A wide swath of the US banking industry is urging Senate leaders to amend the stablecoin yield provisions of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY) now under consideration. 

The American Bankers Association (ABA), the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) and 76 other state banking associations sent a joint letter to Senate leaders that claimed that the current language on stablecoin interest, yield and rewards is too ambiguous and argued that new amendments need to prevent payment stablecoins from acting as deposit substitutes rather than pure transaction tools.

The joint letter, which showed support for the broader bill, said the ABA is concerned that ambiguities within the bill “could encourage stablecoin arrangements to effectively function as substitutes for deposits, despite Congress’ longstanding and clearly stated intent that payment stablecoins should serve as transaction tools rather than store-of-value products,” according to a press release published on Monday.

This marks the latest pushback from the US banking industry against the act’s stablecoin yield provisions and comes just days ahead of the bill’s scheduled House of Representatives hearing on Friday. The bill aims to establish the first regulatory framework for digital assets in the US.

The banking groups said that the current draft poses the risk of a “deposit flight,” urging lawmakers to revise section 404 to “clarify the prohibition on interest and yield and help ensure that the prohibition cannot be circumvented through alternative incentive structures.” 

The pushback reinforces Galaxy Digital’s prediction that the Senate is running out of time to pass the bill before the end of the year, due to a looming Senate recess and other congressional priorities. Galaxy Digital cut its odds of the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 to 50% on June 26, citing the lack of a unified Senate Banking-Agriculture text, no firm floor schedule and a narrowing legislative window before lawmakers leave Washington.

ABA, ICBA join state associations in urging Senate to strengthen stablecoin yield provisions in Clarity Act. Source: ABA.com

Bankers, Dems push back against stablecoin yield elements

The CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May, but met pushback from Democrats and the banking industry, who argued that it would allow crypto firms to offer yields on stablecoins without facing the same requirements as traditional banks. 

In a May interview, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that the banking industry would continue to “fight” against the current version of the CLARITY Act and said that crypto companies wanting to pay yield on stablecoins should apply for banking charters.

Related: A16z’s Andreessen lands Federal Reserve role as AI reshapes policy debate

Meanwhile, the CLARITY Act secured its second public endorsement from a major US law enforcement organization on Friday, when the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) said it submitted a letter to the US Senate Banking Committee endorsing the CLARITY Act, while calling for strengthening accountability in decentralized finance (DeFi) and for preserving the investigators’ existing powers.

At the beginning of June, more than 200 crypto companies and related organizations urged the US Senate to pass the CLARITY Act in a letter shared by crypto lobby group Stand With Crypto.

Magazine: From Bitcoin critics to blockchain believers: The 5 biggest crypto backflips

Bitmine Immersion Technologies says its Ethereum staking operation is now the dominant driver of its business, with $45.7 million in revenue generated from Ether staking and validation in the most recent quarter. The figure underscores how the company’s earlier focus has shifted toward institutional-grade Ethereum participation, following the launch of its staking platform in March.

In its latest 10-Q filing, Bitmine reports that staking revenue represented 98% of total revenue for the three months ended May 31. By comparison, it recorded $624,000 from self-mining Bitcoin (BTC) and $168,000 from consulting services during the same period.

Key takeaways

• Bitmine recorded $45.7 million in quarterly revenue tied to Ether staking and validation, making staking its overwhelming revenue source.
• Staking contributed 98% of Bitmine’s total revenue for the three months ended May 31, far ahead of BTC self-mining and consulting.
• Bitmine said it has staked 85% of its Ether holdings—about 4.9 million ETH—after its March institutional staking platform launch.
• The company’s staking strategy is linked to MAVAN, an institutional validator infrastructure offering that expanded beyond Bitmine’s own treasury.

Quarterly results highlight the staking-driven shift

The latest numbers show a stark transformation in Bitmine’s revenue profile. According to the company’s filing, Ether staking and validation drove $45.7 million during the three months ended May 31. In the same quarter, non-staking lines—BTC self-mining and consulting—remained comparatively small, at $624,000 and $168,000 respectively.

Bitmine also frames this as evidence that its strategy pivot is working at scale. The results follow a year earlier when the company reported just $2 million in total revenue for the quarter ended May 31, 2025, and the largest contributor at that time was machine leasing.

