Crypto World
the 7-Democrat Senate math explained
The bill is on the calendar, the House has promised to move fast, and the committee fight is over. Everything now comes down to a single number: whether Senate leadership can find seven Democratic votes before the August recess. Here is the math that decides crypto’s biggest law.
Summary
- The CLARITY Act is now eligible for a Senate floor vote without further committee action.
- The House has signaled it will move quickly if the Senate passes the bill before recess.
- The bill needs at least seven Democratic votes to clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
- The August recess is the deadline that could decide whether the bill passes or stalls.
As of mid-June 2026, the CLARITY Act, the most comprehensive crypto market-structure bill ever to advance in the United States, has reached the stage where only one thing stands between it and becoming law: votes. On June 1, the bill was formally placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar as Calendar No. 423, making it eligible for a full floor vote without any further committee action.
A vote can now happen at any time the Senate’s leadership chooses to schedule one. On June 18, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee’s digital-assets subcommittee, Dusty Johnson, signaled that the House would act swiftly to pass the bill if the Senate takes it up before the August recess, removing the other procedural uncertainty.
The committee fights are over. Its text is on the floor. The House is ready to move. What remains is arithmetic.
That arithmetic is specific and unforgiving. The CLARITY Act needs 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster, Republicans hold roughly 53 seats, and only two Democrats, Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks, are on record supporting it from the May committee vote.
Both Democrats gave explicit warnings that their committee support did not guarantee a vote for final passage. That leaves a gap of at least seven Democratic votes that Senate leadership must find before the recess, and finding them is now the entire story.
This piece lays out how the bill reached this point, exactly what the vote math requires, where the seven Democrats might come from and what they want, why the August recess is a hard deadline, and what the whole thing means for a crypto market that has waited all year on this single bill. Everything now turns on seven votes.
How the bill got here
To understand why the math is all that is left, it helps to see how much has already been cleared, because the bill has traveled a long road to reach the floor.
The bill began in the House, which passed its version in July 2025 by a decisive bipartisan margin of 294 to 134, drawing more than 70 Democratic votes and the most comprehensive crypto regulatory framework ever to clear a chamber of Congress. That House passage handed the Senate a finished framework for dividing crypto oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The Senate, as it tends to do, declined to simply take the House text and began building its own version through 2025, with discussion drafts and committee work stretching across the year. That process was slow and contentious, reflecting the genuine disagreements over how to regulate a new asset class, but it moved steadily toward a Senate bill.
The decisive committee moment landed on May 14, 2026, when the Senate Banking Committee advanced the bill by a vote of 15 to 9, with all thirteen Republicans joined by two Democrats, Gallego and Alsobrooks. Markets celebrated, with Bitcoin rallying toward $82,000 and XRP breaking above $1.50 on the news.
Then the qualification in the vote sank in: both Democratic supporters stated openly that their committee votes should not be read as commitments to support final passage on the Senate floor. On June 1, the bill was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar as Calendar No. 423, formally eligible for a floor vote without further committee action.
Every committee stage, markup, and text-merging is now behind the bill. That is why the remaining question is no longer about process but about whether the votes exist on the floor.
The vote math, exactly
Now the arithmetic itself, because it is the whole game, and it is worth stating with precision instead of in the vague terms most coverage uses.
Like most significant legislation, the bill must overcome a filibuster to pass the Senate, which requires 60 votes, not a simple majority of 51. Republicans hold roughly 53 seats, so even with every Republican voting yes, the bill falls short of 60 by about seven votes, which must come from Democrats.
From the May committee vote, exactly two Democrats are publicly on record in favor, Gallego and Alsobrooks, and both attached explicit caveats that their committee support was not a promise of a floor vote for final passage. So the math is stark: starting from the two known Democratic supporters, Senate leadership needs to find at least seven more Democratic votes, and may need to first reconfirm the two it thinks it has, to reach the 60-vote threshold.
Every analysis of the bill’s prospects reduces to this question of whether those seven-plus Democratic votes can be assembled.
This is why the situation is best understood as pure vote-counting, not as a question of momentum or process. Its procedural path is clear, the House is committed to moving quickly, and the Republican votes are essentially in hand, which strips away every variable except the one that matters: the Democratic vote count.
A bill that needs seven crossover votes in a polarized Senate is neither doomed nor assured. It sits in the deeply uncertain middle where the outcome depends on negotiation, on what the wavering Democrats can be offered, and on whether leadership can hold a coalition together through a floor vote.
That bicameral commitment from the House, the promise to act swiftly if the Senate delivers, means the House will compress its own timeline to nothing. The only remaining constraint on the bill becoming law before the recess is whether Senate leadership can produce those seven or more Democratic votes.
