“We are seeing the same setup now. If history repeats, ETH could be gearing up for one of its biggest runs yet,” the analyst concluded.

The value of SpaceX’s longest-dated series of bonds shriveled to 90.7 cents on the dollar this week while their effective yield sank to a junk bond-like rate of 7.5%.

This is despite bond investors lending Elon Musk’s company billions of dollars and signaling their willingness to delay principal maturity until 2056.

The 9.3% collapse ranks SpaceX’s long bonds dead last among 1,450 benchmark corporate notes rated US investment-grade “BBB.”

The notes’ credit spread, i.e. the extra yield lenders demand for taking idiosyncratic SpaceX risk, has worsened from 175 basis points at issuance to 231.

At the same time, the stock price of Musk’s company has also been cratering from its high and even trading below its IPO price, so it is not surprising to see the value of its bonds follow suit.

A collapse from highs to lows at SpaceX

For obvious reasons, bond prices typically correlate to quick downturns in common stock prices of the corporate issuer.

Fear is often company-wide and not usually unique to its creditworthiness as distinct from its general business prospects. 

A bond trader at Post Oak Group explained the irony of SpaceX needing to raise capital from bond markets so early into its life as a public company.

“Two weeks after the largest IPO in history, SpaceX is already tapping debt markets while carrying a $5 billion net loss and CapEx [capital expenditures] that more than doubled year over year,” he told CNBC. 

Indeed, SpaceX’s own filings show company-wide CapEx jumping 86% to $20.7 billion — not quite double, but close enough.

Meanwhile, SpaceX also absorbed more money-losing operations from the Grok side of X, the xAI segment which has lost $6.4 billion from operations.

Worse, SpaceX started subsidizing xAI in the middle of an AI industry-wide borrowing binge. Nvidia, SpaceX, and Amazon unloaded $75 billion of bonds on investors in a matter of weeks, emptying bond traders’ pocketbooks right when SpaceX needed to borrow more.

With lots of supply, the answer is predictable: lower prices.

Europe’s MiCA licensing pipeline added 14 more crypto-asset service providers to ESMA’s interim Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) register in the second post-deadline update, bringing momentum down from the larger first wave after the transitional period ended.

According to an ESMA update published on Thursday, the total number of licensed crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) now stands at 294. The latest entries include Ripple Payments Europe (Ripple’s European payments business), Bison Bank based in Portugal, and Croatia’s state-owned Hrvatska poštanska banka (HPB).

Key takeaways

• ESMA added 14 CASPs in the latest MiCA register update, taking the licensed total to 294.
• Banking groups are prominent among new entrants, including institutions from Germany, Portugal, and Croatia.
• EMT and ART registers did not change: 21 EMT issuers remain unchanged, and ART still lists no approved issuers.
• ESMA also expanded its non-compliant list by two entities after actions by Italy’s CONSOB.

MiCA register slows after an initial surge

ESMA’s latest expansion arrives after a more aggressive update on July 3, when the regulator added 37 CASPs in its first major post-deadline roll-out following the end of MiCA’s transitional period. The difference in scale—37 entries the first time versus 14 this update—suggests a shift from the fastest initial licensing push into a steadier, slower cadence.

Still, the register’s upward trajectory remains important for firms planning market entry. For investors and market participants, the register functions as an on-the-record signal of which providers are operating under MiCA’s licensing umbrella, rather than relying only on voluntary or transitional arrangements.

Banks and payment providers extend regulated crypto services

The newest CASP entries underscore how established financial institutions continue to embed crypto services within regulated frameworks. Alongside Ripple Payments Europe and the banks already named, ESMA’s update includes German cooperative banks Volksbank Schwarzwald-Donau-Neckar and Raiffeisenbank Auerbach-Freihung.

ESMA also listed Kaiser Partner Privatbank, a Liechtenstein-based private banking group, further expanding the footprint of wealth and private banking providers offering crypto-related services under MiCA.

The latest additions build on a broader pattern already visible in ESMA’s interim register, which includes dozens of traditional finance firms—such as Spain’s BBVA and CaixaBank, Germany’s Commerzbank, France’s CACEIS Bank, and Standard Chartered Luxembourg.

