Kraken Financial, the baking arm of U.S. centralized exchange Kraken, announced that it has a Federal Reserve master account, granting it direct access to the U.S. payment systems.

In a blog post published today, March 4, the firm said that the approval marks a major milestone for the integration of crypto and traditional financial rails. It also makes Kraken Financial the first crypto-focused bank to receive a master account from the U.S. central bank.

Kraken Financial is state regulated, holding a Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI) license in Wyoming, making it able to offer both digital asset custody and fiat deposit accounts. The Fed master account connects the bank directly to the central bank’s payment infrastructure, including Fedwire. The firm said it expects the move to make fiat transactions more efficient for its institutional clients.

Last month, Kraken announced that it will sponsor so-called “Trump Accounts” for every child born in Wyoming this year, via its banking arm. The parent company of the bank and the CEX, which is the second largest in the U.S. by daily trading volume, is registered in the state, which is generally known for its crypt-friendly legislation efforts.

Both Ripple and crypto-focused, federally chartered bank Anchorage Digital have applied for Fed master accounts last year, but have yet to receive them.

This article was generated with the assistance of AI workflows.

As can be seen on the XAG/USD chart, the price of silver is recovering after forming yesterday’s low below the $79 level. The price per ounce has already exceeded $86 today (+10% in less than 24 hours!).

Volatility in the silver market is being driven by fluctuations in the US dollar, as well as military action in the Middle East, which is fuelling concerns about a prolonged regional conflict. According to media reports:

→ Yesterday, Israel carried out a strike on a building where religious figures had gathered to elect a new Supreme Leader.

→ Following the death of Ali Khamenei, he was succeeded by his son Mojtaba Khamenei. Although some sources consider him the leading candidate (no official statements have yet been made), this has raised concerns that the new Iranian leadership may continue existing policies — increasing uncertainty over the outcome of the conflict.

On 20 February, when analysing the XAG/USD chart, we:

→ highlighted the importance of the $95 resistance level;
→ suggested that the price of silver could consolidate above the breakout level of the descending channel around $79 (shown in red), reinforced by the psychological $80 mark.

Indeed, our assumptions were reflected in the formation of a zigzag pattern, with a bearish reversal at the A peak and a bullish reversal at yesterday’s low B. Notably, these and other key extremes make it possible to outline the contours of an upward trajectory (shown in blue).

It is possible that the upward movement observed this morning will continue during the US trading session, allowing XAG/USD to reach the blue median line. Price action at that point may provide important clues — if the median does not show signs of resistance, this may be interpreted as an indication of further upside potential.

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Police in Thailand have asked Interpol to issue a red notice against Benjamin Mauerberger, an alleged money launderer for a number of South Asian scam operations with links to the world’s once-fourth largest crypto exchange, KuCoin. 

Local media reports that Thailand’s Crime Suppression Division filed a request that, if approved, would see Interpol issue a global warrant for Mauerberger’s arrest. 

Thailand charged the South African businessman and his wife, Cattaliya Beevor, with investment fraud and money laundering last week. 

Courts accused the duo of conning investors out of 1 billion baht ($31.6 million) in 2016 through a series of fraudulent projects involving power plants, private jets, and real estate investments.

Mauerberger reportedly fled his base in Bangkok last September and is now residing in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). 

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2029.47, up 3.9% (+76.88) since 4 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

Eighteen of 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: SOL (+5.6%) and AAVE (+5.0%).

Laggards: NEAR (-2.4%) and DOT (-0.4%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Tether, the crypto firm behind the most popular stablecoin USDT USDT$0.9999, has invested $50 million in sleep technology startup Eight Sleep at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to a Wednesday press release and data from Crunchbase.

With the funding, Eight Sleep plans to develop new AI health features using Tether’s QVAC architecture, a computing framework designed to process data at the device level rather than relying fully on cloud systems.

Eight Sleep builds sensor-equipped sleep systems that track biometrics such as heart rate and temperature during the night. Its flagship “Pod” product adjusts mattress temperature and generates sleep insights based on real-time physiological data.

“We believe advanced personalized AI is the perfect pathway to understand and expand human potential,” Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, said in a statement.

The investment is the latest example of Tether pushing beyond stablecoins and crypto infrastructure. The firm is best known for its $183 billion USDT stablecoin, which is popular as a savings and payments tool across emerging markets with limited access to U.S. dollars. Tether reported more than $10 billion in net profits through 2025 and has increasingly channeled those earnings into venture investments across energy, payments, artificial intelligence, and health technology.

The deal follows Tether’s recent launch of QVAC Health, a platform that aggregates personal health data from wearables and other sources while keeping the information encrypted and under the user’s control.

Stablecoin firm KAST has hired Brad Jaffe as its chief communications officer, the company said Wednesday. Jaffe previously led global communications at cryptocurrency exchange Binance for more than three years.

Jaffe handled strategic communications at Binance during a period at the exchange which saw tumultuous regulatory challenges against a backdrop of rapid growth. At KAST he will oversee global communications, brand positioning, regulator and stakeholder engagement, according to a press release.

