Crypto World
Ripple, JPMorgan settle a tokenized Treasury on XRPL
A redemption that used to take days cleared in about five seconds. The names in the room matter more than the speed, and the question for XRP holders is where the token actually sits in the flow.
Summary
- JPMorgan, Mastercard, Ondo, and Ripple tested tokenized Treasury redemption on the XRP Ledger.
- The settlement speed matters, but the institutional names matter more.
- XRP was not the asset being redeemed, but it can sit in fees, reserves, and routing.
- The long-term signal is utility; the near-term question is whether volume follows.
On June 12, JPMorgan, Mastercard, Ondo Finance, and Ripple completed a test that moved a tokenized United States Treasury through a full redemption on the XRP Ledger. The settlement finished in roughly five seconds.
The same operation on traditional rails takes three to five business days. crypto.news shared the result the day it happened, and within hours the XRP community had folded it into the familiar story: another institution, another marquee logo, another reason the token should be worth more than it is.
The speed is real and the participants are real. What deserves a closer look is the part the headlines skip, which is the exact role XRP the asset plays when a tokenized Treasury changes hands on its ledger.
That answer is more interesting than a simple win or loss. It sets the boundary on how much a holder should read into the news.
What actually happened on June 12
Strip the announcement down to its parts and the test looks like this. Ondo Finance issued a tokenized version of a short-dated United States Treasury instrument, the kind of product that wraps a real government bond into an on-chain token that pays the yield of the underlying paper.
Mastercard provided the link between the regulated money layer and the chain through its Multi-Token Network, the rails it has been building to let banks move tokenized deposits and settle against tokenized assets. JPMorgan brought its institutional settlement infrastructure to the bank side of the trade.
Ripple supplied the ledger and the surrounding tooling that let the redemption clear on the XRP Ledger instead of on a private bank network.
A redemption is the moment a holder hands the token back and receives cash value in return. In the legacy world, that round trip crawls through custodians, transfer agents, and settlement windows that only open on business days.
The test compressed that into a single near-instant on-chain event, with the cash leg and the asset leg settling together instead of days apart. Atomic settlement, where both sides of a trade move or neither does, removes the gap during which one party holds an asset and waits to be paid.
That gap is where counterparty risk lives, and closing it is the entire point of putting this kind of asset on a fast public ledger. So the result is a working proof that a tokenized Treasury can be issued, held, and redeemed across a chain that major financial firms were willing to touch.
That is not nothing. It is also not the same thing as production volume, and the difference is where careful readers should slow down.
The logos are the story, up to a point
Each name on the June 12 test carries weight, and the weight is worth spelling out because the market tends to treat any JPMorgan headline as a verdict.
JPMorgan has spent years building Kinexys, formerly Onyx, its blockchain settlement arm that already moves large daily volumes in tokenized deposits. When a bank of that size agrees to run a redemption across the XRP Ledger, even as a test, it signals that the ledger met its internal bar for security and controls.
Mastercard has been pushing its Multi-Token Network as the connective tissue between banks and tokenized assets, and its presence shows the test was built to plug into existing card-network plumbing instead of standing alone as a crypto experiment. Ondo is one of the larger issuers of tokenized Treasuries, and its OUSG product has become a reference point for the whole real-world-asset category.
Ripple sat at the center as the ledger host and the firm whose institutional features made the settlement possible. Put together, the group reads as a deliberate signal that tokenized Treasuries can settle on the XRP Ledger with names that compliance departments recognize.
The temptation is to draw a straight line from that signal to the XRP price. Before drawing it, look at what moved through the transaction and what did not.
Why tokenized Treasuries are the wedge asset
It is no accident that the test used a Treasury and not some exotic instrument. Among all the assets the industry has tried to move on-chain, short-dated government debt has become the wedge that opens the institutional door, and the reasons say a lot about why June 12 happened at all.
A Treasury bill is the simplest large asset to tokenize honestly. It has a known issuer, a known maturity, a yield that is easy to verify, and a price that barely moves day to day.
There is little argument about what it is worth, which means a token wrapped around it can be marked with confidence and redeemed without disputes. Compare that to tokenized real estate or private credit, where valuation is slow, subjective, and easy to challenge, and the appeal of starting with Treasuries becomes obvious.
The asset removes the hardest problem in tokenization, which is agreeing on value, so the experiment can focus on the plumbing. That is why tokenization as the real story keeps coming back to Treasuries: they are liquid, familiar, yield-bearing, and easy for institutions to understand.
The demand is also concrete. Crypto firms, trading desks, and treasuries sit on large idle dollar balances, often parked in stablecoins that pay them nothing.
A tokenized Treasury lets that cash earn the yield of real government paper while staying on-chain, available to move at any hour without leaving for the banking system. That single feature, on-chain dollars that earn a real yield, has turned tokenized Treasuries into one of the fastest-growing corners of the whole digital-asset market.
Ondo’s OUSG and a handful of competitors have pulled in billions because they answer a question every on-chain treasurer has, which is how to stop leaving money on the table.
