HONG KONG — Hong Kong is a growing locale for Web3 and crypto innovation, its chief executive said on Wednesday.
John KC Lee, the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, opened CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference with a brief speech about the city’s work to grow its crypto communities and businesses.
“The HKSAR Government is committed to establishing Hong Kong as a global hub for innovation in digital assets,” he said in taped remarks. “That’s why over the past few years, Hong Kong has been actively building the regulatory framework to promote the steady and sustainable development of our Web3 ecosystem.”
Hong Kong is positioned to take advantage of both growing crypto efforts and its existing position operating close to China and the broader financial markets, Lee said.
“Under the unique ‘one country, two systems’ principle, Hong Kong is the only city that converges both the China advantage and the global advantage,” he said. “… What’s more, Hong Kong’s financial regulatory system is robust, and our financial market stands out for its deep liquidity, innovative products and world-class investor protection.”
More specifically, he pointed to Hong Kong’s efforts in crypto, including last year’s policy statement on digital asset regulation and stablecoin work.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is close to issuing licenses for stablecoin issuers, he said, saying that the first licenses may come out in the next month.
Similarly, Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission is working to grow the region’s virtual asset market liquidity to further “facilitate the development of this vibrant area of growth.”
“Hong Kong is in a strong position in promoting Web3 development,” he said. “Hong Kong will continue to go all out to stay at the forefront of this pivotal shift in finance and technology. We welcome companies and institutions from around the world to join hands with us, and build a brighter digital future together.”
Former SafeMoon CEO Braden Karony has been handed a 100-month prison sentence for stealing $9 million from the crypto platform’s liquidity pool in 2021 to fund a “lavish lifestyle.”
The sentence on Monday comes nine months after Karony was convicted by a federal jury on charges of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering in May 2025.
“Not only did Braden John Karony abuse his position as CEO, but he also betrayed his investors’ trust by stealing more than nine million dollars in digital assets from his company to fund his lavish lifestyle,” FBI assistant director James C. Barnacle, Jr. said.
Karony used the stolen proceeds to purchase a $2.2 million home in Utah, an Audi R8 sports car, a Tesla, a custom Ford F-550 and Jeep Gladiator pickup trucks.
“Karony lied to investors from all walks of life — including military veterans and hard working-Americans,” US Attorney Joseph Nocella, Jr. said, adding:
“Today’s sentence demonstrates that there are significant consequences for financial crimes. Our Office will continue to vigorously prosecute economic crimes that harm investors and weaken societal trust in the stability and security of digital asset markets.”
Source: Ariel Givner
Karony was ordered to forfeit approximately $7.5 million, the Department of Justice said, while the amount of restitution to the victims will be determined at a later date.
Two SafeMoon execs convicted, one at large
SafeMoon’s former chief technology officer, Thomas Smith, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud in February 2025 and is awaiting sentencing.
SafeMoon platform’s creator, Kyle Nagy, remains at large, the DOJ added.
Karony is one of many former crypto executives who have now been convicted and sentenced for crimes committed during the 2021-2022 market cycle, during a peak in retail market participation.
Others who have been convicted include former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, who are currently serving 25-year and 12-year sentences, respectively.
Related: Crypto PACs secure massive war chests ahead of US midterms
US President Donald Trump said on Jan. 8 that he wouldn’t pardon the former FTX boss, despite having pardoned former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao in October.
Bankman-Fried hasn’t given up, having asked a federal appeals panel for a new trial on Thursday.
Magazine: The critical reason you should never ask ChatGPT for legal advice
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HONG KONG — Robinhood launched its public testnet for its own Ethereum layer-2 blockchain on Wednesday with plans for broader launch later this year as the brokerage app aims to move more trading activity onchain.
The new network, called Robinhood Chain, is built on Arbitrum and is designed to support tokenized real-world assets, including equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other assets. Developers will be able to publicly build on the network for the first time after six months of private testing, ahead of a future mainnet launch, the company announced at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference.
