[PRESS RELEASE – Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 10th, 2026]

NOWPayment believes the crypto industry has accepted unnecessary costs for too long – and that businesses no longer have to. For years, paying blockchain fees has been treated as the price of sending crypto.

According to Kate Lifshits, CEO of NOWPayments, it’s time to challenge that assumption. “Why does sending crypto still feel harder than sending an email?”

The company’s latest zero-fee payout infrastructure replaces wallet-based transfers with instant email-based payouts, enabling businesses to eliminate network fees, reduce operational complexity, and automate payouts at scale.

Crypto Payouts Have Become Unnecessarily Expensive

Most businesses still operate payout infrastructure designed around blockchain wallets. That means collecting wallet addresses, validating networks, recovering failed transactions, paying blockchain fees, and handling recipient support.

At scale, these problems become one of the largest hidden operational costs for affiliate platforms, marketplaces, gaming companies, payroll providers, cashback platforms, creator economies, and fintech businesses.

“The market has spent years competing over who can charge less per payout. We are asking a more important question: why should businesses pay per payout at all?” – Kate Lifshits NOWPayments CEO 

The Industry Is Paying for Problems It No Longer Needs to Have

Instead of requesting wallet addresses, companies simply use an email address as the payout destination. Recipients automatically receive access to their funds, while businesses avoid wallet validation, blockchain confirmation delays, and transaction fees.

Benefits include:

• Zero network fees
• Zero service fees
• Under-one-second delivery
• Automated onboarding
• Fewer failed payouts
• Lower support costs

The Biggest Impact Isn’t Technical

Although the release introduces API support, the larger story is economic rather than technical. Businesses making thousands of payouts can dramatically reduce operational costs while simplifying finance workflows. Payouts become a growth and engagement tool instead of a recurring expense.

Operational Cost Mitigation Analysis

The actual savings depend on payout volume, blockchain network fees, and the cryptocurrencies being used. While some businesses may save thousands of dollars annually, organizations processing hundreds of thousands or even millions of payouts could reduce costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

To help businesses estimate their own potential savings, NOWPayments has launched a Zero-Fee Crypto Payout Savings Calculator, allowing companies to compare their current payout costs with the potential cost of switching to zero-fee email-based payouts.

Calculate your savings here

“The future of crypto payouts is not wallet-to-wallet. It is person-to-person: identified by email, delivered instantly and free to move inside the ecosystem. Anything more complicated is legacy infrastructure.” – Kate Lifshits

Built for Businesses That Pay at Scale

The solution is designed for affiliate networks, marketplaces, gaming platforms, payroll providers, cashback programs, creator platforms, and fintech companies. Businesses can automate payouts globally using only an email address while maintaining existing workflows.

Conclusion

NOWPayments believes crypto payouts are entering a new phase. Instead of optimizing fee-based infrastructure, businesses can eliminate many of the costs and operational barriers traditionally associated with blockchain payouts. The question is no longer how to reduce payout costs – but whether those costs should exist at all.

About NOWPayments

NOWPayments is a global crypto payment gateway helping businesses simplify digital asset payments and payouts through enterprise-ready infrastructure. Supporting 350+ cryptocurrencies, 30+ stablecoins, and a comprehensive suite of APIs, payment tools, and payout solutions, NOWPayments enables companies worldwide to accept crypto, automate payouts, and scale their payment operations with speed, flexibility, and reliability.

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The US Department of Justice is reportedly moving to drop charges against the founder of BitClub Network, a purported crypto mining platform that allegedly defrauded investors of $722 million between 2014 and 2019.

A court filing shows Matthew Goettsche’s attorneys wrote to New Jersey district court Judge Claire Cecchi on Wednesday, stating that the parties “reached an agreement in principle” to resolve the pending charges “but need time to finalize the terms.”

Goettsche’s attorneys’ letter to New Jersey district court Judge Claire Cecchi. Source: Bloomberg Law

The filing came after the deputy attorney general’s office in Washington reportedly ordered the New Jersey attorney general’s office to dismiss the case against Goettsche with prejudice, according to a report on Friday from Bloomberg Law, citing two sources familiar with the matter. 

Goettsche was indicted in December 2019 and was set to face trial in October for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and selling unregistered securities. A reversal would mark one of the more notable changes in US crypto enforcement history, particularly given that three of his former colleagues, Silviu Balaci, Joseph Abel and Gordon Beckstead, have pleaded guilty for their involvement in the scheme.

