Visa said on July 16 that it is rolling out the Visa Stablecoin Platform, a new product designed to plug stablecoins into the company’s existing payment and settlement workflows. The platform is tied to Visa’s network of more than 200 million merchants and about 15,000 financial institutions, according to the company’s announcement as cited by Fortune. The first three supported stablecoins are OUSD from the Open Standard alliance, USDC from Circle, and USDG from Paxos, with OUSD positioned by Visa as the strategic lead asset at launch. Rather than introducing a separate checkout experience, the platform is built to place stablecoins inside Visa’s current infrastructure, which processes $15 trillion in annual settlements. Visa executive Rubail Birwadker said the focus is not how merchants obtain stablecoins, but how those assets can connect with treasury and settlement operations. The platform also features real-time settlement, onchain ledger records, and an interface that keeps blockchain wallet and signing steps away from merchants.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan has joined a growing list of Wall Street executives raising concerns about the risks tied to advanced AI models such as Anthropic's Mythos. Speaking on the issue, Moynihan said the technology could bring a major shift in workload while also changing the speed at which system vulnerabilities are identified, forcing institutions to respond faster. His comments come as the financial industry and the U.S. government have been assessing potential threats linked to the rapid progress of AI models in recent months. Anthropic has said Mythos, launched earlier this year, performs strongly at finding system vulnerabilities. Bank of America is one of the Wall Street firms authorized to use the model, and the bank has been testing its own systems with Mythos while sharing information with peers. The model has not been opened to the public. Earlier this week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned that broad public access to the system would be as dangerous as "giving a ballistic missile to an individual."

Decentralized exchange Based has rolled out Based Alpha, a token issuance platform built on Robinhood Chain. The product uses a bonding curve model with a fixed total token supply of 1 billion units for each launch. Of that amount, 793.1 million tokens are offered to the public through a constant-product bonding curve to handle price discovery. Once the curve is fully sold, the remaining 206.9 million tokens are automatically paired with the funds raised to create a locked liquidity pool on Based DEX. During the bonding period, 0.3% of trading fees goes directly to the token creator, while the rest of the protocol fees are kept by Based. The platform said that once protocol fees reach a certain scale, it plans to turn on a fee switch and distribute proceeds to BASED holders. Based also said more features and trader incentive programs will be released over time. Before this launch, the platform had already introduced a token swap function that lets users bridge assets from other chains and exchange them into Robinhood ecosystem tokens.

The UK Treasury released a joint US-UK statement on stablecoins on July 14, laying out 10 policy points that the source article reads as far more than routine diplomatic language. Its central argument is that the document effectively turns the logic of the historical Eurodollar market into an official policy framework: a dollar-based system operating outside the United States, backed by cross-border regulatory coordination rather than informal market evolution alone. The article places special weight on point five of the statement, which says the two governments will avoid forcing issuers to maintain excessively ring-fenced resources within individual jurisdictions. It contrasts that approach with the European Union’s MiCA regime, described in the source as requiring non-bank stablecoin issuers to place 30% to 60% of customer funds in commercial banks inside the EU. In that reading, Washington and London are backing a single global reserve pool model rather than country-by-country reserve fragmentation. The source also argues that the UK is not acting as a proxy for Europe, but as a European-time-zone node for the dollar system. It links point seven, on stablecoins as settlement tools for securities and commodities markets, and point nine, on priority claims to reserves in insolvency, to a broader legal and market architecture. The article’s conclusion is that the debate is no longer only about exporting dollars, but also about exporting the rules and institutions attached to them.

Avalanche has emerged as one of the larger public chains in tokenized real-world assets, with on-chain RWA value rising to $2.1 billion, up more than 60% from a month earlier, according to RWA.xyz. A major driver was BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund BUIDL, whose Avalanche-based assets jumped from $464 million to more than $900 million in a week, with $436 million in net inflows. The chain is also seeing activity from Securitize and a series of enterprise deployments in Japan and South Korea, including Progmat’s migration of more than JPY 452 billion in tokenized assets, TIS’s multi-token payments platform, Hyundai Motor Group’s internal cross-border remittance system, NHN KCP’s payments network and KB Kookmin Card’s hybrid stablecoin card payments initiative. Yet the article argues that Avalanche’s enterprise success has not translated cleanly into value capture for AVAX. Even with institutions adopting Avalanche for settlement, compliance and customized infrastructure, AVAX has fallen more than 50% this year. The reason, as framed in the source piece, is structural: enterprise-focused subnets or custom L1s often use stablecoins or tokenized deposits rather than AVAX for transaction fees, leaving the network’s native token less directly tied to rising tokenization activity.

Anton Bukov, co-founder of decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch, said he was fired by the company in late November 2025 and is now building a new infrastructure startup called Second Tier. In a statement shared with The Defiant before a planned public announcement, Bukov said he remains a 1inch co-founder and still owns 50% of the company, but no longer participates in operations. He also said he has no role in, and no oversight of, the protocol’s product architecture or security, the technical areas he previously led. 1inch had not responded to a request for comment by press time, and it has not publicly confirmed Bukov’s characterization of the split. Bukov described the separation as a mature founder split centered on strategic direction, communication, and leadership approach rather than any single decision. He said Second Tier is not a DEX, not a DEX aggregator, and is not being built against 1inch. The new company has not disclosed funding, team members, or product details. The split comes as 1inch has been pushing deeper into institutional and traditional finance, including an October integration of its swap engine into the Coinbase app and a rebrand that signaled broader financial-market ambitions.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a new report that changes made by the Trump administration to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, may have left U.S. consumers with as much as $26.5 billion in added costs. According to Warren, roughly $22.5 billion of that total stems from the rollback of limits on credit card late fees and bank overdraft charges, while about $4 billion is tied to the agency dropping some enforcement cases and consumer restitution agreements. The report says a previous CFPB rule on credit card late fees would have capped most charges at $8 and was expected to save consumers about $10 billion a year. A separate proposed rule on overdraft fees would have pushed banks to keep some overdraft charges below $5. Warren argued that staffing cuts, pauses or reductions in enforcement, and the repeal of some consumer protection rules introduced during the Biden administration weakened the CFPB’s role as a consumer watchdog. The CFPB and the White House did not immediately respond to the allegations in Warren’s report, according to CNBC.

Fireworks, an AI cloud startup backed by NVIDIA, has raised $1.5 billion at a $17.5 billion valuation, according to CNBC. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, with participation from NVIDIA, Evantic and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others. Fireworks focuses on hosting and running open-source AI models for developers. The company said its annualized revenue has climbed past $1 billion, reaching five times the level recorded a year earlier. Fireworks also said it is now processing 40 trillion AI tokens per day. In addition to inference-related services, the startup has started offering GPUs for training AI models. The financing adds to investor backing for infrastructure providers serving the fast-growing AI model ecosystem, especially companies building tools and cloud capacity for developers working with open-source systems.