Bitmine (BMNR), the largest Ethereum treasury company, continued its ether (ETH) purchases last week as Chairman Tom Lee pointed to ether (ETH) outperforming bitcoin BTC$64,924.00 as evidence the crypto market is regaining momentum.

The company bought 9,946 ETH, worth about $19.4 million at current prices, up from 7,430 ETH the previous week, according to a Monday update. The purchase lifted Bitmine’s holdings to 5,787,414 ETH ($11.2 billion), or about 4.8% of ether’s circulating supply.

Lee said Bitmine also increased its share repurchases, buying back 6.1 million shares, compared with 5.5 million a week earlier, under its $4 billion buyback authorization.

The latest purchase remains well below the company’s buying pace earlier this year, when Bitmine routinely acquired tens of thousands of ETH each week. Even so, the company has continued adding to its treasury every week since launching the strategy in June 2025 and now owns roughly 4.8% of Ethereum’s total supply, putting it within reach of its long-term goal of accumulating 5%.

Ether relative strength

The company’s optimistic outlook stems in part from the recent strength of ETH relative to BTC, a metric traders often use to gauge risk appetite within crypto markets.

Strategy, the business intelligence firm that has built the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury, continued adjusting its capital structure last week through a combination of stock sales and preferred share repurchases.

Strategy sold 5,429,160 shares of its Class A common stock (MSTR) through its at-the-market (ATM) offering program between July 20 and July 26, generating $544.5 million in net proceeds.

The MSTR share price was up more than 2% in Monday’s premarket activity, according to Yahoo Finance. The STRC preferred shares were up 2.3% to $88.90 ahead of the Nasdaq open.

The company also repurchased 288,930 shares of its STRC preferred stock for $25 million, according to a Form 8-K filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

The update comes after Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor sparked speculation on Sunday with his “We’re gonna need another color” post on X, which some market observers interpreted as a hint at a new move involving the company’s preferred stock strategy.

Source: Michael Saylor on X.com

Stock sales boost dollar reserve $3.75B

Following additional capital raised through its ATM stock offering program, Strategy increased its US dollar reserve to $3.75 billion as of July 26, up from $3.225 billion the previous week.

However, Strategy reported no Bitcoin purchases or sales during the July 20-26 period, leaving its holdings unchanged at 843,775 BTC, acquired at an average purchase price of $75,476 per Bitcoin, or $63.69 billion in aggregate. The biggest crypto was last trading hands at roughly $64,971 at time of publication.

Related: Strive’s SATA recovers most of June decline, trades within 3% of par

Strategy’s growing cash reserve highlights management’s efforts to maintain liquidity as it expands its capital markets activity through common stock offerings and preferred stock instruments. The reserve is intended to support dividend payments on preferred stock and interest payments on the company’s outstanding debt.

Saylor sparks debate over BTC future role for banks

The update came shortly after Saylor reignited a debate over whether banks have a place in Bitcoin’s future after arguing that the crypto asset’s growth depends on integration with traditional financial institutions.

Saylor wrote on X on Sunday that rejecting Bitcoin’s links to financial infrastructure would deny access to most potential users. His comments drew criticism from some BTC supporters, who contend that greater involvement from banks conflicts with the network’s original goal of enabling transactions without intermediaries.

Several users pushed back against Saylor’s argument by citing Bitcoin’s white paper, which introduced the asset as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system designed to remove the need for financial institutions. The exchange highlighted a growing divide between advocates who view banks as necessary gateways for mainstream adoption and those who see them as a threat to Bitcoin’s decentralized foundation.

Magazine: Strategy became a symbol of the dot-com crash: Could history repeat?

By Friday afternoon, the mood on commodity trading desks changes.

For the first four days of the week, traders have been trying to profit from their bets. By lunch on Friday, however, they’re thinking about how much risk they can tolerate until markets reopen on Sunday evening.

Anything could happen while markets are closed: news of a new war, an election result, an unexpected OPEC announcement or, as seen recently, a market-moving presidential post. Forty-eight hours can be a long time when traders are holding a position tied to a few of the world’s most actively traded markets, and there’s nothing they can do until trading resumes.

