Cryptopolitan

San Francisco, California, July 9, 2026 — Eco, a leading provider of programmable cross-chain stablecoin liquidity, today integrates the TRON network. Through this integration, TRON becomes part of Eco’s unified stablecoin network, allowing users to deposit stablecoins directly into TRON applications in seconds.
As one of the world’s leading blockchains for stablecoin payments, TRON processed more than $2 trillion in transfers and supported an $86 billion circulating USDT supply in Q1 2026 alone. By integrating TRON, Eco enables enterprises and developers to embed seamless cross-chain stablecoin flows into their applications, with on-demand liquidity facilitating transfers between TRON and the broader blockchain ecosystem.
“TRON’s dominance in global stablecoin settlement makes it an essential infrastructure for digital finance,” said Jay Kurahashi-Sofue, CMO at Eco. “By integrating TRON into Eco Routes, we’re connecting one of the largest concentrations of USDT activity with unified cross-chain infrastructure. This enables billions in stablecoin liquidity to move seamlessly across chains, empowering enterprises and developers, and their users, with simple, programmable stablecoin experiences.”
The integration enables institutions and developers to easily leverage Eco’s real-time stablecoin execution infrastructure, enabling any product to automate fast USDT flows between TRON and other supported networks. Built for composability, Eco’s integration is permissionless, with the Eco Routes CLI enabling full integration in just hours. By unifying stablecoin liquidity across chains, Eco can enhance market depth, help reduce slippage for eligible cross-chain stablecoin transfers, and maximizes capital efficiency.
“This milestone expands the interoperability of TRON’s vast stablecoin ecosystem across the broader blockchain landscape,” said Sam Elfarra, Community Spokesperson for TRON DAO. “Eco’s infrastructure allows TRON’s 391 million users and developers to seamlessly access liquidity and applications across multiple chains without the complexity of traditional bridges.”
Together, Eco and TRON are making digital dollars more accessible and transferable across blockchain networks. As global stablecoin adoption accelerates, the integration strengthens the infrastructure developers need to build faster, more scalable payment and financial applications powered by seamless cross-chain liquidity.
About Eco
Eco is the stablecoin network that makes money programmable across every major blockchain. Leading companies use Eco to power stablecoin flows that require seamless user experience and best-in-class execution — cross-chain transfers and swaps, programmable flows, and more complex automations. Money simply moves smarter with Eco.
Media Contact
Jay Kurahashi-Sofue
jay@eco.com
About TRON DAO
TRON DAO is a community-governed DAO dedicated to accelerating the decentralization of the internet via blockchain technology and dApps.
Founded in September 2017, the TRON blockchain has experienced significant growth since its MainNet launch in May 2018. Until recently, TRON hosted the largest circulating supply of USD Tether (USDT) stablecoin, which currently exceeds $89 billion. As of July 2026, the TRON blockchain has recorded over 391 million in total user accounts, more than 14 billion in total transactions, and over $26 billion in total value locked (TVL), based on TRONSCAN. Recognized as the global settlement layer for stablecoin transactions and everyday purchases with proven success, TRON is “Moving Trillions, Empowering Billions.”
TRONNetwork | TRONDAO | X | YouTube | Telegram | Discord | Reddit | GitHub | Medium | Forum
Media Contact
Yeweon Park
press@tron.network

The European Parliament has failed to stop platforms from scanning private messages for child abuse material until 2028 after a motion to reject the rules fell short of the 361 votes required.
The EU’s Chat Control message-scanning regime will continue despite the fact that most lawmakers who cast a ballot want the rules gone.
No private messaging in the EU
Former MEP and Pirate Party privacy campaigner Patrick Breyer, revealed that during the recent European Parliament vote, 314 members voted against the EU’s chat control rules while 276 backed it.
There were 17 abstentions, and because rejecting the measure needed an absolute majority of the full chamber rather than a simple majority of those present, the 314 opposing votes were not enough.
A separate amendment to limit message scanning to suspects flagged by courts also drew more support than opposition, 322 to 255, and similarly the majority lost.
Due to the outcome of the vote, “Chat Control 1.0,” which was temporarily paused after EU institutions could not agree to extend it, will now be revived. It is a temporary exception that lets U.S. tech firms scan direct messages on services such as Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Gmail and iCloud without a warrant or prior suspicion.
The proposal was brought back for a vote by the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP). Parliament President Roberta Metsola, who is an EPP member, asked EU leaders to restart discussions at the last European Council meeting. Four European commissioners also wrote to MEPs, urging them to pass the proposal.
Metsola’s office said she was following a decision made by group leaders, but several lawmakers who worked on the issue said they were not told about this in advance.
Simeon de Brouwer from the digital rights group EDRi told Euractiv that the Parliament had been “backstabbed by its own president.” Rand Hammoud from the Centre for Democracy and Technology Europe said that using the largest political group’s power to force a new vote on a measure that had already failed “should concern anyone who cares about institutional integrity.”
Privacy advocates like Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin have also campaigned against the measure.
“Fight Chat Control. You cannot make society secure by making people insecure,” Buterin wrote on X in September 2025. He argued that backdoors into private communication are “inevitably hackable.” NFT collector and free-speech advocate 6529 amplified a Buterin post opposing the renewed push on July 8.
Notably, a 2024 draft leaked to French outlet Contexte and flagged by Breyer showed EU interior ministers seeking to exempt the professional accounts of police, military and intelligence staff from the same scanning they wanted to impose on the public.
Buterin says that is evidence that officials know the tools are unreliable.
Why are platforms scanning messages?
The regulation, formally the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, was proposed by then-Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson in May 2022. Supporters, including the Commission’s own home affairs directorate, argue that voluntary detection by platforms leaves gaps and that the EU relies too heavily on the United States to flag abuse happening inside the bloc.
Opponents counter that scanning everyone’s messages amounts to mass surveillance. The Council of the EU’s own legal service has warned that the approach conflicts with the right to privacy, and a European Parliament study concluded there is no way to detect abuse material at scale without a high rate of false positives.
Breyer cited German federal police figures showing that 48% of alerts are not criminally relevant in the first place, and pointed to EU Commission data indicating scanning of private chats produced only 36% of abuse reports in 2024.
Breyer called the result “a farce” that “damages democracy,” but said the fight over a permanent version was “just getting started.” A symbolic carve-out was added for encrypted chats, though, as Breyer noted, services like WhatsApp were never scanned to begin with.
Talks on the permanent framework, called Chat Control 2.0, resume in September.
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Meta appears set to start the assembly line for its own in-house chip production by September of this year. News of the AI chip code-named Iris first broke after Reuters reported having reviewed an internal company memo on Thursday.
The same report claimed that it only took six weeks to declare the design bug-free as the chip aced testing without turning up any major faults.
Iris is reportedly the first of four chip generations that the Zuckerberg-led firm has lined up in its Meta Training and Inference Accelerators (MTIA) program. Meta first shared plans for the chip in March.
With that, Meta has played its next hand in justifying the roughly $145 billion it has poured into AI infrastructure this year alone. The firm has not publicly reacted to the news.
Why Meta is building its own chip?
For a company that leans heavily on processors to run AI across its flagship Facebook and Instagram products, Meta needs wiggle room in terms of cost and dependence.
The memo that Reuters reviewed explicitly mentioned the headache of riding the wave with Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) when they release new generations of chips.
Rolling out the newest GPUs at Meta’s scale “has been a heavy lift, and it has cost us time,” the memo reportedly read.
The Iris chip will not completely sever the connection between Meta and these firms, though. It just means that if everything else goes to plan, Nvidia and AMD could be losing major business from one of their biggest customers.
Meta, meanwhile, would be moving forward with two new partners in Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), which worked with Meta on the design, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TPE: 2330), which will fabricate the silicon.
A bigger buildout behind the chip
The Iris timeline arrived bundled with the rest of Meta’s hardware roadmap. The memo laid out a compute expansion in two stages, reaching seven gigawatts of capacity in 2026 and doubling to 14 gigawatts in 2027. That growth underpins the company’s projected AI infrastructure bill of up to $145 billion for the year, one of the largest such programs in tech.
