With the restaking sector in a slump, the protocol is betting that institutional distribution can reignite growth.
Ethereum restaking protocol Puffer Finance has partnered with Anchorage Digital to provide institutional clients with access to pufETH, Puffer’s liquid restaking token, via Anchorage’s regulated custody platform.
The integration allows institutions to gain exposure to Ethereum staking and restaking yields while operating within compliant custody and security frameworks. For institutional players that have historically been cautious about engaging directly with DeFi protocols, the partnership offers a more familiar on-ramp into Ethereum-native yield products.
Puffer differentiates its restaking model by distributing validation across a decentralized set of operators rather than relying on a handful of large validator providers, which the protocol says reduces concentration risk. The protocol also touts slashing penalty protection and a buffer designed to absorb losses before they reach pufETH holders, a feature aimed at satisfying institutional risk models that demand clearly defined downside scenarios.
The collaboration comes at a difficult time for liquid restaking protocols. Apart from etherfi and Kelp, most liquid restaking protocols have struggled to retain users. As points-based incentive programs ended, capital rotated out and consolidated into the most established venues.
Puffer launched in February 2024, attracting nearly $200 million in total value locked (TVL) on its first day as the liquid restaking sector boomed on EigenLayer hype. By October 2024, Puffer’s TVL had grown to over 500,000 ETH, worth more than $1.3 billion at the time.
Puffer TVL
Today, Puffer’s core protocol TVL sits at just $62 million, according to DeFiLlama. The drawdown mirrors a broader trend across the liquid restaking sector following the initial airdrop-fueled frenzy.
The PUFFER token tells a similar story. The token hit an all-time high near $1.00 in December 2024 but has since cratered, hitting an all-time low of $0.025 just last week, according to Coingecko.
PUFFER chart
The Anchorage deal signals that Puffer is increasingly focused on the institutional market as a path to sustainable growth, a pivot away from the retail-driven points campaigns that initially powered its TVL.
BlackRock is expanding its crypto investment lineup with a new Nasdaq-listed product tied to Ethereum staking.
BlackRock on Thursday introduced its iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF, or ETHB, describing it as an exchange-traded product (ETP) that combines spot Ether (ETH) exposure with “monthly income potential” by staking a portion of its ETH holdings.
Source: iShares
The product expands BlackRock’s digital asset offerings, which include the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) and the iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA). Both ETPs are the largest in their class, with more than $55 billion and $6.5 billion in assets under management, respectively.
“By bringing together spot ether exposure and staking rewards in an ETP, ETHB provides investors with an important new avenue to participate in the ecosystem’s evolution,” said Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s global head of digital assets.
ETHB will use Coinbase as custodian and staking provider
According to a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission, BlackRock’s ETHB will use Coinbase as its custodian and staking provider.
The fund’s approved validators are currently limited to Figment, Galaxy Digital and Bitwise-owned Attestant.
Source: James Seyffart
Staking rewards are intended to be distributed monthly but “no less frequently than quarterly by the trust,” the filing notes.
Related: Vitalik Buterin envisions ‘one-click’ Ether staking for institutions
At launch, ETHB offers a 0.25% sponsor fee with a one-year waiver, reducing the fee to 0.12% on the first $2.5 billion assets under management.
Grayscale first to enable staking for Ether ETFs in the US
BlackRock’s Ether staking product arrives as several competitors have launched similar offerings.
Grayscale Investments, BlackRock’s largest crypto ETF competitor by assets under management, launched staking for the Grayscale Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHE) and the Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust ETF (ETH) on Oct. 6, 2025, becoming the first US crypto issuer to do so.
The company also enabled staking on its Grayscale Solana Trust (GSOL), which began trading in late October. Additionally, Grayscale debuted the Grayscale Avalanche Staking ETF (GAVA) on Thursday.
