Cryptopolitan

HyroTrader has announced that it is launching Hyro Protocol, an on-chain proprietary (prop) trading protocol built on Solana that settles in USDC.
The Prague-based firm first made the announcement on July 8, stating that it is a response to the funded trading industry’s central credibility problem.
Historically, traders and capital providers have had no way to independently verify what a prop firm’s dashboard tells them. Hyro Protocol is designed to remove that vagueness, and it says that it has made every key protocol event verifiable on-chain.
HyroTrader’s CEO Samuel Drnda said, “Most prop firms still run on closed systems where rules can change mid-evaluation and payouts happen behind closed doors.”
What is Hyro Protocol actually building?
The protocol has designed what it calls a vault model, which is divided into two: the Challenge Vaults and the Direct Vaults. It uses capital pools governed by smart contract rules, and traders building a track record can prove themselves through Challenge Vaults, while those with an established history can apply to manage liquidity provider capital directly through Direct Vaults.
It’s the same hybrid logic the firm has run since 2023, when it became the first crypto prop firm to route funded traders directly to their own Bybit accounts via API rather than pricing trades internally. According to the protocol, “Funded traders access more than 700 USDT perpetual pairs on live order books.”
How big is prop trading’s trust problem?
An estimated 80 to 100 proprietary trading firms shut down between 2024 and 2025, which is roughly 13 to 14% of the global market. It has since been called the industry’s worst collapse, and most ran on a structure where new challenge fees funded payouts to earlier traders, a model that fails the moment growth slows.
On-chain prop trading may succeed where others have failed, and that is Hyro Protocol’s goal. This time around, it is putting transparency on the table to attract traders.
The novelty of Hyro Protocol is the scope it covers. It puts the entire vault and accounting layer on-chain rather than just the payout record, which sets it apart from a field that already includes a payout-tracking service that tracks on-chain payout data from 43 prop firms using an Arbitrum blockchain integration.
What else has HyroTrader’s parent firm built?
HyroTrader says it has funded more than 1,700 traders and paid out over $5 million since introducing exchange-connected accounts in 2023, with funded capital scaling to $1 million and profit splits up to 90%.
Drnda founded an earlier version of the business, HyroTrade, in 2020 before relaunching as HyroTrader by 2024, when the platform had grown to over 30,000 registered traders with 30% month-over-month growth.
Drna added that “Hyro Protocol replaces trust with verification. Traders own their track records, LPs can check every number on a block explorer, and capital scales with performance instead of one company’s balance sheet.”
The firm was also named Best Prop Trading Firm at the CoinGape Web3 Innovation Awards 2026 this month, decided by an independent judging panel featuring representatives from Polygon Labs, Visa, Beldex, Sharplink and Liminal Custody.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have banded together in a rare bipartisan push to oppose the Pentagon’s plan to open up military land for private companies to build AI data centers.
The effort to plant roadblocks all over the Trump admin proposition cites concerns touching on how much power and water data center facilities pull from grids and reservoirs, which inadvertently become a strain on the communities that depend on that infrastructure.
Despite the scrutiny, the Army is already moving ahead with the first two deals from the plan. The Air Force is also already reportedly shopping unengaged land at many of its installations.
What does Congress want from the Trump admin?
Congress is pushing multiple angles in its opposition of the Pentagon’s plan to install data centers on federal land, ranging from amendments, studies, briefings and, in at least one bill, an outright ban.
Speaking to reporters about whether data center plants belong on military installations, Rep. John Garamendi, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Armed Services Readiness subcommittee, was noncommittal, saying, “may be yes, may be no.” His amendment was voted down in committee, according to reports.
The concerns cross party lines, as Republican representatives Ken Calvert and Cory Mills both voiced objections to stall progress before any ground is broken.
Defense Appropriations subcommittee chair Calvert won a provision that compels the Defense Department to first explain to Congress how each project will impact nearby communities.
Florida Republican Cory Mills sent a separate amendment to block the use of any components that the Pentagon has flagged as a national security risk. That proposition already cleared the House this week.
Michigan Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib went for the jugular in her July 23 No AI Data Centers on Federal Lands Act submission. Tlaib wants to permanently ban building and retroactive removal of any large AI data centers on any government land, including military bases.
The Michigan lawmaker cited “noise, light, air, and water pollution” along with energy cost surges as the reasons her district doesn’t want to house those facilities.
Who wants to build data centers on federal land?
Two of the proposed sites have already been conditionally awarded, with each one with nearly $2 billion, per Financial Times. Carlyle received the green light to build on roughly 1,384 acres at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. CyrusOne, a data center operator held by funds from KKR and BlackRock, also got the go-ahead for 1,201 acres at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground.
Notably, the exception is not limited to military data centers. Communities have delayed or canceled nearly $156 billion in data center plans throughout the country, per a tally from Data Center Watch.
Politico backed up Cryptopolitan’s earlier reporting on how consumer power bills have ballooned after AI data center buildouts in its assessment of the Fort Bliss site.
The Army calls it a ‘federal land penalty’
The service is fighting back. The Army told Federal News Network that Mills’ components rule would impose an “unworkable standard” and a “federal land penalty,” since it would apply demands to on-base builders that off-base developers never face, potentially driving away “world-class commercial partners” and more than $1.3 billion in private capital.
Senior Republicans agree. House Armed Services chairman Mike Rogers argued that restrictions would “impede the Army’s ongoing negotiations,” and Wisconsin’s Derrick Van Orden said blocking base projects would only push data centers onto tillable farmland. Army officials have promised net-zero water plans and power that stays off the local grid, but several Democrats say they have yet to receive a real briefing on how any of it will be enforced.
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Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), has pushed back hard against fears that artificial intelligence will destroy jobs.
Huang, whose company powers much of the AI industry, argues that AI will remove individual “tasks” rather than entire jobs, and that this will likely lead to more hiring.
What is Jensen Huang’s main argument about AI and jobs?
Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), told founders at Y Combinator’s Startup School that the panic about AI is because people can’t figure out the line between a “task” and a “job.” According to him, a task is a specific, repeatable action you do at work, like answering a customer’s question or writing a simple line of code, while the job is the larger purpose of a role, like helping customers solve problems or building new software.
Huang says the idea that AI will destroy all jobs is “exactly backward.” Rather, the technology will be used to take over many of these individual tasks, letting employees focus on the more important parts of their work and increasing their productivity.
To make his point, Huang cited radiologists who many people thought would become obsolete once AI could read medical scans. However, demand for radiologists has increased now that AI technology can help do their work faster.
Software engineers now use AI tools to write code more quickly, but instead of reducing the number of engineers needed, this efficiency means companies can tackle a bigger “backlog of ideas,” leading them to hire even more engineers.
Huang has claimed that demand for paralegals is growing “like crazy” because AI can help with research. However, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicts that paralegal jobs will see “little or no change” through 2034, partly because AI is making them more efficient.
Notably, Nvidia is now the world’s most valuable company at a $5 trillion market cap, and Huang’s own fortune has grown to $173 billion, seventh on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Huang directly countered Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, who said that AI could erase 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs. Huang referred to this as “complete nonsense.”
Amodei has since changed his tone, now focusing more on how AI could boost productivity. However, he continues to say that job losses could be a natural part of how the technology works.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has also moved away from the worst-case scenarios, saying he does not believe the industry will cause “the kind of jobs apocalypse” that some of his peers have warned about.
Does research data show that AI is stealing jobs?
The PwC 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, which analyzed over one billion job ads, shows that jobs that require specialized AI skills are growing nearly eight times faster than the overall job market. AI-skilled jobs grew by 69%, compared to just 9% for all jobs.
