Author: driver789
On some Ethereum L2s, bots now burn over half the gas just searching for MEV, and they don’t pay proportionally for it. That’s a scaling and market-fairness problem rooted in market structure.The privacy conversation in crypto has finally escaped the “anonymous money” framing that dominated the last cycle. In early 2026, the urgency is economic and rooted in immediate financial realities.The industry faces a structural problem: on-chain transparency generates extractable value at massive scale, and that extraction has grown into a scaling bottleneck rather than remaining a purely philosophical concern.Flashbots has documented how MEV-related “search spam” can consume more than…
Abu Dhabi-based Al Warda Investments continued to expand its exposure to bitcoin through BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) in the fourth quarter of 2025, extending a strategy shift that began earlier in the year. In a filing released today, Al Warda reported owning 8,218,712 shares of IBIT as of Dec. 31, up from 7,963,393 shares at the end of the third quarter. The increase follows a sharp Q3 buildup, when the firm more than tripled its stake and raised its bitcoin ETF exposure to $517.6 million. Al Warda operates under the Abu Dhabi Investment Council (ADIC), part of Mubadala Investment…
Starknet developer StarkWare has integrated EY’s Nightfall privacy protocol to let institutions run private payments and decentralized finance (DeFi) activity on public Ethereum-aligned rails, targeting banks and corporates that need confidentiality without giving up auditability. In a Tuesday release shared with Cointelegraph, StarkWare positioned the move as a way for enterprises to use a shared, open layer-2 rather than closed, bank-only networks, while working with a Big Four firm that already audits many of the organizations it wants to onboard.The integration brings Nightfall, an open-source zero-knowledge (ZK) privacy layer built by EY, that lets transactions be verified without revealing underlying data,…
Starknet developer StarkWare has integrated EY’s Nightfall privacy protocol to let institutions run private payments and decentralized finance (DeFi) activity on public Ethereum-aligned rails, targeting banks and corporates that need confidentiality without giving up auditability. In a Tuesday release shared with Cointelegraph, StarkWare positioned the move as a way for enterprises to use a shared, open layer-2 rather than closed, bank-only networks, while working with a Big Four firm that already audits many of the organizations it wants to onboard.The integration brings Nightfall, an open-source zero-knowledge (ZK) privacy layer built by EY, that lets transactions be verified without revealing underlying data,…
The vast majority of token sales conducted in 2025 resulted in losses for investors, according to DeFi researcher Edgy. 85% of token launches in 2025 are underwater. VC backed deals barely break even and some are deep in the red. Back in the day having a “Top VC” on the cap table was a huge catalyst, but not anymore. This chart from Galaxy Research tells the story.In Q2 2022, crypto VCs… pic.twitter.com/HAdlXAYccA— Edgy — The DeFi Edge 🗡️ (@thedefiedge) February 17, 2026 Nearly 85% of tokens are currently trading below their initial price. Many venture-backed deals are barely breaking even…
Strategy (MSTR) continued with its customary bitcoin purchases in the last week, adding 2,486 BTC for $168.4 million.The company’s holdings are now 717,131 bitcoin acquired for $54.52 billion, or an average of $76,027 per coin. Bitcoin’s current price sits at $68,000, putting the company at a loss of about $8,000 per coin, or a total of about $5.7 billion.Last week’s buys were funded via $90.5 million in common stock sales and $78.4 million in sales of the company’s STRC preferred series of stock, according to a Tuesday morning filing.MSTR shares are lower by 3.2% in premarket trading and down more…
Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not represent the views and opinions of crypto.news’ editorial. Quantum computing is often framed as a distant storm on the horizon, and not yet relevant to today’s cryptographic systems. In 2026, that framing is dangerously misguided. The Ethereum Foundation’s recent decision to launch a dedicated Post-Quantum (PQ) cryptography team, backed by $2 million in funding, is a watershed moment for the industry. The world’s most influential smart contract ecosystem is no longer treating quantum risk as theoretical; it is acting on the correct assumption that cryptographic…
Jake Claver is again laying out the conditions he says must line up for XRP to reach triple digits, framing the bet not as a chart call but as a sequencing problem tied to institutional tokenization, on-chain liquidity, and regulated market plumbing. In a “Memes and Markets” interview on Feb. 16 with Ben Leavitt and Keith D, Claver defended his so-called “Domino Theory”. Claver told the hosts he didn’t enter crypto until 2020, built a broader portfolio first, then consolidated into XRP after the 2022 drawdown because he viewed it as the “for sure thing.” The hosts pushed on his…
Steak ‘n Shake said its same‑store sales have “risen dramatically” since it launched a burger‑to‑Bitcoin strategy in May 2025 that routes every Bitcoin payment into a corporate treasury reserve. In a Monday post on X, the US fast-food chain said that it had successfully combined a “decentralized, cash-producing operating business with the transformative power of Bitcoin,” and thanked Bitcoiners for making it possible. The chain did not provide figures or define what it meant by “risen dramatically.”Steak ‘n Shake began accepting Bitcoin at participating locations on May 16, 2025, in a phased rollout.Since then, Steak ‘n Shake has repeatedly tied higher…
Monero activity has remained steady even as major cryptocurrency exchanges have pushed the privacy coin off their platforms, according to new research by TRM Labs.Data shows transaction usage in 2024 and 2025 stayed above levels seen before 2022, suggesting demand did not fade even after many big trading platforms removed or restricted the token over traceability concerns, TRM Labs said.In 2024, major exchanges, including Binance and Kraken, moved to delist or phase out Monero (XMR) over compliance concerns. Pressure increased this year when Dubai’s financial regulator banned privacy coins like Monero and Zcash (ZEC) on licensed platforms in the Dubai…