The custom-chip work also has a longer arc. Meta formalized its silicon partnership with Broadcom earlier this year, extending the arrangement through 2029 across several MTIA generations and committing to deploy more than one gigawatt of compute as a first step. Separately, Meta struck a multiyear deal with AMD to bring online up to six gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs, part of a push to avoid relying on any single vendor.
The spending is landing while investors scrutinize AI returns. Meta recently drew attention for a plan to sell surplus AI compute through a new cloud business that sent its shares to a record close of $796.25 on July 1, according to Cryptopolitan.
The mood has since cooled. Meta (META) closed at $603.12 on July 8 and slipped a further 3.75% to $580.50 in Thursday pre-market trading, per Google Finance data, leaving the stock well below its 52-week high.
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INTERPOL revealed in a statement that was shared on Thursday, July 9, that a four-month operation spanning 97 countries and territories arrested 5,811 people and froze $293 million in illicit money.
This sweep also reached some crypto holders as the investigators traced romance-scam profits laundered through cross-chain token swaps.
The operation, called First Light 2026, ran from January 15 to April 30, according to INTERPOL’s statement. Its focus was social engineering, the practice of exploiting a person’s trust to extract money or account details. That category covers business email compromise, sextortion, romance, impersonation, and investment scams, along with the laundering networks that move the proceeds.
INTERPOL counted more than 142,000 victims over the four months. Alongside the arrests, police blocked 31,014 bank accounts, solved 23,715 cases, identified another 15,606 suspects, and issued 99 notices and diffusions, the agency reported.
To intercept money before it vanished, authorities leaned on I-GRIP, INTERPOL’s stop-payment tool that can freeze both fiat and virtual asset transfers.
INTERPOL reveals crypto at the center of a Thai case
Crypto was at the crime scene in Thailand, where the police arrested two suspects tied to a laundering operation that fed romance-scam money into several cryptocurrencies, then used cross-chain swaps to break the trail between blockchains.
One suspect, aged 20, ran a wallet that moved more than $122.5 million in ten months, according to investigators.
Crypto was also involved in other legs of the operation too, one of which was in Palau, where authorities deported 22 people accused of running scam centers out of hotels, using crypto and illegal gambling sites to reach victims abroad. INTERPOL’s financial crime chief sees the pattern as a fixed feature of the trade.
“Criminal syndicates exploit human psychology to manipulate their targets, and no nation can stay safe unless all countries are equipped and committed to jointly fighting back,” said Tomonobu Kaya, director of the INTERPOL Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre, in the statement.
On the African continent, INTERPOL has also been active in dismantling criminal elements engaged in illicit activities that are linked to crypto. It partnered with Binance and AFRIPOL to recover $4.3 million and make over 651 arrests in an operation that spanned late 2025 to January 2026.
Are all the schemes crypto-related, and how do they operate?
The schemes were of varying kinds, ranging from a fake police station to a blocked wire and not every scheme relied on tokens. Police in Eswatini arrested 82 people and seized 240 electronic devices after breaking up a network that ran illegal gambling, laundering, and impersonation scams.
The group had built a working replica of a Brazilian police station, with fake uniforms and signage, and posed as federal police on video calls to convince victims they were under investigation and should move money for “safekeeping,” according to INTERPOL. Due to the volume of digital evidence, the agency deployed a support team to help with forensics.
There were cases where authorities were able to stop money mid-flight. Authorities in Singapore and Oman worked together using I-GRIP to block a $6.6 million transfer linked to a business email compromise scam aimed at a Singapore commodity trading firm.
Another one occurred in Macao, where an anti-fraud outreach campaign found a resident who was being manipulated by scammers posing as public officials. The police stepped in before the victim lost close to $372,000.
INTERPOL’s June 2024 operation, which covered 61 countries, seized $257 million and arrested 3,950 suspects. First Light has run since 2014 and is funded by China’s Ministry of Public Security, with support from regional policing bodies ASEANAPOL, GCCPOL, and Europol.
The investigations are still open as member countries continue to trace assets and identify more suspects, according to INTERPOL.
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Swift announced in a July 9 statement that its blockchain-based ledger is open for business, with 17 lenders already lined up to start using it to send cross-border payments across six continents using tokenized deposits.
Swift is big news from a network that already processes the equivalent of global GDP every 2 to 3 days across more than 200 markets. Now, the infrastructure is in place for banks and corporate treasuries to settle international transfers round the clock.
Today’s announcement lays the groundwork for the first public demonstration of a ledger that Swift first showcased at its Sibos conference in September 2025.
What does Swift’s blockchain ledger do?
The blockchain-based ledger that Swift introduced Thursday is not a payments platform in the traditional sense. The ledger, which runs on Hyperledger Besu, an open-source, Ethereum-compatible framework, is more closely related to an orchestration layer.
Swift’s system allows customer funds to move on a 24/7 schedule by recording and validating the payment commitments that banks make to one another when they issue tokenized deposits on their own ledgers. Banks can then square up when they open for their usual business hours.
All 17 banks mentioned in Swift’s announcement still need to use their own tokenized deposit to use the ledger because settlement is decoupled. HSBC confirmed that its Tokenised Deposit Service is already wired into the new infrastructure.
Another important bit of context from today’s announcement is that the participating banks are only preparing to pilot for now. The Swift blockchain ledger will not actually settle any transactions today.
Still, the platform has moved to the next stage after wrapping up its design phase in March.
Which banks have committed to the Swift ledger?
Swift has arranged an all-star line-up of 17 institutions ready to test live transactions on its blockchain ledger, naming ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, First Abu Dhabi Bank, FirstRand Bank, HSBC, Itaú Unibanco, Lloyds Bank, Mashreq, MUFG Bank, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB and Wells Fargo, in its announcement.
“With our new ledger capability, we’re extending the trust and stability of established finance into the frontiers of digital money,” Thierry Chilosi, Swift’s Chief Business Officer, said. The executive also left the door open to expanding the ledger for developing use cases such as programmable money and the “agentic commerce” push.
Carl Slabicki, who heads commercial payments and trade at BNY, and ANZ’s transaction banking managing director Lisa Vasic both recognized how Swift’s ledger reaching the pilot stage allows them to adapt their existing business to the 24/7, always-on market that customers have started to shift toward.
The race to lead payments and deposit settlement is on
Swift is under pressure to keep correspondent banking relevant as tokenized money and new settlement rails gain ground. The cooperative connects more than 11,500 institutions and says 75% of payments on its existing network already reach the beneficiary bank within 10 minutes, and often in seconds. The ledger is its attempt to answer the demand for weekend and overnight movement that traditional banking hours cannot serve.
It is not moving into an empty field. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citibank, Barclays, BNY and Wells Fargo are part of a consortium that announced a separate tokenized deposit network last month, targeting a launch in the first half of 2027 with The Clearing House running the infrastructure.
Swift has said its own ledger will expand in functionality and availability once the controlled go-live phase is behind it.
The next thing to watch is simple: whether the first live payment actually clears, and how quickly the 17 banks move from integration to production.
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KPMG’s Global AI Pulse for the second quarter of 2026 found that nearly a third of corporate leaders cannot understand or control what their AI systems cost to run.
Companies that laid off employees and restructured their budget in favor of what they expected to be cheaper AI technology are now being charged by the token, leading to massive AI spending bills.
Is AI too expensive for companies to use?
KPMG polled 2,145 C-suite and senior business leaders across 20 countries for its quarterly Global AI Pulse survey. The results show that 29% of executives struggle with operating costs, especially as AI use grows past the testing stage to using it on a large scale.
A separate third of respondents named their own thin grasp of AI economics as an obstacle to rolling out AI agents at all.
The main reason for this struggle is that AI companies are now charging based on usage. Providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI and GitHub, previously operated with fixed subscriptions, but now each prompt and response is charged per token.
A token is a small piece of text or code that a model processes, and because it does not map cleanly to a single word, it is very hard to predict the cost of a project before the invoice lands.
