New business credit card offers rewards and access to Spend Management platform to monitor, track, and control spending
U.S. Bank, a leading provider of payment services and solutions, today announced a new business credit card designed to help small business owners navigate fluctuations in finances and resources: the U.S. Bank Business Shield™ Visa® Card.
The Business Shield Visa card is designed to help business owners navigate the unpredictable financial and resource challenges that come with running a small business.Share
This new business credit card offers a 0% introductory APR on purchases and balance transfers for 18 billing cycles when applying at any U.S. Bank branch and 12 billing cycles when applying in digital channels – all with no annual fee. Plus, cardholders can enjoy a suite of benefits to help navigate the foreseen – and the unforeseen – needs of their small business.
“The Business Shield Visa card is designed to help business owners navigate the unpredictable financial and resource challenges that come with running a small business,” said Anthony Merola, head of Bank Brand and Small Business Cards at U.S. Bank. “Featuring an industry-leading 0% extended introductory APR on purchases and balance transfers, and access to Spend Management, our expense management platform, this card is a transformative solution for both new and seasoned business owners looking to safeguard their business from the unexpected.”
With Spend Management, part of the comprehensive suite of business solutions that is earning U.S. Bank accolades as best bank for small business owners, businesses can drive down costs, reduce manual work, and save time through the use of robust card controls, integrated accounting, intuitive receipt capture, and more – all within a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
The card – which has a sleek, translucent design – also offers:
Purchase Security: When you use your card, your purchases are protected if an item is stolen or damaged.
Extended Protection: Get an extra year on eligible warranties – automatically – when you use your card.
Rewards on prepaid travel: 5% cash back on air, hotel and car reservations booked directly in the Travel Center when you use your card.
Annual statement credit: $50 annual statement credit with $5,000 booked in the Travel Center when you use your card.
Pay over time: $0 fee ExtendPay® Plan annually, available after introductory APR period.
Additional protection benefits: zero fraud liability, auto rental collision insurance and cell phone protection.
The comments came during Bessent’s Congressional testimony on Wednesday in a tense exchange with California Representative Brad Sherman.
United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testified before Congress on Wednesday and reiterated that the US will retain Bitcoin (BTC) acquired through asset seizures but will not direct private banks to purchase more BTC in the event of a market downturn.
California Congressman Brad Sherman, a major critic of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, asked Bessent: “Does the Treasury Department or the various components of the Federal Open Market Committee have the authority to bail out Bitcoin?”
Sherman then asked Bessent if he plans to direct private banks to acquire more BTC or “Trump Coin,” a reference to memecoins connected to US President Donald Trump, through changing banking reserve requirements to allow them to buy more. Bessent said:
“I am Secretary of the Treasury. I do not have the authority to do that, and as chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), I do not have that authority.”
Secretary Bessent testifies before Congress on Wednesday. Source: CNBC
Bessent added that the $500 million in seized Bitcoin retained by the US government surged to over $15 billion while in custody.
The testimony is the latest update on the Bitcoin strategic reserve initiative, which was established by Trump through an executive order in March 2025. However, the order has drawn backlash from some in the Bitcoin community, who say it did not go far enough.
Related: DOJ didn’t sell Bitcoin forfeited from Samourai case: White House advisor
US to acquire more Bitcoin through budget-neutral strategies only
Trump’s executive order stipulated that the US could only acquire more BTC for the strategic reserve through asset forfeiture cases or budget-neutral strategies.
Budget-neutral methods do not add line-item expenses to the US budget and include converting other existing reserve assets, such as petroleum or precious metals, to Bitcoin.
This means the US government will not acquire additional BTC in open market operations, as many in the Bitcoin community had hoped.
Source: Scott Bessent
In August 2025, Bessent said the Treasury Department is exploring acquiring BTC through budget-neutral methods, backtracking on previous comments.
The US government actively buying BTC creates demand for the digital currency, which may raise asset prices and potentially send a signal to other nation-states to establish their own strategic reserves, according to Bitcoin advocate Samson Mow.
Magazine: US risks being ‘front run’ on Bitcoin reserve by other nations: Samson Mow
Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently. Read our Editorial Policy https://cointelegraph.com/editorial-policy
Welcome to our institutional newsletter, Crypto Long & Short. This week:
Lukas Enzersdorfer-Konrad on how the EU’s regulatory clarity could allow tokenised markets to scale
Andy Baehr tells BNB to “suit up”
Top headlines institutions should pay attention to by Francisco Rodrigues
“Bitcoin’s drawdowns compress as markets mature” in Chart of the Week
-Alexandra Levis
Expert Insights
Europe’s role in the next wave of tokenisation
– By Lukas Enzersdorfer-Konrad, chief executive officer, Bitpanda
The tokenisation of real-world assets (RWAs) has moved from buzzword to business case. It has become the bedrock of institutional blockchain adoption. In the first half of 2025 alone, the value of tokenised RWAs surged by 260%, reaching $23 billion in on-chain value. Over the past several years, the sector has experienced rapid and sustained growth, enough to shift tokenisation from an experimental concept to a core pillar of digital-asset infrastructure. This signals a structural shift in how financial markets are built and ultimately expanded.
