Nakamoto, a Bitcoin treasury company listed on the Nasdaq, recently announced the details of its Bitcoin derivatives program, a program designed to generate recurring volatility income from a defined portion of Nakamoto’s Bitcoin holdings while hedging some portion of the company’s downside exposure to Bitcoin price risk.

 

While the Bitcoin derivatives program had already begun in the first quarter of the year, Nakamoto will be partnering with Bitwise Asset Management and the crypto exchange Kraken, with Bitwise running the derivatives strategy and Kraken offering its custody solution that will hold a portion of Nakamoto’s Bitcoin holdings that will be used for the derivatives program.

 

The derivatives program, according to Nakamoto, is aimed at achieving two main objectives: (1) monetizing Bitcoin volatility and (2) mitigating downside risk.

 

By systematically writing covered calls and call spreads against a portion of its Bitcoin holdings, Nakamoto’s Bitcoin derivatives program aims to convert the volatility in the Bitcoin options market into recurring income, which the company says can be reinvested into its Bitcoin treasury or used for its everyday operational costs.

 

The program also aims to mitigate downside risk due to a decline in the Bitcoin price by maintaining a defined allocation of Nakamoto’s Bitcoin holdings to protective puts and put spreads, supporting the stability of Nakamoto’s net asset value and reducing the risk of forced deleveraging, especially during stressed market conditions.

 

"Bitcoin's implied volatility is one of the most persistently mispriced assets in capital markets," said Tyler Evans, chief investment officer of Nakamoto and UTXO Management.

 

"Working with institutional grade partners like Bitwise and Kraken, we have built a disciplined framework to harvest that premium systematically, at scale, and convert that opportunity into long term value for shareholders. This program is just one component of a broader effort to identify and execute on opportunities to generate yield on our Bitcoin holdings."

 

Nakamoto as a Bitcoin Treasury Company

Nakamoto Inc is a publicly traded company that operates a Bitcoin treasury strategy as its core business. The company currently holds approximately 5,342 BTC on its balance sheet, valued at roughly $467.5 million.

 

It made its first major Bitcoin purchase in August 2025 when it purchased 5,743.91 BTC worth approximately $679 million through its subsidiary Nakamoto Holdings. However, it recently sold 284 BTC for $20 million last month, with the proceeds used to support its working capital and fund its business operations.

 

 

Traditional finance giants Charles Schwab and Citadel Securities have revealed possible intentions to enter the crypto prediction market industry.

 

In a call with investors, Rick Wurster, chief executive of Charles Schwab, said that at some point the institution will likely offer its own prediction markets. According to Wurster, prediction markets were not of “tremendous interest” to Schwab, but he said the sector is one the company will take a hard look at and that it would be relatively straightforward to offer such products.

 

Image credit: CNBC

 

However, if Schwab does decide to enter the prediction markets industry, Wurster said it would steer away from bets in areas such as sports, politics and pop culture, adding that the firm aims to position itself as a partner for building long term wealth.

 

“Prediction markets that are not aligned to that are not something that we want to pursue,” Wurster said. “If you look at the stats on the success of gamblers, they are not strong, and people generally lose money.”

 

Citadel Securities also opened up about the possibility of entering prediction markets in the future. At a recent Semafor conference in Washington, DC, Jim Esposito, president of Citadel Securities, said the company is “absolutely keeping an eye on developments” in prediction markets.

 

Image credit: YouTube

 

Although Esposito said Citadel Securities is not there yet because there is not much liquidity in the prediction markets industry, he added that the market is likely to ramp up and scale, and that there is a possibility of the firm getting involved in the future.

 

However, like Wurster’s position on avoiding sports betting contracts, Esposito said Citadel would avoid offering sports event contracts, but signaled interest in other types of event-based contracts.

 

Why Are Sports Event Contracts Being Avoided?

Based on the statistics, sports event contracts are the largest category of contracts on prediction market platforms. According to a recent report, sports event contracts made up 87 percent, or $9.9 billion, of Kalshi’s March $11.39 billion trading volume. On Polymarket, sports event contracts generated over $120 million in 24-hour trading volume in March.

 

However, despite their potential, Charles Schwab and Citadel Securities have said they would not be offering these contracts. For Schwab, these contracts will be avoided as they do not align with the company's goal of positioning itself as a long-term wealth builder. According to Rick Wurster, the chief executive officer of Charles Schwab, people generally lose money from these contracts. The demand for these contracts is also low among Schwab’s clients.

 

Citadel has described these contracts as having thin liquidity. Regulatory uncertainty is also a concern, as the offering of sports event contracts by prediction market platforms is one of the reasons regulators have raised concerns about Polymarket, Kalshi, and other prediction market companies.

 

 

Prediction market platform Polymarket is reportedly in talks with investors to raise 400 million dollars. If successful, this would place the prediction market company at a valuation of 15 billion dollars, up from its current $9 billion.

