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Coinbase faced sharp criticism this weekend after an AI-generated alert on its prediction markets reportedly declared a false World Cup result, saying Norway had beaten Brazil before the match was played.
The notification claimed Norway won 3-2, with striker Erling Haaland scoring twice, and framed the fabricated outcome as breaking news. Users flagged the alert on social media, where critics called it dangerous and irresponsible.
Coinbase AI Alert Draws Backlash Over Fake World Cup Result
Users accuse Coinbase of hallucinating results for a game that had not started, delivering factually incorrect alerts to millions of customers.
this is what happens when a crypto company uses AI to generate sports prediction markets @coinbase is hallucinating results for a World Cup game that hasn’t even been played yet and sending factually incorrect notifications to its millions of users as “breaking news”… pic.twitter.com/coD8xY2O0S
— jay (@jay_drainjr) July 5, 2026
The knockout-stage fixture was set for Sunday at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Coinbase’s own market page listed the match under a weather delay, so no result existed when the alert went out.
Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong responded within hours, acknowledging the reports publicly.
“Taking a look with the team – thx for reporting it,” Armstrong responded in his first public comment on the error.
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Incident Tests Coinbase’s Truth-Seeking Pitch
The timing is awkward. Armstrong has promoted prediction markets as a reliable way to surface facts. He argues financial stakes produce better information than traditional media.
“Prediction markets are the ultimate form of truth seeking. When there’s skin in the game, the output is far more reliable,” Armstrong stated in January.
However, those words now sit beside an AI system that invented, or rather, “hallucinated” a result. Coinbase’s 2025 shareholder letter also calls being the “most trusted name in crypto” its core strategy.
That pitch has drawn scrutiny before. In late 2025, Armstrong read out words that traders had bet he would say on an earnings call. The move nudged a market tied to his own remarks.
“And I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call,” Armstrong stated, blurting out the predicted words without any apparent context.
The mishap also lands as Coinbase leans hard into AI. Armstrong fired engineers in 2025 who refused to use new coding assistants.
He said in September that about 40% of daily code was AI-generated, with a target above 50%. The firm has since cut its AI costs while adding automated features.
~40% of daily code written at Coinbase is AI-generated. I want to get it to >50% by October.Obviously it needs to be reviewed and understood, and not all areas of the business can use AI-generated code. But we should be using it responsibly as much as we possibly can. pic.twitter.com/Nmnsdxgosp
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) September 3, 2025
Coinbase rolled out prediction markets across the US as part of its Everything Exchange. Early market flow was powered by Kalshi, a partner in the prediction market race.
The exchange has also fielded betting promotion concerns in its consumer app. In March, Armstrong addressed a separate targeting bug that pushed unwanted alerts.
“Looks like there was a bug on targeting for these push notifications – getting fixed now…The alternative is for us to apply a heavy hand and dictate what customers should or should not trade and I don’t think people want that either – too paternalistic, and anti free market,” he said.
Meanwhile, the error revives questions about AI safeguards in financial products used by millions.
The company will likely disable automated match alerts until it can verify outcomes. Past fixes suggest a patch and an apology could follow. Repeated failures, however, point to deeper product strain.
Coinbase and Armstrong did not immediately respond to BeInCrypto’s request for comment.

Nvidia (NVDA) will let AI startups use its chips now and pay with a share of future revenue.
The company detailed the revenue-sharing program in a July 1 blog post. The move casts Nvidia as a financier of the AI buildout rather than a pure hardware seller.
From Chip Sales to Compute Royalties
Nvidia normally earns a single payment when it sells a graphics processing unit (GPU). This program adds a second, recurring stream on top.
Cloud partners buy Nvidia systems, then sell access to startups that lack the capital for their own data centers. In return, Nvidia takes a cut of the cloud revenue those chips generate.
“This structure … provides NVIDIA with a recurring, usage-linked earnings stream,” read an excerpt in the blog, co-authored with Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress.
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The plan builds on Nvidia’s new AI compute model. It also widens the base beyond big buyers now trimming their orders.
A Deeper Moat, and Rising Competition
Startups that take the credits stay tied to Nvidia’s chips and software for years. Sharon AI will install up to 40,000 Grace Blackwell GB300 chips under the program.
Leopold and Situational Awareness disclose they’ve bought 19.9% of Sharon AI.Days later, Sharon and Nvidia announce a strategic collaboration.—Sharon AI and Firmus are among the first companies to work with NVIDIA on this new business model. Sharon AI is deploying up to… https://t.co/PBbRXXxFYR
— Brandon Carl (@brandonjcarl) July 2, 2026
Firmus is building a 360-megawatt campus in Batam, Indonesia, for up to 170,000 more GPUs. Sharon AI frames its buildout as sovereign compute for markets outside the United States.
Nvidia just announced startups can swap compute access for a slice of future revenue. Sharon AI gets 40K GPUs. Firmus is building a 360MW campus in Batam, Indonesia — 20km from Singapore — housing 170,000 GPUs, operational by Q1 2027.The overlooked angle: this is Nvidia's most…
— Benniji (@BennyLam) July 4, 2026
The lock-in matters as rivals gain. China recently trained a large model without Nvidia chips, and buyers keep testing cheaper options.
A Bigger Bet on the AI Boom
The design echoes what critics call circular financing. Nvidia has pledged up to $100 billion to OpenAI. It also owns about 7% of CoreWeave, a customer that buys its chips.
Analysts liken the loop to vendor financing from the dot-com era. Michael Burry and other skeptics see the setup feeding AI bubble fears.
The sums are vast. Morgan Stanley expects Big Tech’s AI capital spending to top $800 billion in 2026. That figure could reach $1.1 trillion in 2027, rivaling the US defense budget.
Meanwhile, markets stayed calm. NVDA closed at $194.69 on July 2, the last session before the holiday break. Its value sits near $4.8 trillion, still below its 52-week high.
Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Performance. Source: TradingView
The coming quarters will show how much revenue the program adds. They will also reveal whether startups treat Nvidia as a partner or a landlord.

Bitcoin (BTC) options expiring July 8 have turned call-heavy, with traders positioning for higher prices. The expiry lands the same day the Federal Reserve releases minutes from its June meeting.
Call volume has outpaced puts across the contracts. Glassnode says fading demand for downside protection could mark early optimism returning to the market.
Bitcoin options open interest by strike price for the July 8 expiry, with max pain marked at $63,000. Source: Deribit Call Positioning Builds Into the Expiry
Call volume reached 6,258 contracts over 24 hours against 3,610 puts on Deribit as of this writing, delivering a put-call ratio of 0.58.
Open interest leans the same way, with 370 call contracts against 257 puts. Still, the expiry is small, holding about 628 contracts worth $39.3 million in notional value.
That is a fraction of the late-June monthly settlement, which cleared billions across Bitcoin and Ethereum. Its direct settlement impact is limited, so the signal lies in the positioning itself.
The heaviest call bets sit well above spot, including a large cluster near the $69,000 strike. Put open interest stays between $58,000 and $62,000, which points to lighter downside hedging.
Bitcoin’s spot price sat near $62,645 as of this writing, down 0.3% over 24 hours. The $63,000 has remained elusive for the pioneer crypto since the last week of June, with the weekend breaching proving short-lived.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: TradingView
Max pain marks the strike where the most options expire worthless, leaving sellers the smallest payout. The max pain theory suggests prices may drift toward the strike where option sellers face the smallest payout, but evidence for this effect is mixed.
As the Wednesday FOMC minutes and economic forecast report approaches, therefore, the Bitcoin price could drift toward the $63,000 level in quiet trade, though a small expiry exerts only a mild pull.
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FOMC Minutes Add Event Risk
The minutes from the June 16 to 17 meeting arrive at 2 p.m. ET on July 8. Policymakers held rates at 3.50% to 3.75%, the fourth straight hold.
The meeting was the first led by new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. His hawkish policy debut sent Bitcoin and gold lower on June 17.
Nine of 18 officials projected a rate hike later in 2026, and the statement dropped its easing bias. The minutes will show how firm that hawkish turn was.
Against that backdrop, Glassnode reads the options market as unusually calm. It frames the fading demand for downside protection as a possible turning point.
The options market is currently pricing in low future volatility for $BTC. While upside expectations remain unchanged we see less demand for short exposure. This could be the first sign of optimism returning to the options market,” analysts at Glassnode indicated.
Still, that calm cuts both ways. Light hedging means any surprise in the minutes could move price sharply into the expiry.
Whether Bitcoin holds above $63,000 into Wednesday may hinge on how traders read the minutes. The coming session will show whether call buyers or the Fed set the near-term tone.

