Author: James Wilson

Circle President Heath Tarbert has defended the company’s long-term strategy after Circle shares fell sharply from their post-IPO peak. Summary Circle says USDC’s scale and network effects remain difficult for new stablecoin competitors to replicate. Open USD adds pressure as Circle shares trade far below their post-IPO peak near $260. Circle keeps expanding regulated infrastructure while investors question competition, margins, and future stablecoin revenue sharing. Speaking in a July 14 interview with FOX Business, Tarbert said management remains focused on building financial infrastructure rather than reacting to short-term moves in the stock. The interview came as Circle faced growing investor…

Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox has explained how the network’s July 28 Ironwood hard fork will address uncertainty around a critical flaw in the Orchard shielded pool. Summary Zcash will seal the old Orchard pool, limiting how much ZEC can leave after Ironwood. Ironwood cannot identify fake coins individually but can stop excess hidden supply from escaping Orchard. Temporary exchange and wallet disruptions may occur as providers prepare for Zcash’s July 28 upgrade. The upgrade will not identify or freeze individual counterfeit coins. Instead, it will seal the old pool and limit how much ZEC can leave. In a July 19…

Uniswap governance is preparing to vote on two proposals that could expand the protocol’s UNI burn by adding new fee sources from Uniswap v4 and Robinhood Chain. Summary Uniswap voters will decide whether v4 and Robinhood Chain fees should expand the UNI burn. Robinhood Chain crossed $6 billion in cumulative Uniswap swap volume within ten days of launch. New protocol fees would flow into TokenJar contracts before UNI is burned on Ethereum mainnet. The measures are scheduled for onchain voting from July 19 through July 26.The proposals follow the UNIfication overhaul approved in December 2025, which connected protocol fees to…

U.S. financial regulators have missed the GENIUS Act’s one-year deadline to complete key rules for the country’s federal stablecoin framework.  Summary US regulators missed the GENIUS Act deadline with several major stablecoin rule packages still unfinished. Stablecoin issuers face a shorter preparation window before the federal framework takes effect next January. Customer identification and anti-money laundering proposals remain open, preventing regulators from completing final rules yet. Several regulations remained at the proposal stage when the July 18, 2026, deadline passed.President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law on July 18, 2025. The law required primary federal stablecoin regulators to…

FTX will begin its fifth creditor distribution on July 31, sending nearly $900 million to eligible claimants under its court-approved recovery plan. Summary FTX will distribute nearly $900 million to eligible creditors beginning July 31 through approved providers. The fifth payout round pushes total creditor distributions to about $10 billion since FTX collapsed. Bankman-Fried faces growing political resistance to clemency after losing his appeal against the fraud conviction. The payment will cover creditors in the Convenience and Non-Convenience Classes who completed required steps before the June 16 record date. A repayment update shared by creditor advocate Sunil Kavuri said eligible…

Consensys has temporarily halted product releases after a North Korea-linked consultant gained access to its systems for about one month. Summary Consensys halted product releases after a North Korea-linked consultant accessed its systems for one month. An internal investigation found no stolen assets, exposed data, malicious code, or user harm. Consensys will review contractor screening as North Korean operatives increasingly target crypto firms. Drop Site News reported that the developer joined the Ethereum software company under the alias “Tyler Knapp” and used the GitHub handle “imyugioh.” Public GitHub records reviewed by the outlet showed that the consultant began contributing code…

Senator Elizabeth Warren has demanded that President Donald Trump disclose his 2026 crypto earnings after a federal filing showed $1.4 billion in income from digital asset ventures during 2025. Summary Elizabeth Warren wants Trump to disclose his 2026 crypto earnings by July 23. Trump reported $1.4 billion in crypto-related income from ventures including World Liberty Financial. Democratic demands for ethics rules could complicate the CLARITY Act’s Senate vote. Warren, in a Thursday letter, asked Trump to release details covering his cryptocurrency earnings between Jan. 1 and July 15. She gave the president until July 23 to provide the information voluntarily…

The network that moves the world’s money spent 9 months building a blockchain, and the most important decision it made was what not to put on it. No stablecoins. No public tokens. Just bank deposits, wearing a new coat. Summary On July 9, SWIFT launched a blockchain-based shared ledger with 17 major banks, including Citi, HSBC, UBS, and BNP Paribas, for round-the-clock cross-border payments using tokenized deposits. The ledger is built on Hyperledger Besu, an EVM-compatible architecture, developed with Consensys in 9 months, and it is positioned openly as the banking industry’s answer to a $315 billion stablecoin sector. The…

There is $1.6 trillion in Bitcoin sitting idle, earning nothing, doing nothing. Charles Hoskinson has a plan to put it to work on Cardano, and the plan quietly requires every transaction to burn a little ADA. Whether that saves Cardano or exposes its central problem is the whole question. Summary Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has laid out a strategy to bring Bitcoin into Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem through a platform called Pogun, targeting the roughly $1.6 trillion in idle Bitcoin. Pogun rolls out in three phases across 2026: a non-margin credit market in the second quarter, a yield application in the…

Ethereum’s best marketing line was that using it destroyed it, that every transaction burned ETH and shrank the supply. Then the network solved its scaling problem, activity fled to layer 2s, and the burn collapsed. The scaling worked. The scarcity did not survive it. Summary Ethereum’s “ultrasound money” thesis held that EIP-1559 fee burning would outpace new issuance, making ETH deflationary and a superior store of value to Bitcoin. It worked briefly after the 2022 Merge. Then the March 2024 Dencun upgrade moved activity to layer-2 rollups paying near-zero fees, and the daily burn collapsed from thousands of ETH to…