For investors and market participants, the key question is sustainability: staking revenues tend to depend on the size of assets actively deployed and the evolving economics of Ethereum network activity. While Bitmine’s filing provides a snapshot of recent performance, readers will likely look for how the company’s staked percentage and validator operations translate into future quarterly results.

Bitmine says 85% of its ETH is staked

Alongside the financial disclosure, Bitmine said on Monday that it has staked 85% of its ETH holdings. The company linked that figure to approximately 4.9 million ETH.

Bitmine’s announcement also pointed to the scale of its holdings, including an update that ETH holdings reached 5.77 million tokens and total crypto and cash holdings of $11.3 billion. (The company’s statement was carried in a release from PR Newswire.)

In the same context, Tom Lee, Bitmine’s chairman, said that at full deployment—when the company’s ETH is “fully staked by MAVAN and its staking partners”—projected annualized staking rewards would be $284 million. His remarks suggest the company sees significant upside if it continues to increase the portion of its Ether actively earning staking returns.

Still, investors should separate projections from realized results. The $45.7 million quarterly revenue already reflects current operations, while the $284 million annualized statement is conditional on full staking at scale. The next signal to watch is whether Bitmine maintains the staked level and how it evolves with network conditions and validator capacity.

MAVAN expands validator infrastructure beyond Bitmine’s treasury

Central to Bitmine’s staking push is MAVAN, an institutional-grade Ethereum staking platform. Bitmine’s financial performance is explicitly connected to the March launch of MAVAN, which the company describes as operating validator infrastructure for its own holdings and for external clients.

MAVAN—short for “Made in America VAlidator Network”—was developed initially to support Bitmine’s Ethereum treasury. Its mission later broadened after Bitmine acquired Australia-based non-custodial validator operator Pier Two Holdings. According to the reporting in earlier coverage from Cointelegraph, the platform’s reach expanded to support institutional investors, custodians, and partners across the ecosystem.

That expansion matters because validator infrastructure can generate recurring fee streams, but it also increases operational exposure—such as dependence on client demand, service performance, and the ability to manage validator operations reliably at scale. Bitmine’s latest quarter suggests its staking model is generating substantial revenue today, but the longer-term test will be whether MAVAN can keep attracting and retaining external staking and validation business.

Tom Lee also points to Robinhood Chain’s ETH-denominated activity

Outside Bitmine’s own staking results, Tom Lee discussed another development: Robinhood Chain, which he described as a “breakaway success.” In his remarks, Lee highlighted that dollar volumes exceeded $1 billion since Robinhood Chain’s July 1 launch, and he compared that activity to other decentralized exchanges.

He argued that the chain’s structure ties user behavior to Ethereum because Robinhood Chain uses ETH as the native gas token, with transaction fees denominated in ETH and finality settled on Ethereum. Lee also referenced Robinhood’s 27 million users paying crypto fees denominated in ETH, framing it as evidence that everyday users increasingly interact with ETH as money.

While this is not directly tied to Bitmine’s quarterly financials, it adds color to the broader narrative Lee is promoting: Ethereum’s role as a settlement layer and fee asset may drive more real-world usage. For readers, the practical takeaway is to consider how L2s and DEX ecosystems using ETH-denominated fees could affect sentiment around demand for staking and on-chain utility—though the causal link to staking revenue would still need to be demonstrated through future reporting.

As Bitmine heads into subsequent quarters, the most important items to monitor are whether its ETH staked percentage continues rising toward full deployment, how MAVAN performs with external clients, and whether staking revenue remains the clear majority of total earnings under changing network conditions.

Humanity Protocol will refocus its cybersecurity efforts on operational security following a June $36 million exploit that was traced back to a compromised employee laptop, according to the founder of the decentralized identity company, Terence Kwok.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Kwok said that the exploit stemmed from last year’s mainnet launch, when several production keys were inadvertently backed up onto the laptop that was compromised, including admin hot wallet keys and a quorum of multisig owner keys across both chains.  He said:

“The hard lesson here is that operational security is as critical as smart-contract security, and we’re rebuilding accordingly.”

The exploit and Humanity Protocol’s action highlight an increase in cryptocurrency hackers refocusing their attacks on staff-level vulnerabilities and operational shortcomings, rather than exploiting smart contract code.

Humanity Protocol was exploited last month, when a compromised employee’s laptop enabled attackers to steal $36 million in Humanity (H) tokens. The token’s current market cap is roughly $211 million, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Blockchain security company Quantstamp said that the malicious attachment that was delivered through a phishing email pointed to the involvement of North Korea-linked threat actors. The malicious attachment was disguised as a token lockup schedule update from South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb and installed malware, giving attackers remote access to the machine.

