The Korea Media and Communications Commission said Polymarket’s structure and operations amount to illegal gambling despite its noncustodial design and smart contracts.
XRP sinks below $1 for first time since 2024 as Korean bank adopts Ripple Payments
Fiona Murray, Ripple’s managing director for Asia Pacific, said in a statement the deal reflects growing momentum across Korea’s institutional financial sector, with banks building digital asset capability and looking for long-term infrastructure partners. Regional banks play a vital role in the real economy, she said.
The company has spent the past year pushing RLUSD, the dollar-pegged token it issues, as the settlement asset for institutional work. CoinDesk asked Ripple which asset the Jeonbuk deployment uses and did not immediately receive a reply.
This distinction helps explain why a steady run of Ripple partnerships has done little for the token.
XRP traded above $3 at last year’s highs and has spent August drifting toward and now through $1, CoinDesk data shows, while Ripple has been signing asset managers, custodians and banks.
The split shows on Ripple’s own ledger. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger are worth about $1.38 billion, as CoinDesk reported earlier in the month, of which $845 million is RLUSD. The stablecoin accounts for more than three fifths of everything issued there.
Meanwhile, traders are betting the price turns anyway.
Futures open interest stood at about $2.78 billion this week, as CoinDesk assessed, with more than three accounts holding long XRP positions for every one holding a short on Binance and a similar ratio on OKX, even as commentary about the token across social channels turned its most negative in three months.
The bitcoin price level where leveraged bulls could get whacked
“$57,000 is a key region to watch. If Bitcoin trades down into that area, we could see a massive wave of long liquidations,” Joao Wedson, CEO of crypto analytics platform Alphractal, said.
The risk is amplified by thin trading volumes. As CoinDesk reported Monday, the number of active contracts is unusually large relative to trading volume. That combination matters a scenario, where a large batch of leveraged longs get liquidated and thin order books make it harder to absorb those liquidations at stable prices. The result could a sharper, faster drop rather than a orderly pullback.
The question is whether BTC will fall to $57,000.
Past crypto bear cycles have seen severe crashes of 76% to 84%. The latest one, which began at highs above $126,000 last October, has so far only cut prices in half. If history is any guide, there may be another leg lower still to come.
Analysts at crypto exchange Bitfinex noted that bitcoin is showing mid-to-late bear market characteristics, with price trading between the long-term holder realized price of $52,699 and the short-term holder realized price of $67,176. The realized price median, near $63,200, has provided support over the past two weeks; a break below that level could put the June low of $57,803 back in focus.
Bitcoin climbs above $64,000 while most majors slip
Bitcoin rose above $64,000 on Tuesday, up over 1% on the day and marginally higher on the week, the only major with a meaningful gain as the rest of the market drifted lower.
Ether eased half a percent to just under $1,900, though it holds an almost 1% weekly gain. XRP fell over 1% to just under $1 and is down over 2% on the week, the weakest of the group. Dogecoin dropped almost half a percent to 7 cents, BNB and tron both slipped marginally to just over $600 and 33 cents, and solana was flat at just under $76.
Hyperliquid’s HYPE was the exception among the smaller majors, up almost 1% to just over $59 and 7.5% over seven days, by far the strongest weekly performance.
Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro, said bitcoin has now spent four days below its 50-day moving average after an earlier attempt to break above it, and remains below its 200-week average on the longer view. That puts sellers in control on both the medium and very long-term trends, he said, and nothing changes until the price leaves the $62,000 to $65,000 range it has been stuck in.
Kraken’s parent Payward joins Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, taps Claude Mythos 5 for security
AI is also emerging as a growing threat to crypto companies, giving attackers tools to find vulnerabilities faster, automate attacks and make phishing and social-engineering campaigns more convincing. That raises the stakes for an industry already a frequent target for hackers, while fueling a race to deploy the same technology on the defensive side.
Claude Mythos 5 is Anthropic’s most advanced model for defensive cybersecurity, designed to analyze code at scale, identify vulnerabilities and help developers fix them. Access has initially been limited to organizations that operate or defend critical infrastructure, as Anthropic works on safeguards for a broader rollout.
Payward argued that crypto platforms face security challenges similar to other critical financial infrastructure. Exchanges, custody systems and settlement rails operate around the clock and can present lucrative targets for attackers.
“Security has always been an unfair game. An attacker needs to find one flaw. A defender has to find all of them, first, every single day,” Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi said in the release. “Frontier AI is the first thing that flips that asymmetry.”
