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Tether Launches Open-Source Bitcoin Mining Operating System

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Tether Launches Open-Source Bitcoin Mining Operating System

Tether has open-sourced a new operating system for bitcoin mining, unveiling MiningOS (MOS) as part of a broader push to reduce the industry’s reliance on proprietary, vendor-controlled software.

The stablecoin issuer announced Monday that MOS, a modular and scalable operating system designed to manage, monitor, and automate bitcoin mining operations, is now available as open-source software under the Apache 2.0 license. 

The system was officially unveiled at the 2026 Plan ₿ Forum in San Salvador.

According to Tether, MOS is built to coordinate the complex mix of hardware, power systems, containers, and physical infrastructure that underpin modern bitcoin mining. 

Rather than relying on fragmented software stacks, the operating system treats every component of a mining site as a controllable “worker” within a single operational layer, providing operators with unified visibility across hashrate, energy usage, device health, and site-level infrastructure.

The company said MOS uses a self-hosted, peer-to-peer architecture based on Holepunch protocols, allowing miners to manage operations without relying on centralized services or third-party platforms. 

The system is designed to scale from small home installations running on lightweight hardware to industrial-grade deployments managing hundreds of thousands of machines across multiple locations.

“Mining OS is built to make Bitcoin mining infrastructure more open, modular, and accessible,” said Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino. “Whether it’s a small operator running a handful of machines or a full-scale industrial site, the same operating system can scale without reliance on centralized, third-party software.”

Tether’s Mining SDK announcement

Alongside MOS, Tether also announced the Mining SDK, the framework on which the operating system is built. The Mining SDK is expected to be finalized and released in collaboration with the open-source community in the coming months.

The toolkit is designed to allow developers to build mining software and internal tools without recreating device integrations or operational primitives from scratch, offering ready-made workers, APIs, and UI components.

Tether said the goal of open-sourcing its mining stack is to lower barriers to entry for new miners and remove the “black box” nature of many existing mining setups, where hardware and monitoring tools are tightly coupled to proprietary platforms.

The release places Tether alongside other crypto firms pushing open-source mining infrastructure, including Jack Dorsey’s Block, which has previously backed efforts to decentralize mining tooling and hardware access.

MOS marks another step in Tether’s expansion beyond its core stablecoin business. The company has increasingly positioned itself across mining, payments, and infrastructure, reporting more than $10 billion in net profit in 2025, driven largely by interest income on its reserves.

Bitcoin ETFs Roar Into February With $562 Million Inflow

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Bitcoin ETFs Roar Into February With $562 Million Inflow

U.S. crypto ETFs kicked off February with a decisive return of capital into bitcoin products, while ether and XRP struggled to keep pace. Solana quietly extended its recovery with another day of inflows. February Opens With Bitcoin ETF Surge While Ether and XRP Slip February opened with a sharp change in tone for crypto exchange-traded […]

Here’s why one analyst expects Solana (SOL) to rise twenty-fold from current depressed level

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Here’s why one analyst expects Solana (SOL) to rise twenty-fold from current depressed level

Solana’s SOL$104.79 memecoin-driven reputation may soon give way to a deeper role in digital payments, according to a new report from Standard Chartered’s head of crypto research, Kendrick Geoffrey.

Given SOL’s recent plunge to the $100 level, Kendrick has cut his price forecast for SOL to $250 from $310 by the end of 2026. Kenrick, however, remains a bull, seeing a path to $2,000 by 2030, fueled by Solana’s growing role in stablecoin-based micropayments.

The bank describes Solana as moving beyond its “one-trick pony” image. In 2025, nearly half of Solana’s protocol fees came from memecoin trading on decentralized exchanges. But data now shows a shift in trading flows — from meme tokens to SOL-stablecoin pairs — suggesting that new uses are emerging. Stablecoin turnover on Solana now significantly outpaces Ethereum ETH$2,299.61, pointing to a different kind of activity: high-frequency, low-cost transactions.

