Crypto World
CFTC Sues Minnesota, Governor Walz over Prediction Markets Ban
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), under Chair Michael Selig, has filed a lawsuit against the state of Minnesota and its officials after lawmakers passed a bill “prohibiting prediction markets-related activities.”
In a Tuesday filing in the US District Court for the District of Minnesota, the CFTC said that Minnesota, Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and the state’s director of the department of public safety, Jon Anglin, had passed the “first outright ban” on prediction markets in the country with Senate File (SF) 4760.
Signed into law by Walz on Monday, the bill amended Minnesota’s statutes to prohibit advertising, creating, operating or otherwise facilitating prediction market platforms, effectively banning them in the state. The law, set to go into effect on Aug. 1, specifically said that the event contracts on prediction markets platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, including sporting events, military conflicts and weather were effectively “wagers” and therefore prohibited.
Source: CFTC
The CFTC claims in its lawsuit that it has “exclusive jurisdiction” to oversee prediction markets under the Commodity Exchange Act. The commodities regulator asked a court to “preliminarily and permanently” block the Minnesota law based on the legal premise that event contracts on the platforms were “swaps” to be regulated exclusively by the CFTC.
“If permitted to go into effect, Minnesota law will criminalize exchanges that the Commission has expressly approved, as well as event contracts that have been self-certified to the Commission and that the Commission has permitted to be listed,” said the lawsuit. “These consequences directly harm the federal government’s legally protected interest in enforcing federal law.”
Related: Crypto’s CLARITY Act faces partisan fight over ethics on Senate floor
Selig, who currently serves as the sole commissioner in the absence of nominations from US President Donald Trump, has repeatedly claimed that state-level actions against prediction market platforms would be challenged in court. Lawmakers have pressed Trump to nominate additional commissioners to form a five-person bipartisan panel at the CFTC, but the president had not announced any picks as of Tuesday.
Several state authorities have filed complaints challenging prediction market platforms’ activities, specifically alleging illegal sports betting and other prohibited actions, but Minnesota’s law appeared to be the first outright ban passed by lawmakers. The CFTC has recently sided with Kalshi in a state-level action filed in Ohio, as well as against authorities in Connecticut, Illinois, and New York over similar actions against prediction markets.
Source: Michael Selig
Cointelegraph sought comment from Polymarket but did not receive an immediate response. A Kalshi spokesperson said that the Minnesota law was “unenforceable” and a “blatant violation of the constitution and federal law.”
Minnesota passing other laws covering crypto users, investors
On Friday, Walz signed a bill into law permitting Minnesota-based banking institutions and credit unions to offer and perform “certain virtual-currency custody services.” Like the prediction markets ban, the law is set to go into effect on Aug. 1.
Minnesota lawmakers also worked to ban crypto kiosks and ATMs across the state in response to incidents of residents being scammed. Walz signed the bill into law on May 5.
Magazine: Crypto scammers face death, Aussie CGT makes Asian hubs attractive: Asia Express
TLDR
- Philippines central bank said Binance and BlockShoals do not hold required VASP licenses.
- Authorities clarified that BSP licensing is separate from SEC sandbox approval rules.
- Binance previously faced restrictions in 2023 for operating without proper authorization.
- SEC allowed BlockShoals entry under the StratBox sandbox for controlled fintech testing.
- Regulators require integration with a licensed domestic VASP before user onboarding begins.
The Philippines’ central bank confirmed Binance and its partner lack the required VASP licenses today. Securities and Exchange Commission records show prior warnings against Binance operations in the country. Officials said licensing rules under BSP remain separate from SEC sandbox approval process requirements.
Binance Faces Licensing Gap in Philippine Market
Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas said neither entity holds a valid VASP license authorization. The regulator stressed that crypto payment operations require separate approval frameworks under BSP.
Binance previously faced restrictions after the SEC flagged unlicensed activity in a 2023 public notice. Authorities ordered internet providers and app stores to block the exchange nationwide.
BlockShoals Technologies entered a partnership with Binance under a regulatory sandbox framework program. The sandbox allows firms to test financial services under supervision rules in a controlled environment.
SEC granted initial clearance to BlockShoals under its StratBox program framework pilot phase. Clearance does not replace central bank licensing requirements for operations in Philippines market.
BlockShoals Partnership Under Regulatory Scrutiny
Reports say the SEC revised language describing the Binance crypto-asset service provider classification change. This description differs from earlier references that labeled Binance as a VASP designation status.
New terms require BlockShoals to integrate systems with a licensed domestic VASP by the deadline. Integration must occur before any Binance-powered user onboarding begins according to regulatory terms.
The requirement sets a 90-day timeline for compliance action from the approval stage. Authorities say the rule ensures separation between sandbox and licensing framework requirements.
BlockShoals must meet conditions before onboarding users via the Binance infrastructure system integration stage. The central bank confirmed licensing remains mandatory for all VASP operations nationwide.
BitPinas reported that the central bank clarified sandbox participation limits for crypto firms locally. The clarification highlights regulatory separation between test environments and licensing compliance structure rules.
Binance continues discussions with local partners to enter the Philippine market on the regulatory approval path. Officials maintain that all exchanges must follow dual licensing rules under BSP SEC.
StratBox sandbox continues to evaluate fintech and crypto applications under the supervision of the review process. Participation requires integration testing with regulated financial service providers before the production use stage.
The SEC adjusted sandbox terms describing the Binance crypto service entity classification update. Updated terms also require integration with licensed domestic operators within the regulatory window period.
BlockShoals must complete integration within the 90-day compliance requirement set by the regulators’ framework. No Binance user onboarding can proceed without full licensing approval from authorities process.