 

While there is still no official confirmation from Polymarket regarding this news, the fundraising is expected to drive Polymarket’s growing influence in the expanding prediction market sector, giving it a competitive advantage over its competitors, particularly Kalshi.

 

This move comes a few weeks after Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), invested 600 million dollars into Polymarket. This followed an earlier investment of 1 billion dollars into the prediction market company a few months prior.

 

So far, Polymarket has raised over $2 billion across several fundraising rounds from venture capital firms and investors, including Intercontinental Exchange, Blockchain Capital, Polychain Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, 1789 Capital, Ethereum co founder Vitalik Buterin, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, among several other investors.

 

Prediction Market Firms Grapple With Regulatory Uncertainty

Despite how remarkable the global prediction market sector has grown in recent times, prediction market companies still face several regulatory challenges, ranging from state level lawsuits to nationwide bans.

 

Several U.S. states, including New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Arizona, have taken strict regulatory action against prediction market companies, with many state regulators alleging that these companies offer illegal sports event contracts. At least 12 states in the U.S. have filed civil lawsuits against prediction market companies.

 

Outside the U.S., prediction market companies have also faced strict regulatory scrutiny. Just this year alone, about four countries in Europe, Portugal, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, and Hungary, have imposed nationwide bans on Polymarket’s activities.

 

However, despite this harsh regulatory landscape, the global prediction market continues to grow. In the most recent quarter, global trading volume across prediction market companies exceeded $ 26 billion, a 90 percent increase from the previous quarter. This volume, according to the global equity research firm Bernstein, is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030.

 

 

Global crypto asset manager Bitwise Asset Management has launched BAVA, a spot Avalanche Exchange-Traded Product (ETP) that provides investors with exposure to the Avalanche (AVAX) token, allowing them to earn yield without directly holding it.

 

 

Since the Avalanche network allows investors to earn rewards of up to 5.4% per year for staking AVAX, Bitwise, through its in-house staking division, Bitwise Onchain Solutions, will stake 70% of its AVAX holdings in the BAVA ETP, while the remaining 30% will be kept as a liquidity reserve to meet redemptions and operational needs.

 

Although BAVA allows investors to gain exposure to Avalanche’s AVAX, it is important to note that this exchange-traded product is not suitable for all investors. It is subject to a high degree of risk, is highly volatile, and could result in significant losses. Investors, therefore, need to exercise caution when investing in BAVA.

 

How BAVA Performed

Starting with initial assets under management of $2.5 million and a net asset value of approximately $25 per share, the BAVA crypto ETP recorded a trading volume of over $400,000 within the first 90 minutes of its launch.

 

Within its first day of trading, BAVA closed at $25.50, marking a 2 percent increase from its launch price and reaching $26. According to TradingView, BAVA is currently trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $26.30. Its assets under management have also grown from the initial $2.5 million to approximately $13 million to $19 million within days of its launch, while AVAX, the native cryptocurrency of the Avalanche network, is currently trading at $9.19, according to CoinGecko.

 

The launch of the spot AVAX ETP comes a few days after Bitwise launched the Hyperliquid Staking Exchange-Traded Product, BHYP, on Deutsche Börse Xetra in Europe. In January, the asset manager launched CLNK, a Chainlink exchange-traded fund that provides exposure to LINK, the native cryptocurrency of the Chainlink oracle network.

 

The Bitwise Proficio Currency Debasement fund, an exchange-traded fund that provides exposure to Bitcoin, gold, miners, and precious metals, was also launched by the asset manager earlier this year.

 

About the Avalanche Network

The Avalanche network is a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain designed for speed, scalability, and customization. It uses its own Avalanche, also known as Snow, consensus mechanism that allows a validator to select a small random subset of other validators to validate blockchain transactions.

 

Due to its high performance, several top-tier blockchain protocols have built on the Avalanche network, including the decentralized finance lending protocol Aave and the decentralized exchange WOOFi. Other tokenization institutions, such as Franklin Templeton, VanEck, and Securitize, have also built tokenized products on the Avalanche blockchain.

 

 

Wrapped XRP (wXRP) is now live on Solana, issued by regulated custodian Hex Trust and bridged securely via LayerZero, backed 1:1 of XRP that lets users trade, provide liquidity, lend, and earn yield across Solana’s DeFi apps. 

 

 

This is the latest piece of a multi-chain rollout that Hex Trust detailed back in December 2025, as the same wXRP infrastructure is already operating on Ethereum, Optimism, and HyperEVM, giving XRP holders regulated on-ramps into deeper liquidity pools wherever DeFi happens. RippleX SVP Markus Infanger, noted the move addresses growing demand to use XRP across the wider crypto ecosystem and it aligns with Ripple’s own RLUSD stablecoin work. LayerZero handles the bridging that has captured the majority of reliable cross-chain volume after earlier bridge exploits elsewhere.

