GM Frens,

It’s been another busy week across crypto. Stablecoins continue expanding, AI is finding new ways to spend digital dollars, Bitcoin miners are turning buyers again, and new crypto incentive models are pushing the boundaries of online engagement.

Ripple is pushing RLUSD into Turkey, Travala now lets AI agents book hotels with USDC, Pump.fun launches its new GO bounty platform, Ethereum has 3x more holders than Bitcoin, and we look at how miners may be quietly fueling Bitcoin’s next rally. Finally, Zypto continues advancing real world crypto utility.

Ripple is pushing RLUSD into Turkey

Ripple is pushing its dollar-backed stablecoin into Turkey, betting that one of the world’s most active digital-asset markets is ready for a more regulated version of the digital dollars already used to navigate currency weakness and limited access to traditional dollar savings.

Last week, the company announced that its US dollar-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD, is now available to institutional clients in Turkey through integration agreements with local cryptocurrency platforms. The stakes for capturing market share are exceptionally high.

Turkey handled nearly $200 billion in annual crypto transactions, almost four times the United Arab Emirates’ $53 billion, making it the dominant crypto economy in the Middle East and North America. The rollout places RLUSD inside the domestic order books of three established Turkish gateways.

Since its global launch in late 2024, RLUSD has scaled to a $1.7 billion market capitalization. Ripple’s strategy in Turkey focuses not on retail day traders, but on capturing high-value corporate flows that require strict regulatory certainty. 

Meanwhile, market observers have noted that Turkey’s outsized role in the global crypto ecosystem is not solely due to typical retail speculation. Instead, it sits at the intersection of speculative trading, robust dollar demand, and profound macroeconomic pressure. Turkey dominates the MENA region in digital asset value received and was the fifth-largest global market for retail crypto activity in Q1 2026.

To anchor its commercial expansion, Ripple is simultaneously building physical and academic infrastructure within the country. Ripple announced that Istanbul Technical University (ITU) has joined its global University Blockchain Research Initiative. The partnership would be funded directly by RLUSD allocations.

Travala lets AI agents book hotels with USDC

Singapore-based crypto travel platform Travala has launched a protocol it says lets artificial intelligence agents search for, reserve, and pay for hotels with USDC on the layer-2 blockchain Base, extending agentic AI stablecoin payments to travel bookings.

The company said the system connects Travala’s hotel inventory to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for linking AI apps to external tools. Payments use Base with Travala saying the setup allows gasless USDC transactions, near-instant settlement and transaction costs of about $0.01 per booking.

However, final payment authorization still requires manual approval from the traveler, so it’s not fully autonomous; it’s more advanced than a chatbot that only recommends itineraries.

The launch comes as crypto companies try to make stablecoins useful for machine-to-machine commerce and follows a wave of crypto payment infrastructure aimed at AI agents. The likes of Fireblocks, MoonPay, and Exodus have launched products for AI-driven stablecoin payments, while x402-linked wallets on Base surpassed 100 million transactions.

Travala framed the launch as an early step toward autonomous travel booking, even as travelers still retain final approval over payments. Travala said the setup uses ERC-7715 session keys, allowing the AI agent to request a payment while keeping final signing authority inside the traveler’s wallet. 

The company said the protocol can maintain context across searches, bookings and cancellations in a single chat thread. Travala said the protocol covers more than 2.2 million hotels, including listings from Marriott, Hilton and IHG, which are sourced through its aggregator partners. 

Ethereum has 3x more holders than Bitcoin

Ethereum has emerged as the blockchain with the largest number of holders, far ahead of Bitcoin. Data on non-empty wallets show that Ethereum has around 189.49 million holders, more than three times Bitcoin’s 59.08 million.

The figures, shared by Lisk’s head of research, analyst Leon Waidmann, indicate Ethereum’s large user base even as the asset’s price remained in a bearish zone. After Ethereum and Bitcoin, Tether ranks third with 13.61 million holders, followed by XRP with 7.8 million and USDC with 6.76 million non-empty wallets.

