Author: NBTC

A carveout sidestepping a fight Governor Josh Stein signed North Carolina’s $34 billion fiscal-year budget on July 7, enacting Senate Bill 257 – now Session Law 2026-41 – after more than a year of negotiations. The budget’s two key gambling provisions pull in opposite directions: the first raises the tax on licensed online sports betting from 18% to 23% of gross wagering revenue, effective immediately. The second, taking effect January 1, 2027, imposes a 6% tax on prediction market operators’ net trading fee revenue – and, crucially, does so without bringing those operators under state gaming regulation. According to gaming…

Binance Pay has taken a significant step into Central Asia by partnering with Kazakhstan’s Alatau City Bank to enable cryptocurrency payments at approximately 5,000 point-of-sale (POS) terminals across the country. The integration, first reported by Cointelegraph, allows merchants and consumers to process crypto transactions through existing retail infrastructure, marking one of the largest deployments of digital asset payment rails in the region. How the Partnership Works The collaboration leverages Binance Pay’s digital wallet technology alongside Alatau City Bank’s established POS network. Customers holding supported cryptocurrencies can initiate payments at participating merchants by scanning a QR code or using near-field communication…

Several publicly traded Bitcoin miners have enjoyed sharp stock re-ratings after pivoting toward AI infrastructure, but investors are increasingly questioning whether insiders and major shareholders capitalized on the rally before the sector cooled, raising fresh governance concerns, according to Blocksbridge Consulting. In its latest Miner Weekly newsletter, Blocksbridge said the AI narrative helped lift valuations for several Bitcoin mining companies as they repositioned operations around data centers, power infrastructure and hyperscaler partnerships. However, sentiment has since weakened, with AI and chip stocks pulling back. The TEM AI Infrastructure Growth Index, which tracks Bitcoin miners, artificial intelligence cloud providers, power suppliers…

TL;DR: Morpho Midnight is built around simplicity, immutability and noncustodiality, with the entire protocol limited to 1,100 lines of code. The protocol includes fixed-rate, fixed-maturity credit primitives, immutable contracts, scoped governance and no ability to pause, alter or upgrade deployments. Morpho used continuous formal verification, in-house and Certora engineers, four external audits and a Cantina public audit competition with up to $400,000 in prizes for security researchers worldwide. Morpho Midnight is being presented as a security-first credit protocol whose most important choices were made before development began. Morpho says the product was designed around three fixed principles: simplicity, immutability and…

Public companies kept stacking Bitcoin in June, but the month’s real story played out in a corner of the market that did not exist a couple of years ago: the preferred shares that treasury firms now use to fund their coin purchases. A new report from BitcoinTreasuries.net calls June the first true stress test for this “digital credit” market, and the results offer a mixed but telling verdict on where corporate Bitcoin adoption goes next. First, the buying. Public treasuries added close to 9,000 $BTC before sales in June, or about 7,300 $BTC on a net basis, worth some $427…

Within a week of Robinhood Chain’s mainnet going live, the ecosystem already included Uniswap’s dedicated automated market maker (AMM), Arcus, a stock token and crypto exchange set up in collaboration with dYdX Labs, the derivatives venue Lighter and the spot exchange Rialto. Total value locked reportedly reached $75mn by 9 Jul, according to DeFiLlama, the majority of which was in Morpho’s lending protocol. The World platform went live inside the Phantom wallet on 1 Jul to great fanfare. Some traders have accused World of using Solana for opening-week attention before decamping once the publicity paid off, to follow the next…

In brief Ethereum Foundation researchers are using AI agents to red-team critical network infrastructure. The agents helped uncover a peer-to-peer software vulnerability that was later disclosed. AI-assisted audits have already surfaced bugs in blockchain projects, including Zcash. The Ethereum Foundation is using swarms of AI agents to attack Ethereum—before someone else does. In a blog post on Thursday, Ethereum Foundation researchers on the Protocol Security team said they have deployed a series of AI agents against the software Ethereum relies on, hunting for vulnerabilities in cryptographic systems, protocol code, and smart contracts. “We’ve been running coordinated AI agents against the…

In brief $AVAX One regained compliance with Nasdaq’s $1.00 minimum bid price rule after 10 straight days above threshold. The crypto treasury company rose back above the minimum level thanks to a 1-for-12 reverse stock split in June. Interim CEO Pete Wylie says the company is now focused on growth and profitability. $AVAX One Technology, a crypto treasury firm that holds Avalanche ($AVAX), announced Thursday that it has regained compliance with Nasdaq’s minimum bid price requirement, closing out a listing issue that had put the company under scrutiny ahead of last month’s reverse stock split. The West Palm Beach, Florida-based…

Neo has released Neo-CLI v3.10.1, a patch update that sets the Gorgon hard fork activation heights, targeting TestNet on approximately July 24 and MainNet on Aug. 1. The release also fixes an RPC wallet bug that was breaking ordinary transfers since v3.10.0 was deployed to MainNet on June 26. The Gorgon hard fork will activate at block 17,960,000 on TestNet and block 12,020,000 on MainNet. Node operators running Neo-CLI must upgrade before these heights or fall out of consensus. No blockchain resync is required for operators who upgrade in time. Dynamic opcode pricing clears the path for cheaper transactions Gorgon…

Less than a week after the U.S. stock and crypto trading app Robinhood (HOOD) launched its proprietary Layer 2 network, Robinhood Chain, trading volume on the network via the Uniswap protocol has reached $250 million, according to a report by The Block. The milestone underscores early and strong adoption of the new infrastructure by decentralized finance (DeFi) users. Rapid Adoption Signals Growing Demand for Layer 2 Solutions Robinhood Chain, a Layer 2 scaling solution built on Ethereum, was introduced to offer faster and cheaper transactions for users of the popular trading platform. The integration with Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange,…