Bitcoin rose Thursday, and its share of the total crypto market, its dominance rate, gained alongside a meteoric rise in a lesser-known cryptocurrency.
The BTC price advanced 2.4% in 24 hours to trade recently around $62,800. The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) added 2.3% to 1,690 and the CoinDesk Memecoin Index (CDMEME) led gains with a 2.7% increase.
BTC’s dominance rate has risen to 59% from last week’s low of 57.9%, a sign of renewed capital flowing into the largest cryptocurrency as major altcoins struggle. The bitcoin price has held its 200-week average even as other majors such as XRP, ether (ETH) and solana (SOL) trade below the key technical line, suggesting strengthening bearish momentum in altcoins.
In the wider market, Audiera’s BEAT token jumped another 57%, taking the seven-day gain to over 500%. Audiera is a Web3 entertainment and rhythm gaming platform built on BNB Chain that treats AI characters and virtual idols as economic participants.
The protocol announced on X that onchain activity is surging, driven by consistent token burns and rising wallet participation. However, some users on social media have voiced concerns about concentrated token ownership and potential pump-and-dump risks.
The other big gainer is Velvet’s VELVET token, which has surged roughly 800% in 30 days.
Derivatives positioning
- Bullish crypto futures bets continue to get squeezed. Over the past 24 hours, exchanges liquidated $378 million, with more than $207 million coming from long positions.
- Open interest (OI) in bitcoin and ether futures has remained largely stable, indicating little appetite for fresh leverage. In zcash (ZEC), open interest has fallen to 2.28 million tokens, extending its pullback from recent highs above 2.5 million. This reflects a lightening of positioning as ZEC’s recovery from Friday’s sub-$300 low has stalled. The token has retreated from $480 to around $430 in just two days.
- The 24-hour OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta (CVD) presents a mixed picture. Tokens like BTC, XMR, ETH, HBAR, and SHIB recorded positive CVDs, showing buyers lifting offers. Meanwhile, TON, XLM, HYPE, TRX, XRP, and several others saw negative readings.
- BTC’s 30-day implied volatility index (BVIV) remains steady below 50%, suggesting traders don’t expect volatility related to tomorrow’s SpaceX IPO to spill over into crypto. Ether’s volatility index (EVIV) is also easing from Friday’s peak.
- On Deribit, bitcoin and ether puts continue trading at a premium to calls across all major expiries. The $58,000 BTC put expiring June 13 was the most actively traded contract in the past 24 hours.
Token Talk
- Velvet’s VELVET token has surged roughly 800% in 30 days, more than doubling in the past 24 hours alone.
- The token is riding the rush into pre-IPO perpetual futures, synthetic contracts that let traders bet on the valuations of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic before the shares start trading. The timing tracks SpaceX’s expected June 12 debut at a reported $1.75 trillion valuation.
- DefiLlama now tracks 14 similar markets across SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and Quantinuum on venues including Injective, Hyperliquid and Crypto.com, and Velvet reaches them by routing through outside platforms TradeXYZ and Ventuals rather than building its own. Injective launched the format back in October 2025.
- The contracts carry real risk. They are synthetic derivatives that convey no shares, dividends or voting rights, and their prices come from data feeds that can be thin and can drift far from actual funding rounds or any eventual IPO price. A synthetic SpaceX contract on Hyperliquid flash-crashed about 45% on Thursday.
- The VELVET token itself is drawing scrutiny. Lookonchain flagged concerns over the linkage between its spot and futures markets and heavy selling pressure after the spike, and the price whipsawed between $0.29 and $1.07 in a single day.
- The protocol holds about $653,000 in deposits against a $339 million market cap, a wide gap between the token’s valuation and the money actually using the platform.
Crypto World
Ethereum News: Ethereum’s pERC-20 Proposal Would Make Token Transfers Private by Default
Ethereum News: A draft Ethereum token standard called pERC-20, formally tracked as ERC-7605, proposes making token transfers private by default, hiding balances, transaction amounts, and counterparties using zero-knowledge proofs baked directly into the token contract.
It is not a wrapper around existing ERC-20 tokens. It is a replacement interface: privacy-native from mint to transfer, designed so encrypted balances never exist in public state at any point in a token’s lifecycle.
The mechanism draws heavily on ZK-UTXO architecture pioneered by Zcash, specifically the Groth16 proof system and Orchard-style note commitments, and adapts them for EVM-native deployment. MetaMask-compatible. No new precompile required.
Tokens exist as cryptographic notes, not public account balances.
The proposal also includes a compliance blacklist mechanism, a deliberate architectural choice that positions pERC-20 not as a privacy-maximalist tool but as regulation-aware infrastructure. That framing matters given the regulatory climate that buried Ethereum privacy work for the better part of three years.
Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio
Ethereum News: How pERC-20 Actually Works, The UTXO Model Comes to Ethereum Tokens
Under the current ERC-20 standard, every wallet holding tokens has a publicly readable balance; anyone can query balanceOf on any address and see exactly how many tokens it holds, where they came from, and where they went. pERC-20 removes that interface entirely.
There is no balanceOf, no approve, no allowance, no transferFrom. Instead, the standard introduces a new IPERC20 interface built around mint, burn, and transfer operations, each requiring a valid zero-knowledge proof.
The underlying model is UTXO-style and note-based, the same conceptual architecture behind Zcash Orchard.
A token balance does not live at an address in the traditional sense. It exists as one or more encrypted cryptographic notes, each representing a discrete amount, owned by a key pair, and spendable exactly once. Ownership is proven via standard ECDSA signatures, which is what makes the standard EVM-native and wallet-compatible without requiring custom hardware or new browser extensions.
