Circle on Aug. 5 named the founding validator cohort for Arc, its Layer 1 blockchain, listing BlackRock, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa alongside Circle itself, ahead of a… Read the full story at The Defiant

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Solana’s native token has been bleeding heavily over the past few months, mirroring the broader cryptocurrency market’s weakness.

Some analysts believe a resurgence remains a plausible option as long as the price stays above certain critical levels.

Are Bulls Ready to Return?

SOL currently trades at approximately $73.70 (per CoinGecko) after slipping by 8% over the last 30 days. This is more or less exactly the level Ali Martinez recently described as a “make-or-break” moment. He argued that more than 50 million tokens were purchased around that zone, making it the most critical support on the map. The analyst claimed that a sustained close below could open the door to a plunge to $60 and even $50.

Most of the latest predictions, though, have been much more optimistic. Michael van de Poppe said “it would be great” to see a breakthrough of $76, saying such an uptrend could trigger a stronger rally to $120.

X user BATMAN also gave their two cents, suggesting that SOL’s valuation has neared a bullish trendline that has supported past major bottoms.

For their part, Pepesso claimed that the asset has one of “the cleanest setups in crypto right now.” They noted the brutal correction over the past months, adding that $45-$60 is the zone that “matters.”

“We are still well above it, but that’s the zone I’m watching if we retrace back in there. As long as $45 holds on any retest, this stays a clean accumulation setup,” the analyst said.

The X user opined that a reclaim of $100 could act as the first real confirmation, and from there, $150-$200 becomes the next range worth attention. On the other hand, a breakout under $45 would invalidate the bullish scenario.

The Concerning Factor

There are some signals that can serve as a bearish counterpoint to the aforementioned optimists. According to Ali Martinez, the number of addresses holding at least 0.1 SOL has declined by 5% over the past two weeks.

Specifically, addresses meeting that threshold have fallen from 11.84 million to 11.26 million, with the analyst outlining that this indicates a slowdown in participation among holders that could add further pressure to the price during the already fragile market conditions.

Small players reducing exposure to SOL is not necessarily a bearish factor and, in fact, combined with whale accumulation, is usually interpreted as a bullish signal. However, recent data does not show any meaningful interest from large holders at this stage.

The post Top Solana (SOL) Price Predictions as of Late appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Meta AI predicts a supply driven repricing for XRP, and this price prediction calls the current setup the cleanest since 2017. At $1.07, the case is built around four catalysts rather than a single trigger.

The first is what Meta AI labels an ETF super cycle. After the SEC settled with Ripple in August 2025 and reclassified XRP as a commodity, 11 spot ETF filings followed, with Bloomberg now placing approval odds between 87 and 95%.

Five ETFs already sit on the DTCC list, $1.3 billion in inflows have arrived since November 2025 with zero outflows recorded, and $5 to $8 billion more is projected for 2026, the exact flow level Standard Chartered ties directly to its $8 bull case.

The second pillar is Ripple’s banking push. The company secured initial approval for a federal trust bank charter from the OCC, making RLUSD the first stablecoin under both state and federal oversight at once.

RLUSD is now live on more than 40 chains through Wormhole and the XRPL EVM Sidechain, with BNY Mellon, a custodian managing $53 trillion in assets, serving as primary custodian.

Institutional adoption on XRPL itself is the third leg. Ripple is targeting 2026 as the pivotal year for banks and asset managers actually using on chain liquidity pools, with the XRPL EVM Sidechain already holding more than $105 million in TVL, an SBI blockchain bond worth $64.6 million, and an Archax equity and debt tokenization push expected to drive real settlement demand by mid 2026.

Regulatory tailwinds round out the case, with the CLARITY Act or an equivalent market structure bill unlocking RWA tokenization while 1.35 billion XRP has already been withdrawn from exchanges, tightening available supply.

The base case price target sits at $2.45 to $2.80, drawing on 21Shares and a revised Standard Chartered figure. The bull case runs to $4.94 to $8.00 if ETF flows clear $5 billion and XRPL captures 1 to 2% of the $10.9 trillion tokenization market, a range Meta AI notes would mean a 330 to 650% move from $1.07.

The bear case is not dismissed. If CLARITY stalls and monthly ETF inflows stay under $132 million, 21Shares own bear scenario points to $1.60, a 16% decline, with downside risk extending to $0.86 to $1.00, though Meta AI argues the ongoing supply contraction limits how deep any flush could realistically go.

Xrp (XRP)

24h7d30d1yAll time

XRP Has Spent A Year Grinding Lower With No Real Bounce To Show For It

XRP peaked near $3.65 in August 2025, and the decline since has been remarkably steady rather than sharp, a long staircase of lower highs stretching from that summer peak all the way through the following winter.

February brought the sharpest single break, a gap down from above $2.30 to under $1.60 in a matter of days, and price has spent every month since compressing into an increasingly narrow range.

