DeFi infrastructure provider Spark has initiated a major stablecoin liquidity deployment on Ethereum, moving roughly $150 million into two Uniswap v4 pools as part of a broader effort to standardize how stablecoin issuers access shared market-making liquidity.

According to a Spark spokesperson speaking to Cointelegraph, the initial liquidity is live in two pools pairing Spark’s USDS with PayPal USD (PYUSD) and USDT, with USDS positioned as the foundation. Spark frames the rollout as one of the largest AMM liquidity migrations in DeFi and describes it as the first phase of what it calls the “Stablecoin FX Layer,” aimed at bootstrapping shared liquidity on Uniswap v4.

Key takeaways

• Spark has deployed about $150 million in stablecoin liquidity across two Uniswap v4 pools on Ethereum, initially using USDS as the anchor asset.
• The rollout is intended to establish shared liquidity for stablecoin markets, reducing the need for each issuer to individually bootstrap separate liquidity networks.
• Spark plans to expand into a more programmable liquidity system later, using Uniswap v4 hooks after additional security review and testing.
• The project also functions as a real-world test of the broader thesis that decentralized venues can capture growing activity tied to tokenized finance.

From isolated pools to shared stablecoin liquidity

The core objective behind Spark’s deployment is coordination: rather than requiring every stablecoin issuer to assemble liquidity and trading inventory across multiple venues, Spark says it is building toward a shared liquidity framework. In the first phase, that approach is implemented through standard Uniswap v4 pools—avoiding the complexity of Spark’s planned programmable layer until later.

Spark’s spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the current deployment specifically focuses on “bootstrapping shared liquidity on Uniswap v4.” In other words, the near-term milestone is less about advanced routing or automation and more about proving that large-scale stablecoin liquidity can migrate into a common structure on Uniswap v4.

For market participants, the difference matters. Liquidity bootstrapping is often a slow and capital-intensive process, particularly when issuers need to align with market makers and manage balances across venues. A shared approach—if it reduces operational burden without sacrificing liquidity quality—could make onboarding new stablecoins faster and improve consistency across trading pairs.

Programmable liquidity and the planned DualPool hook

Spark said its longer-term plan involves introducing a Shared Liquidity Layer and a DualPool hook in subsequent phases, leveraging Uniswap v4’s programmable architecture. Uniswap v4 hooks are designed to allow integrations that can extend how liquidity and strategies are managed within the protocol’s framework.

In Spark’s description, a liquidity hook would enable idle or not immediately required capital to be deployed into governance-approved products, liquidity venues, or yield-generating strategies. That concept—turning capital from a static balance sheet into a programmable set of behaviors—is central to how DeFi seeks to compete with traditional finance infrastructure efficiencies.

Spark also noted that the DualPool hook will undergo a separate security review, along with additional testing and production-readiness steps before it is deployed. The distinction is important for users and developers: building on hooks can introduce new failure modes, and Spark’s statement implies that the initial pools are a “safe start,” with more experimental programmability coming only after a formal review process.

While Spark is working with additional partners across the stablecoin ecosystem, the spokesperson did not provide details on those integrations at this stage.

Why this fits the tokenization narrative

Even though Spark’s rollout focuses on stablecoins rather than tokenized securities, it aligns with a wider market narrative: as tokenization expands, trading venues that can efficiently provide liquidity for new onchain assets may see outsized benefits.

Earlier in the month, Standard Chartered pointed to Uniswap as a potential beneficiary of tokenized assets moving into DeFi. In its outlook, the bank forecast that total assets held in DeFi could reach $2.7 trillion by 2030, with Uniswap potentially positioned as a liquidity venue as tokenized markets grow.

Cointelegraph reports that the Spark deployment offers a more immediate test of that general infrastructure thesis, albeit in a stablecoin context. Stablecoins are not tokenized securities, but they are the rails many onchain financial products depend on—particularly when trading activity, hedging, and market-making require deep, reliable liquidity.

The timing also follows steps toward institutional tokenized-asset trading on Uniswap. On Feb. 12, BlackRock said it would bring its $2.1 billion tokenized Treasury fund, BUIDL, to Uniswap, enabling eligible institutional investors and market makers to trade the security through decentralized infrastructure.

Together, these developments highlight a pattern: as more real-world finance primitives move onchain, decentralized venues increasingly need to prove they can deliver not just execution, but also scalable liquidity and operational efficiency.

What to watch next

Investors and builders should watch whether Spark’s shared-liquidity approach can scale beyond two initial stablecoin pairs and whether the planned DualPool hook clears its security review without disrupting liquidity depth. The next phase—moving from standard pools into Spark’s programmable layer—will likely be the clearer signal of whether this “shared liquidity” thesis can deliver measurable efficiency gains across stablecoin markets.

After FTX vanished with billions in customer money, “proof of reserves” became the phrase every exchange started using. This guide explains what it really proves, what it quietly leaves out, and how to tell a meaningful attestation from a marketing badge.

Proof of reserves is a cryptographic method an exchange uses to show that it actually holds the crypto assets its customers have deposited, by publishing verifiable evidence of its on-chain holdings and, in the stronger versions, matching them against what it owes. The first sentence of that definition is the part exchanges love to advertise. The second part, the matching against what it owes, is the part that separates a genuine solvency proof from a reassuring graphic, and it is where most of the difficulty lives. 

The idea moved from a niche cryptographic curiosity to an industry standard almost overnight in late 2022, when FTX, one of the largest exchanges in the world, collapsed and revealed an estimated eight-billion-dollar hole between what it claimed to hold and what it actually had. In the panic that followed, every surviving exchange rushed to prove it was not the next FTX, and “proof of reserves” became the phrase they reached for. This guide explains what proof of reserves is, how the cryptography works, what a credible implementation looks like, the serious limitations every user should understand, and how to read an exchange’s attestation without being lulled by a green checkmark.

