The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld former FTX CEO Sam BankmanFried's 25year sentence and rejected his request for a new trial. The panel affirmed the 2023 New York jury verdict finding him guilty on seven fraud and conspiracy counts, citing overwhelming evidence he knowingly carried out largescale fraud.

A US appeals court has rejected Sam BankmanFried's bid for a new trial in the FTX fraud case, keeping the existing conviction in place. The ruling leaves the current trial outcome unchanged and marks the latest court decision in the ongoing legal proceedings tied to FTX's collapse.

Sam Bankman-Fried has failed in his latest attempt to overturn his fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence, with his bid denied.

Sam Bankman-Fried has lost his bid to overturn his fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence, Reuters reported.

Analysts said the SEC proposal to roll back key NMS rules could support tokenized U.S. stocks. BlackRock filed Form 8A for its proposed yieldbearing bitcoin ETF, signaling a near launch, while U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs are set to top $2 trillion in cumulative volume in under 2.5 years. South Korea's finance ministry said tokenized stocks should be treated as securities.

CoinDesk reports that on June 11 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed amendments to certain rules under Regulation NMS, seeking to remove structural constraints embedded in how U.S. stocks trade. While the effort is aimed at traditional equity markets, market participants say it could also reduce key compliance frictions for tokenized stocks traded onchain. The proposal would rescind two provisions: Rule 611 and Rule 610(e). Rule 610(e) mainly limits cross-market quoting, while Rule 611 requires trading venues to prevent executions at prices worse than other protected quotes. SEC Chair Paul Atkins said the current framework has not reliably improved market efficiency over the last two decades, and has instead contributed to higher trading costs while limiting the evolution of market structure. The SEC argues that rolling back these rules would simplify the market and give competition and innovation more room to shape trading. Galaxy Digital's head of research, Alex Thorn, said Rule 611 has been one of the main obstacles keeping tokenized U.S. equities from being traded within DeFi. He noted that automated market makers (AMMs) execute against pool-based pricing and slippage, which makes it difficult to satisfy traditional "best execution" expectations designed for centralized equity venues. Thorn said that if the SEC ultimately approves the proposal, the scope for tokenized-stock trading via DeFi frontends and onchain liquidity pools could expand materially. In Galaxy's view, the updated approach would better fit AMM-style onchain trading models that the existing rules have struggled to accommodate. Galaxy cautioned that the changes would not resolve the full set of operational and regulatory issues. Even if Rule 611 is repealed, tokenized equities would still face practical hurdles including clearing, settlement, and registration with relevant trading venues. Thorn said these challenges could eventually be addressed through the SEC's so-called "innovation exemption" framework. That initiative was delayed last month after pushback from traditional financial institutions, leaving the timeline uncertain. Tokenized equities continue to scale. The market is currently about $3.5 billion, with monthly transaction volume nearing $5 billion and roughly 357,000 holding addresses. Reported data indicate the segment has grown about 44% over the past month, suggesting that further easing of regulatory constraints could accelerate onchain issuance and trading.

South Korea's finance ministry has determined that tokenized stocks should be treated as securities rather than crypto assets, a classification that could pave the way for taxes on related transactions, according to a report.

