Hi! In today’s edition:
⚖️ The crypto market structure bill could be moving again
🎲 Polymarket just took its first step toward letting US users trade on borrowed money
🏦 Swift is bringing some of the world's biggest banks onto a blockchain
📉 Eric Trump's big bet on Bitcoin mining has gone spectacularly sideways
The CLARITY Act Is Back From the Brink
After weeks of stalled talks, a revised version of the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act could reach the Senate as soon as next week, people following the negotiations told CoinDesk. The new text merges the bills from the Senate Banking and Agriculture committees, reportedly adding more than 70 pages with a heavier focus on consumer protections.
The catch is the same one that has dogged the bill for months: an ethics provision barring senior officials, including the president, from crypto business ties. Several Democrats say they won't vote yes without it, and the bill needs 60 votes to clear the Senate.
Advocates are eyeing floor action the week of July 20. With only three weeks left in the month and a defense bill competing for time, this is likely the market structure push's last real shot in 2026.
Polymarket Moves to Let Americans Trade on Leverage
Polymarket has taken its first regulatory step toward offering margin trading in the U.S., a move that would let users bet on events while putting up only a fraction of the capital upfront. An affiliated entity, PM Derivatives LLC, filed on July 3 with the National Futures Association for futures commission merchant, member, and swap firm registration.
Fully enabling leveraged trading would still require sign-off from the CFTC. Rival Kalshi is already ahead here, having won NFA approval for the same setup back in March.
The two platforms are locked in an escalating fight. Both posted record volume in June: Kalshi handled $33 billion, while Polymarket and its U.S. arm did nearly $14 billion combined. Leverage could reshape that race by letting traders take much larger positions.
Swift Puts 17 Global Banks on a Blockchain
Swift, the messaging backbone that moves the equivalent of world GDP every few days, said its blockchain-based ledger is ready for initial use. About 17 banks from six continents, including HSBC, Citi, BNP Paribas, Wells Fargo, and UBS, are preparing to pilot live transactions using tokenized deposits.
The pitch is 24/7 cross-border payments. The shared ledger lets banks move bank-issued tokenized deposits for customers, including overnight and on weekends, before settling through existing systems. Swift said built it in about nine months with feedback from participating institutions.
For a decades-old cooperative that connects more than 11,500 institutions, this is a notable move onto blockchain rails, and a signal that regulated tokenized money is inching from pilot decks toward real payment flows. Swift frames it as groundwork for programmable money down the line.
Eric Trump's Bitcoin Bet Loses $600 Million
American Bitcoin, the mining company co-founded by Eric Trump, has cratered, and the losses are now hitting the family's balance sheet. The stock is down more than 95% from its September peak, erasing over $600 million from Eric Trump's stake in roughly 10 months, by Bloomberg's math. This week the company ran a 1-for-15 reverse split just to keep its Nasdaq listing, and shares hit a record low Wednesday.
As Bitcoin slid and AI demand surged, rival miners like Riot and MARA pivoted to leasing infrastructure to data centers and saw their stocks climb, while American Bitcoin stuck with pure mining and accumulation. Eric Trump, who owns about 6%, according to Bloomberg's calculations, and serves as chief strategy officer, has said the company won't sell Bitcoin unless the reasons were "beyond catastrophic." It keeps buying.
🏛️ CFTC Chair Michael Selig warned regulators will "end up writing all the rules" for crypto if Congress fails to pass the CLARITY Act, telling Fox Business on Wednesday that fights over ethics provisions are derailing the market structure bill.
⚖️ North Carolina became the first state to recognize the CFTC's exclusive authority over prediction markets, after Governor Josh Stein signed a budget bill letting CFTC-registered platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket operate without state licensing. The law taxes their net trading fee revenue at 6% from Jan. 1, 2027, far below the 23% rate now levied on sports betting.
🟡 Aave Labs rolled out Stable Vaults, opening the fixed-rate stablecoin yield engine behind its own savings app so any business can embed predictable onchain yield into its product without building the infrastructure itself.
🏦 Sony Bank won conditional OCC approval to set up a US national trust bank, Connectia Trust, that would issue a dollar-pegged stablecoin, capitalized at $40 million and following the same charter path as Circle, Ripple, and Paxos.
📈 MARA unveiled a 2-gigawatt digital infrastructure campus in Texas for AI, high-performance computing, and Bitcoin mining, built with Starwood Digital Ventures in a deal worth up to $600 million in milestone payments. The stock climbed 14% on the news.
💵 PayPal will issue PYUSD natively on Polygon and make it available through the network's Open Money Stack, aiming to boost use of the stablecoin for cross-border business payments. PYUSD's supply sits near $3 billion, well behind Tether and Circle.
⚖️ Hyperliquid Policy Center and Phantom urged the CFTC to stop treating onchain protocols and non-custodial wallets like traditional brokers and exchanges, arguing in a joint comment letter that developing protocol software should not trigger registration and that regulated firms should be free to run trading and clearing onchain.
🔒 BitGo introduced quantum-risk tools for institutional Bitcoin wallets, adding a risk score and a remediation workflow to move funds away from addresses whose public keys have been exposed onchain, ahead of any practical quantum threat.
🇬🇧 The UK government tabled an amendment that would bar crypto donations to political parties, while Labour backbenchers led by Liam Byrne push for a tougher, permanent ban when the elections bill returns to the Commons on July 14.
🇺🇸 New Hampshire killed a first-of-its-kind state-backed Bitcoin bond, as its Executive Council voted 3-2 to reject the up to $100 million project tied to Bitcoin miner CleanSpark, months after Moody's had rated it.
🇧🇷 Brazil's B3 launched options on Bitcoin, ether, and solana futures, giving traders at Latin America's largest exchange a regulated way to hedge crypto exposure without using offshore markets. The contracts, which settle into futures rather than tokens, went live July 6.
🇷🇺 Russia's Alfa-Bank plans a digital depository to offer crypto custody and trading once the country's digital asset law takes effect, positioning itself as a custodian for the wider market alongside rivals Sber, VTB, and T-Bank.
🌐 Hyundai Card completed its first stablecoin remittance pilot with Tether and Avalanche, moving $20,000 in USDT from Hyundai Motor America to its Mexico affiliate in about seven minutes versus the usual three to four hours. A second pilot with Visa and Circle in Europe is planned for later this month.
💰 Gauntlet raised $125 million in a Series C led solely by Japan's SBI Holdings, with the risk and yield firm, which curates over $1.5 billion in vault assets, planning to expand stablecoin coverage into currencies like the Mexican peso and Japanese yen.
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