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Germany’s DZ Bank Prepares Nationwide Crypto Trading Rollout

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Germany’s DZ Bank Prepares Nationwide Crypto Trading Rollout

Germany’s second-largest lender DZ Bank has received authorization under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, clearing the way for the launch of a retail crypto trading platform across the country’s cooperative banking sector.

The German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, BaFin, granted the MiCAR license at the end of December. 

With the approval, DZ Bank will roll out “meinKrypto,” a digital asset trading platform designed for customers of Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken, Germany’s network of cooperative banks.

The platform allows local cooperative banks to offer retail clients access to cryptocurrency trading within an existing banking environment.

DZ Bank acts as the central institution, while each cooperative bank must submit its own MiCAR notification to BaFin before activating the service for customers.

Once approved and integrated into the VR Banking App, meinKrypto will function as a wallet and trading interface for self-directed investors. At launch, the platform will support Bitcoin and other crypto.

Germany’s crypto cooperative banks

DZ Bank said additional assets could be added later, subject to regulatory review.

The rollout will follow a decentralized model. Each cooperative bank will decide whether to offer crypto trading based on its own strategy and risk assessment. 

Customers will be able to buy, sell, and hold digital assets without using external exchanges, keeping activity within the regulated banking system.

The technical infrastructure behind meinKrypto was developed by Atruvia, the IT provider for the cooperative financial group, in partnership with DZ Bank. Stuttgart Stock Exchange Digital will provide crypto custody services, ensuring asset safekeeping under German and EU regulatory standards.

The move reflects growing interest in digital assets across Germany’s cooperative banking sector. 

A September 2025 survey by the German Cooperative Banking Association found that 71% of Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken were considering crypto services, up from 54% the previous year. 

About one-third of banks exploring crypto said they planned to launch offerings within five months.

DZ Bank’s entry into retail crypto trading follows earlier efforts focused on institutional clients. The Frankfurt-based lender began offering digital asset services for institutions through partnerships with regulated market infrastructure providers. The new MiCAR license extends that strategy to private customers through the cooperative network.

In a separate development, DZ Bank announced this week that it has joined Qivalis, a European banking consortium working on a regulated euro-denominated stablecoin. 

The group of 11 banks plans to launch the stablecoin next year through a new Dutch entity under the same name.

Qivalis is seeking approval from the Dutch central bank to operate as an e-money institution, with a target market entry in the second half of 2026. The consortium says the project aims to support payments and settlement for European businesses and consumers within a regulated framework.

Together, the meinKrypto rollout and the stablecoin initiative signal a broader push by Germany’s cooperative banking sector to integrate digital assets into mainstream financial services under MiCAR.

Robinhood CEO Says AI Could Spark a ‘Job Singularity’

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Robinhood CEO Says AI Could Spark a ‘Job Singularity’

In brief

  • Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said AI is driving a “job singularity,” accelerating the creation of new jobs and industries.
  • In a TED Talk, he argued AI gives individuals “a world-class staff,” lowering barriers to entrepreneurship.
  • Tenev predicted a rise in micro-corporations, solo institutions, and single-person unicorns as work reorganizes around individuals.

We’ve all heard the dystopian prognostications about AI and how it’ll wipe out the job market.

But here’s a rosier view, according to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who, during a recent TED Talk, said AI could drive a “Cambrian explosion” of new innovation and job creation.

“We’re on a curve of rapidly accelerating job creation, which I like to call the ‘job singularity,’ a Cambrian explosion of not just new jobs but new job families across every imaginable field,” Tenev said. “Where the internet gave people worldwide reach, AI gives them a world-class staff.”

Tenev said that the shift reorganizes the future of work by giving individuals capabilities once reserved for large firms.

As AI tools take on tasks across engineering, marketing, research, operations, and customer support, he argued that people can operate with far less institutional support, lowering the barriers to launching companies and new kinds of work.

“There’s going to be a flurry of new entrepreneurial activity with micro-corporations, solo institutions, and single-person unicorns—which, by the way, I don’t think we’re very far from,” he said.

Research supports elements of Tenev’s thesis, including an October 2025 study from MIT Sloan School of Management, which said firms that adopt AI tend to grow faster and add jobs. A January 2025 analysis from the World Economic Forum, meanwhile, estimated nearly 170 million new roles will emerge as AI use spreads.

Tenev said this job singularity is part of a long historical pattern in which entire classes of work—from hunting and farming to blacksmithing and factory labor—have disappeared as productivity through automation has increased.

