The U.S. Department of the Treasury, specifically the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), has frozen $344 million in USDT allegedly linked to Iran.

 

In a Friday post on X, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the crypto seizure. The move, according to Bessent, is part of the U.S. effort to systematically degrade Tehran’s ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds.

 

 

“We will follow the money that Tehran is desperately attempting to move outside of the country and target all financial lifelines tied to the regime,” Bessent wrote.

 

While the announcement from Bessent confirmed the freeze and the imposition of sanctions on the owners of the wallets involved, the technical action of the freeze itself was carried out by stablecoin issuer Tether. The stablecoin issuer had earlier stated that it was supporting OFAC and law enforcement agencies in freezing the $344 million linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Hezbollah militant group.

 

Following the announcement, Tether blacklisted two specific wallet addresses on the Tron blockchain, holding $213 million and $131 million in USDT respectively. This move by the U.S. Department of the Treasury follows a similar action in February, when OFAC sanctioned more than 30 individuals and entities allegedly linked to Iran’s oil shipping network.

 

Tether Expands Blockchain Development Efforts

Tether has consistently pushed forward with innovative blockchain developments. Just this month, it launched tether.wallet, its self custodial wallet that brings Tether’s global financial infrastructure within reach of those who have been left unbanked by the traditional financial system.

 

In an effort to enhance the utility of its stablecoins, Tether last month invested 5.2 million dollars into Ark Labs, supporting the building of Arkade, an infrastructure layer that brings programmable, instant transactions directly to the Bitcoin network. Through the Arkade network being built by Arkade Labs, we might see the introduction of stablecoins, including USDT, into Bitcoin.

 

Tether, for the first time, expanded USAT, its US regulated stablecoin, to the Celo blockchain. Since Celo is an Ethereum Layer 2 network optimized for payments, the expansion of USAT to Celo enabled the integration of USAT into Opera MiniPay and Google Cloud infrastructure.

 

 

MetaMask cofounder Dan Finlay has left Consensys after spending about a decade working with the self-custodial wallet firm.

 

Finlay announced his departure from Consensys in a Thursday post on X, citing burnout and the need to spend more time with his family. He also wished the Consensys team well, saying the team has an amazing road ahead of them.

 

 

Since joining Consensys in 2016, Dan Finlay, alongside cofounder Aaron Davis, worked hand in hand on the development of MetaMask, Consensys’s self-custodial wallet. Finlay played an instrumental role in shaping MetaMask, transforming it from a browser-based Ethereum wallet into one of the mainstream crypto wallets, enabling access to decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and many other on-chain services.

 

Finlay was also key in the design and creation of some of MetaMask’s technical features, including Snaps, a MetaMask feature that allows third-party developers to safely extend MetaMask’s capabilities. Some of the capabilities added through Snaps include the ability to explore other blockchains such as Bitcoin, Solana, and Cosmos, as well as improved security features and the ability to receive warnings about malicious transactions occurring within a MetaMask wallet.

 

On his last day at Consensys, Finlay highlighted the launch of Advanced Permissions, ERC-7715, stating that he was over the moon regarding its launch. Advanced Permissions is a feature that allows decentralized applications to request pre-approved permissions from a MetaMask user to execute transactions on their behalf.

 

With this Advanced Permissions ERC-7715 feature, a user can activate or grant a particular request in their MetaMask wallet without having to manually approve it repeatedly.

 

Voluntary Exits Not Uncommon Among Crypto Founders

Like Dan Finlay, it is not uncommon to see crypto founders voluntarily step away from work to focus on other important aspects of life, especially their families.

 

On the same day Finlay announced his exit from ConsenSys, Bitcoin advocate and podcaster Preston Pysh announced that he was stepping away from public work and social media to focus on his wife and children.

 

Earlier this month, Ethereum researcher Josh Stark announced his departure from the Ethereum Foundation after spending five years there. According to an X post, Stark said he was stepping away from work to focus more on his family and friends.

