Found 8179 news
The reiteration of the payment company‘s plans not to pursue a public offering followed a $500 million fundraise in November, leading to a $40 billion valuation for Ripple. Ripple Labs president Monica Long has ruled out an IPO for the company, saying it was in a “really healthy position” without going public. In a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg, Long addressed rumors that Ripple was planning to go public after the company reached a $40 billion valuation in November. The Ripple president said the company was focused on growth following the $500 million fundraise headed by Citadel Securities and Fortress Investment Group that led to its valuation. “Currently, we still plan to remain private,” said Long, expanding on her comments in November after the fundraise. "Often the strategy driving an IPO is to get the access to the investors and the liquidity of the public markets [...] We're in a really healthy position to continue to fund and invest in our company's growth without going public.” Read more
MSCI’s rule change on newly issued shares reshapes passive demand, raising questions over how Bitcoin-linked treasury companies fund future BTC purchases. Bitcoin (BTC) fell 2.30% on Wednesday, hitting an intraday low near $91,550. The decline came despite bullish signals, including a whale-linked $280 million BTC accumulation move and MSCI’s decision to keep crypto treasury companies in its benchmark indexes. In the Tuesday announcement, MSCI said it will no longer adjust index weightings to reflect newly issued shares. Read more
The SEC is set to continue last year’s pro-crypto rulemaking, as the commission and other federal agencies are controlled solely by Republicans. Caroline Crenshaw has left the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), leaving the agency solely comprising Republicans. As a result, nothing stands in the way of pro-crypto rulemaking. Republicans in Washington have generally been friendlier toward the crypto industry than their Democratic counterparts. The SEC made a 180-degree turn last year, after President Donald Trump entered office and Congress moved on landmark crypto legislation. Now, just one week into 2026, the Senate is set for a markup vote on the crypto market structure bill — and there is an entirely Republican SEC. Read more
Gracy Chen went from TV star to entrepreneur, becoming the CEO of top crypto exchange Bitget — and then blended it all together on Killer Whales. Young girls who grew up in Asia in the ’90s were enamored by female anchor Yang Lan, much like Americans were with Oprah. Gracy Chen was so inspired that she followed Lan into a career as a TV host and producer. Chen then went from TV host to entrepreneur, falling in love with the mathematical beauty of Bitcoin and later became the only female CEO leading one of the five biggest exchanges in the world (although Binance recently announced Yi He as co-CEO along with Richard Teng.) Chen was poised, positive and pragmatic when she spoke to Magazine. During her stint at Phoenix TV, she interviewed business leaders and celebrities like venture capitalist Tim Draper and renowned computer scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Read more
CoinFlip unveiled a payroll-based crypto investing option as employers and policymakers explore broader access to digital assets and retirement-linked investing. Digital asset company CoinFlip has launched a new workplace benefit that allows employees to invest in cryptocurrencies directly through payroll deductions, offering a payroll-based investing mechanism to digital asset investing as interest in portfolio diversification continues to grow. The program enables employees to automatically purchase cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Solana (SOL) and select stablecoins, with minimum allocations starting at $25 per pay period. According to CoinFlip, the product is designed to appeal to workers who prefer a gradual, cost-averaging approach to crypto investing. The company cited research estimating that tens of millions of US adults already own digital assets, suggesting a growing appetite for regulated and accessible investment options tied to existing financial habits. Read more
DeFi and smart contract-tied cryptocurrencies fell by over 66% during 2025, but analysts are pointing to maturing digital asset valuations due to incoming institutional capital. The steep decline in altcoins over the past year may reflect a broader reassessment of which blockchain networks are likely to attract long-term capital, as institutional investors begin a gradual, multiyear entry into the market, analysts say. Excluding Bitcoin (BTC), 2025 turned out to be a bear market for the wider cryptocurrency market. Decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens fell 67% while cryptocurrencies associated with smart contract blockchains delivered a negative average return of 66%, according to blockchain data shared by Jamie Coutts, the chief crypto analyst at Real Vision. The past year’s poor performance was a “repricing” of the leading crypto projects as institutional capital was seeking to gain more exposure, Coutts wrote in a Wednesday X post. Read more
Dfns integrated Concordium’s layer-1 blockchain to add identity-verified wallets to its WaaS platform as institutions seek compliant Web3 adoption. Dfns, a digital wallet infrastructure provider and a partner of tech giant IBM, has integrated Concordium’s layer-1 (L1) blockchain to launch an identity-verified Web3 wallet solution. Concordium’s privacy-preserving identity layer is now part of Dfns’ wallet-as-a-service (WaaS) platform, the companies announced Wednesday in a joint statement shared with Cointelegraph. “This integration enables financial institutions and enterprises to instantly deploy compliant, privacy-preserving wallets without building complex identity infrastructure from scratch,” Dfns CEO Clarisse Hagège said. Read more
