Bank Leumi customers will be able to buy, hold and sell three major cryptocurrencies directly through the bank’s investment app beginning in early 2027. Israel’s Bank Leumi has partnered with Galaxy Digital to let customers trade Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Solana (SOL) through the bank’s investment platform, with the service expected to launch in early 2027. The companies said Friday that customers of Leumi and Pepper, its mobile banking arm, will be able to buy, hold and sell the three cryptocurrencies through a dedicated section of the Leumi Trade app. Leumi and Galaxy said the rollout would make Leumi the first Israeli bank to offer digital asset trading services to customers. Leumi will use GalaxyOne Institutional for trading and related services, while Galaxy’s custody infrastructure platform, formerly known as GK8, will support the bank’s digital asset infrastructure. Read more
Solana’s proposed fee overhaul would make resource-heavy transactions more expensive while cutting costs for simpler activity, and it increases the amount of SOL burned. Solana is preparing to change how it charges for computing resources on the network. Solana Improvement Document (SIMD-0553) would make its most resource-intensive users pay more while cutting the costs for simpler transactions. As a bonus, it would increase SOL’s burn rate in stages — and one day could even help make it deflationary. Cavey, a researcher at Solana infrastructure firm Temporal and author of the proposal, tells Magazine that fees currently don’t reflect the real costs: Read more
MoneyGram’s Ramps service now connects Solana wallets and applications to its global cash network, with Rift becoming the first wallet to integrate the service. Global remittance company MoneyGram has expanded its Ramps service to Solana, allowing wallets, exchanges and developers on the network to offer cash-to-crypto and crypto-to-cash conversions through its payments network. Ramps previously operated on Stellar, making Solana its second supported blockchain. Rift is the first Solana (SOL) wallet to integrate the service, allowing users to move between crypto and local currencies through MoneyGram. In an X post announcing the launch, Solana said MoneyGram serves more than 60 million customers through nearly 500,000 retail locations across more than 170 countries, with the network now accessible to Solana developers through a single API. Read more