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Anchorage Digital Taps M0 to Scale Regulated Stablecoin Issuance

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TLDR

  • Anchorage Digital has partnered with M0 to strengthen its regulated stablecoin issuance platform.
  • The collaboration allows institutions to launch compliant stablecoins in the United States market.
  • M0 provides modular technology that supports customizable stablecoin creation and management.
  • Anchorage Digital aims to expand its infrastructure while maintaining regulatory and security standards.
  • M0 integrates with platforms like Stripe, MoonPay, and MetaMask to extend its ecosystem reach.

Anchorage expands its stablecoin infrastructure strategy through a new partnership with M0, targeting regulated issuance services. The agreement positions the crypto bank to support institutions seeking compliant digital currency solutions. The move aligns with growing demand for regulated stablecoins in the United States market.

Anchorage Digital expands regulated stablecoin infrastructure with M0

Anchorage Digital has selected M0 as its core technology partner for stablecoin issuance. The integration allows Anchorage to strengthen its platform for institutions seeking regulated digital asset solutions.

The company confirmed that the partnership will expand its issuance capabilities for U.S.-regulated stablecoins. It also enables broader access for firms planning to launch compliant digital currencies.

Anchorage stated that the system upgrade supports operational and security standards required by institutional clients. The firm continues to position itself as a regulated gateway for digital asset services.

Nathan McCauley, Anchorage CEO, said the firm aims to scale its issuance platform through this partnership. He added that the collaboration maintains regulatory and operational reliability for partners.

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The company operates as the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States. It continues to build services focused on institutional digital asset management.

M0 protocol supports flexible stablecoin issuance for institutions

M0 provides modular infrastructure that allows institutions to mint customizable stablecoins. The protocol supports integration with financial platforms and crypto services.

M0 works with platforms such as Stripe, MoonPay, and MetaMask. These integrations expand its reach across payments and blockchain ecosystems.

Luca Prosperi, M0 CEO, stated that the firm has developed modular infrastructure for three years. He said the platform supports entities launching and managing their own stablecoins.

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Prosperi explained that the protocol serves crypto projects, fintech firms, and exchanges. He added that the Anchorage partnership reflects deeper regulatory alignment.

The platform enables institutions to configure stablecoins based on compliance and operational requirements. It also supports scalable deployment across global markets.

Regulatory framework drives collaboration between Anchorage Digital and M0

The partnership follows regulatory developments under the GENIUS Act in the United States. The law introduces clearer rules for stablecoin issuance and oversight.

Anchorage aims to align its services with these regulatory standards through its technology stack. The firm continues to expand its compliance-focused offerings.

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M0 has already partnered with regulated entities using its smart contract infrastructure. However, Prosperi described the Anchorage collaboration as more integrated.

He stated that the relationship includes deeper coordination on compliance and operational processes. This structure supports institutions entering regulated stablecoin markets.

Anchorage confirmed that the expanded platform will support firms seeking U.S.-regulated digital currencies. The company continues to develop infrastructure aligned with federal requirements.

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Sentora Debuts Smart Yield, Broadening Institutional DeFi Access

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Crypto Breaking News

Sentora announced on April 30, 2026 that Sentora Smart Yield is now publicly available, opening access to its DeFi vault discovery and monitoring platform to all users. The move broadens access to a research-led yield infrastructure that had been primarily deployed for institutional partners, signaling a maturation in how on-chain capital is evaluated and deployed.

Vaults have emerged as a central pillar of DeFi infrastructure, enabling capital to move across protocols and chains with defined risk controls. Sentora notes that risk-curated vault structures already account for nearly $7 billion in DeFi capital. At the same time, Sentora’s public vaults hold almost $2 billion in allocations, a scale that positions the firm as the largest public vault curator and aligns it with notable ecosystem partners such as Kraken, Upshift, and Morpho. The company frames its public rollout as a natural extension of its institutional framework, now accessible to a broader audience.

The launch rolls out a public, non-custodial interface built around strategy discovery, analytics, and risk visibility, moving beyond a plain APY dashboard. The platform is designed to help users understand the structure behind opportunities before committing capital, rather than merely presenting headline yields.

“Vaults are becoming one of the main ways capital is organized and deployed across DeFi, but most products still reduce that experience to a single number,” said Jesus Rodriguez, co-founder and CPO at Sentora.

“With Smart Yield, we’re bringing the same strategy framework we’ve built for institutional partners to the public, but in a format that gives users real transparency into how a vault works, where funds go and what risks they are taking before they deposit.”

