Found 8179 news
Franklin Templeton is letting institutions pledge tokenized money market fund shares as collateral for trading on Binance, while keeping the fund assets in off‑exchange custody. Global investment manager Franklin Templeton announced the launch of an institutional off‑exchange collateral program with Binance that lets clients use tokenized money market fund (MMF) shares to back trading activity while the underlying assets remain in regulated custody. According to a Wednesday news release shared with Cointelegraph, the framework is intended to reduce counterparty risk by reflecting collateral balances inside Binance’s trading environment, rather than moving client assets onto the exchange. Eligible institutions can pledge tokenized MMF shares issued via Franklin Templeton’s Benji Technology Platform as collateral for trading on Binance. Read more
Spark is rolling out Spark Prime and Spark Institutional Lending, aiming to turn its DeFi stablecoin stack into institutional margin and credit lines. Spark announced the launch of Spark Prime and Spark Institutional Lending on Wednesday to channel more of its decentralized finance (DeFi) stablecoin reserves into institutional credit markets. Spark, a decentralized asset allocator whose core contributor, Phoenix Labs, previously worked on MakerDAO’s stablecoin and risk architecture, said the suite is designed to let borrowers access stablecoin loans without running their own DeFi operations. Spark Prime offers margin‑style lending and off‑exchange settlement powered by Spark’s liquidity engine, while Spark Institutional Lending plugs Spark‑governed markets into qualified custodians such as Anchorage Digital so clients can keep collateral inside regulated custody. Read more
Bitcoin analysis warned the $69,000 mark may end up as long-term resistance again, thanks to its significance in BTC price history. Bitcoin (BTC) hit new week-to-date lows on Wednesday as $66,500 came into focus. Key points: Bitcoin is trading in a key historical zone, but buyer pressure is too weak to break resistance. Read more
SafeMoon’s former chief technology officer, Thomas Smith, has also pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing. Alleged co-conspirator Kyle Nagy remains at large. Former SafeMoon CEO Braden Karony has been sentenced to 100 months in prison for stealing $9 million from the crypto platform’s liquidity pool in 2021 to fund a “lavish lifestyle.” The sentence on Monday comes nine months after Karony was convicted by a federal jury on charges of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering in May 2025. “Not only did Braden John Karony abuse his position as CEO, but he also betrayed his investors’ trust by stealing more than nine million dollars in digital assets from his company to fund his lavish lifestyle,” FBI assistant director James C. Barnacle, Jr. said. Read more
Robinhood is testing its own Arbitrum‑based Ethereum layer‑2, deepening its push into tokenized stocks and DeFi infrastructure alongside other major exchanges. Robinhood has launched a public testnet for Robinhood Chain, its new Ethereum layer‑2 network built using Arbitrum technology that aims to bring tokenized real‑world and digital assets onchain. According to a release shared with Cointelegraph, the testnet, which is now live for developers, offers network access points, documentation at docs.chain.robinhood.com, compatibility with standard Ethereum development tools and early integrations from infrastructure partners. Robinhood says the chain is designed for “financial‑grade” use cases, including 24/7 trading, seamless bridging, self‑custody, and decentralized products such as tokenized asset platforms, lending markets, and perpetual futures exchanges. Read more
Canaan’s fall on Tuesday sent its share price to $0.56, falling further from the $1 it must reclaim by July to avoid a potential Nasdaq delisting. Crypto miner and manufacturer Canaan fell 6.9% on the Nasdaq on Tuesday despite reporting a 121.1% year-on-year increase in revenue to $196.3 million in the fourth quarter, driven by an increase in hardware sales and stronger mining performance. Canaan reported that its Bitcoin (BTC) mining revenue rose 98.5% year-on-year to $30.4 million, helping boost its Bitcoin treasury to a record 1,750 BTC, valued at nearly $120 million, while the company also increased its Ether (ETH) holdings to 3,950 ETH, worth $7.9 million. The revenue figure is Canaan’s highest quarterly posting in three years, and was also driven by Bitcoin mining machine sales, with the company shipping a record 14.6 exahashes per second (EH/s) of computing power during the quarter. Read more
ETH’s market structure and fractal analysis from 2021 and 2024 provide insights where significant buy demand may exist. Currently, it’s on the downside. Ether (ETH) struggled to hold prices above $2,000 on Tuesday, and against this backdrop, analysts noted that Ether’s 31% decline in 2026 fits a familiar price fractal from previous bull markets. Key takeaways: ETH’s recent dip to $1,736 may mark only the first of many lows in a larger consolidation phase. Read more
