Such large transfers to exchanges can signal potential market volatility, impacting Bitcoin's price and investor sentiment significantly.

The post Bitcoin whale Garrett Jin sends $761 million in BTC to Binance appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Dutch regulator orders Polymarket to halt operations, calling prediction markets unlicensed gambling and threatening 840,000 in penalties.

The post Dutch regulator orders Polymarket to halt operations or face €840,000 penalty appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Base's split from the OP Stack signals a pivotal shift in Ethereum's layer two landscape

The post Bryan Pellegrino: Base’s shift signals independence from OP Stack, why fragmentation is the future of blockchain, and the rising importance of interoperability for institutions | Unchained appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

OpenAI is reportedly developing AI hardware including a smart speaker and smart glasses, expanding beyond ChatGPT into consumer devices.

The post OpenAI plans AI device lineup, including speaker and smart glasses appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The ruling limits presidential power over trade policy, reinforcing Congress's role and potentially stabilizing international trade relations.

The post Trump tariffs blocked by Supreme Court ruling appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Pops After Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariffs

The Supreme Court of the United States on Friday struck down President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariff regime, ruling 6-3 that he exceeded his authority by imposing broad import duties under a national emergency law.

The decision invalidates tariffs Trump levied in early 2025 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a statute enacted in 1977 and historically used to sanction foreign adversaries during crises. Trump cited persistent trade deficits and national security concerns, including fentanyl trafficking, to justify duties ranging from 10% to 50% on imports from nearly every major trading partner.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said the Constitution leaves little ambiguity about who controls the taxing power.

“The Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” Roberts wrote, adding that no previous president had used the statute to impose tariffs “of this magnitude and scope.”

The ruling marks the first major test of Trump’s second-term economic agenda before the high court, which includes three justices he appointed during his first term. Lower courts had already found that the administration overstepped, emphasizing that Article I of the Constitution assigns tariff authority to Congress.

President Trump said he has a backup plan to pursue tariffs following the court ruling, according to various sources.

Bitcoin jumps on the news 

In financial markets, the reaction was swift and unsettled. Bitcoin rose about 2% within minutes of the decision, briefly climbing above $68,000 before retreating toward $67,500. The move reflected a familiar pattern in digital asset markets, where headline-driven rallies have struggled to hold.

The mixed response underscored the ambiguity surrounding the ruling’s economic impact. For some investors, the invalidation of tariffs removes a source of policy uncertainty that has weighed on global trade. 

For others, it introduces new questions about fiscal gaps, refund obligations and next steps from the White House.

Reuters has reported that more than $133 billion in tariff revenue collected under the emergency authority could be subject to refunds. Trump has said his broader tariff program generated roughly $600 billion, though that figure has been disputed. If significant sums must be repaid, Treasury financing needs could shift at a delicate moment for bond markets.

Earlier Friday, economic data painted a complicated picture. The Commerce Department reported that the U.S. economy grew at a 1.4% annualized rate in the final quarter of 2025. 

Core personal consumption expenditures, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, rose 3% year over year, above expectations. 

Annual growth for 2025 slowed to 2.2%, the weakest pace since 2020.

Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, described the data as sending a “messy message” of firmer inflation alongside cooling growth, according to CoinDesk. That backdrop has reinforced expectations that the Federal Reserve will proceed with caution on rate cuts.

Is this ruling good for bitcoin?

For Bitcoin traders, the tariff case has been less about trade flows than about liquidity and risk appetite. During prior episodes of trade escalation, digital assets tended to move in tandem with equities as investors reassessed growth and inflation risks. 

A court decision that removes tariffs could ease cost pressures over time, yet the near-term effect hinges on how Washington fills any fiscal hole.

Stephen Coltman, head of macro at 21Shares, said before the ruling that a negative outcome for the administration could pressure the dollar and Treasuries while favoring stocks and bitcoin. 

Others, including VanEck’s Matthew Sigel, have argued that reduced tariff revenue could widen deficits, increasing the appeal of assets like bitcoin viewed as hedges against currency debasement.

Online prediction markets had assigned high odds to the court striking down the tariffs, suggesting traders were prepared for the headline. 

For now, the court’s decision narrows presidential authority over tariffs and returns leverage to Congress. Whether lawmakers move to codify elements of Trump’s trade agenda or chart a different course remains unclear.

Bitcoin is trading near $67,600.

This post Bitcoin Pops After Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariffs first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin’s 50% Slide: Quantum Scare or Capital Rotation?

Bitcoin’s 46% decline from its October peak near $126,100 to roughly $67,000 has triggered debate over what is driving the pullback. Some market participants have pointed to quantum computing as a looming threat to the network’s cryptographic security. Others argue the explanation lies elsewhere, in shifting capital flows, tightening liquidity and changing miner economics.

On a recent episode of the Unchained podcast hosted by Laura Shin, Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo rejected the idea that quantum fears are behind the downturn. If investors were pricing in imminent quantum risk to Bitcoin’s cryptography, he said, Ether would likely be outperforming rather than falling in tandem.

Bitcoin is down roughly 46% from its all-time high, while Ether has fallen roughly 58% since an early-October market break. Corallo argued that this parallel weakness undercuts the claim that quantum computing is uniquely weighing on Bitcoin. He added that some holders may be looking for a scapegoat to explain weak price action.

The quantum debate has gained visibility as researchers explore post-quantum cryptography and as asset managers update disclosures. Last year, BlackRock amended the registration statement for its iShares Bitcoin ETF to flag quantum computing as a potential risk to the network’s integrity.

Corallo countered that market pricing does not signal urgency. He framed the current environment as one in which Bitcoin is competing for capital against other sectors, especially artificial intelligence. 

Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure 

AI infrastructure requires large data centers, specialized chips and significant energy capacity. That capital intensity, he suggested, has drawn investor attention and funding that might otherwise have flowed into digital assets.

Mining data reflects these crosscurrents. Bitcoin mining difficulty recently climbed to 144.4 trillion, a 15% increase and the largest percentage jump since 2021, when China’s mining ban disrupted the network before operations stabilized. 

Difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks, about every two weeks, to keep block production near a 10-minute average regardless of hashrate changes.

The latest increase follows a 12% decline in difficulty after a drop in total computational power. In October, when bitcoin traded near $126,500, hashrate peaked around 1.1 zettahash per second. As prices slid toward $60,000 in February, hashrate fell to 826 exahash per second. It has since recovered to about 1 zettahash per second as bitcoin rebounded to the high-$60,000 range.

Even with that recovery, miner economics remain tight. Hashprice, a measure of daily revenue per unit of hashrate, sits near multi-year lows around $23.9 per petahash per second. Lower revenues have pressured margins, particularly for operators with higher energy costs. Large-scale miners with access to inexpensive power have continued to expand. The United Arab Emirates, for example, is estimated to hold roughly $344 million in unrealized profit from mining operations.

At the same time, several publicly listed mining firms are reallocating energy and computing resources toward AI and high-performance computing data centers. Bitfarms recently rebranded to remove explicit bitcoin references as it increases its focus on AI infrastructure. 

Activist investor Starboard Value has urged Riot Platforms to expand further into AI data center operations. The shift underscores Corallo’s point that bitcoin now competes directly with other capital-intensive technologies.

Bitcoin is consolidating in ‘extreme fear’

Onchain data suggests the market remains in a compression phase. Analytics firm Glassnode reports that BTC has broken below its “True Market Mean,” a model that tracks the aggregate cost basis of active supply and currently sits near $79,000. 

The firm identifies the Realized Price, around $54,900, as a lower structural boundary. Bitcoin has traded between roughly $60,000 and $70,000 in recent sessions, within that corridor.

Sentiment remains fragile. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index has registered “extreme fear” for weeks. Yet some analysts see valuation support. 

Bitwise’s head of European research, André Dragosch, said bitcoin appears undervalued relative to global money supply growth, gold and exchange-traded product flows. He expects consolidation rather than a rapid recovery, noting that sharp capitulations rarely produce immediate V-shaped rebounds outside crisis events.

Macro data may shape the next move. Traders are watching U.S. core PCE inflation figures for signals on Federal Reserve policy. Higher inflation could support scarce assets in theory, but a hawkish response could strengthen the dollar and pressure risk markets.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading near $67,000. 

This post Bitcoin’s 50% Slide: Quantum Scare or Capital Rotation? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Fed’s Kashkari: Crypto “Utterly Useless,” Stablecoins No Match for Venmo

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari delivered another pointed criticism of crypto while defending the Federal Reserve’s independence during remarks in Fargo, North Dakota, today.

Speaking at the 2026 Midwest Economic Outlook Summit, Kashkari questioned the practical value of digital assets, stating that “crypto has been around for more than a decade and it’s utterly useless,” according to Bloomberg. 

He contrasted crypto with artificial intelligence tools, which he said have demonstrated clear, everyday utility for consumers and businesses.

Kashkari also dismissed the promise of stablecoins, arguing they offer little improvement over existing payment systems. “I can send any one of you $5 with Venmo or PayPal or Zelle,” he said during a question-and-answer session. “So what is it that this magical stablecoin can do?”

While acknowledging claims that stablecoins could make cross-border transfers faster and cheaper, Kashkari argued that recipients must still convert digital tokens into local currency for everyday purchases, creating additional friction and cost. He said advocates have yet to present a compelling use case for U.S. consumers.

Beyond digital assets, Kashkari addressed criticism from National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett regarding a New York Fed study on tariffs. The Minneapolis President characterized the remarks as “another step to try to compromise the Fed’s independence.”

“Over the last year, we’ve seen multiple attempts to try to compromise the Fed’s independence,” he said, referencing a December subpoena from the Department of Justice to the Board of Governors related to building expenses.

The Minneapolis President emphasized that central bank independence underpins effective monetary policy. “Every advanced economy in the world has an independent central bank,” he said, arguing that policy decisions serve the public best when based on data and analysis rather than short-term political considerations.

On the economy, Kashkari noted inflation has eased to between 2.5% and 3%, while unemployment has risen from roughly 3.5% to 4.3%. 

He said the Fed is “pretty close to neutral” after cutting interest rates multiple times over the past two years.

Kashkari: Crypto is like the ‘Beanie Babies’ bubble

Last November, Kashkari had a similar criticism, comparing the sector to the 1990s Beanie Babies bubble and arguing it still lacks meaningful economic use. 

Speaking on CNN, Kashkari said he was more confident in the utility of AI, which he sees as delivering real economic value, whereas crypto fails to demonstrate a compelling purpose. 

He questioned the everyday use of digital assets in the U.S., noting that the main application he hears is to bypass banking regulations like know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering rules — a use he described as “lousy” for a Federal Reserve policymaker.

This post Fed’s Kashkari: Crypto “Utterly Useless,” Stablecoins No Match for Venmo first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Senator Warren Urges Treasury and Fed Not to Bail Out Crypto Billionaires Saylor and CZ Amid Bitcoin Slide

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, called on the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to confirm that they will not use taxpayer funds to support cryptocurrency investors or firms. 

In a letter sent Wednesday to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Warren warned that any government intervention could transfer wealth from taxpayers to wealthy crypto investors.

“Your agencies must refrain from propping up Bitcoin and transferring wealth from taxpayers to crypto billionaires through direct purchases, guarantees, or liquidity facilities,” Warren wrote. 

She argued that a bailout would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest players in the cryptocurrency market and could directly enrich President Donald Trump through his family’s company, World Liberty Financial.

Warren’s letter comes as Bitcoin has declined roughly 50% since reaching a peak in October. She said the sell-off has been worsened by cascading liquidations of leveraged positions, affecting both corporate and individual investors. 

