Crypto theft and fraud losses exceeded $1 billion in the first half of 2026, according to Blockaid’s H1 2026 security report released Tuesday. The period also featured the highest number of hacks in any six-month stretch recorded by the onchain security firm.

Ethereum and Solana accounted for the largest portions of stolen funds, with approximately $332 million and $326 million respectively. Blockaid tracked 212 security incidents during the six-month period, including a standout single exploit tied to KelpDAO, which Blockaid reported at $292 million.

Key takeaways

• Blockaid estimates total crypto losses above $1 billion in H1 2026, alongside the highest six-month hack count in its historical data.
• Ethereum led by stolen-fund impact (about $332 million), largely driven by code and application-layer exploits.
• Solana’s losses were similarly high (about $326 million) but were overwhelmingly linked to compromised keys and signing infrastructure.
• The largest single incident in the report involved KelpDAO, with losses of $292 million.
• Blockaid reports high-threshold exploit verification increased sharply in H1 2026 compared with all of 2025.

Ethereum’s losses underline application-layer risk

Blockaid said Ethereum incurred the highest losses from incidents in H1 2026, with attackers primarily focusing on vulnerabilities in applications built on the network. By count, code exploits were the dominant driver of Ethereum incidents, and Blockaid also highlighted that several major loss events involved compromised keys.

Among the notable incidents cited in the report were the Humanity Protocol and StablR attacks. CoWSwap was singled out as the only major Ethereum incident categorized as a user mistake, rather than a protocol or code vulnerability.

Blockaid described recurring techniques behind Ethereum-related breaches, including flaws in bridges and smart contracts, unauthorized access to privileged accounts, and market manipulation methods. While these categories differ in mechanics, they share a common theme: high-value Ethereum apps present a dense target surface for attackers seeking direct exploitation paths and privileged access.

The report also emphasized Ethereum’s role as a hub for major crypto primitives—restaking platforms, stablecoins, and decentralized exchanges—where substantial capital and complex integrations can concentrate both the value at risk and the probability of exploitable edge cases.

Solana’s stolen funds spiked with a shift toward key compromises

Solana’s losses in the first half of 2026 nearly matched Ethereum’s. Blockaid estimated stolen funds around $326 million for the period, a clear jump from roughly $127 million recorded in 2025.

In an observation carried in the report, Blockaid CEO Ido Ben-Natan told Cointelegraph that 2025 totaled $2.58 billion lost across 63 incidents, with activity concentrated in Q1 and with Ethereum and Arbitrum topping stolen-fund flow at the time.

However, Blockaid said Solana’s deterioration in H1 2026 did not come from a surge in smart contract exploits. Instead, compromised keys accounted for more than 98% of Solana’s losses, which Blockaid linked largely to incidents involving Drift Protocol and Step Finance. Blockaid also attributed those events to North Korea-linked cyber groups.

This matters because it reframes the operational priorities for Solana-related infrastructure. While Ethereum incidents in the report were more closely tied to vulnerabilities in protocol code, Blockaid said Solana-related losses were primarily associated with signer infrastructure and organizational security failures. In other words, the dominant threat vector in this period was not “bugs in execution,” but failures in control systems and signing operations.

Blockaid noted that only a small fraction of Solana losses were tied to code exploits—citing Raydium and Volo as examples—underscoring how heavily the report’s Solana narrative depends on key and signing security rather than on-chain contract defects alone.

What’s changed in the threat landscape

Two shifts stand out across Blockaid’s findings for H1 2026. First, Ethereum’s risk profile remained oriented around smart contract and application-layer weaknesses, where bridges, contract logic, and privileged account access can be exploited. Second, Solana’s losses, despite being comparable in size to Ethereum’s, were driven overwhelmingly by compromised keys and signing infrastructure—an operational and security governance problem rather than a pure software vulnerability issue.

Blockaid also reported that it verified 3.4 times as many high-threshold exploits in H1 2026 as it did across all of 2025. That suggests either that attackers pursued more severe, high-confidence exploitation paths during the period, or that the environment—across targets and integrations—supported higher-impact outcomes. In practice, for teams defending networks and protocols, it raises the likelihood of facing fewer “small” issues and more attacks with direct paths to material loss.

