Stablecoins Print a $1.79 Trillion Record, the CLARITY Act Races the Deadline, and DeFi’s Worst Hack Quarter on Record

Stablecoin rails just processed $1.79 trillion in June, more monthly volume than Mastercard, while Bitcoin is trading above $62,000 as the CLARITY Act picks up fresh Senate traction.

The price chart is not the only story right now.

Growth Stocks Ahead (Sponsored)

5 Stocks with Stellar Growth Ahead

Every market cycle produces a handful of companies that dramatically outperform the rest.

Our latest screening has identified the 5 Stocks Set to Double — companies showing rare early-stage momentum traits.

These picks carry the same indicators that historically precede strong rallies.

Past reports highlighted stocks that surged +175%, +498%, and +673%.

Get the Free 5 Stocks Set to Double Report.

*This free resource is being sent by Zacks. We identify investment resources you may choose to use in making your own decisions. Use of this resource is subject to the Zacks Terms of Service.
*Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing involves risk. This material does not constitute investment, legal, accounting, or tax advice. Zacks Investment Research is not a licensed dealer, broker, or investment adviser.

Market-Moving News

Three forces are shaping the next leg of this market. Stablecoin infrastructure is being adopted at a pace that makes the on-chain plumbing the most important story of the cycle.

The CLARITY Act picked up fresh Senate traction over the weekend with Bitcoin trading above $62,000, partly on that momentum.

And DeFi just closed the most exploited quarter on record, explaining exactly why retail sentiment is where it is.

Understanding all three puts you ahead of the headline noise.

Corporates

Strategy Sells 3,588 Bitcoin as Treasury Playbook Shifts

Strategy sold 3,588 Bitcoin last week for about $216 million, cutting its holdings to 843,775 BTC.

The sale was not framed as an exit. Strategy said the proceeds will fund preferred-stock distributions and replenish the part of its U.S. dollar reserve used for those payments. That reserve stood at $2.55 billion.

Bitcoin Becomes the Funding Valve

Strategy built its reputation on Bitcoin accumulation.

Now the balance sheet is doing something more complicated. Bitcoin is not just the asset being collected; it is also becoming a tool to support preferred-stock payments and reserve management.

The company still holds a mountain of BTC, acquired for about $63.69 billion at an average price of $75,476 per coin.

Accumulation Gets a Two-Way Door

The size of the sale matters because Strategy only sold 32 BTC about one month ago.

This time, the sale was more than 100 times larger. It also came after the company laid out a BTC Monetization Program with $1.25 billion of capacity still available.

That does not mean Strategy has turned bearish on Bitcoin. It means the treasury model now has a sell-side lever investors can no longer ignore.

Take: For you, the important shift is not that Strategy sold Bitcoin; it is that Bitcoin now sits inside the company’s funding machine.

If preferred distributions and dollar reserves continue to drive sales, the market may start treating Strategy as both a major Bitcoin holder and a recurring source of supply.

Regulation

Ripple Gets Full MiCA License for 30 European Markets

Ripple received full MiCA Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorization from Luxembourg, clearing it to offer regulated cryptoasset services across the European Economic Area.

The license upgrades Ripple’s preliminary approval from June and gives the company access across all 30 EEA countries through Europe’s passporting framework.

That timing matters. MiCA is now fully in force, and crypto firms without authorization have to stop operating in the region.

Europe Creates a New Divide

MiCA is turning Europe into a permissions market. Ripple now sits on the approved side of that line, while many crypto firms are still trying to catch up.

The difference is not branding. It is whether a company can legally serve banks, businesses, and payment clients across the bloc.

Ripple already had an Electronic Money Institution license from Luxembourg earlier this year, giving it another regulated payments layer in Europe.

Payments Get the Regulated Lane

Ripple’s stronger angle is infrastructure. Its payments platform has processed more than $100 billion in volume and operates across more than 60 markets, giving the company a real business line to plug into European authorization.

Full CASP approval lets Ripple push cryptoasset and stablecoin payments through one regulated relationship instead of stitching together separate local permissions.

Take: Ripple’s license shows how Europe is separating crypto companies that can already meet the rules you need from those still trying to get through the door.

If MiCA becomes the gatekeeper for institutional crypto services, approved firms may win distribution before the next product cycle even starts.

Policy Impact (Sponsored)

Trump Admin to Pump $1 Billion into this "Off-the-Radar" AI Stock

The U.S. government pumped more than $1 billion into Intel.

The stock popped 128%. It pumped $400 million into MP Materials.

The stock popped 200%. It bought 10% of Trilogy Metals.

The stock popped 500%.

And now, Trump has chosen this AI stock for a $1 billion payday.

Click here for the full story and stock pick (free).

*This ad is sent on behalf of InvestorPlace Media at 1125 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201. If you're not interested in this opportunity, please click here.

Mining

TeraWulf Lands $19B Anthropic Lease as Mining Model Shifts

TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic expected to generate about $19 billion in contracted revenue at its Justified Data campus in Kentucky.

The site is expected to support about 401 MW of critical IT load. Initial services are planned for the second half of 2027, with full ramp expected by early 2028.

For a company that came out of bitcoin mining, the message is loud: power access is now being repriced by AI demand.

