Crypto World
As crypto perpetual futures boom, Ethereum’s role is shifting
For years, Ethereum has been synonymous with decentralized finance. It pioneered onchain financial tools like lending protocols and tokenized assets, which today underpin much of the crypto economy. But one of crypto’s fastest-growing sectors, perpetual futures, or “perps”, has largely flourished elsewhere.
Ask traders where onchain perpetuals live today, and the answer is more likely to be Hyperliquid or Solana than Ethereum. That is because perpetuals demand something Ethereum’s base layer was never designed to optimize for: extremely fast, low-cost, high-frequency trading.
“Perps require frequent transactions, fast execution, and deep liquidity,” said AJ Warner, chief strategy officer at Offchain Labs, the main developer firm behind the layer-2 Arbitrum. “That makes them a natural use case for the Arbitrum platform.”
The distinction has become increasingly important as decentralized perpetual exchanges mature from crypto-native products into markets attracting institutional attention.
Why Ethereum L1 fell behind
Perpetuals are one of the most demanding applications in crypto. Their exchanges require thousands of rapid-fire updates, liquidations, funding payments, and order executions, all without interruption.
“Perps onchain are really hard,” said Brian Smith of the Jito Foundation. “It’s not just the average performance that matters, it’s the 99.99% success rate. If your perps platform goes down, that’s existential risk.”
Ethereum’s security-first architecture made it an ideal settlement layer, but historically, its block times and gas costs made it an expensive place to run latency-sensitive trading applications.
When decentralized perps exchange GMX launched on Arbitrum in 2021,, it helped establish a template that many others would follow. “Ethereum mainnet fees were prohibitively expensive, which naturally attracted perps builders to Arbitrum,” Warner said. Offchain Labs then leaned into that momentum, actively prioritizing perpetuals as a strategic category.
“By prioritizing the vertical, we were able to attract a concentration of builders and capital to the ecosystem.” Today, much of Ethereum’s perpetual trading activity lives not on the Ethereum mainnet, but on layer-2 networks like Arbitrum and, increasingly, Base.
Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem has become something of a compromise: preserving Ethereum’s security while dramatically improving trading performance. Networks like Arbitrum and Base have reduced block times while also becoming an increasingly attractive trading destination because of their growing user base and liquidity.
Chris Boulous of Dromos Labs, the main developer firm behind Aerodrome, a decentralized exchange that lives on the Base network, argued that technical performance is only part of the story.
“Trading is effectively a network-effects business,” he said. “You have to build where the liquidity and users currently exist.” That dynamic has become self-reinforcing: protocols launch where traders already are, liquidity providers follow the traders, and then new applications build around existing liquidity. It’s one reason Boulous sees Aerodrome as complementary to perpetual exchanges rather than competitive with them.
“You can kind of think of perps as a customer of spot exchanges,” Boulous said. Spot exchanges provide pricing, liquidity and hedging opportunities that perpetual markets depend on. “Spot and perps are two sides of the same liquidity coin.”
Why Solana and Hyperliquid surged
Still, Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem isn’t the only place where developers can build high-performance trading infrastructure. Hyperliquid built an application-specific chain optimized almost entirely for perpetual trading. Solana, meanwhile, combined low fees with a large base of retail traders already actively trading memecoins and other speculative assets.
According to Smith of Jito, that user base matters as much as the technology. “The most important ingredient for any exchange platform, but especially perps, is retail organic flow,” he said. “Solana is the king of retail trading activity.”
Smith also argues Ethereum faces an additional challenge: fragmentation. “You need to be able to trade everything in a single spot,” he said. “What Ethereum is suffering from is a level of fragmentation.”
Ethereum’s scaling strategy largely relied on layer-2 networks like Arbitrum and Base to handle high-volume activity. While that approach dramatically reduced costs and improved performance, it also dispersed users and liquidity across multiple ecosystems. Traders often need to bridge assets between networks, making the experience less seamless than on single-chain ecosystems such as Solana. Earlier this year, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that the original layer-2 roadmap vision “no longer makes sense” as layer 2s have decentralized more slowly than expected and Ethereum’s base layer has itself become more scalable.
