Shares in the Bitcoin-buying company Twenty One Capital climbed in after-hours trading on Wednesday after its majority shareholder, Tether, proposed a three-way merger with two other crypto companies.

Tether said Wednesday that it intends to vote in favor of a proposed merger between Twenty One Capital and Bitcoin payments company Strike, followed by a proposed merger of the combined company with Bitcoin mining firm Elektron Energy.

Tether added that if the mergers go through, “Strike would be contributing a profitable financial services platform, global distribution and regulatory infrastructure and Elektron would be adding large-scale Bitcoin mining infrastructure, operational depth and proven execution capabilities.”

Shares in Twenty One Capital (XXI) ended trading on Wednesday down 1.7% at $7.83, but jumped to a high of $9.28 after hours before settling at $8.35 for a gain of 6.6% after the bell.

Shares in Twenty One Capital on Wednesday surged after hours. Source: Google Finance

The company has the second-largest Bitcoin holdings among public companies and its share price has slid over 10.5% so far this year alongside Bitcoin’s decline.

Tether did not share the terms of the mergers or a timeline for their completion, but proposed that Elektron founder and CEO Raphael Zagury serve as president of the new company.

It added that Jack Mallers, the founder and CEO of Strike and co-founder and CEO of Twenty One Capital, would also serve in an executive role.

“The proposed leadership structure is intended to combine Mallers’ product, brand, and consumer Bitcoin leadership with Zagury’s capital markets, operating, and execution experience,” Tether said.

Related: Tether launches open-source mining framework to unify Bitcoin infrastructure

Twenty One Capital went public in December through a merger with Cantor Equity Partners and came to market with holdings of 43,500 Bitcoin and an aim of increasing its Bitcoin per share.

Tether said if the mergers are successful, Twenty One would move “beyond treasury exposure alone and toward a platform with operating businesses, recurring revenue opportunities, and long-term Bitcoin accumulation capabilities.”

Twenty One Capital currently holds 43,514 Bitcoin and is behind only Strategy, Inc. in terms of public company Bitcoin holdings, which holds 818,334 Bitcoin.

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TLDR

• Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement pilot to five additional blockchain networks.
• The program now operates across nine networks and reports a $7 billion annualized run rate.
• Visa recorded a 50% increase in settlement volume compared to the previous quarter.
• The newly added networks include Base, Polygon, Canton Network, Circle’s Arc, and Tempo.
• Visa said the multichain approach allows partners to settle transactions in near real time using stablecoins.

Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement pilot to five new blockchains as annualized volume reached $7 billion. The payments company reported a 50% increase from the previous quarter and confirmed broader multichain coverage. The program allows issuers and acquirers to settle transactions using stablecoins instead of traditional banking systems.

Visa Adds Five Blockchains to Stablecoin Pilot

Visa confirmed that its settlement pilot now operates across nine blockchain networks. The newly supported networks include Coinbase’s Base, Polygon, Canton Network, Circle’s Arc, and Stripe-backed Tempo. These platforms join Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Stellar, which Visa integrated earlier.

The company said the pilot enables partners to complete settlements with stablecoins rather than bank transfers. As a result, participants can move funds using blockchain-based dollars in near real time. Visa stated that this structure reduces delays linked to traditional cross-border banking systems.

Visa reported that the program’s annualized run rate reached $7 billion. The company said this figure marks a 50% increase compared to the prior quarter. It confirmed that issuers and acquirers use the pilot for live settlement activity.

Multichain Strategy Supports Global Stablecoin Payments

Visa said it adopted a multichain approach to meet partner demand. The company explained that partners operate across several blockchain ecosystems. Therefore, Visa aims to provide a unified settlement layer across supported networks.

“Our partners are building in a multi-chain world, and they expect their options to reflect that reality,” said Rubail Birwadker. He serves as Visa’s global head of growth products and strategic partnerships. He said expanding to more blockchains allows partners to choose networks that match their needs.

