic weight and its price impact frames both sides of the debate that follows.

NEW: SBI Holdings and the Solana Foundation partner to build an onchain financial market in Japan

SBI Solana Global will support stablecoin issuance, tokenized real-world assets, cross-border settlement, and institutional services pic.twitter.com/Dn1WDFmEHg

— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) July 14, 2026 What was actually announced Strip the release to its verifiable commitments and the structure is more concrete than the usual partnership language. SBI R3 Japan, the existing entity, adopts the planned trade name SBI Solana Global following standard corporate procedures. The Solana Foundation, the Swiss organization that stewards the network, acquires a fresh equity stake alongside existing shareholders SBI Holdings and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. Equity matters here: foundations typically sign memoranda and grant programs, not cap tables. Taking ownership in the operating company aligns the foundation’s incentives with the venture’s commercial outcomes and gives Solana a seat inside a regulated Japanese financial group rather than a logo on its slide deck.

The mandate spans five areas. First, supporting the issuance and circulation of stablecoins, explicitly including JPYSC, the yen-denominated stablecoin SBI launched in June. Second, structuring and distributing tokenized real-world assets: corporate bonds, commercial paper, investment funds, and real estate, the deepest asset pools in Japanese finance. Third, cross-border payment and settlement infrastructure connecting Japan-originated assets to global liquidity. Fourth, on-chain financial services for institutional investors, covering issuance, transfer, recordkeeping, and settlement. Fifth, and most speculative, next-generation payment systems for the AI agent economy, in which automated software transacts under defined controls without human initiation. SBI framed the collective ambition as making Japan a core hub for on-chain finance in Asia by creating a new market for Japanese digital assets.

What was not announced matters equally. The size of the foundation’s stake is undisclosed. So are product launch dates, fee structures, revenue expectations, and the distribution channel: whether products flow through SBI VC Trade, through Bitbank, the exchange SBI has moved to acquire in a deal reported around 46.7 billion yen, or through another group entity. The venture, as of today, is a structure and a mandate. Everything commercial remains to be built.

The JPYSC foundation The announcement builds directly on a milestone from three weeks earlier. On June 24, Japan launched its first trust-backed yen stablecoin, JPYSC, through a joint initiative between SBI Group and Web3 infrastructure firm Startale Group. SBI Shinsei Trust Bank serves as issuer, SBI VC Trade handles primary distribution, and the token operates as a Type III Electronic Payment Instrument under Japan’s amended Payment Services Act. That classification is the quiet breakthrough: it places a yen token inside a dedicated regulatory category with defined reserve, redemption, and disclosure obligations, which is precisely the legal scaffolding that lets regulated institutions touch the product.

A yen stablecoin with trust-bank issuance is the keystone asset for everything else in the SBI Solana Global mandate. Tokenized bonds need a settlement leg. Cross-border corridors need a regulated on-ramp on the Japanese side. Institutional on-chain services need a cash instrument that compliance departments recognize. One caveat belongs in every analysis: SBI has not confirmed that JPYSC has been issued on Solana or that Solana will become its primary network. The venture will support the token’s issuance and circulation, but the chain-level architecture remains unstated, and the distinction between a Solana-native yen stablecoin and a multi-chain one materially changes how much of the resulting activity accrues to the network the foundation just bought into.

Why Japan, and why now Japan is an unusual candidate for on-chain finance leadership until you look at its rulebook. The country moved earlier than nearly every major market to build statutory frameworks for both stablecoins and security tokens. Stablecoins sit under the Payment Services Act with its dedicated electronic payment instrument categories. Tokenized securities operate inside existing disclosure law through a security token offering regime that domestic institutions have already used for bond and real estate issuance. While the United States argues over the CLARITY Act and its committee reconciliations, as crypto.news has tracked through the bill’s collapsing passage odds, Japan’s equivalent questions were answered by statute years ago. The venture is not waiting on a legal gate. It is standing on one.

That regulatory position explains the timing from the Japanese side. Domestic competition to build the tokenization stack has intensified: SMBC Group has explored stablecoin issuance with Ava Labs, Fireblocks, and TIS. The Progmat platform, backed by a consortium of Japan’s megabanks, has advanced tokenized bonds. Japan Open Chain pursues a similar mandate on domestic rails. SBI itself has worked with Chainlink on tokenized asset infrastructure and led a $125 million round in risk-modeling firm Gauntlet to build institutional DeFi capability. The race is domestic before it is global, and locking a major public network into an equity structure is a differentiating move no rival has matched. For the Solana side, Japan offers what every layer-1 foundation wants and few can get: a G-SIB shareholder, a compliant asset pipeline, and a jurisdiction where the products are legal before they launch.

How Solana became the institutional candidate The selection deserves its own examination, because five years ago the sentence “a Japanese megabank consortium chose Solana for bond settlement” would have read as satire. The network’s early institutional reputation was defined by outages and by an ecosystem culture built around memecoins and retail speculation. The rehabilitation happened in layers. Client diversity and successive network upgrades pushed reliability into territory institutions could underwrite. The validator economics and fee markets matured. The developer ecosystem, measured by shipped applications, kept compounding through the bear market. And critically for this use case, the network’s core design tradeoff, maximal throughput and minimal cost on a single integrated layer, maps cleanly onto what securities settlement actually requires: high message volume, deterministic finality, and fees small enough to vanish inside institutional operating costs.