There is also a significant wage premium for these skills. On average, a job requiring AI skills pays 62% more.
Employer group NACE reports more than a third of entry-level postings now ask for AI skills, close to triple the share a year earlier.
For recent college graduates, the job market is tough. In early 2026, the unemployment rate for recent graduates reached 5.6%, which is 1.6 percentage points higher than three years earlier.
A brief from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research points to AI as a possible factor in this specific trend, as many entry-level jobs are made up of the kinds of tasks that AI is good at automating, such as basic data collection, analysis, and writing.
The Stanford report also found that the unemployment rate in professions most exposed to AI has risen slightly less than in low-exposure professions since 2022.
A separate report from the New York Federal Reserve shows that the unemployment rate for all college graduates (22 to 27 years old) was higher at 5.6% in March 2026, compared to 3.1% for all college graduates. Notably, last week, Uber (NYSE: UBER) cut about 10% of its customer service staff, directly citing AI as a reason for the change.
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South America’s largest economies are not waiting for a regulatory green light to press on full throttle with their crossover into digital asset alternatives, with Brazil and Argentina becoming the latest to plant their flags in the push for new financial territories.
The shift was reiterated this week as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported that crypto rails now carry a majority of Brazil’s cross-border fund transfers, around the same time that news broke of Argentine banking groups building their own peso stablecoins, even though the central bank currently has a ban in place.
Brazilians now send more crypto traditional capital
The IMF’s latest Financial System Stability Assessment of Brazil, reviewing the state of Latin America’s largest economy, came back with a headline finding that emphasized the scale of crypto’s impact. Digital assets, especially stablecoins, have become the primary mode of sending money in and out of Brazil, after steadily climbing since 2017 to overtake the run rate of conventional channels.
As for the appeal of stablecoins for companies and retail users, the IMF’s first such review of Brazil’s economy since 2018 pointed to cheaper transfers and tax advantages.
Why is the IMF cautious about Brazil adopting crypto?
The IMF also noticed correlations between stablecoin demand and economic indicators such as the S&P 500, the VIX volatility index, and Bitcoin’s price, exchange and interest rates, and tax policy shifts. Those findings, according to the fund, show how the digital asset pivot has found its place within the country’s broader economic structure.
While some cheer, the IMF has instead raised red flags about some of the areas that the Central Bank of Brazil has not covered in its supervision of virtual asset service providers. The problems that the fund raised were:
Inadequate legal protection for users
Unclear standards for handling assets held in custody
Travel Rule inadequacies
Lagging fund transfer tracing and anti-money-laundering standards
The Brazilian Congress is already working on bringing the digital asset under proper legislative coverage. Bill 4308/2024 is expected to clearly define legal boundaries for stablecoins, although there is already a domestic push not to classify them as electronic money.
Closing those gaps, the report argued, will require Brazilian regulators to share reporting duties with counterparts abroad.
Argentina’s banking giants move on stablecoins
South of the border, the appetite is for stablecoins denominated in the local currency of the third-largest economy in LATAM. Citing Iproup, two banking conglomerates are reportedly readying peso-pegged tokens aimed at institutions rather than everyday savers, for servicing treasury operations, payments triggered by on-chain events, and collateralized lending.
One of them, BIND Group, which manages more than $2 billion in assets and owns BIND Banco Industrial, is building its token through BEN, an in-house virtual asset service provider. The move tracks with reports from earlier in the month when the banking giant entered a partnership with Circle to serve institutional clients.
The other of the duo, The Petersen Group, which owns and runs several regional banks, is advancing a separate DIPE product. Its own effort comes with the support of Lirium, a crypto-as-a-service firm, and already has a whitepaper.
Will the 2022 ban affect their plan?
Argentina’s central bank has barred private banks from offering crypto services directly since May 2022. That’s why both banks are running their plans through subsidiaries.
Those workarounds may not even be necessary as the central bank is reportedly looking at lifting the ban. That path is not yet clear, though, as the country’s securities regulator blocked the argt peso stablecoin because they regarded it as a security offered without the required compliance.
Why local-currency stablecoins are the next contest
The push for home-grown tokens reflects a broader argument in the region. Writing for the World Economic Forum, Ripio founder and CEO Sebastián Serrano noted that dollar-backed coins such as Tether’s USDT have taken hold in Latin America as a hedge against inflation, but warned that leaning on foreign-issued digital dollars erodes the tools policymakers use to manage their own money supply. His pitch is for stablecoins backed by domestic currencies instead.
The scale explains the stakes. The Digital Chamber reported $324 billion in stablecoin transaction volume across Latin America in 2025, an 89% jump year over year, with stablecoins accounting for over 90% of crypto flows in Brazil and more than 60% in Argentina. The same report found 71% of Latin American institutions already using stablecoins for cross-border payments, the highest rate of any region.
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The South Korean KOSPI index had its eighth circuit breaker for 2026, after another 8% loss. The index is closely watched for signals on the AI and semiconductor trades.
The South Korean KOSPI index hit another circuit breaker for the eighth time this year. The index broke down along with other markets. KOSPI extended this year’s crash, coinciding with market-wide weakness.
KOSPI erased 520B Korean won, or around 360B US dollars. Additionally, some of the South Korean stock positions were used as collateral, leading to more potential losses as leverage unravels. During the market crash of July 9, some considered the drop a final move for KOSPI, but the index continued to slide, dropping by over 20% in the past weeks.
KOSPI erased over 28% in the past month, triggering another circuit breaker. | Source: Google Finance
Additionally, the SK Hynix index is down 50% from its June high, due to weakness in the memory stocks sector. Multiple memory producers fell after the Changxin Memory Technology (CMXT) IPO on Monday.
The South Korean market responded to a drawdown of US chip stocks and a 4.4% Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) drop. Micron (Nasdaq: MU) and SanDisk (Nasdaq: SNDK) were also among the top losers, down 5% and 10%.
Asian markets followed, with a 4% drawdown for Nikkei. At this time, BTC also dropped from its new price range, and dipped to $63,000.
Why did KOSPI drop?
KOSPI has behaved with extreme volatility in 2026, on a mix of retail trading and the influence of semiconductor stocks. As Cryptopolitan reported, just before the crash, KOSPI was showing signs of recovery and a close in the green.
Yet the AI and chip stock recovery was fragile. The trigger for the drop was the recent news of Nvidia backing OpenAI with a $250B backstop of financing a new data center. Nvidia will also set aside $350B for OpenAI to purchase its own chips, and the market priced in the ‘circular financing’ of the AI economy.
Those financing deals are pushing up the price of debt, calling into question the viability of AI scaling.
Since Samsung makes up 50% of the KOSPI index, the drop was rapid, causing liquidations and leading to the circuit breaker.
What does KOSPI indicate for the crypto market?
As of 2026, BTC lost its correlation to AI and chip stocks, moving significantly below the trend. The unraveling of KOSPI may bring some liquidity back into crypto if the AI narrative weakens.
The increased volatility of KOSPI is also not a problem for crypto traders. On-chain exchanges have taken on the challenge. Dextera Labs mentioned the possibility of launching a KOSPI-based perpetual futures market, potentially betting on other dramatic events. A futures market on KOSPI may allow traders to speculate on an eventual short squeeze, or a further drop.
On-chain trading for KOSPI would be viable due to the strong directional moves of the index. Currently, the market is still waiting for the end of de-leveraging. Currently, KOSPI is also waiting for signals on whether it will see liquidity outflows or merely the repricing of risk in AI and memory stocks.