Bitcoin’s double-digit rebound and brief trading above $72,000 may confirm $60,000 was the bottom, but data shows top traders are refusing to open longs. Key takeaways: The Bitcoin long-to-short indicator at Binance hit a 30-day low, signaling a sharp decline in bullish leverage demand. US-listed Bitcoin exchange-traded funds reversed a negative trend with $516 million in net inflows following a period of heavy liquidations. Read more
Sam Bankman-Fried asked a federal appeals panel for a new trial in the FTX fraud case, arguing that new witness testimony could weaken the case that led to his 25-year sentence. Former FTX chief CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has asked a federal court for a new trial on fraud charges, arguing that previously unavailable witness testimony could undermine the government’s case that led to his 25-year prison sentence. In a motion filed Feb. 5 in Manhattan federal court, Bankman-Fried challenged his 2023 conviction, though the request is separate from his formal appeal, as Bloomberg reported. Motions for a new trial face a high legal bar and are rarely granted. The filing was submitted to the court by Bankman-Fried’s mother, retired Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, and is now under review. Bloomberg described the effort as a long shot. Read more
State Street argues the US dollar could fall to multi-year lows if the Fed cuts rates more aggressively, a scenario that could shift capital toward Bitcoin and risk assets. Strategists at State Street, one of the world’s largest asset managers, say the US dollar’s worst run in nearly a decade could deepen if the Federal Reserve eases policy more aggressively than markets expect, which is a distinct possibility following a possible leadership change at the central bank. Speaking at a conference in Miami, State Street strategist Lee Ferridge said the dollar could decline by as much as 10% this year if financial conditions loosen further. While he described two rate cuts as a “reasonable base case,” he warned that the risks are skewed toward more reductions. “Three is possible,” Ferridge said. Lower US interest rates tend to reduce the appeal of dollar-denominated assets, especially for foreign investors. As rate differentials narrow, overseas investors are more likely to increase currency hedging, which involv...
The integration allows Ledger users to execute multichain token swaps directly from the Wallet app while retaining hardware-based custody. Ledger, the French digital asset security company known for its hardware wallets, has integrated OKX DEX into its Wallet app, enabling users to execute multichain token swaps directly from a self-custodial environment. According to the company, the integration provides access to OKX DEX’s liquidity aggregation from within the Ledger Wallet app, allowing users to swap tokens with the need to interact with external decentralized exchange interfaces. Ledger said trades are routed using OKX DEX’s proprietary X-Routing technology, which aggregates liquidity across hundreds of decentralized exchanges to identify efficient execution paths. Transactions remain signed on the user’s Ledger device, with private keys never leaving the hardware wallet. Read more
Multiple long-term Bitcoin valuation models suggest that BTC’s drop to $60,000 opened up a rare discounted buying opportunity. Do traders and institutional investors agree? Bitcoin (BTC) is trading below $69,000 on Tuesday, confirming the view that price consolidation is the most likely course over the short term. The sell-off to $60,000 and the subsequent recovery to $72,000 resulted in many BTC price indicators falling into what analysts say is a deep value zone, but will buyers reach the same conclusion? Key takeaways: Bitcoin’s realized price bands have aligned with a long-term accumulation zone that preceded new BTC highs. Read more
The six-month central bank pilot brings together market infrastructure providers, banks and Web3 companies to assess how core UK markets could move onchain. The Bank of England has launched a new industry experimentation initiative to explore how tokenized assets could be settled using synchronized, atomic settlement in British pounds sterling as part of efforts to modernize the UK’s real-time gross settlement (RTGS) infrastructure. The Synchronisation Lab initiative will allow 18 selected companies to test delivery-versus-payment and payment-versus-payment settlement between the BoE’s next-generation RTGS core ledger, known as RT2, and external distributed-ledger platforms, in a non-live environment without using real money, according to a bank statement. The six-month pilot, scheduled to start in spring 2026, is intended to validate the central bank’s design choices for synchronized settlement, assess interoperability between central bank money and tokenized assets, and inform the development of a potential...