The Massachusetts senator noted that World Liberty Financial recently sold about 173 wrapped Bitcoin to repay $11.75 million in USDC stablecoin debt, avoiding liquidation as Bitcoin fell below $63,000.

Warren: Crypto and bitcoin retail is at risk 

The letter cited losses among major crypto investors. Michael Saylor’s Strategy Inc., a leading corporate holder of Bitcoin, has seen its shares fall nearly 20% since the start of the year. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao reportedly lost close to $30 billion, and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong reportedly lost $7 billion, Warren claimed.

Warren also highlighted the risks to retail investors. In 2025, U.S. investors lost or had stolen a record $17 billion in cryptocurrency fraud, according to her letter.

She urged federal financial agencies to strengthen protections for individual crypto users, citing the growing scale and complexity of digital asset markets.

The letter referenced a February 6 House Financial Services Committee hearing, where Rep. Brad Sherman asked Secretary Bessent whether taxpayer money could be deployed into crypto assets. Bessent did not answer directly but stated that the Treasury was “retaining seized Bitcoin.” Warren described this response as a deflection and said it left unclear whether the government has any plans to intervene in the Bitcoin sell-off.

Warren reminded the Treasury and the Fed that both agencies have broad authorities to provide financial support to banks and other entities during financial crises. She argued that these tools should not be used to stabilize Bitcoin or other digital assets, which she described as high-risk investments primarily benefiting wealthy investors.

The Fed confirmed receipt of Warren’s letter and said it plans to respond. The Treasury Department did not immediately comment.

Bitcoin was trading just under $67,000 Wednesday, according to Bitcoin Magazine data. 

This post Senator Warren Urges Treasury and Fed Not to Bail Out Crypto Billionaires Saylor and CZ Amid Bitcoin Slide first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Surpasses $1 Billion in Monthly Volume As Adoption Grows

Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, the layer-two protocol designed to facilitate faster and cheaper transactions, has surpassed $1 billion in monthly transaction volume, according to new data from River. 

In November 2025, the network processed an estimated $1.17 billion across 5.22 million transactions, marking a milestone in adoption despite Bitcoin’s stagnant price performance throughout the year.

River’s research aggregates anonymized data from major Lightning node operators to provide a network-wide estimate. Their methodology accounts for overlapping channels and extrapolates to untracked nodes, giving a more accurate picture of the Lightning ecosystem. 

“This approach allows us to debunk misconceptions that Lightning adoption isn’t happening,” River said, noting contributions from entities including ACINQ, Kraken, Breez, Lightspark, LQWD, and others, covering over 50% of network capacity.

Interestingly, the transaction count fell slightly compared to 2023. Researchers attribute this to the fading of micropayment experiments in gaming and messaging that had temporarily inflated activity. 

While these applications did not achieve sustained adoption, River said they expect future experimentation — particularly with AI-powered agentic payments — to drive new spikes in network usage.

Last week, Lightning Labs released an open-source toolkit that enables AI agents to run Lightning nodes, make autonomous payments, and host paid services using the Network, addressing the need for native, machine-to-machine transactions. 

Bitcoin lightning transactions shifts toward larger transfers

Despite being known as a network for micropayments, the average Lightning transaction in November 2025 was $223, up from $118 the previous year. Analysts say this reflects the dominant use case today: moving larger sums between exchanges rather than everyday small purchases. 

“Micropayment theory suggested high-frequency, low-value payments, but mental transaction costs for humans limit this behavior,” River explained in a social media report. “AI agents, which do not incur mental costs, could change this dynamic, potentially leading to more frequent, smaller payments in the future.”

Lightning Network’s rise highlights a layer of Bitcoin adoption that price charts often miss, driven by exchange activity and a growing number of businesses accepting this form of payment. 

Crossing $1 billion in monthly volume marks a milestone for Bitcoin’s layer-two infrastructure and signals progress toward using BTC as a means of transaction and settlement.

Looking ahead, River plans to release a comprehensive report on Bitcoin adoption next week, which will include additional metrics showing meaningful growth in usage and integration across the crypto ecosystem.

This post Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Surpasses $1 Billion in Monthly Volume As Adoption Grows first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin has until the end of the year to recover, or the Power Law will be invalidated.

The Power Law model isn't a prophecy. It's a time-based regression that treats Bitcoin's long-run price path as a power curve, and the “deadline” talk centers on a rising floor. Better yet, a lower band that rises every day, regardless of the price.

If Bitcoin chops sideways or sells off through the fall, that floor eventually catches up to price, creating the first headline break of a model that's held for the asset's entire history.

As of mid-February 2026, Newhedge's live Power Law tracker shows the central trendline near $121,733 and the floor near $51,128.

Bitcoin trades around $67,000 as of press time, well above the floor, but far below the trend.

The floor isn't static. Because the model is anchored to time since Bitcoin's genesis block on Jan. 3, 2009, and grows roughly to the power of 5.8, the floor drifts upward by about 0.093% per day, or roughly $47 per day at current levels.

By Oct. 1, the floor is projected to be around $62,700. By Oct. 31, it hits approximately $64,400. By year-end, it reaches $68,000.

That means if Bitcoin stays flat near $67,000 through the fall, the floor catches it by mid-December. Any serious dip below the mid-$60,000s in the fourth quarter turns into a “first break” narrative.

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Oct 31, 2025 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

The model in plain English

The Bitcoin Power Law family of charts fits the asset's long-run price trajectory to a power curve in time, often visualized as a straight line on a log-log plot.

Newhedge frames it as a long-term log-log power-law model and attributes it to astrophysicist Giovanni Santostasi, with prices growing roughly to the power of 5.8 over time.

Most versions aren't single lines, but corridors. A central regression represents “trend” or “fair value,” and parallel upper and lower rails act as “resistance” and “support.”

Santostasi frames his Power Law Theory as an attempt to describe Bitcoin as a scale-invariant growth system and argues that it is scientific and falsifiable.

That framing matters. If the model is falsifiable, it needs a pre-committed rule, such as a weekly close below the floor for a specified number of weeks. Without that rule, any break can be dismissed as noise.

Related Reading

Is the Bitcoin Power Law model more realistic than Stock-to-Flow?

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Jan 31, 2024 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

Why October matters

The October deadline is shorthand for time tightening.

Because the model is time-based, the floor rises every day even if Bitcoin does nothing. That turns sideways markets into a countdown narrative. By late October, the floor enters the mid-$60,000s.

Any sustained price action below that level creates a clean headline: “Bitcoin breaks Power Law floor for the first time.”

But a floor break wouldn't “invalidate Bitcoin.” It would invalidate a specific parameterization, such as the site, bands, and data source.

It would signal a regime change relative to the historical fit, suggesting slower growth than the long-run curve implies. And it would hand critics a clean narrative. Log-log regressions can look stable in-sample but be statistically fragile.

Amdax's Tim Stolte has been a widely circulated critic on precisely these grounds, arguing that power-law fits to Bitcoin are spurious correlations driven by sample window sensitivity.

A 4-to-6% drawdown from current levels, enough to tag or break a mid-$60,000 floor, isn't exotic. It's routine volatility. One-month at-the-money implied volatility on Bitcoin recently sat around 51.77% on Feb. 10.

Deribit's DVOL explainer provides a rule of thumb for converting annualized volatility to the expected daily move: divide by the square root of 365, roughly 19. That translates to expected single-day swings in the mid-single-digit percentage range.

A sharp risk-off episode could easily push Bitcoin into the low $60,000s or below.

Fidelity's Jurrien Timmer has publicly framed roughly $65,000 as a “line in the sand” level, referencing power-law-style trend framing. That helps the story feel less like crypto numerology and more like a widely watched psychological level that happens to rhyme with the model's rising floor.

When institutional voices cite the same zone, the model's band becomes a self-fulfilling coordination point.

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May 18, 2024 · Rajagopal Menon

Three scenarios for the fourth quarter

There are three potential scenarios for the fourth quarter.

The first is the “chop is dangerous” frame. Even if Bitcoin is flat, the floor rises toward it. Every week of consolidation shrinks the cushion. By late October, the buffer disappears entirely if the price stays near current levels.

Second, the “volatility makes breaks plausible” frame. Mid-teens monthly move magnitudes are normal given the current implied volatility. A 4-to-6% drawdown is not an outlier event.

If Bitcoin gaps down on a macro surprise or on accelerated ETF outflows, the floor gets tested immediately.

Third, the “mainstream anchor” frame. The mid-$60,000s keep showing up not just in power-law charts but in institutional commentary. That makes the zone a coordination point.

When enough participants treat a level as significant, it becomes significant through reflexivity.

The model ignores drivers, yet drivers determine where Bitcoin trades within the channel. Two variables matter most: ETF flow regime and risk-off volatility bursts.

Bitcoin has recently been trading in an environment where ETF demand is discussed as cooling or turning. US spot Bitcoin ETFs drove the rally from late 2023 through early 2024, but flows have moderated.

If outflows accelerate or inflows stall, the marginal bid weakens.

Additionally, recent sharp downside moves have been tied to broader risk sentiment, such as equity market stress, inflation surprises, and geopolitical shocks.

Those are exactly the regimes that create “gap risk” relative to a smooth trendline. The power-law model assumes continuous compounding. Real markets have discontinuities.

What a break would mean

A floor break would not “invalidate Bitcoin.” It would invalidate a specific parameterization, signal a regime change versus the historical fit, or hand critics a clean narrative.

Log-log regressions can look stable in-sample but be statistically fragile. They're vulnerable to spurious correlation risk, sensitivity to sample window, and overfitting.

However, the debate is becoming scientific again.

A recent academic preprint from February 2026 agrees that the Bitcoin price is approximately power-law-in-time but finds a different slope, roughly 4.2, on 2011-to-February-2026 data.

The paper argues that “activity-warped time,” which adjusts the time axis for volatility and transaction volume, improves fit and out-of-sample performance. Even sympathetic research sees parameter instability.

The power-law model isn't wrong. It's a first-order approximation that evolves as the system matures.

What to watch

Distance-to-floor, updated weekly, is the cleanest tracker. Whether “break” means a wick, a daily close, or a weekly close should be defined upfront.

Volatility regime matters: if implied vol pops, the probability of a floor tag rises mechanically. ETF flow headlines and macro risk-off episodes are the “why now” drivers that would push prices into the testing range.

Model disagreement itself is worth tracking. Different parameterizations produce different floors.
Some use the genesis block as the starting point. Others anchor to the first exchange price. Some refit annually. Others hold parameters fixed.

Those choices create meaningful divergence. A break on one chart might not show up on another.
The October deadline isn't a prophecy. It's a mechanical consequence of a time-based regression. The floor rises every day.

If Bitcoin chops sideways or sells off, the floor catches up. By late October, the cushion disappears.

Whether that matters depends on whether you believe the model has predictive power or is just a curve-fitted historical artifact. Either way, the next eight months will provide a clean test.

The post If Bitcoin stays near $67k, it breaks the Power Law floor by mid-December appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ethereum’s new roadmap lands in a market that is less interested in vision and more interested in evidence.

That is the core tension behind the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Priorities Update for 2026, which breaks the network’s next phase into three tracks, including Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1.

The roadmap is technical, but the market question is not. Investors want to know whether these priorities can help ETH recover in this bear market, and whether they can do so by changing risk and economics rather than just developer sentiment.

That is why the Foundation’s framing matters. It is not selling one upgrade. It presents a system-level argument that Ethereum can simultaneously increase capacity, reduce user friction, and harden the base layer.

If that works, the market may assign a lower risk premium to ETH and become more willing to pay for Ethereum’s long-term role as a settlement layer.

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Feb 12, 2026 · Oluwapelumi Adejumo

Scale is where the economic case gets judged

The most market-relevant part of the 2026 roadmap sits in the Scale track.

