Tether reported $1.5 billion in net operating profit for the second quarter of 2026, driven by returns from its U.S. Treasury and repurchase agreement holdings.

The issuer of USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin, reported holding $187.75 billion in assets against $183.64 billion in liabilities as of June 30, leaving it with $4.11 billion in excess reserves, according to the BDO attestation released Friday. Those excess reserves are down from just over $8.23 billion three months earlier.

The second quater report shows Tether increased its physical gold holdings by 14 tons to roughly 146.2 metric tons from 132.2 tons during the quarter. The value of those holdings, however, fell to $18.84 billion from $19.84 billion because the price of gold dropped about 15% to just over $4,000 per ounce.

The company lifted bitcoin holdings by roughly 1,796 coins to 98,933 BTC. The value of those holdings fell to $5.80 billion from $6.62 billion as the bitcoin price used in the reports declined to $58,600 from $68,200, during the period.

Tether’s USDT issuance increased by about $446 million to $184.6 billion during the quarter.

SBI Holdings has reaffirmed its commitment to Ripple despite weaker XRP prices and slower cryptocurrency activity. The Japanese financial group values its Ripple shareholding at ¥6.6 trillion, equal to about $41.2 billion. Meanwhile, SBI delivered record first-quarter earnings and continued expanding its digital asset operations.

SBI Holdings Maintains Its Ripple Investment

SBI disclosed the updated Ripple valuation during its first-quarter earnings presentation. The company stressed that its Ripple shareholding remains highly valuable despite the current weakness in the cryptocurrency market. Therefore, SBI continues to treat Ripple as a major strategic asset within its broader financial portfolio.

The group has maintained a long relationship with Ripple and has supported XRP-based payment services. SBI has also promoted blockchain settlement systems through its financial subsidiaries and regional partnerships. Consequently, its latest statement reinforces the group’s long-term focus on Ripple’s payments technology and international network.

XRP has faced selling pressure during the recent cryptocurrency market slowdown. However, SBI did not announce any reduction in its Ripple position during the earnings update. Instead, the company highlighted the stake’s valuation while explaining weaker conditions across its cryptocurrency division.

Clarity Act Uncertainty Weighs on Crypto Activity

SBI linked the sluggish cryptocurrency market to uncertainty surrounding the proposed Clarity Act. The legislation seeks to establish clearer oversight rules for digital assets within the United States. Therefore, its progress could influence market structure, regulation, and business planning across the cryptocurrency sector.

The United States Senate continues considering the bill before its scheduled August recess. Senator Cynthia Lummis recently indicated that Senate leaders had reserved potential floor time for the measure. However, several other legislative matters were also competing for attention during the remaining session.

The Clarity Act has become an important issue for cryptocurrency companies seeking clearer federal rules. Ripple has spent years operating within an uncertain American regulatory environment. As a result, regulatory progress could affect its domestic operations and the wider use of XRP-related services.

SBI Reports Record First-Quarter Earnings

SBI Holdings recorded its strongest first-quarter performance as revenue and profit increased sharply. Revenue reached ¥571.0 billion, while profit before tax climbed to ¥225.8 billion. Additionally, shareholder-attributable net profit rose 149.9% year-over-year to ¥148.1 billion.

The group reported a 29% return on equity for the previous twelve months. That result exceeded SBI’s medium-term return target of 15% by a wide margin. Strong performance across its main financial businesses offset weakness within the cryptocurrency asset division.

SBI’s crypto asset business recorded a ¥1.4 billion pre-tax loss during the quarter. However, global cryptocurrency market maker B2C2 remained profitable and supported the group’s digital asset operations. The mixed results showed continued pressure in retail crypto services but stronger performance within institutional trading activities.

SBI Expands Its Digital Asset Services

SBI continues building its digital asset business through lending, stablecoins, custody, and exchange services. SBI VC Trade recently introduced cryptocurrency lending and support services linked to the JPYSC stablecoin. These services extend the group’s reach across regulated digital payments and blockchain-based financial products.