The contrast with the alternative public-chain path is instructive. Ethereum’s institutional pitch routes through its layer-2 architecture, which offers deep liquidity and conservative security assumptions at the cost of fragmentation: assets and settlement scattered across rollups with distinct trust models and bridging risk. For a regulated issuer building a national market from scratch, a single high-capacity layer with one operational model is an easier system to document, audit, and explain to a financial regulator. That does not make it the winning choice in every jurisdiction, and Ethereum’s institutional footprint in tokenized funds remains the largest in the world. It explains why a greenfield national buildout, with no legacy liquidity to protect, optimized for integration simplicity. SBI ran production systems on permissioned rails for a decade; its engineers know exactly what operational complexity costs.

The market Japan is playing for The prize behind the mandate is the tokenization of conventional assets, the one crypto vertical where institutional forecasts and shipped products have both kept growing through the bear market. Tokenized money market funds and treasuries crossed from pilot to product globally, stablecoin settlement volumes now rival card networks on some corridors, and every major custodian has a tokenization roadmap. The economics driving it are prosaic: settlement compression from days to minutes, collateral mobility across time zones, fractionalization of large-ticket assets like real estate, and the removal of reconciliation layers that exist only because ledgers do not talk to each other.

Japan’s specific opportunity is scale plus stagnation. The country holds one of the deepest bond markets on earth, a vast commercial paper market, and household financial assets in the quadrillions of yen, overwhelmingly parked in instruments whose infrastructure has not changed in decades. A regulated tokenization pipeline that moved even a fraction of a percent of that stock would dwarf every crypto-native RWA experiment to date. That is the arithmetic that makes a cautious conglomerate move: the venture is not chasing crypto volumes, it is positioning for the plumbing upgrade of a domestic capital market, with the yen stablecoin as the settlement layer and the public chain as the registry. Whether that flow prices SOL is a separate question, and an honest one, but the flow itself is the largest addressable market any layer-1 has been formally pointed at in Asia.

The Ripple question No analysis of this announcement is complete without the elephant in SBI’s portfolio. SBI spent close to a decade as Ripple’s anchor partner in Asia: joint ventures, board relationships, XRP-based remittance corridors, and most recently the distribution of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin in Japan. The reflexive reading of the Solana pivot is that SBI is diversifying away from a partner whose token has spent 2026 pinned near $1, and the crypto commentariat spent the announcement day running exactly that narrative.

The evidence supports a more boring conclusion: addition, not substitution. The RLUSD distribution agreement stands. The remittance businesses continue. SBI’s investor materials describe a multi-stablecoin, multi-chain architecture in which USDC, RLUSD, and JPYSC serve different corridors and client bases. What the Solana venture adds is a public-chain execution layer for the tokenized asset and institutional settlement businesses, a lane Ripple’s enterprise stack was never positioned to own in Japan. The sharper competitive reading runs the other direction: SBI has effectively decided that no single network gets exclusivity over Japanese on-chain finance, and every foundation and issuer now knows the anchor client is polyamorous. That is worse news for maximalists of every persuasion than for any specific chain.

The same logic governs the R3 legacy. SBI R3 Japan was built to commercialize Corda, the permissioned ledger that defined the previous era of institutional blockchain strategy. Renaming the entity around a public network is a clean marker of where that era ended: the consortium chains produced pilots, and the public chains produced markets. The rebrand does not confirm SBI is abandoning Corda-based systems already in production, but the naming decision tells you where the growth budget goes.

There is also a precedent dimension worth naming directly, because it changes how other jurisdictions read the deal. Financial institutions worldwide have partnered with blockchain firms for years, but the standard structures kept the chains at arm’s length: vendor contracts, pilots, consortium memberships that could be exited by memo. An equity joint venture with a foundation, a megabank on the register, and a mandate over core capital markets is a different category of commitment, visible to every regulator and rival that studies it. If the structure works, it becomes the template that other national markets copy, and the foundations of competing networks will be pushed by their own ecosystems to offer equivalent skin. If it stalls, it becomes the cautionary slide in every consultant’s deck for a decade. Either way, the arms-length era of bank-blockchain relations ended in Tokyo this week, and the industry will be arguing about the terms of its replacement for years.

The stablecoin geography taking shape Zoom out from the single announcement and a regional architecture becomes visible. SBI’s portfolio now spans three stablecoin lanes with distinct jurisdictions and jobs: USDC for global dollar liquidity, where SBI’s crypto arm has already built retail lending products; RLUSD for the enterprise settlement corridors it operates with Ripple; and JPYSC for the domestic yen leg that everything Japanese ultimately touches. The Solana Foundation’s parallel moves fill in the map: the KG Inicis work in South Korea targets merchant settlement and loyalty on the peninsula, Circle keeps expanding USDC issuance on the network, and the SBI venture now anchors the Japanese corner. The pattern is a network positioning itself as the neutral settlement layer for Asian currency tokens rather than betting on any single issuer.

The strategic logic runs through corridors. The yen-dollar corridor is among the largest foreign exchange pairs in the world, and the remittance and trade flows between Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia move through correspondent banking machinery whose costs stablecoin rails undercut by an order of magnitude. A regulated yen token, a regulated dollar token, and a common high-throughput chain turn cross-currency settlement from a messaging problem into an atomic transaction, which is the actual product hiding inside the venture’s cross-border mandate. Every incumbent in that machinery, from correspondent banks to card networks, has noticed, which is why the same months produced bank-led stablecoin consortiums on three continents.

