The Crypto Basic

Visa’s stablecoin-linked payments business is scaling rapidly, with the company now processing settlement activity at a pace equivalent to more than $20 billion annually.

The annualized settlement rate has increased more than 15-fold year over year, reflecting the broader expansion of stablecoin-powered card products across Visa’s network. During the company’s fiscal second quarter, Visa had more than 160 such programs live worldwide, with payment volume nearly tripling from the prior year.

Stablecoin Card Growth Creates a Financing Challenge

The rapid expansion of these programs has also created a working-capital challenge for some issuers.

Card providers generally need capital available to meet daily settlement payments, even though customer payments may not arrive until later. According to Visa, this timing mismatch can become particularly difficult for younger programs that require relatively small amounts of financing but need to access those funds frequently.

Conventional warehouse financing can be inefficient for businesses operating at that scale. As a result, Visa said access to appropriately structured working capital — rather than customer demand or payment-network capacity — can become the limiting factor for some emerging card programs.

Credit Coop Uses Settlement Receivables to Support Lending

Credit Coop and Visa have developed a financing model that seeks to address that gap through revolving credit denominated in stablecoins.

Settlement receivables back the borrowing arrangement. Visa’s daily settlement data helps determine funding needs, while Credit Coop’s Spigot system automates repayments.

As more lenders have grown willing to finance these arrangements, programs using them are securing funding on better terms. Visa said financing expenses have dropped by up to 30%.

Rain provides one example of how the structure has been deployed at scale. The Visa Principal Member began using the facility for its daily network settlement requirements in August 2023 and has financed roughly $2 billion through it to date.

That activity includes roughly 7,000 on-chain repayments across more than 2,000 borrowing transactions, with no recorded defaults.

Credit Coop Financing Volume Exceeds $2.5 Billion

Credit Coop’s cumulative financing volume since 2023 has surpassed $2.5 billion. The platform has processed over 9,000 on-chain repayments and facilitated more than 3,000 borrowing transactions.

Karta has also used Credit Coop financing while building its travel-card business before separately securing $140 million in new funding in June 2026.

The financing combined a $125 million institutional credit facility from Community Investment Management with $15 million in Series A funding, for which Galaxy Ventures served as the lead investor.

Visa also sees an opportunity to integrate settlement information directly into financing decisions. Giving lenders access to settlement data could enable same-day funding, with financing tailored to the net amount a card program owes during each settlement cycle.

Cronos reversed nearly two hours of blockchain history following the Aug. 30 Tectonic exploit, restoring balances tied to about $111.2 million of the incident’s $120.4 million exposure. 

Another $9.19 million had left the network before validators stopped block production and was therefore outside the scope of the rollback.

The Crypto.com-associated Layer 1 blockchain detailed its response in an incident review published Monday. According to Cronos, the exploit affected nine Tectonic lending markets and resulted in approximately $120.4 million being borrowed. 

Cronos Returns Chain to Pre-Exploit Checkpoint

Instead of continuing from where the network had been paused, validators resumed Cronos from block 90,896,188. Cronos described that height as the finalized checkpoint immediately preceding the exploit.

Restoring that earlier version of the ledger reversed changes associated with roughly $111.2 million in affected assets. However, the rollback was limited to activity recorded within the portion of the chain that was replaced. 

By the time validators suspended the chain at block 90,907,150, assets worth $9.19 million had already been moved beyond Cronos. The outstanding amount represents 7.6% of the total value affected by the exploit. 

Cronos said validators faced a choice between preserving the chain state recorded when block production stopped and recovering assets still exposed to the exploit. Continuing from the later state, according to the incident review, would have preserved the unauthorized borrowing rather than reversing it.

The recovery had consequences beyond the exploit itself. To restore the network to its pre-attack state, validators moved the chain back by 10,961 blocks, effectively reversing nearly two hours of blockchain history. That action also nullified activity processed within the reverted window, including transactions entirely unrelated to the Tectonic incident.

TONIC Price Manipulation Preceded $120.4M in Borrowing

Cronos said the exploit began after new contracts were deployed and TONIC’s market price surged sharply. TONIC is Tectonic’s governance token, and its relatively thin liquidity allowed the price movement to substantially increase the apparent value of the collateral being used in the protocol. 

Around 10 minutes after the manipulation began, the inflated collateral value was used to obtain approximately $120.4 million in loans across the affected markets. 

Roughly 36 minutes into the incident, the unusual on-chain behavior came to Cronos’ attention. Validators subsequently paused the network, stopping new block production while the teams involved coordinated their response.

Block production remained offline for approximately 11 hours before Cronos resumed operation from the earlier finalized checkpoint. 

Exchanges and Infrastructure Providers Reconcile Restored Chain

Bringing the blockchain back online did not immediately resolve the disruption for platforms connected to Cronos. The network said it continues to coordinate with exchanges, cross-chain bridges, and other affected service providers as they reconcile their systems with the restored ledger.