 

Major Solana based players such as Ondo Finance which has expanded tokenized treasury and equity products onto the network, and Superstate whose leadership has publicly endorsed Solana as one of only two viable chains for RWAs work alongside Ethereum now operate in a way where they can integrate wXRP straight into liquidity pools lending markets and atomic settlement flows. 

 

At the same time, big institutions like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are building on Solana with their own tokenized market funds. BlackRock brought its BUIDL fund  which holds cash and Treasuries to deliver dollar yields to Solana, giving qualified investors fast, low-cost access to on-chain returns. Franklin Templeton did the same with its on-chain US Government Money Market Fund. WisdomTree brought its tokenized funds covering money markets, stocks, bonds, alternatives, and balanced portfolios, VanEck launched its low-fee Treasury bill fund VBILL, Hamilton Lane added tokenized access to private infrastructure and secondary funds, and Apollo made its ACRED private credit product available as collateral in protocols like Morpho. This lets firms keep their traditional compliance and custody setups intact while plugging these assets straight into Solana, so institutions can easily use wXRP for liquidity, collateral, or quick settlements.

 

Solana has been scaling RWA activity with tokenized ecosystems on-chain surpassing two billion dollars in value and protocols like Kamino handling over one billion dollars in real world asset deposits across isolated lending markets, where institutions borrow against assets and earn yield from cash flows. Ripple has targeted these kinds of entities through its custody solutions and partnerships with banks, including BBVA, DBS Bank, DZ Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, and more recently Kyobo Life Insurance, for on-chain settlement and staking capabilities that now extend naturally to Solana networks.

 

There’s support across Phantom wallet, Jupiter Exchange, Meteora, and Titan Exchange, ensures that the infrastructure is ready for immediate use, which removes one of the frictions that has kept payment assets like XRP siloed from builders who prefer Solana for its sub-cent fees and near instant finality.

 

 

Goldman Sachs has just filed to launch its first Bitcoin ETF marking a shift for the bank that once dismissed crypto, but now wants to compete directly with BlackRock and Fidelity.

 

The new filing positions Goldman as an issuer, creating its own branded Bitcoin product for public trading. The fund will follow a defined outcome structure aimed at managing risk while still providing exposure to Bitcoin’s price movement. That balanced design reflects how banks are attempting to bridge traditional investment principles with the growing demand for digital assets from clients who want regulated access.

 

Goldman also closed a two billion dollar acquisition of Innovator Capital Management just weeks ago, a company that specializes in complex ETF engineering which gave the bank guidance on the type of fund it is now introducing. Regulatory conditions also helped with the Financial Innovation and Technology Act, passed in late 2024, finally gave big banks clear legal ground to sell crypto based investment products without facing the grey areas that stalled previous attempts.

 

Competitive pressure is another factor with Morgan Stanley launching its own spot Bitcoin ETF only days earlier, offering the lowest fees in the market and giving its advisors full clearance to recommend crypto holdings to clients. With that move, Goldman faced a choice between continuing as a buyer of other firms’ funds or entering the field with its own. It chose the latter, signaling that the era of quiet participation is over and the fight for market share among major banks has begun.

 

Not too long ago in 2020, the firm told clients Bitcoin was not investable and compared it to the Dutch tulip mania. By 2024, the firm had quietly become one of the largest institutional holders of crypto ETFs managed by peers, controlling more than two billion dollars across portfolios like BlackRock’s IBIT. 

 

Other large banks have followed a similar path away as Jamie Dimon who once called Bitcoin a fraud, now treats the asset as collateral through Kinexys and integrates stablecoin rewards into retail banking. Larry Fink shifted from criticizing Bitcoin to calling it digital gold, with IBIT growing into the world’s largest Bitcoin fund. Citigroup is building crypto custody infrastructure, Morgan Stanley is expanding access through thousands of advisors, and Bank of America now recommends up to a four percent crypto allocation for diversified portfolios.

 

As Bitcoin pushes back toward the low seventy thousand range, it is starting to peel away from software stocks, with the Bloomberg chart showing Bitcoin turning higher since February while the WCLD software basket has decreased. For years they moved in correlation with one another, but for now they are splitting which makes the arrival of products from firms like Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and others feel less like a late bet on another software proxy and more like a recognition that Bitcoin is carving out its own lane as an asset that deserves attention.

 

Retail has been quiet this cycle, but banks like Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America rolling out their own Bitcoin products and opening up access on mainstream platforms help everyday investors who don’t know how to use new exchanges or custody setups just to get exposure. Bitcoin starts to show up in the same accounts that already hold index funds and blue chip stocks, with advisors treating it as a small slice of a long term portfolio. That does not remove the risk, but it does change the experience, turning crypto from something that sits on the same pipes and protections that most investors already use.

 

 

Virtuals Protocol just confirmed that Eastworlds is officially live as builders now get direct access to over 30 Unitree humanoids, low latency teleoperation systems, and pre-signed commercial pilots across retail, hospitality, and security. It's taking everything Virtuals already built for autonomous agents and pushing it into the physical world. 

