Swapin.com

Weekly crypto/blockchain update: June 22 - 28

Market snapshot Bitcoin: $59,941 | Ethereum: $1,578 | Total stablecoin market cap: $312B | USDT dominance at 59%

Regulatory developments
The Clarity Act is running out of the Senate calendar. July may be its last window before summer recess.

As of June 22, at least four outstanding issues still block a Senate floor vote, disputes over DeFi protections, ethics provisions tied to Trump family crypto interests, and a housing bill impasse eating up floor time. A Senate aide confirmed Clarity will be "a top priority" when Congress returns in July.

Spain confirmed no extensions for unlicensed crypto firms ahead of MiCA's July 1 deadline.

The Spanish regulator closed any remaining ambiguity: no grace period, no exceptions. Over 200 firms hold full MiCA authorization across the EU.

The Bank of England dropped its proposed holding caps for sterling stablecoins and set a £40 billion total issuance limit per coin instead.

The BOE scrapped its earlier plan to cap individual holdings at £20,000 and corporate holdings at £10 million, limits the industry had called unworkable. The replacement is a macro-level guardrail capping total circulation of any single systemic stablecoin at £40 billion, expected to phase out as the market matures ahead of full UK crypto rules in 2027.

Investments, partnerships, launches, & acquisitions
Ripple's RLUSD dollar stablecoin went live in Japan after FSA regulatory approval.

Japan's Financial Services Agency approved RLUSD as an electronic payment instrument under the Payment Services Act, available through SBI VC Trade to institutional and retail users. RLUSD had a $1.6 billion market cap at launch. Dollar-denominated stablecoin settlement is now a regulated product in Japan, opening a path for cross-border corporate payments between Japan and USD markets.

SBI Holdings is buying Bitbank for $289 million, making it Japan's largest crypto exchange by assets.

Combined with SBI VC Trade, the merged entity will hold $6.8 billion in assets across 2.92 million accounts. The deal closes around October pending Japan Fair Trade Commission clearance. SBI also launched RLUSD and the JPYSC yen stablecoin this week.

Uniswap and Spark launched a shared stablecoin liquidity pool seeded with $150 million, designed for institutions to swap between USDS, USDT, and PYUSD.

The "FX Layer" on Uniswap v4 gives issuers (banks, fintechs, payment companies) shared liquidity infrastructure instead of each bootstrapping their own. Multi-stablecoin settlement is moving toward shared rails.

Invesco filed to launch a tokenised fund specifically targeting the stablecoin reserve market.

The Invesco Stablecoin Reserves Onchain Fund will invest in cash and short-term US Treasuries, run on public blockchain infrastructure, and use Superstate as a sub-transfer agent. It's designed so stablecoin issuers can hold GENIUS Act-compliant reserves while earning yield with daily liquidity. BlackRock, State Street, and ProShares are moving in the same direction.

Framework Ventures raised a $400 million fund to invest at the intersection of tokenisation, stablecoins, AI, and robotics.

The thesis: blockchain is becoming the financing layer for sectors that need new ways to raise capital, with crypto having shifted from serving crypto users to enabling capital formation across real-world industries. The fund signals where institutional money thinks stablecoin infrastructure is heading, not just crypto payments, but the financing backbone for AI compute and physical infrastructure.

SBI Group launched Japan's first trust bank-backed yen stablecoin, JPYSC.

JPYSC operates as an electronic payment instrument under Japan's Payment Services Act without the 1 million yen transaction cap that applies to other yen stablecoin types. SBI Shinsei Trust Bank manages issuance; SBI VC Trade handles distribution. Availability is limited to SBI VC Trade accounts until tax treatment is finalized, but this is the structure Japan's megabank stablecoin consortium will likely follow.

Crypto security
Polymarket lost $3.1 million when a compromised third-party vendor injected a malicious script into its frontend.

Attackers drained 11 user wallets containing PUSD (Polymarket's USDC-backed stablecoin), converted the funds to ETH, and moved them to Ethereum. Polymarket removed the dependency and pledged full refunds.

SecondFi (formerly Yoroi) lost $2.4 million in a Cardano wallet exploit affecting 374 accounts, with total exposure potentially over $20 million.

Three separate attacks exploited a flaw in SecondFi's wallet generation software, introduced by an unaudited third-party SDK on June 8. The team rescued 129 million ADA before attackers reached it. SecondFi aims to begin returning assets within two weeks. Affected users cannot fix exposure by moving their seed phrase, the vulnerability activates at the address level.

More industry/market updates
Nouriel Roubini, crypto's most prominent critic, launched a tokenised ETF product backed by US equities, calling it a "Technodollar." [CoinDesk] [Bloomberg]

USAFi tokenises the Atlas America Fund ETF (listed on Nasdaq), to be issued under Dubai's VARA framework in Q3 2026 with Securitize as tokenisation infrastructure. Roubini's pitch: a digital reserve asset backed by productive US companies rather than a single commodity. When the economist who called crypto a Ponzi scheme is building on blockchain rails, the tokenisation wave has moved past the early adopter stage.

USDT0, Tether's omnichain stablecoin, crossed $100 billion in cumulative transaction volume in under 530 days. [The Block]

USDT0 is backed 1:1 by USDT and operates across multiple chains simultaneously. $100 billion in transactions since January 2025 is actual usage volume, not circulating supply sitting idle. For context on cross-chain stablecoin adoption: USDT0 is now larger than several major national payment networks by annual throughput.

Swapin's Take
tldir; this week in review:

→ The EU's MiCA deadline is on July 1.
→ In Japan, SBI built a full stablecoin stack in five days.
→ In the US, the Clarity Act has maybe one more shot before summer recess, while Invesco and Framework Ventures are already positioning for the GENIUS Act reserve and tokenisation market regardless of whether it passes.
→ The week's two security incidents, Polymarket's $3.1M frontend hack and SecondFi's $2.4M wallet exploit, were both third-party vendor problems, not protocol failures.