The XRP Ledger is reviewing two proposed amendments that could expand lending functions and strengthen vault infrastructure. Validators have begun voting, yet early participation remains limited. Current results suggest the proposals still face significant hurdles before reaching activation requirements.

Data from XRPScan shows that validators have submitted only a small portion of the required votes. The network requires a strong consensus before any protocol change becomes active. Consequently, both amendments remain far from the necessary approval threshold.

The proposed changes target deeper financial functionality across the XRP ecosystem. Developers designed them to enhance lending capabilities and asset management tools. However, the current voting pace indicates that activation may take longer than expected.

SingleAssetVault Amendment

Validators are currently assessing the v3.1.0 SingleAssetVault amendment across the network. The proposal introduces vault mechanisms designed for single asset management within decentralized environments. As a result, developers expect stronger custody options for on-chain financial applications.

So far, only eight validators have recorded votes supporting the proposal. This number remains well below the required activation threshold. Therefore, the amendment currently shows limited progress toward implementation.

The XRP Ledger requires at least 28 validator approvals to activate protocol changes. This requirement represents roughly 80 percent of the network’s validator set. Without that support, the activation process automatically resets after the voting period ends.

Lending Protocol Amendment

Validators are also reviewing the v3.1.0 Lending Protocol amendment during the same voting cycle. This proposal introduces infrastructure for native lending services within the XRP Ledger ecosystem. Consequently, developers aim to expand decentralized finance capabilities directly on the network.

The amendment has gathered only six validator votes so far. That participation rate equals about 17% of the total validator pool. Therefore, the proposal remains far below the required approval threshold.

If voting participation does not accelerate, the activation timer will expire. When that happens, the amendment returns to a pending state. Validators may then reconsider the proposal during a future voting round.

Amendment Oversight and Security Context

Protocol amendments carry major consequences because they directly modify core blockchain functionality. Developers, therefore, apply strict governance rules before enabling any change. The XRP Ledger uses extended validator voting periods to confirm broad consensus.

A recent example demonstrated why careful review remains essential. Security researchers discovered a vulnerability in the proposed Batch amendment, known as XLS-56. That issue appeared during its voting phase and never reached activation.

The flaw could have allowed attackers to withdraw funds from user wallets. Notably, the exploit did not require access to private keys. Early detection prevented potential damage and reinforced the network’s review process.

Such events highlight the importance of gradual amendment adoption. Validators must carefully examine technical risks before approving protocol upgrades. Consequently, the slow progress of current proposals reflects the network’s cautious governance approach.

Why Arthur Hayes is bullish: In an interview with CoinDesk’s Jennifer Sanasie on MArkets Outlook, Hayes said Hyperliquid has separated itself from competing perpetual futures exchanges with real usage rather than incentive-driven volume.

• Hayes told Sanasie he sold his firm’s HYPE position around $50–$55 ahead of expected token unlock pressure but turned bullish again after the team chose not to sell most of its monthly token allocations.
• He said Hyperliquid still generates close to a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate based on 30-day fee data.
• The platform’s HIP-3 permissionless listing system has expanded trading beyond crypto into assets like oil or equity indices.

What’s driving activity: Hayes said traders are increasingly using Hyperliquid to access markets unavailable through traditional platforms.

• Retail traders can trade assets like oil or Nasdaq proxies 24/7 on-chain using stablecoins and crypto wallets.
• Hayes said leverage of 10x–20x is often available compared with the 2x–3x many retail investors receive on traditional brokerage platforms.
• Weekend geopolitical events, such as sudden conflict announcements, have pushed traders to use Hyperliquid while traditional markets are closed.

Why Hyperliquid stands out: Hayes argued Hyperliquid’s liquidity and trading metrics show more genuine market activity than rival decentralized exchanges.

• Many competing platforms rely on wash trading or token incentive programs to inflate activity, Hayes said.
• He evaluates exchanges using the ratio of trading volume to open interest, which he said helps identify genuine trading demand.
• Hayes said Hyperliquid has the lowest ratio among major perpetual DEXs, indicating more “real” trading.
• The platform also offers the lowest slippage for large bitcoin perpetual trades ranging from $100,000 to $10 million, he said.

What could derail the thesis: Hayes said rising hype and stronger competition could signal a potential exit point.

• He said he would reconsider his position if HYPE’s price-to-earnings ratio rises sharply and market sentiment becomes overwhelmingly bullish.
• Another risk is whether competitors offering lower fees can erode Hyperliquid’s roughly 70% share of perpetual DEX revenue.
• Hayes said maintaining strong revenue and continued restraint in team token selling are key to sustaining the bull case.

Beyond HYPE: Hayes also highlighted privacy-focused crypto projects as a developing narrative.