 

Back in February, Virtuals laid out Eastworld Labs as the physical counterpart to its ecosystem of over 18,000 tokenized agents. By early April the full picture came together, and now it's running as the co-founders were direct about what this means in practice: teams don't need to go raise a separate hardware round or sit around waiting on supply chains. 

 

The three pillars of Eastworlds are to build fast, deploy fast, and learn fast. Build fast gives teams the funding, hardware, and talent needed to move from prototype to deployment. Deploy fast handles commercialization through a Robots-as-a-Service model, using teleoperation and hybrid systems to generate value in industries like retail, hospitality, and even entertainment. Learn fast is where their strategy is data compounding by collecting real-world data from every rollout to train more advanced models to eventually be autonomous.

 

Some examples of what they’re testing are HVAC technicians for system maintenance, hospital support staff, security guards, waste collection, hotel housekeeping, plumbing, and mechanical repairs. 

 

Virtuals Protocol is the foundation by being permissionless and decentralized with $VIRTUAL as the base currency of the agentic economy, and Eastworlds sits under it with the team making its own calls on access, scheduling, and hardware allocation. The robotics launch connects the two layers as any team can create a token on the Virtuals launchpad with no review to signal a project, but on the facility side it's gated, with the Eastworlds team evaluating projects on use case, readiness, and slot availability, and teams need to have a $5 million FDV for seven consecutive days to be considered. Both sides are necessary because the protocol provides the economic layer and the facility provides the physical layer, and one without the other doesn't get you very far. 

 

A humanoid robot 3D-printed an item, which was then collected by a rover robot and delivered without any human intervention in USDC on Base. Ant Group released its Anvita platform designed to empower AI agents to independently hold crypto assets, coordinate tasks, and execute real-time payments using stablecoins and x402.

 

 

None of this would be credible without the software foundation Virtuals spent years building. Its Agent Commerce Protocol, integrated with Coinbase's x402 standard on Base, already handles about 47.2% of all Base agentic transactions. Agents can’t access bank accounts so thousands of them are using these rails every day to pay for compute, APIs, and services without any human wallets or KYC friction involved. 

 

 

The future of Virtuals is exciting because it is creating an agentic economy through a decentralized "society of AI agents" that doesn't just assist humans, but runs autonomously to generate real and measurable value with over 18,000 tokenized agents already deployed and Agentic GDP (aGDP) surpassing $479 million in early 2026. By connecting their agent framework to humanoid robots, it’s turning software-based agents into systems that can work alongside humans in factories and labs.

 

 

 

Circle is pushing even further into the global payments infrastructure. On April 8, the company officially launched CPN Managed Payments, a fully managed stablecoin settlement product built on top of its Circle Payments Network that lets banks, fintechs, and payment processors tap into USDC rails without ever touching digital assets themselves. Yes, you heard that correctly, they never even have to touch USDC.

 

The solution handles everything on the backend, including USDC minting and burning, payment orchestration, compliance controls, and blockchain infrastructure, so that partner institutions can operate entirely in fiat. In other words, a payment provider signs up, connects once, and Circle does the rest.

 

That is a huge shift in how stablecoin adoption typically works. Until now, most institutions eyeing blockchain-based settlement had to deal with the full stack: custody arrangements, internal compliance buildout, licensing questions, and the operational headaches that come with managing digital assets on a balance sheet. CPN Managed Payments is designed to help institutions overcome those barriers, including digital asset custody, licensing requirements, compliance complexity, and operational risk.

 

"With CPN Managed Payments, we're simplifying how institutions adopt and scale stablecoin payments," said Nikhil Chandhok, Circle's Chief Product and Technology Officer. "By combining issuance, liquidity, compliance, and programmable infrastructure into a unified solution, we are enabling financial institutions to embed stablecoin settlement into their existing payment stacks with enterprise-grade reliability and operational readiness."

 

The launch is an extension of CPN, which Circle first announced in April 2025 and brought live the following month. CPN was designed to connect banks, neo-banks, payment service providers, virtual asset service providers, and digital wallets to enable real-time settlement of cross-border payments using regulated stablecoins. Cross-border payments can still take longer than one business day to settle and cost more than 6%, according to the World Bank, disproportionately impacting emerging markets.

 

The underlying mechanics are worth understanding. On the sending side, an originating financial institution handles customer onboarding, KYC, and fiat-to-USDC conversion. On the receiving side, a beneficiary institution receives USDC and converts it to local currency for payout. Circle sits in the middle as network operator but is not holding or moving the funds itself, acting instead as a coordination layer between member institutions. With the managed payments product, Circle now absorbs even more of that operational complexity on behalf of its partners.

 

USDC's market cap currently sits at around $74.8 billion, and Circle reported Q4 2025 revenue of $770 million, 77% better than the same period the prior year. The company has been aggressively expanding its licensing footprint globally and is now leaning into that compliance infrastructure as a competitive moat rather than just a cost center. Circle said that USDC has supported over $70 trillion in "cumulative onchain settlement," with nearly $12 trillion of that amount coming in Q4 2025 alone.