The whole thing has narrowed to that single number.
Where the seven votes come from, and what they want
Those seven votes are not abstract; they are specific senators with specific concerns, and understanding what they want explains both why the votes are gettable and why they are hard.
Democrats who might provide the needed votes are, broadly, the more moderate and crypto-open members of the caucus, including some of the twelve Democrats who published their own crypto framework in 2025, signaling a willingness to legislate on the issue if their conditions were met. These are not implacable opponents.
They are senators who want a market-structure bill but want it on terms they can defend, which means their votes are available at a price, and the negotiation is about what that price is. Their central sticking points have been consistent: conflict-of-interest and ethics language, provisions addressing the previous administration’s crypto dealings, rules on stablecoin yield, illicit-finance and anti-money-laundering provisions, and protections for decentralized finance.
A Democrat is far more likely to vote yes if the bill addresses the ethics concerns and the consumer and illicit-finance safeguards they have emphasized. They are far less likely if it does not.
This is where the path to seven votes runs through specific amendments. The most-discussed route to Democratic support has been adding ethics and conflict-of-interest language by amendment on the floor, which several Democrats have signaled would move them toward yes, along with satisfactory resolution of the stablecoin-yield and illicit-finance questions.
That is why the provisions blocking Democratic votes matter so much. The bill is not stuck because members cannot describe the problem; it is stuck because each fix can alienate a different part of the coalition.
The challenge is that amendments that win Democratic votes can cost Republican ones, and the bill has to thread a version that holds essentially all 53 Republicans while adding seven Democrats. That balance is real and difficult because the two sides want different things.
Some provisions have already been fought over and trimmed in committee, leaving them in the awkward position of being too weak for one side and too strong for the other. The seven votes exist in principle, among the moderate Democrats who want a bill, but assembling them requires a negotiated text that satisfies their conditions without losing the Republican base.
That negotiation is the hard, uncertain work now underway on the floor.
Why the August recess is a hard deadline
Its timing is not arbitrary, and the August recess functions as a genuine cliff that shapes everything, which is why the next several weeks matter so much.
The Senate runs on a calendar with limited floor time, and the August recess is a hard break that removes weeks of legislative days. The White House set a target of signing the bill on or around July 4, and while that specific date is ambitious, the broader deadline is the recess.
If the Senate does not pass the bill before it leaves for August, the realistic path narrows considerably. This is partly a matter of momentum, since a bill that misses its window can lose the political energy that carries it, and partly a matter of the calendar beyond the recess, which is where the deeper danger lies.
After the summer comes the runway toward the November midterm elections, and legislating becomes harder as an election approaches. Both parties become less willing to hand the other a win and more focused on campaigning than on compromise.
What makes the recess deadline consequential is the midterm dimension, which makes the recess deadline more than merely inconvenient. If the bill slips past August and into the fall, it collides with the midterm calendar, and a crypto market-structure bill that does not pass before the election faces the risk of stalling entirely.
That could force the bill to confront a potentially less favorable Congress in 2027, depending on how the elections reshape the chamber. A delay, in other words, is not just a delay; it is a step toward the bill possibly dying and having to restart in a new and uncertain political environment.
That is the downside if the votes fall short. The period between now and the August recess is the decisive window, and the seven-vote math has to be solved in weeks rather than months.
The bill is closer to law than any market-structure bill in American history. It is also, if it misses this window, closer to a familiar death, and the recess is the line between those two outcomes.
What it means for crypto and XRP
Its fate matters enormously for the crypto market, and for XRP in particular, because CLARITY would resolve the single biggest overhang on the asset class.
For crypto broadly, CLARITY would provide the federal framework that the industry has wanted for years, defining how digital assets are regulated, dividing oversight between the SEC and CFTC, and replacing regulatory uncertainty with statutory clarity. That certainty is the precondition for the deeper institutional adoption that has been held back by the lack of clear rules, because large institutions managing fiduciary money need defined legal treatment before they commit at scale.
For XRP specifically, the stakes are even sharper, because CLARITY would codify XRP’s status as a digital commodity into federal law, a classification that, unlike an agency-level determination, cannot be reversed by a future administration with a memo. That permanence is what institutions have been waiting for.
It is also what passage would do for XRP. Analysts at Standard Chartered and JPMorgan have projected that XRP exchange-traded funds could draw $4 billion to $8 billion in inflows if the bill passes, several times what they have attracted so far.
The bill also matters beyond the ETF channel. It speaks directly to the utility waiting on the law, including tokenized settlement and institutional infrastructure that can only scale when the legal framework is clear enough for large firms to use.
