OVERVIEW

Welcome To August. It Sucks. 👋

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
🎙️ ‘Project Crypto’ Pulls the Curtain on Wall Street’s Shadow Games  😊

How this speech from SEC Chairman Paul Atkins gave yesterday at the America First Policy Institute isn’t one of the most talked about things in finance is crazy.

I mean besides nuclear subs, firing the Labor Statistics bigwig, tariffs and the selloff in stonks and crypto. This speech should be one of the most talked about things in crypto and Wall Street.

Atkins dragged the ghosts of the 1960s paperwork crisis onto the screen, then asked why we’re still clearing trades like it’s 1999. He framed tokenization as the Depository Trust 2.0 - except on-chain, transparent, and allergic to paper cuts. 📜 

Why Legacy Stonks Should Sweat

Dark Pools Meet Daylight: Blockchain settlement logs every hop - no back-alley prints, no “trust me, bro” reporting windows. Internalizers either migrate or melt.

Super-App Broker Dealers: Reg Super-App (his term, not mine) would let one license cover stonks, crypto, staking, lending. Multi-modal order books kill the old silo model. Enjoy your fragmented liquidity while it lasts.

Tokenized Equities: Firms are “lined up at our doors,” Atkins bragged. When Apple shares start settling like USDC, T-plus-zero becomes table stakes and dividend distribution turns into a smart-contract job. Traditional transfer agents? Check the classifieds (and I weep that some of you reading this have no idea what the classifieds are).

Innovation Exemption: He floated a sandbox letting startups ignore legacy rulebook choke points as long as they hit principles-based guardrails. Translation - if your idea makes sense on-chain, the SEC won’t kneecap it for daring to exist. 🔨 

Winners, Losers, & Loud Messy Transitions

Winners: Self-custody maxis, on-chain settlement vendors, whatever garage band finally cracks tokenized bonds with compliance baked in.

Losers: Custodians married to cold-war era tech, broker-dealers who need ten state charters to blink, dark pool operators clinging to the shadows.

Wildcards: CFTC turf battles, Senate foot-dragging, and banks deciding whether “embrace” or “litigate” feels cheaper this quarter. 🃏 

The Future Is Coming

Atkins didn’t hedge. He promised bright-line rules on what’s a security, a commodity, or just a glorified Pokémon card. He openly trashed “regulation-by-enforcement” and vowed to reshore the builders Gary ran off during Chokepoint 2.0.

Underneath the rhetoric sits one blunt reality - tokenization just nabbed a federal mandate, and the last major moats protecting legacy fee machines are about to spring leaks.

Dark pools, clear your throats - sunrise is coming. 🌞

NEWS
Visa Cranks The Stablecoin Firehose Wider 💿️ 

Visa cranked the stablecoin firehose wider, adding fresh coins, chains, and even a euro plug-in to its settlement pipes. 🚀

• Two extra dollars in the pool – Paxos-issued Global Dollar (USDG) and PayPal USD (PYUSD) now clear natively on Visa’s rails.

• Two fresh lanes – Stellar and Avalanche join Ethereum and Solana, giving Visa a four-chain highway instead of a dual-track backroad.

• Bonjour, EURC – Circle’s euro-backed stablecoin slides in, so partners can settle in euros without touching old-school SWIFT wires.

Expect every competing network to scramble for parity, or risk looking like Blockbuster during Netflix’s mail-DVD era. 💿️ 

NEWS
About Damn Time Crypto Wrote Its Will 💼

You die, your seed phrase dies with you - cute plot twist until the family lawyer asks, “What’s a Ledger?” 😏

CIP just hit the $COTI.X ( ▼ 4.14% ) mainnet and killed that medieval drama dead.

Finally, Someone Is Working On Something

• No middlemen, no paperwork, no “sorry for your loss” emails. Your coins stay in your wallet until a smart-contract timer or inactivity trigger hands them to your heirs.

• Fully private. COTI’s garbled-circuit privacy layer masks every detail, so nosy cousins can’t peek at balances.

• Works right now. It’s live, not “coming soon” or “testnet only.” 👍️ 

Under The Hood

CIP’s contract lets you hard-code either a “wallet went dark” timeout or a specific date. Hit either checkpoint, and the protocol fires assets straight to the beneficiary - no sweaty executor fumbling seed phrases.

