Late July 22 through early July 23 brought a dense run of updates across crypto markets, tokenized securities, on-chain security, regulation, AI infrastructure, and public-company earnings.
Binance adds 10 bStocks tokens as eligible collateral
Binance said its Cross Margin, Portfolio Margin, and Portfolio Margin Pro services will add 10 bStocks tokens as qualified collateral assets at 21:30 on July 22, 2026, Beijing time. The additions are South Korea Bull 3X ETF (KORUB), AXT (AXTIB), CoreWeave (CRWVB), Direxion MU Bull 2X ETF (MUUB), GraniteShares 2X Long MRVL ETF (MVLLB), Tradr 2X Long SNDK ETF (SNXXB), GraniteShares 2X Long INTC ETF (INTWB), ProShares UltraPro QQQ (TQQQB), Quantinuum (QNTB), and Oracle (ORCLB).
Margin trading will also open for the related bStocks pairs. Eligible users will be able to post those tokenized securities as margin collateral, widening the list of assets available in margin trading.
Earlier in the day, Binance spot had already listed 10 bStocks trading pairs, including names tied to Oracle and Quantinuum.
Upbit flags ZIL, while Zilliqa discloses a Ledger app flaw
Upbit designated Zilliqa (ZIL) as a trading caution asset in its KRW and BTC markets. The exchange said the move followed security incidents involving the project’s wallet or distributed ledger that were unexplained or not yet fixed, creating a risk of user losses.
ZIL deposits and withdrawals have been suspended since 19:00 on July 20. Upbit said only withdrawals are currently planned to resume, while the timing for deposit resumption will be announced after additional review. The caution period runs from 19:00 on July 22 through the third week of August. During that period, Upbit said it will decide whether to extend, lift, or terminate support for the asset under its digital asset trading support termination policy.
Zilliqa later disclosed a severe nonce vulnerability in its Ledger application affecting Schnorr signatures for native, non-EVM ZIL transactions. The issue causes the upper 64 bits of the ephemeral nonce to be fixed at zero, and the project said an attacker could recover a private key within seconds using about five affected on-chain signatures.
According to Zilliqa, the defect has existed in every version of the Zilliqa Ledger app since 2019. Native transactions are now paused, affected keys must be abandoned, and ordinary transfers do not fully remove the risk. EVM transactions, along with transactions made through zilliqa-js, gozilliqa-sdk, and pyzil, are not affected. The team said it is working with Ledger on a patched release and a fund migration plan, while KuCoin helped confirm both the root cause and active exploitation.
Payward pushes xStocks beyond U.S. equities
Payward, Kraken’s parent company, said it is expanding tokenized stocks on its xStocks platform from U.S. equities into Hong Kong, the UK, Europe, and South Korea. It has partnered with investment infrastructure provider GTN to launch Hong Kong stocks, while any further rollout will depend on regulatory approval.
Payward said xStocks now supports more than 500 tokenized securities, has handled over $35 billion in cumulative trading volume, and has nearly 200,000 holders. The company plans to extend into more asset classes on top of GTN’s network of more than 90 connected markets. xStocks products remain unavailable to U.S. investors.
Polymarket plans legal challenge in France
Prediction market platform Polymarket said it will challenge the French blocking order against its website through legal procedures in France.
France’s national gambling regulator, ANJ, asked operators last week to block Polymarket, citing the potential for major gambling losses and manipulation risk in some contracts. The report also noted a broader regulatory tightening around prediction markets. Spain temporarily banned Polymarket and Kalshi from operating locally in May, and in June the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission published a draft rule package for the sector.
OpenAI raises the scale of its data center plans
Market chatter said OpenAI plans to spend more than $30 billion on a new data center.
People familiar with the matter said the company has raised its projected compute spending through 2030 from about $600 billion earlier this year to about $750 billion. The higher figure reflects new agreements with cloud service providers to secure the large volume of compute needed to build and run AI models.
OpenAI said Wednesday that it will invest $20 billion to launch a data center project called Camellia in Effingham County, Georgia. Sachin Katti, OpenAI’s vice president of compute strategy, said the company has signed a contract with Georgia Power for 3.2 gigawatts of electricity supply from 2028 through 2032, and said the project’s total cost could exceed $30 billion. That would make it one of OpenAI’s largest data center efforts to date.
