Ant International has closed a Series A equity round of approximately $1.2 billion, with existing backers Ant Group and Alibaba Group joined by a group of undisclosed international institutional investors. The round follows weeks of reporting that pegged the target closer to $1 billion at a pre-money valuation near $10 billion, meaning the final raise came in above earlier expectations.

The Singapore-headquartered company was carved out of Ant Group as an independently operated business in 2024. It now connects more than 150 million merchants with over 2 billion user accounts globally, running the business through four units: Alipay+ for cross-border wallet interoperability, Antom for merchant payment acceptance, WorldFirst for cross-border trade payments, and Bettr for SME lending and treasury services.

Datavault AI (NASDAQ: DVLT) has laid out its strategic priorities for the third quarter of 2026, centered on three tracks: commercializing its Project Qestrel token program, expanding its SanQtum edge AI infrastructure, and advancing a cluster of tokenized data-exchange platforms that depend on U.S. digital-asset rules taking shape.

The token program

The centerpiece is the Qestrel token ($QEST), tied to a roughly $10 billion, ten-phase nationwide edge infrastructure buildout with a partner called Available Infrastructure. Datavault AI says the $1 billion phase-one deployment and an initial token offering are targeted for completion this quarter, with the company providing tokenization, clearing, valuation, and exchange services under contract and generating revenue from that work.

Kalshi and Polymarket built their entire identities around being each other’s opposite. Kalshi is the “regulated from the inside” exchange, holding the first federal license the CFTC ever granted an event-contract platform and pitching itself to lawmakers and institutions as the safe, onshore choice. Polymarket built the opposite brand, crypto-native and historically offshore, technically off-limits to American users even as VPN access made that limit porous, before working toward a US re-entry through its QCEX acquisition. Neither company’s survival argument works without the other looking like the risk.

Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have reportedly offered to acquire PayPal for roughly $53 billion — $60.50 per share, about a 28% premium over Tuesday’s close, backed by around $50 billion in committed bank financing. The two would hold equal stakes and, per the sources, keep the company intact rather than break it up. The approach dates to April; the formal proposal landed this month, with the parties targeting an agreement by the end of July. PayPal has not responded, and there is no guarantee it closes. This is a bid, not a done deal.

Velocity, a stablecoin treasury and settlement platform, has raised $38 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Dragonfly and FirstMark, with participation from Activant Capital, Capital One Ventures, QED Investors, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, and Ripple. The round brings the company’s total funding to roughly $50 million, all raised since it emerged from stealth last year with a $10 million pre-seed led by Activant Capital. For a startup founded only in 2025, assembling a cap table that spans crypto-native funds, a traditional bank’s venture arm, and two of the largest names in the stablecoin ecosystem is itself a signal of how quickly enterprise stablecoin infrastructure has moved from speculative bet to contested land grab.

The announcement reads like a customer roster for the entire global payments industry. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Google, Shopify, Ripple — more than 140 firms lined up behind a single dollar token before it has settled a single transaction. Open USD does not exist yet; it is expected to go live later in 2026. What launched on June 30 was not a product. It was a coalition.

The fastest-growing ETF category in crypto right now tracks a single token that most American investors cannot legally buy at the source. That contradiction is the entire trade.

HYPE is the native token of Hyperliquid, a Layer 1 blockchain built around a fully onchain perpetual futures exchange. While Bitcoin sits roughly 40% below its all-time high, Ethereum has shed 60% of its peak, and Solana is off more than half, HYPE is up around 160% year to date, trading near $73 with a fully diluted valuation approaching $69 billion — larger than Nasdaq Inc. itself. The decoupling is not subtle, and it is not an accident.

Binance has launched the OMS Toolkit, a dedicated integration and analytics layer for Order Management Systems and trading technology providers routing institutional and professional order flow through the exchange. The product is live today for both crypto-native platforms and traditional finance OMS operators.

The toolkit addresses a structural gap that has grown more visible as institutional participation in digital assets has matured. OMS and execution management platforms sit between the exchange and the end client, centralizing order routing, execution tracking, and reconciliation across fragmented liquidity venues. That intermediary position creates a problem: providers have historically had limited visibility into how their clients actually perform on individual venues, making it difficult to optimize workflows or justify product decisions with data. Binance OMS Toolkit attempts to solve that at the exchange level rather than pushing the burden onto the provider’s own analytics stack.

The National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA), a non-profit organization focused on helping Americans better understand and use cryptocurrency, has released its 2026 State of Crypto Holders Report, revealing continued acceleration in crypto adoption across the United States.

According to the report, more than 67 million Americans now own cryptocurrency, representing an increase of 12 million holders compared to 2025. The study, conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll, surveyed 10,000 U.S. cryptocurrency holders between February 12 and March 3, 2026.

The comparison between Ostium and traditional CFD brokers becomes more interesting when you stop treating it as a simple “DeFi versus TradFi” contrast and instead look at what each system is actually doing under the hood. Ostium Labs, the developer of the Ostium Labs protocol, is essentially trying to rebuild the user experience of CFD trading while changing where risk is held, how execution is sourced, and who ultimately controls custody. Traditional CFD brokers, by contrast, remain centralized intermediaries that internalize a large part of the flow, manage exposure on their own balance sheets, and operate within a comparatively opaque execution and risk framework.