Courts in South Korea will use a new set of guidelines in rehabilitation hearings to write off people’s crypto debts in an attempt to stop citizens from going bankrupt.

The new rules will see three courts, opened this month in the cities of Daejeon, Daegu, and Gwangju, exclude debts incurred from stock or cryptocurrency investments from liquidation calculations.

And this, in turn, will reduce the overall amount debtors need to pay their creditors in personal rehabilitation proceedings, South Korean media outlet EToday reported.

The new rules are the South Korean authorities’ latest attempt to get the country’s rampaging debt problem under control.

The country’s household debt-to-GDP ratio has risen to 92% in 2025. The government has vowed to act, promising to cap household debt growth at 3.8%.

The new initiative comes after the government courted public criticism in December by providing 269 individual crypto traders with over $15 million in debt relief from a fund intended to help small companies.

It is against this backdrop that the three new rehabilitation courts are set to write off crypto traders’ debt, despite public criticism.

Easing debt burdens

The first rehabilitation court was opened in Seoul in 2017, as part of a government drive to restructure insolvent individual firms’ arrears and provide debt relief.

The three courts will work alongside the Seoul court and two more branches opened in the cities of Suwon and Busan in 2023.

The Suwon and Busan courts have already begun classifying some individuals’ crypto and stock market-related investment losses as “general property” losses rather than “speculative debts.”

This, the courts say, has helped many people ease the burden of repayments in their personal rehabilitation proceedings.

But bad crypto investments are proving increasingly troublesome in bankruptcy cases.

In 2024, Lee Seok-jun, a Seoul Bankruptcy Court judge, called on the government to create more regulations to protect crypto investors.

The Seoul Rehabilitation Court says its case load has increased by almost 13% since 2023. The capital’s branch said it handled around 28,000 cases last year.

Unnamed critics told EToday that sweeping measures to write off investment losses could lead courts into moral difficulties.

But courts said they will be on their guard against investors who try to deceive them.

The Daegu Rehabilitation Court said it would punish any debtor who “intentionally conceals” their crypto purchases by “disguising them as failed investments.”

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

The warning comes from All-Russia People’s Front, a coalition of leading political groups that was launched by and remains loyal to President Vladimir Putin. The coalition said all crypto fundraising drives made in its name were “fake” and originated from scammers.

“The All-Russia People’s Front does not use cryptocurrencies in its fundraising,” said Sergey Gorbunov, Deputy Head of the coalition’s executive committee, in a statement published on its official website.

The warning comes as Russian security agencies continue to crack down on citizens who use crypto to send funds to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Russian militias fighting on Kyiv’s side, and unnamed “terrorist” groups.

On the other side of the political scale, pro-Russian neo-Nazis have also enjoyed the support of crypto donors in the past.

Everything for Victory

DL News has seen documents circulating on Russian-language Telegram chatrooms that make use of the coalition’s logo and office addresses.

One of the documents featured Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP wallet addresses and called on supporters to send crypto donations.

Its authors claimed the donations would be used to buy electrical generators, thermal bedding, clothing, portable gas heaters, and educational resources for children.

The documents’ authors claim the fundraising campaign is part of the coalition’s Everything for Victory drive.

In its statement, the coalition said that the Everything for Victory campaign only raises funds for Russian soldiers fighting the war in Ukraine.

“Any other information published about the campaign is false,” the coalition said.

Gorbunov said the campaign only accepts donations made using bank transfers via the drive’s dedicated website.

An $8 billion ecosystem

Iran’s crypto ecosystem was worth almost $8 billion in 2025, the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis said in January.

The firm said addresses linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps moved coins worth more than $3 billion last year.

“This is not civilian speculation,” Jake Percy, a Bitcoin analyst, told Indian media outlet NDTV last week. “This is state military financial infrastructure.”

The corps has sent roughly the same amount of crypto to regional militia groups, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, Chainalysis added last week.

Percy claimed Iranian Bitcoin mining drives are helping Tehran raise funds for its missile strikes on targets across the Middle East.

“Iran can mine a single Bitcoin for roughly $1,300,” he said.

Bitcoin is currently trading at just under $70,000.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

It took only a relatively small correction in tech stocks to trigger a 40% slump in Bitcoin’s price.

Now, imagine for a moment what would have happened in case of a much broader market meltdown, the kind of which many investors now expect to happen at some point?

The crypto industry would do well to find an answer to this question.

Bitcoin’s big problem is that investors are treating it as a super procyclical tech stock. The crypto community should have pushed heavily against this because this is not in its long-term interest.

‘The single most damaging event for the crypto industry was the arrival of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds’

Wolfgang Münchau

When cash-strapped investors are forced to clean out their tech portfolios, they realise that there is a real income stream behind Nvidia, but not behind Bitcoin.

No asset class can choose its investors.

But these are the wrong investors. They push up the price in good times, and they are the first to get out when the going gets tough.

One of the astonishing parts of the DL News story about Ray Dalio, the founder of the investment firm Bridgewater, was not his statement that Bitcoin would never be gold, but his mistaken assertion that Bitcoin transactions are not private.

If one of the world’s most influential investors does not understand this fundamental aspect of Bitcoin, then we can say for sure that the cryptocurrency’s principal features are not widely understood in the non-crypto communities.

I have written about the ignorance of macroeconomists, but ignorant investors are much more consequential.

Based on what Dalio believes, it really would not make sense to invest in Bitcoin.

Two reasons to hold Bitcoin

The single most damaging event for the crypto industry was the launch of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which turned Bitcoin into the speculative asset it has become.

There are only two rational reasons why people would want to hold Bitcoin.

The first is that a cryptocurrency allows the owner to transact in the most adverse of circumstances, where their government, or someone else’s government, does not want them to transact.

The second reason is that they are algorithmically safe from debasement.

The ETF does not give you Bitcoins. It gives you a claim to the dollar price of Bitcoin. The full value of Bitcoin lies in the thing itself, not in the stuff that tracks the thing. An ETF is not a transaction currency.

As for debasement insurance, ETFs provide it nominally, but there is something odd about the fact that the unit of account of this insurance, the US dollar, is exactly the currency the debasement of which you want to protect against.

I understand that ETFs are more convenient for many investors, but they come at a cost. If the global financial system melted down, your ETF would be gone. Bitcoin would still be there.

Bitcoin is tech, but not a tech stock. Like gold, it should occupy only a small part of an investment portfolio.

Right now, it sits at the risky end.

I suspect that most investors would want to hold no more than 10% of their portfolio in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. What happened is that more and more investors treated Bitcoin as a speculative asset in its own right.

It was not designed for that purpose.

Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s secretive founder, would turn in his grave if that’s where he resides.

‘Haggling over the price’

People who look at Bitcoin in the way I do — as an alternative transaction currency and debasement insurance — can still disagree on the value.

If you are a macroeconomist, you would pay zero dollars for such insurance, since your economic model tells you that debasement is impossible.

Others, like me, see this differently. But in essence, we are just haggling over the price. That’s how markets work.

But if you think of Bitcoin as a glorified tech stock, and I think of it as an alternative money, then there is no market mechanism on earth capable of arbitraging our different perspectives.

This is why the actual Bitcoin price looks like the random walk of a cocaine addict.

‘ We are one war from financial Armageddon’

Wolfgang Münchau

Here is my answer to my question in the beginning: What would happen if there were a big financial crisis?

I think Bitcoin would be in existential danger.

One plausible crisis scenario would be an artificial intelligence-induced mass layoff of white collar jobs so severe that it would trigger a collapse in consumption and mortgage defaults.

This was the scenario outlined in a report by the research firm Citrini that spooked the markets.

My own crash scenario is a different one, but no less severe.

The US is running a fiscal deficit of 7% of GDP. The war against Iran could easily push this up to 10%. US debt is projected to reach 156% by 2055 under the IMF’s baseline assumptions.

But if the nominal growth is 1pp below the assumed rate, this level of debt would explode to 210%.

We are one war from financial Armageddon, or one economic forecasting error.

In Europe, the big problem is no longer Greece, but France. The European Commission had a truly alarming report out on French debt sustainability. Interest rates on its outstanding debt are expected to grow from currently 2.1% of GDP to 5% in 2035, while the debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to rise from 116% to 140%.

This is just governments.

According to Moody’s, the volume of private credit under management has gone up from approximately half a trillion US dollars in 2015 to approximately $1.7 trillion in 2024. BlackRock has just stopped redemptions for one of its private credit funds.

Every financial crisis is preceded by jitters such as these.

When our credit bubble bursts, the fiat universe will turn into a hyperinflationary mess. This is the world for which Bitcoin was designed and against which it should provide insurance.

But if it gets sucked into this world, it cannot provide this function.

Joyride

In a global financial crisis of the magnitude I just described, speculative cryptocurrencies would be at risk of being swept away.

There are, in principle, three ways to think about financial crises.

Not to think about them at all, which is the default mode; to try to anticipate them, which is difficult; or to be prepared whenever they may happen. That’s the smart way.

This is what the crypto industry should do at this point.

Get off the joyride. Find a new story.

Bitcoin is not going to be a unit of account for a long time, if ever.

But it has a chance to fulfil the other two functions of money – that of a means of transaction and a store of value. But a currency as volatile as Bitcoin cannot credibly claim to be a store of value.

These are the themes I would urge the crypto-community to think about, rather than to plot the next bull market ride. The risk of a global financial crisis is not a hypothetical scenario, but something very real.

Gold will remain a debasement insurance. So will copper. Maybe prime properties will make a comeback.

Bitcoin has the potential to be right up there on that list.

On Monday, the crypto exchange launched futures contracts with up to 10x leverage for the market’s two largest cryptocurrencies across 26 different European countries.

Traders can also tap a crypto equity index, which includes exposure to top tech firms, Coinbase stock, and spot crypto exchange-traded funds.

The publicly listed exchange pitched the launch as a regulated alternative for European traders who have “often relied on unregulated platforms for crypto-derivative products.”

The launch comes as Bitcoin and the broader crypto market have plunged far from their October 2025 highs.

The $1.3 trillion cryptocurrency is down nearly 50% from its record price of $126,000.

A slew of geopolitical events — including the United States’ bellicose tariff regime, an escalating conflict in the Middle East, and market jitters linked to forecasted disruptions from advancements in artificial intelligence — has weighed down the market

Meanwhile, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong continues to advance his company’s objectives of becoming a one-stop trading shop.

The firm’s prediction market product also falls under the commodities umbrella

The ‘everything’ exchange

Coinbase is expanding far beyond trading cryptocurrencies, staking tokens, and other crypto-native features.

That includes the launch of traditional equities trading in 2026, allowing users to trade Apple and Tesla stocks 24 hours a day, five days a week. Coinbase also lets users trade popular commodities, such as gold and oil.

The firm’s prediction market product also falls under the commodities umbrella.

Coinbase has advanced thanks to regulatory tailwinds — albeit that advantage is diminishing.

When landmark stablecoin legislation in the US passed, via the Genius Act, Coinbase found a convenient loophole that allowed it to distribute yield, called “rewards” by the company, to users holding stablecoins. As this yield is far greater than that available at a traditional bank, the broader financial community has condemned the language in the Genius Act.

Now, Coinbase is facing off against heads of traditional banking, including JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, to close that loophole in new legislation.

The Clarity Act, which primarily delegates regulatory oversight of cryptocurrencies, is now a battleground for stablecoin yield.

European sights

As Clarity simmers, Coinbase continues to make inroads in Europe.

“As regulatory clarity continues to mature across Europe and globally, we are looking forward to continuing to introduce new and expanded services,” the exchange said in a statement.

The new futures contracts are cash-settled and come in two flavours: Perpetual and dated. They incur a fee of 0.02% per contract.

Liam Kelly is a DeFi Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at liam@dlnews.com.

The poll-leading Reform Party leader framed his investment in Kwasi Kwarteng’s Stack BTC, a Bitcoin treasury company, as his latest act of support for the UK’s crypto community.

“I have long been one of the UK’s few political advocates for Bitcoin, recognising the role digital currencies will play in the future of business and finance,” Farage said in a statement.

“London and the UK has (sic.) historically been the centre of [the] world’s financial markets, and I believe that we can and should be a major global hub for the crypto industry.”

Farage’s investment further underscores his ambition to replicate Donald Trump’s success in the 2024 presidential election, in which the US president secured his return to the White House with ample support from the crypto industry.

While the two right-wing populists have been seen as close in the past, their relationship seems to be cooling, as Trump decided not to meet Farage at Mar-a-Lago this weekend, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

Over the years, Farage has become a common fixture at industry events, and last year the Reform Party became the first UK party to accept cryptocurrency donations.

Kwarteng’s Bitcoin treasury

Kwarteng served as chancellor of the Exchequer for just over a month in 2022 and is best known for announcing a slew of policies aimed at boosting economic growth.

Instead, his mini-budget triggered a crisis in the UK gilt market, saw the value of the sterling crash and led to Kwarteng’s defenestration from then-Prime Minister Liz Truss’ government.

Truss was ousted from Number 10 just days after.

Since leaving government, Kwarteng has maintained a relatively low profile.

Yet he reemerged in November, announcing that he was backing Stack BTC.

“Crypto is not going to disappear — and given London’s importance and history as a financial centre it’s important that we play a part in this new industry,” he said at the time.

Stack BTC is part of a wave of some 200 companies that aim to replicate the success of Strategy, the software company-turned Bitcoin treasury, which has seen its stock surge by 280% since it began buying Bitcoin in 2022.

They had reason to be excited. The Trump presidency’s pro-crypto tilt seemed to herald an unprecedented Bitcoin rally. Over the last year, the price rose and rose.

As it did, companies banking the digital asset on their balance sheet could issue more shares to raise capital and buy even more Bitcoin.

Many also tapped low-interest debt to help them purchase the soaring asset.

Mounting pressure

Yet, these companies have come under pressure amid the crypto market contracting by almost 50% from its October record highs. Many have stopped buying Bitcoin and begun offloading their assets.

Those firms now hold Bitcoin worth about $76 billion, roughly half of their peak value, according to BitcoinTreasuries.net.

Strategy itself has seen its stock fall by almost 70% since its July highs.

Moreover, Goldman Sachs has named Saylor’s firm the most-shorted stock among companies with market caps over $25 billion.

By contrast, Stack BTC has seen its share price surge by 83% since the start of the year, according to Yahoo Finance.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email him at eric@dlnews.com.

Kennis told DL News that three key forces are converging to turn privacy from a speculative corner of crypto into a durable institutional theme: political tension, regulatory tightening, and the maturation of zero-knowledge technology.

Crypto privacy tools have evolved from “experimental to deployable” because ZK technology has significantly matured, as institutions like venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz have described it as crypto’s “most important moat,” Kennis said.

Kennis’s call comes as the US Treasury Department acknowledged in a new March report that crypto privacy tools such as token mixers that mask transactions and identities can serve “legitimate financial privacy purposes.”

“Lawful users of digital assets may leverage mixers to enable financial privacy when transacting through public blockchains,” the report told Congress.

The language marks a notable recalibration in tone and is the latest signal of the Trump administration’s relaxing attitude toward the industry.

In August, the Department of Justice said it would stop aggressively pursuing future charges against developers building privacy-focused crypto tools.

Privacy performance

Privacy-focused crypto tokens had a stellar run in 2025 before sinking alongside crypto’s $2 trillion wipeout.

Zcash soared nearly 2,000% from August to September. Then the core development team quit, and the price crashed by over 65%. Monero had a similar meteoric rise and fall, reaching a new all-time high of nearly $800 in January before plunging back under $300.

Still, Kennis said there are plenty of privacy-focused crypto projects in investors’ crosshairs.

“Capital is flowing to projects like Railgun, Nocturne, Zama, Aleo, and Nillion, targeting compliant privacy for tokenization, payments, trade finance, and custody rather than just the most liquid privacy coins,” he said.

“There is a large playing field here for this sector and a path to grow.”

Risks

The Treasury does not gloss over the risks associated with private crypto transactions.

Its report discloses that billions in digital assets stolen by North Korean actors between early 2024 and late 2025 flowed through complex laundering chains that often included transaction mixing services, which shield users.

Since mid-2020, more than $1.6 billion in deposits from mixers has moved into crypto bridges, with a substantial concentration tied to a single bridge that was scrutinised for failing to intervene in swaps linked to sanctioned actors, the report said.

Treasury also highlights the interactions among mixers, stablecoins, and cross-chain infrastructure. While direct deposits of stablecoins into mixers for illicit purposes appear low, the Treasury notes that criminal actors frequently route other tokens through mixers before converting into stablecoins to break tracing links prior to fiat off-ramps.

Adding to the pressure on privacy, lawmakers in the European Union have approved legislation that will prohibit crypto exchanges from listing privacy-focused tokens such as Zcash and Monero, citing concerns about anti-money-laundering. The measure is scheduled to take effect in 2027.

At the same time, regulators across the US and Europe have intensified enforcement actions against developers of privacy-focused tools.

In the Netherlands, Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was convicted of money laundering in 2024 after prosecutors argued his software enabled criminals to obscure stolen cryptocurrency.

Authorities in the US have pursued similar cases.

Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm was found guilty of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, while Samourai Wallet developer Keonne Rodriguez received the maximum five-year prison sentence on comparable charges.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? lance@dlnews.com.

Traders rushed into tokenised oil perpetuals on the decentralised crypto exchange as crude surged 30% to above $110 a barrel on Sunday amid the escalating conflict in the Middle East. More than $160 million in oil contract volume changed hands on Hyperliquid in the past 24 hours.

“Pandora’s box is open,” Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperliquid treasury firm Hyperion DeFi, told DL News. “The narrative around onchain financial services is changing.”

The rush to trade on Hyperliquid comes as crypto perpetual markets are emerging as a direct venue for macro trades on oil, metals and currencies, amid a constant stream of geopolitical chaos. The attraction is 24/7 trading outside of Wall Street’s standard business hours.

Oil’s weekend surge followed a dramatic escalation in Middle East tensions that rattled energy supply chains and reignited fears over shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz. The abrupt price shock has triggered the G7 to consider releasing emergency oil reserves, FT reported.

“Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for USA, and World, Safety and Peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!” US President Donald Trump said of the situation on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin barely budged. The world’s largest cryptocurrency is hovering near $67,000, lethargic for the past month and down 50% from its October peak even as major assets like precious metals and energy have skyrocketed.

Hyperliquid momentum

Tokenised traditional assets have accounted for as much as 30% of daily trading activity during peak periods in recent months, Jung said.

He acknowledged that it is impossible to quantify precisely how much traditional finance capital has migrated on-chain because many accounts are pseudonymous. Still, he said traditional financial firms are increasingly choosing Hyperliquid for macro hedging and price discovery.

Jung joins industry leaders such as Kenny Chan, Coinbase’s head of Stablecoin Ecosystem, and Gabe Selby, head of research at CF Benchmarks, who have flagged the surge in tokenised asset trading on Hyperliquid.

Yet the surge in activity hasn’t helped Hyperliquid’s native HYPE token. It’s down nearly 50% from its September peak trading at just over $30.

Competitors exist — Aster and Lighter among them — yet they lack the scale and pace of innovation, Jung argued.

HYPE on Wall Street

Institutional attention toward Hyperliquid is also building with multiple US spot exchange-traded fund filings referencing HYPE, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation database shows.

On Wednesday, Hyperliquid Strategies, a digital asset treasury firm accumulating HYPE tokens, was listed on Nasdaq.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up 0.9% over the past 24 hours, trading at $68,272.
• Ethereum is up 2.4% past 24 hours at $2,011.

What we’re reading

• Insider Trading Is Going to Get People Killed — The Atlantic
• Trump releases cybercrime strategy to protect crypto in a post-quantum world — DL News
• The Aave DAO Is Collapsing. Is the Token Still a Good Investment? — Unchained
• Bitcoin recovers from $66,000 shock as experts predict volatility — and silver linings — DL News
• This AI agent freed itself and started secretly mining crypto — Axios

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

Guidelines issued by the Financial Services Commission to the domestic crypto industry currently forbid exchanges from opening corporate wallets for South Korean firms. The FSC is ready to reform these guidelines this year, following a lengthy wait.

But firms hoping to launch USDT treasuries or use US dollar-pegged coins to conduct cross-border trade are likely to be thwarted by the regulators’ new rules, South Korean newspaper Herald Kyungjae reported.

“I understand that the corporate guidelines taskforce has concluded its deliberations on this matter. The decision is final,” an unnamed source close to the taskforce told the newspaper.

The development will come as a major blow for South Korean companies, who have been waiting years for the chance to make crypto investments.

Many complain the FSC has allowed Japanese and US-based firms to steal a march on them, building several multi-billion dollar Bitcoin treasuries.

Trade firms frustrated

The decision comes as a major blow for several unnamed stock exchange-listed companies active in the cross-border trade sector, the newspaper wrote.

These firms have reportedly asked regulators to let them make corporate investments in USDT and USD Coin so they can conduct deals using real-time exchange rates.

This kind of trading, they say, would let them reduce risk when doing business overseas.

Their lobbying efforts bore fruit in October, when lawmakers drafted a bill that, if passed, would allow companies to use stablecoins as a means of payment.

However, this draft law remains under review at the committee stage in the National Assembly. And while lawmakers deliberate, the FSC is choosing instead to act.

Sources told the newspaper the FSC wants to channel trade deals through foreign exchange banks, rather than letting companies deal directly with overseas partners.

The regulator also reportedly wants to prevent firms from making “indiscriminate investments” in “the early stages of the market.”

The FSC’s tentatively named Corporate Cryptocurrency Trading Guidelines are set to roll out in the weeks ahead, sources said.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin prices have fallen to $67,304, dropping just under 1% over the past 24 hours.
• Ethereum prices are down at $1,944, falling over 2% over the same period.

What we’re reading

• Farage aide ‘Posh George’ loses $655,000 betting on Iran invasion on Polymarket — DL News
• How crypto is becoming a massive divorce problem — DL News
• The $30 trillion gold mine sitting in your driveway— Milk Road
• Bitcoin: Boom or bust—CNBC
• Binance slams $1.7bn Iran probe from US Senators, calls reports ‘defamatory’— DL News

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

Analysts are divided on the short-term fate of Bitcoin prices, with some claiming a renewed bullish sentiment is about to take grip of the markets — and others warning of deeper price drops ahead as the war in the Middle East rumbles on.

“When geopolitical volatility affects financial markets, Bitcoin should be expected to behave like a high-beta risk asset in the short run,” John Haar, managing director at the financial services provider Swan Bitcoin, told DL News. In the traditional financial world, high-beta assets are typically volatile shares in sectors such as technology or small-cap stocks.

“But in the medium and long run, Bitcoin has shown its price is determined more by its monetary properties and increasing adoption,” Haar said.

Bitcoin rose above the $73,000 mark midweek — prices not seen since before the conflict began, with some experts forecasting Bitcoin prices to rally higher should hostilities continue.

Fund movements key

Experts agree that crypto price movements now largely hinge on the confidence of traditional investors who want exposure to Bitcoin through traditional financial products such as funds.

“The recent move in Bitcoin can largely be attributed to renewed institutional demand entering the market through spot exchange-traded funds,” Orkun Mahir Kılıç, co-founder of the blockchain firm Citrea, told DL News. “ETFs are increasingly acting as the main gateway for traditional capital.”

While ETF traders were bullish at the start of last week, ploughing over $900 million into BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, or IBIT, from Monday to Wednesday, uncertainty took grip on Thursday-Friday.

Farside Investors data shows IBIT investors sold off $143.5 million worth of shares on Friday, with Bitcoin ETF investors dumping a total of $349 million.

Iran-related risks could “push Bitcoin lower” and even drive down the price of so-called safe-haven assets like silver from its peak, Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, per a report from South Korea’s Seoul Kyungjae.

McGlone said Bitcoin could drop to $50,000, with silver falling to $50 per ounce.

However, industry players say global crises will inevitably lead to a rise in crypto adoption.

“In the near term, Bitcoin often trades as a risk asset and reacts to macro shocks like the recent Iran crisis, Jordan Jefferson, founder of the Dogecoin wallet MyDoge, told DL News. “But every sanctions crackdown, banking freeze, and currency failure reinforces the long-term argument for permissionless financial infrastructure. And we’re seeing several play out right now.”

Jefferson explained that historical examples from the Middle East show that citizens intuitively seek crypto-powered solutions to failures in the conventional financial system.

“When Lebanese banks froze withdrawals in 2019 as the Lebanese lira collapsed, crypto became one of the only ways to transact and store value, and adoption surged,” he said.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

President Trump released the “National Cyber Strategy” on Friday, telling Americans he would make sure the US remains “unrivaled in cyberspace.”

“Every American should take practical steps to protect themselves and their families in cyberspace, but America’s citizens do not stand alone,” the document from the White House reads.

President Trump is combating cybercrime & fraud by unleashing every tool to stop foreign-backed networks exploiting Americans through cyber-enabled fraud & extortion. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/B2MuZEmTeP

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 6, 2026

“President Trump has demonstrated time and again that he is determined to make Americans secure and prosperous by harnessing all of our comparative advantages.”

The strategy comes as the biggest players in the crypto industry argue about whether major protocols like Bitcoin should prepare for a time when quantum computers can crack their security.

Post-quantum world soon?

The White House document says that the Trump Administration will “build secure technologies and supply chains that protect user privacy from design to deployment, including supporting the security of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies.”

“We will promote the adoption of post-quantum cryptography and secure quantum computing,” it adds.

Quantum researchers have warned that a time will come when Bitcoin’s software — which underpins the biggest and strongest computer network in the world — will need to be upgraded to deal with quantum computing.

Quantum computers may still be theoretical, but some have argued that their development could arrive unexpectedly — just like advances with artificial intelligence.

Some in the crypto industry, like Bitcoin treasury Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor, have said that while developers should prepare, the warnings as overblown.

But the community behind Ethereum, the protocol behind the second biggest cryptocurrency by market value, is already pushing ahead: the project’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, in February proposed a “quantum roadmap” to protect the blockchain from encryption-cracking computers.

Pro-crypto executive orders

The strategy came just as Trump signed an executive order Friday to combat cybercrime.

Trump, who campaigned on a ticket to help the digital asset industry, has signed a number of executive orders with the crypto space in mind.

Last year, the president signed an executive order to establish a Bitcoin strategic reserve.

The US government is not buying more Bitcoin — at least for now — and the reserve contains crypto confiscated mostly from crimes.

And in one of the first actions since taking office, Trump signed an order demanding a sweeping major overhaul of crypto policy — including the banning of central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Lawmakers passed Senate Bill 314 at a State Senate vote Friday. The bill demands stablecoin issuers in Florida be licensed by the Office of Financial Regulation.

“[The bill] aims to integrate state oversight with federal standards, specifically the federal Genius Act to ensure consumer protection and financial stability,” Republican Senator Colleen Burton said Friday.

DeSantis’ pro-crypto agenda

The bill will now head to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for signing.

If approved, Florida would become the first state to have its own regulation for managing the tokens.

DeSantis is a pro-crypto politician: the Republican in the past has said he would protect Bitcoin when running for president, and made Florida the first state to ban central bank digital currencies — or CBDCs — after claiming they were “woke” and would “crowd out and eliminate other types of digital assets, like cryptocurrency.”

Wider stablecoin regulation

Stablecoins have been a hot topic since President Trump signed the Genius Act last year to regulate the tokens.

The bill allows banks and other entities to issue stablecoins if they back the tokens with assets like US Treasuries and provide monthly disclosures of their reserves.

Still, banking chiefs and crypto executives are at odds with how to move forward with the regulation of the assets in another piece of legislation: The Clarity Act.

Companies like Coinbase want the legislation to allow firms in the space to pay customers rewards on their stablecoin holdings; banks have said such a practice should be banned or they could lose their deposits as their customers move to crypto.

President Trump this week sided with the digital asset industry, saying that banks shouldn’t be allowed to undermine the government’s pro-crypto agenda.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Bitcoin’s price recently stood at $68,005, according to CoinGecko, a 3% drop over the past day. Over the past week, the coin has risen by more than 6%.

Its drop comes after exchange-traded fund investors reversed course and quickly redeemed their shares on Thursday and Friday, cashing out a total of $576.8 million, according to Farside Investors.

The rest of the week saw positive flows into the funds, and on Wednesday, the coin reached as high as $73,669.

What about the war?

Experts previously told DL News that a war between Iran and the US would lead investors to de-risk.

And when Israel and the US did finally bomb the Islamic Republic on February 28, Bitcoin, Ethereum and other major coins quickly dropped.

Though not for long. Bitcoin recovered and bolted above $70,000 midweek — a level not seen since the beginning of February.

The largest cryptocurrency’s volatility has surged too, and correlation with equities has spiked.

After a brutal October crash which wiped out $19 billion in leveraged crypto bets, the leading coin’s volatility has been damper compared to previous bear markets.

Another war in the Middle East seems to have brought back the cryptocurrency’s unpredictability — for now.

Other market movers

Elsewhere, Ethereum dropped about the same amount as Bitcoin over the past week. The second biggest coin was trading for $1,985 on Saturday morning in New York after jumping over $2,179 midweek.

XRP, the fifth biggest coin, dropped nearly 1% over a 24-hour period, and was priced at $1.36. The asset has seen a flurry of trading activity in recent weeks with via US ETFs.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin’s price stood at $68,005, after nearly dropping 1% over the past day.
• Ethereum was recently priced at $1,985, flat over a 24-hour period.

What we’re reading

• How Paraguay is using outlaw mining rigs to stack Bitcoin — DL News
• Farage aide ‘Posh George’ loses $655,000 betting on Iran invasion on Polymarket — DL News
• Why hasn’t ETH improved lives? — Milk Road
• How an Oil Crisis Becomes an Everything Crisis — Bloomberg
• How crypto is becoming a massive divorce problem — DL News

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Charles Chong, vice-president of strategy at crypto advisory firm BlockSpaceForce, told DL News that investors have “real alternatives with faster revenue visibility.”

“Crypto teams need to work harder,” he said. “That’s pushing founders to be more precise about defensibility, monetisation, and how their models hold up in a slower market.”

Chong’s words of caution come as crypto startups raised $128 million in the first week of March, DefiLlama data shows. That brings the total amount raised in 2026 to nearly $2.5 billion so far.

Still, this week’s investors include the likes of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Ripple, Y Combinator, Wintermute, and Sequoia Capital, all piling into infrastructure for payments, trading, decentralised finance.

