Crypto World
Ripple wins Europe before XRP wins legal clarity in America
On July 6, Luxembourg’s financial regulator, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier, upgraded Ripple’s preliminary Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorization into a full license under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework. The approval means Ripple can passport regulated crypto services across all 30 countries of the European Economic Area, from Lisbon to Helsinki, under a single national authorization. Cassie Craddock, Ripple’s managing director for the UK and Europe, framed the moment plainly: the company enters the post-transitional MiCA era fully compliant and ready to scale.
Summary
- Ripple secured a full MiCA license in Luxembourg, allowing it to offer regulated crypto services across the European Economic Area.
- While Europe has given Ripple regulatory certainty, XRP’s legal classification in the U.S. still depends on the CLARITY Act.
- The article explores whether Ripple’s expanding regulatory footprint can eventually translate into stronger XRP demand.
Five days later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the legislation that would finally tell American regulators what XRP actually is remained stuck in the Senate. A merged draft of the CLARITY Act is expected the week of July 13, floor action is penciled in for the week of July 20, and the whole effort still needs roughly 7 Democratic votes it does not currently have. Galaxy Research has cut its odds of passage in 2026 to a coin flip.
That is the strange position Ripple occupies in the summer of 2026. A company born in San Francisco, hardened by a 4-year fight with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and lobbying harder than almost anyone for American crypto legislation, is now more comprehensively regulated in Europe than it has ever been at home. The Luxembourg license is not just a compliance milestone. It is a measuring stick for how far apart the two largest Western markets have drifted, and a live experiment in whether regulatory certainty actually converts into business, and eventually into token demand.
What Ripple actually won in Luxembourg
The July 6 approval was the second half of a two-part regulatory build that Ripple has been assembling in the Grand Duchy for most of a year. The first half arrived on February 2, when the CSSF granted Ripple full approval as an Electronic Money Institution. The EMI license lets the company issue electronic money and run regulated fiat payment services across the European Union. It followed a preliminary EMI approval a month earlier and came shortly after Ripple picked up an EMI license and a cryptoasset registration from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, extending the same regulated posture to Britain.
The CASP license completes the picture on the crypto side. Under MiCA, a Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorization covers custody, exchange, transfer, and related services for cryptoassets. Ripple received preliminary CASP approval from the CSSF on June 23, then satisfied the remaining conditions in under 2 weeks, converting the in-principle nod into a full license just after MiCA’s transition period closed on July 1. As crypto.news reported, the timing put Ripple inside the licensed perimeter at the exact moment the perimeter became a hard wall.
The combination matters more than either license alone. With the EMI approval, European banks, fintechs, and corporates can move regulated fiat and e-money through Ripple. With the CASP approval, the same clients can move cryptoassets and stablecoin flows through the same provider under the same rulebook. Ripple Payments, the company’s cross-border settlement product, has processed more than $100 billion across more than 60 markets globally. The Luxembourg stack gives that product a clean legal wrapper in a bloc of roughly 450 million people, with one regulator to answer to and 30 countries to sell into.
Ripple says its global license count now exceeds 75 authorizations, registrations, and approvals, a portfolio that spans Singapore, Dubai, New York’s BitLicense regime, and now the heart of the EU. Few crypto-native companies carry anything comparable. That was a deliberate strategy long before MiCA existed: sell to banks, and you must look like something a bank compliance department can approve.
The graveyard on the other side of the deadline
The value of a MiCA license is easiest to see in what happened to the companies that do not have one. The regulation’s transition period ended on July 1, 2026. From that date, any firm offering covered crypto services in the EEA without CASP authorization must limit or stop those services. The European Securities and Markets Authority added 57 newly approved firms to its register right after the deadline, bringing the total to around 300 authorized providers. Set that against the more than 1,200 firms that operated in Europe under the old patchwork of national regimes, and the scale of the cull becomes clear. By some counts, only around 210 of those incumbent companies completed the licensing process in time.
The casualty list includes names that would have seemed untouchable 2 years ago. Binance, the largest exchange in the world by volume, failed to secure authorization in time through its Greek application and has told customers in several European markets that services are suspended while it seeks approval elsewhere. Tether chose not to apply at all, citing objections to MiCA’s stablecoin requirements, and USDT has been delisted from European venues as a result. Hundreds of smaller firms now face a choice between merging with licensed competitors, shrinking to non-covered activities, or exiting the region entirely.
The passporting mechanism is what makes a single national license so valuable. Under MiCA, a firm authorized in one member state can offer covered crypto services throughout the EU and the wider EEA without seeking separate national approvals, the same single-market logic that has governed European banking and investment services for decades.
Before MiCA, a crypto company wanting continental coverage needed a patchwork of national registrations, each with its own rules, timelines, and supervisory quirks, and each revocable on its own schedule. After MiCA, the choice of home regulator became a strategic decision, because one supervisor now stands behind a firm’s entire European footprint. That concentration cuts both ways.
A company with a Luxembourg license answers to a regulator with a long institutional finance pedigree and a reputation for rigor, which reassures bank counterparties. It also means a single supervisory dispute could, in theory, imperil access to 30 markets at once. Firms accepted that trade because the alternative, 30 separate relationships, was worse.