Speculation on KOSPI has also replaced token and altcoin trading, which remained popular for retail traders in South Korea.
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The digital assets sector isn’t receiving much interest from wealthy asset holders across Asia. While high-net-worth clients in Malaysia and Singapore are still holding onto crypto assets in their portfolios, they are directing new funds towards gold, bank deposits, or alternative financial investments.
Cryptocurrency investment funds have suffered their highest outflows of 2026 at the same time when gold registered its best quarter ever, which could point to investors behaving much more defensively than before. Instead of selling digital assets completely, they seem to be opting for postponing purchasing cryptocurrencies in favor of more traditional safe havens.
Where the fresh money is going instead
According to the new survey from HSBC, there are no signs of investors fleeing from cryptocurrencies. Rich investors seem to be sticking to their current investments, while investing their new money in gold, cash savings, and a variety of other assets.
As HSBC specified:
“Investors are putting the core of their portfolios first, balancing protection and growth, and diversifying with intent. Allocations continue to shift across cash, equities and gold. But cash holdings are playing a clear role in giving investors a buffer to rebalance, deploy or hold steady as conditions change.” — HSBC Global Affluent Investor Snapshot 2026
It mentioned that investors are expected to raise allocation to gold and fixed deposits in the coming year while continuing with the same level of cryptocurrency exposure. Cash, on the other hand, is still regarded as dry powder for potential opportunities at a later time rather than a sign that investors are retreating from risk altogether.
The larger market shows a similar trend. In their report, the World Gold Council stated that gold demand reached 1,231 tonnes in Q1 of 2026, which is an increase of 2% year-on-year. Changes in bullion prices brought the demand value to an unprecedented record of $193 billion. In addition, the demand for coins and bars rose significantly to 474 tonnes, which is 42% more than in the previous year, mainly because of buyers from Asia.
$4.21 billion has walked out of crypto funds
Institutional investor flows showed the same cautious sentiment.
As per CoinShares data, digital asset investment products had approximately $1.67 billion in outflows for the week ending May 31. This marks the third consecutive week of withdrawals and the second highest weekly outflow of this year. Overall, investors withdrew a total of $4.21 billion over the past three weeks.
The total amount of outflows from Bitcoin was $1.438 billion and from Ether $257 million. Overall, assets under management dropped to $141 billion from $148 billion a week before, their lowest level since early April. According to CoinShares analyst James Butterfill, the decrease in assets can be attributed to the geopolitical situation in Iran, which had a bigger impact than any positive news regarding cryptocurrency legislation in the USA.
Gold’s record quarter tells the other half
The same geopolitical situation has greatly increased the demand for gold.
According to the World Gold Council, the LBMA gold price reached a record quarter average after hitting successive maximum values. Many central banks behaved in the same manner, purchasing 244 tons of gold by net, which is an increase of 3 percent compared to the same period a year earlier.
The Council expects that geopolitical uncertainty, ongoing inflation, and limited investment opportunities will continue to contribute to the demand for gold. The purchases of gold bars and coins will be mainly performed by Asian investors through 2026.
Risk rotation at a glance
In summary, the statistics indicate a wider shift of investment portfolios instead of a wholesale abandonment of digital currency.
Crypto investments declined by $4.21 billion over the three weeks while the world’s need for gold grew to 1,231 tons valued at record-breaking $193 billion. Investments in physical assets remained particularly high as demand for gold bars and coins was up by 42% in comparison with the previous year, and central banks bought an additional 244 tons of gold.

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Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, stated on Monday that the company has never attempted to prohibit open-weight AI models, a rebuttal directed at regulators considering new regulations and at competitors that claim that Claude has made use of safety and security dilemmas to defend itself.
This clarification is important due to the fact that Washington is in the process of determining the extent to which the regulations will be implemented. The Senate has put forth a bill that could result in a federal limit on open-weight models, which are a category of models developers can download and use on their machines. The outcome of the debate will influence which lab will gain a competitive advantage, what kind of models companies will have access to the market, and to what extent various closed-model providers will dominate it.
The chokepoints Amodei wants regulated instead
In his blog post, Amodei did not call for an outright ban but proposed three more specific suggestions for policymakers. For one, he wants stricter regulation of advanced chip technology and computing devices sent to authoritarian nations such as China. He also wants the prohibitions against industrial “distillation” to be strict, which means training a new model with the outputs of a more advanced model. Lastly, he wants the mandatory testing of powerful models in order for their safety to be guaranteed.
According to Amodei, the ban would only detract from the real danger, as, as he put it, “bad actors are unlikely to be legitimate US businesses.” Amodei admitted to Axios that banning Chinese open-source should help keep laboratories like his own from competition, but maintained that “that has never been my goal.” As noted by Bloomberg Law, his primary concern is with authoritarian states developing AI that is superior to US products.
The letter Anthropic would not sign
It came in response to a significant public rejection. As per reports, more than two dozen companies, including Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft, signed an earlier letter titled “Open Weights and American AI Leadership” in which the companies asked lawmakers not to impose restrictions on the technology, as stated by Business Insider. Over the weekend, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceX joined the group, so by Monday, Anthropic was the only major firm not to have done so.
Silicon Valley has caught on. David Sacks, the venture capitalist and ex-Trump administration AI advisor, has alerted the industry on X that it must “watch these guys like a hawk.”
The entire tech industry (save for Anthropic) has come out in favor of open source AI.
So what happens next? Will Anthropic change its lobbying efforts? Not likely. Now the gaslighting begins:
“Nobody is trying to ban open source.”
“We just want to limit who can use it.”
“We…
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) July 26, 2026
In turn, Benchmark’s Bill Gurley stated that Anthropic was shielding its “corporate economic strategy.” Kai-Fu Lee, who founded the Chinese open-model startup 01.AI, said that the person who didn’t sign was “far more interesting than who did.”
From a shared China worry to a public split
The division is more recent than the underlying issue. Cryptopolitan reported that closed-model competitors have been uniting against each other in Washington for quite some time. In July, Axios observed how OpenAI and Anthropic joined forces to raise awareness among legislators about powerful Chinese open-weight models, a stance that has drawn criticism from people such as Sacks, who attack it as a possible case of regulatory capture that would solidify the influence of huge companies.
The catalyst for the debate was Kimi K3, an open-weight model developed by the Chinese startup Moonshot, which rivaled US models at a much lower price. Some people accused Moonshot of using Anthropic’s Fable model to train Kimi K3 through a process called distillation, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent proposed sanctions against Chinese models found to be copying the US ones. Following this, OpenAI and Google, Anthropic’s two greatest competitors, signed an open letter, leaving Anthropic alone and raising questions about whether Anthropic wanted a ban to defend its commercial interests.
What Amodei conceded and what he rejected
Amodei attempted to walk a fine line. He acknowledged that open models boost accessibility, enable competition, and put customers in control; he even characterized open models without risky capabilities as “a public good.” However, he rejected the key safety assertion of the letter, claiming that he does not believe that open weights allow defenders to build defenses easily or that increased access is more helpful to defenders than attackers. In his view, any capable model can weaponize pandemic-level viruses, while creating a defense takes a long time.
Currently, the divide is the most evident one in the industry. Nvidia took this occasion to announce the formation of the Open Secure AI Alliance, supported by Microsoft, SpaceX, Hugging Face, among others, asserting that open technologies are protected by law and that total prohibition would give too much power to a few closed suppliers. Now the ball is in the hands of legislators who are yet to develop standards that would determine the answer to the questions addressed above.

