The Luxembourg approval completes the company's MiCA licensing process, enabling it to provide regulated crypto-asset services across the European Economic Area.

Bitmine's big buy contrasts with crypto treasury peer Strategy, which reported selling millions of dollars worth of its Bitcoin holdings on Monday.

England's win highlights their resilience and strategic prowess, potentially redefining their World Cup legacy under Tuchel's leadership.

The post Wayne Rooney calls England’s 3-2 win over Mexico one of the great World Cup displays appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Tottenham's strategic maneuvers in the transfer market highlight the ongoing financial chess game in football, impacting club dynamics and fan engagement.

The post Tottenham Hotspur set to hijack Barcelona’s top transfer target appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Cardano’s governance story is moving from theory into the harder question of spending. The network’s 2026 budget process puts ADA treasury allocation, measurable ecosystem goals, and DRep validation back at the centre of the conversation.

That may not be the kind of headline that creates instant price excitement, but it matters for Cardano’s long-term credibility. A treasury only becomes useful if the ecosystem can decide how to deploy it without turning every funding round into chaos.

For more details, visit the official Cardano platform.

TL;DR

Cardano’s 2026 ecosystem budget framework proposes aligning treasury spending with Cardano Vision 2030 and measurable KPIs. The process includes standardized templates, minimum proposal sizes, and DRep validation. Separately, the Cardano Foundation has described voting decisions around dozens of proposals requesting hundreds of millions of ADA across the strategy’s pillars.

For ADA holders, the question is not just how much money exists in the treasury. It is whether that money can be spent in ways that grow the network.

Governance Is Now About Execution

Cardano has spent years building a reputation around research, process, and decentralised governance. That has strengths. It also creates frustration when the market wants faster execution.

The budget process is where those two realities meet.

A structured framework can help the ecosystem avoid random funding decisions. It can force proposals to define goals, link spending to measurable outcomes, and give DReps a clearer basis for evaluation. That is important because treasury spending without accountability can quickly become political rather than productive.

At the same time, too much process can slow the network down. Cardano has to prove that governance can fund useful work without becoming a bottleneck.

Why ADA Investors Should Watch This

Treasury governance can affect ADA’s investment case in a few ways. First, it can support developer tooling, infrastructure, adoption campaigns, and ecosystem growth. Second, it can improve confidence that Cardano’s resources are being managed responsibly. Third, it can show whether decentralized decision-making works at scale.

The market will not price all of that immediately. But over time, credible treasury allocation can become one of the things that separates durable networks from speculative ones.

The risk is that proposals become too broad, too political, or too disconnected from measurable results. If that happens, treasury spending can dilute focus rather than sharpen it.

Cardano’s 2026 framework is therefore a real test. It asks whether the network can turn governance into execution.

For ADA, price still depends heavily on broader altcoin sentiment. But beneath the chart, the budget process is one of the more important ecosystem stories to watch. Cardano does not just need a treasury. It needs proof that the treasury can help the network move.

This report is based on information from Cardano and the Cardano Foundation.

This is where DReps become more important than a governance label. Their job is not only to vote, but to help filter which initiatives deserve funding and which ones do not. If that filter works, Cardano’s treasury can become an advantage rather than a source of endless debate.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Source: Cardano

Chainlink’s infrastructure story keeps getting broader. The CCIP v1.6 upgrade brings support for Solana and introduces architectural improvements aimed at making the protocol more flexible across different virtual machine designs.

For LINK investors, this is the kind of development that matters even when the token price is quiet. Chainlink is not trying to win attention through one consumer app. It is trying to become connective tissue for tokenized assets, cross-chain applications, and institutional blockchain systems.

For more details, visit the official Chain platform.

TL;DR

Chainlink says CCIP v1.6 introduces support for non-EVM chains starting with Solana, while reducing costs and making chain expansion faster. The upgrade also strengthens the Cross-Chain Token standard narrative and supports a broader push toward secure interoperability.

That is important because the next wave of crypto activity is unlikely to live on one chain.

Stablecoins, tokenized assets, DeFi applications, private chains, public chains, and hybrid networks all need ways to communicate safely. Chainlink’s bet is that secure messaging, cross-chain transfers, and programmable infrastructure become more valuable as the market becomes more fragmented.

Why Solana Support Matters

Solana is not an EVM chain, which makes this upgrade more meaningful than adding another similar network. Supporting Solana shows that CCIP is moving toward a more VM-agnostic model, giving developers and token issuers more options beyond the Ethereum-style environment.

