Welcome to this week’s Crypto Weekly Digest, where digital assets continued their steady journey from experimental technology to increasingly serious financial infrastructure. 🚀
From tokenized credit and stablecoin payments to institutional investments, regulated trading products and new blockchain lending markets, the line between traditional finance and crypto is becoming harder to spot.
Banks, exchanges and fintech companies are not simply watching from the sidelines anymore - they are building, acquiring and applying for licences. 🏦 Meanwhile, AI is quietly changing how these platforms are developed, operated and even discussed inside the workplace. 🤖 There is plenty happening, so let’s unpack the most important stories without requiring a wallet, a validator or a degree in blockchain engineering.
Telegram is preparing to add a native, non-custodial Gram wallet to every version of its app this summer, potentially placing crypto payments in front of more than one billion monthly users. 📲 “Non-custodial” means Telegram should not control the user’s private keys, so people will manage their own funds—and inherit the very un-fun responsibility of not losing access to them. 🔑
Pavel Durov says transactions will be instant and free of fees, which could make sending crypto feel almost as simple as forwarding a questionable group-chat meme. ⚡ The launch also brings back the Gram name, recently restored as the native coin of the TON blockchain and closely connected to Telegram’s original cryptocurrency plans. 🔄
The potential scale is enormous even if only a small part of Telegram’s audience uses the wallet, although the company has not yet provided a precise launch date or detailed technical and security information. 🧐 In practice, this will be a major test of whether self-custody can become a normal consumer feature rather than a hobby for people with three hardware wallets and a fireproof seed-phrase box. 🧰
Arcus, a decentralized exchange backed by Robinhood and developed by the team behind dYdX, has expanded its platform with tokenized stocks and perpetual futures on Robinhood Chain. 📈 Users in eligible markets can access more than 95 stock tokens alongside products linked to cryptocurrencies, commodities, indexes, exchange-traded funds and major companies such as Apple, Nvidia and Tesla. 🌍
Trading takes place through a self-custodial account, meaning users keep control of their assets instead of depositing everything with a centralized exchange. 🔐 However, these stock tokens mainly provide financial exposure to a company’s share price and do not automatically give holders normal shareholder rights such as voting or direct ownership of the underlying shares. 🧾
Arcus is also unavailable in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and several other jurisdictions, showing that regulators are still deciding exactly which financial cupboard these products belong in. 🚧 The platform makes traditional markets more accessible and more programmable, but perpetual contracts and leverage of up to 50 times can turn a small market sneeze into a very large portfolio cold. 🤧
Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have reportedly submitted a joint offer to acquire PayPal, creating one of the largest potential deals in the history of online payments. 💳 The proposal values PayPal at more than $53 billion, or $60.50 per share, representing roughly a 28% premium to its price before the offer became public and supported by about $50 billion in committed financing. 💰
This is not a completed acquisition, however, as PayPal has not formally accepted the proposal and its board reportedly believes the current price undervalues the company. 🛑 The strategic idea is fairly clear: Stripe brings powerful merchant infrastructure, while PayPal brings a huge consumer network, Venmo and an established global payments brand, with the combined companies processing around $3.7 trillion annually. 🌐
A merger of this size would still face difficult questions involving competition rules, financing, integration and potentially the sale or separation of some business units. 🧩 For now, the situation is less “Stripe bought PayPal” and more “Stripe arrived with a giant cheque, while PayPal is checking whether another zero could mysteriously appear.” 😄
Morpho has launched Morpho Midnight on Coinbase’s Base network, introducing loans with fixed interest rates and clearly defined repayment dates alongside Morpho Blue’s variable-rate lending markets. 🌙 Instead of allowing an algorithm to set every borrowing cost according to pool activity, Midnight lets lenders and borrowers propose their preferred rates, maturities and other conditions. 🤝 The first markets support USDC and Coinbase Wrapped Bitcoin across several maturity dates, with Morpho choosing a limited rollout to reduce security and operational risks. 🛡️ Fixed borrowing costs may be particularly useful for companies and professional investors that need to know their future expenses rather than waking up to a completely different interest rate every Tuesday. 📅
