TLDR

• Pavel Durov said TON is now 10× faster after its latest blockchain upgrade.
• TON said the mainnet will begin sub-second finality on April 10 through Catchain 2.0.
• Durov said block production increased by 6× and transactions are now instant.
• TON said the faster network will support payments, trades, and Mini Apps inside Telegram.
• Durov said the next planned step will reduce TON transaction fees by

Pavel Durov said on Thursday that TON now processes transactions in about one second. He said the latest network upgrade raised block production and improved transaction speed. TON said the mainnet will gain sub-second finality on April 10 through Catchain 2.0.

TON Upgrade Raises Speed and Cuts Confirmation Time

Durov posted the update on Telegram and called the blockchain “10× faster.” He added, “Block rate increased 6× … Transactions are now instant, subsecond.”

TON said the upgrade already runs, yet the release is also named April 10 for mainnet sub-second finality. That wording placed the rollout details at the center of Thursday’s announcement.

The company said Catchain 2.0 powers the change and cuts confirmation times from about ten seconds. It said faster finality supports instant payments, quicker trades, and responsive Mini Apps.

Telegram uses TON for transactions and for Mini Apps inside its messaging platform. The blockchain operates separately, yet it remains closely linked to Telegram’s ecosystem.

TON said the upgrade targets scale inside Telegram’s user base of more than 1 billion people. It said lower delay makes in-app payments feel like sending a message.

The statement said earlier that confirmation times limited some app behavior inside Telegram. It said some trades and app responses could not feel instant at ten seconds.

Durov described the release as step one of seven in a plan he called MTONGA. He said the next step will cut TON transaction fees by 6×.

Telegram Link and TON Roadmap Remain in Focus

Telegram began work on blockchain tools in 2018 before U.S. regulators challenged the original project. Open-source developers revived the work in 2022 and renamed it The Open Network.

That effort produced TON, which now serves as infrastructure for payments and app activity around Telegram. Thursday’s upgrade marked the network’s latest technical change under that revived project.

TON said more blocks should raise validator rewards and increase staking incentives. It linked those economics to the higher block rate after the upgrade.

The release did not list new fee levels or a date for the planned fee cut. Durov only said the network would target fees that are already low.

The company framed the speed gain as a base for apps that need immediate user responses. It said those uses include payments, trading, and Mini App actions.

Durov repeated that TON had become faster and said the release started a seven-step roadmap. He gave no added technical details in his Thursday post. TON said sub-second finality on mainnet begins April 10 under Catchain 2.0.

TLDR

• BlackRock appointed Galaxy Digital as an approved validator for its iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF, ETHB.
• ETHB held more than $435 million in assets under management as of April 8.
• The fund had staked $339 million in Ether through institutional validators, including Figment, Attestant, and Galaxy.
• Galaxy ended 2025 with $5 billion in staked assets across Ethereum, Solana, and other proof-of-stake networks.
• BlackRock said ETHB will distribute staking rewards to investors on a monthly basis.

BlackRock has appointed Galaxy Digital as a validator for its iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF, ETHB. The move adds Galaxy to the fund’s validator roster after ETHB launched last month. BlackRock will distribute monthly staking rewards directly to investors through the ETF structure.

BlackRock Expands ETHB Validator Lineup

As of April 8, ETHB held more than $435 million in assets under management. The fund had also staked $339 million in Ether across approved institutional validators.

BlackRock selected Figment, Attestant, and Galaxy to stake most of the fund’s Ether. The company said those providers support the operational standards required for the product for BlackRock.

Steve Kurz said BlackRock chose Galaxy because it proved “systems, scale, and accountability.” He added, “That trust is something we’ve earned over years of building.”

Kurz serves as Galaxy’s global co-head of digital assets. His statement appeared in Thursday’s press release announcing Galaxy’s validator role for ETHB for the BlackRock fund.

BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF remains one of the largest digital asset funds launched globally since 2024. ETHB now follows that expansion with a product built to generate staking income for shareholders.

Galaxy Builds out Institutional Staking Services

Galaxy ended 2025 with $5 billion in staked assets across Ethereum, Solana, and other networks. Its digital infrastructure unit manages validation services for several proof-of-stake blockchains and related infrastructure.

During 2025, Galaxy completed custodial integrations with BitGo, Zodia Custody, Fireblocks, and Coinbase Prime. Those links expanded access for institutions using Galaxy’s staking and digital asset services across major custody channels.