One example is x402, a platform created by Coinbase (COIN) to support micro-sized, AI-driven payments using stablecoins. The average transaction on x402 is just six cents. Base, Coinbase’s own Layer 2 network on Ethereum, has hosted most of the volume so far, but its fees may be too high for long-term viability. Solana’s lower gas fees — often less than a cent — make it better suited for such applications, Geoffrey said.

Micropayments, often unviable in traditional finance due to fixed per-transaction fees, could unlock new types of internet services, from machine-to-machine payments to social apps with built-in pay-per-use features. Solana’s technical strengths position it to serve as the backend for this kind of infrastructure.

Standard Chartered also points to growing institutional interest. Since October 2025, the Bitwise BSOL ETF has absorbed 78% of all net inflows into SOL-related ETFs, bringing over 1% of the total supply under ETF management, according to Geoffrey. Meanwhile, digital asset treasuries now hold nearly 3% of SOL.

Kendrick’s revised targets now project SOL at $400 in 2027, $700 in 2028 and $1,200 in 2029.

Missing Jobs Data Deepens Crypto’s Risk-off Mood

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Missing Jobs Data Deepens Crypto’s Risk-off Mood

The delay of the January U.S. jobs report has intensified macro uncertainty, keeping crypto markets locked in a deleveraging phase. NFP Delay Fuels Uncertainty as Bitcoin Tests Key Levels Crypto markets are navigating a fragile macro backdrop after the U.S. government shutdown forced a delay to the January 2026 Nonfarm Payrolls (NFP) report. The Bureau […]

Snowflake Deal Latest Move into Enterprise Market by OpenAI

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Snowflake Deal Latest Move into Enterprise Market by OpenAI

OpenAI’s multi-year partnership with Snowflake helps the generative AI model maker put its technology in front of a different category of users served by the data platform provider and show that the AI model race has narrowed.

OpenAI and cloud data vendor Snowflake on Feb. 2 said they had signed a $200 million agreement to deliver AI model capabilities to Snowflake’s enterprise customers. The deal makes OpenAI models natively available to Snowflake’s global customers in Snowflake Cortex AI, a managed service that integrates large language model and machine learning technology into the Snowflake platform. Snowflake will use OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise internally for its employees.

The partnership shows how OpenAI, seen as behind in the race to deliver AI products and services to businesses, continues to target enterprise customers indirectly by forging relationships with enterprise platform providers. Last month, the model maker revealed a partnership with ServiceNow.

Related:Google Launches Low-Cost AI Plus Subscription in the U.S.

Models and Access

The deal is a testament to consolidation in the AI model market, with numerous players starting to winnow to three leaders: Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The commoditization of enterprise-ready models indicates that most enterprise platform providers looking to appeal to their customers will seek relationships with these vendors.

“Companies like Snowflake, they’re all trying to build these partnerships as a way to potentially differentiate in the market,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner. He added that a year ago, there was a general consensus that the more models, the better. SaaS and platform providers did not see the need to partner specifically with model makers because the model market was still open, but that is changing, leading vendors to forge deals with key model players and to integrate the models into their technology.

“It’s a way of signaling to the fact that we have what you want, and more importantly, we have tightly integrated that into our product, into our platform and into your workflows,” Chandrasekaran said.

For OpenAI, its partnerships with Snowflake and ServiceNow also help it to reemphasize to the AI market that its models are still important and as useful and dependable as they were in the beginning, he continued.

“OpenAI is trying to create a wide channel ecosystem by partnering with a lot of these … providers as a way to convey that there is still a lot of premium left in the model and also as a way to get access to enterprise customers,” Chandrasekaran said.

Related:Microsoft Aims for Better Inference Efficiency With Maia 200

With the Snowflake partnership, OpenAI gets access to new enterprise customers and new roles within the enterprise since Snowflake’s primary focus has been on data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts. In contrast, OpenAI has, up to now, mostly focused on developers, he added.

