Zero-knowledge scaling company StarkWare has released a quantum-resistant roadmap for Starknet, arguing that other chains will remain exposed if the industry is “too stubborn or stupid” to act.

In an announcement on Tuesday, Starknet framed its three-phased quantum-resistant roadmap as evidence that the crypto industry has no excuse for remaining vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks. 

“The tried-and-tested cryptography exists to secure every crypto key in the world, if necessary changes are made, and the only reason anyone will remain vulnerable is if heads remain buried in the sand,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO at StarkWare. 

Efforts to quantum-proof blockchains are accelerating as some researchers warn that quantum computing could outpace blockchain’s defenses and cryptographically relevant quantum machines could be ready before 2030. 

The Bitcoin community remains divided on how to approach securing old coins against the quantum threat, while other networks are forging ahead with quantum roadmaps. 

Ben-Sasson said Starknet can become resistant to quantum attacks by “seizing on its architecture advantage,” pointing to its zero-knowledge STARK (Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge) proofs, which are “inherently post-quantum safe.”

“There’s an awful irony in the notion that a young industry born from rejecting the way things have always been done is stalling and procrastinating about making changes for quantum security.”

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Ben-Sasson said that “we are currently in a position where the necessary cryptographic tools to secure our future actually exist.”

We aren’t waiting for a miracle invention; we have the solutions. It is legitimate for people to hesitate before taking on the human coordination required. That concern is real and valid. But the issue is that if we don’t address this, we will have missed the chance.

Related: Trump signs orders for quantum computer, cryptography upgrades

He added that crypto has an “elliptical illusion,” distorting reality around elliptic-curve cryptography, the current standard for securing blockchains. 

Believing that this will be quantum resistant is “false confidence” that is leaving the industry “dangerously complacent,” he said. 

“The migration paths we’re discussing are objectively difficult,” he said. “There are hard technical trade-offs, complex governance decisions, and a massive amount of human coordination involved. The changes needed are definitely not trivial, and I fully acknowledge the scale of the task ahead.”

“The crypto industry shouldn’t need wake-up calls from the White House or anyone else. We should all be acting and seizing on the best cryptography that exists.”

Starknet’s three-phase roadmap 

The first phase involves swapping out some of its current security math (Pedersen hashing) for quantum-resistant versions and adding quantum-resistant signatures. 

Phase two focuses on migration tooling that quietly upgrades existing smart contracts to the new quantum-safe standard, without forcing developers to manually rebuild apps. 

Phase three covers dependencies that Starknet cannot resolve alone, which largely depend on Ethereum’s quantum upgrade roadmap. 

Circle, Ethereum, Solana, Tezos and Algorand have all proposed quantum-proof roadmaps, while the Bitcoin community remains at loggerheads. 

Magazine: Bitcoin slides to $58K, XRP hits $1 but onchain data promising: Market Moves

Taiwan has taken a major step forward in overseeing its digital asset sector by enacting comprehensive new regulations for cryptocurrency operations.

On Tuesday, lawmakers in the Legislative Yuan approved the Virtual Asset Service Act during its third reading, forwarding it to President Lai Ching-te for formal signing, which is anticipated within the next ten days.

Once signed, the Executive Yuan will set the official start date for the rules.

The legislation requires all virtual asset service providers, including cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms, to secure explicit licensing from the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) before they can legally operate in the country.

It also brings in tougher standards around cybersecurity protections, keeping customer funds separate from company assets, and strengthening internal governance and risk management.

Platforms that are already registered for anti-money laundering compliance will receive a 12-month grace period to submit license applications and up to 21 months in total to obtain full FSC approval and any other required permits. Until now, crypto businesses operating in Taiwan only needed to register for anti-money laundering compliance.

A community takeover, or CTO, is when the holders of an abandoned token band together and run it themselves after the original developer walks away. It is one of the defining rituals of Solana memecoin culture. Here is how a CTO works, why most fail, and what separates the rare survivor from the rest.

A community takeover, almost always shortened to CTO, is what happens when the people who hold a token decide to take over and run the project themselves after its original developers abandon it, walk away, or lose the community’s trust. It is one of the most distinctive rituals of memecoin culture, particularly on Solana, where the fast, cheap, fully liquid nature of token launches makes both abandonment and revival routine events. In a typical CTO, the founding developer of a memecoin disappears, sells their holdings, or is exposed as untrustworthy, and the token, which would normally just collapse to nothing, instead gets a second life when a group of remaining holders bands together to keep it alive. 

They take over the project’s social media accounts, organize themselves in group chats, raise money for marketing, and try to generate fresh momentum around a token that technically has no team behind it anymore. The contract on the blockchain stays the same; what changes is who is steering the narrative and the community around it. The holders, in effect, seize the wheel of a car the driver has jumped out of.

Understanding the CTO is essential to understanding how the memecoin trenches actually work, because abandonment and revival are not edge cases there but core features of the landscape. This guide explains what a community takeover is and why it is possible at all, the mechanics of how a CTO unfolds step by step, why these takeovers happen so often on Solana specifically, a worked example tracing a typical CTO from abandonment to revival attempt, what separates the rare CTO that succeeds from the many that fail, and an honest look at why most CTOs go to zero and how to think about the risks. 

The aim is to give you a clear and unromantic picture of a phenomenon that memecoin culture often wraps in heroic, underdog language, because the narrative of a community heroically rescuing an abandoned token is emotionally powerful and frequently used to draw in buyers, and the reality is far more sobering than the story. 

This is educational material, not investment advice, and the memecoin environment it describes is among the riskiest corners of crypto.

What a CTO is and why it is possible

Start with why a community takeover can happen at all, because the answer reveals something fundamental about how memecoins are structured. When a memecoin launches on a platform like those common on Solana, the token is created with its liquidity placed in a pool on a decentralized exchange, which means the token can be bought and sold by anyone the moment it exists, with no central party required to keep the market running. The developer who launched it does not control the trading; the market lives on-chain, in a liquidity pool that functions independently of whether the creator is still involved. 

