Category: Coins

• The British Barclays Bank is currently examining several blockchain systems for the possibility of digitizing banking processes for day-to-day business.
• They are in contact with several specialized technology providers and want to make a pre-selection in April.

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This makes Barclays Bank one of the growing number of international banks that are in the process of integrating digital assets and on-chain transaction processes into their operational business.

While competitors such as JPMorgan and HSBC already operate productive systems for tokenized deposits, Barclays is still in the evaluation phase but is relying on an accelerated decision-making process.

Stablecoins and tokenized deposits as pillars

The initial focus of considerations will be stablecoin-based payments and tokenized deposits.

Stablecoins are becoming a relevant instrument in global payment transactions as they allow fast, cost-effective transactions around the clock.

Bloomberg Intelligence predicts that stablecoins could reach tens of trillions in annual payment volume by 2030. This creates an environment for banks in which traditional payment models will come under pressure.

Tokenized deposits offer a regulatory-compliant alternative as they continue to be considered bank deposits and therefore do not fall into the category of freely circulating cryptocurrencies.

Barclays is examining how these tools can be integrated into existing systems and made usable for institutional clients.

The competition

JPMorgan already has an institutional payment token in use, the JPM Coin, which is used for internal and cross-border settlements.

HSBC is working in parallel to expand tokenized deposit offerings in multiple regions. Barclays is forced to catch up technologically in order to remain competitive in international corporate banking.

The planned move to blockchain is intended to enable continuous settlement without cut-off times while meeting UK and EU regulatory requirements.

The bank is also responding to developments in the technology sector, as social media companies such as Meta are integrating stablecoin payments into their applications and are thus entering direct competition with the banks.

Significance for Europe and the DACH region

The coming transformation of Barclays systems comes at a time when European banks are facing landmark decisions due to MiCAR, the DLT pilot regime and the increasing tokenization of traditional financial instruments.

The question of whether banks develop their own onchain infrastructures or rely on external networks is increasingly becoming a key question for the coming years. With its blockchain project, Barclays could provide a model that shows how established banks can seamlessly integrate digital assets into existing systems.

The development is relevant for the DACH region because it increases the pressure within Europe to launch comparable initiatives and accelerate existing projects.

• Former Mt.Gox boss Mark Karpelès wants a Bitcoin hard fork to recover around 80,000 of the BTC stolen between 2011 and 2014. This is a red flag for the community.
• Karpelès begins a new debate about the Mt.Gox hack and the related damages. But now, for the first time, the immutability of the Bitcoin specification is being specifically questioned.

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Mt.Gox was the dominant Bitcoin exchange until 2014 and at times handled the majority of global Bitcoin sales. Between 2011 and 2014, it “lost” around 850,000 BTC through security breaches and undetected outflows.

To date, almost 80,000 BTC are in a wallet that has not been touched since the hack.

The Bitcoins are clearly identifiable, but are virtually lost without an access key. The bankruptcy process has been going on for over a decade, and many creditors have only received a fraction of their damages.

Against this background, Karpelès brings the Bitcoin hard fork into play – for the Bitcoin community a clear violation of its eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not not desire the change of the sacred Bitcoin principle.”

Hard fork due to exceptional situation

Nonetheless Karpelès has released a patch for the Bitcoin corewhich would introduce a new consensus rule. Exceptionally, there would be a specific transaction that transfers the 79,956 BTC to an address controlled by the insolvency administrator without a private key.

Technically speaking, this would be a classic hard fork: only nodes that accept the exception rule would consider the restore valid. The existing Bitcoin chain would ignore the transaction.

Karpelès emphasizes that this is not about changing Bitcoin to anyone’s advantage or disadvantage, but about having an open debate about a unique special case. The insolvency administrator had previously stated that he would not take any steps in this direction without a clear signal from the community.

Community reaction

The reaction is predominantly negative. Developers and long-time community members warn that a retroactive change would set a dangerous precedent.

Bitcoin owes its credibility to the immutability of transactions. An exception – albeit for perhaps the crypto industry’s biggest hack – would undermine trust in the system.

But on the other hand, there is support from Mt.Gox creditors who argue that without such a measure they would never be fully compensated. They see a hard fork less as an interference with the principles of Bitcoin and more as a correction of a historical mistake.

Significance for the future of Bitcoin

The fundamental dispute shows how strong the tensions between technical ideology and practically achievable legal enforcement have become. While Bitcoin has grown enormously, legacy issues such as the Mt.Gox damages remain an unresolved issue.

The Karpelès proposal forces the community to grapple with the question of whether the principle of technical immutability should apply without exception or whether there are situations in which it must take precedence over an older legal principle.

