Heightened maritime tensions could disrupt global shipping routes, impacting trade and security, with potential for further escalation.

The post Putin warns hostile acts against Russian ships will be treated as piracy appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

JPMorgan's dominance highlights the growing disparity in financial power, potentially reshaping competitive dynamics in the banking sector.

The post JPMorgan’s market cap hits $937B, surpassing its three biggest rivals combined appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Increased military action risks escalating U.S.-Iran tensions, impacting global markets and complicating diplomatic resolutions.

The post Trump may consider strikes on Iran if provoked, says former advisor appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The AI-generated imagery shared by Trump may escalate US-Iran tensions, complicating diplomatic efforts and impacting global oil markets.

The post Trump shares AI-generated images of US actions against Iran amid tensions appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Increased drone activity risks escalating tensions, potentially delaying Israel's military withdrawal and impacting regional stability.

The post IDF shoots down Hezbollah drone in southern Lebanon amid rising tensions appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Morgan Stanley Bitcoin ETF Nearly Notches $400M in Assets

Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley Bitcoin exchange-traded fund now has close to $400 million in assets under management — despite only launching in April. 

The NYSE Arca-listed fund, which is the first by a bank, got off to a roaring start when it debuted, bringing in over $33 million in fresh cash on its first day. 

Now, the fund has over $391 million in assets, demonstrating the popularity of the product. Many ETFs never reach $400 million in assets at all, let alone in one quarter.

Senior Bloomberg Intelligence ETF analyst Eric Balchunas revealed Friday that the product has been one of the most successful funds launched this year so far. 

This week alone, investors have thrown $15.7 million in new cash at the product, according to Farside Investors data. 

Morgan Stanley has been making big crypto moves for years now. Back in 2021, it started offering wealthy clients exposure to Bitcoin via funds such as those by Galaxy Digital.

And last year, the bank’s CEO and Chairman, Ted Pick, said that the bank was working with regulators to see how they could offer crypto safely.

Back in April, the bank’s head of digital assets, Amy Oldenburg said client education — not product design — is the central challenge facing Bitcoin adoption.

ETF action this week

After weeks of outflows and sloppy price action, American Bitcoin ETFs have taken in fresh cash over the past seven days. 

Farside Investors shows the products have received a total of $274 million in new investment so far this week. 

The funds had been on a winning streak, receiving nearly $1 billion over seven days until Thursday, when every ETF experienced outflows — except for Morgan Stanley’s product. 

Bitcoin’s price was recently trading for $64,096, down over 1% over the past 24 hours. The cryptocurrency is virtually unmoved over a seven-day period. 

European asset management firm CoinShares last week said that while investors are back at putting fresh cash in Bitcoin ETFs, other factors may hold digital asset markets from going higher. 

“We see no significant upside potential from here,” James Butterfill, head of research at CoinShares, wrote.

This post Morgan Stanley Bitcoin ETF Nearly Notches $400M in Assets first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

$7 Trillion Investment Giant Fidelity Backs New Crypto Clarity Act

Investment giant Fidelity is the latest big player to back the latest version of the long-awaited Clarity Act. 

The Boston-based firm’s “Public Policy” account on X said Friday that it was urging the Senate to pass the bill. 

Lawmakers have been hashing out the crypto market structure bill since last year. A new improved draft circulating the Senate this week bans officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto — a sticking point for opposition politicians. 

“The time is now for clear rules of the road that are essential to strengthening investor confidence, providing certainty for market participants, and reinforcing U.S. leadership in global digital asset markets,” the company said. 

Fidelity — which manages around $7 trillion in assets — was joined Friday by crypto advocacy groups the Crypto Council for Innovation, Blockchain Association, and the Digital Chamber, as well as the National Fraternal Order of Police and other politicians in backing the bill. 

Top asset manager Fidelity is interested in the bill as the firm manages Bitcoin and other digital asset exchange-traded funds: products which give American investors exposure to crypto via shares that trade on stock exchanges. 

The SEC approved a number of spot BTC ETFs in 2024, which have since gone on to be some of the most successful ETF launches ever. 

Clarity stalls

Republicans passed the Clarity Act last year but the bill has been in deadlock — mainly because banking chiefs raised concerns over stablecoins and the yield they would potentially pay customers. 

Coinbase pulled support for the bill in January after clashing with banking bigwigs who said that earning yield on stablecoins should be banned. 

U.S. banks argue that they could lose customers if crypto exchanges like Coinbase offer more attractive products for their deposit base. 

Some lawmakers — like Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren — have argued that President Donald Trump’s family has unfairly benefited from crypto ventures. 

Warren this week argued that the Clarity Act could further be used for Trump to cash in on crypto but the latest draft bans officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto. 

This post $7 Trillion Investment Giant Fidelity Backs New Crypto Clarity Act first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

State Department to Debut Freedom Tech Program with Bitcoin Policy Institute, Palantir as Founding Partners

The U.S. State Department is launching a program that includes Bitcoin as a way to advance digital freedom worldwide. 

Named the Freedom Tech Excellence Program, the initiative will see the State Department work with the Bitcoin Policy Institute, data-analytics firm Palantir Technologies, defense technology company Anduril Industries, and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation on issues including online surveillance, encryption, AI governance, and protecting free expression online.

According to the program’s stated goals, participants will focus on five priority areas: First Amendment and free expression protections in the digital age; countering unlawful digital surveillance and online scams; privacy-enhancing technologies such as strong encryption and VPNs; responsible governance of emerging technologies including AI; and safeguarding children and other users online.

The inclusion of the Bitcoin Policy Institute signals that the Department views Bitcoin and blockchain technology as tools relevant to circumventing censorship and financial surveillance in authoritarian states — a theme the organization has long championed in its advocacy work.

The FTEP will operate through limited-term assignments, placing private sector personnel inside the State Department on temporary embeds tasked with shaping diplomatic efforts around specific digital freedom issues. 

President Trump campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto space and since taking office, his government has taken a more pro-crypto approach to both regulating and including elements of the space in his administration. 

In March 2025, for example, President Trump signed an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a separate U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile, capitalized with roughly 200,000 Bitcoin already held by the government through criminal and civil forfeiture. 

The order framed Bitcoin alongside strategic reserves the U.S. maintains for materials like gold, petroleum, and pharmaceuticals, treating it as a scarce national asset rather than merely a speculative one.

This post State Department to Debut Freedom Tech Program with Bitcoin Policy Institute, Palantir as Founding Partners first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

National Fraternal Order of Police Gives Green Light to Clarity Act in Latest Support for Crypto Bill

The National Fraternal Order of Police became the latest organization to throw its support behind the long-awaited Clarity Act. 

In a statement Friday, specifically addressed to Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Timothy Eugene Scott, the fraternal organization wrote that it approved of the latest bill. The FOP works to improve the working conditions of law enforcement officers.

The newest draft bans officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto, something opposition lawmakers previously had issue with. On Wednesday, Senator Warren, a long-time crypto critic, said that the latest bill would allow President Donald Trump to make money from crypto, as well as benefit criminals. 

“The latest version of the ‘Clarity Act’ includes several provisions that improve the ability of State and local law enforcement to protect consumers, investigate financial crimes, and coordinate with their Federal partners,” the letter read. 

“The revised bill establishes safeguards aimed at addressing fraud and victimization involving digital asset kiosks and related activity while also providing for anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance obligations across the digital asset ecosystem.”

U.S. lawmakers are currently mulling over the latest draft of the Clarity Act — a crypto market structure bill aims to set in stone digital asset regulation. 

More support for the bill 

Top crypto advocacy groups the Crypto Council for Innovation, Blockchain Association, and the Digital Chamber also threw their support behind the latest draft of the Clarity Act on Friday. 

The trade associations said that passing the bill is necessary to establish the “first comprehensive federal consumer protection framework for digital asset markets” as more Americans begin to use and invest in crypto. 

The Clarity Act, which Republicans passed last year, has been in a deadlock mainly because banking chiefs raised concerns over stablecoins and the yield they would potentially pay customers. 

America’s biggest crypto exchange, Coinbase, pulled support for the bill in January after clashing with banking chiefs who said that earning yield on stablecoins should be banned. 

U.S. banks have said they could lose customers if crypto exchanges offer more attractive products for their deposit base. 

A new bill has been circulating this week and it is expected it will head to floor vote. 

The latest draft bans officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto — a sore point for Democratic politicians who have argued that President Donald Trump’s family has unfairly benefited from crypto ventures.

President Trump campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto space but his digital asset ventures have raised eyebrows among Washington lawmakers who think the Trump family has unfairly profited from crypto businesses. 

This post National Fraternal Order of Police Gives Green Light to Clarity Act in Latest Support for Crypto Bill first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Sealed in Foil: BMAG’s New Focus on Trading Cards

Somewhere right now, on a livestream, someone is tearing open a foil package while hundreds of people watch. Trading cards have become a spectator sport. The card market is at all-time highs, cardboard repriced by the hour, rare cards selling for eight figures, and a general sense of frenzy. But watch enough of it and something strange becomes clear. Nobody is looking at the cards. The audience isn’t consuming images, it’s consuming anticipation.

The card boom has also surfaced hard questions, and the hardest ones surround grading. The past year saw the hobby’s dominant grading house facing scrutiny over grades that shifted after cards moved through its own buyback program, and collectors began asking, who grades the grader. When a single subjective number separates a card from ten times its value, and the arbiter of that number also holds a position in the asset, the hobby has a verification problem. These are, in the language of bitcoiners, trusted-third-party problems.

The two worlds keep arriving at the same three questions: what’s real, what’s rare, and what holds value. A graded slab and a confirmed transaction on the timechain are answers to the same anxiety. Collectors demanding transparent grading and provenance that can’t be quietly revised are asking for verification over trust, whether they use those words or not. In that sense, card collectors and bitcoiners already share the same ideals.

This is why BMAG (Bitcoin Museum and Art Gallery) is making trading cards a serious part of its program. Seven years as the cultural wing of the Bitcoin Conference, more than 130 BTC ($8+ million) in art and collectibles sales, the first Magic: The Gathering tournament at a Bitcoin Conference, staged in Las Vegas with Kraken and on-site TAG grading, and the conviction that cards are asking the same questions bitcoin already answered.

Source: https://my.taggrading.com/card/P7612780

The fullest expression of that focus arrives this August. At Bitcoin Asia 2026, August 27-28 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, BMAG will debut a full Trading Card Expo on the conference floor. The Expo is anchored by a marketplace of established vendors from across Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, alongside live activations, grading and authentication, card auctions, and a curated gallery presentation surrounding it all. Cards and collectibles will be available for purchase, and attendees are encouraged to bring their own cards for grading or resale to the 40+ card vendors. Hong Kong is one of the most active card markets in the world and a Bitcoin conference is the natural room for it.

