Anchorage Digital, the federally chartered U.S. crypto bank, signaled deepening institutional conviction in Bitcoin by disclosing it holds perpetual preferred stock issued by Strategy on its balance sheet.

Anchorage Digital backs Strategy’s Bitcoin play with STRC bet

CEO Nathan McCauley framed the move as a meaningful alignment between the company that “operationalizes Bitcoin infrastructure” and the firm that has become synonymous with corporate Bitcoin accumulation.

McCauley posted on social platform X that the investment in STRC, Strategy’s perpetual preferred security, underscored conviction rather than casual interest in digital assets.

STRC is a Nasdaq-listed perpetual preferred security that pays an attractive annual dividend, roughly 11.25% before expenses, and is closely tied to Strategy’s Bitcoin treasury strategy.

Strategy, led by executive chairman Michael Saylor, has aggressively expanded its Bitcoin holdings through regular purchases funded by equity and preferred stock offerings. The firm recently marked its 100th Bitcoin acquisition, adding another 592 BTC and bringing its total to more than 717,000 coins, roughly 3% of all Bitcoin in circulation.

McCauley’s post was met with affirmation from Saylor himself, who echoed the sentiment that “conviction is contagious,” offering a rare glimpse into how significant institutional actors are positioning around Bitcoin beyond simple custodial services or trading exposure.

Hong Kong will introduce sweeping reforms to strengthen its position as a global digital asset hub, Financial Secretary Paul Chan announced in his 2026-27 Budget speech, outlining new licensing rules, stablecoin approvals and tokenization initiatives.

The government will table a bill this year establishing licensing regimes for digital asset dealing platforms and custodian service providers, expanding the city’s regulatory perimeter beyond exchanges.

The move follows Hong Kong’s second policy statement on digital assets, which aims to create what officials describe as a “comprehensive regulatory framework” for innovation and investor protection.

Chan also confirmed that Hong Kong has implemented a licensing regime for issuers of fiat-referenced stablecoins, with the first batch of licenses set to be issued next month. Authorities said they will work with approved issuers to explore compliant, risk-controlled use cases, signaling a shift from policy design to real-world deployment.

The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) will take additional steps to deepen liquidity in the city’s digital asset market, particularly for professional investors. The regulator plans to broaden the range of products and services available and launch an accelerator program aimed at fast-tracking innovation within regulatory guardrails.

Tokenization is another key focus. The government will publish guidance clarifying that debenture holder registers can be maintained using distributed ledger technology, while exploring electronic signatures for bond issuance documents and the digitalization of bearer bonds.

In parallel, Hong Kong will amend its Inland Revenue Ordinance to implement the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework and updated Common Reporting Standard over the next two years. The changes, with a bill expected in the first half of this year, are designed to enhance tax transparency and combat cross-border tax evasion.

Together, the measures mark one of Hong Kong’s most comprehensive digital asset policy pushes to date, reinforcing its ambition to compete with major global crypto financial centers.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has added to a newly released roadmap outlining how Ethereum plans to dramatically speed up the production of new blocks and the confirmation of transactions.

Vitalik’s comments on Thursday offered more detail on a visual public roadmap called “Strawmap” released by the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol team. 

“Fast slots are off in their own lane at the top of the roadmap, and do not really seem to connect to anything,” said Buterin, noting that the rest of the roadmap is “pretty independent of the slot time.” 

Slot time is the time it takes for Ethereum to produce new blocks, currently around 12 seconds. The roadmap aims to get this down to as fast as 2 seconds, so the blockchain feels more like a live, responsive system rather than something that has to be waited for.

“I expect that we’ll reduce slot time in an incremental fashion,” said Buterin, suggesting reductions following a roughly square-root-of-two formula from 12 seconds down through 8, 6, 4, and eventually as low as 2 seconds.

He also suggested that p2p improvements, or upgrades to how Ethereum nodes communicate with each other — such as sharing new blocks and data without the need to download repeated data — can greatly reduce block propagation time, “making shorter slots viable with no security tradeoffs.” 

Finality from minutes to seconds 

The second major improvement in the roadmap is to finality, or the point at which a transaction is mathematically guaranteed to be irreversible, which is currently around 16 minutes. 

The future goal is finality between 6 and 16 seconds, achieved by replacing the current complicated confirmation system with a cleaner, simpler one that’s also quantum-resistant.

Related: Ethereum Foundation lists ‘quantum readiness,’ gas limits as 2026 priorities

“The goal is to decouple slots and finality, to allow us to reason about both separately,” explained Buterin. 

He said this was a “very invasive set of changes,” so the plan is to bundle the largest step in each change with a “switch of the cryptography, notably to post-quantum hash-based signatures.”

Quantum resistance of slots before finality

Buterin said that a consequence of this approach would be quantum-resistant slots before finality. 

“One interesting consequence of the incremental approach is that there is a pathway to making the slots quantum-resistant much sooner than making the finality quantum-resistant.” 

The network might “quite quickly” get to a regime where, if quantum computers suddenly appear, “we lose the finality guarantee, but the chain keeps chugging along,” he said. 

“Expect to see progressive decreases of both slot time and finality time,” Buterin summarized.

The “component-by-component replacement” of Ethereum’s slot structure and consensus will produce a “cleaner, simpler, quantum-resistant, prover-friendly, end-to-end formally-verified alternative.”

The timescale for these changes is over the next four years, with seven forks planned roughly every six months. Glamsterdam and Hegotá are already confirmed and slated for later this year. 

Magazine: Bitcoin may take 7 years to upgrade to post-quantum: BIP-360 co-author