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Fluidstack, a cloud computing startup focused on AI computing power leasing Neocloud, announced that it completed an $830 million Series A funding round in January, with a valuation of $7.5 billion. The round was led by the Situational Awareness fund of former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, with participation from multiple investors.According to reports, Fluidstack builds infrastructure for AI laboratories, aiming to become the company that can deploy hundreds of gigawatts of computing power the fastest in the world.

According to a report by Reuters, informed sources revealed that the PayPal board believes the $53 billion acquisition offer from competitor Stripe and Advent International undervalues the company and faces regulatory and financing hurdles. The sources stated that PayPal has not formally responded yet, and the board is evaluating the trade-offs between the offer and the management's strategy to turn around the company, initially considering that the offer of $60.5 per share, while a premium over recent stock prices, does not fully reflect the company's future potential.The acquirers have secured approximately $50 billion in financing commitments from JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, along with $17 billion in equity raised by Stripe and Advent, to support the $53 billion acquisition offer. If antitrust regulations are violated, the acquirers have considered remedies such as divesting the Braintree business to Advent. Block was initially involved but withdrew before the latest offer submission. Investors will be paying attention to PayPal's earnings report on July 28.

According to CoinDesk, hardware wallet company Ledger has launched an open-source toolkit called Ledger Agent Stack, which supports AI agents to interact with crypto wallets by reading balances, preparing transactions, and suggesting actions, with all transactions requiring user approval on Ledger hardware devices.Ledger stated that this release is the first step in its AI roadmap, aiming to integrate hardware-based security mechanisms into AI-driven crypto applications and to prevent autonomous agents from transferring funds or accessing sensitive credentials without human approval.

Starknet announced the opening of its privacy development stack to developers, launching a privacy SDK and privacy wallet API, allowing applications, wallets, and protocols to integrate private balances, private transfers, and related DeFi interaction features based on STRK20.

At the WebX 2026 conference held in Tokyo, Japan, B.AI announced the latest developments of its platform for global developers and innovators, focusing on showcasing its full-stack capabilities that encompass cutting-edge AI models, highly scalable APIs, and developer tools. B.AI is committed to lowering the application threshold of advanced AI technology, helping businesses and individual developers conveniently and efficiently access cutting-edge intelligence through continuous iteration of products and services. We sincerely invite partners from all sectors to visit the B.AI booth to learn more about the latest developments and explore AI-driven innovation opportunities together.

According to CoinDesk, Christian Lopez, head of blockchain and digital assets at investment bank Cohen & Company Capital Markets, stated that as investors rotate funds into other sectors and macro uncertainty continues to suppress risk appetite, the crypto IPO market has noticeably slowed down.Lopez pointed out that although the successful listings of Circle and Bullish had raised high expectations for crypto IPOs in 2026, the subsequent weakening of market conditions, declining trading volumes, and underperformance of some post-listing stocks have dampened enthusiasm for new issuances. Several crypto companies, including Kraken's parent company Payward, Consensys, Ledger, and Grayscale, have postponed their IPO plans, waiting for market improvement; however, Blockchain.com and FalconX are still advancing their listing processes.Lopez believes that the uncertain interest rate outlook and global deleveraging pressures are making investors more cautious about high beta assets like crypto. He expects that the window for crypto companies to go public may not substantially reopen until next year. Additionally, he stated that regulatory clarity is no longer the primary obstacle for crypto companies going public; rather, the ability to access capital and business diversification are more critical.

According to official news, Circle announced the open-source Agent Stack startup kit, allowing developers to integrate wallets, USDC payments, and on-chain operations into AI Agents, supporting mainstream AI Agent development frameworks such as OpenAI Agents SDK, Anthropic Agent SDK, LangChain Deep Agents, Mastra, Vercel AI SDK, and Google ADK.Circle stated that developers can directly clone example projects based on the framework they are using and start building AI Agent applications.

According to official news, N1 announced the acquisition of 01.xyz. This acquisition means that N1 now has a complete trading stack, the core members of the 01 team will join N1, and the 01 points will be fully recognized on the N1 platform.In addition, the N1 2.0 upgrade is about to be launched.

South Korean fintech company Toss announced a partnership with Optimism and Sunnyside Labs to jointly explore a stablecoin pegged to the Korean won.In the coming months, the three parties will conduct a proof of concept (PoC) test to assess the feasibility of building compliant blockchain digital financial infrastructure based on the OP Stack, providing technical validation for applications related to the Korean won stablecoin.

According to Bloomberg, the strategic Bitcoin reserve plan promoted by U.S. President Trump is facing legal and jurisdictional issues, with the core dispute being whether the U.S. Treasury has the authority to legally manage the reserve. Trump proposed the establishment of a strategic Bitcoin reserve early in his presidency, with the main funding source being Bitcoin already held by the U.S. government through criminal or civil forfeiture, along with a separate digital asset inventory.The relevant executive order also requires the Treasury and Commerce Departments to develop a "budget-neutral" Bitcoin acquisition strategy, meaning it should not increase taxpayer costs. However, informed sources say that discussions around the reserve have now shifted to whether it should be placed under the Commerce Department rather than managed by the Treasury. Another point of contention is whether the U.S. government can hold BTC "indefinitely" given Bitcoin's price volatility. White House spokesperson Liz Huston stated that the Trump administration is still evaluating the best structure for the strategic Bitcoin reserve and the U.S. digital asset inventory to fulfill its vision of making the U.S. a global center for cryptocurrency and cutting-edge technology.

