Business

The Trump-family crypto firm filed a defamation suit against Justin Sun in Florida state court two weeks after Sun sued it for fraud — turning a token-freeze dispute worth roughly $240 million into a contested public trial.

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.

Western Union went live with USDPT, a dollar-backed stablecoin, on Solana on May 4. Anchorage Digital Bank is the issuer, and the company plans to use it for agent settlement, institutional listings, and a consumer payments product launching in more than forty countries this year.

Kraken's deal with MoneyGram puts crypto-to-cash withdrawals in roughly 500,000 retail locations across more than 100 countries, weeks before the exchange's planned Nasdaq listing.

Coinbase will lay off roughly 660 employees and rebuild around AI-native pods, two days before reporting a quarter in which revenue fell 26 per cent and trading volume hit an 18-month low.

Crypto exchange Bullish announced a $4.2 billion deal on May 5 to acquire shareholder-services giant Equiniti from Siris Capital, structured as $1.85 billion in assumed debt and $2.35 billion in stock. The strategic logic only works if tokenised securities actually arrive on schedule.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies disclosed on May 4 that it acquired 101,745 ether last week, taking its treasury to 5.18 million ETH and pushing total holdings to $13.1 billion. Chairman Tom Lee used the announcement to declare that crypto spring had commenced.

MoonPay went live Friday with the MoonAgents Card, a virtual Mastercard debit product that lets autonomous AI agents transact using stablecoin balances on Solana. Funds stay self-custodial; a smart contract authorises each purchase one transaction at a time.

AIMCo, the C$194.7 billion Alberta provincial pension manager, has disclosed a $219 million Strategy position — its first ever Bitcoin-linked allocation, and a return to a stock it sold in September 2020 specifically before Saylor's pivot. The fund is already up $69 million.

Tether reported $1.04 billion in net profit for the first quarter and excess reserves of $8.23 billion against $192 billion in assets — the strongest balance sheet the company has ever published, even as Senators Warren and Wyden launched a fresh investigation into its links to Cantor Fitzgerald and Howard Lutnick's family trust.

The CFTC granted Gemini's Olympus subsidiary a Derivatives Clearing Organization licence on April 29, joining the exchange's existing Designated Contract Market designation and giving it the full regulated stack to settle its own futures, options and prediction markets in-house.

Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings has agreed to buy Long Ridge Energy & Power from FTAI Infrastructure for $1.5 billion, lifting its total power capacity by 65 per cent to 2.2 GW and turning its data-centre pivot into the largest deal a public bitcoin miner has ever signed.

Robinhood's crypto trading revenue collapsed 47 per cent year-on-year to $134 million in Q1, but CEO Vlad Tenev used the earnings call to reframe the entire business around tokenisation and a new public testnet of Robinhood Chain.

Coinbase Asset Management opened a stablecoin-linked institutional credit fund on Thursday, with investors able to hold their shares either through traditional channels or as tokens minted on Ethereum, Solana or Base via Superstate's FundOS platform.

South Korea's largest card issuer signed a memorandum of understanding with the Solana Foundation on Thursday to develop stablecoin payment infrastructure on Solana, with eight other Korean financial institutions reportedly building parallel integrations.

State Street said it will deliver tokenised fund servicing from Luxembourg by the end of 2026, extending administration, custody and transfer agency to digitally native funds and bringing the world's second-largest custodian into direct competition with BNY Mellon and JPMorgan on-chain.

Meta has begun routing creator earnings through Circle's USDC on Solana and Polygon via Stripe, starting in Colombia and the Philippines. It is the company's first stablecoin product since regulators forced it to abandon Libra in 2019.

The world's largest stablecoin issuer is buying its way into the retail wallets that already serve three million users across the region — because at this scale, distribution is the moat, not liquidity.

Lewis Kaplan denied Sam Bankman-Fried's motion for a new trial on Tuesday, six days after the convicted FTX founder asked to withdraw the same motion on the grounds that Kaplan would not give him a fair hearing. The judge denied the withdrawal too.

Japanese Bitcoin treasury firm Metaplanet wrapped the world's most expensive billboard in a 'Secure the Future with Bitcoin' message this week. The advertising blitz coincides with a 25 per cent year-to-date drop in its share price and growing investor questions about whether the treasury model still works.