Making Money

However, the biggest question for OpenAI is how Snowflake will compensate the AI vendor for using its models, said Mark Beccue, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.

“Is it trading compute, which would be some kind of circular thing? Is it licensing? Is it revenue share?” Beccue continued. “Is the difference that they’re getting paid?”

While Snowflake and OpenAI have revealed the value of the agreement, it is unclear whether that is in revenue for OpenAI. Moreover, for a company preparing to go public, such as OpenAI, deals like this help, but they do not resolve OpenAI’s profitability problem, Beccue added.

The model maker projects 2029 to be the year it breaks even, with what it expects as $125 billion in revenue and achieves cash flow.

“Only 22 companies on the planet currently have revenue of $125 billion or more,” Beccue said.

To achieve its goal, OpenAI is shifting away from its no-ad strategy to introduce ads on the free tier of ChatGPT, which might be a way to generate cashflow, Beccue continued.

Related:OpenAI Targets Monetization, $1.4T Commitments by 2034

 “Ad-supported consumer is the only viable path, and that’s shaky,” he said.

 

ING Deutschland Opens Retail Access To Bitcoin ETPs

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ING Deutschland Opens Retail Access To Bitcoin ETPs

ING Deutschland, one of Germany’s largest retail banks, has begun offering retail clients access to cryptocurrency-linked exchange-traded notes (ETNs) and products, allowing customers to gain exposure to bitcoin and other crypto directly through their existing securities accounts.

According to information published on ING’s website, the products are physically backed exchange-traded instruments issued by established asset managers including 21Shares, Bitwise, and VanEck. 

The instruments track the performance of individual cryptocurrencies and trade on regulated exchanges via ING’s Direct Depot platform, which is typically used for stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds.

The bank said the bitcoin offering is intended to lower barriers to entry for crypto investing by integrating digital asset exposure into familiar banking infrastructure. 

Clients do not need to set up third-party crypto exchanges, manage private keys, or operate self-custody wallets, as custody and execution are handled within the securities account framework.

“This creates another particularly low-threshold access to crypto investments via exchange-traded products,” said Martijn Rozemuller, CEO of VanEck Europe, in a translated press release. “Many investors want a solution that fits into existing depot structures and at the same time convinces them with transparent costs. That’s exactly what this partnership stands for.”

ING noted that the bitcoin and crypto ETNs receive the same tax treatment in Germany as directly held cryptocurrencies. Under current German tax rules, capital gains on crypto assets may be exempt if the position is held for more than one year, potentially making the products attractive to long-term investors.

Despite the expanded access, the bank emphasized that the products carry substantial risks. ING warned of “extreme” price volatility, the possibility of total loss in the event of issuer insolvency, liquidity risks, market manipulation, and ongoing regulatory uncertainty surrounding digital assets.

In educational materials published alongside the launch, ING took a notably cautious stance on the asset class itself.

 “Cryptocurrencies are speculative products that have no intrinsic value,” the bank stated, adding that crypto prices are “strongly dependent on psychological effects,” which also influence exchange-traded crypto products.

German banks are embracing bitcoin

Germany’s major banking groups are moving to bring crypto trading into the regulated retail banking system. DZ Bank has secured MiCAR approval and will roll out its “meinKrypto” platform across cooperative banks, allowing customers to trade and custody Bitcoin and other digital assets directly within existing banking apps, while also joining a consortium developing a regulated euro stablecoin. 

In parallel, the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe plans to launch Bitcoin and crypto trading for private customers by summer 2026, with technical support from DekaBank, marking a reversal from its earlier skepticism toward digital assets. 