The reason this matters is simple and uncomfortable. When you deposit crypto on a centralized exchange, you generally do not hold those coins yourself; the exchange holds them and owes them back to you, exactly as a bank holds your deposit. That arrangement works only if the exchange truly has the assets, keeps them separate from money it gambles or lends, and can return them on demand. FTX proved that an exchange can claim all of this while secretly using customer funds to plug losses elsewhere, and that by the time the truth surfaces, the money is gone. 

Proof of reserves is the industry’s attempt to make that kind of fraud detectable in advance, by replacing “trust us” with “verify it yourself.” Whether it succeeds depends entirely on how it is done, and the gap between the strong and weak versions is the most important thing this guide will teach you.

The problem proof of reserves is trying to solve

To understand proof of reserves, start with what an exchange actually is from a financial standpoint. A centralized exchange custodies assets on behalf of millions of users, pooling them in wallets it controls. Your balance on the screen is not a coin with your name on it; it is an entry in the exchange’s database, a promise that the platform owes you that amount and will pay it when you withdraw. As long as everyone does not ask for their money at once, and as long as the exchange truly holds what it owes, the system runs smoothly.

The danger appears when an exchange quietly spends, lends, or loses customer assets while still showing full balances on screen. Users see numbers that look real, but the coins behind them are gone, and the shortfall stays hidden until a wave of withdrawals exposes it.

This is precisely the failure FTX embodied. It took customer deposits and funneled them to an affiliated trading firm, which lost them, while customer account balances continued to display as though the money were safe. When users tried to withdraw en masse, the exchange could not pay, and the missing billions came to light only in the collapse. The episode burned a lesson into the industry: an exchange’s own assurances are worthless, because a fraudulent or insolvent platform will keep claiming everything is fine right up until it implodes. 

What users needed was a way to check, independently and cryptographically, that an exchange held the assets it claimed, without having to trust the exchange’s word or wait for an auditor’s annual report. Proof of reserves was the answer the industry converged on, a mechanism designed to make solvency, or its absence, visible to anyone willing to verify, ideally before a platform fails rather than after.

The two halves: assets and liabilities

The single most important concept in proof of reserves is that real solvency requires proving two separate things, and that an exchange holds enough assets is only one of them. The first half is proof of assets: showing that the exchange controls a certain quantity of crypto in its wallets. This is the easier half, because blockchains are public. An exchange can point to its wallet addresses and let anyone see the balances on-chain, or it can cryptographically sign a message from those addresses to prove it controls them. Either way, the assets side is relatively straightforward to show, because the blockchain itself is the evidence.

The second half is proof of liabilities: showing the total amount the exchange owes to all of its customers combined. This is the hard half, and it is the half that weak implementations skip. Without knowing the total liabilities, proving assets means nothing, because solvency is a comparison. An exchange holding one billion dollars of crypto looks healthy until you learn it owes customers two billion, at which point it is catastrophically insolvent. Proof of assets alone tells you what is in the vault; only proof of liabilities tells you whether what is in the vault is enough. 

A complete proof of reserves therefore pairs the two: it shows that total assets held are greater than or equal to total customer liabilities, which is the actual definition of solvency. When an exchange publishes a glossy page showing its wallet holdings but says nothing rigorous about what it owes, it has proven assets and called it solvency, and that substitution is the most common way the term gets watered down into marketing.

How Merkle-tree proof of reserves works

The clever cryptography in proof of reserves is mostly on the liabilities side, because proving what an exchange owes without exposing every customer’s private balance is the genuinely hard problem. The standard tool is a structure called a Merkle tree. Picture every customer’s balance as a leaf at the bottom of a tree. Each leaf is hashed, meaning run through a one-way cryptographic function that turns it into a fixed string of characters. 

Pairs of hashes are then combined and hashed again, level by level, climbing the tree until everything condenses into a single hash at the very top called the Merkle root. That root is a compact fingerprint of every balance in the system at once, and crucially, changing any single balance anywhere in the tree would change the root entirely.

The exchange publishes the Merkle root, which represents its total customer liabilities, along with the total asset figure, ideally verified by a third party. Each individual user can then independently confirm that their own balance was included in the calculation. The exchange gives the user the specific branch of hashes connecting their leaf to the root, and the user can recompute the path and check that it produces the published root. If it does, the user has proven their balance was counted in the total, without the exchange ever revealing anyone else’s balance. 

The privacy is the point: the Merkle tree lets the exchange prove a true, complete total of what it owes while keeping each customer’s individual figure hidden from everyone else. If enough users perform this check and find themselves correctly included, the published liability total becomes credible, and it can be compared against the proven assets to assess solvency. The catch, which we will return to, is that this only works well if users actually perform the check and if the asset side is honestly and independently verified.

The zero-knowledge upgrade

The basic Merkle-tree approach has a subtle weakness that more advanced systems have moved to close. To fully trust the liability total, you ideally want assurance that the exchange did not cheat in constructing the tree, for instance by sneaking in fake negative balances to make its total liabilities look smaller than they really are, or by excluding certain accounts. The plain Merkle tree proves your balance is included, but it does not, on its own, prove that every entry in the tree was non-negative and that the math behind the total was honest. A sophisticated exchange could, in principle, manipulate the construction in ways an ordinary user checking a single branch would not catch.

The fix that leading exchanges have adopted is to layer a zero-knowledge proof on top of the Merkle tree, using a cryptographic technique called a zk-SNARK. A zero-knowledge proof lets one party prove a statement is true without revealing the underlying data. Applied to proof of reserves, a zk-SNARK can prove that every user balance in the tree was included, that no balance was negative, and that the total was computed correctly, all without exposing any individual balance or even aggregate patterns. 

