Front Runners @247FrontRunners

📉 CRYPTO'S VC BASE HAS COLLAPSED TO A SIX-YEAR LOW Just 651 active venture investors backed crypto deals in Q2 2026, down roughly 75% from the 2,564 that piled in at the 2022 peak. June alone saw only 222. It's the thinnest the field has been since 2020, back when crypto VC barely existed. The Terra and FTX blowups scared off the tourists, and the LPs walked out behind them. What's left is a smaller club of specialists doing more of the deals, which means less money chasing early-stage projects, harder raises, and a higher bar to get funded.

⚖️ GERMANY'S 0% CRYPTO TAX PERK IS UNDER THREAT, AND IT COULD SET THE TONE PERMANENTLY FOR EUROPE Germany lets you sell crypto completely tax-free after holding it a year, the best deal in the EU, and now it's in the crosshairs. A Green Party bill to scrap it was voted down in committee this year, but the SPD finance minister has a fresh draft due in July. One study found Germans booked €47B in crypto gains in 2024, nearly two-thirds untaxed, which is exactly the revenue lawmakers want. The bigger risk is what it signals. DAC8 already forces standardized crypto tax reporting across all 27 EU states this year, and Germany's own reformers are attacking the rule as a "special path" out of step with Europe.

📰 GERMANY LEADS EU CRYPTO LICENSING RACE WITH 57 REGISTERED VASPS ESMA's updated MiCA register now shows 280 licensed crypto firms across the EU, with Germany out front at 57, France at 31, and the Netherlands at 26. Miss the July 1 cutoff and you lost the right to add new EU clients, making a MiCA license the price of entry for staying in the market.

Front Runners @247FrontRunners

17 hours ago

📰 280 FIRMS NOW HOLD MiCA LICENSES AS EUROPE'S CRYPTO RULEBOOK GOES FULLY LIVE ESMA's first post-transitional register update cleared 37 new CASPs in one sweep, with Standard Chartered, FalconX, and Sygnum Europe among those now formally authorized. Standard Chartered also

0 0 15 5K 0

📈 ZUCKERBERG: META'S AI AGENT ROLLOUT IS RUNNING BEHIND, EVEN AS CAPEX SOARS Meta's CEO told Reuters that AI agent progress has been slower than expected over the past four months, with improvement expected in the next three to six months. This comes as Meta has committed to some of the largest AI infrastructure spending in Big Tech, making the delay a costly one.

📰 280 FIRMS NOW HOLD MiCA LICENSES AS EUROPE'S CRYPTO RULEBOOK GOES FULLY LIVE ESMA's first post-transitional register update cleared 37 new CASPs in one sweep, with Standard Chartered, FalconX, and Sygnum Europe among those now formally authorized. Standard Chartered also landed an Electronic Money Institution license in Luxembourg, cementing its EU digital asset custody base there.

🚩 FUNDING IS HEATING UP AS TRADERS RUSH TO CALL THE BOTTOM $BTC clawed back from the $58K lows to around $62K, and funding has spiked right alongside it, now near the hottest levels in weeks. Open interest is climbing too. Translation: longs are piling in and paying up to bet this is the turn. That's the tell. When price bounces and leverage stacks this fast on one side, the move gets top-heavy fast.

📰 AFRICA'S BIGGEST CRYPTO EXCHANGE VALR GOES LIVE ON HYPERLIQUID PERPS VALR will tap Hyperliquid's onchain liquidity to run its perpetuals offering, adding over 200 markets across asset classes via HyperliquidX, according to Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan.

Retail wants leverage. Banks are happy to lend it. Leveraged ETFs hold north of $200 billion now, up from around $70 billion in 2022. I've seen this arrangement before. It doesn't cause the drop. It just makes the drop faster.

📰 ANTHROPIC MOVES TO CUT OFF ANT FINANCIAL AND BYTEDANCE FROM CLAUDE ACCESS! The AI company is strengthening its detection systems to stop Chinese tech giants from reaching Claude through VPNs and foreign subsidiaries.

📰 EREBOR BANK DOUBLES ITS VALUATION TO $8B IN NEW FUNDING TALKS! Peter Thiel's crypto and defense focused bank is in discussions to raise at a valuation of at least $8 billion, up from $4.35 billion just months ago.

