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Revolut to Phase Out USDT, Ending Support by August 31
Revolut has notified users that it will remove USDT from its list of supported assets for affected European accounts.
Buying USDT is available until July 6, deposits stop on July 30, and users can still sell or withdraw their USDT until August 31. After that, any remaining balance will be automatically converted to fiat.
Variational Brings TradFi Onchain with “Swaps”
Variational has launched “swaps” — an onchain instrument that connects crypto markets with TradFi liquidity, offering tighter spreads and deeper liquidity.
Funding is made predictable through dealer-backed OTC execution, bridging onchain markets with institutional-grade liquidity. The new instrument is slated to launch in Q3.
Ripple Secures Full MiCA License Across the EU
Ripple has received full Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) authorisation from Luxembourg's CSSF, completing its MiCA requirements and confirming it as fully compliant across the European Economic Area.
Its end-to-end regulated crypto-payments product is now available to financial institutions, corporates and businesses across all 30 EEA countries. Ripple is now one of a small number of firms with full MiCA authorisation, part of a global portfolio of 75+ regulatory licenses.
Prediction Markets: The Q2 Power Shift
Prediction market volume climbed $30.9B → $35.8B in Q2 (+16% QoQ), capped by a $14.5B June — the biggest month of the year.
The real story is the power shift in share of volume, Q1 → Q2:
— Kalshi: 42.4% → 58.4% (+38%) — now runs the market
— Polymarket: 37.9% → 32.6% (−14%) — still #2, losing ground
— Predict.fun: 2.8% → 3.8% (+36%)
— Limitless: 0.7% → 2.0% (+186%) — fastest riser
— Opinion: 16.2% → 3.2% (−80%) — the quarter's big loser
Vitalik Lays Out the “Lean Ethereum” Roadmap
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has sketched the chain's third major era — “Lean Ethereum” — with upgrades expected to land over the next three to four years.
Highlights: recursive STARKs become a native verification component; quantum-vulnerable cryptography is swapped for post-quantum alternatives; a new “scalable state” type targets 100 TB by 2030 (cutting costs for some tokens 10x+); and RISC-V / leanISA VMs are explored for programmable privacy.
OKX Ventures Acquires 20% of South Korea's Coinone
OKX Ventures has taken a ~20% stake in Coinone, one of South Korea's largest crypto exchanges, becoming a joint third-largest shareholder alongside Korea Investment & Securities — each now holds 19.6%.
The stake is part of a 160B KRW (~$106M) package of new and existing shares. Founder & CEO Cha Myung-hoon stays the top individual shareholder at 27.8% with full management control; Com2uS Holdings & affiliates hold 25%.
MAJOR UPCOMING EVENTS THIS SUMMER!
A full list of Major Upcoming Events, to be updated
👉 https://cryptodiffer.com/events
Thea Network Raises $8M to Build AI Settlement Infrastructure
Thea, a predictive behavioral AI network, has raised $8 million in a round led by Maven 11 Capital, The Spartan Group, Manifold, Hack VC, and Fisher8 Capital, with participation from Galois Capital, DCF God, and icebergy.
The team says the funding will help develop Thea Network, a federated trust-minimized settlement layer built to unify access and coordination across intelligent applications. The project is focused on turning AI services into a more programmable and scalable settlement system.
Only 3 Perp DEXs Grew Open Interest in 2026
Across the field, just three perp DEXs added open interest this year. Everyone else bled positions — even names pushing massive volume.
📈 The only growers
• Pacifica +32.8% ($64M → $85M)
• Hyperliquid +24.2% ($7.46B → $9.26B)
• GRVT +12.0% ($318M → $356M)
The tell: volume ≠ sticky positions. Aster did $482B in volume and still lost 31% of its OI; Apex traded $233B and shed 46%. Open interest is the honest metric — it's capital willing to stay on the book, not just pass through.
Mesh Eyes a $2B Valuation as Binance Leads New Round
Mesh, the crypto payments network behind PayPal's "Pay with Crypto," is raising a round led by Binance at up to a $2B valuation — double its $1B mark from six months ago.
It follows a $75M Series C in January and pushes Mesh past $200M raised since 2020. Earlier backers include PayPal Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Bybit.
Securitize Brings Its Own Stock (SECZ) Onchain
On its NYSE listing day, Securitize tokenized its own public stock (SECZ) on both Avalanche and Solana — putting its shares onchain the moment they went public.
A rare eat-your-own-cooking moment: the RWA-tokenization firm behind BlackRock's BUIDL fund now runs its own equity as an onchain token, tradable alongside its NYSE-listed shares.
