US President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that tariffs could help pay down the $38 trillion, and growing, US national debt. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) issued a ruling on Friday striking down most of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, with six of the nine Supreme Court justices ruling that the Executive Branch lacks authority to levy tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). “IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs,” Friday’s ruling said, adding that the president has “no inherent authority” to impose tariffs during peacetime using the statutes in the IEEPA. The ruling read: Trump claimed that the purported inflow of drugs from Canada, China and Mexico, as well as the “hollowing out” of the US industrial base, constituted a national emergency under IEEPA that justified the tariffs, which the court rejected. In a press briefing following the decision, Trump lashed out at the justices who voted to strike down the tariffs and vowed to get th...
Crypto illiquidity is pressuring DeFi lending companies, but Wall Street giants continue to increase their exposure to the world’s largest Ethereum treasury company. Large institutional investors continued to add exposure to crypto treasury companies over the past week, even as bear-market illiquidity forced another round of shakeouts across decentralized finance (DeFi). The biggest corporate shareholders of Bitmine Immersion Technologies, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, increased exposure to the Ether (ETH) treasury company during Q4 2025 despite a broader market sell-off. Still, ongoing bear-market illiquidity is forcing some protocols to wind down operations, with DeFi lender ZeroLend shutting down. Crypto analytics platform Parsec has also shuttered, citing crypto market volatility as the main reason. Read more
The failure of the bulls to start a strong recovery in Bitcoin and the major altcoins suggests that the bears intend to remain active at higher levels. Key points: Bitcoin bulls are struggling to sustain the intraday rallies, indicating that every minor rise is being sold into. Select major altcoins are showing weakness, signaling a drop to their strong support levels. Read more
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty climbed to 144.4 trillion after January storms briefly slashed hash rate, while some US miners offset downtime by selling electricity back to the grid. Bitcoin’s mining difficulty jumped about 15% to 144.4 trillion on Feb. 20, according to CoinWarz data, reversing an 11% drop earlier this month that marked the sharpest decline since China’s 2021 mining ban. The earlier decline followed a sharp drop in hash rate after severe winter storms swept across much of the United States, disrupting power grids and forcing miners offline. In late January, Foundry USA, the largest mining pool by hash rate, briefly saw its computing power fall to about 198 exahashes per second from nearly 400 EH/s, before recovering. Hash rate measures the total computing power securing the network, while mining difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks, about every two weeks, to keep block production near its 10-minute target. Read more
After four years contributing, BGD Labs said it would be leaving the DAO, citing changes to the organization and taking an “adversarial position“ to its liquidity protocol. BGD Labs, a core technical contributor to decentralized finance protocol Aave, said it will conclude its involvement with the project’s DAO on April 1 after four years. In a Friday forum post on Aave, BGD cited an “asymmetric organizational scenario,” which it said the DAO has “badly executed” without consideration of contributors’ expertise. The contributor added that Aave had taken an “adversarial position” of the third version (v3) of its protocol to promote features in the fourth (v4). “While all previous points that BGD should just keep contributing on the v3 side exclusively, the situation created makes it nonsensical to us: every time we think/will think about improving v3, there will be some type of implicit/explicit artificial constraint,” said BGD. “We are not really interested in being in that position, as we think it is a waste...
Bitcoin stayed rangebound within a "downward trajectory" as the Supreme Court concluded that some US trade tariffs were illegal and liable for a refund. Bitcoin (BTC) saw choppy price action after Friday’s Wall Street open as markets reacted to the US Supreme Court decision on President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs. Key points: The US Supreme Court rules that certain US tariffs are illegal, sparking a modest risk-asset response. Read more
Private equity, which has the second-highest risk weighting, carries a 400% weight under the current Basel III banking framework. Crypto treasury executives are calling on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), an international banking regulatory body, to revise the 1,250% risk weight for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies under the Basel III framework. The 1,250% capital requirement means that banks must back any Bitcoin (BTC) on their balance sheets at a 1:1 ratio with approved collateral, making BTC holding more costly than other asset classes. For comparison, cash, physical gold and government debt carry a 0% risk weight under the Basel III framework. Read more