FIFA cleared United States striker Folarin Balogun to face Belgium in the World Cup Round of 16, suspending his automatic one-match ban. On Polymarket, odds that he would play jumped to about 97%.
The FIFA Disciplinary Committee invoked Article 27 of its code, placing the ban on a one-year probation instead of enforcing it. The move reversed a red card that many US fans called unfair.

Odds Balogun Will Play Against Belgium. Source: Polymarket Why FIFA’s Article 27 Call on Balogun Was Rare
Balogun was sent off in the 64th minute of the USA’s 2-0 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 1. A VAR review flagged him for stepping on defender Tarik Muharemović’s ankle, ruling it serious foul play.
US Soccer had no way to appeal the automatic ban. Red cards at the World Cup almost never get reversed.
Article 27 gave the committee another route. It lets FIFA suspend a punishment on probation, so the ban applies only if Balogun reoffends within a year. FIFA set out the terms in its ruling.
“By operation of Article 27 FDC, the implementation of the automatic match suspension for USA player Folarin Balogun is suspended for a probationary period of one (1) year.”
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FIFA used the same power weeks earlier on Cristiano Ronaldo. He was sent off in a World Cup qualifier, his first red card in 226 internationals. FIFA deferred two games of his three-match ban on probation, keeping him available for 2026.
The reprieve also moved crypto-based prediction markets, which have tracked lucrative World Cup trades all tournament.
Polymarket Jumps as Trump Hails the Balogun Ruling
Traders have priced everything from match outcomes to FIFA’s mystery halftime act. The World Cup has been a windfall for the sector. It pushed Polymarket to a record $10.8 billion in monthly volume in June, CNBC reported.
On Polymarket, Yes shares on Balogun playing Belgium sat near zero for days. They jumped to about 97% within hours of the ruling, on roughly $19,000 in volume.
Most contracts never get that busy. Roughly 70% of the platform’s closed prediction markets have traded under $10,000, and Balogun’s stayed dormant until the news gave traders something to price.
“Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” President Donald Trump wrote, welcoming the outcome on Truth Social.
Several sports outlets reported that the White House called FIFA and asked President Gianni Infantino to review the card.
🚨 Exclusive: The White House made a direct call to FIFA to ask Gianni Infantino to review Folarin Balogun’s red card.FIFA approached for comment and referred to the findings of its independent committee.FIFA sources insist White House influence could not affect the decision… pic.twitter.com/Rl97b1wm4X
— Ben Jacobs (@JacobsBen) July 5, 2026
BeInCrypto could not verify whether this appeal happened.
However, FIFA pointed to its independent committee and said Article 27 gave the panel full authority, denying outside influence.
Balogun is the United States’ leading scorer with three goals. He is now free to face Belgium on Monday in Seattle, the side that ended the US run in 2014. The winner reaches a quarterfinal the Americans last saw in 2002.