Birwadker added that Visa will maintain a common settlement layer across all integrated networks. He said this structure gives partners access to different liquidity pools without added complexity. Visa stated that the expansion aligns with growing stablecoin adoption in global payments.

The company said stablecoins, which track fiat currencies, now play a larger role in cross-border transfers. Visa has tested stablecoin settlements tied to card programs in more than 50 countries. These pilots include USDC-linked transactions for select partners.

Visa explained that blockchain-based settlement reduces the time required to move funds. Instead of waiting days for banking processes, partners can settle transactions almost instantly. The company confirmed it will continue expanding its stablecoin settlement pilot as partners adopt more blockchain networks.

TLDR

• Nigel Farage faces a parliamentary standards probe over a $6.7 million gift from Christopher Harborne.
• The Conservatives asked the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to review the source and use of the funds.
• Labour also questioned whether Farage properly declared the payment under House of Commons rules.
• Farage said the gift was personal and intended to keep him safe and secure after past attacks.
• Reform UK stated that the payment was declared and fell under the exemption for personal gifts.

Nigel Farage faces a parliamentary standards review over a $6.7 million gift from crypto investor Christopher Harborne. The Conservatives asked the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to assess whether the payment breached Commons rules. Labour also questioned the timing of the funds before Farage announced his Clacton candidacy.

Nigel Farage Questioned Over Pre-election Payment Disclosure

The Guardian reported that Harborne transferred about £5 million to Farage in 2024. The payment occurred before Farage declared his candidacy for the Clacton seat. He won the constituency in July after announcing his run in early June.

Farage confirmed the gift in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. He said the funds aimed to keep him “safe and secure for the rest of my life.” He linked the payment to a 2019 milkshake incident and a firebomb attack last year.

A Reform UK spokesman described the transfer as a “personal unconditional gift.” The spokesman said Farage made his decision to stand as an MP independently. He also stated, “We are confident everything has been declared in accordance with the rules.”

The Commons code requires new MPs to register benefits received within 12 months before election. It also states members should register any benefit if doubt exists. Reform UK argues that the payment qualifies for the exemption covering purely personal gifts.

The Conservative Party wrote to Commissioner Daniel Greenberg requesting an inquiry. It asked whether any funds supported political activity rather than security. Labour chair Anna Turley said Farage “appears to have broken the rules again.”

Crypto Donations and Investment Links Draw Attention

Harborne previously donated £9 million to Reform UK in late 2023. Records describe it as the largest single donation from a living person to a U.K. party. Harborne holds a 12% stake in stablecoin issuer Tether.

BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo also backed Reform UK with £4 million this year. He disclosed the contribution in a published opinion piece. The combined crypto-linked donations placed Reform under scrutiny.

The U.K. government imposed an immediate moratorium on crypto political donations in March. Officials cited the Rycroft review, which warned digital assets could channel foreign funds into politics. The ban covers donations of any size and includes criminal penalties.

Lawmakers plan to embed the restriction within the Representation of the People Bill. Authorities said they acted to protect electoral integrity. The rules apply to all parties and all digital asset contributions.

In the same month, Farage invested £215,000 in Stack BTC. The London-listed bitcoin treasury company counts former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng as chair. Farage acquired a 6.31% stake through his vehicle, Thorn In The Side.

Gibraltar has introduced legislation that would legally recognize tokenized fund shares and allow certain regulated funds to issue shares on distributed ledger systems, granting investors the same rights as traditional shareholdings.

The Protected Cell Companies (Amendment) Bill 2026 states that “the holder of a share token is a shareholder with the same rights and obligations as any other holder of cell shares,” referring to shares linked to specific asset pools within a protected cell company.

Protected cell companies, typically insurance or financial entities, have a core organization that is linked to several independent cells, each with its own balance sheet.

The proposal, which requires approval from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission, applies to protected cell companies operating as experienced investor funds. Ownership records must be maintained on blockchain-based share registers, with tokenized shares legally equivalent to traditional certificates.