 

 

Volo Protocol, a decentralized finance protocol built on the Sui blockchain, has suffered a security breach that led to the loss of approximately $3.5 million in digital assets.

 

In an effort to maintain transparency, the team in an X post on Wednesday publicly announced the security breach. According to the team, the attack only affected assets in selected vaults, including Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), Matrixdock Gold XAUm, and USDC (USDC).

 

 

On detecting the breach, the team said it acted quickly to contain it and minimize further damage. It stated, “We detected the attack, immediately notified the Sui Foundation and ecosystem partners to contain the damage, and froze the vaults to prevent any further exposure.”

 

As of the time of its first reporting on the incident, the Volo team said that the $28 million in total value locked across other vaults was safe, adding that all vaults on the protocol were temporarily frozen pending a full postmortem and remediation. The team also said it was in damage control mode and was actively working with on chain investigators and ecosystem partners to recover the stolen funds.

 

The team released updates on the hack

Since the hack happened, the Volo team has, in three separate updates, transparently informed the community about the efforts being made to recover the stolen funds.

 

In the first two updates, the team said it was already working with ecosystem partners and had successfully frozen approximately $500 million of the stolen funds, while also intercepting and blocking the hacker’s attempt to bridge 19.6 WBTC. According to the Volo team, these funds were no longer under the hacker’s control.

 

In a third update, the team said it had already frozen $2 million of the stolen funds, and that together with ecosystem partners and security teams, it had flagged the hacker’s EVM addresses across the majority of centralized exchanges, swappers, and KYC tools.

 

The Volo protocol hack came shortly after the KelpDAO exploit and the Drift Protocol exploit, which led to a combined loss of over $570 million, and are currently the largest DeFi hacks that have occurred this year. So far, over $770 million has been lost to DeFi hacks this year.

 

 

Crypto platform Blockchain.com has rolled out a new perpetual futures trading feature within its non-custodial DeFi wallet, allowing traders to open leveraged positions directly from the wallet.

 

The new feature, according to Blockchain.com, allows traders to trade perpetual futures directly where their assets are held, eliminating the need to continuously move or convert funds between exchanges and platforms. Traders on Blockchain.com can now access more than 190 crypto markets with leverage of up to 40x, without futures contracts expiring.

 

 

The newly launched feature is powered by the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid and is aimed at removing friction associated with derivatives and futures trading.

 

"We have spent the last decade focused on making crypto easy and borderless for everyone," said Nic Cary, co-founder and vice chairman of Blockchain.com. "We want to make the jump from holding your crypto to actually using it feel instant," he added. "By letting you fund your account with your own Bitcoin while keeping full control of your keys, we are proving that managing your own money can actually be the easiest way to trade."

 

Some of the features of this new perpetual futures trading offering include real-time pricing, flexible leverage options, and intuitive risk management tools, all designed to operate seamlessly within the wallet interface. Users can open, manage, and close positions while maintaining full control of their private keys.

 

The Perps Space is Extremely Active

Perpetual futures, which involve speculating on the price of an asset using leverage without directly owning that asset, have grown in recent times.

 

According to a report from CryptoQuant, perpetual futures trading volume reached $61.7 trillion in 2025, a 29% increase from the previous year and a 232% increase compared to the $18.6 trillion spot crypto trading volume for that year. There has also been an increase in institutions offering perpetual futures trading.

 

Just this week, prediction market platform Polymarket announced its expansion into perpetual futures trading. Meanwhile, last week, Payward, the parent company of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, announced it would acquire crypto derivatives platform Bitnomial for up to $550 million, as part of Kraken’s broader strategy to expand into perpetual futures trading.

 

 

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a compensation program for victims of the $4 billion OneCoin crypto fraud, using assets forfeited by the OneCoin project’s architects.

 

According to a Monday press release, the remission program launched by the U.S. Department of Justice is open to all victims who purchased the fraudulent OneCoin cryptocurrency between 2014 and 2019, with the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering, Narcotics and Forfeiture Section handling the compensation process.

