Fisher Tiger

It may be hard to believe, but two of crypto’s biggest stablecoin issuers want to become banks.

Ripple, the company that issues RLUSD, and Circle, responsible for stablecoin USDC, have both applied for US National Trust Bank charters, a rare move that if approved would bring them under federal oversight, and closer to the heart of the US financial system.

The charters would place both companies under the purview of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, subjecting them to the same capital, liquidity, and risk standards as traditional banks.

That matters for crypto, said Chris Colson, payments guru at the Atlanta Federal Reserve, mainly because it suggests that stablecoins would truly enter the financial mainstream.

“A trust charter could enhance trust in USDC and RLUSD safety and oversight,” he said on LinkedIn on July 3.

“It potentially paves the way for broader institutional and cross-border adoption.”

Direct access

Getting approved for a bank charter is a huge deal in crypto, where regulatory clarity has been murky and quite hard to come by.

National bank charters offer more than just prestige. They provide direct access to the US financial system.

National trust banks don’t take deposits or offer lending, however, so they sidestep some of the Fed’s strictest rules and capital requirements.

Still, acquiring a charters would allow these companies could serve as federally regulated custodians, hold stablecoin reserves on their own books, and potentially tap into the Fed’s real-time payment systems.

Incumbents tremble

Approval also means big competition for incumbent banks, Colson said.

“Circle and Ripple’s move blurs the line between fintech and traditional banking,” he said. “It introduces a new kind of competitor — one offering programmable, blockchain-native money but operating under similar rules.”

The OCC has historically been hesitant on crypto, denying Kraken’s application for a bank license in 2023. But now sentiment has changed.

As the Genius Act wiggles its way through Washington D.C., and new leadership at the OCC under Trump-appointed regulator Rodney Hood, crypto companies are racing to get ahead of the curve.

In the first days of his tenure, Hood took action to reaffirm that a range of cryptocurrency activities are permissible in the federal banking system.

‘Absolutely fascinating’

For Chris Perkins, president of crypto VC firm CoinFund, the bank license will form the backbone of compliant issuance under the Genius Act.

And he didn’t shy away from how bullish this is for Ripple.

​​“It’s been absolutely fascinating how Ripple has been acquiring licenses. I think they’re a force to be reckoned with,” Perkins told DL News.

“They’re putting together all the elements to build a very successful and scalable stablecoin in RLUSD.”

Unlike Circle, whose stablecoin USDC forms the backbone of DeFi and led the company to a blockbuster IPO, Ripple’s stablecoin, RLUSD, has grown at a sluggish pace.

It now ranks 20th among all stablecoins by market value with $469 million.

Evolve or die

The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been.

Circle, which recently went public, holds over $60 billion in reserves to back USDC — and currently relies on traditional custodians like BNY Mellon to manage its assets.

A national trust charter would allow Circle to oversee those reserves directly and streamline custody for its institutional clients.

Ripple, meanwhile, has already applied for access to the Federal Reserve’s master account, a move that would let it settle payments directly on Fed rails — a rare privilege even among fintechs.

“It’s evolve or get left behind,” Jeff Cantwell of Seaport Research Partners reportedly said. “And clearly, that’s how Circle and Ripple are seeing things right now.”

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

Bitcoin’s market dominance will jump this quarter and fuel a new all-time high price.

That’s according to a report by CEX.IO, a crypto exchange, that pointed at how Bitcoin’s market dominance tends to increase 2% on average between July and September.

That would “represent over $64 billion in value flowing from altcoins into Bitcoin,” Illia Otychenko, lead analyst at CEX.IO, wrote in the report.

To put that in perspective, a $64 billion reallocation is almost equivalent to the market value of Tron, Doge, and Staked Ether, the eighth, ninth, and tenth largest cryptocurrencies, combined.

Markus Thielen, CEO of 10x Research, offered a similar analysis in a Tuesday report, suggesting that Bitcoin’s price has jumped 10% on average in seven Julys in the last decade. That would put Bitcoin’s price at $116,000 in coming weeks.

To be sure, past performance does not guarantee future results, as investment platform disclaimers are prone to say. Other factors than cyclical patterns are likely to drive the price too.

For example, geopolitical tension, US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, regulations, and unexpected scandals are just some of the factors that can influence the price.

Even so, Bitcoin traders are gearing up for a price rally.

Traders on Deribit, a crypto derivatives trading platform, have poured into bullish bets that Bitcoin will rally, with 67% of calls only paying out if the price is above $112,000 on July 25.

