Open-source AI lab Nous Research, the team behind the Hermes agent, is reportedly finalizing a new round led by Robot Ventures with strong participation from USV, at a $1.5 billion valuation.

The company is raising at least $75 million, following a prior $50 million Series A and a fast rise in developer interest around Hermes, which ships with built-in skills for web search, coding, and image understanding.

Hermes has already built a large open-source following, with roughly 214K GitHub stars and nearly 40K forks, as Nous continues pushing into the agentic AI race.

Tether has led a $7 million Series A round in Pact Labs, joined by Blockchange Ventures and Lasagna, to expand USA₮ across payroll, earned wage access, credit, and everyday payments.

Pact Labs' infrastructure will enable businesses to integrate digital wallets, process real-time payroll, and offer financial services without relying on legacy payment rails. The move aims to bring USA₮, Tether's U.S.-focused dollar-backed stablecoin, into one of the country's largest financial markets, where over $11 trillion in payroll is processed annually.

The investment marks another step in Tether's strategy to drive real-world stablecoin adoption beyond crypto trading and into everyday financial infrastructure.

No matter what the market's doing — green, red, sideways — new projects keep launching every week. And the best window to get in is the earliest one: before the token, before the crowd, while the door's still open.

We tracked down 18 active waitlists you can join right now — from prediction markets and DEXs to crypto cards and privacy AI. One rule first: a real waitlist only ever needs an email or a social handle. Never connect a wallet, sign a transaction, or share a seed phrase to "join" one. With that out of the way — here's the radar.

1. Arcus — The native DEX for Robinhood Chain, bringing early spot trading to the fastest-launching L2 in history. Website

2. blink — A high-performance exchange for spot and perpetual markets, built for fair access and blockchain-native settlement. Website

3. Clawx — An agentic prediction market on Avalanche, where AI agents trade real-world outcomes on your behalf. Website

4. Daily Fun — Turns market speculation into a social, game-like experience for everyday traders. Website

5. Hudi — Trade Asian stock perpetuals — Nikkei, KOSPI, Hang Seng names — with up to 25x leverage. Website

6. KOR Protocol — An on-chain platform for tokenizing, managing and monetizing digital intellectual property, built on Base. (Raised $7.5M) Website

7. Koto Trade — A trading platform where the first 250 users on the waitlist receive a funded account at launch. Website

8. Onyx — A social sports prediction platform to trade positions on game outcomes. (Raised $20M from Payward) Website

9. Pinnaccle — A wallet-native trading workspace on Canton — swaps, limit orders, DCA and stop-loss in one place. Website

10. Proof — A new prediction-market venue for trading on real-world events and outcomes. Website

11. Pulsar Money — Free USD and EUR accounts, 0% stablecoin funding, and a virtual dollar card for global spending. Website

12. Pyre — A crypto card for everyday spending, paid straight from your on-chain balance. (Supported by Sophon) Website

13. Rocket Markets — The first time-based prediction yield market — earn yield on where outcomes are heading. Website

14. Shift DeFi — Non-custodial DeFi asset management targeting up to 15% yield via structured, risk-managed strategies. Website

15. Sovra — A self-custodial USDC platform for saving, earning and spending digital dollars anywhere. (Raised $2M) Website

16. Startale Card — A crypto spending card from Startale, with early-access registration now open. (Startale raised $70M) Website

17. Tplus — A decentralized trading platform combining on-chain settlement with fast off-chain order matching. Website

18. Wisp — Privacy-focused AI where your data is never stored or used for training. Fully owned by the Lido DAO. Website

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Not financial advice. Early-stage projects carry real risk — do your own research, and never share wallet credentials.

Strategy's new Bitcoin Banking Adoption Index scores 25 major banks — and the map is lopsided. US banks lead at ~42% (Fidelity tops it at 71%), Europe sits ~29%, and Japan trails at ~18% (SMBC and RBC at just 13%).

One caveat: this is Strategy's own index, the market's biggest BTC bull, and the full methodology isn't public yet. Directional, not gospel.

Stripe-backed payments chain Tempo has rolled out Receive Policies, letting accounts choose which tokens and senders they accept — and reclaim anything they don't want.

Built for its stablecoin-optimized TIP-20 standard, the opt-in tool lets exchanges, custodians and users whitelist senders, filter incoming tokens, and name a recovery authority to claw back blocked transfers. It tackles a core payments headache as the $5B, Stripe-incubated network pulls enterprises like DoorDash onto stablecoin rails.

Apple tagged a fresh intraday all-time high of $323.45 and a record $317.31 close, lifting its market cap to about $4.66T — the world's second-most valuable company, behind only Nvidia.

The rally rides strong iPhone 17 sales and AI optimism, with the stock up roughly 50% over the past year.

Satoshi's ~1.1M BTC, plus millions of other pre-BIP32 coins, sit behind public keys already exposed on chain. A proposed soft-fork would defensively freeze those wallets, shielding them from a future quantum attack.

The fix is a small, BIP-style update — no hard fork needed — that would lock those exposed legacy wallets until Bitcoin's community decides their fate, while newer wallets get quantum-resistant signing by default.

AmericanFortress, founded by Michal 'Mehow' Pospieszalski, a former white-hat hacker who audited U.S. voting machines for the government, has closed an $8M seed (SAVA, Moon Pursuit, 0G Labs) this May; its Send-to-Name wallet is in beta, with an AF token event slated for early Q3, per the company.

On July 10, Circle got final OCC approval for a national trust charter. The world's largest regulated stablecoin issuer is now a federally chartered US bank.

But Circle is the headline, not the whole story. For 5 years Anchorage was the only crypto firm with a federal charter. Then, in ~6 months, the dam broke: Circle went first, with Ripple, Paxos, BitGo, Fidelity, Coinbase and Crypto com right behind.

1 in 5 years → 7 in 6 months. Federal legitimacy, custody rights, no state-by-state patchwork. The financial rails are being rebuilt — and this time crypto owns them.

ETF demand rebounded, while public companies continued expanding crypto treasury positions across major assets.

Corporate Treasuries

- BitMine acquired 27,801 ETH ($49.1M) over the past week, lifting total holdings to 5.77M ETH ($10.2B)

- Strategy raised $466M through at-the-market stock sales last week, lifting its USD reserve to $3B, but it bought no new Bitcoin, leaving its stack untouched at 843,775 BTC across the period.

ETF Flows

Bitcoin ETFs: +$197M net inflows after eight weeks of outflows.

Ethereum ETFs: +$84.3M net inflows, led by BlackRock’s ETHA.

BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC and UBS are joining the U.K. government’s tokenization taskforce.

Backed by the City of London Corporation, the initiative will spend the next year testing live tokenization use cases in UK financial markets, starting with tokenized repo. The goal is clear: bring tokenization deeper into traditional finance and keep London competitive as the race for RWA infrastructure accelerates.

According to a BCG estimate, the tokenized real-world assets market could reach $88 trillion by 2035, while the U.K. says the shift could add billions in annual economic output and tax revenue.

The message coming out of London is clear: tokenization is no longer being treated as a side experiment or a niche innovation. It is steadily moving into the center of financial infrastructure, where the next generation of markets will be built.