People familiar with the matter said OpenAI has hired Brent Mayo to help keep the project on schedule. Mayo was described as one of the lead architects behind Elon Musk’s data center buildout. OpenAI has also restarted internal efforts aimed at strengthening its control over data centers.
The company additionally rolled out OpenAI Presence through a limited general availability program for eligible enterprise customers, though self-service access is not yet available.
Sui launches Hashi Bitcoin interoperability testnet
Sui said Hashi, its Bitcoin interoperability framework first announced in March, is now live on testnet. The system is designed to let users use native BTC as programmable collateral on Sui without moving BTC off the Bitcoin mainnet.
The team said Hashi uses a 2-of-2 multisig model through a Guardian Layer, with BTC collateral managed by joint signatures from Hashi validators and an independent guardian. Sui said institutions can build BTC-backed lending, yield products, and derivatives on top of the system.
Wave Digital is among the first partners. Sui also said it received a legal analysis from Fenwick West concluding that Hashi’s deposit and withdrawal flow should not constitute a taxable event under U.S. law.
CertiK says physical attacks on crypto holders rose sharply
Blockchain security firm CertiK said 52 confirmed physical “wrench attacks” against crypto holders were recorded globally in the first half of 2026, up 33% from a year earlier. The associated losses and ransom demands totaled about $124 million, up sharply from about $10.5 million in the same period last year.
Home invasions posted the fastest increase, with 20 confirmed cases during the half. France had the largest number of public cases because of its large domestic crypto ecosystem and multiple data leaks. Europe was the main hotspot, and France alone accounted for 33 incidents, or 63.5% of the global total.
The report said criminal groups are combining on-chain records, leaked customer databases, and social media information to identify high-value holders, pushing industry risk beyond cybersecurity and into personal and operational security.
Ostium sets July 23 restart
Ostium, a perpetuals DEX on Arbitrum, said trading will restart at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, July 23. All open positions and orders will remain in place, be marked to live market prices at restart, and then be checked for liquidations or take-profit and stop-loss triggers.
The protocol said functionality will return in phases. At first, only reduce-only actions will be available, including closing positions, adding margin, changing or canceling orders, and automated take-profit, stop-loss, and liquidation flows. Opening new positions will come later, after related orders have been processed.
Ostium also paused new OLP liquidity deposits. Existing LP withdrawals will be processed in the next settlement cycle. The team warned users about impersonation scams and said it will never ask for private keys or seed phrases.
Reports last week said the Arbitrum-based perpetuals DEX OSTIUM may have suffered an attack resulting in about $18 million in losses.
SEC commissioner Hester Peirce warns on on-chain vaults and lending
On the SEC’s website, Commissioner Hester Peirce said putting a crypto asset “on-chain” does not automatically place related activity outside the reach of federal securities laws.
Her statement said crypto vaults and lending strategies that use smart contracts to allocate assets for yield may still raise securities-law questions if specific individuals or teams determine staking and lending allocations, interest rates, accepted assets, loan-to-value ratios, and liquidation thresholds. In those cases, the arrangement could amount to a common enterprise, an investment company, or a securitized note. Participants should assess whether securities issuance, investment adviser, or other regulatory requirements apply.
Peirce said market participants are welcome to discuss compliance pathways with the SEC and comment on how current rules might be adjusted to accommodate vaults and on-chain lending.
Apple prepares a broad Mac refresh for AI demand
Apple plans to refresh the full Mac lineup from this fall into next year, including the iMac, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini, and Mac Studio, to meet rising AI compute demand.
The report said Apple will introduce an entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro with a new M6 chip and update the iMac for the first time in two years. It also plans to release higher-end 14-inch and 16-inch MacBooks with OLED touch displays and M5 Pro or M5 Max chips from late this year into early next year.
The company is also developing MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and OLED iMac models based on M7-series chips, while upgrading the entry-focused MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro chip and more memory. Demand for Mac mini and Mac Studio machines in AI use cases is said to be strong, with some delivery times stretching to three months, and supply tightness is affecting the timing of new launches.
Updated Clarity bill text appears in the Senate
Senate Republicans released a new 616-page version of the Clarity bill, which could reach a full Senate vote as early as next week.
