Good Morning,

Here's a quick preview of today’s content: Public companies continue to add Bitcoin to their balance sheets, CyberKongz free after years long SEC probe, Standard Chartered makes extremely bullish prediction for stablecoin market, Trump is reportedly building a crypto game, a UK legislator has social account hacked, Solana ETFs hit market in Canada today, and so much more below.

Happy Wednesday … something big is coming. Let’s dive in.

Market Snapshot

• Bitcoin fell to $83,600 intraday, retreating from an earlier high of $86,440; XRP dropped over -2% to $2.08, and ADA slipped -4% to $0.61

  • Crypto market sentiment turned negative, with the CoinDesk 20 Index falling over -2%

• Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s speech today is highly anticipated; markets are looking for signs of possible early rate cuts amid rising recession talk

  • Upcoming U.S. retail sales data for March (due Wednesday) is forecasted to show a 1.2% monthly rise, possibly easing recession fears if it exceeds expectations

  • After hours Nvidia shares dropped -8% after revealing a $5.5B expected write-down tied to export restrictions on its H20 chip to China (RT)

Headline Roundup
^{_{The major headlines driving crypto markets}}

• AWS glitch forces Binance and KuCoin to suspend withdrawals and pause some operations which caused widespread panic (TS)

• Trump is reportedly working on a real estate crypto game - see full details here

• NFT collection ‘CyberKongz’ says that the SEC is no longer investigating the firm after a 3 year legal battle (TB)

• The U.S. Bitcoin Reserve could be developed with tariff revenue according to Trump’s executive director, find out how here

• OpenSea now allows Solana token trading ahead of highly anticipated SEA token launch (DT)

• Janover to receive Solana from staking operations agreed in non-binding LOI signed with Kraken (BW)

• Semler Scientific files to raise $500M to buy more Bitcoin (X)

• Mantra, OM, jumps 60% following recent crash, yet still down ~ 85% all time (DF)

• Movement is conducting an internal investigation after market maker issues (BW)

• Pump.fun’s decentralized exchange PumpSwap weekly trading volume reaches new high of $2.3B (DF)

• Blackrock’s BUIDL fund crosses $2.3B valuation, with the firm now holding $48B of BTC and $1.9B of ETH (DF)

• Standard Chartered bets big on stablecoins with $2T market cap prediction by 2028 (TB)

• Revenue splits of USDC between Coinbase have been probed by SEC since 2023 (DT)

• Sui Network and Babylon Labs announce official partnership for bitcoin-secured network (DF)

• Arbitrum Foundation proposes governance shift for Arbitrum DAO, including veto option (DF)

• OpenEden stablecoin hits $100M valuation for RWA tokenization (DF)

• Sky and Spark protocols deploy $25M into Maple Finance lending pool, with options to reach $50M (TB)

Venture Capital

• Treehouse Finance completes another SAFT round, valuing the project at $400M pre-token launch (TB)

• Optimum, a web3 memory startup incubated out of MIT, raises $11M seed round led by 1kx (CD)

• Tether makes strategic investment into Fizen for stablecoin adoption and self-custody solutions (DF)

• Hyperion closes strategic funding round from OKX Ventures and Aptos Labs (AF)

Launches

• Solayer launches Emerald Card, a Visa debit card with crypto rewards (BW)

• Spot Solana ETFs to launch in Canada today that will include staking (TB)

Regulation

• Ethena halts operations in Germany as due to regulatory roadblocks (DT)

• Hayvn Group fined $12.5M by Abu Dhabi regulators for insufficient AML protocols (DT)

• A bipartisan bill has been introduced in the U.S. for accelerating blockchain innovation (CT)

• Debanking is the biggest barrier for crypto adoption and legislation is the biggest support mechanism (CT)

Cybersecurity

• KiloEx token drops 32% following $7.5M oracle exploit (NE)

• A zkSync admin wallet was hacked leading to a $5M for the Ethereum L2 (DF)

• X account of Member of UK Parliament hacked to promote scam coin (CT)

• Fuse and Check Point partner to build a blockchain firewall (CN)

• Aztec develops ‘StealthNote’ for to protect employees and anonymous whistleblowers (TB)

Extra Reads

• The all-time high of Bitcoin is $109,026.02 on January 19th, 2025

  
  Here’s what it might take for bitcoin to top all-time highs

• It’s no secret Ethereum has had a difficult past year
  
  A full breakdown of what it would take for ETH to succeed

• Coinbase Base is an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain developed by Coinbase, designed to improve the scalability, speed, and efficiency of the Ethereum network

  5 must need tools to trade on Base

Chart of the Day

A recent report from Ark Invest states that Bitcoin volatility falls to historic lows

Meme Dump

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