Anthropic has said it plans to expand access to Mythos-class cybersecurity capabilities as it develops safeguards for wider use.
Read more: AI is making crypto security cheaper, faster and harder to ignore
Binance to Plan UK Relaunch with FCA License Application: Report
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OCC approves Trump Family Crypto Company for Trust Charter
Amid scrutiny and accusations of conflicts of interest from many lawmakers, the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) gave conditional approval for World Liberty Financial’s application for a national trust bank.
In a Friday notice, the OCC said the conditional approval for World Liberty’s charter application, subject to certain regulatory and policy requirements, would allow the company to operate under the title World Liberty Trust Company, National Association. According to its application, the World Liberty bank proposed issuing US dollar-backed stablecoins and custodying digital assets related to the company’s USD1 token.
The OCC approval came amid concerns about potential conflicts of interest between World Liberty and US President Donald Trump’s family. The president and his three sons are affiliated with the company, and the head of the OCC, Jonathan Gould, was nominated by Trump in 2025. World Liberty’s website also said a Trump family entity controlled 38% of the company’s equity interests.
According to the agency, “the Comptroller and staff acted consistently with their statutory duties and ethical obligations with respect to the Application.” Gould previously said that the application would be reviewed in an “apolitical and nonpartisan process” following a letter from Senator Elizabeth Warren.
In response to the approval, Warren said on Friday that she had introduced legislation “to stop this kind of unprecedented corruption,” calling the OCC’s move “the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen.” She and nine senators introduced the Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act following the approval.
Related: OCC Comptroller says WLFI charter review will remain apolitical
Under the Trump administration and Gould, the OCC has approved or conditionally approved multiple applications from crypto companies seeking trust charters to expand their services in the US. In December, the agency approved applications from Circle, Ripple Labs, Crypto.com and Coinbase following passage of the GENIUS stablecoin bill in Congress.
World Liberty’s UAE ties under scrutiny in US Congress
Amid the OCC approval, many lawmakers are continuing to call for investigations into World Liberty’s ties to foreign entities potentially influencing US policy through Trump.
An Abu Dhabi investment company backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser, reportedly purchased a 49% stake in World Liberty in January 2025 for $500 million. Another UAE entity, MGX, used World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin to invest $2 billion in crypto exchange Binance. Trump later issued a presidential pardon for former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.
A White House spokesperson has repeatedly said that there were “no conflicts of interest“ with Trump’s investments.
Magazine: El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment turns 5: ‘It was for us, not them’
Tokenization Is Growing Fast. Now the Industry Has to Prove It Can Scale
Tokenization is beginning to face a harder test than attracting assets and investors: proving the infrastructure and economics can work at scale.
A series of developments over the past week illustrates that transition. Securitize reported record tokenized assets but weaker tokenization revenue, tokenized equities surpassed 1.3 million holders, and JPMorgan disclosed larger positions in Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds.
Together, the developments suggest digital assets are moving deeper into mainstream financial markets. The challenge is increasingly shifting from demonstrating demand to supporting that demand reliably and profitably.
“We have spent years asking whether there is demand for digital financial products,” Edwin Mata, CEO and co-founder of tokenization platform Brickken, said in comment provided to AlexaBlockchain. “I think the more important question now is whether we have built the infrastructure to support that demand properly.”
Securitize Highlights the Economics Problem
Securitize offered perhaps the clearest example of the tension between adoption and economics.
The BlackRock-backed tokenization company reported average tokenized AUM of a record $4.3 billion during the Q2, up 16% from a year earlier. Transaction volume increased 170% to $5.3 billion.
Securitize became a publicly traded company on July 2, 2026, trading on the NYSE under the ticker symbol SECZ. It completed its business combination with Cantor Equity Partners II, a SPAC sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald, valuing Securitize at a $1.25 billion pre-money equity value and raising over $400 million in cash.
Carlos Domingo, Chairman and CEO of Securitize, said during the Q2 earning call on 13 August 2026 that the firm reached $5 billion AUM milestone (early Q3).
The company’s financial performance moved in the opposite direction.
Quarterly revenue declined 5% from a year earlier to $14.4 million, while Securitize recorded a net loss of $21.7 million compared with a $6.1 million loss a year earlier. Its shares fell 21% in after-hours trading following the earnings report.
The divergence does not mean tokenization itself has poor economics.
