DL News

Robinhood just rolled out crypto services across the European Union, and announced perpetual futures, tokenised stocks, crypto staking in the US, an AI assistant, and its own blockchain during a keynote event in Cannes.

“We have a chance to prove to the world what we’ve believed all along, that crypto is much more than a speculative asset,” said Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s CEO. “It has the potential to become the backbone of the global financial system.”

The news highlights not just Robinhood’s latest foray into the world of digital assets, but also how the wider fintech and traditional finance industries are muscling into the crypto industry.

EU rollout

Having only been available in six nations, the full app will now be available across the EU, the European Economic Area, and the United Kingdom.

The rollout, which is planned for later this summer, comes on the back of Robinhood acquiring its Markets in Crypto-Assets, or MiCA, licence, which allows it to operate in the EU.

That also means that it will be able to roll out services in the region that aren’t available in the US, such as perpetual futures.

The company also announced the rollout of tokenised US stocks and exchange-traded funds in the EU, something Tenev has argued for for months in opinion pieces, interviews, and podcasts.

Stock tokens will initially be issued on Arbitrum. In the future, tokenised stocks will be facilitated by the new Robinhood layer 2 blockchain, based on Arbitrum, which is still under development.

Robinhood also announced that it will launch crypto staking for eligible US customers, starting with Ethereum and Solana. It will also be available in the EU.

Robinhood also announced an AI-powered investing assistant called Cortex for Crypto, which will be made available later this year.

Cortex will be available for Robinhood Gold members, enabling them to see curated insights, trends, and analysis.

Fintech creep

Robinhood is not alone in pushing into crypto.

Both traditional players such as Morgan Stanley, which owns the E*Trade platform, and fintech powerhouses like Revolut are ratcheting up their digital asset businesses.

At the same time, Kraken and other crypto stalwarts are going the other way by tapping into traditional financial services like stock trading, which has been high on the likes of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s wishlist for years.

The news came just hours after Kraken also announced a rollout of tokenised US equities.

“For the first time, people all over the world can own and use a share of a tokenised stock like they would use money,” Arjun Sethi, Kraken co-CEO, said in a statement. “You can move it, hold it, spend it or borrow against it. All from your wallet, with no intermediaries, no borders and no delays.”

And more may come, with banking giants JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo reportedly exploring the launch of their own stablecoins.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ interim managing editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].

A version of this story appeared in our The Guidance newsletter on June 30. Sign up here.

Hi! Ed here.

Before last week, it’s safe to say few in crypto had ever heard of William Pulte. But now the onetime housing industry investor has become a hot topic in digital assets.

On June 25, Pulte, the director of US Federal Housing Finance Agency, said the two government-sponsored mortgage guarantors — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are poised to permit cryptocurrencies to be used as criteria in assessing the risk of home buyers.

“Today I ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare their businesses to count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage,” Pulte posted on X.

In other words, if a prospective buyer is sitting on a bunch of Bitcoin, that should be counted as an asset and potentially improve their chances of approval.

The move, of course, is consistent with Donald Trump’s embrace of the crypto industry as a new fixture in finance.

The US president, who is personally profiting from a raft of Trump-branded crypto businesses, has vowed to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet.”

Yet Pulte’s decision raises the stakes considerably.

Unlike a Bitcoin strategic reserve or even stablecoin legislation, modifying asset criteria in the housing market goes right to the heart of the US economy.

The US housing market is worth $50 trillion, which is about the same as the combined GDP of the US, China, and Germany. Americans’ homes are their No. 1 source of wealth.

In addition, home loans comprise more than $11 trillion in mortgage-backed bonds, which are a massive market for investors.

Messing with the calculus of risk in the housing market is itself a rather risky proposition. The global financial crash of 2008, after all, was triggered by Wall Street’s disregard for the perils of subprime mortgages, and Washington’s failure to watchdog the market.

It’s little wonder then that Pulte’s embrace of cryptocurrencies, one of the most volatile asset classes on the planet, raised alarms among analysts.

“Price volatility, custody security, and regulatory clarity are non-negotiables,” Lamine Brahimi, a co-founder of Taurus, a digital asset custody firm, told DL News’ Tim Craig.

Ever since Fannie Mae was founded during the Great Depression in 1938, the government has played a vital role in steadying the mortgage market by acquiring mortgage bonds.

Messing with this carefully calibrated system, which is driven by trust as much as mathematical risk-reward ratios, is definitely cause for concern, Sean Tuffy, a financial regulation expert, told DL News last week.

“A lot will depend on what the actual crypto underwriting guidance looks like.”

To be sure, Pulte directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “prepare a proposal” for the consideration of cryptocurrencies, so this could very well turn out to be nothing but a trial balloon.

Still, just raising the possibility of changing the risk metrics of the mortgage market is bound to roil banks, home builders, insurers, and of course, home buyers themselves.

If nothing else, everyone in crypto will now know who Pulte is.

ICYMI

Ripple drops appeal to ‘close the chapter’ on SEC suit, XRP price ticks higherFirst, Judge Analisa Torres rejected Ripple’s, and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s joint request to dissolve the firm’s permanent injunction and cut its penalty to $50 million. One day later, Ripple dropped its appeal and accepted a $125 million fine.

Trump administration’s nod to crypto-backed mortgages raises alarms and applause in ‘defining moment’“There’s definitely reasons to be concerned”,” Sean Tuffy, a financial regulation expert, told DL News about Pulte’s ploy for mortgages to be backed by cryptocurrencies.

Hackers already bagged a record $2.1bn in stolen crypto this year, says TRM LabsDespite money spent on audits, war rooms, and white-hat bounties, cybercriminals still ransacked the crypto industry for $2.1 billion in the first half of 2025.

Story of the Week

Monero-only hacker IntelBroker caught after accepting Bitcoin from FBI

US authorities have arrested a British cybercrime suspect accused of selling stolen data from major US firms — by convincing him to accept payment in Bitcoin.

Post of the Week

Judge Torres’ rejection of Ripple and the SEC’s attempt to lower the fine spurred some saucy comments from those in the regulatory community who are less than pleased about the agency’s more pro-crypto bent under new Chair Paul Atkins.

“The SEC made the unprecedented decision to reverse course on pending litigation. And today their leadership got a taste of what their hubris, incompetence, and crypto fealty results in.”

Corey Frayer, former senior adviser at the SEC.

Edward Robinson is the story editor for DL News. Contact the author at [email protected].

Bitcoin traders are cranking up the speculative fervour and piling into bullish bets on its price.

CryptoQuant’s buy-sell ratio on Deribit, which measures the intensity of buying and selling activity in the market, hit a record high for 2025. This high indicates big-money derivatives traders are aggressively positioning for a Bitcoin price spike.