Veteran trader Peter Brandt is eyeing a move from Bitcoin into gold, citing a technical breakout in the XAU/BTC ratio. His call has reignited the store-of-value debate, drawing sharp pushback from analysts.
Here is what his chart shows, why the timing matters, and how other analysts read the same setup.
I am contemplating selling some of my Bitcoin and going to Gold with the money.Looks to me that Gold is going to gain substantially on Bitcoin $XAUBTC pic.twitter.com/m4EUqkbh5j
— The Factor Report (@PeterLBrandt) July 5, 2026
What the XAU/BTC Ratio Breakout Actually Means
The XAU/BTC ratio measures how many BTC one ounce of gold can buy. A rising ratio means gold is outperforming Bitcoin, while a falling ratio signals the opposite across the market cycle.
Brandt, a respected chartist with over 50 years of experience, sees the ratio turning. His monthly chart shows the pair near 0.067, curling upward from a multi-year base.
Furthermore, he believes gold is poised to gain substantially as the ratio breaks out of a falling channel.
The price math explains the timing. Bitcoin now trades around $62,658, roughly 50% below its October 2025 peak of $126,000.
Meanwhile, gold hovers near $4,175 despite a 25% retracement from its record above $5,600, according to TradingView data.
His view rests on classical technical analysis, not ideology. Brandt has stayed cautious on Bitcoin throughout 2026.
Previously, he outlined potential lows in the $40,000 to $60,000 range before any move toward a much higher $250,000 target.
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Bitcoin (BTC) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto Why Not Everyone Agrees With the Rotation Trade
Not all market participants accept Brandt’s rotation thesis. Michael Saylor argues Bitcoin’s underperformance stems from liquidity diversion toward AI infrastructure, not a shift into gold. On-chain data supports a more nuanced read of the market.
While ETF outflows made headlines, long-term holders absorbed supply. In fact, they added roughly 125,000 BTC during the dip. As a result, the pattern suggests accumulation by strong hands rather than broad distribution across the market.
Everyone's asking why Bitcoin is lagging while the S&P prints all-time highs. Michael Saylor gave me the cleanest answer in Prague:"We're living right now in the summer of the AI bubble… $500 billion of capital is being lurped into the AI complex right now."His framing: a… https://t.co/AkIoUBS5s9 pic.twitter.com/Fyaow2IL8G
— Michaël van de Poppe (@CryptoMichNL) July 4, 2026
Analyst Michaël van de Poppe pushed back directly on the chart. “Until Bitcoin doubles, then this entire chart is worthless,” he wrote. His comment underscores the view that Bitcoin’s growth potential could quickly invalidate any relative weakness against gold.
Trader Pablo Heman offered a more balanced take, holding both assets. He sees near-term upside for Bitcoin if it holds above $55,000. However, he stays long-term bullish on gold, citing China’s push to challenge the LBMA pricing structure.
“Wow, Short Bitcoin Long Gold?! What a ballsy call! I hold both, and think BTC at least has a big bounce coming for next few months. As long as BTC stays above 55K it should have a big bounce. But Gold (and silver) I am bullish on for the Long term, like the next 5-10 year, maybe even more! China will now take on LBMA (London) and try to set the spot good price in HK. Most people probably don’t know how much this will change the world of commodities!,” Herman said on X.
For now, the XAU/BTC ratio serves as the clearest scoreboard. A sustained breakout would bolster the gold-over-Bitcoin narrative. However, a rejection could signal Bitcoin regaining momentum, especially as fresh weekly data shows crypto outperforming both gold and equities.
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Binance outflows climbed to a three-year high last week. The move came as Ethereum (ETH) withdrawals from the exchange hit their highest level since March 2023.
The world’s largest exchange saw $1.23 billion leave in the week beginning June 29. That marked a 207% jump from about $400 million a week earlier, according to DefiLlama data.
Why are Binance Outflows Rising?
The timing is hard to ignore. The outflows peaked in the final days before the European Union’s July 1 crypto deadline.
Monthly net outflows reached roughly $3.2 billion, DefiLlama data shows. Even so, the sum looks modest against Binance’s scale.
Binance Monthly Net Outflows. Source: DefiLlama
The exchange ran about 39% of top-exchange spot volume in 2025, by CoinGecko’s count. Withdrawals can reflect self-custody, market positioning, or accumulation, so the cause is rarely simple.
Is MiCA Fueling the Exodus?
Regulation sits high on the list of suspects. The Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) transition period ends July 1. The European Securities and Markets Authority has ruled out any extension.
Binance confirmed it would not hold a MiCA licence by June 30. It is winding down EU services for users in Poland, Italy, Spain, and France from July 1.
The exchange also pulled its Greek licence bid days earlier. Reports said the regulator would balk at clearing co-founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ). His 2023 guilty plea and Binance’s $4.3 billion US settlement still shadow its applications.
Binance framed the retreat as temporary.
“Binance is not leaving Europe,” Gillian Lynch, its Head of Europe and UK, told Reuters.
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The pressure was not Binance’s alone. Bybit became the second major exchange to restrict European users before the deadline. That points to a regulatory reshuffle rather than a Binance-only problem.
Or Is This ETH Accumulation?
There is a competing read. CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost logged more than 166,000 ether withdrawal transactions on Binance in a single day. That was the highest count since March 2023.
Ethereum Withdrawals on Binance. Source: CryptoQuant
The withdrawals landed as ether rebounded, still about 67% below its August 2025 peak. Coins leaving an exchange often signal intent to hold rather than sell.
Over the past seven days, ether gained about 12% to trade near $1,766. Darkfost tied the exit to demand building near recent lows, a pattern he reads as longer-term accumulation.
The near-term test is whether coins keep leaving once the deadline noise fades. Sustained outflows would strengthen the accumulation case. A swing back into exchanges would point to short-term positioning instead.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) just warned that tokenization, the tech behind the crypto boom, could rip risk out of banks and hand it to lines of code that no regulator controls.
The timing is loaded. Wall Street giants like BlackRock are racing to move trillions on-chain. The IMF says that same plumbing could crack under stress.
Tokenization Turns Delays Into Split-Second Risk
Today, buying or moving assets runs through banks and middlemen, with small delays built in. Those delays are annoying, but they act as safety brakes when something breaks.
Tokenization rips those steps out. Deals settle instantly on shared ledgers, run by self-executing code called smart contracts, with no human in the loop.
That speed cuts costs, and it removes the brakes. When trades fire automatically, a glitch or a run can spread before anyone reacts. The IMF made the same point in earlier work on risks to tokenized finance.
Its sharpest warning is about who ends up holding the danger. Not banks, but the platforms and code that run the trades.
“Effective oversight must therefore extend beyond institutions to the code itself,” read an excerpt in the blog, citing Tobias.
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The IMF even floated a startling idea. Some smart contracts could grow so central they become too important to fail. That is the tag that forced the 2008 bank bailouts.
Courts still have not settled who owns tokenized assets when a deal lives only in code.
Who Wins, Who Loses
The prize is huge. BlackRock’s tokenized fund, BUIDL, already holds about $2.4 billion, and Ondo runs more than $1.4 billion in tokenized assets.
The real action is in stablecoins. More than $300 billion now sits in them, dwarfing the roughly $32 billion in other tokenized assets, per rwa.xyz.
Global RWA Market Overview. Source: rwa.xyz
Even the safe ones wobble. In March 2023, USD Coin (USDC) briefly fell to 87 cents. The cause was $3.3 billion stuck at a collapsed bank.
Tether’s USDT leads the sector near $186 billion, per DefiLlama. However, European rules pushed it off major exchanges, lifting Circle’s USDC toward $73 billion. That European USDT crackdown shows how fast the map redraws.
Not everyone is worried. BlackRock chief Larry Fink calls this the start of an era where every asset gets tokenized. He wants the whole financial system on one shared blockchain.
That is the split. Industry sees cheaper, faster, open markets. The IMF sees the same speed turning a local failure into a global one before regulators can blink.
Tokenization is more than a technology upgrade. It can reshape how the financial system operates. New IMF analysis explains what changes and why policy choices will matter: https://t.co/niSfVsSwgf pic.twitter.com/68nNulSY3w
— IMF (@IMFNews) July 5, 2026
For now, real trading stays thin, with much of the tokenized asset market barely moving week to week. The next few years of rules, not the code, will decide who is right.

