Europe’s flagship crypto law is barely six weeks old and already facing revision. The US Senate pushed its vote on crypto legislation to September. A Bitcoin miner just signed one of the largest AI infrastructure deals on record. And Harmony’s ONE token took a hit after an attacker minted four billion coins out of thin air. It was a week that moved fast across regulation, infrastructure and security simultaneously.
MiCA’s licensing requirement for crypto service providers only came into force on 1 July, yet EU officials are already preparing to rewrite it. According to Euronews, multiple EU diplomats confirmed the European Commission intends to extend the framework to cover non-EU stablecoin issuers and to bring tokenised payments and deposits into scope. A public consultation runs until 30 September, with legislative change targeted for 2027.
The trigger is partly competitive. Around 95 per cent of stablecoins worldwide are pegged to the US dollar, and the US GENIUS Act has given American stablecoin issuers a clearer regulatory runway than their European counterparts. The current MiCA framework does not specifically govern companies based outside the EU that issue stablecoins but operate across the bloc, leaving a gap that officials now want to close. Stablecoins already handle trillions in cross-border payments annually, making the question of who regulates non-EU issuers increasingly difficult to defer.
The US Senate delayed its procedural vote on the Digital Market Structure Clarity Act, now expected on 15 September, according to Reuters. The bill would settle the long-running question of whether digital assets fall under SEC or CFTC jurisdiction, a decision with significant consequences for how tokens are classified, listed and traded across US markets.
Reuters describes the bill as facing long odds, with political backlash unlikely to ease over the summer recess. Last week’s round-up noted the pressure building on the Senate to act before the break. The delay means that uncertainty persists for firms that have been waiting on the outcome before making structural decisions about their US operations. September is now the next real window, and it is far from guaranteed.
Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms has signed a 20-year data center lease with Anthropic worth $9.1 billion in contracted revenue, with prospective extensions that could bring the total to $16.1 billion, according to Bloomberg. The deal covers 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity at Riot’s Rockdale, Texas campus and follows an earlier agreement with AMD, bringing Riot’s total contracted AI capacity to 241 megawatts.
The scale of the deal denotes a turning point in how Bitcoin miners are repositioning themselves. The logic is clear: miners already have the one thing AI data centers need most and struggle most to obtain quickly: approved, energised power capacity at scale. Rather than competing with hyperscalers on construction timelines, companies like Riot are converting existing infrastructure. Amazon’s AWS reported $15 billion in AI revenue as enterprise demand for compute continues to accelerate. The Riot-Anthropic deal shows that demand is now reaching beyond the established cloud giants into crypto-native infrastructure.
Harmony’s ONE token dropped sharply after an attacker minted approximately four billion tokens without authorisation, according to The Block. The stolen tokens were worth around $3.2 million at the time of the attack, with most already sold or transferred to exchanges by the time Harmony confirmed the exploit. The protocol said it is working to freeze remaining funds and develop a patch, though the cause is still under investigation.
This is not Harmony’s first serious security incident. The network lost $100 million to a bridge hack in 2022, and the ONE token has never fully recovered in terms of market confidence. A second exploit, even one smaller in dollar value, raises harder questions about the protocol’s security architecture. Physical crypto attacks caused over $30 million in losses in the first half of 2026 alone, and on-chain exploits continue to run in parallel. The two threat vectors are distinct, but together they reflect an industry that is still working through considerable security challenges at every layer.
Four stories, four different corners of the industry, and the same underlying pressure: crypto is growing faster than the frameworks around it, regulatory, legislative and technical alike. Europe is revising rules it just introduced. The US cannot agree on basic jurisdictional questions. Miners are reinventing themselves as AI infrastructure. And a layer-1 blockchain is dealing with its second major exploit in four years. The week’s news is not pessimistic, but it is honest about where the gaps still are.
