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Cryptocurrencies have changed heavily since the introduction of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer payment system. For some, Bitcoin is better used as an investment rather than as a currency to spend.

New cryptocurrencies are adapting to payment needs. And crypto users have thousands of options to choose from. That’s where crypto wallets can come into play, allowing someone to buy, sell, or save across a variety of cryptocurrencies.

At Consensus 2026 in Miami Beach, BeInCrypto recently met up with Tim Stanyakin, Head of Growth at ChangeNOW, about the company’s latest wallet offerings – including an expansion into areas such as sports betting.

ChangeNOW’s Infrastructure Base

While many users may simply think of a crypto in terms of its end use, there’s often significant code to make a crypto work. And combining multiple cryptocurrencies via a wallet can be a substantial challenge. 

ChangeNOW has been able to build up a substantial infrastructure to provide a one-stop shop for cryptocurrencies across radically different use cases.

“We have an ecosystem. We have a branch called NOWPayments. We provide cryptocurrency, even gateway for different companies, starting from retail to gambling to iGaming. Moreover, we have our own non-custodial wallet, NOW Wallet. We have an infrastructure provider called NOWNodes. It’s like the basement for almost every company on the market.”

NOWNodes provides a scalable crypto node platform. That includes blockchain APIs and full-node infrastructure, with flexibility for developers, enterprise solutions, and even Web3 projects.

The International Regulatory Environment

Regulatory concerns remain at the forefront of the crypto market right now. 

The Clarity Act, which could lead to massive growth in stablecoin adoption in the U.S., appears to be moving towards a vote in the U.S. Senate. 

But that’s just one country’s legislation. ChangeNOW’s global footprint requires a nuanced approach for each country and region.

“We work worldwide in the U.S., Canada, Europe. Now we’re trying to conquer the APAC region. That’s a lot of different regulatory frameworks. You choose the approach [in each region] not because of the mindset of the people, but mostly because of the different requests from the government and from taxes and forms.”

Combining Crypto With Prediction Markets and Sports Betting

Amid the crypto winter, soaring speculative interest has shifted towards areas such as prediction markets and sports betting. 

These can offer some prospective quick wins. Crypto assets can provide funding, as ChangeNOW is fully integrating sports betting into their wallet – and is moving this market on-chain.

“We did a deep research and we understood that the whole market right now, the previous main highlight, I mean the 2024, 2025 was AI. Now it’s perps, prediction, prediction, perps. And as we would like to satisfy all of our customers, we decided to do that on-chain. We integrated Asper, we integrated PolyMarket, HyperLiquid, and it’s natively right now inside the app.” 

The addition of prediction markets on top of other features creates a killer app – a one-stop financial platform for not just buying and holding crypto, but for staking and other financial activities such as gaming.

“When you use a non-decentralized platform for doing perps, prediction, any yield products and using your own keys and private keys from your non-custodial wallet, it makes sense for almost the whole audience.”

Meeting TradFi In Other Asset Markets

ChangeNOW is one of a growing number of platforms providing more than just one site for crypto investing. 

It’s also integrating a substantial number of traditional assets that might normally require a traditional brokerage account – or may be difficult to access for many individuals in some countries.

“We’ve integrated, I think, around 50 assets from traditional finance, including gold, silver, Nvidia stocks, Exodus stocks, Crossforce, everything.  We have everything in the top 10. And we increase that almost every month. That’s similar to how brokerages are introducing crypto.”

To some extent, many of the tradfi companies attending Consensus were looking to integrate cryptocurrencies to their platforms. Both tradfi and defi are now adding features that will substantially overlap.

Looking Ahead

Like many companies at Consensus, it’s a time to showcase the work that’s going on, rather than celebrate the path traveled so far. ChangeNOW is no exception. Its integration of traditional assets, alternative areas such as prediction markets and sports betting, all combine to make a killer app.

The real question is, what does the future hold? Here’s where ChangeNOW expects to be able to include for its users by the end of Q4 2026:

“NOW Wallet will be in a path of transformation to a kind of super app, where there will be everything available, starting from regular payments in the physical world. There will be AI engines… there will be new yield products, so you will be able to gain income from staking. There will be some more complicated products.”

