Category: Business

Solana (SOL) Price Drops 5% Amid Dip in ETF Inflows
On Thursday, Solana ($SOL) fell by around 5%, declining to $86.83 with a market capitalization of $49.69 billion.

Indicators like the relative strength index are suggesting oversold conditions, but also show weak buying momentum.

Despite the drop in the cryptocurrency, Solana is showing strong network activity as it handles 44% of all cryptocurrency transactions globally, according to on-chain data shared by co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
On March 26, Solana ($SOL) price plunged by over 5%, following the downward trend in the crypto sector, forcing its value to drop from $91.81 to $86.54.

This downfall in the seventh biggest cryptocurrency was seen after dropping institutional investments in the cryptocurrency and the growing global tension.

Solana’s $SOL Plunges 5% as Price Falls Below $88

According to CoinMarketCap, Solana ($SOL) dropped by 5% in the latest 24-hour trading period and now trades at approximately $87.57. Its market capitalization is revolving around $52 billion with 24-hour trading volume exceeding $4 billion. This makes the latest candle drop in March 2026, where $SOL has lost ground after failing to hold above the $92 level.

$SOL is below its 50-day simple moving average near $90, and the 200-day average remains far higher at around $139, which confirms the longer-term downward trend. The relative strength index is revolving around 31, which shows oversold conditions but also shows weak buying momentum.

The MACD has turned negative, and the price action forms a bearish flag pattern on the daily chart. One of the major supports of the cryptocurrency is revolving at $85, while the next resistance revolves around $90 to $92. If it breaks above $92, it would spark a rally in the cryptocurrency.

A dip in recent ETF inflows is adding to the pressure. While spot $SOL ETFs have attracted nearly $1 billion in cumulative flows since their July 2025 launch, institutional buying slowed in early March, with many days of net outflows before a modest rebound. Year-to-date inflows reached $222 million by mid-March, but daily figures have stayed modest compared with earlier streaks. This drop is coming even while institutional investment remains visible through 13F filings.

One trader writes in the technical analysis on CoinMarketCap community, “Solana hit the short target today. Entry was around $91.70, and price dropped below $89 during the session, so the move played out as expected. Right now it’s trading near $91.6, still sitting in that $90–$92 area. With the previous high around $139, the structure doesn’t look very strong at the moment.”

“So far there’s no clear reclaim of $92, and price action still feels weak. In similar situations after large drawdowns, it’s common to see another move down rather than an immediate recovery. For now, it seems cautious below $92. Personally, I’d wait to see a clean reclaim and hold before considering any long,” the trader said.

826 million transactions in a single week.

44% of all crypto transactions globally. pic.twitter.com/5DxFKxU4km

— Forward Ind. | NASDAQ-$FWDI (@FWDind) March 26, 2026

Despite the drop in cryptocurrency, the Solana network is showing growth in its activity. The network is now handling over 44% cryptocurrency transactions globally, according to on-chain data shared by co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. This volume is outperforming any single competitor and shows the network’s position as the busiest blockchain for everyday transfers and decentralized applications.

On the Solaba, the stablecoin supply also crossed $17 billion, and real-world asset value hit an all-time high of around $1.85 billion.

Apart from this, there are major developments taking place. The Firedancer validator client is now fully live and has improved network reliability while cutting the risk of outages. The upcoming Alpenglow upgrade will reduce transaction finality to roughly 150 milliseconds, which makes Solana suitable for high-frequency use cases.
March 26, 2026
Australia Lays Groundwork for Tokenized Asset Markets After RBA Project
In brief

The RBA said tokenization is now a question of how, not if, as it outlined the next steps after its Project Acacia research program.

Regulators, including the RBA, ASIC, and AUSTRAC, are now coordinating on legal and regulatory frameworks for tokenised assets and settlement systems.

BTC Markets told Decrypt the move toward a longer-term sandbox and regulatory coordination could unlock institutional participation in tokenized markets.
Australia’s central bank is moving toward building the legal and market infrastructure needed for tokenized asset markets, as regulators begin coordinating on rules that could allow the products to trade at scale within the financial system.