Anthropic faces a new $75 million lawsuit from authors who claim the company pirated copyrighted books to train Claude. The fresh case adds to mounting legal pressure on the AI developer.
The suit signals that the fight between authors and AI companies remains far from over across the industry.
What the New Anthropic Copyright Lawsuit Alleges
A copyright lawsuit is a legal action claiming someone used protected creative work without permission, licensing, or fair compensation. The new complaint accuses Anthropic of copying books from pirate libraries to train Claude. Furthermore, it seeks $75 million in damages.
The authors argue that Anthropic sourced their works from well-known shadow libraries. These sites host copyrighted material without any consent from the original creators, according to The New York Post.
Moreover, the plaintiffs say the company never sought licensing or offered payment before ingesting the books.
The case rests on a specific legal distinction. A previous ruling found that training AI on legally acquired books qualifies as fair use.
However, downloading pirated copies was deemed a separate act of infringement. As a result, the piracy claim remains the central legal battleground.
The plaintiffs believe existing settlements undervalue their works. Copyright law allows statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work.
The authors argue that smaller per-book payouts fail to reflect the true scale of the alleged infringement.
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Who’s Suing Whom in AI? – Overview of notable copyright infringement lawsuits involving major AI companies as of June 2026. Source: X/@randgroup Why the Legal Pressure on Anthropic Keeps Building
The new lawsuit does not stand alone. Anthropic already faces a separate class action filed in June over its Claude Max subscription plans. That case targets the company on a completely different front, adding to the broader legal strain.
In that earlier suit, plaintiff Karl Kahn alleged the advertised 5x and 20x usage boosts collapsed under hidden caps.
Furthermore, the complaint targeted the $100 Max 5x and $200 Max 20x tiers. It sought refunds for subscribers since the plans launched in 2025.
The copyright case carries far heavier financial stakes. Anthropic previously settled a landmark class action for roughly $1.5 billion. That deal paid authors around $3,000 each for an estimated 500,000 pirated books covered under the agreement.
Some authors chose to opt out of that settlement. As a result, they retained the right to pursue their own individual claims.
The new $75 million lawsuit reflects exactly that strategy, allowing plaintiffs to seek far larger per-work damages.
Anthropic maintains a strong financial position despite the pressure. The company is valued at hundreds of billions of dollars following recent funding rounds. However, repeated legal challenges could reshape how AI firms source training data and market their subscription products going forward.
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Michael Saylor thinks Bitcoin (BTC) will win the next decade by doing almost nothing. No new features. No faster blocks. The executive chairman of Strategy says the base layer should barely change while the financial system reorganizes around it.
His nine Bitcoin predictions add up to one contrarian bet. Where most technology projects chase speed and new features, Saylor argues Bitcoin should do the opposite and force everything else to adapt to it.
Change Less, Matter More
The network matters more everywhere else, he believes, precisely because it refuses to change at its core.
1. Bitcoin evolves by changing less.
Most tech projects race to ship. Saylor wants the opposite for Bitcoin. Its job, he says, is to move slowly and not break, leaving wallets, layers, and institutions to handle the fast-moving parts.
The base layer hardens while everything built on top competes and iterates. He treats that restraint not as stagnation but as the source of Bitcoin’s strength, pointing to the same fixed rules that have run without interruption since 2009.
2. The protocol gets harder to change.
Saylor calls hard consensus Bitcoin’s immune system, since any change to the base layer needs overwhelming agreement from nodes, miners, and users.
Hard consensus is Bitcoin’s immune system. Fees price block space. Nodes set policy. Miners build blocks. Holders allocate capital. Protocol changes must earn overwhelming alignment, so bad ideas fail before becoming iatrogenic protocol changes. $BTC
— Michael Saylor (@saylor) July 5, 2026
That bar has only risen with time. The last major upgrade, Taproot, activated back in 2021, and nothing comparable has followed.
The current Bitcoin soft fork debate over spam and ordinals shows how fiercely even modest changes get fought today, echoing the block-size wars that divided the community years earlier. For Saylor, that resistance is a feature, not a flaw.
From Digital Capital to Digital Money
3. Bitcoin is digital capital, not digital cash.
Forget buying coffee with it. Saylor frames Bitcoin as scarce global capital built for final settlement rather than everyday spending. About 20 million of its 21 million coins already exist, and no authority can print more.
Bitcoin’s spot price sits near $62,700, about 50% below its record near $126,000 from October 2025, yet he argues the long-term case is unchanged.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
Treasuries, collateral, and large settlements belong on the base layer, while smaller payments can run on the faster networks layered above it.
4. Capital flows, not halvings, drive the cycle.
The halving no longer runs the show, Saylor says. The 2024 halving cut new issuance to 3.125 Bitcoin per block, but supply is no longer the main story.
Since US spot ETFs launched in January 2024, demand has turned increasingly institutional, moving with balance sheets rather than retail hype.
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust alone grew from $51.5 billion to $67.4 billion in net assets during 2025, according to its annual filing.
In Saylor’s view, capital flows now set the trajectory that halvings once seemed to dictate.
5. Digital credit turns capital into money.
Here is the chain reaction Saylor sees happening. Digital capital enables digital credit, and credit in turn enables new forms of digital money.
He points to gold and real estate, which grew far more useful once banks, lenders, and markets were built around them over the past century.
Bitcoin, he argues, is now entering that same phase of financialization. The main difference is speed, since the plumbing is being built on open networks rather than paper and vaults.
Interfaces, Risks, and the Road to 2036
6. The interfaces become the battleground.
Everyone will want Bitcoin, but few will hold it the same way. Self-custody, ETFs, banks, and credit products all compete to sit between people and their coins.
Saylor says the real fight is keeping that exposure tied to actual Bitcoin rather than IOUs. Even critics of his model warn about too much paper Bitcoin stacked on top of a limited supply.
It is a danger the 2022 collapse of FTX made concrete, and one the 2014 Mt. Gox failure had already foreshadowed.
7. Five real risks define the work ahead.
Saylor does not pretend the path is clean. He names five threats to watch. They are protocol corruption, paper Bitcoin, custodial centralization, regulatory capture, and a shaky fee market.
The last one matters most over time, because the block subsidy keeps halving toward zero, so transaction fees must eventually pay for network security.
Recent warnings about leverage risk around large corporate holders suggest the paper-claims danger is already here, not merely theoretical.
8. Mining becomes energy infrastructure.
Mining turns raw electricity into monetary security, and Saylor expects it to keep maturing into a serious energy business. Since China’s 2021 ban scattered the industry, much of it relocated to the US and other markets, growing more industrial and better capitalized.
The strongest operators will win on power contracts, grid relationships, and balance sheets, not simply faster machines. Increasingly, miners act as flexible buyers of surplus or stranded power, turning otherwise wasted energy into revenue.
9. Bitcoin anchors global finance by 2036.
By 2036, Saylor expects Bitcoin to sit on the balance sheets of individuals, companies, and governments alike. That shift has already started.
In March 2025, a US executive order created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve built from coins seized in criminal and civil cases, with a stated policy of never selling them.
If more states follow, he argues, Bitcoin becomes a neutral reserve asset that anchors credit and settlement worldwide.
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The vision is bold, and Saylor is far from a neutral observer. Strategy, the firm once called MicroStrategy, holds more than 847,300 BTC worth over $53 billion, per its filings.
MicroStrategy Bitcoin Holdings. Source: Strategy
That single corporate stash is roughly 4% of all the coins that will ever exist. Whether the rest of the world chooses to build on a foundation that refuses to change may decide Bitcoin’s next decade.
Bitcoin’s job is not to become everything. Bitcoin’s job is to be the thing that does not change,” Saylor concluded.

Ledger co-founder Eric Larchevêque says a Bitcoin (BTC) price of $1 million would not be good news. He argues the level would reflect war, debt crises, and a collapsing fiat system rather than mainstream success.
The comment cuts against a wave of seven-figure forecasts. Larchevêque accepts the destination but rejects the celebration, casting Bitcoin as insurance against disorder rather than a speculative jackpot.
Why a $1 Million Bitcoin Would Signal Trouble
Larchevêque made the argument in a recent interview on the When Shift Happens podcast. He said Bitcoin has little value in a stable world where few people need it.
Its role grows when systems break. He described the asset as a final settlement tool that protects wealth through wars, revolutions, and capital controls.
That thesis leans on a real backdrop. Governments keep piling on debt, and the US alone now owes more than $39 trillion, a fresh record. Larchevêque sees that kind of borrowing ending in currency failure.
US Debt. Source: FiscalData
The meaning also shifts by geography, he added. For someone in Iran, Bitcoin can be a lifeline. For a comfortable saver in France, it can feel abstract.
Bitcoin now trades just below $63,000, leaving any move to $1 million approximately 16 times away. Larchevêque expects that climb, yet dreads the world that would produce it.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
“I think it’s a world with a lot of suffering,” he said.
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He offered that answer when asked what a $1 million or $10 million Bitcoin would look like.
How the Bulls Frame the Same Target
Other forecasters reach $1 million through optimism. VanEck research head Matthew Sigel calls it a base case within about five years, tied to adoption and Bitcoin’s fixed supply of 21 million coins.
The timing detail matters. Sigel floated that target in May, when Bitcoin traded near $80,000. The token has since slipped to about $63,000, widening the gap to seven figures.
Jan3 chief Samson Mow expects a sudden supply shock he calls an omega candle, a single-day jump above $100,000. Michael Saylor and ARK Invest lean on the same scarcity story, pointing to institutional demand and long-term 2030 targets.
Bitcoin Price Prediction. Source: Ark Invest
Larchevêque shares that price conviction and even cites Saylor. He splits from the group on meaning, treating a seven-figure print as a symptom of failure rather than a reward.
“I share the same vision and Michael Saylor that Bitcoin is the best assets possible, you know, globally, historically. And that’s it’s going to be a very good bet in in the future.”
The Ledger founder keeps almost all of his liquid net worth in Bitcoin, framing it as protection instead of profit. He also insists the call is not investment advice.

