Bitcoin and the wider crypto market started Tuesday on a firmer footing as expectations for US regulatory progress reignited risk appetite, lifting both digital assets and shares tied to crypto activity.

Bitcoin briefly pushed above $67,000 and Ether neared $1,950, while crypto-related equities rose sharply. Coinbase stock climbed about 12%, American Bitcoin gained roughly 14%, and Cipher Digital jumped around 17%.

Key takeaways

• Shares and tokens rallied after US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said lawmakers are approaching a key vote on the CLARITY Act.
• The proposed law would clarify which regulator—SEC or CFTC—oversees different categories of digital assets.
• Analysts also cited weakening momentum in AI-linked equities as a potential driver of capital rotation back into crypto.
• The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index’s pullback suggests speculation in AI infrastructure may be cooling after a strong run.

Regulatory optimism lifts the whole complex

The immediate catalyst for Tuesday’s rebound came from remarks by Scott Bessent, reported by Bloomberg, indicating that lawmakers were at the “1-yard line” on the long-debated CLARITY Act. The bill aims to define the regulatory roles of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for digital assets.

For investors, that kind of clarity matters because it can reduce uncertainty around enforcement risk and the classification of tokens and trading venues. It also has second-order effects: when regulators’ boundaries look more clearly drawn, capital formation—whether in exchanges, custody, or institutional products—tends to improve as participants better price compliance and operational costs.

Crypto’s rebound runs alongside stock strength

Market-wide optimism showed up most visibly in equities connected to the crypto ecosystem. Coinbase’s stock led gains among major crypto market proxies, while companies exposed to mining, trading, or related infrastructure also outperformed.

That strong correlation between crypto prices and crypto-linked equities often reflects a common driver: when policy expectations shift, both asset holders and equity investors adjust their assumptions about future regulation, adoption, and market structure.

Rotation risk: why AI-linked stocks may be losing steam

Beyond US legislative headlines, some analysts pointed to a separate potential driver—investors dialing back exposure to AI-linked equities—which could free up liquidity for other high-beta trades, including digital assets.

Bloomberg quoted FRNT Financial CEO Stephane Ouellette arguing that when Bitcoin is near the upper end of its range, the “path of least resistance” can turn upward. Ouellette also said the likelihood of a breakout may increase if the AI trade slows and investors become more comfortable with the broader interest-rate outlook.

The “AI trade” explanation has a concrete benchmark behind it. According to coverage cited by the article, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX)—a widely watched measure for chipmakers tied to AI demand—surged roughly 110% over the past year. But momentum has started to slip: the SOX entered a technical bear market last week after falling more than 20% from its recent high, with investors reportedly increasingly worried about lofty valuations and the risk of overcapacity in AI infrastructure spending.

That matters because much of the speculative appetite in financial markets has been concentrated in AI during the last year. Since the public launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the mix of rapid innovation, venture capital activity, and retail enthusiasm helped shift attention away from crypto and toward AI narratives across trading desks and risk budgets.

What to watch next

Tuesday’s bounce looks tied to two threads: near-term expectations for the CLARITY Act’s progress in Washington and signs that AI-linked equity momentum may be cooling. The next signal for traders and longer-term investors will be whether crypto price strength holds through subsequent US legislative developments—and whether the broader market continues to rotate attention from semiconductors back toward risk assets like digital currencies.

“If Senate Democrats block this historic legislation after the administration has bent over backward to accommodate their concerns, stakeholders should make no mistake: It is the Democrats who are blocking this legislation because they were never serious about a legislative outcome,” the White House official said.

Democratic negotiators such as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks reportedly haven’t received details of the agreement with Trump, who’d met personally with Republican senators last week. But many of the Democrats have drawn a line in the sand that the ethics provision — driven primarily by Trump’s own deep crypto connections — needs to be strong.

The dispute was heightened recently by the president’s disclosures that he’d pocketed more than $1 billion last year from his crypto interests.

The White House, Republicans and their crypto industry allies are already building their case against any Democrats who don’t accept the new answer to their ethics demands. It’s unclear when they’ll get to see it.

The industry is expecting full circulation of the Clarity Act legislative language as soon as Tuesday night or Wednesday, though that expectation has been repeatedly delayed since last week.

The Senate has fewer than three weeks to finish the bill, including the ethics piece, and get it through the political gauntlet of a floor vote before lawmakers leave town for their reelection campaigns. There’s technically enough time, but even without significant further debate, it would be tight.

XRP Ledger’s v3.2.0 now runs on 66% of tracked validators as the network approaches a scheduled amendment activation. XRP Ledger’s v3.2.0 has reached 99 validators and 481 nodes across the monitored network. The July 29 activation remains on schedule because validator support continues above the required threshold.

