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Circle becomes the shirt sponsor of Chelsea FC for the 2026/2027 season, just a few months after the FCA warned English Premier League clubs about deals with unlicensed financial companies.
Circle, the issuer of the stablecoin USDC, will become the newest sponsor of the football club Chelsea, just a few months after the UK financial regulator warned about “suspicious sponsorship deals with an unlicensed financial company,” including crypto-asset enterprises.

Sber, Russia’s largest bank, plans to accept USDT and Ether, along with Bitcoin, as collateral for loans when the new crypto asset law takes effect on September 1.
Russia’s largest bank, Sber, plans to expand lending backed by crypto assets, under which it will accept Tether’s stablecoin USDT and Ether as collateral alongside Bitcoin, according to a senior bank executive.
Deputy Chairman of Sber, Anatoly Popov, said the bank will adjust existing products and gradually expand its range of services when Russia’s new crypto asset law comes into effect, according to a TASS report on Friday, and is expected to add these assets to the list of collateral assets after the Bank of Russia allows them to be traded publicly.

SBI Holdings invests USD 270 million in Ajaib Group, securing roughly 20% equity, marking the largest technology funding round in Indonesia since 2022.
Japanese financial services group SBI Holdings has invested USD 270 million in Ajaib Group, Indonesia’s multi-asset investment platform, thereby holding about 20% equity as the group expands its presence in the digital assets space across Asia.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upholds a ruling unfavorable to Kalshi, challenging the CFTC’s argument regarding exclusive jurisdiction over sports betting contracts.
On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said in a ruling that Kalshi was not eligible for a preliminary injunction, after Nevada’s Gaming Control Board sent the company a cease-and-desist letter in 2025, demanding that it stop offering contracts for election and sports-related events in the state, and warning of potential criminal or civil liability.

Meta tests robots to replace cables and reboot servers at an AI data center, as some roles could lose up to 80% of their workload.
Meta is testing robots to maintain data centers running the company’s artificial intelligence systems, including devices capable of replacing network cables, rebooting servers, and checking equipment.
According to a report by WIRED published on Friday, Meta is testing robots from Watney Robotics based in San Francisco, Kinova based in Quebec, and ABB based in Zurich—systems that could help reduce labor costs and potentially staffing needs as Meta’s AI infrastructure continues to expand.

More than 100 AI, cybersecurity, and finance organizations warn that AI-assisted cyberattacks will soon become more widespread and more sophisticated.
Leading AI developers are urging governments and businesses to strengthen protection of their network systems after models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic infiltrated the systems of other companies.
In an open letter released Thursday, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more than 100 other organizations warned that AI-supported cyberattacks are set to become significantly more common and more sophisticated in the coming months, and argued that businesses only have a limited window of time to bolster their defenses.

Polygon confirms it has addressed denial-of-service vulnerabilities and strengthened consensus mechanisms through two hard forks, Austin and Kyoto, deploying them quietly before the public announcement.
Polygon Labs says it has fixed a series of security vulnerabilities on the proof-of-stake (PoS) network via two hard fork rounds that were deployed privately before being widely announced. In a forum post announcing the news on Wednesday, the development team detailed the bug fixes that were incorporated into the Austin hard fork on the Bor client and the Kyoto hard fork on the Heimdall client.

Mirae Asset, one of South Korea’s largest financial groups, aims to scale 150 trillion won (US$109 billion) for its digital finance business through Digital X.
Mirae Asset Financial Group, a group specializing in asset management, investment banking, insurance, and brokerage, has identified digital finance as one of the key areas for future growth. The group plans to integrate tokenized assets, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and digital securities on the Digital X platform, which is built on the South Korea-based crypto asset exchange Korbit.

Fed Dallas warns that tokenized deposits could cause the United States’ banks to lose $700 billion in their capacity to withstand interest-rate risk.
Widespread adoption of tokenized deposits could increase the mobility of bank funding sources, change the way liquidity is managed, and limit the ability to finance long-term loans, according to two economists, Rosie Levi and Srini Ramaswamy, from the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

The group of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed is behind an investment that holds 49% ownership in the parent company of the trust bank World Liberty, which has just received preliminary approval from the OCC.
A member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and co-investors are said to be backing the largest stake in the parent company behind the trust bank in the US that World Liberty Financial proposes to set up. Citing sources familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reported that the group of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE National Security Adviser and the brother of the UAE President, is behind StringZ Holding RSC, the entity that owns 49% of WLTC Holdings.

