Cryptopolitan

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is doubling down on its ambitious Project Crypto initiative as it seeks to reverse years of digital asset companies relocating overseas due to regulatory uncertainty.
On X, he wrote, “An entire generation of digital asset innovation developed outside the U.S., not because American entrepreneurs lacked the ambition, or American investors lacked the appetite, but because American regulators lacked the will.”
The SEC now wants to change that by creating what Atkins describes as “basic fairness and common sense” in applying securities laws to digital assets.
Last year, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins first announced “Project Crypto,” a major initiative to overhaul US securities laws for digital asset markets. The program aimed to make the United States the leading global crypto hub.
As previously reported by Cryptopolitan the SEC now expects the initiative’s implementation to pave the way for greater levels of compliant crypto activity nationwide. Atkins even added that U.S. crypto developers were never short on ideas or investment, only on regulators prepared to foster innovation.
What does Project Crypto entail?
Based on the traditional Howey test framework, the Project Crypto initiative establishes a clear framework for token classification.
The SEC aims to define clear regulatory boundaries and replace the guessing system that was at risk of litigation. The previous framework, often referred to as “regulation by enforcement,” required crypto firms to determine the compliance obligations following legal action.
Many companies were waiting until they received a Wells notice to find out what regulators thought of their actions.
Another major highlight of the initiative is its plan to create regulatory carve-outs for certain crypto activities. These exemptions could apply to airdrops and network incentives such as staking rewards.
The initiative includes exemptions for brand-new businesses. Atkins explained that new companies could start operating if they report to the SEC regularly, use verified user pools, and build safety rules right into the tokens using systems like ERC-3643.
So far, he has presented the initiative as a corrective measure for the regulatory pressures that drove U.S. digital asset firms abroad. Before, many founders chose friendlier hubs like Dubai, Switzerland, or the Cayman Islands over a challenging U.S. market.
In a press release last November, he commented, “I described ‘Project Crypto’ as our effort to match the energy of American innovators with a regulatory framework worthy of them.”
Additionally, the initiative incorporates interagency coordination with the CFTC, indicating a shift toward a unified federal strategy rather than a jurisdictional dispute over token classification. Atkins also noted that the SEC’s plan will work alongside new stablecoin laws from Congress. Even though he did not name specific tokens, this connection suggests the new rules will likely affect the most popular digital assets.
Moreover, the initiative also addresses trading venues, custodial services, and on-chain software architectures. It proposes that broker-dealers operating alternative trading systems should be permitted to facilitate non-security digital assets alongside digital asset securities, traditional equities, staking, and lending services under an optimized licensing framework.
Ideally, Project Crypto is a direct response to the President’s Working Group’s call for a cleaner approach to crypto rules.
Project Crypto is still in its early stages
Still, Project Crypto is still a work in progress. The SEC still needs to release proposed rules, gather public feedback, and then decide whether the initiative will work.
Until formal rules are adopted, Project Crypto is still a statement of regulatory intent– not a binding policy. And yet it is the greatest evidence so far that U.S. regulators are moving toward a more predictable system for digital assets.
The commission also recently launched a token taxonomy based on the long-standing Howey test for investment contracts, noting that securities laws have clear limits.
This taxonomy categorizes digital assets into five categories; only one is considered a security, and specifies how regulators will approach airdrops, protocol mining, staking rewards, and token wrapping.
Legal experts and market participants broadly view Project Crypto as the most comprehensive attempt yet to make the United States competitive in digital finance.
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Chun Wang, who is among those who helped create F2Pool, one of the biggest Bitcoin mining pools, deposited 9,876 Ether (ETH), which is currently worth around $17 million USD, into Binance on July 3.
Chun Wang (@satofishi) further deposited 9876 $ETH ($17.02M) into #Binance.https://t.co/tlqgpqwLLL https://t.co/XAhmbXD0i9 pic.twitter.com/eOXMRaPSZr
— Onchain Lens (@OnchainLens) July 3, 2026
This is not the only deposit made by Wang; the previous day he deposited 16,842 ETH (valued at about $26 million) and 60 WBTC (valued at about $3.6 million) into Binance. Combining both these deposits, Wang has transferred over $47 million worth of cryptocurrency assets into Binance within the past 48 hours.
A reversal after months of accumulation
Wang’s deposits illustrate a notable change in his on-chain activity compared to his previous behavior on the chain. From May 26 to late June 2026, he withdrew a total of 91,945 ETH (equal to approximately $160 million USD at the time of this writing) and a total of 973 WBTC (equal to approximately 61 million USD) from Binance, according to on-chain data.
His last withdrawal from Binance before these latest deposits was for 4,950 ETH (equal to approximately $7.7 million USD) on June 28; this continues a pattern that points to long-term accumulation and decreased exposure at an exchange.
With the recent change of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of digital asset transfers back onto Binance, questions arise if one of the industry’s leading infrastructure operators is making moves related to a potential market move or just adjusting his portfolio investments.
Why exchange flows matter for ETH price
Large amounts of cryptocurrency sent to centralized exchanges can imply to the market that there will be a sell-side pressure, due to these exchanges offering instant access to liquidity.
According to CryptoQuant, an increase in exchange inflows and reserves has historically been correlated with an increase in selling pressure (i.e., selling activity), and an extended period of net outflows would imply accumulation and transitioning into self-custody.
However, it should not be automatically assumed that an increase in exchange deposits would mean that sales are imminent; while it raises the likelihood of pressure to sell in the near term, it does not necessarily indicate that a sale will take place.
Therefore, large transfers being made by institutional market participants can represent custody migration; treasury rebalancing; collateral movements to back derivatives; and/or operational transfers from staking providers. On-chain deposits alone do not give information on the sender’s intent, as well as there being no supporting execution data.
CryptoQuant states that in addition to providing a source of liquidity, exchange-related inflows can also occur for reasons other than spot selling, such as for using exchange-specific services or in a staking-related fashion.
Ether traded at approximately $1,748 on July 4, according to CoinMarketCap, with a 24-hour trading range between $1,696 and $1,772. The cryptocurrency remains roughly 65% below its all-time high of $4,953.
According to CoinMarketCap, Binance is currently the largest centralized exchange in the world based on spot-trading volume, handling billions of dollars of daily exchange transactions while managing more than $136B in customer assets.
Who is Chun Wang
Wang co-founded F2Pool with Mao Shihang in April 2013. Since its launch, F2Pool has mined more than 1.3 million Bitcoin, accounting for over 9% of all Bitcoin blocks ever produced, according to Bitcoin Magazine. In addition to being a co-founder of F2Pool, Wang also mined roughly 7,700 BTC during Bitcoin’s early days before focusing exclusively on running mining infrastructure.
In 2018, Wang launched Stake.fish, a non-custodial staking platform that has since grown into one of the largest validator operators on Ethereum, Solana, Polkadot, and many other proof-of-stake blockchains.
As an operator of validator services & holder of large digital assets, Wang’s on-chain transfers may represent operational management of treasuries and/or movement of funds for purposes not necessarily tied to investment activity.
Wang was also a mission commander for the Fram2 mission in March 2025, making him part of the first crewed polar orbital spaceflight. This mission was supported by the sale of a portion of Wang’s Bitcoin holdings.
Due to his influence in the cryptocurrency market and the size of the digital assets he controls, Wang’s on-chain transactions are frequently scrutinized by market participants. As a founder of several significant crypto-infrastructure companies, movement of tens of millions and/or hundreds of millions of dollars could shift market sentiment prior to the rationale for such transactions being made known.
