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What happened in crypto in the past week? This week Bitcoin is relatively stable, ETH is up despite issues with the Ethereum FOundation, Solana is getting better and the US is totally bonkers. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: Michael Saylor said at the BTC Prague conference that Strategy's BTC sale was a structural requirement of running a digital credit bussiness, not a change of position. Bitcoin finds a floor as ETF selling slows and bulls chase $65K. BlackRock launched BTC Income ETF BITA on Nasdaq. Another5 533 BTC sold by Bhutan's government, and their BTC reserve is now 87% down to just 1749 BTC (they mined the entire stack through hydroelectric-powered operations, not by asset seizures). Bitcoin ETF outflows hit a record high, largest 30-day outflow since launching in January 2024. But BTC transaction activity is nearing all time high. A Japanese fund plans to put 1% of its assets into drypto in the fiscal year 2026.
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• Ethereum: Ethereum quantum protection could cost just 7 cents, as ETH accounts could be shielded against quantum attacks for as little as $0.07 per transaction, with the proposal to adapt a NIST post-quantum signature standard to run on ETH without requiring a hard fork, as an interim measure toward a longer-term lower-cost system. Another senior leader, Hsiao-Wei Wang, stepped down as co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation effective June 18. An ETH MEV bot got drained for millions, as the attacked tricked the bot's automated trading system into approving attacker-controlled contracts.
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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Standard Chartered says UNI could hit $100 by 2030, a x40 gain form current levels. Philippines banned privacy coins from licensed exchanges. State Street Investment Management launched a money market fund on Jun e 16 speciffically designed for stablecoin issuers to park their reserves, build to meet Genius Act requirements, maintaining a stable $1 share price while offering daily liquidity and yield. Ripple backed Africa's biggest payments network, Flutterwave. Solana becomes first chain with Moody's ratings in a machine-readable format. Altcoins selling hit a 5-year extreme, yet ZEC is up over 1000% and XMR holds near $344. Five federal regulators proposed a rule this week requiring stablecoin issuers to collect name, address, birth date and ID number before opening an account. Alchemy rolled out AgentCard this week, giving AI agents a full Visa Payment identity through a single API call, so they can now spend directly on Visa's network.
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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: The Fed gave crypto a hawkish signal, as they held rates steady on June 17. Kraken launched regulated perps for the US traders. Coinbase just became an everything exchange, as US users can now transfer existing stock portfolios onto the platform without selling their holdings, as stocks can sit alongside crypto in a single account, with zero commission, fractional shares ab d TradingView charting tools are included. Charles Schwab is building prediction market products with CBOE, a binary options option tied to the S&P 500.
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• Bad news: Bybit, Binance, and Bitget all cancelled campaigns offering tokenized Spacex IPO access after xStocks failed to secure allocations of the underlying shares, all three exchanges issued full refunds. Binance is set to lose permission to operate in the EU under the new MICA laws, after its application is set to be rejected by the Greek market regulator. Out of 600M crypto users, only 10% hold their own asset, and just 12-13M use hardware wallets. Forward Industries, holder of the largest public Solana treasury, announced on June 16 that three acquisition proposals targeting smaller SOL firms were rejected or ignored. IMF flagged stablecoin risk in Nigeria, as they say it creates risk for monetary policy, regulatory oversight, and illicit finance. Nigeria received roughly $95B in crypto inflows and accounts for 60% of all stablecoin flows across sub-Saharan Africa. Illinois becomes the first state to tax crypto transactions with a 0.2% tax on digital asset transactions. Alex Mashinsky, former Celsius CEO, known to me as the man who stole half of my crypto stash, was permanently banned by CFTC from commodities trading, closing the case as he is serving 12 years after pleading guilty to commodities and securities fraud tied to Celsius 2022 collapse. G7 leaders said that North Korea stole $2B in crypto last year, with operatives posing as job applicants or investors gaining trust before striking, rather than relying on technical exploits alone.
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• Joke of the week: The US orders Anthropic to pull Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all the foreign nationals on national security grounds. To comply, Anthropic disabled both models globally. They did not want to give anything even when the UK government requested access. Meanwhile, Trump and Liberty Financial contributed $250K in USD1 stablecoin to the UFC Freedom 250 bonus pool on June 15, the event being held on the South Lawn of the White House on Trump's 80th birthday. Talking about clowns fighting! The US Senate moved against SBF's pardon bid.

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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.