More than two-thirds (68.6%) of Romanians living abroad do not have any form of insurance in Romania, not even the mandatory home insurance, according to a nationwide online survey initiated by Allianz-Tiriac, despite the fact that nearly a quarter say they own a house or apartment in the country, and approximately 13% still own a car left to their family.
Boosty Labs founder and CEO Viktor Ihnatiuk told Cointelegraph that Tether’s USDT will be RGB’s first real-world use case for stablecoin transfers on Bitcoin. Smart contract and asset issuance system RGB Protocol said it had launched on the Bitcoin mainnet, enabling tokenized assets like stablecoins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and custom tokens within the Bitcoin ecosystem. On Thursday, the protocol announced that tokenization tools allowing users to create, send and manage digital assets on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network were available. The protocol said it enables new tokenization functions on top of the network, while preserving its principles of decentralization, privacy and self-custody. Read more
BTCFi TVL soared from $304 million to $7 billion in 2024 — driven by new protocols and institutional inflows — but trust, risks, and infrastructure hurdles still hinder adoption. Bitcoin-based decentralized finance (DeFi), often referred to as BTCFi, is experiencing significant growth but still faces challenges. According to DefiLlama data, Bitcoin-based (BTC) DeFi protocols’ total value locked (TVL) went from $304.66 million on Jan. 1, 2024, to $6.5 billion by Dec. 31, 2024. As of publication, DefiLlama data shows that BTCFi has a TVL of $7.05 billion. This translates to an increase of more than 22 times. A report shared by Bitcoin smart contract layer Arch Network suggests that “this surge was fueled by new protocol launches, emerging token standards, institutional inflows, a major price rally pushing BTC to an all-time high, and the rise of liquid restaking.” Read more
Despite the rising DEX-to-CEX ratio, centralized exchanges still lead in the crypto spot market, posting $3.9 trillion in trading volume, compared to $877 billion for DEXs. Cryptocurrency traders have been moving away from centralized exchanges (CEXs) in favor of decentralized exchanges (DEXs), pushing the CEX-to-DEX ratio to a new all-time high. Spot trading volume on DEXs surged at least 25% in the second quarter of 2025 over the previous quarter, while CEXs volumes plunged almost 28%, according to the latest quarterly industry report by the crypto data aggregator CoinGecko. This shift drove the DEX-to-CEX ratio to a record high in Q2, rising from 0.13 in the previous quarter to 0.23, the report noted. Read more