Tokenisation is emerging as the foundation of institutional blockchain adoption with BlackRock, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs having publicly explored or deployed related initiatives and major institutions validating its potential. Despite this momentum, growth remains constrained. Most assets are still embedded in permissioned systems, segmented by regulatory uncertainty and limited interoperability. Scalable public-network infrastructure remains underdeveloped, slowing the path from institutional pilots to mass-market participation. In short, tokenisation works, but the market rails to support global adoption are still being built.
What’s missing? Regulation, as an enabler. Institutions need clarity before committing to balance sheets and building long-term strategies. Retail investors need transparent rules that protect them without shutting them out. Markets need standards they can trust. Without these elements, liquidity stays shallow, systems stay siloed and innovation struggles to move beyond early adopters.
Europe has undoubtedly emerged as an early leader in this area. With MiCA now in force and the DLT Pilot Regime enabling structured digital-securities experimentation, the region has moved beyond fragmented sandboxes. The European market is the first to implement a unified, continent-wide regulatory framework for tokenised assets. Instead of treating compliance as an obstacle, the region has elevated regulatory clarity into a competitive advantage. It provides the legal, operational and technical certainty that institutions require to innovate with confidence and at scale.
The continent’s regulatory-first approach is already generating tangible momentum. Under MiCA and the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime, banks have begun issuing tokenised bonds on regulated infrastructure, with European issuance exceeding €1.5 billion in 2024 alone. Asset managers are testing on-chain fund structures designed for retail distribution, while fintechs are integrating digital-asset rails directly into licensed platforms. Together, these developments mark a shift from pilot programmes to live deployment, reducing one of the industry’s longest-standing bottlenecks: the ability to build compliant infrastructure from day one.
A new phase: interoperability and market structure
The next frontier of tokenisation will hinge on interoperability and shared standards, areas where Europe’s regulatory clarity could again set the pace. As more institutions bring tokenised products to market, fragmented liquidity pools and proprietary frameworks risk recreating the silos of traditional finance in digital form.
While traditional finance has spent years optimising for speed, the next wave of tokenisation will be shaped by trust in who builds and governs the infrastructure, as well as whether both institutions and retail participants can rely on it. Europe’s clarity around rules and market structure gives it a credible opportunity to define global standards rather than simply follow them.
The EU can reinforce this position by encouraging cross-chain interoperability and common disclosure standards. Establishing shared rules early would allow tokenised markets to scale without repeating the fragmentation that slowed earlier financial innovations.
Headlines of the Week
– By Francisco Rodrigues
President Donald Trump’s surprise nomination of Kevin Warsh to lead the Fed introduced new variables that shook the markets. The precious metals rally saw a violent selloff, while cryptocurrency prices endured a major correction, with major players nevertheless moving to capture value.
Vibe Check
Suit up, BNB
– By Andy Baehr, head of product and research, CoinDesk Indices
Last week’s CoinDesk 20 (CD20) reconstitution brought BNB into the index for the first time. This wasn’t a question of size — BNB has long been one of the largest digital assets by market cap. It was a matter of meeting the liquidity and other requirements that govern CD20 inclusion. For the first time, BNB cleared those hurdles.
The result? One of the largest composition changes since the index launched in January 2024. BNB enters the CD20 with a weight exceeding 15%, making it an immediate heavyweight in the lineup.
From a portfolio construction perspective, this is a meaningful shift. BNB has historically exhibited lower volatility than the broader CD20, which could reduce the index’s overall risk profile. Its correlation with other index constituents has been moderate rather than lockstep (until recently, at least), adding a diversification benefit. The potential outcome: a lower-risk, more diversified index.
Of course, adding a big name means pushing other constituents down the weight ladder, even with the capping mechanisms CD20 employs. The pie charts tell that story clearly — existing holdings get compressed to make room for the new arrival.
As crypto enters what we’ve been calling its “sophomore year” of institutional maturity, the CoinDesk 20 is beginning its own third year of existence. The index evolves alongside the market it’s meant to capture.
Sunday scaries (real or imagined?)
This past weekend felt rough. Bitcoin traded below $75K, billions in liquidations got clocked, and if you’re in crypto, you were probably watching it happen in real time. Whether you count 24/7 market access as a blessing or a curse, it’s simply a fact of life now.
After a few weekends like this one, it starts to feel like a pattern — like crypto absorbs the world’s anxieties while traditional markets sleep. So, we decided to test that feeling against the data.
The scatter plot shows daily returns for the CoinDesk 20, with weekend moves highlighted separately. Yes, there are a few instances of outsized downside moves on Saturdays and Sundays. But there are plenty of quiet weekends too — and plenty of weekday chaos that doesn’t fit the narrative.
