Crypto World
Paramount Skydance (PSKY) Stock Plunges 8% Following Bank of America Downgrade
Key Takeaways
- Paramount Skydance (PSKY) declined approximately 7.7% on Tuesday, closing at $10.37
- Bank of America reduced its price target from $13 down to $11 while maintaining its “Underperform” stance
- Fitch downgraded the company’s credit rating to junk territory; S&P issued a negative watch warning
- The shares have completely wiped out the 21% rally that followed the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition announcement on Feb. 27
- Year-to-date, PSKY has fallen 21.8% and trades 47.8% beneath its 52-week peak
Paramount Skydance emerged victorious in the battle for Warner Bros. Discovery. But investors are now questioning: was the price too high?
Shares of PSKY tumbled approximately 7.7% during Tuesday’s trading session, settling at $10.37. This marks the sixth decline in seven trading days. The stock has completely erased the impressive 21% jump it experienced on Feb. 27, following the company’s announcement of its Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition after Netflix exited the bidding process.
Paramount Skydance Corporation Class B Common Stock, PSKY
The sharp decline followed Bank of America Securities analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich’s decision to maintain her Underperform rating while cutting her price objective from $13 down to $11. Her analysis painted a challenging picture: while the merger offers long-term upside potential, the path to achieving it remains lengthy and filled with uncertainties.
“PSKY had already been undergoing an integration process from the Paramount Skydance merger — which had only just begun — and now would be adding an even larger entity to the mix,” Ehrlich noted in her research.
The context is crucial. Paramount and Skydance Media finalized their combination just last summer. CEO David Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle, had only recently begun that integration work before taking on an acquisition approximately double in size.
Mounting Debt Concerns Spook Investors
The balance sheet situation is causing unease among market participants. Upon completion of the Warner Bros. transaction, Paramount will carry a net debt-to-EBITDA multiple of 4.3, even after accounting for anticipated cost savings. Management believes it can reduce this ratio to an investment-grade 3-to-1 level within a three-year timeframe — however, credit rating agencies are responding now.
Fitch Ratings has lowered PSKY’s credit rating into junk territory. S&P Global Ratings has put the company under negative credit watch. Adding to investor concerns, the deal has attracted political scrutiny due to financing arrangements that partially involve Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.
The merged entity would create an entertainment powerhouse. Combined, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. command roughly 30% of the domestic box office market, bringing together beloved franchises such as Star Trek, Harry Potter, and DC Comics properties. The deal also unites major television networks including CBS, TNT, and CNN.
Rising Content Expenditures
Ellison has demonstrated an aggressive spending approach. Paramount has already locked in rights agreements for South Park and UFC programming through TKO Group. Bank of America’s research highlighted that PSKY “paid well above the next best offer for both of these deals.”
The studio plans to distribute 30 theatrical releases annually — 15 from each production house — while simultaneously expanding streaming content production. Ehrlich characterized this production volume as “a significant undertaking” with unpredictable results.
The NFL presents another major financial question mark. Paramount currently holds a portion of the league’s broadcast rights and seeks renewal in the upcoming negotiation cycle. BofA cautioned the company faces a difficult choice: either lose the package to a competitor willing to pay more, or commit to a substantial price increase to retain it.
PSKY has dropped 21.8% since the beginning of the year. Trading at $10.31, the stock sits 47.8% below its 52-week high of $19.73 reached in September 2025. Over the past twelve months, the stock has experienced 27 price swings exceeding 5%, illustrating the extreme volatility surrounding this equity.
Paramount chose not to provide commentary on Bank of America’s research report.
US Democratic Party Senator Adam Schiff introduced legislation Tuesday that would explicitly bar federally regulated prediction-market platforms from listing contracts tied to war, terrorism, assassination and individual deaths.
The bill, called the DEATH BETS Act, would amend the Commodity Exchange Act to make those contracts prohibited for entities overseen by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
In a statement announcing the bill, Schiff said markets that let traders profit from violent events create incentives for the misuse of classified information, threaten national security and encourage violence. He said prediction markets had become a “Wild West” and called for Congress and the CFTC to make clear that such “death bets” are not allowed.
The bill seeks to ban prediction market contracts that involve references to “terrorism, assassination, war, or any similar activity,” or that are related to an “individual’s death.” The bill was referred to the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry for consideration, where Schiff is a member.
US-Israel war with Iran ignites military insider concerns
The legislation comes after renewed scrutiny of event-contract platforms during the recent US and Israeli military confrontation with Iran, when war-related markets drew heavy trading and fresh allegations of insider activity.
