In March 2000, Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor watched more than $6 billion disappear from his fortune in a single day.

MicroStrategy’s shares had plummeted more than 60%, thrusting the thirty-five year old software entrepreneur into the center of the dot-com crash.

The company later settled civil fraud charges with the US Securities and Exchange Commission over its accounting practices without admitting or denying wrongdoing. MicroStrategy did not cause the dot-com bubble to burst, but the saga was one of the era’s high-profile corporate blowups and the company became a symbol of the periods excesses and risks.

Now, more than 25 years later, the Bitcoin true-believer once again finds himself in the eye of one of Wall Street’s most closely watched financial experiments.

The company, now known simply as Strategy, holds 843,775 Bitcoin, more than any other public company. It has inspired dozens of listed firms to adopt Bitcoin treasury strategies of their own.

But Strategy is no longer simply accumulating Bitcoin, it has developed a series of financial engineering strategies that divide investors and analysts. Some see it as a sophisticated corporate treasury model that can’t lose, while others believe the risks are piling up on top of one another.

“The conversation shifts beyond simply acquiring Bitcoin to how those positions are financed, managed and, when necessary, traded or monetized,” Drew Forman, senior vice president and head of strategy at Talos, told Cointelegraph.

From accumulation to management

On June 29, Strategy unveiled a new capital framework allowing it to sell Bitcoin to fund preferred stock dividends, build its cash reserves and repurchase securities.

The case against MicroStrategy in 2000. Source: SEC

For a company that spent more than half a decade insisting its Bitcoin was to be accumulated rather than sold, the move caused alarm bells to ring.

Related: Lyn Alden says Bitcoin needs no savior as Strategy sells $216M of BTC

Days later, Strategy disclosed the sale of 3,588 Bitcoin, its largest disposal since adopting BTC as its primary treasury reserve asset in 2020.

To Strategy evangelists, these changes reflect the natural evolution of a company managing a multi-billion-dollar Bitcoin treasury, rather than a sharp about-turn.

Yet critics argue that Strategy’s growing reliance on preferred stock, dividend obligations and external financing has made the model more complex and interdependent, rather than more resilient.

MicroStrategy’s road to Bitcoin

MicroStrategy was one of the fastest-growing software companies of the internet boom in the 1990s, selling business intelligence software to blue-chip clients including McDonald’s, Nike and eBay, and making Saylor one of America’s richest entrepreneurs.

But on March 20, 2000, that momentum came to a sudden halt when MicroStrategy announced that it needed to restate its financial results for the fiscal years 1998 and 1999 due to accounting errors.

The company’s stock nosedived, dropping from $260 per share to just $86 in a single session. It continued to plummet over the following weeks. On April 13, when MicroStrategy announced that it would also need to restate its 1997 financial results, the stock closed at $33 per share.

That episode may have defined many executives’ careers, but Saylor spent the next two decades rebuilding the company largely outside the spotlight until the summer of 2020, when MicroStrategy announced that it would make Bitcoin its primary treasury reserve asset, and Saylor became its most vocal evangelist.

MicroStrategy settled charges with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Source: SEC

He likened holding cash reserves during a time of unprecedented pandemic-era stimulus to holding “a melting ice cube.” The company bought its first $250 million Bitcoin on August 11.

Few public companies held Bitcoin on their balance sheets at the time, and the move was widely viewed as a high-risk experiment rather than a blueprint for corporate finance.

But Bitcoin’s price soon began to soar, bolstered by the excess liquidity, and Strategy’s valuation ballooned. Suddenly, Saylor’s controversial decision looked more like a stroke of genius and the company quickly became a leveraged proxy for Bitcoin on Wall Street.

Related: Strategy’s MSTR may plunge 80% if it repeats this dot-com-era fractal

Dozens of listed firms adopted variations of its treasury strategy, and today, Strategy’s Bitcoin stack is worth more than $54 billion. But with BTC languishing far from its all-time high above $126,000 in October 2025, the company’s Bitcoin play has been repeatedly called into question.

Bitcoin price is far from its all-time high. Source: Coingecko

Skeptics argue Strategy’s model only works if Bitcoin keeps appreciating and investors continue providing new capital. Some have even warned that, under prolonged market stress, those dynamics could contribute to a so-called death spiral in Strategy’s financial model.

Different mechanism, same problem

Whether Strategy represents a radical reinvention or history repeating itself depends largely on how investors interpret the risks.

To some critics, the similarities with 2000 are less about accounting than Saylor’s willingness to build his company around a high-risk corporate model that few other chief executives would even contemplate.

“Saylor is insane (not an insult, just a diagnosis) and is either a fool or a knave,” Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at NYU Stern School of Business, told Cointelegraph in an email.

“It hurts my brain cells just thinking about MSTR and I don’t have enough to waste on it.”

David Trainer, chief executive of investment research firm New Constructs, also holds a hawkish view. He argued that while today’s Strategy looks very different from the company that collapsed during the dot-com era, investors are still being asked to place extraordinary faith in Saylor’s latest corporate experiment.

“Different mechanism, same underlying problem: the equity is a leveraged wrapper around a volatile asset, with no fundamental earnings power supporting the valuation,” he said.

He said that the dot-com blow-up was due to incorrect financial reporting. The SEC claimed in 2000 the company’s financial reports had “showed positive net income” when it should have “should have reported net losses from 1997 through the present.” While Saylor and two executives agreed to pay a $10 million fine to settle the case, they did not admit liability to any of the SEC’s allegations.

“That was a […] mismanagement risk layered on a real (if over-hyped) software business,” he said.

Today, the company’s books are “cleaner,” he argued, with the risks embedded in a capital structure built around financing ever-larger Bitcoin purchases rather than software.

Strategy now runs a “large and growing balance of convertible debt and perpetual preferred stock,” he said, pointing to the $6.7 billion in convertible notes and $15.5 billion in preferred stock outstanding as of late May 2026, used specifically to buy more Bitcoin.

