Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard may launch stablecoin platforms

The dwindling congressional calendar may spur a legislative competition for the crypto market structure bill to win Senate floor time against other priorities. What to know : As the crypto Clarity Act took a procedural step toward the U.S. Senate floor this week, the bill still faces serious roadblocks, including some contentious unfinished provisions and an extremely tight Senate window. About eight weeks remain on the Senate calendar before the chamber disperses for its summer break and an increasing focus on the politics of the midterm elections, and the bill may end up requiring as much as a week of that floor time. But a ton of big-ticket legislative competitors also need time on that schedule.

According to Fortune, crypto venture capital firm Variant has completed the fundraising of Variant 4, a fund with a scale of $222 million. The fund will focus on the early stages of investment projects, with a particular emphasis on autonomous applications that integrate AI and crypto. Jesse Walden, a partner, said that encryption would become the underlying infrastructure similar to the Internet, providing users and enterprises with higher autonomy and security through decentralized and contractual security architecture, and supporting the development of applications such as DeFi platform Uniswap and Morpho.

According to a social media post by the US European Command on the 3rd, US Department of Defense officials have informed allies that they will adjust the US contribution to the NATO force model based on the 2026 National Defense Strategy and the "NATO 3.0" vision.

[Kraken to Open U.S. Stock IPO Subscription Channel at Issue Price] According to The Block, Kraken's parent company Payward announced that in the coming weeks, it will open a subscription channel for U.S. listed company IPOs at issue price through the xStocks framework for Kraken users and users of select partner platforms. Users can submit non-binding subscription intentions, which Payward will aggregate and coordinate with the underwriting syndicate to allocate tokenized stock shares at the issue price on the listing day. The related stock tokens are backed 1:1 by underlying stocks held by a regulated entity and can circulate on chains such as Ethereum, Solana, and TON. Payward plans to expand into more markets and add more xStocks Alliance partners.

According to a post on the X platform by BitcoinTreasures.NET, Michael Saylor's Strategy has fallen out of the top 200 US companies in terms of market value, with a current market value of $47.9 billion, and its Bitcoin holdings have incurred losses exceeding $7.31 billion.