Crypto World
Banks vs crypto over stablecoin yield
The biggest fight in American finance right now is over a single clause: whether digital dollars can pay their holders interest. Banks say yield-bearing stablecoins would drain trillions in deposits and break the lending machine. Crypto says the banks are defending a monopoly on other people’s money. The CLARITY Act is hostage to the answer, and this week the standoff escalated on every front.
Summary
- A battle over whether stablecoins should pay interest has become the biggest obstacle to advancing the CLARITY Act in the US Senate.
- Banks warn that yield bearing stablecoins could pull trillions of dollars from deposits while the crypto industry argues savers should receive the returns generated by reserve assets.
- As lawmakers remain divided, banks are also preparing for a future with stablecoins by investing in digital dollar infrastructure and settlement networks.
The week of June 29, 2026, was supposed to move the CLARITY Act toward the Senate floor. Instead, Coinbase publicly pulled its support for the bill it had spent two years championing, Senate Banking Committee chairman Tim Scott postponed the markup, and President Trump posted that the banks lobbying against stablecoin yield were threatening and undermining his own signature crypto law. The proximate cause of all three events was the same unresolved question: can a stablecoin pay interest?
The question sounds technical. It is not. It is a fight over roughly $6 trillion, which is the amount of deposit money that Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan has warned could migrate out of the banking system if digital dollars are allowed to pass their reserve earnings to holders. Behind the number sits the basic architecture of American credit: banks fund loans with deposits that pay savers little, and anything that gives savers a better default option attacks the cheapest funding source in finance.
Both sides understand the stakes with total clarity, which is why neither will yield. The banks have the oldest lobby in Washington and a century of regulatory capture to draw on. Crypto has the GENIUS Act already signed, a president publicly on its side, and products that customers demonstrably want. Between them sits a Congress trying to pass a market structure bill that both industries claim to support and each is willing to kill over this clause.
This is the anatomy of the standoff: where the yield actually comes from, what each side’s studies really say, how the fight broke into the open at Davos, why the CLARITY Act is stalled, and what the banks are quietly building in case they lose.
Where stablecoin yield comes from
A dollar stablecoin is a bearer claim on a reserve. The issuer takes a customer dollar, parks it in Treasury bills and repo and cash equivalents, and gives back a token redeemable at par. At 2026 short-term rates, that reserve portfolio throws off meaningful income: roughly four cents per year on every dollar, paid by the United States government to the issuer.
Under the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin framework signed in 2025, issuers keep that income. The law prohibits payment stablecoins from paying interest or yield to holders, a clause the banking lobby fought for and won. The result is one of the stranger economic arrangements in modern finance: tens of millions of stablecoin holders collectively finance a float measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, and the entire risk-free return on that float accrues to issuers and their distribution partners.
Tether’s profits, Circle’s revenue-sharing arrangement with Coinbase, and the business case for every new entrant described in the consortium stablecoin model behind Open USD all rest on that captured spread.
Crypto’s position is that the arrangement is indefensible on its own terms. If the token holder supplies the dollar, the token holder should be able to receive the yield, the same way a money market fund passes through its portfolio income. Exchanges already approximate this with rewards programs that pay users for holding certain stablecoins, a workaround the banks call interest by another name and want closed.
The banks’ position is that the arrangement is the only thing standing between the deposit system and a slow-motion run. A stablecoin that pays four percent, holds only Treasuries, settles instantly, and lives in a phone app is not a payment instrument, in their telling. It is a narrow bank, the exact institution American regulators have refused to charter for a century, because a narrow bank collects deposits and funds nothing.
Both descriptions are accurate. That is what makes the fight so hard to resolve. A product can be, simultaneously, a long-overdue transfer of interest income to the people who supply the money and a structural threat to the funding model of every lender in the country. The legislative machinery now stuck in the Senate exists precisely because Congress must pick which description governs, and there is no compromise text that makes both true halves false.
The dueling studies: $6.6 trillion or $2.1 billion
In early 2026 the American Bankers Association put a number on the threat. Its analysis warned that permitting interest-bearing stablecoins could trigger as much as $6.6 trillion in deposit flight from the banking system, a figure that would represent a structural repricing of bank funding. Moynihan carried the message personally, telling audiences that 30 to 35 percent of transactional deposits could leave banks if yield-bearing digital dollars became legal, and putting the Bank of America estimate in the $6 trillion range.
The mechanism behind the number is credit contraction. Deposits fund loans. A dollar that leaves a checking account for a stablecoin backed by T-bills stops funding a mortgage or a small business line and starts funding the federal government. Multiply by trillions and the banks’ model produces higher loan rates, reduced credit availability, and concentrated stress on community banks whose entire funding base is retail deposits. The ABA’s framing is not that banks would earn less, though they would; it is that the economy would lend less.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers looked at the same question and produced a number three orders of magnitude smaller. Its assessment put plausible deposit displacement in the low billions, around $2.1 billion in the scenario most cited, arguing that stablecoin demand comes overwhelmingly from crypto trading, cross-border flows, and dollar demand abroad, none of which is money sitting in a Kansas checking account today. In the CEA’s telling, the banks are counting every deposit that could theoretically move as a deposit that would move, ignoring deposit insurance, banking relationships, and the fact that money market funds have offered better rates than checking accounts for fifty years without ending bank lending.
The three-orders-of-magnitude gap is not really an empirical dispute. The two studies answer different questions. The ABA models the ceiling of a mature, frictionless, fully legal yield-bearing stablecoin market; the CEA models the floor of the current one. The honest answer, that displacement would start small and compound as the products improved, satisfies neither side, because the banks need the threat to be immediate and crypto needs it to be imaginary.
Davos, and the fight goes personal
The clearest public glimpse of how raw the conflict has become came at Davos in January, in an exchange between the two most powerful executives on either side.
JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, discussing stablecoin yield with Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong on a panel, dismissed Armstrong’s framing of deposit competition with a phrase that escaped the room within minutes: he told him he was full of s—, a vulgarity from the most measured banker of his generation that did more to reveal the temperature of the fight than any comment letter.
Armstrong’s argument, the one that drew the response, is the consumer-surplus case. American savers hold trillions in accounts paying a fraction of a percent while banks earn multiples of that on the float. Stablecoin yield, in his telling, is simply technology forcing banks to pay depositors something closer to the market rate for their money, and the deposit-flight studies are incumbents pricing their own margin as a systemic necessity. Coinbase has the most direct commercial stake of anyone in the room: its revenue share on USDC reserves is one of its largest income lines, and a world of legal yield pass-through is a world where its stablecoin business attacks bank deposits head-on.
Dimon’s counter is that payments and banking are different businesses with different risk, and that crypto wants banking economics without banking obligations: no lending mandate, no Community Reinvestment Act, no branch network, no discount window responsibilities, just the float. JPMorgan has hedged its own position, running deposit tokens and blockchain settlement internally while its chief executive argues against the retail version, a posture crypto reads as monopoly defense and banks read as prudence.
Then the President entered. In a late June post, Trump accused the banks of threatening and undermining the GENIUS Act, his own signed legislation, by lobbying to extend the yield ban and hobble stablecoin competition. A Republican president publicly siding against the banking lobby on a financial regulation fight is a genuinely new configuration in Washington, and it reshuffled assumptions on both sides about who holds the political high ground.
How the yield clause took CLARITY hostage
The CLARITY Act is a market structure bill. It assigns jurisdiction between the SEC and CFTC, defines when a digital asset is a security or a commodity, and creates the registration framework the industry has demanded for a decade. It is not, on its face, a stablecoin bill; the complete stablecoin framework already passed in GENIUS. But Washington does not respect bill boundaries, and the yield war has annexed it.
The banking lobby’s ask is straightforward: use CLARITY to close the loopholes GENIUS left open. That means extending the interest prohibition from issuers to exchanges and affiliates, killing the rewards programs that pay stablecoin holders today, and blocking any structure that passes reserve income to users. Bank trade groups have made support conditional on those provisions, and enough senators from both parties bank with them, figuratively and literally, to make the demand real.
Crypto’s response arrived the last week of June, when Coinbase announced it could no longer support CLARITY in its current trajectory, precisely because the yield restrictions being negotiated into it would, in the company’s view, entrench the ban permanently. The industry’s most important lobbying force turning against the industry’s most important bill was the loudest possible signal that the yield clause now outweighs the rest of the legislation for the companies whose business models depend on it.
Chairman Scott’s postponement of the markup followed within days. The delay was procedural on its face and structural in substance: there is no current text that both the banks and the crypto industry will accept, and members have little appetite to vote on a bill that one of the two richest lobbies in the country has promised to remember.
The market structure everyone claims to want is now collateral in a fight over a clause most voters have never heard of.
The political calendar sharpens everything. The window before the midterm campaign consumes Congress is measured in weeks, and both lobbies know that a bill that slips past the summer likely slips past the election, into a Congress nobody can predict.
The Regulation Q rhyme
The yield war has a nearly perfect historical precedent, and both sides quote it selectively.
From 1933 until its final repeal in 2011, Regulation Q capped or prohibited the interest American banks could pay on various deposits, a Depression-era rule justified in language strikingly close to today’s: unrestrained competition for deposits would push banks into risky lending and destabilize the system. For four decades the cap was mostly invisible, because market rates sat near the ceiling. Then came the inflation of the 1970s. Market rates ran far above what banks were legally allowed to pay, and savers found themselves holding accounts that lost purchasing power by regulatory design.
The market’s answer was the money market mutual fund, an instrument that did precisely what yield-bearing stablecoins propose to do now: pool customer cash, buy short-term government paper, and pass the interest through. Money funds grew from nothing in 1971 to hundreds of billions by the early 1980s, deposit flight became a named phenomenon, disintermediation, and the banking industry warned in congressional testimony that the funds would destroy community banking and starve the economy of credit. Congress ultimately responded not by banning money funds but by deregulating deposits, phasing out the caps and letting banks compete for money at market rates.
Both sides of the 2026 fight live inside this story. Crypto cites it as proof that yield restrictions always fall, that savers eventually get paid, and that the catastrophic credit predictions never arrived; the banking system that emerged from deregulation was different, and more expensive to fund, but intact. The banks cite the sequel: the savings and loan industry, built entirely on cheap capped deposits, could not survive paying market rates for money, and its collapse consumed a decade and roughly $124 billion of public funds. Deposit competition did not end banking, but it did end the banks whose models required the subsidy.
The rhyme suggests the real question is not whether stablecoin yield eventually becomes legal in some form; the historical base rate says restrictions on paying savers erode. The question is which institutions are the savings and loans of this cycle, funded so completely by the interest-free float that they cannot survive its repricing, and whether they are banks, or the stablecoin issuers whose entire margin is the yield they currently keep.
The banks’ quiet hedge
While the trade associations fight the public war, the banks themselves are behaving like institutions that expect to lose it.
Barclays made the most explicit move, taking a stake in Ubyx, the stablecoin clearing network built to let banks and fintechs redeem stablecoins at par across issuers, the plumbing a bank needs on the day it decides to issue or distribute digital dollars itself. It was the first direct stablecoin infrastructure investment by a major bank since the yield fight broke into the open, and it was not framed as an experiment. Bank executives have begun saying the quiet part in public: if Congress makes yield-bearing digital dollars legal, the banks will go into that business, at scale, the day the ink dries.