Source: Grayscale
Other issuers, including 21Shares and REX-Osprey, also support staking Ether ETFs. 21Shares in February announced its expected 2026 distribution dates for staking rewards from the 21Shares Ethereum ETF.
Magazine: 6 massive challenges Bitcoin faces on the road to quantum security
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As oil surges past $100 amid escalating Middle East tensions, the question for the Bitcoin network and miners is not whether their power bills will rise, but whether Bitcoin’s price will fall.
According to research from bitcoin mining software and services company Luxor’s Hashrate Index, the direct effect of oil price shocks on mining costs is likely to be limited, but the broader macroeconomic consequences could weigh more heavily on the industry.
However, the impact of oil prices surging isn’t zero on the Bitcoin network.
Luxor estimates that about 8 to 10 percent of global bitcoin hashrate operates in electricity markets where power prices are closely linked to crude oil. These operations are primarily concentrated in Gulf states such as the United Arab Emirates and Oman, with smaller contributions from Iran, Kuwait, Qatar and Libya.
“The genuinely oil-exposed countries” are the Gulf states, Luxor wrote in its research note, adding that the UAE and Oman together account for roughly about 6% of the network’s computing power or hashrate.
“These grids run primarily on natural gas derived from oil production, with electricity pricing that does track crude more directly than in the US or Russia,” the report said.
Meanwhile, Iran is estimated to hold another 0.8%, and other smaller contributors like Kuwait, Qatar, and Libya bring the total crude-sensitive hashrate exposure to roughly 8–10% of the network.
Top countries powering the Bitcoin network in 1Q (Hashrate Index)
The remaining roughly 90% of the network runs in regions where electricity prices are driven by natural gas, coal, hydro or nuclear energy, meaning crude oil price swings have little direct influence on mining costs.
Impact on mining
What does this mean for bitcoin miners, who run power-hungry machines to secure the network and validate the transactions?
Luxor argues that even if oil prices remain above $100 per barrel, the effect on mining economics from higher electricity costs would likely be limited to a small portion of the network. Electricity is the single largest input cost for mining bitcoin.
Instead, the bigger risk for miners lies in how geopolitical shocks affect bitcoin’s price. According to Luxor, periods of macro stress often trigger risk-off behavior in financial markets, which can pressure volatile assets such as Bitcoin.
Recent data cited by the firm shows hashprice, a measure of profitability for the miners, fell to an all-time low of $27.89 per petahash per second per day in February, driven largely by a 23.8% drop in bitcoin’s price during the same period.
For miners, Luxor concludes, profitability is far more sensitive to changes in bitcoin’s price than to shifts in electricity costs.
Read more: Bitcoin hashrate drops 12% in worst drawdown since China mining ban: CryptoQuant
OP Labs, the main developer firm supporting the Optimism ecosystem, has laid off 20 employees as part of an internal restructuring aimed at sharpening the organization’s strategic focus, according to a message shared by the group’s leadership.
In a post on X, CEO of OP Labs Jing Wang said the decision followed internal discussions with affected staff and was communicated to employees before being disclosed publicly. The company said the layoffs were driven by a need to “narrow our focus,” rather than financial constraints.
“This is not about finances,” she said in a Slack message she shared alongside her post. “OP Labs is well capitalized with years of runway.”
Instead, she suggested that the move was intended to streamline decision-making and “do fewer things … exceptionally well.”
The OP token is down roughly 3% over the last 24 hours.
OP Labs plays a central role in the development of Optimism, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling network designed to make transactions faster and cheaper by processing activity off the Ethereum main chain. The broader Optimism ecosystem now includes several high-profile chains built on its technology stack, including Coinbase’s Base, Uniswap’s Unichain and Sony’s Soneium.
CoinDesk reached out to OP Labs for comment and to clarify the percentage of staff that was laid off.
Read more: Optimism’s OP token falls after Base moves away from the network’s ‘OP stack’ in major tech shift
Nvidia launched Nemotron 3 Super, a 120B open-weight AI model optimized for autonomous agents and ultra-long context tasks.
The hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE architecture delivers faster reasoning and over 5× throughput while running at 4-bit precision.
Nvidia’s $26 billion investment into open-source AI wants to counter China’s rise in the field.
Nvidia just shipped Nemotron 3 Super, a 120-billion-parameter open-weight model built to do one thing well: run autonomous AI agents without bleeding your compute budget dry.
That’s not a small problem. Multi-agent systems generate a lot more tokens than a normal chat—every tool call, reasoning step, and slice of context gets re-sent from scratch. As a result, costs explode, models tend to drift, and the agents slowly forget what they were supposed to be doing in the first place… or at least decrease in accuracy.
Nemotron 3 Super is Nvidia’s answer to all of that. The model runs 12 billion active parameters out of 120 billion total, using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) design that keeps inference cheap while retaining the reasoning depth complex workflows need. It packs a 1-million-token context window, so agents can hold an entire codebase, or nearly 750,000 words in memory before collapsing.
To build its model, Nvidia combined three components that rarely appear together in the same architecture: Mamba-2 state-space layers—a faster, memory-efficient alternative to attention for handling long token streams—along with Transformer attention layers for precise recall, and a new “Latent MoE” design that compresses token embeddings before routing them to experts. That allows the model to activate four times as many specialists at the same compute cost.
Introducing NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super 🎉
Open 120B-parameter (12B active) hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE model
Native 1M-token context
Built for compute-efficient, high-accuracy multi-agent applications
The model was also pretrained natively in NVFP4, Nvidia’s 4-bit floating-point format. In practice, that means the system learned to operate accurately within 4-bit arithmetic from the very first gradient update, rather than being trained at high precision and compressed afterward, which often causes models to lose accuracy.
For context, a model’s precision is measured in bits. Full precision, known as FP32, is the gold standard—but it is also extremely expensive to run at scale. Developers often reduce precision to save compute while trying to preserve useful performance.
Think of it like shrinking a 4K image down to 1080p: The picture still looks the same at a glance, just with less detail. Normally, dropping from 32-bit precision all the way to 4-bit would cripple a model’s reasoning ability. Nemotron avoids that problem by learning to operate at low precision from the start, instead of being squeezed into it later.
Compared to its own predecessor, Nemotron 3 Super delivers more than five times the throughput. Against external rivals, it’s 2.2x faster than OpenAI’s GPT-OSS 120B on inference throughput, and 7.5x faster than Alibaba’s Qwen3.5-122B.
We ran our own quick test. The reasoning held up well, including on prompts that were deliberately vague, badly worded, or based on wrong information. The model caught small errors in context without being asked to, handled math and logic problems cleanly, and didn’t fall apart when the question itself was slightly off.
The full training pipeline is public: weights on Hugging Face, 10 trillion curated pretraining tokens seen over 25 trillion total during training, 40 million post-training samples, and reinforcement learning recipes across 21 environment configurations. Perplexity, Palantir, Cadence, and Siemens are already integrating the model in their workflows.
The $26 billion bet
The model may be one piece of a larger strategy. A 2025 financial filing shows Nvidia plans to spend $26 billion over the next five years building open-weight AI models. Executives confirmed it, too.
Bryan Catanzaro, VP of applied deep learning research, told Wired the company recently finished pretraining a 550-billion-parameter model. Nvidia released its first Nemotron model back in November 2023, but that filing makes clear this is no longer a side project.
The investment is strategic considering Nvidia’s chips are still the default infrastructure for training and running frontier models. Models tuned to its hardware give customers a built-in reason to stay on Nvidia despite efforts from competitors to use other hardware. But there’s a more urgent pressure behind the move: America is losing the open-source AI race, and losing it fast.
