Bitcoin price climbed above $60,000 on Wednesday, a level the asset had ceded during the last couple weeks of turbulence, after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh told a central bank forum that the threat of persistent inflation had moderated.
The cryptocurrency traded near $60,171 this afternoon, a gain of about 2.7% on the day, with a 24-hour high of $60,474 and a low of $57,718. Trading volume for the session reached $26.68 billion.
Warsh, in remarks at the European Central Bank forum in Sintra, Portugal, said inflation expectations in surveys and bond prices had eased. He paired the observation with a warning that price growth remains too elevated and that the Fed will not accept inflation above its 2 percent target.
“We’re going to deliver price stability,” Warsh said.
Markets read the balance as a tilt toward relief. Bitcoin advanced as U.S. stocks rose and the dollar retreated from a weekly high. A softer dollar tends to lift demand for Bitcoin and other risk assets.
The move offered a reprieve in a hard year. Bitcoin sits about 30% below where it started 2026 and more than $66,000 under its record of $126,277, a slide that has kept the bear-market label in view. Its market value stands near $1.2 trillion.
Strategy (MSTR) and Strive (ASST) jump over 10% at times in intraday trading
Bitcoin treasury companies posted sharper gains. Strategy, the software firm turned Bitcoin holder under Michael Saylor, rose close to 7.5% on the day — with highs of 13% during the day. Strive jumped more than 10% at times to $12.02.
Both trade as leveraged proxies for Bitcoin, and their swings tend to exceed those of the coin. Strive has spent 2026 building a treasury that now tops 16,000 BTC, and the stock has climbed more than 100% across three months.
Earlier this week, Strategy released a new Digital Credit Capital Framework that raised the dividend on its STRC preferred shares to 12%, authorized up to $2 billion in share buybacks, and created a bitcoin monetization program allowing limited BTC sales for specific corporate purposes.
The company also established a $2.55 billion U.S. dollar reserve to cover preferred dividends and debt interest, with board rules requiring at least 12 months of coverage at all times. Strategy said any bitcoin sales would be limited to replenishing reserves, funding dividends and interest when preferable to issuing equity, or financing stock buybacks, while reaffirming bitcoin as its primary treasury asset.
Theo has invested $20 million in Fidelity International’s USD Digital Liquidity Fund through Sygnum Bank, adding FILQ to its onchain Treasury product thBILL.
The move makes Theo the first crypto-native platform to access Fidelity International’s tokenized fund offering.
Theo has invested US$20 million in Fidelity International’s USD Digital Liquidity Fund. With this investment, the onchain capital markets platform becomes the first crypto-native investor in the asset manager’s tokenized fund offering.
The investment was executed through Sygnum Bank and supported by Chainlink’s data and orchestration standards.
The move adds Fidelity International’s FILQ fund to Theo’s institutional tokenized Treasury product, thBILL.
This also expands the product beyondits existing exposure to ULTRA, a tokenized Treasury strategy managed by Wellington Management and FundBridge Capital and tokenized by Libeara.
FILQ is Fidelity International’s first tokenized product and is built on Sygnum’s Desygnate platform. The fund gives professional and institutional investors exposure to yield from regulated, highly rated government securities while keeping the instrument usable across onchain workflows.
The fund received an Aaa-mf rating from Moody’s.
Sygnum said Moody’s described the product as having “a very strong ability” to meet its objectives of capital preservation and high liquidity. The product is intended for professional and institutional investors through Sygnum and is subject to regulatory requirements in selected jurisdictions.
The integration matters because tokenized Treasury products are moving from proof-of-concept experiments into a more competitive institutional market.
Tokenized U.S. Treasury products now represent a multi-billion-dollar category, covering Treasury bills, bonds and Treasury-focused money market funds. RWA.xyz data shows $14.6 billion in distributed value across 84 tokenized Treasury assets, with 63,994 holders till July 1 2026.
RWA.xyz data shows $14.6 billion in distributed value across 84 tokenized Treasury assets, with 63,994 holders till July 1 2026. Image Source: RWA.xyz
For crypto-native firms, the appeal is straightforward.
