Cryptopolitan

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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Meta will build a 1-gigawatt AI data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta, the company’s first in Canada and, by its own account, its largest outside the United States. Meta puts the investment at more than CAD $13 billion, or roughly $9.2 billion in US dollars.
The company confirmed the project on Wednesday, July 8, at a Calgary news conference where Gary Demasi, Meta’s vice-president of data center strategy and development, appeared alongside Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
As reported by EnergyNow, Gary Demasi said:
We are excited to announce that Sturgeon County, Alberta, will be home to Meta’s newest data center.
The site sits about 35 kilometers north of Edmonton in the Alberta Industrial Heartland, a zone set aside for heavy industry. It will span roughly 2.9 million square feet and rank as Meta’s 33rd data center worldwide, joining a fleet that already includes facilities in Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, and Singapore.
Meta describes the campus as optimized for the AI workloads behind products used by billions of people. As Cryptopolitan earlier reported, the company plans to spend up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, nearly double the $72 billion it spent in 2025.
Alberta lands its biggest project since the oilsands era
Meta’s own newsroom lists about 3,000 construction workers at peak build and more than 300 permanent operational jobs, plus roughly CAD $60 million toward local roads and water infrastructure. Alberta’s government frames the payoff more broadly: an estimated $250 million a year in taxes, natural gas royalties, and industry levies, according to Culture Alberta and EnergyNow.
Technology Minister Nate Glubish tied the win to a deliberate campaign. He said he first pitched Meta’s data center team in Silicon Valley about two years ago, when the company had not considered the province. “It did not happen by accident. It happened by design,” Glubish said.
For scale, reports note the campus would be the largest capital project in the province since Suncor’s $17 billion Fort Hills oilsands mine. And the $13 billion figure covers the buildings, not the AI chips inside them. Carson Kearl, an analyst at Enverus, said the project could eventually drive more than $75 billion in total spending once chips and networking gear are counted.
Gas power becomes the key trade-off for Meta’s AI campus
The data center’s power will come from Alberta’s grid and a gas plant next door. That gas plant, called Greenlight Electricity Center, is a stand-alone $4.6 billion facility owned by Pembina Pipeline, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor. Meta doesn’t own the plant, it just purchases the power it generates.
The announcement also solved a small mystery: when the Greenlight plant got its go-ahead on July 2, its backers would only describe the buyer as a single “major data center” customer, Culture Alberta reported. Meta is that customer. The plant is targeted to come online in the second half of 2030.
The facility would require about as much electricity as 800,000 homes would, having power of up to 970 megawatts from the grid, as well as up to 1,800 megawatts of onsite gas generation when fully built out, according to reports. That reliance on gas is key to the province’s argument, and it’s also a source of contention.
Alberta’s grid is far more carbon-intensive than Canada’s national average. Meta says it will match its electricity use with 100% clean and renewable energy and is screening clean-energy projects in the region to offset consumption.
The Pembina Institute, a clean-energy think tank unrelated to the pipeline company, warned that the added gas demand means household electricity costs will keep rising in the years ahead.
Glubish argued the reverse on transmission, saying Meta’s roughly $100 million a year in transmission fees would spread fixed costs across more users and cut other Albertans’ transmission charges by up to six percent.
Meta: “Dry cooling will limit water use”
Meta says that on water, the site will use a closed loop, liquid-cooled system with dry cooling, using no water at all for cooling purposes, as per its newsroom and CBC News.
On-site water use will be limited to domestic needs, fire safety, and equipment maintenance.
Our annual water use is actually less than a typical Alberta golf course.
Meta has also pledged to be water positive by 2030 and, in Alberta, to help conserve 200 acres of grassland, trees, and wetlands in the North Saskatchewan River watershed.
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AI company Mistral AI unveiled an 8-billion-parameter model, called Robostral Navigate, that steers robots with a single camera on Wednesday, marking the French company’s first move into physical A.
The launch is intended to challenge the sensor-heavy navigation systems used across warehouses and factories.
Mistral AI builds novel navigation system with AI
The Paris-based startup, valued at 11.7 billion euros (about $13.4 billion) in its September Series C round, has spent most of its existence competing with OpenAI on text and code. Its new model, Robostral Navigate, however, puts the company in a totally different tech category.
According to a Mistral press release, the model handles “embodied navigation,” which lets a robot move through offices, homes, commercial buildings, and outdoor spaces without external input.
