The Bank of Korea’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) plans are moving forward with nine participating banks.
The second phase of BOK’s CBDC program is scheduled for September with real-transaction testing, Yonhap News Agency reported on Monday.
“The Bank of Korea will provide the infrastructure for the institutional CBDC, and each bank will conduct its own business using deposit tokens,” a BOK official told YNA. “From the second phase, we will lay the groundwork for commercialization.”
The BOK’s second phase will expand to include a total of nine participating banks, including Gyeongnam Bank and iM Bank. The country’s top three banks, KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana, and Woori Financial Group, are also participating in the CBDC project.
“The goal is to create an environment where the won can be traded freely regardless of time or place,” Yonhap quoted the government as saying.
CBDCs are a digital form of blockchain-based fiat currency that are managed by the issuing central bank and considered legal tender. Only a handful of countries have officially introduced a CBDC. Bahamas unveiled one in October 2020, Nigeria in 2021, and Jamaica in 2022, according to the Atlantic Council’s CBDC tracker.
While past patterns are never a guarantee of future performance, volatility metrics are widely known to be mean-reverting. This cyclical nature suggests that periods of below-average volatility are often followed by higher turbulence, while above-average volatility paves the way for market stability.
Currently, the index is trading below both its 30-day and 200-day simple moving averages. In essence, volatility is relatively “cheap” and sitting at a historically reliable support zone, suggesting the measure could be set to rise, which means another round of turbulence.
For now, bitcoin continues to trade just above $64,000, maintaining the range-bound price action that has persisted since last Wednesday. While some analysts have noted two consecutive weeks of spot ETF inflows, the capital movement is tiny compared with the billions yanked from the market during the preceding eight-week outflow streak.
Global volatility gauges in traditional markets are currently offering mixed signals. South Korea’s KOSPI VIX is currently above 70%, its highest level since the 1990s. Meanwhile, Wall Street’s VIX jumped over 12% to reach 18% on Friday, where it continues to hover. However, these levels have been in the play for months, which means that stocks are anything but panicked.
Additionally, the MOVE index, the 30-day volatility gauge for U.S. Treasury notes that underpins global finance, remains steady around 70%, as it has since April, offering a constructive cue for risk assets. Stay alert!
Hyperliquid said its HIP-4 upgrade, which introduced “outcome trading” to the decentralized exchange, will support permissionless deployment of the contracts in a future enhancement.
Once live, anyone will be able to offer a prediction market on the platform, subject to templates approved by validators, Hyperliquid said on Telegram on Sunday. In the meantime, they remain under the authority of validators.
Prediction markets, a sector dominated by Polymarket and Kalshi, allow participants to bet on event outcomes and have evolved into a multibillion-dollar sector of the blockchain industry. Users take positions on events from central bank interest-rate decisions to who performs at the Super Bowl halftime show.
The growing popularity of the platforms — the FIFA World Cup, which wrapped up Sunday with Spain winning its third title, drew more than $50 billion in bets — has attracted centralized trading platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood into the sector to offer customers a one-stop shop for predictions markets alongside more conventional financial trading.
Allbridge Core has paused its cross-chain stablecoin protocol after an attacker stole roughly $1.65 million from its Solana liquidity pools, according to security firms CertiK and PeckShield.
Allbridge is a bridge that lets users move assets between blockchains that do not communicate directly. Its Core product uses liquidity pools to transfer native stablecoins such as USDC and USDT without issuing wrapped versions of the assets.
The attacker used a $1.12 million flash loan from Solana lending protocol Kamino to rapidly swap USDC and USDT, manipulating the pools’ internal ratios before withdrawing assets at favorable rates, according to Onchain Lens. A flash loan is a loan taken and repaid within the same transaction.
The stolen assets were bridged to an Ethereum address and dispersed across additional addresses. It isn’t currently clear how much remains under the attacker’s control.
Allbridge said it paused the protocol while investigating, and told liquidity providers to withdraw from affected pools. The initial manipulation left the pools imbalanced and created a temporary arbitrage opportunity. Allbridge asked traders who profited from the pricing distortion to return funds for LP compensation.
Allbridge suffered a similar flash loan attack in 2023 that drained roughly $650,000 from its BNB Chain pools. The firm later said it recovered most of the funds and changed its liquidity and withdrawal calculations. Allbridge had raised $2 million in 2022 to expand the bridge and fund security audits.
A Japanese logistics company that counts Amazon Japan as a client plans to settle payments in the regulated yen stablecoin JPYC with business partners, including independent truck drivers, according to a report by Nikkei Asia.
