William Dale

USDF, a USDC-backed stablecoin issued on Solana through Coinbase's Custom Stablecoin platform, launched yesterday with wallet app Flipcash as its branding partner — the first commercial deal under the program.

HYPE crossed $56 on May 21 and Hyperliquid's fully diluted valuation overtook Solana's, while Bitwise and 21Shares ETFs combined for a record $25.5 million in net inflows the day before.

SPCX-USDC launched on Hyperliquid at 5:16 AM UTC with a $150 reference price and a $1.78 trillion implied valuation. By the close it was trading at $202.89, implying a valuation well above any private-market mark SpaceX has cleared.

A compromised admin key let an attacker mint 1,000 unbacked eBTC on Monad before Echo Protocol regained control and burnt the remaining 955 tokens. The nominal exposure was $76.7 million; the realised loss, laundered through Tornado Cash, came to about $821,700.

Binance launched Withdraw Protection on May 4, letting users freeze their account against on-chain withdrawals for up to seven days. A stricter lockdown mode disables early unlocking entirely. The feature exists because verified physical coercion attacks against crypto holders rose 75 per cent last year.

A CoinDesk poll of 1,000 registered voters published on May 3 found that 62 per cent do not trust the Trump administration to oversee the crypto sector, and 73 per cent — including 59 per cent of Republicans — oppose senior government officials holding personal business interests in the industry.

GameStop submitted a non-binding $55.5 billion offer for eBay, valuing the marketplace at $125 a share in a roughly even split of cash and stock. The funding mix — $9.4 billion of cash plus up to $20 billion of TD Securities-backed financing — leaves the company's 4,710 bitcoin treasury, worth around $368 million, on the table as a possible source of capital.

Bitcoin's first push above $80,000 since January lasted only hours. A report by Iran's Fars news agency that two Iranian missiles had hit a US patrol boat near the Strait of Hormuz reversed the move; CENTCOM denied any ship was hit, but the price still hasn't recovered.

Visa added Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon, and Tempo to its stablecoin settlement pilot on Wednesday. The network now spans nine chains and is processing $7 billion in annualised live volume, up 50 per cent in a single quarter.

The Federal Reserve held its target rate at 3.5 to 3.75 per cent on Wednesday, but four members voted against the decision — the deepest split since October 1992. Bitcoin slipped from $76,200 to $75,440 in the first hour after the announcement.

David Marcus put a Bitcoin-settled dollar account onto the Visa network on Tuesday and gave AI agents permission to spend from it. The principal-member status is the rare part — most fintechs rent access to Visa through Marqeta or Stripe Issuing.

Aave on Tuesday published the technical proposal that will determine whether DeFi can claw back the $292 million Kelp DAO lost to North Korean hackers ten days ago. The two-part plan re-collateralises rsETH with fresh ETH and uses a temporary oracle adjustment to liquidate seven attacker positions stranded across Aave and Compound.

Spot Solana ETFs hit $1 billion in AUM after five consecutive days of inflows, with Goldman Sachs emerging as the second-largest institutional holder behind Bitwise's BSOL fund, which commands 62 per cent of the category.

Officers from the Financial Conduct Authority, HMRC and the South West Regional Organised Crime Unit issued cease-and-desist notices and gathered evidence that is now feeding into criminal investigations.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has sent a sweeping crypto rulemaking package to the White House for final review, proposing startup exemptions, fundraising thresholds, and a safe harbour that could let some tokens escape the securities label entirely.

Chairman Paul Atkins debuted 'Material Matters' with commissioners Peirce and Uyeda, who spent 28 minutes dismantling the Biden-era SEC's approach to digital assets and laying out a crypto-friendly regulatory reset.

The Strait of Hormuz opened on Friday, triggering $762 million in crypto liquidations and the cleanest short squeeze since February. Iran shut it again on Saturday, sending bitcoin back below $76,000.

CoinShares' Q1 report shows 15 to 20 per cent of the global mining fleet now operating below breakeven, with three consecutive difficulty reductions marking the first sustained capitulation since July 2022.

Grinex, the sanctioned successor to Garantex, has suspended operations after attackers drained approximately $15 million from its systems. The exchange blamed 'foreign intelligence agencies' — a claim blockchain forensics firms have not corroborated.

The SEC's Division of Trading and Markets has exempted providers of self-custodial crypto wallet interfaces from broker-dealer registration, subject to more than 20 conditions and a five-year expiry that leaves the industry reliant on temporary relief rather than permanent rules.

The FBI's annual internet crime report reveals a 22% surge in cryptocurrency-related losses, with investment scams draining $7.2 billion alone and victims over 60 accounting for $4.4 billion of the total.

The USDC issuer's chief executive told Reuters that China could launch a yuan-backed stablecoin within three to five years, framing the dollar-yuan contest as a technological race that Circle intends to win regardless of which currency prevails.

Drift Protocol will relaunch with USDT as its settlement layer after securing $147.5 million from Tether and partners, replacing Circle's USDC following an April 1 exploit that drained $270 million from the Solana-based perpetuals exchange.