Galaxy also became the development company behind Liquid Collective, an institutional liquid staking protocol. The protocol targets clients seeking yield and liquidity at the same time for institutions.

Robert Mitchnick said staking is “a core component” of Ethereum and ETHB investor access. He leads BlackRock’s digital assets division.

Mitchnick added that experienced providers help BlackRock meet the structure and standards clients expect. BlackRock included that comment in the announcement.

Galaxy recently launched staking on GalaxyOne, its platform for institutional clients and counterparties. The company said clients can earn yield there without platform commissions.

Galaxy has also advanced proxy voting on blockchain through a partnership with Broadridge. That work uses the Avalanche network for on-chain corporate governance functions and shareholder voting.

The partnership extends Galaxy’s institutional blockchain services beyond validation and staking. Broadridge and Galaxy announced the effort separately earlier this year.

ETHB launched last month as BlackRock’s first crypto exchange-traded product with staking rewards. Galaxy now joins its approved staking validators.

TLDR

• The U.S. Treasury said eligible crypto firms can access its cybersecurity information-sharing service.
• Treasury will provide the crypto sector with cyber warnings already used by traditional financial institutions.
• The department asked interested companies and organizations to contact its cybersecurity office for access details.
• Treasury said the move followed a recommendation from the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets.
• The announcement came as hackers continue to steal billions of dollars from digital asset platforms each year.

The U.S. Treasury will extend cyber threat alerts to eligible crypto businesses, it said Thursday. The step gives parts of the digital asset sector the same warnings used by banks. Treasury said companies and trade groups can contact its cybersecurity office to join the program.

U.S. Treasury Opens Cyber Warning Channel to Crypto Firms

The Treasury’s Office of Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection will send timely cyber information to approved participants. Pettit said the service gives digital asset firms the same information available to traditional financial institutions.

Luke Pettit, assistant secretary for financial institutions, announced the change in Treasury’s statement on Thursday. He said, “Treasury is helping promote a secure and responsible digital asset ecosystem.”

The announcement did not define which firms qualify for the service. Treasury urged interested companies and organizations to contact the office directly for enrollment details.

The move follows a recommendation from the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets. That report outlined ideas for sharing cyber threat information across the crypto sector.

Crypto platforms continue to face frequent attacks that drain funds and expose data. Those breaches shaped policy talks as lawmakers weigh rules for digital assets.

Last week, North Korea-linked hackers stole over $280 million from the decentralized platform Drift. The theft added to a long record of cybercrime tied to digital asset services.

This week, separate incidents pushed the Solana Foundation to pursue new security measures. The foundation said it wants stronger protections against future exploits on its network.

Hacks keep Pressure on Digital Asset Security

Hackers steal billions of dollars in digital assets each year, Treasury said. The statement said nation-backed groups, including actors linked to North Korea, drive many attacks.

Cybersecurity remains a central issue in congressional work on digital asset legislation. Lawmakers have cited thefts and system weaknesses while shaping federal oversight proposals.

Treasury offered the service as the sector takes a larger financial role. It said the outreach aims to improve defense against cyber threats.

Traditional financial firms already receive these alerts through Treasury’s information-sharing channels. Now, eligible crypto entities may receive the same material for free.

Treasury framed the change as a direct response to earlier federal recommendations. The department cited the working group report issued last year.

The statement arrived after another week of public reports about crypto-related hacks. Those reports included the Drift theft and new Solana security steps.

Interested firms can seek access now by contacting Treasury’s cybersecurity office, the statement said. The Treasury announced that it would open on Thursday and invited crypto organizations to apply.

A StarkWare researcher has published what he says is the first method for making bitcoin transactions quantum-safe on the live network today, without any changes to the Bitcoin protocol. The scheme, however, costs up to $200 per transaction and is designed as an emergency measure rather than a permanent fix.

In a paper published this week, StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy introduced Quantum Safe Bitcoin, or QSB, a scheme that aims to enable quantum-resistant transactions without requiring changes to the Bitcoin protocol, by replacing signature-based security assumptions with hash-based proofs within its design.

The hash-based design survives the kind of quantum attack that would break today’s cryptography, but shifts the burden from consensus to computation, requiring heavy off-chain GPU work for every transaction.

Think of traditional digital signatures as a handwritten signature on a cheque, which proves you authorized a transaction using a secret key that others can cross check with a public key.

In Bitcoin, these digital signatures are called ECDSA signatures. They are secure against today’s computers, but a sufficiently powerful future quantum computer could, in theory, derive the secret key from a public key and potentially compromise funds.

