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Grayscale’s Pandl Says Strategy’s $3B Bitcoin Sale Could Restore Confidence

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Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale, said he hopes Strategy will sell at least $3 billion in Bitcoin to cover most of the company’s cash obligations for the next two years.

In a Saturday X post, Pandl argued that the move may restore market confidence in the company’s capital structure.

Contrary to his hopes, Pandl said he expects a 50-basis-point increase to the dividend rate on Strategy’s preferred stock, STRC, adding roughly $100 million in annual obligations over two years. Pandl added that this scenario “probably does not help market confidence.”

Strategy faces an annual preferred dividend obligation of approximately $1.2 billion, driven primarily by STRC.

STRC is Strategy’s flagship “digital credit” preferred stock designed to trade near its $100 par value, but has been sliding for weeks. On Friday, it fell to as low as $71.25, a 28.75% discount to par. Strategy’s common stock MSTR fared little better and closed Friday at $82.31, down 26.86% throughout the trading week.

Pandl said he expects Strategy to raise STRC’s dividend rate but hopes the company sells Bitcoin instead. Source: Zach Pandl

Strategy’s cash reserve under pressure

Strategy is the world’s largest publicly-listed corporate Bitcoin holder, placing its 847,363 BTC stash and financing decisions under the industry’s microscope. 

According to Strategy’s latest 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, it acquired 520 Bitcoin for $34.9 million between June 15 and June 21.

Blockchain analytics company CryptoQuant argued in a Tuesday report that Strategy should pause Bitcoin purchases and focus on replenishing its cash reserve, which is down 38% in 2026.

Related: Bitcoin doesn’t need Ethereum-style yield, says Strategy’s Michael Saylor

The 8-K filing also revealed that Strategy increased its US dollar reserve by $300 million to $1.4 billion. This leaves the company with roughly 14 months of dividend coverage, down sharply from what was once a seven-year cushion.

Strategy said on Monday that it plans to continue replenishing its cash reserves to support the credit quality of its “digital credit” securities.

Alternatives to a Bitcoin sale

CryptoQuant added that the company has no obligation to sell Bitcoin to support STRC’s price, because it can deploy other methods to defend its stock, such as raising the current 11.5% dividend yield.

Bitcoin advocate Samson Mow argued in a Monday X post that STRC has a built-in “self-repairing mechanism.” Once the stock falls below its $100 reference price, Strategy halts new ATM issuance, cutting off the supply of fresh shares.

At the same time, a lower price mechanically boosts the yield for new buyers relative to what they paid, which Mow said should draw in fresh demand and pull the price back toward par over time.

Source: Samson Mow

Magazine: AI is banking the unbanked in Africa… faster than crypto

Bitcoin UTXO Signal Points to Bear Market Bottom

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Analysis of Bitcoin unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) shows that investors are capitulating, a pattern that has historically coincided with bear market bottoms. 

The ratio of the number of UTXOs spent in profit versus at a loss has fallen to its lowest level this bear market cycle, said CryptoQuant analyst known as Darkfost on Saturday. 

This is the first time this signal has triggered since the start of the correction, “demonstrating that the number of UTXOs spent at a loss is reaching significant levels, reflecting the start of a broader capitulation,” he said. 

The metric shows that markets are entering a bottoming phase, which could be a strategic time to accumulate. The last time it fell this low was in the depths of the previous bear market in mid-2023, when BTC prices fell to around $26,000. 

“These periods have always been profitable for long-term investors,” continued Darkfost. “They correspond to the moment when the majority gives up and loses interest.”

He cautioned that it is a process that takes time, and we are on a long timeframe. 

Bitcoin UTXO profit loss ratio at bear market low. Source: CryptoQuant

“The bottom signal I’ve been waiting for just fired,” said analyst DurdenBTC on Saturday, also commenting on the UTXO ratio. “It’s caught every cycle low since 2016, and it will still feel terrible for weeks,” he added. “If buying here were comfortable, the signal wouldn’t exist.”

Related: Bitcoin faces fresh capitulation risk as 50K BTC moved at a loss

In a separate post, Darkfost confirmed the findings, stating that long-term holders are starting to “enter a capitulation phase,” observing that the Spent Output Profit Ratio (SOPR) is increasingly moving into negative territory for this cohort. 

However, he also said that this correction has been largely fueled by the rapid increase in BTC inflows to exchanges coming from short-term holders.