EMT and ART issuance remains largely static

While CASP licensing activity continues to progress, ESMA reported no changes to two token-specific registers that track stable-value and reference-asset products.

For electronic money tokens (EMTs)—crypto-assets designed to maintain a stable value against a single official currency—ESMA’s register remains at 21 unique issuers. For asset-referenced tokens (ARTs), which are designed to track multiple assets such as currencies or commodities, the register continues to show no approved issuers.

That divergence matters because it points to uneven readiness across MiCA’s product categories. CASPs can continue onboarding under MiCA’s service rules, while token issuance—particularly ARTs—appears to be moving at a slower pace.

Non-compliant register adds two entities

Separately from the licensed CASP framework, ESMA also updated its non-compliant register by adding Reversal Investment Group and Kortex.

ESMA said the additions followed enforcement actions by Italy’s securities regulator, the Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa (CONSOB). With these additions, the non-compliant list now totals 164 entries, including crypto exchange MEXC.

For market participants, non-compliant listings are a caution flag: they indicate entities that ESMA deems to be outside MiCA’s compliance expectations. Traders and users looking for regulatory clarity typically treat the contrast between the licensed register and the non-compliant register as a practical guide for due diligence.

What to watch next

With ESMA’s CASP register continuing to climb—while EMT and especially ART approvals remain comparatively constrained—investors should watch whether token issuance accelerates in the next updates and how quickly the gap between service-provider licensing and token product approvals narrows under MiCA.

Argentine court has ordered the identification of holders behind 25 cryptocurrency wallets and frozen assets linked to the $LIBRA token investigation after authorities traced millions of dollars across multiple blockchain networks.

According to Argentine newspaper Clarín, Federal Judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi issued the order after reviewing a report from the Cybercrime Technical Department of the Argentine Federal Police, which reconstructed the movement of crypto assets linked to the $LIBRA case from May onward. 

The order seeks account holder identities, know-your-customer records, IP addresses, transaction histories, and other information that could identify those behind the transactions.

The latest measure centers on 25 wallets believed to have handled part of the money left with the creators of the $LIBRA token following its failed launch in February 2025. The judge also instructed authorities to freeze assets associated with those wallets, although it remains unclear whether the funds are still held there or have already been transferred elsewhere.

Court documents reviewed by the publication reconstructed the activity of eight wallets identified as the “Libra Team,” which investigators linked to the token’s creation and the withdrawal of investor funds after Argentine President Javier Milei promoted the project on social media. During that period, the token’s price briefly surged before collapsing within minutes.

According to the report, token creator Hayden Davis previously said roughly $110 million remained under his control after the launch. Investigators found that four of the eight Libra Team wallets consolidated funds into a single wallet identified as “61yk.”

Investigators trace funds through exchanges

The police report stated that wallet “61yk” had remained frozen for nearly six months under an order from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which is handling a separate case involving Davis.

After the restriction was lifted, investigators alleged the wallet redistributed funds using what the report described as a “digital smurfing” strategy, breaking larger balances into smaller transfers to make the transactions harder to follow or eventually convert into fiat currency.

Authorities traced a major movement on May 10, when 498,539 USDT was transferred through a cross-chain interoperability protocol to a wallet on the Tron network. The receiving wallet then split the funds into 17 separate transactions in what investigators described as another attempt to obscure the trail.

The Federal Police report found that at least 10 of those transactions passed through Binance, while eight wallets were linked to Bybit, two to OKX, and another two to Bitfinex. Because centralized exchanges generally require customer identity verification, investigators believe those transfers could help identify some of the individuals involved, although the report noted that some platforms may not hold KYC information for every account.

Crypto analyst Fernando Molina, who has independently tracked the movement of $LIBRA funds, previously estimated that about $8.2 million remained dormant before becoming active again in May through wallets now under judicial scrutiny. 

Separate information reviewed by Clarín indicates that the remaining funds are managed through a trust established by Davis, which is intended to distribute grants to Argentine companies as part of a proposed revival of the project before the end of the year. Earlier reports said the trust had already received 71 grant applications.

Bitcoin (BTC) has been counting down to its next bottom for nearly two months, a classic onchain metric suggests.

