ICE Backs OKX at $25B for Tokenized NYSE as Q2 Crypto Hacks Top $755M

Crypto News

Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, has taken a minority stake that values OKX at $25 billion and secured a board seat at the crypto venue. The two firms plan a joint venture offering regulated access to tokenized NYSE-listed equities and ICE futures, pending U.S. broker-dealer and futures commission merchant approvals. More than 120 million OKX users would gain a pathway to traditional markets through a familiar interface, with rollout targeted for the second half of 2026. As part of the deal, ICE will license OKX spot crypto prices to build its own U.S.-regulated crypto futures products, deepening the bridge between Wall Street and digital-asset rails.

The Bank of England has scrapped its proposed holding caps for sterling-backed stablecoins, replacing them with a temporary £40 billion ($52.9 billion) ceiling on how much any single systemic coin can be issued. The earlier plan would have limited individuals to £20,000 and businesses to £10 million per coin, drawing complaints from issuers. Under the draft Code of Practice, backing must sit 70% in short-term UK government debt and 30% at the central bank. The shift leaves Britain as the only major economy capping issuance of a coin in its own currency, even as it targets a 2027 framework rollout.

The second quarter of 2026 has become the most-hacked period on record by incident count, with 83 exploits draining roughly $755.3 million from crypto protocols ranging from bridges to DeFi lending markets, on-chain data shows. Cross-chain bridges emerged as the costliest attack vector, accounting for $351 million in stolen value. A single LayerZero OFT bridge exploit behind the $293 million KelpDAO breach represented more than 38% of quarterly losses, while Drift Protocol lost $280 million in a separate incident. The tally still trails the $3.56 billion lost in the fourth quarter of 2020, suggesting attacks are growing more frequent even as aggregate damages stay below earlier peaks.

A review of more than 1,100 promotional videos has found that none of the roughly $1.9 million in wagers displayed on the prediction-market platform Polymarket were real. Dozens of mostly college-age creators were paid to film staged bets, and occasionally fake wins, on near-identical copies of the site, including one celebrating a fabricated $100,000 payout. Across 118 clips, creators touted nearly $900,000 in winnings on positions that would actually have lost more than $166,000. The clippers earned roughly $2,000 to $3,000 a month and were told not to disclose the arrangement. The campaign targeted U.S. users, who remain barred from the main platform.

Euro-denominated trading represents only about 1% of Binance's global spot volume, leaving the exchange's broad geographic base largely insulated as Europe's licensing deadline looms. Daily EUR-pair turnover has ranged from $100 million to $250 million in 2026, with occasional spikes above $600 million. The figures surface as Greek regulators are reportedly preparing to reject Binance's application ahead of the Markets in Crypto-Assets transitional deadline on July 1. Rivals Coinbase, Kraken and Bitvavo have already secured MiCA authorization and can passport services across the bloc. Estimates suggest only around 210 of more than 1,200 firms operating under pre-MiCA regimes have obtained full authorization.

Japan's Nikkei 225 closed at a record 72,353.96 on Monday, climbing 1.55% after an intraday peak above 72,800 and posting an all-time high that added some $156 billion in market value. The rally spread across Asia, with South Korea's KOSPI and China's SSE Composite both advancing. The yen moved the other way, softening to 161.7 per dollar and approaching the 161.96 mark that would mark its weakest level since 1986. Tokyo has spent a record ¥11.73 trillion ($73.4 billion) defending the currency through late May, while the Bank of Japan lifted its benchmark rate to 1%, the highest since 1995, with little effect on the slide.

Taken together, these developments sketch a market splitting along two lines: institutional infrastructure is maturing rapidly while operational and regulatory risks stay unresolved. ICE's OKX stake and Britain's stablecoin rulebook show traditional finance and sovereign regulators racing to absorb digital assets, even as the record hack tally and the Polymarket revelations expose persistent trust gaps. COINOTAG's aggregate market data frames the caution: the Fear & Greed Index sits at 20, deep in Extreme Fear, Bitcoin dominance holds near 70%, and total crypto market capitalization stands around $1.87 trillion. With macro stress visible in the yen's 40-year lows, capital is consolidating into majors rather than chasing altcoins.