Cryptopolitan

Samsung Electronics unveiled the successful development of its Universal Flash Storage 5.0 (UFS 5.0), offering sequential read speeds up to 10.8 GB/s, the fastest recorded in this standard.
The product is being released amid increased AI workload migration from cloud data centers to edge devices, making it increasingly necessary for the storage systems to become a potential performance bottleneck for on-device inference.
This comes in when the KOSPI Index of South Korea experienced an almost 10% drop on Tuesday due to the selling off of key semiconductor and technology stocks amid weak US tech stocks. The index declined by 910.71 points, representing a fall of 9.99% to end at 8,203.84 having initially risen above 9,175 levels in volatile trading.
It was the fourth time this year and the tenth time ever that trading was suspended in the market. Key firms recorded significant declines in the market, including Samsung Electronics by 12.31%, SK Hynix by 12.47%, Hyundai Motor by 12.05% and LG Energy Solution by 6.1%.
Samsung speeds up local AI
According to Samsung’s report, the sequential read and write speeds offered by UFS 5.0 are twice those offered by UFS 4.1 available in today’s flagship smartphones. In particular, sequential write performance can hit 9.5 GB/s.
The throughput of storage systems is important for large language models because when run locally, these models have to be loaded from flash to DRAM for inference, making bandwidth an important limitation.
This can be explained with the help of a simple numerical illustration. Loading the 7-billion parameter model which otherwise requires 4-5 GB of space in a 4-bit configuration, will take 0.98 seconds with a speed of 4.6 GB per second in the case of UFS 4.1. On the other hand, it will take 0.42 seconds for UFS 5.0 to do the job. This marks a decrease in time by about 57%, without even accounting for any system overhead or thermal limitations.
Storage does the heavy lifting
Performance of on-device AI is increasingly being determined by data movement through memory rather than just computational capabilities alone.
Usually, during inference, model parameters are stored in UFS storage, loaded into the DRAM, and computed by the system-on-chip (SoC). With the increasing size of models, the storage bandwidth limits the responsiveness of the system.
Samsung reaches the maximum throughput of the HS-GEAR6 protocol, which was introduced as part of MIPI M-PHY 6.0 and incorporated into the UFS 5.0 stack. The interface provides up to 46.6 Gbps for each lane, meaning 10.8 GB/s per dual-lane interface.
Participants in the industry seem to be on track for the same performance. KIOXIA started shipment of 512GB UFS 5.0 samples and prepares to launch 1TB models, indicating that the mobile storage sector is slowly adopting a common platform that offers faster and AI-capable memory solutions.
Semiconductor rally meets a sharp pullback in Korean equities
This comes at a time when South Korea’s semiconductor-laden stock market is experiencing sharp swings. Specifically, on June 23, the KOSPI experienced an overall selloff led by tech stocks, where Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix fell double-digits as foreign funds sold off crowded AI trades.
It is following a robust rally for several months in semiconductors driven by AI demand. The two tech giants had reached a valuation of more than $1 trillion each, driven by strong prices of memory used in AI accelerator chips and data center hardware.
SK Hynix had even managed to beat Samsung Electronics to become South Korea’s most valuable listed firm due to its exposure to the HBM production chain to Nvidia and hyperscale cloud providers.
This illustrates how the KOSPI index has become very concentrated, especially on semiconductor stocks, whose weight in the index increases the effect of rapid changes in positioning in AI trades globally.
Foreign flows and valuation pressures affect Korean chip stocks
There has been reduced foreign investor interest in technology stocks in South Korea in recent trading sessions, with the selloff happening particularly in large semiconductor firms.
The two largest semiconductor firms, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix, are currently seeing their share prices fall in tandem with the overall market index as rebalancing occurs after the surge caused by AI technology.
The correction in prices is seen not as a result of any specific trigger but rather a reduction in a speculative hot AI trade for underperformers which valuation looks good.
Both the increase in prices of semiconductor stocks as well as their drop can be largely attributed to foreign inflows. The previously heavy selling in semiconductor firms led to large intraday moves in the KOSPI, especially when the sentiment in the technology stocks was negative globally.
Nonetheless, despite the recent move in prices, the fundamentals of the semiconductor industry are in sync with those required by AI infrastructure, with SK Hynix benefiting from its capabilities in high-bandwidth memory used in AI training, while Samsung has exposure to DRAM, NAND, and packaging.
At the same time, sentiment has turned cautious after the protracted rise in AI shares, with the upside in valuations now being questioned by market participants. The macro conditions, which feature an increase in bond yields in the U.S., as well as a rotation away from growth shares, have further added to the pressures, resulting in a simultaneous drop in Asia-based semiconductor indices.
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RBCH, the biggest external investor in Solana treasury firm Solmate Infrastructure, has filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court accusing the company’s board and officers of fiduciary breaches, self dealing, and making misleading statements to shareholders.
The complaint targets Solmate’s current directors and officers. RBCH is affiliated with Viktor Fischer, the founder and CEO of RockawayX, who holds ~22.74% of Brera Holdings, Solmate’s parent company, after leading a $300 million PIPE investment in September 2025 with an additional $50 million commitment.