Spanish Red Cross Uses Blockchain Proofs to Audit Aid—Without Exposing Recipients

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Spanish Red Cross Uses Blockchain Proofs to Audit Aid—Without Exposing Recipients

Humanitarian agencies are under mounting pressure to show exactly where donations go — without turning the people they serve into data subjects. Creu Roja, the Spanish Red Cross affiliate in Catalonia, has deployed a blockchain-powered digital payments platform that lets donors audit aid flows end-to-end while keeping beneficiaries’ identities and case records off any public ledger.

The system, built with Barcelona-based infrastructure firm BLOOCK, digitizes the lifecycle of assistance — from donation and allocation through to spending at local merchants — creating what the partners describe as an immutable audit trail. But the blockchain role is deliberately narrow: it acts as a verification layer, anchoring cryptographic proofs such as hashes and timestamps, while all personal data remains in Red Cross-controlled systems off-chain.

“People seeking assistance shouldn’t have to choose between getting help and protecting their privacy. We designed this system so donors can verify their contributions made a real difference, and beneficiaries can access support without fear of being tracked, profiled, or stigmatized,” said Francisco López Romero, CTO at Creu Roja, Catalunya.

A transparency push collides with privacy risk

Accountability demands in aid delivery have intensified as communities affected by conflict and disaster increasingly cite corruption, favoritism and opaque distribution as barriers to effective support, according to practitioners and researchers studying humanitarian operations.

Blockchain has been pitched for years as a way to curb leakage by making money trails harder to alter retroactively. Yet many implementations have leaned on invasive identity checks — including biometrics — to prevent duplication and fraud, creating a different set of risks for vulnerable populations.

One of the best-known examples is the World Food Programme’s Building Blocks network, which coordinates assistance through blockchain-linked beneficiary accounts. In Jordan, the program was paired with existing biometric identification to let refugees buy groceries via iris scans, according to program descriptions and case studies. Even when designed for efficiency, the use of biometrics has become a flashpoint. Regulators have recently forced big projects like worldcoin to delete iris-scan data, showing how quickly “proof-of-personhood” systems can run into legal and societal resistance.

Creu Roja and BLOOCK are positioning their deployment as a counter-model: outcome verification without beneficiary identification on-chain — and without “aid instruments” that visibly label recipients at point of sale.

How the new Red Cross system works

Under the design described by the partners, recipients receive digital aid credits in a mobile wallet, without needing a bank account or credit history. They spend those credits at authorized local merchants using QR codes, in transactions meant to resemble ordinary purchases.

Donors and program administrators, meanwhile, see aggregated flows in near real time: how much was allocated, how much was spent, and where funds were used — without access to identities or personal histories of individual recipients. The audit trail is “immutable” in the sense that the proofs anchored to a public blockchain can be independently checked later to confirm the integrity of records held off-chain.

“The architecture follows a principle we apply across all our enterprise deployments: blockchain should certify truth, not store content. Every transaction generates a cryptographic proof that’s permanently anchored and independently verifiable, but the proof contains no personal information,” said Lluís Llibre, CEO of BLOOCK.

Catalonia’s government blockchain case-study dossier describes BLOOCK as a layer-2 style approach that aims to keep sensitive data private while still anchoring integrity proofs to Ethereum, partly to avoid the cost and scalability constraints of putting full records directly on a public chain.

BLOOCK provides a “framework” that integrates enterprise systems with blockchains while emphasizing information-security properties such as integrity and authenticity.

From donation traceability to a broader “aid lifecycle”

The rollout builds on earlier work. A Catalonia government report says that in 2019 Creu Roja used BLOOCK to implement a donation traceability system, designed to increase security and veracity of data while protecting the privacy of aid beneficiaries. The same report notes that BLOOCK was recognized in 2020 with a Talent award for the “Cadena Roja” (Red Chain) project with Creu Roja, and also cites public innovation programs that supported the startup around that period.

A 2022 profile of BLOOCK in Catalan tech outlet MetaData described a Red Cross use case that let donors confirm their contribution’s destination while keeping the chain anonymized — “only the person who has made a contribution will know what it has been invested in,” the article mentioned.