The AI agent wildcard The fifth mandate area drew the most skepticism and deserves a fair reading. Payment infrastructure for AI agents means rails on which software authorized by humans or corporations transacts autonomously: procurement bots settling invoices, data services metering usage by the second, machine-to-machine markets for compute and content. Dismissing it as buzzword compliance is tempting, and until volumes exist, partially correct. But the design requirements are real and specific: sub-cent fees, instant finality, programmable controls, and no dependence on card networks built around human cardholders. Those requirements describe a public high-throughput chain settling in stablecoins more than they describe any legacy system, which is why agent payments appear in the roadmaps of nearly every serious payments company this year.

For the venture, the practical significance is optionality. The stablecoin and tokenization lanes justify the buildout on their own; the agent lane is a cheap call option on a category that could grow discontinuously if agentic commerce arrives on the schedule its promoters claim. A conglomerate writing that option into a joint venture mandate in 2026 costs nothing. Owning the regulated yen settlement layer if the option pays would be worth more than the rest of the mandate combined.

The bull case: the pipeline is the prize The bullish argument begins with what Solana receives that no marketing spend could buy. Direct equity participation embeds the foundation in a regulated Japanese financial group with Sumitomo Mitsui, a global systemically important bank, as co-shareholder. The venture’s mandate points Japan’s deepest asset classes, government-adjacent bonds, commercial paper, funds, and real estate, at Solana’s rails. Japan’s regulatory clarity means product launches face licensing work, not legislative risk. And the choice itself is a technical endorsement: a conglomerate that has run production blockchain systems for a decade evaluated the field and selected Solana’s throughput, cost profile, and developer ecosystem for institutional settlement.

The network context strengthens the case. Solana’s institutional year has compounded: Circle expanding USDC issuance on the network, payment processors in South Korea examining stablecoin checkout through KG Inicis, and a steady migration of tokenization pilots from private chains to public rails. The SBI venture slots into that pattern as its largest and most structurally committed Asian instance. If even the stablecoin and bond tokenization lanes ship at modest scale, Solana becomes the default public network for regulated Japanese assets, a position with compounding returns as the tokenization market grows. Institutional adoption is a coordination game, and Japan just coordinated.

The bear case: a mandate is not a market The skeptical argument starts with the same undisclosed list the release left behind. No stake size, no timelines, no revenue targets, no confirmed distribution channel, and no confirmation that even JPYSC, the venture’s flagship asset, runs primarily on Solana.

Japanese financial conglomerates are famously deliberate: the gap between a joint venture announcement and a product at scale is measured in years, and SBI’s own blockchain history includes ventures whose ambitions outran their shipped products. Corda was itself once the announced future of Japanese institutional blockchain, under the very entity being renamed.

The bear case also notes what the price action already said. SOL fell on announcement day, and not because the market misread the release. Institutional partnerships accrue value to the network’s fee economy slowly and to the token’s price more slowly still: tokenized bonds settle in stablecoins, not in SOL, and the network’s revenue capture from regulated asset flows runs through transaction fees that Solana’s architecture deliberately keeps near zero. The venture can succeed completely and still contribute little near-term to the token, which is the asset most readers of the announcement actually hold. Layer on the competitive risk that Progmat and the megabank consortiums keep Japan’s most conservative issuers on domestic rails, and the realistic bear scenario is not failure but marginalization: a venture that ships a stablecoin corridor and some real estate tokens while the core bond market stays where it is.

Finally, the macro caveat applies here as everywhere. Japan’s on-chain ambitions launch into a global regulation and rate environment that has compressed every crypto asset, and institutional programs approved in bull markets have a documented habit of shrinking in committee during bear ones. SMFG’s presence on the cap table is a commitment, not a guarantee of pace.

Where SOL the asset stands while the venture builds The token’s position entering this news cycle explains the muted reaction as much as any skepticism about the deal. SOL near $76 sits far below its cycle highs, compressed by the same Federal Reserve repricing and risk-off rotation that pulled Bitcoin toward $60,000 and drained the altcoin complex. The network’s fundamental dashboard has diverged from its price for months: application revenue, stablecoin supply, and developer activity holding up while the token trades with the market’s beta. Spot Solana ETFs exist in the United States, giving the asset the same wrapper infrastructure as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP, and the March interpretive release that classified the major assets as digital commodities covered the top of the market broadly, leaving Solana’s institutional access story more mature than its price suggests.

That divergence frames how institutional news gets absorbed in this tape. Announcements that would have been front-run violently in a bull regime now enter a market where the marginal price-setter is a macro fund watching rate expectations, not a crypto fund watching partnerships. The historical pattern is that fundamental accumulation during such regimes expresses itself only when the macro binding constraint releases, at which point the assets with the strongest accumulated institutional stories tend to lead. Whether SOL occupies that position at the turn depends on execution stories exactly like this one converting into measurable on-chain flows before the regime changes. The venture’s builders and the token’s holders are, in that sense, racing different clocks toward the same event.

What would make this pivot real The venture converts from announcement to market on a short list of observable milestones, and each has a rough clock. The corporate rebrand completing is trivial but confirms the procedures are moving. Confirmation of JPYSC issuance on Solana, or of a Solana-native issuance track, is the first substantive tell, because the stablecoin is the settlement asset every other product needs. The first tokenized instrument, most plausibly commercial paper or a fund vehicle before a full corporate bond, would prove the issuance pipeline, and its distribution channel would answer the Bitbank question. Disclosure of the foundation’s stake size, whenever it comes, will calibrate how much skin accompanies the signal. And the first cross-border corridor, connecting a Japanese issuer to offshore liquidity through the venture’s rails, would validate the thesis that Japan-originated assets can find global buyers on a public chain.

