Withdrawals from cryptocurrency exchange BitMart appeared to sluggish down after it announced plans to wind down its operations.

On Monday, the Lookonchain Blockchain Analytical Account reported that just 58 wallets cashed out approximately $805,000 in 24 hours. He added that the exchange had not processed any withdrawals in the last eight hours it monitored.

X users also continued to report difficulty stopping the drug. One user he said received an email stating that their USDT withdrawal was completed, even though the transaction had not been processed and their account showed an on-chain withdrawal freeze message. Another user he said the $30 test withdrawal remained pending for more than 30 minutes. These are individual claims and cannot be verified.

A key test will be BitMart’s ability to efficiently refund customer funds he promised “orderly” liquidation and may determine whether the decline in confidence develops into a broader frenzy of withdrawal.

BitMart previously said withdrawals remain available, but warned that requests may be subject to additional compliance and security checks, including reviews of customer identities, login devices, withdrawal addresses, transaction history and sources of funds. The exchange may also request proof of identity, address, source of funds or ownership of the receiving wallet.

Cointelegraph reached out to BitMart for comment but did not receive a response prior to publication.

BitMart token extends decline as exchange prepares to close

On Sunday, BitMart announced it would stop accepting up-to-date registrations and deposits, while also limiting up-to-date spot orders and futures positions. The end of trading services is scheduled for August 26, and the platform will completely cease operations on January 31, 2027.

Arkham-identified wallets assigned to BitMart held about $69 million in crypto assets on Monday, up from about $102 million on July 6.

Related: Storj files for bankruptcy and explores a capital path for token holders

BitMart’s BMX token in circulation According to CoinGecko, the price was close to $0.057 on Monday, down about 81.5% in seven days. Slow Friday, before the exchange’s close was made public, the token was trading at around $0.31.

BMX token 24-hour chart. Source: CoinGecko

The closure also sparked debate over whether larger exchanges could acquire smaller competitors.

Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao he said acquiring a centralized exchange was more complicated than buying other companies because buyers could inherit security vulnerabilities, including backdoors left by previous teams. He added that takeovers are still possible but require greater scrutiny.

Warehouse: Why Australia’s $17 billion crypto opportunity depends on regulation

Layer 1 blockchain Dango will cease operations, halting trading on its perpetual decentralized exchange (DEX) on Wednesday and shutting down its network on August 13.

“Despite our best efforts, for various reasons we have concluded that there is no viable path to sustained commercial success” – Dango he said in the announcement from Friday

Dango founder, Larry Liu in addition that the team faced cash shortages, legal challenges that slowed momentum, the loss of team members and broader market conditions.

Dango fired on its main network in January, after raising $3.6 million in a 2024 seed round led by Hack VC and Lemniscap. This unfolded its perpetual DEX in April, only to suffer losses of approximately $410,000 to exploit days after launch. The attacker later refunded the funds in exchange for a bug bounty.

Related: BitMEX filed a lawsuit for 623 BTC on the day the closure was announced

Dango’s open interest dwarfs Hyperliquid, Aster

According to DefiLlama, the total value of Dango is locked cut from a peak of about $4.5 million in early May to about $1.6 million before the announcement.

The perp DEX market is increasingly competitive and dominated by a few platforms.

As of Saturday, Hyperliquid had more than $11 billion in open interest, representing the value of outstanding futures contracts that have not been closed.

Perp DEX Ranking by Open Interests. Source: DefiLlama

Only Aster and Variational have open-ended funds worth more than $1 billion. Dango had almost $391,000 in open wallets.

CoinGecko stated in its second quarter industry report that on July 1, Hyperliquid became the second largest perpetual exchange thanks to open interest, behind Binance.

Summer of downtime in cryptocurrencies

Dango’s shutdown adds to a growing list of cryptocurrency platform shutdowns in July, including 11-year-old perpetual futures pioneer BitMEX.

Restructuring advisor Roshan Dharia told Cointelegraph that BitMEX’s closure reflects the structural pressures facing mid-market centralized exchanges, where liquidity is increasingly concentrated among the industry’s largest players and compliance costs continue to rise.

“The top five platforms now control an estimated 80% of global spot volume, leaving mid-tier and regional exchanges with shrinking margins and no viable path to scale,” Dharia said.

Other recent closures include DEX aggregator Odos Protocol and DEX perpetrator Satori Finance.

