A United States federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction preventing Minnesota from enforcing its forthcoming ban on prediction markets against the CFTC-regulated platforms Kalshi and Polymarket US. The order allows the companies to continue operating in the state while the legal challenge proceeds.

US District Judge Katherine Menendez granted the plaintiffs’ motions on Monday. She determined that the platforms were likely to succeed, at least in part, on arguments that the Commodity Exchange Act preempts the Minnesota statute. Several event contracts offered by the platforms appear to meet the definition of swaps, placing transactions involving those contracts on designated contract markets under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The Minnesota law, scheduled to take effect on Saturday, would prohibit the creation, operation and advertising of prediction markets and impose criminal penalties for providing support to them. The preliminary injunction preserves the existing operating environment until the case can be decided on its merits.

The judge noted that the injunction may later be narrowed. The plaintiffs have not demonstrated that every event contract listed by the two platforms satisfies the legal definition of a swap.

Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao has endorsed a system of regulatory passporting for cryptocurrency licenses across ASEAN, under which firms approved in one member state could enter others through a simplified process rather than submitting full new applications. He spoke on Tuesday during a fireside discussion at the ASEAN Tech Summit in Manila.

Zhao supported a proposal for license portability raised by the founding chair of FinTech Alliance PH. Under such an arrangement regulators would retain the ability to examine applicants but would not demand an entirely new licensing procedure. A regional framework could lower compliance expenses, promote competition and ease the operation of crypto and stablecoin services across markets that currently regulate digital assets independently.

Cross-border coordination was described as primarily a political challenge rather than a technical one. Greater competition among licensed platforms could improve service quality and reduce costs for users.

ASEAN already operates limited mutual-recognition arrangements in other areas of finance. The ASEAN Capital Markets Forum’s Collective Investment Schemes Framework permits a fund authorized in its home jurisdiction to be offered in participating host markets through a streamlined authorization process. The arrangement began in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand in 2014, with the Philippines joining in 2021. A separate Professional Mobility Framework allows eligible investment advisers licensed in one jurisdiction to obtain fast-track registration in another without securing a fresh license.

These mechanisms are narrower in scope than a full crypto passport and remain subject to host-market conditions. They demonstrate prior use of mutual recognition to advance regional integration. In the European Union, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation grants authorized crypto-asset service providers the right to operate across member states after notifying their home regulator of the intended countries and services.

Differences in national policies and regulatory approaches complicate alignment more than the construction of shared technical infrastructure. Firms already licensed in one ASEAN market should nevertheless face a lighter application process when expanding into another.

Apple faces a lawsuit from three customers who allege they lost a combined $1.8 million after downloading a counterfeit Bitcoin wallet application from the App Store. The complaint was filed on Friday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

The plaintiffs, James Ramirez, Christopher Ellis and Jalen Delgado, contend that Apple failed to conduct sufficient review and ongoing monitoring of applications despite marketing the App Store as a secure marketplace. They state that they entered their seed phrases into the fraudulent application, enabling scammers to transfer their Bitcoin holdings. The individual losses are reported as approximately $875,000, $840,000 and $120,000, respectively, and occurred during 2025.

The legitimate Sparrow Wallet is available only for Windows, macOS and Linux platforms and has no official iOS version. Its developer has previously raised concerns about counterfeit versions appearing in the App Store.

Apple has removed applications impersonating Sparrow Wallet and terminated the associated developer accounts. The company maintains that developers and users may report applications that breach its guidelines and that it acts against those that fail to comply with App Store rules.

Real-world asset tokenization platform Ondo Finance has introduced an off-chain execution network that processes trades outside public blockchains, marking a shift from the institution-oriented layer-1 blockchain it outlined in 2025. The system, known as Ondo Network, is already operational for the company’s perpetual futures platform.

Conventional blockchains depend on distributed computers to validate transactions and maintain a shared state. Ondo Network instead executes its trading software inside protected computing environments referred to as enclaves. A set of operators verifies that the software remains unaltered, and each operator holds a portion of the digital key required to authorize asset transfers.

Transfers are ultimately settled on public blockchains. The company has not disclosed the identity or number of the operators involved. It characterized the arrangement as a continuation of Ondo Chain, the project announced in February 2025 to bring traditional financial assets on-chain. The current system is not itself a blockchain. Future steps may include additional operators, greater recording of activity on public chains and a mechanism that requires participants to post tokens as security, although no schedule has been provided.

Ondo Chain entered testnet in 2025. Its first transaction, a settlement of tokenized US Treasuries, was completed by JPMorgan’s Kinexys unit and Chainlink.

Liquid staking protocol Lido has launched Curated Module v2, an infrastructure upgrade that could lower Ethereum’s validator count by approximately one-third through higher effective balances and revised operator rules. The change is intended to improve validator efficiency and network decentralization.

The module adds support for Ethereum’s 0x02 withdrawal credentials. Validators may raise their effective balance from 32 ETH to a maximum of 2,048 ETH. Lido projects that the migration could reduce the total number of validators from 880,000 to about 628,000. The process has not yet begun and the estimates remain provisional.

Fewer validators and associated messages are expected to lighten the load on the consensus layer. Execution-layer activity that governs transaction fees and gas costs will remain unaffected. The upgrade also establishes bonding and penalty mechanisms to increase accountability among node operators. Future allocation of stake may give greater consideration to operator performance, fee structures and contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem.

Stakers are not required to take any action, as the adjustments will be implemented at the protocol level.

