Decentralized finance protocol Ethena Labs has partnered with Anchorage Digital, a digital asset infrastructure provider, to expand its presence in institutional lending through Anchorage Digital's Atlas Collateral Management platform, which manages institutional-grade digital asset collateral.

 

 

As Ethena Labs seeks to deepen its involvement in institutional lending, the partnership will see Anchorage Digital act as collateral manager for Ethena's institutional lending activities. This arrangement allows Ethena to focus on deploying capital for loans, while Anchorage Digital manages and safeguards the associated collateral under its custody.

 

"Institutions want access to crypto native capital, but not at the cost of custody, controls, or operational rigor. Atlas Collateral Management lets protocols like Ethena Labs meet institutional borrowers where they are, combining the speed of DeFi with the standards institutions require," said Nathan McCauley, Co-Founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital.

 

Through the Atlas Collateral Management platform, Anchorage can monitor collateral and loan thresholds in real time, support margin processes, and execute rules-based actions when necessary. Because the collateral remains under Anchorage's custody and does not move on the chain, Ethena can access traditional institutional lending markets without requiring institutions to adopt blockchain native custody solutions or interact directly with DeFi smart contracts.

 

For borrowers, the collaboration provides access to crypto native credit while allowing them to maintain their existing custodial, compliance, and risk management frameworks. Atlas offers protocols a streamlined way to expand into institutional lending without building and maintaining their own collateral management, monitoring, and liquidation infrastructure.

 

The partnership between Ethena Labs and Anchorage Digital builds on an existing relationship. In July 2025, Ethena partnered with Anchorage Digital Bank, the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States, to become the primary issuer of USDtb, Ethena Labs' institutional-grade stablecoin.

 

As part of its broader push into institutional lending, Ethena recently partnered with Solana-based DeFi platform Jupiter and Bitwise Asset Management to launch an institutional-grade USDe lending market on Jupiter's lending platform.

 

The partnership between Anchorage Digital and Ethena Labs comes at roughly the same time as Coinbase's investment in Ethena Labs, which included the purchase of an undisclosed amount of ENA tokens. Coinbase and Ethena are working together to launch on-chain savings and finance products for Coinbase's more than 100 million users.

 

 

Global cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has launched direct Indian Rupee (INR) rails for users in India following approval from one of the country's main financial regulators.

 

 

With the launch of the INR rails, Indian users can now directly deposit and withdraw Indian Rupees on Coinbase using the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) from their Indian bank accounts, without relying on peer to peer rails or intermediaries.

 

Using Indian Rupees, customers will be able to access spot trading across a range of assets, alongside perpetual futures contracts covering major crypto assets.

 

“We have built local INR order books that provide dedicated liquidity for Indian customers, while maintaining continued access to our global exchange,” John O'Loghlen, Coinbase's Regional Managing Director for APAC, wrote in a blog post.

 

Coinbase has also rolled out advanced features for users seeking additional functionality, including professional grade trading tools, built in institutional grade APIs, WebSocket order book streaming, and an integrated TradingView charting tool that allows traders to analyse price movements, trends, and technical indicators.

 

Coinbase Deepens Its Presence in India

With this expansion, Coinbase aims to continue contributing meaningfully to India’s growing crypto ecosystem. It is one of the leading investors in CoinDCX, India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which currently serves over 22 million users.

 

Through Base, its Ethereum layer two network, Coinbase has contributed over 1 million dollars to the Indian builder community through hackathons, direct grants, and fellowships, with more than 4,000 builders in India already building on Base and 150 of these projects growing into real startups.

 

To demonstrate its commitment to the growth of the Indian crypto ecosystem and reaffirm its long term presence in India, Coinbase says its latest rollout complies with the Financial Intelligence Unit India regulatory framework and other taxation laws.

 

As a result, Indian users can deposit Indian rupees directly from their bank accounts onto the exchange, trade in both spot and futures markets, and withdraw their funds back to their bank accounts whenever they choose, without any additional steps or workarounds.

 

Coinbase’s expansion in India comes shortly after the exchange received approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, to offer offshore crypto perpetuals and options to users in the United States.

 

Coinbase also recently partnered with Flipcash, a digital payments app, to launch the app’s first stablecoin using its custom stablecoin platform.

