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Stablecoins Were Meant to Disrupt Finance. Instead, They Became Idle Cash.

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Stablecoins Were Meant to Disrupt Finance. Instead, They Became Idle Cash.

Crypto tried to solve this with its own version of yield. We tried staking rewards, liquidity mining, and levered DeFi strategies. At first glance, they looked productive. But too much of that yield was circular. It depended on token emissions and fresh inflows, not real economic activity. That story is a much harder sell now. What investors want is yield that is durable, transparent, and tied to something real.

The next step is not more crypto-native yield. It is putting onchain dollars into real assets. The opportunity is not to build better wrappers for cash, but to connect onchain dollars to assets investors already know how to price: money market funds, U.S. treasuries, corporate bonds, and credit. This is not about chasing the hottest yield on the screen this week, but about making dollars onchain work harder without making them less useful.

This shift has already started. Tokenized real-world assets are now a meaningful onchain category beyond stablecoins, and tokenized treasuries alone are already worth billions. But treasury tokens by themselves do not fully solve the problem. In most cases, they remain separate investment products. The bigger opportunity is a dollar you can still use across crypto, while it quietly earns from real assets underneath.

Here’s what SpaceX’s IPO means for its 18,000 bitcoin (BTC) holdings

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Here’s what SpaceX’s IPO means for its 18,000 bitcoin (BTC) holdings

For Elon Musk’s company, it’s a rounding error against a valuation of over $1.8 trillion: small enough that the stock will never trade on it, yet large enough to normalize the asset in a way no dedicated vehicle can.

For years, onchain analysts estimated SpaceX held about 8,300 bitcoin. The S-1 then revealed the real number was more than twice that, meaning one of the most scrutinized private companies in the world held a billion-dollar bitcoin position, and the public’s best guess was off by half until securities law forced the answer.

Now the position lives under public company rules.

Fair-value accounting means every quarterly report marks bitcoin to market, recording gains and losses whether or not SpaceX trades the coin. Tesla showed how that looks in a drawdown, booking hundreds of millions in paper losses on a position it wasn’t selling.

SpaceX arrives with bitcoin 37% already below its January high, though its roughly $35,000 cost basis means the stake is still up about 80% from its initial buys.

Neither Tesla nor SpaceX — both Elon Musk-owned firms — have ever shown an appetite for trading its stack. These companies continue to hold (at least for now) bitcoin through public earnings cycles and analyst questions, while the position swings, hands every Fortune 500 finance chief a working example of a mega-caps that treat bitcoin as a reserve asset, absorbs the earnings noise and moves on.

Anthropic Mythos Security Audit Found No ‘Serious’ Bugs in Zcash: Wilcox

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Anthropic Mythos Security Audit Found No ‘Serious’ Bugs in Zcash: Wilcox

Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said a security audit by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos artificial intelligence model found no serious vulnerabilities in the privacy-preserving cryptocurrency’s protocol.

Requested by Shielded Labs, a Swiss-based non-profit supporting the development of Zcash, the AI security audit did not find “any more serious bugs” in the Zcash protocol, according to a Saturday X post by Wilcox.

On June 3, Zcash developers temporarily suspended Orchard transactions after discovering a vulnerability in the shielded pool. Functionality was restored later that day through an emergency upgrade.

The issue stemmed from a four-year-old forgery bug in the Orchard shielded pool that was discovered by security researcher Taylor Hornby with the help of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 model. The Zcash Foundation said there was no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited, nor was there any unauthorized value creation detected, while user privacy was unaffected.

Source: Zooko Wilcox

AI models spark crypto security concerns

While developers are using new AI models to identify vulnerabilities, the technology is simultaneously raising security concerns across the crypto industry.

On Tuesday, Anthropic released the first public version of its Claude Mythos model, Fable 5. The company said last month that the Mythos model uncovered more than 10,000 high or critical-severity vulnerabilities in “systemically important software,” leading to concerns about whether it should be publicly released.

