HashStack #015

Trump Media announced a $400M share buyback plan which does not affect its goal of acquiring $2.3B in Bitcoin treasury.

Arizona house passed HB-2324 that aims to establish protocols for managing the seizure, storage, and sale of digital assets.

Lightning Labs announced Taproot assets v0.6 which improves developer experience, streamlines payments, and allows payment receivers to receive larger payments alongside other feature upgrades. 

StarkWare published a demo of a modified Stratum v2 mining client using a STARK proof to prove the block fee without revealing transactions in the block.

South Korea’s FSC has submitted an implementation plan for crypto ETFs to the Presidential Committee, including plans to regulate stablecoins.

Kraken offers bitcoin staking through Babylon, offering up to 1% APY without the need for bridging, wrapping or lending.

The Texas Governor signed the Bitcoin state treasury bill into law, making it the third US state to adopt a Bitcoin treasury reserve.

Major Ethereum validators are now testing OptimumP2P, a high performance memory layer that can help to reduce latency by 10x under high network load compared to current conditions. 

ZkSync introduces ZKSync Airbender, the world’s fastest open source RISC-V ZKVM, far outpacing Succint labs SP1, and RiscZero when using H100 and Nvidia L4. Newer elastic chains can use Airbender as a proof system moving forward and existing chains can migrate to Airbender.

Sharplink gaming boosts Ethereum treasury stash to $461M.

Unichain completes integration with 1inch.

Coinbase launches wrapped Cardano and Litecoin on the Base network. Wrapped assets are backed 1:1 in Coinbase custody with regular proof of reserves.

Ripple applies for national bank charter and Fed Master account which will enable the firm to reduce settlement time and have its stablecoin reserves held directly with the Federal Reserve.

Rex Osprey SOL + staking ETF is officially live, providing investors with attractive Solana staking yields. 

Nano Labs, a Chinese blockchain company, announced a $500M convertible note deal to build its BNB treasury. 

Aptos introduced Shelby, a web3 cloud storage solution by Jump and Aptos Labs. 

Ripple partners with Wormhole to enable cross-chain XRP transfers.

BNB announced Maxwell hard fork which introduces shorter block time, shorter block finality, smarter block fetching logic and enhanced validator network messaging.

Virtuals Protocol Agent Commerce Protocol is now live in public beta. 

Cloudfare is now implementing a new feature that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites. Its pay per crawl is currently in private beta.

Eleven Labs launched 11ai, a personal assistant that is voice first and supports MCP.

Sakana AI introduced AB-MCTS for collective AI intelligence. What this means is that it introduces a new inference-time scaling algorithm that allows multiple models to cooperate which is shown to significantly outperform individual models.

Huawei released an open-sourced model, Pangu Pro 72B A16B, trained entirely using Huawei Ascend NPUs.

Microsoft-backed Space and Time surges as Grayscale debuts SXT crypto fund.

World chain introduced Deep Face mini app, which helps to verify that the counterparty that the user is speaking to is real and not deepfake. Currently in beta mode.

Lagrange is bringing its DeepProve technology to Arbitrum.

Grass network announced DEPIN hardware, Grasshopper.

0G labs announced that validators can now join their public testnet.

Kaiko announced a partnership with San Fran Tokyo to bring AI Agent into anime IP.

AllUnity has received German regulator BaFin approval to issue euro-backed stablecoin, EURAU. 

Circle Internet applies for national trust charter.

Baanx’s Crypto Life card users in EU, UK and LATAM can now spend BNB at 100M+ Mastercard and Visa merchants.

Bolt launched Bolt Connect to enable a more seamless merchant onboarding and flexible payment by supporting stablecoin payments.

Paxos launched USDG, a new fully regulated stablecoin that is MiCA compliant and available for trading on Kraken and Gate.

Budget Wallet partners with Mastercard to bring crypto cards to users in the EU and UK.

Hokkoku Financial partners with fintech firm Soft Space to launch SoftPOS solution scheduled in autumn 2025, enabling participating merchants to accept contactless and digital payments such as the Tochika stablecoin backed by Japanese yen deposits. 

