Credit default swap (CDS) demand is surging throughout the AI industry. Five years of default protection on $10 million of Nvidia debt now costs about $82,000 a year — double since the start of July when it cost roughly $40,000.

CDS spreads are deteriorating rapidly across mega-cap AI stocks including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Broadcom, and SpaceX, which all hit record spreads this week.

Alphabet CDS contracts traded up to 67 basis points days after reporting its first negative quarterly free cash flow since its 2004 listing.

Investors refer to the “price” of a CDS by its basis point spread above the notional amount of debt it guarantees.

A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point, and the higher they “spread” above the notional quantity of debt, the more investors have to pay as a de facto insurance premium.

Companies want their CDS contracts to be cheap. When basis points are low, investors aren’t bidding extra for the right to receive a payout in the event of a credit default. Low basis points on CDS contracts — or even better, no CDS demand at all — indicate confidence that the company will service its debt on-time and in full.

Insurance premium doubles to protect Nvidia credit

Unfortunately, Nvidia’s five-year CDS contracts reached a record 82 basis points on Monday.

Monday’s jump of roughly 14 basis points was the largest single-day move since those Nvidia CDS contracts began trading in November 2025, ICE Data Services reported.

The $330 billion AI company Oracle carries an even worse premium. Its five-year CDSs traded above 215 basis points this week, up from 145 at the end of last year.

S&P Global cut the company’s creditworthiness rating to BBB- earlier this month, the lowest rung of its investment grade band. 

Oracle’s bonds that mature in 2056 and pay 6.7% interest widened eight basis points on Monday to 263 basis points over US Treasuries. Not good.

Even worse, CoreWeave topped 855 basis points on Tuesday. A popular CDS pricing model reads that as roughly a 50% chance of default within five years.

Disturbingly, the instruments themselves have become an unfortunate growth market for Wall Street.

CDS for AI stocks shouldn’t be a growth sector

AI companies and tech stocks accounted for nearly $650 million of second-quarter corporate CDS trading, DTCC data shows. That is up 20% on the first quarter and almost 600% year on year.

The spike in CDS spreads this week followed a Bloomberg report that Nvidia is preparing AI commitments potentially worth more than $750 billion.

Those include a partnership with SK Group valued above $500 billion and talks over a guarantee of as much as $250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing capacity.

Doubt about its ability to service that debt sent CDS rates higher.

Aviva Investors has launched a tokenized share class of its US Dollar Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger, moving its Ripple partnership into production.

Aviva brings its USD liquidity fund to XRPL

Aviva Investors and Ripple announced the launch on July 29, following a tokenization partnership disclosed in February. The product is a new share class of the Aviva Investors US Dollar Liquidity Fund, an Ireland-domiciled UCITS money market fund launched in its traditional form in 2020.

The companies are using a “digital twin” structure. Fund holdings are represented on the XRP Ledger, while the existing off-chain fund and its regulated framework remain in place.

Eligible investors with approved digital wallets will receive the same investment objective, risk profile, liquidity terms and regulatory protections available through the conventional share class, according to the launch announcement.

Mark Versey, CEO of Aviva Investors, described the launch as the asset manager’s first step into tokenized funds.

“It is our view that this trend will increase efficiency and ultimately lead to improved client outcomes.”

Central Bank of Ireland approves tokenized share class

The Central Bank of Ireland approved the new share class, allowing the product to operate within the fund’s existing regulated structure.

Aviva said the fund targets low-risk returns and daily liquidity through high-grade, short-term debt instruments denominated in US dollars. BNY Mellon will continue holding the fund’s underlying assets, separating regulated custody from the blockchain record representing investor holdings.

Komainu, a regulated digital asset custodian, supported the blockchain infrastructure, while Licuido provided technology for tokenizing the fund. The structure lets Aviva issue and manage fund shares on XRPL without moving the underlying securities directly onto the network.

