A heavy slate of crypto, fintech, macro, and AI updates hit the market between July 15 and July 16, led by BNB Chain’s latest quarterly token burn, multiple large ETH transfers, BlackRock’s latest digital-asset disclosures, and a broad Wall Street tokenization effort.
BNB Chain completes its 36th quarterly BNB burn
BNB Foundation said it has completed the 36th quarterly BNB burn, removing 1,615,827.795 BNB from circulation. At the time of the burn, the amount was worth about $932 million, and the burn transaction has been posted on-chain for public verification.
The foundation said BNB is moving toward its deflation target through a dual system that combines the Auto-Burn mechanism with real-time burns linked to gas fees. The long-term plan is to reduce total BNB supply from about 133 million to 100 million.
Revolut gets in-principle approval in Dubai
Fintech company Revolut received in-principle approval from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, or VARA, allowing it to pursue crypto brokerage, dealing, investment, and exchange services in the UAE.
Revolut said it plans to offer crypto services to local users through its retail app and its separate trading platform, Revolut X. The services still require final regulatory approval before launch.
Elon Musk says X will fully open-source its code after security review
Elon Musk said in a post that X will open-source the platform’s entire codebase, with no exceptions, once a security-vulnerability review is complete.
He also said third parties will be invited to inspect the live production system to verify that the code running online matches the released open-source code. Musk said the goal is to build user trust through verifiable system transparency.
BlackRock details pressure on digital-asset AUM and sets long-term crypto targets
BlackRock said assets under management in its digital-asset products fell from $79.6 billion a year earlier to $48.8 billion, a drop of nearly 39%.
The firm said about $15.1 billion in net inflows over the period was offset by roughly $45.8 billion in market depreciation. In the second quarter alone, the business posted $3.1 billion in net outflows.
At the same time, BlackRock’s total AUM reached a record $15.3 trillion. In its earnings materials, the company set a target of about $500 million in annual crypto-related revenue by 2030, up more than tenfold from the current base of about $40 million in fees and securities-lending revenue.
BlackRock said it plans to expand around its existing spot Bitcoin ETF IBIT, spot Ether ETF ETHA, and options strategy product BITY. It also said it wants to become a native asset manager for stablecoin reserves and digital wallets.
On the earnings call, BlackRock CFO Martin Small described a longer-term vision that puts BlackRock products directly inside the places where investors hold digital assets. He said investors should be able to allocate to crypto assets, stablecoins, long-term stocks, and bonds without leaving their digital wallets.
Small added that the company ultimately wants to offer tokenized Treasury funds, iShares ETFs, and private-market products. He described tokenization and crypto as a pure organic growth opportunity. Even though second-quarter digital-asset AUM fell to $49 billion because of weak markets, down about 40% year over year, BlackRock reiterated the same 2030 revenue target of $500 million. Its shares rose more than 7% in early trading after the earnings release. BlackRock manages the largest spot Bitcoin ETF in the world, with about $60 billion in AUM.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told CNBC he is very optimistic about markets over the next 12 months and said a technology revolution should help more companies achieve better margins.
Fink also said leverage in the financial system is far below 2008-2009 crisis levels, leaving overall risk exposure limited, though he warned that pockets of risk remain. On Bitcoin, he said earlier crypto cycles had too many leveraged participants, and that after several rounds of liquidation, Bitcoin and the broader crypto market are now more stable. Over the past 12 months, he said BlackRock improved margins by 260 basis points through technology and added $1 trillion in assets without increasing headcount.
DTCC and nearly 40 institutions push tokenization of stocks and Treasuries
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, or DTCC, is advancing a tokenization plan for Wall Street assets that includes Microsoft, SPY, QQQ, and U.S. Treasuries.
Participants include JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and nearly 40 institutions in total. The plan is to use tokenized assets for collateral transfers, repo transactions, and stock trading, with the stated aim of improving capital efficiency, streamlining settlement, and moving more traditional financial infrastructure on-chain.
Funding rounds: Cyclops, Emergent, and Glacis Labs
Cyclops, a Miami-based payments infrastructure startup, raised $20 million in Series A financing. The company said the money will support efforts to help payment firms use stablecoins to speed up settlement. Its pitch centers on improving cross-border and traditional payment flows, lifting settlement efficiency, cutting costs, and increasing stablecoin use in enterprise payments and financial infrastructure.