📰 8 CRYPTO PROJECTS BUYING BACK MORE THAN THEY MINT, $HYPE TOPS THE LIST AT $283M! Tokenomist tracked eight tokens, $MET, $PUMP, $GMX, $RLB, $MPLX, $HYPE, $LIT, and $AAVE, where repurchases since January 2026 have run ahead of new circulating supply. Hyperliquid leads in dollar terms at $283M bought back, equal to 3% of supply, while its float actually shrank 11%; Meteora's buybacks absorbed 71% of its January supply even as its float grew only 13%.

🌍 RUSSIA'S DIGITAL RUBLE LAUNCHES SEPTEMBER 1! Elvira Nabiullina, head of the Bank of Russia, says the country is prepared and the rollout will proceed as planned next month.

🏢 BINANCE IS LEADING A RAISE THAT VALUES MESH AT UP TO $2B Crypto payments and settlement startup Mesh is raising at up to a $2B valuation with Binance leading, doubling its $1B price from just six months ago. Mesh runs the rails behind things like PayPal's crypto payments, processing close to $10B in monthly volume.

🏢 ONDO FINANCE BRINGS BLACKROCK'S IVV ETF AND MICRON SHARES TO ETHEREUM! Ondo Finance has tokenized BlackRock's IVV ETF and Micron stock on Ethereum, operating under the SEC's third-party custody framework.

🏁 SEC CHAIR SAYS THE AGENCY IS TAKING "HISTORIC STEPS" TO MOVE MARKETS ON-CHAIN Paul Atkins says Project Crypto is rewriting old rules so stocks, bonds and funds can trade as tokens on public blockchains, with issuers finally told upfront whether a token is a security.

🏁 JPMORGAN SAYS SAYLOR JUST BECAME A RISK TO BITCOIN Now that $MSTR can sell BTC to cover its dividends, one of Bitcoin's biggest buyers could flip to seller. JPMorgan calls it "two-way" risk.

📉 THE TOKENIZED RWA MARKET IS MOSTLY A NUMBER THAT DOESN'T MOVE Strip out stablecoins and repos and BeInCrypto and rwa.xyz peg tokenized real-world assets at around $60B. Impressive on paper, until you look under it. More than half the market, 56% by value, didn't record a single on-chain transfer in a typical week. It's been issued, not used. Ownership is stacked in a few hands too. A cluster of 62 assets holds roughly 88% of the value, and you can get to half the entire market through just five products. Almost none of it is open to US retail, who are shut out of 97% of what's listed. One category has actually grown up: tokenized Treasuries, the only slice the report calls production grade. The rest is a claim sitting on a ledger, still waiting on the rails that would let it trade, settle and plug into DeFi. For now, RWA is one real market and a lot of placeholders.

Front Runners @247FrontRunners

2 days ago

📰 A CENTRAL BANK CHIEF JUST NAMED GOVERNMENT BONDS THE “BIG PRIZE” FOR TOKENIZATION Bank of Korea Governor Hyun Song Shin told the ECB’s Sintra forum that putting sovereign debt on-chain is the single most valuable thing blockchain can do for finance. His reasoning is

0 1 29 5K 0

🏁 MUSK SAYS AI AND ROBOTS WILL MAKE WORK OPTIONAL Elon Musk's pitch: AI and robots will eventually do everything, wiping out scarcity and ushering in what he calls "universal high income," where jobs become a hobby rather than a necessity and money slowly fades into the background. He's not saying it alone. Robinhood's CEO just said "every capability that a human can do will be available to an AI agent," and admitted a huge share of trades already run on machines. The read: whether the endgame is universal high income or mass displacement, the direction is identical. The people building this future keep telling you exactly where it's headed. The only question left is who owns the machines when we arrive.

You’re definitely onto something! Though asking one AI to snitch on the rest feels like a bit of a conflict of interest 😂 Either way, we’re watching the new world get built right in front of us! Robinhood’s CEO just said it straight: “every capability that a human can do will be available to an AI agent,” and admitted a huge chunk of trades already run on machines!

Crypto Banter @crypto_banter

2 days ago

Hey @grok - is this because AI is stealing our jobs?👀

12 4 24 10K 0