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Weekly crypto/blockchain news: June 29 - July 5

Market snapshot Bitcoin: $62,786 | Ethereum: $1,762 | Total stablecoin market cap: $311B | USDT dominance at 59.1%

Regulatory developments
→ The UK cut stablecoin capital buffers to 1%, undercutting the EU's MiCA requirements.

The FCA set a lighter reserve rule than Brussels, which gives issuers a cheaper home in London. Expect some stablecoin infrastructure to tilt toward the UK, and expect the EU to feel the pressure on where euro settlement actually happens.

→ Three years after MiCA became law, the EU is already reopening the rulebook.

The European Commission is reviewing which parts of the framework need updating even as the hard deadline lands.

Investments, partnerships, launches, & acquisitions
→ A consortium of 140-plus companies is building Open USD, a shared stablecoin that returns most reserve income to its partners.

Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, Citizens Bank, and Coinbase are among the backers. Businesses will be able to mint and redeem OUSD without fees, and governance sits with a board of partners rather than a single issuer.

→ BNY, the world's largest custody bank, now lets institutions mint, redeem, and custody USDC directly.

Clients can run USDC on BNY's infrastructure instead of building their own. The custody bank behind trillions in assets treats a stablecoin as normal plumbing, clearing its last credibility bar for conservative treasurers.

→ Standard Chartered became the first global systemically important bank to offer direct USDC minting and redemption to institutions.

The service starts in Dubai and targets on-chain settlement, treasury, and liquidity management, with payments features planned next. Clients get USDC through one onboarding with the bank, without holding an account directly with Circle.

→ Crypto founders are weighing Dubai over Europe as the MiCA deadline reshapes where firms base themselves.

Some firms see Dubai's regime as faster and cheaper to operate under than the licensed EU path.

Crypto security
→ Ethical hackers showed that a $3,000 server could have exposed up to $70 billion across Aptos, including stablecoin flows and bridges.

Researchers at Hexens simulated the attack with a 90%-plus success rate under real conditions, using cheap hardware and no insider access. The flaw was reported through emergency channels and patched before any funds moved.

→ Humanity Protocol is pivoting to enterprise AI after a $36 million theft traced to bridge admin keys sitting on one employee's laptop.

In his first interview since the hack, founder Terence Kwok said recovery odds are low. The attacker phished one device that held three of six Ethereum keys and three of five BNB Chain keys, enough to seize the token bridges.

More industry/market updates
→ Circle shares dropped as much as 17% on the Open USD news, then clawed back 5% the next day.

Jefferies told clients not to buy the dip, citing real competitive pressure on USDC. USDC sits near $73 billion in circulation against Tether's roughly $145 billion, so a bank-backed rival aimed straight at the regulated-institutional niche is a genuine threat to Circle's lane.

→ Big banks have stopped debating whether stablecoins belong in finance and started fighting over how to own the rails.

Executives argue the value sits in the networks, liquidity, and settlement layers around stablecoins rather than the tokens. European lenders are pushing euro-denominated stablecoins to keep settlement from defaulting to dollar-backed tokens.

→ CFOs are being told to read Open USD as a treasury signal worth planning around.

The pitch to finance leaders is that shared, revenue-sharing infrastructure changes the economics of holding and moving tokenized dollars. Whether OUSD ships on time or not, the direction of travel for corporate payments is clear enough to plan around.

Swapin's Take
TLDR; week in review

→ On the infrastructure side, a 140-company consortium backed Open USD while BNY and Standard Chartered opened direct USDC access to institutions.
→ On regulation, the MiCA grandfathering deadline closed, the UK undercut the EU on capital buffers, and Brussels started rewriting its own rulebook.
→ And a security disclosure on Aptos was a reminder that the chain underneath settlement carries risk.

Weekly crypto/blockchain update: June 15 - 21

Market snapshot Bitcoin: $64,188 | Ethereum: $1,745 | Total stablecoin market cap: $315B | USDT dominance at 59.05%

Regulatory developments
Stablecoin issuers face bank-style customer ID checks, with a 60-day clock now running. The Fed, Treasury, OCC, FDIC, and FinCEN proposed a joint KYC rule. If you settle in USDC or USDT, expect tighter onboarding from your issuer.

