Regulatory, market structure, payments and funding news stacked up between July 16 and July 17, with fresh disclosures from U.S. agencies, trading platforms, stablecoin operators and asset managers. CoinGecko’s 2026 second-quarter crypto report said total market capitalization fell 12.6% in Q2 to $2.1 trillion as of the end of June. Stablecoin market cap slipped 1.6% to $305.1 billion, the first decline since Q3 2023, while prediction market notional volume climbed 48.7% quarter over quarter to $113.8 billion.
CoinGecko says Q2 was weaker for market cap, stablecoins and CEX spot volume
CoinGecko’s 2026 Q2 crypto market report showed a broad pullback across several core metrics. Total crypto market capitalization fell 12.6% during the quarter and stood at $2.1 trillion at the end of June.
The report also said stablecoin market capitalization declined 1.6% to $305.1 billion. It was the first drop for the sector since the third quarter of 2023.
Trading activity split in different directions. Prediction market notional volume rose 48.7% from the prior quarter to $113.8 billion. Centralized exchange spot volume fell 27.9% to $1.95 trillion, and May marked a monthly low of $620 billion. CEX perpetual futures volume was down 10.0% quarter over quarter to $12.7 trillion.
Binance opens a new Alpha airdrop and adds several TradFi perpetual contracts
Binance Alpha launched the second round of its Block Street, or BSB, airdrop. Users holding at least 250 Binance Alpha points can claim 245 BSB tokens on the Alpha event page.
If rewards are not fully distributed, the points threshold will automatically drop by 5 points every five minutes. Claiming the airdrop uses 15 Binance Alpha points, and users must confirm the claim within 24 hours on the event page or forfeit the allocation.
Binance Futures also said it will list several USD-margined TradFi perpetual contracts:
- July 17, 11:00 a.m. Beijing time: MINIMAXUSDT perpetual contract, settled in USDT
- July 17, 11:05 a.m. Beijing time: ZHIPUUSDT perpetual contract, settled in USDT
- July 17, 11:10 a.m. Beijing time: HK0700USDT Quanto perpetual contract
- July 17, 11:15 a.m. Beijing time: HK1810USDT Quanto perpetual contract
- July 17, 1:00 p.m. Beijing time: TENCENTUSDT perpetual contract, settled in USDT
U.S. agencies move on disclosure and prediction market oversight
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a new Regulation E-Delivery rule aimed at expanding the use of electronic delivery for securities disclosures. Under the proposal, issuers, broker-dealers and investment advisers could default to electronic channels when sending required information to investors.
The scope would include prospectuses for funds and other issuers, annual and semiannual shareholder reports for funds, proxy statements, trade confirmations, Form CRS relationship summaries and Form ADV Part 2 brochures for investment advisers. The proposal will be open for public comment for 60 days after publication in the Federal Register.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is also investigating a potential insider trading case tied to prediction market platform Kalshi. A staffer said to be responsible for operating President Donald Trump’s teleprompter is alleged to have placed wagers in contracts linked to Trump-related prediction events.
According to the report, the person may have used early access to Trump’s public speech content to bet on whether certain statements would be made or whether specific wording would appear. The CFTC is examining whether the trades involved nonpublic information and whether prediction market trading rules were violated.
The case has renewed scrutiny around insider trading risks in prediction markets. As platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket scale up, contracts tied to political, economic and public events are drawing more attention from regulators.
On Capitol Hill, the Clarity Act entered what the report described as a final push. Ethics provisions tied to Trump conflicts of interest remain the central obstacle. South Carolina Republican Representative William Timmons said, “This is one of the president’s top priorities, and it’s also a bipartisan issue in Congress,” adding, “We’ll get it done. There may be twists and turns, but we’ll get it done.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune wants the bill on the Senate floor before the August recess, and an updated text is expected this week. Even if the Senate passes it, the bill would still need to return to the House, leaving a narrow time window.