Tokyo-listed AZ-COM Maruwa Holdings (9090), which reported 230.5 billion yen ($1.4 billion) in revenue for the fiscal year ended March, plans to use JPYC for fees and other payments to its network of around 2,300 partners, including subcontractors and truck drivers. The company has been working with Amazon Japan since 2017, providing delivery services for its online shopping operations.
The move marks the first large-scale corporate use of a stablecoin in day-to-day operations in Japan, signaling that mainstream adoption of tokenized assets continues to expand even as broader cryptocurrency valuations remain subdued in a lingering bear market.
JPYC is Japan’s first fully regulated yen-pegged stablecoin, and is issued by Tokyo-based fintech firm JPYC Inc. The stablecoin debuted in October last year under the Payment Services Act and maintains a strict 1:1 peg to the yen. It is 100% backed by bank deposits and Japanese government bonds. As of last week, its onchain circulation had surpassed 2 billion yen.
South Korea’s financial authorities investigated more than 40 cases of unfair trading, including market manipulation and fraudulent crypto trading, in the last two years.
According to an X post by Financial Services Commission Chair Lee Eog-won, 30 of them reported or referred to investigative agencies, identifying 25 suspects since the Virtual Asset User Protection Act took effect in July 2024.
Lee said the average unlawful gains were around 1.4 billion Korean won ($940,000).
“Today marks the second anniversary of the enactment of the ‘Virtual Asset User Protection Act…’ It was a meaningful time that brought the virtual asset market, which was outside the institutional framework at the time, into the fold of the law and created an opportunity to establish a user protection system for virtual assets,” said Lee.
Related: South Korea to bring digital assets under new state asset management system
The Virtual Asset User Protection Act is designed to protect users who buy and store crypto assets with virtual asset service providers.
VASPs are legally required to separate user deposits and virtual assets from their own corporate holdings, holding client deposits in banks.
The legislation also targets illicit activities such as insider trading, wash trading and market manipulation, enhancing the Financial Services Commission (FSC) authority to supervise and inspect VASPs.
“We will continue to enhance market surveillance investigation and monitoring systems based on AI, and proactively respond to high-risk areas,” Lee added.
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A year on, the rules aren’t quite ready for implementation, but we have a much clearer idea as to how the regulators are thinking about stablecoins and where they’re likely to land on those rules.
In an emailed statement, Crypto Council for Innovation CEO Ji Hun Kim called the passage of the bill “a landmark moment.”
“A year in, agencies, institutions, and innovators are building on a clearer foundation, and stablecoins are moving rapidly toward mainstream adoption,” he said.
The various regulators have proposed rules out for comment on the different aspects of stablecoin governance and regulation, including a proposal that would require stablecoin issuers to conduct similar know-your-customer checks to more traditional financial firms. The FDIC published 144 questions a few months ago about how it would oversee stablecoin issuers, looking at concerns like custody, capital and liquidity standards. The OCC, for its part, put out its own proposal in February laying out how it was interpreting the law.
There’s still a few months left before these rules start being finalized. And in the meantime, the industry is still working on getting the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act passed.
The text of the combined Clarity Act drafts is not yet public, at least as of Friday night. While industry sources expected the bill to be released last week, the timeline has constantly evolved. On Thursday, Senators Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno were supposed to brief Trump on the bill. There was no public readout of that meeting available after, but both lawmakers tweeted about Trump’s remarks on the election later Thursday.
This year, Tether rolled out USAT — launched with U.S. standards in mind and issued through U.S. banking partner Anchorage Digital. So far, it remains at a relatively low level of usage.
“Non-compliant stablecoins cannot be used by U.S. institutions when the safe harbor expires in 2028, but we don’t expect the market to wait,” said Kevin Wysocki, head of policy at Anchorage Digital, the crypto-native bank that manages a number of stablecoins. He said the company believes institutional users will move toward “compliant, bank-issued digital dollars well ahead of that deadline.”
Do they have two years?
GENIUS included a three-year grace period for compliance, and two years remain, after which U.S. crypto platforms won’t be able to offer stablecoins whose issuers haven’t checked all the regulatory boxes. However, there seems to be some disagreement over whether foreign issuers are meant to enjoy that same safe harbor. Some lawyers in finance assume that Tether gets until July 18, 2028, to comply, but others have suggested that foreign issuers would have to comply the moment GENIUS officially goes live, which is likely six months from now in January.
