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SBI to Offer 3% Lending on Its JPYSC Stablecoin
SBI Group is rolling out a lending service for JPYSC — Japan's first trust-bank-backed yen stablecoin — through its crypto arm SBI VC Trade, with applications opening July 16.
The fixed-term product pays a 3% annual yield over a 12-week term, giving holders of the month-old stablecoin a regulated way to earn on idle yen. It deepens SBI's onchain push — recently backed by a $289M Bitbank buyout and fresh $125M and $76M crypto funding rounds — as Japan races to build regulated stablecoin rails.
Bonzo Lend Loses $9M in Supra Oracle Exploit
Bonzo Lend, a lending protocol on Hedera, was drained of about $9M after an attacker slipped a forged price update past a Supra oracle verifier.
The verifier accepted a signature made entirely of zeros — letting the attacker inflate SAUCE by ~12 orders of magnitude, then borrow 6.63M USDC and 34.5M wrapped HBAR against a few dollars of collateral. Bonzo says the flaw sat in the third-party verifier, not Hedera itself; Supra shipped a fix and the real price returned within 45 minutes — but Bonzo Lend was paused.
Prediction Markets Are Becoming More Entertainment-Driven
According to DWF Ventures, trading on Polymarket and Kalshi has shifted sharply since the 2024 U.S. election. Politics, elections, and macro now make up a much smaller share of volume, while sports and parlay-style products are taking over.
That’s good for volume and liquidity, but it also raises a bigger question: are prediction markets still acting as “truth engines”, or slowly becoming more like sportsbooks?
The main concern is the RFQ parlay model. Retail users cannot see or verify how combinations are priced, which creates a clear information asymmetry.
OpenAI Unveils GPT-5.6 Family With Flagship Sol Model & New AI Performance Benchmarks
OpenAI has launched the GPT-5.6 family, introducing Sol, Terra, and Luna. The flagship GPT-5.6 Sol delivers stronger performance across coding, science, cybersecurity, and knowledge work while using fewer tokens and lowering costs.
OpenAI also introduced Ultra, a multi-agent mode designed for complex tasks. GPT-5.6 improves computer use, tool calling, software engineering, and the creation of documents, presentations, and spreadsheets.
The company highlighted significant gains in cybersecurity and scientific research while introducing its strongest safety system yet. GPT-5.6 combines enhanced safeguards, continuous monitoring, and expanded misuse protections.
Metaplanet Studies Bitcoin-Backed Credit Instruments
Metaplanet, its securities arm, yen-stablecoin issuer JPYC and tokenization platform Progmat have launched a joint study into Bitcoin-backed digital credit instruments.
The products would trade 24/7 with interest accruing daily, backed by Bitcoin collateral. Roles: Metaplanet handles BTC strategy and product design, JPYC brings yen-payment rails, and Progmat provides the tokenized-asset issuance platform — all structured to fit Japanese regulation. It's still research-stage, with no terms, product or timeline decided yet.
Polymarket Has Filed for US Margin Trading
Polymarket has filed for futures commission merchant (FCM) registration with the US National Futures Association — its first step toward offering leveraged, margin-based event trading.
Margin would let users bet on events with only a fraction of the capital upfront, but final CFTC sign-off is still needed before leverage goes live. Rival Kalshi cleared the same NFA hurdle back in March and out-traded Polymarket $33B to $14B in June — raising the stakes in the prediction-market race.
Jito Collabs With Privy to Launch Fullsend on Solana
Jito has partnered with wallet-infrastructure provider Privy to launch Fullsend — a service that routes every Solana transaction for institutional-grade landing and speed.
Running through Fullsend by default since January, inclusion latency has dropped to as low as 50ms with 99.999% landing reliability. For Privy's embedded wallets, that means transactions confirm faster and fail less — a direct pitch to teams building consumer apps on Solana.
How 37,700 BTC Left Corporate Balance Sheets
Strategy selling Bitcoin made headlines. But it wasn't even the biggest seller of 2026.
MARA dumped 15,133 BTC ($1.1B) — 40% of the entire sell-off. Bitdeer, Cango, Riot all followed. The full six-month picture, on one chart.
Sony Receives Conditional Approval to Launch U.S. Stablecoin Trust Bank
Sony's online banking unit has received conditional approval to establish Connectia Trust, N.A., a U.S. national trust bank that could support the issuance and management of USD-denominated stablecoins.
The New York-based subsidiary will launch with $40M in capital and be fully owned by Sony Bank. However, operations and any stablecoin issuance remain subject to final regulatory approval from the OCC.