On June 11, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled a sweeping proposal to reshape U.S. equity market structure by rescinding two pillars of Regulation NMS: Rule 611 and Rule 610(e). The move would roll back long-standing quote-protection and quote-display constraints, giving exchanges, alternative trading systems (ATSs), and brokers more latitude in order routing, quote presentation, and execution design. The proposal is not yet in force. Once published in the Federal Register, it will enter a 60-day public comment period. The topic has drawn unusual interest from the Web3 community because the SEC's release explicitly notes the market's evolution toward 24/7 trading and highlights how distributed ledger technology could allow issuers to tokenize securities as crypto assets, while smart contracts and automated market makers (AMMs) could introduce new trading methods. Galaxy Digital research head Alex Thorn described the development as a "TradFi story," arguing it could nonetheless become a meaningful opening for tokenized equities. What Rule 611 does Rule 611, commonly known as the trade-through rule, can be summarized as: don't execute at an inferior displayed price when a better protected quote is accessible elsewhere, unless an exception applies. For example, if Exchange A is showing a protected best offer of $10 and Exchange B is showing $10.01, Rule 611 generally prevents a trading center from filling a buy at $10.01 on Exchange B while bypassing the $10 offer on Exchange A. The SEC argues the market context has changed dramatically since Rule 611 was adopted in 2005. In the agency's view, today's U.S. equity market is highly automated, tightly interconnected, fast, and intensely competitive. While Rule 611 was designed to promote displayed liquidity, the SEC says trading has increasingly migrated toward non-displayed liquidity and off-exchange execution, making the market more fragmented and operationally complex. The SEC lists several costs and unintended consequences associated with Rule 611: higher compliance expenses; fewer choices in order handling and execution; incentives to proliferate venues; greater fragmentation; and pressure on firms to spend heavily to chase ever-lower latency. The agency also points out that brokers already owe customers a best-execution duty under reasonably available conditions, suggesting Rule 611 may no longer be necessary as a parallel safeguard. What Rule 610(e) does Rule 610(e) addresses locked and crossed markets for National Market System (NMS) stocks. A "locked" market occurs when a bid on one venue equals an ask on another. A "crossed" market occurs when a bid exceeds an ask. On screens, locked markets can look like buyers and sellers are meeting at the same price; crossed markets can appear as a quote mismatch that, in theory, creates arbitrage opportunities. Rule 610(e) does not ban every locked or crossed quote outright. Instead, it requires exchanges, FINRA, and other self-regulatory organizations (SROs) to adopt and enforce rules that prevent members from displaying orders that would lock or cross protected quotes, and to address such conditions when they arise. Over the past two decades, that framework has contributed to a proliferation of order types and automated price-adjustment logic designed to avoid locking or crossing. The SEC now proposes to remove the federal requirement embodied in Rule 610(e). It argues that automation and interconnection have improved significantly since 2005 and that market participants have broader access to market data, reducing the need for this layer of mandated quote management. The SEC highlights three main rationales: 1) Locked markets can be a natural byproduct of competitive quoting. Prohibiting them may artificially widen bid-ask spreads; allowing them could tighten spreads for certain names and reduce trading costs. 2) Existing restrictions encourage complex order types, auto-repricing features, and compliance processes, raising system complexity and maintenance burdens. 3) If crossed markets occur, high-speed trading and arbitrage incentives should help correct them quickly. Importantly, access-fee caps would remain in place. These caps limit the fees a venue can charge outside participants to access quotes and execute trades, preventing venues from posting seemingly attractive quotes while effectively raising execution costs through excessive fees. The SEC also acknowledges potential downsides if Rule 610(e) is rescinded. Crossed quotes could distort execution-quality statistics, quote mismatches might persist longer in less liquid stocks, and retail investors could be confused by locked or crossed quotations on their screens. The agency is requesting data and feedback during the comment process. Why tokenized-stock advocates are watching For Web3 market participants, the significance lies less in near-term cost savings and more in the possibility that U.S. equities trading could rely on less centralized coordination logic. Scaling tokenized stocks is not just a matter of putting share representations on-chain; the larger challenge is market structure. On-chain markets naturally support 24/7 operation, smart-contract execution, AMM or hybrid order-book models, and liquidity that can be aggregated across platforms. By contrast, traditional U.S. equity trading is built around exchanges and brokers, quote protection, order routing, SRO rulebooks, and clearing and settlement infrastructure. Those rhythms, quoting conventions, and technical interfaces do not align cleanly with on-chain design. Rule 611, in particular, effectively forces new trading mechanisms to be engineered around the existing protected-quote framework. If the SEC ultimately repeals it, exchanges, ATSs, and other venues could gain additional room to experiment with matching models, auctions, priority schemes, and block-trading protocols. Even so, the proposal is narrow. It does not change securities registration requirements, nor does it address custody, clearing, shareholder rights, cross-border distribution, KYC/AML, or broker responsibilities specific to tokenized equities. Another critical point: repealing federal rules would not automatically erase related exchange and FINRA requirements; SROs would still need to decide whether and how to amend their own rulebooks. Cost impact and the broader message In its economic analysis of repealing Rules 611 and 610(e), the SEC estimates quantifiable annual cost savings for regulated participants of $54.2 million to $77 million. The savings would largely come from exchanges, ATSs, brokers running smart order routers, and OTC market makers no longer having to maintain compliance policies, monitoring programs, routing logic, and connectivity arrangements tied to the two rules. The totals are not massive, but they underscore the SEC's framing: this is a market-structure simplification effort aimed at reducing rule-driven complexity and pushing venues to compete for order flow on price, speed, liquidity, and mechanism design. For tokenized stocks, that focus on "complexity" may be the key point. The promise of on-chain assets is often described as 24/7 availability, composability, and transparent settlement. If the underlying trading rule set continues to force innovation back into a quote-protection architecture built for 2005, tokenization risks becoming little more than packaging. A looser rule framework, by contrast, would shift attention to whether new venues can deliver better execution quality while staying compliant, rather than merely issuing stock-shaped tokens. Source:

Preliminary data from the People's Bank of China showed that China's aggregate social financing rose by 17.48 trillion yuan in the first five months of 2026, down 1.16 trillion yuan from the same period a year earlier. Market estimates had pointed to 1.715 trillion yuan, versus the prior reading of 1.545 trillion yuan. By component, yuan loans to the real economy increased by 9.0 trillion yuan, 1.38 trillion yuan less than a year earlier. Foreign-currency loans to the real economy, converted into yuan, rose by 115.3 billion yuan, up 211.6 billion yuan year on year. Entrusted loans fell by 103.1 billion yuan, an additional 91.8 billion yuan decline from a year earlier. Trust loans increased by 5.7 billion yuan, 57.0 billion yuan less than a year earlier. Undiscounted bank acceptance bills fell by 17.2 billion yuan, a further 151.4 billion yuan drop year on year. Net corporate bond financing totaled 1.67 trillion yuan, up 757.7 billion yuan from a year earlier. Net government bond financing came in at 5.67 trillion yuan, down 634.0 billion yuan year on year. Domestic equity financing by nonfinancial enterprises reached 230.5 billion yuan, up 79.9 billion yuan from a year earlier.