 

CPN Managed Payments is built on Circle's existing infrastructure, which covers payouts across more than 20 blockchains and domestic payment rails, with connectivity to CPN fiat payout corridors worldwide. The platform is also composable, meaning institutions can start fully managed and gradually take on more of the stack themselves as their internal capabilities develop.

 

Launch partners include Veem, along with other global payment service providers. Earlier CPN adopters included Alfred Pay, which is using the network to enable stablecoin-to-fiat offramps via PIX and SPEI; Tazapay, supporting compliant fiat disbursements into Hong Kong; and RedotPay, initiating USDC-based payments into Brazil.

 

The competitive picture is getting crowded. PayPal has had its own stablecoin product on the market for over a year, and Ripple's RLUSD has been gaining ground in cross-border settlement use cases, particularly in corridors where USDC's footprint has been slower to develop. But Circle's bet with CPN Managed Payments is distinct: rather than compete stablecoin-to-stablecoin, it is trying to become the rails that other institutions use, regardless of which digital dollar eventually wins.

 

Circle is currently focusing on serving organizations transacting in high-value, underserved global trade corridors, with plans to explore expansion into Nigeria, the EU, UK, Colombia, India, the UAE, China, Turkey, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Argentina.

 

For traditional finance players who have wanted stablecoin efficiency without the crypto balance sheet exposure, the product is about as clean an entry point as the market has offered. 

 

If you’ve been following Cardano for more than five minutes, you know the running joke. Great tech, very principled, peer-reviewed everything... but also kind of just sitting by itself at lunch while Ethereum and Solana were out making friends. For years, ADA holders had to explain why their chain was “building” while everyone else was “doing.” That conversation is getting a lot easier now.

 

On February of 2026, Charles Hoskinson announced that LayerZero is being integrated into the Cardano ecosystem, sharing the groundbreaking partnership for the first time.

 

So what does this actually mean? Let’s break it down without putting you to sleep.

 

Cardano runs on something called the eUTXO model. Think of it like Bitcoin’s architecture but with smart contracts bolted on. It’s secure, it’s predictable... but it does not play nicely with account-based chains like Ethereum. Interoperability has always been kind of a mess, and Cardano has largely sat on the sidelines of the cross-chain party.

 

LayerZero approaches this challenge differently. It uses a messaging layer to send verified messages between chains, rather than relying on complex token-wrapping structures that are often targeted by hackers. That’s a big deal. No more sketchy wrapped tokens, no more liquidity scattered across isolated pools, and no more depending on some centralized bridge that could get exploited at 3am on a Tuesday.

 

That design reportedly opens access to around $80 billion in omnichain assets already connected through LayerZero standards. Eighty. Billion. Dollars. Let that number sink in. Got the gravity of it? Let's move on.

 

LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token standard sits at the core of the integration. The framework lets assets exist natively across several blockchains. It removes that need for wrapped tokens and avoids splitting liquidity across separate pools, a problem that I mentioned earlier But it's important enough to state twice. That structure gives more than 700 existing tokens a path onto Cardano and Cardano on to them.

 

Cardano can now communicate with Ethereum, Solana, and over 160 other networks. For developers, that’s a completely different building environment than what existed just a few months ago.

 

This LayerZero integration didn’t just come out of nowhere, it’s part of a coordinated push by what’s being called the Pentad. The Pentad includes the Input Output Group (IOG), Cardano Foundation, EMURGO, Intersect, and the Midnight Foundation. Five organizations, one shared mandate: to finally stop arguing about roadmaps and start shipping. A move that was seen by many in the ecosystem as a breath of fresh air. Well, everyone except the trolls on X that seem to relish in FUD in hopes that Elon may send them a big enough check to move out of their mom's basement. I won't mention the names, but I am sure you know who they are.

 

And the Pentad has shipped, despite the current market trend. Oracle integration via Pyth Network improves price data reliability, analytics availability through Dune Analytics increases transparency and data access, and cross-chain messaging via LayerZero lays groundwork for interoperability. That’s not a wishlist anymore, those are done.

 

Then there’s USDCx. It addresses a separate infrastructure need by bringing a tier-one stablecoin rail tied to Circle, giving Cardano a recognizable settlement asset for payments, DeFi activity, and real-world asset flows. Hoskinson described it as better than regular USDC because it adds privacy and is immutable and irreversible, you can move straight from a wallet to Coinbase or Binance with instant convertibility. He said Cardano went from signing a deal with Circle to having USDCx live on the network in 84 days, calling it the number one stablecoin on Cardano already. 84 days. That’s actually fast for anyone, let alone a blockchain project.