What to watch
Wang’s continued deposition of funds into exchanges will provide insight into his future plans in the cryptocurrency market. In addition, market participants will be interested to see if any further exchange inflows occur outside of Wang’s wallet.
Analysts usually look at exchange inflows as just one type of on-chain indicator. They will also be looking at the combined effects of very exchange reserve trends, how derivatives are positioned, and the level of liquidity throughout the entire market before making any conclusions about the possibility of imminent selling pressure.
Continued deposits from ‘whales’ could add to the case for a bearish outlook, while evidence of custodial migrations, treasury rebalancing, derivatives collateral management, or staking-related operational activities would indicate that the transfers taken place would not necessarily be assumed to be intended for immediate liquidation.


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Brantly Millegan, Director of Operations at ENS Labs, announced on July 4 that he has decided to leave the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) ecosystem as well as to close down ethid.org, the identity services company that he operated as a service provider to the ENS decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
His departure removes one of the most significant ecosystem talents from ENS at a time when they are considering the largest governance reform since they created the DAO. This raises new questions about how to manage one of crypto’s largest DAO treasuries.
Millegan wrote on X that, “given recent events and other reasons,” he had decided to leave ENS and begin shutting down ethid.org. He added that members of his team are available for new opportunities elsewhere.
ethid. org shutdown removes active ecosystem infrastructure
The closure of the ethid.org entity as a service provider for the ENS DAO has greater implications than just one person’s resignation. Many of the projects that have been supported by ethid.org, including GrailsMarket, ENSMarketBot, and Ethereum Follow Protocol (EFP), have been built using the infrastructure to support the growing use of ENS, with many of them being used to expand adoption of the ENS beyond domain registration to use cases such as identity management, reputation, and social networking.
While both EFP and ethid.org will be disconnecting from the ENS ecosystem as projects start to be shut down in the coming weeks, EFP had measurable success in establishing decentralization, as shown by its use of Dune Analytics to track the number of unique list minters (over 36,000), the number of lists created (over 55,000), and the total number of list operations executed (over 1,000,000).
These on-chain metrics provide evidence that there is a high level of adoption within the ENS community for the various decentralized social graph functionalities associated with the projects supported by ethid.org, demonstrating that this infrastructure provided by ethid.org facilitated the continued adoption of the ENS project within the ENS ecosystem.
The shutdown therefore removes an ecosystem contributor that helped extend ENS beyond decentralized domain registration into on-chain identity, reputation, and social networking applications.
Governance crisis preceded the departure
Millegan’s departure coincides with a wider debate around the governance of ENS and its future as a DAO.
The debate escalated after co-founder of ENS Nick Johnson used a significant amount of delegated voting power to prevent the Security Council from renewing its term which sparked the suggestion from a community member, Christoph Jentzsch, to dissolve the ENS DAO and have the treasury managed independently. The argument has since changed into a larger debate about whether DAO’s current method of governance is still viable.
In addition to this, the Public Goods Working Group, which was operating for 4 1/2 years under the ENS DAO, has also ended. The working group, in its last funding round, gave away $450,000 USDC and 72.5 ETH to 12 different projects, including strategic grants totaling $375,000 that were co-funded by the Ethereum Foundation. The former lead of the working group, Simona Pop, states the end of this working group represented an opportunity missed for the ENS to achieve what Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, refers to as “ecosystem hero”.
On June 19, the ENS Governance Forum released a temperature check proposal aimed at beginning the next era of the ENS DAO by empowering the ENS Foundation through transferring responsibility for management of treasury, grants and long-term allocation of capital to the Foundation; all whilst ensuring that holders of ENS tokens remain accountable for protocol upgrades, pricing decisions, changes to the constitution and appointments to the board of directors of the Foundation.
This transfer of responsibility would give the Foundation the responsibility of managing around $86.9M dollars of the endowment fund, plus an additional $56.6M of liquid assets. Although this transfer would place the Foundation in a position to have stewardship over $143.5M in total, the Foundation will not be permitted to vote to delegate any ENS tokens over which they have stewardship.
According to supporters of this proposal, the transition will improve the Foundation’s ability to operate more effectively and efficiently while still allowing the governance of the protocol across decentralised platforms.
Katherine Wu, COO of ENS has publicly stated that she is supportive of restructuring, as the token-weighted governance model that was created in 2021 worked well at the time for making decisions concerning the protocol, but is not as well-suited for making operational decisions on a day-to-day basis or for long-term capital allocation.
Millegan has made his opposition to portions of the proposals public; thus, his departure will become one of the more visible examples of an exit during the ongoing governance debate.
Market reflects broader uncertainty
Governance challenges have appeared amidst a persistent decline in the value of the ENS token. In early July, ENS traded around $4.25, as reported by CoinMarketCap, after experiencing a significant drop in price over the past few months, even whilst other parts of the digital asset market have performed quite well.
The governance dispute has very high financial stakes because the value of assets discussed is quite large compared to the market value of the token. This presents a recurring issue for DAOs, where small groups of tokenholders can control large amounts of treasury assets (greater than $100M).
As a result, the outcome of this restructuring proposal has the potential to extend beyond ENS itself. If passed, this would be one of the first instances of a major DAO transferring operational responsibility from tokenholder governance to a professional foundation, while still retaining decentralised ownership of the protocol.
On the contrary, should there be strong opposition from the community, this would strengthen the argument that large amounts of crypto treasury assets should remain directly accountable to tokenholders, regardless of the issues involved in providing operational accountability.
In the weeks ahead, the focus will be whether or not the Foundation proposal receives sufficient support from the community, whether the loss of ethid.org slows development of identity-related products within the ENS ecosystem, and if ENS can find governance stability without continuing to lose contributors and developer momentum.


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JPMorgan expects gold prices to trade sideways in the coming weeks before climbing to $4,500 per ounce by the fourth quarter of 2026. The bank is recalibrating its short-term outlook due to reduced demand from key buying sectors.
The Wall Street bank projects an average price of $4,300/oz during the third quarter, rising to $4,500 in Q4, according to a Reuters report. JPMorgan still sees gold heading higher, just not as fast as it previously expected.
Recalibration due to weakening demand
JPMorgan’s analysis states that purchasing power has reduced among gold’s major demand centers, with gold also becoming more sensitive to shifts in real interest rates.
These changes have made gold less attractive compared to other assets for investment, which then puts a ceiling on the prices that could be attained in the short-term.
The bank has also characterized the current price situation as “range-bound,” according to Binance News. This means that traders should expect sideways price action before any second-half recovery takes hold.
JPMorgan believes longer-term forecasts are still valid
JPMorgan’s medium-to-long-term view remains firmly positive, and the bank has noted three structural forces that all but guarantee that gold will keep rising into 2027.
Central banks around the world are still accumulating gold reserves at an increased pace. In addition, physical demand for the precious metal is expected to continue to strengthen over the next months. Lastly, institutional investors continue to allocate tangible portions of their portfolios to gold for hedging purposes, a pattern that shows no sign of reversing.
JPMorgan expects that these factors will sustain gold’s role as both a safe-haven asset and a reserve currency alternative, even if short-term price action disappoints retail traders.
Gold and Bitcoin have traded as competing macro hedges throughout 2025 and into 2026. JPMorgan’s report on expecting 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 stop being an important store of value any time soon.



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CME Group saw a stronger crypto activity in Q2, despite recent price meltdowns.
In Q2, CME crypto derivatives averaged 250,000 contracts per day, with a notional value of $13.7 billion. That represents a 32% increase year-over-year, according to the report on Thursday.
The record beats the Q1 update, in which the company reported an average daily volume of 198,000 contracts and a notional value of $11.3 billion, driven by its micro ether futures.