A realistic clock helps calibrate expectations against Japanese corporate practice. The rebrand and stake completion should land within one to two quarters, since both run on procedure. A first product announcement inside 2026 would count as fast by the standards of the institutions involved; the first tokenized issuance reaching external investors in 2027 would still qualify as on schedule. Anyone trading SOL on this news should hold that timeline against their horizon, because the venture is built to pay off in infrastructure years, not in market weeks, and the mismatch between those clocks is where most disappointment in institutional crypto news is manufactured.

For DeFi and tokenization watchers, the wider significance does not depend on SBI’s execution speed. July 13 marked the first time a public blockchain foundation took equity in a regulated joint venture with a Japanese megabank group on the shareholder register, aimed at the country’s core capital markets. Whether Solana captures the resulting value in one year or five, the direction of institutional travel is no longer contested: the pilots era ran on private chains, and the production era is being built on public ones, with Japan, of all markets, moving first. The announcement’s price impact was a rounding error. Its precedent is not.

Disclaimer: This article is information, not investment advice. Deal terms, product plans, and market figures reflect reporting available as of July 14, 2026, and can change quickly. Key commercial details of the SBI Solana Global venture, including the equity stake size and launch timelines, remain undisclosed. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell SOL or any other asset. Verify current developments from primary sources and consider your own circumstances before making any decision.

If you’ve ever dealt with failed credit card charges on a SaaS subscription, you know the pain. ConfirmoPay thinks stablecoins can fix that, and it just shipped a product to prove it.

The crypto payment gateway has launched Subscribe, a service that lets businesses automate recurring USDC collections on Solana. Think of it as Stripe’s subscription billing, except the rails are a blockchain instead of Visa’s network. No third-party processors, no manual invoicing, just programmatic money movement.

How Subscribe actually works Subscribe builds on Solana’s Subscriptions & Allowances program, which launched on June 2, 2026. That program essentially lets users pre-authorize recurring token transfers from their wallets, similar to how you’d set up autopay with a bank account, except entirely on-chain.

In English: a customer approves a spending allowance for a merchant, and the merchant can automatically pull the agreed-upon USDC amount at regular intervals. No card networks skimming fees. No chargebacks. No “your payment method has expired” emails.

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The service supports SPL tokens and Token-2022, including confidential transfers. That last bit matters because it means businesses can process payments with an added privacy layer, something enterprise clients tend to care about quite a lot when moving money around.

ConfirmoPay is targeting SaaS businesses specifically, which makes sense. Subscription software companies live and die by recurring revenue, and any friction in the billing process directly hits their bottom line. Traditional payment processors typically take 2.9% plus a per-transaction fee on recurring charges. On-chain settlement on Solana costs a fraction of a cent.

The company behind the product ConfirmoPay isn’t some weekend hackathon project. The company, operating under the Confirmo brand, has been in the crypto payments space for over 12 years. That’s practically ancient by industry standards, predating most of the tokens people trade today.

The numbers back up the track record. Confirmo processes more than $80 million monthly for enterprise clients across 141 countries. The platform runs at 99.97% uptime, which translates to roughly 2.6 hours of downtime per year.

Subscribe joins an existing product suite that already includes Checkout, Deposits, and Payouts. The company is also licensed under the EU’s MiCA regulations, giving it a compliance foundation that many crypto payment startups still lack.

Why Solana, and why now Solana has been methodically building out its payment infrastructure for years. The chain launched Solana Pay back in 2022, establishing its ambitions in the commerce space early. Since then, the ecosystem has expanded through integrations with firms like Helius, Dynamic, and Mesh, all of which served as design partners for the Subscriptions & Allowances program.

What this means for investors Processing $80 million monthly already puts Confirmo in serious territory. For comparison, that’s nearly a billion dollars annually flowing through a single crypto payment processor.

The risk side of the equation isn’t trivial either. Stablecoin regulatory frameworks are still evolving globally, and any changes to USDC’s status or Solana’s regulatory treatment could impact the viability of products built on top of them.

For those tracking the Solana ecosystem specifically, the Subscriptions & Allowances program represents a meaningful infrastructure upgrade that goes beyond ConfirmoPay. The design partners already involved, including Helius, Dynamic, and Mesh, suggest this is being treated as core infrastructure rather than a peripheral feature.

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

Shiba Inu whales are buying every dip, even as the token keeps falling, with a fresh 174 billion SHIB withdrawn from exchanges in the past 24 hours.

The Shiba Inu (SHIB) price trend remains uncertain. Bears are keen to push the token to new lows, while bulls keep fighting to defend key support levels. It remains unknown how low SHIB will fall, but buying pressure appears to be consistently building.

Over the past day, Shiba Inu whales have made another notable accumulation move, reinforcing their belief that the current price level is a favorable entry point for the next bullish phase.

174,820,700,000 SHIB Withdrawn from Exchanges Data from CryptoQuant confirmed this move. Its total exchange netflow reading shows that the difference between inflows and outflows in the past 24 hours is a negative 174.8 billion.

This means that holders withdrew 174,820,700,000 SHIB yesterday, worth $792,002 at the current market price of $0.00000417. Notably, such an exodus from exchanges usually ends up in self-custody or third-party wallets, where the tokens cannot be easily sold. This suggests accumulation, as holders are moving Shiba Inu to where it cannot be easily sold.

