Today's top news highlights:
1. Macroeconomic Outlook for Next Week: The specter of stagflation reappears, the Fed faces a dilemma, and CPI and PCE data are key variables.
2. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a warning regarding security risks associated with the OpenClaw open-source AI agent.
3. South Korea may ban companies from investing in stablecoins.
4. Ethereum co-founder Jeffrey Wilcke is suspected of selling nearly 80,000 ETH, worth $157 million.
5. CryptoQuant analyst: Extreme selling has subsided, Bitcoin may be entering the middle of a bear market.
6. Coinbase adds Fluent (BLEND) to its listing roadmap
Regulation & Macro
South Korea may ban companies from investing in stablecoins.
According to South Korean media reports, the South Korean Financial Services Commission's draft "Guidelines for Corporate Virtual Currency Trading" may exclude stablecoins from the scope of permitted investments. The guidelines will outline standards for listed companies and registered professional investment firms trading digital assets for investment or financial purposes. To prevent blind investment in the early stages of the market, the regulator has decided to exclude dollar-denominated stablecoins (such as Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC)) when defining the scope of permitted investments.
According to Jinshi News, the escalating tensions between the US and Iran have led to significant market volatility this week due to uncertainty surrounding the future direction of the conflict. Recent data suggests that the Federal Reserve will have to address rising inflation and declining employment to curb the possibility of stagflation. Below are the key points the market will focus on in the new week (all times are Beijing time):
- At 23:00 on Monday, the US Federal Reserve Bank of New York will release its 1-year inflation forecasts for February.
- At 20:30 on Wednesday, the US February unadjusted CPI year-on-year rate and unadjusted core CPI year-on-year rate will be released; the US February seasonally adjusted CPI month-on-month rate and seasonally adjusted core CPI month-on-month rate will also be released.
- At 15:00 on Friday, the UK's three-month GDP month-on-month rate for January, the manufacturing/industrial production month-on-month rate for January, and the seasonally adjusted goods trade balance for January will be released.
- At 20:30 on Friday, the following data will be released: US January Core PCE Price Index (YoY/MoM), US January Personal Spending (MoM), US Q4 Real GDP Annualized Quarterly Rate (Revised), and US January Durable Goods Orders (MoM).
- At 22:00 on Friday, the following data will be released: US January JOLTs job openings, US March one-year inflation rate expectations (preliminary), and US March University of Michigan consumer sentiment index (preliminary).
Next week, the focus will be on the February CPI released on Wednesday and the January PCE released on Friday. Stronger-than-expected core CPI and core PCE price indices could further support the US dollar; conversely, weak data could drag down the dollar and boost spot gold's rebound. In addition, Q4 earnings reports remain a key focus, with attention next week on reports from companies such as Oracle (ORCL.N).
Discussions surrounding the U.S. Clarity Act have sparked public debate between the banking industry and White House crypto policy officials. Christopher Williston VI, president of the Texas Independent Bankers Association, stated on the X platform that any compromises by the banking industry on the act would harm local lending and economic productivity, and declared that he would not back down on the issue of liquidity supporting local economies. In response, Patrick Witt, executive director of the White House Advisory Council on Digital Assets, argued that no compromise on the Clarity Act would mean no restrictions on stablecoin rewards offered by intermediaries. He further stated that, according to the banking industry's narrative of "deposit outflows," this could have disastrous consequences, a logic he likened to "watching an arsonist threaten to burn down your own house."
U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan previously dismissed a civil lawsuit against Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao. The case sought to hold them accountable for allegedly aiding terrorist organizations in carrying out global attacks through their trading activities. However, according to the judgment, the judge allowed the plaintiff 60 days to file an amended complaint to supplement it with more specific evidence of on-chain transactions and account linkages.
The judgment stated that the plaintiff had previously failed to prove a direct link between Binance's trading activities and the specific attack, such as key evidence like fund flows, wallet ownership, or transaction times. The judge also criticized the plaintiff's 891-page complaint as "significantly excessive" and therefore did not meet the relevant liability standards under the Anti-Terrorism Act.