This is why the seven-vote math is not just a legislative curiosity but a direct input into the crypto market’s near-term path. A passage before the recess would remove the overhang, codify XRP’s status permanently, and potentially unlock the institutional inflows that have waited on legal certainty, a clearly bullish outcome for XRP and the broader market.
A failure to pass before the recess, with the midterm risk that follows, would leave the uncertainty in place, disappoint a market that has priced in significant odds of passage, and potentially trigger the sell-the-delay reaction that catalysts denied tend to produce.
The market has been pricing meaningful odds of 2026 passage, around 70% by some prediction-market measures, which means a meaningful disappointment is possible if the votes do not materialize. Everything the crypto market is hoping for from CLARITY now depends on whether seven Democrats can be found before August.
That makes the vote math the most important variable in the asset class right now.
What it means for investors
For anyone watching crypto or XRP, the situation translates into a clear framework for what to track and how to think about the binary ahead.
The key variable to watch is no longer whether the bill advances procedurally, which it has, but whether the Democratic votes materialize. That means the signals that matter are reports of negotiations over the ethics, stablecoin-yield, and illicit-finance provisions, statements from moderate Democrats about their willingness to support the bill, and any move by Senate leadership to actually schedule a floor vote.
The August recess is the deadline that frames the whole thing, so the calendar matters as much as the content. The closer the recess approaches without a vote, the more the downside scenario gains weight.
An investor following XRP or the broader market should read the bill’s prospects through this lens, watching the vote count and the calendar instead of the procedural milestones that are already behind it. They should also watch the supply setup into the vote, because XRP’s ability to respond to a legislative catalyst depends not only on the headline, but on whether flows are strong enough to overcome supply pressure.
The realistic framing is that the outcome is starkly binary and deeply uncertain, sitting in the middle range where seven crossover votes in a polarized Senate could go either way. Passage before the recess would be a major positive catalyst, particularly for XRP given the permanence it would grant.
A miss, and the midterm risk that follows, would be a real disappointment for a market that has priced in significant passage odds. An investor should size any position tied to this catalyst to the reality that it is a coin-flip-adjacent legislative bet, not a near-certainty.
They should be wary both of assuming passage and of assuming failure, because the seven-vote math is truly unresolved. None of this is investment advice; it is a frame for the single most important legislative variable in crypto, reduced now to whether a handful of senators can be brought to yes before summer ends.
Seven votes from history
The CLARITY Act stands closer to becoming law than any crypto market-structure bill ever has. The House passed it, the Senate Banking Committee advanced it, it sits on the Senate floor calendar eligible for a vote, and the House has promised to move swiftly the moment the Senate acts.
Every procedural obstacle that can be cleared has been cleared. That is why the bill’s fate no longer turns on process or momentum but on a single, specific number: the seven-plus Democratic votes that Senate leadership must find to reach 60 and break a filibuster, beyond the two committee supporters who have warned their support is not yet a promise.
Those votes exist in principle, among the moderate Democrats who want a market-structure bill on terms they can defend. But assembling them requires a negotiated text that adds ethics and consumer protections enough to win seven Democrats without losing any of the 53 Republicans, a balance that is real work and deeply uncertain.
The August recess is the deadline, with the midterm calendar beyond it threatening to turn any delay into a possible death and a 2027 restart before a less favorable Congress. For crypto and especially for XRP, whose commodity status CLARITY would permanently codify and whose ETF inflows could multiply on passage, everything now rides on this arithmetic.
The bill is one good negotiation from a historic law and one missed window from a familiar grave. The difference between those outcomes is seven votes.
That is all that is left, and it is everything.
Frequently asked questions
What is the current status of the CLARITY Act?
As of mid-June 2026, the CLARITY Act has cleared the Senate Banking Committee, 15-9 on May 14, and was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar as Calendar No. 423 on June 1. That makes it eligible for a full Senate floor vote at any time without further committee action. The House passed its version in July 2025 and, per a June 18 signal from a House Agriculture subcommittee chairman, would move swiftly to finalize the bill if the Senate passes it before the August recess.
Why does the CLARITY Act need seven Democratic votes?
The bill must overcome a Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes. Republicans hold roughly 53 seats, so even with all of them voting yes, the bill falls about seven votes short and must draw them from Democrats. Only two Democrats, Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks, are on record supporting it from the committee vote, and both warned that their committee support did not guarantee a floor vote. So leadership must find at least seven more Democratic votes.
What do the wavering Democrats want in the bill?
The main sticking points are conflict-of-interest and ethics language, including provisions on the prior administration’s crypto dealings, rules on stablecoin yield, illicit-finance and anti-money-laundering provisions, and protections for decentralized finance. Moderate Democrats who want a bill are more likely to vote yes if these concerns are addressed by amendment. The difficulty is that amendments winning Democratic votes can cost Republican ones, so the text must satisfy seven Democrats without losing the Republican base.