Shiba Inu Exchange Netflow/CryptoQuant Meanwhile, the withdrawal continued to reduce the SHIB exchange reserve. The metric fell slightly over the past 24 hours to 86.6 trillion as the amount of the token held on exchanges reduced.

Notably, this not only reduces selling pressure but also improves supply scarcity. If this trend persists and demand starts to return, prices could react considerably.

Additionally, the accumulation continues to highlight the sentiment among whales that Shiba Inu could reclaim higher prices in the future. Buying even when a durable bottom is unclear and price trends near multi-year lows suggest that market participants see a good risk-to-reward ratio at current levels and are positioning accordingly.

Shiba Inu Open Interest Rises 5% Meanwhile, derivative interest in Shiba Inu also received a boost. Over the past 24 hours, open interest has increased by 5.7% to $28.8 million, or 6.52 trillion SHIB.

For context, open interest tracks the total value of open futures positions at a given time. A rise indicates that during the period, traders built more derivative positions, increasing the overall value.

Nonetheless, SHIB’s OI remains well below earlier highs. It has dropped 80% from its January 6 peak of $145.5 million, as traders have taken to caution as the bearish trend persists. The drop mirrors a trend seen in the broader crypto market, where massive liquidations and price volatility have replaced derivative enthusiasm with risk-averseness.

Shiba Inu OI/Coinglass SHIB Price Remains Above $0.0000040 Support From a technical perspective, SHIB remains above the $0.0000040 support after bottoming around it again yesterday. The token dropped to $0.00000408 on Monday as the new US-Iran conflict sparked fresh concerns among investors, impacting the broader market negatively

The support proved too strong for bears again. As SHIB did previously in late June, it bounced from the $0.0000040 demand zone to its current price.

Attention has now turned to the descending resistance trendline above, where the token has persistently faced resistance since May 10. Breaking this opens the path for a strong rebound to higher prices.

Shiba Inu Descending Resistance Trendline 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.

Shiba Inu has seen a major shift in its on-chain activity, with netflows turning negative for the first time in months after a prolonged period of selling. Approximately 148.7 billion SHIB tokens have exited centralized exchanges, marking one of the largest recent outflow events for the token.

Negative netflows signal changing sentimentOn-chain tracking now shows SHIB’s exchange netflow at -148.7 billion tokens. In practice, negative netflows indicate that more tokens are leaving exchanges than being deposited, reducing the immediate supply available for trading or selling. While a single day of withdrawals does not automatically imply a trend reversal, such moves often suggest investors are becoming less inclined to sell, as they opt for self-custody.

This shift comes against the backdrop of a difficult year for SHIB. The token has dropped nearly 69% over the past 12 months and more than 40% since the start of the year. As a result, speculative trading activity has declined, and market participation has thinned. The technical chart further highlights this transition: SHIB recently broke down from a rising wedge pattern on its daily timeframe, typically a bearish signal.

Selling pressure shows signs of exhaustionDespite the bearish formation, the anticipated follow-through from sellers has failed to materialize in force. Trading volumes have diminished steadily, and each push to new lows has attracted fewer willing sellers. This gradual decline in volume and sell-side momentum often characterizes market bottoms, which generally form not at the height of fear but after prolonged exhaustion and fatigue among sellers.

SHIB’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) is currently hovering near oversold territory, and prices have gravitated toward major historical support zones. Although a decisive breakout above key short-term and medium-term moving averages has yet to occur, the reduction in aggressive selling has become more pronounced.

Declining exchange reserves highlight self-custodyThe substantial outflow of 148.7 billion SHIB from exchanges has also led to a notable decline in overall exchange reserves. This is a possible indicator that investors are choosing to transfer their tokens away from exchanges and into private wallets rather than preparing them for sale. Such movement can impact market dynamics by limiting the supply available for immediate trading.

Mini dictionary: Netflow, an on-chain metric tracking the difference between tokens entering and leaving cryptocurrency exchanges. Negative netflow indicates more tokens are withdrawn than deposited, often reflecting investors’ preference for holding rather than selling.

MetricCurrent Status12-Month ChangeSHIB PriceNear historic support-69%Year-to-Date ChangeOngoing downtrend-40% YTDExchange Netflow-148.7 billion SHIBOne of the largest outflowsWhile bearish momentum persists, the combination of shrinking exchange holdings, weakening sell pressure, and sustained downtrend fatigue suggests that market conditions may be evolving. Market watchers are now observing closely to see if this could form the basis for a potential reversal after months of notable declines.

Despite the absence of a clear breakout above key moving averages, the lack of strong selling activity and historic outflows from exchanges indicate that traders are becoming more inclined to hold SHIB, signaling a potential shift in underlying sentiment.

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 fresh AI bubble warning is cracking memory chip stocks. SanDisk, SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung all show bearish reversal patterns after a hot 2026 rally.

The damage may not be even. This looks less like one sector move and more like a stock-by-stock reckoning, where even Samsung, the relative leader, is breaking down.

An AI Bubble Warning Splits the Chip TradeThe trigger came from Wall Street. On July 1, Bank of America’s Bubble Risk Indicator hit 0.91 out of 1 for semiconductor stocks, and the SOXX chip ETF dropped 6.4% in a day. BofA called it an air pocket, not a full crash.

