Truth Blockchain

Volvo Group just quietly did something most Fortune 500 companies only talk about at conferences. The company built its own cryptocurrency.

Disclosed on July 15 during a Cardano Foundation interview, Volvo’s proprietary token is designed to facilitate payments and shared order ledgers between material suppliers and transport providers in Belgium. Ivan Branco, who oversees information management, AI, and analytics for Volvo’s logistics operations in Belgium, walked through the project’s mechanics and goals.

The token isn’t headed to Coinbase. It’s not launching on Uniswap. It exists inside a closed ecosystem, purpose-built to simplify the tangled web of multi-party transactions that define modern supply chains.

BNY is positioning itself as the institutional bridge between traditional finance and blockchain, connecting custody, payments, liquidity and tokenized assets.

If Stripe and Advent acquired PayPal, it could speed up the shift of capital moving onchain, argues Polygon Labs executive Aishwary Gupta.

William Blair analysts said the acquisition could strengthen Stripe’s stablecoin business, though they argued the benefit would likely be limited given PYUSD’s relatively small supply.

SWIFT, the messaging network that handles most of the world’s cross-border banking settlements, says it is ready to pilot a blockchain-based ledger for 24/7 tokenized payments. The system was first unveiled at Sibos in Frankfurt in September 2025 and reached the minimum viable product stage in just nine months. It also has 18 major banks preparing to test live transactions.

Participating institutions include ANZ (ANZ.AX), BNP Paribas (NASDAQ: BNPQF), BNY (NASDAQ: DMF), Citi (NASDAQ: C), DBS (NASDAQ: DBSDY), First Abu Dhabi Bank, FirstRand, HSBC (NASDAQ: HSBC), Itaú Unibanco (NASDAQ: ITUB), Lloyds (NASDAQ: LYG), Mashreq (MASQ.AE), MUFG (NASDAQ: MUFG), OCBC, Standard Bank (SGBLY), Standard Chartered (NASDAQ: SCBFF), UOB, and Wells Fargo (NASDAQ: WFC). More than 40 financial institutions were involved in the design phase, though the initial pilot group is smaller.

Chainalysis now supports Stable, a blockchain optimized for USDT payments, with automatic token integration and advanced tracking tools.

Chainalysis has announced full integration with Stable, a Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin payments and closely aligned with the Tether ecosystem. The partnership brings automatic token support to Chainalysis’ suite of tools, enabling seamless compliance and transaction monitoring for assets minted on Stable.

Blockchain.com has partnered with Polymarket, bringing prediction market trading directly into its brokerage app. The integration allows eligible Blockchain.com users to trade on real-world outcomes without moving funds to a separate prediction platform.

For the company’s 43 million verified users, event contracts become available alongside the digital assets they already hold and manage.

Jeremy Allaire believes AI agents and blockchain are converging into one economic system.

Traditional companies could become smaller and more modular, as specialized AI agents take over tasks across engineering, marketing, finance, legal, and customer support.

Stablecoins could become the preferred money for machine-to-machine commerce, offering programmable, always-on transfers with rapid settlement.

New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte helped make the state into one of the crypto-friendliest in the nation when she signed HB 639 into law last week.

Known as the The Blockchain Basic Laws act, the bill provides protections for cryptocurrency innovation and use in the state while also allowing for the creation of a special blockchain dispute docket in the superior court.

"With Governor Ayotte's signature on HB 639, New Hampshire has once again demonstrated that it intends to lead the nation in blockchain innovation," said New Hampshire Representative Keith Ammon, the bill’s primary sponsor, in a statement.

“The Blockchain Basic Laws protect one of the most fundamental rights in the digital economy—the right of individuals to control their own digital assets through self-custody,” he added. “They also provide clear legal protections for blockchain developers, miners, validators, entrepreneurs, and businesses building the next generation of financial technology.”

Japan's dominant digital asset issuance and management platform Progmat has completed its migration to the Avalanche blockchain.

According to a recent blog post, Progmat moved its entire security token platform — including all active tokenized assets worth over ¥452 billion (about $2.7 billion) — from a private, permissioned ledger based on Corda 5 to a dedicated public Avalanche Layer 1.

"Rather than a straight swap of one ledger for another, Progmat redesigned the underlying architecture so the platform is no longer tied to any specific blockchain, making it easier to facilitate a multi-chain platform as requirements evolve," the blog dated July 10 reads.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is to push beyond experimenting with blockchain-based digital payments through a tie-up that aims to make the technology a ‘regular part of programme delivery.’

The agency – the leading UN organisation focused on tackling poverty, inequality and climate change – has signed a new agreement with the Stellar Development Foundation that moves pre-existing joint-work on pilots towards establishing a ‘standing capability’ that UNDP country offices are able to use on an ongoing basis. Using blockchain has cut aid payment costs and boosted payment resilience, it states.

