Hi! In today’s edition:
🎤 Trump's teleprompter operator found a very profitable use for his front-row seat.
💵 Crypto.com’s valuation gets a Citadel bump.
💳 Visa wants every bank on its network to start using stablecoins.
📈 A wealth-management giant has opened crypto's doors to everyday investors.
The Insider Who Bet on Trump's Words
Trump's longtime teleprompter operator, Gabriel Perez, allegedly used his early access to the president's speeches to win more than $100,000 on the prediction market Kalshi, according to ABC News. Perez, who has run Trump's teleprompter since 2016, is in settlement talks with the CFTC, ABC News reported Thursday.
Investigators found he placed bets on more than a dozen speeches over three months, including February's State of the Union, on Kalshi's "Mentions" market, where users wager on whether specific words come up, ABC News reported. He sometimes backed out of a position mid-speech when Trump skipped a line he had bet on, according to the report.
Kalshi's surveillance team reportedly flagged the trades and referred them to regulators. The CFTC has signaled it may settle, requiring Perez to return his profits. The White House said Thursday that Perez has been placed on unpaid administrative leave, according to media reports.
Citadel Places a $400 Million Crypto Bet
Crypto.com on Thursday said it has received a $400 million investment from Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation. Crypto.com added that it is its first institutional raise in its decade-long history.
Crypto.com said the money will fund expansion into tokenized securities, derivatives, and other asset classes. CEO Kris Marszalek called it proof the industry is entering “a new era of institutionalization.” Citadel president Jim Esposito framed the tie-up as building “the capital markets of the future.”
Visa Turns Its Network Into Stablecoin Rails
Visa on Thursday launched a platform that lets banks and fintechs use stablecoins inside their existing payment and treasury systems, according to Fortune. The Visa Stablecoin Platform targets its network of about 15,000 financial institutions and more than 200 million merchants.
Visa already handles billions of dollars in stablecoin settlements, but the new platform will pull those services under one umbrella and hide the technical complexity so clients can focus on payments, Fortune reported.
Visa's new service launches with OUSD, the dollar stablecoin from the Open Standard consortium unveiled a few weeks ago, alongside Circle's USDC and Paxos' USDG. Rivals Mastercard and American Express have also backed OUSD, a sign the card networks now treat stablecoins as core infrastructure.
Morgan Stanley Brings Crypto to E*TRADE
Morgan Stanley completed its rollout of spot crypto trading on E*TRADE, letting eligible clients buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana directly on the retail brokerage. Trades run through digital-asset firm Zero Hash, which also custodies the coins, at a 0.5% fee.
The move brings crypto to one of the largest mainstream trading platforms in the U.S. and lets users see digital assets next to their stocks. Transfer functionality is expected later this year.
It caps a busy year for Morgan Stanley in crypto. The bank filed for spot Ethereum and Solana ETFs after launching a Bitcoin product in April, launched a money market fund for stablecoin issuers, and is building a trust bank to custody digital assets. It first signaled the E*TRADE plan last September.
🏦 T. Rowe Price launched the first actively managed multi-token spot crypto ETF, trading on NYSE Arca under the ticker TKNZ with exposure to bitcoin, ether, XRP, Solana, and Hyperliquid. The $1.89 trillion asset manager is charging a 0.75% fee, waived until mid-2027.
📊 Polymarket traders may have manipulated bitcoin's price on Binance in the final seconds before settlement to rig its five-minute bitcoin contracts, a Stanford and Singapore Management University working paper found. Researchers estimated about 821 traders took $8.2 million from the pushed cycles while retail bore 93% of the losses.
✈️ Kalshi scrapped its planned flight cancellation contracts after social media backlash warned bad actors could disrupt airports to collect payouts, and after FlightAware said the platform couldn't use its data, according to Fortune. The contracts were set to list Wednesday before the company reversed course.
🏗️ Aave deployed its V4 lending protocol on Avalanche, the first time its Hub and Spoke architecture has run on a chain other than Ethereum. The dedicated market for borrowing against tokenized real-world assets is not yet live, founder Stani Kulechov said.
🔒 Enso found manipulated pools in DeFi engineered to show an attractive quote during a wallet's pre-trade simulation, then execute at a worse rate once the swap is mined. The onchain firm documented rigged Curve and Uniswap v4 pools and put the operator's realized profit at about $34,600.
✂️ Polygon Labs cut staff again, its second round of layoffs in 2026, as CEO Marc Boiron said the company is closing its Coinme acquisition and remaking itself into a payments business aiming to turn a profit in 2027. Boiron did not disclose how many employees were affected.
👋 MegaETH sunset Mega Mafia, its flagship accelerator, after two cohorts that helped roughly 20 teams raise about $80 million, with core team member Shuyao Kong noting most of the successful apps are no longer building on MegaETH.
🐳 A dormant bitcoin whale moved $383 million in BTC after more than eight years, sending 5,907 BTC to a new wallet rather than an exchange, which Galaxy Research said gives no sign of a sale. The coins, acquired in 2017, have gained about 291%.
⚖️ A South Dakota crypto investor was indicted on 29 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft over an alleged scheme prosecutors say caused about $20 million in losses. Benjamin Paul Wiener, 43, pleaded not guilty, with trial set for September.
🇯🇵 SBI Group partnered with Ondo to bring Japanese equities onchain, distribute Ondo's tokenized products across SBI's ecosystem, and use SBI's JPYSC stablecoin for onchain settlement and collateral.
🚛 Volvo Group tested a proprietary cryptocurrency on a closed blockchain to streamline payments and records with its material and transport suppliers, an executive said in a Cardano Foundation interview. The project remains exploratory, with no timeline for broader rollout.
💰 Alpaca raised $135 million led by Peak XV to scale its brokerage infrastructure for tokenized markets and AI-native finance, part of a broader $435 million financing that includes debt from Kraken parent Payward and BMO. The round follows a $150 million Series D in January that valued the company at $1.15 billion.
🍊 ORANGE JUICE raised $40 million to launch a permanent capital firm that acquires cash-generating businesses and holds a bitcoin treasury, backed by ego death capital partners Jeff Booth and Lyn Alden, with Ricardo Salinas as anchor investor.
🟡 Tether invested $20 million in Argentine neobank Ualá as part of a $197 million round led by Allianz X that valued the fintech at $3.2 billion, deepening Tether's push across Latin America.
🤝 MoonPay acquired Glide, a Y Combinator-backed crypto deposits startup, in an all-equity deal that folds Glide's routing technology into MoonPay Deposits. It marks MoonPay's sixth acquisition of 2026.
🔀 Keyrock acquired BlockFills' institutional trading and brokerage assets, expanding the Brussels-based firm's derivatives and options business and adding regulated entities in the Cayman Islands and, pending approval, the UK.
🔮 Multicoin Capital invested $1.75 million in Trasia, an Asia-focused perpetual futures platform built on Hyperliquid, marking the firm's first Hyperliquid ecosystem bet as sole investor. Trasia was co-founded by former Multicoin partner Mable Jiang.
Wintermute Ventures: The prediction market boom has an infrastructure problem
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