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What happened in crypto in the past week? This week AI is creating trouble, or now. ETH and BTC gained a little, lost a little. The Clarity Act is still not very clear. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: BTC gained strenght this week climbing 4.36%. Saylor's Strategy increased their USD reserve by another $225M through share sales, up to $3.2B, without any BTC sales involved. Nice firms, including BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy and Fidelity launched the Bitcoin Security Consortium on July 23, commiting $15M to fund research against future quantum computing threats.
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• Ethereum: The Ethereum Foundation spins out EthSystems, which focuses on building private and confidential settlement layers for ETH, targeting institutional adoption. ETH trailed close behind BTC, gaining 3.68%,
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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Telegram is giving a billion users a crypto wallet this summer. Grayscale filed with the SEC on July 20 to launch a passive ETF holding Worldcoin's WLD token. XRP Ledger is about to process millions of AI payments, with most activity involving agents paying for APIs and data feeds. Bitmex will shut down on September 23 after eleven years of activity. Hype is down 8% after Multicoin Digital, Galaxy Digital and a few others queued nearly $150M of the token for unstaking. Bitwise said that the next bull market starts with Hyperliquid and RobinHood. Others are pointing out that the main choices will still be BTC, ETH and SOL. AI found a Zcash flaw humans missed for four years and ZEC fell 60% on the news.
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• NFTs and blockchain games: On Splinterlands we are still having a few packs left from the Escalation - the latest mini-set from the Conclave Arcana collection. Axie seems to get some cool upgrades, but they are still not convincing me.

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• Good news: Frank Templeton said that autonomous AI agents need blockchain to function, because card networks are too slow and expensive for machine-to-machine payments. Kraken expanded its tokenized stocks to global markets. Crypto.com raised $400M in a strategic investment from Citadel Securities. MoonPay now is accepting Discover cards as a payment option for buying and selling crypto in the US.
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• Bad news: Russia passed its first comprehensive crypto law, before United States, even if they started later, and they established five categories of regulated market participants, capping annual retail purchases at $3800 per licensed intermediary. Pakistan created a crypto crime investigation unit, targeting money laundering and terrorism financing using digital assets. MegaETH incubator, MegaMafia, has been sunsetted, with team deciding to redirect funds and effort to first-party apps. Allbridge has been exploited on Solana, for $1.45M, and Across Protocol was attacked on Solana too, resulting in losses to the relayer, but funds were unaffected.
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• Joke of the week: Clarity Act odds jumped from 32% to 43% in one day, on an unverified report, no bill text, no White House confirmation involved. Dodgy? Or someone is making big money again on Polymarket fraud. The SEC published a statement on July 22 warning that on-chain vaults and lending protocols may already quantify as securities under federal law. The Financial Action Task said that most DEFI platforms retain centralized control through governance tokens, admin keys, or treasury management, and must be regulated accordingly. On July 22, the US Senate finally released a 616-page Clarity Act draft that includes an ethics provision barring federal officials, including the president, from issuing or sponsoring digital assets while in office. How does this work retroactively? Are we fine with a $1.6B fraud stealing people money? You may have the Golden crypto phone to call for help. Wait, was that a fraud too?

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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.