Negotiators from both parties have spent months discussing limits on whether the president, vice president and members of Congress can profit from digital assets while in office. On Thursday afternoon, Trump, Senators Bernie Moreno and Cynthia Lummis, White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles are expected to meet to seek Trump’s support on the issue.
Politico reported that the current text does not have Democratic support. Senator Ruben Gallego said, “Without strong ethics provisions, there will be no Democratic votes.” Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger called ethics a “key piece” and said Democratic offices are firm on that position, while remaining optimistic that the bill will pass. A gaming association is also pushing to add prediction market sports betting rules to the legislation, a move that could turn into a disruptive amendment.
Stablecoins and payments: Visa rolls out VSP, Flex raises $70 million
Visa introduced the Visa Stablecoin Platform, or VSP, to help banks and fintech firms integrate stablecoin services into existing payments and treasury management workflows.
Visa said it processes roughly $15 trillion in payments each year and has already handled billions of dollars in stablecoin settlement. The company said it wants to expand that scale by giving about 15,000 financial institutions and more than 200 million merchants easier ways to use stablecoins.
VSP is designed as a unified infrastructure layer for stablecoin services and will support stablecoin payments, fund transfers and settlement. At launch, it will support OUSD, a new stablecoin from the Open Standard alliance, and will continue to work with assets including USDC and USDG.
In funding news, California-based fintech company Flex raised $70 million in a B1 round led by Halo Fund. Flex Global, its stablecoin-based cross-border banking platform, offers multicurrency accounts covering 32 currencies across 170 countries and regions. Flex said its core customers generate annual revenue ranging from $3 million to $200 million, mainly in construction, wholesale, and import-export businesses.
Funding, acquisitions and expansion updates across crypto and AI
Developer-focused stock, options and crypto API broker Alpaca said it raised $135 million in new funding led by Peak XV, with Elefund participating. Other new and existing backers included Opera Tech Ventures, the venture arm of BNP Paribas Group, and Unbound. The company said the new capital will be used to expand agent-first prime brokerage infrastructure for tokenized markets and AI-native financial services. Alpaca’s total financing has reached $435 million, including debt financing primarily from Payward, Kraken’s parent company, and BMO.
MoonPay completed its acquisition of crypto deposit startup Glide, marking MoonPay’s sixth acquisition announced in 2026. The transaction was all-equity, and Glide’s four-person team will join MoonPay. Glide was founded in 2023 by Soni and Qinyu Tong, who previously worked together on Robinhood’s crypto wallet development team. MoonPay said Glide was backed by Y Combinator, Titan Fund and other investors. Glide’s technology lets apps accept crypto deposits without requiring users to manually bridge across blockchains or swap assets, which MoonPay said helps reduce onboarding friction.
Prediction market platform Pascal announced a $9 million Series A round led by Union Square Ventures. The financing extends a $6 million seed round completed last August, with early backers including Wintermute Ventures and DBA. Pascal said it aims to build a next-generation prediction market platform for professional traders and institutions, using a trading model closer to perpetual futures to offer lower fees, deeper liquidity and more professional tools.
Fireworks, an Nvidia-backed AI cloud startup, completed a $1.5 billion funding round at a $17.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, with Nvidia, Evantic and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating. Fireworks hosts and runs open-source AI models for developers. It said annualized revenue has surpassed $1 billion, five times the level of a year earlier. The company currently processes 40 trillion AI tokens a day and has started offering GPUs for AI model training.
Crypto exchange Crypto.com said it secured a $400 million strategic investment from Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation. The company described it as its first institutional financing round since it was founded a decade ago. The capital will be used to speed up expansion across asset classes, including tokenized securities and derivatives, as the company pushes deeper into the overlap between digital assets and traditional markets.
ETF activity and institutional commentary on bitcoin
T. Rowe Price, which manages about $1.9 trillion in assets, officially launched the TKNZ actively managed multi-token crypto ETF on NYSE Arca on Thursday, nearly nine months after first filing. The fund was described as the first actively managed multi-token spot crypto ETF, with about $15 million in initial assets and a 0.75% management fee.