At the core of Sentora Smart Yield is a bifurcated vault model that balances accessibility with sophistication. Direct Vaults provide simpler, single-strategy exposure—typically anchored in lending markets—offering a cleaner, lower-complexity path to on-chain yield. By contrast, Smart Vaults are more structured products that deploy capital through multi-step strategies to pursue greater capital efficiency or enhanced returns. Examples cited by Sentora include strategies like Supervised Loans and Leveraged Loops, which aim to optimize allocations while maintaining a clear view of exposure.

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The public platform makes the strategy framework visible alongside each vault’s page. Users can compare vaults by asset, chain, strategy, APY, and risk metrics, while also examining how each vault is constructed—the allocation points, the flow of funds, and the exposures embedded in the strategy before engaging with the underlying contracts.

In addition to high-level strategy visibility, Sentora’s dashboards integrate analytics and monitoring tools designed to help users evaluate opportunities in depth. Available data points include historical yield behavior, total value locked (TVL) trends, liquidity conditions, withdrawal simulations, wallet concentration, and the composition of each strategy. For Smart Vaults, users can drill down further to see underlying deployments by protocol, blockchain, and asset, offering a granular view of how capital is distributed across the entire strategy stack.

The firm also signaled an intent to broaden protection for on-chain deployments. Sentora has outlined plans to bring DeFi Cover to its vault lineup, leveraging the Firelight protocol to add an additional layer of protection for assets deployed through its vaults. This move would complement the transparency and risk context already baked into the platform, providing an additional safety net for users deploying capital via public vaults.

The company positions Smart Yield as a product that reflects institutional requirements while remaining accessible to the broader market. The aim is to provide not just yield opportunities but the tools to assess them with discipline—an emphasis on structure, transparency, and contextual risk alongside potential return.

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Sentora Smart Yield is live now at vaults.sentora.com.

Key takeaways

  • The public rollout extends Sentora’s institutional-grade yield research framework to retail users, expanding access to strategy discovery and risk analytics for DeFi vaults.
  • The platform emphasizes transparency, showing how vaults are constructed, where funds go, and the risks involved—beyond a single yield number.
  • Two vault archetypes are offered: Direct Vaults (single-strategy exposure) and Smart Vaults (multi-step, potentially higher-efficiency or higher-variance strategies).
  • Analytical tools include historical yields, TVL trends, liquidity, withdrawal simulations, wallet concentration, and strategy composition—plus underlying deployments for Smart Vaults.
  • Sentora plans to integrate DeFi Cover via Firelight to add an additional protection layer for on-chain asset deployments across its vaults.

From institutional rails to public accessibility

The shift to a public-facing version of Sentora’s yield research and monitoring infrastructure marks a notable evolution in DeFi infrastructure design. Historically, sophisticated yield strategies and risk analysis have lived behind more restricted, institution-facing portals. By publicizing the same framework, Sentora intends to empower a broader set of users—investors, traders, and builders—to evaluate and participate in on-chain strategies with a clearer understanding of risk and capital allocation.

The two-vault model also helps differentiate the user experience. Direct Vaults provide a lower-friction route into yield generation, appealing to users who want straightforward exposure without layering multiple steps of capital deployment. Smart Vaults, meanwhile, align with more sophisticated users who seek enhanced returns through structured deployment patterns, albeit with a deeper layer of complexity and risk to assess. The underlying philosophy is to demystify “how” a vault earns yield, not just “how much.”

The analytics suite strengthens this approach. Investors can study past performance patterns, evaluate how liquidity and withdrawal dynamics might impact their positions, and gauge how concentrated ownership could affect a vault’s resilience to redemptions. For Smart Vaults, the ability to inspect protocol-level and asset-level breakdowns helps traders understand where capital is actually deployed across the stack. This granularity is a meaningful upgrade from surface-level appearance of yield, offering a more decision-ready picture of risk and reward.

Sentora’s planned DeFi Cover integration adds a forward-looking risk-management angle. If successfully rolled out, Cover protection would provide a protection layer for deployed capital, potentially reducing downside risk during extreme market conditions. The addition would complement the platform’s emphasis on transparency and risk context, aligning with broader industry moves toward insuring on-chain activities and expanding the set of guardrails available to yield-focused strategies.

