News without the noise
Cryptocurrency and blockchain
50 articles
Blockchain analytics company Elliptic has closed a $120 million Series D funding round backed by Deutsche Bank and Nasdaq Ventures, valuing the firm at $670 million, as major traditional financial institutions continue to expand their exposure to cryptocurrency infrastructure.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is mounting a broad push to establish federal oversight of sports prediction markets, with Chairman Michael Selig confirming the agency is in talks with every major professional sports league while simultaneously backing prediction market platform Kalshi in a legal dispute with Ohio over who has the right to regulate these fast-growing financial instruments.
Bitcoin's current market drawdown — sitting roughly 35% below its all-time high — is proving significantly less severe than previous bear market cycles, according to multiple analysts, with steady inflows into Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and continued corporate accumulation helping to absorb selling pressure. However, warnings of a possible further pullback persist, highlighted by at least one large investor maintaining a costly short position despite mounting losses.
The global payments landscape shifted on two fronts this week: S&P 500 payments firm Corpay announced a partnership with fintech firm BVNK to introduce stablecoin wallets and round-the-clock settlement for its 800,000-strong client network, while Syria moved to restore credit card payments as part of a broader effort to reintegrate into the international financial system.
Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, raised $222 million in a presale of its Arc token at a $3 billion valuation, the company announced on May 11, 2026, with prominent investors including a16z crypto, Andreessen Horowitz, and BlackRock participating in the round alongside the release of strong first-quarter financial results.
Ronin Network, the blockchain infrastructure powering the popular Axie Infinity game, is migrating from an independent Ethereum sidechain to an Ethereum Layer 2 built on the OP Stack on May 12, 2026 — nearly four years after North Korean hacking group Lazarus stole more than $600 million in what remains the largest decentralised finance bridge exploit on record.
Strategy, the software-turned-Bitcoin treasury company led by Michael Saylor, resumed its cryptocurrency acquisitions on Sunday after a brief pause last week, purchasing 535 Bitcoin for approximately $43 million and pushing its total holdings to 818,869 BTC — representing more than 3.9% of the cryptocurrency's hard-capped supply of 21 million coins.
Ripple announced Monday that it has secured a $200 million debt facility from Neuberger Berman's Specialty Finance division to expand its Ripple Prime institutional brokerage platform, which the company says has tripled its revenue in the past year since Ripple acquired it for $1.25 billion.
Seven major bitcoin mining pools — including Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool, and MARA Pool — have joined the Stratum V2 working group, collectively representing nearly three-quarters of Bitcoin's global hashrate and signalling a potentially significant shift in how the network's blocks are built.
The bitcoin market is showing signs of strain amid a contested rally, with on-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant warning that profit-taking by holders is accelerating and a correction may be forthcoming — even as major miners like TeraWulf report that artificial intelligence compute revenue has already eclipsed their bitcoin mining income.
The Senate Banking Committee has announced it will hold a markup hearing for the Clarity Act on Thursday, March 14, marking a second attempt to advance sweeping cryptocurrency market structure legislation through the committee.
Cryptocurrency markets entered the second week of May 2026 with Bitcoin consolidating above the $80,000 mark and Ethereum continuing a prolonged underperformance against its larger rival, while a longer-term structural threat — quantum computing — is quietly pushing crypto firms to redesign the wallets that underpin both networks.
A coordinated international law enforcement operation led by the FBI resulted in the arrest of 276 individuals across multiple countries in connection with sophisticated cryptocurrency fraud schemes known as 'pig butchering' scams, with Dubai police accounting for 275 of the arrests and Thai authorities detaining one additional suspect.
Alex Mashinsky, founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius, has been permanently banned from the crypto industry under a $10 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission — a dramatic reduction from an initial $4.7 billion judgment — as the broader digital asset sector contends with renewed security vulnerabilities and high-stakes recovery operations.
Bitcoin prices retreated this week as traders reduced risk exposure ahead of a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, even as Eric Trump, co-founder of American Bitcoin, declared the cryptocurrency is in its 'greatest period ever' during a keynote at Bitcoin Las Vegas 2026.
Visa has significantly expanded its stablecoin settlement pilot program, adding five new blockchain networks — including Polygon, Base, Canton, Arc and Tempo — bringing the total to nine supported chains, as the program's annualised settlement run rate reached $7 billion and quarterly growth hit 50%, the company announced on Tuesday.