This is the structural fact that makes a CTO possible. Even if the original developer completely abandons the project, sells everything, and deletes the social accounts, the token itself keeps existing on the blockchain and keeps trading on the exchange, because the liquidity pool and the contract do not depend on the creator’s presence. The project as a social and marketing entity may be dead, but the token as a tradable asset survives.

This separation between the token and its creator is what gives the community something to take over. In traditional contexts, if a company’s founders walk away, the company often simply ceases to function. But a memecoin is not a company; it is a freely trading token with a community attached, and the community can continue even when the founder does not. A community takeover is the act of that community formally adopting the orphaned token, declaring that they will now run the things the developer used to run, the social media presence, the marketing, the coordination, the narrative, and attempting to carry the project forward on collective effort alone. 

Crucially, a CTO does not change the underlying token or its contract; the holders cannot rewrite the code or mint themselves new control. What they take over is everything around the token: the story, the channels, the momentum. The token is the same; the stewardship is new. This is why a CTO is sometimes described as the community inheriting a project rather than acquiring it, they take possession of an asset that was left behind, with all its existing properties intact, good and bad.

How a CTO unfolds

The mechanics of a community takeover follow a recognizable sequence, even though the details vary from case to case. It begins with the trigger: the original developer abandons the project. This can take several forms. The developer might pull the liquidity or sell their entire holding in a rug pull, crashing the price and signaling they have given up; they might quietly disappear, going silent on social media and ceasing all activity; or they might be exposed as having acted in bad faith, destroying the community’s trust even if they have not formally left. Whatever the form, the result is a token with no active team, a collapsed or collapsing price, and a community of holders sitting on losses and a decision: walk away, or try to save it.

If enough holders choose to try, the takeover organizes itself. A core group, often the most committed remaining holders, coordinates through group chats on Telegram and through posts on X, rallying the community around the idea of continuing without the developer. They take over or recreate the social media accounts, establishing new official channels under community control, since the original accounts may have been deleted or abandoned. 

They frequently seek to have the token’s listing on price-tracking sites relabeled to reflect the takeover, since major trackers have processes for marking a token as community-run when the original team is gone, which updates the project’s public information to point at the new community channels. The community then tries to do the work a team would normally do: organizing marketing pushes, raising funds for promotion, sometimes coordinating to provide or lock liquidity, and generating social momentum to attract new buyers. 

In the best cases, the community also pushes for transparency about who is now leading and takes steps to reassure potential buyers, such as confirming that the liquidity is locked or burned so it cannot be pulled again. The whole effort is a bet that collective enthusiasm can substitute for a founding team and breathe new life into a token the market had written off.

Why CTOs happen so often on Solana

Community takeovers are not unique to Solana, but they are far more common there than anywhere else, and the reasons are structural to how the Solana memecoin ecosystem works. The first reason is the sheer volume of memecoin launches. Solana’s low fees and fast transactions, combined with launch platforms that make creating a token nearly effortless, have produced an enormous number of memecoins, far more than could ever succeed, which means abandonment is constant and the raw material for CTOs, orphaned tokens, is abundant. 

Where thousands of tokens launch and the overwhelming majority fail or are abandoned, there is a steady supply of projects a community could potentially take over. The second reason is that Solana memecoins are fully liquid from day one, trading freely on decentralized exchanges, so an abandoned token does not vanish; it keeps trading, which is the precondition for any takeover.

The third reason is cultural and narrative. The Solana memecoin scene has developed a powerful underdog mythology around the CTO, in which a community rescuing a token abandoned by a faithless developer is framed as a triumph of the people over insiders. This narrative has real emotional force in a market where traders are acutely aware that many tokens are stacked in favor of developers and early insiders. When the developer leaves, the community feels it is finally operating on a level playing field, with no insider dumping on them and no hidden team allocation, just the holders and the token. 

That underdog framing, the sense of a genuine community reclaiming something and proving the doubters wrong, turns a failed launch into a movement, at least in the storytelling, and movements attract attention and buyers. The combination of constant abandonment, full liquidity, and a culture that celebrates the takeover as a heroic act makes Solana uniquely fertile ground for CTOs. It is worth being clear-eyed that this same narrative is also a marketing device, deployed precisely because it is effective at drawing in new money, which is part of why the romance of the CTO deserves scrutiny rather than acceptance.

A worked example

Trace a representative case to see how a CTO actually plays out, using an illustrative example rather than any specific real token. Picture a memecoin that launches with an appealing theme and a charismatic developer who builds an early community. The token runs up quickly as buyers pile in, reaching a meaningful market value within days. Then the developer, having accumulated a large position at launch, sells their entire holding into the buying, crashing the price by most of its value in minutes, and goes silent, deleting the project’s social accounts. The remaining holders are left with a token that has lost the vast majority of its value, no team, and no official channels. By the normal logic of memecoins, this token is dead, and most would simply go to zero from here.

But a group of holders decides to attempt a community takeover. They form a new Telegram group, recreate the project’s presence on X under community control, and begin coordinating. They publicize that the original developer is gone and frame the situation as an opportunity: the insider who was dumping on everyone has left, the liquidity that remains is now locked so it cannot be pulled again, and the token is in the hands of the community. They petition the major price-tracking sites to relabel the token as a community takeover, updating its public listing to point at the new channels. 

They organize a marketing push, pooling funds to pay for promotion and rallying members to post about the revival. For a while, this can work: the CTO narrative attracts fresh attention, new buyers come in drawn by the underdog story and the apparent absence of an insider threat, and the token’s price recovers some ground on the renewed momentum. Whether this recovery lasts is the crucial question, and in the great majority of cases it does not, because, as the next section explains, enthusiasm and a new logo do not generate the durable demand a token needs to hold value. The example shows the mechanism clearly; it does not imply the mechanism usually succeeds.