With the chain, Robinhood aims to allow users to trade 24/7 and self-custody their assets in Robinhood’s own crypto wallet. Users will also be able to bridge across different chains and to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on Ethereum ETH$2,018.79, the company said in a press release.
The timing comes as Ethereum’s core roadmap shifts more attention back to the base layer. Certain upgrades have already lowered transaction costs, and further improvements are expected to continue easing congestion, a development that weakens the case for layer-2s as a pure scaling necessity.
Robinhood’s approach suggests it is already operating under that assumption.
“I think Vitalik [Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum] was always pretty clear on this, that L2s were not just here to scale Ethereum,” said Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, in an interview with CoinDesk.
“For us, it was never really about scaling Ethereum or doing faster transactions,” Kerbrat added.
The move builds on Robinhood’s earlier steps into tokenization. Last year, the company rolled out token versions of U.S. stocks and ETFs for European users with dividend payments and extended market hours.
Those assets — almost 2,000 stocks and ETFs, according to data by Entropy Advisors on Dune Analytics — were initially issued on Arbitrum. However, the $15 million in total value of the equity tokens Robinhood minted is lagging behind leading issuers xStocks and Ondo Global Markets.
When rollups — ways of processing transactions on layer-2 networks to ease congestion on the base network — first gained traction, they were widely framed as Ethereum’s answer to high fees and limited throughput. As Ethereum’s layer-1 capacity improves, that narrative is giving way to a different one: layer-2s as customizable, application-specific environments that can embed features difficult to implement on Ethereum itself.
“What we wanted was the security of Ethereum, the liquidity that is available on EVM chains and the Ethereum ecosystem,” Kerbrat said. “But we were also wanting to have a way to customize the chain and to make it really optimized for traditional assets being tokenized.”
Rather than competing with other high-speed trading-focused rollups, Robinhood Chain is being designed around tokenized equities and other regulated financial products, where compliance requirements vary by jurisdiction.
“The complexity to recreate the entire financial system, and on top of that to bring more things on it, makes it that I think chains are going to specialize,” Kerbrat said. “You’ll see chains that are more specialized for payments, and you’ll see chains like ours that are going to be more specialized around tokenized equity.”
Buterin has recently argued that some rollups may need to accept different decentralization trade-offs, particularly when compliance or real-world assets are involved, a view that has stirred debate across the ecosystem.
For Robinhood, Kerbrat said, that shift does not materially change its strategy.
“It doesn’t really change anything for us,” he said. “We’ve always been building with the idea that there are different compliance requirements based on the jurisdiction, and all these things can be embedded into the chain.”
Robinhood first announced plans for its own blockchain in June 2025, positioning the project as part of a broader push into tokenization and onchain finance. Since then, development has largely taken place out of public view.
With the testnet now live, developers can access network entry points, documentation, and standard Ethereum development tools. Ahead of mainnet, Robinhood plans to expand testnet functionality to include test-only assets, including stock tokens, along with deeper integrations with its wallet and other onchain financial tooling.
Read more: Robinhood explains building an Ethereum layer-2: ‘We wanted the security from Ethereum’
Australia has become a proving ground for global fintechs looking to move beyond single-use products and embed themselves into customers’ everyday financial lives. What began as travel-focused FX apps are now competing head-on with incumbent banks across payments, wealth, lending and business services. The acceleration of merchant acquiring and account-to-account payments highlights a broader shift toward fintechs owning more of the transaction lifecycle, particularly for SMEs seeking integrated financial tooling. Rapid growth in customer adoption and transaction volumes reflects changing expectations around digital-first finance—where speed, product breadth and seamless user experience matter more than brand legacy. As competition intensifies, Australia is emerging as a key market where fintech scale, localisation and regulatory execution converge.
Para, a company providing wallets and payments infrastructure for over 10 million users, has publicly launched its REST API. The software enables fintechs and consumer applications with existing userbases to integrate the security, speed, and utility of blockchain wallets without changing the app’s UI or asking users to onboard to new systems. This launch accelerates the convergence of traditional fintech and crypto by treating blockchain as background infrastructure to power consumer-first experiences, such as embedded wallet infrastructure and stablecoin payments.
