Singapore-based crypto exchange Crypto.com is cutting about 12% of its workforce, or roughly 180 employees, as it leans into AI-driven efficiency, joining a growing wave of firms shrinking teams while betting on automation.

“We are joining the list of companies integrating enterprise-wide AI,” a Crypto.com spokesperson told CoinDesk. “As we continue to prioritize resources around key growth areas and drive efficiencies across our business, we reduced our workforce by approximately 12%.”

Kris Marszalek, Crypto.com’s CEO, on X said companies that do not pivot toward the integration of AI into their processes will fail.

“Companies that move slowly will be left behind,” he added. “Companies that move immediately and pair the best AI tools with top performers will achieve a level of scale and precision that was previously impossible. This is where we must go.”

In February, Marszalek said Crypto.com spent $70 million to buy ai.com, signaling his company’s move into artificial intelligence, a sector that reached nearly $1.5 trillion in worldwide spending in 2025, according to Gartner.

The Singapore-headquartered exchange had around 1,500 employees before the cuts.

The move marks the latest round of layoffs at Crypto.com, which has trimmed staff multiple times in recent years amid shifting market conditions and internal restructuring, including a 20% workforce reduction in 2023.

Crypto.com’s layoffs also follow Block’s decision to reduce its 6,000-strong workforce by 40%. Its founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, cited AI-enabled productivity gains as the reason for the cuts. He said AI allows smaller teams to move faster.

In January, OKX announced it was restructuring its global institutional business, resulting in job losses it claimed were not a “mass layoff.” The exchange didn’t mention the exact number. That same month, Polygon laid off 60 employees, disputing reports it let go 30% of its staff. In the U.S., the technology industry cut about 22,291 jobs last year.

The Crypto.com spokesperson said all employees, who before the layoff totalled roughly 1,500 worldwide, have been notified and will receive resources to support their transition.

The Singapore-based exchange, which boasted 100 million registered accounts and approximately $750 billion in trading volume in 2025, recently received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national trust bank, setting the stage for the exchange to expand its custody services under federal oversight.

The European Central Bank is shifting from policy architecture to practical deployment planning for a potential digital euro. In a published call for industry expertise, the ECB opened two workstreams under its Rulebook Development Group to map how the digital euro would operate across ATMs, payment terminals, and the wider acceptance infrastructure.

The bank outlined that one workstream will develop implementation specifications for ATM and terminal providers, focusing on communication technologies, offline capabilities, and the re-use of existing payment standards. The second workstream will design testing, certification, and approval processes for the payment solutions and infrastructure that would underpin the digital euro ecosystem. This marks a notable move toward translating policy concepts into concrete, interoperable technical requirements across Europe.

At the heart of the initiative is the aim to ensure the digital euro can integrate with current payment systems and hardware while supporting offline transactions and cross-border interoperability within European standards. The ECB’s request for expert input signals a desire to harmonize a future digital currency with the region’s established financial infrastructure, rather than building a separate, standalone system from scratch. The announcement comes as part of ongoing work to define a robust, rules-based framework that could govern how digital euro services are accessed by merchants, payment service providers (PSPs), and end users.

Key takeaways

• The ECB has launched two workstreams under its Rulebook Development Group to define ATM/terminal implementation specifications and to establish testing, certification, and approval procedures for digital euro infrastructure and services.
• Efforts emphasize offline functionality and the reuse of existing European payment standards to support broad interoperability across devices and networks.
• The workstreams will gather input from a cross-section of market participants, including merchants, PSPs, and consumers, with the aim of producing a standardized rulebook for the digital euro ecosystem.
• Europe is coupling policy design with implementation timelines, targeting a 2027-era pilot while clarifying that a final issuance decision depends on the passage of relevant legislation.
• The initiative reflects a broader shift toward practical rollout planning, signaling that the ECB expects to test real-world conditions before any potential issuance.

Aim to bridge policy and practice across Europe’s payments landscape

According to the ECB, one workstream will concentrate on crafting practical implementation specifications for ATM networks and payment terminals. This includes mapping communication technologies, ensuring offline capabilities, and identifying how to reuse and harmonize existing payment standards so that digital euro hardware can function smoothly with current terminals and cashless channels. By prioritizing offline support, the ECB acknowledges the reality that connectivity can be uneven across regions, and resilience will be essential for broad acceptance.