That matters for assets that want distribution across different ecosystems. A token issuer may want Ethereum liquidity, Solana speed, and access to other chains without fragmenting supply or relying on weaker bridge architecture.

CCIP’s role is to make that movement more secure and standardized.

For Chainlink, Solana support also places the project inside one of the most active high-throughput ecosystems in crypto. If Solana’s RWA, stablecoin, and DeFi activity keeps growing, interoperability demand should grow with it.

LINK’s Long-Term Setup

LINK does not always trade directly on announcements like this. Infrastructure tokens can be frustrating because adoption often shows up slowly through integrations, standards, and enterprise conversations rather than explosive user-facing metrics.

But the strategic direction is clear. Chainlink wants to be part of the stack that lets value move across chains with fewer trust assumptions.

If crypto’s future is multi-chain, that role becomes more important. If tokenized real-world assets keep expanding, the need for secure cross-chain infrastructure becomes even harder to ignore.

The market may still judge LINK through price action, but CCIP v1.6 gives the project a stronger product story. Solana support is not just another integration. It is a sign that Chainlink is building for a crypto market where assets and applications refuse to stay inside one network.

This report is based on information from Chainlink.

The commercial angle is just as important as the technical one. Institutions and token issuers do not want every new chain connection to require a custom security model. A standardised interoperability layer gives them a clearer framework for expansion, which is exactly the role Chainlink is trying to own.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Source: Chain

A reported Coinbase announcement about a World Cup result, likely using AI, created a problem bigger than a flawed alert. It showed how quickly exchange-run prediction markets can blur the line between tradable outcomes and unverified automated content inside the same consumer app.

The episode surfaced on July 5, when a user posting as jay_drainjr said on X that Coinbase had sent a breaking-news-style alert claiming Norway had won a World Cup game, with Erling Haaland scoring, before the match had been played.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong replied later that day, saying he was looking into it with the team.

Coinbase has not published a full public postmortem as of press time. The public record also does not yet show how many users saw the notification, whether anyone traded after seeing it, or which system generated it. Those unanswered facts are material, but they do not erase the design problem the alert surfaced.

Exchanges are moving toward a product mix in which AI-generated alerts, sports-event contracts, and retail trading interfaces can sit within the same user journey. That means users need to see exactly what has been verified, what is automated, and what remains unresolved before market-adjacent content reaches them.

The timing made the episode sharper. Armstrong had already framed prediction markets as a breakthrough in how markets discover truth, saying in January that Coinbase users in the US could trade outcomes across sports, politics, culture, news, and more through the app's Predict tab.

Coinbase's own prediction markets page presents the product as focused on real-world outcomes, while its sports page shows event markets tied to World Cup, goalscorer, correct-score, and other sports outcomes.

That creates a basic tension for any exchange operating this kind of product. If a prediction market is meant to let prices reflect what participants believe will happen, the app also has to preserve the difference between an unresolved event, a live update, and a verified result.

A bad alert becomes market infrastructure when trading is one tap away

A mistaken pre-match alert would be a content failure in most consumer apps. In a trading app, it can become more serious because information and action sit side by side.

Prediction markets are contracts whose value can move as users react to new information. A notification that an event has already occurred can change a user's understanding before the user sees the market, places a trade, exits a position, or decides to wait.

Even if no trades later show they relied on the alert, the product design has exposed the pressure point.

The reported Coinbase incident therefore belongs in a different category from a generic AI hallucination story. A wrong sentence from a model is embarrassing. A wrong sentence near a tradable event market can appear to be market-relevant information if the app does not indicate whether the event has been resolved.

The later outcome of the match does not settle that risk. If an alert reports a result before a reliable source has resolved the event, it has crossed the key boundary.

In prediction markets, the boundary is between pre- and post-resolution as much as between true and false.

That distinction will become more important as exchanges add more event markets to retail apps. Sports markets are especially sensitive because they produce constant live data, user attention is close, and the line between commentary, odds movement, and outcome confirmation can be thin.

A product can disclaim that users bear risk, but the interface still teaches users what to treat as settled.

Coinbase's own pages already contain the legal and risk framing that makes the question of standards hard to avoid. The sports prediction market page says prediction markets are offered by Coinbase Financial Markets, a CFTC-registered futures commission merchant and National Futures Association member.

The same disclosure warns that event contracts can result in the loss of the full investment.

