Metaplanet (3350), a Japanese bitcoin (BTC) acquirer, will be added to the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) Japan index at the end of Feb. 28, according to the firm's CEO Simon Gerovich . The MSCI index tracks mid-to-large-cap Japanese stocks, which serve as a key benchmark for institutional investors worldwide. As a result of inclusion, Metaplanet will benefit from increased exposure to global investment funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that track MSCI indices. Gerovich on X highlighted the positive news that comes from inclusion, which includes increased visibility, passive inflows and validation of growth."This milestone further solidifies Metaplanet’s position as Asia’s leading Bitcoin Treasury Company and expands our reach in global markets", Gerovich says. In addition, Metaplanet confirmed they had completed a raise for $26 million (4 billion yen) for 0% of unsecured, unguaranteed ordinary bonds to purchase additional bitcoin. Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards . For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy .

2025-02-13 10:50

Bitcoin (BTC) miner Riot Platforms appointed three new directors to its board as it explores potential opportunities in artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC). The additions include Michael Turner, former president of Oxford Properties and global head of real estate at OMERS, one of Canada's largest pension funds, alongside Jaime Leverton, ex-CEO of Hut 8 Mining (HUT), and Doug Mouton, a data center development veteran from Microsoft and Meta, the company said in a release on Thursday . The appointments come as Riot considers repurposing its mining infrastructure, particularly its Corsicana Facility in Texas, for AI workloads, and has tapped investment banks Evercore and Northland Capital Markets to assist with this transition. Riot’s move follows a broader industry trend as miners seek new revenue streams amid rising energy costs and lower mining rewards after the recent Bitcoin halving. CoinDesk reported in October that Core Scientific (CORZ), one of RIOT's rivals, has been building AI-focused infrastructure since 2019.