Finally, the report’s largest single exploit—KelpDAO at $292 million—fits the broader pattern of high-value targets attracting concentrated attacks. Even when overall incident counts vary, a small number of high-impact events can dominate the stolen-fund totals, which is precisely what appears in Blockaid’s H1 2026 breakdown.

Closing perspective

As H1 2026’s losses show, the most consequential threats are not uniform across chains: Ethereum-focused defenses should emphasize application and privileged access security, while Solana stakeholders should treat key management and signing infrastructure resilience as top priority. Readers should watch whether the disparity between code-driven incidents and key-driven incidents persists in the second half of 2026, and whether incident counts remain elevated alongside high-threshold exploit activity.

AmericanFortress has proposed a post-quantum security scheme designed to protect existing Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana wallet addresses without requiring holders to move funds or rotate their keys.

ZK-PoSP uses wallet seeds to authorize transactions

AmericanFortress released the technical paper for Zero-Knowledge Proof of Seed Provenance, or ZK-PoSP, through the International Association for Cryptologic Research’s ePrint archive.

The scheme allows a wallet to prove that it knows the seed used to derive an address without revealing that seed. It would operate alongside existing signature systems before replacing the classical signing step if quantum computers become capable of attacking elliptic curve cryptography.

Bitcoin and Ethereum use the secp256k1 curve, while Solana commonly uses Ed25519. ZK-PoSP is designed to cover both curves and hierarchical deterministic wallet standards, including BIP32 and SLIP-10.

In a statement shared with crypto.news, AmericanFortress described the proposal as the first post-quantum approach that can preserve existing wallet addresses without forcing users to transfer assets.

Quantum protection depends on network upgrades

ZK-PoSP relies on hash functions and the soundness of its zero-knowledge proof system. Its paper says post-quantum security is “conjectured” because the underlying assumptions have not been tested against a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.

No such machine currently exists. However, sufficiently powerful quantum computers could theoretically use Shor’s algorithm to derive private keys from exposed public keys.

Google’s Quantum AI team recently estimated that breaking 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography could require fewer than 1,500 logical qubits and tens of millions of quantum gates. Those are error-corrected logical qubits, not the noisier physical qubits available in present systems. Google’s analysis therefore does not indicate that Bitcoin or other networks face an immediate attack.

AmericanFortress said blockchains could implement ZK-PoSP by adding proof verification through a node-level software upgrade. Wallet providers would also need to generate the required proofs.

Until a network adopts and enforces that verification, addresses with public keys already visible onchain would remain exposed to a future quantum attack.

AmericanFortress reports low verification costs

According to the company, generating a one-time proof to secure an address costs about $0.002 on a 16-core server, while each transaction proof costs roughly $0.00125. Its current implementation reportedly takes about 12 seconds to sign a transaction, with verification requiring between nine and 10 milliseconds.

Those figures reflect computational tests cited by AmericanFortress, not the cost or performance of a live blockchain integration. A network upgrade could introduce additional storage, bandwidth, software, and coordination requirements.

“Today’s implementation is already practical for institutional settlement, and hardware acceleration and proving-system improvements will bring signing times down further,” AmericanFortress CEO Michal “Mehow” Pospieszalski said.

The proofs use RISC Zero and do not require a trusted setup. AmericanFortress plans to license its software development kit to blockchains and other projects, meaning adoption would depend partly on commercial terms as well as independent technical review.

Bitcoin and Ethereum expand quantum research

The proposal arrives as institutional interest in post-quantum security grows. As crypto.news reported, Strategy, BlackRock, Coinbase, and six other companies recently formed the Bitcoin Security Consortium and pledged a combined $15 million over three years.

Post-quantum cryptography is the consortium’s first research focus. Its members will decide independently which developers and organizations receive funding, and the group does not control Bitcoin development or endorse individual protocol changes.

For US-based Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, custodians, and corporate treasuries, avoiding mass wallet migration could reduce operational and legal complications. However, ZK-PoSP would provide no protection unless Bitcoin developers, miners, node operators, wallet companies, and users accepted the necessary changes.