Meanwhile, in Q2, Ether futures averaged 18,000 contracts daily.
CME records $10.7 billion in June volume
The bulk of Q2 volume was driven by stronger crypto activity in June, as per the report.
CME crypto derivatives averaged 334,000 contracts per day in June 2026, representing $10.7 billion in notional value and a 76% year-over-year increase.
Micro Bitcoin futures stood out among other products, with CME reporting a 46% increase in average daily volume to 77,000 contracts for the month.
The June numbers arrive roughly one month after CME launched round-the-clock trading for its regulated crypto futures and options.
More than 7,200 crypto futures and options contracts, worth approximately $50 million in notional value, were traded over the inaugural weekend when the 24/7 trading began.
Derivatives make up most of crypto volume in Q1
The growth in CME’s Q2 volume points to the widening gap between spot and derivatives volumes.
In January, centralized exchanges reported $5.26 trillion in volumes. Spot trading only accounted for $1.27 trillion, Cryptopolitan reported.
In Q1 2026, the spot market generated approximately $1.94 trillion in volume, and derivatives products led with about $18.63 trillion, making a total of $20.57 trillion in volume for the quarter.
Binance processed $4.90 trillion in derivatives volume, the largest among centralized exchanges, followed by OKX.
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According to a recent filing with the Office of Government Ethics, President Trump reported more than $600 million in income from his $TRUMP memecoin in 2025.
As a result, Democrats, led by long-term Trump critic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), have returned to demanding stronger ethics provisions in any crypto legislation Republicans plan to bring to the Senate floor.
Financial disclosure reveals size of crypto profits
Trump’s cryptocurrency income goes well beyond his profits from memecoins. According to reports, Trump reached $1.4 billion last year in crypto-related income, which is over 50% of his $2.2 billion in reported income from 2025.
That figure is a sum total of the $635 million in royalties generated from Trump’s memecoin business, $527 million from token sales distributed by World Liberty Financial (the DeFi project owned by the Trump family), and approximately $263 million from stakes in holding companies connected to WLF and its stablecoin arm.
Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter told NPR that federal conflict-of-interest statutes would bar other executive branch officials from comparable dealings. Trump, Painter said, “stands alone in having such substantial financial conflicts of interest” as president.
The White House rejected claims of any financial conflict. Spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump had made the U.S. “the crypto capital of the world,” and the president stated that outside institutions manage his investments without his involvement, according to NPR.
Gillibrand renews push for ethics rules
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), one of the lead negotiators on the CLARITY Act market structure bill, responded to the filing by renewing her call for provisions that would prohibit the president, members of Congress, and their families from profiting off digital assets, Fox Business reporter Eleanor Terrett reported on July 3.
Gillibrand drew a hard line on the issue at the Consensus Miami conference in May. “We cannot allow members of Congress, senior administration officials, presidents, or vice presidents to get rich off these industries because of their insider status,” she said at the event.
She is also a co-sponsor of the End Crypto Corruption Act (S.1668), introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley with 19 Democratic co-sponsors. That bill would bar senior officials and their families from issuing, sponsoring, or endorsing cryptocurrencies, memecoins, tokens, NFTs, and stablecoins.
Ethics language remains the bill’s biggest obstacle
The Senate Banking Committee advanced a substitute amendment to the market structure bill on May 14 in a 15-9 vote. Two Democrats, Senators Ruben Gallego (AZ) and Angela Alsobrooks (MD), voted yes but warned their support on the floor depended on the inclusion of ethics guardrails.
Alsobrooks called the Trump family “the most corrupt we’ve ever seen in the White House,” citing “planes, pardons, falsifying business records, and now crypto.” Gallego posted on X that “Trump is using the presidency to profit off the American people.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) argued that the bill, in its current form, could make things worse. “The crypto legislation heading to the Senate floor must prevent the president, vice president, senior administration officials, members of Congress, and their families from profiting off the crypto industry,” Warren said.
Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC) has pushed for a full Senate vote this month. House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill (R-AR) echoed that urgency, telling reporters the Senate should “complete their work before the August recess.”
But the two chambers would still need to reconcile the Senate version with a House market structure bill that passed a year ago.
One Senate Republican aide acknowledged the tension between the two chambers. But negotiations over ethics language, anti-money laundering provisions, and oversight of decentralized finance networks are ongoing, as there is a strong appetite to move the piece of legislation to the floor.
Gillibrand faces her own conflict of interest questions
The ethics debate has also touched Gillibrand directly. On July 2, Politico reported that Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen invested in American Perpetuals Exchange Corp. (APEC), a derivatives startup founded by Gillibrand’s 22-year-old son Theodore.
Ripple is one of crypto’s most active Washington lobbying forces and a direct stakeholder in the CLARITY Act that Gillibrand is helping negotiate. Gillibrand’s office said her son is “a grown adult starting his own independent business” and that she has “no involvement in it whatsoever.”
No wrongdoing has been alleged, but the optics are what they are.
The window to pass the CLARITY Act won’t stay open for much longer as the August recess draws closer. However, finding a common ground on ethics language in the coming weeks will likely determine whether comprehensive crypto regulation passes this Congress or stalls for another session.
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The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) updated its interim MiCA register Friday, adding 37 licensed crypto-asset service providers to the list.
The update is the first since the MiCA transitional period closed on July 1, bringing the total number of licensed EU crypto providers to 280 from 243 the week before.
Among the new licensed companies are FalconX and Standard Chartered.
Standard Chartered secured its MiCA authorization through its Luxembourg subsidiary on June 25th. It also received an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license, both of which it said would allow the bank “a regulated entry point to offer digital asset services from Luxembourg” across the EU.
Institutional crypto trading firm FalconX received its MiCA authorization from Malta’s Financial Services Authority (MFSA) as announced on June 29th.
Other notable entrants include Sygnum Europe and Ronin EM, while the register of electronic money tokens (EMTs) added Crédit Agricole’s CACEIS.
Cyprus led the latest batch
Six of the 37 new authorizations came through Cyprus, the largest share in this update. France, Italy, and Malta each contributed five.
The Czech Republic and Spain added four apiece, Luxembourg three, the Netherlands two, and Germany, Liechtenstein, and Latvia each recorded one.
However, Germany leads in overall MiCA authorizations. Germany’s BaFin holds 58 total MiCA authorizations, which is the most of any EU regulator.
France reportedly follows with 31, the Netherlands with 26, and Malta and Cyprus each at roughly 20.
The register update included no changes to the list of approved asset-referenced token issuers, which remains empty. Also, the non-compliant entity list is still at 162.
EU founders without a license consider moving to UAE
Europe’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) was signed into law three years ago, with crypto firms given until July 1, 2026, to obtain full regulatory authorization or cease operating within the EU.
The largest crypto exchange, Binance, didn’t make the cut. The exchange pulled its application in Greece about a week ago, on July 1, informing EU users it would suspend certain services while it pursues authorization through another route, Cryptopolitan reported on June 30th.
“Our ambitions in Europe remain the same, and we are confident we will secure a MiCA license in the coming months,” Binance said.
OKX’s European CEO Erald Ghoos had predicted that 80% of crypto providers in the EU would not survive MiCA, and consequently would be forced to exit the market.
Roughly 3,000 crypto providers were previously operating in the EU. As the deadline drew nearer, most of the companies behind schedule began inquiring about the next friendliest jurisdiction, with many actively considering the UAE.
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Blockchain research firm L2BEAT published a comparative analysis of perpetual futures exchanges Hyperliquid and Lighter on July 2. In its findings, the research firm discovered that none of the platforms fully protects traders through verifiable math alone.