In a speech on Tuesday, Reserve Bank of Australia Assistant Governor Brad Jones said the question was no longer whether tokenization had a future in Australia’s financial system, but how it would be implemented, following the conclusion of the bank’s Project Acacia research program into tokenized assets and money.

The RBA said it would work with other regulators and industry on a new digital market infrastructure sandbox to test tokenized assets, tokenized money, and settlement systems in a longer-term environment designed to support commercialization, rather than short-term pilot programs.

The central bank also confirmed it is coordinating with other agencies on the legal and regulatory framework for tokenized markets, including how tokenized assets are classified, how settlement finality works, and how new platforms would be licensed and supervised.

The push on tokenized markets comes as lawmakers move to bring crypto platforms and tokenized custody services under Australia’s financial-services regime, requiring firms that hold client tokens to obtain licenses and meet asset-safeguarding rules.

Industry participants say that regulatory coordination is the key step needed to move tokenized assets from pilot programs into real markets.

“Project Acacia represents a turning point,” Paul Stonham, chief commercial officer at Australian crypto exchange BTC Markets and a member of the project’s advisory group, told Decrypt.

“The RBA’s decision to move from exploratory pilots to a longer-term, stage-gated sandbox environment signals genuine institutional commitment to making tokenized finance work in Australia, not just studying it.”

Stonham said the most significant development was the coordination now underway between the RBA, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, and AUSTRAC to address legal and regulatory uncertainty that has limited institutional participation.

He said regulated digital asset exchanges are likely to play a central role in tokenized markets, arguing that tokenized assets will need to trade on transparent, centrally managed order books operated by licensed platforms to attract larger players.

The RBA said tokenization could improve efficiency and reduce risk in wholesale markets, particularly if tokenized assets and money can be settled on synchronized systems, and estimated the economic benefit to Australia could reach about $24 billion (US$16.6 billion) per year.

The bank also said further work would focus on settlement infrastructure, tokenized bank deposits, stablecoins, and the potential role of a wholesale central bank digital currency.

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March 26, 2026
Crypto Mining Company MARA Holdings Announces It Has Sold Bitcoin! Here Are the Details

US-based cryptocurrency mining company MARA Holdings has made a significant financial move in its balance sheet management. The company announced that it has entered into special agreements to repurchase $1 billion worth of convertible senior bonds. These transactions target bonds maturing in 2030 and 2031 with a 0% interest rate.

According to the announcement, MARA Holdings plans to repurchase bonds maturing in 2030 with a nominal value of approximately $367.5 million for approximately $322.9 million. Additionally, it was stated that bonds maturing in 2031 with a nominal value of $633.4 million will be repurchased for approximately $589.9 million.

The company announced that it sold a total of 15,133 Bitcoin between March 4 and March 25 to finance these transactions. It stated that approximately $1.1 billion in revenue was generated from these sales.

It was announced that the majority of the proceeds would be used for bond repurchase operations, with the remainder allocated to general corporate spending. J. Wood Capital Advisors acted as an advisor in this financial process.

Experts view MARA’s move as a strategic step to reduce its debt burden and strengthen its balance sheet. However, the company’s large-scale Bitcoin sale is also interpreted as a development that could create short-term pressure on the market.

*This is not investment advice.

March 26, 2026
CoinDesk 20 performance update: index falls 3.2% as all constituents trade lower

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 1985.11, down 3.2% (-65.39) since 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

None of the 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: CRO (-2.2%) and BTC (-2.2%).

Laggards: AAVE (-5.6%) and ADA (-4.8%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

March 26, 2026
Google Sets 2029 Deadline to Deal With Quantum Threat—Is It a Problem for Bitcoin?
In brief

Google publicly set a 2029 deadline to transition its systems to post-quantum cryptography.

Bitcoin faces long-term cryptographic risk as quantum breakthroughs compress security timelines.

Crypto must coordinate a slow, decentralized migration to quantum-resistant standards under external pressure.
Google is done treating quantum computing as a future problem. On Tuesday, the company published a formal timeline for transitioning its entire infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) by 2029—calling the move urgent and saying quantum frontiers “may be closer than they appear.”

“As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it’s our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline,” the blog reads. “Quantum computers will pose a significant threat to current cryptographic standards, and specifically to encryption and digital signature.”