Its initial allocation is 40.75% bitcoin, 18.42% ether, 11.01% BNB, 9.44% Solana, 9.37% XRP, 6.45% Hyperliquid, 3.00% Stellar and 1.28% Dogecoin. Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said the starting mix had “too little bitcoin, too much of most everything else, especially HYPE.” The fund does not currently stake assets, though it has left open the possibility of adding staking later.
JPMorgan analysts said Strategy’s larger cash reserves and positive flows into bitcoin futures are “encouraging signs” for the bitcoin outlook, even though spot bitcoin ETF flows remain unstable. Strategy’s U.S. dollar reserves increased from $2.55 billion to $3 billion, enough to cover roughly 20 months of preferred share dividends.
JPMorgan had previously said that if Strategy rebuilt enough dollar reserves to cover two to three years of dividends, it could reduce concerns that the company might be forced to sell bitcoin in the future. On ETF flows, the bank said spot bitcoin ETFs have swung sharply in recent weeks, with inflows last week turning into outflows this week. Leveraged ETFs tied to Strategy, by contrast, have seen steady positive inflows for seven straight weeks. The analysts said that buying likely came mainly from retail investors, which may have supported Strategy shares and kept the common stock from falling below the net asset value of its bitcoin holdings. They also pointed out that bitcoin futures still recorded positive inflows this week even as spot ETFs saw outflows.
Protocol and ecosystem developments
Ethena said on X that it has launched on the Monad blockchain. USDe and sUSDe are now available across the Monad ecosystem, including integration with Monad’s Aave instance. Ethena said users can borrow stablecoin liquidity at scale, and that parallelized EVM USDe is now live as well.
1inch co-founder Anton Bukov said on X that he stopped participating in the company’s operations in late November 2025 because of disagreements over strategic direction and leadership. He said he is no longer involved in any product architecture or security work and does not supervise either function. Bukov added that he remains a co-founder and still owns 50% of the company. He co-founded 1inch in May 2019 and was involved in designing core architecture including the 1inch Router, Fusion and cross-chain swap systems.
Ethereum Foundation researcher Francesco D’Amato, known as fradamt, said he is leaving the EF and joining the newly formed protocol R&D organization Ethlabs. D’Amato spent five years at the Ethereum Foundation and worked on MEV, consensus, data availability sampling and execution-layer pricing.
Platform governance, creator policy and security incidents
X product lead Nikita Bier posted an update to the platform’s creator revenue-sharing program. Accounts that post “reply and I’ll follow back” type content three times or more will be removed from the program and referred to the policy team for suspension. Bier said Grok can now fully detect this behavior, and nearly 4,000 accounts were removed today.
He also said the new model is three times more accurate than the prior one at detecting duplicate content. Watermarks, intros and other edits will route monetized impressions back to the original uploader, and the same treatment applies to copied viral text posts. Bier said 1.5 million stolen posts were detected during this cycle. Repeated duplication or deliberate attempts to evade the system will result in removal from the program. X said the changes will return more than $1 million in revenue to original creators.
On Solana, CLMM leverage protocol DefiTuna disclosed on X that an attacker exploited a vulnerability in its lending pool yesterday and extracted about $580,000, leaving a $580,000 shortfall in the USDC lending pool. The team said the attack vector has been identified and fixed, investigations are still ongoing, more information will be released soon, and efforts are under way to recover the stolen funds.
Bonzo Finance Labs said on X that users affected by the July 11 oracle attack on Bonzo Lend will be fully reimbursed based on their pre-incident positions. The compensation will be supported by a recovery mechanism committed by the Hedera Foundation.
Separately, an address that drained $21.2 million in BONK from the Bonk treasury through a governance proposal transferred 1.186 trillion BONK, worth $4.11 million, to Binance three hours ago. BONK has fallen 28% over the 10 days since the incident, from $0.0000047 to $0.0000034.