 

 

For years, perpetual futures have been crypto's most traded instrument and almost none of that volume has touched U.S.-regulated infrastructure. Until now. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally approved KalshiEX to list BTCPERP, a no-expiry Bitcoin perpetual futures contract tied to spot BTC prices. On the same day, the agency's Market Participants Division issued a staff-level interpretation clearing Coinbase Financial Markets to route U.S. customers to certain derivatives on Deribit, its offshore affiliate. Two very different regulatory moves, made on the same morning, pointed at the same underlying problem: American traders have been effectively locked out of the largest segment of global crypto markets.

 

CFTC Chairman Mike Selig framed the Kalshi order as delivery on a specific commitment to onshore crypto perpetuals, describing the move as a path for one of the most liquid segments of the crypto asset markets to exist inside the U.S. regulatory framework. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong put a number to the problem his company says it is solving: until now, U.S. users have been locked out of roughly 80% of global crypto markets, which includes perpetual futures and options. Coinbase cited Deribit's more than $185 billion in July 2025 trading volume and approximately $60 billion in open interest at the time of acquisition to illustrate the scale of what domestic traders could not legally access through regulated channels.

 

What the CFTC Actually Approved

BTCPERP is a cash-settled contract referencing the U.S. dollar spot price of one Bitcoin, as tracked by the CF Benchmarks Bitcoin Real Time Index. It trades in units of one ten-thousandth of a BTC, runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and has no fixed expiry date.  Traditional futures converge toward their underlying asset at expiration because physical delivery or final cash settlement pulls the contract to spot. A perpetual has no such date, so the convergence mechanism operates continuously through periodic funding payments between long and short holders. If the contract trades above spot, longs pay shorts. If it trades below, shorts pay longs. The economic pressure keeps the perpetual price tracking Bitcoin in real time.

 

The CFTC's approval leans heavily on Bitcoin's specific market structure as its justification. The order notes Bitcoin's deep, active, and continuous spot trading across broadly distributed venues, with pricing observable around the clock. That depth is what makes the funding rate mechanism credible: arbitrageurs can act while the perpetual is live, since the underlying spot market never closes. The agency was explicit that this reasoning applies to Bitcoin and to similarly structured digital commodities with comparable market depth. Other assets will need to go through a separate review. Bitnomial had previously received certification for a product labeled a perpetual futures contract, but that contract carried a 25-year term limit and is considered a different structure. BTCPERP is the first true no-expiry perpetual to receive a Commission-level order.

 

Two Paths, Very Different Weight

The distinction between the Kalshi approval and the Coinbase staff letter matters more than it might look at first glance. Kalshi's BTCPERP is a Commission-issued order under Section 5c(c)(4) of the Commodity Exchange Act and Regulation 40.3. That is formal product approval, with binding legal weight and a clear compliance framework. Coinbase's route is different in kind. The Market Participants Division issued an interpretation and a no-action position in response to Coinbase Financial Markets. Staff confirmed that certain Deribit digital commodity derivatives may be categorized as foreign futures under Regulation 30.1, and said it would not recommend enforcement action under specified conditions tied to how customer digital assets and stablecoins are handled as margin through Coinbase affiliates.

 

Staff letters are conditional by design. The CFTC was clear: these positions represent the Market Participants Division only, are not binding on the Commission, and can be modified, suspended, or terminated. The Coinbase path is useful for reaching scale quickly because it connects U.S. clients directly to Deribit's existing liquidity pool, which is among the largest in global crypto derivatives. But it carries a thinner precedential footprint. Coinbase said institutional onboarding to Deribit options has already begun, with perpetual futures access and broader retail availability described as coming later, without a hard timeline. Retail access is expected to carry additional eligibility criteria and risk disclosure requirements.

 

The Liquidity Question Nobody Can Answer Yet

Regulatory clearance is the easy part. Getting traders to use a U.S. regulated perpetual when Binance, Bybit, and OKX offer the same exposure with deeper order books and, in most cases, higher leverage, is the actual test. Offshore exchanges process billions of dollars in Bitcoin perp volume on a slow day. The CFTC has been working toward this moment for over a year, issuing a formal request for comment in April 2025 on perpetual derivatives, their benefits, risks, market integrity implications, and customer protection questions. The approvals are, in that sense, the policy answer to the RFI. The market answer comes when Kalshi's BTCPERP goes live and traders decide whether regulated access at U.S. leverage limits is a compelling enough trade-off.