Be that as it may, a hard fork is currently considered extremely unlikely, despite the equivalent of almost 5.3 billion solid arguments in the form of US dollars in the wallet in question.

• The crypto market has been under pressure since the Israeli-American airstrikes on Iran. The military escalation of the conflict has triggered a flight from risk assets.
• According to CoinDesk, the BTC price temporarily fell to $63,000. Bitcoin is the first to be affected by such geopolitical shocks because, unlike most assets, it can be liquidated 24/7.

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The Bitcoin price decline by over six percent in just a few hours is the strongest sign of the deteriorating market mood.

Gate.com describes that the total crypto market capitalization has shrunk by tens of billions of dollars.

Investors seek liquidity during periods of geopolitical stress and avoid highly volatile markets.

Altcoins

Altcoins reacted in the same way as Bitcoin, although less strongly. According to Gate.com, Ethereum and other major tokens lost more than two percent.

The market is showing a clear pattern: capital is flowing out of smaller, less liquid projects while investors focus on the largest assets. This shift is typical of periods of increased uncertainty.

A key driver of the downward trend is the derivatives market. Gate.com describes that hundreds of millions of dollars in leveraged positions were liquidated in a short period of time.

The pattern is well known: If prices fall below critical levels, long positions are closed, which creates additional selling pressure.

Since the crypto market trades around the clock and liquidity is lower compared to traditional markets, market movements intensify particularly quickly.

Consequences for the industry

The new Middle East war can expand. There are several possible consequences for the crypto industry:

• Institutional inflows into ETFs are stagnating as large investors move out of risky assets in times of crisis.
• Stablecoins are gaining in importance because they are a target for withdrawal during highly volatile phases.
• Mining locations in the affected region are at risk, which leads to further price distortions.
• Capital flows can be regulated restrictively because states rely more heavily on financial controls during crises.

outlook

The crypto industry is in a phase of increased uncertainty. While markets have always recovered from geopolitical shocks, the current situation may drag on.

The decisive factor will be whether the military part of the conflict ends quickly or continues to escalate.

• 63 teams submitted their projects for product concepts, system architectures, etc. – a clear indication of the attractiveness of IOTA as a development basis for apps for the real economy.
• The “Build Now Contest” marks the interim status of the IOTA MasterZ Hackathon and shows how much the field of developers has expanded in a short time.

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At the center of the MasterZ & IOTA Hackathon There are applications for trade, supply chains and compliance workflows. The teams are developing mechanisms for proof of origin, digital freight coordination and document verification, among other things.

This alignment is aligned with IOTA’s focus on trading-specific infrastructure, as outlined in the 2026 Manifesto.

The spectrum ranges from digital product passports to authentication mechanisms to dispute resolution systems for cold chains.

The high concentration on solutions for practical detailed problems shows that Web3 teams are increasingly focusing on real economic use cases and hardly any more on speculative token models. In parallel, projects for RWA tokenization and traditional financial systems are emerging.

Work is being done on programmable settlement mechanisms, tokenized market access and infrastructure for assets that are difficult to divide or illiquid.

In addition, data protection and data security come into focus: verification, selective disclosure, decentralized identity and protection against manipulation are the basis for applications that protect sensitive information without violating regulatory requirements.

The infrastructure layer is also noticeably growing. Several teams are developing interoperability tools and system tools that can serve as modules for other projects.

This includes identity frameworks, KYC mechanisms and protocols for structured data storage. These building blocks are essential to make IOTA’s programmable layer sustainable in the long term.

The hackathon itself follows a clear process: After the “learning phase” in February, it is now in its practical development before the final “prototypes” are presented on March 31st.

The best teams receive access to funding and incubation programs, venture contacts and an exclusive presentation at the IOTA Foundation in Berlin.

This makes the competition not only a technical but also a marketing springboard for new products in the IOTA environment.

• Ripple wants to make institutional crypto trading more centralized and capital efficient with the digital prime broker model.
• In this context, the XRP Ledger is primarily intended to support on-chain processing and credit lines.

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Ripple wants to fundamentally change institutional crypto trading and published a new white paper on February 26th. At the center is a model called Digital Prime Broker (DPB). This is intended to replace today’s dominant, fragmented relationships between exchanges, market makers and brokers with a central credit, risk and settlement structure.

Ripple’s Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa Reece Merrick writes via X:

“Traditional financial products meet digital assets, but the connection is not yet fully developed. Managing a complex web of exchanges and bilateral risks is not only time-consuming, but also unnecessarily ties up capital. Ripple’s new white paper introduces the Digital Prime Broker (DPB) model, which transforms complex risks into an optimized 1:1 relationship.”

