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Stablecoins and Public Ledgers Flawed, Report Says

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Stablecoins and Public Ledgers Flawed, Report Says

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) warned that the rapid expansion of stablecoins risks fragmenting the global monetary system and weakening sovereign monetary control, urging central banks and the financial industry to accelerate the development of tokenized forms of central bank and commercial bank money as a safer alternative.

In its Annual Economic Report published Sunday, the Basel-based institution delivered a sharp assessment of the approximately $316 billion stablecoin market, arguing that tokens pegged to fiat currencies lack the institutional features required to serve as safe, reliable money at scale.

BIS pointed to structural vulnerabilities in reserve asset management and warned that a significant migration from commercial bank deposits into private digital tokens could reduce bank funding and constrain credit to the real economy.

The report also provides a signal to policymakers that the current regulatory approach to stablecoins may prove insufficient if private digital currencies continue expanding. Rather than positioning stablecoins as a durable foundation for the future monetary system, BIS said that tokenized commercial bank deposits, combined with tokenized central bank money operating on regulated infrastructures, offer a more robust path toward modernizing payments while preserving monetary stability.

Demand for foreign stablecoins connects FX markets with crypto ecosystem. Source: BIS Annual Economic Report 2026.

The report focuses particular attention on “stablecoin dollarization,” that is, the growing use of dollar-denominated stablecoins in economies with weaker domestic currencies. According to BIS, this trend could weaken monetary sovereignty, erode the effectiveness of domestic monetary policy, reduce bank intermediation and increase exposure to volatile cross-border capital flows, particularly in emerging market economies.

Related: BIS Project Agorá shows tokenized payments can settle in seconds

BIS raises fresh concerns about public blockchains’ limits

The report also delivers one of BIS’s strongest critiques yet of public permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum as a foundation for the monetary system. It argues that decentralized networks relying on distributed validation and lacking a central governance structure struggle to meet the requirements for scalability, legal accountability and settlement finality expected of systemically important financial infrastructure.

BIS raises concerns on rising fragmentation across layer 1 and layer 2 networks.
Source: BIS Annual Economic Report 2026.

At the center of BIS’s critique is the economics of decentralized consensus. The report argues that public permissionless blockchains compensate validators through transaction fees that rise as network activity increases, making congestion, longer confirmation times and higher costs structural features of the system rather than temporary technical shortcomings. According to BIS, these characteristics undermine the efficiency and network effects that are essential for a unified monetary system.

The Basel-based institution further argues that permissionless blockchains lack the clear governance and accountability frameworks required for institutional finance. Without an identifiable entity responsible for maintaining the integrity of the system, resolving disputes or ensuring compliance with financial integrity standards, BIS contends that such networks face significant obstacles to supporting large-scale regulated financial activity.

Rather than rejecting tokenization itself, BIS advocates a “unified ledger” architecture that combines tokenized central bank money, tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized financial assets on programmable platforms operating within regulated legal and institutional frameworks.

By preserving the benefits of tokenization, including programmable transactions and faster settlement, while maintaining the institutional foundations of the existing monetary system, BIS said that financial markets can improve efficiency without sacrificing monetary stability, financial integrity or public trust.

Related: Why stablecoins and SWIFT may have to coexist

Tokenization is becoming the financing layer for AI and robotics, Framework bets with $400 million fund

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Tokenization is becoming the financing layer for AI and robotics, Framework bets with $400 million fund

Traditional securitization markets struggle to package individual servers or computing equipment into investable products, Anderson said. Stablecoins — with more than $300 billion circulating onchain — create a new source of capital for asset-backed lending.

“We have the capital onchain to finance this industry,” he said.

The same thinking extends to energy. Framework has invested in Daylight, which finances residential solar projects through a distributed energy network, and Uranium Digital, which is building a tokenized marketplace for physical uranium.

A different generation

There’s also a notable shift in the profile of founders building today’s crypto companies, Anderson said.

Rather than anonymous crypto-native developers launching speculative protocols, Anderson said, many founders now come from traditional finance, energy or industrial technology, bringing deep expertise while using blockchain as the underlying financial infrastructure to solve real-world problems.

Framework’s recent investments already reflect that trend. They include TVL Capital, founded by former members of Morgan Stanley’s digital assets team; robotics startup Mecka AI, which supplies training data to frontier AI companies; and Plasma, a blockchain-based banking platform built around stablecoin payments.