The phishing email that led to the Humanity Protocol compromise.
Source: Quantstamp

North Korea-linked threat actors were tied to at least $578 million of the $634 million stolen in crypto-related incidents in April alone. 

Related: AI has not triggered DeFi ‘hackpocalypse,’ Dragonfly partner says

Phishing and wallet compromises lead attack vectors in H1 2026

The Humanity Protocol exploit occurred during a resurgence of cryptocurrency exploits that stemmed from operational failures and social engineering schemes.

Phishing drove the majority of the first quarter losses for a total of $508 million, while wallet compromises emerged as the biggest attack vector in the second quarter, contributing $807 million in losses, according to blockchain security company CertiK.

Monthly change in crypto exploit amounts and number of incidents across H1. Source: CertiK 

To be sure, crypto losses to hacks fell 46.8% year-on-year to $1.32 billion in the first half of 2026, but CertiK said that the drop was misleading due to the $1.4 billion Bybit hack in early 2025 and stressed that North Korean malicious actors continue threatening the crypto industry.

During the second quarter of 2026, more than 70% of the losses stemmed from the Drift Protocol and KelpDAO exploits, which were also widely attributed to North Korean state-sponsored hackers.

Magazine: Does Botanix’s failure prove Bitcoiners don’t care about DeFi? 

In March 2000, Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor watched more than $6 billion disappear from his fortune in a single day.

MicroStrategy’s shares had plummeted more than 60%, thrusting the thirty-five year old software entrepreneur into the center of the dot-com crash.

The company later settled civil fraud charges with the US Securities and Exchange Commission over its accounting practices without admitting or denying wrongdoing. MicroStrategy did not cause the dot-com bubble to burst, but the saga was one of the era’s high-profile corporate blowups and the company became a symbol of the periods excesses and risks.

Now, more than 25 years later, the Bitcoin true-believer once again finds himself in the eye of one of Wall Street’s most closely watched financial experiments.

The company, now known simply as Strategy, holds 843,775 Bitcoin, more than any other public company. It has inspired dozens of listed firms to adopt Bitcoin treasury strategies of their own.

But Strategy is no longer simply accumulating Bitcoin, it has developed a series of financial engineering strategies that divide investors and analysts. Some see it as a sophisticated corporate treasury model that can’t lose, while others believe the risks are piling up on top of one another.

“The conversation shifts beyond simply acquiring Bitcoin to how those positions are financed, managed and, when necessary, traded or monetized,” Drew Forman, senior vice president and head of strategy at Talos, told Cointelegraph.

From accumulation to management

On June 29, Strategy unveiled a new capital framework allowing it to sell Bitcoin to fund preferred stock dividends, build its cash reserves and repurchase securities.

The case against MicroStrategy in 2000. Source: SEC

For a company that spent more than half a decade insisting its Bitcoin was to be accumulated rather than sold, the move caused alarm bells to ring.

Related: Lyn Alden says Bitcoin needs no savior as Strategy sells $216M of BTC

Days later, Strategy disclosed the sale of 3,588 Bitcoin, its largest disposal since adopting BTC as its primary treasury reserve asset in 2020.

To Strategy evangelists, these changes reflect the natural evolution of a company managing a multi-billion-dollar Bitcoin treasury, rather than a sharp about-turn.

Yet critics argue that Strategy’s growing reliance on preferred stock, dividend obligations and external financing has made the model more complex and interdependent, rather than more resilient.

MicroStrategy’s road to Bitcoin

MicroStrategy was one of the fastest-growing software companies of the internet boom in the 1990s, selling business intelligence software to blue-chip clients including McDonald’s, Nike and eBay, and making Saylor one of America’s richest entrepreneurs.

But on March 20, 2000, that momentum came to a sudden halt when MicroStrategy announced that it needed to restate its financial results for the fiscal years 1998 and 1999 due to accounting errors.

The company’s stock nosedived, dropping from $260 per share to just $86 in a single session. It continued to plummet over the following weeks. On April 13, when MicroStrategy announced that it would also need to restate its 1997 financial results, the stock closed at $33 per share.

That episode may have defined many executives’ careers, but Saylor spent the next two decades rebuilding the company largely outside the spotlight until the summer of 2020, when MicroStrategy announced that it would make Bitcoin its primary treasury reserve asset, and Saylor became its most vocal evangelist.

