Bitcoin’s upside pressure is quietly building as gold and silver absorb short-term leverage, a familiar rotation that Tom Lee says has repeatedly preceded renewed strength in crypto once precious metals’ momentum fades. Tom Lee Warns Gold and Silver FOMO Drains Crypto Leverage Before Next Bitcoin Surge Capital rotation between asset classes can distort short-term price […]
USDAI Gears Up for Token Launch and Airdrop
The GPU-backed stablecoin protocol plans to launch its CHIP governance token in Q1.
USDAI, a stablecoin protocol that issues loans against GPUs, today announced the upcoming launch of its native CHIP token, slated for Q1 2026.
CHIP will be the USDAI DAO’s governance token, with an initial coin offering (ICO) and token launch set to occur by April.
The protocol was bootstrapped by its “Allo Game” in 2025, which incentivized users to mint USDai and sUSDai and earn points towards the ICO and airdrop. USDAI currently boasts $658 million in total value locked (TVL), after briefly peaking at $701 million in November.
The protocol cites its model as a liquid credit instrument for GPUs, claiming that traditional underwriting is unfeasible for GPUs due to their rapid depreciation, despite the growing need for computing power in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector.
USDAI calls its move “The Fannie Mae Moment” for AI. Fannie Mae is credited with launching tradable mortgages and creating a liquid mortgage-rate market for housing, and USDAI aims to do the same with GPU hardware via tokenization.
Fiserv and Affirm bring BNPL to debit programmes
Fiserv has joined forces with Affirm to bring buy now, pay later capabilities to banks’ and credit unions’ debit card programmes.
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The two firms have been working together since 2022, integrating Affirm into Fiserv’s Commerce Hub, enabling merchants to offer BNPL at checkout. Now, those same instalment payment options will be extended to the debit card programmes of Fiserv’s thousands of bank and credit union clients.
The partners say they will handle all of the technical aspects, leveraging Affirm’s platform to support real-time underwriting, loan origination, and funding.
And, by embedding BNPL into existing debit programmes, issuers can keep customer spend within their ecosystem, driving engagement and transaction growth, with cardholders doing everything directly from their bank’s app.
Erik Wichita, head, card services, Fiserv, says: “This partnership gives our clients a practical, scalable way to offer such payment flexibility through their existing debit products—helping them compete effectively, deepen customer and member relationships, and drive top-of-wallet engagement with their products.”
Tether Launches US-Regulated Stablecoin as New Federal Rules Take Effect
Tether has launched a U.S.-focused, federally regulated stablecoin as Washington moves to establish formal oversight of dollar-backed digital tokens under new legislation.
The issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin said it has begun offering USA₮, a dollar-backed token designed to operate within the regulatory framework created by the GENIUS Act. The token is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, a federally chartered crypto bank, making it one of the first stablecoins structured under a national banking license.
The launch marks Tether’s first major effort to create a stablecoin specifically for the U.S. market, separate from its flagship USD₮ token, which dominates global crypto trading and payments. While USD₮ continues to operate internationally, the company said USA₮ is intended to meet U.S. regulatory requirements for reserve management, compliance, and institutional oversight.
Stablecoins have become a core part of digital asset markets, with US$315 billion worth of stablecoin in circulation and with US$108 billion in daily trading volumes, rivaling major payment networks. U.S. lawmakers have intensified efforts to regulate the sector following a series of market disruptions and concerns about reserve transparency and consumer protection.
Under the GENIUS Act framework, stablecoin issuers must operate through regulated entities, maintain high-quality reserves, and submit to ongoing supervision.
By partnering with Anchorage Digital Bank, Tether has placed USA₮ within the federal banking system, rather than operating through offshore entities as it has historically done with USD₮.
Cantor Fitzgerald will act as reserve custodian and primary dealer for USA₮, providing custody and oversight of the assets backing the token. Tether said the arrangement is intended to improve visibility into reserves and align the product with institutional risk standards.
The company previously announced the development of USA₮ in late 2025 and appointed former White House Crypto Council executive director Bo Hines as chief executive of the U.S. business. Hines now leads the entity overseeing the domestic stablecoin operation.
Tether said USA₮ will initially be available through several major crypto platforms, including Bybit, Crypto.com, Kraken, OKX, and Moonpay, with additional U.S.-regulated exchanges and banking partners expected to follow.
The move comes as Tether seeks to strengthen its position amid rising competition from regulated stablecoin issuers such as Circle, PayPal, and several traditional financial institutions exploring tokenized deposits and digital dollars.
Despite its market dominance, Tether has faced long-running scrutiny over reserve disclosures and regulatory compliance. In recent years, the company has increased its exposure to U.S. Treasuries and published more frequent reserve attestations. Tether has said it now ranks among the world’s largest holders of U.S. government debt through its reserve portfolio.