India-based AI coding startup Emergent raised $130 million in Series C funding at a post-money valuation of about $1.5 billion, roughly five times its $300 million valuation from January this year.
The round was led by private-equity firm Creaegis, with participation from MNI Ventures-Claypond, Sentinel Global, Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator, among others. Total funding has now reached $230 million.
Emergent says it offers an AI coding platform built around “engineering team as a service” for small and medium-sized businesses and founders. The company said annualized revenue is about $120 million, growth over the past four months is around 70%, paid users exceed 200,000, and customers span logistics, manufacturing, construction, and property management.
Glacis Labs, the startup behind crypto clearing platform ZeroDelta, raised $6.8 million in seed funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Faction, with Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, A.GAIN, Protein Capital, and Techni Ventures also investing.
The financing was structured as equity plus token warrants, and valuation was not disclosed. Founded in January 2024, Glacis has built a multi-chain clearing platform that uses matching, netting, and settlement of cross-chain digital-asset transfers to reduce counterparty risk.
ZeroDelta currently supports USDC, USDT, and USDe, and the company plans to expand into tokenized securities, RWA, and foreign exchange. Glacis said it generates revenue by charging fees on cleared volume, has processed more than $1 billion in volume so far, and is running at a $1.5 billion annualized pace. The team has 10 people and plans to add staff in engineering, compliance, and go-to-market roles.
Kalshi, Coinbase, and Aave announce product and network changes
Kalshi has self-certified a CFTC-regulated flight-cancellation event contract that lets investors trade on whether flight cancellations at a specific airport during a defined period will exceed a set threshold.
The contract will settle on actual cancellation data and is designed as a standardized hedging tool for flight-operation risk, while also bringing flight-disruption outcomes into event-contract trading.
Coinbase said it will stop supporting USDC deposits and withdrawals on the Noble network on Aug. 17, 2026. After that date, users will no longer be able to send or receive USDC on Noble through Coinbase.
Aave Labs said Aave V4 is now live on Avalanche, marking the first expansion of that version beyond Ethereum since its initial deployment there.
The rollout is part of founder Stani Kulechov’s plan to bring tokenized RWA into the protocol. V4 uses a “hub-and-spoke” style core-branch architecture to isolate risk across liquidity hubs. On Avalanche, the deployment includes one core liquidity hub and three separate markets: a main market, an AVAX-related market built around liquid staking, and a foreign-exchange market.
Fed commentary focuses on inflation, labor, and AI
Fed Chair Warsh appeared before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs for a hearing on the Federal Reserve’s semiannual monetary policy report.
He said recent inflation data does not perfectly reflect underlying inflation and that any central bank would be pleased when the data moves in the right direction.
Warsh said AI investment is beneficial for employment in the near term because infrastructure is being built, but he also described AI as a disruptive force. He said it would be inappropriate to prejudge meeting outcomes without the facts.
He also said he has strictly complied with, and gone beyond, his ethics agreement by selling or preparing to fully sell assets acquired before becoming Fed chair, shifting those investments into cash equivalents and short-term Treasuries.
Warsh said he expects AI to push up observable price levels over the next 12 months, and that whether AI turns into inflation depends on the Fed. He said he believes AI is a long-term job creator and may have a disruptive effect, but he cannot promise there will be no disruption to employment in the short run. He added that AI-driven price spikes are real and said he does not want to minimize them. He also said he would rather see companies invest than buy back stock and expects capital investment to keep making a large contribution to GDP.
The Fed’s Beige Book said economic activity increased at a slight to modest pace in 11 of the 12 Federal Reserve districts from late May through June, while one district reported no change.
Prices increased moderately overall. Of the 12 districts, 9 reported moderate price growth, 2 reported stronger gains, and 1 reported smaller increases, with the overall pace unchanged or slower than in the previous report.
The Beige Book also said employment increased overall, with five districts posting moderate, modest, or solid growth and seven seeing little change or no change. Surveyed businesses generally expect expansion to continue in the coming months, though several districts flagged high uncertainty around the outlook for fuel costs.
Fed Governor Cook said there is reason to believe inflation will continue to cool, but tariffs, Middle East conflict, and AI investment may keep price pressure alive. She said it is wise to wait for inflation to slow further for some time, but if that cooling does not appear soon, she is prepared to act.
Security and protocol setbacks: Ostium exploit and Summer.fi shutdown
PeckShield said Ostium’s public OLP vault was drained of about 24 million USDC. The attacker swapped the funds into 12,080 ETH and has already deposited 10,540 ETH into Tornado Cash.
