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The European Union has further tightened restrictions on cryptocurrency assets related to Belarus, prohibiting Belarusian citizens and residents from owning, controlling, or managing cryptocurrency service providers regulated by the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). According to the Council Decision (CFSP) 2026/1847 passed by the EU Council, this measure is an extension of the EU's sanctions framework against Belarus's involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.The new regulations will officially take effect on July 24, with the expanded restrictions on the cryptocurrency industry set to be implemented from August 25. According to MiCA, the affected services include operating cryptocurrency trading platforms, cryptocurrency exchanges, executing and transmitting customer orders, cryptocurrency issuance services, asset transfer services, investment consulting, and portfolio management.This restriction comes as the MiCA transition period ends on July 1. The EU had previously required unauthorized cryptocurrency businesses to cease related operations, or face regulatory enforcement. The EU stated that this expansion of restrictions is part of its efforts to combat the use of cryptocurrency platforms to evade sanctions against Russia. Previously, in the 21st round of sanctions against Russia, the EU had expanded the trading ban to 14 cryptocurrency-related service platforms outside the EU and established a mechanism to prohibit future transactions with any foreign cryptocurrency service providers identified as helping Russia evade sanctions. Market participants noted that as the MiCA regulatory framework is fully implemented, the EU is further strengthening its regulatory control over the cryptocurrency industry through licensing systems and sanction mechanisms.

According to reports from Yicai, there are many rumors that "Xiaohongshu secretly submitted an IPO application before the end of June," but it was hindered by former employees reporting its "compliance issues for listing."In response, Xiaohongshu stated: The current circulating information related to the IPO is not true.

According to The Block, the new version of the cryptocurrency ethics clause signed by President Trump has been approved, explicitly prohibiting federal officials (including members of Congress, the President, and the Vice President) from issuing digital assets, with the Department of Justice serving as the primary enforcement agency rather than state attorneys general. This arrangement has sparked controversy among Democrats. Maryland Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks stated that "having the Department of Justice enforce the ethics clause is not a serious proposal," and she will not support the bill if the final text remains as such.This clause is the last obstacle to the passage of the Clarity Act, with the controversy focusing on Trump's own meme coin and his family company World Liberty Financial—last month's financial report revealed that Trump received millions of dollars in related income from WLF. The White House has not confirmed the specific wording of the clause but stated that it is working with lawmakers to push the bill through and will place the blame for any obstruction on the Democrats.

According to a report by Reuters, the Chief Minister of Johor, Malaysia, stated on Tuesday that the Johor state government has noted and fully supports the decision made at the special meeting of the municipal hall: to revoke the business license of NS0 Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. (Network School) located in Forest City, and to order it to cease all activities starting from July 22, 2026.He stated that this decision was made in accordance with due process and relevant legal provisions, and was ultimately decided after a comprehensive review of the law enforcement inspection report, investigation results, and the statements submitted by the company.Network School had previously attracted widespread attention due to allegations on social media. Some netizens claimed that the project accepted participants from Israel, while Malaysia has not established diplomatic relations with Israel.

According to the latest official announcement from the Chrome Web Store, the platform will officially implement the updated Developer Program Policy starting August 1, 2026. This update clearly delineates boundaries for regulated goods and services, listing "prediction markets" as a prohibited product category, strictly prohibiting any extensions from offering, facilitating, or supporting real-money trading based on prediction results.In addition, the new regulations further tighten data privacy and AI safety standards. The policy requires that user data collected by extensions must be strictly and exclusively used for the single purpose disclosed; if there is a change in data processing methods, users must be proactively notified. At the same time, extensions designed to circumvent AI-driven service safety protections, usage restrictions, and other protective mechanisms are explicitly prohibited. After August 1, if any extensions are found to be non-compliant with the above policies, the Chrome Web Store will take enforcement actions.

On the evening of June 22, the U.S. Senate passed the "21st Century Housing Road Act" with an overwhelming vote of 85-5. The bill has now been sent to the House of Representatives, where it is expected to pass quickly and be signed into law by President Trump. The central bank digital currency (CBDC) ban has become a key additional clause in the bill, which will prohibit the Federal Reserve from issuing central bank digital currencies (CBDC) or any substantially similar digital assets before the end of 2030, even if issued indirectly through financial institutions. The bill also explicitly exempts private stablecoins (such as USDC, USDT).