But a marketplace alone isn’t the point. The trading card has an art pedigree longer than most people realize. Jefferson Burdick, the father of American card collecting, spent his final years transferring thousands of cards into albums at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where his collection remains today. Art Spiegelman worked at Topps inventing series like Garbage Pail Kids before his mainstream graphic novel successes. And the critic Brian Droitcour recently put his finger on why the format matters right now: a Magic card is an image that does something, rarity and function entwined, while NFTs inherited that logic and captured only the rarity. Droitcour argues that NFTs dissolved the old hierarchy between the artwork and the collectible, and that the most interesting artists working today make objects that are both at once. 

A generation of artists has taken that invitation literally. Over the past few years, a loose scene of mostly pseudonymous artists, formed across crypto subcultures, Twitter timelines, and private group chats, has been quietly staging one of the more genuine artistic rebellions of the decade. Where the establishment crypto-art world courted galleries with polished generative work, these artists went the other direction, making images dense with meme references, anime, veiled art history, and internet debris, layered so deep that critics had to invent new words for them. They call the style schizocollage. In Spike Art Magazine, Dean Kissick placed the work in the lineage of deliberately “bad painting,” a tradition Marcia Tucker gave institutional credentials when she inaugurated the New Museum with an exhibition of that name in 1978. And increasingly, the scene’s work has been heading not toward the gallery wall but toward cardboard: the pack, the pull, the sleeve, and the slab treated not as merchandising afterthoughts but as the medium itself.

BMAG has spent years working in a room the traditional art world ignored, the art gallery inside a Bitcoin conference. When the painter Nardo showed at Bitcoin MENA in 2024, our conversation kept circling memes as units of cultural transmission and the internet’s layered debris as legitimate subject matter for painting. A year later his Citadel, a seven-foot oil painting built from a 4chan meme, debuted at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas: a monument raised to an internet shitpost. The card movement runs on the same current at a different scale, small enough to fit in a penny sleeve. It’s a conversation we’ve continued in these pages all year, with founders like Alladan Flinn of Based Trading Cards, who describes cards as physical timestamps of the Bitcoin movement. We’ll have much more to say about the artists of this scene, and what they’re bringing to Hong Kong, in the weeks ahead.

The Card Expo debuts at Bitcoin Asia 2026, August 27-28 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Vendors of cards, collectibles, and related goods can apply for a table here. Tables are limited.

Follow BMAG on X at @BMAG_HQ for new partnership announcements, auctions, and first looks at the artists coming to Hong Kong.

This post Sealed in Foil: BMAG’s New Focus on Trading Cards first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.

Hashdex plans to put some of the crypto held by its Nasdaq CME Crypto Index ETF (NCIQ) to work through staking. The sponsor takes the first slice of net income, while common shareholders begin sharing in the rewards after an annual threshold is cleared.

The framework is prospective. A July 23 Form 8-K named Coinbase Cloud as the initial provider and said staking was expected to begin promptly, subject to operational readiness.

Under the July 23 prospectus supplement, a staking provider first retains its portion of gross rewards. Hashdex then receives all remaining net staking income up to a dollar threshold equal to 0.25% of common-share net asset value through one Sponsor Share, a separate unlisted class held exclusively by Hashdex. Income above that threshold is split 40% to Hashdex and 60% to the trust for holders of publicly traded NCIQ common shares.

The threshold is measured over each fiscal year and prorated for a partial year. If net staking income stays at or below it, none is allocated to the trust for common shareholders’ benefit.

For illustration, if net staking income reached 1% of common-share NAV after provider fees over a full year, the trust would receive 0.45% for common shareholders. Hashdex would collect the remaining 0.55%, comprising the first 0.25% and 40% of the next 0.75 percentage point. The figures are illustrative rather than a forecast or realized return.

The Sponsor Share return is separate from NCIQ’s 0.25% annual management fee and is not netted against it.

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Provider deductions vary by asset. Hashdex’s NCIQ product page lists an 8% fee on gross ether staking rewards, an 8% validator commission for Solana, and a 5% validator commission for Cardano.

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As of July 26, Ethereum represented 11.75% of NCIQ’s holdings, Solana 3.17%, and Cardano 0.49%, a combined 15.41%. That is not the amount staked. Hashdex lists a target staking range of 10% to 20% of total fund NAV.

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The eventual benefit will depend on the assets Hashdex stakes, the portion committed, network reward rates, and provider deductions. Unbonding can temporarily lock assets, while validator failures or slashing can reduce rewards.

Those constraints can also complicate redemptions and rebalancing, potentially widening the difference between NCIQ’s NAV performance and its underlying price index. The filing does not quantify how large any tracking difference could become.

The post Why Hashdex’s new crypto ETF keeps 100% of your initial staking yields and 40% of everything else appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Galaxy Digital’s $3.507 billion financing for its CoreWeave data-center build in Texas comes with a steep price: about $346.3 million in annual interest.

A Galaxy project subsidiary priced the 9.875% senior secured notes on July 23. The deal is slated to close July 28, and the notes mature on Aug. 1, 2031.

The financing is intended to cover part of two buildings with eight data halls at the Helios campus. The facilities are planned for 400 megawatts of utility capacity and 260 MW of critical IT capacity, with some proceeds also funding debt-service reserves.

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The 9.875% coupon works out to $346.3 million in annual interest, paid in cash every Feb. 1 and Aug. 1 starting in 2027. The first payment covers only part of a year, but Galaxy has not disclosed the exact amount.

Repayment starts when construction ends

Principal repayment runs on a different schedule. The notes are due to amortize at 4% of original principal each year, subject to adjustment. That equals $140.28 million annually before adjustments, paid in semiannual installments, with the first payment date at least 10 months after project completion.

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Interest starts on a fixed schedule, while principal repayments wait until construction is complete and can be adjusted. Creditors will hold first-priority claims on nearly all project assets and the parent company’s stake in the issuer.

The disclosed liens cover Galaxy Helios Data Centers II LLC, its project guarantor and the parent-held equity in the issuer. They do not extend to Galaxy Digital’s assets generally.

CoreWeave committed to approximately 260 MW of incremental critical IT load for Phase II in April 2025. Galaxy described the terms as substantially similar to its previously announced 15-year, 133 MW Phase I agreement.

Delivery is now the central operating test. On July 6, Galaxy said Phase I had been completed on schedule and that Phase II data-hall deliveries were expected to begin in the first half of 2027.

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The construction schedule now carries a clear financial price. Interest starts in 2027, but principal repayments wait until the project is finished, putting Galaxy’s delivery timeline at the heart of its CoreWeave deal and debt obligations through 2031.

The post The brutal $346M math behind Galaxy’s high-stakes race to build CoreWeave’s Texas AI mega-center appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Section 20216 of the latest CLARITY draft states that a self-custodied digital asset cannot become abandoned, unclaimed, or forfeited. It also cannot become subject to adverse possession or finder's title solely because its owner has not moved it or otherwise shown continued interest.

The language overrides state and local laws that treat years of wallet inactivity alone as grounds for transferring ownership to someone else.

The May 8 and May 20 Senate drafts protected only the ability to hold a self-hosted wallet, and the July 22 version adds scope beyond that, extending into property law and covering whether a person still owns the coins inside that wallet once years of silence go by.

The section defines a self-custodied digital asset as one where the owner keeps exclusive control of the private keys without relying on a custodian, exchange or intermediary.

That definition draws the line the rest of the provision depends on.

From wallet access to property title

Courts would have to draw a line between two categories of digital assets: coins a person controls directly through private keys and coins sitting with an exchange, broker, or custodian. The federal shield from the new CLARITY Act draft goes to the first group.

State unclaimed-property rules keep governing the second, since the draft expressly preserves them for custodial holdings. Recent state amendments already treat exchanges, custodians, and hosted-wallet providers as a distinct category for assets that could belong to missing owners.

A wallet holding its own keys and an exchange account holding the same dollar value in Bitcoin would sit on opposite sides of that line.

In the exchange case, the custodian controls the keys, so state dormancy, reporting, and delivery rules for that custodian keep applying the way they always have.

The case that made this provision urgent

New York's own lost-property law shows why the provision has real teeth right now. Article 7-B of the state's Personal Property Law covers property that someone loses and later turns over to police.

Section 257 lets title vest in the finder under specific conditions, including for property under $10 once a year of failed efforts to find the owner has gone by.

Noah Doe and two companies are using that framework to claim title to 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses holding roughly 3.799 million BTC, nearly 18% of Bitcoin's total supply. Their filing points to an OP_RETURN notice campaign, a press release, and a claim window as evidence that the coins count as lost property nobody came forward to reclaim.

The theory leans hard on the wallets' silence, years of coins sitting untouched with no owner surfacing to contest the claim, and Section 20216 targets that mechanism. A claimant could no longer point to years of inactivity or a lack of communication as the basis for taking title under state abandoned-property law.

Noah Doe's plaintiffs also cite police reports, the OP_RETURN notices, and their attempts to contact possible owners. That evidence goes beyond pure dormancy, and it could let them argue their claim rests on more than silence alone even if CLARITY becomes law.

The provision closes the legal opening their case is testing without settling the lawsuit itself, since a court still has to weigh whether that additional evidence moves the analysis.

Where the provision goes from here

In the bull case, Section 20216 survives Senate negotiation with its preemption language intact, and courts read the phrase “solely due to inactivity” narrowly enough to give self-custody real protection.

Dormancy-based theories like the one behind Noah Doe become far harder to build, since a claimant would need proof beyond years of silence to get anywhere. Holding your own keys gains a legal backing that self-custody advocates have never quite had before.

In the bear case, Senate negotiators strip or soften Section 20216 before a final vote, and whatever language survives leaves room for courts to weigh inactivity alongside other factors when deciding a claim.

State-law experiments around dormant wallets stay possible, and a future claimant could still build a theory similar to Noah Doe's around long stretches of silence plus a notice campaign.

Self-custody keeps its protection as an activity; holding your own keys stays legal, and title during years of inactivity stays a live issue courts have to settle case by case.

Section 20216 removes the single easiest argument a claimant could make against a silent Bitcoin address: the idea that years of nothing happening amounts to abandonment on its own. Whether that turns out to be enough depends on what survives Senate negotiation and what a judge eventually decides silence alone can prove.

The post Lawsuit claims 3.8M dormant BTC using police lost-and-found rules as Congress races to stop it with CLARITY appeared first on CryptoSlate.

KULR Technology Group, a US-listed battery technology company, and The Smarter Web Company, a UK-listed web services group with a Bitcoin treasury strategy, have sold approximately 511 BTC and used the proceeds to retire approximately $31.7 million of obligations in disclosures published one day apart.

The total comprises $20 million of KULR principal and Smarter Web’s exact $11,698,540 repayment. Both companies acted voluntarily and retained substantial Bitcoin reserves; neither disclosure described a lender-forced liquidation. The shared consequence is that financing can turn assets presented as long-term holdings into repayment inventory without ending a treasury strategy.