However, unlike regular autonomous navigation models that lean on LiDAR, depth sensors, or several cameras working together, Robostral Navigate runs on a single RGB camera. All the model requires is a plain-language instruction just like an AI text prompt, after which it produces the movement commands to carry it out.
Mistral AI trial numbers
Mistral AI says the robotic AI model scored 76.6% on R2R-CE validation unseen, a benchmark that measures how well a robot follows instructions in environments it was not trained on. That figure beat the best previous single-camera scores by 9.7 points, according to The News International.
AI Weekly reported that the model also edged out multi-sensor systems built on LiDAR and depth by 4.5 points, with a validation-seen score of 79.4%.
If these gaps hold in real-life situations, it would be of utmost importance to those interested in industrial robots. Naturally, the general assumption in mobile robotics has been that cameras alone are too fragile, so a full sensor stack is compulsory. A build with just a single camera that matches or beats full stack systems would cut the parts bill for warehouse and facility machines.
Skepticism surrounding real-life usage
It is worth noting that these scores come from simulated situations and not real life. Mistral claims to have trained the model on about 400,000 trajectories across 6,000 scenes, using a method the company claims cut training tokens by a factor of 22, while shortening runs that took previously took months to only days.
But as AI Weekly noted, the company has not published any actual robot usage results or figures regarding on-device latency. Engineers have also questioned if a 76.6% success rate is good enough for deployment in real life.
Mistral is also reported to be in talks to raise about 3 billion euros (approximately $3.42 billion) at a valuation close to 20 billion euros (about $23 billion).
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The 50-week moving average of Ethereum crossed below the 200-week average, creating a “death cross.” This is seen as a long-term bearish indicator. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is struggling to stay above $62,000 after being unable to break through the $64,000 to $65,000 resistance area. Such a pattern matters for the retail investors who flocked into crypto through exchange-traded funds and are now trading in the red.
Bitcoin price declined by around 2% over the last 24 hours and was mostly stuck in the low $62,000 territory. However, it recovered from dropping below $58,000, a new 21-month low. Ethereum has been trading below $1,750, which is almost 4% lower than the previous day and about 30% below its value one year ago. All other altcoins followed suit. Crypto market cap excluding Bitcoin and Ether has declined 30% from January.
Ether’s technical warning
The death cross is the main technical event. On-Chain data shows that the 50-week exponential moving average of Ether has crossed below its 200-week counterpart. This has previously managed to avoid such a move during all selloffs. Prediction markets traders bet that the bear trend will continue. It appears that there is a 72.3% chance that Ether will reach $1,500 before rising to $3,000. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index reads 26, flashing “extreme fear” among investors.
Crypto ETF outflows laid out the most evident statistic of the destruction. The outflows of US Bitcoin funds amounted to nearly $1.79 billion in the week ending June 26, and opinions differ regarding how terrible this performance was. The data showed that it was one of the worst weeks for Bitcoin ETFs since their introduction in January 2024. Turns out that this $1.79 billion outflow equals the second biggest week on record, being beaten only by a $2.61 billion outflow in late February 2025.
Regardless of that, this streak is the longest one yet for the group. As per SoSoValue data, there were already seven consecutive weeks of outflows, which began back in mid-May and exceeded two prior five-week streaks.
ETF investors turn underwater
Those ETF outflows tell the tale of retail. The typical IBIT investor is now sitting on close to 40% in losses. This is in sharp contrast to the typical IBIT investor being in the black by about 30% as of mid-2025. IBIT has posted $60.26 billion in inflows but has net assets of $44.42 billion as Bitcoin price dipped by more than 23% over the last 60 days.
The situation is equally dire for Spot Ether funds, which have lost $273.34 million over the same period, marking their seventh consecutive week of outflows.
There is one piece of positive news as Bitcoin ETFs ended a 10-day streak of $2.7 billion in outflows. The sell-off has coincided with a hawkish stance from the Fed. The Fed kept interest rates unchanged at its June 18 meeting and removed the word “ease” from its statement, while the probability of a rate increase in December is currently above 50%,
This pessimism might be overstated, given that every Bitcoin bear cycle since 2009 ended with the onset of extreme fear, and the next halving period, when the production of new bitcoins falls by half, is expected in about 21 months. This time, there is an additional factor to offset the bear market – the presence of institutional investors in the form of spot ETFs, company balance sheets, and the legal framework of digital assets, which was nonexistent during the previous cycle.
