The post XRPL Considers Native Lending: How XLS-66 Would Work appeared first on Coindoo.

Key Takeaways

The proposed system starts with a vault and a broker

XLS-66 relies on XLS-65 Single Asset Vaults. A vault aggregates one asset from depositors and issues shares that represent each depositor’s interest in the pool. The asset can be XRP, an issuer-backed IOU or a Multi-Purpose Token.

A loan broker connects the vault to the lending protocol. The broker sets up the pool, originates loans and manages the arrangement throughout its life. The broker also sets key economic terms, including management fees and the amount of first-loss capital, if any, posted against the pool.

Vault shares show ownership, not guaranteed liquidity

Depositors would receive vault shares when they place assets into a pool. Those shares represent a proportional claim on the vault, yet their practical value depends on the pool’s available assets and withdrawal policy.

Once capital has been lent out, a depositor may not have immediate access to the same amount of liquid assets. A future vault’s documentation should therefore state how withdrawals work while loans remain open, whether requests can queue and whether the vault places limits on lending relative to available liquidity.

Access can be open or restricted

XLS-65 permits public vaults and private vaults. Public pools could accept a wide group of depositors. Private pools can use on-ledger credentials to limit access to approved participants.

That gives XRPL room for institutional credit pools alongside open-access products. It also means that “native lending” will not describe one uniform experience. Each pool can differ in who may deposit, who may borrow and what information participants receive.

How a loan would be recorded and serviced

Under XLS-66, the loan broker and borrower create a loan with a stated principal, interest rate, payment interval, maturity and grace period. The loan object then tracks the principal and interest that remain outstanding.

The protocol includes payment handling, late-interest rules and fees for services such as loan origination or early repayment. If a borrower misses payments beyond the agreed grace period, the broker can mark the loan as impaired or defaulted under the proposal’s rules.

Putting those details on the ledger could make it easier for lenders, borrowers and custodians to work from the same record. Evernorth CBO Sagar Shah has argued that shared loan data can reduce reconciliation disputes among those parties in a company communication filed with the SEC.

A default status, however, is an accounting event. It does not itself recover the unpaid amount. The legal agreement behind the loan and the broker’s recovery process remain central to the outcome for depositors.

Credit decisions remain outside XRPL

XLS-66 is designed for uncollateralized loans at the protocol level. Its authors intentionally omitted automated on-chain collateral management and forced liquidations, opting for off-chain underwriting instead.

In practice, a broker would need to determine whether a borrower can repay. That assessment may involve financial statements, trading history, legal agreements, guarantees or collateral held outside XRPL. The proposal does not prescribe one underwriting method or establish a universal borrower standard.

That design may suit market makers and institutions that already use established credit processes. It also puts more weight on broker transparency. Depositors need enough information to judge the broker’s lending discipline before they decide whether the offered return compensates for the risk.

First-loss capital can soften a default

The proposal allows a broker to deposit first-loss capital. In a default, a portion of that capital can be liquidated and returned to the vault, reducing the loss passed on to depositors.

The buffer may be modest or substantial depending on the pool. Its value cannot be judged from a token amount alone. A reserve of 1 million XRP has a very different meaning against 5 million XRP in loans than it does against 100 million XRP.

Future pool disclosures should show the minimum cover required, the share of that cover available for liquidation and the broker’s ability to withdraw excess capital. Those figures reveal how much protection depositors actually have when a borrower fails.

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The terms that should be visible before capital enters a pool

A credible XRPL lending pool would need more than a published annual yield. Its documentation should answer the following:

• Broker identity and jurisdiction: Who runs the pool, under which legal entity and under which governing law?
• Borrower eligibility: Which firms or accounts can receive loans, and can affiliates borrow from the pool?
• Concentration limits: What portion of the vault may be lent to one borrower or group of connected borrowers?
• Loss cover: How much first-loss capital is posted as a percentage of outstanding debt?
• Withdrawal terms: When can depositors redeem vault shares, and what happens when a large part of the pool is outstanding in loans?
• Default and recovery process: Who takes action after default, and what claims does the pool hold against the borrower?

These are ordinary lending questions, yet they become more important when an on-chain vault gives participants a simple route into a credit market. Settlement transparency does not replace credit analysis.

Approval would open the door to testing

XLS-66 remains a draft and requires XLS-65 and XLS-64. A successful governance and activation process would make the lending primitives available on XRPL. It would not create borrowers, liquidity or a proven broker network on its own.

The first useful signs of adoption would be concrete: named brokers, published pool terms, disclosed coverage ratios and an on-ledger repayment history that can be examined over time. Those details would show whether the proposed framework is serving a real credit market or only adding another unused ledger feature.

Why Evernorth appears in the discussion

The Block reported that Evernorth is exploring DeFi opportunities around XRP. Evernorth does not control XLS-66 and no primary material reviewed identifies an Evernorth-run lending pool. Its relevance is narrower: its stated treasury strategy includes lending, liquidity provision and DeFi yield, making it one potential institutional user if XRPL lending becomes available.

XRPL’s lending proposal will be judged by the pools built under it: their borrowers, their liquidity terms and the protection available when credit conditions deteriorate.

Source review: Technical claims and proposal status are based on the official XLS-66 Lending Protocol and XLS-65 Single Asset Vault specifications. Evernorth’s current relevance is referenced from The Block’s August 20 report, its official launch release and an SEC-filed company communication.

The post XRPL Considers Native Lending: How XLS-66 Would Work appeared first on Coindoo.

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Source: https://coindoo.com/xrpl-considers-native-lending/

The post MANTRA Halts Chain After Upstream Dependency Exploit appeared first on Coindoo.

The project’s official status page confirmed that validators and infrastructure were taken offline as an emergency precaution. Migrate bridge operations and MANTRA-managed IBC relays are frozen, while centralized exchange partners have locked down deposits and withdrawals for the native token.

