In the latest XRP News, Ripple announced strategic equity investments in two UK-based firms, Zilo and Licuido, on August 3, 2026, converting existing commercial partnerships into ownership positions to complete a full-lifecycle institutional capital markets stack on the XRP Ledger.

The move targets the gap that has stalled most institutional tokenization pilots: minting a token is straightforward; financing, pledging, and settling it with the same reliability as a conventional holding is not.

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The Problem: Tokenized Assets That Sit Idle

Institutional RWA tokenization has exhibited a consistent structural failure: tokenized fund shares are issued and then parked.

The ownership record, issuance rail, and settlement mechanism have historically been handled by separate, often incompatible legacy systems that were never designed to interface with on-chain collateral markets.

Ripple’s framing of the deal is explicit on this point. The company described the investments as addressing constraints in which collateral sits idle, settlement takes longer than necessary, and institutions have no reliable path to unlock liquidity from tokenized positions.

The Zilo and Licuido stakes are designed to close those three gaps simultaneously on XRPL.

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XRP News: What Zilo and Licuido Each Provide

Zilo handles transfer agency and fund administration – the regulated record of who owns what, extended to cover tokenized share classes as funds move on-chain. Before any lender will extend credit against a tokenized fund position, they need a legally reliable ownership register; Zilo supplies that layer. Its client roster, which includes Citi, Fidelity International, and State Street, provides Ripple with a direct bridge into incumbent custody and TA infrastructure.

Licuido, an FCA-regulated platform, manages issuance, distribution, and execution, allowing traditional financial assets, including fund shares, to move as digital collateral through on-chain atomic settlement.

Trades settle on the XRPL in three to five seconds. Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD, functions as the regulated cash leg for delivery-versus-payment transactions, so asset transfer and payment settle simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Together, the three-part stack – Zilo for regulated record-keeping, Licuido for issuance and collateral mobility, RLUSD for the cash leg – gives institutions a single operating model for tokenized fund assets from issuance through financing. Neither company’s financial terms were disclosed.

Nigel Khakoo, Ripple’s SVP of Trading and Markets, characterized the infrastructure role of both firms in the official press release: “ZILO and Licuido provide core capabilities that are essential to further scaling this shift: regulated digital transfer agency infrastructure and liquidity for issuance and collateral mobility.”

Building on Live Deployments, Not Pilots

The stakes are not speculative bets on unproven vendors. Ripple confirmed that both investments build on pre-existing partnerships, and Licuido was already in production as the tokenization infrastructure for the Aviva Investors USD Liquidity Fund, the first tokenized fund structure approved by the Central Bank of Ireland on a public blockchain, which went live on XRPL on July 29, 2026.

BNY holds the underlying assets; Komainu provides digital asset custody.

The institutional pipeline extends further. Ripple’s parallel push into institutional infrastructure also encompasses a September 2025 memorandum of understanding with Franklin Templeton and DBS to list Franklin Templeton’s sgBENJI tokenized money market fund on the DBS Digital Exchange alongside RLUSD, with a stated path toward using sgBENJI as repo collateral.

The collateral-mobility thesis Ripple is industrializing through Zilo, and Licuido is the same structure that the partnership was designed to test.

On the network side, Ripple reported that XRPL has processed more than four billion transactions since 2012 and is maintained by 120 independent validators. A major protocol upgrade, xrpld 3.3.0, targeting improvements in XRPL infrastructure and institutional finance functionality, was expected to be released within days of the announcement.

Ripple is also one of 54 firms on a UK government task force formed to build live tokenized wholesale financial market use cases over the next 12 months, alongside Circle, Coinbase, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley. The first target is the tokenized repo. Ripple’s expanding regulatory positioning in Europe provides additional runway for the institutional tokenization push built on XRPL.

The practical test for the Zilo and Licuido stack is whether tokenized fund shares generate genuine secondary liquidity and serve as working collateral in live credit markets over the next 12 to 24 months – or whether they remain a more sophisticated form of the same idle token problem Ripple is explicitly trying to solve.

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The post XRP News: Ripple Takes Equity Stakes in Zilo and Licuido to Fix Idle Tokenized Assets appeared first on Cryptonews.

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The White House is reportedly preparing fresh restrictions targeting Chinese-made data centers as it seeks to secure the infrastructure powering the race for AI domination.

The new rules, reported by Reuters earlier today, would prohibit US imports of new models of Chinese optical transceivers used in AI data centers.

AI-Security Needs Increase

The Federal Communications Commission is developing the proposed restrictions and is expected to announce them later this year. If approved, they would block future imports of the network components, which transmit data through fiber-optic cables at extremely high speeds. They have a key role in connecting AI chips inside modern data centers.

Reuters further claimed that US officials are concerned that Chinese-made transceivers could be exploited to steal sensitive information, install malicious software, or disrupt operations inside the massive data centers that power some of the leading AI models.

