Author: NBTC

Safe smart accounts processed nearly 130 million transactions in the second quarter, the highest quarterly total in the protocol’s history and a 5.7% increase from Q1, the Safe Ecosystem Foundation said in its Q2 2026 report published Wednesday. The record quarter came against a weaker market, a sign that smart account usage is compounding independently of price. Total Safe accounts reached 63.4 million, up 20% year over year, and monthly active accounts climbed through the quarter to 2.73 million in June. April was the busiest month ever recorded, with 55.4 million transactions. Transfer volume hit $39.3 billion in the quarter,…

Blockstream CEO Adam Back said concerns over Strategy’s small Bitcoin sale are overblown, framing the move as normal treasury management rather than a warning sign for the company’s Bitcoin plan. Speaking in a Bloomberg interview shared on YouTube, Back addressed questions about Strategy selling 32 $BTC to help pay preferred stock dividends. He said the sale showed the firm could meet obligations while keeping Bitcoin at the center of its balance sheet. Back frames sale as balance sheet use Back argued that the market should not treat the 32 $BTC sale as a bearish signal. In his view, Strategy used…

“When we reached out to like 10 banks or payment companies asking if we can do crypto debit cards, all of them said no, you cannot. It’s not possible,” Pavel Matveev said on the On The Margin podcast, recalling 2015. “And crypto is only for buying drugs and weapons.” “A lot of companies, a lot of founders, maybe they gave up a bit too early,” Matveev said. “And we just kept going and kept trying.” One company eventually said yes, and in 2015 Wirex shipped one of the first crypto debit cards, a prepaid card you could load with Bitcoin…

A growing number of governments now view crypto mining as an industry worth attracting rather than taxing away. The competitive logic behind this is that structured fee models on mining revenues generate consistent income, above-market electricity tariffs recover infrastructure costs, and the broader economic activity, construction, employment, and foreign investment flows into regions that often have limited industrial development otherwise. The most recent government to enter this competition is Uzbekistan. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed a resolution establishing the Besqala Mining Valley across Karakalpakstan. Miners inside the zone pay zero corporate income tax, zero property tax, zero land tax, and zero…

Morpho, the DeFi lending protocol with about $7.6 billion in total value locked, will complete a full deployment on HashKey’s HSK Chain and become the network’s official onchain credit partner, HSK Chain said in a post on X on Tuesday. The deal gives Morpho its first anchor in Hong Kong, one of the few jurisdictions running a licensed regime for virtual asset trading, and gives HashKey, the licensed Hong Kong crypto group behind the chain, a battle-tested credit engine to build regulated lending products on. The two said they will develop onchain credit products for institutional and retail users, explore…

Optimism around U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio-led ceasefire talks lifted risk sentiment across crypto markets. The talks followed a reported agreement between the U.S. and Iran on a 60-day ceasefire framework. Both sides retained the option to extend it through mutual agreement. Amid the development, the total crypto market cap increased by roughly $39 billion, up 1.37%, and stabilized near $2.19 trillion. Bitcoin [BTC] reclaimed the $64,000 level at press time. Ethereum [ETH] also showed signs of recovery and traded around $1,723. However, average daily trading volume remained below normal levels at $52 billion to $55 billion. That suggested…

BNY, the world’s largest custody bank, plans to support round-the-clock settlement of conventional and tokenized U.S. Treasuries in 2027, after completing an after-hours trade involving the reserves of 2 stablecoin issuers. The bank will test tokenized Treasuries on a private blockchain by the end of the year and will extend its existing settlement network later this year to cover more of the Asian, European and U.S. trading days, according to a letter sent to clients reported by Bloomberg. The earlier transaction involved Ripple’s $RLUSD and OpenEden’s USDO with Ripple participating directly, while BNY’s cash-management business unit Dreyfus acted for OpenEden.…

Garrett Jin, the founder of the now-defunct and fraud-accused cryptocurrency exchange BitForex, has accumulated over $13.5 million in unrealized profits from a leveraged short position on Zcash ($ZEC), according to data from on-chain analytics firm Onchain Lens. The trade, executed on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid ($HYPE), comes as $ZEC’s price dropped following the discovery of a bug in its Orchard Pool privacy protocol. Details of the Trade Onchain Lens reports that Jin opened a 3x leveraged short position on $ZEC, betting that the token’s price would decline. The timing of the trade appears strategic, coinciding with a price slump triggered…

Privacy-focused blockchain networks are experiencing notable growth as institutional investors increasingly adopt blockchain technology, according to a new analysis from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. The report highlights that privacy is becoming a core infrastructure component rather than a niche feature, requiring more sophisticated monitoring approaches. Key Privacy Networks Identified Chainalysis specifically named Canton, Solana Confidential Transfers, Zcash, and Aztec as prominent privacy-focused networks, each employing distinct methods to protect transaction data. The firm noted that these varying technical architectures create different compliance challenges for financial institutions and regulators. Canton, for instance, focuses on privacy within a permissioned network environment, while…

A preferred stock that was supposed to behave like a steady, high-yield bond fell to 82 cents on the dollar in a single session. The issuer says it was a leverage flush, not a credit problem. Either way, the new world of Bitcoin-backed “digital credit” just met its first stress test. On June 18, 2026, a security that was designed to be boring did something deeply un-boring. STRC, the perpetual preferred stock issued by Michael Saylor’s company Strategy, the firm formerly known as MicroStrategy, fell to an intraday low of $82.50, far below the roughly $100 par value such an…