The sudden shutdown triggered immediate market panic, sending the token down roughly 10% for the past 24H on high volume to a record low near $0.0041 before a slight recovery. With foundational questions swirling around the scope of the breach, the incident places heavy pressure on the network’s leadership.

What the network freeze means for users

A hard chain halt locks the ecosystem in place. Asset transfers cannot settle, cross-chain bridge routes are severed, and exchange gateways remain dark until validators safely bring the network back online.

While the lockdown is designed to contain further damage and prevent unauthorized asset movement, it leaves token holders in a holding pattern. The team has issued strict warnings for users to ignore unverified recovery links or support offers circulating on social channels. For now, the safest stance is absolute inaction: keep assets parked, ignore unsolicited DMs, and wait for verified updates from exchanges or the core team.

An upstream vulnerability, not core code

According to MANTRA’s disclosures, the attacker exploited a weakness residing in an “upstream dependency”, external software utilized by the chain rather than a flaw in MANTRA’s native architecture.

That distinction offers little immediate comfort. Modern blockchains inherit risk from every underlying library, tool, and infrastructure package they integrate. The ultimate test isn’t just patching the dependency, but coordinating a decentralized validator set to verify and deploy the fix without triggering secondary failures during the restart. MANTRA developers are actively drafting a patched release, though no hard timeline for mainnet resumption has been locked in.

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Stakes are higher for a tokenized RWA platform

Because MANTRA markets itself as a compliance-focused Layer 1 built explicitly for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, operational reliability is everything.

Institutional participants, asset issuers, and corporate partners require absolute certainty around settlement finality, data availability, and transparent crisis communication. While a swift chain halt is standard emergency protocol, long-term confidence will hinge on the aftermath: a transparent post-mortem, verifiable security audits, and a full accounting of any financial losses.

The timing is particularly sensitive. The network disruption follows the painful legacy OM token collapse in 2025, and arrives right as strategic backer Inveniam Capital Partners prepares to close its acquisition of the platform in the third quarter. While entirely separate events, the convergence makes flawless transparency non-negotiable for MANTRA’s market standing.

Unanswered questions hanging over the network

While containment has stopped the bleeding, critical details remain missing:

Until management publishes concrete answers, the network remains in a state of managed containment. The emergency shutdown successfully barred the door against further exploitation, but the true cost of the attack won’t be known until the ledger starts turning again.

This article is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice.

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The post Kraken Brings US Stocks to Europe, Blurring the Line With Tokens appeared first on Coindoo.

That choice is more consequential than the catalogue size suggests. A customer can buy an ordinary US share or a token built to track the same company’s price. The two may move in broadly the same direction, but they do not give the buyer the same legal position.

One account now offers two routes to US stocks

According to Kraken’s announcement, eligible EEA customers can access stocks listed on the NYSE, Nasdaq, AMEX and other US venues through its mobile apps and Kraken Pro.

The conventional-equity service is provided by Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, which is listed in the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission register as an authorised investment firm under licence number 342/17.

For Kraken users, the practical benefit is simple: they no longer need to move money from an exchange to a separate broker simply to buy a US stock. A single account can now hold Bitcoin, a traditional equity position and a tokenized version of that same equity.

But the last two should not be treated as interchangeable. The listed share is part of the company’s equity structure, held through Kraken’s brokerage arrangement. The tokenized version is a separate instrument issued by another company and designed to follow the underlying share’s value.

The price may track the same company, but ownership does not

A buyer looking for exposure to Apple, for example, can choose a regular Apple share or AAPLx, a tokenized instrument linked to Apple’s market performance. Both may respond to the same earnings report or movement in US markets. Only the conventional share carries the rights associated with a shareholder position.

xStocks are issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, a private company registered in Jersey. Kraken makes them available through Payward Digital Solutions Ltd., a digital-asset business licensed in Bermuda. Each token is described as being backed 1:1 by the corresponding stock or ETF.

The collateral is intended to support the token’s value. It does not mean that the token holder owns the shares held in the backing arrangement.

Kraken’s official xStocks disclosure makes that distinction clear. Token holders do not own the underlying shares, cannot vote, have no claim to the company’s residual assets in a liquidation, and are not entitled to receive information directly from the company whose stock they follow.

Dividends are a useful example. A conventional shareholder may receive a cash distribution when a company pays one. Kraken says xStock holders instead receive the relevant net distribution through additional units of the same token. The result may suit someone who would have reinvested dividends anyway, but the mechanism and legal entitlement are different.

The token format has uses that a brokerage share does not

The appeal of xStocks is not just that they can follow the price of a familiar company. They can also be withdrawn to compatible self-custody wallets and transferred through supported blockchain networks—something a normal brokerage position is not built to do.

Kraken says xStocks can trade 24 hours a day on weekdays, including after US exchanges close. For traders who want to move assets or react to news outside Wall Street hours, that flexibility may be valuable.

The platform is also pushing selected xStocks further into its crypto ecosystem. Kraken has allowed certain tokens to be used as collateral for leveraged crypto positions. This means a eligible customer can retain stock-price exposure while using the token to support another trade.

That feature changes the product’s purpose. A conventional share is generally held as an investment. A tokenized stock can also become part of a broader trading strategy involving wallets, onchain transfers and leverage.

It can also expose the holder to risks that do not arise from the company’s stock price alone. If an xStock is used as collateral, a sharp move in a separate leveraged position can lead to liquidation. The user may lose the token even if the underlying company itself has performed well.

More flexibility means more points of failure

Holding a standard share through a broker already involves intermediaries. The tokenized version adds more: Backed as issuer, the institutions holding the collateral, Kraken’s platform, the blockchain network and the market liquidity for that particular token.

Kraken warns that problems involving a depositary institution could delay or prevent access to the securities behind xStocks. Platform outages, technical failures, low liquidity or regulatory restrictions could also make tokens harder to sell or transfer when a holder wants to exit.

This does not mean the token model is inherently unsuitable. It means that 1:1 backing should not be confused with the absence of risk. The token can track the price of a stock while still relying on a much broader chain of companies and infrastructure.