“Our thesis is that blockchain rails and wallet infrastructure should exist solely to simplify payments,” said Nitya Subramanian, Founder and CEO of Para, “they do this best when they go unnoticed. When wallets fade into the background, they become a vehicle for platforms to control customer relationships, distribution, and access in a rapidly evolving payments landscape.”
The REST API fills a key gap for projects recognising blockchain’s upside of low costs, programmability, global reach, and security. It allows platforms to automatically provision wallets for every existing customer at signup or via API calls and to execute transactions programmatically on behalf of users using their own authentication and policy logic, without requiring any UI/UX changes or user education about crypto.
Stablecoin adoption is surging with transaction volumes in the trillions annually, and major players like Visa and Mastercard are expanding their stablecoin settlement capabilities, whilst fintechs and cross-border payment providers integrate them for lower costs and speed.
REST API is particularly impactful for businesses, which may otherwise get left behind in this global transition to crypto rails. It enables them to easily add stablecoin payments and cross-border rails to their product, including payments, payouts, and treasury operations executed server-side, enabling them to maintain their position and partake in a rapidly changing global market by enabling customers to pay in USDC or other stablecoins.
There are already projects building on the REST API. Coala Pay, a blockchain-powered platform for humanitarian aid funding, is leveraging Para’s REST API, streamlining stablecoin-based payments and cross-border aid distribution. Para’s infrastructure enables Coala Pay to automatically provision wallets for charities and donors, reducing foreign currency risk and delivering faster, more transparent funding to grassroots organisations.
Developers and fintechs can get started today by integrating Para’s REST API to add stablecoin payments, cross-border rails, and embedded wallets, while keeping all wallet operations server-side and invisible to end users.
FF NEWS TAKE: Revolut’s momentum in Australia signals a transition from challenger to serious multi-product financial platform. The next test will be sustainability—maintaining growth while deepening engagement across both consumers and businesses. Watch closely how merchant services and business banking shape its competitive position against local banks and homegrown fintechs in 2026.
Crypto industry negotiators arrived at the White House on Tuesday ready to talk about a legislative deal on stablecoin yields, but their banking counterparts brought further demands for a ban on such rewards in the Senate’s crypto market structure bill, according to people familiar with the talks.
The fight over whether stablecoins should be able to offer rewards — a lobbying battle between Wall Street bankers and crypto insiders — is one of the chief headwinds keeping the Senate Banking Committee from advancing the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. It’s now been a sticking point for months, and the banking side held their ground on prohibiting the rewards activity and more, according to a principles document circulated by the bank negotiators, despite the White House’s insistence last week that both sides come with ideas for compromising.
The document called for a general prohibition on stablecoin yield, according to a copy obtained by CoinDesk, suggesting a ban on “any form of financial or non-financial consideration to a payment stablecoin holder in connection with the payment stablecoin holder’s purchase, use, ownership, possession, custody, holding or retention of a payment stablecoin.”
The crypto team at the table was said to include executives from Coinbase, Ripple, a16z, the Crypto Council for Innovation and the Blockchain Association, according to people familiar with the plans. The White House sought to pare down the numbers of participants in the most recent gathering there last week, which hadn’t produced significant progress on the question of stablecoin rewards programs that are a key component of crypto platforms’ business models.
Despite the lack of significant progress, crypto representatives struck a hopeful note in statements about the meeting.
“We’re encouraged by the progress being made as stakeholders remains constructively engaged on resolving outstanding issues,” said Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger, who was said to participate in the meeting.
“The important work continues,” said Ji Kim, the CEO of CCI, in a statement after the meeting, saying his group “appreciates the banking industry for their continued engagement.”
Banking groups involved in the meeting, including the Bank Policy Institute and American Bankers Association, issued a statement after the meeting, though it included no details about next steps on the legislation.
“As we noted during the meeting, that framework can and must embrace financial innovation without undermining safety and soundness, and without putting the bank deposits that fuel local lending and drive economic activity at risk,” the group said in the combined statement.
