Australia's financial intelligence agency, AUSTRAC, has suspended Cryptolink's operations, forcing the company to take its cryptocurrency ATMs offline. The regulator cited compliance concerns as the reason for the action.

Polygon Labs has been selected to participate in Phase 2 of the Bank of England's Digital Pound Lab, a program exploring how a potential digital pound could function in practice. Announced on August 12, the appointment pairs Polygon with NOBO Finance Limited and Dun & Bradstreet to trial simulated, onchain trade finance use cases aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises. Phase 2 is expected to run from roughly November 2025 to July 2026. The Lab will examine how private stablecoins could interact with a central bank digital currency in real-world payment situations—but only in a controlled test environment. No customers are involved and no real money will move; the work is designed as a sandbox rather than a launch. The consortium will pursue two tracks. One focuses on building reusable, portable credit profiles for SMEs, creating financial identities that could be used across lenders and platforms. The other tests cross-border trade finance flows, including invoice factoring scenarios where a digital pound and stablecoins would need to operate together across jurisdictions. Polygon's role centers on its Open Money Stack, a toolkit for stablecoin settlement, embedded wallets and smart contract deployment. Dun & Bradstreet contributes commercial credit data, while NOBO Finance provides trade finance modeling. The Bank of England's Phase 2 framework puts an emphasis on participant-led applications, inviting firms to propose scenarios and then stress-test them within the Lab. Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron highlighted interoperability as the core theme, arguing that global trade will require public and private forms of digital money to work seamlessly together. Interoperability between stablecoins and a simulated digital pound is likely to be the most significant element of the exercise. Invoice factoring—the sale of unpaid invoices at a discount in exchange for immediate cash—offers a demanding test case due to its multi-party structure, cross-border payments, credit assessment needs and time-sensitive settlement. The SME credit-profile workstream also carries broader market implications. SMEs make up the majority of businesses in most economies yet remain persistently underserved in trade finance. The global trade finance gap, reflecting unmet SME demand versus bank supply, is measured in the trillions of dollars.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said crypto companies should be able to apply for U.S. bank charters, a stance that could open a route for digital-asset firms to enter the national banking system.

Hyperliquid is working with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to identify a compliant pathway into the U.S. perpetual futures market. The platform said roughly 32% of its second-quarter trading volume involved real-world assets such as equities, a mix that could place parts of its business under both CFTC and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) oversight. The Hyperliquid token HYPE was last quoted at $55.80. The effort is aimed at expanding its U.S. footprint while navigating the prospect of overlapping regulatory regimes.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has outlined a revamp of federal market rules that would allow U.S. stocks to trade around the clock on approved blockchain-based platforms. The proposal would shift markets away from the long-standing concept of fixed "market hours," enabling trading and settlement of $AAPL, $TSLA and $NVDA alongside cryptocurrencies on high-speed networks such as @Solana and @Base.

Mexico's Ministry of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP) has issued updated anti-money laundering rules that will mandate full identity verification for every Bitcoin and cryptocurrency transfer conducted in the country from March 1, 2027. Published in early August 2026 as amendments to the General Rules under the Federal Anti-Money Laundering Law, the changes mark Mexico's most significant expansion of crypto compliance requirements since the Fintech Law was enacted in 2018. The regulations classify virtual asset transactions as "vulnerable activities," a legal category that activates a broad set of AML obligations for parties that facilitate them. Under the new framework, digital-asset service providers must adopt a risk-based approach to customer due diligence. Firms will be required to assign risk ratings to all customers, apply enhanced due diligence for higher-risk accounts, and identify ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) when an individual holds 25% or more of an entity involved in a transfer. The 25% UBO threshold is intended to curb the use of shell companies to move crypto without identifying the individuals behind the transactions. Any person meeting that ownership level must have their identity recorded. Service providers must also update and submit internal policy manuals by the March 2027 deadline. These documents will be treated as enforceable compliance materials subject to regulatory review. Automated systems to monitor and flag suspicious transactions must be in place by June 1, 2027, providing a three-month transition period after the main requirements take effect. Full regulatory audits are expected to begin in 2028. The rules add further obligations covering registration, transaction traceability, and custody arrangements for digital assets. Authorities are pushing for end-to-end audit trails on all transfers, while custodial structures will face heightened scrutiny. Mexico's 2018 Fintech Law introduced a regulatory framework for digital assets, including licensing requirements for crypto exchanges, reporting duties, and supervisory oversight. It recognized digital currencies as an electronic means of payment but did not designate them as legal tender. Regulators have long viewed the earlier regime as incomplete. Previous reporting thresholds were around $3,500, allowing smaller transfers to avoid disclosure. The new rules remove that gap by requiring identification data for all transfers regardless of transaction size. Non-financial entities involved in activities such as virtual asset exchange and custody must register with the SAT (Tax Administration Service) and comply with AML obligations. The March 2027 deadline gives market participants roughly seven months to update policies and operational systems.

