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Insider trading claims mount as prediction markets become ubiquitous.Experts share how blurred the lines are between having an edge and breaking the law.Bills are already being drafted to address key loopholes.In 1983, the film Trading Places did far more than just catapult Eddie Murphy’s acting career. When the billionaire Duke brothers are shown discussing an upcoming crop report, they confirm that their operative, Clarence Beeks, is already working to gather the report before its public release, providing audiences with a clear understanding of a specific type of financial fraud. Insider trading. So clear that in 2010, the then-Commodity Futures Trading…

Bitcoin’s next major leg up could hinge on artificial intelligence stocks becoming excessively overvalued in the eyes of investors, according to macroeconomist Lyn Alden.“It could be that the AI stocks eventually just peak, they get so silly big that they can’t get realistically much higher,” Alden told Natalie Brunell on the Coin Stories podcast published to YouTube on Thursday.When an asset’s price rises to a level where further gains are harder to justify, capital often moves into other opportunities with more potential upside. Lyn Alden spoke to Natalie Brunell on the Coin Stories podcast. Source: Natalie Brunell/YouTubeWith Bitcoin (BTC) down…

Hayden Adams, founder of the decentralized exchange Uniswap, has warned users about fraudulent ads impersonating the platform, highlighting a case in which a victim reportedly lost everything.It comes after January saw the highest amount of money stolen in crypto scams in 11 months.“Scam ads keep returning despite years of reporting,” Adams said in an X post on Friday. “There were scam Uniswap apps while we waited months for App Store approval,” he said.Scammers are increasingly buying ads on popular search engines targeting keywords like “Uniswap,” so when crypto users search for it, the top result looks official. Unsuspecting users may…

APIA, Samoa, Feb. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Phemex, a user-first crypto exchange, has announced its integration for the full suite of Ondo Finance tokenized equities. This positions the platform at the forefront of the Real-World Asset (RWA) revolution, offering its 10 million global users seamless exposure to a comprehensive lineup of 14 blue-chip traditional assets in a tokenized format. The expanded offering encompasses a diverse range of market leaders, including technology giants such as NVIDIA (NVDAon), Tesla (TSLAon), Apple (AAPLon), and Amazon (AMZNon), alongside foundational financial instruments like the Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQon) and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPYon).…

On-chain analytics firm Parsec is closing down after five years, as crypto trader flows and on-chain activity no longer resemble what they once did. “Parsec is shutting down,” the company said in an X post on Thursday, while its CEO, Will Sheehan, said the “market zigged while we zagged a few too many times.”Sheehan added that Parsec’s primary focus on decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) fell out of step with where the industry has now headed.“Post FTX DeFi spot lending leverage never really came back in the same way, it changed, morphed into something we understood less,” he said,…

Ethereum is struggling to reclaim the $2,000 level, with persistent selling pressure continuing to weigh on sentiment across the broader crypto market. Despite intermittent recovery attempts, price action remains fragile as liquidity conditions tighten and investors reassess risk exposure following the sharp correction from the 2025 highs. The repeated failure to secure sustained acceptance above this psychological threshold has reinforced caution among both institutional and retail participants. Related Reading Recent on-chain analysis highlights a notable structural development: Ethereum is currently trading below the realized price of every major whale cohort. The realized price metric represents the average acquisition cost of…

Bitcoin mining difficulty has climbed to 144.4 trillion (T), up 15%, the largest percentage increase since 2021, when the China mining ban led to a major disruption, which followed a 22% upward adjustment as the network stabilized.Difficulty adjustments measure how hard it is to mine a new block on the network. It recalibrates every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, to ensure blocks continue to be produced about every 10 minutes, regardless of changes in the hashrate.The adjustment follows a 12% decline in difficulty after a drop in the bitcoin hashrate, which is the total computational power securing the network.…

Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, continued its price struggles as traders weighed two stress-tinged signals from the US financial ecosystem.This week, there was a sudden $18.5 billion Federal Reserve overnight repo operation, and Blue Owl Capital has decided to permanently halt redemptions from a retail-focused private credit fund.In another era, either headline might have been enough to spark a reflexive “money printer” narrative.Taken together, they can read like an early warning that something is tightening in the plumbing of US markets.Yet Bitcoin has stayed heavy, even as it remains marketed as a hedge against the traditional system. Related…

The race for the leading crypto to buy right now is intensifying, and three names are dominating serious buyer conversations: Solana, Hyperliquid, and BlockDAG. Solana continues to anchor headlines with strong transaction activity and resilient support zones. Meanwhile, Hyperliquid is carving out a niche in on-chain derivatives, with institutional attention slowly building.But BlockDAG (BDAG) isn’t simply riding market cycles; it’s engineering a launch sequence. With BDAG available at just $0.000125 during its Final Access window, and a 12-hour early trading advantage before global markets go live, the structure itself creates asymmetry. While established players fight to defend support levels and reclaim…

Another week has ended, and Friday has arrived, which means another batch of Bitcoin options contracts is expiring while spot markets remain sideways. Around 30,600 Bitcoin options contracts will expire on Friday, Feb. 20, with a notional value of roughly $2 billion. This event is a little smaller than last week’s expiry, so there is unlikely to be any impact on spot markets. Crypto markets are in bear market territory, but have remained flat over the past week as volume and volatility dry up. Bitcoin Options Expiry This week’s batch of Bitcoin options contracts has a put/call ratio of 0.59,…