Six Polymarket traders netted $1 million by accurately betting on the US strike against Iran.
Related: Suspected insider wallets rack up $1.2M betting on ZachXBT’s Axiom exposé
The six wallets were all created in February and placed all their bets on the contracts predicting the timing of a potential US attack, with several shares purchased only hours before the first reported explosions in Iran’s capital, Tehran.
On Tuesday, a new wallet spent $32,900 to bet on US forces entering Iran by Saturday, despite the odds continuing to decline, according to blockchain data platform Lookonchain.
Related: Kalshi, Polymarket face trading halt in Nevada after court rulings
In February, Israeli authorities arrested and indicted two people suspected of using secret information about Israel striking Iran for insider trading on Polymarket.
Insider concerns grew in January after a Polymarket account profited $400,000 after it placed a bet on a contract predicting that Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro would be captured, wagering the funds just hours before US forces captured him.
Magazine: Inside a 30,000 phone bot farm stealing crypto airdrops from real users
Crypto World
Binance WSJ Lawsuit: The Crypto Exchange Sues Wall Street Journal Over ‘Defamatory’ Iran Sanctions Report
The Binance crypto exchange has officially filed a defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, or known as WSJ, in the Southern District of New York. The complaint, filed today (March 11), alleges the newspaper published false claims regarding the exchange’s compliance controls and handling of Iran sanctions data.
At the center of the dispute is a February report claiming Binance knowingly processed over $1Bn for sanctioned entities.
This news has led to the BNB price dropping 1% in the past hours, to $640, as investors are seemingly spooked at yet another potential legal dispute involving Binance.
CEO Richard Teng has condemned the reporting as inaccurate, stating the outlet ignored documented evidence provided before publication.
— Litest (@Litest) March 11, 2026
BREAKING:
Binance launches defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over Iran sanctions report. pic.twitter.com/8qdrf9rXcD
What’s the WSJ Report Actually Alleged And Why Binance Says It’s Wrong
The Wall Street Journal article, titled “Binance Fired Staff Who Flagged $1 Billion Moving to Sanctioned Iran Entities,” depicted a chaotic internal struggle at the world’s largest crypto exchange.
It is alleged that compliance staff were fired not for policy breaches, but for doing their jobs identifying illicit flows.
Specifically, the report claimed Binance processed $1.7Bn in transactions linked to Iranian entities, including a Hong Kong-based fiat-to-crypto converter called “Blessed Trust.”
According to the Journal, this activity continued despite internal red flags. The report immediately triggered a regulatory inquiry.
US Senator Richard Blumenthal cited the article as grounds for demanding a formal investigation into the exchange’s operations, which Binance CEO Richard Teng responded to on March 6, denying all claims.
The allegations arrived during a sensitive period for crypto regulation, mirroring the pressure seen as Democrats introduce bills to ban platforms like Polymarket over compliance concerns.
DISCOVER: Next Crypto to Explode in 2026
Binance Fires Back: 19 Ignored Responses and a 96.8% Compliance Claim
Binance’s defense hinges on what it calls willful disregard for the facts. The exchange claims it sent the WSJ 19 detailed responses and answered 27 specific questions before the publication deadline, none of which appeared in the final story.
Richard Teng publicly rejected the narrative, emphasizing that the employees in question were dismissed for data policy violations, not for flagging sanctions evasion.
The exchange cited hard numbers to counter the defamation claims. Binance states it has achieved a -96.8% reduction in sanctions exposure risks through upgraded protocols. Currently, more than 1,500 employees, nearly a quarter of the workforce within Binance, work in compliance.
Regarding the specific “Blessed Trust” account, Binance clarified that the entity was offboarded and reported to law enforcement in 2025, long before the WSJ report suggested the activity was ongoing.
What This Means for Binance and the Broader Crypto-Media Relationship
This lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages, arguing the report caused harm that no simple correction can fix. The legal action follows a significant win for Binance on March 7, when a federal judge dismissed a separate lawsuit alleging the exchange facilitated terrorist financing.
That court found no material support was provided, strengthening Binance’s position that it is not liable for the actions of bad actors who might attempt to access the platform.
Traders are watching this case closely as a test of the “actual malice” standard in crypto reporting. While the exchange settled with the DOJ in 2023 for $4.3Bn over historical failures, this aggressive legal stance signals a refusal to accept what it deems false narratives about its current operations.
The focus now shifts to the WSJ’s response and whether the regulatory inquiry sparked by the article will sustain momentum without the supporting media narrative.
We will continue to update this story as more details emerge over the coming days and weeks.