The backdrop is stretched. The Kobeissi Letter notes AI investment now drives more than 25% of US GDP growth, above the dot-com peak, a sign of peak euphoria.

The US economy is now dependent on AI spending:

AI investment now accounts for more than 25% of US GDP growth, the largest contribution on record.

This includes spending on software, IT equipment, R&D, and data centers.

In other words, for every $4 of US economic growth today,… pic.twitter.com/IzbrsFOt7E

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) July 11, 2026 Yet the smart money is not running. Analysts keep raising SanDisk targets, with Goldman Sachs at $2,200 and Evercore at $3,100 on tight NAND pricing. Money flow shows who is winning.

Money Flow Points to Quiet AccumulationChaikin Money Flow (CMF), a gauge of institutional buying and selling pressure, tells a contrarian story. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron all show positive CMF even as prices fell over 20 days, which suggests quiet institutional accumulation under weakness.

Key AI Memory Stocks And Money Flow: Charlie Quant LabSanDisk is the outlier. Its money flow has slid since July 10 and is nearing the zero line, a sign that buyers there are backing off. However, the CMF is still not in the negative territory.

SanDisk CMF: TradingViewThe strength is uneven. Samsung’s flow score leads, SK Hynix sits barely positive, and Micron reads negative.

Relative Strength Of Memory Stocks: Charlie Quant LabAll three still trail the broad chip index and Nvidia, so the price charts of the AI memory stocks settle the AI bubble discussion.

SanDisk Builds a Second Double TopSanDisk (SNDK) fell to $1,673 and is tracing a second double top, a bearish reversal marked by two peaks near $1,951. The first, near $2,354, already produced a drop of about 21%.

SanDisk Price Analysis: TradingViewVolume favors sellers, with steady distribution from July 7 to July 13. The levels that matter are $1,520 and $1,418.

A daily close below $1,418, a technically strong floor, would confirm the pattern and expose $1,088. A reclaim of $1,951 weakens the immediate bearishness. But a weak SNDK chart isn’t the one-off.

SK Hynix Loses Its Head-and-Shoulders NecklineSK Hynix trades at 1,913,000 won, about $1,276, up 3.7% on the day. It has broken the neckline of a head-and-shoulders top, a three-peak reversal projecting a slide of roughly 32%.

Buyers are trying to return, and CMF from earlier shows accumulation. But the rebound stalls at the 0.618 Fibonacci level near 1,910,000 won, about $1,274.

SK Hynix Price Analysis: TradingViewLosing that level exposes 1,751,000 won ($1,168), then 1,548,000 won ($1,032). Until buyers reclaim it, the bounce risks trapping them.

Micron Forms a Downward-Sloping TopMicron (MU) slipped to $937 and is shaping a head-and-shoulders top with a downward-sloping neckline. A falling neckline is more bearish than a flat one, because sellers keep stepping in at lower prices.

The pattern is still forming, and buying from July 7 to July 13 has stayed too weak to break it. Micron also holds the weakest money flow and softest relative strength of the group.

Micron Price Analysis: TradingViewIf it loses the neckline near $811, the decline can accelerate. A move back above the right shoulder or $1,036 would ease the pressure.

Samsung Stands Out, but Must Prove ItSamsung Electronics rose to 263,000 won, about $175, and looks the strongest of the four. Its growth is real, as IDC data shows Samsung was one of only two vendors to gain smartphone share last quarter, aided by chip demand.

Even so, it broke a double top on July 8 and has trended lower since. So even the strongest name is bearish, a sign the sector-wide rally has likely passed and each stock now trades on its own.

Samsung Price Analysis: TradingViewTo turn bullish, Samsung must reclaim 268,000 won, about $179, then 290,000 won ($193). Failure risks 252,500 won ($168), 233,000 won ($155), and 220,500 won ($147).

That 268,000 won line, near $179, separates a genuine Samsung recovery from a deeper 23% breakdown.

The AI Bubble Test is NowPut the four memory stocks together and one picture forms. Every chart flashes bearishness. Only money flow and Samsung’s IDC-backed growth give any name a floor.

So the AI bubble narrative has not burst everywhere. But it already looks broken in the weakest names, SanDisk and Micron, while Samsung and SK Hynix cling to support.

AI Bubble Memory Scorecard With 24-Hour Price Move: BeInCryptoThe clearest warning sits outside the stock market. In San Francisco, some home sellers now take OpenAI and Anthropic shares instead of cash. Those shares do not trade and have no set price.

THIS IS THE CLEAREST SIGN YET THAT THE AI BUBBLE IS OUT OF CONTROL.

People are now trading real houses for stock that has no price.

OpenAI and Anthropic have not gone public, and their shares cannot be freely traded as no market has priced them. But still, San Francisco… pic.twitter.com/aw3jCoaIhC

— Bull Theory (@BullTheoryio) July 12, 2026 When buyers treat unproven AI money as good as cash, a market top is usually near. These memory stocks rose on the same AI wave, so they are among the first to fall if that confidence breaks.

Injective is spearheading a new area for agentic finance to thrive.

Today we are introducing the Injective AI Agent SDK to give builders one package with the tools needed to create novel agents onchain. It connects documentation, chain commands, agent skills, and onchain execution in one setup.

AI development has changed. Builders direct agents. They give context. They set the goal. Then the agent reads, writes, checks, and executes.

However, financial agents need more than generic coding help. They need market data, transaction flows, current docs, balances, markets, bridges, wallets, and chain state.