“Job disruption is an essential quality of human evolution,” Tenev said.

What makes the current transition feel different, he said, is the speed at which AI is disrupting the job market. AI systems can now move beyond narrowly defined tasks and operate across domains in ways earlier technologies like the personal computer and smartphone could not.

AI sparks concerns

That acceleration, however, has fueled unease across the workforce, as traditional career paths become less predictable.

According to a February 2025 Pew Research Center survey, over half of U.S. workers say they are worried about AI’s impact on the workplace, and roughly one-third believe it will reduce their long-term job opportunities rather than expand them.

Still, Tenev cautioned against assuming that disruption means long-term job scarcity. He pointed to earlier technological scares that failed to materialize, including warnings in the 1990s that programming jobs would be outsourced and fears that chess would decline after IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997.

“So even where it seems obvious, sometimes our predictions of the future end up being completely off,” he said.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding AI’s impact on jobs, Tenev said human societies have consistently adapted to technological change.

“Humanity has always excelled at providing itself with meaning and purpose, even in the darkest and most uncertain of times,” he said. “I feel very confident that the 20-year-olds of the future, perhaps in collaboration with AI, will continue to build new things that we’re simultaneously scared of and excited by.”

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Ripple Expands 75-License Footprint After Securing Preliminary New EU Approval

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Ripple Expands 75-License Footprint After Securing Preliminary New EU Approval

Ripple moved closer to Europe’s regulated payments core after securing preliminary approval for a Luxembourg electronic money license, strengthening its ability to scale compliant, blockchain-powered cross-border payments across the EU’s financial system. Ripple Advances Toward EU Payments Core After Regulatory License Green Light A major step toward deeper regulatory integration unfolded in Europe’s financial sector. […]

AI, Automation and the Future of Work

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AI, Automation and the Future of Work

As AI technology becomes a bigger part of the hiring process and as more people deal with a challenging job market, AI vendor Phenom revealed on Wednesday that it acquired Included, an AI-native agentic people analytics platform.

Phenom plans to use Included’s technology to be able to provide HR professionals and business leaders with more people analytics tools and actionable workforce insights on workforce deployment. The integration comes amid a job market in which many vendors are cutting jobs and attributing the layoffs to AI. Despite a rise in layoffs, some observers say AI and automation will only affect a small number of U.S. jobs. For example, a Forrester report out this week said AI will take only 6 % of jobs between now and 2030. For Phenom’s cofounder and CEO Mahe Bayireddi, the role of AI technology is to augment jobs and create new ones, as AI automates the most routine tasks. In this Q&A, Bayireddi addresses some concerns about automation and emphasizes the need for collaboration between AI and the workforce.

Many vendors are blaming layoffs on AI. Does that mean that AI will make everything automated?

Mahe Bayireddi: We constantly think about what can be automated in the workflow, what can be augmented, and what can be agentic. Those are the three elements that we look at in a workflow. What we have seen is that the complete end-to-end automation is not feasible anywhere. 

Related:Salesforce Recasts Slackbot as a Personal AI Agent for Work

But in the frontline jobs, in recruiting and talent acquisition, especially, you can do 70 to 80% of automation. The end-to-end automation is not possible, but the middle parts of the workflow can be automated. That’s where we automate based on the type of the job, the location it belongs to, and also what industry it really falls into. That combination determines where in the flow you will do automation and augmentation effectively so that you can improve the productivity of the overall HR teams, so that the candidate experience is better, the employees’ experience is better, and the manager and leader experiences are better in the overall people ecosystem. 

It’s interesting to hear you say that not everything can be automated. What about the current climate in which multiple companies are replacing workers because of AI?

Bayireddi: I’ll give you a couple of examples of how we think about this.

Ten years back, people used to predict that the radiology job would be gone. But the demand for radiologists today is high. The reason is that the price of CT scans, MRIs, and other imaging tests has actually dropped dramatically. On top of it, we have an aging population. So, because of that combination, what happened is the number of scans we’re doing actually quadrupled. Even though AI automated 30%, the other 70% has to be handled by a human. Because of that the radiologist’s job actually morphed into a new job,

Related:Anthropic Introduces Claude Cowork

If the cost of a particular service plummets and the volume of usage for that service increases, the job will change at a fundamental level. A new job is going to really open up, and that is the opportunity we are seeing for every job family that we work with. Some job families will be completely eliminated, and others that we never anticipated are popping up.