The revised text adds ethics provisions aimed at one of the biggest political disputes around the bill. The language would bar public officials and their spouses from issuing or sponsoring digital assets, while still allowing them to invest in digital assets. It also requires disclosure of crypto asset sales above $1,000. Covered officials must also divest crypto assets and investments in crypto companies, or place them in blind trusts beyond their control. The Department of Justice would enforce the provisions, though Democrats say state attorneys general should also be involved. The ethics language has a sunset clause that expires on Jan. 20, 2029.
The bill’s Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act section gives safe harbor protection to non-custodial developers and says they are not money transmitters, a provision widely backed by the crypto industry. Law enforcement officials and Catholic leaders, however, have warned it could weaken anti-trafficking efforts and investigative powers. The bill also adds 25 provisions responding to law-enforcement concerns.
Earlier reporting said the industry broadly welcomed the latest text, while Democrats quickly opposed it, arguing the ethics language does not go far enough. That fight, tied in part to Donald Trump’s crypto holdings, has raised new questions about the bill’s path in the Senate.
Later in the day, Senator Cynthia Lummis said the bill’s ethics rules and other provisions would receive more discussion. The Senate majority leader was also reported to be aiming for a vote as early as next week even without a deal with Democrats.
Revolut reaches a $115 billion valuation
Crypto-friendly digital bank Revolut was valued at $115 billion in an employee share sale, up 53% from its $75 billion valuation in November last year. The deal makes it the most valuable private company in Europe.
Shares were priced at $2,017 each. The transaction let employees and existing investors sell stock rather than raising fresh capital for the company. That valuation is higher than Barclays’ roughly $95 billion market value.
Revolut reported $2.3 billion in pretax profit for 2025, up 57% year over year, on revenue of $6 billion, up 46%, with more than 75 million customers. Its main app supports trading in more than 200 crypto tokens, transfers out, and staking, and the company also runs the separate crypto exchange Revolut X.
Revolut obtained a MiCA license last year and a UK banking license in March, and it has applied for a U.S. national bank license. It has also discussed a future IPO that could seek a valuation of as much as $200 billion.
Tesla keeps its BTC holdings unchanged in Q2
Tesla said its Bitcoin position was unchanged in the second quarter at 11,509 BTC, extending a streak of nearly four years without buying or selling the asset.
With Bitcoin falling from about $83,000 to $58,000 during the quarter, Tesla recorded a $112 million after-tax impairment loss on its digital asset holdings. The company remains one of the larger public corporate Bitcoin holders, though its stack is much smaller than companies such as Strategy that have continued to add.
On earnings, Tesla reported non-GAAP EPS of $0.33 for the quarter, below expectations of $0.55. Revenue came in at $28.2 billion, above expectations of $27.6 billion. Gross margin was 16.8%, GAAP net income was $1.11 billion, and free cash flow was negative $1.1 billion.
Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in early 2021 and has held the remaining 11,509 BTC since selling about 75% of its position in 2022.
SEC and Coinbase settle records dispute
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reached a settlement with Coinbase, ending a years-long legal dispute tied to records preservation during the tenure of former SEC Chair Gary Gensler.
Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Gensler had waged a “litigation campaign” against the crypto industry. In 2024, Coinbase, through consulting firm History Associates, filed FOIA lawsuits against both the SEC and the FDIC, accusing regulators of trying to cut the crypto sector off from banking services.
Under the Wednesday settlement, the SEC agreed to pay History Associates $150,000 in legal fees, release two previously undisclosed documents, and review its recordkeeping and text-message retention practices. The FDIC had already settled with Coinbase in February.
NCA report says crypto supports 232,000 U.S. jobs
The National Cryptocurrency Association said the U.S. crypto industry directly employs 34,000 people. Including jobs supported through suppliers and worker spending, the total rises to 232,000.
The report said the industry will contribute more than $55 billion to U.S. GDP in 2026, including roughly $31 billion in labor income. Direct crypto employment already exceeds coffee and tea manufacturing, at 28,400 jobs, and cement manufacturing, at 15,300 jobs.
Software, blockchain, and data engineering roles make up the largest segment at 10,100 jobs, followed by compliance and financial business functions at 5,450. California and New York together support more than 111,000 jobs, followed by Texas at 26,500, Washington state at 15,100, and North Carolina at 9,524. The report said each direct crypto job supports about six additional jobs.
NCA president Stu Alderoty said the industry has become an economic driver with real effects on U.S. employment, wages, and growth.