“The software business is now a rounding error next to the balance sheet,” he said.

Related: Grayscale’s Pandl says Strategy should sell $3B Bitcoin to restore confidence

According to Trainer, the bigger concern is not Bitcoin itself, but the premium investors are willing to pay for exposure through Strategy. If that premium disappears, one of the company’s key advantages disappears with it.

“Once you’re structurally reliant on issuance and issuance becomes value-destructive, the company has to either sell Bitcoin, take on more expensive financing or simply stop growing,” Trainer said.

Treasury management, not just HODLing

Forman said that investors should focus on how the company manages its increasingly sophisticated corporate treasury strategy.

“Strategy’s position can’t be understood simply by looking at the size of its Bitcoin holdings,” Forman told Cointelegraph.

He said Strategy’s willingness to sell Bitcoin is less a departure from Saylor’s long-held accumulation strategy than a practical reality of managing a corporate balance sheet. “I see it as a pragmatic evolution of a more complex treasury strategy,” he said.

“The broader takeaway is that Bitcoin is increasingly being treated as an institutional asset class,” he added, stressing that rather than simply deciding whether to buy Bitcoin, companies will increasingly need to think about governance, liquidity management, execution and risk management.

So, has Saylor rewritten his legacy?

26 years after MicroStrategy’s accounting scandal, the questions surrounding Strategy have changed.

Few critics question the integrity of the company’s financial reporting, but whether its increasingly complex Bitcoin strategy can endure prolonged market stress.

Saylor has fundamentally changed the way many public companies think about corporate treasuries, and many have followed his lead.

But whether Saylor has rewritten his legacy won’t be decided by the next bull run, but on how well Strategy performs if the markets continue to turn against it.

Cointelegraph reached out to Strategy but did not receive a response. A spokesperson from the SEC declined to comment on the settlement case.

Magazine: Bitcoin will not hit $1M by 2030, says veteran trader Peter Brandt

Bitcoin pushed above $64,000 during Tuesday’s Wall Street open as US inflation data printed cooler than expected, lifting broader risk sentiment and bringing crypto back toward the top end of its recent trading range. The move came on the heels of a surprise drop in June’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), with energy costs driving much of the decline.

While the CPI release improved the near-term outlook for monetary policy expectations, traders were still cautious about whether Bitcoin can convincingly break above nearby resistance levels and sustain gains. That tension—between relief from macro data and technical hesitation—shaped market action into the early US session.

Key takeaways

• June CPI came in at 3.5% year over year versus 3.8% expected, marking the biggest monthly decline since April 2020, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Energy fell sharply in June, outweighing increases in other categories such as shelter and food, helping risk assets and Bitcoin trade higher.
• Monetary-policy expectations shifted more dovish after the print, even as the CME Group FedWatch Tool still pointed to a 0.25% hike at the September meeting as the baseline.
• Crypto traders remain focused on whether Bitcoin can hold above resistance near $64,000, with some analysis warning of potential rejection if levels aren’t reclaimed and defended.
• Short liquidations in crypto were elevated after the move, but data indicates the market is still range-bound rather than decisively trending.

US CPI’s sharp energy-led drop changes the near-term macro tone

BTC/USD gained more than 2% on the day, according to price tracking on TradingView, as the June CPI release came in below expectations. The key headline was the year-over-year CPI reading at 3.5% against the 3.8% forecast.

More importantly for markets, the CPI report showed a sharp month-to-month decline. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said June marked the largest monthly fall in CPI since April 2020. The driver was energy: BLS reported that the energy index fell 5.7% in June after rising 3.9% in May, 3.8% in April, and 10.9% in March.

“The energy index was the largest contributor to the monthly all items decrease, more than offsetting increases in other indexes including those for shelter and food.”

The CPI print landed despite other geopolitical pressures tied to the US-Iran conflict, including concerns around supply routes connected to the Strait of Hormuz referenced in earlier market coverage. However, on this inflation reading, energy prices provided the “shock absorber” that swung the inflation profile downward.

Risk assets rally as markets tilt more dovish—CME still sees September hike

Stocks traded higher following the release, and crypto investors appeared to take the macro relief in stride. The immediate impact was visible in pricing of future Federal Reserve policy: expectations shifted more dovish, with traders reducing the perceived likelihood of additional near-term tightening.

Still, the market’s baseline case did not fully break from the probability framework seen before the release. According to CME Group’s FedWatch Tool, the consensus scenario continued to lean toward a 0.25% increase at the Fed’s September meeting. In other words, the CPI outcome appeared to cool the urgency of hikes rather than eliminate the expectation of one later in the year.

Economist Mohamed El-Erian characterized the release as a counterweight to an overly hawkish tilt in rates pricing, writing that the data should temper what had become “excessively hawkish” market assumptions about monetary policy—an observation he posted in a response on X.

Bitcoin tests the $64,000 ceiling as traders debate breakout odds

Even with the macro tailwind, traders largely treated Bitcoin’s advance as a test rather than a resolution. Several market observers pointed to local resistance just above $64,000 as the area that must be cleared to confirm a genuine upswing. Earlier coverage noted that Bitcoin had returned to the upper portion of its range, but that the $64,000 level remained a key decision point.

In ongoing market analysis posted on X, commentator Exitpump argued that the CPI print contributed to a squeeze effect: short sellers were not able to drive price lower as positions were forced to unwind. The takeaway was that passive demand and closing shorts helped push price higher, but the broader market still looked like it could remain range-bound.

“Still a range trading environment.”

Data from CoinGlass showed that crypto short liquidations over the prior 24 hours totaled just over $220 million. Liquidation spikes are often a byproduct of sharp moves against crowded positioning, but they do not automatically confirm a lasting trend—especially when price is already near technically significant levels.