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Perpetuals.com Ltd (Nasdaq: PDC) has signed a non-binding term sheet to explore buying the Trump-linked fintech, Alt5 Sigma Canada, Inc.
The fintech company was known as ALT5 Sigma Corporation until April. If the deal closes, it could be worth up to $15 million and function as a lifeline for the company that has warned it may not survive the year.
Why is AI Financial selling its core business?
Perpetuals.com Ltd (NASDAQ: PDC) has signed a non-binding term sheet to explore buying Alt5 Sigma Canada Inc., a profitable subsidiary of AI Financial Corporation (Nasdaq: AIFC).
The term sheet was disclosed on July 7 in a statement from Matthew Nicoletti, chief strategy officer at Perpetuals. Nicoletti said Perpetuals is still running due diligence and emphasized that nothing has been finalized as the company is still weighing how the purchase might fit its product roadmap.
What is Trump’s connection?
AI Financial was ALT5 Sigma Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTS) until it announced a rebrand and ticker change in April, according to Reuters. The Las Vegas firm, in 2025, recorded roughly $24.8 million in fintech revenue and processed about $3.5 billion in transactions, with more than $8 billion in cumulative volume since inception. It also lost $5.86 per share over the trailing twelve months.
Cryptopolitan reported that Alt5 tied itself to World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, through a $1.5 billion crypto reserve arrangement. Through that arrangement, World Liberty received stock and board seats. Eric Trump appeared on the company’s leadership page as an adviser and board observer as recently as March, then disappeared from it by late April.
In its most recent annual filing, AI Financial recorded a loss of more than $341 million and told investors there was serious doubt about whether it could keep operating for another year.
Before the deal can be completed, Perpetual laid out that first, due diligence must be completed, they have to agree on a price, sign the definitive documents, get board approval, and clear regulators. The company said it will present to investors at the Global Technology Virtual Investor Conference on July 9 and the Emerging Growth Conference on July 15, where questions about the proposed deal are likely to surface.
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The Bank of America has offered a $520 million credit line to OpenAI, with the ChatGPT maker preparing to go public in an IPO. This move pulls one of Wall Street’s largest institutions deeper into the business of financing AI.
This hands the Bank of America a foothold in what could become one of the biggest listings ever, and also signals that a historically cautious bank now sees AI startups as worth the financial risk.
Bank of America makes a U-turn
Bank of America, run by CEO Brian Moynihan, had kept its distance from AI startups because a lot of them kept losing money. However, increased competition in the AI financing sector has changed this.
OpenAI had already pulled in more than $5 billion from other financiers, and the bank has calculated that sitting out meant potentially losing access to an IPO that could feed its Merrill Lynch wealth-management arm.
The bank is also a huge player in the happenings on Wall Street. It carries a $3.5 trillion balance sheet, holds the second-largest deposit share in the United States, and trades at a market cap of about $424 billion.
OpenAI IPO positioning
Since last year, the Bank of America has helped to raise almost $500 billion for AI-related companies. According to Reuters, this figure accounts for 60% of all of that type of fundraising across leveraged finance, investment-grade debt, and equity capital markets. Reuters also reported that the bank was weighing advisory roles in the IPOs of both OpenAI and its rival Anthropic.
The Bank of America worked as one of the bookrunners on SpaceX’s public listing and ran the IPO’s US retail distribution. Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company debuted in June at a valuation above $2 trillion, which remains the largest IPO on record.
OpenAI filed confidentially for a US listing last month and is targeting a valuation above $1 trillion, although the company has reportedly considered delaying the offering.
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A deputy home minister told parliament on Wednesday that since 2022, Malaysian police have arrested 629 people and taken back 75,578 crypto mining machines in more than 3,000 raids. The fight against miners who steal power from the national grid is getting tougher.
According to Bernama and The Star, Datuk Seri Dr. Shamsul Anuar Nasarah gave these numbers during Ministry Question Time in the Dewan Rakyat, the lower house of parliament. They are up to date as of May 2026 and include 3,049 raids across the country. The Royal Malaysian Police, Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB), the Energy Commission, and local councils all worked together on the raids.