It may be memory inflation. Painful weekends stick in our minds more than calm ones. The drama of watching markets move when others aren’t paying attention amplifies the psychological weight. The data suggests that Sunday scaries might be more perception than pattern.
Still, after a weekend like this past one, the feeling is real even if the statistical significance isn’t. We keep on indexin’ through it all — tracking what’s happening, measuring what matters and trying to separate signal from sentiment.
Chart of the Week
Bitcoin’s drawdowns compress as markets mature
Bitcoin’s peak-to-trough drawdowns have steadily compressed over time, moving from -84% in the first epoch (post-1st halving) to a current cycle maximum of -38% as of early 2026. This persistent reduction in “peak pain” suggests a structural shift toward market maturity, as institutional capital and spot ETFs establish a more stable price floor compared to the retail-driven 80%+ crashes of previous eras. Historically, bitcoin has taken approximately 2 to 3 years (roughly 700 to 1,000 days) to fully recover from major cycle bottoms to new highs, though recovery speed has recently increased, with Epoch 3 reclaiming its peak in only 469 days.
Listen. Read. Watch. Engage.
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CME Group CEO Terry Duffy has suggested the derivatives giant is exploring launching its own cryptocurrency.
In response to a question from Morgan Stanley’s Michael Cyprys during the company’s latest earnings call, Duffy confirmed the firm is exploring “initiatives with our own coin that we could potentially put on a decentralized network.”
The comment was brief and came in response to a question about the role of tokenized collateral. In response, Duffy first noted that the world’s largest derivatives exchange is carefully reviewing different forms of margin.
“So if you were to give me a token from a systemically important financial institution, I would probably be more comfortable than maybe a third or fourth-tier bank trying to issue a token for margin,” Duffy said. “Not only are we looking at tokenized cash, we’re looking at different initiatives with our own coin.”
The company is already working on a “tokenized cash” solution with Google that’s set to come out later this year and will involve a depository bank facilitating transactions. The “own coin” Duffy referenced appears to be a different token that the firm could “potentially put on a decentralized network for other of our industry participants to use.”
The CME declined to clarify whether this “coin” would function as a stablecoin, settlement token or something else entirely when asked by CoinDesk.
However, if such an initiative goes through, the implications are significant.
While CME Group has previously flagged tokenization as a general area of interest, CEO Terry Duffy’s comments this week mark the first time the exchange has explicitly floated the concept of a proprietary, CME-issued asset running on a decentralized network.
The firm is set to launch 24/7 trading for all crypto futures in the second quarter of the year, and is also set to soon offer cardano, chainlink and stellar futures contracts.
CME’s average daily crypto trading volume hit $12 billion last year, with its micro-ether and micro-bitcoin futures contracts being top performers.
The launch wouldn’t make CME the first traditional finance giant to launch its own token. JPMorgan has recently rolled out tokenized deposits on Coinbase’s layer-2 blockchain Base via its so-called JPM Coin (JPMD), quietly rewiring how Wall Street moves money.
The price of Ethereum’s native token, Ether (ETH), risks sliding below $2,000 in February as a classic bearish setup plays out.
Key takeaways:
ETH breakdown keeps $1,665 downside target in focus.
MVRV bands also point to price sliding toward $1,725 or lower before a potential bottom.
ETH/USD daily chart. Source: TradingView
ETH risks declining 25% in February
As of Wednesday, ETH had entered the breakdown stage of its prevailing inverse-cup-and-handle (IC&H) pattern. This could extend a downtrend that has already erased about 60% from its August 2025 peak.
An IC&H pattern forms when price forms a rounded top and then drifts higher in a small recovery channel. It typically resolves when the price breaks below the neckline support, often falling by as much as the cup’s maximum height.
Ether broke below the inverse cup-and-handle neckline near $2,960 in January. It later rebounded to retest that level as resistance, a common post-breakdown move, only to resume its decline.
Ether inverse cup-and-handle. Source: TradingView
ETH’s rebound also stalled below the 20-day (green) and 50-day (red) EMAs, which acted as overhead resistance.
These confluence indicators raised ETH’s odds of declining toward the IC&H breakdown target at around $1,665, down 25%, in February or by early March.
Historically, the inverse cup-and-handle hits its projected downside target with an 82% success rate, according to a study by Chartswatcher.
From a macro perspective, Ethereum’s downside risk is increasing as traders cut back on crypto bets, worried the market could slip into a broader 2026 downturn similar to past “four-year cycle” pullbacks.
Fears of an “AI bubble” popping are also forcing traders to avoid riskier bets such as crypto.
Ethereum’s MVRV bands hint at $1,725 target
Ethereum’s technical downside target sat just below the lowest boundary of its MVRV extreme deviation pricing bands, currently at $1,725.
These bands are onchain price zones that show when ETH is trading below or above the average price at which traders last moved their coins.
Historically, ETH price plunged near or even below the lowest MVRV band before bottoming out.