“Investors are still writing cheques, but only for teams that can clearly explain value capture and opportunity cost, especially in a world where AI offers a very different risk-reward profile,” Chong said.

Here are the top three raises this week.

ARQ, $70 million

ARQ, the Latin American fintech previously known as DolarApp, secured $70 million in Series B round, the largest venture round in the sector this week.

The raise was led by Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund. It seemingly signals institutional confidence as the company shifts from a cross-border dollar transfer service into a broader digital banking platform.

Handling more than $10 billion in annualised transaction volume across roughly two million users, ARQ plans to deploy the capital toward a full brand overhaul and the rollout of new products including wealth management services and high-yield local currency accounts.

The move highlights rising demand across Latin America for stablecoin-linked financial infrastructure, as consumers and businesses seek protection from persistent currency volatility and limited access to traditional banking services.

Crossover Markets, $31 million

Crossover Markets raised $31 million in Series B funding roundTradeweb Markets led the raise that valued the firm at roughly $200 million. Additional investors included Ripple and crypto market-maker Wintermute.

The company operates CROSSx, an execution-only electronic communication network built for institutional digital asset trading

Unlike many crypto exchanges, the startup says it separates trade execution from custody and market-making functions, a structure designed to minimise conflicts of interest and appeal to traditional financial firms.

QFEX, $9.5 million

QFEX, a hybrid derivatives exchange focused on tokenised real-world assets, raised $9.5 million in seed funding led by Yuri Sagalov of General Catalyst, with backing from Y Combinator and investor Paul Graham.

Founded by Cambridge mathematics graduates and former high-frequency traders from Citadel and Tower Research Capital, the platform allows investors to trade equities, commodities and foreign currencies via perpetual derivatives that operate around the clock.

You’re reading the latest instalment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

Since the product went live in July 2025, Solana has plunged to around $85, down from nearly $300 when traders could start trading the ETF. In fact, for Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg Intelligence ETF analyst, the timing was terrible.

“About as unlucky timing as you’ll ever see,” Balchunas wrote on X.

the other thing about these flows if we adjust for the size of solana vs bitcoin mkt cap, it's the equiv of $54b in net new flows, which is about DOUBLE where bitcoin was at the same point. And bitcoin was up a ton at that time vs down 57%. Anyhow, pretty impressive numbers given…

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) March 5, 2026

But Solana investors don’t seem to care.

“They managed to not only accumulate $1.5 billion in flows but not really give any of it up,” Balchunas said Thursday. “Both really good signs for the future.”

ETF flows refer to money put into and pulled out of the investment funds. Flows in March and February have been positive, suggesting investors view current prices as a buying opportunity rather than a warning sign.

According to Balchunas, the majority of Solana ETF holders are institutions filing 13Fs — hedge funds, asset managers, pension funds — which typically invest with longer time horizons than retail. Their willingness to accumulate through a cliffside 57% decline shows that they are confident about Solana’s long-term prospects.

Beating Bitcoin

Solana’s flows look even more impressive when they are adjusted for Solana’s market value relative to Bitcoin.

“If we adjust for the size of Solana versus Bitcoin market cap, it’s the equivalent of $54 billion in net new flows,” Balchunas said. “That’s about double where Bitcoin was at the same point.”

Beating Bitcoin in terms of ETFs is no small feat: the cryptocurrency had most successful launch in ETF history, bringing in upwards of $107 billion in its first year.

The composition of Solana holders also suggests some pretty important institutional conviction. Roughly 50% of Solana ETF assets come from 13F filers — institutional investors required to disclose holdings quarterly, according to Balchunas.

“Serious investor base,” he added.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

Last month, the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs urged Binance to provide key records regarding alleged connections between the exchange and terrorist organisations working on behalf of Iran.

The Committee’s probe came after Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, cited anonymous sources and internal documents in reports claiming Binance ignored internal warnings that sanctioned entities used the platform to launder nearly $2 billion.

We’ve voluntarily responded to Senator Blumenthal’s inquiry which raises false and defamatory allegations reported by the WSJ. While we take such matters seriously, it’s important for us to highlight our industry-leading compliance which we've worked hard to build and protect our… pic.twitter.com/qOZ7h1y5nu

— Richard Teng (@_RichardTeng) March 6, 2026

“The recent reporting on which your inquiry relies, however, is demonstrably false, unsupported by credible evidence, and defamatory in several material respects,” Binance’s legal team said in a Friday statement addressed to Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal of the Democratic Party, who’s helping lead the probe.

DL News reached out to both Binance and the law firm representing the company for comment.

The letter

In February, over a dozen US senators signed a letter written by Senator Blumenthal that said Binance “appears to have ignored warnings and recommendations to prevent Iranian money laundering schemes.”

The letter cited newspaper reports alleging Binance ignored internal warnings that sanctioned entities used the platform to launder nearly $2 billion in funds.

The news reports also alleged that company partners Hexa Whale and Blessed Trust operated as intermediaries on behalf of Iranian government entities.

Binance’s legal team said that “a rigorous compliance program” and “strict Know Your Customer” procedures prohibit users residing or located in Iran on the platform. It also said that Binance has reduced exposure to Iranian exchanges by over 97%.

Previous failures

Binance has been in hot water over Iran before.

Back in 2023, the exchange admitted it had failed to prevent criminals, sanctioned entities, and other bad actors from laundering billions of dollars in dirty money, according to court filings.

Iran was among the sanctioned entities, Department of Justice investigators said.

The DOJ fined the company $4.3 billion and ordered a three-year third-party monitor to oversee its operations.

Binance’s CEO at the time, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to violating US laws against money laundering charges and served four months in prison in 2024.

US President Donald Trump pardoned Zhao in 2025.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

But after amateur operations flooded the country, stole electricity and in turn attracted negative press, the nation clamped down on crypto cowboys.

Now, the South American country’s government has a new idea: Use machines confiscated from dodgy operations to kickstart a state-run crypto mining operation.

Morphware is proud to announce the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with ANDE, the National Electricity Administration of Paraguay.

This agreement establishes a formal framework for cooperation and technical coordination between Morphware and ANDE, focused on the… pic.twitter.com/5RKNhtPuid

— Morphware (@MorphwareAI) March 3, 2026

“By redeploying Bitcoin miners on regulated, utility controlled sites, we can transform unused electricity into productive compute that serves both the Bitcoin network and the global AI economy,” Kenso Trabing, founder and CEO of Morphware, the company working with the government on the initiative, said in a post on X.

The plan, according to Morphware and Paraguay’s state-controlled electricity firm, ANDE, is to use the country’s famously cheap and abundant leftover energy to mine with the machines. The two have signed a memorandum of understanding for the project.

Neither ANDE nor Morphware responded to questions from DL News.

Will it actually work?

But engineer and energy expert Nelson Cristaldo told DL News that the project for now would be an analysis for future mining operations.

“The confiscated machines are very old — two generations behind,” he said. “It would be very hard to make a profit with these machines.”

He added: “But it’s very good news that the government is doing this. The government has a very unique vision.”

Fernando Arriola, chief financial officer of Bitcoin miner BC Mining, told DL News that the initiative was a step in the right direction for the country.

“Illegal miners arriving in Paraguay gave our industry a very bad reputation,” he said.

“It’s a very good opportunity for the government to have a Bitcoin reserve, too.”

It is unclear whether Paraguay’s government plans to create a national Bitcoin reserve.

Hotspot for mining?

Paraguay was previously seen as being well-disposed to Bitcoin: A combination of business-friendly laws, cheap energy and an enthusiastic president attracted scores of miners post-2021.

Big players in the mining space, like HIVE Digital, Marathon, and Bitfarms, all set up shop there over the years.

But not all of the miners were legit, and after widespread electricity theft, the country’s authorities clamped down. Some top operators — such as Bitfarms — have since exited the country.

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña has in the past said he wants the country to be a tech hub.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Bitcoin showed signs of life this week.

The top cryptocurrency, which has trembled between $60,000 and $70,000 for most of February, finally broke out of the range after the US and Israel attacked Iran.

It’s currently trading just under $70,000.

Now what?

Will the Middle Eastern conflict shake Bitcoin and the rest of the cryptocurrency market out of their funk and catapult them back to prices seen in October — or even above those levels?

The answer depends on who you’re asking.

Bull case

Perennial pumpers like Maelstrom’s Arthur Hayes already sermonise a return to the land of milk and honey, where Bitcoin reaches record prices.

Their argument usually follows the same format.

Any escalation of the conflict will force the US government to step in to fund the war effort.

When that happens, the Federal Reserve will pump more liquidity into the economy, which will trigger new crypto all-time highs faster than you can say “Satoshi Nakamoto.”

Others are not as bullish.

Bear case

CoinShares’ James Butterfill and Wintermute’s Jake Ostroviskis warn that Iran’s response to the attacks — especially the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the passage of about a fifth of the world’s oil — will raise fuel prices.

Surging energy prices translate to higher inflation, and higher inflation means that the Fed is less likely to cut interest rates.

Lower interest rates usually incentivise investors to bet on riskier assets like Bitcoin.

Then there are those who say that Bitcoin’s price jumping above $70,000 is just a preamble to more violent drops, as the rise will invite traders to take profit.

Even before US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed off on the airstrikes that took out Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Bloomberg analysts warned that Bitcoin’s price would likely fall to $10,000 in the coming months.

So, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next.

Elizabeth Warren torches Trump after ‘lap dog’ SEC drops Justin Sun charges in $10m deal

On Thursday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken critic of the crypto industry, launched a fierce attack against Donald Trump after the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped charges against Justin Sun, Lance Datskoluo reports.

Why this fired OpenAI employee is betting $1bn on Bitcoin miners

Leopold Aschenbrenner, a researcher who was fired by OpenAI in 2024 over an alleged information leak, placed a number of bets on the Bitcoin mining sector through his billion-dollar hedge fund, Situational Awareness LP, Pedro Solimano reports.

Banking lobby decries Kraken bagging ‘skinny’ Federal Reserve account

The banking lobby has been left “deeply concerned” after the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City approved Kraken’s master account request, which will give the crypto exchange access to the payment infrastructure used by traditional lenders.

Post of the Week

The Federal Bureau of Investigation director, Kash Patel, took to social media on Thursday to announce the arrest of a young man alleged of stealing $46 million in crypto from the US Marshals Service.

The USMS are responsible for holding cryptocurrencies seized during legal operations by the US government as part of the administration’s US Bitcoin Reserve.

Patel congratulated French authorities for apprehending John Daghita on the island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean.

Last night, John Daghita – a U.S. government contractor who allegedly stole more than $46 million in cryptocurrency from the U.S Marshals Service – was arrested on the island of Saint Martin by the French Gendarmerie’s premier elite tactical unit in a joint operation with the… pic.twitter.com/3ttochgbjk

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) March 5, 2026

Social media chatter about an altseason has collapsed to levels not seen in years, according to blockchain analytics firm Santiment. Typically that’s been the exact moment when altcoins start to rally.

“Thinking about an altseason right about now? Neither is anyone else,” Santiment wrote on March 3. “Historically, however, moments like these when social volume toward altcoin interest is at extreme lows are around the time that rallies begin.”

The idea is music to many traders’ ears. For years many have been waiting for a repeat of the 2017 initial coin offering boom when every token under the sun pumped by double-to-triple-digit multiples.

But this time, they’ve been sidelined. Price rallies have been mostly contained to Bitcoin and a select number of cryptocurrencies. Even Ethereum has been spared from the gains.

Altseason refers to the period of time when traders plough money into the cryptocurrencies apart from Bitcoin and push prices to staggering numbers in a very short amount of time.

Weekly mentions

Santiment analysed weekly mentions of altseason across a plethora of social media platforms over the past two years, comparing them to Dogecoin’s price.

The memecoin is a proxy for speculative altcoin interest.

A notable pattern emerged. Every time altseason mentions cratered, prices bottomed shortly after, and every time mentions spiked, prices topped.

XRP, the fifth-largest cryptocurrency, has historically been one of the first major altcoins to move when altseasons begin.

In 2017, it surged to about $3.80 from less than a penny in 2017. Later, during DeFi summer in 2021, XRP rallied to nearly $2 from $0.17.

What gives XRP its allure is that it combines a diehard retail fan base that has now tapped into institutional liquidity from exchange-traded funds linked to the cryptocurrency, making it a prime candidate to lead if Santiment’s pattern holds.

Moreover, Santiment explained how social volume forecasts price movements.

“When social volume toward ‘altseason’ gets high, this is commonly associated with tops,” Santiment wrote. “When conversations around ‘altseason’ hit rock bottom, that’s when large capital holders begin to typically pump the price.”

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Russia, and North Korea all helped push illicit onchain finance to stratospheric heights, reported the crypto analytics firm Chainalysis.

The firm added that industry-scale scam networks in Southeast Asia also contributed to a record $154 billion in total illicit transaction volume in 2025.

The depth of integration alongside wider adoption among legitimate users is also making enforcement difficult for authorities.

“This convergence can complicate enforcement,” analysts wrote on Thursday.

“The focus is no longer solely on isolating bad actors, but also on identifying when large-scale use of crypto crosses into sanctions violations or national security risk.”

Sanctioned entities

Pig-butchering scams, terrorist financing, escort services and child abuse material all contribute to the $154 billion figure, but it’s the use of crypto by sanctioned entities that dominates Chainalysis’ reporting.

The value received by sanctioned entities rose by more than 690% last year compared to 2024. There are four key entities behind that surge.

First, the IRGC and their proxy networks are turning to crypto to evade heavy sanctions levelled by the US and the European Union, which have designated the group a terrorist organisation.

Indeed, more than half of all value received by Iranian services has been linked to the IRGC, according to Chainalysis.

The organisation sent at least $3 billion to support regional militia, including Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, in 2025

Those funds were also used to purchase dual-use goods with both commercial and civilian purposes, as well as to facilitate illicit oil sales.

Second, the hermit kingdom of North Korea saw its most fruitful year for crypto exploits in 2025. The DPRK stole roughly $2 billion through various hacks and cyberattacks, but its sprawling IT workforce also continues to generate revenue for the country.

The Pyongyang government has deployed thousands of people to try to secure employment at tech firms in Western countries.

Once hired, they attempt to siphon off funds internally or steal trade secrets.

Finally, Russia provides one of the most prominent examples of how crypto is being used to evade sanctions.

Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the country has faced one of the most severe sanctions programmes in the world. In an attempt to sidestep the blockade, a ruble-backed A7A5 stablecoin emerged to support cross-border trade.

Equally, Meer and Grinex, two exchanges, have also emerged to facilitate trade in this stablecoin and allow sanctioned Russian businesses access to markets.

The stablecoin has facilitated a whopping $93.3 billion in volume, according to Chainalysis.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

The 32-year-old political aide to Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK right-wing Reform Party, appears to have lost approximately $655,000 incorrectly betting on when the US would strike Iran.

The aide, nicknamed “Posh George” due to his aristocratic background, traded under the username GCottrell93 and placed a series of bets in this market — and did manage to win $107,000 by betting that the US would not strike on February 27.

Crypto investigator ZachXBT has previously linked the account to Cottrell.

However, his biggest loss, worth $550,000, was betting “no” on whether the US would attack on February 28, according to Polymarket data and first reported by The Telegraph. He lost another $165,000 across three other wagers, inaccurately betting on other dates, too.

Prediction markets such as Polymarket let users wager money on the outcomes of political, sporting, or financial events.

In this case, Polymarket launched a market that enabled users to speculate on when the US military would attack Iran.

Users could bet on “yes” or “no” for a variety of dates.

After it was clear that the US bombed Iran on February 28, the market closed and paid out those who accurately bet on the day’s violent strikes.

All eyes on prediction markets

The multi-million-dollar war markets on Kalshi and Polymarket, the two largest prediction markets, have drawn fresh scrutiny from lawmakers.

Polymarkets wager on the ouster of Iranian leaders saw more than $529 million in volume.

Six specific users, however, stood out.

Just hours before the strike, analytics firm Bubblemaps showed six brand-new accounts emerge and rake in $1.2 million accurately betting on the strikes on February 28.

“It’s insane this is legal,” Democrat Senator Chris Murphy said on Sunday. “People around Trump are profiting off war and death. I’m introducing legislation ASAP to ban this.”

A White House spokesperson denied that anyone close to US President Donald Trump was behind the trades, according to NPR.

GCottrell93

Betting on Polymarket hasn’t been a complete loss for Cottrell.

Indeed, the author of the book “How to Launder Money” has bagged $3.4 million in profits — after accounting for losses — across 23 predictions.

His biggest win came from betting on the presidential election winner in 2024, where he bagged $4.4 million wagering on Trump.

After inaccurately betting on the Iran strikes, his next biggest loss was betting that the sitting UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, would be ousted on February 28, 2026.

He lost nearly $125,000 on the wager.

The Reform Party didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

On Thursday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken critic of the crypto industry, launched a fierce attack against Trump after the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped charges against Sun. Rainberry, one of the companies associated with the Tron network, which Sun founded, will pay a $10 million settlement.

Key to her broadside is the fact that Sun is a major investor in World Liberty Financial, which is run by the president’s sons. Trump is also a co-founder Emeritus, according to the company’s website.

Sun bought at least $75 million in the project’s native WLFI tokens and approximately $18 million in the president’s TRUMP memecoin, which launched in January 2025. The Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur has appeared alongside Trump family members at conferences and private events.

“Justin Sun poured $90 million into Trump’s crypto ventures, and today the SEC agreed to drop its case against him,” Warren said.

“The SEC should not be a lap dog for Trump’s billionaire buddies, and any crypto legislation moving through Congress must stop the president’s crypto corruption.”

Warren’s diatribe is the latest Democratic Party denunciation of the Trump administration’s increasingly permissive stance toward the digital asset industry.

The scrutiny is mounting ahead of the crucial midterm elections later this year.

In January, Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters, Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee, urged SEC Chairman Paul Atkins to step up enforcement.

The settlement is also the latest in a string of paused, halted and dropped cases against crypto companies since Trump was elected in 2024.

Coinbase, Ripple, and Kraken are just some of the industry players whose cases have been dropped or settled with the SEC

“The president has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities,” White House counsel David Warrington told DL News in February.

Sun settles

The Tron founder is known for engaging in high-profile publicity stunts, including paying over $6 million for “Comedian,” an artwork of a banana taped to a wall, which he then ate at a press conference.

Sun’s settlement resolves a 2023 SEC lawsuit.

The agency accused Sun and his companies — Tron Foundation, BitTorrent Foundation and Rainberry — of illegally distributing digital assets, manipulating trading volume and concealing payments to celebrity endorsers.

Sun has neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing to the SEC’s allegations that he generated roughly $31 million in profits through orchestrated self-trading of his TRX token.

“Today’s resolution brings closure, but I never stopped building,” Sun said after the charges were dropped.

“I will continue to focus on accelerating innovation in the United States and around the world and look forward to working with the SEC to develop guidance and regulations for crypto going forward.”

Regulatory shift

The Sun deal marks one of the most consequential examples yet of the SEC’s enforcement retreat since Trump’s return to the Oval Office in 2025.

The agency has pulled back from more than half of the crypto cases it inherited from the Biden era, according to analyses by the New York Times. Some lawsuits have been frozen. Others were dismissed outright.

The shift dovetails with Trump’s broader repositioning as a crypto ally.

Since taking office, he has pardoned crypto figureheads, signed pro-industry executive orders, and appointed industry allies to key government roles.

Trump has also pardoned Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, whose exchange paid $4.3 billion in penalties to US authorities and whose conviction stemmed from failures to prevent money laundering.

White House officials described Zhao’s pardon as closing the chapter on what they described as the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency.”

The pardon has caught the eye of Trump’s political rivals, who have noted Binance’s ties to the Trump family’s crypto ventures. For instance, it custodies almost 72% of all USD1, World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin, according to Arkham data.

Binance CEO Richard Teng, and Zhao’s lawyer Teresa Goody Guillen, have both dismissed claims that the exchange helped boost USD1 before Zhao received the pardon.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is down 3.9% over the past 24 hours, trading at $70,712.
• Ethereum is down 4.1% past 24 hours at $2,066.

What we’re reading

• Bitcoin price holds firm above $70,000. But market conviction is thin, analysts caution — DL News
• https://www.dlnews.com/articles/markets/crypto-fraudster-resurfaces-after-being-declared-dead/ — DL News
• SEC Sends Crypto Securities Framework to the White House — Unchained
• The Next Crypto Bull Market May Already Be Starting — Milk Road
• Ripple CEO backs President Trump’s ‘pointed message‘ to get Clarity Act passed — DL News

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

Over the past week, nearly $19 million has flowed into XRP ETFs, according to SoSoValue data. The products — which debuted in November — now manage a combined total of close to $1.1 billion in assets.

Still, XRP’s price is over 60% below its all-time high, recently trading for around $1.40, according to CoinGecko. Over the past 30 days, the fifth biggest coin has shed nearly 11% of its value.

Flows into the XRP ETFs are small fish compared to what has been deployed into Bitcoin funds, however. In the past week alone, investors have pumped over $1.3 billion into Bitcoin ETFs.

‘Not normal’

While the ETF flows pale in comparison to their Bitcoin counterparts, experts told DL News that the two products are very different beasts.

Bitcoin ETFs, which launched in January 2024, had the most successful debut in the history of ETFs. The products, managed by the likes of BlackRock, Fidelity, and Grayscale, manage a total of around $107 billion in assets, according to DefiLlama.

Despite its staggering popularity, market watchers reckon investors should remain level-headed when analysing Bitcoin ETFs.

“We need to remember that Bitcoin ETFs are a massive outlier. They were the most successful ETF launch of all time by a factor of six,” Bitwise Asset Management’s chief investment officer, Matt Hougan, said. “They are not normal.”

He added that while XRP ETFs haven’t attracted the same amount of capital as its Bitcoin and Ethereum counterparts, they are doing well considering market conditions.

The broader crypto market has been lambasted by a variety of factors, including a $19 billion liquidation event on October 10, massive macro headwinds, and geopolitical turmoil.

Ripple bounces back

XRP is closely linked to Ripple, a fintech company that claims to use blockchain tech to move money for big institutions.

Ripple, which holds a large amount of XRP, is racing to deploy technology that lets financial institutions mint CBDCs, or central bank digital currencies. It is also adding payment processing technology for stablecoins.

Ric Edelman, the founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, told DL News that while investors — particularly ETF buyers — were mainly interested in Bitcoin and Ethereum for now, XRP still had a chance.

“The tech remains viable; perhaps over time it will get the attention it once enjoyed,” he said, noting that XRP was far more popular years ago.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

“There is only one gold,” said Dalio on the All-In podcast on March 3.

The founder of Bridgewater Associates, an investment firm that manages around $125 billion in assets, explained why gold lives in a category of its own — and why the gap between its purported digital copycat is only set to widen.

“Bitcoin does not have privacy,” Dalio said. “Any transactions can be monitored and then indirectly perhaps controlled. Central banks are not going to want to buy Bitcoin and be able to hold it.”

Dalio’s assessment isn’t new. For years, people have been decrying the lack of privacy on Bitcoin. That’s because the system was designed with transparency and trackability in mind, and not necessarily for individuals to conduct anonymous transactions.

Bitcoin is actually pseudonymous: the blockchain records every transaction, but it doesn’t reveal who’s actually moving money.

Gold, instead, can be held physically and transferred without any digital trace, argued Dalio. A central bank can move gold bars between vaults, conduct transactions government-to-government, and maintain complete privacy — no blockchain records the movement.

That fundamental difference, argued Dalio, explains why gold has surged 80% over the past year — to around $5,000 today from roughly $2,900 per ounce — while Bitcoin has fallen 25% since February 2025.

Bitcoin’s other problems

Beyond privacy, Dalio identified three additional headwinds that have made central banks reticent of buying Bitcoin.

First, there’s the quantum computing risk.

“There have been some questions or thoughts of the development of new technologies like quantum computing,” Dalio said. “Can there be issues regarding that?”

Wall Street banking bigwigs have already expressed concern over the issue.

Second, Bitcoin correlates with equities rather than acting as a hedge. It “tends to have a pretty high correlation with the tech stocks,” Dalio noted.

When markets crash, Bitcoin tends to fall alongside risk assets like the Nasdaq instead of rallying like gold.

Finally, argued Dalio, Bitcoin’s size makes it an easy target for manipulation. “It’s a relatively small market that’s relatively controllable,” he added.

Not all bad

Despite Dalio’s scepticism, Bitcoin has its features — especially for individuals and institutions in today’s world.

For one, Bitcoin is much easier to transfer globally. Bitcoin proponents like Michael Saylor have argued that by paying just a few cents, Bitcoin allows anyone with an internet connection to send value around the world 24/7, without armoured trucks or customs forms.

Then there’s divisibility. Bitcoin allows for someone to send $1 or $1 billion, both with the same ease and for a similar cost.

Lest we forget Bitcoin’s scarcity is verifiable — there will only ever be 21 million coins, Bitcoiners say. Anyone can audit the total supply in real-time, whereas gold reserves rely on trust. Countries and their central banks might lie about holdings, and gold-plated tungsten bars have fooled even the most sophisticated of buyers.

But Dalio’s central bank argument remains Bitcoin’s biggest hurdle. Some central banks do, however, like El Salvador, and Bhutan.

But they are an early wave of adopters, and until more governments start to hold Bitcoin in reserves alongside gold, the “digital gold” narrative faces a structural ceiling.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 24-year-old researcher who was fired by OpenAI in 2024 over an alleged information leak, placed a number of bets on the Bitcoin mining sector through his billion-dollar hedge fund, Situational Awareness LP.

Situational Awareness LP is now worth $5.5 billion, with approximately $1 billion invested in Bitcoin miners, according to the fund’s latest SEC filing.

Aschenbrenner’s billion-dollar bet is one of the largest institutional investments in Bitcoin miners in months. But analysts say it’s a signal that the sector’s real asset was never Bitcoin — but electricity.

“A miner’s true value has always resided in its energy infrastructure and grid access,” Nishant Sharma, founder of mining and computing consulting firm Blocksbridge, told DL News. “In the current market, the underlying energy infrastructure often carries a higher valuation than the Bitcoin it could potentially produce.”

As AI companies scramble for power capacity and big-name mining stocks trade at multi-year lows, Aschenbrenner, who once served as a member of FTX’s Future Fund philanthropy team, sees serious value in Bitcoin companies sitting on gigawatts of industrial power.

And Aschenbrenner’s timing couldn’t be more prescient.

Bitcoin miner revenues have been getting crushed after the 2024 halving cut block rewards in half. Scant onchain activity has further exacerbated their situation, as it’s led to dwindling transaction-fee revenue.

Miners have thus pivoted to AI — riding the coattails of a hyped up trade — selling Bitcoin and abandoning the business model they were built on.

Shareholders for Bitcoin miners are now demanding that they pivot to AI even faster.

Aschenbrenner didn’t return requests for comment.

Aschenbrenner’s portfolio shows major positions across the Bitcoin mining sector.

These include Core Scientific, Iris Energy, Cipher Mining, Riot Platforms, and Hut 8, totalling around $1 billion in Bitcoin miners that are now pivoting heavily into AI.

Basically, he’s targeting Bitcoin miners that have made explicit moves towards the AI sector.

Core Scientific contracted AI cloud provider CoreWeave for 12 years, which is expected to generate $10 billion in revenue. IREN is targeting over $500 million in annualised revenue from AI cloud services by early 2026, and Riot recently shifted gears toward AI and high-performance computing, signing a 10-year data centre lease with AMD.

Indeed, the pivot is driven by economic factors that are hard to overlook. If the trend continues, AI hosting will generate predictable revenue, while Bitcoin mining depends on volatile crypto prices and brutal competition.

“Aschenbrenner’s bet is logical,” said Sharma.

Securing power

AI has one big problem: not enough electricity.

Training OpenAI’s GPT-4, one of the more popular large language modesl on the market, reportedly consumes over 12 megawatts — the equivalent of around 12,000 homes.

Future models will likely need even more.

Securing that power is extraordinarily difficult. In the US, connecting a new data centre to the grid typically takes three to five years due in part to environmental reviews, interconnection studies, transmission upgrades, and local permits.

Those timelines stretch out into the horizon. Cue Bitcoin.

“Because traditional data centre lead times are so long, the existing, power-ready assets held by miners are incredibly valuable for an industry struggling to keep up with demand,” Sharma said.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

The USMS are responsible for holding cryptocurrencies seized during legal operations by the US government as part of the administration’s US Bitcoin Reserve.

Patel congratulated French authorities for apprehending John Daghita on the island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean.

“Last night, John Daghita — a US government contractor who allegedly stole more than $46 million in cryptocurrency from the US Marshals Service — was arrested on the island of Saint Martin by the French Gendarmerie’s premier elite tactical unit in a joint operation with the FBI,” Patel wrote.

Ties to US government

ZachXBT, a pseudonymous investigator, said Daghita was able to steal cryptocurrencies by leveraging his father’s IT company, Command Services and Support.

CMDSS, a Virginia-based firm, won a $4 million contract with the US Marshals Service in 2024.

ZachXBT first alerted authorities to the alleged theft in January. The investigator revealed through a series of videos and screenshots how Daghita seemingly controlled several different crypto addresses, including those on Ethereum and Tron.

By tracing the addresses in the video recordings, ZachXBT identified ties to those funds and to funds from government seizures.

Patrick Witt, the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, responded at that time that he would look into the allegations.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

Bitcoin and altcoin holdings, along with stock options, are the “most difficult assets to divide during divorce proceedings,” Anastasia Madi, a family law attorney at the legal firm Kislov Law, told Russian media outlet RBC Pro.

And the number of crypto-related divorce disputes will increase as the popularity of crypto continues to grow in Russia, legal experts told Russian newspaper Izvestia.

As courts can only denominate the monetary worth of tangible and intangible items in fiat currencies, lawyers require specialists to “determine the value of cryptocurrencies,” the experts said.

Divorce rates in Russia are among the highest in the world, and have peaked at almost five per 1,000 people in recent years. And with crypto ownership also on the rise in Russia, civil law courts in the country could be about to get very busy indeed.

Calculation problems

Russian law was amended in 2020 to recognise crypto as a form of intangible property. This means Bitcoin and other tokens are classified as “marital property” in the eyes of the law, Madi said.

However, she said that “in practice,” proving exactly who owns crypto and calculating the assets’ exact value in rubles is less straightforward.