Warehouse: Quantum Roadmap Would Push Bitcoin Much Higher: Charles Edwards

Perpetual Decentralized Exchange (DEX) Hyperliquid’s weekly tokenized real asset (RWA) trading volume exceeded the combined volume of all other asset classes for the first time.

According to Blockworks, RWA assets generated $25.1 billion in trading volume from July 13 to July 19, representing 52% of Hyperliquid’s total weekly volume of $48.2 billion data.

“The RWA Hyperliquid market alone was larger than the total cryptocurrency volume of every other DEX,” wrote ARK Invest’s research director for digital assets, Lorenzo Valente, in Thursday’s issue of X post.

This milestone reflects the growing demand for tokenized assets on Hyperliquid. Over the past month, the number of RWA holders increased by 32% to 1.25 million users, while the total value of tokenized RWAs increased by 3.5% to $36.7 billion, According to to the RWA.xyz data aggregator.

Last week, Hyperliquid generated $7.6 million in revenue, According to to DefiLlam. The DEX culprit ranked third among crypto apps in terms of weekly revenue, behind stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, which generated $112 million and $45 million, respectively.

Hyperliquid: Perpetual Futures volume, 2-year chart. source: Blockworks

Related: Hyperliquid launches markets for predicting real-world events

Major ‘structural change’ in cryptocurrency markets: Circle co-founder

Crypto companies and conventional financial institutions have expanded their offering of tokenized assets, bringing more financial assets to the blockchain network. In March, the NYSE partnered with tokenization platform Securitize to develop a blockchain-based stock trading infrastructure enabling 24/7 trading and settlement.

Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire he said growing RWA trading on Hyperliquid marks a “major structural shift” in cryptocurrency markets, moving “away from speculation in endogenous digital goods” – in X’s Friday post.

In early July, Pantera Capital stated that perpetual futures could become the dominant trading instrument outside of cryptocurrencies because perps offer structural advantages over conventional derivatives, including 24/7 trading, no contract expiration, simpler position management, and continuous price discovery.

Hyperliquid’s development has caught the attention of Wall Street institutions, including Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the Novel York Stock Exchange, whose CEO, Jeffrey Sprecher, has urged regulators to create a “level playing field” in launching 24-hour futures contracts in the supply chain.

Warehouse: How Hong Kong is turning tokenized bonds into real market infrastructure

According to Hacken, institutional investors are moving beyond shrewd contract audits after conventional trust signals such as past audits and operational history failed to predict which crypto projects would be used.

In its Q2 2026 Security and Compliance Report, Hacken found that only 9% of the 1,427 projects tracked were monitored by third parties, while 4% combined monitoring with busy bug bounty and security auditing. The report highlighted that compromised keys, signers and infrastructure accounted for 88.3% of the approximately $764 million stolen in the quarter.

Hacken said projects that cannot provide continuous evidence of operational security may have greater perceived risk, reduced investment and more challenging access to insurance or contractors.

The report’s authors included Federico Bagiotti, head of the risk management group at Abraxas Capital, who said that “inadequate security in relation to the capital at risk” was the signal that most often led a company to reject an otherwise attractive position. Rajeev Bamra, head of digital economy strategy at Moody’s Ratings, said operational resilience has become a “practical lens” through which institutions assess security, compliance and governance.

Safety checks among those reviewed. source: Hacken

Operational security becomes an allocation test

The report indicates that institutional due diligence is beginning to take into account changes in the composition of signatories, safeguards in the form of safeguards, dependencies on third parties, readiness to respond to incidents, and the scope and timeliness of audits. Abraxas said it now explicitly checks for time locks, payout address whitelisting, multi-party checks, and single-key or single-verifier dependencies.

This change also appeared in regulatory and industry analysis. In a July 10 Cointelegraph report, BitGo’s chief operating officer, Jody Mettler, said institutional clients began asking more specific questions about custody providers’ access controls, incident response and business continuity as European regulators examined operational resiliency under the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).

Related: Cryptocurrency hacks dropped by 47% in the first half of the year, but the ecosystem is no safer: CertiK

Hacken said 14 projects used in the second quarter had previously been audited. However, most of the losses resulted from areas outside the scope of conventional shrewd contract reviews. Affected surfaces included signing devices, bridge validators, back-end infrastructure, administrative keys, and legacy contracts that remained busy despite their obsolescence.