The post From Swaps to Super Apps: How ChangeNOW Is Building Crypto’s One-Stop Financial Platform appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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• Harvard sold its entire Ethereum ETF position after holding it for only one quarter.
• The Q1 2026 SEC filing confirmed the sale of $87 million in ETH-linked ETF shares.
• Harvard reduced its Bitcoin exposure by selling about 2.3 million ETF shares.
• The endowment still holds over 3 million shares of a Bitcoin ETF valued at about $117 million.
• Ethereum has dropped more than 50% from its August 2025 peak of nearly $5000.

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Harvard has exited its entire Ethereum exposure after holding it for just one quarter. The move appeared in its Q1 2026 SEC filing, which showed the sale of all ETH-related ETF shares. Harvard also reduced its Bitcoin holdings during the same period while retaining a large BTC position.

Harvard exits Ethereum ETF holdings in Q1 filing

Harvard Management Company disclosed the sale in its latest United States Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The endowment no longer holds its $87 million stake in an Ethereum exchange-traded fund.

The fund previously owned shares in BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF during Q4 2025. However, the Q1 2026 filing showed a complete exit from that position. Harvard sold the ETH-linked shares after holding them for only one quarter. The filing did not provide a specific reason for the decision.

The endowment also reduced its Bitcoin exposure during the same reporting period. It sold about 2.3 million shares of a Bitcoin ETF. Despite the reduction, Harvard still holds more than 3 million shares of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF. Those holdings are valued at nearly $117 million.

Ethereum price decline and foundation changes

Ethereum has faced a challenging year, with its price falling over 50% from its August 2025 peak. The asset had reached nearly $5,000 before declining. The price drop occurred alongside internal changes at the Ethereum Foundation. Several researchers and staff members have left the organization in 2026. Julian Ma and Carl Beek recently announced their departures from the foundation. Their exits brought the total number of departures this year to eight.

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Josh Stark, a longtime researcher and former project manager, also left in April. These changes followed leadership adjustments that began in January 2025. In March, the Ethereum Foundation released a new mandate outlining its priorities. The document emphasized decentralization, privacy, open-source code, and censorship resistance.

The mandate received mixed responses from members of the crypto community. Some observers supported the focus on core principles. Journalist Laura Shin commented on the foundation’s direction in public remarks. She said the core pillars were “great” and “worth fighting for.”

However, she added that the foundation should also focus on token economics and price performance. “The Ethereum Foundation seems to want to sit back on its laurels,” Shin said. Harvard’s Q1 2026 filing reflects these broader developments in the Ethereum ecosystem. The endowment continues to maintain a reduced but still large Bitcoin ETF position.

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Syndicate Labs, an on-chain development startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, announced that it is winding down operations after five years of building infrastructure for on-chain developers.

It cited major shifts in the rollup market as the primary reason behind the decision.

EVM Rollups No Longer the Standard

In a statement on X, Syndicate Labs said its main focus had been giving developers better tools to build and scale on-chain apps. But according to the company, the rollup market has changed sharply in recent years. It noted that fewer new rollups are entering the space, while several older projects have slowly disappeared.

The company said the market had moved away from the type of technology it was building, and added that EVM rollups are no longer viewed as the industry standard. Instead, it said developers are increasingly choosing to build custom chains from scratch through consulting teams, which has resulted in less reusable infrastructure and reduced network effects across the ecosystem.

Syndicate Labs said it had spent years trying to support the growth of on-chain applications and wished the outcome had been different. Despite the shutdown of the development company, the group stressed that the broader Syndicate ecosystem will continue to exist separately through the Syndicate Network Collective, a Wyoming-based DUNA that holds governance authority over SYND tokens.

The company also clarified that the collective operates independently from Syndicate Labs, which essentially means that governance over the SYND token is not immediately impacted. It explained that a successor organization could continue maintaining the DUNA structure, though it also outlined plans for an orderly wind-down if no successor emerges.

The Syndicate Commons Bridge on Base was compromised in late April after attackers gained access through a leaked private key, which eventually drained 18.5 million SYND tokens worth nearly $330,000. However, Syndicate Labs stated that the shutdown decision was unrelated to the incident.

The affected customer and all SYND holders on Commons Chain have already been reimbursed using treasury reserves specifically set aside for such events. The company further stated that team members and investors remain subject to token lockups and that no affiliated individual has been able to access allocations for short-term benefit. Syndicate Labs said its vesting structure was designed around long-term incentives.