2025-02-13 09:09

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I'm Ben Schiller, CoinDesk’s Opinion and Features editor. In this issue: Can Based Rollups solve Ethereum’s problem? Lido goes modular Uniswap finally unveils Unichain Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade is coming Network news BASED ROLLUPS TO THE RESCUE: In recent years, Ethereum has embraced a layer-2 scaling roadmap—a plan that encouraged the development of third-party auxiliary networks called "layer-2 rollups"—to help scale the base Ethereum ecosystem. Offloading activity to these upstart networks has helped bring down fees and improve speeds for end-users, but it has led to a massive, deeply fragmented ecosystem of layer 2s. But while layer-2 networks all post data back down to Ethereum, they often struggle to communicate directly with one another, meaning passing assets and data between them can become expensive and cumbersome. There's also the risk of centralized sequencers: reliance on company-controlled black boxes to pass transaction data between blockchain layers. As a result, some Ethereum developers are pushing rollup tech that takes a new approach to security and interoperability: “based rollups." Based rollups differ from most existing rollups because they shift execution duties—such as processing transactions—back to Ethereum's layer-1 rather than handling them on a separate layer-2 network. When someone transacts on a layer-2 rollup, their transaction is processed through a component called a “sequencer.” The sequencer batches multiple transactions and submits them to Ethereum for settlement. While sequencers provide efficiency and generate revenue for rollup operators by strategically ordering transactions, they also introduce a single point of failure. Based rollups avoid this vulnerability by using Ethereum’s built-in sequencing—its massive community of validators—rather than a single centralized sequencer. Rollups like Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, zkSync, and Blast have quickly grown to support larger transaction volumes than Ethereum itself. According to L2Beat , there are currently 140 live layer-2 networks, but the experience of operating between them—passing assets and other data between networks—has become clunky. As Ethereum becomes bigger and layer-2 networks become more integral to its functioning, improving communication between layer-2s—in other words, improving "composability"—has become more important than ever. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more. LIDO GOES MODULAR: The developers behind Lido, the largest staking service on Ethereum, have proposed revamping the staking platform with modular "vaults." The new framework would introduce stVaults, a customizable component designed to help Lido accommodate institutions and more complex staking strategies. Lido currently allows investors to pool their ether (ETH) together and "stake" their crypto — locking up their tokens with the network, helping to secure it in exchange for interest. Lido pioneered liquid staking: users get a receipt on their deposits called Lido staked ETH (stETH) that they can trade at any time. With liquid staking on Lido, entering and exiting staking positions became as simple as buying and selling stETH tokens. Lido V3's stVaults are “modular smart contracts designed to meet the diverse and evolving needs of Ethereum participants,” according to a press release shared with CoinDesk. The upgrade would enable staking setups beyond cut-and-dry liquid staking. Specifically, stVaults will be able to help institutional stakers who want to personalize their staking setups, node operators who want to attract high-volume stakers, and asset managers who want to create new staking use cases. “What is important to understand with customizable infrastructure, is that you can in general build even more complex products,” said Konstantin Lomashuk, the founder of the Lido staking protocol. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more. UNICHAIN FINALLY: Uniswap Labs, the primary developer behind one of the largest decentralized exchanges (DEX), Uniswap, shared Feb 13 that its long-awaited layer-2 network, Unichain, is now live. Powered by Optimism's OP stack, Unichain—like other layer-2s on Ethereum—offers faster and cheaper transactions compared to Ethereum's mainnet. Developers can deploy apps onto the network, which has been optimized specifically for decentralized finance (DeFi) and aims to serve as "the home for liquidity across chains," according to Uniswap Labs. For Uniswap Labs, the benefit of launching a layer-2 is twofold: it will provide a better experience for users of Uniswap and similar platforms, and it will create a new revenue opportunity in the form of network fees. A representative for Uniswap Labs told CoinDesk that "around 20%" of the chain's revenue will go directly to the company. Unichain has been in testing since October 2024 and is classified by Uniswap Labs as a "stage-1" rollup, meaning it has elements of decentralization but retains some centrally-controlled safeguards at this early phase. The network is built on the OP Stack, a modular framework that lets developers build interoperable layer-2 chains based on Optimism’s optimistic rollup technology . Several well-known teams have come out with their own OP Stack-based layer-2’s, including Coinbase's ‘ Base ’, Kraken’s ‘ Ink ,’ World’s ‘ World chain ,’ and Sony’s ‘ Soneium .’ “We are anticipating a world of many, many different use cases, of which trading is a small subset,” Adams told CoinDesk in an interview. In collaboration with Ethereum research and development firm Flashbots, the Uniswap team said it has created a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on Unichain, a secure area for more sensitive transactions and is meant to optimize the chain for DeFi by allowing for more advanced trades and faster transaction finality. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more. PECTRA IN APRIL: Ethereum developers have officially set test dates for Pectra, the network's first upgrade in 11 months, putting it on track for a potential April release date. Pectra will contain an array of improvements — with a special focus on wallets and validators — but it comes at a period of heightened scrutiny for Ethereum, which has recently faced pressure from its community to refocus and catch up with competitors. Ethereum's core builders decided on Thursday during their bi-weekly "All Core Developers" call to begin testing Pectra on Feb. 26 on the Holesky testnet, with a follow-up test on the network's Sepolia testnet slated for Mar. 5. Should those tests succeed, the developers will reconvene on Mar. 6 to determine when to launch the upgrade officially. According to Tim Beiko, the protocol support lead at the Ethereum Foundation, developers expect the upgrade to hit mainnet in early April. Pectra — a portmanteau representing two separate upgrades, Prague and Electra — includes eight major improvements to the second-largest blockchain. Among the most-anticipated is EIP-7702, which is supposed to improve the user experience of crypto wallets. The Ethereum community has been facing an identity crisis over the last few weeks. Its native token, ether (ETH), is underperforming against other cryptocurrencies, and competitor networks like Solana have drawn attention and talent from the Ethereum ecosystem — the first-ever programmable blockchain and still the most trafficked. Amid the controversy — much of it directed at the Etheruem Foundation, which coordinates chain upgrades and is currently undergoing a major leadership shuffle — developers are hoping that Pectra will help put the network on steadier footing. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more. Money Center El Salvador Dispatch Berlín, a city of 20,000 people, is home to El Salvador’s second Bitcoin circular economy. “Bitcoin City already exists. It’s called Berlín,” said one resident. Tom Carreras reports. LinksDAO Launches on Base LinksDAO began by selling NFTs, but the market has moved on in the time since. Regulatory and policy Hester Peirce, head of the SEC’s new crypto taskforce, says that memecoins likely to fall outside the regulator’s jurisdiction. Calendar Feb. 19-20, 2025: ConsensusHK , Hong Kong. Feb. 23-24: NFT Paris Feb 23-March 2: ETHDenver March 18-19: Digital Asset Summit , London May 14-16: Consensus , Toronto. May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025 , Las Vegas.

