Cryptopolitan

France will use “sovereign” AI providers such as Mistral, not OpenAI, to test government systems for security vulnerabilities, Budget Minister David Amiel said Tuesday.
The announcement came days after a breach at the national tax agency exposed data of about 700,000 taxpayers.
“This excludes OpenAI”
After a cabinet meeting in Paris, Amiel told reporters the state would turn to what he called sovereign AI companies, “such as Mistral,” to do the work. “This excludes OpenAI,” he said.
Amiel had confirmed the plan itself earlier that day. The government would use AI tools to identify its own services’ vulnerabilities to cyber attacks. The catalyst was the tax agency breach disclosed the previous Thursday. The French Finance Ministry said the data of some 700,000 taxpayers had been taken.
Mistral, the Paris startup backed by chipmaking-equipment supplier ASML, has become the go-to company for France when it wants to demonstrate it can operate critical systems without relying on American technology.
In June, Amiel unveiled a government plan called “Notre IA,” or “Our AI,” to distribute sovereign tools across public services. The state digital agency DINUM developed its centerpiece, an assistant called “L’Assistant,” based on Mistral’s model and hosted it in SecNumCloud-certified datacenters. The tool was being rolled out to close to a million state employees.
A breach that keeps growing
France’s tax administration chief Amelie Verdier said Monday that her teams had uncovered a second data breach. She said the intrusion is still being assessed.
Earlier this month, Cryptopolitan reported the first breach was on the Directorate General of Public Finances. A compromised internal VPN was used by an attacker to reach a taxpayer search tool using a stolen identity, the DGFiP said.
The access was traced back to late June 2026 and was closed by the end of the month. By that time, the attacker had already seen and pulled records.
The data include names, birth details, postal and email addresses, telephone numbers, tax identification numbers, withholding rates, and correspondence with officials, the DGFiP said.
The agency said usernames and passwords were not among the exposed data. France’s privacy watchdog CNIL was notified, and the DGFiP said it would file a criminal complaint.
France has been hit by a wave of violent attacks on crypto owners in 2026, Cryptopolitan has reported. In April, Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on X that the country had seen 41 kidnappings of crypto holders in the first three and a half months of the year. He blamed leaked personal data, including records held by tax authorities.
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France will use “sovereign” AI providers such as Mistral, not OpenAI, to test government systems for security vulnerabilities, Budget Minister David Amiel said Tuesday.
The announcement came days after a breach at the national tax agency exposed data of about 700,000 taxpayers.
“This excludes OpenAI”
After a cabinet meeting in Paris, Amiel told reporters the state would turn to what he called sovereign AI companies, “such as Mistral,” to do the work. “This excludes OpenAI,” he said.
Amiel had confirmed the plan itself earlier that day. The government would use AI tools to identify its own services’ vulnerabilities to cyber attacks. The catalyst was the tax agency breach disclosed the previous Thursday. The French Finance Ministry said the data of some 700,000 taxpayers had been taken.
Mistral, the Paris startup backed by chipmaking-equipment supplier ASML, has become the go-to company for France when it wants to demonstrate it can operate critical systems without relying on American technology.
In June, Amiel unveiled a government plan called “Notre IA,” or “Our AI,” to distribute sovereign tools across public services. The state digital agency DINUM developed its centerpiece, an assistant called “L’Assistant,” based on Mistral’s model and hosted it in SecNumCloud-certified datacenters. The tool was being rolled out to close to a million state employees.
A breach that keeps growing
France’s tax administration chief Amelie Verdier said Monday that her teams had uncovered a second data breach. She said the intrusion is still being assessed.
Earlier this month, Cryptopolitan reported the first breach was on the Directorate General of Public Finances. A compromised internal VPN was used by an attacker to reach a taxpayer search tool using a stolen identity, the DGFiP said.
The access was traced back to late June 2026 and was closed by the end of the month. By that time, the attacker had already seen and pulled records.
The data include names, birth details, postal and email addresses, telephone numbers, tax identification numbers, withholding rates, and correspondence with officials, the DGFiP said.
The agency said usernames and passwords were not among the exposed data. France’s privacy watchdog CNIL was notified, and the DGFiP said it would file a criminal complaint.
France has been hit by a wave of violent attacks on crypto owners in 2026, Cryptopolitan has reported. In April, Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on X that the country had seen 41 kidnappings of crypto holders in the first three and a half months of the year. He blamed leaked personal data, including records held by tax authorities.
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Perplexity’s monthly mobile revenue in India was $156,000 in July 2026, compared to about $34,000 in January 2025.
Its free Pro subscriptions, distributed through telecom operator Airtel, had already begun to expire.
A $200 subscription, handed to 360 million customers
In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Bharti Airtel, India’s second largest carrier, to provide a 12-month free trial of Perplexity Pro to its 360 million subscribers. The plan usually costs about $200 a year, or 17,000 rupees.
Perplexity was downloaded 5.9 million times in all of India in July 2025, a 625% increase from the previous month and more installs in four weeks than the app had amassed during the entire first half of the year.
Daily downloads increased from around 11,200 in the week before the offer to ~223,000 in its first week, reaching ~305,000 a day by mid-October.
New users could get in on the deal for seven months. In that stretch, there were 56 million downloads, more than nine times the downloads in the prior stretch.
Monthly active users doubled to 8.9 million and peaked at nearly 22 million in October.
Airtel stopped new redemptions on January 16, 2026. India saw 3.3 million installs between February and July, a decline of more than 90% from the previous six months.
From February to mid-August, Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India was about 60% higher than during the giveaway window.
India’s revenue for the first seven months of 2026 was estimated at $878,000, 16% above its total for all of 2025.
Monthly actives were close to 14 million in July, down 37% from their October peak but still more than five times the 2.6 million Perplexity averaged in early 2025.
“Ongoing usage has remained resilient,” Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, said.
Users say the ‘free’ plan asked for card details
The earliest Airtel customers activated their year of Pro last summer, so their free access began running out in July 2026, with auto-renewal enabled by default. People who did not cancel before the renewal date were charged.
From July 18 through August 12, when those first subscriptions expired, daily in-app purchase revenue averaged 9% above the prior 30 days and 27% above the 2026 average.
In February, Airtel and Perplexity made it mandatory for users to add a credit or debit card to continue the free trial.
The companies say the cards are only used for verification, nothing is charged during the free period, and users can cancel before any paid renewal.
Subscribers said the original pitch was as a perk, with no payment details asked for. Several said their access was paused until they input a card.
The change disrupted the work of students, freelancers, and small business owners who had integrated the tool into their daily research and writing.
On X, some said the two companies were using forgotten cancellation dates to turn trials into charges. “At least 50% will forget their trial end date and get charged,” one user wrote on January 15.
India is the world’s second-largest smartphone market with 700 million users, and low data costs and an internet base of over a billion people.
OpenAI offered free access to its low-cost ChatGPT Go plan in India for a year in August 2025, as reported by Cryptopolitan, and eventually turned India into its second biggest market.
Google has struck a deal to offer eligible Reliance Jio users 18 months of its AI Pro subscription for free.
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Two of the United States’ financial regulators, headed by Trump-appointed chiefs, are planning to write cryptocurrency rules on their own while the CLARITY Act remains stuck in the Senate.
Lawmakers have only about 14 working days after they return from recess to pass the CLARITY Act before the October election break.
What are the proposed placeholders for the CLARITY Act?
The CLARITY Act, the crypto industry’s top legislative priority, has been put off for another month after the Senate left for a five-week recess without voting on it.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed a cloture motion setting a procedural vote for September 15 that would need 60 votes, and a failure there could effectively end the bill. Lawmakers have only 14 working days after they return before an October election recess.
Opposition to the bill comes from Democrats who want tougher anti-money-laundering safeguards and tighter ethics rules, while CME Group sued the CFTC in June over its approval of perpetual crypto futures.
Republicans updated the bill in July to bar the president and other federal officials from issuing or sponsoring crypto, with penalties reaching $250,000 a day, but the two parties still disagree over whether the Justice Department or state attorneys general should enforce that ban.
