Stablecoins, payments and RWA infrastructure generated most of the week's momentum. Much of the activity came from banks, payment providers and infrastructure companies expanding products that had already been in development.

🔎 Recent Updates & Developments

- Mastercard completed its BVNK acquisition

- Wells Fargo launched tokenized deposits

- Cloudflare rolled out stablecoin wallets for AI

- Western Union launched Stablecard remittances

- Ethereum proposed burning validator rewards

- Base introduced the Cobalt upgrade

- Binance sued RedotPay for $470M

- Plume rebranded its RWA platform as Plume Vaults

The Optimism Foundation has released its Year 5 budget outlook, projecting that approximately 343 million OP will enter circulation between May 2026 and April 2027, bringing the circulating supply to 2.504 billion OP, or 58.3% of the total supply.

The projected increase includes 200 million OP allocated to the Ecosystem Fund, 47.6 million OP for Early Core Contributors, 15.3 million OP for investors, and additional scheduled distributions under the original token allocation framework. The Foundation noted that no new token allocation has been requested.

Optimism also confirmed that no airdrops or Retro Funding distributions are currently planned for Year 5, while OP buybacks have surpassed 9 million tokens under the protocol's ongoing revenue-backed buyback program.

The Foundation emphasized that the projections are directional estimates and may change based on governance decisions and ecosystem performance.

China's Unitree opens its IPO subscription Aug 10 on Shanghai's STAR Market at a ~$6.2B valuation. Last year it shipped ~5,500 humanoids, more than anyone, on $237M revenue and 60% margins.

For contrast: US rival Figure is valued at $39B, 6× more, with almost no revenue.

A-shares are closed to foreign retail, so the way in is crypto — a pre-IPO perp is already live on MEXC (~$72, +8% today).

We mapped 29 private startups building the machines: humanoids (Figure, 1X), warehouse & construction robots (Bedrock, ANYbotics), self-driving vehicles (Waymo, Waabi) and autonomous defense systems (Anduril, Shield AI).

The trigger wasn't price. It was the $292M Kelp bridge exploit back in April. Since then, issuer after issuer has quietly re-routed their cross-chain rails to Chainlink's CCIP, capped by BitGo moving WBTC ($7.3B).

When the bridge breaks, everything built on top starts hunting for safer rails. One exploit is redrawing entire cross-chain trust map.

Most holders had never heard of Kulipa. That's the catch: you don't choose the company that actually issues your crypto card. A handful of invisible issuers power the cards you use every day: MetaMask (Baanx), Phantom (Bridge), Ledger, Bitget Wallet, and more.

And the layer is consolidating fast: Stripe bought Bridge ($1.1B), Mastercard bought BVNK ($1.8B). The strong get acquired — the weak, like Kulipa, brick their partners' cards and disappear.

Your card is only as alive as its issuer. Here's who's really behind them 👇

Its Unified Trading Account (UTA) is the industry's first to pool crypto, 100 tokenized US stocks (rTokens) and RWA into one shared margin account; 370+ assets, a single collateral pool.

That means one tokenized stock like rNVDA does four jobs at once: hold your exposure, earn dividends in USDT, back your futures margin, and pledge it for a stablecoin loan.

It's the third generation of the trading account, and $100M+ flowed in within the first month.

Some are already registered with the SEC. Others are shaping the rules from the inside.

We mapped the RWA players doing both — including Lumia, advised by two former US Congressmen, one from each side of the aisle 👇

Institutional activity stayed fairly quiet, with only a few notable corporate treasury moves, while ETF flows remained relatively light across both Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Corporate Treasuries

- BitMine acquired 10,399 ETH (~$19.2M), increasing its holdings to 5.8M ETH.

- Strategy sold 1,638 BTC to boost its USD reserve to $4B and repurchase $81M of STRC, reducing its Bitcoin holdings to 842,138 BTC.

Outside of these moves, public companies made no other major Bitcoin or Ethereum purchases during the week.

ETF Flows

Bitcoin ETFs recorded $61.5M in net outflows.

Ethereum ETFs posted mild net inflows of $10M.

A firmware build-error made Coldcard seeds reproducible from public data, letting an attacker drain ~$88,6M (1,367 BTC) remotely, without ever touching a device.

Zoom out and the pattern is clear: every earlier "hack" either needed physical access (Trezor) or was just a data leak (Ledger). Coldcard is the first to break cold storage remotely, at scale.