Charles Schwab, managing more than $12 trillion in assets, will expand Schwab Crypto with three new tokens after launching Bitcoin and Ethereum trading starting in May.
Charles Schwab on Thursday announced a plan to add Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink to the Schwab Crypto platform, just a few months after rolling out spot trading for Bitcoin and Ethereum on its platforms.
According to a statement from the investment management firm, the expansion is part of a strategy of “expanding cautiously” its digital asset portfolio, focusing on crypto assets that have been firmly established in the market and that meet customer needs. The three new assets are expected to be offered “in the coming months,” enabling customers to buy and sell directly on the platform.

BitGo completed its acquisition of NYDIG’s institutional trading business segment, taking on around 30 employees, while BitGo shares rose 1.99% to $7.16.
BitGo today announced that it has completed the acquisition of the trading business segment for institutional customers along with related assets of NYDIG, a company operating in the Bitcoin mining sector.
According to a statement released on Thursday, BitGo plans to leverage this business segment to expand its market platform for institutional clients by diversifying derivatives products and strengthening capital financing capabilities, thereby adding to the ecosystem of digital asset infrastructure services the company is building.

Dunamu, the parent company of the Upbit exchange, has entered a strategic partnership with Visa on stablecoins and AI, while also keeping open the possibility of using Open USD backed by more than 140 organizations.
Dunamu, the parent company of the cryptocurrency asset exchange Upbit in South Korea, on Friday announced that it has signed a strategic partnership with Visa to develop innovative financial services that apply stablecoins and artificial intelligence.

The UK Treasury will grant the Bank of England a legally mandated secondary objective regarding digital payment innovation, after pressure from the crypto-asset industry and limits on issuing stablecoins of £40 billion.
The Bank of England (BoE) will be given a legal obligation to promote innovation in the payments and digital money sector, in the clearest signal yet that the UK government wants the central bank to accelerate progress on stablecoin.

Nvidia is said to have agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, acquiring the world’s largest open model hub in the hands of the leading GPU maker.
According to sources, Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion—a deal that will bring the world’s largest open model center under the ownership of the world’s largest graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturer.
This is a move that could reshape the entire open-source AI ecosystem, occurring at a time when Chinese AI companies such as Z.ai and Alibaba’s Qwen are expanding their influence with open models whose capabilities are increasingly approaching—and in some evaluation criteria even surpassing—Claude by Anthropic and GPT by OpenAI.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao predicts that Bitcoin will surpass gold when the market-cap gap has narrowed to 10 times, even though countries’ transition processes will take many years.
Bitcoin will surpass gold, and this could happen as soon as the next bull cycle, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao said at the Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong on Thursday. During a discussion session themed “The Bitcoin Century,” when asked whether the asset could overtake gold in its role as a national reserve asset, Zhao said he believes Bitcoin will certainly become more important than gold.

Sparrow Wallet released an update to version 2.5.4 with dozens of security patches, most of which were discovered with AI, after the Coldcard attack in July.
The Bitcoin wallet developer emphasizes privacy. Sparrow Wallet, Craig Raw, has just released version 2.5.4 on Thursday following a source-code review supported by artificial intelligence. In an interview with Decrypt, Raw said that most of the bug fixes in this update originated directly from the aforementioned review, and that this is considered a core part of the release work.

Standard Chartered Hong Kong officially distributes HKDAP, a neo stablecoin priced in Hong Kong dollars, aiming for cross-border payments and tokenized funds starting from Q4/2026.
Standard Chartered Hong Kong has just become the first bank among the initial group of distributors of HKDAP (HKD At Par), the stable digital currency backed at a fixed exchange rate to the Hong Kong dollar, issued by Anchorpoint Financial. This is a notable step in the process of traditional financial institutions moving toward public blockchain infrastructure to support core banking operations, rather than only stopping at small-scale pilot projects.