Nasdaq-listed crypto treasury firm Solana Company signed an agreement to support the development of Alatau City, Kazakhstan’s planned digital-first megacity.

The company signed a memorandum of understanding to advise and help build Alatau City’s blockchain and crypto infrastructure during the Alatau City Roadshow in Shenzhen and Hong Kong in June, which reportedly secured 30 cooperation agreements with a combined investment potential of over $6 billion.

“We look forward to deepening this partnership and expanding the Solana ecosystem’s footprint across the region,” said Solana Company chair and CEO Joseph Chee.

The deal further pushes Kazakhstan into Solana’s corner. Last year, Kazakhstan launched Central Asia’s first Solana Economic Zone in the country’s capital of Astana with the Solana Foundation.

The Kazakhstan Stock Exchange (KASE) launched its first Solana ETF last week, giving investors regulated exposure to Solana (SOL) through one of the biggest stock exchanges in Central Asia. 

The Solana Foundation also signed a memorandum of understanding with Alatau City to develop its blockchain capabilities during the China roadshow. 

Solana Co.’s work in Alatau City 

The collaboration between Solana Company and Alatau City will cover four areas: digital asset treasury, blockchain infrastructure, accelerating the institutional adoption of blockchain and platform development. 

Alisher Abdykadyrov, CEO of the Alatau City Authority, said the MOU will also see Solana Company participate in the development of the Alatau Crypto Cluster, a dedicated pilot zone and special economic area in the upcoming city where crypto will be permitted for everyday transactions. 

Alatau City’s ambitious plans for megacity

The Alatau City megaproject was first unveiled to an international audience by Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in May 2024. The city is still primarily in early development and planning stages. 

The village of Zhetygen, pictured in March 2023, before it was designated a city and renamed to Alatau. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Planners envision it as a fully integrated smart city with low-altitude aircraft, robotaxis and autonomous drones handling urban transportation and deliveries, with hydrogen energy powering its economy. 

During the Solana Summit Kazakhstan 2026, Arman Tastanbekov, deputy CEO of the Alatau City Authority, said that Alatau City would be built with artificial intelligence, digital identity and blockchain technology from the beginning. 

It hasn’t come without its challengers, however, with Kazakhstan’s National Bank and Financial Monitoring Agency reportedly expressing concerns about the constitutional changes required to support a crypto-based economy, The Diplomat reported in March. 

Other independent news reports suggest that the current residents of Alatau City are still dealing with a lack of gas, water, electricity and internet connectivity, suggesting the futuristic city is still far from reality. 

Cointelegraph reached out to Alatau City for comment.

Magazine: Bitcoin slides to $58K, XRP hits $1 but onchain data promising: Market Moves

Investment firm Spiko has integrated Coinbase’s stablecoin payment infrastructure into two regulated EU Treasury-bill funds, allowing eligible investors to fund subscriptions and receive redemption proceeds using USDC and EURC. 

Coinbase said Tuesday the integration covers Spiko’s EU T-Bills Money Market Fund and US T-Bills Money Market Fund. Both are structured as Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities, or UCITS. Coinbase Payments will provide the payment, wallet and application programming interface (API) infrastructure, with the transactions settling on Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 network. 

The exchange said the products are the first UCITS funds in Europe to accept direct stablecoin payments.

The move into UCITS funds comes as net sales of the assets rebounded in April, the latest data from trade group EFAMA showed on Monday. UCITS saw net inflows of 104 billion euros that month, compared to net outflows of 41 billion euros in March. Net sales reached a new record in 2025, totaling 828 billion euros and surpassing the previous 2021 high of 813 billion euros.

Tokenized funds push toward 24/7 utility

Coinbase described the integration as an example of how stablecoins could reshape payments infrastructure for mutual funds by removing bottlenecks for investors as they enter and exit a product.  It positions stablecoins as settlement infrastructure, connecting onchain capital with regulated investment funds. 

Investors can submit subscriptions at any time, including weekends and holidays. At the same time, redemption proceeds can be delivered to a stablecoin wallet within minutes after a position is liquidated. 

Despite this, round-the-clock stablecoin transfers do not necessarily mean that the underlying fund continuously processes subscriptions and redemptions. Spiko said the Coinbase integration introduces a new payment method rather than changing the funds themselves.

Cointelegraph reached out to Coinbase for more information on order execution, but did not receive a response before publication. 

Related: Coinbase, Kraken and OKX move to swoop up EU users affected by MiCA restrictions

Other asset managers have tested ways to provide 24/7 access to tokenized funds. In February, WisdomTree received approval for round-the-clock secondary trading and instant USDC settlement of its tokenized Treasury fund, with liquidity supplied by its broker-dealer while primary fund processes remained unchanged. 