Even with such strong network adoption, ETH has been on a steady decline over the past month, losing more than 30% during the period. The crypto asset was trading near $1,620 at the time of writing.

The weakness in its price has also affected companies that built large treasury positions in the asset. One example is Nasdaq-listed FG Nexus, which has reportedly incurred more than $85 million in losses on its Ethereum strategy after selling a substantial portion of its holdings at prices below its purchase price.

The company had made ETH its main treasury reserve asset and started building its position around Ethereum’s 10th anniversary, with plans to become a major holder. However, the broader market downturn forced it to reduce its exposure.

Meanwhile, crypto analyst Michael van de Poppe noted that ETH’s daily Relative Strength Index (RSI) has dropped to its lowest level ever.

The market pressure has also been visible in spot Ethereum ETF activity. However, after 17 straight trading days of outflows, these funds recorded net inflows of $19.3 million on June 4. The inflows were driven entirely by ETHA, while the remaining nine ETFs saw no activity.

Overall, Ethereum ETFs still posted $168 million in net inflows for the week. SoSoValue said the latest figures could mean ETF flows are starting to stabilize. However, a meaningful recovery will depend on whether inflows continue into Ethereum and other major crypto assets. 

Pump.fun launches a GO bounty platform

Solana based memecoin launchpad Pump.fun introduced GO, a new bounty platform built around the slogan “Pay ANYONE to do ANYTHING.” In it, users post crypto rewards for bizarre promotional tasks, such as tattooing the ticker symbols of memecoins, quitting their job live on camera, or skydiving into a World Cup match.

Users connect an X account and wallet, post a task, and lock rewards in escrow starting at $5, while Pump.fun reviews submissions and determines payouts. At the time of writing, GO listed 225 live bounties, 509 submissions, and a $115,000 unclaimed pool. The biggest rewards remain unclaimed on the platform.

The top remaining listing, worth roughly $23,655, sought an interview with either a family member of the person responsible for Henry Nowak’s death or the lead police officer on the case.

Another task offered a $3,066 bounty for users to tattoo the ticker “Bountywork” on their foreheads, with a request for video proof. So far, the task has received four submissions with people completing the tattoo.

Further down the board, the tasks turn stranger and, in places, riskier.

Bounties asked people to set a branded car alight, streak during an NBA Finals game, fart through a megaphone at a lecture, pour milk over themselves, hand out 100 jars of pineapple Kool-Aid to homeless people, get Elon Musk to engage with a token on X, and bail someone out of jail.

GO formalizes a pay-for-stunts incentive that has repeatedly turned dangerous on Pump.fun. The launchpad pulled its livestreaming feature in 2024 after an influx of contentious streams. Pump.fun revived livestreaming at the start of 2025 with new moderation, then leaned into ‘creator capital markets,’ pairing viral stunts with tradable tokens.

How miners are quietly fueling Bitcoin’s next rally 

After six weeks of selling, Bitcoin miners have flipped to net accumulation just as price carved a cycle low, an on-chain shift that echoes the last major turn. There are three signals we can consider.

Firstly, since June 5, Bitcoin miners have posted three consecutive days of positive net position change, a metric that tracks whether miners add to or draw down their holdings.

The shift breaks a stretch of red that ran from April 23 through June 4, one of the longer miner capitulation phases of the year. 

The timing stands out. The flip to green arrives just after the price breached its sub-$60,000 low, the same pattern seen at the previous turn. A local bottom near $64,088 in late February closed the prior capitulation, after which miner flows turned positive in early March and coincided with the Bitcoin price recovery.

Secondly, the accumulation shift lines up with a quiet recovery in network demand. Bitcoin network revenue, the total transaction fees miners earn, climbed to 89 BTC in May. That figure tops February’s 80 BTC, March’s 79, and April’s 74, marking a clear pickup in fee income just as miners stopped selling. 

