Mubadala Capital has launched tokenized access to an evergreen private market strategy through UAE-based infrastructure provider KAIO. 

The offering is available on Base, Solana and Sui and has attracted about $75 million from traditional and digital-asset investors.

A wallet tied to the $285 million Drift Protocol exploit moved 23,095.1 Ether, worth about $44.4 million, into Tornado Cash after roughly three months of inactivity.

The same address sent 0.85 ETH to wallets labeled as Bybit deposit addresses, according to Etherscan records and monitoring attributed to PeckShield.

Transfers began on July 23 and continued into July 24, on-chain records show. Researcher JL, known as 0xJaelle, flagged the movement and tagged ZachXBT. The investigator replied that he did not plan to keep following the funds without institutional support.

The crypto market ended the week higher even as U.S. equities slipped.

CoinMarketCap’s six-part recap placed total crypto capitalization at $2.22 trillion, up 2.30%, with Bitcoin gaining 4.16% and Ether rising 2.98%. The S&P 500 lost 0.53%, while the Nasdaq Composite barely moved. Altcoins also posted selective gains during the week.

CoinMarketCap described the week’s theme as “crypto market seeks clarity.” Liquidations remained contained, with shorts closing earlier and longs later. Funding rates stayed near neutral, suggesting leverage had not reached levels seen during sharper market swings.

Bitcoin leads while policy returns to focus

Bitcoin and Ether led the recovery as traders watched the latest U.S. market structure bill. Senator Cynthia Lummis released updated CLARITY Act text on July 22 after Senate Banking and Agriculture committees merged their work. The draft covers regulator duties, developer protections, stablecoin rules, ethics, anti-money laundering controls and law enforcement provisions.

Lummis called the coming weeks the “last real chance” to pass the legislation for years. However, Senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats criticized its ethics language and enforcement structure. As crypto.news previously reported, disputes over political conflicts, decentralized finance protections and crime investigations have repeatedly slowed the bill, even as prediction-market estimates for passage rose.

Corporate balance-sheet activity added another signal. Strategy increased its U.S. dollar reserve by $225 million to roughly $3.2 billion after selling common shares, while keeping 843,775 BTC. The reserve supports preferred-stock dividends and debt interest rather than new Bitcoin purchases.

Shutdowns and project changes reshape the sector

BitMEX announced that it will close on Sept. 23 at 04:00 UTC after reviewing its business and the wider market. The derivatives platform stopped new registrations and will block new positions from Aug. 26. Users can reduce positions and withdraw assets before the final shutdown.

The closure ends an 11-year run for a platform that helped popularize perpetual swaps and high-leverage crypto derivatives. As crypto.news reported before the announcement, BitMEX replaced senior executives in June while reports of a possible sale continued. The shutdown added pressure to smaller centralized exchanges competing for liquidity and paying higher compliance costs.

Other projects also changed direction. CoinMarketCap’s project update said Hyperliquid outlined permissionless HIP-4 outcome markets requiring 500,000 HYPE in staking support. Pump.fun introduced BOOST Mode for new launches, while ENS DAO activated a two-year security council able to stop transactions considered malicious.

Bridge attacks bring security risks back into view

Several cross-chain systems reported attacks. AFX Trade lost about $24.15 million in USDC after attackers obtained enough validator signatures to approve a bridge withdrawal. Arbitrum said the attack did not affect its native bridge. AFX paused operations while investigators reviewed the compromised signing setup.

Allbridge also halted its core bridge after a $1.65 million flash-loan attack on Solana liquidity pools. The attacker manipulated pool balances, withdrew assets at favorable rates and moved proceeds toward Ethereum. Across Protocol faced a separate Solana incident, but the project said the loss affected a Risk Labs-operated relayer rather than customer funds. It later restored Solana deposits.

The incidents returned bridge design and key management to the center of DeFi security. As crypto.news reported in earlier coverage, attacks have continued through 2026, including losses involving Kelp DAO and Axelar routes connected to Secret Network.

Institutional capital and tokenization continue expanding

Institutional deals provided a different market narrative. Crypto.com announced a $400 million investment from Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation. The company said it will use the funding to expand tokenized securities, derivatives and other asset classes across a planned 24/7 financial platform.

S&P Dow Jones Indices and Pantera Capital also launched the S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index. The benchmark uses a rules-based method focused on productive blockchain assets and companies with measurable use or revenue, rather than relying only on token popularity or price momentum.