The Cybersecurity Threat and Vulnerability Information Sharing Platform of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently issued a security risk warning regarding the OpenClaw (commonly known as "Lobster") open-source AI agent. Monitoring revealed that some instances of the OpenClaw open-source AI agent, under default or improper configuration, pose a high security risk and are highly susceptible to cyberattacks, information leaks, and other security issues. Relevant organizations and users are advised to thoroughly verify public network exposure, permission configurations, and credential management when deploying and applying OpenClaw, disable unnecessary public network access, improve security mechanisms such as identity authentication, access control, data encryption, and security auditing, and continuously monitor official security announcements and hardening recommendations to prevent potential cybersecurity risks.
Hong Kong Financial Secretary: Hong Kong will build a gold and commodity trading ecosystem
Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan published a personal essay entitled "The 15th Five-Year Plan—Leveraging Unique Advantages to Better Integrate into and Serve the Overall Development of the Country," in which he pointed out that Hong Kong is committed to consolidating and enhancing its advantages as an international financial center. More importantly, under the premise of safety and controllability, it aims to empower various industries through a "finance+" approach, supporting the accelerated development and application of innovative technologies, and enabling finance to better support the real economy in unleashing its potential. Specifically, key areas will include financing for startups and the development of patient capital; strengthening the offshore RMB business hub; developing green finance; and building an ecosystem for gold and commodity trading.
Project Updates
OpenAI launches Codex Security, a code security review agency.
OpenAI has launched Codex Security, an AI-powered application security agent designed to discover, verify, and propose remediation solutions for vulnerabilities. This capability allows teams to focus on critical vulnerabilities and accelerate code delivery. Codex Security is a successor to Aardvark, which was launched as an internal beta version last year. OpenAI is now rolling out Codex Security in a research preview version to enterprise, commercial, and education customers, offering them free access to the tool for the first month.
Binance released its 40th asset reserve verification, with a snapshot date of March 1st. User assets continue to maintain a reserve ratio of at least 1:1. BTC assets are approximately 631,000, a decrease of 8,004 BTC from February 1st; ETH assets are approximately 3.87 million, a decrease of 307,203 ETH from the previous verification; and USDT assets are approximately 36.4 billion, a decrease of approximately 360 million USDT from the previous verification.
Coinbase adds Fluent (BLEND) to its listing roadmap
According to an official announcement, Coinbase has added Fluent (BLEND) to its listing roadmap. The listing of this asset still depends on whether market-making support and technical infrastructure are in place. The specific listing time will be announced separately once the relevant conditions are met.
According to The Information, prediction market Kalshi is facing a class-action lawsuit over settlement issues related to prediction event contracts involving the Iran war. The plaintiffs allege that the platform failed to pay appropriate bonuses to users who signed related contracts.
The report states that the controversy primarily revolves around contracts related to events concerning whether Khamenei will step down. Previously, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour had explicitly opposed profiting from individual deaths and stated that he would refund related fees to the event contract market. This dispute arises against the backdrop of a surge in trading volume in geopolitical prediction markets, which have attracted a large number of users and sparked ethical and regulatory debates about whether trading in events related to war or individual deaths should be permitted.
In response to community questions about whether OpenClaw has opened an official Weibo account, OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger clarified on the X platform that he has never used Weibo and that the official Weibo account is not under his control.
Opinions & Analysis
CryptoQuant analyst Axel wrote on the X platform that Bitcoin may have entered the middle stage of this bear market cycle. The NUPL-MVRV harmonic composite indicator has reached 0.33, while historical cycle bottoms usually appear in the range of around -0.5. The chart shows that the bear market cycle is beginning to move upward, indicating that the extreme selling situation is becoming more moderate. However, the indicator is still far above the historical bottom area, which means that a full-scale market sell-off has not yet been confirmed.
Chaitanya Jain, Head of Strategy at Bitcoin Treasury Strategy, stated on the X platform that Strategy has invested approximately $4.3 billion to purchase about 48,000 Bitcoins in the first two months of 2026, compared to only about $300 million for the entire year of 2022, when it purchased about 8,000 Bitcoins. Jain believes that against this backdrop, Strategy's perpetual preferred shares, STRC and MSTR, will together constitute the "ultimate Bitcoin accumulation machine," and this continuous and large-scale institutional buying pattern may permanently alter the market structure of the Bitcoin bear market.