Midnight is not replacing Morpho Blue, as the two systems are designed to serve different needs: Blue offers flexible variable-rate loans, while Midnight focuses on predictable fixed-term credit. 🔄 DeFi has therefore discovered one of traditional finance’s oldest inventions—the repayment schedule—but smart-contract, collateral and liquidation risks have not gone on holiday. 🏖️
HSBC has become the first company approved by the Bank of England to begin operating inside the United Kingdom’s Digital Securities Sandbox. 🏦 Its HSBC Orion platform will work as a digital securities depository, supporting the issuance, servicing and settlement of bonds created directly using digital infrastructure. 🔗
This includes corporate bonds and the British government’s planned Digital Gilt Instrument, with the first pilot transaction currently expected during the first quarter of 2027. 🇬🇧 HSBC says Orion has already supported more than $5 billion in digital bond issuances globally, so the platform is not arriving at the sandbox with only a plastic bucket and some good intentions. 🪣
The sandbox, jointly operated by the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority, allows companies to test distributed ledger technology in a live but controlled regulatory environment. 🧪
The move shows that major banks increasingly see blockchain as financial market infrastructure rather than simply a machine for producing new tokens, although this remains a regulated pilot rather than an overnight replacement for the bond market. ⚙️
Japanese financial group SBI Holdings has acquired a majority stake in Holdbuild, the parent company of Singapore-based cryptocurrency platform Coinhako, after receiving approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. 🇸🇬 The transaction made Coinhako a consolidated SBI subsidiary on July 16, giving the Japanese group control of a business that operates through a locally licensed Major Payment Institution. ✅
SBI plans to combine Coinhako’s regional customer base and knowledge of Southeast Asia with its own banking, digital asset and financial technology services. 🌏 The group is particularly interested in areas such as stablecoins, cross-border transactions, tokenized assets and its planned yen-denominated JPYSC stablecoin. 💴
Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed, meaning the size of the shopping bill remains safely hidden in the corporate drawer. 🧾 More broadly, the deal shows how large financial companies are expanding in crypto by purchasing regulated local infrastructure instead of simply launching a global app and hoping the paperwork catches up later. 🏃
Aave has launched its V4 lending infrastructure on Avalanche, marking the protocol’s first V4 expansion outside Ethereum. 🏔️ The new system uses a Hub-and-Spoke structure, allowing specialized lending markets to apply their own collateral rules and risk settings while still accessing shared pools of liquidity. 🛞
One of the planned markets will allow users to borrow against tokenized real-world assets, potentially including government bonds, money market funds, private credit and corporate debt. 🏛️ Aave currently remains the largest decentralized lending protocol, holding roughly $14 billion across more than 20 blockchain networks at the time of the launch. 📊
The important part is that tokenized assets may now become active collateral inside lending markets instead of simply sitting onchain looking modern and expensive. ✨ Nevertheless, putting a Treasury bond on a blockchain does not magically remove credit, liquidity, oracle or smart-contract risk—it only gives those risks a faster vehicle. 🚗
Galaxy Digital has signed a 15-year naming rights agreement with Texas Tech, which will rename the university’s football venue Galaxy Stadium beginning with the 2026 season. 🏈 The stadium will officially debut under its new name on September 5, when Texas Tech plays against Abilene Christian. 📣
Galaxy will also become the official data center and digital assets partner of Texas Tech Athletics, with the cooperation covering artificial intelligence, workforce development and commercial opportunities for student-athletes. 🤝 The partnership fits Galaxy’s growing presence in West Texas, where its nearby Helios data center campus has 1.6 gigawatts of approved capacity for AI and high-performance computing. 🖥️ Neither party disclosed the financial value of the agreement, so fans can debate the price alongside the team’s defensive strategy. 🤠
The deal suggests that crypto and digital infrastructure companies are moving beyond online advertisements and exchange sponsorships into longer-term regional, educational and sporting partnerships—although the quarterback will presumably continue using a normal football rather than a tokenized one. 🪙
Bybit has officially launched a locally operated platform in Indonesia after acquiring a majority stake in digital asset company PT Enkripsi Teknologi Handal, previously known as NOBI. 🇮🇩 The business has been renamed Bybit Indonesia and plans to introduce its services gradually, beginning with approximately 500 cryptocurrency trading pairs. 🔄
The platform will continue to be managed by experienced local executives, combining Bybit’s international infrastructure with a team familiar with Indonesian regulations and customer habits. 👥