That includes the April 2025 bounce, when the ETH price rose 90% a month after testing the lowest MVRV deviation band around $1,390. A similar rebound occurred in June 2018.
Related: ETH funding rate turns negative, but US macro conditions mute buy signal
Therefore, Ether may decline toward $1,725 or below in February, which lines up with the IC&H downside target.
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The second day of Web Summit Qatar 2026 signaled a decisive shift in the Middle East’s technological trajectory, moving from the projection of ambitious visions to the tactical operationalization of a sovereign digital economy.
At the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center, the narrative focused on the localization of critical assets, the institutionalisation of fintech, and the transition from smart to cognitive urban environments.
A central pillar of the day’s proceedings was the drive for digital sovereignty. Iman Al Kuwari, director of the digital innovation department at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), explained that Qatar is moving beyond the adoption of commercial tools toward building multi-location sovereign AI infrastructures.
The strategy aims to ensure data remains secure and algorithms align with local cultural standards, mitigating the risks of relying on models hosted in foreign jurisdictions. Al Kuwari noted that this includes a focus on Natural Language Processing models trained on high-quality Arabic datasets to prevent “cultural flattening” often seen in Western-centric systems.
This hardware foundation is being mirrored in the semiconductor space. Sheikh Ali Alwaleed Al-Thani, CEO of Invest Qatar, outlined a “design-first” strategy. Rather than competing in capital-intensive manufacturing, Qatar is prioritizing chip design and talent development, leveraging its stable, lower-cost sustainable energy to attract compute-heavy operations.
FinTech Maturation: Credit and Open Banking
The financial sector saw a significant evolution from simple equity funding toward complex, institutional-grade debt structuring.
Venture Debt: A Memorandum of Understanding between Shorooq Partners and PayLater marked the arrival of private credit at scale. Mahmoud Adi, founding partner at Shorooq Partners, explained that the next phase of growth will be driven by platforms capable of absorbing institutional capital.
Infrastructure Rails: In an interview with The Fintech Times, Nihal Abughattas of Ozoneapi discussed the “plumbing” of the system, noting that banks are moving from viewing open banking as a regulatory burden to a commercial opportunity.
Deep Tech:Philip Rathle, representing Neo4j, highlighted the role of graph technology in combating financial crime. By mapping relationships in real-time, these systems provide the anti-money laundering and fraud detection capabilities required for instant payment environments.
Najla Al Mutawa of QNB Group added that the region’s largest financial institution is pursuing a “Thinking Beyond” strategy, building proprietary digital platforms to reduce reliance on international payment processors and keep transaction data within the local economy.
Cognitive Cities and the Influence Economy
The built environment is also undergoing a transformation. Msheireb Properties, Ooredoo, and Honeywell announced a partnership to deploy a next-generation AI platform at Msheireb Downtown Doha. This move shifts the district from connected infrastructure to “cognitive” infrastructure, using predictive analytics to drive sustainability and autonomous decision-making.
In the media landscape, the industrialization of content was a key theme. beIN Media Group demonstrated automated workflows for social media design and real-time AI subtitling, while the launch of iHeartArabi—a partnership between iHeartMedia and the Qatar Government Communications Office—signaled a strategic bet on the high-trust medium of Arabic-language audio.
A New Global Order
The day concluded with an analysis of the “New Global Order,” where “middle powers” like Qatar are positioning themselves as neutral connector nodes between fracturing Eastern and Western technology stacks. As global supply chains face continued pressure, the consensus in Doha is that the region is no longer just a participant in the digital economy, but its active architect.
Shares of Strategy ($MSTR) plunged again today as Bitcoin’s sell‑off deepened, reinforcing the tight correlation between the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder and the digital asset’s price action.
Bitcoin cratered toward $72,000, extending losses to levels not seen since late 2024, while MSTR shares tumbled roughly 9% on the session, dipping to intraday lows near $121.19.
At current levels the stock is down roughly 15% year‑to‑date and a staggering 72% from its November 2024 peak.
The drop in Bitcoin — now hovering near $72,000, far below the multi‑year highs seen in 2025 — has rippled across the broader crypto complex.
With sentiment souring and tactical traders eyeing technical support levels near the mid‑$60,000 range, risk assets have taken on a pronounced downbeat tone.
Commentary from market strategists has ranged from cautionary to outright bearish, with calls for deeper retracements if demand fails to stabilize.
Analyst slashes $MSTR price target by 60%
In a notable update this week, Canaccord Genuity analyst Joseph Vafi, long viewed as one of MSTR’s most vocal supporters, dramatically slashed his price target from $474 to $185 — a 61% reduction — while maintaining a Buy rating on the stock.
According to Vafi’s revised outlook, the new target still implies “significant upside” from current levels if volatility subsides and Bitcoin finds a tradable bottom.
Vafi’s retained bullish stance — despite the sharp target cut — highlights a nuanced view among some Wall Street strategists: even amid brutal downside, the stock’s deep discount to theoretical Bitcoin net‑asset value could eventually reprice upward.