Chinese open models went from barely 1.2% of global open-model usage in late 2024 to roughly 30% by the end of 2025, according to research by OpenRouter and Andreessen Horowitz. Alibaba’s Qwen overtook Meta’s Llama as the most-used self-hosted open-source model, according to Runpod. American companies including Airbnb adopted it for customer service. Startups worldwide are building on top of it. Beyond market share, that kind of adoption creates infrastructure dependencies that are hard to reverse.
While U.S. giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google keep their best models locked behind APIs, Chinese labs from DeepSeek to Alibaba have been flooding the open ecosystem. Meta was the one major American player competing in open source with Llama, but Zuckerberg recently signaled the company might not make future models fully open.
The gap between “best proprietary model” and “best open model” used to be massive—and in America’s favor. That gap is now very small, and the open side of the ledger is increasingly Chinese.
Incredible graph. In just one year, China completely overtook the U.S. in free AI models.
Not a single U.S. model in the top 5 today when last year the top 3 were all American. pic.twitter.com/34ErpBv8rg
There’s also a hardware threat underneath all of this. A new DeepSeek model is widely expected to drop soon, and it’s rumored to have been trained entirely on chips made by Huawei—a sanctioned Chinese company. If that’s confirmed, then it would give developers around the world, particularly in China, a concrete reason to start testing Huawei’s hardware. China’s Ziphu AI is already doing that.
That’s the scenario Nvidia most needs to prevent: Chinese open models and Chinese chips building an ecosystem that doesn’t need Nvidia at all.
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Tether’s investment arm has invested in Ark Labs, the developer of the programmable Bitcoin infrastructure Arkade, as part of a $5.2 million funding round to expand stablecoin capabilities on the Bitcoin network.
According to Thursday’s announcement from Ark Labs, the investment is intended to support infrastructure that enables stablecoins such as USDT (USDT) to be issued, transferred and settled more efficiently on Bitcoin (BTC).
The Lugano, Switzerland-based startup is developing an execution layer designed to support instant and programmable transactions on Bitcoin. The funding round brings the company’s total funding to $7.7 million.
Other investors in the seed round include Sats Ventures and Contribution Capital, with participation from Anchorage Digital. Specifics on the sizes of the various stakes were not disclosed.
Currently, Bitcoin does not appear among chains hosting stablecoins, as per data from DefiLlama, which shows about $161 billion in stablecoins on Ethereum (ETH) and about $86 billion on Tron (TRX) out of a total stablecoin market capitalization of around $315 billion.
Tether’s independent investment arm deploys capital from the company’s profits and reserves into companies building infrastructure around digital assets and related technologies. Its portfolio spans sectors including financial services, artificial intelligence, energy and digital media.
Arkade is intended to give developers and institutions the ability to build applications such as payments and financial services on Bitcoin by enabling more complex transaction logic than the base layer currently supports.
The investment comes about a week after Tether, the issuer of USDT, the largest stablecoin by market capitalization, led a $50 million investment round in sleep technology company Eight Sleep aimed at supporting the integration of artificial intelligence agents into its products.
Related: Bitcoin catching up to gold hints at an ‘opportunity within risk’
Companies expand financial infrastructure on Bitcoin
While Bitcoin is not traditionally known for supporting complex financial applications, a growing number of companies are building infrastructure aimed at expanding Bitcoin’s use beyond simple transfers into payments and financial applications.
In 2023, Bitcoin infrastructure company Lightning Labs released the mainnet alpha of Taproot Assets, a protocol designed to enable stablecoins and other assets to be issued on Bitcoin and transferred over the Lightning Network.
Other initiatives include Rootstock, a smart contract platform secured through merged mining with Bitcoin that supports decentralized finance (DeFi) applications tied to the network.
Institutional players have also begun integrating Bitcoin-based financial layers. In February, crypto custody provider Fireblocks said it would integrate the Stacks blockchain, a decentralized finance layer for Bitcoin, to give institutional clients access to lending and yield opportunities tied to Bitcoin-based DeFi.
