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Bitcoin edged higher ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, briefly climbing from around $64,000 to $66,000 before settling near $65,500. The move coincided with gains in Asian equities and reflected broader risk-on positioning rather than any direct reaction to the speech. Market participants attributed the rise to relief following recent tariff and legal volatility, alongside investor focus on upcoming earnings from Nvidia. Data from CoinGecko showed Bitcoin up roughly 3.5% on the day, reinforcing its continued sensitivity to shifts in global risk sentiment.
During the address, Trump highlighted falling inflation, lower mortgage rates, tariff revenues, and stock market performance, though analysts questioned the framing of those claims. Derek Lim of Caladan argued that recent market movements were driven more by macro positioning and equity dynamics than political rhetoric. Attention remained firmly on Nvidia’s earnings as a key near-term catalyst, while US equities advanced, led by major technology stocks. Trump also reaffirmed his commitment to tariffs despite a recent Supreme Court ruling limiting executive authority, underscoring the ongoing policy backdrop shaping investor sentiment. Source
MoonPay has introduced MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer designed to give AI systems direct access to blockchain-based financial networks. The product enables AI agents to create wallets, hold digital assets, and execute onchain transactions independently once funded, removing the need for human intermediaries. CEO Ivan Soto-Wright framed the launch as essential infrastructure for the emerging “agent economy,” arguing that while AI can reason, it cannot participate economically without capital and payment rails. The move reflects a broader industry effort to connect autonomous AI systems with decentralised finance and programmable digital assets, particularly stablecoins.
Interest in MoonPay’s infrastructure comes amid growing institutional focus on stablecoin settlement and blockchain rails. Bloomberg reported that Intercontinental Exchange, parent of the New York Stock Exchange, has held early discussions about a potential investment as MoonPay seeks funding at a reported $5 billion valuation. Forecasts from the World Economic Forum suggest the AI agent market could reach $236 billion by 2034, while McKinsey & Company data indicates rising corporate adoption. Within crypto, firms including CoinGecko and Coinbase have highlighted emerging payment standards, as companies like Crypto.com and CEO Kris Marszalek push further into AI-driven financial automation. Source
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong criticised the Bank of England’s proposed stablecoin restrictions, warning that caps on holdings could undermine the UK’s competitiveness in digital finance. He argued the rules risk turning the country into an “innovation blocker,” amplifying a petition by Stand With Crypto UK urging policymakers to adopt a more pro-innovation framework. The central bank’s proposal would limit individual and business stablecoin balances while mandating that a significant share of reserves be held in non-interest-bearing accounts, a structure lawmakers have cautioned could deter adoption and drive activity overseas.
The debate unfolds as stablecoins become an increasingly important revenue stream for Coinbase, which reported $1.35 billion in stablecoin-related income in 2025 despite posting a quarterly net loss. Analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence estimate that revenue could grow substantially under the US GENIUS Act, though yield provisions remain contentious. Industry participants argue the issue extends beyond one company’s profits, framing it instead as a question of whether regulation should manage risk or constrain scale. In Washington, tensions persist around the CLARITY Act, which includes yield restrictions that could affect Coinbase’s revenue-sharing arrangement with Circle Internet Group, highlighting how stablecoin policy is now central to both market structure and financial stability discussions. Source
Kraken has launched tokenised equity perpetual futures on its regulated derivatives platforms, giving eligible non-US clients 24/7 leveraged exposure to US stock indices, gold, and individual companies such as Nvidia, Apple, and Tesla. The contracts, structured as perpetual futures without expiry, are built on the xStocks framework, which issues blockchain-based representations of publicly traded equities and ETFs. Kraken said the products reference tokenised benchmarks rather than holding underlying shares directly, and support leverage of up to 20x across more than 110 countries.