Source: Gibraltarlaws.gov.gi

The framework sets strict rules for custody and transfers, limiting access to verified investors and allow-listed wallet addresses while requiring disclosures on technology risks, cybersecurity and recovery procedures. 

Companies must retain control over the underlying infrastructure, keeping the system within a regulated environment rather than an open, permissionless market.

Under the proposal, tokenized shares can be issued and transferred using smart contracts and cryptographic signatures, with blockchain records recognized as valid instruments for ownership, transfer and recordkeeping under existing company law.

The bill must now proceed through Gibraltar’s legislative process before taking effect.

Related: ECB backs tokenized EU capital markets with strict guardrails

Tokenized assets move from pilots to regulated markets

Governments and financial institutions are integrating tokenized assets into regulated financial systems, developing legal frameworks and market infrastructure for blockchain-based securities.

Switzerland was among the earliest jurisdictions to bring tokenized assets under existing financial law, with its regulator approving a crypto fund in 2021 for qualified investors. In 2025, the country expanded that framework by licensing its first distributed ledger technologies (DLT) trading facility, enabling tokenized securities to be traded and settled on regulated infrastructure.

In 2022, Singapore launched Project Guardian to test tokenized assets in wholesale markets, while Hong Kong has issued and expanded a program of tokenized government bonds since 2023.

Source: www.hkma.gov

In 2024, the World Bank issued a Swiss franc digital bond on Switzerland’s SIX Digital Exchange with settlement using central bank digital currency.

Most recently, in March, Canada completed a pilot that issued and settled its first tokenized bond on distributed ledger infrastructure.

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Crypto exchange Bullish has expanded its integration with Ripple Prime to give institutional clients direct access to Bitcoin options trading, adding to existing spot, perpetual and futures connectivity through the platform’s prime brokerage network.

The integration connects Ripple Prime users to Bullish’s regulated Bitcoin (BTC) options markets, allowing trades to be funded through existing sub-accounts without additional onboarding, with stablecoins such as Ripple USD (RLUSD) supported as collateral.

RLUSD is a US dollar-pegged stablecoin designed for payments, settlement and use as collateral in digital asset markets. It has a market capitalization of about $1.57 billion, according to DeFiLlama data.

Ripple USD market cap. Source: DefiLlama

The companies said they plan to support cross-venue margin access, which would allow institutions to manage collateral across exchanges and OTC desks from a single account to improve capital efficiency.

Ripple Prime is the company’s institutional prime brokerage platform, formed after its $1.25 billion acquisition of crypto prime broker Hidden Road in 2025. It offers multi-asset brokerage, clearing and financing services and cleared more than $3 trillion in volume in 2025, according to the announcement.

Bullish said its Bitcoin (BTC) options venue ranks among the largest by open interest for crypto-settled contracts. The integration is now live, allowing Ripple Prime clients to begin accessing options markets immediately.

Shares of Bullish have declined sharply over the past year, falling more than 60% from their peak in September and trading around $36.58 at the time of writing. The stock was down roughly 8% in early trading on the day, per Yahoo Finance data.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Related: Bitcoin rally falters as AI industry weakens and CLARITY Act approval odds fall

Bitcoin options gain traction as institutions seek risk management tools

Bitcoin’s volatility has made options, which give traders the right to buy or sell an asset at a set price, an increasingly important tool for hedging and trading price swings.

In August 2025, Coinbase finalized its acquisition of Deribit, bringing the largest crypto options venue under its umbrella as part of a broader push to offer spot, futures and options trading on a single platform. 

Some corporate Bitcoin holders are also beginning to move beyond passive exposure toward more active risk management using derivatives.

Last week, Nakamoto, a Nasdaq-listed company focused on building a Bitcoin treasury strategy, said it has been running an actively managed derivatives program since early 2026, using BTC as collateral for options-based strategies designed to generate income from volatility while hedging downside risk.

Over the past year, Bitcoin options markets have remained consistently large, with total open interest standing at about $32.8 billion as of late April 2026, up slightly from roughly $30.8 billion a year earlier and peaking above $50 billion during periods of heightened activity, according to CoinGlass data.