 

Victims who suffered losses from investing in the fraudulent OneCoin project have been urged to obtain a petition form online at www.onecoinremission.com. Victims may also call, email, or write to the Remission Administrator to request that a petition form be sent to them, and they must do so before the June 30 deadline.

 

The planned compensation has drawn strong positive comments from the public, with many applauding the Department of Justice for taking this step. Reacting to this news, Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said his office will continue working to seize criminal proceeds and prioritize returning money to victims.

 

“With the unwavering support from the Department of Justice, the FBI maintains its commitment to returning these stolen funds to their rightful owners,” said James C. Barnacle Jr, the FBI assistant director in charge of the case.

 

“Our office will continue its investigative pursuit of these criminal fraudsters, especially in locating Ruja Ignatova, an FBI Top Ten Fugitive, alongside our partners at the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation and the Southern District of New York,” Barnacle added. He also urged the public to provide any information that could lead to the arrest of Ruja Ignatova, OneCoin’s alleged mastermind.

 

Inside the OneCoin Crypto Fraud

OneCoin was a fraudulent cryptocurrency project founded in 2014 by Ruja Ignatova, often referred to as the Cryptoqueen, alongside Karl Sebastian Greenwood. It was often referred to as the “Bitcoin killer” and was launched and marketed as a simpler, safer, and more accessible alternative to Bitcoin.

 

Although marketed as a cryptocurrency project, it was far from a legitimate cryptocurrency and was run like a classic Ponzi or pyramid scheme.

 

Despite the team falsely claiming that it had its own private blockchain and mining facilities in Bulgaria and Hong Kong, OneCoin fell short of being a cryptocurrency, with no decentralized public ledger and it was not tradeable on cryptocurrency exchanges.

 

Investors also had to buy expensive educational packages priced anywhere between €100 and over €100,000, with some spending up to €225,000 on these packages that were largely plagiarized from Wikipedia and other online content. The more investors spent on these packages, the more OneCoins they purchased, and the more they recruited new members, the higher their commissions.

 

This continued until the OneCoin marketplace temporarily shut down in early 2016 under the guise of carrying out upgrades and maintenance. The so called upgrade lasted several months, during which Ignatova, the project’s founder, disappeared in 2017.

 

What followed was a series of raids and arrests targeting the project’s executives, including Sebastian Greenwood, OneCoin’s co founder, Irina Dilkinska, an executive, and Konstantin Ignatov, Ruja’s brother, as well as the seizure of several of the project’s assets.

 

Image credit: fbi.gov

 

Ruja Ignatova remains a fugitive and is still on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, with a $5 million reward offered for information leading to her arrest. Europol is also searching for her.

 

 

The world's largest stablecoin issuer is getting into the wallet game. Tether has officially launched tether.wallet, a self-custodial application that puts its payments infrastructure directly into the hands of end users for the first time.

 

For more than a decade, Tether's USDT stablecoin quietly powers hundreds of billions in daily trading volume, settlement, and cross-border payments across dozens of blockchains. But, most users never interact with Tether directly. That is about to change

 

The new app, simply called tether.wallet, supports four assets at launch: USDT, the company's U.S.-market stablecoin USAT, its gold-backed token XAUT, and Bitcoin, available both on-chain and through the Lightning Network. USDT and XAUT run on Ethereum, Polygon, Plasma, and Arbitrum at launch, while USAT is limited to Ethereum for now, with more networks reportedly in the pipeline.

 

No More Long Wallet Addresses

One of the more practical features is the use of human-readable identifiers, think something like [email protected], instead of the standard hexadecimal wallet strings that have caused users to accidentally send funds to the wrong address for years. Transactions also settle without requiring users to hold separate gas tokens; fees are paid directly in the asset being transferred. For anyone who has fumbled through a failed transaction because they did not have enough ETH to cover gas, that is a genuinely meaningful improvement.