A lawmaker named Datuk Siti Zailah Mohd Yusoff asked Shamsul a follow-up question. She pushed the ministry about what she called a lack of prosecutions against miners who steal electricity. He said that law enforcement will now rely more on sharing information and using technology to find high-risk areas before raids. This will allow for what he called a “faster and more precise” response.
Owning crypto is legal, stealing power is not
In Malaysia, people can own and trade crypto, but the government does not recognize it as money. Digital assets are regulated by the Securities Commission Malaysia. Bank Negara Malaysia is the country’s central bank. Its job is to keep the economy stable and enforce laws against money laundering.
The crackdown is meant to stop the theft of electricity that comes with it. Shamsul said that a setup is breaking the law when it uses unauthorized connections, tampered meters, breaks down supply systems, or runs without the right licenses. Since Malaysia doesn’t have a specific law against crypto mining, people who do it are charged under the Electricity Supply Act with bypassing or tampering with meters.
People who want to steal power are drawn to mining rigs. They keep going and pull heavy loads all the time. Shamsul told parliament that operators often tamper with meters to hide how much energy is being used. This drives up utility costs and can make the supply that homes and businesses nearby depend on less stable.
He also talked about claims made before about raids in Manjung, Perak. He said that investigators found no proof that any police officers, agents, or members of the Manjung municipal council were involved in any illegal raids in the area.
Losses top $1 billion
TNB says that between 2018 and 2024, electricity theft related to crypto mining increased by about 300%. The number of cases found increased from 610 to 2,397, as Cryptopolitan reported in November 2025. The power company said that illegal power use by miners at about 14,000 locations between 2020 and August 2025 cost it more than 4.6 billion ringgit, or about $1.1 billion.
This is the same driver that the police have used before, Shamsul said. It’s the need for digital assets and the money that can be made when token prices change. The lawmaker made it clear that gains do not make crimes less serious and that illegal mining is against the law and costs power companies and their customers real money.
Investigators are making lists of properties that might be suspects. TNB has been putting in smart meters that can tell right away if someone is tampering with them or using them in a way that isn’t normal.
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Block (NYSE: XYZ) agreed to pay $45 million and rebuild Cash App’s fraud protections to settle claims from 46 state attorneys general that it misled users about the app’s safety and abandoned fraud victims, the coalition announced Wednesday.
The bipartisan group, led by Oregon and Texas, said the payments company assured Cash App’s 56 million-plus users that their money was as safe as it would be in a bank, even as fraud on the platform climbed.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who helped secure the deal, said Block “cared more about profits than protecting its users.”
Who gets the money?
The $45 million will be shared by the participating states rather than paid to consumers directly.
New York takes $1.6 million in penalties, Washington takes $1.8 million, Connecticut collects $1.5 million, while New Jersey gets $892,753, and Massachusetts gets $730,000. Nebraska gets just $379,619.99, Attorney General Mike Hilgers said.
Consumer refunds are a whole different ballgame. The deal reaffirms an earlier promise from Block to distribute between $75 million and $120 million to fraud victims nationwide following a January 2025 order from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
Block was fined $55 million by the Bureau and was required to pay a maximum of $120 million in redress, with a $75 million floor.
The practices that caught the eye of regulators
Investigators said Cash App’s signup process put speed over anything else, including security. A fraudster could easily run a web of scam accounts, the state of New York alleged.
Customer service was another gaping hole. For years, Cash App had no working phone line, so locked-out users searched the web and reached fake numbers run by scammers posing as customer support staff. Those “callers” then seized accounts or drained linked bank balances, and Block failed to set up a real phone line until 2021, James’s office said.
Block’s marketing giveaway created a third problem. Under its marketing promo called “Cash App Fridays,” the company urged users to post their $cashtag, the app’s unique username, for a chance at a weekly prize.
Scammers messaged contestants with fake winning notices and tricked them into handing over login details. The states said Block was aware of the pattern of fraud but ignored it and kept the promotion running for years.
In its terms of service, Block claimed “cutting-edge” fraud detection technology, New York’s investigation found, even though it had no consistent system in place.
What Block has to change
The consent order requires Block to provide live customer support in the form of a person reachable by phone for at least 13.5 hours a day and at least 18 hours by chat. The ruling mandated Block to stop making misleading claims or leaning into marketing tactics with undue fraud exposure.
Washington pursued a second case parallel to this one. Brown’s office announced a separate $20 million settlement over Block’s mishandling of unemployment money stolen during the pandemic.