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Implications for the DeFi vault landscape

The public launch of Sentora Smart Yield arrives at a moment when DeFi vaults have matured into a common mechanism for capital allocation across chains. By publicly presenting strategy-level detail and risk context, Sentora is testing whether on-chain yield can be both approachable for non-institutional participants and disciplined enough for risk-aware investors. The emphasis on structure over simple APY aligns with a broader industry push to improve governance, transparency, and risk disclosure in yield-bearing products.

For investors and users, the development raises several key considerations. First, access to institutional-grade research tools could raise the quality of decision-making in retail DeFi participation, potentially improving risk awareness and capital efficiency. Second, the visibility into strategy design and deployment could spur more competition among vault builders to publish comparable disclosures, potentially raising standards industry-wide. Third, while DeFi Cover promises added protection, readers should watch how such protection interacts with liquidity, deployment strategies, and protocol risk, particularly in complex Smart Vaults with leveraged or multi-step structures.

In the broader market, Sentora’s public-facing approach may push other vault curators to offer similar levels of transparency, or to differentiate through risk analytics and coverage options. As vaults continue to serve as a primary interface for on-chain capital, the quality of information available to users about risk, exposures, and governance will likely influence participation levels, capital flows, and the pace of institutional-grade tools becoming mainstream.

Sentora’s public rollout also signals a continuing trend toward combining institutional rigor with user-friendly access. By presenting not just opportunities but the scaffolding behind them, the platform invites users to engage with DeFi yield in a more informed, deliberate manner. Whether this approach resonates with a broader audience remains to be seen, but it certainly adds a new layer to how DeFi yield opportunities are evaluated in real time.

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Sentora Smart Yield is now accessible at vaults.sentora.com, and the company continues to position its platform as a bridge between institutional risk discipline and public market participation.

About Sentora

Sentora is a DeFi infrastructure and strategy partner serving institutional and sophisticated on-chain capital allocators. Through its research-led approach to vaults and private strategies, Sentora helps users access on-chain yield opportunities with greater transparency into strategy design, capital allocation, and risk.

Risk & affiliate notice: Crypto assets are volatile and capital is at risk. This article may contain affiliate links. Read full disclosure

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Binance Draws Industry Praise For MegaETH’s MEGA Token Listing

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MON Has Not Appeared on Binance

Binance will list MegaETH’s MEGA token on April 30, 2026, with spot trading set to open at 11:00 UTC. The exchange received no allocation or listing fee, drawing wide praise from analysts and founders.

Binance applied its Seed Tag to MEGA. Every major centralized exchange has now added MEGA without taking project tokens, a rare outcome for a Layer 2 (L2) launch.

Binance Joins MEGA Exchange Spread Without Tokens

Spot pairs including MEGA/USDC and MEGA/USDT went live shortly after the Binance announcement. Deposits and trading remain restricted in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, and other jurisdictions for regulatory reasons.

MegaETH publicly committed earlier in 2026 to a no-pay listing policy. The team refused to send tokens for fees, liquidity rewards, or promotional airdrops.

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The team argued that listings should follow merit and demand, not supply transfers.

“MegaETH has not, and will not, give away MEGA tokens as “fees or airdrops” to any centralized or decentralized exchange for a listing. If an exchange chooses to list the MEGA token, it is because they believe it is a strong project,” the team articulated.

By launch day, Coinbase, Bybit, Upbit, Bithumb, and Binance had each added MEGA without taking project tokens.

Smaller venues including OKX, Bitget, and MEXC also enabled trading. Community members called the spread a “royal flush” and a first for an organic Layer 2 listing run.

Industry Figures Frame Listing as a Shift in Exchange Practice

Simon Dedic, chief executive at Blockhead Capital, said Binance “bent the knee” by listing without compensation. He framed the outcome as a positive signal for token founders weighing exchange demands during launches.

“Honestly, I wouldn’t have expected them to bend the knee and list it for free, so kudos to Binance here. Imagine being such a sought-after project that every major CEX lists you without receiving a single token,” wrote Dedic.

Analyst DeFi Ignas pointed out that Binance had previously committed to supporting builders with large communities. He argued that skipping MEGA would have contradicted that stance.

Notably, Monad’s MON token, which sold publicly on Coinbase earlier in 2026, has not appeared on Binance.

MON Has Not Appeared on Binance
MON Has Not Appeared on Binance. Source: Coingecko

The general sentiment is that the launch is “substantive and principled,” given MegaETH’s avoidance of KOL payments, point-farming campaigns, and supply allocations to exchanges.