The product pages also state that information is provided for informational purposes and is not investment advice. They include language saying Coinbase is not responsible for third-party content errors, delays, or actions taken in reliance on that content.

That kind of disclosure may help allocate legal risk, but it cannot replace product-level clarity.

Users experience one app. If that app shows an event market, pushes a breaking alert, and presents a price that moves with new information, users will naturally treat the information environment as part of the product.

That is where provenance becomes more than a label. A trading app that uses automated alerts around event markets may need to show the source of the claim, the time it was verified, the status of the underlying event, and whether the alert was generated, summarized, or approved by a human.

A simple AI label would be too weak if it does not say whether the event itself has been resolved.

A practical standard would separate at least four states: rumor or social report, scheduled event, live event, and officially resolved result. The user should not need to infer those states from the wording of a push notification.

The app should make the state visible before the user can mistake commentary for settlement.

Latency is also a risk control. Prediction markets can move on seconds-old information. If the app's alert pipeline is faster than its verification pipeline, the product can push users toward a claim before the market has a reliable basis to treat it as fact.

Speed is valuable only if proof travels with it.

Proof controls have to sit above the contract

The CFTC's June 12 Federal Register proposal discusses prediction markets as registered venues offering event contracts and frames the category around public-interest determinations, market integrity, manipulation prevention, clear settlement terms, and objective information that can be publicly verified.

Those concepts are usually discussed in relation to the contract itself: what event is being traded, how the outcome is determined, and what conditions trigger settlement.

The Coinbase alert episode points to the layer above the contract. If the market's settlement criteria are objective but the app's surrounding content pipeline lacks the same discipline, users can still receive a misleading signal before settlement.

That is the gap exchanges will have to close as prediction markets move from specialist venues into mainstream crypto apps. The settlement rule may say one thing. The app notification may imply another.

The user experiences both as part of the same financial interface.

CryptoSlate has already covered how sportsbooks and prediction markets are converging as event contracts draw more trading interest. That trend raises the stakes for Coinbase because the company's advantage is distribution.

If event markets live in the same app as spot crypto trading, wallets, alerts, and consumer finance tools, a content failure can travel faster and feel more authoritative than it would on a smaller market-only platform.

The regulatory context also explains why a disclaimer alone is incomplete. Prediction markets depend on clear evidence of what happened and when.

If the content layer can race ahead of that proof, the market still has a trust problem even when the contract's final settlement criteria are objective.

For consumer exchange apps, verification has to cover both layers. The contract can have objective settlement terms while the surrounding feed still creates confusion if an alert uses final-result language too early.

Controls around content, data vendors, and push timing therefore become part of the same trust system that supports the market.

The next standard is operational

The core Coinbase question is operational. Did the alert come from a model-generated summary, a data vendor, a third-party feed, a human-entered story card, or a mix of those systems?

What source marked the event as resolved? What check should have stopped a pre-match result from being pushed? Could users distinguish a generated alert from an official result?

Those details remain unresolved without a Coinbase postmortem, but the most likely conclusion is clear: exchange-run prediction markets will need visible proof standards before AI-generated alerts can scale alongside tradable outcomes.

Those standards should be measurable. A market operator can log the data source for every event alert, the timestamp when a result becomes eligible to be described as final, separate the generated commentary from the official settlement language, and retain an audit trail for any push notification tied to a tradable market.

It can also prevent content systems from using final-result language until a verified source has crossed a predefined threshold.

The hard part is that these controls may slow down the very alerts that make consumer apps feel timely. That is the tradeoff.

If an exchange chooses speed over provenance, it risks turning the alert layer into an unpriced part of the market structure.

The Coinbase incident is therefore a preview of a larger fight over the credibility of prediction markets. Market prices can serve as useful signals only when users can distinguish among a forecast, a report, and a resolved fact.

As exchanges add AI summaries and real-time alerts, the next competitive standard may shift from who lists the most markets first to who can show the fastest proof without asking users to trust a black box.

Until Coinbase explains the alert pipeline, the unanswered facts remain important. How many users saw the notification, whether anyone traded because of it, and what system generated it are all material details.

The broader lesson is already visible: prediction markets sold as truth-seeking tools need proof infrastructure before automated content becomes part of the trading experience.

The post Coinbase World Cup error shows prediction markets still have a proof problem appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin’s next major rally may depend less on whether investors still believe in the asset than on whether enough large balance sheets are willing to fund the trade.

Fresh analysis from CryptoQuant Chief Executive Ki Young Ju shows that the world’s largest cryptocurrency has grown into a market too large to move with the same force that defined its early cycles.