Two DeFi Projects Falter

Syndicate Labs is not the only crypto project to struggle after security incidents and changing market conditions this year. This year, two DeFi projects moved toward shutdowns after struggling with the fallout from major security and financial problems. In February, Solana-based DeFi aggregator Step Finance, along with SolanaFloor and Remora Markets, ceased operations after a wallet compromise led to roughly $30 million in losses. The teams said fundraising and acquisition talks failed to produce a recovery plan.

A month later, Balancer Labs proposed restructuring the Balancer protocol after months of financial strain, declining TVL, and a November exploit that accelerated liquidity outflows across the platform.

The post a16z-Backed Syndicate Labs Blames Shrinking Rollup Ecosystem for Shutdown Decision appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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SanDisk stock is the best-performing asset of 2026 so far. The shares have gained 509% between January 1 and May 20. A $1,000 investment on day one is worth about $6,090 today.

That makes SanDisk the clear winner across stocks, crypto, commodities and indices. The runner-up is a crypto token called DeXe, up 363%. Intel comes third at 209%, followed by Seagate at 183%.

Why Did SanDisk Stock Surge 500% This Year?

The driver behind SanDisk’s surge is the AI boom. The company makes memory chips that power data centres training large AI models. On April 30, it reported revenue of $5.95 billion, up 251% from a year earlier.

In the same earnings release, SanDisk disclosed a $42 billion order backlog from cloud customers. The stock then jumped to an all-time high of $1,562 on May 8. It now trades near $1,383.

By contrast, Bitcoin disappointed investors this year. The token opened in 2026 at $87,600 and has since fallen to about $76,800. That is a 22.9% loss, turning a $1,000 stake into $771.

Gold also failed to live up to its early promise. The metal briefly hit an all-time high of $5,589 on January 28. It has since dropped back to around $4,500, leaving holders with only a 6.5% gain for the year.

Oil tells a more dramatic story. Brent crude started the year at $60.59 a barrel and now trades near $113. That is an 86% jump, driven mainly by tensions around the Strait of Hormuz in April.

Value of $1,000 Investment in Each Asset Today

Copper Leads in Precious Metals

Industrial metals also had a strong run. Copper has climbed 42% on the London Metal Exchange, supported by demand from AI data centres and electric vehicles. Silver, however, rose only 3.4% after a sharp January spike faded.

Broader stock indices delivered steady but unspectacular returns. The Nasdaq 100 is up 16%. The S&P 500 is up 9.1%, and the Dow Jones has gained 3.9%.

Importantly, the household-name AI stocks did not lead the rally. Nvidia underperformed its own sector, and Microsoft is actually down for the year. 

Instead, investors rotated into less obvious AI suppliers like SanDisk, Intel and Seagate.

Risk also matters in any honest comparison. SanDisk’s gains came with sharp swings, and the stock has already pulled back more than 11% from its May peak. Even so, it has outpaced the Nasdaq 100 by more than 30 times this year.

In short, 2026 has rewarded a narrow group of AI-linked names and punished the assets most retail investors expected to lead.

The post What is The Most Profitable Asset of 2026? It’s Not Bitcoin or Gold appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX filed for an initial public offering on Wednesday. The filing shows a $1 trillion pay package tied to founding a Mars colony, a surprise $45 billion compute deal with rival Anthropic, and the bundled inclusion of X and xAI in the listed entity.

Here are 10 surprising facts that you might have missed from the SpaceX IPO filing. 

SPCX Lands on Two Stock Exchanges at Once

The company will trade as “SPCX” on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas. 

SpaceX reported $18.67 billion in 2025 revenue against a $2.59 billion operating loss. Total debt stands at $29.1 billion.

This isn’t a SpaceX IPO, It’s a SpaceX + X (Twitter) + xAI + Grok IPO 

Crucially, investors buying SPCX will not own a pure rocket company. SpaceX absorbed xAI in February 2026, and xAI had already swallowed X (formerly Twitter) in March 2025. 

The merged business now spans rockets, Starlink satellites, the Grok chatbot, and the X social platform.

A Trillion-Dollar Bet on Martian Colonists

Musk’s compensation has drawn immediate attention. 