All logic runs on-chain, wrapped in COTI’s Privacy 2.0 tech, so the only thing leaked is relief.

They’re doing tests on the live version right now with community testing, bug bounties, hackathons, etc. Translation: break it so they can fix it.

And they’re going to add multi-asset support (stables, NFTs), milestone releases, and even multi-party inheritance. Because families fight; smart contracts shouldn’t. 🥊 

No One Lives Forever

We crypto people love to chant “be your own bank.” But banks, for all their sins, still handle estates. CIP plugs that adult-scale hole without dragging TradFi into the room.

No word yet on whether this, um, has worked in a real-life transfer of crypto post-mortem or not, so we’ll have to wait and see if it works real-time. Damn, that’s dark. Anyway.

Your coins, your rules, your legacy - finally sorted. 🚀

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
AI, Stablecoins, & Privacy News 🕵️

💾 Storj Promises Your Backups Won’t Retire Before They Restore

If you’re still mailing hard disks after a ransomware hit, enjoy the postcard from 2005. Storj’s distributed storage darts back terabytes at gigabit speeds while legacy clouds are still negotiating shipping labels for NAS drives. Independent tests clocked restores at 2-4 hours per TB versus the 6-8 hour slogs on S3 cousins. Storj.

🆔 Ontology Says Stablecoins Need IDs, Not More TPS Flexing

Fast rails solved fees, but merchants still play wallet roulette with mystery senders. Ontology’s DID stack adds zero-knowledge credentials so users verify once and move on. Ontology.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) News 🪙

🛡️ Octane Welds Real-Time Security into Avalanche Builds so Audits Stop Ruining Launch Day

Every commit now gets scanned for delegate-call disasters and stale oracles, already flagging 217 nasties protecting $261 million in TVL. Avalanche-tuned models cut false positives and shove alerts straight into dev workflows. Ship fast, sleep faster. Avalanche.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Metaverse, NFT, & Gaming News 🎮️

🌌 SPACE ID Ships Domains, Payment IDs, and Traffic Spikes While Markets Yawn

Twenty-plus updates, MetaMask Snaps, and Blockscout integrations jammed human-readable names into every corner of Web3. Payment IDs killed copy-paste anxiety and pushed traffic past the million-impression mark. Apparently building stuff beats chart watching. Space ID.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending Protocol News 🏦

🪙 Sui Turns Bitcoin into a DeFi Workhorse Instead of a Couch Ornament

Wrapped flavors like wBTC and tBTC now trade, lend, and farm across DeepBook and seven DEXs with slippage so low it barely registers. BTC-backed assets even collateralize loans and options without leaving the chain. Sui.

🏦 Keyrock Becomes VeChainThor Validator Because Liquidity Deserves On-Chain Street Cred

The Brussels market maker is staking millions of VET to secure blocks while tightening spreads for VET and VTHO across 85 venues. Their 170-strong team survived crypto winter and wants VeChain’s 20 percent validator yield. VeChain.

🖥️ Pocket’s One-Line Script Turns You into a Node Operator Before Lunch

Download, stake 60k POKT, and watch your server earn up to $250 a month relaying data across dozens of chains. The Shannon upgrade even lets nodes serve AI inference and Web2 APIs alongside blockchain calls. Pocket Network.

🔗 Axelar Hands Hyperliquid a Multichain Fast Pass to 80 Networks

Interchain Token Service pipes assets straight into HyperEVM while Fullport beta shuttles USDC from Arbitrum, Solana, and friends in seconds. One integration handles listing, liquidity, and deposits - no third-party bridges needed. Axelar.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

🚣 Trump’s alleged nuclear submarine order unverified

🐐 Speed matters: GOAT Network launches BitVM2 beta testnet with real-time proving

🐖 SUI treasury firm Mill City shares drop as it eyes raising additional $500 million

🤖 Microrobots that can carry drugs and steer could provide targeted drug delivery

🔪 Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag voice actor claims Ubisoft threatened to sue him over remake tease

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in ADA, IMX, COPI, MIN, AGIX, ALGO, ZEC, XLM, and NEAR. 📋