Tag: CRYPTOS FoxBusiness.

MetaMask, the popular crypto wallet developed by blockchain software company Consensys, has launched a new payment card service in the US. The company announced that the card was launched in collaboration with global payments giant Mastercard.

In its announcement, Consensys emphasized that the MetaMask Card differs from traditional crypto cards.

While most crypto cards are custodial, requiring users to transfer their assets to an exchange account before making a purchase, the MetaMask Card is described as completely self-custodial. This means users will retain control of their digital assets in their MetaMask wallets until the payment is made.

The card offered in the US, like the versions in the UK and the European Union, operates on the Monavate (formerly Baanx) infrastructure. It can be used at all merchants that accept Mastercard and also offers Apple Pay and Google Pay compatibility.

Cardholders will be able to earn cashback on their spending. Rewards will be distributed in MetaMask’s stablecoin, mUSD. Standard users will receive 1% cashback, while premium users can earn up to 3% on their first $10,000 of annual spending.

mUSD is issued by Stripe’s Bridge platform and minted on the decentralized M0 infrastructure. The stablecoin is reportedly backed one-to-one by highly liquid dollar assets. Demand for crypto-based payment cards has also been rapidly increasing recently.

*This is not investment advice.

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has chosen Greece as its regulatory hub for its EU operations ahead of the European Union’s new crypto regulations.

According to Finance Feeds, Binance co-CEO Richard Teng announced that the exchange applied to the regulatory authority in Greece last month.

The application aims to obtain an operating license under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA).

The MiCA regulation mandates that crypto companies obtain licenses by July 2026. Companies without licenses will not be able to operate within the EU.

Teng stated that the MiCA license offers a standard framework across Europe, and therefore many factors such as workforce quality, talent pool, and security are considered when selecting an operations center. It was reported that Greece is seen as a suitable base within the EU’s enlargement strategy.

On the other hand, Teng also touched upon the sharp fluctuations experienced in the crypto market over the past year. Noting that Bitcoin has fallen by approximately 50% from its peak of $126,000 in October last year, Teng stated that individual investor interest has weakened, but institutional participation has remained stable. “Smart money, institutional capital, and long-term funds continue to enter the market,” Teng said, emphasizing that regulatory clarity will strengthen the sector in the long term.

*This is not investment advice.

Akash, a decentralized marketplace, has launched early access to the open beta of Homenode, a platform that allows owners of consumer-grade GPUs to supply compute power from personal devices to its network. Participants can earn rewards without deploying enterprise infrastructure or managing complex server setups.

The beta is part of the StarCluster initiative, a distributed AI compute network. During the first phase, the system will focus on high-end GPUs, including $RTX 4090, $RTX 5090 and upcoming 50-series models from NVIDIA. The rollout will also test performance from small colocated setups and repurposed mining equipment before broader expansion.

Homenode is delivered as a dedicated operating system distributed as an ISO image. Users install it via USB to convert eligible machines into secure provider nodes. The environment is isolated and designed for privacy. Device owners can choose dual-boot or partition options to keep their primary operating system separate from the Homenode setup.

Image: Freepik

DoubleZero, a crypto infrastructure startup co-founded by former Solana Foundation executive Austin Federa, is rolling out a major update aimed at spreading Solana’s network more evenly around the world, and making it faster in the process.

On Mar. 9, the company will launch “Phase II” of its DoubleZero Delegation Program, redirecting 2.4 million $SOL from its 13 million pool to validators operating in underrepresented regions such as São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Each region will receive up to 600,000 $SOL in additional delegated stake incentives.

DoubleZero runs a private, high-speed internet network that helps Solana’s computers talk to each other faster and more reliably. In 2025, the company behind the network raised $28 million at a $400 million valuation.

DoubleZero’s goal in rolling out the incentive is simple: reduce Solana’s growing geographic concentration in Europe and introduce “multicast functionality,” a data distribution method widely used in traditional finance.

Geographic cluster

One of the main goals of Federa is to reduce the geographic concentration of validators.

