Crypto World
What are RWA perpetuals? Stock and commodity perps
Crypto exchanges now let you trade Tesla, gold, oil, and even pre-IPO companies like SpaceX and OpenAI as perpetual futures, around the clock, with leverage, without owning a single share. This guide explains how RWA perpetuals work, how a contract tracks an asset the blockchain cannot see, what happens when the stock market closes and the perp does not, and the real risks behind the most ambitious expansion perps have ever attempted.
Summary
- RWA perps bring crypto-style perpetual futures to off-chain assets like stocks, commodities, currencies, and private companies.
- These contracts provide price exposure only, not ownership, dividends, votes, or any claim on the underlying asset.
- The oracle is the core risk layer because it decides what off-chain price the contract tracks and what price can liquidate traders.
- Closed-market gaps make stock and commodity perps structurally different from crypto perps that trade against live spot markets 24/7.
- RWA perps are best understood as trading and hedging instruments, not long-term substitutes for owning stocks or tokenized shares.
The most traded instrument in crypto has started eating the rest of finance. Perpetual futures, the leveraged, never-expiring contracts that dominate crypto volume, are no longer limited to Bitcoin and Ethereum: on a growing list of venues you can now open a leveraged position on Tesla stock at 3 a.m. on a Sunday, short gold from a self-custodied wallet, or trade contracts tracking companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic that have never listed on any stock exchange at all. Coinbase’s rollout of pre-IPO perpetuals on exactly those names made headlines this month, and decentralized venues have quietly listed perps on US equities, indices, foreign exchange, and commodities for over a year.
These instruments are called RWA perpetuals, perps on real-world assets, and they represent something truly new: synthetic, around-the-clock, globally accessible exposure to assets that live entirely outside crypto, delivered through contracts that never touch the underlying. No shares are bought, no gold is vaulted, no barrel of oil changes hands. The entire construction rests on a price feed and a payment mechanism, which is either an elegant triumph of financial engineering or a stack of risks wearing a stock ticker, depending on which part of it you are looking at.
This guide explains RWA perps from first principles: what they are and how they differ from ordinary crypto perps and from tokenized stocks, the oracle machinery that lets a blockchain track an off-chain price, the strange problems that arise when a 24/7 contract tracks a market that closes on weekends, the pre-IPO frontier where perps track companies with no public price at all, the legal battle over what these contracts even are, and the honest risk list anyone should read before trading equity exposure inside a crypto venue.
Perps in one paragraph, and what changes with RWAs
A perpetual future is a derivative contract that lets a trader take a leveraged long or short position on an asset’s price and hold it indefinitely, because unlike a traditional future it never expires. Its price is tethered to the real asset’s price by the funding rate, a recurring payment between longs and shorts that nudges the contract back toward the underlying whenever it drifts: trade above the reference price and longs pay shorts, encouraging selling; trade below and shorts pay longs. Margin collateralizes the position and liquidation closes it if losses approach the margin posted. If any of that machinery is unfamiliar, the full plain-English guide to perps, funding, and liquidations is the place to start, because everything below assumes it.
Now change one word. A Bitcoin perp tracks an asset that trades on the same rails, around the clock, with deep on-chain and exchange price sources. An RWA perp tracks an asset that trades somewhere else entirely: a stock on Nasdaq, gold in London, oil in futures pits, a currency in the interbank market. The contract mechanics are identical, the same funding rate, the same margin, the same liquidation engine, but the reference price now comes from outside crypto, through an oracle, from a market with its own opening hours, holidays, halts, and corporate events. Every distinctive property of RWA perps, good and bad, flows from that single change. The trader gets exposure to Apple without a brokerage account, without owning shares, without market-hours restrictions, and without the venue holding any Apple at all; the trade-off is that the entire product is only as good as the price feed and the venue’s handling of the moments when the real market is dark.
It is worth separating RWA perps cleanly from their tokenized cousins, because the two are constantly conflated. A tokenized stock is a claim: somewhere, an issuer holds real shares and mints tokens representing them, with custody, redemption, and dividend questions attached. An RWA perp is not a claim on anything; it is a bet settled in stablecoins whose size happens to be indexed to a stock’s price. You cannot redeem a perp for a share, you receive no dividends, and you own nothing except a margin position. The perp’s advantage is precisely that it needs no custody chain, no share purchases, and no issuer, which is why perps on real-world assets scaled faster than tokenized versions of the same assets; its limitation is that it delivers only price exposure, nothing else a share provides.
The oracle problem: teaching a blockchain the price of Tesla
A blockchain cannot see Nasdaq. Every RWA perp therefore depends on an oracle, infrastructure that fetches off-chain prices and delivers them on-chain, and the oracle design is the single most important line in any RWA perp’s documentation, because it determines what price you are liquidated against.
Serious implementations layer defenses. Prices are pulled from multiple independent sources, exchange feeds, institutional data providers, aggregators, and combined into an index price so no single source can be spoofed. The contract then computes a mark price, typically a smoothed or median-filtered version of the index, and it is the mark price, not the last trade on the venue itself, that drives liquidations, so a momentary wick on the perp’s own order book cannot cascade positions. Funding is computed from the gap between the perp’s trading price and the index. All of this mirrors crypto-perp best practice; the RWA twist is that equity and commodity data is licensed, paywalled, and published on the real market’s schedule, so oracles for stocks tend to involve professional data vendors and update rules for what to publish when the source market is closed.
The failure modes are exactly what you would guess. A stale feed liquidates traders against yesterday’s price; a manipulated thin source poisons the index; a decimal error in one vendor’s print, without median filtering, becomes a mass liquidation event. These are not hypotheticals in DeFi’s history, oracle failures are among its most reliably recurring disasters, and the diligence question for any RWA perp venue is boringly specific: how many sources, what aggregation, what staleness rules, and what happened the last time one input misbehaved.
