Author: NBTC

New wallet creation on the $XRP Ledger reached its highest level since March during the final week of June. The increase adds to signs of rising network activity alongside growing institutional adoption and tokenized asset issuance. According to on-chain data shared by Evernorth, about 26,000 new $XRP wallets were created in the week ending June 29. That was up roughly 40% from around 18,400 the previous week. It marked the strongest weekly wallet growth since March and suggests renewed interest in the $XRP ecosystem. XRPL Network Activity Notably, new wallet creation trended higher throughout June. Weekly additions rose from 18,100…

The U.S. state of New Hampshire is considering new legislation to explicitly protect the use of cryptocurrency for payments and the right to self-custody digital assets. House Bill 639 (HB639), introduced in the state’s General Court, seeks to prohibit state and local government entities from restricting these activities, marking another step in the ongoing debate over digital asset regulation at the state level. What HB639 Proposes HB639 is a straightforward piece of legislation. Its core provision would prevent any state or municipal agency in New Hampshire from enacting laws, rules, or ordinances that limit or prohibit an individual’s ability to…

Blockchain Meets Mobile Money Financial services giant Visa, mobile money platform M-Pesa, and pan-African payments network Onafriq have launched a pilot program using stablecoins to settle cross-border mobile transactions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to industry reports. The initiative marks the latest push by major financial players to test whether blockchain-powered digital assets can make international money transfers faster and cheaper across Africa. For consumers using platforms like Safaricom’s M-Pesa, the integration of stablecoins is intended to streamline back-end operations. If successful, the pilot could lead to quicker wallet top-ups, smoother international business transactions, and lower remittance…

The adjustment landed at block height 957600. Difficulty moved from 133.87 trillion to 127.17 trillion, a decline of roughly 6.70 trillion. The change took effect at 4:09:11 p.m., based on the block timestamp. The prior epoch ran about 14 days, 18 hours, and 9 minutes, longer than Bitcoin’s 14-day target for 2,016 blocks. That pace works out to an average block time of 10 minutes, 32 seconds, about 5.1% slower than the protocol’s 10-minute target. The 5% cut brought the network back toward that target. A Year Defined by Wide Swings Eight of the 14 difficulty adjustments so far in…

This was quickly fixed and disclosed as ‘CVE-2026-34219′ with credit to the team. The broader concern, however, was separating the agents’ real bugs from the ones that were confidently masquerading as such. “The surprise was how little of the work went into finding them, and how much went into telling the real bugs from the ones that just looked real,” wrote Nikos Baxevanis, who authored the post. The difficulty started with what an agent produces. A fuzzer, the standard tool that hurls malformed data at software until something breaks, returned a crash and a record of where it happened, which…

The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control revoked General License X on July 7, cutting off the authorization that had allowed Iranian crude oil, petrochemical, and petroleum-product transactions through Aug. 21. Its replacement, General License X1, permits only wind-down transactions through 12:01 a.m. ET on July 17. Brent crude settled at $74.16 and WTI at $70.44 that day, then extended gains in post-settlement trade to about $76.03 and $72.20, putting both benchmarks over 5% above the prior session. Tanker attacks near the Strait of Hormuz drove that move, and maritime authorities raised transit risk through the strait to severe,…

$AVAX One Technology, the Nasdaq-listed digital infrastructure company that mines bitcoin and holds a strategic Avalanche treasury, said Chief Executive Jolie Kahn resigned effective July 3, with Chief Operating Officer Pete Wylie stepping in as interim CEO, according to an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, which trades as AVX, said the departure came “by mutual agreement” and that there was no disagreement over the company’s operations, policies or practices, per the filing. The board has retained ZRG Partners, a global executive search firm, to find a permanent successor. Separation Terms Kahn will receive a $160,000…

Berachain is preparing a hard fork that will replace its dual-token incentive model with one centered on its main $BERA token. Set for Wednesday at 4 pm UTC, the hard fork will end Bera Governance Token (BGT) emissions and shift the network’s incentive system to Wrapped $BERA (WBERA), the Berachain Foundation announced in a Tuesday X post. Following the upgrade, the network will distribute fixed amounts of WBERA instead of BGT as block rewards. The change replaces Berachain’s previous dual-token model, which split the network’s functions between the transferable $BERA token and the non-transferable governance token BGT. Berachain said annual…

A request for the UK standards watchdog to examine Nigel Farage’s reported interactions with the Bank of England has turned the UK’s digital-pound fight into an access fight: who gets to shape public payment infrastructure while donations from a major crypto-linked backer face fresh scrutiny. A July 2 Guardian report said Labour MP Phil Brickell asked the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to investigate Farage’s reported interactions with the Bank. The request followed the Guardian’s earlier reporting that Farage told a crypto event he had challenged Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey over the central bank’s digital-pound work. No finding of…

Blockchain research firm L2BEAT published a comparative analysis of perpetual futures exchanges Hyperliquid and Lighter on July 2. In its findings, the research firm discovered that none of the platforms fully protects traders through verifiable math alone. The report matters to anyone trading leveraged crypto derivatives on venues that market themselves as decentralized alternatives to the likes of Binance or Bybit. Are perpetual DEXs delivering on all their promises? Perpetual DEXs claim to offer custody over user collateral, and execution can be verified independently, according to L2BEAT’s research. The firm evaluated Hyperliquid and Lighter across property rights, order fairness, and…