Category: Business

Stablecoin velocity has now doubled in the past two years, with coins changing hands an average of six times per month, Standard Chartered flagged in a note Tuesday morning.

That’s prompted the bank to revisit a key assumption behind its stablecoin market forecast. Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at the bank, said that’s out of sync with the bank’s longstanding forecast. Standard Chartered has predicted that the stablecoin market will reach $2 trillion in total market cap by the end of 2028—and it was premised on velocity remaining stable.

Higher velocity, in theory, means fewer coins are needed to support the same volume of transactions, Kendrick wrote. But he stands by the $2 trillion forecast for 2028.

“The good news is that these new use cases are, so far, additive to overall stablecoin transactions. Furthermore, the higher velocity of these use cases has not impacted the low-velocity [emerging markets] savings use case,” he wrote.

Kendrick found that it’s USDC that has driven new use cases for stablecoins. The Circle-issued token, which accounts for roughly 25% of the market, began decoupling from Tether’s USDT in mid-2024 as it started displacing traditional banking rails—a trend that accelerated after the GENIUS Act established a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins last summer.

Then, starting in October 2025, USDC velocity on Solana and Base surged sharply. Kendrick attributes that second leg to early AI agent payments via x402, an open-source payment protocol developed by Coinbase. Those volumes have since pulled back, the bank notes, suggesting the initial surge may have been transient.

“As a result, our $2 trillion market estimate for end of 2028 remains intact,” Kendrick wrote, “but we will watch stablecoin velocity more closely going forward, as we think it is a key input.”

He added that USDT’s velocity, dominated by lower-turnover emerging-market savings, has remained comparatively stable. The two market leaders, the note argues, have diverged by use case: emerging market savings for USDT, TradFi replacement for USDC.

Anthropic didn’t mean to open-source Claude Code. But on Tuesday, the company effectively did—and not even an army of lawyers can put that toothpaste back in the tube.

It started with a single file. Claude Code version 2.1.88, pushed to the npm registry in the early hours of Tuesday morning, shipped with a 59.8MB JavaScript source map—a debug file that can reconstruct the original code from its compressed form. These files are generated automatically and are supposed to stay private. But a single line in the ignore settings let it go out with the release.

Intern and researcher Chaofan Shou, who appears to be among the first to spot the file, posted a download link to X around 4:23 a.m. ET, and watched 16 million people descend on the thread. Anthropic yanked the npm package, but the internet had already archived 512,000 lines of code across 1,900 different files that make up a major part of the project.

“Earlier today, a Claude Code release included some internal source code. No sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Decrypt. “This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. We’re rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again.”

The leak exposed the full internal architecture of what is arguably one of, if not the most sophisticated AI coding agent on the market: LLM API orchestration, multi-agent coordination, permission logic, OAuth flows, and 44 hidden feature flags covering unreleased functionality.

Among the finds: Kairos, an always-on background daemon that stores memory logs and performs nightly “dreaming” to consolidate knowledge. And Buddy, a Tamagotchi-style AI pet with 18 species, rarity tiers, and stats including debugging, patience, chaos, and wisdom. There’s a teaser rollout for this “Buddy” apparently planned for April 1-7.

Then there’s the detail that made everyone on Hacker News cackle. Per leaker Kuberwastaken, buried inside the code was “Undercover Mode”—a whole subsystem designed to prevent the AI from accidentally leaking Anthropic’s internal codenames and project names when contributing to open-source repositories. The system prompt injected into Claude’s context literally says: “Do not blow your cover.”

Apparently, Anthropic began issuing DMCA takedowns against GitHub mirrors. That’s when things got interesting.

A Korean developer named Sigrid Jin—featured in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month for having consumed 25 billion Claude Code tokens—woke up at 4 a.m. to the news. He sat down, ported the core architecture to Python from scratch using an AI orchestration tool called oh-my-codex, and pushed claw-code before sunrise. The repo hit 30,000 GitHub stars faster than any repository in history.

It’s basically a translation of all the code from the original language to Python, so technically not the same thing, right? We’ll leave that to lawyers and tech philosophers.

The legal logic here is sharp. Gergely Orosz, founder of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, argued in a post on X: “This is either brilliant or scary: Anthropic accidentally leaked the TS source code of Claude Code. Repos sharing the source are taken down with DMCA. BUT this repo rewrote the code using Python, and so it violates no copyright & cannot be taken down!”

It’s a clean-room rewrite. A new creative work. DMCA-proof by design.

The copyright angle gets thornier when considering the legal status of AI-generated work, and how muddy the criteria gets when lawyers have to rule whether or not it carries automatic copyright. The DC Circuit upheld that position in March 2025, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the challenge.

If significant chunks of Claude Code were written by Claude itself—which Anthropic’s own CEO has implied—then the legal standing of any copyright claim gets murkier by the day.

Decentralization adds another layer of permanence. The account @gitlawb mirrored the original code to Gitlawb, a decentralized git platform, with a simple message: “Will never be taken down.” The original remains accessible there. A separate repository has compiled all of Claude’s internal system prompts, which is something that prompt engineers and jailbreakers will appreciate as it gives more insights into the way Anthropic conditions its models.

This matters beyond the drama. DMCA takedowns work against centralized platforms. GitHub complies because it has to. Decentralized infrastructure—which powers Gitlawb, torrents, and cryptocurrency itself—doesn’t have the same single point of failure. When a company tries to pull something back from the internet, the only question is how many mirrors exist and on what kind of infrastructure. The answer here, within hours, was: enough.