Key points:

• BTC supply in loss passed 50% for the first time this bear market in early June.
• In previous bear markets, that event sparked a countdown to a new BTC price macro bottom.
• Separate data hints that the bull market’s “emotional premium” has now gone.

Supply in loss countdown already Bitcoin’s second-longest

In its H1 2026 Round-Up report, crypto research company K33 Research flagged more than 50% of the BTC supply now being held at a loss.

A typical bear-market feature, supply in loss has become a yardstick for progress toward macro bottoms for BTC/USD.

K33 data shows that once supply in loss passes the 50% mark, the bottom has come no more than 101 days later. Bear markets have provided various time frames, with the shortest bottom “window” lasting just 13 days in 2022.

The 2018 bear market required 23 days to reach its floor, while in 2014, Bitcoin continued to decline for 101 days after the 50% supply-in-loss mark was hit. 

In 2026, supply in loss repeated standard bear-market behavior, crossing 50% on June 5. Since then, 42 days have elapsed, making this year’s bottom window Bitcoin’s second-longest ever.

BTC supply in loss and days until bear-market bottom (screenshot). Source: K33 Research

In accompanying commentary, K33 observed that returns over the year following the phenomenon “tend to be very solid.”

Earlier this month, Axel Adler Jr., a contributor to onchain analytics platform CryptoQuant, estimated that supply in loss was around two months away from levels that correspond to bear-market bottoms.

CryptoQuant data puts supply in loss at 46% as of July 17.

“Distribution of capital” teases silver lining

Continuing, CryptoQuant eyed what it described as “rare” readings from Bitcoin investor cost-basis models.

Related: Bitcoin $107K buyers providing ‘early signals’ of 2026 bear-market bottom: Glassnode

The realized cap variance (RCV) model, which measures the difference between realized cap and market cap, currently sits in the bottom six percent of its historical range.

“Instead of tracking price alone, it isolates the variance between realized cap and market cap relative to its own rolling history, capturing how stretched or compressed investor cost basis has become versus current valuation,” contributor Crazzyblockk explained in a QuickTake blog post on Thursday. 

“When that variance compresses into deeply negative z-score territory, the emotional premium built during rallies has largely been priced out. The metric doesn’t read narrative, it reads the distribution of capital.”

Bitcoin RCV data (screenshot). Source: CryptoQuant

At -2.35, standardized RCV’s Z-score is once again pointing to the final stages of the Bitcoin bear market.

“Every prior stretch where the model spent extended time below a -2.0 z-score, late 2018, mid-2022, early 2015, preceded forward twelve-month returns north of 75%,” the post noted. 

“The most extreme reading in this dataset, -4.68 in November 2018, landed almost exactly on Bitcoin’s cycle bottom near $3,792.”

Bitcoin fell to about $63,000 on Friday, down 1.7% over 24 hours and 2.2% on the week, as a deepening selloff in chipmakers dragged risk assets lower, per CoinDesk data. Ether held better at $1,836, still up 2.4% over seven days, while Hyperliquid led the losses at 8% on the day and 12% on the week.

Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 1.8% and S&P 500 contracts fell 0.9% as a semiconductor ETF slid 3% in premarket trading. Taiwanese stocks fell into a technical correction and Asia’s main benchmark hit a two-month low. Europe held up better on lower tech exposure.

The question driving it is the one that has hung over the sector all month. Chipmakers are under scrutiny over whether the hundreds of billions that AI hyperscalers are spending will produce the returns to justify their valuations, and TSMC’s results this week did not settle it.

Crypto is following the same current it has all quarter. This week’s soft inflation print gave bitcoin a lift toward $65,000, but that was a macro trade, and the chip selloff is pulling the other way. The Fed meets July 28 and 29.

He built the app that made stock trading free, sat at the center of the GameStop crisis, launched a blockchain, dismissed memecoins, embraced one six days later, and runs an AI company chasing mathematical superintelligence on the side.