Meanwhile, xStocks moved beyond U.S. shares by adding tokenized exposure to Hong Kong-listed equities through Payward and GTN. The companies plan to consider U.K., European and South Korean securities after securing required approvals. Tokenized equity value and trading activity have expanded as exchanges and traditional firms build around-the-clock products.

The week combined a market rebound with unresolved policy talks, security failures and infrastructure investment. Bitcoin and Ether finished higher, but stronger prices did not remove operational risks. The next market test will depend on the CLARITY Act’s Senate path, responses to bridge attacks and whether institutional funding converts into sustained trading and settlement activity. Traders will also watch funding rates and liquidation pressure closely.

Lien Finance has lost about $542,000 in USDC after an attacker exploited a flaw in its bond token logic to mint unsupported assets and drain liquidity from the protocol.

Blockchain security firm SlowMist said the exploit targeted Lien Finance’s bond exchange mechanism, allowing the attacker to create bond tokens without destroying the corresponding input bonds before swapping them for USDC. The firm estimated the loss at roughly 542,144.63 USDC and identified the attacker wallet as 0x0d7d…1808a.

According to SlowMist, the vulnerability was located in the exchangeEquivalentBonds function of the BondMakerCollateralizedEth contract. Its analysis said the function failed to properly verify the integrity of bond groups during exchanges. Instead of checking whether every bond ID appeared the required number of times, the contract counted only the total number of exception entries. By repeatedly using the same exception bond ID in the output group, the attacker satisfied the validation logic while omitting another required bond from the input.

SlowMist said the flaw allowed the attacker to mint new BondTokens that appeared valid even though no matching collateral had been consumed. The newly created assets were then exchanged for USDC through three pre-authorized endpoints, resulting in the withdrawal of about 542,144.63 USDC from the victim address 0xa961684a3a654fb2cca8f8991226c0cefc514d80.

The security firm identified the affected contracts as 0xda6fc5625e617bb92f5359921d43321cebc6bef0 and 0x843225cf6e663e4454732d6b551a737ac7b47de0.

Permissionless bond registration and pricing logic under scrutiny

Separate on-chain analysis from DefimonAlerts, later amplified by researcher exvulsec, described the incident as a protocol logic failure that combined permissionless bond registration with pricing weaknesses inside Lien Finance’s over-the-counter bond pools.

According to that analysis, the attacker first deployed an orchestration contract before registering a new bond group through the BondMakerCollateralizedEth contract. Because the registration process did not require governance approval, the attacker was reportedly able to introduce a bond group built around a malicious payoff function.

The report said the crafted bond tokens were then routed into Lien Finance’s GeneralizedDotc OTC pools. It pointed to the protocol’s internal _calcRateBondToErc20 function, saying it appears to have assigned excessive value to the newly created bonds despite their lack of genuine collateral backing.

As a result, the attacker exchanged what researchers described as effectively unsupported structured products for real USDC liquidity held in the protocol’s pools. The primary affected liquidity pool was the GeneralizedDotc contract at 0x656e…9ef18, while the attacker wallet received the proceeds through the main exploit transaction.

Researchers examining the exploit have described it as a protocol pricing and validation failure rather than a conventional smart contract exploit such as reentrancy or an access control bypass. According to the published analysis, the attack relied on introducing synthetic financial instruments whose economic value was not sufficiently validated before they became eligible for OTC swaps.

The researchers compared the incident with April’s Drift Protocol exploit, where attackers reportedly introduced fabricated collateral that the protocol accepted at inflated values before real assets were withdrawn. They noted that the two cases differ in implementation but share a similar pattern of exploiting valuation logic instead of breaking cryptographic protections.

Latest incident adds to a string of DeFi exploits

The Lien Finance exploit comes during an active period for decentralized finance security incidents.

Just one day earlier, on-chain analytics platform Lookonchain described July 23 as “Hackers’ Day” after three separate exploits resulted in combined reported losses of about $35.55 million. Those incidents included a $24.15 million exploit involving AFX Trade’s bridge infrastructure, a $7.54 million attack on the Verus Ethereum Bridge, and a separate $3.86 million exploit affecting B² Network.

In the AFX incident, blockchain security firm Blockaid said attackers drained about $24.15 million in USDC from infrastructure operated by the protocol rather than Arbitrum’s native bridge. Offchain Labs separately confirmed that Arbitrum’s core bridge was not compromised and said the incident involved third-party infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Blockaid also linked the latest Verus Ethereum Bridge exploit to the same bridge contract, entry path and apparent bug class involved in the project’s May breach. The firm said the July attack generated unbacked Ethereum-side payouts through the bridge’s import process, although a complete technical explanation had not yet been published.