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The potential reversal follows an April 2025 memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who directed the DOJ to end its “regulation by prosecution” strategy against the digital asset industry.

Cointelegraph reached out to the DOJ for comment but didn’t receive an immediate response.

BitClub operated from April 2014 to December 2019, claiming to be a Bitcoin mining pool where investors could buy shares and earn passive returns. BitClub allegedly falsified earnings values to investors and fabricated mining data to entice more investors into the scheme.

Related: Acting AG Todd Blanche confirms ‘code is not a crime’ in DOJ pivot 

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Past court filings show Goettsche once described his model as one built “on the backs of idiots.”

DOJ is still taking down crypto’s bad actors

In April, California man Evan Tageman was sentenced to 70 months in prison for his role in a criminal enterprise that stole about $263 million worth of crypto from victims through social engineering scams and burglary. 

The DOJ also froze over $700 million in crypto tied to investment scammers targeting Americans in April, while in February, it seized nearly $580 million in crypto linked to a criminal scam group operating in Southeast Asia.

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

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Cardano News: Charles Hoskinson has flatly denied rumors he is retiring from Cardano, calling the claims “categorically untrue” and “a complete fabrication” in a video posted July 10, a denial that became necessary after decontextualized clips circulated widely enough to reach well outside the crypto community.

The rumor spread so far that a London taxi driver relayed it to visiting Cardano supporters, and contacts at a partner firm had passed the same claim to their own chief executive.

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Cardano News: How the Misinformation Took Hold

The exit narrative accumulated over several months from a series of clips stripped of their surrounding context. A New Year 2026 stream in which Hoskinson said he had “outgrown X” and was handing the account to curators circulated without his explicit denial delivered in the same session.

A brief “I’m taking a break. TTYL” post on X was screenshotted and spread without the accompanying video. A 26-minute reform video in which he criticized the Cardano Foundation’s governance structure, calling elements of it the biggest mistake of his career, generated clips that left out the surrounding denial.

The pattern is consistent: each clip preserved the dramatic line and dropped the disavowal. Hoskinson has now posted a direct rebuttal and asked the community to share it with anyone still repeating the rumor.

“It is categorically untrue. It’s a complete lie. It’s a complete fabrication.”

Hoskinson said in the video, leaving no interpretive room on where he stands.

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Governance Turbulence Feeding the Narrative

The denial lands against a backdrop that made the exit story plausible to outside observers. EMURGO exited Cardano’s Pentad governance body following a wallet exploit, removing one of the ecosystem’s three founding pillars from the formal structure.

Investor Justin Bons publicly called for Hoskinson’s removal, a move that drew significant community backlash but kept the founder’s position in the headlines.

A separate period of sharp public commentary from Hoskinson on Cardano’s governance failings added further ammunition to the out-of-context clip cycle.

Hoskinson has also been explicit about his formal position: he holds no governance keys, cannot initiate a hard fork or protocol parameter change, has no treasury access, and does not own the Cardano trademark.

The Plomin hard fork in January 2025 transferred key governance powers to ADA holders via DReps, meaning his influence is structural and reputational rather than executive. That distinction matters for traders trying to assess what his actual departure, hypothetical as it is, would change in protocol terms.

An active funding standoff between DReps and Input Output’s research budget remains unresolved. Hoskinson has warned that the ecosystem could lose scientists if IO’s research funding fails, a credible threat given Cardano’s academic-pipeline model is a core differentiator versus other L1s. He has floated a governance overhaul aimed at restoring confidence, though no specific proposal has been formally tabled.

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Sam Altman ChatGPT AI just delivered the most institutionally detailed Bitcoin price prediction bull case in this entire series. The model predicts $150,000 as the central year-end target, with a credible bull range of $180,000 to $200,000 and a momentum-driven stretch target of $250,000 sitting above that.

The bull case reads like a complete regulatory and adoption checklist rather than a single thesis. Bitcoin trades near $64,000 today, and the model describes the catalyst stack as unusually powerful even by Bitcoin’s historically catalyst-rich standards.

The bipartisan CLARITY Act has passed the House and advanced through Senate committee work, and final enactment would clarify SEC versus CFTC jurisdiction and remove a major institutional risk premium that has kept conservative allocators cautious. The GENIUS Act adds another layer of regulatory clarity for stablecoins and digital assets on top of that.

