Hi! In today’s edition:
💳 Stripe just made a move that could reshape who controls stablecoin payments
🏛️ Trump is stepping directly into the fight over crypto's biggest bill
🏦 Wall Street's biggest names have flipped a switch on tokenized markets
⚖️ The Senate sent Sam Bankman-Fried a message with zero dissent
Stripe Wants PayPal Amid Stablecoin Moves
Payments company Stripe has teamed with private equity firm Advent International on a $53 billion offer to buy PayPal, according to Reuters. The bid works out to $60.50 a share, a 28% premium to PayPal's share price at the time of the report. PayPal's stock jumped more than 17% on the news, and the company has not yet responded to the offer.
PayPal issues PYUSD, the eighth-largest stablecoin at about $2.84 billion. Stripe has been building aggressively in stablecoins through its Bridge unit, its own Tempo blockchain, and the Visa- and BlackRock-backed Open USD effort. Buying PayPal would pull PYUSD and its users into that push, uniting two of the biggest mainstream names racing to turn stablecoins into everyday payment rails.
Trump Steps Into the Clarity Act's Ethics Fight
President Trump is set to meet senators at the White House Thursday afternoon to break the deadlock over the Clarity Act, the crypto market structure bill stalled in the Senate, according to CoinDesk. The sticking point is an ethics section restricting senior officials' personal crypto businesses, a provision aimed largely at Trump himself.
Trump's recent financial disclosure showed his family cleared roughly $1.4 billion from crypto last year. Republican Sens. Bernie Moreno and Cynthia Lummis are expected to attend alongside White House staff, The Block reported, quoting Solana Policy Institute President Kristin Smith.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune wants a floor vote on Clarity before the August recess. After the recess, focus is expected to shift to the November midterms, leaving only weeks to close a gap that has dogged the bill for months.
Wall Street's Settlement Giant Just Went On-Chain
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, which settles most US securities trades, began limited live production of tokenized stocks, ETFs, and Treasurys on Wednesday. JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Vanguard were among more than two dozen firms taking part, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Unlike earlier pilots, the trades ran in a live production environment using real assets already held at the DTCC. JPMorgan tokenized part of its Invesco QQQ holdings and used them to meet margin requirements, while shares like Microsoft and Circle and various Treasurys were also converted. The trades settled on the Hyperledger Besu and Canton networks. A full commercial launch is set for October, running under a three-year SEC no-action letter granted last December. For tokenization, it is the clearest sign yet that the technology is moving into the core of regulated finance.
The Senate Slams the Door on SBF
The Senate passed a resolution Wednesday declaring that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried should "under no circumstances" receive a pardon or commutation. It cleared by unanimous consent, meaning not a single senator objected.
The nonbinding measure was led by Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Ruben Gallego. It comes after Bankman-Fried formally asked Trump for clemency.
"He had his day in court," Lummis said, introducing the resolution last month.
Bankman-Fried is serving 25 years in prison for the fraud that cost FTX customers more than $8 billion and is not eligible for release until around 2044. Trump said in January he had no plans to pardon him, though he has cleared crypto figures such as Binance's Changpeng Zhao and Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht.
🔥 Thursday's Triple Header 🔥
At 2:30pm ET on the Bits + Bips: The Interview, GSR's Andy Baehr joins the Steve to weigh whether cooler-than-expected inflation, which took a July rate hike off the table and pushed bitcoin back above $65,000, is a real turn or a green-July relief bounce, with crypto ETF flows whipsawing after last week's gains already got wiped once.
At 3:30pm ET, Laura Shin sits down with Johann Kerbrat, SVP & GM of Crypto at Robinhood, fresh off a run of announcements including Robinhood Chain's mainnet launch, Robinhood Earn, tokenized stocks, and the company's broader push into agentic trading and global expansion.
At 4pm ET, Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan are joined by Cap founders Benjamin Sarquis Peillard and Weso for the week's biggest onchain fights — Jesse Pollak handing the Base app to Cobie while calling his onchain-social bet "definitively wrong," the Ethereum Foundation's privacy team going for-profit as EthSystems, an oracle attack wave that drained three protocols, and the fallout from Cap's own Stabledrop.
🟡 Circle suspended a Tether-backed fund over alleged market manipulation, newly public arbitration filings show, after concluding the arbitrageur exploited fee waivers from rival Tether to run an "unnatural" USDC arbitrage. An arbitrator sided with Circle, finding it had the contractual right to cut off Heka Funds, whose Elysium vehicle was about 75% backed by Tether.
🏛️ The US Treasury froze more than $130 million in crypto tied to the Central Bank of Iran, most of it Tether's USDT on Tron, with Tether cooperating to lock the sanctioned wallets.
🏦 BlackRock laid out plans to tokenize Treasury funds, iShares ETFs, and private markets, with CFO Martin Small calling crypto and tokenization "a pure organic growth opportunity" on the Q2 earnings call. The firm recently filed for two tokenized money market funds redeemable in stablecoins and reiterated a $500 million crypto revenue target by 2030, even as its digital assets under management fell during the quarter.
🔄 Jesse Pollak handed Coinbase's Base app back to the company and gave control to pseudonymous trader Cobie, conceding his multiyear bet on onchain social apps and creator coins was wrong. Pollak, who still leads the Base chain, said he now wants to build it into "the blockchain for global finance," focused on trading, payments, and agents.
🔒 Ostium lost about $18 million after an attacker gamed the perpetuals exchange's own price-feed system, submitting future-dated oracle reports that made losing trades look profitable and triggered a USDC payout from its vault. Security firm Blockaid flagged the exploit, the latest in a run of oracle and keeper attacks that also drained $6 million from Summer.fi last week.
📉 Noxa gave away all its revenue, redirecting fees to creators before going dark, after the largest launchpad on Robinhood Chain collected an estimated $12 million amid a flood of low-quality tokens. The retreat sent breakout memecoin CASHCAT down more than 33% in a day, undercutting a memecoin economy that had dwarfed the tokenized real-world assets Robinhood built the chain for.
🇨🇿 The Czech Republic added Polymarket to its official list of unauthorized internet games on July 13, giving internet providers 15 days to block the prediction market as unlicensed gambling. It joins France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands in treating event contracts as betting, part of a widening European split as places like Gibraltar move to license the sector instead.
🇰🇷 South Korea plans to reclassify crypto as national assets by revising its 76-year-old National Property Act, part of an economic roadmap that leans heavily on blockchain. The Ministry of Economy and Finance also reaffirmed plans to pilot tokenized government bonds in 2027 and to study tokenizing state-owned real estate for retail investors.
🏦 Securitize and Cantor Fitzgerald are teaming up to let public companies run IPOs and follow-on offerings onchain, extending tokenization from secondary trading into primary capital raising. Cantor, ranked first in U.S. IPOs in 2025, brings equity capital markets muscle while Securitize supplies the SEC-registered tokenization and settlement rails.
💰 Glacis Labs raised $6.8 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed Faction, with Franklin Templeton and Coinbase Ventures backing, to scale its ZeroDelta clearing platform. The multichain clearinghouse nets and settles digital-asset flows across more than 40 chains and has cleared over $1 billion in volume, mostly stablecoins.
💸 FalconX acquired bloXroute to fold the firm's blockchain networking tech into its institutional trading platform and speed up onchain execution for tokenized markets. Terms were not disclosed, and the prime broker said the deal will help it build new trading, financing, and prime brokerage products as, in CEO Raghu Yarlagadda's words, "the future of capital markets will be onchain."
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