Most crypto figures are one thing. Vlad Tenev is the chief executive of a publicly listed American brokerage, the person who made retail stock trading free and then had to explain to Congress what free actually cost, a blockchain founder, an advisor to a decentralized perpetuals exchange, and the co-founder of an artificial intelligence company trying to build mathematical superintelligence. In July 2026 he did all of those jobs in the same fortnight, and in the middle of it dismissed memecoins on television and then endorsed one on X. Understanding him is less about biography than about a pattern that repeats: Tenev builds the infrastructure for a kind of trading he describes as serious, and the traffic that shows up is not.

The company he built

Tenev co-founded Robinhood with Baiju Bhatt. The pitch was simple and, at the time, radical: stock trading with no commissions, on a phone, designed for people who had never owned a brokerage account. It worked. Robinhood now serves roughly 28 million customers across 38 countries and trades on Nasdaq under HOOD.

The name almost was not Robinhood. Before settling on it, the founders called the company CashCat, a detail preserved in a New Yorker profile and largely forgotten until 2026, when a memecoin on Robinhood’s own blockchain resurrected it and briefly reached a $156 million market capitalization. Tenev had tweeted about the CashCat name himself back in April 2021, which meant the lore was documented and personally acknowledged long before anyone tokenized it.

The commission-free model is what everything else follows from, and it is not what most users think. Robinhood does not charge commissions because it routes customer orders to market makers who pay for that flow. The practice is called payment for order flow, and the economics rest on retail orders being valuable precisely because they are uninformed. That structure made Robinhood large, made it controversial, and, as of 2026, has been rebuilt on a blockchain by a company Tenev advises.

GameStop, and what it proved

In January 2021, Robinhood ended up at the center of the most chaotic retail trading episode in modern American history. GameStop’s stock, propelled by a retail crowd largely trading on Robinhood, ran to levels that threatened the firms on the other side. Robinhood restricted buying in the affected names. The decision triggered accusations that the platform had sided with institutions against its own users, congressional hearings, and a durable reputational cost that shaped how the company is read to this day.

The technical explanation, that clearing house collateral requirements spiked and the firm had to restrict activity to meet them, is broadly accepted and did little to change the narrative. The episode fixed Robinhood in the public imagination as the company that democratized trading right up until democratization became expensive.

It also proved something about the business. In the second quarter of 2021, 62% of Robinhood’s crypto revenue came from Dogecoin. A single joke asset produced the majority of a public company’s crypto business. Robinhood has never been a stranger to speculative retail enthusiasm. It has monetized it repeatedly, and the July 2026 memecoin episode is the third act of a pattern rather than a departure from one.

The blockchain bet

On July 1, 2026, Tenev unveiled the blockchain he launched at a livestream from the Old Royal Naval College in London, billed as The World is Flat and described by the company as its most ambitious global expansion and product vision to date.

The architecture was serious. Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum layer 2 built on Arbitrum’s Orbit stack, using ether for gas, running roughly 100-millisecond block times, and settling to Ethereum mainnet. Its flagship product is Stock Tokens: on-chain instruments tracking equities including Nvidia, Apple, and Alphabet, tradeable around the clock and usable in DeFi. The launch stack included Chainlink for oracle pricing, BitGo for custody, Uniswap for liquidity, Morpho for lending, and Lighter for perpetual futures inside Robinhood Wallet.

The business logic is visible in the earnings. Robinhood’s crypto transaction revenue fell 47% year over year to $134 million in the first quarter of 2026, and native-app crypto trading volume dropped 48% to $24 billion. The company cut roughly 10% of its workforce, about 290 people, weeks before the launch. Total revenue of $1.07 billion and platform assets up 39% to $307 billion show the wider business is healthy, but the chain is an explicit attempt to swap volatile transaction revenue for infrastructure income. Tenev is not experimenting. He is trying to own the rails.

The strategy has a wrinkle worth knowing: Stock Tokens are structured as tokenized debt securities, conferring no shareholder rights and no legal ownership of the underlying shares, and they are unavailable to US persons. The CEO of an American brokerage built a tokenized equity product his American customers cannot buy.

The six days

The sequence that defines his 2026 is short enough to state precisely.

On July 2, the day after the chain went live, Tenev told CNBC that the future of crypto is in real-world assets, drawing an explicit line between productive tokenized assets and speculative tokens without underlying utility. His formulation was that an asset not tied to an underlying utility is not a productive asset.