Tokenized money market funds are also increasingly being used as infrastructure beyond subscriptions and redemptions. In February, Franklin Templeton and Binance introduced a program allowing institutions to pledge tokenized fund shares as off-exchange trading collateral while the assets remain in regulated custody

Magazine: China’s 107 Bitcoin memory thief, Bithumb CEO booked: Asia Express

Taiwan has passed its Virtual Asset Service Act, giving crypto exchanges and stablecoin issuers a clear licensing path after years of legal uncertainty.

Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan passed the Virtual Asset Service Act in its third reading on June 30, sending the bill to President Lai Ching-te for the next step. The Financial Supervisory Commission said the law moves Taiwan’s crypto oversight from anti-money laundering registration to wider supervision of operations, market order and customer protection.

The act creates rules for seven types of virtual asset service providers, including exchanges, trading platforms, transfer firms, custodians, underwriters and lending service providers. The law covers internal controls, cybersecurity, asset listing reviews, customer asset segregation, outsourcing, civil liability and financial reporting, according to the FSC statement.

Taiwan sets new licensing rules for crypto firms

Under the new law, crypto businesses must obtain approval from the FSC before operating. Existing firms that already completed anti-money laundering registration before the law takes effect will have 12 months to apply for approval and 21 months to obtain the required license, according to the FSC.

• Selling pressure broke support near $1.0350 during the June 30 session before XRP tested $1.0249 and stabilized.

• Buyers stepped in near the lows, with volume rising to 92.73 million XRP at 01:00 UTC, about 134% above the 24-hour average.

• A late rebound pushed XRP from $1.024 to $1.038, with volume spiking to 3.88 million during the break above $1.032 resistance.

Technical Analysis

• The key development is that XRP continues to defend the $1.00 area even as sentiment across crypto remains weak.

• The leverage reset improves the short-term setup. Open interest has collapsed, funding rates have turned negative and forced liquidations have cleared out crowded long positions.

• The bounce from $1.02 showed buyers are still active near support, but the move has not yet reclaimed the levels needed to shift momentum higher.

• XRP remains below major moving averages, with the 20-day EMA near $1.11, the 50-day near $1.20, the 100-day near $1.31 and the 200-day near $1.52.

• The 14-day RSI has recovered to about 33, showing selling pressure has eased, but momentum remains weak and below neutral levels.

• Bollinger Bands have narrowed after June’s selloff, pointing to lower volatility, but XRP still needs to reclaim the middle band near $1.12 to show a stronger recovery.

Zero-knowledge scaling company StarkWare has released a quantum-resistant roadmap for Starknet, arguing that other chains will remain exposed if the industry is “too stubborn or stupid” to act.

In an announcement on Tuesday, Starknet framed its three-phased quantum-resistant roadmap as evidence that the crypto industry has no excuse for remaining vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks. 

“The tried-and-tested cryptography exists to secure every crypto key in the world, if necessary changes are made, and the only reason anyone will remain vulnerable is if heads remain buried in the sand,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO at StarkWare. 

Efforts to quantum-proof blockchains are accelerating as some researchers warn that quantum computing could outpace blockchain’s defenses and cryptographically relevant quantum machines could be ready before 2030. 

The Bitcoin community remains divided on how to approach securing old coins against the quantum threat, while other networks are forging ahead with quantum roadmaps. 

Ben-Sasson said Starknet can become resistant to quantum attacks by “seizing on its architecture advantage,” pointing to its zero-knowledge STARK (Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge) proofs, which are “inherently post-quantum safe.”

“There’s an awful irony in the notion that a young industry born from rejecting the way things have always been done is stalling and procrastinating about making changes for quantum security.”

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Ben-Sasson said that “we are currently in a position where the necessary cryptographic tools to secure our future actually exist.”

We aren’t waiting for a miracle invention; we have the solutions. It is legitimate for people to hesitate before taking on the human coordination required. That concern is real and valid. But the issue is that if we don’t address this, we will have missed the chance.

Related: Trump signs orders for quantum computer, cryptography upgrades

He added that crypto has an “elliptical illusion,” distorting reality around elliptic-curve cryptography, the current standard for securing blockchains. 

Believing that this will be quantum resistant is “false confidence” that is leaving the industry “dangerously complacent,” he said. 

“The migration paths we’re discussing are objectively difficult,” he said. “There are hard technical trade-offs, complex governance decisions, and a massive amount of human coordination involved. The changes needed are definitely not trivial, and I fully acknowledge the scale of the task ahead.”