The dataset included 1,427 projects with a market capitalization above $1 million, sampled from assets listed on the 50 largest centralized exchanges according to CoinGecko Trust Score. Hacken excluded wrapped assets, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. Its data relied on publicly observable and disclosed controls, meaning private findings may not be captured.

Warehouse: Ethereum’s WSE may drag other blockchains into its orbit

The supply of yielding stablecoins fell by more than $3.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026, reversing nearly three years of quarterly growth as crypto products declined and treasury-backed tokens rose.

CEX.IO cryptocurrency exchange reported As of Thursday, the category was down 15% in the second quarter. SUSDe Etheny lost 52% of its supply, losing almost $2 billion, while sUSDS Sky fell 16%.

Treasury-backed products moved in the opposite direction. BlackRock’s BUIDL index rose 2%, USYC Circle rose almost 16% and Ondo Finance’s USDY rose more than 66%, highlighting the widening divide between cryptocurrency yielding assets and time-honored asset-based products.

The divergence emerged as the broader stablecoin market posted its first quarterly decline since the third quarter of 2023, according to CEX.io. Total supply fell to $312 billion in the second quarter, while adjusted transaction volume fell 5.5%.

Supply growth per quarter, CEX.io summary. Source: CEX.io

The stablecoin slowdown deepens following weaker signals from the first quarter

The decline in the second quarter marks a keen reversal since the beginning of 2026. In the first quarter, stablecoin supply increased by approximately $8 billion to a record $315 billion, with yield products being the main drivers of the growth.

However, signs of weakening organic demand appeared already at the beginning of the year. In the first quarter, retail transfers declined by 16%, while automated activity accounted for approximately 76% of stablecoin transaction volume.

The slowdown continued throughout the second quarter. According to CEX.io, the total number of stablecoin transactions fell by 530 million to 4.48 billion, the largest quarterly decline on record. However, transfers under $250 rose 5% to $19.39 billion, suggesting that smaller peer-to-peer payments were more resilient than larger automated and trade flows.

Related: Financial firms team up for dollar stablecoin, preserving reserve profits

The decline occurs due to weaker activity on the cryptocurrency market

The decline in stablecoins also adds to broader concerns about weakening activity in cryptocurrency markets. On Wednesday, institutional data provider Talos identified falling stablecoin supply along with Bitcoin (BTC) outflows from exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and slower Bitcoin purchases by Strategy as three key demand channels that weakened in the second quarter.

Tanay Ved, senior research fellow at Talos, told Cointelegraph that the recovery in stablecoin supply will signal “the return of fresh capital to the ecosystem on a broader basis” and aid maintain onchain liquidity.

Ved said spot fund flows in the ETF market remain the most critical demand channel to watch because they tend to reflect longer-lasting changes in institutional appetite. However, he added that ETF flows, corporate Bitcoin purchases and stablecoin supply often go hand in hand when market dynamics change.

Warehouse: Japanese pension fund tips 1% in cryptocurrencies, G7 calls for action against hackers NK: Asia Express

Most cryptocurrency investors are still obsessed with price charts. However, in 2026, an increasing part of the focus will shift back to improving the fundamentals of the protocols.

Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche are preparing some of the biggest protocol updates in years, while the Base Coinbase network implemented a tough fork of Beryl last Friday in an effort to streamline the network, with a native token standard and shorter payout windows.

However, Bitcoin’s development remains frozen, and developers are still arguing over controversial proposals for agreements and improvements in post-quantum computing.

Tim Sun, senior researcher at Hong Kong-based asset manager HashKey Group, told Cointelegraph that protocol updates in the past have focused on adding features, speed and bandwidth.

However, he said that in 2026, the focus will shift to reliability, predictable management and institutional-level infrastructure that can support large-scale financial utilize cases.

Here are the top five blockchain improvements worth watching in the second half of 2026.

Ethereum: Glamsterdam

Glamsterdam is probably the most consistent update this year and is already being tested with developers. According to Ethereum’s public roadmap, Glamsterdam is expected to improve scalability, strengthen Layer 1, and make the network easier to utilize, with mainnet launch expected in the second half of 2026.

Sun said the update should improve processing speeds by allowing more transactions to be processed simultaneously, enhance capacity so Ethereum can handle more data with greater bandwidth, and reduce database bloat. These changes should make the network better suited to stablecoin settlements and real-world asset utilize cases, he said.

