Former bitcoin miner Hut 8 (HUT) agreed to pay $2.35 million to settle a securities class action alleging it misled investors in connection with its 2023 merger with U.S. Bitcoin Corp. (USBTC).
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, focused on Hut 8’s all-stock merger with USBTC, which closed in November 2023.
Investors alleged the company, which now focuses on AI data centers and high-performance computing, overstated the transaction’s benefits while failing to disclose persistent energy curtailment and internet connectivity issues at King Mountain, a Texas bitcoin mining joint venture in which USBTC held a 50% interest.
The litigation gained momentum after short seller J Capital Research published a critical report in January 2024, prompting a slide of more than 23% in Hut 8’s share price.
According to a court filing, the $2.35 million recovery represents roughly 19.6% of the estimated maximum recoverable damages, exceeding the 12.9% median and 14.6% average recovery rates for Securities Act-only settlements in 2025.
As part of the agreement, Hut 8 denies any wrongdoing or liability. Hut 8 shares have gained more than 640% over the past year.
Luxembourg’s financial regulator granted Ripple preliminary approval for a crypto asset service provider (CASP) license under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), the company said Tuesday.
Ripple said in a statement that the approval, once finalized, would allow it to offer regulated crypto services to banks, fintechs and other businesses across all 30 countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) through a single regulatory passport.
The move builds on Ripple’s existing Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license in Luxembourg, which allows it to provide regulated cross-border payments and electronic money services across the EEA. The update comes just days before the July 1 transitional deadline, when EU countries begin fully applying MiCA rules.
Cointelegraph reached out to Luxembourg’s Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier but did not receive an immediate response.
Full crypto asset and stablecoin payments infrastructure compliant with MiCA
Ripple said its pending CASP license, combined with the EMI license issued in February 2026, would enable a “full crypto asset and stablecoins payments infrastructure” through a single integration for the first time.
The company added that the approval also positions Ripple to expand into broader crypto asset activities in Europe, which is “already a leading region” for its products.
Source: Cassie Craddock
“MiCA has helped to unlock a new wave of institutional digital assets adoption, and we are seeing that demand accelerate across the region,” said Cassie Craddock, managing director of the UK and Europe at Ripple.
Europe becomes the regulatory battleground
Ripple’s CASP approval comes as Europe emerges as a key regulatory test case for the crypto industry as the MiCA framework takes effect.
Related: EUR trading accounts for 1% of Binance spot volume, CryptoQuant says
Crypto companies are racing to secure MiCA authorization ahead of the July 1 deadline, but major exchanges, including Binance, are still awaiting approval under the new regime.
Media reports have indicated that Greek regulators may be preparing to deny Binance’s application.
Ripple currently holds more than 75 regulatory licenses globally, including a UK license from the Financial Conduct Authority received in January 2026.
Magazine: SBF will never get a pardon, Trump peace deal boosts Bitcoin: Hodlers Digest June 14-21
MoneyGram has launched an active validator node on Solana and joined its institutional developer platform, making Solana the payments giant’s third blockchain validator commitment alongside Tempo and Midnight. The move deepens a blockchain infrastructure push that began with Stellar remittances in 2021.
MoneyGram has launched an active validator node on the Solana network and joined Solana’s institutional developer platform, marking the payments company’s third blockchain infrastructure commitment and its first direct participation in Solana consensus.
The company announced the move via press release on June 22, describing its validator as staking SOL, processing transaction blocks, and contributing to network security. MoneyGram simultaneously joined the Solana Developer Platform, an AI-ready, API-driven institutional build environment designed for compliant financial product development whose members include Mastercard. Luke Tuttle, MoneyGram’s chief product and technology officer, framed the move in operational terms: “We help run the rails we move money on.” MoneyGram serves more than 60 million active customers through nearly 500,000 retail locations, with over 70% of transactions now digital.
Solana Third After Tempo, Midnight
Solana is now MoneyGram’s third active blockchain validator position. The company serves as anchor remittance validator for Tempo and holds a validator stake on Midnight, Cardano’s privacy-focused sidechain. The trio reflects a pattern of MoneyGram placing infrastructure bets alongside payment-focused partnerships rather than simply integrating third-party rails.
Sheraz Shere, general manager of payments and commerce at the Solana Foundation, noted that MoneyGram’s “global scale and experience serving customers across markets” matches the kind of counterparty the foundation wants engaged as more payments activity shifts on-chain.