 

Is this all enough? Honestly. It depends who you ask. Hoskinson argued the effort has moved Cardano from being “an island” to being connected to the broader crypto market, but added that the ecosystem still needs strategic capital deployment to help applications survive and compete. Infrastructure is the foundation, not the house. Developers still need to build, users still need to show up, and liquidity still needs to actually flow... not just theoretically exist.

 

But for a chain that’s spent years being told it’s “all potential, no product,” this is a meaningful shift. A very welcome moment for those here who believe in Cardano's potential. The rails are finally there. What gets built on them is the next chapter. And that next chapter could get very interesting.

 

 

 

The Algorand Foundation, the organization behind the Algorand layer-1 blockchain network, announced on Wednesday that it is laying off 25% of its staff.

 

The foundation described the decision as “difficult” and attributed it to the downturn in the crypto market. “This decision was not taken lightly and is in response to the uncertain global macro environment as well as the broader downturn in crypto markets,” it said.

 

Describing the affected employees as “best-in-class contributors,” the foundation said it would support them through the transition. Following the layoffs, the foundation believes it is now more closely aligned with its long-term business, technology, and ecosystem goals.

 

 

 

 

About the Algorand Foundation

Founded in 2019 by MIT professor and Turing Award winner Silvio Micali, the Algorand Foundation is responsible for guiding, funding, and growing the Algorand blockchain ecosystem.

 

The aim of the foundation is to make real-world adoption of blockchain technology easier, and to build an open and accessible system where digital assets can be transferred instantly and securely.  The foundation is often described as building infrastructure for the future of finance and the broader digital economy.

 

The Algorand Foundation offers a diverse suite of blockchain-related products that serve both end users and developers in the crypto space. Some of its products include:

• Algokit: A developer toolkit designed to simplify smart contract development and deployment, as well as to help builders create applications on the Algorand blockchain.
• Rocca Wallet: A self-custodial wallet that makes it easy for both beginners and experienced users to manage their digital assets. According to the Algorand roadmap, the Rocca Wallet is expected to launch later this year.
• Commercial toolkit: A set of tools that enables enterprises to integrate the Algorand blockchain more easily into their operations.

 

The Reality of Working in the Crypto Space

While the crypto industry is known for offering some of the highest-paid and most sought-after jobs, it has recently experienced a wave of layoffs, with many companies re-pivoting and restructuring due to changing market conditions.

 

Just last month, Block Inc., the company behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, cut approximately 40% of its workforce, laying off about 4,000 employees. The layoffs were part of a broader restructuring and a shift toward artificial intelligence (AI).

 

More recently, this month, the crypto exchange Crypto.com laid off around 20% of its staff as part of a strategic shift toward AI-focused operations. Web3 infrastructure company Eclipse Labs also laid off about 65% of its workforce during a major restructuring in August.

 

 

Tally, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance platform built on Ethereum, is shutting down after five years of operation in the crypto industry.

 

The decision, according to co-founder and CEO Dennison Bertram, was driven by a lack of sustainability in the decentralized governance tooling industry. Despite its success as a DAO governance platform, Bertram said Tally had not yet realized its original vision.

 

“We have spent years championing the DAO vision. But at some point, you have to accept the world as it is, not as you hoped it would be. The reality is that we can no longer build a viable business around this,” he said.

 

Bertram also said Tally will not move forward with its ICO plans, adding that the team was not confident it could fulfill any promises it would make to token holders if it sold them tokens.

 

Prior to the announcement, Tally had built a notable presence in the crypto space, including:

• Serving over one million users, with tens of millions of tokenholder addresses participating in governance through its platform.
• Processing more than $1 billion in crypto payments and, at one point, helping secure over $80 billion through systems it supported.
• Supporting hundreds of organizations on its governance platform, including Uniswap DAO, Arbitrum, zkSync, Wormhole, and EigenLayer.

 

Reflecting on these successes, as well as Tally’s ability to avoid major security incidents and navigate regulatory uncertainty under the previous SEC chair, Tally CEO Dennison Bertram said he was “incredibly proud” of what the team had accomplished.

 

Although the team will wind down operations by the end of the month, it is working with major partners to ensure its enterprise clients continue to be served and will keep its interface live until the transition is complete.

 

 

The Crypto Community Reacted

The announcement of Tally’s shutdown was met with disappointment across the crypto community, with some describing it as the “end of an era” and others recounting their experiences using the platform during the early days of Arbitrum and Uniswap governance.

 

“I still remember writing governance proposals for Uniswap on Tally back in 2021. Those were fun times. It’s disappointing that DAOs didn’t meet expectations. While stablecoins have achieved the strongest product-market fit in crypto, I still believe DAOs will ultimately get there, though perhaps not for another three to 10 years,” said Getty Hill, CEO of DeFi trading platform Oku Trade.

 

“Human labor coordination is one of the hardest problems. DAOs will need to evolve, and their applications must improve. The 2020–2021 era of DAO governance was a lot of fun,” he added.