 

Private keys remain fully under user control. All transactions are signed locally on the device, and Tether says it never holds user funds or keys at any point. It is a fully self-custodial model, which distinguishes it from the exchange-hosted wallets that have drawn scrutiny after a string of high-profile custodial failures in recent years.

 

570 Million Users, and Counting

Tether says its technology already reaches more than 570 million people across over 160 countries as of March 2026, with tens of millions of new wallets being added each quarter. The company is pitching tether.wallet as the next logical step in that growth, designed for mainstream users who have never touched a crypto wallet before, not just the crypto-native crowd who already know what a seed phrase is.

 

CEO Paolo Ardoino has been making the rounds with this one. He described the product as "the People's Wallet," framing it as a natural evolution of Tether's role from building the foundation of the digital asset economy to making it directly usable by anyone. His pitch goes further than stablecoins, though. Ardoino has long argued that AI agents will need native, self-custodial wallets for machine-to-machine payments, and the Wallet Development Kit (WDK) that underpins tether.wallet is designed with that kind of future in mind.

 

tether.wallet is built on Tether's open-source Wallet Development Kit, which the company has been quietly developing for a while now. The WDK had its first significant public deployment in January 2026, when video platform Rumble launched a non-custodial wallet built on the same infrastructure, enabling creator tipping in Bitcoin and USDT across Rumble's 80 million users. That earlier rollout effectively served as a real-world stress test before today's broader consumer launch.

 

The open source nature means third-party developers, businesses, and potentially AI systems can all build self-custodial wallet products on the same foundation. Tether is positioning this less as a single app and more as the beginning of a distribution layer.

 

Tether's Big Year...So Far

Tether has had a busy year on multiple fronts. In January, the company launched USAT, a GENIUS Act-compliant U.S.-regulated stablecoin issued through Anchorage Digital Bank, a direct challenge to Circle's USDC in the institutional and regulated segment of the market. In March, Tether engaged KPMG for what it described as the first-ever full financial audit of its $185 billion USDT reserves, a significant departure from the periodic attestations the company has historically relied on. PwC was also brought in to assist with internal systems preparation.

 

By moving into consumer-facing wallet infrastructure, Tether is entering territory already occupied by MetaMask, Phantom, Trust Wallet, and others. Those players have years of user experience, broad network support, and established reputations. Whether Tether's brand recognition among non-crypto users, combined with the built-in familiarity of USDT, translates into meaningful adoption is the real question. The stablecoin market itself crossed $315 billion in March 2026, an all-time high, and analysts expect this number to grow dramatically over the next few years.

 

 

 

 

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), Hong Kong’s primary banking regulator, has issued its first stablecoin issuer licenses to the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) and Anchorpoint Financial Limited, in line with the city’s new stablecoin framework.

 

The licenses, which were granted on April 10, represent the first batch issued under Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance framework. The process was competitive, involving 36 applicants, with selections based on several factors, including risk management, credible use cases, and compliance readiness.

 

With these licenses granted, HSBC, one of Hong Kong’s largest and oldest banks, and Anchorpoint Financial Limited, a joint financial venture led by Standard Chartered Bank, Hong Kong Telecommunications (HKT), and Animoca Brands, are now a step closer to achieving their stablecoin plans.

 

HSBC plans to launch a Hong Kong dollar-denominated stablecoin by the second half of 2026. The stablecoin will maintain a one-to-one peg with the Hong Kong dollar and will be backed by high-quality liquid assets held in segregated accounts. It will also be integrated into two of HSBC’s consumer applications, the PayMe app, which already has more than 3.3 million users, and the HSBC HK Mobile Banking app.

 

With this integration, HSBC users will be able to perform peer-to-peer transfers and peer-to-merchant payments using the Hong Kong dollar-backed stablecoin directly within HSBC applications.