EEA users also do not access xStocks in exactly the same way as conventional shares. Kraken requires an appropriateness assessment before they can use the product. Its support materials say approved users can buy, sell and convert xStocks, but standard order-book and API trading are not available to EEA customers.

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Commission-free trading still carries costs

Kraken promotes the new conventional-equity service as commission-free, but that does not mean every transaction is free. Regulatory, clearing, foreign-exchange and spread costs can still affect what a customer pays or receives.

xStocks have a separate cost structure. Kraken says the purchase price includes a 1% spread, while Instant Buy fees can apply depending on the payment method or asset used. Sending tokens to a wallet creates blockchain transaction costs, and direct redemption through Backed may involve an additional charge.

Weekday 24-hour trading needs the same caution. A token may remain available while US markets are closed, but available liquidity can be thinner. In those periods, its execution price can move further away from the last quoted price of the underlying share.

Tax treatment may differ too. Since a conventional equity position and a tokenized instrument have different structures, investors should not assume they will receive identical treatment under the rules of every EEA country.

Kraken is offering a choice, not a replacement

Kraken’s 7,000-stock launch is part of a larger shift. The company wants to become a place where customers can keep more of their investing and trading activity: crypto, traditional securities, tokenized assets and collateral-backed positions.

That gives European users a useful choice, but it should be a deliberate one. Investors who want conventional shareholder rights and established securities-market infrastructure have a reason to choose the listed share. Those who value wallet portability, extended access and crypto-market utility may prefer the tokenized route, while accepting its additional risks.

Putting both products on the same screen makes them easier to compare. It does not make them the same investment.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice.

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Source: https://coindoo.com/kraken-adds-us-stocks-blurring-line-tokens/

The post China Takes the Digital Yuan Deeper Into Regional Banking appeared first on Coindoo.

Key Takeaways

Eight banks have joined the e-CNY network

The People’s Bank of China has approved Ping An Bank, Hengfeng Bank, China Bohai Bank, Bank of Shanghai, Bank of Hangzhou, Huishang Bank, Bank of Changsha and Guangxi Beibu Gulf Bank as digital-yuan operating institutions.

Under the official announcement, the banks will be linked to the central bank’s e-CNY system and will begin providing services after completing their business and technical preparations.

That means the decision is an expansion of the network, not proof that every customer of these banks can already use the digital yuan. Each lender still has to turn its approval into a working service: integrate the system, decide which products to offer, and build acceptance among customers and merchants.

The list includes three national joint-stock commercial banks, Ping An, Hengfeng and China Bohai, and five city commercial banks. Bank of Shanghai and Bank of Hangzhou serve two of China’s most important commercial centres, while Huishang Bank, Bank of Changsha and Guangxi Beibu Gulf Bank add reach in Anhui, Hunan and Guangxi.

China has gone from 10 operators to 30 this year

The PBOC started 2026 with 10 authorised operators. In April, it added 12 banks, taking the total to 22. The latest approvals bring the network to 30.

That earlier expansion already marked a break from the original model, which had long depended on a relatively small group of major banks. Previously, we reported that when the 12-bank batch was announced, it brought lenders such as China CITIC Bank, China Everbright Bank, China Minsheng Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and Bank of Ningbo into the system.

The latest round goes further into regional banking. That is significant because banks do not distribute payment tools in the abstract. They distribute them through existing relationships with households, merchants, payroll clients, exporters and smaller companies.

A digital yuan wallet offered by a large state-owned bank can reach millions of customers. A regional lender can add something different: closer ties to the businesses and local payment networks that already operate through that bank.

Why the regional-bank angle matters

The new approvals are not a guarantee of rapid adoption. China has spent years testing the e-CNY across retail payments, public services, travel and other daily uses, yet adding banks alone does not make people choose it over existing payment options.

It does, however, reduce a practical limitation. A company that already uses a regional bank for working capital, supplier payments or payroll is more likely to encounter the e-CNY if that same bank can offer it directly. The same applies to merchants whose everyday banking relationships sit outside the country’s largest lenders.

Dong Ximiao, chief researcher at Merchants Union Consumer Finance Company Limited, told Xinhua that the newly approved banks could help fill gaps in regional small-business and cross-border-trade services. That should be read as a view on their potential role, not as a confirmed product roadmap.

The PBOC has not announced new trade corridors, payment products or lending services tied to this eight-bank group. What it has done is give the e-CNY access to more institutions that already sit close to regional commerce.

China is also upgrading the data rails behind small-business credit

The payment expansion fits into a wider push to digitise financial infrastructure, but it should not be overstated as one unified system.

China has separately moved to improve how banks assess smaller companies. In April, tax and banking regulators directed regional authorities and financial institutions to use blockchain and privacy-computing tools in the sharing of business-credit information. The policy is focused on verified data, electronic invoices and credit decisions, not on using the e-CNY as an automatic lending or payment mechanism.

As we explained in оур report on the small-business credit framework, the aim is to help lenders assess firms without forcing them to hand over every underlying financial record.

There is no public evidence that the eight newly approved e-CNY banks will connect their digital-yuan services directly to that framework. Saying otherwise would go beyond the available information.

But the two policies point in the same broad direction. China is expanding a central-bank digital-payment network while also improving the data systems banks use to serve businesses. One concerns how money moves; the other concerns how lenders verify the firms moving it.

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Thirty domestic operators are not 30 cross-border routes

The domestic operator expansion should also be kept separate from China’s international e-CNY plans.

In June, the e-CNY International Operation Center signed direct-participant agreements with 26 financial institutions for the Cross-border e-CNY Transfer Services platform, known as CBETS. The system is designed to support round-the-clock payment links with foreign central banks and overseas financial institutions. Reuters reported that the platform is intended to support lower-cost cross-border payments and wider international use of the yuan.

The two networks can overlap over time, but they are not the same thing. Approval to operate the e-CNY inside China does not automatically place a bank on CBETS or give it access to every international settlement route.