The company also plans to acquire Bitbank and expand its cryptocurrency customer base. SBI expects the combined operations to serve about three million cryptocurrency accounts after completing the planned transaction. Furthermore, it targets approximately ¥870 billion in digital assets under custody.

These expansion plans support SBI’s strategy of combining traditional finance with regulated cryptocurrency services. The group continues investing in trading, custody, payments, stablecoins, and blockchain infrastructure. Meanwhile, its $41.2 billion Ripple stake remains the largest highlighted asset within that digital strategy.

South Korea will begin taxing cryptocurrency gains at a combined rate of 22% from Jan. 1, 2027, ending expectations that the long-delayed measure could be postponed for a fourth time.

South Korea confirms crypto tax launch

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol confirmed the implementation schedule during a National Assembly Finance and Economy Planning Committee meeting on July 29.

“We are pushing forward with the plan to tax cryptocurrency starting next year as scheduled,” Koo said.

Under the Income Tax Act, income earned by transferring or lending virtual assets will be classified as other income. Annual gains exceeding 2.5 million won, or about $1,740, will face a 20% national tax. A local income tax raises the combined rate to 22%.

Investors whose annual gains remain below the threshold will owe no tax under the framework. Taxpayers are expected to file their first returns in May 2028 for income earned during 2027.

The government first approved the levy in 2020 and planned to introduce it in January 2022. Lawmakers initially postponed implementation until 2025 before a December 2024 amendment moved the deadline to 2027. South Korea’s National Assembly approved that latest delay through revisions to the Income Tax Act.

Loss rules raise offshore trading concerns

People Power Party lawmaker Kim Sang-hoon questioned the tax design during the committee meeting, arguing that investors would not be allowed to offset losses against gains earned in later years.

Kim warned that the restriction could encourage traders to move activity away from domestic exchanges, including Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone and Korbit. Possible alternatives include overseas centralized exchanges, decentralized finance platforms and peer-to-peer markets.

Such a shift could reduce trading volume and tax visibility inside South Korea. Kim argued that implementation should wait until the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework is fully operational, allowing authorities to exchange tax information across borders.

Koo acknowledged the concern but said moving virtual assets into a capital-gains framework would require a broader review of South Korea’s tax treatment of financial markets. He left open the possibility of revising the system after authorities collect operational data.

A separate opposition bill introduced in March seeks to remove crypto income from the Income Tax Act entirely. Lawmakers referred the proposal to a subcommittee on July 29, meaning repeal or another delay remains legally possible before the end of 2026.

Crypto policy develops beyond taxation

The tax confirmation comes as South Korea considers a broader regulatory framework for digital assets and stablecoins.

Hashed Open Research and the Solana Policy Institute called for interim stablecoin licensing guidance in a policy report published July 29. The recommendations include temporary rules covering issuance, payments, permitted activities and foreign-issued tokens while lawmakers negotiate the Digital Asset Basic Act.

The proposals are advisory and do not change existing law. However, the report argues that waiting for the complete legislation could leave businesses without clear requirements for issuing or using won-backed stablecoins.

South Korea is also expanding state-backed investment in technology. As crypto.news previously reported, the government approved plans for a 20 trillion won investment account under the Korea Investment Corporation.

Unlike KIC’s existing overseas-focused portfolio, the new account can invest domestically in artificial intelligence, data centers and other industries considered strategically important.

What the tax means for US investors

The Korean framework differs from the US approach, where the Internal Revenue Service generally treats digital assets as property. US taxpayers can use capital losses to offset capital gains, subject to the applicable tax rules and reporting requirements.

South Korea’s lack of loss carryforwards could therefore leave some active traders with a less flexible tax position than US investors. The direct tax applies to income covered by Korean law, but US investors using Korean platforms should still monitor whether exchanges change access, reporting requirements or available products before 2027.

