H1 in one picture — every major venue, month by month. Where the volume actually went, Jan → Jun:

The majors

— Kalshi: a relentless climb: $3.7B → $9.4B, peaking in June. Six straight months of growth, no wobble.

— Polymarket: stuck in a $3.2B–$4.8B range, dipped to $3.2B in May, rebounded to $4.3B in June. Flat while Kalshi ran.

The challengers

— Opinion: front-loaded and fading: $3.3B in January → collapsed to ~$380M by June. The entire −80% share drop is right here.

— Predict.fun: volatile: a $647M April spike, back down to $265M in June.

— Limitless: the quiet grinder: $47M → $327M by May, the cleanest growth curve of the small caps.

Bottom line: Kalshi's lead isn't a one-month fluke — it's six months of compounding. The majors pulled away while the challengers churned.

Tether has invested $20 million in Mercado Bitcoin's strategic financing round. The Brazilian platform is one of Latin America's largest regulated on-chain financial services providers.

Mercado Bitcoin serves 4.5 million users, has issued over R$2 billion in tokenized assets, and operates under more than 10 licenses across Brazil and Europe.

The new funding will support expansion across stablecoin payments, tokenized investments, lending, and on-chain capital markets, while also fueling international growth.

Tether's former chief investment officer Richard Heathcote is reportedly looking to sell a small portion of his 1.26% stake in the stablecoin giant. According to Bloomberg, he is working with PJT Partners on the secondary sale.

Heathcote stepped down as CIO in March and later moved into a non-executive advisory role. His deputy, Zachary Lyons, took over day-to-day investment management at the company.

The potential deal comes after Tether paused earlier plans to raise funds at a valuation of up to $500 billion, as the firm waits for its first full audit. Tether has also hired a Big Four accounting firm to handle the review.

The company remains the largest stablecoin issuer in the market, with USDT supply standing at around $184 billion. Tether's business has stayed highly profitable thanks to its large holdings of U.S. Treasury bills.

Zeus Network is facing increasing concern from the community after its official X account reportedly disabled replies, while the team has also become less responsive on Discord.

In April, the project announced that it had been “acquired” by a Cardano-related project and would expand beyond Solana. Since then, users have continued to raise questions about communication and withdrawal-related issues.

Meanwhile, ZEUS is now down more than 99%, adding to fears that the protocol may have effectively stalled.

Coinbase has secured U.K. regulatory approval to offer equities and derivatives alongside crypto, adding a MiFID license in one of its largest international markets.

The license lets institutional traders access crypto, equity and commodity perpetual futures, while U.K. retail users can trade equities on Coinbase for the first time. The move advances Coinbase's “Everything Exchange” strategy — spanning stocks, crypto derivatives, prediction markets and tokenized products.

DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip to cut its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The chip targets inference — running trained models — rather than training new ones.

The effort is still early: DeepSeek is in talks with chip-design, foundry and memory firms and has quietly hired chip engineers. Domestic rivals Alibaba and Baidu are already building their own AI chips. Huawei now holds about half of China's $50B domestic AI chip market after U.S. curbs on Nvidia exports.

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Klarna has applied to the Utah Department of Financial Institutions and the FDIC to establish Klarna Bank USA, a proposed Utah-chartered industrial bank. If approved, the unit would be FDIC-insured and operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Klarna Inc.

The move marks another step in Klarna's push beyond buy now, pay later and deeper into full-scale banking. The company says it already serves U.S. customers through partner banks, while about 30 million Americans use Klarna each year.

Klarna also named Gary Harding, former chairman and CEO of Milestone Bank and former president and CEO of Prime Alliance Bank, to lead the proposed bank if the application is approved.

Yield Guild Games (YGG) announced it is sunsetting YGG Play, its Web3 game publishing arm, citing unfavorable macroeconomic conditions and an unsustainable market for crypto game publishing. The transition will be completed by August 1.

Despite generating over $9M in lifetime revenue by the end of Q1 2026, YGG said the prolonged crypto market downturn and weak retail activity made the business no longer commercially viable. The company will also lay off 35 employees as part of the restructuring.

Going forward, YGG will shift its focus toward the AI data economy, building gaming datasets for AI training while leveraging its community to create behavioral data and expand AI-related opportunities.

USD.AI and BSQ Capital Partners have formed a joint venture to finance up to $300M of AI compute across Asia-Pacific, structured as GPU-backed financings.

The initial deployment targets $300M, with a path to upsize to $1B once performance milestones are met — channelling onchain credit into real-world GPU infrastructure to meet surging regional AI-compute demand.