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*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 18th August 2026.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
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What’s up
Global Borrowing Costs Spike
Stock futures wilted early Tuesday following the rare day when Bitcoin outpaced the major equity benchmarks.
BTC spent Monday rising by as much as 2.6% to around $64,000. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 recorded a 0.5% loss.
“That’s a less common occurrence these days,” Glassnode said via a Telegram chat in which the blockchain analytics firm pointed out that blue chip equities have outperformed the biggest crypto on two out of every three trading days going back to May.
BTC not only bested stocks but moved in the totally opposite direction, something which was once fairly typical, as CoinDesk explained.
Historically, BTC more often than not had produced starker daily swings in either direction relative to stocks. But this badge of “higher-beta” courage seems to have been replaced by a slacker's on-backwards baseball cap in part because AI mania has hogged up available risk capital.
That the U.S. stock market has paused from breaking records to hang out in the red could owe to upward shooting government bond yields. Investors are realizing that the wonderfully jaunty bluegrass music accompanying memory chip stock momentum is not just being streamed free of charge. Actual fiddlers need to be paid.
The inability of the U.S. and Iran to negotiate a diplomatic exit ramp has raised fresh concerns pertaining to prolonged inflationary pressures. Hope for an end to hostilities in the Middle East is fading. Brent crude oil futures once again hover near the $90-per-barrel mark.
And so this morning, bonds sold off, sending yields to multi-decade highs, CNBC said.
The benchmark U.S. 10-year Treasury yield early Tuesday climbed to 4.748%, its highest level since 2007.
Germany’s 10-year bund hit a 15-year high. Yields also spiked on British, French, Italian, Swiss and Canadian government bonds.
“Rising long-dated bond yields are not driven solely by expectations of higher interest rates and inflation fears,” explained Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, in a research note cited by CNBC. “They can also reflect concerns around high levels of government borrowing.”
Investors, in other words, are demanding greater compensation for holding government IOUs.
What's down
XRP Loses Grip On Key Mark
Thrice in the past week, XRP briefly slid to 99 cents before quickly climbing back to $1. Today, XRP touched as low as 98 cents. As of 9:20 a.m. (EST), the crucially important $1 mark had not been reclaimed.
It’s been a tough year for XRP, the coin closely associated with Ripple, the ledger technology company that at times can seem more connected to its stablecoin RLUSD.
The last time XRP languished below a dollar was November of 2024. The token's all-time high of $3.65 came last July. One year ago, in August of 2025, XRP, fourth-largest non-stablecoin, succumbed to gravitational forces in the wake of that ATH. And yet it still managed to stay above $3.
This current summer slump, in which XRP drifted toward and under the $1 mark, is occurring even as Ripple has inked a slew of partnership deals.
What's next
Ripple's Payments Push? It Might Not Center Around XRP. But Futures Traders Are Bullish Anyway
Open interest on XRP futures currently stands at $2.78B, CoinDesk reports, noting that, on Binance, bullish long bets outweigh bearish short bets by a more than 3-to-1 ratio.
Is Ripple’s payments infrastructure positioning finally paying off? And if so, for which asset, XRP — or RLUSD?
Impressively, Ripple just announced its third partnership this year in South Korea as Jeonbuk Bank became the first regional bank in the country to deploy Ripple Payments for cross-border transfers, CoinDesk said.
That announced arrangement comes in the wake of custody and wallet infrastructure deals with Kyobo Life Insurance and Kbank.
As of early August, some $1.38B worth of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) had been issued on the XRP Ledger, according to CoinDesk’s calculations.
Roughly $845M of that total resides in RLUSD, the Ripple-issued, dollar-pegged stablecoin.
While Jeonbuk Bank intends to use Ripple’s 24/7 cross-border payment service for business remittances, it remains unclear whether flows will involve XRP or RLUSD or both. CoinDesk’s Shaurya Malwa asked Ripple which asset the Jeonbuk deployment uses but did not receive a reply.
Ripple, it should be underscored, has spent the better part of the past 18 months promoting RLUSD as the settlement asset for institutional work.