Divyansh Kaushik, an AI policy expert in advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies, doubled down that “transceivers definitely pose a risk,” and warned that AI developers “want to make sure the data center supply chain is secure from the get-go.”

According to the report, the proposals come after some hard lessons learned by the US government from the Huawei fiasco, when Chinese telecommunications equipment became so deeply embedded into American infrastructure that replacing it became highly expensive and time-consuming.

Beijing Will Respond

Although the White House and the FCC failed to respond to Reuters’ queries, the Chinese embassy in Washington said Beijing had urged the US to “heed the objective and rational voices of the business communities in both countries and stop smearing Chinese companies and threatening them with sanctions.”

The officials added that China will “take all necessary measures” in response to whatever action is undertaken by the Trump administration.

The POTUS has frequently outlined in the past the significance of keeping the US as the leader in terms of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency adoption and development.

The post Trump Administration Plans Ban on New Chinese AI Data Center Components: Report appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune confirmed on August 3 that H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, will receive a Senate floor vote before the August recess, upgrading the bill’s status from probable to scheduled.

The confirmation matters, but it does not resolve the harder question: whether Republicans can assemble the roughly seven Democratic votes needed to clear the 60-vote filibuster threshold that stands between a floor vote and actual passage.

As of that confirmation, the CLARITY Act was still absent from the official Senate floor calendar, and no cloture motion had been filed.

Per analysis from crypto analyst Ted Pillows, if Senate leadership waits until Wednesday, August 6, to file cloture, the earliest possible floor vote falls on Friday, August 8, leaving almost no margin before the chamber disperses for its state work period.

The primary source identifies August 7 as the last functional Senate workday, with August 10 marking the visible close of the window.

Thune’s move to force a vote, even without guaranteed passage, is partly about accountability. A floor vote creates a public record, placing every undecided Democrat on the spot before the midterm cycle intensifies. That political calculation does not change the arithmetic, but it changes the pressure environment heading into September.

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What the CLARITY Act Would Actually Restructure

The core function of the CLARITY Act is jurisdictional. The SEC retains oversight of investment contracts and tokenized securities.

The CFTC acquires full spot market regulatory authority over digital commodities, a significant expansion given the agency currently holds derivatives jurisdiction but limited fraud enforcement reach in spot markets.

That SEC-CFTC split is the structural change the industry has been lobbying toward for years, as covered in earlier reporting on Treasury Secretary Bessent’s pressure campaign for the same vote.

The total crypto market stood at $2.28 trillion as of July 20, 2026, with Bitcoin accounting for $1.29 trillion, roughly 56% dominance, and stablecoins representing approximately $305 billion.

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The remaining $680 billion in digital assets is the most directly affected tranche: those are the tokens whose securities-versus-commodities classification remains legally ambiguous, and whose exchanges, market makers, and issuers would face new registration and compliance obligations under the bill.

Bitcoin is the least affected asset in this picture. It already carries established commodity treatment, a derivatives market, and spot ETF access. The CLARITY Act would confirm its status rather than change it.

The primary beneficiaries sit in the mid- and long-tail of the market: investment contract-type tokens seeking commodity reclassification, U.S. spot exchanges pursuing federal registration, stablecoin platforms navigating yield restrictions, and DeFi protocols with identifiable governance structures.

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Three Unresolved Disputes That Could Sink the 60-Vote Count

The Senate Banking Committee passed its version of the bill 15-9 on May 14, 2026, with all Republicans plus Democratic Senators Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks in favor, though both explicitly reserved judgment on floor support pending further negotiations.

The Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees CFTC jurisdiction over digital commodity spot markets, approved a separate version in January 2026. Senator Cynthia Lummis released a unified draft merging both committee texts on July 22, but reconciliation gaps remain.

The stablecoin rewards debate is the most commercially charged open issue. The Senate Banking draft would prohibit yield payments on stablecoin holdings, treating platforms that pay such yields as de facto deposit-taking institutions subject to bank-equivalent requirements.

Crypto firms argue the provision protects incumbent banks rather than consumers, and the carve-outs for transaction rewards, digital payments, and loyalty programs raise definitional questions that the SEC, CFTC, and Treasury would have to resolve jointly in rulemaking, adding implementation uncertainty even if the bill passes.

Ethics rules represent the more politically explosive obstacle. Several Democratic senators are pushing for stricter restrictions on federal officials and their families engaging in crypto dealings, a demand inseparable from the Trump family’s crypto activity.

The updated draft includes a temporary restriction on senior officials issuing or sponsoring digital assets, set to expire in 2029, but that provision has not secured White House backing.

Senator Thom Tillis acknowledged negotiators are “not quite there” on an ethics agreement. Without that resolution, the Democratic vote count necessary to reach 60 likely does not exist. Per crypto.news, Polymarket traders price the CLARITY Act’s probability of becoming law in 2026 at approximately 33%, while Galaxy Research puts it at 30%.