 

 

Mastercard has agreed to acquire BVNK, the London-based stablecoin infrastructure company, for up to $1.8 billion in a deal that includes $300 million in contingent payments tied to future performance milestones. The agreement, announced Tuesday morning, is expected to close before the end of 2026, pending regulatory approvals.

The deal is the latest and largest chapter in a stablecoin acquisition frenzy that has gripped traditional finance and crypto alike, and it carries a backstory messier than most. BVNK didn't end up at Mastercard's door by accident. It got there after a months-long bidding war with Coinbase, exclusivity agreements, a very public deal collapse, and a detour that briefly had Mastercard chasing a different company entirely.

 

The Road to This Deal Was Anything But Clean
Back in October 2025, Fortune reported that both Mastercard and Coinbase had separately held advanced acquisition talks with BVNK, with the price tag floating somewhere between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion. At the time, Coinbase looked like the clear front-runner. Three sources familiar with the matter told Fortune that the crypto exchange had the inside track, and by late October, BVNK had entered into exclusivity with Coinbase, meaning the startup legally couldn't entertain other offers.

It seemed like a done deal. Then it wasn't.

In November, Coinbase and BVNK quietly called off talks. The deal had gotten as far as due diligence and exclusivity before the two sides parted ways. Coinbase issued a carefully worded non-statement about "continuously seeking opportunities to expand on our mission," and BVNK was suddenly back on the market.

Meanwhile, after losing out to Coinbase in the first round, Mastercard had pivoted and was reported to be in serious discussions to acquire Zerohash, a Chicago-based crypto infrastructure firm, for somewhere between $1.5 billion and $2 billion. That deal apparently didn't close either, and Mastercard eventually circled back to the startup it had wanted all along.

The result is the deal announced today: Mastercard gets BVNK for a price that, at $1.8 billion, comes in below the $2 billion Coinbase had been pursuing and meaningfully below the top of the original $2.5 billion range. Whether that represents a discount, a reflection of changed market conditions, or simply the realities of a second negotiation is hard to say. But for a company that was valued at around $750 million as recently as mid-2025, it is still a remarkable outcome.

 

Who is BVNK and Why Does It Matter
Founded in 2021 by Chris Harmse, Jesse Bernson-Struthers, and Donald Jackson, BVNK was built with a specific problem in mind: enterprises wanted to use stablecoins, but the plumbing didn't exist to make that happen at scale. The company's pitch was never about building a consumer wallet or launching its own token. It was about becoming the invisible layer that lets other financial businesses actually move money using stablecoins.

The platform operates across more than 130 countries and supports payments on all major blockchain networks. Its customers include Worldpay, Deel, Flywire, Rapyd, Thunes, and a growing list of enterprise clients that process real commercial volume. In its own end-of-year review published in January 2026, BVNK said it was processing $30 billion in annualized stablecoin payment volume, up 2.3x from the prior year, across 2.8 million transactions. A year before that, its volumes were reported at roughly $12 billion when Visa was announced as an investor.

One third of that volume now comes from the U.S. market alone, where BVNK launched operations at the start of 2025 and scaled from essentially zero to $10 billion in annualized volume by year end. The company opened two San Francisco offices and a New York outpost in just twelve months.

The investor roster reads like a who's who of institutions that have come around to stablecoins as strategic infrastructure rather than speculative technology. Haun Ventures led BVNK's $50 million Series Bin December 2024. Coinbase Ventures participated. Tiger Global was already in. And then Visa Ventures and Citi Ventures both made strategic investments, a signal that even the largest incumbent financial networks were willing to bet on the startup they might otherwise consider a competitive threat.

Bernson-Struthers described BVNK as the "global leader" in stablecoin infrastructure in a December 2024 interview, citing the company's banking relationships and financial licenses as the harder-to-replicate moat. That licensing infrastructure, built out painstakingly across multiple jurisdictions including full U.S. state-level coverage and comprehensive EU authorization, is likely a substantial part of what Mastercard is paying for.

 

What Mastercard Is Actually Buying
Jorn Lambert, Mastercard's Chief Product Officer, put it plainly in the company's announcement Tuesday: "We expect that most financial institutions and fintechs will in time provide digital currency services, be it with stablecoins or tokenized deposits. We want to support them and their customers with a best in class, highly compliant, interoperable offering that brings the benefits of tokenized money to the real world."

That framing says a lot about how Mastercard is positioning this acquisition. The company isn't buying BVNK because it thinks stablecoins will replace its core business. It's buying BVNK because it wants to be the network that connects stablecoin rails to everything else, the way it currently connects card networks to merchants and banks around the world.

The logic is straightforward, if you squint at it. Mastercard's entire business model is built on being the trusted intermediary between different financial systems. Stablecoins create new rails that, without an orchestration layer, are isolated from the broader financial system. BVNK's core product is precisely that orchestration layer: the infrastructure that lets money move fluidly between dollars, stablecoins, blockchains, and traditional bank accounts. Mastercard plugs that into its global network and, theoretically, becomes the interoperability layer for the next generation of payments.