The company said users that Fable 5 was “made safe for general use” and has safeguards that reroute some topics, such as cybersecurity, to a different model, Claude Opus 4.8.  

On Friday, Anthropic said it suspended access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models due to a US government export control directive citing national security concerns.

Related: Recovery hopes fade as Kelp DAO hacker launders nearly all $220M in stolen funds 

The proliferation of these new AI models has shifted the cybersecurity playing field in favor of the threat actors, causing a “vulnerability apocalypse” that is fueling a resurgence in decentralized finance (DeFi) hacks, Mitchell Amador, the CEO of bug bounty platform Immunefi, told Cointelegraph in a recent interview.

Crypto hacks surged to $634 million in April, the highest monthly value since the Bybit hack led to about $1.4 billion in losses in February 2025, according to DefiLlama data. 

Magazine: The legal battle over who can claim DeFi’s stolen millions 

Blockworks Acquires Messari in Crypto Data Consolidation

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Blockworks Acquires Messari in Crypto Data Consolidation

Crypto data and media company Blockworks has acquired rival research platform Messari at a discount to its prior valuation, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported Friday. The deal joins two of the most prominent names in the crypto intelligence space.

Crypto data and media company Blockworks has acquired rival research platform Messari, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Bloomberg also confirmed the deal.

The acquisition joins two of the most prominent names in crypto data and research. Blockworks, cofounded by Jason Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito, raised at a $192 million valuation in April from a round led by ParaFi Capital and Reciprocal Ventures, with Coinbase Ventures also participating. The company had explicitly said it planned to use that capital to acquire competitors. Financial terms of the Messari purchase were not disclosed.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Blockworks paid more than $10 million for the company, a significant discount from a reported $300 million its was valued at in 2022

Messari’s Rough Year

Messari was already in a weakened position heading into the deal. In March, CEO Eric Turner stepped down alongside a round of layoffs as the company pivoted to an “AI-first” strategy focused on institutional research. CTO Diran Li assumed the chief executive role. Turner had himself taken over as CEO in 2024 after founder Ryan Selkis resigned following a series of controversial posts.

Messari also shelved its flagship Mainnet conference in New York, which had drawn thousands of attendees at its peak. The retreat, combined with leadership churn, left the research firm in a significantly diminished competitive position relative to the cycle highs when it was seen as the go-to source for institutional crypto intelligence.

Blockworks’ Roll-Up Ambition

Blockworks has moved aggressively from crypto media into data infrastructure. The company’s platform ingests trillions of rows of blockchain and exchange data from nearly 100 sources. It also operates Blockworks IR, an investor relations product for on-chain companies, and the Token Transparency Framework, a disclosure standard that has rated more than 30 token issuers and been presented to the SEC and CFTC.

Yanowitz has cast the data push in explicitly infrastructure terms. “Our mission is to build trust in onchain markets,” he said in April when announcing the fundraise. “Every liquid asset class in history has required data you can rely on, a way for businesses to communicate with investors, and disclosures that hold issuers accountable. In traditional markets, that infrastructure is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In crypto, almost none of it exists yet.”

Blockworks has positioned itself as the crypto equivalent of Morningstar, which built a durable financial data business alongside its media and ratings operations. Messari served a broadly similar market, with research reports, on-chain analytics, and an enterprise data terminal.

Here’s what Claude Fable 5 means for crypto and DeFi

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Here’s what Claude Fable 5 means for crypto and DeFi

However, the two largest incidents were not simple smart-contract exploits of the type AI could engineer.

In one, a North Korea-linked group drained about $285 million from Drift Protocol after a six-month social-engineering campaign that won it admin access. For the other, the attacker exploited a single-verifier flaw that allowed roughly $292 million to be siphoned from Kelp DAO.

Another example hit on Tuesday, when Humanity Protocol, a decentralized human-identity service, lost over $30 million to a private-key compromise. CoinDesk found that a hacker gained access to three out of six private keys on one employee’s laptop,

Therein is the problem. While the most obvious smart-contract prompts may be exactly the ones Anthropic’s filters are designed to catch, the largest losses have not needed a contract bug.