Gauntlet Raises $125M in Series C Led by SBI Holdings
Gauntlet has closed a $125M Series C led by SBI Holdings as it pushes deeper into onchain finance and institutional infrastructure.
The company says the new capital will help expand its platform, grow the global team, and broaden stablecoin coverage beyond USD and EUR to include MXN, JPY, and more. Gauntlet currently curates more than $1.5B in supplied assets across its vaults and works with over 150 fintechs and institutions.
Cryptomarket Check-In. Major Events & Headlines
This week saw major crypto firms deepen their regulatory presence in Europe while blockchain infrastructure kept moving forward with new networks, scaling upgrades and Bitcoin-native innovation.
🔎 Recent Updates & Developments
– Robinhood launched its Layer 2 on Arbitrum
– Kraken is pursuing a European banking license
– Coinbase obtained a U.K. MiFID license
– GRVT set July 21 for its token launch
– BNB Chain unveiled an AI-focused Layer 1
– Ethereum scheduled Glamsterdam with up to 78% lower fees
– Tether is bringing native USDT back to Bitcoin via RGB99
Prime Intellect Raises a $130M Series A
Prime Intellect closed a $130M Series A led by Radical Ventures, with NVIDIA Ventures, Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital also joining — lifting total funding to over $150M.
The startup builds decentralized infrastructure to train and deploy open frontier AI models with reinforcement learning — its bid to make an open superintelligence stack real and usable. Angel backers span founders and execs from Cloudflare, Ramp, Box, Zapier, Tesla and LangChain.
World.xyz Leaves Solana for Robinhood Chain
World.xyz, a decentralized prediction market that debuted on Solana barely a week ago, is migrating to Robinhood Chain — the new Layer 2 that Robinhood only launched on July 1.
The team called it a “tactful pivot” made after 24 hours of deliberation, thanking the Solana foundation and community on its way out. Solana diehards weren't impressed — Raydium mocked the exit, and Phantom simply replied: “i still like solana.”
Hyundai Card's Stablecoin Pilot: 4 Hours to 7 Minutes
Hyundai Card and Hyundai Motor completed a stablecoin remittance pilot, moving $20,000 between the automaker's U.S. and Mexican units in about 7 minutes — versus 3–4 hours by traditional bank wire.
Phase one ran on Avalanche with Tether's USDT (via Axiym), while a European phase with Circle and Visa is set to begin in late July.
GRVT Announced July 21 as GRVT Token Launch Date
GRVT, the licensed ZK-powered hybrid derivatives exchange, confirmed its native token GRVT will go live on July 21 — putting an official date on its long-awaited TGE.
GRVT has expanded its community token allocation to 28%, with Season 2 participants receiving an 18% share.
Polymarket Launches Combos for Multi-Leg Bets
Polymarket has officially launched Combos, letting users stack up to 32 picks into a single bet across sports — from the World Cup and UFC to MLB and beyond.
It's parlay-style betting for prediction markets: chain many outcomes together for a bigger payout, but every single leg has to hit to win. The launch pushes Polymarket deeper onto sportsbook turf and its heated race against rival Kalshi.
MAJOR UPCOMING EVENTS THIS SUMMER!
A full list of Major Upcoming Events, to be updated
👉 https://cryptodiffer.com/events
Revolut Brings AI-Assisted Trading to Revolut X With Natural Language Order Execution
Revolut has integrated its crypto exchange, Revolut X, with third-party AI assistants, enabling users to analyze markets, monitor portfolios, and execute trades using natural language prompts. Supported platforms include Claude, Gemini, OpenClaw, and Cursor, with no coding required.
The integration allows traders to access real-time market data, review portfolio performance, set custom price alerts, place market and limit orders, and manage open positions directly through AI assistants. Users can also test trading strategies, receive historical performance analysis, and optimize risk before placing trades.
Crypto Venture Funds Expand Beyond Digital Assets as AI & Frontier Technologies Attract More Capital
Some of crypto's largest venture firms are broadening their investment focus beyond digital assets. Paradigm recently raised a $1.2 billion fund to invest in crypto alongside AI, robotics, and other frontier technologies, while Framework Ventures and Haun Ventures have also launched funds targeting sectors beyond traditional crypto.
The shift comes as the crypto venture market cools. According to Galaxy Research, crypto VCs deployed around $4 billion across 355 deals in Q1 2026, while the number of new crypto venture funds fell to its lowest level since Q3 2020. Meanwhile, AI accounted for nearly 70% of global startup funding in Q2, highlighting where investor demand is moving.
Circle Wins Final OCC Nod for a National Trust Bank
Circle has received final OCC approval to launch Circle National Trust — a federally regulated national trust bank offering fiduciary custody of digital assets.