What separates a rare success from the many failures

Among the flood of community takeovers, a small number achieve a real and lasting revival while most fade, and the differences between them, though they do not guarantee anything, are instructive. The first factor is transparent and credible new leadership. A CTO led by identifiable, communicative people who articulate a clear plan and follow through tends to fare better than one run anonymously with vague promises, because trust is the scarce resource in a project that has already betrayed its community once. 

The second factor is the state of the liquidity. A takeover where the remaining liquidity is verifiably locked or burned, so it cannot be pulled out from under buyers again, removes one of the biggest risks and gives new participants a reason to believe the rug cannot happen twice. Checking whether liquidity-provider tokens have been burned or locked is one of the most important pieces of due diligence in any CTO.

The third factor is the distribution of holdings. A CTO where the token supply is spread across many holders is healthier than one where a few large wallets dominate, because concentrated holdings mean a small number of people can crash the price by selling, recreating the very dynamic the takeover was supposed to escape. A diversified holder base gives a revival a more stable foundation. The fourth factor, the hardest and least common, is genuine sustained effort and some reason for the token to attract ongoing attention, real marketing, real community activity, sometimes an attempt to build something beyond pure speculation. 

Even with all of these factors present, success is rare, and it is essential to understand that these are markers that improve the odds at the margin, not formulas that produce a winner. The base rate is failure. The point of knowing the success factors is not to identify guaranteed revivals, which do not exist, but to recognize the warning signs in their absence: anonymous leadership, unlocked liquidity, and concentrated holdings are signals that a CTO is especially likely to fail, and their presence should make anyone considering participation far more cautious. The factors are a filter for avoiding the worst, not a recipe for finding the best.

The hard truth about CTOs and how to think about the risk

The unromantic reality, which the heroic CTO narrative tends to obscure, is that the overwhelming majority of community takeovers fail, and the token settles at or near zero regardless of the community’s effort. This is not a cynical exaggeration but the base rate of the phenomenon, and understanding why is essential. A community takeover changes the stewardship of a token, but it does not change the fundamental problem that sank the project in the first place: a memecoin has no inherent product, revenue, or utility, and its price depends entirely on continued speculative demand. 

A new Telegram group, a recovered social account, and a wave of marketing can generate a burst of renewed attention, but attention is not the same as durable demand, and once the initial CTO excitement fades, the token is left exactly where it was, a speculative asset with nothing underneath it, now without even the novelty of a fresh launch. The community can work tirelessly and still fail, because the thing they are trying to revive never had a foundation to stand on.

Compounding this, the same dynamics that make memecoins dangerous in the first place persist through a takeover. The people coordinating a CTO are often the same speculators who bought in originally, with the same incentives to sell into any strength, so a price recovery driven by the CTO narrative can itself become an exit opportunity for early holders at the expense of the new buyers the narrative attracted. The underdog story that draws fresh money into a CTO is, viewed coldly, sometimes a mechanism for transferring losses from the people who held through the crash to the people who buy the revival. There are also coordination and trust problems inherent in running anything by committee with anonymous participants and no formal structure.

For anyone weighing involvement in a CTO, the honest framework is this: treat it as among the highest-risk activities in crypto, assume the base rate is failure, do the specific due diligence that can at least rule out the worst cases, checking that liquidity is locked or burned, researching who is now leading, examining whether holdings are concentrated, and never commit money you cannot afford to lose entirely, because losing it entirely is the most common outcome. The CTO is a real and fascinating feature of memecoin culture, and it occasionally produces a genuine revival, but it is a casino bet dressed in the language of community heroism, and seeing it clearly means holding both the appeal and the brutal odds in view at once.

Frequently Asked Questions

This article is educational information, not financial or investment advice. Memecoins and community takeovers are among the highest-risk activities in crypto, and most result in total loss. Examples are illustrative and not references to specific tokens. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or participate in any project. Do your own research and never risk money you cannot afford to lose.

A Manhattan federal judge sentenced Carl Erik Rinsch to 30 months in prison in an $11 million fraud case tied to an unfinished Netflix science-fiction series. 

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Rinsch was also sentenced to three years of supervised release, $11 million in forfeiture and $700 in mandatory special assessments.

Rinsch, known for directing the 2013 film “47 Ronin,” was convicted in December 2025 after a one-week trial. The case centered on funds he received to complete a streaming series called “White Horse,” which was later renamed “Conquest,” according to federal prosecutors and court records.

U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said Rinsch sought $11 million from a subscription streaming service by falsely claiming the money would be used to finance the television show he was creating. 

“Instead of using the money to make the show, Rinsch made risky bets on highly speculative stock options and cryptocurrency, and spent millions of dollars on luxury goods for himself,” said Clayton.

Production money moved into trading

Federal prosecutors said the streaming company had already paid Rinsch about $44 million between 2018 and 2019 before sending another $11 million in March 2020. The added funds were meant to complete the show, but prosecutors said Rinsch moved the money through several accounts and into a personal brokerage account.

According to the original indictment, Rinsch used the funds to trade stock options and lost more than half of the $11 million in less than two months. Prosecutors said he placed trades tied to pharmaceutical companies and the S&P 500 before moving remaining funds into cryptocurrency.

The government said Rinsch later used the money for personal expenses and luxury goods. The spending included credit card bills, legal fees, furniture, antiques, mattresses, watches, clothes, five Rolls-Royces and a Ferrari, according to the case filings.

Dogecoin profit did not end the case

As previously reported by crypto.news, Rinsch was arrested in March 2025 after prosecutors accused him of using Netflix production funds for crypto and stock bets. The case named the company as “Streaming Company-1,” but several reports identified it as Netflix.