Earlier this month, Lazy Summer Protocol lost about $6.04 million in a share price manipulation attack, while Bonzo Finance on Hedera reported losses of around $9 million following an oracle-related exploit. Allbridge Core also suffered a flash-loan-driven stable pool attack that drained roughly $1.65 million, and Polychain-backed Cascade lost approximately $1.34 million in another exploit during July.

Researchers tracking decentralized finance attacks have estimated cumulative losses exceeding $630 million during the first seven months of 2026. Their data identifies oracle manipulation, pricing flaws, compromised credentials and bridge validation weaknesses among the most common attack vectors recorded this year.

BondMaker architecture has faced security issues before

For long-time Ethereum developers, the latest exploit revisits an architecture that has drawn security attention before.

In September 2020, a white-hat group led by security researcher Samczsun prevented the loss of roughly $10 million after identifying a flaw in Lien Finance’s original BondMaker system.

Security researchers at the time said the earlier vulnerability allowed attackers to create empty bond groups that could be exchanged for properly collateralized ones through an equivalence function, making it possible to extract Ether without matching backing. The issue was intercepted before malicious actors could exploit it, and the recovery became one of Ethereum’s most prominent coordinated white-hat rescue efforts.

Unlike the 2020 incident, the latest exploit resulted in an actual loss after attackers used weaknesses in bond validation and pricing logic to withdraw USDC from live liquidity pools. At the time of publication, Lien Finance had not released a detailed technical postmortem or announced whether any of the stolen funds had been frozen or recovered.

Mirae Asset has rebranded South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Korbit as Digital X after completing its acquisition of a controlling stake, positioning the platform as the centerpiece of its digital asset strategy.

South Korean outlet Herald Business reported that Mirae Asset Group founder and Global Strategy Officer Park Hyeon-joo informed employees in an internal email on July 23 that Korbit had officially joined the group and would begin operating under the new name, Digital X. The announcement came after Mirae Asset Consulting completed its purchase of a 97.15% stake in the exchange.

Park described the rebranding as part of the group’s “Mirae Asset 3.0” strategy, under which Digital X will combine traditional financial services with digital asset businesses. According to the report, he said the new name represents the intersection of different forms of value and the possibilities created by bringing them together rather than serving as only a corporate identity change.

The company plans to build products around real-world asset tokenization, security token offerings, stablecoins and investment products that connect traditional and digital assets. Park said Digital X would serve as a core business unit supporting that strategy as digital assets become more integrated with mainstream finance.

Compliance and customer protection remain central

Alongside the business roadmap, Park outlined governance priorities for the newly rebranded exchange. Herald Business reported that he instructed employees to treat compliance as a non-negotiable standard by maintaining strict controls across anti-money laundering, know-your-customer verification, information security and fraud detection systems.

He also said the company should closely follow regulatory requirements as South Korea continues refining its Virtual Asset User Protection Act and prepares rules for security token offerings. According to the report, Park urged Digital X to become a model for implementing financial regulators’ guidance during the country’s evolving digital asset regulatory framework.

Park further linked the exchange’s future operations to Mirae Asset’s long-standing management philosophy, saying customer wealth creation should remain the foundation for every business decision. He added that products lacking sufficient value should not be introduced under the Mirae Asset brand, according to Herald Business.

The executive also said Mirae Asset intends to combine more than three decades of experience in global financial markets with Korbit’s operational knowledge in digital assets. According to the report, the company sees that combination as a way to help define the next stage of South Korea’s digital asset industry.

Acquisition completed after regulatory approval

The rebranding follows the completion of Mirae Asset’s acquisition of Korbit, which closed after the financial group’s affiliate, Mirae Asset Consulting, secured the required regulatory approvals.

Korbit confirmed on Thursday that Mirae Asset Consulting had completed its purchase of the remaining 5.42% stake, increasing its ownership to 97.15%. Earlier this week, the company disclosed plans to acquire an additional 7.35 million shares worth approximately 7.2 billion won ($5.32 million), raising its holding from 92.06%.

Earlier this month, South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission approved the transaction, which The Korea Herald described as the country’s first acquisition of a cryptocurrency exchange by an affiliate of a traditional financial group. Mirae Asset Consulting previously said the investment was intended to secure future growth opportunities connected to digital assets.