“The crypto industry shouldn’t need wake-up calls from the White House or anyone else. We should all be acting and seizing on the best cryptography that exists.”

Starknet’s three-phase roadmap 

The first phase involves swapping out some of its current security math (Pedersen hashing) for quantum-resistant versions and adding quantum-resistant signatures. 

Phase two focuses on migration tooling that quietly upgrades existing smart contracts to the new quantum-safe standard, without forcing developers to manually rebuild apps. 

Phase three covers dependencies that Starknet cannot resolve alone, which largely depend on Ethereum’s quantum upgrade roadmap. 

Circle, Ethereum, Solana, Tezos and Algorand have all proposed quantum-proof roadmaps, while the Bitcoin community remains at loggerheads. 

Magazine: Bitcoin slides to $58K, XRP hits $1 but onchain data promising: Market Moves

Taiwan has taken a major step forward in overseeing its digital asset sector by enacting comprehensive new regulations for cryptocurrency operations.

On Tuesday, lawmakers in the Legislative Yuan approved the Virtual Asset Service Act during its third reading, forwarding it to President Lai Ching-te for formal signing, which is anticipated within the next ten days.

Once signed, the Executive Yuan will set the official start date for the rules.

The legislation requires all virtual asset service providers, including cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms, to secure explicit licensing from the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) before they can legally operate in the country.

It also brings in tougher standards around cybersecurity protections, keeping customer funds separate from company assets, and strengthening internal governance and risk management.

Platforms that are already registered for anti-money laundering compliance will receive a 12-month grace period to submit license applications and up to 21 months in total to obtain full FSC approval and any other required permits. Until now, crypto businesses operating in Taiwan only needed to register for anti-money laundering compliance.

A community takeover, or CTO, is when the holders of an abandoned token band together and run it themselves after the original developer walks away. It is one of the defining rituals of Solana memecoin culture. Here is how a CTO works, why most fail, and what separates the rare survivor from the rest.

A community takeover, almost always shortened to CTO, is what happens when the people who hold a token decide to take over and run the project themselves after its original developers abandon it, walk away, or lose the community’s trust. It is one of the most distinctive rituals of memecoin culture, particularly on Solana, where the fast, cheap, fully liquid nature of token launches makes both abandonment and revival routine events. In a typical CTO, the founding developer of a memecoin disappears, sells their holdings, or is exposed as untrustworthy, and the token, which would normally just collapse to nothing, instead gets a second life when a group of remaining holders bands together to keep it alive. 

They take over the project’s social media accounts, organize themselves in group chats, raise money for marketing, and try to generate fresh momentum around a token that technically has no team behind it anymore. The contract on the blockchain stays the same; what changes is who is steering the narrative and the community around it. The holders, in effect, seize the wheel of a car the driver has jumped out of.

Understanding the CTO is essential to understanding how the memecoin trenches actually work, because abandonment and revival are not edge cases there but core features of the landscape. This guide explains what a community takeover is and why it is possible at all, the mechanics of how a CTO unfolds step by step, why these takeovers happen so often on Solana specifically, a worked example tracing a typical CTO from abandonment to revival attempt, what separates the rare CTO that succeeds from the many that fail, and an honest look at why most CTOs go to zero and how to think about the risks. 

The aim is to give you a clear and unromantic picture of a phenomenon that memecoin culture often wraps in heroic, underdog language, because the narrative of a community heroically rescuing an abandoned token is emotionally powerful and frequently used to draw in buyers, and the reality is far more sobering than the story. 

This is educational material, not investment advice, and the memecoin environment it describes is among the riskiest corners of crypto.

What a CTO is and why it is possible

Start with why a community takeover can happen at all, because the answer reveals something fundamental about how memecoins are structured. When a memecoin launches on a platform like those common on Solana, the token is created with its liquidity placed in a pool on a decentralized exchange, which means the token can be bought and sold by anyone the moment it exists, with no central party required to keep the market running. The developer who launched it does not control the trading; the market lives on-chain, in a liquidity pool that functions independently of whether the creator is still involved. 

This is the structural fact that makes a CTO possible. Even if the original developer completely abandons the project, sells everything, and deletes the social accounts, the token itself keeps existing on the blockchain and keeps trading on the exchange, because the liquidity pool and the contract do not depend on the creator’s presence. The project as a social and marketing entity may be dead, but the token as a tradable asset survives.