The exchange proves, in effect, “the sum of all real, non-negative customer balances equals this published number, and here is mathematical proof we did not fake it,” and anyone can verify that proof. The founder of Ethereum publicly proposed exactly this kind of zk-SNARK enhancement as the right way to do proof of reserves, and major exchanges now run zk-SNARK systems atop their Merkle trees. This is the current state of the art on the liabilities side: a privacy-preserving, tamper-evident proof that the total owed is honest and complete.

The limitations every user must understand

Even the most sophisticated proof of reserves has serious limitations, and understanding them is what separates an informed user from someone soothed by a checkmark. The first and most damning is the snapshot problem. Proof of reserves captures a single moment in time. An exchange short on assets could borrow funds, perhaps from another exchange or a lender, hold them just long enough to pass the snapshot, prove healthy reserves, and return the borrowed money the next day. The proof would be technically accurate and completely misleading, because the assets were never really there outside the photographed instant. Frequent or continuous proofs reduce this risk but do not eliminate it, and many exchanges publish only periodically.

The second limitation is that proving assets does not prove they are unencumbered. An exchange can genuinely hold the coins it shows while having secretly borrowed them, pledged them as collateral, or owing them to a third party. The blockchain shows the coins sitting in the wallet; it does not show the hidden loan agreement that means those coins are not really free to cover customer withdrawals. The third limitation is the liabilities honesty problem already noted: a proof of assets with no rigorous, independently verified proof of liabilities is not a solvency proof at all, and many advertised implementations stop at assets. 

Fourth, off-chain assets and obligations sit entirely outside the blockchain’s view, so an exchange holding fiat currency, real-world assets, or off-chain debts cannot have those captured by an on-chain proof. The honest summary is that proof of reserves can show an exchange has assets at a moment, but it struggles to prove those assets are sufficient, unencumbered, continuously present, and matched against an honest accounting of everything owed. It is a meaningful check, not a guarantee.

Why auditors and skeptics both have a point

Because the cryptography alone cannot close every gap, third-party auditors have become central to credible proof of reserves, and their role is both valuable and contested. An independent auditor or specialized verification firm can examine an exchange’s wallets, confirm control of the assets, review the liability construction, and attest that, at the time examined, assets exceeded liabilities by some margin. Several firms now perform this work, publishing reserve ratios for exchanges that show assets comfortably above liabilities, figures above one hundred percent meaning the exchange holds more than it owes. Some exchanges go further, combining independent accountant reviews with user verifiable identifiers so individuals can confirm their own inclusion. This blend of cryptographic proof and human attestation is currently the strongest form of assurance an exchange can offer short of full, traditional financial audits.

Yet skeptics raise a point worth taking seriously, and it is best captured by the prominent executive who refused to publish proof of reserves for his own company’s holdings, calling it a bad idea. His argument was not that hiding assets is good, but that proof of reserves as commonly practiced can mislead: it can create a false sense of security by proving assets while saying little verifiable about liabilities, off-chain obligations, or whether the assets are encumbered, and a sophisticated bad actor can satisfy the letter of a proof while remaining insolvent in substance. The skeptics and the auditors are, in a sense, both right. Proof of reserves done well, with honest liabilities, independent attestation, and frequent snapshots, is a real improvement over the pre-FTX world of pure blind trust. Proof of reserves done poorly, as a one-time assets-only graphic, can be worse than nothing if it lulls users into a confidence the proof does not actually earn. The technique is a tool, and like any tool it can be wielded honestly or as theater.

A cautionary tale that proves the point

The limitations are not hypothetical, and a fresh example shows exactly how a proof-of-reserves regime can fail in practice. In early 2026, an investigation by an on-chain forensics firm revealed that a European exchange’s main Bitcoin holding wallet had collapsed from around fifty-six Bitcoin to a fraction of a single coin, a drop of more than ninety-nine percent, even as the platform continued to assure users it was solvent. 

Tens of thousands of customers were potentially affected, and observers described it as one of the most significant European exchange failures since FTX itself. The episode landed as a direct reminder that an exchange claiming solvency, and even one gesturing at reserves, can be hollow underneath, and that the gap between a public claim and verifiable on-chain reality is exactly where users lose money.

The lesson is not that proof of reserves is useless; it is that the quality and continuity of verification are everything. Had that exchange’s reserves been continuously proven, independently audited, and matched against honestly constructed liabilities, the draining of its main wallet would have been visible to anyone watching, and users could have withdrawn before the collapse rather than after. Instead, the assurance was a claim rather than a living, verifiable proof, and the on-chain reality diverged catastrophically from the story being told. 

This is the practical case for treating proof of reserves as a process to scrutinize instead of a badge to trust. A meaningful proof is recent, frequent, independently attested, and covers both halves of the solvency equation. A claim of solvency with none of that behind it is precisely the kind of reassurance that history keeps showing to be worthless at the worst possible moment.

Proof of reserves versus a real audit

A point of confusion worth clearing up is the difference between proof of reserves and a traditional financial audit, because exchanges sometimes blur the two and they are not the same thing. A full audit, of the kind applied to a public company, examines far more than whether assets exceed liabilities at a moment. It scrutinizes the quality and ownership of those assets, whether they are encumbered or pledged, the accuracy of the books over a period instead of a snapshot, the internal controls that govern how money moves, the company’s other obligations and debts, and the truthfulness of management’s representations, all signed off by an accountable auditing firm that stakes its reputation and faces legal consequences for getting it wrong. 

Proof of reserves, even in its strongest cryptographic form, does much less: it shows on-chain assets and, ideally, customer liabilities at a point in time, but it does not examine the off-chain business, the encumbrances, the controls, or the conduct of management.

This gap matters because the marketing around proof of reserves can imply a level of assurance closer to a full audit than the technique actually provides. An exchange can truthfully say it published a proof of reserves while its off-chain finances, its corporate debts, its commingling of funds, or its risky lending remain entirely unexamined. The early scramble after the FTX collapse made this gap vivid: some auditing firms that had begun providing proof-of-reserves attestations stepped back from the work, wary of the reputational risk of appearing to vouch for an exchange’s overall solvency when their procedures covered only a narrow, point-in-time slice. 

