The crypto venture backed by President Donald Trump’s family plans to launch a foreign exchange and remittance platform targeting lower fees in the $7 trillion global currency market. World Liberty Financial said Thursday it will soon roll out “World Swap,” a platform designed to simplify cross-border foreign exchange and remittance services, according to reporting by […]
Google’s Practical AI Playbook for Banks and Fintechs
Karen Zhang explains how Google is supporting organisations across financial services, from small fintechs to large financial institutions. The common theme throughout the conversation is using AI in practical ways: improving customer experiences on the front end and reducing repetitive workload on the back end, so teams can focus on work that needs real judgement.
Zhang highlights a partnership with Starling Bank to create a “Spend intelligence” service. Put simply, it lets Starling customers ask natural-language questions inside the app (typed or voice) and get clear answers about their spending. Instead of digging through statements and filters, users can ask things like: “How much have I spent on TFL and transport over the last week?” or “Has that changed week on week over the last month?” The point is to make spending insights feel more like a conversation, and easier to access for everyday users.
For fintech teams, Zhang’s example also signals a shift in product thinking. Natural-language interfaces lower the barrier to insight as customers don’t need to know where to tap or how to interpret charts to find what they need. Done well, this supports budgeting, spotting patterns, and noticing gradual changes in behaviour, without turning the user into a data analyst.
Zhang then moves to internal automation, using a second example with Liberis who Google partnered with to build an AI underwriting agent called Ada, named after Ada Lovelace. Underwriting often involves large volumes of information and repeatable steps, which can create heavy admin load. According to Google, Ada works alongside underwriters, helping them through the process and reducing overhead by 50%. Zhang frames the benefit as both efficiency and focus: AI takes on more repetitive tasks, while underwriters spend more time on higher-stakes, knowledge-based decisions.
Google finishes with a scaling message which is while these examples sit in the mid-tier fintech space, the same approach can apply to much smaller firms. The idea is that with the right AI support, teams don’t need huge headcount, “100 underwriters,” as Zhang puts it, to deliver strong service. For banks and fintechs trying to balance cost and customer experience, Google’s point is straightforward: use AI to remove friction for customers and cut repetitive work internally, while keeping human judgement where it matters.
BTC remains under pressure amid slumping stock market
Bitcoin has fallen back to the low end of its recent trading range during late-morning U.S. trading hours on Thursday as the tech-heavy Nasdaq tumbles 1.6%.
Trading at $65,700, bitcoin is now lower by 1.5% over the past 24 hours, while ether , just above $1,900, is down more than 2%.
The bitcoin price action — uncorrelated with the Nasdaq when that index is headed higher, but perfectly correlated when it heads lower — has become all too familiar for the crypto sector. And the failure to hold any sort of sustained bounce from last week’s panicky plunge has bulls seemingly in full capitulation mode.
Alternative’s well-followed Crypto Fear & Greed Index today fell to just 5, a level of “extreme fear” exceeding even what was seen during the multiple collapses of the 2022 crypto winter and the 2020 Covid crash.
Also raising eyebrows is longtime bull Geoff Kendrick from Standard Chartered, slashing his 2026 price targets for bitcoin, ether, solana, BNB and AVAX, while warning bitcoin could dip to as low as $50,000.
Crypto stocks lose ground
Coinbase (COIN) and Robinhood (HOOD) are among the largest losers on Thursday, each down more than 8%. Coinbase reports fourth-quarter results after the bell, but Robinhood’s fourth-quarter report earlier this week confirmed that the crypto bear market had taken a large bite out of trading revenues in the final three months of 2025 — and that was before the price action got really bad to begin 2026.
Other large decliners today include Strategy (MSTR), down 4.2%, Circle Financial (CRCL), down 4.3%, and Hut 8 (HUT), down 6.6%.
Aave labs proposes ‘Aave Will Win’ plan to send 100% of product revenue to DAO
Aave Labs has introduced a new governance proposal that would shape the next chapter of one of crypto’s largest lending platforms, and send all revenue from Aave-branded products back to its community treasury.