So when Ripple wanted to prove the XRP Ledger could host serious institutional settlement, the Treasury was the natural choice. It is the asset most likely to move in real size, the one institutions most want on-chain, and the one with the fewest excuses for the test to fail.
Winning the Treasury-settlement business is the beachhead. Everything heavier, corporate bonds, funds, structured credit, follows the rail that first proves itself on the simple asset.
Where XRP actually sits in the transaction
Here is the part that gets lost. In the June 12 flow, the asset being moved was a tokenized Treasury. The cash leg most likely settled in a stablecoin or a tokenized deposit.
XRP, the native token of the ledger, was not the thing being bought, sold, or redeemed.
That sounds like bad news for the holder thesis, and read too quickly it would be. The reality is more layered.
XRP touches a settlement like this in three indirect ways, and each one is small per transaction but structural across millions of them.
First, every transaction on the XRP Ledger burns a tiny amount of XRP as a fee. The amounts are fractions of a cent, designed to stop spam, not to enrich anyone.
As transaction count rises, the burn rises with it, which slowly removes XRP from supply. Second, accounts and certain ledger objects require a reserve denominated in XRP, so a ledger that hosts more institutional activity locks up more XRP in reserves.
Third, and most important over time, XRP can serve as the auto-bridge asset when one currency or token needs to move into another inside the ledger’s exchange. In a redemption that converts a tokenized Treasury back into a chosen settlement currency, XRP can sit in the middle as the routing asset that connects the two sides.
None of those roles require XRP to be the headline asset in the trade. All three grow with usage, not with hype.
That is the honest frame: the June 12 test does not put XRP at the center of the transaction, but it does feed the machinery where XRP earns its keep. Whether that machinery turns fast enough to matter for price is a separate question, and the search history of XRP suggests patience is warranted.
This is also what the tokenized Treasury settlement means for XRP: the ledger can win serious institutional use before the token captures meaningful demand. The two are connected, but not identical.
The ledger features that made it possible
A redemption like this could not have run on the XRP Ledger of a few years ago. The capability is new, and it comes from a stack of institutional features Ripple and the wider XRPL developer community shipped across 2025 and into 2026.
Multi-Purpose Tokens, the MPT standard, let a token carry the metadata that a real financial instrument needs, things like maturity dates, transfer restrictions, and tranche information, without forcing developers to bolt on fragile smart contracts. Permissioned Domains and a permissioned version of the ledger’s decentralized exchange let regulated participants trade in gated environments where access depends on credentials such as know-your-customer checks.
RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar stablecoin, now settles on the ledger and gives institutions a compliant cash leg that lives on the same rail as the asset. The escrow feature was extended to support third-party tokens like RLUSD, which matters for structured settlement.
Layer the XLS-66 lending protocol on top, with its single-asset vaults that isolate credit risk one asset at a time, and the ledger starts to look less like a payments network and more like a settlement venue with a credit layer attached. The June 12 test is the visible output of that quieter build.
The features were the precondition. The redemption was the demonstration that they hold together under the eyes of firms that do not lend their names casually.
The competition for the same settlement business
The XRP Ledger is not the only chain courting this work, and the contest for institutional settlement is the backdrop that gives June 12 its real stakes.
Ethereum sits at the center of the tokenized-asset world today. Most tokenized Treasuries, including the largest funds from the biggest asset managers, launched on Ethereum or its layer-2 networks, where the deepest pool of developers and the most established custody and compliance tooling already live.
An institution choosing where to settle starts from a world in which Ethereum is the default, and the burden falls on every other chain to give a reason to look elsewhere. Solana has pushed hard on speed and cost and has won its own share of tokenization projects and corporate interest.
On top of the public chains, the banks are building private ones. JPMorgan’s own settlement network already moves enormous daily volumes inside a permissioned environment the bank controls end to end.
Against that field, the XRP Ledger’s pitch is specific. It offers settlement built for payments from the start, with the institutional features, the MPT standard, permissioned trading, credentials, baked into the base layer instead of bolted on through smart contracts that have to be audited one project at a time.
The argument is that a purpose-built settlement ledger carries less risk surface than a general-purpose smart-contract chain, because there is less custom code between an institution and a completed trade. June 12 is Ripple making that argument in public with partners who could have run the same test anywhere.
This is why the names matter more than the speed. Five-second settlement is achievable on several chains.
What the XRP Ledger needed to prove was that firms like JPMorgan and Mastercard would choose it for a real institutional flow when they had every other option available. The test does not win the war.
It wins the right to be in the room for the next one, which for a chain competing against Ethereum’s incumbency is the harder thing to secure.
Following one tokenized Treasury through the flow
Abstractions blur the stakes, so trace a single unit through the kind of cycle the test modeled.
Start with a short-dated United States Treasury bill sitting in a custodian’s account. Ondo, or an issuer like it, holds that bill and mints an on-chain token against it.
The token represents a claim on the bill and the yield it throws off. Call it one unit of a tokenized Treasury, and place it in the wallet of an institutional holder who wants short-term dollar yield without leaving the chain.
For weeks, the holder simply holds. The token accrues the bill’s yield.
When the holder decides to exit, the redemption begins. The holder submits the token back toward the issuer through the settlement arrangement that JPMorgan and Mastercard stand behind.