When the market sleeps and the perp does not
Here is the genuinely novel problem RWA perps introduced, one crypto perps never had: the underlying market closes. Nasdaq trades six and a half hours a day, five days a week; the perp trades every hour of every day. For roughly two-thirds of the perp’s life, there is no live reference price at all.
What happens in the gap is price discovery in reverse. During market hours, the perp follows the stock. Overnight and on weekends, the perp becomes the only live market for that exposure, and it drifts on crypto-native flows, news, and speculation, anchored only by traders’ expectations of where the stock will open. Then comes Monday’s open, and the stock either validates the weekend perp price or gaps away from it, at which point funding and arbitrage violently reconcile the two. Traders who study these venues have observed that weekend equity-perp prices function as a real-time forecast of Monday’s open, which is fascinating for researchers and dangerous for the overleveraged: a position that survives the whole weekend can be liquidated in the first minute of the cash session when the reference price jumps to reality.
Corporate actions add a second layer of housekeeping crypto never needed. Stocks split, pay dividends, get halted, and get delisted. A 10-for-1 split must be handled by adjusting the contract or the index, or every position would instantly show a 90% move; dividends create predictable price drops the perp must account for, typically through funding adjustments, since perp holders receive no dividend; a trading halt in the underlying leaves the oracle publishing nothing while the perp keeps trading. Every serious RWA-perp venue has written rules for each event, and the difference between venues is largely the quality of those rules, which nobody reads until the day they matter.
Where RWA perps trade, and how the peg holds in practice
The venue landscape splits along the same centralized-versus-decentralized line as the rest of crypto, with the decentralized side, unusually, having led. On-chain perp exchanges pioneered equity and forex perps because listing a new market there requires an oracle feed and a risk parameter file, not a licensing negotiation: Hyperliquid, the dominant on-chain perp venue with roughly 70% of decentralized open interest, lists perps across crypto, US equities, indices, foreign exchange, and commodities, and peers like dYdX and GMX cover overlapping ground. The centralized side arrived with 2026’s regulatory thaw, Coinbase’s CFTC-supervised perp products and pre-IPO contracts being the landmark, and carries the opposite trade-offs: eligibility gating and custody of your margin, in exchange for regulated recourse and deeper fiat integration. The decentralized share of total perp open interest has climbed to roughly 13.5% from under 4% a year earlier, and RWA listings are a visible driver, because the assets people most want to trade at 3 a.m. are precisely the ones whose official markets are closed.
It is worth dwelling on how the peg actually holds for an RWA perp, because the mechanism is subtler than for crypto perps. With a Bitcoin perp, arbitrageurs enforce the peg directly: if the perp trades rich, they short it and buy spot Bitcoin, a riskless-ish basis trade available around the clock. With a stock perp, the spot leg is only available during market hours, so during the trading day the peg is enforced by the same basis arbitrage, brokerage account on one side, perp on the other, and it holds tightly. Overnight, the arbitrage is unavailable, and the only tether is the funding rate pushing against crowd positioning plus traders’ willingness to fade a drift they expect the open to punish. The result, visible in the data, is a peg that breathes: tight during cash sessions, loose and expectation-driven outside them, snapping taut at each open. Traders who internalize that rhythm stop being surprised by it; funding on equity perps also inherits the rhythm, often resetting sharply around opens as the reconciliation happens.
One further mechanical note: margin and settlement on RWA perps are almost universally in stablecoins, which means a trader’s collateral is exposed to stablecoin risk on top of position risk, and profits on a Tesla short arrive as USDC, not as anything resembling a brokerage balance. The entire experience is crypto-native from margin to settlement; only the price is borrowed from the outside world.
The frontier: perps on companies with no price
The strangest members of the family are the pre-IPO perpetuals, contracts tracking private companies, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, that have no exchange-listed price to reference at all. Here the oracle question becomes almost philosophical: what does the contract track? In practice, venues construct reference prices from private-market data, secondary-share transaction reports, disclosed funding rounds, and administrator judgment, published as an index that updates far less frequently and far less verifiably than any stock feed. The funding mechanism then tethers the perp to that constructed number.
The appeal is obvious and real: exposure to the most coveted private companies on earth has historically been reserved for venture funds and accredited insiders, and a perp democratizes at least the price bet. The caveats deserve equal billing. The reference price is an estimate with wide error bars, not a market print; liquidity in these contracts is thin relative to major perps; the gap between a private valuation and an eventual IPO price can be enormous in either direction; and a trader is ultimately taking positions against a number a small set of parties assembles. It is the frontier, with everything that word implies, and its emergence within regulated American venues in 2026 says as much about the regulatory moment as about the product.
What the law says a perp is
That regulatory moment is its own story, because RWA perps sit precisely on the fault line American law is redrawing. Perpetual futures spent a decade as an offshore product, and 2026 is the year they came onshore: the CFTC approved US-regulated perpetual contracts, Coinbase secured routes to offer perp-style products to eligible American customers, and equity and pre-IPO perps followed. Immediately, the definitional fight began, most visibly in litigation between CME and the CFTC over what legally distinguishes a perpetual from the dated futures the incumbent exchanges have licensed for decades. The answer matters commercially, an instrument classified one way slots into existing licensing regimes and another way does not, and it matters for RWA perps most of all, because a perp on a stock brushes against securities law in ways a perp on Bitcoin does not. The broader classification architecture being decided in Congress, mapped in this publication’s guide to the pending market-structure law, will determine which agency’s rules these products ultimately live under, and traders should treat the current arrangements as provisional. Meanwhile the traditional-finance side is converging from the other direction, with the DTCC piloting tokenized versions of the very equities these perps synthesize, a pincer movement whose endpoint, real assets and synthetic exposure sharing on-chain rails, is visible even if its timeline is not.