Previously, crypto.news reported that Rinsch allegedly turned about $4 million in Dogecoin into roughly $27 million. Prosecutors said the crypto gains did not change the source of the funds, which had been provided for production work.

The Dogecoin trade became one of the most watched parts of the case. However, the court focused on whether Rinsch obtained the extra production money through false claims and used it outside the agreed purpose. Rinsch never finished the show or returned the added funds.

Prosecutors sought five years

Rinsch was convicted of one count of wire fraud, one count of money laundering and five counts of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity. Wire fraud and money laundering each carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, while the five other counts each carried a maximum of 10 years.

Prosecutors asked the court to sentence Rinsch to five years in prison, according to sentencing filings. His defense sought a sentence without prison time and argued that he had mental health issues, with friends and family writing to the court about changes in his behavior.

Actor Keanu Reeves, who starred in “47 Ronin,” also wrote to the court in support of Rinsch, according to AP News. The court imposed a prison sentence below the five years requested by prosecutors, but still ordered prison time, forfeiture and supervised release.

The sentence closed a case that began with Rinsch’s March 2025 arrest and continued through his December 2025 conviction. The U.S. Attorney’s Office also announced the sentencing in a post on X, saying the director had been sentenced for an $11 million production fraud.

A bridge asset is a cryptocurrency used as a neutral middle step to move value between two different currencies without pre-funding accounts in each one. XRP and XLM were both built for this job. Here is how a bridge asset works, the problem it solves, and the hard question of whether being a bridge makes a token valuable.

A bridge asset is a cryptocurrency that serves as a neutral intermediary for moving value between two different currencies, allowing a sender to convert from one currency into the bridge asset and then out into another currency, without needing to hold pre-funded balances in each currency along the way. The idea sits at the heart of one of crypto’s oldest and most practical use cases, cross-border payments, and it is the design purpose behind two of the largest cryptocurrencies by market value, XRP and XLM. 

In a world where moving money across borders is slow, expensive, and capital-intensive, a bridge asset promises a faster and cheaper path: instead of a bank needing accounts pre-funded with local currency in every country it pays into, it can convert the source currency into a bridge asset, send that asset across a blockchain in seconds, and convert it into the destination currency on the other side. The bridge asset is the universal middle step, the common denominator that connects any currency to any other without requiring a direct relationship between them.

Understanding the bridge-asset concept is the key to understanding what XRP and XLM were actually built to do, and also to understanding the central debate about whether that role makes them valuable. This guide explains what a bridge asset is and the specific problem it solves, how the mechanics work step by step, how XRP and XLM each implement the idea, a worked example of a cross-border payment, the crucial difference between a bridge asset and a cross-chain bridge, and then the hard part: the unresolved question of whether being a bridge asset creates sustained demand for a token, including the velocity problem and the growing competition from stablecoins. 

The aim is to give you both the clear mechanical picture and the honest analytical debate, because the bridge-asset story is genuinely useful technology wrapped around a genuinely contested investment thesis, and you cannot understand one without the other. This is educational material, not investment advice.

The problem a bridge asset solves

To see why a bridge asset is useful, you have to understand the problem with how cross-border payments traditionally work, because the bridge asset is an answer to a specific and expensive inefficiency. When money moves across borders through the conventional banking system, it travels through a network of correspondent banks, each holding accounts with the others. To pay out in a foreign currency, a bank typically needs a pre-funded account in that currency, sitting in a bank in the destination country, a setup known in the industry as nostro and vostro accounts. 

The bank fills these accounts in advance with the local currency so that when a payment needs to be made, the money is already there to send. Multiply this across every currency and every corridor a large bank operates in, and the result is enormous amounts of capital locked up around the world, sitting idle in pre-funded accounts purely so that payments can be made when needed. That trapped capital has a cost, and it is one of the reasons cross-border payments are expensive, slow, and inaccessible to smaller players.

A bridge asset attacks this problem directly by eliminating the need for pre-funding. Instead of holding local currency in an account in the destination country, an institution can convert the source currency into the bridge asset at the moment of payment, send the bridge asset across a blockchain to the destination in a matter of seconds, and convert it into the local currency there, where it is paid out. Because the whole round trip happens almost instantly, there is no need to keep capital parked in advance; the liquidity is sourced and settled on demand. This is the core promise of a bridge asset: it replaces pre-funded, idle capital with just-in-time conversion, freeing up the money that would otherwise be locked in nostro accounts and making cross-border settlement faster and cheaper. 

A neutral bridge asset is especially powerful because it does not belong to any one country or currency, so it can connect any pair of currencies without requiring a direct trading relationship between them. Rather than maintaining liquidity between every possible pair of currencies, which grows impossibly complex as you add currencies, institutions only need liquidity between each currency and the single common bridge. The bridge asset becomes the hub that every spoke connects to.

How the mechanics work

The mechanics of a bridge-asset payment follow a consistent pattern regardless of which asset is used, and walking through the steps shows why speed is everything. The process begins when a sender wants to move value from a source currency to a destination currency. 

First, the source currency is converted into the bridge asset, typically on an exchange or liquidity venue in the source market, turning, say, dollars into the bridge token at the current market rate. 

Second, the bridge asset is transferred across its blockchain from the source side to the destination side, a step that takes seconds on the networks designed for this purpose. 

Third, on the destination side, the bridge asset is converted into the local currency at a liquidity venue in that market, turning the token into, say, pesos or euros, which are then paid out to the recipient. 

The entire sequence, convert in, transfer, convert out, completes in seconds rather than the days a traditional cross-border transfer can take. The reason speed matters so much is that it is what makes pre-funding unnecessary, and it also limits the risk of holding the bridge asset. Because the bridge token is only held for the few seconds between conversion in and conversion out, the parties are exposed to its price for only a moment, which limits the risk that the token’s volatility moves against them during the transfer. This is essential, because bridge assets like XRP and XLM are themselves volatile cryptocurrencies, and no institution would want to hold a volatile asset for long simply to make a payment. 