KULR’s July 24 filing said it sold approximately 333 BTC from July 9 through July 23 at a weighted-average price of approximately $64,538, generating about $21.5 million in gross proceeds. It used the net proceeds to clear all principal under its $20 million Coinbase Credit facility. Accrued interest still had to be calculated at month-end and was expected to be paid in August 2026.

KULR said the sale was a deliberate step to reduce interest expense and remove collateral and liquidation risk. An earlier quarterly filing showed a March $5 million draw with a 7% loan fee and a May $15 million draw carrying a 7% yearly financing charge paid monthly. KULR expected 565 pledged BTC to be released and reported approximately 760 BTC still in its treasury.

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Smarter Web removed maturity and dilution risk

Smarter Web’s July 23 announcement described a different trade. At the company’s request and with support from TOBAM-related noteholders, it sold exactly 177.8909127 BTC at an average of $65,762 to repay Smarter Convert approximately two weeks before maturity.

The zero-coupon instrument was due August 5. At maturity, holders could choose the segregated BTC, its fiat-equivalent value, or shares converted at £2.0475. Early repayment removed that approaching settlement obligation and the potential issuance of 7,718,551 shares. Smarter Web retained 2,700 BTC.

A separate Coinbase facility appeared on the company’s April 30 balance sheet, so repaying the convert alone did not establish that Smarter Web was debt-free.

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Another Bitcoin treasury company provides a bounded precedent. In June, Nakamoto said it sold approximately 600 BTC plus derivatives and applied $45 million to debt while retaining Bitcoin and leaving 165 million USDT outstanding.

The next seller cannot be named from these cases, but the pressure points are visible: BTC pledged to loans, recurring financing charges, nearby maturities, and large conversion-linked share counts. A July SEC filing for another treasury company also disclosed a 24-hour cure window after a loan’s collateral ratio fell below 130%.

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Those features show where holding every coin competes most directly with debt service, collateral safety, and shareholder dilution. They identify exposed financing structures, not a forecast of another sale.

The post Why two public companies quietly liquidated 511 Bitcoin in 24 hours to escape $31.7 million in debt appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Traders spent most of July with a pretty good explanation for why Bitcoin wouldn't move. A dense cluster of options contracts had the price boxed in, they argued, because the dealers who sold those contracts were buying every dip and selling every rally to keep their own books balanced. Clear the contracts away, and Bitcoin would finally be free to go somewhere.

The contracts have now cleared on two consecutive Fridays, and Bitcoin is sitting roughly where it started. It traded just under $64,000 on Saturday, closing out a week in which it failed to hold $66,000 and then slid back through the level that positioning was supposed to defend. The pretty good explanation has run out of road, and what's left is pretty boring: demand for Bitcoin is thin right now, and it's thin on both sides of the market.

The options number everyone watches, and what it can tell you

About 19,000 Bitcoin options worth roughly $1.2 billion expired at 08:00 UTC on Friday on Deribit, which handles the bulk of crypto options trading. The exchange put max pain for that expiry at $64,500. Bitcoin closed the day at $64,140, about $360 underneath it, having opened at $65,099 and touched $63,740 along the way.

The Friday before, an expiry of identical size carried a max-pain level of $63,000, and Bitcoin drifted up toward $65,400 in the days afterward. Two expiries, two opposite outcomes, and in neither case did max pain visibly pull anything.

Max pain is a number that gets quoted every week as though it were a force in itself. An option is a contract giving someone the right to buy or sell Bitcoin at a set price on a set date, and max pain is simply the price at which the people who sold those contracts would owe the least money when they settle. It's a snapshot of where bets have piled up, calculated from contracts that are currently open. It carries no mechanism that pushes the price toward it.

The $1.2 billion number deserves the same treatment. That's the face value of the Bitcoin the contracts reference, and the money truly at risk is just a small fraction of it. We also can't say with confidence which way dealers were forced to hedge into the settlement, because exchange data shows how many contracts sit at each strike, not who holds which side.

Confident claims about dealer positioning are almost always built on an assumption, and the growth of the options market has made that assumption an expensive one to get wrong. Ethereum contributed another $234 million to Friday's settlement, with a max-pain level of $1,875 and a put-call ratio of 1.29 that showed a full month of appetite for downside protection.

What did happen on Friday is easy to see in the trading data. CryptoQuant's exchange-wide figures track which side of the market is crossing the spread to get filled, a decent proxy for who's in a hurry.

Sellers were the ones in a hurry on both Thursday and Friday. The Coinbase premium index, which compares Bitcoin's price on the largest US exchange against offshore venues, sank to a 0.088% discount on Friday, its widest since July 16, indicating that American buyers had stepped back.

Traders holding leveraged long positions were forced out of $45.9 million on Friday against $7.4 million on the short side, roughly a six-to-one imbalance.

Leverage itself stayed subdued. Funding rates, the payment leveraged longs make to shorts to hold their positions open, averaged 0.0038% across exchanges on Friday, down from 0.0064% five days earlier and barely above neutral. Open interest across futures and perpetual contracts finished at $22.35 billion, up from $21.26 billion when the previous expiry settled, and it edged higher on Friday even as price fell 1.5%. New positions were arriving on the way down.

US spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $225.2 million on Thursday, ending a seven-session run that had drawn in close to $1 billion, with BlackRock's IBIT responsible for $202.5 million of the reversal. The week still finished positive at around $274 million.

Renewed tension between the US and Iran pushed equities lower into the weekend and pulled crypto along; the Crypto Fear and Greed Index fell three points to 28, and implied volatility slid toward 35%.

The bet that's still alive is 9% away

Deribit's board carries nearly $5 billion of open interest at the $70,000 and $72,000 strikes for the July 31 monthly expiry, roughly 18% of the exchange's entire $28 billion Bitcoin options book. Calls dominate both strikes heavily. As of July 20, about 27,000 contracts sat at $70,000 and around 21,000 at $72,000.

One structure accounts for a large share of it. Deribit chief commercial officer Jean-David Péquignot described a single block that bought 20,000 of the $70,000 calls and sold 20,000 of the $72,000 calls, a combination worth about $2.5 billion in gross notional across the two legs.

The trade pays out if Bitcoin finishes above $70,000, stops paying more once it clears $72,000, and costs less upfront than buying the lower strike outright, since selling the higher one offsets part of the premium. Whoever put it on wanted a specific move within a specific window, and paid for that.

The window was chosen for a reason. Jimmy Yang of Orbit Markets, an institutional liquidity provider, tied the July 31 call demand to expectations that the CLARITY Act would pass, and traders have been trimming since.

Polymarket now prices 2026 passage at roughly 35%, down from above 80% in February, after a merged Banking-Agriculture draft dropped the ethics provision Democrats had demanded and drew formal opposition from Senators Chris Murphy, Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley. The August recess leaves the Senate a narrow window to act.

The expiry also lands two days after the Federal Reserve's decision. The FOMC meets July 28 and 29, with the statement due at 2:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday and Kevin Warsh's press conference half an hour later.

There's no set of economic projections attached to this meeting, so the wording of the statement carries the entire signal. Rates have held at 3.50% to 3.75% across four consecutive meetings, and futures markets assign roughly a one-in-three chance to a quarter-point increase, with a cut priced at effectively zero.

Governor Lisa Cook has pointed to inflation running at 3.7%, while Vice Chair Philip Jefferson and Governor Christopher Waller have both warned about revisiting policy if prices stay elevated.

Bitcoin has to climb about 9% in six days for the $70,000 strike to finish in the money, and Deribit's own probabilities put the odds of the price merely touching that level during July at 14.5%, with $72,000 at 4.1%.

Gamma exposure, the measure of how aggressively dealers have to adjust their hedges as price moves, concentrates at $65,000 and $72,000. The near cluster is directly on top of the market and is pretty small. The large one sits far enough away that it exerts almost no pull until Bitcoin closes most of the distance on its own.

So the biggest concentration of conviction in the Bitcoin options market is parked at a price the market gives itself less than a one-in-six chance of even reaching, and it comes due 48 hours after a central bank meeting nobody can call with confidence.

The two weekly expiries that drew all the attention this month settled and changed nothing. Bitcoin's range belongs to whoever shows up in the spot market, and over the past week, very few people did.

The post Bitcoin traders ran out of excuses for the market’s flatline – and now a $2.5 billion bet is running out of time appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Every cycle produces a handful of coins that are not just traded, they are believed in. They come with a founder who gives keynote talks, a whitepaper that reads like a manifesto, and a promise that goes far beyond price: this one is going to replace the cloud, connect every blockchain, or put a billion machines on-chain.

Then the cycle ends. And ends again.

The market backdrop makes the comparison brutal. Bitcoin is trading in the low-mid $60,000s after peaking around $126,000 in October 2025, the total crypto market cap sits near $2.17 trillion, Bitcoin dominance is above 56%, and the Fear and Greed Index is stuck in fear. Capital is not rotating down the risk curve. It is sitting still.

That means the coins below are not down because of one bad week. They are down because two full cycles came and went without them ever getting back to where they started. Here are five of the most striking examples, ranked by how far they have fallen from their peaks.

5. Cosmos (ATOM): what happened to the Internet of Blockchains?

Cosmos was supposed to be the connective tissue of crypto. One SDK to build any blockchain, one protocol (IBC) to let them all talk to each other, and one hub at the center of it, secured by ATOM. In 2021, "Internet of Blockchains" was one of the strongest narratives in the market.

• Where it is now: the strange part is that the technology largely worked. The Cosmos SDK went on to power Celestia, Injective, dYdX, Sei and Terra. IBC still moves real volume. What failed was the token. Every chain that launched with Cosmos tooling launched with its own token, its own validators and its own fee revenue, and dYdX eventually built its own chain and took its business with it. ATOM secured the hub and captured almost nothing else. The 2022 "ATOM 2.0" proposal, which tried to fix exactly that, was voted down by the community. Jae Kwon's departure and years of governance infighting did the rest.
• Price: ATOM trades around $1.39 against an all-time high of roughly $44.70 set in September 2021. That is about 96.8% below the peak, with a market cap of roughly $727 million.

4. Algorand (ALGO): can academic credibility save a token?

Algorand had the best résumé in the industry. Founded by Silvio Micali, an MIT professor and Turing Award winner, it introduced pure proof-of-stake with instant finality and no forks, and marketed itself as the chain institutions and governments would actually use. It landed a FIFA World Cup sponsorship and a string of central bank and government pilots.