Luxembourg, meanwhile, has become one of the main gateways for the firms that made it through. Coinbase won its MiCA license from the CSSF in June 2025, opened a physical hub in the country, and migrated its EU operations into a dedicated Luxembourg entity.
Standard Chartered received its authorization through the same regulator. B2C2 took the Luxembourg route for its European trading business. Ripple now joins that group, which turns the Grand Duchy into something like the institutional crypto capital of the EU, a jurisdiction that courted the industry with dedicated blockchain legislation and a regulator willing to process serious applications quickly.
For Ripple specifically, the competitive math is straightforward. Every payments client it pitches in Europe now faces a shrunken menu of fully licensed providers. The company spent years and considerable money building a compliance posture that most rivals treated as optional. MiCA just made it mandatory, and Ripple crossed the line while much of the field did not.
The license lands on top of an institutional build-out
The Luxembourg approval did not arrive in isolation. It caps 12 months in which Ripple assembled more institutional infrastructure than in the previous decade combined, which is what makes the token’s indifference so striking and the license so strategically loaded.
Start with the prime brokerage. Ripple closed its $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road in October 2025, folding a multi-asset prime broker into the company and rebranding the operation as Ripple Prime. On March 2, 2026, Ripple Prime appeared in the participant directory of the National Securities Clearing Corporation, the DTCC subsidiary that clears the vast majority of American equity trades.
The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation processes transactions measured in the quadrillions of dollars annually and safeguards roughly $100 trillion in assets. Having XRP-linked infrastructure inside that machine is the kind of positioning that takes years to arrange and cannot be improvised later. DTCC has since named Ripple Prime to the industry working group of more than 50 firms shaping its tokenization service for Russell 1000 stocks, major ETFs, and US Treasuries, scheduled to launch in October 2026.
Then the ledger itself. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger grew from $991 million at the start of 2026 to roughly $3.5 billion by midsummer. In early May, JPMorgan, Mastercard, Ondo Finance, and Ripple completed the first cross-border tokenized US Treasury redemption on XRPL, clearing in under 5 seconds.
Daily transactions on the ledger hit 3 million on March 15, roughly triple the averages of mid-2025. RLUSD, the stablecoin at the center of Ripple’s settlement strategy, reached a market capitalization of $1.72 billion in under a year, with more than $18 billion in transfer volume in the first quarter of 2026 alone. And in July, Ripple joined Open USD, the consortium dollar stablecoin backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, and more than 140 other companies, hedging its own stablecoin bet with a seat at the industry table.
Every item on that list is the kind of development that, in a friendlier market, would have carried its own rally. Instead, each landed on a chart grinding lower, which is a useful reminder of how much of crypto pricing in 2026 is macro beta and how little is project-specific fundamentals. The relevance to the Luxembourg story is this: the license is not a standalone trophy. It is the regulatory layer of a stack that now includes clearing access, tokenization rails, a stablecoin, and a prime broker. Europe is where that full stack can operate legally today.
Meanwhile in Washington: a bill, a deadline, and seven missing votes
The contrast with the United States is not subtle. The CLARITY Act, the market structure bill that would sort digital assets into commodity and security buckets and hand spot market oversight of digital commodities to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has traveled further than any crypto legislation in American history. The House passed it 294 to 134 in July 2025. The Senate Banking Committee advanced its version 15 to 9 on May 14, 2026, with Democrats Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks crossing over. The bill sits on the Senate Legislative Calendar, eligible for a floor vote whenever leadership schedules one.
And there it sits. A unified draft merging the Banking and Agriculture Committee texts, reportedly more than 70 pages longer than the earlier versions and heavier on consumer protections, is expected as soon as the week of July 13, with floor action targeted for the week of July 20. The Senate breaks for recess on August 7.
Senator Cynthia Lummis has warned that failure in this window likely means no market structure law before 2030. Galaxy Research has lowered its passage odds for 2026 to 50%, down from 75% right after the committee vote, and Stifel’s Washington strategist has written that the bill’s prospects deteriorate materially if it misses the recess deadline.
The blockage is not primarily about crypto. It is about ethics. Senate Democrats have demanded language barring senior government officials, including the president, from holding business interests in the crypto industry, a demand aimed squarely at the Trump family’s estimated $2.3 billion in crypto exposure across memecoins, World Liberty Financial, and mining ventures.
The White House has said it will accept rules that apply across the board but not language that singles out one officeholder. A tentative compromise involving state attorney general enforcement fell apart. Even Gallego and Alsobrooks have said their floor votes depend on the ethics fix. As crypto.news covered, disputes over vacant SEC and CFTC commissioner seats have layered a second standoff on top of the first.
Two more fault lines complicate the count. Senator Amy Klobuchar has proposed an amendment that would block new CFTC rules from taking effect until at least four commissioners are confirmed, effectively turning the agency staffing dispute into a statutory switch on the entire regulatory framework the bill would create. CFTC Chair Selig has pushed back, arguing on July 9 that the bill is being derailed by matters extraneous to its substance and that the agency does not need a quorum to write rules.
And law enforcement groups have raised objections to Section 604, the developer protection language drawn from the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, worried it could complicate illicit finance cases. Senator Ron Wyden countered on July 8 with a letter to Senate leadership urging that the BRCA provisions be preserved, giving the DeFi industry its one clear win of the month. Lummis, for her part, has answered the illicit finance critique by pointing to more than 16 safeguards in the text and $150 million in dedicated enforcement funding.