By introducing a domestically regulated product, Tether appears to be positioning itself to participate more directly in the U.S. financial system as stablecoins become more integrated into payments, settlement, and corporate treasury operations.
The launch reflects a broader shift toward bank-issued and regulator-approved digital dollars, as policymakers seek to balance innovation with financial stability.
The rollout of USA₮ follows growing interest from banks, asset managers, and payment firms in using blockchain-based dollars for cross-border transfers, liquidity management, and on-chain finance. Federal regulators have signaled that compliant stablecoins could play a role in modernizing payment infrastructure, provided issuers meet strict governance and transparency standards.
Tether said USD₮ will continue to serve international markets while the new token focuses on domestic use cases, marking a dual-track strategy that separates its U.S. and global operations.
Read Also: Falcon Finance Links USDf Stablecoin to Traditional Banking
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Image Credits: Tether, Shutterstock, Canva, Wiki Commons
Bitcoin Is Getting Banked — 60% Of Leading US Banks Are Ready
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Bitcoin is moving into mainstream banking in small, steady steps. What once seemed unlikely is becoming routine as traditional banks test ways to hold, trade, or lend against Bitcoin. Reports say a sizable slice of the biggest US banks are now planning real customer offerings.
60% Of Top Banks Preparing Bitcoin Products: River Study
A study conducted by Bitcoin financial services firm River shows about 60% of the top 25 US banks are at some stage of building Bitcoin services, from custody to trading and client-facing products. This shift is not just talk; it shows up in boardroom plans and pilot projects across several large lenders.
Banks Moving From Caution To Practical Steps
For years, many banks kept their distance. But change came fast after clearer rules and big exchange-traded funds put Bitcoin on more mainstream radars. Spot ETF approvals and rising demand from big investors nudged banks to revisit their stance and to test practical, compliant ways to serve customers interested in digital assets.
60% of the top US banks are into bitcoin. pic.twitter.com/AqceDDfjDP
— River (@River) January 26, 2026
Some major names are already on the record with pilot projects or new services. Reports mention that JPMorgan Chase is looking at crypto trading, Wells Fargo has rolled out credit and custody-linked offerings to institutional clients, and Citigroup is exploring custody and payments tied to tokenized assets. Those moves signal a shift from theory to products customers can use.
How This Changes The Picture For Clients
Customers could get simpler access to Bitcoin without needing separate crypto accounts. That means an investor might see Bitcoin as another line on a bank statement, with custody and reporting wrapped into services they already use. Some banks plan to partner with specialists to avoid taking on all the technical work themselves, keeping risk and compliance squarely in focus.
Regulation, Risk, And The Role Of Policy
Regulatory moves earlier in the year reopened options that were closed when tight capital rules made custody costly. Reports note that a change in guidance helped some banks resume or rethink custody services, and that the current political climate under US President Donald Trump has been described as more favorable to broader crypto adoption. These shifts are nudging banks to act where they had hesitated.
Expect more pilot announcements and a slow roll of services into client offerings. Not every bank will move at the same speed. Some will stay cautious, others will move sooner. The practical test will be whether banks can offer secure custody, clear accounting, and easy reporting without taking on outsized risk.
Featured image from Pexels, chart from TradingView
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Morgan Stanley Appoints Head of Digital Asset Strategy
Morgan Stanley has tapped veteran executive Amy Oldenburg to lead the investment bank’s new crypto unit, just weeks after announcing plans to launch three crypto exchange-traded funds and a crypto wallet.
Oldenburg will transition to head of digital asset strategy after working in Morgan Stanley’s emerging markets equity team since 2001, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
Oldenburg has been leading the emerging markets team since November 2021, where she was tasked with driving the division’s digital asset strategy.
Job listings on LinkedIn show the $2 trillion investment bank is also looking to expand its crypto team, listing positions for digital assets strategy director, digital assets strategist and digital assets product lead.
Morgan Stanley filed to launch spot Bitcoin (BTC) and Solana (SOL) exchange-traded funds in the first week of 2025 — its first major move in the crypto space after largely sitting out the first wave of institutional adoption over the past two years.
Later that week, Morgan Stanley filed for a staked Ether (ETH) ETF that seeks to hold ETH while staking an undisclosed amount to earn staking income.
If approved, the funds could bring new inflows to BTC, ETH, and SOL from Morgan Stanley’s 19 million clients served through its wealth management division.
It is also looking to launch a crypto wallet that would support cryptocurrencies and tokenized real-world assets, including stocks, bonds and real estate.
Oldenburg advocates for crypto self-custody
In past public appearances, Oldenburg has stressed the importance of the “Not your keys, not your coins” concept and the need to build out better self-custody infrastructure, particularly for those in emerging markets. She also stated in March last year that she was “against ETFs” as they didn’t provide staking at the time.