The exploits, Ledger’s Guillemet noted, come from familiar weak points: social engineering, bad signing flows, exposed keys and human error.

A model like Fable does not need to hand over a finished exploit to change the economics of an attack. It can read public repositories, compare old versions of software, summarize audit reports and draft convincing messages that look for the small operational mistakes humans miss.

“These exploits remain rooted in social engineering and human error. “

A defender, in such an environment, has to secure every key path, every dependency, every signing flow and every privileged account. Because AI accelerates the scouting phase, the final signing step becomes more important. Private keys need to sit somewhere a compromised laptop cannot reach, and users need a trusted screen that shows what they are actually approving.

Wall Street is moving past crypto pilots and deeper into Ethereum, says Etherealize founder

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Wall Street is moving past crypto pilots and deeper into Ethereum, says Etherealize founder

Yet the growing institutional interest has not translated neatly into ETH’s market performance, a disconnect that has frustrated many investors. Raman attributes that gap largely to timing.

“The sales cycles for institutions are especially long,” he said. “The piping is all in place. We just haven’t seen all the assets come onchain yet.”

He said his view is that Ethereum is currently in a transitional phase where the infrastructure has largely been built, but the scale of adoption has yet to be fully reflected in the asset itself. As more tokenized assets migrate onchain, he believes the market will eventually reevaluate ETH’s role as the asset securing the network.

“When you look at the headlines in retrospect, it’ll be: the global financial system’s internet moment happened on Ethereum,” he said.

Raman also pushed back on criticism surrounding the Ethereum Foundation, which has faced scrutiny over leadership changes and its evolving role in the ecosystem. He argues that the foundation’s willingness to step back is a feature, not a flaw.

“The substrate for the financial system can’t have a party controlling it,” he said. “The network is universal. The pieces are all there now. Let’s hand it off.”

Rather than acting as a central coordinator, Raman believes the foundation should focus on maintaining Ethereum’s core values — security, censorship resistance, privacy and open standards — while continuing work on long-term priorities such as zero-knowledge technology and quantum resistance.

Bitcoin surpasses $64,00 as Friday’s ETF inflows reach highest level since May 14

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Bitcoin surpasses $64,00 as Friday’s ETF inflows reach highest level since May 14

Bitcoin climbed above $64,000 on Saturday, reaching an intraday high of more than $64,200. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is up more than 1% over the past 24 hours and is now up over 8% from its June low of just above $59,000.

Sentiment has also been supported by further positive developments on the geopolitical front in the Middle East.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister stated on X: “We are closer to a peace deal than ever before. With finalisation likely within the next 24 hours, Pakistan is preparing for the electronic signing of the agreement immediately afterwards, followed by technical-level talks next week.”

Meanwhile, Friday recorded the largest daily inflow into U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs since May, with net inflows totaling $85.9 million. The last time inflows exceeded this level was on May 14.

On Friday, a Standard Chartered analyst said that ETF holders have anecdotally been liquidating their positions to free up cash to participate in the SpaceX initial public offering. After SpaceX’s IPO launch on Friday, it may finally ease that selling pressure, the analyst added.

Perpetual futures could become crypto’s next ETF moment

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Perpetual futures could become crypto’s next ETF moment

The comparison may indicate how much the U.S. crypto derivatives market could change over the next several years. While spot bitcoin ETFs opened the door for traditional investors to gain exposure to bitcoin through brokerage accounts, regulated perpetual futures could give both retail and institutional traders access to one of crypto’s most popular trading instruments without needing to use offshore venues.

Prediction market platform Kalshi, which launched U.S. perpetual futures last week, said on Wednesday that it already crossed $1 billion in trading volume.

Palmer argued that one reason perpetual futures became so successful outside the U.S. is their simplicity. Unlike dated futures, which require traders to manage expirations and contract rolls, perps allow positions to remain open indefinitely.

