Hi! In today’s edition:
💵 Circle bags a major federal approval after a year of waiting.
🏛️ Senate Democrats want the president's crypto dealings under oath.
🏦 Washington just closed the door on a Fed digital dollar.
🤖 AI found a real bug in Ethereum, but finding bugs is the easy part.
Circle Lands Its Federal Charter, Reserves Come Next
Circle secured final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Friday to open a national trust bank.
The bank, called Circle National Trust, will start by holding digital assets in custody for Circle and its affiliates. Down the line it could serve a small set of institutional clients like banks, and eventually manage the reserves backing USDC, all under direct OCC oversight.
Circle stock tanked two weeks ago after a 140-firm consortium unveiled a rival no-fee stablecoin, Open USD. Friday's approval hands Circle a regulatory edge as competition intensifies.
Senate Democrats Want Trump's Crypto Billions Under Oath
Five senior Senate Democrats called Friday for hearings into President Trump's crypto holdings after new financial disclosures showed his family's ventures earned about $1.4 billion in the first year of his second term.
Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Gary Peters, Dick Durbin, and Ron Wyden, the ranking members of five committees, want to probe the national security implications, pointing to an unknown group of "third parties" holding a stake in World Liberty Financial amid reports that a UAE royal purchased a 49% stake in the project.
Their letter sharpens a running conflict-of-interest fight. The same senators demanded hearings on the reported UAE deal in June. The CLARITY Act has also stalled over ethics language meant to limit Trump's crypto dealings.
A Fed Digital Dollar Is Off the Table
A sweeping housing bill carrying a ban on a Federal Reserve digital dollar became law on Friday, even though President Trump refused to sign it. Under the Constitution, a bill becomes law without a signature if the president sits on it for 10 days.
Trump withheld his signature, saying he would not sign until the Senate passed a voter-citizenship bill he calls the SAVE America Act. The housing measure bars the Fed from issuing a CBDC through 2030.
Blocking a digital dollar has been a Republican priority for years, and the provision turns Trump's earlier executive order on the subject into statute.
AI Found an Ethereum Bug
The Ethereum Foundation turned coordinated AI agents loose on the software its validators run and found a real one: a remotely triggerable crash in a core networking component that could knock a validator offline until an operator restarts it. It was fixed and disclosed as CVE-2026-34219.
The bug was not the surprise. In field notes published this week, the Foundation's security team said the hard part was telling real findings from convincing fakes. AI agents produce fluent, confident writeups whether or not the bug exists, so most of the effort went into triage, not discovery.
The takeaway for a security world bracing for AI attackers: the models can search at scale, but human judgment still decides what is real.
DON’T MISS BITS + BIPS TODAY
This week's Bits + Bips brings in Sam Lyman, Head of Research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, to dig into the fight over power between AI data centers and Bitcoin miners. Austin, Ram, and Chris also cover whether Robinhood's onchain push has real product-market fit, why the CLARITY Act is hitting a crunch point in the Senate, and the end of Bitcoin's ETF outflow streak.
Streams live Monday at 4:30pm ET.
🏛️ Binance said 70% of withdrawals by EU users went to self-custody wallets after its MiCA-driven service suspension, with only 30% moving to licensed platforms. Co-CEO Richard Teng told Reuters NEXT Asia the split suggests the rules may be pushing users beyond regulators' reach rather than protecting them.
🔒 Bonzo Finance lost about $9 million after an attacker exploited a verification flaw in a third-party Supra oracle on Hedera, faking a SAUCE price to borrow far beyond the collateral posted. Its lending pool is paused.
🤖 Kraken is rebuilding its app from the ground up around what it calls built-in financial intelligence, with agentic trading and advice that work in the background toward a user's goals. The revamp, teased Friday, positions the exchange to compete on automation rather than just trading tools.
🤖 OKX, MetaMask, and Matter Labs joined a 27-company consortium backing Internet Court, an open standard for AI agents to settle payment and contract disputes at machine speed. Led by the GenLayer Foundation, it aims to add a dispute-resolution layer to the fast-growing agentic commerce stack.
🔒 Ledger disclosed a laser attack that can reset the password on any Tangem hardware wallet card by faulting a single firmware check, though it needs physical access and roughly $250,000 in lab equipment. Tangem countered that the flaw cannot be patched but called the real-world risk to everyday users "virtually non-existent."
📉 Empery Digital sold 1,400 bitcoins since May 7 at an average of $62,200 each, raising about $87.1 million to repay $10 million in debt and fund a planned property acquisition and legal costs. The bitcoin treasury company now holds 1,514 BTC and roughly $73.9 million in cash, per its 8-K filing.
⚖️ Rossen Iossifov was charged with moving roughly $290,000 in forfeited cryptocurrency through exchanges and mixers while serving a federal prison sentence, according to the Justice Department. The Bulgarian national was already convicted in 2021 in a scheme that laundered nearly $5 million in crypto.
🇯🇵 Japanese convenience store Lawson will pilot JPYC payments in early August at a Tokyo store, linking the yen stablecoin directly to its point-of-sale system in what it calls Japan's first such trial. Wallet provider HashPort will process the payments as customers scan a barcode at checkout.
💰 TrueDAO raised $10 million in a strategic round led by Brevan Howard Digital, with Zee Prime Capital and Jump Capital participating. The AI-driven DeFi infrastructure startup will use the funds for protocol development, risk controls, security audits, and compliance.
Satya Nadella: The Reverse Information Paradox
Zane Hengsperger: America can dominate Shenzhen. A call for factory abundance.