The state said over $22 million in Unemployment Benefits was processed through Cash App accounts in 2020 after criminals filed claims using stolen identities of Washingtonians.
Pressure mounts on Dorsey’s payments business
The settlements arrive during a rough stretch for Block, which trades on the NYSE under the ticker XYZ. The Jack Dorsey-led firm posted a $308.7 million net loss for the first quarter of 2026, even as Cash App gross profit rose 38%, Cryptopolitan reported in May.
Block, which holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet and earns revenue from Bitcoin sales through Cash App, has also said it would cut more than 4,000 jobs.
Other regulatory fronts are closing, too. In a May securities filing, Block stated that it was negotiating settlement proposals with the U.S. Department of Justice over its compliance and risk practices.
Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission had ended a separate investigation without an enforcement action.
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About 1,200 people in Texas lost a total of $56.8 million last year to scams that used cryptocurrency kiosks. According to FBI complaint data, that’s more than any other state and about twice as much as was stolen in Florida, which came in second. Prosecutors and sheriffs are pushing the state to regulate crypto ATMs that it doesn’t even watch because of the losses.
Many of these kiosks, which look like ATMs, can be found in Texas gas stations, grocery stores, and convenience stores. However, no organization keeps track of the exact number. People can put cash into the machines, buy cryptocurrency, and very quickly have it sent to a wallet address.
Con artists only care about speed. Once the money arrives, the con artists split it up among many wallets and mix it with clean money. According to the Texas Financial Crimes Intelligence Center, victims have only 36 to 48 hours to recover any of their money. Clawbacks don’t happen often.
The caller says they are a police officer, a court official, or a utility company. For example, they say that the target missed a jury summons or a fine that needs to be paid. Then, they stay on the line while the target drives to a kiosk and deposits cash.
In one case reported by the Tribune, a fake Travis County officer called a 72-year-old Austin woman named Maria and said she was going to be arrested. The caller also texted her court papers with a real case number and her home address. She just stood there at the machine. “That thing is a Bitcoin machine.” She said, “I’m not putting any money there.” Some people did not get as lucky. Someone lost almost $100,000, and someone else lost $63,000.
No state rules, and a settlement over a seized crypto machine
Texas doesn’t license or keep an eye on the kiosks, which is a hole that public safety advocates say fraudsters take advantage of. In May, Adam Colby, who runs the Texas Financial Crimes Intelligence Center, told a Texas House committee that the machines “do not do anything useful, and no sane person would choose to use them except to hide illegal funds.”
Some officers went right for the gear. Sheriff Chuck Havard took a power tool to a Bitcoin Depot kiosk in June 2025 after a family said they had been scammed out of $25,000. This happened in Jasper County, which is northwest of Houston. The machine gave his office back about $32,000. Bitcoin Depot sued the county and reached a settlement after a similar seizure happened in McLennan County in 2023, after an 82-year-old woman lost $15,000.
“Crypto is a wonderful, amazing, horrible, terrible invention,” said Michael Levine, chief felony prosecutor for the Cyber and Financial Crimes Division of the Harris County district attorney’s office. “The advantage of crypto is you can move money much faster without supervision.”
Cities move while the state debates
San Antonio logged about $39 million in losses across 660 reports between January 2024 and April 2026. On July 1, the city started requiring bilingual English and Spanish warning signs at its 193 kiosks, Cryptopolitan reported. Operators that skip the notices face fines of $100 to $500 per machine per day. Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith is lobbying state legislators for a flat-out ban after an elderly woman lost $13,000 to an inmate running the scam from a Georgia prison. Indiana, Tennessee, and Minnesota already banned the machines statewide.
Bitcoin Depot had more than 9,000 kiosks across North America. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May after its first-quarter 2026 revenue fell about 50% year over year. The Massachusetts attorney general sued the company in February.
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In a video that has been going around since early July, Cristiano Ronaldo seems to be telling fans to buy a token called USWR. The video isn’t real. It was made based on a real interview the captain of Portugal gave at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The fake endorsement came out while Ronaldo was getting all the attention at the tournament. It spread even more after Portugal lost to Spain in the round of 16 and was eliminated. “I’m not a big investment advice kind of guy, but if you put every dollar you have into USWR, you’ll be very happy at the end of July,” a fake Ronaldo says in the staged video. He didn’t say it.