 

The CFTC's case-by-case stance on future perpetual approvals means the template is now set, but the runway is not yet cleared. Ethereum perps, Solana perps, and other digital assets with sufficient spot market depth could follow, but each application needs to clear the same review process independently. Kalshi separately indicated it plans to launch perpetual contracts on more than a dozen currencies pending additional regulatory reviews. CME's parallel push toward 24/7 crypto futures and options trading adds another dimension to the picture: traditional derivatives infrastructure is adapting to match crypto's always-on market structure, while crypto-native exchanges now have a formal path to operate inside U.S. regulatory boundaries. Whether the liquidity follows is a question of product quality, margin efficiency, and distribution reach, and none of that gets answered in an approval order.

 

The next signals are practical: Kalshi's launch terms and funding rate performance, Coinbase's timeline for rolling out perpetual futures through CFM, how retail access gets structured, and whether formal rulemaking eventually hardens the current agency posture into something more durable. For now, U.S.-regulated Bitcoin perps exist. Whether they can actually compete is the harder question, and the market will answer it faster than any regulator. It usually does.

 

Flipcash, a digital payment app founded by Ted Livingston, the founder of messaging app Kik, has partnered with Coinbase to launch USDF, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar.

 

 

According to Coinbase, the launch aims to make stablecoin issuance more accessible. Through the partnership, Flipcash can leverage Coinbase’s custom stablecoin platform to create its own stablecoin asset without having to handle much of the underlying technical complexity itself. As a result, Flipcash does not need to build an entire stablecoin infrastructure from scratch.

 

The USDF stablecoin will be issued on the Solana blockchain and will be 1:1 backed by USDC. It will also serve as Flipcash’s native currency. Since Flipcash allows users to create their own digital currencies, USDF will be the asset in which those currencies are priced and settled. It will serve as the settlement asset for trading digital currencies within the Flipcash app.

 

Coinbase’s Custom Stablecoin Platform 

Coinbase custom stablecoin, or stablecoin as a service, is a platform launched by Coinbase in 2025 that allows businesses to easily create and issue their own branded stablecoins backed by the United States dollar.

 

As the stablecoin market continues to grow and gain institutional adoption, Coinbase launched its stablecoin platform to make it easier for businesses to enter the stablecoin market, reducing the technical and compliance work associated with issuing stablecoins.

 

Stablecoins launched on Coinbase’s custom stablecoin platform, including USDF, which is the first stablecoin created on the platform, will maintain a 1-to-1 backing with USDC and will be supported across multiple chains, including Base and Solana.

 

About Flipcash 

Flipcash is a Solana-based non-custodial mobile wallet and digital payment app created by Canadian entrepreneur Ted Livingston in 2021.

 

It was created to digitize cash and make peer-to-peer payments as frictionless as possible. Through its “Currency Creator” feature, which officially went live last month, Flipcash allows anyone to create a fixed supply of digital currencies.

 

 

Senator Elizabeth Warren is not letting up. Not after the GENIUS Act. Not after the CLARITY Act. Not after nine crypto firms got federal trust charters. And certainly not after the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency spent the better part of five months quietly waving through some of the biggest names in digital assets.

 

On Monday, the Massachusetts Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee fired off a sharply worded letter to OCC Comptroller Jonathan Gould, accusing his agency of violating the National Bank Act by granting trust charters to at least nine crypto companies, including Coinbase, Ripple, Paxos, BitGo, Circle, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, Crypto.com, Stripe subsidiary Bridge, and Protego. The letter, dated May 18, demands a full accounting of the approvals, along with any communications between OCC officials and the White House or Trump family members, by June 1.

 

Regulatory Arbitrage, or Smart Business?

At the core of Warren's complaint is a fairly pointed argument: these companies are behaving like banks while holding charters that do not require them to operate like banks. National trust companies are, by design, more limited than full-service institutions. They cannot take FDIC-insured deposits. They do not engage in traditional commercial lending. They are supposed to focus on fiduciary work, managing assets on behalf of clients.

 

But Warren says the business plans she reviewed tell a different story. Several of the approved firms appear to be pursuing stablecoin issuance, custodial services, payments processing, and lending activities that resemble full-scale banking operations more than traditional trust work. She argues this creates systemic risk and amounts to regulatory arbitrage, writing: “These companies are effectively crypto banks that want to evade the fundamental safeguards and obligations that come with being a bank.”