Over the past 16 months the two organisations have been researching digital payments’ use in 17 countries, implementing live pilots in Haiti, Syria, Kenya, Guatemala and The Gambia; as well as undertaking ‘working prototype’ development in Colombia and Papua New Guinea. The new agreement ‘shifts the focus from testing the technology in specific contexts to putting in place the institutional conditions under which it can be used at scale’, the UNDP states this week (6 July).

“We have shown that digital payments can reach the people that conventional systems miss, and in some of the hardest places to operate,” said Robert Pasicko, team leader at the UNDP Alternative Finance Lab (AltFinLab). “The work now is to make that capability ordinary, so that a country office can use it with confidence as part of how it already works, rather than treating each deployment as an experiment.”

Strategy's recent bitcoin sales and its formal BTC monetization program may be viewed by investors as a key risk to the crypto market, but that isn't the main risk for bitcoin, according to JPMorgan analysts.

Instead, the bigger threat comes from blockchain adoption that does not benefit public blockchains and their tokens, the analysts led by managing director Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou said in a report. If tokenization, payments, and settlement increasingly happen outside public crypto networks, the broader crypto ecosystem could face a "structural de-rating," see slower activity, lower liquidity, and weaker capital flows, eventually weighing on bitcoin.

"We do not see Strategy as the main structural threat to bitcoin," the analysts said. "In our view, the more important risk to bitcoin stems from the broader crypto ecosystem and from blockchain adoption within traditional finance continuing to develop in ways that bypass public permissionless networks."

SWIFT announced on July 9 that its blockchain-based shared ledger is ready for initial use, with 17 banks across six continents, including HSBC, Citi, UBS, BNY, Wells Fargo, Standard Chartered, and BNP Paribas, preparing to pilot 24/7 tokenized cross-border payments.

Publicly traded companies operating at the intersection of blockchain technology and interactive entertainment have delivered a notably strong earnings cycle, reflecting accelerating consumer engagement and expanding digital asset integration across their platforms. The results arrive against a backdrop of improving sentiment toward crypto-adjacent equities, driven by regulatory progress on stablecoins and rising institutional comfort with digital asset exposure. For investor relations professionals and analysts tracking this space, the numbers signal more than a seasonal bump — they reflect structural growth.

The breadth of outperformance spans platform-based gaming, iGaming, and sports betting operations, each drawing on digital payment infrastructure and in-app economies to generate higher per-user revenue. Companies that moved early to embed cryptocurrency functionality into their ecosystems are now reporting tangible margin advantages over peers that delayed adoption.

Major financial exchange Robinhood launched its own blockchain on July 1 to move stocks and bonds onchain. But the first breakout hit is a cat-themed token that's generated a fortune for early, lucky punters.

CASHCAT, a memecoin named after the mascot Robinhood used before it was Robinhood, has surged several hundred percent on Robinhood Chain in the past two days, the Arbitrum-based network the brokerage switched on at a London keynote billed "Robinhood Presents: The World Is Flat."

One early buyer spent $838 on 15.04 million tokens roughly three weeks ago and has since sold about 13.5 million of them for around $917,600, according to onchain data, with the remainder worth roughly $133,700 as of Asian afternoon hours Thursday. That is a return of about 1,250 times the original stake.

Swift rolls out new blockchain ledger to bring 24/7 banking to 17 global giants

HSBC, UBS, Wells Fargo and Citi are among the 17 banks now preparing to pilot live transactions using tokenized digital assets on Swift’s new blockchain payments platform.

SS&C announced that it is working on supporting regulated digital cash for the settlement of tokenized funds. Last year SS&C spent just over $1 billion acquiring fund distribution platform Calastone, one of the earliest adopters of blockchain technology in the asset management sector. SS&C is considered the largest third party transfer agent for mutual funds, and more than $45 trillion in assets run on its technology.

The announcement implied the plans are early stage, given it didn’t mention any particular stablecoins or tokenized deposit networks. Digital cash could support atomic settlement or delivery versus payment, thereby reducing settlement risk, and also make cross border investment transactions simpler. Digitally advanced asset managers such as Franklin Templeton already accept USDC for subscriptions to tokenized funds. On the cross border front, this echoes yesterday’s news that Japanese securities firms Daiwa and SBI are planning to use stablecoins to settle transactions by Singapore residents investing in Japanese tokenized asset.

Recent research from Citigroup and others has also concluded that quantum computing, along with artificial intelligence breakthroughs, has compressed the time frame in which cryptocurrencies will become widely vulnerable to hackers.

Acknowledging the risks the technology poses to the public and private sectors, U.S. President Donald Trump last month issued executive orders to bolster U.S. quantum capability.

Some crypto companies and blockchain developers are already drawing up plans to upgrade their networks with ‌quantum-resistant ​cryptography, a potentially years-long effort that could require sweeping changes to the infrastructure underpinning digital assets.

“It’s the most direct and existential threat ⁠towards cryptocurrencies and crypto networks,” said Chris Tam, head of ⁠quantum innovation at BTQ Technologies, which focuses on quantum security.