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Circle (CRCL) shares continued their rally on Monday

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Circle (CRCL) shares continued their rally on Monday

Already on a tear ahead of the war in Iran, Circle (CRCL) might be an unlikely beneficiary of the conflict.

The stock rose 10% on Monday, outperforming other crypto-linked equities, with the shares now up by 86% over the past month, though they remain sharply lower since their peak post-IPO frenzy last summer.

Japanese bank Mizuho said part of the Circle rally reflects the jump in oil prices following the escalation in Middle East tensions. Higher crude prices could reignite inflationary pressures, potentially reducing expectations for Federal Reserve rate cuts.

Indeed, oil prices have surged since hostilities erupted in the Gulf, with WTI crude up roughly 35% since Feb. 28. Higher energy prices tend to fuel inflation and can limit central banks’ ability to cut interest rates.

Positioning has surely played a role as well.

While the company reported solid growth in USDC supply in its fourth-quarter earnings, analysts say the magnitude of the move likely reflected a crowded short trade ahead of the release.

“The magnitude of the move wasn’t purely about the headline numbers. Positioning was the real catalyst,” said Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research.

According to his data, hedge funds had accumulated sizable bearish bets ahead of the report. That setup created what Thielen described as a “high-probability short squeeze rather than a fundamental re-rating.”

Short interest currently stands at about 13% of the float, equivalent to roughly two days to cover, according to FactSet data.

Read more: Circle moves $68 million in just 30 minutes by using its own stablecoin for internal payments

The U.S. Fintech Market Is Heating Up Again

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The U.S. Fintech Market Is Heating Up Again

New York correspondent Amrit Kang reports on the third phase of the U.S. fintech evolution, where the industry has traded “vanity metrics” for a ruthless focus on profitability, infrastructure, and AI-driven efficiency.

Q1 isn’t even over and the U.S. fintech market is already signalling renewed momentum. After two years of valuation compression and cautious capital deployment, deal activity is picking up a sign that investors are re-entering the market selectively, backing profitability over pure growth. The reset phase appears to be evolving into a recalibration phase.

Old Is Gold… But Can It Be Sold?

The payments narrative this week was dominated by two giants: Stripe and PayPal. Stripe’s annual letter highlighted a major profitability inflection. The company processed over $1trillion in total payment volume in 2023, placing it among the largest financial infrastructure providers globally. It has quietly evolved from a

developer-friendly API into core commerce infrastructure powering millions of businesses.

PayPal, by contrast, has been navigating margin pressure and slowing growth. During the pandemic, digital payments surged as e-commerce penetration jumped years ahead of forecasts. But as consumer behaviour normalized, so did PayPal’s growth curve. Revenue growth has decelerated materially from pandemic highs, and operating margins have been under pressure amid competition from wallets, BNPL players, and embedded finance providers. Under CEO Alex Chriss, PayPal is in turnaround mode refocusing on branded

checkout, Venmo monetization, and margin expansion.

So, the provocative question:

Could the “new” payments leader acquire the “old” one?

It sounds unlikely at first glance but strategically, it isn’t irrational.

  • Stripe gains instant consumer wallet scale and 400M+ active accounts.
  • PayPal gains world-class developer infrastructure.
  • Consolidation would reshape the global payments hierarchy overnight.

Regulatory hurdles would be enormous, but the broader point stands: payments are

maturing, and scale + profitability now matter more than growth-at-all-costs.

 

The era of vanity metrics is over.

Stablecoins: Momentum Without Infrastructure?

Stablecoin adoption continues to expand, but institutional integration remains the

gating factor.

The global stablecoin market cap hovers around $130B+, dominated by players like

Tether and Circle. Daily settlement volumes frequently rival traditional payment

networks in raw throughput.

  • Bank distribution
  • Clear U.S. regulatory frameworks
  • Institutional custody integration

Stablecoins remain powerful but incomplete.

And then there’s Meta.

After the high-profile collapse of its Diem project, signals suggest the company is again exploring digital currency rails for global payments use cases. If Big Tech re- enters the stablecoin arena this time aligned with regulatory guidance it could dramatically accelerate mainstream adoption.

But the lesson from the first wave is clear: Stablecoins cannot scale without banks.

What the Block?

The week’s boldest headline came from Block and its founder Jack Dorsey.

Dorsey announced significant workforce reductions while positioning the company as becoming an “intelligence-driven” organization. The framing was striking:

  • Profitability focus
  • Speed over bureaucracy
  • AI integration at core

Markets reacted immediately shares surged over 20% following the announcement.

This is part of a broader fintech shift:

From: Growth + hiring

To: Efficiency + automation

From: Headcount scaling

To: AI-leveraged productivity

Fintechs across lending, payments, and infrastructure are quietly trimming costs but Block’s messaging was uniquely aggressive. It signals confidence that AI can meaningfully replace operational layers while preserving output.