The report matters to anyone trading leveraged crypto derivatives on venues that market themselves as decentralized alternatives to the likes of Binance or Bybit.
Are perpetual DEXs delivering on all their promises?
Perpetual DEXs claim to offer custody over user collateral, and execution can be verified independently, according to L2BEAT’s research. The firm evaluated Hyperliquid and Lighter across property rights, order fairness, and position fairness.
Lighter operates as an Ethereum layer-2, posting validity proofs to a chain it does not control.
Hyperliquid, on the other hand, runs its own layer-1, where 28 validators handle both trade execution and settlement. The Hyperliquid Foundation directly controls half the staked tokens, with additional stake routed through a delegation program.
Should Lighter stop working, users are not necessarily left in limbo, as they can generate an account proof against the latest state root on Ethereum and withdraw funds independently.
If the same thing happened to Hyperliquid, L2BEAT reports that there is no permissionless exit path because the platform’s Arbitrum bridge relies on permissioned validator subsets (two groups of four validators each).
Do the validity proofs on Lighter and Hyperliquid have limits?
Lighter runs on zero-knowledge proofs, which means that operators cannot steal idle funds, fabricate USDC balances, or match orders at prices worse than the user’s limit. Similar standards on Hyperliquid are up to validator consensus.
However, L2BEAT’s analysis shows Lighter’s proofs are not evidence of full protection. The research firm discovered that oracle signatures used for mark prices are not verified on-chain or within the proof circuit.
On both platforms, order flow protections are absent. Neither venue prevents the operator from seeing, reordering, front-running, or censoring submitted orders, L2BEAT stated.
Lighter’s proofs guarantee that once an order enters the system, it cannot be altered in price or size. But the operator can insert its own orders ahead of users to become the best quote on the book.
What precedent did the JELLY incident set?
In March 2025, Hyperliquid had to carry out an operator intervention during the JELLY incident. It all started after three coordinated accounts opened opposing positions in the low-liquidity JELLY token. One of the accounts took a $4.1 million short while the other two went long for a combined $4.05 million.
As spot purchases pushed JELLY’s price up, the short position was liquidated and passed to Hyperliquid’s automated market-making vault (HLP), which could not absorb it.
Hyperliquid’s validators voted to delist JELLY and force-settled all positions at $0.0095, which is a fraction of the $0.50 price on decentralized spot markets at the time.
While that action saved the HLP vault from an estimated $13 million loss, it overrode the exchange’s own matching engine. The Hyper Foundation pledged to compensate affected users.
Based on L2BEAT’s analysis, Hyperliquid’s validator acts in ways that are similar to a traditional exchange operator, as they have the power to change trade outcomes through governance.
Lighter’s current contract setup also permits such action through upgradeable contracts with no time delay.
The trust ceiling
The core finding is that both platforms currently require trust in their operators for critical functions. Lighter’s advantage is in its L2 architecture, which could eventually reach Stage 2 decentralization by removing upgrade control, at which point Ethereum’s validator set would enforce the rules.
Hyperliquid’s L1 design means it does not have a similar path to Lighter’s.
The L2BEAT report has brought to the fore the depth of how decentralized these platforms are in terms of protection, and users using them should know the full extent of what is covered and areas where the lines blur between their chosen platforms and centralized exchanges.
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Brazilian Federal Police recently seized assets worth roughly $2 billion in a drug trafficking and money laundering investigation.
Days before this seizure, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions against two Brazilian nationals and four companies tied to Primeiro Comando da Capital, one of Latin America’s largest criminal organizations.
Brazil’s crackdown on crypto crime continues
Brazilian Federal Police, in a major operation called “Exchange,” seized assets worth roughly $2 billion. The operation deployed more than 50 officers across São Paulo state to execute 13 search-and-seizure warrants and 11 temporary arrest warrants targeting a money laundering network tied to drug trafficking.
A federal court in São Paulo ordered the seizure of assets, valuables, and cryptocurrency belonging to the suspects, with preliminary analysis identifying transactions exceeding $1.92 billion.
The suspects could face charges including criminal association, money laundering, and tax evasion. The warrants covered addresses in São Paulo city, Santos, Praia Grande, and Santana de Parnaíba.
Days before the crackdown, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on two Brazilian nationals and four companies allegedly linked to Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), one of Latin America’s largest criminal organizations.
“Exchange” was reportedly planned before the US sanctions were announced, but had to be accelerated after the Treasury’s designation.
Why did the U.S. sanction Brazilian nationals and companies?
Victor Henrique de Oliveira Shimada and Stella Stefanie Nunes Henrique de Oliveira, along with three Brazilian companies and one Portuguese firm, were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for the alleged laundering of drug proceeds on behalf of PCC.
Shimada reportedly functioned as the connection between PCC operatives based in Florida and foreign drug traffickers. His network allegedly moved more than $30 million in illicit proceeds generated in U.S. cities. Most of the funds were transferred back to Brazil as cryptocurrency.
Shimada’s name was involved in Brazilian money laundering investigations dating to 2024. São Paulo prosecutors had previously charged him in a case involving the alleged diversion of funds from a sponsorship deal between a soccer club and a betting company, but that earlier case did not accuse him of PCC membership.
Nunes Henrique de Oliveira, described by the Treasury as Shimada’s relative and close associate, allegedly served as his secretary and coordinated bulk cash pickups to support the laundering operation.
The sanctioned companies are three Brazilian firms: Victory Trading Intermediação de Negócios Cobranças e Tecnologia Ltda, Pixwave Soluções de Pagamentos Ltda, and Wave Construções Inteligentes Ltda, along with Portuguese firm Avenidas Flutuantes Unipessoal LDA. O
FAC said Victory Trading was used to launder money stolen from a Brazilian soccer club.
On the same day it sanctioned the PCC-linked network, OFAC also designated 134 cryptocurrency wallet addresses tied to ISIS-Khorasan. Tether subsequently froze funds in 131 Tron wallets that had received more than $1.4 million since 2023.
PCC was first sanctioned by the Treasury in 2021 for international drug trafficking, and again in 2024, Diego Macedo Gonçalves do Carmo was designated as a financial operator for the organization.
How are U.S. sanctions affecting Brazil?
The U.S. sanctions arrived weeks after the Trump administration classified strained relations between the two countries by labeling the PCC as a terrorist organization.
Fabrício Polido, an international law professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and a partner at L.O. Baptista Advogados, told Courthouse News that the sanctions take immediate effect in the U.S. but carry no automatic legal force in Brazil. Criminal consequences would require Brazilian authorities to investigate under domestic law.
Foreign financial institutions, including Brazilian ones, face the threat of secondary sanctions if they knowingly facilitate significant transactions involving the designated parties, meaning that those institutions could begin imposing more restrictive policies to avoid getting in the bad books of U.S. authorities.
Brazil’s government under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has pushed back against the terrorist designation, arguing that while PCC uses terror tactics in the communities it controls, it remains a profit-driven criminal organization.
Federal Police Director General Andrei Rodrigues called the designation a “mistake,” saying terrorist organizations have ideological or religious motivations while criminal factions pursue economic goals.
Six people connected to the network’s Florida operations were arrested by the FBI and indicted on money laundering charges in federal court in the Southern District of Florida in January. The new sanctions and Brazil’s subsequent operation targeted the São Paulo side of the alleged pipeline.
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Chinese robot maker Unitree Robotics has been approved for an IPO in Shanghai later this month.
The China Securities Regulatory Commission signed off on Unitree’s application on Thursday, clearing the last regulatory hurdle for the company to go public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market.