Ethereum has pursued a separate path. The Ethereum Foundation formed a dedicated post-quantum team in January and is testing hash-based signatures, a minimal zero-knowledge virtual machine, and migration tools, according to its quantum-security roadmap.

AmericanFortress’s proposal now faces the same central test as other security designs: independent cryptographic review, implementation audits, and sufficient network agreement to deploy it.

To Richmond, the delay isn’t about regulators moving slowly, but a structural difference between U.S. and Canadian frameworks.

“It’s not necessarily just a regulatory thing; just the nature of the rules is different,” he said.

Harmonized ‘national instrument’

While there is still work to be done, Richmond is encouraged by the fact that Canadian regulators are actively listening to industry players about digital asset products and are open to creating new regulatory frameworks to support the growing industry.

One example Richmond cited as “a very good piece of legislation” is the new Stablecoin Act, which was enacted by the Canadian Federal government earlier this year, after the U.S. passed the GENIUS Act last year.

In the wake of the Stablecoin Act’s passage, Canada has already seen Tetra Trust — a company backed by heavyweights such as Wealthsimple, Shopify and National Bank of Canada — launching Canada’s first regulated financial institution-issued Canadian-dollar stablecoin CADD.

Canada has already shown that crypto companies can operate inside a regulated market. The next test is whether its rules can accommodate products that move beyond spot trading into payments, derivatives, tokenized securities and decentralized finance.

Richmond said that, rather than having companies interpret these guidelines, “codifying” the existing regulatory practices into a national framework that applies consistently across provincial securities regulators will help reduce legal uncertainties for builders. Essentially, he argued that Canada should consolidate more of its existing crypto requirements into a ‘national instrument’ — a set of harmonized securities rules adopted across provincial and territorial regulators.

Kraken is expanding its tokenized-IPO offering to retail investors with access to Jersey Mike’s upcoming public listing. The exchange says eligible US customers will be able to request allocations of Jersey Mike’s shares at the IPO price, while customers outside the US can request tokenized shares designed to be backed 1:1 by the underlying stock.

The development adds another well-known US consumer brand to the small but growing menu of tokenized equities accessible through major crypto venues. It also comes after recent friction in similar campaigns—most notably around SpaceX—highlighting that investor demand for tokenized IPO access can exceed the supply of underlying shares.

Key takeaways

• Kraken will let eligible US retail users submit interest in book-entry Jersey Mike’s shares at the IPO price, while global users can request tokenized shares backed 1:1 by the stock.
• Tokenized shares will trade 24 hours a day, five days a week on Kraken and participating xStocks Alliance platforms, while the underlying Jersey Mike’s shares will trade only during regular US market hours.
• Allocations for the IPO are determined by the underwriter and are not guaranteed.
• Kraken says the tokenized shares can be transferred across participating xStocks Alliance platforms, moved onchain, and used with compatible decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
• This marks another tokenized-IPO rollout following SpaceX’s debut, but the earlier listing faced oversubscription that led some platforms to cancel and refund.

How Kraken’s Jersey Mike’s access works

Kraken’s planned offering gives two routes depending on where a user is located. Eligible US customers can express interest in Jersey Mike’s shares in book-entry form at the IPO price. For customers outside the US, Kraken offers JMKEx, a tokenized version of the stock.

Kraken describes JMKEx as being backed 1:1 by underlying Jersey Mike’s shares held in regulated custody. In both cases, the IPO process controls outcomes: Kraken states that allocations are selected by the IPO underwriter and are not guaranteed.

The practical distinction for users is trading access. Once the IPO closes, Kraken says JMKEx will run on a near-continuous schedule—24 hours a day, five days a week—on Kraken and participating platforms in the xStocks Alliance. Meanwhile, the underlying Jersey Mike’s shares will trade according to normal US market hours.

Why tokenized IPO shares matter for investors

Tokenized equities are often discussed as a bridge between traditional capital markets and blockchain-based settlement. Kraken’s framing underscores that investors may not only buy exposure more flexibly, but also move that exposure in ways standard broker accounts typically do not allow.