Alphabet posts strong revenue and cloud growth
Alphabet reported second-quarter results for fiscal 2026 on July 22 local time. Revenue rose 24% year over year to $119.8 billion, beating expectations and marking a 12th straight quarter of double-digit growth. GAAP operating profit increased 30% to $40.8 billion, lifting the operating margin to 34%, while GAAP EPS came in at $9.11, also ahead of expectations.
The company said net income benefited materially from investment gains, including fair-value changes in some equity stakes.
Google Cloud was the strongest business highlight, with revenue jumping 82% to $24.8 billion on strong demand for enterprise AI infrastructure and solutions. Operating profit there rose to $8.8 billion. Google Services revenue climbed 15% to $94.54 billion, including Search and Other revenue up 17% to $63.3 billion and YouTube ad revenue up 13% to $11.1 billion.
Alphabet also raised its full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $195 billion-$205 billion from $180 billion-$190 billion to support AI infrastructure expansion. Separate reporting said second-quarter capex doubled to $44.9 billion and investment gains reached $98 billion, helping push net income past $100 billion.
B² Network and AFX report security incidents
B² Network on BNB Chain appears to have been attacked. The attacker took 8.591 million B2 tokens worth about $3.86 million, swapped them into 5,409 WBNB worth about $3.11 million, then bridged the funds to Ethereum and is now moving them into Zcash through NEAR Intents.
Separately, AFX, an Arbitrum ecosystem protocol, was attacked at 05:30 Beijing time on July 23. The target was a bridge operated by the protocol, and about 24.15 million USDC had been stolen as of the latest update.
Blockaid said it is working with the Arbitrum team to respond, contacting affected protocols and helping freeze stolen funds. Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, said on X that the Arbitrum team is aware of the reports and is investigating. He added that the transactions originated from a third-party protocol and that Arbitrum’s native bridge was not attacked or exploited.
BNY Mellon targets round-the-clock Treasury settlement
BNY Mellon is preparing to support around-the-clock settlement for U.S. Treasuries in response to the growing influence of digital assets on traditional financial infrastructure.
In a letter to clients, the bank said it had already facilitated after-hours Treasury trades involving stablecoin issuers earlier this year. It plans to launch tokenized Treasuries and begin pilot trades on its private blockchain by the end of 2026, with the goal of achieving 24/7 settlement for both traditional and tokenized Treasuries in 2027.
Those earlier after-hours trades were completed after the Federal Reserve’s Fedwire Securities Service had closed and involved Ripple, issuer of the RLUSD stablecoin, and OpenEden, issuer of USDO. Both stablecoins are backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries. BNY said the transaction showed that Treasury market activity tied to the digital asset ecosystem can continue after traditional cutoff times.
Multicoin says HYPE unstaking was not for a sale
Multicoin Capital managing partner Tushar Jain said on X that his team unstaked a large amount of HYPE yesterday, but not because it planned to sell.
Jain said the fund’s holdings are tracked continuously, forcing it to rotate wallet addresses from time to time. He said institutions need privacy in operations, which is one reason he is bullish on Zama (ZAMA) and Zcash (ZEC). In his description, Zama unlocks private DeFi, Zcash is a leading privacy-focused store-of-value chain, and privacy becomes more important as capital markets move on-chain.
Whale ETH buying and market views from Grayscale and Bitwise
Grayscale research head Zach Pandl said the bottom of Bitcoin’s bear market may already have formed. He argued that Bitcoin has matured into a macro asset and that its price should be driven more by factors such as real rates and economic growth than by the four-year halving cycle. He said past Bitcoin bear markets lined up with slower growth and rising real rates, and that the macro setup now looks similar. If the Federal Reserve abandons rate hikes and the economy remains in good shape, he said Bitcoin may already have bottomed.
On trading flows, a previously inactive whale bought 27,000 ETH worth about $52.03 million through an OTC transaction with Galaxy Digital roughly four hours earlier after three months of silence.
Arthur Hayes also bought another 644.34 ETH worth about $1.25 million around eight hours earlier. Over the past eight days, he has accumulated 3,270 ETH worth about $6.27 million at an average cost of roughly $1,917.
Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan wrote that the crypto market is starting to show signs of a bottom. Since July 1, Bitcoin has risen 9% while the Nasdaq has fallen 6%, ETF fund flows have turned positive, and market sentiment has improved.
Hougan said the next bull market will be driven by the convergence of on-chain finance and traditional finance, with stablecoins, tokenization, 24/7 trading, instant settlement, and institutional DeFi as the main themes.
