Digital Assets archive
Every Digital Assets story, newest first. 458 stories
5 stories
- Tokenization
Bitwise puts Coinbase tokenized stocks into self-custodied portfolios
Automated Token Portfolios put the model in Glider's hands and the token in the investor's wallet, leaving Coinbase's ADGM-licensed issuer as the anchor.
- The Wrap
Term Finance shuts Meta Vaults after governance exploit
Term Labs has permanently closed its Meta Vaults after a governance exploit PeckShield estimated at $8.5 million, and depositor recovery remains unresolved.
- The Wrap
LayerZero gets paid for volume it never routes
ATLAS, the protocol's exchange engine, ships with no frontend and burns 75% of residual fees, a bid to capture value from venues that would never build on a competitor's rails.
- The Wrap
Pendle's oracle worked; the market design didn't
A $36 million liquidation on Morpho exposes the flaw in pricing a $67.5 million collateral book off an $8.97 million pool.
- The Wrap
Grayscale's Zcash ETF filing dares the SEC to set a privacy-coin perimeter
Converting the Zcash Trust into an NYSE fund asks the agency to say whether a transaction-hiding token belongs inside the most tightly surveilled wrapper in regulated markets.
3 stories
- Crypto ETFs & funds
Grayscale's Zcash ETF filing puts privacy coin in surveillance wrapper
The conversion of the Zcash Trust into an NYSE fund forces the SEC to decide whether a token built to hide transactions can survive contact with a regulated product.
- The Wrap
Arc’s mainnet launch tests settlement, not scale
Eleven bank validators and half a billion test transactions have not answered whether a permissioned chain can settle without central-bank money.
- The Wrap
Senate math, not mainnet code, gates tokenized rails
The CLARITY Act's Sept. 15 cloture vote will determine what Circle's Arc mainnet becomes when it opens Sept. 16, and settlement finality remains the weak point on every permissioned rail.
7 stories
- Regulation
CLARITY Act gets a date; 60 votes remain the real test
The Sept. 15 cloture vote will show whether the White House push and the SEC's token proposal moved Senate math, not just token prices.
- The Wrap
Metaplanet, Strategy turn bitcoin into collateral
A $134.6M reverse merger and a $4.8B war chest mark the shift from bitcoin accumulation to bitcoin collateral.
- The Wrap
Tokenized settlement is becoming a bank consortium, not a public chain
Circle's Arc, BIS's Agorá, and JPMorgan's euro rail put permissioned chains and bank validators at the center. MANTRA's outage is why.
- Tokenization
Circle sets Sept. 16 target for Arc's public mainnet launch
Circle targets Sept. 16 to open Arc's production blockchain to any user; eleven founding institutions will still control block production. Half a billion test transactions measure capacity, not trust.
- Tokenization
MANTRA halt freezes tokenized settlement as token slides
The outage on a chain carrying Securitize's validator seat shows settlement risk is still the weak point in the tokenization story.
- The Wrap
HSBC and Standard Chartered settle tokenized deposits the old way
The first live transfer on Swift's ledger netted obligations but left final settlement on legacy systems.
- Regulation
A prediction-market fight nears the Supreme Court
A circuit split over who polices event contracts could put the question before the justices by June.
3 stories
- The Wrap
The rulebook is being written in Abu Dhabi, Paris, and Hong Kong
While Washington debates definitions, banks and exchanges are locking in licenses that decide where institutional digital assets operate.
- Tokenization
HSBC and Standard Chartered complete first live tokenized-deposit transfer on Swift ledger
Swift's ledger matched and netted the banks' obligations; final settlement still ran on existing systems.
- The Wrap
OCC trust charter queue splits between World Liberty and Zerohash
A conditional approval and a materially deficient return show a selective gate now reaching derivatives venues.
12 stories
- Regulation
White House backs CFTC move to onshore Hyperliquid
A compliant US path for Hyperliquid would fold the venue into the CFTC's rulebook and hand the exchanges that lobbied against it a defeat.
- Regulation
OCC grants Trump-linked World Liberty a conditional trust charter
The preliminary approval puts a Trump-linked stablecoin issuer on a regulated fiduciary path, but final sign-off still depends on preopening requirements.