The proposal, called “Aave Will Win,” asks the Aave DAO to approve a broader strategy built around its upcoming V4 upgrade. If passed, the plan would make V4 the foundation for Aave’s future development and formalize a structure in which 100% of revenue from products built by Aave Labs flows directly to the DAO.
The AAVE token has gained about 2% on the news even as the broader crypto market is selling off heavily on Thursday.
In simple terms, that means any money generated from Aave-branded apps, institutional offerings or enterprise tools would go back to the community-controlled treasury rather than to the development company itself.
“The framework formalizes Aave Labs’ role as a long-term contributor to the Aave DAO under a token-centric model, with 100% of product revenue directed to the DAO,” said Stani Kulechov, Founder of Aave Labs, in a press release shared with CoinDesk. “As onchain finance enters a decisive new phase, with fintechs and institutions entering DeFi, this framework positions Aave to capture major growth markets and win over the next decade.”
The proposal arrives against a backdrop of discord within the Aave community over control of the protocol’s brand and key assets. In late 2025, community members became sharply divided over whether the DAO or Aave Labs should control trademarks, domains, social accounts and other branded assets, with critics arguing that concentrated control by Labs risked undermining the spirit of decentralization. That fight highlighted wider tensions over how much influence founding teams should retain once a protocol becomes decentralized
Aave is already one of the largest decentralized lending protocols in crypto, allowing users to borrow and lend digital assets without relying on traditional banks. The new proposal is designed to help the protocol compete as more fintech companies and financial institutions explore blockchain-based products.
At the center of the plan is Aave V4, a major software upgrade intended to make it easier to launch new markets and financial products on top of the protocol. Rather than requiring major changes to the core system each time something new is introduced, V4 is designed to make expansion faster and more flexible while maintaining security.
The proposal also introduces the idea of launching separate markets with different risk and revenue structures. This could allow Aave to support specialized use cases, including institutional participation, without affecting the broader protocol.
A key part of the framework is a shift in how revenue flows to the DAO. Currently, Aave primarily earns income from lending activity. Under the proposal, revenue from additional Aave Labs-built products, such as user interfaces and institutional services built around the protocol, would also be directed to the DAO treasury. The goal is to diversify income and more closely align product development with token holder incentives.
The proposal further calls for the creation of a dedicated foundation to hold and protect Aave’s brand and trademarks, since decentralized organizations cannot directly own intellectual property. More details on that structure would be introduced in a follow-up vote.
If approved, additional proposals will outline how V4 will be activated and how funding will be structured. Taken together, the framework signals Aave’s ambition to evolve from a leading DeFi lending protocol into a broader piece of global financial infrastructure governed by its DAO.
Read more: ‘Most important tokenholder rights debate’: Aave faces identity crisis
Coinbase’s Armstrong, Ripple’s Garlinghouse among familiar crypto execs in U.S. CFTC advisory group
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is set to be a leading regulator of the crypto markets, has named some of the crypto sector’s most prominent executives as members of its newly established Innovation Advisory Committee, including the CEOs of Coinbase, Ripple, Robinhood and Uniswap Labs.
The 35-member committee will steer the U.S. derivatives regulator on the needs of firms at the center of financial innovation, and to fill some of its number, the agency had repurposed a previous CEO council established at the end of last year before the arrival of CFTC Chairman Mike Selig.
“By bringing together participants from every corner of the marketplace, the IAC will be a major asset for the Commission as we work to modernize our rules and regulations for the innovations of today and tomorrow,” Selig said in a statement.
While the earlier group already included members such as Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss, Kraken Co-CEO Arjun Sethi and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, the much larger committee adds several more crypto CEOs and the top executives of FanDuel and DraftKings. Additionally, the advisers will include the leaders of many of the more traditional companies and organizations, such as the chief executives of Nasdaq, CME Group, Cboe Global Markets, Futures Industry Association (FIA) and International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA).