“I think it’s a simple derivative structure compared to some of the nuances of dealing with dated futures,” he said. “If I buy a June [future], then it expires, and if I want to keep my position on, I have to roll it.”

Kraken believes removing those complexities — and eventually allowing crypto assets to be used as collateral — could help bring U.S. traders closer to the experience available in international markets, he said.

For now, the company sees the launch of regulated perps as just the beginning. Despite crypto derivatives generating trillions of dollars in annual volume globally, Palmer said the U.S. market remains in its early stages.

Bybit, Binance and Bitget Cancel Tokenized SpaceX Allocations as xStocks Fails to Deliver Shares

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Bybit, Binance and Bitget Cancel Tokenized SpaceX Allocations as xStocks Fails to Deliver Shares

Three major crypto exchanges canceled their tokenized SpaceX IPO allocation campaigns Friday after xStocks could not source underlying shares, while rival onchain protocols from Ondo, xStocks’ DeFi arm and Backpack launched successfully on the same morning.

Binance, Bybit and Bitget canceled their tokenized SpaceX IPO allocation campaigns Friday and refunded subscribers in full after xStocks, the tokenized-equity provider routing the deals, could not source the underlying shares — even as xStocks’ own onchain token and competing protocols brought SpaceX exposure live the same morning.

Bybit moved first. In a Friday notice, the exchange told subscribers that “due to xStocks’ inability to deliver the underlying assets, no SpaceX allocations were received,” and that it would return all subscription funds automatically. Binance followed with its own cancellation notice, citing “circumstances outside of our control” for the collapse of its Binance Wallet SPCXX campaign. Bitget also canceled and refunded.

Binance, the largest crypto exchange by trading volume, had drawn $557 million in onchain subscriptions for its SPCXX campaign ahead of the IPO. The exchange unwound the campaign with no allocations distributed.

Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s co-founder, posted Friday linking to the cancellation notice with a brief note: “Protect users when things don’t go as planned.” He offered no further detail on how the sourcing breakdown occurred.

xStocks Role

xStocks is a tokenized-equity provider that issues onchain tokens tracking the price of real shares; its assets had crossed $100 million on Ethereum and $30 million on BNB Chain in the weeks before the IPO.

xSrocks has its own DeFi token, SPCXx, is an onchain instrument that traded on decentralized exchanges from IPO morning. Separately, xStocks agreed to procure physical SpaceX shares and hand them to Binance, Bybit and Bitget, which packaged that supply into centralized IPO-allocation campaigns for their users.

The DeFi token launched as planned. The share-sourcing handoff to the three exchanges did not.

Kraken Rollout

Kraken, the US-based crypto exchange, split its launch across two products, and neither depended on the route that failed. Its US listing, SPCX, sources shares through Payward Securities, Kraken’s affiliated broker-dealer, and never touched xStocks. Its non-US offering, SPCXx, is the same xStocks DeFi token that traded everywhere else. Kraken posted Friday that “SpaceX has officially landed on Kraken,” with SPCX tradable in the U.S. and SPCXx available outside it.

The Onchain Launches Held

Three onchain protocols brought tokenized SpaceX exposure live on IPO morning. Ondo Finance, a tokenization protocol, posted that SPCXon went live on Ondo Global Markets across Solana, Ethereum and BNB Chain simultaneously, with the token swappable through 1inch, which announced the integration Friday. 1inch separately noted that xStocks’ SPCXx was live and swappable on its decentralized exchange.

On Solana, the Solana account posted that SPCX was live via Sunrise, issued by Backpack Securities, redeemable for an underlying SpaceX share and tradable around the clock. Pyth Network announced a live SPCX price feed for Pyth Pro users Friday morning.

Where the Delivery Broke Down

Ondo’s SPCXon, xStocks’ SPCXx and Backpack’s SPCX are onchain instruments linked directly to underlying shares or price feeds. Kraken’s US SPCX routes share procurement through its own broker-dealer.