Despite the ownership change, Korbit said customers would continue using the exchange without disruption. The company stated that its operating entity would remain unchanged and that existing services, including trading, deposits, withdrawals and account access, would continue as before.

The exchange also said customer funds and virtual assets would remain segregated from company assets under South Korea’s Virtual Asset User Protection Act. It added that Korbit would continue acting as the controller of users’ personal information, meaning customers would not need to take any action following the acquisition.

Traditional finance expands crypto presence

Mirae Asset’s entry into the cryptocurrency exchange business comes as South Korea’s financial institutions continue increasing their involvement in digital assets through acquisitions, investments and infrastructure partnerships.

CoinGecko data showed Korbit processed roughly $4.3 million in spot trading volume over a recent 24-hour period, placing it among the country’s leading exchanges behind market leader Upbit.

Several similar transactions have emerged across the market in recent months. In May, OKX Ventures agreed to acquire a 19.6% stake in Coinone through an 80 billion won ($53 million) investment alongside Korea Investment & Securities, subject to regulatory approval. The companies said they would cooperate on user protection, security systems and risk management while exploring opportunities related to security tokens and stablecoins.

Binance has also pursued expansion in South Korea through its acquisition of Gopax, while Samsung affiliates announced plans earlier this year to acquire a combined 4% stake in Dunamu, the parent company of Upbit. 

At the same time, major financial institutions including KB Kookmin Bank, Shinhan Bank and NHN KCP have entered partnerships involving tokenized deposits and stablecoin payment infrastructure.

Before joining Mirae Asset, Korbit had also expanded its international partnerships. In November 2024, the exchange integrated Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network Base, allowing users to move Ether between Ethereum and Base while supporting future collaboration on on-chain technology, developer programs and community initiatives in South Korea.

SpaceX’s broken IPO has crypto media narrating every tick against its 18,712 BTC. One division destroys the story: the coins are eight basis points of the company. 

Here is the decomposition, why the proxy myth survives arithmetic, and where SpaceX actually touches crypto, which is stranger than the myth.

There is a genre of crypto headline that has attached itself to SpaceX like a barnacle since June 12, when the company completed the largest IPO in history and promptly broke: every move in the stock, now 48% below its peak and under its own offer price, gets narrated against the 18,712 Bitcoin on the company’s balance sheet. The stock falls, and the coins are in danger. A dormant wallet moves $88 of test dust, and a selloff looms. The framing has a name, the Bitcoin proxy, a listed stock that functions partly as leveraged BTC exposure from day one, and it has migrated from trading desks to research notes to the passive-flow analysis around the company’s Nasdaq-100 inclusion. It survives on one number, 18,712, and dies on one division. SpaceX is worth roughly $1.56 trillion at Thursday’s price. Its Bitcoin is worth roughly $1.18 billion. The coins are 0.076% of the company, eight basis points, a rounding error inside a rounding error, and every trader positioning in SPCX for Bitcoin exposure is buying a rocket company with a satellite business and receiving, as a bonus, less BTC sensitivity than the cash drag in a money-market fund. This piece does the decomposition the narrative skips, explains why the myth is immortal anyway, and maps where SpaceX actually matters to crypto, which turns out to be a better story than the one being told.

Three major crypto advocacy groups have urged U.S. Senate leaders to allow the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act to receive “floor consideration,” pushing for a full vote before the chamber departs for state work periods in August. In a joint letter sent Friday to Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the organizations said bipartisan negotiations are still underway and asked senators to keep discussions moving.

The appeal lands as the bill has cleared the Senate Banking and Agriculture committees, but the political math and remaining policy disputes have left uncertainty around timing. With Republicans holding a 52–47 majority over Democrats in the Senate, passage would require 60 votes—meaning cross-party support remains essential.

Key takeaways

• Crypto advocacy groups are requesting Senate leadership schedule the CLARITY Act for a floor vote (“floor consideration”) before August recess.
• The bill has progressed through the Senate Banking and Agriculture committees, but some lawmakers plan to delay voting until specific provisions are addressed.
• Republicans released the CLARITY market structure text earlier this week, including ethics provisions aimed at public corruption concerns.
• Democrats have criticized the ethics package as insufficient, raising the odds of stalled negotiations and a delayed vote.
• Markets are already pricing in uncertainty: Kalshi event contracts showed about a 40.3% chance of a Senate vote before the August recess as of Friday.