Stablecoins offer instant settlement and broad onchain utility, but they generally do not pass yield to holders. FILQ is positioned differently: it combines money-market-fund-like yield exposure with the programmability and 24/7 usability expected in digital asset markets.
That is the gap Theo is trying to fill with thBILL.
By holding FILQ inside thBILL, Theo makes a traditional liquidity fund usable in onchain treasury, collateral, reporting and liquidity workflows. The aim is not just to tokenize fund units, but to make them functional inside crypto-native market structure.
Arijit Pingle, Co-CEO of Theo, said FILQ is “the strongest institutional foundation we’ve put under thBILL, and the first time a crypto-native platform has accessed Fidelity International’s tokenized fund offering.”
“The breadth of Fidelity International’s expertise across global fixed income makes this exactly the kind of institutional foundation our product was built for — accessible 24/7 onchain,” Pingle said.
The Fidelity allocation also gives Theo a second major asset-management relationship inside thBILL.
In December, Theo and Stable committed more than $100 million to ULTRA, a tokenized U.S. Treasury strategy managed by Wellington Management and FundBridge Capital. ULTRA uses Libeara’s tokenization infrastructure, while Standard Chartered provides custody for the underlying portfolio.
That makes thBILL a crypto-native Treasury product backed by exposure to funds linked to two large traditional asset managers.
The combination reflects a broader shift in tokenization: crypto firms are no longer only building synthetic yield products or lending pools. They are increasingly trying to plug regulated money-market and Treasury funds into digital asset rails.
Chainlink’s role is central to that design.
The company brings FILQ’s NAV and distribution data onchain through the Chainlink Runtime Environment. Sygnum’s earlier work with Fidelity International and Chainlink focused on bringing NAV data onchain for tokenized assets, a function the firms described as important for transparency, accessibility and historical data availability.
In the FILQ structure, J.P. Morgan provides daily NAV data that is received and approved before being made available onchain.
That data layer is important because tokenized funds need reliable pricing if they are to be used in collateral, treasury management and settlement workflows. Without trusted NAV data, the token may exist onchain but remain difficult to use in institutional risk systems.
Emma Pecenicic, Head of Digital Assets Distribution at Fidelity International, said tokenisation is “a foundational shift in how global financial markets will function.”
“By combining long-standing investment expertise with digital-native infrastructure, we are helping to enable regulated, institutional-grade liquidity on-chain for markets that operate around the clock, bringing new utility to onchain investors like Theo,” Pecenicic said.
The development comes as major financial institutions push deeper into blockchain-based settlement and tokenized funds.
J.P. Morgan, BlackRock, BNY and Franklin Templeton are among the large financial firms expanding work around tokenized funds, deposits and blockchain-based settlement. The U.S. Treasury market remains one of the largest and most systemically important markets globally, which is why tokenized Treasury products have become an early focus for institutional blockchain adoption.
Still, tokenization is not the same as liquidity.
A tokenized fund can offer faster settlement, better programmability and broader distribution, but its usefulness depends on investor access, regulatory permissions, pricing transparency and redemption mechanics.
Sygnum says FILQ supports 24/7 subscriptions and redemptions after onboarding, with near-instant settlement during market hours and liquidity facilities outside those hours, though transactions may be queued or subject to fees depending on conditions.
That distinction is important for institutions.
The market is moving toward always-on capital markets, but the underlying assets still sit inside regulated fund, custody and administration structures. The winners will likely be products that can combine blockchain settlement with institutional safeguards, rather than simply putting traditional assets onchain.
Fatmire Bekiri, Head of Tokenization at Sygnum, said the bank’s infrastructure was designed “to bridge institutional-grade assets and onchain markets.”
“Seeing FILQ back thBILL is a strong validation of the institutional-grade infrastructure emerging onchain,” Bekiri said.
The transaction gives thBILL a stronger claim to institutional-grade backing.
Moreover, it shows how tokenized Treasuries are becoming a bridge between crypto liquidity and traditional asset management — a space where Fidelity International, Wellington, Standard Chartered, Sygnum and Chainlink are now part of the same operating stack.
Johann Eid, Chief Business Officer at Chainlink Labs, said bringing secure NAV and distribution data onchain allows FILQ to be integrated into Theo’s thBILL workflows.
