South Korea plans to update its 76-year-old national asset management system to formally include virtual currencies and intellectual property in the country’s definition of national assets, according to the Ministry of Economy and Finance’s economic policy roadmap released Wednesday.

The proposal contemplates revising the National Property Act, which dates back to 1950, and includes plans to create a broader legal framework for managing state-owned assets. The ministry reiterated plans to start a pilot program for tokenized government bonds in 2027, saying blockchain technology has the potential to reduce transaction costs and speed up transfers.

Officials are also studying the tokenization of state-owned real estate to allow retail investors to participate and share in investment returns, according to the plan.

The announcement builds on South Korea’s broader push to bring blockchain into public finance. Earlier this year, the Finance Ministry said it would begin testing tokenized deposits for government spending in the fourth quarter. The Bank of Korea has already started trials of its central bank digital currency (CBDC) with commercial banks.

An attacker drained approximately $18 million in USDC from Ostium’s liquidity vault on Arbitrum in an oracle manipulation exploit detected by blockchain security firm Blockaid, onchain data shows.

According to Blockaid’s alert, the attacker leveraged a registered PriceUpKeep forwarder, a component of Ostium’s automated infrastructure, to submit oracle price reports with future-dated timestamps. The manipulated reports created the appearance of profitable trades, which triggered an $18 million USDC payout from the vault.

Ostium is a decentralized perpetuals exchange on Arbitrum that allows users to trade real-world assets including commodities, forex, and equity indices, with up to 200x leverage, settling in USDC.

Ostium uses a custom price-feed system to track real-world asset prices, with a third-party automation network called Gelato responsible for pushing those prices onchain at the right moments. A smart contract called PriceUpKeep sits at the center of that process, acting as the trigger that writes the latest price data to the blockchain whenever a trade needs to be executed.

Binance has unveiled an $800,000 XRP airdrop campaign for eligible Ripple USD holders, introducing weekly rewards designed to encourage activity around Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin.

According to a July 15 announcement from Binance, users holding RLUSD in Binance Earn, Margin, or Futures accounts between July 17 and Aug. 14 will qualify for XRP rewards through weekly distributions scheduled every Friday until the campaign concludes.

The exchange said the promotion is available only to users who meet its eligibility requirements and is excluded in certain jurisdictions.

Eligibility rules focus on active RLUSD users

To qualify, Binance said participants must maintain at least 0.01 RLUSD in eligible accounts. In addition, users are required to record an average daily Margin or Futures trading volume of $500 or more across any trading pairs during the promotion period.

Binance also introduced separate treatment for borrowed assets. According to the exchange, RLUSD obtained by borrowing other stablecoins will receive a 60% haircut after liabilities are calculated. The adjustment applies to borrowing involving USDT, USDC, U, USD1, and FDUSD within Margin accounts.

Broker accounts are also eligible to receive XRP rewards, Binance said, adding that there is no individual cap on airdrop payouts for those accounts. Even so, the exchange noted that participation remains restricted in selected countries because of local regulatory requirements.

The campaign arrives as RLUSD has lost some of the momentum it built earlier this year. The Ripple-issued stablecoin carried a market capitalization of about $1.51 billion at the time of writing after declining more than 10% over recent weeks, while its 24-hour trading volume slipped by roughly 6%.

Earlier in June, RLUSD’s market capitalization climbed above $1.81 billion following the rollout of 24/7 settlement on the XRP Ledger with Mastercard, before later retreating amid delays surrounding U.S. crypto legislation and lower market expectations for passage of the CLARITY Act.

Ripple expands RLUSD use cases beyond stablecoin payments

The Binance rewards program comes shortly after Ripple continued expanding RLUSD’s role beyond conventional payments. As previously reported by crypto.news, Ripple joined the x402 Foundation as a Premier Member to support payments made with XRP and RLUSD through an open standard built for AI agents.

Ripple said AI systems are increasingly handling more of the payment process, creating demand for infrastructure capable of transferring value as efficiently as information moves across the internet. The company added that developers can use the XRP Ledger and the x402 protocol to build AI-powered applications that settle transactions with XRP and RLUSD.

The Foundation’s Premier Members include Coinbase, Circle, Google, Mastercard, Visa, Amazon Web Services, Stripe, Shopify, American Express, Adyen, Cloudflare, Fiserv, the Solana Foundation, the Stellar Development Foundation, the Monad Foundation, and MoonPay.

Meanwhile, XRP (XRP) continued to strengthen alongside improving macro sentiment. The token rose about 5% after U.S. consumer inflation data came in below expectations, trading between $1.07 and $1.12 over the past 24 hours. Trading volume climbed roughly 40%, indicating stronger market participation.