According to The Block, leaders of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives jointly released an updated version of the "21st Century Housing Road Act," confirming that the two chambers have reached a bipartisan agreement. The core content of the bill focuses on housing affordability reform, including expanding housing supply and limiting market monopolies by corporate landlords. Notably, an additional clause in the bill explicitly prohibits the Federal Reserve from issuing or creating CBDCs and any "substantially similar" digital assets before December 31, 2030, a clause driven by House Republicans. The Trump administration has consistently held this position, with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin previously stating that CBDCs are "not under consideration." The bill will first undergo procedural voting in the Senate and is expected to be submitted to the House for review after Congress reconvenes, and then sent to the President for signing.

According to The Wall Street Journal, China's lifestyle and video sharing platform Xiaohongshu plans to go public in Hong Kong as early as the end of this year, with major investors seeking to value it at over $70 billion. Previously, the company was valued at over $50 billion in recent private secondary market transactions.

According to Bloomberg, citing informed sources, the operating entity of Xiaohongshu, Xiaohongshu Technology Co., Ltd., is preparing to secretly submit its initial public offering application in Hong Kong by the end of June. The report states that the company is advancing potential listing matters with advisors, and this transaction is expected to rank among the large IPOs in Hong Kong in recent years. However, details such as the listing time, fundraising scale, and valuation have not yet been finalized, and discussions are still ongoing.Xiaohongshu was founded in Shanghai in 2013, with investors including Tencent, Alibaba, Sequoia China, Hillhouse Capital, and GGV Capital. In the 2024 financing round, Xiaohongshu's valuation was approximately $17 billion. With business growth, Xiaohongshu's valuation soared to $31 billion in secondary market trading in September 2025, and it predicted to shareholders that the full-year profit for 2025 would reach approximately $3 billion.

The US stock market weakened overall due to geopolitical risks and a high-level correction in technology stocks, while the optical communication sector showed resilience against declines. According to CoinGlass data, Coherent (COHR) is currently priced at $360.06, with a daily increase of 1.21%, and the total contract open interest across the network reached $8.9669 million, with approximately $843,300 in contract open interest on the Gate platform, ranking third in the network. In addition, Lumentum (LITE) is currently priced at $865.82, with a daily increase of 5.86%, and the total contract open interest increased by 29.17%, with approximately $777,000 in contract open interest on the Gate platform, also ranking among the industry leaders.

According to PR Newswire, AI-driven anti-fraud infrastructure InfoHawk announced the completion of a $2.25 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from former Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Jon Leibowitz, AppNexus founder Brian O'Kelley, former head of advertising at Meta Rob Goldman, GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov, and others.The new funds are intended to support its efforts to help businesses detect, analyze, and combat large-scale online fraud, phishing sites, brand impersonation, and deepfake attacks through AI content recognition and deep infrastructure analysis technology.

According to Bloomberg, informed sources say that underwriters for SpaceX's approximately $75 billion initial public offering (IPO) have been told not to accept subscription orders from investors in mainland China and Hong Kong, due to U.S. restrictions on the export of critical technologies. The lead underwriter for the transaction has further notified other banks in the underwriting syndicate that clients from mainland China and Hong Kong, including private banking clients, are not allowed to participate in placing orders.The report states that this move is primarily due to regulatory and compliance risk considerations, and the related arrangements have not been publicly disclosed.

The General Office of the State Council has released guiding opinions on strengthening regulation, preventing risks, and promoting the high-quality development of private equity investment funds. The opinions mention adhering to goal-oriented and problem-oriented approaches, addressing issues such as the need to improve the access mechanism for the private equity fund industry, inadequate regulation, incomplete systems, insufficient coordination and cooperation among ministries, central and local governments, the failure to implement the responsibilities of some government investment funds and state-owned enterprise investment fund contributors, and the use of some private equity funds as tools for illegal activities, new forms of corruption, and hidden corruption. A system and long-term mechanism for strengthening regulation and preventing risks will be established to promote the development of the industry in a standardized manner and enhance it during development.Uphold functional positioning, coordinate the overall layout, optimize increments, revitalize existing resources, support the excellent and limit the inferior, improve quality and efficiency, and strictly prohibit private equity funds from engaging in illegal activities such as lending and disguised debt. Adhere to classified regulation, implementing "one policy for one category" regulation based on different dimensions such as contributor entities and product types. Insist on regulating both legal and illegal entities, with strict regulation for legal institutions, resolute prohibition of illegal institutions, and severe crackdowns on illegal activities.Promote the revision of the Securities Investment Fund Law. Push for the issuance of judicial documents related to criminal cases involving private equity funds. Formulate regulations for the supervision of private equity fund managers, information disclosure, fundraising, and mandatory custody rules. Introduce standardized arrangements for private equity fund betting agreements. Fully establish a regulatory system for private equity funds that is primarily based on administrative regulation and supplemented by self-regulation.

