Turning Japanese

It’s been quite a week, from Iran war headlines rattling stocks and crypto alike, to SpaceX lifting off on Friday with the biggest IPO in history. Surely this coming week will be quiet by comparison?

Well, don’t get too comfortable. Although the summer lull that usually hits markets and makes them mercifully more boring isn’t far away, we have two central bank meetings in the next few days and the first one from the Bank of Japan could really shake things up. Find out how below.

Elsewhere, although AI and SpaceX have hogged the headlines recently, the robotics space is heating up too and deals are being struck that could have huge consequences for all of us down the line. Read on for a deep dive into one such deal which also gives the crypto industry a foot in the door.

🧐 Can XRP Recover? 🧐

It was less than a year ago that XRP set a new all-time high, confounding many naysayers and vindicating the faith of this OG crypto’s army of fans. Surely the road to $10 lay open ahead of them?

Fast forward to today and things aren’t so rosy. XRP is suffering along with most other altcoins, and many now fear that it could break below $1 for the first time since 2024 without some fresh buying catalysts and/or a broader upturn in the market. Times are tough.

But, away from the price chart, the outlook is a lot brighter. Ripple is going from strength to strength, as its years-long tussle with the SEC fades into history. RLUSD is gaining traction in the stablecoin space and, while the chart bleeds out, XRP whales are taking the opportunity to accumulate at record levels.

In today’s video, we analyse the bull and bear cases for XRP and dig into everything that’s going on behind the scenes. We look at what Ripple has cooking, lift the lid on who’s buying and selling the XRP ETFs and assess the challenges that still lie ahead for this most resilient of altcoins.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

The past week was one of the most consequential in global financial markets since the Iran war began in February. And, the coming week is set to be another blockbuster, with the most important central bank meeting of the year so far set to kick things off (hint: it’s not the Fed…)

On Friday, SpaceX made its stock market debut at $135 per share and closed at $160.95, a 19% gain on its first day of trading. With after-hours extension to $166.76, the company briefly surpassed $2.2 trillion in market capitalisation. This matters for crypto for a reason that has nothing to do with Elon Musk's personal enthusiasm for Bitcoin. The SpaceX listing, and the two set to follow it from OpenAI and Anthropic, will trigger forced mechanical buying by passive index funds across Nasdaq and S&P benchmarks within the next 15 trading sessions. To fund that buying, those same funds will sell existing holdings. The estimate from JPMorgan is that SpaceX alone will eventually require roughly $95 billion of selling from existing index constituents. This has nothing to do with sentiment. It’s a function of the rules index providers have written, and it will happen regardless of market conditions.

Looking ahead, the Bank of Japan meets on Monday. A rate hike is now nearly certain - overnight index swaps placed the probability above 94% ahead of the weekend. Japan's producer prices hit a three-year high this week. The yen has spent most of the past month above 160 per dollar, a level that prompted the Finance Ministry to spend a record $73.6 billion in a single month trying to defend the currency, without lasting effect. A BOJ hike matters to crypto because of the carry trade unwind mechanism. When Japan raises rates, Japanese institutional investors with leverage in US assets reduce their positions, putting upward pressure on US bond yields. US 10-year yields were already testing 4.6% going into the weekend, and 30-year yields remain near their highest level since 2007. Probably nothing…

That combination - forced passive equity selling from the SpaceX inclusion and potential carry trade unwinds - creates a complex macro backdrop for the week ahead. Neither of these is a crypto-specific event, but both have direct implications for the risk appetite that drives Bitcoin.

BTC closed the week at approximately $63,700, having recovered from the lows near $60,000 seen in the previous week. The recovery is meaningful but not yet decisive. The on-chain picture remains broadly supportive: the realised cap has stabilised, the pattern of this correction continues to differ from the bear market reversals of 2014, 2018, and 2022. The 200-day moving average is trending lower rather than climbing, so the key precondition for a violent reversal in previous cycles remains absent.

The Iran situation also deserves a mention because it’s the single most important macro wildcard for everything else. As of this weekend, Pakistan's prime minister confirmed that the US and Iran have agreed to the wording of a deal to end the war. Trump simultaneously dismissed Iranian media reports that an agreement was close, despite having suggested earlier that a deal could be signed this weekend. The pattern is now four months old: signals of imminent agreement, followed by denial or escalation, followed by new signals. Rinse and repeat.

In sum then, the week ahead has three dominant catalysts: the BOJ decision on Monday night, ongoing SpaceX index inclusion and the Iran war. Bitcoin at $63,700 is in a better position than it was at $60,000 and the recovery thesis is intact. But the macro environment remains genuinely difficult - inflation is not falling and the Fed is not cutting. Our directional call is cautiously constructive over a one to three month horizon. Near-term, the path is likely to remain volatile and macro-dependent. Patience remains the correct position.

🤖 Tether’s Robot Curiosity  🤖

Last week, Tether confirmed it was leading a Series C funding round of up to $1.4 Billion in NEURA Robotics, a German humanoid robotics firm. Besides being one of the largest private rounds ever raised by a full-stack robotics firm, it’s also reportedly one of the largest European tech rounds in history. By all measures, this is one of the biggest tech funding announcements this month.