What to watch next: whether $64,000 holds—or becomes a lower high

Trader Killa highlighted the importance of follow-through above recent highs. In an X post, Killa described liquidity located above $64.8K and explained that price was testing the weekly open. The warning was conditional: if Bitcoin could not reclaim and hold the weekly open, the move might turn into a “lower high,” potentially setting up a pullback toward the $60,000 region.

For traders and investors, the practical implication is that the CPI-driven rally may be less about a confirmed trend reversal and more about whether momentum can overcome near-term resistance. In range conditions, breakouts typically need sustained holding above key levels, not just a momentary spike.

As the market digests the inflation surprise, the immediate question is whether Bitcoin can convert CPI-fueled optimism into structural strength above $64,000 and follow-through toward higher liquidity zones. If it fails to hold, traders may treat the rally as a volatility event within a broader sideways framework until new macro data or positioning shifts provide clearer directional evidence.

On July 13, one of Japan’s largest financial conglomerates rewired its blockchain strategy in a single press release. SBI Holdings announced that the Solana Foundation will take an equity stake in SBI R3 Japan, the joint venture it shares with Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, and that the entity will be renamed SBI Solana Global. 

The new company’s mandate reads like a full-stack blueprint for moving Japanese finance onto a public blockchain: yen stablecoin issuance and distribution, tokenization of corporate bonds, commercial paper, funds, and real estate, cross-border settlement rails, institutional on-chain services, and payment infrastructure for AI agents. For Solana, it is the deepest institutional embrace the network has received in Asia. For SBI, a company that spent nearly a decade as Ripple’s most committed champion in the region, it is a pivot loaded with signal. The question the market spent July 14 arguing about is which signal: validation of Solana as institutional infrastructure, or a reminder of how much distance separates a memorandum from a market.

The price answered with a shrug. SOL traded near $76 as the announcement circulated, slipping roughly 3.5 percent in line with a broader risk-off session, its market capitalization holding above $44 billion. That muted reaction is itself the story.

A G-SIB-adjacent joint venture with equity participation from the Solana Foundation would have produced a double-digit candle in any prior cycle. In this one, it landed on a market that has learned to discount institutional announcements until they ship products, and the gap between the announcement’s strategic weight and its price impact frames both sides of the debate that follows.

What was actually announced

Strip the release to its verifiable commitments and the structure is more concrete than the usual partnership language. SBI R3 Japan, the existing entity, adopts the planned trade name SBI Solana Global following standard corporate procedures. The Solana Foundation, the Swiss organization that stewards the network, acquires a fresh equity stake alongside existing shareholders SBI Holdings and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. Equity matters here: foundations typically sign memoranda and grant programs, not cap tables. Taking ownership in the operating company aligns the foundation’s incentives with the venture’s commercial outcomes and gives Solana a seat inside a regulated Japanese financial group rather than a logo on its slide deck.

The mandate spans five areas. First, supporting the issuance and circulation of stablecoins, explicitly including JPYSC, the yen-denominated stablecoin SBI launched in June. Second, structuring and distributing tokenized real-world assets: corporate bonds, commercial paper, investment funds, and real estate, the deepest asset pools in Japanese finance. Third, cross-border payment and settlement infrastructure connecting Japan-originated assets to global liquidity. Fourth, on-chain financial services for institutional investors, covering issuance, transfer, recordkeeping, and settlement. Fifth, and most speculative, next-generation payment systems for the AI agent economy, in which automated software transacts under defined controls without human initiation. SBI framed the collective ambition as making Japan a core hub for on-chain finance in Asia by creating a new market for Japanese digital assets.

What was not announced matters equally. The size of the foundation’s stake is undisclosed. So are product launch dates, fee structures, revenue expectations, and the distribution channel: whether products flow through SBI VC Trade, through Bitbank, the exchange SBI has moved to acquire in a deal reported around 46.7 billion yen, or through another group entity. The venture, as of today, is a structure and a mandate. Everything commercial remains to be built.

The JPYSC foundation

The announcement builds directly on a milestone from three weeks earlier. On June 24, Japan launched its first trust-backed yen stablecoin, JPYSC, through a joint initiative between SBI Group and Web3 infrastructure firm Startale Group. SBI Shinsei Trust Bank serves as issuer, SBI VC Trade handles primary distribution, and the token operates as a Type III Electronic Payment Instrument under Japan’s amended Payment Services Act. That classification is the quiet breakthrough: it places a yen token inside a dedicated regulatory category with defined reserve, redemption, and disclosure obligations, which is precisely the legal scaffolding that lets regulated institutions touch the product.

A yen stablecoin with trust-bank issuance is the keystone asset for everything else in the SBI Solana Global mandate. Tokenized bonds need a settlement leg. Cross-border corridors need a regulated on-ramp on the Japanese side. Institutional on-chain services need a cash instrument that compliance departments recognize. One caveat belongs in every analysis: SBI has not confirmed that JPYSC has been issued on Solana or that Solana will become its primary network. The venture will support the token’s issuance and circulation, but the chain-level architecture remains unstated, and the distinction between a Solana-native yen stablecoin and a multi-chain one materially changes how much of the resulting activity accrues to the network the foundation just bought into.

Why Japan, and why now

Japan is an unusual candidate for on-chain finance leadership until you look at its rulebook. The country moved earlier than nearly every major market to build statutory frameworks for both stablecoins and security tokens. Stablecoins sit under the Payment Services Act with its dedicated electronic payment instrument categories. Tokenized securities operate inside existing disclosure law through a security token offering regime that domestic institutions have already used for bond and real estate issuance. While the United States argues over the CLARITY Act and its committee reconciliations, as crypto.news has tracked through the bill’s collapsing passage odds, Japan’s equivalent questions were answered by statute years ago. The venture is not waiting on a legal gate. It is standing on one.

