Crypto World
‘Crypto Robin Hood’ faked prison for clout, rugged memecoins for Palestine
The brief career of William Banks is one of the crypto industry’s most bizarre tales, involving months of staged content, a fake jailbreak that earned over 10 million views, and two memecoin rug pulls that he claimed raised approximately $50,000 for Palestinian aid organizations.
On memecoin platform Pump Fun, where over 99% of tokens collapse to near-$0, the self-proclaimed comedian tried to stand apart by using philanthropy to justify his antics.
“Thank you to the crypto community for buying my pretend memecoin and helping me to raise $50,000 for the crisis in Gaza,” he said about a very real, not-at-all pretend memecoin that he created
“Free Palestine,” he added.
He also proclaimed, “William Banks is Robin Hood,” childishly assuming that everybody who lost money in his memecoin deserved their assets less than leaders of foreign aid organizations.
Moreover, the mythical Robin Hood didn’t create deep-fake videos to harm his Merry Men before giving to the poor.
William Banks creates content for his upcoming promo
Banks’ curious story began in December 2023, when the 20-something comedian from Brooklyn stole Israeli yard signs from lawns in Westport, Connecticut. Police charged him with sixth degree larceny.
He duly took advantage of his new-found infamy, plastering his mugshot on social media in an effort to shift some merch. In October 2024, he announced an eight-month prison sentence on X, even though he received no such punishment.
He then spent four months posting content from what appeared to be a jail cell. This included football tosses, theological discussions, and on February 20, 2025, a video of himself crawling under a security fence during a supposed prison riot.
However, the Connecticut Department of Corrections has no record of Banks being incarcerated. Public records turned up a backstage casting call for a project titled Jail Saga Reality Show, posted by a company that lists Banks as a co-owner.
When Cryptopolitan pressed him directly, Banks answered, “It’s real. I recreated it of course, but it’s real. It happened.”
Read more: ‘Thanks for the 20 bandos!’ Teen behind QUANT rug pull misses out on $4M profit
Another crypto bro claiming to hate crypto bros
The escape video attracted precisely the kind of attention from crypto promoters that Banks claimed he didn’t want. For months, he’s vehemently espoused hatred for crypto, despite his extensive use of the industry’s tactics.
Among those who reached out to Banks was “Jester,” a self-proclaimed “memecoin marketer” who uses a Retardio NFT profile picture.
Banks denied working with him directly, although Jester claims he helped Banks launch four tokens.
Either way, in the media wave of his manufactured prison break, memecoin operators sent Banks unsolicited portions of token supply in the hopes that he’d mention them to his growing following.
“They were using me, so I decided to use them back,” Banks justified.
He launched White Moses (MOSES) on Solana-based Pump Fun. After pumping to a market capitalization of a few hundred thousand dollars, Banks sold his holdings in three liquidations.
The first sale of about $14,000 caused a 75% price drop within eight seconds. After a partial recovery, two further sales drove the token down 96% within a few more seconds.
He followed MOSES with a second token called William Banks (BANKS), and ran the same sequence.
His total haul was approximately $50,000.
On social media, he then shared receipts showing payments totaling that amount to Palestinian aid organizations.
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The QSB scheme uses only existing Bitcoin consensus rules, sidestepping the network’s contentious upgrade process.
A researcher at StarkWare has published an open-source scheme for making Bitcoin transactions resistant to quantum computing attacks using only the network’s existing consensus rules — requiring no softfork, no protocol upgrade, and no community-wide coordination.
The project, called Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB), was released on GitHub by Avihu Levy, StarkWare’s chief product officer and a leading Bitcoin researcher at the firm who previously co-authored ColliderScript, a protocol for enabling stateful computation on Bitcoin without consensus changes. Levy also co-authored BIP-360, the quantum-resistant address proposal that was merged into Bitcoin’s official BIP repository in February — a proposal that, unlike QSB, would require a softfork.
“StarkWare has some of the best hackers on the planet,” Eric Wall, co-founder of Taproot Wizards and board member of the Starknet Foundation, wrote on X. “It is beautiful to see when hackers use their powers for good.”
QSB builds on Binohash, a transaction introspection technique developed by BitVM creator Robin Linus of ZeroSync and Stanford University that was demonstrated on Bitcoin mainnet in February.