The design solves this by minimizing the holding time to near zero. It also depends on deep liquidity at both ends: there must be enough of a market to convert the source currency into the bridge asset, and the bridge asset into the destination currency, without large price slippage, which is why bridge-asset systems concentrate on building liquidity in the corridors they serve. When liquidity is deep and the transfer is fast, the bridge-asset path can be cheaper and faster than the correspondent-banking alternative. When liquidity is thin, the conversions become expensive and the advantage erodes, which is one of the practical limits of the model and one reason adoption has concentrated in specific corridors rather than spreading evenly everywhere.

How XRP and XLM implement the idea

XRP and XLM are the two most prominent bridge assets, and although they share the core concept, they come from related but distinct lineages. XRP is the native asset of the XRP Ledger and is the bridge asset used by Ripple’s cross-border payment offering, where it functions as the intermediary for sourcing liquidity on demand instead of pre-funding destination accounts. Ripple’s branded implementation of this, its on-demand liquidity service, is the productized version of using XRP as a bridge between currencies for institutional payments, and it is the clearest real-world deployment of the bridge-asset concept at scale. 

The XRP Ledger settles transactions in a few seconds with very low fees, which are the properties a bridge asset needs, and XRP’s entire original design rationale was to serve as this neutral settlement intermediary between currencies. When people describe XRP as a “bridge currency,” this is what they mean: an asset meant to sit in the middle of cross-border value transfers, converted in and out within seconds.

XLM, the native asset of the Stellar network, was designed with a closely related purpose, and Stellar’s architecture makes the bridge role especially explicit. Stellar was built to move money between currencies cheaply, with a particular focus on payments, remittances, and financial inclusion. On Stellar, institutions called anchors issue tokens that represent fiat currencies, backed by reserves, and the network includes a built-in decentralized exchange and a feature called path payments that automatically finds the cheapest route to convert one asset into another. XLM serves as a bridge in this system, a neutral asset that can connect currency pairs that lack a direct market, and it is also used to pay the network’s small transaction fees. 

So both assets are built around the same fundamental idea, a fast, cheap, neutral intermediary for moving value between currencies, but XRP is most associated with institutional, bank-facing cross-border payments through Ripple, while XLM is most associated with a more open, anchor-based network oriented toward payments and financial inclusion. Both illustrate the bridge-asset concept in production, and both face the same hard question about whether the role translates into lasting token value.

A worked example

Trace a single payment to make the concept concrete. Imagine a business in the United States needs to pay a supplier in Mexico the equivalent of $10,000, and consider how this works with and without a bridge asset. In the traditional model, the US business’s bank would rely on having a pre-funded account holding Mexican pesos at a bank in Mexico, or on a chain of correspondent banks that do. The payment instruction passes through this chain, the pesos are paid out from the pre-funded account, and the whole process can take one to several business days, with fees taken at multiple points and a large amount of peso liquidity sitting idle in that account at all times to make such payments possible. The cost of that idle capital, plus the intermediary fees, is what makes the traditional transfer expensive.

In the bridge-asset model, the same payment takes a different path. The $10,000 is converted into a bridge asset, say XRP or XLM, on a liquidity venue in the United States, turning dollars into the token at the current rate. The bridge asset is then sent across its blockchain to Mexico in a matter of seconds. On the Mexican side, the bridge asset is immediately converted into pesos on a local liquidity venue, and the pesos are paid out to the supplier. 

The entire round trip completes in seconds, and at no point did anyone need to keep pesos pre-funded in advance, because the liquidity was sourced on demand at the moment of payment. The business’s bank did not need idle peso capital sitting in Mexico; it converted exactly what it needed, exactly when it needed it. If the liquidity on both ends is deep, the total cost of the two conversions plus the tiny network fee can be lower than the traditional route, and the settlement is far faster. This is the bridge asset doing its job: replacing days and pre-funded capital with seconds and just-in-time conversion. The token was held for only the few seconds of the transfer, which is the whole point of the design, and also, as the next sections explain, the source of the central debate about its value.

Bridge asset versus cross-chain bridge

A crucial point of confusion deserves its own section, because the word “bridge” is used in two very different ways in crypto and conflating them leads to real misunderstanding. The bridge asset described in this guide is about moving value between currencies, an asset used as a neutral intermediary to convert one currency into another in a payment. A cross-chain bridge, by contrast, is about moving tokens between blockchains, a piece of infrastructure that lets you take a token on one blockchain and represent or transfer it onto a different blockchain, for example moving an asset from Ethereum to another network. These are entirely different concepts that happen to share a word. A bridge asset is a currency playing a role in a payment; a cross-chain bridge is software connecting two blockchains, often by locking a token on one chain and minting a wrapped version on another.

The distinction matters for several reasons. First, the risks are completely different. Cross-chain bridges have been among the most exploited pieces of infrastructure in crypto, with several large hacks resulting from vulnerabilities in the smart contracts that lock and mint tokens across chains, so “bridge risk” in that context refers to the security of that connecting infrastructure. A bridge asset used in a payment carries different risks, mainly the price volatility of the token during the brief moment it is held and the depth of liquidity on each side, not smart-contract exploit risk of a chain-connecting bridge. 

Second, the purpose is different: a bridge asset answers “how do I move value from one currency to another,” while a cross-chain bridge answers “how do I move a token from one blockchain to another.” When you read about XRP or XLM as bridge assets, the meaning is the currency-to-currency payments sense, not the chain-to-chain infrastructure sense. Keeping the two ideas separate is essential to understanding both the technology and the risks, because a discussion that mixes them will mislead on both. The shared word is an unfortunate accident of terminology, and the careful reader learns to ask which kind of bridge is meant.