New EIP! — ethresearchbot (@ethresearchbot) June 4, 2026
pERC20 – Privacy-Native Fungible Tokens
https://t.co/gi69qSed0M
Highlights:
– Not ERC-20 compatible by design: pERC20 removes public balance/allowance concepts (no balanceOf/approve/allowance/transferFrom) and replaces transfers with a ZK note-based interface…
Transaction validity is verified using Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs, the same proof system Zcash has used at scale.
A Groth16 proof lets the network confirm that a transfer is mathematically sound, that inputs equal outputs, that the spender owns the notes being consumed, without revealing any of the underlying values.
Poseidon hash commitments are used for note construction, optimized for ZK circuit efficiency. Spent-note tracking happens in O(1) with configurable epoch cleanup, preventing the unbounded state growth that plagued earlier on-chain privacy experiments.
One thing the VOSA design does preserve publicly: the transfer graph, which addresses interacted with which. Amounts are hidden; the linkage between Virtual One-time Sub-Accounts is not. That is a deliberate tradeoff, and a significant one for anyone treating pERC-20 as equivalent to full transaction graph privacy.
pERC-20 is still a draft, it must survive the full ERC review process before any widespread deployment, and no mainnet changes are required for it to launch as an application-level standard.
The first real test is whether it advances from forum discussion to a stable interface with a reference implementation. If it does, the question of whether Ethereum’s default token layer should be transparent or private by default becomes a live design choice rather than a theoretical one.
Discover: The Best Token Presales
The post Ethereum News: Ethereum’s pERC-20 Proposal Would Make Token Transfers Private by Default appeared first on Cryptonews.
Digital Asset Holdings LLC, best known as the entity behind the Canton Network, has raised another $355 million in a new funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s main crypto fund.
The US-based privately held venture capital firm, founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, contributed $100 million. Other notable names that participated in the funding round include heavyweights like Citadel Securities, Apollo, BNP Paribas, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and HSBC.
Digital Asset Holding built the Canton Network, a layer-1 smart-contract blockchain with configurable privacy and controls. It aims to become a household name in the rapidly growing sectors of Real-World Assets (RWA) and TradFi institutions.
It uses a two-tier consensus mechanism that allows unlimited horizontal scalability of the network. It also maintains full smart contract interoperability.
According to reports, the Canton Network has already supported $6 trillion in tokenized issuance, while the proceeds from the latest funding round will be channeled toward partnerships, M&A, and ecosystem expansion.
It’s worth noting that this is the second major funding round closed by Digital Asset Holdings. In the previous round, announced a month ago, the entity raised $300 million at a near-$2 billion valuation, and a16z was once again at the forefront.
In 2025, it raised $50 million from major backers such as Nasdaq and Bank of New York Mellon.
The post Digital Asset Holdings Secures Another $355 Million in Funding Round Led by a16z appeared first on CryptoPotato.
A federal bank charter, a European passport, a growing stablecoin, and a ledger upgrade cycle in full swing. The company has never looked stronger. The token is down nearly half this year. The gap between those sentences is the most important question in the XRP market.
Summary
- Ripple’s regulatory and stablecoin wins strengthen the company, but they do not automatically create XRP token demand.
- XRP’s supply pressure, escrow releases, whale selling, and weak ETF demand have kept the chart under pressure.
- RLUSD supports Ripple’s payments business but narrows XRP’s original bridge-asset narrative.
- XRP’s next durable rally likely depends on mechanical demand channels such as lending, burn, escrow reform, and ETF flow recovery.
Picture two screens side by side. On the left, Ripple’s 2026: conditional approval for a national trust bank from the OCC, a stablecoin passport covering 30 European countries, regulatory wins from London to Abu Dhabi, a lending protocol moving through ledger governance, transaction counts on the XRP Ledger at a two-year high, and a quantum-security roadmap stretching confidently to 2028.
On the right, XRP’s 2026: a token that opened the year near $2.10, touched multi-year highs in the spring, and now trades around $1.10 after a week in which it lost roughly 17%, sitting below its 50-day moving average near $1.38 and its 200-day near $1.62.
Six years ago, the explanation would have been easy: the SEC lawsuit was strangling the company, so of course the token suffered.
The lawsuit’s shadow has mostly lifted, the regulatory environment is the friendliest in the asset’s history, and the divergence has only widened.
Holders are asking the question with increasing irritation, and they deserve a better answer than market manipulation memes or bagholder cope.
There is a real answer. It has several parts, none of them flattering to the simple thesis that corporate success must eventually pull the token upward, and a few of them hopeful in ways the frustrated crowd is currently ignoring.
The answer, compressed
Five forces explain the gap, and the rest of this piece unpacks them in order.
First, Ripple’s wins accrue to Ripple’s equity, and XRP is not equity; nothing in a bank charter or a license buys the token.
Second, supply runs on its own clock: the escrow drips up to a billion XRP a month into the market while large early holders have spent the spring selling into every bounce.
Third, the company’s flagship product now competes with the token’s original thesis, because RLUSD does the bridge-asset job without the volatility.
Fourth, the ETF demand channel turned out to be cyclical, chasing strength instead of creating it.
Fifth, a market-wide crash hit a high-beta token with extra sell pressure attached harder than most.
None of these forces is mysterious. What they share is that no press release fixes any of them, and the channels that could—lending, burn, escrow reform—are still under construction.
The win column, taken seriously
Start by giving the left screen its due, because the corporate run is real and remarkable.
In December 2025, the OCC conditionally approved Ripple National Trust Bank, putting a crypto-native company inside the federal banking perimeter and opening a path toward reserves held directly with the Federal Reserve.