The project’s mUSD stablecoin and proximity market design are potential routes for the token to capture network value.

“It’s a rare sight in a space that rewards crime. Good to see good teams win. Hopefully an inspiration playbook for other quality projects to follow,” stated Grail.eth, a popular user on X.

MEGA Trades Near $2 Billion Fully Diluted Valuation

MEGA traded around $0.16 in the hours after the Binance listing announcement. The price placed circulating market cap near $190 million and fully diluted valuation around $1.7 billion. Total supply is 10 billion tokens.

MegaETH (MEGA) Price.
MegaETH (MEGA) Price. SOurce: Coingecko

Initial Coin Offering (ICO) buyers saw paper gains of roughly 2x, including those who agreed to a 12-month lock.

However, not every report from the launch was positive, with some users reporting a wallet drain of about $31,920 in USDC.

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Community responses pointed to compromised approvals or phishing rather than a protocol fault. Users urged claimants to revoke unused permissions before interacting with new contracts.

The MEGA listing run sets a precedent for other Layer 2 teams to point to. Whether future launches replicate the playbook may depend on whether their tokens see comparable demand.

Supply concessions have long shaped exchange decisions, and few projects have refused them.

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XRP Price Prediction: RLUSD Pushes Ripple Stablecoin Adoption, But XRP Lags

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XRP price trades just a few levels below $1.40 after clearing a key resistance level, which then lags. The token’s price action has remained stubbornly muted even as Ripple’s stablecoin ecosystem posts record numbers.

RLUSD’s market cap has surged to $1.59 billion, with 24-hour trading volume spiking 143% as BlackRock adopted it as collateral. OKX’s listing of RLUSD as institutional collateral marks a structural upgrade too, moving it from a tier-two exchange asset to a genuine money-market instrument.

Ripple ecosystem is firing on multiple cylinders, with MEA expansion deals closing, central bank payment integrations deepening, record XRPL transaction volumes printing, while XRP spot price consolidates in a tight band.

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Can XRP Price Hit $2.80 Before Year-End?

XRP currently trades in the $1.37–$1.40 range, having cleared the $1.40 resistance level before falling back under it again. The volume driven by stablecoin positioning doesn’t always carry the same weight as organic spot demand. Support sits at $1.33; a clean hold above $1.40 on a daily close would confirm the level as new support.

Momentum indicators suggest consolidation rather than a clean directional trend. The price is holding its ground, but moving averages show no strong bullish divergence yet.

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XRP price has remained stubbornly muted even as Ripple's stablecoin ecosystem posts record numbers. Should holders worry?
XRP USD, TradingView

If RLUSD can hit the $2 billion market cap milestone, it would likely trigger institutional liquidity flows that spill into XRP. Analysts at Standard Chartered target $2.80 by year-end under this scenario, conditional on RLUSD reaching $1 billion supply thresholds.

Garlinghouse’s recent commentary reinforced the long-term payments narrative, but near-term price action hinges on whether the $1.40 level holds through the week. Watch it closely.

Discover: The best pre-launch token sales

LiquidChain Targets Early-Mover Upside as XRP Tests Key Levels

XRP at $1.40 represents a cleaned-up technical picture, but at a $73+ billion market cap, the multiples needed for life-changing returns require a very specific macro setup. That’s the honest math.

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Traders rotating between established large-caps and genuinely early-stage infrastructure are increasingly looking one layer deeper in the stack.

LiquidChain ($LIQUID) is a Layer 3 infrastructure project built around a single thesis: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana liquidity shouldn’t live in silos. Its Unified Liquidity Layer fuses all three ecosystems into one execution environment.

With Liquid, developers deploy once, access all three, with verifiable settlement baked in. The presale is live at $0.01454 per $LIQUID, with more than $700k raised, and not to forget, it’s 1500% APY rewards. Single-Step Execution and Deploy-Once Architecture are the headline technical features.

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Research LiquidChain before the next price increase.

The post XRP Price Prediction: RLUSD Pushes Ripple Stablecoin Adoption, But XRP Lags appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Sentora brings institutional DeFi to the public with the launch of its Smart Yield platform

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Sentora brings institutional DeFi to the public with the launch of its Smart Yield platform

April 30, 2026Sentora has announced that Sentora Smart Yield is now publicly available, opening access to its DeFi vault discovery and monitoring platform to all users.

As DeFi vaults become a core way capital moves onchain, Sentora is opening public access to the same research-led yield infrastructure it has used to support institutional deployments.