According to the same update, the attacker initially funded the wallet with 1 ETH from ChangeNow and 1 ETH from Bybit. Ostium had earlier halted all trading while it investigated the OLP vault issue.
Summer.fi said on its blog that it will shut down both Summer.fi and the Labs company behind it after the Lazy Summer Protocol was attacked on July 6.
The team said the attacker manipulated the share prices of two USDC vaults on Ethereum mainnet and stole about $6.04 million in deposits in a single transaction. The loss severely damaged both protocol funds and team treasury, leaving operating capital exhausted.
Summer.fi said that after the Stream Finance incident in October 2025 and wider pressure across DeFi, it sees no workable restructuring path. The front end will remain available until Aug. 31. The future of Lazy Summer Protocol will be decided by Lazy Summer DAO, which is working to restore full vault withdrawals and redemptions. Official support by email and Discord will stay open through the end of August.
Whale moves: unstaking, withdrawals, OTC buying, and fresh WBTC accumulation
Chun Wang moved about 4,950 ETH, worth about $9.53 million, to a Binance address ending in 2b51 after completing an ETH unstake through Lido and unwrapping WETH.
Another whale accumulated ETH by buying and withdrawing 21,300 ETH from Fidelity custody, worth about $40.95 million, into a new wallet.
A separate whale withdrew 30,000 ETH from Coinbase Prime, worth about $57.66 million, and distributed the holdings across three new wallets.
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes also appeared to add ETH through OTC transactions. In the first transfer, 1.25 million USDC was sent to Galaxy Digital and 646.33 ETH, worth about $1.24 million, was received. In the second, executed through FalconX, he received another 646.93 ETH, also worth about $1.24 million. Together the two transfers amounted to about 1,293 ETH valued at about $2.48 million. The related addresses were publicly disclosed.
Another whale or entity that has built a position of nearly $100 million in ETH and WBTC since July withdrew 50 WBTC from Binance eight hours earlier. The address now holds 49,407 ETH and 300 WBTC, with total value above $103 million. The average costs were listed at about $1,705 for ETH and $63,027.58 for WBTC, with unrealized profit of about $11.113 million.
Leadership and strategy updates at Coinbase, Base, and Strategy
Coinbase executive and Base founder Jesse Pollak said on X that he will no longer lead the Base applications team. Cobie, whose legal name is Jordan Fish, will take over.
Pollak said Base’s earlier bet on social and creator features largely failed. He cited the sale of Farcaster, Zora’s shift to Solana, and losses suffered by most investors in creator tokens. He said the first quarter of 2026 hit “like a punch,” and that Base fell behind in trading, stablecoin payments, and AI agents because too much attention went to social features.
Pollak said he will now focus on Base chain infrastructure, with the goal of making Base “the blockchain for global finance” and, over the next century, “the core platform for global money settlement.” Cobie joined Coinbase last year. Coinbase had previously acquired his ICO launch platform Echo for about $375 million in cash and stock. Earlier, Coinbase’s CEO had publicly acknowledged that Base’s creator-token strategy failed.
Strategy president and CEO Phong Le told Bloomberg TV that the company will not stop buying Bitcoin and that, for the foreseeable future, it wants to be the biggest Bitcoin buyer.
Le said debt risk would only become a concern if Bitcoin fell to around $8,000 to $10,000, and that he feels very comfortable with the balance sheet at current levels. He said the recent sale of more than $215 million in Bitcoin and the increase in cash reserves to $3 billion were meant to address preferred shareholders’ short-term liquidity needs and to show the liquidity of the company’s Bitcoin holdings.
He added that once STRC returns to its $100 par value, the company will issue more preferred shares to buy more Bitcoin. Strategy’s price-to-book multiple has recovered from below 1 to about 1.02, while BTC is trading near $65,000.
Policy focus shifts to ethics language in the Clarity Act
Ethics provisions in the Clarity Act are expected to be the main topic of a Thursday afternoon meeting involving President Trump, a small group of lawmakers, and White House staff.
Kristin Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute, said the meeting is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. local time Thursday. Attendees are set to include Republican Senators Bernie Moreno and Cynthia Lummis, White House senior crypto adviser Patrick Witt, and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
The meeting comes as lawmakers negotiate ethics provisions meant to address concerns about Trump and his family’s crypto businesses. Smith said the meeting is critical to getting the Clarity Act through and said she hopes Trump will approve the ethics language. Crypto industry sources said progress depends on Thursday’s meeting, adding that Trump’s personal attendance is significant. Senate Majority Leader Thune wants the bill on the floor before the August recess, and an updated text is expected this week.