For US investors, the fund’s dollar denomination does not automatically make it available in the United States. Access remains limited to eligible investors and depends on local securities rules, distribution approvals and Aviva’s onboarding requirements. The announcement did not identify a US retail offering or approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Ripple expands its institutional product strategy

The launch turns Ripple’s first partnership with a European investment manager into a live product. When the firms announced their agreement in February, they said they intended to work together throughout 2026 and beyond on bringing regulated funds to XRPL.

Ripple has also expanded other parts of its institutional infrastructure. Last week, the company launched Ripple Mint, giving approved customers a direct channel to issue, redeem, bridge and track its Ripple USD stablecoin.

Ripple separately invested in compliance firm Notabene, which operates a payment and transaction network for regulated businesses. Together, the updates address token issuance, distribution and compliance rather than relying on a single blockchain product.

SBI Holdings, a long-time Ripple partner, is also broadening its blockchain exposure. The Japanese financial group recently renamed SBI Security Solutions as SBI Digital Practice and repositioned the subsidiary around the Canton Network. The move extends SBI’s institutional on-chain strategy beyond Ripple and XRPL.

XRP Ledger holds $4.37B in tokenized assets

The Aviva fund joins a growing group of tokenized financial products represented on XRPL.

RWA.xyz data showed $313.3 million in distributed assets and $4.06 billion in represented assets on the network as of July 29. Together, those categories placed XRPL’s tracked real-world asset value at approximately $4.37 billion.

The number of RWA holders increased 17.42% during the previous 30 days to 182. However, distributed asset value fell 5.24%, while represented value declined 0.47% over the same period.

XRPL also held $952.25 million in stablecoins, including about $907.2 million attributed to RLUSD. Adding stablecoins to the network’s distributed and represented RWA figures would put the broader tracked total above $5.3 billion, although RWA.xyz lists the categories separately.

Aviva and Ripple have not disclosed the initial value of shares issued through the tokenized class. Future growth will depend on investor onboarding and whether Aviva expands the model to other funds under the partnership.

For years, Ethereum has been synonymous with decentralized finance. It pioneered onchain financial tools like lending protocols and tokenized assets, which today underpin much of the crypto economy. But one of crypto’s fastest-growing sectors, perpetual futures, or “perps”, has largely flourished elsewhere.

Ask traders where onchain perpetuals live today, and the answer is more likely to be Hyperliquid or Solana than Ethereum. That is because perpetuals demand something Ethereum’s base layer was never designed to optimize for: extremely fast, low-cost, high-frequency trading.

“Perps require frequent transactions, fast execution, and deep liquidity,” said AJ Warner, chief strategy officer at Offchain Labs, the main developer firm behind the layer-2 Arbitrum. “That makes them a natural use case for the Arbitrum platform.”

The distinction has become increasingly important as decentralized perpetual exchanges mature from crypto-native products into markets attracting institutional attention.

Why Ethereum L1 fell behind

Perpetuals are one of the most demanding applications in crypto. Their exchanges require thousands of rapid-fire updates, liquidations, funding payments, and order executions, all without interruption.

“Perps onchain are really hard,” said Brian Smith of the Jito Foundation. “It’s not just the average performance that matters, it’s the 99.99% success rate. If your perps platform goes down, that’s existential risk.”

Ethereum’s security-first architecture made it an ideal settlement layer, but historically, its block times and gas costs made it an expensive place to run latency-sensitive trading applications.

When decentralized perps exchange GMX launched on Arbitrum in 2021,, it helped establish a template that many others would follow. “Ethereum mainnet fees were prohibitively expensive, which naturally attracted perps builders to Arbitrum,” Warner said. Offchain Labs then leaned into that momentum, actively prioritizing perpetuals as a strategic category.

“By prioritizing the vertical, we were able to attract a concentration of builders and capital to the ecosystem.” Today, much of Ethereum’s perpetual trading activity lives not on the Ethereum mainnet, but on layer-2 networks like Arbitrum and, increasingly, Base.

Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem has become something of a compromise: preserving Ethereum’s security while dramatically improving trading performance. Networks like Arbitrum and Base have reduced block times while also becoming an increasingly attractive trading destination because of their growing user base and liquidity.

Chris Boulous of Dromos Labs, the main developer firm behind Aerodrome, a decentralized exchange that lives on the Base network, argued that technical performance is only part of the story.

“Trading is effectively a network-effects business,” he said. “You have to build where the liquidity and users currently exist.” That dynamic has become self-reinforcing: protocols launch where traders already are, liquidity providers follow the traders, and then new applications build around existing liquidity. It’s one reason Boulous sees Aerodrome as complementary to perpetual exchanges rather than competitive with them.

“You can kind of think of perps as a customer of spot exchanges,” Boulous said. Spot exchanges provide pricing, liquidity and hedging opportunities that perpetual markets depend on. “Spot and perps are two sides of the same liquidity coin.”

Why Solana and Hyperliquid surged

Still, Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem isn’t the only place where developers can build high-performance trading infrastructure. Hyperliquid built an application-specific chain optimized almost entirely for perpetual trading. Solana, meanwhile, combined low fees with a large base of retail traders already actively trading memecoins and other speculative assets.

According to Smith of Jito, that user base matters as much as the technology. “The most important ingredient for any exchange platform, but especially perps, is retail organic flow,” he said. “Solana is the king of retail trading activity.”

Smith also argues Ethereum faces an additional challenge: fragmentation. “You need to be able to trade everything in a single spot,” he said. “What Ethereum is suffering from is a level of fragmentation.”

Ethereum’s scaling strategy largely relied on layer-2 networks like Arbitrum and Base to handle high-volume activity. While that approach dramatically reduced costs and improved performance, it also dispersed users and liquidity across multiple ecosystems. Traders often need to bridge assets between networks, making the experience less seamless than on single-chain ecosystems such as Solana. Earlier this year, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that the original layer-2 roadmap vision “no longer makes sense” as layer 2s have decentralized more slowly than expected and Ethereum’s base layer has itself become more scalable.

Not everyone sees that fragmentation as a fatal flaw, however. Some Ethereum proponents argue the focus on execution misses the network’s longer-term role in the onchain financial stack. Matthieu Saint Olive, a staff product manager at MetaMask, argues the framing itself misses what’s happening. “I’d push back gently on the premise that it’s a competition in the first place,” he told CoinDesk.

Purpose-built trading chains may ultimately win on execution speed, but they still require somewhere to source collateral, liquidity, stablecoins, and settlement. “Ethereum’s role is the settlement and collateral base where the deepest liquidity, the widest range of assets, the stablecoins, and the most mature DeFi primitives live.”

Several leading perpetual trading platforms either operate directly on Ethereum layer 2s or remain closely connected to Ethereum’s ecosystem for collateral, settlement, and developer tooling. “L2s are how Ethereum scales into use cases like active trading without giving up the thing that makes the base layer valuable,” Saint Olive said.

The institutional question

As institutions begin paying closer attention to onchain derivatives, the conversation is shifting from whether decentralized perpetuals can work to whether they can compete with traditional infrastructure. “It comes down to execution, custody, and predictability, not ideology,” Saint Olive said.

Institutions, Warner of Offchain Labs argued, still need deeper liquidity, more efficient capital usage, and better execution before deploying significant trading volume onchain. “Capital is still fragmented across venues,” Warner said. “Institutions will want better access to credit, cross-margining, and the ability to trade across venues without leaving large amounts of capital idle.”

For Boulous, the next milestone is straightforward: “You have to be able to do things onchain that you can’t do, or can’t do as cheaply, in traditional markets.”

While much of today’s decentralized perpetual volume still revolves around crypto assets, market participants increasingly see the infrastructure supporting perps as the foundation for broader capital markets. Saint Olive believes perpetuals are already demonstrating what programmable markets can become.

“Perps are the leading indicator, the first place you can watch traditional financial activity genuinely migrate onchain,” Saint Olive said.