Add it together, and the arithmetic is unforgiving. Three working weeks remain in July, a defense spending bill competes for floor time, and every unresolved dispute needs to close simultaneously for 7 Democrats to move. The committee vote on May 14 offered a preview of what passage would be worth: within an hour of the 15-9 result, Bitcoin jumped to $81,449, and XRP gained 4.5% on the day. Citi has a $143,000 Bitcoin target and Standard Chartered a $150,000 target contingent on the bill becoming law. Markets have, in other words, priced regulatory clarity as a real asset. The Senate simply has not delivered it.
So the American question that matters most to Ripple, whether XRP is a digital commodity under CFTC oversight or something the SEC can still reach, remains formally unanswered. The 2023 court ruling in the SEC’s case against Ripple found that programmatic sales of XRP on exchanges were not securities transactions, and the SEC case itself ended in a settlement in 2025. But a court ruling in one district and a dropped enforcement action are not a statute. They are precedents that a future administration, a future commission, or a future judge could narrow. That is precisely the uncertainty the CLARITY Act exists to remove, and precisely the uncertainty Europe has already removed for Ripple’s payments business.
Does a license move a token?
Here is where the bull case and the bear case split, and both deserve a fair hearing.
The bear case is blunt: the Luxembourg license is a company milestone, not a token catalyst. Ripple’s own announcement barely mentions XRP. The approval covers Ripple’s regulated payments services, not its tokens, and MiCA runs a separate authorization track for stablecoins that RLUSD has not yet cleared. Until that happens, Ripple’s own dollar token cannot be offered to the European public, a gap rivals like Circle’s USDC do not have.
Most Ripple Payments volume today settles in RLUSD or fiat, not XRP, and where XRP does route payments across the XRP Ledger, the fees burned per transaction amount to fractions of a cent. When the preliminary CASP approval landed in June, XRP fell about 3% that week alongside the broader market. The market looked at the news and, quite rationally, did not treat it as a buy signal.
The token’s price action through 2026 supports that reading. XRP peaked near $3.65 in July 2025, closed last year around $1.90, and has spent this summer defending the $1 level, trading recently in the $1.05 to $1.13 range. None of Ripple’s regulatory wins arrested the slide, because the slide was never about Ripple. It tracked a market-wide drawdown that pulled Bitcoin below $60,000 and cut altcoins far deeper.
The bull case asks for a longer clock. Regulatory moats compound slowly. Ripple can now sell regulated crypto payments to European banks and corporates at a moment when much of its competition legally cannot, and enterprise procurement cycles that begin in 2026 produce volume in 2027 and 2028. If that volume increasingly touches the XRP Ledger, whether through On-Demand Liquidity corridors, RLUSD flows that settle on XRPL, or tokenized asset activity, the token accrues usage that exists independently of speculative sentiment.
Institutional demand channels are also open in a way they were not a year ago: spot XRP ETFs have logged roughly $1.49 billion in cumulative net inflows since launching in November 2025, and as crypto.news noted, that streak recently stretched to 8 consecutive weeks even as the price languished. Standard Chartered and JPMorgan have both projected $4 to $8.4 billion in first-year ETF inflows if the CLARITY Act passes and unlocks allocators who cannot touch unclassified assets.
The honest synthesis is that the license changes Ripple’s revenue trajectory with high confidence and XRP’s demand trajectory with low confidence. The link between the two runs through actual ledger usage, and that is a metric to watch, not a headline to trade.
The deeper pattern: Two systems, two bets
Step back from Ripple and the transatlantic gap looks like two different theories of how to regulate an industry.
Europe chose comprehensiveness first. MiCA is a single rulebook, written once, applied across 30 countries, with a hard deadline and real exclusion for non-compliance. Its critics have a point: the regime’s stablecoin rules, including a blanket ban on interest and heavy bank-deposit reserve requirements, pushed the largest stablecoin issuer on earth out of the market, and the European Commission has already opened a consultation on whether parts of the framework need repair. A rulebook that excludes Tether and stalls RLUSD is not obviously optimized for growth. But it exists, it is enforceable, and a company that clears it knows exactly where it stands.
The United States chose litigation first and legislation later, maybe. The SEC’s enforcement campaign defined the rules by lawsuit, Ripple’s case being the canonical example, and the current Congress is attempting to replace that regime with statute under intense time pressure and presidential conflict-of-interest baggage that no other financial bill has ever carried. The fallback if CLARITY fails is the SEC’s administrative framework known as Regulation Crypto, which Chair Paul Atkins has described as a bridge to legislation. A bridge built by one commission can be dismantled by the next, which is exactly the problem statutes exist to solve. Similar dynamics played out in the stablecoin fight that preceded this one, where, as crypto.news reported, even a bill that eventually passed spent months hostage to fights over state versus federal authority.
For a company like Ripple, which sells to the most conservative buyers in finance, the European bet pays off immediately, and the American bet pays off only if Congress acts. Cross-border payments are also a business where network effects follow regulatory access. Japan already shows what deep institutional integration looks like, with SBI running XRP-based remittance corridors that have no real American equivalent, a story crypto.news has examined in depth. Europe is now the second major bloc where Ripple can attempt that playbook with full regulatory cover. The United States, the company’s home market, is the one place where it still cannot.