The fact that crypto is stored in password- and private key-protected wallets adds another layer of complexity to the matter, the lawyer said.

If one of the partners “conceals their private keys or passwords,” civil court lawyers have few resources to help them force the partner to hand over this information.

If a partner transfers their crypto to another wallet during the course of proceedings, even “proving the existence” of the crypto can become extremely difficult, Madi said.

In such situations, courts may simply refuse to divide crypto holdings “due to a lack of evidence,” she added.

A civil law court in Krasnodar last year turned down a woman’s request for the division of what she claimed were shared crypto holdings because she could not prove the existence of these coins to the judge, Izvestia wrote.

Lawmaker’s solution

Other legal experts agree that crypto presents family lawyers with a unique challenge.

“The anonymity of cryptocurrency is both its advantage and disadvantage: confidentiality protects the owners, but it makes division almost impossible,” Olga Dovgilova, managing partner of the Dovgilova & Partners Law Firm, told Russian media outlet Gazeta Ru last year. “What’s more, international crypto exchanges and blockchain platforms are not obliged to provide any information to Russian courts.”

Lawmakers are already aware of the problem. And one has drafted legislation that may help lawyers and courts out of the quagmire.

In October, Igor Antropenko, a member of the State Duma Committee on Industry and Trade, presented parliament with a bill proposing that crypto bought by either partner during a marriage be considered “joint property.”

Antropenko’s proposal also stipulates that any crypto acquired before marriage or received as a gift should “remain the sole property of the owner.”

The lawmaker also submitted the bill to the central bank, which has yet to comment on the matter.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

Ministry of Finance officials say that they’re mulling the introduction of a new stablecoin bill.

The ministry said it wants to launch a separate stablecoin bill, rather than bundle fiat-pegged assets with the new rules of a forthcoming crypto exchange law.

“Stablecoins “hold enormous — even colossal — potential,” said Alexey Yakovlev, the director of the Ministry of Finance’s Department of Financial Policy, Russian media outlet RBC reported.

Moscow has already earmarked stablecoins as a potential sanctions-busting tool, as the Kremlin races to legalise a sector that remains largely in the grey zone.

Talks of the new bill come a year after the US greenlit the Genius Act, a landmark stablecoin bill. Issued stablecoins have surged over 51% since the start of 2025 to reach a value of $311 billion, according to DefiLlama data.

‘Colossal potential’

Yakovlev said Moscow wants to tackle stablecoin regulation as soon as the State Duma has approved a law that will ban citizens from trading crypto on platforms that do not have operating permits.

This bill, which lawmakers will present to the State Duma in the spring session, will likely come into force as early as July, RBC reported.

“Once we launch the main [crypto] regulations, we will be able to [tackle stablecoin regulation] so we can regulate them separately and in a segregated manner,” Yakovlev said.

Currently, stablecoins have no legal status under Russian law. The ministry said it wants to redress this as soon as possible.

“For now, the consensus is that stablecoins are not unlike a form of digital currency,” the ministry official said. “But we intend to continue this discussion with the central bank and market players.”

Yakovlev said the government wants to ensure stablecoins “serve economic interests, primarily our domestic ones” before making a final decision on how to regulate stablecoin issuance.

The central bank has waded into the stablecoin debate before. It has created a category of approved “foreign digital rights,” which it said could “include certain cryptocurrencies, including stablecoins.”

Provided they meet central bank approval, this means the government could approve certain stablecoins as acceptable forms of payment in cross-border transactions.

The first stablecoin to be granted “foreign digital rights” status was the ruble-pegged A7A5 stablecoin, which the central bank approved for use in overseas trade in October.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

OKB bolted upwards by 53% to nearly $118 on the news, according to CoinGecko. It’s now trading at close to $108 — a 39% rise over the past 24 hours.

The Ethereum-based token is up nearly 40% over the past week, making it the biggest winner over that timeframe. Bitcoin and Ethereum, by comparison, are up 1.2% and 1.6% respectively over the past 24 hours. They are up just under 7% and 2.5% respectively in the same week.

ICE’s NYSE-listed stock rose on the news too.

In a joint statement Thursday, OKX and ICE announced they were working together on a deal that values the cryptocurrency exchange at $25 billion.

“Our strategic relationship with OKX will expand global retail access to ICE’s pre-eminent regulated markets and accelerate our plans to offer on-chain infrastructure and tokenized assets to US investors,” Jeffrey C. Sprecher, ICE chair and CEO, said in a statement.

OKX CEO and co-founder, Star Xu, added that the deal will help “build a more reliable market structure that bridges digital assets and equities, strengthens cross-market price formation, and meets institutional standards for risk and compliance.”

ICE will get a seat on OKX’s board and will license the exchange’s spot crypto prices, as well as debuting regulated futures contracts.

OKX last year pleaded guilty to violating US money laundering laws. Aux Cayes FinTech Co. Ltd, which operates the exchange, settled with the US Department of Justice by paying over $500 million worth of penalties for serving American customers without a money transmitter license.

ICE last year said it was investing up to $2 billion in crypto-powered prediction market, Polymarket, in a deal to become the platform’s global data distributor.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

The CEO of Ripple, the creators of the XRP token, took to social media on Tuesday to praise US President Donald Trump’s “pointed message” urging lawmakers to pass the Clarity Act.

Trump sided with the crypto industry in a Tuesday post, after traditional banks criticised stablecoin legislation language that would allow crypto firms to pass interest on stablecoin holdings to their customers.

That row may even derail the Clarity Act.

“An extremely pointed message from POTUS to those who are dragging their feet on Clarity,” wrote Garlinghouse. “This is, and always has been, about what’s in the best interest of the American people.”

Stablecoin loophole

Though the Genius Act, which passed last summer, banned passing on interest to stablecoin holders, crypto companies found a convenient workaround.

Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the US, for instance, pays interest to stablecoin holders as “rewards.” The company has also put this rewards programme behind a subscription product called Coinbase One, framing any financial incentives as a loyalty benefit for users.

Banking lobby groups are eager to close this loophole by adding new language to the upcoming Clarity Act.

The crypto lobby has opposed those changes, hence the clash.

Until those those differences can be settled, the act — a key piece of legislation according to many industry insiders — is on hold.

“The banks should not be trying under the Genius Act, or hold the Clarity Act hostage,” Trump said. “They need to make a good deal with the crypto industry because that’s what’s in the best interest of the American people.”

The Trump family owns and operates the fifth-largest stablecoin on the market, called USD1, according to DefiLlama.

It is issued by the company World Liberty Financial, of which the president is a co-founder Emeritus.

What is the Clarity Act?

Though landmark stablecoin legislation passed swiftly in the US, legislation that will delegate oversight of the crypto industry to regulatory agencies has hit a major roadblock.

The Clarity Act will define different cryptocurrencies as either commodities or securities.

Cryptocurrencies will meet these definitions based on what lawmakers are calling sufficient decentralisation. This refers to the extent of control that developers or companies may have over any of the blockchain network’s critical infrastructure or token issuance.

A cryptocurrency that achieves sufficient decentralisation would qualify as a commodity and fall under the purview of the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission.

The securities regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, has emerged as a very lenient partner for the crypto industry during Trump’s second term; it’s widely held that the CFTC would be even more lenient.

The stakes are high to get the bill passed.

US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent attributed Bitcoin’s volatility in February to the gridlock between lawmakers and a group of crypto firms over the Clarity Act.

Likewise, Garlinghouse forecast Bitcoin would hit new highs in 2026 if the bill were passed.

The heat of the debate hinges on this one key stablecoin clause, however.

Battle of the banks

Large banks are concerned that without interest restrictions on stablecoins, clients will withdraw their funds en masse to convert them to stablecoins and hold them on a crypto exchange.

Standard Chartered said that this deposit flight could see up to $500 billion exit the traditional banking system by 2028 if the Clarity Act is passed.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, said on Monday that if crypto firms want to pay customers stablecoin rewards, they need to be properly regulated and become banks so they can compete fairly with traditional lenders.

On Wednesday, the banking lobby hit back against the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s decision to grant Kraken, a major crypto exchange, the rights to use the same payment rails as banks and credit unions.

“We are deeply concerned,” Paige Pidano Paridon, co-head of regulatory affairs at the Bank Policy Institute, said in a statement.

For now, the Clarity Act is stuck in the Senate Banking Committee after an agreement between the banking community and crypto firms fell apart last week.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

Seoul prosecutors said they restored the legal identity of a man who had been treated as deceased under domestic law, enabling the sale of his frozen cryptocurrency assets and the repayment of about $60,000 to victims of his investment scam, local media outlet Yonhap reported on Wednesday.

After committing a major crypto fraud, the man fled to Cambodia in June 2019, the publication reported. At the request of family members, a Korean court issued a formal declaration of disappearance. Under South Korean law, that ruling effectively rendered him dead at home.

For years, he remained abroad. But in January, Cambodian authorities deported him to South Korea. Prosecutors arrested him immediately upon arrival and began untangling a bureaucratic knot that had turned a living suspect into a legal ghost, Yonhap reported.

To facilitate victim compensation, prosecutors sought and obtained a court order cancelling the earlier disappearance ruling. On February 27, they formally notified the relevant local government office that the man’s legal status had been restored. Only then could frozen bank and crypto accounts be accessed for restitution.

Working directly with defence lawyers, victims and a cryptocurrency exchange, prosecutors arranged for the sale of the defendant’s frozen digital assets. About $60,000 was repaid to victims.

“While strictly investigating the case, we will strive to protect the human rights of the parties as a representative of the public interest, and we will do our best to handle the case so that the dispute is resolved through the recovery of the actual damage,” the prosecutor’s office said.

Crypto crime

The episode captures the quirky — and complicated — intersection of crypto, cross-border enforcement and domestic law in South Korea, one of the world’s most active digital asset markets.

It also lands at a sensitive moment for the country’s authorities.

In recent weeks, South Korean law enforcement has faced public scrutiny over a string of crypto-related blunders.

A senior police officer was sentenced to six years in prison for taking about $90,000 in bribes from suspects linked to gambling and crypto fraud investigations.

In another case, officers in Seoul’s Gangnam district lost 22 Bitcoin — worth about $1.4 million — after failing to transfer seized coins into a police-controlled cold wallet.

Separately, the National Tax Service accidentally published seed phrases for confiscated crypto wallets in a press release image, enabling an anonymous actor to drain assets reportedly worth up to $5 million.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

But the real test for the top crypto is unfolding now, analysts say.

“The move brings Bitcoin to the level where previous rallies have stalled, and there is no confirmation yet of a break with follow-through,” Nicolai Søndergaard, research analyst at Nansen, said in an investor note shared with DL News.

Søndergaard’s call comes as Bitcoin’s price has been tightly rangebound between $60,000 and $70,000 over much of the past month. Since the October liquidation event, the crypto industry has been sitting some $2 trillion below its peak despite other assets like stocks and gold charging to new highs.

The move above $72,000 is “driven more by short-covering and retail flow than by conviction positioning,” according to Søndergaard.

He cites a “disconnect” between the recent price action and smart money risk appetite.

“Smart money netflows over the past seven and 30 days show persistent distribution across DeFi and governance tokens, not accumulation into strength,” he said.

Others optimistic

Livio Weng, chief executive of Bitfire, argues that the rally underscores Bitcoin’s structural evolution and demonstrates the top crypto’s value as a safe-haven asset.

As the US and Israel continue to strike hard at Iran, Bitcoin’s price action demonstrates renewed independence from US stocks as investors see it as an independent asset, Weng told DL News.

“The US dollar was once the only option, but as America’s global credibility weakens and a period of dollar softness takes hold, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are increasingly favoured for their security, liquidity, portability and divisibility,” he said.

Weng joins a growing chorus of bullish voices which include Maelstrom’s Arthur Hayes, Bitmine’s Tom Lee, David Brickell and Chris Mills of the London Crypto Club. They all see Bitcoin’s price surging amid the geopolitical chaos.

Indeed, investors poured in $462 million into Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, DefiLlama data shows.

That sets up March to be the first positive month for inflows since October, with $1.4 billion in the first week alone.

To be sure, some analysts advise caution given the uncertainties of the conflict in the Middle East.

“Assuming US and Israeli forces can finish the war in ‘a few weeks’ then I’d expect some bearish sentiment to subside,” Sean Dawson, research head at Derive.xyz, told DL News. “A longer, more protracted war would likely sustain risk-off positioning, increase volatility, and keep downside hedging demand elevated across crypto markets.”

US President Donald Trump has said the war could last five weeks, but that it could go “far longer.”

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up 2.0% over the past 24 hours, trading at $72,597.
• Ethereum is up 2.7% past 24 hours at $2,126.

What we’re reading

• Reform Party bags huge crypto donation to pull ahead of Labour and Conservatives — DL News
• Banking lobby decries Kraken bagging ‘skinny’ Federal Reserve account — DL News
• Riot Delivers Record Revenue as Mining Industry Feels the Squeeze — Unchained
• Crypto isn’t ready for AI’ - Stripe — Milk Road
• Traders take to Hyperliquid for 24/7 edge in global chaos leaving Bitcoin price sidelined, analysts say — DL News

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

The leader of the UK Reform Party pulled ahead of both Labour and the Conservative Party in terms of donations, thanks to a £3 million contribution from Christopher Harborne, a crypto investor and an aviation entrepreneur, according to Electoral Commission data.

The November donation marks Harborne’s second donation to the far-right party. He donated £9 million to the Reform Party in August.

The latest crypto donation brought the Reform Party’s donations to £5.5 million in the fourth quarter, ahead of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, which received £2.3 million and £1.7 million during the same period, the Financial Times reported

The Reform Party did not immediately return a request for comment.

The donations came after the Reform Party became the first British political party to accept donations in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in May. It is the only party that accepts crypto donations.

Since then, several members of parliament have called for a ban on crypto donations, arguing that they raise the risk of foreign interference.

Concern over foreign interference in UK politics has grown, not least with the conviction of Nathan Gill, the former Reform UK leader in Wales, who was jailed for more than 10 years after admitting to taking bribes for pro-Russia interviews and speeches.

Bring crypto ‘in from the cold’

The latest donation also highlights how Farage’s ambitions to replicate US President Donald Trump’s successful strategy of aligning himself with the crypto industry’s interests.

Farage, a member of parliament, has spoken at international Bitcoin conferences and made pro-crypto overtures for years. In 2025, he ramped up his pro-crypto campaign.

He said he would make the UK the crypto capital of the world “when I’m in Number 10,” referring to Number 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s residence.

“I want to bring in digital assets and crypto from the cold in London, to have that regulatory framework under which everybody can operate,” Farage said at the Zebu Live conference in London in October.

Last year, Farage not only signed off on the party accepting crypto donations, but also fired off a barrage of pro-industry volleys.

That included attacking the Bank of England for its proposed cap on stablecoin ownership, championing a pro-industry bill, urging the central bank to create a Bitcoin reserve, and pledging to turn the UK into a crypto powerhouse.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email him at eric@dlnews.com.

In a report this week, BIS authors Andrea Minto, Anneke Kosse, Takeshi Shirakami and Peter Wierts wrote that each variant of central bank digital currency — or CBDC — needs regulation appropriate to its specific risk profile.

“Offline digital euro payments could, all else being equal, pose greater anti-money laundering/combating the financing of terrorism risks compared with online digital euro payments or payments made using commercial bank deposits or hosted cryptoasset wallets,” the report read.

The comments come as European lawmakers push further towards a CBDC. European Parliament members last month backed a digital euro that would have both online and offline functionality.

More efficient than cash?

European citizens have expressed a preference for a CBDC with offline functionality for privacy reasons and for the ability to pay without an internet connection.

Offline functionality would allow users to transact without being connected to the internet, using features like near-field communication or bluetooth.

While the EU will soon limit cash payments to €10,000, lawmakers have yet to decide whether to apply a similar cap to a euro CBDC. The limit on cash transactions, set to take effect in 2027, is intended to combat money laundering.

Illicit actors could prefer using offline digital euro for illegal transfers due to the “cumbersome and less portable” nature of cash, the BIS paper noted.

“When issued for general use, retail CBDCs need to be incorporated into AML/CFT frameworks,” the report added. “The probability of detecting illicit use of retail CBDCs will likely differ for online and offline CBDC payments.”

Digital euro incoming — but no digital dollar

Lawmakers have been talking about a digital euro for years, but last month the European Parliament for the first time backed the project.

A digital euro — which will be the product of the European Central Bank — is necessary to compete with private and non-EU actors racing to digitise payments, lawmakers said.

EU lawmakers have been especially concerned by the growth of stablecoins pegged to the US dollar. A digital euro would be different to stablecoins as the European Central Bank would be the issuer. Stablecoins, meanwhile, are typically issued by private companies that have assets like US treasury bills backing the tokens in reserves.

While the EU races ahead with a CBDC, the US is unlikely to build its own — at least for now.

President Donald Trump campaigned against a CBDC, and last year signed an executive order prohibiting the establishment of a CBDC within the US.

American lawmakers this week introduced bipartisan legislation that proposes banning the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC until 2030.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Issued by Angle Protocol, EURA held the top spot among euro stablecoins for a brief moment at the end of 2021, when its circulating supply topped 180 million. It was overtaken in January 2022 by Tether’s EURT, which announced its own closure in 2024.

As of Wednesday, EURA was the 10th largest euro stablecoin, with a market value just under $4 million, according to DefiLlama data.

“While the stablecoins remain fully collateralized and functional, maintaining an idle protocol indefinitely creates ongoing operational overhead and liability for a diminishing user base,” Angle Protocol co-founder Pablo Veyrat wrote in February, when he first proposed the protocol’s closure.

“Rather than letting the protocol languish, we propose an orderly wind down that gives all participants ample time to exit their positions with no haircut.”

Veyrat did not immediately return DL News’ request for comment on Wednesday.

Angle tokenholders voted unanimously on Sunday to shutter EURA as well as a dollar-pegged stablecoin, USDA.

The vote only drew four voters, one of whom cast 98% of the votes — a sign of plummeting interest in the protocol. Only one prior vote drew fewer votes.

In a post on X, Angle attributed the declining interest to a dramatic change in the stablecoin market.

“The decentralised stablecoin space has also fundamentally changed,” Angle wrote. “Yield-bearing stablecoins are now essentially a branding layer on top of vaults and lending protocols that already exist everywhere. There is no strong reason to keep running dedicated infrastructure for something others do natively.”

Indeed, the market for euro-pegged stablecoins has only grown over the past year.

In March 2025, there was $315 million worth of euro-pegged stablecoins in circulation. That figure has since grown 131%, to $729 million.

Circle’s EURC has led the way. As of Wednesday, it accounted for more than half of all euro stablecoins in circulation, with a market capitalisation above $$60 million.

Last month, S&P Global Ratings said top European banks are likely to issue euro-pegged digital tokens this year, with the market to surge to €1.1 billion, or $1.2 billion, by 2030.

Angle holders will be able to redeem their stablecoins for the collateral they posted, or exchange them on a one-to-one basis with Circle’s euro and dollars stablecoins.

After one year, Angle will discontinue the stablecoins’ redemption mechanism, meaning they will almost certainly lose their pegs. Still, there will be ways to redeem outstanding EURA and USDA tokens at a discount.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

The win gives the crypto exchange access to the same payments rail as thousands of banks and credit unions.

“We are deeply concerned that the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has approved an account request for a ‘limited purpose’ master account — which appears to be a ‘skinny’ account — before the Federal Reserve Board has finalised its policy framework for those accounts,” Paige Pidano Paridon, co-head of regulatory affairs at the Bank Policy Institute, said in a statement.

The advocacy group also decried the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s decision for ignoring public comments, failing to provide transparency and said it “violates the board’s own policy on seeking public comment when it intends to make significant changes to the payments system.”

For Cynthia Lummis, a long-time crypto supporter and Republican senator of Wyoming, the decision marks “a watershed moment.”

Indeed, it comes at a time when the crypto industry and US banks are on a collision course as the former is increasingly getting legal and regulatory recognition, which has enabled it to encroach on what has traditionally been the $23 trillion US lending industry’s turf.

Kraken didn’t immediately return requests for comment.

A ‘milestone’

Kraken celebrated the master account approval on Wednesday, which will enable the crypto exchange to handle transactions faster and more seamlessly for big clients. Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Kraken, told DL News in September that the company’s aim is that institutional investors will make up a third of the firm’s revenue.

Even though the firm won’t get access to the full range of services that banks enjoy with the central bank — such as payments of interest on reserves held with the Federal Reserve — it still marks a major win for an industry that has long been treated as the financial industry’s unwanted step-child.

“This milestone marks the convergence of crypto infrastructure and sovereign financial rails,” Sethi said in a statement. “With a Federal Reserve master account, we can operate not as a peripheral participant in the US banking system, but as a directly connected financial institution.”

US President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto policies have legitimised the industry. In his first year back in the Oval Office, the 79-year-old has fired off a barrage of crypto-friendly executive orders, appointed industry allies to key government roles, supported looser policing of the sector, and signed the Genius Act, a landmark stablecoin bill, into law.

The Genius Act did, however, provide a loophole that could enable crypto exchanges to pay customers interest on stablecoin holdings, which the banks have rejected out of fear that it would drive customers away from them.

This week, Trump sided with the crypto industry in its monthslong dispute with banks over stablecoin yield, a row that has threatened to derail negotiations over the Clarity Act, a landmark regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies in the US.

Banks have lobbied lawmakers to include language in the Clarity Act that would close the supposed stablecoin interest loophole. Crypto companies, in turn, have slammed banks for attempting to relitigate components of a bill more than six months after it was signed into law.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email him at eric@dlnews.com.

Omsk’s Leninsky District Court sentenced the three, all aged between 21 and 23, to prison on March 3.

“The defendants broke into the [unnamed] victim’s apartment, threatened him with a knife, beat him, and demanded that he hand over cryptocurrencies and cash,” prosecutors told the court, the Omsk Oblast Prosecutor’s Office reported on its Telegram channel.

Crypto holders have recently become a key target for criminals in Russia and in other countries.

Last year was the worst year on record for so-called wrench attacks, with criminals torturing victims and cutting off their fingers. Experts warn of an escalation in brutality in 2026, with nearly a dozen violent attacks or kidnappings of crypto entrepreneurs, investors, and their loved ones reported in January and February.

Yet, the courts are catching up.

In November, a court in western Russia jailed two knife-wielding attackers who stole crypto worth $171,000 from a blogger.

And a court in Kazan has begun the trial of seven people suspected of beating and forcing a man to send them crypto worth $42,000.

Violent attack

The Omsk incident took place on April 10, 2024, the court heard, after the trio’s accomplice, a courier who had previously delivered a package to the address, identified the victim as a crypto owner.

Police showed the court closed-circuit television footage of the three defendants, wearing masks and hoods, approaching the apartment complex at night.

The trio tricked the victim into answering the door before forcing their way in and torturing him at knifepoint.

However, the attack was cut short after a neighbour grew suspicious about the noises coming from the apartment and came to investigate.

This caused the criminals to panic and flee the scene of the crime before they could get their hands on any crypto, prosecutors explained.

The three defendants denied involvement in the crime, but the court found them guilty of all charges and ordered them to serve their terms in maximum-security penal colonies.

The court also ordered them to pay the victim over $5,000 in damages.

The trio’s courier acquaintance is being tried separately.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

Now, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer is betting big on mattresses.

On Wednesday, the company invested an undisclosed amount in Eight Sleep at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Eight Sleep’s mattresses and covers have grown popular among tech crowds for their personalised sleep insights generated by a network of sensors inside their products.

Tether, which is also investing heavily in artificial intelligence, expects to marry Eight Sleep’s products with the stablecoin firm’s data infrastructure.

Tether issues the dollar-pegged stablecoin, USDT. The token is worth more than $183 billion as of Wednesday afternoon.

The token is the largest of its kind and the third largest cryptocurrency, after Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Founded in 4, Tether’s business has boomed. As the underlying assets have historically been commercial paper, gold, and billions of dollars in US Treasuries, Tether has steadily generated enormous profits in the last few years simply by collecting the yield on American debt.

In 2025, Tether reported $10 billion in net profit, according to its own accounts.

Naturally, with such a vast war chest, the company has been eager to expand beyond its investment horizons.

Eclectic investment portfolio

The investment in Eight Sleep is yet another scatter-shot bet on sectors far beyond cryptocurrencies.

In 2024, Tether invested $200 million for a majority stake in Blackrock Neurotech, which is developing a type of brain-computer interface.

The company has also explored robotics, participating in an $81 million round in the Italian humanoid upstart Generative Bionics in December 2025.

The tie to Eight Sleep, however, rests in Tether’s health app launch, called QVAC Health.

Launched in 2025, the product uses artificial intelligence that runs locally on users‘ devices to help them track metrics such as heart rate, workouts, and, of course, sleep habits.

QVAC is pitched as an offline-capable app that skips the need for large, centralised cloud platforms.

Eight Sleep is expected to build out its own AI features on QVAC.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

The coin was launched by NoBorder, a video production team and decentralised autonomous organisation run by the Japanese businessman and YouTuber Yuji Mizoguchi, in late February. It currently has a market cap of almost $8 million, per Dextools data. The token’s price has surged several times since its launch, with prices fluctuating rapidly at the time of writing.

But anonymous sources at the Financial Services Agency say Mizoguchi’s NoBorder team did not have a crypto exchange operating permit as of the end of January, with “no subsequent applications lodged,” Japanese news agency Kyodo News reported.”

The FSA has already begun “voluntary interviews with the companies involved,” sources told Kyodo.

Politician-themed memecoins have previously drawn criticism in the US. Investors accused former New York Mayor Eric Adams of orchestrating a “rug pull” following the issuance of the NYC Token, while President Donald Trump’s memecoin has plummeted in value by 94% since hitting an all-time high on April 19, 2025.

PM issues warning

Controversy erupted in early March when Sanae Token’s value rocketed 260% on decentralised exchanges, reaching a market cap of almost $28 million.

This prompted Takaichi to make a public statement on X on March 2.

“I have absolutely no knowledge of [this token], and my office has not been informed about the nature of this token,” she said. “The government has not given its approval to this project.”

On its website, NoBorder claims Sanae Token is “a participation token, not a speculative cryptocurrency.”

NoBorder says that it is a political movement that supports Takaichi’s policies, and that its token allows DAO members to voice their opinions, which will then be “delivered” to Takaichi and her government.

“We have not received a single yen in revenue from this [project],” Takaichi wrote on X on March 3.

However, the FSA has identified potential legal violations. Sanae Token is currently tradable on decentralised Solana exchanges like Raydium, Japanese media outlet New Economy reported.

The fact that the coin can be exchanged on Raydium for other cryptocurrencies and transferred between unspecified parties means it could be considered a cryptocurrency under the terms of the Payment Services Act.

If the FSA can establish that NoBorder has allowed Japanese residents to buy, sell, or exchange cryptocurrencies, the DAO could be found to have violated the country’s crypto exchange laws, New Economy wrote.

The FSA also says it has never given its approval for Sanae Token trading on Japanese exchanges. Japanese law stipulates that the FSA has a veto over token listings, and stipulates that a self-governing panel of exchanges must approve coins before they can be offered for sale in Japan.

Takaichi won a landslide victory in snap elections she called earlier this year. She has pledged to carry out sweeping economic reforms to reverse decades of economic stagnation.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

Analysts at Kaiko measured revenue for various blockchain networks, including Solana and Ethereum, using 2025 data and found that all but one network posted annual losses.

More importantly, a new institutional demographic is taking a much harder look at these numbers, thanks in part to the arrival of spot crypto exchange-traded funds.

“This exposes an uncomfortable reality the market has largely ignored,” wrote Laurens Fraussen, a research analyst at Kaiko, on Tuesday.

“While these protocols were never designed to run as traditional businesses, this matters increasingly for the investors, institutions, and retail traders who now hold these tokens.

Blockchain business

Blockchain revenue, unlike revenue ginned up by a traditional company, follows a slightly different arithmetic.

Networks like Ethereum, Solana, and Tron are constantly issuing new native tokens to pay validators for securing the network.

This constant issuance, not unlike equity issuance from a traditional company, dilutes the value of existing token holders and should be understood as a cost on the network.

That doesn’t mean that these networks aren’t generating revenues. Last year, Ethereum raked in over $260 million while Solana generated $170 million.

It’s just that this revenue is being outpaced by inflationary pressures on the token’s price due to constant dilution.

“Ethereum and Solana generate meaningful revenue, $260 million and $170 million, respectively,” Fraussen said. “But inflation costs of $1.88 billion and $4.32 billion make both deeply unprofitable to holders.”

What’s driving Tron?

Meanwhile, Tron raked in $624 million last year while incurring very little inflationary costs.

In fact, in 2025, the Tron network was destroying more of its native TRX token than it was issuing, creating a deflationary supply dynamic, according to Fraussen.

The latest date paints a similar picture. Tron continues to lead blockchain revenue by chain, according to DefiLlama.

The Tron network has established itself as the primary blockchain for stablecoin transactions, providing it with a steady revenue stream.

“The result is a revenue floor that Ethereum and Solana lack,” said Fraussens, “where fee income tracks speculation rather than utility.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

The Uijeongbu District Court’s Goyang branch said the man “greatly damaged the fairness and integrity of public office and social trust,” Chosun Ilbo reported.

He was convicted of aggravated bribery, solicitation of bribes and fraud for taking about $38,000 in cash and roughly $53,000 in entertainment expenses between December 2023 and March 2024 while serving at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency.

The case highlights yet another blunder for South Korean authorities.

In recent weeks, reports emerged of police losing track of millions in Bitcoin and of the government accidentally publishing seed phrases for a crypto wallet containing millions.

‘Enjoyed entertainment’

South Korea’s latest criminal case also lands as authorities have ramped up investigations into illegal online gambling, unregistered cryptocurrency sales and organised crypto investment scams that draw in retail victims.

The concentration of large sums of digital wealth in relatively small networks has created fertile ground not only for fraudsters but also for corruption risks within enforcement bodies themselves.

The South Korean bribery case reveals another pressure point: corruption risks within law enforcement itself.

As police departments handle more crypto-linked fraud and gambling investigations, officers gain access to sensitive information about suspects and high-value digital holdings.

“The defendant thought that his authority as an executive-level police civil servant was power, and he enjoyed entertainment or collected money and goods without any guilt while mingling with the people who were under investigation,” Chosun Ilbo quoted the court as saying during the sentencing.