MicroStrategy settled charges with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Source: SEC

He likened holding cash reserves during a time of unprecedented pandemic-era stimulus to holding “a melting ice cube.” The company bought its first $250 million Bitcoin on August 11.

Few public companies held Bitcoin on their balance sheets at the time, and the move was widely viewed as a high-risk experiment rather than a blueprint for corporate finance.

But Bitcoin’s price soon began to soar, bolstered by the excess liquidity, and Strategy’s valuation ballooned. Suddenly, Saylor’s controversial decision looked more like a stroke of genius and the company quickly became a leveraged proxy for Bitcoin on Wall Street.

Related: Strategy’s MSTR may plunge 80% if it repeats this dot-com-era fractal

Dozens of listed firms adopted variations of its treasury strategy, and today, Strategy’s Bitcoin stack is worth more than $54 billion. But with BTC languishing far from its all-time high above $126,000 in October 2025, the company’s Bitcoin play has been repeatedly called into question.

Bitcoin price is far from its all-time high. Source: Coingecko

Skeptics argue Strategy’s model only works if Bitcoin keeps appreciating and investors continue providing new capital. Some have even warned that, under prolonged market stress, those dynamics could contribute to a so-called death spiral in Strategy’s financial model.

Different mechanism, same problem

Whether Strategy represents a radical reinvention or history repeating itself depends largely on how investors interpret the risks.

To some critics, the similarities with 2000 are less about accounting than Saylor’s willingness to build his company around a high-risk corporate model that few other chief executives would even contemplate.

“Saylor is insane (not an insult, just a diagnosis) and is either a fool or a knave,” Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at NYU Stern School of Business, told Cointelegraph in an email.

“It hurts my brain cells just thinking about MSTR and I don’t have enough to waste on it.”

David Trainer, chief executive of investment research firm New Constructs, also holds a hawkish view. He argued that while today’s Strategy looks very different from the company that collapsed during the dot-com era, investors are still being asked to place extraordinary faith in Saylor’s latest corporate experiment.

“Different mechanism, same underlying problem: the equity is a leveraged wrapper around a volatile asset, with no fundamental earnings power supporting the valuation,” he said.

He said that the dot-com blow-up was due to incorrect financial reporting. The SEC claimed in 2000 the company’s financial reports had “showed positive net income” when it should have “should have reported net losses from 1997 through the present.” While Saylor and two executives agreed to pay a $10 million fine to settle the case, they did not admit liability to any of the SEC’s allegations.

“That was a […] mismanagement risk layered on a real (if over-hyped) software business,” he said.

Today, the company’s books are “cleaner,” he argued, with the risks embedded in a capital structure built around financing ever-larger Bitcoin purchases rather than software.

Strategy now runs a “large and growing balance of convertible debt and perpetual preferred stock,” he said, pointing to the $6.7 billion in convertible notes and $15.5 billion in preferred stock outstanding as of late May 2026, used specifically to buy more Bitcoin.

“The software business is now a rounding error next to the balance sheet,” he said.

Related: Grayscale’s Pandl says Strategy should sell $3B Bitcoin to restore confidence

According to Trainer, the bigger concern is not Bitcoin itself, but the premium investors are willing to pay for exposure through Strategy. If that premium disappears, one of the company’s key advantages disappears with it.

“Once you’re structurally reliant on issuance and issuance becomes value-destructive, the company has to either sell Bitcoin, take on more expensive financing or simply stop growing,” Trainer said.

Treasury management, not just HODLing

Forman said that investors should focus on how the company manages its increasingly sophisticated corporate treasury strategy.

“Strategy’s position can’t be understood simply by looking at the size of its Bitcoin holdings,” Forman told Cointelegraph.

He said Strategy’s willingness to sell Bitcoin is less a departure from Saylor’s long-held accumulation strategy than a practical reality of managing a corporate balance sheet. “I see it as a pragmatic evolution of a more complex treasury strategy,” he said.

“The broader takeaway is that Bitcoin is increasingly being treated as an institutional asset class,” he added, stressing that rather than simply deciding whether to buy Bitcoin, companies will increasingly need to think about governance, liquidity management, execution and risk management.

So, has Saylor rewritten his legacy?

26 years after MicroStrategy’s accounting scandal, the questions surrounding Strategy have changed.

