Author: NBTC

Network News ETHEREUM COMMUNITY DEBATES FOUNDATIONS NEW MANDATE DOCUMENT: The Ethereum Foundation’s new mandate — a sweeping document released to clarify the organization’s role and principles — sparked a torrent of reactions, with supporters praising it as a long-overdue articulation of the blockchain’s ethos and critics saying it reinforces the foundation’s hands-off approach at a time when Ethereum needs stronger leadership to meet the growing needs of institutions. The 38-page document lays out what the foundation described as a constitutional guide to its mission, emphasizing its role as a neutral steward rather than a centralized authority. The mandate frames the…

Switzerland has launched its first live municipal blockchain project through a biodiversity reward voucher system built on the Hedera network and backed by a Swiss franc-linked digital payment instrument. According to an announcement shared with crypto.news by the Municipality of Muri bei Bern, the Canton of Bern municipality partnered with Swiss Web3 engineering firm The Hashgraph Group, blockchain developer Swisscoast, and digital transformation company Apps with Love to roll out BIDI, a blockchain-based biodiversity voucher designed to reward residents for participating in conservation work. Built on the Hedera distributed ledger network, the system issues on-chain vouchers pegged to the Swiss…

Ukraine has complicated President Donald Trump’s efforts to stabilize oil markets amid the Iran war, amplifying risks for financial markets, including cryptocurrencies. For nearly a month, markets have been gripped by a single concern: the Iran war. Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz – a critical oil chokepoint – have driven prices sharply higher, stoking fears of sticky inflation, a risk-off shift, and renewed Fed rate hikes. To cool things down, the Trump administration quickly lifted sanctions on Russian crude for the short term, opening the tap to compensate for oil supply disruptions caused by the Iran war. It came…

Most companies move payroll funds into a wallet or bank account and let them sit. For distributed teams running global payroll, that can mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in $USDC sitting idle for days or weeks between funding and disbursement, earning nothing. At the same time, DeFi protocols like Aave have been generating meaningful yield on stablecoin deposits for years. The problem is that accessing that yield has historically required crypto-native knowledge: self-custody wallets, bridging between networks, managing gas fees, and navigating protocol interfaces that weren’t built for business operators. Rise Earn closes that gap. It lets…

SoFi Technologies reported strong first-quarter results, with profit and revenue surpassing expectations, but its shares fell sharply after the company issued a slightly weaker-than-expected outlook for the current quarter. The financial services firm said it expects adjusted revenue growth of around 30% in the second quarter, just below analyst estimates of 31%. The cautious guidance appeared to dampen investor sentiment, sending shares down by over 12% in early trading on Wednesday. While the company reaffirmed its full-year outlook, it stopped short of raising its forecast despite the upbeat quarterly performance, which some investors had anticipated. Strong growth in lending and…

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has turned the spotlight on a very different corner of artificial intelligence: translation that happens entirely on-device, without sending sensitive text to the cloud. In a recent post, Ardoino framed the issue around privacy, speed, and practicality. His point was simple enough, but it touches a problem that millions of users encounter every day. When someone translates a medical note, a private message, a legal contract, or even a personal journal entry through a cloud service, that text leaves the device and enters someone else’s infrastructure. In many cases, users do not fully know where the…

In a groundbreaking move to build secure, privacy-preserving, and verifiable workflows that operate efficiently across various DeFi ecosystems, TradingRazor, an AI-native trading decision platform built for multi-chain markets, today entered into a strategic integration with Manadia, a data settlement and AI coordination infrastructure. Using this tech incorporation, TradingRazor combines with Manadia to ensure that AI-driven applications in its DeFi analytics and trading platform are supported by reliable, transparent, and low-trust data settlement and AI coordination infrastructure designed to enable trusted execution across on-chain and off-chain systems. TradingRazor is an AI-driven signal analysis platform that serves the needs of multi-chain DeFi…

“It makes nothing but sense” for assets like collectible trading cards to become tokenized and traded onchain, OpenSea Chief Marketing Officer Adam Hollander said during an interview with The Block’s Gareth Jenkinson at Consensus Miami. Hollander argued that NFTs remain a valid technology for proving ownership of digital and physical assets, despite the crash in the values of profile-picture collections like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks. “I think that we will see a resurgence,” Hollander said. “But I think it might look a little different when we do than what people saw back in 2021 and 2022.” According to Hollander, the…

Ethereum captures 71.9% of all tokenized fund assets — and BlackRock just filed to make that lead nearly impossible to close. Recently, BlackRock — the world’s largest asset manager overseeing $14 trillion — submitted two new filings to the SEC. It proposes to launch tokenized share classes for its $7 billion Select Treasury Based Liquidity Fund (BSTBL) and a new BlackRock Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle. Both products will run on Ethereum using ERC-20 tokens. The infrastructure for institutional finance is being built — and it is being built on one chain. Wall Street Didn’t Arrive Here Overnight In 2021,…

The shares of Twenty One Capital (XXI), the bitcoin-focused firm, are up over 8% in after-hours trading on Wednesday, after majority shareholder Tether Investments proposed a merger with Strike and Elektron Energy. Tether Investment, the independent investment arm of the stablecoin issuer, said it intends to vote its shares in favor of combining XXI with Strike, a global bitcoin financial services company founded by Jack Mallers and Elektron Energy, according to a press release. Mallers is also the CEO of XXI. “If completed, these transactions would position XXI to become the premier listed Bitcoin company in the world: a public…