In a related KPMG survey, only 26% of companies said they had a comprehensive real-time view of AI spending. Half had partial oversight. The remaining 22% either had none or learned what they had spent only when the bill showed up.
Steve Chase, KPMG’s global head of AI, stated that artificial intelligence technology is “a new resource that needs to be managed.” He also said his firm is currently advising clients who have drained a full year of their token and cloud budget in a matter of months.
What are companies spending on AI?
An unnamed enterprise reportedly ran up a bill of roughly $500 million on Anthropic’s Claude in a single month after failing to set any usage limits for employees. When GitHub Copilot moved fully to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026, one developer’s projected monthly cost climbed from about €67 ($72) to €966 ($1040).
Companies are responding to these exorbitant costs by pulling back. KPMG found that almost half of organizations have slowed down or delayed the rollouts of their AI products after the costs outran the value they expected.
Cheaper high-fidelity models are now the fastest-growing influence on AI strategy, up seven percentage points since the first quarter.
Cryptopolitan reported that Uber (NYSE: UBER) exhausted its entire 2026 AI coding budget by April, four months into the year, and now restricts its engineers to $1,500 per tool each month. Meta (NASDAQ: META) has told roughly 6,000 employees that it is building an internal gateway with budgets and spending alerts to curb “tokenmaxxing.”
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) dismantled the leaderboard it created to encourage AI use in late May after staff gamed it with pointless activity.
Cryptopolitan recently reported that Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, proposed using cheaper open-weight models to control the rising AI costs, but that suggestion drew criticism and concerns due to security implications.
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TAC Protocol’s attempt to explain away a trading session where its TAC token lost around 90% of its value has stirred skepticism from holders after the project’s July 8 statement on X ruled out any exploit and also denied any foul play in the form of insider selling too, pinning the collapse on forced selling in the futures market.
However, onchain researchers have presented a conflicting theory, saying the chain of transactions tells a different story as fingers point to a coordinated exit by 18 wallets.
What is the TAC team’s explanation of the events?
“The protocol operates exactly as designed,” the TAC account wrote, adding that the network “was not hacked in any form” and that onchain assets stayed secure.
The team stated, “The decline was a liquidation cascade triggered initially by a large perpetual futures sell order exceeding the relatively thin liquidity on the market.”
The team also stated that neither its own holdings nor those of early investors moved because both remain under vesting locks.
To restore confidence, TAC stated that they are focused on strengthening their market structure and deepening liquidity, though it disclosed no specifics.
Were insiders selling TAC?
Although they stopped short of pointing the finger at people with connections to TAC Protocol, a July 8 post by onchain analyst EmberCN counted 18 wallets offloading about 372 million TAC and walking away with 1.78 million USD1.
The tokens were moved off TAC’s native chain onto BNB Chain first, where they were sold. By EmberCN’s measure, the price fell 91%, from about $0.05 to $0.0045.
EmberCN stated, “This coin bears a striking resemblance in onchain dumping tactics to $SIREN from a month ago and $AKE from yesterday—it’s highly likely they’re all being manipulated by the same ‘conspiracy syndicate.’”
What are TAC Protocol’s numbers now?
The protocol’s native token, TAC, was trading around $0.065 at the end of June but now trades around $0.0026, a decline of around 96%.
It has a market cap over $12.2 million, and DefiLlama put its total value locked on the TAC chain at around $1.27 million.
This is not TAC’s first violent week, as the token had already dropped about 82% in a day, roughly two months after a $2.8 million bridge exploit on May 11 that the team reclassified as a white-hat incident once the attacker returned about 90% of the funds.
TAC reopened cross-chain transfers between TON and its own network on June 10.
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Asia’s ongoing repression of cryptocurrency prediction markets is channeling investment, liquidity, and innovation to Western nations that opted for regulation.
In a report dated July 8, the Web3 research firm Tiger Research suggested that the characterization of prediction markets as unlawful gambling is hindering Asian countries from enjoying a thriving blockchain market. Instead of stopping demand, the legal constraints merely push users and business transactions onto international platforms and diminish consumer safety.
The growth of the sphere has been fueled by crypto-native platforms like Polymarket, where trades are settled on-chain. Tiger Research estimates that the volume of trade exceeds $14 billion every month; moreover, the leaders in the industry have an overall value of $40 billion.
According to the report, Prediction markets sell contracts that pay $1 if an event takes place and $0 if it does not; thus, predictions become real-time estimates of probabilities. Academic research has found these markets can produce informative forecasts. Meta’s reported Arena project is an example of the growing interest in this technology beyond crypto.
Asia keeps reaching for the ban hammer
The crypto prediction markets are mostly thought of by authorities across the Asian continent as illegal forms of gambling.
In January 2025, the Singapore Gambling Regulatory Authority took censorship actions against the Polymarket platform due to it being regarded as an unlicensed gambling website. Additionally, the usage of the platform was restricted across Taiwan during the 2024 presidential elections when users were punished for violating the election laws. In Thailand, the usage of the platform was later also deemed illegal when internet service providers were ordered to censor it, while China continues its long-standing ban on all gambling and cryptocurrency platforms.
At present, Polymarket has also expanded the list of countries where its platform is not available to include the nations of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Myanmar, North Korea, Singapore, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, and Yemen. Users in Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand are only allowed to close their positions in Polymarket as the platform does not allow them to place new bets.
The tendency of regulators to crack down upon crypto prediction markets continues throughout Asia. As indicated by Interexy, a company that specializes in blockchain development, India prohibited real-money online gaming in 2025, stating that the prohibition follows the actions taken against the opinion-trading platform Probo, which operates domestically.
The Philippines had also canceled the licenses for offshore gambling operations, Hong Kong warned that crypto prediction markets can be treated as illegal gambling, Indonesia froze more than 33,000 gambling-linked accounts, and Vietnam banned illegal gambling apps from app stores. Interexy concluded that regulators continue applying decades-old gambling laws instead of developing dedicated rules for crypto prediction markets.
Nonetheless, the demand continues to be robust. According to Chosun Daily, a South Korean betting exchange known as Opinion has surpassed a remarkable 2 trillion-won mark in its weekly trading volume since its inception, despite the stringent measures imposed by the country’s gambling regulations, highlighting that the regulations do not prevent gamblers from engaging in such activities and merely push them elsewhere.
The West chose to regulate, and cashed in
For the West, the course took a turn, and the difference is apparent in the money. Instead of completely prohibiting prediction markets, U.S. authorities have allowed regulated event contracts to coexist with crypto exchanges. As estimated by blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs, transaction volumes in prediction markets were around $1.2 billion per month at the beginning of 2025 and increased to over $20 billion in January 2026, with approximately 840,000 active wallets involved.
Polymarket and Kalshi have paved the way for the expansion. Kalshi functions as a designated contract market under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. This particular status allowed its partners such as CNN and Robinhood to gain significant acceptance of event-type financial contracts.
Regulatory measures did not stop many experts from voicing their concerns. Former SEC Commissioner Joseph Grundfest cautioned that highly specific event contracts can make inside trading feasible and argued that Polymarket does not have anti-money laundering or know-your-customer regulations that are mandatory for financial markets in the US.
Similarly, distressed-asset investor Thomas Braziel called prediction markets “sports gambling wrapped in finance.” In addition, he warned that it is a matter of time before venture capital starts regretting its investments because of the high level of regulatory uncertainty. Regulators in the US also called to tighten oversight in the wake of the insider- trading scandal involving event-driven contracts.
Currently, the legal conversation in the United States focuses on whether federal commodities laws take precedence over state gambling regulations. This issue may eventually reach the Supreme Court, according to Grundfest. In Asia, however, the competitive implications are already showing.
Tiger Research states that relying on gambling prohibitions may lead to a loss of capital, liquidity, and innovations as other regions adopt regulated prediction-market frameworks. As Western markets refine their regulatory regimes, Asian countries are under more pressure to figure out if their existing gambling laws are still the best way of overseeing one of the fastest-growing industries in the crypto space.
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The number of new exchange listings declined for another month in June, moving down from their peak in September 2025. More projects are delaying token launches, while exchange liquidity continues to decline.
