blockchain

According to official news, the one-stop trading platform Dango team announced that due to various reasons, the project has no viable path to achieve sustained commercial success and has decided to shut down. The team emphasized user fund safety, withdrawal restrictions will be lifted in the short term, and advised users to close positions and withdraw funds as soon as possible, while reminding that current liquidity is expected to be thin, and caution should be taken regarding slippage risk.At 20:00 Beijing time on July 29 (12:00 UTC), Dango will stop trading, and remaining positions will be closed at oracle prices. DLP gold deposits will be unlocked, and all funds will be returned to users' spot accounts in the form of USDC.At 20:00 Beijing time on August 13 (12:00 UTC), the Dango L1 blockchain will cease operation. At that time, any deposits that have not been withdrawn will be refunded to the user's original Ethereum deposit address.

According to Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, the state is advancing the drafting of the "Maharashtra Land Token Asset Digitalization and Exchange Bill (DELTA Act)." Fadnavis chaired a related meeting, instructing officials to study global laws and regulations as well as best practices, and established an expert committee composed of representatives from SEBI, BSE, NSE, and professionals to formulate a complete legislative framework.According to the proposal, real estate will be tokenized through blockchain technology, with the entire transaction completed on-chain. This move aims to unlock the potential value of real estate, create new sources of revenue, and help Maharashtra achieve its goal of a $1 trillion GDP by 2030. If the legislation is implemented, Maharashtra will become the first state in India to introduce such regulations.

According to SolanaFloor data, Solana regained the top position among all blockchains in terms of daily network revenue (on July 18), marking the first time in nearly five months.

According to official news, the L1 blockchain ILITY has received a $1 million investment from Archer Capital and TBV to accelerate the layout of the Agent ecosystem. It is reported that ILITY's AI Agent economic ecosystem is about to launch, and this round of funding will mainly be used to deepen this emerging sector.ILITY Network is an infrastructure aimed at the AI Agent economy, providing verifiable on-chain identities for autonomous AI agents, real-time machine-to-machine (M2M) payment settlements between agents, and a reputation system that can be carried across services based on real on-chain performance records; its native token $ILY serves as the Gas and settlement currency for this ecosystem.Previously, the project's last round of financing was supported by institutions such as Animoca Brands, DuckDAO, UZ Capital, and Vega Ventures.

According to The Block, Bank of America has appointed Sonali Theisen as the head of its global digital asset platform and Kevin Milsom as the head of AI transformation to drive the development of digital asset and artificial intelligence strategies.Sonali Theisen will be responsible for the design, development, expansion, and governance of the bank's digital asset platform, while continuing to serve as the head of electronic trading and strategic investments for fixed income, foreign exchange, and commodities (FICC) business. Her focus will include promoting the integration of blockchain products into Bank of America's existing financial market infrastructure and collaborating with the digital asset transformation head Adam Dixon to advance tokenized deposits, stablecoins, digital collateral circulation, cryptocurrency trading settlement, and custody services.Kevin Milsom will be responsible for promoting the application of AI in Bank of America's global markets platform. Reports indicate that this move continues the trend of Wall Street financial institutions accelerating their layout in digital assets and AI. Previously, Vanguard had initiated the recruitment of its first head of digital assets, and Morgan Stanley appointed Amy Oldenburg earlier this year to lead digital asset strategy to promote the integration of crypto assets and asset tokenization with traditional financial infrastructure.

New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte recently signed HB 639, the Blockchain Basic Laws, which increases legal protections for digital asset users, developers, miners, validators, and businesses, and protects the rights to use and self-custody of digital assets. The bill also authorizes the establishment of specialized case files for blockchain-related disputes.New Hampshire's 2025 law allows the state treasurer to allocate up to 5% of certain public funds to precious metals and qualified digital assets, with only Bitcoin currently meeting the market capitalization threshold. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 21 in June 2025, establishing the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. State legislators allocated $10 million, and Texas subsequently made an initial investment of about $5 million through a spot Bitcoin ETF.Wyoming's 2025 proposal to allow up to 3% of state funds to be allocated to Bitcoin was not approved, but the state continues to advance its specialized banking framework and Frontier Stable Token. FRNT is set to be publicly available in January 2026 and is described as the first state-issued stablecoin in the United States.

Ethena officially announced the launch of the Monad blockchain on platform X. USDe and sUSDe are now available throughout the Monad ecosystem, including integration with Monad's Aave instance, allowing Ethena users to borrow stablecoin liquidity at scale.In addition, the parallelized EVM USDe has now been launched.

