[PRESS RELEASE – Kingstown, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, March 17th, 2026]

Non-custodial exchange platform ChangeNOW has announced the rollout of Private Send, a feature designed to prevent direct links between sender and recipient addresses on public blockchains.

Integrated into NOW Wallet, Private Send introduces a toggle within the transaction flow. Instead of a direct wallet-to-wallet transfer, funds are routed through ChangeNOW infrastructure before reaching the final address. To the recipient, the transaction appears standard, while the sender’s address does not appear in the recipient’s transaction history.

Pauline Shangett, CSO at ChangeNOW, says, “Public blockchains were supposed to be about financial freedom, not financial surveillance. Yet today, analytics firms map billions of addresses into clusters, building profiles on ordinary users. Private Send isn’t about hiding from regulators, it’s about stopping the default exposure of every move you make. One click, and the direct link between you and the recipient disappears. That’s it.”

Role of Blockchain Analytics

Blockchain analytics has become standard infrastructure across the industry. A common misconception is that holding crypto in self-custodied wallets ensures anonymity. Analytics firms map billions of addresses into identifiable clusters, linking wallet activity to individuals or entities. Private Send was developed in response to this environment by introducing an intermediary into the transaction flow. The blockchain records the transaction without establishing a direct connection between the sender and the recipient.

Transaction Flow Structure

• Users toggle “Private Send” in NOW Wallet’s standard send flow
• Transaction routes: sender → ChangeNOW → recipient
• Recipient sees funds arriving from a ChangeNOW address
• No additional apps, registrations, or technical knowledge required

Key details

• Most assets available in NOW Wallet
• All transactions undergo standard AML screening
• Geographic availability matches ChangeNOW’s existing restrictions
• Requirement: latest version of NOW Wallet

Typical use cases

• Moving funds between personal wallets without consolidating on-chain history
• Paying vendors or contractors without exposing full portfolio activity
• General privacy-conscious transfers where direct address links are undesirable

Private Send is not a mixing service or an anonymization tool. It operates entirely within ChangeNOW’s compliance framework and does not alter the final transaction record; it only changes the path to the destination.

About ChangeNOW

ChangeNOW is a non-custodial cryptocurrency exchange platform that values speed, security, and user liberty. Since its launch, it has served over 8 million customers worldwide, offering access to over 110 blockchains and 70+ fiat currencies. By combining the best rates from top centralized and decentralized platforms, ChangeNOW offers a seamless experience with simplified onboarding where users have full control over their assets.

Hyperliquid whale positioning hits $3.64B as leverage splits evenly between longs and shorts.

Leverage on decentralized derivatives venue Hyperliquid (HYPE) has reached eye‑watering levels, with on‑chain data showing whale positions almost perfectly balanced between longs and shorts even as individual traders rack up eight‑figure unrealized profits. According to Coinglass figures cited by ChainCatcher, total whale exposure on Hyperliquid now stands at about 3.644 billion dollars, split into 1.821 billion dollars of long positions and 1.823 billion dollars of shorts. That leaves the long‑short ratio effectively at 1:1, a rare equilibrium that suggests aggressive positioning on both sides of the tape rather than a one‑sided bet on continued upside.

At a P&L level, the skew is less balanced. Long positions are currently sitting on roughly 57.38 million dollars in profits, while shorts are down about 11.16 million dollars, reflecting how the recent grind higher in majors like BTC (BTC) and ETH (ETH) has quietly rewarded leveraged bulls. One address stands out: the whale wallet 0x6c85…f6 has taken a 20x leveraged long on ETH at an entry price of 2,012.11 dollars and is now running an unrealized gain of about 15.14 million dollars. That single trade captures the core dynamic on Hyperliquid right now—a structurally high‑leverage environment where a handful of well‑timed positions can print institutional‑scale P&L in days, but where a sharp reversal could erase paper profits just as quickly.​

For market structure, the 3.6 billion‑dollar positioning and near‑perfect long/short balance turn Hyperliquid into a leverage fulcrum for the broader alt and perp complex. When books are this tightly matched, the direction of the next large move often comes down to exogenous catalysts—ETF flows, macro surprises, or idiosyncratic headlines—rather than slow positioning drift. With longs in aggregate comfortably green and shorts nursing losses, the path of least resistance in the near term is still higher; but if the tape turns, those same profitable longs become forced sellers, and the 20x ETH whales that look brilliant today are exactly the ones that can drive a cascade tomorrow.

The Solana blockchain turned six years old yesterday, and the community has taken the opportunity to reiterate its motto, “Just one more hard quarter.” 

Although intended as a source of pride about the grit and determination of workers under the leadership of founder Anatoly Yakavenko, the motto could just as easily describe the experience of using the Solana blockchain.

Since its first multi-hour outage in 2020, Solana users have endured weeks of combined mainnet disruption, bridge collapses, wallet drains, market manipulation, and the criminal conviction of its once-most influential tokenholder and supporter, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). 

