News

Proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining does not trigger federal securities laws, according to a Thursday staff statement from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which told mining operators they do not need to register their transactions with the regulator.

The statement, published by the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, declared that both solo proof-of-work crypto mining and pooled proof-of-work crypto mining do not meet the definition of a securities transaction under the Howey Test — the legal framework used to determine whether a transaction represents an investment contract — because they are “not undertaken with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others.”

The statement puts to rest any lingering fears that the SEC’s enforcement division could turn its gaze on proof-of-work crypto miners. Though the agency, under the leadership of former Chair Gary Gensler, begrudgingly admitted that bitcoin was a commodity rather than a security, the agency’s enforcement suit against Utah-based Green United, an alleged ponzi scheme accused of defrauding customers in a cloud mining scheme, prompted concerns among some in the industry that the agency would eventually crack down on legitimate crypto miners.

The SEC said that Thursday’s statement is “part of an effort to provide greater clarity on the application of the federal securities laws to crypto assets” — something the industry has been pushing for for years. Under the new leadership of Acting Chair Mark Uyeda, who established a Crypto Task Force spearheaded by crypto-friendly Commissioner Hester Peirce, the agency has rapidly begun reversing course on its approach to crypto, dropping lawsuits and investigations started under Gensler and repealing the controversial Staff Accounting Bulletin 121.

Thursday’s staff statement comes shortly after the SEC put out a similar staff statement in February declaring most memecoins to be outside the regulator’s jurisdiction.

Read more: As Congress Talks Up Its Earth-Shaking Bill, Regulators Are Already at Work

Under its new leadership, the SEC has signaled a much greater willingness to work with the crypto industry to craft better, clearer regulations moving forward. On Friday, the agency will host a roundtable discussion on what makes a cryptocurrency a security – the first in a series of roundtable discussions between the regulator and industry participants.

Stock and other traditional financial asset traders across the world are wanting to be able to buy and sell assets around the clock, resulting in two of the biggest stock markets in the U.S., Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) making moves to offer round-the-clock trading soon.

“We definitely see that this is where the markets are moving,” said Giang Bui, Nasdaq’s head of U.S. Equities & Exchange-Traded Products, speaking at the Digital Asset Summit in New York on Thursday. “There's a lot of demand globally for U.S. stocks and people want to trade within the hours that they're typically awake, and I think a lot of it is because people are used to trading crypto 24/7.”

Both Nasdaq and the NYSE are in the process of receiving approval to open their venues 24 hours a day, for five or even seven days a week. Nasdaq recently announced that it had begun engaging with regulators about the change while the NYSE has already received the green light.

Round-the-clock trading can have several advantages for markets, including increased volume and market liquidity as traders aren’t tied to specific time zones. Currently, the U.S. stock market opens for trading at 9:30 a.m. ET and closes at 4 p.m. ET.

“We're hearing it across the board from global broker dealers, clients who they're servicing, even within the U.S., there's a number of U.S. brokers that already are offering overnight trading because their customers are used to trading crypto in those hours,” Bui added.

Nasdaq lists a number of crypto-related products, including the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the spot ETF issued by BlackRock, which saw the most successful ETF debut in the history of U.S. ETF launches. Earlier today, the exchange listed two Solana (SOL) futures ETFs issued by Volatility Shares.

Bitcoin miners are facing renewed financial pressure as declining transaction fees and a hashprice drop push operational costs higher, according to TheMinerMag’s February 2025 report​.

Bitcoin’s hashrate climbed 3.8% in February to 810 EH/s, showing a slowdown in mining competition growth. However, the hashprice (the revenue that miners earn per unit of computing power) slipped to $45/PH/s, wiping out gains from the U.S. election-driven price surge. At this level, inefficient miners are feeling the strain.

Transaction fees made up just 1.3% of total block rewards in February, marking their lowest share since the last bear market bottom in 2022. March is trending even lower, at 1.12% so far.

These factors — alongside increased competition from artificial intelligence (AI) data centers — are putting extra pressure on mining operations who rely on hosting agreements and asset-light strategies.