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The Trump administration is close to establishing a national framework for artificial intelligence, according to The Information. The initiative may cause a substantial change in the regulation of artificial intelligence, not only in the USA, but also in the global tech sector. This framework will take AI policy-making to Washington, clearing the way for the pile of state rules that the developers have to face nowadays.
This is significant because many of the best AI technologies are developed by American companies. The regulations that are enacted in Washington will undoubtedly have an effect on the work of businesses and other authorities outside of American borders. However, one vital issue still remains open: how will open-source AI be handled by the U.S. government?
Washington wants one rulebook instead of fifty
The main focus of the issue is the White House’s National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, which was published on March 20, 2026. Though the title might suggest otherwise, the report is not a regulation or an executive order. The experts from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET) think that the framework is merely a legislative proposal for Congress and cannot be considered a working policy.
According to CSET analysts Mina Narayanan, Jessica Ji, and Vikram Venkatram, the document should be viewed as a starting point for negotiations. Instead of assuming Congress will accept the framework as is, they see it as a way for the administration to express its priorities and still allow Congress to create its own AI laws.
The core idea behind this proposal is simple: to abolish the many AI regulations in different states and come up with a single federal standard. The initiative was based on an executive order that was issued in December 2025, which directed White House officials to develop recommendations regarding a nationwide policy on AI.
This initiative follows the lack of progress by Congress on proposals to prohibit states from enforcing new AI laws or require certain federal funding to be conditional on states limiting their own AI regulations. These proposals were an indication of the concern that companies that build AI systems could have to deal with a plethora of different rules.
This issue is no longer hypothetical. Colorado’s AI Act has put in place rules preventing algorithmic discrimination in high-risk AI. Texas has also reportedly announced its own transparency and consumer protection rules, and California continues to work on issues related to AI legislation for frontier models and AI-generated content. Although the approaches differ, they all add to an increasingly fragmented regulatory landscape.
The White House claims that a unified federal framework would provide developers with more transparent guidelines while dealing with such issues as child safety, AI-generated deepfakes, and innovative opportunities provided by regulatory sandboxes. If Congress takes this step, businesses will be able to spend less time adjusting their products to comply with each state’s laws and more time developing them.
Trump’s AI strategy goes beyond Congress
Legislation passed by Congress is just one component of the administration’s plan. On June 2, 2026, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14409 titled, “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security,” which called on federal agencies to bolster cybersecurity for advanced AI technologies.
The directive mandates an AI cybersecurity clearinghouse, run in conjunction with the private sector, to accelerate the identification of software flaws. In addition, the directive establishes the idea of “covered frontier models”, referring to the best AI systems, and requires agencies to implement a plan for safely using them.
The legislative framework and the executive order both reaffirm the administration’s core message of maintaining the United States’ leadership in AI while boosting its cybersecurity capabilities.
Open-source is still the open question
The biggest area of uncertainty is what happens with open-weight AI models. On one hand, the framework discusses important subjects such as children’s safety, digital identity, deepfakes, and innovation. On the other hand, it does not provide a clear definition of how open-source AI should be regulated. The Information thinks that this is one of the major unresolved issues of the proposal.
The controversy arises as countries around the world place greater emphasis on advanced AI. The International AI Safety Report 2026, led by Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio and authored by more than 100 experts from over 30 countries, concludes that increasingly capable AI systems require stronger governance. The report also notes that open-weight AI models create distinctive governance challenges because, once released, they can be freely modified and redistributed, making it more difficult to ensure that safety mitigations are consistently adopted.
For AI developers, the current focus might not be open-source but rather on regulatory clarity. A federal government system, which overrules state regulations, can transform various compliance rules into a single national standard and can thus minimize expenses for companies running businesses in every state. On the other hand, this means that states will have fewer opportunities to develop their own AI protection measures before the federal authorities adopt new regulations.
It is still unclear if Congress will finally approve the proposal. However, even if it is just an offer, this policy framework indicates that the authorities in Washington would like to become the main authority in charge of regulating AI technologies. If American companies still produce the majority of AI technologies globally, it is obvious that the final decision will affect not only US laws, but also rules to be adhered to by many more developers worldwide.

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The number of tokenized stock holders since the start of the month has grown by around 68.5% from 554.9K to 934.8K. The biggest reason for this jump can be attributed to the arrival of the Robinhood Chain which now has more tokenized stock holders than any other network. The latest data from Token Terminal shows that there are 329.2K asset holders on the network, ahead of the long standing leaders in this category, Solana at 281.4K and BNB Chain at 214.6K. Robinhood Chain’s mainnet went live on July 1 and in under four weeks, it has managed to topple Solana, a network that spent most of the past year in pole position within this category.
Source: Token Terminal
The holder chart above tells you where the growth came from. Solana led the sector throughout last year and was the network alongside BNB Chain and Ethereum that gradually grew the tokenized stock holder base. Then July comes and a green block appears almost vertically. Robinhood Chain is now nearly a third of the entire sector by holder count from a standing start.
Distribution Won This, Not The Chain
Robinhood Chain’s rapid growth wasn’t because it shipped better infrastructure compared to other existing networks. It took the lead by owning the front door. By front door, we mean the massive existing user base under the Robinhood umbrella. Tokenized equities were dropped into an established brokerage app that already had around 28 million users, most of whom never had to think about a wallet, a bridge or a gas fee to end up holding one.
The other networks within the tokenized stock market have to convince a large group of existing crypto users to buy stocks. Robinhood, on the other hand, only had to convince stock users to click a button, and that directly shows up onchain as a holder number.
A 35% Holder Share Sitting on $44 Million
The lead is wide but It is also thin. Robinhood accounts for about 35% of tokenized-stock holders but only around $44 million in assets on the chain according to data from DWF Labs. Ondo, by comparison, sits near $857 million with a fraction of the wallets.
The math is not flattering when you run it. Average holdings per wallet on Robinhood Chain work out to a little over $130. Retail accounts opening small positions in tokenized Tesla or Nvidia will produce exactly that pattern. Institutional and accredited flow, which is what Ondo has been building toward, produces the opposite one. Holder count is a distribution metric. It is not a capital metric, and the two rarely move together at this stage.
Memecoins Still Take the Volume
Earlier this month the chain’s story was memecoins and speculation, and that has not gone away. Trading volume on Robinhood Chain still skews heavily toward memecoin activity, with tokenized equities growing on top of that base rather than replacing it. Both things are true at once. The speculative layer is what brought early liquidity and attention, and the equity layer is what gives the chain a reason to exist beyond it.
What happens next depends on whether average balances rise. If holders stay at $130 a wallet, Robinhood has built a very large, very shallow user base and the asset numbers will keep favoring Ondo. If those balances climb even modestly across 329,000 wallets, the ranking that matters starts to move too.
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The United States Senate has moved the crypto Clarity Act to the back of its schedule, and the slowdown has stalled an important agreement between the crypto industry and the banking lobby on the possibility for stablecoins to yield money to their investors.
The aforementioned agreement is incorporated in the legislation. Banks have spent months negotiating to keep stablecoin issuers from offering interest-like returns on their stablecoin, which may lead to a loss of deposits from banks.
The resulting provisions stop providers from offering returns for simply holding stablecoins while still allowing them to reward customers for engaging in activities that are not equivalent to deposit interest, according to a research by Galaxy. As long as the voting is delayed, this arrangement is not signed into law.
Russia sanctions and a senator’s funeral jump the line
It appears that Senate Majority Leader John Thune has prioritized other issues. It was reported that Thune began the process to approve several nominations on Monday and will tackle a package of sanctions against Russia at the Tuesday night Senate session, at which point he will initiate the clock on cloture.