How the Trump admin is advancing crypto regulation
As a workaround to this delay, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected within weeks to propose a rule that would exempt some token offerings from securities requirements.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), meanwhile, is set to put crypto on the agenda at an industry event later this week.
Meanwhile, the White House is reportedly expected to host executives from crypto, prediction markets, and traditional finance on Wednesday.
Nate Geraci, president of Nova Dius Wealth, wrote on X that expected attendees include SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, Acting CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, and executives from Coinbase, Ripple, Polymarket, and Gemini, alongside Wall Street names such as Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, CME Group, and the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
The meeting happens one day before the CFTC holds its first Innovation Advisory Committee, a panel drawn from crypto, gambling, finance, and prediction market firms.
Why does the industry still want a law?
Executives are open to the cryptocurrency rules from the SEC or CFTC, but rules written by regulators can be challenged in court, and a future administration could scrap them. The Trump administration already reversed dozens of Biden-era SEC and consumer-protection policies. Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler also sued dozens of crypto firms under President Biden.
On August 14, the SEC canceled a meeting where it was set to vote on proposing its first formal crypto-specific rulemaking, known as “Regulation Crypto.”
The proposal would have created three ways for companies to offer tokens, including one that would have let startups raise about $5 million without full SEC registration and another path that would have allowed fundraising of up to $75 million.
The SEC canceled the meeting where it was going to vote on this proposal because officials worried that the SEC moving forward on its own could hurt the chances of the CLARITY Act passing in Congress.
However, with SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who leads the agency’s Crypto Task Force, set to leave the agency in November 2026, there is more pressure on the SEC to finish its work before she goes.
The SEC also delayed another plan called the “innovation exemption” that would have let crypto firms issue and trade digital versions of stocks and bonds without going through the full SEC registration process.
But traditional finance groups like the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association pushed back on the system, arguing that big changes like this should go through proper rulemaking procedures, not exemptions that skip the normal process.
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Justin Sun, the founder of TRON and owner of the HTX exchange, has dismissed a wave of reports that exchange wallets had been spraying small crypto transfers at unrelated addresses.
Sun said that the claims were fabricated, writing in Chinese on X on August 18, which, when translated to English, reads, “The investigation is clear: it’s all made up.”
However, he did not provide supporting details to the post. Sun linked to an unspecified follow-up but did not name the accusers, describe the transfers, or explain what his team had investigated.
Sun’s post comes after what is being seen as a noisy day for his exchange, HTX, formerly Huobi. Traders on the platform had been circulating for hours screenshots of unsolicited USDT landing in wallets that blockchain explorers tagged as belonging to the exchange.
A trader known as 紫夜 (0xZiye) wrote that he had received 7.5 USDT to his Coinbase account, and he attributed it to Sun’s exchange.
0xZiye wrote, “HTX is crazily transferring out small amounts, polluting other addresses.” The trader claimed that Coinbase informed him that his account would be closed unless he explained where the funds came from.
What users actually received, and what happened next
The amounts that were transferred to the respective addresses were small, with some reportedly receiving as high as 12 USDT. The transferred funds are not near zero, as is usually seen in dust attacks.
Phyrex, a widely followed analyst on X, later confirmed that 0xZiye’s Coinbase account had returned to normal and that anyone in a similar position could ask Coinbase support to review the case. He said that he had contacted the Coinbase Singapore arm, adding that “They have escalated the feedback to relevant departments at Coinbase, including the legal team.”
Phyrex also added that he is in communication with the HTX team.
Why is a few dollars of USDT setting off alarms?
The concern of the users who received these USDT deposits has not been theft but compliance.
HTX is being treated as a sanctioned counterparty in the United Kingdom and the European Union. So wallets that withdrew from HTX after May 26 are considered in breach of those sanctions. That was what led to some of the freezes that some users, like 0xZiye, experienced when the funds entered their Coinbase addresses.
Binance has frozen transactions tied to HTX, Exmo, and more than a dozen other exchanges and some decentralized venues. Even Hyperliquid, a decentralized platform, has begun blacklisting HTX-linked addresses.
What is HTX saying, and are there new freezes on its ledger?
In an official statement, the exchange said it had “not conducted any related transfers or testing activities” and would not speculate before finishing its review.
Molly, HTX head of marketing, said that the platform “absolutely” did not behave this way and blamed either a misunderstanding or deliberate sabotage.
The exchange also pointed to attribution as a possible culprit. Explorers and analytics firms assign wallet labels using ownership disclosures and clustering, and a displayed tag is not proof that the named exchange authorized a payment.
HTX said it was checking whether address tagging or on-chain source identification had produced a false link.
Later in the day, the representative said HTX had reviewed tens of thousands of deposit and withdrawal orders across platforms and found no new frozen cases.
HTX has denied sending the transfers, and so far, a security researcher has publicly connected the disputed deposits to a specific operator.
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OpenAI has started rolling out a version of ChatGPT built specifically for Teens aged 13 to 17.
The rollout comes after OpenAI has been dragged through the courts over lawsuits tying ChatGPT conversations to teen suicides.
How will the teen ChatGPT work?
OpenAI is rolling out a new version of its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, which will automatically place users aged 13 to 17 in the teen version. Users under 13 are barred from ChatGPT entirely.
Even if teens try to trick the system by signing up with a fake birthdate, the system will consider signals such as the topics an account discusses, the hours it is active, and how long it has existed, in order to decide if a user is under 18 or not.
Users who are still wrongly sorted can get their age verified through Persona, a third-party firm that reviews a government ID or a live selfie and deletes the upload within seven days.
Ann O’Leary, OpenAI’s vice president of global policy, said the goal is to stop exposing teens to material “they shouldn’t be exposed to.”
Parents who link an account to a teen user can lock access to the chatbot at chosen times. They also receive alerts in limited high-risk cases, although OpenAI says the controls do not let them read a teen’s messages.
Is OpenAI adding new safety features?
OpenAI’s teen version brings together its existing safety features rather than create new ones. For instance, the age prediction feature has existed since the start of the year, while OpenAI’s parental controls and study mode were launched roughly a year ago.
The company first revealed its plans for a teen tier in September 2025. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also made an official inquiry into OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, xAI, Snap and Character.AI over how they protect minors around that period.
The FTC specifically targeted “companion” chatbots following multiple tragic incidents, including the suicide of a 16-year-old who had interacted extensively with ChatGPT.
A 2025 study from Common Sense Media found more than 70% of U.S. teens have used AI chatbots for companionship, and half use AI companions regularly.
A separate research found that ChatGPT would, when asked, tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, hide an eating disorder, or draft a suicide note. Sam Altman has called emotional overreliance on the technology “a really common thing” among young people.
The teen experience will be available for eligible accounts on either free or paid personal plans. From August 18, the teen version will be available for eligible accounts with no restrictions for free accounts. The company is also planning a full rollout in Australia, expected by September 8.
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Superplanet (Nasdaq: SLE) opened trading hot on Tuesday, August 18, after Metaplanet revealed its plan to take over roughly 95.7% stake in Super League Enterprise’s (Nasdaq: SLE) business in exchange for 2,100 Bitcoin and $2.5 million in cash.
The deal closed with the Nasdaq-listed gaming firm getting a rebrand as a US Bitcoin treasury company, with the backing of the third-largest corporate holders of the asset. Once the transaction closes, Superplanet will drop the Super league era SLE ticker for its new SUPA label.
Metaplanet and Super Planet have gone out of their way to emphasize that they are entering a private placement of new securities into an existing firm, which is different from a reverse takeover or a SPAC deal.
How Metaplanet entered the US
The agreement with Super League (Nasdaq: SLE) gave Metaplanet a route into the United States. That way, the Simpn Gerovich-led firm gains a second listed vehicle in a different currency and under a different regulator.