 

That argument becomes harder to justify with how the modern banking system already operates. Under fractional reserve banking, traditional banks are permitted to lend out the vast majority of depositor funds while holding only a fraction in reserve, prioritizing leverage, liquidity, and profit generation over true one-to-one custody of customer assets. Critics argue that Warren is defending a legacy system built on counterparty risk while attacking crypto firms that, in many cases, are attempting to offer more transparent and fully reserved financial infrastructure.

 

The OCC has not responded to requests for comment. Gould, for his part, has been publicly bullish on the move toward crypto integration. When the agency announced its first wave of five conditional charter approvals back in December 2025, he framed it as a win for consumers and competition. "New entrants into the federal banking sector are good for consumers, the banking industry and the economy," he said at the time.

 

The Trump Angle Warren Will Not Ignore

There is a political dimension here that Warren has been pushing hard, and it involves the Trump family directly. World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family, is reportedly in the final stages of receiving a conditional OCC approval of its own. Warren and Gould clashed over the pending application at a Senate hearing in February, when Gould declined to commit to delaying or denying it. Warren, visibly frustrated, called him an accomplice to what she described as presidential corruption.

 

In her latest letter, Warren went further, requesting all emails, text messages, meeting summaries, and call transcripts between OCC staff and Trump, his immediate family, or anyone acting on their behalf, specifically as they relate to any of the nine approved charters. It is a broad ask, and one that almost certainly will not be met without a fight.

 

Industry Momentum Has Not Slowed Warren Down

The crypto industry has had a genuinely strong stretch in Washington. The GENIUS Act, which created a federal framework for stablecoin issuance, passed into law last year and was hailed across the industry as a landmark moment. The SEC under Chair Paul Atkins has signaled major regulatory relief, including a potential innovation exemption for tokenized securities. Crypto-friendly appointments have reshaped several key agencies.

 

And still, Warren keeps pushing back. Her office has framed the GENIUS Act as legislation that creates "light-touch regulation for crypto banks" while weakening the consumer protections that took decades to build. The trust charter campaign fits neatly into that critique. From Warren's perspective, every charter granted to a Coinbase or a Ripple is another step toward a two-tiered financial system, where traditional banks operate under strict rules while crypto firms get a cheaper, faster path into the same market.

 

What Happens Next

The June 1 deadline Warren has set is more political theater than hard deadline. The OCC is not legally obligated to respond on her timeline. But the letter sets up a paper trail, and if the agency stonewalls or the World Liberty Financial approval comes through before then, expect Warren to take that back to the committee floor.

 

The broader question, one that neither side has fully answered, is whether the OCC's chartering activity actually violates the National Bank Act or whether it represents a reasonable interpretation of existing authority. The agency has defended the charters as consistent with prior interpretive letters, some dating back to 2021. Lawyers on both sides will be watching the OCC's formal response closely, assuming one comes.

 

For crypto firms, the political noise is mostly background at this point. Charters have been granted. Business plans are moving forward. But Warren's sustained pressure does carry real risk, particularly if Democrats gain ground in 2026 midterms or if any of the chartered institutions runs into trouble. In this regulatory environment, one high-profile failure could reframe the entire debate very quickly.

 

Fredrik Haga, CEO and co-founder of crypto analytics firm Dune, has revealed the firm’s plan to lay off a quarter, or 25%, of its staff, citing AI investments as the reason for this decision.

 

 

“We’re restructuring Dune to sharpen our focus around the core data products thousands of customers across the crypto industry rely on. That unfortunately means we’ve let 25% of the team go this week. These are exceptional people I can wholeheartedly recommend. Ping me if you’re hiring top crypto talent,” Haga wrote in a post on X.

 

The decision to lay off some of its staff, according to Haga, is driven by the firm’s plan to accelerate more quickly with AI, with Dune positioning itself as the only firm to have built an end to end stack for crypto data. Its stack performs key roles in data ingestion, quality assurance, storage, cleaning, normalizing, and querying.

 

“With Dune MCP, teams and agents can now build dashboards and workflows without needing to know anything about SQL or data infrastructure and associated costs,” Haga said. Dune Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is an open protocol that allows AI tools to connect to external data sources in a structured way. It automates much of the manual work associated with data use.