There is one more wrinkle worth naming. If the CLARITY Act does pass before the August recess, the transatlantic gap closes fast, and it closes in a way that favors assets with existing institutional plumbing. XRP would enter CFTC jurisdiction as a digital commodity with ETFs already trading, a prime brokerage arm already inside the DTCC’s clearing ecosystem, and a European license portfolio already generating regulated volume. The pieces would connect. If the bill dies, the gap becomes the story for another year at minimum, and Ripple’s center of commercial gravity keeps shifting toward jurisdictions that gave it an answer.
What to watch from here
Three markers will tell the story faster than any press release.
First, RLUSD’s European stablecoin authorization. The EMI license gives Ripple the corporate foundation to seek approval for its stablecoin under MiCA’s separate e-money token rules. Until that clears, the most natural settlement asset in Ripple’s European stack stays off the shelf for public offering, and the license story remains half finished.
Second, disclosed European client wins. Licenses are permission, not demand. The proof that regulatory certainty converts into business will arrive as named banks, payment providers, and corporates routing volume through Ripple Payments in the EEA. Watch for whether those announcements specify XRPL settlement or quietly settle in fiat and RLUSD, because that distinction is the entire XRP investment case in miniature.
Third, the Senate floor in the last 2 weeks of July. The merged CLARITY draft, the ethics compromise or its absence, and the 7-Democrat math will determine whether the United States joins Europe in giving Ripple a rulebook or hands the company another year of asymmetry. Either outcome is informative. One of them is also tradable.
The Luxembourg license will not move XRP this week, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. What it does is quietly settle an older argument. For years, skeptics said Ripple’s compliance-heavy strategy was expensive theater in an industry that rewarded speed over permission.
In Europe, in July 2026, permission became the product. The companies that skipped the theater are locked out of a market of 450 million people, and the company that endured 4 years of litigation from its own government is, for the moment, more welcome in Brussels than in Washington. That inversion says less about Ripple than it does about the two systems that produced it, and the next month will reveal whether the American half of the story finally catches up.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has confirmed that hackers compromised his X account earlier this week after the profile published a lengthy thread about blockchain-based real-world asset tokenization.
Summary
- Brian Chesky confirmed his X account was hacked after it posted a crypto tokenization thread.
- Airbnb treated the incident as a high-profile compromise and worked with X to secure access.
- The deleted posts praised asset tokenization, prompting questions because they did not promote scams directly.
The posts later disappeared, and Chesky has now responded with a joke about the unexpected audience the incident brought to his account.
In a July 17 post on X, Chesky wrote, “To the person who hacked my account earlier this week: thanks for all the new crypto followers.” He then added, “To my new crypto followers: I’m going to be a very disappointing follow.” His statement confirmed that the earlier tokenization posts did not represent commentary he intended to publish.
Chesky confirms hack after unusual tokenization thread
The deleted thread attracted attention because it presented detailed arguments about tokenized real-world assets rather than promoting Airbnb’s core business. It discussed blockchain-based ownership and financial markets in a way that initially led some observers and publications to treat the posts as genuine comments from the Airbnb chief.
According to Fortune’s report on the incident, Airbnb treated the episode as a high-profile account compromise and moved to secure the profile with X. However, the nature of the posts caused confusion because the thread focused on tokenization rather than pushing a meme coin, fake presale or cryptocurrency giveaway.
The episode differs from many recent social media hacks linked directly to token schemes. As crypto.news reported this week, attackers also compromised SpaceX’s X presence in an incident linked to the SCATMAN token, renewing concerns about criminals using trusted brands to attract crypto traders.
Earlier, as crypto.news reported in May, hackers used Keith Gill’s verified Roaring Kitty account to promote and dump a Solana-based token. The incident reportedly left traders with $2.8 million in losses after users trusted posts coming from the well-known market personality’s account.
By contrast, available reports have not identified a token sale, wallet-draining link or fraudulent giveaway connected to Chesky’s deleted posts. Instead, the compromised account published commentary that users could have mistaken for a genuine shift in the Airbnb CEO’s public position on crypto. That makes the episode different from attacks built around immediate token promotion.
High-profile X profiles remain attractive targets because their established audiences can give unfamiliar crypto claims instant credibility. As previously reported by crypto.news, attackers have compromised accounts belonging to executives, companies, entertainers and market personalities to promote fraudulent tokens, fake airdrops and phishing links.
Bitcoin and Ethereum options worth about $1.43 billion expired on July 17 as crypto markets remained within established trading ranges.
Summary
- Bitcoin options worth $1.2 billion expired as BTC remained inside its month-long trading range Friday.
- Ethereum’s 1.61 put-call ratio showed persistent demand for puts as traders remained sharply divided Friday.
- Greeks.live said bullish block trades increased, while overall options activity stayed muted amid low volatility.
According to Greeks.live data, 19,000 Bitcoin options worth $1.2 billion expired with a put-call ratio of 0.9 and a maximum pain point of $63,000.
