HashStack #009

The market never sleeps, and neither does innovation.

Author

HashKey Capital
March 19, 2025

From AI agents to regulatory shifts, March has been a whirlwind for crypto. Bitcoin hovers near $90K, Trump’s strategic Bitcoin reserve is setting new precedents, and Ethereum’s ecosystem continues to evolve with major upgrades on the horizon. Meanwhile, the tokenization wave is picking up momentum, and institutions are making deeper inroads into Web3.

In this edition of HashStack, we break down the key trends shaping the industry and what they mean for the road ahead.

  • Publicly traded Bitcoin services company, Fold, adds $41M in BTC to their reserve.

  • Mara holdings reported fewer blocks won amid rising network difficulty and fewer operational days in February. 

  • Fiamma’s BitVM2 announced support for Babylon, BOB Network, Monad, ZKsync and Arbitrum, offering trustless, secure and native BTCFi. 

  • WLFI acquires more assets worth $21.5M, including Ethereum and WBTC ahead of the White House Crypto Summit.

  • Ethereum developers decide to postpone Pectra Upgrade after multiple buggy tests.

  • Nasdaq listed firm, BioNexus becomes the first firm to approve Ethereum treasury. 

  • Ethereum Foundation announced the establishment of Silviculture Society, which will invite external individuals to provide informal advice to the Foundation.

  • MetaMask unveiled a new roadmap, including features to make the user experience better – for example, supporting ERC-5792 “batched transactions”.

  • Solana co-founder prefers to have no US reserves as he believes it will undermine decentralization.

  • President Trump says that the U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile will hold Solana, Cardano and XRP.

  • First Solana ETF listed on DTCC.

  • Microsoft began testing AI models from various providers in a bid to reduce its reliance on OpenAI.

  • Manus AI launched a general-purpose AI Agent that can answer queries and perform tasks. It has drawn praise for its ability to multitask in both work and personal domains.

  • Bounce Finance announced Auction Intelligence, its AI Agent launchpad, on BNB.

  • Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 3.7, the best performing non-reasoning model in coding so far. However, this comes at a cost to consumers as it is now more expensive than OpenAI and DeepSeek. It has also launched Claude Code in limited research preview, an agentic coding assistant that can use NLP to read, modify, execute and store codes.

  • Virtuals Protocol revenue is down 97% as AI agent demand falls.

  • OpenAI rolls out Chatgpt 4.5 to paying users, with broader access rolling out in the coming weeks. 

  • Paypal targets PYUSD to reach 20M merchants by the end of 2025. 

  • USDC and EURC become the first stablecoins recognized by the Dubai International Financial Centre.

  • Metro Departmental store in Singapore will accept stablecoins.

  • USDe launches on Aptos.

  • SEC Approves First Yield-Bearing Stablecoin. The U.S. SEC has approved Figure Markets’ application for YLDS, a stablecoin that pays 3.85% APY.

  • Seismic, an encrypted blockchain, raised a $7M seed round led by a16z. 

  • August, an onchain prime brokerage and execution platform, completed a $10M Series A round led by Dragonfly Ventures. 

  • Across, a cross-chain interoperability protocol, raised $41M in strategic token sale led by Paradigm.

  • Infrared, a liquid staking protocol on Berachain, raised $14M in a Series A round led by Framework Ventures. 

  • Validation Cloud completed its $15M Series A round led by True Global Ventures. 

  • Rakurai, a Solana staking protocol, has completed a $3M seed round led by Anagram Ventures. 

  • Fastlane Labs, an MEV-aware infrastructure protocol, closed a $6M strategic round led by Figment Capital. 

  • Sentient launched Sentient Chat, an open, agentic perplexity.

  • Skate launched Skate AMM, the first AMM that operates across Solana, Sui, Base, Ton and more to forward cross-VM liquidity with a unified pricing curve.

  • Hex Trust Secures the Major Payment Institution licence (MPI) from the MAS.

  • Trusta Labs rebranded to Trusta.AI and launched an AI agent identity framework, multichain Trusta Attestation Service and a 5D onchain evaluation system. 

Crypto moves fast, but strategy wins the game.

As institutions ramp up adoption and markets navigate volatility, staying ahead of the curve is critical. Whether it’s regulatory clarity, emerging asset classes, or the next wave of onchain innovation, HashKey Capital remains at the forefront—analyzing, investing, and building for the future.

Stay tuned. The next chapter of Web3 is being written right now.