This comes as vaults have become a key part of DeFi infrastructure, and risk curators already account for nearly $7 billion in DeFi capital through curated vault structures.

The success of this model has been driven in large part by its ability to give users a simpler way to access onchain strategies while abstracting away much of the complexity of risk management.

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With nearly $2 billion allocated across Sentora’s public vaults, the firm has become the largest public vault curator and works with key ecosystem partners such as Kraken, Upshift and Morpho.

Automated risk management, advanced strategy design and in-depth research have been central to Sentora’s rapid growth in this market segment.

The new platform means that the company is extending that same research-led framework to the public through a transparent, non-custodial interface built around strategy discovery, analytics and risk visibility.

Rather than functioning as another simple APY screen, Sentora Smart Yield is designed to help users understand the structure behind opportunities before they act.

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Through the platform, users can compare vaults by asset, chain, strategy, APY, and risk metrics, while also reviewing how each vault is constructed. This is where capital is allocated and what exposures come with the strategy before interacting with the underlying vault contracts.

“Vaults are becoming one of the main ways capital is organized and deployed across DeFi, but most products still reduce that experience to a single number,” said Jesus Rodriguez, co-founder and CPO at Sentora.

“With Smart Yield, we’re bringing the same strategy framework we’ve built for institutional partners to the public, but in a format that gives users real transparency into how a vault works, where funds go and what risks they are taking before they deposit.”

Sentora Smart Yield also includes two core vault categories, Direct Vaults and Smart Vaults. Direct Vaults provide simpler, single-strategy exposure, typically through lending markets, and are designed to offer a cleaner, lower-complexity path to onchain yield.

Smart Vaults are more structured products that use multi-step capital deployment to pursue greater capital efficiency or enhanced returns through strategies, such as Supervised Loans and Leveraged Loops.

By making these strategies visible through a public dashboard, Sentora is bringing part of its more advanced institutional strategy set to a broader market for the first time.

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In addition, each vault page includes analytics and monitoring tools designed to help users evaluate opportunities in greater detail.

These include historical yield behavior, TVL trends, liquidity conditions, withdrawal simulations, wallet concentration and strategy composition. 

For Smart Vaults, users can also view underlying deployments by protocol, blockchain and asset, giving them a clearer picture of how capital is allocated across the full strategy stack.

Sentora has also shared plans to bring DeFi Cover to all of its vaults, leveraging the Firelight protocol to add an additional protection layer for onchain asset deployments.

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The result is a public product shaped by institutional requirements, not just access to DeFi yield but with the tools to assess it with greater discipline too.

As vaults continue to grow as an interface for onchain capital allocation, Sentora is positioning Smart Yield around a simple idea – yield discovery should come with structure, transparency and risk context, not just headline returns.

Sentora Smart Yield is available now at vaults.sentora.com.

About Sentora

Sentora is a DeFi infrastructure and strategy partner serving institutional and sophisticated onchain capital allocators. Through its research-led approach to vaults and private strategies, Sentora helps users and institutions access onchain yield opportunities with greater transparency into strategy design, capital allocation, and risk.

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This publication is provided by the client. The text below is a paid press release that is not part of Cointelegraph.com independent editorial content. The text has undergone editorial review to ensure quality and relevance, it may not reflect the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.com. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before taking any actions related to the company. Disclosure.

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Meta Pays Facebook Creators in USDC for First Time

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Circle paid $461 million in distribution costs from $733 million reserve income in Q4

Meta has begun paying select creators in USDC stablecoin on Solana and Polygon via Stripe, marking Facebook’s first crypto payout program four years after the company shut down its Libra project under regulatory pressure.

Summary

  • Meta USDC creator payouts launched April 29 for select creators in Colombia and the Philippines, with eligible users able to link a MetaMask, Phantom, or Binance wallet and receive earnings in Circle’s USDC directly.
  • Stripe handles the backend and provides tax reporting for the transactions. Meta emphasized it is not issuing its own stablecoin and is using Circle’s existing USDC, which has a market cap exceeding $77 billion.
  • The move reverses Meta’s retreat from crypto payments: Libra was launched in 2019, rebranded as Diem, and shut down entirely in 2022 after regulators blocked every path to launch.

Meta USDC creator payouts went live on April 29 when the company quietly updated its support page to show that eligible creators in Colombia and the Philippines can now receive earnings in USDC on either Solana or Polygon. Yahoo Finance reported that Stripe, which acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge for $1.1 billion in late 2024, is the payments provider handling transactions and generating crypto-related tax documents for creators. Meta explicitly told reporters it is “not issuing a Meta stablecoin” and is instead using Circle’s USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market cap.