EXPLORE: Best Crypto Presales to Buy in 2026
The post Binance WSJ Lawsuit: The Crypto Exchange Sues Wall Street Journal Over ‘Defamatory’ Iran Sanctions Report appeared first on Cryptonews.
CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.
The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 1980.55, down 0.6% (-12.31) since 4 p.m. ET on Tuesday.
Eight of 20 assets are trading higher.
Leaders: ICP (+11.9%) and DOT (+2.2%).
Laggards: HBAR (-1.8%) and XLM (-1.6%).
The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.
TLDR
- February’s Consumer Price Index increased 2.4% year-over-year, aligned with analyst predictions
- Core inflation (stripping out food and energy costs) registered at 2.5% annually, meeting forecasts
- Report captures timeframe prior to U.S.-Israel coordinated strikes against Iran
- Crude oil has jumped approximately 18% since late February, while pump prices climbed 20%
- Federal Reserve anticipated to maintain current interest rate range of 3.5%–3.75% at upcoming meeting
While February’s inflation report appeared reassuring at first glance, the underlying narrative reveals a more complex situation unfolding.
The Consumer Price Index advanced 0.3% month-over-month in February and climbed 2.4% on an annual basis. These metrics aligned precisely with economist projections. Meanwhile, core CPI—which excludes volatile food and energy categories—increased 0.2% monthly and 2.5% yearly, similarly matching consensus estimates.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics published these figures on Wednesday, March 11.
Both energy and food categories showed increases during February, though these changes were relatively contained compared to subsequent developments following the data collection period.
Crucially, this report reflects conditions that existed before coordinated U.S. and Israeli military operations against Iran commenced in late February. Those hostilities have subsequently created significant disruptions throughout global energy markets.
Iran Crisis Delivers Major Shock to Energy Sector
The Strait of Hormuz—a critical chokepoint handling approximately 20% of worldwide oil shipments—has experienced a dramatic reduction in tanker movement. Intelligence reports suggest Iran has deployed naval mines throughout the waterway, prompting President Trump to warn of potential additional military responses.
Brent crude futures stood near $92 per barrel at press time, following an earlier spike to almost $120 this week. Motorists across America have seen gasoline costs surge 20% as a direct consequence.
Bank of America’s economist Stephen Juneau noted that petroleum prices have climbed roughly 18% since February concluded. He indicated that sustained conflict would probably generate upward pressure on both headline and underlying inflation measures in coming months.
The International Energy Agency has put forward its most substantial strategic reserve release proposal to date aimed at market stabilization, the Wall Street Journal reported. IEA member countries were scheduled to vote on this initiative Wednesday. The prior record stood at 182 million barrels, authorized following Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion.
Implications for Federal Reserve Policy
The Fed’s favored inflation metric—the Personal Consumption Expenditures index—registered 2.9% annually in December. This remains substantially above the central bank’s 2% objective. January’s PCE figures are scheduled for Friday release, with forecasters anticipating a 3.1% annual rate.
Market indicators suggest the Federal Reserve will almost certainly maintain its current rate posture during next week’s policy meeting, preserving the 3.5%–3.75% band, per CME FedWatch tracking data.
Employment trends add another dimension of complexity to the Fed’s calculus. The U.S. economy surprisingly shed 92,000 positions last month, elevating the unemployment rate to 4.4%.
President Trump indicated earlier this week the military operations might conclude “very soon,” though U.S. and Israeli forces have maintained strikes across multiple Iranian targets throughout the Middle East region.
Ghana’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said 11 companies have been granted access to a regulatory sandbox to test cryptocurrency and digital asset services under the country’s Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, 2025.
The program allows companies to run their products in a controlled environment while regulators monitor risks and compliance.
The sandbox will run for 12 months and sits at the center of Ghana’s early efforts to bring oversight to the crypto sector, according to a press release.
Companies in the first cohort include asset tokenization firms like Africoin, Blu Penguin, Vaulta, XChain and Goldbod as well as cryptocurrency exchanges like Hyro Exchange, HanyPay and WhiteBit.
The commission said firms whose products are market-ready and meet regulatory requirements could transition to a full license after six months. Others may remain in the sandbox for the remaining period to refine their services.
The SEC said the exercise will also help it shape detailed licensing guidelines for different types of crypto businesses. Data gathered during the pilot will inform rules covering areas such as investor protection, market integrity and anti-money laundering controls.
Once the sandbox closes, the regulator plans to publish the final guidelines and open the licensing process to a broader set of virtual asset service providers.