In late January 2026, the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority granted an electronic money license; days later, Luxembourg finalized an EMI license that passports RLUSD issuance across the entire European Economic Area under MiCA.
Swiss approval reached advanced review in March. Gulf regulators in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Bahrain signed off on RLUSD for regulated use.
The stablecoin itself crossed $1 billion within 11 months of launch and now holds around $1.5 billion with reserves attested above the float.
The ledger side has been just as busy.
The XLS-65 and XLS-66 amendments, which would build native vaults and fixed-rate lending into the protocol, entered validator voting in January after a $200,000 security Attackathon.
The EVM sidechain has grown to roughly $180 million in locked value.
The core software is being rebranded from Rippled to XRPLd with a major performance release attached, RippleX has begun threading AI through the development pipeline, and a four-phase plan aims to make the ledger quantum-resistant by 2028.
Transactions recently touched their highest levels in two years. Central bank pilots continue to run on Ripple infrastructure. Any one of these items would have produced a double-digit rally in 2021.
In 2026, the market shrugged at all of them. That is not because the market is broken. It is because the market is answering a different question than the one holders are asking.
The question the market is actually answering
The core of it is uncomfortable. Ripple’s wins accrue, first and most directly, to Ripple, a private company whose equity captures the value of its licenses, stablecoin business, and enterprise relationships.
XRP is not equity.
Holding the token gives no claim on Ripple’s revenue, no share of RLUSD’s reserve interest, and no dividend from the trust bank.
The token’s value rests on demand for the token itself: as bridge liquidity, as the ledger’s native asset, as collateral, and as a speculative vehicle.
The implicit thesis behind the divergence frustration is that corporate success must convert into token demand.
Sometimes it does, through real channels this piece will get to.
But the conversion is neither automatic nor proportional, and 2026 has made the gap brutally visible because the corporate wins have come faster than the token-demand channels can absorb.
A bank charter does not buy XRP. A stablecoin passport does not buy XRP. A quantum roadmap does not buy XRP.
Each one makes the company more valuable and the ecosystem more durable, and each one leaves the token’s daily demand-supply balance where it was.
Equity markets understood this distinction long ago, which is why the perennial Ripple IPO chatter cuts deeper than it first appears.
If Ripple ever lists, investors will finally have a direct way to own the win column, and the market will be forced to price, openly, how much of the company’s success the token was ever going to capture. The realistic range of answers starts at less than holders hope.
The announcement rally died of overuse
Some market history explains why the win column stopped working. Half of crypto Twitter still trades as if the old regime were alive, so the story bears retelling in full. From 2017 through 2021, XRP was the announcement-rally token par excellence.
A bank partnership, a new RippleNet corridor, a MoneyGram deal, or an exchange listing in a new country: each headline produced a pop, because the holder base was overwhelmingly retail, the float available on exchanges was thinner, and the surrounding market treated every institutional gesture as confirmation of the bridge-asset destiny.
Traders learned to buy rumors of announcements, then to buy rumors of rumors. The reflex was so reliable that it became infrastructure; entire accounts existed to catalog Ripple partnership hints. Regimes like that die in a specific way.
Each announcement that fails to change the underlying demand for the token teaches a cohort of traders that the pop is for selling, and the selling arrives a little earlier each cycle, until the pop stops forming at all.
The MoneyGram partnership was the canonical lesson: a flagship deal, celebrated for two years, that ended with the disclosure that the partner had been selling the XRP it received as fast as it arrived.
By the time the 2026 win column began stacking up, the market had a decade of training data showing that Ripple’s corporate milestones convert to token demand weakly and slowly when they convert at all.
The OCC charter announcement in December produced barely a candle. That was not apathy. That was memory.
The practical implication runs against instinct: the next durable XRP rally will almost certainly not begin with a Ripple announcement, and a trader waiting for the catalyst headline is watching the wrong screen.
It will begin, if it begins, in the boring data series this piece keeps returning to: vault deposits, burn rates, flow tables, where changes compound quietly long before they trend.
The supply side never sleeps
Demand is only half of any price, and XRP’s supply side runs on a schedule that no corporate achievement alters.
Every month, Ripple’s escrow releases up to one billion XRP, with the unused portion re-locked into new contracts.
In practice only a fraction enters circulation, but the headline figure is what traders price, and the mechanism guarantees a steady drip of potential supply from a single large holder into a market that must absorb it.
Years of debate have not changed the basic optics: the largest beneficiary of XRP sales is the company whose successes holders are waiting to be paid for.
Watchers have pressed for a more transparent release regime, and the CLARITY Act’s progress has revived speculation that disclosure standards might force one.
Until then, every rally runs into the same arithmetic. The nearer-term pressure has come from whales.
On-chain trackers through late spring flagged sustained distribution from large wallets, with sizeable cohorts selling into every bounce, and the past week’s slide came with whale selling named repeatedly as the proximate cause.
Some of that is profit-taking from addresses that accumulated in 2024 at a fraction of current prices, behavior that is rational, predictable, and indifferent to press releases.
Distribution of this kind ends in one of two ways: sellers exhaust, or demand arrives that absorbs them. The win column produces neither directly. A caution on reading all this.
A falling price during heavy distribution tells you about the sellers’ positioning, not about the asset’s prospects, and conflating the two is how investors talk themselves out of positions at lows and into them at highs.
The current chart is ugly. The current chart is also exactly what a transfer from early large holders to a wider base looks like, when it is that. The data cannot yet say which it is.
The IPO wildcard cuts both ways
Hovering over all of this is the listing question, which resurfaces every quarter and usually gets argued with less precision than it needs.