No Softfork Required
The no-softfork distinction is what sets QSB apart. Most paths to hardening Bitcoin against quantum attacks, including BIP-360 and hash-based signature schemes like SPHINCS+, require protocol-level changes that must navigate Bitcoin’s notoriously slow and contentious governance process.
That governance bottleneck is increasingly seen as the real vulnerability. A Google Quantum AI paper published March 30 concluded that breaking Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve cryptography could require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits — a roughly 20-fold reduction from prior estimates. The paper warned that a sufficiently advanced machine could derive a private key from an exposed public key in about nine minutes, narrowly inside Bitcoin’s 10-minute block window. Google itself has set a 2029 deadline to migrate its own authentication services to post-quantum cryptography.
QSB sidesteps the governance question entirely. The scheme operates within Bitcoin’s tightest legacy script constraints — 201 opcodes and a 10,000-byte script limit — and can be used by anyone willing to pay roughly $75 to $150 in cloud GPU compute and submit their transaction directly to a miner via a service like MARA’s Slipstream.
StarkWare has been at the center of Bitcoin’s quantum-defense efforts. Co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson has argued that Bitcoin must begin responding to the quantum threat now.
How It Works
Standard Bitcoin transactions use a digital signature scheme called ECDSA to prove ownership of funds. A quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could reverse-engineer that signature process, deriving private keys from public keys and stealing coins.
QSB swaps out the security model. Instead of relying on the mathematical hardness of elliptic curves — which quantum computers can break — it relies on the hardness of reversing hash functions, which they cannot. The scheme forces a would-be spender to solve a computationally expensive hash puzzle that binds the transaction to a specific set of parameters. Any attempt to alter the transaction invalidates the puzzle solution, requiring the attacker to redo the work from scratch.
The result is roughly 118 bits of security against Shor’s algorithm, compared to effectively zero for standard Bitcoin transactions in a post-quantum world.
Early Stage
The project remains a work in progress. The GPU pinning search — the first of three phases required to construct a quantum-safe transaction — has been successfully tested, finding a valid result after roughly six hours across eight Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 GPUs. But the digest search and on-chain broadcast have not yet been completed end-to-end.
There are practical constraints as well. The transactions exceed default relay policy limits and must be submitted directly to miners. The locking script must be placed as a bare output because it exceeds P2SH’s 520-byte redeem script limit.
Still, the release demonstrates that a degree of quantum resistance is achievable on Bitcoin today — for anyone willing to bear the cost — without waiting for the community to agree on a softfork.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
Ether (ETH) may be on the path to retesting $2,500 if the current rally above $2,150 and the bullish spot and futures market volumes pushing prices higher are sustained.
Ether is also supported by a key macro indicator that places the altcoin in a rare undervaluation zone not seen since 2022. The data points to fading selling pressure and the early stages of an accumulation process for Ether.
ETH price structure strengthens above $2,150
Ether’s daily chart shows bulls leading the charge after a 6.33% rally pushed the price above the $2,150 resistance. ETH now eyes a retest of its March highs near $2,385, with further upside toward the $2,475–$2,635 fair-value gap acting as a price magnet for bulls.
Repeat retests of $2,150 over the past two months suggest weakening resistance, as buyers continue stepping in at higher levels.
Charts show ETH market structure improving and the current volumes being largely spot market driven. On the four-hour chart, ETH maintains higher lows while attempting to break into the $2,250–$2,300 range.
The aggregated spot cumulative volume delta (CVD) has remained elevated in April at 184,500 ETH, reflecting sustained spot demand.
The futures CVD has also trended gradually upward to 4.36 million ETH, suggesting that derivatives traders are beginning to support, rather than lead, the move.
The funding rate remains positive at 0.0052, indicating a long bias, and the open interest near 4.75 million ETH is still range-bound, signaling limited leverage.
Data shows ETH is in a controlled accumulation phase, marginally led by spot demand, though a stronger breakout would likely require an expansion in futures positioning.
Related: Ethereum stablecoin supply hits $180B all-time high: Token Terminal
Macro index shows ETH in a “rare” undervalued zone
Ether may be nearing a macro bottom according to the Capriole Macro Index Oscillator with a reading at -2.42. This puts Ether in a rare undervalued zone historically linked with capitulation and trend reversals.
The indicator tracks investment behavior, cycle positioning, and onchain data, with deeply negative values often signaling seller exhaustion.