According to him, each bull market has required far more capital to produce a smaller percentage gain, a shift that raises the bar for another parabolic advance.

This has become pertinent considering BTC is in a prolonged bear market that has seen its value fall to around $63,000, representing a 50% decline from its peak of above $126,000 recorded last October.

This drawdown has tested the institutional adoption that helped push the asset into mainstream portfolios, and the central question now is whether Bitcoin can attract enough durable capital from to offset the decline in its price sensitivity.

A larger market changes the cycle math

Bitcoin’s early rallies were built on a much smaller base, allowing modest amounts of new money to generate large price changes. That relationship has weakened as the asset has matured.

Ju’s analysis compared the increase in Bitcoin’s realized capitalization across several bull cycles with the gains that followed. Realized capitalization values coins at the price at which they last moved on-chain, making it a common proxy for the amount of capital absorbed by the network.

In the 2011 cycle, about $2.7 billion in net capital inflows was linked to a roughly 55,000% price increase, Ju said.

The current cycle has absorbed about $697 billion and produced a gain of about 689%, underlining how much more capital is needed to generate a smaller move as the asset scales.

The same pattern appears in smaller increments. Ju said roughly $5 million in new capital was enough to double Bitcoin’s price in 2011. In the current cycle, that figure was around $101 billion.

While that does not end the bull case surrounding BTC, it changes the type of demand needed to sustain it.

Ju argued that another major rally remains possible if Bitcoin becomes a deeper macro allocation. “Bitcoin needs to be a core macro asset,” he wrote, adding that the market can no longer rely on a retail-led ETF trade alone.

That view turns Bitcoin’s next cycle into a test of financial-market integration. Supply shocks from halvings still reduce new issuance, but the growth trajectory increasingly depends on whether capital allocators treat Bitcoin as a recurring portfolio position rather than a tactical trade.

ETF outflows weaken the near-term setup

That test has arrived during a difficult stretch for the most visible institutional vehicle in the market.

US spot Bitcoin ETFs helped broaden access after their 2024 launch, giving advisers, hedge funds and traditional investors a regulated route into the asset. But recent flows have turned negative, cutting against the argument that institutional demand is already deep enough to support another major leg higher.

Data from Santiment shows that Bitcoin ETFs have seen nearly $10 billion in outflows since early May, and the 12 products are currently on an 8-week outflow streak.

Speaking on these numbers, Ecoinometrics, a BTC-focused analysis platform, said:

“The pattern since May has been remarkably one-sided. Every attempt to rebuild buying momentum has stalled almost immediately. The Bitcoin ETFs haven’t managed more than a single consecutive day of inflows, while streaks of outflows have repeatedly stretched for days at a time, culminating in the longest run of outflows since the ETFs launched.”

These outflows complicate the case for a swift return to the highs. Bitcoin’s October record came during a period when investors were still rewarding the ETF-access and treating the asset as a beneficiary of friendlier policy, institutional participation, and broader links with global markets.

Now, ETF weakness suggests that access alone is not enough. The next stage of adoption would need steadier allocations across wealth platforms, model portfolios, corporate balance sheets and other pools of capital that move more slowly than retail traders but can deploy at much larger scale.

For Bitcoin, that creates a higher-quality but harder-to-win demand profile. Institutions may bring larger checks, but they also require liquidity, risk controls, custody standards, portfolio mandates and compliance approvals before allocations become durable.

Institutions are still engaged, but with tighter standards

Despite these substantial outflows, Coinbase's survey data suggest institutional interest has not disappeared.

A January 2026 survey by Coinbase and EY-Parthenon of 351 institutional decision-makers found that nearly three-quarters planned to increase crypto allocations, while 74% expected crypto prices to rise over the following 12 months.

The same survey found that 49% had placed greater emphasis on risk management, liquidity and position sizing.

That mix is important for Bitcoin’s capital problem. Institutions are not approaching crypto with the same behavior that defined earlier retail-led cycles.

They are more likely to demand regulated products, clear governance, operational resilience and defined exposure limits.

The survey found that 66% of respondents already had exposure through spot crypto ETFs or exchange-traded products, while 81% preferred spot exposure through a registered vehicle.

Those findings support the view that regulated wrappers remain central to the next phase of adoption.

However, they also show why recent ETF outflows are a pressure point. If ETFs are the main institutional on-ramp, sustained weakness in those products can slow the broader allocation process.