Polymarket vs Kalshi: The Distribution War
Kalshi and Polymarket barely pull you to their own sites anymore. The land grab is happening inside other people's products — and the two took opposite doors.
Kalshi wired itself into regulated brokers: Robinhood, Coinbase, Webull, Interactive Brokers. ~88M funded accounts, sitting next to trillions in client assets.
Polymarket went the other way — into self-custodial wallets: MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Bitget, OKX. A market in front of ~420M users.
H2 2026 TGE Watchlist. 40 Tokens That Haven't Launched Yet
The Q2 TGE wave already cleared out its winners — Arcium, MegaETH, Re and others are live and trading. This is what's still loaded in the chamber for the back half of the year.
40 projects, zero tokens — yet. And the mix tells you where the meta is heading: perp DEXs dominate the board (10 of 40, all quietly farming points), while the biggest names left tokenless — Base, MetaMask, Arc — could each be the airdrop of the year.
Some are weeks away (Squid, GRVT). Some are a whole narrative away. Either way, if you're positioning for H2, these 40 are the names to know.
Standard Chartered Is First G-SIB to Offer USDC Access
Standard Chartered and Circle have launched institutional USDC minting and redemption — making Standard Chartered the first global systemically important bank (G-SIB) to offer it through a regulated banking channel.
The service runs out of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), giving institutions a bank-grade on-ramp to mint and redeem USDC directly against Circle's reserves.
Avalanche Treasury Corp Stock Crashes 93% in a Month
Avalanche Treasury Corp told the SEC its ability to continue as a going concern is in doubt after its Nasdaq-listed stock (AVAT) fell 93% in a month — from over $10 to under $0.73.
The firm holds ~15M AVAX (about 3.5% of supply), which it paid roughly $265M for — a position now worth less than half. It disclosed the going-concern risk in a July 1 SEC filing.
USD.AI & BSQ Capital Form a $300M Joint Venture for AI Compute
USD.AI and BSQ Capital Partners have formed a joint venture to finance up to $300M of AI compute across Asia-Pacific, structured as GPU-backed financings.
The initial deployment targets $300M, with a path to upsize to $1B once performance milestones are met — channelling onchain credit into real-world GPU infrastructure to meet surging regional AI-compute demand.
Interfold Opens the $FOLD Public Sale via Uniswap CCA
Interfold — infrastructure for multiplayer privacy that lets independent parties coordinate without exposing inputs — has laid out full details for its FOLD token auction, a Continuous Clearing Auction (CCA) on Uniswap.
Registration & verification: July 6–7 (KYC via Predicate). Auction: July 8, 10am ET → July 10, 10am ET. Starting CCA price $0.0167, starting FDV $20M, 120M FOLD up for auction (of a 1.2B supply), plus a 48M FOLD airdrop. FOLD transferability / TGE target: Aug 19, with a 40-day cooldown on auction-bought FOLD.
Treasuries & ETFs Board. Crypto Accumulation and Capital Flows
This week featured new corporate treasury announcements across Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, while ETF flows remained mixed, with continued outflows from BTC and ETH products and modest inflows into select altcoins.
Corporate Treasuries
- Strategy sold 3,588 BTC to fund dividends on its digital credit securities
- Metaplanet increased its holdings to 43,000 BTC.
- BitMine launched its ETH treasury strategy
- Forward Industries acquired 500K+ SOL, bringing holdings to 7.55M+ SOL
ETF Flows
Bitcoin ETFs: -$526M net outflows (8th consecutive week)
Ethereum ETFs: -$13.7M net outflows
Summer Finance Exploited for ~$6M
DeFi protocol Summer Finance has been drained of roughly $6M on Ethereum, according to on-chain security firm PeckShield, which flagged the attack.
The team has issued no official statement so far, and the exact attack vector is not yet confirmed. Around $6M in assets were moved out of the protocol before the alert.
Moonbeam Leaves Polkadot, Migrates GLMR to Base
Moonbeam Network — one of Polkadot's earliest and biggest parachains — is fully leaving the ecosystem after ~4 years and migrating its GLMR token to Base, Coinbase's Ethereum L2.
Holders have until July 31 to bridge GLMR 1:1 to a new ERC-20 on Base through a dedicated migration portal. Centralized exchanges are expected to swap custodied balances automatically.
$TRUMP: How a Million Buyers Funded 58 Wallets
18 months after launch, the scorecard on the presidential memecoin is brutal:
— ~1,000,000 investors underwater, down a combined $3.81B
— Only 58 wallets made millions — 764,000 are in the red
— Token is −97% from its $74 peak ($15B → $436M market cap)
— $10,000 bought at the top is worth ~$230 today
Shyft One-Pager. Infra for Modern Investing
Shyft merges traditional finance with crypto and real-world assets — fully self-custodial. Capital flows into isolated onchain vaults running vetted, professionally-managed strategies: T-Bills, private credit, basis trading, blue-chip DeFi lending.