That regulatory position explains the timing from the Japanese side. Domestic competition to build the tokenization stack has intensified: SMBC Group has explored stablecoin issuance with Ava Labs, Fireblocks, and TIS. The Progmat platform, backed by a consortium of Japan’s megabanks, has advanced tokenized bonds. Japan Open Chain pursues a similar mandate on domestic rails. SBI itself has worked with Chainlink on tokenized asset infrastructure and led a $125 million round in risk-modeling firm Gauntlet to build institutional DeFi capability. The race is domestic before it is global, and locking a major public network into an equity structure is a differentiating move no rival has matched. For the Solana side, Japan offers what every layer-1 foundation wants and few can get: a G-SIB shareholder, a compliant asset pipeline, and a jurisdiction where the products are legal before they launch.

How Solana became the institutional candidate

The selection deserves its own examination, because five years ago the sentence “a Japanese megabank consortium chose Solana for bond settlement” would have read as satire. The network’s early institutional reputation was defined by outages and by an ecosystem culture built around memecoins and retail speculation. The rehabilitation happened in layers. Client diversity and successive network upgrades pushed reliability into territory institutions could underwrite. The validator economics and fee markets matured. The developer ecosystem, measured by shipped applications, kept compounding through the bear market. And critically for this use case, the network’s core design tradeoff, maximal throughput and minimal cost on a single integrated layer, maps cleanly onto what securities settlement actually requires: high message volume, deterministic finality, and fees small enough to vanish inside institutional operating costs.

The contrast with the alternative public-chain path is instructive. Ethereum’s institutional pitch routes through its layer-2 architecture, which offers deep liquidity and conservative security assumptions at the cost of fragmentation: assets and settlement scattered across rollups with distinct trust models and bridging risk. For a regulated issuer building a national market from scratch, a single high-capacity layer with one operational model is an easier system to document, audit, and explain to a financial regulator. That does not make it the winning choice in every jurisdiction, and Ethereum’s institutional footprint in tokenized funds remains the largest in the world. It explains why a greenfield national buildout, with no legacy liquidity to protect, optimized for integration simplicity. SBI ran production systems on permissioned rails for a decade; its engineers know exactly what operational complexity costs.

The market Japan is playing for

The prize behind the mandate is the tokenization of conventional assets, the one crypto vertical where institutional forecasts and shipped products have both kept growing through the bear market. Tokenized money market funds and treasuries crossed from pilot to product globally, stablecoin settlement volumes now rival card networks on some corridors, and every major custodian has a tokenization roadmap. The economics driving it are prosaic: settlement compression from days to minutes, collateral mobility across time zones, fractionalization of large-ticket assets like real estate, and the removal of reconciliation layers that exist only because ledgers do not talk to each other.

Japan’s specific opportunity is scale plus stagnation. The country holds one of the deepest bond markets on earth, a vast commercial paper market, and household financial assets in the quadrillions of yen, overwhelmingly parked in instruments whose infrastructure has not changed in decades. A regulated tokenization pipeline that moved even a fraction of a percent of that stock would dwarf every crypto-native RWA experiment to date. That is the arithmetic that makes a cautious conglomerate move: the venture is not chasing crypto volumes, it is positioning for the plumbing upgrade of a domestic capital market, with the yen stablecoin as the settlement layer and the public chain as the registry. Whether that flow prices SOL is a separate question, and an honest one, but the flow itself is the largest addressable market any layer-1 has been formally pointed at in Asia.

The Ripple question

No analysis of this announcement is complete without the elephant in SBI’s portfolio. SBI spent close to a decade as Ripple’s anchor partner in Asia: joint ventures, board relationships, XRP-based remittance corridors, and most recently the distribution of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin in Japan. The reflexive reading of the Solana pivot is that SBI is diversifying away from a partner whose token has spent 2026 pinned near $1, and the crypto commentariat spent the announcement day running exactly that narrative.

The evidence supports a more boring conclusion: addition, not substitution. The RLUSD distribution agreement stands. The remittance businesses continue. SBI’s investor materials describe a multi-stablecoin, multi-chain architecture in which USDC, RLUSD, and JPYSC serve different corridors and client bases. What the Solana venture adds is a public-chain execution layer for the tokenized asset and institutional settlement businesses, a lane Ripple’s enterprise stack was never positioned to own in Japan. The sharper competitive reading runs the other direction: SBI has effectively decided that no single network gets exclusivity over Japanese on-chain finance, and every foundation and issuer now knows the anchor client is polyamorous. That is worse news for maximalists of every persuasion than for any specific chain.

The same logic governs the R3 legacy. SBI R3 Japan was built to commercialize Corda, the permissioned ledger that defined the previous era of institutional blockchain strategy. Renaming the entity around a public network is a clean marker of where that era ended: the consortium chains produced pilots, and the public chains produced markets. The rebrand does not confirm SBI is abandoning Corda-based systems already in production, but the naming decision tells you where the growth budget goes.

There is also a precedent dimension worth naming directly, because it changes how other jurisdictions read the deal. Financial institutions worldwide have partnered with blockchain firms for years, but the standard structures kept the chains at arm’s length: vendor contracts, pilots, consortium memberships that could be exited by memo. An equity joint venture with a foundation, a megabank on the register, and a mandate over core capital markets is a different category of commitment, visible to every regulator and rival that studies it. If the structure works, it becomes the template that other national markets copy, and the foundations of competing networks will be pushed by their own ecosystems to offer equivalent skin. If it stalls, it becomes the cautionary slide in every consultant’s deck for a decade. Either way, the arms-length era of bank-blockchain relations ended in Tokyo this week, and the industry will be arguing about the terms of its replacement for years.

The stablecoin geography taking shape

Zoom out from the single announcement and a regional architecture becomes visible. SBI’s portfolio now spans three stablecoin lanes with distinct jurisdictions and jobs: USDC for global dollar liquidity, where SBI’s crypto arm has already built retail lending products; RLUSD for the enterprise settlement corridors it operates with Ripple; and JPYSC for the domestic yen leg that everything Japanese ultimately touches. The Solana Foundation’s parallel moves fill in the map: the KG Inicis work in South Korea targets merchant settlement and loyalty on the peninsula, Circle keeps expanding USDC issuance on the network, and the SBI venture now anchors the Japanese corner. The pattern is a network positioning itself as the neutral settlement layer for Asian currency tokens rather than betting on any single issuer.