The launch highlights the accelerating convergence between crypto venues and traditional financial markets. Kraken’s move follows its agreement to acquire Backed Finance AG, the issuer behind xStocks, and comes amid rapid growth in tokenised equity trading volumes. Other exchanges are pursuing similar strategies, including Gemini, which has expanded its tokenised equities offerings in Europe, while Coinbase recently introduced commission-free stock and ETF trading for US users. Together, these developments signal intensifying competition among crypto platforms seeking to offer round-the-clock access, leverage, and integrated trading across both digital and traditional assets. Source
WisdomTree announced it is enabling instant settlement and 24/7 trading for its WisdomTree Treasury Money Market Digital Fund (WTGXX), following exemptive relief from the US Securities and Exchange Commission and approval from FINRA. The change allows investors to transact shares intraday at a fixed $1 price with a dealer regardless of the fund’s end-of-day net asset value, effectively positioning the tokenised product as a form of digital cash. The firm said the structure reduces settlement-related cash drag while preserving the regulatory protections associated with traditional money market funds.
Valued at roughly $730 million, WTGXX is issued across multiple blockchain networks including Ethereum and Solana, offering an annualised yield of about 3.5% backed by US Treasuries. WisdomTree also introduced blockchain-based timestamping to maintain continuous dividend accrual as tokens move between wallets, enabling holders to retain yield during transfers. The development reflects growing regulatory comfort with tokenised financial instruments, aligning with SEC Chair Paul Atkins’ broader push to modernise securities infrastructure and facilitate on-chain capital markets. Source
Crypto asset manager Bitwise has acquired staking services provider Chorus One, a move that significantly broadens Bitwise’s staking capabilities across more than 30 proof-of-stake blockchains. Chorus One, which oversees more than $2.2 billion in staked assets, will bring its team and infrastructure into Bitwise Onchain Solutions, adding expertise built since the company’s founding in 2018. Around 50 employees are joining Bitwise, strengthening a global workforce that now totals nearly 200 people.
The acquisition positions Bitwise to expand its range of staking-focused investment products at a time when the Securities and Exchange Commission has shown greater openness to diversified crypto exchange-traded products. CEO Hunter Horsley highlighted staking as a major growth opportunity, noting that it offers investors yield typically ranging between 2% and 10% annually. Chorus One CEO Brian Crain will take on an advisory role, while Bitwise continues managing over $15 billion in assets across more than 40 investment products. Source
Crypto.com has donated $35 million over the past year to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc., with the most recent $5 million contribution made in January. Within weeks, the company benefited from favourable regulatory developments under Donald Trump’s administration. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission intervened in a lawsuit involving the exchange and the state of Nevada, filing a motion supporting Crypto.com’s position on sports-related prediction markets, despite earlier indications from commissioner Mike Selig that the matter would be left to the courts.
Shortly afterwards, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency conditionally approved a national trust bank charter for Crypto.com’s parent company, Foris Dax, enabling it to pursue federally regulated custody, staking, and settlement services. While other major crypto firms such as Coinbase, Ripple, and Tether have generally channelled political spending into industry-focused PACs, Crypto.com has directed most of its contributions towards Trump-aligned groups. The company’s relationship with Trump Media and Technology Group has also deepened, resulting in joint products including Trump-branded crypto ETFs and integrations with Truth Social. Source
Gamification is increasingly reshaping digital marketing by turning passive user behaviour into active, rewarding experiences. The model relies on mechanisms such as incentives, challenges, and rewards to sustain engagement and build loyalty. Within this landscape, Markethive positions itself as more than a conventional social platform, combining inbound marketing principles with social networking dynamics while emphasising privacy and security. This structure is presented as particularly suited to gamified systems, creating feedback loops where participation, attention, and data reinforce one another.
A central innovation described is Flying Video Ads, designed as interactive content units that reward users for deliberate engagement rather than accidental clicks. By compensating members for their time and attention, advertising is reframed as a value exchange rather than an interruption. The approach is argued to improve user experience, reduce ad fatigue, and deliver higher-quality engagement data for advertisers. For businesses, the system aims to increase retention, enhance brand recall, and generate more measurable returns, while fostering a more positive relationship between audiences, brands, and the platform ecosystem. Source
Coinbase has expanded beyond crypto by enabling all US users to trade stocks and exchange-traded funds within the same app. Customers can now access roughly 6,000 securities on a 24/5 basis, with commission-free trading, fractional shares, and instant funding using USD or USDC. The move reflects Coinbase’s broader strategy to become a multi-asset platform, with plans to introduce tokenised equities and, pending regulatory approval, stock perpetual futures for non-US users via Coinbase Bermuda Ltd. The announcement follows the company’s recent nationwide rollout of prediction markets through its partnership with Kalshi, reinforcing its ambition to build what its leadership describes as an “everything exchange”.
