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What happened in crypto in the past week? This week we reach rock bottom, probably, but we are only 90% sure of that. AI agents are the buzzword. Even big names like Mastercard are working on it. Bitmine is buying more ETH. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: After they scared everyone, Strategy is signalling a new buy, 20% less than the recent sale price. Almost like they counted on it. JPMorgan turned cautious in digital assets after Strategy's dollar reserve fell to $900M, covering only 6 months of preffered stock dividents. The reserve stood at $2B before a major convertible note repurchase in May. Institutions are aactively buying BTC at $65K, while everyone sells. Starknet just added on-chain privacy to Bitcoin. almost 90% of all the BTC sits in US hands, mostly institutional investors. Analysts identified $53600 as the most likely floor for this BTC cycle.
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• Ethereum: Bitmine bought nearly 127K ETH last week, as Ethereum hit its lowest prive in over a year, the largest single-week acquisition on 2026. Bitmine holds now 4.59% of all the ETH's circulating supply. Ethereum hit an intraday low near $1507.
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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Hayes sold his HYPE as he warned that traditional exchanges are actively building perpetual futures to compete directly with HyperLiquid, and credible products could arrive within a year. A $480B asset manager entered DEFI, planning ETFs for client exposure to USDe and ENA, expected in the second half of 2026. The CFTC proposed its first prediction market regulation on June 10. On chain gambling generated $14B in Q1 2026, despite broad market correction. World Cup could push prediction markets to new records. Ripple will let AI agents pay with XRP and stableconis, covering API calls, model inference, and digital services. Coinbase let AI agents access your crypto account. Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines on June 10, an infrastructure layer for payments made by autonomous AI agents, and more than 30 partners joined including Coinbase, OKX, Stripe, and Ripple. SpaceX shares will go live on Solana immediatelly after its IPO, powered by Backpack Securities.
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• NFTs and blockchain games: I have also enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite engaging, I would say, with no significant updates lately. On Splinterlands, we have had the Land NFT new update and improved tokenomics, and the new cards from the Escalation mini collection are up and running.

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• Good news: Travala released a Travel MCP in June 5 that lets an AI agent to search hotels, reserve a room and pay in USDC on Base inside a single chat thread, and it works with Claude Desktop, being open to outside developers. UK FCA proposed on June 9 that UK retail investment funds be allowed to hold up to 10% of assets in crypto ETNs. Over 60 founders are pushing to shape the Clarity Act before the Senate floor vote. Canton Network raises $355M form a16z and Abu Dhabi Fund. LG is building a blockchain for digital advertising. Japan is reclassifying crypto as a financial instrument.
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• Bad news: Metamask build a wallet designed for AI agents to trade DEFI autonomously without human approval on every transaction, and it supports swaps, perpetual futures, and liquidity provisioning across ETH and HYPE. Can you lose your money there? You bet, but this made me curious, I may set $100 there and forget about it. SBF is back filing a clemency petition while serving a 25 year sentence for the FTX fraud. Donald said there is no way to grant it.
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• Joke of the week: Crypto sheds billions in the worst week since the FTX November 2022 event, as the market lost roughly $390B in 7 days. Yet, surprisingly, the tokenized real world assets grew 589% form 2025 to June 2026, almost sixfold.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- a Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - a Play2Earn game on Hive) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game)and ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog. I am also writing for crypto on Hive.