Few critics question the integrity of the company’s financial reporting, but whether its increasingly complex Bitcoin strategy can endure prolonged market stress.

Saylor has fundamentally changed the way many public companies think about corporate treasuries, and many have followed his lead.

But whether Saylor has rewritten his legacy won’t be decided by the next bull run, but on how well Strategy performs if the markets continue to turn against it.

Cointelegraph reached out to Strategy but did not receive a response. A spokesperson from the SEC declined to comment on the settlement case.

Magazine: Bitcoin will not hit $1M by 2030, says veteran trader Peter Brandt

Bitcoin pushed above $64,000 during Tuesday’s Wall Street open as US inflation data printed cooler than expected, lifting broader risk sentiment and bringing crypto back toward the top end of its recent trading range. The move came on the heels of a surprise drop in June’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), with energy costs driving much of the decline.

While the CPI release improved the near-term outlook for monetary policy expectations, traders were still cautious about whether Bitcoin can convincingly break above nearby resistance levels and sustain gains. That tension—between relief from macro data and technical hesitation—shaped market action into the early US session.

Key takeaways

• June CPI came in at 3.5% year over year versus 3.8% expected, marking the biggest monthly decline since April 2020, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Energy fell sharply in June, outweighing increases in other categories such as shelter and food, helping risk assets and Bitcoin trade higher.
• Monetary-policy expectations shifted more dovish after the print, even as the CME Group FedWatch Tool still pointed to a 0.25% hike at the September meeting as the baseline.
• Crypto traders remain focused on whether Bitcoin can hold above resistance near $64,000, with some analysis warning of potential rejection if levels aren’t reclaimed and defended.
• Short liquidations in crypto were elevated after the move, but data indicates the market is still range-bound rather than decisively trending.

US CPI’s sharp energy-led drop changes the near-term macro tone

BTC/USD gained more than 2% on the day, according to price tracking on TradingView, as the June CPI release came in below expectations. The key headline was the year-over-year CPI reading at 3.5% against the 3.8% forecast.

More importantly for markets, the CPI report showed a sharp month-to-month decline. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said June marked the largest monthly fall in CPI since April 2020. The driver was energy: BLS reported that the energy index fell 5.7% in June after rising 3.9% in May, 3.8% in April, and 10.9% in March.

“The energy index was the largest contributor to the monthly all items decrease, more than offsetting increases in other indexes including those for shelter and food.”

The CPI print landed despite other geopolitical pressures tied to the US-Iran conflict, including concerns around supply routes connected to the Strait of Hormuz referenced in earlier market coverage. However, on this inflation reading, energy prices provided the “shock absorber” that swung the inflation profile downward.

Risk assets rally as markets tilt more dovish—CME still sees September hike

Stocks traded higher following the release, and crypto investors appeared to take the macro relief in stride. The immediate impact was visible in pricing of future Federal Reserve policy: expectations shifted more dovish, with traders reducing the perceived likelihood of additional near-term tightening.

Still, the market’s baseline case did not fully break from the probability framework seen before the release. According to CME Group’s FedWatch Tool, the consensus scenario continued to lean toward a 0.25% increase at the Fed’s September meeting. In other words, the CPI outcome appeared to cool the urgency of hikes rather than eliminate the expectation of one later in the year.

Economist Mohamed El-Erian characterized the release as a counterweight to an overly hawkish tilt in rates pricing, writing that the data should temper what had become “excessively hawkish” market assumptions about monetary policy—an observation he posted in a response on X.

Bitcoin tests the $64,000 ceiling as traders debate breakout odds

Even with the macro tailwind, traders largely treated Bitcoin’s advance as a test rather than a resolution. Several market observers pointed to local resistance just above $64,000 as the area that must be cleared to confirm a genuine upswing. Earlier coverage noted that Bitcoin had returned to the upper portion of its range, but that the $64,000 level remained a key decision point.

In ongoing market analysis posted on X, commentator Exitpump argued that the CPI print contributed to a squeeze effect: short sellers were not able to drive price lower as positions were forced to unwind. The takeaway was that passive demand and closing shorts helped push price higher, but the broader market still looked like it could remain range-bound.

“Still a range trading environment.”

Data from CoinGlass showed that crypto short liquidations over the prior 24 hours totaled just over $220 million. Liquidation spikes are often a byproduct of sharp moves against crowded positioning, but they do not automatically confirm a lasting trend—especially when price is already near technically significant levels.