Other new names among the 35 are Chris Dixon of a16z Crypto, Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana Labs, Peter Mintzberg of Grayscale, Sergey Nazarov of Chainlink Labs and Alana Palmedo of Paradigm. Tom Farley, the CEO of Bullish, CoinDesk’s parent company, is also a member.
Selig recently announced a crypto agenda his agency is pursuing alongside the Securities and Exchange Commission, having formally joined with the SEC’s Project Crypto.
The CFTC’s advisory committee is listed below (* denotes earlier council membership):
- Hayden Adams, CEO, Uniswap Labs
- Brian Armstrong, CEO, Coinbase
- Andrej Bolkovic, CEO, Options Clearing Corporation
- Thomas Chippas, CEO, Rothera Markets
- Shayne Coplan, CEO, Polymarket *
- Professor Harry Crane, Representative
- Chris Dixon, General Partner, a16z Crypto
- Craig Donohue, CEO, Cboe Global Markets *
- Terry Duffy, Chair & CEO, CME Group *
- Tom Farley, CEO, Bullish *
- Adena Friedman, Chair & CEO, Nasdaq *
- Brad Garlinghouse, CEO, Ripple
- Christian Genetski, President, FanDuel
- Luke Hoersten, CEO, Bitnomial *
- Frank LaSalla, President & CEO, Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation
- Walt Lukken, CEO, FIA
- Tarek Mansour, CEO, Kalshi *
- Kris Marszalek, CEO, Crypto.com *
- Nathan McCauley, CEO, Anchorage Digital
- Peter Mintzberg, CEO, Grayscale
- Sergey Nazarov, CEO, Chainlink Labs
- Scott D. O’Malia, CEO, ISDA
- Alana Palmedo, Managing Partner, Paradigm
- Vivek Raman, CEO, Etherealize
- Professor Carla Reyes, Representative
- Jason Robins, CEO, DraftKings
- David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG *
- Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO, Kraken *
- Peter Smith, CEO, Blockchain.com
- Vance Spencer, Co-founder, Framework Ventures
- Jeff Sprecher, CEO, Intercontinental Exchange *
- Vlad Tenev, CEO, Robinhood
- Don Wilson, CEO, DRW
- Tyler Winklevoss, CEO, Gemini *
- Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO, Solana Labs
Read More: CFTC to tap Tyler Winklevoss, other crypto CEOs as first members of innovation panel
Is Bitcoin Digital Gold or Growth Asset? Grayscale Weighs In
A new report from Grayscale argues that while bitcoin retains the design features of a long-term store of value, its recent price action has looked far more like a growth stock than digital gold. Grayscale Report Says Bitcoin Moves in Lockstep With High-EV Software Stocks Bitcoin’s price slid to roughly $60,000 on Feb. 5, marking […]
Ambience Healthcare expands “chart awareness” across its intelligence platform
Ambience Healthcare, the leading AI platform for clinical documentation and revenue integrity, today announced expanded “chart awareness” across its capabilities. Chart awareness enables AI to interpret a patient’s full longitudinal record, including prior notes, diagnoses, labs, imaging, medications, pathology, and problem lists. That understanding is applied directly across documentation and coding workflows.
While AI scribes focus on capturing clinical conversations and writing notes, Ambience was never built to be just a scribe. Transcription from a single patient encounter is not sufficient for modern healthcare.
“AI in healthcare has to do more than generate notes,” said Nikhil Buduma, CEO and Co-Founder of Ambience Healthcare. “Health systems need AI that synthesizes across the chart, supports clinical decision-making and delivers real operational and financial impact. Chart awareness is the foundation for that level of platform intelligence.”
Today, Ambience is extending chart awareness across its platform, strengthening both clinical decision-making and revenue integrity. Core capabilities include:
- Chart-Aware Patient Summaries – problem-oriented summaries that organize a patient’s longitudinal history by diagnosis. This enables clinicians to see everything related to a condition in one place, without reviewing the chart note by note.
