Robinhood (HOOD) is introducing zero-fee crypto trading in the U.K. alongside stocks and shares ISAs, equities, options and futures, the company said on Monday.
The all-in-one Robinhood app will bring U.K. customers access to over 50 cryptos including Bitcoin BTC$65,252.85, Ethereum ETH$1,926.76, XRP (XRP), Hyperliquid (HYPE), accessed via Bitstamp, the exchange Robinhood acquired in 2025.
The trading firm is also introducing “Robinhood Cortex Digests for Crypto,” a generative AI-powered widget that analyses breaking news, market data, technical indicators and Robinhood’s proprietary insights. The AI service explains in plain English the key factors driving price movements in individual crypto assets, Robinhood said.
“Our new product provides a transparent, low-cost alternative to many incumbent U.K. platforms, which often rely on opaque pricing structures and apply wide spreads that can erode customers’ returns,” Robinhood said.
“It will begin rolling out to eligible U.K. customers this week.”
The product also expands Robinhood’s growing crypto ecosystem for UK customers. As such, UK developers can build on the highly popular Robinhood Chain, a layer 2 blockchain built on the Arbitrum platform.
The crypto industry is angry and disappointed that the Senate is not holding a procedural vote on the Clarity Act this month, but that isn’t the worst possible outcome.
“There were way too many general-purpose layer twos, which frankly don’t make sense as a product, because there’s no reason to have many, many versions of the same thing,” Ben Fisch, CEO of Espresso Systems, told CoinDesk. “We’re in a consolidation phase for general-purpose layer twos, not layer twos broadly.”
Industry leaders argue the shakeout reflects a broader shift across crypto rather than a problem unique to Ethereum scaling networks.
“Consolidation is happening across all of crypto right now, not just layer two, from DeFi protocols to DEXs and infrastructure providers. It’s a sign that the industry is maturing. The networks continuing through this period are the ones people actually use and depend on,” Marek Olszewski, co-founder of the Celo layer-2, told CoinDesk.
“For every crypto project that you hear about shutting down, there are perhaps another 10 silently doing the same,” Nick Puckrin, founder of Coin Bureau, wrote in a post on X. “Creative destruction for the next cycle perhaps.”
Orkun Mahir Kılıç, co-founder and CEO of Chainway Labs, which is building the Bitcoin layer-2 Citrea, said the wave of closures reflects a maturing market where capital is harder to raise and investors are becoming more selective.
“Different businesses have different reasons and different underlying problems for shutting down. The pattern we’re seeing emerge isn’t really an inherent problem within the L2 ecosystem. The market and the tech are maturing, investment is a lot slower and more cautious now, and only projects with sound business models and a clear problem statement will survive,” Mahir Kılıç told CoinDesk.
“The order is intended to preserve identified stolen digital assets while the litigation continues, representing an important step in Bybit’s ongoing efforts to recover funds, support international law enforcement investigations, and reinforce accountability for large-scale cybercrime,” Bybit said in the release.
“Our focus has never changed: protect our users first, recover what we can, and make sure the people behind these attacks are held accountable,” said Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit, in a statement. “The Lazarus attack wasn’t just an attack on Bybit. It was an attack on trust in our industry. That’s why we’ve worked closely with investigators, exchanges, regulators, law enforcement, and now the courts.”
The preliminary injunction means a federal judge ordered the respondents not to transfer or sell the assets they’re holding while the case is ongoing, Bybit said. The exchange added that it will look for further relief from the court.
“The civil action is being pursued independently of ongoing criminal investigations conducted by U.S. law enforcement authorities,” the firm added.
Citadel21, the bitcoin publication run by pseudonymous commentator hodlonaut, also reported that its Lightning node had been swept, though it said little money was held there.
The vulnerability had already been reported to BTCPay by members of the Bitcoin Red Team — a group of developers that began pointing AI models at bitcoin codebases this week and has filed thousands of findings across hundreds of projects since.
Read More: Bitcoin developers flag 85 critical bugs in an “extremely bad” situation.
BTCPay credited Red Team members Craig Raw, Rob Hamilton, Calle and Evan Kaloudis with responsibly disclosing the issue and helping analyze it.
The group’s stated reason for publishing findings quickly was that people outside it would arrive at the same bugs, and by the time BTCPay’s public warning went out, attackers were already exploiting this one against live servers.
Meanwhile, BTCPay narrowed the scope after its initial alert, saying its standard on-chain wallets, including hot wallets generated inside BTCPay, are not affected by the credential flaw.
The exposure applies specifically to deployments using LND, and funds held inside LND’s own on-chain wallet can still be at risk because they sit under the compromised Lightning node.
BTCPay has not yet published technical details of the vulnerability, saying operators need time to patch. A full postmortem is due in the coming days.