Total Bitcoin options open interest. Source: CoinGlass

Trading is heavily concentrated on Deribit, which accounts for the majority of Bitcoin options open interest, while smaller shares are distributed across venues including CME Group, OKX, Binance and Bybit.

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Bitcoin (BTC) may face “a few months” of downside as the new US Federal Reserve chair takes over next month.

Key points:

• Bitcoin may follow risk assets downhill after Kevin Warsh takes over as chair of the US Federal Reserve.
• President Donald Trump has said that he “would” be disappointed if an interest-rate cut did not occur in June.
• Wednesday marks current Chair Jerome Powell’s last rate decision.

Bitcoin price tends to fall after new Fed chair enters

In its latest market coverage on X, crypto trading account CRYPTOWZRD warned that fresh downward BTC price pressure could return in June.

The Fed’s new chair, Kevin Warsh, is due to take over from Jerome Powell — and the stakes are high when it comes to crypto and risk-asset performance.

“Every time a new FED Chair takes over $BTC has corrected for a few months before the real fun began,” CRYPTOWZRD noted.

“Can it break the curse or a final dip?”

BTC/USD one-month chart with Fed chair appointments. Source: CRYPTOWZRD/X

History shows that a change of management at the Fed pressures stocks as well — but this year, the S&P 500 is at all-time highs as it happens.

The picture is complicated by politics. Powell avoided cutting interest rates — a would-be bullish catalyst for crypto — even as US President Donald Trump publicly shamed him for not doing so.

In an interview with CNBC last week, Trump said that he “would” be disappointed if Warsh did not cut rates at his first Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in June. 

Powell’s last FOMC meeting is due on Wednesday, with markets unanimously seeing rates being held at current levels, per data from CME Group’s FedWatch Tool.

Fed target rate probabilities for April 29 FOMC meeting (screenshot). Source: CME Group

Warsh gives traders mixed signals on policy

Continuing, crypto market participants see potential tailwinds for Bitcoin and altcoins thanks to US macro trends.

Related: Bitcoin Bull Score hits six-month high as 2022 bear-market fears linger

The Fed has begun adding to its balance sheet this year — a form of liquidity catalyst that traditionally benefits markets.

“That’s right, the Fed has added ~$200B of US Treasuries back onto its balance sheet in the last few months,” Bitcoin Opportunity Fund partner James Lavish wrote on the day. 

“So much for tightening the money supply. QT is officially over. QE-light is in the house.”

Fed balance-sheet data. Source: James Lavish/X

In recent YouTube content, meanwhile, Charlie Bilello, chief market strategist at wealth manager Creative Planning, revealed what he called a “contradiction” in Warsh’s plans.

While “building the case” for rate cuts, he said, Warsh has been critical of the Fed keeping rates low during the post-COVID-19 inflation surge in 2021 and 2022.

“It was a ‘fatal policy error’ that was what he was saying back then, and I would agree with that,” Bilello said.

Warsh has also criticized balance-sheet expansion, raising questions over the fate of the 2026 uptrend.

The vulnerability that led to ZetaChain’s recent exploit had been flagged through its bug bounty program before the attack, but was dismissed as intended behavior.

In a post-mortem published Wednesday, the team said the incident has prompted a review of how it handles bug bounty submissions, particularly reports involving chained attack vectors that may appear harmless in isolation but are dangerous in combination.

“This bug was reported and they simply ignored it,” one user wrote on X. “That’s how bug bounty programs work with these protocols currently; they incentivize losses for the protocol, the TVL, and the user’s balance instead of paying the researcher for discovering and fixing the bug,” they added.

ZetaChain lost approximately $334,000 to a premeditated exploit on Sunday that targeted its cross-chain gateway contract. The exploit drained funds across nine transactions on four chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and BSC, all from ZetaChain-controlled wallets. No user funds were affected.