AFP says that the token is based on a claim to ownership in the “United States Water Reserve.” The short, fake video of Ronaldo sends fans to a website named uswr[.]ai.
One Instagram post from July 4 tried to sell the video as a scoop. It asked if anyone else had heard Ronaldo talk about the deal after the win. Many people shared copies on Facebook, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube.
Where the real footage came from
The clip came from the Spanish news site Diario AS, which caught Ronaldo in the mixed zone after July 3’s 2-1 win over Croatia. It had nothing to do with money in the real exchange. Ronaldo spoke English instead of Portuguese and praised Luka Modrić, the captain of Croatia and a former teammate at Real Madrid. He called Modrić “a legend of football” and wished him luck.
Scammers kept the video and added fake sound to it. AFP said that in both versions, Ronaldo’s face and the people around him are exactly the same. The token part was run through the Hiya[.]com voice-cloning detector in the InVID Verification Plugin. The speech that came back was “probably made by AI.”
The word “Water Reserve” was probably chosen on purpose. It’s a play on Ronaldo’s real stake in Maravilha Décimal, a high-end bottled water brand. Fans who remember some of his business deals will find the pitch more believable. The news source also said that he is one of the most copied athletes online. Any fake with his face on it gets around quickly.
Footballers keep turning up in crypto trouble
The USWR clip is a fake endorsement, not a project Ronaldo ever touched. But footballers have landed in real crypto disputes too. As Cryptopolitan reported in May, a Barcelona court is investigating six former Sevilla players over the Shirtum project. The group includes Ivan Rakitić and Papu Gómez. Spanish investors say losses could top €24 million.
Experts keep pointing to the same defense. Fans should check the athlete’s own verified channels before believing any crypto pitch. And they should treat “put in every dollar” and month-end payoff promises as reasons to walk away.
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Adam Back’s Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company (BSTR) and Cantor Equity Partners I (NASDAQ: CEPO) have scrapped the terms of their year-old merger on Wednesday and postponed a shareholder vote indefinitely, restarting negotiations on how the Bitcoin treasury firm goes public.
Cantor Equity Partners I (CEPO) has said its BSTR deal will not close on the terms set in the business combination agreement dated July 16, 2025. Both sides are now discussing a new structure for the merger and amended terms meant to “better reflect current market conditions.”
The reset effectively kills the private placement financing, which was set to raise $1.5 billion, attached to the original merger.
A vote that never came to life
CEPO had initially planned its shareholder meeting for the 10th of July at 10 a.m. Eastern. But has now canceled the meeting. The company has asked shareholders to remain calm, and anyone who filed to redeem shares will have them returned.
The indefinite postponement comes after weeks of indecision on the part of the two companies. The vote was slated for June 26, then moved to July 2 and then to July 10, with each delay linked to unresolved terms on the private investment in public equity, or PIPE.
No deadline has been set for the redemption of shares.
Back sees the move as a strategic choice meant to position BSTR for more opportunities in the market. He wrote on X that BSTR and CEPO are working on a potential revised structure “intended to opportunistically better capitalize on market conditions.”
Back told CoinDesk early this year that going public in a softer Bitcoin market could help BSTR by letting it buy coins at lower prices before any recovery.
What BSTR was set to bring to the public market?
BSTR is a pure-play Bitcoin treasury company led by Adam Back. BSTR was set to go public on Nasdaq with 30,021 BTC, worth ~$1.9 billion at Wednesday’s price of ~ $62,000. CEPO’s market capitalization was $267.2 million during the merger process.
That stash would rank BSTR fifth among public corporate Bitcoin holders, behind Michael Saylor’s Strategy, Twenty One Capital, Metaplanet, and MARA Holdings.
Founders Back and Blockstream Capital were to supply 25,000 BTC, with a further 5,021 BTC coming in through the PIPE. Cryptopolitan noted BSTR had billed that arrangement as the first major in-kind Bitcoin PIPE in a SPAC deal, with investors contributing actual Bitcoin instead of cash.
CEPO is sponsored by an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald and chaired by Brandon Lutnick, son of U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The SPAC raised about $200 million in its January 2026 IPO.
What to watch next
Any new structure agreed by both companies would have to be reflected in fresh filings amending registration documents previously approved by the SEC. Then a vote can proceed. Until CEPO and BSTR make further announcements, BSTR’s path to Nasdaq remains open.
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