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Keyrock's latest report shows that crypto rails are gradually becoming the default payment layer for AI Agents. Over the past year, AI Agents have completed more than 176 million transactions via blockchain, with a settlement amount exceeding 73 million dollars.As AI Agents begin to autonomously purchase data, cloud computing power, API services, and AI inference resources, the traditional bank card payment system has struggled to adapt to high-frequency, ultra-small payment scenarios. Currently, about 76% of Agent payment amounts are below 30 cents, while some on-chain stablecoin transfer costs are only "a fraction of a cent." Coinbase, Stripe, Google, and Visa have all begun to lay out the infrastructure for machine-to-machine payments. Among them, Coinbase's x402 protocol allows AI Agents to directly use USDC to pay for on-chain analysis and cloud service fees.Data shows that currently, 98.6% of AI Agent payments are settled in USDC. The report suggests that this further strengthens Circle's important position in the crypto payment field, but it also means that the industry's reliance on a single stablecoin issuer is increasing.

According to monitoring by Catcher Predict, in the predicted market event on Polymarket "LoL: Invictus Gaming vs ThunderTalk Gaming (BO5) - LPL Qualifiers," the "Yes" option for the sub-market "Any player pentakill" has experienced a drastic fluctuation in win rate, dropping from 50% an hour ago to the current 24.95% (a fluctuation of 25.05%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.

Solayer Labs announced the official launch of its Solana native perpetual trading platform Margin Trade public testnet.Margin Trade was jointly developed by the Solayer Labs team and former traders from Citadel and Kraken, adopting a unified margin model that supports trading multiple assets such as cryptocurrencies, commodities (gold, silver, crude oil), and stock indices (MT500) in a single chain environment.In addition, Solayer will gradually launch individual stocks and volatility products, and plans to introduce trading competitions, rankings, and incentive activities.

According to The Block, the Ethereum Layer 2 project Zero Network announced that it will officially shut down soon, just about 1.5 years after its launch. Zero Network was launched by the Zerion team in November 2024, positioned as the first EVM-compatible gas-free Rollup, aimed at lowering user barriers and promoting mainstream adoption.The team stated that they will focus resources on Zerion's API and wallet business. Users need to bridge out their NFTs, ETH, and other tokens from the Zero Network by the end of July, as the bridging deposit function has currently been suspended.

Syndicate Labs, Everclear, and ZERO Network announced the cessation of operations on the same day, highlighting the deep dilemmas in the blockchain infrastructure sector.Syndicate Labs, a startup supported by a16z and having raised over $27 million, announced its closure after five years of operation, stating that EVM Rollup is no longer the industry standard and the market has fundamentally shifted to custom chains. The cross-chain settlement protocol Everclear (formerly Connext) announced hours later that it would shut down its foundation and lab entities, despite having a monthly trading volume that once reached $500 million, it was unable to convert that volume into revenue, and the CLEAR token dropped about 40% on the same day. The gasless Ethereum Layer 2 ZERO Network built by the crypto wallet Zerion also announced its closure on the same day, with the team shifting focus to the development of Zerion wallet and API products, and users must bridge their funds out by July 31.The common dilemma faced by the three projects is that even with venture capital funding and operational products, it remains difficult to find a sustainable business model to withstand market deterioration.

Tom Lee, the chairman of BitMine, Ethereum's largest treasury, stated that Ethereum has a strong group of leaders and developers who can ensure it continues to be the future settlement layer for finance and AI.Currently, much of the bearish sentiment is just despair and mutual blame at the bottom of the crypto winter. Blockchain is the only viable way for agentic AI to conduct business interactions while significantly improving the profitability of the financial system. I will continue to be optimistic about ETH.

According to monitoring by Catcher Predict, in the predicted market Polymarket for the event "LoL: BNK FEARX vs Hanwha Life Esports (BO3) - LCK Round 1-2", the "Yes" option for the sub-market "Any player gets a Quadra Kill" has experienced a dramatic fluctuation in win rate, soaring from 50% an hour ago to the current 90% (a fluctuation of 40%). Please note the impact of relevant breaking news.