Not everyone sees that fragmentation as a fatal flaw, however. Some Ethereum proponents argue the focus on execution misses the network’s longer-term role in the onchain financial stack. Matthieu Saint Olive, a staff product manager at MetaMask, argues the framing itself misses what’s happening. “I’d push back gently on the premise that it’s a competition in the first place,” he told CoinDesk.
Purpose-built trading chains may ultimately win on execution speed, but they still require somewhere to source collateral, liquidity, stablecoins, and settlement. “Ethereum’s role is the settlement and collateral base where the deepest liquidity, the widest range of assets, the stablecoins, and the most mature DeFi primitives live.”
Several leading perpetual trading platforms either operate directly on Ethereum layer 2s or remain closely connected to Ethereum’s ecosystem for collateral, settlement, and developer tooling. “L2s are how Ethereum scales into use cases like active trading without giving up the thing that makes the base layer valuable,” Saint Olive said.
The institutional question
As institutions begin paying closer attention to onchain derivatives, the conversation is shifting from whether decentralized perpetuals can work to whether they can compete with traditional infrastructure. “It comes down to execution, custody, and predictability, not ideology,” Saint Olive said.
Institutions, Warner of Offchain Labs argued, still need deeper liquidity, more efficient capital usage, and better execution before deploying significant trading volume onchain. “Capital is still fragmented across venues,” Warner said. “Institutions will want better access to credit, cross-margining, and the ability to trade across venues without leaving large amounts of capital idle.”
For Boulous, the next milestone is straightforward: “You have to be able to do things onchain that you can’t do, or can’t do as cheaply, in traditional markets.”
While much of today’s decentralized perpetual volume still revolves around crypto assets, market participants increasingly see the infrastructure supporting perps as the foundation for broader capital markets. Saint Olive believes perpetuals are already demonstrating what programmable markets can become.
“Perps are the leading indicator, the first place you can watch traditional financial activity genuinely migrate onchain,” Saint Olive said.
That may also explain why Ethereum’s role in the market is evolving rather than diminishing.
Solana and purpose-built chains like Hyperliquid have established themselves as the venues where traders execute high-speed transactions. Ethereum, meanwhile, is increasingly positioning itself as the settlement and collateral layer that underpins those markets through its layer-2 ecosystem and broader DeFi infrastructure.
Whether that division of labor persists will depend on how quickly Ethereum can solve some of the challenges its critics point to: fragmented liquidity across layer 2s, better interoperability between networks, and a smoother user experience. If it can, proponents argue Ethereum doesn’t necessarily need to become the fastest place to trade perpetuals. It simply needs to remain the deepest and most trusted place to settle them.
Read more: Perpetual futures could become crypto’s next ETF moment
Grok AI predicts a massive breakout for Ethereum, and this price prediction sets the bar unusually high. The bull case runs to $6,000 to $8,000, with a stretch scenario reaching $10,000 to $12,000 by the end of 2026, up from roughly $1,890 today.
Accelerating spot ETH ETF inflows anchor the case. These are described as already flipping positive, with BlackRock’s ETHA taking the leadership position and cumulative net inflows exceeding $11 billion.
Expanding staked ETH ETF products are named as a second driver, unlocking yield for institutions in a way that turns simple price exposure into something closer to an income-bearing asset. That structural shift did not exist in any prior Ethereum cycle.
Post Pectra and Fusaka scaling adds real technical weight to the case. PeerDAS is expected to deliver a multi-fold increase in blob capacity, making Layer 2 networks meaningfully cheaper to operate, while the Glamsterdam upgrade in the second half of 2026 is set to boost Layer 1 throughput through ePBS and parallel execution.
Ethereum’s dominant share of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, estimated at tens of billions and still growing, forms the usage backbone underpinning the technical upgrades. Rising staking lockups are tightening liquid supply, a potential ETH-to-BTC ratio recovery is floated as a further tailwind, and broader institutional and RWA adoption is framed as solidifying Ethereum’s position as the premier settlement layer.
The bear case is treated as a real possibility rather than a footnote. Stalled ETF flows, Layer 2 competition or fee compression limiting how much value accrues to the base layer, upgrade delays, regulatory setbacks, or macro tightening could all keep Ethereum trading between $2,200 and $4,000 instead.