Bitcoin reached a $111,814 all-time high in May.

Similarly, the chances of Bitcoin reaching another record before August have surged to 63% on Polymarket. Punters on the prediction market platform give the cryptocurrency an 81% chance of the price reaching new heights before October.

This week, David Brickell, head of international distribution at FRNT Financial, and former forex trader Chris Mills predicted that Bitcoin is likely to hit $125,000 in early July, amid the backdrop of de-escalating geopolitical tensions and the easing of the quarter-end liquidity crunch.

Bitwise analysts expect that the price could break even higher, saying the price could hit as high as $136,000 in July.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin is up slightly by 0.8% over the past 24 hours and is at $107,399.

Ethereum has traded flat over the same period and is at $2,444.

What we’re reading

How a little-known Bitcoin miner surged tenfold as it became an Ethereum treasury company ― DL News

Maple Finance and EtherFi Launch Institutional Loans Backed by weETH ― Unchained

You can now buy OpenAI stock onchain — Milk Road

Senator Lummis Pushes Making Small Crypto Transactions Tax-Free in ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ ― Unchained

Mantle to target Asia first with ‘onchain neobank’ UR ― DL News

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.

Ric Edelman just made a huge call on crypto.

Edelman isn’t just another financial advisor. He is the founder of Edelman Financial Engines, which manages $287 billion for 1.3 million clients.

More importantly, Edelman is hugely influential among Main Street investors.

He’s a fixture on Barron’s list of top financial advisors, and hosts a nationally syndicated radio show with more than 1 million weekly listeners.

The author of ten bestselling books on how to build and protect wealth, Edelman is often dubbed “Mr. RIA” — a nod to his dominance in the world of registered investment advisors, who are independent professionals who manage money on behalf of clients.

40% allocation

Back in 2021, Edelman said a 1% allocation to crypto was reasonable.

Now Edelman recommends that conservative investors allocate 10% to digital assets, moderate investors assign 25% to the instruments, and aggressive investors devote a whopping 40% of their investment capital to Bitcoin and its ilk.

“Today I am saying 40%, that’s astonishing,” he said on CNBC on June 27.

“No one has ever said such a thing.”

The call caught seasoned analysts by surprise.

Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior ETF analyst, called it the “most important full-throated endorsement” of crypto from a traditional finance figure since Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, accepted Bitcoin as “digital gold.”

“This guy is Mr. RIA,” Balchunas said on X.

A lot has changed. Four years ago, investors were wary of the asset class as the Biden administration cracked down on crypto platforms and the FTX failure showcased the fraud running rampant in the space.

‘Today I am saying 40%, that’s astonishing.’

Ric Edelman

There was a lot of doubt mainstream investors would ever get comfortable with crypto.

“Today, all those questions have been resolved,” Edelman said in his CNBC interview.

Much of the resolution stems from the Trump administration’s end to the crypto crackdown and Congress’ push to bring regulatory clarity to the industry, starting with stablecoins.

Echoes of Larry Fink

Edelman’s remarks are a flashback to those of another TradFi stalwart — BlackRock’s Fink.

In 2017, he called Bitcoin an “index of money laundering.”

Yet five years later, he said Bitcoin would “transcend any one currency” and called it a “digitized version of gold.”

Since then, BlackRock has helped take Bitcoin mainstream by winning regulatory approval for Bitcoin and Ether ETFs and introducing them to the market in January 2024.

The iShares offering is now the No. 1 Bitcoin fund, with $75 billion in net assets.

And Bitcoin, which has hit a series of all-time highs this year, is up 70% in the last 12 months.

That kind of performance is hard to remain wary of for long, even in the traditional world of retail investing.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

Economist and author of The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous, has weighed in on the ongoing debate over spam inscriptions on the Bitcoin network, suggesting he would “throw in a few sats” to fund a full-time developer focused on making Bitcoin spamming more difficult and expensive.

Ammous made the remarks in response to a thread initiated by the pseudonymous developer GrassFedBitcoin, who called for Bitcoin Core to merge pull request #28408, which would enable node operators to filter inscriptions more easily.

According to GrassFedBitcoin, the lack of inscription filtering tools contributes to unnecessary blockchain bloat and undermines Bitcoin (BTC)’s role as a monetary protocol.