The logic is the same one that has played out in every disruption cycle in finance. Banks did not want money market funds in 1975 or online brokerages in 1995, and once each became inevitable, banks became the largest providers of both. A legal yield-bearing stablecoin issued by a money center bank, with deposit-adjacent branding, existing customer relationships, and a balance sheet behind it, is a formidable product, and arguably a more dangerous one to Tether and Circle than to the banks themselves. Consortium efforts like Open USD, whose members built a shared issuance model precisely so no single firm owns the float, exist in part because everyone can see the banks coming.
The infrastructure is converging from the other direction too. Payment-first blockchains designed for regulated issuers, the category examined in the rise of dedicated stablechains, are being built with bank compliance requirements as first-order design constraints, not afterthoughts. The technical gap between a bank deposit and a stablecoin narrows every quarter; the yield clause is the last load-bearing wall between the two products.
That is the tell in this fight. Institutions do not invest in the rails of a product category they expect to strangle. The banks are lobbying to delay the future and provisioning to own it.
What each side gets wrong
The banks’ deposit-flight case has a real weakness at its center: it treats the current deposit franchise as an entitlement. The spread between what banks earn on customer money and what they pay for it is not a law of nature; it is a price maintained by friction, and every prior technology that reduced the friction, from money funds to high-yield online savings, transferred some of that spread to savers without collapsing credit. The system adapted, banks paid more for funding, lending got marginally more expensive, and the economy survived. Framing the next step in that fifty-year process as a $6.6 trillion cliff requires assuming, without much evidence, that this time adaptation is impossible.
Crypto’s consumer-surplus case has a mirror-image weakness: it waves away the run problem. Bank deposits are sticky in a crisis partly because they are insured and partly because moving them is slow. A yield-bearing stablecoin is uninsured and moves at the speed of a tap. In a March 2023-style panic, the same properties that make stablecoins efficient make them the fastest exit door in the system, and a world where a meaningful share of transactional money can flee to tokenized T-bills in an afternoon is a world with a new, untested amplifier under every banking stress. The honest crypto answer is that this risk is manageable with reserve rules and redemption gates; the marketing answer, that it does not exist, is the one that gets said out loud.
There is also a shared blind spot. Both sides model the fight as domestic, and the stablecoin market is not. The majority of dollar stablecoin demand originates outside the United States, from savers and businesses in weak-currency economies for whom the yield question is secondary to the dollar itself. Whatever Congress decides about interest, the offshore float will keep growing, and the deposits it drains first are not in Kansas; they are in Buenos Aires and Lagos and Istanbul. The American fight over yield is, in part, a fight over who gets to monetize a global phenomenon neither side created.
The endgame scenarios
Three broad resolutions are visible from here, and each has a coalition behind it.
The first is the status quo hardened: CLARITY passes with the extended yield ban, rewards programs die, and issuers keep the float. This is the banks’ victory condition. Its weakness is that it is probably temporary, an attempt to legislate against a spread that technology keeps making easier to deliver, enforced against an industry with a sitting president publicly on its side. Prohibitions that fight both technology and the White House have a poor record.
The second is the pass-through world: yield becomes legal, the banks execute their hedge, and within a few years the largest stablecoin issuers in America are the same institutions that spent 2026 warning about them. Deposits reprice, weaker banks consolidate, and the credit system adjusts to more expensive funding, the way it adjusted to money market funds. This is where the investment behavior of the banks themselves suggests the smart money already sits.
The third is stalemate: CLARITY dies this Congress, GENIUS remains the only law, and the yield question migrates to regulators and courts, fought product by product through rewards programs, tokenized money funds, and offshore issuers that Congress never manages to reach. This is the default outcome if the next few weeks produce no text, and default outcomes in a midterm year are heavy favorites.
The watch list for the next few weeks is short and concrete. First, whether Scott reschedules the markup before the August recess, because a markup date means a text exists that leadership believes can survive both lobbies, and no date means the third scenario is winning. Second, the behavior of the pro-crypto Senate bloc, which has to decide whether a CLARITY with a hardened yield ban is worth passing over the industry’s objection, or whether half the coalition walks. Third, the regulatory perimeter fights already underway: how the Treasury implements the GENIUS provisions on affiliates, whether the rewards programs survive their first supervisory challenges, and how aggressively tokenized money market funds, which pay yield legally because they are securities, get marketed as the stablecoin alternative the ban cannot touch. Every one of those is a proxy battle in the same war, and each can move independent of Congress.
It is also worth naming the quiet incentive nobody in the fight advertises: the federal government is a beneficiary of the stablecoin boom regardless of who keeps the yield, because every reserve dollar is demand for Treasury bills at the exact moment deficits need buyers. A Washington that quietly likes the float’s growth has reasons to resolve the fight in whatever way grows it fastest, and that logic, unspoken, may ultimately weigh more than either lobby’s studies.
The $6 trillion number that anchors the fight will keep being quoted whichever path unfolds, and it is worth remembering what it actually is: not a measurement, but a boundary claim, the banks’ estimate of everything they could lose in the world their opponents want. The real number will be discovered the way these numbers always are, one repriced deposit at a time. The only certainty is the direction. Money has spent fifty years migrating toward whoever pays for it, and no clause has ever held that line forever.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Digital asset markets are volatile and you can lose your entire investment. Always do your own research. Information current as of July 6, 2026.
PayPal has reported $486.4 billion in total payment volume for the second quarter on July 28, up 10% year over year. It also confirmed a reorganization that hands crypto its own division inside the company.
The unit, Payment Services & Crypto, sits alongside Checkout Solutions & PayPal and Consumer Financial Services & Venmo. In the same presentation, PayPal listed stablecoins as one of three areas it is expanding into under an “innovating with discipline” heading, next to agentic commerce and identity and biometrics.