The strategic logic runs through corridors. The yen-dollar corridor is among the largest foreign exchange pairs in the world, and the remittance and trade flows between Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia move through correspondent banking machinery whose costs stablecoin rails undercut by an order of magnitude. A regulated yen token, a regulated dollar token, and a common high-throughput chain turn cross-currency settlement from a messaging problem into an atomic transaction, which is the actual product hiding inside the venture’s cross-border mandate. Every incumbent in that machinery, from correspondent banks to card networks, has noticed, which is why the same months produced bank-led stablecoin consortiums on three continents.

The AI agent wildcard

The fifth mandate area drew the most skepticism and deserves a fair reading. Payment infrastructure for AI agents means rails on which software authorized by humans or corporations transacts autonomously: procurement bots settling invoices, data services metering usage by the second, machine-to-machine markets for compute and content. Dismissing it as buzzword compliance is tempting, and until volumes exist, partially correct. But the design requirements are real and specific: sub-cent fees, instant finality, programmable controls, and no dependence on card networks built around human cardholders. Those requirements describe a public high-throughput chain settling in stablecoins more than they describe any legacy system, which is why agent payments appear in the roadmaps of nearly every serious payments company this year.

For the venture, the practical significance is optionality. The stablecoin and tokenization lanes justify the buildout on their own; the agent lane is a cheap call option on a category that could grow discontinuously if agentic commerce arrives on the schedule its promoters claim. A conglomerate writing that option into a joint venture mandate in 2026 costs nothing. Owning the regulated yen settlement layer if the option pays would be worth more than the rest of the mandate combined.

The bull case: the pipeline is the prize

The bullish argument begins with what Solana receives that no marketing spend could buy. Direct equity participation embeds the foundation in a regulated Japanese financial group with Sumitomo Mitsui, a global systemically important bank, as co-shareholder. The venture’s mandate points Japan’s deepest asset classes, government-adjacent bonds, commercial paper, funds, and real estate, at Solana’s rails. Japan’s regulatory clarity means product launches face licensing work, not legislative risk. And the choice itself is a technical endorsement: a conglomerate that has run production blockchain systems for a decade evaluated the field and selected Solana’s throughput, cost profile, and developer ecosystem for institutional settlement.

The network context strengthens the case. Solana’s institutional year has compounded: Circle expanding USDC issuance on the network, payment processors in South Korea examining stablecoin checkout through KG Inicis, and a steady migration of tokenization pilots from private chains to public rails. The SBI venture slots into that pattern as its largest and most structurally committed Asian instance. If even the stablecoin and bond tokenization lanes ship at modest scale, Solana becomes the default public network for regulated Japanese assets, a position with compounding returns as the tokenization market grows. Institutional adoption is a coordination game, and Japan just coordinated.

The bear case: a mandate is not a market

The skeptical argument starts with the same undisclosed list the release left behind. No stake size, no timelines, no revenue targets, no confirmed distribution channel, and no confirmation that even JPYSC, the venture’s flagship asset, runs primarily on Solana.

Japanese financial conglomerates are famously deliberate: the gap between a joint venture announcement and a product at scale is measured in years, and SBI’s own blockchain history includes ventures whose ambitions outran their shipped products. Corda was itself once the announced future of Japanese institutional blockchain, under the very entity being renamed.

The bear case also notes what the price action already said. SOL fell on announcement day, and not because the market misread the release. Institutional partnerships accrue value to the network’s fee economy slowly and to the token’s price more slowly still: tokenized bonds settle in stablecoins, not in SOL, and the network’s revenue capture from regulated asset flows runs through transaction fees that Solana’s architecture deliberately keeps near zero. The venture can succeed completely and still contribute little near-term to the token, which is the asset most readers of the announcement actually hold. Layer on the competitive risk that Progmat and the megabank consortiums keep Japan’s most conservative issuers on domestic rails, and the realistic bear scenario is not failure but marginalization: a venture that ships a stablecoin corridor and some real estate tokens while the core bond market stays where it is.

Finally, the macro caveat applies here as everywhere. Japan’s on-chain ambitions launch into a global regulation and rate environment that has compressed every crypto asset, and institutional programs approved in bull markets have a documented habit of shrinking in committee during bear ones. SMFG’s presence on the cap table is a commitment, not a guarantee of pace.

Where SOL the asset stands while the venture builds

The token’s position entering this news cycle explains the muted reaction as much as any skepticism about the deal. SOL near $76 sits far below its cycle highs, compressed by the same Federal Reserve repricing and risk-off rotation that pulled Bitcoin toward $60,000 and drained the altcoin complex. The network’s fundamental dashboard has diverged from its price for months: application revenue, stablecoin supply, and developer activity holding up while the token trades with the market’s beta. Spot Solana ETFs exist in the United States, giving the asset the same wrapper infrastructure as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP, and the March interpretive release that classified the major assets as digital commodities covered the top of the market broadly, leaving Solana’s institutional access story more mature than its price suggests.

That divergence frames how institutional news gets absorbed in this tape. Announcements that would have been front-run violently in a bull regime now enter a market where the marginal price-setter is a macro fund watching rate expectations, not a crypto fund watching partnerships. The historical pattern is that fundamental accumulation during such regimes expresses itself only when the macro binding constraint releases, at which point the assets with the strongest accumulated institutional stories tend to lead. Whether SOL occupies that position at the turn depends on execution stories exactly like this one converting into measurable on-chain flows before the regime changes. The venture’s builders and the token’s holders are, in that sense, racing different clocks toward the same event.

