Featured
How Tether Became the Payment Rail in Orlen's $230 Million Failed Venezuela Oil Deal
USB sticks loaded with USDT changed hands in Caracas hotels and restaurants as a chain of intermediaries multiplied, according to a Financial Times investigation that has already produced criminal charges against former executives at the Polish energy group's Swiss trading arm.
Licensed to Shill: Taiwan's Banks & AI Hardware Makers Could Fuel Asia's Largest Stablecoin Corridor | Justin Wang, Capital Layer
Wang says manufacturers selling AI devices into Latin America are paying up to 11% in local transfer fees, the gap Capital Layer is betting stablecoins can close.
Licensed to Shill: Ethereum's Staking Yield Cut Won't Fix What's Actually Broken
The panel, featuring Blockhead's Tim Han, discusses why cutting ETH's risk-free rate from roughly 3% to 1.2% cannot fix a token that still has nowhere useful to go.
Licensed to Shill: Retail Barely Touches Stablecoins – Treasury & Remittance Are the Real Adoption (Jeannie Lim, Xweave)
At Xweave, Jeannie Lim says her team moved $1 million for an e-commerce client in under three minutes, cutting settlement costs 30% against a Tier 2 bank's SWIFT rate.
Licensed to Shill: DeFi's Third Phase is Tokenized Yield, and Institutions Are Already Buying In (Ben Nadareski, Solstice)
The Solana-based yield protocol has $500 million in liquidity and a delta-neutral strategy with four and a half years of trading history – but its CEO's bigger argument is about what most DeFi investors still fail to check before they deposit.
Bitcoin’s $77K Standoff: Spot Deleveraging Meets Political Binary
Leverage is falling, ETF flows are weakening and macro risks are mounting as Bitcoin faces two major catalysts that could determine its next move.
Bitcoin Holds Near $77,500 as Spot ETFs Snap Three-Week Inflow Streak Ahead of Fed Decision
Ethereum outpaced Bitcoin's ETF demand for a fourth straight week even as both assets traded in a narrow range with the Fed's rate decision and a Senate procedural vote on the CLARITY Act both due this week.
Why Crypto's Fragile Equilibrium is a Trap
Bitcoin looks calm on the surface, but ETF inflows, thin liquidity, leverage and geopolitical risk are building a market primed for a sharp move in either direction.
Bitcoin, Ether Jump as Fed Pause Bets Take Hold, Sending Leveraged Crypto Stocks Sharply Higher
Zcash's rally to the edge of $1,000 adds a second storyline to a broad-based risk-on move across digital assets and the equities tied to them.
AI Agents Could Close the Wealth Gap in Emerging Markets – Or Widen It
Crypto promised to democratise finance in Southeast Asia. The results were mixed. AI agents could be a second chance, but only if the infrastructure is built for everyone, not just those who can already afford a seat at the table, argues Morph CEO Colin Goltra.
The Retail vs. Institutional Divide: How Trading Patterns Reveal Two Completely Different Markets
As ETFs, corporate treasuries, and tokenized real-world assets absorb supply, the old four-year retail cycle is giving way to a macro-driven, institution-led regime where liquidity concentrates, volatility compresses, and value accrues to utility over hype.
Industry Inflection Point: How 2026 Will Define Enterprise Adoption of Crypto’s Fastest-Growing Asset Class
Bhau Kotecha, co-founder and head of Paxos Labs, explains why programmable stablecoins are becoming core financial infrastructure—and how institutions can capture value beyond payments.
Crypto Wasn’t on the Ballot in Japan, But the Mandate Will Shape It
Sota Watanabe, CEO of Startale Group and founder of Astar Foundation, discusses how Japan's snap election could affect crypto tax and regulatory reforms.
Clarity Act Fails Senate Cloture Vote, Sending Crypto Stocks Sharply Lower
Coinbase led the selloff with a decline of roughly 10%, and total crypto market capitalization fell more than 3%, as the bill's defeat closes off, for now, the market-structure framework the industry had lobbied for over several years.
Trump Accepts Stricter Ethics Rules Ahead of Clarity Act's Make-or-Break Senate Vote
The concessions clear a key obstacle to Tuesday's cloture vote, though prediction markets still put the bill's odds of passing at roughly one in four.
Escalating the Prediction Markets Fight
The CFTC says federal law clearly overrides state gambling rules. The problem is that the courts have never actually said that — and the agency’s aggressive defense of Kalshi could put its own powers at risk.
Senate Republicans Release Revised 630-Page CLARITY Act Text Days Before Sept. 15 Vote, Still No Democratic Support
Cynthia Lummis says the redraft incorporates more than 114 provisions Democrats asked for, including a CFTC registration requirement for centralized platforms posing as DeFi, but Politico reports zero Democratic senators have signed on ahead of the cloture vote.