“From about lunchtime, the desk basically stops thinking about making money and starts thinking about what they can live with for roughly forty-eight hours until the Sunday evening reopen,” said Mustafa Al Niama, former Goldman Sachs head of digital assets of the Americas and now head of capital markets at Mysten Labs.

Every commodities options trader knows this ritual. By the end of the week, the question isn’t where the commodity is going — it’s whether they are comfortable living with their position if something happens while markets are closed, as they can’t adjust or rebalance their bets on the weekend.

“Risk, geopolitical or not, does not know what day of the week it is,” said Terry Duffy, chairman and CEO of CME Group.

Markets, however, still largely do. And for decades, planning ahead for potential weekend and after-hours catastrophes has just been part of the job for traders. But earlier this year, something unusual happened in the oil options market, which upended this long-standing routine.

As tensions escalated between Iran and Israel and traders rushed to speculate on prices, oil-linked futures saw a sudden spike in volume over the weekend in March. The catch was that it happened when commodity markets were closed, but the traders didn’t need to wait for the traditional market to reopen before reacting. Instead, they traded elsewhere.

Traders flocked to crypto exchanges over the weekend to trade derivatives contracts called “perpetual futures,” which run around the clock.

The total value of all active contracts on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid hit a record $1.2 billion on March 8, a Sunday when traditional commodity markets were closed.

While weekend volume is still smaller than on weekdays, at least by Wall Street’s standards, it is no longer just a blip. It highlighted something that barely existed a few years ago: a 24/7 venue for oil derivatives trading, while traditional finance is stuck offline.

“We’re roughly seeing 2-3x more volume on average on weekdays vs weekends for oil perps on Hyperliquid over the last 3 months,” said Martin Lee, market insights lead at DWF Labs. Even so, Lee said that weekend trading’s share of overall volume has grown by roughly 25% since March, despite activity cooling after the spike that followed the Iran conflict.

And this change might be quietly influencing another corner of the oil market.

The weekend problem

Researchers at the energy and macro analytics firm Energy Aspects (EA) said the dynamics of how traders price short-dated West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude options are set to change, thanks to the rapid growth of similar round-the-clock perpetuals on crypto exchanges.

For years, the implied volatility or how much an underlying asset’s price is likely to fluctuate in the future, for WTI contracts, fell on Fridays. Traders were reluctant to pay for protection through options or derivatives that they couldn’t actively manage while markets were shut. To avoid being exposed through the weekend, many traders reduced their positions before Friday’s close, creating what Energy Aspects describes as a persistent Friday discount in implied volatility.

That discount has begun to narrow, according to Energy Aspects.

“For the first time, traders can hedge options exposure through the weekend, when geopolitical risk has become disproportionately concentrated. This development has implications for the well-documented ‘weekend effect’ in short-dated WTI options, where implied volatility is structurally depressed on Fridays as long gamma holders liquidate positions they cannot hedge over the market closure,” analysts led by Tim Skirrow said in a recent note.

Because perpetual contracts are available, the analysts argued that if traders can hedge oil exposure through perpetual futures over the weekend, they may be willing to hold or even buy options they previously would have sold before Friday’s close.

In theory, this could create an opportunity for traders that didn’t exist before: they can capture profits over the weekend if the market becomes chaotic, rather than just sitting on their positions while the underlying prices of the assets move sharply.

In fact, Energy Aspects estimates that if a continuous futures contract is available, it would create roughly 40% more hedging sessions over the life of a typical contract. And it’s not just due to perps, as CME recently said it plans to add smaller-sized 24/7 contracts for WTI crude and gold. Any continuous futures for commodities would help traders hedge their weekend bets and reduce the Friday selling pressure. (It’s worth noting, however, that the regulator that oversees commodity trading, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has blocked that contract launch, an action that prompted CME to sue the agency.)

While finding any edge to capture a few basis points of profit sounds like any trader’s dream, for most traders, it’s still likely to remain theoretical until continuous trading becomes more widespread. Even traders who find the strategy plausible are cautious not to overstate its impact.

