Retail traders are piling into XRP and ether while both tokens slip, the kind of crowd behavior that more often precedes further downside than a bounce.

XRP drew 3.02 bullish social media comments for every bearish one on Monday, its most positive reading in five weeks, according to Santiment. Ether ran at 2.31 and bitcoin at 1.40, which the firm classified as neutral. Bitcoin and ether both opened higher and faded through the day, so the loudest enthusiasm is landing on the assets that are falling.

Sentiment readings like these are used as contrarian signals, because crowd excitement usually peaks near local tops.

“Crypto typically moves opposite to what the crowd is loudly expecting,” Santiment wrote, adding that heavy bullishness on XRP or ether while prices dip can add short-term downside risk or slow any rebound.

Bitcoin’s flat reading is the healthier one, meanwhile. Retail chasing the smaller tokens while staying neutral on bitcoin is narrow speculation, not broad greed, and rallies have more room when the crowd hasn’t already crowded into the higher-prices trade. XRP traded near $1.09 on Monday, down on the week.

But the regulated U.S. app and the global platform are fundamentally different products. The U.S. version requires full KYC identity verification, is funded through registered futures commission merchants rather than crypto wallets and settles in U.S. dollars. The global platform, still geoblocked for U.S. IP addresses, has no identity checks, settles in USDC and carries a far wider range of markets.

The $571 million figure refers to Americans trading on that global platform through VPNs and existing crypto wallets. Allium tracked wallet behavior rather than IP addresses, which is how a VPN that defeats geoblocking still leaves U.S. fingerprints in the data.

Kalshi’s breakout moment

Named FIFA’s official prediction market partner part-way through the tournament, Kalshi had branding rights, in-venue presence and a media distribution deal with Fox Sports.Though notably, the user growth was already well underway when Kalshi signed its co-branding deal with ADI Predictstreet, the FIFA World Cup’s official prediction market partner, on June 26, just four days before Apptopia data was recorded. Both Kalshi and Polymarket have advertised heavily during games, with ads airing during the halftime break, as well as the so-called hydration breaks during the American broadcasts.

App data from Apptopia found that by June 30, Kalshi’s daily active users were 36% above their June 15 level. Over the same period, DraftKings fell 36% from its tournament peak, FanDuel dropped 41% and BetMGM and Caesars each declined 32%. Traditional sportsbook apps spiked early and faded, while prediction markets built steadily throughout.

Bitcoin’s consensus rules have historically treated valid transactions equally regardless of purpose. BIP-110 prompted concerns that rules aimed at discouraging one category of transaction risked opening the door to future restrictions on others.

BIP-110 rejected

The means by which the proposal sought approval was equally contentious. Bitcoin upgrades typically only proceed after overwhelming support has emerged across miners, businesses, wallet providers and the wider ecosystem. BIP-110, instead, revived discussion around a user-led activation approach, with upgraded nodes enforcing the new rules if predefined conditions were met.

Supporters viewed that as a necessary safeguard if miners refused to act against what they considered abuse of block space. Opponents warned that attempting to introduce new consensus rules without broad agreement risked creating incompatible versions of Bitcoin, a scenario that many veterans still associate with the divisive block-size wars of 2017.

This was where BIP-110 fell short in winning support. Mining companies had little inventive to reject transactions that paid competitive fees, while institutional investors had no appetite for governance battles.

Michael Saylor, founder of Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin BTC$64,541.11, said BIP-110 “turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions.”

“That precedent is the danger,” he wrote on X on July 11. “We shoul save our energy for threats that really matter.”

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission threw itself in between Michigan courts and prediction market firm Kalshi on Tuesday, issuing an order to disallow the company from meeting a local court demand that it cancel previous customer transactions.

The CFTC move amplifies its legal fight with state governments and courts over what its chairman argues is its unbreakable and exclusive regulatory authority over trading at Kalshi, which it regulates as a designated contract market (DCM).

“The commission will not allow states or state courts to bully registered entities into violating the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations,” said CFTC Chairman Mike Selig in a statement alongside his agency’s order. Selig has embraced prediction markets and promised to institute friendly regulations, and he’s also vigorously defended his agency’s authority to regulate them in a way that negates state powers.

The CFTC has sued a number of states that have sought to halt or penalize event contract businesses as illegal gambling. The agency noted Tuesday that Michigan is the first state to attempt to interfere in transaction activity directly.

Bitcoin BTC$64,405.36 has fallen in the past 24 hours to $62,600 as traders exited riskier investments amid growing inflation concerns tied to rising oil prices.

Brent crude is up nearly 4% in the period, reflecting the renewed open conflict between the U.S. and Iran. That’s reigniting the so-called Nacho (Not a Chance Hormuz Opens) trade, which bets the strategic waterway stays shut.

The broader CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index lost 0.6% of its value over the same period while equities benchmarks in Europe are down about 1% and U.S. index futures 0.3%.

