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Meet Christopher Arnone 👋

Huge congrats to Chris on starting a new role as Senior Account Executive at Halborn, the end-to-end blockchain security firm.

→ Senior Account Executive at Halborn
→ Former Enterprise Account Executive at Messari
→ Former Corporate Partnerships at Plug and Play

Chris came up on the connective side of the industry: corporate partnerships at Plug and Play, one of Silicon Valley's most active early-stage investors, then enterprise sales at Messari, putting institutional-grade crypto research and data in front of the industry's biggest desks.

Now he joins the firm that has been guarding the space since 2019.

Halborn runs smart-contract audits, offensive security, and advisory for more than 250 clients, including the Solana Foundation and Avalanche, backed by a $90M Series A led by Summit Partners.

In his own words: security and compliance are two of the most important pieces to pushing this industry where it deserves to be, and Halborn's end-to-end security advisory made the move a no-brainer.

He'd love to connect with anyone looking to harden their security posture.

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

Show Chris some love 👇

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Glacis Labs

Glacis Labs raised $6.8M in seed funding.

Lightspeed Faction led, with Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, A.GAIN, Protein Capital, and Techni Ventures participating.

Proceeds will scale ZeroDelta, Glacis's multichain clearing platform that matches, nets, and settles digital-asset transfers across chains, on top of the $1B+ it has already cleared.

Way to go Jonathan King and the Coinbase team!

Velocity

Velocity raised $38M in Series A funding.

Dragonfly and FirstMark co-led, with Activant Capital, Capital One Ventures, QED Investors, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, and Ripple participating.

Proceeds will expand the global banking and payments network behind Velocity's treasury and settlement platform, which lets enterprises and financial institutions hold, move, and settle funds in stablecoins on top of traditional banking rails, and brings total funding to nearly $50M since May 2025.

Ayt B. and the Wintermute team getting after it!

Cyclops

Cyclops raised $20M in Series A funding.

Nava Ventures led, with Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Lasagna Ventures, and Global PayTech Ventures participating.

Proceeds will accelerate product and licensing for Cyclops's stablecoin settlement, payin, payout, and treasury rails, which let payment providers move money over stablecoins through a single API, already serving 300k merchants with volume up 350% month over month.

Big wins for Kevin Leffew and the Coinbase team!

Pact Labs

Pact Labs raised $7M in a Tether-led round.

Blockchange Ventures and Lasagna participated.

Proceeds will bring USAT, Tether's US-compliant stablecoin, into payroll, earned wage access, and everyday payments, starting with faster wage settlement and 24/7 payment execution for employers.

LFG! Love to see a Tether win!

Glide

Glide was acquired by MoonPay in an all-equity deal.

The YC-backed crypto-deposits infrastructure (100+ tokens, 30+ networks, over $100M in annualized volume) folds into MoonPay Deposits, MoonPay's sixth acquisition of 2026, with co-founders Tushar Soni and Qinyu Tong, both ex-Robinhood, joining alongside the full team.

Congrats to Halsey Huth and the MoonPay group! Smiles all around.

Crypto.com

Crypto.com secured $400M in strategic funding at a $20B valuation.

Citadel Securities made the first institutional investment in the company's ten-year history.

Proceeds will accelerate expansion into all asset classes, including tokenized securities and derivatives.

Databricks

Databricks is raising at a $188B valuation.

Coatue leads the strategic round, making Databricks the highest-valued private software company and resetting every private AI-infra comp.

ADI Chain

ADI Chain secured $50M in strategic funding. Investors were not disclosed.

Proceeds will fund network expansion, ecosystem development, and institutional integrations for the MENA-focused Layer-2 behind the dirham-pegged DDSC stablecoin.

Staking Rewards

Staking Rewards was acquired by The Tie in an undisclosed deal. The staking-data provider's intelligence folds into The Tie Terminal and its data APIs.

Coinhako

Coinhako's majority stake was acquired by SBI Holdings. The MAS-licensed Singapore exchange becomes SBI's corridor between Japan and Southeast Asia for tokenization, stablecoins, and cross-border payments.