However, after six years of near-death experiences, Solana is still here. Whether it can credit resilience or stubbornness for its success depends on the user’s perspective on those difficult times.

Even its own social media manager was conflicted, posting a birthday message with a picture that hinted at a solider in the trenches.

Solana outages since its founding year

Solana’s mainnet, built by former Qualcomm engineer Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder Raj Gokal, and other developers, went live on March 16, 2020.

Their first catastrophe struck before the network’s first birthday.

On December 4, 2020, a bug in Turbine, Solana’s block propagation system, halted the entire blockchain for six hours. A validator transmitted two conflicting blocks for the same slot, and the network split into partitions.

Nine months later, a series of misfortunes began that would eventually make Solana outages so well-known that its offline status became a meme. 

On September 14, 2021, bots flooded the network during Grape Protocol’s IDO on Raydium. Over 300,000 transactions per second overwhelmed validator memory. The chain went dark for 17 hours.

Then 2022 arrived. There’s no other year containing more media attention about a blockchain repeatedly failing than Solana’s outages across almost every month of 2022.

The miracle of Solana surviving 2022

Between January 6 and 12, bots spamming duplicate transactions degraded Solana’s network so badly that transaction success rates dropped 70%. 

Another wave of outages from January 21 to 23 repeatedly knocked Solana’s public RPC endpoints offline.

• On February 2, hackers exploited the Wormhole inter-blockchain bridge between Solana and Ethereum, minted 120,000 fraudulently wrapped ether, and stole over $320 million. Within hours, Jump Trading covered the loss from its corporate balance sheet.
• On April 30, NFT minting bots hit the Candy Machine program with millions of requests per second, crashing Solana’s blockchain’s consensus-making. The blockchain was down for about seven hours.
• On June 1, a durable nonce bug stalled blocks for over four hours.
• On August 2, a hacker drained over 9,000 wallets of millions of dollars worth of Solana assets. Slope, a once-popular Solana wallet, had leaked private keys through a misconfigured Sentry server.
• Less than two months later on September 30, a validator’s malfunctioning hot-spare node produced duplicate blocks. A fork-selection bug halted consensus for over eight hours. 
• On October 11, Avraham Eisenberg manipulated Mango Markets’ MNGO price oracle and drained over $110 million from the Solana-based exchange. A jury convicted him in April 2024.

Zcash (ZEC) surged as much as 20% on Monday evening, March 16 — spiking from $231 to as high as $284 — after ZEC digital asset treasury (DAT) firm Cypherpunk Technologies (Nasdaq: CYPH) released its full-year 2025 financial results showing a swing to profitability.

ZEC remains up roughly 9% on the day as of press time today, March 17, trading over $270, making it the top performer among the top-100 large-cap crypto assets, per CoinGecko data.

ZEC’s rally over the past 24 hours appears to be driven by Cypherpunk’s positive financials for 2025, which is the year the company rebranded from a biotech firm to a Zcash-focused DAT. Per the release, Cypherpunk reported net income of $4.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, a dramatic reversal from a net loss of $67.8 million in 2024.

According to the firm, the turnaround was driven by $50.4 million in unrealized gains on the fair value of its ZEC treasury holdings, marked to market at period end, Dec. 31. At that time, ZEC was trading near $530 and those holdings were valued at $147.4 million on its balance sheet, according to the firm’s press release.

Shares of CYPH also rallied yesterday and today, and are currently up over 13% today at nearly $0.80, and up over 40% in the past five days, per Yahoo Finance data.

Biotech to DAT Pivot

Cypherpunk was launched in mid-November last year and is backed by Gemini founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and the firm is the only publicly traded focused on Zcash.

Like several other DATs that launched last year as the experimental strategy exploded into a trend, Cypherpunk pivoted to a DAT via a rebrand from an entirely different industry, namely biotech. The company’s biotech past as Leap Therapeutics still shows up in the books, and the release notes that R&D expenses for what is now the company’s subsidiary fell by more than half last year from the previous year, which also helped it achieve net income.

Buying High, Reporting Profitable

As The Defiant previously reported last month, ZEC had fallen more than 50% since Cypherpunk’s last disclosed purchase on Dec. 30, 2025, when the company added 56,418 ZEC at around $514 per token.

According to the release, total holdings now stand at 294,743.10 ZEC at an average purchase price of $335.89 per token — about 19% higher than current prices, meaning the treasury remains underwater on a cost basis.

Still, Monday’s move suggests markets read the first-ever profit report as a validation of the DAT model applied to ZEC.

ZEC was the top-performing large-cap crypto asset of the year, as The Defiant previously reported, having surged more than 800% over the course of 2025.

The privacy-focused cryptocurrency, which is the second-largest privacy coin by market cap after Monero (XMR), began its extended price rally in the fall, starting in early September. The timing coincided roughly with the Winklevoss’ investment into Leap.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed criminal charges against Kalshi Tuesday, charging the prediction markets platform with operating an unlicensed gambling business and offering election wagering in the state, actions she said violated the state’s laws.