The solution = Ripple Prime

The Ripple white paper provides a structure that removes this complexity. Ripple’s main focus is on the OTC market for cryptocurrencies, which from the US company’s perspective is still based on retail infrastructure.

Exchanges bundle execution, custody, credit and clearing in a single platform. According to Ripple, this leads to fragmented liquidity, hidden financing costs, multiple counterparty risks and tied up capital that cannot be used efficiently.

The white paper compares this model with the structure of the foreign exchange market. There, prime brokers take over the credit intermediation, trades across multiple trading venues are aggregated and cleared, and settlement is netted, typically on a T+1 basis.

It is precisely this solution that Ripple now wants to establish as an institutional standard for digital assets. In the DPB model, the customer only concludes a central master contract (with Ripple) with the prime broker. All transactions happen in the background with approved liquidity providers or market makers and are then given to this broker.

The white paper identifies three key benefits as better execution through aggregated liquidity, centralized credit and risk management, and greater capital efficiency through standardized net settlement and cross-collateralization.

Ultimately, Ripple also refers to its own service: Ripple Prime.

The company attributes an additional role to the XRP ledger. This could enable settlement via on-chain credit lines within a DPB framework, with financing costs being calculated transparently and explicitly to those who actually use the advanced settlement liquidity.

• This year the XRP ledger is to be optimized. You want to adapt it to the requirements of new apps without neglecting its core principles of stability, efficiency and security.
• In general, the aim is to promote the creativity of developers. The planned adjustments particularly affect the smart contract-like functions and the interaction of the ledger with applications.

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XRPL is intended to become more attractive for projects that are currently hosted on other blockchains. The goal of Ripple’s planning for 2026 is to handle more and more complex tasks with the same or better performance of the core ledger.

To achieve this, Ripple relies on the separation of deterministic core functions and modular extensions that run outside of the main validation process. The aim is to prevent computationally intensive applications from putting a strain on the transaction capacity of the network.

At the same time, scalability is increased through optimized consensus mechanisms and more efficient data paths. The goal is an XRP ledger that has consistently low latencies and a stable fee structure even as usage increases.

Interoperability and new applications

Interoperability is coming to the fore. Ripple is planning mechanisms that will simplify the exchange of assets and data between the XRP ledger and other networks. This opening is intended not only to create bridges to EVM-based systems, but also to support institutional applications that use multiple ledgers in parallel.

Through standardized interfaces and clearly defined security measures, developers should be able to deliver applications that run in different infrastructures. This creates new use cases, for example in the area of ​​RWA tokenization, digital identities and automated financial processes.

Governance‑Reform

In parallel to the technical innovations, the aim is to modernize the governance structures in 2026. Ripple and the XRPL community want to make decision-making processes more transparent and strengthen the participation of external developers.

Clearer procedures for technical proposals, defined evaluation phases and a more formalized coordination model are planned. This structure is intended to ensure that further developments remain comprehensible, verifiable and sustainable in the long term.

All of these innovations are intended to make the XRP ledger even more attractive as an infrastructure for companies, especially for financial service providers and institutions.

• IOTA is apparently about to go live in Kenya in the second quarter.
• The launch would be a first step for IOTA’s digital trading strategy in Africa.

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According to the IOTA Foundation, Kenya is on the verge of taking a decisive step towards fully digitalized trade processing. After a steering committee meeting of the TWIN Foundation in Nairobi explained Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen, Head of Global Trade & Supply Chains at the IOTA Foundation:

“This week we met in Nairobi for the TWIN Foundation Steering Committee with our partners Dave Beer, Philippe Isler, Tim Stekkinger, Frank Matsaert MBE, Marco Forgione MCIEx, Erick Sirali, Dr. Anja Raden, Yves Jobin and Wambui Wanjiku.”

The participants at the meeting were convinced of the system and declared the second quarter as the target to go live with the pilot project:

“We heard contributions from the Kenya Trade Network Agency (KenTrade) (operator of the central trading portal), the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), the Kenya Crop Protection Service Kephis and the freight forwarding company AiRFLOW. The unanimous opinion was: the system is working and everyone is looking forward to having it operational in the second quarter.”

This would turn a multi-year pilot project into an operational rollout for IOTA for the first time. Lund-Nielsen wrote in a LinkedIn post on February 26 that Kenya is “on track to become the world’s most digital frontier,” further stating:

“Once launched, Kenya will be a global leader as all government-issued trade documents will be digitized, verifiable and shareable with foreign partners. As electronic trade documents (ETDs) become more widespread, Kenyan traders will be the first to operate fully digitized, end-to-end supply chains.”