Meanwhile, 123,000 Ethereum options worth $230 million expired with a put-call ratio of 1.61. The maximum pain level stood at $1,800. The elevated ratio showed that put positions continued to outweigh calls, extending a trend that Greeks.live said has lasted for about a month.
Bitcoin remained above $60,000 during the week and has traded mainly between $60,000 and $65,000 for more than a month. Despite sharp moves in parts of the U.S. stock market, crypto volatility remained relatively subdued. The latest weekly expiry represented only about 5% of outstanding options, while open interest declined slightly amid fewer short-term trading opportunities.
Ethereum options show deeper divide as Bitcoin volatility stays low
Greeks.live said Bitcoin gamma exposure remained concentrated around the $64,000 and $70,000 strikes. Ethereum’s exposure was more widely spread between $1,825 and $2,000 as some traders used shallow out-of-the-money options to position for a possible rebound. The firm also said large bullish trades increased, led mainly by short-term bull spreads.
However, Ethereum’s put-call ratio continued to show strong demand for downside positions. “The proportion of put options has exceeded 1 for a consecutive month and continues to rise,” Greeks.live said, describing the current positioning as unusually divided between bullish and bearish traders.
The latest expiry follows several weeks of cautious derivatives positioning. As previously reported by crypto.news, Bitcoin and Ethereum options worth about $1.75 billion expired on July 10, with Bitcoin’s maximum pain level at $62,000 and Ethereum’s put-call ratio at 1.26.
A week earlier, $1.9 billion in Bitcoin options expired while traders continued to watch the $60,000 area. Ethereum already showed heavier demand for downside protection at that time, with its put-call ratio standing at 1.29.
The July 17 expiry was smaller than major monthly and quarterly settlements, reducing the likelihood that the event alone would drive a large spot-market move. Still, Bitcoin traded close to its $63,000 maximum pain level, while Ethereum’s growing put exposure showed that traders remained divided over its near-term direction.
Greeks.live said overall market activity remained subdued despite the increase in bullish block trades. With Bitcoin still locked inside its month-long range, traders continue to watch the $64,000 and $70,000 options concentrations for signs of the next broader move.
Bitcoin Ordinals advocate Leonidas has proposed developing a new open-source Bitcoin client, aimed at removing restrictions affecting Runes and Ordinals transactions.
In a post to X on Friday, Leonidas called the proposed client “Bitcoin $DOG Mode,” which would lift the maximum individual transaction size to 3.9 million weight units (WU), compared to Bitcoin Core’s 400,000 WU, and lower the dust limit to 1 satoshi (sats) from 294-546 sats.
The changes would make it easier to send Ordinals inscriptions and Runes, which have been described as Bitcoin’s take on fungible and non-fungible tokens. Both have been controversial within the Bitcoin community, with critics arguing they amount to “spam” on the Bitcoin network.
“Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots have spent years enforcing rules that Bitcoin itself does not have,” Leonidas said in a statement. “The $DOG Army is done asking for permission. It is time to remove even more of these frivolous restrictions.”
Source: Leonidas
Increasing the maximum transaction size would make it easier for Ordinals users to place much larger files or collections into one transaction, even ones that take up nearly an entire block.
Meanwhile, the dust limit is a rule on the Bitcoin network defining the smallest transaction amount, or UTXO, that can be economically sent. Lowering the dust limit would stop users from having to “pad” outputs to get their transaction broadcast on default Bitcoin Core nodes.
Related: Bitcoin bulls Michael Saylor, Adam Back slam BIP-110 Ordinals proposal
Bitcoin $DOG Mode would be an alternative to Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots, the two most widely used Bitcoin clients.
Leonidas said the goal is to attract enough users to the new client that Bitcoin Core would eventually have to loosen its own policy restrictions.
Magazine: Bitcoin nearing late stages of bear market: Jamie Coutts, Real Vision
MegaETH is shutting down its Mega Mafia accelerator after two years, saying the program helped startups raise substantial capital but failed to keep enough value inside its ecosystem.
Summary
- MegaETH ends Mega Mafia after most successful incubated applications stopped building on its blockchain network.
- Two accelerator cohorts supported about 20 teams that collectively raised approximately $80 million from investors.
- MegaETH will redirect funding toward first-party consumer apps and products designed specifically for its infrastructure.
Core team member Shuyao Kong said on X that most successful applications backed by the program are no longer being built on MegaETH.
The accelerator supported about 20 teams across two cohorts, which collectively raised roughly $80 million from pre-seed through Series A rounds. MegaETH selected teams to work closely with its core developers and provided technical, management and market-making support. However, the network did not take equity, governance rights or ownership positions in the projects it helped build.
MegaETH shifts resources toward first-party applications
Kong said MegaETH originally believed founders would remain aligned with the network without formal ownership arrangements. That approach produced successful startups, but many later chose different technical paths. “Very little of that value has trickled to Mega,” she wrote, while announcing that there will be no Mega Mafia 3.0 cohort.
Several projects show how that model changed. Global Token Exchange, or GTE, decided to build its own chain after participating in the first accelerator cohort.
Social attention market Noise later chose Base, while HelloTrade moved toward Monad. Meanwhile, stablecoin project Cap launched on MegaETH but has pursued a broader multichain strategy.