- Chart-Aware Assessment & Plan (A&P) – assessment and plan generation grounded in the current visit and relevant chart history. This reduces copy-forward risk, improves documentation integrity, and ensures the plan reflects what changed in the encounter.
- Chart-Aware Diagnostics – automated extraction and synthesis of lab trends, imaging findings, and pathology results directly into the note. This eliminates manual chart review and copy-paste workflows while highlighting clinically meaningful changes over time.
- Chart-Aware Coding – coding assistance grounded in longitudinal chart reasoning, which allows codes like G2211, Annual Well Visits, and chronic care management to be substantiated correctly at the point of care.
Integrated directly into documentation, coding, and compliance workflows, these capabilities improve documentation accuracy and coding alignment at the point of care. This reduces retrospective queries, lowers compliance risk, and supports cleaner claims and stronger revenue integrity. Together, they move ambient AI beyond transcription and into true clinical synthesis.
Expanded chart awareness for Patient Summary and A&P is now live across all health systems where these features are deployed, with chart-aware A&P in beta. Chart-aware Diagnostics is in alpha with select partners and will roll out broadly in the coming months. Early pilots of Chart-Aware Coding are underway with select health system partners. This feature is slated for broad availability in 2026.
Ambience: The Intelligence Platform
Healthcare decisions extend far beyond a single conversation. They are shaped by years of prior diagnoses, longitudinal lab trends, imaging results, evolving problem lists, and past clinical reasoning. An AI system limited to one encounter cannot deliver the level of clinical synthesis health systems require.
“Ambient listening reduces typing; Ambient intelligence improves care delivery and financial performance,” said Mike Valli, Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Value Officer at Ambience Healthcare. “Health systems are looking for accuracy, compliance and financial return. To connect clinical documentation to real enterprise performance, you need to provide a fully chart-aware intelligence platform.”
Ambience’s platform was designed from the ground-up to pair clinicians and AI at every layer of care. Physicians, clinical documentation integrity leaders, and revenue cycle experts work directly alongside AI researchers and engineers to shape model development, validation, and deployment. This clinician–AI partnership ensures the system reflects real-world clinical reasoning, compliance standards, and specialty-specific nuance.
Now fully connected by chart awareness, Ambience supports more than 200 subspecialties across outpatient, emergency, and inpatient settings. In enterprise deployments across the country, the platform has achieved over 90% clinician adoption and is used in 80% of patient visits. Health systems have reported reductions in documentation time of up to 40% and more than $13,000 in incremental annual revenue per clinician through improved coding accuracy, based on third-party evaluations.
This combination of clinical depth and financial impact differentiates Ambience’s intelligence platform from AI scribes.
MultiCare Health System recently completed a head-to-head evaluation of three leading ambient AI solutions involving more than 550 clinicians and 20+ specialties. Ambience was selected after achieving an NPS score 63 points higher than the next best solution and outperforming across patient experience, clinician satisfaction, administrative burden reduction, and financial sustainability.
“We weren’t interested in hype. We wanted proof of technology that could truly help our physicians, APPs and patients,” said Todd Czartoski, MD, executive vice president and chief physician executive at MultiCare. “Ambience didn’t just perform well — it was the clear favorite among our clinicians. When your front-line staff overwhelmingly chooses a solution because it makes care better and their work easier, that’s where you invest.”
By unifying longitudinal patient understanding with documentation, coding, and compliance workflows, Ambience is advancing an intelligence platform built to support both clinical quality and revenue integrity at scale. This expansion marks the next step in a broader roadmap to deliver deeper synthesis across the entire clinical workflow.
SBET executives urge to look beyond recent price action
As institutional adoption of digital assets matures, a new corporate playbook is emerging: treat ether not just as an investment, but as productive financial infrastructure.
The shift comes amid sharp downward market volatility. SharpLink Gaming (SBET) — which saw its stock soar last May after adopting an ether treasury strategy — has since plunged (along with every other of 2025’s hastily-formed digital asset treasury companies). It’s a reminder of the turbulence that continues to define the asset class.