The Ethereum Foundation says the community has already raised Ethereum’s gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, the first significant increase since 2021.

The next target is progress toward and beyond 100 million, with execution and data availability work organized more tightly.

That is not just engineering housekeeping. It is a direct response to a competitive pressure that has defined this cycle.

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Feb 17, 2026 · Gino Matos

Ethereum needs to support more economic activity without pricing out users, while preserving the decentralization and neutrality that made institutions comfortable with the chain in the first place.

In light of this, two pieces inside the Scale track matter most for market structure.

One is ePBS (enshrined proposer-builder separation), which the Foundation identifies as part of Glamsterdam’s scaling components, alongside repricings and additional increases to the blob parameter.

ePBS is deeply technical, but its market significance is clearer than it looks. It addresses a long-standing concern about MEV extraction and the centralization pressure in block building.

If block production becomes more predictable and more credibly neutral, Ethereum reduces one of the structural risks that has made some investors cautious about its long-term security and governance profile.

The second is the zkEVM attester client, which the Foundation says is moving from prototype to production readiness.

That is an important signal because it suggests Ethereum’s future scaling is not only about external rollups operating on the base chain. It is also about making verification and proving feel more native to Ethereum’s core stack, and more robust in a way institutions can underwrite.

Put simply, the Scale track is not only about throughput. It is about preserving Ethereum’s economic relevance while reducing the perception that scaling requires too many tradeoffs.

That matters for price, but indirectly. Markets usually reward higher capacity only when they believe the added capacity can support durable, monetizable demand.

UX and L1 hardening are the risk premium story

The other two tracks, Improve UX and Harden the L1, deliver less immediate headlines, but they may yield more for Ethereum’s discount rate over time.

The Foundation says 2026 usability work will focus on native account abstraction and interoperability, with the goal of making smart contract wallets the default without the bundler and relayer complexity that slowed earlier designs.

It also points to EIP-7701 and EIP-8141 as steps toward embedding smart-account logic more directly in the protocol.

This sounds like product design, but it is also a market issue.

Wallet friction remains one of the biggest hidden obstacles to broader adoption. Cheaper transactions do not matter much if onboarding still feels complex and error-prone.

If Ethereum can reduce the number of signatures, simplify cross-chain behavior, and make wallets safer by default, it improves the odds that consumer and enterprise activity actually sticks.

The Foundation also ties this work to post-quantum readiness, arguing that native account abstraction creates a cleaner migration path away from today’s ECDSA-based authentication, while work continues to make quantum-resistant signature verification more gas-efficient.

That is not a near-term catalyst, but it is exactly the kind of future-proofing that long-duration capital tends to notice.

The Harden the L1 track completes the message.

The Foundation frames it as preserving core properties through security hardening, censorship-resistance research, and stronger test infrastructure to support a faster fork cadence.

It points to the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative and work such as post-execution transaction assertions and trustless RPCs. It also highlights FOCIL (EIP-7805), plus extensions spanning blobs and statelessness research, and an effort to develop measurable censorship-resistance metrics.

For institutional allocators, this is not optional. It is the base case.

Ethereum increasingly competes for roles that demand high trust, including stablecoin settlement, tokenized funds, and other real-world financial use cases.

Those markets care less about headline transaction counts than they do about whether the base layer remains secure, neutral, and predictable under stress.

The Foundation is trying to show that Ethereum can scale without weakening those properties.

If markets believe that, the reward is not only more usage. It is a lower perceived risk premium for ETH.

Ethereum still has gravity, but the fee story looks weak

Despite all of these great plans, the problem is that ETH trades on current optics as much as future design.

Right now, Ethereum’s fundamentals describe a network that is functional and active, but optically cheap on the metric many investors still use to judge ETH’s value capture, fees.

Gas prices are around 0.038 gwei on Etherscan’s tracker, which is extremely low. YCharts puts Ethereum network transaction fees per day at about 140.8 ETH, down roughly 40% year over year.

That is good for users and builders. It supports adoption. It makes more applications economically viable.

However, it also weakens the cleanest version of the post-EIP-1559 narrative. If transactions are cheap, and fee revenue stays low, then more usage does not automatically translate into stronger burn and tighter supply.

In other words, Ethereum can be winning on utility while still looking weak on the scoreboard that many ETH investors watch first.

This is where Ethereum’s role has shifted rather than shrunk.

The network still anchors a large part of the on-chain economy, but more of that economic activity now sits across its layer 2 networks.

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, recently acknowledged this problem and conceded that Ethereum needs “a new path” that relies less on layer-2 networks.

According to him:

“The original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.”

However, as these networks mature, the open question is how much of that growth accrues to ETH, and how quickly investors can see it in the numbers.

What would make the roadmap matter to ETH price?

So, can the Ethereum Foundation’s priorities help ETH recover from this bear market? Yes, but mostly by improving the setup quality.

This is consistent with asset manager 21Shares’ position, which ties ETH upside to specific conditions.

This includes the need for L2 activity to either drive a rebound in ETH burn or introduce structural mechanisms that better align L2 value accrual with mainnet economics.

The new roadmap can help achieve this if Ethereum moves toward and beyond 100 million gas, advances blob scaling, makes smart wallets feel native, and preserves censorship resistance and security at the base layer.

This would improve the odds that Ethereum remains the preferred settlement layer for on-chain dollars and tokenized assets. It can also make the next adoption wave easier to underwrite.

However, what it cannot do on its own is force ETF inflows to reverse or instantly restore a high-fee regime.

The post Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap just hit — but ETH won’t recover until one metric flips appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ledn's $188 million securitization marks the moment Bitcoin-backed consumer credit started looking like mainstream asset-backed debt.

Ledn Issuer Trust 2026-1 packages 5,441 fixed-rate balloon loans into rated, tradable notes with investment-grade and subordinated tranches, custody arrangements, liquidity reserves, and all the structural scaffolding that allows institutional investors to buy Bitcoin-linked yield without ever touching spot Bitcoin.

The deal establishes a template that could turn “don't sell your BTC, borrow against it” into a repeatable consumer-finance product, with all the benefits and pathologies that implies.

The deal sold $160 million of Class A notes rated BBB-(sf) by S&P and $28 million of Class B notes rated B-(sf), backed by a pool of loans totaling $199.1 million in principal.

Those loans, originated to 2,914 US retail borrowers, are secured by 4,078.87 Bitcoin, valued at roughly $356.9 million as of the Dec. 31 cutoff date. The weighted average loan-to-value ratio sits at 55.78%, and borrowers pay a weighted average rate of 11.80%.

Jefferies acted as the structuring agent and bookrunner. Reporting indicates the investment-grade tranche priced around 335 basis points over the benchmark rate. This is tight enough to signal investor appetite for structured crypto credit, wide enough to reflect the underlying volatility.

Unlike the subprime mortgages that helped ignite the 2008 crisis, these Bitcoin-backed loans aren’t primarily a bet on shaky borrowers slowly defaulting over time; however, like subprime-era lending, once the loans can be pooled, rated, and sold on an originate-to-distribute basis, the incentive shifts toward scaling volume.

And in this case, the systemic stress shows up as a single correlated shock (a BTC drawdown) that can trigger fast, synchronized liquidations and forced selling.

The machine that scales consumer credit

Securitization grows because it is repeatable. Replicability, rather than novelty, is what allows it to scale.

Once Bitcoin-backed loans can be rated, pooled, and distributed as notes, the real product becomes standardization: consistent LTV bands, liquidation policies, custody setups, concentration limits, and triggers that ABS buyers can diligence the way they would auto loans or credit cards.

Ledn can originate loans, warehouse them briefly, then sell the risk into capital markets rather than holding everything on the balance sheet or relying on expensive private funding.

If the format catches on, other lenders can copy the structure and compete on rate, terms, and distribution.

The immediate consequence is a potential funding-cost advantage that could push Bitcoin-backed borrowing beyond niche users.

If securitization meaningfully lowers the cost of capital for originators, borrowers may see lower APRs, higher advance rates, longer tenors, or simply more product availability. The originate-to-distribute model that scaled mortgages, autos, and credit cards could do the same for Bitcoin credit, assuming the underlying mechanics hold under stress.

For investors, the appeal is structural. ABS buyers can get Bitcoin-adjacent yield via credit spread and tranching without holding spot Bitcoin, which matters for mandate purposes and committee optics.

Investment committees that balk at “buying cryptocurrency” may be comfortable with buying a rated spread product collateralized by Bitcoin.

That's a distribution unlock. It also means TradFi capital can flow into crypto credit through a familiar channel, expanding the ecosystem's funding base without requiring cultural conversion.

Why now, and why this format

Credit markets are in spread-hunting mode. High-yield option-adjusted spreads hovered around 286 basis points on Feb. 18, according to FRED data.

This is the kind of environment where buyers reach for structured yield, especially if it carries an investment-grade rating.

Meanwhile, the US ABS issuance totaled $36.8 billion through January 2026 per SIFMA. The market is deep, institutional by default, and already wired for consumer-credit securitization. Ledn is trying to plug Bitcoin credit into that rail.

The deal arrives when Bitcoin-backed lending has reached consumer scale but still lacks institutional legitimacy.

Market-wide BTC-backed loan volumes reportedly hit around $2 billion in 2025 across various platforms: large enough to matter, fragmented enough that no single player dominates, and opaque enough that investors can't easily compare origination quality or liquidation mechanics across lenders.

Securitization forces visibility. Once you're selling notes to ABS buyers, you need disclosures, third-party ratings, legal opinions, and ongoing reporting.

The structure borrows heavily from traditional consumer ABS.

The deal includes a liquidity reserve, funded at 5% of the outstanding note balance ($9.4 million at closing), that provides a buffer against servicing shortfalls or timing mismatches.

Loans are governed by US law, and Bitcoin collateral is held by a custodian domiciled in New York, which matters for asset isolation and bankruptcy-remoteness analysis.

S&P's rating methodology emphasizes Ledn's liquidation history as evidence that the platform can execute under stress: 7,493 loans have been historically liquidated with an average LTV of 80.32% at liquidation, a maximum of 84.66%, and no reported losses.

The rating is a bet that the liquidation engine can outrun volatility.

The flywheel and the feedback loop

If this format repeats, the knock-on effects are both obvious and uncomfortable.

More originators entering the space creates competition on rate and terms. More structures emerge, such as senior/mezz tranches, revolving shelves, and covered-bond-style formats.

More consumer marketing frames Bitcoin-backed borrowing as a mainstream alternative to selling holdings. The ecosystem starts to look like any other consumer-credit vertical.

That's the procyclical dynamic. In a bull market, rising Bitcoin prices increase collateral headroom, allowing borrowers to leverage, which in turn increases demand for origination, which, in turn, feeds securitization volume, lowering funding costs and enabling more competitive borrowing terms.

The feedback loop is self-reinforcing. In a drawdown, the same loop runs in reverse and faster.

Automatic liquidations can become forced selling at scale. If securitizations grow large, this becomes a microstructure story: collateral liquidations feeding price impact, which in turn feeds more liquidations.

The math is straightforward. At the Dec. 31 cutoff, the pool held $199.1 million in loan principal backed by 4,078.87 Bitcoin, valued at roughly $356.9 million, implying a Bitcoin price of roughly $87,500.

If Bitcoin falls to $61,000, the portfolio LTV will automatically reach roughly 80%. If Bitcoin falls to $48,800, the portfolio LTV reaches 100%, and collateral equals the loan principal.

Those aren't hypothetical tail scenarios in a market where short-horizon volatility models point to annualized volatility in the mid-50% range.

The liquidation engine has to execute faster than price decay, even when everyone else is liquidating into the same liquidity pool.