Related: The hated Ethereum staking “tax” may already be obsolete

Holly Atkinson, chief product and technology officer at 1inch, told Cointelegraph that Glamsterdam is seen by many as the most significant upgrade to Ethereum since The Merge in September 2022, when the blockchain transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake.

Glamsterdam. Source: Ethereum.org

She said a key change is enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS), as most validators still depend on a tiny set of specialized builders and relayers who concentrate control over ordering transactions.

This setup increases maximum extractable value (MEV), the risk of censorship and centralization, she said. ePBS is designed to re-incorporate block building and proposal submission into the protocol, making the process more crystal clear and accountable.

Pavan Kaur is a Solana Foundation judge and founder of RuleSpark, a compliance mechanism for digital asset marketing. She told Cointelegraph that ePBS is better understood as one step in a broader Ethereum roadmap and does not eliminate MEV or fully address builder centralization. “Practices such as sandwich attacks may therefore be migrating rather than disappearing,” she said.

Solana: Alpenglow

Solana’s biggest change this year is Alpenglow, a consensus-based update that changes the underlying network protocol. Alpenglow was charged by many, including Solana ecosystem leader David Liang, as “the most significant improvement to network consensus to date.”

After being dominant approved as part of the governance process in September 2025. Alpenglow remains in development, but it is what it is expected will ship with the Agave 4.1 validator client release later in 2026.

Arun Krishnakumar, vice president of institutional capital at enterprise software firm R3, told Cointelegraph that Alpenglow will be a major tailwind that will further strengthen the “internet capital markets” thesis.

Solana network updates. source: Solana

At its core is Alpenglow designed dramatically accelerate the speed at which the network reaches its end state. Instead of relying on Solana’s existing TowerBFT-based consensus mechanism, it introduces a redesigned system built around a recent voting component called Votor.

Related: Solana Treasury Companies Oppose Forward Industries’ Consolidation Push

The practical effect is a significant reduction in confirmation times, with the final result expected to be around 100–150 milliseconds under optimal conditions, compared to the current around 12.8 seconds.

In addition to speed, the update also removes on-chain voting transactions, which currently account for a significant portion of network activity. By streamlining the way validators communicate and agree on the state of the chain, Alpenglow aims to make Solana lighter and more effective under load.

Hadley Stern, board director of DeFi Development Corp, told Cointelegraph that the removal of supply chain voting transactions is a “real story” for institutional allocators because it “cleans up the economics of the validator and provides reliable telemetry, which matters when you underwrite SOL as a treasury asset.”

He said a network that can migrate its consensus layer as cleanly as planned would demonstrate what kind of “legacy financial infrastructure with regulated adaptability cannot match.”

Base: beryllium

The Beryl tough fork of Base launched on Friday after a brief sequencer-related outage when block production stopped for about two hours as a result of a bad block that caused a fleeting consensus error.

Co-founder of the database Jesse Pollak he said The incident had no impact on user funds. He stressed that “all funds are safe”, added that “the detention is not okay” and said the lessons learned from the episode will be used to further strengthen Base as a “24/7 global finance” platform.

Jesse Pollak talks about stopping the chain. Source: Jesse Pollak

According to Base documentation, Beryl to introduce a number of changes aimed at tightening network performance and reducing friction at the edges. These include a native B20 token standard, a reduction in the payout period from seven to five days, and integration with Reth V2, which is expected to reduce storage requirements on nodes while improving execution efficiency.

Related: Coinbase resumes block production after a 2-hour break

Sun said Base is moving toward a more unified “stack” approach, providing greater control over how the network is built and modernized and enabling changes to be made more quickly than the earlier Optimism Superchain model.

The trade-off is that liquidity that once flowed more freely within the broader Superchain ecosystem may become more fragmented, even as Base deepens its integration with Coinbase’s broader user base.

Avalanche: octane

Avalanche’s next chapter is not about a single-brand tough fork, but a broader effort to improve performance while courting institutions and issuers of tokenized assets.

Sun told Cointelegraph that Avalanche’s recent Etna tough fork replaced the ancient subnet model with Avalanche L1 sovereign ones, reducing the cost of launching a dedicated blockchain by over 99% and making the network more attractive to institutional players.