A federal judge has dismissed Sam Bankman-Fried's motion for a new trial, rejecting the convicted FTX founder's claims that potential witnesses were subjected to 'government threats and retaliation' — characterising the allegations as 'wildly conspiratorial.'
Canada's Liberal government has proposed a nationwide ban on cryptocurrency ATMs, describing the machines as a primary vehicle for fraud and money laundering, as data and law enforcement agencies report rising financial losses linked to the devices.
Tether, the world's largest stablecoin issuer, has announced a partnership with mining hardware manufacturer Canaan and Swiss technology firm ACME Swisstech to develop modular, upgradable Bitcoin mining systems, marking its latest expansion beyond its core stablecoin business into broader cryptocurrency infrastructure.
Robinhood reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $1.07 billion, a 15% year-over-year increase, even as its cryptocurrency trading revenue fell by roughly 47% to $134 million — a sharp decline offset by record-breaking activity in event betting and prediction markets.
Polymarket, one of the world's largest decentralized prediction market platforms, is in discussions with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to obtain regulatory approval to reopen its main exchange to American traders, according to reports from Bloomberg cited by CoinDesk and The Block.
Major decentralised finance protocols Aave and Compound, operating under the banner of DeFi United, on Monday released a technical recovery plan aimed at eliminating bad debt and restoring full backing for rsETH tokens following a $293 million exploit of the Kelp DAO protocol.
Visa has announced a partnership with WeFi, a fintech startup co-founded by a former Tether executive, to integrate cryptocurrency payment capabilities into Visa's global payment network, with a stated focus on expanding financial access to underbanked communities worldwide.
The European Commission has expanded its sanctions against Russia to include cryptocurrency exchanges, stablecoins and the country's central bank digital currency (CBDC), in a direct response to Moscow's growing use of digital assets to circumvent existing financial restrictions imposed since the invasion of Ukraine.
Cryptocurrency markets presented a contradictory picture this week as institutional investors poured $1.2 billion into crypto exchange-traded products for the fourth consecutive week, while Bitcoin's spot price reversed from the $79,500 level and fell roughly 2% following a surge in oil prices that rattled broader risk sentiment.
Western Union, one of the world's oldest and largest money transfer companies, is preparing to launch its own stablecoin — dubbed USDPT — as early as May 2026, with CEO Devin McGranahan signalling a broader push to embed digital assets into the company's core payment infrastructure.
A nascent open-source payment protocol called x402 is gaining attention from cryptocurrency developers and AI infrastructure companies alike, with Coinbase's Jesse Pollak and others arguing it could become foundational infrastructure for a future in which AI agents autonomously purchase compute, data, and API services without human intervention.
BitMine Immersion Technologies, the Ethereum treasury firm backed by Wall Street veteran Tom Lee, has purchased approximately 10,000 ETH for $23.9 million directly from the Ethereum Foundation, marking the company's second such transaction after a $10 million purchase of 5,000 ETH last month.
Italian independent researcher Giancarlo Lelli has claimed a 1 bitcoin prize from Project Eleven after successfully breaking a 15-bit elliptic curve key using publicly accessible quantum hardware — the largest such demonstration ever recorded publicly, and one that has renewed debate about how close the cryptocurrency industry is to a so-called 'Q-Day' reckoning.
Morgan Stanley has launched a dedicated government money market fund — MSNXX — designed specifically for stablecoin issuers to hold their reserves, positioning the Wall Street bank as a major institutional custodian for the fast-growing stablecoin sector, according to reports published Thursday.
Spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded their first eight-day consecutive inflow streak since October, drawing approximately $2 billion in fresh capital, according to CoinDesk data — a milestone that BNY Asset Servicing says has pushed year-to-date ETF flows back into positive territory. However, on-chain analysts warn that short-term holders are selling at three times the rate historically associated with local market tops.
A $292 million exploit targeting KelpDAO's bridge infrastructure triggered a mass withdrawal from Aave, one of decentralised finance's largest lending protocols, with deposited funds falling by approximately $15 billion as users sought to limit their exposure while the industry coordinated a collective recovery effort.