“Is volatility coming down because of that [availability of perps]? I don’t think so,” said one trader at a proprietary market-making firm active across both traditional and crypto markets, who opted to remain anonymous. “When I’m long volatility or short volatility, all I care about is how much this thing moves. And where it moves or how it moves doesn’t really impact me. So volatility came down on the CME would sort of imply that it was maybe too high before, because there were not that many venues to buy it on,” he added.

But he doesn’t reject the broader idea that hedging bets during the weekend is valuable for traders.

What he agreed with is that, given the ability to hedge over the weekend, a trader may be willing to pay a higher price for volatility on a different venue than the CME. Why? Because now, “You have more touch points for picking up and laying off risk over the weekend than you had before. You had zero [places to hedge] before, and now you have more than zero.”

Getting Wall Street’s buy-in

So, if traders could hedge their prior “dead zone” positions, why aren’t the big banks trading perps?

“There is some interest coming up from the institutional clients, my guess is that the majority of the volume is from the retail market,” said Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, a centralized crypto exchange that ranked second in terms of trading volume of commodities and stock perps during the second quarter, followed by Binance, according to TokenInsight data.

“The main issue is not really that they can’t,” Chen said. “It’s probably more like they don’t see it as profitable enough for them to invest … at least not yet.”

Lack of meaningful liquidity is a major reason institutional traders are likely still staying away.

The volume of perps linked to traditional assets such as commodities and stocks has increased meaningfully over the past few months, but still likely isn’t large enough for giant Wall Street trading firms to come in and profit — yet.

For example, in March and April, the average volume of crude oil perps accounted for about just 2% and 4%, respectively, of the primary futures contract equivalents traded on traditional exchanges, according to Binance Research data.

Meanwhile, in 2025, total perps trading volume on centralized exchanges was $62 trillion versus spot volume of roughly $19 trillion, venture capital giant Pantera said, citing data from CryptoQuant. Decentralized exchange (DEX) Hyperliquid has supercharged the use of perps, with monthly perps volume of nearly $200 billion, according to DeFiLlama data.

While those are massive numbers for crypto, they are still relatively small from Wall Street’s perspective.

“The hardest thing about trading is finding someone who wants to take the other side,” said the trader from the proprietary market-making firm. “In the absence of traditional liquidity providers, how are you gonna get that bet on big enough such that you care about the result?”

In TradFi, money takes the weekend off

Then there are issues with the existing infrastructure.

Large institutions, such as banks, already have systems in place for the market’s traditional operating hours. Even if weekend trading has sufficient volume for them to jump in, they will need a different structure for it, according to BitGet’s Chen.

“Especially for those top organizations that never really had the 24/7 infrastructure,” she added.

DWF’s Lee echoed this issue. “Having the option to trade does not mean that people would automatically start doing so. There needs to be a broad shift in operational capacity from institutions and corporations to be able to cater to that.”

One of these structural issues might be how institutions operate (or don’t operate) on weekends. Banks are closed on Saturdays and Sundays, so it would be hard to collect margin for perps trading mid-weekend, said Mysten Labs’ Mustafa Al Niama, adding that these large institutions would need the backing of clearing and settlement rails that actually move money, which is, for now, mostly on weekdays.

Even when weekend trading is available, much of the financial infrastructure that these large institutions rely on still isn’t. Banks don’t move collateral around the clock, clearing systems largely keep weekday hours, and firms can’t simply summon additional capital on a Saturday afternoon.

“You cannot do that until you put the infrastructure in place that you have Monday through Friday,” CME’s Duffy said.

Put simply, the biggest challenge may not be keeping the markets open. It’s keeping the financial system underneath everything open as well.

So, in the meantime, who is actually trading perps? For now, these instruments remain in the domain of crypto-native firms, proprietary trading shops and savvy retail traders.

“Predominantly now, it’s the same typical retail, market makers, prop shops that are trading perps,” said Al Niama, noting that they are probably using perps mostly for basis trading or carry trades, rather than hedging. “Because it is a very lucrative delta-neutral type of trade.”