Kraken says tokenized shares can be:

• Transferred across participating xStocks Alliance platforms
• Moved onchain
• Integrated with compatible DeFi applications

For market participants, that combination matters because it changes where equity-linked exposure can live. Instead of being confined to brokerage infrastructure, the tokenized wrapper is designed to be compatible with broader onchain systems—potentially improving interoperability for users who want to combine public equity exposure with onchain strategies.

At the same time, Kraken’s emphasis on underwriter-determined allocations and non-guaranteed access serves as a reminder that the tokenization layer does not remove core IPO constraints: if there are not enough underlying shares, token allocations can be limited.

Jersey Mike’s IPO details and what users should watch

Jersey Mike’s is a US sandwich chain with more than 3,300 locations. In its IPO announcement, the company said it expects to price the offering between $21 and $25 per share and to list its Class A shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker JMKE. (Source: PR Newswire IPO announcement)

Those price expectations are relevant not only for standard IPO participants but also for users planning to request tokenized shares through Kraken. Because the token product is intended to be backed 1:1 by the underlying shares, the token’s credibility depends on the custody and redemption mechanics associated with the backing shares—areas Kraken states are supported through regulated custody.

What remains uncertain for investors is allocation availability. Kraken is explicit that the IPO underwriter—not the exchange—determines allocations. That means eligible users should be prepared for the possibility that demand could outstrip supply, as occurred during other tokenized-IPO rollouts.

Lessons from the SpaceX tokenized IPO rollout

Kraken’s Jersey Mike’s plan is not happening in isolation. It follows SpaceX’s tokenized IPO access in June, which multiple crypto platforms rolled out with similar structures tied to the underlying shares.

According to earlier coverage from Cointelegraph, other platforms—including Binance, Bybit, Blockchain.com, Bitget Wallet and MEXC—also launched products connected to SpaceX’s offering. However, demand appears to have been far higher than the underlying share supply. Cointelegraph previously reported that the SpaceX IPO was more than four times oversubscribed, forcing tokenized-IPO platforms to compete for limited allocations.

In the aftermath, Cointelegraph reported that several exchanges—including Binance, Bybit, Bitget Wallet and MEXC—ultimately canceled their tokenized IPO campaigns and refunded users after they were unable to secure enough underlying SpaceX shares to meet customer allocations.

The price path for the underlying listing also reflected the typical volatility that can follow oversubscribed offerings. Cointelegraph noted that those Nasdaq-traded shares have declined from their $135 IPO price, with last trading at roughly $115 on Tuesday (as cited in the earlier report).

Kraken’s Jersey Mike’s campaign is therefore best understood as a continued test of whether tokenized-IPO distribution can scale to match real-world IPO demand. For users, the key watch item is not only whether the token product goes live, but whether allocations are successfully secured for the participating customer base.

Despite the operational challenges seen in the SpaceX rollout, growth in the broader tokenized equities market has continued. Data cited from RWA.xyz indicates the sector’s distributed value rose from well under $500 million in mid-2025 to about $1.87 billion, including a 29.4% increase over the prior 30 days (Source: RWA.xyz).

Next, investors should focus on two practical milestones: whether Kraken confirms sufficient underlying share allocations for eligible customers once Jersey Mike’s IPO closes, and how smoothly tokenized trading and transfers work across xStocks Alliance platforms once JMKEx begins its extended-hours schedule.

Decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch announced Aqua, a protocol aimed at unifying the liquidity pools of numerous markets in the decentralized finance ecosystem.

According to Tuesday’s announcement, Aqua allows liquidity providers to authorize several strategies against one wallet inventory, while the assets remain in the wallet until a trade settles, rather than depositing the funds to any particular liquidity pool. The protocol has been deployed on 13 blockchains including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Robinhood Chain and BNB Chain.

Source: 1inch

The protocol provides an integrated package including a generalized onchain registry, wallet-backed automated market making strategies, atomic settlement and consumer-facing position management. Liquidity becomes more widely available, as it does not have to be tied to any protocol in particular — but it also does not multiply, as assets can be involved only in one operation at a time.