Lost Bitcoin

South Korean authorities are facing public scrutiny after two separate blunders exposed millions of dollars in cryptocurrency to theft while in police custody.

In one case, police in Seoul’s Gangnam district lost 22 Bitcoin worth about $1.4 million after failing to follow official guidelines for storing seized crypto.

Instead of transferring the assets to a police-controlled cold wallet, officers left the coins in a wallet managed by a private company and never obtained the seed phrases. The Bitcoin later vanished, and two suspects have since been arrested while the incident remains under investigation.

In a separate case, South Korea’s National Tax Service accidentally published the seed phrases to confiscated crypto wallets in a press release photo.

An anonymous hacker quickly used the phrases to access and drain the funds, reportedly worth up to $5 million, though officials say the actual value was much lower.

Authorities are now working with police to recover the assets and have apologised, admitting the leak resulted from carelessness when sharing the image with the media

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

As US and Israeli strikes on Iran triggered a surge in oil and gold prices, traders did not wait for Wall Street’s opening bell. They turned to the decentralised derivatives exchange to price geopolitical risk in real time — and sent its HYPE token 13% higher.

This weekend’s chaos “offered another data point in an emerging pattern worth watching,” Gabe Selby, head of research at CF Benchmarks, told DL News. “The ability to price risk continuously, without waiting for Monday’s open, is central to crypto’s value proposition.”

Selby’s call comes as traders have been rushing to take positions in traditional assets like gold and oil during major geopolitical shocks while leaving cryptocurrencies sidelined.

Kenny Chan, Coinbase’s head of Stablecoin Ecosystem, also flagged the changing paradigm. For years, he said, traders routed geopolitical views through Bitcoin because it was the only liquid 24/7 instrument available to speculate on.

“This weekend was different,” Chan said. “Traders didn’t need to route through Bitcoin anymore. They went straight to the source on Hyperliquid.”

Bitwise’s Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan offered a similar view in a March 3 blog, saying that the conflict has shown that traders can no longer afford to be shut out of the markets for days as world events spin out of control around them.

“I imagined it would take [five to ten] years,” Hougan wrote. “This weekend proved me wrong. Now I’m convinced it’s going to happen much faster than that.”

Paradigm shift

Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures tied to crude oil surged nearly 20% after Iranian retaliation against its Gulf neighbours cast fresh uncertainty on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a maritime artery for more than $500 billion in annual oil and gas flows.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s price has been tightly rangebound between $60,000 to $70,000 for the past month. The top crypto is still down nearly 50% from its $126,000 October peak and has severely lagged behind gold and stocks despite favourable macroeconomic conditions.

Another key beneficiary is Hyperliquid’s native HYPE token, which rose 13% to rank as the best performer among the top 25 assets by market cap, Selby added.

“Commodity volatility is driving meaningful volume on platforms listing tokenised forms of these assets, and the market is pricing that access accordingly,” Selby said. “The structural logic is worth taking seriously independent of the current cycle.”

He flagged that a similar pattern emerged in late January when silver crossed $100 and gold topped $5,000, coinciding with a 55% rally in HYPE over three days on $1.2bn in silver-linked volume. Volatility in underlying commodities is translating directly into demand for onchain exposure, he stressed.

“Wars are hard to predict,” cautioned Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research. “The fog of war can be very disorienting.”

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up 6.1% over the past 24 hours, trading at $71,135.
• Ethereum is up 5.2% past 24 hours at $2,069.

What we’re reading

• Iran war will move traditional market onchain faster than expected, says Bitwise — DL News
• Bitcoin price rescued by ‘boomer’ ETF investors, says analyst — DL News
• Nasdaq Eyes Prediction Markets With SEC Filing — Unchained
• Crypto isn’t ready for AI’ - Stripe — Milk Road
• Aave governance firm exits $27bn DeFi giant as protracted power struggle deepens — DL News

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

His argument, laid out in a blog on March 3, is that the conflict in the Middle East has shown that traders can no longer afford to be shut out of the markets for days as world events spin out of control around them.

“I imagined it would take [five to ten] years,” Hougan wrote. “This weekend proved me wrong. Now I’m convinced it’s going to happen much faster than that.”

His argument cuts to the core of an argument laid out by both crypto players and Wall Street giants: That blockchain technology will transform the world economy by tokenising real world assets like stocks, oil and gold to ensure speed, fairness and to end corruption.

Hougan points at how traders who were shut out of traditional markets over the weekend turned to crypto instead.

Trading volume on Hyperliquid and Tether’s tokenised gold both soared over the weekend, Hougan noted. Major prediction markets saw record volume.

“It was the first time I remember crypto-enabled markets being ‘the market,’ full stop,” he wrote.

Major traditional markets only operate at select hours Monday through Friday. Smaller markets such as those in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, trade Sunday through Thursday, Hougan noted.

While that concentrates traders, ensuring markets are highly liquid, it also means those traders are unable to react to events that happen during nights and weekends.

And it wasn’t until well after markets closed on Friday that media outlets reported Israel and the US had bombed Iran, potentially setting off a regional war that could ensnare some of the world’s largest oil producers.

“Trading volume on Hyperliquid spiked so much that, when Bloomberg wanted to write about how crude oil responded to the bombing, it cited the Hyperliquid crude oil contract as the most relevant price,” Hougan wrote.

While traditional markets are primed to extend their hours during the work week, Hougan said that wouldn’t be enough to stave off the threat posed by crypto.

After the events of this past weekend, he says the transition will happen much faster than he’d first anticipated.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

That row has threatened to derail negotiations over the Clarity Act, a bill that would create a long-sought regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies in the US.

“Americans should earn more money on their money,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.

“The Banks are hitting record profits, and we are not going to allow them to undermine our powerful crypto agenda that will end up going to China, and other countries if we don’t get the Clarity Act taken care of.”

In a bid to boost stablecoin adoption or win market share, some issuers have paid customers yield on their digital dollars.

Last year’s stablecoin legislation, the Genius Act, banned the practice, in part because banks feared customers would abandon traditional checking and savings accounts for stablecoins, which often pay substantially higher interest rates.

But it was unclear whether the law banned third-party crypto companies, such as exchanges, from paying interest on customers’ stablecoin holdings.

Banks have lobbied lawmakers to include language in the Clarity Act that would close this supposed loophole. Crypto companies, in turn, have slammed banks for attempting to relitigate components of a bill more than six months after it was signed into law.

The sides appeared to reach a compromise in January. A revised draft of the Clarity Act banned companies from paying passive yield on stablecoins — but it allowed them to offer rewards or incentives on activities such as transactions, payments, transfers, remittances, and providing liquidity in DeFi protocols.

But Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong torpedoed the bill on the eve of a scheduled vote when he pulled his support, citing the ban on passive yield, among other things.

Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina and the head of the Senate’s Banking Committee, delayed the vote indefinitely. Despite regular meetings at the White House, representatives from the crypto and the banking industries have made little progress since.

Armstrong’s power play even led to a report the White House had soured on Coinbase, though Armstrong denied the claim in a post on X.

Still, the deadlock over the Clarity Act has jeopardized Trump’s plan to make the US the “Crypto Capital of the World,” as he put it on Tuesday.

“The Genius Act is being threatened and undermined by the banks, and that is unacceptable,” he wrote. “The US needs to get market structure done, ASAP.”

Trump family company DT Marks DEFI LLC holds a 38% stake in World Liberty Financial, which issues a stablecoin called USD1.

Eric Trump — the president’s son and a co-founder of World Liberty — also weighed in on the dispute on Tuesday.

“The ‘Big Banks’ — the very institutions that have held a monopoly and screwed their customers for years, offering near-zero yields on retail Money Market Accounts while crushing low-balance accounts with exorbitant fees — are now doing everything they can to block the Crypto industry from offering real benefits, perks, and rewards on their platforms.," he wrote on X.

“They are the greatest hypocrites and are in mass panic given they know they are losing the digital finance race!” he added, before tagging World Liberty.

Democrats have accused the 79-year-old president of self-dealing, foreign influence, and obstruction of justice stemming from his family’s involvement in crypto and his attempts to push pro-crypto legislation.

“President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest,” Anna Kelly, the deputy press secretary, told DL News in January.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

A report from crypto exchange Lemon shows that adoption in the region last year grew three times faster than in the US. And Argentina led with the highest number of monthly active users.

While Argentines have in the past turned to stablecoins to fight rampant inflation, Lemon attributed the surge in 2025 to payments infrastructure.

“Just as nobody talks about the Internet but everyone uses it every day, the same thing is happening with crypto in finance,” Maxi Raimondi, the company’s chief financial officer, said.

All in the apps

While Argentines did indeed buy cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in 2025, the increased adoption was mostly driven by their use of stablecoins, according to Lemon.

The reason: A record number of Argentines went on holiday to Brazil thanks to a weaker Brazilian real and stronger Argentine peso.

To buy things in Brazil, Argentine tourists had to download mobile apps that interact with Brazilian payment platform Pix.

Apps that interact with Pix — like Binance and Lemon — use stablecoins such as USDT to make payments, hence the increase in cryptocurrency adoption.

“In Argentina, four times more people are using crypto than in 2021, without even realizing it,” added Raimondi.

Pix is the preferred method of payment in Brazil, Latin America’s biggest economy. Debuted by the country’s central bank in 2020, it is more popular than credit and debit cards.

Crypto adoption in Argentina has surged in recent years, with people in the country buying digital dollars as a hedge against the world’s worst inflation. In 2025, though, inflation in the country dropped to its lowest in eight years.

Where else?

The report also showed that adoption surged in Peru — the region’s sixth largest economy.

According to Lemon, there were over 2.9 million crypto app downloads in the country in 2025, up 50% from the year before.

And transaction volume across exchanges in Peru beat that of Chile, a bigger economy. While Peruvian investors are interested in holding Bitcoin over the long-term, the report said, they are keener on digital dollars.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Over the past five days, presumably elderly investors have bought up $1.5 billion in spot Bitcoin ETFs. For Balchunas, they are keeping the top crypto afloat in spite of galloping geopolitical tensions and a staggering 50% drawdown from its October 2025 highs.

“Boomers to the rescue again,” Eric Balchunas, a Bloomberg Intelligence ETF expert, said on X on Tuesday. It’s the “biggest haul in a while,” he added, as nearly every one of the ten original spot Bitcoin ETFs saw action.

“This is after a 50%(!) drawdown and most underwater. Even I’m impressed.”

Why are market watchers so shocked? To start, many didn’t expect ETF investors to be such staunch buyers of Bitcoin.

Since crypto has always been deemed an asset that younger generations alone understand, baby boomers — the generation of persons born between 1946 and 1964 — weren’t going to get it, or feel comfortable enough to buy it.

But the exact opposite has happened. Indeed, while many Bitcoin investors rushed for the exits amid yet another bull-to-bear market downturn, buyers of spot Bitcoin ETFs have mostly stayed put and gone long.

Bitcoin ETFs hold more than $107 billion worth of Bitcoin, according to DefiLlama. Moreover, institutions now control 12% of the network’s entire supply.

Unflinching institutions

Don’t be fooled by the boomer quip.

While Balchunas used the generational shorthand to describe steady ETF buying, there’s another story cooking: unflinching institutional accumulation.

Since October, 17 of the top 25 largest Bitcoin ETF holders have added to their positions during the same period, according to Zac Townsend, CEO of Meanwhile, a Bitcoin insurance firm.

While many retail traders chase short-term profits, institutions are allocating — in droves and for the long-run.

That’s something that other ETF experts had already highlighted, in fact, despite the nearly 50% downturn and yet another military conflict in the Middle East.

“ETF investors clearly aren’t panicking,” said Nate Geraci, co-founder of the ETF Institute.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

The top cryptocurrency’s price may have spiked and dived a bit since US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed off on joint strikes against Iran over the weekend, but it’s still trading within the $65,000 to $70,000 range traders have come to expect since the start of February.

That’s almost 50% below the all-time high of $126,000, which Bitcoin achieved in October. However, this may change as the conflict continues.

Six experts have shared thoughts on how the war in Iran will affect the price of Bitcoin moving forward.

Arthur Hayes, Maelstrom

The war will shake Bitcoin out of its funk, according to Arthur Hayes, chief investment officer at Maelstrom.

His argument is that the war effort will force the Federal Reserve to pump liquidity into the market to support the US war effort and cut interest rates. Low interest rates usually incentivise investors to bet on riskier assets like Bitcoin.

Decades of data suggest that this is pretty much what always happens during US military conflicts, Hayes says.

Jake Ostroviskis, Wintermute

Iran has responded to the US and Israeli attacks by not only firing off strikes of its own, but it has also de facto closed the Strait of Hormuz.

The closure of the key passage for one-fifth of the world’s oil could have dire consequences for the world economy in general and for the price of Bitcoin in particular. The price of Brent crude oil has already surged to $85 a barrel.

While that’s still below the dreaded $100 price many analysts predicted ahead of the war, it could still cause Bitcoin traders and digital asset treasuries a lot of headaches.

“The oil move matters more for crypto than the geopolitics itself,” Jake Ostroviskis, head of OTC at Wintermute, said in a statement shared with DL News. “If Brent stays above $80 for more than a few sessions, the re-inflation narrative hardens and the March rate cut that was already a long shot becomes impossible.”

To be sure, traders had already pretty much priced in no change to the US interest rate in March, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch Tool. They give it a 2.4% chance of a rate cut in March. Those chances stand at just over 18% and 41% in April and June.

London Crypto Club

The conflict could go two ways: it could be fast and it could be slow, but Bitcoin will be the big winner no matter what happens, according to analysts from the London Crypto Club.

David Brickell and Chris Mills argued in their latest newsletter that a prolonged war would create an “extreme risk-off scenario” where investors will pour into Bitcoin, using the top cryptocurrency as a hedge against economic uncertainty.

If the war is over swiftly, then they expect that to unleash a Bitcoin buying bonanza that will see the asset’s price surge.

Either way, the US central bank will pump money into the financial system to support the war effort, which will support riskier assets like Bitcoin, Brickell and Mills said.

James Butterfill, CoinShares

So far, Bitcoin has shown remarkable resilience, according to James Butterfill, head of research at CoinShares. Instead of skyrocketing or falling hard, it’s pretty much traded evenly.

Yet, this could change if the longer the conflict continues, Butterfill said in emailed comments to DL News.

“If energy-driven inflation delays monetary easing, traditional risk assets could come under pressure,” Butterfill said. “However, if government tensions intensify and confidence in global financial and trade structures, especially around critical trade routes such as the Strait of Hormuz, continues to erode, scarce and non-sovereign assets such as Bitcoin could benefit in the medium term.”

Pratik Kala, Apollo Crypto

Bitcoin surged on the back of the initial strikes to trade just under $70,000. While it has dropped somewhat, it is still up almost 7% over the past seven days.

That, however, may create a risk, according to Pratik Kala, head of research at Apollo Crypto.

He told Bloomberg that the cryptocurrency has pretty much traded between $65,000 and $70,000 since early February. If the price was to jump above that line, it would invite profit-taking. And as traders liquidated their positions, the price would likely drop again.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email him at eric@dlnews.com.

For many, it would continue trading at that level. Investors have historically dumped Bitcoin at the first whisper of a geopolitical crisis.

This time is different. For now, at least.

Since the joint military operation by the US and Israeli governments started this past weekend, the price of Bitcoin has been trading to a different tune.

In fact, the digital asset managed to regain another 9% on Monday even as Iran continued to trade volleys with neighbouring countries, effectively recouping its losses since the attack.

“From a market perspective, crypto’s been doing pretty well since yesterday, and honestly, it’s not what you’d expect given the circumstances,” Laurens Fraussen, a research analyst with the crypto data firm Kaiko, told DL News on Tuesday.

“The US and Israeli airstrikes in Iran could’ve sent everything into a tailspin, but the market barely flinched, signalling some exhaustion from all the geopolitical tensions.”

Digital gold revival?

Bitcoin has long been touted by supporters as the ultimate safe-haven asset — a digital gold.

Now, it finally seems to be acting like one.

It cannot be controlled by a centralised government; its supply is fixed, and the technology has so far shown its resistance to even the most sophisticated cyberattack.

Over its 17-year-existence, however, it has had a terrible track record during uncertain global events.

The price of Bitcoin dropped 8% in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Then, in April 2024, after Iran attacked Israel with a significant drone and missile strike, Bitcoin plunged 7%.

On each occasion, gold soared at market open.

So, what gives?

“Crypto markets dipped on Saturday amid initial concerns over the Iran war, but have since rallied due to the effectiveness of the initial US-Israel strikes,” Carlos Guzman, an analyst at market-making firm GSR, told DL News.

“It seems market participants are pricing in a contained conflict that won’t have significant spillover effects and could end quickly.”

US President Donald Trump has said the war could last five weeks, but that it could go “far longer.”

Though equity markets, such as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq, are down over 1% at press time, they opened on Monday relatively unscathed.

“What’s interesting is that when US markets opened, equities were barely affected, which gave crypto the green light to keep pushing higher,” Kaiko’s Fraussen said.

Bitcoin is down 2% on Tuesday evening, trading at just over $67,000.

And though it hasn’t haemorrhaged over the last 48 hours doesn’t mean it won’t.

“Market sentiment could flip if this turns into a prolonged conflict,” Guzman said. “We could see negative price action the longer this drags on.”

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

The banking executive said on Monday that if crypto firms want to pay customers stablecoin rewards, they need to be properly regulated and become banks so they can compete fairly with traditional lenders.

If crypto companies, such as Coinbase, don’t play by the same rules as banks, the “public will pay,” Dimon warned in a Monday interview with CNBC.

“It can’t be: you have these people doing one thing without any regulation like that, and these people doing another,” he said.

Dimon’s comments come as the banking lobby and crypto executives thrash out a market structure bill that would give digital asset firms greater access to traditional markets.

Coinbase in January pulled support for the bill, with the exchange’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, slamming the proposal to ban stablecoin rewards.

Level playing field

Many crypto firms are keen to keep paying customers stablecoin rewards while also managing and holding client assets and handling trade settlement within a federally regulated structure.

But banking chiefs have warned that it would create an unfair playing field — and people would flock to companies like crypto exchanges instead of traditional banks to hold their cash.

“Banks feel strongly that [stablecoin] rewards are the same as interest,” Dimon said. “If you are going to be holding balances and paying interest, that’s a bank and you should be regulated as a bank.”

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has granted conditional approval for national trust bank charters to a number of top firms in the digital asset space, including Crypto.com, BitGo, and Ripple.

The banking lobby in December urged the OCC to reject Coinbase’s application for a national trust bank charter on the grounds that the exchange has “demonstrably flawed risk and control functions” and operates under governance that “prevents independent oversight.”

We love blockchain

Dimon, who has long been a Bitcoin sceptic, reiterated that JPMorgan still uses the cryptocurrency’s underlying technology.

“We’re actually one of the biggest users of blockchain,” he said, mentioning the bank’s JPM Coin, a deposit token which runs on Coinbase’s layer 2 network, Base.

But that doesn’t mean rules don’t apply.

“We’re moving a lot of data now using blockchain, so we’re in favour of competition, but it’s got to be a fair and balanced level playing field.”

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Court victories come hard and fast for Uniswap right now.

Last month, a judge dismissed a patent infringement lawsuit brought against Uniswap by Bancor, a competing decentralised exchange.

Now, another federal judge has dismissed the final element of a class action lawsuit that targeted Uniswap’s creators.

Unlike the patent infringement case, this one is a win for decentralised finance writ large.

Here’s why.

The lawsuit was brought in 2022 by traders who lost money on “scam tokens” they found on Uniswap. But those scammy tokens weren’t created by Uniswap. In fact, their issuers have never been identified.

Here’s the judge’s take, summed up in a single sentence: “Plaintiffs cannot hold defendants liable for the misconduct of the unidentified third-party issuers.”

This is a recurring theme in crypto litigation. Victims of a purported crime looking for someone to blame often turn to the platform where the crime occurred, rather than the anonymous perpetrators of said crime.

The reason is obvious. True DeFi protocols are permissionless and immutable. That first term means that anybody can use the protocol, no questions asked. The second means that nobody, not even the protocols’ creators, can change the protocols to, say, limit access to “good guys.”

This freedom is a double-edged sword, allowing all kinds of malfeasance in the world of DeFi.

Take, for example, the criminal trial of Roman Storm. The software engineer was charged with conspiracy to launder money and evade sanctions after he released Tornado Cash, a protocol that helps users obfuscate their onchain crypto movements.

One of those users was North Korea, which used the crypto mixer to launder some $500 million in stolen crypto.

Jurors were deadlocked on the money laundering and sanctions evasion charges. But they convicted him of a lesser ofense, operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. He faces up to five years in prison.

In Uniswap’s case, traders from North Carolina, Idaho, New York, and Australia alleged they used a website built by Uniswap Labs to access the Uniswap protocol. There, they found and purchased 38 tokens that turned out to be rug pulls or pump-and-dump schemes.

The traders sued Uniswap, alleging it was functionally an unregistered broker-dealer and that it had aided and abetted fraud.

In 2023, a federal court dismissed the claims, arguing their concerns were “better addressed to Congress than to this Court,” as Judge Katherine Polk Failla put it in her Monday ruling, which included a brief history of the case.

“After all, no plaintiff would sue the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ for tweeting that its exchange was a safe place to trade after that plaintiff had lost money due to an issuer’s fraudulent schemes,” the judge’s 2022 ruling read.

Last year, an appellate court dismissed the traders’ appeal. But it asked the lower court to reconsider the allegations made under state law. The traders filed an amended complaint that added fresh state-level charges.

On Monday, Failla said the complaint suffers the same flaw as its predecessors.

“Despite three chances to get it right, Plaintiffs remain unable to allege plausible claims,” she wrote. “Plaintiffs’ theories of liability are still predicated on Defendants having ‘facilitated’ the scam trades ‘by providing a marketplace and facilities for bringing together buyers and sellers of Tokens[.]’”

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams took a victory lap on social media.

“If you write open source smart contract code, and the code is used by scammers, the scammers are liable, not the open source devs,” he wrote. “Good, sensible outcome.”

Top DeFi stories of the week

This week in DeFi governance

VOTE: Aave DAO votes to deploy on Monad

VOTE: Lido DAO votes to establish auto-renewing delegate incentive program

VOTE: Arbitrum DAO votes to use new quorum model

Post of the week

As my colleague Liam Kelly just reported, Aave DAO service provider and delegate Aave Chain Initiative is rage-quitting. It’s a profound development in a long-running civil war over the fate of the largest DeFi protocol, so I’m giving you three standout posts this week.

https://t.co/74E9xB7jj8 pic.twitter.com/lRrv4AkVG7

— Marc ”七十 Billy” Zeller (@Marczeller) March 3, 2026

GG, one of the few remaining functioning DAOs is folding back under founder control - similar happened to Maker / SKY

FWIW I think its safe to conclude DAOs in this form are dysfunctional and not competitive with traditional org structures, they only work to a point

I hope… https://t.co/wl908Mnotu

— daddy fiskantes ⭐️🩸 (@Fiskantes) March 3, 2026

Most DAOs were never about distributing power. They've just been LARPing to pass the "Howey Test" and avoid security laws.

Under current administration you no longer have to pretend. Not worth it to participate when you realize it's just a plutocracy with extra steps.. https://t.co/dbwIKVEvaZ

— Wesley— oss/acc (@wslyvh) March 3, 2026

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

That’s the paradox Bitcoin investors are facing, according to Bitwise Europe’s latest market analysis. The traditional four-year cycle framework, which many market watchers swore was over, suggests Bitcoin won’t find a bottom until late 2026, roughly 12 months after its October 2025 peak.

But that timeline has become so widely accepted that it may undermine itself.

“This expectation has become deeply embedded in investor consensus,” André Dragosch, head of European research at Bitwise. “The eight-month horizon now appears somewhat consensus-heavy.”

Dragosch’s thesis is that when too many investors agree on a set timeline, markets often move faster than expected as sophisticated traders position themselves ahead of the crowd.

The analysis offers a sobering thought for traders — as well as the some 200 digital asset treasuries that bet their companies’ future on the promise of Bitcoin’s price reaching new records — that hoped that Bitcoin’s near 50% collapse from its October all-time high was the worst of it.

Wait until October

Since inception in 2009, Bitcoin has followed a four-year boom-bust cycle that’s tied to its halving events, which cut miner rewards in half every four years.

And over time, that pattern has remained remarkably consistent. Bitcoin peaks between 12 to 18 months after the halving, then takes another year to find a bottom before the next bull market kicks in again.

October 2025 marked the peak of this cycle when Bitcoin hit all-time highs of around $126,000. Using the traditional framework, that suggests a bottom should arrive around October 2026.

Today, the top crypto trades at nearly a 50% discount.

“The recent market top conformed closely to the traditional four-year cycle template,” Dragosch wrote.

Front-running Bitcoin

For Bitwise, if enough investors believe in the eight-month timeline, they may start buying earlier to position themselves ahead of the bottom.

That means that everyone waiting for October 2026 might create the bottom in June or July instead as early movers jump in before the consensus trade gets crowded.

“This divergence raises the possibility that the traditional four-year timing heuristic may be front-run,” Dragosch wrote.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

The country’s permit-holding crypto trading platforms must begin submitting daily reports proving they have sufficient funds to cover the cost of hacks or other leaks, the central bank announced in a resolution on February 27.

The new rules also stipulate that exchanges must adopt the same data protection and confidentiality criteria that apply to Brazilian commercial banks.

“Investors will enjoy more security thanks to these regulations,” Denis Medina, a professor at the Faculty of Commerce of São Paulo, told Brazilian media outlet Conexão Record News. “But it will also benefit the entire system by preventing various crypto-powered financial crimes, such as money laundering and tax evasion.”

Brazil’s move comes as regulators around the world order crypto exchanges to beef up their security and liability credentials to the level of the banking industry. Financial chiefs in Japan made similar demands in November. South Korean regulators followed suit in December after the $30 million hack of the Upbit exchange.

Crypto accounting rules

Many of Brazil’s new regulations will come into effect on January 1, 2027, the central bank said. One of the new rules comprised an accounting manual for crypto exchanges and crypto pay firms.

This manual allows crypto companies to log crypto on their balance sheets, rather than having to convert the worth of their coins into fiat currencies.

The bank has also ordered crypto exchanges to keep their fiat currency and crypto holdings in separate accounts and wallets from those of their clients.

Medina said the rules will also impose limits and checks on transactions, particularly those made to overseas exchanges.

The academic said the rules effectively put an end to the “uncontrolled transfer of crypto to other countries.”

The new protocols will ensure the flow of crypto becomes more traceable in Brazil, Medina said.

The central bank says its new rules will make it harder for criminals to conduct illicit activities with crypto, such as drug trafficking and the financing of terrorist groups.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

Police in South Korea say they’re investigating a string of arrests committed by individuals who say they were paid in crypto to vandalise residential properties and defame or threaten their owners.

“I will not leave you alone,” was the message reportedly written in bold on a leaflet stuffed into a letterbox by a suspect who told police in Gyeonggi Province he was paid between $300 and $600 to deliver the threat.

The suspect, officers say, has no idea who paid him to commit the crime — although police have vowed to find out.

The attacks come amid an increase in crypto-related crime in South Korea. Last month, prosecutors in Seoul indicted a man accused of poisoning his business partner’s coffee after embezzling company money to make a secret six-figure crypto investment.

Masterminds at large

The recent attacks follow a similar pattern, South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh reported.

The most recent of these was reported on March 1, when a branch of the Suwon District Court ordered the arrest of a man surnamed Lim, aged in his 20s, on property damage charges.

Police say Lim broke into an apartment complex in the city of Hwaseong at night on February 22. Officers say Lim graffitied the front door of the victim’s house with red paint, scattered food waste on the entrance, and smeared human faeces on a nearby stairwell.

Lim is also accused of scattering dozens of defamatory leaflets about the victim around the building.

Prosecutors in Anyang last month reported an attack in the city of Gunpo that also involved graffitiing a front door and the distribution of similarly worded leaflets.

A third case of this nature was reported in December, when police arrested three men in Pyeongtaek for “spraying contaminants” on a citizen’s front door and “distributing defamatory leaflets.”

All three suspects told police that they received payments in crypto from an unknown person who’d contacted them via Telegram.

‘Private revenge organisation’

Police believe a self-styled “private revenge organisation” is now active on Korean-language Telegram channels.

Crypto-powered revenge attacks are not a uniquely South Korean phenomenon.

In late 2024, the Russian newspaper Izvestia published evidence that networks of middlemen use the anonymity provided by crypto and Telegram to preside over an empire of customised revenge attacks.

The newspaper explained middlemen charge prospective customers $1,500 for arson attacks that target vehicles and non-residential properties. One of the middlemen said he advertised his services on Telegram open chat rooms and darkweb portals.

He explained that he paid teenagers $750 to carry out the attacks. All transactions are allegedly carried out exclusively in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

Marc Zeller, the founder of ACI, announced the move on Wednesday via a governance post.

In the post, he outlined that his firm, which conducts business development and manages governance for the wider Aave community, will wind down its operations over the next four months.

Zeller pointed to a crucial governance vote that passed on Saturday, which moved forward a proposal to grant Aave Labs, the core development firm behind the protocol, “the largest budget in DAO history.”

Stani Kulechov, the Finnish founder of Aave and CEO of Aave Labs, said the protocol will continue to operate as normal during the transition.

“We thank Marc for everything he has contributed and wish him well,“ Kulechov said on Tuesday.

A decentralised autonomous organisation is a community of token holders who can vote and propose amendments to a specific DeFi protocol to enhance it.

Zeller alleged that the vote was backed almost entirely by crypto addresses linked to the Labs entity.

“There is no role for an independent service provider in an environment where the largest budget recipient holds undisclosed voting power and uses it on its own proposals,” the post reads.

ACI’s exit from the largest protocol in decentralised finance is just the latest salvo in what has been a tumultuous passage for Aave.

Aave’s bumpy ride

Last month, BGD Labs, the developer team that deployed major updates to the latest iteration of the Aave Labs-built codebase, called V3, also exited the ecosystem.

The project’s native AAVE token plummeted 6% on February 20 after “the most productive engineering team” called it quits.

Zeller told DL News today that this event was the final straw.

“Everything was entirely preventable,” he said.

The primary contention revolves around a protracted conflict between Aave Labs and the purported agency that its DAO actually enjoys.

This could include hiring – or firing – a new auditor to revise the code or whether a protocol should launch on a new blockchain network.