That distinction matters for the latest announcement. The immediate development is domestic: more banks can prepare to distribute and support the digital yuan inside China. Any future cross-border role would need to be announced separately.

The important measure is now usage, not approvals

The PBOC has tripled the number of authorised e-CNY operators since the start of the year. That gives the digital yuan a much wider banking base, particularly outside the country’s biggest national lenders.

The next test is whether those banks turn approval into services that customers actually use. The most useful updates will be launch dates, merchant partnerships, business-payment products and evidence that the e-CNY is gaining a regular place in local commercial activity.

For crypto markets, this is not a step toward public-crypto adoption. It is China building a bank-distributed, centrally issued digital-money system on its own terms. The significance lies in the infrastructure: the e-CNY is gaining more channels into the economy, one regional lender at a time.

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Source: https://coindoo.com/china-digital-yuan-deeper-into-regional-banking/

The post Bitwise Wants to Tokenize Its Solana ETF – Here’s How It Works appeared first on Coindoo.

Key Takeaways

The company is working with Superstate to let eligible investors hold shares of the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) through blockchain-based records. Those shares would carry the same rights as conventional BSOL shares, while the fund would continue holding and staking SOL exactly as it does today.

The main constraint is already clear: tokenized BSOL shares would not initially be freely transferable outside Superstate’s recordkeeping system. Investors would not be getting a BSOL token they could immediately send anywhere, trade permissionlessly or deposit across DeFi.

Bitwise is starting with the ownership record rather than trying to rebuild the ETF’s trading market around a blockchain.

How Tokenized BSOL Would Actually Work

Traditional ETF ownership is recorded through the securities infrastructure connecting brokers, custodians, transfer agents and clearing systems. Superstate would add a blockchain-based route to that process.

As an SEC-registered transfer agent, Superstate can maintain the official shareholder register while linking an eligible investor’s position to a supported blockchain address through its FundOS infrastructure. The blockchain entry would represent ownership of an actual BSOL share rather than a separate token designed merely to track the ETF’s price.

Investors choosing this route would still own the same regulated security as investors holding BSOL through conventional book-entry records. The economic exposure, shareholder rights and assets inside the fund would remain unchanged.

That separates Bitwise’s proposal from synthetic tokenized securities built as separate instruments around an underlying stock or fund.

The Immediate Benefit Is Fairly Limited

For an investor already comfortable buying BSOL through a brokerage, blockchain registration alone does not improve the investment. It does not increase staking returns, change Solana exposure or make the ETF cheaper to own.

The appeal is stronger for institutions or investors that want a regulated fund wrapper but also use blockchain-based custody and settlement infrastructure.

An institution may be unable or unwilling to hold SOL directly because of custody, accounting or compliance requirements. Holding an ETF solves that problem. Recording the share onchain could eventually make the same regulated position easier to use alongside stablecoins, digital collateral systems or other compliant blockchain services.

Those additional uses are not part of the current BSOL proposal. Bitwise is first establishing a regulated way for the share itself to exist onchain.

Why the Shares Cannot Simply Move Anywhere

BSOL remains a security regardless of where its ownership record sits.

Superstate must still maintain an accurate shareholder register, verify eligible holders and enforce the restrictions attached to the security. Opening the token immediately to unrestricted wallet transfers would make those obligations much harder to control.

Bitwise is therefore taking a narrower route than the broader tokenized-securities models currently being debated in Washington. The SEC has separately been examining how tokenized U.S. securities might trade through crypto-native platforms, where questions around exchanges, secondary-market liquidity and execution rules become central.

BSOL does not go that far. Bitwise is keeping trading inside the existing ETF framework and experimenting only with how shareholder ownership can be recorded. That avoids many of the market-structure questions attached to launching a separate onchain venue for the fund.

Running Two Ownership Systems Also Adds Work

Tokenization is often presented as a way to simplify financial infrastructure, but supporting conventional and blockchain-based ownership at the same time can initially add another operational layer.

The same ETF needs one accurate shareholder record across brokerage accounts and approved blockchain addresses. Bitwise and Superstate also need procedures for wallet verification, supported networks, transfers between the two systems and recovery when an investor loses access to a wallet.

Superstate’s transfer-agent infrastructure is designed to keep those records synchronized, but blockchain does not remove the administrative work behind a regulated fund.

Any later expansion into wider onchain trading or third-party financial applications would introduce additional securities-law and market-structure requirements beyond the controlled model Bitwise is exploring now.

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Why BSOL Makes Sense as the First Test

A Solana staking ETF gives Bitwise a relatively natural audience for the experiment.

BSOL already serves investors who want exposure to a blockchain-native asset without directly holding SOL. Some of them are likely choosing the ETF precisely because they need regulated custody, conventional accounting or an investment vehicle that fits existing institutional rules.

Blockchain-based registration could appeal to the subset that wants those protections without keeping every part of the position inside traditional financial infrastructure.

Starting with BSOL also gives Bitwise a useful demand test before extending the model to funds whose investors may have much less interest in wallets or onchain settlement.

Tokenized Funds Still Need More Than Growth Statistics

The wider market is expanding quickly. Tokenized ETFs had reached roughly $442 million across 651 products by May, after growing sharply from a small base.

For Bitwise, the relevant question is less about the industry’s percentage growth and more about whether investors actually prefer the blockchain form when an identical conventional share remains available.

That preference will be measurable once the product exists. Uptake would show that some investors value onchain registration even before broader functionality arrives. Weak demand would suggest that recordkeeping alone is not enough to pull ETF ownership away from brokerage infrastructure.

Bitwise has not announced a launch date, and other ETFs may follow depending on how the BSOL project develops.

The useful milestone will not be the first tokenized share appearing on a blockchain. It will be whether investors choose to hold BSOL that way, and whether Bitwise eventually gives that form of ownership capabilities that justify leaving the traditional recordkeeping system in the first place.

The post Bitwise Wants to Tokenize Its Solana ETF – Here’s How It Works appeared first on Coindoo.

