Author: NBTC

CoinDesk is hosting its second annual Consensus Hong Kong conference, and as always, we’ll have a number of policy-focused sessions. Are you in town? Find me on stage or around the show floor and say hi! You’re reading State of Crypto, a CoinDesk newsletter looking at the intersection of cryptocurrency and government. Click here to sign up for future editions. The narrative CoinDesk’s annual Consensus Hong Kong conference will kick off this Wednesday with a speech from Hong Kong Chief Executive John KC Lee. Why it matters Hong Kong is playing an interesting role in the intersection of financial services…

South Korea’s Bithum admitted Wednesday that severe flaws left the trading platform’s internal system wide open to potential sabotage and that it failed to prevent the mistaken transfer of $40 billion in bitcoin to customers, according to Reuters. The blunder, which triggered the price of bitcoin to plunge by 17% on Bithumb, according to Reuters, consisted of the country’s second-largest crypto trading platform accidentally giving away 620,000 bitcoins to customers instead of just 620,000 won (roughly $428). The Financial Supervisory Service said Sunday it will start investigations into “high-risk” practices that undermine market order, including large-scale price manipulation by so-called…

R3E Network has published a new version of NeoRust, a substantial maintenance release focused on code quality, security, and developer experience. First launched in 2021, NeoRust is a Rust SDK that helps developers build on Neo N3 using a high-level API with unified error handling. The project received GrantShares funding in 2023 and includes tooling for cryptography, wallet management (BIP-39/44 HD wallets, multi-sig, and hardware wallet support), and RPC-based node interaction. It also supports smart contract deployment and invocation, NEP-17 token operations, WebSocket-based event monitoring, transaction simulation for fee estimation, and network configuration for MainNet, TestNet, and custom networks. Key…

A new wallet has come into the market. First, it created address 0x15a4. Thereafter, it placed a deposit of $5 million of $USDC in Hyperliquid. It immediately went short leveraged 20 times. The position targets 30,000 $ETH. The notional exposure is a sum of $60.76 million. This was not a cautious entry. It was decisive, fast and highly leveraged. Consequently, on-chain analysts were immediately attracted by the trade. A gambler created a new wallet 0x15a4, deposited 5M $USDC into #Hyperliquid, and opened a 20× short on 30,000 $ETH($60.76M).Liquidation price: $2,143.38https://t.co/Z2oHDELAHi pic.twitter.com/A5dbMsX7TF — Lookonchain (@lookonchain) February 9, 2026 The entry price…

Despite the face-value strength of the U.S. economy, exemplified by the S&P 500’s 16% rally in 2025, the previous year has seen a string of warning signs. One of the most pointed metrics of brewing trouble has been the number of large corporate bankruptcies, which has reached its highest level since 2010. Specifically, 717 major American companies have filed for bankruptcy in 2025 – a 4.37% increase from 687 in 2024. Furthermore, the number is 12.21% greater than during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and is the highest figure recorded since the 828 corporate failures recorded in 2010. Indeed, the…

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is calling on the Senate Banking Committee to proceed with confirmation hearings for Federal Reserve chair nominee Kevin Warsh, despite a standoff over an ongoing probe into current Fed chair Jerome Powell. Speaking with Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, Bessent referenced recent pushback from Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who said he plans to stall on the confirmation of the next Fed chair until the Department of Justice probe into Powell is resolved. “Senator Tillis has come out and said he thinks that Kevin Warsh is an extreme candidate,” Bessent said, adding: “So I would say,…

Arkham Exchange is not shutting down, despite reports to the contrary, and is instead redesigning itself as a decentralized trading platform, the company confirmed to Cointelegraph. The crypto trading platform launched by data analytics firm Arkham Intelligence is shifting from a centralized model to a fully decentralized exchange (DEX), Arkham CEO Miguel Morel told Cointelegraph on Wednesday. “The future of crypto trading is decentralized, and that’s what we’re building towards,” Morel said. Launched in 2024, Arkham Exchange allows users to trade both spot crypto and perpetual contracts. The platform launched a mobile app in late 2025. At the time of…

SPACE ID announces the integration with $RIVER, the decentralized communication protocol for communities to engage with each other, which is an important step forward for social interactions within the Web 3.0 space. This integration is very important because it makes it possible for users to easily switch between different blockchains’ communities and have a unified experience when using them. By integrating SPACE ID’s name infrastructure into $RIVER’s environment will allow users to identify and communicate with each other in decentralized chat rooms and social networks much more easily. Enhancing User Experience with Human-Readable Identities Technical complexity is an issue preventing…

The expansion of cbBTC – Coinbase’s wrapped Bitcoin – into the Monad ecosystem marks a pivotal milestone for decentralized finance. Thanks to the integration with Chainlink and its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), cbBTC can now be transferred directly from Base to Monad, paving the way for new opportunities for developers, investors, and users of the DeFi. Chainlink CCIP: the Key to Interoperability Monad: a high-performance blockchain for DeFi New Opportunities for DeFi: Lending, Borrowing, and Beyond Security and Scalability: The Strength of Chainlink A rapidly evolving ecosystem Conclusions: The Future of Bitcoin Liquidity in DeFi Chainlink CCIP: the Key to…

After recovering the $2,000 mark, Ethereum is displaying signs of strength, and data from the derivatives market now indicates a significant change in sentiment. The recent market-wide sell-off appears to have caused traders to quickly rotate back into risk, as evidenced by the spike in leveraged long positioning seen in funding rates across major exchanges. Funding is everything The BitMEX signal, where $ETH funding has flipped into extremely positive territory, is the most noticeable. Positive funding rates — which usually indicate strong bullish conviction and aggressive leverage expansion — indicate that long traders are paying shorts to maintain positions open.…