Liquid, a trading platform targeting the convergence of crypto and traditional finance, has closed an $18 million Series Seed round co-led by Neo and Left Lane Capital. The round also drew participation from Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel, AntiFund, and Sunflower Capital, alongside existing backers Paradigm and General Catalyst — a heavyweight roster that signals serious institutional confidence in the platform’s thesis.

The core premise is straightforward: modern traders don’t stop when Wall Street closes, and their tools shouldn’t either. Liquid consolidates access to over 500 markets — spanning crypto, equities, commodities, FX, and pre-IPO assets — into a single interface available on iOS, Android, and desktop. Users can trade with up to 200x leverage without surrendering custody of their assets. The platform launched in August 2025 and has already processed over $3 billion in trading volume across 40,000 users.

Paystand, the blockchain-powered B2B payments network, has announced the launch of USDb, a stablecoin designed specifically for commercial-scale enterprise finance. The announcement was made on stage at Bitcoin Las Vegas.

Unlike Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) — which together control over 90% of the stablecoin market and were built for crypto-native use cases — USDb targets the accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll, and treasury workflows that underpin the global economy. It is backed 1:1 by USD reserves and natively deployed on Rootstock, Bitcoin’s leading smart contract sidechain.

Tangem, the Swiss hardware wallet company, has published a research report arguing that the cold wallet user profile has been fundamentally misread by the broader market. The report, titled From Storage to Participation: The Rise of Active Self-Custody, was commissioned by Tangem and developed by Protocol Theory, an independent consumer research firm, drawing on data from more than 3,172 U.S.-based crypto users.

The central finding cuts against the conventional image of the cold wallet as a passive vault. Cold wallet users are 1.83x more likely to be active traders than passive holders, and short-term traders represent the single most likely cohort to use a cold wallet at 46%, compared to just 11% of passive owners. Only 9% of cold wallet users qualify as passive holders, versus 25% of centralized exchange users. Cold wallet holders are also 20 percentage points more likely to hold stablecoins than CEX users and 12 percentage points more likely to hold altcoins and other non-core assets — a pattern consistent with active, diversified portfolio management rather than long-term storage.

MoonPay, KOSDAQ-listed Sungho Electronics, and its controlling shareholder Seoryong Electronics have signed an agreement to jointly acquire a stake in Finger, one of Korea’s original fintech companies, in a deal structured to build a Korean won stablecoin ecosystem from the issuance layer down to point-of-payment usage. Pantos Holdings, a vehicle wholly owned by Koo Bon-ho — a member of the LG founding family and former major shareholder of LX Pantos — joins as a strategic investor. The total transaction is valued at approximately KRW 110 billion, or around $76 million.

Bitcoin was first mined in 2009 on a standard laptop CPU. Within a few years, miners had migrated to graphics processing units for their superior hashing efficiency, then to field-programmable gate arrays, and by 2013 to application-specific integrated circuits purpose-built for Bitcoin mining. Each hardware generation rendered the previous one unprofitable, because the proof-of-work mechanism adjusts difficulty to maintain a ten-minute block interval regardless of total network computing power. Better hardware does not reduce the network’s energy consumption; it raises the difficulty floor, and the total energy expenditure grows with investment.

The United States Energy Information Administration estimated in 2024 that domestic cryptocurrency mining consumed somewhere between 25 and 91 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, representing between 0.6% and 2.3% of total U.S. electricity demand for the year. That range is wide because the industry has resisted disclosure, but even the low end places cryptomining on par with entire industrial sectors that receive far more regulatory attention.

The EIA identified 137 cryptocurrency mining facilities operating in the United States as of 2023, concentrated in Texas, Georgia, and New York. For the 101 facilities where maximum capacity data were available, combined peak power demand reached 10.275 gigawatts — roughly 2.3% of total average U.S. annual power demand. Applying an 80% utilization rate to that figure yields an estimate of 70 terawatt-hours per year, sitting comfortably within the top-down projection derived from global hashrate data.

A 2018 study published in Nature Climate Change estimated that if Bitcoin were broadly adopted for cashless transactions, its associated energy consumption could alone produce enough carbon dioxide emissions to push global mean temperatures past 2°C within 30 years. Critics challenged the methodology immediately, arguing the projections excluded unprofitable hardware, failed to account for shifts in the electricity generation fuel mix, and assumed adoption trajectories that outpaced historical precedent for any payment technology. The methodological dispute was legitimate. What it obscured was the underlying direction of the data.

BitGo Holdings (NYSE: BTGO) has expanded its Prime Services platform to deliver integrated treasury infrastructure for protocols, foundations, DAOs, and early-stage token investors. The buildout adds risk management solutions, structured products, financing, and treasury management capabilities to a platform already anchored by regulated qualified custody.

The expansion targets a gap that has long complicated institutional token management: the absence of a single-platform solution capable of handling the full lifecycle of a token treasury, from unlock scheduling to hedging to liquidity execution. BitGo’s updated offering addresses that gap by combining OTC liquidity and discreet offchain settlement for large token distributions, hedging tools for managing treasury volatility, and financing structures that allow clients to access capital without moving assets out of custody.

Bitmain, a privately held Chinese company, controls an estimated 80% of the global market for cryptocurrency mining hardware. The application-specific integrated circuits it manufactures — the ASICs that power the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin mining operations worldwide — are physically present inside data centers scattered across the United States, operating at sustained high power loads, networked to the internet, and in many cases located in states with significant military or defense infrastructure. In November 2025, the Department of Homeland Security opened a formal investigation into whether Bitmain’s equipment can be remotely controlled for surveillance, espionage, or grid disruption purposes.

N3XT, the blockchain-powered narrow bank targeting institutional B2B payments, has launched the N3XT Digital Dollar (NDD), a bank-issued tokenized deposit backed one-to-one by cash or short-term U.S. Treasuries. The announcement was made at Money 20/20 Asia in Bangkok.

The distinction N3XT draws — and leans on heavily — is that NDD is not a stablecoin. It is issued under a Wyoming Special Purpose Depository Institution charter, making each unit a direct digital representation of a regulated bank deposit rather than a liability of a private issuer operating outside banking law. N3XT operates on a full-reserve model and does not lend, which removes the fractional-reserve risk that has historically complicated institutional adoption of deposit-like digital instruments. Reserve holdings are fully transparent and auditable.