The Bank of England has selected a Polygon-led consortium—including NOBO Finance and Dun & Bradstreet—for Phase 2 of its Digital Pound Lab, broadening trials that combine stablecoin payments, a digital-pound settlement layer and reusable business identity to accelerate trade finance for small and medium-sized enterprises. Inside the lab’s sandbox (with no real customers or money), the work splits into two linked tracks. First, the group is building an "SME Bankable Profile" that uses consented transaction data from wallets, open-finance feeds and Dun & Bradstreet’s commercial intelligence to produce a reusable, pre-qualified credit outcome. Polygon is providing smart contracts for consent management, verification and financing-lifecycle logic, while NOBO coordinates the effort. The profile is designed to stay under the SME’s control and be portable across financing requests. Second, the consortium is testing invoice factoring backed by an electronic bill of lading (eBL) using two forms of digital money in a single trade flow: the exporter receives an advance in stablecoins, while the UK importer completes final settlement in digital pounds. Polygon’s Open Money Stack will support the stablecoin leg, wallets and fiat on/off ramps. The project targets a long-standing friction point in cross-border trade finance: multi-party verification and slow settlement can lock up working capital, hitting smaller firms hardest. The tests aim to shorten the cycle by making credit assessments portable and consent-driven, and by showing interoperability between private stablecoins and a CBDC-style settlement layer. Sara de la Torre, head of financial services at Dun & Bradstreet, said smoother SME trade finance depends on trust, adding that the firm’s Commercial Graph can make smaller companies easier to verify. Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron said the trial explores whether "public and private, central bank money and stablecoins" can work together, framing the flow as exporters receiving stablecoins while importers settle with digital pounds. NOBO Finance founder and CEO Ayo Ojerinola described the lab as a safe environment to test innovations, highlighting the challenge of coordinating workflows, data and settlement across multiple parties. Polygon is contributing its Open Money Stack, a modular integration layer combining fiat conversion, wallets, stablecoin settlement and smart contracts to help institutions move between fiat and stablecoins without building separate rails. Polygon says it previously integrated PayPal USD into the stack and that its network has processed more than $2.6 trillion in stablecoin transactions for clients including Revolut and Stripe. The firm also points to 2026 upgrades—including a reduction in average block time to 1.75 seconds, higher theoretical throughput and zero-knowledge private stablecoin transfers via Hinkal—as evidence of its push toward regulated payments infrastructure. The Digital Pound Lab is the Bank of England’s experimental environment for exploring how a retail CBDC could function alongside existing and emerging payment systems. The central bank has not decided to issue a digital pound and is instead mapping design and infrastructure requirements. Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden has indicated the UK’s future retail payments ecosystem could include tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins and a possible digital pound. Regulatory work is advancing in parallel. The UK finalized new stablecoin rules in June, setting an initial £40 billion issuance limit per token and permitting up to 70% of reserves to be held in short-term government debt. Separately, the Bank of England and the FCA’s Digital Securities Sandbox now includes 16 firms—including HSBC and Euroclear—preparing tokenized asset launches from late 2026. Phase 2 of the Digital Pound Lab sets up a practical public-private testbed for two core trade-finance upgrades: reusable, consent-based SME credit profiles and mixed-rail settlement that pairs private stablecoins with central-bank-style money. Success would provide a concrete interoperability model for future CBDC deployments and regulated stablecoin use cases, with direct benefits for small exporters and importers.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing an "innovation exemption" that would allow tokenized stocks to trade around the clock on blockchain-based venues.