The lesson is not that proof of reserves is dishonest, but that it occupies a specific and limited place. It is a cryptographic check on a particular question, do the on-chain assets cover the customer liabilities right now, and it is truly useful for that. It is not a substitute for the comprehensive, ongoing, accountable scrutiny that a real audit provides, and an exchange that has only published a proof of reserves has not been audited in the full sense, however much the language might suggest otherwise.

The practical upshot is to hold two ideas at once. Proof of reserves is a meaningful advance over the pre-FTX world, in which users had nothing but blind faith, and a strong, frequent, independently attested, two-sided proof truly lowers the risk of a hidden insolvency. At the same time, it is a narrow instrument that cannot see the off-chain obligations, the encumbrances, or the management conduct that have featured in many exchange failures. 

The most informed users treat a credible proof of reserves as one positive signal among several, alongside an exchange’s regulatory standing, its track record, its transparency, and the protections of the jurisdiction it operates in, instead of as a complete verdict on safety. Combining the cryptographic check with these other signals, and keeping meaningful holdings in self-custody, is the realistic way to manage exchange risk, because no single proof, however clever, captures everything that can go wrong.

How to read an exchange’s proof of reserves

Putting it together, here is how to evaluate any exchange’s proof of reserves instead of taking the headline at face value. First, check whether it proves liabilities, not just assets. A page showing only wallet balances is proof of assets, and on its own it tells you nothing about solvency, because you cannot see what the exchange owes. Look for a Merkle-tree liability commitment, ideally strengthened by a zero-knowledge proof, and the ability to verify your own balance’s inclusion. Second, check for independent attestation. 

A reserve ratio confirmed by a reputable third party carries far more weight than a self-published graphic, because it means someone with professional accountability examined the wallets and the liability construction instead of the exchange grading its own homework.

Third, check recency and frequency. A proof from many months ago tells you little about today, and a single annual snapshot is easy to game with borrowed funds; frequent or continuous proofs are far harder to fake. Fourth, keep the structural limitations in mind even when all of the above is present: a proof cannot easily show that assets are unencumbered, cannot capture off-chain obligations, and cannot guarantee the assets stay there after the snapshot. The most important practical takeaway sits above all the cryptography. 

Proof of reserves reduces the trust you must place in an exchange, but it does not eliminate it, and the only way to remove custody risk entirely is to hold your own keys in self-custody, where no exchange stands between you and your coins. For assets you do keep on an exchange, favor platforms with frequent, independently audited, two-sided proofs, treat assets-only graphics with skepticism, and remember the lesson FTX taught at great cost: an exchange will keep telling you everything is fine right up until it is not, so verification, not reassurance, is what protects you.

Frequently Asked Questions

This article is educational information, not financial or investment advice. Exchange practices, reserve ratios, and verification methods change, and figures reflect reporting available as of June 25, 2026. Always confirm an exchange’s current proof-of-reserves details from primary sources, and remember that self-custody is the only way to fully remove exchange custody risk.

• CertiK joins XDC Network as institutional masternode validator.
• Partnership strengthens security, resilience and decentralization.
• SkyNode infrastructure delivers 24/7 protection and monitoring.

CertiK has joined the XDC Network as an Institutional Masternode Validator, marking a new step in the network’s push to build trusted blockchain infrastructure for enterprise finance, trade finance, and real-world asset tokenization.

The New York-headquartered Web3 security services provider has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with XDC Network under which it will deploy and operate validator nodes on the blockchain.

The partnership will use CertiK’s enterprise node solution, CertiK SkyNode, to strengthen XDC Network’s security, resilience, and decentralization.

The move comes as digital assets and traditional finance continue to converge, with institutions increasingly looking for blockchain networks that can support secure settlement, asset tokenization, and operational resilience at scale.

CertiK to operate validator nodes on XDC Network

Under the agreement, CertiK will participate as an Institutional Masternode Validator on the XDC Network, an open-source, EVM-compatible Layer-1 blockchain built for payments, trade finance, and real-world assets.

XDC Network’s hybrid architecture combines public transparency with private subnetwork capabilities.

The network is designed to support institutional settlement and RWA tokenization, while offering high throughput, low fees, and enterprise-grade security.

By joining as a validator, CertiK will embed security controls into the infrastructure layer of the network.

The companies said this is aimed at reducing operational and network-related risks as enterprise blockchain adoption gathers pace.

“CertiK is one of the most recognized names in blockchain security, and having them validate our network is a meaningful signal to institutions,” said Atul Khekade, Co-founder, XDC Network.

This is not just a technical partnership. It is a statement about the standard of infrastructure we are building for enterprise finance. The institutions moving into trade finance and asset settlement are making long-term infrastructure decisions, and we want XDC Network to be the answer they keep coming back to.

Security focus targets institutional adoption

CertiK will use its SkyNode infrastructure to provide 24/7 proactive defences for XDC Network.

These include continuous vulnerability scanning, automated threat mitigation, and node-level penetration testing.

The infrastructure will also use a multi-region sentry node architecture with redundant failover protection.

According to the companies, this setup is designed to maintain consensus continuity and support high availability during periods of peak network congestion.

For institutions evaluating blockchain rails for trade finance and asset settlement, operational resilience remains a central requirement.

The collaboration is positioned around that need, with CertiK bringing its security and infrastructure expertise to XDC Network’s validator ecosystem.

“CertiK is honored to join the XDC Network as an Institutional Masternode Validator,” said Ronghui Gu, Co-Founder and CEO of CertiK.

Traditional trade finance and RWA tokenization require rigorous risk management, strong security foundations, and operational resilience. Through this collaboration, we are bringing our security and infrastructure expertise to help strengthen the network and support the trusted infrastructure needed for institutional adoption.