At a panel discussion at Consensus Hong Kong 2026 featuring Sharplink Chairman Joe Lubin and CEO Joseph Chalom, the two executives outlined how DATs are evolving into a distinct institutional strategy.
“I’ve never seen more of a moment of differentiation where the actual macro tailwinds for Ethereum have never been better in its 10-and-a-half-year history,” said Chalom, pointing to the growth of stablecoins and tokenization. “Listen to Larry Fink at Davos, when he’s telling you $14 trillion of BlackRock assets will be tokenized, and over 65% of that to date is happening on Ethereum.”
While recent ether price action and ETF flows have raised concerns, Chalom framed them as part of broader macro de-risking. “Bitcoin and ether were very easy to de-risk,” he said, adding that rotations out of liquid assets are typical during volatility. “The largest players in institutional finance are telling us out loud — they’re coming to ether.”
SharpLink’s strategy differs, he argued, because it deploys permanent capital. “An ETF is a great passive exposure vehicle, but it needs to provide daily liquidity…We own permanent capital,” he said. “The third stage — which is actually most important — is making your ETH productive.”
Lubin emphasized ether’s distinguishing feature: yield.
“Ether would be a much better asset… because it is a productive asset. It yields. It has a risk-free rate,” he said, referring to staking returns of roughly 3%. SharpLink has staked nearly all its holdings and plans to continue accumulating. “We’ll keep buying ether. We’ll keep staking ether and adding new yield to ether.”
Beyond staking, Chalom described what he called “good institutional DeFi,” using long-term locked capital to earn risk-adjusted returns rather than chasing venture-style upside. “We’re not looking for convex VC 10x outcomes — we’re looking for the best risk-adjusted yield for our investors. And we’re actually confident that by doing it, we’ll improve the DeFi ecosystem by raising its standards.”
For Lubin, the shift resembles the early internet era. “A long time ago…there were internet companies. Now every company is an internet company. Soon, every company is going to be a blockchain company,” he said, predicting firms will increasingly hold tokens on balance sheets and require sophisticated onchain treasury tools.
Read more: Ethereum treasury firm SharpLink stakes $170M ETH on Linea network
Russia eyes digital ruble to break dollar’s grip on BRICS trade – DL News
- BRICS members may debate plans to link digital currencies this year.
- Nations could use shared infrastructure and unified regulatory standards.
- Major Russian banks aren’t keen on digital ruble adoption plans.
Russia wants to move yet further away from the US dollar, and plans to use its central bank digital currency, the digital ruble, to trade with its BRICS partners.
As Washington-Moscow relations remain frosty amid talk of possible further sanctions on Russia, BRICS central bankers are looking for more ways to trade outside the US-dominated global financial system.
“The digital ruble is first and foremost an international project,” said Timur Aitov, a member of the Russian Chamber of Commerce, chair of the Financial Market Security Committee, in an interview with Russian media outlet Plus World.
China, Russia’s closest trading partner, is also moving away from dollar-denominated trade at an increasingly rapid speed. Its central bank recently included cross-border digital yuan adoption in the Communist Party’s 15th five-year plan.
BRICS alignment plans
Aitov said there was a lack of domestic demand for a Russian CBDC. He said he agreed with CBDC-sceptical comments made last year by German Gref, the CEO of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank.
“I don’t understand why an individual needs the option to use a CBDC,” Gref said in July. “And neither do banks or businesses. I still don’t really understand why we need the [digital ruble].”
But Aitov said BRICS countries need CBDCs to trade with one another, which is why the Russian central bank is targeting a September 1 rollout for the digital ruble.
He noted that the Reserve Bank of India has recommended including a proposal to link BRICS nations’ CBDCs on the agenda of the upcoming BRICS summit in New Delhi.
The Indian central bank reportedly thinks its plan will help facilitate cross-border trade and tourism payments.