Vitalik Buterin has outlined Lean Ethereum, a sweeping redesign he calls the network’s third major evolution after the Merge. The upgrades will roll out across three to four years, touching nearly every core part of the protocol.
Buterin shared the plan through a public roadmap he calls the strawmap, an Ethereum Foundation draft. He said almost every major piece will be replaced, calling the effort ambitious yet low-risk.
What Lean Ethereum Changes
Recursive STARKs sit at the center. The cryptographic proof system would verify the chain rather than force every node to re-execute transactions. Buterin wants these proofs enshrined as a core protocol component.
Quantum safety has also jumped up the list. The roadmap swaps quantum-vulnerable cryptography for hash-based schemes built to outlast quantum computers. The shift echoes NIST, the US standards body that finalized its first post-quantum encryption standards in 2024.
The most disruptive change targets how Ethereum stores data. Buterin would keep today’s core protocol architecture largely intact. He would add a restrictive new state type that scales toward 100 TB by 2030.
Rewriting an ERC-20 token or non-fungible token (NFT) into that format could cut fees more than 10x. Complex apps like decentralized exchanges would stay put.
Privacy becomes a first-class goal, not an afterthought, extending Buterin’s broader privacy push. Nearer term, the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade should raise the gas limit.
Buterin has reason for confidence. The 2022 Merge moved Ethereum to proof of stake and cut its energy use by more than 99%. It shipped with little disruption to users or apps.
“But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second,” Vitalik Buterin articulated.
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Not Everyone Buys the Timeline
The schedule drew fast pushback, and not from outsiders. Dankrad Feist praised the vision but called three to four years far too slow. The Ethereum Foundation researcher’s data-scaling work gave danksharding its name.
“Fully proven STF and scaling to Gigagas with finality in seconds gets me excited! But 3-4 years is very slow… I think we should be ambitious and get it done in ~1 year. I think this is realistically possible now with LLMs,” Dankrad Feist suggested.
His faith in AI is not fringe. The strawmap itself assumes human-first development and concedes that AI-accelerated research could compress the timeline.
Others were more cautious. Some urged the Foundation to underpromise, drawing the reply that underpromising only leads to under-delivery.
2 years seems between possible and likely, but from a communication perspective I think it would be irresponsible for V/EF to communicate a 1-2 year expectation. Better to underpromise.
— Matt Liston (@no__________end) July 4, 2026
The stakes are practical. The overhaul arrives weeks after a leaner Ethereum Foundation cut about 20% of its staff, or 54 roles. It has also moved to a tighter, endowment-style budget.
The strawmap remains a draft, not a schedule. Buterin said the coming Hegotá fork is likely the last before the Lean era begins.
Ethereum Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
Ether (ETH) has fallen about 41% in 2026 to near $1,760. For now, its market price reflects a market waiting on delivery, not promises.

Being an entrepreneur and investor means I sit on the other side of many pitches. I get decks on my desk built around roadmaps and teams that swear their traction is real.
My job is to figure out which parts of those pitches survive contact with the blockchain. So when I tell you the detection side of this industry has genuinely improved, I’m not repeating a vendor’s pitch deck.
Blockchain forensics platforms like Chainalysis, TRM Labs, and Elliptic have frozen or recovered an estimated $34 billion in illicit funds. More than 45 regulators worldwide now use these tools as standard practice. They help recover stolen money, traced through wallet clustering and entity attribution that are good enough to hold up in court.
Blockchain Forensics. Source: Coinlaw
Thanks to AI, newer generations of these tools do more than trace money after it’s already moved. Today, there are predictive platforms that claim to flag a wallet before it acts at all.
They score behavior against 50+ features and retrain daily. One vendor claims a 98% accuracy score across 14 million wallets. We’ve got rug-pull scanners sitting directly inside AI trading agents, checking liquidity locks, freeze authority, and deployer history in about five seconds.
One such service reported scanning over 881,000 token addresses and flagging 271,000 as high-risk. There are even wallet-clustering tools that spot a “sleeper” address that sat dormant for years and only sprang to life right before a liquidation — the digital version of noticing someone’s been casing your street.
So if you only read the vendor pages, you’d walk away thinking crypto fraud is basically solved, because we now have this small army of machine-learning models watching every chain, every wallet, and every transaction around the clock.
Then you check what that same machine-learning era has done to the other side of the ledger.
The Numbers Behind AI Crypto Scams
According to Chainalysis, total crypto scam and fraud-related losses for 2025 sit at roughly $17 billion, up from $9.9 billion the previous year. The FBI’s own figure for crypto fraud over the same period is $11.36 billion in the US alone, a 22% jump year-on-year.
Those are the numbers that make it onto a panel slide. But the one that actually changed how I run due diligence is this: Chainalysis found that AI-powered scams were 4.5x more profitable than traditional ones.
Same con, same target, but with AI, scammers can manufacture fake support agents, fake investors, or trusted insiders at scale.
76% of AI Scams are High-Value and High-Volume. Source: Chainalysis
Lior Aizik, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at crypto exchange XBO, has publicly warned that impersonation scams are increasing and becoming more sophisticated industry-wide. His rule of thumb is simple: never transfer your crypto to anyone you can’t verify, especially if the request comes wrapped in urgency and secrecy.
Impersonation fraud — criminals posing as a bank, an investor, or a crypto influencer — posted 1,400% year-on-year growth. Scammers now use AI to run expensive, targeted cons on people they’ve profiled first, rather than the cheap, high-volume spray-and-pray approach they used before.
That pushed the average payment size sharply higher, from $782 in 2024 to $2,764 in 2025, a 253% increase. I take this personally, because investors and operators with any public profile are exactly who gets cloned.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: while defensive tooling has gotten dramatically better, the offensive results have gotten better too.
It’s like a generative adversarial network, where the generator and discriminator share a rivalry that improves the whole model continuously.
Both offensive and defensive tools draw from the same well of AI capability. Right now, that well favors the first mover, not whoever builds the better model in isolation.
Why Better Detection Keeps Losing the Race
The honest answer is that forensic tools are built for detective work, not prediction. For an investigation to happen, a crime needs to have been committed.
You need a victim who has already lost money before you can trace a pattern visible enough to flag. Even the predictive models that claim to catch a rug pull before it happens are trained on yesterday’s scams — and tomorrow’s scam is being designed by someone who read the same training data.
This became clear to me in real time with the FBI’s NexFundAI sting: the fake honeypot token federal agents created to catch wash traders.
The FBI created NexFundAI as a fake token to catch market manipulators.@EvanLuthra exposed how the FBI built a professional website, hired market makers to fake volume, and arrested 18 people across the US, UK, and Portugal. $25M was seized…After Evan posted about it, the… pic.twitter.com/UPCCp9VKEn
— BeInCrypto (@beincrypto) June 1, 2026
A day after the DOJ announced arrests tied to the operation, someone cloned the exact smart contract and launched a copycat token, making $127,000 in a single day using the same tactics the FBI had just exposed in court documents.
Any LP who asked me whether “the worst behavior in this market was finally getting cleaned up” would have had their answer within twenty-four hours.
The FBI operation became the blueprint for the attacker. Every disclosure that helps the defender also hands the attacker a working template — and attackers read faster than regulators patch.
The Attack Side Just Got Cheaper and Faster
You can see the same asymmetry in how little effort an attack now takes. Software developer Peter Steinberger built a popular open-source project that lets you run an AI assistant on your computer with full system access via apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, and Discord.
The product had to be rebranded after a trademark dispute.
Within minutes of the rebrand announcement, someone had hijacked his old GitHub and X accounts and used them to launch and pump a token that reached a $16 million market cap before crashing over 90%.
No malware, no stolen keys. Just someone fast enough to exploit a gap in attention that no forensic tool was watching for. The tools weren’t watching because nothing illegal had happened yet.
The man behind Clawdbot– Peter Steinberger– Austrian software engineer and founder– deeply technical, low-ego, builder-first profileEarly formation:– studies medical computer science at TU Vienna– becomes a tutor while still a student– later runs iOS and Mac development… pic.twitter.com/J9xxiPX30l
— StarPlatinum (@StarPlatinum_) January 27, 2026
When the AI Agent Is the One Getting Rugged
It’s not just humans falling for this that worries me, because so many of the pitches I get are some version of “let our AI agent trade for you.” Those agents can lose money on your behalf too.
A developer described how an AI agent on Solana bought a token that rugged 94% after twenty minutes, costing the agent’s wallet $12,000.
On investigation, the token had freeze authority enabled, the top 10 holders controlled 91% of the supply. The deployer had already launched three previous scam tokens.
Every one of those red flags was supposed to be checkable in seconds by the detection tools I’ve described here. But the agent didn’t check. It simply saw a token and a price and bought it — because nobody wired the safety layer to the decision layer.
That’s the exact failure mode I now stress-test in every agent-based fund pitch that crosses my desk.
The Part No Tool Can Fix
What worries me most is that some of this damage never touches a smart contract at all. I have a public profile and a following, which makes me exactly the kind of face that gets cloned.
In May, it was reported that a woman in Guelph, Ontario, lost $14,000 to scammers after thinking she was speaking with YouTuber Mr Beast about a crypto investment. She wasn’t. Mr Beast has been fighting AI-generated videos that use his likeness to push fake giveaways for years.
Lots of people are getting this deepfake scam ad of me… are social media platforms ready to handle the rise of AI deepfakes? This is a serious problem pic.twitter.com/llkhxswQSw
— MrBeast (@MrBeast) October 3, 2023
Forensic tools don’t flag these interactions, because nothing about them touches the chain until the money is already moving. The fraud happens in a video call, in a moment of trust. By the time a transaction exists for an analytics platform to score, the decision that costs the victim has already been made.
AI has gotten better at manufacturing that false trust faster than it has gotten at flagging it. And that’s where most of the $17 billion actually went.
AI Crypto Scams: So Who’s Actually Winning?
Neither side.
That’s the most honest answer I can give. Both sets of tools, forensic and predictive, are real. The recoveries are real. Dismissing them because fraud has also grown would be its own kind of dishonesty.
But “real and improving” isn’t the same as “ahead.” The 2025 data is clear: in dollar terms, offense has improved faster than defense.
If there’s one reason for that, it’s this. Detection tools mainly answer the question “is this wallet suspicious?” — and that question is only asked after someone decides to check.
Then there are cases like Guelph, where there’s no wallet to scan in the first place. AI has made those cases more common, which is why I’ve stopped treating AI as a selling point in any pitch and started treating it as the first thing I want to stress-test.
The blockchain can confirm a wallet’s history. It can’t confirm a phone call,

