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BNY expands its partnership with Ripple, adding custody for XRP and RLUSD, while teaming up with C2FO to test tokenized trade finance on the XRP Ledger.
BNY, one of the world’s largest custodial banks, has expanded its partnership with Ripple by adding XRP and RLUSD, a USD-backed stablecoin, to its custody platform for institutional clients. The two companies announced the news on Tuesday.
The two companies already had a close relationship. BNY currently serves as the primary custodian for the reserve assets backing RLUSD and has partnered with Ripple Prime to provide custody services. Under the new agreement, BNY clients are expected to be able to issue and redeem RLUSD directly through the bank, while the two companies explore applications for tokenized trade finance on the XRP Ledger network.

SoFi reported 503,000 crypto products and $161.6 million in gross transaction revenue, as quarterly revenue hit a record $1.39 billion.
SoFi Technologies has included crypto asset metrics in its earnings report for the first time, highlighting the segment’s growing presence in the U.S. fintech company’s product ecosystem. According to its third-quarter report, SoFi had 503,000 crypto asset products at quarter-end. This metric appeared for the first time in the company’s financial services product statistics.

Circle is partnering with ACI Worldwide to pilot the integration of USDC stablecoin settlement into Bre-B, Colombia’s instant payments network, expanding its presence in Latin America.
Circle is continuing to advance its strategy in Latin America through a partnership with payments technology company ACI Worldwide to integrate USDC settlement into the region’s existing banking payment infrastructure. The first step is a pilot program in Colombia.

Keystone destroys 18,835 hardware wallets after authentication key leaked in an attack affecting 25,964 customer records, raising the risk of counterfeit wallets.
Keystone, a manufacturer of Bitcoin hardware wallets that store private keys offline to control crypto assets, announced on Monday that it would destroy 18,835 unsold devices after an attacker obtained an authentication key used to prove its hardware was genuine. The company also temporarily halted shipping all outstanding orders from its website. Keystone said users’ recovery phrases and private keys were not affected.

Intel, Oracle, IBM, and IonQ oppose the OKX-ICE tokenized stock exchange, bringing the total number of companies opposed to 26 in less than two weeks.
Opposition to tokenized stocks from U.S. tech companies continues to grow. According to a public notice updated Monday by OKXICE TSV, the planned tokenized stock trading platform, Intel, Oracle, IBM, and quantum computing company IonQ are the latest to oppose having their shares traded on the platform.

Akamai launches Agent Sandbox, joining the AI agent security race as every user identity corresponds to 109 machine identities, 79 of which belong to AI.
Akamai, an AI-focused cloud computing provider, launched Agent Sandbox on Tuesday, an isolated environment that allows code generated by AI agents to run without affecting the rest of an enterprise system. The product is in beta and was introduced alongside Akamai Inference, a service for running open AI models on the company’s cloud infrastructure. With this move, Akamai joins security companies such as Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Okta, and Zscaler in competing to protect software capable of acting autonomously.

Through an expanded partnership with Bitso, Anchorage Digital Bank will custody stablecoins at both ends of the U.S.–Mexico remittance corridor, where Bitso has handled about 15% of the money flows.
Anchorage Digital is strengthening its position in one of the world’s largest remittance corridors. On Tuesday, the company announced an expanded custody and asset-listing agreement with Bitso, Latin America’s leading crypto trading platform. The deal makes Anchorage Digital Bank’s custody services part of the infrastructure supporting money flows in both directions between the U.S. and Mexico. The parties did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement.

Robinhood partners with Ripple to deploy the RLUSD stablecoin, which has a market capitalization of over $2.5 billion, for settlement, treasury management, and financing for institutional clients.
Robinhood, a trading platform with 28.6 million customers who have funded accounts, has expanded its partnership with Ripple across three areas: stablecoins, treasury management software, and trade financing services. According to Ripple's announcement, RLUSD officially launched on Tuesday on Robinhood Chain, Robinhood's proprietary blockchain network, and on the Bitstamp exchange, which the company owns. RLUSD is expected to be integrated into the main Robinhood app later this year.

OCC Calls on U.S. Community Banks to Issue Their Own Stablecoins Under the GENIUS Act, as Thousands of Financial Institutions Gain Access to Stablecoin Payments.
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which supervises national banks and federal savings associations, has sent a clear signal that the stablecoin race is not just for Wall Street giants. The agency is urging community banks to proactively develop stablecoin-based payment services and consider becoming licensed stablecoin issuers, including by establishing dedicated subsidiaries.