New token listings on CEXs became another signal of slowing crypto sentiment. In June, new listings sank to the lowest level in two years, as appetite for new assets diminished.
Monthly listing activity is now down by over 77% since the last quarter of 2025, as the decline in listings continued for the past nine months.
In the past months, token trading slowed down as the altcoin market also slowed down to multi-year lows. The recent token listings data is also seen as another indicator of a potential market bottom, as token-based projects usually wait for bull markets and higher risk appetite.
Why are token-based projects delaying listings?
The token listing market declined for the third consecutive quarter. According to Cryptoquant, only 351 new projects were listed in Q2, down from 537 projects in Q1, a 35% drop. Token-based projects closed their worst quarter in two years.
New token listings on CEXs declined for several reasons. Some new assets only traded on DEXs or perpetual futures markets.
Overall interest in tokens was also displaced by tokenized securities and the occasional airdrop or meme launch.
Token trading also slowed down as market participants remained more skeptical of unlocks and controlled supply. A larger number of listings was also not seen as a source of guaranteed returns.
New token listings for high-profile projects often chose Binance, but the bulk of new tokens were listed on Mexc. The exchange still holds its position as the leader in new listings, but the overall trend shows an outflow of new projects and liquidity.
Most exchanges also saw significant outflows of liquidity in June. Binance lost nearly $2.5B in liquidity, with a significant withdrawal trend for stablecoins. Close to $1B flowed out of OKX and Bybit. The only exchange with positive inflows was Robinhood, which recently started drawing volumes to its newly launched chain.
New tokens in Q2 faced bear market headwinds
For the tokens that chose Q2 to launch, return on investment was limited. New assets battled for shrinking liquidity and a shift to perpetual futures markets or real-world assets.
The success of token listings depended on the exchange rules, where more selective markets had more positive price moves and higher general returns. Cryptorank data shows some high-profile listings achieve short-term success, though overall, the majority of new listings were in the red.
Most new token listings were in the red, even for leading centralized exchanges. | Source: Cryptorank
Upbit achieved the biggest returns for new projects, with three profitable and five unprofitable listings in Q2. OKX and Binance followed with similar return rates. MEXC listed 153 tokens, but most of the new additions underperformed.
The last few months showed that new tokens could not rely on hype for drawing in liquidity. In 2026, projects are vetted for their ownership structure, as well as for signs of real activity and fee generation. Token-based projects also no longer rely on constant asset appreciation, but try to attract users with fee sharing and token burns.
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Centralized exchanges are moving away from speculative narratives and toward tokens with demonstrated utility. An analysis of over 10,000 listings across the 10 major exchanges, Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, Gate, MEXC, KuCoin, HTX, Kraken, and Crypto.com, shows blockchain infrastructure, DeFi, and tokenized real-world assets displacing meme and GameFi tokens at the top of exchange listing activity in the first half of 2026. The shift marks a break from the two prior cycles, in which listing pipelines were dominated by crypto-native, hype-driven categories.
In Q2 2026, exchanges shifted listings toward blockchain infrastructure (64 listings) and DeFi (46 listings) tokens over speculative assets, reflecting a broader move toward projects with demonstrated utility. Tokenized assets, covering equities, commodities, and real-world assets, ranked third with 42 listings as exchanges sought exposure to TradFi instruments.
Source: CryptoRank API
Beneath that leaderboard, the speculative end of the market lost momentum. Meme and GameFi, the two categories that had defined the previous hype cycle, both saw their new listings fall quarter after quarter from their 2024-2025 peaks.
Taken together, the shift points to a more selective market, where exchanges leaning toward projects tied to real usage rather than the meme speculation that defined the previous cycle.
CEX Listing Category Share: State of 2025 vs H1 2026
The biggest shift in exchange listing activity was a switch towards Tokenized Assets, which became the most-listed category in H1 2026. In H1 2026, nearly every 5th listed token was a tokenized asset. By contrast, in 2025, less than 7% of listings were tokenized assets.
Source: CryptoRank API
The growth was driven primarily by tokenized stocks. Most new listings came from a small number of issuers, including xStocks, bStocks, and Ondo’s tokenized markets. This represents a clear shift from the Meme tokens that dominated the previous cycle, with exchanges increasingly listing tokenized versions of traditional financial assets.
Meme Listings Return to Pre-Memecraze Levels
Memecoin listings have declined for six consecutive quarters. In Q4 2024 exchanges listed 196 memecoins, but in Q2 2026 there were only 41 new listings in this category. which is a 79% decline from the peak. This is the lowest quarterly total since Q3 2023, before the memecoin craze began.
Source: CryptoRank API
GameFi Listings Down 84% Since the Q2 2024 Peak
GameFi was one of the leading listing narratives throughout 2023 and 2024. However, listings in this category are down 84% from their peak 2 years ago, reaching just 15 new listings in Q2 2026. This suggests the lowest interest in GameFi tokens since Q3 2023, when only 10 tokens were listed across analyzed exchanges.
Source: CryptoRank API
Listings and category share point in the same direction: exchanges are rewarding categories with an external, real-world anchor over those that depend on internal crypto narrative cycles. Whether this reflects a lasting reallocation of exchange risk appetite or a temporary lull between speculative cycles will depend on whether tokenized assets can sustain the growth rate they showed in H1 2026 once the current wave of issuers, xStocks, bStocks, and Ondo among them, is joined by others.

A federal court has denied a request to suspend Tennessee’s new ban on crypto ATMs, which is an early legal blow to the kiosk sector at a time when state governments are moving from imposing restrictions on the devices to outright bans.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced the ruling on July 7, stating that Public Chapter 766 would continue to be enforceable while a constitutional challenge by CoinFlip operator GPD Holdings LLC and kiosk owner Charles Wernicke is pending. While the court did not rule on the constitutionality of the ban, it determined that the plaintiffs did not meet the high threshold necessary to stop its application before the hearing.
Court lets Tennessee enforce the ban
According to Public Chapter 766, installing, operating, or allowing a virtual currency kiosk anywhere in Tennessee is a Class A offense.
Plaintiffs stated that the law would result in real damage and unlawfully burden interstate commerce. But U.S. District Judge Travis McDonough stated that they were not convincing, concluding that the interest of protecting consumers is stronger than the need for emergency relief required by the plaintiffs. The judge made it clear that he based his ruling on the limited evidence the court had at the preliminary stage, and broader issues of constitutionality would have to wait for further proceedings.
The ruling gives a first glance at the legal issues to be faced during the litigation. Instead of outright rejecting the claims, the court hinted that CoinFlip proved insufficient facts to demonstrate that the law in Tennessee affects interstate commerce, while the Tennessee government relied on legislative conclusions and statistics relating to fraud on the federal level.
“Cryptocurrency ATMs are tools for scammers targeting vulnerable Tennesseans and are rarely used for anything approaching a legitimate purpose,” Skrmetti said after the decision, adding that the legislature acted to protect consumers from increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes.
CoinFlip has objected to this interpretation. In legal documents, CEO Ben Weiss disclosed that the kiosks help clients who use cash, are unbanked, or do not like tying their bank account to cryptocurrency platforms. The firm also insisted that taking away its machines from Tennessee would irreversibly damage its relationship with customers and retail associates it developed over several years.
Tennessee reflects a broader regulatory shift
The Tennessee court ruling arrives at a time when elected officials across the United States are becoming more vocal in establishing regulations pertaining to crypto ATMs.
Indiana was the first state to entirely prohibit their use; since then, states such as Tennessee and Minnesota have followed suit; however, other states have taken a different approach and opted to enact regulations regarding the use of crypto ATMs. According to the American Bankers Association, at least 20 states have different measures in place regarding crypto ATMs, including transaction caps, licensing requirements, and mandatory fraud reimbursement programs.
The debate regarding crypto ATMs has also reached Congress, where Representatives Sean Casten and María Elvira Salazar introduced the bipartisan Stop Crypto ATM Scams Act, stating that the payment kiosks have become a popular means of payment for scams aimed at older people. Casten said that extortionists are able “to prey on seniors” quickly and easily, while Salazar feels that more should be done to protect retirees from scams.