 

Anchorpoint Financial Limited also plans to launch a Hong Kong dollar-pegged stablecoin, with its first rollout expected this quarter. While the stablecoin is intended to support the digital economy, including cross-border and local payments, Anchorpoint’s initial focus will be on institutional investors and business partners, with retail users to follow at a later stage.

 

With this first batch of stablecoin issuer licenses and additional approvals underway, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority aims to address financial challenges in Hong Kong and support the development of the city’s digital asset industry.

 

“The granting of stablecoin issuer licenses is an important milestone for the development of digital assets in Hong Kong. We look forward to the issuers launching their businesses according to their plans, exploring growth opportunities while properly managing risks,” said Eddie Yue, Chief Executive of the HKMA. “We hope their promotion of regulated stablecoins will address pain points in financial and economic activities, create value for both individuals and businesses, and support the healthy development of digital assets in Hong Kong.”

 

Hong Kong Stablecoin Ordinance

The Hong Kong Stablecoin Ordinance is a regulatory framework passed into law by Hong Kong's Legislative Council in August 2025. The framework establishes a comprehensive licensing and supervisory regime specifically for fiat-backed stablecoins.

 

Under this framework, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority sets standards for stablecoin issuers seeking licenses in the jurisdiction. These include requirements related to financial resources, reserve assets, risk management, and anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism compliance, among others.

 

Although Hong Kong’s stablecoin regime is considered one of the strictest in the world, it is designed to promote trust and support the long term adoption of stablecoins rather than allow unregulated growth that could ultimately lead to systemic risks.

 

 

Decentralized email platform Dmail Network has announced that it will cease all services and shut down on May 25 after five years of operation.

 

The team, in a press release, cited several factors leading to the decision, including high infrastructure costs, unsustainable monetization, and limited token utility. It urged users to export their data from the system before the shutdown date.

 

Image credit: Dmail

 

What Happened?

The costs of running its decentralized infrastructure, including bandwidth, storage, and computing, had become extremely high. According to the team, these expenses have long consumed a large portion of its budget, making it impossible to continue operating a sustainable business.

 

Conditions worsened as core team members began leaving. The remaining members, the team said, could no longer maintain such a high cost decentralized infrastructure.

 

Despite reportedly having over 49 million users and, according to DappRadar, 4.9 million unique active wallets monthly in 2025, these figures did not help the team establish a sustainable business model. The company experimented with several monetization approaches, including its Mail to Earn model, its sub-hub model, and premium offerings, but said users were not willing to pay for them. DMAIL, the protocol’s native cryptocurrency, also had very limited utility.

 

With the closure date set, the team has launched a mail export tool and account cancellation feature that will allow users to securely transfer their email content to other platforms such as Gmail. After exporting, users can cancel their accounts and associated data, including emails, NFT domains, and social addresses, the team noted. Users were urged to complete the export process before the May 15 deadline.

 

Following the announcement, the DMAIL token declined sharply, falling by more than 70 percent to all time lows. At the time of publication, the DMAIL token, according to CoinGecko, was trading at around $0.00014, representing a decline of about 99.99 percent from its peak price of $0.97 in 2024.

 

A Wave of Web3 Shutdown 

Dmail’s shutdown is one of several closures among crypto companies seen in recent times. Leap Wallet, a non-custodial wallet infrastructure built on Cosmos, has announced that it will shut down and exit the crypto market by May 28 next month. This announcement comes shortly after the crypto custody company Entropy and the NFT marketplace Magic Eden wound down and shut down in January and March of this year.

 

Crypto exchanges and trading platforms have also been affected by this wave of shutdowns. In March, the crypto platform Bit.com announced that it would shut down its derivatives exchange operations, citing declining user activity. DeFi aggregator platform Slingshot also shut down in February, citing low usage. These are just some of the more than 20 crypto companies that have wound dow their operations this year.

 

 

In a Thursday post on X, stablecoin issuer Circle announced that it will be launching cirBTC, its own version of wrapped Bitcoin for institutional markets.