The development comes amid growing momentum behind tokenised equities across both crypto-native firms and traditional financial institutions. Platforms such as Kraken, Bybit, and Solana-based DeFi services have already listed blockchain-based stock representations through initiatives led by Backed Finance, while Robinhood has continued expanding its tokenisation programme on Arbitrum. Interest has also intensified among major exchanges, with Nasdaq seeking regulatory approval from the SEC to list tokenised shares and the New York Stock Exchange, alongside Intercontinental Exchange, exploring blockchain-enabled trading infrastructure. Coinbase additionally revealed a partnership with Yahoo Finance to streamline the transition from research to trade execution, while offering Coinbase One incentives tied to USDC balances. Source
Payoneer has filed for a national trust bank charter in the United States, signalling its intention to deepen its involvement in stablecoins and digital asset services. The global payments firm submitted its application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish PAYO Digital Bank, shortly after partnering with stablecoin infrastructure provider Bridge to integrate stablecoin functionality into its cross-border payments platform. Payoneer plans to launch a GENIUS Act-compliant stablecoin, PAYO-USD, designed to act as the holding currency within customer wallets while also supporting stablecoin payments and receipts. Regulatory approval would allow the company to oversee reserves, provide custodial services, and enable conversions between stablecoins and local currencies, reflecting its view that stablecoins will become increasingly important in global trade.
The move places Payoneer alongside a growing list of fintech and crypto firms seeking banking charters as competition intensifies around regulated digital finance offerings. The OCC recently granted conditional approval to Crypto.com, following earlier charter successes by companies such as Circle, Ripple, Fidelity Digital Assets, BitGo and Paxos. Other applicants, including World Liberty Financial, Laser Digital and Coinbase, are still awaiting regulatory decisions. Payoneer argues that stablecoins are particularly well suited to small and medium-sized businesses engaged in international commerce, highlighting their potential to streamline cross-border transfers, lower friction in dollar-denominated trade, and expand the role of the US dollar in global payment corridors. Source
Stripe has launched a tender offer to repurchase shares from current and former employees, placing the company’s valuation at $159 billion. The offer is being funded mainly by investors such as a16z and Thrive Capital, with some of Stripe’s own capital. The valuation positions the privately held payments firm just behind Charles Schwab and comparable to large global corporations like Unilever and Pfizer. Stripe highlighted a 34% year-on-year increase in business volumes, with its platform handling $1.9 trillion, and emphasised the rapid growth in stablecoin transactions, particularly through its Bridge acquisition, which saw volumes quadruple over the past year.
The company is also advancing stablecoin infrastructure with the development of its blockchain network, Tempo, in partnership with crypto VC Paradigm, which has already attracted testing from major firms including Visa, Nubank, and Shopify. Stripe recently completed the $1.1 billion acquisition of the stablecoin platform Bridge and obtained a National Bank Trust Charter from the OCC to support its stablecoin initiatives. The Collison brothers, Stripe’s founders, describe the current environment as a “stablecoin summer,” noting that stablecoin payments are steadily gaining traction across global payouts, embedded finance, and cross-border remittances. Source
Anthropic has accused three Chinese AI firms—DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax—of illicitly using its Claude large language model in what it describes as a “distillation” attack. The firm claims the companies created around 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million interactions with Claude to train their own models. While distillation is a legitimate method when used internally to create smaller or cheaper models, Anthropic alleges that these attacks allowed competitors to gain advanced capabilities quickly and at minimal cost, targeting Claude’s strengths in agentic reasoning, tool use, coding, and data analysis. The company identified the campaigns through IP address correlations, metadata, infrastructure indicators, and corroboration from industry partners.