A brief sizing note grounds all of this. Perpetual futures as a class did roughly $61 trillion of volume in 2025 with daily totals routinely above $100 billion, several multiples of spot; RWA contracts are a young single-digit share of that machine, growing from a base near zero two years ago. The scale of the host explains the stakes: even a modest share of perp flow migrating to equity and commodity tickers represents volume that rivals mid-sized national stock exchanges, arriving on rails no securities regulator designed.
Who actually uses RWA perps
The user base sorts into recognizable types, and knowing them clarifies what the product is for. The largest group is access-constrained traders: people in jurisdictions without cheap brokerage access to US equities, for whom a perp on an index or a mega-cap is the first practical route to that exposure at all, leverage aside. The second is the crypto-native hedger: a fund or treasury holding volatile crypto that wants to offset macro exposure, short an index against a token portfolio, hedge dollar strength through forex perps, without opening brokerage relationships and moving capital across the fiat border. The third is the weekend and event trader, using the perp’s always-open market to position around news that breaks when exchanges are closed, earnings leaks, geopolitical shocks, Sunday-night macro, accepting gap risk in exchange for being early. The fourth is the basis and funding trader, harvesting the structural spreads between the perp, the underlying, and the calendar of opens and closes, the professionals for whom the peg’s breathing rhythm is not a hazard but the product itself.
What the list conspicuously lacks is the buy-and-hold investor, and that is the honest boundary of the instrument. A perp position pays funding indefinitely, carries liquidation risk permanently, and confers no ownership; holding one for months as a stock substitute is almost always dominated by simply owning the stock or its tokenized form. RWA perps are a trading and hedging instrument that happens to wear equity tickers, not an investment product, and most of the grief in the category comes from users who mistook one for the other.
The honest risk list
Everything above condenses into a short list anyone should hold against the marketing.
First, you own nothing. An RWA perp delivers price exposure, not shares, dividends, votes, or any claim; in a venue insolvency you are an unsecured creditor of a margin balance. Second, the oracle is the product; a perp on Tesla is really a perp on someone’s Tesla price feed, and its integrity ceiling is the feed’s. Third, the closed-market gap is a structural hazard: weekend positions carry reconciliation risk at every open, and leverage that feels safe on Saturday can be fatal at 9:30 on Monday. Fourth, all the ordinary perp dangers apply at full strength, funding costs that erode crowded positions, liquidation mechanics that work exactly as brutally here as everywhere else, and thin order books where large orders suffer meaningful execution costs. Fifth, the legal ground is actively shifting, and products available today may be restructured, restricted, or geofenced tomorrow.
Against those risks stands what RWA perps genuinely deliver: the first globally accessible, always-open, self-custodial route to price exposure on the world’s most important assets, with shorting and leverage included, no brokerage gatekeeping, and settlement in stablecoins. That is not a small thing, and it explains why volume has arrived faster than infrastructure maturity. The sensible posture is the one perps have always demanded, respect the leverage, know your liquidation price, read the contract specifications, and add the RWA-specific habits: check the oracle design, check the corporate-actions policy, and never carry a weekend position sized for a market that cannot gap.
The larger meaning of the category is worth one closing paragraph. RWA perps are the first instrument through which crypto’s market structure, rather than its assets, went global: what is being exported is not a coin but a way of trading, continuous, self-custodial, leverage-native, and settled in stablecoins, applied to the underlyings the rest of the world already cares about. Whether that export ends with crypto venues capturing equity flow, or with traditional exchanges adopting perpetual mechanics and around-the-clock sessions to repatriate it, and the incumbents’ own moves toward continuous clearing suggest the second path is live, the direction of convergence is set. The trader’s edge, for now, lies in understanding both worlds at once: the perp machinery crypto built, and the market-hours, corporate-actions, oracle-fed reality of the assets it has annexed.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Perpetual futures are high-risk leveraged instruments and you can lose your entire margin. Product availability and regulation vary by jurisdiction and are changing rapidly as of July 8, 2026. Always do your own research.
Frequently asked questions
What is an RWA perpetual in simple terms?
An RWA perpetual is a crypto-style perpetual futures contract whose price tracks a real-world asset, a stock, a commodity, a currency, or even a private company, instead of a cryptocurrency. It lets you take a leveraged long or short position on that asset’s price, around the clock, without owning it, with the contract kept in line by funding payments against an oracle-delivered reference price.
How is an RWA perp different from a tokenized stock?
A tokenized stock is a token backed by real shares held somewhere by an issuer, a claim you can in principle redeem. An RWA perp is backed by nothing; it is a margin bet whose payoff is indexed to the asset’s price. Perps offer easier leverage, shorting, and no custody chain; tokenized stocks offer actual ownership economics like dividends. They solve different problems and carry different risks.
Do I receive dividends from a stock perp?
No. Perp holders own no shares and receive no dividends, votes, or corporate rights. Venues typically account for dividends through index or funding adjustments so that the predictable price drop on the ex-dividend date does not unfairly transfer money between longs and shorts, but no dividend is ever paid to you.
What happens to my stock perp when the market is closed?
The perp keeps trading. With no live reference price, it floats on traders’ expectations of where the stock will reopen, effectively becoming a forecast market. When the real market opens, the reference price jumps to reality and funding and arbitrage pull the perp into line, which can be violent if news broke during the closure. Overleveraged weekend positions are the classic casualty.
How can there be a perp on a private company like SpaceX?