The document they were said to have shared insisted that stablecoin activity “must not drive deposit flight that would undercut Main Street lending.” It asked that the requested ban come with an enforcement stick for regulators, and the document suggested a study by regulators that examines the effect of stablecoin activity on deposits.
After two White House meetings on the topic and no significant movement of the line on yields, the matter may return to the discretion of lawmakers working on the bill.
Before the Senate can approve a bill, the banking panel needs to clear it through a majority vote. The legislation already has its necessary backing from the Senate Agriculture Committee, and a similar bill with the same name won a vote in the House of Representatives last year. But bankers have raised their concerns about the threat to deposits at the core of their industry.
However, stablecoin yield isn’t the only major sticking point. Senate Democratic negotiators have demanded that the effort include a ban on deep crypto involvement from senior government officials, driven primarily by President Donald Trump’s personal crypto interests. The Democratic lawmakers have also insisted on greater protections against crypto’s use in illicit finance and also that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission get fully staffed by commissioners — including Democratic appointees — before it can get to work on crypto regulations.
While Trump’s crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, has predicted the negotiators will find common ground soon, he also told CoinDesk that the White House won’t support an effort that targets the president. Witt was said to lead the meeting on Tuesday, as he did the one last week.
The Clarity Act faces a number of practical challenges beyond the policy disputes, including the Senate’s ongoing friction over a last remaining budget issue: the funding of the Department of Homeland Security, which runs Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Senate is always a tough place to secure necessary floor time to move legislation, and the closer the chamber gets to the lengthy breaks before the midterm elections this year, the more difficult it is to find enough time to handle a major crypto bill.
Read More: Crypto industry, banks not yet close to stablecoin yield deal at White House meeting
UPDATE (February 10, 2025, 23:16 UTC): Adds comment from the bank lobbying groups.
UPDATE (February 10, 2025, 00:12 UTC): Adds details about the bankers’ document stating their principles on yield.
Age checks will only apply to age-restricted servers and certain safety settings, Discord said.
Discord says its “teen-by-default” rollout is not driven by ongoing ID requirement regulations.
Privacy advocates say the change still asks users to trust the company’s claims about how their data is handled.
Discord attempted to reassure users on Tuesday about its plans to implement age-verification technology, saying most will not need to scan their faces or upload government IDs.
Under its new age-assurance system, expected in March, users will only be required to verify when accessing 18+ servers and channels, or when attempting to modify certain safety settings.
“As part of our ongoing commitment to teen safety and wellbeing, we decided to evolve how the platform helps keep users safer by introducing teen-by-default, a teen-appropriate default experience for all new and existing users worldwide,” Savannah Badalich, the Global Head of Product Policy at Discord, told Decrypt.
In a Tuesday post on X, the official Discord account said the “vast majority” of users can continue using the platform without ever being asked to confirm their age.
“We use age prediction to determine, with high confidence, when a user is an adult,” it wrote. “This allows many adults to access age-appropriate features without completing an explicit age check.”
The move follows online backlash and users seeking alternatives, with some reports estimating a surge of more than 10,000% in online searches in February compared to the month prior.
Discord said most adult users will be assigned to an age group using internal age-prediction models based on account signals.
Only when those systems cannot determine adulthood with high confidence will users be asked to complete additional verification through third-party partners.
When verification is required, Discord said facial age estimation runs entirely on a user’s device and is not transmitted to the company or its vendors. Government IDs are used only to confirm age and are deleted afterward. Discord said it receives only a user’s age and does not associate identity documents with user accounts.
Age verification on social media is gaining global momentum.
Earlier this month, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov called out Spanish regulators on X, saying such measures were “pushing dangerous new regulations” that threaten internet freedoms.
Those sentiments were echoed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in January, which said 2025 was the year “age verification went from a fringe policy experiment to a sweeping reality across the U.S.”
In December, Australia’s Labor government banned the use of social media for under-16s, citing concerns over child safety. That initiative has largely failed, with teens reporting measures to easily circumvent age-restricted controls.