Validator Adoption Expands Across The Network

XRP Ledger’s v3.2.0 currently operates on 57.33% of tracked nodes, according to recent XRPL Explorer data. The tracker recorded 481 updated nodes among 825 observed systems. Adoption has increased since the software became available in June.

However, many operators still use the earlier release across both validator and node infrastructure. Version 3.1.3 remains active on 42 validators, representing 28% of the monitored validator group. Another 323 nodes continue running that version, equal to 38.41% of tracked nodes.

XRP Ledger’s v3.2.0 gives operators access to maintenance fixes before the amendment changes ledger rules. Software installation and amendment approval remain separate processes under XRP Ledger governance. Updated servers receive the code, while validator votes determine whether consensus changes become binding.

Amendment Support Clears The Required Threshold

The fixCleanup3_2_0 amendment currently holds 85.71% validator support ahead of its planned activation. Thirty validators support the proposal, while five validators oppose it. The approval level exceeds the network’s required 80% threshold.

XRP Ledger’s v3.2.0 supports the amendment, but approval must remain above 80% during the full waiting period. XRP Ledger rules require that level for two consecutive weeks. A decline below the threshold would restart the countdown.

The network has scheduled activation for July 29, 2026, at 09:57 UTC. XRP Ledger’s v3.2.0 must remain available across participating infrastructure when the new rules take effect. Unsupported servers may become amendment-blocked and lose the ability to confirm the ledger’s valid state.

Update Addresses Existing Protocol Issues

XRP Ledger’s v3.2.0 fixes problems affecting vaults, lending functions, permissioned trading, and related domain features. The release addresses calculations involving Single Asset Vault deposits and issued shares. It also corrects accounting behavior within the Lending Protocol.

The update includes repairs for the Permissioned DEX, Multi-Purpose Tokens, and Permissioned Domains. XRP Ledger’s v3.2.0 applies maintenance changes to features already introduced through earlier amendments. The package does not center on new consumer-facing products.

The development team also renamed the main server software from rippled to xrpld. XRP Ledger’s v3.2.0 retires amendments that have remained active for more than two years. Developers also continued dividing libxrpl into smaller modules for simpler maintenance and future development.

XRP Ledger’s v3.2.0 remains on course for the July 29 amendment activation after reaching 66% validator adoption. Validator support remains above the required level, while operators using older software still face an update deadline.

The controversy centered on Rentech, a little-known intermediary that appeared in contracts connected to Chinese market maker Web3Port. According to documents obtained by CoinDesk, Movement executives later questioned whether the foundation believed Rentech was affiliated with Web3Port when it was not. Rentech has denied any wrongdoing or misrepresentation.

The fallout extended beyond Movement. Binance banned the market-making account involved in the token launch for what it described as misconduct, while Movement launched a token buyback program and hired outside firm Groom Lake to review the events surrounding the deal.

Movement Labs and co-founder Rushi Manche separated in May 2025.

More recently, the company attempted to chart a new course.

In June, Movement announced it would pivot away from competing with other Ethereum scaling networks and instead focus on cross-border payments, remittances and stablecoin settlement. The company said it had secured access to licensed payment infrastructure in the U.S., Canada and the European Union as it sought to build services aimed at emerging markets.

The strategy reflected a wider trend across the crowded layer-2 sector, where blockchain projects have increasingly shifted toward real-world financial applications as competition among scaling networks has intensified.

It remains unclear how the Chapter 11 filing will affect Movement’s blockchain network, its partnerships or plans to expand its payments business. Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows companies to continue operating while restructuring their debts under court supervision.

The White House agreed to provisions in a crypto market structure bill that could ensure support from some Democratic lawmakers in the US Senate.

According to a Tuesday Punchbowl report, White House officials met with Republican Senators Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno to reach an agreement on ethics language in the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act under consideration in the Senate.

Neither Lummis nor Moreno have publicly announced the details of the deal, which could facilitate Democratic support in what is expected to be a tight Senate vote, but the report suggested that it could affect US President Donald Trump’s crypto investments.

Event contract on chances of CLARITY Act being signed into law in 2026.
Source: Polymarket

The CLARITY Act, passed by the House of Representatives in July 2025 as part of Republicans’ “Crypto Week” agenda, has faced several delays in Congress due to government shutdowns, concerns from lawmakers over ethics, tokenization and stablecoin rewards and provisions for protecting developers from enforcement actions. Many lawmakers and industry advocates expect the Senate to consider the bill before the chamber breaks for August state work periods, but as of Tuesday, no vote appeared on the congressional calendar and the text of the bill had not been made public.