June’s reading sits at 26 BTC. Still, that figure covers only the first eight days and remains incomplete, so it cannot be read as a drop. Yet, the BTC trend still looks positive, which explains why the miners’ net position change has turned up. 

Stronger fee revenue eases the operational pressure that forces miners to liquidate, which helps explain why their net position turned. When network revenue rises, miners earn more from fees, so they feel less need to sell their Bitcoin to cover costs, which is why their net position can flip from selling to accumulating.

The relevant is the May surge, the best fee month since the start of the year, landing alongside the miner flip. Two signals now point the same way. The third tests whether leverage could undo them. 

Thirdly, the final signal sits in derivatives, where the setup looks calmer than it did before last week’s crash. Total open interest dropped from about $31.26 billion in late May to near $22.31 billion, after touching $21.09 billion.

That matters because the current funding rate of 0.005%, which reflects what traders pay to hold long positions, sits just below the 0.006% reading from early June that preceded the price crash.

The difference is open interest. Leverage stood far higher on June 1, so the same lean toward longs carries less risk of a cascading long flush now. That leverage cooling coincides with the Bitcoin miner pickup.

However, there are some warning signs. Funding turning positive again shows buyers leaning long, and sellers have reappeared as new whales realize losses. 

For now, watch whether miner accumulation holds, whether fee revenue builds in June, and whether open interest stays contained. Those three, not price alone, will show if the on-chain turn has staying power. 

Zypto advances real-world crypto utility

For most of history, cross-border transfers have traditionally been slow, expensive, and dependent on layers of intermediaries, with access unevenly distributed across regions. This gap between how information moves and how value moves began to close with the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009.

While widely recognized as the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin was originally conceived as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It wasn’t designed as an investment vehicle, but as a form of money native to the internet. Since then, thousands of blockchain networks and digital assets have built on this, creating a decentralized system for transferring value across borders.

While the underlying technology proved effective, practical usage has remained fragmented. Owning and transferring crypto became increasingly accessible, but using it in everyday life or spending across borders often required navigating multiple platforms and services.

Zypto is positioning itself to address this gap by focusing on utility, aiming to make digital assets function like everyday money. Through its app ecosystem, Zypto integrates a wide range of services—cross-chain swaps, cards, bill payments, gift cards—that enable users to move from simply holding crypto to actively using it. 

It supports more than 20 blockchains, over 24,000 digital assets, and more than 1,000,000 cross-chain swap routes, combining services that are typically dispersed across multiple providers into a single interface. This integration allows users to perform practical financial actions across borders.

By consolidating these capabilities, Zypto is addressing a core limitation in the current crypto landscape: fragmentation. While individual services exist across the ecosystem, they are often disconnected, creating friction for users attempting to rely on digital assets in everyday scenarios. 

Zypro’s approach reflects a broader shift within the industry toward real-world applicability. As cryptocurrencies and stablecoins increasingly facilitate billions of dollars in daily transactions, the focus is shifting from trading to usability.   

Find out more here.

Closing remark

Ripple is expanding its dollar-backed stablecoin RLUSD into Turkey through local exchange integrations. Travala has introduced a system that allows AI agents to search and book hotels using USDC on Base, enabling low-cost, near-instant payments while keeping final transaction approval with the user.

Ethereum now has over three times as many non-empty wallets as Bitcoin, highlighting its broader user base. Pump.fun has launched GO, a crypto bounty platform where users pay others for promotional tasks and viral marketing campaigns.

Bitcoin miners have shifted from selling to accumulating after a prolonged period of capitulation, coinciding with rising network fees and reduced leverage in derivatives markets. Zypto’s model suggests that the next phase of crypto adoption will be defined less by asset ownership and more by everyday functionality.

What’s your favorite development this week? Let us know in the comments section!

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