Bitcoin’s capital-efficiency problem therefore cuts both ways. Its larger size may make the asset more acceptable to traditional finance.

Still, that same size also means marginal buyers must be larger, more consistent and less speculative than the buyers that powered earlier cycles.

Bitcoin’s next buyers must compete with the rest of Wall Street

That leaves Bitcoin’s next cycle dependent on a broader set of investors than the retail traders and crypto-native funds that powered earlier rallies.

Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, has argued that Bitcoin’s next decade will be driven less by miner issuance than by the movement of capital across financial markets. Strategy is the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, making Saylor one of the most visible advocates for treating the asset as a balance-sheet instrument rather than a speculative trade.

According to him:

“Over the next decade, Bitcoin’s trajectory will be driven less by miner issuance and more by capital flows. ETF flows. Corporate treasury flows. Sovereign reserve flows. Bank credit flows. Derivatives flows. Insurance flows. Collateral flows. Structured credit flows. Global savings flows. The halving tightens supply. Capital flows set the growth trajectory. This is the next phase of Bitcoin adoption: not just more buyers, but more balance sheets.”

The point is that Bitcoin’s supply story is no longer new. Its issuance schedule is known, the halving cycle is understood, and the asset already trades at a scale that requires much larger pools of capital to move it meaningfully higher.

As such, any fresh repricing would have to come from demand channels capable of absorbing a market worth more than $1 trillion.

This means that ETF demand would be only one part of that shift. A stronger cycle would likely require advisers to add Bitcoin to model portfolios, companies to use it more actively on balance sheets, banks to build credit products around it, insurers and asset managers to treat it as a macro allocation, and sovereign entities to consider exposure over time.

That transition would probably be slower than a retail momentum cycle. It would also leave Bitcoin more exposed to interest-rate expectations, regulatory delays, liquidity shocks and competition from other markets chasing the same institutional capital.

Notably, artificial intelligence has already become one of those competitors. AI-linked assets and infrastructure have absorbed a large share of investor attention this year, with spending and investment forecasts running into the trillions of dollars.

In earlier crypto cycles, looser speculative capital may have flowed more readily into Bitcoin. In the current market, Bitcoin has to compete with AI equities, private infrastructure deals, credit products, commodities and other macro trades for the same pool of institutional money.

That competition now sits at the center of the Bitcoin cycle debate. The asset has become large enough to enter mainstream allocation discussions, but that also means it is judged against every other major use of capital.

The post Bitcoin needs trillions to go parabolic again as ETF demand fades appeared first on CryptoSlate.

An anonymous trader turned a $754 bet into roughly $271,000 in under 48 hours, scoring a 357x return. The windfall came from CZ, a BNB Chain meme coin tied to Binance founder Changpeng Zhao.

Here is how the trade unfolded, what powers the token, and why the story is both inspiring and risky.

How the Trader Scored a Staggering 357x Return With a CZ Meme Coin

A meme coin is a cryptocurrency built around an internet joke, personality, or cultural reference rather than a specific technical use case. The CZ token, known as “The Final Form Bull,” leans entirely on that formula across the BNB Smart Chain.

On-chain platform Lookonchain reported the details. The wallet acquired roughly 5.1 million CZ tokens across three transactions totaling $754.49. Furthermore, the average entry price sat near $0.000147 per token during the early accumulation phase.

Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens.

The payoff was explosive at its peak. As the token surged, the position’s value skyrocketed to around $271,100. However, the meme coin has since pulled back from 0.0592 to $0.0418, according to GeckoTerminal.

As a result, the holder’s unrealized gains have eased to roughly $246,000, though the trader still holds 100% of the position without selling a single token.

The token itself draws direct inspiration from a viral CZ tweet. On January 17, 2021, Zhao wrote, “Everyone knows I’m a bull. You haven’t even seen my final form yet,” alongside a muscular bull image. As a result, that phrase became legendary crypto folklore.

Launched recently via the Four.Meme platform, CZ meme coin now holds a market capitalization of around $41 million. Furthermore, its 24-hour trading volume briefly topped $80 million during the rally’s peak, reflecting intense speculative interest.

Why This 357x Win Comes With Real Warnings

The trade looks glamorous, but the trader’s history reveals the harsh reality of meme coins. Over the past two months, the wallet made roughly 260 trades with just a 31.88% win rate. Most positions ended in losses.

That context matters enormously. This single outlier dramatically offset a long string of failures. As a result, a single successful bet can mask the fact that most speculative meme coin trades do not pay off in the long run.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch leaders and journalists provide expert insights.