“Upon the effectiveness of the GENIUS Act, foreign issuers will need to immediately comply with lawful orders to seize and freeze coins held by illicit actors, but they will have a runway of approximately two more years to prepare for the additional requirements so that their coins may remain eligible for listing on U.S. centralized trading platforms,” said Justin Levine, a lawyer at Davis Polk who advises clients on stablecoin issues, adding that one of those remaining requirements — registration with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — is likely to require a “significant undertaking”
US regulatory agencies missed Saturday’s rulemaking deadline under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, one year after the law was signed.
While several regulatory agencies published proposed rules and collected public feedback during the past year, no final regulations were issued before the deadline.
Those agencies include the Department of the Treasury, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Federal Reserve Board, according to rulemaking trackers by law firm Chapman and crypto investment company Paradigm.
Missing the statutory deadline does not invalidate the GENIUS Act, but the unfinished rules could result in regulatory uncertainty for stablecoin issuers.
The GENIUS Act established the first comprehensive federal regulatory framework for stablecoins in the US. The act was signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 18, 2025.
Related: ABA, state banking groups push back on CLARITY Act stablecoin yield provisions
Treasury issued four rule proposals since law signing
Of the 10 notices of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) issued since since the GENIUS Act was signed into law, the Treasury Department issued the most proposals, four, covering the broader implementation of the act, including standards for determining whether state stablecoin regulatory regimes are similar to the federal framework, registration requirements for foreign stablecoin issuers and guidelines for compliance with anti-money laundering measures, according to Paradigm.
Rulemaking progress after the GENIUS Act was signed into law. Source: Paradigm.
The OCC issued two NPRMs covering nationally chartered payment stablecoin issuers, approval requirements and supervisory standards.
The FDIC issued one NPRM on FDIC-supervised institutions that issue payment stablecoins, focused on supervisory expectations and operational standards such as reserve management.
The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) proposed rules enabling federally insured credit unions to participate in stablecoin issuance.
Finally, federal banking agencies jointly proposed an interagency implementation rule to harmonize supervision across the OCC, Federal Reserve and FDIC, aiming to ensure consistent supervisory expectations across all federal regulators.
Anchorage urges lawmakers to pass CLARITY Act
Federally chartered crypto bank Anchorage Digital took the occasion of the one-year anniversary to urge lawmakers to pass a second piece of crypto legislation, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY).
“On GENIUS’ one-year anniversary, we’re renewing our call for Congress to pass the CLARITY Act and extend the clear market-structure rules that worked for stablecoins to the broader digital asset economy,” Anchorage Digital wrote in a Friday report.
The CLARITY Act seeks to establish the first federal regulatory framework for digital assets in the US. It cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May, though banking industry groups argued that it would allow crypto firms to offer yields on stablecoins without facing the same requirements as traditional banks.
On July 13, state banking associations, including the American Bankers Association (ABA) and the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), sent a joint letter urging Senate leaders to provide more detail on the CLARITY Act’s stablecoin yield provisions and argued that new amendments need to prevent payment stablecoins from acting as deposit substitutes rather than pure transaction tools.
On June 26, Galaxy Digital cut its odds of the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 to 50%, citing the lack of a unified Senate Banking-Agriculture text, no firm floor schedule and a narrowing legislative window before lawmakers leave Washington.
Magazine: Gambling on random Pokémon cards: Onchain gagcha hits record high as crypto sinks
Derivatives account for the vast majority of crypto trading volumes, but options remain a relatively small corner of the market, dominated by a handful of established venues including Deribit, CME Group and Binance. New entrants are increasingly betting that broader adoption of options will follow the institutionalization of digital assets.
The move is the latest step in Kraken’s transformation from a crypto exchange into a broader financial platform offering trading, payments and other digital asset services.
Growing the market, not just market share
Rather than focusing solely on taking market share from incumbent venues, Theodorou believes the larger opportunity is expanding the addressable market by making options easier to use.
“The existing options market in crypto has been built for a narrow slice of the trader base,” Theodorou said.
“Our offering broadens access through a straightforward, dollar-settled contract in the same account clients already use for spot and futures,” she added.
A retail-first approach
According to Theodorou, the slow growth of crypto options is less a demand problem than a product design problem.
“The gap in crypto options isn’t demand, it’s design,” Theodorou said.
She notes that existing crypto options platforms have largely catered to institutional traders and market makers, while retail traders instead have gravitated toward perpetual futures, which became the industry’s dominant speculative product because of their relative simplicity.