• He said Zcash could benefit from growing concerns about blockchain surveillance and AI-powered transaction analysis.
• Hayes cited Zcash’s cryptographic upgrades and privacy model as reasons he favors it over alternatives like Monero.

Bitcoin outlook: Hayes maintained his aggressive forecast for Bitcoin.

• He reiterated that Bitcoin could reach $250,000 by the end of the year despite missing earlier targets.

The Ethereum Foundation released the EF Mandate today, a foundational document it says functions as part constitution, part manifesto. The 38-page document, published by the EF’s board today, March 13, as a PDF and on-chain, aims to articulate the “promise of Etheruem,” as well as the EF’s role in the ecosystem.

Per the Mandate, the EF defines its role not as Ethereum’s owner or ruler, but as a steward with one core mission: ensuring Ethereum becomes and stays a decentralized, resilient tool for user self-sovereignty.

The Mandate also reaffirms the definition of Ethereum as humanity’s “World Computer” as the ecosystem’s first “promise” — what the EF says represents a “common computational substrate that anyone can interact with trustlessly, permissionlessly, and persistently.” Ethereum’s second promise, per the EF Mandate, is to enable self-sovereign coordination at scale, without coercion or capture.

Per the document, the EF’s mandate consists of two main principles: ensuring Ethereum stay decentralized and resilient, specifically as a tool for self-sovereignty; secondly, “scaling the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty to users ready to
exercise it directly.”

The document states that a core aim of the EF within the first of its mandates is to ensure that Ethereum remain “CROPS” — censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure. This collection of properties, the EF says, is the non-negotiable baseline for all EF decisions for Ethereum, at both the protocol and application layers, per the Mandate.

“May the Foundation fall on its own sword if it fails to uphold its solemn promise to Ethereum,” an illustrated part of the EF Mandate reads.

Buterin Responds

Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, posted a detailed breakdown of the Mandate on X today, describing Ethereum’s as “a sanctuary technology” built to “preserve technological self-sovereignty” and “ensure that no single person, organization or ideology’s victory in cyberspace can be total.”

Buterin outlined the EF’s role as well, including developing “the zero option” at the Ethereum application layer — UX that “goes hard” on security, privacy, and respecting user agency — while leaving broader adoption-first efforts to outside players. “Such work has its natural home outside the EF,” he wrote.

The Mandate also formally enshrines passing the “walkaway test” as the EF’s norttart for Ethereum. Buterin first introduced the concept on Jan. 12, as The Defiant reported at the time.

The walkaway test refers to making sure Ethereum is robust and resilient enough to function and evolve even if the EF and the protocol’s core developers “disappeared tomorrow.” The Foundation frames its own diminishing relevance as the truest measure of success, arguing that despite what may sound like a contradiction, “we believe, and history shows us time and again, that the only way to grow a garden into something truly infinite is to choose subtraction,” referring to the eventual “subtraction” of the EF itself as steward of Ethereum.

“For we are building nothing less than the machinery of freedom — not just for today, but for the next thousand years,” the Mandate states in its closing section.

The release comes amid significant internal change at the EF, following leadership restructuring last summer, and more recently, executive departures.

“We are doubling down on Ethereum,” Buterin wrote in his X post today, “and are excited about its next chapter.”

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

Robinhood’s February data show crypto notional volumes up 9% to $25b while equity, options and event contracts shrink, proving speculative energy has rotated back into coins.

Robinhood’s February numbers are clear: crypto is where the life is, everything else is fading.

Robinhood crypto volume jumps in February

Robinhood reported February crypto notional trading volumes of $25.0 billion, up 9% month‑on‑month and 74% year‑on‑year. Of that, $9.4 billion ran through the Robinhood app itself, with the remaining volume routed via Bitstamp, which Robinhood acquired in 2025 and now uses as its institutional and deep‑liquidity back‑end. This follows January’s $22.9 billion in crypto volume, meaning Robinhood has printed back‑to‑back months of sequential growth in digital‑asset activity to start 2026.

The crypto growth comes as Bitcoin trades near all‑time highs and volatility returns across majors and meme‑adjacent tokens, pulling in both retail flow on the app and larger tickets via Bitstamp. For Robinhood, that mix is ideal: more notional, fatter spreads and higher engagement in a product line that was supposed to be dead post‑2021 but is now the only one actually inflecting up.

Equities, options and event contracts slump

Everything outside crypto is going the other way. Equity notional trading volume in February came in at $194.4 billion, down 14% from January, even though that still marks a 36% increase versus a year earlier. Options contracts traded fell to 180.3 million, a 10% month‑on‑month decline and only a 9% gain year‑on‑year, with average daily option volume at 9.5 million contracts, down 5% versus January.

The sharpest hit is in Robinhood’s event contracts — its prediction‑market‑style product. February saw just 2.4 billion event contracts traded, a 29% drop from January’s level, giving back a chunk of the growth the firm had touted as part of its post‑meme diversification story. That tells you where speculative energy has rotated: away from binary macro bets and back into leveraged plays on BTC and friends.