“No one running a node wants to relay inscriptions,” he wrote, arguing that the OP_RETURN limit increases were justified in the past under false assumptions. He pushed for a configurable, default policy discouraging the use of Bitcoin for storing JPEGs rather than monetary data.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back challenged the proposal, describing inscription filtering as an “arms race.” He noted that spam data embedded in Bitcoin transactions can be endlessly modified using code structures, requiring constant updates to filtering tools.

Source: Adam Back

Ammous compares Bitcoin spam to email

Ammous compared the Bitcoin spam issue to email spam — another arms race society continues to fight without abandoning the system.

“It’s not easy, but it’s worth trying to help bankrupt the spammers faster,” Ammous said. He argued that fighting spam is not censorship, noting that node operators already reject invalid transactions.

“So a node runner looking to remove retards' spam is no less valid than retards' spam,” he added.

The debate drew commentary from other users. One participant suggested Core developers treat spam-coding employees at certain startups as “unwilling QA engineers” and simply unstandardize every trick they deploy.

Ammous took it further, proposing to “deprecate” the work of developers building spam tools and even hiring outside coders to overwhelm their systems.

Source: Saifedean Ammous

The conversation reflects ongoing tensions in the Bitcoin community over the network’s intended use. With inscriptions continuing to congest the network, calls for technical countermeasures — and pointed critiques of those defending spam — are growing louder.

In a Feb. 4 report, Mempool Research said the adoption of inscriptions could drive the Bitcoin network’s average block size as high as 4 megabytes (MB) per block, far higher than current averages.

Bitcoin’s average block size — the amount of data in each block posted to the network’s public ledger — is currently around 1.5 MB.

Magazine: Arthur Hayes $1M Bitcoin tip, altcoins’ powerful rally’ looms: Hodler’s Digest, May 11 – 17

Key points:

New Bitcoin price targets leverage interplay with gold to deliver $200,000 and higher this year.

Bitcoin price cycles remain in focus as part of the BTC price “power curve” model.

Eating gold’s market cap could propel BTC/USD to nearly $1 million by the decade's end.

Bitcoin (BTC) has a “decent chance” of hitting $250,000 or more in 2025 as attention turns to gold copycat moves.

In his latest analysis, popular X analytics account Apsk32 argued that the four-year BTC price cycle should provide giant new highs this year.

Bitcoin “power curve” delivers $200,000+ target

Bitcoin following gold to new all-time highs is a popular theory among bulls. Historically, BTC/USD follows XAU/USD higher with a delay of several months.

For Apsk32, the implications are considerable this time around — with gold hitting a record $3,500 per ounce, the future for BTC price action is bright.

“Bitcoin's position relative to gold has improved considerably since April,” he told X followers alongside his dedicated “power curve” tool. 

“This is the indicator that gives me hope for higher than expected returns later this year.”

Bitcoin power curve data. Source: Apsk32/X

The power curve concept involves measuring Bitcoin price in gold ounces to avoid the inflationary nature of the US dollar.

“Here, I’m measuring the value of the Bitcoin network (market cap) in gold ounces and fitting that value to a power curve,” Apsk32 explained in a dedicated X post in March.

Among the results is a potential bull market top target that contextualized the old 2017 top of $20,000.

“If Bitcoin’s network value measured in gold continues to follow a power curve, and gold holds its current value, and Bitcoin’s price returns to ‘five years ahead of support,’ we could hit Josh’s $444K this year,” it added.

This week, meanwhile, Apsk32 suggested that a more “reasonable” target for 2025 would be up to $220,000.

“If we start getting above $250k, that's what I would consider ‘higher than expected,’” he responded when asked about the outlook.

“I do think there's a decent chance we get there, it's just not the most likely outcome.”

Bitcoin power curve chart. Source: Apsk32/X

Half gold’s future market cap means $1 million BTC

Continuing the gold theme, Bitcoin analyst Sam Callahan considered data showing how high BTC/USD could go if it were to capture varying portions of gold’s market cap.

This could come about thanks to a shift toward “digital gold” — something widely anticipated to gain momentum in the coming years.

“If gold hits $5,000/oz by 2030 and Bitcoin captures 50% of its market cap, that puts BTC at $924K,” Callahan noted alongside the data from the latest report by In Gold We Trust released this week. 

Gold/Bitcoin matrix (screenshot). Source: In Gold We Trust

The report stated that the data “does not represent a price prediction per se, but rather a scenario based framework – rooted in our established gold model – that offers a clearer sense of what relative revaluations of non-sovereign hard assets might look like by decade’s end.”

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.