On the ledger, the asset leg and the cash leg are matched so they settle as one event. The token is retired.
A settlement currency, most likely RLUSD or a tokenized deposit, lands in the holder’s wallet in return. The fee for the ledger transactions is paid in XRP and burned.
If the chosen settlement currency differs from the currency the token was priced in, the ledger’s exchange can route through XRP as the bridge to complete the swap. Total elapsed time: around five seconds.
Compare that to the legacy path, where the same redemption would route through a transfer agent, wait for a settlement window, and clear across three to five business days while both sides carry risk. The end state is identical.
The holder is out of the Treasury and into cash. The path is what changed, and the path is the product.
Notice where XRP appeared in that walk. It paid the fee. It may have bridged the currencies. It backed the account reserves.
It was never the asset the holder set out to trade. That is the shape of XRP’s role in institutional settlement, and it explains why utility can climb for years while the token price moves sideways.
What institutions actually buy beyond the five seconds
The speed grabs the headline, but settlement time is not the only thing an institution gains, and the other gains explain why firms keep running these tests even when the token economics do not concern them.
The first gain is capital efficiency. In the legacy model, the days between trade and settlement are days during which capital sits frozen, posted as margin or held in reserve against the risk that the other side fails to deliver.
Collapse settlement to seconds and that frozen capital comes free, available to be deployed elsewhere. For a large trading desk, the value of unlocking capital that used to sit idle for three days at a time runs into real money across a year of activity.
The second gain is around-the-clock operation. Traditional settlement runs on banking hours and business days, so a Friday trade waits through the weekend.
An on-chain ledger settles at any hour, which matters more every year as markets globalize and the line between trading days blurs. The third gain is collateral mobility.
A tokenized Treasury that settles instantly can be moved, pledged, or redeemed the moment it is needed, which lets the same asset work harder as collateral across more uses.
These are the reasons a JPMorgan or a Mastercard cares about the test, and none of them depend on XRP the token doing anything. The institution is buying a better settlement process.
XRP earns its small dues in the background. Keeping those two things separate is the key to reading any announcement like this one without mistaking institutional interest in the ledger for institutional demand for the token.
The first is clearly growing. The second has to be inferred from on-chain flow, and the inference is where most of the disappointment in XRP’s price history has come from.
That is why Ripple’s IPO and XRP holders is part of the same broader lesson. Ripple’s success, XRPL adoption, and XRP holder value are related, but they do not automatically collapse into the same thing.
Does settlement volume reach the price?
This is the question every holder actually wants answered, and it deserves a straight treatment, not a number pulled from the air.
The bullish case runs through the indirect roles. If tokenized Treasuries and similar real-world assets move onto the XRP Ledger in size, transaction counts climb, fee burn climbs, reserves lock up more supply, and bridge routing pulls XRP into more flows.
Demand for the token then rises from use instead of from speculation, and demand that comes from use tends to be stickier. Ripple has framed exactly this flywheel in its institutional materials, and the logic holds on its own terms.
The sober case sits in the math. Fee burn on the XRP Ledger is deliberately tiny.
Even a large jump in institutional transactions removes a small fraction of supply against the tens of billions of XRP already in circulation and the monthly escrow releases that add to it. Bridge routing only pulls in XRP when a trade actually needs a currency conversion that the ledger chooses to route through XRP, and many institutional flows will settle stablecoin to stablecoin without ever touching the token.
Reserves lock supply but do not create buy pressure on their own. There is a supply side to weigh as well, and it cuts against the burn story in the near term.
Ripple releases up to one billion XRP from escrow at the start of each month, then re-locks most of it, but the net new supply that reaches the market still runs into the hundreds of millions of tokens monthly. For fee burn from institutional settlement to tighten supply in any meaningful way, the volume would have to grow large enough to offset that steady release, which is a high bar at current transaction levels.
A holder who pins hopes on burn alone is betting that on-chain activity climbs by orders of magnitude while the escrow schedule keeps running on its long-set path. That can happen over years. It does not happen because of one test.
The careful reading is that the June 12 test strengthens the long-term utility argument and does little for the short-term price argument. XRP spent most of 2026 trading near or below the one-dollar-and-change range while news exactly like this piled up, which is the market telling you that proofs of concept are priced as proofs of concept until volume follows.
A settlement test is a door opening. Walking through it at scale is a different event, and the token tends to wait for the second one.
What has to be true for this to matter
For the June 12 result to move from interesting to important, a few things need to happen, and naming them gives a holder a watchlist instead of a hope.
Production volume has to follow the test. One redemption proves the plumbing.
Recurring institutional flow, measured in real daily value rather than pilot transactions, is what feeds the burn-and-bridge machinery. Regulatory clarity has to land, because the CLARITY Act and the broader United States market-structure framework decide how freely regulated institutions can settle tokenized assets on public ledgers.
Until the rules set, much of this activity stays in the test-and-pilot stage where the June 12 work lives. That is why CLARITY’s XRP classification question matters: the technology can be ready before the legal framework gives the rest of Wall Street permission to use it.