In March, Bitcoin staking infrastructure developer Babylon Labs said it would work with Ledger, a hardware wallet maker, to enable users to lock Bitcoin into programmable vaults while maintaining self-custody of their assets.
Magazine: All 21 million Bitcoin is at risk from quantum computers
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Bitcoin saw heightened volatility on Thursday, as investors reacted to a U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) report showing a 2.4% inflation rate for February. The leading cryptocurrency initially retreated from $70,800 to an intraday floor of $69,264; however, it successfully recouped those losses in a midday rally. Bitcoin Consolidation Following CPI Data Bitcoin ( BTC) […]
According to ResearchAndMarkets’ recent forecasts, Chinese outbound travel is predicted to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 13.5%, increasing from $140B today to reach $386B by 2033. UnionPay International helps cardholders to easily make cross-border payments in 183 markets and its payment methods are particularly popular with travelers across Asia Pacific.
That’s why being able to directly accept UnionPay cards is crucial for airlines serving travelers from the 85 countries and regions where UnionPay cards are issued.
Under the terms of a new partnership between Outpayce from Amadeus and UnionPay International, airlines that power online payments in their direct channels with Outpayce’s Xchange Payments Platform can natively accept UnionPay cards in the standardized way. This native acceptance secures more revenue for airlines while improving the payment experience for travelers by drastically increasing acceptance rates.
The Amadeus Travel Platform is a comprehensive marketplace connecting travel providers like airlines, hotels, car rentals and rail operators to more than 60,000 travel sellers so they can combine and retail attractive offers. Thanks to the new partnership, travelers wishing to pay with a UnionPay card can be passed through to the provider to pay directly when making a booking.
The new approach means travelers can access the same payments experience as an airline offers on its website, including access to loyalty benefits that depend on making payment directly with the airline.
By directly processing the payment, airlines improve cash flow by accessing funds faster and can also take control of the payments experience for indirect bookings. By applying their own approach to issues like fraud management, airlines can improve acceptance rates and deliver a better overall experience.
Bomme Sheng, Global Director of UnionPay International said: “UnionPay has established a solid presence in the airline payment vertical. By deepening cooperation with Amadeus, UnionPay cards will be fully integrated into the underlying technology of airline distribution, covering websites, and indirect channels. This will further refine UnionPay’s air travel payment ecosystem and promote the industry to upgrade towards greater efficiency and diversity.”
Damian Alonso, Head of Product and Partnerships, Outpayce said: “We are committed to enabling a smooth payment experience in every channel however the traveler chooses to pay. Our payment platform approach means travelers can pay with the method of their choice in a way that’s easy and trusted. Airlines can now offer the same payments experience to UnionPay cardholders whether they are shopping via Amadeus travel sellers or in their own direct channels, maximizing investments in payments and improving the overall experience.”
The addition of card acceptance for UnionPay means that travelers can pay travel providers directly with all major card schemes when their booking is completed via the Amadeus Travel Platform. Native acceptance of UnionPay cards via the Outpayce Xchange Payments Platform is expected to be enabled in H1 2026 and will be enabled gradually across different markets throughout 2026 within the Amadeus Travel Platform.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) is urging Congress to broaden proposed de minimis tax relief for digital assets beyond payment stablecoins to include bitcoin and other major network tokens.
Under current law, bitcoin is treated as property, which means every purchase with the asset triggers a capital gains calculation, regardless of transaction size.
BPI argues that this framework discourages routine payments, such as buying coffee or sending small remittances, because users must track cost basis and report minor gains and losses.
Lawmakers have worked on several approaches in the 119th Congress. Senator Cynthia Lummis introduced a standalone bill that would create a 300 dollar per‑transaction threshold with a 5,000 dollar annual cap and address mining and staking taxation.
House members Max Miller and Steven Horsford floated a discussion draft tied to the PARITY Act that would apply a narrower exemption to regulated payment stablecoins and target a 200 dollar threshold consistent with foreign currency rules.