Listed bitcoin mining companies could derive as much as 70 per cent of their revenue from artificial intelligence infrastructure by December, according to Bloomberg, as production costs now exceed the price of the asset they were built to mine.

The Bank of Russia has proposed mandatory KYC checks for all cryptocurrency transactions on domestic platforms, with a July deadline for legislation that would also require citizens to declare offshore holdings to the Federal Tax Service.

The Goldman Sachs Bitcoin Premium Income ETF would use a covered-call strategy to generate yield from bitcoin's price swings, marking the bank's first proprietary crypto fund after years of scepticism.

The Digital Currency Group subsidiary's new pool already controls 30 per cent of Zcash's hashrate, alongside a new block explorer at Zcashinfo.com aimed at institutional miners.

Alameda Research moved 198,425 SOL worth approximately $16 million to an FTX bankruptcy distribution wallet, continuing a pattern of monthly unstaking tranches from its remaining $294 million Solana position.

Zaheer Ebtikar is shutting his two-year-old crypto fund and joining stablecoin startup Plasma as chief strategy officer, arguing that ETFs have made the hedge fund structure obsolete in digital assets.

The new Spot Price Range Execution Rule creates a moving corridor around each trading pair's reference price. Orders that attempt to fill beyond the band are automatically trimmed.

A week-long international enforcement campaign led by the US Secret Service and the UK's National Crime Agency traced $45 million in crypto fraud, froze $12 million, and disrupted over 120 scam domains.

The exchange has integrated PreStocks' tokenised exposure to SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Kalshi and Polymarket into a new Markets tab in the Web3 Wallet — though holders receive no voting, dividend or information rights, and the feature is blocked to US users.

Morpho has opened a beta interface designed to let autonomous AI agents read, simulate and execute transactions on its lending markets without the week of integration work the protocol's SDK previously demanded.

Europe's largest asset manager has quietly built the fastest-growing tokenised fund on record, with Amundi and Paris-based Spiko disclosing that SAFO has crossed $400 million in assets under management less than a month after launching on Ethereum and Stellar.

Binance has offered roughly 1,000 United Arab Emirates-based staff — about a fifth of its global workforce — the option to relocate temporarily to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok, citing six weeks of regional conflict that included Iranian missile and drone debris falling on parts of Dubai.

The BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust absorbed $269.3 million on 9 April, its strongest one-day inflow since early March, even as Morgan Stanley's new MSBT fund and Fidelity's FBTC pulled in capital alongside it.

In an extraordinary intervention, the DOJ and CFTC have asked a Phoenix judge to halt Arizona's criminal case against prediction market Kalshi, arguing that sports and election event contracts are swaps under federal law and beyond the reach of state gambling statutes.

Visa processed 97% of crypto-linked card transactions in March as monthly volume hit $600 million, driven by stablecoin adoption in Southeast Asia and a structural shift away from speculative spending.

The White House regulatory review office has completed its assessment of a Department of Labor proposal that would reshape how 401(k) fiduciaries evaluate alternative assets including crypto — a rule classified as 'economically significant' given its potential impact on nearly $50 trillion in retirement savings.

The 2025 Nobel laureate and Qolab co-founder warns that elliptic curve cryptography — the backbone of Bitcoin's security — is among the easiest targets for a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, giving the network a five-to-ten-year window to prepare.

Aave's 2.61 per cent APY on USDC now trails the 3.14 per cent offered by Interactive Brokers on idle cash, inverting the risk-return logic that underpinned decentralised lending for five years.

Addresses holding 1,000 to 10,000 BTC have flipped from accumulating 200,000 coins a year ago to offloading 188,000, while options dealers warn that a drop below $68,000 could trigger a self-reinforcing selloff toward $60,000.

An IRGC-linked intermediary is charging vessels up to $2 million per transit in stablecoins and Chinese yuan, formalising a sanctions-evasion toll system at the world's most critical oil chokepoint.

The former bitcoin miner will develop up to 2,295 megawatts of AI compute capacity at its River Bend campus in Louisiana under a 15-year lease backed by Google, marking the largest single infrastructure deal in the crypto mining industry's pivot to artificial intelligence.

A federal appeals court has ruled 2-1 that the Commodity Exchange Act preempts state gambling laws, granting the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over prediction market platforms and setting up a potential Supreme Court challenge.

Suspected North Korean operatives compromised the widely used Axios JavaScript library on 31 March 2026 by socially engineering its maintainer over several weeks, publishing two malicious npm packages that may have infected thousands of downstream systems before being pulled three hours later.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's proposed Reg Crypto rulemaking — featuring startup exemptions, a $75 million fundraising pathway, and an investment contract safe harbour — has reached the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, putting it one step from formal publication.

Ripple launches Digital Asset Accounts and Unified Treasury features, allowing corporate finance teams to manage XRP and RLUSD alongside traditional fiat currencies within a single treasury management system.