The International Monetary Fund has cautioned that Brazil’s cryptocurrency market, led by US dollar-pegged stablecoins, has expanded rapidly since 2017. Cross-border crypto flows have increased faster than conventional capital movements and display greater sensitivity to global shocks.

Stablecoin purchases are two to three times more responsive to global disturbances than traditional portfolio investment or foreign direct investment. The Fund described the domestic crypto-asset market as large, fast-growing and increasingly linked to the traditional financial system.

Banco Central do Brasil has introduced regulation for crypto-asset service providers. Remaining gaps include customer asset protection, rules governing stablecoin issuance and compliance with anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing standards.

In April the central bank issued Resolution BCB No. 561, which revises requirements for electronic foreign-exchange providers and bars the use of digital assets for certain international payment and transfer services. Under the revised framework, payments and receipts between such providers and foreign counterparties must occur through foreign-exchange transactions or movements in non-resident Brazilian real accounts.

Decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch has launched Aqua, a protocol designed to enable liquidity providers to supply capital across multiple decentralized finance markets simultaneously while keeping assets in their own wallets until settlement. The system has been deployed on 13 blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Robinhood Chain and BNB Chain.

Aqua allows providers to authorize several strategies against a single wallet inventory. Funds remain in the wallet rather than being deposited into individual liquidity pools and are transferred only when a trade settles. The protocol includes a generalized on-chain registry, wallet-backed automated market-making strategies, atomic settlement and tools for position management.

Liquidity is not multiplied. A provider can advertise the same capital across multiple protocols, yet the assets may participate in only one operation at a time. For example, $10,000 can be advertised on three protocols for a combined $30,000 of advertised capacity, but only $10,000 of concurrent trades can execute against those funds. The design aims to raise capital utilization when simultaneous demand is low.

Access is restricted to resolvers holding a 1inch-issued credential, and not every protocol is supported. Positions are continuously quoted against the market maker’s live wallet balance. Any proposed swap that would exceed the available balance reverts atomically.

Subject to tokenholder approval, the protocol plans to allocate 500,000 USDC and 10 million 1INCH tokens, valued at approximately $830,000, as incentives to encourage liquidity growth and trading activity on supported pairs.

PayPal Holdings reported second-quarter revenue of $8.68 billion, an increase from $8.29 billion a year earlier, and outlined expansion in stablecoins and artificial intelligence-driven payment tools. Earnings per share came to $1.26, compared with $1.30 in the prior-year period.

The company recorded an $81 million non-GAAP adjustment for gains and losses on strategic investments and cryptocurrency assets held for investment. Those items are excluded from non-GAAP results because the firm does not actively trade the assets or depend on them to finance ongoing operations.

PayPal is extending its capabilities into agentic payments, stablecoins, identity solutions and biometric technologies by drawing on its existing payments network, risk infrastructure and trust framework. Its PayPal World platform processed approximately $200 million in total payment volume between Venmo and PayPal during the period.

Cryptocurrency losses exceeded $1 billion in the first half of 2026, marking the highest number of security incidents recorded in any six-month period. Ethereum and Solana registered the greatest losses at roughly $332 million and $326 million respectively.

Security researchers tracked 212 incidents during the period. The single largest exploit involved KelpDAO and totaled $292 million. The number of high-threshold exploits was 3.4 times higher than the figure recorded across the whole of 2025.

On Ethereum, code exploits formed the majority of incidents by number. Additional losses arose from key compromises affecting Humanity Protocol and StablR. One significant case involving the decentralized exchange CoWSwap was classified as a user error. Common attack vectors included vulnerabilities in bridges and smart contracts, unauthorized access to privileged accounts and market manipulation techniques. The network continues to attract attackers because it hosts many of the industry’s highest-value applications, including restaking platforms, stablecoins and decentralized exchanges.

Solana losses rose sharply from approximately $127 million in 2025. Compromised keys accounted for more than 98 percent of the total, largely from incidents involving Drift Protocol and Step Finance that were attributed to North Korea-linked groups. A smaller number of code exploits affected Raydium and Volo. In contrast to Ethereum’s concentration on protocol-code vulnerabilities, Solana incidents primarily targeted signer infrastructure and organizational security controls.

Global markets are monitoring the Bank of Japan’s interest-rate decision scheduled for July 31 as the yen approaches fresh 40-year lows against the US dollar. The exchange rate neared 164 on Tuesday, close to the multi-decade highs recorded last week.

The central bank’s benchmark rate currently stands at 1 percent, its highest level since September 1995. Market pricing indicates a high probability that policymakers will leave the rate unchanged, following the increase enacted in June. At that time the bank indicated that further adjustments to the degree of monetary accommodation would be appropriate as underlying consumer price inflation approaches 2 percent and financial conditions remain accommodative.

The yen has long functioned as a primary global funding currency because of Japan’s historically low interest rates, high market liquidity and earlier current-account surpluses. The rise in domestic inflation since 2022 has increased the risk of sudden reversals in positions that borrow in yen to invest elsewhere. The currency has remained above the 160 level against the dollar even after the June rate increase.

Policymakers have previously noted that exchange-rate movements can influence domestic prices more readily than in the past, given firms’ greater willingness to raise wages and prices, and that such effects may feed into inflation expectations. A significant policy shift or intervention to support the yen could trigger rapid unwinding of leveraged carry trades. Such reversals have historically been abrupt rather than gradual and have previously transmitted volatility into broader risk assets, including cryptocurrency markets. The overall direction of policy, rather than the precise timing of any future rate change, remains the central consideration for global liquidity conditions.