Yuma, Arizona

When a local government decides how to spend taxpayer money, use public land, or approve massive infrastructure projects, the law requires everything to be open and transparent. However, an institutional breakdown occurs when executive leaders such as Mayor Douglas Nicholls along with board members of influential regional non-profits, fail to disclose private Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) before presenting projects to the city council. By using these secret legal contracts to hide their personal business interests, these figures create a massive conflict of interest. They essentially force council members to vote on major community initiatives while completely blindfolded to who is actually profiting behind the scenes.

​This intentional lack of disclosure transforms the city council from an independent oversight board into an unwitting legal shield for private networks. Non-profits and public-private partnerships are frequently used as the “middlemen” to broker local development deals because they do not face the same strict public transparency laws as City Hall. When a mayor or a non-profit board member signs a private NDA regarding a project, they lock away the real data, the financial alignments, and the identities of future commercial beneficiaries. They then present only the shiny, high-level summaries to the council floor. The council members are induced to vote “yes” on a proposal based on incomplete facts, entirely unaware that their votes are being harvested to validate and protect the executive inner circle’s hidden business ties.

​However, the city council needs to realize that they are not legally or ethically bound to stand by decisions made under this decade-long pattern of deception. Legally, a legislative body cannot be held strictly liable for a contract or resolution if material facts and personal financial interests were deliberately hidden from them at the time of the vote. An approval granted in an information vacuum is fundamentally flawed. Once independent investigations and forensic audits follow the paper trails, the protective “firewall” these insiders built entirely collapses. A vote cast in darkness cannot insulate public officials once federal regulatory agencies and the public expose the underlying conflicts of interest..

​The city council has the ultimate statutory power to break this cycle of co-optation immediately. Council members must stop acting as a rubber stamp for prepackaged deals brought forward by executive networks and their preferred non-profit proxies. The council has the full authority to halt any vote, table any resolution, and launch independent investigations into any project where full financial disclosure has been denied under the guise of private NDAs. The moment the city council refuses to validate deals wrapped in executive secrecy, they strip the inner circle of its legal insulation. They force entrenched leadership to stand alone and finally answer for years of keeping the council, and the entire Yuma community, in the dark.

Hong Kong — June 24, 2026

Financial & AI Layer 1 Pharos Network today welcomed Circle, Avalon Labs, TermMax Finance, Primus and Tulipa Capital as the newest strategic partners of the RealFi Alliance led by Pharos Network. This expansion directly tackles one of the most consequential challenges facing onchain finance today, that is expanding productive capital beyond stablecoin yield loops to include the largest pools of onchain liquidity, the deepest asset class in traditional finance, and the trust infrastructure required for institutional scale.

Bitcoin, the largest pool of onchain capital, sits largely passive. Fixed income, the deepest asset class in global finance, remains underserved onchain. Institutional capital stays on the sidelines without verifiable trust and compliance frameworks. The industry has the assets, but not yet the productive infrastructure around them.

This cohort is designed when Circle anchors the stack with USDC and CCTP, the regulated settlement layer that moves dollar liquidity natively across chains and into RealFi applications. Avalon Labs activates Bitcoin as working capital, enabling BTC-backed lending, borrowing, and structured yield strategies that connect the largest onchain asset to real-world opportunities. TermMax brings fixed-income and maturity-based products backed by real-world assets onchain, introducing the predictable, institutional-grade yield curve that traditional capital expects. Primus establishes the verification and trust layer through zkTLS and verifiable credentials, enabling compliance-friendly onboarding, reputation systems, and trusted interactions, including for AI agent–driven finance. Tulipa brings institutional capital expertise and professional asset allocation frameworks, channeling sophisticated capital into onchain RealFi opportunities. They extend the RealFi yield layer from stablecoin deposits into a complete productive capital stack covering dollars, Bitcoin, fixed-income, trust, and institutional allocation.

These collaborations among alliance members are already in motion, and deepening. More than 10 alliance members have jointly published an industry perspective report on the state and future of RealFi, setting a shared framework for how onchain finance can move from fragmented tokenization to productive capital at scale. On the product side, R25 Protocol, TopNod, and Ember Protocol (from previous cohorts) are advancing real yield product designs, translating institutional-grade strategies into accessible onchain experiences for users. TermMax is working with Ember Protocol to channel fixed-income strategies into accessible onchain yield products, while Tulipa Capital is leveraging Circle’s USDC for its settlement strategies. These efforts reflect a deliberate shift, that is alliance members are no longer operating as parallel partners, but converging into a tightly coordinated network where research, products, and infrastructure compound on one another. More integrations across alliance members are underway, with additional product launches to come.

“Tokenization without utility is just a database entry.” said Wish Wu, Co-Founder & CEO of Pharos. “What the industry needs now is the productive capital infrastructure around those assets like settlement, Bitcoin liquidity, fixed-income, trust, and institutional allocation working as one stack. That is exactly what this cohort of partners is building together.”

The RealFi Alliance continues to expand as a coalition of the infrastructure providers, asset issuers, and financial applications shaping the future of onchain finance. Previous cohorts include Chainlink, Centrifuge, Faroo, Amber Group, LI.FI Protocol, Vishwa, Agra, Dune Analytics, Anchorage Digital, and others, bringing institutional assets, DeFi players, cross-chain infrastructure, intelligence and data access that established the foundational layer of the RealFi ecosystem. Explore the full RealFi Alliance and the growing list of partners at https://www.pharos.xyz/realfi-alliance.