What the complaint alleges
The lawsuit claims that board members sold their own shares while other investors remained locked up, unable to trade. Insiders, such as Sade and Maimon, sold shares above $33 each on the same day the PIPE closed in September 2025, generating over $1.6 million, while PIPE investors, such as RBCH, were still locked up.
According to RBCH, the board authorized advisory agreements that distributed benefits to individuals who were affiliated with directors.
Ron Sade and Keren Maimon, directors, acquired ~2.298 million. Existing shareholders were diluted by ~20% as a result of the transaction, which involved the issuance of Class B shares at $4.97 each, according to the complaint. The purchase is classified by RBCH as an unlawful self dealing transaction.
Days later, Forward, a treasury firm owned by Solana, proposed to acquire Brera for $7.19 per share, a 30% premium to the market price at the time. The board declined the offer without subjecting it to a shareholder vote.
Solmate’s stock has cratered
The lawsuit arrives amid steep losses for Solmate investors. The company’s stock has fallen by ~78% since the start of 2026. Solana itself has dropped about 50% over the same stretch, meaning Solmate’s decline has outpaced the underlying asset it was built to hold by a wide margin.
At present, around 2 million SOL tokens are in Solmate’s possession. The firm is currently operating as a Solana treasury company under its parent, Brera Holdings. This structure is designed to ensure that the firm’s equity valuation is closely tied to Solana’s price performance.
The Solana ecosystem continues to grow in other areas. The network leads all blockchains in tokenized real-world asset (RWA) holders with ~286,000 wallets as of mid June, according to Cryptopolitan’s reporting on RWA.xyz data. That growth has not insulated Solmate from its governance troubles.
The case will play out in the New York State Supreme Court, with an annual general meeting set for June 26, adding urgency to the proceedings.
RBCH is seeking emergency injunctive relief, disgorgement of improper compensation, and rescission of Sade and Maimon’s share offering — and is pushing to block the two directors from voting their newly issued shares at the upcoming meeting.
Neither Solmate nor its directors have publicly responded to the complaint.
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THORChain announced that it has resumed full operations as of today, June 23. The restart came after an 11-stage, 39-day security overhaul project that started after $10.7 million was stolen from the protocol in a May 1 hack.
As of this report, THORChain swaps, liquidity provider actions, and cross-chain signing infrastructure have formally reopened.
THORChain first went dark as part of the emergency response to a May 15 security incident, where an exploiter infiltrated the protocol by posing as a node operator two days before they exploited a flaw in THORChain’s GG20 threshold signature scheme.
THORChain returns after major overhaul
THORChain’s DeFi metrics thinned out during the downtime period. The DEX’s total value locked (TVL) is currently around $53 million, down from over $80 million on May 15, the day the hack was reported. At its March 2024 peak, the protocol held over $500 million.
THORChain will be attempting to stage a recovery after restarting its network on June 25. Source: Defillama
News of the protocol restart did not immediately translate to any real action for the RUNE token,which is trading near $0.42 per CoinMarketCap data, with a market capitalization just above $141 million. The token dropped more than 21% in the days after the May 15 breach and has yet to recover.
Post-recovery, THORChain will now refocus on items that it already committed to on its privacy roadmap.
One of them is Native Monero swaps, which the team says are fully functional in testing and close to a mainnet launch.
The Zcash support timeline is less straightforward as it is contingent on THORChain’s confidence in Zcash’s recovery after a critical vulnerability was discovered in its Orchard shielded pool in late May, as Cryptopolitan previously reported.
Why did THORChain shut down for 39 days?
THORChain went into emergency shutdown after suffering losses that THORChain’s incident report estimated at $10.7 million.
THORChain’s recovery did not follow the typical route of issuing a patch to fix the vulnerability that was exploited. Instead, developers came up with version 3.19.0 update after a multi-week process, introducing new multi-party computation security patches and a KeyVerify protocol that checks the integrity of every node’s cryptographic keyshare before vault churning can proceed.
Other non-technical matters had to be decided in the meantime too. On May 22, node operators voted on the ADR-028 governance proposal to decide how the protocol would absorb the $10.7 million loss.
The proposed resolution was that protocol liquidity would cover the gap first. Synthetic asset holders will make up the difference by bearing the uncovered losses.
The churn itself began on June 21, retiring old vaults and standing up fresh ones, according to THORChain’s eighth incident update.
THORChain’s unwanted reputation with crypto hacks
With the latest episode, THORChain has lost close to $25 million to thefts since 2021. In a September 2025 Cryptopolitan report, THORChain’s co-founder’s personal wallet was suspected to have been hacked for $1.2 million in a DPRK-linked operation.
There are also the billions in hack dollars that flow through the THORChain mixer, locking the protocol’s status as a regular feature in the biggest crypto incidents. The Bybit hackers, who stole $1.5 billion in 2025, used the protocol’s cross-chain swap mechanics. THORChain also entered the mix when KelpDAO lost $300 million earlier in the year. However, THORChain has resisted the pressure to block such transactions, referring to how its censorship-resistance stance does not shift on a case-by-case basis.
