🌐 Hut 8 Signs $9.8B Texas AI Lease, Doubling Campus to 704MW
Bitcoin miner-turned-AI infrastructure company Hut 8 has signed a $9.8 billion, 15-year lease at its Beacon Point campus in Texas, adding 352MW of capacity and doubling the site to 704MW total.
The deal brings Hut 8's total contracted capacity across its portfolio to 949MW. Shares of HUT surged more than 30% following the announcement, reflecting investor confidence in the company's pivot away from Bitcoin mining toward AI data center infrastructure.
💵 South Korea unveils won stablecoin legal framework
South Korea has released a roadmap to make the Korean won a freely convertible currency, combining foreign exchange reforms with a legal framework for won-backed stablecoins and new digital payment infrastructure.
The plan pairs currency liberalization measures with formal rules governing won-denominated stablecoins, signaling the government's intent to integrate digital assets into the country's broader financial architecture. The announcement was reported on July 19.
South Korea has been among the more active regulators in Asia on crypto policy, having previously introduced licensing frameworks for virtual asset service providers.
⚖️ US Regulators Miss GENIUS Act Stablecoin Deadline
Federal agencies failed to finalize implementing regulations by the GENIUS Act's one-year deadline, issuing 10 proposed rules instead of final ones.
The GENIUS Act, which established a federal framework for stablecoin regulation, required regulators to complete rulemaking within a set timeframe. With agencies still at the proposal stage, the rules are not yet in force, leaving key aspects of the stablecoin regulatory framework unresolved.
📊 US traders pile into 100x leveraged perpetual futures
The Trump administration has opened American markets to perpetual futures contracts — highly leveraged derivatives long available offshore but previously restricted for US retail traders.
US day traders are now piling into "perps" offering up to 100x leverage. The products are widely considered among the riskiest in crypto, with data showing 70–97% of day traders lose money over time using them.
Perpetual futures have no expiry date and allow traders to hold leveraged positions indefinitely, making them a dominant instrument in global crypto markets — and a significant source of exchange revenue.
🌐 Zcash launches node targeting 50,000 private transactions per second
The Zcash ecosystem has released Zakura, a new node client and the first live component of Project Tachyon — a broader initiative to scale Zcash from approximately one private transaction per second to Visa-level throughput of 50,000 TPS.
The upgrade is tied to the planned NU7 network upgrade and aims to make fully shielded transactions viable at payment-network scale. The rollout comes despite headwinds: a recently disclosed vulnerability and a 48% decline in ZEC's price have raised questions about execution risk as the project pursues its technical roadmap.
An attacker exploited BonkDAO's governance mechanism to drain 4.426 trillion BONK tokens from its treasury. The exploit allowed the attacker to pass a malicious proposal and withdraw the funds.
Of the stolen tokens, 800 billion BONK have already been sold for approximately $2 million. The attacker still holds an estimated 2.4 trillion BONK, leaving significant sell pressure potential on the market. BONK is the memecoin associated with the Solana ecosystem.