A fresh wave of failures in crypto has not stopped larger firms from buying infrastructure. This month, three crypto companies filed for Chapter 11 protection in the United States and two exchanges said they would shut down, yet MoonPay, Circle and Kraken each moved ahead with deals tied to their core operations. The three transactions reflect very different strategic needs. MoonPay is expanding around fiat-to-crypto and cross-platform money movement without tying itself to one blockchain or one stablecoin. Circle, whose revenue is closely linked to USDC, is using a purchase of nearly 1,000 granted blockchain patents from IBM to strengthen the ecosystem around its stablecoin, payments network and Arc platform as competition from OUSD puts pressure on reserve-interest economics. Kraken, meanwhile, is buying Magic Labs’ wallet-as-a-service business to push deeper into an all-in-one trading account model that spans onchain and offchain assets. Taken together, the deals show how crypto M&A is being used less as a simple margin play and more as a way to stay relevant no matter which exchange venue, blockchain or dollar stablecoin ends up dominating the market.

Bitget has expanded the collateral list on its Crypto Loans product by adding 38 stock tokens, or rTokens, bringing the total number of supported names to 103. The newly added assets include rIBM, rTQQQ and rNOK, covering major U.S. stocks and ETFs across sectors such as technology, consumer and finance. Users holding these stock tokens can now pledge them as collateral to borrow USDT, USDC and more than 100 crypto assets without selling their positions. Bitget said collateral parameters are available on its official platform. The exchange said rTokens are issued by Reality, its licensed real-world asset protocol. These tokens use the format of the letter "r" plus the stock ticker, such as rNVDA for Nvidia. According to the announcement, Reality connects to liquidity pools tied to Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange through a partnership with regulated broker Alpaca. Bitget also outlined several features of the product, including 1:1 reserves for the underlying assets under licensed custody, 1:1 tokenized dividend distribution, synchronized handling of corporate actions such as stock splits and reverse splits, and the ability to use holdings as joint margin in unified accounts and USDT-margined futures.

Quantum computing is often framed as a broad threat to any system that relies on modern cryptography, from banks to government networks. Yet several voices cited in a recent report argue that crypto may be the first place where the danger becomes visible. The reason, they say, is not simply Bitcoin’s use of elliptic-curve cryptography, but the slower governance process required to coordinate a network-wide response. Quantum Xchange CEO Eddy Zervigon told CoinDesk that crypto is the “canary in the coal mine,” warning that the first real signs of a cryptographically relevant quantum machine may appear in decentralized crypto networks. He pointed to an industry timeline that places such machines around 2029, a view he said aligns with public comments from IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and with newer research from Google Quantum AI. That research suggested the hardware needed to break elliptic-curve cryptography protecting Bitcoin and Ethereum could be below 500,000 physical qubits, far less than older estimates. Other cited work says even under ideal conditions, migrating vulnerable Bitcoin UTXOs to post-quantum-safe addresses would take at least 76 days, while major upgrades require 90% miner consensus. Taken together, the concern is clear: post-quantum tools may arrive in time, but Bitcoin’s governance may struggle to move fast enough.

A cluster of crypto and tech developments landed on July 27, led by Changxin’s blockbuster market debut and Circle’s latest infrastructure push. According to crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong, Country Garden invested RMB 2 billion in Changxin in September 2021 at RMB 2.22 per share, securing 901 million shares, but later exited at cost by the end of 2024 as it grappled with a property-sector liquidity crisis. Had it held the position until now, the return would have reached 23x. Changxin then closed its first trading day up 465.8% at RMB 49, with a total market value of RMB 3.28 trillion. In crypto, Circle said it acquired IBM’s blockchain patent portfolio, covering more than 680 patent families and nearly 1,000 granted patents tied to core blockchain technology, banking, financial services, insurance, enterprise infrastructure, supply-chain verification and secure cloud operations. In the U.S., the Senate’s latest merged text of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act entered a critical two-week window before the August recess, with ethics provisions emerging as the main sticking point. Onchain data also drew attention: 6.93 million HYPE are set to be unstaked over the next seven days on Hyperliquid, while the platform’s nine largest whale addresses were collectively sitting on about $48.635 million in unrealized losses.

NVIDIA and Microsoft have joined other major technology companies to launch the Open Secure AI Alliance, a new group focused on promoting open-source AI for cybersecurity use cases. The alliance says open and closed AI systems should work together to strengthen cyber defenses rather than be treated as opposing approaches. Founding members named in the announcement include IBM, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Hugging Face. The group plans to build several tools, including NVIDIA’s NOOA agent framework, Microsoft’s MDASH vulnerability scanning system, and secure coding tools. It also urged regulators to treat open-source AI as a defensive resource and to invest in shared AI security infrastructure instead of imposing blanket restrictions on open models. The development was reported by CryptoBriefing and cited by Techub News.

TechFlow’s July 27 briefing pulled together a broad set of signals across semiconductors, AI, crypto, macro and large-cap tech. The headline move came from Changxin Technology, whose first trading day surge of 472% pushed its market value above RMB 3.3 trillion, making it the new market-cap leader in China’s A-share market and the first semiconductor hard-tech company to hold that position in 35 years. The report also highlighted Samsung’s review of Chinese DRAM suppliers for its Galaxy A lineup, SK hynix’s position at Kioxia, and expectations that Samsung and SK hynix could post combined second-quarter profits above KRW 150 trillion, alongside large industry cooperation figures tied to memory, foundry and packaging. In AI, the digest pointed to a leaked Claude Opus 5 system prompt reportedly reaching 200,000 characters, Hugging Face’s demand that OpenAI provide $100 million worth of compute after an attack, Moonshot AI’s Kimi-K3 launch on Hugging Face, and the formation of an open safe AI alliance by 37 companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and IBM. In crypto, Bitcoin returned to $65,000 as oil prices fell after a pause in U.S.-Iran exchanges, WEMIX suffered an exploit involving its minting contract admin account, and Aster DEX revised tokenomics to direct 99% of platform fees to ASTER buybacks for stakers while burning team tokens on a 1:1 basis.

Circle said it has acquired IBM’s blockchain patent portfolio, adding a large set of intellectual property tied to core blockchain technology and enterprise use cases. The assets include more than 680 patent families and nearly 1,000 granted patents, spanning banking, financial services, insurance, enterprise infrastructure, supply chain verification, and secure cloud operations. Circle said the deal makes it a leading blockchain patent holder in the United States. The company added that the portfolio will support the buildout of USDC, Circle Payments Network, Arc, and other on-chain financial products and infrastructure. Circle and IBM also said they will explore additional commercial cooperation opportunities going forward. The announcement was reported by ChainCatcher.

NVIDIA said it has formed the Open Secure AI Alliance with a group of founding members including Adobe, CrowdStrike, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, SpaceXAI and organizations such as the Linux Foundation, according to the NVIDIA Blog. The alliance is focused on building and sharing open-source models, agent harnesses and security tools for cybersecurity and AI safety defense. Initial contributions named by the group include NVIDIA’s NOOA agent framework, the SPIFFE/SPIRE zero-trust identity standard with HPE participation, Hugging Face’s Safetensors model weight format, IBM and Red Hat’s Lightwell supply-chain signing patch, Microsoft’s MDASH multi-model vulnerability scanning system, and SpaceXAI’s open-source Grok Build coding agent alongside plans to open Grok model weights. The alliance also called on regulators to treat open models and tools as defensive assets rather than as a regulatory burden.