The Trump administration’s explicitly pro-crypto policy pivot and the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve whose holdings are not to be sold give Bitcoin unprecedented political legitimacy that no previous cycle has ever had.

Regulated demand channels are widening simultaneously across multiple vectors, including spot ETFs, in-kind ETF creations and redemptions, potential 401 (k) access, the repeal of restrictive SAB 121 custody accounting, OCC approval for banks to provide crypto custody and execution, and FASB fair value accounting.

That last item matters enormously because it means corporations can now hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets without penalizing accounting treatment.

Adoption has moved well past theoretical at this point, with digital asset funds attracting $47.2 billion during 2025, corporate treasury participation expanding, and Strategy alone reporting holdings above 845,000 BTC, creating persistent structural demand against Bitcoin’s fixed post-halving issuance.

The bear case names specific triggers rather than vague concerns. A fall toward $45,000 to $60,000 becomes the scenario if CLARITY stalls before the midterms, inflation forces the Federal Reserve to tighten instead of easing, ETF flows reverse, or leveraged Treasury companies are forced sellers.

The model explicitly frames the $150,000 target as the best risk-adjusted outcome rather than a guaranteed one, which is a notably measured closing statement for a prediction this ambitious.

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Bitcoin Price Prediction: Recovers Off Its Lowest Level In Over A Year With The Best Catalyst Stack Of The Cycle

The daily chart shows Bitcoin at $64,382 after a recovery that has gained real traction over the past 2 weeks, bouncing from lows near $58,000 in late June and building momentum into early July.

Today’s candle is up nearly 2% and has traded as high as $64,453 intraday, putting Bitcoin back above the $64,000 level for the first time since late May.

That recovery looks structurally different from the shallow bounces that came before it, with a series of higher lows forming since the June bottom and each subsequent session holding gains rather than immediately giving them back.

Resistance sits first at $68,000, the level that capped multiple attempts to push higher throughout May and June, with a much heavier ceiling near $80,000 where the most extended rally of the year ultimately ran out of buyers.

The $60,000 level sits directly below as the line between the current base and the upper end of the bear case range named in this prediction, making it the most critical number to watch on this chart.

The broader structure still shows lower highs stretching back to October, with the downtrend technically intact until Bitcoin can clear $80,000 and hold it.

Momentum on the daily candles looks the most constructive it has been since April, with green sessions becoming more consistent and the selling pressure that dominated June clearly dissipating.

Given how precisely the model frames the CLARITY Act timeline and late Q3 to Q4 as the ignition window, the price action over the next 6 to 8 weeks around the $60,000 to $68,000 zone will almost certainly determine whether this base becomes the launchpad ChatGPT is describing or simply another failed attempt to reverse a dominant downtrend.

Here is What ChatGPT AI Predicts About LiquidChain

Most people will only see this rotation in hindsight. The smart money has already moved.

Large caps are not failing. They are out of room. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP keep pressing against the same ceilings with nothing breaking through. Every macro tailwind has a new arrival date. Every institutional wave lands next quarter. Sitting in assets where the upside depends entirely on someone else’s decision is not a strategy. It is a waiting room.

Capital that has survived enough cycles knows one thing. It moves before the destination becomes obvious.

Early-stage infrastructure plays by completely different rules. A small market cap means that a modest rotation can produce dramatic price movement. The returns live in the gap between what something is genuinely worth and what the market has assigned it so far. That gap exists only while the project remains undiscovered. Once found, it closes permanently.

Multi-chain fragmentation is bleeding DeFi every single day. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana exist as completely isolated systems. No native bridge between them. Every user crossing those boundaries absorbs the cost directly in fees, slippage, and failed transactions. Every single crossing. Every single time.

ChatGPT AI predicts LiquidChain fixes that entirely. All 3 networks within a single execution layer. One deployment reaches everything. Zero cross-chain tax on any interaction.

The presale is at $0.01454 with just over $890,000 raised. The market has not found this yet. That is exactly the point.

Execution is unproven. Adoption is unknown. Established assets offer a predictable ride toward a ceiling everyone can already see. LiquidChain is an entry point that disappears the moment the market looks up.

Visit LiquidChain.

The post Sam Altman ChatGPT AI Predicts Bitcoin Price Will Shock Everyone by End Of 2026 appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Ethereum News: The Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Security team disclosed on July 9 that coordinated AI agents scanning Ethereum’s core codebase identified CVE-2026-34219, a remotely-triggerable panic in libp2p’s gossipsub layer that allows any unauthenticated peer to crash a vulnerable node with a single crafted control message.