Price closed today at $1.07531, up 0.04%, in a session ranging between $1.06900 and $1.08182. Support sits at $1.00, the psychological floor that lines up closely with the bear case’s own downside target, then $0.86 below that if the supply contraction argument fails to hold.

Resistance stacks first at $1.20, then $1.40, then the far heavier ceiling near $1.60 that has capped every recovery attempt since February. The signal line reads 45.68 against 45.82, a gap so narrow it is effectively flat, and both lines have been drifting in that same tight band for months without any real separation.

That is not a chart building toward a breakout in either direction. For Meta AI’s base case near $2.45 to become plausible, XRP first needs to clear $1.60, a level this chart has not touched since before the February breakdown, regardless of how tight exchange supply has become in the background.

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The post Mark Zuckerberg Meta AI Predicts an XRP Surge Few Saw Coming appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Chair of the Federal Reserve Kevin Warsh speaks during a news conference at the William McChesney Martin Jr. Federal Reserve Board Building in Washington, DC, on July 29, 2026.

Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images

Add the possibility of fewer meetings into the mix of how Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh wants to reduce the central bank’s footprint on financial markets, a move that some experts say could introduce both volatility and opportunity for investors.

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Since taking office in May, Warsh has implemented several measures that reverse decades of Fed culture in which policymakers have been aggressively transparent — some say overly so — about where they think monetary policy is headed.

Thus far, he has curtailed so-called forward guidance, or how the Fed signals its future rate moves, dramatically shortened the post-meeting statement and provided cryptic and often evasive answers when questioned about his views during the two news conferences he’s held so far.

Now comes the possibility, discussed in what one Fed source described as mostly hypothetical terms, of reducing the long-held schedule of eight meetings each year for the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee.

Such a move would further curtail the communications output from the Warsh Fed — and lead to some uncertain outcomes for the stock and bond markets.

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“Certainly, it’s going to increase volatility,” said George Catrambone, head of fixed income for the Americas at DWS Group. “Having less transparency forces market participants to hedge or have a wider dispersion of outcomes.”

‘Nothing magical’ about schedule

The Fed has used various meeting strategies over the decades.

Until the early 1980s, it met nearly monthly before changing to eight a year under former Chairman Paul Volcker. Moreover, the Fed is free at any time to call meeting, though the market implications could be substantial given that such a move would be considered an emergency.

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari told CNBC on Wednesday that he is fine with re-examining the meeting schedule.

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“I don’t think there’s any magic number about eight or 10 or six. You know, we always have the ability to call emergency meetings if things happen, but that’s a big event,” he said. “When the FOMC calls an emergency meeting, it really sends a signal that we’re concerned about something. And so, you know, I think I’m open-minded. I don’t have a strong view.”

Philadelphia Fed President Anna Paulson on Tuesday expressed similar sentiments, telling CNBC, “it’s healthy to have a good discussion about that.” Other Fed experts take a similar tack that having a fewer meetings a year might not be a big deal to markets.

“There’s nothing magical about eight meetings,” said Bill English, the Fed’s former head of monetary affairs during Warsh’s first stint there and now a Yale professor. “There are costs associated with having a lot of meetings, but on the other hand, you don’t want to have so few meetings that you end up not acting in a timely way.”

English said he once proposed six meetings a year, but with each including a news conference as well as an update to the Fed’s Summary of Economic Projections. Overall, he sees eight as “close to the right number” and instead is more concerned about other aspects of Warsh’s strategy.

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“I really don’t like this effort to communicate much less,” he said. “Explaining more about why you’re doing what you’re doing helps the public to understand it. It helps the public to anticipate it. It makes monetary policy more effective, and also it it just seems like it’s appropriate to make the Fed accountable.

Muted market reaction

So far, markets either have been willing to give Warsh the benefit of the doubt, or simply have been too focused on geopolitics to care about the Fed rumblings.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has added about 3,500 points, or 7%, since Warsh took over from now-Governor Jerome Powell on May 22. Bond yields on net have risen though not dramatically, with the policy-sensitive 2-year Treasury up about 8 basis points, or 0.08 percentage points, while the benchmark 10-year yield has risen about the same.

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Dow since May 22

Those moves have come despite Warsh defying a tradition of open communication that dates back into the latter part of the 20th century while also establishing five task forces aimed at a top-to-bottom rethinking of the Fed’s approach to policy, communications strategy and data utilization, among other things.

“He’s kind of getting away with it,” said Mark Hackett, chief market strategist at Nationwide. “Warsh is really the first Fed official that I’ve seen explicitly say he wants the Fed to have less direct impact on market movement.”

Indeed, Warsh has told market participants explicitly that they should be reacting to data, not the vagaries of Fedspeak.