For the deal to go through, the Japanese firm put up 2,100 BTC (4.9% of its 43,000 BTC stack), valued at about $132.1 million, and another $2.5 million in cash in exchange for 44,859,400 newly issued Super League shares priced at $3.00 per share. Metaplanet also received preferred stock and warrants.
Put together, Metaplanet committed about $134.6 million to get the arrangement over the line. The valuations were calculated based on Bitcoin’s closing price on Coinbase at 4:00 p.m. New York time on August 14.
Before the deal, Santa Monica-based Super League was an advertising and gaming-media company, and that part of the business is expected to continue to operate as a distinct segment.
The US market is the prize
Metaplanet CEO Simon Gerovich was optimistic about landing in the United States, saying “Superplanet is how we build in America, the deepest capital market in the world,” in the announcement.
Gerovich confirmed that the two firms would run “one consolidated Bitcoin position, compounding through two listed platforms in Japan and in the U.S.”
Some of the particulars already disclosed in how the group will handle its financials are:
Bitcoins contributed by the group stay inside it and get folded into Metaplanet’s financial statements.
When Superplanet raises money without printing new common shares, through instruments such as perpetual preferred stock, the Bitcoin behind each common share is expected to rise, and so is the Bitcoin attributable to each Metaplanet share.
This deal has been cooking since at least April, as Gerovich intimated that a small internal team had been “working on something we could not talk about.”
Metaplanet gains board rights in Super League
Metaplanet will gain voting rights and name a majority of Superplanet’s board with the 100 convertible perpetual preferred stock shares it received from Super League.
The Japanese firm also gets ten-year warrants over as many as 381 million common shares across four tranches. A separate investor, Evo Fund, receives warrants for up to 10 million shares.
Metaplanet can subscribe for up to 2.1 million shares of junior liquidity preferred stock at $100.00 apiece for 24 months after closing. That’s a $210 million lever if it’s needed.
As a counterweight, every share Metaplanet gets at closing, and any it later acquires through warrants or conversions, is locked for five years. That lockup is being touted as evidence of Metaplanet’s long-term commitment.
Traders sent SLE from $3 to $7
The market read it as a catalyst. Before the deal hit, SLE looked broken, down 10.6% in Tuesday premarket to $2.70 and near its 52-week low of $2.12, capping a year in which the stock had shed more than 92%.
Then the announcement landed. SLE jumped about 120% intraday and ran from roughly $3.30 to just above $7.00 in the first half hour before fading toward the mid-$6s. Google Finance logged a session high of $7.37 against a $3.02 prior close.
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Crypto companies raised $1.36B across 41 VC rounds in July. Investment fell only 6.8% from June, but round count dropped 28%, and one $400M strategic round supplied almost a third of the total.
Key Takeaways
$1.36B was invested across 41 VC rounds. Investment slipped 6.8% from June, while round count fell 28.1% to a 12-month low.
Crypto.com‘s $400M strategic round supplied 29.4% of monthly VC investment. Excluding it, investment would have been $960M, down 34.2% from June.
Series A and later rounds attracted $661M, nearly twice June’s total. Augustus, Prime Intellect and Gauntlet accounted for 65.8% of the stage group.
The number of unique institutional investors fell 30.7% to 140, broadly matching the decline in completed rounds.
Buyer activity held steady at 17 M&A transactions. None had a publicly disclosed value, leaving no measurable acquisition total.
Introduction
Headline investment was resilient, but market breadth weakened. Crypto companies raised $1.36B in venture capital, only $100M less than in June. The number of completed rounds fell by 16, and the number of institutional investors fell by 62. Investment became concentrated in a smaller set of transactions.
The ten largest rounds accounted for 85% of VC investment, and the largest round alone contributed 29.4%. Stage, category and investor data tell the same story. Large cheques remained available to selected companies while financing breadth contracted.
Fundraising Activity
Monthly VC Investment Held as the Market Narrowed
July’s $1.36B in VC investment sat near the middle of the range since August 2025. Round count did not. At 41, the total was the lowest in the 12-month window and 63.1% below the 111 rounds completed in July 2025.
The mean round rose from $25.6M in June to $33.2M in July, but that increase disappears after excluding the largest transaction. Without Crypto.com’s $400M strategic investment, VC investment would have been $960M across 40 rounds, or $24M per round. The data therefore point to concentration rather than an improvement in the typical financing environment.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Venture Remained the Largest Funding Channel
CryptoRank identified $2.13B in publicly disclosed investment across transaction types. VC rounds supplied $1.36B, or 63.9%. Strategy‘s $466.7M post-IPO raise contributed 21.9%, and Alpaca‘s $300M debt facility contributed 14.1%.
The total is a floor rather than a complete measure of economic activity. All 17 acquisitions had private terms, so M&A added transactions but no publicly disclosed value. The mix should therefore be read as a distribution of published investment values, not of all money committed.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Later-Stage Investment Nearly Doubled
Series A and later rounds were the only major stage group to expand. Investment rose 94.4% from $340M in June to $661M in July. Augustus, Prime Intellect and Gauntlet supplied $435M, or 65.8% of that total, so the recovery was substantial but narrow.
Strategic investment fell 8.8% to $542M, while Seed and Pre-Seed investment declined about 18% to $100M. Later-stage and strategic rounds together represented 88.5% of VC investment, leaving early-stage financing as a small share of the disclosed total.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Category Analysis
Exchanges Led Investment While AI Led Activity
Exchange projects attracted $543M across seven rounds, the highest investment of any category. Crypto.com supplied 73.7% of the category total. Payments followed with $244M across four rounds. AI ranked third with $232M but led by transaction count with eight rounds.
AI investment was also concentrated. Prime Intellect and Venice AI raised a combined $195M, or 84.1% of the category total. The category had the broadest deal pipeline, but most of its investment still came from two transactions.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Largest Rounds in the Leading Categories
The table combines rounds of at least $10M in the three leading categories and lists selected investors for larger syndicates.
Table 1. Largest July rounds of at least $10M in Exchange, Payments and AI.
CategoryProjectRaisedStageSelected investorsExchangeCrypto.com$400MStrategicCitadel SecuritiesExchangeEDX Markets$76MSeries CSBI HoldingsExchangeSkew$33MStrategicHyperion DeFiExchangeMercado Bitcoin$20MStrategicTetherExchangeExtended$12.5MStrategicJump Crypto, Alber Blanc, eToroPaymentsAugustus$180MSeries BTiger Global, QED, Variant, Brevan Howard DigitalPaymentsVelocity$38MSeries ACapital One Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Ripple, Dragonfly, QEDPaymentsCyclops$20MSeries AGPT Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Castle Island VenturesAIPrime Intellect$130MSeries ANVentures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Radical VenturesAIVenice AI$65MSeries ANorth Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, DragonflyAIAxis Robotics$12MSeedNomad Capital, Pi Network, 10K Ventures, Hack VC
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Investor Activity
The Investor Base Shrunk With the Deal Pipeline
CryptoRank identified 140 unique institutional investors in July, down 30.7% from 202 in June and 66.1% from 413 in July 2024. This was the lowest observation in the corrected 25-month series.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Most Active Funds and Lead Investors
Coinbase Ventures was the most active fund with five investments, equal to 12.2% of July’s 41 rounds, but it was not listed as the lead investor on any of them. Nascent followed with three investments. The other funds in the top ten made two investments each.
Lead-investor activity was more selective. Hack VC and Dragonfly led both of their recorded rounds, while several active funds participated only as co-investors. Overall investment count measures activity across rounds, while lead-investor count isolates rounds in which a fund was identified as the lead.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Deal Concentration
Ten Rounds Accounted for 85% of VC Investment
The ten largest disclosed rounds attracted $1.16B, equal to 85% of July VC investment. The four largest supplied $835M, or 61.4%. This concentration explains why total investment stayed close to June even as round count and investor participation fell sharply.