CoinGlass data also pointed to rising derivatives activity. The analytics platform reported that XRP futures open interest increased 3% over the previous four hours to $2.44 billion, suggesting traders added fresh positions as lower U.S. inflation data and Binance’s incentive program supported bullish sentiment.

In Utah, which passed State-Endorsed Digital Identity (SEDI) legislation, Cardano Foundation-built Veridian has already shown that digital identity can be delivered in a privacy-preserving way, allowing users to prove that they are over or under a specific age without exposing any other data. It’s a working model of what responsible verification can look like and shows trust does not require unnecessary disclosure. Privacy can be designed into the system from the start.

That is the standard bills like KIDS or KOSA should favor.

If the goal is to protect children, the tools should be narrow, purposeful, and minimally invasive. Broad mandates that push every platform toward more data, more retention, and greater dependence on identity are too blunt and risk creating a multitude of other problems alongside the ones they claim to solve.

A better approach is straightforward. Build for data minimization, limit retention, and use privacy-preserving verification where verification is truly needed. If digital trust can be established without exposing personal data, lawmakers should prefer that path. If safety can be improved without turning the internet into an identity checkpoint, that should be the only option.

Children deserve protection online. But they do not need a policy framework that makes everyone more visible in order to make the internet, and the companies that thrive on it, more accountable.

EU AML watchdog has warned that the end of MiCA’s transitional period has increased the risk of compliance pressure on crypto firms as customers move to licensed providers across the bloc.

According to Bruna Szego, chair of the Authority for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AMLA), crypto companies exiting the European Union market could face a surge in customer withdrawal requests, while licensed virtual asset service providers (VASPs) may struggle to onboard large numbers of new users without weakening compliance standards.

Speaking during a Wednesday briefing before the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, Szego said firms winding down operations should be prepared for increased customer activity as users transfer their assets before services end. She added that licensed providers absorbing those customers should keep anti-money laundering procedures effective throughout the transition.

The warning comes after the European Union’s 18-month Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) transitional period ended on July 1, requiring crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) to obtain authorization to continue serving customers in the bloc.

Earlier, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) instructed firms that remained unauthorized after the deadline to take immediate steps to wind down their EU operations, leaving customers to migrate to licensed providers.

AMLA prepares next stage of MiCA oversight

Before the July 1 deadline, AMLA issued an advisory note outlining money laundering risks linked to the end of the transitional period. According to the authority, the guidance sets out expectations for both firms closing their EU businesses and licensed providers accepting new customers so that anti-money laundering controls remain effective during the migration.

During the parliamentary briefing, Szego said AMLA plans to publish a report before the end of the year examining money laundering risks across the crypto sector alongside supervisory practices used by national authorities. She added that the authority is expanding its blockchain analytics capabilities to strengthen oversight of crypto-asset service providers.

According to Szego, the report will compare how regulators supervise CASPs across member states and identify differences that could require coordinated follow-up work between AMLA and national authorities.

The latest comments build on Europe’s post-licensing supervisory efforts. On July 11, ESMA launched a Common Supervisory Action covering a sample of MiCA-authorized crypto custodians to examine operational resilience in areas including private key management, transaction controls, incident response and reliance on third-party technology providers.

ESMA said the review is intended to test whether authorized firms can maintain effective operational safeguards in practice rather than relying solely on their MiCA licenses, making it one of the first coordinated supervisory exercises after the transition period expired.

Robinhood’s newly launched Ethereum layer-2, built on Arbitrum technology, has quickly become one of the busiest rollups in the ecosystem—prompting fresh debate over a familiar question in Ethereum scaling: do successful L2s ultimately lift demand for ETH, or do they mainly capture value for themselves?

According to Cointelegraph’s reporting and data it cites, more than $141 million in Ether was bridged to Robinhood Chain in its first two weeks. DeFiLlama’s Ether distribution data also indicates that more than half a million wallets now hold ETH on the network. Activity has spilled into trading as well: Robinhood Chain has reportedly surpassed Ethereum L1 and Coinbase’s Base L2 in 24-hour DEX volume.

Key takeaways

• Robinhood Chain’s rollout has boosted attention on whether L2 adoption can translate into stronger ETH demand.
• Bridged Ether and wallet growth on the L2 are clear early signals, but that does not automatically mean higher L1 fee revenue or burn.
• Industry participants differ on what drives ETH upside: fee-share economics versus ETH’s role as “money” across L2 ecosystems.
• Even if major institutions build on Ethereum, it remains uncertain how much of that activity requires users to hold ETH directly.

Robinhood Chain’s rapid traction puts institutions in the spotlight

Robinhood Chain launched on July 1 and, per the activity figures cited above, has rapidly drawn users and liquidity. In its first two weeks, the network drew meaningful Ether bridging volumes and grew to more than 500,000 wallets holding ETH on the chain, according to DeFiLlama.