IOTA’s path to the first major Africa rollout

The goal of the project is to connect TLIP and TWIN. According to TradeMark Africa, TLIP, the Trade Logistics Information Pipeline, was founded together with IOTA in 2016. The system was tested on flower exports from Nairobi to the Netherlands. So far, six documents and releases from several authorities have had to be coordinated there. TLIP eliminates exactly these paper-based processes.

TWIN is the next step. TWIN is an open, decentralized infrastructure for verifiable real-time data in global supply chains. While TLIP is aimed at improving specific trade processes in East Africa, TWIN forms the technological base layer.

The TWIN Foundation was officially launched on May 8, 2025 in Lusaka. In addition to IOTA, the six founding organizations also include TradeMark Africa, the World Economic Forum and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

The fact that Kenya is now about to go live fits into a broader Africa strategy that has become much more concrete in recent months. In June 2025, IOTA and the Tony Blair Institute signed a memorandum of understanding to develop trusted digital public infrastructure around commerce, identity and data sharing. The collaboration begins in Africa but is intended to expand worldwide.

The biggest step to date followed in November 2025 with ADAPT. Led by the AfCFTA Secretariat, the initiative is supported by IOTA, the Tony Blair Institute and the World Economic Forum and aims to bring together identity, trade structure and financial flows on the African continent. The rollout started with pilot projects in Kenya and Ghana and is expected to integrate all 55 countries in the free trade zone by 2035.

• AllUnity, backed by Deutsche Bank, issues the stablecoin CHFAU. It is tied to the Swiss franc and covered by liquid CHF reserves.
• The issue takes place under the EU’s E-Money Institution license as a MiCAR-compliant, transparent instrument for digital financial markets.

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The COFFEE will initially be issued as an ERC 20 token on Ethereum. The reserves are stored at several banks, while issuance and redemption are carried out exclusively via AllUnity’s Mint service.

Customers can deposit francs, have CHFAU minted and redeem them at any time. AllUnity plans to bring its stablecoin to additional blockchains by the end of the year to expand its use in DeFi applications, institutional settlement systems and other trading infrastructures. At the same time, we are cooperating with crypto trading to spread the CHFAU in the market.

Importance in the EU and Switzerland

With the CHFAU, AllUnity is expanding its offering in addition to the already established Euro stablecoin EURAU. The combination of EU regulation, Swiss currency and institutional infrastructure is intended to set a new standard for digital payment methods in the European Economic Area.

AllUnity CEO Alexander Höptner speaks of a decisive step in enabling digital value transfer with bankable quality. For Switzerland, the CHFAU is a digital instrument that can function independently of possible digital central bank currencies.

Fields of application and perspectives

The stablecoin is aimed at international payments, treasury management and institutional settlement. Companies should be able to move liquidity in real time, without FX risks or delays caused by classic banking processes.

For DeFi protocols, CHFAU offers a stable, regulated CHF equivalent that was previously rarely available. AllUnity will expand the stablecoin system around the CHFAU through partnerships with banks, FinTechs and exchanges and establish the stablecoin as an integral part of the European digital financial infrastructure in the long term.

• Speculation is growing on X that Jane Street may have deliberately depressed the Bitcoin price via spot ETFs and futures markets.
• Reliable evidence of this is still missing, while critics tend to point to structural weaknesses in the ETF architecture.

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The conspiracy theory that Jane Street is manipulating the Bitcoin price has gained momentum again on X in recent days. The trigger was the lawsuit filed by the insolvency administrator of Terraform Labs against Wall Street giant Jane Street over a possible insider trade in the collapse of the Terra ecosystem.

The theory: Jane Street is manipulating Bitcoin

In a viral one X-Post Roberto Rios (on X: @peruvian_bull) refers to the lawsuit filed in Manhattan, as CNF reported. Rios writes that the Terra lawsuit must be seen in context. He refers to a procedure by the Indian stock exchange regulator SEBI. In July 2025, Jane Street accused Jane Street of deliberately manipulating the Bank Nifty index on 18 days between January 2023 and March 2025.

According to the agency, the company aggressively bought stocks and futures in the morning, then pushed the market lower again later. Jane Street thus benefited from massive short option positions. The SEBI speaks of the equivalent of around 580 million US dollars in ill-gotten gains and of a “deliberately designed instrument to manipulate settlement prices”.

The Bitcoin price development since November 2025 should be viewed against this background. The Bitcoin price repeatedly crashed at around 10:00 a.m. Eastern time, i.e. at the start of US stock trading. Rios and others cite countless trading days in which Bitcoin fell sharply within minutes of the start of the US stock exchange.