JPMorgan’s Kinexys unit is taking JPM Coin beyond its existing rails, planning a native launch of the US dollar deposit token on the Canton Network. Digital Asset, the creator of the Canton Network, and Kinexys by JPMorgan plan to bring USD JPM Coin (JPMD) natively to the Canton Network, extending the bank’s deposit token from its existing infrastructure onto a public, institutional-grade blockchain. The bank has already begun deploying JPM Coin on Coinbase’s Base network for institutional clients as part of a pilot, and has indicated it plans to support additional public blockchains over time, making Canton another leg in a multi-chain strategy. According to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, JPM Coin by Kinexys Digital Payments is “the first bank‑issued, USD‑denominated deposit token” designed for institutional clients and represents a digital claim on JPMorgan US dollar deposits on distributed ledger infrastructure. Read more
The reported divestment follows Nike’s closure of its digital collectibles unit and comes as market pressures continue to weigh on NFTs. Footwear conglomerate Nike has quietly offloaded RTFKT, the digital collectibles studio it acquired at the height of the non-fungible token (NFT) boom, according to a report by The Oregonian. The transaction reportedly happened in December, though neither the buyer nor the financial terms have been disclosed. The quiet exit happened almost a year after Nike announced that it was shutting down its RTFKT subsidiary. Nike has not publicly confirmed the sale, saying only in a brief statement published by The Oregonian that the transaction marked a new chapter for RTFKT and its community. The company said that it continues to invest in digital experiences, mentioning partnerships with gaming platforms. Read more
Innovation thrives only when blockchain and crypto remain apolitical, compliant and interoperable, ensuring technology serves trust, not political agendas. Opinion by: Marcos Viriato, co-founder and CEO of Parfin Blockchain was born to decentralize power and create systems that operate on transparency, not control. Yet today, the technology is being adopted by the institutions it sought to disrupt. Governments and corporations are integrating blockchain into their existing frameworks. This turns a tool built for autonomy into one that reinforces oversight. Read more
The investment banking giant is seeking to capture additional yield from the proposed ETF’s Ether holdings via staking, as institutional investors launch more regulated crypto funds. Morgan Stanley has filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch a spot Ether exchange-traded fund (ETF), adding to a growing list of crypto products from the investment banking giant. The US investment bank filed an S-1 form to establish the Morgan Stanley Ethereum Trust, an ETF that seeks to buy, hold and track the price of spot Ether (ETH), according to a Tuesday filing with the SEC. The filing states that the fund will not seek to “speculatively sell” Ether to realize additional returns, but it plans to engage third-party staking services providers to stake an undisclosed amount of their holdings for additional passive yield. Read more
Moody’s said stablecoins and tokenized deposits are evolving into institutional “digital cash,” with trillions in onchain settlement volume and billions in infrastructure investment. Stablecoins are shifting from a crypto native tool to a core piece of institutional market plumbing, according to a new cross-sector outlook report from Moody’s. In the report, published Monday, the ratings agency said stablecoins processed about 87% more settlement volume in 2025 than the year before, reaching $9 trillion in activity based on industry estimates of onchain transactions, rather than purely bank‑to‑bank flows. Moody’s said fiat‑backed stablecoins and tokenized deposits are evolving into “digital cash” for liquidity management, collateral movements and settlements across an increasingly tokenized financial system. Read more
Barclays has invested in Ubyx, a US stablecoin clearing platform, marking a major move into regulated digital money and tokenized financial services. Barclays, one of the world’s biggest banks and a systemically important global financial institution, has made its first investment in a stablecoin-related company. The United Kingdom-based bank said Wednesday it had invested in Ubyx, a US stablecoin clearing platform that aims to connect regulated issuers with banks and fintech companies. Barclays did not disclose the size of the investment. “As the landscape of tokens, blockchains and wallets evolves, specialist technology will play a pivotal role in delivering connectivity and infrastructure to enable regulated financial institutions to interact seamlessly,” said Ryan Hayward, head of digital assets and strategic investments at Barclays. Read more