The announcement, signed by Google VP of Security Engineering Heather Adkins and Senior Cryptography Engineer Sophie Schmieg, describes the 2029 target as a response to rapid advances in quantum hardware, error correction, and factoring resource estimates.

In plain English: The machines that could theoretically crack today’s encryption are getting real, faster than expected.

Google’s warning rests on two distinct threats. The first is already happening. So-called “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks allow bad actors to steal encrypted data today and sit on it, confident they’ll be able to unlock it once quantum computers are powerful enough. That threat is present-tense. The second is future-facing: digital signatures, the cryptographic foundation of authentication across the internet, will need to be replaced before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer—a CRQC—arrives.

To lead by example, Google announced that Android 17 will integrate post-quantum digital signature protection using ML-DSA, an algorithm recently standardized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The company is also pushing PQC across Google Cloud and internal communications systems.

The 2029 deadline is not arbitrary. IBM has its own roadmap targeting fault-tolerant quantum systems by the same year. As both companies race toward that threshold, 2025 marked a turning point in the field—when error correction breakthroughs, new processor architectures, and a Caltech result trapping over 6,000 atomic qubits at once shifted the conversation from “if” to “when.”

What does it mean for Bitcoin?

Bitcoin runs on elliptic curve cryptography (or ECDSA signatures), the same class of math that quantum computers—running what’s known as Shor’s algorithm—could eventually reverse-engineer. That means: Given your public key, a sufficiently powerful quantum machine could derive your private key.

Normal computers would take centuries to crack something like this. Quantum computers may take that problem and turn it into something solvable in practical time.

The exposure is larger than most people realize. According to Project Eleven, a cybersecurity and crypto-focused startup working on protecting crypto from future quantum computer attacks, over 6.8 million Bitcoin—over $470 billion worth—sits in addresses that are vulnerable to quantum attacks, including coins from Bitcoin’s earliest days. A separate estimate from Ark Invest and Unchained puts roughly 35% of the total Bitcoin supply in address types theoretically vulnerable to a future quantum attack.

Source: Project eleven

Google’s researchers recently found that cracking RSA encryption may require 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously estimated—a finding that compressed the security timeline for everything that relies on similar mathematical structures, Bitcoin included. Earlier estimates put the qubit count needed to crack Bitcoin at around 20 million. Researchers at Iceberg Quantum now suggest the number could fall to roughly 100,000.

Quantum computers have achieved almost a 10x growth in power in the last five years.

Source: Programming-Helper.com

So, should we all panic and sell our coins? Not really—but we should pay attention.

First of all, Google isn’t saying quantum computers will break cryptography by 2029. It’s simply saying it plans to be ready before they do.

Also, Bitcoin developers are not asleep at the wheel. BIP 360, a proposal introducing a quantum-resistant address format called Pay-to-Merkle-Root, was recently merged into Bitcoin’s formal improvement repository. It doesn’t activate anything—but it starts the clock on a serious overhaul.

Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Bitcoin custody firm Casa, believes that even if quantum computers remain years away from posing a real threat, upgrading Bitcoin’s protocol and migrating billions in user funds could take five to 10 years on its own.

“Right now, we’re several orders of magnitude away from having a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, at least as far as we know,” Loop told Decrypt earlier this year. “If innovation in quantum computing continues at a similar, fairly linear rate, it’s going to take many years—probably over a decade, maybe even several decades—before we get to that point.”

Bitcoin’s decentralized governance means no single team can flip a switch. Miners, wallet developers, exchanges, and millions of individual users would all need to move simultaneously.

Google can set a 2029 deadline because it controls its own infrastructure. Bitcoin cannot. And that asymmetry is exactly what makes Google’s announcement matter for crypto—not as a death sentence, but as a hard deadline the network didn’t set for itself and can’t afford to ignore.

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March 26, 2026
Google Shrinks AI Memory With No Accuracy Loss—But There’s a Catch
In brief

Google said its TurboQuant algorithm can cut a major AI memory bottleneck by at least sixfold with no accuracy loss during inference.

Memory stocks including Micron, Western Digital and Seagate fell after the paper circulated.