In December, the community issued a proposal to transfer all of the project’s intellectual property, including social media accounts and the aave.com website, to the DAO. That proposal failed on Christmas Day.

To defuse the conflict, Labs proposed directing all revenue from Aave-branded products, including the Aave website, to the DAO.

But that proposal also included language “ratifying” Aave V4 as the “core technical foundation for future development.”

That would mean pausing work on Aave V3 and even changing its lending and borrowing parameters to compel users to migrate to V4 — a red line for BDG Labs.

The organisation viewed pausing work on a robust, lucrative version of the protocol’s codebase to move users to an unproven version as reckless.

As for what’s next, Zeller said he’s keeping an eye on what BDG Labs will do next.

“If they build a protocol, I’ll join,” he told DL News. “But now, I need time to wind down gracefully.”

Update: This story was updated on March 3, 2026, at 5 pm CET to include a comment from Aave Labs CEO, Stani Kulechov.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

The analysts suggested two distinct scenarios stemming from the joint strikes on Iran on Saturday that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and unleashed waves of retaliation against the Islamic Republic’s Gulf neighbours.

“This might finally be the ‘narrative catalyst’ Bitcoin has been waiting for,” David Brickell and Chris Mills said in their weekly newsletter.

The optimistic forecasts come as Bitcoin trades 47% below its October peak of $126,000 while assets like gold and stocks have blazed new all-time highs.

The top crypto surged to over $69,000 after the strikes on Iran, but has since fallen back down to just under $67,000.

Investors purchased $458 million worth of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds on Monday in a strong start for the month of March, DefiLlama data shows.

Two Bitcoin rally scenarios

Brickell and Mills’ first scenario is one where the conflict evolves into a prolonged war. If that happens, the analysts expect it to unleash an “extreme risk-off scenario” where investors pile into Bitcoin to “hedge against the failure of existing economic and political structures.”

In this scenario, Bitcoin will out-perform the market alongside safe-haven asset gold, the pair said.

The second scenario is “a swift conclusion” where investors go on a Bitcoin buying bonanza after US President Donald Trump announces a peace deal, triggering a peace premium for the top crypto’s price.

Brickell and Mills stressed that either way, the Federal Reserve will inject more money into the financial system to support war efforts, thus boosting prices of risk-on assets like Bitcoin.

“Markets remain always a function of rates and liquidity,” they said.

“We maintain the view that risk sell-offs on war are typically very short lived as it leads to more debt creation and larger deficits, necessitating ever more liquidity,” they said.

To be sure, Brickell and Mills aren’t the only ones that predict war to be a positive catalyst for Bitcoin’s price.

Arthur Hayes, Maelstrom’s chief investment officer, made a similar call.

Hayes argues that every major US military adventure in the Middle East ends the same way — with the Federal Reserve printing more money — thus boosting the prices of assets like Bitcoin.

Hayes cited decades of data showing that US military campaigns, ballooning federal outlays, and subsequent Fed interest rate cuts have been positive market catalysts.

“The time to back up the truck and buy Bitcoin and high-quality [altcoins] like HYPE is immediately after the Fed cuts rates and or prints money to support the government’s goals in Iran,” he wrote.

“The longer Trump engages in the extremely costly activity of Iranian nation-building, the higher the likelihood the Fed lowers the price and increases the quantity of money,” Hayes said.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

The chair of Bitmine, a digital asset treasury firm predominantly stockpiling Ethereum, said that cryptocurrency prices are showing signs of bottoming out, which means that they’re set for a rebound.

“So much is being built on Ethereum now, almost every major announcement of a tokenised fund,” Lee said on CNBC Squawk Box. “If it’s all taking place on Ethereum then price follows.”

Tokenisation is the process of converting ownership rights in assets such as real estate, stocks or bonds into digital tokens on a blockchain. Financial giants such as BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink have sung the praises of tokenisation, saying it will boost efficiencies and reduce corruption.

Lee has previously forecast that Ethereum’s price will hit $250,000, but hasn’t provided a timeline for that surge.

Lee’s bullish forecast comes as Ethereum’s price has crashed over 50% since the October mass liquidation event that triggered a $2 trillion crypto market drawdown. Bitmine’s share price has also mirrored the negative price action, declining some 66% since September to trade at $20 per share.

“Bitmine is sitting on more than $8 billion in unrealised losses, ” Luke Nolan, senior research associate at CoinShares, told DL News.

Paper losses during a market downturn are not the same as permanent losses, especially if there are no loan rules, margin calls or regular interest payments forcing you to sell, Nolan said.

Wall Street is taking advantage of the discount. BlackRock’s holdings of Bitmine shares surged by 166% to $246 million in the fourth-quarter of 2025, according to a 13F-HR form filed with the SEC.

On Friday, Jeff Housenbold, Beast Industries CEO, declared Ethereum the “backbone” of the stablecoin industry and touted the promise of decentralised finance as the company plans to launch new fintech products for its 1.5 billion fanbase. Bitmine invested $200 million into Beast Industries in January.

Ethereum is up 9% over the past seven days to trade around $2,000.

War worries?

Lee’s optimism also comes against the backdrop of an escalating conflict in the Middle East.

Yet, traders shouldn’t be too concerned about the US and Israeli strikes on Iran because the US economy’s fundamentals haven’t changed, Lee said.

“In the past, markets tend to sell during the buildup, and they tend to do better once the battle begins, and I think this is going to be similar,” he said. “No one likes to see headlines and images of explosions and war.”

Markets are concerned about disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, a maritime chokepoint through which more than $500 billion worth of oil and gas flows annually. Over the weekend, traders took to Hyperliquid to bet on oil prices, with USOIL reaching 97$ on Sunday.

Adding to market momentum, the US Federal Reserve will likely take a dovish stance and print more money if oil prices skyrocket, Lee said. More money in the financial system is typically bullish for asset prices like crypto and technology stocks.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up 3.7% over the past 24 hours, trading at $68,192.
• Ethereum is up 3.3% past 24 hours at $2,000.

What we’re reading

• Hyperliquid captures macro trade as Bitcoin price hovers near $65,000 after Trump’s Iran gambit— DL News
• Circle’s breakout year sets up 129% upside to $190 per share, Bernstein says— DL News
• Wall Street Leans Into Crypto Despite Bear Market Gloom — Unchained
• War good, peace bad? — Milk Road
• Tokenised gold continues rally while Bitcoin slides on US attack against Iran — DL News

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

The proposal passed a so-called snapshot vote with more than 52% of votes cast in its favour and 42% in opposition.

Kulechov’s company, Aave Labs, has already amended the proposal in response to DAO feedback. Last week, Labs relaxed its aggressive timeline for moving Aave users to a newer version of the Aave protocol, v4.

The initial timeline frightened some members of the DAO, who said it was a risk the digital cooperative could not afford. More three-quarters of the DAO’s $286 million in lifetime revenue has come from the current version of the protocol, v3, according to data from TokenLogic.

V4 is currently undergoing security audits and is expected to be released later this year.

The controversial, wide-ranging proposal would have Aave Labs direct all revenue from Aave-branded products to the DAO. Such products include aave.com and the Aave mobile application.

But it would also have the DAO pay Labs $25 million for ongoing product development, another $17.5 million “payable upon specific product launches,” and 75,000 Aave tokens, worth about $9 million at Monday’s prices.

Critics have said that request is too steep, given the size of Aave’s treasury.

“We recognise there are many improvements based on feedback to be made to get the proposal to its final stage,” Aave Labs said on the DAO’s forum on Sunday.

“The goal is a token-centric model that positions Aave for the next decade of growth.”

Margin of Victory

The vote comes amid a heated debate over the future of the DAO and the Aave protocol.

Aave v3 is the largest protocol in DeFi, with nearly $27 billion in user deposits. But Labs has pushed for the DAO to turn its attention to v4, arguing it could dramatically boost protocol revenue.

“Aave V3 has served the protocol well, but it is approaching its architectural limits,” Labs wrote in the proposal. “V4’s architecture expands the range of revenue models the protocol can support.”

But prominent members of the cooperative have criticised Labs over its growing influence in DAO affairs. Marc Zeller, the head of Aave Chan Initiative, an Aave DAO delegate and service provider, previously referred to it as a “slow-motion coup.”

On Monday, Zeller said ACI would not continue debating the proposal, citing Kulechov’s use of Aave tokens to sway the outcome of the vote.

“The dice are loaded,” Zeller wrote in the Aave DAO governance forum.

“Continuing to negotiate inside a process where the outcome is predetermined does one thing: it gives that process legitimacy it hasn’t earned. We won’t do that.”

But Blockchain Capital General Partner Aleks Larsen said the proposal’s margin of victory would have been higher if his firm could participate in snapshot votes.

“A number of funds with material AAVE positions, Blockchain Capital included, hold tokens at a custodian that had deprecated Snapshot support,” he wrote.

“We were planning on signaling Yae in support of moving the Aave Labs proposal forward in the governance process, and had we and other institutional investors at this custodian had not been limited, we believe the proposal would have succeeded by a materially larger margin.”

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

The National Tax Service began targeting crypto holders who fail to pay their taxes and traffic fines in recent years, seizing coins from people who default on their bills. They have also started publishing details of these crypto confiscations as evidence of their campaigns’ success.

But their latest promotional drive has backfired, as a photograph accompanying the February 26 press release displayed hand-written, uncensored seed phrases.

Seed phrases are combinations of 12 to 24 words used to back up and restore crypto wallets.

“The tax authorities have displayed a basic lack of understanding of how cryptocurrencies work,” Cho Jae-woo, director of the Hansung University’s Blockchain Research Institute, told South Korean newspaper Maeil Kyungjae.

The year has got off to a bad start for South Korean officials, with police losing $1.4 million worth of Bitcoin just days after prosecutors lost, then tracked down Bitcoin worth $20 million.

The stolen cryptocurrency in question was Pre-Retogeum, a small-cap altcoin with a market value of $13 million.

Hunt continues

A hacker immediately took advantage of the NTS’ blunder, the newspaper wrote, using the seed phrases to access and drain the wallets. Cho speculated the coins may have been drained by a “white hat hacker” — an individual who wanted their actions to expose security flaws before returning the crypto.

But in a statement released on March 1, the NTS said it was working with the police and “making every effort to recover the leaked cryptoassets,” although it believed the hacker “only stole the coins out of curiosity.”

It denied that the coins in question were worth $5 million, saying that the missing Pre-Retogeum haul was worth “far less than the reported figure.”

The NTS press release claimed the body had seized assets, including cash and crypto wallets, from 124 habitual tax evaders.

Officers explained special task force agents had performed on-site searches to hunt for crypto and other concealed assets.

In a statement on March 1, the NTS said it offered its “deepest apologies for causing concern to the public,” South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.

The tax body said it had behaved “carelessly” in “providing the original photo to the press without recognising that it contained sensitive information.”

“The government and [financial regulators] will inspect the status and management of digital assets held and managed by government and public institutions through confiscations from non-compliant taxpayers,” said the South Korean Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Strategy and Finance Koo Yoon-chul.

Koo said Seoul would “quickly establish and implement measures to prevent a recurrence.”

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

Traders who accurately bet on when Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, would exit office were met with a confusing answer to that question by Kalshi.

When reports of Khamenei’s death began rolling in on Saturday, those who bet on his ouster by February 28 assumed their money was as good as earned.

Kalshi, however, highlighted the fine print in that specific event contract.

Instead of the market settling on $1 and closing, Kalshi settled the market based on the last traded price before the death was officially confirmed. This means that any gains from positions established before his death came to little.

Early Sunday morning, Kalshi’s CEO apologised to users.

He reminded that Khamenei’s ouster could only be concluded if it was by means other than his death, according to the event contract’s rules.

“I know some of you disagree and prefer that we list these markets without a death carveout because it keeps the rules simple and because many traditional markets, like oil futures, can be proxy markets for war and death,” he wrote on Sunday morning.

“We believe that’s different from having a market directly settling on someone’s death, which is not allowed for US-regulated entities.”

He said that Kalshi never changed any of its rules, but admitted that how this market was presented to users should be updated, along with other markets that have a “death carveout.”

Mansour went ahead and announced that all fees will be reimbursed, and that if traders bought up shares in Khamenei’s ouster after his death, those traders will be reimbursed as well.

Prediction market spotlight

The joint attack on Iran by US and Israeli military forces has cast a unique spotlight on the fast-growing and controversial betting niche.

Volumes on popular prediction markets, such as Kalshi and Polymarket, soared as bombs fell on Iran.

But so, too, has scrutiny of these platforms.

While Kalshi attempted to assuage and enlighten traders that the platform didn’t double as an assassination market, six brand-new users on Polymarket closed $1.2 million in trades betting on Khamenei leaving office.

Unlike Kalshi, Polymarket’s international site is not regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Polymarket doesn’t require customers to verify their identity upon signup, making it difficult to police the market for insider trading. Kalshi users, on the other hand, must undergo a know-your-customer onboarding process.

When Khameini was assassinated, the relevant market, which hosted more than $529 million in volume, closed as many users likely assumed.

These six users specifically wagered on the ouster of Iranian leaders on February 28 and placed bets just hours before the strike, according to analytics firm Bubblemaps.

“It’s insane this is legal,” Democrat Senator Chris Murphy said on Sunday.

“People around Trump are profiting off war and death. I’m introducing legislation ASAP to ban this.”

A White House spokesperson denied that anyone close to US President Donald Trump was behind the trades, according to NPR.

Naturally, preventing government insiders from trading on national security intelligence is critical — it ensures that decisions are made with an eye toward public welfare, rather than officials’ bank accounts.

But there’s also a clear business case, according to Daniel Lo, the chief legal officer of market marketing firm Acheron Trading.

Without clear know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering standards for prediction markets, institutional buy-in will be limited.

“It’s one of the blockers,” Lo told DL News.

“They will only normalise when there are markets that place sufficient emphasis on proper KYC and AML. Otherwise, they’re not mandated to join in.”

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

Japan’s Financial Services Agency said last week it would support private businesses’ efforts to conduct crypto AML-related pilots over the next three months.

“Globally, there is a consistent pattern emerging where the private sector increasingly executes AML operationally because it owns the data, technology, and transaction layers,” Aleksander Gora, the head of identity and digital trust at the security provider Teranode Group, told DL News.

“Governments will continue to define the regulatory framework, while execution shifts toward those closest to the transactions themselves.”

Japanese firms are gearing up for a major crypto pivot in Tokyo, which has indicated it wants to fully integrate crypto into the financial sector mainstream by 2028.

Heavy-hitters join pilots

The FSA says several leading domestic crypto exchanges, including GMO Coin and Bitbank, will take part in the pilots, along with the Japanese branch of blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis.

Other heavyweight firms from the world of Japanese finance are also taking part, including the crypto arms of the retail giant Rakuten and the securities provider Nomura. The conglomerate Hitachi has also expressed an interest in the project.

Several other firms are also working on the pilots, but have asked the regulator to keep their identities a secret.

“These pilots will test the effectiveness and legal compliance credentials of a new framework for private businesses,” said the FSA. “[This will allow firms] to collaborate and share information regarding crypto-related anti-money laundering.”

The companies will work alongside the regulator’s own affiliates to explore AML compliance measures for transactions, including stablecoins and non-fungible tokens.

“Rather than building a massive state-run setup, governments can just set standards and require private entities to implement them,” Shiv Shankar, CEO of the decentralised blockchain marketplace Boundless and the former head of compliance at Coinbase Japan, told DL News.

“In places like Japan, where regulators are a bit more cautious but technologically forward-looking, this model fits quite well.”

Information sharing

One of the participants explained the FSA wants “multiple cryptocurrency exchanges and stablecoin businesses to verify the sophistication and efficiency of AML measures” by sharing information on “wallet addresses suspected of fraud across industries.”

This would allow crypto exchanges to share information with banks about suspicious transactions, and vice versa.

Inter-sector collaboration will become particularly important as Japan looks to deregulate crypto and blur the boundaries between it and the traditional financial sector.

Japanese banks and securities firms have stepped up efforts to launch yen-pegged stablecoins and offer their clients a range of crypto-related financial services in the year ahead.

Nomura is reportedly seeking a Japanese operating permit for its Europe-based crypto exchange this year, with banking rivals Daiwa Securities Group and SMBC Nikko Securities also reportedly mulling similar moves.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

The Maelstrom chief investment officer argues that every major US military adventure in the Middle East ends the same way — with the Federal Reserve printing more money — thus boosting the prices of assets like Bitcoin.

“The time to back up the truck and buy Bitcoin and high-quality [altcoins] like HYPE is immediately after the Fed cuts rates and or prints money to support the government’s goals in Iran,” he wrote.

Hayes cited decades of data showing that US military campaigns, ballooning federal outlays, and subsequent Fed interest rate cuts have been catalysts for Bitcoin’s price.

“The longer [Donald] Trump engages in the extremely costly activity of Iranian nation-building, the higher the likelihood the Fed lowers the price and increases the quantity of money,” Hayes said.

In other words, to support the government’s war effort, policymakers will cut rates and expand the money supply, he argues.

Hayes bullish call comes as Bitcoin’s price is stalling near $66,000, or almost 50% below its October peak of $126,000. That’s despite gold and oil surging after the US and Israeli strikes on Iran on Saturday killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and unleashed market uncertainty.

In December, he predicted that Bitcoin’s price would reach $200,000 by March.

Hayes’s calls are increasingly at odds with market consensus.

For example, he predicts that a massive disruption to the economy by artificial intelligence will be beneficial to Bitcoin’s price, rather than drag the top crypto down.

Hayes’ history lesson

Hayes backs his claim with statements from the Federal Open Market Committee during past conflicts.

During the 1990 Gulf War, policymakers warned that “heightened uncertainties” stemming from events in the Middle East had “greatly complicated the formulation of an effective monetary policy,” he said.

By November and December that year, the Fed had cut rates, citing weakening market confidence and economic strain.

In 2001, after the September 11 terror attacks, Fed chair Alan Greenspan moved swiftly.

“The events of last week… have created a heightened degree of fear and uncertainty,” Greenspan said at an emergency meeting, proposing a 50-basis-point cut. The Fed obliged, and markets stabilised.

Hayes now argues that Trump’s latest military foray fits squarely into that lineage.

Military engagements cost “hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars,” he wrote.

“The cure, as always, is cheaper and more plentiful money.”

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

Perpetual futures tied to oil on the decentralised exchange jumped nearly 20% after US and Israeli strikes on Iran on Saturday killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

USOIL, a token tied to crude oil, surged to as high as $97 on Sunday while OIL advanced to $76, with the two derivatives contracts paired with Hyperliquid’s native USDH stablecoin generating nearly $17 million in trading volume.

Iran’s retaliation against its Gulf neighbours revived concerns about supply disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, a maritime chokepoint through which more than $500 billion worth of oil and gas flows annually.

Gold climbed back over $5,400 per ounce with Hyperliquid recording $148 million in trading volume. Tether Gold and Paxos Gold also jumped as investors sought safety.

Hyperliquid’s HYPE token also surged over 20% to $32 on Monday.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s price is hovering just above $65,000, down more than 20% over the past month. It is still down nearly 50% from its October peak of $126,000.

“This is the power of tokenised assets and perpetuals built on crypto infrastructure,” Kenny Chan, Coinbase’s head of Stablecoin Ecosystem, said.

Paradigm shift

The contrast marks a major shift in how geopolitical events are traded.

“For years, whenever a major geo event hit over the weekend, Bitcoin was the only choice available to traders,” Chan said.

Bitcoin had long been the asset of choice thanks to its ability to be traded at all hours and infrequent correlation to risk-off assets, Chan said

“This weekend was different,” he added.

“Traders didn’t need to route through Bitcoin anymore. They went straight to the source on Hyperliquid: perpetual futures tied to oil, gold, and silver — the assets that you actually want to take a view on.”

Bitcoin forgotten?

Bitcoin has long been marketed as digital gold, or a hedge against currency debasement and systemic risk. At times, it has even shown fleeting correlation with bullion, reinforcing the narrative that it could serve as a refuge during macro stress.

That thesis is now under strain.

Since a severe crypto liquidation event in October triggered the largest market unwind in the asset class’s history, Bitcoin has struggled to regain momentum despite other asset classes, like stocks, pushing new highs.

Gold, by contrast, has extended its rally into 2026, reaching fresh peaks amid geopolitical uncertainty, driving demand for traditional havens.

“Nothing upends the economic game board like a sudden war few had in their bingo cards a week ago,” Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, said.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is down 0.2% over the past 24 hours, trading at $66,476.
• Ethereum is down 1.6% past 24 hours at $1,961.

What we’re reading

• Russian pyramid scheme operators have turned to crypto en masse, warns Moscow — DL News
• Circle’s breakout year sets up 129% upside to $190 per share, Bernstein says— DL News
• Meta Eyes Stablecoin Return, This Time at Arm’s Length — Unchained
• Has Bitcoin Lost Its “Digital Gold” Status for Good? w/ Ran Neuner — Milk Road
• Tokenised gold continues rally while Bitcoin slides on US attack against Iran — DL News

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

The central bank says it identified 7,087 financial pyramids, pseudo-brokers, and other fraudulent schemes last year. The bank says 80% of these pyramids operated online, with the majority using crypto and money mules.

“Most of the illegal projects [...] had no offices and interacted with potential clients via social media and chat apps, or by phone. They most often used cryptocurrency to raise funds,” bank officials wrote.

Crypto adoption is on the rise in Russia, as is crypto-related crime. The finance ministry says Russians spend $648 million on crypto every day, and is fast-tracking regulations that could soon see overseas exchanges blocked.

Blocking orders

Nearly 1,500 firms offered would-be clients bogus crypto investments last year, said the bank. And 84% of scammers used crypto to raise funds last year, up from 77% in 2024.

The bank said it had ordered the blocking of 21,500 web pages and social media posts associated with crypto scammers and other financial fraud operators.

Fraudsters “choose cryptocurrencies because tokens allow them to maintain anonymity and avoid punishment,” the central bank wrote.

The bank has previously vowed to bolster its monitoring of the crypto market and step up its public fight against crypto-powered fraud.

Officials said they would continue efforts to identify increasingly sophisticated financial pyramids and online schemes.

The central bank warned the public that only permit-holding firms have the right to publicly offer investments to Russian retail investors.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up 3.8% over the past 24 hours, and is trading for $66,566.
• Ethereum is up by over 6% over the same period, trading at $1,990.

What we’re reading

• Bitcoin, Ethereum ‘pumping hard’ after Iran strikes, but states brace for financial fallout— DL News
• Bitcoin price shows ‘absurd strength’ as ETF investors continue to hold the asset, analysts say — DL News
• Morgan Stanley files for bank charter to custody crypto — DL News
• Ethereum 3.0 — coming in 2029 — Milk Road
• You may not care about crypto, but you could be voting for it – USA Today

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

Bitcoin orices briefly rose above $68,000 after Iran’s government confirmed the strikes had killed the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top officials.

But experts claimed more volatility awaits the crypto sector when US stock markets resume trading tomorrow, as bombs continue to fall across the Middle East.

“The real price discovery happens Monday when US equity markets and Bitcoin exchange-traded funds reopen,” Hayden Hughes, managing partner at the investment firm Tokenize Capital, told Bloomberg. “With missiles hitting Dubai, Iranian retaliation across the Gulf, and Strait of Hormuz closure risk, this is not a contained event.”

Optimists hope crypto ETF investors will continue to display “diamond hands,” and stick with Bitcoin throughout increasingly heated geopolitical turmoil — as has largely proved the case thus far during Bitcoin’s damaging downward slide.

Volatility warnings

Hughes said the crypto markets had reacted rapidly to reports of the start of joint US-Israel military operations against Iran on Saturday.

The total value of the crypto market fell by $128 billion in minutes, he said, adding that forced liquidations had also “cascaded.”

Hughes said that if Bitcoin ETF investors abandon their positions, Bitcoin levels could quickly fall below $63,000.

On X, experts claimed Bitcoin had already shrugged off the shock of February 28’s news.

“Bitcoin and Ethereum are pumping hard,” the crypto markets commentator Ash Crypto wrote on X. “[They have fully] recovered from the Iran strike news and [are] now pumping even higher.”

Ash Crypto also claimed the rebound was evidence the markets think the conflict will be short-lived.

Others concurred.

“Traders generally don’t expect the Iran conflict to have major negative economic consequences, and demand for upside Bitcoin calls has clearly picked up in recent days,” Markus Thielen, the head of research at 10x Research, told Bloomberg.

Following US-Israeli strikes, Iran’s military launched a series of counterattacks, hitting targets in Israel and several Middle Eastern nations.

Korea cautious

Despite crypto analysts’ optimism, global financial chiefs are braced for market shocks. In South Korea, Financial Services Commission chair Lee Eok-won called an emergency meeting on March 1.

Financial leaders in Seoul are concerned the still-booming South Korean stock market could nosedive as a result of the conflict. They warned of an incoming “influx of retail investor bargain hunters” set to take advantage of “short-term adjustments due to geopolitical risks,” South Korean media outlet Fn News reported.

Lee urged investors to be “especially vigilant.”

“The situation in the Middle East remains uncertain,” he said. “And if [the conflict] is prolonged, it could impact the economy in a very real manner.”

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

As the price of Bitcoin continued to rise, companies banking the digital asset on their balance sheet could issue more shares to raise capital and buy even more Bitcoin. Many also tapped low-interest debt to help them purchase the soaring asset.

Some of these companies, shored up by Bitcoin’s rallying price, were making so much money that Strategy’s Michael Saylor once called the scheme the “infinite money glitch.”

Now, that’s all changed. The reason?

Bitcoin stopped going up.

“The Bitcoin treasury space is unwinding due to lacklustre demand from investors for shares in Bitcoin and altcoin treasury companies,” Dom Kwok, former Goldman Sachs analyst and co-founder of developer app EasyA, told DL News.

Just this week, one treasury approved a sale of its 7,500 Bitcoin — worth around $503 million — to buy back its own shares and shore up its stock price, while another has received a letter from shareholders demanding that its entire board resign.

The rest of the sector paints an equally glum picture.

Many of these ventures now sit on billions in unrealised losses as Bitcoin’s price has sunk nearly 50% from its October 2025 high.

Barely two of the 193 public companies that hold Bitcoin in their corporate coffers bought Bitcoin in the past week.

Indeed, the Bitcoin treasuries space is in tatters.

Those firms now hold Bitcoin worth about $72 billion, roughly half of their peak value, according to BitcoinTreasuries.net.

What happened?

‘Forest fire’

The treasury model has always been fragile.

“This is very much an expected result,” James Check, a Bitcoin analyst, told DL News. “It will continue, the forest fire will clear a lot of the grift and bad ideas out.”

Though companies banked on investors opting to hold stocks with exposure to digital assets rather than the sometimes clunky underlying asset, investors’ crypto competencies have since evolved, said Kwok.

“Most investors are now sophisticated enough to buy the underlying tokens, so treasury companies that simply buy and hold aren’t as appealing as they once were,” Kwok said.

If they don’t want to buy Bitcoin directly, they can always tap into spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which currently hold around $107 billion worth of the asset, according to DefiLlama.

The digital treasury play also offered investors leveraged exposure to the underlying asset.

A metric called market-to-net-asset value, or mNav, became the niche’s North Star. It told investors how much equity value they’re paying for every $1 of crypto the company holds.

As mNav increased beyond 1, investors would pay more than the underlying crypto was worth. So, 1.5x would mean investors pay $1.50 for every $1 of Bitcoin.

Shares in Strategy, the first and largest publicly listed company to begin investing in Bitcoin, traded at premiums of up to 7 times its Bitcoin holdings during peak euphoria.

But that worked in reverse, too.

As Bitcoin fell, leverage amplified losses.

When premiums collapsed into discounts, investors didn’t reject the underlying asset per se. Instead, they questioned why they needed these vehicles at all.

“It’s not so much due to sentiment, it’s the realisation that the original idea was an unsound one,” Check said.

Mutiny at Empery Digital

The cracks in the Bitcoin treasury model are already spawning shareholder revolts.

On Monday, Tice P. Brown, who owns 9.8% of Empery Digital, publicly called for the immediate resignation of CEO Ryan Lane and the entire board of directors at Empery Digital, the 24th largest Bitcoin treasury.

Empery holds 4,081 Bitcoin worth about $275 million.

Brown is demanding the company sell all its Bitcoin and return the proceeds to shareholders.

The letter comes after management at Empery made Brown a pretty unusual offer, he says. They would repurchase 100% of his stake at a 100% premium to market-to-net-asset-value — a significant premium to the current market price. In exchange, the company demanded he stop his agitation, according to Brown.

Empery’s stock, though, trades at an mNav of 0.59, meaning the Bitcoin it holds is valued at a 41% discount. If an investor owns $100 worth of Bitcoin through Empery shares, they can only sell those shares for $59 on the stock market.

But management offered to pay Brown $100 for every $100 of Bitcoin backing his shares — nearly double what he could get by selling on the open market, he says.

Empery disputes Brown’s account, saying he’s the one who actually initiated the conversation and “initially demanded a significant premium to NAV.”

The company called Brown’s campaign “self-serving” and said it would no longer respond to his statements.

Buried deep in Empery’s response was a more damaging revelation.

The company plans to sell its Bitcoin holdings to buy back company shares in the future, a move that is anathema to the entire treasury movement.

GD Capital sells

Yesterday, Bitcoin treasury GD Culture approved the sale of some or all of its 7,500 Bitcoin — worth around $505 million — to fund a $100 million share repurchase programme.

The publicly traded artificial intelligence and livestreaming firm acquired the Bitcoin just five months ago.

Now, it may sell those holdings to prop up its stock price, which trades well below the assets’ value.

GD Capital, like dozens of other treasury firms, has another big problem.

It is sitting on a 42% unrealised loss on its Bitcoin position, or about $208 million paper loss, according to BitcoinTreasuries.net.

If the company were to sell Bitcoin now, it would take a massive blow to its bottom line.

GD Capital did not immediately reply to a request for comment from DL News.

Last man standing

One company that has managed to stay somewhat afloat is Strategy, which makes up over 99% of all corporate buying these days.

“It’s quite natural to see that capital continues to concentrate on the biggest, most stable players like MSTR in an environment that is rather characterised by tightening financial conditions,” André Dragosch, head of European research at Bitwise, told DL News, referring to Strategy’s stock ticker.

That doesn’t mean investors aren’t pessimistic.