Indonesia represents a major market, with more than 21 million registered crypto users and transactions worth around $26.85 billion during 2025. 📊 The acquisition also gives Bybit access through an already licensed local entity, which is rather more efficient than arriving at the regulator’s office with a laptop and a hopeful smile. 📝
The expansion could increase competition and product choice, but users should still check which local company holds their assets, what protections apply and whether they genuinely need all 500 trading pairs before breakfast. ☕
Morgan Stanley’s E*TRADE platform has introduced spot cryptocurrency trading for eligible retail customers through a partnership with digital asset infrastructure provider Zero Hash. 🪙 Users can now buy, sell and hold Bitcoin, Ether and Solana while viewing their crypto positions next to their stocks and other traditional investments. 📱
Trading carries a fee of 50 basis points, while the ability to transfer crypto into or out of the platform is expected to arrive later in the year. 💸 The assets are held in separate Zero Hash accounts and are not protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, an important detail hiding behind the convenient interface. ⚠️
The rollout gives crypto access to a platform serving 8.6 million households and managing roughly $1.56 trillion in client assets as of the end of March. 🏦 Crypto appearing next to fractional shares and retirement planning tools may be the clearest sign yet that digital assets are entering mainstream finance, although the three-coin selection is still more tasting menu than unlimited buffet. 🍽️
Tradable plans to move up to $1 billion worth of private credit assets onto the Stellar blockchain, giving institutional investors another way to access loans and other real-world financial products onchain. 💼 Around $500 million in notional value is expected to be available at launch, with the total increasing gradually, although the companies have not yet announced an exact starting date. 📅
The Stellar network will support processes such as compliance checks, investor onboarding and the management of assets throughout their full lifecycle, so this is about much more than simply creating some shiny new tokens. 🔗 Tradable says it has already tokenized approximately $1.7 billion in private credit across nearly 30 institutional-grade positions, meaning the company is not entering this market with an empty spreadsheet and a motivational quote. 📊
Tokenized real-world assets are now worth more than $34 billion, while private credit represents one of the largest parts of the sector as financial institutions search for faster and more programmable infrastructure. 🚀 In simple terms, private loans are getting blockchain passports, although they still carry the same credit and liquidity risks they had before learning how to travel digitally. 🛂
Brokerage infrastructure provider Alpaca has raised $135 million in new equity financing led by Peak XV, with participation from investors including Elefund and BNP Paribas’ venture capital arm. 💰 Together with debt financing primarily provided by Kraken parent Payward and BMO, the wider financing package reaches approximately $435 million. 🏦
Alpaca says it will use the money to expand its “agent-first” brokerage infrastructure, meaning financial applications and AI agents should be able to access investing, clearing and custody services through APIs. 🤖 The funding follows a $150 million Series D completed in January 2026, which valued the company at $1.15 billion and officially placed the alpaca in the surprisingly crowded fintech-unicorn zoo. 🦙
Alpaca also reports more than $1.5 billion in assets under custody supporting tokenized equities, while its number of monthly active API users has grown almost fourfold during the past six months. 📈
The bigger idea is to build regulated plumbing connecting traditional shares, tokenized markets and automated financial applications, although whether autonomous agents become brilliant investors or simply trade faster than humans remains an open question. 🧠
Citadel Securities has made a $400 million strategic investment in Crypto.com, valuing the cryptocurrency company at approximately $20 billion. 💵 The transaction is described as Crypto.com’s first institutional funding round in its ten-year history, making it a notable meeting between one of traditional finance’s largest market makers and a major crypto platform. 🤝
Crypto.com says the capital will support its expansion across different asset classes, including tokenized securities and derivatives, as it attempts to connect conventional markets with 24/7 digital infrastructure. 🌐 The partnership may also give Citadel Securities a closer position in the growing market for tokenized stocks, stablecoins and blockchain-based trading systems without requiring it to build an entire crypto exchange from scratch. 🧱