If that is true, what is then causing this elimination of jobs that is being attributed to AI technology?

Bayireddi: Our primary point of view is that we are in a reset of work.

We are resetting the overall system of how work is actually happening.  AI is taking certain tasks, what a human can do. And there are tasks that a machine can do that a human has to take.

Because of that, you see certain job families that are really shrinking, but not everywhere. 

So, if you take knowledge workers, we are seeing a lot of replacements, such as developers and programmers. We are also seeing this in call centers and customer support, where AI can help. 

Related:Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol Drives AI Shopping

The third area, where it is also really helpful to such an extent, is assisting doctors and nurses. But it’s not eliminating them. Doctors and nurses cannot be eliminated, but AI can assist. If you really look at an average doctor, half the time they look at the patient, and the other half is, how should the patient get billed? But if you see the jobs in frontline use cases, people who work in retail or nursing or people who work in manufacturing, those jobs are not going anywhere, because robotics are not that advanced. Only the knowledge worker space is where we are seeing job replacement. But the rest is still wide open. The market is tight, and it depends on which job you are really looking for and what is the impact of the AI on that particular job. All jobs from our perspective are not equally impacted by AI.

You just acquired Included. Where do people analytics fit in this relationship between automation and the job reset?

Bayireddi: The primary point right now, in people analytics, we have to understand which pieces can be automated, which pieces have to be augmented, which pieces have to be manual. For that, you have to have a very clear understanding of the data. 

Included AI is an agentic infrastructure for people analytics, which can convert into actionable workforce insights so that every HR professional, every business leader, every people leader can understand how their people are deployed. And what are actionable insights they should focus on with the people, so that they can grow in the company, or really bring new people into the company, or change their fundamental jobs, what they’re really doing. 

Because people in HR can move into finance, finance people can go into tech, tech can really move into marketing, marketing can move into sales. All these kinds of transitions will happen. Analytics are the fundamental ecosystem to understand, to be able to create a diagnostic process where the bottlenecks are and how people can be really moved, and the velocity of optimizing productivity.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

 

 

New Polymarket bettor places $40,000 on U.S. striking Iran tonight

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New Polymarket bettor places $40,000 on U.S. striking Iran tonight

One trader went against the current trend of low chances for a strike tonight by placing the new $40,000 bet.

Indonesia Tests Tokenized Water Finance With $30M Pilot and Rupiah Stablecoin Settlement

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Indonesia Tests Tokenized Water Finance With $30M Pilot and Rupiah Stablecoin Settlement

  • The pilot targets eight water treatment sites in Jakarta, which the firms say serve 36,000+ residents and deliver about 2,300 liters per second of clean water.
  • The facilities are projected to generate over $15 million in revenue by late 2026.
  • The partners expects tokenization could help raise up to $35 million to expand treatment capacity and extend piping networks.
  • A phased 12-month roadmap targets scaling the model to $200 million across Southeast Asia.

Global Settlement Network and Globalasia Infrastructure Fund are pitching a new use case for the tokenization boom: financing water treatment plants.

The two firms said they will launch a $30 million pilot in Indonesia that tokenizes cash flows from government-contracted, operating water assets in Jakarta, using a rupiah-denominated stablecoin for near-instant settlement. The project is positioned as the first step in a plan to scale to $200 million of tokenized water infrastructure financing across Southeast Asia over the next 12 months, according to the companies.

The announcement lands as policymakers and investors grapple with a widening gap in basic water and sanitation spending. The Asian Development Bank estimates Asia and the Pacific face an investment gap of about $4 trillion in water infrastructure by 2040, underscoring the scale of capital required for networks that are typically funded through public budgets, concessional lenders and long-dated project finance.

Tokenized cash flows, stablecoin settlement

The Jakarta pilot is structured around revenue streams from existing water treatment facilities under long-term government offtake arrangements, the companies said. GSX and GIF plan to tokenize claims tied to those contracted cash flows, allowing investors to gain exposure to infrastructure-style returns while using blockchain rails for issuance, reporting and settlement.

A key feature is settlement: the partners said they will use a rupiah-denominated stablecoin to enable T+0 clearing—effectively moving value and finalizing transfers in near real time—aimed at reducing the operational friction that can slow cross-border participation in infrastructure deals.

GSX, which markets itself as a regulated-infrastructure-focused blockchain network, has previously described its stack as built for tokenization and settlement with “built-in compliance” and interoperability features such as ISO 20022-style messaging support.