In accordance with Senate rules, the Senate only allows one bill to be debated at a time, meaning that market structure legislation can only proceed once those particular bills either pass or hit the deadline.
The measure against Russia that would target leadership in Moscow and impose tariffs on trade partners is now known under the name of the late senator Lindsey Graham, who supported the initiative. The funeral of Graham will take place this week, monopolizing the Senate on Tuesday and Wednesday both in Washington and South Carolina.
What can be expected is that the Clarity Act will not be voted upon until next week, just before the Senate starts its summer break on August 8. If this opportunity is missed, the next one does not come until September.
The ethics provision still blocking 60 votes
The larger issue is that the legislation has yet to be finalized. Negotiators are still grappling with a rule, supported by the Democrats, which prohibits high-ranking officials, including President Donald Trump, from having any connections to the crypto industry. While Trump indicated last week that he would comply by the new rule, but the Democrats rejected the proposal stating it would leave his crypto holdings safe.
The battle has taken on a form beyond just conventional rivalry. Axios reports that a number of progressive associations including Indivisible and Demand Progress have sent a letter to every Democratic senator criticizing Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who is currently trying to negotiate a compromise to resolve the issue. It is evident that money lies at the root of the issue, as Fairshake, which is a super PAC involved in the issue, claims that it has at its disposal total of $125 million.
As negotiations have reached the White House thanks to Republican senators Bernie Moreno, Cynthia Lummis, and Thom Tillis, it is still necessary for the bill to get the support of 60 senators. Until now, only Democratic representatives Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks have approved of the original proposal of the Banking Committee.
A 616-page bill that still needs Democrats
The legislation being debated by the senators is extensive. According to Galaxy Research, the draft released recently spans 616 pages and consists of 104 sections and four divisions.
In a previous report, Cryptopolitan informed about the content of the bill that combines the bills offered by Banking and Agriculture committees as two major parts, presents ethics limitations, a law enforcement title, amendments of last year’s GENIUS Act, and some other negotiated provisions. Galaxy evaluated the chances of the bill approval at 30%, and the most radical opponent of the bill, Senator Elizabeth Warren heavily criticized the current version of the bill.
Officials from various states are also opposing the legislation. According to New York Attorney General Letitia James, in her testimony before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the new legislation would transfer oversight from states to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, thus limiting states’ abilities to regulate scams. James’s office states that it has received three times as many complaints about scams in the past three years.
What happens if the window closes
If Clarity fails to get through this session, there is still hope for the industry in the form of the ongoing implementation of GENIUS Act and rulemaking processes at the SEC and CFTC.
Even if the Senate passes the bill, it will still have to make its way through the House that will be paralyzed by conflict among Republicans, and then subsequently to Trump who is known for refusing to sign bills until Congress agrees on the new set of requirements for verifying voters’ identities.
In the following week, we may see the first moves towards cloture before Congress goes on break. This may represent the highest level of achievement for lobbies promoting crypto before September.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has consistently argued that regulatory clarity would accelerate institutional adoption rather than merely benefit crypto firms.
A comprehensive federal framework for payment stablecoins would strengthen the U.S. dollar and improve the competitiveness of the U.S. financial system.
Allaire explains the market consequences (“institutional adoption remains on hold until Congress provides regulatory certainty”). Instead of banks vs crypto
legislation delayed becomes institutional adoption delayed. The story from a conflict between banks and crypto firms to a broader question of whether delayed legislation is postponing Wall Street’s deeper participation in digital assets.
The Bank Policy Institute has argued that stablecoin issuers performing bank-like functions should face comparable regulatory requirements. The Senate’s delay leaves unresolved whether Congress will eventually require stablecoin issuers offering yield-like products to compete under rules similar to those governing banks.
Implications to the crypto market
Circle welcomed Senate passage of the GENIUS Act, with Allaire saying:
“The GENIUS Act establishes clear rules that will help modernize the financial system while protecting consumers and supporting innovation.”
Galaxy’s head of research Alex Thorn provided one of the strongest market-impact assessments:
“As the Senate calendar tightens and a lack of progress in negotiations makes passage less likely than several weeks ago.”
He also wrote that a 60-vote bill that still needs a merged Banking-Agriculture text, a motion to proceed, floor debate, an amendment process, and then House action… the runway is quickly declining into just a matter of weeks.
Alex Thorn also says legislative momentum has slowed because “the Senate calendar tightens” and the time available for negotiations is “quickly declining into just a matter of weeks,” even as he still assigns the bill roughly even odds of becoming law this year.

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Kalshi and Polymarket obtained a temporary court order that is stopping Minnesota from applying its ban on prediction markets, enabling two of the fastest growing trading services to keep operating as the sector record-high growth.
The ruling will have wider implications for cryptocurrency. Polymarket performs onchain margin settlement using stablecoin. In addition, cryptocurrency-related trades account for a significant proportion of the trading carried out by both companies above.
Therefore, the state-level ban will not only affect two companies— it will also determine how far states can go in regulating the markets that increasingly intertwine with digital assets at a time when regulators are still trying to determine whether prediction markets are subject to the regulation of derivatives law or fall under gambling regulations.
Why a state ruling reaches into crypto
Prediction markets allow people to get involved in trading through contracts related to future events. The cost of the contracts reflects the probability of the prediction happening, as stated by Pew Research Center.
Crypto has become one of the industry’s largest trading categories. Pew estimates digital asset contracts account for roughly 20% of Polymarket’s trading volume and about 7% of Kalshi’s since July 2024, behind only sports and politics.
This makes it clear that Minnesota’s lawsuit is important not just to the two companies. Polymarket’s move to a high-performance central limit order book (CLOB v2) and its launch of a new USDC-backed token, called pUSD, show a trend in the way leading prediction markets are changing into more advanced crypto-native trading infrastructure.
As these platforms become faster, more liquid, and better integrated with blockchain-based settlement, legal rulings in Minnesota have greater significance for the whole digital asset ecosystem. In blocking the implementation of Minnesota’s ruling, the court allows for the continuation of a big amount of crypto-native trading activity in Minnesota.
A sector that has outgrown its niche
The fast growth of the industry explains why the case has gotten more attention. Data from Artemis indicates that the trading volume of prediction markets remained between $25 and $30 billion every month in the first five months of 2026, and after that, it reached a historical record of $52.8 billion in June.
For the month of July, the month-to-date trading volume reached $50.9 billion, which means that trade activity is high even after the FIFA World Cup, which was one of the biggest trading events of the year.
Unlike in previous years when political events and developments have taken center stage, this year’s developments in prediction markets have been driven by sports events, macroeconomic expectations, the activities of the central bank and developments in the crypto markets.
According to Galaxy Research, the cumulative lifetime volume of prediction markets has broken past $150 billion. Bernstein analysts mentioned by Galaxy believe that if regulations improve, prediction markets may be worth as much as $1 trillion by the year 2030.
However, whether or not this happens depends on an important issue that is currently being tested out in Minnesota and various other states: market access.
Kalshi pulls ahead as Polymarket eyes US onshoring
Competition has shifted in favor of Kalshi as well. According to Token Terminal data, the regulated exchange has taken hold of 61.1% of the cumulative prediction market notional volume in the last five years, having $159.5 billion opposed to $101.7 billion of Polymarket. Kalshi made $39.5 billion in the last 30 days in notional volume compared to Polymarket’s $8.7 billion volume, which highlights the exchange’s momentum lately.
