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Clients at a billion-dollar lender may have had their personal information exposed after a cybersecurity incident. River Bank & Trust says in a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that a hacker gained access to its network on June 16th and deployed ransomware in its server. River says it discovered the breach on June 19th and promptly took measures to limit the impact by disabling the “affected administrative accounts and taking impacted systems offline.” An investigation into the hack is ongoing with assistance from a third-party forensic firm to determine the “nature and scope of the…

In brief Ethereum Institutional, a new nonprofit, will help Wall Street firms adopt Ethereum-based infrastructure. The group follows last week’s launch of Ethlabs, another Ethereum nonprofit backed by many of the same supporters. Both initiatives come as the Ethereum Foundation faces mounting criticism, leadership departures, and a major restructuring. A new nonprofit aimed at onboarding Wall Street to Ethereum launched Wednesday, marking the second major Ethereum-focused initiative backed in recent weeks by network co-founder Joe Lubin alongside top treasury firms BitMine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink.Ethereum Institutional will serve as an independent point of contact for banks, asset managers, and other…

A man from Shasta County, California has admitted to orchestrating a financial scam using stolen identities and fake documents. The U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of California says James Raymond Hanes obtained the personally identifiable information of certain individuals to produce at least 16 counterfeit driver’s licenses that bear his photo but use someone else’s identity. He then used the victims’ names to secure more than $476,000 in vehicle loans and purchase cars from dealerships across Northern California that he later resold to associates and unsuspecting buyers. The 61-year-old Hanes was indicted in October last year following an investigation by…

In brief American Bitcoin Corp. will execute a 1-for-15 reverse stock split on July 2. The move is intended mainly to boost the per-share price so the company keeps meeting Nasdaq’s minimum bid price rule. ABTC shares fell to a fresh low Wednesday, and were recently down 41% in the last month. American Bitcoin Corp., the Bitcoin mining and accumulation company co-founded by Eric Trump and majority-owned by Hut 8 Corp., is set to consolidate its shares in a 1-for-15 reverse stock split, the company announced Wednesday, in a move aimed at lifting its stock price back above Nasdaq’s minimum…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure A new stablecoin project backed by a broad group of payments and finance names has pulled the XRP Ledger back into the conversation. Open USD, or OUSD, is governed by Open Standard and has been described as a consortium-backed stablecoin involving more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, and Ripple. TL;DR Open Standard has announced Open USD, a new consortium-governed stablecoin. The backer list reportedly includes Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, and Ripple. Former Ripple engineer Matt Hamilton compared parts of the design…

In brief Meituan officially unveiled LongCat-2.0 on June 30, revealing it as the model behind “Owl Alpha.” The anonymous Model had ranked first on Hermes Agent, second on Claude Code, and third on OpenClaw by call volume. Standard API pricing is $0.75 per million input tokens and $2.95 per million output tokens—well under GPT-5.5’s $5/$30 and Claude Sonnet 5’s introductory $2/$10. Chinese tech company Meituan officially unveiled LongCat-2.0 on June 30, confirming the open-license, 1.6-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts AI model is the same system that spent two months running anonymously on OpenRouter under the alias Owl Alpha.Parameters are the total number of…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure XRP network activity is improving after a sharp derivatives reset, with active addresses and wallet creation rates reportedly reaching a three-month high. The move came as leveraged positioning was flushed from the market, while XRP held around the psychologically important $1.00 support area. TL;DR XRP active addresses and wallet creation rates reportedly reached a three-month high. The activity spike followed a major flush in derivatives open interest. XRP held near the key $1.00 support level during the reset. A reclaim of $1.10 is still needed for…

In brief Venice AI raised $65 million at a $1 billion valuation in its first outside funding round. Founder Erik Voorhees said the company has surpassed 3 million users and become profitable. Voorhees argued AI surveillance—not model capability—is becoming the industry’s defining challenge. Venice AI has raised $65 million in its first outside funding round at a $1 billion valuation, founder Erik Voorhees announced Wednesday.In a post on X, Voorhees—a cryptocurrency industry veteran who is best known as the founder of the ShapeShift exchange—said the funding validates Venice’s mission to build a private, uncensored alternative to mainstream AI like ChatGPT.“This…

In brief Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an “AI-native” Ethereum layer-2 network. The chain further bridges the firm’s traditional financial offerings with its crypto products, beginning with Stock Tokens. Shares finished the day up more than 8% on the news, though are still well off their 52-week high. Publicly traded brokerage and financial app Robinhood launched the public mainnet Wednesday for its Ethereum layer-2 network, Robinhood Chain. The Arbitrum-powered network aims to “bridge the gap” between crypto and the traditional finance world, opening with integrations from BitGo, Chainlink, and partnerships with Uniswap and Pleiades to offer dedicated automated…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure Solana’s meme coin machine is heating up again, with daily token creation reportedly climbing to an 80-day high in late June and early July. The jump has been tied to meme coin launch programs, Raydium-linked activity, and renewed attention around new tokens such as ANSEM. TL;DR Solana daily token launches reportedly reached an 80-day high. Meme coin creation remains a major driver of the spike. Raydium integrations and launch tools helped support the burst of activity. New meme coins are extremely risky and should not be…

July 1st, 2026 – Chicago, United States Liquid Mercury announced today that its MERC crypto-asset white paper was submitted to the Central Bank of Ireland and officially added to ESMA’s MiCA white paper register. MiCA, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, is the EU framework for crypto-asset offers, admission to trading, disclosures, and market integrity. It requires a published white paper before a non-exempt crypto-asset can be offered or admitted to trading in the EU. With the white paper in the ESMA register, MERC meets the disclosure requirements that support its admission to trading on regulated venues across the EU and…

A pair of executive orders signed by President Trump on June 22 has pushed the quantum computing question from the research lab into the boardrooms of crypto exchanges, custodians and stablecoin issuers.  In a June 24 sector comment, Moody’s Ratings warned that the credit implications for digital assets are significant, and that the industry now faces pressure to prove it can defend the cryptography at its foundation. The orders make quantum computing and its security a strategic national priority. One directs the development of a quantum computer “powerful enough to initiate the era of quantum-enabled scientific discovery,” with system specifications…

July 1st, 2026 – Tortola, British Virgin Islands VCT combines blockchain transparency, agribusiness intelligence, export-finance infrastructure and real-world asset tokenization on BNB Smart Chain. Valle Capital Token (“VCT”) today announced the development and expansion of its blockchain-powered ecosystem designed to connect global digital capital with Brazilian agribusiness operations and international commodity exports. Built on BNB Smart Chain, Valle Capital Token combines utility-token functionality with a real-world asset-focused model intended to support greater transparency, operational visibility and digital infrastructure across agricultural production, commodity financing, logistics and export activity. The project is structured around a British Virgin Islands tokenization entity and aims…

In brief The UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI released its first preliminary report Wednesday, drawing on 40 experts. Panel co-chair Yoshua Bengio said mounting evidence of deceptive AI behavior means science can’t guarantee the technology won’t cause catastrophic harm as it grows more capable. The report lands days before the UN’s inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance opens in Geneva on July 6. The United Nations published an independent scientific assessment of artificial intelligence on Wednesday, and the conclusion is blunt: nobody can currently guarantee the technology won’t cause catastrophic harm.The finding comes from the Independent International Scientific…