Bettors on Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction market, put the odds of Bitcoin hitting an all-time high before October at 85%.

The bullishness comes as Bitcoin is likely to hit $125,000 “in the next few weeks” as the de-escalating geopolitical backdrop is likely to incentivise investors to bet on risk-on assets like cryptocurrencies, according to David Brickell, head of international distribution at FRNT Financial, and former forex trader Chris Mills’ Monday newsletter.

“The walls of worry have been climbed,” they said. “This is not a time to be sidelined.”

They said that the quarter-end liquidity crunch that contributed to Bitcoin’s price lull in the latter half of June is expected to ease, and they anticipate Bitcoin will “catch up” as liquidity returns to the market.

To be sure, not everyone is equally bullish on Bitcoin’s price. In fact, there’s been a marked decline in buying interest in Bitcoin, according to CryptoQuant.

Short-term holders, who are typically the primary drivers of sustained price rallies, have offloaded $85.6 billion worth of Bitcoin since May. These traders booked profits as Bitcoin rose to $110,000.

With spot demand drying up, there’s a real risk that Bitcoin could slide below the six-figure threshold, according to analysts at B2BINPay, the crypto business payment provider.

On June 25, they told DL News that a “reasonable scenario” of the selling pressure would be Bitcoin slumping to as low as $91,300.

And Bitcoin perpetual traders are taking that bet. Perpetuals are futures contracts without expiration dates.

There are twice as many traders who have entered bearish short positions on Bitcoin compared to bullish long bets, according to data from CoinGlass.

There’s also the potential for a slight market wobble on July 9 when US President Donald Trump’s tariff hike pause expires.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin is down by 0.5% over the past 24 hours and is at $107,627.

Ethereum is up slightly over the same period and is at $2,466.

What we’re reading

Bitcoin treasury bug bites UK firms chasing share price boosts ― DL News

AI Crypto Tokens Swoon as Nvidia Reaches a New All-Time High ― Unchained

ETH, dead? Lol — Milk Road

Bakkt Files to Raise $1 Billion for Bitcoin and Crypto Treasury Push ― Unchained

Coinbase storms S&P 500 ranks with record debut as best-performing stock ― DL News

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at [email protected].

Circle shares will ride the inbound stablecoin boom to a near 30% increase over the next year, a $785 billion wealth manager predicts.

On Monday, Bernstein analysts gave the company’s stock CRCL a $230 price target, arguing that the firm’s prime position as the first publicly traded stablecoin issuer in the US will give it an advantage as stablecoins become mainstream.

“CRCL is a long-term must-hold as a stablecoin category leader and for investors wanting to be exposed to Circle’s long-term transformative payments’ story,” Gautam Chhugani and two other Bernstein analysts wrote.

The bullish call follows a blockbuster initial public offering, as well as US policymakers moving closer to passing landmark stablecoin legislation that would give companies like Circle a clearer path to mainstream growth.

The upshot?

The stablecoin supply is expected to increase by almost 1,500% over the next decade and reach $4 trillion as digital dollars move beyond crypto trading and into payments, remittances, and tokenised finance, Bernstein predicted.

IPO gains

Circle went public on June 5. Shares initially surged sevenfold to a price of nearly $265 in the weeks following their debut on the New York Stock Exchange. It now trades at $180.

Circle’s market cap has surged over 600% since its IPO to more than $40 billion.

It drew attention from analysts and market commentators, including CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who praised the business but cautioned that the valuation has become overheated.

“Circle’s a solid company, but the stock has gotten too hot for me,” Cramer said in June. “You’ll get a better opportunity simply by being patient.”

Despite Cramer’s concerns, Bernstein sees further room for gains as Circle capitalises on its early-mover advantage in stablecoins.

The analysts highlighted the company’s deep liquidity, regulatory head start, and partnerships with major platforms like Coinbase and Binance as competitive advantages that will be “hard to replicate.”

Bernstein projects that Circle will capture around 30% of the global stablecoin market.

Regulatory boon

Part of that growth hinges on the political momentum behind stablecoin regulation in the US.

The Genius Act, which sets new rules for dollar-backed stablecoins, passed with bipartisan support earlier this month and is now awaiting a vote in the House.

If enacted, the bill could pave the way for the broader adoption of regulated stablecoins such as USDC, marking a shift that crypto leaders have called a “once-in-a-generation platform change.”

Bernstein’s analysts described Circle as “best positioned” to benefit from that regulatory tailwind, though they noted that risks remain.

The company’s reliance on float income from USDC reserves means future revenue could face pressure from falling interest rates.

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected]

Bitcoin treasury fever is spreading.

A growing number of companies, big and small, have begun to pile Bitcoin up on their balance sheets. The trend started with US software group Strategy, which has spent nearly five years stacking up over $64 billion worth of the top cryptocurrency.

The playbook has gone global and includes companies from Japan’s Metaplanet to Trump Media and GameStop in the US.

Now, a handful of London’s microcaps are jumping in.

A wave of UK-listed companies, many on London’s Aquis Exchange, have unveiled Bitcoin treasury strategies in recent months.

AI services group Tao Alpha plans to raise £100 million to expand its Bitcoin holdings, according to the Financial Times. The news sent its shares up over 1,200%, though much of that rally unwound just a week later.

Website design firm The Smarter Web Company saw its valuation balloon from just £4 million to over £1 billion within weeks of revealing its own Bitcoin pivot in April.

Even precious metals miners like Bluebird Mining are getting in on the act, raising £2 million in debt to begin building a Bitcoin reserve.

The company describes its strategy as “converting gold into digital gold” by funnelling revenue from its mining projects into Bitcoin. Shares are now trading nearly 400% higher than they were a month ago.

The risks

But analysts warn the strategy carries risks.

For companies like Strategy, the approach works as long as their share price trades above the value of the Bitcoin they hold, known as the “net asset value.”

That premium allows it to issue new shares and use the cash to buy more Bitcoin. But once the share price falls to match NAV, that engine stalls.

“Once you’re trading at net asset value, shareholder dilution is no longer strategic, it’s erosion,” warned Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets at VanEck.

Smaller, newer treasury companies face an even tougher road. Without a strong track record or market reputation, they may have to rely on riskier debt or face steeper terms when raising money.

If Bitcoin’s price drops or market confidence fades, those companies could be forced to sell their Bitcoin at a loss to stay afloat.

US-listed Semler Scientific has already run into trouble after its share prices tumbled this year, cutting off access to fresh capital and limiting its ability to grow its Bitcoin reserves.

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].

