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Even as spot prices of major cryptos have been lacklustre of late, the web3 world is still churning out major developments.
Here's a quick snapshot to help you catch up:
1) Hyperliquid has launched the Hyperliquid Policy Center in Washington, D.C., led by crypto lawyer Jake Chervinsky, to push a clearer U.S. regulatory path for DeFi.
A key focus is building a legal framework for perpetual derivatives, a major global crypto product still largely shut out of U.S. markets.
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2) Canary Capital has listed the Canary Staked SUI ETF (SUIS) on Nasdaq, offering U.S. investors spot exposure to Sui’s native token through a regulated ETF.
The fund is designed to track SUI’s price while participating in the network’s proof-of-stake process, with net staking rewards incorporated into the ETF’s NAV.
The listing adds to the growing range of crypto ETFs moving beyond BTC and ETH. It also comes as Grayscale’s Sui Staking ETF (GSUI) begins trading on NYSE Arca.
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3) BlackRock has taken a significant step toward launching a yield-generating Ethereum fund in the US, according to an amended S-1 registration statement filed on Tuesday.
The iShares Staked Ethereum Trust, expected to trade as ETHB, was seeded with $100,000 and plans to stake the majority of its ether, typically 70% to 95%, with an estimated average staking yield of around 3% based on early 2026 benchmarks, not guaranteed.
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4) Zora, a crypto social platform closely associated with Ethereum layer-2 Base, announced that it is launching a new product on Solana called "Attention Markets".
The feature lets users speculate on which topics, memes and narratives will gain traction online, effectively enabling SocialFi traders to take long or short exposure to social-media virality.
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5) ZCash Open Development Lab, or ZODL, has announced a new chapter for the ZCash project’s development, with the former Electric Coin Company team continuing its work under a revamped structure.
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6) Wintermute announced the launch of institutional OTC execution for tokenised gold, offering PAXG and XAUT trading versus USDT, USDC, fiat and major crypto assets.
The firm says demand is rising as gold hovers near record highs, with tokenised rails enabling 24/7 liquidity, faster settlement, real-time hedging and more flexible collateral use.
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7) deBridge announced that it has launched a Model Context Protocol server, enabling AI agents and developer tools such as Claude, Cursor and Copilot to execute swaps, bridging and multi-step onchain flows across EVM chains and Solana.
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8) Solana DAT Company (NASDAQ: HSDT)'s share prices jumped about 14.5% last Friday (Feb 13) after the firm announced a new structure that lets institutions borrow against natively staked SOL while keeping the assets in custody.
The Nasdaq-listed company partnered with Anchorage Digital and Solana lending protocol Kamino to enable loans backed by SOL that remain staked and held in segregated custody accounts at Anchorage, allowing holders to unlock liquidity without unstaking or selling and while still earning staking rewards.
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9) Pressure on Trump-linked crypto firm World Liberty Financial is escalating as members of the Senate Banking Committee, Elizabeth Warren and Andy Kim have asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to assess whether the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) should review a reported 49% stake in WLF held by a UAE-backed entity, setting a March 5 deadline for a response.
Their request follows a separate House inquiry led by Rep. Ro Khanna, intensifying congressional scrutiny of the venture and its foreign ties.
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10) Aave, a major DeFi lending protocol, has proposed the “Aave Will Win” framework to align the ecosystem around a token-first model that routes 100% of Aave-branded product revenue into the Aave DAO treasury (the community-controlled pool of funds).
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11) At Injective, a new programme has been launched to buy back and burn INJ tokens.
The INJ Community BuyBack is gaining traction, combining accelerated token burns with a revenue-share mechanism for eligible participants.
Users commit INJ onchain, receive a pro-rata share of ecosystem revenue, and the committed tokens are permanently burned.
More than 6.9M INJ has been burned to date, with the initiative designed to further increase burn.
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12) UK Treasury has selected HSBC Orion, a strategic platform for asset tokenisation, as the platform provider for its Digital Gilt Instrument (DIGIT) pilot, a programme testing the issuance of a digitally native, short-dated gilt using distributed ledger technology within the UK’s Digital Securities Sandbox, according to their press release today.
The pilot is designed to assess how tokenised sovereign debt could improve market infrastructure, including faster settlement and more efficient post-trade processes, while remaining separate from the government’s core debt management programme.
The Treasury is also engaging additional suppliers to support delivery of the required functionality, including on-chain settlement.
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13) Coinbase has launched Agentic Wallets, a wallet infrastructure built for autonomous AI agents, allowing bots to hold funds, send payments, trade, and transact on-chain within user-defined controls and limits.
The product builds on Coinbase’s x402 protocol for automated crypto payments and complements its earlier AgentKit by offering a plug-and-play way to “give any agent a wallet.”
Decentralised perp exchange Aster is preparing to launch the Aster Chain mainnet in March as part of its 2026 roadmap.
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14) Aster Chain is intended to strengthen its on-chain infrastructure, offering dedicated support for its products, builder tools, and integrated fiat on- and off-ramps, following a testnet phase that drew more than 50,000 participants.
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ESP is the native token of Espresso Network, launched as part of the project’s transition toward a permissionless proof-of-stake blockchain designed specifically to serve Ethereum rollups.
Espresso is positioned as infrastructure for the rollup ecosystem: rather than competing as an execution layer, it focuses on improving how Ethereum layer-2 networks coordinate, share security, and interoperate. Its core function is to provide fast, decentralised confirmations and transaction ordering that multiple rollups can rely on, helping reduce dependence on centralised sequencers and enabling smoother cross-rollup composability.
A central part of Espresso’s value proposition is faster finality for rollups: through its PoS validator set and HotShot BFT consensus, it can provide rollups with confirmations within seconds, rather than waiting for Ethereum’s 12+ minute finality.
At launch, Espresso Network set the total supply at 3.59B ESP and allocated 10% of this supply to a fully unlocked community airdrop. The airdrop was intended to reward early ecosystem participants and users of Espresso-integrated rollups, broaden token ownership, and decentralise governance from the outset.
It targeted over 1M eligible addresses and applied anti-Sybil checks to limit farming and wallet-splitting. These checks are designed to identify and filter clusters of wallets controlled by the same entity to prevent a single participant from claiming multiple allocations through duplicate or coordinated accounts. Beyond the community airdrop, the remaining supply was allocated to contributors and investors with multi-year vesting schedules, as well as to future airdrops, grants, ecosystem incentives, and foundation operations.
The Espresso Foundation also introduced a “Holder Score” framework. This model evaluates user engagement across more than 30 qualifying activities and prioritises sustained participation - particularly longer-term holding and staking - over short-term speculative behaviour. The objective is to mitigate typical launch volatility and encourage a more stable, conviction-driven ownership base that supports network security and ecosystem growth over time.
Espresso reported that it was finalising rollup blocks in roughly six seconds on average, compared with Ethereum’s 12-minute-plus finality window, and argued this gap had become a structural bottleneck as applications and liquidity spread across multiple rollups rather than remaining concentrated on a single chain.
Bybit converted the ESPUSDT Pre-Market Perpetual Contract into a standard perpetual contract on 12 Feb 2026, after which users could trade ESPUSDT with up to 50x leverage.