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The dollar index (DXY) hit 101 on June 23, marking the highest level seen since May last year. The reason for why it’s climbing matters a lot for crypto. Rather than a pure safe-haven bid due to the situation in the Middle East, this rise could be the indication that the Federal Reserve is finished cutting and could start hiking again.
Bitcoin felt the pinch right away. The latest news coming out of the Fed on future interest rate decisions have resulted in BTC slipping below the $63K region and now trading below $62.5K. The DXY tracks the greenback against a basket of major currencies, and a move to 101 reverses most of last year’s weakness in one stretch.
Analysts and traders have been looking at the dollar’s strength based on what’s happening with regards to the Iran-US conflict. The U.S. and Iran are moving toward a 60-day ceasefire agreement wherein talks will proceed to reach a final deal between the two sides. The price of crude has fallen sharply to around $76, a level not seen since early March. The energy shock that rattled markets across the globe is dissipating.
What’s happening now is that the dollar is going up even as fears around the war ease. If the bid had really been about Iran, the opposite should have happened. Strip out the geopolitics and what’s left is rate expectations, and those have turned sharply hawkish.
Nine Fed Officials Now See a Hike Under Warsh
The tone around future interest rate projections in the Fed has changed dramatically under new chair Kevin Warsh. Nine out of nineteen officials now see this year having at least one rate hike on the cards. May inflation came in at 4.2%, more than double the 2% target, and that figure is carrying a lot of weight in the latest projections.
The odds of a hike sit at 70.3% by September, 78.3% by October, and 86.1% by December. Not long ago the debate was about how many cuts were coming. Now it’s about how many hikes.
Source: CME Group
Dollar Strength Hits Bitcoin Hardest When It’s About Rates
Bitcoin is priced in dollars, so a stronger dollar makes BTC more expensive for anyone holding euros, yen, or won. A rising dollar also tends to signal tighter liquidity and higher yields, which pulls money toward cash and Treasuries and away from assets that throw off no income.
That inverse link is loose most of the time. It gets much tighter in one specific case, which is when the dollar is climbing on rate expectations instead of fear. That’s the exact setup now. The dollar isn’t rising because investors are scared. It’s rising because they think money is about to get more expensive, and that’s the version of dollar strength Bitcoin handles worst.
ETF Outflows Are Doing Real Damage
Spot Bitcoin ETFs have flipped from tailwind to drag. Bitcoin spot ETFs have now registered seven consecutive weeks of outflows according to data from SoSoValue. Since the week of May 15, $6.01 billion have flowed out of Bitcoin Spot ETFs. The same products that helped BTC with the ascent to new highs are now speeding up the downturn, and redemptions at that scale force selling regardless of where conviction sits.
Source: SoSoValue
For BTC, a close above the $62K zone is the level to watch which also aligns with the 200-week simple moving average. Almost everything lining up against it right now traces back to one source, a Fed the market suddenly believes is about to tighten. The bull case needs that conviction to crack first.
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Following the sharp crash of its native token, CoinUP, a Singaporean-headquartered crypto exchange has stated that it is exploring legal actions after posts emerged on social media linking it to Zhu Pan, a controversial figure associated with past fraud allegations in China’s crypto scene.
The exchange published two statements on X on June 23 and a detailed notice on its help center within hours of each other, seeking to distance itself from Zhu Pan and explain the CPX token sell-off.
However, the damage control effort clashed with allegations from Binance co-founder He Yi, who publicly accused Zhu Pan of carrying out an impersonation scam targeting both her and Tron founder Justin Sun.
What is CoinUp’s explanation of the events?
CoinUp, in its help center announcement, linked the CPX price drop to “concentrated selling pressure on the market side” and said the actual cause was undergoing investigation.
The platform also said that it has completed a security review and found no hacker attack, data breach, or system vulnerability. According to the notice, deposits, withdrawals, and trading remained operational, and user assets were unaffected.
On allegations linking Zhu Pan to the exchange, CoinUp stated that he “is not a member of the CoinUp team and is not involved in CoinUp’s core business management.”
According to CoinUp, Zhu Pan is a project owner associated with one of the projects launched on its platform.
The exchange also stated in a different post on X that it has observed inaccurate and misleading information spreading across certain media outlets and social platforms and signaled it was considering legal remedies.
What are the allegations against Zhu Pan?
Crypto commentator Web3老吴 made a post on X on June 22 that alleged that Zhu Pan previously ran the ZJLT project in 2018, where he raised hundreds of millions of yuan before the token went to zero.
The post alleged that CoinUp employed similar tactics, including mode-based dividend schemes and lockup mechanisms to trap user funds.
He Yi, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Service Officer of Binance, also lent her voice in the matter, writing, “Spread the word. Zhu Pan once impersonated someone else to try and scam me, but failed. He also impersonated me to scam Brother Sun.”
In a follow-up post, Yi added that Zhu Pan had used AI-generated content to impersonate prominent families in China and Hong Kong, as well as major crypto exchanges, to carry out scams.
She also warned that there is a WeChat account that is currently impersonating Binance founder CZ.
What remains unclear
The scale of the CPX price decline or the volume of the selling activity has not been shared by CoinUp.