It does, however, highlight an important distinction. Growth in assets represented onchain does not automatically generate proportional revenue or profits for the companies supplying the infrastructure.
For providers, the commercial question becomes more important as tokenization moves beyond pilots.
Historically, many deployments have required integrations, regulatory structuring and technology configured around individual issuers. Such an approach is workable when volumes are small, but becomes harder to sustain when institutions launch multiple products across jurisdictions.
“Tokenization will ultimately be judged on what stays live and keeps operating,” Mata said. “If every new deployment requires another custom project, it becomes very difficult to build a market that genuinely scales.”
Mata argues that the industry will increasingly need a Tokenization-as-a-Service model, where common infrastructure can be reused across different issuers and instruments rather than rebuilt for each deployment.
That would shift the economic model closer to enterprise software: recurring infrastructure supporting assets throughout their lifecycle, rather than primarily earning revenue when an asset is initially issued.
Tokenized Stocks Are Starting to Find Users
The demand side of the market, meanwhile, is growing rapidly.
Tokenized-stock holders increased 92.61% over the past 30 days to about 1.33 million, according to RWA.xyz data. Monthly transfer volume climbed 194.73% to $23.49 billion, while monthly active addresses increased 41.60% to almost 601,623.
The total distributed value of tokenized stocks increased more modestly, rising 4.01% to approximately $2.33 billion.
As on 17 August 2026, Ondo leads the total tokenized stocks market with $873 million, followed by Kraken’s xStocks at $555.9 million and Binance’s bStocks at $480.8 million.
The numbers suggest tokenized equities are developing an audience beyond small-scale experiments.
Yet a larger user base also increases the operational burden.
Creating a blockchain representation of a stock is only the starting point. Platforms still need to handle ownership rights, custody, compliance restrictions, distributions, corporate actions and secondary transfers.
The underlying asset must also actually be available.
That problem became particularly visible during SpaceX’s June initial public offering.
Binance Wallet, Bybit and Bitget Wallet canceled tokenized SpaceX offerings and refunded customers after xStocks was unable to provide enough underlying shares. The campaigns had collectively attracted more than $1 billion in demand before the supply shortage became apparent.
The blockchain was not the principal constraint. Access to the underlying shares was.
The episode demonstrated an important limitation of tokenization: moving distribution onto a blockchain does not remove the structural constraints of the market underneath it.
“Reaching a million holders is a meaningful milestone,” Mata said, “but what matters over the long term is whether the infrastructure can support those people once they are actually using these assets every day.”
JPMorgan Shows Crypto Moving Into Existing Financial Infrastructure
A separate development provides another indication of how digital assets are becoming integrated into conventional finance.
JPMorgan disclosed about 10.4 million shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, or IBIT, in its Q2 13F filing. That was up roughly 25% from 8.3 million shares in Q1, with the position valued at $356 million at the end of June.
The bank’s reported position in BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust increased even more sharply.
JPMorgan held 1.17 million ETHA shares at the end of the quarter, more than 4 times the 267,000 shares disclosed three months earlier.
Those figures should not be interpreted as a straightforward directional wager by JPMorgan on Bitcoin or Ether.
A Form 13F shows certain long positions held by institutional investment managers but does not reveal the complete economic exposure behind them. Holdings can be related to client activity, market-making, hedging, inventory or other institutional functions.
That distinction is important.
The more significant development may be that Bitcoin and Ether exposure increasingly appears inside the same regulated products, reporting processes and portfolio infrastructure used by major financial institutions for traditional assets.
“One of the clearest signs of institutional adoption is when digital assets stop requiring their own separate conversation and simply become another part of how financial institutions manage capital,” Mata said.
Institutional adoption does not necessarily require every major bank to become a long-term crypto investor.
It can instead mean banks custody assets, facilitate client demand, provide liquidity, manage hedges and incorporate digital-asset products into existing risk and capital-management systems.
Why It Matters: Tokenization Is Moving From Proof to Execution
The latest developments point to a tokenization market entering a more demanding stage.
The question is no longer simply whether stocks, funds and other financial instruments can be represented on blockchains. A growing number of financial firms are already demonstrating that they can.
The harder question is whether those instruments can operate reliably, compliantly and economically for years.
That requires infrastructure capable of handling identity, permissions, ownership records, regulatory restrictions, settlement, distributions and corporate actions as user numbers and transaction volumes grow.