The reward? Margin expansion and operating leverage in a slower-growth environment.

The Bigger Picture

We’re witnessing three simultaneous transitions in U.S. fintech:

1. Profitability over growth

2. Infrastructure over hype

The pandemic boom was phase one.

The correction was phase two.

This may be phase three disciplined scale.

The question isn’t whether fintech will grow.

It’s who emerges stronger in the next cycle.

  • Amrit Kang

    Amrit Kang is Vice President, and a key player in strengthening the fintech bridge between London and New York City. Through her role at London & Partners, London’s growth agency, she has supported more than 200 tech companies on their international expansion journeys, helping founders navigate new markets, access clients and investors, and scale globally.

    With over 15 years of experience working with tech start-ups and scale-ups worldwide, Amrit brings deep expertise across fintech, venture capital, and financial services. Having lived and worked in both London and New York, she offers a unique transatlantic perspective and works closely with financial institutions, investors, and innovation leaders to connect them with high-growth, innovative companies.

    Amrit is widely recognized for her impact on the fintech ecosystem and has been named an Inspiring Fintech Female by the Women’s FinTech Network. She is a regular speaker at industry conferences and events, where she shares insights on emerging fintech trends and the sub-sectors attracting venture capital investment. She also leads an all-female team, actively supporting the development and confidence of women in financial services.

    Prior to her work in fintech, Amrit studied and practiced criminal defense law, developing strong analytical and problem-solving skills. She has also founded and successfully sold her own business, giving her first-hand experience of the entrepreneurial journey.

    An active member of New York’s fintech community, Amrit is known for her collaborative approach and willingness to share her network and expertise to support founders and innovators.

    View all posts


    New York Corespondant

Hyperliquid price to $150? Arthur Hayes makes bold prediction for HYPE token – DL News

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Hyperliquid price to $150? Arthur Hayes makes bold prediction for HYPE token – DL News

  • Hyperliquid rose on Monday after Arthur Hayes predicted it would hit $150 by August.
  • But he’s known for making bold predictions, only to quickly reverse course.
  • Last year, his office sold Hyperliquid just one month after predicting its fees were set to grow more than 100-fold.

Maelstrom, the family office of crypto investor and influencer Arthur Hayes, has amassed a large position in Hyperliquid just months after warning the exchange was overvalued.

Hyperliquid’s HYPE token is now the fund’s largest non-Bitcoin position, Hayes said in a lengthy newsletter post on Monday.

It would pay off handsomely if Hayes’ forecast comes to pass: He predicts that HYPE tokens will hit $150 by August, a fivefold increase from their Monday price. He cited Hyperliquid’s aggressive buyback programme, the rapid growth of its permissionless markets, and the end of competitors’ incentive campaigns.

HYPE has soared more than 9% since Hayes’ comments were published.

The surge can also be attributed to traders rushing in to trade tokenised oil perpetuals on the decentralised exchange over the weekend amid the escalating conflict in the Middle East.

More than $160 million in oil contract volume changed hands on Hyperliquid in the past 24 hours.

“Pandora’s box is open,” Hyunsu Jung, CEO of Hyperliquid treasury firm Hyperion DeFi, told DL News. “The narrative around onchain financial services is changing.”

History of predictions

Hayes is and influential trader. But the BitMEX founder is known for making bold predictions, only to quickly reverse course.

Last year, he predicted Hyperliquid’s annualised fees would grow more than 100-fold by 2028, to $258 billion. A month later, a Maelstrom colleague published a report arguing HYPE would take a hit as its creators began selling previously locked tokens, and the fund sold some $5 million in HYPE.

Since then, HYPE has fallen from about $45 per token. It hit an eight-month low of $20 at the end of January, but has since recovered to about $34.

While Bitcoin continues to trade below $70,000 — far from the all-time high it hit last year — exchanges such as Hyperliquid can see profits rise even during downturns, Hayes argued. That’s because a downswing in prices can lead to increased trading and, in turn, exchange revenue.

Moreover, Hyperliquid spends roughly 97% of its revenue on buying back its token.

“No other project in all of crypto hands as much money back to token holders as Hyperliquid,” Hayes wrote.

His $150 price target requires Hyperliquid to grow its 30-day, annualised revenue to $1.4 billion, a figure it hit last August. Hayes says that is possible if the outsize growth of Hyperliquid’s permissionless markets, introduced in October, continues over the next several months.

“Hyperliquid must give traders something new and shiny to trade on-chain,” he wrote.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

Mastercard and Google Team Up to Build Trust for AI-Powered Shopping

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Mastercard and Google Team Up to Build Trust for AI-Powered Shopping

Verifiable Intent creates a tamper-resistant, cryptographic record of what a user authorized when an AI agent acts on their behalf.