The largest transactions spanned several themes. The top four included a strategic exchange investment, a Series B payments round, a Series A AI round and a Series C DeFi round. The data support a conclusion about large cheque sizes, not a claim that one category captured the entire market.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
M&A Activity
Deal Count Held Steady With No Public Deal Values
CryptoRank identified 17 acquisitions in July, matching June and sitting slightly above the 12-month average of 16.4. None had a publicly disclosed value. The absence of a reported M&A total reflects private deal terms, not a lack of activity.
Announcement count is the more consistent measure of buyer activity. Monthly deal count ranged from five to 23 over the past year, while disclosed values ranged from $94M to $5.55B in months with at least one public price. A few priced transactions can dominate the value series, and an active month can have no measurable total when all terms remain private.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Infrastructure and Exchanges Led Consolidation
Infrastructure led July M&A with five targets, followed by Exchange with four and DeFi with three. Together, those categories represented 12 of 17 transactions. Infrastructure and Exchange alone accounted for 52.9%, consistent with buyers adding operational rails, licences and distribution.
Fundraising and acquisition activity targeted different categories. AI led VC round count but had no July acquisitions, while Infrastructure attracted two VC rounds and five acquisitions. One month is too short to establish a durable preference, but the split suggests that primary financing and consolidation were focused on different parts of the market.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Selected July Transactions
Because no deal values were made public, the transactions cannot be ranked by size. The table therefore presents ten examples and the capability or market access each acquirer added.
Table 2. Selected July M&A transactions.
TargetCategoryAcquirerStrategic roleNewton LabsInfrastructurePayward (Kraken)Embedded non-custodial wallet infrastructureCoinhakoExchangeSBI HoldingsLicensed exchange distribution in SingaporeBybit IndonesiaExchangeBybitRegulated Indonesian exchange operationsGlidePaymentsMoonPayCross-chain deposit and funding infrastructureStaking RewardsAnalyticsThe TieStaking yield and validator dataLiquidity LandDeFiThe TieAutomated Solana yield allocationbloXrouteInfrastructureFalconXLow-latency transaction relay and MEV toolingOdinBotDeFiCieloCopy-trading execution on SolanaRaven MarketDeFiPremiaFixed-payout digital optionsCypherPaymentsNiumSelf-custodial card and payment infrastructure
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Conclusion
July’s headline investment did not collapse, but it reached fewer companies. One $400M transaction kept the monthly total close to June, while round count, unique investors and early-stage investment all moved lower. Later-stage financing improved, but three rounds supplied almost two-thirds of that stage group’s investment.
Two cautions matter. Investor rosters may rise as CryptoRank backfills participation, and acquisition value cannot be assessed because every July transaction had private terms. Neither limitation changes the direction of the breadth indicators, but both constrain how strongly the data should be interpreted.
The next test is whether round count and unique investors recover while investment outside the largest transactions expands. A rebound across those measures would indicate broader financing conditions. Another month led by a handful of large rounds would reinforce July’s concentration pattern.

Etched is already eyeing a fresh funding round that will more than double the AI inference chips startup’s valuation at around $21 billion, barely one month after its late July Sequoia-led $300 million Series C round that valued the firm at $10.3 billion.
The new numbers cited in the Wall Street Journal’s August 18 report represent a fourfold expansion of the firm’s $5 billion valuation in December 2025. Etched also closed on Jane Street as its first customer, delivering a server rack filled with AI processors optimized for rapid inference computing to the Wall Street quantitative trading giant.
The scale of the firm’s growth after only coming out of stealth on June 30 signals the rush for alternatives to Nvidia’s big lead at the head of the supply chain that supplies the silicon powering the AI boom.
“This round reflects a growing industry conviction that the challenge demands a new entrant willing to rebuild the stack from first principles,” co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said in a statement.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), SK Hynix, Jane Street and Diffusion Capital also joined the July 31 financing round.
What do Etched’s chips do?
Etched sells full rack systems optimized for the inference portion of the AI compute stack, which occurs after users submit prompts. The firm believes its inference focus allows it to build specialist chips compared to Nvidia, which builds all-purpose GPUs for both AI training and inference.
Etched splits the work into the prefill and decode phases.
The prefill phase reads and interprets prompts using what Etched co-founder Robert Wachen calls low-voltage inference. That design choice allows the chip to run cooler with more transistors and a higher clock speed.
The decode phase, where the model writes its answer one token at a time, uses a Cluster Scale Memory design. The shared memory design allows accelerators inside one rack to draw data from another memory pool instead of having to copy the data themselves.
Etched said its systems are already inside DeepSeek, Qwen, Mamba, and Llama models.
Big money is flowing into inference
Etched is riding the hot hand in a broader market that forecasters back as the fastest-growing slice of a hot AI sector. The company delivered on its promise to start shipping chips by the summer, filling over $1 billion of booked orders, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
Bloomberg Intelligence set a $1.3 trillion target for the inference sector, doubling the size of the AI training market by 2032. Iron Mountain and Structure Research back inference capacity to overtake training capacity this year and continue to grow to account for 80% of AI compute load by 2030.
The rush for AI data centers has created a steady demand route fed by names such as Nvidia, Cerebras, and AMD, which are also building inference-specific systems on the same prefill-and-decode split that Etched describes.
Etched now employs more than 400 people and reported first-pass silicon success on TSMC’s N4P process. It runs a 2-megawatt data center at its San Jose headquarters and has opened a new 80,000-square-foot, 10-megawatt facility in nearby Milpitas, TechCrunch reported.
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Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) missed Wall Street’s second-quarter revenue estimate on Tuesday, August 18, reporting 31.3 billion yuan ($4.62 billion) for the three months to June, which is a 4% drop from a year earlier.
Analysts at LSEG had expected about 31.96 billion yuan, and Baidu came in under that mark.
The company recorded a quarterly net income of 2.3 billion yuan ($324 million), which was a decline of 68% from the same time last year. The diluted earnings per American depositary share fell to $0.85, a decline of almost 72% from June 2025. Operating income also slipped to $446 million.
Investors have reacted to the development as well, as Baidu’s US-listed shares fell between 3.5% and 4.35% in pre-market trading in New York after the release.
Where did Baidu struggle?
The pressure came from Baidu’s oldest business. Online marketing revenue dropped 19% to 13.1 billion yuan, as advertisers held back spending in a weak Chinese economy.
Two forces squeezed that segment. A drawn-out slump in China’s property market and soft consumer demand pushed companies to trim marketing budgets.
On top of that, the country’s mid-year 618 shopping festival worked against Baidu, because e-commerce platforms shifted promotional money toward user subsidies instead of buying search and feed traffic.
The AI side Baidu wants investors to watch
Revenue from Baidu’s AI-related operations, which covers cloud, applications, and marketing services, rose 25% to 12.5 billion yuan, cushioning the advertising fall.
Its AI Cloud Infra revenue climbed 50% to 7.3 billion yuan, and within it, GPU Cloud revenue jumped 283% year-on-year, accelerating from 184% growth the prior quarter, according to Baidu’s earnings statement. AI application revenue grew a slimmer 3% to 2.5 billion yuan, while AI marketing services were flat at 2.6 billion yuan.
“While our online marketing business remains under pressure, the growing momentum in our core AI-powered business reaffirms Baidu’s transition from an internet-centric company to an AI-first company,” Robin Li, Baidu’s co-founder and CEO, said in the earnings statement.
Robotaxis, a Hong Kong listing, and payouts
Beyond the balance sheet, Baidu used the quarter to push its Apollo Go robotaxi service into new markets. The unit began open-road testing in London with Uber and Lyft, started fully driverless commercial rides in Dubai, and won Hong Kong’s first permits for driverless testing. It also ran open-road tests in Switzerland with operator PostBus.
Baidu’s chief financial officer (CFO) Haijian He said their operating cash flow stayed positive for a fourth straight quarter at 3.4 billion yuan and that the company is moving toward a dual-primary listing in Hong Kong that it expects to complete this year.
The company has returned $259 million to shareholders through buybacks since the start of the first quarter, the release stated.