Some elected officials think that stricter regulations may not suffice. For instance, New Jersey Senator Paul Moriarty told The Jersey Vindicator that crypto ATMs have “no legitimate purpose” and that their operators are reaping profits from scammed people.
The changing view on crypto ATMs is directly connected to growing losses from scams. According to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center data in 2024, victims lost $247 million in scams related to crypto ATMs, many of whom were older people.
Industry faces mounting legal and commercial pressure
The ruling from the court is increasing the pressure on crypto ATM operators, most of whom face economic difficulties and greater scrutiny from regulators.
In Texas, there were around $56.8 million in losses caused by crypto ATM fraud last year, more than in any other state. Bitcoin Depot, one of the leading companies in the industry, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to huge declines in income. Regulators in multiple states have either initiated lawsuits or introduced new measures against the operators of kiosks.
The industry claims that it is not the machines themselves that generate fraudulent activities. In fact, operators argue that criminals lure unwitting victims into committing unlawful transactions and boast of the use of transaction monitoring, customer identification, and fraud prevention techniques that many companies have put in place.
What comes next
Although Tennessee secured an early courtroom victory, the constitutional fight is far from over.
This decision does not indicate that a statewide crypto ATM ban is constitutional. Rather, it gives Tennessee the right to enforce its law while its constitutionality is being litigated. This may matter for regulators elsewhere—state lawmakers looking to impose stricter measures may see this verdict as a sign that courts could uphold cases of consumer protection laws while constitutionality claims take their course.
For the crypto ATM industry, the litigation has become about more than Tennessee. As lawmakers increasingly question whether kiosks have a place in society or whether they should be controlled with various laws, the CoinFlip case could turn out to be a very significant example when it comes to defining how much states can do when it comes to limiting physical access to digital assets.
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Robinhood Chain was pitched as the network for RWAs and the place to trade tokenized stocks. On July 8, it did something else entirely. According to data from Dune, the chain drew in $563.9 million in volume on Uniswap, making it the biggest volume day by far since its mainnet launch on July 1.
Source: Dune
That is roughly 10 times the $58.9 million it processed the day before. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams confirmed in a tweet that the volume seen yesterday beat every network except Ethereum mainnet.
Robinhood chain is going absolutely crazy
$500m in 24hr volume on Uniswap – that’s 10x what it did yesterday
And more than any chain other than Ethereum mainnet! pic.twitter.com/wcV70BYqFa
— Hayden Adams 🦄 (@haydenzadams) July 9, 2026
CASHCAT Ran 10x and Dragged the Chain With It
The memecoin called CASHCAT has been the main reason behind the volume spike. The token’s lore is around Robinhood’s old “Cashcat” mascot. The token went up more than 10x within the span of 24 hours with its market cap going over $100 million. That single token dragged the chain’s Uniswap V3 WETH pair from the low tens of millions to $212.3 million in a day.
All of this took place on the day Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev embraced memes and stated in a tweet that the RWA-focused chain “works great for memes too.” Pump.fun added Robinhood Chain support on the same day, letting traders buy in with SOL and skip the bridging friction that usually keeps retail from piling into a new network.
Robinhood tokens are now available to trade on the Pumpfun app!
– No bridging
– Trade seamlessly in SOL
– Trade every trending Robinhood token
Never miss out again, no matter the meta. Only on the Pumpfun app. pic.twitter.com/xWiz0LDVBo
— Pump.fun (@Pumpfun) July 8, 2026
The network’s RWA market cap, in comparison, is at $12.62 million according to DeFiLlama.
At its peak, the memecoin’s market cap was around 8x the size of the tokenized asset market on the chain.
Nearly 16,000 New Tokens Were Created in a Single Day
The activity was not limited to one token. Daily active addresses approached 200,000, and more than 140,000 of those made their first transaction on the chain that day. Nearly 16,000 new tokens were created in 24 hours. Seven memecoins crossed $1 million in market cap.
This is the cascade memecoins tend to set off on a young network. One token runs, the tooling shows up to feed it, wallets and launchpads plug in, and suddenly a chain that measured its activity in tens of millions is clearing more than half a billion. The users arrive for the meme, and the infrastructure follows the users. Robinhood built the rails for equities and watched a cat token fill them.
The Question Is What Happens When CASHCAT Cools
Records like this are easy to celebrate and hard to keep. The volume redefined what Robinhood Chain looks like on paper, a network built for equities now posting numbers that put it near the top of Uniswap. Whether that sticks is a different question.
The open question is conversion. A memecoin can flood a chain with first-time users and new tokens overnight, but those addresses do not automatically become RWA traders. If CASHCAT fades, the 140,000 new wallets and the 16,000 tokens can fade with it, leaving the chain with the same $12.62 million RWA market it started the week with. If even a fraction stay, Robinhood just found a cheaper acquisition funnel than any tokenized-stock pitch was going to hand it.
For now the number stands. What it means depends entirely on July 9 and everything after.
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Sony Bank has successfully completed its inaugural federal assessment and acquired the necessary permission to manufacture a dollar stablecoin. This is a remarkable progress for the well-known production company in allusion to its ambitions in the field where major manufacturers are trying to exploit the opportunities provided by the system of regulation in US banking.
The approval of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has implications that extend beyond Tokyo. The fact that Sony has entered the digital currency space means that it is no longer just cryptocurrency companies involved in issuing dollar-pegged cryptocurrency tokens. Circle, Ripple, and Paxos were among the first group of companies to be granted a trust license in December.
Major financial institutions such as Morgan Stanley are also seeking the same licensing arrangements for their own digital-asset arms. The Klaros Group’s director and a former OCC regulator, Roman Goldstein, dubbed the Sony operation the “first commercial-conglomerate ecosystem bank.”
What the OCC actually granted
The regulator did not provide a green signal to conduct business but offered initial provisional approval. Sony Bank, an online lender of Sony Financial Group, stated that the newly formed entity which will be established as a fully-owned subsidiary with $40-million (approx. ¥6.4 billion) initial capital is named as Connectia Trust, National Association. The start of business operations is expected in 2027.
Connectia has been set up for only one purpose; issuance and management of dollar-stable coins. The application for the charter does not include any traditional banking activity such as taking deposits, granting loans or making payments. Additionally, Sony wanted to highlight that no transactions would occur until an acquisition of the needed approvals from the OCC.
“Until all approvals and other authorizations, including the OCC’s final approval, have been obtained, no business activities, including the issuance of stablecoins, will be conducted,” the Company said in a statement.
Because the $40 million commitment exceeds 10% of Sony Financial Group’s capital, the parent had to disclose the plan to Japanese authorities under the country’s Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, Banking Dive noted.
Why Sony wants to be its own issuer
According to the American Banker, Sony already had a way to get into the stablecoin business in December 2025. It partnered with Bastion Platforms of California, which is expected to become the issuer, custodian and reserve keeper of the token once it is launched. Bastion itself is pursuing a conversion application to obtain a national trust charter.
With a charter, Sony’s position changes in the hierarchy. Goldstein stated that this license makes Sony the “issuer of record,” which means that the company obtains direct communication with the regulator and also manages its compliance program. The license also allows receiving income from the reserve assets, which in the future will allow it to become a qualified issuer in compliance with the GENIUS Act. If it lacked such a charter, Goldstein claims that its product would be issued under another company’s license and inherit that company’s regulatory risk.
Evey Guo, a principal of FS Vector, suggests that the charter allows Sony to “control their own destiny.” With the federal charter in hand, the company can manage issuance, custody, transfer and redemption under as single federal supervisor without involvement of any third-party provider and money-transmitter licensee.
The strategic business interest relies on Sony’s own products. According to American Banker, the company intends to use dollar tokens for treasury operations, cross-border payments, and in-app purchases for its entertainment products, such as video games, anime, movies and music, which would help save on payment processing fees through the card networks.