Artificial intelligence has long been defined by scale—larger models, faster processing, and sprawling data centers. Yet a growing cohort of researchers, investors, and practitioners is suggesting the traditional growth path is hitting a ceiling. AI is increasingly capital-intensive and tethered to physical limits, with diminishing returns appearing sooner than many anticipated. The latest data underscore the shift: electricity demand from global data centers is projected to more than double by 2030, a surge comparable to expanding entire industrial sectors; in the United States, data-center power usage is forecast to rise well over 100% by the end of the decade. As the economics of AI tighten, trillions of dollars in new investment and substantial grid upgrades loom, coinciding with the way the technology embeds itself into finance, law, and crypto workflows.
Key takeaways
- Energy demand tied to AI is accelerating, with the IEA projecting data-center electricity use will more than double by 2030, highlighting a fundamental constraint in the current scaling paradigm.
- The United States could see data-center power consumption surge by more than 100% before the 2030s, signaling a major resource and infrastructure challenge for AI-enabled sectors.
- Frontier AI training costs are skyrocketing, with estimates suggesting single training runs could exceed $1 billion, making inference and ongoing operation the dominant long-term expense.
- The verification burden grows with scale: as AI outputs proliferate, human oversight becomes increasingly critical to prevent errors from propagating, such as false positives in automated AML flagging.
- Architectural shifts toward cognitive or neurosymbolic systems—emphasizing reasoning, verifiability, and localized deployment—offer a path to reduce energy use and improve reliability versus brute-force scaling.
- Blockchain-enabled, decentralized AI concepts may distribute data, models, and computing resources more broadly, potentially lowering concentration risk and aligning deployment with local needs.
Sentiment: Neutral
Market context: The convergence of AI with crypto analytics and DeFi tooling sits amid broader questions about energy consumption, regulation, and the governance of automated decision-making. As AI tools increasingly monitor on-chain activity, assess sentiment, and assist in smart-contract development, the industry faces a tighter coupling between performance, verification, and accountability.
Why it matters
The debate over AI scaling is not a theoretical one—it touches the core of how and where AI is deployed in high-stakes sectors. Large language models (LLMs) have grown fluent by pattern-matching across vast text corpora, enabling impressive capabilities but not necessarily robust, reliable reasoning. As these systems become embedded in legal workflows, financial risk management, and crypto operations, the consequences of incorrect outputs become less tolerable and more costly.
Training frontier AI models remains a mission-critical and expensive endeavor. Independent analyses suggest that the cumulative cost of training can be immense, with credible voices estimating that a single training run could cross the $1 billion threshold in the near future. Yet even more consequential is the ongoing cost of inference—running models at scale with low latency, high uptime, and rigorous verification requirements. Each query consumes energy, and each deployment necessitates infrastructure. As usage expands, energy use compounds, pressuring both operators and grids alike. In crypto contexts, AI systems increasingly monitor on-chain activity, analyze sentiment, generate code for smart contracts, flag suspicious transactions, and automate decision-making; missteps here can move capital and undermine trust across markets.
The industry is beginning to recognize that fluency alone is insufficient. When AI can produce convincing but incorrect conclusions, verification burdens intensify. False positives in AML flagging, for instance, have been documented as a practical drag on resources, diverting investigators from genuine activity. This dynamic underscores why a shift toward architectures that integrate cause-and-effect reasoning, explicit rules, and self-checking mechanisms is gaining traction. Cognitive AI and neurosymbolic approaches—where knowledge is structured into interrelated concepts and reasoning can be revisited and audited—promise higher reliability with lower energy demands than brute-force scaling.
Beyond the architecture, there is a broader trend toward decentralization of AI development itself. Some platforms explore blockchain-enabled models for contributing data, models, and computing resources, reducing concentration risk and aligning deployment with local needs. In a field where room for error is small and the stakes are high, the ability to inspect, audit, and shape AI systems matters just as much as the outputs they produce. The turning point is clear: scaling for the sake of scale may no longer be sufficient. The industry must invest in architectures that make intelligence more reliable, verifiable, and controlled by communities rather than distant, centralized infrastructure.
As AI considerations bleed into crypto workflows, the stakes grow sharper. On-chain monitoring, sentiment analysis for market signals, automated code generation for smart contracts, and risk-management automation are all increasingly dependent on AI, yet they demand a higher standard of trust. The tension between speed and accuracy—between fast, automated decisions and verifiable reasoning—will shape the next wave of crypto tooling and governance. The upshot is not simply bigger models; it is better systems that can reason about their own steps, explain conclusions, and operate within clear constraints.