The bug has been patched in libp2p-gossipsub v0.49.4, and every operator running consensus clients on an older version should treat the upgrade as non-negotiable.

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Ethereum News: What the Bug Actually Does

Gossipsub is the P2P messaging layer all Ethereum consensus clients depend on to propagate blocks and attestations across the network.

CVE-2026-34219 lives in the PRUNE backoff expiry handler: when a peer sends a crafted PRUNE control message carrying a near-maximum backoff value, the implementation performs unchecked Instant + Duration arithmetic on the next heartbeat tick. That arithmetic overflows and triggers a panic, according to SentinelOne’s vulnerability database.

According to NVD’s CVE record, the vulnerability carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 8.2 HIGH with an attack vector of network, no privileges required, and no user interaction.

The attacker can reconnect and replay the message after each crash, making the denial-of-service repeatable at negligible cost. Affected scope is any validator, indexer, or sidecar tool running Rust libp2p-gossipsub below v0.49.4, the vulnerability is not confined to Ethereum deployments, as Snyk’s advisory flags it as a risk for any application using the vulnerable crate in production.

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How the AI Agent Pipeline Found It

Nikos Baxevanis of the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Security team published the methodology behind the find.

The team ran many AI agents in parallel against Ethereum’s systems software, cryptographic code, and contracts, coordinating through a shared Git repository with no central dispatcher, a structure borrowed from Anthropic’s fleet-based compiler work.

Roles were generated dynamically as the work surfaced them: Recon converted attack surface into testable hypotheses, Hunting traced code paths and built reproducers, Gap-filling tracked coverage, and Validation independently re-checked every candidate before it counted.

The key discipline was a strict reproducibility threshold. As the EF post states: “A candidate isn’t a finding until there’s a self-contained artifact that reproduces the failure against the real code, and that runs for someone who didn’t write it.”

That single rule filtered out the most common false-positive traps – panics that vanished in production builds, reproducers that relied on internal values no real attacker input could ever produce, and formal proofs that were trivially satisfied regardless of actual code behaviour.

The EF team’s candid framing of the triage burden is the most operationally useful part of the disclosure. “The surprise was how little of the work went into finding them, and how much went into telling the real bugs from the ones that just looked real,” Baxevanis wrote.

Most candidates were wrong, duplicate, or out of scope, and the volume AI generates means that false-positive rate compounds fast without rigorous triage infrastructure.

What This Means for Protocol Security Going Forward

CVE-2026-34219 is not an isolated incident in libp2p’s backoff handling. According to external CVE listings, a prior vulnerability, CVE-2026-33040, reportedly involved a similar PRUNE/backoff overflow fixed in v0.49.3 and carried a CVSS score of 8.7. CVE-2026-33040 and CVE-2026-34219 appear to be back-to-back high-severity bugs in the same subsystem across consecutive minor releases, suggesting a pattern of systematic hardening in libp2p’s backoff handling rather than a one-off patch, and suggesting the gossipsub control-message surface warrants continued scrutiny.

The broader implication for Ethereum infrastructure is structural. AI-assisted security work has been applied to smart contract audits for years; this disclosure marks a meaningful shift toward deploying the same capability against core networking and systems code.

The EF team’s conclusion is direct: “The bottleneck didn’t go away. It moved from finding bugs to trusting the results, which is a better place for it, because that’s where human judgment actually matters.” For Ethereum’s ongoing protocol development, that’s a durable process improvement – not just a one-time find.

Operators running consensus clients or any auxiliary tooling built on Rust libp2p should verify their gossipsub version immediately and upgrade to v0.49.4 or later. The patch adds bounds checking on backoff duration values in PRUNE messages before they enter heartbeat arithmetic, closing the overflow path entirely.

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JPMorgan’s artificial intelligence (AI) agents beat a traditional 60/40 portfolio across two decades of backtests. The bank celebrated the result, then warned investors not to trust it.

The test asks whether AI can move from assisting analysts to allocating capital itself. It lands as Jack Dorsey champions a similar shift in how people work with machines.

How JPMorgan’s AI Agents Beat the 60/40 Portfolio

JPMorgan’s cross-asset strategy team built eight AI agents that move between stocks and bonds as conditions change. The strategists, led by Thomas Salopek, shared the results in a July 9 note. The system reads four macro regimes set by growth and inflation.