Why is the August recess a hard deadline?
The Senate has limited floor time, and the August recess removes weeks of legislative days. The White House targeted a July 4 signing, but the real deadline is the recess: if the bill does not pass before it, the path narrows sharply. Beyond the recess looms the November midterm calendar, which makes legislating harder and risks stalling the bill entirely, potentially forcing a restart before a less favorable Congress in 2027. A delay is a step toward possible death.
What would CLARITY mean for XRP?
CLARITY would codify XRP’s status as a digital commodity into federal law, a classification that, unlike an agency determination, cannot be reversed by a future administration. That permanence is what institutions have waited for before committing at scale. Analysts at Standard Chartered and JPMorgan have projected XRP ETFs could draw $4 billion to $8 billion in inflows if the bill passes, several times what they have attracted so far, making passage a potentially major catalyst for XRP.
How likely is the CLARITY Act to pass in 2026?
It is deeply uncertain. Prediction markets have priced 2026 passage around 70%, but the outcome reduces to whether seven-plus Democratic votes can be assembled before the August recess, a coin-flip-adjacent question in a polarized Senate. The bill is closer to law than any market-structure bill in history, with every procedural step cleared, but seven crossover votes are neither assured nor doomed. The result depends on floor negotiations over ethics and consumer provisions in the coming weeks.
As of June 19, 2026. Legislative situations change rapidly; verify the current status before relying on this analysis. This article is information, not investment or legal advice.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup generated a record $20 billion in prediction market volume, according to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis.
The figure encompasses activity across nearly 400,000 wallets starting in January 2026 with $5.7 billion in volume generated during the tournament itself, Chainalysis said in a Thursday report.
Markets ranged from the simple question of who would win the international soccer tournament to whether Portugal legend Cristiano Ronaldo would cry when his team was eliminated (he did).
The World Cup, held in June and July, represented by far the biggest prediction market event in terms of volume, shattering the $3.6 billion traded during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Other notable events were Super Bowl 60 in February and the NCAA’s basketball tournament known as March Madness, both of which eclipsed the $1 billion mark.
Prediction markets offer derivatives contracts on the outcome of future events, and settle when the relevant event takes place.
Market leader Polymarket runs on blockchain rails with trades and settlement in stablecoin USDC. As a result, the platforms have become one of the ways in which blockchain technology has gained significant mainstream attention.
Crypto World
Ripple Just Got Full MiCA Authorization in Europe But Fed’s Hawkish Tone Is Keeping XRP Capped at $1.10
In the latest XRP News, XRP price is trading at $1.07, down 0.57% in the last 24 hours, as the asset continues to wrestle with the $1.10 resistance that has capped three consecutive sessions of attempted recovery.
The setup looks deceptively calm on the surface, but the macro and on-chain picture underneath tells a more complicated story. Whether this range resolves with a clean break or a reversal depends on factors that are moving fast right now.
The Federal Reserve held rates steady in the 3.50%–3.75% range, but Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s hawkish post-meeting tone, insisting the Fed “will deliver the 2% target”, reinforced a risk-off undertone across liquid assets.
Despite that headwind, on-chain data from Santiment shows mid-tier holders (10,000–100,000 XRP) lifting their cumulative share to 11.9% of total supply, up from 11.64% on July 1, while the 100,000–1M XRP cohort climbed to 11.75% over the same window.
Ripple also secured full MiCA Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorization in Europe this week, a regulatory milestone with direct implications for institutional XRP payments flowing across the EU. Perpetual futures open interest sits at 2.27 billion XRP, just below this week’s peak of 2.29 billion.
The combination of a hawkish Fed, a technically capped chart, and a meaningful regulatory unlock creates a binary setup worth examining closely.
Discover: What traders are pricing for the Fed’s next move on Kalshi
XRP News: Can XRP Price Break $1.10 Resistance This Week?
XRP is trading at $1.07, pinned below the Bollinger Band midline near $1.10 and every key exponential moving average.
The 50-day EMA at $1.13 converges with the upper Bollinger Band around $1.14, creating a dense overhead zone that has rejected every intraday push so far. The 100-day EMA at $1.21 and the 200-day EMA at $1.41 confirm the broader structural trend still leans lower. Those levels are not in play unless near-term momentum shifts materially.
Momentum reads soft. Daily RSI hovers near 45, technically neutral but drifting toward weak. MACD is fractionally negative, signaling fading bullish attempts rather than any fresh accumulation pulse. Trading volume and open interest below this week’s high both undermine the idea that a breakout is imminent.
$1.00 remains the primary support level traders are watching. A close below it invalidates the current recovery thesis outright.
