Qivalis, a consortium of 12 major European banks, is in advanced talks with crypto exchanges and market makers ahead of a euro stablecoin launch in the second half of 2026, aiming to build a regulated EU alternative to dollar-backed tokens.

Developments across crypto, regulation, trading infrastructure, and adjacent tech sectors piled up between July 21 and July 22. Jito Labs rolled out JTX, a self-custodial trading venue on Solana for spot trading in ecosystem tokens and tokenized real-world assets. Telegram founder Pavel Durov said the company plans to ship a native non-custodial Gram wallet inside every Telegram client this summer, a move he described as a wallet deployment for more than 1 billion users. In regulation, Russia’s State Duma passed its first comprehensive crypto law, while Pakistan’s FIA set up a virtual asset investigation unit focused on money laundering and terrorist financing. In the U.S., Coinbase published a postmortem on its July 14 outage, saying a Kubernetes resource naming conflict disrupted transfers, card payments, and on-chain services but did not put customer funds at risk. The broader news cycle also included ETF flow data, legal action over an Illinois digital asset tax, new trading products from Arcus and Kalshi, additional financing for Digital Asset, and a Chapter 11 filing by Movement Labs.

Digital Asset, the developer of the Canton blockchain network, has raised an additional $10 million from Shinhan Financial Group of South Korea and SC Ventures, the investment arm of Standard Chartered, according to The Block. The new capital increases the company’s latest financing round from $355 million to $365 million, while keeping the equity valuation unchanged at $2 billion. Digital Asset’s Canton Network is a public Layer 1 blockchain built for regulated financial institutions, designed to let firms manage assets and financial workflows on-chain while maintaining compliance and privacy controls. The company had announced the earlier $355 million close last month, led by a16z Crypto. Other participants in that round included ABN Amro, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Hanwha Investment & Securities, HSBC, S&P Global and SBI Group.

Crypto primary-market activity picked up sharply in the week of July 13 to July 19, with 17 disclosed blockchain funding deals worth more than $812 million, according to PANews. Capital continued to cluster around a smaller number of larger rounds, a trend also visible in first-half 2026 data from Tiger Research and RootData, which showed $13.3 billion in crypto capital inflows across 435 rounds, down 78% from the 1,978-round peak in 2022. The week’s largest deal came from Crypto.com, which said it received a $400 million strategic investment from Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation, marking the exchange’s first institutional funding round in its 10-year history. Beyond CeFi, stablecoin payments and financial infrastructure remained a major draw, with deals for Cyclops, Pact Labs, Flex and Velocity. PANews also highlighted continued momentum in AI-linked markets, from DGrid AI in Web3 infrastructure to large non-crypto rounds such as Fireworks, Walden Robotics and LimX Dynamics, as investors kept backing AI compute, developer platforms and embodied intelligence commercialization.

Real-world asset activity expanded on-chain during the week ending July 17, 2026, even as stablecoin payments lost momentum. Data cited from RWA.xyz showed total on-chain RWA market capitalization rising to $34.9 billion, up 3.74% from a month earlier, while the number of asset holders climbed to 1.077 million, a record high. At the same time, stablecoin market capitalization edged down to $299.06 billion and monthly transfer volume fell 20.9% to $5.49 trillion, pointing to a split between broader user participation and softer settlement demand. Regulation moved on several fronts. In the United States, a bipartisan housing bill containing a central bank digital currency ban became law automatically after Donald Trump declined to sign it. The UK set an early-2027 target for a digital sovereign bond, the European Central Bank selected 36 payment firms for a digital euro pilot due to begin in the second half of 2027, and regulators or governments in Russia, South Korea, Bolivia and Tanzania also advanced new digital asset rules or pilots. On the industry side, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo and HSBC are joining a shared tokenized deposit network operated by The Clearing House. DTCC is working with nearly 40 institutions on tokenized stocks and U.S. Treasuries, while Japan remained a focal point through SBI, Progmat and Lawson. Funding activity also stayed strong, led by Alpaca’s $135 million round, Flex’s $70 million financing and Velocity’s $38 million Series A.

Crypto.com has secured a $400 million strategic investment from Citadel Securities, giving the exchange a post-money valuation of $20 billion. The company said the capital will support expansion across asset classes, with a focus on tokenized securities and derivatives. The deal marks the first time since Crypto.com was founded in 2016 that it has brought in a strategic equity investment from a top Wall Street market maker. The transaction comes as institutional participation in digital assets continues to build. Citadel Securities, founded by Ken Griffin, has been increasing its exposure to crypto infrastructure over the past two years through moves spanning market-making, Digital Asset, Ripple and Kraken. For Crypto.com, the financing lands at a time when the company is shifting away from its image as a retail trading app and toward institutional-grade infrastructure. The exchange has also been cutting costs, including a roughly 12% workforce reduction in March 2026. The $20 billion valuation matches the level assigned to Kraken in a previous Citadel-backed deal, offering another reference point for how Wall Street is pricing large private crypto exchanges.

Tiger Research, using RootData records covering 9,416 crypto investment deals from 2018 through the first half of 2026, says the market has entered a far more selective phase. Funding volume in H1 2026 reached $13.3 billion, nearly matching the full-year 2024 total of $13.2 billion, yet the number of rounds fell to only 435, down 78% from the 2022 peak of 1,978. The report argues that the old model of wide portfolio spraying around token launch narratives has broken down. The investor base has changed as well. Traditional financial institutions took part in 54.5% of all investment deals in H1 2026, and capital increasingly went to companies with auditable revenue, regulatory licenses, and mature business models. Large crypto-native firms remained important in lead rounds, while exchange-affiliated investors ranked highly in overall participation thanks to liquidity and distribution advantages. Sector data showed sharp declines in gaming, NFTs, and social projects, while payments and stablecoins, centralized exchanges, prediction markets, and custody drew outsized capital. Tiger Research says this marks a broader move away from speculative early-stage bets and toward owning infrastructure, distribution, and regulated financial rails inside crypto.

A broad set of crypto, payments, regulatory and AI developments emerged between July 16 and July 17. CoinGecko’s 2026 second-quarter report showed total crypto market capitalization fell 12.6% to $2.1 trillion by the end of June, while stablecoin market cap slipped 1.6% to $305.1 billion, marking its first decline since Q3 2023. Centralized exchange spot volume dropped 27.9% to $1.95 trillion, but prediction market notional volume rose 48.7% to $113.8 billion. In Washington, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a new Regulation E-Delivery framework that would let issuers, broker-dealers and investment advisers default to electronic delivery for a wide range of required disclosures, with a 60-day public comment period after publication in the Federal Register. Separately, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating whether trading on Kalshi involving alleged early access to Trump speech content may have relied on nonpublic information. Corporate and product announcements also accelerated. Visa launched its Visa Stablecoin Platform, while Flex raised $70 million for its stablecoin-based cross-border banking platform. Crypto.com disclosed a $400 million strategic investment from Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation, and T. Rowe Price launched TKNZ, described as the first actively managed multi-token spot crypto ETF. Binance, MoonPay, Alpaca, Fireworks, Ethena and several other firms also announced new listings, acquisitions, funding rounds or ecosystem expansions.