On July 8, as CASHCAT climbed toward a nine-figure market capitalization on his own chain, he posted on X that while the company is building Robinhood Chain to be the best chain for real-world assets, it works great for memes too. He followed the token’s account. For the full context, crypto.news has covered his memecoin reversal in full.

Six days. The charitable reading is that a permissionless chain cannot control what deploys on it and a CEO refusing to acknowledge the most visible thing on his own network would look absurd. The uncharitable reading is that the endorsement, however light, told the market what the company actually values, which is volume, and that a regulated brokerage asking institutions to tokenize serious assets on its chain does not advance that case by cheerleading a cat token. Robinhood’s crypto chief stayed on message throughout, insisting the focus remains a secure and scalable foundation for real-world assets.

Both readings are available and Tenev has not resolved them, which may itself be the position.

The trade the market noticed

One episode from July belongs in any honest account, because it is the kind of detail that shapes how a CEO is read.

Filings show Tenev sold 375,000 HOOD shares in early July, at weighted average prices ranging from roughly $112.22 to $118.14, for a total in the region of $43.6 million. Robinhood’s chief legal officer, Daniel Gallagher, sold shares on July 6 for approximately $1.1 million. Robinhood Ventures Fund I sold as well. The sales landed in the same window as the chain launch, the CNBC interview, and the CASHCAT post.

Context matters and cuts in both directions. Tenev continued to hold more than 48.2 million Class B shares after the transaction, so this was a trim rather than an exit, and by any proportional measure a small one. Executive share sales are also routinely conducted under pre-scheduled plans adopted months in advance precisely so that timing cannot be read as signalling, and a sale executed under such a plan carries no information about what the seller thinks. Anyone drawing conclusions from the timing needs to check whether a plan governed it before drawing them.

What is not in dispute is how it looks, and appearance is the currency a consumer brokerage trades in. A chief executive selling $43.6 million of stock during the fortnight he launched a blockchain and amplified a memecoin on it is a set of facts that arrive together whether or not they are connected. Robinhood’s history makes that harder rather than easier: this is the company whose defining crisis was a decision that looked like it served institutions over users, explained afterward by a technical account that was accurate and did not land.

The broader pattern is what makes it worth stating. Tenev’s public communication is consistently accurate at the level of the individual statement and consistently ambiguous at the level of what the company actually wants. Assets without utility do not last, and the chain works great for memes. Robinhood Chain is institutional infrastructure, and its most famous asset is a cat. The stock is a long-term bet, and here is $43.6 million. Each statement defensible, the aggregate unresolved.

That ambiguity may be deliberate, and it may simply be what running a retail brokerage in 2026 requires: the serious story is what persuades institutions and regulators, and the fun story is what brings volume. Tenev has never had to choose, and the July sequence is the clearest example yet of a career spent not choosing.

The other company

The part of Tenev that crypto coverage almost entirely misses is that he co-founded an artificial intelligence company and it is not a side project.

Harmonic was founded in 2023 by Tenev and Tudor Achim, former chief executive of Helm.ai. Its stated goal is building AI systems that can solve complex mathematical problems, an ambition the company calls mathematical superintelligence, with a flagship model named Aristotle. It raised a $100 million Series B in July 2025 at an $875 million valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, and Paradigm.

Note that last name. Paradigm is one of crypto’s largest venture firms, and it is funding the Robinhood CEO’s AI mathematics company. That crossover is not incidental to how Tenev talks about the future.

Because the AI thesis is now inside Robinhood. He has predicted that AI agents will soon trade financial assets as effectively as experienced human traders. The company is building toward it: Robinhood markets its chain as AI-native and is rolling out Agentic Accounts, which let eligible users connect AI models to Robinhood’s data and tools through a Trading MCP so agents can analyze markets and construct strategies while humans retain control of capital. Third parties have gone further, with the agent platform Bankr integrating Robinhood Chain so users can trade tokenized stocks and memecoins by text command on X or Telegram.

There is an asymmetry there worth noticing. Americans are barred from Stock Tokens and barred from perpetual futures through the wallet. Agentic Accounts are rolling out in the United States. The AI trading product is the one Tenev can ship to his home market.