Mayes charged KalshiEx LLC and Kalshi Trading LLC with 20 counts, alleging the platform accepted bets from Arizona on a wide range of events in violation of Arizona law, including sports and elections, like contracts betting on the outcomes of the 2028 presidential race and 2026 state gubernatorial race.

“Arizona law prohibits operating an unlicensed wagering business, and separately bans betting on elections outright,” the attorney general said in a statement.

The charges come just days after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) signaled a more supportive federal stance toward prediction markets, issuing new guidance and launching a rulemaking process under Chairman Mike Selig.

That effort asserted the CFTC’s “exclusive jurisdiction” over event contracts and frames platforms like Kalshi as regulated derivatives venues rather than gambling operators, setting up a direct clash with states such as Arizona that continue to treat sports and election-related contracts.

“Sadly, a state can file criminal charges on paper thin arguments,” a Kalshi spokesperson said in a statement. “States like Arizona want to individually regulate a nationwide financial exchange, and are trying every trick in the book to do it. As other courts have recognized and the CFTC affirms, Kalshi is subject to federal jurisdiction. It’s different from what sportsbooks and casinos offer their customers, and it should not be overseen by a patchwork of inconsistent state laws.”

Different courts have ruled in different ways on whether prediction market providers are subject to state laws. A federal judge in Nevada ruled last year that the company’s sports-related contracts are subject to state gaming regulators. A Massachusetts state court similarly found that sports-related conduct might be subject to state regulations in that state. A federal judge in Tennessee ruled the other way earlier this year, at least temporarily blocking state regulators from enforcing a cease-and-desist against Kalshi.

Notably, most of these contracts and cases were related to sports gambling, and not election-related bets, as Arizona’s case is.

In her statement, Mayes said, “Kalshi may brand itself as a ‘prediction market,’ but what it’s actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections.”

She added that state law prohibits both unlicensed wagering businesses and betting on elections outright.

The charges escalate a widening legal fight between Kalshi and state regulators. The company sued Arizona on March 12 in a preemptive move, part of a broader strategy that has recently included litigation against Iowa and Utah, Mayes’ filing added. Arizona officials also criticized the approach, saying Kalshi is attempting to bypass state-level gambling rules by turning to federal courts.

“Kalshi is making a habit of suing states rather than following their laws,” Mayes said. “In the last three weeks alone, the company has filed lawsuits against Iowa and Utah, and now Arizona.”

Mayes criticized Kalshi saying that instead of operating within the legal frameworks such as Arizona’s, “Kalshi is running to federal court to try to avoid accountability.”

The filing also cited a recent federal court setback for Kalshi in Ohio, where a judge denied the firm’s request for a preliminary injunction and affirmed the state’s authority to enforce its gambling laws.

Kalshi has positioned its event contracts as federally regulated derivatives rather than gambling products, a distinction now being tested across multiple jurisdictions.

Crypto trading and investment company GSR has acquired advisory companies Autonomous and Architech in a $57 million deal to expand its services for tokenized projects, combining launch support, treasury management and capital markets infrastructure under one platform.

The acquisition brings together Autonomous’s operational and financial services for token launches with Architech’s focus on token design and liquidity strategy, integrating both into GSR’s existing trading, market-making and asset management business.

To be sure, many crypto projects face challenges due to their reliance on different providers for structuring, token economics, fundraising, and exchange listings, which can lead to inefficiencies and a lack of coordination, according to Philipp Maume and Mathias Fromberger, writing recently in the Chicago Journal of International Law.

GSR said that its platform will provide treasury services, including liquidity planning, risk management and capital allocation for digital asset reserves.

Architech, founded in 2024, has advised on token launches with a combined peak fully diluted value of more than $10 billion, according to the company. Autonomous provides treasury operations, financial management and coordination with exchanges, custodians and market makers.

Autonomous will continue operating under its existing brand within GSR, while Architech will be integrated into a new digital asset advisory unit.

Related: Mastercard agrees to acquire BVNK in $1.8B stablecoin deal

From ICOs to structured token launches

Token fundraising in crypto has shifted significantly since the initial coin offering (ICO) boom of 2017 and 2018 saw projects raise capital directly from retail investors with minimal coordination across service providers. Today, token launches are often structured through private funding rounds, followed by coordinated exchange listings and liquidity provisioning.

Projects such as Monad raised $225 million in 2024 in a funding round led by Paradigm ahead of a planned token launch.

In November, Coinbase launched a platform for regulated primary token offerings, giving US retail investors access to token sales with compliance requirements, lockups and controlled distribution. The platform debuted with the token sale from Monad, marking one of the first broad opportunities for US retail investors to participate in public token sales in recent years.

Projects are also experimenting with new issuance models tied to broader financial strategies.

Crypto exchange Backpack said its planned token distribution will be linked to business milestones and a potential IPO, with a portion of supply managed within a corporate treasury. In February, the company was reportedly in talks to raise $50 million at a $1 billion pre-money valuation.

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