2025-02-13 02:20

Circle's USDC, the second-largest stablecoin on the market, rose to a record market capitalization over $56 billion this week as stablecoin growth showed signs of reaccelerating. USDC added $10.2 billion to its market cap over the past month, driven primarily by rising Solana-based DeFi trading volumes, Artemis data shows. That's more than double the $4.6 billion growth of Tether's USDT, the largest stablecoin in the market and Circle's biggest competitor, during the same period. USDT still dominates the stablecoin space with a $142 billion market cap. With the latest growth spurt, USDC surpassed its 2022 peak and fully recovered from the 2023 U.S. regional-banking crisis, which dealt a serious blow to the cryptocurrency. At the time, Circle held a part of stablecoin reserves in bank deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, which suffered a bank run and led to USDC temporarily losing its peg to the U.S. dollar. Many token holders fled to USDT, helping Tether to surpass its 2022 peak market capitalization as early as May 2023. Stablecoins are a special type of cryptocurrencies with prices anchored to an external asset, predominantly to the U.S. dollar. USDT and USDC are widely used for trading on crypto exchanges and serve as a key source of liquidity. Thus, their expanding supply is a key indicator of investor demand and overall health of crypto markets. After a period of tepid action in December and early January, USDT and USDC growth accelerated in the past weeks, data shows. Previous growth spurts, such as between late October and early December and October 2023 to April 2024, coincided with steep rallies in bitcoin (BTC) and altcoin prices. Accelerating stablecoin growth, while it's only one of the factors influencing crypto markets, offers a positive signal for the overall market health amid macro headwinds and consolidating prices.

2025-02-12 21:03

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) likely doesn’t have jurisdiction over many of the memecoins flooding the crypto market, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg. “We always have to look at the facts and circumstances, but many of the memecoins that are out there probably do not have a home in the SEC under our current set of regulations,” Peirce said. “If that’s something Congress wants to address, they can do that. Maybe that’s something that the [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] wants to address. But many of those, I think, are probably not within our jurisdiction.” Memecoins, unlike cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, have no inherent value. For years, many in the industry have pushed back on regulating them like securities, arguing that they’re more like digital beanie babies or baseball cards than investment contracts. Peirce’s hands-off stance is a marked shift away from the SEC’s approach to crypto regulation under former Chairman Gary Gensler, who frequently asserted that all crypto tokens aside from Bitcoin were securities . Just one day after Gensler stepped down, Acting Chair Mark Uyeda announced the formation of a new Crypto Task Force, spearheaded by Peirce, promising regulatory clarity for the crypto industry and signaling a shift away from the so-called “regulation by enforcement” practiced by Gensler. Last week, Peirce laid out a roadmap for the Crypto Task Force’s top priorities, including resolving the long-standing question of what makes a crypto asset a security vs. a commodity and creating a more viable path to registration by modifying the SEC’s existing paths. In the same statement, Peirce previewed her stance toward memecoins, writing: “If people want to buy a token or product that lacks a clear long-term value proposition, they should feel free but should not be surprised some day if the price drops. In this country, people generally have a right to make decisions for themselves, but the counterpart to that wonderful American liberty is the equally wonderful American expectation that people must decide for themselves, not look to Mama Government to tell them what to do or not to do, nor to bail them out when they do something that turns out badly.” Read more: SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce Lays Out 10 Priorities For New Crypto Task Force