Strategy continues bitcoin purchasing
Earlier this week, Strategy said it purchased 855 bitcoin for about $75.3 million, paying an average price of $87,974 per BTC, according to a Monday filing.
The acquisition came just days before bitcoin fell below $75,000 over the weekend on some rapid selling, briefly pushing Strategy’s treasury close to $1 billion in unrealized losses. Now, the price of bitcoin is below those levels at $72,000.
The company now holds 713,502 BTC, acquired for roughly $54.26 billion at an average cost of $76,052 per coin.
Last week’s purchase was fully funded through the sale of common stock, following Strategy’s ongoing capital-raising approach to finance bitcoin buys. The purchase of 855 bitcoin was significantly smaller compared to prior company purchases.
All eyes remain on MSTR’s upcoming fourth‑quarter 2025 earnings release, scheduled for later this week, a report that could provide more color on its capital‑raising cadence, BTC purchase strategy, and the evolving balance between leverage and asset coverage.
At the time of writing, bitcoin’s price dropped to lows near $72,000 today, its lowest level in over a year. The bitcoin price has now retraced more than 40% from its all‑time highs reached in late 2025.
When people describe Rutherford Chang’s work, you hear words like: obsessive, conceptual, minimalist. These descriptions aren’t wrong, they point to something real in his practice. But they also miss what makes his approach distinctive. Chang worked with objects that industrial culture designed to be identical: records pressed in millions of copies, portraits drawn according to strict house style, coins minted for perfect interchange. His interest lay in the precise moment when the promise of sameness begins to fail, when time and human handling leave marks that transform supposedly identical objects into singular things.
The retrospective Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands opened January 17, 2026 at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, one of China’s leading institutions for contemporary art. This exhibition is significant for several reasons. It represents Chang’s first institutional retrospective and his most comprehensive solo presentation to date. It is also a posthumous one. Chang died in 2025 at the age of 45, leaving behind a body of work built almost entirely around the practice of collecting and arranging mass-produced objects until their individual histories became visible and legible.
Beijing provides a fitting location for this retrospective, though not for the obvious reasons alone. Yes, Chang moved frequently between New York and China throughout his career, and yes, he showed work in Beijing early on. But the city itself offers something more specific: a context shaped by rapid cycles of construction and replacement, by the constant acceleration of change and circulation. In such an environment, Chang’s patient attention to what gets left behind, to the residues and traces that accumulate on objects even as they move through systems designed to keep them uniform, takes on particular resonance. The exhibition is co-curated by Philip Tinari, director of UCCA, and Aki Sasamoto, a fellow artist – both longtime friends of Chang who understand his working methods from the inside. Their collaboration keeps the exhibition close to the work as practice, with process and method in the foreground.
To understand Chang’s approach, we need to look carefully at the exhibition’s title. Hundreds and Thousands sounds like simple measurement, like a gesture toward quantification. Chang typically worked at scale. He collected not dozens but hundreds or thousands of examples. But what the title really describes is a method and a particular way of working that emerges when you engage with mass-produced objects at sufficient volume. Chang discovered that quantity, at a certain point, stops behaving in predictable ways. At a certain scale, repetition starts to reveal detail. Put hundreds of nearly identical objects next to each other and you start to see time. You start to see touch. You see accidents. You see storage. You see neglect. You also see care. The marks of individual handling become visible. What you’re looking at, ultimately, is a record of lived life pressed into objects that industrial culture designed to keep stable and interchangeable.
We Buy White Albums
One of Chang’s best-known projects demonstrates this method with particular clarity. We Buy White Albums operates from a constraint simple enough to state in a single sentence, though its implications unfold over years: Chang established a record store that stocked only first pressings of the Beatles’ The Beatles (1968), commonly known as “The White Album”. The store had one rule that inverted normal commercial logic: It sold nothing, it only bought.
This premise is deliberately narrow, and it remains narrow throughout the project’s duration, which turns out to be part of what allows it to scale so effectively over time. During exhibitions where Chang was present, the work functioned in real time: people could show up with their own copy of the White Album and sell it to the archive while the exhibition was on view. The act of buying became a moment of direct exchange between the work and its audience, and the archive grew through these individual transactions instead of curatorial selection or market acquisition. Each copy arrived already marked by years of handling. These marks, the accumulated evidence of circulation, carried the work forward.
To understand why this project works as it does, we need to look more carefully at the White Album itself as an object. Richard Hamilton designed the cover as an almost completely blank white surface. Minimalism at its most reductive form. And yet early pressings carry a stamped serial number, a small detail that complicates the apparent simplicity. This serial number performs a curious double function: it frames each copy as one among many (your copy is number 0234561 out of millions), while simultaneously gesturing toward something like limited edition status through the very act of numbering. Here we find the contradiction built directly into the object itself: mass-produced minimalism making a paradoxical claim to uniqueness. The serial number tells you this is just one copy out of millions, while the blank white cover invites you to make it yours.
