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Talk about frenzied trading. On Thursday, BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, tickered as IBIT, hit a wild record with over 284 million shares traded, per Nasdaq data. That’s a whopping $10 billion-plus in notional value.To put it in perspective, that smashed the old record of 169.21 million shares from Nov. 21 by a massive 169%.The record volume came as IBIT plunged 13% to under $35, the lowest since Oct. 11, 2024, extending the year-to-date loss to 27%. Prices peaked at a high of $71.82 in early October.The fund processed redemptions totaling $175.33 million on Thursday, accounting for 40% of the…

New surveillance committee and enforcement hires come as regulated event markets seek credibility with traders, regulators and major sports leagues.Federally-regulated prediction market platform Kalshi is stepping up market integrity initiatives as the broader prediction market sector faces renewed scrutiny over alleged insider trading and market manipulation.The company announced on Thursday a major expansion of its surveillance and enforcement framework, including a new independent advisory committee, external analytics partnerships and a dedicated head of enforcement. The moves come amid growing debate about whether prediction markets can maintain investor trust as trading volumes and public visibility increase. Kalshi founder and CEO Tarek Mansour…

Large Bitcoin holders are now controlling the smallest share of the cryptocurrency’s supply since late May, when it first reclaimed $100,000 after more than three months, according to crypto sentiment platform Santiment.Santiment posted to X on Thursday that “whale and shark wallets” holding between 10 and 10,000 Bitcoin (BTC) have fallen to a nine-month low, collectively accounting for about 68.04% of the entire Bitcoin supply.“This includes a dump of -81,068 BTC in just the past 8 days alone,” Santiment said, as Bitcoin fell from around $90,000 to $65,000 over the same period, a roughly 27% decline, according to CoinMarketCap. Bitcoin…

Zcash price plunged to $217, hitting a four-month low amid a 20% dip. The privacy coin dumped as bears pushed Bitcoin under $70,000. ZEC traded around $228 at the time of writing, but risks breaching support at $200. Zcash (ZEC) has declined by more than 20% in the past 24 hours, accelerating its sharp descent amid an increasingly bearish cryptocurrency market. The privacy coin’s dip to below $220, the first time in four months, came as Bitcoin crashed to $69,500 and Ethereum fell to lows of $2,070. Among other top altcoin losers on the day was Cardano, which broke to…

Vitalik Buterin warns copy-paste Layer 2s and generic EVM chains are stalling Ethereum’s long-term scaling vision. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that many new Layer 2 (L2) networks are repeating shallow design patterns, and warned that generic EVM chains with optimistic bridges are holding back meaningful progress. His comments extend the public debate over whether today’s L2 ecosystem still aligns with Ethereum’s original scaling goals. No More “Copypasta” EVM Chains In a February 5 post on X, Buterin argued that comfort and familiarity, not technical necessity, are driving many L2 launches, leading to copy-paste designs that add little beyond…

Russia’s Moscow Exchange (MOEX) is moving to broaden which digital assets it tracks and trades. Reports say the exchange plans to roll out new indices and futures tied to XRP, Solana, and Tron this year. That will give traders ways to follow price moves without owning the coins directly. New Crypto Indices Planned According to local coverage, Maria Silkina, who runs the derivative products group at the exchange, outlined the expansion on a recent radio broadcast. MOEX already lists benchmarks for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now the exchange is preparing indices that mirror three more of the bigger, actively traded tokens,…

The creator of Incognito Market, the online black market that used crypto as its economic heart, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after some blockchain sleuthing led US authorities straight to the platform’s steward.The Justice Department said on Wednesday that a Manhattan court gave Rui-Siang Lin three decades behind bars for owning and operating Incognito, which sold $105 million worth of illicit narcotics between its launch in October 2020 and its closure in March 2024.Lin, who pleaded guilty to his role in December 2024, was sentenced for conspiring to distribute narcotics, money laundering, and conspiring to sell misbranded…

During Devconnect Buenos Aires, the Ethereum Foundation and Secureum TrustX brought together Ethereum security practitioners for Trillion Dollar Security Day, a focused event exploring what it would take to securely support a trillion-dollar Ethereum economy. The event brought together around eighty participants from across the Ethereum Security Ecosystem—spanning Infrastructure, Interoperability, Layer 1 & 2, Onchain, Offchain, Privacy, and Wallets—to assess the current security landscape, surface shared challenges, and identify concrete next steps across the stack. The discussions and outputs from this event contribute to the Ethereum Foundation’s ongoing One Trillion Dollar Security (1TS) initiative. Why a Trillion Dollar Security Day?…

Bitcoin’s price sell-off continued Thursday, with prices breaking below the widely-tracked $70,000 level on the OG crypto exchange Bitstamp. BTC’s dollar-denominated price slipped to $69,101 during the Asian trading hours, trading a discount to prices on other exchanges, including Coinbase, where BTC hit a low of $70,002. The discount on Bitstamp likely stemmed from stronger selling pressure on the Robinhood-owned platform. The global average price, tracked by CoinDesk, peaked above $126,000 in early October and has been in a downtrend since then. Some analysts expect further sell-off at least to $60,000, where prices may eventually bottom out. BTC’s price on…

The landscape of leading crypto payment gateways in 2025 includes a mix of established providers and innovative newcomers that prioritize speed, regulatory compliance, low fees, and seamless fiat on- and off-ramps; merchants and consumers are choosing solutions that support multi-chain settlements, stablecoin payouts, instant conversion to local currency, robust fraud prevention, and easy API integrations for e-commerce platforms and POS systems, with notable names offering merchant dashboards, invoicing, chargeback protection, and global payout networks to simplify accepting cryptocurrencies while managing volatility and compliance across jurisdictions.How crypto payment service providers work involves integrating blockchain-based payment rails into merchant systems so customers…