“One of the unintended consequences of blockchains getting faster is there’s more incentive to co-locate next to one another,” Federa said in an interview. He compared it to early high-frequency trading wars on Wall Street, when firms scrambled to place servers physically closer to the New York Stock Exchange to shave milliseconds off trades.

Read more: ‘Crypto’s Flash Boys’: A Q&A With Austin Federa on DoubleZero

Today, much of Solana’s staked tokens, which secure the network, sit in Central Europe — largely for historical and economic reasons. “There were a lot of really good, really cheap bare-metal data centers in Europe,” Federa said. “Solana was optimized for that kind of hosting early on, and the infrastructure just built up there.”

But geographic clustering creates trade-offs: If most validators are in Europe, users farther away may be at a disadvantage.

“If I’m sitting in South America trying to execute a trade on Solana, I can hit send first,” Federa said. “But someone who’s got a computer in Germany might actually win that trade.”

To address that imbalance, DoubleZero is offering 2.4 million $SOL and aims to make it economically viable for validators to operate outside traditional hubs.

‘More dependable’

The next problem DoubleZero is trying to solve through the new initiative is data transmission latency.

The main barrier to expanding into those areas isn’t technical, Federa said — it’s economic. “Because you’re further away, everything takes longer to get there. It’s like Amazon Prime — in New York you get it same day. In Montana, it’s four or five days.”

DoubleZero says its private fiber network helps address connectivity issues, while the new delegation incentives aim to offset the economic penalty of being outside traditional hubs.

This is why, alongside the geographic push, DoubleZero is introducing the multicast functionality to Solana.

Federa compared it to watching the Super Bowl via satellite versus streaming. With satellite, “an infinite number of people can be watching that radio wave… and it’s no additional tax.” Streaming, by contrast, requires a separate data stream for each viewer.

Blockchain networks today largely operate like streaming services — sending duplicate data over and over. Multicast, he said, changes that.

“In a pre-multicast world, if I’m sending data to 1,000 nodes, I’m handing out 1,000 copies,” he said. “With multicast, I send one copy, and the network hardware replicates it closer to where it needs to go.”

That reduces bandwidth costs, improves fairness in how quickly participants receive data, and creates more room for future upgrades. It also makes blockchain infrastructure behave more like traditional exchanges, which rely heavily on multicast.

“Traditional finance isn’t just faster than blockchain — it’s more dependable,” Federa said. “If we can bring more determinism to blockchain networking, it makes it a much more attractive place for market makers and traders.”

Ultimately, DoubleZero is betting that financial incentives like this will help Solana’s infrastructure spread globally, moving it closer to functioning like a truly real-time market.

Read more: DoubleZero Mainnet Goes Live With 22% of Staked $SOL on Board

MetaMask is expanding the reach of its blockchain-based debit card in the U.S. after a year-long trial and receiving permission to enter New York for the first time.

The U.S. test period followed a pilot phase in Europe and the U.K. that started in 2024. The rollout includes product refinements to bring crypto payments into everyday commerce, MetaMask announced Thursday.

“We designed the MetaMask Card to make crypto disappear. Not go away, but become so seamlessly woven into daily life that the line between onchain and offchain fades away entirely,” said Gal Eldar, a product lead at MetaMask, in a press release shared with CoinDesk.

The MetaMask Card, developed with payment giant Mastercard and crypto payment provider Baanx, joins a market that already features a number of competitors including crypto exchanges Coinbase (COIN) and Crypto.com, though many require users to deposit their crypto on the card issuers’ platform.

MetaMask began a limited rollout of its blockchain-based debit card to a few thousand users in the European Union and U.K. in August 2024, with customers allowed to make purchases using USDC, USDT and wETH held on the layer-2 network Linea, an Ethereum-based chain developed by Consensys, MetaMask’s parent. The U.S. pilot started in December 2024.

MetaMask says the card now works everywhere Mastercard is accepted, including support for digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and offers onchain cashback rewards and yield options on unspent balances via DeFi protocols. The company is also offering a premium MetaMask Metal Card, priced at $199 a year.

