Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned as co-executive director and board member of the Ethereum Foundation on Thursday after a sabbatical, the second co-ED exit at the Switzerland-based nonprofit in four months and the latest in a five-month wave of senior departures.

Anthropic's most powerful public model came with guardrails users called too broad — then the US government switched it off entirely. Crypto's builders say that is exactly why AI should run on networks no company or state controls, and traders have started to bid up the tokens betting on it.

Ondo Finance expanded Ondo Global Markets with 173 new tokenized stocks and ETFs on Tuesday, lifting the platform's total catalog past 430 assets on Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain. The batch brings AI, robotics, quantum, defense tech, critical materials, and data center energy names onchain alongside BlackRock active ETFs and covered call strategies.

Backpack's tokenized SpaceX share token has crossed 10,000 onchain holders on Solana, six days after listing alongside the company's Nasdaq debut. The milestone widens the holder gap with rival xStocks' SpaceX product and lands as Backpack chief executive Armani Ferrante stakes out a structural distinction from competing onchain SpaceX exposure.

The Stretch preferred fell to about $85 on Thursday, roughly 15% below the $100 it is engineered to hold, extending a record-low close and tightening one of the channels Strategy uses to fund its bitcoin buying.

Years before AI became the dominant narrative in tech, NEAR was already positioning itself as "the AI blockchain." Camila Russo sits down with NEAR co-founder Ilya Polosukhin — co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" paper — to discuss whether this moment feels like vindication, and where NEAR fits into the AI landscape now that everyone else has caught up. Topics covered: Why decentralized AI and blockchain need each other, and how NEAR uses secure enclaves to deliver verifiable, low-cost inference The case for decentralized AI as "freedom technology," and Ilya's take on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 export-control shutdown and AI censorship more broadly NEAR's standout token performance this year, reduced inflation, and the new fee-generating model behind NEAR Intents How NEAR Intents work as a cross-chain matching layer, and the rise of confidential balances and private transactions Why Ilya believes blockchains will increasingly be used by AI agents rather than humans — and what that means for NEAR's roadmap NEAR's evolving agent marketplace and vision for AI-driven commerce beyond simple stablecoin payments Guest: Ilya Polosukhin, Co-founder of NEAR Protocol Host: Camila Russo, The Defiant

Cap Labs' batch auction for its CAP governance token drew 1,002 bids and $16.4 million in commitments, clearing at $0.011 per token for a $106 million fully diluted valuation.

Zama, Morpho and Steakhouse open the first DeFi yield vault for Confidential USDC on June 23, routing encrypted cUSDC into Steakhouse Prime v2 on Morpho and putting fully homomorphic encryption to work in live lending.

The first US spot Litecoin ETF has been trading for nearly eight months, but Canary Capital's LTCC has drawn under $10 million as LTC sits 89% below its all-time high, testing the thesis that altcoin ETF approval automatically translates into institutional inflows.

Congressional negotiators folded a statutory ban on a Federal Reserve central bank digital currency into the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, blocking any Fed-issued retail digital dollar until December 31, 2030. The text now heads back to the Senate floor.