It is important to note that this is an investment rather than an acquisition, so Crypto.com remains an independent company and the $20 billion figure is an agreed valuation, not a pile of cash delivered in a very large suitcase. 🧳 Overall, the deal shows that the relationship between Wall Street and crypto has progressed from suspicious staring to sharing financial infrastructure—although probably not passwords. 🔐
Crypto exchange MEXC has introduced staking for Bittensor’s TAO token through an integration with Yuma, making the service available to the exchange’s reported global user base of 40 million people. 🌍 The feature allows eligible users to earn staking rewards while contributing to the operation and security of Bittensor, a blockchain network designed to coordinate decentralized artificial intelligence services. 🧠
Bittensor currently includes 128 specialized subnets working on areas such as AI inference, model training, coding assistants and financial modelling, with participants competing for token rewards based on their usefulness. 🛠️ Yuma operates validator infrastructure that evaluates subnet performance and assigns weights helping determine how rewards are distributed across the network. ⚖️
For MEXC customers, the integration removes the need to manage validator infrastructure directly, although they still face risks connected to TAO’s market price, staking rewards, validator performance and holding assets through a centralized exchange. ⚠️ Decentralized AI now officially has a savings-style feature, but unfortunately the algorithms still cannot guarantee that the number will only go up. 📉
Cardano activated its van Rossem hard fork on July 18, moving the mainnet from protocol version 10 to version 11 at the boundary between epochs 643 and 644. 🔄 The upgrade introduces improvements to Plutus smart contracts and their cost models, which are expected to reduce the computational cost of executing certain applications on the network. 💻
Van Rossem is also the first hard fork in Cardano’s history to be approved and activated through the network’s onchain governance system rather than being coordinated mainly by Input Output. 🗳️ The upgrade creates technical foundations for the future Dijkstra-era hard fork, which is intended to introduce Ouroboros Leios and significantly increase Cardano’s transaction capacity without weakening its security model. 🚀
Importantly, Leios itself is not yet running on the Cardano mainnet and is still expected later in 2026, so the network has prepared the runway but the faster aircraft has not taken off. ✈️ Cardano has therefore completed an important infrastructure update, although users may notice lower contract costs before they notice any dramatic transformation in everyday network performance. 🔧
Revolut has received in-principle approval from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority to offer crypto broker-dealer, exchange, management and investment services in the United Arab Emirates. 🇦🇪 The company intends to provide eligible customers with the ability to buy, sell and hold digital assets through its main retail application and its separate Revolut X trading platform. 📱
However, the approval is only a conditional stage in the licensing process, and Revolut cannot begin serving UAE crypto customers until it satisfies the remaining requirements and receives a full VASP licence. 🚧 VARA explicitly states that companies holding only in-principle approval are prohibited from conducting virtual asset activities, making this more of a regulatory green light to continue preparing than permission to immediately press the launch button. 🟢
The crypto approval follows separate authorization from the Central Bank of the UAE for Revolut’s payment activities, supporting the company’s plan to build a wider locally regulated financial offering. 🏦 The expansion could make the UAE an important market for Revolut, but for now the company has received an invitation to finish the paperwork rather than the keys to the crypto kingdom. 🗝️
MoonPay has acquired Glide, a crypto infrastructure startup founded in 2023 by former Robinhood Wallet engineers Tushar Soni and Qinyu Tong. 🛒 Glide developed technology that helps applications accept deposits from different tokens, wallets, exchanges, payment cards and blockchain networks through one unified process. 🔀
The platform supports more than 100 tokens across 30 networks and aims to handle processes such as bridging and swapping automatically instead of asking users to complete several confusing steps themselves. 🌉 Following the acquisition, Glide’s routing system will become part of MoonPay Deposits, which is already used by services including Wallet in Telegram, Moonshot and Paysafe. 📲
MoonPay did not disclose the financial terms, but the purchase is its sixth announced acquisition of 2026 as the company expands beyond fiat-to-crypto payments into security, trading, accounting and broader digital asset infrastructure. 🧩 The goal is to make sending money to a crypto application feel less like solving a puzzle where one wrong network selection can make the pieces—and occasionally the funds—disappear. 🫠