Related: South Dakota lawmaker takes another run at Bitcoin reserve bill
“I want my liquidity 24/7, and also we have clients that want to move assets that they have and potentially bank them with us and be able to leverage all of the features that the digital assets space allows you,” Oldenburg said at the Digital Assets Summit 2025.
Oldenburg was referring to the limitations of ETFs with crypto staking and yield-bearing products at the time; however, the Paul Atkins-led Securities and Exchange Commission has since demonstrated an openness to a broader range of crypto products.
Magazine: One metric shows crypto is now in a bear market: Carl ‘The Moon’
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Theo Launches Yield-Bearing Tokenized Gold as Price Tops $5,100
The new product offers exposure to spot gold while generating yield.
Theo, a real-world asset (RWA) tokenization platform, has launched thGOLD, a tokenized gold product.
The token not only provides exposure to spot gold prices but also generates yield, according to a press release viewed by The Defiant. This differs from most other tokenized gold products, which typically only track spot prices. Theo said thGOLD is expected to be available across decentralized finance (DeFi) venues, including Hyperliquid, Uniswap, Morpho, and Pendle.
The launch comes as gold prices reached a new all-time high this week, rising above $5,100 per ounce amid strong demand for safe-haven assets. Last week, tokenized gold surpassed $4 billion in market value, The Defiant reported. Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG) accounted for most of this growth, according to DeFiLlama data.
It also comes as investors continue to look for ways to make idle assets like gold more productive within the DeFi landscape, especially as interest in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) continues to grow.
Currently, the tokenized RWA sector boasts over $23 billion in Distributed Asset Value, up 12% over the past month, per RWAxyz. Meanwhile, the tokenized commodities market stands at $5.14 billion, up more than 28% over the past 30 days
thGOLD is built on the MG999 On-Chain Gold Fund, a tokenized private credit fund managed by FundBridge Capital, the release explained. The fund generates yield by lending to gold retailers, starting with Singapore-based Mustafa Gold. Libeara, a tokenization platform incubated by Standard Chartered Ventures, provides the underlying infrastructure.
Theo said the structure could later be expanded to incorporate additional sources of yield, including bank gold lending rates.
“Most tokenized gold today is just a wrapper. You’re paying fees to hold an asset that does nothing,” said Ari Pingle, co-founder of Theo. “We built thGOLD to actually work in DeFi: it earns yield, it trades on real venues, and you can use it as collateral. That’s what tokenization should deliver.”
The release notes that gold rose 64% in 2025, its strongest annual performance in decades, driven by central bank purchases and increased demand for safe-haven assets amid geopolitical uncertainty.
The launch follows Theo’s earlier tokenized Treasury product, thBILL, which reached more than $200 million in total value locked (TVL) within four months of launch. thGOLD will initially be available through a capped rollout as the underlying fund scales.
ETH is already 20% of the way toward quantum resilience
Antonio Sanso, cryptography researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, is confident the blockchain will be quantum secure long before a quantum attack is even possible.
”We as the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and Ethereum community are working massively on this topic,” he told Cointelegraph.
“The research part is probably the part that has been already figured out. And we are starting with the execution phase of it. And we’re really confident we’re gonna meet the timeline and the deadline.”
The EF has declared post-quantum (PQ) security a top strategic priority. On Jan. 24, it announced the formation of a Post Quantum team led by Thomas Coratger. Sanso is leading its new biweekly All Core Devs calls on post-quantum security from Feb. 4.
It’s a massive undertaking. He explained that Ethereum’s execution, consensus and data availability layers all need to be upgraded.
”When we talk about having a post-quantum solution, we are not talking about one part — there are all the different big macro areas of Ethereum that need to be migrated,” he said.
“The good thing is that we have been working on it for many months, if not years. So, we have a clear plan in mind, and we are probably going to execute in the next years.”
One-fifth of the way to the finish line
Asked to put a figure on how far work has progressed to date, Sanso said solutions for the different layers are progressing at different rates, “so there is not one percentage for all three. But we are like, ballpark, probably 20%.”
The new biweekly call will discuss the benefits and trade-offs of different approaches. Multi-client post-quantum devnets are now live, and a PQ roadmap will be released soon, targeting what EF researcher Justin Drake calls “a full transition in coming years with zero loss of funds and zero downtime.”
Making Ethereum quantum-resilient is just one part of a complete overhaul of the entire blockchain as part of Lean Ethereum. The aim is to make Ethereum faster, simpler and more decentralized using zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, while also making it resistant to quantum attacks.
Comparison to Bitcoin
The enthusiasm for quantum proofing Ethereum is in stark contrast to Bitcoin, where leaders from Adam Back to Michael Saylor have played down the need for change, pointing to estimates that suggest a quantum computer might be many years or decades away.