The Binance, Bybit and Bitget campaigns were the only products that relied on xStocks to source physical shares from the IPO pipeline and deliver them to a centralized exchange. That handoff is where the failure sat.

The onchain tokens went live, the broker-dealer path went live, and only the share-sourcing route into the three exchanges broke down.

By the exchanges’ own accounts, the breakdown originated with xStocks. xStocks has made no public statement explaining why it could not deliver the shares.

To Be Sure

The cancellations do not point to a broad failure of tokenized equities. xStocks’ own token, Ondo’s and Backpack’s tokens, and Kraken’s broker-dealer listing all delivered SpaceX exposure on schedule.

The failure was confined to the centralized allocation model, which depends on an intermediary procuring real shares from the IPO and delivering them to an exchange, a step the purely onchain and broker-dealer paths skip.

The Defiant previewed the tokenized-equity stack on the eve of the IPO, and Bybit and Kraken had listed xStocks SpaceX derivatives in the pre-IPO run-up.

SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on Friday at a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion. xStocks has not said whether it will attempt to source the shares again, and none of the three exchanges has indicated plans to relaunch its campaign.

Metaplanet Buys Siiibo Securities In Push To Stack Bitcoin

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Metaplanet Buys Siiibo Securities In Push To Stack Bitcoin

Metaplanet Inc., Japan’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder, has entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of Siiibo Securities Co., Ltd. in a deal valued at approximately 2.1 billion yen, or roughly $13.1 million, the Tokyo-listed company announced on Friday, June 12.

The acquisition, expected to close on July 13, 2026, marks the first major transaction under “Project Nova” — Metaplanet’s medium- to long-term strategy to build a Bitcoin-centric financial platform in Japan. Following the close, Siiibo Securities will be renamed Metaplanet Securities Inc.

The deal gives Metaplanet something it has not held before: a Type I Financial Instruments Business Operator registration, the license required under Japanese law to structure and distribute financial products to retail investors. 

That regulatory standing, combined with Siiibo’s existing customer base and online platform, positions the group to begin offering Bitcoin-linked investment products to individual Japanese investors.

Siiibo Securities was founded in January 2019 and operates an online platform for private placement corporate bonds — a market segment once reserved for institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals. 

The company has backed more than 40 issuers and facilitated over 100 bond offerings, building one of the largest track records in Japan’s retail corporate bond space.

The strategic rationale for Metaplanet

Metaplanet held 40,177 BTC as of May 31, 2026, with a net asset value of 457.6 billion yen, making it the third-largest corporate Bitcoin holder in the world and the largest in Asia. 

The company has spent the past two years accumulating Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, a strategy that has drawn comparisons to Strategy in the United States. Project Nova represents the next phase: converting that treasury into the backbone of a financial services business.

Simon Gerovich, Metaplanet’s President and CEO, framed the acquisition as a structural shift. 

“We view Bitcoin not as a treasury reserve asset, but as the foundation of the next generation of financial ecosystems,” Gerovich said in the press release. “Siiibo Securities’ Type I Financial Instruments Business registration, corporate bond platform, and established customer base give us the tools to make that vision real.”

Metaplanet outlined four core synergies it expects from the deal. The company plans to distribute Siiibo’s existing bond products to its shareholder base of approximately 250,000 investors. It also intends to develop BTC-linked financial products — including BTC-linked bonds — for distribution through the Siiibo platform. 

Joint underwriting of bond and digital securities issuances is planned in collaboration with Metaplanet Ventures Inc., with a focus on venture companies in cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. 

A pilot program for security tokens and other digitized financial instruments is on the roadmap as well.

Kazuki Komura, CEO of Siiibo Securities, said the combination would enable capital formation structures not possible before.

“By combining the strengths of both companies in finance, technology, and community building, we believe we can create new forms of capital formation and investment experiences,” Komura said.

Metaplanet said it will fund the acquisition from cash on hand and borrowings, with the option to draw on Bitcoin-backed credit facilities that carry an aggregate borrowing capacity of up to $500 million.

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