Domestic exchanges must now prepare their reporting infrastructure, while lawmakers consider the repeal bill and possible changes to loss treatment. Unless the National Assembly intervenes, the 22% levy will take effect on Jan. 1.

Talk about crypto trading with any savvy trader, and the first thing that comes up these days is perpetual futures, or “perps” — derivatives contracts that allow traders to control a much larger position than the money held in the account. Perps work like standard futures, but with one key advantage: there is no expiry.

While bitcoin and ether traders can dabble in spot, futures, options, perpetual futures and even structured products, for traders of other altcoins, perps are perhaps the only avenue for derivatives available to them. Dated futures (those with expiry) for altcoins are illiquid, and the spot market is an afterthought for anybody who doesn’t plan to hold.

So, CoinDesk talked to traders who have thrived in the perpetual futures market to explain what makes perps different from other derivatives, how they help efficiently manage the needs of institutional traders and retail traders alike and what perps trading actually costs.

Their answers were clear and nearly unanimous: everyone loves perps because of their deep liquidity, cheap trading fees and brutal margin efficiency, which is the amount of trading exposure you can get per unit of collateral you post.

But trading fees aren’t the only expense for traders. There’s also a recurring cost for keeping positions open, called funding rates. Think of it as an interest charge that builds up the longer you hold, and the traders we spoke with are concerned about how much this could add up.

Why perps?

If you ask traders why crypto perps average a daily volume of over $200 billion, they’ll tell you it’s not a matter of choice, but one of necessity.

Lucas Krenn, a derivatives trader at market-making firm STS Digital, and an independent trader for six years, said perps are the plumbing underneath everything the firm does.

“Outside bitcoin and ether, dated futures liquidity is thin to the point of being unusable,” he said. “So perps are not one tool among several. For a crypto native firm, they are the tool.”

Dated futures aren’t popular mainly because they have to be replaced with new contracts at expiry, and that process costs money. Those same costs are why futures-based ETFs tend to be less efficient than spot ETFs.

Liquidity refers to the market’s ability to absorb large buy and sell orders at stable prices. Per Krenn, standard dated futures are largely illiquid, meaning a few big orders can easily sway prices in either direction, raising slippage and spoiling execution for traders. (Slippage is the price at which the trade was submitted and the price at which it was actually executed.

Kenneth Ong, an independent trader for six years, with most of his trading activity concentrated in perps, explained a similar draw to perpetual futures from the perspective of a retail trader. According to Ong, perps offer better fills, meaning your order is executed at a more favorable price than you expected or than the ongoing market quote when you sent the order, lower fees, and the ability to run both sides at once via hedge mode. In simple terms, the hedge mode allows the trader to hold longs (bullish bets) and shorts (bearish plays) on the same token at the same time in the same account. These are treated as separate positions, not netted against each other.

That’s a big advantage over a regulated venue like CME, which offers standard futures in which a single account is typically netted by default.

Ong started in the spot market and drifted almost entirely into perps once he saw the difference. Spot, for him now, is “for actually holding something long term.”

Both Ong and Krenn told CoinDesk that margin efficiency was the real draw to perps. As noted earlier, for most tokens, perps listed across different exchanges are the only real venue to trade. That fragmentation is an issue for perps, but the leverage they offer, which is significantly greater than that of standard futures, helps manage risk efficiently across different venues and tokens.

Because perps require only a fraction of a position’s value as collateral, the same pool of capital can be split across a dozen venues and still back meaningful positions at each one.

Perps and price discovery

The always-on nature of perps has shifted price discovery to occur whenever the news breaks, not just whenever markets are open.

Ong found himself in the middle of this during the Iran conflict, which flared up repeatedly across the first half of 2026. It started with the conflict’s opening weekend in late February, when tokenized oil trading on Hyperliquid saw its first real surge in volume.

