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.

Michael Saylor's Strategy raised $466.7M 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.

The cash cushion is earmarked for dividends on its preferred stock and interest on its debt, as the firm's once-relentless BTC accumulation pauses. It underscores a shift in Strategy's playbook: after years of relentless buying, Saylor's Bitcoin machine has downshifted to raising and holding cash.

Faster than Base (33d). Faster than Arbitrum itself (26d) — and it's built on Arbitrum's stack. This isn't a slow burn, it's a rocket.

Records like this don't happen on empty chains — they happen where the liquidity is. Uniswap, PancakeSwap, Curve are all live. But the early native play riding this wave is Arcus — the DEX built for Robinhood Chain from day one.

SBI Holdings has struck a strategic partnership with the Solana Foundation to build an onchain financial market in Japan, folding the foundation into its SBI R3 Japan unit — now renamed SBI Solana Global.

The venture will roll out yen-backed stablecoins, tokenized bonds, funds and real estate, plus cross-border payment rails for institutions — starting in Japan, then expanding across Asia and beyond. It's another leg of SBI's aggressive onchain push, positioning Japan's largest financial group as a regional hub for regulated tokenized finance.

Startale Group unveiled Startale Card at WebX 2026 — a self-custodial Visa card that lets users spend Soneium assets at 150M+ merchants worldwide, with the waitlist now open.

Unlike custodial crypto cards, eligible holdings keep earning yield right up until they're spent, and every purchase returns cashback paid in USDSC. Built on Soneium — the Ethereum L2 Startale co-developed with Sony — it's Startale's bet on bringing onchain assets into everyday payments.

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.

A full list of Major Upcoming Events, to be updated

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.

At the same time, more casual volume can deepen liquidity, reduce manipulation risk, and help prediction markets scale beyond their early crypto/politics user base.

So the real challenge is not whether this shift is happening, it clearly is. The question is whether prediction markets can keep their forecasting edge while expanding into a broader entertainment audience.