What this rotation really means

From a market‑structure perspective, Robinhood is simply reflecting the broader tape: crypto volatility plus upside trends are attracting flows at the margin, while single‑stock and options trading cools off after a heavy run. For crypto markets, more retail flow through Robinhood and Bitstamp means more noise, more forced buying and selling around headlines, and fatter tails on both sides when the Fed or macro shocks hit.

XRP remains in a fragile position, with both the USDT and BTC pairs still trading within broader bearish structures. Although the price is attempting to stabilize near key support zones, buyers have yet to reclaim the major moving averages or break the descending trendlines that continue to define the downtrend.

Ripple Price Analysis: The USDT Pair

On the XRP/USDT chart, the asset is still moving inside a falling channel and remains below both the 100-day and 200-day moving averages, which keeps the broader outlook tilted to the downside. XRP is now trading around $1.43, holding above the $1.10 to $1.20 support zone, while the first meaningful resistance sits at the $1.80 mark.

If buyers manage to push above that area, the next major hurdle comes in around $2.40 to $2.50. For now, though, the structure remains weak, and the recent RSI recovery only points to mild momentum improvement rather than a confirmed trend reversal.

The BTC Pair

Against Bitcoin, XRP continues to underperform and again, remains pinned below both the 100-day and 200-day moving averages. The pair is trading near 1,968 sats and is once again testing the key 1,950 to 2,000 sats support area, which has acted as an important floor in recent months.

As long as that support holds, a short-term bounce remains possible, but any recovery still needs to clear the 2,500 sats resistance zone to shift momentum more decisively. If the current support breaks, the next downside target would likely be the 1,500 sats region, while a stronger reclaim of overhead resistance could open the way toward the key 2,700 sats resistance level.

Circle’s (CRCL) USDC has overtaken Tether’s USDT in transaction volumes for the first time since 2019, prompting Japanese investment bank Mizuho to raise its price target for the stablecoin issuer to $120 from $100, while reiterating its neutral rating on the stock.

The shares rose 1% in early trading to $115.40 and are up roughly 95% from their February lows.

Analysts Dan Dolev and Alexander Jenkins increased their Circle estimates, citing “USDC activity trends and use cases like Polymarket or agentic commerce expectations.”

Stablecoins, digital tokens backed by reserves such as fiat currency or gold, serve as key payment and settlement rails in the crypto economy, particularly for trading and cross-border transfers. The sector is dominated by Tether’s USDT with a $143 billion market cap, followed by Circle’s USDC at $78 billion.

According to their Friday report, USDC has recorded about $2.2 trillion in adjusted transaction volume so far in 2026, compared with $1.3 trillion for USDT. That gives USDC roughly 64% share of adjusted volumes, a sharp reversal from 2019–2025 when Tether consistently led, and USDC averaged about a 30% share.

The analysts said the shift matters because the long-term winner among stablecoins will likely be determined by real economic usage rather than market capitalization alone. Standard Chartered expects the stablecoin market cap to reach $2 trillion by the end of 2028.

Reflecting stronger USDC activity and expanding use cases, the Mizuho analysts raised several long-term Circle forecasts. They now expect “meaningful wallets” to reach 11.7 million by 2027, up from a prior estimate of 10 million, helping lift projected USDC market capitalization to $139 billion from $123 billion.

Circle has outperformed other crypto-linked equities recently.

William Blair analysts said in a Thursday note that while recent gains could easily be linked to rising oil prices and a potentially more hawkish Federal Reserve, other factors are likely driving the move.

They pointed instead to the resilience of USDC’s market capitalization despite the broader crypto downturn, along with increasing investor recognition of Circle’s economic model and its leadership in stablecoin infrastructure.

Other analysts pointed to a positioning-driven short squeeze rather than fundamentals as the driver of the recent move higher in the shares.

While the company delivered strong growth in USDC supply, the stock’s outsized reaction post earnings was driven more by crowded short bets heading into the print than by strong financials, according to Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research.

Read more: Circle’s outperformance highlights USDC’s staying power, says bullish Wall Street analyst

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) released a sweeping new document outlining its philosophy, priorities and long-term role in stewarding the world’s second-largest blockchain network.

The 38-page “EF Mandate,” published Friday, frames the blockchain, whose ether (ETH) token is beaten only by bitcoin BTC$71,803.36 in market capitalization, as a technology designed to protect individual freedom in an increasingly centralized digital world and lays out the principles the nonprofit says must guide its development.

The document comes at a time of transition for the organization, following recent shifts in Ethereum’s technical roadmap and the resignation earlier this year of one of the foundation’s co-executive directors.