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Source: https://coindoo.com/bitwise-wants-to-tokenize-its-solana-etf-heres-how-it-works/

The post Israel’s Largest Bank Plans Bitcoin Trading Inside Its Banking App appeared first on Coindoo.

Galaxy confirmed the partnership on August 14 and will supply both the trading and custody infrastructure.

Galaxy Will Power Trading and Custody

According to Galaxy’s announcement, customers will access the service through a dedicated section of Leumi Trade.

GalaxyOne Institutional, its platform for banks and asset managers, will handle trading. Galaxy Custody Infrastructure, formerly GK8, will provide the technology used to safeguard customer assets.

The service will be custodial. Customers would trade and hold crypto through the bank rather than manage private keys or a separate wallet.

Leumi has not provided further detail on whether access will differ between its main banking customers and PEPPER users.

Crypto Ownership Is Already Widespread in Israel

Leumi is entering a market where digital assets already have a sizeable user base.

A January 2026 survey by Geocartography found that 21% of Israeli adults hold cryptocurrency, according to TheMarker.

Many of those users already rely on exchanges and other crypto platforms. Leumi’s planned service would give them the option to trade through their bank instead, while keeping custody within an institutional platform.

It could also remove the need to transfer funds between a bank account and an external exchange for customers who prefer to keep both traditional investments and crypto under one provider.

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Leumi Tried a Similar Launch in 2022

The bank has been pursuing a regulated crypto service for several years.

In March 2022, PEPPER announced an agreement with Paxos to offer Bitcoin and Ether trading through Pepper Invest. Customers were supposed to be able to buy, hold and sell the assets without maintaining their own wallet.

That product was also subject to regulatory approval and did not reach the market as announced.

The latest plan replaces Paxos with Galaxy, adds Solana and moves the offering into Leumi Trade. If it receives approval and launches, Leumi says it would become the first Israeli bank to offer direct digital-asset trading through its banking infrastructure.

Approval Will Decide Whether It Launches

The Bank of Israel remains the final hurdle.

Until approval is granted, Leumi’s proposed launch date remains provisional. A successful rollout would revive an effort the bank first made public through PEPPER in 2022, this time with Galaxy providing the infrastructure behind it.

The post Israel’s Largest Bank Plans Bitcoin Trading Inside Its Banking App appeared first on Coindoo.

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Source: https://coindoo.com/israels-largest-bank-plans-bitcoin-trading-inside-its-banking-app/

The post Ethereum’s Roadmap Is Becoming a Different Kind of Plan appeared first on Coindoo.

Key Takeaways

Vitalik Buterin compared his 2023 roadmap with the current Ethereum Strawmap, highlighting projects that moved up or down in priority, ideas that were replaced, and entire research areas that barely existed when the earlier plan was drawn.

The deeper shift is architectural. Quantum resistance, privacy and formal verification increasingly influence how Ethereum wants to scale, while parts of the protocol once treated as relatively fixed, including the role of the EVM itself, have entered the design discussion.
The current Ethereum Strawmap reorganizes development across the consensus, data and execution layers, with stronger emphasis on cryptography, privacy, scalability and protocol simplification.

Quantum Safety Is Becoming a Design Constraint

Quantum resistance has been discussed around Ethereum for years. Its position in the roadmap is what has changed.

Buterin says quantum safety has moved higher in priority. That creates a practical problem alongside the security one: post-quantum signatures can be considerably heavier than the cryptography Ethereum relies on today.

The network therefore cannot treat quantum resistance as a simple signature swap years from now. Any replacement also has to work within Ethereum’s scaling ambitions.

EIP-8288 shows how those two problems are beginning to overlap. The proposal introduces a framework in which expensive cryptographic dependencies, including post-quantum signatures, could be aggregated through recursive STARK proofs instead of forcing every transaction to absorb their full verification cost independently.

This matters long before quantum computers become capable of attacking Ethereum.

Changing fundamental cryptography after such a threat appears would require coordinating wallets, accounts, validators and protocol infrastructure under pressure. Designing around that constraint earlier gives researchers room to tackle the performance cost at the same time.

Ethereum’s future-proofing work already identifies several cryptographic components that will eventually require quantum-resistant alternatives.

Scaling Everything Equally Is Losing Its Appeal

Another change in Buterin’s update may have broader consequences for everyday Ethereum activity.

New state types and zkzk frames share an increasingly important idea: Ethereum does not necessarily need to maximize the scalability of every possible computation in exactly the same way.

Some workloads dominate real usage. Token transfers and swaps already generate enormous demand, while privacy applications could become another heavy category later.

If those activities can operate under more restrictive rules, Ethereum can potentially build specialized mechanisms that handle them much more efficiently without forcing every application into the same optimization strategy.

Buterin’s description of new state types makes this shift especially clear. He presents them as more than a replacement for the older state-expiry approach, describing a different way of thinking about scaling itself.

Specialized paths can produce much larger performance gains for common activities. They can also leave client teams maintaining more distinct mechanisms if too many special cases accumulate.

Ethereum’s push toward a “Lean” protocol therefore has to coexist with this specialization. As workloads receive more tailored treatment, pressure also grows to simplify the general-purpose machinery beneath them.

The EVM Is No Longer an Untouchable Assumption

That pressure is reaching Ethereum’s execution architecture as well.

Ethereum is not planning to remove the EVM. But its permanent role at the deepest level of the protocol is no longer being treated as inevitable.

Post-quantum zkzk frames could require Ethereum to expose an instruction set outside the EVM. Buterin names leanISA and RISC-V among the leading candidates because they are simpler and more modern architectures.

Once such an instruction set exists inside Ethereum, restricting it to one narrow protocol function becomes harder to justify.

Developers could eventually gain more direct access to it. Further out, Buterin raises the possibility that the EVM could operate as an intermediate representation above a simpler underlying instruction set rather than remain deeply enshrined in the base protocol.

Applications could theoretically retain the environment and tooling they depend on while the machinery underneath becomes simpler.