This is the latest key hire from KAST, the firm said, with the business making over 300 hires in the past year across engineering, product and compliance from across the fintech and crypto ecosystem including Circle, Stripe and Airwallex.

“KAST is built for people who need money to work reliably – entrepreneurs operating internationally, professionals paid in digital assets, families sending funds across borders, or individuals looking for a more predictable way to store and use value.” Jaffe said. “The opportunity now is to turn this infrastructure into financial tools people trust and rely on.”

“Brad has led communications at global scale during pivotal moments in this industry. That perspective will help us shape the next phase of KAST’s growth,” added Raagulan Pathy, Founder & CEO of KAST.

The Sui Dollar (USDsui), the stablecoin of the Sui blockchain, went live Wednesday with a promise that income from the assets backing the token will be funneled back into the ecosystem from which it sprang.

Yield on the bonds and liquid assets backing USDsui will be used to repurchase and remove SUI$0.9388 tokens from circulation or deployed to decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and into automated market making for incentivizing swaps, said Adeniyi Abiodun, a co-founder at Mysten Labs, the original contributors to Sui.

Stablecoin growth has been rapid, and the $310 billion market-cap industry led by Tether and Circle Internet (CRCL) is entering the global payments arena. Both companies keep all the yield generated by the masses of U.S. Treasury bonds backing their dollar-pegged tokens, USDT and USDC, respectively.

“I think we are starting to see a dislocation of the business model of stablecoin issuers, whereby the yield is largely kept to external agencies that don’t really pour value back to the ecosystem,” said Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder at Mysten Labs, the original contributors to Sui. “That yield effectively can get funneled back from the foundation straight to the Sui ecosystem.”

Plans for the coin, which is issued by Bridge, the stablecoin firm acquired last year by payments giant Stripe, were first announced toward the end of 2025. Sui was built by a group of former Meta engineers who worked on the soial media company’s abandoned Libra/Diem digital dollar project.

“Right now those funds do not hit the ecosystem; they really flow out,” Abiodun said. “We are all about closing that loop. So it’s real yield from real world finance that is going back into DeFi that creates a flywheel.”

Bootstrapping a stablecoin is not such a heavy lift when your network has carried over $1 trillion in stablecoins: the likes of USDT, USDC and other stablecoins, Abiodun said.

“The Sui Foundation actually has USDC and other stablecoins today, and so can transition a lot of that straight to Sui Dollar. Mysten Labs can do the same. On top of that, we actually have a lot of investors and hedge funds who are interested in minting Sui USD. So bootstrapping this is actually very easy,” he said.

Abiodun’s former Facebook colleagues and Libra coin partners are the Mysten Labs co-founders: George Danezis (chief scientist), Sam Blackshear (CTO), Evan Cheng (CEO), Kostas Kryptos Chalkias (chief cryptographer).

Polkadot price will be in the spotlight this month as the layer-1 network makes one of its biggest changes since its inception.

Polkadot (DOT) token was trading at $1.5223 on Wednesday, up by 37% from its lowest point in February. Its market capitalization has jumped to $2.5 billion.

DOT price will be in focus next week as the developers implement the new tokenomics framework that will cap the number of tokens to 2.1 billion.

It will also reduce its emissions immediately by 53.6% and eliminate treasury burns, replacing it with a new Dynamic Allocation Pool. Instead of burning tokens, the network fee generated from transactions, slashes, and coretime sales will go to a new permanent on-chain pool available for governance allocation.

The governance will be free to allocate the DOT tokens to validator rewards, staking incentives, treasury budgets, and strategic reserves.

The other big change will be on staking, where validators will have to lock at least 10,000 DOT tokens as self-stake. On top of this, the minimum validator commission will move to 10%, while unbonding will be slashed from 28 days to between 24 and 48 hours.

Polkadot’s tokenomics changes come after the network completed the move to Polkadot 2.0, which involved three core parts: asynchronous backing, agile coretime, and elastic scaling. 

Asynchronous backing reduced its block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, while agile coretime replaced parachain auctions with a more flexible model. Elastic scaling enabled vertical scalability by allowing parachains to access multiple cores in real time.

Still, a major challenge for Polkadot is that its ecosystem growth has been relatively limited, with developers opting for other popular chains like Solana and Ethereum.

Polkadot price prediction: Technical analysis 

The daily timeframe chart shows that the DOT token price has rebounded in the past few days, moving from a low of $1.2260 to the current $1.550.  This rebound happened after forming a double-bottom pattern at $1.2260 and a neckline at $1.4300.

Polkadot price then pulled back, forming a bullish flag pattern, which often leads to a bullish breakout. It has also flipped the Supertrend indicator from red to green.

Therefore, the most likely DOT price forecast is bullish, with the next initial target being last month’s high of $1.7445. A move above that level will point to more upside, potentially to $2.

However, there is also a risk that it will retreat after the tokenomics changes as investors sell the news.