Tether backs Ualá, and ORANGE JUICE raises capital for a Bitcoin reserve strategy
Tether invested $20 million in Argentine digital bank Ualá as part of the $197 million financing round Ualá announced in March. Ualá said it plans to use the capital to accelerate expansion in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia.
Founder and CEO Pierpaolo Barbieri said Ualá does not plan to integrate USDT on the platform in the short term because of the regulatory environment in Argentina and Mexico. He said Tether is participating only as a financial investor. Ualá has 11 million customers, was valued at $3.2 billion after the round, and plans to speed up growth in Mexico.
ORANGE JUICE said it has raised $40 million to build a permanent-capital holding company backed by Bitcoin reserves. The company was co-founded by ego death capital partner Jeff Booth, Lyn Alden, Nico Lechuga, Andi Pitt, and others, with Grupo Salinas founder Ricardo Salinas participating as an anchor investor.
ORANGE JUICE said it is not constrained by fund cycles or resale pressure and can focus on the long-term development of portfolio companies. It also plans to pursue a future public listing. The firm’s initial strategy is to acquire stable cash-generating businesses with annual cash flow between $1 million and $10 million. Acquired companies will keep their brands, and founders may retire, stay on, or transition gradually. Cash generated by the businesses will be reinvested into acquisitions or Bitcoin reserves.
Research, market moves, and other developments
Bybit market data showed SpaceX shares fell for a fourth straight trading day on Wednesday and briefly dropped below the $135 IPO price for the first time since listing. The stock closed down about 0.60% at $135.27. During its first month of trading, SpaceX had reached an all-time high of $225.64.
Researchers at Stanford University said they found signs of manipulation in Polymarket’s five-minute Bitcoin betting markets. Their study examined about two months of contract data and found repeated one-way trading pulses on Binance that briefly moved Bitcoin prices in the final seconds before settlement, benefiting traders positioned in the same direction.
The researchers described the pattern as temporary manipulation that pushes up spot prices and said the contracts suffer from a structural weakness: traders can influence the outcome by trading the underlying asset that determines the result. A Polymarket spokesperson said the platform uses multiple independent price oracles to ensure accuracy and plans to move some markets next year to longer settlement windows to improve market integrity.
The study estimated that suspected manipulators earned about $8.2 million over two months, largely from losses borne by retail traders. The same pattern was not obvious in 15-minute markets, where longer windows appear harder to influence.
NYDIG said in a report that Bitcoin is down nearly 30% this year and is the worst performer among the assets it tracks, trailing U.S. Treasuries, silver, and the Swiss franc.
The report said the weakness appears tied to supply mechanics rather than risk sentiment, and that the timing and structure of the 2025-2026 drawdown increasingly resemble the correction years of 2014, 2018, and 2022. If the market were to fully repeat the 2022 pattern, the cycle low could land around $38,000 to $39,000.
At the same time, NYDIG noted that 2025 has been Bitcoin’s lowest-volatility year on record, and some analysts think the drawdown could be shallower than previous bear markets. In the second quarter of 2026, Bitcoin’s rolling correlation with gold rose, and both assets were sold off, weakening the so-called debasement trade. Bitwise said last week that, despite the deepest and longest slump since the last bear market, fundamentals are in place for a fast recovery. NYDIG called the CLARITY Act the most important forward-looking catalyst for the digital-asset industry.
AI updates compiled by PANews
PANews’ AI coverage also highlighted several developments over the past 24 hours. Thinking Machines Lab introduced Inkling, its first general-purpose multimodal model. The model accepts text, image, and audio input, is released with open weights, contains 975 billion total parameters with 41 billion active parameters, supports a 1 million-token context window, and uses a mixture-of-experts architecture.
xAI open-sourced Grok Build on GitHub, describing it as a terminal-native AI coding agent. The tool had previously drawn privacy criticism after uploading entire user directories, and xAI responded by releasing the code.
OpenAI also introduced GPT-Red, an automated red-teaming system designed to improve model resilience against prompt injection and cyberattacks through self-play. The company said GPT-5.6 was trained using the system and described it as its most robust version so far.