This remains highly speculative. Buterin explicitly says the deeper exploration is too early even for the current Strawmap.

For a network whose enormous application ecosystem was built around the EVM, opening its deepest protocol role to redesign shows how far the current simplification effort may eventually reach.

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Rollup Technology Is Moving Back Into the Base Layer

The roadmap also shows how quickly zero-knowledge technology has matured.

Native rollups did not appear in the 2023 diagram because, according to Buterin, SNARK technology was not mature enough at the time to make them realistic. The newer roadmap places proof systems much deeper into Ethereum’s architecture.

Ethereum’s scaling strategy still relies heavily on Layer 2 rollups. Some of the cryptographic machinery developed around that ecosystem, however, is now becoming useful to Ethereum itself.

Recursive proofs can compress expensive computation, support privacy and help accommodate cryptographic systems that would otherwise place much heavier demands on the protocol.

For years, much of Ethereum’s scaling innovation moved outward from the base layer into rollups. Research developed there is now beginning to feed capabilities back into the protocol.

Native rollups are one example. Reusable proof aggregation across different Ethereum layers could become another.

The boundary between “L1 technology” and “rollup technology” is becoming less clear.

Why AI Matters to a Leaner Ethereum

Moving more proof machinery into the protocol raises another problem: reusable cryptographic components concentrate risk as well as efficiency.

A primitive shared across the execution, consensus and data layers reduces duplication, but a flaw in that component could affect several parts of Ethereum at once. Testing alone becomes a weaker safety argument as those dependencies deepen.

Buterin points to AI-assisted formal verification as part of the answer.

Formal verification uses mathematical methods to demonstrate that software behaves according to its specification. AI does not replace those proofs; its potential value is helping researchers and engineers produce, inspect and maintain them at a scale that would previously have been impractical.

This gives “Lean Ethereum” a more concrete meaning.

The objective is not to make every cryptographic mechanism easy for a human to understand at a glance. It is to keep the core specification sufficiently constrained and explicit that critical components can be formally verified rather than relying mainly on conventional testing.

More reuse can then reduce protocol duplication without requiring developers to simply trust increasingly complicated shared machinery.

AI’s role in Ethereum may therefore be far less visible than running agents or executing transactions. It could instead help make sophisticated infrastructure safe enough to become part of the protocol itself.

Some of Ethereum’s Old Design Choices Are Back on the Table

Comparing the two diagrams exposes something individual upgrade announcements often hide: Ethereum is becoming comfortable abandoning ideas after years of research.

VDFs have fallen in priority. Verkle-based plans have evolved into different constructions. State expiry is giving way to new state types. Native rollups, stronger privacy mechanisms, post-quantum scaling and blob and gas futures occupy space that barely existed in the 2023 plan.

Ethereum has made large turns before. Its original shard-chain strategy changed dramatically as rollups became a better scaling path, something the project’s own roadmap documentation uses to illustrate how development priorities evolve.

The same willingness to revisit settled-looking assumptions is showing up outside the roadmap’s scaling and cryptography work. Draft EIP-8363 would burn a growing share of validator rewards as staking participation rises, challenging the economic incentives that currently support ever-higher levels of staking.

The staking proposal and the architectural roadmap address different problems, but they point in the same direction: existing protocol behavior is being treated as adjustable when researchers believe it conflicts with newer goals around decentralization, security or efficiency.

That makes the Strawmap useful even if many of its boxes eventually change again. It shows which properties Ethereum’s researchers increasingly want to preserve even when doing so means replacing mechanisms once considered part of the long-term plan.

The roadmap is becoming less a commitment to particular technologies and more a test of which technologies still deserve to remain.

The post Ethereum’s Roadmap Is Becoming a Different Kind of Plan appeared first on Coindoo.

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Source: https://coindoo.com/ethereums-roadmap-becoming-different-kind-plan/

The post BRICS Eyes CBDC and Payment-System Links to Cut Costs appeared first on Coindoo.

BRICS Is Looking for a Cheaper Way to Move Money

Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra said on August 11 that BRICS members are discussing potential connections between their fast-payment systems and central bank digital currencies.

The talks remain at an early stage, with no agreed architecture or launch timetable. India is hosting the 2026 BRICS summit, and the RBI had already recommended earlier this year that CBDC interoperability be placed on the agenda.

For Malhotra, the immediate case is practical: cross-border payments are still expensive. Linking national systems could reduce the number of intermediaries involved in moving money between countries and make settlement faster for trade and tourism.

The RBI also wants greater use of local currencies in international transactions. If national payment systems can communicate directly, more bilateral trade could potentially be settled without routing every transaction through the same existing channels.

CBDCs Are Only One Part of the Payment Puzzle

India already shows why the discussion extends beyond central bank digital currencies.

Its digital rupee remains in an RBI pilot, while UPI already operates at enormous domestic scale. According to official NPCI data, the network processed about 23.66 billion transactions worth roughly $313B in July 2026.

The two systems can already overlap in practice. Digital-rupee wallets can scan UPI merchant QR codes, even though the underlying money and settlement process differ.

Brazil approaches the same cross-border problem from another direction. Its Pix instant-payment network handled nearly 80 billion transactions worth more than $6.83 trillion in 2025, and the central bank is now examining links between Pix and foreign instant-payment systems.

For BRICS, this broadens the technical challenge. Some members already have mature instant-payment rails that could potentially be connected internationally, while their CBDCs are developing on very different timelines.

BRICS Members Are Far Apart on CBDC Development

China is considerably further along with the digital yuan. As we previously covered, Beijing expanded the e-CNY network in April by authorizing 12 additional commercial banks, while its cross-border infrastructure was also moving further into international settlement. Official Chinese government data shows that by the end of November 2025, e-CNY had processed 3.48 billion cumulative transactions worth $2.47T.

Its design also changed in 2026. Digital-yuan balances held in authorized commercial-bank wallets can now earn interest and are treated as bank deposit liabilities covered by deposit insurance.