The CZ phenomenon also reflects the ongoing popularity of Binance-themed meme coins. Low fees and fast transactions on BNB Chain continue to attract retail traders seeking high-volatility opportunities amid an increasingly crowded speculative market.

However, experts caution that such extreme returns remain rare. Meme coins can pump violently and then correct just as sharply. Sustainable success requires discipline, risk management, and the understanding that most participants never achieve life-changing results.

The post Trader Makes 357x Gains With CZ Meme Coin Born From a Viral Post appeared first on BeInCrypto.

BONK DAO has confirmed that attackers drained an estimated $20 million worth of BONK tokens from its treasury through a malicious governance proposal.

The stolen funds have reportedly started moving to exchanges, prompting the project to coordinate with exchanges, the Solana Foundation, and law enforcement in an effort to recover the assets. The BONK meme coin fell over 10% on this news.

BONK DAO Confirms $20 Million Governance Attack

BONK DAO has become the latest victim of a high-profile decentralized governance attack after confirming that approximately $20 million in BONK tokens was drained from its treasury.

Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens 

According to the project’s official statement, the attacker successfully passed a malicious governance proposal, allowing treasury funds to be transferred to wallets under their control. BONK said it has already identified the exchange wallets used to accumulate voting power before the proposal was executed.

The team is now working alongside exchanges, the Solana Foundation, bridges, and law enforcement to track the stolen assets and explore recovery options.

How the Attack Worked

Preliminary on-chain analysis shared by blockchain investigators suggests the attacker purchased roughly $4 million worth of BONK to secure enough voting power for the proposal.

Once approved through BONK DAO’s governance system on Solana’s Realms platform, the proposal authorized the transfer of an estimated $20 million from the DAO treasury.

Unlike a smart contract exploit, the incident appears to be a governance attack, where token-weighted voting was used to legitimately approve a malicious treasury transaction.

“Basically $4M worth of BONK was used by the drainer to vote YES for taking $21M worth of BONK tokens from the DAO,” one expert highlighted.

Reports also indicate that portions of the stolen BONK have already begun moving to cryptocurrency exchanges, raising concerns that the attacker may attempt to liquidate the holdings.

What’s Next for BONK?

The investigation remains ongoing, with BONK stating that recovery efforts are underway.

The incident is expected to renew industry debate over DAO governance security, particularly around safeguards such as timelocks, multisignature approvals, and treasury execution delays designed to prevent single governance proposals from draining protocol funds.

Investors will now be watching for updates on potential fund recovery, exchange actions, and whether BONK introduces governance reforms to strengthen treasury protection.

The post BONK DAO Loses $20 Million in Governance Attack, Token Falls 10% appeared first on BeInCrypto.

• Variational is introducing a new trading instrument called Swaps with institutional TradFi liquidity on Arbitrum.
• Swaps are designed to offer tighter spreads, larger position sizes, and around 4.5% predictable carry costs.
• As per the official announcement, Swaps has already signed more than $1 billion in open interest capacity with TradFi dealers at launch.

On July 6, Variational, a leading peer-to-peer derivatives trading protocol on Arbitrum, announced the launch of its new on-chain product, Swaps, in Q3, which is expected to expand the protocol’s operations by attracting institutional investors.

The official announcement stated that “Today, we’re enabling the first TradFi hedging venues integrated with the Omni Liquidity Provider (OLP) to begin improving spreads across a select set of our existing crypto-native perps, and announcing swaps, a new instrument type that will bring TradFi-level liquidity fully on-chain in Q3.”

Variational is known for zero-fee perpetual futures across more than 450 markets, including crypto, stocks, commodities, and indices with up to 50x leverage.

The announcement of Swaps comes after Variational concluded a $50 million Series A funding round led by Dragonfly Capital in May 2026, which was supported by Bain Capital Crypto and Coinbase Ventures. The protocol has already recorded more than $200 billion in cumulative trading volume. Variational is currently the 4th biggest perpetual futures DEX by open interest with $1.15 billion, according to DeFiLlama.

What are Variational’s Swaps?

According to the official announcement, the Swaps feature is Variational’s plan to bring Traditional finance (TradeFi) on-chain through its Omni Liquidity Provider (OLP) vault. OLP works as a single counterparty to all trades by aggregating liquidity from centralized exchanges, decentralized crypto exchanges, and other traditional finance dealers.