How Wall Street sees Baidu
Baidu shares traded near $103.67 ahead of the release, down about 28% for the year. Bank of America (BofA) analyst Miranda Zhuang kept a Buy rating but cut her price target to $165 from $180, citing falling advertising revenue and higher AI infrastructure spending.
The three-month analyst view sat at a Moderate Buy, with three Buy ratings, two Holds and no Sells.
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South Korean regulators approved Ripple’s integration with the country’s banking system on the same day a media watchdog voted to cut off access to the prediction market Polymarket.
South Korean regulators have joined a widening crackdown against Polymarket while approving Ripple’s partnership with Jeonbuk Bank.
Jeonbuk Bank is Ripple’s first regional lender in Korea
Ripple (XRP) has announced that Jeonbuk Bank will run cross-border business remittances over Ripple Payments, making it the first regional lender in the country to adopt the service.
Traditional transfers have to be routed between intermediary banks on the SWIFT network, and this process can make transactions take days to clear. However, Ripple offers a route that settles in seconds to minutes and runs around the clock. The service is aimed at the bank’s importers, exporters, IT startups and online content creators.
Jeonbuk is Ripple’s third Korean partnership of 2026, following a tokenized government-bond trial with Kyobo Life Insurance and a custody and wallet deal with internet-only Kbank.
Despite these partnership announcements, XRP slipped under $1 to 98 cents in Asian morning trading on Tuesday, its weakest level since November 2024 and the worst performer among major coins over the day and week.
The decline might be due to RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, which now does much of the institutional settlement work. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger are worth roughly $1.38 billion, and $845 million of that is RLUSD, representing more than three-fifths of the total value.
RLUSD’s circulating supply reached approximately 1.71 billion tokens, with a market capitalization of around $1.71 billion. Ripple minted another 10 million RLUSD on the XRP Ledger on August 17.
Despite the drop in XRP’s price, traders are still leaning long, with futures open interest near $2.78 billion.
Is Polymarket a legal platform in South Korea?
On the same day that the Ripple deal advanced, the Korea Media and Communications Standards Commission voted to block domestic access to Polymarket, stating that the platform facilitates gambling under the Criminal Act and the National Sports Promotion Act.
The commission explained that because payouts hinge on events users cannot control and winners take the entire pot, the design “fuels gambling psychology.” It also noted the fact that Polymarket sets the markets, runs the settlement rails, and collects trading fees.
Polymarket argued it had removed Korean-language services and won-denominated payments and therefore fell outside Korean law, but the regulator rejected that, saying technical features cannot exempt a platform providing “a real illegal gambling environment to domestic users.”
Cryptopolitan has been tracking the situation since the Korean police opened the country’s first criminal investigation into local Polymarket bettors after heavy trading around the June 3 national election. The commission began deliberations on July 6 after referrals from the National Police Agency.
Beyond Korea, more than 30 countries, including Italy, Indonesia and Argentina have blocked or limited Polymarket.
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South Korea’s AI and robotics push came to the fore again after LG Electronics hosted Nvidia senior director Madison Huang during a Tuesday trip to its robot data factory in southern Seoul.
The younger Huang’s visit to the Yangjae campus in Seocho District came after her father, Jensen Huang, who is also Nvidia’s chief executive met and signed an MOU with LG Group’s Chairman Koo Kwang-mo, covering robotics, AI factories and mobility together in Santa Clara, California.
Madison Huang also handles product marketing for Nvidia’s physical AI platform.
Nvidia is all-in on South Korea’s robotics push
According to local reports, Madison Huang was received by C-suite executives, including LG Electronics CEO Lyu Jae-cheol, LG CNS CEO Hyun Shin-gyoon and LG Sciencepark’s chief. The visit, which started with a courtesy bouquet delivered to Huang by one of the company’s CLOiD robots, ran longer than the two hours originally put on the schedule.
Huang described her visit to the facility as “incredible,” doubling down on positive sentiments she expressed when she left a handwritten “Amazing LG” on a CLOiD robot.
100,000 hours of data by December
LG expects to have its robots running on Nvidia’s training platform before the end of 2026, with plans to have at least 100,000 hours of robot training data in its library by the end of the year.
The tech giant’s plan will combine physically tracking robots doing tasks with real on-site motion data. Nvidia’s Omniverse libraries, LG’s Cosmos world foundation models and the Isaac development platform will then be used to amplify and synthesize the data into far larger virtual datasets, which feeds LG’s robot foundation model.
LG Electronics CEO Lyu Jae-cheol’s team described the combined pool as the robot’s brain, which lets it handle objects even though it does not have specific training for such tasks.
That self-improving loop of collection, synthesis, training and improvement comes up together as what LG is describing internally as a “data flywheel.”
Where did Madison Huang visit in Korea?
Madison Huang visited the 10,000-square-meter, converted Yangjae R&D campus in Seocho District. The facility is expected to be running hundreds of CLOiD robots operating on a 24/7 schedule by the end of the year.
LG has simulated environments it expects to deploy its humanoid robots across the facility’s four floors, including one below ground.
CLOiD practices cleaning in the home zone.
Robots are moving, stacking and assembling washing machine parts in a setting that resembles the assembly line at LG’s Tennessee plant.
LG CNS added a logistics-automation area.
A space for training robotic hands by LG Innotek.
LG has ambitions to build a bipedal, next-gen humanoid on Nvidia’s robotics stack before the end of March, 2027. The South Korean firm named other Nvidia projects in its Friday report on H1 2026.
“We will secure competitiveness in physical AI,” Lyu said, adding that LG aims to become “a total robotics solutions provider.”
Seoul’s wider physical AI bet
The partnership sits inside a national push. President Lee Jae Myung’s government has folded physical AI into a roughly $1 trillion program alongside semiconductors and AI data centers, and plans a special law this year to fast-track approvals and infrastructure.
Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan said the state intends to buy more than 1,000 robots by 2030, including 700 humanoids, to seed an early market that Lee has said is still too small.
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Circle revealed that its euro stablecoin (EURC) has now crossed the mark of €400 million in circulation within around four years since it was launched. Although this amount is still insignificant compared to the dollar stablecoins, this gap is part of the overall picture. Establishing a serious payment rail that doesn’t rely on the dollar has required years of work even for one of the biggest issuers of stablecoins in the sector.
As far as institutions, payment firms, and developers wanting to hold and transfer euros on the blockchain are concerned, this achievement indicates that a promising alternative is coming into being. Nonetheless, the expansion of EURC points to the fact that the adoption process has been rather lengthy, owing to more advanced regulations and improved infrastructure, but not to the sharp increase in demand.
A four-year climb from one chain to five
The European euro stablecoin EURC debuted on Ethereum back in June 2022, where it remained until 2023, when Circle started to launch it on other blockchains, including Avalanche, Stellar, Solana, and Base. By December 2024, it had been introduced to five different blockchains and had almost €80 million in circulation. According to Circle, the EURC supply doubled in the first half of 2025, rising more than 100% over the past 12 months.
Circle executives mentioned that the industry had achieved a milestone of €400 million for the first time. On August 14, Patrick Hansen tweeted that EURC had “officially crossed €400M in circulation for the first time in history,” which is more than ten times its size at the beginning of the MiCA period two years back. Another colleague, Peter Schroeder, also talked about EURC being the first euro-pegged stablecoin to ever reach €400 million worth of supply.
Why does the dollar still own the rails?
The milestone appears different when viewed in the context of the dominance of the dollar. According to a paper published in May 2026 by the Bank for International Settlements, nearly 98% of the value of stablecoins is dollar-denominated, which suggests that stablecoins would only strengthen the dollar’s current position before rival currencies make a meaningful dent.
Euro tokens have encountered hurdles in practical usage, as Circle noted that users typically had to resort to dollar-pegged stablecoins for euro transactions, experience low liquidity on-chain, or use bridges that create obstacles and risks.
Regulation transformed the industry too. Cryptopolitan had reported Tether’s discontinuation of its euro stablecoin EURT instead of complying with the European Union’s emerging regulations. Even with robust increases in euro-pegged stablecoins to reach around $900 million by mid-2026, they still made up much less than 1% of the approximately $300 billion stablecoin market globally.