What to watch next: whether $64,000 holds—or becomes a lower high

Trader Killa highlighted the importance of follow-through above recent highs. In an X post, Killa described liquidity located above $64.8K and explained that price was testing the weekly open. The warning was conditional: if Bitcoin could not reclaim and hold the weekly open, the move might turn into a “lower high,” potentially setting up a pullback toward the $60,000 region.

For traders and investors, the practical implication is that the CPI-driven rally may be less about a confirmed trend reversal and more about whether momentum can overcome near-term resistance. In range conditions, breakouts typically need sustained holding above key levels, not just a momentary spike.

As the market digests the inflation surprise, the immediate question is whether Bitcoin can convert CPI-fueled optimism into structural strength above $64,000 and follow-through toward higher liquidity zones. If it fails to hold, traders may treat the rally as a volatility event within a broader sideways framework until new macro data or positioning shifts provide clearer directional evidence.

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

The new company’s mandate reads like a full-stack blueprint for moving Japanese finance onto a public blockchain: yen stablecoin issuance and distribution, tokenization of corporate bonds, commercial paper, funds, and real estate, cross-border settlement rails, institutional on-chain services, and payment infrastructure for AI agents. For Solana, it is the deepest institutional embrace the network has received in Asia. For SBI, a company that spent nearly a decade as Ripple’s most committed champion in the region, it is a pivot loaded with signal. The question the market spent July 14 arguing about is which signal: validation of Solana as institutional infrastructure, or a reminder of how much distance separates a memorandum from a market.

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

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

What was actually announced

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

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

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

The JPYSC foundation

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

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

Why Japan, and why now

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

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

How Solana became the institutional candidate

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

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

The market Japan is playing for

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

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

The Ripple question

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

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

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

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

The stablecoin geography taking shape

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

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

The AI agent wildcard

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

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

The bull case: the pipeline is the prize

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

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

The bear case: a mandate is not a market

The skeptical argument starts with the same undisclosed list the release left behind. No stake size, no timelines, no revenue targets, no confirmed distribution channel, and no confirmation that even JPYSC, the venture’s flagship asset, runs primarily on Solana.

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

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

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

Where SOL the asset stands while the venture builds

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

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

What would make this pivot real

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

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

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

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

The most instructive XRP trade of 2026 was an exit. When it emerged this month that Goldman Sachs, once the largest XRP holder among Wall Street institutions, had sold down its position, the reaction split along familiar lines: bears read it as the smartest money leaving a stalled asset, bulls read it as a bank taking profits on ETF seeding and creation-desk inventory it never intended to hold.

Both camps then arrived at the same, more interesting question, and it is the one that will define XRP’s next year. The first $1.5 billion of ETF money is in. Goldman’s chapter is closed. Standard Chartered says the next tranche is worth $4 billion to $8 billion. So who, exactly, buys it, what has to happen first, and what does XRP look like if they do?

The question matters because XRP has spent 2026 as the market’s cleanest natural experiment in whether flows alone can move a price. The token trades near $1.08 inside a range that has compressed to roughly $1.00 to $1.13, down around 40 percent on the year, while nearly every input a flow analyst would track has pointed the other way: sustained ETF creations, whale accumulation running at multiples of last year’s pace, exchange balances at multi-year lows, and a parent company stacking regulatory wins across three continents. The demand arrived. The price did not respond. Resolving that contradiction requires taking the flow machine apart piece by piece.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies recorded $45.7 million in revenue from Ether staking and validation last quarter, following the launch of its institutional-grade Ethereum staking platform in March. 

Staking revenue accounted for 98% of total revenue for the three months ended May 31, far outpacing the $624,000 from self-mining Bitcoin (BTC) and the $168,000 from consulting services, according to Bitmine’s latest 10-Q filing. On Monday, Bitmine said it had staked 85% of its ETH holdings, equating to around 4.9 million Ether (ETH). 

“Bitmine has staked more ETH than other entities in the world. At scale (when Bitmine’s ETH is fully staked by MAVAN and its staking partners), the projected ETH staking reward is $284 million on an annualized basis,” said Tom Lee, chairman of Bitmine. 

The latest quarterly results show how Bitmine’s pivot to Ethereum has reshaped its revenue mix. A year ago, Bitmine recorded just $2 million in total revenue for the quarter ended May 31, 2025, primarily from machine leasing. 