In this respect it has already been successful. Sun pointed to Progmat, which he believes accounts for about 63% of Japan’s national security token market emigrated over $2 billion in tokenized assets to the dedicated Avalanche L1, as well as the Avalanche Payments Collective backed by companies such as Franklin Templeton, VanEck and WisdomTree.

Progmat is moving over $2 billion of its tokenized securities to Avalanche. source: avalanche

Atkinson said Avalanche is also rolling out two updates aimed at making its C-Chain one of the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environments.

Related: Avalanche Treasury Falls 16% After Nasdaq Debut

She described asynchronous streaming execution as a way to decouple transaction execution from consensus, allowing the chain to run more continuously and capacity closer to normal demand. For users, she said, the practical effect should be more bandwidth and lower, more stable fees during periods of high activity.

Bitcoin: OP_CAT

Bitcoin is an exception here, as its biggest changes in 2026 are not planned updates, but the continuation of passionate debates about whether the protocol should become more programmable and how urgently it needs to be secured against quantum threats.

Bitcoin has not activated any major cushioned fork since Taproot in 2020, which improved Bitcoin scripts to make transactions more elastic and improve privacy.

Since then, discussion of contract-related proposals such as OP_CAT, CheckTemplateVerify (CTV), and lightning-related ideas such as LNHANCE, intensified. None of these changes have an established activation pathway.

Scientists were there too debate BIP-360 and related proposals as ways to facilitate the migration of coins to quantum-resistant spending paths if and when the threat of quantum computing becomes real.

Atkinson described Bitcoin as a group wildcard. She said proposed agreements could unlock safer storage and richer scripts, but the topic remains divisive and the subject of much debate.

Sun said these proposals could improve self-care security, fee management and protocols such as Lightning and Ark, while providing institutions with more programmable care logic directly on L1.

Bitcoin’s development is notoriously tardy, and any changes to the protocol are analyzed from every angle. There is a general agreement that no operational code of the agreement will be activated this year, and reaching a consensus on proposals such as OP_CAT or CTV is still a long way off.

On the post-quantum side, the authors of BIP-360 estimate that full migration to quantization-resistant addresses and signatures would take years, even under confident assumptions. At this point, it seems unlikely that quantum immunity modernization will be implemented before the end of 2026.

Warehouse: How Artificial Intelligence Dramatically Accelerated Quantum Risk for Bitcoin

According to Injective CEO Eric Chen, Layer 1 blockchains will come under increasing pressure to sacrifice decentralization for speed and efficiency as apply of the technology increases.

This pressure will come from the need to meet users’ desires for faster speeds or larger block space for greater bandwidth, Chen told Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction podcast on Monday.

“Our view is that it is fundamentally about finding opportunities to scale without compromising the fundamental pillars that define what blockchain is,” he said.

As blockchain adoption accelerates due to institutional adoption and agentic AI funding, this tension will soon be tested on a much larger scale. Part of the original idea behind cryptocurrencies was to create a “trustless” financial system in which individuals could transact without relying on established intermediaries.

Centralization carries risks

Chen said centralization is the effortless way out — it could be a very, very effortless choice to move everyone to the same data warehouse or literally have a validator leader calling the shots — but he warns that it creates a single point of failure: “If this one server has a particular failure, the whole chain goes down.”

Related: DAOs may have to abandon decentralization in favor of judicial institutions

Eric Chen talks to Ciaran Lyons about Chain Reaction. Source: Cointelegraph

Chen added this for injection — Layer 1 interoperable blockchain designed for DeFi applications — the idea is to “find ways to optimize the entire chain” and there are other ways to do this without reducing block times.

One of the options he suggested was “scaling spots,” where there are “dedicated zones” and Layer 2 scaling to ensure all high-demand transactions can be fulfilled.

“It’s always a constant tug of war and it’s about maintaining the basic pillars and then seeing where the space moves.”

The blockchain trilemma remains a challenge

It is said that the ideal blockchain boasts three elements: security, decentralization and scalability. The principle of the blockchain trilemma is that it is possible to fully optimize only two of the three properties at a time.

Decentralization means there is no single point of control and many independent participants validate the network. Security means resistance to attacks, fraud and manipulation. Scalability means the ability to handle huge transaction volumes at high speeds.

Pushing too strenuous on any one of them, e.g. scalability, will sacrifice another one, e.g decentralizationChen said.

The blockchain trilemma. source: OKX

Warehouse: Artificial intelligence is serving unbanked people in Africa… faster than cryptocurrencies