The venue constructs a reference price from private-market data such as secondary transactions and funding rounds, and the perp’s funding mechanism tethers the contract to that constructed index. It provides otherwise unavailable exposure, with the major caveat that the reference price is an estimate rather than a market print, updated less often and less verifiably than any stock feed.
Are RWA perps legal in the United States?
The landscape shifted in 2026 as the CFTC approved US-regulated perpetual contracts and major venues brought perp-style products onshore, including equity and pre-IPO contracts for eligible customers. Classification disputes are active, including litigation over how perps differ from dated futures, and pending market-structure legislation will shape the final rules, so availability depends on venue, product, and jurisdiction and should be verified rather than assumed.
What is the biggest risk specific to RWA perps?
The oracle and the closed-market gap. Your position is marked and liquidated against a constructed reference price, so feed quality is everything, and when the underlying market is closed the perp can drift far from where the asset will actually reopen. Both risks come on top of the standard perp dangers of leverage, funding costs, and liquidation.
Can I get liquidated while the stock market is closed?
Yes. The perp trades and marks positions continuously, so a weekend move in the perp’s mark price can liquidate you before the underlying market ever opens. Equally, a position can survive the weekend and be liquidated instantly at the open when the reference price gaps. Sizing for the gap, not for the calm, is the core discipline.
Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.
A crypto user lost nearly $1 million after approving a malicious token permission on Ethereum, according to onchain tracking shared by Scam Sniffer. The incident highlights how phishing “token approvals” continue to evolve from one-off scams into repeatable theft workflows.
Scam Sniffer reported that the victim’s loss was 999,999 USDT (USDT) linked to an Ethereum phishing approval. The attacker first attempted to drain funds through multicall requests but failed due to insufficient balance, then immediately succeeded seconds later by executing follow-up transfers that removed the remaining funds.
Key takeaways
- A single “approve” on an Ethereum token can grant an attacker sweeping power, allowing losses to be extracted quickly via automated transfers.
- Scam Sniffer’s report describes multi-step draining: an initial multicall attempt may fail, but subsequent transactions can still empty the wallet.
- Approval-phishing remains a widely used tactic within broader onchain scam ecosystems, including investment fraud.
- Researchers warn that scammers often reuse the same wallet patterns—meaning one uncovered incident can reveal a broader network of activity.
- Address poisoning still compounds the risk, and users should treat copied addresses and pasted contract or wallet data with extra caution.
A nearly $1 million theft triggered by a token approval
The phishing mechanism centers on token approvals that appear routine. In these scams, victims are tricked into signing a transaction that grants a malicious actor permission to spend tokens or route funds from the wallet. The approval itself may be presented as a small step—such as enabling a transfer, interaction, or “verification”—but it can instead grant broad or lasting access that the attacker immediately exploits.
In the reported case, Scam Sniffer said the script recalculated the victim’s remaining balance and then pulled the exact amount left after the first drain attempt. That meant the attacker did not need to guess the wallet’s contents—execution was adjusted in real time to maximize extraction.
On Etherscan, the scam’s activity is reflected across three transactions culminating in the extraction of 999,999 USDT. (See: Etherscan transaction.)
Why approval phishing keeps working
Approval phishing is a recurring pattern rather than a new trick. CertiK data cited in the coverage indicates that in 2025 phishing losses totaled $723 million across 248 incidents. The structure of these scams is consistent: social engineering prompts victims to click “approve,” but the approval hands over spending capability to an attacker-controlled contract.
CertiK’s figures are particularly important because they suggest the problem is not isolated. Approval phishing scales well for criminals: once a victim grants token permissions, the attacker can use that permission to drain balances without requiring ongoing interaction from the victim.
Industry-wide, the scale of phishing losses remains high. The article notes that the crypto sector recorded $366 million in phishing losses in the first half of the year, reinforcing that approval-based permission scams are part of a broader wave of onchain fraud rather than a niche threat.
Scammers reuse wallets and permission patterns
The broader risk is amplified when criminals reuse the same infrastructure and wallet targets. Earlier in the month, a separate incident was reported involving a victim losing $1.65 million after connecting to a fake exchange and signing a malicious contract. In that scenario, the approval gave attackers “unlimited access,” enabling an automated sweeper to drain funds, according to researcher Ryan Coleman.
Chainalysis previously reported that onchain scams pulled in at least $14 billion in 2025, with investment scams remaining a dominant category. In Chainalysis materials on approval phishing, the firm explains that approval-based tactics are one way investment fraud moves from social engineering into automated onchain theft.
Chainalysis also cautioned that criminals reuse the same wallets, leverage legitimate approval features from contracts, and employ consistent cash-out routes across victims. That reuse matters for investors and users because it changes what “one report” can mean: when investigators map recurring permission and withdrawal behaviors, it can expose a wider network of coordinated activity rather than a standalone attacker.
Chainalysis senior investigator Renato Bastos is quoted in the underlying coverage explaining that each uncovered report can reveal a broader network because scammers repeat wallet usage and operational paths. Readers should watch for whether similar approval signatures, contract patterns, or draining methods recur across incidents—those repetitions often indicate systematic campaigns.
Address poisoning adds another layer of risk
Phishing token approvals are not the only mechanism used to steal funds. The coverage also points to address poisoning, where scammers create wallet addresses that look similar to legitimate ones and then send small “dust” amounts to those near-matching addresses. When victims copy and paste the address, the dusted lookalike can cause users to send funds to the attacker rather than the intended recipient.
The risk is especially relevant on ecosystems where manual copy/paste workflows remain common. The article notes that MetaMask launched live address poisoning detection in June. That tool compares each pasted address with addresses the wallet has previously interacted with—designed to flag suspicious new or unexpected addresses that match known patterns for deception.