Publicly traded Bitcoin treasury firm Nakamoto Holdings (NAKA) sold around $20 million worth of Bitcoin in an effort to improve its balance sheet and financial flexibility, but its stock fell to a fresh low early Tuesday following the late Monday announcement.

The firm reported a fourth quarter loss of $142.6 million in fair value of its digital assets amid Bitcoin’s downward slide, while also registering a $10.8 million investment loss thanks to its investment in another Bitcoin treasury firm, Metaplanet. 

“Nakamoto Holdings entered 2025 with the mandate to launch a public, Bitcoin-native enterprise and executed that vision through the merger with KindlyMD in August 2025,” said the firm’s CEO David Bailey, in a statement. 

“We established a robust Bitcoin treasury, built a scalable capital strategy, and, with the acquisitions of BTC Inc and UTXO, transitioned into a fully integrated Bitcoin operating business with the scale and infrastructure to drive sustained growth,” he added. 

The firm’s acquisitions, both completed in February, added to Nakamoto’s Bitcoin exposure, providing it a media and events firm in the Bitcoin ecosystem (BTC Inc) and public and private asset and capital management services via UTXO Management. Both companies had also been founded by Bailey.

Despite its Bitcoin sales, the firm ended the year with 5,342 Bitcoin in its treasury, valued around $359 million at the time of writing. At the end of the year, the firm was down around $166 million on its Bitcoin holdings, as the top crypto asset had fallen sharply from its October high of $126,080. 

With a reported weighted average purchase price of $118,171, it’s estimated that the firm is now down around $275 million on its Bitcoin holdings as BTC changes hands around $66,693 on Tuesday, 47% off its all-time high mark. 

“Our focus now is on strengthening our operating businesses, scaling revenue-generating initiatives, and building infrastructure for a unified Bitcoin company,” Nakamoto COO Amanda Fabiano said, in a statement. “By combining operating income with disciplined capital allocation, we aim to reinvest into growth initiatives and Bitcoin accumulation while strengthening Nakamoto over time.”

The firm, which raised more than $700 million to build a digital asset treasury focused on Bitcoin, is still focused on a long-term commitment to crypto’s largest asset but it has been subject to a volatile first year. 

While warning shareholders of some of that volatility amid its business transition and the unlocking of some shares, Bailey notably encouraged short-term investors in the business to sell their positions. 

“For those shareholders who have come looking for a trade, I encourage you to exit,” he wrote in a shareholder letter published in September. 

Shares of the firm are trading around 3.3% higher on Tuesday, recently changing hands around $0.217. That mark is down nearly 80% in the last six months. Earlier Tuesday, shares fell to $0.211, the firm’s lowest price to date.

Analysts at investment bank Benchmark initiated coverage of Cantor Equity Partners II on Tuesday, assigning a “Buy” rating to the firm that’s expected to merge later this year with Miami-based tokenization specialist Securitize.

The analysts described Securitize as “compelling pure-play investment on tokenization” that’s building a foundation for tomorrow’s capital markets through its end-to-end platform for digital representations of real-world assets like stocks and bonds. 

Benchmark analysts penciled in a $16 price target for Securitize, a projection that hinges on the firm’s ability to generate $178 million in sales by the end of next year. That involves widening its competitive moat through blue-chip partnerships, the analysts added. 

Benchmark’s assessment reflects an optimistic outlook for Securitize following a bevy of listings for crypto-related firms last year, amid tepid market conditions that have reportedly stalled similar moves among crypto-native firms like Kraken.

When Securitize signaled last October that it plans to debut on the Nasdaq via a merger with blank-check firm Cantor Equity Partners II (CEPT), the deal valued Securitize at $1.25 billion. On Tuesday, CEPT changed hands around $11, according to Yahoo Finance.

Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer has confidence in Securitize’s ability to hit that mark because there’s “a great deal of visibility with regard to the company’s future revenue streams,” including origination fees from companies tokenizing assets and recurring revenue from servicing costs.

“I think there’s a massive disruptive potential as it pertains to traditional finance and the ways in which capital markets have functioned up to this point,” he told Decrypt. “The concept here really is better and faster across the board, and I think it’s just a matter of time before the market begins to recognize the benefits both in terms of efficiency and settlement times.”

When Circle’s stock soared upon its Wall Street debut last year, analysts lauded the moment as indicative of investors’ growing interest in stablecoins. While dollar-pegged stablecoins have the potential to pressure payment incumbents, Palmer argued that the stakes are higher with Securitize because its platform effectively bypasses legacy clearing infrastructure like DTCC.

Last week, Securitize and the New York Stock Exchange said that they would collaborate on a platform for tokenized securities rooted in round-the-clock trading, underscoring efforts to modernize financial markets in line with the SEC’s vision for “Project Crypto.”

Some influential institutions are still warming up to tokenization, but BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has touted the technology publicly as the “next generation of markets” since 2022. Years later, the world’s largest asset manager led a $47 million strategic funding round in Securitize.

Benchmark analysts noted that Securitize’s platform already underpins BlackRock’s BUIDL, the industry’s largest tokenized money-market fund. Valued at $2.2 billion on Tuesday, the fund exists across eight networks, with a lion’s share issued on Ethereum and Solana.

Figure Technologies debuted on the Nasdaq last September. Although the company’s business focuses on turning Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOCs) into tokenized assets, Palmer noted that Securitize “is not focused on a particular vertical or industry.” As a result, the firm’s total addressable market could be defined as $300 trillion in real-world assets, he said.

“Securitize is really focused on providing the process behind tokenization, from origination through servicing, in a way that’s applicable to a breadth of industry vertices,” he said. “That’s one of the things that distinguishes it.”