Where subprime risk accumulated gradually through borrower deterioration, Bitcoin-backed ABS concentrates risk into abrupt, market-wide collateral repricing that can unfold in hours rather than years.

The uncomfortable part

Investment-grade speaks to structural protections rather than to the inherent stability of Bitcoin itself. A BBB-(sf) rating reflects S&P’s view that the combination of overcollateralization, liquidity reserves, subordination, and performance triggers provides sufficient cushion under its modeled stress scenarios.

Bitcoin’s behavior as collateral remains highly volatile. The rating agency’s assessment rests on whether the structure can absorb that volatility, based on historical liquidation performance and expected price swings.

In traditional consumer ABS, stress is driven by idiosyncratic borrower deterioration. In Bitcoin-backed ABS, stress is driven by systematic collateral repricing.

The correlation is one. Everyone's loans get squeezed at the same time, and everyone's liquidation engine competes for the same exit liquidity.

Contagion pathways are also different. Traditional consumer-credit stress transmits through bank balance sheets and capital constraints. Bitcoin-backed ABS stress transmits through microstructure: price drop triggers margin calls, which trigger forced selling, which drives price impact, which triggers more margin calls.

That's mechanically faster than credit-deterioration timelines.

The real product here is the funding machine powering Bitcoin-backed loans. When Ledn securitizes loans, warehouse capacity expands. Expanded warehouse capacity drives origination growth. Greater origination volume pushes borrowing costs lower.

That's the consumer-behavior wedge. It also creates a new category of Bitcoin exposure for investors who can't or won't hold spot: credit spread plus structural protection, packaged in a familiar format.

The pathway to mainstream adoption isn't cultural, but operational. If the deal performs, secondary spreads tighten, and repeat issuance follows, the template becomes standardized.

The sector stops being a “crypto niche” and becomes “another ABS subcategory.” That's how consumer-credit markets scale: not through evangelism, but through repeatable, financeable templates that institutional capital can plug into.

The open question is whether the liquidation mechanics hold under real stress. S&P's rating is based on Ledn's historical performance of 7,493 liquidations with no losses.

However, those liquidations occurred in markets with specific liquidity conditions and volatility regimes. The next test will come during a gap-down event, when multiple platforms liquidate simultaneously into shallow order books.

Subprime mortgages embedded fragility in borrower credit and dispersed it through tranching.

Bitcoin-backed ABS embeds fragility in collateral volatility and relies on liquidation speed as the shock absorber, while still delivering genuine benefits in the form of liquidity access, tax deferral, and institutional capital formation.

The risk sits in market structure rather than household solvency, and the payoff is capital efficiency rather than homeownership expansion.

Still, this is the moment Bitcoin-backed consumer credit becomes mainstream securitized debt.

Whether that's a scaling breakthrough or a leverage trap depends on what happens when the market reprices collateral faster than the liquidation engine can execute.

The post Bitcoin-backed loans with sub-prime-style incentives, but with liquidation triggers hit Wall Street appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Two spot Sui ETFs began trading in US markets on Feb. 18. Canary's SUIS is listed on Nasdaq, while Grayscale's GSUI appeared on NYSE Arca.

Both products offer staking-enabled exposure to Sui, the layer-1 blockchain positioned as a high-throughput alternative to Ethereum.

By the end of the first trading session, GSUI had moved roughly 8,000 shares. SUIS traded around 1,468. Combined notional volume came in under $150,000, a figure so low it barely registered on the tape.

While Solana's BSOL debuted with $55.4 million in day-one trading volume in October 2025 and XRP's XRPC opened with roughly $58 million a month later, Sui's twin launches struggled to generate liquidity equivalent to a single large institutional block trade.

The contrast reveals a structural reality: the further an asset sits from the top of the market cap rankings, the harder it becomes to summon secondary-market activity. This happens even when the regulatory wrapper, exchange listing, and issuer pedigree are identical.

Liquidity ladder

Debut-day trading volume creates a clean snapshot of investor readiness.

It captures how many desks are willing to make markets, how many advisors are comfortable recommending exposure, how many retail platforms prominently feature the ticker, and how much natural two-way flow exists from the open.

The altcoin ETF class has now generated enough launches to reveal clear tiering.

At the top, Solana and XRP command tens of millions in opening-day volume. Bitwise's BSOL moved $55.4 million on Oct. 28. Canary's XRPC hit roughly $58 million on Nov. 13.

Those numbers reflect institutional-grade liquidity: tight spreads, active market making, and enough flow to absorb size without moving the market.

The mid-tier shows more variance. Grayscale's Chainlink ETF (GLNK) reportedly generated around $13 million in first-day trading volume on Dec. 2.

Bitwise's competing Chainlink product (CLNK) moved approximately $3.2 million in notional value on Jan. 14.

Then the cliff arrives. Canary's Litecoin fund (LTCC) managed roughly $1 million, while its Hedera ETF (HBR) was the exception, posting about $8 million on its October debut.

Grayscale's Dogecoin ETF (GDOG) traded around $1.4 million on Nov. 24. VanEck's Avalanche product (VAVX) printed approximately $334,000 on Jan. 26.

Sui's combined launch sits well below that baseline.

Market cap rank maps closely to debut-day liquidity. XRP sits at #4, Solana at #7, and Dogecoin at #9. Hedera ranks #25, Litecoin #27, and Sui #31.

A rough quantitative read suggests that every 10 rank drops corresponds to a roughly 7-fold decline in opening-day trading volume. By rank 30, implied debut-day volume falls into the low six figures, exactly where Sui landed.

Dogecoin complicates the narrative. Despite its top 10 market cap, GDOG's $1.4 million debut volume sits closer to the lower-tier cohort.

What matters isn't just size but familiarity, distribution infrastructure, advisor comfort, and trading culture. Market cap gets attention, distribution gets volume.

Why volume fades

Listing an ETF is cheap and administratively simple. Issuers file, exchanges approve, tickers go live.

However, none of that forces advisory platforms, model portfolios, or retail brokerage interfaces to feature the product. Distribution is earned through education, marketing spend, backroom integration, and a liquidity flywheel where early volume attracts market making capital, which tightens spreads, which attracts more flow.

That flywheel never spins up for most launches. Market makers, who handle more than 99% of secondary ETF transactions according to VettaFi research, make money on flow and hedging efficiency.

For a single-token altcoin ETF, the question is: how cleanly can I hedge this exposure intraday? For Solana or XRP, the answer is “very cleanly,” as deep order books on multiple venues, robust futures markets, and institutional lending desks.

For Sui, hedging becomes more costly, spread-capture less reliable, and capital commitment harder to justify.

ETF trading volume does not equal ETF liquidity.

JPMorgan's research argues that low screen volume doesn't automatically signal liquidity risk, because creation and redemption mechanisms allow market makers to source liquidity directly from the underlying asset.

But low volume still matters for smaller tactical orders and investor perception.

ETF.com notes that spreads tend to be narrower when trading volume is robust. Poor day-to-day tape signals weak mindshare, limited natural two-way flow, and bad optics.

Even if sophisticated traders can access liquidity through creation units, retail investors see wide spreads and thin volume and walk away.

The distribution wall

What Sui's debut reveals isn't a problem with Sui. It's a ceiling on how far down the market-cap ladder ETF distribution can realistically reach.

The same infrastructure that made Solana ETFs functional exists for Sui. The regulatory approval process was identical. What's missing is investor demand at a sufficient scale to create sustainable liquidity.

That demand doesn't scale linearly with market cap. It clusters around assets that institutional allocators and retail platforms consider “committee-safe.”

Solana and XRP have that status, built through years of venture backing, exchange listings, and regulatory survival. Chainlink carved out a niche as “the infrastructure play.” Hedera benefits from enterprise governance branding. Litecoin trades on nostalgia.

Sui, despite strong technical fundamentals, hasn't achieved that level of institutional comfort. The ETF wrapper can't create demand that doesn't exist upstream.

The forward-looking implication is a barbell market structure.

A small set of altcoin ETFs, likely three to five products, will achieve genuine liquidity and institutional adoption. Everything else becomes tradeable-but-thin: functional for niche allocators, but not competitive with the top tier on spreads, volume, or advisor mindshare.

This dynamic isn't unique to crypto. Morningstar's 2025 ETF review highlights a long tail of sub-scale products across the broader fund universe, with persistent closures among funds that fail to attract assets or trading interest.

The crypto ETF market is replicating that pattern faster, compressed by the rapid pace of launches and the narrow distribution infrastructure.

JPMorgan projected that altcoin ETFs could draw $14 billion in assets during their first six months, with a large portion flowing into Solana-focused products. That forecast reflects asset-gathering potential, not guaranteed trading volume, but reinforces the concentration risk.

Even in an optimistic scenario, most capital flows to the top few names.

What happens next

The Sui debut offers a test case for what happens when regulatory approval meets weak distribution.

The products exist. The infrastructure works. The underlying asset is liquid enough to support creation and redemption.

Yet the volume isn't there, and volume attracts more volume. Without day-to-day tape, spreads stay wide. Without tight spreads, advisors don't recommend exposure. The distribution wall becomes self-reinforcing.

In a strong crypto market, the entire volume curve could shift upward.

Rising prices create speculative energy, which pulls capital into riskier names, which generates more flow. However, even in that scenario, the slope is likely to remain. Top-tier products still capture most incremental attention.

The alternative is a culling mechanism. If the next three to six months don't produce persistent trading activity, expect fewer follow-on launches, wider spreads, reduced marketing budgets, and eventual shutdown risk for the least-trafficked products.

That's the normal lifecycle of sub-scale ETFs.

Sui's sub-$150,000 debut shows how far liquidity has to fall before the ETF wrapper stops mattering.

The structure is the same. The regulatory approval is the same. The issuer pedigree is the same. What changed is the asset's rank in the attention economy, and that difference translated into a 300-to-400-times decline in opening-day volume relative to Solana.

Distribution is the gating factor. Everything else is infrastructure.

The post Sui ETFs just launched — and the volume is collapsing because nobody’s showing up appeared first on CryptoSlate.

CME Group has spent most of its life as the financial plumbing moving the gears behind wheat hedges, rate bets, equity futures, the quiet machinery that keeps risk moving. Now it is taking a very public step into crypto’s always-on world.

On May 29, CME says it will launch 24/7 trading for its cryptocurrency futures and options on the CME Globex platform, starting at 4:00 p.m. CT, pending regulatory review.

That sounds like an operational update, the kind that usually lands with a shrug. In Bitcoin land, it touches one of the longest running storylines in chart watching culture, the so-called CME gap.

Bitcoin trades every hour of every day, it never sleeps. CME’s Bitcoin futures, by design, have had set trading hours, historically running from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon, with closures that leave a clean break between the last print and the next session’s open.

The weekend is where the biggest discontinuity can show up on the futures chart.

When Bitcoin moves during the weekend, the futures market is frozen in time. When the futures market reopens, it “catches up” in a single leap, leaving a blank space on the chart between Friday’s last trade and Sunday’s first trade.

That blank space, “The CME Gap,” becomes a target, a magnet, a meme, a reason to stay up late refreshing a chart, a reason to take a small trade and feel like you are part of an inside joke. Though, in reality, most CME gaps do eventually fill.

As of press time, there is still one open around $60,000… as well as one above around $85,000.

CME going 24/7 changes the shape of that story.

The chart gap has always been tied to the simple reality of a market closing while the underlying keeps moving. With continuous trading, that weekend jump loses its main stage.

CME is framing the shift as a response to demand, and it is backing that up with scale. The exchange says its crypto futures and options saw more than $3 trillion in notional volume in 2025, and it highlights 2026 year-to-date activity with average daily volume of 407,200 contracts, up 46% year over year, alongside average daily open interest of 335,400, up 7% year over year.