Advocates press for a floor vote amid legislative uncertainty

In their letter, the Crypto Council for Innovation, the Digital Chamber, and the Blockchain Association urged senators to prioritize bringing CLARITY to the floor. The groups acknowledged that “constructive bipartisan negotiations remain underway” and encouraged lawmakers to continue good-faith discussions between both parties.

Committee progress does not guarantee that the bill reaches the chamber in time. While the legislation has advanced through Senate banking and agriculture panels, the letter suggests that political leaders are still weighing whether the final language will satisfy key concerns. The timing matters: if senators fail to vote before the August recess, the debate could spill into the weeks leading up to the 2026 U.S. midterms, potentially reshaping the incentive structure for lawmakers on both sides.

Ethics and market structure provisions become the sticking point

CLARITY is widely framed as one of the most consequential U.S. bills for the crypto sector, in part because it aims to provide clearer rules for digital asset markets. The latest Republican effort included ethics provisions designed to bar public officials from issuing or sponsoring cryptocurrencies, according to reporting that referenced the bill text released earlier this week.

However, those measures appear to be at the center of Democratic skepticism. Politico reported that Senator Ruben Gallego criticized the GOP’s counterproposal as not matching what Democrats said had been promised during negotiations. Gallego said, according to Politico, that after extensive work with Republican colleagues, the new offer did not reflect a serious attempt to address concerns raised during earlier bargaining.

“[…] After all the work that we’ve done with our Republican colleagues, that they would take the months and months of work and somehow interpret that and turn around and think what they offered was even remotely close.”

That criticism underscores a central tension: even as the bill’s broader market-structure goals gain traction, lawmakers may be reluctant to move without stronger agreement on ethics and enforcement-related safeguards.

Industry groups argue CLARITY matters for both compliance and innovation

While the legislative fight focuses heavily on ethics provisions, industry leaders are also emphasizing what they see as CLARITY’s practical impact on how the U.S. regulates digital assets—especially outside traditional custody models.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong argued that the U.S. still lacks a comprehensive federal framework and that the absence of such rules has allowed harmful behavior to reach customers while business activity migrates beyond U.S. oversight. In a Wednesday X post, Armstrong said the bill would provide consumer protections, tools for law enforcement, and a path for the country to lead in the industry.

Orest Gavryliak, chief legal officer of DeFi platform 1inch, discussed the bill on Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction podcast on Friday. He said CLARITY would help recognize a legal framework for non-custodial protocols, contrasting that approach with what he described as regulators trying to fit decentralized systems into custodial frameworks. Gavryliak’s argument was that rules designed for custodial models do not translate cleanly to non-custodial protocols—an issue he said makes passage “very important.”

What markets are signaling about timing—and what to watch next

Even with committee approvals, reaching the 60-vote threshold remains the main challenge. That requirement creates a built-in incentive for lawmakers to negotiate hard on unresolved provisions rather than accept a narrow coalition. The result is that procedural timing—whether leadership can secure enough alignment to schedule a floor vote—may become as consequential as the final bill text itself.

As of Friday, Kalshi’s event contracts offered users a 40.3% chance that the Senate would vote on the CLARITY Act before the August recess, reflecting a market view that passage may not be immediate even if the bill is moving.

For investors, traders, and developers, the next key question is not simply whether the CLARITY Act survives procedural hurdles, but what changes—if any—are made as senators try to reconcile ethics-related disagreements. If the ethics language remains the primary point of contention, negotiations could continue to expand rather than converge. Conversely, if the Senate leadership finds a pathway to unify enough support for floor consideration, CLARITY could become a central reference point for U.S. crypto compliance planning well before lawmakers turn to the broader midterm political cycle.

Belarusian nationals and residents have been barred from owning, controlling, or managing crypto-asset service providers regulated under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework from Aug. 25, extending the bloc’s sanctions on the country.

According to Council Decision (CFSP) 2026/1847, adopted by the Council of the European Union on Thursday, the bloc has expanded its sanctions framework against Belarus by preventing Belarusian nationals and residents from owning, controlling or serving on the governing bodies of crypto-asset service providers authorized under the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.

The decision entered into force on July 24, while the new crypto-related restrictions will begin applying from Aug. 25.

The latest measure goes beyond earlier sanctions that covered only providers of crypto wallet, account and custody services. Once the rule takes effect, the restriction will extend to every crypto-asset service category recognized under MiCA.

Under the regulation, Belarusian nationals and residents will no longer be allowed to own or control EU-based firms offering crypto services or hold positions on their governing bodies. MiCA defines those services to include operating crypto trading platforms, exchanging crypto assets, executing and transmitting client orders, placing crypto assets, providing transfer services, offering investment advice and managing crypto portfolios.