The exchange’s promise to publish investigation results “at the earliest opportunity” leaves open the question of whether the concentrated selling came from insiders, a single large holder, or coordinated market manipulation.
In a press release that was shared in March, CoinUp reported that it recorded $3 billion in average daily trading volume and a $3 billion reserve fund.
CoinUp said at the time that its reserves had passed a Proof of Reserves audit by CER.
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Open source AI startup Reflection AI will pay SpaceX $150 million per month for computing capacity at the Colossus 2 data center, gaining immediate access to Nvidia’s latest AI hardware in a deal that could run through 2029.
The agreement represents one of the largest infrastructure commitments by an open weight AI lab to date. Payments begin July 1, 2026, and either party can walk away with 90 days’ notice after the first three months.
Reflection AI locks in Colossus 2 access
Reflection will get access to Nvidia (NVDA) GB300 chips, the hardware used to train and run frontier AI models, housed at SpaceX’s Colossus 2 facility near Memphis, Tennessee.
If the contract runs its full term through 2029, total payments would reach ~$6.3 billion, according to reports from CNBC and Reuters.
“More compute gives us more room to push the frontier on open models,” the Nvidia-backed startup said in a LinkedIn post.
The price tag is smaller than what SpaceX’s other computing tenants are paying. Anthropic’s arrangement costs $1.25 billion per month, while Google agreed earlier this month to pay $920 million monthly from October through June 2029, with reduced fees during a ramp up period.
All three contracts have the same end date and cancellation terms, though Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, has played down the three year terms by focusing on the exit clauses.
Two former Google DeepMind researchers started Reflection AI in 2024. The company offers a different option compared to closed labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, which are on the cutting edge of AI technology. Open weight models make their learned parameters available so developers and governments can inspect and change them, and use them independently.
The U.S. government recently banned Anthropic’s closed models Fable and Mythos, pushing more organizations to reconsider their reliance on proprietary AI systems.
SpaceX’s data center pivot
Colossus was built by Musk’s AI company xAI, which is now part of SpaceX, to power its own Grok chatbot. The company decided to turn extra hardware into a steady source of income and started renting its chips to outside labs.
The Reflection contract adds to a growing roster of tenants. Beyond Anthropic and Google, SpaceX has also struck a deal with Cursor, the AI coding tool it is currently in the process of acquiring.
SpaceX shares (SPCX) fell about 16.43% yesterday and closed trading at $154.60 acoording to Google Finance data.
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MiniMax is set to experience its first-ever share unlock on July 9 following its IPO. The company is an AI startup based in China that has more than doubled its value relative to its Hong Kong debut last January. Its two major strategic investors, namely Alibaba and miHoYo, claimed that they will not sell any shares, based on a report from Cai Lian She (Financial Associated Press) on June 22.
The pledge came at a time when China’s AI industry is growing rapidly and garnering funding that would be inconceivable just two years ago. MiniMax currently has an estimated user base of 300 million worldwide and more than one million enterprise developers. The decision by two of China’s biggest technology companies to hold their stakes in MiniMax instead of cashing out after a 400% surge highlights growing confidence in homegrown AI infrastructure and the long-term potential of China’s domestic AI ecosystem.
What the Minimax lock-up entails
The July 9 unlock relates to the restrictions placed on shares of pre-IPO shareholders whose lock-up periods end on the same day. The MiniMax founders took the initiative of locking up their shares for 12 months, double the required period, meaning that their shares and those held by employees will still be under restriction, Cai Lian She says.
According to Cai Lian She, Alibaba viewed its holding of the company’s shares as an opportunity to leverage the wider revolution in which artificial general intelligence (AGI) is expected to play. It said that it planned to enhance its cooperation with MiniMax in cloud computing and enterprise services. According to miHoYo, a Shanghai-headquartered video game developer behind Genshin Impact, AGI represents “the most important technology force of the next decade” and said its investment thesis aligns with MiniMax’s full-stack approach to multimodal AI.
China’s AI edge: speed, scale, cost
From the disclosures made by Minimax, the comments made by the founder quoted by Chinese media, and reports from Reuters on the growth strategy of the company, China’s strengths in relation to AI research and development lie in three main areas, which include speed, scale, and cost.
Speed. China’s AI firms are focusing on quickly launching products and commercializing them. According to comments made by the founder of MiniMax, the company is keen to maintain its pace of developing models and deploying products. The company has assured investors of quick expansion and diversification of its products following a strong 2025 revenue growth.
Scale. China’s AI developers enjoy the benefit of having large user bases domestically and a wide range of application ecosystems. MiniMax has expressed ambitions of becoming an AI platform firm globally and has diversified from foundation models to applications, including Talkie and Hailuo AI, as well as products for enterprises in order to test and monetize products at scale. Reuters has also observed that Chinese firms are competing fiercely with firms like DeepSeek and Zhipu in a fast-growing domestic market.
Cost. Reductions in the cost of inference and deployment have become a critical competitive theme among Chinese model builders. MiniMax has emphasized efficiency-oriented architectures and open models that promise lower computing costs, while Chinese AI firms in general have positioned themselves to provide high-performance systems at a lower cost than those from leading Western competitors.