Injective gives agents those rails with seamless accessibility for developers everywhere.

npm install -g @injectivelabs/ainj

One Install for the Injective AI StackThe SDK brings together the pieces developers usually assemble by hand.

Injective CLI
The injectived command gives agents direct access to core chain functions. Agents can query state, manage wallet flows, prepare transactions, and interact with Injective from the same command line interface used across the network.

Injective agent skills
Agent skills teach AI coding tools how Injective workflows actually work. The agent gets chain specific context across docs, commands, and examples.

Injective documentation MCP server
The documentation server connects agents to Injective source material while they build. That keeps answers grounded in the current developer stack.

Injective main MCP server
The main server gives agents a path to query, transact, and trade across Injective Mainnet and Testnet.

The result is simple. Builders spend less time wiring tools together and more time building the actual application.

Why AI Agents Need Purpose-Built Financial RailsAgents act constantly.

They check state. They compare markets. They rebalance portfolios. They test logic. They prepare transactions. They retry when conditions change.

That behavior breaks on expensive, slow infrastructure. It works on Injective.

Injective supports 650 millisecond block times, instant finality, and standard transaction fees around $0.0003. It also gives agents native financial modules, an onchain orderbook, and cross chain connectivity.

That performance gives agents room to operate. A trading agent can research a market and place an order inside the Injective environment. A treasury agent can read balances, inspect routes, and prepare actions onchain. A builder can ask for an application and give the agent the context to build against live Injective rails.

This is the chain doing what agents need.

From Prompt to Onchain ActionThe SDK is designed around the way developers already work with modern AI environments such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other MCP compatible tools.

With the SDK installed, an agent can do the following.

Search the Injective docs for the right workflow.Query wallet balances and market data.Prepare and sign Injective transactions.Open and close perpetual futures positions.Bridge assets across supported networks.Write EVM or Injective native applications with chain specific context.Reason about staking, token metadata, and onchain activity.The point is simple. Injective should be available wherever builders already direct agents to work.

Part of the Larger Injective RoadmapThe SDK fits directly into the Injective roadmap.

The Injective MCP Server brought natural language execution to perpetual futures. Injective agent skills made those workflows reusable. dAppBuilder lets users generate financial applications from prompts. The Injective Agents platform points toward autonomous agents with onchain identities and direct economic activity.

The SDK pulls that direction into a cleaner builder flow.

AI native finance needs a chain where agents can read, reason, and execute. Injective has the financial modules, settlement speed, and cross chain reach to make that real.

This reaches beyond trading. Agents can support stablecoin payments, real world asset workflows, treasury management, portfolio automation, institutional dashboards, and new financial applications that static interfaces struggle to handle.

Injective is turning finance into software agents can use.

What to Know Before You BuildThe SDK plugs into the AI development environments builders already use.

It works alongside tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and MCP compatible agent setups. It gives those tools Injective context and execution paths.

User control stays at the center. Any action that writes to the chain still needs a funded wallet, signing approval, and thoughtful key management. Good agent design keeps keys local, exposes only the right context, and asks for approval before state changes.

Powerful agents need clear guardrails.

Get StartedThe Injective AI Agent SDK is live today.

npm install -g @injectivelabs/ainj

Read more in the Injective AI developer docs, explore the open source Injective agent skills, and follow Injective for what ships next.

About InjectiveInjective is a lightning fast interoperable layer one blockchain optimized for building premier Web3 finance applications. Injective provides developers with powerful plug-and-play modules for creating unmatched dApps. INJ is the native asset that powers Injective and its rapidly growing ecosystem. Injective is incubated by Binance and is backed by prominent investors such as Jump Crypto, Pantera and Mark Cuban.

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Ads3, an AI-driven platform that advances Web3 network growth, has partnered with Conflux Network, a cutting-edge L1 blockchain. The partnership is set to bolster Web3 adoption across the globe by merging scalable blockchain architecture with AI-led growth solutions. As Ads3 mentioned in its official social media announcement, the development focuses on fortifying user acquisition, supporting payment-powered innovation, and expanding blockchain networks. Additionally, the initiative endeavors to enhance DeFi access while enabling relatively effective blockchain-based financial operations.

🤝Ads3 x Conflux Network

Ads3 @ads3_ai — the AI-powered growth platform accelerating Web3 ecosystem expansion.

Conflux Network @Conflux_Network — a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain building the infrastructure for seamless payments, global remittances, and decentralized… pic.twitter.com/UmUWDLO1ib

— Ads3 (@ads3_ai) July 13, 2026 Ads3 Brings AI-Driven Web3 Growth Infrastructure to Conflux Network The collaboration between Ads3 and Conflux Network highlights the mutual commitment to push forward on-chain finance via wider network development and scalable technology. The development merges the strengths of both companies for blockchain ecosystem expansion. In this respect, Ads3 is famous for utilizing AI to assist Web3 initiatives in growing their accessibility and enhancing community engagement.

With the use of AI-led strategies, the platform backs blockchain projects in attracting consumers and widening participation across diverse decentralized applications. Additionally, Conflux Network has become a high-performance L1 chain to provide efficiency, security, and scalability. The network pays significant attention to the development of infrastructure that promotes streamlined digital payments, DeFi services, and global remittances. Its framework is poised to accommodate the rising transfer volumes while also maintaining dependable performance. This makes it appropriate for applications that need high throughput.