Michael Saylor’s company is the world’s most shorted company, with bearish investors betting against 14% of Strategy’s entire market capitalisation. That means for every $100 of Strategy stock that exists, $14 worth has been borrowed and sold by bears.

Meanwhile, the stock trades at $133, down from $473 just last year.

With the amount levied against it by short sellers, the pressure for it to continue dropping is only growing.

To be sure, a sudden Bitcoin rally could turn their fortunes around.

Yet, analysts have lost confidence that the sector will recover its losses.

Standard Chartered not only expects Bitcoin’s price to fall another 30% to hit $50,000 over the next few months, but the UK bank predicts that the price will just hit $100,000 at the end of 2026 — well below its record high of $126,000 recorded in October.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

A filing submitted to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency this week shows that the New York-based bank filed for an entity called the Morgan Stanley Digital Trust. Bloomberg first reported the news.

The filing comes as a number of crypto-native companies file to get banking licences. Morgan Stanley, a titan in the world of traditional finance, has delved deeper into the crypto world in recent years.

Morgan Stanley did not immediately respond to questions from DL News.

Morgan Stanley’s moves

Morgan Stanley has been making big crypto moves for years now. It started in 2021 offering wealthy clients exposure to Bitcoin via funds such as those by Galaxy Digital.

The bank’s CEO and Chairman Ted Pick said last year that the bank was working with regulators to see how they could offer crypto safely.

Wow, they really going all the way. Don't forget they also have spot btc and eth ETFs in registration too. Esp notable IMO given they have 16k advisors that manage $7T for 18 million people. It's like a massive network of Boomer money. https://t.co/BwNgFObkVk

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) February 27, 2026

Morgan Stanley also started working with stablecoin infrastructure firm Zerohash in 2025 to allow clients on its online brokerage platform to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana.

And last month, the bank filed to debut its own Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds.

Top Wall Street firms have been pushing further into the world of crypto since Donald Trump, who received support and financial banking from digital asset entrepreneurs, became president.

What’s with the banking licence?

Top crypto firms like Coinbase and Trump-backed crypto company World Liberty Financial have also applied to the OCC for a banking licence.

The regulator has also given conditional approval to the likes of Crypto.com, Ripple, Circle, BitGo and others.

Such a licence would allow crypto firms like exchanges to custody assets and move money for customers in the way a traditional bank would.

Morgan Stanley’s move shows that Wall Street giants are also keen on being able to custody digital assets.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Investors this week piled into Tether Gold and Paxos Gold over tensions in the Middle East. Both assets continued to surge following the unprecedented attack on Iran.

Tether Gold — XAUT — jumped as high as $5,455 on Saturday morning in New York. It then dropped slightly and was recently trading for $5,332, about 5% below the all-time high it notched in February and up 2% over the past day.

Paxos’ PAXG was up nearly 4% to hit $5,438, according to CoinGecko. It rose nearly as high as $5,536 before dipping slightly.

Geopolitical headwinds

The two tokenised assets — which trade on a number of different crypto networks — surged as Bitcoin fell. The leading cryptocurrency traded as low as $63,177 at one point on Saturday.

Ethereum, too, dropped sharply on news that the US had hit Iran. Major cryptocurrencies have typically experienced volatility on news of geopolitical strife.

But the rise of tokenised gold shows that crypto is still proving useful for investors wanting fast exposure to blockchain-based precious metals.

The total value locked of PAXG and XAUT has surged this year, DefiLama data shows, as the price of gold spot market has attracted more investors.

Stablecoin giant Tether, which issues USDT, the most-traded cryptocurrency, has been fast accumulating gold and is now one of the world’s largest holders of the precious metal.

Tether in January said that “digital-native demand for safe-haven assets that remain fully onchain” was spurring the growth of its XAUT product.

Bitcoin as a safe-haven?

Bitcoin has in the past been touted as a safe-haven asset, and has in previous years been correlated — albeit briefly — with gold.

Last year, Bitcoin was sold as part of the debasement trade with precious metals: an asset investors could use to protect themselves against the devaluation of fiat currencies.

But that narrative has been rattled since October when crypto markets experienced a shock selloff.

Bitcoin and Ethereum have struggled to regain ground and are now trading well below their all-time highs since the biggest liquidation event in the history of crypto wiped billions of dollars off their market value.

Gold, meanwhile, has continued to notch new highs in 2026.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Bitcoin was priced at $64,055 at 9am in New York, down nearly 3% over a 24-hour period, according to CoinGecko. It dropped hard on the news, quickly dropping as low as $63,177, but has since recovered slightly.

Ethereum’s price was hit harder: the coin has lost nearly 5% of its value over the past day and was recently trading for $1,867.

“We’re going to annihilate their navy, we’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilise the region or the world,” Trump said in a video posted on Truth Social.

“This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States armed forces,” he added.

Derisk expected

Experts last week told DL News that a US attack on Iran would most certainly lead to a dip in crypto prices.

But market observers were divided on how prolonged a selloff would be. When tensions flared last year between Israel and Iran investors quickly sold off their Bitcoin.

The leading cryptocurrency’s price fell sharply following Israel’s June 2025 “Operation Midnight Hammer” strike and dipped again later that month when the US joined in.

It then recovered after Trump announced a pause in attacks.

Experts, though, warned that this time round, conflict between the US, Israel and Iran could go on for longer — and possibly lead to a wider regional war.

Other assets

Other top cryptocurrencies were also down on Saturday. XRP dropped by more than 3% and was priced at $1.33. Solana dropped by the same amount and was trading hands for $80.34.

Elsewhere, Dogecoin and Cardano, the 10th and 13th biggest coins by market cap, respectively experienced bigger selloffs. Memecoin Dogecoin lost 4% of its value over a 24-hour period and Cardano dropped by nearly 6%.

The entire crypto market cap has lost 50% of its value since October.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin was down 3% over a 24-hour period, trading for $64,055.
• Ethereum dropped by 5% over the same timeframe and was priced at $1,867.

What we’re reading

• Aave Labs leads in major vote after backtracking on plan to sideline v3 — DL News
• Bitcoin price shows ‘absurd strength’ as ETF investors continue to hold the asset, analysts say — DL News
• For L2 Tokens, Will Robinhood Be to Arbitrum What Base Was to Optimism? — Unchained

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

The figure represents a 13% decrease fromthis time last year, when startups secured over $1 billion amid a crypto bull run.

These days, venture firms are still doling out cheques but erring on the side of caution.

“Last year, you could raise on a narrative and a deck,” Andrei Grachev, managing partner at crypto VC firm DWF Labs, told DL News.

“This year, investors want revenue, users, and a reason to believe the product survives a bear cycle,” he said. “The spray-and-pray era is over.”

Grachev said that bear markets “always present opportunities” and that some of DWF Labs’ best-performing investments were made during downturns.

He points to three key themes driving venture investment in 2026.

Those include stablecoins and payments infrastructure, artificial intelligence agents, and institutional tools such as compliance and treasury management.

“It’s not sexy but it’s where the next $500 billion of institutional capital needs to flow through before it touches any token.”

Here are the biggest raises in February.

Flying Tulip, $206 million

Founded by veteran decentralised finance architect Andre Cronje, Flying Tulip secured $206 million via a token sale this month to build what it describes as an all-in-one financial stack.

The platform combines spot trading, lending and perpetual derivatives with its native stablecoin, ftUSD, positioning itself as a vertically integrated liquidity hub.

A core innovation is the ftPUT structure, which grants token holders a permanent redemption right to anchor the FT token’s floor value.

Capital is allocated into relatively conservative yield venues such as Aave and Lido, aiming to generate sustainable native returns.

The raise signals strong investor appetite for DeFi models that blend structured downside protection with exchange-grade financial tooling.

Whop, $200 million

Whop, a social commerce marketplace for digital goods, attracted a $200 million strategic investment from stablecoin giants Tether, valuing the company at $1.6 billion. The platform connects thousands of creators with more than 18 million users, facilitating the sale of software, online courses, and subscription-based communities.

The deal centres on integrating Tether’s Wallet Development Kit to enable self-custodial settlement in USDT and the newly launched USAT stablecoin.

By reducing reliance on traditional banking rails, Whop aims to accelerate payments within the global creator economy, particularly in emerging markets.

The capital will support expansion across Europe and Asia and fund AI-powered commerce tools, Whop said.

Anchorage Digital, $100 million

Anchorage Digital, the first federally regulated digital asset bank in the US, raised $100 million in strategic equity from Tether, lifting its valuation to $4.2 billion.

The investment deepens a partnership under which Anchorage serves as the regulated issuer for Tether’s US-compliant stablecoin, USAT.

Anchorage provides institutional-grade custody, staking, governance and settlement infrastructure, acting as a bridge between traditional capital markets and blockchain-native finance.

You’re reading the latest instalment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

That’s frightened delegates who say it’s a risk the DAO cannot afford — the current version of Aave, v3, is a smash hit, and its would-be replacement, v4, has yet to see the light of day.

This week, the critics notched a small victory. Before voting began on Wednesday, Aave Labs, the company behind the proposal, relaxed its aggressive timeline for moving Aave users to v4.

“While we think it is important for the DAO to align strategically behind V4 as part of this proposal, the timeline is up for discussion,” Labs, the company that built the protocol, wrote in the Aave governance forum earlier this week.

“Aave V3 is a battle-tested protocol, and it will continue to operate as a core part of the ecosystem for as long as the DAO decides it should.”

Voting is set to end on Saturday. As of Friday evening, “aye” votes held a narrow lead, with 52%.

Contractor departure

With more than $26.3 billion in user deposits, Aave is the largest protocol in decentralised finance. V3 accounts for more than 97% of Aave’s deposits, according to DefiLlama data. It has generated $184 million in revenue since its launch in 2022.

Before Labs’ about-face this week, it had proposed pausing work to improve v3 and even changing its lending and borrowing parameters in order to compel users to migrate to v4.

That didn’t just anger delegates. Bored Ghosts Developing, a major Aave DAO contractor founded by a former Labs executive, said it would not seek renewal of its contract this year.

“We believe even proposing this on the main revenue-maker & fully functional engine of Aave, is borderline outrageous,” Bored Ghosts wrote.

On Monday, Labs said it would not seek to force users to move to v4 after all.

“If a V3 market serves a particular chain or ecosystem well, the DAO has the authority to keep it running indefinitely,” the company wrote. “V4 also brings new use cases and opportunities that do not exist on V3, which we expect will drive adoption on its own terms … There will be no forced migration.”

Funding request

The proposal went well beyond cementing v4’s status as the future of the Aave protocol, however.

Labs has proposed directing all of its revenue from Aave-branded products to Aave DAO. It is a concession to critics who were furious to learn in December that Labs had ended its practice of sending the DAO certain revenue from aave.com, a website the company built.

The company has also proposed creating a foundation that would own and defend Aave trademarks, as well as a service provider agreement with the DAO that would see the cooperative pay Labs $25 million for ongoing product development and another $17.5 million “payable upon specific product launches.”

The proposal garnered several prominent supporters. But it also drew scepticism from major delegates, including Marc Zeller, one of Labs’ fiercest critics in recent months.

Zeller said the requested payment was far too high, amounting to 31% of the DAO’s war chest. Among other things, he requested that Labs break up its asks into multiple votes.

“Each stands on its own merits,” he wrote. “The community can support what it agrees with and refine what it doesn’t.”

Instead, Labs advanced the proposal to an initial vote.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

The price of the Uniswap token, UNI, has outperformed major cryptocurrencies over the past seven days, rising 9% in that span as of Friday afternoon New York time. Bitcoin and Ethereum, meanwhile, fell 3.5% and 2.4%, respectively.

The proposals would activate Uniswap’s so-called fee switch on two versions of the Uniswap protocol deployed across eight layer 2 blockchains: Base, Arbitrum, OP Mainnet, World Chain, X Layer, Celo, Soneium, and Zora.

Activation of the fee switch would direct at least one-sixth of the fees collected on those blockchains from liquidity providers to a so-called token jar, where they can be claimed by investors who burn, or destroy, Uniswap tokens of equal value.

The fee switch has been active on v2 and the largest v3 trading pools on Ethereum since late December. It has generated a cumulative $3.3 million since then, according to DefiLlama data.

The proposal — which also seeks to flip the fee switch on all remaining v3 pools on Ethereum — would likely double that revenue. Base has overtaken Ethereum as the top fee-generating blockchain for Uniswap in 2026, with traders there paying $55 million across all four versions of Uniswap since January 1. Traders using Uniswap on Ethereum have paid just $37 million in fees in that span.

Uniswap is the largest decentralised exchange. It processed transactions worth more than $1.7 billion over the past 24 hours and more than $69 billion over the past month.

Founder Hayden Adams said the rollout of the fee switch on Ethereum had been a success, citing the growth in user deposits in crypto terms. (Deposits fell in dollar terms due to the collapse in the value of Ether over the past month.)

“Since UNIfication, we’ve monitored the first wave of fees on v2 and a large subset of v3 pools on mainnet,” Adams wrote on X, referring to the title of the November proposal that flipped the fee switch on Ethereum.

“Rollout went very well, with market adjusted [user deposits] up and burn working efficiently.”

After years of debate, Uniswap leadership proposed a fee switch in November. By encouraging Uniswap investors to destroy their tokens in exchange for protocol-generated fees, it reduces the UNI supply and, in theory, boosts its value.

But UNI has plummeted along with the rest of the crypto market since UNIfication was proposed, falling 59% to $3.74.

The wide-ranging proposal did more than flip the fee switch on Ethereum. It also burned almost 100 million UNI, the amount of tokens that would have been removed from circulation had the fee switch been implemented since Uniswap’s inception several years ago.

UNIfication also approved the development of a new mechanism to boost liquidity provider earnings, the eventual disbandment of the Uniswap Foundation, and the end of Uniswap Labs’ collection of additional fees from interfaces that allow non-technical traders to use the Uniswap protocol, including a Labs-built website and crypto wallet.

The proposal to expand the fee switch passed an initial vote unanimously. A final pair of votes ends on March 4.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

Now it seems that those investors are keeping Bitcoin’s price afloat.

“ETF investors have largely displayed diamond hands during [the] recent Bitcoin downturn,” Nate Geraci, co-founder of the ETF Institute, said on X on Friday.

Diamond hands refers to holding a financial asset and not selling it, regardless of its volatility.

As Bitcoin plunged to the lower $60,000 range from its October 2025 peak of $126,000, around $6.5 billion flowed out of ETFs, according to Geraci. That’s a “drop in the bucket” compared to the $107 billion that has flowed into ETFs since they launched in January 2025, he argued.

Others agree, reckoning that many are missing the forest for the trees when observing ETF flows.

“I’ve been harping on this. As an ETF watcher you know just how absurd this strength [is] amid a 50% drawdown,” Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg Intelligence ETF expert, wrote on X.

“This is the real story.”

Indeed, this isn’t the first time market watchers tout the stickiness of spot Bitcoin ETF investors. Back in 2025, when tensions flared between Israel, Iran, and the US, Bitcoin ETFs notched 10 straight days of inflows, according to data from Ecoinometrics.

That consistency highlighted something pretty profound: that institutions were done speculating, and instead, even amid market jitters, were allocating.

Today’s numbers support that thesis. If barely 10% of ETFs have left these funds amid a 50% drawdown, then ETF investors are clearly in it for the long haul.

“50% drawdowns are a walk in the park for long-time Bitcoin investors,” said Geraci. “But it appears newer ETF investors aren’t worried either.”

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

Two digital assets emerged as the winners after an especially gloomy report about the future of artificial intelligence this week.

That report painted a scenario in which AI becomes so advanced that it wipes out large swathes of white-collar jobs and crushes consumer spending, after which entire economies are brought to their knees.

To stem the bleeding, the Federal Reserve in the US will inevitably step in by cutting interest rates or increasing the money supply — much like it did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When the economy is in the gutter, the Fed often ramps up money printing,” Laurens Fraussen, research analyst at Kaiko, told DL News on Tuesday.

“Bitcoin goes up in response to the increased money supply and concerns about currency debasement,” he said.

cryptocurrencies that track the price of fiat currencies such as

The second digital asset that the Citrini report directly points out is stablecoins.

That’s because so-called agents, or autonomous computer programmes that can perform tasks at users‘ behest, will eventually need a convenient method of payment.

“Agents went looking for faster and cheaper options than cards,” the Citrini analysts wrote on Sunday. “Most settled on using stablecoins via Solana or Ethereum layer 2s, where settlement was near-instant, and the transaction cost was measured in fractions of a penny.”

At least a few investors took that last prediction to heart.

Stocks for Mastercard and Visa plummeted roughly 5% at market open on Monday.

Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and CEO of payments firm Block, announced on Thursday that his firm is slashing its headcount by 40%.

He cited AI advancements as the reason for the layoffs.

Double down on stablecoins

Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies that track the price of fiat currencies such as the dollar or the pound sterling, have garnered enormous attention in 2025.

For many, the Citrini report presented even more reason to double down.

“There will be a huge amount of agentic commerce,” John Collison, a co-founder of Stripe, said on TBPN on Tuesday. “That is what unites stablecoins and AI. You’re going to need blockchains, and better blockchains, honestly.”

To be sure, Stripe is all in on stablecoins.

In 2025, the company acquired Bridge for a record $1 billion. The fintech also incubated Tempo, an upcoming blockchain optimised for stablecoin activity.

But stablecoins have hit a roadblock in 2026. Last year, they added a whopping $103 billion to their supply, bringing the total to $300 billion in October.

Since then, however, investor appetite has dwindled.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin continues to be rocked by geopolitical chaos and tariff-related turmoil in the US. The $1.3 trillion digital asset is trading at just over $66,000 on Friday after dipping as low as $62,900 on Tuesday.

Bitcoin is about to register its worst losing streak in more than seven years.

So, while Wall Street continues to reel over hotly contested reports about the implications of artificial intelligence, the theses that buttress the rise of cryptocurrencies have yet to manifest.

In the meantime, real usage should emerge, say analysts.

“This type of correction can be constructive for the underlying ecosystem,” Franklin Templeton’s Tony Pecore told DL News on Wednesday.

“Speculative activity declines, and attention shifts toward fundamentals: real usage, infrastructure, and sustainable economics.”

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

The $40 billion company, which uses the XRP cryptocurrency for cross-border payments, announced the shift, along with new developer funding programmes, in a Thursday blog post.

“As the ecosystem matures, the focus is shifting toward expanding access to funding through more distributed and independent pathways so builders have multiple avenues to scale,” Ripple said in the post.

Historically, much of the XRP Ledger ecosystem funding flowed through Ripple-supported initiatives. The company said its goal is to create a healthier ecosystem where builders can access funding through multiple channels.

The development comes as Ripple tries to shake the impression that it exerts too much influence and control over the XRP Ledger.

While Ripple and the XRP Ledger are distinct, the two have been close for much of their existence.

After launching the XRP Ledger in 2012, many of its creators went on to found Ripple or join the firm as executives.

Ripple is also the biggest owner of XRP. The firm said it held $57 billion worth of the cryptocurrency — around two-third of all tokens in circulation — as of March 2025, the last time it reported its holdings publicly.

Ripple is also a major XRP Ledger developer.

New funding routes

In its blog post, Ripple outlined several routes it hopes will help diversify developer funding.

The firm said it will launch a new FinTech Builder Programme designed to support startups building financial applications on the XRP Ledger, including for stablecoin payments, credit infrastructure, tokenisation, and regulated financial services.

In June, the XRP Ledger also got its own decentralised autonomous organisation called XAO DAO. Its stated goal is to boost community voices and foster a culture of rapid experimentation through microgrant funding.

The XRPL Commons, a non-profit that supports XRP Ledger development, and XRP Asia, an initiative to support XRP developers across the Asia-Pacific region, will continue to support development.

Ripple’s many university partnerships, and venture capital partners Dragonfly Capital, Pantera, and Franklin Templeton, among others, will also play key funding roles, the firm said.

“The goal is to ensure that no single organisation becomes the sole gatekeeper for ecosystem support,” Ripple said.

Bleeding deposits

Despite hosting the $84 billion XRP token, the XRP Ledger has struggled to grow its DeFi ecosystem.

Since July, deposits to XRP Ledger protocols have declined from a peak of $120 million to just $49 million.

In October, Ripple chief technical officer David Schwartz stepped down. During Schwartz’s 14 years at the firm he played a key role in several XRP Ledger DeFi updates, including the launch of a native automated market maker and the introduction of programmable tokens.

There are developments that could turn the blockchain’s fortunes around, however.

Ripple developers have discussed plans to introduce XRP staking, a feature that could boost the blockchain’s DeFi ecosystem.

Ripple is also building the infrastructure for a lending market on the XRP Ledger. The hope is that financial institutions will use the lending market to borrow funds from retail investors.

The feature entered voting on January 28, and requires an 80% supermajority among XRP Ledger validators to pass.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

The Lightning Network has been promoted by Bitcoin maxis like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who last year integrated the layer 2 into his payments platform, Cash App.

Bitcoiners argue that Lightning will help the big orange coin become — in the words of Dorsey — “everyday money”: skirting transactions around the main chain cuts costs and increases speed, allowing people to use Bitcoin for daily purchases.

And the data would have you believe that it is working. Bitcoin brokerage River this month posted figures showing that transactions on the second-layer solution in November hit $1.1 billion, much to the delight of Bitcoiners on Crypto Twitter. In the same period in 2024, volume stood at $286.5 million.

Bitcoin's Lightning Network exceeds $1B in monthly transaction volume. pic.twitter.com/USmosCQ1gM

— River (@River) February 19, 2026

Though the picture appears to be more complicated, experts told DL News.

What’s it really for?

Despite in the past being pushed for smaller transactions, Lightning, which debuted in 2018, isn’t just being used for microtransactions like tipping or buying a cup of coffee.

“We are seeing larger transactions go through right on a regular basis,” Jesse Shrader, co-founder of Bitcoin infrastructure firm Amboss, said.

He added that his company had seen Lightning transactions surge by 300% since January, and the average size of a Bitcoin transaction now stands at 74,000 sats — worth $50 at today’s price of $67,714 per coin.

Lightning made headlines this month when American crypto exchange Kraken helped facilitate a $1 million transaction on the network.

“By dramatically reducing settlement times, the Lightning Network unlocks Bitcoin’s potential at global scale, and we’re proud to help bring that future into reality,” Kraken’s head of onchain, Calvin Leyon, said of the transaction.

Indeed, exchanges using Lightning to move money may be the reason why transaction volume has spiked.

“The average transaction value on the Lightning Network has actually increased and it goes to show that it’s not so much peer-to-peer payments for coffee or whatever — it’s more like a settlement between exchanges or between businesses,” Spencer Yang, a managing partner of crypto investment firm, BlockSpaceForce, told DL News.

He added that Jack Dorsey integrating Lightning into Square’s payment terminals could also be playing a part.

Payments company Block, the parent company of Square, last year debuted a new Bitcoin payments system, allowing merchants to accept the cryptocurrency over the Lightning Network.

It isn’t clear how many merchants are using the Lightning network to accept payments. Block did not respond to questions from DL News.

Bobby Shell, VP of marketing at Lightning infrastructure company Voltage, told DL News that nearly 29% of Bitcoin transfers pass through the layer 2, with Coinbase routing around 15% of its transactions on the network.

“This isn’t a niche anymore,” he said.

Privacy and price matters

But transaction volume may also be surging due to rising costs on other blockchains, Shrader said.

“Tether on Tron is probably one of the best examples,” he noted.

The cost of sending USDT on the Tron network has risen in recent years to nearly $4 per transaction. The network was once the go-to for small-dollar transactions because of its low costs. Cheaper blockchains, though, now exist.

Using Lightning, in comparison, can cost less than a fraction of a cent.

But another reason transaction volume has shot up may be down to its privacy-centric nature: Sending coins via Lightning is harder to trace compared to a standard Bitcoin network transaction.

“But at the end of the day, lightning is incredibly private,” said Shrader. “From a practical and a data analytics perspective, there’s not a lot that you can do to track it.”

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

The reason?

Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed what it means to build and run a company, Jack Dorsey, the firm’s co-founder and CEO, said in a Thursday letter to shareholders reporting the firm’s fourth quarter financial results.

“Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” Dorsey said in the letter.

The layoffs reduce the headcount of the company — which owns Square, Cash App, and several Bitcoin-related enterprises — from 10,000 to less than 6,000.

Block’s stock, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, jumped some 24% following the announcement.

The layoffs come as investors grow increasingly fearful that the AI boom, which has helped boost markets for years, will ultimately hurt investors and crush the wider economy.

On Sunday, a widely-circulated report from Citrini Research, an investment research provider, argued that if AI continues to advance, it will trigger widespread white-collar layoffs, weakening consumer spending and slowing growth.

More layoffs

Block is among Bitcoin’s biggest corporate advocates, with the firm integrating Bitcoin payments into Square and Cash App, running Bitkey, a self-custody Bitcoin hardware wallet, and even developing its own Bitcoin mining machines.

Some industry pundits even contend Dorsey is Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto — a claim the Twitter founder has denied on multiple occasions.

Block has undergone several rounds of layoffs in recent years. This is the first time the firm has cited AI as the reason for the redundancies.

“We over-hired during COVID because I incorrectly built two separate company structures (Square and Cash App) rather than one, which we corrected mid 2024,” Dorsey said on X, addressing the latest layoffs.

Block is one of hundreds of firms leaning heavily into AI.

Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström said in a fourth-quarter earnings call in early February that his firm’s top developers “have not written a single line of code” in 2026, instead using AI exclusively to design software.

Most companies ‘late’ to AI

It’s also not the only one laying off employees because of it.

In January, Amazon laid off 16,000 employees, which Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, attributed to cost reductions as it ramps up AI spending.

In the same month, Pinterest announced layoffs affecting roughly 15% of its workforce as part of a reallocation of resources to AI-focused products.

Salesforce, Klarna, and Accenture have also cut thousands of jobs amid increased use of AI and automation.

Block’s latest layoffs could be a sign that the trend is accelerating.

“I don’t think we’re early to this realisation,” Dorsey said.

“I think most companies are late.”

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

“We’re big fans of Ethereum,” Jeff Housenbold, Beast Industries president and CEO, said on Thursday.

The executive went on to declare Ethereum the “backbone” of the stablecoin industry and touted the promise of decentralised finance, or DeFi, a sector whose apps offer borrowing, lending, trading and a host of other financial services on decentralised blockchain networks.

“We think the DeFi movement is really important, and the benefits it brings to consumers in greater access, democratisation, lower cost of capital, the ability to move capital around the globe in a safe and secure way,” he told CNBC Television.

Beast Industries brands itself as a “creator-based platform” and oversees the viral MrBeast brand, founded by YouTube creator Jimmy Donaldson.

It leverages a 1.5 billion fanbase to sell consumer products, including official apparel, toys, and healthy protein snacks.

The praise for Ethereum comes as Beast Industries rolls out a new suite of financial products following its acquisition of fintech firm Step on February 9.

Step is a six-year-old fintech company “dedicated to making financial literacy and money management accessible to all,” according to Beast Industries.

For Housenbold, the acquisition gives the company access to a massive customer base.

“When you have 1.45 billion users, there’s a lot of share of wallet you can gain,” He said. “The real key is to develop a lifetime relationship with the customer.”

Bitmine x MrBeast

Beast Industries turn to crypto hasn’t been without warning.

In January, Bitmine, the Ethereum treasury company chaired by Tom Lee, invested $200 million in Beast Industries.

The deal gives Bitmine a stake in a brand with massive global reach among younger audiences.

Beast Industries’ YouTube channels have over 450 million subscribers and generate over 5 billion views per month.

“MrBeast and Beast Industries, in our view, is the leading content creator of our generation, with a reach and engagement unmatched with GenZ, GenAlpha and Millennials,” Lee said.

Housenbold said the Bitmine investment validates the company’s strategy as it pursues becoming “the most impactful entertainment brand in the world.”

Fintech push

Beast Industries has filed a US trademark application for “MrBeast Financial,” hinting at crypto-enabled financial products.

“What we’re going to do is take traditionally dry information around financial literacy, make it entertaining, we’re going to gamify it, and we’re going to help drive the habit that leads to long term success for the masses,” Housenbold said.

“It fits so perfect with our mission, which is to uplevel children around the world.”

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up down 1.9% over the past 24 hours, trading at $67,244.
• Ethereum is down 3.4% past 24 hours at $2,009.

What we’re reading

• Vitalik proposes ‘quantum roadmap’ for Ethereum — DL News
• Circle’s breakout year sets up 129% upside to $190 per share, Bernstein says— DL News
• Meta Eyes Stablecoin Return, This Time at Arm’s Length — Unchained
• Has Bitcoin Lost Its “Digital Gold” Status for Good? w/ Ran Neuner — Milk Road
• Revolut joins financial watchdog’s stablecoin sandbox as UK rushes to catch up to US — DL News

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

That roadmap features several changes to parts of the blockchain that are vulnerable to quantum computers. It does not include a proposed timeline for those changes, though at least one proposed change is currently being considered for inclusion in an Ethereum upgrade expected to arrive in the latter half of 2026.

Quantum computers are still theoretical, but researchers’ rapid progress building them has frightened some blockchain engineers and even pro-crypto Wall Street executives.

It has roiled the Bitcoin community, which is divided over the urgency of the issue. Ethereum developers, however, have signalled they want to take a more proactive approach to the looming threat.

Buterin is among the most concerned. He warned in November that quantum computers could break Ethereum’s underlying security model before the next US presidential election in 2028.

His solutions to the quantum threat, all explained in highly technical jargon, include certain hash-based signatures, recursive STARKs, native account abstraction, and protocol-layer recursive signature and proof aggregation.

Put simply, they would update the cryptography that currently secures the blockchain. And at least one of those changes could arrive by the end of the year.

Hegota

Ethereum developers are currently debating which improvements should be included in a forthcoming upgrade dubbed Hegota.

Several weeks ago, Ethereum Foundation developer Felix Lange suggested that Hegota include frame transactions — a new type of transaction that would offer a more robust version of account abstraction.

“It’s also for us the most important one, because of the readiness for the post-quantum world,” Lange said.

“We feel like we have to get started with the off-ramp from ECDSA, and in order to do that, we need a comprehensive system that can deal with whatever signature algorithms we want to use.”

ECDSA is the acronym for the quantum-vulnerable cryptography that undergirds Ethereum currently.