Ethereum Price Prediction: ETH Just Fell Back Below The Level It Spent Weeks Trying To Hold
Price closed at $1,877.71, down 2.20%, in a session ranging between $1,871.84 and $1,932.72. That red day breaks a run of gains that had briefly pushed Ethereum back above the $1,900 mark.
Zoom out, and the broader trend since September 2025 has been a long, uneven decline. Ethereum peaked near $4,950 that month, then broke down hard through January, gapping from above $3,000 to under $2,200 in a matter of weeks.
Since that crash, price has made two separate recovery attempts, one in April that stalled near $2,450, and another in June that also topped out near the same level before rolling back into a sharp flush to $1,540. The climb since that June low pushed price above $1,900 for the first time since the flush, but today’s drop pulls it right back under that mark.
Support sits at $1,850, then the June low near $1,540 if this pullback deepens. Resistance stacks at $1,930, then $2,200, then the heavier ceiling near $2,450 that has already rejected two separate rally attempts this year.
Momentum here has cooled sharply after weeks of steady gains, with today’s decline erasing some of the recent progress. For Grok’s bull case to gain any real traction, Ethereum first needs to reclaim $1,930 and then clear $2,450, the exact level that has stopped this chart twice before, rather than losing ground the way it did today.
Here is what Grok AI Predicts For LiquidChain’s Near Future
Every cycle has one moment when standing still costs more than moving. That moment is now.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP are all trapped under the same resistance they have tested for weeks. The macro catalyst is always one data point away. The institutional wave always lands next quarter. Large cap traders waiting for a breakout are lined up behind a decision that belongs entirely to someone else.
Grok AI has flagged what experienced cycle traders already understand instinctively. Capital that vanishes as statistical noise at Bitcoin’s scale can completely reshape the price of a small, undiscovered project. The asymmetry here is not complex. It exists in the gap between what something is genuinely worth and what the market currently believes it is worth. That gap collapses the instant it gets noticed. Right now, it remains fully open.
Cross-chain fragmentation has quietly extracted value from every DeFi participant since the first bridge went live. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana were built independently, with no shared infrastructure and zero intention of communicating with each other. Every transaction crossing those boundaries pays for that decision in fees, failed execution, and slippage extracted before settlement even completes. Bridges were never the fix. They became a business built on top of the unsolved problem.
LiquidChain eliminates that business model entirely. All 3 networks merge into a single execution layer. One deployment reaches everything at once. Zero cross-chain tax on any interaction, anywhere.
Grok AI has flagged it as a coin worth watching. The presale sits at $0.01454 with just over $860,000 raised.
Execution is unproven. Adoption remains an open question. Established assets offer a smoother climb toward a ceiling the whole market can already see. LiquidChain is the entry point that disappears the moment the market catches on.
The post Elon Musk Grok AI Predicts Ethereum Will Hit This Price by End of 2026 appeared first on Cryptonews.
Elon Musk says 90% of Earth has a financial reason to move to Spain. He made the claim on Thursday, as thousands of people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta.
It is an argument he has made many times before. Until now, he aimed it at the United States.
What Happened in Ceuta
Ceuta is a small Spanish city on the coast of North Africa. About 85,000 people live there. It sits right on the border with Morocco.
Thousands crossed over on Thursday. Most swam around the Tarajal seawall. At least nine people died.
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Rachid Sbihi runs the union for Ceuta’s border police. He described “absolute chaos” and said the border had “totally collapsed,” according to the Associated Press.
Local leader Juan Jesús Vivas asked Madrid to declare a national emergency and send the army. The Interior Ministry said no. It sent troops and extra police anyway. Spain and Morocco then agreed to speed up returns.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Spain was mobilizing all necessary resources. In January, his government gave legal status to about half a million undocumented workers.
“The Government of Spain is fully committed to providing an immediate response to the situation in Ceuta…working with Moroccan and international authorities, and preparing the necessary measures to restore normalcy as soon as possible… This is the moment to build solutions, with responsibility and cooperation,” wrote Sanchez.
Musk attacked that plan at the time. Sánchez told him “Mars can wait.” The clash fits a pattern in Musk’s European political commentary.