A user providing $10,000 of liquidity can advertise $10,000 on three protocols for a total of $30,000, but only $10,000 of simultaneous trades can happen with those funds. The system resembles coordinated overbooking and may improve the utilization of liquidity capital if it is unlikely to be called for multiple operations simultaneously.

A 1inch spokesperson told Cointelegraph that Aqua can be used by resolvers holding a 1inch-issued access credential, as not all protocols are supported.

The spokesperson also explained that all positions are quoted against the market maker’s live wallet balance, so after a fill, the remaining position quotes against what is left. “If a swap would exceed the actual balance, it reverts atomically,” they said.

In a related development, pending tokenholder vote approval, the protocol will allocate 500,000 USDC (USDC) to incentives for adoption of Aqua alongside 10 million 1inch (1INCH) tokens (worth roughly $830,000 at the time of writing). “The initiative is designed to accelerate liquidity growth and swap activity across supported pairs,” according to 1inch’s announcement.

Today’s announcement follows a statement earlier this month from Anton Bukov, a co-founder of 1inch, who said that he was “fired” from 1inch in November 2025 after “push[ing] for change” in the company’s management and operations.

Bitcoin fell below $64,000 on Tuesday as traders reduced risk before the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate decision, while ETF outflows and leveraged liquidations added to selling pressure.

Bitcoin price falls below rising trendline

According to data from crypto.news, Bitcoin (BTC) price opened Tuesday near $63,706 and extended its decline toward $63,327 as traders cut exposure before the Fed decision. BTC later traded around $63,858, leaving it down roughly 2.5% during the session.

The 4-hour chart shows that Bitcoin broke below an ascending trendline that had supported the recovery from its late-June low near $58,000. Price attempted to move back above the trendline, but the rebound stalled below $64,000.

Bitcoin also remained under the 4-hour Supertrend resistance at $65,198. The indicator will continue to favor sellers unless BTC closes above that level and converts the broken trendline into support.

The Chaikin Money Flow reading stood at minus 0.04, showing that capital flows had turned slightly negative. While the reading does not point to extreme distribution, it shows that selling pressure continues to exceed buying demand.

Bitcoin’s daily chart presents a mixed structure. BTC traded below the 20-day moving average at $64,449 but remained slightly above the 50-day average near $63,343. That leaves the price compressed between short-term resistance and an important support level.

Fed decision drives demand for cash

The Federal Reserve began its two-day meeting on July 28 and will announce its decision at 2 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. Chair Kevin Warsh’s press conference will follow 30 minutes later, according to the Federal Reserve’s July calendar.

Markets broadly expect policymakers to keep the federal funds rate within the current 3.50% to 3.75% range. However, futures pricing has assigned roughly a one-in-three probability to a rate increase, making the meeting less predictable than recent policy decisions.

A Reuters report said the threshold for an immediate increase remains high despite inflation concerns and hawkish comments from some policymakers. Cooler June inflation and easing geopolitical pressure support the case for holding rates steady.

A surprise increase could strengthen the US dollar and lift Treasury yields, creating another headwind for Bitcoin and other risk assets. A hold may ease immediate pressure, but markets could still sell off if Warsh signals that a September increase remains likely.

Bitcoin’s decline below $64,000 therefore reflects more than technical weakness. Traders are limiting leveraged exposure before an event that could quickly change expectations for US liquidity and borrowing costs.

US Bitcoin ETF outflows add selling pressure

US spot Bitcoin ETFs posted $11.64 million in net outflows on July 27, marking a third consecutive session of withdrawals, according to data from SoSoValue.

BlackRock’s IBIT led the daily withdrawals with $8.82 million, while Fidelity’s FBTC lost $2.82 million. The funds still held combined net assets of about $78.71 billion, but the latest outflow showed weaker institutional demand before the Fed announcement.

Spot Ether ETFs moved in the opposite direction. The products attracted $9.23 million, led by an $11.75 million inflow into BlackRock’s ETHA. Invesco’s QETH partly offset that demand with a $2.52 million withdrawal.

The split suggests some US-listed fund investors favored Ether over Bitcoin during the session. However, one day of divergent flows is not enough to establish a lasting institutional rotation between the two assets.

