Tokenized Stock Trading Surges to $6.7B as Ethereum Gets Lean

The tokenized stock trading volume surged to $6.7 billion in June, a 42% increase from May. The S&P 500 ETF and Circle saw significant gains, with their prices skyrocketing by 19.5x and 68.5%, respectively.

World Liberty Financial, backed by the Trump family, is reportedly discussing the sale of its payments subsidiary, AI Financial, to Perpetuals.com for up to $15 million. This marks a strategic reversal for the crypto venture, which acquired AI Financial in August 2024 with plans to build a major international stablecoin payments business.

Vitalik Buterin outlined a multi-year 'Lean Ethereum' roadmap aimed at overhauling nearly every major protocol component without disrupting existing decentralized applications (dapps). The network is preparing for its most profound optimization to date by prioritizing quantum resistance, recursive STARKs for privacy, state storage scaling, and a potential shift to a RISC-V architecture.