XDC expands validator ecosystem for enterprise finance

The partnership adds CertiK to a wider group of institutional validators already supporting XDC Network.

These include regulated financial institutions, global telecoms companies, and Web3 digital asset firms.

XDC Network’s existing institutional validators include Animoca Brands, BCW Group, Blueprint, Clearpool, Credora, Deutsche Telekom, HashKeyCloud, Hivemind Digital Group, InvestaX, IXS, RedStone, Republic Crypto, SBI Holdings, StakeFi, and UOB Venture Management.

The collaboration will focus on supporting trusted infrastructure for trade finance, asset tokenization, and institutional digital asset ecosystems.

Both organizations said they aim to support the secure adoption of blockchain technologies across these areas.

American Bitcoin Corp has approved a 1-for-15 reverse stock split after shareholders backed the proposal at the company’s 2026 annual meeting.

According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, shareholders of American Bitcoin Corp voted on several corporate matters during the annual meeting, after which the company’s board authorized a one-for-15 reverse stock split. The company said the change will take effect as soon as practicable.

The SEC filing states that the reverse split will reduce the number of outstanding shares while leaving the total number of authorized shares unchanged. Reverse stock splits are commonly used by listed companies to increase their per-share trading price without changing the overall value of shareholders’ holdings.

American Bitcoin has expanded its Bitcoin treasury

Alongside the reverse split, shareholders elected Asher Genoot as a Class I director for a three-year term that will expire in 2029, according to the SEC filing. Investors also approved the reappointment of KPMG LLP as American Bitcoin’s independent registered public accounting firm.

American Bitcoin, the Bitcoin mining and treasury company backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., has accumulated more than 7,500 Bitcoin since its launch. The company currently ranks 16th among publicly traded corporate Bitcoin holders based on available treasury data, while Eric Trump continues to play a prominent role in the business.

The corporate update arrives one day after crypto.news reported that Democratic senators urged Senate Republican leaders to hold hearings into a reported $500 million investment in World Liberty Financial by an Abu Dhabi-backed entity.

According to the lawmakers’ letter, they want Trump administration officials to testify under oath about whether the investment affected later policy decisions involving the United Arab Emirates.

As previously reported by crypto.news, the senators cited a Wall Street Journal report stating that Aryam Investment 1, an Abu Dhabi-based company backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, acquired a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial under an agreement signed in January 2025. The lawmakers also pointed to subsequent approvals for major arms sales and access to advanced AI chips for the UAE as developments warranting congressional scrutiny.

ABTC stocks remains under pressure despite the corporate action

American Bitcoin’s filing also disclosed that several directors received Class A common shares after restricted stock units vested on the annual meeting date. Justin Mateen received 254,778 shares, Richard Busch was issued 254,778 shares, and Michael Broukhim received 270,701 shares through one-for-one conversions of vested RSUs.

ABTC shares closed Wednesday’s session down 4.17% at $0.74 after trading between an intraday high of $0.78 and a low of $0.73. The stock has fallen roughly 17% over the past week and remains down about 60% year-to-date, according to Google Finance data.

Early Thursday trading extended the weakness, with ABTC falling another 3.15% to around $0.72 after touching an intraday high of $0.75 and a low of $0.68. Meanwhile, Bitcoin traded around $59,360, down 2.6% over the past 24 hours after slipping below the $60,000 mark, as investors continued to digest the latest U.S. Personal Consumption Expenditures inflation data.

Stablecoin issuer Circle and Japan’s largest investment bank Nomura have reportedly partnered to enable instant foreign exchange settlement for Japanese companies as early as 2027.

The service would enable companies to convert yen into dollar-denominated stablecoins for cross-border transactions and instant settlement, reducing delays caused by banking hours and time zone differences, Nikkei reported on Thursday.

The partnership would bring one of the world’s largest dollar stablecoins into Japan’s corporate foreign exchange market, expanding the use of stablecoins for business-to-business cross-border settlement.

Circle is the issuer of the world’s second-largest stablecoin, USDC (USDC), which has a market capitalization of $73.8 billion, CoinMarketCap data shows.

Cointelegraph has reached out to Circle and Nomura but had not received a response by press time.

Stablecoin initiatives in Japan have been accelerating as financial institutions explore regulated blockchain-based settlement. On Wednesday, SBI Holdings and Startale Group announced JPYSC, a trust bank-backed yen stablecoin designed for institutional and cross-border settlement, while Ripple USD (RLUSD), the world’s 10th-largest dollar stablecoin by market capitalization, officially launched in Japan.

Source: Ripple

Related: SBI eyes Bitbank deal as Japan’s crypto exchange market consolidates

Japan moves closer to crypto ETFs, lower tax on digital assets

Japan has been one of the first major economies to establish a legal framework for stablecoins, allowing banks, trust companies and licensed money transfer providers to issue regulated tokens under the Payment Services Act.

The Payment Services Act also currently governs cryptocurrencies in Japan, but regulators have been moving to shift digital assets under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, which would bring them closer to the regulatory treatment of traditional financial products.

Earlier in June, Japan’s Lower House passed a bill that would bring crypto assets under the country’s financial instruments framework, potentially opening a path to exchange-traded funds, lower tax treatment, tighter exchange oversight, disclosure requirements and insider trading restrictions.

The proposed changes would also lower the capital gains tax on crypto assets from the current 55% to a 20% flat rate.

Magazine: Vietnam preps crypto pilot, HK pushes tokenization: Asia Express

MiCA is the European Union’s first comprehensive rulebook for crypto, and on July 1, 2026, its transition period ends for good. This guide explains what MiCA does, why USDT got delisted while USDC did not, and what the hard deadline means for exchanges and users.