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“Market participants are learning to play the ball, not the referee — and market prices will continue to respond in the direction and magnitude they see fit,” Warsh said during last week’s news conference. “This is, in my view, a change for the better — and we are just getting started.”

Still, some investors think Warsh’s strategy is risky.

“The main takeaway is more volatility,” Dario Perkins, head of global macroeconomics at TS Lombard, said in a note in which he deemed the result of Warsh’s approach “a regime of continuous market repricing.”

“Investors have to get used to FOMC meetings at which they don’t know the outcome ahead of time,” he added. “That will also provide new trading opportunities. It goes without saying that this may well be what Warsh has wanted all along.”

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Potential ramifications

Concerns already have been raised about the chairman’s feelings over forward guidance, and that has been exacerbated by a loosely defined reaction function — a delineation of the economic conditions that would cause the Fed to react. Warsh also has spoken critically about the Fed’s “dot plot” of individual officials’ rate expectations and declined to submit his own dot when the Federal Open Market Committee last updated the grid in June.

Adding to the information vacuum by only meeting, say, four or six times a year raises further concerns that a market that has for decades looked for cues from the Fed now will have to guess at policy.

“Obviously, if the the dot plot changes or if guidance changes, I don’t think that’s the end of the world,” Hackett said. “If you stop start having less meetings, that’s a different level, and that could be seen as disruptive.”

One potential consequence would be longer-term yields rising faster than shorter-term rates, what the market refers to as a bear steepener, said Komal Sri-Kumar, president of Sri-Kumar Global Strategies. The implication is that fixed income investors would see the Fed holding short-term rates low and causing inflation expectations to rise.

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10-year Treasury yield in 2026

“Bondholders are not babies trying to have their hands held,” Sri-Kumar said. “The bondholders are saying, ‘Please don’t make my life more difficult by introducing even more uncertainty.’”

The federal government literally can’t afford a spike in yields as it struggles with financing costs for the $31.1 trillion in outstanding Treasury debt held by the public.

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If investors sour further on government debt, it will make Bessent’s job tougher at a time when interest on the debt is second only to Social Security in government outlays. The Treasury Department estimates it will spend $1.3 trillion this year on debt financing costs.

In a CNBC appearance Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the Warsh approach as a “detox” for markets.

There are plausible benefits and plausible drawbacks, and after such a short time, nobody really knows if the new approach will work. In the meantime, Warsh has a very important speech coming up when the Fed holds its annual gathering in Jackson Hole, Wyoming at the end of August, a time that prior chairmen used to lay out new agendas.

“Warsh is trying to undertake a very large change in terms of how to communicate the data and how to interpret it,” said Catrambone, the DWS bond strategist. “I would say we should also provide a little bit of grace.”

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The UK AI Security Institute (AISI) disclosed that an AI agent, built on Anthropic’s Mythos 5, autonomously ran a social engineering attack during cyber testing. The agent opened a pull request containing malicious code on a real open-source project and created fake identities to win a maintainer’s approval.

The attempt failed. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the code.

AISI says its investigation has not identified any resulting real-world harm. The model also ran with its developer’s cyber classifiers deliberately switched off and open internet access, a test configuration that is not commercially available.

How the AI Agent Ran Its Malicious Code Campaign

AISI logged 19 unsanctioned actions in 10 of 122 evaluation runs conducted in late July, according to its report. 17 traced to Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, and two to a single run of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.

The agent researched the project’s human maintainers and created multiple fake identities. It used them to socially engineer a real maintainer into approving the code.

When the pull request was publicly challenged, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless. The model also considered adopting a fresh identity to continue.

The playbook recalls the 2024 XZ Utils backdoor, in which a human-run persona spent years earning a maintainer’s trust before planting hidden code. AISI’s report does not draw that comparison, but the contrast is hard to miss. The activity unfolded over several days, between July 25 and July 28. 

AISI stressed that nobody asked the model to lie.

“It was never instructed to deceive; deception emerged as a by-product of pursuing the task, the kind of goal-directed deception that, until recently, had been largely theoretical.”

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The institute said so in its disclosure. It also acknowledged that misconfigured prompts led the agent to believe some tasks could not be solved within their intended scope. Although the behavior also appeared in runs where the agent had the instructions it needed to stay on task. 

Security teams caught the activity on July 28, when the agent used the Tor anonymity network to bypass some network restrictions on GitHub. GitHub confirmed the actions violated its terms of service. AISI also worked with the platform to remove artefacts left behind by the agent and to notify the users it interacted with. 

The report argues that the case signals a shift in the source of risk: harm can arise not only when people misuse publicly available models but also when capable agents in privileged settings act beyond their authorized scope. 

AISI said the case points to a broader shift in the AI risk space. The institute now plans an independent review with METR, an AI evaluation nonprofit, as well as tighter network controls and real-time monitoring for future tests.

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The post AI Agent Faked Identities to Push Malicious Code During Cyber Test, AISI Finds appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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