The Solana network has surpassed Ethereum and Base combined in 24-hour decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume, according to data from DefiLlama. According to DefiLlama, daily trading volume across Solana-based DEXs neared $3.8 billion on Jan. 6, versus $1.7 billion for Ethereum and $1.2 billion for Base, Ethereum’s most popular layer-2 scaling network. The growing trading volume…

Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) is being hailed as a significant step forward for the cryptocurrency industry despite concerns about potential overregulation during its initial rollout. MiCA is the world’s first comprehensive regulatory crypto framework, which went into full effect for crypto-asset service providers on Dec. 30. While concerns regarding regulatory overreach persist, the…

Mining company MARA, formerly known as Marathon Digital, lent out 7,377 Bitcoin to third parties in 2024, according to a Jan. 3 announcement from the Bitcoin miner. Vice president of investor relations at MARA Robert Samuels provided more information about MARA’s Bitcoin lending activity but did not cite specific numbers. According to Samuels, MARA’s Bitcoin…

A Donald Trump-led Bitcoin rally — expected to occur in the days leading up to his Jan. 20 US presidential inauguration — could wane toward the end of the month as the Federal Reserve publishes its first interest rate decision of the year. In a Jan. 5 report, 10x Research’s founder Markus Thielen predicted a “positive start”…

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says a temporary “pause” to worldwide available compute could be a way to “buy more time for humanity” in case of a possibly harmful form of AI superintelligence. In a Jan. 5 blog post following up his November 2023 post advocating the idea of “defensive accelerationism” or d/acc, Buterin said super intelligent AI could be…

Former United States prosecutor and crypto advocate John Deaton has offered the incoming Trump administration to lead a probe into Operation Chokepoint 2.0 — an unconfirmed initiative that allegedly attempted to cut crypto companies from the traditional banking system. “If these actions go unchallenged, it creates a dangerous precedent where regulatory bodies can quietly suppress…

Solana developers have created a quantum-resistant vault on the Solana blockchain to protect user funds from potential threats posed by quantum computers. The “Solana Winternitz Vault” solution achieves this by implementing a complex hash-based signature system that generates new keys every time a transaction is made, explained cryptography researcher and Zeus Network chief scientist Dean Little in…

More than $19 trillion in transactions settled over the Bitcoin network in 2024 — more than double the $8.7 trillion settled over the network in 2023 — reversing two years of declining transaction volume since 2021. According to data from vice president of research at Riot Platforms Pierre Rochard, Bitcoin transaction volume peaked during the…

Ethena is preparing to roll out a new crypto-based product aimed at attracting traditional finance (TradFi) institutions. The blockchain platform plans to launch the new iUSDe product in February. Built on its synthetic dollar, sUSDe, iUSDe introduces a “simple wrapper contract” that adds transfer restrictions at the token level, according to Ethena’s 2025 roadmap published on Jan….

Bitcoin’s hashrate — the total computing power securing the network — reached a new all-time high of over 1,000 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Jan. 3, according to data from CoinWarz. That is nearly double the network’s hashrate 12 months ago. According to CoinWarz, Bitcoin’s hashrate hovered around 510 EH/s in January 2024. At the time of…