Fintech Futures

Iran Bitcoin hashrate fell approximately 77% over the past quarter – from roughly 9 exahashes per second to 2 EH/s,  as U.S. and Israeli military strikes disrupted power infrastructure and forced an estimated 427,000 active mining machines offline, according to a Hashrate Index report published Monday by Ian Philpot, marketing…

Morgan Stanley spot Bitcoin ETF enters a crowded market with a structural advantage its competitors cannot easily replicate – a captive distribution network that Bloomberg Senior ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas argues could translate into durable, advisor-directed inflows from day one. Ahead of the fund’s anticipated debut, Balchunas framed the bank’s…

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) acknowledged on Tuesday that a category of its prior crypto enforcement actions produced no meaningful investor benefit, misallocated agency resources, and reflected a misinterpretation of federal securities laws – a formal admission embedded in a public statement on its fiscal 2025 enforcement results….

Bitcoin price is trading near $71,700, up +4% over the past 24 hours after briefly touching $72,753 intraday, its highest print in 20 days – as the US and Iran agreed to a two-week suspension of military hostilities. The move erased weeks of geopolitical discount baked into price, but the…

Three individuals have been convicted of terrorism financing in Indonesian courts across 2024 and 2025, with crypto blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs confirming that on-chain evidence – wallet addresses, transaction histories, and traced fund flows – served as the prosecutorial anchor in each case, marking what appears to be Southeast…

The Solana Foundation launched a structured ecosystem security initiative on Monday, partnering with blockchain security firm Asymmetric Research to introduce STRIDE – Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises – a tiered evaluation and monitoring program open to all Solana-based protocols, alongside a coalition incident response network that formalizes…

Argentine President Javier Milei spoke on the phone with an entrepreneur linked to the Libra crypto token at least seven times on the night he promoted the cryptocurrency on X, according to call logs obtained by Argentine prosecutors and reviewed by The New York Times – new documentary evidence that…

Polygon crypto activated its Giugliano hardfork on mainnet at block 85,268,500 on April 8, targeting a measurable reduction in transaction finality by allowing block producers to announce blocks earlier in the confirmation cycle. The Polygon Foundation confirmed the upgrade in a post on X, citing a demonstrated 2-second reduction in…

Standard Chartered has put a $500,000 Bitcoin price target on the table for 2030, and the market nudged higher in response – BTC climbing roughly 100 basis points to $67,500 as the forecast circulated. The number alone is striking; what’s more telling is that it comes from a bank with…

Drift Crypto Protocol has attributed a $270 million exploit executed on April 1, 2026 to a six-month intelligence operation conducted by UNC4736 – a North Korean state-affiliated threat group also tracked as Citrine Sleet or AppleJeus – in a detailed incident update published by the team on Sunday, making it…

The New Hampshire Business Finance Authority (BFA) is set to issue $100 million in Bitcoin-collateralized bonds carrying a provisional Ba2 rating from Moody’s Investors Service – a speculative-grade designation that places this instrument two notches below the lowest investment-grade threshold and marks the first known instance of a U.S. public…

The Solana Policy Institute, a Washington-focused nonprofit launched in late 2025 to advance blockchain-specific legislative and regulatory strategy, has characterized the current U.S. crypto policy environment as entering a materially new phase – one defined by implementation rather than survival, and by legislative specificity rather than existential debate. Kristin Smith,…

Bitfarms (BITF) shares climbed 6.6% on Tuesday despite reporting a $284.5 million net loss for full-year 2025 – a result driven by falling Bitcoin prices, elevated cost of revenue, and digital asset impairments that collectively erased the company’s gross margin. The market’s reaction was not irrational. It was a deliberate…

A new paper from Google Quantum AI has compressed the estimated hardware requirements for breaking elliptic-curve cryptography – the signature scheme underpinning Bitcoin and crypto transactions – by roughly 20-fold, moving a long-running theoretical threat measurably closer to an engineering problem. The research, co-authored by Google researchers, Ethereum Foundation researcher…

BTC USD is trading at approximately $68,200, down roughly +2.2% in the past 24 hours, as a key on-chain metric quietly signals something analysts haven’t flagged since the 2022 cycle bottom. The question isn’t whether a buy zone exists; it’s whether the market has actually reached it yet. According to…