The decision comes only months after Mega Mafia applications helped MegaETH reach a key network milestone.MegaETH launched its MEGA token on April 30 after 10 ecosystem applications met the first performance target required to trigger the token generation event. The milestone tied the accelerator directly to the network’s early growth strategy.
MegaETH has since expanded the economic systems around its blockchain. As crypto.news reported in May, the MegaETH Foundation started a MEGA token buyback program funded by net income generated by the USDm stablecoin issuer. The structure connects stablecoin activity with recurring token purchases as MegaETH develops high-speed onchain applications.
However, ending Mega Mafia changes how the team plans to build future demand. Kong said MegaETH will focus resources on “OMEGA” applications, meaning products designed around capabilities that the team believes are specific to MegaETH. The network also plans to invest more directly in first-party consumer applications.
Under the new approach, MegaETH expects to build direct relationships with users instead of depending mainly on independent startups to create products and eventually return value to the network. Kong said first-party development would also give the team greater responsibility for product results.
The change comes after Mega Mafia played a central role in MegaETH’s move from development into mainnet activity and its MEGA token launch. The network is now testing whether building more consumer-facing products itself can keep users, activity and economic value closer to its core ecosystem.
While BIP 110 wants to restrict data through a consensus change and has almost no miner support, a new DOG Mode client wants the opposite and requires no vote at all.
Crypto trader Ansem has questioned whether token buybacks can create lasting value on their own, pointing to the wide valuation gap between Hyperliquid’s HYPE and Pump.fun’s PUMP.
Summary
- Ansem argues recurring token buybacks cannot overcome weak community trust or poor alignment with users.
- HYPE trades at a far richer valuation than PUMP despite both platforms using profit-funded buybacks.
- Pump.fun’s delayed airdrop remains central to Ansem’s view that PUMP lacks Hyperliquid’s trust premium.
In a July 17 X post, he argued that both businesses generate large revenues and regularly repurchase their tokens, yet the market values them very differently.
According to Ansem’s figures, Hyperliquid generates about $800 million in annualized revenue and carries a fully diluted valuation near $65 billion. Pump.fun, by comparison, generates roughly $440 million in annualized revenue while PUMP trades at an FDV of about $1.4 billion. He said the contrast challenges the view that recurring buybacks alone determine crypto valuations.
“I have a thesis that buybacks don’t actually work,” Ansem wrote.
His broader argument was that market confidence, community alignment and a project’s record of delivering on commitments can create an additional “trust premium” that financial metrics cannot fully measure.
Hyperliquid and Pump.fun show different results from buybacks
Ansem pointed to Hyperliquid as a platform that built strong confidence among core users. He said the team focused on shipping products without overpromising and rewarded users according to measurable activity. In his view, that approach strengthened trust and helped HYPE command a higher valuation relative to revenue.
Hyperliquid also operates one of crypto’s largest token repurchase programs. As previously reported by crypto.news, its Assistance Fund directs most protocol fees toward continuous open-market HYPE purchases. By May 2026, the mechanism had spent more than $1.3 billion on buybacks.
Pump.fun has also committed substantial resources to supporting PUMP. However, its token has struggled despite aggressive repurchases and burns. As crypto.news reported ahead of the July vesting event, the platform had spent $233 million buying back 62.2 billion PUMP by early January and later carried out a large token burn.
Meanwhile, Pump.fun distributed 57.279 billion PUMP worth about $86.49 million to 121 team and investor wallets on July 15, beginning a three-year vesting cycle after a one-year lockup. The transfers made the tokens available to move but did not confirm that recipients sold them.
Ansem argued that the missing factor is community trust. He pointed to Pump.fun’s previously discussed user airdrop, which has not yet been delivered, as a source of weaker alignment with its core audience. Pump.fun co-founder Alon Cohen said in July 2025 that an airdrop remained planned but would not arrive in the immediate future.
Therefore, Ansem said Pump.fun could potentially close part of its valuation gap by improving communication and delivering the distribution expected by users. That remains his market thesis rather than a guarantee of future price performance. He estimated that stronger community alignment could raise PUMP’s valuation and activity.
He also cited Bitcoin as an example of what he views as an extreme trust premium. Bitcoin produces no business revenue, yet its fixed 21 million supply and established network rules support a far larger valuation.
Bybit has moved deeper into Southeast Asia by launching a locally operated crypto trading platform in Indonesia, a step it says follows a majority acquisition of NOBI. The exchange announced Thursday that it has launched the new Indonesia entity after taking control of digital asset firm PT Enkripsi Teknologi Handal, which previously operated under the name NOBI.
The deal results in a rebrand: NOBI is now Bybit Indonesia. Bybit said it intends to roll out its services in stages, beginning with 500 cryptocurrency trading pairs, and to expand from there as the platform ramps up.
Key takeaways
- Bybit has launched a locally operated Indonesia platform after acquiring a majority stake in PT Enkripsi Teknologi Handal (formerly NOBI).
- NOBI has been rebranded as Bybit Indonesia, with the company set to expand its trading offering in phases.
- The exchange plans to start with 500 trading pairs and build from there rather than opening the full set at once.
- Leadership will come from former NOBI executives, with Lawrence Samantha as CEO and Dionisius Evan as chief operating officer.
- Indonesia’s regulator reports a rapidly growing crypto user base, alongside a licensing framework covering exchanges, custodians, and traders.