Crypto Holdings Cost $81 Million
Further, revenue came in at $8.68 billion, up 5%. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.38 per share against analyst estimates near $1.28. Transaction margin dollars rose 1% to $3.9 billion, and adjusted free cash flow reached $1.83 billion. PayPal raised full-year transaction margin guidance to about $15.6 billion and lifted the low end of its EPS range to roughly $5.38.
Net losses on strategic investments and crypto assets held for investment came to $81 million in the quarter, added back in the reconciliation to non-GAAP net income. The same line ran $74 million in the first quarter. PayPal’s full-year 2025 GAAP earnings carried a positive impact of about $0.14 per share from that portfolio.
PYUSD supply sat near $2.8 billion in mid-July, down from more than $4 billion in March. The token went live natively on Polygon on July 9 through issuer Paxos, and PayPal has said the stablecoin reaches 70 markets.
YouTube began paying US-based creators in PYUSD in December. CryptoPotato has also reported on CoinGecko research showing PYUSD and Societe Generale’s EURCV taking little share while USDT and USDC hold 93.5% of fiat-backed stablecoin supply.
CEO Restructures After Rejecting Stripe
CEO Enrique Lores, who took the role on March 1 after Alex Chriss departed, is targeting at least $1.5 billion in gross run-rate savings over the next two to three years, with about $400 million reached by year-end.
The plan runs to 2029 across three drivers: a simplified structure, operational and portfolio optimization, and accelerated AI adoption, which PayPal expects to deliver around 40% of the savings.
The post PayPal Betting Big on Stablecoins After Disclosing Q2 Results appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Crypto World
Coldcard Exploit Sparks Bitcoin Flight, ‘Bullish’ Crypto Consolidation: Hodler’s Digest,
Cold storage fears after Coldcard users lose $90M in Bitcoin
After $90 million in Bitcoin was drained from Coldcard wallet users, small hodlers desperately sought refuge on centralized exchanges and via alternative custody methods.
Bitcoin transfers below 1 BTC climbed to their highest daily level since 2022 on Friday, with 39,600 BTC moved, according to data shared by CryptoQuant head of research Julio Moreno on Saturday.
The figure was just 300 BTC below the 39,900 BTC transferred on Nov. 16, 2022, days after FTX filed for bankruptcy.
Galaxy Research, the research arm of crypto investment company Galaxy Digital, reported Saturday that the third wave of attacks on users of the hardware wallet on the weekend brought estimated losses to 1,367 BTC ($88.6 million) across 4,585 addresses.
Alex Thorn, Galaxy Digital’s head of firmwide research, warned in an X post on Sunday that the attack was still ongoing and urged users to move funds from Coldcard-generated addresses immediately if they had not already done so. The exploit reportedly targets a flaw in the Coldcard seed generation process, that did not employ a genuinely random number generator.
Clarity Act clock running out: No vote, or ‘no’ vote?
President Donald Trump is considering a revised ethics proposal for the Clarity Act that was devised by Senator Thom Tillis and Senator Ruben Gallego.
The original proposal Trump signed off on would have prevented elected officials from endorsing or profiting from crypto projects and would have been enforced by the Department of Justice. The Democrats don’t trust the DoJ and want the State Attorney Generals to enforce it. The compromise proposal would allow the State AGs to sue the DoJ if it does not properly enforce the rules, rather than allow them to sue elected officials *cough, Trump* directly.
With just five days left on the clock, the chances of any kind of Senate vote on the legislation are receding, much less the three separate votes required to pass the bill. Trump’s $1.4 billion in crypto profits are a particular sticking point, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer introducing a bill (with little hope of passing) called the Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act that targets “executive branch corruption.”
Ethics isn’t the only outstanding issue, with the banks still up in arms over paying any kind of yield on stablecoins, and law enforcement groups divided over the impact of the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. Designed to protect blockchain developers, some argue it would thwart investigations into money laundering and fraud.
Changes to the BRCA proposed by the National Association of Assistant US Attorneys and the National District Attorneys Association look dead in the water. White House crypto advisor Patrick Witt scoffed at the proposals and the claim they resulted from “productive negotiations.”
”This is not even close,” he said.
Crypto ‘no earnings’ reports
Nobody is making much money in crypto right now it seems, at least according to this week’s corporate earnings reports for the second quarter.
Coinbase generated roughly $1.2 billion in net revenue, down 19% from a year earlier. It reported a net loss of $359 million, significantly wider than analysts’ expectations for a $122 million loss. Transaction revenue, subscription and services revenue, and adjusted EBITDA all fell short of consensus estimates.
Strategy’s habit of smash-buying every Bitcoin top, helped it to record an $8.22 billion loss in the second quarter, driven almost entirely by its unrealized losses on its Bitcoin holdings. However, the company also said it has now built a $3.75 billion U.S. dollar reserve, which is enough to cover more than two years of preferred dividend payments and interest obligations.
Online brokerage Robinhood is making loads of money, but not much of it is attributable to crypto. The firm posted record second-quarter revenue and earnings, even as cryptocurrency transaction revenue fell 38% from a year earlier, from $160 million to $100 million.
Crypto enters biggest consolidation phase in history
ARK Invest analyst Lorenzo Valente says the cryptocurrency industry is entering its biggest consolidation phase yet, with revenue increasingly concentrated among a handful of dominant protocols.
Valente noted that perpetual futures exchange Hyperliquid and memecoin launchpad Pump.fun account for roughly 67% of total crypto application revenue between them. Including synthetic dollar protocol Ethena raises the top three’s combined share to nearly 80%.
Valente added that he expects the trend to accelerate in the coming months, leading to more mergers and acquisitions, Chapter 11 bankruptcies, project shutdowns and acqui-hires. Somewhat surprisingly, he concluded that “this is extremely bullish for the space.”
World Cup generated $20B in blockchain prediction market volume
The 2026 FIFA World Cup drove $20 billion in blockchain-based prediction market volume and $24 million in digital collectible trades, with more than 400,000 wallets participating in blockchain-based betting, according to a report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.