 

By cutting its workforce, Dune aims to double down on AI and its end to end crypto data stack, including its model context protocol, which is already being used by some of the industry’s biggest players such as Polygon Labs, 1inch, Base, OP Labs, Blockworks, and COW Protocol.

 

Tech Layoffs Continue to Rise

Layoffs, especially in the tech and crypto sectors, continue to rise. According to a recent survey, about 81,000 layoffs were recorded in the first quarter of 2026, the highest since 2023, with the number reaching more than 100,000 by early May.

 

Several crypto companies have reduced their workforces in recent months. Coinbase most recently cut 14% of its workforce, laying off about 700 employees. The company cited a volatile crypto market and a strategic shift toward artificial intelligence focused operations as reasons for the layoffs.

 

Other companies, including Crypto.com, Gemini, Algorand Foundation, and Block, have also reduced their workforces. Many of these firms have pointed to a volatile crypto market and a broader strategic pivot toward artificial intelligence as contributing factors to the cuts.

 

 

After months of gridlock and four hours of pointed debate, the Senate Banking Committee voted 15-9 to advance the Clarity Act, sending one of the most consequential pieces of financial legislation in recent memory toward a full Senate floor vote. Two Democrats joined all Republicans on the panel in support, a small but symbolically meaningful show of bipartisan backing that industry advocates say could prove decisive when the bill eventually needs 60 votes to pass the full chamber.

 

For the digital asset industry, the vote felt like a long time coming. The bill, formally titled the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, has been kicking around Capitol Hill for well over a year. The fact that it cleared committee at all, given the partisan atmosphere that dominated much of Thursday's hearing, was seen by many in the space as a genuine win.

 

Rules of the Road, Finally

At its core, the Clarity Act tries to solve a problem that has dogged the crypto industry since its earliest days: nobody could quite agree on who was in charge. The SEC and the CFTC have spent years in an uneasy standoff over which agency has jurisdiction over which digital assets, leaving companies in legal limbo and pushing some development offshore. The bill would draw a cleaner line, classifying digital assets as either securities or commodities and assigning oversight accordingly.

 

The market responded before the committee even finished voting. Coinbase surged more than 8% on the session, as investors bet that regulatory clarity could finally unlock the broader institutional participation that has been sitting on the sidelines. Galaxy Digital climbed over 6%. Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, was up 7%. Bitcoin itself ground higher, hitting session highs near $81,500.

 

"For too long, regulatory uncertainty has sent talent, investment, and innovation overseas, strengthening foreign competitors while leaving American builders without the certainty they need to compete," said Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger, who called the committee vote a "defining moment." Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse was blunter: "If the largest economy in the world is going to lead on crypto, and it must, this is the moment."

 

Still Some Runway Ahead

Thursday's vote was a milestone, but it is not the finish line. The bill still needs to be reconciled with a separate version approved by the Senate Agriculture Committee, and the full Senate will require 60 votes to pass it, meaning a significant number of Democrats will have to come on board. The House passed its own version of the legislation last year, so the two chambers will also need to hammer out a unified text before anything heads to President Trump's desk.

 

The largest outstanding issue is an ethics provision intended to limit government officials, including the president, from profiting off crypto. Democrats have made clear they will not move forward without some version of it, while White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt has said the administration will not tolerate language targeting a specific officeholder. Both sides appeared at least open to finding common ground, with Cody Carbone of the Digital Chamber telling reporters that a deal on the ethics provision is likely a prerequisite for getting the bill to a floor vote at all. The window, several lawmakers noted, is probably August.

 

A Framework Built to Last

What makes the Clarity Act different from the patchwork of guidance and enforcement actions that have defined crypto policy for the past decade is its ambition. It does not try to pigeonhole digital assets into frameworks designed for equities or futures contracts decades ago. It builds something new, with defined registration pathways for digital commodity exchanges, brokers, and dealers, as well as clear definitions covering blockchain applications, protocols, and smart contracts.

 

Ji Hun Kim, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, put it plainly after the vote: "Clear durable rules will help drive greater institutional and retail adoption, support innovation, create more high quality jobs in the U.S., protect Americans, and ensure that our country leads when it comes to digital assets policy and innovation."

 

The GENIUS Act, which passed the full Senate 68-30 last year, showed that comprehensive crypto legislation can attract broad support once the details are sorted. The Clarity Act is a harder lift, covering more ground and touching more competing interests. But Thursday's committee vote suggests the political will is there, and the industry is watching closely.