According to Bloomberg, informed sources revealed that the prediction market Kalshi has raised an additional $200 million from two new investors, Baillie Gifford and Layer Global, expanding the previous $1 billion financing led by Coatue Management, with the company's valuation remaining unchanged at $22 billion.Earlier, Kalshi announced at the beginning of this month the completion of a $1 billion Series F financing led by Coatue Management, with a valuation of $22 billion. Other participants included Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley, and ARK Invest. Kalshi's monthly trading volume in April exceeded $14 billion, with an annualized revenue of over $1.5 billion.

LayerZero Labs released a report on the KelpDAO attack incident, confirming that the KelpDAO rsETH cross-chain bridge built on its cross-chain communication protocol was attacked, resulting in the theft of approximately 116,500 rsETH (about $292 million). Several security agencies, including Mandiant, CrowdStrike, and independent researchers, attributed the attack to the North Korean-related hacker group TraderTraitor (UNC4899).The report indicates that the attack began on March 6, 2026, when the attackers used social engineering techniques to compromise a LayerZero developer account, obtain session keys, and infiltrate the RPC cloud environment, further contaminating internal RPC node data and manipulating return results to deceive monitoring systems and the decentralized verification network (DVN).LayerZero Labs officially announced that it will adjust its security strategy, including no longer allowing its DVN to act as the sole signer in a single validation configuration, while also rebuilding the affected cloud infrastructure and introducing short-term credentials, instant permission upgrades, and multi-party approval mechanisms to enhance security.

According to a message posted by Aave founder Stani Kulechov on X, Aave V4 is being gradually launched in phases, introducing a brand new dual-layer isolation market architecture. This architecture separates collateral into independent Hubs, with each Hub further divided into Spokes, implementing selective cap control for liquidity sharing between the Spokes within each Hub.The initial market structure is organized around three Hubs: Prime, Core, and Plus, with more Hubs expected to be launched in subsequent phases. This architecture achieves more refined collateral isolation and liquidity supply management compared to Aave's previous market design. The phased launch allows Aave to progressively deploy V4 while continuously monitoring performance and risk parameters under the new market structure before a full launch.

The fintech company Antalpha (NASDAQ: ANTA) announced a strategic expansion into the field of AI infrastructure and intelligent routing systems, positioning it as a new growth engine for the company's long-term technology roadmap.To advance the implementation of this strategy, Antalpha has launched a self-developed MCP (Model Context Protocol) framework, aimed at supporting intelligent routing and coordination across data and execution environments. Based on this underlying architecture, the company has recently launched an early agent interface layer named "Nina."Antalpha officially stated that the company expects intelligent routing and coordination technology to become a core component of future infrastructure architecture. In the future, its long-term strategy will focus on the research and development of such intelligent infrastructure and digital coordination technologies to support increasingly intelligent and interconnected digital systems and Web3 scenarios.

According to The Block, the AI settlement layer AEON has completed an $8 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by YZi Labs, with participation from IDG Capital, HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, and Oak Grove Ventures. The structure of this financing round and the post-investment valuation have not been disclosed. AEON plans to use the funds from this round to develop a settlement layer aimed at supporting interactions between AI agents.AEON launched its first AI payment product in May, enabling AI agents to connect with over 50 million physical merchants worldwide. In addition, AEON has partnered with BNB Chain to launch a product called x402 Facilitator, which is natively built on BNB Chain infrastructure, providing verifiable transactions, on-chain settlements, and tamper-proof receipts for service providers within the BNB ecosystem.