Bybit’s Indonesia push: acquisition to local operation
For Bybit, the launch is not just a marketing move—it reflects a shift toward operating within Indonesia’s local regulatory and market structure. The exchange said its acquisition allows it to pair Bybit’s global capabilities with an experienced local team that understands Indonesia’s market dynamics and regulatory requirements.
The company’s statement names Lawrence Samantha as CEO and Dionisius Evan as chief operating officer. Both previously served as senior executives at NOBI, indicating that Bybit is using the acquired firm’s institutional know-how and local relationships as it enters a regulated environment.
What Bybit plans to launch first
Bybit Indonesia will be introduced in phases. According to the announcement, the rollout will start with 500 cryptocurrency trading pairs. That staged approach suggests Bybit is likely pacing market access and product configuration rather than attempting a full-scale launch overnight, which can be important in jurisdictions where onboarding, compliance processes, and platform readiness must be managed carefully.
While Bybit did not provide a detailed timeline for subsequent phases in the information available, the initial pair count is a key operational signal: the exchange is aiming to offer broad spot market coverage from day one, giving Indonesian users a range of trading choices as liquidity and infrastructure are established.
Indonesia’s growing crypto market and the licensing environment
Indonesia has been steadily expanding its crypto user base under a framework overseen by the Indonesia Financial Services Authority (OJK). As of February 2026, OJK reported 21.07 million registered crypto asset users, and it cited total crypto transaction value of $26.85 billion (482 trillion Indonesian rupiah) in 2025.
Regulatory activity has also accelerated. As of April 2026, OJK reported that Indonesia had licensed 31 crypto-related entities. That includes two crypto exchanges, two clearing institutions, two custodians, and 25 digital asset traders. PT Enkripsi Teknologi Handal—Bybit’s acquired company—was listed among those licensed entities.
For investors and users, the significance is that Bybit’s local launch is arriving in a market where regulatory status and licensing are increasingly central to participation. In other words, the opportunity is expanding, but so are compliance expectations. Bybit’s decision to structure entry via an acquired, locally licensed firm may reduce friction compared with trying to build a local regulated presence from scratch.
Why the local leadership model matters
Bybit Indonesia’s management lineup is drawn from the former NOBI leadership, with Samantha taking the CEO role and Evan serving as COO. That continuity can matter operationally: local executives typically have deeper context around compliance workflows, relationships with regulated counterparties, and day-to-day execution in-country.
From a broader perspective, this model reflects a common pattern in regulated crypto markets. Global exchanges often need more than technology and brand recognition—they need a team that understands local rules, user behavior, and market structure well enough to execute quickly once a platform goes live.
Even so, readers should watch how the staged launch progresses beyond the initial 500 pairs. The next question will be whether Bybit increases liquidity and expands pair availability at a pace that matches Indonesia’s user growth, and how effectively it integrates the acquired platform into its wider global systems.
With Bybit Indonesia now live and using former NOBI executives to lead operations, the key developments to track are the timing of subsequent rollout phases, any expansion beyond the initial trading pairs, and how the platform performs within Indonesia’s regulated ecosystem as OJK continues to license and supervise crypto firms.
Around 19,500 Bitcoin options contracts will expire on Friday, July 17, with a notional value of roughly $1.23 billion. This expiry is much smaller than usual events, so it is unlikely to have any impact on spot markets.
Crypto markets have gained later in the week following cooler-than-expected US inflation data, but have lost those gains by Friday.
Bitcoin Options Expiry
This week’s batch of Bitcoin options contracts has a put/call ratio of 0.87, meaning that sellers of long (call) contracts and short (put) contracts are almost evenly matched. Max pain is around $62,500, which is lower than current spot prices, so some will be out of the money on expiry.
Open interest (OI), or the value or number of Bitcoin options contracts yet to expire, remains highest at the $70,000 strike price on Deribit, with $1.6 billion, but short sellers still have $1.1 billion in OI at $60,000. Total BTC options OI across all exchanges has ticked up a little to $30 billion, according to Coinglass.
“Puts continue to trade at a premium to calls across all major tenors, although the magnitude of that premium has become increasingly uniform,” said crypto derivatives provider Greeks Live this week.
This suggests that overall, the market is less panicked about an immediate crash than before, though people still pay a bit more for “drop protection” than for “rise bets” — just not as extremely as they did recently.
“The proportion of large-scale bullish trades continued to increase this week, primarily consisting of short-term bull spreads.”
Meanwhile, Deribit said, “This floods the market with liquidity and volatility, creating prime conditions for trading short-dated options on Deribit.”
At 08:00 UTC tomorrow, ~$1.45B in BTC and ETH options are set to expire on Deribit.$BTC : ~$1.23B notional | P/C: 0.86| Max Pain: $62.5K$ETH : ~$218M notional | P/C: 1.54| Max Pain: $1.75K
This floods the market with liquidity and volatility, creating prime conditions for… pic.twitter.com/OlYg6LQsls
— Deribit (@DeribitOfficial) July 16, 2026
In addition to today’s tiny batch of Bitcoin options, around 131,000 Ethereum contracts are expiring, with a notional value of $242 million, a max pain of $1,750, and a put/call ratio of 1.5.