The same address spent $4.4 million 10 days ago to acquire enough BONK to meet the governance voting threshold, passed the proposal, and removed 4.426 trillion BONK from the treasury, worth $21.2 million. On the same day it sent 40 billion BONK, worth $190,000, to OKX, while the rest remained on-chain. After the latest Binance transfer, the address still holds 3.2 trillion BONK, worth about $10.98 million.
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky’s X account was hacked on Monday and used to post a bullish message about “RWA tokenization,” which was later deleted. AI detection tool Pangram said the post was 100% AI-generated. Users pointed to traits such as a lack of commas. X’s security team said it protected the account after being notified, and Chesky has regained access.
Political and corporate developments in the U.S.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on July 15 that the U.S. Mint will begin producing a $1 coin bearing President Trump’s portrait to commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence. The obverse will also include “Liberty,” “In God We Trust” and “1776–2026,” while the reverse will feature a bald eagle. Trump said he was “honored” by the coin.
Critics questioned whether the coin is legal. An 1866 U.S. law says living persons may not appear on U.S. currency, but that law refers to paper money printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, while coins are produced by the U.S. Mint. In 2020, Congress passed a law authorizing the Treasury secretary to mint $1 coins to commemorate the 250th anniversary, but that law bars living persons from appearing on the coins. In a Fox News interview aired on July 14, Bessent said a coin commemorating the 150th anniversary had carried the portrait of then-President Calvin Coolidge. “So we can put living persons on coins,” he said.
OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor said in a recent interview that the company has no update on plans for an initial public offering. The interview focused on OpenAI’s newly released AI agent tools and also covered enterprise AI spending, litigation involving Apple and broader industry trends.
In a separate corporate development, people familiar with the matter said PayPal’s board believes a $53 billion takeover proposal from rival Stripe and Advent International undervalues the company and faces regulatory and financing hurdles. The sources said PayPal has not formally responded and the board is weighing the offer against management’s turnaround strategy. Its preliminary view is that the $60.50-per-share proposal represents a premium to recent trading levels but does not fully reflect PayPal’s future potential.
The buyers have secured about $50 billion in financing commitments from JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, plus $17 billion in equity from Stripe and Advent, to support the $53 billion proposal. If antitrust concerns arise, the bidders have considered remedies including separating Braintree and shifting that business to Advent. Block was initially involved but withdrew before the latest bid was submitted. Investors will be watching PayPal’s July 28 earnings report.
China and AI-related developments
An investment progress announcement from Korrun on the evening of July 16 disclosed a new market valuation for Chinese AI company DeepSeek. Based on the filing, DeepSeek’s post-money valuation in the latest financing round has reached about RMB 351 billion. A person close to DeepSeek told a reporter that the company has already started a second round of fundraising after completing the current one, though there is still no decision on whether it will seek a listing on the STAR Market by year-end.
According to 36Kr, citing multiple independent sources, Zhipu’s annual recurring revenue had reached $1 billion as of July 2026. Zhipu, listed as 02513.HK, did not respond to the report.
Investor Serenity wrote that Micron announced a long-term memory supply agreement with Qualcomm, yet the market reaction was unexpectedly negative and Micron shares fell 5.37%. Serenity argued that with long-term supply agreements continuing across the AI supply chain to lock in future demand, memory and AI-related stocks do not show obvious signs of fundamental deterioration. In that view, the recent pullback is more likely tied to deleveraging and margin pressure than to a reversal in AI demand or storage industry trends. Serenity also said that as AI infrastructure buildout continues, companies up and down the supply chain are reinforcing supply security through long-term contracts, meaning short-term volatility may reflect positioning and valuation adjustments more than a change in long-term growth logic.
Google’s Gemini 3.5 Pro flagship model has been delayed by months from the original plan because its capabilities, especially in coding, have not yet met expectations. People familiar with the matter said the delay has frustrated engineers, AI researchers and management, and raised concern that Google could lose ground to Anthropic and OpenAI. A Google spokesperson said the company is testing 3.5 Pro and an upgraded Flash model and is in contact with the U.S. government about model testing and safety frameworks.