An eventual Ripple IPO would be a genuine event for the token, in two opposite directions at once. The supportive direction runs through disclosure.
A public Ripple must publish audited financials, and audited financials would put hard numbers on things the XRP market has guessed about for a decade: the size and pace of XRP sales, the carrying value of the company’s holdings, the actual revenue contribution of products that use the token versus products that bypass it.
Forced transparency would close the trust discount that escrow opacity built, and a successful listing would carry validation effects no private milestone can match, with the equity’s reception telling the world how serious institutions price the whole Ripple complex.
The adverse direction runs through substitution. Every investor who wanted exposure to Ripple’s regulatory empire and bought XRP for lack of an alternative would suddenly have the real thing.
The token’s role as a proxy for the company, always analytically wrong but behaviorally real, would end on listing day, and demand built on that proxy logic would migrate to the stock.
Circle’s market history offers the template: its IPO gave investors a direct claim on stablecoin economics, and nobody needed to hold a token to participate.
The likeliest net effect is a repricing in which XRP trades more purely on its own mechanical demand, which is healthy in the long run and could be violent in the short run, in either direction, depending on what the disclosures reveal.
No filing exists, and post-CLARITY rules would shape the timing.
But the scenario belongs in any serious map of the divergence, because it is the one event that would force the market to answer, in public and with money, exactly how much of the win column the token was ever entitled to.
The stablecoin ate the story
There is a deeper, slower force underneath the supply mechanics, and it is the one the XRP community least enjoys discussing. RLUSD competes with the original XRP thesis.
The bridge-asset argument that powered every XRP bull case since 2017 held that institutions moving money across borders would prefer a fast, neutral intermediary asset over pre-funded foreign accounts.
The argument was sound. What it did not anticipate was that the winning intermediary might be a stablecoin: an asset with the same settlement speed, on the same ledger, with none of the volatility that makes treasurers flinch.
Ripple built that asset itself, wrapped it in more licenses than any competitor, and now leads its corporate communication with it.
Inside Ripple’s payment flows, the two assets do cooperate, with XRP providing bridge liquidity in thin corridors while RLUSD provides the stable leg.
But at the level of narrative, the company’s regulatory triumphs of 2026 are stablecoin triumphs, and every one of them strengthens the case that regulated tokenized dollars, not volatile bridge assets, are what institutional payments were waiting for.
The market is not stupid. It watched the company’s center of gravity move and repriced the token’s role accordingly.
This, more than any single sale or unlock, explains why announcements that would once have ignited the chart now pass through it.
The announcements are about a future in which XRP’s job description has narrowed. The token keeps the ledger’s fee and anti-spam functions, its DEX and collateral roles, and its bridge niche in exotic corridors.
Those are real. They are simply smaller than the world-reserve-bridge dream that old prices were built on, and markets reprice dreams without sentimentality.
The ETF era arrived, and it was not enough
Spot XRP ETFs were supposed to be the demand channel that finally connected institutional interest to the token itself, and their story this year is a microcosm of the whole divergence.
The products exist now, after the post-lawsuit regulatory thaw turned filings into listings.
Flows through their first stretch have been positive but modest, a topic this publication has covered in depth, and nothing close to the Bitcoin ETF tidal wave that the most excited projections borrowed their math from.
The shortfall is informative. Bitcoin ETFs succeeded because they let a vast, pre-existing pool of fiduciary money express a view it already held.
XRP ETFs offer access to a view that institutions, evidently, hold with less conviction, and access without conviction produces shelf space, not flows.
Spring’s price action made the problem circular. ETF allocators chase strength and momentum. A token down sharply on the year with visible whale distribution gives a portfolio committee every reason to wait, and their waiting removes the bid that would have stopped the slide.
None of this makes the ETF channel worthless. It makes it cyclical, a demand amplifier that will matter enormously in the next genuine uptrend and contributes little during a markdown.
The steady institutional bid arrives when the price story improves, which is backwards from what holders hoped ETFs would do.
The macro made everything worse
Fairness requires the context that XRP’s slide did not happen in a vacuum.
The broader crypto market has spent recent weeks in a brutal selloff, with hundreds of billions wiped from total capitalization, Ethereum dragged toward levels not seen in years, and Bitcoin well off its highs even as equity markets sat near records.
The decoupling of crypto from stocks has been one of the stranger features of the season, and it has hit high-beta large caps like XRP harder than the leaders.
XRP’s relationship with Bitcoin this year has been its own study in decoupling.
Through the spring, the token traded its own calendar of legal and regulatory catalysts, sometimes rallying against a flat market, which felt like strength.
The same independence cuts the other way in a downturn: idiosyncratic supply pressure means XRP can fall harder than its beta predicts, and the past month delivered it, with the token breaking the $1.20 to $1.25 support zone that had held through earlier scares and probing toward the $1.05 to $1.10 region that technicians flag as the next meaningful floor.
The concentration of XRP’s spot volume on Asian retail venues, particularly in South Korea and Japan, adds a final amplifier.
Retail-heavy order books are momentum machines in both directions, quick to chase highs and quick to abandon support, and they make XRP’s drawdowns sharper than its institutional-era story would suggest.
The microstructure of who actually trades this token has changed far less than the company behind it.
What Ripple itself could do tomorrow
One actor in this story has tools nobody else holds, and the discussion rarely puts them on the table plainly.
Ripple could publish a binding, transparent escrow release policy: fixed schedules, advance disclosure of intended sales, and reporting that lets the market price supply instead of fearing it.
The cost would be flexibility; the benefit would be retiring the single oldest discount on the asset.