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As crypto.news reported, the rollout aligns with Meta’s plans disclosed in February to enter the stablecoin payments space through third-party infrastructure, with Stripe emerging as the leading partner after an RFP process. The choice of Solana is significant: Solana processes transactions in roughly 400 milliseconds with fees under $0.001, and as crypto.news documented, Circle minted over $10.5 billion USDC on Solana in a single month earlier in 2026, making it already the leading chain for USDC settlement volume ahead of Ethereum. Meta paid content creators nearly $3 billion in 2025, meaning even a partial conversion to stablecoin payouts would place meaningful volume onto Solana and Polygon.

The strategic context is the opposite of Libra. As crypto.news tracked, Meta’s 2019 Libra project failed because it tried to issue its own currency, control the wallet, and run the settlement network, giving regulators a single point to block. The 2026 approach makes Meta a customer rather than an issuer: Circle issues USDC, Stripe moves the money, and Solana and Polygon process the transactions. Meta provides the distribution through its more than 3 billion users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

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New data suggests military insider trading crisis on Polymarket

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New data suggests military insider trading crisis on Polymarket

A Green Beret’s alleged $400,000 insider bet on a raid in Venezuela seemed like an isolated breach. A new report suggests it may be the visible edge of something broader.

The Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC), a nonprofit research group, analyzed every settled Polymarket contract from January 2021 through mid-March 2026 — more than 435,000 markets and $54.4 billion in cumulative volume — and found that low-probability bets on military and defense outcomes win at rates that are difficult to explain through skill or luck.

Across political markets, such “longshot” bets typically succeed about 14% of the time. In military-linked contracts, success rates have topped 50% in some cases.

“Markets tied to specific government policies, such as military and defense and foreign affairs, are harder to forecast using public information alone,” the authors wrote, making them “more susceptible to information asymmetries,” including insider trading or specialized knowledge.

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In those markets, the gap between informed and uninformed traders may be widest, creating conditions in which a small group can consistently outperform not just by reacting faster, but by knowing more.

For its part, Polymarket touts its market surveillance teams and cooperation with the Department of Justice on the Venezuela case. Trading on confidential knowledge is prohibited on the platform, as it is on Kalshi.

Concentrated profits

The ACDC report’s findings add to a growing body of research pointing in the same direction. A working paper from London Business School and Yale found that roughly 3% of traders account for most price discovery on Polymarket.

Separate analysis from blockchain analytics firm Solidus Labs showed that profits are even more concentrated, with fewer than 1% of wallets capturing about half of all gains. ACDC’s contribution is to suggest where some of that edge may come from.

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The report examines the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran as a case study. Polymarket listed several date-specific contracts on whether a strike would occur. Markets tied to June 19 and June 20 expired without incident, and no longshot bets won.

The strike came at 18:40 ET on June 21. In the hours leading up to it, 19 longshot bets totaling $164,292 were placed across the contracts that ultimately resolved YES. Eight wallets shared about $1.8 million in profits, with one taking nearly $500,000.

The Pentagon had designed the operation to be unreadable from the outside, using decoy bombers and long-range stealth aircraft to avoid detection. Despite that, a small number of traders placed large, well-timed bets on the outcome.

The pattern extends beyond a single event. Across Polymarket’s military and defense category, the report found that in five of the six two-hour windows before market resolution, winning longshot bets outnumbered losing ones, contrary to what market prices imply.

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Longshot bets can outperform for other reasons, including mispricing or shifts in public expectations. But the consistency of the patterns, especially in markets tied to military decisions, suggests that some participants may be operating with information advantages that others do not have.

ACDC, being a nonprofit research group funded through the Fund for Constitutional Government, has no surveillance product to sell, compared to Solidus Labs, whose own recent Polymarket analysis doubles as a marketing case for the platform it licenses to Kalshi.

ACDC’s recommendations include identity verification for bettors, conditional payouts on suspicious wagers, restrictions on markets whose outcomes are decided by small groups, and limits on how granular contracts can become.

The report’s conclusion goes further, calling for “an evidence-informed debate about whether the public should be betting on these outcomes at all.”