Buterin previously suggested he supported including frame transactions in Hegota. On Thursday, he appeared to renew his push for the feature.

Adding frame transactions would give Ethereum users “first-class accounts that can use any signature algorithm,” including those that cannot be broken by quantum computers, Buterin wrote.

Other proposals in Buterin’s quantum roadmap require advances in computer science.

“It’s manageable, but there’s a lot of engineering work to do,” he wrote.

Quantum focus

Last month, the Ethereum Foundation said it had established a post-quantum team following “years of quiet R&D.”

The Swiss nonprofit would also host new, bi-weekly calls in which Ethereum developers would discuss quantum security and offer a new $1 million prize to anyone who can help harden quantum-resistant cryptography.

Foundation employees are also working on a website that will detail a post-quantum strategy for Ethereum that “targets a full transition in coming years with zero loss of funds and zero downtime,” according to researcher Justin Drake.

But support from Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation doesn’t necessarily mean Ethereum developers will go along, a point that Drake emphasised earlier this week when he released a “strawman roadmap” for the blockchain.

The “strawmap” it was named due to “the limits of drafting a roadmap in a highly decentralised ecosystem.”

“An ‘official’ roadmap reflecting all Ethereum stakeholders is effectively impossible,” Drake wrote, calling it “one reasonably coherent path among millions of possible outcomes.”

It details potential Ethereum upgrades through the end of the decade and features five focus areas, including quantum resistance.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can contact him at aleks@dlnews.com.

The foundation would allow Fluid’s developers to comply with anti-money laundering and know-your-customer rules as they seek to strike deals with traditional financial institutions.

“Establishing the Fluid Foundation allows the protocol to meet AML, KYC, banking, and regulatory requirements when interacting with off-chain counterparties, without compromising the decentralised governance that token holders have today,” DeFi Made Here, the new foundation’s pseudonymous director, wrote on X this week.

“The Foundation cannot be owned; it is governed by its constitutional documents, which give $FLUID token holders ultimate authority.”

DeFi Made Here, or DMH, was previously the chief operating officer at Fluid developer InstaDapp.

Fluid, a decentralised financial protocol with more than $1 billion in user deposits, features a decentralised exchange and a lending-and-borrowing platform, putting it in competition with Aave and Morpho.

All eyes on Aave

The proposal comes as stakeholders in Aave, the world’s largest decentralised financial protocol, clash over ownership of brand assets, including aave.com and related social media accounts.

Aave’s fight has seen its token plummet relative to rival protocol Morpho’s over the past 90 days, though its share of the crypto lending market has remained largely unchanged.

But DMH said the proposal was not motivated by the trouble at Aave.

“Regarding allegations that this is done because of Aave governance drama - this is not true,” they wrote on X this week.

“We’ve been actively working on setting up the foundation for the past 6 months - much earlier than things escalated at Aave.”

Aave Labs, the company that built the Aave protocol, has clashed with members of Aave DAO, the digital cooperative that controls the protocol. DAO members have chafed at Labs’ growing influence, and some have demanded that Labs relinquish brand assets, such as the Aave website.

In a bid to settle the fight, Labs recently proposed creating a foundation to own and defend Aave trademarks and “operate in alignment with DAO-approved parameters,” among other things.

Labs did not detail the proposed foundation’s structure, and DAO members have expressed displeasure with other elements of the proposal.

Token holders remain in charge

DMH said the new foundation has already been incorporated in the Cayman Islands, and its funding would come exclusively from the DAO that governs the Fluid protocol.

“Token holders will continue to retain oversight over objectives, budgets, and major decisions as they do now.”

Significantly, InstaDapp would relinquish all intellectual property, including websites and the protocol’s smart contracts.

“Instead of these assets remaining with the team or early contributors, they will transition into a neutral, mission-aligned entity: the Fluid Foundation,” DMH wrote. “This gives token holders real, enforceable control over Fluid’s IP for the first time.”

InstaDapp employees will hold director seats at the foundation and manage its day-to-day operations, though they will be bound by DAO votes, according to DMH.

The DAO controls the revenue generated by the protocol, and DMH has requested that it approve a $250,000-per-month grant to the foundation “to fund the team responsible for maintaining and growing the protocol.”

DMH and InstaDapp did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent over X.

The transfer of IP and the monthly grant are both subject to DAO approval. In the Fluid governance forum, one commenter said the grant took up too great a share of protocol revenue and questioned the need to transfer IP ownership to a DAO-controlled foundation.

But others were supportive.

“Doing this before a potential equity+token ownership conflict arises is smart,” Ignas, a delegate in several DAOs, wrote. “Aave is going through similar discussions now but under tension. Fluid is getting ahead of it.”

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

Police discovered the missing Bitcoin earlier this year after another, unrelated case saw prosecutors in Gwangju temporarily lose control of 320 Bitcoin, currently worth over $20 million.

The National Police Agency followed up with an audit, asking all police stations in the country to check on the status of confiscated crypto.

That’s when Gangnam Police Station, one of the most affluent parts of the South Korean capital, discovered 22 Bitcoin, seized in 2022, were missing.

The problem, per a report from South Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo, was that the police were never really in control of the Bitcoin in the first place.

Voluntary surrender

Quoting anonymous police sources and other people familiar with the matter, the newspaper explained the incident has its roots in a police probe into the suspected hack of an unnamed crypto exchange in November 2021.

While examining the exchange’s transaction records, Gangnam Police Station officers reportedly discovered that a single account holder had sold a large quantity of unnamed altcoins for Bitcoin, and then attempted to move the tokens to an overseas exchange.

The hacked exchange moved to block these transactions. Its efforts were at least partially successful, leaving 22 Bitcoin in the account.

The account’s owner reportedly told the police they had nothing to do with these transactions, and that the Bitcoin “was not theirs.”

This individual then “voluntarily surrendered” the coins to the police, Dong-A Ilbo reported.

The was then supposed to store the Bitcoin in a police-controlled cold wallet, an offline hard drive designed to store crypto. That’s what the then-recently issued National Police Agency guidelines said they should do.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, officers reportedly agreed to keep the Bitcoin in a cold wallet owned by a company that had requested to investigate the hacking incident.

The newspaper’s sources said the officers never even learned the wallet’s seed phrases, the combinations of 12 to 24 words that can back up and restore crypto wallets.

An employee of the aforementioned company reportedly told the newspaper the company handed the seed phrases over to a hacker surnamed Jeong in May 2022 after experiencing financial difficulties.

Soon after, the 22 Bitcoin disappeared from the cold wallet, which was still being held in a sealed vault at Gangnam Police Station.

Missing pieces

How exactly Jeong or their associates were supposedly able to access a police vault remains unclear.

However, police have arrested two men, aged in their 40s, in connection with the incident.

Dong-a Ilbo noted that a former Gangnam Police Station investigator, who was in charge of the crypto exchange hacking investigation at the time, was jailed in August for 18 months for bribery.

A court in Seoul heard that a company connected with the probe had offered money to the investigation “in exchange for ensuring the investigation proceeded in their favour.”

Police have refused to publicly confirm or deny the veracity of the report.

“The specific circumstances of this incident, including the manner by which the Bitcoin was leaked externally, are currently under investigation,” a police official told South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

The Supreme People’s Court, the country’s highest judicial body, said it wants to fight insider trading and market manipulation.

“We must conduct research and strengthen our responses to new types of financial crime, in sectors such as supply chain finance, internet finance, and cryptocurrencies,” said Wang Chuang, director of the court’s Second Civil Division.

The Supreme Court’s comments come just weeks after the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis reported Chinese-language money laundering networks are responsible for processing 20% of illicit crypto funds over the past five years.

Chinese-speaking money launderers processed over $16 billion in 2025, or around $44 million per day, the firm said.

Courts’ new powers

The Chinese judiciary wants to create a series of comprehensive laws to help prosecutors and courts issue stricter punishments for crypto and financial crimes, Ma Hongwei, a senior partner at Beijing Dacheng Law Firm, told Chinese media outlet Shanghai Securities News.

This will mean judges will no longer have to rely chiefly on legal precedent in crypto- and price manipulation-related cases, Ma said.

Chinese courts handled more than 2.7 million financial cases last year, including many crypto-related cases, Wang said. That represents a rise of 2% from 2024.

Wang said the judiciary must move fast to formulate “a response to new financial cases such as those involving cryptocurrencies.”

The Supreme Court said it was aware of the rise of crypto-related crime and is “aiming to unify judicial standards” on the matter.

The court called crypto “a new financial field that needs to be studied” as it formulates new regulatory and judicial responses.

“The financial sector is the backbone of the national economy and a key component of China’s core competitiveness,” said Wang. “We must support the development of a sound financial system.”

Beijing has reiterated its zero-tolerance stance on crypto in recent months. In December, the central People’s Bank of China, or PBoC, said it was stepping up efforts to combat crypto “speculation and trading.”

The bank said it would continue to uphold bans on crypto trading and “crack down on illegal financial activities related to virtual currencies, and protect the safety of the public.”

Earlier this month, the bank and China’s securities regulators banned most forms of yuan-pegged stablecoins and real-world asset-related projects.

Crypto scams rising

Meanwhile, reports of crypto-related crime continue to appear in the Chinese press with increasing frequency.

Police in Macau say a woman in the special administrative region fell victim to a sophisticated crypto scam that saw her lose $163,000.

Officers said an online acquaintance recommended she download a crypto trading app that offered users a range of bonuses, including monthly cash payouts.

At first, she thought the app was helping her make money, and successfully withdrew over $70 from the platform, reported Macau-based media outlet TDM.

However, when she attempted to withdraw more funds from the platform, she received a message instructing her to pay a hefty tax bill before she could make further withdrawals.

She filed a report with the police, who identified the platform as fraudulent.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

An investigation released by pseudonymous crypto sleuth ZachXBT on Thursday pinned the schemes on Broox Bauer, an employee who handled business development for the platform.

Bauer, along with several associates, allegedly used Axiom’s internal tools to look up customers’ crypto wallets and track their activity, giving the group a significant advantage over other traders.

“There was little to no monitoring or access controls in place to mitigate this abuse from happening in the first place,” ZachXBT said. “The extent of data granted to employees in an easily accessible dashboard is unusual for business development roles.”

It’s not clear how much Bauer and his associates made through the schemes, which allegedly started just months after the platform launched in January 2025.

In a recorded call that took place in early February, Broox allegedly outlined a plan to help one of his associates profit $200,000 by abusing his privileged access, ZachXBT said.

Bauer did not immediately respond to DL News’ request for comment.

Insider trading concerns

The accusations come as concerns over insider trading of crypto assets and on prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi reach a fever pitch.

On Tuesday, the administrator overseeing Terraform Labs’ winding down filed a lawsuit against Jane Street, alleging that the high-frequency trading firm used nonpublic information to profit from Terraform’s collapse.

Last month, several Democratic politicians in the US co-sponsored the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026, a bill that prohibits elected officials from buying, selling or exchanging prediction market contracts tied to the administration’s policies.

On February 23, ZachXBT teased that he planned to release an exposé on alleged insider trading, leading to the creation of a Polymarket prediction market that let bettors gamble on the named project.

Before the investigation was posted, bettors gave Axiom around a 30% chance of being named, the highest out of all available options.

Profitable company

Axiom is a crypto trading platform founded in 2024 by Henry Zhang, otherwise known as Mist, and Preston Ellis, who also goes by Cal — both recent college graduates at the time.

The platform went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch and launched in early-access shortly after. It quickly became one of the most profitable companies in the crypto industry, generating over $390 million in revenue to date, according to DefiLlama data.

ZachXBT is a prolific crypto sleuth who has conducted dozens of investigations across the industry. He said he was retained by Axiom to investigate allegations of misconduct.

“We are surprised and disappointed to hear that someone on our team abused internal customer support tools to look up user wallets,” Axiom said in response to the investigation.

“We have removed access to these tools and will continue to investigate and hold the offending parties responsible.”

Wallet spreadsheet

According to ZachXBT’s investigation, Bauer and his associates created a spreadsheet compiling the wallet addresses of potential targets obtained by abusing Axiom’s tools.

Multiple people named on the spreadsheet or in leaked screenshots were contacted and independently confirmed the accuracy of wallet data attributed to them, ZachXBT said.

It wasn’t just wallet addresses that the group had access to. Axiom’s tools allow Bauer to look up a user’s entire wallet list, the wallets that user is tracking, their transaction history, nicknames of wallets, and linked accounts.

“Given Broox is based in NYC I think the case presents itself as a good opportunity for SDNY since it may fall within their jurisdiction,” ZachXBT said.

The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York — SDNY — is one of the most active federal prosecutors in pursuing crypto-related fraud, manipulation, Ponzi schemes, insider trading, and money laundering cases.

The federal trial court has litigated some of the most high-profile crypto cases, including those against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon, and Mango Markets exploiter Avraham Eisenberg.

“Whether or not criminal charges are filed, I hope the Axiom co-founders further investigate the abuse and consider taking legal action against the employees involved,” ZachXBT said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Gold has consistently broken records this year. It hit an all-time high of $5,417 per ounce at the end of January, and while it fell amid a wipeout in leveraged metals bets, it has traded above $5,000 over the past week.

Political chaos — including US tariffs and a potential invasion of Iran — has fuelled the rally, according to experts.

Tether Gold has grown 62%, to $3.7 billion, since January 1, according to DefiLlama data. Paxos Gold has grown 48%, to $2.4 billion.

Moreover, Ondo Finance and Securitize, two broader tokenisation platforms, have also experienced double-digit growth.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, has completely reversed the gains it enjoyed in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024. The global crypto market has fallen more than 21% since January 1, according to CoinGecko.

In fact, of the top 20 protocols in decentralised finance, only one other has seen any growth to begin the year — Ethena, the issuer of USDe, a token it calls a “synthetic dollar.”

While some of those flagging protocols have grown in crypto terms, the dollar value of their users’ deposits has dropped steeply. The top performer, Sky, has seen the dollar value of its deposits fall 5%, and Aave, the largest protocol in DeFi, has seen its deposits fall more than 19%.

The tokenised gold case

Tokenised gold has its own appeal.

South Korean investors have been snapping up gold-pegged stablecoins as part of a bid to avoid hefty tax bills.

That’s because crypto trading, unlike gold, is not yet subject to any form of taxation in South Korea. Tokenised gold products let South Korean investors gain exposure to the soaring metal without the hefty taxes that come with buying the real thing.

Gold-backed tokens are tradeable digital assets pegged to the value of physical gold. In most cases, one token represents a troy ounce, or a gram, of physical gold. Tether and other companies back their coins with physical gold held in secure, audited vaults.

Even smaller tokenised gold players have enjoyed the boom.

Pleasing Gold, with a market capitalisation of $102 million, has grown 21% since the beginning of the year, according to data from RWA.xyz. Matrixdock Gold has grown 23%, to more than $69 million.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

That is Bernstein’s blunt assessment shared with DL News after the USDC stablecoin issuer posted its fourth-quarter earnings that saw its revenue skyrocket by 77% to $770 million in 2025.

To Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, this is only just the beginning as artificial intelligence and blockchain technology influence the world economy.

“We are in the earliest stages of a very deep and very fundamental transformation of the way the global economic system functions and works,” he said during the earnings call.

“Not only will our global economic system become more internet native, but it’s also going to become dramatically more automated.”

To Bernstein, Circle will play a key role in that shift. The research and brokerage firm reiterated its “outperform” rating and $190 price target, implying 129% upside, arguing that Circle is evolving into core internet infrastructure.

Analyst Gautum Chhugani and his three Bernstein colleagues described Circle’s fourth-quarter as a “clear divergence from crypto” amid the market downturn that has wiped out over $2 trillion.

They value Circle using a long-term discounted cash flow approach, citing “stablecoin’s potential applications in payments and stablecoin-native financial services.”

Bernstein’s bullish call comes as stablecoins in circulation surged 50% in 2025 and sits at just under $310 billion, DefiLlama data shows.

After a 72% year-on-year jump, Circle’s dollar pegged token USDC makes up $75 billion, or 28%, of the total stablecoins in circulation.

Arc ahead

Bernstein sees Circle’s future not just in USDC supply growth, but in the expansion of its Arc blockchain and payments stack — infrastructure that could reposition the company from interest-income beneficiary to full-stack digital dollar platform.

Arc, Circle’s layer-1 blockchain, launched its testnet in October with participation from more than 100 partners and remains on track for a 2026 mainnet launch.

Bernstein notes that Arc has maintained near-100% uptime, 0.5-second finality and has processed 166 million transactions since launch.

To be sure, Circle does face some challenges.

Bernstein flags that 99% of revenue remains tied to interest income, making Circle sensitive to declining rates.

Competition from banks and payments giants could also intensify as regulatory clarity improves, the company said.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

According to the February 25 proposal, those who hold and stake 10 million WLFI tokens — dubbed Node stakers — will receive the right to convert USD1 directly to other stablecoins through the project’s partner market makers. This will allow Node stakers to profit from small price differences that emerge between USD1 and other dollar-pegged tokens.

“WLFI subsidises the market makers to maintain one-to-one parity, effectively passing the arbitrage opportunity — which today is captured exclusively by institutional market makers at ~10–15 bps — to Node stakers,” the project said in the proposal. Bps, or basis points, is a common financial term referring to one hundredth of a percentage point.

At current WLFI token prices, governance participants need to spend around $1 million to become Node stakers.

Since the start of the year, World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin has swelled to a circulating supply of over 4.7 billion, becoming the fifth-largest stablecoin on the market.

Although USD1 and many of its rivals are backed one-to-one by dollars, they are not hardcoded to trade at that price, and instead rely on market forces to keep them close to their targeted value.

This creates a lucrative opportunity for market makers — financial firms or individuals who continuously offer to both buy and sell various stablecoins and profit when they deviate from their targeted value.

World Liberty Financial’s new proposal ensures that firms that want to take advantage of market-making opportunities for USD1 also give something back to the project.

WLFI lock-ups

The proposal comes just days after World Liberty Financial said it suffered a “coordinated attack” that briefly knocked USD1 off its target dollar value.

“Attackers hacked several WLFI co-founder accounts, paid influencers to spread FUD, and opened massive WLFI shorts to profit from the manufactured chaos,” a Monday post from the official World Liberty Financial X account said.

USD1 returned to its targeted dollar value the same day it broke its peg. Yet, spooked investors have pulled out over $290 million from the Trump-linked stablecoin since the incident, according to DefiLlama data.

World Liberty Financial’s proposed staking system also overhauls how the project’s governance operates more generally.

Those who wish to vote on proposals must lock up their tokens for a minimum of 180 days.

According to the proposal, governance power will be weighted by the amount of tokens staked and the remaining lock-up duration using a non-linear formula to prevent excessive concentration of voting power.

“This ensures that voting power is held by participants with long-term alignment to the protocol who elect to participate in the governance consensus mechanism, not short-term holders or speculators,” the project said.

In addition to the $1 million Node staker requirement, those who stake over $5 million worth of WLFI will receive additional benefits, including guaranteed direct access to the project’s team for partnership discussions and eligibility for any future economic incentives.

Stakers will receive additional WLFI tokens as rewards at an annual rate of around 2%, as long as they participate in governance votes. WLFI staking rewards will be funded by the project’s treasury.

The WLFI token has traded down around 1.6% since the proposal was posted to the World Liberty Financial governance forum.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Investors funnelled $134 billion into cryptocurrencies after Trump’s speech to Congress on Tuesday, CoinGecko data shows.

On Wednesday, traders bought $157 million worth of stakes in Ethereum exchange-traded funds, the best single day since January 15, DefiLlama data shows.

The positive price action comes as Wall Street has quietly increased its exposure to the $250 billion blockchain network by buying up shares in Bitmine, the largest Ethereum treasury firm.

“Despite Ethereum being down significantly off its highs, there is continued adoption from Wall Street,” Kevin Lepsoe, CEO and founder of ETHGas, told DL News.

BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, State Street, Vanguard, Bank of America, Charles Schwab, Citi, and Bank of New York Mellon all boosted their holdings of Bitmine shares in the fourth quarter of 2025, 13-F filings with the SEC show.

In January, BlackRock said that Ethereum will lead the tokenisation of real-world assets. CEO Larry Fink described tokenisation as necessary during a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland.

Tom Lee, the chair of Bitmine who predicts that the price for Ethereum will hit $250,000, has praised the heavy institutional accumulation.

Yet, Bitmine’s share price has been hammered some 60% since the October mass liquidations.

Bitmine keeps buying

Bitmine announced it purchased another $106 million of Ethereum on Monday, bringing its total holdings to over $9 billion.

The digital asset treasury firm has been making weekly purchases of up to 50,000 Ethereum tokens and scooped up $370 million worth in February.

On Wednesday, Lee appeared to poke fun at Bitmine’s buying spree, which has left the firm nearly $7 billion underwater. “These Ethereum bags are heavy,” he said on X, while posting a GIF.

“Bitmine is set up for one of the largest, most profitable trades in history,” Lepsoe said.

To be sure, Ethereum’s price is still down nearly 60% from its August peak of $4,950, against the backdrop of a crypto industry downturn that has vaporised $2 trillion in value. It is also down some 30% over the past 30 days.

Standard Chartered expects Ethereum to shed 30% of its price and drop to $1,400 over the next few months.

The UK bank projected Ethereum’s price to hit $4,000 by the end of the year, down from previous prognoses of a $7,500 finish.

Even so, Sam Tabar, the chief executive of Ethereum treasury Bit Digital, shared an optimistic outlook for digital asset firms with DL News.

“Periods like this often help distinguish between fleeting speculation and enduring utility, and our focus – similar to Tom Lee’s — is to support the parts of the ecosystem that create lasting value,” he said.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up 4.2% over the past 24 hours, trading at $68,301.
• Ethereum is up 8.3% past 24 hours at $2,068.

What we’re reading

• Strategy becomes the most shorted stock as Bitcoin price soars near $70,000 — DL News
• Bitcoin to $50,000? Strategy buys top crypto despite ghoulish price forecast as Citrini AI report rattles markets — DL News
• Meta Eyes Stablecoin Return, This Time at Arm’s Length — Unchained
• Has Bitcoin Lost Its “Digital Gold” Status for Good? w/ Ran Neuner — Milk Road
• Revolut joins financial watchdog’s stablecoin sandbox as UK rushes to catch up to US — DL News

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

The world’s largest treasury, led by Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, has become the most shorted large-cap stock in the US, with bearish investors betting against 14% of the company’s entire market capitalisation.

Short sellers are investors that borrow money to then make a bet that a company’s shares will drop. At 14% of market cap, Strategy has roughly $6 billion worth of shares sold short based on its current valuation. That means for every $100 of Strategy stock that exists, $14 worth has been borrowed and sold by bears.

Moreover, Strategy tops Goldman Sachs’ list of the 50 most-shorted stocks with market caps over $25 billion, according to the investment bank’s latest Hedge Fund Trend Monitor published on February 20. Just 63 hedge funds own Strategy stock, representing only 3% of the company’s equity.

That’s a dramatic reversal for a stock that was among the market’s biggest winners during Bitcoin’s 2025 rally.

Strategy’s position atop the short interest rankings reflects growing scepticism about the sustainability of its Bitcoin accumulation strategy, throwing even more shade on a sector in tatters.

Treasury model at risk

Becoming the most shorted mega-cap company in the world is worrying.

Much of that concern stems from the fact that Strategy pioneered the Bitcoin treasury model in 2020. The scheme meant raising capital through stock and convoluted convertible debt offerings to then buy more Bitcoin, amplifying both gains and losses compared to simply holding the cryptocurrency.

The strategy worked spectacularly when Bitcoin rallied. Strategy’s stock surged to over $473 in November 2025 from $12 in 2020, vastly outperforming Bitcoin itself as investors paid a premium for leveraged exposure to the top cryptocurrency.

But now that premium has collapsed. Strategy stock has fallen 18% in the past month, and 60% in the past six months. Shares today trade at around $135, well below the value of the Bitcoin it holds on a per-share basis.

The company owns 717,722 Bitcoin valued at approximately $47 billion.

Bitcoin stagnation

Strategy’s troubles mirror broader weakness in Bitcoin treasury stocks.

The sector has imploded as Bitcoin languishes in the $66,000 to $70,000 range, far below its highs above $120,000.

Strategy now accounts for 99.2% of all Bitcoin treasury purchases, according to BitcoinTreasuries.net. The rest of the sector — 193 other public companies — has effectively stopped buying.

Last week, only one company besides Strategy added any Bitcoin to its balance sheet.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at psolimano@dlnews.com.

The sandbox, an ongoing project for the regulator since last year, will focus on key uses under real-world conditions, including crypto trading and payments.

Alongside Revolut, Monee Financial Technologies, ReStabilise, and VVTX will participate.

Monee is a digital lending platform also involved in the Bank of England’s digital securities sandbox. ReStabilise is a white-label stablecoin service designed to help more traditional outfits issue their own stablecoins. VVTX is a layer-1 blockchain underpinning the UK’s largest sterling stablecoin, tGBP.

“We are supporting UK stablecoin issuers to ensure they can be trusted for payments, settlement and trading,” Matthew Long, the FCA’s director of payments and digital assets, said in a statement.

“It will benefit consumers and financial transactions and help to deliver the FCA’s strategy and the Government’s National Payments Vision.”

UK leans in

The collective value of sterling-based stablecoins is worth just under $5 million, according to DefiLlama data.

By comparison, stablecoins denominated in the US dollar are worth over $307 billion.

The British government, however, is keen to close that gap.

In December, the FCA announced that stablecoins used for payments would be a key priority for the new year.

The move is part of a wider push for growth from the left-leaning Labour government.

“We will continue to embrace a bolder risk appetite to support growth, while maintaining our commitment to protect consumers and ensure market integrity,” Nikhil Rathi, the FCA’s chief executive, wrote in a note to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Meanwhile, the Bank of England is finalising rules for its supervisory regime for stablecoins.

Alpha Bank said that cryptocurrencies pegged to fiat currencies could offer more efficient payment solutions than traditional payment rails.

Avoiding pitfalls

Despite the vast lead that dollar-backed stablecoins, such as Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, have over their British counterparts, some have argued that the tactical approach to stablecoins means avoiding the pitfalls that have slowed US policymakers.

Though landmark stablecoin legislation in the US passed quickly last summer, regulators, officials, and legislators are still hammering out several key details.

The biggest sticking point is whether the yield generated by the assets backing stablecoins should be passed on to holders.

With sterling stablecoins still embryonic, industry insiders hope this gridlock can be avoided.

“Stablecoins there have scaled quickly, but under fragmented oversight and unclear accountability,” Javed Khattak, co-founder and CEO of London-based digital identity provider Cheqd, told DL News.

“UK regulators and industry are likely keen to avoid repeating that pattern by setting clear expectations early, while the market is still small enough to shape responsibly.”

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

The law, approved by the Dutch House of Representatives on February 12, would require Dutch nationals to pay a 36% tax on crypto value increases, even if they haven’t sold any.

“I don’t think the law can pass as it is,” Heinen told Dutch television news service RTL Nieuws. “Something simply went wrong here, and the current law needs to be amended.”

The policy, dubbed the Actual Return in Box 3 Act, has been widely criticised from both the crypto industry and more broadly.

The biggest issue is that under the new law, if an asset’s value rises one year but crashes the next, taxpayers could owe hefty tax bills even if they lost money on their investments.

‘The dumbest thing’

The legislative volte-face comes as governments across the world grapple with crypto regulation as the asset class gains mainstream recognition.

Most countries have implemented laws that tax cryptocurrency gains similarly to other investments, barring a few so-called crypto tax havens, such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and the Cayman Islands, among others.

Taxing unrealised gains on investments is rare, and unprecedented at the scale proposed by Dutch lawmakers. Critics say doing so would punish wealth-building, disrupt investors’ ability to compound their returns, and risk driving away entrepreneurs and capital.

“This is the dumbest thing any government on planet Earth is pursuing right now. And that’s saying something,” Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke said in a February 13 X post.

The law still needs to pass through the Eerste Kamer, the Dutch Senate, and won’t take effect until January 1, 2028, giving Heinen plenty of time to make amendments.

It’s not clear if the law needs to be completely reworked or only amended in parts, however.

The finance minister said he has already spoken with his state secretary about it.

“We also said together: let’s go back to the drawing board, start a discussion with the House of Representatives and the Senate, and see how we can amend the law,” he said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Octane Security, a self-described “AI-native security firm,” said on Wednesday its AI tool found a high-severity bug in Nethermind, software that runs the Ethereum blockchain.

Nethermind fixed the bug before it could be exploited, Octane said. Nearly 40% of Ethereum validators use Nethermind, and an exploit could have caused them to miss blocks, affecting Ethereum’s liveness and availability.

“This is one of the highest-stakes demonstrations yet of AI-led vulnerability research,” Giovanni Vignone, founder and CEO of Octane Security, said in a statement.

“AI has dramatically accelerated vulnerability research. Bug hypotheses, exploit verification, and production-grade reports can now happen 10× faster, which rewrites the threat model for every organisation putting code onchain.”

Octane’s announcement comes just five days after AI firm Anthropic rattled cybersecurity stocks with a new security tool that “scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review.”

Moonwell

AI has taken the tech world by storm, enabling experienced software engineers to write code faster than ever before. In crypto, it has fuelled the idea of agentic AI where programmes conduct trades independent of human beings.

But it has also fanned concerns.

This week, a report from Citrini Research rattled Wall Street by envisioning a future where AI has replaced human workers and nuked the world economy. The S&P dropped more than 1% on Monday as a result.

Even AI developers are worried about the potential military applications of their creations, as Anthropic’s clash with the White House shows.

And AI has triggered fears that the technology can be used to break cybersecurity.

Some have worried it could empower hackers. Others are concerned engineers could become over-reliant on AI-written code and release buggy software.

That concern came to life earlier this month, when a bug in AI-generated code cost users of crypto protocol Moonwell nearly $2.7 million in crypto. One Moonwell software engineer said the code in question had passed an audit from crypto security firm Halborn.

“AI coding will become more and more prevalent, and the increasing adoption of vibe coding remains one reason why more investment in design, threat modelling, formal methods, fuzzing, and 24/7 monitoring are critical steps for every web3 team to take,” Seth Hallem, CEO at crypto security firm Certora, told DL News after the Moonwell incident.

Octane’s experience suggests that investment might increasingly flow toward AI.

In the run-up to the launch of Ethereum upgrade Fusaka last year, Octane joined an audit contest sponsored by Gnosis and Lido. The contest rewarded security researchers for finding bugs in Nethermind and the other so-called clients that run Ethereum.