The $20 billion figure includes trading before and during the tournament, with bettors placing roughly $5.7 billion in wagers over the five-week World Cup itself. World Cup-related markets accounted for about 63% of all prediction market activity during that period, the report said.
Winners and Losers
At the end of the week, Bitcoin (BTC) is down 3% to trade at $63,350, Ether (ETH) is down 3.5% to trade at $1,879 and XRP (XRP) is down 2.3% and is changing hands for $1.08. The total market cap is at $2.18 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap.
Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin winners of the week are Cardano (ADA) at 14.7%, Uniswap (UNI) at 8%, and Pi (PI) at 3.2%.
The top three altcoin losers of the week are Stable (STABLE) at -16%, Venice Token (VVV) at -14.6% and Lido DAO (LDO) at -14.1%.
Prediction of the Week
Bitcoin may have bottomed before its traditional cycle low
Crypto-focused asset manager Grayscale said that Bitcoin’s price may have bottomed earlier than the traditional four-year cycle, which would imply a cycle low in September or October.
Head of research, Zach Pandl, argued that Bitcoin (BTC) has “grown up” as an asset and is increasingly driven by macroeconomic factors.
“If the Fed forgoes rate hikes and economic growth holds up well, Bitcoin’s price may already have bottomed,” Pandl wrote in a report.
However, people have been peddling this hopium for months now. Earlier in July, crypto brokerage K33 pointed to more than 50% of the Bitcoin supply being held at a loss as another signal of an imminent market bottom. In June, Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten told Cointelegraph that the holdings of long-term investors, which reached an all-time high of 14.7 million Bitcoin, were another signal of an imminent Bitcoin bottom.
Sooner or later, someone will be right.
Top FUD of the Week
The Russians… and the Australians… are after Telegram’s Pavel Durov
Russian authorities have placed Telegram founder Pavel Durov on an international wanted list as they escalate a criminal case accusing him of facilitating terrorist activity.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Wednesday that it had charged Durov with facilitating terrorist activity and issued an international warrant for his arrest, local news agency Interfax reported.
The FSB alleged that Telegram failed to remove channels, chats and bots that Ukrainian intelligence services, alleged terrorist groups and extremist organizations used to coordinate attacks, recruit operatives and conduct cyber fraud.
A defiant Durov said on Thursday the Russians had become “confused about who can ban whom from the Internet.”
Meanwhile the Australian eSafety Commisioner has launched court proceedings against Telegram seeking civil penalties, alleging the platform failed to remove terrorism-related content.
Pump.fun laid off workers before they received millions in PUMP tokens
Solana-based memecoin launchpad Pump.fun reportedly fired employees two months before they were due to receive PUMP tokens worth millions of dollars.
According to a Friday Sandmark report, at least one Pump.fun worker was due to receive PUMP tokens worth in the seven-figure range.
The employees were reportedly fired in April, just two months before they were due to start receiving the company’s tokens based on agreements signed in 2025.
Trump teleprompter operator accused over Kalshi bets leaves government
A White House teleprompter operator accused of using inside knowledge to profit from prediction market bets on President Donald Trump’s speeches no longer works for the federal government, according to the Associated Press.
Perez was accused of using nonpublic information to make more than $100,000 betting on Kalshi prediction markets tied to Trump’s speeches, according to an earlier ABC News report.
Best Magazine Stories of the Week
Crypto’s fundamentals have never been stronger, yet degens keep chasing hot new narratives. Behavioral finance may explain why get-rich-quick stories continue to beat substance.
DeFi projects that survived the fallout from the Terra and FTX collapses in 2022 are dying out in 2026. But analysts say it’s not a case of industry consolidation — but the opposite.
Cointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.
XRP-backed exchange-traded funds (ETFs) pulled in $27.29 million in July, marking a fourth straight month of net inflows.
The token itself trades near $1.08, down roughly 40% since the start of the year, in line with a generally poorly preforming crypto market. But many expect intuitional money and these products to be bolstering XRP, and others.
Instituional Money
Cumulative XRP ETF inflows now sit near $1.5 billion, the largest total among altcoin products. The price keeps sliding anyway.
XRP funds have ranked first or second in monthly inflows since April, without barely any outflows. Inflows ran $81.59 million in April, $131.94 million in May, $59.46 million in June, and $27.29 million in July, showing the pace has cooled even as the streak holds.
That steady buying stands out against a market where fresh capital keeps concentrating in a handful of tokens. Several smaller altcoin funds recorded no net flows in July. XRP kept adding, even at a slower pace.
Why the Price Isn’t Following the Flows
Steady ETF demand alone hasn’t lifted XRP’s price. Some of the pressure traces to a specific seller. Grayscale chief executive Peter Mintzberg filed to sell XRP ETF shares he acquired before the fund’s listing. He priced the sale at $20.45 a share, about half what earlier Grayscale insiders got in January.
Momentum indicators tell a similar story. XRP recently hit its most oversold readings on record. Traders remain split on whether the sell-off has finished.
Competition for capital plays a role too. Solana funds have pulled in about $1.15 billion since launch, edging back into second place in July. Hyperliquid funds added roughly $293 million in May and June before posting a first monthly outflow in July.
Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) funds still dominate the category. They pulled in $172 million and $365 million in July, respectively.
Steady ETF buying shows institutional appetite for XRP has not faded. Whether that demand eventually lifts the price may depend on the broader altcoin market finding its footing first.
The post XRP ETFs Keep Drawing Cash, So Why Is the Price Down 40%? appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Cardano (ADA) price jumped nearly 10% in 24 hours to around $0.189, as the network turned its attention to the Dijkstra era following the van Rossem upgrade.
