Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto investment arm said its new fund would seek to back projects that “people keep using when the hype fades.” The crypto-focused arm of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has raised $2.2 billion for its fifth fund dedicated to backing crypto projects. In a blog post on Tuesday, a16z Crypto said its latest fund, Crypto Fund 5, would back founders “turning new infrastructure into products people use every day,” including stablecoins, perpetual futures, prediction markets and tokenized assets. “Software is getting more complex and harder to trust,” a16z Crypto general partners Eddy Lazzarin, Guy Wuollet, Ali Yahya and founder and managing partner Chris Dixon wrote in the blog post. Read more
The crypto exchange said eligible US users can now access up to 10x leveraged spot crypto trading through a CFTC-registered entity. Kraken has launched spot margin trading for eligible US retail users on Kraken Pro through a CFTC-registered entity, expanding access to leveraged crypto trading on a regulated domestic platform. The product allows traders to borrow against crypto holdings without selling them, offering up to 10x leverage for long and short positions, according to the company. Kraken said the platform displays liquidation prices and borrowing costs before trades are executed. The crypto exchange said regulated margin trading in the United States has historically been limited to institutions and high-net-worth individuals classified as Eligible Contract Participants, pushing many retail traders toward offshore platforms offering leverage products. Read more
SIX Group received FINMA approval to provide crypto custody through the same regulated infrastructure used for traditional securities settlement and post-trade services. SIX Group said it has received approval from Swiss regulator FINMA to integrate crypto custody into its central securities depository infrastructure, allowing financial institutions to access digital asset custody through the same regulated post-trade system used for traditional securities. The approval also allows SIX to merge its digital central securities depository, SIX Digital Exchange, into SIX SIS AG, consolidating digital and traditional asset services under a single legal entity. SIX said the structure is intended to give institutions a single infrastructure layer for settlement and custody across both traditional and digital assets. Read more
Anchorage’s new product enables AI agents to have compliant access to capital across traditional finance and crypto payment rails. Crypto bank Anchorage is launching a new agentic banking service, seeking to give AI agents the ability to access and move money without human interference — an industry that could be worth a trillion dollars, according to its co-founder. In an X post on Tuesday, Anchorage co-founder and CEO Nathan McCauley said the firm's new agentic banking infrastructure gives AI agents the ability to access both traditional finance and crypto payment rails. Blockchain and tech companies have been rushing to prepare themselves for the future of agentic commerce. Firms such as Stripe argued in February that blockchains will need to eventually be able to process between 1 million and 1 billion transactions per second to handle the network demand coming from AI agents. Read more