The second workstream will focus on how solutions within the digital euro framework should be tested, certified, and approved before they can be deployed by PSPs and other infrastructure providers. The aim is to create a credible, standardized process that regulators, merchants, and tech partners can rely on as they develop and bring digital euro services to market. Through this structure, the ECB intends to reduce ambiguity around compliance and safety criteria, helping to align a diverse ecosystem of vendors, software platforms, and hardware manufacturers.

Both streams report to the Rulebook Development Group, which includes representatives from merchants, payment service providers, and consumers. The ECB said selected experts are expected to provide technical input to support the development of a standardized rulebook, ensuring that the digital euro’s design choices translate into concrete, testable requirements for market participants.

Timeline and pilot context: moving toward a 2027 milestone

The ECB has previously sketched out a plan to begin selecting EU-licensed PSPs ahead of a 12-month digital euro pilot, anticipated to commence in the second half of 2027. In remarks on Feb. 18, ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone indicated that the pilot would involve a limited set of merchants, Eurosystem staff, and PSPs, providing a controlled environment to assess how digital euro transactions unfold in real-world settings.

The pilot is designed to test a narrow slice of the ecosystem—focusing on merchant acceptance, settlement flows, security controls, and user experience—before broader policy decisions are made. The ECB has stressed that its final decision on whether to issue a digital euro will come only after the relevant legislation is enacted, underscoring the program’s regulatory and legislative dependencies as the project moves forward.

The timing aligns with a broader European push to explore programmable money, interoperability, and cross-border payments within a monetary policy framework that remains under public debate. The workstreams’ emphasis on standards, certification, and implementation readiness complements earlier outlining of the Appia roadmap and other tokenized-money initiatives, illustrating a coordinated path from concept to potential deployment.

In practice, the forthcoming rulebook and testing framework would help determine how a digital euro would interact with existing point-of-sale systems, online checkout flows, and offline payment experiences acrossEU member states. The approach seeks to minimize disruption to merchants while maximizing the currency’s reliability, security, and user accessibility across a diverse payments landscape.

What comes next and what to watch

As the ECB progresses through the RDG-led workstreams, market participants will be watching how quickly a standardized rulebook materializes, which PSPs are invited to participate in the pilot, and how the 2027 timeline aligns with legislative developments in the EU. The coordination between policy objectives and implementation specifications will be crucial for assessing the digital euro’s feasibility and potential impact on existing payment rails, cross-border settlement, and consumer protection regimes.

Observers should also monitor how offline capabilities are reconciled with security and risk controls, how interoperability with legacy payment standards is achieved, and how the certification framework will certify both software and hardware components used in digital euro ecosystems. The path from policy to practical deployment remains complex, but the ECB’s latest move signals a deliberate step toward testing and standardization that could shape Europe’s digital monetary future.

The governance token of Venus (XVS), a BNB Chain-based money market with over $1.4 billion in total value locked, has dropped more than 9% in 24 hours after an exploit that left it with $2.15 million in bad debt.

The drawdown comes amid a broad risk asset sell-off that has seen the broader CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index lose 4.6% of its value in the same period.

The exploit, which occurred on March 16, didn’t appear to impact XVS prices until analysis showed major holders, including wallets linked to Justin Sun, moving large amounts to exchanges.

Venus said the exploit, in its Thena market left about $2.15 million in bad debt or loans the system can no longer recover.

The attacker, according to the protocol, spent about nine months accumulating a large position in Thena’s THE token. That accumulation, according to PeckShield, was funded with 7,400 ETH withdrawn from mixing protocol Tornado Cash.

The attacker then donated more than 36 million THE straight to the vTHE contract, skipping the normal cap checks and lifting the market’s exchange rate by about 3.8 times. The gap in code that allowed the attacker to skip these checks, Venus said, is being closed.

With that higher paper value, the attacker posted THE as collateral, borrowed other assets and bought more THE in a thin market, according to Venus.

The buying helped lift THE from about $0.26 to near $0.56. Venus said this was not a flash-loan attack, its oracles kept working and Venus Flux was not affected.