Does being a bridge asset make a token valuable?

Now the hard question, the one that turns a clean technical story into a truly contested investment debate: does serving as a bridge asset actually create lasting demand for the token, and therefore support its value? The intuitive answer is yes, surely a token used to move large volumes of cross-border payments must capture value from that usage. But the reality is more complicated, and the complication has a name: the velocity problem. 

A bridge asset, by design, is held for only the few seconds of a transfer. It is bought, used, and sold almost instantly, never accumulated. High transaction volume through a bridge asset therefore does not necessarily translate into sustained holding demand, because the same units of the token can be reused over and over for many transfers without anyone needing to hold a growing stockpile. A token can process enormous payment volume while generating little persistent demand to own it, because payments require the token to flow through, not to be held. This is the core tension in the bridge-asset value thesis, and it is why critics argue that network usage and token price can diverge: the network can be busy while the token is weak.

There is a serious counterargument, and the honest treatment gives it weight. Proponents contend that very large and growing payment volume does require deeper liquidity pools at every conversion point, and that maintaining those pools effectively takes a meaningful float of the token out of circulation, creating a baseline of demand that scales with usage. They argue that if a bridge asset became the settlement layer for a significant share of global cross-border value, the liquidity required to support that volume without slippage would be substantial and persistent, supporting the token’s value even if no individual holder keeps it for long. 

The debate, then, is between the velocity critique, which says payments flow through without creating holding demand, and the liquidity-depth argument, which says sufficient scale forces a persistent float. Layered on top is a growing competitive threat: stablecoins. A stablecoin pegged to a currency can serve as a bridge instrument too, moving value between parties quickly, and it offers something a volatile bridge token cannot, price stability, so neither sender nor receiver bears volatility risk during the transfer. 

As regulated stablecoins proliferate, including ones issued by the very companies behind bridge-asset networks, some of the cross-border settlement role that bridge tokens were meant to fill may flow to stablecoins instead, which would weaken the demand case for the volatile bridge asset. None of this is settled, and a careful reader should hold all of it at once: the bridge-asset technology is real and useful, the velocity problem is a genuine challenge to the token-value thesis, the liquidity-depth rebuttal is a legitimate counter, and stablecoin competition is a real and growing complication. The mechanism works; whether it makes the token valuable is the open question.

Frequently Asked Questions

This article is educational information, not financial or investment advice. Descriptions of XRP, XLM, and their networks reflect their design and general operation as understood in mid-2026 and can change. Nothing here is a recommendation about any asset, and the question of whether bridge assets accrue value is truly contested. Cryptocurrency is volatile, and you can lose money. Do your own research and consult a qualified professional before making any decision.

What if an artificial intelligence health coach could optimize your daily energy levels without sending a single byte of your private medical data to a corporate cloud server? That’s what Sleepagotchi is trying to achieve with its new AI-powered decentralized wellness application.

With the advent of wearable devices, people have become significantly more health-conscious, tracking everything from daily workouts to baseline heart rate metrics. And with artificial intelligence now smart enough to analyze thousands of biological data points in seconds, the technology can do far more than just display numbers. This has created a market for intelligent applications that can interpret these numbers and turn the raw biometric signals into actionable daily advice.

Sleepagotchi was originally developed as a casual “sleep-to-earn” mobile mini-game that rewarded players with digital collectibles for maintaining a consistent bedtime routine. 

However, the team soon realized that poor sleep sits at the root of almost all health and mood problems, which led them to expand the mini-game into a full wellness application that uses artificial intelligence to analyze data from phones and wearables for personalized health insights.

“What we noticed is that sleep is at the root of all health problems. If a user has problems with their sleep, it affects everything, including their mood and overall health,” Sleepagotchi CEO Kenny Wood told crypto.news during an interview.

“Originally, we had a sleep monitoring system in the game, and we’ve expanded that into a health app with sleep at its root. It takes health and wellness data from wearables and even from the phone and processes it to generate insights using AI. That’s basically what we’re doing with Sleepagotchi and the health app.”

What Sleepagotchi is trying to do is blend on-device artificial intelligence and utility-focused cryptocurrency infrastructure to deliver deep, personalized wellness insights while giving users complete ownership of their health data.

While this may sound pretty ambitious at first glance, the underlying software platform uses a decentralized multi-agent system where four different digital entities handle specific lifestyle tasks right on the device.

Instead of routing personal logs to an external cloud server, the application coordinates a sleep coach, a wellness coach, a meal planner, and a shopping agent that pass state data to one another in real-time.

“Basically, all the data is processed within the phone, so the data as a whole is kept on the phone,” Wood said, adding that the sleep coach studies rest patterns and passes those insights directly to the wellness assistant.

When the wellness assistant detects that a user feels fatigued despite sleeping enough, the system automatically checks for potential nutritional gaps. The platform can suggest adding specific items like leafy greens to address iron deficiencies before sending those details directly to the meal planner for custom ingredient lists.

“Those kinds of supplements and ingredients can then be given to the shopping agent,” Wood said.

To make things easier for the everyday user, Sleepagotchi also lets users set a personalized spending budget, which can then be used by the shopping agent to automatically purchase the necessary ingredients and supplements with a single click.

Even with all this, giving out your personal health information to third-party corporations may not sound ideal, but Wood has reiterated that sensitive biometric information doesn’t leave the individual smartphone, not even on the blockchain.

The decision to restrict processing entirely to local hardware represents a major change from the startup’s early roadmap, which originally included an on-chain data marketplace for research firms.

“We had the idea of giving the user the ability to sell their data, but we quickly found that it was unworkable and unfeasible, and there are laws pertaining to this,” Wood explained, noting that commercial data sales also violate wearable manufacturers’ terms of service.