What’s new in the current deployment? According to the information shared with AlexaBlockchain, the latest deployment transitions from a narrow “traceability of donations” concept into a digitized payments workflow that covers allocation and spending. This turns transparency into an operational feature rather than an after-the-fact audit.

Identity partners enter the picture

The project also leans on a privacy-first view of identity and eligibility. “What Creu Roja built here is a credential system, not a surveillance system. Recipients hold proof of their eligibility in their own wallet. They present it when needed, reveal nothing else, and move on with their lives,” said Evin McMullen, CEO & Co-Founder of Billions Network.

Billions.Network, described by the company as a mobile-first verification platform (and previously associated with the Polygon ID/Privado ID ecosystem), has been positioning itself as infrastructure for privacy-preserving verification as both AI agents and digital payments proliferate online.

Why this matters — and what it doesn’t solve

The platform offers easily verifiable proof for donors and regulators. They can track that funds went to authorized purposes, with fewer manual steps and less reliance on paper-based workflows that can be slow to reconcile and easy to dispute.

For recipients, the stated goal is dignity-by-design: no “special aid cards,” no public signaling, and minimal data exposure. That matters in contexts where receiving assistance can carry stigma — or where data leaks can be weaponized for discrimination.

Still, the approach doesn’t eliminate the hardest governance questions in aid delivery. A blockchain proof can show that a record wasn’t altered, but it can’t, by itself, guarantee that the underlying eligibility decisions were fair — or that the merchant network was free of bias. The system’s integrity is only as strong as the controls over the off-chain databases, the authorization policies for merchants, and the operational audits that sit around the cryptographic layer.

What Creu Roja’s deployment does suggest is a narrowing of the trade-off that has dogged humanitarian “digital identity” systems: transparency without turning beneficiaries into permanently linkable identifiers on a public network — and without making biometrics the default price of participation.

The article “Spanish Red Cross Uses Blockchain Proofs to Audit Aid—Without Exposing Recipients” was first published on AlexaBlockchain. Read the complete article here: https://alexablockchain.com/spanish-red-cross-uses-blockchain-proofs-to-audit-aid/

Read Also: Tether Launches US-Regulated Stablecoin as New Federal Rules Take Effect

Disclaimer: The information provided on AlexaBlockchain is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Read complete disclaimer here.

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Bitwise argues crypto is near the end of a brutal winter

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Bitwise argues crypto is near the end of a brutal winter

Crypto has been in a full-blown winter since January 2025, even if much of the market has been reluctant to say it out loud, asset manager Bitwise said in a Monday blog post.

Having lived through multiple crypto winters, the investment manager said the current mood of despair looks familiar, and historically has marked the later stages of downturns. After more than a year of declining prices, the market is likely closer to the end of winter than the beginning, with a recovery arriving “sooner rather than later.”

Crypto winters are prolonged bear markets marked by steep price declines, collapsing sentiment and a general indifference to good news. Historically, they have followed periods of excess leverage and speculative excess, lasting roughly a year from peak to trough.

In past cycles, including 2018 and 2022, adoption milestones and regulatory progress did little to halt losses in the depths of the downturn. Instead, crypto winters have tended to end quietly, as selling pressure fades and markets stabilize, setting the stage for the next expansion, the post said.

Prices have been sharply lower across the board, with bitcoin BTC$78,937.14 down roughly 39% from its October 2025 peak, ether ETH$2,325.24 off more than 50%, and many major tokens down far more.

This is not a routine pullback or a healthy correction, according to Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan, but a 2022-style downturn driven by excess leverage and profit-taking that has overwhelmed even a steady stream of positive headlines.

Hougan argued that recognizing the market as a true crypto winter helps explain why good news, from regulatory progress to institutional adoption, has failed to lift prices.

In past cycles, Hougan noted, fundamentals rarely matter at market lows. Crypto winters do not end with optimism or excitement, but with fatigue, as sellers are finally exhausted.

