Crypto News

Crypto’s Quiet Power Plays As the sun sets on the markets, today’s crypto tape tells a familiar story: prices wobble, regulators circle, institutions keep building, and a few die-hard players quietly double down. Let’s unpack what mattered. In London, the UK made one of its clearest moves yet toward treating digital assets like grown‑up finance. The Treasury set a target of October 2027 for bringing crypto fully under the watchful eye of the Financial Conduct Authority. The plan is to slot crypto alongside traditional products: firm but “proportionate” rules, stronger consumer protection, more transparency, and less space for “dodgy actors” to operate. For builders, this is a nudge toward a future where you can launch products without guessing what regulators think. For the sketchy corners of the market, the clock is now officially ticking. Institutions, meanwhile, acted like it’s business as usual. Standard Chartered and Coinbase announced a deeper global partnership to bee...

Wall Street, Washington, and Web3 all showed up today – and by the time markets wound down, the lines between “traditional” and “crypto” finance looked blurrier than ever. The clearest signal came from the plumbing of the legacy system itself. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation – the backbone that settles U.S. stocks and bonds – secured a no-action letter from the SEC to launch a blockchain-based tokenization service for U.S. securities. Over the next three years, DTCC will be able to tokenize everything from stocks and ETFs to Treasurys and corporate bonds, effectively turning traditional assets into on-chain entitlements. That sounds technical, but the punchline is simple: the same infrastructure that keeps Wall Street running is now experimenting with blockchain rails. If it works, it could deepen liquidity, speed up settlement, and quietly merge TradFi with digital markets in a way that’s very hard to roll back. On the consumer side, crypto also took another step int...

Wall Street, Washington, and Web3 all showed up today – and by the time markets wound down, the lines between “traditional” and “crypto” finance looked blurrier than ever. The clearest signal came from the plumbing of the legacy system itself. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation – the backbone that settles U.S. stocks and bonds – secured a no-action letter from the SEC to launch a blockchain-based tokenization service for U.S. securities. Over the next three years, DTCC will be able to tokenize everything from stocks and ETFs to Treasurys and corporate bonds, effectively turning traditional assets into on-chain entitlements. That sounds technical, but the punchline is simple: the same infrastructure that keeps Wall Street running is now experimenting with blockchain rails. If it works, it could deepen liquidity, speed up settlement, and quietly merge TradFi with digital markets in a way that’s very hard to roll back. On the consumer side, crypto also took another step int...

Wall Street, Washington, and Web3 all showed up today – and by the time markets wound down, the lines between “traditional” and “crypto” finance looked blurrier than ever. The clearest signal came from the plumbing of the legacy system itself. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation – the backbone that settles U.S. stocks and bonds – secured a no-action letter from the SEC to launch a blockchain-based tokenization service for U.S. securities. Over the next three years, DTCC will be able to tokenize everything from stocks and ETFs to Treasurys and corporate bonds, effectively turning traditional assets into on-chain entitlements. That sounds technical, but the punchline is simple: the same infrastructure that keeps Wall Street running is now experimenting with blockchain rails. If it works, it could deepen liquidity, speed up settlement, and quietly merge TradFi with digital markets in a way that’s very hard to roll back. On the consumer side, crypto also took another step int...

Tonight’s crypto tape didn’t pick a single storyline. It was all happening at once: big banks on-chain, regulators fighting over the future of digital assets, and stablecoins slipping further into the center of global payments while prices stayed choppy and cautious. Let’s start with the rails being built under the market. Stripe quietly doubled down on crypto by acquiring the team behind Valora, the mobile wallet originally built on Celo. The app’s IP heads back to Celo’s cLabs, but the people go to Stripe, just days after its Tempo testnet went live. The message is pretty clear: Stripe wants stablecoins and blockchain payments to feel as boring as using a credit card. That theme keeps popping up. In the UK, regulators are targeting 2026 as the year pound‑pegged stablecoins become part of everyday payments, with sandboxes and pilots meant to let fintechs test real-world use cases without blowing up the system. In the UAE, telecom giant e& is piloting AE Coin, a dirham‑backed sta...

If today’s crypto tape felt a bit bipolar, you’re not alone. At the same time that Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) kept grinding higher on macro optimism, parts of the market looked like they’d just rolled out of a hangover. From slumping NFTs to record institutional demand, regulatory battles, hacked chat apps, and the Fed’s latest move, the story tonight is less “up or down” and more “what exactly is this asset class becoming?” Let’s start where the money is actually moving. Bitcoin and Ethereum spent the day in the driver’s seat. With traders fully pricing in a 25 bps Fed rate cut, BTC hovered in the low-to-mid $90,000s and ETH climbed above $3,300–$3,400, outpacing most of the altcoin field. The narrative is simple: rate cuts plus an improving outlook into 2026 are fuel for risk assets, and crypto is back in that risk-on bucket. Markets are now obsessing over Powell’s tone rather than the cut itself. A “hawkish pivot” is in play, but as long as the Fed isn’t slamming on the ...

The sun is setting on another wild day in crypto, and tonight’s tape tells a story of two worlds converging: old-school finance finally leaning into digital assets, even as regulators, rating agencies, and markets remind everyone this is still a high‑risk game. Let’s start in Hong Kong, where HashKey Group is aiming to make history. The UBS- and Fidelity-backed firm is seeking to raise about HK$1.67 billion (around $215 million) in an IPO that would make it the city’s first publicly listed, fully licensed crypto exchange. If it lands, HashKey becomes the poster child for Hong Kong’s push to be a regulated digital asset hub, giving traditional investors a way to own a slice of the exchange business instead of just trading tokens on it. That same theme of “TradFi meets crypto” is running hot elsewhere. In the U.S., Twenty One Capital just listed on the NYSE under ticker XXI, backed by more than 43,500 Bitcoin (BTC). It’s essentially a publicly traded vehicle with a mountain of BTC behi...