Wall Street Moves Into Crypto's Neighborhood While Bitcoin Naps 🏦😴

Welcome back to your Monday round-up, guys.

Funny week. Crypto spent the last few years begging Wall Street to take it seriously, and now that the suits are finally showing up en masse, Bitcoin has decided this is the perfect moment to lie down and take a nap near $64K. 

The NYSE's parent company is building plumbing into a crypto exchange, Charles Schwab wants in on the prediction-market action, and the Bank of England just blinked on stablecoins. 

Meanwhile, the actual coins are flat and the ETFs are quietly leaking money for the sixth week straight.

So the party's getting crowded, the host is asleep, and Michael Saylor is in the corner counting his cash. Let's get into it.

Here are the highlights:

• ICE (Yes, the NYSE One) and OKX Launch a Joint Venture to Put Wall Street On-Chain
• Charles Schwab Crashes the Prediction-Market Party with S&P 500 "Yes or No" Bets
• Bank of England Backs Down on Stablecoin Holding Caps, Sets a £40B Issuance Ceiling
• Spot Bitcoin ETFs Bleed for a Sixth Straight Week as BTC Goes Sideways
• Saylor's Strategy Slows the Bitcoin Buying to Stack a $1.4B Cash War Chest

ICE and OKX Launch a Joint Venture to Put Wall Street On-Chain

Intercontinental Exchange — the company that literally owns the New York Stock Exchange — just formalised a 50/50 joint venture with crypto exchange OKX, building on the minority stake it took back in March that valued OKX at a cool $25 billion. The plan: a US-registered broker-dealer and futures commission merchant that, pending regulatory approval, will pipe ICE futures and tokenised NYSE equities straight to OKX's 120 million users. In plain English, OKX users could soon trade blockchain-wrapped versions of real NYSE-listed stocks from inside a crypto app, with a rollout eyed for the second half of 2026. Oh, and the venture is being co-chaired by former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, which is its own kind of plot twist. This is TradFi and crypto merging in real time, and ICE is making it clear it doesn't want to be left behind. Read More

Charles Schwab Crashes the Prediction-Market Party

Taking dead aim at crypto-native platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, Charles Schwab is teaming up with Cboe Global Markets to offer binary options on the S&P 500 — simple "yes or no" contracts that pay a fixed amount if the index closes above or below a set level, and nothing if you're wrong. There's also a "Plus Zone" feature in the works that hands you a partial payout if your call was directionally right but your target was off. Notably, Schwab is steering clear of sports, politics and entertainment bets, sticking to financial outcomes only — a tidy way to dodge the legal headaches Kalshi and Polymarket are currently tangled in. It's a real about-face for CEO Rick Wurster, who as recently as December said prediction markets weren't high on Schwab's list. With ~$13 trillion in client assets behind it, Schwab joining the party is a big deal for event-based trading going mainstream. Read More

Bank of England Backs Down on Stablecoin Holding Caps

Score one for the industry. The Bank of England published its final draft rules for systemic sterling stablecoins on Monday and quietly scrapped its most-hated proposal: the plan to cap individuals at £20,000 and businesses at £10 million per coin. Those limits are gone. In their place sits a single, temporary "issuance guardrail" of £40 billion (around $53 billion) per systemic stablecoin — meant to stop money fleeing bank deposits too fast, and set to be reviewed and eventually removed. The BoE also softened reserve rules, now letting issuers park up to 70% of backing in short-term UK government debt (up from 60%), with the rest at the central bank. Issuers still can't pay interest, must back coins 1:1, and have to honour redemptions within 24 hours. Feedback closes in September, with regulated sterling stablecoins expected to go live from 2027. Read More

Spot Bitcoin ETFs Bleed for a Sixth Straight Week

While everyone else throws parties, the ETF money keeps quietly walking out the door. US spot Bitcoin ETFs just notched their sixth consecutive week of net outflows, with roughly $6.35 billion pulled over the trailing 30 days. Bitcoin itself has been stuck in the mud, range-bound around the $64,000 mark for weeks — though it did nudge back toward $65K on Monday after the US and Iran reported "encouraging progress" in Switzerland and signalled the Strait of Hormuz blockade could finally lift. The Fear & Greed Index has been camped in "Extreme Fear" the entire month. Translation: retail's twitchy, institutions are trimming, and the market's waiting for a real reason to wake up. Read More

Saylor's Strategy Slows the Buying to Build a $1.4B War Chest

Michael Saylor's Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) bought just 520 BTC last week for about $35 million — roughly two-thirds less than the prior week's 1,587 coins. The interesting part isn't the buy, it's the restraint: Strategy raised $335.5 million selling MSTR stock but spent less than 11% of it on Bitcoin, funnelling the rest into a USD reserve that now sits at $1.4 billion. That cash cushion exists to keep paying dividends on its preferred shares (STRC), which have been wobbling — dipping below $83 to a record low last week before recovering. The company now holds 847,363 BTC and, at current prices, is sitting roughly $9.8 billion underwater on its cost basis. Saylor being Saylor, he's not flinching — but the slower pace and the growing cash pile suggest even the most relentless buyer is keeping one eye on the door. Read More

Other Highlights Worth Mentioning

• Ethereum's Most Notorious "Sandwich" Bot, Jaredfromsubway.eth, Gets Tricked and Drained for $7.5M in Karmic Honeypot – CoinDesk
• Ex-Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky Hit With Permanent CFTC Trading Ban in Final Resolution – Decrypt
• Franklin Templeton Files for ETFs That Funnel Stock Dividends Into Bitcoin – Decrypt
• CME Group Sues the CFTC Over Its Approval of Kalshi's First US Perpetual Futures – The Block
• Microsoft Uncovers "Crypto Clipper" Malware That Hijacks Wallets and Spreads via USB Sticks – CoinDesk

COINIGY FACT OF THE DAY

On this day in 2021, Bitcoin broke below $30,000 for the first time since January as China's mining crackdown went into overdrive.

June 22, 2021 capped a brutal week: after Sichuan ordered miners to pull the plug and the People's Bank of China leaned on banks and Alipay to cut off crypto services, an estimated 90% of China's mining capacity went dark and the network's hashrate nearly halved. Around $400 billion was wiped off the total crypto market in a matter of days. The great miner exodus that followed reshaped the map — sending machines to Texas, Kazakhstan and beyond. Learn More

COINIGY MEME OF THE WEEK