According to Cointelegraph, ARK Invest's research director Lorenzo Valente published a rebuttal to a16z crypto's view that "traditional finance will adopt blockchain rather than DeFi," arguing that institutions will increasingly rely on DeFi infrastructure in the future.Valente stated that public chains are leading private chain projects in actual development, with the growth of tokenized assets on open networks like Ethereum as an example. He also believes that crypto-native companies like Circle and Coinbase are better positioned than traditional financial institutions to build the next generation of financial infrastructure.a16z crypto previously stated that banks and asset management institutions would not directly adopt DeFi but would choose blockchain technologies that comply with existing regulatory, governance, and operational requirements, including features like tokenization and atomic settlement, while continuing to maintain licensing and institutional control.Sentora co-founder Jesus Rodriguez also disagreed with a16z's viewpoint, suggesting that institutions might adopt the underlying infrastructure of DeFi and overlay compliance, custody, and other enterprise-level controls on top of it.

Digital asset prime broker FalconX will acquire blockchain infrastructure company bloXroute.By combining bloXroute's network technology with FalconX's institutional trading platform, FalconX will accelerate the development of new trading, financing, and prime brokerage capabilities.

India imposes a uniform 30% tax on the income from virtual digital assets and an additional 1% withholding tax on the transfer amount. Approximately 54 cryptocurrency service providers in the country have registered with the financial intelligence department, serving 39 million verified users, who collectively hold about $2.1 billion in assets.The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has repeatedly expressed to Parliament its preference for a prohibitive policy towards private cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, urging banks to avoid related exposures to protect financial stability. The long-promised cryptocurrency bill has yet to be completed.Indian government agencies are also using permissioned blockchain in non-trading scenarios. AIIMS Delhi uses blockchain to manage teacher recruitment records, the Cotton Corporation of India tracks cotton bales through a blockchain identification system, and the aviation regulator DGCA is building a digital service platform associated with blockchain.

Celestia Labs announced that it has acquired the high-performance blockchain framework developer Sovereign Labs. The latter has been deeply engaged in the Celestia ecosystem since 2021, and its framework has provided underlying support for projects such as the cross-chain bridge Relay Protocol and the high-performance perpetual contract trading platform Bullet.After this acquisition, Celestia Labs' technical capabilities will extend from Layer 1 to the execution layer and application layer, becoming a full-stack custom blockchain development partner for enterprises. As projects like Hyperliquid, Polymarket, and Robinhood choose to build their own chains, the demand for full-stack blockchain infrastructure among enterprises is accelerating.

According to South Korea's "Daily Economic News," the South Korean government has officially established policies for cultivating the blockchain and digital asset ecosystem through the "2026 Economic Growth Strategy for the Second Half of the Year." Core initiatives include launching a pilot project for the tokenization of government bonds in 2027, linking it with the central bank digital currency of South Korean banking institutions, and considering the interoperability of CBDC with other private blockchains.The legislation for digital assets is accelerating, with plans to promote the legislation of the "Fundamental Law on Digital Assets" in the second half of the year, covering the institutionalization of stablecoins and the systematization of cross-border stablecoin transactions. The government will also support amendments to capital market laws to promote the institutionalization of virtual asset spot ETFs. In terms of the competitiveness of the blockchain industry, large demonstration projects and leading technology research and development will be promoted in the fourth quarter of this year. Additionally, the government will collaborate with international organizations such as UNFCCC and GGGI to manage GVCM carbon credits in accordance with the Paris Agreement based on blockchain technology.

a16z published a blog post stating that as traditional financial institutions accelerate their exploration of blockchain technology, the market generally believes that the future will see a comprehensive integration of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) and TradFi (Traditional Finance), forming a new financial model through the combination of decentralized finance and institutional distribution systems.However, the reality may not be so. The core motivation for traditional financial institutions to adopt blockchain is not to embrace decentralization, but to value its commercial benefits in reducing costs, improving settlement efficiency, expanding distribution channels, and optimizing customer relationship management.What is more likely to emerge in the future is a new type of "programmable financial infrastructure" based on underlying blockchain technology, optimized for institutional needs, rather than a simple integration of traditional finance and DeFi. Institutions are selectively absorbing certain technological capabilities from DeFi and modifying them according to their own regulatory, risk management, and operational requirements.For example, atomic settlement can reduce counterparty risk, shared ledgers can lower back-office reconciliation costs, programmable funds can automatically execute processes such as interest payments, margin management, and corporate actions, and automated market-making models are also being applied to on-chain foreign exchange and tokenized asset pricing.At the same time, the native DeFi features of open access, anonymity, and trustless execution often conflict with institutional requirements for compliance, control, and accountability. Therefore, cases such as JPMorgan's institutional blockchain project, BlackRock's and Franklin Templeton's tokenized funds, are essentially not traditional finance entering DeFi, but rather using blockchain technology to improve existing financial business processes.In the future, the blockchain industry will have two development paths: on one hand, enterprises and financial institutions will continue to promote the implementation of blockchain infrastructure that meets regulatory requirements, expanding the industry scale through applications such as stablecoins, tokenized assets, and on-chain settlements; on the other hand, open networks will continue to play the role of a source of innovation, continuously generating new financial primitives and market mechanisms, providing technical reserves for future institutional infrastructure.TradFi and DeFi are not in competition but are developing together in different directions. Traditional finance may not fully adopt the DeFi model but will gradually adopt parts that suit its own needs. The true integration may ultimately occur at the underlying blockchain network level, rather than one side replacing the other.For developers, the key is not to chase all markets simultaneously but to clarify the target audience: for institutions, products need to be built around compliance, risk control, and long-term business processes; for open networks, there is a need to continue exploring innovation, liquidity, and network effects. The future financial system may operate on blockchain infrastructure, but the most important innovations may still come first from open networks.