Mastercard has unveiled Verifiable Intent, a new open, standards-based trust framework co-developed with Google, designed specifically for “agentic commerce” — a world where artificial intelligence (AI) systems don’t just assist shoppers, but actively plan, decide, and complete purchases autonomously.

The core problem Verifiable Intent aims to solve is visibility: when a consumer delegates a purchase to an AI agent, the clear “click buy” or “tap to pay” moment that traditionally signals intent disappears. Mastercard’s Chief Digital Officer Pablo Fourez argues that this creates a new challenge for every party involved — consumers need assurance their instructions were followed, merchants need confirmation an agent is authorized to buy, and issuers need to distinguish legitimate activity from fraud.

To address this, Verifiable Intent creates a tamper-resistant, cryptographic record of what a user authorized when an AI agent acts on their behalf — linking identity, intent, and action into a single, privacy-preserving audit trail.

The framework uses Selective Disclosure, a privacy control technique, to ensure that only the minimum necessary information is shared between parties and only when needed, allowing merchants and issuers to verify transactions without access to sensitive consumer data.

It leverages widely adopted standards from the FIDO Alliance, EMVCo, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the World Wide Web Consortium, and is designed to work across agentic protocols, devices, wallets, and platforms. Mastercard says Verifiable Intent will be integrated into its Agent Pay APIs in the coming months.

Crypto Rails Join the Fray

Not everyone sees traditional payment networks as the right foundation for AI-driven commerce, however, highlighting a growing debate about whether AI agents will ultimately transact through incumbent networks like Mastercard or bypass them entirely in favor of crypto-native infrastructure.

“Very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions. They can’t open a bank account, but they can own a crypto wallet. Think about it,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted on X today.

In September, EigenCloud, Ethereum’s largest restaking protocol with nearly $9 billion in total value locked, announced a partnership with Google Cloud to serve as the verifiable backbone for AI agent payments.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation launched a dedicated AI initiative called the dAI Team, with a stated mission to make Ethereum the preferred settlement and coordination layer for the emerging “machine economy.”

The following month, attention turned to x402 protocols, which enable AI agent payment systems and increase the practicality of agentic AI-led finance.

Taken together, these developments paint a picture of an industry racing to solve the same core problem from two very different directions. Mastercard and traditional finance are building trust layers on top of existing payment rails, while crypto proponents are betting that blockchain infrastructure is better suited to a world where AI agents are first-class economic actors.

Wyoming Senator Revives Crypto Tax Exemption Debate

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Wyoming Senator Revives Crypto Tax Exemption Debate

Cynthia Lummis, one of Wyoming’s two US senators, who announced plans to leave the chamber in 2027, has revived a push for a de minimis tax exclusion on small cryptocurrencies transactions as the Senate debates a digital asset market structure bill.

In a CNBC interview on Wednesday, Lummis said that the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee were considering a $300 exemption to allow crypto users to better use Bitcoin (BTC) for transactions without paying capital gains taxes.

The Wyoming senator’s statement followed her introduction of a standalone bill in July 2025 proposing a de minimis tax exemption for crypto transactions under $300, with a $5,000 limit annually.

“We’re trying to figure out how to weigh, the appropriate way, to decide when a sale — for example of Bitcoin — should be subject to capital gains and when it should be allowed to be used as a simple means of exchange the same way we use the US dollar,” said Lummis.

Source: Cynthia Lummis

Lummis, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, said that her Democrat colleagues were still not voting “yes” on the crypto market structure bill, which passed the House of Representatives as the CLARITY Act in July 2025.

The committee had been scheduled for a markup on the bill in January, but the chair, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, postponed the meeting indefinitely after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that the exchange could not support the legislation “as written,” citing concerns with tokenized equities.

Related: Crypto turnaround at Fed as Kraken scores account and Trump nominee goes to Senate

The Wyoming senator has been one of the most outspoken proponents for the market structure bill in Congress. However, Lummis announced in December that she would not seek reelection to the Senate, making her last day in January 2027.

Donald Trump gets deeper into crypto-banking clash on stablecoins

Concerns over the market structure bill, ranging from tokenized equities, responsibilities for US financial regulators, ethics over potential conflicts of interest, and stablecoin yield have effectively stalled progress of the legislation in the Senate.

However, last week US President Donald Trump took to social media to urge banking groups to “make a good deal” with the crypto industry, adding that banks could not hold the CLARITY Act “hostage.” As of Monday, the Senate Banking Committee had not rescheduled its markup of the bill.

Magazine: The debate over Bitcoin’s four-year cycle is over: Benjamin Cowen