“That opening weekend, all the real reaction happened on crypto/tokenized commodity perps while the ‘official’ market was straight up closed,” Ong said. “By Monday, a chunk of the repricing already happened somewhere else.”

Krenn sees the same mechanism playing out in perps tied to other traditional assets.

For instance, building a proper tokenized equity product is genuinely hard primarily because it requires recreating the full legal, operational, and regulatory machinery of traditional share ownership on-chain. A perpetual that references the price sidesteps all of it, and is handy for those looking to just trade rather than invest for the long-term.

“That is why the instrument is so powerful and why it keeps spreading into new asset classes,” Krenn said.

Both traders see this perpification of various assets gaining momentum in the coming years. Ong said that tokenized oil trading over the weekend “is basically a preview” of what’s to come for other commodities. Deepen that liquidity across commodities and equities, and “it kills one of the last reasons to bother with dated futures at all,” he said.

Beware the funding rate

Ask any crypto trader what’s wrong with perps and you’ll usually get “liquidations,” or forced closure of long and short positions on account of margin shortage. But, according to Krenn and Ong, the funding rate is more of a cause for concern.

A dated futures contract tells you the interest rate of the trade right away. The trader knows exactly what he is getting into. A perpetual futures contract, on the other hand, has a funding rate that changes over time and is typically charged every eight hours. The trader, therefore, remains exposed to the floating rate while holding the position, with no built-in mechanism to lock it in. And if the market doesn’t move as expected, that funding rate becomes a burden.

“It is unquantifiable at the point of trade and unhedgeable afterwards,” Krenn said.

Ong was blunter in expressing his concern: “That funding’s not just some tiny fee you can ignore. It’s not. If you hold positions for long periods, it can potentially balloon to the point where a profitable trade loses money.”

The myth of the safe trade

Bitcoin’s current bear market kicked off with the Oct. 10 crash last year, which triggered widespread deleveraging across both losing and profitable positions. In a sense, it was the opposite of the Fed’s quantitative easing response to past crises, in which liquidity injections lifted both weak and strong assets alike.

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On Oct. 10, exchanges socialized losses to protect their own systems. Longs got liquidated on price, which is normal. Then, profitable shorts were force-closed anyway, because the exchange’s insurance fund couldn’t absorb losses coming from the other side. Being right and being well-capitalized didn’t matter, and perpetuals faced a lot of criticism then.

But Krenn said the problem wasn’t with perps..

“It is not a perpetual problem. It is a crypto exchange margin model problem,” Krenn said. “Dated futures on those same venues sit behind the same insurance funds and the same deleveraging queue.”

“The distinction that matters is not perpetual versus dated [futures]. It is whether you are facing a proper clearing house with a mutualized default fund, or an exchange that socializes losses onto the winners,” Krenn added.

The asymmetry almost nobody prices correctly

Krenn, the institutional trader, offered one insight that inverts what most people assume about perp risk.

“Being long is the structurally safer side,” Krenn said.

His logic is that positive funding is easy to arbitrage away. Anyone holding stablecoins can buy spot, sell the perp, and pocket the spread, thereby compressing positive funding.

However, when the funding rate is negative, the arbitrage, involving a long position in the per and short position in the spot, the so-called reverse cash-and-carry is easier said than done. This only works if you can short the underlying token and only existing holders can readily short, and it becomes even more difficult if the circulating supply is small and concentrated. With arbitrage constrained, the gap between perp and spot prices can persist, meaning funding rates can stay extremely negative for long stretches.

Funding rates can stay extremely high or low for a long time.

“So the long side has a bounded cost and an unbounded upside. The short side has a bounded upside and an unbounded cost,” Krenn explained. “That asymmetry sits in very few risk models.”

He pointed to lending protocol Euler’s token this year as an example: a hard run on a listing, a small and concentrated float, funding on the perp going deeply negative, a situation where shorts “paying in the region of one percent every four hours,” to longs with almost nobody able to compress it because almost nobody had the token stash.