Dan Finlay, co-founder of MetaMask and a decade-long veteran of blockchain software firm Consensys, has announced his departure from the company, citing burnout — joining a small but notable wave of prominent crypto figures stepping back from public-facing roles in the industry.
French police are investigating claims that a weather sensor at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport was deliberately tampered with — possibly using a hairdryer or lighter — to manipulate temperature readings used to settle online prediction market bets worth tens of thousands of dollars on the platform Polymarket.
A consortium of twelve prominent European banks, operating under the name Qivalis, has partnered with digital asset infrastructure firm Fireblocks to develop a regulated euro stablecoin compliant with the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, with a planned launch in the second half of 2026.
Crypto market maker GSR has launched its first exchange-traded fund, the GSR Crypto Core3 ETF, offering investors bundled exposure to Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana — the three largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation — marking a notable expansion of institutional-grade crypto investment products.
The United States military is operating a Bitcoin node as part of an effort to evaluate how the blockchain protocol could support national security applications, Admiral Paparo disclosed to Congress on April 23, marking a significant signal of institutional interest in cryptocurrency infrastructure at the highest levels of the US defence establishment.
Tether, the issuer of the world's largest stablecoin, has frozen approximately $344 million in USDT held on the Tron blockchain following coordination with the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and federal law enforcement agencies, in what appears to be one of the largest such freezes in the company's history.
Binance.US announced a sweeping reduction in spot trading fees on Tuesday, setting maker fees to 0% and taker fees to 0.02% across all listed cryptocurrency pairs, as the exchange seeks to attract users by undercutting competitors on price.
The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) conducted its first-ever enforcement operation against illegal peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading on Tuesday, raiding eight sites in London that allegedly facilitated crypto trading without required registration or anti-money laundering controls.
Tesla reported a $173 million loss on its digital asset holdings in its latest financial results, even as the electric vehicle maker's bitcoin stash remained unchanged at 11,509 BTC — worth approximately $880 million at bitcoin's current price of around $78,000.
Global crypto regulation moved on two fronts on Tuesday, April 22, 2026, as US lawmakers reportedly reached a 'good spot' in negotiations over stablecoin yield provisions in a pending crypto bill, while Russian legislators passed a first reading of sweeping crypto legislation that could introduce criminal penalties for unlicensed digital asset activity.
The decentralised finance sector suffered a damaging series of exploits in April 2026, with the Kelp DAO cross-chain bridge hack alone accounting for $292 million in losses and North Korea-linked groups tied to a combined $578 million in cryptocurrency theft across the month — figures that analysts say underscore deep structural vulnerabilities in how DeFi protocols are built and connected.
The crypto fund sector continued its expansion this week as market maker GSR launched its first exchange-traded fund tracking Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, while UK investors gained access to a tax-free route into crypto through a new partnership offering 21Shares exchange-traded notes.
Coinbase's quantum advisory board has released a sweeping 50-page report concluding that while current blockchain networks remain secure, the emergence of fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of breaking widely used encryption is increasingly plausible — and that the cryptocurrency industry must begin preparing now.
Tron blockchain founder Justin Sun has filed a lawsuit against World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the cryptocurrency venture associated with President Donald Trump, alleging that the project unlawfully froze his WLFI token holdings and excluded him from governance participation, according to reports from multiple crypto news outlets published on April 22, 2026.
Core Scientific, one of the United States' largest Bitcoin mining companies turned data centre operators, announced plans on Monday to raise $3.3 billion through a junk-bond offering, with the proceeds earmarked for refinancing existing debt and scaling its artificial intelligence and high-performance computing infrastructure.
New York Attorney General Letitia James filed lawsuits against cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Gemini on Monday, alleging the companies illegally offer gambling services through their prediction market platforms and seeking billions of dollars in damages.
Hackers responsible for the KelpDAO breach have begun actively laundering approximately $290 million in stolen cryptocurrency, on-chain data shows, using privacy tools and cross-blockchain transfers to obscure the funds' origins — raising alarm across the decentralised finance sector about broader systemic risks.
Cryptocurrency investment products attracted $1.4 billion in inflows last week — the second-strongest weekly figure since January — as Bitcoin's price climbed toward $78,000 and total assets under management across crypto funds rose to $154.8 billion, according to data reported by Cointelegraph and The Block.