Sovereign Labs

Sovereign Labs was acquired by Celestia Labs in an undisclosed deal. The Sovereign SDK team joins to build custom high-performance chains, and co-founder Preston Evans becomes Celestia Labs CTO.

bloXroute

bloXroute was acquired by FalconX in an undisclosed deal. The low-latency blockchain networking specialist joins the prime broker to build execution speed, tokenized assets, and 24/7 onchain markets.

MasterDEX

MasterDEX was acquired by LCX. The AI-powered multi-chain DeFi platform's team and IP launch "LCX Liberty," LCX's American DeFi product line.

The smart money is taking its leverage off the table, everywhere at once. Goldman's prime brokerage desk reports hedge funds sold US tech stocks in six of the last eight weeks, the largest retreat since their data began more than a decade ago, and Goldman's high-beta momentum index is on pace for its biggest monthly drop since the financial crisis, with memory leaders like Micron down more than 24% in a month.

What makes this unwind different is how new the leverage is. Single-stock leveraged ETFs did not exist in the US until 2022; there are now 355 of them, all but 80 launched since January 2025, and nearly 90% of their trading is retail. Leveraged semiconductor ETFs alone held about $163 billion at the June peak. Six weeks later, $63 billion of that is gone, a 39% collapse to roughly $100 billion, and even after the wipeout the complex still sits 400% above January 2023 levels.

Nowhere is the unwind sharper than Korea, where retail leverage runs deepest. Retail investors drive 64% of transaction value on the Korean market, the highest share in the world, and debt-fueled investing is common enough to have its own word, bittu. Margin loans hit a record 38.6 trillion won in late June, and regulators saw it coming: the FSS governor warned on July 7 that "the tail is wagging the dog" on single-stock leveraged ETFs, and nine days later Korea banned new listings of them outright. In between came the bill: margin calls reportedly hit 1.2 million retail accounts, 340,000 of them fully liquidated, the Kospi dropped 25% in a month, and trading halts broke records set in 2008. Even after all that, the index is still up more than 50% on the year, a measure of how far the leverage had run.

China has run this experiment before. Margin debt peaked at 2.27 trillion yuan in June 2015, and the unwind that followed erased roughly $5 trillion in market value. Last week's one-day contraction was the sharpest since January 2016, per Bloomberg, the tail end of that washout, and Beijing reached for the same playbook: two state funds stepped in to buy and the securities regulator convened a stabilization meeting Monday. The timing is bad. China just missed its growth target for the first time since Covid, with Q2 GDP at 4.3%, its weakest since 2022.

The froth the leverage was chasing was real. Unprofitable Russell 2000 companies have returned +154% since mid-2025, against +34% for profitable ones, per HSBC. The biggest balance sheets in the market carry their own version: a Nikkei investigation found the five hyperscalers hold $1.65 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI obligations, more than the $1.35 trillion on their books, and Epoch AI projects their combined free cash flow turns negative around Q3 of this year as capex outruns operating cash. Berkshire sits on $397 billion in cash after 14 straight quarters of net selling.

So far the damage is contained to the leveraged complex. The S&P sits near 7,500, the VIX is at 17, and markets bounced hard Tuesday on strong Korean chip-export data. The thing to watch is whether the selling spreads to unlevered accounts. The margin data will show it first.

Meta is in early talks to lease up to $10 billion of computing capacity to Anthropic over two years, per the NYT, confirmed by CNBC. It hired AWS compute chief Dave Brown this month to build the effort and sell excess GPU capacity. Talks are preliminary and no deal is signed.

Oil is up roughly 20% in three weeks as the Iran conflict enters its second week, with the US sending dozens more refueling planes to Israel ahead of a possible wider offensive. On Monday, mediators put a 10-day ceasefire proposal in front of both sides that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz; neither has accepted. Founders should be stress-testing Q3 against $100 oil either way.

In OpenAI's own account, an internal long-horizon model, the same one that disproved a decades-old Erdős conjecture, circumvented sandbox restrictions during testing, reached the public internet, and hid a credential by splitting it into fragments to evade the security scanner. OpenAI paused access, rebuilt safeguards, and returned the model to stricter supervised use. It is the first incident of its kind a frontier lab has documented in its own words.