Hyperliquid plans to allow permissionless prediction market deployment under its HIP-4 upgrade, enabling developers to create markets linked to elections, economic events, sports or other measurable outcomes. 🔮 Developers will initially need to stake 500,000 HYPE tokens, worth about $30.4 million when the plan was announced, before they can launch their own markets. 💰
The feature will first appear on testnet and is expected to reach the mainnet in a future network upgrade, while the exact specifications may still change before release. 🧪 Validators will approve standardized outcome templates, and each deployer will initially be allowed to offer up to 100 possible outcomes across its markets. 📋 The required stake will remain locked for six months and may be partially or fully slashed if a developer creates poorly defined markets, settles them incorrectly or leaves them improperly unsettled for more than one week. ✂️
Hyperliquid is therefore making market creation permissionless in the technical sense, although the entrance fee is large enough to make most developers politely admire the feature from outside. 🚪
CoinShares has launched its first European UCITS exchange-traded fund, offering investors exposure to publicly listed Bitcoin mining companies through a regulated Irish-domiciled vehicle. ⛏️ The CoinShares Bitcoin Mining UCITS ETF began trading on Deutsche Börse Xetra under the ticker MINE and follows the rules-based CoinShares Bitcoin Mining Index administered by Solactive. 🇪🇺
The fund uses full physical replication, meaning it directly holds the shares included in its index rather than recreating their performance through derivatives. 📦 Companies are selected using factors such as mining efficiency, financial stability and environmental, social and governance considerations, with the portfolio rebalanced every quarter. ⚙️
The ETF has an annual total expense ratio of 0.65%, and its UCITS structure allows it to be marketed more easily across multiple European jurisdictions under a harmonized regulatory framework. 🧾 Investors should remember that the fund does not hold Bitcoin directly, so its results will depend not only on BTC prices but also on electricity costs, mining hardware, corporate debt and whether miners remembered to pay the power bill. 💡
The London Stock Exchange is planning to introduce a separate overnight trading venue during the first half of 2027, responding to growing demand for markets that remain accessible outside traditional working hours. 🌙 The new venue is expected to operate from 5:00 p.m. until 7:50 a.m. London time, while the main exchange will continue using its standard schedule of 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. 🕰️
Initially, overnight trading will focus on exchange-traded products connected to markets such as UK and US equities, rather than immediately opening every London-listed company for night-time speculation. 📈 The project is still planned rather than operational and will require testing, technical preparation and relevant regulatory approval before investors can begin placing midnight orders. 🧪
Traditional exchanges are extending their hours partly because crypto platforms, tokenized equity services and international retail brokers have trained users to expect financial markets that rarely close. 🌐 Longer hours may improve global access, but lower overnight liquidity could also create wider spreads and sharper price movements—because even markets behave differently when most professional traders are asleep. 😴
Tether Gold has been recognized as an Accepted Spot Commodity within Abu Dhabi Global Market, allowing properly authorized companies in the financial center to provide services involving the tokenized gold asset. 🏦 Each full XAUT token represents one troy fine ounce of physical gold held in a London Good Delivery bar, combining a traditional safe-haven asset with blockchain-based transfers. 🪙
The decision follows ADGM’s earlier recognition of Tether’s USDT as an Accepted Fiat-Referenced Token, expanding the range of Tether products that regulated firms may support in the jurisdiction. 📋 However, the designation is not a universal permission slip, because individual firms still need the relevant regulatory approvals before offering trading, custody or other XAUT-related services. 🚦
Interest in the token has grown significantly, with its total value increasing from about $826 million to roughly $2.86 billion over the previous year according to data cited by Cointelegraph. 📈 Gold may be one of humanity’s oldest investments, but in Abu Dhabi it has now received a blockchain upgrade and no longer needs to travel everywhere in a very heavy suitcase. 🧳
OKX Europe has introduced a feature that allows eligible users in the European Economic Area to deposit USDT and convert it into the MiCA-compliant USDC stablecoin. 🇪🇺 The conversion only works in one direction, meaning customers can move from USDT to USDC but cannot use the tool to convert their USDC back into USDT. ➡️ This does not restore normal USDT trading on the European platform, as deposited tokens are accepted only for conversion and cannot be held there as a regular investment. 🚫
