Vietnam Crypto Licences Draw Five Firms as Overseas Platform Ban Looms

Five Vietnamese companies are reportedly competing to launch the country’s first licensed crypto exchanges as authorities move to bring trading onshore and ban overseas platforms. Five companies have passed an initial qualification round, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing a March 12 finance ministry document. The group reportedly includes affiliates of private banks Techcombank, VPBank and LPBank, alongside stockbroker VIX Securities and conglomerate Sun Group. VPBank and Sun Group reportedly confirmed their licence applications to Reuters. Vietnam opened applications for licenses to operate crypto exchanges in January. The move came after…

World Launches AgentKit to Verify Human-Backed AI Agents Using World ID

World, the identity network co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has released AgentKit, a developer toolkit that allows AI agents to prove they are linked to a verified, unique human through World ID when interacting with websites and online services. The system integrates World ID’s proof-of-human identity with the x402 micropayments protocol started by Coinbase and Cloudflare, allowing agents to pay for access to online resources while presenting cryptographic proof that they are linked to a verified human credential. The x402 protocol allows agents to pay small fees to access…

Cango Posts $285M Q4 Loss on Costs, Impairments

Bitcoin mining firm Cango Inc. reported a net loss of $285 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, as impairment charges, fair-value losses and higher mining costs outweighed revenue from its expanding Bitcoin mining business. In its earnings report published Monday, Cango said fourth-quarter revenue reached $179.5 million, including $172.4 million from Bitcoin mining, while total operating costs and expenses rose to $456.0 million. The losses were driven in part by an $81.4 million impairment on mining machines and a $171.4 million loss tied to changes in the fair value…

Mastercard to Acquire BVNK in $1.8B Stablecoin Payments Push

Mastercard has agreed to acquire stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK in a deal valued at up to $1.8 billion, further expanding into blockchain-based payments. The deal includes up to $300 million in contingent payments and is intended to strengthen Mastercard’s ability to connect fiat payment rails with onchain transactions, the company said on Tuesday. “We expect that most financial institutions and fintechs will in time provide digital currency services, be it with stablecoins or tokenized deposits,” Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard, said. BVNK, founded in 2021, provides infrastructure that…

Bitcoin Standard Author Envision World Without Fiat

Author of The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous, believes that fiat is the central problem plaguing society. “The 20th century is just an enormous amount of wealth being taken away from people who produced it and being sent to the meat grinder of war. And this is what fiat does,” he told Cointelegraph. “If you take that away, we get a lot less murder and death, and then we get a lot more prosperity, productivity and a lot more wealth.” In his latest book, The Gold Standard, he explores this very…

Maestro Debuts Bitcoin Credit Market for Institutional BTC Mining Yield

Bitcoin infrastructure provider Maestro has launched a Bitcoin-denominated credit market backed by mining economics, aiming to give institutions a new way to earn yield on idle Bitcoin while expanding financing options for miners. Maestro said Mezzamine went live with its first program in partnership with mining-as-a-service provider Sazmining. According to a Tuesday announcement shared with Cointelegraph, the program is designed to let institutional Bitcoin (BTC) holders deploy BTC into mining-backed credit facilities targeting an annual yield of 8% to 9%. The offering is designed to connect miners seeking capital with…

DAOs May Need To Ditch Decentralization To Court Institutions

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) were built on an ideological premise that is now running up against the realities of running a business, where decentralization collides with the need for legal ownership and control. On March 11, DAO Across Protocol made a controversial proposal to transition to a private company through a token-to-equity exchange buyout. Risk Labs, the team behind Across (ACX), said that the token and DAO structure “materially” impacted its ability to close deals with enterprises and institutions. The industry reaction has been split. Decentralized finance (DeFi) researcher Ignas…

Bitcoin Adoption Metrics Say One Thing, Price Action Says Another

Key takeaways Bitcoin’s price reflects short-term marginal buying and selling, while adoption reflects long-term structural shifts. Ownership expansion, institutional integration and merchant growth can accelerate even when the market price remains flat or declines. In 2025, Bitcoin expanded significantly across institutions, banks, corporations, merchants and sovereign entities. These shifts represent deeper entrenchment within global financial systems, even as headline price performance appeared underwhelming. Institutions accumulated substantial amounts of Bitcoin, but much of this demand was offset by distribution from long-term holders. As supply changes hands between cohorts, price may consolidate…

Decentralized Compute Has Failed

Opinion by: Leo Fan, founder of Cysic Decentralized compute has failed. Not because it can’t find you a cheap GPU; it’s actually quite good at that. The problem is that every major network today still forces you to trust the node operator with your data and results.  We have replaced Amazon’s login page with a wallet connection and called it Web3. A staggering $2 billion to $3 billion was poured into “decentralized cloud” tokens from 2023 to 2025. Yet none of the top players can give a smart contract mathematical…

Cari Taps ZKsync’s Prividium as US Banks’ Answer to Stablecoins

Cari Network, a permissioned network for banks led by former United States Comptroller of the Currency Gene Ludwig, has chosen Matter Labs’ Prividium infrastructure to power a bank-governed tokenized deposit network for US regional and mid-sized lenders.  Built on ZKsync and anchored to Ethereum, the platform is designed to let participating banks issue and move tokenized deposits around the clock while keeping them on the balance sheet as bank liabilities, according to a Tuesday release shared with Cointelegraph. The move comes as lawmakers debate frameworks such as the Guiding and…