Previous signals highlight the metric’s reliability. In June to July 2022, ETH bottomed near $1,000–$1,200 when the indicator fell to -2.2. In October to November 2023, a drop to -1 aligned with ETH’s price breaking out after a drop to $1,500.
In April 2025, another negative reading marked a local bottom near $1,500, setting the stage for a rally above $4,000.
The current setup mirrors prior capitulation phases. ETH has fallen from highs near $4,800 to $2,100, while the oscillator sits near cycle lows.
With ETH now in a rare undervalued zone, the downside risk appears limited relative to the upside potential. However, the confirmation would come with a reclaim of the $2,400–$2,500 level and a move back toward zero for the macro indicator.
Analyst crypto sunmoon noted that the ETH taker buy/sell ratio has been trending upward for four to five months.
Combined with the current drawdown, the structure resembles the setup preceding the April to May 2025 rally, suggesting a similar recovery phase may be forming.
Related: Three reasons why Ether traders expect ETH to hold above $1.8K
This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research before making any decisions. Cointelegraph makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy or completeness of the information presented, including forward-looking statements, and will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this content.
Curve’s FXSwap pools use frxUSD as the base dollar pairing for cross-currency swaps spanning the Brazilian real, Indonesian rupiah, British pound, Australian dollar, Korean won and USDT.
Polygon Labs, Frax, Curve Finance and DFB Network have launched a suite of foreign exchange liquidity pools on the Polygon blockchain, enabling onchain swaps between fiat-pegged stablecoins using Frax’s frxUSD as the base dollar pairing.
The pools are live on Curve’s Polygon deployment and pair frxUSD against BRZ (Brazilian real), IDRX (Indonesian rupiah), tGBP (British pound), AUDF (Australian dollar), KRWQ (Korean won) and USDT, with additional currency pairs in development. The four partners have also collaborated on an incentive program to bootstrap liquidity across the pools, with gauges live for reward distribution.
$6 Trillion Market
The launch targets the $6.6 trillion-per-day global FX market, which the partners argue has remained expensive and slow due to its concentration among a small number of intermediaries. Onchain FX has been theoretically possible for years, the partners said, but high transaction fees, fragmented dollar-side liquidity and a lack of institutional trust in automated market maker (AMM) infrastructure have prevented commercial-scale adoption.
“When you pair sub-cent transaction fees with a stable dollar base like frxUSD and Curve’s liquidity infrastructure, you get something the traditional FX market has never offered: transparent pricing, instant settlement, and access for any company,” Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron said in a blog post.
How the Stack Works
Each layer of the stack handles a different function. Frax’s frxUSD serves as the dollar anchor for every pool. The stablecoin is fully backed by tokenized U.S. Treasuries from institutions including BlackRock, WisdomTree and Superstate, and the protocol forwards underlying Treasury yield as sustainable LP incentives.
Curve provides the exchange layer via its FXSwap pool type, which is optimized for currency-pair trading, offering tighter spreads and lower slippage than general-purpose AMMs.Curve has operated on Polygon since 2021 and remains one of the deepest stablecoin liquidity venues in DeFi.
DFB Network handles market-making and liquidity infrastructure, connecting international stablecoin issuers to the onchain exchange layer. The firm provides automated bots that monitor onchain and offchain FX markets and execute arbitrage to maintain pool health.
Polygon itself functions as the settlement layer. A typical token transfer on the network costs roughly $0.002, according to Polygon Labs, and throughput capacity sits at over 2,600 transactions per second.
Commercial FX
The pools are being pitched as practical infrastructure for cross-border business payments. A company settling transactions between Brazil and the United States, for instance, could swap BRZ to frxUSD at market rates, settle in seconds and pay a fraction of a cent in fees, according to the blog post.
For a company processing $10 million per month, even a 50-basis-point improvement in FX spreads would return $50,000 monthly.
Among the non-USD stablecoins in the initial set, BRZ is described as the longest-lasting Brazilian real stablecoin, IDRX serves a large retail base in Indonesia, tGBP is positioned as the leading British pound-pegged token, and AUDF is backed by one of the largest OTC desks in the Oceania region.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
Trading in tokenized versions of traditional assets surged in the first quarter, with perpetual swaps tied to commodities and equities drawing billions in weekly volume and bringing 24/7 activity to a wider range of markets.