The board granted him 1 billion restricted shares in January, vesting only if SpaceX hits a $7.5 trillion market cap and establishes “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” 

A second 302-million-share tranche vests on building space-based data centres delivering 100 terawatts of compute. The company’s own auditors currently rate both milestones “improbable.”

Minimum Wage for the World’s Richest CEO

According to the filing, Musk’s base salary is just $54,080. This is California’s minimum legal pay for exempt employees. It has not changed since 2019.

Grok’s Biggest Rival Is Footing the Bill

Anthropic, a direct competitor to Grok, agreed in May to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through 2029 for access to the COLOSSUS supercomputer in Memphis. 

The deal totals roughly $45 billion.

No Insurance on the Satellites, or the CEO

The filing also discloses several risks. SpaceX does not insure its 9,600 orbiting satellites and holds no life insurance policy on Musk. 

Foreign governments have publicly discussed using anti-satellite weapons against the Starlink network, the document notes.

Three in Four Satellites in Orbit Belong to Elon Musk

Starlink now accounts for around 75% of all active manoeuvrable satellites in orbit, serving 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries. 

The constellation performed more than 1,000 collision-avoidance manoeuvres per day in 2025.

Asteroid Mines, Moon Railguns, and a Star-Sized Goal

Looking further ahead, SpaceX plans to deploy data centres in orbit from 2028, mine asteroids, and build an electromagnetic “lunar mass driver” on the Moon. 

The filing states the long-term aim is reaching “Kardashev Type II” status — a civilisation harnessing the full energy of its star.

Musk Still Holds the Keys

After the offering, Musk will retain 85.1% of the voting power. Musk’s official SEC-disclosed title at Tesla is listed as “Technoking.”

What about Clean Energy?

SpaceX’s data centers run on natural gas and gas turbines, an awkward disclosure for the brand built on clean energy.

The post 10 Surprising Facts About Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion SpaceX IPO appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Ethereum News: Syndicate Labs is shutting down after five years of operations, becoming the most prominent casualty yet of the Ethereum Layer 2 consolidation wave that has steadily stripped liquidity, users, and economic viability from smaller chains.

The company posted its wind-down announcement on X on May 21, stating plainly that the “rollup market has fundamentally shifted”, and the data backs that conclusion without any hedging required.

Arbitrum One, Base, and OP Mainnet now control roughly 75% of the layer-2 market. Total value secured across the rollup ecosystem has dropped 36% from its October peak of more than $50 billion.

That is the environment in which smaller chains are trying to survive, and most cannot.

Discover: The best pre-launch token sales

Ethereum News: ETH Layer 2 Economics: Why the App-Chain Thesis Stopped Working

The mechanism here is worth understanding precisely. Syndicate Labs was not building a general-purpose L2 to compete with Arbitrum head-on.

The company, backed by a $20 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2021, built customizable rollup infrastructure, the kind that was supposed to power thousands of application-specific app-chains for DAOs, social communities, and investment clubs. The thesis was that demand for sovereign, programmable chains would be durable.

It was not. Syndicate’s shutdown statement identified the core structural problem: custom chains are increasingly being assembled by consulting teams as bespoke, one-off builds rather than using reusable infrastructure platforms.

When each deployment is engineered from scratch with almost no shared technology or network value, a platform like Syndicate’s smart sequencer becomes economically redundant. The market moved toward customization-as-consulting and away from customization-as-platform.

The numbers confirm the trend is broad, not isolated. 21Shares research published in December showed layer-2 activity had fallen 61% since June, with the asset manager describing several smaller networks as “zombie chains”, technically live but operating with negligible transaction volume.

L2Beat data puts total rollup ecosystem TVS at roughly $32 billion today, down from the $50 billion peak. The top five rollups now capture close to 90% of all L2 liquidity. That is not a competitive market – it is a consolidation already in its final stages.

Syndicate’s SYND token reflects the damage with brutal precision. SYND fell another 21% within hours of the shutdown announcement on Thursday, hitting a record low near $0.012. The token has now lost approximately 99.5% of its value since its September 2025 peak of $2.61.

Discover: The best crypto to diversify your portfolio with

The post Ethereum News: Syndicate Labs Shutdown: Is the Ethereum L2 ‘Great Shakeout’ Here? appeared first on Cryptonews.

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