“We’re excited to accelerate the future where all the world’s value is tokenized onchain and powering 24/7 markets,” Eid said.
The above article “Theo Adds Fidelity’s FILQ to thBILL in Tokenized Treasury Push” was first published on AlexaBlockchain. Read the complete article here: https://alexablockchain.com/theo-adds-fidelitys-filq-to-thbill/
Read Also: Polygon’s 5,000 TPS Upgrade Could Make Stablecoin Payments Viable for Payroll, Remittances and B2B Settlement
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Crédit Agricole (ACA), France’s second-largest bank by assets, unveiled a euro-pegged stablecoin, a rival to offerings from smaller peer Société Générale (GLE) and Circle Internet (CRCL) in a market that’s also targeted by Qivalis, a group of 37 European banks that plans to introduce its own contender later this year.
The coin, EURO eXchange Token (EURXT), is pegged 1:1 to the euro and complies with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, according to a post on the website of its asset servicing unit, Caceis Bank, which is issuing the token. It has already been used to settle a subscription into a tokenized Amundi money market fund.
There are 20 million EURXT in circulation on Ethereum, backed 1:1 by euro reserves held by Caceis Bank. The compares with about 378 million of Circle’s EURC and 124 million of SocGen’s EURCV.
ESMA itself said in a February statement that firms with derivatives marketed as “perpetual futures” are likely to fall under the existing product-intervention measures on contracts for difference (CFDs). The commercial name, ESMA said, is irrelevant. Even voluntary negative-balance protection does not alter the analysis. If a perp meets the CFD definition, all CFD rules apply: leverage limits, a mandatory risk warning, margin close-out, negative balance protection and a ban on trading incentives. Those restrictions are a heavy burden on licensed derivatives providers in Europe.
The offshore market is teeming with sharks
A European investor can open an account at Hyperliquid, the largest decentralized perp trading platform, and take Bitcoin exposure with 50x leverage. Other platforms, like Aster, offer up to 200x leverage on bitcoin. Neither platform is authorized under MiCA or the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), which covers derivatives trading in the EU. There’s no loss limit that the EU can enforce, no key information document, no bonus ban, and no close-out rule, and they’re available to anyone with a self-custody wallet and a few minutes of free time.
And without those protections, retail investors almost always lose: when ESMA and national regulators reviewed the data in 2018, 74% to 89% of retail investment accounts lose money on CFDs across EU jurisdictions, with average losses per client ranging from €1,600 to €29,000.
Cloudflare opened a waitlist for its Monetization Gateway on Wednesday, letting customers charge for web pages, datasets, APIs or MCP tools with payments settling in stablecoins over the x402 protocol. Will Papper, formerly of Syndicate, joined the company as product manager for Agent Payments to lead the effort.
Cloudflare opened a waitlist Wednesday for its Monetization Gateway, a new tool letting customers charge for any web page, dataset, API or MCP tool sitting behind its network. Payments settle in stablecoins over the x402 protocol.
The announcement came from Cloudflare’s official X account Wednesday morning. Cloudflare, which says it handles roughly a fifth of global Internet traffic, is building on x402 through the x402 Foundation, the standards group the Linux Foundation launched in April.
Agent-Driven Web Traffic
Cloudflare pitched the product around AI agents replacing human visitors as the web’s dominant traffic source, arguing that shift makes per-seat and subscription pricing a poor fit for machine-to-machine transactions, since an agent reads a page or calls an API once rather than maintaining a monthly account. The same agent-traffic surge is what pushed rival infrastructure providers toward per-request billing over the past year.
The Monetization Gateway gives site operators a single control plane to set payment policies and enforce them at Cloudflare’s network edge, before a request reaches the origin server. It is Cloudflare’s answer to a problem stablecoin rails have targeted for over a year: collecting sub-cent payments cheaply enough that the transaction cost does not exceed the payment itself.
Papper Joins From Syndicate
Will Papper announced on X that he has joined Cloudflare as product manager for Agent Payments, tasked with building payment tooling on stablecoin rails, with the Monetization Gateway as the team’s first product. Papper spent the prior five years at Syndicate, a blockchain scaling and developer-tooling startup that wound down operations in June alongside two other crypto infrastructure projects.