The charter clears a path for Circle to eventually bring management of the USDC Reserve under federal oversight, with custody later opening to select banks and institutions. CEO Jeremy Allaire called it “a defining step in bringing blockchain and digital assets into the core of the U.S. financial system.”
Relay Warns of Scam Tokens on Robinhood Chain
Relay Protocol is warning users about a wave of scam tokens on Robinhood Chain that vanish from wallets moments after they're bought — advanced honeypots built to trap buyers.
Crucially, Relay says this is NOT a wallet or private-key breach: only the money spent on the malicious token is lost, and your other holdings stay safe. Robinhood Chain — live since July 1 and permissionless — is seeing heavy memecoin activity, and Relay says it's now blocking bad contracts while verifying legit ones. Stick to tokens verified by trusted sources.
Ollama Raises $88M to Scale Open-Source AI
The $88M round was led by Benchmark's Peter Fenton, with Y Combinator, 8VC, Theory Ventures and a deep bench of founder-angels — including Docker's Solomon Hykes and ClickHouse CEO Aaron Katz — also joining.
Ollama lets developers run open models locally — no API keys, no per-token fees, no data leaving the machine. It's already used by 8.9M developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, betting on hybrid, privacy-first inference without vendor lock-in.
Who's Selling Bitcoin? The 2026 Breakdown
Strategy just sold Bitcoin for the first time ever. The "never sell" company offloaded 3,588 BTC ($216M) to fund dividends. So we asked: who else quietly sold BTC in 2026?
Turns out — a lot of them. 7 public companies, ~37,700 BTC, ~$2.66B in six months. Here's the full list.
Swift Expands Into Tokenized Finance With 17-Bank Blockchain Pilot
Swift has launched a blockchain-based shared ledger for a tokenized deposit pilot involving 17 banks across six continents, marking its first live use case for the technology.
The pilot includes major institutions such as Citi, HSBC, UBS, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered, Wells Fargo, BNY, DBS, and MUFG Bank. Swift says the ledger will let banks transfer tokenized deposits around the clock, including overnight and on weekends, while final settlement still happens through existing systems.
Aave Labs Unveils Stable Vaults for Fixed-Rate Stablecoin Yield
Aave Labs is introducing Stable Vaults, a new all-in-one infrastructure layer for embedding fixed-rate stablecoin yield into consumer products.
The system is already powering the Aave mobile savings app and is now open for any business to build on. Stable Vaults aim to solve one of DeFi’s biggest challenges: turning volatile onchain lending rates into a predictable rate users can actually rely on.
MiCA is live — and Europe already has a leader
The EU's crypto rulebook fully kicked in on July 1. One week later, the regulated market has a clear #1: Kraken.
$416M in spot liquidity — nearly half of all MiCA-regulated liquidity, and 2.4x its closest rival. Kraken alone runs deeper than Coinbase and Crypto com combined.
The exchanges that went all-in on EU compliance early now own the market. In regulated Europe, being big globally means nothing. Being licensed and liquid means everything.
DeFi Dashboard Zapper to Shut Down After 7 Years
Zapper, one of DeFi's earliest portfolio dashboards, will wind down on August 3, 2026 — closing its website, mobile apps and API. CEO Seb Audet said the team weighed its options and chose an orderly shutdown.
At its peak Zapper served ~2 million monthly users and processed over $13 billion in transactions, after raising roughly $16.5M from Framework Ventures, Sound Ventures and others since 2019.
Robinhood Chain Sends 10% of Fees to Arbitrum's DAO
Robinhood launched its own chain on Arbitrum — and for the first time, Arbitrum's DAO earns from a network it doesn't even settle. Every Arbitrum-stack L2 that settles outside Arbitrum One/Nova now returns 10% of net revenue: 8% to the DAO treasury, 2% to the developer guild.
ARB jumped ~14% in 24 hours on the news. Week one brought ~$57K in protocol revenue — a modest run-rate today, but a genuine structural shift: from a pure governance token to one with a real, recurring on-chain revenue path.
Binance Wallet Adds Plume's RWA Yield Vault
Binance Wallet has integrated Plume Network's nBASIS vault, giving self-custody users direct access to tokenized Invesco and Bitwise funds — its first structured RWA yield product.
Users deposit stablecoins and earn roughly 3.5% from two institutional funds behind one vault: Invesco's tokenized U.S. government-securities fund (USTB) and Bitwise's crypto carry fund (USCC).
The Bloodbath — H1 2026 Worst Performers
And here's the other side. MYX lost 98% — basically everything. Pippin, Merlin Chain and Prom all dropped 85%+.
Hold any of these through H1 and you're left with pocket change. The full wreckage 👇