Which is true, but with caveats. At DevConnect in Buenos Aires, co-founder Vitalik Buterin noted the median prediction for a quantum computer to break cryptography was 2040, but there was still a 20% chance it could happen by 2030.
But as it happens, less Bitcoin (BTC) is actually vulnerable to quantum attacks, with estimates suggesting around 6 million BTC, mostly in older addresses with public keys exposed, is currently at risk.
Related: Bitcoin doesn’t have 20 years because the quantum threat is already here
However, the vast majority of Ethereum is vulnerable — and all of Solana. The proposed fixes for Bitcoin are simpler as well, even if much larger PQ signatures remain a big problem.
“From the technical perspective, it’s simpler to migrate,” Sanso explained. “But they probably will have an issue at the human level … finding an agreement on what to do.”
“Ethereum, we don’t have this problem, but… technologically, we have more stuff to migrate,” he said. “We share the same fact that we need to change execution transaction signatures, but of the problems we have — between execution layer, consensus and data availability — the execution layer is the easiest. So, then the other two are a bit more complicated.”
What happens if quantum computers arrive early?
Sanso’s own best guess for the quantum computer deadline is the mid-2030s. He expects Lean Ethereum to be complete sometime between 2028 and 2032.
Given how suddenly large language models and ZK-proofs arrived (in the latter case, well ahead of estimates), it’s possible quantum computers may be able to crack blockchains before they’re completely finished.
You can increase protection for your Ether (ETH) right now by sending it to a new, unused address, as the public keys will not be exposed (quantum computers work backwards to derive the private keys from the public ones using Shor’s algorithm).
In the future, smart wallets using a combination of account abstraction and post-quantum signatures will protect your ETH.
“The idea is to have a new algorithm that is post-quantum, probably lattice- or hash-based. And basically, we’ll integrate with account abstraction.”
PQ signatures are much larger
At DevConnect in November, Zknox demonstrated a hardware wallet with a post-quantum Dilithium signature that’s compatible with Ethereum’s existing infrastructure.
However, post-quantum signatures are massive, and the lightest one, called Falcon, is still 10 times larger than the current Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) ones.
Sanso explained that coding the lattice solution in Solidity costs a fortune in gas. There’s an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) for a precompile to handle this automatically outside of the core protocol, which would speed things up and reduce costs.
The wider issue of incorporating signatures 10 times bigger than the current ones into the chain will likely require a range of different measures, including the use of ZK-STARKs to compress down the size.
Emergency quantum upgrade
But Buterin also developed an emergency plan in March 2024 to deal with a quantum attack, which involves a hard fork and a method for ETH owners to prove they are the legit owners of a particular address before being transitioned to PQ addresses holding the equivalent balance.
Sanso said this plan has progressed, and they’ve been working on a way for ETH owners to use ZK-proofs to safely prove they have the correct seed for an address.
”It’s something we have been actively working on. Hopefully, it’s going to be one project that will show this, either at EthCC Cannes or Devcon in India.”
Depending on which EIPs are approved, this system might also be used as part of the planned switch to PQ signatures. Individuals could prove ownership of an address and would then be able to switch off the existing quantum-vulnerable ECDSA part of an account.
”We have this EIP that you can enable yourself, and say, I will kill the elliptic curve part on my EOAs. So, you keep the same address, and the only way for you to move out stuff from your address is a combination of account abstraction and this proof of seeds.”
“Probably, it’s going to be discussed in the next forks, and I think it’s in the right direction if you ask me.”
Sanso pointed out that choosing which EIPs to include will be a long process and ultimately decided by the community.
He said the first All Core Devs PQ “breakout room” call is scheduled for Feb. 4, 2026.
According to Drake, the biweekly sessions will “focus on user-facing security, covering dedicated precompiles, account abstraction and longer-term transaction signature aggregation with leanVM.”
Magazine: Bitcoin vs. the quantum computer threat — Timeline and solutions (2025-2035)
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eBay to ban independent AI agents
Online flea market eBay has thrown a spanner into the works of the emerging agentic commerce movement by banning third party AI agents from shopping on its site.
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The ban effectively creates a closed-loop ecosystem that locks out independent bots from companies like Amazon and Google while keeping the door open for approved partners like OpenAI.
In early 2025, eBay became a launch partner of OpenAI’s ‘Operator’, an AI agent that is permitted to interact directly with users wanting to make purchases from eBay listings.
The ban comes into efffect next month, targeting bots that can search for items, negotiate prices, and complete transactions, often bypassing traditional user interactions.
EBay says the aim of the prohibition is to prevent instances where bots could outpace human buyers in purchasing, or engage in manipulative practices such as scalping.
WH advisor Patrick Witt: Davos 2026 was ‘turning point’ for global crypto normalization
White House crypto advisor Patrick Witt said stablecoins are the “gateway drug” for global finance and that Washington is racing to deliver regulatory clarity.