Weekly trading volume of such assets jumped to $30.7 billion, or 1.72% of the total crypto derivatives market, by end-March, crypto exchange BitMEX, said in a report published Thursday. That’s up from 0.03% in December, according to the exchange, which invented the tools in 2014.
Commodities powered the rise. Contracts linked to silver, gold and crude oil saw sharp gains as price swings and geopolitical tension fueled demand. Oil trading alone climbed to $6.9 billion in weekly volume after the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran started Feb. 28, prompting a surge in round-the-clock oil trading volumes.
While commodities saw a 65,000% jump in volume during the quarter, there’s context to the figure. Precious metals saw a historic rally at the beginning of the year, with silver topping $100 per ounce for the first time and gold rising nearly 24%, before both gave back nearly all of the gains.
Equities saw a similar breakout. Perpetual swaps tied to stocks grew 908% over the quarter to roughly $4.9 billion in weekly volume, BitMEX found.
At its peak during the February metals rally, total weekly volume across perpetuals tied to traditional investments hit $54.5 billion.
The price of oil started surging at the outbreak of hostilities with Iran, given the country’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows.
Perpetual swaps differ from traditional futures contracts by removing expiry dates. Instead, they use a funding rate, a periodic payment between long and short holders, to keep prices aligned with the underlying assets, allowing the instruments to trade round-the-clock with no expiry.
That permanent access to traditional financial markets is what’s driving the growth of tokenized perpetual swaps, BitMEX noted. The current macroeconomic volatility has served as a catalyst to boost volumes, and exchanges have capitalized by launching TradFi perpetuals.
The AI healthcare pivot inside the OpenAI Foundation became concrete this week as the organization announced it is finalizing more than $100 million in Alzheimer’s research grants this month across six research institutions, making the disease the first major target of what the Foundation has committed to as at least $1 billion in 2026 grantmaking.
Summary
- The grants focus on four research areas: mapping Alzheimer’s disease pathways using AI, designing and lab-testing new drugs with AI assistance, supporting open datasets to predict drug activity and chart disease progression, and establishing new biomarkers for diagnosis and clinical trials, including repurposing existing FDA-approved molecules to reduce the path from discovery to treatment
- Jacob Trefethen, Head of Life Sciences at the OpenAI Foundation, is leading the work; he joins from Coefficient Giving, where he oversaw more than $500 million in grantmaking to science and health; the Foundation’s total grantmaking in 2024 was $7.6 million, making this $100 million round a 13-fold increase in a single month
- The grants are part of the Foundation’s $1 billion 2026 spending commitment, itself the first tranche of a $25 billion long-term philanthropic pledge made possible by OpenAI’s fall 2025 recapitalization, which gave the nonprofit access to capital for the first time since OpenAI incorporated a for-profit subsidiary in 2019
The OpenAI Foundation’s Alzheimer’s page frames the disease plainly: “Alzheimer’s is one of the hardest and most heartbreaking diseases families face — and one of the toughest problems in medicine.”
Wait, that quote contains an em dash. Let me use the quote without the dash:
The OpenAI Foundation’s Alzheimer’s page describes the disease as “one of the hardest and most heartbreaking diseases families face.” The Foundation’s approach is pragmatic rather than speculative. Rather than developing new compounds from scratch, the grants prioritize repurposing existing FDA-approved molecules, a lower-risk strategy that shortens the path from discovery to patient access. Over 100 Alzheimer’s drugs have failed in clinical trials since 2000. The Foundation’s position is that AI’s ability to reason across complex, heterogeneous biological datasets can surface mechanisms and biomarkers that conventional research has repeatedly missed. Grantee institutions include UCSF and the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design.
The UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design has already used AI-driven protein design models to engineer molecules that engage, modify, and degrade targets critical to Alzheimer’s disease progression. The Foundation describes this as the beginning of a collaborative pipeline, with the goal of validating AI-designed molecules in cells, tissues, and animals before advancing to clinical testing. The biomarker focus is equally significant. The recent approval of the first Alzheimer’s blood test created a new tool for assessing a patient’s condition without invasive procedures. The Foundation is funding work to expand that toolkit, making it possible to measure a drug’s effect on disease progression in clinical trials and to identify high-risk patients earlier.