According to CoinDesk, after KelpDAO was attacked resulting in a loss of $292 million, the industry's scrutiny of the security of cross-chain infrastructure continues to heat up, with approximately $4 billion in assets having completed or currently migrating from LayerZero to Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).The DeFi protocol Lombard is the latest project to join this migration trend. The protocol announced it would abandon LayerZero and migrate over $1 billion in Bitcoin-backed assets to Chainlink CCIP, stating that this decision stemmed from a comprehensive internal security review following the April attack incident.Lombard issues two types of Bitcoin-backed tokens—LBTC and BTC.b—and will prioritize the migration of assets on chains such as Solana, Etherlink, Berachain, Corn, and TAC, while terminating the use of LayerZero on Morph and Swell. Lombard stated that the reason for choosing CCIP is its independent node operators, built-in rate limiting mechanisms, and audited infrastructure. Additionally, the protocol will adopt Chainlink's cross-chain token standard to achieve asset cross-chain circulation through a burn-and-mint model.Previously, Kelp DAO, Solv Protocol, Re, and the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken have all completed similar migrations, with these projects collectively transferring approximately $4 billion in assets. Chainlink Labs Chief Business Officer Johann Eid stated, "We are witnessing a continued wave of risk-averse migration within the industry."

According to CoinDesk, Kraken announced that it will use Chainlink's cross-chain interoperability protocol CCIP, replacing LayerZero as the exclusive cross-chain infrastructure for its wrapped assets, covering kBTC and more wrapped assets in the future. This migration involves over $3 billion in TVL, following a $292 million LayerZero-related cross-chain attack incident that occurred in April. Kraken stated that the migration will cover networks such as Ink, Ethereum, Unichain, and Optimism. kBTC is set to launch in 2024, with a current market value of approximately $260 million. Coinbase had previously also chosen Chainlink CCIP as the sole cross-chain bridge solution for about $7 billion in wrapped tokens.

Global financial infrastructure giant DTCC (whose subsidiary processed $47 trillion in securities transactions in 2025) announced on Tuesday that it will integrate Chainlink as the data and orchestration layer for its upcoming tokenized collateral platform.DTCC's Collateral AppChain will utilize the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) and its data standards to support eligibility checks, valuations, margin calculations, collateral optimization, and settlement functions, with a target to go live in Q4 2026.Nadine Chakar, DTCC's Global Head of Digital Assets, stated that the goal is to achieve near real-time collateral management between global markets and blockchain through tokenization and distributed ledger technology, operating 24/7. Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov described collateral management as "the killer application that traditional finance has been waiting for." The platform is designed as a shared infrastructure for collateral providers, recipients, managers, third-party agents, and custodians, rather than a bilateral institutional chain. This collaboration continues the foundation of previous partnerships between the two parties, such as in the Smart NAV pilot project.

Movement announced that it has completed the acquisition of the on-chain Vault infrastructure project Canopy, further integrating key financial infrastructure within the Movement Network. Canopy has previously been an important part of the Movement ecosystem, primarily responsible for building the Vault layer on the Movement Network, with its smart contracts allowing users to allocate assets and strategize on-chain with independent strategy managers.After this acquisition, Canopy will collaborate more closely with the on-chain credit protocol MovePosition, and Movement is gradually building a complete on-chain financial infrastructure stack covering modules such as Vault, credit, and yield strategies. Movement stated that most public chain ecosystems still rely on third parties to provide core financial primitives, while Movement hopes to achieve deeper technical collaboration between Vault contracts and other components of the network through self-built and internally integrated methods.For developers, this means they can directly integrate core protocols that are continuously iterating; for partners, it means stronger consistency between the underlying infrastructure and the development team; for users, it is expected to provide a more unified on-chain financial product experience. The official also revealed that MovePosition and Canopy will gradually operate as a unified infrastructure, with more integration details to be announced in the coming weeks.

According to monitoring by Catcher Predict, in the predicted market event "LoL: Top Esports vs Pajama Ninjas (BO3) - LPL Group Advancement" on Polymarket, the "Yes" option for the sub-market "Any Player Quadra Kill" has experienced a sharp fluctuation in win rate, soaring from 50% an hour ago to the current 75.5% (a fluctuation of 25.5%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.

The Ethereum Layer 2 network Starknet developed by StarkWare officially launched strkBTC, a new type of asset based on Bitcoin, designed to achieve privacy balances and anonymous transfers through zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology, while maintaining composability with DeFi applications.After the launch of strkBTC, it supports "re-anonymization," allowing assets to be bridged back to a new, unassociated Bitcoin address, and provides compliance auditing and asset screening functions.