“The Ethereum Foundation is the original steward of the Ethereum project,” the document says. “The Foundation is not the parent, owner, or ruler of Ethereum. We are not ‘the system’ itself.”

At the center of the mandate is the concept of self-sovereignty, which the foundation describes as Ethereum’s core purpose.

“The first aim is to ensure Ethereum becomes and stays a decentralized and resilient tool for self-sovereignty,” the manifesto states. “Our first fundamental principle is that a user has the final say over their identities, assets, actions, and agents.”

To preserve that goal, the foundation says four properties must remain central to Ethereum’s development: censorship resistance, open source and free (as in freedom), privacy, and security, collectively known as CROPS.

“We hold that these properties – CROPS – must remain, as an indivisible whole, the sine qua non of all Ethereum’s development priorities, which cannot be displaced,” the mandate says.

The foundation also said it will measure its own long-term success by how unnecessary it becomes. For the time being, it will focus on work that no other ecosystem participants are likely to undertake, including long-term protocol research, public-goods security work and coordination across development teams.

Once the broader ecosystem can take over those functions, it plans to step back.

“Our goal is to reduce the Foundation’s relative influence over time,” the team wrote. “Subtraction is rather a process of ensuring Ethereum’s maturity: a trajectory of growth with decentralization, robust enough to outgrow and outlast us.”

More broadly, the document situates the blockchain within an ecosystem of open technologies that support free and decentralized systems. The EF describes Ethereum as part of an “infinite garden,” an expanding network of builders, communities and institutions working to keep digital infrastructure open and resilient.

“The World Computer is decentralized infrastructure for permissionless compute, communication, and association,” the mandate states.

The manifesto concludes by reiterating the foundation’s long-term goal: protecting Ethereum’s promise as an open system that enables individuals and communities to coordinate without relying on centralized authorities.

“Our work is not about capturing markets, corporates, or states, nor about helping them extract or capture,” the document says. “We are here to uncapture the individual, and to entrench their freedoms of association.”

Read more: Ethereum Foundation leadership shake-up: Tomasz Stańczak out as co-executive director

Crypto exchange KuCoin has launched equity-linked perpetual derivatives tied to stocks, including Tesla and Strategy, allowing traders to speculate on their price movements through USDt-settled contracts that trade around the clock.

According to Friday’s announcement, the first listings include TSLAUSDT and MSTRUSDT perpetual contracts, which track price movements in the underlying equities but do not grant ownership of the shares. Instead, the products are synthetic derivatives settled in stablecoins.

The contracts have no expiration date and can be traded continuously. Positions can be opened with as little as 1 USDt (USDT), lowering the entry threshold for traders seeking exposure to equity-linked price movements through a crypto trading platform.

According to KuCoin, the product uses a pricing framework designed to track underlying equity benchmarks while accounting for differences between traditional stock market hours and the continuous trading environment of crypto derivatives markets.

Access to the contracts may be restricted in some jurisdictions depending on local regulations, the company said.

Founded in 2017, KuCoin says its platform serves more than 40 million users across more than 200 countries and lists over 1,000 digital tokens for trading. The exchange ranks eighth by spot trading volume, according to CoinMarketCap data.

MicroStrategy, which rebranded to Strategy in February 2025, is currently the largest corporate Bitcoin holder, with 738,731 BTC on its balance sheet. Tesla ranks as the 12th-largest public holder, with 11,509 BTC.

Related: SEC’s ‘Crypto Mom’ calls for simpler disclosure rules, flags tokenization debate

Fintechs and exchanges move to tokenize stocks

The market for tokenized equities has surged since the beginning of 2025. Tokenized stocks now have a total market value of about $1.03 billion, according to RWA.xyz data, up from around $291 million on Jan. 1, 2025.

Growth in the sector is being driven by fintech companies, crypto exchanges, and traditional brokerages alike.

In October, Robinhood expanded its tokenization initiative on the Arbitrum blockchain, adding 80 new stock tokens and bringing the total number of tokenized assets on the platform to nearly 500.

In June, more than 60 tokenized stocks became available on Kraken and Bybit following the launch of Backed Finance’s xStocks product. Last month, Kraken launched tokenized equity perpetual futures on its regulated derivatives platform, allowing eligible non-US clients to trade 24/7 leveraged exposure to major US stock indexes, gold and companies including Tesla, Nvidia, and Apple.

Traditional exchanges are also exploring the concept. In January, the New York Stock Exchange announced it is developing a platform for trading tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds with 24/7 trading and instant settlement, subject to regulatory approval.

In September, Nasdaq filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission seeking approval to list tokenized stocks. It has since partnered with Payward, Kraken’s parent company, and its subsidiary, Backed Finance, to develop an equities tokenization gateway. The platform is expected to begin offering services to issuers in the first half of 2027.

Magazine: All 21 million Bitcoin is at risk from quantum computers