ARK Invest Research Director Lorenzo Valente commented on the OpenUSD stablecoin project launched by several institutions. He stated that, despite the strong capabilities of the participants (including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, etc.), OpenUSD faces multiple significant obstacles:First, there are liquidity and cold start issues; USDC and USDT have already formed strong network effects, dominating exchanges, payment processors, and brokers, making it difficult for the new stablecoin to gain trading pairs and large-scale holding willingness;Second, the decision-making speed of the alliance composed of 500 competitors will be extremely slow, lacking successful precedents, and conflicts of interest will be hard to coordinate;Third, the regulatory and antitrust risks are extremely high; the joint issuance of currency by large banks and card networks is likely to become a regulatory focus;Fourth, the revenue-sharing model results in issuers retaining too little capital, making it difficult to cover high operational and promotional expenses;Fifth, the actual commitments from partners are limited, mostly consisting of letters of intent (LOI), and parties are still supporting competitors, preferring multiple hedges rather than exclusive binding.Valente concluded that OpenUSD is essentially similar to "a DAO of multiple competitors," making it difficult to execute and make decisions quickly, and it may ultimately repeat the governance failures of early DAO projects, which could not be effectively implemented.Affected by the OpenUSD plan, Circle's stock fell over 17% in a single day, and ARK Invest took the opportunity to buy in.

According to CoinDesk, Wall Street broker Bernstein pointed out in a recent report that the rapid integration of the market technology stack is increasing the likelihood of a new round of mergers and acquisitions in the field of sports event contracts and financial markets.The report states that in the past eight months, major prediction platforms have been developing towards simultaneously controlling customer distribution and exchange infrastructure. Although Kalshi and Polymarket have core technology stacks, their distribution capabilities are relatively lagging, making them potential acquisition targets.Recent actions include DraftKings acquiring Railbird to launch DKeX, Robinhood collaborating with Susquehanna to create Rothera, and Coinbase acquiring The Clearing Company. Bernstein believes that Robinhood and Coinbase are currently in a relatively advantageous position in the competitive landscape, as both have large consumer user bases and fully owned regulated infrastructures, while Kalshi and Polymarket are viewed as potential acquisition targets due to their lack of large-scale distribution capabilities.

According to Coindesk, former 21Shares co-founder Ophelia Snyder stated that there is a significant communication misalignment between the crypto industry and traditional finance regarding the issue of tokenization.Snyder pointed out that current discussions mostly focus on the settlement speed of blockchain and the ability to transfer assets, but overlook the operational processes from trade execution to final settlement. She believes that tokenization projects are feasible in small-scale tests, but face enormous challenges in supporting the massive flow of funds in the U.S. capital markets.The main difficulties include: how to integrate tokenized assets into existing ledger systems, compliance processes, and regulatory reporting frameworks, as well as how to adjust the risk management framework to accommodate round-the-clock trading. Additionally, many third-party software solutions relied upon by financial institutions have yet to support blockchain-native transactions.She stated that the real challenges will become apparent when institutions incorporate tokenized infrastructure into their core business pathways. The industry is still in the pilot phase, and there is still a long way to go before large-scale implementation.

According to Jinshi News, Nvidia has released "Halos for Robotics," which is the industry's first full-stack safety system for physical artificial intelligence.

Galaxy Research Director Alex Thorn posted that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) plans to abolish Rule 611 "Order Protection Rule" and Rule 610(e) in the National Market System Regulation (Reg NMS), which could become an important turning point for the development of tokenized stocks.Thorn pointed out that Rule 611 requires trades to adhere to the best quotes across the entire market (NBBO), while AMMs cannot route orders in real-time, access low-latency market data, or pause trading due to better quotes existing on other exchanges. Therefore, it has long been difficult to meet regulatory requirements, becoming one of the main structural obstacles for tokenized U.S. stocks to land in the DeFi scenario. He stated that if the future replaces the regulatory requirements for trade-by-trade supervision with brokers' "best execution obligations," on-chain liquidity pools and AMM mechanisms will be more easily incorporated into the compliance framework.Although tokenized securities still face issues such as trading venue registration and clearing and settlement, the SEC's subsequent plan to introduce an "innovation exemption" mechanism is expected to further promote related developments. Thorn believes this is an important step for the SEC to implement the "Project Crypto" roadmap, paving the way for innovations in tokenized stocks, AMMs, and on-chain securities trading by removing key market structure barriers.

Alex Thorn, Head of Research at Galaxy Digital, posted on the X platform that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed to abolish Rule 611 of Reg NMS (Order Protection Rule) and Rule 610(e) (Locking/Crossing Market Restrictions). Rule 611 requires each trading center to prevent trades from being executed at prices inferior to protected quotes displayed by other exchanges, and it has been a core rule of the U.S. stock market structure since 2005. Alex Thorn stated that Rule 611 is one of the biggest obstacles to trading tokenized stocks in DeFi. Automated market makers cannot comply with this rule, and any liquidity pool for tokenized stocks would continuously violate the regulation, essentially constituting an illegal trading center.After the abolition of Rule 611, it will be replaced by the "best execution" principle, which applies at the broker level and is based on a rules-based framework rather than a trade-by-trade review, thus being compatible with automated market makers. Alex Thorn mentioned that this is part of the SEC's execution of the "crypto project" plan, first abolishing the most challenging market structure barriers and then addressing venue registration issues through "innovation waivers."

According to a report by Cai Lian She, OpenAI released a statement regarding the recent "Mini Shai-Hulud" supply chain attack incident targeting the popular open-source library TanStack. After monitoring the malicious attacks on several commonly used npm packages, the security team quickly investigated the internal systems and found no evidence of user data being leaked or accessed illegally.OpenAI pointed out that although its core services were not directly compromised, to ensure the security of local environments, all macOS users using its official applications must complete software updates by June 12, 2026.