Competing venues have to be held off, since Ethereum, Solana, and a wave of bank-built private chains are chasing the same tokenized-asset settlement business, and the XRP Ledger has to keep winning the names that make compliance teams comfortable.
If those line up, the indirect demand argument gets a real chance to show up in on-chain data, and from there in price. If they stall, June 12 joins the long list of XRP headlines that read well and changed little.
The token has taught its holders that lesson more than once. That is also why institutional positioning in XRP matters as a separate signal: ETFs show who wants exposure, while settlement flows show whether utility is becoming demand.
Reading the signal without inflating it
The clean takeaway is that Ripple, with JPMorgan, Mastercard, and Ondo alongside it, proved that a tokenized Treasury can be issued and redeemed on the XRP Ledger in seconds, with names that the institutional world takes seriously.
That is a meaningful step for the ledger as a settlement venue. For XRP the asset, it is a vote for the long-term utility thesis and a weak input to the near-term price, because the token sits in the fees, the reserves, and the bridge rather than at the center of the trade.
A holder who understands that distinction will not oversell the day and will not dismiss it either. The machinery that pays XRP its small, repeated dues got a high-profile workout.
Now the only thing that turns that into price is the boring part, which is volume that shows up and keeps showing up. Watch the on-chain flow, watch the rules, and let the token follow the usage instead of the logos.
This article is information, not investment advice. Figures and partnership details reflect reporting available as of June 23, 2026, and corporate plans, test results, and market conditions can change.
Crypto World
Lummis Sets July as Senate Floor Deadline for Clarity Act, Tells Dimon to Read the Bill
Senator Cynthia Lummis announced Wednesday morning that the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act will reach the Senate floor in July, setting the first hard public commitment to a floor date from the bill's lead sponsor. Lummis made the announcement on Fox Business's "Mornings with Maria," saying the… Read the full story at The Defiant
Months of negotiations have brought the CLARITY Act to its final review stage, with Senator Cynthia Lummis confirming a July 4 release of the updated text ahead of a Senate push later in July.
Summary
- Senator Cynthia Lummis said the final CLARITY Act text will be released around July 4 for public review.
- Senate leaders are working to schedule floor consideration of the crypto market structure bill in July.
- Law enforcement groups and anti-trafficking advocates continue to oppose Section 604 over AML and oversight concerns.
According to Lummis, who spoke with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, Senate negotiators are preparing to publish the updated legislative text after months of discussions involving lawmakers, industry stakeholders, and banking representatives. She said the bill will be made available for one final round of feedback before lawmakers seek a Senate floor vote later in July.
Speaking during the interview, Lummis said negotiations on the legislation have been ongoing since last Labor Day and have required extensive work to address concerns raised throughout the drafting process. She stated that lawmakers spent thousands of hours examining issues tied to both the CLARITY Act and the recently debated GENIUS Act while also considering objections raised by parts of the banking industry.
Following the publication of the text, Lummis said Senate leadership is working to secure floor time next month. She added that discussions with Senate Majority Leader John Thune are focused on placing the legislation on the chamber’s July agenda.
Senate prepares next step for crypto market structure bill
The expected release comes as lawmakers continue refining a framework intended to establish regulatory boundaries for digital asset markets in the United States.
During the interview, Lummis pushed back against criticism from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who had argued that the bill could allow crypto companies to offer rewards programs resembling interest-bearing banking products without being subject to the same safeguards as traditional financial institutions.
Responding to those concerns, Lummis said the criticism does not accurately reflect the legislation’s current language. She pointed to Section 301 of the bill, which she said was revised during negotiations to address issues raised by banks and regulators.
According to Lummis, the updated provisions ensure that rewards offered by crypto firms are not linked to account balances in a way that resembles interest payments. She also said the legislation includes additional anti-money laundering measures that were incorporated during the drafting process.
Her remarks come as lawmakers continue balancing demands from the crypto industry with concerns raised by traditional financial institutions over consumer protections and regulatory consistency.
Section 604 continues to attract opposition
While Senate negotiators move toward publication of the final text, several organizations have recently urged lawmakers to reconsider another part of the legislation.
As crypto.news previously reported, four law enforcement organizations sent a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and White House digital assets adviser Patrick Witt, warning that Section 604 could create regulatory gaps and make investigations involving digital assets more difficult. The groups argued that the provision could weaken Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering requirements compared with standards applied in traditional finance.
Section 604 incorporates the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act and would prevent certain non-custodial participants, including open-source developers, self-custody tool providers, software contributors, and some decentralized finance infrastructure operators, from automatically being classified as money transmitters.
Separately, the Alliance to End Human Trafficking urged Senate Republican Leader John Thune and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to revisit the same provision. The organization said the proposed language could create ambiguities that complicate efforts to monitor financial activity linked to human trafficking, organized crime, child exploitation, sanctions evasion, and other illicit conduct.
Those objections add to the list of issues lawmakers are weighing as the CLARITY Act enters what Lummis described as its final public review phase before Senate consideration.
Ripple won a regulatory milestone in Japan this week — but it needed a rival blockchain to do it.