2025-02-12 20:33

President Donald Trump is just about done naming the key figures he's seeking to get into financial regulation posts that will direct the future oversight of the crypto industry, now including lawyer Jonathan Gould as a nominee to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that oversees U.S. national banks. With a widely circulated White House nominations document showing Trump has settled on Gould, a partner at law firm Jones Day who was a top lawyer at the OCC and a former crypto executive, and the president will reportedly nominate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s Jonathan McKernan to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the slate is almost clear. Gould had briefly worked as the chief legal officer for blockchain technology company Bitfury after he left the OCC as senior deputy comptroller and chief counsel during the first Trump administration. At Bitfury, he worked for CEO Brian Brooks, who Trump had once installed at the OCC as an acting comptroller and also tried to make it permanent. At the OCC, Brooks worked to open U.S. banking for crypto firms, and he elevated Anchorage Digital as the first and only crypto bank chartered by the agency. Now the industry will find out if Gould will follow in those footsteps. "For crypto, we believe Gould could seek to revive the concept of a limited-purpose national bank charter," said Jaret Seiberg, a policy analyst at TD Cowen, in a note to clients on Wednesday. "That could lead to banks that specialize in crypto. We also believe he would permit banks to get more involved with crypto including stablecoins." Rodney Hood, a former Republican chief of the National Credit Union Association, had been placed as Trump's temporary comptroller and would be replaced by Gould if he wins his Senate confirmation. Temporary Republican replacements like Hood are now leading most of the financial regulators, including banking agencies, the FDIC and OCC; the pair of markets regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and the consumer watchdog CFPB. At the CFPB, the Trump administration's effort to gut the regulator with the assignment of his budget director, Russ Vought, as its interim leader has drawn vigorous protests from congressional Democrats. Now he's announced the name he wants to eventually replace Vought there: McKernan, a Republican member of the FDIC . McKernan had served as a staffer for former Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who had led an early (failed) charge to get stablecoins regulated in the U.S. Ian Katz, a veteran financial-regulation analyst in Washington, noted the "conventional" pick of Gould for the OCC and the other recent choices for permanent chiefs of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that probably won't ruffle feathers among the U.S. senators that will evaluate their nominations. The relatively sedate choices seem to hew closely to Trump's model for financial regulators during his first term: No dramatic surprises. Unlike some of Trump's personnel decisions in his cabinet and other agencies, the choices are experienced and are absent political firebrands, including the pick of longtime securities consultant and former Commissioner Paul Atkins to run the Securities and Exchange Commission. Virtually all of the names — temporary and those nominated for permanent roles — have crypto backgrounds or have demonstrated support. The Senate must still confirm all of these nominees, and that process often takes months into an incoming president's first year. Sometimes the confirmations fail entirely, and agencies are left with permanently acting heads, like the OCC was during the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Trump also picked former Commissioner Brian Quintenz to run the CFTC, where sitting Commissioner Caroline Pham has been holding down the fort and making major agency changes as acting chairman. So far, Pham and other acting agency heads have already begun work to overhaul Biden-era crypto policy.

2025-02-12 19:13

Crypto mid-caps are struggling. While some digital asset investors may seek hidden gems and future powerhouses in the next tier of market capitalization and liquidity, that pursuit has generally not been rewarded. Furthermore, mid-caps have delivered significantly higher volatility. Less reward, more risk. What gives? Is this a mirror of “Mag 7” dominance in equities, a lack of promising assets in the mid tier or just the future of finance taking longer to bear fruit than we previously thought? You're reading Crypto Long & Short , our weekly newsletter featuring insights, news and analysis for the professional investor. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday. We define our size segments using the CoinDesk 20 and CoinDesk 80 indices. CoinDesk 20 captures the performance of top digital assets with some constraints to promote adoption in a number of places and products — specifically, no memecoins, access to U.S. investors, select exchange listings and liquidity in specific pairs. CoinDesk 80 captures the next 80 assets outside of CoinDesk 20 — still reasonably large and still measurably liquid with fewer restrictions and more trading pairs allowed. In other words, the mid-caps. Both indices have a base date of Oct. 4, 2022 and a base value of 1000. As of this writing, CoinDesk 20 sits at around 3200. CoinDesk 80 sits at 970. You read that right: the CoinDesk 20 index has delivered a 320% return since its base date, while the CoinDesk 80 index has lost 3%. The volatility of CoinDesk 80 sits well above that of CoinDesk 20, although its patterns follow those of the other index and majors bitcoin and ether. What are these difficult digital assets in the mid-cap segment? Ill-conceived platforms? Frivolous projects? Not really. Although there are some highly volatile memecoins in the mix (I’m looking at you, PNUT), many constituents are household names. If we narrow our view to year-to-date performance of current constituents (CoinDesk 80 was reconstituted on Jan. 31) we see that only one constituent is up on the year, yet many of the leaders (and laggards) are names we have known for some time. Of course, pinpointing the underlying cause of the mid-cap underperformance is just as difficult in crypto as in other asset classes. Although size is one of the three classic Fama-French factors (suggesting that small-cap equities should outperform), it has not always been demonstrated in performance. We suspect that while the crypto community will trade just about anything, it tends to invest in the biggest, the longest-tenured and the most familiar names. Regulatory accommodations (e.g., ETFs) will also follow this pattern, leading to a broader set of investors. Does this suggest that a large-cap tilt in digital asset investing — the inverse of the Fama-French size factor — will deliver excess returns? We shall see, but in the meantime, we can keep an eye on the values of CoinDesk 20 and CoinDesk 80.