Chang understood what this contradiction sets in motion once these objects enter circulation and begin moving through time. The clean white surface that Hamilton designed with such care doesn’t stay clean for long. Everyday life rewrites it. Water damage spreads across the cardboard in irregular patterns. Corners get torn or bent through careless handling or too-tight shelving. Owners write their names on the cover, add notes about when and where they bought the album, sometimes include dedications or detailed lists of favorite tracks. Price stickers from second-hand shops accumulate in layers, creating unintended collages of commercial history. In some cases, mold sets in during storage in damp basements or attics, creating organic patterns that can look almost intentional, or lets say, almost artistic. Through all of this, the album stops being a uniform industrial product and becomes something singular, that’s marked by its particular history.
The decision to collect these albums in any condition and not searching only for pristine, museum-quality copies, represents a choice with significant consequences for how the work means. It means treating damage and wear as information and not as degradation to be corrected or restored. This shift in how we value objects is crucial to understanding the project. A pristine copy might tell you something about careful preservation, about someone who valued the object enough to keep it protected from the world. But a tattered copy, covered in stains and marks, tells a different and probably richer story. In Chang’s hands, these marks remain visible and begin to matter in new ways. He returns again and again, across different projects, to this precise point where objects designed for perfect interchange start to fray at the edges, where they begin to carry their own record of circulation that makes them individually readable.
The work doesn’t stop with physical collection, however. Chang took the project a step further by recording multiple copies of the album and layering them into a single audio piece. One hundred versions of the White Album play simultaneously, drifting gradually out of sync as small differences in quality and accumulated wear compound into a shifting chorus of sound. The result doesn’t register as a remix or a mashup in any conventional sense. It feels closer to the archive itself made audible, a way of hearing how uniformity fails when you stack enough iterations on top of each other. What comes to the surface is not purity or fidelity to an original, but time itself, materialized in the form of friction and noise. The piece functions as what we might call material memory, with surprisingly little interest in fan culture, or the mythology that typically surrounds The Beatles.
The Class of 2008
Chang applied this same basic methodological approach to a very different kind of mass-produced object: printed news media. The Class of 2008 presents itself as a straightforward catalogue. It’s an alphabetical listing of every hedcut portrait published in The Wall Street Journal during the year 2008. Before we can understand what Chang does with this material, though, we need to understand what hedcuts are and why they matter. Hedcuts are the distinctive stippled, engraving-style portraits that the Journal uses for certain figures in its reporting. The technique is borrowed deliberately from nineteenth-century engraving, and it carries with it specific associations: authority, permanence, trustworthiness, the visual register of something meant to hold up under scrutiny and stand the test of time.
The structure of the catalogue is deceptively simple: alphabetical order, with repetition kept visible in the record. If someone appeared multiple times in 2008, this is clearly indicated in the book, and those appearances are explicitly not reduced to a single representative entry. This decision about how to organize the material matters, because it allows patterns of repetition and recurrence to emerge through the reader’s encounter with the work. And the timing of the project sharpens its implications considerably. 2008 was, of course as we all know, the year when financial authority came under extraordinary strain, when economic structures that had seemed most stable revealed themselves to be fragile or even illusory. And yet throughout this period, the visual language of legitimacy in the Journal continued without interruption, day after day rendering certain faces in this particular register of authority and trust.
Chang’s catalogue simply records this continuity without adding editorial commentary or explicit critique. The alphabetical organization flattens any narrative arc that the year’s events might suggest. There’s no chronological story being told about crisis and response, no hierarchy of importance imposed through the order of presentation. Instead, repetition itself does the interpretive work. As you page through the book, you notice who appears once and who appears again and again and again. You start to see patterns in who gets rendered in this authoritative visual register and who remains outside it. The hedcut becomes not just a neutral technique of illustration but a question about legitimacy and representation: who gets marked as worth this particular kind of attention, who gets enrolled in this visual vocabulary of permanence and authority, and who remains invisible to this institutional gaze?
Game Boy Tetris
If Chang’s collecting projects make time visible through the gradual accumulation of marks on physical objects, Game Boy Tetris approaches the question of time and repetition through a different medium: labor itself, as the repetitive effort of trying and failing and trying again. The work documents Chang’s repeated attempts to achieve the highest possible score in the original Game Boy version of Tetris, filming the process over an extended period until the accumulation of attempts becomes the substance and meaning of the work. At one point during this extended engagement, he surpassed Steve Wozniak’s score on the leaderboard. A detail he noted with evident satisfaction –– a reminder of how seriously he took questions of record-keeping and documented proof of achievement.
The same simple rule-based system holds your attention through long stretches of concentration punctuated by failure and the decision to restart. The desire for completion, for reaching some definitive endpoint, keeps pulling you back into the loop even as the reasons for continuing become harder to articulate. Progress remains measurable throughout — you can track improvement across attempts, watch skills developing and patterns emerging — even as the larger meaning or purpose of this progress starts to slip away, even as the question of why this particular score matters becomes increasingly difficult to answer with any conviction.