• Where it is now: the chain still works exactly as advertised. Blocks are fast, fees are fractions of a cent, and it never had a serious outage. But developers went to Ethereum L2s and Solana, DeFi liquidity never arrived at scale, and the pilots rarely turned into recurring on-chain volume. Algorand is now positioning around post-quantum security and real-world assets, which is a real differentiator, but so far it is a technical one rather than a demand one. ALGO printed a fresh all-time low in March 2026.
• Price: ALGO trades near $0.084 against an all-time high of $3.56 from June 2019, roughly 97.6% below the peak, with a market cap around $758 million.

3. IOTA: what is left of the Internet of Things coin?

IOTA was going to be the machine economy. No blocks, no miners, no fees. Instead a directed acyclic graph called the Tangle, where every transaction confirms two others, which in theory meant it got faster as it got busier. Fridges paying for their own repairs, cars paying for their own parking, sensors selling data. In late 2017 that story pushed it into the top five coins.

• Where it is now: the fee-free machine economy never materialised. A 2017 "Microsoft partnership" that turned out to be a data marketplace pilot damaged credibility, the Trinity wallet was compromised in 2020 and forced the team to halt the entire network for weeks, and the founding group split in public. IOTA has since rebuilt itself almost from scratch as a Move-based, DAG-consensus L1 aimed at DeFi and real-world assets. It is a legitimate technical reset. It is also a completely different product from the one people bought in 2017, and the market has priced it accordingly. The token is sitting essentially on its all-time low.
• Price: IOTA trades around $0.035 against an all-time high of $5.25 from December 2017, about 99.3% below the peak, with a market cap of roughly $158 million.

2. EOS / Vaulta (A): what did $4.1 billion actually buy?

The largest ICO in history. Block.one ran a token sale for a full year and raised about $4.1 billion for an "Ethereum killer" with millions of transactions per second and zero fees. It was, at the time, the most heavily funded project in crypto.

• Where it is now: the SEC settled with Block.one for $24 million in 2019, a rounding error against the raise. The promised throughput arrived, the applications did not, and the community spent years fighting Block.one over unspent funds and unfulfilled commitments. In 2025 the network rebranded to Vaulta with a Web3 banking pitch, and the ticker changed from EOS to A. The rebrand produced a short-lived rally, then a collapse: a new all-time low in January 2026, another around $0.057 in June 2026, and the resignation of the CEO who led the pivot.
• Price: Vaulta trades near $0.06 against an EOS all-time high of $22.89 from April 2018, roughly 99.6% below the peak, with a market cap around $105 million.

1. Internet Computer (ICP): how does a token fall 99.7%?

The most ambitious pitch of the 2021 cycle. Dfinity spent more than $500 million on R&D to build a blockchain that could host entire applications end to end, replacing AWS, Google Cloud and the traditional web stack. Websites, databases, front ends and payments, all running on-chain. It was described as nothing less than a decentralised internet.

• Where it is now: ICP listed in May 2021 at a valuation that implied a market cap near $400 billion at its peak, which would have made it one of the largest technology assets on earth. Then early allocations unlocked into a falling market and the price broke almost immediately. The technology is genuinely unusual and still shipping, with ckBTC, on-chain AI experiments and a "Mission 70" proposal published in February 2026 to cut token inflation by at least 70% by 2027. But inflation was never the core problem. Usage was. Every app on the network burns ICP, so the fix only works if the apps arrive.
• Price: ICP trades around $2.15 against an all-time high of $700.65 from May 2021, roughly 99.7% below the peak, with a market cap of about $1.2 billion.

The damage in one table

*Figures reflect data at the time of writing and will move.

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What do all five have in common?

None of these projects is a scam, and none of them is technically dead. Every network still produces blocks. Every team still ships. That is what makes the list interesting rather than just depressing.

The pattern is not fraud, it is three repeating mistakes:

• The token was not the product. Cosmos is the purest case. The tech won, the token did not, because value accrued to the chains built with it instead of the chain at the center.
• Supply arrived before demand. ICP and EOS both hit the market with enormous valuations and enormous unlock schedules attached, which is a mathematical headwind no amount of engineering fixes.
• The narrative expired faster than the roadmap. IOTA's machine economy and Algorand's institutional pitch were both multi-year theses in a market that reprices every 90 days. By the time the product was ready, the story belonged to someone else.

Are any of these coins still worth watching?

There is a real argument that some of these are the most asymmetric assets in the market: working technology, tiny valuations, functioning teams, near-zero expectations. A coin trading 99% below its high does not need a new bull market to double; it needs one credible reason for anyone to care.

There is an equally real argument that a token which has failed to reclaim its high across two full cycles is telling you something the roadmap is not. Networks can survive indefinitely while their tokens go nowhere, and dead money is still dead money even when the GitHub is active.

What would change the picture is not a partnership announcement or a rebrand. It is measurable, recurring, fee-paying usage that has to route through the token. Until one of these five can show that, the charts are the honest summary.

If you have seen headlines suggesting the President personally sat down with senators to get the CLARITY Act over the line, that reporting was accurate, and then the story moved on without it. Trump did intervene directly. He did approve the ethics language that had blocked the bill for months. And within roughly a week, the Senate Majority Leader was telling reporters the bill probably would not pass before the August recess.

That gap between "the White House is now personally involved" and "the bill is about to become law" is the whole story right now, and it is worth getting straight before you position yourself around a passage trade.

What did Trump actually do?

On 16 July, Trump met a group of Republican senators in the Oval Office: Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee. Also present were White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt, chief of staff Susie Wiles and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. No Democrats were invited.

This was the deepest executive-branch involvement the bill has seen. The purpose was narrow: break the deadlock over the ethics provision, which had been the single unresolved item after months of negotiation.

Days later, the President signed off on ethics language. On 22 July, Senate Republicans published a revised draft running to several hundred pages. For the first time, the text included explicit restrictions on how a sitting president may profit from digital assets. The president, vice president, members of Congress, federal judges and other covered officials would be barred from issuing or sponsoring digital assets for compensation while in office.

On the face of it, that was the concession Democrats had been demanding since spring. It did not land that way.

Why did Democrats reject the ethics language?

Within hours of the text dropping, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, one of only two Democrats who voted the bill out of the Senate Banking Committee, dismissed the Republican draft in terms too crude to print, saying it was not a serious effort and fell well short of a deal. He added that he is working on a counteroffer with Tillis and unnamed Republicans, and that the fight is not over.

The underlying dispute is about scope and timing rather than the existence of a provision. Democrats have wanted binding, durable limits on officials' crypto business interests. Republicans produced restrictions that critics describe as narrower and more temporary than what was asked for. Democrats had made the ethics question a stated precondition for their votes; Republicans consider the matter now addressed. Both positions are on the record, and neither side has moved since.

Context matters here for why this became the sticking point at all. Trump's annual financial disclosure reported more than $1.4 billion in crypto-related income for 2025, including roughly $635 million in meme coin royalties and around $515 million linked to World Liberty Financial token sales. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in connection with his digital asset businesses. Democratic critics have argued that a new regulatory framework should not pass without constraints on the President's own commercial exposure to the industry it governs. Supporters counter that conflating market structure rules with a fight over one official's holdings is what has cost the industry a year of legal uncertainty.

What is the actual vote math?

This is where the optimism runs out, and it has nothing to do with who is right on ethics.

The bill needs 60 votes in the Senate to clear cloture. Republicans hold 53 seats. Senators Josh Hawley and Rand Paul are expected to vote no on substantive grounds, which puts the working Republican base closer to 51. That means roughly nine Democratic votes are required.

Only two Democrats, Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, voted for the bill in committee, and both explicitly warned that committee support did not guarantee a floor vote. Meanwhile, Senators Chris Murphy, Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley have formally come out against it.

Nine votes from a caucus where the two most sympathetic members are publicly unsatisfied is not a rounding error. It is the reason experienced observers expected the ethics deal to come before floor time, not after.

What did Thune actually say, and does it settle it?

Asked on Thursday whether the Senate could clear the CLARITY Act and a separate college sports bill before the recess, Majority Leader John Thune said he did not think they could be finished, adding that he would like to at least get CLARITY started and see where the votes land.

Read that carefully, because the two halves point in different directions. "Get it started" means opening floor debate without completing it, which would leave the bill mid-process going into September. That is not the same as the bill dying, but it does mean burning floor time in a fall calendar already crowded by midterm politics. Thune's office has pointed to a Russia sanctions bill as the next priority for floor time.

Not everyone accepts that read. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt said he was perplexed by Thune's assessment and remains slightly more optimistic, arguing the first week of August is still viable and pushing for the vote to be scheduled rather than waiting indefinitely for Democratic sign-off. Senator John Kennedy has framed the stakes plainly: without a positive vote before the break, he expects the odds to turn against the bill.

The recess begins around 7 August.

How far have the odds actually moved?

The prediction markets tell the story more cleanly than the press releases do.

Polymarket priced 2026 passage at 82% in February. It sat near 48% three weeks ago. After Thune's comments it fell to roughly 37%. Galaxy Research, which had 75% in May, cut to 50% and then again to about 30%. Kalshi traders had earlier given a Senate vote before recess a 79% chance while assigning only 36% to the bill actually becoming law this year. That spread captured the distinction most headlines missed.

Institutional forecasters have been blunter. Stifel's Washington strategist wrote that the bill probably needs to clear the Senate by the end of July, and that missing the recess would cause its prospects to deteriorate materially. Beacon Policy Advisors has suggested a miss could end the 2026 path altogether. Lummis has warned that a delay could push comprehensive market structure legislation out by years.

Is the ethics fight the only obstacle?

No, and this is underreported.

A second front opened over stablecoin yield. Banking groups have pushed back on provisions they argue would let yield-bearing stablecoin products draw deposits away from community lenders. Senator John Cornyn has voiced those concerns publicly, and Senator John Curtis said he would take the question of local lending capacity to Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott.

That matters because it is Republican resistance, on economic rather than ethical grounds, in a chamber where the majority cannot afford defections.

Worth noting alongside it: 18 July marked one year since the GENIUS Act, and the statutory deadline for federal agencies to finalise stablecoin implementing rules passed without a single final rule being issued. The legislative machinery on US digital asset policy is moving slower than the announcements suggest across the board.

What does this mean if you trade or build?

For traders, the practical takeaway is that CLARITY passage is not a priced-in certainty and has not been for weeks. Anyone positioning on a regulatory catalyst should be working from roughly one-in-three, not from a headline about a White House meeting. Citi cut its Bitcoin and Ethereum targets earlier in July partly on the persistence of regulatory uncertainty, which is a reasonable proxy for how the sell side is reading this.

For builders and US-facing firms, the status quo continues: oversight split between the SEC and CFTC on a case-by-case basis, with agency posture rather than statute doing the work. That posture is a reversible administrative choice, not law, and that is precisely the exposure the bill was meant to close.

For everyone else, the sequencing question is simple. If the Senate begins debate before 7 August, September is live. If nothing starts, the realistic window shifts past the November midterms, and a Congress campaigning on other things is not one that finds floor time for a 600-page market structure bill.