MicroStrategy chief executive Phong Le has called Bitcoin (BTC) the “United States of money.” On-chain tracker Arkham says the $1 million bet he made on the firm’s preferred stock is back to break-even.
The purchase, in a securities filing, doubles as a personal wager on the company Le runs. Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, is fighting to hold its Stretch preferred stock (STRC) near par after a Bitcoin slump.
$1 Million Bet Back at Break-Even
A June 22 filing shows Le bought 11,000 STRC shares through his family trust. He paid a weighted-average $90.80 apiece, or about $998,756. He framed it as a long-term hold, not a trade.
That price was below STRC’s stated $100 value. Strategy designed the stock to trade near that $100 par value, adjusting its dividend monthly to defend the peg.
The company has since lifted STRC’s annual dividend to 12%, up from 9% at its July 2025 debut. That has pulled the shares back toward par. Arkham now pegs Le’s position at break-even.
STRATEGY CEO BACK IN PROFITStrategy CEO Phong Le bought $1 Million of STRC on June 22nd at ~$90. STRC is now back at $90. Will the Strategy CEO end up turning a profit on this trade? https://t.co/yOzbagLb1a pic.twitter.com/410XI9Qlpd
— Arkham (@arkham) July 2, 2026
The recovery matters because STRC anchors a preferred-stock stack now worth more than $13 billion. MicroStrategy recently outlined a new Bitcoin sales policy that could fund those dividends by selling some of its holdings.
“I bought $1 million of $STRC today. Will hold it until it reaches par, likely longer,” Le described the buy in a June post.
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Why Le Calls Bitcoin the United States of Money
Le laid out his case for Bitcoin, describing it as money set by transparent rules and a fixed supply that no government can inflate away. The asset, he argued, shields wealth from inflation, censorship, and political pressure.
“Bitcoin is the United States of money. It aspires to do for money what the American Constitution aspired to do for government: create a system governed by transparent rules rather than the discretion of individuals…But beyond that, Bitcoin is hope,” he stated.
He tied the view to his own past. He linked his family’s refugee journey from Vietnam to the belief that people should control their own money. Le has predicted Bitcoin could become a global reserve asset within a decade.
The conviction carries weight because Le runs Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder at 818,334 BTC.
Top 100 Public Bitcoin Treasury Companies. Source: Bitcoin Treasuries
Founder Michael Saylor pioneered that treasury model in 2020. Le points to banks like Goldman Sachs and Citi adding Bitcoin services as proof that the shift is real.
Not everyone shares the optimism. Bitwise has said Strategy is no longer Bitcoin’s dominant buyer. The firm also booked a $12.5 billion quarterly loss as bitcoin fell. Rival corporate Bitcoin treasuries have kept accumulating through the slump.
Whether the break-even holds depends on how STRC and Bitcoin’s bear market play out from here. For now, Le’s balance sheet and his personal account are pointing in the same direction.

IREN handed its two co-CEOs 18.2 million restricted stock units worth about $700 million, a grant equal to roughly 5% of the company and locked up through fiscal 2033.
The award went to Daniel and William Roberts, the former Macquarie bankers who founded IREN in 2018. Its calendar stretches to the end of the decade, ending on the year a rare piece of founder control expires.
A Grant Built to Run Until 2033
IREN sits among the Bitcoin miner stocks retooling for AI. The board approved 9,099,328 units for each brother on June 30. The units vest over four years, and each tranche is subject to a two-year sale ban.
The last shares come free only in fiscal 2033. Neither executive can collect another equity grant before fiscal 2031.
The timing is not incidental. IREN was listed on Nasdaq in 2021, and the brothers each hold one B Class share that carries 15 votes for every ordinary share they own, per the IPO prospectus.
That gap is wide. In August, each founder held 2.3% of the equity but 21.8% of the vote, IREN’s proxy shows. Together they command nearly 44%.
Those rights expire around November 2033. The Council of Institutional Investors urges dual-class sunsets of seven years or fewer.
The dilution thins their grip further. Share count rose from about 272 million last August to 341 million by March, funding its pivot toward AI compute.
Investors Sold the News
IREN stock fell about 10% to $38.82 on July 2, according to TradingView data. The drop stung even by the standards of volatile crypto mining stocks.
IREN Stock Performance. Source: TradingView
Short seller Jim Chanos flagged the size. He put the award near 17% of IREN’s projected cumulative adjusted net income from fiscal 2027 through 2030. The shares vest on time served, not performance.
Huh…?! If the stock drops 50% over the next four years they will still own shares worth $400 million. How is that pay for “performance”…?! $IREN
— James Chanos (@RealJimChanos) July 3, 2026
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IREN’s board said it weighed performance and hybrid designs first. It cast the award as the close of a multi-year pay plan.
“The Equity Grants are designed to retain and incentivize the Co-CEOs to lead the Company through its next phase of growth and the execution of its long-term strategic plan,” IREN said in its filing.
By fading founder votes and locking fresh stock to 2033, the deal reads as alignment or entrenchment. The answer will follow the wider mining-to-AI transition and what the brothers deliver.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) officially ended on July 4, the sunset date written into President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order. Posts from Elon Musk and Michael Saylor quickly fueled speculation that Bitcoin (BTC) inherits the reform story.
Musk, DOGE’s former co-leader, marked Independence Day with a patriotic video montage instead of a farewell to the program. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy’s executive chairman answered him with one loaded line.
DOGE Ends With No Report and No Farewell
Trump’s January 2025 executive order created DOGE as a temporary organization. It set termination for July 4, 2026, America’s 250th birthday.
The program barely made it that far. DOGE had already collapsed as a centralized body last November, months ahead of schedule. Its public savings tracker went silent after January 1.
The commission claimed $215 billion in savings, about $1,335 per taxpayer by its own math. That equals roughly 3% of one year’s $7 trillion federal budget, and a fraction of the $2 trillion Musk pitched in October 2024.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought told lawmakers this week that no closing report is planned, Politico reported.
Musk, who left Washington in May 2025 after 130 days as a special government employee, always framed the ending as intentional.
The final step of @DOGE is to delete itself https://t.co/ZCj2NvHm1U
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 2, 2024
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The efficiency concept has meanwhile traveled beyond Washington. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently launched a municipal efficiency version of the playbook.
Michael Saylor Answers Musk With a Bitcoin Pitch
Marc Andreessen opened July 4 with a five-minute montage of American history and the caption “God bless America.” Musk shared the same video hours later.
Saylor then replied to Musk directly, swapping a letter for the Bitcoin symbol.
We can still make something ₿etter.
— Michael Saylor (@saylor) July 4, 2026
Saylor has run this play before. In December 2020, he publicly urged Musk to shift Tesla’s balance sheet into Bitcoin. Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth two months later, then suspended BTC payments in May 2021 over energy concerns.
That history shaped the reaction. Traders read the exchange as a handoff from government reform to sound money, and some replies urged Tesla to resume Bitcoin payments. BTC trades near $62,584, up about 1% in 24 hours.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
The timing carries irony for Saylor. Strategy faces questions over a reported 491 BTC sale and a dividend policy JPMorgan called risky. Meanwhile, Saylor pits MSTR against the Magnificent 7.
Neither Musk nor Saylor mentioned DOGE by name. The debate now turns on whether innovation and Bitcoin truly replace the reform push, or whether the ₿etter reply stays a holiday flourish.