Chang wasn’t observing obsessive cultures or completionist practices from a safe critical distance, making work about collecting or repetition without genuinely participating in those structures himself. Instead, he built systems and constraints that could absorb years of his own attention and effort while still continuing to demand more. Over time, through this sustained and genuine engagement with repetitive structures, Chang himself starts to resemble the thing he’s ostensibly studying. He becomes, in a real sense, a kind of repetitive system himself as lived practice.
CENTS
Chang’s final major project takes his long-standing interest in units, standards, and systems of record-keeping and extends it into what has become an ongoing and in some ways autonomous condition. He completed the physical collection and documentation of ten thousand copper cents in 2023, at a moment when the one-cent coin was still in regular circulation throughout the United States. In 2024 the digital records of these ten thousand individual coins were inscribed onto Bitcoin, allowing the work to continue circulating and accumulating meaning beyond Chang’s direct control or intervention. Then, in a development that gives the entire project an another historical dimension, the U.S. Mint stopped producing the circulating one-cent coin on November 12, 2025. What this means is that in hindsight, with the perspective that historical distance provides, the penny itself has begun to read as a historical object, something that belongs to a particular moment of currency and exchange that is now passing into the past.
The project starts, like most of Chang’s work, from a condition that many people vaguely know about but rarely think through with any care or precision. Chang limited his collection specifically to cents minted before 1982, the year when the U.S. Mint changed the composition of the penny to reduce costs. Before 1982, pennies were made primarily of copper; after that date, they became copper-plated zinc. This seemingly minor detail has real consequences: pennies from the earlier period can, under certain market conditions, exceed their face value when considered purely as raw material. The copper content might be worth more than one cent. This creates an odd situation where the State continues to define each coin as being worth exactly one cent (and makes melting them for their metal content illegal), while the material reality of the object suggests a different value entirely. Chang doesn’t treat this as a paradox to resolve or a problem to solve. He treats it as a given, as one of the structural conditions that makes the work possible and interesting.
The process he developed is methodical and systematic. He removed ten thousand copper cents from circulation, pulling them out of the flow of exchange and use, and documented each one individually through detailed photography (obverse and reverse, better known as heads and tails). The coins were then smelted together into a single copper block weighing sixty-eight pounds. At this moment, individual units disappear entirely into undifferentiated mass. The penny’s ordinary role in exchange, its function as a discrete unit of value that can circulate and combine with other units, comes to a definitive end. But the block itself continues to exist in multiple forms. It was rendered as a detailed 3D digital model and inscribed as a single massive inscription filling the entirety of Bitcoin block #839969. This digital version was then sold at Christie’s in 2024, entering yet another system of value and circulation, moving from material object to digital record to collectible artwork in the contemporary art market.
The documentation, meanwhile, moves in the opposite direction from this consolidation. While the physical coins condense into a single unified object and lose their existence as separable, countable units, each individual cent remains readable as a distinct record. The photographic images stay separate and individuated, each one assigned to a fixed and permanent position in the set through inscription onto individual satoshis. What disappears completely at the level of material form — you can no longer hold these particular ten thousand pennies in your hand, can no longer sort through them or arrange them or put them back into circulation — remains perfectly intact at the level of the record. You can still look at the photograph of each specific coin, still examine the particular wear patterns and surface marks and small imperfections that distinguished it from the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others.
This structure allows CENTS to hold in tension several different and potentially conflicting ideas about where value is located and how it gets established and maintained. There’s value as defined by governmental authority: the State declares that this coin is worth one cent, and that declaration carries legal force. There’s value registered in material composition: the copper content might actually be worth more than one cent when calculated according to commodity prices. And there’s value produced through preservation and documentation: the decision to photograph each coin individually, to maintain the archive’s legibility over time, to treat these mass-produced objects as worthy of sustained attention. These different registers of value remain distinct within the work, not collapsing into a single unified meaning or resolving into some synthesis.
When we place CENTS alongside We Buy White Albums and think about them as part of a consistent practice, the underlying logic becomes clear. Objects that were designed and manufactured for perfect interchange, for being functionally identical and mutually substitutable, become readable as singular and individual once their circulation is interrupted and held still, once their particular histories are made visible through careful documentation and systematic archiving.
It’s worth noting here — because it matters for understanding how the work continues to function after Chang’s death — that CENTS was initiated through collaboration with Sovrn Art, an independent, artist-first platform that provided the initial framework and support for the project’s development. After the full inscription of the work onto Bitcoin was completed, a council formed independently of Chang himself, without his organization or oversight. This council is made up of collectors who chose, for their own reasons, to take responsibility for the work’s continuation and interpretation. The council members come from different generations and different professional fields, bringing various forms of expertise and perspective to their engagement with the archive. Their work has focused consistently on keeping the distinctions within the archive visible and legible — through close reading of the documentation, through careful cataloguing of variations and patterns, through writing that approaches the material from multiple angles and asks different kinds of questions. Their involvement has centered particularly on the problem of how to keep this archive readable and meaningful over time, how to maintain the precision and care of the record as it continues to circulate through systems and contexts that Chang himself could not have anticipated.