Visa is commercializing a stablecoin-based funding solution for international money transfers through Visa Direct, starting with Inyo Global in more than 180 countries.
After more than a year of testing, Visa has officially put stablecoins into commercial operation for cross-border payments. Businesses can now use USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, to pre-fund international payouts through Visa Direct. Funds can be added almost in real time, without being constrained by traditional banking system settlement hours.

Ripple receives formal approval from the OCC, bringing the reserve assets of its $2.5 billion market-cap stablecoin RLUSD under U.S. federal oversight.
Ripple has received formal approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national trust bank, a significant step in its effort to bring the company’s stablecoin operations under a federal regulatory framework.
On X, CEO Brad Garlinghouse said Ripple National Trust Bank will serve as a federally supervised platform supporting Ripple USD (RLUSD), a stablecoin, and providing digital asset custody services to businesses. He reiterated Ripple’s longstanding view that digital assets and banking work more effectively together.

Payward, Kraken’s parent company, will be the first to launch a CFTC-regulated HIP-3 market on Hyperliquid, pending approval.
Hyperliquid, the leading decentralized trading protocol for crypto derivatives, said it expects Payward, the parent company of the Kraken exchange, to become the first to launch a HIP-3 market regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The move could pave the way for perpetual futures—products that have been restricted for U.S. traders—to be offered within a formal regulatory framework built on decentralized infrastructure.

BlackRock signs an MOU with SBI Holdings and Startale to explore connecting tokenized money market funds with JPYSC, a stablecoin pegged to the Japanese yen.
BlackRock Financial Management and BlackRock Japan have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with SBI Holdings and Startale Group to explore the potential of connecting tokenized money market funds (MMFs) with JPYSC, SBI’s Japanese yen-denominated stablecoin. The agreement marks a notable move by the world’s largest asset manager into Japan’s crypto asset market, although it is currently only at the stage of assessing its potential.

Electrum wallet releases version 4.8.3 to patch a vulnerability that allowed malicious servers to redirect Bitcoin, after at least one user lost funds.
Electrum, one of the oldest Bitcoin software wallets, released a patch for a high-severity security vulnerability over the weekend. The vulnerability allowed malicious servers to manipulate pending transactions and redirect funds to addresses controlled by attackers. All versions before 4.8.3 were affected, and at least one user has confirmed losing funds.

SpaceX finalizes a $40 billion financing lease with Apollo to buy GPUs, as Musk warns that more than 200 neocloud companies will be driven out of the market.
SpaceX has just finalized a $40 billion financing deal to buy AI chips for its data centers, just as credit markets are shutting their doors to most smaller AI cloud companies. This growing divide could reshape control over computing capacity, a strategic resource in the race for artificial intelligence.

The $1.4 billion startup Cathedral says its AI agents found ways into Anthropic’s business systems through third-party software.
AI agents from a cybersecurity startup found ways into Anthropic’s business systems in less than 12 hours, according to a Washington Post report published earlier this week. The vulnerability wasn’t in Claude, Anthropic’s flagship AI assistant, but in third-party management and sales software—tools widely used by other businesses to manage customer and employee information.

A 32-year-old suspect with no technology background used AI to hack around 90 organizations, steal 8.2 million records, and demand about USD 270,000.
The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency announced earlier this week that it had arrested seven people linked to a generative AI-powered cyberattack campaign that infiltrated the systems of around 90 organizations and stole 8.2 million data records. According to police, this is the first time in South Korea that suspects in a large-scale cyberattack campaign supported by AI have been arrested. The group demanded a total of around USD 270,000 in ransom from its victims.

GPT-6.1 Terra has API pricing that is 50% lower than GPT-5.6 Terra, while the information error rate fell from 53.6% to 16.7%, according to OpenAI’s internal evaluations.
Earlier this week, OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra, an upgraded version of the mid-tier artificial intelligence (AI) model in its product lineup. The biggest highlight is the cost: standard application programming interface (API) pricing—the fee developers pay to integrate the model into their products—is 50% lower than for GPT-5.6 Terra, while computer-based tasks are handled faster and more accurately.