Third-party analyses have highlighted MiniMax’s pricing advantage, with one comparison estimating M2.5 input costs at $0.15 per million tokens versus roughly $5 per million tokens for Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6. Several technology publications reported that MiniMax’s M1 training run cost only about $534,700, far below estimates for training GPT-4-class models. One article characterized this as “200 times lower” than GPT-4o’s estimated training cost.
Dual listing and the STAR Market strategy
MiniMax does not intend to stop at Hong Kong. According to Reuters, MiniMax submitted an A-share listing prospectus with the Shanghai securities authorities on May 29, with CITIC Securities as its sponsor, for listing in the STAR Market. By listing both in Hong Kong and on the mainland, MiniMax will be able to reach mainland Chinese investors, who traditionally assign a premium to tech stocks compared with those listed in Hong Kong.
MiniMax is racing Zhipu AI for the distinction of becoming the first major Chinese large language model company on the A-share market, according to Nikkei Asia. Both companies face the heavy capital expenditure demands of staying competitive in the AI race, Nikkei noted, which makes access to domestic capital markets a strategic priority rather than a vanity exercise.
Cryptopolitan has previously reported on how China’s regulatory environment, once seen as a constraint on its tech sector, has shifted toward actively supporting AI development. The STAR Market’s role as a destination for AI listings reflects that pivot.
What to watch?
MiniMax introduced its next-generation flagship model, M3, with a one-million-token context window and native multimodal abilities in early June 2026, as per Cai Lian She. The firm continues to be loss-making, with a net loss of $1.87 billion in 2025, but most of it was due to changes in the value of financial assets and not due to operating cash burn, as per Reuters.
The July 9 unlock will prove the investors’ belief or disbelief regarding Alibaba and miHoYo’s confidence. Annual recurring revenue of more than $300 million on a valuation of $33 billion means the price/revenue ratio is more than 100x, as per CryptoBriefing. It will be interesting to see how fast/slow the STAR Market application can be processed by Chinese authorities.
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韓国の暗号取引所は、地元ニュースで報告されたデータによると、従来の銀行よりも多くのクロスボーダー送金を処理しています。
韓国の五大ウォン建て暗号通貨取引所は、昨年に163.55兆ウォン（1258億ドル）のクロスボーダー送金を記録し、2022年の34.02兆ウォンから380%の増加を遂げました。
なぜ銀行は暗号企業に投資しているの？
2022年から2025年にかけて、韓国の五大銀行は外国通貨送金量を20%しか増やさず、159兆ウォンに達しました。同じ期間に、韓国の暗号取引所は163.55兆ウォン（1258億ドル）のクロスボーダー送金を処理しました。これは、2022年の34.02兆ウォンからの380%の増加です。

ロシア政府は、国内の人工知能の開発を規制し支援する新しい法案にゴーサインを出しました。
国内のAIソリューションを促進することを目的としたこの法律は、他のニューラルネットワークの使用や外国データを使ったローカルモデルのトレーニングを禁止するものではありません。
ロシアは人工知能を規制しようとしています
ロシアで人工知能（AI）の開発を促進するための法案を監視する政府委員会が承認されました。

リップルは、ルクセンブルクの金融監視委員会（CSSF）がEUのクリプトアセットに関する市場規制（MiCA）の下での予備的なCASP承認を付与するグリーンライトレターを発行したと発表しました。ただし、この承認は仮のものであり、未解決の最終条件を満たすことが条件となります。
リップルはすでにルクセンブルクでEMIライセンスを取得しており、この追加のマイルストーンにより、リップルは規制されたクリプトアセットサービスを欧州経済領域（EEA）の他の金融機関や企業に拡大することが可能になります。

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders at the White House on June 22, flanked by the presidents of Google and IBM. The two executive orders cement what the administration is calling the most ambitious quantum technology agenda in U.S. history.
One executive order pushes to deliver a scientifically relevant quantum computer by 2028. The second one moves the federal post-quantum cryptography deadline from 2035 to December 2031.
The White House posted the signing on X, framing it as a landmark step in the global race against China.
Michael Kratsios expounds on the executive orders
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, laid out the agenda on X shortly after the announcement. According to Kratsios, the Department of Energy will build the first quantum computer powerful enough for scientific discovery by 2028. He also mentioned that the federal agencies will deploy quantum sensors and networks within five years, and the FBI will lead a new effort to shield quantum research and intellectual property from foreign espionage.
“We’re now at the moment where a lot of that research is starting to pay off into commercial applications — and what this Executive Order will do will turbocharge that,”
– Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
The first, Executive Order 14411 titled “Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation,” is an investment and development directive. The EO establishes the Quantum Computer for Application Development and Discovery Science initiative. It also tasks Commerce with expanding federal investment in private quantum firms following the $2 billion in equity stakes announced in May. Finally, the Executive Order also establishes five-year deployment plans for sensing and networking technologies.
The second, Executive Order 14409 titled “Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks,” is where the crypto industry’s attention should be concentrated. It accelerates the federal government’s migration to post-quantum cryptography by four years. The EO also moves the deadline from 2035 to December 2031, and directs NIST to complete a pilot migration of federal systems by December 2027.
