Category: Bitcoin News

Banks Must Upgrade Their Blockchain Infrastructure

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Opinion by: Igor Mandrigin, co-founder and chief technology and product officer of Gateway.fm For years, private distributed ledger systems, like Hyperledger, have provided banks with a secure means to explore blockchain technology without venturing into public networks. These frameworks delivered privacy, permissioned access and a sense of institutional control — qualities that undoubtedly appealed to traditional finance players when the crypto market was still viewed as the Wild West. The environment has changed fundamentally since then, as tokenized assets, stablecoin settlements and institutional crypto exposure have quickly become the standard.…

BitMine Buys $105M ETH to Start 2026, Holds $915M Cash

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BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest known corporate holder of ether, resumed purchases of the cryptocurrency in the new year, signaling continued confidence in Ethereum even as some analysts expect near-term price weakness. BitMine bought $105 million worth of Ether (ETH) in its first reported acquisitions of the new year, according to a Wednesday X post from blockchain data platform Arkham. The treasury company now holds 4.07 million Ether worth $12.6 billion, representing 3.36% of the ETH supply, according to data from the StrategicEthReserve. BitMine still holds $915 million in total…

XRP ETFs See $40.8M Exit in First Outflow Day

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US spot XRP exchange-traded funds (ETFs) recorded their first net outflow day since launch, with about $40.8 million exiting the products on Wednesday, ending a multi-week streak of uninterrupted inflows.  SoSoValue data shows that the pullback marked the first daily reversal after XRP (XRP) ETFs had steadily accumulated assets since mid-November 2025. The outflow day also followed a strong start to the year, with the funds logging consecutive inflow days, pushing their cumulative net inflows to $1.2 billion. The red day coincided with heavy selling pressure across major crypto-linked ETFs.…

Morgan Stanley Bitcoin ETF Will Build Firm’s Clout: Exec

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US investment bank Morgan Stanley may be positioning itself so that even if its newly announced spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) underperforms, it will still deliver strategic benefits across the firm, according to ProCap chief investment officer Jeff Park. “Morgan Stanley is making the bet that even if their ETF doesn’t scale to blockbuster success, there’s an intangible benefit that will help build their clout,” Park said on Wednesday. It comes just a day after Morgan Stanley filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to launch two ETFs, one…

Memecoin Social Buzz Could Signal Renewed Risk Appetite

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Social media buzz around memecoins has jumped since the start of the year, matching the rise in market capitalization, which analysts say could mean risk appetite has returned to crypto. Several memecoins have recently posted strong gains, and a speculative rally pushed the market value of memecoins up, which caught traders’ attention and sparked a rise in crowd interest, the market intelligence platform Santiment said on Wednesday. Vincent Liu, the chief investment officer at trading firm Kronos Research, told Cointelegraph that traders are rotating back into liquidity-rich assets where reflexivity…

3 Checkpoints for Crypto to Reach New Highs in 2026: Bitwise

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Crypto markets need to pass three so-called checkpoints in order to reach new peaks in 2026, which include the US Senate passing a highly-awaited crypto bill, says Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan. “Crypto is off to a good start in 2026,” Hougan said in a note on Tuesday, but added there are “three big hurdles standing between us and new all-time highs.”  Markets are currently down 2% over the past 24 hours, but have gained 5.6%, or around $170 billion, since the beginning of the year, pushing total capitalization…

GENIUS Act Suggested Changes Outrage Crypto Executives

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The bank lobby’s requested changes to the stablecoin-regulating GENIUS Act could undermine competition and weaken the US dollar’s global position, crypto executives and industry groups have claimed.  Crypto advocacy group the Blockchain Association said on Tuesday that a bid to lawmakers by a group of community bankers to ban issuers from offering yield to tokenholders through third parties was “a last-ditch effort by Big Banks to block competition after Congress struck a careful, bipartisan deal.”  The GENIUS Act bans stablecoin issuers from offering interest or yield, but major crypto exchanges…

Wyoming State-Backed Stablecoin FRNT Goes Live to Public

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Wyoming’s Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), the first stablecoin issued by a US state, is now available to the public following delays caused by lingering regulatory hurdles. The state’s Governor Mark Gordon said on Wednesday that it is “the first fiat-backed, fully-reserved stable token to be issued by a public entity in the United States.”  He added that the token would provide “a cheaper, faster, and more transparent means of transacting,” and would be “another source of funding for our schools and can lower the taxpayer burden in our state.” The…

Solana Stablecoin Market Cap Surges as RWA Market Grows

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The market capitalization of stablecoins on the Solana layer-1 blockchain surged by $900 million over a 24-hour period on Tuesday.  Stablecoins, blockchain tokens backed by fiat currency or debt assets, surged to a market cap of $15.3 billion on the Solana network, according to DeFiLlama.  The dramatic surge came as decentralized finance platform Jupiter launched its JupUSD stablecoin, developed in partnership with synthetic stablecoin issuer Ethena. The Solana stablecoin market cap surges. Source: DeFiLlama Solana’s stablecoin ecosystem is dominated by Circle’s USDC (USDC), a dollar-pegged token, which accounts for over…

Gate.io Adds AI Market Analysis Tool as Exchanges Embrace AI

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Cryptocurrency exchange Gate has added an AI-powered market analysis tool, called GateAI, to its trading app, offering automated summaries and explanations of market data. GateAI is available in version 8.2.0 and above of the Gate app and can be accessed across multiple areas of the platform, including token search, spot charts and the community feed. The company said the tool organizes market information based on existing data and is designed to flag uncertainty when conclusions cannot be verified. According to Wednesday’s announcement, the feature is intended as a decision-support tool…