Bankers and consumer advocates push back
Since October 2025, the proposal has been the subject of criticism. The Bank Policy Institute questioned if the charter could violate the long-standing separation of commerce and banking activities. Moreover, the Independent Community Bankers of America warned that the trust lacks deposit insurance, increasing the risk for customers in case of its collapse, and also stated that the OCC’s assumptions were untested for such a large institution.
The National Community Reinvestment Coalition went even further expressing the opinion that approval of Connectia “would create a two-tier system where digital asset firms receive comparable federal status without comparable public obligations, undermining the integrity of the entire chartering framework.”
Nevertheless, the OCC decided to proceed since the interpretation of the current law allows the move. It did attach at least one unusual string: Goldstein noted the regulator may require Sony’s unit to install a full-time, dedicated chief financial officer.
What to watch next
Before it can proceed with issuing anything, Connectia must receive final approval from OCC authorities and approval from Japanese regulators, and there still isn’t a named head from Sony to run it. The 2027 plan is only saved if those approvals happen. Sony is now the testing subject for a market watching if big companies not in finance can get into the US dollar-token system.
Sony Bank has won preliminary conditional approval from the US OCC to set up Connectia Trust, a national trust bank subsidiary built to issue and manage dollar-denominated stablecoins, with a launch targeted for 2027. The move matters to the wider crypto market because it puts a major global conglomerate alongside Circle, Ripple and Paxos in the race for US trust charters, even as banking groups and consumer advocates warn the structure lets stablecoin issuers gain bank-like status without bank-like obligations.
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On July 9, the Fair Trade Commission of South Korea (KFTC) approved Mirae Asset Consulting’s acquisition of 92.06% of the cryptocurrency exchange Korbit. This is the first time that a subsidiary of a significant Korean financial institution has been permitted to buy a licensed digital asset exchange.
For the rest of the world, which is keenly observing how conventional finance is moving towards cryptocurrency, this ruling represents a real trial for the acceptance of that merger.
Regulators in the US, Europe and Asia spent years considering how banks and asset management companies would be able to operate exchanges. South Korea has demonstrated one approach to make use of and did not have to break down the barriers between finance and cryptocurrency.
Mirae Asset Consulting is paying 133.4 billion won for the acquisition (equivalent to $97.9 million based on Bank of Korea’s exchange rates on July 9). The company purchased 26.9 million shares of Korbit, as stated in the regulatory filing.
Why the regulator said yes
The KFTC based its case for approval on the fact that Korbit is a minor player in the market. The commission informed that Korbit is the fourth in the country of five licensed exchanges operating using the technology of exchange trading with won. The platform saw the trading volume of the year equal to only 0.5%. Also, it is widely known that Upbit accounts for 69% of trading volume; Bithumb reaches about 28%; Coinone has about 2%; and Gopax is close to 0.1%, as reported by Bloomingbit.
Thus, the Commission ruled that the deal will not cause harmful effects on the market. The commission explained that it studied two risks: whether it is possible to create a stock-and-crypto platform that will make difficult for competitors to access the securities market and whether it is realistic to set up a crypto-exchange traded fund that will push rivals in asset management. The regulator concluded that these risks could occur only in the case of Korbit enjoying much more liquidity.
“For concerns such as the exclusion of competing businesses in the securities and asset management markets to actually materialize, Korbit must have sufficient liquidity,” a commission official said, according to Chosunbiz, adding that “at the current level, it is insufficient to cause anticompetitive effects.”
A workaround, not a rewrite
In Korea, there is a regulation that prohibits banks, insurance companies, and securities firms that are regulated from participating in cryptocurrency transactions, which was the approach that Mirae Asset applied in executing this transaction.
The buyer is a firm called Mirae Asset Consulting, which is an organization not in the financial sector that generates its revenue from hotel operations, and not from any of the various activities related to investment securities or other financial activities conducted by the group.
Structure is important to anybody viewing the deal as a precedent. Mirae Asset didn’t manage to secure the approval of its financial subsidiary to own the exchange but employed a non-financial company to hold the asset to assure that the separation principle was preserved, which is a difference highlighted by KFTC when it called this precedent the first case of a financial entity subsidiary acquiring a digital asset exchange.
According to a report from Ledger Insights, the sellers are NXC, which is the holding firm of game maker Nexon, and SK Square. Meanwhile, it looks like Bitstamp, which is owned by Robinhood, retains the other 8 percent stake in Korbit. This stake is in line with Mirae Asset Group’s goal of building digital asset and wallet infrastructure outside of Korea.
What it signals for the wider market
The purchase slots into a strategy Mirae Asset has branded as “Mirae Asset 3.0,” a plan its securities arm announced this year to fold digital assets into a traditional finance business. The ownership of the exchange infrastructure gives the company a licensed base from where to explore the world of tokenized securities and crypto ETFs.
KFTC defined the outcome as a stimulus, rather than a threat to the industry. “We hope competition in the digital asset market will be invigorated through a reshaping of the digital finance market and service innovation,” it said, according to DigitalToday.
Only time will tell if the reshaping of the market will remain confined to Korea. The consolidation process has already begun since Coinone is currently seeking for a buyer, according to a CoinMarketCap report. A licensed exchange now located among one of the biggest banking conglomerates in South Korea acts like a new indicator for international financial institutions that are still contemplating how to invest in cryptocurrencies through legal means.



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Binance, which makes up about 39% of the overall spot trading volume for cryptocurrencies in the month of May, may become harder for investigators to depend on in the near future.
The Information, which looked over an internal memo from the US Department of Justice (DOJ), stated that prosecutors dealing with cases regarding cryptocurrency were informed in June that cooperation from Binance may be less than wanted. It has been said that Binance intends to add conditions before fulfilling requests regarding freezing and seizing customer assets.
This raises concerns for the digital asset industry as a whole. Being the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, Binance has proven to be an essential ally in the pursuit of tracking, freezing, and recovering illicit digital assets that were obtained by way of hacking, ransomware, violating sanctions, and fraud. Any decrease in the willingness to cooperate voluntarily is bound to draw the investigations and retrieval of the assets to a halt.
The memorandum was reportedly written by Rachel Jones, who serves as DOJ digital currency counsel, and then disseminated among the people dealing directly with cryptocurrency cases. It also included copies of the memo for some high-level employees, including Kevin Mosley who was involved in the investigations of Binance in 2023.
Binance contest this interpretation of events, with its spokesperson saying:
There has been and will be no change to Binance’s cooperation with U.S. law enforcement.
In a different interview with BeInCrypto, the company’s head of corporate communications stated that the DOJ officials seem to have misinterpreted Binance’s responsibilities under the Abu Dhabi licensing structure and that the company has reached out to both the DOJ and Abu Dhabi officials to clear the matter.
The Abu Dhabi wrinkle
The cause of the misunderstanding, according to Binance, is the license which the company received from the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) where regulation started on Jan. 5, 2026.
According to the official guidance from the ADGM Office of Data Protection, the exemption allowing for necessary disclosures “would not extend to cover requests from law enforcement agencies outside of the UAE.”
If read narrowly, it may mean requiring international authorities to submit requests in accordance with the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLTA) rather than relying on the voluntary cooperation of Binance for immediate asset freezing.
However, the provided guidance allows for transfers needed for the “establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims (including judicial, administrative, regulatory and out-of-court procedures).”
The guidance even gives an example of said provision with reference to the request of a US regulator. Binance insists that this allows the company to continue its cooperation with American law enforcement while still complying with the privacy laws of the UAE, saying:
“We are not going to change in any way, shape or form, the way that we interact with law enforcement in America.”
The firm’s head of corporate communications stated to BeInCrypto that the firm is expanding its cooperation with the DOJ, not decreasing it.
Why voluntary help carries weight now
This issue has taken on greater importance because many of the supervision procedures that were put in place following Binance’s landmark settlement in 2023 have been relaxed significantly.
In November 2023, Binance accepted its guilt regarding the violations of the Bank Secrecy Act including operating an unauthorized money transmitting firm and violations of the sanctions.
The firm agreed to pay penalties worth more than 4.3 billion dollars and accept three years of independent compliance monitoring. As per the plea agreement, Binance also consented to “cooperate fully” with law enforcement agencies in the United States and across the globe.