The takeaway

Perps seem to have democratized futures trading by solving the problem of access, cost and margin efficiency, but they are not without unique pain points, namely, the

volatile funding-rate exposure that can’t be quantified while taking bets and can’t be hedged once the trade is on.

As Krenn put it: “Until there is a liquid dated curve in crypto, the whole market is carrying an interest rate exposure it cannot price and cannot hedge.”

In the meantime, funding is the tax everyone pays for easy access to this leveraged market.

HYPE fell below $55 after Hyperliquid activated permissionless HIP-4 deployments on testnet, with whale transfers and broader crypto market weakness weighing on the token.

Hyperliquid opens HIP-4 deployments on testnet

Hyperliquid has released the first implementation of permissionless deployments for its HIP-4 prediction-market framework on testnet.

The update allows developers to begin testing their own prediction and outcome markets on the decentralized exchange. Hyperliquid said it plans to introduce more features, including configurable fees and additional testnet templates.

HIP-4 extends the permissionless listing model used by HIP-3, which allows developers to deploy perpetual futures markets for different assets. The newer framework applies a similar approach to event contracts, placing Hyperliquid in closer competition with prediction-market platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi.

A mainnet launch is expected to follow the testing phase, although Hyperliquid has not provided a confirmed date. Developers will likely use the testnet period to assess market settlement, liquidity, and contract configuration before deploying products involving real capital.

HIP-4 activity declines after the World Cup

Current activity on HIP-4 remains limited compared with established prediction-market platforms. Blockworks data shows that HIP-4 markets have about $182,000 in open interest and $881,000 in notional trading volume.

Sports contracts have accounted for most of the open positions. However, open interest has declined since the end of the 2026 FIFA World Cup earlier in July, reducing activity across Hyperliquid’s early event markets.

Permissionless deployment could broaden the available contract range beyond sports. Developers may eventually create markets tied to economic releases, elections and other measurable events, subject to the platform’s rules and applicable regulations.

The rollout also carries operational risks. Crypto.news reported on July 28 that Hyperliquid’s SK Hynix perpetual contract briefly dropped about 17.9% after an unusually low pre-market trade in South Korea affected its oracle price.

The market, listed as xyz:SKHX and displayed as SKHYNIX-USDC, tracks the U.S. dollar value of SK Hynix shares and offers leverage of up to 10 times. A Hyperliquid representative said Trade.xyz deployed and operated the market under HIP-3. Trade.xyz is investigating the incident and plans to release an update after completing its review.

Although that incident involved HIP-3 rather than HIP-4, it shows the importance of reliable pricing and settlement systems as Hyperliquid opens market creation to more developers.

HYPE price loses the $55 level

HYPE traded near $54.70 at the time of reporting, down almost 2% over the previous 24 hours. The decline pushed the token below $55 despite the HIP-4 testnet announcement.

The move followed weakness across the broader crypto market as Bitcoin fell below $64,000. Risk appetite declined amid reports that the United States and Israel were discussing a land blockade on Iran, raising concerns about a further escalation of the conflict.

On-chain transfers added to the pressure. Lookonchain identified a whale that acquired HYPE at an average price of about $18 several months ago before unstaking the tokens and depositing them with FalconX and Coinbase Prime.

Coinbase stock extended its post-earnings sell-off on Friday, falling more than 12% as weaker trading revenue and a $359 million quarterly loss raised concerns about the exchange’s near-term growth.

Coinbase stock extends its post-earnings decline

Coinbase shares opened under heavy selling pressure after the company reported weaker-than-expected second-quarter results.

COIN traded at $143.77 at the time of the chart reading, down $19.81, or 12.11%, for the session. The stock touched an intraday low of $139.11 after opening at $153.10, showing that the sell-off accelerated after the opening bell.

The move followed a 5.12% premarket decline to $155.20. Coinbase had closed Thursday at $163.58 after gaining 2.18% during regular trading, but the earnings reaction erased that advance and pushed the shares to their lowest level since late June.

