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Meet Cameron Kates 👋

Huge congrats to Cameron on making Partner at Dentons, joining the firm’s fintech and digital assets practice in New York.

→ Corporate Partner, Fintech & Digital Assets at Dentons
→ Founding CEO of the ApeCoin Foundation
→ Former Chief Legal Officer at Yuga Labs

Cameron built the legal backbone of one of crypto’s most recognizable brands at Yuga Labs, then became the first-ever CEO of the ApeCoin Foundation.

Now he brings that rare operator-and-lawyer mix into Big Law, advising digital-asset and fintech companies at one of the world’s largest firms.

Bored Apes. ApeCoin. Now Big Law.

This is what our network is all about.
Keep building.

Show Cameron some love 👇

Savior of Health

Savior of Health raised $4M in strategic funding round.

The round was backed by Amber Group, Basics Capital, Animoca Brands, Candaq Fintech Group, and TBV.

Proceeds will scale Savior of Health’s AI-powered healthcare infrastructure, spanning health-data management and AI-driven scientific research built on health questionnaires and surveys, as the team expands its global onchain healthcare ecosystem.

Luca Ioannis and the Animoca team keep building!
When a member wins, we all win 😤

Elliptic

Elliptic secured a strategic investment from Circle Ventures, terms undisclosed, alongside Circle joining Elliptic’s Agentic Design Partner Program.

The deal builds on Elliptic’s $120M Series D (May 2026, led by One Peak, with Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank, and British Business Bank), pairing the blockchain-analytics leader with the newly chartered stablecoin bank.

Proceeds will deepen Elliptic’s compliance and agentic-analytics tooling for banks, exchanges, and regulators, landing the same week Circle stood up First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A.

Love seeing circle in the mix here! Glad to have them on our team. Keep it up!

QIZ Security

QIZ Security closed $17M in seed funding.

Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures co-led, with Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital participating.

Proceeds will accelerate product development and market expansion for QIZ’s cryptographic posture and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) management platform, which helps enterprises discover cryptographic assets, model risk, and enforce quantum-safe remediation before “Q-Day” arrives.

Gauntlet

Gauntlet closed $125M in a Series C round led by SBI Holdings, one of the largest single-investor bets in crypto to date.

SBI anchored the round solo, extending the Japanese financial giant’s crypto build-out after backing EDX Markets and acquiring Bitbank in recent weeks.

Proceeds will scale Tarun Chitra’s DeFi risk-management and vault-curation platform into institutional DeFi, bringing Gauntlet’s simulation-driven risk engine to the capital now moving onchain.

TrueDAO

TrueDAO raised $10M in strategic funding.

Brevan Howard Digital led, with Zee Prime Capital and Jump Capital participating.

Proceeds will scale TrueDAO’s AI-driven decentralized financial infrastructure, including smart contracts with onchain reserves, dynamic adjustment mechanisms, and community governance, as modular building blocks for ecosystem projects.

01 Exchange

01 Exchange was acquired by N1 in an undisclosed deal.

N1, the L1 that built 01’s margining engine and orderbook and incubated it as the ecosystem’s first app, is bringing the perps venue ($3B+ in volume across 25,000+ traders) fully in-house.

The combination vertically integrates infrastructure, product, and liquidity under one stack, with trading moving to app.n1.xyz and user points and funds carried over.

Cypher

Cypher was acquired by Nium in an undisclosed deal.

Nium, the cross-border payments infrastructure giant (190+ countries, 100+ currencies, ~41M cards issued annually, with Circle and Coinbase among its partners), is folding in Cypher’s crypto debit card and non-custodial wallet to expand its fiat-to-onchain capabilities.

The current Cypher platform winds down September 6 before relaunching on Nium’s rails. It’s another crypto-native consumer product absorbed into TradFi payment infrastructure.

Imperator

Imperator was acquired by Hyperdash in an undisclosed deal.

The tie-up pairs Imperator, the institutional-grade Hyperliquid validator and data-infrastructure shop, with Hyperdash’s trading-analytics terminal, consolidating Hyperliquid staking, data, and analytics under one roof.