What would make this pivot real

The venture converts from announcement to market on a short list of observable milestones, and each has a rough clock. The corporate rebrand completing is trivial but confirms the procedures are moving. Confirmation of JPYSC issuance on Solana, or of a Solana-native issuance track, is the first substantive tell, because the stablecoin is the settlement asset every other product needs. The first tokenized instrument, most plausibly commercial paper or a fund vehicle before a full corporate bond, would prove the issuance pipeline, and its distribution channel would answer the Bitbank question. Disclosure of the foundation’s stake size, whenever it comes, will calibrate how much skin accompanies the signal. And the first cross-border corridor, connecting a Japanese issuer to offshore liquidity through the venture’s rails, would validate the thesis that Japan-originated assets can find global buyers on a public chain.

A realistic clock helps calibrate expectations against Japanese corporate practice. The rebrand and stake completion should land within one to two quarters, since both run on procedure. A first product announcement inside 2026 would count as fast by the standards of the institutions involved; the first tokenized issuance reaching external investors in 2027 would still qualify as on schedule. Anyone trading SOL on this news should hold that timeline against their horizon, because the venture is built to pay off in infrastructure years, not in market weeks, and the mismatch between those clocks is where most disappointment in institutional crypto news is manufactured.

For DeFi and tokenization watchers, the wider significance does not depend on SBI’s execution speed. July 13 marked the first time a public blockchain foundation took equity in a regulated joint venture with a Japanese megabank group on the shareholder register, aimed at the country’s core capital markets. Whether Solana captures the resulting value in one year or five, the direction of institutional travel is no longer contested: the pilots era ran on private chains, and the production era is being built on public ones, with Japan, of all markets, moving first. The announcement’s price impact was a rounding error. Its precedent is not.

Disclaimer: This article is information, not investment advice. Deal terms, product plans, and market figures reflect reporting available as of July 14, 2026, and can change quickly. Key commercial details of the SBI Solana Global venture, including the equity stake size and launch timelines, remain undisclosed. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell SOL or any other asset. Verify current developments from primary sources and consider your own circumstances before making any decision.

The most instructive XRP trade of 2026 was an exit. When it emerged this month that Goldman Sachs, once the largest XRP holder among Wall Street institutions, had sold down its position, the reaction split along familiar lines: bears read it as the smartest money leaving a stalled asset, bulls read it as a bank taking profits on ETF seeding and creation-desk inventory it never intended to hold.

Both camps then arrived at the same, more interesting question, and it is the one that will define XRP’s next year. The first $1.5 billion of ETF money is in. Goldman’s chapter is closed. Standard Chartered says the next tranche is worth $4 billion to $8 billion. So who, exactly, buys it, what has to happen first, and what does XRP look like if they do?

The question matters because XRP has spent 2026 as the market’s cleanest natural experiment in whether flows alone can move a price. The token trades near $1.08 inside a range that has compressed to roughly $1.00 to $1.13, down around 40 percent on the year, while nearly every input a flow analyst would track has pointed the other way: sustained ETF creations, whale accumulation running at multiples of last year’s pace, exchange balances at multi-year lows, and a parent company stacking regulatory wins across three continents. The demand arrived. The price did not respond. Resolving that contradiction requires taking the flow machine apart piece by piece.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies recorded $45.7 million in revenue from Ether staking and validation last quarter, following the launch of its institutional-grade Ethereum staking platform in March. 

Staking revenue accounted for 98% of total revenue for the three months ended May 31, far outpacing the $624,000 from self-mining Bitcoin (BTC) and the $168,000 from consulting services, according to Bitmine’s latest 10-Q filing. On Monday, Bitmine said it had staked 85% of its ETH holdings, equating to around 4.9 million Ether (ETH). 

“Bitmine has staked more ETH than other entities in the world. At scale (when Bitmine’s ETH is fully staked by MAVAN and its staking partners), the projected ETH staking reward is $284 million on an annualized basis,” said Tom Lee, chairman of Bitmine. 

The latest quarterly results show how Bitmine’s pivot to Ethereum has reshaped its revenue mix. A year ago, Bitmine recorded just $2 million in total revenue for the quarter ended May 31, 2025, primarily from machine leasing. 

The results also reflect the March launch of MAVAN, an institutional-grade Ethereum staking platform that operates validator infrastructure for its own holdings and external clients. 

Related: Ethereum backers launch nonprofit to lead institutional adoption efforts 

MAVAN, short for “Made in America VAlidator Network,” followed the acquisition of Australia-based non-custodial validator operator Pier Two Holdings. It was originally developed to support Bitmine’s own Ethereum treasury; its scope expanded to serve institutional investors, custodians and ecosystem partners.  

Lee calls Robinhood Chain a “breakaway success”

On Monday, Lee highlighted the success of the newly launched Robinhood Chain, with dollar volumes exceeding $1 billion since its July 1 launch. 

“Robinhood Chain now has more trading volume than any other decentralized exchange (DEX), demonstrating the outstanding utility and product market fit for Ethereum, which is the underlying chain,” he said. 

“Robinhood Chain uses ETH as the native gas token. And transaction fees are denominated in ETH and the finality is settled on Ethereum. Robinhood’s 27 million users are paying crypto fees denominated in ETH. In other words, everyday users are starting to see ETH as money,” he added. 

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Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | 30 June 2026: VAP Group announced the launch of VAP Ventures, its dedicated investment arm, marking a significant milestone in the company’s evolution from building global platforms for innovation to directly supporting the founders shaping the future of technology.

The announcement was made at the Global AI Show, Global Games Show, and Global Blockchain Show Riyadh 2026, from 29-30 June, where thousands of global industry leaders, innovators, investors and decision-makers have gathered to explore the technologies defining the next decade. The introduction of VAP Ventures represents one of the flagship announcements of this year’s Riyadh editions.

For years, VAP Group’s global stages have brought together founders, enterprises, governments and investors across AI, Web3, blockchain, gaming and emerging technologies. Through VAP Ventures, the company is taking the next step moving beyond creating opportunities for conversations to building the next generation of high-impact startups..

