Week 28, June 29 – July 5, 2026 The week closed the regulatory perimeter on both sides of the Atlantic. On July 1, Europe cut off platforms without a MiCA license — the market went through a cleanup without any shocks. The corporate response came a day later: 140 companies led by Visa, Mastercard, and BlackRock launched their own stablecoin and sent Circle shares down 16%. Strategy directed the capital it raised not into bitcoin, but into dollar reserves — JPMorgan considers them insufficient. At the same time, the crypto industry became the largest donor to the U.S. midterm elections, contributing $189 million. Europe carried out a cleanup — the market barely noticed. The EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) grace period expired on July 1: out of 3,000 crypto companies operating in the EU under national regimes, only 244 obtained licenses. Germany, France, and the Netherlands granted 45% of the approvals. After rejections from Ireland, Latvia, and Greece, Binance withdrew its application and restricted services for 20 million European customers — weekly outflows, according to DefiLlama, amounted to $641 million, or 0.48% of assets. According to Kaiko, licensed platforms already account for 83% of European trading volume. Corporations are issuing their own dollar — the BIS denies stablecoins the status of money. A consortium of 140 companies launched the Open USD (OUSD) stablecoin — fee-free, with reserve income distributed among participants and governance through an independent DAO. The list includes Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Google, and Coinbase; for Stripe clients, the token will become the default settlement asset. Circle shares corrected by 16%. Meanwhile, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said that stablecoins do not meet the criteria for money and resemble exchange-traded fund units: in its model for the U.S., their effect on issuance remains weakly negative even at a market cap of $3 trillion. Strategy is accumulating dollars instead of bitcoin. The company directed $1.15 billion from share sales into reserves instead of buying BTC and announced a share buyback of up to $2 billion — half for preferred series and half for common MSTR shares. Crypto capital is flowing into U.S. politics — and is being disclosed at the White House. Crypto companies contributed $189 million to the U.S. November midterm elections — 37% of all donations, totaling $517 million — three times more than the AI sector and tech companies combined. Donald Trump disclosed $236.3 million in income from World Liberty Financial tokens, while Vice President J.D. Vance disclosed up to $500,000 in BTC.