That may also explain why Ethereum’s role in the market is evolving rather than diminishing.

Solana and purpose-built chains like Hyperliquid have established themselves as the venues where traders execute high-speed transactions. Ethereum, meanwhile, is increasingly positioning itself as the settlement and collateral layer that underpins those markets through its layer-2 ecosystem and broader DeFi infrastructure.

Whether that division of labor persists will depend on how quickly Ethereum can solve some of the challenges its critics point to: fragmented liquidity across layer 2s, better interoperability between networks, and a smoother user experience. If it can, proponents argue Ethereum doesn’t necessarily need to become the fastest place to trade perpetuals. It simply needs to remain the deepest and most trusted place to settle them.

Read more: Perpetual futures could become crypto’s next ETF moment

About 176,000 ZEC, worth roughly $81 million, had migrated into Zcash’s new Ironwood shielded pool by Wednesday, a day after the upgrade activated and sealed the pool where a counterfeiting flaw had gone undetected for four years.

That is roughly 5% of the 3.66 million ZEC held in Orchard at activation. Orchard’s balance has since fallen to about 3.51 million, with around 46,000 ZEC crossing over in the past 24 hours, according to the Ironwood migration tracker.

Zcash holds funds in separate compartments called pools, each one a generation of the network’s privacy technology. The transparent pool works like bitcoin, with every balance and transaction visible on the chain, and holds about 12.5 million ZEC.

The shielded pools hide amounts and participants. Sapling, introduced in 2018, holds about 582,000 ZEC, and Orchard, which arrived in 2022 and was the newest until this week, held about 3.5 million. Each time the network upgrades its privacy cryptography, it opens a new pool rather than rebuilding the old one, leaving holders to move their coins across themselves.

Iranian hacker collective CyberAv3ngers is the main suspect in a series of cyber attacks that hit 30 different water companies across the state of Minnesota this week.

That’s according to security research firm Tenable, which claims the attacks are consistent with CyberAv3ngers’ past exploits. 

Meanwhile, Minnesota’s state IT agency claimed the disruption was the result of a “coordinated cyberattack.”

Tenable not only believes the attack to be the work of CyberAv3ngers, but also says the timing of the attack is “significant” given a July 22 report from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). 

In it, the CISA warned that Iranian actors were actively targeting internet-connected devices, such as programmable logic controllers, across US water, energy, and government sectors.

Expanding crypto tax reporting rules are pushing investors to maintain accurate transaction records across exchanges, wallets, staking, and DeFi.

For a long time, many crypto investors treated tax preparation as a year-end export. Download a CSV from an exchange, send it to tax software, and deal with the result before the filing deadline.

That approach can still work for someone who bought a few assets on one platform and never moved them. It becomes unreliable once the portfolio includes self-custody, staking, decentralized finance, NFTs, or transfers among several exchanges. At that point, the hard part is not filling in a tax form. It is rebuilding an accurate transaction history.

The distinction matters more now because broker reporting is expanding. US brokers began reporting gross proceeds from digital asset dispositions on Form 1099-DA for the 2025 tax year. Basis reporting for covered assets starts with 2026 transactions. The IRS will receive more information directly from brokers, but those reports may still show only part of an investor’s financial history.

One wallet can create several tax questions

A centralized exchange records activity inside its own system. It can usually identify a purchase made on the platform and a later sale from the same account. It cannot automatically know what happened before an asset arrived from a hardware wallet, another exchange, or a decentralized application.

Consider an investor who buys ETH on one exchange, transfers it to a wallet, stakes part of it, uses the rest in a liquidity pool, and later sends several tokens to a different exchange to sell. The final exchange sees the deposit and sale. It may not know the original purchase date, acquisition cost, staking history, or what happened inside the liquidity pool.

Those missing details affect more than one number. They can change basis, holding period, income recognition, transaction classification, and the amount of gain or loss. A CSV from the final exchange cannot supply facts the exchange never had.