The benchmark is fair and meaningful. The 60/40 split anchored balanced portfolios for decades. In 2022 it had its worst year since 1937, when stocks and bonds sank together.

The agents favored stocks when growth looked strong and bonds when it weakened. Over 20 years of backtests, the best agent topped the 60/40 portfolio by 0.7 percentage point a year.

It did so with 2.8% lower annual volatility. All eight agents won on a risk-adjusted basis, with Sharpe ratios of 0.74 to 0.95 against the portfolio’s 0.61.

The agents ran on off-the-shelf models from OpenAI and Anthropic, yet beat JPMorgan’s own rules-based regime model. That extends the bank’s recent AI calls into riskier territory.

Why the Bet Echoes Dorsey’s Agent-First Vision

The approach mirrors a philosophy Jack Dorsey described. The Block chief executive now defers to AI agents rather than directing them.

Dorsey has already bet his company on it, cutting over 4,000 jobs at Block in February and crediting AI. That was about 40% of staff. JPMorgan’s agents apply the same logic to markets, part of a wider push toward AI agents handling money.

The Warning Veteran Quants Know Well

JPMorgan was clear about the limits. The results come from historical simulations, not live trading, and the bank cautioned against over-reading them.

Richard Bernstein, a veteran Wall Street quant, put it more sharply. New strategies, he noted, rarely publish backtests that lose.

His point is publication bias. Flexible AI models can fit past noise, then fade when live costs and unseen regimes hit.

JPMorgan also warned that crowded AI trades could amplify market stress, echoing broader cracks in AI spending. Backtests have flattered many strategies that later stumbled. Whether these agents survive live markets is the real question.

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Grayscale has named five blockchains best positioned to gain as tokenized stocks push deeper into traditional finance. The asset manager pointed to Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Avalanche (AVAX), BNB Chain, and Canton Network.

A new research note frames tokenized equities as one of the clearest signs of blockchain entering mainstream markets. Grayscale sees three models driving that shift, and each rewards a different set of networks.

Three Models Moving Tokenized Stocks Onchain

Grayscale head of research Zach Pandl laid out the three phases in the note. The first is the wrapper model, where a token represents shares held inside a special purpose vehicle. That structure holds more than 70% of tokenized stock value today.

These wrapped tokens give holders price exposure rather than direct ownership. They appeal to retail traders because they fit decentralized finance and trade around the clock. Demand has climbed fast, with tokenized stock products drawing fresh capital in recent weeks.

The split already favors specific chains. Grayscale’s data shows third-party platforms hold most tokenized stock value. Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain carry the majority of onchain assets.

The second model brings existing securities on-chain through regulated rails, part of the broader real-world asset tokenization trend. Grayscale pointed to the DTCC pilot on Canton Network.

That pilot runs under a no-action letter from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. A live launch is targeted for the first half of 2026. The weight behind it is substantial. DTCC processed $3.7 quadrillion in securities transactions in 2024, and it recently joined Euroclear as co-chair of Canton’s governance.

Securitize Pushes the Newest Model

The third and newest model has companies issue shares natively on-chain. Securitize became the first newly public company to bring its own stock on-chain at its NYSE debut this month. It launched SECZ shares on Avalanche and Solana on day one.

The firm expects SECZ to become the world’s largest tokenized stock. Its choice of Avalanche and Solana tracks Grayscale’s view that open and hybrid networks suit issuer-native shares. Securitize also serves as the tokenization platform behind BlackRock’s BUIDL, the largest tokenized US Treasury fund.

Grayscale expects all three models to coexist for years. It sees the issuer-native model as the most promising, though tokenized market liquidity stays thin and rules remain unclear. Wrapper products lean on Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain, while Canton anchors the institutional pilot.

What Comes Next for the Five Networks

The framework lands as tokenized equities move from pilots toward regulated infrastructure. Broader adoption still depends on clearer rules for natively issued shares.

Market pricing shows the stakes for the named chains. Ethereum’s spot market had ether near $1,785, the second-largest crypto asset, while Solana’s SOL price hovered around $78. Both networks host a rising share of on-chain tokenized assets.

Whether regulated pilots can match the retail pull of wrapper tokens will shape the next phase. For now, Grayscale’s map sends the value toward a short list of chains.

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