Bitcoin mining firm AntPool mined the first non-signaling block, which the rest of the network accepted and BIP-110 nodes rejected, and a miner using Ocean produced the alternative that the breakaway chain followed instead. (A miner is an entity that uses massive computing resources to maintain bitcoin and process its transactions, earning newly issued bitcoin and fees for the work.)
AntPool and Ocean are mining pools, where many operators combine their machines and share the rewards.
The stall has a mechanical cause that is hard to escape. Bitcoin recalculates how difficult mining is every 2,016 blocks, aiming to keep blocks arriving roughly every ten minutes.
The breakaway chain inherited bitcoin’s current setting but has a tiny share of the machines, so its blocks arrive at long intervals. It cannot make mining easier until it completes 2,016 blocks at that pace. The monitor puts that at 350 days away, against 14 days for bitcoin.
BIP-110 Situation Monitor. (Bip110.orange.surf)
Support was never there. Only 2.53% of blocks signaled for BIP-110 over the past two weeks, against the 55% needed to activate it without a split.
That leaves the fork coin in an awkward position for anyone hoping to sell it. Both chains still accept identical transactions, so a signed transaction sending fork coins also works on bitcoin, and a buyer can rebroadcast it there and collect real BTC from the same seller — opening up the chances of a novel attack method that users should keep track of.
Bitcoin will draw trillions of dollars from institutional investors over the next decade as financial advisers, family offices, pension plans and sovereign wealth funds begin to view it as a mainstream financial asset, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan told CoinDesk.
The first professional investors to allocate at scale will be financial advisers and family offices, Hougan said in an email interview on Friday. The shift, said Hougan, is already visible in 13F filings for spot bitcoin ETFs and in moves by large wealth firms, including Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, to make bitcoin more accessible to clients.
Over time, Hougan expects the money to come from even larger pools of capital: foundations, endowments, pension plans, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds and central banks.
“It’s a process that will take 10+ years,” Hougan said.
The scale matters. Those institutions control between $100 trillion and $200 trillion in assets globally, he said. A 1% allocation to bitcoin would be enough to support his long-term price targets.
Bitcoin has reached block 961,632, triggering the long-awaited mandatory signaling period for BIP-110, a controversial proposal designed to temporarily curb non-financial data from being embedded on the network.
The proposal entered the signaling phase at around 19:35 UTC on Saturday, with support from miners seldom exceeding 2.5%, a long way short of the 55% mark required.
Prominent Bitcoin voices such as Strategy chairman Michael Saylor and Blockstream CEO Adam Back have also voiced their opposition to the proposal.
Its supporters, however, are pushing BIP-110 as a user-activated soft fork (UASF), meaning it would rely on node operators, not miners, to force the rule change. Users would update their node software to reject any block from miners that fails to signal support for BIP-110, effectively attempting to coerce miners into line or cut them off entirely.
BIP-110’s proponents maintain there is an historic precedent for this outlook in the 2017 activation of SegWit via BIP-148, which enabled the separation of digital signatures from transaction data and was accepted by users not having the required support from miners.
US Senate Majority Leader John Thune has filed cloture on a motion to take up the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, also known as the CLARITY Act, setting up a key procedural vote on the crypto market structure bill for September.
The vote is expected after the Senate reconvenes on Sept. 15, giving lawmakers several more weeks to resolve disagreements that prevented a deal before the August recess.
The Senate Daily Press confirmed that Thune filed cloture on the motion to bring the CLARITY Act to the Senate floor for consideration. Invoking cloture requires 60 votes, meaning Republicans will need Democratic support to clear the procedural hurdle.
Thune’s move puts the CLARITY Act on a path toward Senate consideration after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement before the August recess. Negotiations have been complicated by disagreements over ethics provisions and rules governing stablecoin rewards, among other issues.
Source: Eleanor Terrett
While the move marks progress for the legislation, it does not guarantee that the CLARITY Act will receive a final vote or pass the Senate. The cloture vote concerns whether to take up the legislation for consideration, rather than passage of the bill itself.
The CLARITY Act is considered a landmark piece of US crypto legislation that would establish a federal market structure for digital assets, clarify when crypto assets fall under securities or commodities laws and delineate oversight responsibilities between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Until now, negotiations have stalled over proposed ethics provisions that would restrict government officials and their families from issuing or profiting from digital assets while in office.
In an effort to break that impasse, lawmakers have been reportedly working on a bipartisan ethics addendum aimed at addressing Democratic concerns over President Donald Trump’s crypto-related financial interests. As Bloomberg reported Thursday, the proposal would require the president to divest from certain crypto-related businesses.
Magazine: CLARITY hopes fade, BitMEX shuts as lawsuit looms: Hodler’s Digest, July 26
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