For crypto to mature fully, regulated derivatives are non-negotiable.

Derivatives already comprise 70-75% of crypto transaction volumes, with institutional players leading the charge. While there is a growing number of regulated offerings, the majority of the volume – about 95% – happens in “offshore” venues, meaning in unregulated or lightly regulated jurisdictions. This exposes investors to risks like market manipulation and fraud, and leaves consumers with a lack of protections.

Luckily, there are a growing number of pathways, particularly in Europe, for crypto exchanges to meet the demands of risk-averse institutional investors whose primary concern is compliance, security and regulation.

What We Can Learn From Market History

Historically, spot markets have served as foundational liquidity sources and initial price discovery venues. As markets mature, derivatives markets often take the lead by incorporating broader information and future expectations. This transition has already been observed in commodities and equities markets globally, signaling a shift towards more advanced trading strategies — a key indicator of a maturing market.

Similarly, in the crypto space, for a mature and balanced crypto market, it is imperative to have access to both spot and derivatives trading. Futures and options will play — and have always played — an essential role in managing risk, hedging and enhancing capital efficiency. They are crucial for attracting sustained institutional participation, allowing capital efficiency and affording a wide array of trading strategies.

However, only regulated exchanges will be able to provide the security and compliance essential for large financial clients. For crypto exchanges to offer E.U.-regulated crypto derivatives like perpetual swaps, getting a MiFID license is a must. There’s no doubt about the growing demand for derivatives — about $3 trillion. MiFID brings the clarity and protections that crypto markets desperately need, giving us oversight that aligns with traditional financial services. This boosts market integrity and helps curb fraud.

Regulated exchanges can attract a wider range of institutional clients with demand for crypto derivatives. And they can become sources of innovation. The growing appetite for sophisticated products like perpetual swaps reflects the maturation of trading strategies, provided they come with oversight. Effectively leveraging these tools is critical to promoting market integrity and creating sustainable yield opportunities.

Managing the Real Institutional Risks

As we have seen in 2024, hedge funds and family offices are diversifying beyond Bitcoin and Ether, increasingly focusing on stablecoins, derivatives and emerging products. These players know that all markets have volatility, and trading comes with inherent risks – and crypto is no different. Rapid market shifts can quickly transform profitable positions into losses. Derivatives, in general, carry more inherent risk than spot markets due to factors like leverage and complexity, as their value is derived from underlying assets.

Access alone is insufficient. While regulated exchanges offer compliant crypto derivative products, they cannot shield traders from potential losses. They can only provide defenses against risky practices, abuses and bad actors.

Compliance is the next essential piece of the decentralized, cross-border landscape of crypto, where regulatory gaps can amplify risks. Regulatory bodies in reputable jurisdictions are implementing stricter standards for platforms offering crypto derivatives, requiring exchanges to register, maintain sufficient capital, and adopt robust anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) practices.

Custody has matured the most since the last bull run in terms of compliance.

Institutions need custodians that combine technical expertise in securely holding crypto assets with rigorous compliance akin to traditional asset management. Leading custodians bridge this gap through secure storage, operational transparency, and robust safeguards, thereby reducing risks associated with hacks or technical failures.

The result has been institutions are gaining confidence in the crypto market now that regulated custodians can align with their operational standards.

The industry must learn from past mistakes. Focusing solely on venues for liquidity that lack adequate licensing in reputable jurisdictions, developed compliance practices and other trust factors can lead to disastrous consequences. Web pages about “Proof of Reserves” mean nothing without other safeguards in place. Global financial audits (preferably from a Big 4 accounting firm), ISO and SOC2 designations are exceedingly important for both institutional and retail users to consider and prioritize when they choose a crypto platform or partner.

Today’s institutional players seek a marketplace that effectively balances spot liquidity with derivatives for risk management and capital efficiency. The complementary roles of spot and derivatives markets can create a stable and growing crypto ecosystem where transparency, security, and compliance facilitate broader participation.

Therefore, exchanges must prioritize regulated products and secure custody if they want to offer comprehensive trading options for institutional investors moving into 2025.

Macbeth, William Shakespeare’s iconic play, is being reimagined as an interactive video game with a neo-noir vibe — and it’s being developed in part by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The game, titled Lili, is a “screen life thriller video game” where you’ll have access to a modern-day Lady Macbeth’s personal devices, according to a press release.

“Players will be immersed in a stylized, neo-noir vision of modern Iran, where surveillance and authoritarianism are part of daily life,” the release says. “The gameplay will feature a blend of live-action cinema within an interactive game format, giving players the chance to immerse themselves in the world of Lady Macbeth and make choices that influence her destiny.” It sounds kind of like a version of Macbeth inspired by Sam Barlow’s interactive thrillers.

The Royal Shakespeare Company is making the game in collaboration with iNK Stories, a New York-based indie studio and publisher that also made 1979 Revolution: Black Friday. It stars Zar Amir as “Lady Macbeth (Lili),” per the press release.

Lili is set to release “later in 2025.”

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WPP has “looked at” switching its primary listing to New York, according to chief executive Mark Read, who will pursue opportunities to take advantage of a “resurgence” in the US as Donald Trump re-enters the White House.

Read told the Financial Times this was the year for the London-listed advertising network to start delivering on its push into AI, revenue growth and — despite his worries over the health of the UK stock market — its share price.

“We have to drive topline growth to drive the share price — I’m very focused on that,” Read said in an interview at his office on London’s Southbank, as he outlined plans for up to $100mn in additional AI investment to drive both creativity and productivity across its agencies.

