Unchained

A $433 million Friday was the only thing standing between U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs and a second straight losing week.

The boys get together in person as CLARITY falls short with 47 votes. They break down what comes next, Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP token collapse, the Robinhood/Hyperliquid case, Balancer winding down, and the debate over an AI pause.

The ratings firm that cut Tether’s stability grade to its lowest level last year is buying the security company behind the open source smart contract libraries widely used across DeFi, and it is placing the business under S&P Global Ratings.

The order lets permissioned AMM venues trade tokenized shares with full shareholder rights, but says nothing about the future of the synthetic stock tokens fueling crypto’s equity craze.

The protocol’s restart plan converts what its Tron liquidity providers hold into a claim: their balances read zero, and what they are owed moves to a separate on-chain record. Chainflip says it will make them whole but has not publicly said when, or from where.

An attacker drained about $7.8 million in rsETH from an Ethereum Safe through an over-permissioned module. A bot named Yoink beat him to the payout in the same block.

Ethena’s Guy Young explains why the company built a neobank that pays 6% in yield, 5% cash back, and never tells users they’re holding self-custodial stablecoins instead of dollars.

A forum proposal would pause pools in October, cancel the approved buyback, and pay at least $9 million to BAL holders who burn their tokens starting in May 2027.

The endowment built from unclaimed 2016 DAO money is asking the companies that benefit from Ethereum security work to help pay for it, in a year whose first half already set a record for the number of crypto hacks.

The teams behind rival plans to build account abstraction into the base layer, Ethereum’s EIP-8141 and Base’s EIP-8130, have given up trying to converge, so wallet developers may end up supporting two transaction formats across the two networks.

The company behind much of Ethereum’s tooling will carry on as MetaMask under Joe Lubin, while its protocol and institutional infrastructure work, including Linea and Besu, moves into a newly formed company that takes the Consensys name.

The EF’s Protocol cluster set a hard date for post-quantum Ethereum and graded 62 proposals for the fork that decides whether it holds.

Owners must stake, post and attest to a permitted country to earn Robinhood Stock Tokens. Anyone can buy the NFT, and the portfolio inside it, with no KYC.

OpenSea postponed its SEA token generation event indefinitely as NFT market capitalization fell 50% since January, even as the platform’s OS2 rebuild shifts most volume to crypto trading.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found Polymarket removed an anti-money-laundering control while fraudsters worked its U.S. platform with stolen debit cards.

The agency filed its crypto market rulemaking with the White House two days after the Clarity Act failed in the Senate, though the contents remain undisclosed.

Treasury says the Tehran exchange moved hundreds of millions in bitcoin to the Revolutionary Guards and handled fees collected from tankers buying passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

Days after Clarity failed, the SEC granted a major exemption for tokenized stocks. The Digital Chamber’s Cody Carbone explains whether agencies can replace the law.

Chainalysis says state-backed operators now account for about half of the malicious code written to public chains, storing command-server addresses in smart contracts and transaction data that no registrar or host can take down.

Nearly 2.4 million ZEC, about two-thirds of the eligible supply, voted to speed up blocks, preserve halvings and ship NU7 as soon as possible.

A crowdsourced challenge of more than 100 researchers and AI agents drove a quantum benchmark down 86% in two months, well below Google’s March figure.

BitBox reported a matching campaign the same day, weeks after a shipping provider breach exposed tens of thousands of Trezor customer records.