The rally suggests investors are pricing in the scalability roadmap rather than the upgrade already delivered.
What the Dijkstra Era Will Bring to Cardano
The Dijkstra era refers to Cardano’s next major development phase. Intersect, the organization supporting the network’s open development and governance, confirmed planning has begun.
The timing follows a completed milestone. The van Rossem hard fork, enacted on July 18, upgraded the protocol to Version 11, improving Plutus performance, ledger consistency, and node security.
Dijkstra will arrive in phases rather than as a single event. Key features include Nested Transactions, Linear Leios and Peras, all part of the broader Ouroboros Leios research programme.
The goal is throughput without compromise. Those upgrades aim to increase transaction capacity and support more complex applications while preserving decentralization and security.
Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens.
A concrete deadline exists. The Haskell node team aims to deliver Nested Transactions and Linear Leios to the mainnet by the end of 2026. Governance work runs alongside the roadmap. Intersect defines a process that lets stakeholders shape the scope of hard forks beyond the initial Dijkstra release.
Even the name remains open, with discussions leaning toward Alexander Esgen and Fabian von Bergen as alternatives.
Can the Roadmap Sustain ADA’s Rally
Cardano researcher Dr. Cuadrado framed the distinction clearly. Van Rossem improved core performance and security, while Dijkstra addresses significantly higher transaction volumes and more sophisticated on-chain applications.
He emphasized the network’s deliberate, research-driven approach, contrasting it with projects that prioritize marketing over architectural rigor.
Other items appeared in Intersect’s latest weekly update. A new minPoolCost and Plutus memory parameter action is open for voting, alongside audited Constitutional Committee election results. Infrastructure progress continued, too. The CAP Portal reached alpha launch, and the Eryx ZK Bridge was completed.
The market response looks constructive but deserves context. ADA still trades roughly 95% below its record high of $3.09, set in September 2021, and a 10% daily move remains modest against the token’s historical volatility.
Roadmap announcements carry execution risk. Cardano upgrades have frequently generated initial enthusiasm followed by consolidation when timelines stretch.
The end-of-2026 target leaves ample room for slippage. Nested Transactions and Linear Leios both depend on research that continues evolving.
Sustained price gains will likely require measurable adoption. Developer activity, new applications, and rising total value locked matter more than announcements alone.
For now, the rally reflects renewed confidence in Cardano’s technical direction. Whether that confidence translates into lasting demand depends on what actually ships over the coming months.
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The post ADA Price Jumps 10% While Cardano Turns Toward Its Next Big Upgrade Era appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Brent crude tumbled 9% intraday on Sunday evening. It slid from a previous close of $91.03 to a low of $82.83 after US President Donald Trump said talks with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz begin Monday afternoon.
The price later clawed back some ground to trade near $84.06, still down 7.66% on the day.
Another Walk-Back, or Real Peace?
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that negotiations start the following afternoon. He made the comment a day after he called off what he described as a massive planned attack on Iran.
Trump said Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Iran itself all asked him to hold off. He said the request signals every side expects a Hormuz deal, with a separate nuclear agreement to follow.
Saudi state media confirmed part of that account. It reported that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pushed Trump toward deescalation in a weekend phone call. Iran tells a different story.
State media gave no sign Tehran had shifted its stance on the strait. The semi-official Fars news agency went further and denied Iran ever asked Trump to pause the strikes, mocking his account directly.
“Trump the fool has run out of steam!”
— Fars news agency, via CNN
Uncertainty Continues to Plague the Markets
The exchange fits a pattern. Trump credits regional pressure, not his own advisers, each time he delays a strike. He still maintains on social media that US forces stand ready to resume action at any moment.
Any nuclear deal would build on the memorandum of understanding both sides signed in June. That agreement gave both sides 60 days to negotiate, and the window is now closing.
The uncertainty already hits consumers and markets on both sides. Americans pay more at the pump as shipping and output disruptions persist. Months of conflict have strained Iran’s own economy.
Every Trump signal has whipsawed oil traders since, including Wednesday’s 9.6% Hormuz-linked jump that preceded this latest reversal.
Monday’s talks may still produce only another delay. Tehran remains publicly unmoved, and the MoU clock keeps running out.
The post Oil Plunges 9% as Trump Sets Monday Talks to Reopen Hormuz appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Grok AI predicts a major re-rating for Bitcoin, and this price prediction is unusual in its timeframe, targeting the end of 2027 rather than 2026. From today’s roughly $64,000 levels, well below the 2025 all-time high near $126,000, the bull case runs to $200,000 to $250,000 or higher.
The setup rests on sustained ETF inflows and institutional accumulation continuing to build. US spot ETFs already hold approximately 1.2 million BTC, roughly 6% of total supply, with corporate treasuries, pensions, and wealth platforms all expanding their allocations at the same time.
Regulatory clarity is named as a second major pillar. US market structure legislation, combined with global regulatory frameworks, is expected to reduce the risk premium investors have historically attached to holding Bitcoin.
Macro tailwinds round out the case with monetary easing, broader liquidity expansion, and rising demand for hedges against non-dollar and fiat debasement. Grok also points to the fixed 21 million coin supply, with the next halving approaching in 2028, tightening issuance even further, while ETFs and treasuries are already absorbing multiple times the amount of newly mined supply entering the market.
Growing adoption of sovereign and corporate treasuries is framed as the final piece. Grok argues these catalysts align with historical cycle dynamics and established scarcity models, positioning Bitcoin to reclaim and exceed its prior highs as the premier digital store of value.
The bear case here is treated as mild but genuinely possible. If ETF outflows persist for a prolonged period, regulation gets delayed, or monetary policy stays tighter than expected, Grok sees Bitcoin remaining range-bound in the $60,000 to $100,000 zone straight through 2027.
Bitcoin Price Prediction: BTC Has Spent Six Months Rebuilding From The Same Low Twice, Can Grok AI Predicts Work out?