What Failure Before August 10 Actually Means for Crypto Markets

The August 10 date carries institutional weight rather than immediate market weight. No existing exchange, token, or stablecoin faces legal jeopardy if the bill misses the window.

What changes is the regulatory trajectory: a failed vote pushes the realistic timeline for comprehensive crypto market-structure legislation into mid-2027 at the earliest, as post-recess legislative calendar compression coincides with government funding negotiations and a sharpening midterm environment.

The practical consequence of continued delay is that the SEC and CFTC proceed through guidance and enforcement rather than statute, a framework that is both less predictable and more reversible with each change in administration.

That regulatory uncertainty is already priced into U.S.-based exchange valuations and token classification risk premiums. Passage would compress those premiums; failure extends them.

The parallel is instructive: MiCA’s implementation in Europe demonstrated how codified market structure rules can materially shift institutional positioning once legal ambiguity is removed.

Even if the CLARITY Act clears the Senate and reaches the president’s desk, the operational timeline is not immediate. The current draft sets a 360-day effective date after enactment, with additional delays built in for SEC and CFTC rulemaking on exchanges, custody, derivatives, and market data.

Most operational changes would not take effect until late 2027. Passage in 2026 matters for the institutional commitment it signals and the legal baseline it sets, not because it flips a switch on market structure in the near term. The next 72 hours of Senate scheduling will determine whether that baseline arrives this year or gets deferred into another Congress entirely.

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The post CLARITY Act Senate Vote Locked In, But 60-Vote Hurdle Looms Large appeared first on Cryptonews.

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The preferred shares have recovered nearly 24% from their June closing low as Strategy builds its cash reserve and repurchases STRC.

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The pound just closed its strongest week against the dollar in months, ending July up more than 1% and holding just below $1.35. Two factors are driving the move. First, political risk has faded: the UK appointed its seventh prime minister in a decade, and the new government’s pledge of fiscal discipline has reassured markets. Second, the Bank of England surprised with a more hawkish tone than expected—policymakers voted 6-3 to hold rates steady, but three members pushed for a hike, a stronger signal of resolve than markets had priced in.

The dollar, meanwhile, has had a rough few sessions. Following the Fed’s decision to hold rates for a fifth consecutive meeting, Chair Kevin Warsh offered little clarity on the path ahead, leaving investors questioning whether the central bank is doing enough to bring inflation back to target. The dollar index posted its worst weekly performance in three months as a result, though roughly two-thirds of the market still expects a September hike.

With both central banks striking cautiously hawkish tones but offering little forward guidance, GBP/USD’s next move looks set to hinge on incoming US labor data.

Technical Analysis of GBP/USD

As the GBP/USD chart shows, the pair has been compressing into a broad symmetrical triangle since January’s highs, with price now converging near the 0.382 Fibonacci retracement around 1.3427, exactly where the two trendlines meet. This narrowing structure suggests a decisive breakout may be approaching after months of range-bound trading.

Bullish Scenario

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Should buyers push through the descending trendline and reclaim the 0.5 Fibonacci retracement near 1.3510, the path would open toward the 0.618 level around 1.3594, with a stronger move potentially targeting the 1.3865 highs from January if fundamental momentum aligns.

Bearish Scenario

Conversely, a break below the ascending trendline would expose the 1.3200 support zone, with a more significant breakdown risking a retest of the 1.3155 low that anchored this entire triangle formation.

With price coiled right at the apex of this multi-month triangle, and both the Fed and incoming labor data serving as potential catalysts, GBP/USD looks primed for its next major directional move—will the pound extend its recent strength, or is the dollar poised for a comeback?

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After a painful end to the previous week (and month), the spot Bitcoin ETFs began August with a bang, attracting over $170 million in net inflows.

This made them the best-performing exchange-traded funds tracking any cryptocurrency on Monday, which has not always been the case lately.

The fresh capital that entered the BTC funds on Monday is almost the same as the entire net positive for July, which was $172.42 million. At the same time, the underlying asset rebounded from another dip to $62,200, and jumped to $64,000 in midday trading.

In contrast, the Ethereum ETFs far outperformed in July, attracting more than $365 million last month. However, SoSoValue data shows that the financial vehicles tracking the largest altcoin were actually in the red on Monday, losing $11.42 million.

The XRP ETFs gained a modest $1.15 million, but extended their non-red streak, as the last day with more withdrawals was July 8.

The Solana funds saw no reportable action, similar to those tracking Dogecoin, but that’s no surprise since they have rarely seen any actual inflows.

The spot HYPE ETFs, which were once the top-performing crypto funds, are on a painful streak. The last time they were in the green was July 15. On Monday, the ETFs lost nearly $1 million again.

The post BTC vs ETH vs XRP: Which ETFs Attracted the Most Money on Monday? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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