Total ETH options OI across all exchanges is low at around $4.8 billion. This brings the total notional value of crypto options expirations to around $1.4 billion, a very small event.
Spot Market Outlook
Crypto markets bounced to a mid-week high of $2.3 trillion, but those gains had started to erode by the end of the week.
Bitcoin has fallen around 2% from its intraday high of $64,800 to $63,300 during the Friday morning Asian trading session. It appears to be heading for the weekly resistance area, which is around $62,000.
Ether has also broken down from its six-week high in an almost 4% decline to around $1,850 at the time of writing.
The post Will Crypto Markets Move When $1.2B Bitcoin Options Expire Today? appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Bybit has launched a locally operated cryptocurrency platform in Indonesia following its majority acquisition of PT Enkripsi Teknologi Handal, formerly known as NOBI.
Summary
- Bybit launches Indonesia platform after acquiring NOBI, entering a regulated market with 21.07 million accounts.
- Bybit Indonesia will roll out more than 500 trading pairs while keeping local management leadership.
- OJK licensed 31 crypto entities by March, as Indonesia tightened oversight across its digital market.
The company said the deal establishes Bybit Indonesia as a local entity operating under the supervision of the Financial Services Authority, or OJK.
The exchange plans to introduce its services in stages, starting with more than 500 trading pairs. According to Bybit’s announcement, the platform will use its global liquidity alongside market surveillance and risk controls designed to meet Indonesian requirements.
The acquisition gives Bybit a locally regulated route into Indonesia rather than operating solely through its global platform. NOBI has been rebranded as Bybit Indonesia, while its existing local management remains involved in running the business and handling regulatory compliance.
Lawrence Samantha, formerly part of NOBI’s senior management, will serve as CEO. Dionisius Evan will continue as chief operating officer, while Steven Gotama will serve as chief marketing officer.
Samantha said “this acquisition allows us to combine Bybit’s global capabilities with an experienced local team” familiar with Indonesia’s market and regulatory system.
Bybit targets a growing regulated crypto market
Indonesia had 21.07 million crypto consumer accounts as of February 2026, according to official OJK data. The figure rose to 21.37 million in March, while crypto transactions reached IDR22.24 trillion during that month.
Meanwhile, Indonesia’s crypto ecosystem has continued to expand under OJK oversight. The regulator had licensed 31 crypto-related entities by March, including two exchanges, two clearing institutions, two custodians and 25 digital financial asset traders. Indonesia also recorded IDR482.23 trillion in crypto transactions during 2025.
In additoin, Bybit is not the only international exchange expanding through a locally compliant structure. BTSE launched its own regulated Indonesian platform in July after rebranding local exchange NVX through a joint venture. The platform supports rupiah services under an OJK license.
The two launches come as authorities increase oversight of companies serving Indonesian crypto users. OJK has expanded licensing and consumer protection requirements since taking responsibility for the sector, creating a market where global exchanges increasingly need local entities and regulatory approval to expand their services.
Bybit continues regulated global expansion
The Indonesia launch also fits Bybit’s wider push into regulated markets. As previously reported by crypto.news, the exchange secured a full Virtual Asset Platform Operator license in the United Arab Emirates in October 2025 after receiving initial approval earlier that year.
Moreover, Bybit outlined plans in January to expand beyond its core cryptocurrency exchange business into a broader financial platform covering banking, custody and cross-border services. The acquisition of NOBI adds another locally operated market to that strategy.
Bybit Indonesia said future products will be introduced gradually and according to OJK requirements. The company also plans to offer local education through Bybit Learn as it transitions existing NOBI users onto the new platform and expands its services in the country.
Citadel Securities has invested $400 million in Crypto.com, valuing the exchange at $20 billion. It is the first institutional capital the platform has raised since launching in 2016.
The check stands out against a sharp pullback in crypto fundraising. Deal counts have collapsed even as a few large platforms continue to attract nine-figure investments.
Citadel Pours $400 Million Into Crypto.com
The funds will support expansion into new markets. Crypto.com said it plans to move into tokenized securities and derivatives.
Citadel Securities President Jim Esposito called the convergence of traditional finance and digital assets an “exciting evolution” with room to lift market efficiency.
Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens
The exchange is not Citadel’s only crypto bet. The market maker invested $200 million in Kraken at a $20 billion valuation in November 2025.
Crypto Funding Falls to Its Lowest Since 2020
The Citadel deal runs against a retreat in crypto fundraising. Crypto companies closed 61 funding rounds in June, according to CryptoRank. That was the lowest monthly total since November 2020, when 49 rounds were recorded.
Round counts fell 31.5% from May’s 89 deals. In addition, the June figure sat 72% below the record of 218 rounds set in March 2022.
Monthly capital raised tells a similar story. June’s $1.44 billion dropped sharply from May’s $3.89 billion.
July has shown little change so far. Projects had raised $763.8 million by mid-July, keeping the sector near June’s subdued levels.
The figures point to a market splitting along size. Incumbent exchanges are drawing nine-figure checks, while the broader field sees fewer deals. The coming months will show whether that gap narrows or settles into a longer pattern.
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The post Crypto.com Secures $400M From Citadel While Crypto Funding Hits Lowest Since 2020 appeared first on BeInCrypto.
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