Price closed at $63,931, down 1.21%, during a session that ranged between $63,547 and $65,340. That quiet red day sits almost exactly on top of a level this chart has visited and defended more than once this year.
Zoom out, and the shape since October 2025 has been a long, uneven decline. Bitcoin peaked near $128,000 that month, then broke down hard through January, gapping from above $92,000 to under $76,000 in a matter of weeks.
Since that crash, price built a rounded recovery through spring, peaking near $99,000 in April, then rolled over into a sharp flush down to $60,000 in June. A second recovery attempt through May pushed toward $82,000 before failing and dragging the price back down to retest that same $60,000 floor in June and July.
That is two separate visits to the same support level within a matter of months, which makes $60,000 one of the more tested lines on this entire chart. Support sits right there at $60,000, with limited recent history below it, before the price moves into territory not seen this year.
Resistance stacks at $66,000, then $70,000, then the heavier April ceiling near $99,000 that has already rejected two full rally attempts. Momentum here is mildly negative after today’s session, consistent with a market still consolidating rather than committing to a clear direction.
For Grok’s bull case to gain real traction over its multi-year timeframe, Bitcoin eventually needs to clear $99,000, a level this exact chart has failed at twice already. Until that happens, the current price action looks much closer to the bear-case range this prediction lays out than to the start of a run toward six figures.
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The post Grok AI Predicts Bitcoin Will Blow Past Its Old Record by End of 2027 appeared first on Cryptonews.
Japan could formally confirm joint currency action with Washington on Monday, and one official told Reuters the operation is still ongoing, turning the announcement into a live market event.
Bitcoin trades near $63,000, exposed to a bond market problem most crypto traders have not priced.
The Bond Market Reason Behind the Cooperation
The 2011 comparison matters more than it appears. That year the Group of Seven (G7) sold yen to stop it rising, meaning this is the first coordinated effort in 15 years pushing the currency the opposite direction.
Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama will make the announcement, two officials told Reuters. Her top currency diplomat, Atsushi Mimura, signaled the ministry now works in close coordination with monetary policy.
That phrasing carries weight. It suggests Tokyo will pair intervention with the rate hikes the Bank of Japan hinted at last week, rather than relying on purchases alone.
A quieter development may matter more. Japan’s finance ministry made a rare English-language post on X noting it holds a broad range of tools, including access to the Federal Reserve repurchase facility.
The mechanism deserves attention. Introduced in 2020, the facility lets Japan raise dollar liquidity without selling US Treasuries outright.
Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens.
Critics flagged exactly that constraint. Funding intervention by liquidating Japan’s enormous Treasury holdings risks triggering a selloff in American debt and spiking yields.
Washington’s motivation becomes clearer through that lens. Analysts see the cooperation driven partly by concern over rising Treasury yields, which would worsen if Tokyo failed to stabilize both the yen and Japanese government bonds.
Former Bank of Japan official Nobuyasu Atago framed the logic directly. Both countries risk inflation running hot and leaving their central banks behind the curve, so they see merits in cooperating.
What Bitcoin Traders Should Watch on Monday
Tokyo is managing domestic pressure too. Economy Minister Minoru Kiuchi said Sunday the government will improve market communication, stressing the importance of maintaining trust in Japan’s fiscal sustainability.
Bitcoin traders should care about that bond angle specifically. Rising global yields compete directly with non-yielding assets, and Japanese government bond stress has repeatedly spilled into crypto this year.
“How will global risk assets respond if the world’s largest carry trade begins to unwind? The answers won’t come overnight. But one thing is clear. A story that started in the currency market could end up influencing everything from stocks to Bitcoin…,” Wise Advice said on X.
Positioning amplifies the risk. Non-commercial yen short contracts reached 163,412 by late July, leaving substantial leverage exposed to any sudden reversal. The immediate question is credibility rather than firepower.
Markets will test whether Monday’s confirmation carries a rate commitment or only a purchase pledge.
A hawkish pairing changes the calculus considerably. Rate differentials close permanently when policy shifts, whereas interventions fade once the buying stops.
That distinction shapes both scenarios for Bitcoin. Aggressive yen appreciation forces leveraged unwinding across risk assets, while gradual strengthening alongside a softer dollar could expand liquidity instead.
Timing determines everything here. Asian markets open first on Monday, and any gap in USD/JPY will reach crypto before American traders react.
“If the US sells dollars to buy yen, the dollar weakens and USD/JPY falls. Normally, this supports Bitcoin, gold and tech stocks. But there is a major catch: A rapid yen rally could unwind one of the world’s largest carry trades. Investors who borrowed cheap yen to buy stocks, crypto and other higher-yielding assets may be forced to sell…,” Coin Bureau noted.
The rate gap remains the structural anchor. Japan holds policy at 1% against a considerably higher US ceiling, and no intervention closes that on its own.
Watch the Japanese bond market alongside the currency. If yields stay contained after the announcement, the coordinated defense is working, and Bitcoin’s macro headwind eases with it.
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The post Japan Could Trigger the Biggest Market Shock of 2026: How Might Bitcoin React? appeared first on BeInCrypto.
“This is what modern warfare looks like, and it further illustrates there’s no plan to win a war with Iran,” Walz said.
Emphasizing comments that he recently shared on X, Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that it would be reasonable for Iran to attempt cyber attacks as a “warning” that it is prepared to retaliate for U.S. strikes.
And Parsi tells TIME that Iran is more than capable of fulfilling the threat.
“Iran is a highly capable cyber power, only one tier below the U.S., China, and Russia, and in some aspects on par with Israel,” he says. “It has in the past demonstrated a clear ability to target industrial control systems, water facilities, and energy infrastructure.”