Even as the industry standard these days is to store sensitive tracking metrics on the cloud, which is very much susceptible to corporate exploitation and data leaks, for Wood, the ideal infrastructure relies on decentralized networks that allow individuals to retain complete authority over their personal information.

What role does crypto play in this?

To support such a user-controlled network, any platform would need a viable economic framework that incentivizes permanent decentralization.

Sleepagotchi currently operates locally on individual smartphones using its multi-agent system, but it plans on leveraging its very own native stakable digital asset, which the team calls SLEEP, to power its upcoming marketplace and gate advanced tracking features.

It is common knowledge that running complex Artificial Intelligence models requires substantial amounts of processing power, and that’s where the token economy comes into play. 

Sleepagotchi users have access to basic health insights and automated coaching at no cost, but to manage heavy processing demands, the protocol requires premium queries to be paid for with tokens once a user exhausts their daily baseline allotment, creating a natural computational boundary that protects the network from unsustainable resource strain.

“The user will pay with the sleep token for extra credits to get further information from the AI about the health and wellness data,” Wood explained. “The actual infrastructure for AI is pretty strong as it is and can handle a lot of users, so the blockchain can just focus on handling the transactions and staking side of things.”

Other revenue streams built into the platform ecosystem are designed to scale alongside user adoption. 

While premium user subscriptions for advanced health tracking provide a recurring baseline of traditional capital, Sleepagotchi plans to use commercial interactions within its upcoming marketplace to introduce additional monetization layers, including listing fees and staking bonds required for external business partners to participate. 

Finally, localized ingredient orders yield affiliate commerce revenue through the built-in Shopping Agent whenever a user opts for an automated product recommendation.

So far, Sleepagotchi has raised $6.5 million from investors including 6th Man Ventures, Collab+Currency, Inception, Sfermion, 1kx, Alliance, Signum Capital, GSR, and several other venture firms and angel investors. According to company documentation, the platform has attracted more than 2 million users and generated over $100,000 in revenue during a three-week beta period.

Sleepagotchi can be integrated with wearable devices such as WHOOP, Oura, Apple Watch, Cudis, and Pulse as of publication time. 

On the Web3 and infrastructure side, the project has secured partnerships with ecosystems like Solana and Soneium, alongside native protocols such as Bonk, MOOAR, Pixels, Cudis, and Pulse.

The project has also secured a high-profile integration with legacy gaming giant Square Enix, bridging the application directly into traditional, mainstream entertainment markets.

The Bitcoin holding level of long-term investors has reached a record high of 14.7 million Bitcoin, which could suggest that the crypto market bottom will come early, according to Cory Klippsten, CEO of Swan Bitcoin. 

“We’re at an all-time high of BTC held in addresses of long-term holders,” Klippsten told Cointelegraph in an interview, which he said has “marked cycle lows historically.”

Bitcoin (BTC) supply held by long-term holders reached 14.7 million BTC on Wednesday, an all-time high that “signals continued conviction” among seasoned investors, according to crypto analytics platform Glassnode. 

Klippsten said these figures suggest that Bitcoin may find its cycle bottom earlier compared to previous cycles. That stands in contrast to several other analyses, including Lebit Mining Pool founder Jiang Zhuoer, who predicted that Bitcoin would only bottom between October and December 2026, or about six months after Strategy’s Multiple to Net Asset Value (mNAV) found its cycle low. 

“MSTR’s mNAV has already dropped to 0.72,” approaching the lowest point of 0.7 seen on May 11, 2022, wrote Zhuoer, adding that Bitcoin may bottom with a six-month gap following Strategy’s mNAV, which may result in a cycle low near $42,000 to $44,000.

The mNAV measures a company’s stock market value compared to the intrinsic value of its treasury holdings. Both predictions suggest that Bitcoin’s price may sink lower, offering cheaper entry points for investors.

Cointelegraph’s Ciaran Lyons (left) and Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten (right), during an interview. Source: Cointelegraph

BTC long-term holder supply up 14% since November

Long-term holders restarted their Bitcoin accumulation at the end of 2025, nearly two months after early October’s record $19 billion liquidation event.

The supply of Bitcoin held by long-term holders was 16.65 million BTC at publication time, up 14% from 14.6 million BTC on Nov. 26, data provider Coinglass shows.

Bitcoin long-term holder supply chart. Source: Coinglass

Coinglass tracks Bitcoin held by long-term holders, or addresses that held BTC for at least 155 days. Increases in that cohort are often seen as a sign of confidence in Bitcoin’s future value, showing reluctance to sell at current prices.

Related: DeFi TVL drops 39% in 2026 amid market downturn and record hack activity

CLARITY Act uncertainty weighs on Bitcoin demand

Other regulatory developments may also influence Bitcoin’s price action, such as the uncertainty about the passage of the CLARITY Act, according to crypto-focused asset manager Grayscale.

If the CLARITY Act doesn’t pass this year, Strategy and other treasury companies may continue to further “deleverage,” causing Bitcoin to “fall moderately further,” wrote Grayscale’s head of research, Zach Pandl, in a Friday report.

On Monday, Galaxy Digital cut its odds of the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 to 50%, warning that the US Senate is running out of time to move the crypto market structure bill before its August recess. 

The legislation is set for a House of Representatives committee hearing on July 17. The bill aims to establish the first regulatory framework for digital assets in the US, but has faced pushback from the banking industry over allowing yield on stablecoin holdings.

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Donald Trump’s latest annual financial disclosure suggests his cryptocurrency-related ventures generated more income for him in 2025 than his real estate and resort businesses, reigniting scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest as his administration has promoted pro-crypto policies.

The U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE) released Trump’s 2025 annual financial disclosure on Tuesday in a report spanning 927 pages, showing that he earned more than $1.4 billion from crypto-linked activities last year. According to reporting by BBC, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said Trump has “proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world,” adding that neither the president nor his family has “ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest.”