The results also reflect the March launch of MAVAN, an institutional-grade Ethereum staking platform that operates validator infrastructure for its own holdings and external clients. 

Related: Ethereum backers launch nonprofit to lead institutional adoption efforts 

MAVAN, short for “Made in America VAlidator Network,” followed the acquisition of Australia-based non-custodial validator operator Pier Two Holdings. It was originally developed to support Bitmine’s own Ethereum treasury; its scope expanded to serve institutional investors, custodians and ecosystem partners.  

Lee calls Robinhood Chain a “breakaway success”

On Monday, Lee highlighted the success of the newly launched Robinhood Chain, with dollar volumes exceeding $1 billion since its July 1 launch. 

“Robinhood Chain now has more trading volume than any other decentralized exchange (DEX), demonstrating the outstanding utility and product market fit for Ethereum, which is the underlying chain,” he said. 

“Robinhood Chain uses ETH as the native gas token. And transaction fees are denominated in ETH and the finality is settled on Ethereum. Robinhood’s 27 million users are paying crypto fees denominated in ETH. In other words, everyday users are starting to see ETH as money,” he added. 

Magazine: Strategy became a symbol of the dot-com crash: Could history repeat?

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | 30 June 2026: VAP Group announced the launch of VAP Ventures, its dedicated investment arm, marking a significant milestone in the company’s evolution from building global platforms for innovation to directly supporting the founders shaping the future of technology.

The announcement was made at the Global AI Show, Global Games Show, and Global Blockchain Show Riyadh 2026, from 29-30 June, where thousands of global industry leaders, innovators, investors and decision-makers have gathered to explore the technologies defining the next decade. The introduction of VAP Ventures represents one of the flagship announcements of this year’s Riyadh editions.

For years, VAP Group’s global stages have brought together founders, enterprises, governments and investors across AI, Web3, blockchain, gaming and emerging technologies. Through VAP Ventures, the company is taking the next step moving beyond creating opportunities for conversations to building the next generation of high-impact startups..

Over the next five years, VAP Ventures will back 100 startups by 2030 building across AI, Web3 & Blockchain, and Digital Games. The initiative reflects VAP Group’s long-term commitment to strengthening the global innovation economy through an integrated ecosystem that combines investment with market access and strategic growth support.
Unlike traditional investment models, VAP Ventures is designed to provide more than funding. Each selected startup will receive a blended support with direct capital alongside access to VAP Group’s media ecosystem, marketing capabilities, talent network and globally recognised event platforms. The objective is to help founders move from early-stage ideas to scalable businesses with the resources needed beyond investment alone.

VAP Ventures will focus on technologies shaping the future of the digital economy, including enterprise AI, Web3 infrastructure, blockchain innovation and next-generation gaming ecosystems. The initiative is strategically aligned with the Kingdom’s vision of fostering innovation, entrepreneurship and knowledge-based industries while supporting globally ambitious founders.

Key Highlights

• 100 startups to be backed by 2030
• Launching from Riyadh, KSA
• Focus sectors: Artificial Intelligence, Web3 & Blockchain, and Digital Games
• Support extending beyond capital to include media, marketing, talent and global stage access

“We gave founders a stage for years. Now we’re backing them. VAP Ventures will invest in more than 100 startups across AI, Web3, and gaming over five years in capital, media, talent, and reach, all under one roof. This is visibility turning into vital support” Vishal Parmar, Founder & CEO, VAP Group.

The launch of VAP Ventures reinforces VAP Group’s broader mission to strengthen the global innovation economy by bringing together capital, media, talent and international platforms under one roof. By expanding from convening innovators to backing them, the company aims to create lasting impact across the startup ecosystem while enabling the next generation of technology companies to grow from the region onto the global stage.

Startups interested in applying to VAP Ventures will be able to submit their details through the dedicated application platform, including company information and pitch materials, as the initiative begins building its inaugural cohort.

About VAP Group

With 13+ years of expertise, VAP Group is a premier global consulting and media powerhouse driving the next wave of technology-led growth.

Through its media ecosystem and flagship events, including the Global AI Show, Global Games Show, and Global Blockchain Show, VAP Group connects policymakers, enterprises, and innovators worldwide, enabling strategic communications, ecosystem-building, and talent solutions.

For more information: https://www.vapgroup.co/vap-ventures/

Media Enquiries:

media@vapgroup.co