The business nobody covers

Ask what Robinhood’s fastest-growing crypto-adjacent business is and most people will say the chain. They would be wrong.

Robinhood’s prediction markets platform processed more than 12 billion contracts in 2025, including a record 8.5 billion in the fourth quarter alone. On the earnings call, Tenev noted that NBA contracts had overtaken NFL contracts in trading activity, defying expectations that the end of football season would drag volumes down, and pointed to the Winter Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, and March Madness as catalysts for a strong year. He described the business as being at the beginning. Non-sports contracts are contributing too, with a government shutdown contract driving substantial volume. For more context, crypto.news has explained Robinhood’s fastest-growing business.

For context on scale, the company reported record fourth-quarter revenue of $1.28 billion, slightly below Street estimates of $1.34 billion, with earnings of 66 cents per share against a 62-cent consensus.

That business sits inside the same regulatory fight as everything else Tenev touches. The CFTC is asserting exclusive federal jurisdiction over prediction markets, litigating against states, and doing it with a single confirmed commissioner. Whatever happens to Robinhood’s prediction markets will be decided by the same understaffed agency that the CLARITY Act would make crypto’s primary regulator.

Reading him

The pattern across sixteen years is consistent enough to state.

Tenev builds infrastructure for a serious version of retail finance, describes it in serious terms, and then discovers that what retail actually wants is the fun version.

Commission-free trading was democratization until it was GameStop. The crypto business was portfolio diversification until 62% of it was Dogecoin. Robinhood Chain is institutional settlement infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets, and its defining asset is a cat named after a company name he threw away in 2010.

The uncharitable conclusion is that he keeps building casinos and calling them exchanges. The charitable one, and probably the more accurate, is that he keeps building genuine infrastructure and retail keeps using it for entertainment, which is a fact about retail and not about him. The chain is real. The engineering is real. Tokenized equities settling on-chain is a thesis serious institutions share, and Robinhood is the only brokerage that also built the settlement layer.

What is not resolved is whether Tenev can hold both positions at once, because the entire regulatory proposition of Robinhood Chain is that a licensed brokerage extends institutional standards into DeFi, and that proposition is what would persuade issuers to tokenize serious assets there. The measurable test is close: second-quarter earnings land on July 29 and will show whether Stock Tokens are converting, or whether the $12.8 million of tokenized assets on a $312 million chain is what it looks like. That is the thesis he is betting the company on.

What to watch

Three measurable things will settle how the 2026 chapter is read.

Second-quarter earnings on July 29. This is the first look at Stock Token adoption from the company’s own books instead of from chain metrics distorted by a 90-day gas subsidy. Crypto transaction revenue fell 47% year over year in the first quarter and native-app crypto volume fell 48%. The chain was the response. Either the response is producing revenue or it is producing traffic, and the filing will say which.

The real-world asset figure on the chain. Roughly $12.8 million of tokenized assets against about $312 million in total value locked. That ratio is the entire thesis expressed as a fraction. If it improves substantially while memecoin activity fades, Tenev was right and the speculation was ignition. If it stays flat, the chain attracted a crowd that had no interest in the product.

Whether the American wall moves. Stock Tokens are barred to US persons. Wallet perpetuals are barred to US persons. Agentic Accounts are rolling out in the United States. That asymmetry is a map of what American law currently permits, and it is why the CLARITY Act and the CFTC’s staffing matter to Robinhood more than to almost any other listed company. If tokenized equities come onshore, Tenev has already built the rail and 28 million customers become addressable. If they do not, he has built a product for everywhere except home.

The through-line is that every one of those depends on decisions made outside the company, by regulators and legislators, which is an unusual position for a founder who spent a decade routing around gatekeepers. Robinhood’s original insight was that you could give retail direct access and let the incumbents object afterward. The chain inverts it: this time the access requires permission first, and Tenev is waiting on Washington like everyone else.

Frequently asked questions

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. It describes a public company, its executives, and its products, and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security or token. Company figures, product availability, and jurisdictional restrictions change frequently and should be verified independently. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of July 17, 2026.