Those numbers matter because the CME gap narrative has always carried an implied second act, the idea that CME futures are where serious money shows its hand.

As CME’s crypto products grow, the futures tape becomes harder to dismiss as “just a chart.” CME itself has been building that case in its own publications, including its quarterly crypto insights, which reiterate the market’s growth and institutional participation.

The gap gets smaller, and more contained

Here is the detail that keeps this from being a simple funeral for the gap.

CME says 24/7 trading will still include “at least a two-hour weekly maintenance period over the weekend,” a line tucked into the same announcement that celebrates always-on access.

A scheduled outage is a different animal from a two day weekend shutdown, and the difference is important.

The old gap has been big enough to build folklore around, a wide open space that can contain a meaningful move.

A two hour window is tighter, and it will usually capture less price action. Yet in markets, small windows can still matter, especially if they are predictable.

If trading is thin around maintenance, if volatility hits at the wrong moment, if liquidity providers step back for any reason, the market can still reopen with a jump. The gap becomes less like a canyon and more like a crack, and cracks still catch ankles if you are running.

The key here is to look at the way rituals adapt. Traders love rituals because rituals turn uncertainty into a routine.

Weekend gap talk has been one of those routines, part superstition, part pattern recognition, part community bonding. A world with 24/7 CME trading presses that ritual into a smaller, more technical shape.

It also changes who has to stay awake.

The people who made careers around the weekend close and reopen rhythm may find themselves looking at Sunday night the way they look at any other hour, and they may shift their attention to the maintenance period, to weekend liquidity, to how spreads behave when fewer participants are around.

Meanwhile, the institutions CME is courting can manage risk on their own clock, with fewer forced waits until the bell rings.

Related Reading

Bitcoin crash imminent? Price spike makes two new CME gaps and closing one carries a punishing cost

If price revisits the $88,000 zone, it triggers a "narrative flip" that could trap anyone holding high-leverage positions.

Jan 5, 2026 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

The bigger story is always-on finance, and the cost of keeping it running

CME’s move lands in a broader moment, where “always on” is spreading from crypto into the expectations of traditional markets.

Crypto traders grew up in a world where price can change at 3 a.m. on a Saturday because a headline dropped somewhere in the world, a liquidation cascade hit, or a whale decided to move coins. A regulated derivatives exchange expanding access is another step toward meeting that world on its own terms.

At the same time, always-on markets raise the stakes on operational reliability. When there is less downtime, the downtime that remains matters more.

CME has had to deal with that reality in recent history. There was a significant CME outage in November 2025 tied to data center cooling issues.

That history matters for crypto because traders tend to treat outages as forced volatility events. A maintenance window is planned, an outage is chaos, and both create discontinuities. If the “gap” is ultimately about discontinuities, then the real evolution is a shift from a weekend shaped discontinuity to a maintenance and resilience shaped one.

There is also a cross market angle here that goes beyond Bitcoin culture. When a big venue like CME keeps crypto derivatives open all weekend, it tightens the link between crypto and the rest of the risk universe.

Macro headlines do not respect trading schedules, geopolitics does not wait for Monday, policy chatter hits when it hits. Continuous trading makes it easier for the futures curve to adjust in real time, and that can change how basis, hedges, and risk overlays behave.

CME’s move is already being treated as a meaningful market structure event in mainstream finance coverage. Bloomberg wrote about CME moving closer to 24/7 crypto derivatives trading, framing it as another sign of institutional demand and infrastructure adaptation.

Related Reading

CME to start trading crypto futures 24/7: What changes for Bitcoin?

Round-the-clock trading could narrow gaps with crypto-native venues. We chart who benefits and when.

Oct 3, 2025 · Andjela Radmilac

So, is this the death of the CME gap?

If you define the CME gap as the classic weekend void, the one everyone points to after a big Saturday move, then May 29 looks like the date where that specific artifact loses its reason to exist.

CME is offering continuous access, and it is doing it for products that have become central to institutional crypto trading.

If you define the CME gap as a broader habit of treating CME’s chart as a map of delayed information, then the habit will likely evolve instead of disappearing.

Markets find new seams. The weekly maintenance period becomes one, and any operational incident does too. The storyline shifts from a two day drama to a smaller, repeated, more technical moment.

The more interesting question for the next few months is how much trading actually shows up when the weekend becomes just another session.

A 24/7 sign on the door is one thing, a busy room is another. CME’s own growth metrics suggest strong participation overall, and the first weekends after May 29 will show whether that participation wants to be awake.

For traders who grew up with the gap as a comforting myth, the change may feel like losing a landmark. For everyone else, it is one more sign that crypto is becoming a normal part of the financial system’s plumbing, with all the benefits and responsibilities that come with it.

And for the chart watchers, the ones who love a clean story you can draw with two horizontal lines, the hunt continues. The gap has always been a way of saying, “something happened while you weren’t looking.” In a market that never stops, that sentence still applies, it just points to different moments.

The post The Bitcoin CME gap will now close forever in May leaving a return to $84k hanging appeared first on CryptoSlate.

In a historic 6-3 decision delivered today, February 20, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the sweeping "emergency" tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. The court ruled that the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to bypass Congress was an unlawful expansion of executive authority. This decision immediately invalidates billions in ongoing duties and triggers a massive fiscal scramble as corporations seek up to $175 billion in potential refunds.

A "Tax Cut" for Markets

For investors, this is an immediate bullish signal. The ruling effectively acts as a retroactive, large-scale tax cut for U.S. importers. As billions in capital are slated to return to corporate balance sheets, analysts expect a surge in market liquidity. Assets like $BTC are already showing sensitivity to the news, as increased dollar liquidity historically flows into high-growth, digital assets.

The Ruling: Why SCOTUS Sided Against the President

The majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, emphasized that while the President has broad powers in national emergencies, the power to levy taxes—including tariffs—resides strictly with Congress.

• The "Emergency" Loophole Closed: The court rejected the administration's argument that trade deficits and fentanyl flows constituted a "national emergency" sufficient to trigger IEEPA for tariff purposes.
• Refund Mechanisms: While the court didn't outline a specific repayment timeline, the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) is expected to oversee the refund process, which could see over $130–$175 billion returned to the private sector.

Market Impact: Why Crypto and Stocks are Reacting

The removal of these tariffs provides a dual-engine for a market rally:

• Inflation Relief: Removing the "tariff tax" eases upward pressure on consumer prices. This gives the Federal Reserve more breathing room, potentially sustaining a "risk-on" environment for crypto news and equities.
• Corporate Margins: Major retailers and tech firms (heavy importers) will see an immediate improvement in margins. This excess cash is frequently diverted into stock buybacks or diversified into liquid reserves like $Bitcoin.

Risks: Government Revenue Gap and "Backup Plans"

Despite the euphoria, the U.S. government now faces a $175 billion revenue hole. President Trump has already hinted at a "backup plan," potentially utilizing Section 232 (National Security) or Section 301 (Unfair Trade) to keep some levies in place. Furthermore, Treasury rates may rise as the government is forced to borrow more to cover the refund liabilities.

The digital asset landscape today is defined by a sharp contrast between institutional accumulation and retail exhaustion. While MicroStrategy continues its aggressive "buy every quarter" mandate, bringing its total holdings to over 717,131 BTC, the broader market is grappling with a severe liquidity crisis. On-chain data indicates that the vast majority of altcoins are now trapped in a long-term bear trend, struggling to find support as capital consolidates into $Bitcoin. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin network itself has demonstrated immense resilience, recovering from recent weather-related disruptions to post its largest absolute difficulty adjustment in history.

MicroStrategy Expands Treasury: Michael Saylor’s $168 Million Move

In the headline for crypto news today, MicroStrategy has confirmed an additional purchase of 2,486 BTC for approximately $168.4 million. According to the latest SEC filings, the purchase was made between February 9 and February 16, 2026, at an average price of roughly $67,710 per coin.

Michael Saylor, the firm’s Executive Chairman, continues to pivot the company’s capital structure to support these buys. Notably, nearly half of this acquisition was funded through the issuance of "Stretch" preferred shares, a tactical shift designed to protect common equity holders while maintaining a "perpetual bitcoin-buying machine." Despite the $BTC price currently sitting below the company’s aggregate cost basis of $76,027, the firm now controls over 3.4% of the total Bitcoin supply.

Altcoin Liquidity Crunch: 83% of Tokens Slip Into Bear Trend

While Bitcoin benefits from corporate backing, the rest of the market is under significant duress. Analysts at CryptoQuant have issued a "Bear Trend" alert, noting that 83% of altcoins on Binance are now trading below their 50-week moving average.

This deterioration in market breadth suggests a profound liquidity crunch. Outside of Bitcoin and major stablecoins like USDT and USDC, retail demand has essentially evaporated. This trend is particularly evident in high-beta assets like $XRP, which is currently hovering around $1.41. As "risk-off" sentiment prevails, leveraged long positions are being flushed out, with technical experts warning that a failure to reclaim the $1.54 resistance could lead to a deeper correction toward $1.35.

Bitcoin Network Records Historic 15% Difficulty Jump

One of the most significant infrastructure developments in crypto news today is the record-breaking adjustment in Bitcoin mining difficulty. This morning, the network's difficulty jumped by 14.7%, reaching a new high of 144.4 trillion.

This adjustment follows a massive hashrate rebound after severe winter storms in the United States forced many miners to temporarily power down. As these operators reconnected their rigs, block production times plummeted to under 9 minutes, triggering the protocol's automated upward adjustment.

• Hashrate Recovery: The network hashrate rose from 884 EH/s back above 1,030 EH/s.
• Significance: This marks the largest absolute increase in the history of the network, underscoring that Bitcoin mining remains highly competitive even in a suppressed price environment.

Technical Analysis: The "True Market Mean" Resistance

According to the latest "Week On-chain" report from Glassnode, Bitcoin is currently trading in a "defensive range." The "True Market Mean," a metric representing the aggregate cost basis of active supply, is positioned at $79,000 and is acting as a stiff technical ceiling.

Currently, the market is finding support in the $60,000–$69,000 zone, where significant volume was traded throughout 2024 and 2025. However, if this demand cluster fails to hold, the next major structural floor is the Realized Price at $54,900.

Security Alert: 12-Month Anniversary of the Bybit Exploit

On the security front, today marks the one-year anniversary of the $1.46 billion Bybit exploit, attributed by the FBI to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. A recent report from Elliptic warns that DPRK-linked cyber activity is actually accelerating. In January 2026, the volume of social engineering attacks was double the monthly average of 2025.

With state-sponsored hackers focusing on sophisticated "spear-phishing" and social engineering, individual security is more important than ever. We highly recommend reviewing our hardware wallet comparison to move your assets off exchanges and into self-custody.

The digital asset market is currently standing at a delicate crossroads. After the highs of 2025, investors are increasingly concerned about a potential "black swan" event that could trigger a significant market correction. While $Bitcoin remains the bellwether for the industry, external pressures are mounting that could force prices lower across the board.

Will Cryptos Crash Again?

Yes, the probability of a sharp correction is elevated due to a combination of escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, a "hawkish" turn in U.S. monetary policy, and a massive overhang of leveraged positions. Historically, crypto news has shown that when these three factors align, the result is often a double-digit percentage drop in a matter of days.

1. Geopolitical Escalation: The US, Israel, and Iran

The most immediate threat to the crypto market is the rising risk of a direct military confrontation between the United States, Israel, and Iran. In early 2026, diplomatic efforts have hit a stalemate, and military buildups in the region have reached critical levels.