Why This Represents a Structural Shift in OpenAI’s Mission
The scale gap is the most striking number in this announcement. The OpenAI Foundation granted $7.6 million in all of 2024. The Alzheimer’s grants alone exceed that by a factor of 13. The $1 billion 2026 target is 130 times larger than last year’s total. This is the activation of a dormant philanthropic vehicle using capital from the company’s recapitalization. The Foundation’s Executive Director role remains unfilled, meaning Trefethen and the life sciences team are building programs at this scale without a fully constituted leadership team in place.
What the Investment Signals for AI in Science
As crypto.news has reported, the credibility of frontier AI companies’ stated missions, including OpenAI’s, is directly tracked by institutional investors and markets watching the AI infrastructure buildout. As crypto.news has noted, OpenAI’s capital and talent decisions in 2025 and 2026 have had direct market effects on AI-adjacent crypto assets and broader perceptions of the AI sector’s long-term trajectory. The Foundation expects to make further Alzheimer’s grants throughout 2026 and is actively seeking to expand partnerships to additional scientists and research institutions.
Binance has added a prediction markets feature to its Binance Wallet, giving users a way to trade on the likelihood of real-world events without leaving the app.
The rolloaut connects Binance Wallet to Predict.fun, a decentralized platform built on BNB Smart Chain and it isn’t supported in every region in which the exchange operates. The platform was built by a former Binance employee and lets users earn yield while positions remain open.
Prediction markets let users buy shares tied to outcomes such as election results, sports matches or economic data releases and have seen their popularity explode. Prices range from $0.01 to $0.99 and reflect crowd estimates of probability.
Users can now place trades using funds already held in Binance spot or funding accounts. It also removes blockchain transaction fees by covering gas costs, a step that could lower the barrier for retail users.
Binance said the feature runs through a keyless wallet system, which splits control of private keys to reduce single points of failure. Users must create a separate prediction account to access the service.
The company does not operate the markets directly or act as a counterparty, it said. Instead, it provides access to a third-party application.
The move comes following prediction markets’ monthly trading volumes surging 200-fold in the last two years from less than $100 million to more than $20 billion, according to TokenTerminal data.
Prediction markets are currently dominated by Polymarket and Kalshi, which together capture more than 97% of the market and have been growing steadily while gaining institutional backing. Kalshi recently secured $1 billion in funding at an $11 billion valuation, and Polymarket seeing up to $2 billion in commitments from the owner of the New York Stock Exchange.
Data shows Bitcoin (BTC) investors who had held their positions for over seven years took profit last week by selling $271 million in BTC.
A similar wave of “OG whale” selling in January coincided with a more fragile market that lacked buyer demand, triggering a sharp dip in the BTC price. Current onchain data reflects a much stronger market where BTC supply absorption and reduced selling may allow Bitcoin to hold its place in the $70,000-$72,000 range.
OG Whale BTC supply meets strong absorption
Data from Capriole Investments shows that the Bitcoin “OG whale spent value” moved roughly $271 million on Sunday. That marks the largest surge in activity for this cohort since Jan. 10, when a $280 million outflow spike preceded a 13% correction to $78,700 from $90,000 within two weeks.
While the whale movement may raise concerns among investors, this activity historically aligns with measured profit-taking rather than with chaotic selling.
Glassnode suggests a stronger absorption capacity from other holders. Data show that the 30-day net position change for long-term holders remained positive at 88,000 BTC on April 9. This follows a reversal from deeply negative flows of -152,000 BTC recorded in February, easing the prior overhead supply pressure.
The accumulating cohorts also continued to expand their holdings. Cointelegraph reported that the total balance exceeded 4.3 million BTC on Tuesday, rising further to 4.5 million on Thursday.
This indicates a sustained transfer of coins into stronger hands, reducing the impact of selling from older wallets.
Related: Morgan Stanley Bitcoin ETF trails BlackRock with $30M in first-day inflows
Bitcoin “stress cycle” has not reversed yet, says analyst
CryptoQuant analyst MorenoDV highlighted two key indicators shaping the current BTC positioning. The short-term Sharpe Ratio has dropped to -40, a level historically associated with major accumulation phases in 2015, 2019, 2020, and 2023.
At the same time, the buy-and-sell pressure delta (30) indicates a completed capitulation phase, marked by intense sell pressure below -0.05. The metric is now moving toward neutral territory, signaling that forced selling has eased while demand gradually rebuilds.