Over the next five years, VAP Ventures will back 100 startups by 2030 building across AI, Web3 & Blockchain, and Digital Games. The initiative reflects VAP Group’s long-term commitment to strengthening the global innovation economy through an integrated ecosystem that combines investment with market access and strategic growth support.
Unlike traditional investment models, VAP Ventures is designed to provide more than funding. Each selected startup will receive a blended support with direct capital alongside access to VAP Group’s media ecosystem, marketing capabilities, talent network and globally recognised event platforms. The objective is to help founders move from early-stage ideas to scalable businesses with the resources needed beyond investment alone.

VAP Ventures will focus on technologies shaping the future of the digital economy, including enterprise AI, Web3 infrastructure, blockchain innovation and next-generation gaming ecosystems. The initiative is strategically aligned with the Kingdom’s vision of fostering innovation, entrepreneurship and knowledge-based industries while supporting globally ambitious founders.

Key Highlights

• 100 startups to be backed by 2030
• Launching from Riyadh, KSA
• Focus sectors: Artificial Intelligence, Web3 & Blockchain, and Digital Games
• Support extending beyond capital to include media, marketing, talent and global stage access

“We gave founders a stage for years. Now we’re backing them. VAP Ventures will invest in more than 100 startups across AI, Web3, and gaming over five years in capital, media, talent, and reach, all under one roof. This is visibility turning into vital support” Vishal Parmar, Founder & CEO, VAP Group.

The launch of VAP Ventures reinforces VAP Group’s broader mission to strengthen the global innovation economy by bringing together capital, media, talent and international platforms under one roof. By expanding from convening innovators to backing them, the company aims to create lasting impact across the startup ecosystem while enabling the next generation of technology companies to grow from the region onto the global stage.

Startups interested in applying to VAP Ventures will be able to submit their details through the dedicated application platform, including company information and pitch materials, as the initiative begins building its inaugural cohort.

About VAP Group

With 13+ years of expertise, VAP Group is a premier global consulting and media powerhouse driving the next wave of technology-led growth.

Through its media ecosystem and flagship events, including the Global AI Show, Global Games Show, and Global Blockchain Show, VAP Group connects policymakers, enterprises, and innovators worldwide, enabling strategic communications, ecosystem-building, and talent solutions.

For more information: https://www.vapgroup.co/vap-ventures/

Media Enquiries:

media@vapgroup.co

The United States Senate returned from its holiday recess on July 13 with one piece of paper waiting on its desk that matters more to crypto markets than any price chart. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the market structure bill the industry has chased for the better part of two years, sits on the Senate Legislative Calendar with no floor vote scheduled, a shrinking window before the August recess, and prediction market odds that have collapsed from the low seventies to roughly 43 percent.

On July 17, the House Financial Services Committee takes the unusual step of holding a field hearing in New York titled Building the Future of Finance: How CLARITY Act Unlocks Innovation. The hearing cannot pass anything. What it can do is force every participant in this fight, from Senate holdouts to ETF issuers to the White House, to show their cards in public during the exact week when the bill’s fate for 2026 gets decided.

The stakes are not abstract. Bitcoin trades near $63,000 after months of pressure from a Federal Reserve that markets now expect to raise rates instead of cutting them. Ethereum sits under $1,800. XRP clings to the $1 level it has defended all summer. The total crypto market capitalization hovers around $2.17 trillion, and the Fear and Greed Index has spent weeks in the twenties, deep in fear territory. Against that backdrop, the CLARITY Act has become the one catalyst that does not depend on the Fed, on oil prices, or on the war headlines out of the Middle East. It is the single lever Washington can still pull this year, and the market knows it.

What the bill actually does

The CLARITY Act is a market structure law, not a price support program. Its core function is taxonomy: it draws a statutory line between digital assets that count as commodities, overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and those that count as securities, overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission. For a decade, that line existed only in enforcement actions, court rulings, and agency guidance that shifted with each administration. The bill would replace that patchwork with a durable federal framework covering how tokens are issued, how exchanges register, how custody works, and which regulator answers for which market.

That distinction sounds technical until you consider what currently protects the industry’s legal footing. On March 17, 2026, the SEC and CFTC issued a joint interpretive release that classified 16 digital assets, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP, as digital commodities. That release did enormous practical work. It handed day-to-day oversight to the CFTC, lifted the threat of unregistered securities treatment from the largest tokens, and cleared the path for the spot ETFs that now trade on all three assets. But an interpretive release is not a statute. A future administration, or even a future commission majority, could withdraw or rewrite it. The CLARITY Act exists to convert that reversible administrative posture into permanent law. For holders of the affected assets, the difference is the difference between renting legal certainty and owning it.

Coinbase says it has moved far beyond early experiments with artificial intelligence, with executives describing AI as now being deeply embedded in how the exchange builds and tests software. In the wake of a May workforce reduction, the company’s leaders pointed to AI as a central reason it has been able to speed up development and reorganize teams.

According to Coinbase executives, more than 95% of the company’s code is now written by or with large language models (LLMs). That figure marks a sharp jump from an earlier estimate Coinbase shared in February, when it said AI supported about 40% of its code.

Key takeaways

• Coinbase reports that between 95% and 100% of its code is written by or with LLMs, according to platform chief Rob Witoff.
• The company links its May layoffs to a need to restore the “speed and focus” of its startup-era operations, placing AI at the core.
• Witoff describes a “wide spectrum” of AI usage—from human-led work on core cryptography to fully automated prototyping.
• Coinbase says smaller, senior teams can handle work that previously required far larger groups, with AI agents running continuously.

From “helping” to “writing”: Coinbase’s evolving AI role

Coinbase cut roughly 14% of its workforce in May, laying off about 700 employees. In an email to staff, CEO Brian Armstrong said the company needed to “return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core,” framing AI as a major shift in how work moves.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Coinbase’s head of platform, Rob Witoff, said the company has reached a state where AI is used on an everyday basis. “Effectively, 100% of our employees are using AI on a daily basis,” Witoff said. He added that “close to 100% of our code” is written by or with LLMs—“probably somewhere between 95% and 100%.”