When the attacker later sold THE, the price dropped more than 17% in less than a day and liquidations followed. Analysis puts the value pulled before liquidations at roughly $3.7 million to $5.8 million, with assets including tokenized bitcoin, BNB, and stablecoins being taken.

The damage was mostly limited to THE token and, to a lesser extent, CAKE. It also said no user funds were lost outside the affected pools.

The protocol paused THE borrows and withdrawals, cut THE’s collateral value to zero and tightened rules on other markets identified as at-risk in response to the incident. Markets at-risk include those for BCH$457.13, LTC$55.39, aave AAVE$114.99, among others.

The attacking address had been flagged by the community before the incident. Venus did not act as “no rules had been broken, and no exploit had occurred,” it said.

“Venus is a decentralized protocol. As a permissionless protocol, we cannot and should not freeze or blacklist addresses based on suspicion alone,” the protocol wrote on social media. “This is a tension inherent to DeFi, and one we take seriously.”

Governance is expected to decide how to cover the loss through Venus’s risk fund.

• Ethereum price was poised above the $2,150 level.
• Bulls were showing resilience as a whale re-accumulated $111 million worth of ETH.
• Another move above $2,000 could push prices towards the $2,500 resistance.

A mysterious Ethereum whale has re-emerged after lying dormant for seven months, and just deployed over $111 million in USDT to accumulate ETH.

The whale’s move came as the ETH price hovered above $2,170 amid a broader slip for cryptocurrencies early Thursday.

As Bitcoin revisited $70,000 support, Ethereum bounced off the crucial $2,150 level, with intraday volume up 39% at over $27 billion.

Ethereum whale spends $111 million to re-accumulate ETH

According to Lookonchain, a whale that exited Ethereum seven months ago as prices jumped towards $4,000 is back.

The mysterious holder has spent 111.62 million USDT to buy 50,706 ETH, executing this fresh buy at an average price of $2,201 per token.

On-chain data shows this purchase mirrors a sale exactly one year prior, when the same address offloaded 28,683 ETH at $3,892 each.

That sale netted $111.62 million, and a re-cumulation worth this exact value highlights a classic “buy-low, sell-high” move.

A mysterious whale returned after 7 months of inactivity and spent 111.62M $USDT to buy back 50,706 $ETH at an average price of $2,201.

1 year ago, this whale sold 28,683 $ETH at an average price of $3,892 for 111.62M $USDT.

What a perfect buy-low-sell-high move!… pic.twitter.com/3F56jkgr2y

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— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) March 19, 2026

Waking up after seven months  also points to the whale’s positioning amid a potential rebound, and mirrors conviction buys by entities such as Bitmine.

The treasury firm, led by Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, recently bought 60,999 ETH worth over $140.3 million and currently holds 4,595,562 ETH worth over $10.5 billion.

ETH’s rebound above $2,000 coincided with the Ethereum Foundation depositing $7.88 million of the altcoin to Steakhouse, a DeFi asset manager with over a billion dollars in AUM.

The EF currently holds over $400 million of ETH.

Can ETH hold gains above $2,150?

Ethereum’s price rose to highs of $2,386 on Monday, riding a bullish flip that pushed Bitcoin to $76,000.

However, the current price hovers near $2,170, testing support amid Bitcoin’s fresh retest of support around $70,000.

As noted, top coins are retreating as risk assets grapple with global economic headwinds. Inflation and escalating Middle East tensions stand out as key short-term headwinds.

Meanwhile, the technical picture shows ETH hovering near a key support level on the daily chart.

The $2,100 mark currently acts as a pivotal support zone and aligns with a rising trendline.

Prices also track the 50-day exponential moving average, currently acting as resistance near $2,215. This is the hurdle bulls need to surmount for potential upside continuation.

If support holds firm above the aforementioned level, the next target remains $2,400-$2,500. Per the daily chart, the 100 EMA sits at the $2,500 mark.

A breakdown from current levels could allow bears to target $2,000 or lower. Cycle lows near $1,800 offer a robust demand reload zone.

Bitcoin BTC$70,121.27 is, unusually, outperforming gold even as rising oil prices and hawkish signals from the U.S. Federal Reserve fuel increased risk aversion in financial markets.