 

 

cirBTC will maintain a 1:1 backing with Bitcoin and will be launched on Ethereum as well as on Circle’s Layer-1 Arc blockchain. Circle also says the yet-to-be-launched crypto asset will be credible, claiming it was designed with the same foundations as USDC and EURC.

 

Despite the existence of dozens of wrapped Bitcoin products in the crypto market, Circle says several features set cirBTC apart from other versions of wrapped Bitcoin:

• Institutional-grade global standard: cirBTC is well-suited for over-the-counter (OTC) desks, market makers, and lending protocols, as well as other institutional crypto users seeking a neutral, secure, and high-performance tokenized version of Bitcoin.
• Verifiability: cirBTC reserves can be independently verified onchain in real time by any counterparty.
• Interoperable infrastructure: cirBTC is designed to be multi-chain compatible. Although it will launch on Ethereum and Arc first, support is expected to expand to additional chains over time.

 

Circle Joins the Wrapped Bitcoin Race

With cirBTC now in place, Circle will compete with the likes of BitGo, Coinbase, and Ren Protocol, whose wrapped versions of Bitcoin have long dominated the crypto and DeFi space.

 

BitGo, in combination with Kyber Network and Ren Protocol, launched its own version of wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) in 2018. WBTC was introduced with the goal of bringing Bitcoin liquidity into Ethereum and DeFi protocols, and since its launch, it has been widely used for DeFi lending, borrowing, and trading.

 

WBTC currently holds a dominant market share of about 85% of the total wrapped Bitcoin market, with a market capitalization of approximately $7.9 billion, a 1:1 backing with Bitcoin, and roughly 119,000 WBTC in circulation.

 

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase also launched cbBTC, its own version of wrapped Bitcoin, in 2024. cbBTC was introduced with the goal of providing institutional-grade, exchange-native wrapped Bitcoin that would serve as an alternative to BitGo’s WBTC while tightly integrating into Coinbase services and the Base ecosystem.

 

cbBTC currently has a market capitalization of about $5.9 billion, a circulating supply of approximately 88,000 cbBTC tokens, and a 1:1 backing with Bitcoin.

 

To bring Bitcoin liquidity into DeFi, several other crypto exchanges have also created their own versions of wrapped Bitcoin, including Binance Wrapped BTC (BTCB), Kraken Wrapped BTC (kBTC), and OKX Wrapped BTC (XBTC).

 

 

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.

 

 

This is the launch that the blockchain industry has spent years waiting for. The Midnight network has announced that mainnet is live, and with this groundbreaking moment, something that no previous generation of blockchain has managed to deliver: end-to-end programmable privacy that is flexible, enforceable, and built for the real world. After years of research, development, and collaboration involving scientists, engineers, developers, and institutional partners across the globe, the fourth generation of blockchain technology is officially here.

 

The timing could not feel more significant. Within days of the mainnet going live, Midnight confirmed what may be the most consequential real-world blockchain deal announced in years. Monument Bank, a Bank of England-regulated institution serving over 100,000 clients with more than 7 billion pounds in savings deposits, announced plans to tokenize up to 250 million pounds of retail customer deposits directly on the Midnight network. Those deposits remain interest-bearing, fully backed in sterling, and protected under the UK's Financial Services Compensation Scheme. It is the first time a UK-regulated bank has ever moved retail deposits onto a public blockchain, and it happened at the exact moment Midnight's mainnet came to life.

 

Charles Hoskinson, founder of Input Output Group and the visionary behind Midnight and Cardano, was candid about the scale of what this represents. Writing on X following the Monument announcement, he called it "one of the largest deals we've ever done" and said it could bring "hundreds of millions to billions of TVL" to the Midnight ecosystem. More striking is what Monument Technology plans to do next: offer the same tokenized deposit infrastructure to other banks through a Banking-as-a-Service platform. 