2025-02-12 18:38

Franklin Templeton has made the OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX), the third-largest tokenized money market fund, available on Solana in another signal of growing interest in the blockchain. The fund is already available on Ethereum, Coinbase’s Base, Aptos and Avalanche, which were all added last year. The Stellar network functions as the primary blockchain. The asset manager announced the expansion on Wednesday. Solana has emerged as the leading venue for new tokens (mostly memecoins) and decentralized trading. It now accounts for over 90% of all new tokens appearing on decentralized exchanges (DEX), according to a Pantera Capital report. That's up from 1% in late 2023. “Even when innovation doesn’t start on Solana, it eventually finds its way there,” Cosmo Jiang and Eric Wallach wrote in the report. FOBXX, which started in 2021, has grown to a $594 million market capitalization, according to data by rwa.xyx . It lags behind Hashnote’s Short Duration Yield Coin (USYC) and BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL). Tokenization is one of the fastest-growing sectors in crypto adoption as institutions increasingly bring traditional financial assets like bonds, commodities and funds into the blockchain economy for more efficient operations and faster settlement. It's a multitrillion dollar market opportunity, reports from BCG, McKinsey and Brevan Howard have forecast. Solana gathers steam Smart-contract network Ethereum leads ecosystem for tokenization efforts with a 52% market share representing $3.8 billion worth of tokenized real-world assets. It is followed by Ethereum layer-2 ZKsync Era, rwa.xyz data shows. Solana, at $135 million, ranks seventh. Franklin Templeton's expansion to Solana is the latest sign of increasing interest in the network for tokenization efforts. Real-world asset platform Securitize expanded its offerings, including BUIDL, to the network in late January. Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of hedge fund SkyBridge, in a Tuesday interview touted Solana's speed and efficiency, saying that it will "win the race" in the tokenization world.

2025-02-12 18:35

Alexander Vinnik, the jailed former operator of once mighty bitcoin exchange BTC-e, is being released from U.S. custody as part of a prisoner exchange with Russia. Vinnik, 44, is being swapped with jailed American teacher Marc Fogel, who returned to the U.S. last night after negotiators struck a surprise breakthrough with the Kremlin. It had not immediately been clear who was on the other side of the deal. But BTC-e was one of the early exchanges that popularized the buying and selling of the world's most popular digital asset. It had over 1 million customers and moved over $9 billion of transactions between 2011 and 2017. Its popularity also fostered a thriving criminal underground who relied on it to move in and out of ill-gotten bitcoin proceeds, according to U.S. prosecutors. They accused Vinnik of operating BTC-e "with the intent to promote" drug dealers, money launders and other cybercriminals, and caused the loss of $121 million. Vinnik was arrested in Greece in 2017 and ultimately extradited to the U.S. He pled guilty to money laundering conspiracy in 2024 and faced a maximum of 20 years in prison. His lawyers had previously lobbied unsuccessfully for his inclusion in other high-profile U.S.-Russia prisoner exchanges, like last year's deal over formerly jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

2025-02-12 18:24