State regulators are fighting to stay in the GENIUS Act process.

US senators urged the Treasury not to sideline them. The outcome decides whether your provider answers to federal or state supervisors, which is who you call when something breaks.

The IMF flagged Nigeria's stablecoin boom as a stress test for monetary policy.

Nigeria takes 60% of sub-Saharan Africa's stablecoin inflows. If you pay into emerging markets, expect local rules to tighten and ramps to get squeezed.

Investments, partnerships, launches, & acquisitions
Ripple is wiring RLUSD into African payment rails through Flutterwave.

Ripple invested in Flutterwave at a $3.2B valuation. Africa now has a third serious corridor alongside USDC and USDT,enabling cheaper transfers.

Trace Finance raised $32M to connect stablecoins to actual banking rails.

The Series A, led by CoinFund, values the company 10x above seed. The money is going to the boring plumbing between stablecoins and bank accounts, which is where real adoption sits.

A bank-issued enterprise stablecoin crossed $500M in circulation in four months.

USDGO, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank under the GENIUS Act, hit the mark on June 16. The detail that matters for a CFO is the issuer: a federally chartered bank, not an offshore entity.

State Street launched a money market fund built to back stablecoin reserves.

The fund makes State Street the fourth major asset manager chasing reserve management under the GENIUS Act. When BlackRock and State Street want to hold the backing, the asset class has gone mainstream.

Crypto security
Microsoft found malware that swaps wallet addresses mid-transaction.

The USB worm watches your clipboard and replaces a copied address with the attacker's before you paste.

A cross-chain bridge sat drained for seven days before anyone noticed.

An attacker minted unbacked tokens through an Axelar-to-Secret Network bridge and took $4.67M. The flaw had been in the code since 2023, unaudited.

Ethereum's biggest sandwich bot got drained of $7.5M in an approval trap. On June 21, an attacker tricked jaredfromsubway.eth into approving malicious contracts, then drained WETH, USDC, and USDT.

$220M in recovered ETH is becoming a permanent Ethereum security fund.

Ten years after the original DAO hack, developers are staking 75,000 unclaimed ETH to fund security research.

Swapin's Take
tldir; this week in review

Regulators tightened the rules with a bank-style ID proposal for stablecoin issuers, while the IMF warned that dollar stablecoins are straining Nigeria's monetary system.

On the infrastructure side, money kept flowing to the plumbing: Ripple into African rails, $32M into Trace Finance's bank-to-stablecoin bridge, and a bank-issued enterprise stablecoin crossing $500M.

And on security, Microsoft exposed clipboard malware that swaps wallet addresses, plus a bridge that bled funds for a week before anyone noticed.

Weekly Crypto & Blockchain Update: June 1 - 7, 2026

Market snapshot Bitcoin: $62,960 | Ethereum: $1,665 | Total stablecoin market cap: ~$316B | USDT dominance at 59.03%

Regulatory developments
The UK's House of Lords told the Bank of England its proposed stablecoin limits are too conservative.

The Bank of England had proposed capping individual holdings at £20,000 per coin and requiring issuers to hold 40% of backing in non-interest-bearing central bank deposits. The House of Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee called both rules premature, arguing that holding limits should only kick in if financial stability risks actually materialize.

The BoE's own deputy governor had already signaled the proposals were "overly conservative" in May. For businesses operating in the UK, this points toward a lighter regulatory landing than initially feared.

The Clarity Act, the US crypto market structure bill, is running out of runway.

JPMorgan analysts flagged this week that the midterm election calendar is compressing the window to pass the bill. The Clarity Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee on May 14 but still needs 60 Senate votes, a House reconciliation, and presidential signature. The sticking point: whether stablecoins can pay passive yield to holders.

Banks want to prohibit it; crypto firms want flexibility. If yield restrictions land in the final bill, expect capital to shift toward tokenized Treasuries and money-market fund products.

The US House Ways and Means Committee moved this week toward crypto tax relief.

Seven draft bills under consideration include a "de minimis" exemption for small crypto transactions, which would remove the tax reporting requirement on everyday stablecoin purchases below a certain threshold.

If passed, this is the kind of change that makes stablecoin payments viable for small business use cases in the US market.

US regulators sanctioned four Iranian crypto exchanges this week.

