HONG KONG — Hong Kong is ready to begin issuing the first of its stablecoin licenses next month, the Special Administration Region’s Financial Secretary said Wednesday.

Hong Kong will only issue a small batch of licenses initially, Hong Kong’s Paul Chan Mo-Po said Wednesday at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference.

“In giving our licenses, we ensure that licensees have novel use cases, a credible and sustainable business model and strong regulatory compliance capabilities,” he said.

Hong Kong is also moving to finalize its licensing regime for custodian service providers, he said, and looking to introduce legislation this summer.

“Together with the framework already in place, this will ensure that our regulatory regime comprehensively covers the team of the digital asset ecosystem,” he said.

Speaking more broadly, Chan pointed to three trends in particular maturing at this moment: The growth of tokenized products in the real world, increasing interaction between decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance and the growing ties between artificial intelligence (AI) and digital assets.

“Tokenization initiatives are moving from proof of concept to real world deployment supported by more institutional adoption government bonds, money market funds and other more traditional financial instruments are increasingly being issued onchain, using digital ledgers to enhance settlement efficiency enable fractional ownership and unlock liquidity in assets that have traditionally been less liquid.”

He also pointed to increasing growth in AI.

“As AI agents become capable of making and executing decisions independently, we may begin to see the early forms of what some call the machine economy, where AI agents can hold and transfer digital assets, pay for services and transact with one another onchain,” Chan said.

How is XRP performing during bear markets and is a parabolic recovery rally inbound? Let’s find out what history has to say.

Ripple’s XRP is down 15% in the past seven days, 26% in the past fortnight, and over 40% in the past year. Clearly, it’s in a downtrend in what’s currently considered to be a bear market in the crypto industry.In the following, we will examine XRP’s price, some of its fundamentals, and try to figure out how it holds up during crypto winters.

After all, the popular saying is that we should “buy when there’s blood on the street,” and it feels like there’s plenty of blood on the streets right now. Just yesterday, for example, the popular Crypto Fear & Greed Index was at 7 points (Extreme fear). That’s right, we have rarely seen sentiment so depressed.

XRP During Crypto Winters

The first thing to consider when it comes to investing in cryptocurrencies is the type of coin you’re eyeing. XRP is an altcoin, meaning that it is inherently much more volatile than Bitcoin and, by extension, almost all of traditional finance. Unlike many other altcoins, XRP is tied to a large US-based corporation that is spending millions of dollars on marketing and other activities to generate value for its shareholders and users.

Ripple is building an “ultra-fast” settlement layer for banks and all sorts of financial institutions ot use, arguing that this is what the future holds. You know, no intermediaries, 24/7 access, etc. But what has this done for XRP exactly?

Well, its first pronounced crypto winter was felt back in 2018. After peaking above $3 and with Wall Street calling it the next coin to buy, XRP lost most of its value and traded close to $0.3 for most of the bear market.

Then came the bull market of 2021. In April of that year, the price surged to a high of around $1.7 and tracked most of the crypto market, attempting a double-top in November and eventually, once again, losing most of its value and plunging back toward $0.35 in spring 2022. XRP remained in a range around that level all the way until November of 2024, when it skyrocketed in value above $2, later achieving a new all-time high in July 2025.

In other words, bottom buyers enjoyed a nice return of close to 10x if they got in during the bear market ranges and sold around the top. Now, the price is repeating a similar pattern and is once again cooling down following a parabolic rally.

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At the time of this writing, XRP sits on a total market cap of around $85 billion, meaning that it’s hard to argue in favor of a face-melting, millionaire-making rally. However, if history is any indication, cycles exist, and Ripple’s native cryptocurrency has been somewhat tracking them, despite a year-long lawsuit that had supposedly suppressed its dollar value for a while.

What You Need to Know Next?

When it comes to the crypto markets, there are quite literally two types of assets – Bitcoin and everything else, where everything else tends to be a lot less sustainable in terms of price and staying power.