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The CLARITY Act has come further than any crypto market structure bill in US history: passed the House 294–134 in July 2025, cleared Senate Banking 15–9 in May 2026, placed on the Senate calendar, and now backed by direct presidential involvement. It is still nine votes short of a chamber that leaves town in under two weeks. Both of those things are true at once, and only one of them is making headlines.

Three days after BitMEX told users it was closing after eleven years, BitMart has announced the orderly cessation of its own trading platform. The notice went live on 26 July 2026 at 01:40 UTC and puts a hard clock on every balance still sitting on the exchange. Two centralized venues announcing wind-downs in the same week is not a coincidence — it is what the mid-tier exchange model looks like when the numbers stop working.

What exactly did BitMart announce?

BitMart says the decision follows an evaluation of its operating conditions, market environment and future strategic direction. There is no mention of insolvency, hack or enforcement action. The wording is the corporate equivalent of the business no longer paying for itself.

The shutdown is staged rather than immediate:

• 26 July 2026, 01:30 UTC — new user registrations stop, all crypto and fiat deposits are suspended, futures accounts move to Reduce-Only, spot stops accepting new orders, and Copy Trading, Grid, API and other automated services are switched off in phases. Open orders must be cancelled by users or will be cancelled by the system.
• 26 August 2026, 01:00 UTC — all spot, futures and other trading services end. Any futures position still open may be settled by the platform at its mark, index or applicable settlement price.
• 31 January 2027, 15:59 UTC — the trading platform officially ceases operations. Accounts remain accessible for a period afterwards for history and withdrawal requests.

Earn, Staking, Lending and Launchpad products are being retired in phases, with separate redemption notices to follow.

What is the actual withdrawal deadline?

This is the part that matters and it is earlier than the January 2027 date suggests.

BitMart recommends users complete identity verification and close all positions before 26 August 2026, 01:00 UTC, and submit withdrawal requests before 26 August 2026, 05:00 UTC. Anything after that gets routed into a separate processing procedure with its own documentation requirements.

Withdrawals are also not automatic. BitMart states that requests may go through manual review covering KYC verification, login device and IP checks, withdrawal address screening, source-of-funds review, Travel Rule compliance and sanctions checks. Submitting a request is explicitly not the same as the assets being broadcast on-chain. In a wind-down, review queues get long — which is the practical argument for withdrawing now rather than in the final week of August.

Were there warning signs before the announcement?

In hindsight, the week before the notice reads like a checklist:

• 24 July — BitMart introduced a custody fee policy for inactive accounts.
• 25 July — a notice restricting services for U.S. users, the suspension of the AMM Bot service, and the discontinuation of Spot Margin trading with forced liquidation set for 26 July at 02:00 UTC.
• 26 July — the full cessation notice.

That sequence came just nine days after BitMart published an upbeat H1 2026 report on 17 July, highlighting asset-management AUM up roughly 256%, a new Prediction Market product and an expanded regulatory footprint including an Australian financial services licence secured in June. The same report acknowledged the backdrop plainly: Bitcoin down around 33% in the half, Ether down 50%, record spot ETF outflows, and cooling volumes across the top ten centralized exchanges.

How does this compare to the BitMEX shutdown?

BitMEX announced on 23 July that HDR Global Trading Limited would close the exchange at 04:00 UTC on 23 September 2026, following a strategic review. Registrations stopped immediately, reduce-only trading begins 26 August at 04:00 UTC, and KYC-verified users who leave balances behind face a monthly fee of the greater of $50 or 1% annually.

The overlap is striking. Both exchanges chose 26 August as the date trading effectively ends. Both framed the decision as strategic rather than distressed. Both stopped registrations the day of the announcement. BitMEX was an eleven-year-old derivatives pioneer that invented the perpetual swap; BitMart was an eight-year-old altcoin-heavy spot and futures venue with a broad listings catalogue. Very different businesses, same conclusion within 72 hours.

Why are mid-tier exchanges closing now?

The squeeze is structural rather than dramatic.

Trading fees have compressed toward zero across the industry. Compliance costs have gone the other way — MiCA in Europe, licensing regimes in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, Travel Rule infrastructure, proof-of-reserves expectations. Liquidity has concentrated into a handful of the largest venues, while on-chain perpetual platforms have absorbed a growing share of derivatives flow that used to sit on exchanges like BitMEX.

A mid-tier exchange therefore pays large-exchange compliance costs on small-exchange revenue, in a half-year where Bitcoin fell a third. That is not a business you fix with another listing campaign.

Expect more of these. The realistic outcome of the current cycle is fewer, larger, more heavily licensed venues — which solves some problems and concentrates counterparty risk into a smaller number of names.

What should affected users do right now?

1. Log in and check every balance, including Earn, staking and lending positions.
2. Complete or update KYC before the deadline — unverified accounts will hit review friction.
3. Cancel open orders and close futures positions rather than letting them be force-settled.
4. Redeem Earn and locked products, which have their own separate timelines.
5. Withdraw early. Verify the network and destination address carefully, and do not submit duplicate requests.
6. Download your balance, deposit, withdrawal and trade history for tax purposes before access changes.

One more thing: BitMart has explicitly warned about impersonation scams during the wind-down. There are no paid priority withdrawal channels, no "account unfreezing fees" and no expedited processing. Nobody from BitMart will ask for your password, 2FA code, private keys or seed phrase. Any message on Telegram or WhatsApp offering to speed up your withdrawal for a fee is a scam.

Where can users move their assets?

Long-term holdings that are not being actively traded belong in self-custody, where no exchange timeline applies to them. For funds that need to stay on a trading venue, the sensible filter now is regulatory footing and balance-sheet durability rather than fee tables and listing counts.

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The broader lesson of this week is worth stating simply: assets held on any exchange are a claim against a company, not coins you control. Both BitMart and BitMEX appear to be closing in an orderly way with user funds intact. That is the good version of this outcome. It still means that tens of thousands of users are moving funds on someone else's schedule.

The National AI Initiative Act became law on 1 January 2021. Five years later, the companies at the centre of the AI trade are worth tens of trillions of dollars. The entire crypto market, meanwhile, is worth about $2.2 trillion. The implied conclusion: pass the CLARITY Act, and crypto re-rates the same way.

It is a good story. It is also a comparison that falls apart the moment you check the numbers, the legislation, and the vote count. Here is the honest version.

What Actually Happened To AI Stocks After 2021?

The Magnificent Seven — Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla — carried a combined market capitalisation of roughly $22.6 trillion as of 22 July 2026, around a third of the entire S&P 500. Nvidia alone sits above $5 trillion. The direction of travel in the viral post is correct: an enormous amount of value has been created since 2021.

The causation is not. The National AI Initiative Act created a coordination office and a federal R&D framework. It did not deregulate a market, unlock institutional capital, or remove a legal overhang. What actually re-rated those stocks was ChatGPT, a capex supercycle, and earnings. The Magnificent Seven are projected to spend around $680 billion on AI-related capital expenditure in 2026 alone. That is the engine — not a 2021 authorisation bill.

There is also a warning inside the comparison that the bullish framing skips. That trade is currently cracking. The Mag 7 ETF is up only marginally in 2026, the group is down roughly 11% from its May record, and JPMorgan strategists have publicly compared the internal split between chipmakers and hyperscalers to the late stages of the dot-com bubble. If crypto gets an "AI-style re-rating," that is what it looks like at the end.

Why Is The $2.2 Trillion Crypto Number Misleading?

Because it is a number that has already come down hard.

The global crypto market cap sits between roughly $2.19 trillion and $2.28 trillion as of 25 July 2026 — down about 42% year on year and roughly 47% below the all-time high of about $4.27 trillion set on 6 October 2025. Bitcoin is trading near $64,000 with dominance around 56–58%, and the Crypto Fear & Greed Index is reading 27: fear.

So the correct framing is not "crypto is small and about to explode." It is "crypto is in a drawdown and looking for a catalyst." Those are very different trades with very different risk profiles. The 2021-to-2026 AI comparison quietly borrows the optimism of a bull market and applies it to a market that has spent nine months bleeding.

Where Does The CLARITY Act Actually Stand?

This is the part most of the hype posts skip, and it matters.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (H.R. 3633) passed the House on 17 July 2025 by 294–134, with more than 70 Democrats crossing the aisle — the strongest congressional endorsement digital assets have ever received. The Senate Banking Committee then advanced its version 15–9 on 14 May 2026. On 1 June it was reported out and placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar as Calendar No. 423.

And there it has sat. No cloture motion has been filed. Majority Leader John Thune has not allocated floor time. The White House's informal 4 July signing target passed without a ceremony.

The blockage was never the market-structure substance — the SEC/CFTC split, the "digital commodity" definition, the maturity test, DeFi developer safe harbours. It was a conflict-of-interest clause restricting how the president, vice president and members of Congress can profit from digital assets while in office. Trump's July financial disclosure logged roughly $1.4 billion in crypto income for 2025, most of it tied to World Liberty Financial and his memecoin, making him the single largest obstacle to the bill he says he wants.

On 20 July the White House signed off on ethics language. On 22 July Senate Republicans circulated updated text merging the Banking and Agriculture Committee approaches, with an ethics provision that sunsets in 2029. Both Democrats who voted the bill out of committee — Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks — immediately said they oppose that version.

Who Wants CLARITY, And Who Is Blocking It?

The institutional list in the viral post is real, and it got longer this week.

Fidelity, which oversees about $7.1 trillion in assets, publicly urged the Senate to pass the bill on 24 July. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told Politico he is supportive, arguing the legislation creates a level playing field and lets regulated institutions that have stayed on the sidelines participate. BlackRock, Fidelity and Goldman have all continued building out blockchain and digital-asset products as the regulatory picture improved. Coinbase-backed Stand With Crypto says it has generated some 950,000 constituent contacts pushing for Senate action.

But "Wall Street wants it" is not the same as "Wall Street agrees." The American Bankers Association, Bank Policy Institute, Consumer Bankers Association, Financial Services Forum, Independent Community Bankers of America and National Bankers Association issued a joint statement opposing provisions that would let crypto platforms pay yield on stablecoins — their argument being that it drains deposits away from mortgage and small-business lending. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon has raised the same objection. The National Sheriffs' Association has campaigned against the bill on law-enforcement grounds, and Senators Mark Warner and Catherine Cortez Masto have conditioned their support on addressing those concerns.

The arithmetic is brutal. Passage needs 60 votes. Republicans hold 53 seats, and Josh Hawley and Rand Paul are expected to vote no on substance. That means seven to nine Democrats have to be found — and the two who have already voted for it once are currently opposed to the latest text.

What Are The Real Odds Of Passage In 2026?

The people with money on it have been cutting their numbers, not raising them.