MARA remains the industry leader with 44 EH/s after a 6% hashrate increase, while CleanSpark grew 12% to 39 EH/s. Meanwhile, total bitcoin holdings among miners surpassed 100,000 BTC for the first time, despite some firms like HIVE Digital and Cipher Mining selling their production to fund expansion.

Mining stocks took a hit, with the combined market capitalization of 15 major firms dropping from $36 billion in January to $22 billion in March. Cipher, Canaan, Hut 8, HIVE, and Bitdeer all saw losses exceeding 40%.

With network growth slowing and energy costs rising, miners may need a Bitcoin price rally to avoid further financial strain.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.

Tether, the crypto company behind the largest stablecoin USDT, said it would rank as the seventh largest net buyer of U.S. Treasury securities in 2024 among countries. The firm purchased a net $33.1 billion worth of U.S. Treasury securities last year, according to a compilation posted on Thursday by CEO Paolo Ardonio using data from Tether's reserve reports and the U.S. Treasury Department. That puts the stablecoin issuer above countries like Canada, Mexico and Germany in the ranking, while Japan and China were net sellers by significantly reducing their U.S. Treasury holdings.

The data underscores the case of U.S. dollar stablecoins being a key force of demand in the U.S. government debt market. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this month that crypto and stablecoins are key to preserve the U.S. dollar's global dominance. President Trump echoed the argument on Thursday at a pre-recorded message at the Digital Asset Summit.

Read more: Crypto Will 'Expand Dominance of U.S. Dollar,' Trump Says Circle's USDC, the second-largest stablecoin and fully backed by U.S. government securities, cash and other cash-equivalent assets, increased its market capitalization by $19 billion last year. USDT's market cap, which is predominantly backed by U.S. government securities, grew by $45 billion during the same period.

A year ago, restaking was one of the hottest areas of crypto, and projects like EigenLayer were heralded as the next big thing.

Fast forward to mid-2025 and total value locked (TVL) has fallen across the sector and the hype that surrounded point farms has withered away.

Through it all, Ether.fi, the market leader, has stayed steady, helping users generate yield through liquid staking tokens (LSTs) that can be staked across the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

Now, Ether.fi is looking to expand with plans to become a neobank for crypto companies and users.

Ether.fi's dominance

Ether.fi, which is based in the Cayman Islands, benefited from being one of the first movers in the liquid restaking space, starting up a lucrative points farm which saw early users receive points that could eventually be transferred into a token airdrop.

In a 10 week period at the start of 2024, staked ETH grew from 45,000 ETH to 808,000 ETH. Now, there is 2.58 million staked ETH on Ether.fi while the next competitor, Renzo, has around 380,000 ETH.

In dollar terms, Ether.fi has around $5 billion worth of TVL. This number has slumped from December's high of $9.4 billion but only due to the dwindling price of ETH, as opposed to any significant outflows.

Ether.fi engages closely with its users in an effort to keep them onboard.

"We know probably half the TVL," Silagadze added. "As in, we know who they are and we talk to them and have ongoing conversations."

Renzo in contrast has seen more than 60% ETH withdrawn from the platform since last July, with TVL sliding from 1 million ETH to 378,000 ETH, according to DefiLlama.

From restaking protocol to Neobank

For Silvagadze, the restaking product is a means to onboard users and capital, while the company's main ambition is to become a neobank to rival the likes of Revolut.

"Staking for us was really just a way of building TVL and getting a user base," Silagadze told CoinDesk. "The ultimate goal is to create an integrated product suite that allows users to fully off ramp from their traditional banking institutions and operate on a crypto native platform."

Ether.fi rolled out a "Cash" Visa card on the Scroll network in September and Silagadze believes this will become the company's main revenue driver.

Neobank has become quite the buzzword in crypto of late. Lending platform Nexo rebranded last year as a neobank and there was also the stealth launch of Dakota, a crypto app that will provide banking services to crypto depositors. EOS, which launched as a much-heralded smart contract platform in 2017, has also shifted focus to Web3 banking.

For Ether.fi, the plan is to incorporate three products into one soon-to-be released mobile app.