What MiCA changed for euro tokens
The Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework of the European Union came into effect in December 2024, putting in place requirements with regard to reserves, disclosures, governance, and redemption. Circle designed EURC in a manner that allows it to be classified as an e-money token in compliance with MiCA regulations, and issued it through one of its electronic money institutions in France under the supervision of ACPR with full backing of segregated reserves.
MiCA was not responsible for creating demand for euro stablecoins. Instead, it gave banks, payment companies, and other regulated entities a clear basis so they could decide whether to use a euro stablecoin or not.
This transition can be seen in the framework of the EURC. The token is traded on major exchanges and payment gateways and has institutional custody services backing it up. Visa and Mastercard have also expanded stablecoin settlement functionality to include EURC and bring this token out of the crypto trading landscape and closer to the traditional payment infrastructure.
Where the euro token is actually being used
When it comes to the question of whether EURC could become a true payment rail, usage is more significant than listings. As reported by Thunes on August 13, the payments company has now added its EURC prefunding features throughout Ethereum, Solana, Base, and Stellar. This means that users of the network are able to execute euro transactions irrespective of banking hours or the need to first convert to dollars.
Data from third parties also suggests a similar trend. A study prepared by Dune for Visa indicates that during the period ending in February 2026, the total volume of local-currency stablecoins grew by approximately 90%, reaching $1.2 billion, which is a much higher rate than dollar-based tokens. Most of this capital was generated via euro-based stablecoins, which represent more than 80% of the total market capitalization and 85% of the overall transfer volume. EURC alone processes between $10 and $20 billion per month.
Notably, the number of unique addresses dealing with non-dollar stablecoins surged from an estimated 40,000 in January 2023 to upwards of 1.2 million in early February 2026.
Broader stablecoin context
EURC’s milestone of €400 million is less significant in the context of how it poses a threat to the dollar today, but more important in regard to proving another currency can create its own on-chain infrastructure. The euro stablecoin sector is becoming more usable, regulated, and liquid. The scale of the euro stablecoin market, however, is a reminder of the fact that a majority of the global stablecoin economy remains dollar-denominated.
Date EURC Circulation Growth / Context May 31, 2024 €37.0M Early baseline; Circle’s reserve report Jan. 1, 2025 ~€70M Beginning-of-year level cited by Circle Dec. 23, 2025 >€300M EURC became the largest euro-denominated stablecoin by market cap Dec. 31, 2025 €310M Circle year-end figure; +284% YoY July 27, 2026 €394.6M Latest Circle disclosure; approaching €400M
The figures show how quickly EURC moved from a sub-€100 million niche in early 2025 to nearly €400 million by mid-2026. Circle reported €310 million at the end of 2025, up 284% year over year.
EURC circulation rose from about €37 million in May 2024 to €394.6 million by July 27, 2026, putting the euro stablecoin within roughly €5.4 million of the €400 million threshold. Circle reported €310 million at the end of 2025, representing 284% year-over-year growth.

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Multiple users have reported dust attacks from wallets linked to the HTX exchange, formerly Huobi. Users are worried that even a small transaction can connect the wallet to the exchange, which has been sanctioned as a counterparty in the UK and the European Union.
User wallets have received dust transactions linked to HTX addresses. A token contract for a new HTX asset has interacted with thousands of wallets on BNB Smart Chain, while other users report receiving USDT from an address tagged as HTX48.
An HTX ambassador responded to the allegations, stating the exchange did not intentionally send out any assets, and it was not its usual mode of behavior. Justin Sun, the founder of TRON and the owner of HTX, has also not responded to questions on the spam attack. Currently, Sun has pivoted to AI, offering bonus tokens and usage of one of his new advanced models.
As Cryptopolitan reported, HTX was also targeted in another wave of sanctions against third-country exchanges. Binance froze transactions from HTX, Exmo, and 14 other exchanges.
Why are user wallets threatened by HTX?
Usually, a dust attack has the goal of making users send funds to the wrong address. This time, however, the attack has been tagged as compliance poisoning.
In the EU and other regions, exchanges have started to vet and de-anonymize user wallets. This means wallets may be watched for interactions with the sanctioned exchange. So far, Binance has not confirmed it would screen for dust transfers, but it is at least possible to flag wallets for interacting with HTX.
Some users commented that the attack could especially target crypto influencers and high-profile traders, challenging exchanges to freeze or review their accounts. Some KOLs and insiders are already reporting that the dust attack has resulted in their centralized accounts being frozen for review.
Are dust attacks a risk to personal wallets?
A similar dust attack has targeted user wallets after the USA sanctioned the Tornado Cash mixer. At that point, a user spent $50,000 to contaminate addresses with dust transactions.
Despite the automated risk filtering, the dust attack was not enough to ban all wallets and user accounts on centralized exchanges. Later, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) ruled that non-material passive receipt of funds was not enough to deem an account an accomplice to a banned service.
The recent transactions are also often a bit larger than the usual dust attack, often handing over up to 12 USDT. The attack is also not using any new or counterfeit tokens.
Practices on screening wallets may differ between exchanges. Binance has been the strictest, freezing some accounts for suspicious transactions. Other brokerages flag the received transaction and sometimes allow the user to send it back to a self-custodial wallet without freezing the funds.
Currently, all wallets withdrawing from HTX after May 26 are considered sanctioned. Even decentralized services like Hyperliquid and some DeFi protocols are already blacklisting the wallets. Even if authorities do not require an account freeze, decentralized services could refuse users based on their recent connection to HTX.
Critics believe the measures against HTX are an overreach, spending too many resources to track legitimate users instead of tracking real on-chain crime.
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Uniswap founder Hayden Adams has presented his own argument for why automated market makers (AMMs) should be at the center of the tokenization wave that has taken over global finance as markets continue to shift to meet the demand for always-on infrastructure.
Hayden’s comments land as Uniswap has gone all out in its own push to claim major share in the tokenized stocks sweepstakes, which in itself is only a slice of the onchain real-world asset deposits approaching $4 billion, per Cryptopolitan reporting.
Why Uniswap’s founder says AMMs are better for tokenized markets
Adams’ big pitch for blockchain tech and tokenized rails rests on how blockchains separately manage execution, custody, and settlement as separate layers while traditional market makers just bundle them together.
So instead of concentrating participation among a few established firms that can manage all the vertical integration involved, Adams says blockchain tech lowers the barrier to entry.
In the scenario that Adams painted, AMMs are perfectly positioned because they favor closely related asset pairs, where passive liquidity carries lower inventory risk while still offering costs that compare favorably with big-time professional desks.
Adams expects the onchain migration of assets to persist into the future, which will naturally reorganize trading around related pairs plus a handful of cross-chain routes and expand market access. The Uniswap founder also expects passive AMM strategies to start to operate in the same lane as index funds.
Adams’ tokenized push for AMMs follows on his January disagreement with AMM critics who called the undercompensation of liquidity providers a structural flaw. As Cryptopolitan reported at the time, the founder pointed to Uniswap’s pool growth as evidence that AMM liquidity is easier to reuse as collateral than the alternatives.
The tokenized market has exploded
Hayden Adams’ case for AMMs comes around RWA deposit stakes that have exploded roughly sixfold in twelve months from $650.88 million to around $3.98 billion per DeFiLlama data cited by Cryptopolitan on August 18.
Total tokenized issuance across the sector reached $34.55 billion.
Uniswap itself has been active in the new global, self-custodial, and 24/7 market, touting support for more than 190 Robinhood stock tokens across its protocol, apps, and API as of August 13. A single tokenized SPY pair booked $33 million in trades over 12 days.
Uniswap has also courted regulated issuers directly: in July it introduced Permissioned Pools, a v4 hook that restricts trading to wallets on an issuer’s approved list, with tokenization firms Securitize, Superstate, and Dowgo named as launch partners.