Galaxy Research has trimmed its 2026 passage odds to around 50%, citing the absence of a unified Senate text, no firm floor schedule and a shrinking window. Polymarket has been far more volatile: above 80% in February, a record low near 24% in mid-July, back to roughly 43–45% when the updated text was expected, and settling in the mid-30s as the ethics deadlock hardened.

The calendar is now the binding constraint. The Senate breaks for August recess around 7–8 August. Stifel's Brian Gardner has written that the bill probably needs to clear the Senate by end of July, and that missing the recess would cause its prospects to deteriorate materially. Beacon Policy Advisors has gone further, suggesting a miss could end the 2026 path entirely.

So Will Crypto Pump When CLARITY Passes?

Two things are worth separating.

First, passage is not the finish line. The GENIUS Act was signed in July 2025 and then missed its own one-year rulemaking deadline outright. CLARITY would make the CFTC the primary digital-asset regulator — an agency currently operating with a single commissioner and an unfunded budget request. Registration windows, definitional rulemaking and agency capacity mean the practical effects would arrive over quarters and years, not on the day of the signature.

Second, most of the good news may already be priced. Markets have been trading the CLARITY headline since February. Odds have round-tripped from 80% to 24% and back into the 30s and 40s, and the market is still down 42% year on year. That pattern suggests the bill is functioning as a sentiment variable rather than a coiled spring — and it means the asymmetry may run in the other direction. A clean Senate passage before August recess is a genuine catalyst. A miss, with prediction markets already pessimistic, is a slow bleed of the last remaining 2026 policy hope.

The honest summary: the CLARITY Act is the most consequential piece of crypto legislation ever to get this far, the institutional support behind it is real and growing, and it is still nowhere near certain. Anyone telling you a 10x re-rating is the base case is selling you a narrative, not an analysis.

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Samsung has put stablecoins on the roadmap for Samsung Wallet. The announcement came at Galaxy Unpacked 2026 on 22 July, and would place dollar-pegged digital currencies directly inside an app already installed on millions of devices. Samsung says the move would make it one of the first major mobile brands to support stablecoins natively on smartphones.

That is a genuinely significant distribution story. It is also, for now, an announcement rather than a product — and the distinction matters a great deal when you start asking what it does to prices.

Samsung Stablecoins: What exactly did Samsung announce?

During the Galaxy Unpacked event, Samsung said its in-house wallet app will include stablecoin support, positioning Wallet as "the foundation of a connected financial ecosystem" across Galaxy devices and services, bringing payments, rewards and digital assets into one experience.

The on-stage demo showed a USDC account with send, receive and top-up functions. Samsung did not, however, confirm partnerships with any stablecoin issuers.

It arrived bundled with a more concrete product. Samsung launched the Galaxy Card in the US with Barclays and Visa — the first financial product built directly around Samsung Wallet. The card offers 5% cashback on certain purchases in Samsung's own stores alongside other perks. The pattern here is worth noting: the card is shipping, the stablecoin support is signposted.

Is this really a billion-user crypto on-ramp?

Samsung's global Galaxy install base is frequently put in the region of a billion devices, and that is the ceiling this story points at. But Samsung Wallet itself is not available everywhere — it operates in roughly 30 to 40 markets, and the Galaxy Card launching alongside the announcement is US-only. One estimate framed the immediately addressable figure at 241 million Galaxy phones.

Samsung has not confirmed a timeline or a regional rollout plan. Stablecoin regulation differs sharply across its markets, and that alone makes a simultaneous global switch-on implausible. The US, where the Galaxy Card and Barclays partnership are launching, is the likely first target.

So: a billion-device ceiling, a low-hundreds-of-millions realistic near-term ceiling, and an actual launch audience of zero until Samsung ships it.

Why does this matter more than previous Samsung crypto moves?

Because it changes what the wallet is rather than what it links to.

Samsung has been circling crypto for years. It shipped an embedded cryptocurrency wallet with hardware-backed security in the Galaxy S10 back in 2019, and integrated Coinbase One into Samsung Wallet in the US to give millions of consumers an easier path into crypto.

But offering users the ability to buy Bitcoin through a partner app is one thing. Embedding a dollar-equivalent digital currency into the core wallet experience is a fundamentally different proposition.

Stablecoins have largely stayed inside crypto — circulating between exchanges and platforms that ordinary users never touch. A default slot in the wallet app that comes preinstalled on the phone removes the single biggest barrier to that changing: nobody has to download anything, sign up anywhere, or learn what a seed phrase is.

The competitive pressure is the other half of the story. Apple, which restricted NFC access on iPhones until EU regulatory pressure forced changes, has announced no stablecoin integration for Apple Wallet. If Samsung ships this at scale, rival manufacturers and wallet providers face pressure to move sooner than they had planned.

How would this affect crypto prices over the medium term?

Here is where a lot of coverage gets sloppy, so let's be precise about the mechanism.

Stablecoin adoption is not a direct bid on Bitcoin. Someone topping up a USDC balance to buy coffee is not buying BTC. They may never buy BTC. The demand this creates flows to dollar-pegged tokens, and issuing more USDC means Circle buys more short-term Treasuries — not more crypto.

The transmission to asset prices is indirect and works through three channels:

1. Settlement layers capture the fees. Stablecoin transactions have to settle somewhere. Whichever chains Samsung routes volume through — Ethereum, its L2s, Solana, or something else — would see real transaction demand rather than speculative demand. That is the clearest medium-term link to a tradeable asset, and it depends entirely on technical choices Samsung has not disclosed.

2. Issuers are the direct beneficiaries. Circle's listed equity (CRCL) is a far more direct expression of this trade than any token. Stablecoins already exceed $320 billion in market capitalisation, dominated by USDT and USDC. Distribution through a top-two smartphone vendor moves that number.

3. The funnel effect — slow, real, unquantifiable. Users who hold a stablecoin balance in an app they already trust are meaningfully closer to buying a volatile asset than users who hold nothing. Historically, that's how retail crypto adoption has worked: stablecoin first, speculation second. But this operates over years, not quarters, and no one can put a number on the conversion rate.

And over the long term?

The honest answer is that infrastructure announcements of this type have a poor record of showing up in price charts on any timeline traders care about.

Samsung has not disclosed which stablecoins will be supported or when the feature launches globally. Until those two questions are answered, this is a directional signal about where consumer fintech is heading, not a catalyst.

What it does change is the structural argument. The case for stablecoins as payment infrastructure — rather than as trading collateral — gets materially stronger when the default wallet on hundreds of millions of phones supports them natively. Visa and blockchain data firm Allium now publish on-chain stablecoin volumes, reflecting how far fiat-backed tokens have already moved beyond trading into payments infrastructure.

For anyone positioning around this: watch for the launch date, the named issuer, the chain, and the first market list. Those four details will tell you whether this is a headline or a business.

Worth keeping in perspective, too, that the wider market is not currently trading on adoption news. $Bitcoin is around $63,900 and down roughly 27% year-to-date, with the Fed's 28–29 July meeting dominating positioning. A roadmap item at a phone launch will not outweigh that.

After two years of silence from Thinking Machines Lab, Murati's debut model is out and on OpenRouter. The MCP score is genuinely impressive. The price-to-performance math is more complicated.

The AI Kill Switch Act would let Homeland Security order frontier AI throttled or shut down, with fines up to $20 million a day for defying it.

For the first time, real-world assets—stocks, commodities, and market indices—outpaced crypto on the world's biggest decentralized derivatives exchange.

Samsung showed a wallet mockup holding Circle's USDC at Galaxy Unpacked. But details are scarce.

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Shiba Inu trading volume surged as much as 1200% as SHIB price suddenly gained momentum.

TL;DR

• Arthur Hayes acquired 1,290 ETH worth about $2.5 million after transferring funds to Cumberland and FalconX.
• Ethereum is consolidating below the $1,900 resistance level. 
• Analysts are now watching for a move toward $2,000.
• Ethereum network activity remains healthy as new smart contract deployments continue despite recent price volatility.

Arthur Hayes’s Ethereum accumulation continued after the BitMEX co-founder purchased 1,290 ETH worth approximately $2.5 million. On-chain data shows Hayes completed the acquisition using funds transferred to trading firms Cumberland and FalconX three days earlier, adding to growing attention around Ethereum as it tests an important technical resistance level.

The purchase comes as Ethereum trades just below $1,900, a price zone that analysts consider critical for determining the asset’s next directional move. Market participants are now watching whether buying pressure can push ETH above resistance and open the path toward $2,000.

Ethereum tests resistance after steady recovery

The accompanying price chart shows Ethereum recovering from June lows while establishing higher lows during July. However, the rally has stalled beneath the $1,900 resistance zone, where sellers have repeatedly limited upward momentum.

According to market analyst Ted Pillows, reclaiming $1,900 could trigger a move toward $2,000 in the near term. A successful breakout would also place the next resistance around the $2,200 region before Ethereum challenges the broader supply zone near $2,400.

Failure to hold current support, however, could expose Ethereum to another decline toward the $1,700 level. A deeper correction could eventually revisit support around $1,550 if selling pressure accelerates.

Network activity remains supportive

Beyond price action, Ethereum’s network continues showing signs of developer activity. The accompanying Messari data highlights several spikes in new smart contract deployments throughout July, including one surge that exceeded 300,000 new contracts.

Although contract creation fluctuates daily, consistent deployment activity suggests developers continue building applications despite recent market volatility. Strong developer participation often reflects continued ecosystem growth, even when token prices remain range-bound.

That trend complements the broader narrative surrounding Ethereum, where institutional participants and developers continue expanding their exposure while investors await stronger price confirmation.

The Arthur Hayes Ethereum purchase adds another example of large investors accumulating the asset near a major technical level. While a single transaction does not determine market direction, institutional buying often attracts additional attention when prices approach important resistance.

For bullish momentum to strengthen, Ethereum must establish support above $1,900 before attempting a move toward $2,000. A sustained break above that level could encourage further buying and shift sentiment after months of consolidation.

Conversely, rejection below resistance would keep Ethereum trading within its current range and increase the likelihood of another test of lower support levels.

For now, Arthur Hayes Ethereum accumulation coincides with improving technical structure and steady network activity, leaving traders focused on whether ETH can convert the $1,900 resistance into support and extend its recovery toward the next major price objective.

The post Ethereum Approaches Key Breakout Level as Hayes Boosts Holdings appeared first on Blockonomi.

TL;DR

• Bitcoin miner selling remains inside a long-term downward trend despite a recent increase in exchange transfers.
• Miners sent 4,841 BTC to Binance during the past 30 days.
• The number represents 98.66% of all miner transfers to exchanges.
• Lower exchange flows reduce immediate selling pressure but do not confirm a bullish market on their own.