End of the weekend gap

There is, however, another important role that perps play for traders that didn’t exist before. They give traders a tool to gauge how the market will trade when it opens if news breaks out during the weekend.

Before perps, it was mostly a guess of how an asset would trade once the traditional market opens. But now, because perps trade 24/7, traders at least have a better idea of the bets’ direction after the weekend.

Hein Tibosch, head of digital assets OTC and product at Flow Traders, said perpetual markets have become another source of information before traditional markets reopen.

“The perps… will be a pretty good indicator of where the market is heading,” he said. “You have some direction.”

The trader at the proprietary market-making firm described the same shift.

“It’s not really a surprise anymore by Sunday’s open,” he said, noting that traders increasingly watch crypto markets throughout the weekend to gauge where traditional futures may begin trading once the CME opens.

This might be the first signal that perpetual futures are starting to influence traditional markets — not as a replacement for CME, but as another source of price discovery while the rest of the market sleeps.

Perhaps the biggest impact of perps thus far is that the instrument might be influencing how some traders behave.

“For the crypto industry, it actually is a big deal because for the longest time, we as an industry have always been the student,” said Al Niama. However, perps might become one of the first ideas moving in the opposite direction, where traditional finance is potentially influenced by crypto innovations.

Whether perps can actually reshape the traditional market remains uncertain. Volumes (at least by TradFi measures) are still modest, and big-money institutions are still cautiously watching. Meanwhile, CME’s proposed 24/7 futures contract trading remains uncertain.

But there are signs that on Friday afternoons, old habits are already beginning to change for traders. They will still spend the end of the week worrying about the weekend — the difference is that if there are continuous trading hours, some of them may no longer have to spend time waiting. Now, they can start making money either by trading or tracking these contracts.

“For lots of players, for example, a hedge fund or quant shop, if you can just have your strategies run instead of five days a week, seven days a week, that’s two extra days of trading,” said Flow Traders’ Tibosch.

“So if you can have alpha, bring it on,” he added.

And it seems, at least in the future, one assumption appears less permanent than it once did: that Friday’s closing bell marks the beginning of two days when traders simply have to wait.

“I think that markets will be 24/7 down the road. All markets,” said CME’s Duffy.

Perhaps it’s time for trading desks to start preparing to properly staff for an around-the-clock market, and forget the old routine of the “weekend effect.”

European regulators have extended the scope of their Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) oversight by adding 15 new crypto-asset service providers to ESMA’s interim MiCA register, bringing the total number of licensed providers to 309. The update was published on Friday and follows the EU’s July 1 transitional deadline for firms operating under the new framework.

According to ESMA’s latest register update, the new additions include providers across banking and digital-asset infrastructure, signaling continued momentum as companies complete licensing steps under Europe’s unified crypto rules.

Key takeaways

• ESMA’s interim MiCA register now lists 309 licensed crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) after 15 new additions were published.
• BNY SA/NV—part of BNY Mellon’s banking group—is among the newly registered firms.
• Germany and Denmark led the latest wave, with three new CASPs added in each country.
• ESMA reported no changes in this update to other MiCA-related registers covering issuers and non-compliant entities.
• Industry observers continue to debate the long-term burden of MiCA compliance for smaller firms.

New CASPs join ESMA’s interim MiCA register

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) updated its MiCA register on Friday as part of an ongoing effort to map which crypto firms have met regulatory requirements. ESMA’s page on the MiCA framework shows that, in this third post-deadline update, the number of listed CASPs rose to 309.

The latest additions include four banking institutions. One is BNY SA/NV, the Belgian subsidiary of the US banking group BNY Mellon. The other newly listed banks are three German institutions, reflecting how traditional financial firms are progressively positioning themselves within MiCA’s permitted activities.

Beyond banking, ESMA’s list also includes digital-asset platforms such as BitPay and other providers including Coinify and Bleap, demonstrating that payment and infrastructure-focused companies continue to work through the licensing process.