DeFi records describe mechanics, not tax treatment

On-chain records are public, but public does not mean tax-ready. A block explorer shows contract calls, token movements, and transaction hashes. It does not explain the investor’s intent or label each event for a federal return.

A single DeFi interaction can produce deposits, receipt tokens, reward tokens, fees, and later withdrawals. Some activity may represent a transfer of ownership, while other activity may simply change how an asset is held. The tax analysis depends on the transaction’s substance and the available guidance, not on the number of lines in a wallet export.

Staking adds a separate layer. IRS Revenue Ruling 2023-14 generally treats staking rewards as income when a cash-method taxpayer has dominion and control over them. The fair market value used for income can also establish a basis for a later disposition. If the receipt value is missing, the eventual capital gain calculation can be wrong even when the sale proceeds are correct.

NFT activity creates similar recordkeeping problems. A mint can involve the purchase price, gas paid in crypto, and a later sale on a different marketplace. Royalties and creator income may need different treatment from an investor’s capital transaction. Marketplace exports often cover only the activity inside that marketplace.

Cost basis now has a wallet-level dimension

The final digital asset basis regulations moved taxpayers toward wallet-by-wallet or account-by-account identification beginning in 2025. Revenue Procedure 2024-28 provided a safe harbor for allocating previously unattached basis to wallets or accounts as of January 1, 2025, subject to its requirements.

This change makes portfolio-wide recordkeeping more important, not less. An investor can no longer assume that a universal pool of basis will always produce the correct answer across every location. Records need to show which units and basis lots sit in each wallet or account, then preserve that history when assets move.

Transfers between wallets owned by the same taxpayer generally are not sales. Yet a transfer can still break the data trail if the receiving platform does not receive the acquisition history. Even a network fee paid in crypto can create a small disposition that needs to be considered.

Broker reports are a checkpoint, not a completed return

For 2025 transactions, Form 1099-DA generally reports gross proceeds without cost basis. Gross proceeds are not profit. A trader who repeatedly buys and sells with the same capital can have proceeds far above the amount ever deposited, while the taxable result is based on proceeds minus supported basis.

Beginning with 2026 transactions, brokers report basis for certain covered assets. In general, that means assets acquired after 2025 in a custodial account with the broker and held there until disposition. Crypto transferred in from elsewhere is generally noncovered, so the broker may still report proceeds without basis.

This creates a predictable mismatch. The IRS receives the sale amount, the taxpayer has the purchase history, and the return has to connect the two. If missing basis is treated as zero, gain can be overstated. If proceeds are omitted because a wallet export was incomplete, the return may not match broker reporting.

What specialized review actually adds

The useful work begins before tax preparation. It includes collecting exchange files, wallet addresses, and income records, then building one timeline across the portfolio. Transfers need to be paired so they are not mistaken for sales. Duplicate entries need to be removed. Missing basis must be traced to original acquisitions. DeFi and NFT activity needs transaction-level classification.

Software is valuable for calculation and scale, but its output depends on the inputs and labels it receives. A polished report can still be wrong if imported transfers were treated as income, token swaps were missed, or receipt tokens were counted as new wealth.

Count On Sheep describes its crypto tax accountant work as reconciliation first: human specialists review multi-wallet and multi-chain activity, including staking, DeFi, and NFTs, then produce reports that clients can use with their own CPA or preferred filing platform. That boundary is useful. Reconstruct the data first, then prepare the return from a record that can be explained.

The right time to get help

Complexity is a better trigger than portfolio value. Someone with a modest balance spread across bridges and protocols may have a harder reporting problem than a large holder who bought once and never moved the asset.

Warning signs include unexplained zero basis, negative balances, large proceeds that do not resemble economic gains, missing wallet history, and results that change sharply when one data source is added. Multi-year gaps also deserve attention because an incorrect opening balance can carry forward into every later year. The expanding reporting regime does not mean every broker form will be complete. It means inconsistencies will be easier to spot. For investors with activity beyond a single exchange, careful reconciliation is becoming a normal part of tax.

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