The app will comprise three integrated products: Ether.fi stake, which is the staking protocol; Ether.fi liquid, which is an automated DeFi strategy manager that generates the best available yield through the use of AI; and the Ether.fi cash wallet and credit card.

Staking firms looking to serve the U.S. market have been put off by an absence of a clear regulatory framework.

But Ether.fi hopes the crypto-friendly Trump administration will smooth the way for it to offer services to U.S. citizens after it secures respective licenses.

"We are actually going to be turning on the U.S. for our staking product and the cash product relatively soon. We actually just got a legal opinion that we're cool to do that," Silvagadze said. Ether.fi is also applying for licenses to operate in the European Union and the Cayman Islands, where its team operates.

Ethereum's sentiment problem

Ethereum was the darling of the 2017 bull market and subsequent ICO boom and was the dominant smart contract chain as DeFi and NFTs animated the 2020-22 boom.

This cycle, however, the Ethereum network has been criticized for a drawn-out roadmap as the market centers on memecoins and faster blockchains like Solana.

Ether is currently trading at around $1,965, having lost 40% of its value over the past 12-months. Solana, meanwhile, is trading at $131 having lost just 25% of its value in the same period.

"Some of that [negative sentiment] is clearly engineered by competing ecosystems. The Solana folks are out there every single day talking to investors and allocators and media and just spreading bulls**t about ether," Silagadze said.

"If you actually dissect those arguments, they're incoherent. But those memes are floating around, and that has an effect."

The Walrus protocol, a blockchain-based data storage platform, said it raised $140 million in a private sale of its native token, WAL, led by Standard Crypto.

The mainnet of the protocol, originally developed by Mysten Labs and built on layer-1 blockchain Sui, will debut on March 27, the Walrus Foundation said Thursday.

Walrus plans to capitalize on the growing market for storing large amounts of data, driven in particular by the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the last couple of years.

"By leveraging Sui’s unique architecture, we’re making storing data programmable, interactive, and secure," Walrus Foundation managing executive Rebecca Simmonds said in the statement.

The funds from the token sale, which included participation from a16z crypto, Electric Capital, Franklin Templeton Digital Assets and RW3 Ventures, will be used to expand the project's decentralized data storage protocol and build further applications atop it.

Another company has elected to add bitcoin (BTC) to its balance sheet.

Christian Angermayer, the chairman of Germany-based biopharmaceutical company atai Life Sciences (ATAI) announced today that the firm would develop its own bitcoin treasury strategy.

“In an era of persistent inflation and volatile markets, I find myself asking an important question for biotech companies looking to preserve and optimize the capital they have: Could allocating a portion of treasury cash to bitcoin help preserve, optimize, and even extend a company’s runway and hence contribute to its success,” Angermayer wrote on Substack.

The company will initially invest $5 million in bitcoin, Angermayer said, while holding enough cash, short-term securities and public equity for operational expenses into 2027.

The pharmaceutical firm is the latest in a long line of corporations which have sought to replicate Michael Saylor’s bitcoin treasury strategy.

ATAI briefly surged when the news broke but is now down 2.8% for the day. After briefly topping $87,000 overnight, bitcoin has been in quick retreat, now changing hands at $83,900, lower by about 1% over the past 24 hours.

Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin struck a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday that will see him serve no more than 24 months behind bars for his role in what prosecutors described as a “wide-ranging conspiracy” to manipulate token prices for paying clients.

Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. from Portugal last month and charged with two counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud – charges which carry a maximum combined sentence of 25 years in prison. In exchange for a reduced sentence, Andriunin pleaded guilty to all three counts. He also agreed to forfeit approximately $23 million in stablecoins tied to his crimes. The government is not seeking any other fine.

In their indictment last October, prosecutors alleged that Gotbit was basically a market manipulator for hire, offering wash-trading services to paying crypto projects who wanted to artificially inflate the volume and price of their tokens.

Andriunin’s guilty plea is not entirely surprising: he was never coy about Gotbit’s business activities. In a 2019 interview with CoinDesk, Andriunin – then a 20-year-old college sophomore at Moscow State University – admitted that his business was “not entirely ethical” and detailed how he used bot trading to create enough artificial trade volume for a project to be listed on CoinMarketCap.

