Author: NBTC

Miami Beach, FL — Morgan Stanley’s newly launched spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (MSBT) has attracted over $200 million in early demand, and it’s largely without help from its own advisors. “Almost all of that first week or two of activity was self-directed, meaning it was not our advisors that were selling this,” Amy Oldenburg, the bank’s newly appointed head of digital assets, said during a fireside chat at Consensus in Miami. The fund, just a few weeks old, has already gathered more than $200 million in assets, an unusually fast start in the traditional ETF market, where most launches struggle…

Virtuals Protocol officially launched on Celo, a carbon-neutral, mobile-first blockchain that’s designed for decentralization. Both AI and decentralized finance are starting a new phase of their journey. This strategic partnership is pioneering the new field of “Agentic Commerce” with both Artificial Intelligence and DeFi. Agentic Commerce is a complete reformation of what an AI agent can be as they become active economic participants instead of just passive assistants. As such, this represents a completely new way for AI agents to operate autonomously within the blockchain ecosystem. The Rise of Autonomous On-Chain Agents The partnership between Virtuals Protocol and Celo is…

Law and Ledger is a news segment focusing on crypto legal news, brought to you by Kelman Law – A law firm focused on digital asset commerce. This Week in Crypto Law The opinion editorial below was written by Alex Forehand and Michael Handelsman for Kelman.Law. The final week of April highlighted a pivotal shift in crypto law: the migration of core crypto products and infrastructure into regulated frameworks—paired with expanding enforcement into previously overlooked corners of the market. From anticipated U.S. derivatives rule changes to European banking expansion and novel litigation over token control, the legal perimeter around digital…

Bakkt and Zoth have entered into a strategic partnership framework to build a compliant stablecoin payment infrastructure across remittance corridors connecting the U.S., South Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. According to a press release shared with crypto.news, the agreement will place the company under the licensing structure of Bakkt Financial Solutions I, LLC, allowing Zoth to operate as an Authorized Agent while using Bakkt’s U.S. regulatory approvals for enterprise payment flows. The Singapore-based firm said the setup is expected to help financial institutions and money transfer operators move stablecoin-based payments across high-volume corridors that have historically faced…

The use of Web 3 has always been about a promise of privacy, with some apps and dApps still having at least some dependency upon centralized servers, centralized clouds, or third-party data. On May 7th, 2026, MAGNE.AI announced a collaboration with MarsCat whereby they are creating an “end-to-end” privacy layer where MarsCat manages the infrastructure for the network and MAGNE.AI constructs devices that are secured upon that network. What Each Side Brings to the Table MarsCat is a distributed connection network and a decentralized Web3 application engine that allows decentralized applications to function in a privacy-first, serverless manner with no…

Bitcoin is closing out Q1 2026 on a sour note. The largest crypto is trading around $66.4k after a quarter that saw shedding nearly half its value from the October 2025 peak near $125k. With macro and geopolitical uncertainty still weighing on risk assets and no major structural level reclaimed, $BTC heads into Q2 without a clear bullish catalyst on the horizon. Bitcoin Price Analysis: The Daily Chart On the daily timeframe, it is evident that the descending channel that has governed Bitcoin’s price action since late 2025 remains intact. Both the 100-day MA (~$77k) and 200-day MA (~$90k) are…

The path to mainstream crypto adoption runs through more visible, controllable product design, executives from PayPal, Robinhood, Public.com and 248 Ventures told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference Tuesday. “It’s important to tell users with AI products what the underlying system is not doing in addition to what it is doing,” Public.com CFO Sruthi Lanka said. Public has built its agentic-investing product so that users review and approve a “deterministic recipe” before any trade is placed. “Make sure it’s not a black box,” she said. The result, according to Lanka, is an organization where everyone is now writing code: “I have accountants…

Filecoin Foundation and the GSR Foundation are backing five projects that use decentralized storage for things most crypto funding rounds don’t go near. War crime evidence. Refugee oral histories. Experimental art is at risk of disappearing. Geospatial data that researchers can’t reliably access. Ocean ecosystem records turned into sensory experiences. All five are already active within the Filecoin ecosystem. .@FilFoundation and @GSR_io Foundation support projects that store things like satellite data, historical records, and digital media on Filecoin. These systems don’t rely on trust in one provider. They can prove the data is still there and unchanged. pic.twitter.com/11T1REH9Ql — Filecoin…

Yellow Card, a crypto exchange and fintech platform that allows users and businesses to buy, sell, and use cryptocurrencies for payments, has announced its history-making partnership with MasterCard, a company integrating digital assets and distributed ledger technology that facilitates secure, fast, and compliant transactions. This binding purpose is based on compliant cross-border payments flow especially for stablecoins. Big news: We are officially partnering with @Mastercard!Together, we are accelerating stablecoin payment innovation across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EEMEA). We are building better ways for our clients to handle cross-border payments and B2B settlements.🧵 pic.twitter.com/zrgT6z0qGx — Yellow Card (@yellowcard_app)…

Instant Settlement: The $XRP Ledger has demonstrated the capacity to process bond redemptions in less than five seconds, compared to the two days required by the traditional system. Institutional Adoption: Ripple, JPMorgan, Mastercard, and Ondo Finance recently completed a cross-border pilot for tokenized Treasury bonds. RWA Growth: The total value of real-world assets (RWA) in the XRPL ecosystem surpassed $3 billion in May 2026. During his appearance on the program Crypto in America, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse described the current bond settlement system as an obsolete and fragmented infrastructure. The executive noted that the $XRP Ledger presents itself as the…