Earlier today, SBI VC Trade, a crypto arm of the $11 billion Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings, listed Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin for trading, heralding it as the country’s first “Type 4 electronic payment instrument” under Japan’s revised Payment Services Act.
However, the only Ripple USD (RLUSD) tokens that SBI traders in Japan can deposit or withdraw are on the Ethereum blockchain.
The irony is rich. Ethereum is the primary competitor of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), the blockchain that Ripple incubated.
The Japanese approval of RLUSD as its first Type 4 instrument is unambiguous. The supported chain is Ethereum, and RLUSD on any other chain will not be accepted for deposit, including XRPL-based RLUSD.
Additional blockchains could earn approval in the future, although regulators have not specified any particular timeline for review.
Type 4 electronic payment method
Japan’s 2023 amendments to its Payment Services Act created a dedicated regulatory bucket for fiat-pegged stablecoins.
These “electronic payment instruments” separated digital money-type tokens from ordinary crypto assets like ether or XRP, which aren’t pegged in value to any fiat currency.
Pursuant to Article 2 of the act, Type 1 instruments include currency-denominated value usable for payment to and tradable with unspecified persons, Type 2 covers value instantly exchangeable with Type 1, and Type 3 covers instruments with specific trust beneficiary rights.
Type 4 is a residual, catch-all slot for property value designated, by cabinet office ordinance, as otherwise equivalent in value to the first three categories.
It’s the bucket regulators can reach for when an instrument doesn’t fit cleanly anywhere else.
That residual quality explains the awkward legal footnote in SBI VC Trade’s own announcement. The RLUSD token is not a trust beneficiary right under US law, the company noted, yet SBI workers were able to help it gain Type 4 classification for Japanese purposes anyway after establishing its financial equivalencies to the USD to the satisfaction of regulators.
The Type 4 label is as much a classification as a regulatory admission that Ethereum has some superiority over the XRPL.
RLUSD didn’t slot neatly into the three main categories, but thanks to the help of Ethereum, it was able to gain a catch-all designation.
It’s issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-chartered Ripple subsidiary, and is backed by dollar deposits and short-term Treasuries subject to monthly, third-party attestations.
It’s the second dollar stablecoin on the SBI VCTRADE platform, which has handled Circle’s USDC since March 2025. USDC is a Type 3 instrument in Japan.
An XRP milestone using Ethereum
Still, XRP influencers framed the event as a win. RLUSD started trending on X.
The president of SBI VC Trade billed the listing as a milestone and credited Ripple Labs for the momentous occasion.
Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president for stablecoins, praised Japan’s regulatory clarity and applauded RLUSD’s ability to link Japanese institutions with global liquidity.
Neither executive dwelt on which blockchain was actually linking up the liquidity.
“They launched this one on ETHEREUM,” one account posted in reply to celebratory coverage.
A separate post highlighted the fine print on the approval. RLUSD is live “on Ethereum ONLY” as a Japanese Type 4 electronic payment instrument and capped at roughly $6,200 per transaction, a ceiling that matches the 1 million yen per-transaction limit set in SBI VC Trade’s own announcement.
Most of RLUSD already lives on Ethereum
The Japanese listing isn’t an anomaly. Indeed, despite being a Ripple project, the majority of RLUSD tokens have historically existed outside of the XRPL.
As Protos reported on June 15, around $879 million of the token in circulation was parked on Ethereum, ahead of roughly $760 million on the XRP Ledger.
Read more: Ripple dumps XRP to pump RLUSD — still 0.2% the size of USDT
Ethereum’s dominance had been wider earlier in the cycle, with Ethereum holding close to 88% of RLUSD supply as recently as October 2025.
Coin listing sites like CoinMarketCap reinforce the preeminence of Ethereum-based RLUSD, listing RLUSD’s primary blockchain as Ethereum and pointing to the token’s ERC-20 contract address as its primary smart contract, rather than any XRP Ledger issuance.
Dwarfing the size of XRPL, Ethereum gave RLUSD deeper liquidity, mature DeFi venues like Aave and Curve, and a far larger base of dollar-stablecoin holders.
For a Japanese exchange wiring up a new asset, Ethereum-based RLUSD was the quickest path to approval and trade listings.
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Congressional scrutiny has intensified around World Liberty Financial (WLFI) after Senate Democrats raised concerns about a major foreign-linked investment. The lawmakers are seeking additional information about a reported transaction involving entities connected to the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, the issue has emerged alongside ongoing debates over digital asset legislation in Washington.
Senate Democrats Seek Review of WLFI UAE Investment
Five Democratic senators have urged Republican committee leaders to examine a reported investment involving WLFI. The lawmakers requested a congressional hearing and highlighted potential conflicts linked to foreign interests. As a result, the issue has drawn fresh attention to the company’s ownership structure.
According to the senators, the investment agreement was completed shortly before Donald Trump returned to office. They stated that a UAE-linked partner received a 49% stake in WLFI through the arrangement. Additionally, the lawmakers reported that foreign buyers paid $218 million to entities connected to Trump and envoy Steve Witkoff.
The senators identified Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan as the lead investor in the transaction. They argued that the reported ownership structure raises questions about foreign influence. Consequently, they requested sworn statements from administration officials and others connected to the deal.