Attacks on tankers have reduced traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which carried about one-fifth of global oil and gas supplies before the conflict and has been de-facto closed for 136 days. Oil prices reached a four-week high after hostilities restarted.

The move reverses part of the peace trade that helped bitcoin recover from its late-June lows. Higher oil prices raise near-term inflation risks, pushing up Treasury yields and reducing demand for rate-sensitive assets.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the UK’s HM Treasury have released joint recommendations as part of a transatlantic working group aimed at coordinating financial-market oversight for digital assets—specifically stablecoins and tokenized finance.

In a statement published Tuesday, the two agencies said they want to align regulatory expectations in ways that promote financial stability without creating unnecessary market distortions. The guidance also points toward cross-border testing for tokenized assets and closer coordination between U.S. regulators and the Bank of England on shared approaches to tokenized-asset rules.

Key takeaways

• The U.S. and UK called for regulatory alignment around stablecoins, emphasizing requirements that avoid undermining cross-border competition.
• Stablecoins, under the joint framework, should be fully backed—at least on a one-to-one basis—by high-quality, liquid assets.
• For tokenized finance, the statement suggests authorities should consider a private-sector-led group to test cross-border use cases.
• The UK is pushing tokenization forward with a government-backed report that links adoption to meaningful economic gains by 2035.

Transatlantic recommendations target stablecoins and tokenization

The Treasury and HM Treasury’s joint statement was issued under the Transatlantic Taskforce for the Markets of the Future, a bilateral effort focused on cooperation across financial markets. According to the agencies, the recommendations reflect an intent to tailor rules in each jurisdiction while aiming for comparable outcomes for comparable risks and activities.

For stablecoins, the two governments said their goal is to support a “dynamic stablecoin market across borders.” The statement frames this as a balancing act: moving toward regulatory alignment while avoiding outcomes that could destabilize markets or discourage cross-border competition.

Crucially, the stablecoin guidance does not stop at general principles. The statement explicitly says stablecoins should be “fully backed, on at least a one-to-one basis, by high-quality, liquid assets.” That requirement mirrors the core concept embedded in U.S. legislation discussed in the same context.

The U.S. side did not explicitly name the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act in the joint recommendations, though the statement’s “fully backed” framing is aligned with the approach that U.S. law takes. GENIUS was signed into law last year, and is waiting for regulations to be approved before its effective date in January 2027.

Cross-border testing and shared approaches for tokenized assets

Beyond stablecoins, the joint statement contains recommendations for tokenized finance and cross-border activity. The task force urged authorities to consider the creation of a private-sector-led group focused on “testing of cross-border use cases for tokenized assets.”

That emphasis on use-case testing matters because tokenization can mean very different implementations depending on the asset class, settlement structure, and counterparties involved. Cross-border testing is positioned as a practical step to identify where regulatory expectations diverge and where common standards might emerge through real-world experimentation.

On regulation itself, the statement says U.S. financial agencies and the Bank of England should identify shared approaches to the regulation of tokenized assets. While the statement does not lay out specific rule text, it signals that regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are looking for convergence in how tokenized assets are treated from a supervisory and risk-management perspective.

UK report links tokenization to economic upside—by 2035

The U.S.-UK recommendations arrive after renewed attention in the UK on tokenization’s potential economic benefits. Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph highlighted a UK government-backed industry task force report claiming the country could add up to $44 billion to annual economic output by 2035, if the UK becomes a leading jurisdiction for tokenization, tokenization scales globally, and domestic adoption grows alongside major peers.

In that report, the task force called for the UK to issue tokenized bonds by the first quarter of 2027 and proposed testing financial transactions on the blockchain. Those proposals point toward a strategy of moving from policy discussions toward concrete market infrastructure steps—something that would likely raise the stakes for regulators to define consistent frameworks for tokenized securities and settlement.

Read together, the transatlantic message from Treasury and HM Treasury underscores how tokenization is increasingly being treated not just as a technology topic, but as a cross-border financial market issue requiring coordination. If tokenized debt instruments and other blockchain-based transactions expand, regulators will need shared expectations on matters like custody, settlement finality, disclosure, and the perimeter of existing financial rules.

What investors and builders should watch next

These joint recommendations are best viewed as a direction-setting effort: they establish how the U.S. and UK want to align on stablecoin backing standards and how they may collaborate on tokenized-asset testing and regulatory coherence. For market participants, the most immediate question is how quickly alignment translates into implementable guidance—especially given that the U.S. stablecoin regime is still waiting on implementing regulations under GENIUS.

As the UK pursues tokenized bonds and blockchain transaction testing toward 2027, and as U.S. rulemaking progresses toward GENIUS’s timeline, the key watch items are whether cross-border use-case testing produces concrete recommendations and whether “comparable outcomes” on stablecoin and tokenized-asset regulation become more specific in practice.