“This is the first time such a proposal for a unified system has been formally submitted for consideration within BRICS,” said Aitov. “If it’s approved, the digital currencies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa will unite, using a shared infrastructure and unified regulatory standards.”
Aitov added that Russian commercial banks would prefer to use ruble-pegged stablecoins.
But BRICS central bankers say they largely oppose using stablecoin-powered solutions.
“Stablecoins raise significant concerns for monetary stability, fiscal policy, banking intermediation, and systemic resilience,” the Indian central bank’s Deputy Governor T Rabi Sankar said in December.
His comments closely echo remarks made by the Russian central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina in October.
When asked about her stance on stablecoin issuance in Russia, Nabiullina said she had no objection to such coins being used in cross-border trade, but ruled out stablecoins’ use in domestic scenarios.
Combating fraud
Aitov did, however, say that the digital ruble rollout would have some significant positive benefits for domestic users: namely, when it comes to battling corruption and fighting fraud.
“Officials could be monitored, because it will be clear who has stolen digital rubles and from where,” he said. “Citizens will also be happy — particularly those who have lost their digital rubles to fraudsters.”
Earlier this month, Anatoly Aksakov, head of the State Duma’s Committee on Financial Markets and the chief architect of Russia’s crypto legislation, predicted the eventual “demise” of Bitcoin.
“By all the fundamental laws of economics, [cryptocurrencies] are bound to collapse sooner or later,” he said
Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.
Vitalik Proposes ‘Decentralized Governance’ Model for Russia’s Future
The Ethereum co-founder condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while saying the country could benefit from crypto principles like decentralization.
Vitalik Buterin shared in a long post on X on Feb. 12, originally written in Russian, his views on Russia’s war against Ukraine and what Russia’s future could look like under a “decentralized governance” model.
In the first half of the post, published ahead of the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion, the Ethereum co-founder called the war “criminal aggression,” not a “complicated situation” where both sides are equally at fault. He then argued that real, lasting security for Ukraine and Europe will not come from a temporary ceasefire alone, but from change inside Russia itself.
In his view, the strongest guarantee of peace would be for Russia to transform into a different kind of system. To do that, he said, the country would need deeper structural reform based on decentralized governance.
Buterin’s post underscores a broader trend of applying crypto ideas, especially decentralization and transparency, to geopolitics. As crypto adoption grows around the world, its core principles are increasingly being discussed as models for both financial and political systems.
“People often speak about ‘decentralized governance’ and ‘radical democracy’ in very abstract and idealistic terms, but far too rarely do they talk about what concrete problem it can actually solve,” Buterin wrote, via translation.
He listed ideas such as quadratic voting, zero-knowledge (ZK) systems and online discussion platforms like pol.is. These tools, he said, can help large groups find common ground instead of leaving decisions to a small, centralized elite.
“In the crypto industry, some people like to say that we need to move from ‘don’t be evil’ to ‘can’t be evil’. In human society, achieving this goal 100% is completely unrealistic, but achieving 25%? That would already be a very good result,” Buterin wrote in Russian.
He added that this point matters for two reasons: First, when building any new system, people must be clear about the real goal. Second, both ordinary Russians and members of the political elite who would need to “cooperate in order for there to be any success” must understand why these ideas are worth supporting.
In the final part of his essay, Buterin focused on decentralized governance as a process, highlighting digital tools and AI-driven discussion platforms. He argued that the Russian opposition needs new ideas and leaders, and that the best way to find them is to involve more people directly.
Instead of relying on a small group, he suggested using online systems like pol.is, where large numbers of citizens can post views and vote on proposals.
“This makes it possible to find societal compromises — or even consensus — directly, without intermediaries (such as elected representatives), so that officials are left only with the task of turning that compromise/consensus into an official document or law,” Buterin wrote.
He emphasized that “this is all long-term,” and that the Russian people need to think deeply about what happens after Putin. “Having a concrete roadmap — a plan that can convince a broad coalition, both ordinary people and politicians, both inside Russia and in other countries — is an important first step,” he concluded.