As per the Executive Orders, agency heads have 30 days to designate a post-quantum cryptography migration lead. Federal contractors also face new procurement rules requiring the use of NIST-standard post-quantum algorithms by the end of 2030.
Bitcoin and Ethereum brace for the quantum era
Bitcoin and most major cryptocurrencies rely on elliptic curve cryptography to prove wallet ownership and authorize transactions. Analysts argue that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could, in principle, derive a private key from a public key already visible on-chain.
Coinbase’s Independent Advisory Board on Quantum Computing and Blockchain warned earlier this month that approximately 7 million BTC sit in addresses that are already exposed. The board included the Satoshi-era wallets, where public keys are visible. They also flagged currently active cold wallets run by exchanges as part of the addresses already exposed.
Google has set its own internal deadline of 2029 to adopt post-quantum cryptography. Similarly, the federal government just moved its own target to 2031 following President Trump’s executive orders.
As a security measure, Bitcoin developers have already proposed BIP-360 and BIP-361. The first introduces quantum-resistant Bitcoin addresses, while the second would eventually freeze coins held in vulnerable legacy addresses if their owners fail to migrate.
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The Starknet Foundation, in collaboration with RareSkills, has published a free e-book on advanced smart contract development on Starknet using the Cairo programming language.
Most code is written by agents instead of by hand. However, to manage coding agents effectively, developers must
Understand the design space afforded by the Starknet blockchain.
Be able to quickly read code the agents produce.
Write strong testing frameworks to prevent bugs from being introduced
Starknet offers stronger support for features such as account abstraction, batched transactions, and smart contract upgradeability compared to other solutions. Starknet also provides a strong developer tooling with Starknet Foundry.
However, if developers are unaware of the expanded design space Starknet offers, they might unintentionally copy outdated design patterns that they used previously. They might also miss opportunities to significantly improve end-user UX.
AI is a productivity tool, not a substitute for domain knowledge. Thus, the e-book goes beyond code examples and explains what happens “behind the scenes,” helping developers build a cohesive mental model of how their code interacts with the Starknet blockchain. This makes learning more engaging than memorizing a list of features.
“Our team did a fantastic job creating this e-book, which spans over 50,000 words. The team went above and beyond, even turning dry technical diagrams into animated schematics that convey the same information with less burden for the reader. I’m also grateful to the reviewers who built applications based on the provided resource to really tease out any aspects of the book that weren’t completely clear and compelling,” said Jeffrey Scholz, the founder of RareSkills.
“Rareskills did such a good job with their deep dive into Starknet’s technology that at the end, instead of reviewing the content, I ended up learning from it,” said David Barreto a Developer Advocate at the Starknet Foundation
The Starknet Foundation stewards the growth and development of the Starknet ecosystem by providing the tools, resources, and support needed to create transformative solutions that drive the adoption of a reinvented digital world.
RareSkills is a leading education provider for blockchain developers, with a focus on serving senior engineers, smart contract auditors, and CTOs. RareSkills provides numerous free learning resources for blockchain developers, and a coaching program for busy engineering professionals looking to carve out time for effective technical upskilling.
The learning resource can be accessed here: RareSkills.io/cairo-tutorial

議員たちは、デジタルドルの議論を法案に進め、CBDCに対して4年間の禁止を加えた上院通過の住宅負担軽減パッケージを作成しましたが、米国の仮想通貨に関する具体的な計画はありません。
法案の要約や委員会のリリースによると、この法案は連邦準備制度が「一般市民に広く提供される」中央銀行デジタル通貨を発行、作成、または間接的に配布することを、少なくとも2030年12月31日まで防ぐことになります。
EUや中国のCBDCフレームワークを米国が模倣するのを防ぐために、GOPの政治家たちはこの概念に対抗し、国家監視の侵入的なツールと位置付けています。

Baillie Gifford, a 118-year-old fund manager overseeing approximately £286 billion, has launched the Enhanced Yield Fund, marketed under the ticker BAGEY. The fund entered into a partnership with custody giant BNY to launch BAGEY, which will run entirely on the blockchain.
The enhanced yield fund is now the UK’s first fully tokenized investment fund, and unlike most “tokenized” products that just slap a digital wrapper on a traditional structure, this one is supposed to live entirely onchain.
The fund is structured as a UK-regulated Open-Ended Investment Company denominated in dollars and invested in an actively managed portfolio of short-term corporate bonds.
According to the fund manager, BNY will handle tokenization and wallet plumbing, while NatWest Trustee and Depositary Services will handle depositary duties. Investors can expect a yield of around 7%. The fund is currently limited to qualified investors in the UK, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands.
Baillie Gifford fronts BAGEY as the real tokenization
Theo Golden, head of digital assets and tokenization at Baillie Gifford, contrasted the fund with what most of the industry has been calling “tokenization” so far. He argued that digitizing old infrastructure will not, by itself, improve finance. Golden pointed out that BAGEY offers a structurally different approach, as it runs entirely onchain unlike other “tokenized” funds.
Baillie Gifford pointed out that most tokenized funds in the market are wrappers, as they don’t entirely operate onchain as intended.