Coinbase’s S&P 500 debut couldn’t have gone much better.

Shares of the crypto exchange surged nearly 43% in June, ending its first full month in the index as its best-performing stock.

COIN hit a fresh all-time high of just under $380 on Thursday, capping a record-breaking run driven by growing institutional demand and optimism over regulatory tailwinds.

“Our institutional team is crushing it,” CEO Brian Armstrong wrote on Saturday, pointing to two figures from the company’s latest quarterly business review.

Eight of the top ten publicly traded companies holding Bitcoin use Coinbase Prime for custody, and 81% of the $140 billion in crypto assets held in US exchange-traded funds are stored with Coinbase.

But Wall Street still seems slow to catch on, at least according to analysts at Bernstein.

In a note to investors on Wednesday, the firm called Coinbase the “most misunderstood” company in crypto and predicted a hefty stock surge once investors recognise its broader role as a crypto infrastructure provider, not just a trading platform.

Bernstein set a price target of $510, implying another 45% upside from current levels of around $350.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin is even on the day and trading at $107,470.

Ethereum has gained 0.8% over the past 24 hours and is trading at $2,440.

What we’re reading

Ripple drops appeal to ‘close the chapter’ on SEC suit, XRP price ticks higher — DL News

AI Crypto Tokens Swoon as Nvidia Reaches a New All-Time High — Unchained

We’ve reached a macro turning point — Milk Road

Vitalik Buterin floats alternative to Worldcoin-esque global identities — DL News

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected]

A digital identity system is the next logical step for a world that’s moving deeper into the online age.

Deciding how that system works and who controls it is far less straightforward.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argues that the answer isn’t a single global solution like World, formerly Worldcoin, but a more fragmented, ‘pluralistic’ model that gives users choice and protects against overreach.

In a new blog post, Buterin unpacks the rising popularity of the ‘one-per-person identity’ systems, where each user holds a single verifiable ID designed to prove they are human without revealing sensitive personal details.

World, which uses biometric scans combined with zero-knowledge proofs to issue World IDs, is the most prominent example, boasting over 26 million users globally.

While these systems promise greater privacy and protection against bots or manipulation, Buterin warns that enforcing a one-ID-per-person model carries its own risks, particularly for online freedom.

“In the real world, pseudonymity generally requires having multiple accounts,” he writes, pointing to the growing concern that universal ID systems could make it harder for people to maintain separate digital personas or participate anonymously online.

“If it’s common knowledge that everyone has only one identity, you can be coerced into revealing it.”

Buterin’s preferred alternative is what he calls pluralistic identity. It’s an ecosystem of overlapping, competing identity systems rather than a single dominant one.

These can be explicit, like social-graph-based IDs where trust comes from your community, or implicit, like the current patchwork of passports, social logins, and other credentials.

This messier approach makes it harder for any government, company, or protocol to monopolise identity or force users into a single traceable profile.

It also better accommodates edge cases, such as people without formal IDs or those unable to participate in biometric schemes.

This comes at a time when projects like World are aggressively expanding, having recently launched in six major US cities and unveiled partnerships with platforms like Visa and Tinder-owner Match Group.

The company pitches its biometric IDs as a way to fight fraud and bots in the age of AI, but regulators in several countries have raised concerns over privacy and surveillance.

Buterin acknowledges that identity solutions are essential for things like fair governance, reducing spam, and providing access to basic online services. But he argues the industry should avoid the temptation to chase neat, universal solutions at the expense of user control and diversity.

“The ideal outcome,” he writes, “is if one-per-person identity systems today merge with social-graph-based identity… at which point there would be enough adoption to safely grow a globally distributed social graph.”

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected]

The judge in Ripple’s case against the Securities and Exchange Commission gave them two options: fight on or walk away.

And less than a day later, Ripple made its choice.

The firm is dropping its cross-appeal in the nearly five-year legal fight, signalling it’s ready to move on after a drawn-out battle over XRP’s status.

CEO Brad Garlinghouse confirmed the decision Friday, adding that the SEC is expected to withdraw its own appeal as well.

“We’re closing this chapter once and for all, and focusing on what’s most important — building the Internet of Value,” Garlinghouse wrote on X.

The move comes after Judge Analisa Torres rejected the parties’ conditional settlement deal, which would have dissolved Ripple’s injunction and reduced its penalty to $50 million.

Torres ruled that neither Ripple nor the SEC had “come close” to justifying the request to alter her final judgment.

If the SEC also drops its appeal, Ripple will end up forking over $125 million in penalties, and the case will be finished.

Bring on the ETFs

ETFStore president Nate Geraci noted that ending the appeals could clear a path for new market products, including spot price XRP exchange-traded funds.

“Closed chapter on this clears way for spot XRP ETF,” he wrote, adding that BlackRock may now be positioned to enter.

Several XRP ETF applications are currently pending before the SEC, with a final decision deadline set for October. Bloomberg ETF analysts put the odds of approval at 95%.

XRP ticked 4.5% higher following the news, and is now trading at $2.20.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin has gained 0.5% in the past 24 hours and is trading at $107,475.

Ethereum is down 0.6% in the same period to $2,425.

What we’re reading

Humanity Protocol token plummets as founder admits network could be up to 88% bots — DL News

AI Crypto Tokens Swoon as Nvidia Reaches a New All-Time High — Unchained

ETH, dead? Lol — Milk Road

Resupply developer donates $1.4m after protocol suffers $9m exploit — DL News

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected]

A developer at Resupply, the stablecoin lending protocol that suffered a $9.3 million exploit earlier this week, has donated $1.4 million of his own money to help pay down the protocol’s bad debt.

C2tP, who made the donation, is a pseudonymous developer for Resupply as well as Convex Finance, an Ethereum-based protocol that boasts more than $1 billion in user deposits.

“C2 just did this from his own pocket,” Winthorpe, one of Resupply’s pseudonymous co-founders, said on Discord, linking onchain records of the donation.

“He didn’t have too and shouldn’t have in my opinion, but it’s the kind of person he is.”

The donation has spurred hope that the protocol could eventually recover and return funds to Resupply’s impacted users.

On Thursday, an attacker used a bug in Resupply’s code to steal funds from the protocol using a $200,000 deposit.

In response, Resupply assured users that only one of the protocol’s liquidity pools had been affected, and funds deposited to other parts of the protocol were still safe.

That didn’t stop users from withdrawing their funds. Resupply’s deposits fell $58 million in the aftermath, to $78 million.

While many Resupply users have praised C2tP’s donation, some stakeholders are also questioning how the project has responded to the exploit.

Mounting criticism

Wang Yishi, founder of crypto hardware wallet Onekey, is one of many users to criticise the protocol team’s response.