Hyperliquid showed the opposite lever in 2025, showing the whole industry how mechanically routing protocol revenue into open-market token purchases can re-anchor a price to a business.
While Ripple’s corporate structure makes a direct copy awkward, nothing prevents the company from committing a defined slice of payments or stablecoin revenue to programmatic XRP acquisition for operational reserves.
Even a modest, audited program would invert the market’s core assumption that the company is a permanent net seller of the asset its community holds.
The fact that none of this has happened is itself information. Ripple’s incentives point toward funding the regulatory land grab, and selling escrowed XRP remains the cheapest funding desk on earth.
Holders waiting for the company to defend the chart are waiting for it to act against its own treasury logic, which companies do rarely and only when the asset’s weakness starts costing them something they value more: ecosystem credibility, validator goodwill, or an IPO narrative.
Watch for that pain threshold. The day defending XRP becomes cheaper for Ripple than ignoring it is the day the win column finally gets a direct conduit to the price, and that day is more likely to be chosen in a boardroom than discovered on a chart.
The channels that could reconnect company and token
Diagnosis without prognosis is just complaint. The constructive version is a list of specific, watchable channels through which the win column could start paying the chart.
The first is the lending protocol. If XLS-65 and XLS-66 activate and vault deposits grow, XRP gains its first native yield and its first protocol-level supply sink.
Locked tokens earning underwritten credit yield are tokens off the order books, and the analyst threshold of $500 million in vault value is a reasonable line for when the effect becomes visible.
The second is fee burn at scale. Every XRPL transaction destroys a sliver of XRP; transaction counts at two-year highs make the burn real but still tiny, and only an order-of-magnitude rise in ledger activity, of the kind tokenization and lending could bring, turns it into a pricing factor.
The third is escrow reform. A credible move to a transparent, rules-based release schedule, whether volunteered or regulation-forced, would remove the single largest standing discount on the asset.
The fourth is the ETF flywheel reversing polarity, which requires a price uptrend to start it but compounds once started.
The four channels share one trait. Each converts ecosystem activity into token demand mechanically, without requiring anyone to believe a narrative.
That is the actual lesson of 2026 for XRP: narrative channels are exhausted, mechanical channels are under construction, and the chart will reconnect with the company when the mechanics, not the press releases, say so.
Reading the divergence honestly
The divergence supports two readings: a broken token attached to a thriving company, or a mispriced one.
The bearish reading is coherent. The company’s success has migrated to assets and business lines that holders do not own, supply pressure is structural and scheduled, the flagship demand thesis was partially cannibalized in-house, and the token now trades as a high-beta large cap with extra sell pressure attached.
Under this reading, the divergence is not an anomaly to be corrected but a discovery of how things always were, and rallies are for selling until a mechanical demand channel proves itself at scale.
The bullish reading is also coherent, and it is not cope.
Ripple is constructing the most heavily regulated financial stack in crypto, every layer of it runs on a ledger whose native asset is XRP, and the conversion channels—lending, burn, collateral, ETF flows—are months rather than years from testable.
Prices set during indiscriminate whale distribution and a market-wide crash are the worst possible estimate of what a demand structure will look like after those channels open.
Under this reading, 2026 is the year the market punished XRP for the gap between announcement and mechanism, and the punishment is creating the entry that the mechanism era will reward.
What a careful observer cannot do is split the difference lazily.
The two readings make different predictions on visible timelines: vault deposit growth, burn rates, escrow policy, ETF flow direction.
Within two or three quarters, the data will start choosing between them.
Until then, the only defensible position is the uncomfortable one: the company’s win column is real, the chart’s verdict is real, and the bridge between them is under construction with no completion date on the permit.
As of June 11, 2026. Prices and on-chain figures move quickly; verify current data before trading. This article is information, not investment advice.
The debate over Strategy’s (MSTR) recent dilutive transaction resurfaced, this time featuring Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor and Strike and Twenty One Capital (XXI) CEO Jack Mallers, on Wednesday at BTC Prague, as the two weighed in on how investors should assess the company’s increasingly complex capital structure.
Mallers asked Saylor how he defines multiple-to-net asset value (mNAV), noting that some investors include out-of-the-money securities in their calculations and asking whether he agrees with that approach. (Strategy currently has $6.7 billion of convertible debt that is out of the money, meaning the securities are not expected to convert into equity at the current $115 share price).
Mallers also challenged Saylor’s view on dilution, asking for an example of a dilutive transaction if issuing equity for cash is not considered dilutive.
Saylor responded that mNAV can be calculated by including the notional value of convertible debt, common equity and preferred equity. However, he argued that mNAV is only one valuation framework. Investors can also evaluate gross assets per share and net assets per share, which may exclude preferred equity or convertible debt from the calculation. According to Saylor, the distinction matters less when debt and preferred equity represent only a small portion of the company’s overall asset base.
On dilution, Saylor argued that issuing equity for cash is not inherently dilutive because shareholders receive a tangible asset in return, whether cash or bitcoin. He said raising capital strengthens the balance sheet, expands the capital base and improves creditworthiness. As an example, Saylor pointed to Strategy’s recent addition of approximately $100 million to its U.S. dollar reserves, bringing the total to roughly $1 billion.
AI agents are crypto’s strongest story in 2026, but DeFAI projects now have to prove they can handle user capital safely once money is moving in live markets.
DeFAI projects pitch automated trading, portfolio management, and AI-assisted token launches to users who may not fully understand the risks. Singularry is one of those projects, working on non-custodial automation, risk controls, and smart-wallet permissions.
In an exclusive interview with BeInCrypto, Singularry explained how its AI trading agent works, which dApp features are already live, and what the project needs to prove before traders treat it as a serious DeFi product.
