TLDR Crypto 2026-07-13

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law Friday without Trump's signature after he declined to sign in protest over unrelated voter-ID legislation, letting the 10-day constitutional default trigger enactment. The bipartisan bill, which passed 85-5 in the Senate and 358-32 in the House, bans the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency. The CBDC ban has been a longstanding Republican priority and previously complicated passage of the GENIUS Act stablecoin law last year.

The DOJ is preparing to drop charges with prejudice against Matthew Goettsche, the alleged architect of BitClub Network, a cryptocurrency mining fraud that prosecutors say defrauded investors of $722 million. Prosecutors alleged the scheme fabricated mining pool profit claims to attract capital while paying members to recruit others. Goettsche was indicted in 2019 on wire fraud and unregistered securities charges with a trial scheduled for October. The DOJ attributed the dismissal to the case's seven-year timeline and efforts to recover funds for victims, denying that pressure from defense attorneys influenced the decision. Three co-defendants previously pleaded guilty, and final dismissal terms remain under negotiation before submission to the court.

Ethlabs posted a week-three update covering two closed hires, continued interop research including the Ethereum Economic Zone's synchronous composability work and the team's own async bridging lane built on the Open Intents Framework, and a push for faster Ethereum finality via a "quick slots" (EIP-8198) proposal ahead of the Hegotá upgrade's August 6 deadline. The team is tracking Robinhood Chain's rapid growth as a signal of L2 momentum and cited a new Cambridge study finding about 8,500 physical Ethereum nodes and 880,000 validators. Otherwise, Ethlabs remains in its fundraising phase, seeking one to two more anchor funders.

Bankr's rh-wallet skill executed what the team claims is the first AI agent-initiated crypto trade inside a live Robinhood account, triggered by tagging @bankrbot in a tweet with a plain-language instruction such as "buy $5 of SOL." The agent checks buying power and live prices across 30+ supported tokens, routes the order, and returns an on-chain receipt with no manual login, app, or browser interaction required. A demonstration trade of $1 DOGE filled instantly, and the team tokenized the milestone as $RHAGENT on Robinhood Chain as a commemorative and utility token. Planned additions include portfolio views and broader Robinhood account access, extending a social-to-settlement pipeline toward agentic execution of real financial actions across Base and Robinhood Chain.

Crypto's next era favors Ethereum L1+L2 as real cash-flow businesses replace token-sale-driven projects in shaping infrastructure choices (e.g., Robinhood Chain and Coinbase's Base as evidence). Both use ETH as native gas and Ethereum for data availability and settlement despite being built by companies with no ideological allegiance to Ethereum. Ethereum's model is a "barbell," L1 for maximum decentralization and liquidity, L2s for customization and control. This shift is bullish for ETH as its role as collateral, liquidity, and monetary asset deepens across more products and users.

Robinhood Chain, launched July 1 for tokenized stocks and RWAs, saw memecoins become its dominant first-week use case, with a July 8 tweet from CEO Vlad Tenev endorsing the activity sending daily DEX volumes from $35M-$70M to $560M. The resurgence spans chains: Solana's $ANSEM went from zero to $400M market cap within days on Pump.fun before settling near $250M, while social trading app Fomo closed a $75M Series B at a $550M valuation and announced Robinhood Chain integration. There are structural infrastructure improvements (Apple Pay on-ramps, social leaderboards, multi-chain support) as an upgrade over prior cycles, but the underlying behavior remains speculative and narrative-driven. The durability question is whether these rails convert memecoin-attracted volume into retained wallets or RWA adoption, a conversion Solana managed but most chains have not.

Robinhood Chain launched July 1 with 24/7 stock token trading across 120+ countries, integrating a Uniswap AMM, Morpho lending, and USDG as the settlement layer for the firm's 27.4 million funded accounts. The launch extends Robinhood's vertical integration playbook, which has absorbed Bitstamp ($200M), WonderFi, Lighter for perps, and Morpho for lending, collapsing TradFi's fragmented broker/exchange/custodian/clearing/issuer stack into a single composable system. With PFOF earning around 3 basis points, each owned layer raises Robinhood's take rate, and the chain serves as distribution leverage over 28 million users rather than a standalone revenue line. The logical next target is a proprietary stablecoin: USDG's $3.2B float, up from $1B in December, generates an estimated $119M/year in T-bill reserve income, a pool Coinbase harvested $305M from last quarter on a coin it does not issue.

Base shipped Beryl and the B20 Native Token Standard to mainnet this week, and Aerodrome hit #1 in BTC-USD spot volume while capturing over 50% of onchain FX spot volume in Q2. Cloudflare opened an x402 monetization gateway for pages, datasets, APIs, and MCP tools, and Apify added 20,000+ web automation tools for agents via x402, widening the protocol's distribution across web infrastructure. Centrifuge deployed $50M+ in tokenized AAA CLOs on Base as Ethena collateral, and OpenStandard launched Open USD, a stablecoin for the internet economy, on Base. ClawBank's Manfred AI agent registered as the first zero-human US company, running a full agentic banking operation on Base.

An attacker exploited Hedera Mainnet for $5.25M and bridged the funds to Ethereum.

The high DEX volume reported on Robinhood Chain is allegedly driven almost entirely by memecoin trading rather than other activity.

Michael Saylor posted the company's bitcoin acquisition tracker with the ambiguous caption "Orange dots tell only part of the story," breaking from his usual purchase-signaling pattern days after Strategy sold 3,588 BTC for $216 million, its largest disposal ever.

A new DefiLlama-built dashboard tracking ETH distribution on Robinhood Chain shows the L2 heavily uses and holds ETH.