Jack Mallers, the founder of Bitcoin payments company Strike, stepped down as CEO of Twenty One Capital on July 20 and returned to Strike to focus on Bitcoin payment and financial services. At the same time, Twenty One Capital named Raphael Zagury as its new chief executive, according to reports cited by Yahoo Finance and CoinDesk. Mallers had been tapped by Tether in the second half of 2025 to lead XXI, while Tether had also been moving to tighten control over the company. ABMedia said Tether completed the purchase of SoftBank’s stake in Twenty One Capital in May, cementing its position as the controlling shareholder. The leadership change also affects a broader corporate combination first proposed by Tether in April. That structure involved Twenty One Capital, Strike and Bitcoin mining company Elektron Energy. With Strike no longer participating, the original three-way merger is no longer moving forward. Twenty One Capital is now discussing a revised two-party deal with Elektron Energy while reorganizing its broader strategy. The earlier proposal had aimed to combine Bitcoin treasury operations, mining, payments, lending and capital markets activities under a single listed company.

Peter Schiff said the artificial intelligence stock bubble may already have burst, pointing to growing pressure from Moonshot AI’s low-cost Kimi K3 model and a sharp sell-off in AI-related shares. According to the report, Schiff, who has long criticized bubble-driven markets, linked part of the latest decline in AI stocks to the competitive disruption created by Moonshot AI’s cheaper model. The report also said AI-linked stocks have broadly pulled back in recent trading, while the market is reassessing growth expectations for highly valued technology names. Cointelegraph was cited as the source for the remarks.

Ionic Digital said its shares are expected to start trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 28 under the ticker IOND, after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission declared the company’s registration statement effective. The move clears what the company described as the last major regulatory hurdle in its long-running listing plan. Ionic is choosing a direct listing rather than a traditional initial public offering, meaning it will not issue new shares or raise fresh capital through the transaction. Instead, existing registered shareholders will be able to sell their holdings on the public market. The company was originally formed to take over Bitcoin mining assets tied to the Celsius estate, but has since been repositioning itself as a broader digital infrastructure business serving artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads. Ionic also said it filed its first Form S-1 registration statement earlier this month. Before the listing, the company had already raised about $400 million to support data center construction and help shift its business beyond Bitcoin mining.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao said crypto remains far from saturated, argued that many people still misunderstand it as only an investment asset, and predicted that AI agents will eventually use cryptocurrency to make payments directly. In a Talking Tokens Podcast interview, Zhao looked back on Binance’s launch in 2017 and said the exchange became the world’s largest within five months of going live. He credited that rise to product quality, customer service, a mission centered on increasing freedom of money, and a strong focus on user protection, while also acknowledging that market timing helped. Zhao said that if he could go back, he would spend more time learning law, compliance and politics, and he would ship products faster. He pointed to fiat on- and off-ramps, yield-bearing stablecoins that remain easy to transact with, lending, debt markets and real-world assets as areas where crypto platforms still have room to build. He also said crypto wealth penetration is still below 1%. On AI, Zhao said he expects payments to be the clearest near-term overlap with crypto, with AI handling transactions on users’ behalf and needing a natively digital form of money. He added that AI could improve security by helping developers find vulnerabilities more quickly and could speed up blockchain performance improvements. Over the long run, he said traditional finance and crypto finance will not remain separate systems, but converge into one financial system.

Bitcoin miner Ionic Digital said its stock is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 28 after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission declared the company’s registration statement effective, removing the final major regulatory hurdle in its long-running path to the public market. The company said it will trade under the ticker IOND and will use a direct listing rather than a traditional initial public offering. That structure means Ionic will not issue new shares and will not raise fresh capital through the listing itself. Instead, existing registered shareholders will be able to sell their holdings on the open market. Ionic was originally created to take over Bitcoin mining assets from the Celsius estate, but the company has since been repositioning itself as a broader digital infrastructure business serving artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads. Earlier this month, Ionic filed its initial Form S-1 registration statement. Before listing, it had already raised about $400 million to support data center construction and its shift beyond Bitcoin mining.

Grayscale said it has hired Sebastian Pulido as head of onchain asset management, putting him in charge of the firm’s onchain product strategy. The appointment adds an executive with experience across both traditional finance and digital assets. Pulido previously worked at Aave Labs, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan’s Kinexys team, according to the company’s announcement. His background spans institutional finance as well as the digital asset sector. The move centers on Grayscale’s onchain product plans and identifies Pulido as the executive leading that effort.

Bitcoin miner Ionic Digital said its registration statement has been declared effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, clearing the way for the company to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 28, 2026, under the ticker IOND. The company said it will go public through a direct listing rather than a traditional initial public offering. Under that structure, Ionic Digital will not issue new shares and will not raise capital from the market debut. Instead, existing registered shareholders will be able to sell their holdings directly into the public market. The company said the listing is designed to provide a liquidity path for shareholders, including a large group of investors who received stock in the company through the bankruptcy restructuring of crypto lending platform Celsius Network. The update was cited by Odaily, which referenced Theenergymag.

Arcus, a decentralized exchange backed by Robinhood, launched tokenized stocks and perpetual futures on Robinhood Chain on Tuesday. The platform was built by the team behind decentralized trading venue dYdX and is supported by Robinhood Crypto. Arcus had already introduced spot markets when it went live on Robinhood Chain on July 1. The exchange now offers more than 95 stock tokens, perpetual markets and crypto assets through self-custodial trading accounts. It uses USDG, the stablecoin issued by Paxos, as its main collateral and settlement asset. Listed names include tokenized shares tied to major U.S. companies such as Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon. Arcus also offers perpetual products linked to stocks, ETFs, commodities, indexes and crypto assets. Arcus said its stock tokens are not available to users in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and other restricted jurisdictions. The platform uses a self-custody model, allowing users to retain control of their assets while connecting wallets such as MetaMask, Ledger and WalletConnect.