The main difference between them is regulation. Kalshi is a Designated Contract Market regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), whereas Polymarket does not have CFTC oversight of its international platform.
According to estimates from Galaxy, Polymarket’s U.S. operations generated about $1.3 billion worth of trades in April versus about $9 billion on its international platform. Also, it has been reported that Polymarket is currently pursuing broader regulatory approval in the U.S. for its flagship platform.
Thus, the controversy that originated in Minnesota is making an impact beyond the state concerned. If judges persist in siding with federal regulation of prediction exchanges instead of state regulation of gambling, prediction markets may become one of the key areas where cryptocurrencies achieve broad acceptance using existing regular market regulation as opposed to specific cryptocurrency laws. If states win in the end, however, the market may face many obstacles as it operates amid conflicting regulations.
What traders should watch next
The ruling by the court is provisional, and the larger issue of whether states are permitted to restrict federally regulated prediction markets is still open. Traders will be interested to see what Minnesota’s next step is, whether other states will enact similar restrictions, and how Polymarket will succeed in expanding its regulatory reach in the U.S.
The outcome could shape more than prediction markets. As stablecoins and digital asset contracts become increasingly embedded in these platforms, the case may influence how institutional investors view blockchain-based financial infrastructure. The Minnesota dispute could ultimately help determine whether federal derivatives oversight or state gambling laws define the next stage of this rapidly expanding market.

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Magic Labs has agreed to sell its embedded wallet business to Kraken’s parent company, Payward.
The deal will be closed in the coming weeks, subject to customary closing conditions. No figure was mentioned; however, Magic Labs’ CEO Sean Li said the acquisition will be through an asset sale.
Magic Labs’ wallet business in question has created over 60 million wallets and is used by popular names like Polymarket and WalletConnect.
The business will operate independently of Payward, although customers will be serviced by Payward, starting August 1st, according to Li.
Payward plans to integrate the wallet technology to expand its Payward Services’ product suite.
Magic Labs said it’s parting with the wallet business to focus on Newton Protocol, its authorization layer for on-chain finance.
“This transition allows us to put our full energy behind Newton, the authorization layer for onchain finance, while the wallet business moves to a team committed to serving our customers,” said Li.
As part of the transition, the company is rebranded to Newton Labs.
Today we announced two decisions: 1) we've sold our wallet business to Payward, the company behind Kraken. And 2) Magic Labs is becoming Newton Labs.
Onboarding the world was part one of our mission. Securing the capital that follows is part two.
Here's a video on why. 👇 https://t.co/UhU7GLErKC pic.twitter.com/4ezZfcoVkX
— Sean Li (@seanli) July 27, 2026
Payward’s shopping spree continues
The Magic Labs’ deal extends a run of acquisitions made by Kraken’s parent company so far in 2026.
Payward closed its acquisition of Reap Technologies Holdings Limited (“Reap”), a Hong Kong stablecoin payments and card-issuing firm it had first announced on May 7.
The transaction was structured as a cash-and-stock sale, worth a $600 million.
In April, Payward had also agreed to pay up to $550 million in cash and stock for Bitnomial, a US derivatives platform that holds all three licenses required to run a full-stack derivatives business, as Cryptopolitan reported.
The deal was said to have valued Payward at $20 billion.
While Payward has continued to shop for crypto businesses, earlier plans to take Kraken public remain halted.
The company filed a draft S-1 registration statement with the SEC in November for a potential U.S. listing. However, the move was halted in March, with Kraken citing difficult market conditions.
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Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) is putting money and hardware behind Safe Superintelligence, the lab started by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
The deal gives Ilya more access to Nvidia’s graphics chips and cuts the lab’s earlier dependence on processors from Alphabet’s Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL).
Nvidia called the funding “substantial,” but neither side shared the amount. The company agreed after reviewing work that Safe Superintelligence has kept mostly hidden. Financial terms remain private, and neither company gave a timeline for hardware deliveries.
The companies said the hardware could multiply the startup’s computing capacity by an “order of magnitude.”
Safe Superintelligence had primarily trained its systems with Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs. It will now add a lot of Nvidia GPUs, which are used for huge AI training sessions. The deal also gives Nvidia another high-profile research customer as chip companies compete for future demand.
Nvidia brings another former OpenAI leader onto its hardware platform
Nvidia used a similar deal in March with Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former technology chief. Mira co-founded Thinking Machines Lab in 2025. Nvidia invested in that company in March, and Thinking Machines released its first model this month using Nvidia chips.
Safe Superintelligence was formed in 2024. Ilya built the company around one goal: creating what he calls “safe superintelligence.” That means AI able to do anything humans can do without endangering them. Its plan is a “straight-shot” research effort rather than a normal product schedule filled with public releases.
Safe Superintelligence raised about $2 billion from firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. By late last year, the business had reached a valuation of around $30 billion without providing a public model or specific product strategy. Its price was primarily based on Ilya’s reputation and previous work at OpenAI.
The lab has kept nearly all technical details private. Ilya said its scientists are “focused on overlooked aspects of how the human brain functions.” Nvidia was given a closer look before committing capital and chips. The deal gives the lab another source of computing power.
Apple retakes the top valuation as Nvidia and other chip names fall
The announcement came on a weak day for Nvidia shares. Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) dropped 5% on Monday and finished with a market value of $4.77 trillion. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) gained 1%, lifting its value to $4.95 trillion and putting it ahead of Nvidia for the first time since April 2025.
Nvidia had been the world’s most valuable company since June 2025, when it passed Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). Its valuation briefly reached $5 trillion in October. So far in 2026, Nvidia stock has risen only 4%, while Apple has climbed 24%.
Apple has spent less on building its own AI data centers. It has chosen to rent capacity instead. Investors have favored that approach as concern grows over the huge bills tied to AI construction. Nvidia’s sales are still in their third year of strong AI-led growth, but some money has gone toward memory makers and other suppliers that benefit from data center demand.
Those companies include Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU), SK Hynix (KRX: 000660), and SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK). Apple will publish fiscal third-quarter results on Thursday. The report is expected to show the financial effect of the global memory shortage linked to AI demand. Apple raised Mac and iPad prices in June after memory costs increased.
Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 262.83 points, or 0.51%, and closed at 52,210.08. The S&P 500 gained 0.02% to end at 7,413.18. The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.18% and settled at 24,932.08.
Chip stocks cut some early losses but still finished lower. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ: SMH) lost more than 2% after also falling on Friday. Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) dropped 5%, Teradyne (NASDAQ: TER) fell 4%, and Micron declined about 2%.
Oil also fell after the United States and Iran paused attacks. September Brent crude futures sank 8.7% to $88.36 per barrel. West Texas Intermediate futures lost 7.5% and closed at $82.61 per barrel.
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Circle (NYSE: CRCL) has announced that it has acquired fundamental assets from IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) blockchain portfolio, a purchase the issuer of USDC says makes it the biggest holder of blockchain patents in the United States.
The portfolio comes with over 680 patent families and close to 1,000 issued patents worldwide, as in Circle’s press release.
Beyond core blockchain technology, the patents touch banking, financial services, insurance, enterprise infrastructure, supply-chain verification, and secure cloud operations.
Circle did not disclose the cost of the acquisition. Also, it is not yet disclosed if IBM kept any licensing rights.
Circle’s general counsel and corporate secretary, Sarah Wilson, who mentioned in a statement that IBM has been a pioneer in technological innovation, stated that intellectual property is critical to advancing their “mission and expanding adoption of on-chain infrastructure.”
Where will Circle be applying the patents?
