
Anchorpoint Opened Its HKD Stablecoin to Institutions via HashKey
The Standard Chartered-backed issuer put HKDAP into beta on Wednesday, with HashKey Exchange and OSL Group cleared to mint and redeem for professional investors only.
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The Standard Chartered-backed issuer put HKDAP into beta on Wednesday, with HashKey Exchange and OSL Group cleared to mint and redeem for professional investors only.

Approval opens a comment period on Paul Atkins's three-track proposal: a startup exemption, a fundraising exemption, and a safe harbor that ends investment-contract treatment once network development is complete. Compliance-relevant adoption is a 2027 story.

The 20-year contract at Rockdale, Texas is worth $9.1 billion at floor and up to $16.1 billion with two five-year extensions. It is Riot's second AI-compute lease inside six months.

The three-month annualised futures basis has fallen to roughly 3 per cent, below two-year Treasury yields, ending the market-neutral position that kept leveraged funds structurally short for years.

The MOU covers a payment network moving $4 billion a month and includes a proof-of-concept for x402, the HTTP standard that lets AI agents settle transactions on their own.

The Fed chair asked officials to submit written views on shrinking a calendar that has held eight meetings a year since Paul Volcker set it in 1981. Six is the number circulating in Washington.

The vault runs on Sodot's MPC key infrastructure, the Israeli firm MoonPay bought for roughly $100 million in April, and settles through the x402 payment standard that Coinbase built and gave away to the Linux Foundation.

Decree 284/2026 puts individual penalties on retail investors for the first time and takes effect on 1 September, hardening a pilot regime that until now had no consequences attached.

The security firm Hexens published the details of an Aptos Move virtual machine flaw on 4 July. Its simulation showed a 90 per cent success rate at compromising the network with commodity hardware, and about $70 billion in bridge, stablecoin and exchange balances sat within the blast radius.

Strategy disclosed the sale of 3,588 BTC across two tranches to fund dividends on its Digital Credit securities, marking its largest bitcoin disposal since the 2022 tax-loss transaction and confirming the shift from pure accumulation to selective monetisation.

Vitalik Buterin's Lean Ethereum roadmap commits the network to a three-to-four-year rebuild spanning seven hard forks — replacing the EVM, elevating quantum resistance to an immediate requirement, and building shielded transfers into the base layer rather than the application layer.

The former Ethereum Foundation enterprise team has spun out as an independent nonprofit backed by BitMine, SharpLink Gaming, Joseph Lubin and Standard Chartered, with a mandate to serve every institution engaging Ethereum without charging a fee.

SOL climbed out of its mid-June $66–$72 range on 1 July, testing above $85 intraday as the SEC and CFTC's March joint commodity interpretation continues to reshape which institutions can hold it.

Consensys is trying to turn MetaMask from a swap interface into a full self-custodial current account, routing stablecoin balances into Morpho for yield while letting users spend at any Mastercard merchant.

The second-largest difficulty cut of 2026 reflects what miner earnings have been telegraphing all year: Marathon, Riot and their peers are pulling power and capital out of bitcoin mining and into AI data centres as fast as the contracts can be signed.

Bitcoin Depot's voluntary Chapter 11 filing on Monday took North America's largest bitcoin ATM fleet offline overnight. A 49 per cent year-on-year revenue collapse, a $3.7 million April hack, and parallel state attorney general lawsuits finally moved faster than the company's cash position.

The $9 trillion broker rolled out Schwab Crypto to a first cohort of US retail clients on May 13, priced well below Coinbase's standard fee, with custody handled inside a chartered bank rather than an exchange.

MARA Holdings disposed of nearly a third of its bitcoin treasury in Q1 to retire zero-coupon convertibles and fund a pivot toward AI infrastructure — and its 10-Q no longer describes the firm primarily as a miner.

A class action filed in April alleges Circle had both the technical capability and a recent track record of freezing wallets, then declined to act for eight hours while $230 million in stolen USDC moved out of Solana through its own bridge.

Base announced on May 4 that its Azul upgrade would integrate Succinct's SP1 zero-knowledge prover alongside its existing TEE proof system, with mainnet activation planned for May 13. The change cuts withdrawal finality from a multi-day challenge window to roughly one day — and makes Base the largest single Ethereum operator to put ZK proofs in production.

Senators voted unanimously on April 30 to bar themselves and their staff from trading on prediction markets, an immediate amendment to Rule 37 introduced by Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno after months of insider-trading concerns over senators wagering on policy outcomes they themselves were shaping.

Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reports that North Korean state-backed hackers stole approximately $577 million in 2026 — 76% of all crypto hack losses — across just two attacks: the Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO exploits.

Bitcoin's daily spot trading volume has fallen below $5 billion across major exchanges, the lowest reading since October 2023, with Glassnode warning that the resulting drop in market depth has historically preceded sharp directional moves rather than calm consolidation.

The world's largest stablecoin issuer is buying its way into the retail wallets that already serve three million users across the region — because at this scale, distribution is the moat, not liquidity.

Japanese Bitcoin treasury firm Metaplanet wrapped the world's most expensive billboard in a 'Secure the Future with Bitcoin' message this week. The advertising blitz coincides with a 25 per cent year-to-date drop in its share price and growing investor questions about whether the treasury model still works.

The largest IPO in history is targeting a 30 per cent retail allocation — roughly $22 billion — and analysts warn that the capital earmarked for SpaceX shares is the same risk-on money that has been propping up bitcoin's April rally.

The $12 trillion brokerage has begun a phased rollout of Schwab Crypto, offering direct bitcoin and ether trading through the same interfaces its clients already use for equities, with Paxos handling execution and custody sitting at its Premier Bank subsidiary.

The Besqala Mining Valley in Karakalpakstan will exempt operators from corporate and property tax until 2035, but requires all sale proceeds to be repatriated through Uzbekistan's domestic banking system.

LayerZero's post-mortem pins the largest DeFi exploit of 2026 on KelpDAO's single-verifier bridge configuration, but Kelp says it was using LayerZero's own defaults. North Korea's Lazarus Group has been attributed as the attacker.

A week after Iran's Strait of Hormuz reopening sent bitcoin past $75,000, the rally has run into a concentrated band of sell orders and increasingly nervous derivatives positioning.

The crypto asset manager's BAVA fund debuted on the NYSE on 15 April, staking roughly 70% of its AVAX holdings in-house while charging 0.34% — undercutting competitors in a three-way race for Avalanche exposure.

The social trading platform's acquisition of the keyless MPC wallet — which has never been hacked in seven years — is its clearest signal yet that it sees crypto's future in user-held assets rather than centralised order books.