Discord’s Badalich said a specific legal requirement had no bearing on the timing of the policy change.
“This was a part of our proactive, ongoing commitment to teen safety and wellbeing,” she said. “The global teen-by-default experience is not driven by any single regulation.”
Privacy advocacy groups, however, say those assurances ask users to trust the company without a way to verify the claims independently.
“They’re asking folks to trust,” Suzanne Bernstein, counsel at the non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Decrypt. “Many companies already have all this information, so there’s sometimes a false choice in terms of what information we have control over, our privacy.
Bernstein said the issue goes beyond Discord and reflects broader limits on user control online.
“This shows that often, as consumers, we don’t have a lot of agency over our own information if we want to engage online, which all of us do or have to do in some scenarios,” she said.
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Alongside its permissionless blockchain, the firm also revealed investments from Citadel Securities and ARK Invest.
LayerZero, a cross-chain interoperability protocol, has announced the launch of a new Layer 1 blockchain, dubbed Zero, that aims to address “long-standing scalability challenges” in blockchain, according to a press release shared with The Defiant.
The new blockchain — backed by heavyweight collaborators including Citadel Securities, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), and Google Cloud — is positioned as core infrastructure for financial markets, rather than just another platform for crypto apps, the developers said.
Alongside the launch, LayerZero said Citadel Securities, a multi-billion-dollar market maker, is making a strategic investment in the network’s ZRO token. ARK Invest is also coming on board as a holder of LayerZero equity, as well as its native token.
The Defiant reached out to LayerZero to clarify the funding terms, but didn’t receive a response by press time.
Citadel Securities is exploring how Zero could be used across trading, clearing, and settlement workflows, per the announcement. Meanwhile, DTCC said it’s looking into using the new network for tokenized securities and large-scale collateral management.
ICE, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, said it’s also evaluating using Zero as it adapts its infrastructure for 24/7 tokenized markets. Meanwhile, Google Cloud will be joining as a partner “to explore how to enable AI agents to make micropayments,” per the press release.
LayerZero said it has also formed an advisory board that includes ARK Invest founder and CEO Cathie Wood, alongside current and former executives from ICE and BNY Mellon.
Earlier today, stablecoin giant Tether also announced a strategic investment in LayerZero, though the funding size wasn’t disclosed.
How Zero Works
At the technical level, the team behind Zero says the network employs a different approach from many blockchains, especially around consensus. Rather than requiring “every node to replicate the same work,” by validating transactions and updating the blockchain ledger, Zero uses zero-knowledge proofs to separate transaction execution from verification.
That design, combined with what the team describes as advances in compute, storage, and networking, allows Zero to potentially reach as many as 2 million transactions per second (TPS) across multiple “zones,” which the team describes as permissionless environments owned and governed by the network itself.
For context, Ethereum currently operates at around 20-30 TPS, while Solana boasts over 3,000 TPS.
According to the press release, Zero will be launched with three initial zones, including a general-purpose Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environment, a privacy-focused payments setup, and a trading-oriented zone covering multiple asset classes. The network will be permissionless, with LayerZero’s native token used for governance.
ZRO is currently trading around $1.80, flat today but up about 21% in the past 30 days.
Crypto’s $193 million campaign-finance force, the Fairshake political action committee, is launching into congressional midterm season with a massive $5 million injection into the Republican primary campaign of Barry Moore, a U.S. congressman now running for Senate.
One of Fairshake’s affiliates, Defend American Jobs, is committing that spending to support Moore, even though the general election remains almost nine months away. That marks one of the group’s first major forays into what promises to be a high-stakes, high-spending election season.”We are proud to stand with Barry Moore, a leader who will fight for economic growth and make America the crypto capital,” Fairshake said in a Tuesday statement.
Fairshake had also recently devoted funds to Representative French Hill, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee who has led the charge on crypto legislation in the U.S., according to a representative of the PAC. Hill and his allies already managed to get a crypto market structure bill through the House of Representatives last year and are now awaiting a matching effort in the U.S. Senate.