BPI describes that shift toward a “stablecoin‑only” de minimis model as a significant departure from earlier bipartisan efforts to cover a broader range of digital assets.
The group contends that limiting relief to stablecoins would leave most bitcoin payments subject to full reporting obligations while also failing to account for the fact that stablecoin transactions rely on separate network tokens for transaction fees, which remain taxable events.
In response, BPI has led a coalition letter to key tax writers and mounted an outreach campaign on Capitol Hill, meeting with 19 congressional offices across both chambers over the past three months.
The organization is pressing for a value‑based exemption that would apply to both GENIUS‑compliant payment stablecoins and large‑cap network tokens, potentially up to 600 dollars per transaction with an annual cap near 20,000 dollars.
BPI warns that with midterm politics approaching and Senator Lummis set to leave the Senate in January 2027, the window for comprehensive digital asset tax reform may close if Congress does not advance a package before an expected legislative push in August 2026.
Coinbase rejects claims they opposed Bitcoin tax relief
All this comes as Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad and CEO Brian Armstrong recently denied allegations that the exchange lobbied against the proposed de minimis tax exemption for Bitcoin, responding on X to claims made by Bitcoin podcaster Marty Bent.
Shirzad called the accusation “a total lie,” stating the company had never and would never lobby against Bitcoin.
The denial followed Bent’s March 11 report alleging Coinbase had told lawmakers the exemption was unnecessary because Bitcoin was not widely used as money.
According to Bent, the company argued that a de minimis exemption would amount to a “handout” unlikely to pass and was instead advocating for stablecoin-focused tax treatment that could benefit its own business model. Bent later said he had three sources supporting the claim.
Armstrong rejected the allegation, calling the rumor “totally false” after being publicly asked for clarification by Jack Dorsey of Block Inc..
Executives at Coinbase have denied allegations that the crypto exchange is blocking a de minimis tax exemption for Bitcoin (BTC) transactions below a certain threshold to push for stablecoin tax exemptions.
Several Bitcoin advocates speculated on social media that the exchange told US lawmakers that a BTC tax exemption is not needed because BTC is not widely used as a medium of exchange.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong responded by calling the allegations “totally false” and a form of misinformation.
“I’ve spent a bunch of time lobbying for Bitcoin’s de minimis tax exemption, and will continue doing so. It’s obviously the right thing,” he said.
Source: Brian Armstrong
In separate posts, Paul Grewal, chief legal officer at Coinbase, said, “We’ve never lobbied against BTC,” while Faryar Shirzad, the crypto exchange’s chief policy officer, echoed the statement.
Cointelegraph reached out to Coinbase, but the company declined to comment beyond the responses made by its executives.
Tax policy is one of the main impediments to Bitcoin’s use as a payment method, according to advocates for the biggest crypto, as every sale or transfer would trigger a taxable event, prohibiting its use as an electronic cash system.
BTC advocates and pro-crypto lawmakers push for BTC tax exemption
In July 2025, US Senator Cynthia Lummis introduced a bill proposing a de minimis tax exemption for cryptocurrency transactions of $300 or less, with a $5,000 annual exemption cap.
However, the bill failed to gain traction, and the de minimis exemption for BTC transactions is not included in the CLARITY Act draft legislation, according to advocacy group the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
Instead, the tax exemption will apply only to US dollar-pegged stablecoins, according to Conner Brown, the managing director for the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
Washington, DC-based crypto advocacy group Blockchain Association also outlined a crypto tax proposal and submitted the plan to US lawmakers in February.
The crypto tax policy proposal from the Blockchain Association. Source: Blockchain Association
The proposal called for exemptions on “low-dollar” crypto transactions, but did not specify a dollar amount.
“A meaningful de minimis exemption for digital asset transactions would eliminate disproportionately onerous reporting for individual taxpayers,” the proposal said.
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