The lawmakers also pointed to policy developments that occurred after Trump took office. They noted that the UAE received more than $1.4 billion in arms approvals since January 2025. Furthermore, exports of advanced artificial intelligence chips exceeded $1 billion during the same period.
Democrats want authorities to clarify what officials knew about the reported payments and timing. Therefore, they are seeking records and testimony from relevant parties. The request forms part of a broader effort to examine potential conflicts involving public officials.
The inquiry adds another layer of political pressure on WLFI and its associated projects. At the same time, lawmakers continue to debate how digital asset businesses should operate. As discussions continue, congressional committees may face increased pressure to address the concerns.
Clarity Act Debate Adds New Dimension to Dispute
The controversy has surfaced while Congress continues work on the CLARITY Act. The legislation aims to establish a clearer regulatory framework for digital assets. Therefore, lawmakers remain engaged in negotiations over several key provisions.
Senate Democrats have proposed ethics measures tied to the legislation. The proposal would restrict federal officials from creating, promoting, or sponsoring crypto assets. Consequently, the amendment could affect projects associated with current government officials.
The proposed restrictions could impact crypto ventures linked to Trump. Lawmakers specifically referenced World Liberty Financial and the TRUMP meme coin. As a result, the debate has expanded beyond market regulation and into ethics oversight.
White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt has become involved in discussions surrounding the bill. Reports indicate that he is working to address concerns related to the ethics provisions. Meanwhile, lawmakers continue to negotiate the final structure of the legislation.
Supporters of the ethics proposal argue that stronger safeguards would reduce potential conflicts. However, opponents maintain that broad restrictions could affect participation in emerging technologies. Therefore, the issue remains a key point of disagreement in Congress.
The dispute highlights the growing intersection between digital assets and national politics. At the same time, regulators and lawmakers continue shaping future crypto policy. As congressional discussions move forward, both the WLFI inquiry and the CLARITY Act debate are expected to remain prominent topics.
Cboe, one of the largest U.S. derivatives exchanges, said it is entering the prediction-market arena and is reviving binary options on the S&P 500 index after abandoning them more than a decade ago, a move that brings it into competition with platforms such as Kalshi and the crypto-native Polymarket.
A binary option is a yes-or-no bet that pays a fixed amount if an outcome occurs, in this case whether the benchmark U.S. equity index crosses a specific level. That is close to what Polymarket and Kalshi already offer, though their offerings go beyond stock market forecasts to cover political and sporting outcomes as well as other topics.
The introduction follows Cboe’s success with same-day S&P 500 options, contracts that expire within hours and now make up about 30% of U.S. options volume, calling attention to the demand for fast, outcome-based trades.
“Investors increasingly seek products that allow them to express a specific view on future events and market outcomes,” said Milan Galik, CEO of Interactive Brokers, which is carrying the binary contracts, in a statement.
The contracts will also become available on Charles Schwab later this year.
Second time round
Cboe has tried this market before. It first listed binary options on the S&P 500 and the Cboe Volatility Index in 2008, but they failed to draw interest and were pulled, with the last such contract expiring in 2017.
YZi rejected suggestions that the settlement amounts to a takeover, a person close to the settlement told CoinDesk in an interview, describing it instead as a governance reset intended to unlock shareholder value. The firm also stressed that Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao was not involved in the initiative.
The investment firm was rebranded from the venture arm of crypto exchange Binance in 2024. Following Zhao’s release from prison that year, he took a more active role in venture project. YZI Labs is often referred to as Zhao’s family office – the name for an investment vehicle that manages a family’s wealth. YZi, however, says its structure is different, as it does not involve itself in estate planning, tax structuring and other similar functions.
YZi’s goal is to reposition CEA as a leading BNB treasury vehicle, comparable to Strategy’s (MSTR) role in bitcoin markets. The firm argues that CEA’s shares trade at a significant discount to the value of its underlying BNB holdings, a gap it believes can be narrowed through governance reforms and a clearer operating strategy.
The move comes as digital asset treasury companies enter what some investors describe as a second phase of development. While early treasury firms focused primarily on accumulating crypto assets, newer models are increasingly looking to generate revenue from ecosystem participation and infrastructure businesses tied to those holdings.
Arredondo argues that the industry has spent years building separate blockchain networks, stablecoins and digital money projects, but has spent less time ensuring those systems can work together.
“We need to move the market from everyone doing their own very cool things to actually thinking about standard-setting across the piece.”
The issue has become more important as governments, banks and private companies increasingly experiment with tokenized deposits, stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
Arredondo pointed to the European Union (EU) as an example of a jurisdiction seeking to accommodate multiple forms of digital money simultaneously.
The EU’s approach allows stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits and central bank money to coexist under the same broad framework, she said.
Wall Street’s crypto role
The growing role of banks, asset managers and large financial institutions in crypto has divided the industry. Some early crypto supporters argue the sector is moving away from its original goals of decentralization and disintermediation.
Arredondo sees it differently. “The early crypto vision raised fundamental economic questions and brought them to the mainstream,” she said.
For Arredondo, the rise of institutional crypto does not mean the industry’s early ideas failed.