But if that isn’t enough to warrant attention, you should know that Tether’s involvement in this funding round represents a key strategic effort by the stablecoin issuer to cement itself in the agentic payments space.

But before we dive into that, let’s learn a bit more about why the NEURA funding round is impressive in its own right.

First, the co-investor list reads like a cross-section of the global industrial economy. Alongside Tether sit Nvidia, Amazon, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, the European Investment Bank, imec.xpand, Lingotto Horizon and InterAlpen Partners.

If you read the cap table as a map of the supply chain, you’ll see how this mutually benefits every player beyond basic equity gains in an emerging sector. Nvidia and Qualcomm for the chips. Amazon for the cloud and logistics muscle. Bosch and Schaeffler bring industrial credibility and the factory floors where these machines will actually work. The European Investment Bank lends sovereign cover. And Tether for the financial and intelligence layer.

Bloomberg puts the post-money valuation at roughly $7 billion. That said, it seems like not all of the $1.4 Billion is guaranteed upfront. The disbursement of these funds is reportedly tied to performance milestones. NEURA itself has declined to confirm both the valuation or the funding milestones. In many ways, this round looks similar to the circular financing trend we’ve seen in the AI industry. While it’s a dampening perspective, it doesn’t change the fact that each of these players is considering NEURA to be a serious contender in the emerging robotics category.

On a more optimistic note, NEURA claims that its existing orderbook and strategic deployment pipeline exceed $1 billion. The latest funding will reportedly help it scale its manufacturing and deployment infrastructure across Germany and India. The company says that it aims to produce several million robots by 2030. For context, that target would put its production ambitions in the same conversation as established automakers within four years of this raise. Whether that is within the realm of possibility is something that only time will tell.

In the meantime though, we can monitor how it achieves its shorter-term goals. According to Neura CEO David Reger, the company’s near-term target is to increase production capacity for its humanoid robots from 6,000 units in 2026 to tens of thousands in 2027. That’s quite a ramp-up in output.

Now, for Tether more specifically, NEURA represents a foothold within the agentic payments space. You see, what Tether is buying, beyond equity, is the right to embed its own infrastructure into NEURA's machines at scale. Specifically, two integrations sit at the centre of the Tether-NEURA partnership.

The first is Tether's Wallet Development Kit, an open-source, self-custodial wallet toolkit that Neura's robotic platforms are expected to embed directly. This will allow NEURA robots to hold their own wallet, get paid the moment a task is completed, and spend within parameters set by its operator. All without routing through a human-approved invoice queue for routine transactions, especially in a machine economy where different AI agents and robots transact with each other through micropayments.

The second integration is QVAC, Tether's edge-first AI runtime, which Neura will test and deploy inside the Neuraverse. To put it simply, QVAC allows the robot to think without needing constant access to the internet. This especially matters in an industrial setting (factory basements, mining sites and rural logistics hubs) where constant internet connectivity cannot be guaranteed. A robot running QVAC can keep making decisions even when its network connection degrades.

Both will be deployed inside Neuraverse, NEURA's unified software platform that links robots, models, compute, data and services into a single ecosystem. While the benefit on Neura’s side is in terms of latency, resilience and data sovereignty, Tether’s outcome from this partnership is a foothold in the intelligence layer of the machine, not just the payments rail side of it.

Now, why does a stablecoin issuer want to own a slice of this?

Well, it’s no secret that agentic payments are the first genuinely new payments market to emerge in decades. Currently, rival stablecoin firm Circle has been making strides in the space through its partnership with Coinbase. Notably, Coinbase's x402 protocol, which revives HTTP's long-dormant "402 Payment Required" status code, is heralded as a key infrastructure in unlocking stablecoin micropayments on the agentic web. In fact, Google has already wired x402 into its own agent payments protocol as the default stablecoin rail.

According to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, x402 has processed more than 160 million agentic payments in the last year. While the standard is token and chain agnostic, it still directly benefits Circle’s USDC, which underpins a lot of these x402 microtransactions and has strong ties to Coinbase and its Base L2 network.

Similarly, TradFi incumbents like Mastercard and Visa are also simultaneously making strides in the agentic payments sector. Notably, on the same day as NEURA’s fundraise announcement, Mastercard announced the launch of Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) - its new payments infrastructure designed specifically for autonomous transactions executed by AI agents and machines. With more than 30 partners including Coinbase, Stripe, Cloudflare, Adyen, and OKX, AP4M has strong support.  

Notably, Mastercard's chief product officer Jorn Lambert called agentic payments the start of "a superbloom of AI business models." He also clarified that he doesn’t expect this to move Mastercard's revenue meaningfully in the next year, framing it instead as positioning for a market that might arrive within the next five years.

So, with that context, it’s easy to see Tether’s strategic logic in its NEURA investment. After all, every wallet-equipped robot NEURA ships is, in effect, a new USDT holder that never sleeps, never churns, and transacts continuously. Getting a foothold in the hardware layer is Tether's way of trying to make USDT the default unit of account for machine commerce before the card networks get there first.

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🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* Cypherock X1 Review 2026: Is Seedless Backup the Future of Hardware Wallets?
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* KuCoin Earn Review 2026: Products, Rates & Honest Safety Assessment

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

"Exiting the market after a decline — and thus failing to participate in a cyclical rebound — is truly the cardinal sin in investing."- Howard Marks

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.