Ultimately, the industry faces an inflection point. If architecture and reasoning take precedence over sheer scale, AI could become more affordable to operate, while remaining safer and more controllable. The era of growth-at-any-cost may yield to a more deliberate phase where wealth creation in AI and crypto hinges on transparent verification, resilient design, and decentralized collaboration. The author argues that the path forward lies in rethinking how intelligence is built and deployed—prioritizing robust reasoning and governance over incremental increases in parameter counts.
What to watch next
- Regulatory and policy developments around AI safety, auditing, and accountability in finance and crypto.
- Advances in cognitive AI and neurosymbolic architectures, including practical deployments on edge devices and local servers.
- Decentralized AI initiatives that use blockchain-inspired models to distribute data, models, and computing resources.
- Shifts in data-center capacity, energy pricing, and grid infrastructure tied to AI-enabled demand.
- New benchmarks or case studies illustrating the trade-offs between scale, reasoning, and verification in real-world crypto applications.
Sources & verification
- Energy demand from AI: IEA, Energy and AI — energy demand from AI.
- U.S. data-center power demand projections: Pew Research Center / energy use at US data centers amid the AI boom.
- UK legal AI cautionary note: Guardian article on the High Court warning against AI-generated fabricated case law in legal filings (June 2025).
- AML false positives and AI risk: IBM Think topics on AI fraud detection in banking and related AML flagging issues.
- Costs to train frontier AI models and ongoing inference costs: Epoch AI blog and Digital Experience Live analyses.
- On-chain and crypto AI applications: efforts around Ethereum and on-chain tooling that leverage AI signals (as referenced in industry coverage).
Rethinking AI scaling: energy, reasoning, and the crypto interface
Artificial intelligence has long scaled on a simple premise—more data, bigger models, faster hardware would continually unlock better performance and lower costs. The latest economic and technical signals, however, suggest a pivot. Energy and capital intensity are rising faster than anticipated, with global data-center electricity demand projected to more than double by 2030. In the United States alone, data-center power consumption is expected to rise by more than 100% before the decade ends, a trajectory that will require massive investments in grid capacity and infrastructure as AI becomes embedded in critical sectors, including markets, compliance, and on-chain activity monitoring.
Training frontier AI models remains extraordinarily expensive, with credible estimates pointing to costs that could top $1 billion per training run. Yet even more consequential is the ongoing cost of inference—sustained, low-latency operation that must deliver results with high reliability. In markets and crypto, AI systems are increasingly used to monitor on-chain activity, analyze sentiment, generate smart-contract code, flag suspicious transactions, and automate governance decisions. The result is a double exposure: the potential for rapid, data-driven signals coupled with the risk of false signals that can misallocate capital or mischaracterize risk. Notably, false positives in automated AML flagging illustrate how unreliable outputs can waste human resources and erode trust when deployed widely.
To address these pressures, the narrative is shifting away from sheer scale toward architectures that emphasize reasoning and verifiability. Cognitive AI and neurosymbolic approaches seek to braid pattern recognition with structured knowledge, rules, and self-checks. These systems aim to deliver usable reasoning traces and transparent decision processes, reducing the need for brute-force computation and enabling more predictable energy use. Early demonstrations suggest that local or edge deployments, supported by knowledge representations, could keep control with users and organizations rather than entrusting cognition to centralized, opaque infrastructure.
Decentralized AI models—where data, models, and computation can be contributed by diverse participants—offer another path to resilience. By distributing the workload and oversight, communities can mitigate concentration risk and tailor AI deployments to local needs. In this ecosystem, the role of governance becomes more pronounced: platforms must enable auditing, adjustment, and interoperability without compromising security or performance. The shift toward more sophisticated reasoning, coupled with a commitment to verifiable outcomes, marks a meaningful departure from scaling solely for scale’s sake. If the industry can operationalize cognitive architectures at scale, the economics of AI may improve—reducing both energy consumption per decision and the verification burden on human operators.
In the crypto arena, this evolution matters. The reliability of AI-assisted on-chain analytics, fraud detection, and smart-contract tooling will influence investor confidence and market integrity. The path forward requires not only bigger systems but smarter ones—systems whose inner workings can be inspected, challenged, and improved by a broad community. The debate is no longer about whether AI should grow, but how to grow it in a way that is auditable, trustworthy, and aligned with the needs of decentralized finance and broader digital markets.
U.S. inflation data met expectations on Wednesday, reinforcing anticipation that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates steady not just at its March 18 meeting, but likely at the bank’s April meeting as well.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.3% in February, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economist forecasts had been for a rise of 0.3% and January’s increase was 0.2%.
On a year-over-year basis, CPI was higher by 2.4% against expectations of 2.4% and January’s 2.4%.
