Modern Consensus

A consortium supported by a who’s who of the payments, banking, and crypto industries has launched a new stablecoin, Open USD. The reserve-backed stablecoin is the brainchild of Zach Abrams, founding CEO of Open Standard and co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, which was bought by payment processing firm Stripe in 2024.

Almost a month after Michael Saylor’s Strategy helped push bitcoin down about 20% in a week by selling just 32 bitcoins for $2.5 million, the company announced it may sell far more aggressively. In an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Strategy on June 29 announced its Digital Credit Capital Framework, allowing it to sell as much as $1.25 billion worth of bitcoin to build its cash reserve, pay dividends, and fund stock buybacks.

Digital asset infrastructure provider Stablecore has joined forces with two U.S. federal credit union organizations to launch a program intended to help the small lenders evaluate stablecoin, tokenized deposit and digital asset products as adoption grows.

If you’re an EU-based crypto trader and you use Binance, you may need to look for a new exchange shortly. In a blog post on Wednesday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange said that it had withdrawn its application for a Greek license to operate in the EU. Those Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) licenses become mandatory for exchanges to continue to do business after July 1. “Binance is not leaving Europe,” Gillian Lynch, the company’s head of Europe and the United Kingdom, told Reuters.

Ripple has acquired a preliminary crypto asset service provider (CASP) license in Luxembourg, making it compliant with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations ahead of a July 1 deadline. In a statement on Tuesday, Ripple said that once its CASP is finalized, it would be able to provide regulated cryptoasset services to financial institutions and businesses across the 30-member European Economic Area (EEA).

An infamous “sandwich” bot was exploited for $7.7 million in a hack dripping with irony. Jaredfromsubway.eth is a maximal extractable value (MEV) bot that specializes in sandwich attacks, in which an attacker sees a trade waiting to be executed and makes the same buy directly before the trade and sells immediately after it. The way it works is that the sandwiched trade raises the price of the cryptocurrency being bought, letting the bot sell at a profit.

Blockchain infrastructure provider Alchemy is partnering with Visa to launch AgentCard, a new payment method for AI agents designed to let them operate in the real world. Using agents from any provider, the virtual Visa card will let users’ AI agents ”book a vacation, order groceries, or renew a subscription on a consumer’s behalf, without the consumer ever touching a checkout screen,” Alchemy said in a statement.

Crypto custody firm BitGo has launched a crypto-as-a-service platform designed to help exchanges meet the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations. With the EU’s July 1 deadline for MiCA compliance fast approaching, firms without MiCA licenses won’t be able to continue serving customers after that date.

Crypto exchange Coinbase is advancing its ‘everything exchange’ push, adding tokenized stocks, stock and options trading, and an AI advisor to its offerings. On the stock trading front, Coinbase Advanced users can now transfer over their stock portfolio — including virtually every major stock, index, and ETF — with zero-commission trading, fractional shares, and 3.5% rewards on trade-ready USDC balances.

Crypto exchange Coinbase’s Quantum Advisory Council has released a report calling for the Bitcoin community to start work now on quantum-proofing the world’s largest cryptocurrency. It found that approximately seven million bitcoins are at risk of quantum theft, which could happen when quantum computers become powerful enough to break Bitcoin’s encryption. How far off that is remains a matter of debate, with some experts saying it’s at least a decade off. Others disagree.