Circle stated that the IP will back its existing suite, which includes USDC, the Circle Payments Network, and Arc, the company’s enterprise blockchain. It also named financial tools built for AI agents, an area Circle has pushed through its Agent Stack products. The two companies also added that they plan to look at further commercial deals together.
The acquisition reshuffles a small league table. IBM ranked among the top US blockchain patent holders before the sale. A December 2025 study by patent analytics firm PatSnap put IBM at 790 patents, level with Advanced New Technologies and Bank of America. The latest acquisition of most of IBM’s patents pushes Circle past its rivals.
Circle received its first patent, covering parallel blockchain data processing, in December 2023 and had earlier joined the LOT Network, a group that shields members from patent-assertion firms.
How is the market reacting to Circle’s acquisition of IBM’s blockchain portfolio?
Investors nudged both stocks up in premarket trading. Circle shares rose 2.5%, with IBM up 1.6%.
The bump lands against a rough year for Circle stock. Yahoo Finance reported CRCL down 66% over the trailing 12 months to $62.36, while IBM had slipped 18% to $214.19 on July 27. Circle’s slide follows a turbulent 2025 in which the stock swung from roughly $81 to a $293 peak before giving most of it back.
Why the timing lines up
The patent deal fits a run of moves that push Circle further into regulated finance. On July 10, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted final approval for Circle to set up a national trust bank, operating as Circle National Trust, which will offer custody for digital assets.
In May, Circle raised $222 million selling Arc tokens ahead of that blockchain’s launch, landing a $3 billion network valuation.
Owning IBM’s patents gives Circle a defensive and offensive asset as it competes for the infrastructure layer beneath stablecoin payments.
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China’s Ministry of Commerce has told the United States to stop threatening to impose sanctions on Chinese artificial intelligence companies.
The ministry has warned that it will take “all necessary measures” to defend its interests if Washington acts against them.
Why did the U.S. sanction China’s AI?
A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce said the continuous sanction threats from the United States lack any factual or legal grounding and amount to what China calls “AI hegemony.”
Senior U.S. officials reportedly want to investigate Chinese labs over the alleged “distillation” of advanced American models and might sanction them on claims of intellectual-property theft.
The same spokesperson argues that several of the Chinese models shipped at roughly the same time as leading U.S. systems and already rank among the best in certain areas, including front-end coding. Innovation, the spokesperson added, belongs to no single country.
China’s sharpest point is that many U.S. AI firms have distilled Chinese models during research and training, according to the Ministry of Commerce. The ministry also noted that close to 200 U.S. startups have asked their own government not to cut off access to Chinese open-source models, arguing a cutoff would blunt their competitiveness, as Cryptopolitan reported.
A government spokesperson also previously dismissed the theft allegations, calling them an unfounded “smear” rooted in prejudice.
Beijing closed by suggesting both countries honor a consensus reached by the two nations’ leaders.
Why is the money moving to Chinese models?
Cryptopolitan reported that Chinese models now account for 46.4% of routed token traffic on OpenRouter, a platform that lets developers swap between systems, against 35.7% for US-built models. DeepSeek alone contributes 17.6% of that total as of July 2026. A Hugging Face study published March 16, 2026, found Chinese open-source models made up 41% of all open-source model downloads.
The reasons for this massive adoption of Chinese technology are that its compute runs far cheaper, and the U.S. export limits that were imposed earlier in 2026 on frontier models such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 created openings that foreign systems filled.
Following Moonshot AI’s launch of Kimi K3 and developers’ claims that the model’s performance is close to Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, offered at a far lower price, the U.S. has been considering new measures against Chinese technology.
OpenAI’s most recent valuation stood at $852 billion and Anthropic’s at $965 billion, against a reported roughly $30 billion for Moonshot.
Cryptopolitan reported July 20 that the U.S. is likely to impose new procurement rules, renew its threats to add Chinese labs to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, and apply public pressure on American companies that use Chinese models. The Entity List already restricts hundreds of Chinese firms from buying U.S. goods without a license.
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Emorya has launched its AI Health Module inside the live app, marking a major product update for the Web3 health and fitness platform as it continues to move beyond its original move-to-earn foundation.
The new module brings AI-powered food scanning into the Emorya app, allowing users to scan meals, analyze what they eat and add calorie intake data directly into their daily health tracking. The feature is now connected to the app’s existing calorie burn system, creating a more complete calorie balance experience where users can compare what they consume against what they burn through activity.
Why Emorya is launching its AI Health Module
This is an important step for Emorya because it changes the app from a movement-focused rewards platform into a broader health tracking product. Instead of only recording activity, the app can now begin to connect both sides of the daily health equation.
Users can see calories burned, calories consumed, macronutrient targets and body progress inside one interface, supported by a visual human-body system designed to make the information easier to understand.
Inside the updated experience, users are shown their daily calorie burn progress alongside their calorie intake target. The app also displays macronutrient categories including protein, carbohydrates and fats, while allowing users to update their weight and scan food directly from the same screen. This gives the product a clearer daily use case and brings Emorya closer to the type of health app experience mainstream users already understand.
Emorya is expanding its product foundation
The launch follows a wider rebuild of the Emorya app, which has included a new user interface, improved user experience, better speed, stronger analytics and a more structured product foundation. These updates give the app a cleaner base for the AI module and help move the platform towards a more accessible consumer experience.
For Web3 health apps, that accessibility is becoming increasingly important. Early move-to-earn products often placed the reward mechanism at the center of the user journey, which appealed to crypto-native users but did not always create a simple experience for broader audiences.
Emorya’s latest update points in a different direction by putting health utility first and allowing the Web3 reward layer to support the product from underneath.
According to Emorya CEO Oliviu Jurjica, the launch of the AI Health Module represents a major milestone in the project’s development.
“It is extremely exciting to see Emorya reach this stage. In the beginning, the app was much simpler, focused mainly on movement tracking and rewarding users for activity. That foundation was important, but the vision was always much bigger.
Over the last phase of development, we have rebuilt the app with a new UI, improved UX, better speed, stronger analytics and more control across the ecosystem. Now, with the AI module approved and live in the app, users can scan their food, analyse what they eat, track calorie intake and compare it live against what they burn through a visual human-body system inside the app.
This changes what Emorya is. It is no longer just a crypto project or a simple move-to-earn app. It is becoming a bridge between Web2 usability, real health utility and Web3 rewards. We are seeing blockchain technology become more abstracted into everyday products, and that gives Emorya a very strong position because the Web3 foundations are already built into the app. As users look for smarter health tools and more rewarding digital experiences, Emorya is ready for that next chapter.”
Is Emorya a health app now?
The launch also gives Emorya a clearer position in the wider health app category. Food scanning, calorie tracking and activity monitoring are already familiar behaviors for many users, but Emorya is combining them with a reward-based model that was built into the platform from the beginning. That gives the app a different route into the market, where users can interact with a familiar health product while also accessing the added value of Web3 participation.
The most important part of the update is that the experience does not need to feel technical. A user does not have to understand blockchain infrastructure to see the benefit of scanning food, checking calorie intake, comparing it with activity and following progress over time.
That is where Emorya’s mainstream potential becomes more practical. The product can lead with health, fitness and daily habit tracking, while the Web3 layer remains part of the underlying value structure.
With the AI Health Module now live, Emorya has moved into a new phase of product development. The app is no longer only about tracking movement and rewarding activity. It now gives users a more complete way to monitor calories consumed, calories burned and nutrition data in one place, supported by a redesigned interface and a clearer health-focused user journey.