MiCA follow-through driving institutional flow, open interest expanding above 2.29 billion, and XRP clearing $1.10 with volume opens a run toward $1.13 to $1.14.
Range-bound consolidation between $1.05 and $1.15 continues while the market waits on ETF flow headlines and any exchange listing catalysts, the more likely near-term path. A daily close below $1.00 signals distribution is winning and the mid-tier accumulation data becomes irrelevant.
Discover: Live odds on the Fed’s next rate decision
The post Ripple Just Got Full MiCA Authorization in Europe But Fed’s Hawkish Tone Is Keeping XRP Capped at $1.10 appeared first on Cryptonews.
The latest earnings week has handed investors a clear shortlist of US stocks to watch in August. Three of the market’s largest companies just reported, and Wall Street split its verdict between reward and punishment.
The divide came down to one test, which AI spender could prove that customers are paying for the build. It left the winners with strong setups and one laggard facing a cautious road into August.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)
Microsoft soared about 15% to near $451 after its July 29 results, its biggest jump in months. Trading volume, the number of shares changing hands, hit its highest since June 22, which shows strong conviction behind the buying.
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Yet the rally is not fully convincing. That volume still sits below the heavy selling of late June, so buyers have not fully overpowered sellers.
The Chaikin Money Flow (CMF), a gauge of whether institutional money is flowing into or out of a stock, shows the same doubt. It nearly turned negative before earnings, then rose to 0.04 as big investors reacted. It still sits below its July 24 peak, and it must reclaim that level to confirm institutions are truly buying.
The fundamentals explain the jump. Microsoft spent $41 billion on capital expenditure, the cost of building AI data centers, but backed it with a $678 billion book of signed customer contracts. That locked-in demand proves the spending is funded by real orders, which is the bullish case. It also guided Azure cloud growth toward 45%, and faster growth at that scale points to rising future revenue.
Wall Street agrees. The stock holds a Strong Buy rating, with 24 of 25 firms on Buy, signaling broad expectations of more upside.
Only Barclays trimmed its target, a lone caution that matches the soft volume.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)
Amazon carries the strongest analyst support of the three, making it one of the more bullish US stocks to watch into August. All 28 covering firms rate it Buy, with none on Hold or Sell, and every major desk raised its price target after earnings. That rare unanimity gives Amazon the cleanest bull case of the week.
Options positioning backs that optimism. The put-to-call volume ratio, which compares bearish bets against bullish ones, fell from 0.74 to 0.54 into the print, meaning traders bought far more calls and leaned bullish.
The open interest ratio, the standing option contracts already in place, held steady at 0.66. That shows longer-term money has not fully committed yet, which leaves room for new buyers to lift the stock in August.
The business explains the confidence. Amazon Web Services, its cloud arm, reaccelerated, and the company disclosed a $496 billion backlog of signed customer demand. When Alphabet and Meta raised their AI spending, investors sold both stocks, fearing spending with no proven payoff. Amazon raised spending too, but its backlog proved customers had already agreed to pay, so the stock rose instead.
There is a catch worth knowing. Amazon’s headline $5.75 per share reads like a huge beat, but most of it came from a one-time paper gain on its Anthropic stake, not from the core business. Strip that out, and profit still rose a healthy 43%, so the bull case holds. The real pressure is cash, because heavy AI spending has pushed free cash flow, the money a company keeps after building, into the red over the past year.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META)
Meta is the outlier among the top US stocks to watch. The stock fell about 8% to near $539 and now sits roughly 23% below its mid-July high.
The problem is cash, not sales. Revenue grew 28%, but free cash flow collapsed to $784 million from $8.55 billion a year earlier. Capex nearly swallowed all the cash the business generated, so Meta leaned on about $25 billion of new debt to keep funding its dividend, which unsettles investors.
Unlike Microsoft and Amazon, the other two US stocks to watch, Meta disclosed no backlog of signed demand, so it cannot yet prove the AI build will pay off. Its core apps also earned less, as Family of Apps operating income, the profit from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, slipped to $23.4 billion from $25 billion. The strongest ad engine on earth delivered a weaker bottom line.
The chart warns of more risk. Meta’s CMF trended lower even as the price climbed from early June to mid-July, and a deep correction followed. It still has not cleared the 0.05 line that would confirm buyers are back, so the same bearish drop could repeat.
Analysts stay loyal but nervous. Meta keeps a Strong Buy, yet at least ten firms cut price targets overnight, including Citi to $800 from $850.
That lower ceiling with unchanged ratings signals near-term caution even from believers.
The post 3 US Stocks To Watch In August 2026 After Big Earnings Week appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Fundstrat’s Tom Lee says the artificial intelligence (AI) trade is not finished. He argues the next leg runs through crypto payment rails built for software agents rather than people.