 

"Durable, lasting digital asset policy must be built on a bipartisan foundation," Mersinger added. By that measure, the Clarity Act is not finished yet. But for the first time in a long while, it looks like it might actually get there.

 

Why This Matters for the Future of Digital Assets

Let's be clear about all of this: Thursday was a great day for anyone who believes that digital assets have a meaningful role to play in the future of finance. I am certainly one of those. Not because the Clarity Act is perfect, and not because it's done, but because it signals something important that has been missing for years: the U.S. government is starting to treat this industry like it's here to stay.

 

The case for optimism goes beyond this single vote. The GENIUS Act passing 68-30 last year proved that stablecoin legislation could attract real bipartisan support. Institutional investment in Bitcoin ETFs has steadily matured. Major financial players who once dismissed crypto as a fringe asset are now building infrastructure around it. The underlying technology, particularly in DeFi and tokenization, keeps advancing regardless of what Washington does. What regulation does is create the conditions for all of that to compound. It clears the path for pension funds, endowments, and large asset managers who have been sitting on the sidelines waiting for legal certainty before committing serious capital.

 

That said, the Senate still has to close the deal, and that is not a given. The remaining sticking points on the ethics provision and law enforcement concerns are real, not just noise. Lawmakers like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand have been consistent that they will not deliver Democratic votes without meaningful conflict-of-interest guardrails, and that is a fair position. The 60-vote threshold means the bill needs to be genuinely bipartisan, not just technically so.

 

On timing, the realistic window is narrower than it might appear. Industry insiders, including Cody Carbone of the Digital Chamber, have pointed to August as a likely deadline if the bill is to move this year. Congress typically slows through the fall ahead of elections, and the legislative calendar fills up fast. That gives negotiators roughly ten to twelve weeks to reconcile the two committee versions, finalize the ethics language, and lock down the 60 votes needed for a floor vote. It is achievable, but it requires both parties to decide they want a deal more than they want a talking point.

 

If it does pass, the long-term impact will be substantial. Clear rules attract capital. Capital attracts builders. Builders create products that bring in users. That cycle, running inside a legitimate regulatory framework and anchored in the world's largest economy, is how digital assets stop being a niche and become infrastructure. You know...that "mass adoption" that people have been talking about for years? Well, this could be it. It might not look like how we all imagined, but what ever really does? Thursday was one huge step in that direction. The Senate now needs to finish what it started and we need to come together to make sure they all know that they need to do just that. Let's get it done.

 

Leading startup accelerator Y Combinator will be holding the first-ever interview session in New York City, keenly focused on fintech builders developing projects around tokenization, stablecoins, prediction markets, and trading.

 

 

According to a YC spokesperson, the New York event will be the first of its kind, as it will focus on a specific sector, with accepted startups joining the Y Combinator Summer 2026 batch, which will begin on June 23 in San Francisco. Once a startup is accepted into the accelerator program, Y Coombinator will invest immediately in the company, even before the summer batch begins.

 

With New York becoming a major fintech hub in the U.S. and accounting for around 30% of all U.S. fintech investment in 2025, while also being home to roughly 1,500 crypto and fintech startups, Y Combinator is making this move to tap into this fast-growing sector and back more startups in the space.

 

Y Combinator Investing in Crypto

Through its funding, Y Combinator has helped support some of the most successful companies in the crypto space, with several reaching and surpassing unicorn status.

 

In 2012, Y Combinator invested about $150,000 into the crypto exchange Coinbase, acquiring an approximately 7% stake in the company. With support from Y Combinator and other early investors, Coinbase has grown into one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, with a market cap of around $52 billion.

 

Y Combinator also invested early in the decentralized exchange Uniswap, contributing about $120,000 in 2018. Like Coinbase, Uniswap has grown into one of the largest decentralized exchanges, with a valuation of around $2 billion.

 

The startup accelerator has also invested in the prediction market sector, backing Kalshi at an early stage. With support from early investors, including Y Combinator, Kalshi has grown into one of the leading prediction market companies and recently raised $1 billion in a Series F round, reaching a valuation of $22 billion.

 

Other crypto companies that have benefited from Y Combinator’s support include the NFT marketplace OpenSea, blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs, and the Solana-based trading platform Axiom, with all of these companies surpassing the $1 billion valuation mark.