 

 

A New Generation of Blockchain, Built for the Real World

To understand why this launch matters so much, it helps to understand what came before it. Hoskinson has framed Midnight's arrival in the clearest possible terms: Satoshi gave us sound money, Ethereum gave us programmability, Cardano brought interoperability and governance, and Midnight "gives us our identity and privacy back." Each generation solved the limitations of the last. Midnight is solving the biggest one remaining.

 

The world's value has stayed off-chain for a reason. Trillions of dollars in real estate, private equity, debt, and currency cannot be digitized on transparent public ledgers without exposing the sensitive data that institutions and individuals depend on keeping private. Midnight changes that equation fundamentally. Its hybrid ledger architecture combines public and private data, allowing applications to process and verify sensitive personal, financial, and commercial information without ever exposing it to the network. Zero-knowledge proofs are generated locally on a user's device and submitted for validation, meaning identity, credit, and compliance verification can all happen on-chain with the underlying data never leaving the user's hands.

 

The tokenomics are equally well-designed for mainstream adoption. Midnight operates on a dual-component model: NIGHT, the governance and utility token, and DUST, the renewable resource used to power transactions. NIGHT holders generate DUST over time, and developers can hold NIGHT to cover transaction costs for their users entirely. For the first time, end-users can interact with a blockchain-powered application without ever needing to hold or even be aware of a crypto token. That is not a small thing. That is how you build for a billion users.

 

The caliber of institutions that signed on to run Midnight's founding federated nodes is genuinely unprecedented for a blockchain launch. Google Cloud, MoneyGram, Vodafone's Pairpoint division, eToro, Blockdaemon, Bullish, Worldpay, AlphaTON Capital, and Shielded Technologies are all running live infrastructure on the Midnight network right now. This is not a list of logos on a website. These entities are producing blocks on a live, production blockchain.

 

Consider what each of those names brings. Blockdaemon secures over 110 billion dollars in digital assets across networks globally. MoneyGram operates payment infrastructure spanning more than 200 countries and territories, and is already exploring how private on-chain payments can flow across that entire footprint. eToro carries more than 35 million registered users. Google Cloud brings enterprise-grade infrastructure and Confidential Computing capabilities backed by Mandiant security monitoring. Hoskinson put it plainly at launch: "For the first time, organisations of this scale have committed not only to running critical infrastructure but also to building and deploying live applications on a public network."

 

The rollout is structured in phases, which reflects how seriously the Midnight Foundation is taking stability and security at this stage. The current Kukolu phase establishes the operational foundation. The Mohalu phase, targeted for Q2 2026, will bring in Cardano stake pool operators and activate the DUST Capacity Exchange, beginning the move toward broader decentralization. Full cross-chain interoperability with networks including Ethereum and Solana is planned for the Hua phase in Q3 2026. This is a network being built to last, not rushed to market.

 

 

Privacy That Works With Compliance, Not Against It

What makes Midnight's privacy architecture so significant is that it has been designed from the ground up for regulated environments. This is not a privacy coin. Midnight is not trying to make transactions untraceable. What it delivers is something far more powerful for institutional adoption: the ability to prove facts about data without revealing the data itself. KYC status, solvency, eligibility, and settlement completion can all be verified on-chain while the underlying customer records remain completely shielded from public view.

 

The scale of the opportunity this unlocks is staggering. Aleo's 2025 Privacy Gap Report found that approximately 1.22 trillion dollars in institutional stablecoin transaction volume currently moves through on-chain rails, with just 0.0013% of that settling on privacy-enabled infrastructure. The gap has not existed because institutions lack interest. It has existed because no compliant privacy tooling was available. Midnight is the tooling. The Monument deal is the proof.

 

Midnight Foundation President Fahmi Syed captured the broader vision at launch: "When privacy is built into the system itself, it becomes possible to bring real-world activity and assets on-chain without exposing the underlying data, unlocking entirely new forms of economic value that were previously impossible on transparent infrastructure." That is not marketing language. It is a description of what the Monument deal already demonstrates in practice.

