TLDR Crypto 2026-06-24

The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 85-5, with a provision embedded in the bill that prohibits the Federal Reserve or any Federal Reserve bank from issuing or creating a CBDC, directly or indirectly through an intermediary, for four years. There is no active Fed CBDC project to block, but Republican lawmakers pushed for the ban's inclusion as a symbolic anti-surveillance measure, and the bill is expected to move quickly through the House toward becoming law.

Bitcoin gained 1.4% to $62,310 and ether rose 2.4%, with the move driven by easing oil prices and Iran-US diplomatic hopes lifting risk appetite, though analysts place near-term resistance at $66,000-$68,000 and flag a bearish formation targeting $54,000 on a breakdown of $60,000 support. Despite a 30% spike in 24-hour BTC trading volume to $129.9 billion, open interest fell from 801K to 722K BTC since early June, and liquidations rose 41% to $212 million, with only Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tron posting positive cumulative volume delta among the top 25 assets. Options markets continue pricing more downside protection than upside exposure, with analysts framing the current range as a "buy near the 200-week, sell into resistance" posture rather than trend conviction.

The ETHgent testnet launched today as an EVM-compatible application chain built on ICP infrastructure, targeting developers who need cheap, geo-distributed execution with built-in cryptographic primitives including on-chain randomness generation, HTTP outcalls, an async sublayer, and threshold ECDSA. The platform ships with Hardhat support, code samples, and agent deployment skill files, reducing friction for teams building on-chain agents or applications that require native crypto capabilities at the protocol layer. The team describes the design as opinionated and acknowledges areas needing improvement, inviting community input to surface issues ahead of a production push.

Ethlabs has launched as a non-profit R&D organization with the mission of establishing Ethereum as the neutral settlement layer for global finance, framing the opportunity through an analogy to shared internet protocols that enabled cross-network interoperability at scale. The lab will operate as a bridge between application-layer stakeholders – wallets, L2s, institutions, and frontier builders – and core protocol developers, converting real-world usage requirements into protocol work, shared standards, and shipped products. Alongside its protocol focus, Ethlabs takes an explicit pro-ETH-asset position, framing ETH as a programmable store of value with a decade of broad distribution and deep onchain liquidity. Founded by contributors with roughly a decade of Ethereum core R&D experience, the lab describes itself as independent but collaborative within Ethereum's broader stewardship network, and is actively recruiting for a lean, senior team.

The Ethereum Foundation published a thread spotlighting four independent organizations that have emerged over the past year to strengthen Ethereum's resilience and expand its capacity, framing the ecosystem's future as a coalition effort rather than a single-foundation mandate. Ethlabs is a non-profit R&D lab with the mission of making Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy, focused on the next era of adoption. The Ethereum Applications Guild (EAG) is a global non-profit pushing Ethereum-native apps toward real-world use in emerging markets through local communities. The Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) is an initiative building synchronously composable rollup infrastructure to reduce fragmentation and unify liquidity across Ethereum-compatible networks. The Argot Collective is a self-governed collective of engineers and researchers that maintains Solidity and open-source compiler tooling while also serving as a home for more experimental core infrastructure research.

Proof of reserves confirms that a pool of assets exists but does not establish whether tokenholders hold an enforceable legal claim on those assets, a gap that becomes critical when issuers, custodians, or legal wrappers fail. In many RWA structures, users own a token representing a claim against an issuer rather than direct ownership, leaving them exposed to segregation failures, encumbrance, and insolvency risk that no reserve dashboard discloses. The MainStreet Finance collapse illustrated this: when Accountable terminated its verification relationship, msUSD depegged and Morpho lending markets came under stress before any legal process ran its course, while Alturax wound down its yield vault entirely due to contagion in market confidence despite holding no MainStreet exposure. One solution is replacing binary proof-of-reserves with a composite standard covering proof of solvency plus proof of rights, adding legal-claim attestation, encumbrance reporting, feed degradation states, and circuit breakers in lending markets that auto-adjust LTVs when reserve feeds go stale.

An attacker exploited a years-old infinite-mint flaw in Secret Network's CW20-ICS20 contract, draining $4.67M in Axelar-wrapped tokens across seven assets between June 10 and June 17. The exploit ran undetected for seven days, indicating a gap in on-chain monitoring for the bridge's liquidity positions. The contract flaw permitted minting of wrapped tokens without collateral backing, allowing the attacker to draw down bridge reserves without triggering alerts. Secret Network has suspended the Axelar bridge while the team addresses the contract vulnerability.

Warbler Labs submitted a governance proposal on June 12 to wind down Goldfinch Prime, with a Snapshot vote passing 100% in favor, placing the a16z-backed RWA lending protocol into maintenance mode. Goldfinch originated over $100 million in loans to emerging market borrowers before serial defaults eroded depositor capital, pushing GFI to 99.8% below its January 2022 peak. Depositors face a two-or-more-year recovery horizon, a direct consequence of an undercollateralized credit model that depended on off-chain enforcement in markets with limited legal recourse. The wind-down adds to a pattern of on-chain undercollateralized lending failures and puts RWA protocols relying on off-chain enforcement in illiquid markets under greater scrutiny.

Hut 8 filed a proposed $2.35 million settlement in the Southern District of New York to resolve a securities class action brought by investors who bought shares between February 2023 and January 2024, covering the period around the miner's all-stock merger with US Bitcoin Corp.

THORChain halted trading in May after a newly churned node operator exploited a vulnerability in the GG20 Threshold Signature Scheme to drain roughly $10.7 million from one of the protocol's five vaults.

Publicly traded fintech SoFi has deployed its stablecoin SOFIUSD on Solana, marking the company's first onchain dollar-denominated asset.

Bitmine now holds 4.72 million staked ETH, ~4.7% of total supply, at a cost basis of $3,440 per ETH, sitting $9.5 billion underwater on an unrealized basis, while generating $223 million in annual staking yield.