Weakness across the broader cryptocurrency market added to the pressure. Bitcoin fell 1.34% to approximately $63,655, while the total crypto market capitalization declined 1.11% to $2.18 trillion.

It matters for Coinbase because transaction fees remain tied to crypto prices and trading activity. Lower volatility or falling asset prices can reduce retail participation, even when the exchange gains market share.

Q2 revenue miss exposes trading slowdown

Coinbase reported $1.22 billion in second-quarter revenue, missing the $1.29 billion Wall Street estimate. Revenue fell 14% from the previous quarter and 18.5% from the same period last year.

The company also recorded a net loss of approximately $359 million. Lower retail and institutional transaction revenue weighed on the result as digital asset trading slowed across key markets.

Coinbase nevertheless said its share of global crypto trading volume reached a record 10.3%, up from 9.1% during the first quarter. The exchange has now gained market share for three consecutive quarters despite weaker conditions across the wider market.

Derivatives activity remained close to the previous quarter’s record, while event contracts and related revenue increased 106% quarter over quarter. That business surpassed a $100 million annualized revenue rate, according to the company.

Stablecoins also provided a source of growth. Average USDC held across Coinbase products reached a record $20 billion, representing more than 30% of the stablecoin’s circulating supply.

Chief Executive Brian Armstrong has positioned stablecoins, the Base blockchain and prediction markets as important parts of Coinbase’s expansion beyond spot cryptocurrency trading. Subscription and services revenue could also reduce its exposure to sharp changes in transaction activity, although the latest earnings show that trading conditions still have a large effect on overall performance.

Coinbase stock breaks below a key technical level

Coinbase’s daily chart shows that the earnings decline pushed the stock below the lower boundary of its Bollinger Bands.

COIN traded beneath the lower band at $149.38 after reaching $139.11. A drop below that boundary suggests the selling move has stretched beyond the stock’s recent trading range, although it does not guarantee an immediate recovery.

The daily relative strength index fell to 39.19, below its signal average of 49.51. Momentum has weakened sharply, but the RSI remains above the conventional oversold threshold of 30, leaving room for additional losses if sellers remain active.

Immediate support sits between $139 and $140, where buyers briefly entered during Friday’s decline. A decisive break below that area could expose the $130–$135 region, which supported the stock during its February sell-off.

On the upside, COIN must first recover the lower Bollinger Band near $149.38. Further resistance sits around Friday’s opening range between $153.10 and $153.68.

A sustained rebound above those levels could shift attention toward the Bollinger midpoint at $161.88. That level now stands close to Thursday’s $163.58 closing price and represents a more demanding test for any earnings-driven recovery.

Leadership changes add to the uncertainty

The earnings decline follows several changes across Coinbase’s senior management team. As crypto.news reported one week before the results, the exchange replaced or reassigned four senior leaders after cutting 14% of its workforce.

Chief People Officer Lawrence Brock is scheduled to leave his role on Aug. 17, with Dominique Baillet expected to succeed him. Greg Tusar, co-head of Coinbase Institutional, has moved into a policy-focused position.

Paul Grewal also planned to leave his roles as chief legal officer and corporate secretary on July 31. Molly Abraham is set to become general counsel and secretary, while Ryan VanGrack will serve as Coinbase’s first vice chair and head of corporate affairs.

Coinbase separately appointed early company engineer Rob Witoff as chief technology officer on July 28. Armstrong credited Witoff with helping make Coinbase “one of the most AI-enabled companies in the world,” although that description represents the chief executive’s assessment rather than an independently measured ranking.

For U.S. investors, the earnings miss places more attention on Coinbase’s ability to turn its wider product strategy into recurring revenue. The company has expanded across derivatives, stablecoins, stocks and prediction markets, but COIN’s near-term direction may continue to depend on crypto trading volumes and whether the shares can recover above $149.