Such crypto legislation is the central purpose of Fairshake’s giving — promoting pro-crypto candidates ready to pass friendly bills and opposing those who stand against such legislation.
As with all the super PAC’s giving, the money for Moore will be through “independent expenditures” under federal election law, meaning the cash can buy ads for the candidate, but they can’t deal directly with the campaign. Fairshake-backed ads in the 2024 election didn’t mention crypto at all, and this broadcast ad for Moore intends to feature the candidate’s endorsement from President Donald Trump.
Moore has served five years in the House, and he’s now campaigning to replace Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican who is aiming for the governor’s mansion this year. The Alabama congressman has so far served in the House’s Agriculture Committee, where crypto legislation was on the agenda last year.
“Crypto is not a fad,” Moore wrote in a December post on social media site X. “It is part of our future. It is part of Alabama’s future.”
Moore is one of five Republican candidates who announced their participation in that primary. Early polling has so far seen Moore generally in second place behind state Attorney General Steve Marshall. Both have “A” crypto ratings from Stand With Crypto, a group that reviews the digital assets views of political figures.
Read More: Industry’s PAC Keeps Seeking to Add Allies as Congress Hashes Out Crypto Legislation
The Bitcoin long-to-short indicator at Binance hit a 30-day low, signaling a sharp decline in bullish leverage demand.
US-listed Bitcoin exchange-traded funds reversed a negative trend with $516 million in net inflows following a period of heavy liquidations.
Bitcoin (BTC) has fluctuated within a tight 8% range over the last four days, consolidating near $69,000 after an abrupt slide to $60,130 on Friday. Traders are currently grappling with the primary catalysts for this correction, particularly as the S&P 500 holds near record highs and gold prices have climbed 20% over a two-month period.
The uncertainty following the 52% retreat from Bitcoin’s $126,220 all-time high in October 2025 has likely prompted an ultra-skeptical stance among top traders, stoking concerns of further price declines.
Bitcoin top traders’ long-to-short positions at Binance and OKX. Source: Coinglass
Whales and market makers on Binance have steadily pared back bullish exposure since Wednesday. This shift is reflected in the long-to-short ratio, which dropped to 1.20 from 1.93. This reading represents a 30-day low for the exchange, suggesting that demand for leveraged long positions in margin and futures markets has cooled, even with BTC hitting 15-month lows.
Meanwhile, the long-to-short ratio for top traders at OKX hit 1.7 on Tuesday, a sharp reversal from its 4.3 peak on Thursday. This transition aligns with a $1 billion liquidation event in leveraged bullish BTC futures, where market participants were forced to close positions due to inadequate margin. Importantly, this specific data point reflects forced exits rather than a deliberate directional bet on further downside.
Strong ETF demand suggests Bitcoin whales are still bullish
Demand for spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) serves as strong evidence that whales haven’t flipped bearish, despite recent price weakness.
Bitcoin spot exchange-traded funds daily net flows, USD. Source: CoinGlass
Since Friday, US-listed Bitcoin ETFs have attracted $516 million in net inflows, reversing a trend from the previous three trading days. Consequently, the conditions that triggered the $2.2 billion in net outflows between Jan. 27 and Feb. 5 appear to have faded. A leading theory for that pressure pointed to an Asian fund that collapsed after leveraging ETF options positions via cheap Japanese yen funding.
Franklin Bi, a general partner at Pantera Capital, argued that a non-crypto-native trading firm is the most likely culprit. He noted that a broader cross-asset margin unwind coincided with sharp corrections in metals. For instance, silver faced a staggering 45% decline in the seven days ending Feb. 5, erasing two months of gains. However, official data has yet to be released to validate this thesis.
The Bitcoin options market followed a similar trajectory, with a spike in neutral-to-bearish strategies on Thursday. Traders pivoted after Bitcoin’s price slipped below $72,000 rather than anticipating worsening conditions.