The venture firm’s strategy mirrors a broader shift across the digital asset industry. Global banks and asset managers are increasingly using blockchain rails to issue, trade and settle traditional financial assets, while stablecoins are becoming part of cross-border payments and treasury operations as banks and fintechs look to modernize payment rails.

Why SBI paid $289 million for an unprofitable crypto exchange: Architect Partners

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Why SBI paid $289 million for an unprofitable crypto exchange: Architect Partners

SBI Holdings is a financial services group with businesses spanning securities, banking, insurance, asset management and venture investing with a market capitalization of about $11 billion. The Tokyo-based company is one of Japan’s most active traditional-finance participants in digital assets, with stakes and partnerships across crypto trading, liquidity, tokenization, stablecoins and blockchain-based settlement.

Bitbank is one of the country’s largest licensed cryptocurrency exchanges, offering spot trading, custody and other digital-asset services to retail and institutional clients.

Cheaper, quicker to buy

Crypto mergers and acquisitions have remained brisk in 2026 as banks, payments firms and exchanges race to build regulated digital asset businesses rather than develop them in-house.

The industry has recorded 144 deals worth $11.8 billion so far this year, according to data from Architect Partners, with buyers increasingly targeting exchanges, custody providers, data firms and stablecoin infrastructure as regulatory clarity draws more institutional capital into the sector.

According to Payne, the Bitbank acquisition is about more than customer growth. The deal brings a Financial Services Agency-licensed exchange, one of Japan’s deepest altcoin liquidity pools and an institutional custody business, Japan Digital Asset Trust, giving SBI capabilities that would be far more costly and time-consuming to build internally.

The acquisition comes at a pivotal moment for Japan’s crypto industry. Legislation passed by the country’s lower house on June 11 would shift crypto assets under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, aligning them with securities regulation. The reforms lower the tax rate on crypto gains to a flat 20% and pave the way for spot bitcoin BTC$59,605.53, ether (ETH) and XRP exchange-traded funds, while simultaneously imposing more stringent capital, custody and disclosure requirements on exchanges.

Securitize Goes Public on NYSE July 2 With $400M From SPAC Merger

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Securitize Goes Public on NYSE July 2 With $400M From SPAC Merger

Securitize, the tokenization platform behind BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, is set to begin trading on the NYSE on July 2 under the ticker SECZ after a SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners II that raised over $400 million, including an oversubscribed $225M PIPE.

Securitize, the tokenization platform behind BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on July 2 under the ticker SECZ after a SPAC merger that closed with more than $400 million in cash.

Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo confirmed the terms Friday morning on his personal X account. The deal ran through Cantor Equity Partners II, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald. Domingo said the company raised an oversubscribed $225 million private investment in public equity (PIPE), the largest PIPE for any operating business entering via a SPAC since 2021. Final redemptions came in below 30%, leaving the merged company with over $400 million in cash at listing. The Block reported Thursday morning that Securitize was set to raise approximately $400 million through the merger.

CEO’s Own Words

Domingo wrote that advisers had discouraged the SPAC route: “Don’t do it, you won’t raise a PIPE, and SPACs get on average 95% redemptions, and you will IPO with no cash.” The oversubscribed PIPE and the sub-30% redemption rate produced the opposite result. Domingo’s post calls July 2 “the next stage in Securitize history.”

RWA Platform Context

Securitize operates as a FINRA-approved broker-dealer with custody approval for tokenized securities and is the issuance platform for BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, one of the largest tokenized money-market products on-chain. The company added secondary trading rails for tokenized equities earlier this year, tapping Jump Crypto and Jupiter for regulated on-chain execution. In June the firm issued the Hamilton Lane HLSCOPE private-credit fund on TRON as its first multi-chain institutional product beyond Ethereum.

Securitize Holdings filed an S-4 registration statement with the SEC in January 2026, amended through May 2026, listing the company under CIK 0002094496. NYSE Disclosure and financial terms beyond those disclosed by Domingo on Friday morning remain subject to the closing 8-K filing, which had not appeared on EDGAR at time of publication.

The NYSE listing places Securitize alongside a growing cohort of tokenization infrastructure firms pursuing public equity vehicles in 2026. NYSE parent ICE formed a 50-50 joint venture with OKX in June to tokenize NYSE equities on-chain.

