First Ukrainian International Bank (FUIB) has signed its first loan agreement with the National Development Institution (NUR) for EUR 2.9 million to finance Ukrainian entrepreneurs and companies, the bank announced on Monday.
The agreement was signed on August 28 by PUMB Deputy Chairman of the Board Artur Zagorodnikov and NUR Chairman of the Board Andriy Hapon.
“The signing of the first loan agreement with the NDR is an important practical outcome of the partnership we launched under state-sponsored preferential programs back in February 2020 and successfully continued several months ago by attracting funds from foreign investors,” Zagorodnikov said.
Under the terms of the agreement, NUR will provide PUMB with financial resources, which the bank will direct toward lending to individual entrepreneurs and micro, small, and medium-sized private enterprises operating and investing in Ukraine.
The funds may be used for investment projects, the modernization and development of production, the purchase of equipment, and the replenishment of working capital.
According to the National Bank, as of July 1, 2026, PUMB, with total assets of 248.63 billion UAH, ranked fifth among Ukraine’s 59 banks. The bank’s loan portfolio grew by 17.6% in the first half of the year, reaching 115.4 billion UAH.
BUSINESS, FUIB, INVESTMENT, LOAN, НУР
Bringing pharmaceutical production into compliance with European requirements demands significant investments from Ukrainian pharmaceutical manufacturers, which could lead to higher production costs, according to Anatoliy Reder, CEO of the pharmaceutical company “Interchem.”
“We are operating within the paradigm that our country is currently moving toward—alignment with European requirements. We must understand that compliance with European standards, EU directives, and the principles and approaches currently in effect in Europe will require significant additional investments from us—in production, regulatory processes, research, and so on. In other words, this involves enormous additional costs in order to meet, within a relatively short period of time, the requirements that are currently the norm in the European Union. With a gradual transition to these requirements, it must be acknowledged that production costs will rise significantly,” he said in an interview with the “Interfax-Ukraine” news agency.
As Reder noted, compliance with European standards—particularly those incorporated into Ukraine’s law on medicinal products—will automatically require additional investments, which will inevitably lead to price increases.
“We need to speak openly about this. You can’t make pills out of thin air. If additional controls are needed, additional costs will be incurred. Today, we monitor every batch of manufactured products throughout their entire shelf life—something that wasn’t required before—and this involves hundreds and thousands of manufactured batches and, consequently, enormous costs. The additional control points in production required of us by European Union legislation—this means additional equipment, additional laboratory staff, and additional production processes—represent objectively large-scale investments. These costs will inevitably lead to price increases,” he stated.
According to Fixygen, buybacks—a strategy long used by public companies to support their stock prices—are becoming one of the main tools of the cryptocurrency market.
In 2026, crypto projects have already allocated approximately $640 million to buy back their own tokens—a historic high, according to the Financial Times.
By comparison, this figure stood at about $545 million for all of 2025, and in 2024, it was just $366,000.
Nearly 90% of current buybacks are accounted for by Hyperliquid and pump.fun.
Hyperliquid allocates virtually all of the platform’s revenue toward purchasing HYPE. Against the backdrop of this policy, the token’s value has risen by approximately 70%.
The economic logic is similar to a stock buyback: a company or protocol uses its cash flow to reduce the number of tokens in free circulation and increase the economic value of the remaining ones.
However, there is a fundamental difference between a token and a stock. A stock represents an ownership stake in a company, whereas a token holder’s rights may be significantly weaker or may not confer any legal right to profits at all.
Therefore, a buyback alone does not guarantee growth. Some projects continued to lose value even after launching buyback programs.
Nevertheless, the emergence of a $640 million buyback market indicates that the cryptocurrency industry is gradually adopting tools from traditional corporate finance.
Companies that built their investment strategies around accumulating Bitcoin have lost over $80 billion in market capitalization since this model peaked in popularity in the summer of 2025.
According to Financial Times calculations, the combined market capitalization of the 50 largest Bitcoin treasury companies fell from approximately $150 billion in July 2025 to $67 billion in August 2026.
The model gained popularity thanks to Michael Saylor’s Strategy. Companies issued stocks or debt securities, used the raised funds to buy Bitcoin, and expected the market to value them higher than the cost of the cryptocurrency on their balance sheets.
As long as Bitcoin was rising, this scheme allowed companies to raise new capital in a virtually endless cycle. But BTC’s drop of about 30% from its October 2025 high disrupted the mechanism.
According to the FT, the shares of 35 companies in the group studied lost more than half their value. Some market participants have already begun selling part of their crypto reserves to service their debts.
In effect, the market has stopped automatically paying a premium simply for having Bitcoin on a company’s balance sheet. Investors are now much more closely scrutinizing a company’s debt, the cost of raising capital, and the business’s ability to fund payments without selling cryptocurrency.
According to Fixygen, Strategy remains the world’s largest corporate holder of bitcoin. As of August 23, the company held 840,447 BTC, or about 4% of the maximum possible supply of the first cryptocurrency.
At a BTC price of $77,004, its Bitcoin reserves were valued at $64.72 billion, while Strategy’s market capitalization stood at approximately $49.6 billion.
At first glance, it appears that investors value the entire company at less than the value of the Bitcoin it holds.
However, this comparison is incomplete. In addition to BTC, Strategy held $6.69 billion in dollar-denominated assets, but at the same time had approximately $6.75 billion in debt and $14.97 billion in preferred stock, which ranks higher than common shareholders in the capital structure.
After accounting for these liabilities, Strategy itself estimated the net value of its reserves at approximately $49.68 billion—nearly the same as its market capitalization.
This is precisely why the company’s mNAV ratio as of August 23 stood at around 1.01x. In other words, the huge premium that investors previously paid for the opportunity to gain indirect exposure to bitcoin through MSTR has virtually disappeared.
This is a fundamental shift in Sailor’s model: Strategy remains the world’s largest Bitcoin treasury, but its stock is increasingly valued as a financial entity with BTC, debt, and expensive preferred equity, rather than as “Bitcoin at a premium.”
The volume of capital investments in Ukraine from January through June 2026 increased by 9.9% compared to the same period in 2025—to 307.915 billion UAH, according to the State Statistics Service.
The agency specifies that 39.5% of the total value of capital investments made (or 121.5 billion UAH) was accounted for by industry, while 11.4% (35 billion UAH) went to agriculture, forestry, and fisheries.
The vast majority of investments were concentrated in tangible assets—94.5% of the total volume. In particular, the largest amounts were invested in machinery, equipment, and inventory (36.1%), engineering structures (22.4%), non-residential buildings (11.4%), and vehicles (10.7%).
According to the State Statistics Service, the main source of funding for capital investments in January–June of this year remains the own funds of enterprises and organizations—75.4% (232.114 billion UAH).
As previously reported, capital investments in Ukraine in 2025 increased by 20.3% compared to 2024, reaching 893.6 billion UAH.
agricultural sector, INDUSTRY, INVESTMENT, State Statistics Service, UKRAINE