China’s property slump has now wiped out two decades of home-price growth, dragging values back toward 2005 levels. The market is in free-fall as buyers wait for a floor, with analysts seeing no sign of a bottom.

Even the bright spots are dim. Shanghai prices ticked up 2.4%, yet developer stocks still fell 24%, a sign the market doesn’t believe a tier-1 blip changes the national picture. Beijing is leaning on subsidies and provident-fund tweaks to steady prices, while the World Bank’s July update frames it as a long rebalancing, not a quick fix.

Here’s why it matters even if you never touch a yuan. Property is roughly a quarter of Chinese GDP, so a deflating market means weaker commodity demand, softer global growth, and a deflationary impulse the world imports, exactly as the US fights the opposite battle with tariffs and sticky inflation. Money is leaving Chinese real estate and pouring into US hard tech and AI.

SpaceX priced its record IPO near $135, but the stock is down about 25% and sinking back toward its offer price as debt markets flash warnings. The biggest IPO ever is now a stress test for every listing lined up behind it.

Michael Saylor’s Strategy made its largest-ever Bitcoin sale, about $216M, and reportedly sold 7x more than first disclosed, with MSTR sliding below $100. The company that turned “never sell” into a strategy just sold.

Apple announced a $30B deal with Broadcom to make billions more American-made chips, its largest US manufacturing investment yet. It’s one of the largest bets yet that chipmaking comes home.

The two announced a partnership to deploy 10 GW of NVIDIA systems, one of the largest AI-infrastructure commitments ever. Ten gigawatts is about ten nuclear reactors’ worth of power, all pointed at AI.

The BOJ hiked to 1%, its highest since 1995, and JGBs are “back in play after decades in the wilderness.” Rising Japanese yields threaten the yen carry trade that quietly funds risk assets worldwide. The last time it unwound, it dragged global markets down with it.

June CPI fell to 3.5%, matching 2020 lows, sending growth stocks rallying. Cooling inflation is the clearest case yet for a cut, if tariffs don’t undo it first.

Two crypto bills are splitting in opposite directions. GENIUS Act stablecoin rules hit their July 18 finalization deadline, with six federal agencies racing to write the reserve and redemption requirements that pull stablecoins into the banking system.

Meanwhile the CLARITY Act has stalled in the Senate over ethics provisions, state preemption, and SEC/CFTC turf, with passage odds sliding and a July 17 House hearing looming.

Stablecoins get their federal rulebook this week. Everything else in crypto keeps waiting.

The Fed meets July 28–29 with a committee openly split on rates, just as a fresh round of tariffs threatens to reheat inflation.

Tariffs raise import and commodity costs, that feeds CPI, and a hot print keeps cuts on ice.

Cooling inflation says cut, tariffs say wait, and the Fed has to pick.

Washington revoked its Iran oil sanctions waiver after ship attacks and struck Iranian targets, with Trump declaring the US-Iran deal “over” and floating a new Hormuz blockade.

Brent pushed past $80 and crude jumped roughly 5% in a session.

Cheap energy was one of the last things holding inflation down. That just changed.

The European Commission reopened MiCA for a targeted review, putting stablecoins, tokenized assets, DeFi, and staking back on the table barely two years into the regime.

It lands as firms are still scrambling through MiCA’s licensing crunch after the July 1 transition deadline reshaped who can operate in the EU.

Two years in, Europe is admitting its “finished” crypto rulebook isn’t finished.

India’s central bank is backing a hard prohibition stance while the tax department flags evasion risks.

SEBI, India’s markets regulator, is pushing for a regulated framework instead of a ban.

It’s a policy tug-of-war in the world’s most populous market, which still can’t decide if crypto is legal.

The EU’s top court upheld a record €4.1bn antitrust fine against Google, and Brussels is stepping up enforcement of its digital rules.

Trump is threatening 25% tariffs on EU tech in response.

Big Tech just became a bargaining chip in a US-EU trade fight.