According to the Securities Times, Xiaohongshu has launched a special governance action for certified professional accounts in the financial sector starting from June 3. Based on relevant laws and regulations as well as platform rules, financial certifications are only issued to institutions holding compliant licenses. The nicknames of certified professional accounts on the platform must strictly match the actual business scope of the certified entity and must not obtain certification marks through false or misleading information. In the past week, Xiaohongshu has dealt with over 1,500 non-compliant financial professional accounts and will continue to comprehensively strengthen the public verification and validation mechanism, conducting regular inspections and handling of existing accounts.Staff introduced that since May, the Xiaohongshu platform has dealt with a total of 31,000 accounts involved in financial sector violations and marketing accounts without financial-related qualifications, including 539 notes and 146 comments related to illegal inducement of cross-border investment issues; 141 related notes regarding the low-priced resale of foreign investment bank research reports, and freezing of 132 related products. In addition, the platform has also handled over 130 pieces of suspected illegal information related to gold financial marketing promotion and domestic promotion of overseas platforms.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted that the internal team of the Ethereum Foundation has been working on a new project called Kohaku for nearly a year. The goal is to achieve both security (including decentralization) and read-write privacy at the Ethereum access layer, making security and privacy a "normal configuration" on Ethereum rather than an advanced option. Earlier today, it was reported that Kohaku, under the Ethereum Foundation, released an SDK for wallet-level privacy integration.

According to The Defiant, the Kohaku Initiative under the Ethereum Foundation has released a software development kit (SDK) that supports direct integration of privacy protocols such as Railgun, Tornado Cash, and Privacy Pools into wallet interfaces without intermediaries.This SDK allows all privacy protocol transactions to be routed through the 4337 mempool, enabling users to control their privacy independently without relying on centralized relayers.The team has implemented private transactions with 4337 mempool relaying functionality, and integration with Tornado Cash and Privacy Pools is under development. Kohaku aims to make end-to-end privacy the default option for Ethereum users by abstracting the complexity of interacting with privacy protocols.Developers have created a CLI-based wallet demo, and wallets like Ambire are integrating it, while a browser extension wallet is also in development. Kohaku is also developing post-quantum accounts, multi-signature, and hardware wallet support.

According to BBX data, yesterday the layout of traditional payment institutions in the cryptocurrency infrastructure showed divergence, with institutions having clear differences in their views on ETH and the altcoin sector. The core dynamics are as follows:Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE: $MA) signed an acquisition agreement for the UK stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK on March 17 for a maximum of $1.8 billion (including $300 million in performance-based payments), which directly led Mastercard to abandon its previously pursued strategic investment plan in Zerohash (a privately held company). According to CoinDesk on May 19, Mastercard exited negotiations with Zerohash after the completion of the BVNK acquisition, and Zerohash is currently seeking to initiate a new financing round with a valuation of over $1.5 billion (higher than the $1 billion valuation established during the D-2 round of financing of $104 million in September 2025); the strategic logic behind Mastercard's acquisition of BVNK is that BVNK has a stablecoin payment infrastructure covering over 130 countries and a difficult-to-replicate combination of multi-country payment licenses; Mastercard's Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert stated that the goal is to integrate stablecoins into the core network of Mastercard Move cross-border payments, rather than treating them as a peripheral experiment.JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: $JPM) analysts cited by CoinDesk on May 19 released the latest research report indicating that in the current market environment, Ethereum and the broader altcoin sector will continue to lag behind Bitcoin, primarily due to three structural weaknesses: weak network activity, stagnation in DeFi ecosystem growth (Solana's TVL has dropped from a peak of $13.1 billion in 2025 to about $5.5 billion), and limited real-world adoption scenarios; analysts believe that for the altcoin sector to catch up with Bitcoin's performance, a "significant network activity explosion" is a prerequisite, and this condition currently lacks visible short-term catalysts.

Cointelegraph posted on the X platform that the governor of South Carolina has signed Bill S.163. The bill protects the self-custody rights of Bitcoin, prohibits discriminatory taxes on Bitcoin, and safeguards the rights of proof-of-work mining in the state.