He said he deposited “millions” of dollars to Resupply’s insurance pool to earn yield, and disagreed with the protocol’s decision to tap into insurance pool funds to cover the exploit losses.

“There is no DeFi precedent where an insurance pool covers damage from a bug caused by the protocol team,” he said.

An insurance pool is a fund that is set aside by DeFi protocols to cover losses from hacks and exploits.

Michael Egorov, co-founder of decentralised exchange Curve, stepped in to defend Resupply and its developers.

He said the exploit was “not the easiest thing to spot,” and argued that the insurance pool is specifically designed to cover exploit losses.

Resupply partly relies on Curve a decentralised stablecoin exchange, but has no connection to the Curve team. Resupply’s success contributed to the growth of Curve’s stablecoin, crvUSD, and its affiliated lending protocol, LlamaLend.

Resupply said it will release a post-mortem of the exploit as soon as a complete analysis of the situation has been conducted.

Disclaimer: The two co-founders of DL News were previously core contributors to the Curve protocol.

Zachary Rampone is a DeFi correspondent at DL News. Have a tip? Contact him at [email protected].

Despite money spent on audits, war rooms, and white-hat bounties, cybercriminals still ransacked the crypto industry for $2.1 billion in the first half of 2025.

That’s according to TRM Labs, a blockchain forensics company, in a report on Friday.

The losses mark the worst start to any year in crypto’s history and mark a 10% jump from the previous record in 2022.

The vast majority of this year’s figure comes from the $1.4 billion stolen from crypto exchange Bybit by hackers linked to North Korea in February.

Indeed, hacks targeting backend systems to access wallet keys and passwords made up 80% of all crypto thefts over the last six months, according to TRM Labs.

Bleak picture for crypto

In April, crypto exchange Bitget lost $100 million to an infrastructure attack that exposed the private keys of some of its wallets.

The TRM Labs report stated that such attacks were, on average, ten times larger than other attack vectors, including phishing and protocol exploits.

Even excluding the Bybit megahack, the picture seems bleak for crypto security.

Monthly tallies from DefiLlama show that five out of the first six months of the year recorded more than $100 million in losses from hacks and exploits.

Ari Redbord, vice president and global head of policy at TRM Labs, described the situation as emblematic of “persistent and widespread risks” in a note shared with DL News.

Increasingly, these adversaries aren’t lone hackers chasing huge scores, either.

Nation-state groups strike

North Korean hacking syndicates remain the most prolific crypto bandits, and they use the stolen funds to bankroll Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme.

Elsewhere in the world, Gonjeshke Darande, a cyber sabotage group with links to Israel, claimed responsibility for hacking Nobitex, a major Iranian cryptocurrency exchange.

The group made off with $90 million from the exchange.

The Israeli group said the exchange funnelled crypto funds to help Tehran finance its nuclear weapons programme and bypass international sanctions.

Unlike North Korean syndicates like the Lazarus Group, the Nobitex hackers didn’t attempt to launder the syphoned funds. Onchain data show they sent the funds to unspendable vanity addresses, which the hackers didn’t have access to.

The incident occurred amid the recent missile attacks between the two countries

DeFi spirals

DeFi protocols suffered significant losses in the first half of the year, too.

Attacks against DeFi projects often target protocol logic by manipulating oracles or exploiting maths errors in smart contracts.

Cetus, the largest decentralised exchange on Sui, suffered a $220 million exploit in May. The protocol successfully recovered $163 million by counter-hacking the attacker.

Other projects weren’t as lucky.

Protocols like zkLend and Conic Finance recently shut down after failing to recover from devastating fund losses due to malicious exploits.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at [email protected].

Humanity Protocol, a rival to the Sam Altman-backed crypto identity project World, is in trouble.

The project’s newly launched token has plummeted by over 61% since its launch on Wednesday.

That comes as Terrance Kwok, Humanity Protocol’s founder, admitted that the vast majority of the project’s users aren’t real people.

“In terms of Human IDs, there were nine million created, but there were actually quite a lot that were bots,” Kwok said in a leaked conversation with a pseudonymous content creator called Zun on Tuesday. “When you look at the number of people who were actually verified I think it’s approaching a million.”

If Kwok’s numbers are correct, it means roughly 88% of the network’s users aren’t real.

That’s an issue, as Humanity Protocol’s raison d’être is to prevent bots from cropping up on the network.

On the project’s website, it advertises that there are over six million so-called Human IDs on its network.

“Humanity Protocol is growing one human at a time,” the project’s website says under the six million figure.

In the leaked conversation, Kwok suggests the figure is misleading, and Human IDs aren’t so human after all.

Kwok did not immediately return a request for comment.

The reason for the vast number of bots is Humanity Protocol’s airdrop. It planned to give out 1.2 billion tokens in an airdrop to verified users, its Discord community, and stakers for the AI-powered crypto project Kaito.

Token airdrops are a popular way for crypto projects to reward early users.

However, they are often targeted by so-called Sybil attackers, users who mass-create accounts using bots in an attempt to claim an airdrop multiple times.

Palm scans

Humanity Protocol uses biometrics, such as palm scans, to generate unique identities for its users, which are stored on its blockchain.

Users can create Human IDs by linking their crypto wallets and social accounts, but can only unlock exclusive rewards, such as airdrops, by verifying themselves with palm scans.

The idea is to verify users’ identities without creating a vulnerable centralised point of control, Kwok previously told DL News.

In January, the project raised $20 million from venture investors including Pantera Capital and Jump Crypto at a $1.1 billion valuation.

Pantera Capital and Jump Crypto did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Humanity Protocol isn’t Kwok’s first venture.

In 2012, he founded Tink Labs, which in 2016 raised $200 million from investors, including Japan’s SoftBank, for a business that supplied smartphones to hotels.

By 2019, that business had collapsed, vaporising investor capital.

‘Be on our side’

When Humanity Protocol launched the token on Wednesday, many users complained that they had been unfairly excluded from the airdrop.

Others, such as Zun, said the small number of tokens they were set to receive wasn’t fair either.

In the same leaked conversation, Kwok told Zun that many of the Human IDs created using Zun’s referral link were flagged as bots, lowering his allocation of tokens.

Kwok also said he would increase Zun’s allocation of tokens and asked him to inform the Humanity Protocol community about the strategy to combat bots.

“Two things I will do: Number one, we’ll update the allocation; and number two, I want to see if you can help be on our side,” Kwok said.

Zun, who has a following of almost 29,000 followers on X, holds significant influence within the Humanity Protocol community.