Core CPI, which excludes food and energy costs, rose 0.2% in February versus forecasts of 0.2% and January’s 0.3%. Year-over-year core CPI was higher by 2.5% versus forecasts of 2.5% and January’s 2.5%.
Under modest pressure for the morning, bitcoin was trading at $69,500 in the minutes following the report, lower by 1.2% over the past 24 hours.
U.S. stock index futures were slightly lower across the board and the 10-year Treasury yield ticked up to 4.18%. The main actor in markets this week, WTI crude oil was higher by 4.2% to $87 per barrel.
Ahead of the data, markets were pricing in a 99% probability that the Federal Reserve would leave interest rates unchanged at its March meeting next week, according to the CME FedWatch tool. For the April meeting, rate cut odds were at just 11% versus 21% one month ago.
February’s inflation numbers, of course, are somewhat old news given the events that have transpired since, namely the war in Iran and spiking oil prices. How much this plays into the Fed’s thinking on interest rates should become more evident following next week’s policy meeting.
Foundry Digital, one of largest Bitcoin mining pools by hashrate, said it plans to introduce a zcash (ZEC) mining pool by next month, expanding beyond BTC and bringing a large institutional operator into the privacy-focused network.
With the new pool, Foundry aims to offer zcash miners a U.S.-based platform designed around compliance checks, reporting standards and operational controls often required by public companies and large firms.
The move addresses what Foundry describes as a gap in Zcash infrastructure. While the cryptocurrency has existed for nearly a decade, much of its mining ecosystem still consists of smaller global pools that often operate outside formal compliance frameworks.
“Zcash has matured into an institutional-grade asset, but the mining infrastructure supporting it hasn’t kept pace,” Foundry CEO Mike Colyer said in a statement shared with CoinDesk.
Betting on privacy
The expansion comes as privacy-focused cryptocurrencies regain attention across the market as new crypto tax reporting rules, with threat of asset seizure, kicked in across the European Union at the turn of the year and as onchain analysis keeps developing, leading to growing demand for financial anonymity.
Zcash, along with other privacy coins including monero (XMR) and dash (DASH) has seen renewed interest that has helped their prices surge. ZEC has seen significant outperformance, up more than 670% in the last 12 month period, compared XMR’s 72% rise in the same period, while DASH is up 51%.
ZEC’s outperformance can likely be attributed to its hybrid privacy model, which makes shielded – completely anonymous – transactions optional with selective disclosure. This means that transactions can be transparent for custody and exchanges, and attracted accumulation from a Winklevoss-backed treasury firm as well as into the Grayscale Zcash Trust.
Foundry’s shift toward zcash also likely reflects broader changes in mining economics. Bitcoin mining profitability has tightened following the 2024 halving, which cut block rewards in half while mining difficulty surged.
Speaking to CoinDesk, Coyler pushed back on the idea the move is primarily a response to lowering bitcoin margins.
“We evaluate opportunities based on where institutional infrastructure is needed, not on bitcoin margins at any given moment,” he said. “Foundry’s bitcoin mining business is strong and remains our core foundation.”
The expansion, Coyler said, was over an identified gap in compliant Zcash infrastructure. “Institutional and public miners who want exposure to zcash have had no US-based, compliant, purpose-built infrastructure to do it through,” he added.
As for whether the move shows a broader multi-chain strategy, Coyler said the company’s focus is “squarely on bitcoin and zcash” for now, though he added that Foundry is “always evaluating opportunities” that align with its mission and the demands of institutional miners.
While the price of bitcoin saw a major rise to near $125,000 late last year, its price has since corrected to now stand at $69,500. That has seen hashprice, a measure of expected value of 1TH/s of hashing power a day, drop from over $60 to $30 per petahash.
As margins shrink, many large mining firms have begun exploring other proof-of-work networks to diversify revenue.
Zcash mining infrastructure
Zcash launched in 2016 as a privacy-focused cryptocurrency built on zero-knowledge proof technology. The network allows users to send transactions on a public blockchain while keeping key details private. Using a cryptographic method known as zk-SNARKs, Zcash can verify that a transaction is valid without revealing the sender, receiver or amount involved.
Like Bitcoin, the Zcash network relies on proof-of-work mining to secure its blockchain and miners use specialized hardware to solve complex mathematical puzzles to help secure the network. When a miner or mining pool solves one of these puzzles, it adds a new block of transactions to the chain and earns a reward in newly issued ZEC tokens along with transaction fees.
