Hi! In today’s edition:
🏛️ Trump doesn’t get the fuss about his 2025 crypto profits
🏦 Samsung and Dunamu say OUSD listed them as partners without asking
⚖️ EU regulators just complicated life for prediction market platforms eyeing Europe
🔧 Vitalik breaksdown the “Lean Ethereum” vision
Trump Says His Crypto Windfall Is Fine
President Trump said Thursday there's "nothing wrong" with the more than $1.4 billion his family made from crypto last year, dismissing questions about conflicts of interest during a CNBC interview at the White House. Asked whether he knew about the ventures, he said, "I could know about it. I didn't." He pointed to son Eric Trump as the one who "handles" the investments.
The disclosure showed $636 million tied to his TRUMP memecoin, roughly $594 million from World Liberty Financial, and nearly $197 million from a stablecoin venture linked to Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Meanwhile, blockchain analytics firm Nansen found nearly a million wallets that bought the TRUMP memecoin have lost a combined $3.8 billion, even as roughly 492,000 earlier buyers are up $4 billion.
Samsung, Dunamu Deny Signing Up for OUSD
Samsung Electronics and Dunamu say they never agreed to join the founding consortium behind OUSD, according to a Chosun Biz report.
Open Standard unveiled OUSD on June 30, saying it is backed by more than 140 companies, including Samsung and Dunamu. A Samsung official, however, told Chosun Biz the company held no official consultations with Open Standard and doesn't know what role it would play. Shinhan Financial Group, Dunamu, and Kbank gave similar accounts, saying they'd only agreed to review the proposal before their names turned up as members.
The dispute matters because OUSD's pitch partly rests on the strength of its 140-plus-firm roster.
EU Warns Prediction Markets Could Hit Retail Ban
The European Securities and Markets Authority warned Friday that some prediction market contracts could fall under the EU's binary options ban, meaning firms could be barred from marketing yes-or-no "event contracts" to retail investors across the bloc. ESMA said a prediction market contract could be a derivative to the 2018 rules if the underlying asset falls within the bloc’s classification of a financial instrument.
The warning lands as Kalshi and Polymarket are already facing regulatory hurdles in the block. Spain blocked both platforms in May over missing gambling licenses.
Vitalik Says Ethereum's Next Overhaul Rivals the Merge
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the network's next big rebuild, dubbed "Lean Ethereum," will take three to four years and rival the scale of 2022's Merge. Posting after a Berlin researcher meeting, Buterin called it Ethereum's "third major iteration," touching nearly every layer of the protocol: transaction verification, quantum-resistant cryptography, finality speed, and how the chain stores data.
The storage overhaul is the “most disruptive part of the plan,” Buterin said. Ethereum would keep its current model for complex apps like Uniswap while adding a cheaper tier for simpler tokens and NFTs, Buterin said, adding that the newer system could cut fees more than tenfold. He also flagged quantum safety as a rising priority.
🔈 DON’T MISS BITS + BIPS TODAY 🔊
Stablecoin wars just got messy: Robinhood pushes further into USDG and its new Earn product, Revolut drops USDT tomorrow, and Samsung, Upbit, Shinhan, and Kbank are all denying they signed on as OpenUSD partners. Circle fell 15% in the fallout.
Austin, Ram, and Chris also get into Securitize's NYSE-plus-onchain IPO, the Clarity Act's $1.4 billion disclosure fight, and why crypto is losing ground to a cheaper Chinese AI stack.
Streams live today at 4:30pm ET.
🗳️ Solana activated on-chain governance, letting validators with at least 100,000 SOL (about $7.7 million) staked put binding proposals to a stake-weighted vote. The system requires a two-thirds supermajority to pass and lets delegators override how their validator votes, a feature the Solana Foundation calls "staker sovereignty."
🇺🇸 US-linked wallets traded $571 million in Polymarket political markets over the past year, more than any other country, despite the platform being legally barred from serving American users, according to onchain analytics firm Allium. Americans bet on foreign-conflict markets like the Iran war at nearly three times the rate they bet on elections, but picked winners no better than everyone else.
🏛️ The IMF warned that tokenization could reshape global finance for better or worse depending on policy choices, since moving assets onto shared digital ledgers removes the traditional buffers that give banks and regulators time to react to shocks. Financial Counsellor Tobias Adrian said risk could migrate from institutions' balance sheets onto the platforms and code that run tokenized markets.
🎵 Spotify demanded logo removal from Kalshi and Polymarket after discovering manipulated streams had already been used to settle a prediction market bet. The company pulled more than 500,000 fake streams that had pushed Malcolm Todd's "Earrings" up its charts, a metric a $3 million Kalshi market had already used to declare a winner.
🏛️ Nigel Farage failed to declare extensive financial support from George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster tied to offshore crypto gambling platform Tether.bet, a Sunday Times investigation found. Cottrell paid for Farage's private security, staff, and accommodation in the year before his 2024 election, a potential breach of MPs' disclosure rules.
📉 K Wave Media sold all its bitcoin and filed to raise up to $250 million as it abandons its Saylor-style treasury plan for AI data centers and GPU computing. The Nasdaq-listed Korean media company once aimed to hold 10,000 bitcoin but never got close, and now faces delisting risk with shares near 16 cents.
🤖 THEA announced an $8 million round led by Maven11 Capital and Spartan Group to build a Solana-anchored AI settlement layer. THEA said it has no current plans for a token or public sale.
💧 Squid closed its public token sale for $QUID, raising roughly $26.7 million from over 3,500 subscribers. The cross-chain router claims to have processed more than $6 billion in volume through more than 4 million transactions since 2023.
Michael Saylor: Bitcoin Evolves by Not Changing