Bitcoin liquidation map identifies key levels

The three-day liquidation heatmap shows the nearest large concentration of leveraged positions between roughly $64,400 and $64,600. A rebound into this area could trigger short liquidations, but it also overlaps with Bitcoin’s 20-day moving average and may act as resistance.

Additional liquidity sits near $65,800 to $66,200. Bitcoin would need to recover the 4-hour Supertrend at $65,198 before that upper zone becomes a realistic target.

Below the market, the strongest nearby liquidity concentration appears around $62,500 to $62,600. A break under the 50-day moving average at $63,343 could draw price toward that cluster. Lower support is visible around $61,800 to $62,000.

Daily momentum remains neutral rather than deeply oversold. Bitcoin’s relative strength index was 48.13, below its moving average at 53.58 and slightly under the neutral midpoint. The reading leaves room for further losses if sellers break the 50-day average.

Analyst sees $68,000 recovery in August

Crypto analyst Michaël van de Poppe maintained a bullish near-term outlook despite Bitcoin’s latest pullback.

“I think we’ll target $68,000 in early August again, and are likely going to break out of that fairly soon to $75,000+.”

For that scenario to strengthen, Bitcoin must first reclaim the $64,450 to $65,200 resistance region. A move above $66,000 would then expose the analyst’s $68,000 target.

On-chain analyst Ardi noted that Bitcoin’s market-value-to-realized-value ratio stood at 1.21. The level remains well above the 0.69 and 0.75 readings associated with the 2018 and 2022 bear-market lows, respectively.

That comparison suggests Bitcoin has not reached the same degree of market-wide capitulation seen at previous cycle bottoms. For US investors, Wednesday’s Fed statement and Warsh’s guidance remain the immediate catalysts: a hawkish surprise could expose $62,500, while a less restrictive message may help BTC recover $65,200.

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1inch has unveiled Aqua, a DeFi protocol designed to unify liquidity across multiple decentralized markets without forcing liquidity providers (LPs) to deposit funds into a specific venue. The announcement frames Aqua as a way to make liquidity more flexible across blockchains and protocols, while still enforcing capital constraints so funds aren’t overextended in simultaneous trades.

According to 1inch’s release on Tuesday, Aqua lets LPs authorize multiple strategies from a single wallet inventory and keeps the assets in that wallet until an executed swap settles—rather than routing the liquidity into any one liquidity pool. The protocol is already deployed across 13 blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Robinhood Chain, and BNB Chain.

Key takeaways

• Aqua coordinates liquidity across protocols without requiring LP funds to be deposited into a single pool.
• Wallet-backed strategies maintain atomic settlement, reverting trades if they exceed available wallet balances.
• Assets can only be used in one operation at a time, limiting effective over-allocation even if liquidity is “advertised” broadly.
• Incentives are planned via a pending tokenholder vote: 500,000 USDC plus 10 million 1INCH tokens earmarked for adoption.

How Aqua is meant to work

At the core of Aqua is an integrated system that 1inch describes as combining a generalized onchain registry, wallet-backed automated market making (AMM) strategies, atomic settlement, and consumer-facing position management.

Instead of tying liquidity to a particular protocol, the LP effectively “authorizes” strategies against their wallet’s available inventory. This distinction matters for capital efficiency: liquidity can be made available across a broader set of supported markets, potentially improving access for traders searching for swaps on different venues.

1inch also emphasizes a hard constraint designed to prevent true capital multiplication. While a provider can advertise the same amount of liquidity across multiple protocols, the liquidity cannot support unlimited simultaneous executions.

To illustrate the trade-off, 1inch’s explanation includes a scenario in which an LP supplying $10,000 can list $10,000 on three protocols for a combined $30,000 advertised availability, but only $10,000 worth of trades can run at the same time with those funds. In practice, this is closer to coordinated “overbooking” with strict execution limits than to a mechanism that multiplies liquidity across independent pools.

Atomic settlement and balance safety checks

In an interview with Cointelegraph, a 1inch spokesperson said Aqua can be used by “resolvers” holding a 1inch-issued access credential, noting that not all protocols are supported under the system.