Read more: For $15K, He’ll Fake Your Exchange Volume – You’ll Get on CoinMarketCap

Gotbit is not the only market maker offering these services. At the same time that Andriunin and his company were charged, along with two other employees, U.S. prosecutors charged a handful of other firms, including CLS Global, MyTrade and ZMQuant, as well as several of the companies’ employees and promoters, with similarly offering for-hire market manipulation services.

Andriunin’s sentencing date has not yet been set.

The chief economist at the European Central Bank (ECB), Philip Lane, said Europe needs a digital euro to counter the foothold that dollar-linked stablecoins and U.S. electronic payments systems are gaining in region's the financial system.

The prevalence of electronic payments provided by Big Tech firms, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal, "exposes Europe to risks of economic pressure and coercion," Lane said, according to the text of a speech at University College, Cork in Ireland on Thursday.

"The digital euro would provide a secure, universally accepted digital payment option under European governance, reducing reliance on foreign providers," Lane said. "The availability of the digital euro would also limit the likelihood of foreign-currency stablecoins gaining a foothold as a medium of exchange in the euro area."

Lane pointed out that 99% of the stablecoin market is made up of tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar. That raises the possibility of dollar stablecoins gaining traction in in the euro area and payments systems become "directly or indirectly anchored by the dollar rather than the euro."

The ECB, like central banks in other developed economies around the world, is exploring the possibility of introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Addressing the competition posed by stablecoins and corporate-run payment services are often among the reasons cited for doing so.

The case for a CBDC may be greater especially for the ECB, given the eurozone encompasses multiple countries, Lane said. The single currency is used across 20 European Union member states, and the eurozone lacks a unified payment system due to diverse legacy standards from country to country.

"The digital euro presents a unique opportunity to overcome the persistent fragmentation in retail payment systems across the euro area," he said.

Solana's most profitable protocol Pump.fun is gunning for an even greater share of the chain's DeFi economy.

The massively popular memecoin launchpad on Thursday unveiled a token swaps service powered by the protocol's liquidity pools. Called PumpSwap, it puts the project in direct competition with Solana's coterie of automated market makers (AMMs) that facilitate on-chain token trades.

Instead of "graduating" highly-traded memecoins to Raydium, a longtime hub for Solana DeFi pools, Pump.fun will now seed promising tokens' launch liquidity in PumpSwap. This fully in-house setup will cut down on launch costs, the founders told CoinDesk, and alter the way Pump.Fun generates its historically astronomical revenue.

Pump.Fun's founders believe PumpSwap can become the beating heart of permissionless trading infrastructure on Solana for all tokens, according to launch documents reviewed by CoinDesk. They've brokered deals with a number of token projects who will now set up their liquidity on PumpSwap's rails.

If the AMM is leaning on some undisclosed technological advantage to woo users – profit-hungry token traders and yield-chasing liquidity providers – from Solana's established trading outposts, then Pump.Fun's founders wouldn't say. CoinDesk asked them as much – repeatedly.

What the service has going for it, at least in the minds of its backers, is distribution. For nearly a year now Pump.Fun's explosion of memecoins has set the agenda for much of crypto, and especially Solana. Its profit windfalls reshaped the way on-chain researchers think and talk about revenue-generating protocols.

On Tuesday Pump.Fun saw $1 million in revenue. The sum is a relative pittance compared to the platform's previous year mining gold in the trenches. But it also trounces the numbers posted by many major crypto projects, including Ethereum itself. Such profits yield a mindshare dividend that could give PumpSwap its competitive edge.

Raydium is set to be the biggest loser. Much of its trading volume over the past year has occurred in pools first seeded by Pump.Fun's graduation mechanism. It will miss out on future activity now flowing to PumpSwap. That said, Raydium's newly-unveiled memecoin launchpad could blunt the pain by giving Raydium its own stream of memecoins.

Creators of tokens, meanwhile, may eventually capture a win. PumpSwap will eventually enable revenue sharing to give them a slice of protocol's 25 basis point fee on trades, the founders said. But they declined to say how much would flow to creators, or when the switch would flip.