Meanwhile, onchain analytics firm Swissblock said on Saturday that Bitcoin has likely moved beyond the initial breakdown, but “we’re still in the base formation phase.”

“Price is stabilizing, yet momentum remains deeply negative, and Bitcoin impulse has only just returned to neutral.”

Selling pressure may increase 

Uncertainty and selling pressure may increase following resumed strikes by the US military on Iranian targets over the weekend. 

US fighter jets conducted strikes on 10 Iranian military targets at multiple locations in and near the Strait of Hormuz late on Saturday in response to an Iranian drone attack on a commercial ship, reported Central Command. 

BTC prices dipped to $59,800 in early trading on Sunday morning, but had recovered the $60,100 level at the time of writing. 

Magazine: AI is banking the unbanked in Africa… faster than crypto

Tokenized Asset Value Stalls Even as Stock Token Holders Surge

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Distributed tokenized real-world asset value slipped about 1.4% over the past month to roughly $31.5 billion, the first monthly decline of its institutional-led run, even as the number of holders climbed 14%, led by tokenized stocks, according to data from rwa.xyz.

Growth in the value of tokenized real-world assets has stalled.

The total value of distributed real-world assets (RWAs), meaning tokenized assets that can be freely transferred between wallets, slipped about 1.4% over the past 30 days to roughly $31.5 billion, according to data from rwa.xyz, the leading tracker of tokenized assets. It is the first monthly contraction after more than a year of steady gains.

U.S. Treasury debt, the largest category, accounts for about $14.8 billion, or nearly half of the distributed total. The recent decline was led by the more price-sensitive corners of the market: the value of tokenized commodities fell about 9% over the past week, and tokenized stocks dropped about 8% over the same period.

The flattening marks a sharp break from the sector’s pace through 2025, when monthly growth ran in the double digits. The market rose 12% in the 30 days before it crossed $20 billion in April 2025, and 9% in the month before it surpassed $30 billion under its prior accounting in September. Tokenization has been one of the few crypto sectors to set repeated records through 2025, drawing in firms such as BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and JPMorgan. A stall, even a shallow one, signals that the institutional-led run is cooling on a dollar basis.

RWA Distributed Assets. Source: RWA.xyz

Holders Keep Climbing

Participation in the market is still rising, even as its dollar value flattens.

The number of unique asset holders rose about 14% over the past 30 days to 943,236, according to rwa.xyz. The growth came almost entirely from one category: tokenized stocks.

The number of holders of tokenized stocks jumped 36% over the month to 389,972, an increase of roughly 104,000. Across all categories, holders grew by about 114,000 over the same period, meaning stocks drove the bulk of the network-wide increase. Monthly active addresses in the stocks category climbed 37% to 196,495, and monthly transfer volume in the category more than doubled to about $8.1 billion.

The surge in users came even as the dollar value of tokenized stocks fell about 10% over the month to $1.49 billion. The split points to a market where new participants are arriving faster than capital, a pattern more typical of retail adoption than of the institutional Treasury and credit flows that built the sector.

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RWA Asset Holders. Source: RWA.xyz

Retail Equities Pull in New Users

The divergence reflects the kind of products driving stock tokenization. Tokenized equities are largely retail-facing and synthetic, issued by firms including Backed Finance and Ondo Finance and offered through platforms such as Robinhood and Swarm. Those products bring in large numbers of small holders, which lifts holder and address counts faster than total value.

The drop in the category’s dollar value, by contrast, can reflect price moves in the underlying assets rather than investors exiting, since a tokenized stock’s value tracks the equity it represents.

Distributed Vs. Represented Assets

Comparisons across the sector’s history are complicated by a methodology change. rwa.xyz revised its framework in 2025, splitting the market into “distributed” assets, which circulate between wallets, and “represented” assets, which are recorded on a blockchain but locked on a single platform.

The represented market is far larger, at about $359 billion, and it slipped about 1.4% over the same 30 days.

The question for the sector is whether the new holders arriving through tokenized stocks translate into renewed value growth, or whether the dollar stall persists while participation broadens.

Market makers Keyrock and Securitize project the distributed market could reach $400 billion by 2030, contingent on regulation, liquidity and distribution maturing together. Near-term catalysts include the interest-rate path, which sets the yield on tokenized Treasuries, and whether more exchanges and custodians add RWA tokens to their accepted collateral.