Gold, traditionally a store of value and haven investment in times of trouble, has dropped 2% since midnight UTC while the largest cryptocurrency lost only half that amount. The performance has lifted the ratio between the two by 1% in 24 hours, and one bitcoin now buys about 15 ounces of gold.

Part of the reason for the unexpected trading pattern stems from gold’s surge in February. Before the Middle East conflict started at the end of the month, it had already locked in a 90% gain over the course of a year and was trading at a record high. That left it overbought, making the rally difficult to sustain even as the geopolitical situation worsened.

Since the war began, the performance of bitcoin — seen by some supporters as digital gold — and the precious metal has diverged. Bitcoin has been one of the strongest performing assets outside energy after falling 50% since October and leaving it oversold. Gold is now some 17% below its January peak, edging toward bear-market territory.

The macroeconomic backdrop is adding to the pressure. The Federal Reserve delivered a more hawkish-than-expected tone in Wednesday’s comments, pushing back against market expectations for imminent interest-rate cuts in the world’s largest economy.

This has weighed on risk assets, with U.S. equities lower in premarket trading and the Invesco QQQ exchange-traded fund, which tracks the Nasdaq 100 index, falling 0.5% on Thursday. Crypto-related equities have also declined, with Strategy (MSTR), Galaxy Digital (GLXY) and Coinbase (COIN) all falling in pre-market trading.

At the same time, the war with Iran has pushed Brent crude oil up more than 6% in the past 24 hours to around $117 per barrel. The widening gap between Brent and West Texas Intermediate, now the largest since 2013, signals global supply disruptions and logistical constraints, adding to inflationary pressures and complicating the outlook for central banks.

Fears that quantum computing could one day break Bitcoin’s cryptography have sparked a heated debate across the crypto industry.

But according to Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital (GLXY), the narrative that Bitcoin is unprepared, or that investors should avoid exposure because of it, is overstated.

The risk itself is not imaginary. A sufficiently advanced quantum computer could, in theory, derive private keys from exposed public keys, allowing an attacker to forge signatures and steal funds. But Thorn argues that framing this as an imminent or uniquely Bitcoin-specific crisis misses critical context, both about the technology and about the work already underway to address it.

“The risk is real but recognized,” Thorn told CoinDesk in an interview. “And the people best positioned to solve it are actively working on it.”

Quantum computing is a fundamentally different approach to computation that uses the principles of quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. Instead of traditional bits that are either 0 or 1, quantum computers use “qubits,” which can exist in multiple states at once, a property known as superposition, allowing them to process many possibilities simultaneously.

Combined with another feature called entanglement, this enables quantum machines to solve certain complex problems far more efficiently than classical computers, particularly tasks like factoring large numbers that underpin modern encryption

Analysis from Project Eleven, a security firm focused on quantum risks in digital assets, suggests that roughly 7 million bitcoin BTC$70,150.74, worth about $470 billion at recent prices, could be vulnerable under a “long exposure” definition, meaning their public keys have already been revealed onchain. Other estimates vary widely depending on how exposure is defined.

Importantly, most bitcoin today is not immediately vulnerable. Funds are only at risk in scenarios where public keys are exposed onchain, either because users reused addresses, certain custodians employ operational shortcuts, or coins sit in older address formats. While some estimates suggest millions of BTC fall into these categories, they remain secure under current, publicly known quantum capabilities.

That distinction is central to Galaxy’s argument. The conversation has become polarized between those who dismiss quantum computing as decades away and those who warn of imminent danger. Thorn’s view lands in between. The probability of a future threat is meaningful enough to warrant action, but not so urgent that it outpaces Bitcoin’s ability to respond.

And that response is already underway.

A growing body of technical work is focused on making Bitcoin “quantum-resistant” over time. One of the most prominent efforts involves introducing new address types that rely on post-quantum cryptography. These would allow users to migrate funds away from potentially vulnerable formats, significantly reducing long-term exposure.

“There’s a lot more work being done than people realize,” Thorn said. “Developers are actively building pathways to upgrade the system.”

Other proposals tackle edge cases, such as dormant coins with permanently exposed public keys. One idea, sometimes referred to as an “hourglass” approach, would gradually restrict how such coins can be spent, mitigating systemic risk without outright confiscation or disruption.

