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In a week that saw the Middle East conflict raging on, here are some of the latest developments within the DeFi universe:
1) SOL Strategies Inc. rallied more than 20% after publishing its February update, which highlighted continued momentum across its Solana staking and validator business.
The firm said in its update that its validator network expanded to 33,568 unique wallets, while its STKESOL liquid staking product, launched in January, surpassed 691,039 SOL staked and more than 1,000 holders.
Total assets under delegation reached 3.87M SOL, spanning treasury stake and third-party delegations, with proprietary validators earning roughly 1,276 SOL in February and delivering 99.99% uptime.
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2) Morgan Stanley has submitted an amended S-1 registration statement for a proposed Bitcoin ETF.
Custody of the fund’s digital assets would be handled through Coinbase Custody alongside The Bank of New York Mellon (BNY).
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3) BTC miner MARA Holdings updated its HODL strategy in its 10-K SEC filing, stating that in the second half of 2025, it “changed our digital asset management strategy to permit sales of bitcoin generated from operations,” and in 2026, expanded the strategy to allow for sales of bitcoin held on our balance sheet.”
As of Dec. 31, 2025, the company held 53,822 BTC, including 9,377 BTC loaned to counterparties and 5,938 BTC pledged as collateral for $350M in outstanding credit facilities.
4) South Korean regulators and lawmakers have reportedly agreed on a proposal to cap major shareholder ownership in cryptocurrency exchanges at 20%, a move aimed at reducing governance and control risks from concentrated stakes.
The framework would also allow limited exceptions, with holdings of up to 34% permitted in cases defined later by the Financial Services Commission through enforcement decrees.
The measure is expected to be folded into South Korea’s forthcoming Digital Asset Basic Act, which is intended to set a broader regulatory baseline for the sector and has faced timeline slippage from earlier targets.
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5) Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT) released their full-year 2025 earnings, reporting a revenue of $647.4M, up from $376.7M in 2024, driven largely by a $255.3M increase in Bitcoin Mining revenue to $576.3M, alongside record gross profit of $302M, as the company advances a strategic shift toward AI and high-performance computing infrastructure by leveraging its nearly two-gigawatt power portfolio for large-scale data centers.
The company produced 5,686 bitcoin in 2025 versus 4,828 in 2024, with average mining costs excluding depreciation rising to $49,645 per bitcoin from $32,216, primarily due to a 47% increase in global network hash rate.
Riot ended the year with 18,005 bitcoin, plus $309.8M in cash, over $1.9B in total liquidity, and began generating revenue in January 2026 from the first phase of its data center lease with AI chipmaker AMD.
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6) TradFi exchange Nasdaq Inc. has taken its first step into the prediction market space by submitting a proposed rule change to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission outlining plans to introduce binary options on its benchmark Nasdaq-100 Index and the Nasdaq-100 Micro Index.
According to the filing, the contracts would trade at prices ranging from $0.01 to $1.00, with the price representing the market-implied probability of a specified outcome occurring.
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7) The largest BTC and ETH digital asset treasuries, Strategy and BitMine, respectively, are continuing to step in as sources of buyers.
Michael Saylor’s Strategy Inc. purchased $204M worth of bitcoins last week, while BitMine acquired an additional 50,928 ETH last week (bringing its total holdings to 4,473,587 ETH, or 3.71% of the token's entire circulating supply).
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8) Anthony Pompliano’s Bitcoin treasury company, ProCap Financial, Inc. (Nasdaq: BRR), announced it has acquired 450 Bitcoin, increasing its total holdings to 5,457 Bitcoin while lowering its average cost basis per coin.
Over the past 10 days, the company repurchased 782,408 common shares at a significant discount to Net Asset Value (NAV), and said it will continue buybacks as long as BRR trades materially below NAV, in an effort to reduce the share count at prices below the company’s underlying asset value, which in turn lifts NAV per share and helps close the discount.
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9) Paradigm is reportedly preparing a $1.5B fund that expands its remit into AI, robotics and other frontier technologies, while continuing to back blockchain-native projects.
The firm is said to be using its existing technical and research-led team to evaluate opportunities outside crypto, rather than creating a separate AI unit.
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10) Japan’s SBI Holdings and Startale Group have unveiled JPYSC, a yen-denominated stablecoin aimed at institutional and cross-border use cases, with a Q2 2026 launch target pending regulatory approval.
Issuance is managed by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank, bringing a trust-bank framework with tighter governance and operational safeguards.
SBI VC Trade is set to be the main distribution partner, while Startale leads the technical build, including plans for interoperability across traditional rails and multiple blockchain networks.
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11) CoinShares has launched a Hyperliquid Staking ETP (LIQD) on Xetra, giving investors regulated, physically backed exposure to HYPE with a headline-grabbing 0% management fee and 0.5% annual staking yield.
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12) DeFi project World Liberty Financial has put forward a proposal to introduce a Governance Staking System that would require holders of unlocked WLFI tokens to stake them before voting.
If approved, the system would introduce a 180-day minimum lock-up, weighted voting based on stake, staking rewards for active voters (targeting ~2% APR), and tiered incentives including USD1 benefits and prioritised partnership access for long-term supporters.
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13) Wallet in Telegram is expanding TON Wallet by introducing on-chain “Vaults” that offer variable yield on BTC, ETH and USDT.
The feature integrates third-party DeFi strategies via Morpho, TAC and Re7, with the highest-yield USDT option advertised at up to 18% blended APY through a Re7-powered strategy.
Block Street (BSB) is a cryptocurrency project positioned as liquidity infrastructure for on-chain capital markets, designed to make trading and settlement more efficient when liquidity is scattered across issuers, pools, and blockchains.
The project’s main focus is the long-standing issue of liquidity fragmentation.
As more financial instruments and tokenised real-world assets move on-chain, liquidity often gets split across different venues and networks, leading to wider spreads, higher slippage, and inconsistent execution. Block Street presents its solution as a unified layer that aggregates and routes liquidity more effectively, allowing applications and users to tap into deeper combined liquidity rather than interacting with isolated pools individually. In principle, that kind of aggregation can tighten effective spreads and improve execution quality by matching flow across multiple sources instead of forcing every market to operate as a standalone silo.
Block Street specifically frames this challenge in the context of tokenised capital markets products, such as tokenised equities, derivatives, and securities-lending style activity, where fragmented liquidity can become a structural bottleneck to scale. By aiming to unify liquidity across both issuers and chains, the platform’s stated goal is to make these markets function with more “institutional-grade” efficiency while preserving on-chain composability.
Block Street also emphasises composability and multi-chain connectivity.
By aiming to provide a simplified integration surface for accessing liquidity across environments, the platform’s ambition is to reduce friction for developers building DeFi and tokenised asset applications, while also supporting smoother execution for market participants interacting with these markets. In the project’s positioning, this is reinforced by an institutional-style API layer intended to make integration straightforward for both developers and professional participants, so they can connect to the liquidity layer without stitching together multiple fragmented endpoints.
A key part of Block Street’s value proposition is stronger capital efficiency.
By supporting cross-protocol collateral use, tokenised assets can be deployed more flexibly across DeFi rather than remaining confined within isolated pools or venues. In this context, “best execution” is positioned as a practical outcome: improved pricing driven by smarter routing and access to deeper, aggregated liquidity across markets.