After the call, Zun said Humanity Protocol tripled his allocation of tokens. When the token launched, his allocation was worth around $1,050.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at [email protected].

It’s not without reason that Ripple’s has been called “the case that never goes away.”

Nearly five years in, Ripple’s fight with the Securities and Exchange Commission hit another wall as a federal judge rejected the parties’ latest attempt to quietly settle among themselves.

Judge Analisa Torres denied the joint request to dissolve Ripple’s permanent injunction and cut its penalty to $50 million, dismissing the proposal as legally flawed and contrary to the public interest.

That figure is already a steep discount from the $125 million imposed last year, and far below the $1.3 billion the SEC originally sought.

The parties argued that shifting SEC policy and a private settlement agreement justified revisiting certain aspects of the court’s final judgment.

Torres wasn’t convinced.

In her view, nothing had changed that would warrant reversing a decision the court spent years crafting.

“The parties must show exceptional circumstances that outweigh the public interest or the administration of justice,” she wrote in Thursday’s order. “They have not come close to doing so here.”

Industry reactions

The rejection drew comments from Corey Frayer, a former senior adviser at the SEC.

“The SEC made the unprecedented decision to reverse course on pending litigation,” Frayer said. “And today their leadership got a taste of what their hubris, incompetence, and crypto fealty results in.”

He also described the episode as “absolute malpractice” by the agency’s leadership.

Both parties have appeals pending before the Second Circuit.

Ripple’s chief legal officer, Stuart Alderoty, downplayed the setback on social media.

“With this, the ball is back in our court,” he said. “The Court gave us two options: dismiss our appeal challenging the finding on historic institutional sales, or press forward with the appeal. Stay tuned.”

Crypto attorney John Deaton previously put the odds of Judge Torres approving the request at 70%.

But after reading Thursday’s order, he admitted he wasn’t surprised by the outcome.

“Although I believed she would ultimately grant the indicative ruling, I can’t say I’m shocked,” Deaton wrote.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin is down slightly by 0.3% over the past 24 hours, currently trading at $107,000.

Ethereum is down 0.2% over the same period to about $2,445.

What we’re reading

Monero-only hacker IntelBroker caught after accepting Bitcoin from FBI ― DL News

AI Crypto Tokens Swoon as Nvidia Reaches a New All-Time High — Unchained

This altcoin season will be different — Milk Road

Trump administration’s nod to crypto-backed mortgages raises alarms and applause in ‘defining moment’ ― DL News

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected]

The marriage of Wall Street and crypto will push investments into digital asset startups up to $25 billion this year, VCs say.

“We’ll end somewhere in the [$20 billion to $25 billion] range,” Mike Giampapa, general partner at Galaxy Ventures, told DL News.

PitchBook, the investment research firm, shared that optimism and estimated the industry will raise $18 billion in 2025. That would double the $9.6 billion raised in 2024 — an amount the industry has already surpassed this year, according to DefiLlama.

The bullishness comes at a critical juncture for the industry.

After the Biden administration’s crypto crackdown, the sector has found itself in a state of metamorphosis. Having long been relegated to the outskirts of finance, it’s increasingly accepted by Wall Street as a legitimate industry.

Bullish signals

Buoyed by US President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto administration and industry-friendly legislation, bullish signals are on the rise.

Both Bitcoin and altcoins’ prices have reached record highs, stablecoin issuer Circle’s IPO soared to levels not seen since the dotcom boom of the 1990s, fintechs have bought crypto firms, and banks are exploring the launch of their own stablecoins.

But with the lines between crypto and traditional finance beginning to blur, the approach of VCs has changed, investors told DL News. They’ve updated how they judge prospective startups, and shared what it’ll take for the days of 2021, when investors injected $36 billion into the industry, to return.

‘Fundamentals matter — there has to be a proper, real business.’ Jonas Kristensen

The crypto funding boom coincides with a new wave of founders.

In a break from previous cycles, founding teams aren’t dominated by native-crypto members, but also entrepreneurs from other sectors, Wyatt Lonergan, general partner at VanEck Ventures, told DL News.

VanEck Ventures, for instance, has backed teams that include ex-bankers or tech workers at companies like OpenAI who bring blockchain technology into traditional finance and other industries, he said.

They are “starting to tie the tech world and the crypto world together — it’s not its own island anymore,” Lonergan said.

Founders who can demonstrate how to merge those worlds will have an advantage in the funding race, investors said.

Other areas of interest include the cross-pollination of crypto and AI, better user experiences, and innovative crypto-trading platforms.

Key for those firms to get funding, however, is that they can demonstrate the viability of their business. That means investors will look at metrics like revenue, distribution, and active users.

“The general sentiment in 2025 is that fundamentals matter when investing — there has to be a proper, real business,” Jonas Kristensen, head of Wintermute Ventures, told DL News.

The FTX effect

FTX was a gift in disguise, Kristensen said.

To him, the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire and other scandals purged bad actors from the industry and forced crypto companies to level up their compliance credentials.

But it came at a cost. Big investors burnt by the scandals withdrew from crypto to focus on areas like AI that promised greater yield and smaller risk. They’re unlikely to return to crypto any time soon, Giampapa said.

The absence of those big deployers of capital is one of the reasons why investors say they don’t expect funding levels to return to the heights of the last cycle, at least not yet.

Another reason is that limited partners, the investors that invest in VC funds, are also more hesitant to back crypto investments this time around. VCs are betting that those backers will eventually return.

“LPs are smart and where good opportunities are popping up, capital will form,” Giampapa said. “We’re still in a bit of a digestion period before that capital does actually form.”

The scandals also incentivised investors to look for founders willing to disclose holdings and deals akin to how startups in other sectors do.

“We know from history that if you set up a system where it can be gamed and you can hurt people, then people will take advantage of it,” Lonergan said. “There are smart, cutting people out there.”

Finally, the scandals armed anti-crypto firebrands like Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler with fresh ammunition.

According to the investors we spoke with, founders became more hesitant to launch and market crypto businesses out of fear of drawing the SEC’s ire.

They had reason to be worried. During the Gensler year, the agency fired off a barrage of law enforcement actions against crypto companies such as Ripple, Coinbase, and Kraken.

The regulator ended most of those lawsuits after Trump was elected, which encouraged entrepreneurs to explore crypto opportunities more openly, Lonergan said.

“Those shackles are off,” he said.

You’re reading the latest installment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ interim managing editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].

Ripple, the company behind XRP, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies, made waves when it purchased prime broker Hidden Road earlier this year.

It won’t stop there, according to Ripple Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz.

“Our M&A people are very busy,” the executive told DL News in New York.

“We have multiple potential acquisitions in various different stages, from early stages to late stages.”