The change reflects the EU’s MiCA rules, under which Tether has not received the authorization required to issue USDT as a compliant stablecoin in the region. 📜 Unlike some automatic migration processes, OKX says customers can choose when to make the conversion instead of racing toward a platform-imposed deadline. ⏳ In practice, OKX has created a regulatory emergency exit for USDT holders—although the door has a clear sign saying “USDC only.” 🚪
Tether has invested $20 million in Argentine neobank Ualá as part of the company’s $197 million equity funding round led by Allianz X. 💵 The wider round was originally announced in March 2026, but Ualá publicly confirmed the exact size of Tether’s participation on July 15. 📅 The investment supports Ualá’s continued development of its financial ecosystem and expansion across Latin America, where digital banking and stablecoin usage have both grown rapidly. 🌎
It also fits Tether’s recent regional strategy, which has included investments in Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin and Argentine crypto platform Belo. 🧩 The deal does not mean that Ualá is becoming a crypto-only bank or that USDT will immediately appear in every customer account, as the announcement focuses on an equity investment rather than a specific product launch. 🏦 Tether is therefore placing another chip on Latin American fintech, but this time the chip is sitting inside a very large neobank funding round. 🎰
Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has signed an executive order designed to coordinate the country’s previously fragmented approach to virtual asset regulation. 🇳🇬 The order creates a Virtual Asset Council chaired by the Central Bank of Nigeria, with the tax authority and Securities and Exchange Commission acting as vice-chairs. 🏛️
Rather than establishing one completely new super-regulator, the framework keeps the existing powers of each institution while requiring them to cooperate on policy, supervision and enforcement. 🤝 Nigeria also plans to introduce a regulatory sandbox, publish a dedicated tax policy for virtual assets and complete a broader white paper describing its long-term strategy. 🧪
The council has been instructed to prepare a harmonized implementation framework within 30 days, so the order comes with both a mission and a rather noticeable calendar reminder. ⏰ The government is essentially asking its regulators to stop playing separate crypto games and begin reading from the same rulebook, although the detailed tax and operating rules are still being prepared. 📘
The Bank of Korea may begin the second phase of Project Hangang as early as September, although the timing is currently based on media reports rather than a final official launch announcement. 🇰🇷 The project uses a wholesale central bank digital currency as a settlement asset for deposit tokens issued by participating commercial banks. 🏦 Participation is expected to expand from seven banks to nine, with Kyongnam Bank and iM Bank joining the existing group.
The new phase will test features including peer-to-peer transfers, biometric authentication, automated deposit-token functions and the distribution of government subsidies. 📲 During the first phase, approximately 81,000 participants completed 114,880 transactions between April and June 2025, providing a useful foundation for the more commercially focused experiments. 📊 South Korea is not replacing cash with a national digital wallet overnight, but it is giving tokenized bank deposits a larger classroom and considerably more complicated homework. 🎓
Japanese logistics company AZ-COM Maruwa Holdings plans to use the yen-denominated JPYC stablecoin to make payments to around 2,300 business partners and transportation contractors. 🚚 The planned system would cover payments to independent contractors and truck drivers, potentially allowing them to receive compensation more frequently than through traditional settlement schedules. 💴 According to the report, JPYC transfers would not carry ordinary bank transfer fees, which could reduce payment costs across a large and highly distributed logistics network. 🧾
AZ-COM Maruwa is also considering a business partnership with JPYC and an investment worth more than 1 billion yen, or approximately $6.2 million. 🤝
The rollout is still a plan rather than a fully operating payment system, but it could become Japan’s first large-scale corporate use of the stablecoin. 🚧 Truck drivers may therefore receive digital yen before self-driving trucks take all the headlines, although somebody will still need to explain wallets, networks and private keys at the next staff meeting. 🔑
Jack Dorsey and Block have launched Buzz, an early-stage workplace communication platform where employees and their AI agents can collaborate inside the same group conversations. 🤖 Buzz looks similar to Slack, but it also connects with GitHub-style project management and is designed to support different AI models instead of locking teams into one provider. 🧩
The platform is open source, decentralized and self-sovereign, allowing companies to run customized instances and build features that match their own workflows. 🔧 Its free desktop application is already available for macOS, Windows and Linux, while the source code has also been published on GitHub. 💻