Amazon Web Services took a similar step in June, plugging Coinbase’s version of the x402 protocol into CloudFront and letting publishers charge AI agents per request in USDC. Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway applies the same pay-per-request model across its own network of customer sites, APIs and MCP tools.
Industry Reaction
Circle co-founder Jeremy Allaire called it “a big win for data providers and publishers,” saying it expands agentic monetization through x402 and USDC. Spark co-founder Sam MacPherson predicted stablecoin payments will drive the next market cycle, while Polygon Labs Chief Technology Officer Mudit Gupta asked which blockchains Cloudflare will support at launch, a detail the company has not yet disclosed publicly.
Cloudflare has not published pricing or a waitlist-to-launch timeline for the Monetization Gateway.
“A MiCA license is not something you can buy because you have money and power,” he said. “It is making sure every process is fully transparent.”
Still, Fazel acknowledged the new rules will be hardest on startups because obtaining and maintaining a license requires significant capital.
“If there’s one segment I feel bad for, it’s startups,” he said. “Innovation may suffer for companies that don’t have enough capital.”
A level playing field
For licensed exchanges, another question remains: whether regulators can enforce the new rules against firms operating outside the European Union.
Lin Han, founder and CEO of Gate Group, said licensed exchanges have spent years preparing for MiCA, but the framework only works if everyone follows it.
“Everybody needs to follow the rule,” Han said. “Then we can compete on better service for users.”
The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has said firms serving EU clients without MiCA authorization are breaching EU law and should stop offering those services. It has also warned firms not to rely on “reverse solicitation” to continue serving European customers and has encouraged measures such as geo-blocking to prevent access.
Han questioned whether regulators have the resources to prevent unlicensed platforms from continuing to operate from overseas.
Manny Rutinel, a Democratic candidate running to represent Colorado’s 8th congressional district, has won his party’s primary and will head to the November election after being supported by a crypto-aligned political action committee (PAC).
Early on Wednesday, Rutinel reported that he would be the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 8th district, having won with 61.7% of the vote against Shannon Bird’s 33.6%. Before the primary, the You Can Push Back Super PAC, backed by $3.5 million from Ripple Labs co-founder Chris Larsen, reportedly spent $1 million on media to support Rutinel’s run.
The Colorado Democrat has a “strongly supports crypto” rating from the Coinbase-affiliated Stand With Crypto organization, based on his answers to questions about stablecoins, market structure and regulatory clarity. Coinbase is also a major contributor to the Fairshake PAC, which supports what it considers “pro-crypto” Democratic and Republican candidates for Congress.
Source: Stand With Crypto
On Tuesday, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen reported that the cryptocurrency industry had spent about $189 million so far on contributions to influence the 2026 US elections, largely through PACs. In what some experts say is the industry repeating its 2024 strategy, crypto-aligned groups are expected to continue spending to elect what they consider “pro-crypto” politicians.
Related: Senate leaders push for July passage of CLARITY Act
Cointelegraph reached out to a spokesperson for You Can Push Back but did not receive an immediate response.
Poll shows Americans think crypto has too much influence in Washington, DC
A new poll commissioned by Americans for Financial Reform released on Wednesday showed that a majority of Americans are concerned about the influence the crypto industry has on US lawmakers. The results followed financial disclosures showing that US President Donald Trump profited by more than $1.4 billion from his crypto investments.
“Voters have seen serious crypto corruption and high ranking government officials raking in profits while everyday people experience crypto-fueled losses and scams,” said Mark Hays, the associate director of crypto and fintech at Americans for Financial Reform. “Voters want crypto to have to play by the same kinds of rules as other financial companies, not dictate special privileges for itself.”
White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said on Tuesday that neither Trump nor his family “has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest.”
Among the poll’s results included a majority of Democrats, Republicans and Independents being concerned about crypto-related laws being influenced by donations from those in the industry. Americans for Financial Reform concluded that voters were likely to agree that the crypto industry needs sensible regulation.