Since that time, the Department of Justice has suspended many corporate monitoring programs, while the memo that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued in April 2025 ended what it called “regulation by prosecution” of digital assets and led to the closure of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.
The internal memo, as stated by The Information, read that Binance is going to stop “courtesy freezes” and will need additional legal processes including MLAT requests sometimes before making the decision on specific asset freezing or seizing requests. If the idea is implemented, then the investigators may have to wait longer to recover potentially movable digital assets.
Yet, problems regarding compliance remain. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported that the Cambodia-linked Huione Group transferred at least $408 million through Binance in November 2025, while the exchange was being monitored by court officials. In April 2026, Senator Richard Blumenthal asked the DOJ and Treasury for information regarding reports that more than $1 billion was sent via Binance to wallets linked to Iran.
Scott Armstrong, former official of the DOJ Fraud Section, said the rumored changes could lead to “an additional and quite frankly unnecessary hurdle that is going to cause a lot of problems in the law enforcement community.”
What to watch
Binance has disclosed that it has raised the matter of the DOJ memo with officials from the department in its effort to end the monitorship imposed on it by the court. Whether the disagreement results from a fundamental misunderstanding of the privacy laws in ADGM or represents a change in operational procedures could seriously impact the cross-border cryptocurrency enforcement.
Given that Binance is currently responsible for two-fifths of the global market of centralized spot cryptocurrency trading, law enforcement entities have started to depend more and more on the cooperation of Binance in freezing stolen or sanctioned asset in an efficient manner. Should there be a need for more formal requests to be made, the process of international investigations will become a lot slower and more complicated.



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ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is about to open subscription for its Shanghai IPO worth about 29.5 billion yuan (approximately 4.33 billion dollars) on July 16. This is significant not only because CXMT is the largest DRAM producer in China, but also because investors can use this event to evaluate the potential of the company in light of AI developments.
This listing comes about as the memory market across the globe is changing due to developments in AI infrastructure. Companies in the cloud business have started to set up AI data centers that require new technology with higher volume and speed, particularly in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and DRAM.
With that, motherboard producers have prioritized higher profit-margin memory models. The shift has tightened supply and resulted in the continuous increase in memory prices.
Interest in CXMT has spread outside of China as well. According to Financial Times, Apple is checking the Chinese memory chip company’s products for their China-based devices, which proves the increased importance of Chinese manufacturers.
However, the process might turn out to be distorted due to geopolitical reasons supplied by new restrictions introduced by Washington regarding semiconductors. Cryptopolitan had reported previously that new developments in the U.S. will complicate Apple’s path in that direction.
This IPO comes as a result of the company’s quick financial recovery from losses it faced last year, making it now one of the key semiconductor IPOs in China.
The mechanics of the offering
As revealed by CXMT’s STAR Market documentation, preliminary bidding will begin on July 13 and the final IPO price announcement will happen on July 15. The institutional and retail subscriptions will commence on July 16 under the code 688825 for securities, while for online, the code will be 787825, and payment should be made by July 20.
CXMT intends to sell approximately 6.69 billion shares which will be around 10% of the enlarged share capital. The lead underwriter China International Capital Corporation also has an over-allotment option of 15% which may take the total number of shares under sale to over 7.69 billion shares.
CXMT aims to raise 29.5 billion yuan, making it the second-largest IPO in the history of Shanghai’s STAR Market after Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation and the largest A-share listing of 2026, according to the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC).
From losses to record earnings
CXMT’s financial performance has improved sharply alongside the industry’s recovery.
Caixin reported that the company posted a first-quarter net profit of 33 billion yuan after recording a 2.8-billion-yuan loss a year earlier, while revenue surged 719% year over year to 50.8 billion yuan.
The momentum is expected to continue. National Business Daily reported that CXMT forecasts first-half 2026 revenue of 110 billion to 120 billion yuan and net profit of 50 billion to 57 billion yuan, representing year-over-year profit growth of between 2,244% and 2,544%.
The company credits its recovery to restrained supply of DRAM products combined with increased pricing as demand related to AI has taken up all production capacity of the sector.
China’s flagship DRAM maker
Founded in 2016, CXMT is based in Hefei, Anhui and it is currently the largest DRAM manufacturer in China. It supplies memory chips to mobile phones, computers, servers and other computing devices. Its founder, Zhu Yiming, who was also behind GigaDevice, is the major stakeholder of the firm.
In June, the company got the approval from the CSRC for registering on the STAR Market, clearing the way for the IPO
Though it is still lagging behind Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology in cutting-edge memory technologies, CXMT is still the leading manufacturer of DRAM in China. News that Apple is testing its chips indicates that foreign companies are becoming interested in China amid ongoing geopolitical conflicts.
Riding the AI memory supercycle
CXMT is going public during what industry experts refer to as a “memory supercycle.”
According to TrendForce, DRAM contract prices are projected to rise 13-18 percent in Q3, while NAND flash prices are estimated to increase by 10-15 percent due to shifting production capacities toward AI server memory. Gartner projects that overall revenue within the semiconductor sector might approach $1.3 trillion in 2026, with memory segment contributing to approximately 50 percent of the growth in the industry.
Leading cloud computing organizations are buying up huge quantities of memory dedicated to AI projects, thereby leaving little room for supplies for other potential customers and pushing DRAM prices higher, according to the report by TrendForce.
Unlike the previous cycles that were powered mainly by mobile phone and PC upgrades, the current rally is linked to the structural demand for AI infrastructure. One of the reasons behind this phenomenon is that memory manufacturing capacities are not easily increased in a short time, which has resulted in increasing production of HBM and enterprise DRAM, affecting availability of mainstream products and supporting elevated prices.
The favorable state of the market has obviously played into the hands of its competitors. South Korea’s SK Hynix is preparing for a U.S. ADR offering of about $28 billion ahead of its July 10 Nasdaq debut. If completed as planned, the transaction would become the largest foreign listing in U.S. history and the world’s second-largest share sale.
Investor sentiment regarding CXMT remains optimistic. Even though the IPO aims to raise 29.5 billion yuan, the estimates provided by National Business Daily claim the company’s value to be between 2 and 3 trillion yuan.
The valuation seems to be supported by the expectations of investors concerning the ability of CXMT to shorten the technological gap between the Chinese manufacturer and the global market leaders although maintaining such valuation will depend on the company’s ability to consistently bring new advanced DRAM technologies into commercialization rather than relying solely on favorable market conditions.
Founder commits to long-term stake
As stated by National Business Daily, Zhu Yiming has committed to not selling any of his shares within ten years following the timeframe of the IPO. In the following years, Zhu will sell up to 20% of his remaining holdings each year which is one of the longest-held voluntary lock-up commitments made by a founder of an A-share company.
Zhu is also preparing to allocate 768 million shares to his staff over the course of 10 years starting three years after the IPO. The value of the stock package is projected to be higher than 20 billion yuan based on the recent market prices, making it the largest individual employee equity grant in A-share market history, according to National Business Daily.
When subscriptions begin on July 16, the demand from investors will act as the initial test of the market’s confidence. Moreover, the IPO is predicted not only to reflect the success of the fundraising but also how high on the scale the investors put China’s aspiration to create a genuinely competitive memory sector during an AI semiconductor boom period. With Yangtze Memory Technologies also preparing for an IPO, CXMT’s debut could set the benchmark for future Chinese chip listings.



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Kalshi has lost another round in court. A federal judge has turned down the company’s request to stop New York from applying its gambling laws to the prediction markets platform.
U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in Manhattan issued the ruling on Tuesday. She said Kalshi was not entitled to a preliminary injunction. She reasoned that the federal Commodity Exchange Act does not override New York’s gambling laws when it comes to Kalshi’s sports-event contracts.
Torres said New York has strong reasons for its position. She pointed to the state’s goals of stopping gambling addiction, protecting the integrity of sports, and keeping unregulated contracts from spreading. Those interests, she wrote, “heavily” outweigh Kalshi’s arguments about federal law taking priority, and about customers running into what the company called “intractable” tech problems.