However, Buzz openly describes itself as being in its early stages, so replacing a company’s entire Slack workspace immediately would be a fairly adventurous IT decision. 🚧 The idea is essentially to turn the office chatbot into a proper colleague—although nobody has confirmed whether AI agents will also attend meetings that could have been emails. 📧
Adobe is testing new AI features inside Project Indigo, its experimental iPhone camera app, including a tool that provides a professional-style critique of users’ photographs. 📸 The AI examines elements such as framing, lighting, colors and emotional impact, then suggests how the photographer could reshoot or edit the image. 🧐 Other experimental tools can remove selected background objects, create artificial depth of field, apply visual styles and perform edits described through written instructions. 🪄
Adobe is currently using Google’s Gemini-based Nano Banana model for these functions, although it may later switch to other technology, including its own Firefly models. 🔄 The features are available only to selected users through an AI playground and may never receive a full public release, making this a test rather than a finished addition to Adobe’s wider product range. 🧪 Project Indigo could become a useful photography teacher in your pocket, but users remain free to ignore its advice when it says the sunset would look better without Uncle Robert standing in front of it. 🌅
Coinbase’s head of platform, Rob Witoff, says between 95% and 100% of the exchange’s code is now written by or with the assistance of large language models. 💻 This represents a dramatic increase from the company’s February estimate of around 40%, while almost every Coinbase employee reportedly uses AI tools every day. 📈 The level of automation depends on the task: internal prototypes may be almost completely AI-generated, while sensitive cryptographic code continues to receive detailed human research and manual review. 🔐 Coinbase says smaller groups of two or three senior employees can now perform work that previously required teams of ten or more, with many engineers managing five to ten AI agents at once. 🤖
The shift follows the elimination of approximately 700 jobs in May, and Witoff acknowledged that junior development positions were among those affected, showing that the productivity story also has a difficult human side. 👥 AI may now type nearly every line, but Coinbase still believes experienced people are needed to choose what should be built—and, ideally, to stop a confident chatbot from redesigning the crypto vault before lunch. 🏦
Meta is piloting StoryKit, an iPhone application that generates personalized children’s stories complete with custom characters, settings, moral lessons, illustrations, narration and music. 📚 Parents can photograph a child, toy or other person, select a fictional world and choose values such as courage, kindness or empathy for the story to include. 🧸 Meta says the pilot is available only in selected countries, contains no social features and uses AI safety filters, while the actual account holder must be over 18. 🛡️
The App Store listing describes the application as free, with parental controls, no advertising or in-app purchases, and the ability to save stories privately or download them as PDF files. 📲 At the same time, the listing indicates that information such as photos, user content and identifiers may be collected and linked to the user’s identity, giving parents another reason to examine the privacy details carefully. 🔍 StoryKit may be useful after a very long day, although completely outsourcing imagination to Meta feels slightly like asking the family printer to write the next great fairy tale. 🧚
Google Vids now allows eligible users to create a personal AI avatar using a selfie and a short voice recording, then make the avatar deliver any written script. 🎭 The platform is also adding Gemini Omni, which can generate videos from written prompts and reference images or edit existing clips by changing backgrounds, improving lighting and adding effects. 🎬 Users can request changes step by step instead of generating the entire video again, making the editing process closer to a conversation than a traditional timeline full of tiny buttons. 💬
Google is positioning Vids for business tasks such as company announcements, personalized messages and training materials, while moving into territory already occupied by specialist AI-video companies. 🏢 Personal avatars are currently limited to adults in selected regions and are available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers and Google Workspace business customers. 🔒 Every generated clip receives an invisible SynthID watermark, so your digital double can present the Monday update while the original version remains professionally hidden behind a coffee mug. ☕
Roblox Lets Players Build Games by Simply Describing Them