The size of that jump matters because it signals how quickly AI adoption has progressed within crypto infrastructure, not just as a productivity tool but as part of the coding workflow. Coinbase’s earlier February estimate—AI supporting around 40% of its code—suggests a rapid acceleration in how the exchange operationalizes AI in engineering.

Human oversight stays central for high-stakes cryptography

Even with such high automation claims, Witoff emphasized that Coinbase’s use of AI isn’t uniform across all parts of its stack. He described a “wide spectrum” in the way AI is deployed, depending on risk and complexity.

“For example, when we’re writing core cryptography, we have industry-leading cryptographers that are meticulously researching and reviewing one line at a time.”

In other areas, AI plays a different role. Witoff said AI is used heavily to test and verify that code behaves correctly and to help check for vulnerabilities. However, he portrayed this work as still requiring more manual oversight than the prototyping pipeline.

“We’re using AI quite a bit to test and make sure the code we’ve written is working the way it should, there’s no vulnerabilities, we’re verifying the math,” Witoff said, adding that this verification process remains more hands-on. By contrast, he said internal prototyping is now “effectively a 100% automated” workflow.

For builders and investors watching how AI reshapes crypto companies, this distinction is important: the move toward AI-driven development appears strongest in low-to-medium risk areas like prototyping and iteration, while core security work remains tightly supervised by specialized experts.

Smaller teams, more senior judgment—and the “agent” layer

Coinbase also linked its AI-driven coding changes to a reorganization of how teams are structured. Witoff said the company has been able to move toward smaller, more senior groups, where two or three employees can handle work that previously required 10 or more people.

He noted that the May layoffs disproportionately affected junior roles, describing “a lot of junior development roles” among those impacted. While engineering saw major changes, he also said cuts extended beyond developer functions, including positions in marketing, legal, customer support, and compliance.

“For those smaller teams to work, for people to have the taste, the judgment, I think a lot about people having the battle scars so they know how to point agents in the right direction.”

The “agent” concept is a key part of the operational picture. Witoff said most Coinbase engineers now work with five to 10 AI agents running at any given time, and that these agents collectively perform coding work equivalent to about 1,200 employees.

Looking further ahead, Witoff suggested that by 2030 AI agents could do the equivalent work of 100,000 employees. While such projections are inherently speculative, the company’s internal framing underscores a broader industry belief: once AI agents are integrated into development processes, the bottleneck shifts from generating code to steering systems responsibly and validating outcomes—especially where security and correctness are non-negotiable.

AI-led restructuring is spreading across crypto

Coinbase’s story fits into a wider pattern seen across the sector this year, where multiple crypto firms cited AI-driven efficiency as they rebalanced headcount.

In March, crypto exchange Crypto.com cut about 12% of staff, according to Cointelegraph reporting, affecting roles that “do not adapt in our new world.” Earlier, Block CEO Jack Dorsey said he was cutting about 40% of the company’s workforce, describing AI-enabled changes to how companies build and operate.

Other crypto organizations mentioned in the same broader wave include Kraken, Gemini, Messari, and Dune, each of which has been reported to have adjusted staffing in part as they increased AI use.

For market participants, this matters beyond workforce headlines. When exchanges and crypto services reduce layers of staffing while increasing reliance on AI-driven workflows, it can change how quickly they ship product, how they manage operational risk, and how they allocate resources between core engineering and support functions.

There is still an open question for readers: how sustainable and measurable these gains are over time, especially for the parts of the stack that require specialized security review. Coinbase’s next signal will likely be whether its AI-heavy approach continues to hold up under stress—whether in scaling performance, minimizing vulnerabilities, or maintaining reliability as token and user activity grows.

Stablecoin treasury platform Velocity has raised $38 million in a Series A funding round to expand infrastructure that helps enterprises and financial institutions use stablecoins for cross-border settlement and treasury operations.

The funding round was led by Dragonfly and FirstMark, with participation from Activant Capital, Capital One Ventures, QED Investors, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures and Ripple. Velocity said it plans to use the capital to expand its banking and payments network, develop new products and strengthen its regulatory capabilities.

Founded in 2025, Velocity develops software that connects stablecoin networks with banking, custody, compliance and settlement systems. The company targets enterprise finance teams, payment providers, fintech firms and financial institutions using stablecoins for cross-border payments and treasury operations.

The latest financing brings Velocity’s total funding to nearly $50 million since it launched in 2025, according to the company.

Related: JCB signs Circle MOU to test stablecoin payments in Japan

The funding comes as competition in the enterprise stablecoin market intensifies. In June, more than 140 companies backed the launch of Open USD (OUSD), a dollar-pegged stablecoin supported by companies including Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and Ripple.

Stablecoin infrastructure investment accelerates

Investment in stablecoin infrastructure has accelerated this year as companies build the software and network infrastructure supporting payments, settlement and enterprise financial services.

In March, Tether participated in a $5.2 million funding round for Ark Labs, a startup building infrastructure for stablecoin issuance and settlement on Bitcoin. The company is developing a programmable execution layer to enable faster payments and more complex financial applications on the network.

Later that month, OpenFX raised $94 million in a Series A funding round to expand its stablecoin-based foreign exchange network, which is designed to speed up cross-border payments for businesses. The company said it would use the capital to expand into Southeast Asia and Latin America while increasing liquidity across its network.

Trace Finance secured $32 million the following month to expand its cross-border payment infrastructure, which combines banking, foreign exchange and stablecoin settlement services for businesses operating across multiple markets.

The investments come as stablecoin payments continue to expand. A joint analysis by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics estimated that stablecoins processed $390 billion in annualized real-world payments in 2025, including about $226 billion in business-to-business transactions.

Annualized real-world stablecoin payment volume by use case. Source: McKinsey, Artemis Analytics

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