With both approval phishing and address poisoning in play, the common theme is user interaction: scams manipulate what people think they’re signing or sending. Defenses therefore require slowing down and verifying the exact permission or recipient address before proceeding.
What to watch next
Approval phishing incidents like the reported 999,999 USDT theft tend to spread quickly when criminals refine execution and reuse wallet patterns. Users should be alert to any signature request connected to token approvals, avoid rushing through prompts, and consider detection tools—while security teams and onchain analysts will likely continue tracking recurring draining scripts and shared infrastructure to identify campaigns before they expand further.
European currencies are showing mixed performance as they attempt to stabilise following their recent decline and the release of the Federal Reserve’s latest meeting minutes. The minutes revealed growing concern over persistent inflationary pressures, with several policymakers supporting the possibility of an immediate interest rate increase, while the majority maintained a more cautious approach to further monetary tightening. Overall, the document highlighted ongoing divisions within the Fed over the future path of interest rates but maintained a broadly hawkish backdrop for the US dollar, as further rate hikes have not been ruled out should inflation remain elevated.
Fresh uncertainty has also emerged from renewed tensions in the Middle East. Following the latest escalation between the United States and Iran, investors have once again shifted their focus to the risk of a broader regional conflict and the potential disruption of energy supplies through key shipping routes. Rising geopolitical tensions continue to support demand for safe-haven assets while increasing concerns that higher energy prices could fuel another wave of inflation, further complicating the Federal Reserve’s prospects for policy easing. Against this backdrop, European currencies are attempting to stabilise, although persistent uncertainty continues to limit the scope for a sustained recovery.
EUR/USD
Following its recent decline, EUR/USD has once again tested support around 1.1390 before attempting to stabilise. Buyers have so far managed to keep the pair above its June lows, although the broader technical picture remains fragile. Technical indicators suggest the pair could recover towards the 1.1450–1.1470 region, supported by several bullish reversal patterns on the daily chart. However, if the pair is rejected from that resistance area and fails to establish a foothold above it, downside pressure could return, exposing 1.1330–1.1350 as the next support zone.
Key events for EUR/USD:
- Today, 09:00 (GMT+3): Germany Trade Balance
- Today, 13:00 (GMT+3): Spain Thomson Reuters/Ipsos Primary Consumer Sentiment Index (PCSI)
- Today, 15:30 (GMT+3): US Initial Jobless Claims
GBP/USD
GBP/USD continues to outperform, extending its recovery after rebounding from the 1.3160–1.3200 support zone. Sterling has regained ground towards 1.3400, reflecting continued short-term buying interest. A sustained move above 1.3400 could pave the way for further gains towards 1.3460–1.3500. Conversely, a decisive break below 1.3320 would invalidate the current bullish outlook.
Key events for GBP/USD:
- Today, 13:00 (GMT+3): UK Thomson Reuters/Ipsos Primary Consumer Sentiment Index (PCSI)
- Today, 16:00 (GMT+3): Speech by FOMC member John Williams
- Today, 20:30 (GMT+3): Speech by Dallas Federal Reserve President Lorie Logan
Key Takeaways
European currencies are attempting to regain stability after their recent decline, but the technical outlook remains mixed. EUR/USD is holding above key support near 1.1390, although the risk of renewed downside persists. By contrast, GBP/USD continues to recover and is now testing significant resistance around 1.3400. The next directional move will largely depend on developments in the Middle East, further guidance from the Federal Reserve, and whether buyers can secure sustained breaks above key technical levels.
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Blockchain security experts are urging crypto protocols to reaudit their smart contracts as AI tooling is making it easier for hackers to identify vulnerabilities more quickly than ever before.
“Our data argues for continuous review rather than a one-time audit,” TRM Labs head of policy Ari Redbord told Cointelegraph, adding that “attack techniques are moving faster than a single audit from launch day can account for.”
“An audit built for last year’s attack patterns leaves a protocol exposed to this year’s as bad actors are changing up.”
CertiK reported Monday that hackers stole another $1.32 billion in the first half of 2026 and have adopted increasingly sophisticated strategies in response to strengthened security measures across the industry.
One of those strategies has been to revisit old codebases, CertiK said, adding that the attackers’ efforts have likely been “aided by improved automated tooling for identifying latent vulnerabilities at scale.”
One of the most recent incidents involved privacy-focused blockchain Zcash, where Shielded Labs security engineer Taylor Hornby found a major security vulnerability using a custom auditing agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8. The bug has since been patched.
The security vulnerability, which existed for four years, could have enabled undetectable counterfeiting inside the Orchard shielded pool, one of the network’s key privacy features.
“The window of maximum vulnerability does not close after launch,” CertiK warned. “Projects operating legacy infrastructure should treat reauditing as a recurring operational requirement rather than a one-time exercise conducted at deployment.”
In December, Anthropic conducted a study finding that AI agents found $4.6 million worth of exploitable vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Meanwhile, there is more than $72.3 billion worth of crypto locked across hundreds of DeFi protocols, giving hackers plenty of incentive to exploit vulnerable smart contracts.
SlowMist’s estimate of total crypto losses from blockchain hacks. Source: SlowMist
Defunct crypto protocols targeted
On June 14, hackers exploited a smart contract vulnerability to steal $2.1 million from the Aztec Connect, which had been shut down since March 2023.
Five days later, a smart contract on the decentralized exchange mySwap was exploited for $300,000, even after the mySwap user interface had been closed to new liquidity deposits for more than six months.
A more fortunate event took place in May, when a white hat, known as “0xflorent,” helped recover 1,003 Ether (ETH) worth over $1.72 million from 48 investors involved in the Hong Coin (HONG) initial coin offering in 2016.
