A car accident left Trevor Koverko with brain injuries. But his fortunes turned around when Vitalik handed him the Ethereum white paper. Not everyone can say they were there when history was being made. But former ice hockey star Trevor Koverko, on the mend from a serious car accident, witnessed it firsthand in his hometown. I was at a meet-up in Toronto and this guy named Vitalik was handing out documents, which turned out to be the Ethereum whitepaper. We had a cluster of really important high-profile people that came out of that time in Toronto. Vitalik, Joe Lubin and Charles Hoskinson, for example. In Canada, ice hockey is its own kind of subculture. Koverko had fallen in love with the sport at a young age, and by the time he was a teen, he was competing at the semi-pro level and moved away from home, playing to crowds of 10,000. Read more
Polygon’s co-founder said even small merchants and drivers recognized MATIC, but many struggle to locate POL since the token’s rebrand. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal spurred public discussion about the project’s token branding, asking the community if the network should consider reverting its ticker from POL to MATIC. On Wednesday, Nailwal said that while he personally thinks that they should stick to POL, he continues to hear feedback that the original MATIC ticker had stronger recognition, especially among retail users who are now confused about the asset’s whereabouts. “The counter-argument I keep getting is: the guy in the Philippines running a sari-sari store, or an Uber driver in Dubai, knew MATIC… and now he has no idea where it went,” he wrote. Read more
Strategy said it has a 70-year dividend runway even after Bitcoin’s slide, rolling out a new credit rating metric to ease fears over DAT liquidation risks. Michael Saylor’s Strategy is attempting to calm investor concerns about its balance sheet after the recent Bitcoin market downturn and a sharp pullback in digital asset treasury (DAT) stocks. Strategy, the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin (BTC) holder, has rolled out a new credit rating dashboard based on the company’s preferred stock notional value, and claims to have another 70 years’ worth of dividend payment runway to service its debt, even if Bitcoin’s price remains flat. “If $BTC drops to our $74K average cost basis, we still have 5.9x assets to convertible debt, which we refer to as the BTC Rating of our debt. At $25K BTC, it would be 2.0x,” said Strategy in a Tuesday X post. Read more
Blockrise secures a MiCA license in the Netherlands, unlocking regulated Bitcoin custody and trading while paving the way for BTC-backed business loans across Europe. Blockrise, a Netherlands-based Bitcoin-only startup, has secured a regulatory license that opens the door for fully regulated Bitcoin financial services across Europe. The Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) has granted Blockrise a license under the new Europe-wide Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) framework, the company announced Wednesday. Issued on Tuesday, the MiCA license allows Blockrise to provide its Bitcoin (BTC) services, including custody solutions, trading and asset management, throughout Europe. Read more
Tether accounted for almost 2% of global gold demand last quarter, with Jefferies noting that its aggressive buying may be influencing short-term market sentiment. Stablecoin issuer Tether holds 116 tons of physical gold, placing it on par with central banks such as those in South Korea, Hungary and Greece. Tether is “the largest holder of gold outside central banks,” Jefferies wrote in a recent analysis, per a report by the Financial Times. The investment bank added that Tether’s growing appetite for gold may be playing a larger role in the metal’s recent surge than previously assumed. According to Jefferies, Tether’s gold purchases last quarter accounted for nearly 2% of total global gold demand and almost 12% of central bank purchases. The company said that Tether’s aggressive accumulation over the past two months “is likely to have tightened supply in the short term and influenced sentiment,” potentially driving speculative inflows into gold markets. Read more
Eunice will trial standardized crypto disclosure templates with major exchanges, feeding real-world data into the UK’s evolving 2026 rulebook. The United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) approved regulatory technology (RegTech) company Eunice to run experiments in its sandbox, which offers one of the clearest indications yet of how the country intends to build its forthcoming crypto rulebook. On Wednesday, the FCA announced that Eunice will test a set of standardized crypto disclosure templates with major exchanges, including Coinbase, Crypto.com and Kraken. The company will test whether the templates improve transparency when used in real-world settings. The FCA also highlighted that its regulatory sandbox is still accepting applications from companies looking to test their ideas. “We encourage any firm to apply who are looking to test a similar solution to help inform our regulatory approach to cryptoassets,” said Colin Payne, the head of innovation at the FCA. Read more
The Trump family-backed WLFI purchased nearly $8 million worth of tokens, aiming to mitigate the downtrend of the token by artificially reducing the outstanding supply. The Trump family-backed crypto project, World Liberty Financial, continued its token buyback strategy, aiming to create more demand for the token, which has declined almost 50% since its launch. The platform acquired $7.7 million worth of World Liberty Financial (WLFI) tokens on Wednesday at an average price of $0.16 per token, according to blockchain data platform Lookonchain. The nearly $8 million buy is significantly larger than its $1.06 million WLFI token buyback on Sept. 27, which saw $1.43 million worth of tokens burned, Cointelegraph reported at the time. Read more