What has drawn more interest than the underlying rollup concept is the sponsor: Robinhood is a publicly listed retail brokerage with tens of millions of customers. Prior waves of L2 growth—often associated with crypto-native teams—failed to materially shift market pricing for ETH, largely because much of the economic action stayed on the rollups rather than flowing back to Ethereum L1.

This time, the narrative is different: Robinhood has brought a mainstream financial brand into the L2 arena, and early signals suggest it is integrating into broader real-world asset (RWA) activity. Within days of launch, Robinhood Chain reportedly accounted for 6.9% of all tokenized stockholders, based on Token Terminal data referenced in the coverage.

Why some see the launch as a stronger “ETH is money” thesis

Ether’s price reaction has added fuel to the optimism. The article notes that Ether rose roughly 15% from $1,582 on July 1 to $1,825 by July 13, citing Coingecko price data.

Commentators linked the price strength to Robinhood Chain as reinforcement of an “ETH is money” argument—one that emphasizes ETH’s role as the base asset underpinning Ethereum settlement and collateral usage rather than just its share of transaction fees.

On July 11, World Liberty Financial’s Eric Trump posted on X that “ETH is pumping hard,” while Tom Lee, chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, argued on X that the launch supports the idea that “ETH is money,” pointing to Ethereum’s native gas role and L2 finality on the mainnet.

Developer commentary also leaned toward a milestone framing. Alex Gluchowski, founder and CEO of Matter Labs (the developer behind zkSync), described Robinhood Chain as a milestone showing L2 infrastructure has moved from experimentation by crypto teams to usage by regulated, publicly listed companies. He also characterized Robinhood’s approach as tailoring an Ethereum rollup for privacy, compliance, and performance while inheriting Ethereum’s security and staying connected to its liquidity.

Bitwise’s Max Shannon, quoted in the article, suggested the significance goes beyond prior L2 deployments. He argued it reflects growth of the Ethereum ecosystem among major institutions and arrives as Ethereum broadens its push toward institutional engagement through initiatives referenced in the report.

But value-accrual questions remain unresolved

Even with institutional participation, the core investment question has not been fully answered: how does rising L2 usage translate into measurable economic value for ETH holders?

The coverage highlights a key tension between two ways of thinking about ETH upside. One view treats ETH as a revenue-generating asset tied to L1 fee capture and burn. The other treats ETH as money—gaining value as it becomes the widely accepted collateral and settlement asset across a growing number of L2 systems.

Ark Invest’s Lorenzo Valente posted on July 14 that Robinhood Chain generated $816,000 in revenue since launch, with Arbitrum taking a 10% cut and only about 0.15% of the total reportedly paid back to Ethereum. The article also includes pushback from GrowThePie, which argued Valente’s numbers were off by a factor of four and that 0.6% is the correct share.

Regardless of which proportion is accurate, the broader point remains: even if Robinhood Chain is among the busiest L2s, the portion of fees attributed to Ethereum L1 appears small in the near term. The article adds that, while Robinhood generated more gas fees than any other L2 in the past week (citing a post referencing “Matze” and GrowThePie), Ethereum’s L1 only received $4,400 from that activity.

Gluchowski argued that ETH’s appreciation likely would not hinge on fee revenue alone. Instead, he said the asset’s value could strengthen as ETH becomes more widely used as a base monetary asset across the L2 environment—particularly as value settles through Ethereum and ETH becomes less “just a fee token.” He also suggested that users might pay for activity with stablecoins or not think about gas directly, yet ETH could still benefit from its underlying role in settlement and collateralization.

Institutional builders may not mean users hold ETH directly

Shannon acknowledged that upgrades such as Fusaka have improved Ethereum’s scaling capabilities, but he said rising transaction activity hasn’t yet translated into meaningfully higher L1 fees or ETH burn. In his view, Robinhood Chain won’t “solve this problem,” and neither will the aggregate growth of L2s without a broader shift in developer incentives and in Ethereum’s token economics.

The coverage also flags another practical uncertainty: whether institutional users actually need to hold ETH themselves. As tokenized stocks and other RWAs increasingly trade against stablecoins, some users may interact less with ETH day to day—despite ETH’s role in running settlement and securing the ecosystem behind the scenes.

Robinhood Chain therefore appears to be both a promising signal and a reminder of the gap between adoption and accrual. It demonstrates that a large, regulated financial brand is willing to build on Ethereum’s infrastructure, but it does not yet provide a conclusive pathway for how that activity should translate into stronger demand for ETH from end users.

For investors and builders, the next watch items are straightforward: whether L2 growth continues to expand Ether collateral and usage over time, whether L1 fee and burn effects move meaningfully beyond current baselines, and whether Ethereum’s economics evolve enough to ensure value from institutional L2 activity doesn’t get stranded entirely on the rollups.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh testifies Wednesday before the Senate Banking Committee, facing questions over the the economy and how various factors might impact interest rates.