ByteDance Secures $29.6 Billion Loan From Nearly 30 Banks to Fund AI Buildout
The unsecured, three-year facility ranks as Asia's second-largest loan of the year and shows how far Chinese tech giants are willing to lever up to compete in AI infrastructure.
AI's Biggest Rivals Just Agreed to Slow Down, But Wall Street Is Betting They Won't
The same week Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk converged on a call to pace AI development, Nvidia was reportedly negotiating a $10 billion anchor position in what could become the largest IPO in history.
OpenAI Launches GPT-6 Astra, Says Its Most Capable Model Yet Might Be AGI
The model is the first from OpenAI to cross its own "critical" threshold for cybersecurity risk, and its launch sharpens a parallel question about how autonomous AI agents will actually pay for what they do.
Licensed to Shill: Taiwan's Banks & AI Hardware Makers Could Fuel Asia's Largest Stablecoin Corridor | Justin Wang, Capital Layer
Wang says manufacturers selling AI devices into Latin America are paying up to 11% in local transfer fees, the gap Capital Layer is betting stablecoins can close.
Circle to Acquire Singapore's Tazapay for $400 Million in Stock – Its Largest Deal Since Poloniex
The all-stock acquisition gives Circle direct banking relationships across 100-plus markets where more than 60% of Tazapay's $25 billion in annual payment volume already moves through stablecoins.
Ethena Launches Ethena Pay, a Self-Custodial Neobank Built Exclusively on Avalanche
The app gives Ethena's USDe stablecoin a route into everyday spending just as the token's circulating supply has fallen by more than 70% from its September 2025 peak.
Singapore Fintech Funding Falls to Decade Low, But Crypto Deal Count Holds Up
KPMG's Pulse of Fintech report shows Singapore investment dropping to $499 million in H1 2026, with capital concentrated in a single mega-round, even as digital assets and cryptocurrency accounted for more deals than any other vertical.
Dunamu, Visa Partner to Explore Stablecoin Payment, AI-Driven Financial Services
The Upbit operator and the global payments network unveiled a roadmap in San Francisco covering OUSD-based business models, cross-border remittances and agentic commerce, days after Visa joined MAS's BLOOM initiative and signed a separate stablecoin MOU with Shinhan Financial.
Gemini Wins Full Singapore Payment License After 23-Month Restructuring, Joining Coinbase and OKX
The Major Payment Institution license lets Gemini offer spot trading, custody and OTC services in one of Asia's most sought-after crypto hubs, following an April 2025 shift of its Singapore customers to a newly incorporated local entity.
Singapore is Now BitGo's Largest Trading Desk
The expansion arrives as the newly public custodian works to show that revenue growth, up nearly 80 percent last quarter, can translate into profit.
Singapore Proposes Stablecoin License With 100% Reserves, No Holder Interest
MAS opened a consultation on the legislative amendments needed to bring its 2023 stablecoin framework into force, formalizing a protected "MAS-regulated stablecoin" label as regulated tokens are already being piloted in payment and settlement projects across the city-state.
Singapore Fintech Funding Falls to Decade Low, But Crypto Deal Count Holds Up
KPMG's Pulse of Fintech report shows Singapore investment dropping to $499 million in H1 2026, with capital concentrated in a single mega-round, even as digital assets and cryptocurrency accounted for more deals than any other vertical.
Editors' Picks
Escalating the Prediction Markets Fight
The CFTC says federal law clearly overrides state gambling rules. The problem is that the courts have never actually said that — and the agency’s aggressive defense of Kalshi could put its own powers at risk.
The ColdCard "Hack" Should Not Be Called Theft
ColdCard’s security failure exposes an uncomfortable truth about self-custody: if private keys are meant to be the final authority, users cannot invoke the legal system whenever that authority produces an outcome they did not intend.
The Fine Print in Singapore's New Fund Tax Break That Crypto Managers Should Read
Hong Kong just wrote digital assets directly into its carried-interest tax law. Singapore's competing package leans on an older, asset-neutral scheme that Singapore's crypto funds already use, leaving the crypto-specific certainty to Budget 2027.
Coinfest Asia's 2026 Edition Adds Institutional Track for Stablecoins, Tokenization
The shift follows a 2025 edition that drew more than 11,000 attendees from 90 countries, and adds closed-door tokenization roundtables to a festival previously built around a single unified stage.
The ENS DAO Treasury Mess
A simple, profitable protocol with little real governance is now facing a treasury fight it was always heading toward—ENS’s looming payout exposes how incentives, not ideals, have shaped its DAO from the start.
Circle's Claimed Impotence
Circle tells a Wisconsin court it can’t seize USDC, while regulators argue it’s choosing not to, setting up a rare, real-time clash between technical design, contractual wiggle room, and outright defiance of a seizure order.