As I mentioned above, there’s a fully functioning, large-scale, US-based corporation behind XRP. Ripple is continually expanding its operations and product offerings. They have issued a stablecoin, RLUSD, and are actively obtaining additional licenses across major jurisdictions.

But XRP itself is not directly tied to the company’s success. The investment thesis, aside from its speculative nature, remains questionable, particularly as the industry matures and competition intensifies.

XRP holders do not receive anything – in fact, they’re buying a cryptocurrency that’s meant to transact. They also made this clear during the trial against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which argued that XRP is a security.

It does have a fixed supply, that’s true, but a lot of that supply is also concentrated in the hands of the company itself, which regularly sells it to fund operations.

So, is XRP a good investment right now? There has been a historic precedent in the altcoin producing face-melting rallies following periods of a prolonged downturn; there’s absolutely no denying that. However, history should never be used as an indication of what’s to happen next, and there might be another 90% of downside before any potential relief, so keep that in mind.

Naturally, none of the above is financial advice. It’s just an observation of XRP’s price performance in previous market cycles as well as its connection to Ripple.

If there is a classic technology hype cycle attached to tokenization — the representation of any asset on blockchains like Ethereum — we are barely getting started.

That was the view of Min Lin, managing director of global expansion at Ondo, who pointed out the U.S. Treasuries market alone is worth $29 trillion. Adding in the global equities market pushes that value closer to $127 trillion, of which $69 trillion is in the U.S. alone, Lin said at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference.

But while the numbers are dizzying, and there is no doubt demand from traditional finance to explore tokenized real world assets (RWAs), there has to be care and attention when it comes to matching the hype to real world utility, said Graham Ferguson, head of ecosystem at Securitize.

“It’s incumbent on us to figure out how we distribute these and I think, historically, we haven’t done a great job of ascribing utility to these assets,” Ferguson said. “We have all these assets that we could tokenize. We have tons of different choices. We have to, we have to figure out, how do we unite that hype, how do we bring that together.”

It’s important not to “jump the gun on the regulatory side of things,” Ferguson of Securitize pointed out. That said, the U.S. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is waking up to the idea that tokenization can form the plumbing of future markets, and does not mean just “isolated compliance islands.”

“We’ve been around for a while talking about the benefits of settlement when it comes to tokenization and programmatic compliance built into the token standard itself, transferability of these assets among KYC’d [know-your-customer] individuals,” Ferguson said. ”We’re really excited for the regulatory clarity. No pun intended.”

Ondo’s focus is on efficiency. The firm has been busy tokenizing stocks and EFTs and recently announced the introduction of Ondo Perps, whereby those tokenized equities can be used as collateral margin directly — rather than using stablecoins as collateral on exchanges or DEXs, Lin explained.

Essentially, these firms’ different approaches to tokenization involve two design choices: in the case of Ondo, it’s about quickly and easily wrapping assets in a token; with Securitize, it comes down to issuing securities natively on chain and smoothing out the jurisdictional compliance wrinkles associated with that process.

Securitze’s approach “has always been to do this in lockstep with regulators,” Ferguson said. “So in the US and the EU, or regulated as a transfer agent, as a broker dealer, and we’ve always kind of done things by the book,” he said.

This comes with challenges when working with DeFi protocols, Ferguson acknowledged, because of the need to track who the beneficial owner of an asset is at every point in time.

“In crypto and DeFi, we’re used to massive pools of assets, so we are fixated on figuring out ways of working with these protocols so that we’re able to implement the same tracking mechanisms that are required in order to trade and transfer securities. And so it’s not necessarily the most DeFi comfortable approach,” Ferguson said.

For Lin of Ondo, tokenization falls into either a permissionless camp and a permissioned camp.

For example, OUSG, the Ondo Short-Term US Treasuries Fund is available for a global audience, and is permissioned which means users are able to transfer this asset to whitelisted addresses only.

On the other hand, Ondo Global Markets tokenizes publicly traded U.S. stocks and ETFs, which is permissionless following a given compliance period, but is only available to investors outside the U.S.