Restrictions follow MiCA transition and new Russia sanctions

The timing of the measure comes shortly after the European Union completed MiCA’s transition period on July 1. Crypto firms operating without authorization were instructed to wind down their activities or face enforcement action once the transition ended.

The Belarus-related restriction also forms part of the European Union’s continuing sanctions policy linked to Russia’s war against Ukraine. EU authorities have increasingly focused on crypto infrastructure that they believe could facilitate sanctions evasion or alternative financial channels.

Earlier on Thursday, the European Union adopted its 21st sanctions package against Russia, extending its transaction ban to 14 crypto-related service platforms located outside the bloc. The package also introduced a mechanism allowing the EU to prohibit transactions with foreign crypto service providers that authorities determine are being used to help Russia circumvent sanctions.

The final measures expanded on a proposal published on June 11, when the European Commission had proposed targeting 11 crypto platforms. The approved package ultimately increased that number to 14.

The proposal itself followed action taken by the United Kingdom on May 26, when British authorities sanctioned Huobi Global S.A., the Panama-based company behind HTX. UK officials alleged the company supported Russia-linked financial networks connected to sanctioned entities A7 and Garantex.

Responding to those allegations at the time, HTX told Cointelegraph that regulatory compliance remained its highest priority and said the exchange strictly followed the regulatory frameworks in every jurisdiction where it operates.

Belarus has promoted crypto despite mounting sanctions

The European Union’s latest restrictions arrive as Belarus has increasingly promoted cryptocurrency use inside the country while facing years of financial sanctions from Western governments.

In September 2025, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko urged the country’s banking sector to expand the use of cryptocurrencies and modern digital payment systems, arguing that traditional financial methods were no longer sufficient for an economy operating under extensive international sanctions, according to the Belarusian Telegraph Agency.

During the meeting with central and commercial bank leaders, Lukashenko said digital assets should play a larger role in cross-border payments and domestic financial operations. He argued that cryptocurrencies could reduce dependence on financial intermediaries while enabling automated transactions through smart contracts and giving users more control over their assets.

At the time, he also said Belarusian crypto exchanges were on track to potentially double the value of external payments by the end of the year and instructed banks to actively support the country’s growing use of cryptocurrency transactions.

That push came only days after Lukashenko publicly criticized his government for failing to deliver a comprehensive cryptocurrency oversight framework that he had first requested in 2023.

According to the Belarusian Telegraph Agency, the president cited findings from an unscheduled inspection conducted by the State Control Committee, which reported that about half of the funds Belarusian investors transferred to foreign crypto platforms failed to return. Lukashenko said the findings demonstrated the need for stronger supervision and investor protection.

He instructed officials to establish transparent rules and new oversight mechanisms that would protect citizens, businesses and the state’s financial interests while allowing legitimate Belarusian and foreign companies to continue operating in the country’s digital asset sector.

Belarus has permitted cryptocurrency transactions since 2018 under a legal framework administered through the country’s Hi-Tech Park. More recently, Lukashenko has supported additional measures, including directing retail crypto trading toward domestic exchanges and encouraging the development of a state-backed cryptocurrency mining industry to take advantage of Belarus’ surplus electricity.

The European Union’s latest sanctions now place additional limits on how Belarusian nationals and residents can participate in the regulated crypto market inside the bloc, even as Belarus continues pursuing digital assets as part of its domestic financial strategy.

When hackers hijacked Robinhood’s CEO’s X account, they did not run the usual smash-and-grab. They launched a token whose liquidity is locked forever, un-ruggable by design, and are collecting trading fees from it in perpetuity. The rug pull just evolved into a yield product, and the anti-scam infrastructure built the machine.

Crypto crime has a classical form, refined over a decade: create a token, manufacture credibility, collect the victims’ money, and vanish, the rug pull, a crime with a beginning, a middle, and above all an end. What happened on Thursday, when hackers seized the X account of Robinhood’s chief executive and pointed 15 million followers at a memecoin called Vladhood, had the beginning and the middle and then, deliberately, no end. 

The attackers launched $VLAD through a launchpad whose signature safety feature locks a token’s liquidity forever, which means the token cannot be rugged, which means, and here is the inversion worth an entire article, the scam never has to stop. The locked pool collects trading fees on every swap, the launchpad pays those fees to the token’s creator, and the creator is the hacker, who called the fee-collection function six times in the first two hours and has no reason ever to stop calling it. The rug pull was a robbery. This is a toll booth, built on stolen credibility, operated in public, generating income for its architect with every trade, protected by the exact mechanism the industry built to protect traders. The Defiant’s on-chain forensics documented the machine within hours; what the machine means, for scam economics, for the launchpads, and for the brokerage whose chain now hosts its second executive-impersonation token in eleven days, is the subject here.