Bitcoin miner selling continues to contract as exchange-bound supply stays within a descending trend that has persisted since mid-2023. The latest on-chain data shows miners transferred 4,841 BTC to Binance over the past 30 days, representing 98.66% of all miner flows to exchanges. Although transfers recently rebounded from their lows, the broader trend still points to lower miner-driven selling pressure.

The latest readings suggest miners are sending fewer coins to public exchanges even as Bitcoin trades below recent highs. That shift reduces the amount of fresh supply entering the spot market, although analysts caution that the signal should be viewed alongside other on-chain indicators.

Bitcoin Halving Continues to Reshape Miner Activity

The long-term decline partly reflects the impact of Bitcoin’s 2024 halving. Since block rewards were reduced by half, miners naturally produce fewer BTC for the same amount of computational work. As a result, lower exchange transfers are an expected outcome and should not automatically be interpreted as stronger confidence among mining companies.

The chart also shows miner transfers have remained inside a descending channel despite several short-term spikes. Recent flows recovered from around 3,500 BTC toward 6,000 BTC as Bitcoin rebounded, suggesting some operators sold part of their production to cover expenses. However, the increase faded quickly without breaking the broader downtrend.

The declining trend may also reflect structural changes across the mining sector. Larger mining companies now have greater access to financing through debt, equity offerings, production hedging, and private liquidity arrangements. These alternatives allow operators to fund operations without immediately selling newly mined Bitcoin on public exchanges.

Another factor may be lower available inventories. Some miners have already distributed significant portions of their holdings during previous market rallies, leaving fewer coins available for future exchange deposits. Together, these developments point to a more mature industry that depends less on constant spot market selling.

Why the Trend Matters for Bitcoin

The continued decline in Bitcoin miner selling is constructive because it limits one source of supply entering the market. Lower miner distribution can ease selling pressure when investor demand remains stable, although it does not guarantee higher prices.

Analysts say the signal becomes more meaningful if miner reserves stabilize while exchange transfers remain subdued. That combination would suggest miners are holding a larger share of production instead of selling into market strength.

On the other hand, a breakout above the descending channel, combined with falling miner reserves and weaker Bitcoin prices, would indicate renewed financial pressure across the mining sector. Such a shift could force operators to increase exchange deposits and add fresh selling pressure.

For now, Bitcoin miner selling continues to follow its broader downward trajectory despite recent market volatility. The latest data suggests miners remain under less pressure to distribute coins through public exchanges, leaving overall market structure more balanced while investors monitor whether the trend can persist.

The post Bitcoin Miner Selling Slows as Exchange Flows Remain in Long-Term Decline appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Tom Lee says Ethereum’s 2.0 phase mirrors past re-ratings at Amazon and Nvidia stocks.
• AI-driven “uncanny valley of wealth” thesis positions Ethereum as a necessary trust layer.
• BitMine holds 5.74 million ETH, 4.8% of supply, and plans to stay below 5%.
• Technical analysts project near-term ETH targets between $2,200 and $2,239 per token.

Ethereum could reach $250,000 per token over the long term, according to BitMine Chairman Tom Lee. He shared this outlook during WebX 2026 in Tokyo on July 13.

Lee described Ethereum’s shift into a “2.0” phase, comparing it to past re-ratings at Amazon and Nvidia. His thesis centers on Ethereum becoming “productive money” within an AI-driven economy.

Why Tom Lee Sees Ethereum Reaching $250,000

Lee’s price target stems from Ethereum’s potential role as global settlement money. He argued ETH could function similarly to how JPMorgan re-rated as a financial platform.

This “2.0” framing suggests Ethereum moves beyond a simple crypto asset. Instead, it becomes core infrastructure for an economy shaped by artificial intelligence.

Central to Lee’s argument is what he calls the “uncanny valley of wealth.” Agentic AI systems could soon generate income exceeding human capacity, he explained.

Blockchain, in this view, becomes a necessary trust layer. It separates human economic activity from autonomous AI-driven transactions.

Ethereum increasingly functions as “money” through its use in transaction fees, Lee wrote. Robinhood Chain, for example, now uses ETH as its native gas token.

This utility reinforces demand beyond simple price speculation, he said. Growing developer activity on Ethereum further strengthens this settlement-layer thesis.

Lee tied his long-term valuation to BitMine’s own stock performance. The company’s share price has closely tracked Ethereum’s market price.

If Ethereum fulfills its potential as “productive money,” he suggested, both assets benefit substantially. That correlation forms a key pillar of his $250,000 projection.

BitMine’s Position Behind the Long-Term Ethereum Thesis

BitMine has built the largest corporate Ethereum treasury to support this outlook. The company currently holds 5.74 million ETH, or 4.8% of supply.

BitMine intends to stay below a 5% concentration threshold going forward. This approach reflects a long-term accumulation strategy rather than short-term trading.

BitMine’s first year included launching the MAVAN validator network. It also led investment rounds in Ethereum Foundation spin-offs ETH Labs and Ethereum Institutional.

These initiatives position BitMine at the center of Ethereum’s institutional buildout. Lee frames this involvement as necessary for reaching his $250,000 target.

Near-term technical signals add support to the broader long-term view. Analysts at DeMark Analytics and Steve Suttmeier project Ethereum reaching $2,200 to $2,239 soon.

They compared current conditions to the 1987 S&P 500 pattern. Lee sees this near-term move as an early step toward his larger thesis.

Recent corporate milestones reinforce BitMine’s role in this narrative. The company completed a preferred stock offering and uplisted to the NYSE.

It also gained inclusion in the Russell 1000 index this year. Lee titled his July message “Ethereum is the Cure for the Uncanny Valley of Wealth,” urging investor patience.

The post Tom Lee: Ethereum 2.0 Could Push ETH Toward a $250,000 Long-Term Target appeared first on Blockonomi.

AlienWP, an established digital platform launched in 2013, has announced a significant expansion into comprehensive daily coverage of the casino and iGaming sectors. The website now delivers regular editorial content focused on online casino developments, industry reviews, regulatory updates, promotional offerings, and player protection initiatives, complementing its traditional digital resources portfolio.

Editorial Expansion Details

The transition to daily publication schedules enables the platform to provide consistent updates regarding the rapidly evolving online casino landscape. Coverage areas include regulatory framework modifications, licensing announcements, promotional term analyses, and comprehensive player safety resources. According to AlienWP, this enhanced publishing frequency addresses the dynamic nature of the iGaming marketplace and serves the growing demand for current, reliable industry intelligence.

This strategic pivot leverages AlienWP’s decade-long history as a digital information resource, now channeling substantial editorial capacity toward specialized iGaming sector reporting.

Parallel Platform Development

Concurrent with its expanded news operations, AlienWP maintains active development of Alien Wise Play, an independent web application engineered to assist players in evaluating online casino operators, bookmarking preferred platforms, monitoring promotional opportunities, and accessing licensing transparency. The dashboard functions strictly as an informational resource—it neither operates gaming services, handles financial transactions, nor dispenses gambling counsel.

Revenue generation for Alien Wise Play derives from affiliate marketing relationships, though the company emphasizes its player-centric design philosophy over conventional affiliate models, prioritizing transparency and responsible gaming principles throughout its architecture.

Central to the Alien Wise Play infrastructure is the proprietary Wise Play Score, an objective evaluation framework measuring casino operators across multiple dimensions including regulatory compliance, trustworthiness, payment system reliability, operational transparency, customer service quality, and player safeguarding measures. AlienWP has indicated that forthcoming iterations will integrate aggregated user feedback mechanisms and artificial intelligence-powered analytical tools while preserving editorial autonomy.

Additional details are accessible at Alien Wise Play.

Official Statement

Oliver Dale, representing AlienWP, commented: “Transitioning to a daily publication model for casino and iGaming content provides both players and industry professionals with a dependable source for current information. This editorial evolution aligns naturally with our Alien Wise Play development objectives, which center on delivering transparent, independent intelligence precisely when users require it.”

Development Roadmap

Looking ahead, AlienWP intends to sustain its daily editorial calendar while advancing Alien Wise Play functionality and refining the Wise Play Score methodology. Upcoming enhancements encompass player feedback integration systems and AI-augmented analytical capabilities, with unwavering commitment to editorial independence guiding all initiatives.

Company Background

Established in 2013, AlienWP operates as an iGaming news platform and casino information resource delivering comprehensive coverage of online casino developments, operator evaluations, regulatory frameworks, promotional offerings, responsible gaming advocacy, and sector-wide developments. The organization simultaneously advances Alien Wise Play, a user-focused comparison dashboard enabling players to evaluate casino operators, monitor promotional opportunities, and access transparent licensing and safety intelligence. Further information is available at alienwp.com.

Press Inquiries

Oliver Dale
AlienWP
Website: https://alienwp.com

The post AlienWP Launches Comprehensive Daily Coverage of Casino and iGaming Industry appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Binance’s red team runs simulated phishing attacks on employees every month to test awareness.
• Scenarios include fake recruiter outreach and free conference invites to gather personal data.
• Employees who fail must complete remedial training, and repeated failures affect their ratings.
• Binance has run the phishing program for three to four years, improving staff security habits.

Binance phishing tests now run every month across the exchange’s global workforce, according to chief security officer Jimmy Su.

The internal red team designs fake attacks that mimic real threats, including recruiter outreach and free conference invitations.

Employees who fail face mandatory remedial training, while repeated serious failures can affect performance ratings. Su said the program has operated for three to four years and has improved staff security habits over time.

How Binance Phishing Tests Work

The Binance phishing tests are run by the company’s red team, an internal ethical hacking unit. Their job involves breaking into systems to find weak points before outside attackers do.

Su told Cointelegraph the tests happen monthly to track improvements in staff behavior over time. “We do phishing attacks on our own employees on a monthly basis just so we understand if our security hygiene is improving,” Su said.

Scenarios vary widely and change to match current attacker methods. One simulation has red team members pose as job recruiters reaching out to employees.

Another involves offering a free conference invitation to collect personal details from unsuspecting staff members. “It could be that we are offering some kind of free conference invite just to try to collect personal information,” Su explained.

These scenarios echo real attack methods seen across the crypto industry in recent years. A well-known example is the fake Zoom update, where hackers disguise malware as a video app patch. Many of these campaigns start with a fake job offer or a partnership proposal as bait.

Su said the program began with mixed results among employees. “In the beginning, the security hygiene left a lot to be desired,” he said. After three to four years of testing, staff habits have improved across the company, he added.

Consequences And Wider Industry Context

Employees who fail Binance phishing tests must complete remedial training sessions afterward. Su said results are tied directly to performance reviews, giving staff a reason to stay alert.

“If someone repeatedly fails the phishing-simulation attack, that will negatively impact their rating,” Su said. “That’s the incentive to be vigilant.”

Repeated, serious failures can cause a rating to drop sharply over time. Such drops could eventually lead to dismissal, according to Su. The exchange treats consistent failure as a genuine security risk rather than a minor lapse.