Ripple is the creator of the XRP Ledger, a blockchain that runs on XRP. The cryptocurrency had a market value of $124 billion Thursday, making it the fourth-largest, behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether’s USDT stablecoin.

The company has been aggressively courting traditional finance, pitching XRP and its new stablecoin, RLUSD, as assets designed to facilitate cross-border payments.

In April, Ripple acquired Hidden Road for $1.25 billion. The crypto firm said it would use RLUSD as a collateral across Hidden Road’s suite of brokerage services.

Previously, Ripple acquired the crypto custody firms Metaco for $250 million and Standard Custody for an undisclosed amount.

In January, a spokesperson told DL News the firm was “actively seeking companies to purchase.”

Crypto M&A

Schwartz said Thursday those efforts are ongoing — and buoyed by a relative lack of interest from titans of traditional finance.

“There’s a unique opportunity right now for cryptocurrency companies to acquire companies that create strategic value, like the Hidden Road acquisition,” he said.

“And we’re definitely aggressively looking for those opportunities, because it seems like Wall Street hasn’t quite caught on yet. … They’re not competing to acquire the companies that could give them a leg up in these spaces.”

Crypto mergers and acquisitions have soared this year. But they have been largely limited to crypto-first companies and fintechs eager to expand crypto offerings to their base of retail traders.

Last month, Coinbase acquired crypto options exchange Deribit in a $2.9 billion cash and stock deal, and Robinhood bought Canadian exchange WonderFi for $250 million Canadian dollars in an all-cash deal.

In March, US-based crypto exchange Kraken acquired NinjaTrader, a retail futures trading platform, for $1.5 billion.

And in January, Circle, the company that issues the USDC stablecoin, bought Hashnote, the world’s largest tokenised treasury fund.

XRP Ledger

Unlike other, more flexible blockchains on which developers are free to deploy virtually any kind of application, the XRP Ledger is tightly controlled and features only a small number of applications — a design choice meant to ensure user funds aren’t siloed across a variety of exchanges and lending platforms, Schwartz said.

Nevertheless, his team is currently working to make it more flexible, or “programmable,” in developer parlance.

“I don’t think you’re going to see, even in the medium term, the full programmability,” he said.

“We like the fact that we have a niche where we have things like concentrated liquidity. But what we’re looking at is, can we get some of the benefits of programmability without the downsides?”

The XRP Ledger could, for example, soon feature smart contracts that manage payments, converting the crypto a payee receives into their preferred digital asset, Schwartz said.

Ripple is also building a lending protocol for the XRP Ledger, set to debut in the the third quarter of the year, pending approval of “validators” who confirm transactions on the blockchain.

“There’ll be somebody offchain, who curates the set of borrowers, who sues them if they don’t repay, or who handles repayment arrangements if they declare bankruptcy or whatever,” Schwartz said.

“And then the ledger can tokenize your interest in the repayments and handle the distribution of the repayment. Which is sort of a nice split between TradFi on the frontend and DeFi on the backend.”

Ripple has made a flurry of announcements in June, including the debut of tokenised treasuries, an institution-friendly decentralised exchange, and a partnership with Wormhole, a so-called crypto bridge that allows for the movement of crypto assets across otherwise incompatible blockchains.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at [email protected].

Resupply, a stablecoin lending protocol, is reeling from an exploit that resulted in the loss of $9.3 million.

Investor deposits on the protocol have dropped to $85 million from $135 million before the incident, according to data from DefiLlama, and the market value of its RSUP token has fallen to $7 million.

The attacker, funded through privacy protocol Tornado Cash, was able to target a bug in the system that allowed them to extract millions from a deposit of about $200,000.

“The attacker exploited a price manipulation bug in the Resupply pair contract,” Meir Dolev, chief technology officer at Cyvers, a blockchain security firm, told DL News.

Pair contracts control how liquidity pools for token pairs on DeFi protocols work. Dolev said the attacker got a huge loan, about $10 million, for very little collateral by exploiting the vulnerability.

“The affected contract has been identified and paused. Only the wstUSR market was impacted and the protocol continues to function as intended,” Resupply said following the incident.

Exploits

2025 has been an especially tough year for crypto-related hacks and exploits. According to DeFiLlama, over $2 billion has been lost in 2025 alone, an increase of more than 50% from last year.

Recent exploits such as zklend and Conic have been catastrophic, as the respective projects have since shut down.

Resupply allows users to lend their crvUSD stablecoins into Curve vaults to earn yield.

“There is no single person from Curve working on that project. It’s a sad incident because they helped crvUSD to grow a little bit,” Curve founder Michael Egorov said about Resupply’s relationship with Curve.

While only its insurance pool got hit in the exploit and there are millions in funds within the protocol, the exploit causes some to question the overall security of the protocol.

“This exploit could have been prevented with proper input validation, oracle checks, and edge-case testing,” Dolev said.

So far, the team has only just acknowledged the situation, stating that it will be releasing a full post-mortem on the situation once a complete analysis has been conducted.

Zachary Rampone is a DeFi correspondent at DL News. Have a tip? Contact him at [email protected]

US authorities have arrested a British cybercrime suspect accused of selling stolen data from major US firms — by convincing him to accept payment in Bitcoin.

Kai West, a 20-year-old cybersecurity student from the UK, was charged in the Southern District of New York this week with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions, wire fraud, and the sale of sensitive personal and corporate data.

Operating under the alias “IntelBroker,” West allegedly led a hacker collective known as CyberN\[------] and posted offers to sell stolen data on dark web forums at least 158 times between 2023 and 2025.

But for all his technical sophistication, West made a single, critical mistake: he agreed to a Bitcoin payment.

According to court documents released on June 25, West had insisted on using Monero — a “privacy coin” designed to obscure transaction details — for all illicit sales.

But in January 2023, an undercover FBI agent persuaded him to accept a $250 payment in Bitcoin in exchange for access credentials — login details connected to a software interface, known as API, the hacker had previously breached.

That payment became the thread that unraveled the operation.

The Bitcoin wallet West provided had been funded via another wallet, which had in turn been seeded by an account at Ramp, platform that covers between fiat money like British pounds and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The platform requires identity verification.

Investigators discovered that the Ramp account was registered to Kai West, using a UK driver’s licence. The same ID had also been used to open a Coinbase account under the alias “Kyle Northern”, which further linked West to the transaction trail.

Unlike Bitcoin, where all transactions are permanently recorded on a public ledger and can be traced with sufficient blockchain analysis, Monero employs cryptographic methods like ring signatures, stealth addresses, and confidential transaction amounts to obscure the sender, recipient, and value involved.