This separation between the token and its creator is what gives the community something to take over. In traditional contexts, if a company’s founders walk away, the company often simply ceases to function. But a memecoin is not a company; it is a freely trading token with a community attached, and the community can continue even when the founder does not. A community takeover is the act of that community formally adopting the orphaned token, declaring that they will now run the things the developer used to run, the social media presence, the marketing, the coordination, the narrative, and attempting to carry the project forward on collective effort alone. 

Crucially, a CTO does not change the underlying token or its contract; the holders cannot rewrite the code or mint themselves new control. What they take over is everything around the token: the story, the channels, the momentum. The token is the same; the stewardship is new. This is why a CTO is sometimes described as the community inheriting a project rather than acquiring it, they take possession of an asset that was left behind, with all its existing properties intact, good and bad.

How a CTO unfolds

The mechanics of a community takeover follow a recognizable sequence, even though the details vary from case to case. It begins with the trigger: the original developer abandons the project. This can take several forms. The developer might pull the liquidity or sell their entire holding in a rug pull, crashing the price and signaling they have given up; they might quietly disappear, going silent on social media and ceasing all activity; or they might be exposed as having acted in bad faith, destroying the community’s trust even if they have not formally left. Whatever the form, the result is a token with no active team, a collapsed or collapsing price, and a community of holders sitting on losses and a decision: walk away, or try to save it.

If enough holders choose to try, the takeover organizes itself. A core group, often the most committed remaining holders, coordinates through group chats on Telegram and through posts on X, rallying the community around the idea of continuing without the developer. They take over or recreate the social media accounts, establishing new official channels under community control, since the original accounts may have been deleted or abandoned. 

They frequently seek to have the token’s listing on price-tracking sites relabeled to reflect the takeover, since major trackers have processes for marking a token as community-run when the original team is gone, which updates the project’s public information to point at the new community channels. The community then tries to do the work a team would normally do: organizing marketing pushes, raising funds for promotion, sometimes coordinating to provide or lock liquidity, and generating social momentum to attract new buyers. 

In the best cases, the community also pushes for transparency about who is now leading and takes steps to reassure potential buyers, such as confirming that the liquidity is locked or burned so it cannot be pulled again. The whole effort is a bet that collective enthusiasm can substitute for a founding team and breathe new life into a token the market had written off.

Why CTOs happen so often on Solana

Community takeovers are not unique to Solana, but they are far more common there than anywhere else, and the reasons are structural to how the Solana memecoin ecosystem works. The first reason is the sheer volume of memecoin launches. Solana’s low fees and fast transactions, combined with launch platforms that make creating a token nearly effortless, have produced an enormous number of memecoins, far more than could ever succeed, which means abandonment is constant and the raw material for CTOs, orphaned tokens, is abundant. 

Where thousands of tokens launch and the overwhelming majority fail or are abandoned, there is a steady supply of projects a community could potentially take over. The second reason is that Solana memecoins are fully liquid from day one, trading freely on decentralized exchanges, so an abandoned token does not vanish; it keeps trading, which is the precondition for any takeover.

The third reason is cultural and narrative. The Solana memecoin scene has developed a powerful underdog mythology around the CTO, in which a community rescuing a token abandoned by a faithless developer is framed as a triumph of the people over insiders. This narrative has real emotional force in a market where traders are acutely aware that many tokens are stacked in favor of developers and early insiders. When the developer leaves, the community feels it is finally operating on a level playing field, with no insider dumping on them and no hidden team allocation, just the holders and the token. 

That underdog framing, the sense of a genuine community reclaiming something and proving the doubters wrong, turns a failed launch into a movement, at least in the storytelling, and movements attract attention and buyers. The combination of constant abandonment, full liquidity, and a culture that celebrates the takeover as a heroic act makes Solana uniquely fertile ground for CTOs. It is worth being clear-eyed that this same narrative is also a marketing device, deployed precisely because it is effective at drawing in new money, which is part of why the romance of the CTO deserves scrutiny rather than acceptance.

A worked example

Trace a representative case to see how a CTO actually plays out, using an illustrative example rather than any specific real token. Picture a memecoin that launches with an appealing theme and a charismatic developer who builds an early community. The token runs up quickly as buyers pile in, reaching a meaningful market value within days. Then the developer, having accumulated a large position at launch, sells their entire holding into the buying, crashing the price by most of its value in minutes, and goes silent, deleting the project’s social accounts. The remaining holders are left with a token that has lost the vast majority of its value, no team, and no official channels. By the normal logic of memecoins, this token is dead, and most would simply go to zero from here.

But a group of holders decides to attempt a community takeover. They form a new Telegram group, recreate the project’s presence on X under community control, and begin coordinating. They publicize that the original developer is gone and frame the situation as an opportunity: the insider who was dumping on everyone has left, the liquidity that remains is now locked so it cannot be pulled again, and the token is in the hands of the community. They petition the major price-tracking sites to relabel the token as a community takeover, updating its public listing to point at the new channels. 