Instead, she sees it as evidence that ideas first developed inside the crypto sphere are increasingly being adopted by mainstream finance. “It shouldn’t be disappointing that we are maintaining the pillars that have long anchored trust in money.”
Key Points
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President Trump postpones housing legislation signing, halting CBDC prohibition.
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Legislation includes provision blocking Federal Reserve digital dollar until 2030.
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Signing contingent on Congressional passage of SAVE America Act.
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Stablecoin exemptions preserved within housing legislation framework.
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Senate faces mounting pressure on cryptocurrency regulatory framework discussions.
President Donald Trump has postponed the implementation of a federal prohibition on central bank digital currencies by canceling Wednesday’s scheduled signing ceremony for comprehensive bipartisan housing legislation. The measure includes provisions preventing the Federal Reserve from launching a digital dollar until 2030, though Trump has made his approval conditional on separate voting reform legislation.
President Conditions Housing Bill on Electoral Reforms
Through a Truth Social announcement, Trump canceled the ceremony mere hours before its scheduled start. He indicated that Congressional approval of the SAVE America Act must occur before he proceeds with the housing package. This decision immediately created uncertainty surrounding the housing bill’s CBDC prohibition language.
The SAVE America Act mandates citizenship verification for individuals registering to vote in federal elections. Proponents characterize this requirement as necessary election integrity protection, while critics contend it may disenfranchise legitimate voters. Trump has urged Senate Republicans to expedite the measure despite minimal Democratic backing.
Congressional approval for the housing bill was substantial, with the House voting 358 to 32 following Senate passage at 85 to five. This bipartisan support demonstrated rare legislative consensus across party lines. Nevertheless, Trump chose to delay the signing despite broad congressional backing.
Digital Currency Ban Embedded in Housing Legislation
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act focuses predominantly on housing availability, cost reduction, mortgage regulations, and development obstacles. Yet legislators inserted provisions prohibiting the Federal Reserve from developing or distributing a retail CBDC. This restriction extends through December 31, 2030.
The language encompasses digital instruments that function similarly to central bank digital currencies. Conversely, it carves out private dollar-denominated assets operating on transparent, permissionless, and decentralized networks. This exemption safeguards eligible stablecoins from the federal prohibition.
Trump has previously instructed federal departments to refrain from creating, distributing, or advocating for a United States CBDC absent explicit legislative authority. While the Federal Reserve has conducted digital currency research, no digital dollar has been introduced. The congressional language would codify existing administrative policy into statutory law.
Postponement Creates Uncertainty for Crypto Regulatory Framework
Trump retains the option to sign the housing legislation once Congress addresses his voting reform priorities. Constitutional mechanisms also permit the bill to become law without presidential signature. However, formal transmission procedures and legislative scheduling will dictate available timeframes.
This postponement may generate additional concerns regarding the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. That legislation would establish regulatory jurisdiction for digital assets and allocate supervision among federal agencies. Trump has expressed support for establishing permanent market structure frameworks for the cryptocurrency industry.
The CLARITY Act awaits Senate deliberation, potential modifications, and ultimate floor consideration. Concurrently, legislators are negotiating ethics requirements concerning political figures’ involvement in digital asset enterprises. The housing bill dispute now introduces another political prerequisite to an already congested Senate agenda.
Trump has not explicitly threatened vetoes against market structure legislation or other cryptocurrency bills. However, his linkage of unrelated measures may decelerate congressional progress across multiple policy domains. The CBDC prohibition consequently remains entangled with broader controversies involving housing policy, electoral procedures, and digital asset oversight.
Several Democrats and one Republican who were supported by more than $8 million worth of ads funded by cryptocurrency-aligned political action committees (PACs) won their respective US primaries on Tuesday, setting up their candidacies for the November election.
Party primaries for US House of Representatives and Senate candidates in Utah, Maryland and New York resulted in wins for many aligned with crypto industry interests. PACs like Fairshake and its affiliates, largely backed by crypto companies Coinbase and Ripple Labs, spent a combined $8 million on media to support the candidates it considered likely in favor of digital asset policies for the next session of Congress.
In New York, Democrat Ritchie Torres won a primary for the state’s 15th congressional district with 71.9% of the vote, while in Utah, Republican Blake Moore won in the 2nd district with 57.5% of the vote. Fairshake affiliate Protect Progress reported $5.5 million in expenditures to support Adrian Boafo, who won the Democratic primary for Maryland’s 5th district with 32% against other candidates who opposed “spending from crypto billionaires.”
“We went big and we went early,” said Fairshake spokesperson Geoff Vetter. “We did our part to move Adrian Boafo from fifth place to the halls of Congress.”
Source: The New York Times
Fairshake, which reported having “$150 million cash on hand” in June after its spending in several US state primaries, may have already influenced voters in key elections in its attempts to send candidates to Congress it considers to be “pro-crypto.” Other PACs aligned with crypto interests that have reported spending on 2026 candidates included Fellowship, backed by Cantor Fitzgerald and Anchorage Digital, and the Blockchain Leadership Fund, a hybrid PAC backed by Anchorage and Chainlink Labs.