Past cycles show that the highest asymmetry emerges once the delta re-enters clear buy-pressure zones. The current readings sit between exhaustion and confirmed demand recovery.
The analyst noted that the macro conditions and liquidity flows continue to shape the pace of this transition, adding,
“For investors with a cycle-aware framework, the data suggests we are closer to the beginning of an opportunity than the end of one.”
Related: Bitcoin price surfs US PCE inflation as trader keeps $80K BTC price target
This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research before making any decisions. Cointelegraph makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy or completeness of the information presented, including forward-looking statements, and will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this content.
AI agents built on Anthropic’s Claude now have a hosted production infrastructure behind them, as the company launched Claude Managed Agents in public beta on April 8, handling the sandboxing, state management, credential handling, and error recovery that previously took engineering teams three to six months to build before writing a single line of agent logic.
Summary
- Claude Managed Agents is available now on the Claude Platform at $0.08 per runtime hour plus standard Claude model usage costs; an agent running around the clock costs approximately $58 per month in runtime before token costs, and the service runs exclusively on Anthropic’s infrastructure
- Early adopters already in production include Notion, which delegates coding, slides, and spreadsheet tasks to Claude in parallel across dozens of simultaneous sessions; Rakuten, which deployed specialist agents across product, sales, marketing, finance, and HR, each live in under a week; and Asana, whose CTO says the company shipped advanced features “dramatically faster” than prior methods allowed
- Two features are in research preview: the ability for agents to create additional sub-agents for complex tasks, and an automatic prompt quality enhancement that improved structured file generation success rates by up to 10 points in internal testing
Anthropic’s @claudeai account announced the launch on April 8 at 5:14 PM ET, drawing 5.09 million views. The service is built around what Anthropic calls a brain versus hands design philosophy: Claude itself is the reasoning layer, while each session runs in a disposable, isolated Linux container that handles code execution, file manipulation, and tool calls. When the next Claude model ships, the infrastructure does not need to be rebuilt. The brain upgrades and the hands remain the same.
Pricing is usage based. The $0.08 per runtime hour applies to the session; standard Claude token pricing applies to model usage on top of that.
The deployment patterns across Notion, Asana, and Rakuten illustrate three distinct enterprise use cases. Notion integrated Claude directly into workspaces, allowing engineers to ship code and knowledge workers to generate presentations and websites without leaving the platform, running dozens of parallel tasks while teams collaborate on outputs simultaneously. Asana built what they call AI Teammates, agents embedded in project management workflows that pick up assigned tasks, draft deliverables, and hand back outputs for human review. Rakuten stood up agents across five business functions, each plugged into Slack and Teams, accepting task assignments and returning structured deliverables, with each function live in under a week. Sentry took a different path, pairing its existing debugging agent with a Claude-powered counterpart that writes patches and opens pull requests autonomously from a flagged bug to a completed pull request with no human intervention.
What Developers Need to Know Before Building
Developers define the agent by specifying the model, system prompt, tools, MCP server connections, and guardrails, then configure a cloud environment with pre-installed packages and network access rules. Anthropic’s infrastructure handles tool orchestration, context management, checkpointing, and crash recovery. Sessions persist through disconnections, a practical requirement for complex workflows. The one significant constraint is that the service runs only on Anthropic’s infrastructure and is not currently available through Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex AI, which matters for organizations with multi-cloud strategies.
Why This Launch Matters for the Broader AI Market
As crypto.news has reported, the AI integration driving enterprise decisions in 2026 increasingly determines headcount, and the operational overhead that Claude Managed Agents eliminates has been a significant barrier to adoption for teams without specialist DevOps resources. As crypto.news has noted, the AI infrastructure buildout, of which Anthropic’s agent platform is a direct example, is one of the primary drivers of capital allocation decisions that have ripple effects across crypto-adjacent AI token markets. The multi-agent coordination feature, which allows agents to spawn sub-agents for complex tasks, is in research preview, with early access available through the Claude Platform console.
The Open Network (TON), the independent layer-1 blockchain closely integrated with Telegram, has rolled out Catchain 2.0, dramatically shortening block times to 400 milliseconds. The upgrade is designed to push settlement speeds toward real-time for both payments and trades, while enabling decentralized applications to run with performance closer to traditional apps.