Russia is approaching a broader rollout. The Bank of Russia says major banks must begin offering digital-ruble services from September 1, 2026, with large qualifying retailers also required to accept it.

South Africa is taking a more cautious path. The South African Reserve Bank has said there is no compelling immediate need to launch a retail CBDC, preferring to focus on broader payment modernization while continuing to study wholesale applications.

China may therefore come to the table with a mature CBDC network, Brazil with Pix, India with UPI alongside an e-rupee pilot, Russia with an expanding digital ruble, and South Africa with a more cautious retail-CBDC stance.

Any common architecture would have to accommodate those differences rather than assume every member is building the same kind of digital-payment system.

 Faster Settlement Doesn’t Fix Trade Imbalances

The proposal will inevitably be viewed through the wider debate over the dollar.

If an Indian importer and a Brazilian exporter can settle efficiently through linked national systems using rupees and reais, that transaction may have less need to pass through the dollar. Across enough trade corridors, local currencies could gradually play a larger role in settlement.

The RBI has previously stressed that its efforts to expand use of the rupee internationally are not presented as a formal de-dollarization campaign. The more immediate goal is to reduce costs and make local-currency settlement easier where it makes commercial sense.

Lower transaction costs also depend on more than the payment rail itself. A recent Bank of Italy experiment we examined found that the largest costs in cross-border stablecoin transfers often appeared when users entered or exited the digital-asset system rather than during the underlying transfer.

Uneven trade creates a separate problem. When the RBI first pushed the CBDC-linking idea earlier this year, Reuters reported that governance, technical standards, regulation and trade imbalances were among the hurdles officials expected to confront.

India and Russia have already encountered that issue. Greater local-currency trade left Russia accumulating rupee balances that were difficult to recycle efficiently. Making settlement faster does not change what happens when one side consistently receives more of another country’s currency than it can readily use.

Central banks would still need mechanisms for currency conversion, liquidity provision and persistent imbalances between trading partners.

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The Hardest Part May Come After the Payment Is Sent

A workable BRICS system would need common rules for settlement finality, compliance, cybersecurity, privacy and access. It would also need answers for what happens after a payment clears: which currency is held, how excess balances are converted and who provides liquidity when trade flows are uneven.

Technical interoperability can shorten the route between payer and recipient. The economic and legal arrangements determine whether the network can function reliably once money begins moving at scale.

If BRICS can solve both sides, member countries would gain more practical options for settling trade directly in national currencies even though their domestic payment systems and digital-money projects look very different.

That is the real test behind the current discussions: not simply whether BRICS can connect payment rails and CBDCs, but whether it can make the settlement behind those connections work across countries with different technologies, regulations and trade relationships.

The post BRICS Eyes CBDC and Payment-System Links to Cut Costs appeared first on Coindoo.

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Source: https://coindoo.com/brics-eyes-cbdc-payment-system-links-cut-costs/

The post MoneyGram Opens Its Global Cash Network to Solana appeared first on Coindoo.

Key Takeaways

MoneyGram Brings Ramps Directly to Solana

MoneyGram announced on August 11 that MoneyGram Ramps is now live natively on Solana, giving wallets, exchanges and developers access to its cash-to-crypto and crypto-to-cash infrastructure through a single API.

Developers can connect their applications to MoneyGram’s existing network rather than building separate banking and cash-access integrations market by market. The company provides API credentials, sandbox access, documentation and SDKs for integrating Ramps into digital-asset products.

Rift became the first Solana wallet to launch the service for users, allowing customers to move between digital assets and local currency from within the wallet’s broader trading experience.

MoneyGram also brings something most crypto-native companies cannot easily reproduce: nearly 500,000 retail locations across its global payments network.

The Bigger Reach Is on the Cash-Out Side

Cash deposits into digital assets are currently supported in more than 25 countries, while crypto-to-cash withdrawals reach more than 170 countries and territories.

For wallets and payment apps, the wider withdrawal coverage solves a very different problem from moving assets onchain. Digital tokens can already travel globally, but turning them into usable local cash still depends on exchanges, banking relationships or regional payout infrastructure. MoneyGram gives developers access to an existing retail network for that last step.

The service is much more limited in the opposite direction. A user in one of the 170-plus withdrawal markets cannot automatically walk into a MoneyGram location and buy digital assets with cash, because the cash-in service is available in far fewer jurisdictions.

That makes the current setup particularly relevant for remittances and payment apps serving markets where recipients still rely heavily on physical cash.

MoneyGram Was Already Building on Solana

The Ramps launch follows MoneyGram’s deeper move into Solana infrastructure earlier this summer.

On June 22, the Solana Foundation announced that MoneyGram had become an active validator on the network and joined the Solana Developer Platform, or SDP, as an infrastructure partner.

Ramps is now integrated into SDP’s payments module, allowing developers building through the platform to access MoneyGram’s fiat infrastructure alongside Solana’s blockchain tools.

MoneyGram Chairman and CEO Anthony Soohoo described the company’s direction in simple terms:

The future of payments is built on access.

Less than two months after becoming a validator and SDP partner, MoneyGram has now opened one of its own payment products directly to applications built on Solana. The relationship has moved from participating in the network’s infrastructure to giving developers a practical way to connect Solana-based products with fiat cash.

Solana Adds Another Layer to MoneyGram’s Multichain Strategy

The Solana launch does not replace MoneyGram’s existing work on Stellar.

MoneyGram launched MGUSD in June with native issuance on Stellar. Bridge, a Stripe company, serves as the regulated issuer, while M0 provides infrastructure supporting minting and burning.

MGUSD is designed around MoneyGram’s own financial network. Ramps serves a different role on Solana by allowing external wallets and applications to connect to the company’s fiat on- and off-ramp infrastructure.

Stellar can remain the native home of MGUSD while Solana becomes another blockchain where MoneyGram’s cash-access network is available directly to developers. MoneyGram does not need to move every blockchain product onto one chain for the strategy to become multichain.