Unlike most tokenized funds, BAGEY will run entirely onchain, meaning investors hold the fund directly, with the chain doing the legal bookkeeping rather than just mirroring it.
BNY’s Katey Neate called it proof that tokenization has moved from concept to real-world application. She proposed the fund as a template that other UK fund managers could emulate.
FCA plays catch-up in regulation matters
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority authorized the first tokenized UCITS fund under its “Blueprint” model back in January 2025. The FCA then spent 2025 consulting with the industry on how far public blockchains could go inside existing fund rules.
After consultation, the authority came up with PS26/7, a policy statement published in April, confirming that asset managers can use public DLT networks for fund registers. provided they maintain the appropriate controls.
Shortly after the announcement, the $BAGEY token launched on the Solana network and then on Ethereum.
The Solana token trading under the same $BAGEY ticker has no verified connection to Baillie Gifford’s actual regulated product. However, the creators claimed it launched on Ethereum under FCA oversight.
A token tracker shows the Solana-listed $BAGEY trading at essentially zero price and with around 132 holders.
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元イーサリアム財団の研究者5人が、イーサリアム共同創設者のジョー・ルービンと主要なETHトレジャリー企業のバックアップを受けた、独立した非営利の研究開発企業Ethlabsを立ち上げました。
この立ち上げは、一部のイーサリアムのコアリサーチがイーサリアム財団の外で独立して資金調達された構造に移行していることを示しています。このシフトは、機関資本がさらにオンチェーンに移動するにつれて、ネットワークの進化の仕方を再編成する可能性があります。
6月22日、EthlabsはPR Newswireによると、イーサリアムのインフラを大規模な機関利用に向けて整備する計画を発表しました。資金はBitmine Immersion Technologies、SharpLink、ルービン、そしてAnchorage、Octant、SNZを含む他のエコシステムのバックersから提供されます。Decryptによると、50以上のコミュニティパートナーも支援を約束しています。

Franklin Templeton has now finalized its purchase of crypto investment firm 250 Digital today, effectively creating a standalone crypto division called Franklin Crypto that will offer actively managed digital asset strategies to pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and other large financial allocators.
The transaction, previously announced in April 2026, will bring 250 Digital’s full investment team along, in addition to the liquid cryptocurrency strategies the group ran while operating under CoinFund, according to Franklin Templeton. The investment firm has said it will deploy capital into those strategies via the new unit.
New division Franklin crypto
Christopher Perkins, co-founder of 250 Digital, will take the top role as head of the new division. Seth Ginns, who previously served as 250 Digital’s chief investment officer, will keep this title in Franklin Crypto. Both of these head figures spent years at CoinFund before liquid strategies arm was spun into 250 Digital in January 2026.
Tony Pecore, a veteran of Franklin Templeton’s existing digital assets group, will co-manage the unit. The division will report to Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton’s head of innovation.
CEO Jenny Johnson has explained that the deal will help to fill a gap in the firm’s crypto capabilities. “Together, their investment talent and differentiated strategies strengthen our capabilities in digital assets and position us among a small group of global asset managers with a dedicated, institutional-grade crypto investment management team,” Johnson said.
Franklin Templeton’s crypto strategy
Franklin Templeton manages roughly $1.78 trillion in assets across more than 35 countries. The firm has been building digital asset infrastructure since 2018, although most of this infrastructure was for tokenization and passive products and not active crypto portfolio management.
In February, the company struck a deal with Binance to allow its institutional clients to use tokenized money market fund shares as trading collateral. A March partnership with Ondo Finance also put tokenized ETFs on blockchain networks.
The 250 Digital acquisition, however, adds a different capability, where a team actively trades liquid crypto markets instead of working with passive fund structures.
Data from RWA.xyz shows how quickly Franklin Templeton’s tokenized asset base has grown. The company’s tokenized holdings rose from about $768 million in June 2025 to more than $2.5 billion a year later. The general market for on-chain RWAs has climbed from about $11.8 billion to $32.2 billion over the same period.
One unusual detail: Franklin Templeton used BENJI tokens in the acquisition process. BENJI tokens are a representation of shares related to the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, a regulated money market product recorded on a public blockchain. This makes this purchase one of the first major financial-services acquisitions settled partly with tokenized fund shares and not only with cash or traditional securities.
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IBM partnered with OpenAI to launch a security solution that uses advanced AI models to detect code vulnerabilities and help companies fix them before they become problems.
The two companies are now working together through OpenAI’s Daybreak Cyber Partner Program. IBM’s consulting infrastructure, added to OpenAI’s frontier AI models, helps business clients uncover security issues faster.
According to an IBM news release, the service provides AI analysis that extends beyond typical scanning solutions for organizations with huge codebases.
IBM’s new security tool scans code for flaws
The new offering runs inside client environments with read-only access to code repositories. It analyzes application code, flags areas with potential flaws, and identifies exploitable paths. Organizations can start with targeted evaluations of individual applications and scale up to continuous monitoring as their code evolves.
IBM Consulting Advantage, the company’s AI platform for delivering consulting engagements, powers the security service.
“Attackers are already using AI to probe, exploit, and scale threats at machine speed. Defenders need the same advantage, with the security and control enterprises require,” said Mark Hughes, IBM Consulting’s global managing partner for cybersecurity services.