PANews’ AI digest also said Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, its flagship model with about 2.8 trillion parameters and a 1 million-token context window. The model ranked first on the Arena.ai frontend coding leaderboard with a score of 1679, ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 at 1631 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol at 1618.
Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released its first open-source model, Inkling. The model has 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active parameters, uses a mixture-of-experts architecture, and was trained on 45 trillion tokens of multimodal data. It has been open-sourced under Apache-2.0. A smaller 276 billion-parameter model, Inkling-Small, will be released later.
The digest also noted that the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance opened in Shanghai on July 17, and President Xi Jinping will attend the opening ceremony and deliver a keynote speech. On the first day of the event, “2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference is too popular” rose to the top of Weibo’s trending topics.
China market and infrastructure updates
Private investment firms linked to Liang Wenfeng have taken a large position in ChangXin Memory. The chipmaker’s IPO issuance announcement showed that the National Social Security Fund, the Basic Pension Insurance Fund and other long-term state-backed investors, along with upstream and downstream industry leaders and large insurers, participated in the strategic placement.
Shenzhen Sankuai Network Technology, NIO Power Technology (Hefei), ZTE Corporation and Chery Intelligent Vehicle Technology (Hefei), among others, each received allocations worth RMB 157,999,993.98 with an 18-month lock-up. Hangzhou Alibaba Cloud Feitian Information Technology received an allocation worth RMB 157,999,993.98 with a 36-month lock-up.
High-Flyer Quant participated in the offline placement at a proposed subscription price of RMB 8.78 per share. The upper limit for each offline order was 230 million shares, and most of High-Flyer’s products reportedly bid in the 70 million to 140 million share range. High-Flyer Quant mainly consists of Zhejiang Jiuzhang and Ningbo High-Flyer Quant. Both are registered with the Asset Management Association of China, and both are controlled by Liang Wenfeng, who holds 85% of Jiuzhang Asset and 85.15% of Ningbo High-Flyer Quant.
The Base Ecosystem Fund published a developer call titled “Request for Builders: Funding the Future of Global Finance,” saying it will provide early-stage capital and ecosystem resources to startup teams building the next generation of global financial infrastructure, with a focus on Pre-Seed and Seed projects.
The fund highlighted tokenization, stablecoins and emerging market finance, on-chain credit and lending, prediction markets, bringing traditional finance on-chain, commercial AI agent applications and SKU tokenization as core areas of interest. In tokenization, it is looking at real-world assets on-chain, including yield-bearing assets, short-term working capital tools, invoice finance, trade finance, revenue-based financing, REITs, royalty income and private credit funds. In stablecoins, it is focused on linking offline cash networks with stablecoin payment systems and supporting local-currency stablecoins. For on-chain credit and lending, it is interested in unsecured consumer credit and multi-party credit systems built with zkTLS, smart contracts and stablecoin infrastructure. In prediction markets, it mentioned politics, culture, insurance risk management and clinical trials. In traditional finance, it pointed to foreign exchange and on-chain bilateral agreements as institutional infrastructure opportunities. It also highlighted AI agent use cases such as shopping, automated settlement and booking services.
Montage Technology said in a filing that on July 15 the Fair Trade Investigation Division of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office carried out an on-site search and evidence collection at the company’s South Korea office over a potential violation of antitrust-related regulations. The company said it is fully cooperating. As of the filing date, neither the company nor its directors or employees had been accused by prosecutors or any government agency of wrongdoing, and operations remain normal.
The company said the investigation is still at an early stage, making it impossible to predict how long it will last or what the final outcome will be. It said it will closely track the case and fulfill disclosure obligations in accordance with the law. The filing added that the matter remains uncertain and could affect market sentiment and the company’s reputation, though there is currently no evidence of a material impact on financial condition or operations.
Montage Technology also proposed a share buyback to support company value and investor interests. It plans to repurchase part of its A shares using its own funds through centralized bidding, with a total amount of no less than RMB 300 million and no more than RMB 600 million. The proposed buyback period is within three months after the board approves the plan.