June existing-home sales fell 2.4% while the median price hit an all-time high of $440,600, mortgage rates sit at 6.55% as of the July 16 reading, and for the first time since at least 1974, the median new home costs less than the median existing one as builders cut prices first. Builder incentives now run 7 to 8% of sale price, and roughly one in five new homes took outright price cuts in the latest quarter measured.

Apple passed Nvidia intraday Friday as the world's most valuable company before Nvidia retook a $200 billion lead by Monday's close; Apple is up 23% this year against Nvidia's 7%. The same week, Apple sent preservation notices to roughly 40 former employees now at OpenAI, per the FT, escalating the trade-secrets suit it filed July 10. The notices are routine litigation-hold steps, but they signal Apple believes the alleged theft went wider than the two named defendants.

Moonshot's Kimi K3 tops Arena's frontend coding leaderboard ahead of the top US models, with open weights promised July 27, and Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8 Max, claiming 2.4 trillion parameters and near-frontier performance, though with no benchmarks published yet. Kimi K3 prices at $3 in and $15 out per million tokens, a fraction of frontier rates.

Only 16% of parents prefer a job-training or certificate path for their kids while nearly 60% prefer college, even as construction alone needs 349,000 new workers this year on top of normal hiring.

Treasury yields hit a two-month high Monday as markets price a real chance the Warsh Fed hikes at the July 28 to 29 meeting, with nine officials' projections pointing to a 2026 increase.

It lands just as all five major banks beat earnings and JPMorgan posts the highest quarterly profit in US banking history.

A hike would be the first of the Warsh era, and the decision lands July 29.

Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Canadian autos, alcohol, and dairy Monday under Section 338, a never-used 1930 authority, effective August 19.

25% tariffs on essentially all Brazilian goods take effect today, India's interim-deal deadline hits July 24 with talks reportedly wobbling, and 100% tariffs on patented pharmaceuticals phase in July 31.

Four tariff events in ten days, hitting North American supply chains, pharma costs, and India exposure at once.

The CLARITY Act has sat on the Senate calendar since June 1 with no vote scheduled and roughly 14 working days before August recess, blocked on an ethics clause barring officials from profiting from digital assets.

Meanwhile the SEC's "Regulation Crypto" package, including a four-year registration safe harbor for early-stage token projects, is expected within days.

If Congress misses its window, the SEC writes the de facto rules first.

Trump Media will sell traders early access to top Truth Social posts, pitched at up to $100,000 a month ahead of an August 1 launch, and Rep. Ritchie Torres asked the SEC Monday to review it, citing Trump's roughly 41% stake in TMTG.

Separately, the CFTC is investigating the White House teleprompter operator who won $100,000+ on Kalshi markets tied to Trump's own speeches; Kalshi's surveillance flagged the trades itself.

No written insider-trading rulebook exists for event contracts yet; these two cases will set the early lines.

Japan's Diet passed its FIEA amendment July 15, reclassifying roughly 105 cryptoassets as financial products, adding insider-trading prohibitions, and laying the legal foundation for spot crypto ETFs, with provisions effective FY2027.

The flat 20% tax filling crypto feeds sits in a separate tax-reform track that lands around January 2028, and "banks can hold crypto" remains an FSA council discussion with no bill filed.

The world's third-largest economy just gave crypto a securities-style rulebook with an ETF path; the tax relief is at least 18 months out.

The FCA published its final core rulebook June 30, five policy statements covering trading platforms, stablecoins, custody, market abuse, and prudential rules, with an application window from September 30, 2026 to February 28, 2027 and the full regime live October 2027.

It explicitly rejected MiCA alignment: half MiCA's stablecoin capital coefficient, T+1 redemption, and no EU-style passporting.

Three deliberately incompatible rulebooks now span the US, UK, and EU. For anyone serving UK users, the application window opens September 30.

The 2020 national emergency behind Hong Kong sanctions expired July 17; OFAC removed nine names from the SDN list and moved 39 more, including former chief executive Carrie Lam, to a softer non-SDN list.

Beijing answered by signaling it could restore Hong Kong's preferential trade privileges.

It is the first rollback of the 2020 Hong Kong measures since they began, and it went almost entirely uncovered.