UNI itself has not tracked the optimism. CoinMarketCap listed the token near $3.25 on the day of Adams’ post, with a market cap around $2.03 billion, well off levels seen earlier in the year.
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One trader used $2,328,595.73 to buy 3,167.53 QQQon in one Ethereum transaction this week, a seven-figure purchase that Ondo Finance pointed out as proof that tokenized stocks are no longer in the experimental phase.
The announcement of the trade was made by Ondo on August 17, and its alerts confirmed the same number of tokens and amount of money. As for a market that is trying to demonstrate that it can cope with big flows, the $2.3 million transaction in one execution is noteworthy.
Tokenized stocks are making history.
A $2,328,595.73 QQQon buy was executed in a single transaction on Ethereum.
Seven-figure execution, only on Ondo Stocks. https://t.co/hBDBcycrS1
— Ondo Finance (@Ondo) August 17, 2026
The trade happened while Ondo Stocks, the company’s tokenized equities site, hit the $1 billion milestone in total value locked. It has logged $27 billion in total trading volume since its launch in September 2025. QQQon is one of Ondo’s tokenized exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that allows blockchain investors to access different shares in the U.S.
Why a single seven-figure order matters
Traditionally, tokenized stock trading has been seen as fairly centered around smaller, retail-sized transactions. However, the recent one-time transaction said to be exceeding $2.3 million hints that larger investors may be beginning to embrace the format. According to Ondo, the transaction was made on Ethereum, pointing users to the blockchain record itself.
According to the tracking account of Ondo, the transaction took place at a total of 3,167.53 QQQon for a price of $2,328,595.73, suggesting a price of about $735 per token. Moreover, since the buyer or the counterparty is not named in the two announcements, it would not be correct to conclude that the transaction was institutional. What it does mean, though, is that the system can process an order worth millions of dollars in one operation.
From passive tokens to collateral you can borrow against
This deal also illustrates what Ondo has done with its equity tokens. In February, the company provided SPYon and QQQon as collateral in DeFi lending markets through Morpho, where the risk parameters, including collateral factors and liquidation levels, were established by the risk management company Gauntlet.
This is important considering that tokens once acted solely as passive means of ownership: they just allowed the holder to keep or transfer them. However, if QQQon can be used as collateral in a loan, it can serve as a productive means of investment in crypto portfolios instead of just being a representation of a physical asset.
Ondo began its journey with SPYon as well as QQQon, given that both of them track broad-based ETFs that enjoy substantial underlying liquidity. This provides a relatively stable financial opportunity for entering DeFi lending with tokenized equities.
Always-on access to Wall Street exposure
Ondo has also been taking steps to widen the number of hours during which such assets can be traded. In June, it rolled out 24/7 instant minting and redemption for the six most traded tokens, including QQQon, on Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Solana. This represents an extension of the previous 24/5 model that ceased to operate on weekends.
This change addresses one of the fundamental benefits of using tokenization: its global participants are allowed to exit and enter their positions at any time, even during weekends and holidays when traditional stock market operations are non-functional.
According to Ondo, its platform now includes upwards of 430 tokenized stocks and ETFs and has become the first platform of its kind to reach a total value locked of over $1 billion. The tokens can be used across several different venues, including Ondo Perps, Morpho, and Euler, allowing tokenized stocks to slowly transform into assets that are able to cross over into a broader on-chain financial ecosystem.
A category that is still small but growing fast
Despite the fact that the overall market is quite small compared to traditional stocks, it is growing exponentially fast. According to a research report released in June 2026, the market for tokenized stocks was appraised with a valuation of more than $1.7 billion, which is a year-on-year increase of 149%. Monthly on-chain trading volume escalated beyond $6.7 billion during this period.
Researchers at Coinbase warned in January that tokenized stocks are still small even in the market for real-world assets since many products are designed as foreign derivatives rather than owning U.S. shares directly.
Authorities are paying close attention. On January 28, three divisions of the SEC emphasized in their statement that a security retains its regulatory status regardless of its format, including when tokenized. This principle is going to determine how companies like Ondo will expand as trading volume increases.
What to watch next
The pressing question that arises is whether trades that are worth more than $2 million become commonplace or are still seen as exceptional. The accomplishments achieved by Ondo by obtaining a total value locked of $1 billion, in addition to lending and perpetuals, allow tokenized equities to gain and retain capital in various ways.
The next indicator will be if both TVL and the size of individual orders continue increasing through the remainder of 2026. Should this occur, the tokenization of stocks could mark the transition from a crypto trial to a real second layer trading for conventional equities.
The cleanest comparable starting point is January 2024, when Ondo’s reported TVL was about $192 million. Ondo subsequently reported $500M in June 2024, crossed $1B in March 2025, reached about $1.93B in December 2025, surpassed $2.5B in January 2026, and is now around $3.5B.
The growth is striking: from approximately $192M in January 2024 to $3.51B currently, an increase of roughly 18.3×. DeFiLlama currently puts Ondo’s combined TVL at about $3.51B.
For the peer comparison, DeFiLlama currently lists these large RWA/tokenized-asset platforms. These are not perfectly like-for-like businesses: some peers are individual tokenized funds or gold products, while Ondo is a broader platform spanning USDY, OUSG, and tokenized stocks. DeFiLlama nevertheless categorizes Ondo as RWA and provides the peer set below.
RWA platform/product Current TVL Relative to Ondo Ondo Finance $3.51B 100% BlackRock BUIDL $3.44B 98% Circle USYC $3.01B 86% Tether Gold $2.87B 82% Spiko $2.22B 63% Paxos Gold $1.78B 51% Centrifuge $1.63B 46% Midas RWA $122M 3.5% OpenEden TBILL $256M 7.3% KAIO $43M 1.2%


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Authorities in the United States have accused Edward Zimbardi, age 59, of orchestrating a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme amounting to $165 million, contributing to the list of several high-profile cases of scams in the current year. According to the Office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, the man faced charges in federal court after he was extradited from Fiji on August 14, 2026.
A guaranteed 25% a month that never existed
According to prosecutors, Zimbardi developed and promoted The Crypto Program from June 2022 to August 2023. The program boasted an assured return of 25% on advertising packages on a monthly basis. Instead, the money was transferred to wallets controlled by Zimbardi, the indictment claims. In total, thousands of people invested more than $165 million.
The money didn’t go into advertising. Prosecutors allege Zimbardi lost over $34 million on speculative foreign-currency bets that he made, and then used money from new investors to pay back earlier ones. At least $10 million allegedly went to personal expenses, including his son’s house and other luxury goods. When the operation failed in August 2023, investors were left without the possibility of recovering any of their investments.
A warning had already been issued. The Department of Financial Protection and Innovation in California issued a desist-and-refrain order against The Crypto Program and Zimbardi on June 28, 2023. It accused them of violations of securities laws as well as gross misrepresentation or omission of essential details. This brings to light one of the most stubborn challenges of enforcing laws in the crypto sector: regulators are able to warn against a cryptocurrency scam while the money is still flowing, but investors will only benefit from the warning if they notice it in time.
Fiji, a canceled wedding, and a deportation flight
Zimbardi’s route to a US courtroom ran through the South Pacific. By July 2025, aware that the FBI was investigating, he settled in Fiji, prosecutors say. In May 2026, he skipped his son’s wedding in Virginia, correctly guessing agents would be waiting to arrest him.
“When his scam imploded, he allegedly tried to evade federal prosecution by fleeing to the other side of the world,” U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg said.
Fijian officials, working with the FBI and State Department, eventually sent him back. A grand jury indicted him on July 8 on 12 counts of wire fraud, 12 counts of money laundering, and one count of money-laundering conspiracy. He is presumed innocent.
Why one Georgia case reflects a global problem
In its 2025 Internet Crime Report published in April 2026, the FBI determined that the total losses resulting from cyber-enabled crimes were almost $21 billion. Among the different categories of thefts reported, the one with the biggest sum of losses was that of cryptocurrency crimes, reaching $11 billion. Georgia happens to be one of the ten US states that suffered the most when it comes to cryptocurrency fraud, with the losses estimated at over $264.5 million.