Zcash blocks are produced about every 75 seconds, faster than bitcoin’s blocks which are produced every 10 minutes. Still, both shared a supply cap of 21 million coins. The mining process uses an algorithm called Equihash, which differs from Bitcoin’s SHA-256 and was designed to require large amounts of memory during computation.
Network difficulty, which helps the time between block production remain consistent, means the probability of solving a block alone is low. As a result miners bundle together in what are known as mining pools, in which participants combine computing power and share rewards based on how much work they contribute. Large pools can influence the stability and decentralization of a network because they control significant portions of its total hashrate.
Foundry’s zcash pool
Foundry said its zcash pool will include identity verification checks for participants through rigorous know-your-customer and anti-money laundering compliance, transparent payout calculations and reporting tools aimed at institutional users. It’ll feature a dedicated support team and its operations will be based in the United States.
The company plans to apply the same operational framework used by its bitcoin pool, which has undergone SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance audits, it said.
Mining rewards will be distributed through transparent Zcash addresses, not shielded ones, the company said. The pool will be paying miners on a Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) model, which Coyler said is “fully auditable” and provides detailed data supporting daily payment reconciliation.
Foundry didn’t disclose the fee for miners, saying only it will offer “competitive pool fee rates.” There will be no minimum hashrate threshold to join the pool, Coyler said, noting that the Zcash mining ecosystem is still emerging.
The company expects demand from miners that already operate in regulated environments such as North America. Many of those firms rely on formal reporting systems and compliance programs to meet corporate governance requirements.
If the zcash pool launches on schedule in 2026, it would mark one of the largest institutional entries into the Zcash mining ecosystem to date. Other major mining pools operating within it include F2Pool, 2Miners, and ViaBTC.
EUR/USD is recovering losses from 1.1500. USD/JPY is correcting gains from 159.00 and might decline further if it stays below 158.30.
Important Takeaways for EUR/USD and USD/JPY Analysis Today
- The Euro struggled to stay in a positive zone and declined below 1.1700 before finding support.
- There was a break above a connecting bearish trend line with resistance at 1.1580 on the hourly chart of EUR/USD at FXOpen.
- USD/JPY started a decent increase above 157.00 before the bears appeared near 158.90.
- There is a key contracting triangle forming with resistance near 158.30 on the hourly chart at FXOpen.
EUR/USD Technical Analysis
On the hourly chart of EUR/USD at FXOpen, the pair started a fresh decline from 1.1825. The pair broke below 1.1665 and the 50-hour simple moving average. Finally, it tested the 1.1500 zone. A low was formed at 1.1507, and the pair is now recovering losses.
There was a move above 1.1550 and a connecting bearish trend line at 1.1580. The pair surpassed the 38.2% Fib retracement level of the downward move from the 1.1826 swing high to the 1.1507 low. On the upside, the pair is now facing resistance near the 50% Fib retracement at 1.1665.
The first major hurdle for the bulls could be 1.1705. A break above 1.1705 could set the pace for another increase. In the stated case, the pair might rise toward 1.1775.
If not, the pair might drop again. Immediate support is near the 50-hour simple moving average and 1.1620. The next key area of interest might be 1.1565. If there is a downside break below 1.1565, the pair could drop towards 1.1505. The main target for the bears on the EUR/USD chart could be 1.1440, below which the pair could start a major decline.
USD/JPY Technical Analysis
On the hourly chart of USD/JPY at FXOpen, the pair gained pace for a move above 158.00. The US dollar even traded close to 159.00 against the Japanese yen before the bears emerged.
A high was formed at 158.90 before a downside correction. The pair dipped below 158.00 and the 50% Fib retracement level of the upward move from the 156.45 swing low to the 158.90 high. However, the bulls were active above 157.00 and protected the 61.8% Fib retracement.
The pair is back above the 50-hour simple moving average and 158.00. Immediate resistance on the USD/JPY chart is near 158.30. There is also a key contracting triangle at 158.30.
If there is a close above the triangle and the hourly RSI moves above 65, the pair could rise towards 158.90. The next major barrier for the bulls could be 159.25, above which the pair could test 160.00 in the near term.
On the downside, the first major support is near 158.00. The next key region for the bears might be 157.40. If there is a close below 157.40, the pair could decline steadily. In the stated case, the pair might drop towards 156.45. Any more losses might send the pair toward 155.85.
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Opinion by: Mohammed Marikar, co-founder at Neem Capital
Artificial intelligence has consistently been defined by scale, so far — bigger models, faster processing, expanding data centers. The assumption, based on traditional technology cycles, was that scale would keep improving performance and, over time, costs would fall and access would expand.