OFAC blacklisted Nobitex and three other Iranian exchanges, citing links to terror financing. This is relevant context for any business operating cross-border payments through crypto: sanctions compliance has to be baked into your stablecoin infrastructure, not bolted on after.

Investments, partnerships, launches, & acquisitions
Mastercard is now settling card transactions in regulated stablecoins, 24/7, including weekends and holidays.

The network will support USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD, USDG, USDP, and SoFiUSD across Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, and XRPL. Banks and payment firms including Cross River, Lead Bank, and Nuvei are among the first participants.

This means stablecoin settlement is now inside one of the world's two dominant card networks not as a future feature, but as live infrastructure you can build on.

JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citi are building a shared tokenized deposit network to compete with stablecoins.

The system, operated by The Clearing House and expected to go live by mid-2027, will convert bank deposits into blockchain tokens that move around the clock. The explicit goal: stop deposit flight to stablecoin wallets if the Clarity Act passes and stablecoins become more attractive savings vehicles.

This is the traditional banking system acknowledging, publicly, that stablecoins are a competitive threat worth building against.

Coinbase backed Ethena and is bringing its yield products to 100 million users.

Coinbase Ventures bought ENA tokens on the open market, and Ethena's USDe yield product will roll out on Coinbase's platform and the Base network. Coinbase already serves as Ethena's primary custodian and perpetuals venue. The deal signals that yield-bearing stablecoin products are moving from DeFi-native audiences toward mainstream crypto exchange users.

Securitize, the firm running the back-end for BlackRock's tokenized fund, is going public on the NYSE.

The SEC approved its merger registration with Cantor Equity Partners II this week. Shareholder vote: June 29. The ticker will be "SECZ." Securitize handles tokenization, transfer-agent services, and trading infrastructure for BlackRock, Apollo, KKR, Hamilton Lane, and VanEck.

It's also building the NYSE's tokenized securities platform. The tokenized asset market has grown past $30 billion, with Citi projecting $5.5 trillion by 2030.

Crypto security
A four-year-old bug in Zcash's privacy pool could have allowed unlimited, undetectable counterfeit tokens.

Shielded Labs disclosed Thursday that a critical vulnerability in Zcash's Orchard privacy pool active since May 2022 could have let an attacker create counterfeit ZEC that was cryptographically invisible. The bug was found on May 29 by a security engineer using Anthropic's Opus 4.8 model and patched by June 1. ZEC dropped ~38% on the news.

The TrapDoor malware campaign is targeting developer environments across Solana, Sui, and Aptos.

A malicious package campaign is exfiltrating wallet keys, cloud credentials, and production access from developers. The attack vector is software supply chain: compromised dev packages that look legitimate.

A stablecoin on Apyx briefly depegged this week.

The STRC collateralized stablecoin dipped off its peg briefly on June 4. The protocol described this as an intentional design feature rather than a failure.

More industry/market updates
The tokenized asset market tripled in a year and crossed $30 billion.

BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, and Fidelity are all active in the space now. Citi projects the market will reach $5.5 trillion by 2030. If tokenized Treasuries and money-market funds become mainstream settlement assets, they'll sit in the same infrastructure conversation as USDC and USDT for businesses thinking about treasury management.

Bitcoin ETFs bled $4.4 billion across 13 consecutive sessions.

ETH, SOL, and XRP ETFs also posted outflows in the same period. The capital rotation into AI equities, particularly after Broadcom's chip guidance, pulled institutional money away from crypto. This is context for the price moves this week, not a structural story about crypto adoption.

Goldman Sachs partnered with Apex and Archax to launch a tokenized real estate fund.

Goldman's move into tokenized real estate follows its earlier tokenized bond work. The financial institutions are choosing which assets to start with.

Swapin's take
On June 3, Mastercard started settling card transactions in USDC, RLUSD, and PYUSD across Ethereum, Solana, and XRPL. Cross River and Nuvei are already live on it.

The practical difference for a business is that your money stops sitting in a batch queue waiting for banks in a different timezone to open.

JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citi announced a shared tokenized deposit network the same week, explicitly to stop deposit flight to stablecoins. When the biggest card network and the three biggest US banks are both building around stablecoin settlement in the same week, the infrastructure question is answered.