Vitalik and Solana's Yakovenko outline competing ideas about resilience, exposing deeper trade-offs between sovereignty, speed and economic design. Ethereum and Solana are not only separated by questions of scalability, they are increasingly divided by competing visions of what blockchain networks must be built to withstand in the future. Recent remarks from the co-founders of each network revealed two competing definitions of “resilience,” rooted in different assumptions about risk, infrastructure and the future shape of blockchain adoption. In an X post revisiting Ethereum’s Trustless Manifesto, co-founder Vitalik Buterin framed resilience as protection against catastrophic failure, including political exclusion, infrastructure collapse, developer disappearance and financial confiscation. Read more
The Community Bankers Council has asked the Senate for a crypto market structure bill that will ban exchanges and others offering interest on stablecoins. A group of US community bankers is pressuring Congress to change the GENIUS Act to close a supposed “loophole” that allows yield-generating stablecoins to undercut banks. The American Bankers Association’s Community Bankers Council said in a letter on Monday to the Senate that it must tighten the stablecoin regulating bill passed last year to stop stablecoin issuers from offering yield to tokenholders through third parties. “Some companies have exploited a perceived loophole allowing stablecoin issuers to indirectly fund payments to stablecoin holders through digital asset exchanges and other partners,” the group of more than 200 community bank leaders said. Read more
Bitchat developer Calle boldly said, “You can’t stop us” after Uganda threatened to block Bitchat ahead of elections next week. One of the developers of Jack Dorsey’s decentralized messaging app Bitchat has cast doubt on Uganda’s threat to shut down the app ahead of the country’s presidential election. On Monday, the Uganda Communications Commission executive director, Nyombi Thembo, said his team has the technical know-how to turn off Bitchat. Bitchat leverages Bluetooth mesh networks, enabling encrypted communication without the need for an internet connection. Read more
A protocol-level flaw allowed assets to be duplicated rather than minted, prompting a network halt and a governance-led recovery process. The Flow Foundation on Tuesday published a technical post-mortem detailing a protocol-level exploit that occurred on Dec. 27, when an attacker was able to counterfeit tokens on the network, resulting in about $3.9 million in confirmed losses before the exploit was contained. According to the report, the attacker exploited a flaw in Flow’s Cadence runtime that allowed certain assets to be duplicated rather than minted, bypassing supply controls without accessing or draining existing user balances. Validators coordinated a network halt within six hours of the first malicious transaction, while exchange partners froze most counterfeit assets before they could be sold. Flow said the temporary halt placed the network into a read-only mode to sever exit paths and prevent further duplication while the issue was investigated. Operations resumed two days later under an “isolated rec...
MSCI announced it will keep digital asset treasury companies in its global indexes, citing investor feedback and the need for further study on non-operating firms. Shares in Michael Saylor’s Strategy rose 5% after Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) decided not to exclude digital asset treasury companies from its market index, for now. In a note published Tuesday, MSCI said digital asset treasury companies (DATCOs) would, however, be subject to broader consultations to distinguish between investment companies and other companies that hold digital assets as part of their core operations. The MSCI identifies DATCOs as companies in which digital assets make up 50% or more of their total assets. The continued inclusion ensures that DATs are still eligible for passive index funds, sustaining demand and liquidity while broadening institutional ownership of digital assets. Exclusion could have seen Strategy and other DATs lose billions of dollars in passive capital inflow. Related: Bitcoin advocate Machado i...
Canaan‘s pilot program will use the miner‘s liquid cooling systems to supplement the power needed to heat intake water for the greenhouses, helping grow tomatoes. Hardware manufacturer and Bitcoin miner Canaan has continued its initiative of reusing energy for commercial and consumer applications by making compute heat available for greenhouses in Canada. In a Tuesday notice, Canaan said it would participate in a 3 megawatt (MW) proof-of-concept with Bitforest Investment in the province of Manitoba to “recover heat from an Avalon computing system and use the heat as a supplemental source for greenhouse operations.” The pilot program, expected to run for an initial 24 months, will use Canaan’s liquid cooling systems to capture heat and preheat the intake water for the greenhouses, reducing the energy required. Read more
The Solana-native token is backed by USDtb and USDC and is designed to serve as a settlement asset across Jupiter’s DeFi stack. Jupiter, a Solana-based DeFi protocol and trading platform, has launched JupUSD, a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued natively on Solana and developed in partnership with Ethena Labs. In an X post on Monday, Jupiter said 90% of the stablecoin’s reserves will initially be held in USDtb, a licensed stablecoin collateralized by shares of BUIDL, BlackRock’s tokenized money-market fund. The remaining 10% will be held in USDC as a liquidity buffer, with a secondary pool on Meteora. In an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, Jupiter said that JupUSD is issued as an SPL token, Solana’s standard token format, allowing it to integrate across Solana-based applications. The reserves are custodied by Porto through Anchorage Digital and verifiable onchain. Read more8179 items