“What we have done at Ondo is a wrapper model for our Ondo global markets products,” Lin said. “That permissionless approach allows for us to operate and transfer freely from peer to peer within DeFi. So you’re able to use DeFi protocols to be able to leverage those products in lending and collateral margin.”

When it comes to tokenizing anything and everything, there’s no doubt this wrapping approach will get results faster; Ondo was able to tokenize BitGo stock some 15 minutes after the firm started trading on public markets, for instance.

“This wrapper model is essentially allowing us to scale much quicker. Today, we have around 200 plus tokenized stocks and ETFs. We’re looking to be able to scale that to thousands,” Lin said. “The wrapper model has been widely adopted. Stablecoins are essentially wrapped U.S. dollars and we have adopted a very similar model.”

The Ethereum price is down more than 5% over the past few days and has now slipped below a key short-term structure. On February 10, ETH fell under $1,980 after failing to hold a narrow rebound channel. This move followed a sharp decline in DeFi activity and weakening institutional flows. Yet, despite the pressure, large holders have started adding again.

The question is simple: is this early accumulation, or just a temporary pause before another leg lower?

Pattern Break Confirms Weak ‘Big Money’ Support

Ethereum’s recent rebound from early February formed inside a bear flag. This structure acted like a short-term recovery attempt, not a trend reversal. On February 10, the price slipped below the lower boundary of the flag, triggering a pattern break with over 50% crash potential, as predicted in a previous Ethereum analysis.

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This move mattered because it happened alongside weak money flow.

The Chaikin Money Flow, or CMF, measures whether capital is entering or leaving an asset using price and volume. When CMF moves above zero, it often shows large-scale institutional-style buying. When it stays below, it signals weak participation.

Between February 6 and February 9, ETH bounced, but CMF never crossed above zero. It also failed to break its descending trendline. This meant the rebound lacked strong backing from large investors.

Want more token insights like this? Sign up for Editor Harsh Notariya’s Daily Crypto Newsletter here.

In simple terms, the price moved up, but serious money did not follow strongly enough. When rebounds happen without strong CMF backing, they tend to fail. That is exactly what happened here. Once buying momentum stalled, sellers regained control and pushed ETH lower.

This confirms that the pattern break was not random. It was possibly supported by fading big money flows. But technical weakness alone does not explain the full picture.

DeFi TVL and Exchange Flows Reveal a Structural Problem

A deeper issue sits inside Ethereum’s DeFi activity.

Total Value Locked, or TVL, measures how much money is stored inside decentralized finance platforms. It reflects real usage, capital commitment, and long-term confidence. When TVL rises, users are locking funds. When it falls, capital is leaving.

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BeInCrypto analysts combined the TVL and exchange flow dashboards to show a clear pattern.

On November 13, DeFi TVL stood at $75.6 billion. At the same time, ETH traded around $3,232. The exchange net position change was strongly negative, indicating more coins were leaving exchanges than entering. Investors were possibly moving ETH into self-custody.

That was a healthy setup.

By December 31, TVL had dropped to about $67.4 billion. ETH fell to $2,968. Exchange flows flipped positive. Around 1.5 million ETH moved onto exchanges. Selling pressure increased. Now look at February.

On February 6, DeFi TVL touched a three-month low of $51.7 billion. ETH was near $2,060. Exchange outflows weakened sharply (the Net Position line reached a local peak). Even though net flows stayed slightly negative, buying pressure collapsed, as explained by the February 6 peak. This shows a repeating relationship.

When TVL falls, exchange inflows rise or outflows weaken. That means capital is shifting from long-term use toward potential selling.

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As of February 10, TVL has only recovered to around $55.5 billion, down almost $20 billion from the mid-November levels. That is still close to the three-month low. Without a stronger recovery, exchange-side pressure is likely to return. So the pattern break is happening while Ethereum’s core usage remains weak.

That is a structural problem, not just a chart issue.