Suspicion was primarily directed at Jane Street because the company is one of the authorized participants of the BlackRock ETF IBIT and therefore has direct access to the issuance and redemption process of ETF shares. On the other hand, Rios argues that Jane Street is the second largest holder of the BlackRock Spot Bitcoin ETF IBIT after Millennium Management LLC, according to 13F filings.

His thesis: Sell spot Bitcoin and ETF-related products in the morning, depress the market, flush leveraged longs out of the market, buy them back later at a cheaper price. With Terraform Labs’ lawsuit against Jane Street, the pattern has suddenly stopped. Bitcoin rose more than 7% yesterday because the “10am dump” didn’t happen. Jane Street has been exposed, or so the theory goes.

Why there is probably no “manipulation”.

ProCap CIO and Bitwise advisor Jeff Park contradicts the theory, but sees a different structural problem. For him, the “billion-dollar question” is not whether a single Wall Street firm is actively “pushing” Bitcoin, but rather whether the ETF architecture can distort pricing. He wrote via X on February 25th:

“The short answer is that no Authorized Participant explicitly suppresses the Bitcoin price. What the AP structure can suppress is the integrity of the price discovery mechanism itself. That is not the same thing – but the latter may be more consequential.”

Park argues that Authorized Participants are structurally privileged through regulatory exemptions under Reg SHO. They could create and short sell ETF shares as part of creation and redemption processes in a way that is not possible for other market participants.

It is also crucial that a short in IBIT does not necessarily have to be hedged with spot Bitcoin. If futures are used instead, there is no immediate buying pressure in the spot market. With the recent approval of in-kind creations and redemptions, this flexibility has become even greater. He writes:

“Each AP on the IBIT list operates within the same structural framework, with the same exceptions, and thus with the same theoretical capacity. Whether any of them utilize that capacity in a manner bordering on coordinated activity is a question […] for the SEC. Whether these arrangements are sufficient to capture conduct that simultaneously spans spot, futures and ETF markets – including offshore trading venues – remains an open question.”

However, macro analyst Alex Krüger contradicts the basic assumption that there is a significant “10am dump” based on the data. For him, the theory is “another flawed conspiracy theory.” He writes today via X:

“I checked the data and that’s not true. Since January 1, IBIT’s cumulative return is +0.9% in the 10:00 to 10:30 a.m. window and -1% in the 10:00 to 10:15 a.m. window. So these are fluctuations, not a systematic fall in prices.

Even more interesting: the performance in both time windows largely corresponds to that of the Nasdaq. The alleged “10 o’clock dump” is just a general reassessment of risk assets. The conventional wisdom is wrong.”

• Timothy Stebbing wants to turn Dogecoin from a memecoin into an RWA platform in the long term.
• The plan initially calls for a sidechain before implementation on Dogecoin’s Layer 1 could come.

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Dogecoin could gain a completely new use case in the next two to three years. Timothy Stebbing, Director of the Dogecoin Foundation and CTO of House of Doge, revealed today on

Dogecoin plans evolution: from memecoin to RWA platform

According to Stebbing, the infrastructure should initially not be developed on the Dogecoin Layer 1 itself, but on a sidechain infrastructure:

“This is a plan I have been working on for 12 months: to make Dogecoin an asset-backed currency over the next two to three years by moving the market for tokenization of real-world assets to the Fractal Engine – a purpose-built Dogecoin-denominated rules engine for RWAs.”

First, the tokenization of real assets will run via the Fractal Engine, which he describes as a tailor-made RWA rules engine for Dogecoin. Only when this model proves successful will the next step follow: moving RWA tokenization from the sidechain to the Dogecoin main chain via protocol upgrades.

“Once the model is proven, we plan to work on migrating RWA tokenization from the sidechain to Layer 1 – via protocol upgrades. This would result in Dogecoin becoming the leading platform for tokenization of assets denominated in Dogecoin.”

From the plan you can derive a bullish narrative for the Dogecoin price, which Stebbing himself explains. According to him, DOGE would not just be an accompanying asset, but the central exchange and settlement medium for real-world assets.

“This would give Dogecoin a direct use as a medium of exchange for RWAs – a market that is seen worldwide as the next stage of the financial system’s evolution. Not the tokenization of another inconsequential meme coin with no real value living parasitically on another chain. No – it’s about the tokenization of real assets: hotels, companies, minerals, oil and gas. And if you want to trade them, do it with Dogecoin.”

Stebbing is therefore aiming for a fundamental change of plan for Dogecoin: away from the mere meme internet currency, towards an infrastructure in which real assets are valued and traded in DOGE.