Crypto

Questions raised after Bithumb intern sent 15X more “phantom” Bitcoin to users than it held. Plus, did a Hong Kong fund blow up? Asia Express

Cango is the latest publicly traded Bitcoin miner to embrace AI, and it's fueling that push by selling a bunch of Bitcoin.

MrBeast's Beast Industries just acquired fintech startup Step, a banking platform for teens, following a crypto trademark application.

Reform of Israel's digital asset regulations may add 70,000 jobs and $38 billion to the country's GDP, according to KPMG. The Israeli Crypto Blockchain & Web 3.0 Companies Forum last week launched a lobbying effort to push regulatory reforms that research from KPMG says may add 120 billion shekels ($38.36 billion) to the country’s economy by 2035 and create 70,000 new jobs. At a Feb. 3 event in Tel Aviv, Forum leader Nir Hirshman-Rub said there is broad public support for legislation that would relax rules on stablecoins and tokenization, along with simplifying tax compliance requirements. In the wake of the US-brokered ceasefire of the Gaza war, 2026 is seen as a “defining year” for the local digital assets industry, Hirshman-Rub said. Read more

The new integrations enable banks and custodians to deploy custody and staking services without operating their own validator or key-management infrastructure. Ripple said on Monday it has expanded its institutional custody platform through new integrations with Securosys and Figment. The company said it is adding hardware security modules to enable banks and custodians to deploy custody services and offer staking without necessarily operating their own validator or key-management infrastructure. Building on Ripple’s recent acquisition of Palisade and the integration of Chainalysis compliance tools, the custody upgrades allow regulated institutions to manage cryptographic keys using on-premises or cloud-based HSMs and to offer staking on networks such as Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL), with compliance checks embedded directly into transaction workflows. Read more

Rising miner deposits to Binance signal near-term supply pressure despite whale accumulation during the dip.

With temporary bans of prediction markets poised to take effect in Massachusetts and Nevada, Polymarket is asking a federal court to intervene.

OpenAI started testing ads in ChatGPT on Monday, hours after Anthropic's Super Bowl commercials mocked the idea. The $8 billion loss explains why.

Ripple is working to make decentralized finance more familiar to regulated institutions and is placing XRP at the center of that effort. DeFi’s earlier growth cycles were built around open, retail-facing liquidity pools and the associated risk tolerance. Total value locked across major protocols climbed into the tens of billions of dollars and, at previous […] The post Ripple says compliance controls will unlock DeFi, but XRPL liquidity is still too thin to prove it appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan have both exited crypto social media to focus on global payments via stablecoins.

Bitcoin and several major altcoins are not out of the woods yet, especially since they face significant selling near their range highs. Do charts show BTC and altcoins forming a bottom? Key points: Bitcoin’s relief rally is facing selling near $72,000, but a positive sign is that the bulls have not ceded much ground to the bears. Several major altcoins are facing selling at higher levels, indicating that the sentiment remains negative. Read more

Wall Street–style liquidity is reportedly moving into prediction markets, signaling a shift toward deeper markets, higher volumes and greater institutional participation. Jump Trading, a Chicago-based quantitative trading company, is reportedly set to acquire minority stakes in prediction market platforms Polymarket and Kalshi, underscoring growing institutional interest in the rapidly expanding sector. The equity stakes would be obtained in exchange for providing trading liquidity on both platforms, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the discussions. While the report did not disclose specific ownership percentages, Bloomberg said Jump’s stake in Polymarket would scale based on the liquidity the company ultimately provides. Read more

A sudden transfer to a wallet tied to Satoshi Nakamoto just sent a wave of speculation through the crypto world and briefly shook confidence in the current Bitcoin rally.Out of nowhere, a random wallet sent 2.56 BTC, worth over $176,000, to one of the most iconic addresses in Bitcoin’s history.The move instantly triggered theories that […] The post Bitcoin Price Prediction: Satoshi’s Wallet Just Got $174K in BTC – Is the Creator About to Return? appeared first on Cryptonews.

Kiyosaki says he will choose BTC over gold because the latter is infinite in theory, while the former is finite by design.

A CTDG Dev Hub participant introduces an adapter layer for RGB to facilitate seamless integration with wallet SDKs. Interoperability is crucial for a seamless experience with blockchains and cryptocurrencies. However, it is largely missing in integrations between many existing wallet SDKs and RGB, a protocol for issuing assets and running smart contracts on Bitcoin. Utexo, a CTDG Dev Hub participant, has introduced RGB support for Tether’s Wallet Development Kit (WDK) via the Utexo SDK. The support essentially reconciles two fundamentally different views of asset state. Most wallet SDKs are designed around a narrow and well-defined set of responsibilities: managing keys, tracking balances, constructing transactions and interacting with the underlying chain. They assume that asset state is globally observable, derived from the blockchain and updated monotonically. Read more

Bitcoin price more than doubled the last time Tether's crypto market dominance topped out, a signal that is flashing again in 2026. Bitcoin (BTC) may form a bottom in the coming weeks as Tether’s USDt (USDT) dominance retests a key resistance level that preceded BTC’s 2022 cycle low. As of February, Tether dominance reached the 8.50%–9.00% range (the red area in the chart below), revisiting a historically significant zone that previously aligned with Bitcoin’s bear market lows. When USDt’s market share rises, it usually means traders are playing it safe and parking money in stablecoins instead of riskier coins like Bitcoin. Likewise, a rotation back into crypto usually aligns with USDt dominance falling. Read more

CoinShares noted that the market may have reached an ‘inflection point’ as outflows from Bitcoin investment products slowed.

"What we are experiencing is the weakest bitcoin bear case in its history," wrote Bernstein's Gautam Chhugani.

The research analysts pointed to tight liquidity and macro pressure as drivers of the decline, while noting that spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen relatively modest outflows. Bernstein analysts on Monday maintained their $150,000 target for Bitcoin (BTC) despite the recent sell-off that they said was being driven by lacking investor confidence rather than structural stress. Calling the pullback the “weakest bear case” in the asset’s history, the analysts’ note to investors said no major failures have emerged across Bitcoin’s market plumbing, and pointed to relatively modest 7% net outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs even as BTC price dropped by about 50%. “The current Bitcoin price action is a mere crisis of confidence. Nothing broke, no skeletons will show up,” analysts led by Gautam Chhugani said. Read more

Tom Lee–backed BitMine added over 40,000 ETH during last week’s market sell-off, doubling down on its Ether treasury strategy despite multibillion-dollar unrealized losses. Ether treasury company BitMine Immersion Technologies significantly increased its ETH holdings during last week’s market correction, signaling continued conviction in its long-term strategy despite mounting unrealized losses. The company disclosed Monday that it acquired 40,613 Ether (ETH) last week, lifting its total holdings to more than 4.326 million ETH, worth about $8.8 billion at current prices. Despite the accumulation, BitMine is currently deeply underwater on its Ether position, according to DropsTab data. Read more