The issue is becoming increasingly global. According to Chainalysis, the average payment made to scam addresses increased by 253% in 2025 to $2,764. In addition, inflow from impersonation scams increased by more than 1,400%.
According to TRM Labs, illegal crypto transactions surged by almost 145% to $158 billion in 2025. This figure, although meaningful, only represented around 1.2% of total transactions. This distinction of crime not being the main source of crypto activity matters, but the amounts that are flowing in the illicit network require a global response.
According to INTERPOL’s Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment dated March 16, scam syndicates are becoming more widespread as fraud networks continue to share resources, technology, and know-how on money laundering. The number of INTERPOL Notices and Diffusions related to fraud has increased by 54% since 2024.
The FATF reported a similar weakness on July 16, cautioning that criminal organizations are taking advantage of inconsistent regulation of cryptocurrencies and their enforcement to transfer billions of dollars in illegal funds. Although 83% of the responding jurisdictions passed the Travel Rule legislation, numerous countries are not able to apply the legislation successfully.
The Zimbardi case demonstrates these gaps in action. A scheme promoted in one location is capable of transferring and moving cryptocurrency from one country to another while both the perpetrators of the crime and those involved in money laundering sit in a different jurisdiction. Hence, tracing this money and making sure it is intercepted before vanishing increasingly relies on cooperation amongst authorities, investigators and foreign governments.

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Real World Assets that are actively deployed inside DeFi protocols are on the verge of reaching $4 billion. As of August 18, DefiLlama shows this number is at $3.98 billion. This same number stood at $650.88 million just a year ago and around $12 million three years ago. That is a 6x in twelve months and a staggering over 300x in three years.
Source: DefiLlama
What makes this number useful is actually what it excludes. DefiLlama only counts a tokenized asset here when it is put to use onchain. Collateral posted in a lending market qualifies. So does liquidity in a DEX pool or a deposit locked in a vault. Whereas tokens in a wallet that are simply earning fund yield do not.
Total tokenized issuance across the sector is at $34.55 billion. When doing the math here, that equates to about 11.5% of the total RWA space being put to work onchain.
Tokenized Treasuries Lead Issuance and Then Sit Still
BlackRock’s BUIDL has $2.74 billion issued and around $18 million of it is showing up in DeFi. That is a utilization rate of 0.66% as of today. Meanwhile, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI product has a utilization rate of zero. Now between these two products, there is well over $3 billion of tokenized money market exposure that never actually touches a lending pool.
The design of these funds explains why the onchain utilization percentages are low. These funds were built for institutional cash management with whitelisted transfers with the buyers holding them wanting the T-bill yield rather than any sort of borrowing power. Tokenization basically gave them much faster settlement but it did not turn them into collateral.
Private Credit and Reinsurance Are Where the Collateral Actually Moves
Private credit accounts for $2.13 billion of the $3.98 billion active total, more than half on its own. Bonds contribute $799.88 million and reinsurance another $406.45 million.
Janus Henderson’s Anemoy AAA CLO fund runs at 97.53% utilization on $421.88 million. Re Protocol’s reUSD sits at 97.03% on $184.67 million. Maple’s syrupUSDT is at 91%. Syrup USDG tops the entire rankings table at 153.37% utilization on $181.32 million of DeFi TVL, which points to the same token being counted across multiple venues as it gets lent, borrowed and redeposited.
These are assets that DeFi lenders will price and accept. A CLO fund with a defined credit rating and a reinsurance token with a yield stream both fit into existing collateral frameworks in a way that a whitelisted treasury fund does not.
Further down the list, the smaller categories look experimental rather than structural. Precious metals hold $311.96 million in active TVL, public equities $150.5 million and equity indices $31.95 million. Oil registers $1.42 million. Natural gas comes in at $315.
Utilization Is the Number to Watch as Issuance Scales
Issuance headlines have driven RWA coverage for two years, and $34.55 billion is a real figure. The question now is whether the next $34 billion behaves like BUIDL or like JAAA.
If issuance doubles while utilization holds near 11.5%, tokenization mostly delivered better custody rails for institutions that were already buying treasuries. If utilization climbs alongside issuance, RWAs turn into working collateral inside crypto credit markets, and the $4 billion mark stops being the ceiling it currently looks like.
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Jane Street informed the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it possessed more than $990 million worth of spot BTC ETFs, which equals approximately 15,394 BTC at now existing prices.
This is an important position because Jane Street is not merely another institutional investor. Indeed, it is also one of the largest market makers of the ETFs it holds, which brings its trading activities near the place where Bitcoin prices are being created.
This helps explain the unique characteristics of the filing. When a firm that performs quoting and settling of ETF trades simultaneously holds a nearly billion-dollar position in those ETFs, the change in its exposure can affect the very products that serve as one of the key sources of institutional demand for Bitcoin.
Why a market maker’s book carries weight
Jane Street’s role in the ETF machinery goes back to the products’ launch. When Wall Street rolled out spot Bitcoin ETFs in early 2024, the firm appeared in filings as an anchor market maker for every fund, according to the Financial Times.
The FT has also described Jane Street as the most profitable of the trading firms reshaping modern markets, with a Wall Street-record $39.6 billion in net trading revenue in 2025.
This means that changes in its Bitcoin exposure should be taken seriously. CoinShares reports that Jane Street cut its holdings by 10,800 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, calling it a usual activity of a big ETF market maker in a period marked by large outflows. Other brokerages had their total of BTC holdings down by 18,800 BTC in that same period.
Where the $990 million actually sits
Mostly, Jane Street’s disclosed holdings come from one fund. Records referenced by Bitcoin Magazine indicate that Jane Street has nearly $828 million in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, with some minor investments in Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund and Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust.
BlackRock’s fund is the largest spot Bitcoin ETF, with $47.3 billion in assets under management, and has attracted more capital than any competing crypto ETF since the products began trading in early 2024.
Jane Street is not the only entity that uses ETFs to get exposure to Bitcoin. According to Bitcoin Magazine, Edelman Financial and Tudor Investment Corporation revealed large stakes the week before and sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi also disclosed having positions. All of this proves how mainstream Bitcoin exposure has become part of traditional investment portfolios.
The $15 billion July that came first
The filing also arrives just weeks after a rare setback for Jane Street. The firm suffered its first losing month in roughly a decade, taking about $15 billion in losses in July.
Jane Street’s entry into AI investments has already been reported by Cryptopolitan, and this exposure played a key role in the losses made by the company. Most of the losses were due to its investment in the hedge fund, Situational Awareness, where losses from a series of bad trades in the AI sector were made, along with losses in the Asian equities market.
Even if that is the case, it has minimal effect on Jane Street’s performance this year. The company has already made more than $40 billion in net revenue, surpassing its best-ever result in 2025. At such levels, a $15 billion loss in a month does not necessarily mean that the company will withdraw from other ventures.
A stake disclosed into a deep drawdown
The timing makes the topic about Jane Street’s Bitcoin exposure particularly interesting. Bitcoin price has declined by about fifty percent from its peak on October 2025, when it was above $126,000.
In the market update released in August 2026, BlackRock mentioned that most of the decline could be explained by crypto-native deleveraging instead of any issues with Bitcoin’s long-term investment thesis.
CoinShares shows evidence of the same. In the first quarter, Bitcoin fell 22% to approximately $68,000, at one point trading below $60,000, as institutional positioning shifted.
In this respect, Jane Street finds itself in an unexpected situation. It is not only one of the largest holders of Bitcoin ETFs but also one of the firms facilitating liquidity in the space. However, the $990 million investment cannot reflect Jane Street’s view on market developments, as market makers use ETF shares for purposes other than directional trading.
However, following a substantial Bitcoin decline as well as a hectic quarter for institutional investment, the changes that have taken place in Jane Street’s ETF are worth watching. Only a few companies have found their place on both sides of the trade.

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