Unitree plans to raise roughly 4.2 billion yuan ($618.4 million) by selling a minimum of 40.4 million shares in the IPO. The proposed shares represent a stake of at least 10% in the firm, implying a total valuation of about 42 billion yuan or $6.18 billion, according to the South China Morning Post.
Unitree targets late July for IPO debut
With the regulator’s nod, the robot maker can begin to work on its underwriting plan, pricing, and share subscriptions, with a potential debut as early as late July.
Unitree stands out among Chinese robotics firms for one reason, which is that the company actually makes money. Last year, Unitree reported 1.7 billion yuan ($250.4 million) in revenue and 591 million yuan ($87 million) in adjusted profit.
That puts it in contrast with Hong Kong-listed UBTech Robotics, which posted 2 billion yuan ($294.5 million) in revenue over the same period but ended with a net loss of about 700 million yuan ($10 million).
Unitree stated in its prospectus that proceeds from the July IPO will go toward developing robot “brains,” funding research on robot bodies, and new products.
AGIBOT plans a Hong Kong IPO in 2026
China’s biggest vendor AGIBOT is equally exploring going public in Hong Kong later in 2026.
AGIBOT disclosed its IPO plans last year. It’s expected to issue 15%-25% of its shares at a valuation of HK$40 billion to HK$50 billion ($5.14 billion to $6.4 billion), Reuters reported, citing sources with knowledge on the matter.
China operates one of the fastest-growing robotics markets in the world.
Some of its players have continued to attract massive investments, with the recent being Suzhou-based JoyIn, which reportedly closed a 500 million yuan Pre-A round on Thursday, led by Ant Group.
Recently, X Square Robot and AI² Robotics also reported closing multiple funding rounds.
U.S. Agility Robotics set for public listing
Beyond the Chinese market, the robotics IPO trend extends to the United States.
Last month, American robot maker Agility Robotics signed a definitive merger agreement with Michael Klein’s Churchill Capital to go public in the U.S market under the ticker “AGLT.”
The SPAC deal values the company at $2.5 billion pre-money. The transaction is expected to generate more than $620 million in gross proceeds, as Cryptopolitan reported.
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The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has informed a parliamentary committee that cryptocurrencies pose a threat to India’s economy, and it is also recommending that they should not be legalized.
The bank has had a long-standing opposition to digital assets, and this latest submission reinforces its position as lawmakers weigh the country’s digital asset policy.
RBI Deputy Governor Rohit Jain and Executive Director P. Vasudevan presented the central bank’s position to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, chaired by BJP MP Bhartruhari Mahtab, according to The Economic Times. The session was the seventh meeting the panel has held on virtual digital assets.
In a background note submitted to the committee, the RBI stated that conventional financial regulation applied to crypto assets would amount to legitimizing speculative products that are not beneficial to the economy.
The bank warned that creating a regulation around crypto creates a false perception of safety among users and also exposes the banking sector to assets that are unstable.
RBI recommended that banks and regulated financial institutions be barred from holding, trading, or taking on exposure to crypto assets and privately issued stablecoins.
The RBI sees prohibition as a recognized policy option
The RBI outlined what it called a containment strategy tilted toward prohibition, one that would block crypto from payments and settlements and also sever the links between digital assets and the banking sector.
The central bank also flagged stablecoins as a distinct risk, as it states that the adoption of privately issued stablecoins could weaken monetary policy transmission, fragment payment systems, and threaten India’s monetary sovereignty, adding that it lacks the foundational properties of money.
What does the RBI position mean for India’s crypto adoption ranking?
The central bank pushed back on the commonly cited claim that India leads the world in crypto adoption, a ranking derived from Chainalysis’s annual index. RBI says that the methodology is flawed and overstates adoption in countries with large populations.
RBI data submitted to the panel put the scale of India’s crypto market at 54 FIU-registered service providers and 39.3 million KYC-verified users holding assets worth about 20,437 crore rupees, which is approximately $2.4 billion.
The central bank also linked a significant share of crypto activity to fraud, scams, and the movement of illicit funds, telling the committee that tracking offshore entities involved in crypto trading presents a serious regulatory challenge.
What is India’s accounting body’s opinion on a digital asset policy?
RBI’s position is not a general consensus in the country, as the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) told the same committee that virtual digital assets (VDA) present strategic opportunities if paired with India’s strengths in digital infrastructure and fintech.
ICAI believes that blockchain-based systems and stablecoins could make cross-border payments faster and cheaper, complementing existing infrastructure.
The accounting body has called for a comprehensive VDA law that covers issuance, trading, and custody.
What is the current state of India’s digital asset policy split?
The Indian government levies a 30% capital gains tax and a 1% TDS on crypto transactions while requiring exchanges to register with the Financial Intelligence Unit. However, no law defines digital assets as a recognized asset class, and the RBI continues to push for their exclusion from the financial system.
Industry data cited by Cryptopolitan in February showed that around 73% of Indian crypto trading volume had migrated to offshore platforms, with an estimated 120 million Indian users trading through foreign exchanges.
MP Raghav Chadha warned at the time that strict taxation without a regulatory framework was driving capital and startups out of the country.
The parliamentary committee is expected to produce a report on virtual digital assets soon, according to its chair, MP Bhartruhari Mahtab.
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TRON network has enabled post-quantum cryptographic signatures on its Nile testnet, deploying two NIST-standardized algorithms to strengthen the network against future threats from quantum computing.
Tron network becomes one of the first blockchain networks to actively upgrade its native cryptographic foundations to keep up with the growing threat of quantum computing. In an X post, the Tron network announced the release of GreatVoyage-v4.8.2-PQ1-build1 on the Nile testnet.
The build introduces support for two post-quantum signature schemes: Falcon-512 and ML-DSA-44. Both signature schemes are drawn from the cryptographic standards finalized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
According to the announcement, the upgrade will apply to transaction signatures, super representative block production signatures, P2P fast-forward node handshakes, and TVM contract signature verification.
In June, the TRON network processed 385.77 million transactions and logged 26.97 million active addresses, both all-time highs. The circulating USDT on TRON also topped $86 billion last month, more than on any other blockchain.
Justin Sun says Tron network will be quantum resistant
波场 TRON 抗量子签名功能，正式登陆测试网！
后量子时代，波场 TRON 在行动——致力于打造后量子时代最安全的区块链！
新加坡时间 2026 年 7 月 2 日 12:10，TRON Nile 测试网正式通过第 20628 号委员会提议。根据该提议，Nile 测试网已正式开启后量子签名功能，本次率先启用的签名算法为…
— H.E. Justin Sun 👨‍🚀 🌞 (@justinsuntron) July 3, 2026
Justin Sun cited TRON DAO’s statement, saying that the TRON network will be the first quantum-resistant network. He argued that post-quantum security is the primary demand of the AI era. He cited decryption risks as a reason the shift is unavoidable for any major blockchain.
Many public blockchains today, including TRON, rely on the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) over the secp256k1 curve, the same cryptographic foundation Bitcoin uses.
However, the crypto research community is concerned that a sufficiently powerful, quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm can theoretically derive a private key from a public key. This can break the fundamental security assumption that safeguards wallet ownership on every major chain.
TRON network has deployed on its testnet, Falcon-512 and ML-DSA-44, which are designed to resist attacks from future quantum computers that are powerful enough to break current elliptic-curve cryptography. Falcon relies on lattice-based mathematics, while ML-DSA-44 is a variant of CRYSTALS-Dilithium, another NIST-selected scheme.
The TRON network testnet build is a mandatory upgrade for Nile testnet nodes, but the new features do not activate automatically. They require a separate governance proposal to go through TRON’s on-chain committee process before any transition to the mainnet can proceed.