MGUSD, Stellar Context
The Solana move follows MoneyGram’s June 2 launch of MGUSD, a USD-backed stablecoin issued on Stellar via Stripe-owned Bridge. That token, described as “GENIUS Act-ready,” makes MoneyGram an issuer of a U.S. dollar token on a public chain. MoneyGram has operated on Stellar since a 2021 partnership with the Stellar Development Foundation that has since facilitated more than $4.2 billion in USDC remittance volume.
Chairman and CEO Anthony Soohoo described the company’s direction: “We believe the future of global money movement will be built on open, interoperable stablecoin rails that anyone, anywhere can access.”
SOL was trading at $71.71 at the time of the announcement.
The US Senate has passed housing legislation that includes a ban on the Federal Reserve creating or working on a central bank digital currency (CBDC) until 2030, which is expected to be quickly taken up and passed by the House.
The Senate on Monday voted 85-5 to pass the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which aims to increase the housing supply after a bipartisan group of House and Senate leaders reached a deal last week to move forward with the legislation.
The bill has included a CBDC ban since the Senate first passed a version of the bill in March, which outlines that the Fed may not, directly or indirectly, “issue or create a central bank digital currency or any digital asset that is substantially similar to a central bank digital currency.”
Crypto advocates have long criticized CBDCs, which they see as an attempt by governments to bring digital currency under central bank control, and the bill is set to be a win for Republicans who have for years attempted to ban CBDCs.
The bill will now be sent to the House for a vote, where it is expected to pass quickly with the deal struck by House leaders last week, before it’s then sent to the president to sign it into law.
The CBDC clause in the bill became wrapped into the housing package as a political sweetener to secure support from House Republicans and the administration for faster passage.
Related: South Carolina governor signs bill protecting Bitcoin miners, banning CBDC
The ban makes a carve-out for stablecoins, or any “dollar-denominated currency that is open, permissionless, and private,” and that even after the CBDC ban lifts in 2030, the Fed can’t act on a CBDC without explicit congressional authorization.
A section of the housing bill banning the Federal Reserve from creating a CBDC. Source: Senate Banking Committee
Meanwhile, other nations are charging ahead with their plans for a CBDC.
Reuters reported on June 16 that China signed up 26 financial institutions to its digital yuan (e-CNY) cross-border payment platform.
Three countries have officially launched a CBDC, while 41 are in the pilot phase, 33 are in development, and 40 are still researching, according to the think tank Atlantic Council.
A widely watched indicator has flipped to “altcoin season,” for the opposite reason the label suggests. Glassnode’s Altcoin Cycle Signal, which reads above 50 when alternative coins, or alts, outperform bitcoin, has climbed to 86. Alts are not rallying. Bitcoin is just falling faster than they are.
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The signal tracks relative performance, so alts can lead either by rising or by falling less. This is the second case. After nearly two years of declines, alts have run out of sellers and steadied, while bitcoin has dropped hard, sliding back toward $63,600, per CoinDesk data. Bitcoin, as Glassnode puts it, “is still doing most of the work.”
A real altcoin season has capital rotating into smaller tokens as they climb. This is the hollow version, where the reading turns bullish for alts because bitcoin is selling off, which is bearish for the market as a whole. Relative strength is not a rally.
Until alts start rising on their own rather than holding while bitcoin falls, the signal says more about bitcoin’s weakness than about demand for anything else.
It explicitly says that adversaries may already be collecting encrypted U.S. data, or information mathematically scrambled into an unreadable format to protect it from unauthorized access, and could decrypt it in future with the help of quantum computers.
That’s the “harvest now, decrypt later” problem. Steal the locked box today, crack it open whenever the tool to do so finally exists.
The fix, according to the order, is a hard post quantum cryptography (PQC) migration timeline. Federal agencies must move their most sensitive systems to post-quantum cryptography for key establishment by the end of 2030, and for digital signatures by the end of 2031.
In other words, the government plans to replace the current method for setting up secure, encrypted connections with a new way that remains secure from future quantum computers.
The crypto angle
Quantum computing has been a buzzword in the crypto industry since Google researchers said a sufficiently powerful machine could crack Bitcoin’s blockchain with significantly less firepower than previously expected.
The March paper, co-authored with Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake and Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh, said that breaking the elliptic curve cryptography behind Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains could take fewer than 500,000 physical qubits. That’s a 20-fold drop from earlier estimates.
Bitcoin fell toward $63,000 on Tuesday, caught in a broad retreat from risk as investors pulled out of the technology stocks that have led markets all year.