On-chain analyst Willy Woo wrote on the X platform that although Bitcoin encountered local resistance around $75,000, investor funds have been steadily recovering since mid-February. At the same time, the VIX, an indicator of expected volatility in the US stock market, suggests that market sentiment may shift to "risk-on" in the coming weeks.
Willy Woo points out that Bitcoin's decline in the early stages of this bear market was "too rapid," and the current market environment is creating conditions for a price rebound to test around $85,000 (the cost price for short-term investors), which does not mean the market has bottomed out. From a long-term liquidity perspective, he believes Bitcoin is still in the middle of a bear market; historically, after similar rapid declines, prices usually experience a period of consolidation before repeatedly testing key resistance levels during the rebound.
SlowMist founder: Distrusts OpenClaw's stability but optimistic about Claude Code's security.
Yu Xian, founder of SlowMist Technology, stated in an article on the X platform that he "distrusts" OpenClaw's stability or resilience, but feels more confident in Claude Code, believing that security is one of the core goals of software engineering. Yu pointed out that both platforms place a high degree of emphasis on security, and submitted vulnerabilities receive timely feedback. However, some OpenClaw forks or reference versions clearly lack sufficient investment in security. He noted that while OpenClaw also has a sandbox mechanism and attempts to implement more granular design in tool permissions, its "open" nature means that a more free system may be more difficult to control; "overly free OpenClaw is prone to getting out of control."
He believes that the conflict between openness and controllability is a common dilemma faced by users when using OpenClaw in actual production environments, while Claude Code is more reassuring in terms of security and trust.
Vitalik Buterin: The AI era needs encrypted privacy mechanisms to protect API access patterns
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that with the increasing prevalence of AI agents, cryptographic privacy technologies are crucial for protecting users' API call patterns and behavioral data. He pointed out that even with local AI agents, if external services have access to all search or API call records, they can still infer a user's ongoing activities.
Vitalik believes that a preliminary solution is to forward requests via mixnets to hide the source of access. However, service providers may require anti-abuse mechanisms and pay-per-use models due to DoS attacks, and in reality, these payment methods often rely on credit cards or stablecoin systems lacking privacy protection. Therefore, he emphasizes the need for crypto payment solutions with privacy features.
He further pointed out that privacy protection needs to be considered from the **full stack** level, with the local AI agent layer being particularly crucial. Vitalik likened it to the issue of healthy lifespan: if there are multiple detrimental factors, addressing them one by one will bring cumulative benefits; similarly, measures to reduce the risk of data breaches will produce similar compounding effects.
Investment and Financing
On-chain escrow decentralized protocol OmniPact completes $50 million private funding round
OmniPact, a decentralized protocol that builds a trust layer for peer-to-peer transactions of physical and digital assets, announced the completion of a $50 million private funding round. The investors are a consortium of institutional investors and family offices who requested anonymity. The protocol uses smart contracts as on-chain guarantees to solve the "trust problem" in peer-to-peer transactions. The new funds will support the development of its core contracts and multi-chain infrastructure, as well as related security audits, while also propelling its testnet to launch in the first quarter of 2026.
Important data
According to Allium data, stablecoin trading volume reached $1.8 trillion in February, setting a new monthly record. USDC accounted for approximately 70% of the total trading volume, reaching $1.26 trillion, while USDT's trading volume in February was $514 billion.
Ethereum co-founder Jeffrey Wilcke is suspected of selling nearly 80,000 ETH, worth $157 million.
According to on-chain analyst Ai Yi, ETH co-founder Jeffrey Wilcke is suspected of selling 79,258.61 ETH, worth $157 million.
Its address became active again after 7 months, transferring a large amount of ETH to Kraken through 4 addresses 5 minutes ago; it currently still holds 27,421.73 ETH on the chain, with a total value of $54.37 million.
According to on-chain data tracking, due to a brief and slight market decline, Huang Licheng's 25x Ethereum long position has just been partially liquidated again. His position currently holds 2,500 ETH, with a floating loss of about $200,000 and a liquidation price of about $1,926.
