Crypto

The Aptos Foundation said building infrastructure that enables sub-second finality without the need for human intervention is a key to supporting the next wave of AI agent adoption. Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs have committed $50 million to Aptos development, with a particular focus on AI agent infrastructure and research, including support for two products it shipped last year to meet rising demand for onchain AI agent activity.  Those products include Decibel, an AI-powered onchain order book and perpetuals exchange that launched on the Aptos mainnet in February, and Shelby, a decentralized storage protocol that seeks to support the workloads of AI agents, the Aptos Foundation said on Thursday. “Autonomous agents are already transacting onchain at frequencies no human can match, routing to whatever venue is fastest, most consistent, and least gameable,” it said. Read more

While trading is being restored, all Coinbase markets have been placed in "Cancel Only" mode, allowing users to revoke existing trades.

Panelists at Consensus Miami said institutional investors are still largely absent from perp DEXs, citing security risks and KYC friction as key barriers.

Chappy Asel says autonomous software may be more natural users of wallets and stablecoins than humans, though agentic payments remain mostly theoretical.

Bitcoin pulled back from this week's $81,500 high after U.S. forces fired on Iranian targets, while crypto futures markets logged their 67th straight day of negative funding rates, the longest streak in a decade per K33 Research.

The pilot linked XRPL to global banking infrastructure, enabling institutions to execute cross-border transactions in a single, integrated flow.

Bitcoin options show bulls targeting $115,000 by year-end but are traders becoming overly optimistic? Key takeaways: Bitcoin (BTC) bulls have high hopes for the year-end options expiry on Dec. 25, which features $6 billion at stake. The 33% price gain since the $60,130 yearly low on Feb. 6 have played a major role in bringing back bullish expectations. However, the huge amount of call (buy) options targeting $115,000 and higher for Dec. 25 raises questions about whether bulls are overconfident. Read more

US Treasury officials reportedly sent a letter to Binance pressing the crypto exchange on compliance with a 2023 deal, after reports circulated that the company had facilitated transactions linked to Iran. Update (May 7 at 9:47 PM UTC): This article has been updated to include a statement from Binance. The US Department of the Treasury reportedly demanded that Binance follow a monitoring program put in place by a 2023 deal between authorities and the cryptocurrency exchange, following reports that the company facilitated $1 billion to entities tied to Iran. According to a Thursday report by The Information, the Treasury Department “privately demanded” that Binance be in compliance with a monitoring program to which it had agreed after reaching a deal with US authorities in 2023. The deal, which included a $4.3 billion settlement with Treasury and the US Department of Justice, required Binance to comply with a three-year monitoring program overseen by government officials.  Read more

Solv Protocol will move its tokenized Bitcoin infrastructure to Chainlink, following Kelp DAO's lead after it blamed LayerZero for a hack.

The provisions in the crypto market structure bill are still under review by the banking and crypto lobbies as a new poll shows bipartisan voter support for the legislation. The CLARITY crypto market structure bill could see a markup in the US Senate Banking Committee as early as next week, according to Kara Calvert, the vice president of US policy at crypto exchange Coinbase. “My prediction is that we have a markup next week,” Calvert told the audience at the Consensus 2026 crypto industry conference in Miami, Florida. She said that the bill needs at least 60 votes to pass in the Senate and that the CLARITY bill needs bipartisan support to become law. She said: Read more

World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff also said Thursday that the crypto firm is “in the final stages” of receiving bank charter approval from the Trump administration.

Coinbax took the top spot at Consensus Miami with software built to add compliance controls to onchain payments.

Two affiliates of the crypto-backed PAC Fairshake reported media buys for political candidates in Georgia, Alabama, Nebraska, Kentucky and Texas this week. Political action committees (PACs) affiliated with the cryptocurrency company-backed Fairshake reported spending millions of dollars to support candidates in five races, with less than six months until US voters decide on their representatives in Congress. According to filings with the Federal Election Commission this week, the Protect Progress PAC reported about a combined $1.6 million in expenditures for Jasmine Clark and Christian Menefee, Democrats running to represent Georgia’s 13th Congressional district and Texas’ 18th district, respectively.  The reported media buys came before Clark will face a May 19 Democratic primary and Menefee a May 26 runoff against Representative Al Green, who is running for a 12th term in office. Protect Progress claimed that Green was “actively hostile towards a growing Texas crypto community,” pledging to spend $1.5 mill...

Crypto exchange Coinbase reported a consecutive quarterly loss as transaction revenue plummeted 40% amid a volatile market.

Public blockchains make transactions traceable, but that transparency can come at the expense of user privacy. Speakers from Moody’s Ratings and ChangeNOW said that hybrid blockchain architecture and address-level monitoring can help solve both problems simultaneously.

Stablecoins are entering a new phase of adoption, with large corporations using them for cross-border treasury flows while AI agents begin using blockchain rails for autonomous payments, Bridge and Deus X Capital executives said at Consensus 2026.

"SOL still looks like one of the strongest coins in the market," one analyst claimed.

Institutional investors are gradually increasing crypto exposure as Bitcoin leads allocation preferences amid rising fund inflows and improving market sentiment. Fund managers are warming back up to digital assets, with Bitcoin continuing to dominate allocation preferences even as broader crypto sentiment improves, according to a new survey by CoinShares. The April survey gathered responses from 26 institutional investors overseeing a combined $1.3 trillion in assets under management. Allocations to digital assets remain relatively modest, at around 1%, reflecting what CoinShares described as “typical entry sizing” in the current de-risking environment. “Bitcoin remains the digital asset with the most compelling growth outlook,” CoinShares head of research James Butterfill wrote in the report. Sentiment toward Ether (ETH) and Solana (SOL) also improved modestly compared with previous quarters. Read more

Leading Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies may start slowing its ETH purchases as it approaches its 5% supply goal.

Chrome is quietly installing a 4GB AI on your devices. And now, its latest version has removed the disclosure that promised to keep your data off Google’s servers.