Samson Mow says bitcoin bottom is in, but analysts remain divided

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Samson Mow says bitcoin bottom is in, but analysts remain divided

Mow is not the first to argue that bitcoin’s traditional four-year cycle has changed. After bitcoin climbed to a then-all-time high before the April 2024 halving, several analysts suggested growing institutional demand following the launch of U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs could alter the pattern that has historically followed each halving. Others, however, argued it was too early to conclude the cycle had changed.

$55,000 more likely

Not everyone agrees. Several analysts have recently argued that bitcoin is either close to a market bottom or still has further to fall, although they rely on different indicators and models.

CoinDesk market analyst Omkar Godbole recently wrote that if you were “wondering just how much lower bitcoin is likely to drop, the answer, at least according to one historically accurate contrarian indicator, is not much.”

That indicator is based on bitcoin’s 50-week and 100-week simple moving averages. The 50-week average, representing roughly one year, is very close to dropping below the 100-week line, forming what analysts call a “bear cross.” Historically, similar signals coincided with market bottoms, leading some analysts to see the pattern as bullish.

More recently, Markus Thielen, the founder of 10x Research, said he believes the bottom is more likely at $55,000 and not until somewhere between August and October. Arthur Hayes, the BitMex co-founder, took a more bearish position, saying bitcoin would bottom at around $40,000 within the next six months.

Bipartisan Senators Ask CFTC Chair Whether Agency Is Investigating Polymarket’s Fake-Bet Campaign

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Bipartisan Senators Ask CFTC Chair Whether Agency Is Investigating Polymarket’s Fake-Bet Campaign

Senators Adam Schiff and John Curtis sent a letter to CFTC Chair Michael Selig Thursday asking whether the agency is investigating Polymarket’s paid influencer scheme, putting the regulator in a bind over a platform it licenses but whose staged trades ran on an offshore site beyond its direct reach.

— title: Bipartisan Senators Ask CFTC Chair Whether Agency Is Investigating Polymarket’s Fake-Bet Campaign excerpt: Senators Adam Schiff and John Curtis sent a letter to CFTC Chair Michael Selig Thursday asking whether the agency is investigating Polymarket’s paid influencer scheme, putting the regulator in a bind over a platform it licenses but whose staged trades ran on an offshore site beyond its direct reach. —

Two senators spanning the political divide pressed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission this week to answer whether it is investigating Polymarket over a staged-trading campaign that, according to the Wall Street Journal investigation, generated more than 140 million views across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

In a letter dated Thursday to CFTC Chair Michael Selig, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) cited the Journal investigation, which found Polymarket paid creators monthly fees to film trades on dummy sites built to mimic its real platform. None of the roughly $1.9 million in apparent winnings shown across more than 1,100 videos was real, CBS News reported. The Journal also reported that creators were instructed not to disclose the paid relationship, a direct breach of Federal Trade Commission influencer-disclosure rules. TechCrunch separately reported that a marketing contractor helped amplify the videos.

The senators set a deadline in the coming weeks for a written response. They asked Selig to confirm whether the CFTC is investigating, and if not, to explain why.

Jurisdictional Bind

The letter arrives at an awkward moment for the agency. Last January, the CFTC granted Polymarket an amended designation that allows it to onboard U.S. customers. But the staged trades the senators cited ran on Polymarket’s offshore platform, the one the CFTC does not directly oversee. That gap gives the regulator a narrow lane: it can examine whether the offshore campaign violated the terms of Polymarket’s U.S. registration, but any action against the foreign-platform conduct faces a harder evidentiary threshold.

Schiff and Curtis pressed Selig on exactly that question, asking whether the CFTC, given its claim to exclusive jurisdiction over prediction markets, has “the authority, resources, and expertise” to replicate the consumer-protection, licensing, and enforcement work that state and tribal gaming regulators currently perform. They also asked what advertising standards, age-verification rules, addiction warnings, and influencer-disclosure requirements the CFTC currently imposes on platforms like Polymarket.

Enforcement Headwinds

Fortune reported Monday that meaningful regulatory consequences are unlikely under the current administration. The CFTC has shed roughly a quarter of its staff over the past year and pushed out career officials who sought to investigate crypto and prediction-market companies, according to a New York Times investigation. Selig, the agency’s sole sitting commissioner, previously represented crypto and prediction-market companies as a corporate lawyer.

Legal experts cited by Fortune said the FTC, not the CFTC, may have the cleaner enforcement path, given that the staged videos were a straightforward advertising issue. Neither agency has made a public statement on whether it plans to act.