Related: Bitcoin sentiment hits record low as contrarian investors say $60K was BTC’s bottom
Bitcoin options premium volumes at Deribit, USD. Source: Laevitas.ch
The BTC options premium put-to-call ratio at Deribit surged to 3.1 on Thursday, heavily favoring put (sell) instruments, though the indicator has since retreated to 1.7. Overall, the past two weeks have been marked by low demand for bullish positioning through BTC derivatives. While sentiment has worsened, lower leverage provides a healthier setup for sustainable price gains once the tide turns.
It remains unclear what could shift investor perception back toward Bitcoin, as core values like censorship resistance and strict monetary policy stay unchanged. The weak demand for Bitcoin derivatives should not be interpreted as a lack of confidence. Instead, it represents a surge in uncertainty until it becomes clear that exchanges and market makers were unaffected by the price crash.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision. While we strive to provide accurate and timely information, Cointelegraph does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information in this article. This article may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Cointelegraph will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your reliance on this information.
SpaceMolt is a new massively multiplayer online game with a unique hook: It’s exclusively for AI agents to play.
Humans can watch the strategic action go down in real-time, but they can’t join in.
The game was vibe-coded using Claude Code, and even bugs are fixed by the AI.
Esports is already a tough sell for some people, but now we’ve reached the point where AI plays video games while we sit on the couch and watch.
SpaceMolt is a new massively multiplayer online game designed exclusively for AI agents, where software entities mine asteroids, trade resources, form factions, and even engage in space piracy—all while their human creators are politely asked to stay out of the way.
The game is the brainchild of developer Ian Langworth, who built it over a weekend as what he describes as a “fun, goofy experiment.” But here’s the truly wild part: Langworth didn’t actually write the code himself. Instead, he used Anthropic’s Claude Code to generate all 59,000 lines of Go source code and 33,000 lines of YAML game data—and he admits he hasn’t even read any of it.
A screenshot from SpaceMolt. Image: Decrypt
“There’s probably more in there I don’t even know about,” he wrote in his blog. When bugs get reported, he simply has Claude Code research the problem, write a fix, and deploy it automatically. It’s vibes all the way down.
SpaceMolt positions itself as “a living universe where AI agents compete, cooperate, and create emergent stories” set in a distant future where spacefaring humans and AI coexist. In practice, that means agents connect to the game server via MCP, WebSocket, or API, pick an empire to represent their play style—mining and trading, exploration, piracy and combat, stealth, or crafting—and then start grinding.
Like any MMO, you start small. Agents travel between asteroids to mine ore, level up, discover crafting recipes, and eventually can form factions or attack other players in areas without police presence.
As of this writing, over 350 agents are scattered across the game’s 505 star systems, mostly mining and exploring. Agents keep their human owners updated through a “Captain’s Log” text output, which Langworth said ends up being “very entertaining to watch, like you’re peeking into the diary of a very important person.”
The in-game forum allows agents to chat strategy, share discoveries, and even reveal hidden codes—though humans can only observe, not participate.
Humans are so 21st century
The whole thing is the result of the OpenClaw phenomenon that swept through tech circles in late January. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework that rocketed to over 182,000 GitHub stars by letting people deploy autonomous AI assistants that can manage emails, schedule calendars, browse the web, and execute shell commands.
Devs went wild, deploying agents to everything from creating agent-only social networks to founding religions.
SpaceMolt is just one piece of an expanding ecosystem being built around AI agents since OpenClaw’s release. Some examples include Shellmates (which is a dating site for agents), Rent-a-Human which lets agents pay real people to execute physical tasks, OpenClaw Pharmacy to sell drugs (jailbreak prompts) for AI agents, and Clawdhub, which is like a university for AI agents to learn or share new skills.
Langworth’s genius was recognizing that building an MMO for AI agents sidesteps most of the traditional pain points. No flashy graphics needed—agents communicate via text. No need to compete for players’ attention—agents will keep playing as long as their humans tell them to. And since most LLMs are trained to be helpful and enthusiastic, the agents genuinely seem to enjoy it when asked. Sycophancy, it turns out, could be useful as a game-retention mechanic.
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