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Traditional Payment Giants Are Building Around the Same Problem

MoneyGram’s Solana expansion comes as other established payment companies are also pushing deeper into stablecoins and blockchain settlement.

Western Union is developing its own stablecoin strategy around Solana, including the USDPT stablecoin and a Digital Asset Network intended to connect digital payments with its existing distribution infrastructure.

MoneyGram is taking a different route. Instead of centering the Solana expansion on a new stablecoin, it is giving third-party applications access to its existing cash rails through Ramps.

Both companies are also involved in the Open USD initiative alongside Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock and more than 140 other participants, putting remittance companies, card networks, asset managers and blockchain infrastructure providers into the same broader stablecoin push.

The common challenge is no longer simply issuing or transferring a digital dollar. Wallet access, compliance, liquidity, fiat conversion and real-world payout infrastructure determine whether those assets can move beyond crypto-native markets.

MoneyGram’s Solana launch fits into that shift by opening an existing global cash network to applications built onchain. For developers, the value is not another token to integrate, but a way to connect onchain value with the fiat infrastructure users still depend on outside crypto.

The post MoneyGram Opens Its Global Cash Network to Solana appeared first on Coindoo.

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Source: https://coindoo.com/moneygram-opens-global-cash-network-solana/

The post Hyperliquid Pushes CFTC on Perpetual Futures for Commodity Markets appeared first on Coindoo.

Key Takeaways

In an August 7 submission connected to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s July 29 Agricultural Advisory Committee meeting, the Hyperliquid Policy Center focused on product choice, the CFTC’s gradual approach to perpetual futures and the potential role of public blockchains in derivatives markets.

The committee represents agricultural producers, merchants and other businesses that use derivatives to manage costs and revenues tied to their operations. Its July meeting examined risk-management tools for agricultural users alongside 24-hour trading and newer derivatives products.

Bringing perpetual futures into that discussion puts the structure in front of businesses with very different needs from crypto traders. The question for regulators is whether it can offer a useful hedging alternative in markets where derivatives protect operating margins.

Why Would a Farmer Need a Perpetual Future?

Traditional futures contracts expire. A farmer, commodity merchant or food producer that wants to remain protected against price changes beyond the life of a contract has to close or roll the position into another maturity.

A perpetual future removes the fixed expiry date. The position can remain open while a funding mechanism helps keep its price aligned with the underlying market.

That could suit companies with continuous exposure to commodities. A business that regularly buys energy, grain or another input may want to maintain protection for an extended period without repeatedly moving into a new contract.

Traditional futures remain useful when their expiration dates align with a harvest, shipment or scheduled purchase. A December contract, for example, may suit an exposure that also ends in December.

Perpetuals would give businesses another option when the risk they are managing does not fit neatly into a fixed maturity.

24-Hour Trading Is Useful Only If Liquidity Follows

The CFTC is also examining longer trading schedules. In his remarks to the Agricultural Advisory Committee, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig focused on giving farmers and producers efficient tools for managing price uncertainty.

Commodity prices can move while US exchanges are closed. Weather events, geopolitical developments, energy shocks and overseas trading can all affect markets outside normal domestic sessions.

Longer trading hours could allow companies to adjust hedges sooner when those events occur.

Liquidity remains the complication. Thin overnight trading can mean fewer counterparties, wider spreads and larger price moves from relatively small orders. Under those conditions, a 24-hour perpetual contract could offer worse execution than a traditional future during its most active trading hours.

Keeping a market open around the clock only helps if enough participants are there to trade. Commercial users, market makers and other counterparties still need to provide sufficient depth.

Public Blockchains Could Change the Market Infrastructure

Derivatives markets require collateral transfers, position reconciliation and settlement of gains and losses between participants. Public blockchains could handle some of those processes on infrastructure that operates continuously and can be independently verified.

Faster collateral movement and systems that remain available outside traditional banking hours could be useful to commercial participants. This may be especially relevant for perpetual contracts, where positions stay open and collateral requirements can change as prices move.

The Hyperliquid Policy Center has also argued that regulators should distinguish public blockchain infrastructure from financial businesses that take custody of customer assets or intermediate transactions.

Agricultural derivatives offer a practical setting for that argument to be tested. Any advantage would need to appear in areas businesses already care about, including collateral efficiency, settlement speed and access during volatile market periods.

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The Policy Push Also Serves Hyperliquid’s Broader Strategy

Hyperliquid has its own stake in how regulators treat perpetual futures and onchain derivatives.

Hyperliquid Policy Center describes itself as an independent research and advocacy organisation focused on creating a regulated US path for onchain finance. When it launched, the Hyper Foundation committed 1 million HYPE tokens to support its work, according to the organisation’s official launch announcement.

A regulatory framework that accommodates perpetual futures and public blockchain infrastructure could give platforms built around those markets more opportunities to compete with established derivatives venues.

The campaign also comes as Hyperliquid faces growing competitive pressure. JPMorgan has recently argued that regulated US perpetual products could narrow the platform’s advantage, while HYPE ETF demand has weakened. Our earlier analysis explains why JPMorgan sees growing competition as a test for Hyperliquid and HYPE.

That gives the policy effort a broader strategic importance. Expanding the regulatory role of perpetual futures could increase the number of markets where onchain derivatives platforms are able to compete.

The Real Test Is Whether Businesses Actually Use Them

Perpetual futures already have a long trading history in crypto. What remains uncertain is whether companies managing commodity and other commercial exposures would find the same structure worthwhile.

Farmers, merchants and producers will judge these products on hedging costs, liquidity, collateral requirements and their ability to respond when markets move.

If perpetual futures improve those areas, they could earn a place alongside established derivatives products.

If they do not, regulatory approval may expand where the contracts can trade without creating much demand from the businesses the CFTC’s agricultural committee represents.

The post Hyperliquid Pushes CFTC on Perpetual Futures for Commodity Markets appeared first on Coindoo.

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Source: https://coindoo.com/hyperliquid-perpetual-futures-in-commodity-markets/