Key events of the night: analytics firm Chainalysis filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government over a contract with competitor TRM Labs, payment giant Stripe is acquiring AI gateway OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, and the founder of Curve harshly criticized Pump.fun and Phantom.
Movement of market cap leaders
Bitcoin (BTC) was trading near $63,389 at 08:35 Moscow time. Overnight, on the 15-minute chart, quotes rose from $62,650 to $63,500. Over the past week, the leading cryptocurrency has fallen by approximately 2.49%. Ether (ETH) held near $1,897, recovering overnight from $1,868 to $1,904, but lost about 1.17% over seven days.
In the top 20 over the week, the best result was shown by Hyperliquid (HYPE) with a gain of 8.69%, while XRP fell by 3.07% and Solana (SOL) by 1.75%. Among the top 100, Velvet (VELVET) stood out, surging by 116.05%; Ether.fi (ETHFI) and Chainlink (LINK) added 30.10% and 14.88%, respectively. The outsider was Uniswap (UNI) with a drop of 19.68%, followed by Aptos (APT) and LayerZero (ZRO) with declines of 12.34% and 10.70%.
Spot ETFs showed mixed flows: bitcoin funds lost about $389.71 million, while Solana products attracted $10.26 million and Ethereum products $2.26 million. Over the day, positions of 50,362 traders were liquidated for a total of $114.03 million. The largest liquidation order occurred on Binance — for the BTCUSDT pair at $2.98 million.
Overnight industry news
Chainalysis filed a lawsuit against U.S. authorities in the Court of Federal Claims. According to its version, the Department of Homeland Security and the ICE immigration service bypassed standard competitive procedures and directly awarded an exclusive contract to competitor TRM Labs. The company is seeking to cancel the deal; the court imposed a protective order due to possible trade secrets, and oral hearings are scheduled for September 2, 2026.
Payment service Stripe is close to acquiring startup OpenRouter, which called itself the "Stripe for the AI world." The deal amount will exceed $7 billion, whereas in May 2025 the company was valued at $1.3 billion. OpenRouter is developing a unified AI gateway: through one interface, users can connect to more than 400 models from different developers, choosing based on task and budget. About 8 million people use the service; Stripe itself does not comment on the deal.
Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov criticized the Pump.fun platform, calling it a "casino of fraudulent memecoins," and stated that Phantom's work with hardware wallets is inferior to the MetaMask experience. ClawPump co-founder under the nickname Tomi204 objected that Pump.fun merely provides a service, and how to use it is up to people. Egorov countered that software products often lose quality after gaining market recognition.
My comment: The Chainalysis lawsuit is a landmark signal for the entire analytics industry: even major players are ready to challenge opaque government procurement, which could reshape the rules of the game in blockchain investigations. Stripe's purchase of OpenRouter confirms the trend toward convergence of payment infrastructure and AI, which in the long term will increase pressure on crypto wallets as alternative financial instruments.