That assumption is now breaking down. AI is not scaling like other software. Instead, it is capital-intensive, constrained by physical limits, and hitting diminishing returns far earlier than expected.
The numbers make this clear. Electricity demand from global data centers will more than double by 2030 — levels once associated with entire industrial sectors. In the US alone, data center power demand is projected to rise well over 100 percent before the decade ends. This expansion is demanding trillions of dollars in new investment alongside major expansions in grid capacity.
Meanwhile, these systems are being embedded into law, finance, compliance, trading and risk management, where errors propagate quickly but credibility is non-negotiable. In June 2025, the UK High Court warned lawyers to immediately stop submitting filings that cited fabricated case law generated by AI tools.
The scaling AI debate
When an AI system can invent a precedent that never existed, and a professional relies on it, debates about scaling start becoming serious questions of public trust. Scaling is amplifying AI’s weaknesses rather than solving them.
Part of the problem lies in what scale actually improves. Large language models (LLMs) are evolving to become increasingly fluent because language is pattern-based. The more examples an LLM sees of how real people write, summarize and translate, the faster it improves.
Deeper intelligence — reasoning — does not scale the same way. The next generation of AI must understand cause and effect and know when an answer is uncertain or incomplete. It will need to explain why a conclusion follows, not simply produce a confident response. This does not reliably improve with more parameters or more compute.
The consequence is a growing verification burden. Humans must spend more time checking machine output rather than acting on it, and that burden builds as systems are deployed more widely.
The cost of training AI models
Training frontier AI models has already become extraordinarily expensive, with credible tracking suggesting costs have been multiplying year over year, and projections that single training runs could soon exceed $1 billion. Training is only the entry cost.
The larger expense is inference: running these models continuously, at scale, with real latency, uptime and verification requirements. Every query consumes energy. Every deployment requires infrastructure. As usage grows, energy use and costs compound.
In terms of markets and crypto, AI systems are increasingly used to monitor onchain activity, analyze sentiment, generate codes for smart contracts, flag suspicious transactions and automate decisions.
In such a fast-moving, competitive environment, fluent but unreliable AI propagates errors quickly; false signals move capital, and fabricated explanations and hallucinations undermine trust. One example of this is false positives being generated in automated Anti-Money Laundering (AML) flagging, a common issue that wastes time and resources on investigating innocent trading activity.
Time to improve reasoning
Scaling AI systems without improving their reasoning amplifies risk, especially in use cases where automation and credibility are vital and tightly coupled.
Ensuring AI is economically viable and socially valuable means we cannot rely on scaling. The dominant approach today prioritizes increasing compute and data while leaving the underlying reasoning machinery largely unchanged, a strategy that is becoming more expensive without becoming proportionally safer.
Related: Crypto dev launches website for agentic AI to ‘rent a human’
The alternative is architectural. Systems need to do more than predict the next word. They need to represent relationships, apply rules, check their own steps and make it possible to see how conclusions were reached.
This is where cognitive or neurosymbolic systems come into play. By organizing knowledge into interrelated concepts, rather than relying solely on brute-force pattern matching, these systems can deliver high reasoning capability with far lower energy and infrastructure demands.
Emerging “cognitive AI” platforms are demonstrating how structured reasoning systems can operate on local servers or edge devices, allowing users to keep control over their own knowledge rather than outsourcing cognition to distant infrastructure.
Cognitive AI systems are harder to design and can underperform on open-ended tasks, but when reasoning is reusable in this way rather than rederived from scratch through massive compute, costs fall and verification becomes tractable.
Control over how AI is built matters as much as how it reasons. Communities need systems they can shape, audit and deploy without waiting for permission from centralized platform owners.
Some platforms are exploring this frontier by using blockchain to enable both individuals and corporations to contribute data, models and computing resources. By decentralizing AI development itself, these approaches reduce concentration risk and align deployment with local needs rather than global demands.
AI faces an inflection point. When reasoning can be reused rather than rediscovered through massive pattern matching, systems require less compute per decision and impose a smaller verification burden on humans. That shifts the economics. Experimentation becomes cheaper, inference becomes more predictable. Scaling no longer depends on exponential increases in infrastructure.
Scaling has already done what it could. What it has exposed, just as clearly, is the limit relying on size alone. The question now is whether the industry keeps pushing scale or starts investing in architectures that make intelligence reliable before making it bigger.
Opinion by: Mohammed Marikar, co-founder at Neem Capital.
This opinion article presents the author’s expert view, and it may not reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. This content has undergone editorial review to ensure clarity and relevance. Cointelegraph remains committed to transparent reporting and upholding the highest standards of journalism. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before taking any actions related to the company.
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