The spokesperson further explained how Aqua prevents swaps from exceeding the wallet’s balance. They stated that all quoted positions are priced against the market maker’s live wallet balance, and once a fill occurs, remaining quotes adjust to reflect what’s left.

If an attempted swap would go beyond available funds, the system is designed to revert atomically. As the spokesperson put it: “If a swap would exceed the actual balance, it reverts atomically.”

For investors and traders, this approach addresses a key risk in liquidity aggregation: ensuring that quoted prices and advertised availability correspond to real executable inventory. Rather than relying on liquidity being pre-positioned in a given pool, Aqua ties execution to wallet state at settlement time.

Expansion across blockchains—and how incentives may pull liquidity in

Aqua’s initial rollout is positioned as multi-chain from the start, with deployments on 13 networks. That matters because one of DeFi’s practical frictions is not only the fragmented liquidity across protocols, but also the fragmentation across chains—each with its own trading dynamics and wallet activity.

To accelerate usage, 1inch says a related tokenholder process is underway. Pending vote approval, the protocol will allocate 500,000 USDC toward incentives for adopting Aqua, alongside 10 million 1inch (1INCH) tokens, described as roughly $830,000 at the time of writing. The announcement says the initiative is designed to “accelerate liquidity growth and swap activity across supported pairs.”

The incentives are contingent on approval through 1inch’s governance forum, referenced by the company in its announcement. If approved, the program would connect Aqua’s technical liquidity unification goal to a direct adoption push—something that typically becomes critical early when new routing or liquidity coordination systems must prove they can attract meaningful volume.

Why Aqua’s design could change how liquidity is routed

Liquidity aggregation in DeFi has traditionally meant either routing trades through existing pools, or encouraging liquidity providers to place capital into specific venues. Aqua’s differentiator is the separation between where capital resides (the wallet inventory) and where it is made actionable (strategies across markets).

However, the protocol’s constraint—that assets aren’t truly multiplied and can participate in only one operation at a time—suggests Aqua is aiming for better coordination rather than unlimited leverage of inventory. The “advertise broadly, execute limitedly” framing implies that Aqua could improve utilization when overlapping demand is unlikely, while preventing failure scenarios where more traders execute than the capital supports simultaneously.

That uncertainty—how often real-world demand overlaps across the set of supported strategies—will likely determine how quickly Aqua’s theoretical improvements translate into measurable routing performance. Investors and builders may want to monitor whether swap volume increasingly clears via Aqua-linked pathways and whether the promised improvement in liquidity availability shows up in practice as more wallets and resolvers participate.

Finally, it’s worth noting that 1inch’s announcement arrives amid ongoing internal turbulence. Earlier this month, Cointelegraph reported that co-founder Anton Bukov said he was “fired” from 1inch in November 2025 after “push[ing] for change” in company management and operations. While that dispute isn’t directly tied to Aqua’s technical rollout, it remains part of the broader context around execution risk and governance decisions as the protocol moves into incentive-driven adoption.

For now, the key question for readers is whether Aqua can attract liquidity at scale and translate its unified wallet inventory model into sustained swap throughput—particularly once the proposed USDC and 1INCH incentive program is decided. The next watch items are the tokenholder vote outcome and whether Aqua’s multi-chain deployments drive measurable growth in routed trading across the supported pairs.

Kraken has announced that eligible retail customers in the US can request allocations for Jersey Mike’s shares through its tokenized IPO offering, joining a growing list of equity tokenization rollouts tied to high-profile public listings. The exchange says US participants can submit interest in book-entry Jersey Mike’s shares at the IPO price, while customers outside the US can request JMKEx—a tokenized version of the stock backed 1:1 by underlying shares held in regulated custody.

When the Jersey Mike’s IPO closes, JMKEx is set to trade 24 hours a day, five days a week on Kraken and participating platforms in the xStocks Alliance network. The underlying Jersey Mike’s Class A shares will trade only during regular US market hours.