Related: ‘All DeFi unsafe’ claim sparks AI security debate after April hack surge
The ICO failed to launch after missing its funding target, and the funds remained locked in the smart contract due to a bug in the auto-refund function.
Reaudits only part of the equation, TRM says
The work doesn’t stop with hardening the codebase and infrastructure, Redbord said, explaining that the broader industry and regulators need to continue finding ways to mitigate malicious cyberactivity from North Korea and disrupt Chinese money laundering networks:
“Protocols can lock their doors, but someone still has to go after the actor breaking in.”
Features: DeFi hacks shake institutional confidence as risks outpace yields
Key Takeaways
- CEO Seb Audet confirmed Zapper will cease all operations on Aug. 3, 2026
- At its height, the platform served 2 million active monthly users and facilitated $13 billion in transactions
- The company secured $15 million in Series A funding in 2021 from investors including Mark Cuban and Sound Ventures
- Zapper’s closure reflects a broader trend of crypto platform exits throughout 2026
- While crypto VC funding increased, deal volume has plummeted nine-fold over 10 consecutive quarters
Zapper, a prominent decentralized finance portfolio management tool, is shutting down permanently. Co-founder and CEO Seb Audet announced Wednesday that the platform will completely cease operations on Aug. 3, 2026, bringing an end to its nearly seven-year journey in the DeFi space.
In his announcement, Audet revealed the team had “evaluated a number of different options” before concluding that “an orderly wind down is the best course of action.” When pressed about the rationale behind the decision, he offered a straightforward explanation: “At the end of the day, the market decides.”
Rapid Rise in DeFi’s Early Days
Launched in 2019, Zapper made an immediate impact by winning Kyber’s DeFi Hackathon during its inaugural year. This early success propelled the startup to raise $1.5 million in seed capital by early 2020.
The momentum continued through May 2021, when Framework Ventures led a $15 million Series A investment round. Notable backers included Mark Cuban and Sound Ventures, the investment firm co-founded by actor Ashton Kutcher.
During its prime operating period, Zapper attracted 2 million monthly active users. The platform successfully processed over $13 billion worth of transactions across its lifespan.
The service enabled users to link their cryptocurrency wallets to oversee DeFi holdings, track liquidity pool positions, coordinate yield farming activities, and receive alerts about potential airdrops.
Zapper later expanded its capabilities to include decentralized exchange aggregation, non-fungible token functionality, and community features such as a Farcaster integration.
Growing Trend of Industry Exits
Zapper’s shutdown is far from an isolated incident. Numerous cryptocurrency platforms have announced closures throughout 2026.
TapTools, an analytics platform serving the Cardano ecosystem, terminated operations in June. Bitcoin DeFi protocol Botanix followed suit just one week later, similarly citing insufficient market demand.
The closure wave has touched multiple sectors: NFT marketplaces Nifty Gateway and Rodeo have shuttered, SBI’s cryptocurrency division has wound down, and decentralized email service Dmail has closed its doors.
Even Cosmos ecosystem wallet Leap has joined the exodus, contributing to what has emerged as a persistent pattern of closures throughout the cryptocurrency industry.
In April 2025, Zapper experienced a damaging social engineering breach. Malicious actors compromised the platform’s domain and diverted users to a fraudulent phishing site. This security incident proved to be a blow from which the platform struggled to recover.
Though cryptocurrency venture capital funding climbed 57.6% year-over-year to reach $4.21 billion in Q2 2026, RootData reports that deal volume has contracted nine-fold over the past 10 quarters. Investment capital is becoming increasingly concentrated among fewer projects.
Audet reflected on the platform’s founding vision of democratizing DeFi access. “I do believe we helped make the onchain economy easier to use for a considerable number of people,” he stated.
All Zapper infrastructure, including its website, mobile applications, and application programming interface, will be deactivated on Aug. 3.
The whole thing stands on shaky ground, however. CASHCAT carries a market value of about $105 million against roughly $6.6 million of liquidity in its Uniswap pool, meaning it may not absorb even a fraction of the holders trying to leave at once.
The token is down about 12% over 24 hours and roughly a quarter off the intraday peak near $145 million it touched on Wednesday, and sell volume has edged past buy volume, $29.1 million against $28.9 million, across more than 30,000 transactions from about 6,800 traders.
Robinhood did not create the token. CASHCAT’s own website describes it as “fan fiction with a ticker,” a project built by outsiders around the cat-with-cash logo the company used in its earliest days before rebranding. The utility, the site says, “is cat.”
Interestingly, on July 2, the day after the chain went live, Robinhood’s chief executive Vlad Tenev told CNBC that memecoins were largely a dead end, as ‘assets without utility do not serve a lasting purpose,’ and that tokenized real-world assets were the durable direction for crypto.
However, days later on July 7, as CASHCAT climbed, he posted on X that while the company is building its chain to be the best for real-world assets, “it works great for memes too.” He also followed the token’s account.
The Bank of Japan (BOJ) may raise its benchmark interest rate rapidly this year, as the yen slides, eventually pushing it above 2%.
That’s the latest warning from a former Bank of Japan official Tsutomu Watanabe, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo who left the central bank in 1999, according to Bloomberg.
As of now, the official rate is at 1%, the result of recent hikes, and the 10-year benchmark government bond yield hovers above 2.8%, the highest in at least three decades, according to data source TradingView.
Meanwhile, the Japanese yen continues to slide despite recent hikes and hardening Japanese government bond yields. It has depreciated by 60% to 162.36 per U.S. dollar since early 2021, a major decline for one of the most traded currencies in the world. Also, it has dropped 3% so far this year.
