Today's top news highlights:
Tether has hired KPMG to audit USDT.
MARA Holdings sold 15,133 bitcoins and repurchased over $1 billion in convertible bonds.
Fannie Mae to accept Bitcoin mortgage loans for the first time
OpenAI invests in AI agent startup Isara, valuing the company at $650 million.
Shield AI raised $2 billion at a valuation of $12.7 billion.
Regulation & Macro
ECB paper: DeFi DAO governance tokens may struggle to meet MiCA exemption criteria.
According to Cointelegraph, a paper by a European Central Bank staff member points out that governance tokens in DeFi protocols are highly centralized. Approximately half or more of the holdings of governance tokens in Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth, and Uniswap are linked to the protocols themselves or exchanges. Major voting participants are often delegated representatives, who in many cases are neither identifiable nor able to establish a connection with token holders. This research questions whether DeFi DAOs possess sufficient decentralization to exclude them from the MiCA regulatory framework and provides a reference for policymakers to bring relevant entities under regulation.
German Foreign Minister: The US and Iran have had indirect contact and plan to hold a meeting.
The German Foreign Minister said on Friday that the United States and Iran have held indirect talks, and that representatives from both sides plan to meet in Pakistan soon. "As far as I know, there has been indirect contact, and preparations have been made for a direct meeting. Clearly, this meeting will take place in Pakistan soon," said German Foreign Minister Wadfol.
According to Jinshi, citing the Financial Times, the UAE has indicated to its allies that it will participate in a multinational maritime task force aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz and is lobbying for a coalition to ensure the restoration of navigation on this vital Gulf waterway. Sources familiar with the matter revealed that the UAE has informed the US and other Western countries of its participation, and Abu Dhabi will deploy its navy. A growing consensus exists among some Gulf states and within the Trump administration that there is no easy way to reopen the strait without naval escort.
The United Arab Emirates, possessing a relatively small but modern navy, is attempting to push for the formation of a "Hormuz Security Force" by dozens of countries to protect the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian attacks and escort shipping. Two sources familiar with the matter said Bahrain is the only other Gulf state supporting the plan, and the UAE hopes to gain support from Saudi Arabia and other international partners. Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, are caught in a dilemma: they want Trump to inflict further damage on Iran, yet they also urge an end to the war through negotiations. They also fear a potential abrupt US withdrawal, leaving behind a wounded and more radical regime.
Senator Tim Scott, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, stated that legislation on the structure of the crypto market has bipartisan support, with industry consensus being the final hurdle. He revealed that he spoke with Coinbase last night, and all parties are still at the negotiating table.
According to The Block, the UK government has announced sanctions against Xinbi, a cryptocurrency illicit marketplace, and its affiliated individuals and entities, alleging that it provided communication services such as crypto payments, trading of stolen goods, and satellite internet to large-scale fraud parks in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia's "#8 Park." Chainalysis data shows that Xinbi processed over $19.9 billion in transactions between 2021 and 2025, allegedly for money laundering and over-the-counter illegal transactions. The sanctions also affect the operator, Legend Innovation Co., its head, Eang Soklim, and the Prince Group financial network, which was previously sanctioned by the UK and the US; related assets, including multiple properties in London, will be frozen.
According to The Block, U.S. Representatives Adrian Smith and Nikki Budzinski have introduced a bipartisan bill called the PREDICT Act, which would prohibit federal officials and their families from betting on political or policy events such as elections, legislation, and government actions in prediction markets. The bill would cover members of Congress, the president, vice president, politically appointed officials, and senior federal employees. Those who violate pricing regulations would face a civil penalty of 10% of the contract value and would be required to forfeit all related profits, with the funds going to the U.S. Treasury.
Project Updates
According to GoPlus monitoring, the Anthropic Claude Chrome extension contains a high-risk prompt injection vulnerability, affecting versions lower than 1.0.41. Attackers can hijack the Claude plugin through malicious web pages, using a subdomain trust whitelist to send malicious prompts to the extension and execute them automatically. This could allow attackers to read Google Drive documents, steal business tokens, export chat logs, and even impersonate users to perform sensitive operations without the user's knowledge. Users are advised to update the extension to version 1.0.41 or later and to be wary of unknown links.
Tether has hired KPMG to audit USDT.