According to TON’s announcement, payment transactions now settle in about one second, and trades settle in near real time. The upgrade strengthens TON’s position as a platform aiming to blend messaging with on-chain functionality, a path already underscored by its ongoing Telegram integration. The update comes alongside an inflationary shift in TON’s token economics: annual inflation is projected to rise six-fold, to roughly 3.6% from about 0.6%, driven by the increased rate of block production.
“More blocks mean more validator rewards, which create stronger staking incentives and bring more TON into the network,” TON stated in its release. The Catchain 2.0 upgrade builds on TON’s Catchain consensus architecture, a BFT-style algorithm first proposed in 2020, and brings near-instant settlement to a network already embedded in an app ecosystem with approximately 1 billion users globally.
Market data captures a snapshot of how the upgrade is being received. TON was trading up about 2.3% to roughly $1.28 on Thursday, with volume around $130 million and a market capitalization near $3.17 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. Observers noted a surge in activity on TON’s network following the upgrade, including spikes in transactions per second tracked by TON Explorer, underscoring the immediate demand for faster settlement and more responsive smart-contract activity.
The announcement frames Catchain 2.0 as a natural evolution of TON’s thrust to merge everyday communications with on-chain finance, a vision that has been reinforced by Telegram’s growing crypto toolkit. In February, Telegram added self-custodial vaults to its in-app wallet, enabling users to earn yield on Bitcoin, USDT and ETH. Earlier this month, the wallet extended into perpetual futures trading, launching a new feature set in collaboration with the perpetual DEX Lighter. The integration enables TON-based payments and on-chain interactions directly within Telegram’s user interface, broadening the potential scale of user adoption and on-chain activity.
Key takeaways
- Block time slashed to 400 milliseconds. Catchain 2.0 delivers substantially faster block finality, aiming to improve throughput and responsiveness for both financial transactions and developer applications.
- Settlement accelerates to near real-time. Payments settle in about one second; trades settle in real time, enabling a smoother user experience for rapid on-chain exchanges.
- Inflation expected to rise to 3.6%. The increase from roughly 0.6% reflects higher block production and the ongoing minting/burning dynamics within TON’s ecosystem.
- Stronger staking incentives. More blocks translate into more validator rewards, reinforcing incentives to run validators and participate in securing the network.
Catchain 2.0: what changes and why it matters
At the core of the upgrade is TON’s Catchain consensus algorithm, a mechanism designed to achieve Byzantine fault tolerance while maintaining speed and finality. By accelerating block production, Catchain 2.0 effectively raises throughput across the network, which has several practical implications for users and developers. First, faster blocks reduce the latency between submitting a transaction and its confirmation, a critical factor for payment rails and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that rely on quick settlement to minimize front-running and slippage. Second, the higher block rate inflates the expected rewards for validators, potentially strengthening the security of the network through deeper staking participation and a larger base of committed validators.
The inflationary shift, while potentially dilutive in the short term, is positioned by TON as a byproduct of increased activity and network security. The organization argues that the higher issuance supports a more robust staking economy, which can, in turn, bolster long-run network reliability and validator health as adoption grows. Investors and builders should weigh the inflationary impact against the benefits of faster settlement and a more responsive ecosystem, particularly as TON deepens its ties with Telegram’s user base and integrated financial features.
Telegram: turning messaging into a multi-asset financial channel
The upgrade arrives amid a broader narrative: TON’s alignment with Telegram is not merely cosmetic. The Telegram integration is positioned to enable users to send TON-enabled crypto payments within chats, bridging everyday communication and on-chain activity. The platform’s wallet features have evolved to offer in-app yield opportunities across major assets, including BTC, USDT, and ETH, and the ecosystem already supports perpetual futures trading through Lighter within the Telegram app. This progression points to a broader strategy of embedding crypto functionality into a widely used messaging interface, lowering the friction for mainstream users to engage with digital assets and on-chain commerce.
Pavel Durov, co-founder of Telegram, has highlighted how real-world restrictions and VPN workarounds in certain jurisdictions—such as Iran and Russia—have driven users to seek more resilient, open channels for communication. The TON-Telegram integration exemplifies a complementary model: users can exchange value alongside messages, with the possibility of automated payments and more sophisticated DeFi interactions embedded into the chat experience. For builders, this signals a shift toward app-layer ecosystems where identity, messaging, and asset transfer are increasingly interwoven.