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MARA to buy Long Ridge Energy in $1.5 billion AI data center push

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Foundry unveils Zcash block explorer as mining pool reaches 30% of hashrate

MARA Holdings (MARA) has agreed to buy Long Ridge Energy & Power in a deal valued at about $1.5 billion. MARA will also assume at least $785 million of debt backstopped by a bridge loan.

The seller, FTAI Infrastructure (FIP), is up 12% in pre-market trading. MARA is ahead 3%.

The deal includes Long Ridge’s 505-megawatt combined-cycle gas plant in Hannibal, Ohio, along with more than 1,600 acres of land, water access, fiber links, fuel supply and grid connections, according to a Thursday filing.

MARA said the site could support more than 1 gigawatt of total power capacity over time.

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MARA said the acquisition would raise its owned-and-operated power capacity by about 65% and expand its operating and development pipeline to roughly 2.2 gigawatts across PJM, ERCOT, SPP and international markets.

MARA plans to start construction on an initial AI and critical IT buildout in the first half of 2027, with the first capacity targeted for mid-2028. The company said it does not expect to cut Long Ridge’s current power supply to the PJM grid.

The company expects the Long Ridge assets to add about $144 million of annualized adjusted EBITDA. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026.

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How North Korean spies spent months in-person to drain $285 million from Drift

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How North Korean spies spent months in-person to drain $285 million from Drift

North Korean government-backed hackers are becoming more sophisticated, more precise and now account for more than 76% or nearly $600 million in crypto losses this year alone.

The $285 Drift Protocol exploit, for example, involved what TRMLabs describes as a long and “unprecedented in-person social engineering” attack. It included months of in-person meetings between North Korean proxies and Drift employees.

“North Korean proxies sitting across a table from protocol employees over a period of months. That is, to my knowledge, unprecedented in North Korea’s crypto hacking campaign,” Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy and Government Affairs at TRMLabs, told CoinDesk. “This is no longer just a remote keyboard operation.”

Ari’s comments accompany TRMLabs’ new report released Thursday, which highlights how North Korea’s two main hacking groups, DPRK and Lazarus, are responsible for 76% of all the crypto losses to hacks and exploits in 2026.

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“What we are watching is not a North Korean campaign that is broader — it is one that is sharper,” Redbord said in the report. “North Korea is moving faster and more precisely than ever.”

“North Korea’s cumulative crypto theft now exceeds $6 billion attributed incidents since 2017,” TRM Labs’ report adds.

TRMLabs’ findings coincide with a Wasabi Protocol exploit using a similar playbook to Drift’s April 19 hack, where the assailants used a compromised deployer key with no timelock or multisig to drain $4.5 million.

The $292 million KelpDAO breach exploited a known single-verifier flaw that LayerZero had repeatedly warned against.

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The playbook was vastly different from the Drift exploit, according to TRMLabs. Hackers converted the Drift proceeds to USDC, bridged to Ethereum, swapped into ETH, and have not moved them since the day of the theft, which is consistent with the DPRK’s patient, multi-year cashout pattern.

In contrast, Lazarus took their KelpDAO proceeds and immediately laundered them through THORChain and Umbra, which is handled almost entirely by Chinese intermediaries operating the well-documented TraderTraitor playbook, the report explains.

The Kelp DAO exploit triggered DeFi’s largest wipeouts as $13 billion exited several lending platforms, most notably, Aave’s, which lost $8.54 billion in deposits over 48 hours, leaving it with a nearly $200 bad-debt crisis, which industry participants are now helping it to alleviate with $300 million in pledges.

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The only rally during Bitcoin 2026 was Ethereum NFTs

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The only rally during Bitcoin 2026 was Ethereum NFTs

During the world’s largest Bitcoin conference, Ethereum NFTs have, ironically, provided one of only a few green shoots on red-filled crypto dashboards.

Bitcoin’s biggest annual conference opened on Monday in Las Vegas with bitcoin (BTC) above $78,600 and tens of thousands of attendees packing into the Venetian conference center to hear why it should be worth more.

Three days later, BTC was below $75,000.

Over the three-day conference, every top 10 digital asset was negative except for memecoin DOGE. Far lower down the leaderboard, however, Ethereum NFT collections from the 2021 bull run rallied.

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Bored Ape Yacht Club climbed 17% over the past seven days, while its two derivatives, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Bored Ape Kennel Club, rallied 25% and 53%, respectively. 

Pudgy Penguins added 15%, Azuki NFTs rallied 34%, Doodles gained 27%, and Clone X was up 16%.