Tether, the issuer of the stablecoin USDT, has selected KPMG as its auditing firm and hired PwC to assist in improving its internal systems.
Ethereum core developers have voted not to prioritize the "frame transactions" proposal, supported by Vitalik Buterin, in the upcoming Hegota upgrade. Hegota is an Ethereum upgrade expected to launch in the second half of 2026, and last month it was confirmed that FOCIL would be the first key feature to improve censorship resistance. Frame transactions aim to improve the blockchain user experience and enhance quantum resistance, but developers believe they are too complex and could delay the upgrade. The developers agreed to mark frame transactions as "under consideration" rather than as a mandatory upgrade feature.
Frame trading is a new type of trading that prepares the market for a post-quantum world and offers more robust account abstraction, enabling username/password login and fee-free trading similar to traditional web trading. Some developers point out that native account abstraction has been lacking for a long time, and its absence could hinder user experience innovation. However, client developers emphasize its excessive complexity, requiring careful evaluation.
Ethereum Layer 2 network Polygon has proposed a new fee model, PIP-85, aimed at reversing the over 60% drop in its native token POL's price over the past year and addressing competition from Base and Arbitrum. The proposal would redistribute 50% of priority fee revenue to network validators and delegators, and adjust validator reward distribution from being based on staking size to being based on contribution performance. Of the remaining validator pool, 75% will be allocated based on contribution rather than staking size, while 25% will remain allocated according to existing staking weights. The authors state in the proposal that implementing it requires no direct on-chain changes.
Coinbase adds Based One (BASED1) to its listing roadmap
According to an official announcement, Coinbase has added Based One (BASED1) to its listing roadmap. The listing of these assets still depends on the availability of market-making support and technical infrastructure. The specific listing time will be announced separately once the relevant conditions are met.
MARA Holdings sold 15,133 bitcoins and repurchased over $1 billion in convertible bonds.
MARA Holdings announced an agreement with bondholders to repurchase approximately $1 billion of its 0.00% convertible bonds at approximately 90% of their face value. This includes approximately $368 million of bonds maturing in 2030 and approximately $633 million of bonds maturing in 2031, to be paid in cash at approximately $323 million and $590 million respectively. The transaction is expected to close on March 30 and 31, reducing the outstanding balances of the two tranches of convertible bonds to approximately $633 million and $292 million respectively. The company stated that the repurchase funds primarily came from the sale of 15,133 bitcoins, totaling approximately $1.1 billion, between March 4 and 25. The remaining funds will be used for general corporate purposes, reducing its total convertible bond holdings from approximately $3.3 billion to approximately $2.3 billion.
Fannie Mae to accept Bitcoin mortgage loans for the first time
Mortgage company Better Home & Finance and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global have launched a new mortgage product that allows homebuyers to use their holdings of crypto assets, such as Bitcoin, as collateral when applying for a Fannie Mae-backed mortgage, without having to sell cryptocurrency for a cash down payment.
Binance will list Tether Gold (XAUt) and add a seed tag to it.
Binance will list Tether Gold (XAUt) on March 26, 2026 at 21:30 (UTC+8) and open spot trading pairs XAUt/USDT, XAUt/BTC, XAUt/U, XAUt/USDC, and XAUt/TRY.
Investment and financing news
OpenAI invests in AI agent startup Isara, valuing the company at $650 million.
OpenAI has invested in Isara, an AI startup founded by two 23-year-old researchers. Isara aims to develop software that can coordinate thousands of AI agents to work together to solve complex problems in fields such as finance and biotechnology. Isara recently completed a $94 million funding round at a $650 million valuation, with investors including Michael Ovitz and Stanley Druckenmiller, and OpenAI participating in the investment.
Isara's founders co-authored an academic paper last June, proposing a solution to improve policymaking through collaborative AI systems. The company has currently recruited approximately 12 researchers from companies such as Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Isara plans to initially sell its predictive modeling software to investment institutions and has already demonstrated its ability to coordinate approximately 2,000 AI agents to predict gold prices.