Singularry’s AI Agent Is Built Around Portfolio Automation
Singularry’s dApp currently includes a fully autonomous, non-custodial AI trading agent designed to manage a diversified portfolio of strategies around the clock.
The platform also offers a library of 17 strategies, ranging from conservative approaches such as dollar-cost averaging, index exposure, and stablecoin vaults to more advanced delta-neutral and market-neutral strategies.
The company said the agent is designed to act as an always-on portfolio manager rather than a single-trade execution tool.
“You set the guardrails, how much it can deploy, how aggressive it should be, and which strategies it is allowed to use, and it does the rest: continuously reading the market, sizing positions to your risk profile, entering and exiting across DeFi and CEX venues, and rebalancing as conditions shift,” Singularry said.
The company added that the agent “thinks in portfolios, not one-off trades,” weighing eligible strategies, allocating capital to stronger opportunities, and learning from each outcome over time.
Permissions Are Scoped, Revocable, and Risk-Capped
A major concern around AI trading agents is permission risk. If users give an agent too much control, a faulty strategy, compromised integration, or malicious execution path can quickly become dangerous.
Singularry said its system is designed around narrow, revocable permissions rather than open-ended access.
“Users never hand over open-ended control. Permissions are scoped on four levels,” the company said.
Those levels include on-chain capability controls, approval thresholds, risk caps, and revocable signing.
In practice, the smart wallet only lets the agent interact with protocols the user has enabled, while larger trades require explicit approval. Sensitive actions such as withdrawals remain manual.
The platform also allows users to define maximum position size, the number of concurrent positions, and daily spending limits. Execution authority can be revoked on-chain at any time.
“You grant narrow, revocable permissions. Not the keys to your funds,” Singularry said.
Security Goes Beyond Audits
Singularry said its security model relies on several safeguards beyond formal audits. These include pre-trade simulation, stale-data protection, circuit breakers, integration safeguards, and restricted custody flows.
Transactions are simulated before being broadcast. If they cannot be safely validated, they are blocked. Price and market data that exceed freshness thresholds are flagged, and the agent refuses to trade on degraded inputs.
Circuit breakers can halt activity when daily-loss limits or drawdown thresholds are reached. Singularry also said that if a connected service or signing path behaves unexpectedly, the system locks execution rather than attempting to continue.
“Keys are never held in the open; signing happens in a secure delegated environment, and destinations are restricted,” the company said.
Singularry also said its smart contracts have been audited by Fairyproof, and that all known issues have been remediated.
Risk Profiles Are Designed for Different User Types
Singularry’s risk profiles come in three presets: conservative, balanced, and aggressive. Each preset defines how capital is split across risk tiers, position limits, and approval thresholds.
The company said the agent reacts to changing market conditions through market-regime detection, volatility-aware position sizing, automatic drawdown pauses, and daily-loss breakers. It also continuously re-ranks strategies based on real outcomes.
Still, Singularry acknowledged that its system is built for disciplined portfolio management rather than ultra-fast trading.
“One honest note: the agent operates on a regular evaluation cycle, so it is built for disciplined risk management, not millisecond reaction,” the company said.
The platform currently appears most suited to intermediate DeFi users: people who already understand wallets, self-custody, and risk settings, but want to automate portfolio execution.
“Today, Singularry naturally resonates most with intermediate DeFi users: those confident enough to define their own risk parameters, smart enough to value automation, and looking for exposure to proven, conservative strategies without unnecessary complexity,” Singularry said.
Over time, the company wants beginners to grow into more advanced strategies while experienced traders use Singularry alongside existing trading systems.
The AI Launchpad Needs Quality Controls
Alongside its managed-strategy product, Singularry also has an AI Launchpad for AI-assisted token creation and bonding-curve launches. This introduces a separate challenge: preventing the launchpad from becoming a low-quality token factory.
Singularry gave a direct answer on this point.
“A bonding-curve launchpad with AI generation is structurally a memecoin factory unless quality gates are deliberately added,” the company said.
According to Singularry, better controls would include token-security screening at launch, graduation requirements based on liquidity and holder thresholds, creator reputation tied to on-chain identity.
And also a clear separation between the speculative launchpad and the audited managed-strategy product.
The company also said teams should avoid marketing quality controls before those controls are actually built.
The Market Will Judge DeFAI by Live Performance
For Singularry, the next six months will ultimately be judged by real product metrics: live capital deployed by agents, funded active users, net ecosystem growth, risk-adjusted returns, retention, re-funding behavior, fund safety, and the long-term survival rate of launchpad projects.
The company believes autonomous DeFi agents must prove they can operate safely, intelligently, and economically under real market conditions. Not just in theory, but at scale and over time.
“Narratives alone are easy in crypto. Sustainable execution is not” Singularry said. “At the end of the day, live performance, user trust, and continuous execution will determine who survives this market cycle. We believe the future of DeFi will be increasingly managed by autonomous AI agents interacting directly on-chain, optimizing strategies, allocating capital, and operating across ecosystems in real time.”
The post Singularry Says DeFAI Must Prove Itself in Live Markets appeared first on BeInCrypto.
It has been nearly two months since the pivotal elections in Hungary, in which Viktor Orban’s 16-year tenure finally came to an end, as the country showed a clear shift toward the West.
The new government has taken numerous steps to neutralize some of the controversial policies undertaken by the former administration, and the local cryptocurrency space could be among the beneficiaries.
The rules against cryptocurrency trading were introduced by the Orban administration in 2025. They required approved validation for transactions converting digital assets to traditional currency and for crypto-to-crypto exchanges. Even more controversially, the rules included possible prison sentences in some extreme cases of violations.
