Digital Asset Companies Announce Strategic Acquisitions
By Keith R. Murphy
According to a recent press release, a major U.S. cryptocurrency exchange has entered into an agreement to acquire NinjaTrader, a U.S. retail futures trading platform. As stated in the press release, the acquisition marks the largest-ever deal combining traditional finance and cryptocurrency and represents a step toward providing a trading platform where any asset can be traded anytime. NinjaTrader reportedly will remain a stand-alone platform, but it will operate under the acquiring platform’s suite of trading and payments applications.
In related news, a cryptocurrency-focused financial technology company recently announced its acquisition of an API-first stablecoin infrastructure platform, according to a recent press release. The acquisition reportedly expands the financial technology company’s offerings, allowing companies to manage multi-currency treasuries, generate additional revenue through yield-bearing assets and facilitate cross-border payments.
In other news, Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, recently announced plans to bring its recently acquired Hashnote Tokenized Money Market Fund under the company’s existing Bermuda Digital Assets Business Act license. According to a company blog post, Circle anticipates integrating USYC – which is issued by Hashnote – with USDC, with the goal of USYC becoming the preferred form of yield-bearing collateral on cryptocurrency exchanges and among prime brokers and custodians.
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New Blockchain Network, Crypto Loan and Trading Products Announced
By Robert A. Musiala Jr.
Ethena Labs and Securitize recently announced “the upcoming launch of Converge, a new blockchain designed to support and advance DeFi and tokenized assets.” According to a press release, the Converge blockchain was developed jointly by the two companies to be “a purpose built EVM blockchain, optimized for both retail and institutional DeFi.” The press release further notes that Ethena will seek to migrate its existing DeFi ecosystem to Converge, and Securitize “will look to issue existing and future tokenized assets on Converge, and continue to facilitate interoperability across its many protocol integrations.”
According to reports, Xapo Bank recently launched a new lending product that allows qualified customers to access U.S. dollar loans using bitcoin holdings as collateral. Customers of the bank will reportedly be able to use the new product to access up to $1 million in loans secured by bitcoin.
A recent press release announced that tastytrade, a traditional brokerage firm, has expanded its existing relationship with Zero Hash, a crypto and stablecoin infrastructure provider, to enable trading of five additional digital assets. According to the press release, tastytrade now allows its customers to trade 17 digital assets alongside traditional financial products.
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New Data Published on Stablecoin Market
By Robert A. Musiala Jr.
Blockchain data analytics companies Artemis and Dune recently published a paper analyzing stablecoin market supply, adoption and market trends. The paper focuses on the period of February 2024 – February 2025. Key findings include the following:
- As of February 2025, the total stablecoin supply had reached $214 billion, with $35 trillion in transfer volume over the past year.
- The stablecoin market experienced significant expansion in 2024, with total supply increasing by 63 percent, from $138 billion to $225 billion.
- Stablecoin monthly transfer volume more than doubled in 2024, rising from $1.9 trillion in February 2024 to $4.1 trillion in February 2025 (115 percent YoY increase).
- The number of active addresses using stablecoins increased from 19.6 million in February 2024 to 30 million in February 2025 (53 percent YoY increase).
- USDT grew from $96 billion to $146 billion but lost market share, dropping from 69 percent to 64 percent. Meanwhile, USDC doubled from $28.5 billion to $56 billion, gaining 4 percent and now accounting for 24.5 percent of the market.
- Ethena’s USDe grew from $620 million to $6.2 billion, now ranking as the third-largest stablecoin by supply (2.9 percent).
- Maker’s DAI – now rebranded Sky – declined slightly from $4.9 billion to $4.7 billion, with its market share dropping to 2.1 percent.
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SEC Publishes Statement on Mining Activities, Reportedly Will Drop Ripple Case
By Robert A. Musiala Jr.
On March 20, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Division of Corporation Finance published “Statement on Certain Proof-of-Work Mining Activities.” The statement addresses certain mining activities on “proof-of-work networks,” specifically “the mining of crypto assets that are intrinsically linked to the programmatic functioning of a public, permissionless network … earned for participating in such network’s consensus mechanism or … for maintaining the technological operation and security of such network.” The statement refers to such crypto assets as “Covered Crypto Assets” and their mining on proof-of-work networks as “Protocol Mining.”
According to the statement, it is the Division’s view that “Mining Activities” in connection with Protocol Mining (as those terms are defined in the statement), under the circumstances described in the statement, do not involve the offer and sale of securities within the meaning of Section 2(a)(1) of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 3(a)(10) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The statement further notes that “it is the Division’s view that participants in Mining Activities do not need to register transactions with the Commission under the Securities Act or fall within one of the Securities Act’s exemptions from registration in connection with these Mining Activities.” SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw criticized the Division’s statement in a separate statement published the same day.
In other SEC-related news, according to recent reports, the CEO of Ripple Labs said the SEC plans to drop its lawsuit against the company, pending a commission vote. Ripple Labs’ chief legal officer reportedly said the SEC is “walking away from their appeal, which basically puts an end to their case.”
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US Department of the Treasury Removes Tornado Cash Sanctions
By Robert A. Musiala Jr.
On March 21, the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) published a press release announcing that Treasury has “exercised our discretion to remove the economic sanctions against Tornado Cash as reflected in Treasury’s Monday filing in Van Loon v. Department of the Treasury.” The press release notes that Treasury remains “deeply concerned about the significant state-sponsored hacking and money laundering campaign aimed at stealing, acquiring, and deploying digital assets for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Kim regime,” and remains “committed to using our authorities to expose and disrupt the ability of malicious cyber actors to profit from their criminal activities through the exploitation of digital assets and the digital assets ecosystem.” In conjunction with the press release, Treasury published a notice of deletions that have been made on the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. The notice lists the Tornado Cash website and dozens of Ethereum public keys associated with the Tornado Cash protocol that have been removed from the SDN list.
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Malware Targets Crypto Wallet Extensions; ‘Address Poisoning’ Data Published
By Robert A. Musiala Jr.
According to recent reports, the incident response team of a major U.S. tech firm has discovered a new remote access trojan (RAT) that targets crypto held in 20 different cryptocurrency wallet extensions used on a popular internet browser. In a blog post, the U.S. tech firm provided a complete list of the crypto wallet extensions that are known to be targeted by the RAT.
Separately, a blockchain security firm recently reported that victims of so-called address poisoning scams lost over $1.8 million in the month of February and have lost $1.2 million so far in the month of March. Address poisoning, also known as wallet poisoning, occurs when scammers trick victims into sending the victim’s digital assets to wallets controlled by the scammers.
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