Geography shows where licensing is moving fastest

ESMA’s update highlights uneven geographic progress across the bloc. Germany and Denmark recorded the largest number of new CASPs in this round, with three providers added in each country.

Bulgaria and Latvia followed with two additions each, while Belgium, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, and the Netherlands each added one provider.

Among the German additions, ESMA listed cooperative financial societies including Spar-und Kreditbank Rheinstetten and VR-Bank Augsburg-Ostallgäu, along with Raiffeisenbank Falkenstein-Wörth.

Other newly listed providers named in the update include Altcoins BG and Digital Assist in Bulgaria; SafeLynx Technologies and Januar in Denmark; and Bleap and Nodu Digital in Latvia.

Regulators keep expanding after the July 1 deadline

The Friday update is part of ESMA’s broader post-deadline process to ensure MiCA licensing becomes operational across the EU. ESMA previously published register additions after July 1—including a second post-deadline update that added 14 CASPs. Earlier coverage noted that this second update included well-known industry players such as Ripple Payments Europe.

Importantly, ESMA’s latest publication did not signal changes to other MiCA-related registers in this specific update. ESMA reported no changes to lists covering authorized issuers of asset-referenced tokens (ARTs), e-money tokens (EMTs), and other crypto assets, nor to registers of entities categorized as non-compliant.

That split—adding more CASPs while leaving other register categories unchanged—suggests that licensing progress is not uniform across the MiCA value chain. Some types of MiCA permissions may require longer review cycles or depend on different documentation and compliance steps than service-provider authorizations.

Why the register updates matter for firms and users

For market participants, ESMA’s evolving interim register functions as a practical checkpoint. It provides a clearer view of which providers have successfully moved into MiCA-regulated status, which can influence partnerships, custody and onboarding decisions, and compliance processes for businesses choosing counterparties.

While the register continues to expand, ESMA’s work also underscores that MiCA implementation is a moving target. The framework introduced Europe’s first unified regulatory regime for crypto-asset services, but the path from “operating” to “authorized under MiCA” remains procedural—requiring firms to complete licensing steps across jurisdictions and within ESMA’s register process.

At the same time, concerns about the cost of compliance have persisted. In earlier reporting, Gate Europe CEO Giovanni Cunti warned that some licensed firms may struggle to sustain the compliance resources required over the long term, particularly smaller operators that may find the ongoing burden harder to absorb.

That tension—more providers entering the register, but questions around affordability and scalability—could shape how the MiCA market develops. Investors and counterparties may need to weigh not only whether a firm is licensed, but also whether it can maintain the operational capacity to comply consistently as the framework matures.

What to watch next

With ESMA continuing to publish successive register updates, the next question for EU observers is whether upcoming additions accelerate across other MiCA categories—such as token issuers—rather than concentrating solely on CASPs. Market participants should also monitor whether compliance pressures intensify for smaller firms as the licensing pipeline progresses beyond the initial post-deadline wave.

Stablecoin issuer Circle (CRCL) has acquired nearly 1,000 issued blockchain-anchored patents from IBM, a deal the firm said makes it the largest holder of blockchain patents in the United States.

The portfolio spans more than 680 patent families covering blockchain technology, banking, financial services, insurance, enterprise infrastructure, supply-chain verification and cloud security, according to a press release.

The deal’s financial terms weren’t disclosed.

IBM was already among the largest U.S. blockchain patent holders before the sale. A December 2025 analysis by patent analytics firm PatSnap credited it with 790 patents, alongside Advanced New Technologies and Bank of America.

Circle said the portfolio would support USDC, Circle Payments Network, its Arc blockchain and financial tools designed for AI agents. Circle and IBM also plan to explore further commercial opportunities, the document adds.

“Intellectual property is critical to advancing our mission and expanding adoption of onchain infrastructure,” said Sarah Wilson, Circle’s general counsel and corporate secretary.

Circle received its first patent, covering parallel blockchain data processing, in December 2023. It had earlier joined the LOT Network to protect its products from patent-assertion firms.