“As a leadership team, we have a plan. We know what we need to do. And 2025 is the year about execution, and particularly execution in AI.”

Read said WPP had looked at moving its primary listing to the US, adding: “It’s something we keep a watching eye on.” While it has no plans to do so at the moment, he pointed out that “other CEOs who have moved their listing to the US have found a positive experience”.

The market is closely watching Read’s next moves, with talk among corporate advisers and industry rivals about pressure mounting on the chief executive after the arrival of former BT boss Philip Jansen as chair three weeks ago.

WPP shares have fallen by a tenth in the past month, and are now about a third lower than when Read took over in 2018. The share price of its French rival Publicis has almost doubled in the same period.

Meanwhile WPP’s two largest US rivals — Omnicom and IPG — last month unveiled merger plans to create a single, New York-based advertising heavyweight.

Read said that while major deals along the lines of Omnicom-IPG were “obviously something we consider”, he would not have pursued such a tie-up. “We’d be better off investing in what we have than going through a major consolidation,” he said.

He also viewed the merger as an opportunity, suggesting WPP’s own period of restructuring pointed to disruption ahead for his US rivals. “I’ve got the battle scars of integrating businesses over the past six years,” said Read, pointing to the challenges of bringing together companies spanning multiple advertising and PR agencies.

“There’ll be three big players in our industry. None of us are massively different in size and scale from the others,” he said. And while scale tended to be positive for media buying and planning activities, he added, it was “not entirely clear to me that scale and creativity are two words that always go together”.

Read has faced criticism from some staff over a policy announced last week to bring people back to the office four days a week. But he said: “Ogilvy in New York is one of our best-performing agencies. It’s packed — busy and vibrant — you can feel the energy. And I’m sure those things are linked.”

Read said the US, where it has about 38 per cent of its business, would be the main area for growth for WPP, including M&A plans focused on data and technology services to give it a bigger presence in the world’s largest advertising market.

“With the Trump presidency, there’s a resurgence in business confidence in the US,” he observed, noting the “sense of ambition and growth in the US” that also translated into how well their companies fared on the stock market.

The UK government needed to “get to the bottom” of how to provide the flow of capital that the FTSE 100 required, he said, noting how the valuation discount for companies quoted in London was now “the biggest it’s been in history”. 

“It’s driving M&A and a reduction in the number of listed companies,” he added.

This posed a challenge, he said, for the UK as a whole. “We have to get closer: WPP as a company to the US and the UK as a country to the US.”

WPP counts some of the largest US tech companies as clients — including winning Amazon’s media business outside the Americas last year — but has been hit by a slowdown in spending on advertising in the sector. Even so, he said that “in the long run, those companies are going to be changing the world”. 

He also noted how Trump had in a short space of time brought cultural change in corporate America: “The most striking example of the changes at Meta over the last six weeks. They can see the way the wind is blowing.”

Advertisers were also returning to X, the social media site owned by Trump’s ally Elon Musk. “The change in content moderation [at] Meta — more closely aligned with X — probably helps that as well,” he said.

Looking ahead, he said he was hopeful that this year will deliver improvement in revenues, with plans to spend between £50mn and £100mn more than in 2024 on an AI platform that is being rolled out across the group’s 100,000 workers.

“We’ve got a lot of great new business opportunities,” Read said. “We’re very confident where we are with our investments in AI, and I think we’re going to see a better year in 2025 than we did in 2024.”

A software engineer has bought the website “OGOpenAI.com” and redirected it to DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab that’s been making waves in the open source AI world lately.

Software engineer Ananay Arora tells TechCrunch that he bought the domain name for “less than a Chipotle meal,” and that he plans to sell it for more.

The move was an apparent nod to how DeepSeek releases cutting-edge open AI models, just as OpenAI did in its early years. DeepSeek’s models can be used offline and for free by any developer with the necessary hardware, similar to older OpenAI models like Point-E and Jukebox.

DeepSeek caught the attention of AI enthusiasts last week when it released an open version of its DeepSeek-R1 model, which the company claims performs better than OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks. Outside of models such as Whisper, OpenAI rarely releases its flagship AI in an “open” format these days, drawing criticism from some in the AI industry. In fact, OpenAI’s reticence to release its most powerful models is cited in a lawsuit from Elon Musk, who claims that the startup isn’t staying true to its original nonprofit mission.

Trump family-backed WLFI’s recent $9.84 million wBTC purchase raises its total crypto holdings to $365 million.

World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a crypto project tied to the Trump family, has intensified its aggressive push into digital assets.

Over the past three days, the fund has invested a staggering $178.2 million across six tokens, including Ethereum (ETH), Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), TRON (TRX), Aave (AAVE), Chainlink (LINK), and Ethena (ENA).

The latest on-chain data shows that on Jan. 22, WLFI spent $9.84 million to purchase 94.94 wBTC, taking advantage of a price drop. This came just a day after the fund poured $2.65 million into 10.81 million TRX.

• Anthropic CEO has promised several updates to Claude, including one that gives it memory.
• This means the AI can remember things and bring it up in future conversations.
• It remains to be seen how this performs and is slated to arrive in the coming months.

The Claude AI chatbot will receive major upgrades in the months ahead, including the ability to listen and respond by voice alone. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei explained the plans to the Wall Street Journal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, including the voice mode and an upcoming memory feature.

Essentially, Claude is about to get a personality boost, allowing it to talk back and remember who you are. The two-way voice mode promises to let users speak to Claude and hear it respond, creating a more natural, hands-free conversation. Whether this makes Claude a more accessible version of itself or will let it mimic a human on the phone is questionable, though.