Networks adjust to quantum threats
Ethereum Foundation developers launched a Post-Quantum Ethereum website in March 2026, with Layer 1 protocol upgrades projected to finish by 2029. Similarly, the Solana Foundation has already gone a step further by deploying post-quantum digital signatures on its own testnet.
Outside the chain layer, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced in January 2026 an independent advisory board dedicated to quantum computing and blockchain security. Google has set its own 2029 target for migrating its infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography.
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Several South Korean companies listed among the partners in Open USD have come out to deny a formal role in the alliance.
Open USD was announced on June 30th, listing 140-plus partners, including financial heavyweights such as Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, and Coinbase, among others.
Thirteen Korean firms appeared on the list, including Upbit exchange operator Dunamu, spanning Samsung Electronics, Shinhan Financial Group, KakaoBank, K Bank, Hanwha Life, and seven card issuers.
A number of the companies said Thursday they had no formal talks about the Open USD, and only learned about their inclusion in the alliance through news reports.
A Samsung Electronics official told a local news outlet, Chosun Biz, that there had been “no official consultations” and that the company did not know what role it would play in the consortium.
Some of the firms, including Dunamu, Shinhan Financial, and K Bank, confirmed that Open Standard had asked whether they were interested, and that they had replied only with a willingness to review the proposal.
“We only learned about our inclusion in the OUSD alliance through domestic news,” said one unnamed company official. “We are perplexed to be included as a member.”
“Integrity matters,” says Circle’s CEO
The revelations from the Korean firms strike right at Open USD’s biggest marketing weapon.
Open USD was quickly touted as a big rival for USDT and USDC, amid the long list of financial heavyweights named as its partners.
Circle (CRCL) fell over 15% on the day of the announcement. With Coinbase listed among the Open USD partners, there was also speculation on what that could mean for Circle and USDC, which have long had the U.S. exchange as a major partner.
But Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire affirmed that nothing has changed about their partnership with Coinbase. “Our stablecoin partnership with Coinbase remains as strong as ever,” Allaire precisely noted.
“Integrity matters,” Circle’s CEO posted on X, as news of Korean firms denying the OUSD alliance made headlines.
Integrity matters
— Jeremy Allaire – jerallaire.arc (@jerallaire) July 3, 2026
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BubbleMaps has sent another warning to LAB token holders ahead of a scheduled cliff unlock that the blockchain analytics firm expects to trigger a sharp selloff large enough that it would cause pain for investors sitting on roughly $1 billion in unrealized gains, while full presale allocations remain locked until 2027.
The latest warning adds a sequel to an ongoing series of BubbleMaps pre-emptively exposing inorganic token pumps, which is often soon followed by dumps, rounding out the classic “pump and dump” cycle that often extracts value from crypto markets.
LAB is the token of a project that describes itself as “a multi-chain trading infrastructure for spot, limits, and perps with an AI research engine, delivering high-performance execution and actionable strategies across surfaces.”
Why is BubbbleMaps warning LAB token presale investors?
When BubbleMaps wrote on June 4 that “This will be ugly,” the firm was referring to the irregular patterns it found in the on-chain data visualizations of the LAB token. At the time, LAB presale participants had more than $1 billion in unrealized gains that they cannot touch until their full token allocations unlock next year.
2/ Updated Stats from the $LAB presale on Legion
> Total participants: 313
> Total invested: $1,428,359
> Total value today: $519,517,144
> First unlock: 14 Julyhttps://t.co/rrAmG01Dys
— Bubblemaps (@bubblemaps) July 3, 2026
Roughly one month later, investors’ paper profits are down to around half a billion dollars after a stretch that saw the token lose approximately 60% in a matter of days.
Per BubbleMaps, it is only a matter of time (about two weeks when early investors’ locked tokens become tradable) before the cycle is completed, and prices come crashing down.
LAB traded at $7.2 as of this July 3 report, according to CoinMarketCap, with a market capitalization of $2.34 billion and a fully diluted valuation of $7.51 billion. The token has fallen 72% from its all-time high of $27.22, set on June 2.
LAB’s token is down over 60% in the last week. Source: CoinMarketCap
Is LAB a high-risk token?
LAB’s ownership structure and price have endured months of controversy. BubbleMaps already has an “insider price manipulation” investigation open on its Intel Desk, with community submissions alleging coordinated wallet activity going as far back as February 2025.
The token also landed on ZachXBT’s radar in May 2026, when the blockchain investigator claimed that LAB insiders controlled more than 95% of the token supply.
For a token that has only 312 million of its 1 billion maximum supply in circulation (roughly 31%), the potential to cause pain cannot be overemphasized, assuming Zach’s projections are accurate.
According to Cryptopolitan’s coverage of ZachXBT’s findings, the investigator also exposed opaque private loans and promotional deals offering 80% discounts and token unlocks to key opinion leaders in exchange for promotional content.
Blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain also reported that ten fresh wallets withdrew 100 million LAB tokens (then worth $480 million and representing 32% of circulating supply) from Bitget in a 12-hour window around the same period, according to the same Cryptopolitan report.
What happens to tokens accused of manipulation?
LAB is not the first token BubbleMaps has flagged for insider concentration risks. The firm previously warned about the PIPPIN memecoin in December 2025 after its price surged over 1,000% with no material news.
BubbleMaps identified roughly 50 connected wallets that had purchased $19 million worth of PIPPIN, funded through HTX in tight time windows with no prior on-chain history, according to Cryptopolitan’s reporting.
ZachXBT also linked LAB’s market-making infrastructure to other manipulation suspects such as RAVE, RIVER, SIREN, MYX, and SKYAI. Per the on-chain sleuth, everything goes back to an unknown market maker operating through Chinese exchanges with a consistent manipulation playbook.
The RAVE token collapsed more than 95% after rallying from $0.25 to nearly $28, erasing a $6 billion market cap on just $52 million in 24-hour liquidations. ZachXBT called that ratio evidence of a “manufactured and structurally unsustainable valuation.”
The LAB team and founder Vova Sadkov have not issued a public response to either BubbleMaps’ warning or ZachXBT’s earlier investigation.
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Spotify confirmed it removed roughly 500,000 artificial streams from Malcolm Todd’s song “Earrings” after the track’s jump to the top of its daily U.S. chart raised alarms from traders.
Spotify has now said it will be tightening how it publishes chart data following the incident. “Earrings” dropped to fourth place on the charts after the fake streams were removed.
Can you fake streams on Spotify to win bets?
Caleb Davies, a prediction market trader from Minneapolis, who downloads and studies Spotify data every morning to inform his bets, noticed something wasn’t right when he saw “Earrings” shoot up overnight.
Davies, who has earned an estimated $1.2 million across betting platforms, calculated that the jump had a roughly 1 in 77 octillion chance of happening naturally. The Financial Times reported the song had climbed by about 70% in a single day.
Davies believes someone used bots to inflate the song’s streams in order to win money on Kalshi, a prediction market where users bet on which songs will top Spotify’s charts. Spotify confirmed it found evidence of artificial streaming after investigating the claims.
After reviewing the data, Spotify removed the fraudulent plays and corrected its charts. The company also asked both Kalshi and Polymarket to remove Spotify’s logo from their websites. Spotify has reportedly never had a partnership with either platform. The company also said it would be “adding additional checks to the charts before they’re published.”
However, Kalshi had already paid out winners based on the incorrect chart data before Spotify made the correction. The market related to June’s most-streamed U.S. song on Spotify had attracted about $3 million in trading.
Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana said the company is “actively investigating this matter,” but as of now, no one knows who was behind the bot-driven streams or their exact motive.
Who was affected by the fake streams?