More broadly, developers are exploring phased upgrade paths that would allow Bitcoin to adapt even under more extreme scenarios, such as a world where quantum systems can rapidly break existing cryptographic schemes. That could include changes to how transactions reveal public keys in the first place, limiting attack surfaces altogether.

While these efforts are complex, both technically and from a governance standpoint, Thorn emphasizes that Bitcoin’s open development model is a strength, not a weakness. The ecosystem has time, talent, and strong incentives to solve the problem well before it becomes critical.

Crucially, the number of actors capable of triggering a so-called “Q-day,” when quantum computers can break modern cryptography, is still extremely limited. Even optimistic projections suggest only a small group of highly specialized researchers could achieve such a breakthrough in the foreseeable future.

Against that backdrop, Thorn views the growing wave of quantum-related fear, uncertainty, and doubt as disproportionate.

“Quantum computing is a powerful, potentially disruptive technology, but that doesn’t mean every risk is immediate or unmanageable,” he said.

For investors, the takeaway is straightforward. Quantum risk should be monitored, but not used as a blanket justification to avoid bitcoin exposure. The network has a track record of evolving in response to credible threats, and the groundwork for quantum resilience is already being laid.

“It’s not certain that quantum is an existential issue for bitcoin, but the chance that it is justifies concern,” Thorn said. “But what’s clear today is that Bitcoin developers are not ignoring it. Instead, many are actively working on it,” he added.

Read more: Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest says quantum computing is a long-term risk for bitcoin, not an imminent threat

Bitcoin BTC$70,249.13 nursed fresh losses on Thursday after bearing the brunt of soaring energy prices, with Brent crude oil rising to $114 and Oman crude pushing up to $150.

European natural gas futures followed suit, surging about 25% to above $78 per MWh on Thursday as Iran attacked key Gulf energy infrastructure after an Israeli strike on its South Pars gas field.

Bitcoin traded near $70,000 having lost 1.6% since midnight UTC while ether (ETH) dropped 1.7% to $2,160.

The Federal Reserve also had an impact after it left rates unchanged in the 3.50%–3.75% range on Wednesday, pausing a rate-cutting cycle to boost the U.S. dollar.

Risk assets tumbled across the board as a result, with Nasdaq 100 futures down by around 0.3% since midnight UTC.

Derivatives positioning

• Nearly $600 million in leveraged crypto futures bets have been liquidated by crypto platforms in 24 hours, with longs, or bullish plays, accounting for most of the tally. The overnight price drop clearly caught bulls off guard.
• Industry-wide, futures open interest (OI) has declined by 5.6% to $106.90.
• Ether futures OI dropped 9% as the token’s spot price fell 6%. This combination represents capital outflows.
• Futures tied to tether gold (XAUT) and privacy-focused ZEC saw double-digit declines, indicating investor risk aversion.
• Bearish short plays are in demand again, as evidenced by negative funding rates for BTC, ETH, BNB, SOL and other tokens. The 24-hour cumulative volume delta for most of these coins is negative, underlining the position.
• Fear has crept back into the market. Volmex’s BVIV, which measures the 30-day implied, or expected, price turbulence in bitcoin, has jumped over 5% to 58.36%, ending a week-long decline. The same is true for ether.
• On Deribit, bitcoin and ether put skews have strengthened, again indicating heightened downside concerns.
• Block flows featured an outsized demand for ether straddles, a volatility strategy. In BTC’s case, traders chased risk reversals and put spreads.

Token talk

• Several altcoins were dealt deep moves to the downside on Thursday, notably bittensor (TAO) and hyperliquid (HYPE), which lost 8.8% and 6.5%, respectively, since midnight.
• The move in the altcoin market can be attributed to a lack of liquidity in a market that remains fractured following a $19 billion leverage wipeout in October.
• A select few tokens showed strength despite the broader market pullback. NEO rose by 4.2% and restaking token ETHFI continued its strong start to the year, adding 1.5% to $0.55.
• The CoinDesk 20 (CD20) is in the red after losing around 1% since midnight, while the DeFi Select Index (DFX) and CoinDesk Memecoin Index (CDMEME) are down by 1.4% and 2%, respectively.