The token traded around $63,640, down 0.9% over 24 hours and 3.3% on the week, per CoinDesk data, after touching about $65,076 on Monday and sliding through the session. The selling was marketwide. Ether fell 0.9% to $1,719 and is also down 3.3% on the week, XRP dropped 1.6% to $1.12 for a 9% weekly loss, solana lost 3.4% to $71 and dogecoin slid 6.6% over seven days.
Tron was the rare gainer, up 1.3% on the day and 4.6% on the week. Hyperliquid’s HYPE fell 4.8% on the week.
The pressure came from outside crypto. A rotation out of this year’s best-performing technology and chip shares sank global equities, with a gauge of Asian stocks falling more than 2% after a record close and South Korea’s Kospi plunging more than 6% on fears that the rally in chipmakers had run too far.
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is leading an OKX and New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) joint venture to build infrastructure to bridge traditional and digital financial markets.
“The ICE-OKX joint venture is a step towards building the infrastructure that will define how global markets operate in the decades ahead,” said Trabue Bland, senior vice president at ICE in a statement Monday morning.
Subject to regulatory approvals, the OKX and ICE project is expected to operate as a registered broker-dealer and a futures commission merchant, the statement noted.
The goal of the joint venture is to enable OKX’s 120 million users in the U.S. and overseas to access ICE futures and NYSE tokenized equities markets. It will also explore adjacent opportunities for the regulatory-compliant blockchain-enabled market, it added.
Cuomo, who served as New York’s 56th governor, New York State Attorney General, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, began working with OKX in 2023.
Multiple XRP (XRP) indicators have hinted at a potential 25% relief rally in the coming weeks.
Key takeaways:
XRP price looks poised to print a rare death cross with a rebound setup toward $1.40.
XRP may also be forming a broader bottom, eyeing a larger rally toward $8 in the coming months.
XRP’s mean-reversion setup may send price toward $1.40
As of Monday, XRP’s 20-week exponential moving average (20-week EMA, green) near $1.40 was on the verge of crossing below its 200-week EMA (blue) near $1.39.
A confirmed weekly close below the longer-term average would mark a rare death cross between the two trend gauges.
XRP/USD weekly chart. Source: TradingView
In the past, XRP’s previous 20-week/200-week EMA crosses were followed by relief rebounds back toward the 200-week EMA. That includes a roughly 20% recovery in 2019 and a larger 82.7% rebound in 2022.
A similar mean-reversion move this time would put the $1.39–$1.40 area in focus, implying roughly 23%–25% upside by July from XRP’s current price near $1.13.
XRP’s weekly relative strength index, or RSI, was also hovering just above the oversold threshold of 30 on Monday.
The RSI measures whether an asset is becoming overheated or overly sold. Readings near 30 typically suggest that sellers may be running out of momentum, raising the odds of a short-term rebound even if the broader trend remains weak.
XRP shorts create $1.40 price magnet
Binance XRP/USDT liquidation heatmap data further supports the relief-rally setup.
The chart shows a heavier concentration of short liquidation liquidity above the current price than long liquidation liquidity below it. The largest upside cluster, of around $236.5 million, appears around the $1.37–$1.40 zone, according to CoinGlass data.
Liquidation heatmaps often highlight where prices may move to flush out crowded leveraged positions.
Short sellers positioned above the spot price could be forced to buy back their exposure if XRP starts rebounding from the current $1.13 price levels, adding fuel to a move toward the $1.39–$1.40 area.
XRP may rebound toward $8: Analyst
A separate long-term chart from analyst Cryptollica suggests that XRP’s next rebound could be part of a broader bottoming setup.
The chart shows XRP’s 10-day RSI hovering near the low-30s, close to the level that has historically appeared around major accumulation phases.
XRP/USD 10-day chart. Source: TradingView
“In 13 years, XRP has only been this washed out 3 times,” Cryptollica said in a Sunday post, adding:
“The first 2 times, the crowd laughed, ignored it, and only understood the setup after price had already left.”
Cryptollica’s chart also shows XRP trading above the lower boundary of a giant ascending channel, a long-term support line that has connected multiple macro lows since 2017.
Related: XRP whale wallet withdrawals top 720M as risk-adjusted return data points to opportunity
That trend line currently sits near $0.75, meaning XRP could still see one more downside sweep before a larger recovery begins. In previous cycles, tests of this support area preceded major upside expansions.
XRP could first retest the channel support before entering a broader bull-market phase, with the channel’s upper boundary putting a long-term target near $8 in focus if the pattern plays out again.