No certainty for 60-vote threshold

Last week, Trump urged the Senate to pass CLARITY “in honor of” the late Senator Lindsey Graham, whom the president said was “a big supporter” of the bill. Many crypto industry executives and lawmakers have publicly come out in support of the bill, but it’s unclear whether the legislation will pass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, due to many Democrats’ concerns about potential conflicts of interest with the Trump administration.

Related: Ethics remain sticking point as crypto market structure bill goes to markup

Several Senate Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen said that any CLARITY bill would be “worthless” without ethics provisions to address Trump’s ties to the crypto industry, including his memecoin and his family’s World Liberty Financial business. Cointelegraph requested details on the agreement from Lummis’ office but did not receive an immediate response.

A White House official told Cointelegraph that the administration was “committed to working with Congress to see the CLARITY Act advance and has agreed to the most comprehensive and wide-ranging ethics provision in history,“ adding that it had “bent over backward to accommodate [Democrats’] concerns.“

According to Coinbase vice chair Ryan VanGrack, Democrats have already been able to negotiate to include provisions on customer protection in the Senate bill. However, many lawmakers are calling for hearings to explore Trump’s investments and links to the industry before any potential vote.

Bitcoin price climbs amid CLARITY talks

The price of Bitcoin (BTC) rose above $66,000 early on Tuesday, reaching a seven-week high amid reports of an ethics deal and Trump’s plans to introduce additional 10% international trade tariffs.

“The reason that prices are running upwards are entirely dedicated towards the potential approval of the Clarity Act,“ said Michaël van de Poppe, founder and chief investment officer of MN Fund and MN Capital, in a Tuesday X post. “Things are brighter and brighter, and as the charts technically look incredible from here, it looks likely that we’ll see the Clarity Act being approved shortly.“

Magazine: Will the crypto lobby’s $189M campaign get CLARITY over the line?

AI shopping agent developer ORO has revealed that it lost $630,000 worth of crypto when a suspected North Korean state hacker, posing as a conference contact, tricked a staff member into installing a malicious Microsoft Teams extension.

According to a post-mortem released by ORO, one of its team members met a contact at an industry conference in February 2025 and formed a “legitimate relationship” that involved communicating on Telegram.

Almost a year later in May 2026, the Telegram account belonging to this genuine contact reached out to schedule a catch-up call. 

However, when the ORO staff member joined the call via a link that mimicked Microsoft Teams, there was no working audio, and so the pair rescheduled for another day. 

Almost immediately, the team member’s computer prompted them to update Microsoft Teams, and, thinking nothing of it, they okayed the procedure. 

Read more: MetaMask hired suspected North Korean dev flagged months earlier

However, the seemingly innocent update allowed a malicious extension to be installed onto their computer. This extension tracked their keyboard inputs, clipboard history, took screenshots of the computer’s page and browser history, and could swap out crypto addresses.  

The attacker spent almost a month quietly collecting data before, on July 13, they drained ORO’s crypto wallets of 147,000 Alpha tokens.  

ORO believes attack came from North Korea

ORO maintains that the contact at the conference was “legitimate,” and that their Telegram account had become compromised. 

As for who the attacker is, ORO claims with “high confidence,” based on its macOS intrusion, that it’s a North Korean hacker from the state-backed group Sapphire Sleet.  

It said, “The IP address that our compromised machine was beaconing to, the matching payload and some overlapping infrastructure outlined in the above post from Microsoft makes us confident that the attack came from this group.”

Indeed, Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence department highlights how Sapphire Sleet uses Teams-themed cover, social engineering, and focuses on macOS. 

“By impersonating a legitimate software update, threat actors tricked users into manually running malicious files, allowing them to steal passwords, cryptocurrency assets, and personal data while avoiding built‑in macOS security checks,” it said. 

ORO claims it’s partly responsible for $600K hack

Despite the hacker’s actions, ORO also partly admitted responsibility for causing the hack. 

It claims that a lack of widespread support for hardware wallets in decentralised protocol Bittensor meant that the firm, going against its preference for hardware wallets, “temporarily” established the owner key as a software wallet. 

It said, “This is what allowed it to be exfiltrated from a compromised machine. That was inexcusable, and it was our mistake. We are sorry for the impact this has had on our community and our supporters.”

ORO claims it’s actively pursuing the recovery of the stolen assets with the help of cryptocurrency exchanges and law enforcement, as well as Bittsensor agent firm Opentensor, Bittsensor wallet firm Curciible Labs, and Bittsensor AI infrastructure firm Connito AI.

The company also stressed that its subnet is “fully operational,” no other wallets, user, or subnet data was affected, and that validator signing keys on hardware wallets “were never exposed.”