Key takeaways

• Kraken will offer two participation paths: book-entry shares for eligible US customers and tokenized shares (JMKEx) for eligible global customers.
• JMKEx is designed to track the underlying Jersey Mike’s stock on a 1:1 basis, with backing shares held in regulated custody.
• Trading for JMKEx is planned for near-continuous sessions (24/5), while the regular stock will follow US market hours.
• Allocations depend on the IPO process and are not guaranteed, meaning demand could outstrip supply—an issue that already affected earlier tokenized IPO campaigns.
• Kraken says tokenized shares can move across participating xStocks Alliance platforms and be used in compatible onchain integrations.

How Kraken’s Jersey Mike’s tokenized IPO works

Kraken’s announcement frames the offering as an extension of its tokenized IPO access model. For eligible US customers, participation is submitted as interest in book-entry Jersey Mike’s shares at the IPO price. For customers in more than 110 countries, Kraken instead enables requests for JMKEx, a tokenized share representation backed by actual Jersey Mike’s shares held in custody.

The exchange emphasizes that allocations are determined by the IPO underwriter and that requests do not guarantee receipt of shares. That distinction matters for retail users who are used to instant execution in standard crypto markets; tokenized IPO campaigns typically depend on traditional IPO distribution mechanics before moving into secondary trading.

Tokenized trading, custody, and cross-platform movement

Once the IPO closes, Kraken says JMKEx will begin trading 24/5 on Kraken and on platforms that participate in the xStocks Alliance. The underlying stock is expected to continue trading during regular US sessions, highlighting the structural split between traditional equity market hours and crypto-native trading windows.

Kraken also claims that tokenized shares can be transferred across participating xStocks Alliance platforms, moved onchain, and integrated with compatible decentralized finance applications. In practical terms, this is pitched as a way to bring more public equity exposure into ecosystems that don’t rely on traditional brokerage accounts—while keeping a direct tie to the underlying shares through custody.

Jersey Mike’s IPO details and expected listing

Jersey Mike’s is a US sandwich chain with more than 3,300 locations. According to the company’s IPO announcement, it expects to price the offering between $21 and $25 per share and list its Class A shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker JMKE.

Kraken’s tokenized offering is built around that traditional IPO process: users seeking exposure through JMKEx receive a claim representation backed by actual shares, with pricing tied to the IPO pricing mechanism rather than to token spot formation alone.

Lesson from SpaceX: when demand outran supply

This is not Kraken’s first tokenized IPO-linked product. The exchange’s roll-out follows the public debut of SpaceX via similar tokenized access in June, which also saw participation from other crypto platforms. Several venues launched offerings tied to the SpaceX IPO, including Binance, Bybit, Blockchain.com, Bitget Wallet, and MEXC.

But in that case, reported demand for underlying shares quickly became a limiting factor. Cointelegraph previously noted that the SpaceX IPO was reported to be more than four times oversubscribed, leaving tokenized platforms competing for a finite pool of shares. Eventually, multiple exchanges canceled their tokenized IPO allocation campaigns and refunded users after they could not secure enough underlying shares to fill customer allocations.

That earlier episode highlights a recurring risk for retail users considering tokenized IPO access: even when tokens are marketed as “share-like” exposure, the initial distribution is still governed by IPO underwriting supply. Kraken’s statement that allocations are not guaranteed directly addresses that structural uncertainty.

Cointelegraph also reported that the SpaceX-backed Nasdaq-traded shares have traded below the IPO price, with a reference last trading around $115 after an initial $135 figure—underscoring that tokenized IPO access does not insulate participants from typical post-listing price dynamics.

Tokenized equities keep expanding despite rollout friction

The challenges around the SpaceX rollout have not appeared to slow broader growth in tokenized equities. Data cited from RWA.xyz indicates that the sector’s distributed value rose from under $500 million in mid-2025 to about $1.87 billion, including a 29.4% increase over the past 30 days.

For investors and builders, the takeaway is less about any single IPO and more about the evolution of the infrastructure: demand can spike faster than IPO allocation supply, but the market is still attracting capital and expanding distribution methods for real-world assets and tokenized securities.

As Kraken prepares to support JMKEx ahead of the Jersey Mike’s listing, users should watch the allocation outcome closely—especially given the oversubscription lessons from earlier tokenized IPO launches—and then pay attention to how quickly onchain integrations and cross-platform transfers mature after trading begins.