Grant Cardone will keep buying bitcoin using real estate cash flows

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Grant Cardone, CEO of Cardone Capital, used this week’s crypto slide to restate the case for his bitcoin-and-property model, saying the structure is designed to keep buying as prices fall.

“We work to improve the cash flow of the real estate and buy more bitcoin as it falls,” Cardone said in a post on X.

Cardone Capital, which has about $5.3 billion under management, uses the income generated from its real estate assets to buy bitcoin at regular intervals regardless of its price, smoothing out the expenditure in a process known as dollar-cost averaging. The largest cryptocurrency has lost 4.7% this week.

Cardone said the model was “inspired by treasury companies but with real assets and real cash flow,” and called his firm the largest real estate-bitcoin hybrid in the world, with no institutional investors shaping its strategy.

His comment draws a distinction with the corporate bitcoin treasury model popularized by Strategy (MSTR), in which companies raise money by issuing stock or debt to buy bitcoin.

That approach has come under pressure this week, with Strategy’s stock trading below the value of the bitcoin it holds and analysts at CryptoQuant arguing the firm has overextended itself.

Japanese giant SBI Holdings to buy Bitbank for $289 million

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Japanese financial services giant SBI Holdings said it agreed to buy cryptocurrency exchange Bitbank for around $289 million.

The Tokyo-based bank first floated the idea at the start of last month, framing it as part of a broader strategy to expand its crypto business ahead of potential regulatory developments in Japan. It bought crypto exchange Bitpoint in 2022.

Japan is in the process of bringing cryptocurrencies under the umbrella of financial products as authorized by the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, which applies to stocks and other securities. This could take effect from early next fiscal year.

Bitbank is among Japan’s top 10 largest crypto exchanges by trading activity, according to CoinGecko, processing 24-hour volume of just under $50 million. Competitors such as Toobit, CoinW, Kraken and Bitmart all process in excess of $1 billion.

SBI said the acquisition, which is subject to regulatory approval, is set to close in October in a statement on Thursday.

Binance founder CZ blames crypto’s sour 2026 on mix of AI, global tension, 4-year cycle

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CZ acknowledged that there is a gambling component to prediction markets, but he said that is also true in other financial markets.

“With any financial instrument, there’s always some speculators,” he said. “The speculators actually provide the liquidity, so it’s good that you have that speculation.”

Policy futures

The U.S.’s potential signature crypto policy legislation — the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (known as the Clarity Act) — may become a law by the end of the year if lawmakers can work out some remaining issues, including an ethics provision for government officials, chiefly the president.

But he said the Clarity Act and other individual bills are “sort of small, tactical things, which are really important, but those are not gonna impact the growth of crypto longer-term.”

Even if the Clarity Act does not become law this year, CZ said he expected the U.S. would continue to take a leading role in crypto regulation, adding that other countries were continuing to introduce their own regulations governing digital assets.

The U.S. would likely still compete with other countries to introduce rules, and it already has the stablecoin-focused Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, he said.

“I, of course, hope to see it get passed, and then every other country will probably copy it to some extent,” he said. “If it gets delayed … other countries may move forward first.”

Coinbase and OKX try to lure in Binance’s users after it failed to secure a MiCA license

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“If you’re looking for a regulated platform built for the long term, we’re excited to welcome you to OKX,” he said. “To celebrate this new chapter, we’re offering one of our biggest welcome campaigns for eligible EEA users, including welcome bonuses and deposit matching of up to 8%.”

Binance emailed its users notifying them the exchange was no longer able to accept new registrations and would restrict services, a spokesperson for the Abu Dhabi-based company told CoinDesk. “Your assets remain safe and secure, and will remain accessible at all times,” the email said.

On Thursday, the company said it withdrew its license application in Greece and would seek authorization in another EU country.

However, in a statement to CoinDesk, Binance said its “ambitions in Europe remain the same, and we are confident we will secure a MiCA licence in the coming months.”

The emails to clients in France, Italy, Poland and Spain come days before a June 30 deadline. Crypto firms must have a MiCA license from at least one EU member state by July 1 to provide services across all 27 member states. Unlicensed firms must wind down their EU activities.

