Everyone's trading on Polymarket. The real bet is who's building underneath it. 12 startups are quietly building prediction-market infrastructure — data, terminals, matching engines, credit. All of the early-stage.

Radiant Prime turns market noise into structured yield. A delta-neutral, multi-factor engine runs 200+ research signals across liquid crypto markets — forecasting risk, hedging exposure and executing 24/7 on millisecond-latency infrastructure.

The system combines quantitative research, portfolio-level hedging, constrained optimization, automated execution and continuous risk control across liquid digital-asset markets.

Databricks announced a new funding round Thursday valuing the company at $188 billion, led by Coatue. The valuation jump caps an aggressive 18-month run: $10B raised at a $62B valuation in Dec 2024, $1B at $100B in Sep 2025, $5B at $134B in Feb 2026, and now this latest round at $188B.

Founded in 2013 as a big-data analytics platform, Databricks has repositioned as core AI infrastructure, rolling out products like Lakebase, Unity, and Omnigent on top of its existing enterprise data holdings.

The new capital will fuel Databricks' AI strategy, with the company doubling down on three core products: Unity AI Gateway, its multi-AI governance tool for managing enterprise AI costs; Genie, an AI coworker that turns business data into trusted answers and actions; and Lakebase, a serverless Postgres database built for AI agents.

Databricks says its platform is now used by more than 20,000 organizations, including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Block, Mastercard, Rivian, and Unilever, along with 70% of the Fortune 500.

U.S. prosecutors have charged a Florida man with distributing malware-laden video games on Steam as part of a scheme that allegedly infected thousands of victims and drained their crypto wallets.

According to a criminal complaint, the FBI arrested 21-year-old Zyaire Wilkins on Tuesday, accusing him and several unnamed co-conspirators of publishing malicious games, including BlockBlasters, Dashverse, Lampy, Lunara, and PirateFi, on Steam over the past two years.

The games were designed to look and function like legitimate titles, but once installed, the embedded malware harvested passwords and personal data and targeted victims' crypto wallets.

Prosecutors allege the scheme infected roughly 8,000 victims and compromised around 80 crypto wallets, resulting in at least $220,000 in stolen crypto.

The games were reportedly marketed through Discord, LinkedIn, and Telegram. The FBI first flagged the investigation publicly in March, calling on victims who had downloaded the affected games to come forward with evidence.

Consensys, the firm behind the MetaMask wallet, unknowingly hired a software developer with alleged ties to North Korea, who spent roughly a month working on core platform code before being terminated.

The individual used the alias "Tyler Knapp" and GitHub handle "imyugioh", was brought on as a consultant through an existing third-party service provider relationship. He contributed to core MetaMask code, including components for crypto-to-fiat conversion via third-party payment providers and parts of the mobile wallet platform. His contributions began March 9 and stopped abruptly in April 2026, coinciding with the termination of his access.

Consensys general counsel Matt Corva confirmed the company discovered the threat shortly after the consultant was introduced, immediately cut off access, and launched an investigation that found no misappropriated assets or data, no malicious code deployed, and no impact to user security. Consensys notified law enforcement and has since reviewed its practices around outsourced engineering work.

Notably, the same GitHub identity had prior contributions to several other crypto projects, including Ankr, Blueberry Protocol, DEPO, Pickle Finance, and Harmony.

The incident fits a broader pattern: North Korean operatives have increasingly infiltrated crypto and software firms by posing as remote engineers, given that developer access can extend beyond source code to transaction-signing infrastructure, a direct pipeline for moving stolen assets across chains.

TRM Labs estimates North Korea-linked activity accounts for nearly 66% of all funds stolen in crypto hacks, including last year's $1.5B Bybit hack, one of the largest crypto heists on record.

BTC ETFs: +$75.5M

ETH ETFs: +$105M

This week (July 13-20, 2026): 

- BitMine (BMNR): Bought 7,430 ETH (~$13.9M). Total now ~5.77M ETH.

- Strategy (MSTR): Strategy has increased its USD Reserve by $225 million. Holds steady at 843,775 BTC.

- Strive (ASST): Bought 18 BTC (~$1.2M). Total now ~19,900 BTC. 

Others: Mostly flat, no big moves reported. 

Overall: Pause in big buying after strong prior months. Companies building cash instead.

Stablecoin reserves on two of the largest exchanges have dropped sharply, pointing to shrinking liquidity as BTC remains stuck near key support.