Related: Crypto hackers stole $17B over past 10 years: DefiLlama

Attacker exploits small design flaws

ZetaChain said in its post-mortem that the attacker exploited three design flaws that, individually, might have seemed minor, but together opened the door to a full drain. First, the gateway allowed anyone to send arbitrary cross-chain instructions with no restrictions. Second, on the receiving end, it would execute almost any command on any contract, with a blocklist so narrow it missed basic token transfer functions.

Third, wallets that had previously used the gateway had left unlimited spending permissions in place that were never cleaned up. By combining all three, the attacker simply told the gateway to transfer tokens from victim wallets to their own, and the gateway complied.

Source: ZetaChain

“This was not an opportunistic attack,” ZetaChain said in its post-mortem. The attacker funded their wallet through Tornado Cash three days before the exploit, deployed a purpose-built drainer contract on ZetaChain and ran an address poisoning campaign before seeding it into their transaction history via dust transfers.

ZetaChain added that a patch permanently disabling the arbitrary call functionality is being rolled out to mainnet nodes. The platform also removed unlimited token approvals from its deposit flow, replacing them with exact-amount approvals going forward.

Related: Ethical hacker intercepts $2.6M in Morpho Labs exploit

AI DeFi exploit success rate increases

A new study by a16z tested whether an off-the-shelf AI agent could go beyond identifying DeFi vulnerabilities and actually produce working exploits. Using OpenAI’s Codex against a dataset of 20 real Ethereum price manipulation incidents, researchers ran the agent in a sandboxed environment with no access to future transaction data and no guidance on how the attacks worked. The agent succeeded in just 10% of cases.

However, when researchers fed the agent structured knowledge about common attack patterns and exploit workflows, the success rate jumped to 70%.

Magazine: How to fix suspected insider trading on Polymarket and Kalshi

Leading decentralized exchange Hyperliquid’s push into prediction markets is about who captures the upside, not just cheaper trading, according to Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX exchange and CIO of Maelstrom fund.

CoinDesk reported earlier that Hyperliquid is preparing a zero-fee-to-open model for event trading under HIP-4. The Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal (HIP)-4 is a proposal that introduces event trading on Hyperliquid.

Hayes said that structure is only the first layer. In a note to CoinDesk, he argued that the real differentiator is HYPE, Hyperliquid’s exchange token, which he said allows users to benefit from platform activity in a way Polymarket and Kalshi currently do not.

“HIP-4 will quickly become a dominate prediction market because of Hyperliquid’s large user base, much cheaper trading fees, and very robust tech infrastructure,” Hayes told CoinDesk. “Users who own the $HYPE token can directly profit from their usage of HIP-4.”

Polymarket is expected to launch a token, often referred to as $POLY.

On Gate, premarket perpetual contracts tied to a potential $POLY token are trading around $14, implying a fully-diluted valuation of roughly $14 billion. HYPE, by comparison, has an FDV of about $38 billion, according to CoinGecko data.

Pre-listing markets are often highly speculative and can be thinly traded, meaning any implied valuation should be treated with caution and may not reliably reflect actual market demand.

The argument also comes down to geography. Polymarket registered with the CFTC last July and is rebuilding its U.S. business, putting compliance at the center of its strategy.

However, in Asia, it is still grappling with how regulators classify its product. It is geoblocked in Singapore, Thailand, and Taiwan, partially restricted in Japan. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, prediction markets more broadly are on the radar of gambling regulators

Hyperliquid faces no equivalent constraint, and its user base skews toward Asia, where crypto-native trading is already deep.

The contrast is clearest with Kalshi.

As a CFTC-regulated exchange, Kalshi’s model is built around compliance and licensing, not token incentives, which likely rules out the kind of value-accrual layer Hayes is pointing to.

That makes it the most direct test of his thesis. Users can trade event outcomes on Kalshi, but they have no path to the upside of the platform itself. In traditional markets, that kind of upside is typically accessed via equity, such as an IPO, though for now, Kalshi users’ participation is limited to trading on the platform.

Across the three platforms, the split is structural: Hyperliquid already ties usage to a token, Polymarket appears to be moving in that direction, and Kalshi’s model likely prevents it altogether.