“Earrings” had already been near the top five of Spotify’s U.S. daily chart for weeks prior to the manipulation. The Financial Times made clear that there is no suspicion that the artist, Malcolm Todd, or his team were involved.
Davies pointed out that Polymarket traders probably didn’t profit from the fraud because Todd wasn’t even listed as an option on Polymarket’s version of the market.
Amanda Fischer, a former SEC chief of staff and policy director at Better Markets, told WIRED that platforms are supposed to verify contracts aren’t susceptible to manipulation before listing them. “It is clear that in this market, and many other markets, they are not doing that,” Fischer said.
This isn’t the first time prediction markets have faced manipulation problems in 2026. Cryptopolitan reported in April that a Polymarket trader allegedly tampered with a weather sensor at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport using a hand dryer to win a temperature-based bet worth about $34,000.
That incident prompted Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to call for markets to use multiple independent data sources rather than relying on a single feed.
Davies told WIRED that he will be stepping away from chart-based markets due to the risks despite their history of profitability. Kalshi still lists dozens of contracts tied to Spotify and Billboard chart results.
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Russia’s delayed cryptocurrency law is now expected to enter into force on the first day of September, a couple of months later than originally planned.
Additional rules necessary to fully legalize coin transactions will be introduced by November, and the first regulated crypto operations should begin in early 2027.
Russian ‘digital currency’ law delayed by amendments
A draft law laying the legal ground for the circulation of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in Russia will be adopted in the coming weeks, well past the initially announced deadline, local media reported.
The legislation, which overcame its first hurdle at the lower house of Russian parliament in April, was supposed to be finally passed and enforced no later than July 1, 2026.
However, a number of proposed amendments and approval procedures are delaying the process, the business daily Kommersant wrote Friday, citing knowledgeable sources.
According to Anatoly Aksakov, chair of the State Duma Committee on Financial Markets, the enactment of the law is being postponed mainly “due to protracted approvals with government agencies.”
Thus, the second and third reading of Bill No. 1194918-8 “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights” are now tentatively scheduled for July 21, the prominent lawmaker unveiled.
It will then require a positive vote at the Federation Council, the upper house, as well as President Putin’s signature to enter into force, which will take another two weeks, the newspaper noted.
The comprehensive legislation is based on a new regulatory concept released by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) in December 2025.
The policy envisages recognizing cryptocurrencies as “monetary assets” and regulating their turnover in the Russian Federation’s economy.
Crypto transactions should be conducted exclusively through licensed intermediaries such as exchanges, brokers, trustees, and depositories, registered with the CBR.
While expanding access to digital assets by allowing even non-qualified investors to acquire them, the framework introduces a number of restrictions, such as an annual 300,000-ruble purchase limit for ordinary Russians (less than $4,000).
Initially, the draft law also permitted custodial storage of cryptocurrencies, with wallet keys held by state-approved depositories.
It’s now being discussed whether to permit Russian investors to withdraw up to 100,000 rubles’ worth of digital coins ($1,300) to non-custodial wallets.
This was revealed to Kommersant by Mikhail Uspensky, a member of the expert council on the legislative regulation of cryptocurrencies at the State Duma.
Crypto legislation to come into force in September
The law that will allow Russian citizens and businesses to legally transact with cryptocurrencies will enter into force on September 1, 2026, Interfax confirmed in a separate report.
The Bank of Russia sees other provisions governing crypto operations adopted by November, the news agency added, quoting its First Deputy Chairman Vladimir Chistyukhin.
Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the Financial Congress forum organized by the monetary authority, the CBR official elaborated:
“I think the regulations will be ready by October, and we’ll send them to the Ministry of Justice … If everything goes according to plan, then by early November, all of this could already be adopted and published.”
Chistyukhin expects Russia’s first regulated crypto transactions to take place by early next year, depending on how ready market participants are to launch specific products and services.
Major players in the Russian financial market, which will be able to provide them under their existing licenses, are already prepared to take this step.
On Thursday, the Moscow Exchange (MOEX) said it plans to commence cryptocurrency operations by the end of the year, as per a statement by its representative at the same event, Igor Marich.
Meanwhile, two leading Russian banks, VTB and T-Bank, announced they intend to create depositories for digital assets, as reported by the business news portal RBC.
A number of major financial institutions have already been offering crypto derivatives to their clients since the CBR authorized them to do so in May of 2025.
Pressed by Western sanctions, Russia gradually softened its previously conservative stance on decentralized digital money over the course of the past year.
Nevertheless, it’s still lagging behind other nations in the post-Soviet space when it comes to regulation, including regional leaders like Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Representatives of the country’s central bank are currently in dialogue with their Belarusian counterparts to maintain Russian access to the Belarusian infrastructure.
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Skyroot Aerospace, a billion dollar startup based in Hyderabad is about to launch the first privately developed orbital rocket ever from Indian soil. Between July 12 and August 4, 2026, its Vikram-1 rocket will be launching from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.
The flight is called Mission Aagaman (meaning “the arrival” in Sanskrit). It is a demonstrative mission designed to gather real-time performance data that ground simulations would not be able to provide. These include acoustic vibration measurements, thermal stress during supersonic ascent, and stage separation dynamics, according to Jagran Josh.
The rocket will also carry payloads from both Indian startups and international customers.
What Vikram-1 is built to do
Vikram-1 is about seven stories tall and uses an all-carbon composite airframe to reduce structural weight.
The rocket has four stages. The first three use Skyroot’s Kalam-series solid-fuel motors, and the fourth stage is powered by a liquid-fuel engine called Raman-I, according to Jagran Josh. Vikram-1 can deliver up to 350 kg to low Earth orbit or 260 kg to a sun-synchronous polar orbit.
The rocket is named for Vikram Sarabhai, who is widely considered the father of India’s space program. Skyroot has replaced heavier metal structures with carbon composites and uses 3D-printed engine parts. This approach is intended to enable high-frequency manufacturing and reduce the cost of each launch.
Co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana, who previously worked at ISRO, told Bloomberg that Skyroot plans to conduct more test launches before starting commercial operations. The company has raised funding from GIC and BlackRock to support this campaign, according to the Economic Times.
A private sector three years in the making
Skyroot is one of about 400 startups registered with the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre, which was set up after Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the space sector to private companies in 2020.
Skyroot is not the only Indian startup reaching new milestones. GalaxEye Space Solutions (based in Bengaluru and backed by Infosys) successfully launched the world’s first satellite combining optical cameras with radar sensors via a SpaceX Falcon 9 on May 3, with plans to grow its fleet to 10 satellites over the next three years.
Another competitor, Pixxel Space, supported by Google and Lightspeed, provides hyperspectral imaging data to clients such as NASA, Rio Tinto, and India’s Ministry of Agriculture.
India’s space sector now includes about 260 startups that have raised a total of $730 million in funding. Around a quarter of that investment has come in the past year.
Pawan Goenka, the automotive industry veteran who chairs India’s space authorization agency, told Bloomberg that making Indian companies adopt space technology domestically remains a key challenge.
“We are becoming more aggressive in the kind of technology that we are able to transfer from ISRO because we now see the ability of the private sector to absorb this technology and take it forward,” Goenka said.
Scale gap with SpaceX remains vast
India’s private space sector has big ambitions, but the gap with established players is still pretty big. SpaceX invested over $11 billion in three years to expand its Starlink constellation beyond 10,000 satellites and completed a $75 billion IPO in June, which later increased to $85.7 billion after underwriters exercised a greenshoe option, according to BBC.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 completed 165 missions in 2025, which is more than the rest of the world combined. By comparison, India’s government space agency ISRO has carried out 105 launches in total since 1979.