Cryptocurrencies are often marketed as "digital gold," but in times of actual kinetic warfare, they frequently behave as high-risk assets. We saw a clear example of this in April 2024, when Iran launched a drone and missile attack on Israel. Within hours, Bitcoin plummeted by over 7%, dropping to $61,000, while altcoins saw even steeper declines of up to 20%. A similar event occurred in June 2025, where Israeli strikes led to over $1 billion in liquidations in a single day.

If a full-scale "kinetic action" occurs in the coming weeks, as some White House advisors suggest is possible, we could see a flight to safety. In this scenario, investors typically dump "risk-on" assets like $Ethereum and $Solana in favor of the US Dollar and physical Gold.

2. A "Hawkish" Federal Reserve and the Strong Dollar

While many expected the Federal Reserve to pivot toward aggressive rate cuts in 2026, the reality has been quite different. Inflation remains "sticky," and the nomination of a more hawkish Fed Chair has signaled that high interest rates are here to stay for longer than anticipated.

• The DXY Factor: The US Dollar Index (DXY) has recently surged above the 97.5 level. Historically, there is an inverse correlation between the strength of the dollar and the price of Bitcoin.
• Liquidity Drain: Higher rates mean that the "easy money" which fueled the 2025 bull run is drying up. Institutional investors, who now control a massive portion of the supply through spot ETFs, are more sensitive to these macro shifts and may continue their recent trend of multi-billion dollar outflows.

According to data from Bloomberg, the persistent high-rate environment makes non-yielding assets like crypto less attractive compared to 5% yields on "risk-free" government bonds.

3. The "Liquidation Cascade" and Corporate Sell-offs

The third reason for a potential crash is structural. The market is currently "over-leveraged," meaning many traders are using borrowed funds to bet on higher prices. When a small price drop occurs—perhaps triggered by the geopolitical or macro reasons mentioned above—it forces these traders to sell, which pushes the price down further, triggering even more sales.

Furthermore, the rise of "Digital Asset Treasuries" (DATs)—companies that follow the Michael Saylor playbook—has created a new risk. If Bitcoin stays below key support levels for too long, these companies may face pressure from shareholders to liquidate their holdings to cover operating losses, creating a massive wave of "forced selling" that the market may not have the liquidity to absorb.

The digital asset market is currently at a critical juncture as of February 19, 2026. While the broader sector grapples with macroeconomic uncertainty from the Federal Reserve, $XRP has carved out a distinct technical path. Traders and institutional investors are now laser-focused on a singular objective: the $1.60 resistance zone.

XRP Price Target: The Strategic Significance of $1.60

In the current market structure, $1.60 is more than just a psychological number; it represents the "bull-bear" line for the first quarter of 2026. Reclaiming this level would effectively invalidate the bearish "pin bar" rejection seen earlier this week and confirm that the massive institutional inflows into are finally outweighing sell-side pressure from exchange-heavy whales.

XRP Price Analysis: Breaking the Ceiling

XRP is currently consolidating after a sharp rejection near the $1.67 peak. The strategy for the coming days hinges on how the asset interacts with its overhead hurdles.

1. The Resistance Ladder

The path to a sustained rally requires a systematic flip of several key levels:

1. The Immediate Hurdle ($1.51 - $1.57): This zone served as the "rejection point" on February 16. Until the bulls can close a 4-hour candle above $1.57, the $1.60 milestone remains out of reach.
2. The Major Milestone ($1.60): This level aligns with the 50% Fibonacci retracement of the recent swing high. A breakout here is widely considered the trigger for a "short squeeze," as funding rates on major have recently flipped negative.
3. The Bullish Gateway ($1.81): Beyond $1.60, the next structural resistance sits at $1.81, which matches the November and December floors.

2. Momentum Indicators: The Coil Effect

• The Stochastic RSI is currently deep in the "opportunity zone" (below 10). Historically, when XRP reaches these oversold extremes while maintaining its primary horizontal support, it often leads to a "spring-loaded" move.
• Trading Insight: The combination of shrinking exchange supply (down to 1.7 billion tokens) and an oversold RSI suggests that the market is "coiling." A sudden burst in volume could propel the asset toward the $1.60 milestone within a very short window.

Fundamental Catalysts: Why Now?

Several market-moving events are providing the fuel for this potential breakout:

• Institutional Deployment: As reports, cumulative ETF inflows have now topped $1.37 billion. This "steady hand" buying is absorbing the volatility created by retail panic.
• Regulatory Momentum: The appointment of Ripple leadership to federal advisory committees has shifted sentiment from "defensive" to "expansionary."
• On-Chain Scarcity: Exchange balances are at their lowest levels since 2018, according to Glassnode data. This reduced "sell-side liquidity" means that any fresh demand at the $1.60 level could result in outsized upward price action.

XRP Price Prediction: Looking Higher and Lower

A professional trader's strategy requires planning for both directions. Here are the targets based on current market depth:

Higher Targets (The Breakout Play)

• Milestone 1 ($1.60): Confirms local trend reversal and triggers momentum buying.
• Milestone 2 ($1.85): Reclaims the 50-day EMA and sets the stage for a $2.00 retest.
• Long-Term Target ($2.40): The previous January 2026 high.

Lower Targets (The Defensive Play)

• Support 1 ($1.40): The immediate structural floor.
• Support 2 ($1.26): The "October flash-crash" low, which serves as a secondary demand zone.
• Critical Floor ($1.11): The absolute year-to-date bottom.

Conclusion: The Gateway to a Recovery

The $1.60 breakout is the "litmus test" for Ripple bulls. Achieving this milestone would signal that the corrective phase is over and that the asset is ready to resume its institutional growth trajectory. While stability is still a required variable, XRP’s independent on-chain strength is becoming harder to ignore.

Crypto markets have entered another sharp correction phase. Bitcoin has printed multiple consecutive red candles, Ethereum is under pressure, and altcoins are broadly selling off.

At first glance, many traders are blaming the Federal Reserve. Others point to political headlines or speculative FUD. But the deeper driver appears to be something far more structural: a liquidity shock.

This is not a crypto-specific collapse. It is a macro liquidity event.

What Is the Treasury General Account (TGA)?

The Treasury General Account (TGA) is essentially the US government’s bank account held at the Federal Reserve.

When the US Treasury increases the balance in the TGA, it pulls liquidity out of the financial system. That money moves from banks and markets into the government’s account.

In practical terms:

• Liquidity leaves risk assets
• Bank reserves decline
• Financial conditions tighten
• Risk markets weaken

Crypto, being one of the most liquidity-sensitive asset classes, reacts quickly.

Why This Is Hitting Crypto Now

Recent data suggests that a significant amount of liquidity has been drained as the Treasury refills the TGA.

This creates a temporary but powerful tightening effect across markets:

• Equities show weakness
• Metals experience forced liquidations
• Crypto sees broad-based selling

Bitcoin’s recent sequence of red candles reflects this shift in liquidity conditions rather than a fundamental breakdown in the network or adoption narrative.

There has been no protocol failure. No structural collapse. No major regulatory shock. What we are seeing is liquidity compression.

This Is Not 2022 — But It Rhymes

In 2022, crypto collapsed due to systemic internal failures and aggressive monetary tightening.

Today’s environment is different.

The Federal Reserve is not aggressively hiking rates. Inflation expectations are stabilising. Institutional participation remains present.

However, liquidity cycles still matter.

Even without rate hikes, when government actions temporarily remove liquidity from the system, risk assets respond.

Crypto tends to react first and react harder.

Why Liquidity Matters More Than Headlines

Recent headlines range from tariff uncertainty to political developments and institutional positioning. While these stories create short-term volatility, they are not the core driver.

Liquidity is.

Crypto thrives when:

1. Global liquidity expands
2. Bank reserves grow
3. Capital seeks higher returns

It struggles when:

1. Liquidity contracts
2. Cash is pulled from the system
3. Leverage unwinds

The current market structure suggests we are in a temporary liquidity contraction phase.

What Happens When Liquidity Returns?

Historically, when TGA refilling slows or liquidity conditions stabilise, risk assets often rebound.

Crypto, being high-beta, tends to recover aggressively once capital flows resume.

That does not mean volatility disappears. But it does mean the current correction may be structural repositioning rather than the start of a long-term collapse.

The key variables to monitor:

• TGA balance trends
• Bank reserve data
• Dollar strength
• Treasury issuance pace
• Options market positioning

Final Outlook: Structural Reset or Opportunity?

Crypto markets are not collapsing because of hawkish Fed policy or internal breakdowns.

They are reacting to a liquidity shock.

Understanding that distinction is critical.

If liquidity conditions stabilise, this phase may ultimately resemble previous macro-driven resets — painful in the short term but constructive for the next expansion cycle.

As always, volatility remains elevated, and risk management is essential.

States are scoring victories against prediction markets when they invoke congressional intent, said a legal expert—and losing when they focus on narrower legal definitions.

Software firm Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) and its co-founder Michael Saylor have become synonymous with Bitcoin. Here’s what you need to know.

Bitcoin ticked up after the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump exceeded his authority in imposing most tariffs on foreign goods.

The cinema chain has stepped back from screening an award-winning AI short while Hollywood battles over the technology’s creative role.

Lawmakers in South Korea are intensifying scrutiny over the role of regulators after Bithumb accidentally gave out $43 billion in Bitcoin.

Strategy founder Michael Saylor has predicted that Bitcoin could surge to $1 million (unless it is crashes to zero).

Coinbase suspends 25 perpetual contracts following a liquidity-driven review. See the full list of affected tokens, from AI microcaps to layer-2 ecosystems.

A bug was found in the batch transaction and another fix amendment for the XRP Ledger, causing a setback for both.

Bitcoin whales are not entirely backing down amid the prolonged market volatility as they have scooped up over 30,000 BTC in the last week.

RLUSD is on track to hit two billion circulating supply amid sustained Ripple minting.

TLDR:

• The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, putting $150B+ in potential refunds on the table for U.S. firms.
• Refunds won’t be automatic; companies must file claims or lawsuits to recover payments made under the tariffs.
• If tariffs ease, import costs may fall, inflation could cool, and the Fed may have room to cut rates sooner.
• Trump retains tariff authority under Sections 232, 301, and 122, though broader tariffs now require stronger legal grounds.

The Supreme Court has ruled Trump’s sweeping tariffs unconstitutional, upending a cornerstone of his trade policy. 

Importers across the U.S. paid over $150 billion under these tariffs. The government now faces pressure to return that money. The ruling reshapes the trade landscape and carries wide economic consequences.

Supreme Court Tariff Ruling Opens Door to $150 Billion in Refunds

The tariffs in question relied on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, known as IEEPA. The court’s decision strips that tool from the administration’s trade arsenal. It does not, however, eliminate the president’s authority to levy tariffs altogether.

Refunds will not flow automatically to affected companies. According to Bull Theory, businesses will likely need to file formal claims or pursue litigation. That process could take months or years to resolve.

If the government approves large-scale refunds, federal revenue takes a serious hit. The fiscal gap could force higher borrowing, which tends to push Treasury yields upward. That creates a new pressure point for bond markets.

At the same time, removing these tariffs could ease cost burdens on importers. Lower import costs typically reduce what businesses charge consumers. That could translate into softer inflation readings over time.

Crypto and Financial Markets Watch Fed’s Next Move Amid Tariff Fallout

The Federal Reserve currently faces a difficult position. Growth signals are soft. Inflation remains sticky. The tariff ruling adds a new variable to that calculation.

If import costs fall and inflation cools, the Fed gains more room to cut interest rates. Bull Theory notes that reduced tariff pressure and easing prices could support more aggressive rate cuts. Lower rates historically benefit risk assets, including crypto markets.

Rate cuts tend to lift consumer spending and business investment. Housing markets also respond quickly to cheaper borrowing. Crypto traders watch these macro signals closely.