The operation, reconstructed

The timeline, assembled from on-chain records and the forensic work of The Defiant and Onchain Lens, settles the fact that reframes everything else: this was a single coordinated operation, planned around the account takeover, not a scammer riding a lucky hack.

At 12:38 pm ET on Thursday, a wallet with no prior history launched Vladhood through Pons, the busiest of the Pump.fun-style launchpads that colonized Robinhood Chain in its first month. The launch parameters included a detail that functions as a confession of premeditation: the token’s official website field listed Tenev’s X profile URL, meaning the creators configured the token around an account they did not yet publicly control. Forty-six minutes later, the post appeared on that account: Does Robinhood love memes? The answer is yes, introducing $VLAD as the official mascot of Robinhood Chain, falsely promising a Robinhood app listing, signed off, Welcome to the Hood, with the contract address attached. The credibility stack was complete: a verified account, a CEO’s voice, a chain the CEO actually launched three weeks earlier, and a claim, app listing, that sat exactly on the boundary of plausible.

The market did what engineered credibility makes it do. The post drew more than 175,000 views in under 20 minutes; the token ran up more than 90,000% from launch; volume reached $22 million across roughly 85,000 swaps in the main pool; the market cap touched somewhere between $4 million and $10 million depending on the snapshot; 5,266 holders and 137,000 transfers accumulated on a contract deployed that afternoon. Robinhood’s communications team confirmed the compromise roughly 41 minutes after the post and worked with X to delete it; the chain’s own explorer flagged the contract as a likely scam. On-chain monitors estimate wallets tied to the operation extracted around 650 to 690 ETH, between $1.2 million and $1.3 million, through the classic half of the play, early wallets, holding a reported 70% of supply, selling into the spike.

And then the part that makes this a new genre: the sale was not the payday’s end. It was the down payment.

The mechanism: anti-rug as annuity

To see the innovation, start with the protection it exploits, because the protection is real and the exploitation is parasitic on its virtue.

Launchpads in the Pump.fun lineage answered the rug pull structurally: when a token graduates to a trading pool, the platform locks the liquidity in a locker contract the creator cannot drain. The creator cannot pull the pool, so the classic exit, remove liquidity, collapse the price to zero, vanish, is mechanically impossible, which is the safety pitch that lets these platforms describe themselves as scam-resistant and lets traders ape into anonymous tokens with one category of fear removed. Pons implements the standard design with the standard incentive attached: locked liquidity still generates trading fees on every swap, and those fees are claimable by the token’s creator, a reasonable arrangement meant to reward legitimate builders whose tokens sustain volume.

Now run the $VLAD operation through that machinery. The attacker cannot rug, and does not need to. Every trade in the pool, the panic selling after the exposure, the bagholders averaging down, the day traders playing the volatility, the bots arbitraging the chaos, pays a fee, and the fee flows to the creator wallet on demand. Starting seven minutes after the fake post, the wallet called the locker’s fee-collection function six times over roughly two hours, netting about 31.6 ETH, roughly $59,000, and the meter is still running: the balance grows as long as anyone, for any reason, trades the token. The Defiant’s framing captures the inversion precisely: the wallet did not need to pull liquidity to cash out. The token never rugged. It just collects.

The economics deserve to be stated as the design they are. A rug pull monetizes credibility once, in a single extractive event that ends the scam and starts the manhunt. The locked-liquidity structure converts the same stolen credibility into an income-producing asset: a perpetual claim on the trading activity of a token that cannot die by its creator’s hand, whose infamy itself sustains volume, and whose victims’ every attempt to trade out of their position pays the person who put them in it. The scam has acquired a business model, and the business model was donated by the anti-scam infrastructure. Eleven days earlier, crypto.news covered the predecessor eleven days earlier, the SCATMAN operation, run through SpaceX’s hijacked accounts onto this same chain, which took $135,000 in the classical style and ended. $VLAD’s operators took ten times that in the opening hours and, structurally, have not ended at all. That delta, between a robbery and a franchise, is the evolution this incident marks.

Bitcoin price has slipped back toward $65,000 after spot ETF outflows, a major options expiry and rising oil prices stopped its rebound from extending beyond $66,800.

