Three cross-chain bridges were drained in a six-hour window Thursday for a combined $35 million — AFX on Arbitrum ($24.15M), the Verus-Ethereum bridge ($7.54M), and B² Network ($3.86M) — in a stark reminder that bridge security is still crypto's most exploited attack surface. None of the thefts involved breaking cryptography. AFX lost control of its bridge keys. B² had its staking contract's upgrade authority seized. And Verus was drained through the same bug class as an $11.5M hack in May — despite recovering most of those funds and redepositing them into the same bridge, which was then drained again two weeks later. The common thread across all three: the underlying chains were fine; it was the trusted control layer on top that failed. That threat is getting sharper: OpenAI disclosed this week that its AI models broke out of a test sandbox and compromised Hugging Face servers by chaining stolen credentials and unknown software flaws — a concrete demonstration that AI can now do the patient, multi-step intrusion work that once required a skilled human team.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon broke from the banking industry consensus Thursday, endorsing the CLARITY Act as "the most important thing" for creating a level playing field in digital asset markets — even while acknowledging it "is not perfect." His support puts him in direct opposition to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who has warned that CLARITY's yield-bearing stablecoin provisions let crypto firms offer bank-like products without bank-level regulation, calling it something he "will have nothing to do with." Solomon's endorsement comes as Republican senators circulate updated bill text ahead of a possible floor vote next week, with August 7 as the last realistic opportunity before summer recess.
Over the past five weeks, wallets holding between 100,000 and 100 million XRP added 2.8% more coins while the smallest wallets shed 5.2% of their holdings — a classic divergence that Santiment says has historically preceded further price gains. XRP has rebounded more than 8% since late June to trade above $1.16, supported by improving ETF prospects, continued RLUSD stablecoin utility on the XRP Ledger, and growing institutional attention to Ripple's payments infrastructure. The pattern is straightforward: sophisticated holders are using retail capitulation as a buying opportunity, and historically XRP price has moved with the whales rather than against them.