For Emorya, the launch is a product milestone as well as a positioning shift. It gives the project a stronger foundation in the mainstream health app category, while maintaining the Web3 reward structure that made the platform different from the start.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has pushed back against calls for crypto founders to pivot to AI.
In a post on Sunday, Armstrong took aim directly at the years-old slogan “If you’re in crypto, pivot to AI,” which seems to have become popular in recent months, amid the growth of AI.
“It’s zero sum, scarcity thinking,” he wrote, saying crypto is a general-purpose technology.
"If you're in crypto, pivot to AI."
I used to hear versions of this, and it's the wrong way to think about the world. It's zero sum, scarcity thinking.
Crypto is a general purpose technology. It's infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It…
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) July 26, 2026
Coinbase CEO says crypto will power agentic payments
Armstrong put crypto in the same category as electricity and the internet, saying it’s an infrastructure that doesn’t compete with AI, but rather underpins it.​
“AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto. If anything, it makes crypto more important,” said Coinbase CEO.
He noted that the opportunity lies in crypto being a real-time programmable money, a new sector coined as “Agentic Finance (AiFi).”
According to Armstrong, AI agents will eventually need their own financial infrastructure to trade, hold funds, and pay for items, among other things. He believes crypto will power most of all agentic payments.
“They can’t open a bank account, they can’t wait three days for a wire, they reside in one country,” Armstrong argued. “They need real time programmable money (and that’s crypto).”
Bitcoin miners are already jumping ship to AI
The crypto industry already sees a trend of participants shifting focus to AI, especially in the mining sector.
Core Scientific, CleanSpark, and DMG Blockchain Solutions, among others, have rented out their facilities to serve clients, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and other hyperscalers chasing more computing capacity.
Adam Sullivan, the Chief Executive at Core Scientific, said: “The opportunity for miners to convert to AI is one of the greatest opportunities I could possibly imagine.”
In fact, the company plans to stop all mining operations by 2028, as Cryptopolitan reported in December.
More recently, in July, Grayscale announced it would rename the Grayscale Bitcoin Miners ETF ($MNRS) to the Grayscale AI Compute ETF, effective September 15. The fund will now target the AI and high-performance computing sector.
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Strategy Inc. (MSTR) raised its cash reserve by $525 million over the past week.
The company filed Form 8-K on Monday, reporting it sold 5.4 million MSTR shares last week for $544.5 million. In that period, it also repurchased 288,930 shares of its STRC preferred stock for $25 million.
Michael Saylor, the company’s executive chairman, confirmed the news, writing on X that Strategy has now achieved 2.1 years of coverage for dividend and interest payments.
As of the filing, Strategy has a total of $3.75 billion in its USD Reserve.
Saylor announced the update a day early, as Cryptopolitan reported. On Sunday, he posted the same tracker chart with the comment “We’re gonna need another color”, a behavior that had in the past consistently been followed by a disclosure on Monday regarding a coin purchase.
We’re gonna need another color. pic.twitter.com/AqZO5UeXDx
— Michael Saylor (@saylor) July 26, 2026
But this time, the follow-up was a reserve building; Strategy failed to buy any Bitcoins during the week, which meant it was the fifth week in a row.
The company holds a total of 843,775 BTC, worth $54 billion, sitting on paper losses of more than $8 billion.
Critic Peter Schiff argues Strategy should have sold BTC
Long-time Bitcoin and Strategy Peter Schiff said that selling MSTR was a wrong move, arguing that Strategy should have sold BTC instead of the “discounted MSTR shares.”
“So, another week when you chose to destroy common shareholder value by selling discounted MSTR shares (thereby reducing Bitcoin per share) to raise cash and buy back STRC rather than sell Bitcoin,” Schiff posted.
He argued that the common stock sell-offs leave investors with no legitimate reason to own MSTR.
Strategy will report its Q2 earnings results on Thursday, July 30th. The company’s earnings are expected to increase by 6.40%, reaching $121.88 million.
MSTR currently trades at $97.46, up 6.44% in the day, following the news.
MSTR price chart. Source: Yahoo Finance.
The consensus price target for MSTR is around the $360 price mark, which implies an upside potential of over 290%.
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South Korea’s KOSPI index closed up roughly 1% for the day on Monday, July 27, as markets reacted to a wave of commitments from the government and private investors buying into the Asian country’s push to claim a stake in regional and global semiconductor, AI and robotics relevance.
The positive wave that started with Seoul’s $1 trillion plan for semiconductors, AI data centers, and robotics grew bigger this week as KB Financial Group rolled out its own 150 billion won venture fund backing for the sector.
By the time the markets closed for the day, the conviction pushed the benchmark to 6,755.75, up from its 6,690.62 close the week before on Friday, according to Google Finance data.
Where is KB Financial investing its 150 billion won bet on Korean tech?
The 150 billion won (roughly $100 million) KB Kookmin Growth Unicorn Scale-up Fund, revealed on July 27, plans to support about six South Korean firms in advanced fields such as AI, semiconductors, secondary batteries, aerospace, mobility, robotics, and bio.
The plan was waved through at the group’s fourth Productive Finance Council on July 24, with the funds coming from affiliate capital and run through KB Securities’ PE Growth Investment Division.
KB is also shaking up the process to decide which companies will get a slice of the $100 million its council approved. For example, the group said that future value, based on firms’ adoption of advanced technology, will rank higher than financial statements in its criteria for testing candidates’ compatibility with its fund.
“For early-growth-stage companies that will be eligible for support from the Unicorn Scale-up Fund, it is difficult to judge growth potential based on financial statements alone,” a KB Financial Group official was quoted in local media.
The group also said it is setting up an “Advanced Strategic Industry Study Forum” to train its screening staff. The same official continued that the goal is “to cultivate screening personnel with the expertise and foresight to look ahead to the future development potential of industries and technologies.”
The advanced tech push comes from the top of the Lee government
The Lee Jae Myung administration has been a major catalyst for the funds coming into the country. The latest headline came after the South Korean president lobbied executives from six Silicon Valley venture firms to consider Korean startups in their investment meetings during a July 25 San Francisco stopover that punctuated his trip to Brazil.
Lee pitched the pairing of US venture capital with Korean tech and manufacturing capacity as the formula for building “the next-generation Samsungs, Hyundais, SKs, Navers.”
The National Pension Service, which holds 1,690 trillion won in assets, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on investment cooperation at the end of the meeting. The six-firm group, which includes Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and General Catalyst, collectively manages a combined $313 billion.
Before the 150 billion won KB fund and Lee’s San Fransciso meeting, the Financial Services Commission and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced the “K-culture Value-up Fund” on July 22. The ministry will invest in K-culture firms, AI content and technology. Of the total, 100 billion won is earmarked for AI and intellectual property, and 50 billion won for content.
The 150 billion won will be contributed by the FSC, which is putting 50 billion won by itself, 30 billion won each from the Korea Development Bank and the Advanced Strategic Industry Fund, with private investors expected to add more than 70 billion won.
The FSC called it the first time its Public Growth Fund has scaled up by pairing with a ministry’s own policy money.
South Korea is moving on from June’s selloff
The activity follows a rough stretch for Korean equities. Cryptopolitan previously reported that the KOSPI fell nearly 10% on June 23, with Samsung Electronics down 12.3% and SK Hynix off 12.5% as foreign investors rotated out of AI trades.
That correction landed on a market heavily tilted toward chipmakers, and it came shortly before Seoul unveiled a roughly $1 trillion plan for semiconductors, AI data centers, and robotics anchored by Samsung and SK Hynix. Monday’s higher close, alongside the new private funding, suggests the sector’s backers are still committing money rather than retreating.
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