About Pharos Network

Pharos is a financial and AI Layer 1 built for RealFi. It delivers the compliant infrastructure needed for institutional assets and internet-scale capital markets.

Designed to coordinate real-world financial activity onchain, Pharos combines deep-parallel execution (SALI engine), modular SPNs, and protocol-level compliance infrastructure, integrating ZK-KYC / AML mechanisms, AsyncBFT consensus, native AI agent support (X402 protocol), and dualVM (EVM + WASM compatibility), to support RWAs, stablecoins, cross-border settlement, onchain yield markets, and agent-mediated commerce at internet scale.

The network is supported by strategic partners across the global financial stack, including Circle, Chainlink, Anchorage Digital, Morpho, and Centrifuge, connecting regulated capital markets with onchain liquidity venues where real-world assets can be actively deployed into real-yield-generating strategies.

Built by former Ant Group leadership and engineers, backed by leading global investors across TradFi and crypto, including Sumitomo Corporation, Flow Traders, SNZ, Hack VC, and Faction VC, Pharos is developing the infrastructure layer for the next era of programmable finance and the agentic economy.

MONACO, June 24, 2026

c8ntinuum, an interoperability protocol building verified cross-chain infrastructure for Web3, has formally unveiled its trust-minimized interoperability architecture at WAIB Summit Monaco 2026. The announcement, made alongside the project’s sponsorship of the VIP Private Dinner at the Yacht Club de Monaco, marks c8ntinuum’s transition from infrastructure development into broader market onboarding and sets the stage for a Q4 2026 public release of its Bridgeless Protocol.

The Monaco summit served as the launch platform for c8ntinuum Summer, an integrated program covering B2B interoperability integrations, strategic partnership announcements, SuperApp access, and community expansion through the coming months.

The Bridgeless Architecture

Cross-chain interoperability has long run on bridges, and bridges run on trust. A bridge takes custody on one chain and asks another to believe a message about it, with that belief manufactured by multisigs, oracle networks, and verifier sets. That trust assumption has become the largest attack surface in crypto: CertiK reports more than $328 million in bridge-related losses in 2026 alone.

c8ntinuum’s answer is verification. Through on-chain light clients and ZK light clients, a destination chain checks what happened on a source chain directly, reducing the trust path to the security of the underlying chains and the soundness of the proof system. The proof becomes the authority.

“Recent attacks have made cross-chain security the core pillar around which projects should be built. Our architecture solves the biggest problem in the space: the destination chain should verify the source chain rather than trust a messenger between them.”

— Bogdan Dinulescu, COO, c8ntinuum

The architecture supports three core use cases:

• General Message Passing — verified cross-chain messages for governance, coordination, state updates and multichain logic
• Cross-chain swaps — enabling users and applications to access liquidity without navigating fragmented bridge flows
• Cross-chain smart contract invocations — allowing contracts on one chain to coordinate actions on another, expanding the design space for DeFi, SocialFi, launchpads and automated markets

c8ntinuum Summer

COO Bogdan Dinulescu opened the VIP Private Dinner at the Yacht Club de Monaco, leading two days of conversations with founders, investors, and family offices on cross-chain finance and shared liquidity. Those discussions confirmed a consistent market requirement: cross-chain access without importing an additional trust domain. The summit launched c8ntinuum Summer across four areas:

• Interoperability and B2B integrations — expanded private testing, additional integration model disclosures, and strategic partner announcements as implementations progress toward the Q4 2026 public release of the Bridgeless Protocol.
• SuperApp and product access — the c8ntinuum SuperApp is in development as the first public product layer, bringing holding, trading, staking, launching and earning into one interface while abstracting cross-chain routing and verification from the user experience.
• Market and community expansion — CTM is now available on KuCoin Alpha, Gate Alpha and BitMart. The protocol’s base fee is burned, connecting network usage directly to CTM supply mechanics.
• Arena seasons — upcoming performance-based Arena seasons will evaluate projects and communities through transparent on-chain indicators, holder growth, trading volume, and user activity, connecting ecosystem opportunities to measurable performance.

The program launched with strong early momentum: 40,000 verified users joined the SuperApp waitlist in a single week, and 5,000 OG community roles were claimed in under 24 hours.

The Road to Q4

The Bridgeless Protocol targets a public release in Q4 2026. Between now and then, c8ntinuum will advance private SDK integrations into named partner work and move the SuperApp toward launch as the first public-facing product. The waitlist remains the last point of entry without a referral code: app.c8ntinuum.com.

About c8ntinuum

c8ntinuum is a universal interoperability protocol and forward-compatible EVM chain built around trust-minimized cross-chain verification. The protocol verifies source-chain activity through light clients and ZK light clients, reducing reliance on privileged third parties such as multisigs, TSS or MPC groups, oracle networks or operator committees. c8ntinuum is building infrastructure for general message passing, cross-chain swaps, cross-chain smart contract invocations and shared liquidity across Web3, with a product ecosystem that includes the c8ntinuum chain, a SuperApp and private interoperability SDK integrations. The network is secured by a validator set that includes Dokia Capital, one of the biggest and oldest institutional staking providers and the only licensed validator in the Principality of Monaco.

www.c8ntinuum.com   |   docs.c8ntinuum.com

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Media Contact
Mihai Pop, Marketing Manager — [email protected]

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