MiCA, short for Markets in Crypto-Assets, is the European Union’s first comprehensive law governing crypto-assets and the companies that deal in them, creating one common rulebook across all twenty-seven member states in place of the patchwork of national approaches that came before. Formally known as Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, it entered into force in mid-2023 and has rolled out in phases ever since, and it now sits at a decisive moment: on July 1, 2026, the transition period that let existing crypto firms keep operating under old national rules expires for good, and Europe’s market supervisor has been blunt that there will be no extensions. 

After that date, any company offering crypto services to European Union clients without a proper MiCA license is simply breaking the law. This guide explains what MiCA is, the categories it creates, why some stablecoins survived in Europe while others were delisted, what a crypto company must do to comply, and what the hard 2026 deadline means for exchanges and ordinary users alike.

The significance of MiCA is hard to overstate, because the European Union is one of the largest economic blocs on earth and MiCA is the most ambitious attempt yet to bring crypto fully inside a traditional financial-regulation framework. Before MiCA, a crypto exchange or token issuer operating in Europe faced a confusing mix of national rules, with one regime in Germany, another in France, another in Malta, and gaps everywhere in between. 

MiCA replaces that fragmentation with a single, harmonized system: get authorized once, and you can passport your services across the entire bloc. The trade-off is that the bar to get authorized is high, the obligations are heavy, and the deadline to clear them is now days away rather than years off. The result is a market being reshaped in real time, with a small number of licensed winners, a large number of firms facing exit, and a stablecoin landscape that already looks very different inside Europe than outside it.

What MiCA actually regulates

MiCA divides the crypto world into categories and applies different rules to each, so the first step in understanding it is learning what those categories are. At the top level, MiCA governs two kinds of actors: the issuers of crypto-assets and the providers of crypto-asset services. For issuers, MiCA sorts tokens into three buckets.

The first is electronic money tokens, or EMTs, which are stablecoins pegged to a single official currency, such as a euro-pegged or dollar-pegged coin. The second is asset-referenced tokens, or ARTs, which are stablecoins backed by a basket of things, multiple currencies, commodities, or other assets, rather than a single currency. The third is a catch-all category of other crypto-assets, which covers utility tokens, governance tokens, and unbacked cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether, the assets most exchanges handle every day.

Each bucket carries different obligations. The two stablecoin categories face the strictest treatment, because regulators view stablecoins as the part of crypto most capable of threatening the wider financial system, a concern sharpened by the 2022 collapse of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin that wiped out tens of billions of dollars. EMT and ART issuers must hold proper reserves, grant holders redemption rights, and meet governance and disclosure standards. 

The other crypto-assets face lighter rules, mainly requirements to publish an honest whitepaper before offering a token to the public and to avoid market abuse. Notably, MiCA largely excludes non-fungible tokens, unless they are issued in a large fungible series that makes them function more like ordinary tokens, and it excludes assets already covered by existing financial law, such as securities. The category a token falls into determines almost everything about how MiCA treats it, which is why getting the classification right is the starting point for any issuer.

The stablecoin rules and why USDT got delisted

The most visible effect of MiCA so far has been on stablecoins, and the clearest way to understand the rules is through what happened to the two largest dollar stablecoins. Under MiCA, a stablecoin can only be offered by European Union-regulated platforms if its issuer is authorized, which for a single-currency stablecoin means holding an e-money or credit institution license and meeting MiCA’s reserve, redemption, and governance requirements. 

The reserve rules are strict: an EMT must back its tokens fully, holding one hundred percent of reserves in safe, segregated accounts, while an ART must keep at least a substantial portion segregated at regulated credit institutions. MiCA also bars stablecoin issuers from paying interest or yield to holders, a deliberate choice to stop stablecoins from competing with bank deposits and drawing money out of the banking system.

This is where the two giants diverged. Circle, the issuer of USDC, pursued authorization through a European subsidiary and obtained MiCA approval for USDC and its euro stablecoin EURC, making them compliant and freely offered across European Union exchanges. Tether, the issuer of USDT, the largest stablecoin in the world, did not apply for MiCA authorization and confirmed its token was not compliant. The consequence was swift: major European Union-regulated exchanges, including the regional arms of the largest global platforms, delisted USDT and other non-compliant stablecoins for their European users. 

The nuance worth understanding is that USDT is not banned from existence in Europe; users can still hold it in self-custody and trade it on decentralized exchanges. What changed is that a MiCA-licensed exchange can no longer offer it, which fragments liquidity and pushes European users toward compliant alternatives like USDC. Every stablecoin authorized under MiCA so far has been an EMT, a single-currency token, and USDC’s compliance versus USDT’s non-compliance has become the textbook illustration of the rules in action.

CASPs: the rules for exchanges and service providers

Beyond token issuers, MiCA’s other major target is the companies that provide crypto services, which the regulation calls crypto-asset service providers, or CASPs. This category is broad: it covers exchanges, brokers, custodians, wallet providers that hold customer assets, trading platforms, and firms that advise on or place crypto-assets. 

If your business touches customer crypto in almost any commercial way, you likely need a CASP authorization to keep serving European Union clients. The obligations that come with that authorization are extensive and closely mirror those imposed on traditional financial firms, which is the entire point: MiCA aims to make crypto service providers behave like regulated financial institutions rather than lightly governed startups.

A CASP must meet requirements covering customer identity verification and anti-money-laundering controls, the safekeeping and segregation of customer assets, governance and capital standards, market-conduct rules that prohibit insider trading and market manipulation, and clear disclosure of risks to customers. Authorized CASPs also become subject to the European Union’s operational-resilience framework, which mandates cybersecurity and incident-reporting standards, and to the crypto travel rule, which requires them to pass along sender and recipient information on transfers, the same obligation that has applied to bank wires for decades. 

The reward for shouldering all of this is passporting: once a firm is authorized in any one member state, it can offer its services across all twenty-seven without seeking separate licenses in each, turning a fragmented continent into a single market. The burden is that running these programs at scale, across a global customer base, is expensive and demanding, which is exactly why so many firms are struggling to clear the bar before the deadline.