“Kalshi has not, therefore, made a clear or substantial showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits,” Torres wrote. She also noted that federal courts around the country remain split on this question.
A lawyer for Kalshi declined to comment on the ruling. The company has since filed an appeal with the federal appeals court in Manhattan.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James put out a joint statement on Wednesday, welcoming the decision. “New York’s gambling laws are designed to protect consumers,” they said. “We will continue to hold all gambling platforms accountable to the law – and that includes prediction markets.”
Commodity Futures Trading Commission sees things differently
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig has said his agency holds “exclusive” authority over commodity derivatives markets, a category he says includes prediction markets.
Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket let users bet on outcomes, from sports results to elections. Interest in them grew sharply after the 2024 presidential election, when their live odds turned out to be more accurate than traditional polls in predicting Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harris.
As reported by Cryptopolitan previously, Kalshi first sued New York in October, after the state’s gaming commission told the company to stop offering sports event contracts without a license.
On April 21, New York filed separate lawsuits against Coinbase Financial Markets and Gemini Titan, accusing both companies of promoting gambling through their own event contracts.
Three days later, the CFTC sued New York. Last month, the CFTC said it has also challenged similar regulatory moves in eight other states: Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.
Google bans prediction market extensions
In a second blow, Google has updated its Chrome Web Store rules to ban browser extensions tied to prediction markets.
The company’s Developer Program policy now lists predictive markets as a prohibited product. “Extensions that facilitate or enable real money transactions on predictive outcomes are not allowed,” Google said in a blog post announcing the change. Enforcement begins August 1, 2026.
Spotify has also recently spoken up about removal of its branding since no partnership exists between them.
That request came after Spotify found and removed more than 500,000 fake streams that had helped push Malcolm Todd’s song “Earrings” onto its charts. Kalshi had already settled a prediction market tied to those fake streams.



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Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat sent a letter this week to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer. His ask: keep Section 604 in future drafts of the Clarity Act.
The disputed section is the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, known as BRCA.
BRCA began as its own bill. It later got folded into the bigger Clarity Act, and it has since become one of the hardest sticking points as lawmakers try to move crypto legislation forward.
The measure creates a safe harbor for developers who don’t hold or control customer funds. It says plainly that these developers should not count as money transmitters. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., introduced the original bill earlier this year. Wyden is its only cosponsor.
“Smart policy will empower law enforcement to do its job and facilitate innovation at the same time,” Wyden wrote in the letter, seen by The Block. “As the Senate continues its consideration of the Clarity Act, I urge you to include the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act in any legislative package.”
Pressure builds from Law Enforcement
Pressure on Section 604 built up in June. Two separate coalitions sent letters raising concerns about the developer safe harbor. Law enforcement groups said their main worries hadn’t been addressed. The Catholic anti-trafficking network went further, telling Senate leaders to rework the section before the bill moves ahead.
The first letter came from groups representing more than 70,000 prosecutors, sheriffs, and police officers. Signers included the National District Attorneys Association, NAAUSA, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and the National Sheriffs’ Association. It went to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt. The letter warned that broad exemptions could shield people who help move illicit money.
“Regulatory certainty should not come at the expense of accountability, transparency, victim protection, or public safety,” the letter read. The groups said the problem isn’t limited to Section 604 either. Other parts of the Clarity Act, they argued, could weaken transparency and leave gaps in anti-money-laundering safeguards that law enforcement relies on.
The second letter came from the Alliance to End Human Trafficking, a network of Catholic sisters and advocates. It went to Thune and Schumer, and it tied Section 604 directly to trafficking and money-laundering risks.
“We are particularly concerned that certain provisions under Section 604 could create broad carveouts and regulatory ambiguities that may make it more difficult to responsibly monitor illicit financial activity tied to trafficking, organized crime, child exploitation, sanctions evasion, and other forms of abuse,” the alliance wrote.
Industry support and Wyden’s rationale
Much of the crypto industry backs the section as reported by Cryptopolitan previously. Supporters say it gives software developers legal clarity and keeps innovation from moving overseas.
In his letter, Wyden said the provision would line up policy between the Department of Justice and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The goal, he said, is to focus resources on people running unlicensed money transmitting businesses, not on ordinary coders.
“The provision also includes a common-sense exception that any non-custodial developers found to be transferring or using funds originating from illicit activity are not protected, ensuring that bad actors can still be held accountable while avoiding the unintended consequence of mistreating neutral software developers as financial intermediaries,” Wyden wrote.
The fight over BRCA is now one of the biggest unresolved pieces of the Clarity Act. Lawmakers are also stuck on whether new ethics rules are needed for officials with crypto ties, including President Donald Trump. Time is short. Congress leaves Washington in August, and the November elections are getting close.
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OpenAI began rolling out a rebuilt voice mode to ChatGPT consumer users on Wednesday, replacing Advanced Voice Mode with two models, GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 mini, that can hear a user and respond at the same time.
The update will be made available to free and paid consumer accounts and comes one day prior to the launch of the GPT-5.6 model family by the company.
The main reason behind the shift to GPT Live is architectural. While previous voice models would wait for the human speaker to finish their sentence, GPT-Live operates based on OpenAI’s full-duplex architecture, which involves processing input speech while generating output speech at the same time.
According to OpenAI’s announcement, the model decides many times per second whether to talk, keep listening, pause, cut in, or reach for a tool. In practice, that means a user can talk over it, stop to think without being interrupted, or hear it drop in an “mhmm” to signal it is following along.
OpenAI brings GPT-Live to ChatGPT Voice
Free ChatGPT accounts now default to GPT-Live-1 mini, while subscribers on the Go, Plus, and Pro tiers get the larger GPT-Live-1.
The rollout covers iOS, Android, and the web, and because ChatGPT already works through CarPlay, 9to5Mac noted the update also lands in the car. OpenAI says the nine voices in ChatGPT have been remastered for the new models.
It also said it built GPT-Live to be a conversationalist, not a reasoning engine. For more complex requests, GPT-Live does not handle everything on its own. According to OpenAI, the voice model is capable of delegating tasks like web search, reasoning, and even multistep answers to GPT-5.5 without pausing the voice conversation.
This is supposed to address one of the major shortcomings of ChatGPT’s earlier voice mode, where it sometimes seemed to be less powerful compared to typing. Users will also have the option of selecting between a quick-response mode and a high-effort mode.
OpenAI is also adding near real-time speech translation and visual cards for weather, stock prices, and sports scores, giving users some answers on screen instead of having ChatGPT read everything aloud. The company said more than 150 million people already use ChatGPT features such as Voice and Dictation each week.
GPT-Live improves voice flow but leaves gaps
According to TechCrunch, which covered an OpenAI press conference, the Hindi translation had a strong American accent along with very stiff and bookish language.
Per OpenAI, the model works best for “some of the most common languages in ChatGPT,” although they warn that there might be a problem with the accent or fluency in some languages. Also, OpenAI stated that voice in combination with videos and screen sharing is not supported as of now.
While OpenAI has pitched GPT-Live as a more human version of its entire model lineup, it insists that it is not an AI companion. The company also highlighted safeguards it had put in place to guarantee age-appropriate responses to teens. It also added that crisis resources are in place should a user conversation be geared towards self-harm.
Audio clips from Live and Advanced Voice conversations are retained for 30 days and are not used to train models unless users choose to share them.
Atty Eleti, product lead for ChatGPT Voice, told the briefing he has held 30- to 40-minute conversations with the feature on walks, and argued voice could become a main way people run longer, more complex tasks.
The kind of amazing use cases that we see people using Codex and ChatGPT to accomplish, we think voice can be the future interface to all kinds of work
– Eleti via TechCrunch
GPT-5.6 launch puts the timing in focus
The voice update is separate from the model release OpenAI has scheduled for Thursday.
According to Cryptopolitan, the approval of GPT-5.6 for public release was granted after the U.S. Department of Commerce had released the embargo imposed during its national security review, and it is available in three versions: Sol, Terra, and Luna.
GPT-Live is set to reach OpenAI’s API after the consumer rollout, with developers able to register for access.



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