Where the ‘90% of Earth’ Line Comes From
The idea is simple. Musk says a country becomes a magnet when its benefits beat what most of the world lives on. That magnet then grows big enough to break the budget.
He made the same point in April about America. Free taxpayer money can beat the living standards of 90% of Earth, he wrote. That gives 90% of Earth a reason to move there.
A 2024 version used smaller numbers. America holds 4% of the world’s people. A shift of just 1% would crush essential services, he said. For Spain, he put the number at 7 billion.
Spain’s entire budget will be destroyed by illegal migrants. It’s basic math: if Spain offers free stuff to migrants that is above 90% of the living standard of Earth, they create a forcing function for 90% of Earth to move to Spain, which is around 7 billion people!” Musk explained.
Researchers see it differently. They find that jobs, distance, language, and family already living abroad matter more than benefits. That gap is why the line spreads fast, and why it gets attacked just as fast.
The post Elon Musk Says 90% of Earth Would Move to Spain: Is He Right? appeared first on BeInCrypto.
China Shipping containers are seen at the port of Oakland, as trade tensions continued over U.S. tariffs with China, in Oakland, California, U.S., May 12, 2025.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
BEIJING — One of the Chinese economy’s few growth drivers lost steam in July, according to the latest survey of businesses by China Beige Book.
“U.S.-bound shipments fell outright for the first time in several months,” the U.S.-based research firm said Friday. The findings are based on a survey of 1,436 Chinese businesses between July 20 and 28.
The last time China’s exports to the U.S. fell was in March, when they plunged more than 26% from a year ago, in line with the general trend of double-digit declines since trade tension escalated in April 2025, according to official data accessed via Wind Information.
Shipments to the U.S. rose by 14% in June, helping overall exports surge by 27% — the most in nearly five years. The growth came as businesses frontloaded shipments ahead of expected higher U.S. tariffs later in the summer. The rapid development of data centers to power AI has also driven demand for China-made parts.
The latest China Beige Book study found factory activity decelerated in July, with manufacturing seeing the worst performance in employment as all sectors surveyed saw job growth worsen from a year ago.
Retail sales also fell in July from the prior month and the year-ago period, the report said, noting travel and restaurants “saw a sharp on-year downturn.”
China’s top policymakers on Thursday emphasized the need to expand domestic demand and international trade cooperation, according to a state media readout. The statement underscored Beijing’s priority of achieving technological “breakthroughs.”
Trade data for July is due out Aug. 7, while retail sales and investment figures are expected on Aug. 17.
Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) look set to finish July ahead of most major asset classes, with the former adding over 7% and the latter gaining almost 20% in the last 30 days.
The performance adds to a month of recovery for the two largest cryptocurrencies after a difficult first half of 2026, although historical data suggests August has been a much tougher month for BTC.
Bitcoin and Ethereum Lead July Returns
Data from CoinGlass at the time of writing showed that Ethereum had gained 19.5% during the month while Bitcoin had risen 7.37%. Meanwhile, a comparison by analyst Ash Crypto across major markets showed chip stocks fell 22% in the same period, with the Nasdaq 100 and the Russell 2000 slipping by 9% and 3%, respectively.
The S&P 500 also fell, but its decline was much smaller than that of its counterparts, at about 1%. Silver dropped by 2.64%, but gold was little changed, adding just 0.38% to its value over 30 days.
What makes the gains by the cryptocurrencies noteworthy is that before July, they had endured a rough 2026. CoinGlass data shows BTC fell more than 10% in January, as it continued a red run that had started in October 2025. That sequence continued into February, when the OG crypto lost almost 15%, before reprieves in March and April. May registered a -3.41% return and June recorded the worst drop of the year so far when the asset lost over 20% of its worth.
Ethereum’s first two quarterly performances were just as bad, with Q1 returns at -21.26% and those for Q2 at -25.28%.
Recall that BTC started July trading near $58,000 but gradually climbed the chart, hitting a monthly high near $67,000 last week before price action started cooling somewhat. It was pretty much the same with ETH, as CoinGecko data shows it kicking off the month near $1,500 and eventually ending up very close to $2,000 as July drew to a close.