Goenka acknowledged the gap. “Frankly, we are late to the party, and the US is now more private sector than government in terms of the overall space economy,” he told Bloomberg.
How does India plan to catch up?
On June 21, India’s government published a Press Information Bureau backgrounder detailing upcoming programs. These include the Gaganyaan crewed spaceflight, a plan for a national space station by 2035, and a target for a crewed lunar landing by 2040.
Meanwhile, Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms is considering a low-orbit satellite constellation of over 1,600 satellites that could compete with Starlink in India.
For now, the immediate question is whether Vikram-1 will reach orbit within its launch window. If successful, India will join a small group of countries where private companies are able to launch payloads into space.
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Brazil’s central bank recently placed virtual asset service providers (VASPs) under the same rules as traditional securities brokerages.
Starting January 1, 2027, crypto platforms operating in the South American nation will be required to meet capital, risk management, and disclosure standards similar to traditional financial intermediaries.
What are the new requirements for virtual asset service providers in Brazil?
Brazil’s central bank reclassified crypto service providers as Type 3 institutions (Resolution No. 580/2026), placing them under the same rules as traditional securities brokerages, effective January 1, 2027.
Once it’s in place, crypto firms will be required to maintain capital reserves, implement risk management systems, and disclose financial information on the same terms as traditional financial intermediaries.
By June 30, 2028, all crypto firms are expected to be placed into Segment 4 (S4) of the central bank’s supervisory system, regardless of their size. S4 comes with stricter compliance rules than the simpler S5 segment, which is meant for smaller financial institutions. The central bank said crypto activity is “incompatible” with the lower-tier S5 segment.
The central bank has been building this regulatory framework since Law 14,478/2022 gave it authority over virtual assets. A 2023 presidential decree confirmed that mandate, and in November 2025, the central bank published Resolutions 519, 520, and 521, which set capital requirements between R$10.8 million and R$37.2 million (roughly $2 million to $7 million) for crypto firms. These rules also included anti-money laundering protocols and asset segregation requirements.
In February 2026, the National Monetary Council extended bank secrecy requirements to crypto platforms, and the central bank added in May that platforms must have mandatory independent audits conducted by professionals registered with Brazil’s securities regulator (CVM).
Will this hurt smaller crypto platforms?
Industry executives, like Carlos Russo, CEO of Bloquo and coordinator at the Brazilian Association of Tokenization and Digital Assets (ABToken), expect that companies in the industry will begin consolidating once smaller platforms realize the struggle of absorbing compliance costs.
One unnamed industry executive reportedly said that the equivalence between crypto platforms and brokerages “doesn’t seem to make much sense in terms of ‘same risk, same regulation.’” However, the executive noted the 2027 effective date at least gives companies time to prepare.
The industry expects the central bank to issue a supplementary rule detailing specific risk factors for the crypto segment. This topic has already gone through a public consultation process, and the central bank has taken public feedback into account on previous rules, such as allowing self-custody wallets and authorizing banks to operate in the crypto market.
Cryptopolitan reported that Brazil processed approximately $318 billion in crypto transactions between mid-2024 and mid-2025, making it one of the largest crypto markets globally. Brazil’s central bank stated that its move is in line with international best practices for virtual asset regulation.
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Alibaba has ordered all its employees to uninstall all Anthropic products from their machines after determining through an internal security audit that the AI coding assistant, Claude Code, has potential embedded backdoor risks. The ban will eliminate one of Alibaba’s most widely used external AI applications from within the Chinese technology juggernaut and signifies a significant escalation in the fracturing of global AI supply chains.
This directive reportedly prohibits the entire Anthropic product line, including its Sonnet, Opus, and Fable model families. A source close to the matter confirmed the ban to Reuters. Employees at Alibaba will be prohibited from using the Claude Coding Assistant in their workplace after July 10 due to the suspected embedded backdoor risks.
Alibaba reverses AI tool policy
The new policy is a change of direction from a prior initiative from the company, which had been previously encouraging staff to use publicly available AI tools. Since early 2026, Alibaba began allowing its engineers flexible financing towards the use of third-party AI tools such as Claude Code, Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), and/or Gemini. This change in policy means that Alibaba will not allow its engineers to be reimbursed for their use of outside AI tools.
Employees were reportedly able to claim as much as $1400 (approximately RMB 10,000) per month in reimbursement for their usage of the outside tools, and engineering teams reported that many engineers took advantage of the program. Developers who focused primarily on Claude Code and other similar services reportedly spent up to several hundred dollars per week prior to making claims against the Alibaba program.
Many software engineers took advantage of the program by using Claude Code as well as competing companies’ products, such as OpenAI’s Codex and Alibaba’s own Qoder agent.
Claude access comes under scrutiny
Employees have now lost their option of utilizing Anthropic’s products. The restriction comes after an extended period of growing tension between Anthropic and Chinese AI users.
In a letter sent to Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren dated June 10, reviewed by Reuters, Anthropic detailed the activities of Alibaba-affiliated operators who generated more than 28.8 million interactions with Claude through approximately 25,000 fraudulently created accounts from April 22 to June 5, which Anthropic described as the largest data extraction operation they had discovered. Additionally, the company alleged that this activity was an attempt to accelerate the development of rival AI systems by using model distillation.
Alibaba is separately challenging its inclusion on the Pentagon’s Section 1260H list of companies the U.S. Defense Department says are linked to the Chinese military, filing a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose) on June 23.
Anthropic has previously made similar allegations against DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax and utilized similar verbiage when discussing these firms engaging in industrial-scale extraction-related activity. The pattern of allegations and accusations has coincided with Anthropic’s tightening of access: in late June and early July, the company suspended accounts of many Chinese users who had accounts under both personal and team plans, according to Zhidx. Accounts in violation of their terms of service were not refunded and success rates in appeals were described as extremely low.
Backdoor claims add a new dimension
Aside from the arguments regarding the distillation process, developers who reverse-engineered Claude Code said that all of the versions released from April 2026 and beyond contained code that could determine the local timezone and check the API or proxy configuration against keywords for both Chinese cloud providers and AI companies, according to Zhidx.
The allegations about this code in the Claude Code gained broader attention as a result of recent reports from Reuters about Alibaba’s concerns over possible “embedded backdoor risk” within their applications. However, Reuters has made clear that no detailed technical information from Alibaba has been officially released to the public.
Similarly, The Next Web reported that developers looking at the Claude Code had found a number of code paths identified as inspecting local configuration information (e.g., timezone settings, API/proxy configuration settings), but later Anthropic developers indicated that part of the functionality had been identified as ‘experimental’ and not maliciously created. In addition, both publications write that the exact intent and resulting security risks associated with determining timezone, API/proxy, etc. are debatable; neither publication could provide an independent third-party confirmation of any intentional backdoor.
These findings appear to have been the direct trigger for Alibaba’s security assessment.
Broader market consequences
The ban removes Anthropic from one of its largest potential enterprise environments in Asia. Alibaba Cloud is one of the world’s biggest cloud platforms, and the company’s AI workforce spans thousands of engineers working on its Qwen model family, cloud infrastructure, and AI-powered commerce tools.
The split also fits a wider pattern. JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have both restricted staff access to Anthropic models in Hong Kong. Anthropic itself has blocked foreign nationals from accessing its most advanced models under US export-control rules.
For Alibaba, the move consolidates its reliance on domestic AI tools, particularly its own Qwen models, which Chairman Joe Tsai recently called one of the world’s most popular open-source model families while laying out a vision for AI as a $50 trillion market opportunity.
The result is an AI market splitting faster along national lines, with security allegations on both sides accelerating the divide.
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