The joint statement issued last week by federal agencies also underscored Iran’s cyber capabilities. “Iranian cyber actors continue to target U.S. critical infrastructure,” said Assistant Director Brett Leatherman of the FBI’s Cyber Division. However, he added, “The FBI is committed to identifying, disrupting, and imposing costs on those responsible. Sharing timely, actionable intelligence is a critical part of that work.”
Crypto World
Robinhood’s Q2 Revenue Hits Record $1.31B as Prediction Markets Fuel 10x Surge in Event Contracts
Robinhood posted record second-quarter net revenue of $1.31 billion, up 32% year-over-year, as activity across prediction markets, options, and equities helped offset a sharp decline in crypto income.
The company’s transaction-based revenue jumped 44% to $776 million during the quarter. Event contracts emerged as one of its fastest-growing businesses.
In fact, revenue from event contracts reached $156 million, more than 10 times higher than a year earlier. The number of contracts traded also surged more than 10x to a record 13.6 billion.
Prediction Markets Steal the Spotlight
Speaking about the growth of prediction markets, Chairman and CEO Vlad Tenev said that the space has grown steadily since March and expects the momentum to continue. Robinhood launched Rothera, a CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse, in June through its joint venture with Susquehanna International Group. The company said more than 3.5 billion event contracts had been traded to date.
Meanwhile, options remained another major contributor, generating $342 million in revenue. This figure was up by 29% year-over-year. Equities revenue climbed even more sharply, rising 95% to $129 million as equity notional trading volumes reached a record $956 billion, an 85% increase from the same period last year.
The strong performance across these businesses came despite weaker cryptocurrency activity. Robinhood’s crypto revenue fell 38% year-over-year to $100 million, while crypto notional trading volume stood at $40 billion, including $18 billion from its app and $22 billion from Bitstamp.
Global Push
The online brokerage is pushing deeper into blockchain and digital assets internationally. It unveiled the public mainnet for Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 network designed for financial services and real-world assets, while also announcing stock tokens for eligible users in more than 120 countries.
In May, it launched Agentic Trading, which allows customers to use AI-powered agents to trade equities, options, and crypto. Nearly 100,000 customers have opened Agentic Trading accounts so far, with more than $100 million in assets under custody.
During the quarter, the company expanded its international footprint by closing its acquisition of WonderFi, a Canadian digital asset products and services platform. The move marked its official entry into the Canadian market.
Tenev also pointed to the broader expansion strategy, saying
“Whether it’s the Robinhood Chain, Robinhood Ventures, or Trump Accounts, our product velocity is focused on one goal: making everyone an owner. Broad ownership is essential to a free, stable, and prosperous society.”
The post Robinhood’s Q2 Revenue Hits Record $1.31B as Prediction Markets Fuel 10x Surge in Event Contracts appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Craig Wright, the Australian who long claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, resurfaced with a sharp critique of Bitcoin current governance.
His argument centers on a single idea: the base protocol should never change, and anyone who can change it holds too much power.
Why Wright Wants Bitcoin Rules Permanently Fixed
Protocol immutability means the fundamental rules of a blockchain remain permanently fixed, with no upgrades altering how the system works. Wright argues that the principle defines genuine decentralization.
In a series of posts on X, the self-proclaimed Satoshi targeted what he described as control by a small circle of developers. Bitcoin, he wrote, was designed as the opposite of a system in which a group can rewrite the rules and isolate dissenters.
Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens.
The protocol must remain immutable, according to Wright, so no developer, miner, exchange, or corporation can alter it for private gain. Stable rules would create a level playing field.
Businesses could then compete without fearing that a future upgrade undermines their investments. Innovation, in his view, belongs at the application layer.
He expanded on the point in a follow-up post, highlighting what he sees as a contradiction. Many who called him a fraud for defending fixed rules simultaneously defend developers who can restrict capacity and set consensus.
Wright also challenged the popular narrative around running a full node. A home node without hash power cannot produce blocks, order transactions, or compel the network to follow its preferences, he said.
“…Bitcoin was never supposed to depend upon trusting the correct developers. It was designed to remove that power entirely. The rules are fixed; everyone competes above them. If you opposed me because I wanted an open protocol that no individual could change, ask yourself what you were actually defending—and who truly benefited from it…,” Wright exposed on X.
Why the Satoshi Controversy Undermines Wright’s Argument
Node operation may verify data for its owner, he argued, but it does not govern. Running nodes has been marketed as a form of sovereignty, while economic power has shifted toward exchanges and custodians.
Capacity limits push ordinary users away from direct on-chain transactions and toward centralized services, he claimed, reversing the system’s original intent.
His posts also addressed Bitcoin’s evolving public story. The marketing moved from electronic cash to digital gold, then to a store of value, and recently toward promises of generational wealth.
“…the limits pushed ordinary users away from direct transactions and towards exchanges, custodians, payment channels and other middlemen. You were taught that running powerless software at home made you independent while the economic system became increasingly dependent upon centralised services…,” Wright noted.
Wright dismissed that framing as unrealistic. A multi-trillion-dollar asset cannot repeat its early exponential returns, and market capitalization does not equal cash realizable without collapsing prices.
The critique arrives with substantial baggage, however. A United Kingdom High Court ruled in 2024 that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, finding he had forged documents on an extensive scale.
He later received a suspended prison sentence for contempt of court after breaching orders related to that case. Those rulings undercut the authority his claims once carried within the industry.
The underlying debates remain genuine nonetheless. Scaling, protocol rigidity, and the balance of power between developers, miners, and users have divided Bitcoin for a decade.
Whether his comments shift any minds seems doubtful. They do reaffirm a position he has held consistently, regardless of what courts concluded about his identity.
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The post The Self-Proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto Attacks Bitcoin Governance Model appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Lennox Lewis delivers honest verdict on Anthony Joshua’s current ability after Prenga fight
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