The method compresses inference memory, not model weights, and has only been tested in research benchmarks.
Google Research published TurboQuant on Wednesday, a compression algorithm that shrinks a major inference-memory bottleneck by at least 6x while maintaining zero loss in accuracy.

The paper is slated for presentation at ICLR 2026, and the reaction online was immediate.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince called it Google’s DeepSeek moment. Memory stock prices, including Micron, Western Digital, and Seagate, fell on the same day.

So is it real?

Quantization efficiency is a big achievement by itself. But “zero accuracy loss” needs context.

TurboQuant targets the KV cache—the chunk of GPU memory that stores everything a language model needs to remember during a conversation.

As context windows grow toward millions of tokens, those caches balloon into hundreds of gigabytes per session. That’s the actual bottleneck. Not compute power but raw memory.

Traditional compression methods try to shrink those caches by rounding numbers down—from 32-bit floats to 16, to 8 to 4-bit integers, for example. To better understand it, think of shrinking an image from 4K, to full HD, to 720p and so. It’s easy to tell it’s the same image overall, but there’s more detail in 4K resolution.

The catch: they have to store extra “quantization constants” alongside the compressed data to keep the model from going stupid. Those constants add 1 to 2 bits per value, partially eroding the gains.

TurboQuant claims it eliminates that overhead entirely.

It does this via two sub-algorithms. PolarQuant separates magnitude from direction in vectors, and QJL (Quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss) takes the tiny residual error left over and reduces it to a single sign bit, positive or negative, with zero stored constants.

The result, Google says, is a mathematically unbiased estimator for the attention calculations that drive transformer models.

In benchmarks using Gemma and Mistral, TurboQuant matched full-precision performance under 4x compression, including perfect retrieval accuracy on needle-in-haystack tasks up to 104,000 tokens.

For context on why those benchmarks matter, expanding a model’s usable context without quality loss has been one of the hardest problems in LLM deployment.

Now, the fine print.

“Zero accuracy loss” applies to KV cache compression during inference—not to the model’s weights. Compressing weights is a completely different, harder problem. TurboQuant doesn’t touch those.

What it compresses is the temporary memory storing mid-session attention computations, which is more forgiving because that data can theoretically be reconstructed.

There’s also the gap between a clean benchmark and a production system serving billions of requests. TurboQuant was tested on open-source models—Gemma, Mistral, Llama—not Google’s own Gemini stack at scale.

Unlike DeepSeek’s efficiency gains, which required deep architectural decisions baked in from the start, TurboQuant requires no retraining or fine-tuning and claims negligible runtime overhead. In theory, it drops straight into existing inference pipelines.

That’s the part that spooked the memory hardware sector—because if it works in production, every major AI lab runs leaner on the same GPUs they already own.

The paper goes to ICLR 2026. Until it ships in production, the “zero loss” headline stays in the lab.

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March 26, 2026
Mortgage giant Fannie Mae to accept Bitcoin and crypto as collateral for home loans

Digital assets are making their way into the US housing market as mortgage giant Fannie Mae prepares to accept Bitcoin and other crypto holdings as part of down payments, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The move allows crypto holders to use assets like Bitcoin directly when buying a home through Fannie Mae-backed mortgages. Instead of selling their crypto for US dollars, they can pledge it as part of the down payment, making it easier to access traditional housing finance. The program is being rolled out with Coinbase and Better Home & Finance.

The change comes after the US Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to draft plans that would let certain crypto assets be used in mortgage underwriting without mandatory conversion to dollars.

Crypto adoption pushes rethink of mortgage lending rules

The rise of crypto, in particular, among younger generations, is forcing a rethink of traditional mortgage lending, as housing affordability becomes a growing global concern.

Major non-bank lender Newrez has started accepting certain crypto holdings as part of mortgage qualifications, allowing homebuyers to leverage digital assets without selling them.

The FHFA, which oversees government-sponsored enterprises, has recognized that integrating digital assets could expand access to homeownership for a cohort increasingly building wealth through crypto.

With homeownership rates among young Americans at historic lows, pressure is mounting to develop mortgage products that reflect modern financial realities.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

March 26, 2026
Analysis Company Announces Bottoming for Bitcoin (BTC)! “These Levels Shouldn’t Be Missed!”

The leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin ($BTC), has attracted attention by remaining strong compared to assets like gold and silver despite the US-Iran conflict.

However, Bitcoin is facing obstacles in its short-term upward trend. The continued increase in geopolitical tensions due to the lack of progress in peace talks between the US and Iran, coupled with concerns about war-related inflation, is negatively impacting Bitcoin’s rise.

Recently, $BTC has been moving sideways between approximately $72,000 and $67,000, and in its latest report, crypto analytics company K33 Research stated that these sideways movements in Bitcoin could indicate a bottoming out process.

K33 analysts stated that Bitcoin’s consolidation between $60,000 and $75,000 in the medium term indicates a bottom, supported by reduced selling pressure, stabilization of spot ETF inflows, and a recovery in the supply of long-term investors.

Analysts said that prolonged consolidation could signal a shift in the $BTC market structure and a potential bottom.

K33 Research Head Vetle Lunde stated that this consolidation in Bitcoin has historically been seen as a signal of forming a bottom.

“The $70,000 level, in particular, stands out as an attractive area for medium and long-term investors.”

The modest trend in net inflows into spot ETFs since the end of February suggests that the large-scale sell-off that began last October has ended.

In addition, long-term investors have also abandoned their selling decisions, and the number of long-term investors, which had decreased in late last year, has started to increase again.

However, Lunde also pointed to persistent macroeconomic uncertainties such as geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, rising oil prices, and reduced expectations of interest rate cuts due to the Fed’s hawkish stance. According to Lunde, these factors are hindering Bitcoin’s rise: “These factors are suppressing risk appetite and limiting the rise.”

*This is not investment advice.

March 26, 2026
Google targets 2029 post-quantum migration as threats draw nearer

Google has set a 2029 deadline for its post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration, warning that “quantum frontiers” could be closer than they appear.

On Wednesday, Google said rapid progress in quantum computing hardware and quantum error correction, along with updated estimates of how quickly a quantum machine could break today’s encryption standards, has heightened the urgency to act sooner rather than later.

“Quantum computers will pose a significant threat to current cryptographic standards, and specifically to encryption and digital signatures,” Google said, while also noting that PQC migration is needed for users to use authentication services securely.

This is the first time Google has set a timeline to roll out post-quantum capabilities across its products. The 2029 timeline is earlier than some industry estimates for Q-Day — the point at which quantum computers become powerful enough to break current public-key encryption.

“It’s our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline. By doing this, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but also across the industry.”

Source: JP Richardson

Google’s call for urgency comes as it continues to develop its quantum chip, Willow, which has a computing capacity of 105 qubits, making it one of the most powerful in the industry.

There are also rising concerns that quantum computers could severely disrupt the crypto industry by breaking the cryptographic algorithms used to secure digital assets. However, there is still debate over whether only crypto wallets with exposed public keys are vulnerable or whether all coins are at risk.

Crypto networks also eye post-quantum upgrades

The Ethereum Foundation launched a “Post-Quantum Ethereum” resource hub on Tuesday, focused on protecting the blockchain from future quantum computing threats and securing the billions of dollars in value on the network.

The post-quantum team plans to implement quantum-resistant solutions in Ethereum at the protocol level by 2029, with solutions targeting the execution layer to follow.

In January 2025, Solana developers created a quantum-resistant vault on the Solana blockchain to protect user funds from quantum threats by implementing a complex hash-based signature system that generates new keys each time a transaction is made.

However, to access the feature, Solana users need to store their funds in Winternitz vaults rather than regular Solana wallets, as it isn’t a network-wide security upgrade.

Meanwhile, there has been increasing division in the Bitcoin ecosystem on what action developers should take, if any at all.

One of the Bitcoin ecosystem’s strongest voices, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, says quantum risks are widely overstated and that no action is needed for decades.

On the other hand, security researcher Ethan Heilman and others have proposed a new output type for Bitcoin, called Pay-to-Merkle-Root, through Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 360 (BIP-360), which seeks to protect Bitcoin addresses from potential short-exposure quantum attacks.

However, that implementation may take seven years, Heilman told Cointelegraph in February.

March 26, 2026
$18.6B in Bitcoin options expire Friday: Should traders prepare for $75K BTC?

March 26, 2026