They organize a marketing push, pooling funds to pay for promotion and rallying members to post about the revival. For a while, this can work: the CTO narrative attracts fresh attention, new buyers come in drawn by the underdog story and the apparent absence of an insider threat, and the token’s price recovers some ground on the renewed momentum. Whether this recovery lasts is the crucial question, and in the great majority of cases it does not, because, as the next section explains, enthusiasm and a new logo do not generate the durable demand a token needs to hold value. The example shows the mechanism clearly; it does not imply the mechanism usually succeeds.

What separates a rare success from the many failures

Among the flood of community takeovers, a small number achieve a real and lasting revival while most fade, and the differences between them, though they do not guarantee anything, are instructive. The first factor is transparent and credible new leadership. A CTO led by identifiable, communicative people who articulate a clear plan and follow through tends to fare better than one run anonymously with vague promises, because trust is the scarce resource in a project that has already betrayed its community once. 

The second factor is the state of the liquidity. A takeover where the remaining liquidity is verifiably locked or burned, so it cannot be pulled out from under buyers again, removes one of the biggest risks and gives new participants a reason to believe the rug cannot happen twice. Checking whether liquidity-provider tokens have been burned or locked is one of the most important pieces of due diligence in any CTO.

The third factor is the distribution of holdings. A CTO where the token supply is spread across many holders is healthier than one where a few large wallets dominate, because concentrated holdings mean a small number of people can crash the price by selling, recreating the very dynamic the takeover was supposed to escape. A diversified holder base gives a revival a more stable foundation. The fourth factor, the hardest and least common, is genuine sustained effort and some reason for the token to attract ongoing attention, real marketing, real community activity, sometimes an attempt to build something beyond pure speculation. 

Even with all of these factors present, success is rare, and it is essential to understand that these are markers that improve the odds at the margin, not formulas that produce a winner. The base rate is failure. The point of knowing the success factors is not to identify guaranteed revivals, which do not exist, but to recognize the warning signs in their absence: anonymous leadership, unlocked liquidity, and concentrated holdings are signals that a CTO is especially likely to fail, and their presence should make anyone considering participation far more cautious. The factors are a filter for avoiding the worst, not a recipe for finding the best.

The hard truth about CTOs and how to think about the risk

The unromantic reality, which the heroic CTO narrative tends to obscure, is that the overwhelming majority of community takeovers fail, and the token settles at or near zero regardless of the community’s effort. This is not a cynical exaggeration but the base rate of the phenomenon, and understanding why is essential. A community takeover changes the stewardship of a token, but it does not change the fundamental problem that sank the project in the first place: a memecoin has no inherent product, revenue, or utility, and its price depends entirely on continued speculative demand. 

A new Telegram group, a recovered social account, and a wave of marketing can generate a burst of renewed attention, but attention is not the same as durable demand, and once the initial CTO excitement fades, the token is left exactly where it was, a speculative asset with nothing underneath it, now without even the novelty of a fresh launch. The community can work tirelessly and still fail, because the thing they are trying to revive never had a foundation to stand on.

Compounding this, the same dynamics that make memecoins dangerous in the first place persist through a takeover. The people coordinating a CTO are often the same speculators who bought in originally, with the same incentives to sell into any strength, so a price recovery driven by the CTO narrative can itself become an exit opportunity for early holders at the expense of the new buyers the narrative attracted. The underdog story that draws fresh money into a CTO is, viewed coldly, sometimes a mechanism for transferring losses from the people who held through the crash to the people who buy the revival. There are also coordination and trust problems inherent in running anything by committee with anonymous participants and no formal structure.

For anyone weighing involvement in a CTO, the honest framework is this: treat it as among the highest-risk activities in crypto, assume the base rate is failure, do the specific due diligence that can at least rule out the worst cases, checking that liquidity is locked or burned, researching who is now leading, examining whether holdings are concentrated, and never commit money you cannot afford to lose entirely, because losing it entirely is the most common outcome. The CTO is a real and fascinating feature of memecoin culture, and it occasionally produces a genuine revival, but it is a casino bet dressed in the language of community heroism, and seeing it clearly means holding both the appeal and the brutal odds in view at once.

Frequently Asked Questions

This article is educational information, not financial or investment advice. Memecoins and community takeovers are among the highest-risk activities in crypto, and most result in total loss. Examples are illustrative and not references to specific tokens. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or participate in any project. Do your own research and never risk money you cannot afford to lose.