Veteran macro investor Jordi Visser argued the opposite this week. Lee also chairs the largest corporate holder of ether, which gives his version of the thesis a direct financial stake.
Why Lee Says Chips Were Only the First Leg
Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat, made the case on a panel hosted by the firm. He covered mobile phones as an analyst in the early 1990s.
Motorola and the infrastructure suppliers led that cycle early. The larger winners arrived later, namely the tower companies spun out of the carriers, and Apple.
Lee expects the same shape now, with financial services as the downstream market. He has already called AI capital spending fears a bullish market tell.
The Four Reasons Banks Cannot Bank Agents
Lee listed trust, proof of funds, lending, and tax collection as the reasons people built commerce around banks. Agents need none of those, he argued.
“It’s a mistake to think that this is going to be built on traditional financial rails,” Lee said.
Bank ledgers must settle in a single national currency. Money is becoming code, according to Lee, so equities, gold, and tokens could all clear as payment.
Part of that rail already exists on paper. ERC-8183, a proposed Ethereum standard filed on Feb. 25, locks an agent’s payment in escrow until a designated evaluator signs off.
Ethereum Foundation researcher Davide Crapis co-authored it with three Virtuals Protocol engineers. It carries Draft status, so nothing about it is final.
Where Tom Lee and Visser Split on the AI Trade
Visser leads AI research at 22V Research and spent two decades at Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers, latterly as chief investment officer. He says AI’s easy money is over.
He now expects roughly 30% a year instead of the seven or eight times investors once chased. Lee reads the same compression as rotation.
The two converge on the destination. Both expect fee-earning networks to absorb the flow, and both name Ethereum.
Ethereum trades near $1,873 after gaining 19.7% over 30 days. It still sits 51% lower across 12 months, and just over 2% below its trading price the previous day.
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Lee’s $11.8 Billion Reason to Prefer Ethereum
Lee chairs BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest corporate holder of ether. The company disclosed 5.79 million ETH on July 27, close to 4.8% of circulating supply.
Crypto and cash holdings reached $11.8 billion. BitMine states the dependency plainly in its own investor materials.
“So our future price for Bitmine stock is heavily dependent on the future price of Ethereum,” Lee said in the July chairman’s message.
Lee puts the correlation between BitMine shares and ether at 90%. Anyone weighing his agent thesis is also weighing that balance sheet, which rallied this month on its ETH treasury bet.
The Numbers Do Not Match the Story Yet
Jansen Teng, co-founder and chief executive of Virtuals Protocol, shared the panel with Lee. His platform lets agents hold wallets and pay each other onchain, and his figures undercut the timeline.
Teng said the launchpad for agent tokens has cleared about $15 billion in trading volume. Agent-to-agent commerce has settled roughly $500 million in a year.
Speculating on agents is therefore some 30 times larger than agents transacting. Both figures are company-reported and have not been independently verified.
Teng said the agents kept $2.5 million in profit, and that the product has not reached product-market fit (PMF). Virtuals commissioned the Fundstrat research and is a client of the firm.
Its VIRTUAL token trades near $0.56, down 89% from a January 2025 peak, even after agents started trading tokenized stocks onchain.
So the question is not whether the AI trade ended. It is whether machine payments arrive before the balance sheets betting on them need the story to work.
The post Tom Lee vs Jordi Visser on the AI Trade: Both End Up at Ethereum appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Coinbase said it captured a record 10.3% share of global crypto trading volume during the quarter, its third consecutive quarterly gain. Analysts at Benchmark, Oppenheimer, Clear Street and Cantor all highlighted the figure as evidence that trading activity is consolidating onto larger regulated exchanges during periods of market stress.
Several also pointed to derivatives, where Coinbase reported flat trading volumes despite management saying the broader derivatives market declined by double digits.
Diversification shows progress, but isn’t enough
Analysts viewed Coinbase’s push beyond spot trading as encouraging, even though the newer businesses remain too small to offset weakness in core trading revenue.
The company is trying to diversify through prediction markets, derivatives, subscriptions, stablecoins and its Base blockchain. Prediction markets surpassed a $100 million annualized revenue run rate, while Coinbase One topped one million paid subscribers. Its Circle partnership for USDC also renewed on existing terms, removing a key concern for investors.
Still, there was broad agreement that diversification has not yet become large enough to replace lost trading revenue.
Clear Street noted new businesses continue gaining traction but remain “optionality” rather than meaningful earnings contributors. Barclays was more critical, arguing prediction markets and retail derivatives “did not” provide the boost they offered last quarter. Compass Point similarly said emerging businesses “barely moved the needle.”