QSB addresses that flaw by redesigning the system around a different kind of cryptography, involving hash-based proofs, which are more like a tamper-proof fingerprint, where instead of relying on signature alone, a unique mathematical digest of data is created. This is said to be extremely difficult to forge or reverse, even for powerful computers.

QSB works entirely within Bitcoin’s existing consensus rules for legacy transactions. It requires no soft fork (software upgrade), no miner signaling, and no activation timeline. This is a sharp contrast to BIP-360, the quantum-resistance proposal that was merged into Bitcoin’s official improvement proposal repository in February but has no Bitcoin Core implementation and faces years of governance delay.

The proposal builds on an earlier idea known as Binohash, which added an extra layer of computational work to secure bitcoin transactions. The problem is that it depends on a type of cryptography that quantum computers are expected to break. In practice, that means the protection disappears in a quantum scenario. An attacker could bypass the system’s core security check entirely, making it ineffective.

Extra cost

The hash-based solution, however, means extremely expensive transactions.

Generating a valid transaction requires searching through billions of possible candidates, a process Levy estimates would cost between $75 and $200 using commodity cloud GPUs. Currently, the cost to send a bitcoin transaction through the blockchain is around 33 cents.

The system also comes with practical hurdles. QSB transactions wouldn’t move through Bitcoin’s normal blockchain like typical payments. Instead, users would likely need to send them directly to miners willing to process them.

They also don’t work with faster, cheaper layers like the Lightning Network, and are far more complicated to create. Generating a transaction would require outsourcing heavy computation to external hardware, rather than simply signing and sending from a wallet.

Levy describes the scheme as a “last resort measure,” not a replacement for protocol-level upgrades. Proposals such as BIP-360, which aim to introduce quantum-resistant signature schemes through a soft fork, remain the more scalable long-term solution but could take years to activate.

BIP-360’s activation timeline is uncertain. Polymarket bettors are pricing in low odds of it happening this year, and Bitcoin’s governance history offers little reason for urgency — Taproot took roughly seven and a half years from concept to deployment. Then again, mature quantum computers capable of breaking the encryption that secures the network are not arriving tomorrow either.

QSB instead offers something different: a way to survive a quantum break using today’s rules, if users are willing to pay for it.

BitMEX said in a Thursday report that commodity perpetual swaps were the fastest-growing segment of TradFi perps in the first quarter of 2026, with weekly volume rising 65,463% from $38.1 million to $25.0 billion.

The report said silver, crude oil and gold drove most of that growth. By the week of March 15, Silver (XAG) accounted for 34.8% of the market share of tokenized commodities, followed by crude oil (CL) for 27.7%, gold (XAU) at 27.5% and Silver on Hyperliquid for 6%, according to a Thursday report.

BitMEX said the March entry of crude oil added a new leg to the market, attributing that move to Iran-related geopolitical tensions and broader demand for 24/7 commodity exposure on crypto-native venues.

The figures point to a fast-growing niche inside crypto derivatives markets.

Brent crude oil has risen by around 44% since the first US/Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, from around $69 to above $99 at the time of writing, according to data from Trading Economics. Oil prices peaked at around $114 on Tuesday, their highest level since the beginning of the conflict.

Weekend dislocations lifted commodity perps

Onchain TradFi perps are driving traders to “speculate and hedge against weekend geopolitical events like the recent Iran conflict, in real time,” Stephan Lutz, CEO at BitMEX, told Cointelegraph. “While the perpetual swaps model will continue to capture significant market share in commodities trading due to its 24/7 nature, we are highly skeptical about tokenising spot assets,” he said.

However, minting physical commodities on the blockchain is complicated by the legacy financial system’s “complex, arbitrary legal rules,” Lutz said, adding that onchain derivatives will continue to eat into the trading share of traditional commodities, until “legacy giants like the CME” launch their own 24/7 trading venues.

Related: Crypto exchanges gain as tokenized commodity market climbs to $7.7B

In the broader market, the total market capitalization of onchain commodities declined by 2.7% during the past 30 days to $7.34 billion as of Thursday, according to data aggregator RWA.xyz.

BitMEX, which says it launched the first perpetual swap in 2016, now offers more than 20 TradFi contracts, according to the report.

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, introduced gold and silver perpetuals in January. It offers contracts spanning precious metals and tokenized equities. Its Silver (XAG) contract saw an average daily volume of $1.31 billion during the quarter, according to the report.

Magazine: Can Robinhood or Kraken’s tokenized stocks ever be truly decentralized?