A Forbes report at the time claimed that transactions for over $140,000 (50 million forints) carried a possible prison sentence of up to three years. Largest transactions for over $1.4 million (500 million forints) could lead to five years behind bars.
Numerous popular trading platforms were forced to leave the country or restrict their services for locals to a large extent. Although the European Union opened an investigation to determine whether these restrictions complied with its regulations, the local trading volumes plunged before the administration change earlier this year.
According to a new report from Bloomberg, the new government has decided to lift the threat of jail time and criminal charges for using unauthorized exchanges or conducting non-compliant crypto-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat transactions.
Government spokeswoman Anita Kobol said that Hungary will dismantle the transaction-level ‘validation certificate’ requirement and plans to align the local market with the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework.
The post Hungary Plans to Decriminalize Cryptocurrency Trading After Orban’s Departure (Report) appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Crypto World
As SpaceX IPO approaches, Polymarket, Ventuals assign $2 trillion valuation: Crypto Daily
Elon Musk’s SpaceX sets the price of its Friday IPO on Nasdaq later today. While the company is currently valued at roughly $1.77 trillion, blockchain-based pre-IPO price discovery derivatives and prediction markets seem to think that’s too low.
That gap is evident from three markets: Onchain perpetuals futures offered by Ventuals and trade.xyz, both running on Hyperliquid, and Polymarket’s implied first-day close. These have all converged on the $1.8 trillion-$2.1 trillion range, according to data source Allium.
Right now, traders on Polymarket, a decentralized betting platform, assign a 64% chance that SpaceX will close its first trading day above a $2 trillion valuation. A close above $3 trillion? Polymarket gives a 5% chance.
In other words, the market expects a strong debut, but not a blowout.
For bitcoin traders, the IPO serves as a real-world test of the dominant narrative: that the offering has been draining risk capital from crypto, contributing to the recent price decline.
If that theory holds, capital should flow back into bitcoin and crypto once the IPO is out of the way and the initial allocation frenzy subsides. Stay alert!
Read more: For analysis of today’s activity in altcoins and derivatives, see Crypto Markets Today . For a comprehensive list of events this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead.”
What’s trending
Today’s signal
The chart compares bitcoin’s daily price moves with Nasdaq-100 E-mini futures since March.
The strong positive correlation between the two broke down in May, as the Nasdaq rallied sharply while bitcoin fell. However, Nasdaq has turned lower this month, hinting at a potential realignment.
The key question is whether bitcoin can hold steady — having already absorbed significant losses — in the face of a potential Nasdaq selloff. Trading firm Wintermute noted last year that the correlation between the two assets is particularly strong during Nasdaq declines. If that dynamic still holds, BTC risks sliding below $60,000.
Bitget, the world’s largest Universal Exchange (UEX), has launched Universal Cup, a global football-themed community campaign that invites users to compete for a share of a 250,000 USDT prize pool through an interactive mini-game inspired by one of the biggest sporting events this year.
Built around the “Don’t Just Watch. Rule the Game,” Universal Cup transforms spectators into participants through a global competition where users represent nations, score points, climb leaderboards, and unlock rewards throughout the tournament.
Players can choose from 48 countries and participate in a penalty shootout challenge featuring moving targets representing Crypto, Stocks, and CFDs. Individual scores contribute to national rankings, creating a live global leaderboard that evolves throughout the competition. Users can continue participating across every stage of the tournament, even if their original nation is eliminated simply by switching countries. The tournament runs from June 11, till July 19 2026.
The campaign includes a total prize pool of 250,000 USDT distributed through daily rewards, leaderboard rankings, lucky draws, and championship prizes. Top participants will compete for rewards throughout each tournament phase, with additional prizes available to members of the eventual winning nation.
“For years, sports fans have been some of the most passionate audiences in the world, but mostly as spectators,” said Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget. “Crypto changes that dynamic by making participation part of the experience. Universal Cup brings together competition, community, and engagement around a global sporting moment while giving users a fun introduction to the Universal Exchange ecosystem.”
Universal Cup builds on Bitget’s long-standing connection with the global football community. The company previously partnered with football icon Lionel Messi and currently serves as an official regional partner of LALIGA across Eastern, Southeast Asian, and Latin American markets. Through the Universal Cup, Bitget brings that relationship one step further, creating an interactive experience where football fans and traders can participate together rather than simply follow the action from the sidelines.
Don’t just watch. Rule the Game. Join the Universal Cup.
About Bitget
Bitget is the world’s largest Universal Exchange (UEX), serving over 125 million users and offering access to over 2M crypto tokens, 100+ tokenized stocks, ETFs, commodities, FX, and precious metals such as gold. The ecosystem is committed to helping users trade smarter with its AI agent, which co-pilots trade execution. Bitget is driving crypto adoption through strategic partnerships with LALIGA and MotoGP™. Aligned with its global impact strategy, Bitget has joined hands with UNICEF to support blockchain education for 1.1 million people by 2027. Bitget currently leads in the tokenized TradFi market, providing the industry’s lowest fees and highest liquidity across 150 regions worldwide.
Risk Warning: Digital asset prices are subject to fluctuation and may experience significant volatility. Investors are advised to only allocate funds they can afford to lose. The value of any investment may be impacted, and there is a possibility that financial objectives may not be met, nor the principal investment recovered. Independent financial advice should always be sought, and personal financial experience and standing carefully considered. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Bitget accepts no liability for any potential losses incurred. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice. For further information, please refer to our Terms of Use.
The post Bitget Launches Universal Cup With 250,000 USDT Prize Pool appeared first on BeInCrypto.
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