Ripple partners with OpenPayd, leveraging OpenPayd's fiat infrastructure to enable enterprises to have seamless conversion between RLUSD and fiat. 

KB Kookmin Bank files stablecoin 17 stablecoin trademark ahead of major banking consortium.

Taurus launched the first private stablecoin contract on Aztec, leveraging on zero knowledge proofs with the compliance features of existing stablecoins.

Mastercard partners with Fiserv to enable merchants to accept stablecoin regardless of the payment methods. Integration with Mastercard multi-token network will enable programmable onchain commerce for banks through the Fiserv digital asset platform.

FalconX joins Crypto.com and others as launch partners of Lynq, a digital asset settlement platform.

HashKey Chain partnered with GF securities to issue tokenized GF token on its network, allowing institutional and HNWI to subscribe. This is done in collaboration with other business units including HashKey Tokenization, HashKey Cloud and HashKey exchange. 

A platform that allows investors to buy private companies shares, Linqto, is now facing SEC investigations for securities fraud and headed towards bankruptcy.

Ondo and Pantera planned $250M investment into RWA projects through the Ondo Catalyst fund. 

Dinari and Bitgo partners to offer tokenized equities to fintechs via one unified API. This is expected to launch in Q3 2025

S&P 500 partners with Centrifuge to bring S&P 500 index onchain. Anemoy, a web3 native asset manager has been licensed by S&P 500 and Janus Henderson as a sub-advisor to the fund and bring the Janus Henderson Anemoy S&P 500 index fund segregated portfolio onchain.

Chainlink announced ACE, a toolkit that provides onchain KYC/AML compliance, privacy preserving identity verification and other tools to manage tokenized RWAs. 

Robinhood launched access to 200+ tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs to users in Europe, faced backlash from OpenAI CEO. 

Solana treasury firm, Upexi, plans to tokenize its shares via Superstate’s Opening Bell tokenization platform.

Dinari Securities received a broker/dealer license with the SEC and FINRA to offer tokenized stocks. Coinbase and Kraken are also pursuing similar licenses.

Dinari partnered with Gemini and started offering tokenized Strategy shares on the Gemini platform.

Bitfinex launches 2 RWA products on Bitcoin Liquid Network: a debt offering from a Scottish bank and $136M car finance claims litigation.

Chainlink and Mastercard announced a partnership to allow 3 billion cardholders to buy crypto.

Singapore-based Starborn energy partners with Libertum to tokenize $100M in gas infrastructure, offering 8-10% APY for investors. 

Nasdaq integrates Canton Network into Calypso Platform for 24/7 margin and collateral management across a broad range of assets.

Zama, a cryptographic company building Fully Homomorphic Encryption, has raised $57M at a $1B valuation in its Series B round led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange Ventures. 

Digital Asset, a blockchain software and service provider has completed a $135M strategic round led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets. 

Kalshi, a prediction market platform, has completed a $185M Series C round at a $2B valuation led by Paradigm. 

Niural, a compliant crypto payroll platform, has raised $31M in its Series A round led by Marathon Management Partners. 

Coinbase acquired token management platform LiquiFi. 

Spekter Games, a blockchain game development studio raised a $5M pre-seed round led by a16z speedrun to launch ‘Spekter Agency’, a roguelite action game on Telegram.

Intmax launched on mainnet, revolutionizing Ethereum payments with privacy-preserving technology and near-zero fees.

Grayscale announced the launch of the Space and Time Trust, providing investment exposure to SXT. It is now open to eligible individual and institutional investors.

Nano Labs has raised $500 million through a convertible bond private placement for its BNB reserve strategy. 

Merlin Chain has launched BTC staking, with a maximum annual yield of up to 21%. 

Brevis announced Pico-GPU 1.0 with 20x faster proofs than Pico CPU. 

Tevaera Protocol announced Teva Protocol on Base, providing native games support and seamless guild creation.