Galaxy Digital has rolled out Galaxy Curator, an institutional vault curation offering on the decentralized lending protocol Morpho, according to CoinDesk. The service is being made available to institutional clients through Fireblocks Earn and is designed for firms that want to deploy idle stablecoins into selected on-chain yield strategies without having to build and manage their own DeFi infrastructure. Galaxy said the initial lineup includes two strategy types. One is focused on capital preservation and allocates only to markets backed by high-quality collateral. The other takes on more risk in exchange for higher yield, with allocations to liquid staking and restaking tokens, Pendle principal tokens, and Ethena products. The company also said the vaults use the same collateral standards, risk exposure limits, and market monitoring framework that it applies in its institutional lending and trading businesses.

Galaxy Digital (GLXY) has introduced Galaxy Curator, a vault management business aimed at institutional clients seeking on-chain stablecoin yield without running DeFi infrastructure themselves. The product is built on decentralized lending protocol Morpho and is being distributed through Fireblocks Earn, giving access to more than 2,400 institutional customers. Galaxy said the service is designed to address a common balance-sheet issue for larger firms: sizable stablecoin holdings often sit idle in custody accounts because they are reserved for settlement, capital deployment, and day-to-day operating needs. Direct participation in DeFi protocols, the company said, can also bring technical complexity and risk hurdles that many institutions prefer not to handle on their own. CoinDesk cited Galaxy’s announcement.

California-based fintech company Flex has raised $70 million in a B1 funding round led by Halo Fund, according to Forbes. The company said the fresh capital is intended to support business expansion. Flex operates Flex Global, a stablecoin-based cross-border banking platform that offers multi-currency accounts covering 32 currencies across 170 countries and regions. The report also outlined the company’s client profile: Flex mainly serves businesses with annual revenue ranging from $3 million to $200 million, with a concentration in the construction, wholesale, and import-export sectors. The funding and customer details point to Flex’s focus on serving internationally active mid-market companies through stablecoin-enabled financial infrastructure.

California-based fintech company Flex has raised $70 million in a B1 funding round led by Halo Fund, according to Forbes. The company said the new capital is intended to support further business expansion. Flex operates Flex Global, a stablecoin-based cross-border banking platform that offers multicurrency accounts covering 32 currencies across 170 countries and regions. The report said Flex’s core customer base includes companies with annual revenue ranging from $3 million to $200 million. Those customers are concentrated mainly in the construction, wholesale, and import-export sectors. The funding highlights investor interest in financial infrastructure that uses stablecoins to support cross-border banking and payments for businesses.

Federated Hermes fund manager Karen Manna said in a report that the firm still expects the Federal Reserve to remain largely on hold, while inflation continues to rank among the hardest macroeconomic variables to forecast. She said the shift from the low-inflation environment that followed the 2008-09 financial crisis to the post-pandemic surge in prices was driven by supply-chain disruptions, changes in consumption patterns and labor-market imbalances. Many of those distortions have faded, she said, but a new set of variables is still clouding the inflation outlook. Manna pointed to tariffs implemented last year, a period of reduced economic visibility around the government shutdown last autumn, elevated energy prices and heavy capital spending tied to artificial intelligence. In her view, the disinflation process may prove more uneven and more episodic than what markets experienced in past cycles, reinforcing the Fed’s cautious, data-dependent approach. The report was cited by Jin10, according to Odaily.

Cantor has partnered with Securitize to introduce blockchain infrastructure into initial public offerings and follow-on stock issuance, according to Techub News, citing crypto.news. The arrangement is designed to let companies raise capital and issue securities on-chain while staying within the current regulatory framework for capital markets. Securitize had already taken its own shares public through the New York Stock Exchange and tokenized that equity. This new partnership moves blockchain use further upstream, into the primary issuance process itself, rather than limiting tokenization to shares that are already listed. Securitize said the setup could modernize how equity records are maintained and how allocation and settlement are handled. The announcement focuses on integrating blockchain into issuance workflows under existing rules, rather than positioning the effort outside traditional market structures.

ARK Invest has publicly challenged a16z Crypto’s view that traditional finance needs blockchain technology but not necessarily DeFi. Lorenzo Valente, ARK Invest’s head of research, argued that financial institutions are more likely to build on open DeFi infrastructure than on closed or private blockchain systems. He said public chains have already shown stronger advantages than private-chain models, pointing to the growth of tokenized assets on open networks such as Ethereum as evidence of better network effects and greater room to scale. Valente also said the builders of next-generation financial infrastructure may not be incumbent financial institutions, but crypto-native companies such as Circle and Coinbase. That stands in contrast to a16z Crypto’s position that banks and asset managers are selectively adopting blockchain features that fit existing compliance, governance, and operational requirements rather than embracing DeFi itself. Sentora co-founder Jesus Rodriguez also disputed the a16z view. He said financial institutions may ultimately adopt DeFi as the base layer, while adding compliance, custody, and enterprise-grade control mechanisms on top. The debate has intensified as RWA tokenization, onchain settlement, and institution-focused financial applications continue to expand.

Reuters reported on July 16, citing three sources, that Iran has asked Yemen's Houthi movement to be ready to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait if the United States attacks Iranian power infrastructure. The report said such a move would create a new major threat to global energy supplies. According to the sources, the idea has been discussed within Iran's leadership and the message has already been passed to Tehran's Houthi allies. The Houthis were said to have been informed of the request in recent days. The sources did not provide more detail on how the request was delivered. They also did not say whether it came after former US President Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday to strike Iran's power infrastructure. The original flash was carried by BlockBeats and attributed the report to Reuters.