At the time of writing, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency was changing hands just above $1,900, having shed about 1% in the last seven days. However, despite the good monthly run, it’s still more than 50% lower than where it was a year ago and about 61% away from its August 2025 all-time high. Bitcoin, on its part, has settled near $64,000, which is almost half of its own ATH, after shrugging off the slight volatility that came with yesterday’s decision by the Fed to keep interest rates unchanged.
August Record Keeps Traders Cautious
While July brought relief for crypto investors, CoinGlass data points to a recurring seasonal pattern. Every August since 2022 has ended with Bitcoin posting a monthly loss, including declines of 6.49% in 2025, 8.6% in 2024, 11.29% in 2023 and 13.88% in 2022.
That backdrop has kept analysts divided on what comes next, with Ali Martinez forecasting that Bitcoin’s bear market could last until October, while traders Pepesso and Crypto Lens expect another move lower before a broader recovery begins in 2027.
The post Bitcoin, Ethereum Outperform Markets in July as Chip Stocks Plunge 22% appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Then the regulator stepped in. On June 22, the CFTC opened a request for comment on extending perpetual contracts to physically-delivered crude oil; 67 questions on reference prices, liquidity, position limits, and customer protection. And when the CME tried to self-certify its 24/7 oil contract in July, the CFTC stayed it, blocking the fast track and forcing a full review first.
This story – the market sprinting toward round-the-clock leveraged access to everything, and the rule-writers trying to decide how fast is safe – will keep repeating as the U.S. works to onshore derivatives flow and exchanges push for a level playing field with their offshore counterparts. When the biggest U.S. derivatives exchange is shrinking oil contracts for 24/7 retail access, and the U.S. derivatives regulator is drafting the rules for perpetual oil, you can stop debating whether the model won. It won.
So the interesting conversation isn’t “are perps spreading.” It’s three sharper questions: which asset classes get perpetuals next, where the leverage actually concentrates, and what breaks along the way.
On what’s next, follow the friction. Perps are most valuable precisely where the traditional market is most annoying, where it closes at night, gates you by geography, demands accreditation, or settles at a crawl. That’s why commodities, pre-IPO equities, and hard-to-reach foreign stocks got perpetuals first: enormous latent demand, hopelessly constrained access. The same logic points straight at private credit, carbon, freight, and the long tail of real-world assets coming onchain. Anything with a reference price and a frustrated audience is a candidate. The underlying almost doesn’t matter; the demand to trade it freely does.
MoonPay has launched PayBox, a noncustodial payment vault that lets users prepare and execute crypto transactions or online purchases through ChatGPT and Claude.
Summary
- PayBox connects with ChatGPT and Claude through custom connectors and natural-language commands.
- Users can buy, swap, bridge or deposit crypto and complete travel, dining and retail purchases.
- Passkey approvals and user-defined spending limits control what connected AI assistants can execute.
- MoonPay supports Solana and several EVM networks, including Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and Polygon.
MoonPay PayBox turns AI conversations into transactions
PayBox allows users to connect a payment vault to ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude and describe a transaction in plain language. The AI assistant can then research available options, prepare the transaction, and execute it under permissions set by the user.
Supported crypto actions include buying digital assets with fiat currency, swapping tokens, moving assets between blockchains, and depositing funds into decentralized finance protocols. PayBox can also complete commercial transactions such as booking flights, reserving restaurant tables and purchasing goods from online retailers.
The launch extends AI assistants beyond research and transaction preparation by giving them limited authority to act on a user’s behalf. However, that authority depends on the security settings attached to the PayBox account.
MoonPay said the product is live through the PayBox website. Users must connect it to a supported AI platform through a custom connector before issuing payment instructions.
Passkeys and spending rules limit AI access
PayBox offers two authorization models. Under the “Always Ask” setting, every transaction requires the user to approve the action with a passkey. The approval applies to only one transaction and expires after use, preventing the AI from applying it to a different payment.
The “Autonomous” model allows the connected assistant to operate within spending limits and other rules chosen by the user. This option removes the need to approve each eligible transaction separately, but it does not give the assistant unrestricted control over the vault.
Any change to the permission model or transaction rules requires another passkey authorization. Users can therefore define how much the assistant can spend and the types of actions it can perform before enabling autonomous execution.