Faster potential interest rate hikes by the BOJ may put a floor under the yen, or potentially lift it higher. The question then is whether it will help bitcoin or work against it.
Elon Musk called Grok 4.5 an Opus-class model that runs faster and costs less. An independent, agentic benchmark now provides real backing for that claim.
On Artificial Analysis’s AutomationBench-AA, Grok 4.5 ranked first with a 51.4% score while costing $0.34 per task. It beat both Claude Fable 5 (48.6%) and Claude Opus 4.8 (48.5%).
An Independent Check on Elon Musk’s Claim
SpaceXAI took Grok 4.5 public this week, built on its 1.5 trillion-parameter V9 foundation. Musk’s pitch rested on early internal evaluations.
AutomationBench-AA changes that. Artificial Analysis runs the benchmark independently and keeps its task set private to prevent contamination.
The test spans 657 tasks across 40 simulated apps, including Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, and HubSpot. It scores the share of objectives an agent completes without breaking guardrails.
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Grok 4.5: Cheaper, Faster, and Mostly Compliant
Grok 4.5’s $0.34 per task sat far below Fable 5’s $1.35 and Opus 4.8’s $1.46. Gemini 3.5 Flash came closest at $0.49.
The model used about 8,000 output tokens per task, roughly a quarter of Opus 4.8’s total. That efficiency drives most of the cost gap, matching the framing Musk used at launch.
“Its total token usage of 0.44M per task is among the lowest on the leaderboard. Low cost is driven by this efficiency as well as low token pricing,” Artificial Analysis said.
In addition, Grok 4.5 completed 79.9% of task objectives and fully passed 21.9% of tasks. In Finance, the hardest domain, it led with 71%, ahead of Fable 5’s 64% and Opus 4.8’s 62%.
However, the model broke more rules than its closest rivals. It logged 0.63 guardrail violations per task, above Opus 4.8’s 0.55 and Gemini 3.5 Flash’s 0.46.
That gap matters for firms that deploy agents to live financial systems, where a single violation can incur real costs.
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The post Grok 4.5 Tops Agent Test, Backing Musk’s Opus-Class Claim appeared first on BeInCrypto.
US Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has urged Senate leaders to ensure that crypto developer protections stay in the crypto market structure legislation that lawmakers are looking to pass ahead of the midterms.
Wyden told Senate Minority Leader John Thune and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer to preserve a section of the CLARITY Act known as the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA), according to a letter shared by Crypto in America podcast co-founder Eleanor Terrett on Wednesday.
“Developers who make and release software that allows people to manage their own digital assets — and, critically, where the developer does not control user assets — should not be treated as money transmitters solely because they create or publish software,” Wyden wrote.
The letter comes after certain groups and lawmakers opposed the BRCA. A group of law enforcement organizations and a coalition of Catholic organizations last month argued it could create gaps in the oversight of illicit activity.
Meanwhile, crypto groups have urged the Senate to keep the section intact, arguing that developers of non-custodial technology can’t control user funds and should not be treated as financial intermediaries.
Negotiations over provisions in the bill are ongoing. Senate leaders are pushing for the bill to be passed this month, and will want to bring to the floor a bill that has wide support to avoid prolonged debate.
BRCA needed for US to remain competitive: Wyden
In his letter, Wyden argued that treating crypto developers as money transmitters “punishes technological innovation and advancement in strategically important areas at a time when the United States must remain globally competitive.”
He added that the BRCA reflects guidance from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and gives legal certainty for developers of open-source and non-custodial projects “to continue building and developing the decentralized finance ecosystem right here in the United States.”
“Smart policy will empower law enforcement to do its job and facilitate innovation at the same time,” Wyden wrote. “As the Senate continues its consideration of the Clarity Act, I urge you to include the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act in any legislative package.”
Related: Gaming groups urge Congress to ban prediction markets sports betting in CLARITY Act
The Senate has other provisions in the CLARITY Act that are at issue before it can go to a floor vote, with some lawmakers calling for tighter ethics provisions on government officials’ involvement in crypto after US President Donald Trump revealed he made $1.4 billion from his crypto interests last year.
Lawmakers who back the bill want to pass it before this Congress is out to avoid having to reintroduce it into a new Congress next year.
However, the timeline for the bill to pass before the midterm elections in November is tightening, as Congress will also take a monthlong recess in August.
That tight timeline saw Galaxy Digital recently cut its odds of the CLARITY Act becoming law this year to 50%, saying that the Senate is running out of time to move on the bill before its August recess.
Features: Crypto lobby spending on Republicans far outpaces Democratic support
Crypto World
SpaceX Bitcoin Holdings See First Transaction in Half a Year While SPCX Stock Tumbles 25%
Key Takeaways
- A cryptocurrency wallet associated with SpaceX transferred only $88 in Bitcoin following a half-year period of no activity
- The aerospace company maintains ownership of 18,712 BTC valued at approximately $1.16 billion
- Shares of SPCX finished Tuesday’s session down 6.83%, trading beneath its initial public offering price
- The equity has declined over 25% from recent peaks even with Nasdaq-100 membership
- JPMorgan projects that approximately $4.3 billion in passive investment flows could result from the index addition
A cryptocurrency wallet associated with Elon Musk’s aerospace venture SpaceX executed a Bitcoin transaction for the first time in half a year, sparking discussion among digital asset observers. Simultaneously, the company’s publicly traded shares have retreated more than 25% from their recent peak levels, despite securing a spot in the prestigious Nasdaq-100 index.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., SPCX
SpaceX-Linked Wallet Executes Minimal BTC Transfer
Blockchain tracking service Arkham Intelligence reported that a wallet tied to SpaceX conducted a transaction involving just $88 in Bitcoin on July 8. This marked the conclusion of a six-month period during which the wallet remained completely dormant.