 

 

Gemini Olympus, LLC, an affiliate of the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, has recently received a Derivatives Clearing Organization license from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, enabling it to act as the clearinghouse for Gemini’s regulated derivatives trading, including prediction markets.

 

“Today marks a major milestone in Gemini’s marketplace expansion. In addition to our crypto spot marketplace, Gemini now has a full-stack, end-to-end marketplace for predictions as well as futures, options, and more,” said Cameron Winklevoss, Gemini’s president. He added that the DCO license is a major stepping stone toward Gemini achieving its goal of building a super app that allows users to fulfill all their existing and future financial needs in one place.

 

 

With this newly secured DCO license, together with the Designated Contract Market license that Gemini Titan, LLC, another Gemini entity, secured around December of last year, Gemini is now one step closer to obtaining the full suite of CFTC derivatives licenses.

 

Once it secures the Futures Commission Merchant license, the final component of the CFTC derivatives licensing framework, the company would be able to position itself as a fully regulated derivatives platform in the United States, offering U.S. customers a range of products, including crypto futures, options, and perpetual futures.

 

Gemini Joins Exchanges in Crypto Derivatives Push

With the Derivatives Clearing Organization license now secured and the Futures Commission Merchant license in sight, Gemini has joined a host of other crypto exchanges, including Kraken, Crypto.com, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in the race to position themselves as all-in-one derivatives platforms.

 

To break into the derivatives market, Payward, the parent company of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, acquired Bitnomial, a U.S.-based derivatives exchange, for $550 million last month. Like Kraken, Coinbase has also taken the acquisition route to enter the crypto derivatives market, acquiring Deribit Exchange for $2.9 billion and The Clearing Company for an undisclosed amount.

 

The race to provide complete crypto derivatives offerings is not unique to cryptocurrency exchanges, as prediction market companies like Kalshi and Polymarket are also making efforts to enter the crypto derivatives market.

 

Through Kinetic Markets LLC, one of its affiliates, Kalshi recently secured the Futures Commission Merchant license, along with the Designated Contract Market license it already holds, with efforts underway to secure the Derivatives Clearing Organization license, which is the final license required.

 

 

Singapore-based fintech company Nium has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to integrate the USDC stablecoin into its global payment network.

 

The integration, announced this week, leverages Coinbase’s custody, liquidity, and wallet infrastructure, allowing Nium’s clients and users to perform cross-border payments in USDC and settle transactions in either stablecoins or local currencies.

 

 

As Coinbase will provide the wallet infrastructure, Nium clients will be able to fund accounts in USDC within a Coinbase wallet embedded in the Nium platform. The USDC can then be converted to fiat currency by Coinbase and paid out through Nium, all within a single workflow on the platform.

 

Through this partnership, Nium will enable end-to-end stablecoin-to-fiat payment flows that allow users to send, receive, and convert stablecoins into fiat across more than 190 countries within a single platform.

 

Speaking about the partnership, Prajit Nanu, CEO of Nium, said it is aimed at providing clients with a more efficient way to move and manage money globally. He added that the collaboration improves capital efficiency while supporting a future in which stablecoins play a central role in Nium’s payment stack.

 

About Nium 

Based in Singapore, Nium is a cross-border payments company that allows users, including retail and institutional clients, to perform cross-border remittances and transactions.

 

Apart from being a core traditional finance company, Nium has in the past made several pro-crypto moves, especially in the stablecoin space.

 

In March of this year, it launched a stablecoin card issuance platform that allows companies holding stablecoins to issue spending cards on both the Visa and Mastercard networks through a single API integration on its platform. To enable USDC settlements on its platform, Nium last year participated in Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot, which eventually made it possible for the company to settle cross-border transactions using stablecoins across different supported blockchain networks.

 

Like Nium, several other Singapore-based traditional finance companies have taken pro-crypto steps in recent times, integrating blockchain technology and crypto support into their platforms. Notable among them is DBS Bank, Singapore’s largest bank, which launched the DBS Digital Exchange, a platform for asset tokenization, crypto trading, and custody.

 

Cryptocurrency exchanges, including Kraken, OKX, Binance, and Bybit, have also partnered with traditional finance institutions to help bridge the gap between traditional finance and decentralized finance.