The platform will use a Request-for-Quote (RFQ) system that bypasses the cold start problem faced by order book exchanges. This system will allow Variational to offer numerous markets without bootstrapping liquidity from scratch.

Variational is currently providing perpetual service on crypto, gold, silver, copper, and oil. Apart from this, the protocol is planning to list more than 100 additional traditional finance markets this summer, which include equities, indices, and currencies.

In the official announcement, Variational has mentioned some of the major features of the Swaps, including:

• Bilateral Trading – Dealers will be able to stream liquidity privately to the Omni Liquidity Provider instead of public order books, which will open a door for larger trade sizes without price slippage.
• Predictable Carry – Swaps will provide predictable financing costs of around 4.5% all-in, instead of the volatile funding rates found in perpetual futures. This feature can also create dividend opportunities for equities.

• Hybrid Hours Initially – In the initial phase, Swaps will follow traditional market hours, and later on, the protocol will expand to 24/7 trading.
• Cross-margin Vision – The long-term goal of Swaps is to provide a single account for trading crypto, stocks, commodities, indices, and FX, which will allow the protocol to combine prime-broker-like execution with perks of DeFi, like faster execution speed.

“These swap markets will sit alongside existing perp markets, allowing traders to choose between trading the perp and the swap based on their priorities. For example, when a trader searches “Nvidia,” they will see “$NVDA-PERP” and “$NVDA-SWAP”: if the trader prioritizes 24/7 trading and wants funding rate exposure, they can trade the perp; if they prefer liquidity depth and predictable carry payments, they can trade the swap,” stated in the announcement.

How are Swaps Different From Perps?

Variational has cited a difference between perpetual futures and swaps while ensuring that both can co-exist on the protocol. 

Perpetual futures are the dominant on-chain derivative. They use order books or AMM-based mechanisms with funding rates that adjust periodically to keep prices aligned with the spot market. However, there are some issues associated with perpetual futures, like volatile funding and a lack of depth in liquidity for big orders.

Swaps are designed to address issues present in perpetual futures. While perps depend on the public order book, swaps are designed to use signed bilateral deals with TradFi dealers through the OLP. Apart from this, perps have variable funding costs, while swaps come with a stable, approximately 4.5% carry.

“These swap markets will sit alongside existing perp markets, allowing traders to choose between trading the perp and the swap based on their priorities. For example, when a trader searches “Nvidia,” they will see “$NVDA-PERP” and “$NVDA-SWAP”: if the trader prioritizes 24/7 trading and wants funding rate exposure, they can trade the perp; if they prefer liquidity depth and predictable carry payments, they can trade the swap,” stated in the announcement.

Amid the rise in perpetual futures, thanks to platforms like Hyperliquid, the launch of Swaps will open a door for institutional investors to diversify their investments.

On July 3, Gnosis Pay, a self-custodial crypto debit card service developed on Gnosis Chain using Safe smart wallets, shared a detailed post-mortem report related to a security incident that took place on June 1.

On 1 June, Gnosis Pay experienced a security incident affecting card accounts. All affected balances were restored.

Post-mortem here: https://t.co/2QZhQG4ndr

— Gnosis Pay 💳 (@gnosispay) July 3, 2026

What Happened on Gnosis Pay: Incident Details

In early June, Gnosis Pay experienced a major security exploit. Co-founder and CEO Martin Koppelmann also confirmed a vulnerability in the Zodiac Delay Module. The main flaw existed in the ERC-1271 signature verification logic within the module. It is the same system that only reads the contract’s return value without verifying whether the call had actually executed successfully or not.

The post-mortem report mentioned that the attack was rapidly detected by the treasury manager, NOCA, via their monitoring infrastructure. They immediately triggered the incident response protocol and identified the root cause within 2 hours.

“The impact was isolated to the card safe software module components (specifically the Delay and Roles Modules provided by Zodiac). To ensure containment during the active triage phase, we systematically paused card transaction processing, authorisation systems, and new user onboarding,” stated the report.

Attackers exploited this vulnerability by deploying a contract, which is designed to fail but still return a “valid” indicator. This allowed them to forge authorization and withdraw funds from accounts they did not own.

The vulnerability had been introduced with the Zodiac code version 3.4.0 in October 2023 and was patched on June 5. Attackers have stolen approximately $1.5 million across 5,281 wallets, including about $641,000 in GNO, $453,000 in EURe, and $399,000 in USDC.e.