While previous crypto winters have lasted roughly 13 months from peak to trough, Hougan believes this cycle effectively began in January 2025, even though the market did not fully register it at the time. Heavy inflows into spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and digital asset treasury strategies helped prop up a handful of large, institutionally accessible assets, masking a brutal bear market in retail-focused crypto.

According to the report, assets with strong institutional support fell modestly in 2025, while tokens without ETF or treasury demand suffered declines of 60% or more. Bitwise estimated that institutional vehicles absorbed more than 740,000 bitcoin during the period, providing tens of billions of dollars in price support that may have prevented far steeper losses.

Despite the gloom, the underlying story for crypto has not materially deteriorated, according to Hougan.

Regulatory momentum, Wall Street adoption, stablecoins and tokenization all continue to advance, even if markets are ignoring them for now. That positive news is building latent pressure that could fuel a sharp recovery once sentiment turns, the report added.

Read more: Wall Street integration will power crypto’s next phase, says Fidelity Digital Assets

MetaMask integrates Ondo to offer 200+ tokenized U.S. stocks inside wallet

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MetaMask integrates Ondo to offer 200+ tokenized U.S. stocks inside wallet

MetaMask, the popular self-custodial wallet, has added access to tokenized U.S. stocks, exchange-traded funds and commodities through a new integration with Ondo Finance’s Global Markets platform, the companies said Tuesday.

Eligible MetaMask mobile users in “supported non-U.S. jurisdictions” can now buy and trade more than 200 U.S. tokenized securities, including shares tracking companies like Tesla, Apple and Nvidia, as well as ETFs tied to gold, silver and the Nasdaq, directly inside the wallet, without opening a traditional brokerage account, according to the announcement.

The launch marks one of the first times tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs have been made natively available through a major self-custodial wallet, highlighting how real-world asset tokenization might become more closely integrated with traditional financial infrastructure.

The move comes as tokenized real-world assets have grown into a market worth more than $22 billion globally, according to the companies, as crypto firms look to blur the lines between traditional finance and on-chain markets.

“Access to U.S. markets still runs through legacy rails. Brokerage accounts, fragmented apps, and rigid trading windows haven’t meaningfully evolved,” said Joe Lubin, the founder and CEO of Consensys and co-founder of Ethereum, in a press release shared with CoinDesk. “Bringing Ondo’s tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs directly into MetaMask shows what a better model looks like. A single, self-custodial wallet where people can move between crypto and traditional assets without intermediaries and without giving up control.“

Read more: MetaMask Confirms $30M Rewards Program, Links to Future Token

Kraken parent company Payward says revenue grew 33% in 2025

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Kraken parent company Payward says revenue grew 33% in 2025

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, said 2025 adjusted revenue grew 33% as transaction volume increased by 34% to $2 trillion.

Trading-based revenue accounted for 47% of the $2.2 billion total, the company said in a blog post, with rest coming from non-trading sources such as custody, payments and financing. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda) rose to 26% to $531 million.

The 15-year-old company, which lodged a confidential draft U.S. IPO filing in November, said its corporate structure separates consumer products from infrastructure operations, likening the strategy to those of tech giants Alphabet (GOOG), Meta (META), and Amazon (AMZN).

“By separating infrastructure from product expression, Payward ensures that innovation does not come at the expense of control, risk discipline, or regulatory integrity,” the firm wrote.

The corporate structure marks a formal move for the company to encompass the multiple platforms Kraken, now the sixth-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has acquired over the years. These include NinjaTrader, Breakout and Backed Finance.

These acquisitions contributed to a 119% increase in daily average revenue trades (DARTs) for futures products, the company said.

Payward said it ended the year with $48.5 billion in assets on the platform, up 12%. The number of funded customer accounts rose 50% to 5.7 million.

The revenue figure is adjusted for trading costs and and gains or losses on trading activities, the company said.

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