Trump still holds several legal tools for imposing tariffs. Section 232 covers national security-based tariffs and applies to specific industries. Section 301 targets countries engaged in unfair trade practices, and it already underpins most China-related tariffs.

Section 122 offers a faster but narrower option, limited in size and duration. Anti-dumping and countervailing duties remain available too, though they require formal legal proceedings. 

Bull Theory points out that what changes most is speed. IEEPA allowed near-instant, broad tariffs. Future tariffs will require investigations and stronger legal grounds.

The post Supreme Court Rules Trump Tariffs Illegal, $150B Refund Now on the Table appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Illicit stablecoin flows hit $141B in 2025, the highest figure TRM Labs has recorded in five years.
• Sanctions-linked networks drove 86% of all illicit crypto volume, anchored by Russia’s A7 platform.
• Guarantee services moved funds that were 99% stablecoin-denominated, peaking above $17B per quarter.
• Zedcex and Zedxion processed 83% of volume in USDT before receiving OFAC sanctions in 2026.

Stablecoins have quietly become the backbone of global crypto crime. New data from TRM Labs reveals illicit entities received $141 billion through stablecoin wallets in 2025. 

That figure marks the highest level recorded in five years. Monthly stablecoin transaction volumes surpassed $1 trillion several times throughout the year.

Sanctions Networks Fuel Stablecoin Crime Surge in 2025

According to the report by TRM Labs, sanctions-related activity accounted for 86% of all illicit crypto flows last year. That share climbs to 42% after removing volumes tied to the A7A5 token, a ruble-pegged stablecoin. 

TRM Labs traced much of this activity to the A7 network, a cross-border payment platform tied to Russia. The firm attributed at least $83 billion in direct volume to addresses linked to A7 following a communications leak.

Garantex and Grinex, both sanctioned Russian exchanges, maintained heavy exposure to A7. These platforms operated with stablecoins as internal settlement rails.

They used them to reconcile transactions across affiliated entities and shell companies. 

TRM noted bidirectional flows between A7 and entities registered in jurisdictions including Kyrgyzstan.

A7A5 itself functions almost entirely within sanctions-linked ecosystems, per TRM Labs. USDT and A7A5 together served as core payment instruments in these networks. 

State-linked entities tied to China, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela intersected with these flows. Stablecoins enabled cross-border value movement outside traditional banking controls.

In January 2026, the US Treasury designated Zedcex and Zedxion. These were the first sanctions ever targeting digital asset exchanges for operating within Iran’s financial sector. 

Between 2024 and 2025, roughly 83% of incoming volume to both platforms was in USDT. TRM’s analysis confirmed they functioned as value-transfer intermediaries, not retail trading platforms.

Illicit Use Varies Sharply Across Crime Categories

Stablecoin adoption is not uniform across crime types. Illicit goods, services, and laundering networks show near-total reliance on stablecoins. .

Scams and ransomware operators favor Bitcoin at the point of offense before converting later. CSAM vendors recorded significantly lower stablecoin usage, leaning on fragmented payment structures instead.

Guarantee and escrow services showed particularly stark numbers. Roughly 99% of volume through these services moved in stablecoins. Quarterly activity in this category surged from under $1 billion to peaks above $17 billion by mid-2025. 

A sharp drop followed in late 2025 after enforcement actions hit Huione and Haowang Guarantee in October.

TRM Labs flagged professional facilitators as the primary source of stablecoin-linked illicit risk. These include guarantee services, OTC desks, and front-company exchanges. 

Stablecoins offer them speed, low costs, and price certainty at high transaction volumes. That combination makes them operationally attractive for industrial-scale laundering.

The post Stablecoins Now Drive 86% of All Illicit Crypto Flows, TRM Labs Finds appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• BGD Labs announced it will end its contributions to Aave DAO on April 1 after nearly four years of work.
• The firm said it will continue supporting Aave v3 and related infrastructure until its contract expires.
• BGD Labs cited governance tensions and structural shifts within the Aave ecosystem as reasons for its departure.
• The company described an asymmetric organizational scenario involving Aave Labs’ growing control.
• Aave Labs has proposed directing all protocol revenue to the DAO treasury while seeking funding for development.

BGD Labs confirmed it will end its work with Aave DAO on April 1, closing nearly four years of technical leadership. The firm said it will complete its current service agreement and assist with a transition plan. The announcement follows governance friction and structural changes within the Aave ecosystem.

Aave Governance Shift and Development Disputes

BGD Labs informed the Aave community through a forum post on Friday. The firm said it wants to ensure continuity before its contract expires. It will continue supporting Aave v3, Umbrella, chain expansions, asset onboarding, and security until April 1.

The company described Aave v3 as the ecosystem’s “crown jewel.” It said it built and refined its core infrastructure since early 2022. It also stated that governance systems “just work” and can operate without major changes.

BGD Labs linked its departure to structural changes within Aave. Aave Labs has moved to lead Aave v4 development and related initiatives. The firm said this shift created an “asymmetric organizational scenario.”

It argued that Aave Labs controls brand assets and communication channels. It also referenced voting influence within governance processes. The firm said these factors introduce centralization risks in a decentralized framework.

BGD Labs criticized what it called an adversarial stance toward improving Aave v3. It said contributors advised on v4 without incentives or design participation. The firm wrote, “the environment no longer aligns with how we operate.”

Transition Plan and Proposed Security Retainer

BGD Labs said it will publish documentation and maintenance guidelines. It wants other contributors to assume its responsibilities smoothly. The firm pledged full cooperation during the remaining contract period.

It confirmed that Aave’s core systems remain stable and future-proof. The team said infrastructure and safety mechanisms can function indefinitely. It credited years of operational procedures and governance tooling.

Aave Labs recently proposed directing all protocol revenue to the DAO treasury. In return, it requested funding for ongoing development work. The plan includes placing intellectual property under a new foundation.

The proposal prioritizes Aave v4 rollout and coordination with the DAO. It also suggests reducing new feature work on v3. The plan outlines a gradual wind-down of v3 after v4 launches.

BGD Labs proposed an optional security retainer from April through June 2026. The firm would respond to incidents affecting Aave v3 and governance systems. The retainer would cost $200,000 and requires DAO approval.

The firm stated it remains committed to a stable transition. It said it will fulfill all duties through the contract’s end date. The optional retainer now awaits a governance vote.

The post BGD Labs Confirms Aave Departure Amid Governance Shift appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty said lawmakers are now reviewing specific language for the CLARITY Act.
• Alderoty confirmed that participants worked through detailed statutory text during recent meetings in Washington.
• He thanked Representative Patrick McHenry for helping move the crypto legislation forward.
• The CLARITY Act aims to define oversight roles between the SEC and the CFTC.
• Industry representatives took part in drafting discussions alongside lawmakers and executive branch officials.

Lawmakers and industry representatives are now drafting precise statutory text for a major crypto bill. Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty confirmed the shift after meetings in Washington. He said discussions on the CLARITY Act now center on exact wording and implementation details.

CLARITY Act Discussions Move to Technical Drafting Stage

Alderoty said participants reviewed “specific language” during the latest policy session. He shared the update in a public post after the meeting. He stated, “We rolled up our sleeves and went through specific language today.” He added that discussions will continue in the coming days.

He thanked Representative Patrick McHenry for advancing the legislation. He said McHenry has played an important role in moving talks forward. Lawmakers and stakeholders focused on refining definitions and oversight provisions. They worked through line-by-line text that could shape the final statutory language.

Earlier talks addressed market structure and token classification at a broad level. However, current sessions concentrate on drafting enforceable rules. Participants are now aligning terminology tied to agency jurisdiction. They are also reviewing how the bill assigns regulatory responsibilities.

Ripple Engages Directly in Legislative Negotiations

Ripple has taken part in policy meetings related to digital asset regulation. The company has engaged with lawmakers during negotiations over the bill’s framework. Alderoty indicated that industry representatives contributed directly to drafting discussions. He said participants examined wording that could guide agency enforcement.

The CLARITY Act seeks to define oversight boundaries between the SEC and the CFTC. Lawmakers aim to clarify how agencies classify and supervise digital tokens. Industry groups have argued that unclear definitions created compliance challenges. They have also said that regulatory overlap increases legal disputes.

Ripple’s involvement follows its multi-year court dispute with federal regulators. The company has advocated for clearer federal rules governing digital assets. Alderoty’s recent comments show continued engagement in the legislative process. He described the talks as focused and text-driven.

Officials from the executive branch also attended recent meetings. The White House session indicated coordination across branches of government. However, Congress must pass the bill through both chambers. Lawmakers continue negotiations as they refine draft provisions.

The post Ripple CLO Stuart Alderoty Says CLARITY Act Talks Shift to Drafting appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Peter Schiff warned that Bitcoin could fall to $20,000 if it breaks below the $50,000 level.
• He said such a move would mark an 84% decline from Bitcoin’s all-time high.
• Schiff urged holders to sell Bitcoin now as he questioned the current market structure.
• He argued that high leverage and institutional ownership could worsen any sharp downturn.
• Bitcoin supporters pushed back and defended the asset’s long-term value and network strength.

Peter Schiff renewed his criticism of Bitcoin and warned of a steep decline if prices fall below $50,000. He said a break of that level could push the asset toward $20,000. He urged holders to sell now and framed the risk as severe.

Bitcoin Crash Warning Targets $50K Support

Schiff posted his latest warning on X and pointed to weakening price action.

He wrote, “If Bitcoin price breaks $50K, which looks likely, it seems highly likely it will at least test $20K.”

He added that such a move would mark an 84% drop from the all-time high. He said prior drawdowns followed similar patterns but occurred under different conditions.

Schiff stated, “I know Bitcoin has done that before,” and compared the setup to earlier cycles. However, he argued that current leverage and ownership levels change the risk profile.

He said hype, leverage, and institutional exposure now sit at elevated levels. He warned that these factors could accelerate losses during a selloff.

Schiff has long criticized Bitcoin and promoted gold as an alternative store of value. He repeated his call and told followers to “Sell Bitcoin now!”

Bitcoin previously fell more than 70% after its 2017 peak. It also dropped sharply after reaching its 2021 high.

Those declines occurred before the launch of U.S. spot exchange-traded funds. They also preceded wider corporate treasury allocations.

Market Pushback and Ongoing Divide

Schiff’s comments drew immediate responses from Bitcoin supporters on X. Critics accused him of repeating a bearish stance he has held for years.

One user said investors who followed his silver calls remained “stuck in it for 20 years.” Others noted that Schiff urged sales when Bitcoin traded near $100.

Several replies highlighted Bitcoin’s censorship-resistant settlement network. They argued that global liquidity and open access support its long-term case.

One response said volatility reflects price discovery in a developing system. That user framed swings as part of market maturation.

Schiff has issued similar warnings during previous rallies and downturns. He has maintained that Bitcoin behaves like a speculative bubble.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin now counts spot ETFs, corporations, and institutions among holders. These entities control large portions of the circulating supply.

The debate reflects a divide over whether institutional ownership strengthens or weakens resilience. Schiff’s forecast centers on a potential break below $50,000 and a move toward $20,000.

The post Peter Schiff Urges Bitcoin Sell-Off, Sees 84% Price Plunge appeared first on Blockonomi.

Changpeng Zhao (CZ), founder and former CEO of the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, has revealed his role in the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Bitcoin adoption.

In a tweet highlighting information that the UAE has formally recognized bitcoin (BTC) as a store of value similar to gold, CZ disclosed that his advocacy contributed to the development.

CZ Influenced the UAE’s Bitcoin Adoption

“I might have done a tiny bit of advocacy for this,” the Binance founder said.