According to Gate Ventures' latest weekly report, the global market continued to be influenced by high interest rate expectations and geopolitical factors last week, with the cryptocurrency market overall maintaining volatility. BTC rose 0.2% over the week, ETH increased by 1.2%, and market sentiment saw a slight recovery. Meanwhile, BTC spot ETFs ended eight consecutive weeks of net outflows, recording a net inflow of approximately $197 million, and ETH spot ETFs also resumed net inflows, with institutional allocation demand showing marginal improvement.On the industry front, traditional financial institutions are continuing to accelerate the construction of on-chain infrastructure. Swift officially launched a blockchain-based shared ledger and partnered with 17 global banks to initiate a tokenized deposit pilot; fintech platform Toss is collaborating with Optimism to advance the infrastructure development for the Korean won stablecoin; Robinhood Chain, which launched only two weeks ago, has surpassed a total locked value (TVL) of $132 million.In terms of investment and financing, a total of 8 financing deals were disclosed last week, amounting to $381 million, with the infrastructure (Infra) sector dominating. Prime Intellect completed a $130 million financing round to accelerate the construction of enterprise-level AI infrastructure; Gauntlet received a $125 million strategic investment from Japan's SBI Holdings to further expand its institutional-level DeFi treasury business. Gate Ventures believes that stablecoins, on-chain finance, and institutional-level infrastructure are continuing to become important development directions for the industry, with institutional capital further increasing its investment in digital asset infrastructure.

According to South Korean media EToday, the South Korean government announced the "2026 Economic Growth Strategy for the Second Half of the Year," declaring that it will accelerate the advancement of three major "super projects": semiconductors, AI data centers, and physical AI, and plans to enhance industrial competitiveness through the construction of blockchain and digital asset ecosystems.According to the plan, South Korea aims to double its storage chip production capacity within the next five years and launch an AI chatbot and a unified AI education platform for the public in the second half of this year. Notably, the South Korean government proposed to advance large-scale demonstration projects for blockchain and digital asset ecosystems in the second half of this year and to initiate a pilot project for the tokenization of government bonds based on blockchain, exploring the linkage with the central bank's institutional CBDC to promote the upgrade of financial infrastructure. In addition, South Korea also plans to establish strategic investment accounts and a national growth fund to expand long-term capital support for strategic industries such as artificial intelligence, quantum technology, security, and blockchain.

New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte signed HB 639 into law last week. The bill is known as The Blockchain Basic Laws, which provides protection for cryptocurrency innovation and use in the state, and allows for the establishment of special blockchain dispute case files in the superior court.New Hampshire passed a strategic Bitcoin reserve bill last year, allowing the state treasurer to invest up to 5% of public funds in Bitcoin, as well as precious metals like gold and silver. The state's executive council rejected a proposal last week that would have allowed the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority to promote Bitcoin-supported municipal bonds.

According to The Information, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) plans to showcase a real-time stock trading settlement process based on blockchain technology this Wednesday, focusing on verifying the feasibility of this technology in the clearing, settlement, and recording stages to enhance the operational efficiency of capital market infrastructure.

According to crypto KOL @amathxbt and others, Circle's public blockchain Arc may have been launched privately. The cross-chain protocols LayerZero and LI.FI have been deployed to the Arc network, but have not been publicly tested by the community.According to public information, Arc is a public Layer 1 blockchain, positioned as the "Economic Operating System of the Internet," providing shared and composable infrastructure to support economic contracts, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and global market operations. In May of this year, Circle officially released the ARC white paper, outlining the design framework for ARC as the native coordinating asset of the Arc blockchain network. The Arc public testnet is set to launch in October 2025. The mainnet is expected to go live in the summer of 2026.