AMLBot Puts Polymarket Phishing Toll at $3.1M Across 11 Wallets, Funds Traced to Ethereum

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Blockchain intelligence firm AMLBot has confirmed the Polymarket supply-chain attack total at approximately $3.1 million in PUSD across 11 user wallets, with funds bridged from Polygon to Ethereum and converted to ETH. Polymarket has pledged full refunds but has not named the compromised vendor.

Blockchain intelligence firm AMLBot has fixed the total stolen in Thursday’s Polymarket supply-chain attack at approximately $3.1 million in PUSD, providing the first forensically confirmed on-chain dollar figure and tracing the stolen assets from Polygon to Ethereum. On-chain investigator Specter, which published the first public alert, identified more than 11 victim wallets.

AMLBot posted the revised tally on Saturday, two days after on-chain investigators first flagged the drain. The figure revises earlier estimates upward and, for the first time, pins both the dollar amount to a single on-chain intelligence source. AMLBot said it continues to monitor affected accounts as the investigation proceeds.

From Front-End to Bridge

The attack, covered by The Defiant on Thursday, began when a compromised third-party vendor injected malicious JavaScript into Polymarket’s website. The code targeted user transactions at the front-end layer; Polymarket’s smart contracts on Polygon were untouched. Polymarket confirmed fewer than 15 accounts were affected, consistent with scope described by on-chain security researchers tracking the wallets in real time.

On-chain investigator Specter published the first public alert and identified the attacker’s primary consolidation address on Ethereum: `0xe65b1C586757c5510B60F998Eebb14C1eF71E1eD`. PeckShield confirmed the stolen funds were bridged from Polygon to Ethereum and then swapped into roughly 1,893 ETH. Bubblemaps independently counted fewer than 15 affected accounts and estimated $3 million in losses being refunded.

PUSD is Polymarket’s native collateral token, a Polygon-based ERC-20 minted 1:1 against USDC.e through the platform’s on-chain collateral contracts. Deployed in April 2026 per on-chain records, PUSD operates exclusively within the platform and carries no external exchange listing, so the attacker had to convert it to ETH to exit. The token held its $1.00 peg throughout the incident, per PolygonScan data for the pUSD contract on Polygon.

Refund Commitment, Vendor Still Unnamed

Polymarket posted on X Thursday morning saying it had contained the attack, removed the malicious dependency, and would refund impacted users in full. William LeGate confirmed the repayment would be total, adding in a second post that there were “no user ‘losses.'” The platform has not publicly named the compromised vendor across any channel since the incident was disclosed.

Initial independent estimates put the theft at $2.94 million, based on on-chain wallet tallies by Specter Analyst, while PeckShield and other firms rounded to roughly $3 million. AMLBot’s Saturday update lifts the confirmed total by approximately $160,000 from Specter’s initial read.

TechCrunch reported that a Polymarket spokesperson confirmed the breach but declined to provide further detail. Security researchers at CyberInsider and BleepingComputer both classified the incident as a supply-chain attack, the type where a downstream dependency injects hostile code into a trusted application, rather than a direct protocol exploit.

Platform Context

The platform currently holds $432 million in total value locked on Polygon, per DefiLlama. Security trackers cataloguing Q2 2026 DeFi incidents have counted the June 25 Polymarket attack among a sustained wave of supply-chain and front-end compromises targeting DeFi infrastructure in 2026.

Polymarket has committed to refunding affected users in full but has set no public timeline for completion and has not disclosed the identity of the third-party vendor whose compromise triggered the attack.

Polymarket hack updated to $3.1 million days after the platform promised users full refunds

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On Thursday as well, Specter Analyst, another blockchain intelligence platform, said on Thursday that “It appears there may be a phishing attack targeting Polymarket users, with estimated losses of $2.94M so far.”

One of the victims of the hack, Ash, on X wrote that his wallet had been hacked and had no idea why at the time. Ash also shared his and the attacker’s wallet addresses.

Polymarket has suffered other security breaches recently. In March, blockchain investigator ZachXBT highlighted a suspected security breach. He said over $520,000 was reportedly drained from two smart contracts on the Polygon blockchain. Polymarket then said the funds were safe.

In December, the platform confirmed a security incident on its Discord channel after users reported missing funds and suspicious login attempts. It blamed an unidentified third-party login provider for those account breaches.

The news of the phishing attack follows reports that Polymarket is under federal investigation following a Wall Street Journal article into the prediction markets platform deceptive social media promotion of users boasting winnings.