Magazine: The end of anonymity? AI could unmask crypto’s hidden identities
Erik Voorhees’ privacy-first AI platform Venice landed a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion equity valuation, its first outside capital, after hitting profitability in Q1.
Venice, a privacy-first AI platform founded by Erik Voorhees, raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion equity valuation in a round led by Dragonfly. It is the company’s first outside capital since launching.
Voorhees announced the round Wednesday morning, saying Venice hit profitability in the first quarter and has become, by revenue, the largest company at the intersection of AI and cryptoeconomics. TechCrunch reported the raise makes Venice a unicorn. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called Venice “important infrastructure for freedom.”
Equity Over Token
Venice chose to sell equity rather than tap its treasury of VVV, the platform’s native token, which is up 11.6% over the past 24 hours to $13.80, according to CoinGecko. Voorhees said the company holds more than 30 million of the roughly 80 million VVV in circulation and has not sold any tokens to date.
Series A investors received 8.98% of the company, a vesting grant of 1.5 million VVV, and an option to buy another 5 million VVV over the next eight years. Exercising that option would require investors to pay Venice an additional $66.5 million, bringing total potential proceeds to $131.5 million.
Funding the Buildout
Venice plans to use the capital to build out its own datacenters, the first time the company will own compute infrastructure rather than renting it. Voorhees said the move ensures capacity in a coming resource squeeze and increases gross margins, making room for larger revenue-funded token burns.
The rest will go toward customer growth, new markets, acquisitions and hiring as Venice pushes to become, in Voorhees’ words, “the port city for agentic civilization.”
Any VVV granted or optioned to investors is locked for a year and unlocks linearly over three additional years, meaning tokens would not reach the market until roughly two years after Venice’s token launch. Voorhees said the resulting supply release, if the full warrant is exercised, would run just under 6,000 VVV per day, about 0.2% of current daily trading volume.
The deal caps an 18-month run in which VVV traded openly before Venice brought in outside capital, a sequencing Voorhees framed as the reverse of the typical pre-sale model used by most crypto projects.
To support its case, the report highlighted Ethereum’s technical track record, noting that the network has maintained uninterrupted uptime since launching in 2015. Citing a recent OpenZeppelin report, the foundation said Ethereum was secured by roughly $76 billion worth of staked ETH as of March 2026, while emphasizing its geographically distributed validator network, multiple independent client implementations and large developer ecosystem.
Beyond technical metrics, the report framed Ethereum as digital public infrastructure rather than simply a financial network. It pointed to existing deployments, including decentralized identity initiatives in Bhutan and Buenos Aires and Ethereum-based land registry projects in India, as examples of governments already experimenting with the technology.
The publication comes as governments around the world increasingly explore blockchain-based infrastructure for identity, asset tokenization and public records. The Ethereum Foundation said policymakers should distinguish between decentralized public blockchains and networks that remain controlled by corporations or foundations, arguing that governance structures will play a critical role in determining which platforms are suitable for long-term public sector use.
Read more: Ethereum gets a new nonprofit focused on institutional adoption
Its launch comes as Ethereum’s support ecosystem undergoes a broader evolution, following the debut of EthLabs and amid ongoing efforts by the Ethereum Foundation to respond to community criticism over transparency, communication and its role within the ecosystem by encouraging more independent organizations to take the lead on adoption and ecosystem growth.
Vivek Raman, CEO of Etherealize, said on X that Ethereum Institutional is another example of Ethereum’s decentralized model in action.
“Ethereum is not built by or run by a single organization,” Raman wrote. “Ethereum is a network of independent nodes that collectively make the infrastructure inevitable. Ethereum Institutional will play a key role in amplifying and growing Ethereum. Could not be more excited for this launch.”
Joe Andrews, CEO of privacy developer firm Aztec Labs, told CoinDesk that the launch reflects the continued decentralization of Ethereum’s support ecosystem rather than the emergence of a single voice.
“Over the last two weeks, the Ethereum community has further added to the decentralisation of the network,” he said. “There are now three non-profits all advocating for adoption of Ethereum. It is natural that one of these entities is focusing on institutions, as the world needs a global settlement layer and Ethereum is the only credible option.”