Roblox has introduced Build, a mobile creation tool that can turn a simple written idea into the first playable version of a game without requiring programming experience. 🎮 Its combination of proprietary and open-source AI models can generate gameplay mechanics, environments, characters, sounds and visual styles directly inside the Roblox application. 🧱 The feature is scheduled to enter public alpha testing in New Zealand on July 28 for age-verified users aged nine and above, while publishing globally will be available to verified creators aged at least 16. 🇳🇿
A basic version will be free, with additional paid options intended for more advanced creators and power users. 💳 Roblox says AI-created games will pass its normal safety checks and compete through the same retention-based recommendation system, meaning poorly received creations should not automatically flood the homepage. 🛡️ Build makes game development much easier to begin, but typing “create the greatest game ever made” will probably still require slightly more detailed instructions. 🕹️
Live-shopping platform Whatnot has acquired Shaped, a machine-learning company specializing in real-time search, ranking and personalized recommendation systems. 🛍️ The technology is designed to help buyers find relevant livestreams and products while auctions, available inventory and customer interest change from one second to the next. ⚡
Whatnot says it has already reduced recommendation delays from approximately one day to only a few minutes, and Shaped’s systems should bring those suggestions even closer to real time. ⏱️ The platform processes more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of user interactions every week, giving the combined recommendation system a rather enormous amount of shopping behavior to study. 📊
Shaped’s founder and nearly a dozen engineers and researchers will join Whatnot, with the team helping create a new Applied AI Research group. 🧠 The acquisition should make product discovery faster, although it may also help the app identify the exact moment when a viewer is emotionally vulnerable enough to bid on a third collectible frog. 🐸
Alphabet is reportedly developing a new server processor, internally called Frozen v2, that would be optimized specifically for running Google’s Gemini models more efficiently. 🧊 According to a report based on anonymous sources, the chip could arrive in 2028 and generate between six and ten times more AI tokens per unit of electricity than Google’s current processors. Google has not directly confirmed the chip, its performance figures or the launch schedule, saying only that its teams continuously experiment with new hardware and software designs. 🧪
The project would fit a wider industry trend in which major AI companies are designing their own processors to lower operating costs, improve performance and reduce dependence on Nvidia. 🖥️
Greater efficiency is becoming increasingly important because AI systems require huge amounts of computing capacity and electricity, while investors are becoming less enthusiastic about infrastructure bills that resemble the budget of a small country. 💸 Frozen v2 therefore sounds promising, but for now it remains more of a reported chip project than a product that anyone can actually place inside a data center. 🚧
Databricks has signed a term sheet for a new strategic funding round led by Coatue that values the data and artificial intelligence company at $188 billion. 💰 The company has not officially disclosed the size of the round, although separate reports suggest it may raise approximately $3 billion, and the transaction is expected to close later in the summer. 📅 Databricks plans to invest the capital in AI products including Unity AI Gateway, the Genie business-data assistant and Lakebase, a database designed for AI agents. 🤖
The company also expects the money to support further research and possible acquisitions as it expands from its original big-data business into a broader enterprise AI platform. 🔬 Its valuation has risen from $62 billion in December 2024 to $100 billion in September 2025, $134 billion in February 2026 and now $188 billion, giving Databricks one of technology’s most energetic fundraising calendars. 📈 The round is not completed yet, but Databricks has already announced the valuation—apparently because waiting for the money to arrive is less exciting than immediately adding another very large number to the company presentation. 🧮
That wraps up another busy week in crypto, where regulation, tokenization and institutional adoption once again dominated the conversation. 🌍 The biggest takeaway is not one spectacular token launch, but the growing number of practical connections between digital assets and everyday financial services—from lending and brokerage to payments, commodities and capital markets. Stablecoins are entering new regions, traditional institutions are expanding their crypto exposure, and blockchain infrastructure is becoming more specialized and more regulated. ⚙️
Not every announcement is a finished product, however, so it remains important to distinguish between live services, regulatory approvals, pilot programs and ambitious plans with very attractive presentation slides. 📊 Until next week, keep an eye on the details—and remember that “permissionless” sometimes still comes with a $30 million entry fee.