As a part of this collaboration, Ads3 will offer its AI-powered functionalities to strengthen and grow the Conflux Network. The partnership is anticipated to support consumer acquisition endeavors while assisting developers, blockchain projects, and businesses in gaining wider visibility in the growing Web3 sector. Broader network participation could lead to notable adoption of the Conflux-built applications.

Accelerating DeFi Accessibility via Payment Innovation According to Ads3, the partnership with Conflux Network stresses payment-led innovation. While blockchain technology keeps redefining financial services, an effective payment framework remains a crucial element among the most noteworthy priorities of the market. The combination has substantial potential to boost the DeFi products’ usability and accessibility. Overall, the move denotes a shared focus on the advancement of Web3 through ecosystem development, a scalable financial model, and innovation.

AUTHOR

Umair Younas is a cryptocurrency-related content writer linked with this work since 2019. Here, at Blockchainreporter, he serves as a news and article writer. He is a crypto, blockchain, NFTs, DeFi, and FinTech enthusiast. He has strong command over writing authentic reviews about brokers and exchanges and he has collaborated with our education team to write educational content as well. He has a dream to raise awareness among people about digital currencies. His works are well-researched and brimmed with information hence they provide fresh insights. Stay tuned to his posts if you want to stay up-to-date with the crypto-verse.

Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.

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The Robinhood Chain project has brought attention to the gap between user fees collected by Layer 2 blockchains and the revenue generated for the Ethereum mainnet. Recent data reveals a striking disparity, with users paying substantial fees while Ethereum receives only a fraction as compensation for settlement and data availability services.

Layer 2 Fee Flows: Robinhood versus EthereumUser fees on the Robinhood Chain surpassed $800,000, yet only about $1,600 was routed to Ethereum. According to statistics shared by Ethereum Daily, the user fee for the given period totaled $843,000, while the amount passed on to the Ethereum network reached just under $1,600, covering the costs of data availability and settlement.

Crypto analyst Lorenzo Valente referenced an earlier set of figures, noting that Robinhood Chain generated approximately $816,000 in total fees at that time, with $1,538 remitted to Ethereum. Valente attributed 89% of the revenue to Robinhood, 10% to Arbitrum, and only 0.15% to Ethereum, illustrating the current distribution of fee income among participants in the chain’s ecosystem.

This arrangement has led some observers to question whether Robinhood Chain is providing significant value to Ethereum. Concerns stem from the fact that most of the revenue remains within the Layer 2 and the connected Arbitrum ecosystem, with Ethereum seeing only minimal direct financial benefit.

Valente highlighted the efficiency of Robinhood Chain’s revenue model, noting that Robinhood captures the majority of user-paid fees, leaving Ethereum’s share comparatively negligible.

Mini dictionary: Robinhood Chain is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, built on Arbitrum, designed to offer lower fees and faster transactions for real asset trading and decentralized finance.

EntityFees Received ($)Share of Revenue (%)Robinhood Chain~843,00089Arbitrum~94,00010Ethereum~1,6000.15Arbitrum’s Role and Revenue DistributionThe Robinhood Chain leverages Arbitrum, a prominent Ethereum Layer 2 technology, to transmit transactions to the Ethereum mainnet for finalization. The revenue sharing structure allocates 10% of protocol income to the Arbitrum ecosystem, with 8% directed to the ecosystem’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) treasury and 2% reserved for developer incentives. This demonstrates Robinhood Chain’s contribution to Arbitrum’s revenue while keeping Ethereum’s share to a minimum.

Ethereum Daily pointed out that fee revenue does not capture the full impact of Robinhood Chain’s activity. Robinhood has enabled stock token trading via its wallet in over 120 countries, expanding user access to tokenized stocks and decentralized applications, such as lending and collateral platforms.

Eligible users can engage in round-the-clock trading and participate in decentralized finance products, further expanding Robinhood Chain’s service offerings and user engagement.

Implications for ETH Demand and LiquidityThe network recorded $70 million in bridged Ether and $100 million in total value locked (TVL) in its early days, signaling rapid adoption. Uniswap, an established decentralized exchange and core Robinhood Chain partner, saw daily volumes approach $500 million as liquidity flowed in through various incentive initiatives, lending products, and transactional growth.

With the Robinhood Chain using ETH as its native gas token, an increase in network activity could drive meaningful demand for ETH as a transactional, collateral, and staking asset. The rising volume of ETH bridged from Ethereum to Robinhood Chain—having surged approximately 70-fold in one week past the $70 million mark—illustrates the pace of adoption and potential impact on ETH markets.

Nevertheless, the most significant share of fee revenue remains with Robinhood Chain and the Arbitrum ecosystem, with Ethereum’s income from user fees continuing to lag behind transaction growth. The long-term effect will depend on whether the platform’s expansion translates into sustained demand for ETH for essential network functions.

Joe Lubin, Ethereum co-founder, has emphasized the importance of low fees on Ethereum Layer 1 to foster broader growth and encourage expanded use of both mainnet and Layer 2 solutions.

Lubin argues that broader Ethereum adoption—across mainnet, Layer 2 networks, and private chains—will increase the overall use of ETH for gas, collateral, and staking. As network usage grows, more ETH can also be removed from circulating supply through transaction burns, potentially benefiting holders in the longer term.

Robinhood publicly launched the mainnet of Robinhood Chain on July 1. The project aims to facilitate trading in real assets, decentralized finance products, and tokenized stocks—supported by technology partners like Uniswap, Chainlink, and Morpho—while leveraging Arbitrum’s Layer 2 infrastructure for scaling.

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.