“…we are collaborating with AI pioneers like IBM to use frontier models to accelerate defensive security workflows and support enterprises, governments, and other organizations as they identify risks,” said Dane Stuckey, OpenAI’s chief information security officer, in the official press release.
IBM commits $5 billion to secure open source software
The application security service builds on Project Lightwell, an initiative IBM launched last month to secure open source software used across enterprise supply chains. IBM and Red Hat have committed $5 billion to fund the project, which deploys engineers and AI tools to patch, validate, and manage open source code.
OpenAI’s models will work alongside other AI systems within Project Lightwell for code review and remediation tasks. IBM has described the initiative as an enterprise security clearinghouse staffed by a global engineering team.
IBM shares jumped 4.6% in after-hours trading, according to Google Finance. The company holds a market capitalization of about $235.7 billion.
IBM has reported revenue growth of close to 10%, and seven analysts have recently raised their earnings estimates for the upcoming period, according to Investing.com.
The US’s Commerce Department is separately expected to allocate $1 billion to IBM as part of a $2 billion quantum computing grant program, Cryptopolitan reported in May.
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Bank of America (BAC) now expects the Fed to raise interest rates three times this year under new Chair Kevin Warsh, with no cut penciled in until 2028.
That is a hard turn from the bank’s view just days ago, when Cryptopolitan reported that its economists had thought the Fed would sit still and tolerate war-driven price pressure from the Iran conflict.
After Kevin’s first meeting, and after another look at inflation, that call got tossed.
The bank now sees 75 basis points of tightening this year, meaning three quarter-point hikes to the Fed benchmark rate.
The reason is simple and ugly: prices are not cooling fast enough. Bank of America expects this week’s core personal consumption expenditures report, the inflation measure the Fed watches most closely, to run at 3.5% from a year earlier.
Warsh keeps the Fed focused on prices as BofA sees three hikes this year
Aditya Bhave, an economist at Bank of America (BAC), said the inflation picture has turned worse. He wrote, “The Fed’s inflation problem has gotten unambiguously worse.” Aditya said the Fed had been ready to tolerate tariffs for a while, but the latest supply shocks have tested that patience.
In addition, he pointed out that rent and housing expenses were among the factors responsible for keeping inflation low, but that period was coming to an end soon. The other core services are stickies, meaning that prices in most parts of the economy are becoming defiant.
The Federal Reserve desires an inflation of 2%. However, the target has not been achieved for the past five years. The price levels went up in 2021 and hit the 40-year high level. At first, it was described as “transitory.” However, inflation continued to be very loud and persistent.
Kevin used his first meeting as chair to talk again and again about price stability, mentioning it about a dozen times. Markets heard him, and traders now price in at least one Fed hike this year, with September seen as the likely month. According to the CME Group (CME) FedWatch indicator, there is also more than a 50% probability that there will be another rate hike in December.
His words at that time were very unlike those which Kevin had expressed prior to his confirmation to the Senate.
Bank of America still left a few doors open. Aditya said a July hike is possible, but the bank thinks the Fed will probably wait for summer data before acting. The Fed could also wait until after the November midterm elections. Aditya did not rule out more than 75 basis points of hikes, but the bank’s current base case has the Fed holding rates steady in 2027 and cutting only in 2028.
Warsh diminishes Fed guidance as markets abandon the old policy playbook
Previous chairmen of the Federal Reserve usually provided markets with enough signals to be prepared before any decision was made. Kevin appears to share more similarities with his predecessor Alan Greenspan, who served as the chairman from 1987 until 2005.
Alan still helped create parts of the modern Fed communication system. During his time, the central bank began releasing statements after meetings to announce rate decisions. It also began publishing meeting minutes and full transcripts after a five-year delay. Congress pushed for some of those changes.
The first post-meeting statement came on Feb. 4, 1994. The Fed raised its key rate for the first time in five years. Investors were not ready. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2.4% that day.
Kevin said a communications task force will review the Fed’s quarterly economic projections. It will also look at newer tools, including press conferences. Ben Bernanke started holding press conferences, but only after every other meeting. Jerome Powell later held them after every meeting.
That is far away from the 1990s, when Alan did not explain Fed decisions to reporters on the record. Kevin could now roll back parts of the system that grew after the 2008 to 2009 global financial crisis.
Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank (DB), said, “This is a big change in how the Fed has conducted itself since the global financial crisis.” Matthew added that the Fed had spent years giving more guidance, more communication, and more transparency, but Kevin has now “put that train in reverse.”
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Nvidia（NASDAQ: NVDA）の株は2026年にまだグリーンだが、2024年と2025年に他のすべての会社や国をアウトパフォームした会社からのトレードはもはやクリーンには見えない。NNDは今年約12%上昇しているが、先月には約3%滑った。
チップ市場の他の部分とのギャップは無視できない。VanEck半導体ETF（NASDAQ: SMH）は2026年に約84%ジャンプし、先月だけで15%追加した。それがMicron（NASDAQ: MU）とSanDisk（NASDAQ: SNDK）の両方を、先月だけでほぼ60%ラリーさせた。