PayBox supports both crypto wallets and payment cards. For wallet transactions, private keys are divided using multiparty computation and stored across secure hardware environments. MoonPay said neither it nor the connected AI assistant can independently reconstruct the complete key or authorize an asset transfer.
Card payments use Visa’s agentic commerce protocol, allowing the assistant to complete approved purchases without receiving or storing the underlying card number.
PayBox supports Solana and major EVM networks
MoonPay has added support for Solana and several Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible networks. The initial list includes Ethereum, Hyperliquid, Tempo, Base, Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum and Polygon.
The vault also integrates with x402, an open payment standard designed for services that accept transactions initiated by AI agents. MoonPay said its first x402 integrations cover travel bookings, restaurant reservations and purchases from major online retailers.
The network coverage lets users carry out several steps through one conversation. An assistant could, for example, help a user acquire an asset, bridge it to another blockchain and deposit it into a supported DeFi protocol, provided every step falls within the account’s permissions.
The product relies on security technology developed by Sodot, a key-management company MoonPay acquired earlier in 2026. MoonPay said Sodot’s infrastructure secures more than $50 billion in assets across over 10 million wallets.
MoonPay expands from institutional trading into AI payments
PayBox follows MoonPay’s recent expansion into tokenized financial products. As crypto.news reported in June, Franklin Templeton added its BENJI tokenized money market fund to MoonPay Trade.
That integration allows institutional users to exchange USDC, USDT and other stablecoins for BENJI through MoonPay’s on-chain trading platform. It also gives BENJI holders access to stablecoin liquidity and supports uses such as treasury management, portfolio rebalancing, collateral and liquidity provision.
PayBox targets a different part of the market by connecting consumer and crypto payments directly with conversational AI. MoonPay describes the vault as noncustodial because users retain control of their assets and neither MoonPay nor the AI provider can move funds alone.
For US users, PayBox’s use of Visa’s agentic commerce framework could make AI-assisted card payments more practical, while passkey controls may help address concerns over unauthorized purchases. Access to individual crypto assets, DeFi protocols, and payment services may still depend on location and the rules applied by each provider.
Crypto World
Senator Schumer Proposes Agency to Address Corruption, Including Trump’s Crypto Ventures
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced legislation to create a new US government agency focused entirely on addressing corruption at the federal level, noting President Donald Trump’s gains from “various, and extremely lucrative, cryptocurrency ventures.”
In a Thursday notice, Schumer said that he had introduced a bill called the Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act, which, if passed, would have the authority to “investigate, enforce, and prevent executive branch corruption.” The text of the bill addressed Congress’ findings that Trump had disclosed earning more than $2 billion from investments in 2025, including $1.4 billion tied to crypto, and his family had more than $1 billion in a crypto fund tied to foreign governments.
In a Public Citizen forum describing the bill, Schumer described the anti-corruption agency as having “real teeth” with enforcement authority, and consisting of a bipartisan group of seven members to be confirmed by the Senate. The legislation also provided mechanisms for private citizens and state authorities to recover funds that Schumer said had been stolen from Americans “through corruption.“
“This new bureau is one where these institutions work in symbiosis, strengthening each other and eliminating barriers between them which often got in the way,” said Schumer. “It replaces a broken patchwork of watchdogs, none of which were built for this moment, with one, powerful anti-corruption agency, ready to act anywhere, anytime corruption strikes.”
Senator Chuck Schumer announcing the Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act on Thursday. Source: Public Citizen
Trump’s ties to the cryptocurrency industry have been a sticking point for many Democrats in Congress considering their support for a comprehensive market structure bill called the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act. Although the White House agreed to certain ethics provisions in the bill, many lawmakers say the measures do not go far enough to address the president’s potential conflicts of interest.
Related: Ethics remain sticking point as crypto market structure bill goes to markup
Notably, the proposed anti-corruption agency would place the US Federal Election Commission, Office of Government Ethics and Office of Special Counsel “under one roof“ within the new bureau. Cointelegraph reached out to the White House for comment on the proposed legislation but did not receive an immediate response.
Senators Andy Kim, Alex Padilla and Jeff Merkley cosponsored the bill with Schumer. The introduction of the bill also came the same week Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Van Hollen held a public forum to address Trump’s ties to the crypto industry.