According to CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost, Binance's stablecoin reserves fell by roughly $1.55 billion over the past 30 days, while Bybit saw approximately $786 million in outflows, bringing the combined decline to nearly $2.3 billion across both platforms. The exact destination of these funds remains unconfirmed, though possible factors include MiCA-related user migration in Europe, weaker fresh capital inflows, and stablecoins moving into self-custody or onchain yield products.

Darkfost points to declining exchange stablecoin reserves as a sign that fresh liquidity simply isn't entering the market, a trend that's been consistent since the start of the year, with outflows persistently outpacing inflows.

Tether's USDT is now on a two-year countdown to meet GENIUS Act requirements or risk losing eligibility for listing on U.S. centralized exchanges.

The foreign stablecoin issuers like Tether may have until July 2028 to comply with the law, which could require OCC registration, adherence to U.S. freeze-and-seizure orders, and changes to USDT's reserve composition.

The GENIUS Act, signed into law a year ago, mandates that stablecoin issuers be fully backed by highly liquid assets — essentially cash and U.S. Treasuries. Tether's latest disclosures show roughly a quarter of USDT's reserves are still tied up in assets that wouldn't meet that standard, including precious metals, lending positions, and bitcoin holdings.

CEO Paolo Ardoino pledged compliance when the law was signed, and Tether has since launched USAT, a U.S.-focused stablecoin issued through Anchorage Digital, though adoption remains limited so far.

Prediction markets had their breakout year — Polymarket and Kalshi cleared record volumes, and the category crossed $20B in monthly turnover. But the loudest names are the venues. The real land-grab is quieter: the startups building the rails underneath — data, terminals, matching engines and credit — and most are still pre-token.

Wintermute put it bluntly this month: the prediction-market boom has an infrastructure problem. Fragmented data, slow tooling, no professional-grade APIs. So we went hunting for the teams fixing it. Ground rules: we skipped the big traded names (UMA, Chainlink) and the venues themselves, and kept only fresh, mostly pre-token builders. Inclusion isn't an endorsement — do your own research.

Here's the infrastructure map 👇

Data / API

1. Oddpool — Aggregates odds, orderbooks and arbitrage across every prediction venue into one searchable data layer for quants. Y Combinator (S26).

2. PredictionTalk — A prediction-markets hub tracking TVL, volume, fees and oracles across every major venue, updated continuously. Independent.

3. Adjacent — A data-and-news API surfacing 40,000+ markets and prediction indices, turning odds shifts into breaking news. Pre-seed, 2026.

4. Marketlens — Tick-level Polymarket orderbook history plus a Python backtesting SDK for quants building and testing real strategies. Independent.

Terminals / Execution

5. Kairos — Unified execution-and-intelligence terminal aggregating data, news and low-latency trades across venues. $2.5M, a16z crypto.

6. Verso — Bloomberg-style terminal with real-time data, AI news scoring and smart order routing across Polymarket and Kalshi. Y Combinator backed.

7. Fireplace — Institutional terminal aggregating markets, liquidity and execution, auto-routing orders to the deepest, best-priced venue. $1.5M pre-seed, Frachtis.

8. Converge — The first unified terminal letting traders watch and act across Polymarket, Kalshi and Limitless from one screen. Independent.

Protocols / Credit / Infra

9. Pascal — Core infrastructure powering the launch and operation of prediction-market platforms. $9M Series A, Union Square Ventures.

10. Kuest — Open-source protocol to launch and run your own prediction market. Independent · open-source.

11. OrderbookTrade — High-performance CLOB matching engine with on-chain settlement, launching markets instantly. Independent.

12. Dimes — Embedded credit letting any app offer leveraged prediction-market exposure via API. Independent.

The takeaway: everyone is trading on Polymarket. The smarter bet may be on who's building the layer beneath it — and unlike the venues, most of these are still early and pre-token.

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Nothing here is financial advice. Early-stage projects carry high risk — DYOR.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared a “vibe-coded” demo of an anonymous message board built on Aztec, Ethereum’s ZK privacy L2. Users deposit ETH on mainnet, post anonymously on L2 with no public link between a post and their wallet, and can withdraw later.

The twist is onchain moderation: a designated censor can flag posts as “immoral” — hiding them from default feeds and time-locking the poster’s next messages — while a local LLM daemon checks each post against a transparent onchain policy. Posts are rate-limited by deposit size (0.001 ETH = 1 post/hour), and the logic ships with 70 theorems formally proven in Lean 4. Based on his 2022 “anon billboard” blog idea, Buterin stressed the demo is early, incomplete and only a toy — with access-control fixes and browser flows still to do.