Octane partnered with pseudonymous security researcher Guhu, who reviewed potential bugs flagged by the company’s AI.

Octane and Guhu submitted 17 issues, 16 of which were fixed by client teams. Nine were considered severe, and, of those, “six are believed to be unique,” the company said. They ultimately placed fourth in the contest, earning $70,633 in rewards.

They also submitted the Nethermind bug to a bug bounty program run by the Ethereum Foundation.

According to Octane, a hacker could sabotage validators running Nethermind by submitting a “malformed transaction.”

“This could have caused sustained missed slots across all Nethermind-based proposers for as long as the malformed transaction remained in the pool,” the company said.

“Exploitation would have removed that capacity from the network, causing affected validators to miss block rewards, incur inactivity leak penalties, and degrade overall network liveness and availability.”

The bug was never exploited and was promptly patched. The Ethereum Foundation awarded Octane a $50,000 bug bounty, the company said.

“If you are not using AI to find and fix flaws continuously, you are competing against the blackhats who are,” Vignone said.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

Strategy’s chairman dismissed a growing chorus of investors worried that quantum computing could threaten Bitcoin’s encryption.

Instead, he called it just another supposed existential threat to the 17-year-old digital asset.

“I don’t actually think that the quantum narrative is the greatest security threat to Bitcoin right now,” Saylor said on the Coinstories podcast on February 24.

“People joke they’ve been concerned and talking about it every two years for the past 15 years.”

Of late, quantum computing has become a hot topic for debate among Bitcoin developers and investors. Quantum computers are super-powerful computers that could eventually break Bitcoin’s encryption.

Just because quantum computing isn’t here doesn’t mean the $1.3 trillion digital asset is perfectly immune. Some of its top developers reckon that Bitcoin isn’t ready for a future in which government agencies have access to superfast quantum computers that can break the system’s cryptography.

But they’re working on it.

“Nearly everyone has been very grateful that we are taking the problem seriously,” Hunter Beast, Bitcoin developer and author of BIP 360, previously told DL News. “Our whole motto is: prepared, not scared.”

A rotating cast

Rather than pointing to specific alternative threats, Saylor rattled off what he called “a hundred narratives that people discuss that might be a security threat.”

None of which, he implied, has ever actually derailed the world’s largest cryptocurrency.

First, there was a broad debate over Chinese mining dominance, Saylor noted. Then concerns revolved around whether Chinese mining equipment had backdoors that could shut down remote miners. Finally, there was China’s broad-based mining ban.

Bitcoin carried on.

Saylor also mentioned network capacity problems, the possibility of governments taking down Bitcoin, questions about decentralisation, and even whether Bitcoin should be easier to run on an iPhone.

“The number of debates about what’s good for Bitcoin are mind-numbing and there are many of them,” Saylor said. “They will continue. Quantum will be one.”

Quantum concerns

Notwithstanding Saylor’s dismissive stance, Bitcoin investors and developers have been taking quantum computing concerns seriously.

In early February, BIP 360, a quantum-resistant upgrade to Bitcoin, was formally accepted as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, although this is a notoriously slow process for incorporation into the Bitcoin software stack.

Meanwhile, investors are quite vocal about their worries.

Eliezer Ndinga, global head of research at 21Shares, recently told DL News that the quantum threats rate “10/10” in terms of magnitude, citing recent research from Chaincode Labs that found that up to 50% of all Bitcoin could be stolen by quantum-computing-enabled thieves.

Nic Carter, a crypto angel investor who led an investment in Project Eleven, dedicated to assuaging quantum computing threats, previously told DL News that “virtually everyone” he talks to is quietly concerned about Bitcoin.

Even on Wall Street.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him atpsolimano@dlnews.com.

Binance, which recorded more than $9.9 billion in volume today, is at the centre of a new investigation by the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Chaired by Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee is urging the company to provide key records regarding alleged connections between the exchange and terrorist organisations working on behalf of Iran.

“I therefore demand that you provide the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations records and information related to Binance’s role in Iranian money laundering and its repeated failure to prevent illicit use by sanctioned entities, terrorist organisations, and other criminal actors,” Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, the ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and a member of the Democratic Party, wrote on Tuesday.

Hexa Whale and Blessed Trust

The probe comes hot on the heels of explosive reports that allege Binance ignored internal warnings that sanctioned entities used the platform to launder nearly $2 billion in funds.

Specifically, the probe highlights company partners, Hexa Whale and Blessed Trust, which allegedly operated as intermediaries on behalf of Iranian government entities.

‘While we cannot comment on specific users or disclose details that could compromise ongoing inquiries, we can clarify the process followed and correct clear inaccuracies.‘

Binance spokesperson.

Chairman Paul’s inquiry relies on reporting from Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, which cite anonymous sources and internal documents.

These reports paint a picture of a company that continues to struggle to fend off sanctioned entities on its platform, despite having been punished for similar offences in the past.

In 2023, Binance and its then-CEO, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing safeguards on the exchange.

The company paid a record $4.3 billion fine in 2023 and agreed to oversight from two independent monitors to review its compliance practices. Zhao agreed to step down as CEO and spent four months in prison in 2024.

But from March 2024 to August 2025, Binance’s compliance team revealed that $1.7 billion had flowed through the crypto exchange to fund Iran-backed groups, such as Yemen’s Houthi militants, according to reports.

After revealing these flows, the compliance team was reportedly fired.

“Binance is a repeat offender,” Blumenthal wrote. “It has long been aware that the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies use its cryptocurrency platform as a convenient and reliable means to bypass international sanctions, anti-money laundering controls, and other banking restrictions.”

The probe also serves as another attack line for the Democrats, who have used Donald Trump’s crypto links to attack the president.

Trump pardoned Zhao in October. Blumenthal and others have linked the pardon with Binance’s business dealings with the Trump family’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial, using it to “evade accountability and influence the White House.”

Binance and Zhao have denied that the pardon was linked to the firm’s partnership with the Trump family’s venture.

Zhao appeared at the Trump family’s World Liberty Forum in February.

Binance bounces back

Binance has staunchly denied claims of misconduct.

“Recent reporting on Binance’s sanctions compliance relies on incomplete and mischaracterised accounts that do not reflect all of the facts and the full investigative record,” the company said on February 22.

“While we cannot comment on specific users or disclose details that could compromise ongoing inquiries, we can clarify the process followed and correct clear inaccuracies.”

Withers Bergman LLP, a law firm representing Binance, characterised the WSJ’s coverage as “false, seriously misleading to your readers, and defamatory of our client,” on February 24.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.

That’s because tariff troubles, artificial intelligence anxieties, regulatory holdups and more hang heavy over the top cryptocurrency’s price.

For four straight months, Bitcoin’s price has steadily fallen from its all-time high of over $126,000 to around $65,500 — a 48% drop.

As March approaches, Bitcoin is set to end February down another 16%, marking its fifth monthly fall in a row — a situation that has only occurred once before between August and December in 2018.

Bitcoin’s fall has been spurred on by several key macroeconomic factors rather than a single crypto-specific catalyst, Tony Pecore, senior vice president and director of digital asset management at Franklin Templeton, told DL News.

“Digital assets tend to respond quickly to these shifts because they trade continuously and carry higher embedded leverage, which is why we so often look to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as a leading indicator of changes in investor risk appetite,” he said.

Rising headwinds

It’s a stark shift from the bullishness that pervaded the crypto market for much of 2025.

President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto policies, coupled with the passing of key stablecoin legislation in July, helped boost the crypto market to an all-time high of almost $4.4 trillion.

Yet in recent months, rising headwinds have put pressure on digital assets.

Trump’s ongoing trade war is one of the primary drivers of Bitcoin’s decline early this week, Carlos Guzman, vice president of research at GSR, a crypto trading firm, told DL News.

“Markets initially reacted positively to the US Supreme Court striking down Trump’s tariffs,” he said. “But the market quickly retraced after Trump threatened to impose even higher tariffs of 15% globally over the weekend.”

That’s not all.

Heightened fears over the disruptive impact of AI are also spurring volatility, according to Guzman.

On Sunday, a report from Citrini Research, an investment research provider, warned that the AI boom, which has helped boost markets for years, will ultimately hurt investors and crush the wider economy.

The report argues that if AI continues to advance, it will trigger widespread white-collar layoffs, weakening consumer spending and slowing growth.

Then there’s Bitcoin’s uncertain place in the broader economic landscape.

While Bitcoin slid, gold gained 24% over the past five months as it benefitted from the so-called debasement trade. This has invited fresh scepticism about Bitcoin’s digital gold narrative, Fabian Dori, chief investment officer at Sygnum Bank, told DL News.

Crypto-specific factors

Those anxieties are compounded by several more crypto-specific factors.

As Bitcoin falls, investors are increasingly concerned that the crypto market’s historical four-year cycle is repeating, Dori said.

The cycle refers to the recurring pattern observed in Bitcoin’s and the broader crypto market’s price behaviour, which aligns with Bitcoin’s halving events that occur roughly every four years.

Bitcoin has historically rallied to all-time highs after each halving before dropping into an extended bear market. With crypto becoming more institutionalised in recent years, many investors had hoped that the four-year cycle would disappear.

Elsewhere, efforts to regulate the US crypto industry are stagnating, creating even more uncertainty for investors, according to Dori.

The biggest let-down is the Clarity Act, a broad bill on crypto market structure that has stalled in the US Senate.

The bill was previously predicted to pass into law before the end of 2025, but has faced numerous delays since the start of the year.

Still, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse gave the bill a 90% chance of passing by the end of April in an interview with Fox Business on February 19.

Some analysts remain optimistic about Bitcoin’s bleed out.

“This type of correction can be constructive for the underlying ecosystem,” Franklin Templeton’s Pecore said.

“Speculative activity declines, and attention shifts toward fundamentals: real usage, infrastructure, and sustainable economics.”

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin gave Anthropic that message as the artificial intelligence firm’s high-stakes face-off with the White House over the military’s application of its technology is coming to a head this week.

The OpenAI rival has maintained that its tools should not be used to power fully autonomous weapons platforms and mass-surveillance of Americans, a stance Buterin backs.

“It will significantly increase my opinion of Anthropic if they do not back down, and honourably eat the consequences,” Buterin said on X while copying Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

“Actually a very conservative and limited posture, it’s not even anti-military,” Buterin said. “Fully autonomous weapons and mass privacy violation are two things we all want less of.”

The Ethereum founder’s support comes as US War Secretary Pete Hegseth has given Anthropic a Friday deadline to grant the military broad access to its AI models, escalating a standoff that could reshape the government’s AI supply chain, CNBC reported.

If the company declines, Hegseth has threatened to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a label typically reserved for foreign adversaries — or recommend invoking the Defense Production Act, which grants sweeping authority to direct domestic industry in the name of national security.

Anthropic so far seems to maintain its two red lines.

“As a safety-first company, we believe that building reliable, trustworthy, and secure systems is our collective responsibility,” Anthropic’s marketing materials say.

AI nightmares

Buterin’s support for Anthropic comes as a new report by Citrini Research rattled Wall Street this week by sermonising the risks of AI to the global market.

The report, titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” casts a dystopian outlook driven by AI.

The report sketches a 2028 scenario in which rapid advances in automation push US unemployment to over 10%, as software and delivery roles are displaced at scale.

The thesis has struck a chord with investors already questioning stretched valuations in AI-linked names. Shares in software and automation-sensitive sectors have come under pressure, with BlackRock’s flagship index down over 27% this year.

What’s Anthropic?

Anthropic has become one of tech’s fastest-scaling enterprises, generating roughly 80% of its revenue from corporate clients and closing a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation this month.

It secured a $200 million Department of War contract last year and, until recently, was the only AI firm authorised to operate on US classified networks.

Anthropic’s clash with US officials intensified after reports that Claude, the company’s flagship product, was used alongside Palantir technology during the US special operations raid in Venezuela.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced co-founder of FTX, was one of Anthropic’s early investors and invested $500 million into the AI developer before his crypto exchange collapsed.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

In the nearly two-hour speech to Congress, Trump praised America’s “roaring” economy and injected fresh optimism into crypto markets.

Crypto investors funnelled $52 billion into cryptocurrencies during the speech, CoinGecko data shows.

While Trump did not mention crypto directly, the 79-year-old top Republican lauded the broader market.

“The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election,” he said. “Everyone’s up, way up.”

Trump also said that global investors have poured $18 trillion into the US economy since he took office, matching optimistic scenarios forecast by economists such as Ed Yardeni.

The optimism comes as concerns over major disruption to the economy have weighed on Bitcoin’s price, which is trading 49% below its October peak of $126,000.

Bitcoin’s price has lost some of the gains during the speech and is trading at just over $65,000 at time of reporting.

It also lands weeks after data revealed that the US job market last month was the worst of any January since 2009, when the economy was at the end of the worst crash since the Great Depression. Over 100,000 people were fired.

To be sure, analysts remain skeptical about the crypto market’s ability to snap back into its groove, despite the bullish State of the Union — there are simply too many factors dragging down the industry right now.

Aurélie Barthere, principal research analyst at Nansen, said in an investor note shared with DL News that slowing regulatory momentum and the tech sector selloff are adding pressure to Bitcoin’s downtrend.

AI jitters

Piling on the pressure is fears of massive disruption by artificial intelligence.

A dystopian report by Citrini Research released on Sunday rattled markets, especially technology stocks, which Bitcoin’s price closely follows.

The report, titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” envisions a future where AI replaces office workers and tanks the global economy as white-collar workers will be unable to pay their debts which will lead to a 38% S&P 500 crash.

BlackRock’s flagship technology fund sank another 3% after the report went viral. The ETF tracks tech leaders like Microsoft, Oracle, and Palantir, and is now down 27% year-to-date.

To be sure, not everyone is as worried about AI nuking job markets.

“Will it impact the job market? In some sense yes,” Laurens Fraussen, research analyst at crypto analysis firm Kaiko, told DL News. “It’s a matter of adapting to the technology that’s given to you, or you risk falling behind. I think we’ll get a soft landing in the sense that it’ll gradually impact the job market and change the way certain jobs currently operate.”

He also noted that if AI leads to massive job losses, then it’s only a matter of time before the US government and the Federal Reserve step in to pump capital into the sector like they did during the pandemic. That could help pump Bitcoin’s price.

“Bitcoin goes up in response to the increased money supply and concerns about currency debasement,” Fraussen said.

Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, offered a similar forecast earlier in February, saying that the US central bank printing money will catapult Bitcoin’s price to new heights. When that happens, however, is anyone’s guess.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up 3.9% over the past 24 hours, trading at $65,524.
• Ethereum is up 5.1% past 24 hours at $1,911.

What we’re reading

• Citrini AI report terrified Wall Street. Here’s why its vision is a boon for Bitcoin’s price — DL News
• Bitcoin to $50,000? Strategy buys top crypto despite ghoulish price forecast as Citrini AI report rattles markets — DL News
• Step Finance Shuts Down After $40 Million Exploit — Unchained
• This week’s market-moving events — Milk Road
• Crypto.com joins the club with bank charter approval. Here are the other firms it joins — DL News

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

The approval comes after the US’ largest banking lobby this month urged the OCC to slow its review of crypto companies’ charter applications.

“ABA encourages OCC to ensure that a national bank charter does not become a vehicle leveraged by entities to avoid, or attempting to avoid, registration with and scrutiny by the SEC, CFTC, or any other federal regulator,” the American Bankers Association said, adding that it wanted the body to “to increase transparency throughout the chartering process.”

It’s the latest sign that banks are increasingly concerned by crypto firms’ attempt to move in on their turf. Coinbase, for example, has not been shy about proclaiming itself as a future “everything app” for Americans’ financial lives.

The banking lobby and crypto executives have locked horns over a market structure bill that would give digital asset firms greater access to traditional markets.

Stablecoins and the rewards they pay customers are a particular sticking point: The banks have urged lawmakers to use the market structure bill as an opportunity to close a loophole in last year’s stablecoin-focused bill, the Genius Act.

Here are the other crypto companies that have received conditional approval from the OCC.

Crypto.com

Crypto.com announced Monday that it had received conditional approval after it applied back in October. The approval will allow the Singapore-based crypto exchange to manage and hold client assets and handle trade settlement within a federally regulated structure.

“This milestone brings us a major step closer to meeting leading institutions’ needs for a one-stop-shop qualified custodian under a gold standard of federal oversight,” Crypto.com’s co-founder and CEO, Kris Marszalek, said in a statement.

We are proud to announce that https://t.co/vCNztATkNg has received conditional approval from @USOCC for its national trust bank charter.

Read more here: https://t.co/gcGdaUG0Li pic.twitter.com/eMq434fapX

— Crypto.com (@cryptocom) February 23, 2026

Crypto.com, unlike other applicants, doesn’t have a stablecoin — but it does have a native token: CRO.

Ripple

Ripple in December received conditional approval for the Ripple National Trust Bank, allowing it to manage and hold assets on behalf of customers but not take cash deposits or make loans.

The firm, whose founders created XRP, applied in July, shortly after the president signed the Genius Act to regulate stablecoins. The fintech company debuted its RLUSD stablecoin in 2024.

Circle

Stablecoin issuer Circle also received approval from the OCC in December. The publicly traded crypto heavyweight is best known for its USDC stablecoin — the fourth most-traded cryptocurrency in the space.

With a charter, the fintech won’t have to rely on a third party to look after the reserves that back its stablecoin and will be better able to serve institutional clients by offering custody and payments infrastructure.

Paxos

The OCC gave Paxos conditional approval in December. The company said approval would allow others to build digital asset products using Paxos’s infrastructure.

New York-based Paxos issues PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin, and has provided blockchain solutions to the likes of Mastercard and Mercado Libre.

BitGo

The OCC gave crypto custodian BitGo conditional approval in December, giving it “bank-level oversight with the security, compliance, and scalability that define BitGo’s infrastructure.”

Last week, BitGo announced with New Frontier Labs that it would issue FYUSD, a stablecoin for institutions in Asia.

Fidelity Digital Assets

The digital assets subsidiary of Wall Street giant Fidelity received approval from the OCC in December.

Fidelity this month debuted its Ethereum-based stablecoin, FIDD, for retail and institutional investors. The firm said that its product would be particularly useful for those wanting to transact within the decentralised finance ecosystem.

Bridge

Stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, owned by Stripe, received the OCC’s conditional approval earlier this month.

The firm said in an announcement that the approval will allow crypto companies to build stablecoin products within a clear federal framework. Bridge does not have a proprietary stablecoin but allows other companies to issue the tokens.

Who could be next?

Two other major crypto firms are hoping to get approval: America’s biggest crypto exchange, Coinbase, and Trump-backed crypto company World Liberty Financial.

The banking lobby in December urged the OCC to reject Coinbase’s application for a national trust bank charter on the grounds that the exchange has “demonstrably flawed risk and control functions” and operates under governance that “prevents independent oversight.”

World Liberty Financial, which debuted its USD1 stablecoin in 2025, told DL News that it applied with the hope that both institutions and retail will use its token over others for everyday payments.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

As my colleague Tim Craig noted last week, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently forecast US dollar stablecoins would swell to $3 trillion by 2030. Citibank predicted $4 trillion. S&P Global gave euro stablecoins a range of $250 billion to $1.1 trillion.

Put another way: it’s critical that investors and policymakers know whether their stablecoins are, well, stable. And new research from MIT suggests there are risks lurking in plain sight, and that last year’s Genius Act did nothing to address these risks.

Even when stablecoins are fully-backed by highly liquid assets, they can break their peg in times of market stress as underlying infrastructure buckles, the researchers found.

“A stablecoin’s ability to trade at par under stress depends not only on its asset quality, but on the functioning of redemption mechanisms, markets, and operational infrastructure,” they write. “The Genius framework leaves these stress-contingent dynamics largely unspecified.”

Stablecoins need to keep their peg. And virtually every conversation about stablecoin resilience centers on the issuer’s reserve assets.

“It implicitly treats stablecoin stability as a balance-sheet problem, resolvable through conservative asset holdings and supervision,” the researchers note.

It’s why Tether got a rather poor grade from S&P last year. S&P cited Tether’s reliance on supposedly high-risk reserves, such as gold and Bitcoin, when it said the issuer was vulnerable to a market downturn.

Even if Tether were invested entirely in short-duration US Treasuries, as money market funds are, a “run on the bank” could challenge its ability to quickly sell those treasuries.

Broker-dealers stand between buyers and sellers of treasuries. And they can be a bottleneck that limits stablecoin issuers’ ability to honour mass redemption requests, according to the researchers.

For example, when the coronavirus hammered markets in March 2020, bid-ask spreads on treasuries widened. If that were to happen again, a run on a stablecoin could knock it off its peg, setting off a doom loop.

There is an easy fix: let stablecoin issuers borrow directly from the Federal Reserve, and address the bottleneck issue. But then they would be subject to stringent bank-like regulations, which could make them unprofitable in a low-interest rate environment.

Traditional markets aren’t the only threat to stablecoin stability.

Issues with blockchains and smart contracts could also knock a stablecoin off its peg, according to the researchers.

On a matrix that ranks such risks by severity and likelihood, they identify two that are most worrisome: Smart contract logic flaws and bridge failures.

Then there are more quotidian problems. Last year, Paxos accidentally minted $300 trillion PYUSD. Though it corrected the problem minutes later, Aave had to pause PYUSD activity and the stablecoin briefly traded below par.

In the US, banks are attempting to re-litigate the Genius Act, annoyed that crypto companies seem to have found a loophole allowing them to pay customers yield on their holdings. The debate has held up landmark legislation that would bring the rest of the crypto industry out of its legal grey area.

If there are additional risks the law never considered, this might not be Congress’ last stablecoin battle.

Top DeFi stories of the week

This week in DeFi governance

VOTE: GMX DAO votes to fund GMX Labs for two years

PROPOSAL: Fluid DAO considers creation on nonprofit foundation

VOTE: Stablecoin issuer Angle Protocol votes on incentive program

Post of the week

Crypto sleuth ZachXBT made waves when he recently said he would soon provide evidence that employees at one of crypto’s most profitable companies were engaging in insider trading. That has led to speculation as to the company’s identity, a prediction market, and many, many jokes.

Imagine the team being investigated knows that it will be exposed and decides to do one last act of insider trading by betting on themselves. pic.twitter.com/mC5Y4NwNse

— Tom Wan (@tomwanhh) February 24, 2026

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can contact him at aleks@dlnews.com.

Just last week, the company led by Bitcoin permabull Michael Saylor, picked up another $39 million in Bitcoin, taking its staggering stack to a new record of 717,722 coins worth about $45 billion.

Meanwhile, the rest of the treasury market, which is made up of 193 public companies, according to BitcoinTreasuries.net, has virtually vanished. While Strategy added to its stack, over the same period, three micro-cap companies added barely more than $305,000 in Bitcoin to their balance sheets — with two of the purchases under $20,000.

That means Strategy accounts for 99.2% of all Bitcoin buys these days. Even so, its position sits in unrealised losses that topple $6.5 billion.

Strategy’s unparalleled concentration reveals the sector’s fundamental fragility. The other firms seemingly can’t afford to keep up with Strategy, whether on access to institutional capital or simply cash reserves that allow it to deploy more to buy Bitcoin.

Bitcoin treasuries are companies that buy Bitcoin to hold on their balance sheets. Some are doing it simply to diversify their reserves, while others use convoluted financial schemes and have made buying Bitcoin their sole business model.

Evaporated buying

Investors don’t even need to go that far back in time to see how stark the collapse has been.

In late January, five treasuries deployed 1,677 Bitcoin across a single week. Those firms were diversified in nature as well, spanning across South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the US. Moreover, they came from a range of sectors, including Bitcoin mining and the food services.

Even during Bitcoin’s crash to $60,000 in early February, small treasuries bought aggressively, making the most of Bitcoin’s cheaper prices.

Nowadays that buying has evaporated entirely.

Bitcoin miners are usually responsible for 200 to 400 Bitcoin weekly through operational production. Last week, they contributed zero in treasury adoption. One company, Bitdeer, effectively sold its entire treasury.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him atpsolimano@dlnews.com.

Putin signed a new law that will amend the country’s Criminal Code, and recognise cryptocurrencies as a form of intangible property, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.

The law codifies existing protocols for seizing digital assets, Deputy Justice Minister Elena Ardabyeva told the newspaper. But instead of relying on legal precedent for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the confiscation of various altcoins, these protocols are now enshrined in Russian law.

The law also provides legal avenues for cooperation with foreign crypto exchanges, Ardabyeva said.

The development comes as Russia tries to bring order to its largely unregulated crypto sector.

Experts say the Kremlin could even begin to block citizens’ access to overseas crypto exchanges this year, amid government claims that citizens spend a collective $650 million a day on crypto trades.

Courts’ new powers

The law stipulates that police or prosecutors’ requests to confiscate crypto must include details on the type and quantity of the token in question, as well as wallet addresses.

The law also allows bailiffs to transfer crypto to government-controlled wallets.

The State Duma is working on a raft of new crypto laws this year. Moscow wants to force traders to use domestic platforms or crypto exchanges that have a physical presence in Russia.

The Kremlin is also set to change the way it taxes and polices Bitcoin miners.

And the Russian legal system is struggling to keep up. Crypto-related crime is “becoming one of the key challenges now facing the judiciary,” Olga Tisen, rector of the V.M. Lebedev Russian State University of Justice, told Russian newspaper Vedomosti on February 24.

“Currently, Russia has virtually no systematic programs to train lawyers to work with digital assets and cryptocurrencies in civil and criminal cases,” Tisen explained.

Tisen said the university has responded by creating the nation’s first master’s program in cryptocurrency law.

Russia, North Korea, and Iran are collectively responsible for conducting $100 billion worth of sanctions-evading trade transactions, the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis claimed in January.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.

Then, the report he co-authored with Citrini Research further inflated AI bubble fears and triggered a mass selloff of everything from delivery to payment stocks — an event that dragged cryptocurrency prices down with it.

Now, the Lotus Technology Management chief investment officer says he is surprised by how visceral the reaction to the paper’s vision of the future was.

“I thought there was going to be a small reaction, “ Shah told Bloomberg after his screed went viral over the weekend. “It was definitely larger than we expected.”

The report outlines a potential future based on one core thesis: that AI will only get smarter, replace troves of white-collar workers, and decimate consumer spending, laying waste to a slew of industries and even countries’ economies.

Industries like insurance, banking and food delivery are just some sectors that would be affected by the onslaught, Shah and Citrini Research, the independent research firm, wrote.

The report came at a troubling time for the crypto industry.

The general tech selloff pulled Bitcoin’s price below $63,000 for the first time since October, deepening a major market pullback that has shaved over $2 trillion off the digital asset’s market cap, roughly half of its record high in October.

Yet, crypto market watchers are bullish.

The dark future outlined in the Citrini report could even benefit the crypto industry, experts, including Maelstrom’s CIO Arthur Hayes, say.

Pump Bitcoin

The Citrini report only mentions crypto in passing. It notes that AI agents, programmes powered by large language models, will automate commerce.

When they do, they’ll likely choose to use stablecoins rather than traditional payment rails, due to their near-instant settlements and transaction cost “measured in fractions of a penny.”

This will likely, Citrini and Shah write, lead to a decline in payment companies’ stock prices.

Yet the mass layoffs and economic slump envisioned in the report could pump the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Laurens Fraussen, research analyst at Kaiko, says this is essentially what happened when the US Federal Reserve stepped in after the pandemic.

“When the economy is in the gutter, the Fed often ramps up money printing,” Fraussen told DL News.

“Bitcoin goes up in response to the increased money supply and concerns about currency debasement,” he said.

Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX, made a similar prediction earlier in February, saying that the US central bank will have to plough liquidity into the economy to avoid a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.

“Deflation is bad, but ultimately good for fiat credit-sensitive assets like Bitcoin,” Hayes wrote in a February 17 blog.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email him at eric@dlnews.com.

The business partner escaped death, but was in a medically induced coma for three days after collapsing in a busy Seoul cafe, South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported.

The accused, aged 39, will stand trial for attempted murder and violations of the South Korean Pesticide Control Act, prosecutors said.

The incident comes amid a rise in crypto-related crime in South Korea.

In January, prosecutors accused a Seoul-based plastic surgery manager of laundering millions of dollars’ worth of Chinese customers’ Alipay and WeChat Pay payments.

Crypto investment failed

The unnamed duo began working together in 2022, running Bitcoin investment programmes and co-launching a company.

However, the partners’ relationship reportedly deteriorated after the accused made a further secret crypto investment of $810,000.

This investment reportedly failed, and the duo clashed after the business partner discovered that the accused had used company funds to make it.

Despite this clash, the two men reportedly continued to work together. But prosecutors say the accused resented his partner’s rebukes and planned a murder to take sole control of the company and its funds.

Prosecutors, South Korean media outlet Asia Kyungjae reported, say the accused bought a lethal dose of the illegal pesticide methomyl from an online vendor based in China.

Mesomyl is colourless and odourless, but is highly toxic. Doses of between 0.5 and 50 milligrams per kilogram of body weight can be lethal for humans. Ingestion of methomyl at even relatively modest doses can cause symptoms such as headache, vomiting, severe abdominal pain, low blood pressure, and breathing problems.

South Korean lawmakers ordered a ban on domestic methomyl manufacturing and sales in 2012. They followed up with a blanket ban on its distribution and use on South Korean territory in 2015.

Poisonous pesticide

Prosecutors said that the accused bought an unspecified amount of the pesticide on October 28 for around $200, with the product illegally smuggled into the country via Incheon International Airport in a cargo delivery from China 10 days later.

Two weeks later, when the duo had arranged to meet at a cafe near a lake in Seoul’s Songpa District, the accused allegedly arrived early and sent a text message to his business partner, asking him what he wanted to drink.

The business partner reportedly asked for an iced latte. After buying the drink, the accused reportedly added the pesticide to the beverage and gave it to his business partner when the latter arrived.

The business partner collapsed shortly after drinking the latte and was rushed to a nearby hospital. Doctors put the business partner into an induced coma, from which he only emerged three days later.

“I was about to get married, and my future wife was in the early stages of her pregnancy,” the accused business partner told Asia Kyungjae. “My family was almost completely destroyed. I have since made a partial recovery, but I still need medical treatment.”

The trial is set to begin on March 10 at a branch of the Seoul Eastern District Court.

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.