Whale Accumulation and Cost Basis Explain the Ethereum Price Support

Despite weak technicals and falling TVL, whales have not fully exited.

Whale supply tracks how much ETH is held by large wallets, excluding exchanges. Since February 6, whale holdings fell from about 113.91 million ETH to nearly 113.56 million. That confirmed the distribution during the breakdown. But over the past 24 hours, this trend paused.

Holdings edged back up slightly, from 113.56 million ETH to 113.62 million, showing small-scale accumulation. This suggests that whales are testing support rather than committing fully.

The reason becomes clear when looking at cost basis data.

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Cost basis heat maps show where large groups of investors bought their coins. These zones often act as support because holders defend their entry prices. For Ethereum, a major cluster sits between $1,879 and $1,898. Around 1.36 million ETH were accumulated in this range. That makes it a strong demand zone.

The current price is hovering just above this area.

As long as ETH stays above this band, whales have an incentive to defend it. Falling below would push many holders into losses and likely trigger heavier selling. This explains the cautious buying.

Whales are not betting on a rally. They are possibly protecting a critical cost zone.

From here, the Ethereum price structure becomes clear.

Support sits near $1,960 and then $1,845. A daily close below $1,845 would break the main cost cluster and confirm deeper downside risk. If that happens, the next major downside zones sit near $1,650 and $1,500.

On the upside, ETH must reclaim $2,150 to stabilize. Only above $2,780 would the broader bearish structure weaken. Until then, rebounds remain weak.

A New York federal judge dismissed a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Bancor-affiliated entities against Uniswap, ruling that the asserted patents claim abstract ideas and are not eligible for protection under US patent law.

In a memorandum opinion and order dated Tuesday, Feb. 10, Judge John G. Koeltl of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss the complaint filed by Bprotocol Foundation and LocalCoin Ltd. against Universal Navigation Inc. and the Uniswap Foundation. 

The court found that the patents are directed to the abstract idea of calculating crypto exchange rates and therefore fail the two-step test for patent eligibility established by the US Supreme Court. 

The ruling marks a procedural win for Uniswap, but it is not final. The case was dismissed without prejudice, giving the plaintiffs 21 days to file an amended complaint. If no amended complaint is filed, the dismissal will convert to one with prejudice.

Shortly after the ruling, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams wrote on X, “A lawyer just told me we won.”

Cointelegraph reached out to representatives of Bprotocol Foundation and Uniswap for comment but had not received a response by publication.

Judge finds that patents claim abstract ideas

As previously reported, Bancor alleged that Uniswap infringed patents related to a “constant product automated market maker” system underpinning decentralized exchanges.

The dispute centered on whether Uniswap’s protocol unlawfully used patented technology for automated token pricing and liquidity pools. 

Koeltl said that the patents were directed to “the abstract idea of calculating currency exchange rates to perform transactions.”

He wrote that currency exchange is a “fundamental economic practice” and that calculating pricing information is abstract under established Federal Circuit precedent.

The judge rejected arguments that implementing the pricing formula on blockchain infrastructure made the claims patentable, and said the patents merely use existing blockchain and smart contract technology “in predictable ways to address an economic problem.”

He said limiting an abstract idea to a particular technological environment does not make it patent-eligible. The court also found no “inventive concept” sufficient to transform the abstract idea into a patent-eligible application. 

Related: Vitalik draws line between ‘real DeFi’ and centralized yield stablecoins

Complaint fails to plead infringement

Beyond patent eligibility, the court found that the amended complaint did not plausibly allege direct infringement.

According to the memorandum, the plaintiffs failed to identify how Uniswap’s publicly available code includes the required reserve ratio constant specified in the patents.

The judge also dismissed claims of induced and willful infringement, finding that the complaint did not plausibly allege that the defendants knew about the patents before the lawsuit was filed.

The dismissal without prejudice leaves open the possibility that Bprotocol Foundation and LocalCoin Ltd. could attempt to refile with revised claims.