Visa is processing roughly 90% of on-chain crypto card payments as total crypto card spending reached a record $7.8 billion. Monthly crypto card volume has risen 230% since May 2025, helped by card-based spending of stablecoins held in self-custody wallets. Visa's spending through Jupiter Global climbed 648% over the past two months, while central banks and financial firms also tested blockchain settlement rails via Project Agorá.

Ahead of Thursday's U.S. economic releases, options activity in the iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) skewed heavily defensive, with put premium topping 70% of Wednesday's total. A representative trade spent $11.4 million on 277 puts expiring July 17 and sold $3.6 million of 271 puts expiring June 18, positioning for about a 7% drop in IWM by mid-July.

On May 27, Nansen identified a "Smart Money" wallet holding 20x leveraged shorts worth $7.4M in bitcoin and $8.7M in ether on Hyperliquid, alongside leveraged longs in TradFi index perps. The same wallet is long $5.09M on XYZ100 (4x) and $3.46M on the S&P 500 (2x), with combined unrealized profit of about $1.35M. With 20x leverage, a 5% rise in BTC or ETH could put the $16.1M short legs at liquidation risk.

Eli Lilly said Tuesday it plans to acquire three privately held vaccine companies in transactions valued at nearly $4 billion in total. The deals include up to $1.5 billion for Curevo, up to $780 million for LimmaTech Biologics, and up to $1.55 billion for Vaccine Company, with programs targeting shingles, staph infections and Epstein-Barr virus.

South Korea's Seoul Southern District Prosecutors' Office arrested and indicted suspects tied to the Solana-based memecoin CATFI, in what is described as the first DEX rug-pull prosecution under the Virtual Asset User Protection Act that took effect in July 2024. Authorities said the token jumped 1,001-fold in 26 hours before collapsing, and 256 investors reported losses of about 900 million won (~$586,000).

On Tuesday, May 26, crypto ETF flows diverged as bitcoin ETFs saw $333.71 million in net redemptions and ether ETFs logged a $35.04 million exit. In contrast, HYPE ETFs took in $20.45 million and XRP ETFs added $1.55 million, while solana ETFs recorded no trading activity.

U.S. crude prices slid on Wednesday after WTI fell 5.7% to $88.53 a barrel by 8:33 a.m. ET, while Brent dropped about 4.7% to $94.91. The move followed a report that Iran has committed to return commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to pre-war levels within one month of a framework agreement with the U.S.

Cumulative aligned sustainable debt climbed to USD 6.8 trillion by the end of 2025, with annual issuance topping USD 1 trillion for a third straight year. Green bonds represented 64% of aligned GSS+ issuance in 2025 and totalled USD 653.5 billion, while Europe accounted for 45% of annual volume and surpassed USD 3 trillion cumulatively.