The July 2026 deadline and the great narrowing

Everything about MiCA now points toward a single date, and understanding the phased rollout explains why that date matters so much. MiCA did not arrive all at once. The stablecoin rules for EMTs and ARTs took effect in mid-2024. The full CASP authorization regime took effect at the end of 2024, the point from which firms needed a MiCA license to operate. 

But MiCA included a grandfathering provision, a transition period that let firms already operating legally under their national rules continue doing so while they applied for full MiCA authorization. Member states set their own transition windows within the limits MiCA allowed, ranging from short windows ending in 2025 to the full eighteen-month period ending on July 1, 2026. That final date is the bloc-wide cutoff, the moment the transition ends everywhere at once.

What makes the deadline dramatic is how few firms have actually cleared the bar. As the cutoff approached in 2026, roughly a couple of hundred firms held some form of full MiCA authorization across the entire union, but the number cleared to run an actual crypto trading platform was strikingly small, in the low double digits, with a number of member states having issued zero trading-platform licenses at all. Industry executives openly warned that a large majority of exchanges currently operating may fail to secure a license and be forced to exit the European market, and reports emerged of major global exchanges facing rejection in specific countries. 

Europe’s market supervisor reinforced the message with no room for ambiguity: no member state may extend the transition beyond July 1, 2026, and after that date, operating without authorization is a breach of European Union law, not a paperwork gap. The picture, then, is of a great narrowing, a market being compressed from a crowded field into a small set of licensed survivors, with the rest required to wind down their European operations or leave.

A worked example: what a token and an exchange each face

To make the rules concrete, it helps to walk through how MiCA treats two typical cases, a stablecoin issuer and an exchange, because the abstract categories become much clearer in motion. Imagine a company issuing a euro-pegged stablecoin and wanting European users to hold and trade it on regulated platforms. 

Under MiCA, that token is an electronic money token, so the issuer must hold an e-money or credit institution license, back every token fully with reserves held in safe, segregated accounts, grant holders the right to redeem their tokens for the underlying currency on demand, publish a compliant whitepaper, and accept that it cannot pay holders any interest or yield. If the company does all of this and secures authorization, its stablecoin can be offered across the bloc; if it does not, regulated exchanges must refuse to list it, exactly the fork in the road that separated the compliant dollar stablecoin from the non-compliant one. The token’s fate under MiCA is decided entirely by whether its issuer accepts this package of obligations.

Now imagine an exchange that wants to keep serving European customers. Its path runs through CASP authorization. It must apply to a national regulator in some member state, prove it meets MiCA’s standards for governance, capital, and the safekeeping and segregation of customer assets, stand up the identity-verification and anti-money-laundering machinery that turns it into an obliged entity under European law, implement the travel rule so it passes sender and recipient information on transfers, meet the operational-resilience and cybersecurity requirements, and submit to ongoing supervision and market-conduct rules. If the regulator grants authorization, the exchange can passport that single license across all twenty-seven member states and operate bloc-wide. 

If it cannot meet the bar or applies too late, it must stop serving European Union clients once the transition ends, winding down in an orderly way. The two journeys share a logic: MiCA offers a single, valuable prize, legal access to the entire European market, in exchange for accepting obligations modeled on those that govern banks and regulated financial firms.

What this worked example reveals is the deeper character of MiCA. It is not a light-touch registration that lets crypto firms keep operating much as before with a new label. It is a serious authorization regime that demands real reserves, real controls, real segregation of customer money, and real accountability, and it forces every issuer and service provider to decide whether the prize of European market access is worth the cost of meeting those demands. 

For well-resourced firms with a long-term commitment to Europe, the answer is often yes, and they have built the compliance machinery to clear the bar. For many smaller or offshore operators, the cost is too high or the timeline too short, which is why the market is narrowing toward a smaller set of licensed survivors. The categories and rules described earlier are not bureaucratic abstractions; they are the concrete hurdles that decide, token by token and firm by firm, who gets to operate in Europe after the transition closes.

What MiCA leaves unsettled

For all its ambition, MiCA leaves important questions open, and the gaps are as revealing as the rules. The largest unsettled area is decentralized finance. MiCA is built around identifiable issuers and service providers, the companies it can authorize and supervise, but a genuinely decentralized protocol has no company at its center, no firm to hold a license or answer to a regulator. MiCA states that fully decentralized arrangements, those provided without any intermediary, fall outside its scope, which sounds clean until you ask what “fully decentralized” actually means. 

The market supervisor has not yet defined the term precisely, and most real protocols sit somewhere in the middle, with a governance token, a development team, a foundation, or a front-end operator that a regulator might decide counts as an intermediary. The result is genuine uncertainty about which DeFi protocols MiCA captures and which it does not, a gap that will be filled by future guidance and enforcement instead of the text itself.

Other tensions are surfacing as the rules meet reality. MiCA places caps on how widely very large stablecoins denominated in non-European currencies, such as dollar stablecoins, can be used as a means of payment within the bloc, a provision aimed at protecting European monetary sovereignty but one that complicates life for a market where most trading is dollar-denominated. 

There are overlaps with other European financial laws, such as payment services rules, that can double the compliance burden for some stablecoin activities and have prompted worries about the competitiveness of euro stablecoins. And politically, the dossier has grown charged, with some member states floating the idea of a mechanism to switch off foreign stablecoins seen as a systemic threat. 

None of these unsettled questions undermines MiCA’s core achievement of creating a single framework, but they are reminders that a law this sweeping cannot anticipate everything, and that MiCA will keep evolving through guidance, enforcement, and amendment for years after the headline deadline passes.

MiCA in the global picture

MiCA does not exist in isolation, and seeing it alongside parallel efforts elsewhere reveals where global crypto regulation is heading. The same years that produced MiCA also produced the United States’ first comprehensive federal stablecoin law, the United Kingdom’s move toward its own crypto regime under its financial regulator, and Hong Kong’s stablecoin ordinance, among others. 