The Bitcoin conference’s institutional speaker lineup, reportedly drawing more than 40,000 attendees across three days — even though many received free GA passes — was supposed to deliver a flurry of bullish headlines. Instead, it became a classic sell-the-news event.

Meanwhile, over on Bitcoin’s largest competitor Ethereum, five-year-old cartoon apes became one of the best-performing trades in crypto.

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Read more: Pudgy Penguins PENGU token crashes at launch alongside NFTs

Percentage gains are easy from a low base

The reality, of course, is that the entire NFT market cap is now $1.9 billion, down from a peak exceeding $17 billion in April 2022.

So although NFTs have performed well over the last month, they’re still well beneath their previous highs.

Moreover, NFTs are now a thinly-traded asset class with high mark-to-market capitalizations that require very little purchases to move collection valuations substantially.

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Worse, wash trading accounts for roughly $24 million of the $48 million total NFT trading volume over the past week.

Indeed, the rally is almost purely a floor-price phenomenon that’s thinly justified by real purchases. Over the last 30 days on just $125 million of non-wash traded volume, including liquidations and sales at lower prices, the total market cap of NFTs has increased $480 million.

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Real Finance teams up with Wiener Privatbank to unlock institutional crypto access

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XRP price outlook as SBI CEO debunks $10B XRP holdings claim
Real Finance partners Wiener Privatbank to build regulated blockchain infrastructure for institutional market access.
  • Real Finance, Wiener Privatbank partner for regulated blockchain access.
  • EU-compliant framework enables institutional entry into on-chain markets.
  • MVP targets $50 million, scaling to over $500 million tokenized assets in year one.

In a move that underscores the growing convergence between traditional finance and digital assets, Real Finance has announced a strategic partnership with Vienna-based Wiener Privatbank.

The partnership is to develop regulated infrastructure for institutional participation in blockchain-based financial markets.

The collaboration aims to create a framework that aligns blockchain innovation with established European regulatory standards, potentially opening new pathways for institutional capital to enter on-chain ecosystems.

Building a regulated gateway to on-chain markets

At the core of the partnership is the integration of traditional banking services with the REAL blockchain.

Wiener Privatbank will provide essential financial infrastructure, including custody of client funds, reserve safeguarding, and support for asset origination.

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Client funds will be held in EU-regulated accounts, with compliance structured around frameworks such as MiCA, alongside standard know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) procedures.

The framework is designed to address key institutional concerns around legal clarity, operational transparency, and risk management.

By embedding these controls within the system, the partnership seeks to make blockchain-based financial products more accessible to regulated financial institutions that require robust compliance and governance standards.

Scaling tokenized assets within a controlled framework

The collaboration will begin with a minimum viable product (MVP) phase expected to support approximately $50 million in on-chain assets.

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Following the launch of the REAL blockchain mainnet, the partners aim to scale significantly, targeting more than $500 million in tokenized assets within the first year.

Wiener Privatbank will also play a role in originating and structuring euro-denominated assets, contributing to liquidity development within what the companies describe as a regulated digital asset environment.

This focus on euro-based instruments reflects an effort to align blockchain offerings with the needs of European institutional investors.

Looking ahead, the companies plan to explore the issuance of a euro-denominated stablecoin native to the REAL blockchain.

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However, this initiative remains subject to further regulatory assessment and structuring, indicating a cautious approach to compliance and oversight.

Aligning innovation with institutional standards

Executives from both organizations emphasized the importance of combining innovation with regulatory integrity.

Ivo Grigorov, CEO of Real Finance, said the partnership reflects a commitment to building infrastructure that meets institutional expectations.

This partnership reflects our commitment to building institutional-grade infrastructure that meets the expectations of regulated financial institutions. By working with Wiener Privatbank, we are ensuring that access to on-chain markets is underpinned by robust compliance standards, clear governance, and trusted banking relationships.

Michael Munterl, a member of the Executive Board at Wiener Privatbank, highlighted the shared focus on regulatory integrity and innovation.

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Our collaboration with Real Finance is grounded in a shared focus on regulatory integrity and innovation. We see this partnership as an opportunity to extend established banking standards into emerging digital asset infrastructures, while maintaining the compliance, transparency, and client protection principles that define our institution.

The REAL blockchain itself is designed to support the tokenization and distribution of real-world assets within a controlled environment.

Through partnerships with regulated financial institutions, Real Finance aims to create infrastructure where traditional finance and blockchain systems can operate within clearly defined regulatory parameters.

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