— 0% management fee
— Vault infra that's already secured $100M+
— Strategies powered by Ondo, Franklin Templeton (BENJI), Radiant Prime, Gauntlet & Maple
— Supported by a Global Strategy Council (including 3 former US Congressmen and The Blockchain Center Abu Dhabi)
Spotify Confirms Streaming Fraud Linked to Prediction Markets
Spotify has confirmed it found evidence of artificial streaming after a Kalshi trader flagged suspicious activity tied to music-chart prediction markets. The issue centered on Malcolm Todd’s “Earrings,” which briefly surged to No. 1 on Spotify’s U.S. chart before being pushed back after an internal review.
Spotify said it removed more than 500,000 artificial streams that had inflated the track’s ranking. By the time the correction was made, Kalshi had already settled the market based on the earlier chart data.
Samsung, Dunamu and K Bank Deny Joining the OUSD Stablecoin Consortium
Three of the marquee names attached to Open USD (OUSD) — Samsung, Dunamu (the parent of Korean exchange Upbit) and internet bank K Bank — say they never formally agreed to join the consortium, and were caught off guard to find themselves listed as partners.
OUSD, backed by Open Standard, was unveiled as a revenue-sharing stablecoin standard with a roster of 140+ "major partners" spanning Coinbase, BlackRock, Visa, Stripe and Mastercard — pitched as a serious challenger to Circle's USDC.
Solana (SOL) Has Launched Onchain Governance
Solana has gone live with onchain governance, letting validators and SOL stakers formally propose, back and vote on core protocol changes directly on the network.
Opening a proposal requires 100,000 SOL staked — around $7.7M — a deliberately high bar to keep out spam and low-effort proposals.
eToro Leads $12.5M Round in Onchain Perps DEX Extended
eToro led a $12.5M funding round for Extended, an onchain perpetual-futures exchange built by a former Revolut crypto team, alongside Jump Crypto and Alber Blanc.
Extended has cleared over $245B in volume across 100+ perp markets. eToro plans to wire its engine into Zengo, the self-custody wallet it acquired for $70M in April — letting users trade onchain derivatives while keeping custody.
Cryptomarket Check-In. Major Events & Headlines
Tokenized infrastructure reached operational scale this week, with major traditional finance players launching active services and platforms deploying concrete integrations rather than announcements.
🔎 Recent Updates & Developments
– Open Standard unveiled Open USD backed by 140+ partners
– Standard Chartered became first G-SIB offering USDC minting and redemption
– Ondo launched tokenized stocks on Ethereum including iShares S&P 500 ETF
– Robinhood Layer 2 went live on mainnet with full settlement stack
– Ethena integrated USDe into BlackRock’s Aladdin managing $20 trillion
– Plume and FalconX launched a $1B RWA facility for prime brokerage loans
– SK Hynix filed for a $29B Nasdaq listing as dominant AI HBM maker
– Venice AI raised $65M at $1B valuation led by Dragonfly
Ondo Finance Debuts SEC-Aligned Tokenized Stocks on Ethereum
Ondo has launched tokenized versions of iShares Core S&P 500 ETF and Micron Technology (MU) shares on Ethereum, becoming the first live implementation of the SEC's custodial tokenization framework.
The underlying securities remain held by regulated custodians, while one-to-one tokenized representations are issued through a registered transfer agent. Token holders also receive proxy voting, shareholder communications, and governance rights via Broadridge's infrastructure.
June 2026: One $32M Hack Did Half the Damage
Crypto lost ~$65M to exploits in June — a relatively calm month by 2026 standards. But the damage was lopsided.
Humanity was drained for $32M, nearly half of every dollar lost all month, in a single hit. Everything else was a long tail: Syscoin, the infamous MEV bot JaredFromSubway, and a string of sub-$5M drains.
The 2026 lesson repeats: aggregate losses are shrinking, but concentration is rising. One bad day outweighs a whole quiet month.
dYdX Rebrands to Arcus, a DEX on Robinhood Chain
dYdX Labs has rebranded its exchange as Arcus, a next-generation DEX it built jointly with Robinhood Crypto and launched July 1 on Robinhood Chain.
Arcus lists 95 tokenized US stocks for spot trading plus waitlisted perpetuals, with 0% web trading fees and pre-IPO access planned. The year-long build pairs dYdX's on-chain derivatives with Robinhood's retail reach.