According to data from crypto.news, Bitcoin (BTC) price traded near $65,050 on July 24, down about 2.6% from its July 21 peak. Traders remained cautious as the pullback brought the price closer to a large derivatives settlement level and a rising trendline that has supported the recovery since late June.

U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded $225 million in net outflows on July 23, according to SoSoValue data. BlackRock’s IBIT accounted for about $202 million of those withdrawals, reversing the steady institutional inflows that had helped Bitcoin recover from its June low near $58,000.

At the same time, U.S. technology shares suffered their sharpest sell-off since April 2025. The Magnificent Seven fell 4.8% on July 23 and lost about $797 billion in combined market value as investors questioned the scale of corporate spending on artificial intelligence. The Nasdaq 100 dropped 1.9%, while the S&P 500 lost 1.2%.

Bitcoin fell less than 1% during the equity sell-off, which showed relative strength against technology stocks. However, the decline in risk appetite denied BTC the new capital needed to clear the $66,800 resistance area.

Oil prices added another obstacle. West Texas Intermediate crude eased to about $90.59 on Friday but remained on course for a weekly gain of nearly 10%, while Brent held near $98.87 after briefly trading above $100.

The United States carried out a 13th consecutive night of strikes on Iran as Washington and Tehran rejected immediate negotiations. President Donald Trump also threatened “major military punishment” against Iran and the Houthis after the militant group attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea.

Higher energy costs could keep inflation elevated and reduce the Federal Reserve’s room to cut interest rates during the second half of 2026. Rising Treasury yields would also increase the appeal of income-producing assets over Bitcoin, which pays no interest.

Bitcoin price remains above its rising trendline despite weaker momentum

Bitcoin’s 4-hour chart shows an ascending support line connecting a series of higher lows formed since the price bottomed near $58,000 in late June. The trendline now sits between $63,700 and $64,300, placing the current price about 1.5% above the structure.

Momentum has weakened after BTC failed to hold above $66,000. The 4-hour Relative Strength Index fell to 45.65, below its signal average of 51.53, but remained above the oversold threshold of 30.

Meanwhile, the Moving Average Convergence Divergence line dropped below its signal line. The histogram reached negative 131, which shows that sellers have controlled the latest 4-hour candles following the rejection near $66,800.

On the daily chart, Bitcoin remains above its 20-day and 50-day simple moving averages at $64,293 and $63,181. The price must hold those levels to preserve the recovery structure formed since June.

Chaikin Money Flow remained positive at 0.08, showing that buying volume has not fully left the market despite the ETF withdrawals. However, BTC still trades below its 100-day and 200-day moving averages at $69,940 and $72,455, leaving the long-term trend under seller control.

A daily close above $66,800 would open the path toward the 100-day average near $70,000. Bitcoin would then need to reclaim $72,455 to establish a stronger trend reversal.

The one-week CoinGlass liquidation heatmap places the nearest large pool of leveraged positions around $64,200–$64,500. Another dense cluster sits near $63,500, while upside liquidity has accumulated around $65,700 and between $66,500 and $67,300.

Those levels could attract price as traders approach the weekly derivatives settlement. About 19,000 Bitcoin options worth $1.2 billion expire on July 24, with a put-call ratio of 0.89 and maximum pain at $64,500, according to Greeks.live data. Implied volatility has also fallen toward 35%, while gamma exposure is concentrated at $65,000 and $72,000.

Drop under $63,700 would invalidate the local recovery

According to crypto analyst Lennaert Snyder, Bitcoin’s long setup remains active after BTC swept the $65,000 lows. Snyder identified $64,600 as a possible second-entry area and $67,000 as the next liquidity target.

“The invalidation for the local long thesis is the 63.7K low,” Snyder wrote.

A 4-hour close beneath $63,700 would break the rising trendline and expose the liquidation cluster near $63,500. Continued selling could then push BTC toward $62,000, followed by the June support zone between $58,000 and $60,000.

On the upside, $67,000 and $68,100 remain the immediate resistance levels. Snyder views $68,100 as both a profit-taking zone for long positions and a possible short entry, with $60,000 as the bearish target after a liquidity sweep.

Bitcoin’s outlook therefore depends on whether buyers defend the $63,700–$64,500 area after the options expiry. A renewed oil surge, further ETF withdrawals or an escalation in the U.S.-Iran conflict would raise the risk of a trendline breakdown, while a close above $66,800 would return control to buyers.