News linked to both this project and an event.
a Polymarket contract on Israel's prime ministerial election has surpassed $55 million in trading volume, with Gadi Eisenkot at a 55% probability of winning and Benjamin Netanyahu at 29%. Eisenkot, a former Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces and current leader of the Yashar party, is the subject of a contract on who will become prime minister following the parliamentary election on October 27, 2026.Traditional polling shows Eisenkot's bloc leading Netanyahu's bloc by 6 seats, but no single party currently holds a majority. The Israel Democracy Institute has called on the Central Elections Committee to treat prediction market odds as polling and to restrict the publication of related results before elections. (Bitcoin.com News)
According to CryptoBriefing, Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson stated at the TOKEN2049 Singapore conference that most competing tokenized funds on the market are merely "digital twins" of traditional products and do not truly leverage the efficiency advantages of blockchain. In contrast, Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund uses a public blockchain as its native ledger layer, supports per-second yield accrual, and incurs transaction costs of just $1.13 per trade, far lower than the approximately $150 typical of traditional methods.
Odaily News: Nonprofit financial reform advocacy group Better Markets stated that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)'s plan to bring certain cryptocurrency trading and exchanges under its regulatory purview could give retail investors weaker protections than those under the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The CFTC has solicited public comments on a framework for margin, leverage, or financing in retail crypto trading.Benjamin Schiffrin, Director of Securities Policy at Better Markets, noted that the CFTC lacks an investor protection mandate, and its statutory authority was originally designed to address fraud in leveraged precious metals trading, which does not justify making it the primary regulator of retail crypto trading. He also said the proposed framework could allow the kind of interrelated market participants that were seen as contributing to FTX's collapse.After the CLARITY Act stalled in Congress, the CFTC and SEC have continued to advance crypto policy under existing law. The CFTC plans to establish a new federal category to bring qualifying crypto trading platforms directly under regulation; the SEC, meanwhile, has proposed relaxing certain investment adviser custody rules, allowing limited tokenized trading of U.S. equities, and issuing new guidance on how securities laws apply to crypto assets. (Cointelegraph)
Odaily News: Goldman Sachs' $100 billion treasury fund FTIXX has launched on Lynq as the first external fund, providing institutional digital asset companies with access to a traditional treasury fund.Unlike BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's BENJI, FTIXX will not be tokenized, with Lynq serving merely as a new distribution channel for the existing fund. Lynq clients can park cash in FTIXX between trades to earn yield until the funds are needed for other purposes. (CoinDesk)
Odaily News: Recent Bitcoin volatility has triggered a wave of leveraged long position liquidations. On August 22, hourly liquidations reached $529 million, with long positions accounting for $478 million; on August 23, an additional $84 million in crypto long positions were liquidated within one hour.Prediction market Kalshi launched the first spot Bitcoin perpetual futures contract approved by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on June 3, with liquidations reaching $5.5 billion in the first two weeks. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour stated that the product offers U.S. institutions regulated onshore perpetual contract trading.Benjamin Schiffrin, Director of Securities Policy at Better Markets, pointed out that perpetual futures are high-risk crypto products for retail investors, and the CFTC did not impose additional investor protections when approving them. Analysis account Qmo noted that there are significant Bitcoin long liquidation pools in the $62,000 to $67,000 range; trader Money Bunny disclosed that short liquidations reached $2.7 billion to $3.5 billion within 24 hours. (Forbes Digital Assets)
According to Cryptopolitan, data from the on-chain data platform DefiLlama shows that as of August 18, the active deposit size of Real World Assets (RWA) in DeFi protocols has reached $3.98 billion, representing an approximately 6-fold increase compared to $651 million a year ago; three years ago, this figure was only $12 million. The current total issuance of tokenized RWA is $34.55 billion, but the actual on-chain utilization rate is only about 11.5%. Of this, private credit accounts for over half of the active total with $2.13 billion, bonds contribute $799 million, and reinsurance contributes $406 million. In contrast, the utilization rate of tokenized treasury bonds is extremely low—BlackRock BUIDL issuance reaches $2.74 billion, but on-chain deployment is only $18 million, with a utilization rate of only 0.66%; Franklin Templeton BENJI utilization rate is zero. Analysis points out that such products are designed specifically for institutional cash management, where holders pursue treasury yields rather than lending capabilities; tokenization only improves settlement efficiency and does not convert them into collateral.
OdailyOdailyOdaily News: The Wisconsin Election Commission has stated that residents who purchase contracts related to a specific election on Kalshi or Polymarket may lose their eligibility to vote in that same election. The Commission also noted that knowingly voting without being eligible could constitute a Class I felony. The Commission unanimously approved a legal memorandum regarding prediction markets during a meeting on July 9, and issued a statewide notice on Tuesday. The restrictions apply only to the corresponding election and do not automatically affect a trader's voting eligibility in other unrelated elections. Benjamin Freeman, Head of Election Business at Kalshi, stated that the guidance is "clearly unconstitutional and unlawful," adding that the company has hundreds of thousands of users in Wisconsin alone. Robert DeNault, Head of Enforcement and Legal Counsel at Kalshi, said that election markets certified by the CFTC and offered on federally regulated exchanges are legal. A spokesperson for Polymarket stated that the company would respond to the Commission's claims through appropriate legal proceedings. Both companies argue that their products are tradable financial contracts, not gambling.
investigative journalist Whitney Webb has published a series of articles on the origins and ambitions of Polymarket, questioning its official founding narrative.Whitney Webb stated that Polymarket's official claim that "Shayne Coplan founded the company alone in 2020, starting it in a bathroom" is not true. She believes that Polymarket's origins can be traced back to an earlier company, TokenBnk, and that it is linked to a crypto company founded by the nephew and niece of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Webb also stated that Polymarket is essentially a product of Peter Thiel and his team's attempt to revive the Pentagon's early controversial project, the Policy Analysis Market (PAM). This project was previously cancelled due to controversy, and Polymarket can be seen as its "privatized rebirth."
on July 1, 2026, STBL launched the institution-grade stablecoin USST on the Stellar network. This stablecoin is backed by real-world assets, with the initial minting collateral being the tokenized Treasury bill USDY. USST is built on STBL's Stablecoin 2.0 infrastructure, allowing market participants to deposit eligible real-world assets, such as tokenized Treasury bills or money market funds, to mint USST. It supports settlement, collateral liquidity, and cross-border payments. STBL plans to add Franklin Templeton's BENJI as a second collateral option but has not yet set a date for the BENJI collateral integration, nor has it disclosed the initial minting size of USST on Stellar.