According to Fortune, foreign exchange settlement startup XFX announced the completion of a $17 million Series A funding round, led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Haun Ventures and Coinbase Ventures, among others. This follows a previous seed round of $9 million. Founded by three former Bitso employees and headquartered in Miami, XFX focuses on providing institutional clients with high-speed forex and payment infrastructure between fiat currencies and stablecoins. Currently, it supports USD, Mexican Peso, and Colombian Peso, as well as various stablecoins, with a focus on providing deep liquidity on a select few currency pairs. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its quantitative team and strengthen partnerships with trading desks and banks.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Reflection, an open-source AI startup backed by Nvidia, is in talks to raise $2.5 billion at a $25 billion valuation, which, if completed, would be one of the largest funding rounds in the open-source AI field. Founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, Reflection focuses on developing AI systems that can automatically write, test, and maintain code, and building an open-source model network for enterprises, research institutions, and universities, as a US-based solution to compete with overseas rivals such as China's DeepSeek.
Shield AI raised $2 billion at a valuation of $12.7 billion.
According to the New York Times, Shield AI has raised $2 billion at a valuation of $12.7 billion.
Opinions & Analysis
French President Emmanuel Macron will deliver a speech at Paris Blockchain Week on April 15.
French President Emmanuel Macron will deliver a keynote speech at Paris Blockchain Week on April 15, becoming the first sitting G7 leader to attend a blockchain industry summit. The speech will be held in the Carrousel du Louvre and is expected to attract over 10,000 global policymakers. Macron will focus on the concept of "European digital sovereignty," emphasizing that the unified legal framework provided by the Crypto Asset Market Regulation Act for EU digital asset companies is Europe's core competitive advantage compared to the fragmented markets of the US and Asia.
Macron also plans to announce a series of national incentives for "deep technology" startups in fields such as zero-knowledge proofs and post-quantum cryptography, and calls for the establishment of a "unified European capital market" to reduce cross-border investment costs using distributed ledger technology. This appearance is seen as a strategic signal that France is integrating blockchain technology into the core of its national industrial policy.
According to CoinDesk, the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil infrastructure have disrupted the Trump administration's short-term measures to stabilize the oil market and exacerbated supply pressures in the energy market. Previously, the US had temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil to offset supply disruptions caused by the war with Iran, but the Ukrainian attacks have disrupted approximately 40% of Russia's oil export capacity, keeping oil prices persistently high.
Analysts point out that continued rises in energy prices could exacerbate inflationary pressures, forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy and putting pressure on risk assets, including Bitcoin. Traders have begun betting that the Federal Reserve may raise interest rates in the near term. Bitcoin has recently fluctuated between $65,000 and $75,000, and is currently trading at approximately $68,500.
According to crypto journalist Eleanor Terrett, securities lawyers say that the SEC's interpretative guidance on how federal securities laws apply to crypto assets remains highly subjective regarding when investment contracts for tokens terminate, and a key issue remains unresolved. This is important because, in most cases, violations of securities laws are subject to the strict liability principle, meaning that no proof of subjective fault is required to establish a violation.
Important data
The Bhutanese government transferred 123.7 BTC to a new address, worth $8.5 million.
According to Onchain Lens, the Royal Government of Bhutan has transferred 123.7 BTC (worth $8.5 million) to a new address.
According to Arkham's monitoring, digital asset treasury company Tron Inc. currently holds over $200 million in TRX, most of which is pledged. Over the past two months, the company has been purchasing $50,000 worth of TRX daily.
According to on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa, a whale address, 0xd64…07ED7, acquired 38,800 ETH through an ICO in 2015. After a year of dormancy, it re-emerged 45 minutes ago and transferred 18,500 of those ETH to address 0xBE4…a0c5F. Subsequently, it sold 9,628.54 ETH on-chain for $2,049, making a profit of $19.72 million, and may continue to sell.
The Ethereum spot ETF with the largest single-day net inflow yesterday was the BlackRock Staked ETH ETF (ETHB), with a net inflow of $96.8058 million. The total historical net inflow for ETHB has now reached $261 million.
The Ethereum spot ETF with the largest single-day net outflow yesterday was the BlackRock ETF ETHA, with a net outflow of $140 million. The total historical net inflow for ETHA is currently $11.697 billion.
The Bitcoin spot ETF with the largest single-day net outflow yesterday was BlackRock ETF IBIT, with a net outflow of $41.9191 million. IBIT's total historical net inflow has reached $63.3 billion.
The second largest outflow was from the Bitwise ETF (BITB), which saw a net outflow of $33.1013 million in a single day. BITB's total historical net inflow has reached $2.087 billion.