Key takeaways

• Trump’s OGE financial disclosure reports over $1.4 billion in income tied to crypto ventures for 2025, surpassing income from his real estate and resorts.
• Memecoin licensing royalties were identified as the largest income source, followed by proceeds tied to World Liberty Financial token sales.
• The filing also indicates Trump holds cryptocurrency assets, including Bitcoin and Ether, as well as stablecoins such as USDC.
• Critics argue the structure of personal profit alongside government policy support raises conflict-of-interest concerns, while the White House rejects that claim.

Crypto income dwarfs real estate and resorts

As detailed in the OGE filing released Tuesday, Trump reported more than $1.4 billion in income from crypto-related ventures in 2025. The scale of that figure stands out against his business income from traditional assets, including Mar-a-Lago and a portfolio of golf clubs and resorts.

In the same disclosure, Trump reported more than $290 million in income connected to revenue from his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, along with other properties and resorts he owns. The contrast is central to the controversy surrounding the disclosures: critics point to the proximity between the administration’s stance on digital assets and the president’s family-linked financial activity.

Memecoins and World Liberty Financial lead the earnings

According to the disclosure, the biggest reported contributor to Trump’s crypto-related income came from the licensing and sale of memecoins, including “Trump Coin.” The filing attributes roughly $635 million in “royalties” to a “license agreement with Celebration Coins.”

The next-largest category cited in the report relates to World Liberty Financial, a DeFi platform associated with the Trump family. The disclosure states it generated about $588 million through “proceeds from token sales,” making it the second-largest income stream in the crypto portfolio described.

Trump’s reported crypto income also includes $197 million from selling equity in a stablecoin venture, the filing indicating a separate line item tied to that investment activity.

Digital assets listed in the filing

Beyond income, the disclosure also outlines certain crypto holdings. The filing states Trump owns more than $50 million in Bitcoin, with between $5 million and $25 million in Ether held in cold wallets.

In addition, the report references holdings that include USDC and USD Key (KEY). The presence of stablecoins and major cryptocurrencies among disclosed assets adds another dimension to questions about how personal exposure to the market intersects with government policy decisions affecting the sector.

White House response and renewed political pressure

Trump Organization communications emphasized what it characterized as transparency. Reuters reported that the Trump Organization said the filing’s “breadth and depth” underscores its commitment to transparency, describing the report as comprehensive.

Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, took the opposite view. In a statement released Tuesday, the group called the reported crypto earnings an “obscene crypto grift,” arguing that the alignment between personal profit interests and government activity creates conditions for legislation that could put consumers at risk. Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman was quoted urging Congress to act, warning that such conflicts could facilitate “mass rip-offs” and potentially threaten stability across the financial system.

In its broader critique, Public Citizen framed the disclosure as evidence that the president’s financial incentives are increasingly tied to the cryptocurrency industry itself. The White House, through Kelly’s statement to the media, denied any conflict concerns, asserting that the president and his family have not engaged—and will not engage—in conflicts of interest.

For investors and users watching the sector, the immediate follow-up is political rather than market-driven: the disclosures strengthen the case made by critics and may increase legislative and oversight focus on how digital-asset policy is crafted when the executive branch and private crypto interests appear intertwined. The key uncertainty remains how regulators and lawmakers will respond, and whether any specific conflict-of-interest questions translate into enforceable changes to rules or process.

Business use of stablecoins is poised to surge in the next 12 months as adoption of the digital currency goes mainstream, according to a new report from payments infrastructure firm Cybrid.

The report found 42% of businesses surveyed are already using stablecoins for cross-border payments and 88% of respondents said they are likely or very likely to use stablecoins within the next 12 months. Still, only 2% identified as committed users of traditional payment rails.

Businesses using stablecoins reported average cross-border payment cost savings of 35%, with companies processing more than $100 million in monthly payment volume reporting average savings of up to 47%, according to the survey.

Source: Cybrid report

The global stablecoin market cap is now at $307.64 billion, led by Tether’s USDT, at $184.7 billion, and Circle’s USDC, at $73.51 billion, Coingecko data shows. Fueled by recent legislation, GENIUS Act-compliant stablecoins have reached a market cap of more than $76 billion. That established the first federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins in the United States.

The report is based on a survey of 468 executives and business leaders conducted between April 28 and May 4.

Varied users look for regulatory clarity to gain confidence

Payroll and contractor payments were the most common stablecoin use case among respondents, followed by supplier payments, customer payments, investment and yield generation, vendor payments, and treasury and liquidity management.

Regulatory clarity was also a top factor respondents said would increase their confidence in expanding stablecoin use, with 71% identifying it as more important than trusted infrastructure providers or integration with existing systems.

Respondents came from the technology, financial services and ecommerce sectors in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, including C-suite executives, finance and treasury managers, and payments and operations leaders.

Related: Breez launches Bitcoin-to-stablecoin payments across more than 30 blockchains

Companies expand infrastructure for stablecoin payments

Separate industry data points to the same trend. In June, payments infrastructure provider Paybis said business customers accounted for nearly 98% of stablecoin payout volume processed through its platform during the first four months of 2026, up from 36% in 2023.

Paybis also cited McKinsey research estimating that business-to-business transactions accounted for roughly 60% of the $390 billion in global stablecoin payment volume recorded in 2025.

Companies have continued expanding infrastructure to support growing business demand. In May, Falcon Finance debuted the dollar-backed stablecoin fUSD through Anchorage Digital Bank’s federally regulated issuance platform, targeting institutional trading, collateral and treasury workflows.

On Monday, BNY expanded its digital asset custody platform to support Circle’s USDC, allowing institutional clients to store, transfer, mint and redeem the stablecoin directly through the bank.

Source: DefiLlama

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