After this hack, Koppelmann said, “Please be patient while we try to contain the damage. Rest assured, Gnosis will cover all user losses.” A few days after this cyber attack, most of the operations were restored. The company claimed that it had recovered more than 99% of services and completed full user refunds.

Crypto Sector Faces Tough Time with a Series of Security Incidents 

In the last few months, the crypto sector has faced a tough time with security problems. From April to June 2026, hackers have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars through clever attacks on DeFi platforms, bridges, and wallets. The series of cyber hacks in 2026 has sparked fear in the entire crypto community, which is currently going through a bullish wave.

In April, the crypto sector suffered major cyberattacks, including the Kelp DAO exploit. In around 28 security incidents, the cumulative losses have reached around $635 million. In April, two major cyberattacks took place, including Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO. On April 1, Drift Protocol, a Solana-based trading platform, was compromised in a cyber attack and lost around $285 million. After a few days, Kelp DAO suffered a massive $292 million exploit through a bug in its LayerZero cross-chain bridge. 

In May and June, the crypto sector also reported small-scale cyber attacks, where losses dropped to approximately $80 million in May and $76 million in June across dozens of security incidents in each month. One of the major security incidents took place on the Humanity Protocol, where hackers stole around $36 million by compromising private keys on an infected developer machine. 

Donald Trump’s scheduled keynote at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville puts crypto policy back on the main political stage at a time when digital assets are becoming a louder campaign issue.

For more details, visit the official B platform.

TL;DR

• Donald Trump is listed as a keynote speaker for the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville.
• The appearance shows how aggressively political campaigns are courting crypto voters.
• The market angle is policy perception, not an endorsement of any candidate.

Bitcoin conferences have always mixed technology, finance, and ideology. This one now has a clearer political layer. A major presidential figure speaking directly to a Bitcoin audience is a sign that crypto is no longer being treated as a niche internet issue by campaign teams.

Crypto Becomes A Campaign Audience

The practical reason is simple: crypto users are organized, vocal, and increasingly focused on regulation. Exchanges, miners, wallet developers, and token holders all have reasons to care about what the next administration does with agencies such as the SEC, CFTC, and Treasury.

That does not mean every Bitcoin holder votes the same way. It does mean campaigns see the industry as worth addressing directly. Policy promises around self-custody, mining, enforcement, banking access, and stablecoins can now become campaign material.

Why Markets Pay Attention

Markets usually care less about speeches than actual law, but political tone still matters. A more crypto-friendly posture can influence expectations around enforcement, appointments, and legislative priorities. A hostile tone can do the opposite.

The keynote should therefore be read carefully and neutrally. It is not a price signal by itself, and it does not settle future policy. But it does show that Bitcoin has become politically important enough to command a national-stage appearance. That alone is a notable shift from previous cycles.

This article is based on the official Bitcoin Conference speaker listing.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

This report is based on information from B. at B

Sui has crossed the $1 billion total value locked mark on DeFiLlama, giving the Move-based network a clearer claim to serious DeFi liquidity.

For more details, visit the official DeFiLlama platform.

TL;DR

• Sui’s DeFi TVL has moved above $1 billion, according to DeFiLlama data.
• Lending and native DeFi protocols are helping drive capital onto the chain.
• The milestone strengthens Sui’s pitch as a high-performance smart contract network.

TVL is an imperfect metric, but it remains one of the easiest ways to see where capital is willing to take smart contract risk. For Sui, crossing $1 billion is a meaningful marker because it moves the chain further away from early-stage experimentation and closer to the conversation around durable DeFi ecosystems.

Liquidity Is The Real Test

Fast blockchains are common. Sustainable liquidity is rarer. Users can rotate through incentive programs quickly, especially when yield campaigns are generous. The question for Sui is whether capital stays after the first wave of rewards and novelty fades.

The current growth points to rising activity in lending, trading, and native protocols. That matters because a chain needs more than one flagship app to feel alive. The healthier version of Sui’s growth story is not just that TVL crossed a number, but that more capital is being deployed across several functions.

What Comes After The Milestone

The next test is depth. Sui needs liquidity that supports real usage, not just headline TVL. Stablecoin availability, reliable lending markets, strong bridges, and developer retention will decide whether this becomes a lasting DeFi base.

For now, the $1 billion level gives Sui a stronger seat at the table. Move-based chains have been fighting for attention against Ethereum L2s, Solana, and other high-throughput networks. Sui now has a clearer data point to show that capital is paying attention.

This report is based on DeFiLlama data for Sui.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Source: DeFiLlama