 

 

Coinbase dropped a new public discovery tool aimed at making it easier for both people and AI agents to find and use paid online services that settle instantly with crypto micropayments.

 

The platform went live today at agentic.market and works as an open directory for thousands of services built on the x402 protocol. You can jump in and browse immediately without login, API keys, nothing like that required. It pulls fresh data straight from real payments moving through Coinbase’s Developer Platform, so you see live pricing, how much volume each service is actually getting, how many different users are paying, and the latest activity timestamps. This release picks up right where Coinbase left off with its Agentic Wallets back in February, which first let AI agents hold their own funds and spend them independently. 

 

The x402 Bazaar is where paid online services show up once they’re set up with the right discovery info and start receiving payments, so you don’t have to submit a separate listing. It acts as x402’s backend index, tracking what’s available, how it’s priced, and what’s happening on-chain, while Agentic.Market turns that into a public marketplace where people and AI agents can easily search, compare, and plug these services into their workflows. This includes things like AI model runs, data and analytics feeds, media tools for images and video, search and scraping services, social and messaging integrations, core infrastructure like storage and compute, and even trading tools for moving assets around. Coinbase says the protocol is built so both humans and machines can pay programmatically for things like paid APIs, pay‑per‑call tools, and agents buying access at runtime, so the whole setup is really about making it simple.

 

 

Coinbase noted that the x402 protocol already has more than 165 million transactions and moved roughly 50 million dollars in volume, with over 480,000 agents actively taking part across around 100,000 services. The directory puts the busiest and most reliable ones front and center, which helps both humans and machines figure out what is actually getting real traction day to day. 

 

This is about smoothing out the little daily frictions that slow down building, and rolling out useful agents that can move naturally between on-chain steps like shifting assets or chasing better yields and off-chain jobs like running inference or grabbing fresh data, all paid for through in stablecoins. Teams handling internal automation or tools that face customers now have one, clean spot with data to check out providers without digging through random docs or dealing with payment mismatches. Work in DeFi or tokenization gets clearer ways to add agent driven logic that works natively instead of forcing awkward bridges or extra steps.

 

This is still early, so real momentum will come down to more services jumping on the x402 standard and agents getting better at handling payment details and safety checks on their own. Even with that, the way it indexes itself automatically and stays completely open shows Coinbase leaning toward letting the ecosystem expand through actual use rather than any kind of control. Groups that start implementing x402 features into their agents today could end up in a much better spot, as these machine-to-machine payments become normal.

 

 

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has rolled out crypto-backed loans for users in the United Kingdom, allowing users to borrow USDC against Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Coinbase Wrapped Staked Ether (cbETH) holdings.

 

The launch, announced this Monday, is part of Coinbase’s overall efforts to build a leading financial app in the UK that allows users to invest, manage, and grow their money.

 

 

The loans will be issued through Morpho, a decentralized finance lending protocol on Base, and according to Coinbase, users will be able to borrow up to $5 million in USDC, depending on the amount of Bitcoin and other eligible assets they hold as collateral. Coinbase says the interest rates will vary, depending on market conditions on Base, and that these rates will be set by Morpho.

 

It is also important to note that while there is no fixed repayment schedule for the borrowed loans, borrowers face liquidation risk if the loan-to-value ratio exceeds specific thresholds that will be set by Coinbase.

 

The crypto-backed loans can be accessed through the Coinbase app, where users can choose the amount of USDC they want to borrow and their preferred collateral asset. Once this is done, the pledged collateral will be transferred on-chain to a Morpho smart contract, and the USDC loans will be automatically disbursed to the user’s Coinbase account, which can then be converted to British pounds (GBP).

 

Coinbase Expands Its Crypto Efforts

Coinbase is one of the cryptocurrency exchanges leading development at the intersection of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI).

 

In an X post last weekend, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the exchange was testing and integrating two AI agents into Slack and email. These AI agents will serve as virtual workers, able to perform on-chain actions such as holding funds, spending and sending money, trading, and earning yield.

 

This recent development comes shortly after Coinbase launched the x402 Foundation, designed to enhance the use of its x402 protocol as a standard payment protocol for internet native payments.

 

To achieve its “Everything Exchange” goal, Coinbase made a number of significant acquisitions last year, including the acquisition of the Deribit exchange and Echo. The exchange has also rolled out stock and ETF trading in-app for all eligible users, with its most recent rollout in Canada.