- Adoption
Hong Kong's first regulated stablecoin is set to settle trade and insurance
HashKey Exchange plans to put HKDAP to work on cross-border trade with the UAE and commercial insurance payouts, giving the city's licensed token a real-world test.
- Custody & Infrastructure
OCC returns Zerohash's trust bank charter application
Zerohash's first application was returned as 'materially deficient.' The firm calls the move administrative and plans to refile this month with a narrower request.
- Custody & Infrastructure
Coldcard's $100M hack: the air-gap's blind spot
The wallet never touched the internet, yet it was drained. The vulnerability was in how its seed phrase was created.
- Tokenization
AMM-correlated-pairs debate turns on permission
The XTX counterpoint concedes the mechanism; who gets to provide liquidity decides whether tokenized equities matter.
- Tokenization
Coinbase makes Abu Dhabi its tokenized-securities hub
The ADGM license lets Coinbase arrange deals and hold digital assets, with investors keeping tokenized shares in wallets instead of brokerage accounts.
- Crypto ETFs & funds
Neuberger Berman puts a credit fund on Securitize's rails
The filing landed just as Securitize reported record assets and shrinking fees, raising the question of who collects when the wrapper is a commodity.
- Custody & Infrastructure
GnosisDAO votes to settle Gnosis Chain on Ethereum
The move would release roughly 350,000 GNO and end the treasury's staking subsidy.
- Adoption
Metaplanet pays $134.6 million to turn Super League into Superplanet
The Japanese bitcoin treasury firm will hold a 95.7% stake in the renamed Superplanet and use bitcoin as collateral for preferred stock financing.
- Tokenization
Robinhood CEO Tenev pushes SEC to open US to tokenized stocks
A week after the SEC shelved its innovation exemption, Tenev makes a market-structure case for tokenized equities at home.
- Tokenization
HSBC and Standard Chartered move first cross-bank tokenized deposit on Swift
A live transfer between HSBC and Standard Chartered shows how tokenized deposits can move across banks on Swift's blockchain.
10 stories
- Regulation
GENIUS Act's redemption test opens a stablecoin wrapper gap
Coins that redeem only into other stablecoins fall outside the payment-stablecoin definition, opening a route around issuer regulation that rulemaking has to close.
- The Wrap
Stablecoin oversight is becoming a dollar funding problem
The Treasury's GENIUS Act definitions and a BIS-IMF paper decide which institutions absorb the dollar pressure that stablecoin demand creates.
- Tokenization
Hong Kong's first regulated stablecoin, Standard Chartered's HKDAP, enters beta
The HKMA-licensed stablecoin's beta pairs strict holder-identification rules with institutional distribution; tokenized settlement is the aim.
- Regulation
SEC proposes crypto asset rules with $75 million exemption, safe harbor
The proposal gives token issuers a registration-free path to $75 million and a completion-based off-ramp from security status.
- Adoption
Jeonbuk Bank takes Ripple's payment rail to regional Korea
The first regional Korean bank to deploy Ripple Payments extends the company's institutional push beyond the country's biggest financial firms.
- Adoption
Strategy hoards $4.8 billion as bitcoin treasury playbook shifts
Saylor's retreat from buybacks and pivot to preferred equity redraws how corporate bitcoin holders manage capital.
- Adoption
Visa's stablecoin settlement search turns on four licenses
The card network's request for a licensed over-the-counter and settlement partner, seen by CoinDesk, points to a future of multiple stablecoin issuers.
- Regulation
Bank of England listens, but stablecoin rules wait on risk appetite
Lord Ranger came away from a Bank of England evidence session with two impressions. The one that sets the stablecoin timeline is risk appetite, not technology.
- Tokenization
BIS's Agorá selects 41 institutions for tokenized payments test
A unified-ledger experiment backed by seven central banks moves from design to live testing with the private sector.
- Custody & Infrastructure
SocGen Forge secures French license for digital-asset custody and trading
France's AMF has licensed Societe Generale's digital-assets arm to hold client crypto, a milestone for bank-run custody.