Power Becomes the Product

Bitcoin miners spent years chasing cheap energy, large sites, and reliable grid access. Now those same ingredients are being sold into a different market.

AI labs need long-duration capacity, and TeraWulf is turning energy-backed campuses into sources of lease revenue rather than relying solely on mining economics.

The deal gives TeraWulf a contracted customer, a long timeline, and a cleaner story for investors seeking data center exposure without the pure crypto volatility.

AI Pulls Miners Off the Old Track

TeraWulf is also selling its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy Joint Venture to a Fluidstack-led investor group.

The move lets the company monetize about $450 million of invested capital and redirect attention toward AI infrastructure it can own and operate directly.

Mining companies used to compete mainly on hash rate, energy cost, and Bitcoin price. Now, the better question is who has enough power to meet AI demand.

Take: TeraWulf gives you the clearest version of the mining sector’s new trade: power that once secured Bitcoin can now be leased to AI.

If more miners follow that route, the sector may start trading less like a crypto proxy and more like digital infrastructure.

AI Warning (Sponsored)

Your AI "Go Plan"

Artificial intelligence is creating enormous opportunities but some investors are also preparing for a very different future.

One veteran market analyst believes the next wave of AI could dramatically reshape the economy, and he's released a free briefing outlining the trends he's watching and the strategy he believes investors should understand.

Watch the Free Briefing.

Future Forward

The CLARITY Act’s Senate window is the biggest single event on next month’s calendar.

Beyond that, a major Asian Web3 conference arrives tomorrow, a critical Solana ecosystem unlock lands later this week, and two airdrop programs remain active through the summer.

Crypto Conferences:

💎 WebX 2026 (Tomorrow — Tokyo, Asia’s largest Web3 conference)

💎 Injective Summit (Later this week)

💎 RAISE Summit (Next week — Paris)

💎 Money Expo Abu Dhabi (Next week)

Active Airdrop Programs:

🎁 Hyperliquid Season 2 (Live through Q3, est. $600M)

🎁 Jupiter Jupuary Season 2 (Live now, est. $120M)

Upcoming Token Unlocks:

🔓 Pump.fun (PUMP) (This week, 82.5B tokens — watch for Solana ecosystem volume spike)

🔓 Monad mainnet airdrop window closes (This week)

Regulatory Milestone:

🏛️ CLARITY Act Senate floor vote window open, August recess is the hard deadline

Crypto Know-How: Why the RWA Category Grew While Everything Else in DeFi Bled

Every DeFi subcategory contracted in 2026 except one. Real-world assets were up 48% year-to-date while liquid staking, lending, and DEX liquidity all lost ground. That is not a coincidence. Here is why.

Most DeFi TVL is denominated in volatile native assets. When ETH falls 43% and SOL falls 40%, the dollar value of TVL denominated in those assets falls with them, even if the underlying token holdings stay constant.

RWA protocols are different.

They hold tokenized Treasuries, money market funds, real estate, and private credit instruments, assets whose value does not move with the crypto market. When crypto corrects 40%, the dollar value of a tokenized T-bill does not.

That structural insulation from crypto volatility is exactly why RWA TVL grew while everything else shrank.

There is a second factor: institutional demand. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, Ondo Finance’s tokenized Treasury products, and Franklin Templeton’s FOBXX have all attracted genuine institutional capital that is not speculating on token prices.

That capital does not exit during a crypto drawdown the same way yield farmers do, because it was never there for token appreciation in the first place.

The practical implication for you is this: protocols that generate real revenue from assets with non-crypto correlations behave differently from protocols whose TVL is just a leveraged bet on ETH price.

As more institutional capital enters crypto through regulated wrappers, the protocols that bridge traditional finance to on-chain rails are the ones that retain TVL through downturns.

That is why Ondo, Centrifuge, and Morpho have held up while pure DeFi yield farms have not.

Everything Else

• Market leadership is starting to broaden, as investors look beyond the Mag 7 for the next group of companies positioned to drive the next cycle.

• Stablecoin transaction volume hit a record $1.79 trillion per Visa’s Allium-powered analytics dashboard, up 63% from May and 125% from a year earlier, with USDC leading at $1.21 trillion and Coinbase’s Base network handling the most volume at $565 billion. 

• The CLARITY Act sits on the Senate Legislative Calendar as Calendar No. 423 with the August recess as the hard deadline, Polymarket pricing 2026 passage at 48% and Galaxy Research at 60%, while SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said publicly on July 1 she is “still optimistic it will get done this summer.” 

• DeFi TVL fell 39% year-to-date from roughly $115 billion in January to about $70 billion per CryptoRank data published, with 121 hacks totaling $942 million in losses and Q2 alone seeing 85 exploits making it the most-hacked quarter on record by incident count. 

• Open USD launched with backing from more than 140 partners including Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Shopify, and Ripple as a zero-fee open stablecoin standard, positioning OUSD as a consortium-backed alternative targeting institutional settlement across both TradFi and crypto rails. 

• JPMorgan said publicly that Strategy’s Bitcoin sales policy adds avoidable two-way risk to crypto markets and recommended the company use equity issuance to build cash reserves instead, while MSTR shares rose in pre-market trading as markets treated the new capital framework as a credibility restoration.