Binance reports 323 million registered users and holds an estimated $137.7 billion in assets, per DefiLlama data. That scale makes staff-level security failures a potential entry point for major breaches. Testing employees regularly is one way the exchange tries to close that gap.

Social engineering has become a leading cause of crypto losses industry-wide. AMLBot estimated in February that 65% of 2025 security incidents stemmed from social engineering tactics. In April, Drift Protocol lost $285 million following a long-term social engineering campaign against its systems.

A separate case saw a Venus Protocol user lose roughly $13 million in September 2025 after a fake Zoom client compromised his device, though Venus later recovered $11.4 million of the stolen funds through an emergency governance vote.

The post Binance Phishing Tests Run Monthly as Exchange Targets Staff Security Awareness appeared first on Blockonomi.

It was less than a year ago when the Ethereum validator exit queue had stretched for 45 days as millions of tokens waited to be unlocked from staking.

Today, that queue has completely emptied out, while the number of ETH actually staked continues to grow to a new record.

No One Wants to Unstake ETH

Current data from ValidatorQueue shows that there are zero ETH waiting to be unstaked from the network. This means that if anyone decides to unstake their altcoin holdings, they can do so immediately, subject only to the protocol’s normal withdrawal process.

This is a significant turnaround from Q3 last year, when the exit queue had swelled to roughly 2.6 million coins. Validators were forced to wait up to 45 days before they could withdraw their holdings. At the time, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin defended the extensive period, arguing that it’s an important element of the network’s defense.

The narrative has completely flipped now. ValidatorQueue shows that over 2.5 million ETH is currently waiting to enter staking, translating into an estimated activation delay of nearly 44 days. Investors are willing to wait for a month and a half just to begin earning staking rewards on their ETH holdings.

This shifted imbalance suggests that investors are confident in Ethereum’s long-term outlook to remain strong despite the year-to-date price retracement. It also removes one of the most significant concerns from last year – that millions of staked ETH could suddenly flood exchanges if validators decide to cash out.

Record ETH Is Locked

The broader staking picture has also continued improving as the total number of active validators securing the network has neared 900,000. Almost 41 million ETH is currently staked, which is equivalent to roughly 33.6% of the entire circulating supply. This is the highest percentage in the network’s history, and it means that every one out of three ETH is locked in staking rather than sitting on exchanges or actively circulating.

Tom Lee’s Bitmine remains a leader in this field, having staked over 4.9 million tokens through its institutional platform MAVAN.

Although staked ETH is not permanently removed from supply, it is generally considered less liquid because validators must go through Ethereum’s withdrawal process before they receive access to those holdings.

However, Merlijn The Trader reported a rather intriguing and unexpected twist. The record amount of staked ETH comes even as staking rewards are down to 2.62% per year from 3.05% and issuance has increased from 0.757% to 0.842%.

The post Nobody Wants to Unstake Ethereum Anymore: Here’s Why It’s a Big Deal appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The spot exchange-traded funds tracking Ripple’s cross-border token started the week strong, hitting a fresh all-time high in terms of total net inflows, but a familiar and slightly worrisome scenario repeated in the following days.

At the same time, the HYPE ETFs have broken their streak and were deep in the red for a second consecutive week.

XRP ETFs: The Good and the Worrisome

Data from SoSoValue shows that the spot XRP ETFs attracted $2.49 million on Monday and $5.66 million on Tuesday. That’s the good news. However, the other side of the coin was what happened during the remaining three business days of the week. And, it was something that has repeated and even accelerated in recent weeks.

The same data aggregator shows that there were no reportable net flows during those three days, with $0.00 pointing at each. Something similar was observed last week, when only one day was in the green, while the other four were at $0.00. If we look back, we can see that 10 out of the last 15 trading days have seen zero net flows.

Thus, even though the XRP ETFs ended two consecutive weeks in the green, a more in-depth look into the numbers shows a clear sign that investors’ interest has dwindled lately. Before these two weeks, the funds were on a massive nine-week streak in which they attracted over $150 million.

Nevertheless, the overall data shows that the cumulative total net inflow has risen to almost $1.5 billion, according to SoSoValue, which is an all-time high.

Meanwhile, the underlying asset pumped at the beginning of the week, perhaps due to the growing ETF net flows, went from under $1.09 to a multi-day peak of $1.16. However, it was halted there and has returned to below $1.10 as of press time.

HYPE ETFs Break Form

The spot HYPE ETFs quickly joined the XRP funds as a fan favorite, especially during one week in which they attracted over $110 million to set a record of their own. However, investors have turned their back on those funds in the past two weeks, as net outflows dominate.

During the past five-day trading period, they pulled out over $8.6 million, following another red one in which the net outflows stood at $7.26 million. Thus, the cumulative total net inflows have dropped from an all-time high of $308.60 million to $292.73 million as of Friday’s close.

The post Ripple (XRP) ETF Inflows Set Another Record, but One Problem Remains appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ripple’s token is showing signs of stabilization after the sharp decline from higher levels, but the recovery remains limited by a series of resistance zones that continue to attract sellers. While buyers have defended the recent lows, the market still needs a clear structural breakout before a stronger upside move can be considered.

Ripple Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

On the daily timeframe, XRP continues to trade inside a broader descending channel that has shaped the price action for months. The recent rebound from the $1.02 to $1.04 demand zone has helped the asset recover, but the move has not yet changed the larger bearish structure.

The main challenge for buyers remains the $1.17 to $1.2 supply zone, which sits near the upper boundary of the descending channel. A successful breakout above this region could open the path toward the next resistance area around $1.28. However, as long as XRP remains below this level, the current recovery may still represent a corrective move within the broader downtrend.

A rejection from the current resistance area could send the price back toward the $1.05 to $1.07 support region, while a deeper decline would bring the $1.02 to $1.04 buyers’ base back into focus.

XRP/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The 4-hour chart highlights the ongoing struggle between buyers attempting to build a base and sellers defending the overhead supply. XRP recently pushed toward the $1.16 to $1.18 resistance zone but failed to secure a breakout, keeping the short-term structure vulnerable.

The $1.16 – $1.18 supply range remains an important barrier, with price action still showing difficulty reclaiming the area above it. Until the asset breaks above this price region and confirms strength above it, upside attempts may continue to face selling pressure.

On the downside, the ascending wedge’s lower trendline remains the key support area. Holding above this zone would preserve the possibility of another recovery attempt, while a breakdown below it would weaken the current setup and increase the risk of further downside.

The post Ripple Price Analysis: XRP Could Be Heading for a Major Move Next Week appeared first on CryptoPotato.

After staging an impressive rebound from its local bottom, Ethereum is beginning to test increasingly important resistance levels. The coming sessions should provide more clarity on whether this recovery has enough momentum to continue.

Ethereum Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

The daily chart shows ETH holding above the previously broken descending trendline, confirming that the medium-term structure has improved compared to the aggressive selloff seen in June. Following the breakout, the market has successfully established a sequence of higher highs and higher lows while consolidating above the $1.76K to $1.82K support region.

However, the recovery is now approaching a major technical barrier. The $1.88K to $1.91K supply zone is acting as the first resistance, while the declining 100-day moving average sits just overhead near the $1.95K area. This creates a confluence of resistance that could cap the current rally before ETH attempts to challenge the broader long-term supply zone between roughly $2K and $2.15K.

As long as the price remains above the $1.76K to $1.82K support, buyers maintain the short-term advantage. Losing that area, however, would expose the next support around $1.55K to $1.64K and weaken the current bullish structure.

ETH/USDT 4-Hour Chart

On the 4-hour timeframe, Ethereum has slipped slightly below the ascending trendline that had guided the recovery throughout July. While the break is not yet decisive, it signals that bullish momentum is beginning to weaken as the price trades inside the $1.88K to $1.91K supply zone. The current structure suggests that buyers are losing some control after failing to extend the recent rally.

If ETH remains below the broken trendline, the move could evolve into a deeper retracement toward the notable demand zone around $1.76K to $1.79K, where buyers would be expected to step in. Conversely, reclaiming the trendline and securing a breakout above the $1.88K to $1.91K resistance would invalidate the short-term weakness and increase the probability of another push toward the $1.95K to $2K region.

Sentiment Analysis

The one-month Binance ETH liquidation heatmap shows a substantial concentration of liquidity around the $1.5K level. Although Ethereum is currently trading well above that region, this cluster remains an important magnet from a derivatives perspective.

If the current rally loses momentum and sellers regain control, a deeper correction toward the $1.5K liquidity pocket could attract price as leveraged long positions are unwound.

Such a move would likely coincide with a break below the key technical supports visible on the chart. Until then, the prevailing structure remains constructive, but the presence of this large liquidity cluster highlights that downside risk has not completely disappeared despite the recent recovery.

The post Ethereum Price Analysis: ETH Hits a Decision Point as Major Resistance Comes Into Play appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Unlike the previous major bear market in which numerous cryptocurrency exchanges reduced their staff number, the current cycle turned out to be more violent and requires a different sort of reaction.

The latest to close shop, with an announcement earlier today, was BitMart.

BitMart to Shut Down

The exchange saw the light of day during the 2017 big bull market and expanded its services to over 1,700 cryptocurrencies as of today. However, it followed the recent negative trend, stating that it has begun to “orderly” wind down its trading operations.

New registrations have already been halted, as well as deposits and opening new trading orders. A month later, the exchange will stop all trading services. The official shutdown will be at the end of January at 15:59 UTC, when the platform operations will cease. In contrast, withdrawals will remain available.

The company urged all users to close their trading positions, complete KYC if needed, and transfer out the available funds as soon as possible.

Important Notice

After a careful evaluation of the Company’s operating conditions, market environment, and future strategic direction, BitMart has made the difficult decision to commence an orderly wind-down of its trading platform operations. We deeply regret having to make… pic.twitter.com/KX3zczIrAh

— BitMart (@BitMartExchange) July 26, 2026

The exchange’s native token reacted with an immediate price drop, plunging by over 60% on a 24-hour scale. BMX traded at $0.32 before the news went live, and dumped to $0.09 as of press time. It also remains 90% away from its all-time high at $0.619 (CoinGecko data) recorded in early 2024.

BitMEX and Who Else?

Just a few days ago, the Arthur Hayes-co-founded cryptocurrency derivatives platform BitMEX said it will shut down on September 23. The creator of the 100x perpetual swap was active for nearly a decade, but it has fallen out of traders’ grace in the past couple of years.

The crypto shutdowns continued with popular DEX aggregator Odos. The project announced on July 24 that it will halt all of its services at the end of July.

One of its competitors, Dango, made a similar statement on the same day. The self-proclaimed ‘Endgame Exchange’ informed that the team has made the difficult decision to wind down its services, outlining “various reasons” without actually specifying them. It will stop trading on July 29, while the Dango L1 blockchain will halt on August 13.

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