“This is by far the biggest Iranian illegal gambling network ever discovered and one of the biggest in the world,” said John Wojcik, a former researcher at Infoblox and now senior analyst at TRM Labs, who spent seven years investigating illegal gambling for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
It is also one of the largest Iranian sanctions-evasion networks discovered since 2016, when the U.S. broke up a roughly $20 billion IRGC gold-for-oil operation based in Turkey. Separately, the U.S. seized $1 billion in crypto from Iran in May.
“It’s an IRGC operation, and that’s plain as day,” Rich Sanders, an independent blockchain researcher and investigator focused on Iran, said of Shelbit. Reuters said it could not determine whether the IRGC directly controlled Shelbit or the gambling network.
The IRGC, founded in 1979, is the country’s most powerful and influential military, political and economic institution that answers directly to the country’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei.
Shelbit also interacts directly with Iran’s central bank, wallets linked to the IRGC by the Israeli government, and Nobitex, an Iranian exchange that the U.S. government sanctioned earlier this year after a Reuters investigation revealed its ties to the government. Some of the crypto flowing to Shelbit came from what the two investigative firms described as an Iranian bitcoin mining operation that creates new digital coins.
European support for Ukraine remains strong, and governments suffering from higher prices are more likely to blame Moscow than Kyiv. But Putin is now so anxious for battlefield wins that he will stay the course even without a clear-cut victory. Nor should we expect a revival of the agreement brokered by the United Nations in July 2022 that restored safe maritime traffic to and from Ukrainian ports.
Just as the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz has sent neighboring countries scrambling for new ways to move oil out of the Persian Gulf, Ukraine may be able to move grain through the Danube, via Romanian ports, and by rail, as it did in the war’s early days. But as before, diversions are costly and logistically complicated.
For all these reasons, the shape of Russia’s war on Ukraine will continue to shift as each side searches for new ways to break the battlefield stalemate in its favor. And the economic damage, felt well beyond Ukraine and Russia, will continue.
Traders have no way to react to events after markets close on TradFi venues. Perps on the other hand run 24/7. The Iran conflict was reflected in oil perps on Hyperliquid before CME reopened. Perps offer a continuously running, efficient market in a simple interface. Futures and options come with expiry dates, complicated greeks and interfaces. Perps remove all of that while keeping the speculative upside potential intact.
Martin Lee is Market Insights Lead of DWF Labs, one of the most active market makers and investors in digital assets.
Derivatives always outgrow spot
Derivatives volumes always outgrow their underlying spot market. It’s what we see in equities, commodities and crypto. RWAs are following the same trend. Equity perp volume on Hyperliquid ran 13-20x tokenized equity spot volume between March and May 2026.
You could argue that the number of traders matter more, a metric that spot usually wins out across most markets (except commodities). Looking into the numbers, tokenized equities have the bigger base: 180,845 wallets against 24,378 for equity perps. But perp holders are compounding at roughly 33% a month against spot’s 17%. Even in the domain where spot dominates, perps are rapidly closing the gap.
Perps innovate faster
The biggest factor driving the acceleration is the rapid rate of experimentation that RWA perps are able to have. Launching tokenized assets takes much longer and is more legally complex than launching a new perp market. The ease of launching perp markets creates opportunities for novel synthetic markets to be spun up. Markets that unlock fresh opportunities that didn’t exist before. A true 0 to 1 moment.
The team behind Pi Network set a deadline for its next big upgrade, while Solana’s native token risks plunging to as low as $50.
Bitcoin (BTC) may also head south, but interestingly, some analysts believe such a move could actually benefit the bulls.
Pi Network’s Announcement
The Core Team has been on a tear since the start of 2026, unveiling several major ecosystem improvements. The latest was the migration to protocol version 25, which was supposed to be deployed earlier this month.
Pi Network’s team did not disclose the move on X or on its website, yet multiple users claimed that it was in effect. The project has now shifted its attention to the next protocol update (version 26), setting August 11 as the deadline.
“All Mainnet note operators must complete the upgrade before the deadline to remain connected to the network,” the post reads.
The team also shared additional details about its Pi Launchpad model. It explained that in this ecosystem, projects issue tokens as tools to acquire users for their applications and integrate those coins directly into product functionality, such as rewards, payments, access, and governance.
“Instead of being taken by the issuing project, the proceeds of Pi from their token launch go to a liquidity pool with the ecosystem token, which bootstraps a healthy liquidity foundation from the start,” the team added.
PI, which was bleeding heavily prior to the aforementioned announcements, managed to rebound and now trades at around $0.08. Still, it remains down roughly 97% from its all-time high of $3 registered last year.
