On July 1, MiCA's final transition period ended — replacing 30+ national crypto regimes with a single EU-wide rulebook. Firms now need authorization to serve any market in the bloc.

244 CASPs are licensed as of late June, handling 83% of European trading volume. Germany leads with 57 approvals, France and the Netherlands 26 each; Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal and Romania have none yet.

Kraken, Coinbase, OKX and Crypto.com gain a single passport across the 30-country EEA. Binance — which pulled its Greek application last week — has no MiCA license, and unlicensed firms must wind down or restrict EU services.

Multi-jurisdiction stablecoin issuance stays ambiguous, a lingering disadvantage for EU-based issuers.

StarkWare published Starknet's post-quantum readiness roadmap, migrating its cryptographic surfaces off the elliptic curves quantum computers threaten — with STARK proofs and native account abstraction giving it a head start.

Phase 1 shifts OS config hash, address derivation, and state commitment from Pedersen to BLAKE2 (PQ-secure by default). Phase 2 adds a migration toolkit for legacy contracts; Phase 3 resolves Ethereum-facing dependencies.

Its edge: STARK proofs avoid elliptic-curve assumptions, and native account abstraction lets signatures evolve without protocol-level changes.

OpenAI engineers found a software optimization that cuts the cost of running its models by more than 50% — squeezing far more from existing GPUs, with no new hardware.

Applied to logged-out ChatGPT, it now runs on just a couple hundred Nvidia GPUs — a fraction of the compute once needed.

The savings give OpenAI room to widen margins, raise ChatGPT usage limits, or ease API pricing, per The Information.

Donald Trump's 2025 financial disclosure shows he earned more than $1 billion from crypto ventures — even as Bitcoin fell roughly 50% from its all-time high.

The bulk came from $635M in $TRUMP memecoin royalties and over $500M from World Liberty Financial token sales, plus $220M+ in BTC, ETH, and USDC holdings.

Reported by CoinDesk and The Block, the filings land as the broader market slumps — a stark split between the president's crypto windfall and investors' losses.

MetaMask unveiled the Money Account, a self-custodial account that automatically earns up to ~4% APY on its mUSD stablecoin as you trade, send, and spend.

Funds spend worldwide via the MetaMask Card with up to 3% back, and deposits in mUSD, USDC, USDT, or DAI carry no conversion fees.

mUSD is backed 1:1 by USD and short-term Treasuries via Bridge, a Stripe company. The account is rolling out now on MetaMask Mobile.

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5, its most agentic Sonnet model — able to plan and run autonomously with tools like browsers and terminals.

It delivers near-Opus 4.8 performance at a fraction of the cost — $2 / $10 per million input/output tokens at intro pricing through August 31.

Sonnet 5 is the new default on Free and Pro and is live across the API as claude-sonnet-5, with stronger safety than Sonnet 4.6.

Plume has partnered with FalconX to introduce the FALX Structured Credit Facility, a new onchain RWA product offering exposure to overcollateralized prime brokerage loans. The vault is designed to scale up to $1B in capacity, targeting institutional-grade yield strategies in a compliant, programmable format.

The facility is facilitated through Pareto and curated by M11 Credit, allocating capital into a FalconX-managed SPV. It provides exposure to diversified lending activity across quant funds, hedge funds, and asset managers using FalconX’s prime brokerage infrastructure.

The vault is deployed on Plume in collaboration with OpenTrade and is available across Plume, Ethereum, and Solana. It features fixed monthly interest rates, giving investors more predictable yield compared to traditional variable DeFi lending models.

A key upgrade is intra-month subscription support, allowing capital to start earning prorated yield immediately upon entry. M11 Credit acts as administrative and collateral agent, while reporting loan composition and performance metrics across the portfolio.

SK Hynix, the dominant maker of HBM memory for AI, filed to list American depositary receipts on Nasdaq, aiming to raise about $29 billion.

ADRs are priced near $166 (255,000 won), with trading slated to begin around July 10 — one of the year's biggest US listings.

BofA, Citi, Goldman, and JPMorgan are leading the deal. SK Hynix already trades in Seoul and holds ~60% of the AI HBM market.

X has launched a hosted MCP server that lets AI agents tap the X API with no setup — wiring tools like Grok and Cursor into real-time X data using an account's own permissions.

It exposes the X API and developer docs through Model Context Protocol, so any MCP-compatible agent can query X directly.

X calls its feed "the best real-time information source in the world," positioning the platform as a live data layer for the agent economy.

Strategy unveiled a Digital Credit Capital Framework that, for the first time, lets the long buy-only company sell Bitcoin to actively manage its capital.

Its new BTC Monetization Program clears up to $1.25B in sales to refill the ~$2.55B USD reserve, cover dividends, or fund buybacks — alongside $2B in new repurchase authorizations.

Saylor stressed Bitcoin stays the primary reserve asset, with cash covering ~17 months of dividends. MSTR snapped a 9-day losing streak on the news.