 

 

The Community Behind the Network

Midnight arrived at its genesis block with one of the broadest token holder bases in blockchain history already in place. The Glacier Drop distribution attracted participants from across eight major blockchain ecosystems, with over 3.5 billion NIGHT tokens claimed. A second phase, the Scavenger Mine, drew over 8 million unique wallet addresses, setting an industry record for distribution volume. NIGHT is now live on Kraken, OKX, Binance, Bitpanda, and a growing list of exchanges, and gained around 5% in the days immediately leading up to the mainnet launch as the momentum built.

 

The developer community has also been building with real urgency. The Midnight Summit hackathon in November 2025 brought together over 120 builders working on privacy applications across healthcare, AI, governance, and finance. Smart contract deployments on the Preprod network surged 1,617% in November alone. Midnight's Compact smart contract language, a domain-specific language built on familiar TypeScript syntax, is already enabling developers to build ZK-powered applications without needing years of cryptographic expertise. The technical barrier to building on Midnight is lower than it has ever been for any privacy-focused network.

 

There is a real sense across the space that something genuinely new has arrived. Hoskinson's generational framing resonates because the history backs it up. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano each opened doors that the previous generation could not. Midnight opens the door to the world's real economy, the trillions in assets that have remained off-chain because no infrastructure could protect them adequately. That door is now open. The genesis block has been written, the institutional partners are live, the first bank deal is signed, and the ecosystem is just getting started. The dawn of Midnight is here.

 

Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, has hired KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms, to conduct its first full audit of its USDT reserves. It has also engaged PwC to support the preparation of its internal systems.

 

The move comes days after Tether announced plans to work with one of the Big Four firms on an inaugural audit of its stablecoin reserves. Although it did not initially name the firm, the Financial Times reported that KPMG had been selected, citing sources familiar with the matter.

 

Prior to now, Tether had, for several years, engaged BDO Italia, an Italian affiliate of the global accounting firm BDO, to conduct periodic attestations of its reserves. These attestations involved BDO Italia taking a point-in-time snapshot of Tether's USDT reserves.

 

These snapshots helped confirm that, at a specific date, Tether's reported assets, including cash, U.S. Treasuries, gold, Bitcoin, and secured loans, met or exceeded the circulating supply of USDT. They were conducted quarterly and also included details on Tether's profit, reserve composition, and excess reserves.

 

While these attestations provided a degree of transparency and accountability, they were not full, comprehensive audits, as they relied on agreed-upon procedures and did not include elements typically associated with a full audit, such as in-depth testing of internal controls, continuous transaction verification, and formal risk assessments.

 

Tether’s Expansion Goals

Apart from ensuring transparency, the audit of its reserves aligns with Tether’s U.S. expansion goals under the GENIUS framework for stablecoins.

 

Signed into law by President Trump on July 18, 2025, the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act establishes a federal regulatory framework for dollar-backed payment stablecoins.

 

The framework outlines requirements that must be met by stablecoin issuers operating in the United States, including:

 

• Full reserve backing with high-quality liquid assets, such as cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries.
• Comprehensive audits and robust internal controls for larger issuers.
• Strict anti-money laundering (AML), redemption, and consumer protection requirements.
• Monthly public disclosures of reserve composition.

 

Tether, in partnership with crypto bank Anchorage Digital, launched USAT, a dollar-pegged stablecoin designed to comply with the GENIUS Act, as part of efforts to expand its presence in the U.S. market under the GENIUS framework.

 

The launch provides Tether with immediate regulatory cover, potentially making the asset more attractive to U.S. institutions that have previously avoided offshore-issued stablecoins such as USDT. Because USAT is issued by Anchorage Digital, a U.S.-based company, it has been positioned as a “made in America” product—marking a significant step in Tether’s broader U.S. expansion strategy.

 

Since comprehensive reserve audits are among the requirements for stablecoin issuers seeking to operate in the U.S., the KPMG audit helps position Tether as compliant with U.S. standards.