SOL at Risk
Solana’s native cryptocurrency has slipped by 3% over the past week, currently trading at around $73.50. This means that it has plunged below the $73.75 mark, which the popular analyst Ali Martinez recently described as a “make-or-break” level.
He believes that a sustained close under this key zone might trigger further selling pressure and result in a collapse to $60 and even $50 in the near future.
However, not all are pessimists. X user Crypto Zenkai argued that buying SOL below $80 is like investing in Bitcoin (BTC) in 2010, while Lucky told his nearly 2 million followers that the asset’s plunge under $75 might represent a “juicy dip.”
BTC Needs to Fall?
As of press time, the primary cryptocurrency is worth approximately $63,800, a 2.5% decline on a weekly basis. And while bulls eagerly await a resurgence, Martinez claimed they should actually welcome a potential drop to $60K.
He believes that a plunge to that level would validate the formation of a classic inverse head-and-shoulders pattern that is typically seen as a precursor to a rally. The analyst opined that completing the setup, combined with a confirmed breakout above $66,500, could set the stage for a rally to a two-month high of $74K.
Not long ago, Martinez predicted that BTC’s bear market (assuming the 4-year cycle holds) may conclude between October 6 and October 16. Until then, many industry participants expect the asset’s price to plunge below $50,000 and even $40,000. The most bearish forecast came from X user BATMAN, who claimed that BTC’s recent performance mirrors that of the autumn of 2022, which was followed by a giant collapse to roughly $16,000.
The post Recent Pi Network (PI) Updates, Solana (SOL) Warning, and More: Bits Recap July 31 appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Someone likely used AI to drain almost 600 BTC, worth $38 million, from roughly 500 dormant wallets yesterday as part of a seed phrase exploit targeting Coldcard hardware wallets.
The attack took just 25 minutes to move the BTC from 500 single-signature addresses into a single address, and reports suggest the exploit will likely continue.
Coindesk reports that the affected BTC was dated between 2021 and 2026, and much had remained dormant for years. Of the 594 coins stolen, 562 remain in the same address at the time of writing.
Coldcard maker, Coinkite, confirmed hours after the exploit that seed generation within its Mk3 wallet, and its subsequently updated versions beyond March 2021 (version 4.0.1), may not have been random at all.
Coldcard initially claimed that its Mk3 devices were at risk, and that the Mk4, Q, and Mk5 are “not affected based on our early analysis.”
Read more: Credit default swaps forecast AI bankruptcies
Block, formerly known as Square, found different results in its published analysis while one of its team members, Max Guise, found flaws between Mk2 and Mk5 Coldcard models.
The payments company traced the bug to a mis-written compile-time check. The newer devices, Block found, carry a smaller, but real, version of the same flaw.
Coinkite believes AI was used to discover exploit
Coinkite’s recent analysis deduced that, because Coldcard’s source code is open and public, someone likely used AI to exploit it.
It said that a few weeks before the attack, it couldn’t spot the bug even with Coinkite’s use of “the best available AI models.”
It added, “Both attackers and defenders have the same AI tools, but today it did not help us, and only helped the bad guys.”
Pseudonymous owners of Bitcoin.org website, Cobra, also expressed that they have “very bad feeling AI was involved,” and noted, “For whatever reason some addresses are only being partially drained despite the private key being compromised. Strange.”
Read more: Apple threatens Sparrow bitcoin wallet dev with App Store termination
Crypto developer Stephen DeLorme claims he was able to use AI model Claude Opus 5 to sniff out the Coldcard vulnerability after cloning the firmware’s repository.
“All our software is insecure, and we’re painfully figuring that out in realtime with AI agents,” DeLorme said.
The technicalities behind the Coldcard BTC theft
BTC wallets need genuinely random numbers to generate an unguessable private key. Coldcard’s firmware was supposed to pull that randomness from a hardware generator built into its STM32 chip.
According to Block, a codebase check tested only whether a macro called MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, not what value it held.
Coinkite’s software build set that macro to zero on purpose. Because the character was set to zero, and not a variable symbol, the check was flawed.
Despite this, the flawed check passed anyway during software operations. Firmware fell back to Yasmarang, a MicroPython pseudo-random number generator never meant for real-world cryptographic protection.
Read more: The number of BTC wallets holding more than 0.1 BTC hasn’t grown in two years
Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Sanders reproduced the attack using setup button-press counts, and confirmed its impact on Mk3 and Mk2 models. His own response to his findings was, “Sorry, this is the time to panic.”
Sanders first wrote, “confirmed. Mk2/3 vuln, I don’t think mk4 is but can’t be certain,” before following up an hour later with “mk4 is probably not much better.”
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The post Coldcard attack: 25 minutes, 500 wallets, $38M in BTC gone appeared first on Protos.
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