Archive as Practice
It is easy to call Rutherford obsessive. The sustained attention over years, the commitment to completeness and thoroughness, the willingness to spend enormous amounts of time and effort on projects built around deliberately narrow constraints. The word isn’t inaccurate. And yet it still manages to miss something important about the dimension of what Chang was actually doing with his time and attention. He treated mass culture and industrial production with a kind of patience that’s rare in contemporary art. He made rarity and singularity visible inside precisely those things we’ve learned to overlook or dismiss as generic and interchangeable. He listened carefully to what we might call the noise inside familiar symbols and objects — the small variations and accumulated marks that circulation and handling inscribe on surfaces that were designed specifically to resist such marking and remain stable over time.
This attention to what accumulates in the gaps and margins of systems designed for uniformity helps explain why Hundreds and Thousands works so effectively as a title for this retrospective. On one level, it simply names the scale at which Chang characteristically worked: collecting not dozens but hundreds, not hundreds but thousands of examples. But it also names something more fundamental. A discipline, a particular kind of methodical practice that requires looking long enough and carefully enough that difference begins to appear within what first presents itself as sameness. The practice keeps returning, with remarkable consistency across different projects and materials, to what circulation leaves behind: the marks and traces that accumulate even on objects designed to remain stable and unchanged.
Chang’s work can be read, in many ways, as a sustained practice of custody and care. He kept objects, pulled them out of circulation or gathered them from its margins. He indexed and organized them into systems that made their individual histories newly visible and legible. And then, crucially, he returned them to circulation in altered form: as archives open to examination, as exhibitions that invited direct encounter, as permanent records inscribed on Bitcoin. Through this process, he built situations and structures in which circulation itself becomes visible as a process. In which value turns concrete and measurable. The archive is consistently where this transformation takes place in his work — the site and the method through which individual objects become readable as parts of larger systems and patterns.
The retrospective gathers Chang’s method into a single frame and brings together projects from different moments in his career to demonstrate the underlying consistency of his approach across various materials and contexts. What remains is the structure he built, the archives he assembled with such care, the questions he persistently refused to resolve or close down prematurely. The promise of sameness keeps failing. Difference keeps appearing in the gaps and variations. The marks stay visible for anyone willing to look closely enough, and patiently enough, to actually see them.
This is a guest post by Steven Reiss. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
On Wednesday, XRP spot values traded in a tight $1.53 to $1.62 range over the past 24 hours and was last seen at $1.56 at press time on Feb. 4, as derivatives data signaled a market growing more selective rather than outright confident. XRP Derivatives Flash Mixed Signals as Volatility Fades Options activity continues to […]
The funding round comes right after the platform had a record month for revenue and trading volume.
Opinion, a prediction marketplace founded in 2023 by Forrest Liu, announced today, Feb. 4, that it has raised $20 million in a pre-Series A round as it quietly moves into the top tier of on-chain betting.
The round was backed by Hack VC, Jump Crypto, Primitive Ventures and others, and comes about three months after the platform’s launch, according to a press release shared with The Defiant.
Before the pre-Series A, Opinion Labs, the firm behind the platform, raised $5 million in seed funding, led by YZi Labs, an investment vehicle spun out of Binance, with participation from Animoca Ventures and others.
Now, the company says it plans to use the new capital to deepen its APAC presence, while also scaling globally ahead of this year’s elections and the 2026 World Cup, the press release reads.
Since its October launch on BNB Smart Chain (BSC), formerly known as Binance Smart Chain, Opinion has jumped to third place among prediction markets by trading volume across daily, weekly and monthly timeframes.
The platform saw more than $653 million traded in the past week, trailing fellow on-chain prediction market Polymarket with $967 million, and hybrid on-off-chain competitor Kalshi with $902.2 million.
Opinion captured just over 20% of global prediction market volume in the past seven days, which stands at $3.24 billion, according to DefiLlama data. The platform is ranked second by total value locked (TVL) with about $120 million, following Polymarket with $330 million.
Opinion’s TVL and fees since launch in October 2025. Source: DefiLlama
Opinion is also the largest prediction marketplace on BSC, with nearly $20 billion in cumulative volume and over 185,000 users as of press time, according to data from Dune Analytics.
The funding news comes after a sharp revenue jump for Opinion. The prediction marketplace generated an annualized $66 million in revenue and posted a monthly record of $6.14 million in January alone, per DefiLlama data, and is currently leading the sector by 30-day revenue.
Trading volume in January also marked a record high for the platform.
Opinion monthly revenue and on-chain volume. Source: DefiLlama
In the past week, the native token of Base-based prediction market Limitless rallied over 260% amid growing activity on the platform.