New Grayscale research shows Bitcoin’s price behavior is increasingly tied to equities, particularly software stocks, challenging its long-held safe-haven narrative in the short term. Bitcoin’s long-standing narrative as “digital gold” is being put to the test as its recent price action increasingly resembles that of a high-risk growth asset rather than a traditional safe haven, according to new research from Grayscale. Report author Zach Pandl said on Tuesday that while Grayscale still views Bitcoin (BTC) as a long-term store of value due to its fixed supply and independence from central banking authorities, recent market behavior suggests otherwise. “Bitcoin’s short-term price movements have not been tightly correlated with gold or other precious metals,” Pandl wrote, pointing to record rallies in bullion and silver prices. Read more
Discover the real evidence required to prove someone is Satoshi Nakamoto and why past claims failed to meet Bitcoin’s cryptographic standard. From time to time, individuals claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator. Such announcements generate headlines, spark heated debates and trigger instant skepticism. Yet after years of assertions, lawsuits, leaked files and media interviews, no claim has been backed by definitive proof. The reason is simple. Proving someone is Satoshi is not a matter of storytelling, credentials or courtroom victories. It is a cryptographic problem governed by unforgiving rules. Read more
Super Bowl LX featured 10 ads for different AI products, and some observers believe it could be a sign that the AI financial bubble will soon burst. Advertisements for the Super Bowl — the championship game of American football — are some of the most watched and most expensive. The game on Sunday boasted some 127 million viewers, making it the most-viewed sporting match of the year in the US, as well as the most-watched Super Bowl of all time. Advertisers pay a premium for the limited number of commercial spots. Some companies shelled out as much as $4 million for a 30-second slot. The high sticker price, as well as the massive audience, drives companies to make their advertisements unique. Read more
Flash Freezing Flash Boys is a novel proposal for per-transaction encryption to prevent frontrunning. Malicious MEV attacks pose a significant threat to traders on Ethereum. Our latest research shows that almost 2,000 sandwich attacks happen daily and more than $2 million is extracted from the network each month. Even traders who execute large WETH, WBTC or stable swaps remain at risk and can lose a substantial portion of their trades. MEV thrives because of the transparent nature of blockchains, where transaction data is visible before transactions are executed and finalized. One path toward mitigating MEV is mempool encryption, particularly through the use of threshold encryption. In our earlier articles, we examined two different models for threshold-encrypted mempools. Shutter, one of the first projects to apply threshold encryption to protect the mempool, introduced a per-epoch setup. Batched threshold encryption (BTE), a newer model, decrypts multiple transactions with a single key to reduce communicat...
Bitcoin sparked mass long and short BTC liquidations while staying rangebound around $70,000 as analysis predicted a local support retest. Bitcoin (BTC) eyed multiday lows into Tuesday’s Wall Street open as analysis warned that bears were trying to “regain control.” Key points: Bitcoin is setting up a support retest at the bottom of its local range, says analysis. Read more
Analysts are split on whether the drop represents a cycle low or a pause before further downside. Bitcoin’s sharp correction at the start of the month may represent a critical “halfway point” in the current bear market, according to Kaiko Research. Bitcoin (BTC) fell to $59,930 on Friday, marking its lowest level since October 2024, before the re-election of US President Donald Trump, according to TradingView data. The decline suggests the market has moved out of the euphoric post-halving phase and into what Kaiko described as a historically typical bear market period that lasts about 12 months before a new accumulation phase begins. Read more
The Bitcoin Mayer Multiple reached 0.65, echoing the deep bear market conditions of 2022 and sparking debate on whether BTC's real bottom lies at $50,000 or lower. Bitcoin (BTC) has entered the “darkest days” of its bear market correction, based on a classic BTC price indicator hitting near four-year lows. Key takeaways: Bitcoin Mayer Multiple fell to 0.65, matching deep bear market lows in May 2022. Read more8179 items