This makes it extremely difficult — even for sophisticated forensic tools — to link transactions to specific individuals or wallets. As a result, Monero has become the preferred medium of exchange in illicit markets where anonymity is paramount.

The European Union is looking to ban crypto assets like Monero’s native cryptocurrency XMR. Several crypto exchanges, including Binance, OKX, and Kraken last year delisted XMR across multiple jurisdictions, which resulted in the cryptocurrency’s low liquidity.

“Regulators need a boogeyman, and Monero is that boogeyman,” Riccardo Spagni, former lead maintainer of Monero, told DL News in November. Bitcoin’s growing acceptance has led regulators to target other cryptocurrencies, Spagni said.

$25m in damages

Investigators traced overlapping IP addresses, email accounts, and even YouTube watch histories to catch the suspect.

West’s personal Google account was found to have watched several videos that were subsequently posted by IntelBroker on the forum Forum-1. His Coinbase and email activity used the same names, IP addresses, and even passwords associated with forum logins.

Despite efforts to present himself as a Russian or Serbian-speaking operator in one media appearance, West was in fact a native English speaker living in the UK and studying cybersecurity at an unnamed university, the FBI said.

Prosecutors allege he used his alias to leak or sell data from telecom providers, healthcare systems, and government-related entities — often attaching samples to boost his reputation among peers.

At one point, he was listed as the “owner” of the now-defunct Forum-1, a dark web marketplace for stolen data, and regularly posted recruitment messages to grow his group. While some datasets were sold for five-figure sums in Monero, others were leaked for free to gain notoriety.

The US Department of Justice said West’s activities had caused an estimated $25 million in damages, with stolen data covering everything from internal corporate marketing documents to the health insurance information of more than 50,000 Americans.

West is expected to appear before a US magistrate judge later this month. If convicted, he faces decades in prison.

The floodgates for altcoin exchange-traded fund filings in the US have burst wide open this year.

And firms aren’t only filing ETFs for the likes of Solana or Cardano; they’re also packaging investment vehicles for weird and wacky memecoins.

There are fund filings for Dogecoin, Bonk, and US President Donald Trump-linked memecoins. But one gassy giant is missing from the lineup: Fartcoin, the seventh-biggest memecoin by market size, just shy of $1 billion.

“I’m surprised we haven’t seen a Fartcoin ETF filed yet,” Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior ETF analyst, said on X, noting that its market value is bigger than memecoin rival Pudgy Penguins, which Cboe filed to launch a dedicated fund for this week.

“Perhaps issuers fear brand damage or are holding fire to not jinx the SEC’s good vibes right now,” Balchunas added.

His musings come as Trump’s pro-crypto stance has opened the floodgates for altcoin ETFs this year.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing more than 70 altcoin ETF applications.

Bitcoin ETFs’ success also drive the altcoin ETFs arms race. Bitcoin ETFs amassed $107 billion in assets under management last year, becoming the most successful launch in history.

The vehicle also broadened the asset’s appeal among institutional investors, which has continued this year even amid economic and geopolitical headwinds.

The FOMO among fund managers appears to be real, given the flurry of altcoin ETF filings as issuers look to leverage the next big narrative now that Bitcoin ETFs have proven institutional hunger for digital assets.

Several altcoin ETF filings are already in the review stage after being publicly acknowledged by the SEC. Last month, the regulator delayed its decision on applications for Doge and XRP ETF proposals.

Fartcoin launched amid the memecoin boom of 2024. It reached a market size of $3.2 billion at the peak of its run.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin is up slightly by 0.3% over the past 24 hours and is at $107,382.

Ethereum is up 1.4% over the same period to about $2,460.

What we’re reading

Bitcoin ETF investors aren’t flinching amid conflict in the Middle East, says analyst ― DL News

DeFi Dev Corp. Launches Dogwifhat Validator ― Unchained

We have a new crypto unicorn — Milk Road

Barclaycard blocks credit card crypto purchases — Finextra

ZKsync’s Airbender Helps Prove Ethereum Blocks in Under 35 Seconds on Single GPU ― Unchained

Why shares of Coinbase, the ‘most misunderstood’ company in crypto, may jump 42% ― DL News

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at [email protected].

Does the average US homebuyer want to back their mortgage with volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum?

Probably not.

Yet William Plute, the newly appointed director of federal housing, brought the idea into focus on Wednesday when he ordered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to consider accepting a borrower’s crypto holdings in their criteria for buying mortgages from banks.

Analysts are digesting the notion, which could introduce a new layer of risk into the financial sector.

“Implementing this responsibly requires robust risk management frameworks,” Lamine Brahimi, a co-founder of Taurus, a digital asset custody firm, told DL News. ”Price volatility, custody security, and regulatory clarity are non-negotiables.”

Despite their increased institutional adoption in recent years, cryptocurrencies are still more volatile and risky compared to traditional assets.

According to a 2024 Fidelity report, Bitcoin has been three to four times more volatile than large cap stock indexes over the past four years.

“There are definitely reasons to be concerned,” Sean Tuffy, a financial regulation expert, told DL News. “A lot will depend on what the actual crypto underwriting guidance looks like.”

A better option?

Crypto-secured mortgages aren’t a new idea. In 2022, Florida-based startup Milo Credit started letting crypto-rich customers put up their Bitcoin and Ethereum for purchases of homes.

For some, borrowing directly against crypto is a better option than cashing out and incurring a hefty tax burden.

Private lenders accepting crypto collateral is one thing.

But Plute’s order, which he said is in keeping with President Donald Trump’s vision to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet,” impacts government-sponsored mortgage buyers.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are vital cogs in the US housing market, which is the number one source of wealth for American households.

If crypto-secured mortgages become common, it threatens to bake the increased risk more deeply into this crucial financial system.

“History has shown that when people start playing fast and loose with mortgage lending standards bad things happen,” Tuffy said.

The move has also rung alarm bells for many in the crypto industry, who compared the idea to the reckless lending practices that brought about the 2008 financial crisis.

These mortgages are solely collateralized with fartcoin and SXP6900? https://t.co/3exxVG2IhW pic.twitter.com/9W9tKmzp3h

— Rob Paone (@crypto_bobby) June 25, 2025

And Bitcoin, after all, was launched in response to that historic crisis.

Questionable quality

There’s also the issue of which cryptocurrencies will be recognised by financial institutions and mortgage brokers.

Plute’s order directs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “to consider only cryptocurrency assets that can be evidenced and stored on a US-regulated centralised exchange.”

That casts a wide net.

While it includes more established crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which benefit from exchange-traded funds issued by financial giants BlackRock and Fidelity, it also includes many more assets of questionable quality.