Beyond the intellectual property theft, Anthropic warns that such foreign distillation attacks carry geopolitical risks, as unprotected AI capabilities could be used in military, intelligence, or surveillance applications by authoritarian governments. To counter these threats, the firm plans to enhance detection systems, tighten access controls, and share threat intelligence while calling for greater collaboration among domestic AI companies, cloud providers, and policymakers. Anthropic emphasises that defending against large-scale distillation attacks requires a coordinated industry-wide response and has published its findings to encourage collective action. Source
Bitcoin Depot is introducing a new policy requiring customers to provide personal identification for every transaction at its ATMs, building on changes it made in October when IDs were only required for first-time use. The company, which operates 8,800 ATMs across North America, says this step is aimed at preventing fraud, account theft, and misuse, and is part of a phased rollout it began earlier this month. The move comes amid legal pressure from state authorities, including a lawsuit from the Massachusetts Attorney General alleging that Bitcoin Depot knowingly profited from scams targeting vulnerable users, particularly the elderly.
The firm has faced declining stock performance, with shares dropping 80 percent over the past six months, and wider scrutiny over the risks posed by crypto ATMs in general, which saw Americans lose $333 million to fraud in 2025. Critics note that past practices allowed minimal verification for small transactions, and ongoing lawsuits in Massachusetts and Iowa seek to enforce stricter fraud prevention measures and consumer protections. Despite these issues, Bitcoin Depot continues to work with law enforcement and has settled past claims, emphasising that the new ID requirement at every transaction is a significant step towards securing customer trust and safety. Source
Major crypto exchanges are increasingly embracing tokenized real-world assets as investor interest shifts toward more structured products despite a wider market downturn. Coinbase has partnered with Yahoo Finance to link crypto tickers and equities directly to its platform, allowing users to trade either digital assets or tokenized stocks. Kraken has introduced regulated tokenized equity perpetual futures for non-U.S. clients, offering up to 20 times leverage, while Binance is providing tokenized assets through Ondo Finance on its Binance Alpha platform. The total value of assets represented on-chain has risen nearly 300 percent over the past year, reflecting growing demand for durable, tradable digital representations of traditional investments such as stocks, bonds, and real estate.
These developments signal a broader effort by exchanges to integrate tokenisation into mainstream financial activity and provide new avenues for trading and risk management. Tokenized assets function as on-chain records of ownership, enabling faster transfers and use in decentralised finance applications, while initiatives like Coinbase’s Everything Exchange aim to remove artificial boundaries between asset classes. Analysts suggest that as tokenized assets become more accessible, they offer investors the speed, flexibility, and programmability of crypto markets while maintaining exposure to familiar traditional investments. Source
The Blockchain Association has presented its tax proposals for digital assets to Congress, advocating for exemptions on low-dollar crypto transactions and for taxing mining and staking rewards only when they are sold or disposed of. The lobby group suggests treating stablecoins as cash for ordinary purchases and argues that requiring reporting for negligible gains imposes unnecessary costs on individuals while adding little revenue. It also supports extending wash-sale rules to digital assets, limiting the ability to claim losses when repurchasing the same asset within a specified period, and emphasises balancing taxpayer privacy with effective enforcement against illicit crypto activity.
These efforts are part of ongoing debates in Washington over how to tax cryptocurrency, with Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis introducing a bill including some of the Blockchain Association’s recommendations, while Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren has strongly opposed them. Warren criticised proposals for de minimis exemptions, warning they could cost the US $5.8 billion and allowing investors to avoid reporting income from small transactions would be unfair compared with traditional assets. The Blockchain Association has also engaged with White House officials on market structure legislation, including provisions favourable to stablecoin rewards. Source
Stripe is reportedly in early discussions to acquire all or parts of PayPal as the payments company faces competition, leadership changes, and a sharp decline in its stock price. While no deal is confirmed, Stripe has expressed preliminary interest in PayPal’s business amid its struggles to compete with Apple Pay and Google Pay, which are integrated directly into consumer smartphones. PayPal is also undergoing a leadership transition, with Enrique Lores set to become CEO in March following missed earnings and slowing payment volumes. Stripe itself was valued at $159 billion in a recent tender offer, marking a significant increase from the previous year.
Both companies have shown interest in cryptocurrency and stablecoins, with PayPal offering crypto trading since 2020 and launching its stablecoin PYUSD in 2023, which recently surpassed a market capitalisation of $4 billion. Stripe operates its stablecoin platform Bridge, recently granted conditional approval as a federally chartered national trust bank, and has offered stablecoin-based accounts globally since May 2025. A potential merger could create a major player in the stablecoin sector while strengthening their combined position in digital payments. Source
Disclaimer: These articles are provided for informational purposes only. They are not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or any other advice.
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