The bill would require Republican support to pass in the US House of Representatives and Senate, where the party holds a slim majority. If it were to advance in both chambers before 2028, Trump could still veto the legislation and send it back to Congress, where it would need a two-thirds majority to override the president’s action.
Crypto bill is still under consideration in Senate
The US Senate has just over a week left before lawmakers break for a month-long state work period, leaving many scrambling to pass bills before the 2026 US midterms potentially complicate discussions on their return.
“The big question at this very minute is where the CLARITY Act stands,“ said former US Securities and Exchange Commission official John Reed Stark following his appearance at Blumenthal’s and Van Hollen’s Monday forum. “Of all the experts and political insiders I spoke with yesterday, not one could say for sure what happens this week with the CLARITY Act. There is enormous drama surrounding this legislation.“
As of Thursday, the Senate had not scheduled a vote on the bill, despite pushes from many Republican lawmakers and industry leaders. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on Wednesday that the bill was at the “one-yard line,“ and Senator Cynthia Lummis, who has long advocated for the market structure legislation, has continued to push for a vote.
Magazine: Will the crypto lobby’s $189M campaign get CLARITY over the line?
South Korean authorities have uncovered a cryptocurrency fraud case that exploited interest in a newly launched blockchain token. The operation targeted XRP holders through a fake investment platform that disappeared after collecting millions of dollars in digital assets.
Authorities launched their investigation after an overseas cryptocurrency exchange flagged suspicious transactions. Within three days of receiving the alert, investigators traced the activity and froze digital wallets holding most of the stolen assets.
How the Scam Worked
According to the probe, the fraudulent website appeared shortly after the Flare Network introduced its FXRP token in October 2025. The platform promised monthly returns of 1.5% to 1.8% while claiming users’ original deposits would remain protected.
The investigation found that the group created convincing online material to support the fake project and make it appear legitimate. False reference pages, blog posts, online articles, and promotional videos were published to strengthen trust among potential victims.
The probe also revealed that victims were instructed to move their XRP through overseas exchanges before sending funds to designated wallet addresses. This process made the transfers appear more credible while helping the organizers distance themselves from the stolen assets.
Ultimately, the website operated for slightly more than one week before shutting down without warning after attracting deposits. During that period, seventy-one victims transferred about 3.4 million XRP worth roughly $8.6 million (12.3 billion won) into wallets controlled by the suspects.
Where the Stolen Funds Went
Blockchain tracing later showed that the suspects’ wallets handled digital assets worth approximately $19 million (27.3 billion won) during the operation. Officials froze about $12.1 million (17.3 billion won) on foreign exchanges, while the remaining funds have not been recovered.
The confirmed losses averaged around $121,000 (173 million won) per victim, although the amounts varied significantly. Police said at least one victim reported losing more than one billion won through the fraudulent platform.
The financial investigation eventually led to several arrests in South Korea. Three men in their late twenties and thirties were taken into custody in South Korea during the investigation. Two suspected organizers face aggravated fraud charges, while another suspect remains overseas under an international alert.
The post South Korea Arrests Suspects in Fake FXRP Scam That Stole $8.6M in XRP appeared first on CryptoPotato.
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In a post on X, CEO Brian Armstrong pointed to the company’s expanding businesses beyond spot trading, including stablecoins, Base and prediction markets, noting that Coinbase reached a record 10.3% share of global crypto trading volume during the quarter.
CFO Alesia Haas struck a more measured tone, saying crypto market conditions were challenging as industry spot trading volumes fell more than 20% and the total crypto market capitalization declined by double digits. She said those conditions contributed to a 14% quarter-over-quarter decline in Coinbase’s total revenue.
Several Wall Street firms lowered estimates ahead of earnings and trimmed EBITDA forecasts as lower crypto prices weighed on institutional trading, blockchain rewards and retail activity.
Investors remained focused on Coinbase’s efforts to reduce its dependence on transaction fees.
Subscription and services revenue, which includes USDC interest income, staking, custody, Coinbase One memberships and institutional services, has become a key measure of whether the company can generate more stable revenue through crypto market cycles.
Analysts also watched for updates on newer businesses, including derivatives, prediction markets and Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network.
The company will host a call with investors at 5pm E.T.
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