Nearly 1 million buyers of the Official Trump (TRUMP) meme coin are sitting on a combined $3.81 billion in losses, according to blockchain analytics firm Nansen. The TRUMP meme coin now trades roughly 98% below its January 2025 record high.
The losses look like the final stage of a familiar meme coin cycle. Early buyers captured most of the gains, while later arrivals absorbed the decline that followed the launch hype.
Official Trump (TRUMP) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto The TRUMP Meme Coin Cycle Played Out in 18 Months
TRUMP launched on January 17, 2025, three days before President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Its price jumped from below $1 to a record $73.43 within two days. That briefly lifted its market value near $15 billion.
Nansen tracked about 1.48 million wallets that bought the token. Just under 500,000 locked in profits worth roughly $4 billion. Most of those gains went to early traders who sold into the first rally.
The buyers who followed became the exit liquidity. Nansen counted 988,905 wallets underwater, about two out of every three, once paper losses are included. The token’s own website had warned that it was not an investment.
“Everybody’s profiting.” -President TrumpExcept the people who bought his coins.Trump family crypto earnings: $1.4 billion$TRUMP meme coin: -98%$MELANIA meme coin: -99%Perhaps the most blatant example of corruption in the history of American politics. pic.twitter.com/SlNdRmWFvg
— Charlie Bilello (@charliebilello) July 1, 2026
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The outcome fit a pattern that analysts flagged for celebrity meme coins from the start. A month later, Argentina saw a faster version. President Javier Milei promoted the LIBRA token in February 2025. Its near $4 billion valuation collapsed within hours, triggering a fraud probe.
The Token Earned for Its Backers Regardless of Price
The design meant the decline barely touched the people behind it. The token’s code routes a share of every trade to creator-linked wallets. Chainalysis traced more than $324 million in such fees to those addresses in the months after launch.
Those fees accrued whether buyers won or lost. Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure later listed a $636 million windfall from the meme coin. The royalties were routed through CIC Digital, the Trump-linked entity behind the token.
Retail buyers had little legal cover. In a February 2025 statement, the Securities and Exchange Commission said meme coins are not securities. That left the market outside its oversight.
Economist Peter Schiff has called the tokens a way to buy access to the president rather than a real investment.
“He’s actually had events at the White House where the top owners of Trump coin are allowed to attend. But it’s really a way to bribe the president. You don’t have to give him money directly, just buy his token, because who else would buy the token? It’s a lousy investment,” he said.
The White House rejects that view. According to a New York Times report, Spokeswoman Anna Kelly said there are no conflicts of interest and that the president acts in the public interest.
TRUMP set an all-time low of $1.50 in early June and has barely recovered. Appetite across the wider meme coin market has stayed subdued. The token now trades close to $1.79, little changed over the past month. Its market value sits near $424 million, ranking around 115th.
Political branding drew far more attention than a typical meme coin. It did not rewrite the math. The TRUMP token traced the same boom-and-bust arc as the speculative coins that came before it.

Charles Hoskinson expects the Ouroboros Leios upgrade to multiply Cardano’s capacity by 60 times, a leap that would put the network on par with the XRP Ledger in terms of speed.
The founder also defended Midnight City against critics and outlined the upgrade’s next steps.
Leios: Cardano’s Bet to Catch the XRP Ledger
Ouroboros Leios is an upgrade to Cardano’s protocol designed to multiply transaction capacity without sacrificing decentralization or security. Charles Hoskinson explained its scope during an interview with David Gokhshtein on “The Breakdown podcast”.
According to the founder, the technology will increase the network’s internal throughput by up to 60x. That jump, he said, would leave Cardano with performance comparable to the XRP Ledger, a network known for its efficiency.
“Leios will be a 60x in terms of throughput inside the system, so we’re good, we’re as performant as XRP, and we still kept our principles,” Hoskinson said.
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The Breakdown #739: Crypto Is Back and Moving Again https://t.co/KrGUe9wm0m
— David Gokhshtein (@davidgokhshtein) July 2, 2026
The comparison carries weight. The XRPL built its reputation on settlements between three and five seconds and a maximum capacity of 1,500 transactions per second. In March 2026, that network surpassed 120 TPS during a peak with roughly 650 operations.
Hoskinson stressed that these improvements do not mean giving up the project’s founding principles. The industry knows this dilemma as the blockchain trilemma, where scaling often demands trade-offs between decentralization and security. Cardano wants to prove that exchange is not inevitable.
The path is already underway. The public Leios testnet, named Musashi Dojo, debuted on June 23, 2026. It marks the protocol’s first operation in a live network environment. Mainnet deployment is expected before the end of this year.
Hoskinson Defends Midnight City After Big Pey’s Criticism
Hoskinson also responded firmly to questions about Midnight City. Content creator Big Pey labeled the initiative an example of wasteful spending within the ecosystem.
According to the critic, the team invested millions of dollars in a project that was unable to attract new users. He described that strategy as the “Cardano Way,” referring to investments that yield no immediate commercial returns.
The reply came at once. Hoskinson said he had lost all respect for Big Pey as an entrepreneur and criticized him for failing to understand how consumer products evolve. He even challenged the critic to save the post and return in a year to apologize.
I've just lost all respect for you as an entrepreneur. You clearly have no clue how adoption or consumer experiences work. Save this tweet and come back in a year to apologize. Midnight City is one of the most important applications on Midnight and will be one of the keys to…
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) July 2, 2026
Midnight City works as an interactive showcase for Midnight Network, the privacy-focused chain tied to Cardano. The platform translates complex blockchain mechanics into a retro-futuristic 2D city inhabited by AI agents.
Those agents generate transactions and economic behavior similar to everyday use by consumers and businesses.
Institutional interest supports that vision. Midnight already added Monument Bank, Google, and AlphaTON Capital, and is holding talks with investment banks in the United States and Europe.
For Hoskinson, 2026 will be a beta year meant to strengthen the infrastructure before mainstream adoption.
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Germany’s savings and cooperative banks are rolling out crypto trading to retail clients, wiring Bitcoin (BTC) into the apps of institutions that hold roughly 80 million customer relationships in a country of 84 million people.
The Sparkassen serve about 50 million customers, per DSGV data, and the cooperative banks another 30 million, per BVR figures. Both groups dismissed the asset class as too risky just four years ago.
German Banks That Rejected Crypto Trading Now Court Millions
According to Bloomberg, both groups are building in-house services rather than steering clients to outside exchanges. DZ Bank’s meinKrypto platform already runs inside the VR Banking App, offering BTC, Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Cardano (ADA).
BaFin licensed meinKrypto under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework in late December 2025, per DZ Bank’s announcement. Boerse Stuttgart Digital handles custody, keeping the whole chain under German supervision.
DekaBank is building the equivalent product for the roughly 340 savings banks, with a phased launch later this year. Each of the almost 650 cooperative banks and every Sparkasse opts in individually. DZ Bank product specialist Markus Bärenfänger expects hundreds to join.
Germany’s Local Banks Bring Crypto Trading to Millions in Major Mainstream Adoption Push
The reversal is stark. The savings banks considered crypto trading in 2021, then shelved it over incalculable risks. MiCA has since opened the door for Germany’s largest financial institutions.
Trust Advantage Collides With Total Loss Warnings
The trust math explains the bet. Germans trust their primary bank twice as much as specialized crypto platforms, 38% to 19%, per a Boerse Stuttgart Digital survey. However, only about a quarter have invested in crypto, in line with broader European adoption figures.
That trust is precisely what worries critics. Co-Pierre Georg, professor at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, argues that traditional bank customers may not grasp the risks.
“It is concerning that the floodgates to the cryptocurrency market are now being opened by savings and cooperative banks,” Co-Pierre Georg, professor at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, via Bloomberg.
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Even the savings banks’ own lobby group, DSGV, calls crypto a highly speculative investment carrying the risk of total loss. It frames the service as suitable for self-directed investors only.
Timing sharpens the debate. Bitcoin trades near $62,483 after falling roughly 50% from its October 2025 record of $126,080.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
The German lenders also join a wider European shift. UBS opened crypto trading for private clients in January.
For local banks, the payoff may be relevance rather than revenue. Westerwald Bank chief Ralf Kölbach warns that lenders skipping crypto lose younger, tech-savvy customers.
The bigger test is whether bank-branded credibility can survive the market’s next deep drawdown.