Polymarket has made no public statement beyond the audit commitment it issued in response to the Journal’s investigation. “We are conducting a comprehensive audit of active promotional content to ensure it complies with our standards, as well as applicable regulatory and legal disclosure requirements,” a Polymarket spokesperson told CBS News.

State-Preemption Warning

Schiff and Curtis also used the letter to push back on the CFTC’s ongoing campaign to assert federal supremacy over state gaming laws. The agency has sued nine states, including Kentucky, since earlier this year to block them from applying their own gaming regulations to Polymarket and competitor Kalshi.

The senators warned Selig against allowing companies to invoke CFTC oversight as a shield against state consumer-protection laws. That framing converts the Polymarket fake-bet story into a broader regulatory-architecture question: if the CFTC is the sole gatekeeper for a rapidly expanding prediction-market sector, it needs to show it can actually police conduct on the platforms it licenses.

Polymarket settled a previous CFTC action in 2022, paying a $1.4 million civil penalty for operating an unregistered options exchange and agreeing to stop serving U.S. customers. The January 2026 license marked its return to the U.S. market.

The senators’ deadline gives Selig a matter of weeks to respond before the Senate’s summer recess window begins to narrow.

Michael Saylor teases more bitcoin buying even as Strategy stock continues to fall

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Michael Saylor teases more bitcoin buying even as Strategy stock continues to fall

Michael Saylor shared a StrategyTracker chart on X this Sunday showing Strategy holds 847,363 bitcoin valued at $50.88 billion as of June 28, 2026, with 113 purchase events and an average cost basis of $75,653 per BTC.

That chart displays orange bubbles for MSTR’s buys overlaid on bitcoin price history, highlighting aggressive accumulation especially in 2024-2025 with the average purchase price line trending upward.

“We’re gonna need more charts” signals Saylor’s intent for continued bitcoin purchases, generating more data points as Strategy maintains its position as a leading corporate BTC holder.

Last week, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said he remains bullish on bitcoin but that Saylor’s approach to funding bitcoin purchases has damaged the wider cryptocurrency market, as the preferred stock at the center of Strategy’s model fell to a record low.

Strategy’s (MSTR) stock fell 8% lower Thursday to $86, amid concerns about its ability to meet dividend obligations. However, Saylor’s treasury still has 10 months of dollar reserves available to cover STRC’s dividend obligations. MSTR is currently priced at $82.31 following a further 3.54% drop. STRC hovers around $74.57 after a 1.48% increase on Sunday.

Canton Network Tops Blockchain Fee Rankings With $60M in 30 Days

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Canton Network Tops Blockchain Fee Rankings With $60M in 30 Days

Canton Network, the privacy-enabled institutional blockchain built by Digital Asset, generated $60.2 million in fees over the trailing 30 days, outpacing Tron’s $27.6 million and Ethereum’s $11.3 million by a wide margin, according to DefiLlama data.

Canton Network, the privacy-enabled institutional blockchain built by Digital Asset, generated $60.2 million in fees over the trailing 30 days, placing it ahead of Tron and far above Ethereum by that measure, according to DefiLlama data.

The DefiLlama fee-tracking dashboard logs Canton’s 30-day total at $60.2 million, compared with $27.6 million for Tron and $11.3 million for Ethereum over the same window. Digital Asset co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz noted the milestone on X earlier this month: “$CC today processes the highest fees of any institutional blockchain network.”

Trailing 30-day fees as of June 26, 2026: Canton $60.2M, Tron $27.6M, Ethereum $11.3M. Source: DefiLlama. Methodology: gas fees paid by users.

Fee Methodology

DefiLlama tracks Canton fees as gas paid by network participants, a methodology consistent with how it measures fees on Ethereum and Tron. Canton is a permissioned, privacy-preserving network used primarily by financial institutions for settlement and asset tokenization. Transaction volumes there trace to institutional workflows rather than retail DeFi activity, which shapes how the fee comparison reads.

Canton’s 30-day fee figure places it fourth overall on the DefiLlama leaderboard among all protocols, behind Tether, Circle’s USDC, and Hyperliquid’s perpetual exchange. Its all-time cumulative fees reached $488.9 million. The trailing 24-hour figure stood at $1.84 million at time of publication.

