Industry Reports

Recently, as the crypto market has evaporated over $2 trillion, most venture capital firms have started shifting to other areas such as AI and robotics. In contrast, a16z is raising its fifth crypto fund with a target of $2 billion, demonstrating its continued confidence in the crypto market. However, the fund size has been halved compared to the previous fund, indicating a move towards a more flexible fundraising strategy that reflects the overall market changes.

Visa, ANZ Bank, China Asset Management, and Fidelity International have completed a cross-border settlement solution based on Chainlink, utilizing the e-HKD program to achieve compliant and secure asset transfers, automated tokenized fund issuance, and real-time identity credential verification.

Digital asset investment firm Bitwise Asset Management announces a donation of $233,000 to support Bitcoin open-source developers. The funds come from profits of its spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund and will be distributed to three non-profit organizations to promote Bitcoin project development.

RedStone launches price oracle services on the Stellar network to provide real-time price data for the DeFi ecosystem. This move is a necessary measure to strengthen market price reliability after Stellar experienced a security attack. Through a modular data architecture, RedStone enhances data redundancy, improving the flexibility and accuracy of price updates. Additionally, this initiative helps Stellar better meet the needs of lending, asset tokenization, and other financial applications, promoting the development of financial services.

MEV Capital suffered a severe blow due to involvement in deUSD leverage strategies, with assets shrinking from $1.5 billion to $300 million, a decline of nearly 80%. This DeFi crisis was caused by complex lending relationships among yield treasury tokens, leading to multiple project failures and massive capital evaporation. The industry is working to shift towards more stable asset structures, but risks still remain.

The Bank for International Settlements report indicates that offline transactions of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) may increase the risk of financial crimes due to complex regulatory challenges and the potential for misuse by malicious actors to evade financial oversight. The European Central Bank is accelerating legislation on the digital euro, aiming to meet consumer privacy needs, while the European Union plans to implement a cap on cash transactions to strengthen anti-money laundering regulations. CBDC policies worldwide are diverging, with the EU actively promoting initiatives to address stablecoin challenges, whereas the United States remains more cautious.

According to DeFiLlama data, the digital asset vault companies' monthly capital inflow has dropped to approximately $555 million, the lowest point since 2024, shrinking over 95% from the historical peak. The market warns that without transforming into a cash flow-generating operational model, they will face the risk of being eliminated. Industry experts recommend that digital asset vaults adopt methods such as staking and mining to generate cash flow and enhance competitiveness.

DTCC's 43-page report highlights interoperability as crucial for expanding and integrating digital assets in DeFi, warning that fragmentation in DLT networks could hinder scalability. It calls for data standardization and process harmonization to address these challenges.

February saw record activity for stablecoins on the Solana blockchain, with a transaction volume of $650 billion, surpassing previous highs. Analysts from Grayscale noted Solana's strong position in retail stablecoin payments, amidst a shift from speculative trading to practical use cases.

A16z Crypto is raising approximately $2 billion for its fifth fund, focusing on blockchain investments, significantly smaller in scale compared to previous funds. This move aims to shorten the fundraising cycle and respond more flexibly to market changes, especially under the current favorable regulatory environment. Unlike Paradigm's expansion into new investment areas, A16z remains committed to focusing on blockchain, demonstrating its long-term conviction. This adjustment does not reflect a decline in market confidence but is a pragmatic response to high volatility.

Foresight News reports that according to CCTV News, Dong Jin, a National People's Congress representative and director of the Beijing Microchip Blockchain and Edge Computing Research Institute, stated, "Our country's independently innovative underlying blockchain technology has been applied to 16 central ministries and commissions and 27 central enterprises, achieving positive progress in areas such as taxation, cross-border trade, and global payments. Every year, hundreds of billions of invoices are 'run' on autonomous blockchains, with over 300,000 enterprises involved in cross-border trade on-chain, and trade volumes reaching trillions of yuan."

Cryptocurrency infrastructure company Zerohash has applied to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a National Trust Bank charter to enhance digital asset services, including custody, verification, and trade execution. Although it cannot conduct traditional banking operations, obtaining the license will help it attract institutional clients within the federal regulatory framework.

XRP ETF inflows fell 45% to $1.9 million last week, but year-to-date inflows remain strong at $153 million. Despite the slowdown, XRP saw no outflows, with robust monthly inflows of $106.8 million, leading among comparable products. US investors dominate the market, driving significant crypto ETF inflows.

Gate News bot message, Real World Assets (RWAs) are becoming one of the most talked-about narratives in crypto. What started as a simple tokenization story is now expanding into a much broader ecosystem – from private credit and Treasuries to stablecoins and real assets.

Gate News bot message, new analysis reveals that nearly 50% of Polymarket's trading volume may be inauthentic. Out of $337 million in daily volume, 28% ($94.7 million) comes from airdrop farmers trading in stagnant markets that remain below 2% or above 98% for over 36 hours to inflate wallet statist

In February, the trading volume of stablecoins on the Solana blockchain reached $650 billion, a record high and double that of last year. The surge in retail payment demand has driven the growth of stablecoin transactions, with Solana gradually shifting from Meme coins to stablecoin trading, indicating an increase in payment use cases. Although Ethereum still dominates the market, stablecoins could become a key pillar of the Solana network.

Author: Clow, Plain Language Blockchain An AI wrote a piece of code that requires data for verification. It sent an HTTP request, and the server returned a number: 402. Then, it paid $0.001 using USDC. Less than a second later, the data was back. This transaction involved no account, no password, no bank card, no KYC. The entire process involved no human participation. This is no longer science fiction. By the end of 2025, the x402 protocol will have processed over 100 million such transactions; in the first 30 days of this year alone, another 15 million. The "Payment Code" that slept for thirty years In 1990, when drafting the HTTP protocol, the creators specifically reserved a spot for status code 402: Payment Required. The meaning is straightforward—"Payment is required to proceed."

RippleX's J. Ayo Akinyele outlined post-bug measures for improving XRPL security, emphasizing AI integration in development processes to enhance protective mechanisms and audit standards, ensuring safer transaction handling and system resilience.

A16z Crypto – the Web3 investment branch of the leading venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz – has criticized the widespread but inaccurate use of the term “ZK” within the developer community in a recent blog post introducing Jolt zkVM. According to the article, “most zkVMs in reality are not fully zero-knowledge and often rely on simplified assumptions or partial proofs, which can lead to misconceptions about their security and privacy guarantees.”

Research by the Bitcoin Policy Research Institute shows that among 36 AI models, most AI agents prefer Bitcoin in economic activities, with 79.1% choosing Bitcoin in long-term value preservation scenarios, while fiat currencies are less favored. Stablecoins are more popular in real-time payment scenarios (53.2%). There are significant differences in Bitcoin preferences among different vendors, and the influence of training data on the results should be interpreted with caution.