It is no news that CZ established his primary residence in Dubai in 2021, due to the city’s pro-crypto and forward-thinking environment. His presence in the city and influence on prominent figures have certainly affected their stance on Bitcoin and the crypto industry as a whole.

Over the years, the UAE has increased its Bitcoin exposure through mining and the purchase of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). By 2022, Abu Dhabi’s royal family had ventured into Bitcoin mining through its affiliated firm, Citadel Mining. The royal family, through Citadel, established large-scale mining operations on AI Reem Island and has since amassed over $450 million in bitcoin.

Earlier today, the market intelligence platform, Arkham, revealed that the UAE has mined $453.6 BTC. On-chain data shows the entity has been holding the majority of BTC produced, with its last outflow recorded 4 months ago. The royal family is now $344 million in profit on their BTC, minus energy costs.

UAE’s Bitcoin Exposure Crosses $1B

Besides the Bitcoin mining ventures, two major Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth entities, namely Mubadala Investment Company and Al Warda Investments, have purchased millions of shares in spot Bitcoin ETFs. By the end of 2025, the companies had amassed more than $1 billion in combined holdings of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).

Separate 13F filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed that by the end of last year, Mubadala held over 12.7 million shares in IBIT. On the other hand, Al Warda owned at least 8.21 million shares of the same product. The shares were worth $631 million and $408 million, respectively.

Although the value of the ETF shares has plummeted alongside bitcoin’s price, the combined Bitcoin exposure for the UAE remains well above $1 billion. With the government recognizing BTC as a store of value, the cryptocurrency is likely to be treated as a permanent reserve asset going forward.

The post Binance’s CZ Says He Played a ‘Tiny’ Part in UAE’s Embrace of Bitcoin as Store of Value appeared first on CryptoPotato.

XRP remains under sustained bearish pressure across both its USDT and BTC pairs, with the price structure continuing to print lower highs and lower lows. Despite short-term bounces from support levels, the broader trend favors sellers as the price trades below key moving averages and within a descending structure.

Ripple Price Analysis: The USDT Pair

On the XRP/USDT chart, the price is trading inside a well-defined descending channel, consistently rejecting dynamic resistance from the midline of the channel, the upper trendline, and the 100-day and 200-day moving averages. The recent bounce from the $1.20 demand zone failed to reclaim the $1.80 supply area, reinforcing the bearish structure and confirming that rallies are still corrective in nature.

The RSI also remains below the neutral 50 level and continues to trend weakly, signaling a lack of bullish momentum. As long as XRP stays below the mid-channel resistance and the 100-day and 200-day moving averages, located near $1.90 and $2.30 levels, respectively, the downside risk toward the lower channel boundary remains elevated, with the $1.20 zone acting as critical structural support.

The BTC Pair

Against Bitcoin, XRP is also showing relative weakness, trading below both the 100-day and 200-day moving averages, which are both located above the 2,200 sats area, after failing to hold prior breakout gains. The rejection from the 2,200-2,400 sats resistance zone confirms that sellers are defending higher levels, while the price compresses near a key horizontal support band at 2,000 sats.

Momentum on the XRP/BTC pair is neutral-to-bearish, with the RSI struggling to establish sustained strength above 50. A breakdown below the current support region could open the door for further relative underperformance, while reclaiming the moving average cluster would be the first signal that XRP is beginning to regain strength versus BTC.

The post Ripple Price Prediction: Will XRP Drop Back to $1.20? Key Support Levels Tested Amid Bearish Pressure appeared first on CryptoPotato.

After the aggressive sell-off toward the $1.8K region, the market has transitioned into choppy consolidation, while lower timeframes are now approaching a decisive breakout point. The key question is whether this compression resolves to the upside or results in continuation within the dominant downtrend structure.

Ethereum Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

On the daily timeframe, ETH continues to trade inside a descending channel, with the midline acting as dynamic resistance and the $1.8K region serving as a firm structural base. Following the aggressive sell-off, the price action has turned increasingly choppy, printing overlapping candles and minor retracements rather than impulsive continuation. This behavior signals equilibrium and indecision.

The consolidation remains confined between the channel’s mid-boundary above and the $1.8K demand zone below. Each attempt to push higher has been capped before reclaiming a meaningful resistance cluster, while sellers have failed to generate a decisive breakdown beneath the base. Until one of these boundaries is violated, the dominant expectation is continued range-bound fluctuation.

A confirmed breakout above the midline would open the path toward the next resistance zone around the $2.3K–$2.5K region. Conversely, losing $1.8K would invalidate the equilibrium and likely trigger another bearish impulse.

ETH/USDT 4-Hour Chart

On the 4-hour timeframe, the price compression is more evident. ETH has formed a clear triangle pattern, defined by descending resistance and rising support. The structure reflects volatility contraction and is now approaching its apex, suggesting that a breakout is imminent.

The recent higher lows inside the pattern indicate improving short-term demand, increasing the probability of an upside resolution. However, as long as ETH remains capped below the 0.5 Fib at $2,396, the structure remains technically corrective within a broader downtrend.

A confirmed breakout above the triangle, followed by a reclaim of $2,396, would shift short-term momentum toward the 0.618 level at $2,549 and potentially the 0.702–0.786 retracement cluster near $2,658–$2,767, which also coincides with a marked supply zone on the chart.

On the downside, failure to break upward and a decisive loss of the triangle’s ascending support would expose the $1,800–$1,746 base once again. In that scenario, the recent consolidation would resolve as a continuation pattern rather than a reversal attempt.

At this stage, ETH is at a technical inflection point, with Fibonacci resistance levels clearly defining the upside targets and the $1.8K base anchoring the downside risk.

Sentiment Analysis

The Taker Buy/Sell Ratio across all exchanges provides additional context for the current equilibrium. The ratio has remained below the 1.0 threshold for a prolonged period, indicating that aggressive market sells have dominated overall order flow. This aligns with the broader bearish structure observed on higher timeframes.

However, the recent rebound in the ratio and the stabilization of its 30-day EMA suggest that selling pressure may be weakening. Although buyers have not yet taken full control, the gradual recovery toward the neutral level signals improving demand. If the ratio decisively moves above 1.0 and sustains that level, it would confirm aggressive market buying and increase the probability of an upside breakout from the triangle structure.

Overall, Ethereum is positioned at a technical and derivatives inflection point. The daily chart reflects equilibrium, the 4-hour chart shows imminent compression resolution, and order-flow metrics suggest that bearish dominance is softening. A decisive break from the current structure will likely define the next impulsive phase.

The post Ethereum Price Analysis: 4-Hour Triangle Compression Signals Imminent Breakout appeared first on CryptoPotato.

After a few delays, the United States Supreme Court finally announced its ruling on the highly debated Trump-tariff case. Unfortunately for the US President, the Court ruled them illegal, rejecting their usage of emergency powers to impose trade duties.

As reported by Walter Bloomberg, the import tariffs from countries like Canada, China, Mexico, and the EU were projected to raise $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN TRUMP’S GLOBAL TARIFFS

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Trump’s global tariffs are illegal, rejecting his use of emergency powers to impose trade duties.

• The tariffs, covering imports from Canada, China, Mexico, and nearly all… pic.twitter.com/Qu7EVbBCch

— *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) February 20, 2026

Trump was quick to lash out against the Supreme Court’s decision, calling it a “disgrace.” Additionally, he said his administration has a backup plan.

Further reports on the matter, including trade expert Lawrence Herman’s opinion, indicated that the trade tensions won’t end with the Supreme Court’s ruling. He reportedly added that the tariffs are “here to stay in one form or another,” and warned that the US-Canada trade relationship has already been “shattered.”

In the more recent development on the matter as of press time, Trump seemed to have threatened the US legal system, saying he had to do something about the courts.

Bitcoin has had a long and mostly painful history with Trump’s tariff impositions. It plunged last April when the first wave was announced and has reacted negatively to almost all threats from the POTUS to other countries.

After the Supreme Court ruling today, BTC went on a wild micro ride, going down to $66,500, jumping to over $68,000 within minutes, before it repeated the scenario a few times. It has since settled at under $68,000.

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After several consecutive weeks of intense volatility and new multi-year lows, bitcoin has finally found some support but also significant resistance that continues to suppress its breakout attempts.

Last Friday, the cryptocurrency tested the $65,000 support after it was stopped at $70,000 and $72,000 days earlier. The bulls intervened at this point and didn’t allow another breakdown. Just the opposite; bitcoin started to recover some ground and exceeded $70,000 in a rare weekend rally.

Nevertheless, that was another short-term fakeout as the asset’s attempt failed in its tracks. By Monday, it had already lost that coveted psychological level and began a gradual descent. After a few days of trading sideways between $68,000 and $70,000, it broke down to under $66,000 yesterday amid multiple calls about further declines, and new lows of down to $10,000 in some doomsday scenarios.

It reacted rather well to this drop and jumped to just over $68,000 earlier today. However, another rejection awaited, and BTC now sits below $67,000 once again. This means that its weekly performance is somewhat negative, given the fact that it traded slightly above this level at this time last Friday when we published our previous update.

Even the more volatile altcoin sector has not posted any significant moves in either direction. XRP, BNB, and ADA are slightly in the green, while ETH, LINK, and XLM are with some losses.

More impressive gains come from the likes of WLFI, PEPE, and ZEC, while HYPE has dropped the most from the larger-cap alts.

Market Data

Market Cap: $2.36T | 24H Vol: $95B | BTC Dominance: 56.4%

BTC: $66,750 (-1%) | ETH: $1,930 (-2%) | XRP: $1.38 (+0.3%)

This Week’s Crypto Headlines You Can’t Miss

Ethereum Foundation Flags Post-Quantum Security as Core Priority in 2026 Protocol Roadmap. The Ethereum Foundation published a 2026 roadmap post, saying it would prioritize post-quantum security and further increases to the gas limit. It also wants to restructure its development efforts into three core tracks covering scaling, user experience, and Layer 1 security.

2,486 BTC: Strategy Doubles Down as Portfolio Hits Unrealized Loss. Although its enormous stash continues to be deep in the red (in terms of unrealized losses), Saylor’s Strategy announced another BTC acquisition this week, purchasing 2,486 BTC for just under $170 million. It now holds more than 717,000 BTC.

Ripple CEO Garlinghouse Predicts CLARITY Bill Has 90% Chance of Approval Soon. Although banks, the crypto industry, and lawmakers continue to struggle to find a resolution to the highly anticipated CLARITY Act, Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse said after the most recent meeting that bipartisan interest in the legislation is high, which is why he expects approval soon.

Ethereum Staking Address Now Holds Over Half ETH Supply For First Time Ever: Santiment. Data from the analytics company indicated that over half of ETH’s supply is now held by Ethereum’s proof-of-stake contract address for the first time in the asset’s eleven-year history.

CryptoQuant Founder Proposes Freezing Old Bitcoin Addresses to Prevent Quantum Attacks. It might be years away from deployment, but quantum computing is a main concern within the cryptocurrency community. CryptoQuant’s CEO proposed that old Bitcoin addresses might need to be frozen to prevent quantum attacks in the future.

Bitcoin Entering Phase 2 Bear Market, Analyst Warns. As mentioned earlier, analysts are rushing to offer their views on the bear market topic, suggesting that the asset might be months away from a more profound recovery. Veteran chartist Willy Woo said BTC has strengthened its bear market trend and has approached the second phase of a multi-stage downturn.

Charts

This week, we have a chart analysis of Ethereum, Ripple, Cardano, Binance Coin, and Hyperliquid – click here for the complete price analysis.

The post Bear Market Fears Grow as BTC Struggles Below $70K, CLARITY Act Resolution Nears: Weekly Crypto Recap appeared first on CryptoPotato.