Lambert added that adding on-chain rails to Mastercard's network "will support speed and programmability for virtually every type of transaction," pointing to use cases beyond just consumer payments including capital markets, treasury management, B2B transactions, and cross-border remittances. That's a broader canvas than most people associate with stablecoins today, but it reflects where the industry is headed.

Mastercard cited a Boston Consulting Group figure showing digital currency payment use cases hit at least $350 billion in volume in 2025. The company also pointed to the growing regulatory clarity around digital currencies in multiple jurisdictions as a catalyst for financial institutions and fintechs that are now looking to build stablecoin-enabled payment products for their own customers.

 

The Stablecoin Acquisition Parade
This is the latest in a series of major acquisitions that have reshaped how the payments industry thinks about stablecoin infrastructure.

The deal that started the current wave was Stripe's acquisition of Bridge, another stablecoin infrastructure startup, for $1.1 billion. That deal closed in early 2025 and set a new benchmark for what stablecoin infrastructure could fetch. BVNK's volumes at the time of Bridge's acquisition were already significantly larger, which is part of why the bidding quickly escalated into the multi-billion dollar range.

Since then, MoonPay acquired Iron, stablecoin M&A activity has continued to accelerate, and the market cap of all stablecoins combined crossed $300 billion. Circle's IPO on the NYSE in June 2025 added further legitimacy and brought mainstream investor attention to the sector. The U.S. GENIUS Act, signed by President Trump in July 2025, provided the regulatory framework that large institutions had been waiting for before fully committing to stablecoin strategies.

That legislative clarity changed the calculus for traditional finance almost overnight. JPMorgan launched its JPMD deposit tokens. Citigroup announced a Citi stablecoin. Banks that had previously treated stablecoins as a fringe curiosity started treating them as product lines they needed to support.

For a payments network like Mastercard, the pressure is acute. The company's stock was reportedly hit when the GENIUS Act passed, with investors worried that stablecoins could erode the interchange fee model that underpins Mastercard's revenue. Buying BVNK is, in part, a direct response to that concern. Rather than cede the stablecoin payments market to crypto-native competitors or fintech newcomers, Mastercard is acquiring the infrastructure to own a piece ofit.

 

A Telling U-Turn on Stablecoins
There is a certain irony in today's announcement. As recently as July 2025, Raj Seshadri, Mastercard's chief commercial payments officer, told analysts on an earnings call that the company expected most payment flows to "begin and end in fiat," and that stablecoins would be "just one more currency for some specific use cases." That is a significant shift in tone from announcing a near-$2 billion acquisition to get into the middle of those flows.

To be fair, Mastercard's position has been nuanced. The company has been quietly building its crypto infrastructure for years, having acquired blockchain analytics firm CipherTrace back in 2021. It later shut down many of CipherTrace's key products, suggesting that early acquisition didn't pan out as planned. The company also joined a consortium focused on stablecoin technology alongside Robinhood and K:raken, and launched its Crypto Partner Program to foster collaboration in the space.

But the BVNK deal is a different order of magnitude. This is not a defensive data play or a consortium membership. This is Mastercard paying top dollar for the most battle-tested stablecoin infrastructure business in the world and betting that the orchestration layer between fiat and on-chain money will be one of the most valuable positions in payments over the next decade.

What Happens Next
The deal is expected to close by end of 2026, and both companies will presumably spend the intervening months navigating regulatory reviews across multiple jurisdictions. Given BVNK's existing licenses in the U.S. and EU and Mastercard's regulatory relationships globally, the path to approval is probably cleaner than it might be for a crypto-native acquirer.
 
The more interesting question is how BVNK's existing enterprise clients will react. Worldpay, Deel, Flywire and others built integrations with an independent infrastructure provider. Being absorbed into one of the world's largest payments networks changes the dynamic. Mastercard will need to make the case that the independence and product velocity those customers rely on will survive the acquisition intact.

And then there is the competitive landscape. Stripe now has Bridge. Mastercard will have BVNK. Coinbase, having walked away from the deal, will presumably continue building or find another infrastructure target. PayPal, which just announced the expansion of its own stablecoin PYUSD to 70 markets worldwide, is clearly not sitting still either. The scramble for position in the stablecoin payments stack is only getting more crowded, and today's announcement is more an acceleration of that competition than a resolution of it.

For BVNK's founders, who built the company from scratch in 2021 into a $1.8 billion exit in under five years, it is an extraordinary outcome. For Mastercard, it is a significant bet that the future of payments runs on both rails at once, fiat and on-chain, and that the company that controls the bridge between them will be in a very strong position. 

 

Whether that bet pays off depends on whether stablecoin payment volumes continue their current trajectory or whether the technology hits the kind of adoption ceiling that has frustrated crypto advocates before.

The contingent $300 million in the deal structure suggests both sides are hedging a little on that question. Which, all things considered, is probably the right instinct.