Securitize’s results illustrate one side of that transition. Assets and transaction volumes can increase even while the economics of providing tokenization infrastructure remain under pressure.
Tokenized equities illustrate another.
The market has reached 1.33 million holders and over $23 billion in monthly transfer volume, but the SpaceX episode demonstrated that blockchain accessibility cannot compensate for failures in sourcing and maintaining the underlying asset.
JPMorgan’s filings provide a third signal.
Rather than existing exclusively within a separate crypto market, Bitcoin and Ether exposure is increasingly being handled through conventional investment vehicles and institutional reporting systems.
That changes what success looks like for tokenization companies.
The competitive advantage may increasingly come not from putting the largest number of assets onchain, but from making those assets inexpensive to launch, reliable to operate and easy to manage over their entire lifecycle.
“Tokenization becomes genuinely useful when people stop being impressed by the technology and simply expect the financial instrument to work,” Mata said. “I think that is the standard the industry is now moving towards.”
The above article “Tokenization Is Growing Fast. Now the Industry Has to Prove It Can Scale” was first published on AlexaBlockchain. Read the complete article here: https://alexablockchain.com/tokenization-growing-fast-now-industry-has-to-prove-it-can-scale/
Read Also: This is the First U.S.-Chartered Depository Bank to Offer Stablecoin Invoicing
Disclaimer: The information provided on AlexaBlockchain is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Read complete disclaimer here.
Bitmine Nears 5% of Ethereum Supply With 5.82M ETH
Tom Lee’s Bitmine Immersion Technologies, an Ethereum treasury company, resumed its Ether purchases last week, bringing it closer to a key business target of owning 5% of the second-biggest cryptocurrency’s supply despite challenging market conditions.
The company disclosed Monday that it acquired 9,926 Ether (ETH) during the week ending Aug. 16, bringing its total holdings to roughly 5.82 million ETH, or about 4.8% of Ethereum’s circulating supply. At an ETH reference price of $1,893, Bitmine’s Ether holdings were valued at roughly $11 billion. However, much of the company’s ETH was acquired at significantly higher prices.
Ether’s price was little changed on Monday, sitting just above $1,900.
The latest purchase puts Bitmine within striking distance of its long-term “Alchemy of 5%” target of holding 5% of the total ETH supply.
Bitmine’s conviction has been tested by a prolonged bear market for Ether, which has sharply eroded the value of its digital asset treasury. The company is sitting on more than $8.4 billion in unrealized losses on its ETH holdings, according to industry data.
With a portfolio value of more than $11 billion, BitMine’s unrealized losses are around 43%. Source: DropsTab
Still, Bitmine has continued accumulating Ether, making purchases every week since launching its ETH treasury strategy in June 2025.
Related: Ethereum devs to narrow 66 proposals tied to Hegotá upgrade
Bitmine’s staked Ether approaches $10 billion in value
Although Bitmine is sitting on large unrealized losses on its Ether holdings, its staking operations continue to generate yield. The company said it is staking more than 5 million ETH, worth roughly $9.6 billion at current prices.
That staking has enabled Bitmine to earn protocol rewards for helping secure the Ethereum network, providing a predictable source of yield regardless of short-term ETH price movements. Based on a seven-day staking yield of 2.61%, Bitmine projects annualized staking rewards of roughly $287 million, according to Lee.
Related: Crypto Biz: Bitcoin’s $116M self-custody wake-up call
Compound bets $52 million, new leadership team in switch to institutional focus
“DeFi is a remarkable innovation; however, it has achieved limited institutional adoption,” Schnarch said in a statement. “Current product offerings fall short of meeting the traditional finance bar, especially as it pertains to compliance and technical requirements.”
The move is a logical response to the shift in DeFi’s user base, according to Ran Hammer, chief business officer at Orbs.
“Retail participation is a fraction of what it was, and the chain has quietly become a venue for settlement, execution and interaction between financial institutions,” Hammer said. “Since DeFi summer, the space has turned into something completely different, essentially a new financial layer for institutions. So bringing in leadership that speaks that language is exactly the right direction.”
The size of the allocated budget, the largest approved by Compound’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), may help underline its commitment.
“The $52 million and a bench with that much institutional experience is a serious move, and it should improve its execution,” said Himanshu Sahay, co-founder and chief technology officer of crypto lending firm Arch Lending, but institutions will want more than credentials. They “aren’t underwriting teams, they’re underwriting structures.”