France will stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption from 2027. The decision hands fresh urgency to Algorand’s (ALGO) pledge to deliver broad quantum security across its blockchain by the end of that same year.
The French cybersecurity agency ANSSI announced the cutoff at the France Quantum conference in Paris. Meanwhile, Washington is accelerating post-quantum cryptography across federal and national security systems.
Quantum Security Becomes a Procurement Requirement
Samih Souissi, ANSSI’s chief of staff, said the agency will certify only quantum-resistant security products from 2027, Reuters reported on June 16.
He added that businesses should buy only quantum-safe products by 2030. ANSSI certification is a gateway for sales into French government agencies and critical infrastructure. The qualification process typically takes 12 to 18 months, so vendors starting now barely fit the window.
Souissi framed the policy as reaching well beyond technology.
“It’s not only a technical issue. It’s a matter of governance, industrial planning, regulation, and sovereignty.”
The fear driving these deadlines is the harvest now, decrypt later attack. Adversaries can store encrypted data today and read it once quantum computers mature. Certification, therefore, cannot wait for that moment to arrive.
The US is moving on a parallel track. President Trump signed quantum executive orders on June 22. The order requires federal agencies to adopt approved post-quantum standards by the end of 2031.
Separately, the National Security Agency (NSA) requires new national security acquisitions to support quantum-resistant algorithms from January 2027.
Algorand Races Its Own End-2027 Deadline
The Algorand Foundation published its post-quantum roadmap in June, targeting quantum resilience across every network layer by the end of 2027. The plan covers user wallets, developer tooling, and consensus.
France just said it will stop certifying security products that aren't quantum-resistant starting in 2027.The US is already fast-tracking post-quantum cryptography across federal systems.Governments are preparing for Q-Day now, because migration takes years.Algorand's…
— Algorand (@Algorand) July 3, 2026
Native post-quantum accounts arrive in Q3 2026, built on the lattice-based Falcon signature scheme. Algorand has used Falcon for State Proofs since 2022. Multi-signature support and a foundation treasury migration will follow before year-end, according to the roadmap.
Markets are already pricing the theme. ALGO trades near $0.089, up 1.2% in 24 hours, with a market cap of roughly $796 million.
Algorand (ALGO) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
In contrast, quantum-resistant tokens outpaced Bitcoin (BTC) by 59.3% during May’s selloff, per Binance Research.
The pressure is not limited to one chain. Google Quantum AI research recently cut the estimated hardware needed to break Ethereum’s account security by 20 times.
France and the US have converged on 2027 as the year quantum readiness becomes a pass-fail procurement test. Whether rival chains can match Algorand’s schedule may determine which networks institutions trust with decades’ worth of data.

JPMorgan just turned cautious on gold in the short term. The bank cut its Q4 2026 forecast by roughly 25% to $4,500 per ounce, down from around $6,000. The recalibration follows weaker demand from key buying sectors.
This move signals fresh caution ahead, even as JPMorgan keeps its longer-term bullish thesis fully intact.
JPMorgan Slashed Its Gold Forecast 25%
A price forecast is an analyst’s projection of where an asset may trade over a defined future period. JPMorgan now projects an average gold price of $4,300 per ounce in the third quarter. Furthermore, it sees the metal rising to $4,500 in Q4.
The cut is significant in scale. The bank previously targeted roughly $6,000 per ounce by the fourth quarter. As a result, the new $4,500 target represents a roughly 25% reduction from prior expectations for the same period.
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GOLD LIKELY TO STAY RANGE-BOUND IN NEAR TERM, THEN RISE TO $4,500/oz IN Q4: JPMORGANJPMorgan expects gold prices to move sideways in the short term due to mixed market signals.It forecasts a stronger rebound later in the year, with prices potentially averaging around $4,500…
— First Squawk (@FirstSquawk) July 4, 2026
The recalibration stems from softer demand. Purchasing power has weakened among gold’s major demand centers. Moreover, the metal has become more sensitive to shifts in real interest rates, capping the near-term price ceiling.
The bank described the situation as “range-bound”. As a result, traders should expect sideways price action before any second-half recovery takes hold.
Other institutions remain more bullish. Goldman Sachs sees $4,900 per ounce by the end of 2026, driven by sovereign demand and emerging-market central bank diversification.
Furthermore, UBS targets $5,200 over the next 12 months as markets reassess Fed policy and dollar pressure intensifies. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley also eyes $5,200 in H2 2026, but warns that gold needs stronger ETF inflows first.
The precious metal is currently trading at $4,175, up 1.26% over the last 24 hours. However, it is now down 26% from its all-time high near $5,600 reached in January 2026, according to TradingView data.
Gold (XAU) Price Performance. Source: TradingView Why JPMorgan’s Long-Term Bullish View Holds
Despite the cut, JPMorgan’s medium- to long-term view remains firmly positive. The bank pointed to two structural forces that could drive gold prices through 2027. Each factor supports demand well beyond the current short-term consolidation phase across global markets.
First, central banks worldwide continue accumulating gold reserves at an increased pace. Furthermore, physical demand for the precious metal is expected to keep strengthening over the coming months. Both trends provide a durable floor under prices across the entire outlook.
Second, institutional investors continue to allocate tangible portions of their portfolios to gold for hedging purposes. Moreover, that pattern shows no sign of reversing. As a result, JPMorgan expects gold to retain its role as both a safe-haven asset and an alternative reserve currency.
The JPMorgan forecast also carries implications for crypto markets. Gold and Bitcoin have traded as competing macro hedges throughout 2025 and into 2026. As a result, a “range-bound” gold price could potentially shift some institutional capital toward the crypto market in the short term.
However, the bank’s long-term bullish stance means gold will not lose its importance as a store of value any time soon. The near-term caution simply reflects a temporary pause rather than a structural break in the broader multi-year uptrend.
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