Related: Trump cancels signing of housing bill with CBDC ban
Not every pro-crypto candidate emerged a winner on Tuesday. Alex Bores, a Democrat running in New York’s 12th District, lost to Micah Lasher. He criticized Bores in a June debate, saying that he potentially benefitted from Ripple Labs co-founder Chris Larsen spending $3.5 million to support his campaign.
Next primaries in Colorado and Arizona, but no reports of spending yet
Many expect Fairshake and other crypto-aligned PACs to turn their attention to candidates in Colorado and Arizona next. The two states are scheduled to hold primaries on June 30 and July 21, respectively, but Fairshake affiliates had not disclosed significant spending in any of the races as of Wednesday.
In 2024, the PAC and its affiliates poured more than $10 million into media to support Ruben Gallego’s Senate race in Arizona and $2.1 million for Democratic Representative Yadira Caraveo in Colorado’s 8th district. Gallego won his race, while Caraveo lost in the November 2024 election to Republican Gabe Evans.
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Crypto World
Bitcoin Price Prediction: CryptoQuant Believes Strategy Ought to Pause Its Bitcoin Purchases
Bitcoin price is trading around $62,000, with relatively no movement, but it’s doing little to mask a deeper structural prediction that is playing out publicly. CryptoQuant has issued a pointed recommendation. According to CryptoQuant analyst, Strategy, the Michael Saylor-led corporate Bitcoin buyer should stop accumulating BTC and focus on rebuilding cash reserves before its preferred stock situation turns into a full credibility crisis.
CryptoQuant’s head of research, Julio Moreno, outlined the pressure points in a Tuesday report. Strategy’s preferred stock STRC hit a record 17.5% discount to par value last week, closing at $82.50 against its $100 par. Cash reserves have dropped 38% since January 2026, partly because Strategy retired $1.5 billion in convertible notes, shrinking its dividend buffer at exactly the wrong moment.
Not just the above, Strategy’s dividend obligations have ballooned from $300 million annualized at the start of the year to $1.2 billion today, a nearly fourfold increase in under six months. STRC’s dividend coverage has collapsed from over seven years to just 14 months.
Now, for Strategy, selling Bitcoin to close the gap isn’t going to be straightforward either. It currently carries an aggregate unrealized BTC loss of roughly $10.6 billion, with every coin purchased in 2024, 2025, and 2026 underwater at current prices.
Strategy’s bind matters to the market because it removes one of the most consistent marginal buyers from the demand side, at a moment when on-chain data already points to significant weakness across the board. Can Bitcoin survive this?
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Bitcoin Price Prediction: Recover to $81,000, or a Drop to $55,000?
Bitcoin’s current setup reads bearish on most metrics that matter. CryptoQuant’s cycle framework also classifies this as a bear phase, with 30-day apparent demand down approximately ‑63,000 BTC, a level consistent with distribution. The Coinbase premium remains negative, signaling U.S. spot buyers are not stepping in to absorb sell-side pressure. Bitcoin is already down 50% from its October all-time high near $126,080.
On the downside, CryptoQuant’s base case targets $55,000 as the structural bear-market bottom, or 20% below current levels. Standard Chartered has flagged a similar downside risk toward $50,000 before any sustained push toward $100,000. The $55,000–$56,000 zone represents the confluence of prior accumulation levels, and where realized-loss exhaustion has historically resolved prior cycles.
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The bull case is conditional, not dismissed. CryptoQuant’s own scenario analysis allows for a relief rally into the $71,500–$81,200 band if geopolitical and macro tensions ease materially. The “Trader Realized Price” near $81,200 capped the last bear-market rally in January 2026 and would likely act as resistance again. Current long positioning data suggests the market is not pricing a clean breakout, and it’s pricing uncertainty.
The most likely scenario is a consolidation between $60,000 and $66,000 near-term, with the $55,000 target in play if demand metrics deteriorate further. Invalidation of the bearish thesis requires a sustained close above $81,200 on volume.
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Bitcoin Hyper Eyes Early-Stage Upside as BTC Buyers Wait on the Sidelines
With Bitcoin price prediction tumbling and its large institutional buyers potentially sidelined and spot demand contracting, the near-term upside on BTC itself looks capped, at least until macro conditions shift. That dynamic is pushing some traders to look earlier in the risk curve, specifically at infrastructure plays building on top of Bitcoin rather than trading it outright.
Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER) is positioning directly in that gap. It’s a Bitcoin Layer 2 protocol integrating the Solana Virtual Machine, making it, by design, the first BTC L2 capable of delivering SVM-powered smart contracts while settling on Bitcoin’s security layer.
The pitch addresses Bitcoin’s core bottlenecks: slow finality, high fees, and the absence of programmable execution. The presale has raised $33 million at a current token price of $0.0136821, with staking available during the presale phase.
Early participants also access a Decentralized Canonical Bridge for BTC transfers, the infrastructure layer that makes the SVM integration usable in practice, not just on paper.
The post Bitcoin Price Prediction: CryptoQuant Believes Strategy Ought to Pause Its Bitcoin Purchases appeared first on Cryptonews.
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