These frameworks differ in detail, but they converge on a striking number of core principles: stablecoin issuers should hold full, high-quality reserves; they should be licensed and supervised; holders should have clear redemption rights; service providers should enforce identity checks and anti-money-laundering controls; and the whole apparatus should be brought inside the regulatory perimeter that governs traditional finance. MiCA, having arrived early and comprehensively, has functioned as something of a reference point that later frameworks echo and respond to.

This convergence matters for anyone trying to understand the trajectory of the industry. The era in which crypto operated in a regulatory vacuum, where an exchange could serve a global audience with minimal oversight, is closing, and MiCA is one of the clearest markers of that shift. The picture that emerges is of a maturing market in which access increasingly depends on compliance, in which the same stablecoin can be freely available in one jurisdiction and delisted in another based purely on its issuer’s regulatory posture, and in which the cost of operating legally has risen sharply. 

For Europe specifically, MiCA’s promise is a safer, more transparent market with clear rules and a public register of authorized firms and tokens that anyone can consult. Its cost is a heavier compliance burden, a narrower field of providers, and reduced access to some popular global assets. Whether that trade favors consumers or stifles innovation is the live debate, but the direction is set: in Europe, crypto is now a regulated activity, and after July 1, 2026, that is true without exception.

What it means for everyday users

For an ordinary person using crypto in Europe, MiCA changes the landscape in concrete ways worth understanding before the deadline instead of after. The most immediate effect is on which platforms and tokens you can use. If you rely on an exchange that has not secured a MiCA license, that platform may be forced to stop serving European Union clients after July 1, 2026, which in practice can mean frozen new deposits, halted trading features, and eventually a forced withdrawal of your funds, sometimes during a period of low liquidity and high fees. The protective move is to check, today instead of on July 2, whether the platforms you use have secured or are clearly on track to secure authorization, and to favor those that have. An unauthorized service operating after the deadline offers reduced legal protection and potential restrictions on access to your own assets.

The second effect is on stablecoins. If you hold a non-compliant stablecoin on a European Union-regulated exchange, you may find it delisted, with trading pairs removed and liquidity drying up, which is why many European users have shifted toward MiCA-authorized options. You can still self-custody whatever you like, but the convenient on-ramps and trading pairs increasingly favor compliant tokens. The broader takeaway is that MiCA, for all its complexity, ultimately aims to make the European crypto market safer and more transparent for users by ensuring the exchanges they trust meet real standards and the stablecoins they hold are genuinely backed. The cost of that safety is fewer choices and more friction, and a transition period that, for some platforms and tokens, ends abruptly. 

The practical wisdom is simple: understand which of your platforms and assets are compliant, make any moves before the deadline instead of during the disruption, and treat MiCA authorization as a meaningful signal that a service has accepted real regulatory accountability.

Frequently Asked Questions

This article is educational information, not legal or financial advice. MiCA implementation, license counts, stablecoin compliance status, and deadlines can change, and details reflect reporting available as of June 25, 2026. Confirm current requirements and the status of specific platforms and tokens through official sources such as the European Securities and Markets Authority register before relying on anything described here.

• GoMining mines first Stratum V2 Bitcoin block with DMND pool.
• Stratum V2 enables miners to choose block transactions directly.
• New system shifts power from pools to miners in Bitcoin mining.

GoMining has mined the first known Bitcoin block produced using the Stratum V2 protocol with the DMND Bitcoin mining pool.

The process demonstrates miner-controlled block creation in a live mining environment.

The block was created using Stratum V2’s Job Declaration functionality through the DMND pool.

The approach allowed GoMining to construct and declare its own block template rather than relying on a mining pool to select transactions.

Pool-controlled transaction selection has been the dominant model in Bitcoin mining for years.

The milestone marks an early real-world implementation of Stratum V2’s miner-driven architecture and highlights a shift toward giving miners greater authority over how blocks are constructed while remaining part of pooled mining operations.

Miner-controlled block construction demonstrated in production

The block included transactions linked to GoMining’s GoBTC Pay, an open-source Bitcoin instant payments protocol developed by the company.

By incorporating GoBTC Pay transactions into the block template it created, GoMining demonstrated a practical use case for Stratum V2’s Job Declaration feature and showed how miners can directly influence the contents of blocks they help produce.

“This block demonstrates that miners can now participate in pooled mining while retaining control over block construction,” said Mark Zalan, CEO at GoMining. “For years, mining pools have largely determined which transactions are included in Bitcoin blocks. By creating our own block template and including GoBTC Pay transactions, we’re demonstrating one of the practical capabilities that Stratum V2 makes possible.”

The successful mining of the block provides an example of how miners may be able to gain more autonomy while continuing to benefit from the shared resources and economics of mining pools.

Stratum V2 aims to expand miner participation and flexibility

Stratum V2 is an open-source mining protocol developed with contributions from multiple participants across the Bitcoin industry.

In addition to improvements in security and efficiency, the protocol enables miners to create their own block templates while still participating in pooled mining.

The latest development demonstrates that miner-controlled block construction can operate in a production environment, potentially supporting broader adoption of Stratum V2 across the mining ecosystem.

The deployment also illustrates how the protocol may allow miners to integrate their own applications and services directly into the block creation process.

“A miner just mined the first Stratum V2 block to power their own product end to end. GoMining declared the template and included their GoBTC Pay payments with no pool in the way. We built DMND for exactly this.” said Alejandro De La Torre, CEO & Co-founder at DMND.

The milestone comes as the bitcoin mining industry continues to explore technologies that improve efficiency, security and decentralization.

By demonstrating that miners can build and declare their own block templates while remaining part of a mining pool, GoMining and DMND have provided an early example of how Stratum V2’s architecture could reshape block creation and transaction selection within the broader Bitcoin mining ecosystem.