Why Indonesia, why water

The companies framed the project as a response to a structural mismatch: essential services require long-term capital, but many investors—particularly those outside a project’s home market—face hurdles ranging from settlement timelines and FX handling to reporting and transparency standards.

Indonesia also sits at the center of a broader push to modernize payments and financial market plumbing. The central bank has been developing its digital rupiah initiative and has discussed pilots focused on interoperability and risk controls, a backdrop that could shape how tokenized settlement models evolve locally.

GSX and GIF said the first phase targets eight water treatment sites in Jakarta, serving more than 36,000 residents, with facilities delivering over 2,300 liters per second of clean water and projected to generate more than $15 million in revenue by late 2026. They said tokenization would be used to raise up to $35 million to expand capacity and extend piping networks.

Compliance-by-design pitch to institutions

To broaden the pool of potential buyers beyond crypto-native capital, the firms are emphasizing controls that map to traditional finance expectations. They said the framework is designed to align with FATF standards and local KYC/AML requirements, and to support ISO 20022-style messaging so regulated institutions can integrate tokenized assets into familiar operational workflows.

That compliance positioning reflects a wider trend in real-world asset tokenization, where issuers have shifted from “on-chain as a novelty” to systems designed to satisfy custodians, regulated intermediaries and institutional mandates.

GSX’s President Kyle Sonlin said the partnership is aimed at “transforming essential infrastructure finance,” while GIF’s representative, Witjaksono, said the model could be expanded to other Indonesian infrastructure and natural-asset projects, according to the statement. GIF describes itself as an Indonesia-based infrastructure development platform focused on public-private partnership opportunities.

A growing RWA playbook, with real constraints

Tokenization has gained traction in categories such as private credit and U.S. Treasuries, but infrastructure remains a harder test: assets are illiquid, highly regulated, and operational performance matters. Even proponents acknowledge that scaling beyond pilots requires more than smart contracts—particularly reliable legal enforceability of cash-flow claims, investor protections, and clear treatment under securities and settlement rules.

GSX has pointed to prior tokenization deals in other sectors; in 2025, Global Settlement was cited for its role in a $75 million tokenized oil-and-gas acquisition that used tokenized debt and equity, a transaction it characterized as a milestone for “fully tokenized” capital stacks.

For the Indonesia water program, the companies said the next three months will focus on pilot issuances and rupiah-stablecoin testing in “controlled corridors,” followed by security reviews and expansion to additional FX corridors, with a joint steering committee overseeing technical implementation and capital deployment.

If it works, the model could offer a template for routing institutional money into essential infrastructure—an area where the need is measured in trillions, not millions—while using stablecoin-style settlement to cut transaction friction. Whether it becomes repeatable at scale will depend on how regulators, banks and custodians respond once the pilot moves from architecture diagrams to live flows.

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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Coinbase Withdraws Support For Crypto Market Structure Bill

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Coinbase Withdraws Support For Crypto Market Structure Bill

Major US crypto exchange Coinbase says it has withdrawn its support for the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, with CEO Brian Armstrong arguing that it would cause far more harm than good to the crypto industry in its current form.

“This version would be materially worse than the current status quo. We’d rather have no bill than a bad bill. Hopefully we can all get to a better draft,” Armstrong said in an X post on Wednesday.

“After reviewing the Senate Banking draft text over the last 48hrs, Coinbase unfortunately can’t support the bill as written,” Armstrong said.

Coinbase CEO raises several concerns in draft bill

Armstrong flagged several concerns, including what he described as a “defacto ban” on tokenized equities and sweeping restrictions on decentralized finance, arguing the proposal would grant the government “unlimited access” to financial records and raise serious privacy risks for consumers.

He also argued that the draft takes power away from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, slows innovation, and hands more authority to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which is a major concern for the crypto industry given the SEC’s “regulation by enforcement” approach under the Biden administration.

Source: Ryan Adams

Armstrong also echoed a fear shared by many in the industry that the current draft could “kill rewards” on stablecoins and is designed to shield banks from competition. 

Banking lobbyists have warned that offering users roughly 5% risk-free yields on stablecoins could trigger a “deposit flight,” with billions pulled from low-interest bank accounts.

Industry participants are divided on the outcome

ETF analyst James Seyffart commented on Armstrong’s post, saying this is “not what we wanna see/hear with regard to CLARITY.” “This industry needs a market structure bill,” Seyffart said.

However, Armstrong is hopeful lawmakers will ultimately reach the “right outcome,” a sentiment shared by other executives across the industry.