Part of congressionally mandated Capitol Hill appearances for the central bank leader, Warsh spoke Tuesday to the House Financial Services Committee. During his remarks, he reaffirmed the Fed’s commitment to fighting inflation though he gave few clues about the direction of monetary policy.

Legislators tried baiting Warsh into commenting on fiscal and political matters, but he largely avoided the topics, stressing the importance of the Fed staying focused on its assigned responsibilities.

Read more:
Warsh pledges Fed policy ‘regime change’ to rid inflation ‘tax’ on American people
Kevin Warsh names members of his Federal Reserve task forces, including Marc Andreessen, Doug McMillon
Fed meeting minutes to show ‘family fight’ over rates. The squabble could drag on for a while

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Circle has secured a court-backed arbitration win after records made public in a Boston federal court detailed why the stablecoin issuer suspended Heka Funds’ USDC minting and redemption services over suspected market manipulation involving Tether.

Court filings submitted by Circle on Tuesday as part of its petition to confirm a February arbitration award said the company concluded the Malta-based arbitrage fund had failed to disclose Tether’s role as its principal investor and reasonably suspected trading activity that could have manipulated the USDC market.

Retired judge Robert L. Dondero, who served as arbitrator, ruled in Circle’s favor on the remaining contract claims, finding the company acted within the rights granted under its agreements with Heka.

Hidden Tether ties became central to the dispute

At the center of the case was Heka Funds, managed by London-based Abraxas Capital Management, which opened a Circle account in January 2022 for its Elysium Global Arbitrage Fund.

According to the arbitration record, Heka disclosed only investor Simon Grima during onboarding, while Tether had become the fund’s dominant capital provider. Testimony from Heka founder Fabio Frontini showed Tether’s investment reached about $800 million by the time of arbitration, accounting for roughly 75% of Elysium’s assets.

Dondero concluded the omission was intentional and wrote that the missing disclosure appeared designed to avoid revealing Tether’s involvement in the fund. Circle Chief Business Officer Kash Razzaghi testified that the company would not have approved the account had it known of Tether’s role when the relationship began.

The trading dispute emerged after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse in March 2023 temporarily pushed USDC below its dollar peg. According to the filings, Heka bought discounted USDC in secondary markets and redeemed the tokens with Circle at face value after many other arbitrage firms had stopped once the spread narrowed.

Internal Circle communications presented during arbitration showed executives disagreed over whether the trades represented legitimate arbitrage. Razzaghi described the activity as “a manufactured arb not a market-driven one,” attributing it to Tether waiving its normal fees, while Circle employee David Norton initially argued the trades appeared commercially rational.

Circle allowed Heka to redeem more than $587 million in USDC over a two-week period while testing whether the trading opportunity depended on Heka’s activity. Court records said Norton later changed his position after asking Heka to pause its trades and observing that the market spread tightened instead of widening. Coinbase also informed Circle it was uncomfortable working with Heka because of the fund’s Tether relationship and fee structure, leading the exchange to place restrictions on the account, according to the filings.

Arbitrator upholds Circle’s contractual rights

Court documents showed Circle reduced Heka’s minting and redemption limits to zero in November 2023 before suspending the account on Dec. 1 under Section 9(c) of the parties’ master services agreement after Frontini threatened legal and regulatory action.

Heka’s request to redeem $100 million in February 2024 was rejected, and the master services agreement expired the following month. Testimony presented during arbitration said Tether invested another $500 million in Elysium during the same month before Heka filed its arbitration claim.

Another issue raised during the proceedings involved Frontini’s application for an account with Circle France shortly before the hearing. According to the arbitration award, he did not disclose the ongoing dispute and submitted a board resolution stating Heka maintained an active Circle relationship, later testifying he expected his U.S. application to fail.

Applying Delaware law, Dondero found Circle did not breach either agreement because the user terms allowed the company to adjust transaction limits and suspend services at its discretion. The arbitrator also ruled Circle was not required to prove market manipulation had occurred, only that it had reached a reasonable conclusion that such activity might be taking place.

Although Circle requested about $5.15 million in legal fees and costs, Dondero awarded only $166,643.25 related to expert work after finding Heka continued pursuing a $49 million lost-profits claim that had already been excluded from the case.

A Heka spokesperson told the Financial Times the fund had never engaged in market manipulation and had never been the subject of a regulatory investigation involving such conduct. The spokesperson also said Circle sought to make the arbitration record public to divert attention from its refusal to process USDC redemptions.

The disclosure comes as Circle continues expanding its institutional business globally. The company recently received final approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Circle National Trust and is preparing to host its invitation-only Current Seoul event on July 23, where executives from banks, crypto exchanges, and payments companies are expected to discuss future partnerships as Circle pursues wider USDC adoption in South Korea.