The modest transaction amount didn’t prevent market observers from weighing in with various theories. Historically, SpaceX’s cryptocurrency wallets have exhibited extended periods of inactivity before executing more substantial movements.
Data from Arkham indicates that SpaceX continues to maintain approximately 18,712 Bitcoin in its holdings, representing a market value of roughly $1.16 billion. The destination wallet in this transaction now contains 614 Bitcoin, worth approximately $38 million.
The previous significant movement from SpaceX wallets involved over 1,016 Bitcoin valued at close to $100 million at the time. Arkham’s analysis also revealed that outbound transfers from SpaceX to unidentified wallets rose during the cryptocurrency market downturn that occurred on October 10 of the previous year.
This activity emerges amid a broader trend of major corporate Bitcoin holders reducing positions. Strategy recently liquidated approximately $216 million in Bitcoin holdings. Additional companies including MARA Holdings, Nakamoto Holdings, and Sequans Communications have similarly announced Bitcoin disposals in recent weeks.
Bitcoin’s price stood above the $62,000 threshold on Tuesday but experienced a nearly 2% decline during the trading session. The decrease followed renewed military confrontations between the United States and Iran, with President Trump expressing skepticism regarding the durability of any potential cease-fire agreement.
SPCX Shares Slip Below Debut Price Amid Nasdaq-100 Inclusion
SPCX concluded Tuesday at $149.47, representing a 6.83% decline, with the intraday bottom reaching $148.86. The stock has now surrendered over 25% of its value from the highs recorded roughly one month earlier and has fallen beneath the price level established during its initial public offering.
SpaceX secured its position in the Nasdaq-100 index prior to Monday’s opening bell on July 7. The exchange operator granted an expedited inclusion based on updated guidelines that enable recently listed companies of substantial size to achieve index eligibility more rapidly than previous protocols allowed.
Analysts at JPMorgan calculate that the index membership will compel passive investment vehicles and exchange-traded funds to acquire approximately $4.3 billion in SPCX shares as they execute portfolio adjustments to mirror the Nasdaq-100 composition.
Notwithstanding the anticipated institutional purchasing pressure, market participants have persisted in realizing gains following the equity’s dramatic appreciation after its market introduction.
Major investment banks have expressed optimistic outlooks. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup have each initiated research coverage on SpaceX with elevated price objectives. Morgan Stanley established a $300 target price, representing the most aggressive projection among the three institutions.
Pre-market activity on Wednesday indicated shares climbing 0.49%.
Tokenized stock transfers rose 105% over the past month to $8.41 billion, according to RWA.xyz data cited in market reports. The jump shows faster activity in on-chain equity markets as crypto platforms and traditional finance firms expand tokenized stock products.
Summary
- Tokenized stock transfers doubled in one month as on-chain equity demand moved beyond early experiments.
- DTCC’s tokenization pilot gives Wall Street a regulated path to test on-chain stock settlement.
- Crypto exchanges and traditional firms now compete to control tokenized stock trading infrastructure worldwide.
Tokenized stocks. Source: RWA.xyz
The sector’s distributed value also climbed 43% to $2.16 billion. The number of holders rose 17% to more than 409,000, showing that growth came from both transfer activity and user participation.
Figure recorded the fastest growth among major platforms, with distributed value rising 935% over 30 days. Securitize rose 332%, while xStocks gained about 62% during the same period.
Ondo remained the largest tokenized stock platform by distributed value at about $846 million. xStocks followed with about $708 million, while Securitize and Figure held about $306 million and $239 million.
DTCC brings Wall Street into tokenization
DTCC said it has brought more than 50 firms into an industry working group to help develop DTC’s tokenization service. The group supports testing around tokenized securities and other digital asset use cases.
A related report said DTCC plans tokenized securities pilots before an October 2026 launch. The service follows a December 2025 SEC no-action letter tied to tokenization of select DTC-custodied assets.
The approval covers a defined group of highly liquid assets. These include Russell 1000 stocks, major index ETFs and U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds.
The service will run under a three-year framework. DTC participants may use the system to test tokenized record-keeping and transfers on approved blockchain networks, while traditional custody controls remain in place.
Crypto exchanges push tokenized equities
The rise in tokenized stock transfers also follows new exchange-led offerings. Kraken, Bybit and Bitget Wallet used xStocks infrastructure during the SpaceX market cycle, giving users access to tokenized pre-IPO exposure.
A recent analysis said crypto platforms already owned much of the SpaceX tokenized stock trade. Demand reportedly exceeded available allocation, showing strong user interest in blockchain-based equity products.
Securitize also moved into public-market tokenization. The company issued tokenized versions of its own shares on Solana and Avalanche after listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
These moves show that tokenized stocks are no longer limited to small tests. They now include private-market access, public-company shares and infrastructure built by both crypto-native firms and regulated market players.
On-chain stocks gain wider market attention
Tokenized equities outpaced other parts of the real-world asset market over the past month. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries, still the largest RWA segment, stayed mostly flat, while the broader RWA market grew about 4% to $33.5 billion.
A separate guide explains how tokenized stocks work and why equities are moving on-chain. It notes that tokenized shares can represent legal or synthetic exposure, depending on product structure and jurisdiction.
Broader RWA growth adds context to the latest stock activity. A May report said tokenized real-world assets had grown to about $34 billion, with Treasuries and Ethereum-based products leading the market.
The next stage will depend on regulation, liquidity and investor access. DTCC’s pilot may give Wall Street a controlled route into tokenized securities, while crypto exchanges continue to move faster with user-facing products.
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