For example, Coinbase, the biggest US-regulated exchange, has in recent months launched markets for popular memecoins Dogwifhat, Pepe, and Fartcoin.

While unlikely, these volatile joke tokens could theoretically be used to collateralise mortgages under Plute’s order.

Recent guidance from the Securities and Exchange Commission suggests that many cryptocurrencies — including memecoins — shouldn’t be classed as securities.

“If this is the case, then it’s hard to understand why they should be considered as assets for mortgages,” Tuffy said.

‘A defining moment’

Yet recognising crypto as mortgage collateral is also an acknowledgement of the asset class’ widening role in personal and corporate balance sheets, Brahimi said.

After all, asset manager BlackRock recommends a 1-2% allocation in Bitcoin for investors who wish to hold it, and even typically conservative pension schemes are diversifying into crypto.

Not all crypto boosters are against the idea, either.

Strategy chair Michael Saylor called the move “a defining moment for institutional BTC adoption and collateral recognition” in an X post.

“This means over 300,000 mortgage brokers and real estate agents in the USA are about to discover Bitcoin,” Anthony Bassili, head of allocators and tokenisation at Coinbase Institutional, said in an X post.

While it’s still early days, Plute’s order could influence how other governments address crypto’s role in their economies too.

“We expect other jurisdictions to watch this development closely, especially those already advancing digital asset regulation,” Brahimi said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips [email protected].

Missiles are flying. Markets are jittery. Bitcoin ETFs? Still stacking.

As tensions flared between Israel, Iran, and the US over the past two weeks, Bitcoin exchange-traded funds notched 10 consecutive days of inflows, according to data from Ecoinometrics.

That’s not a record-breaking streak. But it’s telling, analysts say.

“Institutional demand for Bitcoin doesn’t flinch easily,” Ecoinometrics said on X on Wednesday.

“The streak is still intact and that sets the stage for Bitcoin’s upside potential to play out.”

A number of market watchers have predicted Bitcoin will soon surpass its all-time high of about $111,000. Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets at UK-based Standard Chartered, sees $120,000 per coin by July. Arthur Hayes, Maelstrom CIO, sees Bitcoin soaring to $1 million by 2028.

Bitcoin ETFs hold more than 1.2 million Bitcoin worth about $133 billion. That’s a whopping 6% of the network’s total supply, according to Dragonfly data analyst Hildebert Moulie.

Moreover, the consistency highlights something deeper: institutions don’t seem to be speculating anymore — they’re allocating. And they’re doing it in size, despite market jitters.

Sticky investors

Bitcoin’s price has risen in line with ETFs recent growth.

On June 22, as the US struck three alleged Iranian nuclear sites, Bitcoin dipped to about $99,000. It has quickly rebounded, and now trades near $107,000, less than 5% below its all-time high.

Bloomberg Intelligence ETF expert Eric Balchunas has also underscored the stickiness.

“The ETFs and Saylor have been buying up all dumps from tourists, FTX refugees, GBTC discounters, legal unlocks, government confiscations and Lord knows who else,” Balchunas said on X in April.

“ETF investors are much stronger hands than most think.”

‘Decoupling’

Executives at BlackRock, the leading issuer with over 52% of the entire spot Bitcoin ETF market, have become the de facto ambassadors for the top cryptocurrency this year.

“Institutional investors are really largely focused on Bitcoin,” Samara Cohen, BlackRock’s CIO of ETF and Index Investments said on April 28.

Cohen’s colleague, Jay Jacobs shares the notion.

“If you zoom out, you tend to see the longer term fundamental thesis of Bitcoin really drives it to behave differently to traditional assets,” he said on April 25.

In April, amid a tariff war between the US and China, Bitcoin began to decouple from traditional equities.

To be sure, the cease-fire in the Middle East could prove to be short-lived, and interest rates remain high. And although the temperature has dropped in the China and US tariff war, they could flare up at any time.

But for now, the message from Wall Street Bitcoin investors is clear: missiles, tariffs or rate fears — they’re not going anywhere.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].

Wall Street fails to recognise Coinbase’s potential.

In a note to investors on Wednesday, analysts from $781 billion wealth manager Bernstein made that argument, saying that Coinbase is the “most misunderstood” company in crypto and that it’s primed for a hefty stock surge.

What’s the misunderstanding? Most investors still see Coinbase as a retail trading platform — not as an infrastructure giant that powers the crypto economy behind the scenes.

“Despite multiple growth levers — from stablecoins to staking and derivatives — consensus remains far too bearish on what is effectively crypto’s universal bank,” said Bernstein analysts Gautam Chhughani and his two colleagues.

Once investors wise up, Coinbase’s stock is set to pop, said Bernstein.

They forecast a $510 price tag for Coinbase’s shares, a whopping 42% jump from its current price.

Wake-up call

Bernstein’s note points to a company nestling itself at the centre of the crypto industry.

It already safeguards assets for eight of the 11 US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, processes billions in derivatives through its Deribit stake, and is building out Base, the second largest Ethereum layer-2 by total value secured.

The company is now set to benefit from a friendlier US regulatory regime, having already established its bonafides as a compliance-first exchange with an ability to find new revenue streams, the Bernstein analysts wrote.

“With growing dominance in custody, stablecoins, and derivatives, and regulatory tailwinds from the Genius and Clarity Acts, we believe the market is underestimating its earnings power,” they wrote.

In 2024, Coinbase reported it took in $6.6 billion in total revenue, while net income topped $2.6 billion. Moreover, the company holds a whopping $220 billion in assets under management.

Since May, it is also the only crypto company in the S&P 500.

Underestimated giant

Coinbase has a lot going for it, Bernstein said.

It’s been busy diversifying into products that offer steadier income, and are not beholden to crypto cycles.

Just last month, it inked a $2.9 billion deal with derivatives giant Deribit — a platform that accounts for about 85% of all Bitcoin and Ethereum options trading.

Options are tools for hedging, not just speculation, which means they attract activity even in sideways — or downtrodden — markets.

Additionally, volatility in both directions also brings traders in, which can help Coinbase earn fees even in bearish conditions.

Doors unlocking

Regulatory tailwinds in the US are expected to unlock opportunities for Coinbase to offer more options products to investors, Bernstein said.

Meanwhile, its Base network, the fastest-growing Ethereum Layer-2, is becoming a force to be reckoned with in tokenised finance.

In 2024, the network generated $24 million in profit.

Coinbase’s business not pertaining to trading could hit $4.2 billion in 2025, Bernstein said. Even its first-quarter dip in earnings, driven by paper losses on held cryptocurrency, was brushed off by analysts.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].