Institutional Backdrop

The numbers follow significant capital formation around Digital Asset. The company closed a $355 million funding round led by a16z crypto in June, with HSBC, Apollo, BNP Paribas, CME, Tradeweb and more than 20 other institutional names joining. Visa and stablecoin issuer Brale piloted stablecoin settlement on the network using SBC, a US dollar-backed stablecoin. South Korea’s Bithumb listed Canton Coin in its KRW market on June 23.

Canton is among the eight blockchains integrated into Mastercard’s card-settlement network, per earlier Defiant coverage. The Canton Foundation was also registered under the National Cooperative Research and Production Act on June 22.

Ethereum Gap

Ethereum’s fees have stayed compressed since the Dencun upgrade reduced Layer 2 settlement costs. Over the trailing 30-day window, Canton’s $60.2 million compares with Ethereum’s $11.3 million, a ratio of more than five to one. The contrast reflects how differently the two networks generate fee activity: Canton’s throughput comes from institutional settlement workflows with fixed participants, while Ethereum’s comes from a broader but currently less fee-intensive base of applications.

Canton has made no public statement on when or whether the fee ranking will be updated or reported as a recurring metric.

Base Suffers Second Chain Halt in 24 Hours, Complicating B20 Activation Window

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Base Suffers Second Chain Halt in 24 Hours, Complicating B20 Activation Window

Base stalled block production for a second time in less than 24 hours on Friday morning, describing the incident as showing ‘similar symptoms’ to Thursday’s roughly two-hour outage, with the event arriving less than three hours before the B20 Activation Registry was anticipated to go live.

Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase, halted block production for the second time in two days on Friday, arriving hours before a scheduled activation of its new B20 token standard on mainnet.

The second stall began at 15:33 UTC Friday when Base’s status page flagged block production as unhealthy. The team identified “similar symptoms” to Thursday’s outage within one minute and restored production by 15:47 UTC, a roughly 14-minute halt. Thursday’s incident ran for approximately two hours after an invalid block at position 47,806,542 choked the sequencer and interrupted withdrawals. The Defiant covered that first halt as it resolved Thursday evening.

Beryl and B20

Thursday’s outage had already forced a schedule shift for Base’s Beryl hardfork. Teams had pushed the upgrade window to allow the B20 Activation Registry to complete its initialization process, a sequence that can take up to 60 minutes after the hard fork activates.

The B20 standard, a Rust precompile embedded directly in Base’s node software, introduces native token management built for stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. It adds role-based minting controls, transfer restrictions, and freeze capabilities while maintaining full ERC-20 compatibility.

The registry at contract address stores feature flags that govern whether the B20 standard is live. Until the flags are flipped by a designated admin, any call to create a B20 token reverts with a “FeatureNotActivated” error. Beryl completed on Thursday at 20:00 UTC. A dev relations representative confirmed the B20 registry activation was scheduled for Friday at 18:00 UTC, placing that window roughly two hours after the second stall resolved.

Same Bug Returns

Friday’s status update explicitly described the halt as exhibiting “similar symptoms” to Thursday’s, indicating the root cause had not been fully remediated before the second event struck. After the Thursday stall, Base stated it had found the root cause and was “verifying a fix to ensure it cannot recur,” with a full postmortem promised. No postmortem had been published as of Friday afternoon, and the second incident remained in “monitoring” status as of 16:11 UTC.

Node operators were required to restart their Base Mainnet nodes to resume syncing after both incidents. Base’s 90-day block-production uptime stood at 98.72% as of Friday, per the status page. No public statement on the B20 registry activation timeline had been issued as of publication.

Bitcoin under $60,000 on track for a rare back-to-back quarterly loss

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Bitcoin under $60,000 on track for a rare back-to-back quarterly loss

Bitcoin dipped below $60,000 over the weekend, trading around $59,940 on Sunday, down 0.6% over 24 hours and nearly 7% on the week, per CoinDesk data, as a quarter of selling neared its final days.

The altcoins again led the way down. Ether fell 9.5% on the week to about $1,567, dogecoin dropped 11.7% to $0.073, Hyperliquid’s HYPE lost 10.6% and XRP slid 8.7% to $1.04. Solana held up better at $70, off 3.5%, and tron was the most resilient, down 1.5%.

The market has spent the week leaning on bitcoin’s relative steadiness while everything riskier fell faster.

The weekend marks the end of a weak first half, with just two days to go. Bitcoin is on track to finish the second quarter down about 12%, after a roughly 22% drop in the first, according to data from Coinglass. Ether has fared worse, down about 25% in the second quarter following a 29% first-quarter fall.

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