Market response and next steps for TON
From a market perspective, TON’s price and on-chain activity suggest cautious enthusiasm for Catchain 2.0. The token’s modest near-term gain aligns with a broader pattern of traders evaluating how faster settlement and higher block production could influence user uptake, validator participation, and overall network throughput. The surge in on-chain activity reported by TON Explorer after the upgrade offers a tangible signal that developers and users are experimenting with new throughput capabilities and real-time interactions across the TON ecosystem.
Beyond immediate price moves, the key questions for investors and developers center on the durability of the new throughput gains, the sustainability of the higher inflation regime, and the extent to which Telegram’s in-app crypto features catalyze meaningful, recurring usage. Will higher staking rewards translate into deeper validator participation, and how will that impact network security and governance over time? How quickly will the on-chain experiences inside Telegram translate into real-world transaction volumes, merchant integrations, or consumer wallets?
Analysts will also be watching how Catchain 2.0 scales with continued ecosystem support. The near-term trajectory will depend on the balance between attracting new users through Telegram’s reach and maintaining robust validator participation to preserve the benefits of faster finality. In the meantime, developers can start leveraging the improved throughput to experiment with more sophisticated DeFi primitives, cross-chain liquidity, and real-time settlement use cases that were previously limited by latency.
What remains uncertain and what to watch next
While the upgrade delivers clear technical and user-facing benefits, several uncertainties deserve attention. The sustainability of the 3.6% inflation target hinges on adoption rates and the ongoing cycle of block production. The pace at which Telegram-integrated features translate into measurable user engagement and on-chain value remains to be seen, as does how regulatory developments may shape in-app crypto features and wallet services. Market participants will want to monitor validator health, network security metrics, and any changes in staking participation as Catchain 2.0 matures.
In sum, TON’s Catchain 2.0 represents a meaningful step toward faster, more interactive on-chain experiences embedded in a widely used messaging platform. For traders and developers, it signals a broader opportunity: a more responsive, scalable environment for payments, DeFi, and user-centric apps that live at the intersection of daily communication and digital assets. As TON continues to evolve its ecosystem—balancing security, inflation dynamics, and user adoption—the coming quarters will reveal how deeply this integration can redefine mainstream crypto usage.
Readers should watch for updates on validator participation, new application experiments on TON’s mainnet, and any material shifts in on-chain activity as Telegram-enabled features gain traction in real-world usage.
Pyth Network, a blockchain data oracle provider, is launching a platform for financial institutions to publish and monetize their market data across blockchain networks.
The Pyth Data Marketplace will initially support datasets for spot foreign currency exchange markets (FX), precious metals and crude oil swaps, while allowing publishers to retain “full control” over the data they share, according to Thursday’s announcement.
Seven new institutional data providers will publish price feeds on the marketplace at launch, the announcement said.
These include stock exchange Euronext, data provider Exchange Data International, asset manager Fidelity Investments, financial exchange OTC Markets Group, Singapore Exchange FX and the Tradeweb trading platform.
The announcement reflects how blockchain technology can democratize access to financial data, which has traditionally been controlled by a handful of service providers who charge exorbitant fees for high-quality market pricing data.
Related: Polymarket expands into equities and commodities with Pyth price feeds
Pyth to enable customers to “pull” data rather than traditional “push”
Pyth’s data pull model allows customers to pay for market data on demand, instead of traditional push-based oracle models that force users to pay for entire datasets, which they may or may not need.
This reduces the cost for the end user, according to Michael James, the head of institutional business development at Douro Labs, the main developer behind the Pyth Network.
Traditional service providers monopolize the $50 billion financial data industry, James told Cointelegraph at Consensus 2025. That is now being challenged by new emerging blockchain alternatives like Pyth and Chainlink.
“These data vendors have no competition in traditional finance, and so they have all the pricing power in the world,” he said.
Banks, hedge funds, trading firms and other financial institutions are forced to buy this financial data for “compliance” reasons, James added.
In August 2025, the US Department of Commerce selected Pyth and blockchain oracle provider Chainlink to publish economic data onchain.
Pyth was initially selected to publish quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) data, including five years of historical GDP figures, according to a previous announcement from the oracle provider.
However, Pyth anticipates adding support for more government economic data sets in the future.
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