For users, Cronos said no action is currently necessary. Its blockchain explorer is accessible again, while public RPC infrastructure, indexing services, and subgraphs are functioning. 

Cronos’ incident review did not attribute the exploit to a named individual or group. It also left unresolved the ultimate recovery prospects for the $9.19 million that moved beyond the portion of blockchain history validators could reverse.

Hunter Biden is preparing to enter the memecoin market with LAPTOP, a token scheduled to launch Wednesday that will distribute part of its supply to investors who lost money on President Donald Trump’s Official Trump (TRUMP) cryptocurrency, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Hunter Biden, whose father is former U.S. President Joe Biden, revealed the $LAPTOP ticker on X on Monday. The project will have a total supply of one billion tokens, with 20% allocated to eligible recipients, including TRUMP investors who lost money, people on a mailing list, and Biden’s Substack subscribers, the Journal reported. 

The planned distribution connects the new token directly with one of Trump’s crypto ventures. TRUMP has lost roughly 97% of its value since hitting a record high in January 2025.

Token Burns Tied to Bitcoin, Politics and TRUMP Valuation

LAPTOP’s creators will retain a 30% share of the token supply and could later burn as much as three-tenths of all tokens in circulation if certain future milestones are reached, according to the report.

The triggers include a Bitcoin (BTC) setting a new record high, a Democratic candidate winning the 2028 U.S. presidential election, and LAPTOP achieving a fully diluted valuation greater than TRUMP’s.

Beyond its tokenomics, LAPTOP also draws directly on Biden’s political history. The token takes its name from Biden’s computer, which attracted intense public attention ahead of the 2020 presidential election as his father ran against Trump for the White House. The controversy surrounding the device has remained a recurring topic among conservative commentators. Biden has also filed two lawsuits alleging violations of his privacy rights stemming from the episode.

The project also comes as Biden has become more vocal about cryptocurrency and blockchain since his father left office in early 2025.

In August, Biden accused World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture backed by members of the Trump family, of corruption and described its activities as unprecedented in scope. He compared its conduct with that of the failed crypto exchange FTX and raised concerns about its connections with foreign governments, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

His broader position on the technology has been more favorable. In June, Biden said he considered decentralized digital currencies and blockchain to be an inevitable part of the future.

Liquid has regained control of 3,400 BTC after a weekend security incident drained nearly 4,000 BTC from the Bitcoin sidechain’s reserves.

The recovered coins were worth approximately $270 million at the time and make up about 85% of the Bitcoin removed during the incident. The federation wallet had held around 4,200 BTC beforehand, leaving only a fraction of its previous balance after the withdrawal.

The latest recovery does not account for all of the missing Bitcoin. Samson Mow, a former Blockstream executive and CEO of JAN3, said approximately 598 BTC remained with the actors behind the incident.

According to Mow, the large repayment followed progress in securing the affected infrastructure. Blockstream had confirmed that the necessary patch was in place on the relevant bridge nodes, while communication with the actors continued.

The return also restores most of the Bitcoin reserves lost during the episode. That matters because LBTC circulating on Liquid is designed to maintain verifiable one-for-one backing with BTC secured by the federation on Bitcoin’s mainchain.

Liquid, however, had not immediately resumed normal service. Updated software had been rolled out as federation participants coordinated the work needed to bring the sidechain back into operation.

Software Flaw Linked to Withdrawal

Details surrounding the incident point to Elements, rather than the theft of a SideSwap authorization credential, as the source of the problem.

The withdrawal passed through SideSwap’s peg-out service using its Peg-out Authorization Key. SideSwap and Liquid maintained that the credential remained secure. SideSwap said the L-BTC involved in the transaction instead stemmed from a vulnerability affecting Elements, the blockchain software on which Liquid is built.

Meanwhile, Blockstream opened a line of communication with the actors by exchanging cryptographically authenticated messages over Bitcoin. The group presented its actions as a security intervention rather than a theft.

Its proposal conditioned the release of most of the BTC on fixing the software flaw across the network. The actors wanted the vulnerability addressed and the relevant node software updated before releasing most of the coins.

Technical work continued even after the repayment. Mow said federation participants were implementing additional security measures and addressing a chain split as part of efforts to resume Liquid operations.

Users were also urged to wait before making new BTC peg-ins. Mow said Bitcoin should not be sent through that route until Liquid’s return to service had been officially confirmed, while indicating that no other action was required from users.

Remaining Bitcoin Puts White-Hat Label Under Scrutiny

The roughly 600 BTC that was not part of the main repayment has complicated the actors’ characterization of themselves as white hats.

Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet challenged that description, focusing on whether the retained coins might amount to compensation arranged during private blockchain-based communications.

In Guillemet’s view, retaining such a large amount as compensation under those circumstances would blur the line between a legitimate white-hat disclosure and coercion.

However, neither Liquid nor Blockstream has publicly confirmed that the remaining BTC was approved as compensation. Neither organization has announced repayment conditions or an agreed bounty covering those coins.