He highlighted two categories of opportunities. One is crypto-native applications such as Hyperliquid (HYPE), which he said combine real revenue with a strong token model, with 99% of revenue used for HYPE buybacks and burns; HYPE is up 146% this year. The other is traditional financial platforms such as Robinhood (HOOD). Hougan said Robinhood Chain, the company’s Layer 2 blockchain, attracted more than $300 million in deposits within two weeks of launch, processes 3.6 million transactions a day on average, and supports 24/7 trading in tokenized stocks for users in 120 countries. He said he remains constructive on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, crypto equities, and firms including Coinbase, Figure, BlackRock, Visa, Stripe, and JPMorgan.
Franklin Templeton calls agentic AI a crypto use case
Sandy Kaul, head of digital assets and industry advisory services at Franklin Templeton, said in a report that agentic AI will become a “killer use case” for blockchain adoption.
The report argued that traditional payment rails are not structurally or operationally suited to agentic AI. Blockchains combine recordkeeping and settlement, while Visa settlement takes one to three business days. That time gap matters when AI agents are making thousands of micropayments an hour.
Citing outside projections, the report said AI agents could account for 15% to 25% of U.S. e-commerce sales by 2030, with agentic commerce reaching $3 trillion to $5 trillion in scale. Kaul said that if each agent uses blockchain-native tokens to buy data, compute, and API services, demand for tokens such as SOL and ETH would rise with it.
Samsung Wallet plans stablecoin support
Samsung Electronics said at Galaxy Unpacked 2026 that Samsung Wallet will add support for stablecoins, combining payments, rewards, and digital assets into a unified service.
Samsung said the move would make it one of the first major phone brands to support stablecoins as a native feature. Samsung Wallet has already expanded beyond payments into a broader digital hub that stores keys, IDs, and boarding passes.
The event also introduced Samsung Galaxy Card, the first financial service built around Samsung Wallet, launched in the U.S. in partnership with Barclays and Visa. Samsung said its Knox security platform protects sensitive data with end-to-end encryption.
Cathie Wood says SpaceX could still become extremely important
Ark Invest chief executive Cathie Wood told Fox Business that SpaceX may become “the most important company in history globally,” even though its share price has fallen about 48% from its peak to $116.95 and sits about 13% below its IPO price of $135.
Wood said Starlink, launch services, and orbital data centers create a large opportunity set. She noted that Starlink controls about 70% of satellites currently in orbit as a global communications network, and said orbital data centers could reduce compute costs and support advanced AI model development. She also said SpaceX is leasing data center capacity to companies including Anthropic and Google.
Ark has bought about $80 million of SpaceX stock since the listing and added roughly another $20.5 million during the recent decline. SpaceX is set to report its first quarterly earnings on Aug. 4, and lockup expirations on about 911.5 million insider shares begin on Aug. 6, representing around $116 billion in market value.
Grayscale filing details Worldcoin concentration
An SEC filing tied to Grayscale’s proposed Worldcoin ETF said about 90% of circulating WLD is concentrated in 100 wallets, a sharp contrast with the project’s stated goal of distributing tokens fairly to as many people as possible around the world.
The filing also said World Chain’s sequencer is run in a centralized way, with upgrade functions coordinated by a small group involving World Foundation, Tools for Humanity, and Optimism. Governance, the filing said, is still mainly guided by World Foundation.
Binance Futures to list POPMARTUSDT perpetual
Binance Futures said it will list the POPMARTUSDT U-margined perpetual contract at 10:30 on July 23, 2026, Beijing time. The contract tracks the share price of Pop Mart International Group Ltd. on HKEX under ticker 9992 and offers leverage of up to 25x.
Additional AI headlines
PANews also highlighted several AI developments over the past 24 hours.
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly accused Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic’s Fable model to build Kimi K3. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened sanctions on Chinese AI companies involved in intellectual property theft.
The Wall Street Journal reported that nearly 200 U.S. utilities and data center developers signed President Donald Trump’s “taxpayer protection pledge” to address concerns that AI development could push up consumer electricity bills.
AMD said it will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic and help expand its compute capacity. As part of the partnership, Anthropic will deploy as much as 2 gigawatts of AMD Instinct MI450 AI GPUs using AMD’s new Helios rack-scale system.