“We’ve seen tens of thousands of users around the world use it for everything from morning coffee to engagement rings, and now we’re excited to bring that to U.S. users, including places like New York that previously haven’t had access.” Eldar wrote in the press release.

Read more: MetaMask Starts Rollout of Blockchain-Based Debit Card Developed With Mastercard, Baanx

Decibel, a fully onchain perpetuals exchange incubated by Aptos Labs, is now live on the Aptos mainnet, the Decibel Foundation said Wednesday.

The debut follows a public testnet that drew more than 700,000 unique accounts and 132,000 daily active users, according to the foundation. Users executed over 1 million trades per day during testing, and more than $58 million was committed through a pre-deposit campaign ahead of mainnet activation.

Decibel’s debut comes during an intensifying race among onchain perpetuals exchanges. The past year has seen a surge of competition, led by Hyperliquid, which remains the category’s dominant venue by volume.

Other contenders, including Aster and Lighter, briefly gained traction before fading from the spotlight. Decibel now enters that increasingly crowded field with plans to gain market share from a sector that racked up $920 billion in trading volume over the past 30 days, according to DeFiLlama.

Decibel operates a central limit order book where order placement, matching, settlement and risk management occur entirely onchain. The model replaces the offchain risk engines and discretionary controls common in traditional and crypto exchanges with predefined smart contract rules visible to users.

The protocol will become the first perpetual exchange built on Aptos, a layer-1 blockchain with sub-50 millisecond block times and sub-500 millisecond finality. Decibel’s matching engine, margin requirements and liquidation logic execute onchain.

Users can fund accounts from Aptos, Ethereum, Solana or centralized exchanges. Roughly 40% of pre-deposit capital originated from Ethereum and Solana, the foundation said. The platform uses a dollar-denominated stablecoin, usDCBL, issued by Bridge, a Stripe company, as default collateral.

The Decibel Foundation said it plans to add spot markets, multi-collateral accounts and tokenized real-world assets, with the aim of expanding beyond crypto derivatives over time.

STS Digital, a trading firm specializing in crypto options, said it raised $30 million in a strategic round backed by CMT Digital, crypto exchange Kraken’s parent company Payward, and other investors.

The company plans to use the funds to scale its institutional trading platform and solidify its role as a liquidity provider in digital asset markets, according to a statement shared with CoinDesk.

Based in Bermuda, STS Digital allows institutions to trade more than 400 cryptocurrencies across spot, vanilla and exotic options, and structured products through a single interface that supports web, API and voice.

Options are a growing part of institutional crypto portfolios as firms use them to hedge risk and generate yield during volatile market conditions. Open interest is currently around $40 billion, according to TheTie, with the lion’s share on Deribit.

“This investment enables us to meet the explosive demand from institutional investors for our spot, options and structured product pricing,” said chairman and co-founder Gideon Hyams. “As banks, asset managers and financial intermediaries rush to integrate our pricing engine, this funding ensures we stay ahead of demand.”

In the statement, CMT Digital, the round’s lead investor, said it sees STS as being positioned to become “a foundational liquidity layer for crypto derivatives.”

STS Digital, a Bermuda-regulated digital asset trading firm serving institutional clients, has secured $30 million in a round led by CMT Digital, according to a Thursday announcement.

Payward, the parent company of exchange operator Kraken, also participated alongside Arrington Capital, BitRock Capital, Strobe Ventures, and Fidelity’s affiliated investment arm, F-Prime.

Established in 2022, STS Digital offers trading in spot markets, options, and structured products across more than 400 digital assets through multiple access channels.

The fresh capital will be used to grow the firm’s spot and options infrastructure, enhance its ability to provide liquidity under volatile market conditions, and strengthen its financial position.

“This investment enables us to meet the explosive demand from institutional investors for our spot, options, and structured product pricing,” said Gideon Hyams, chairman and co-founder of the firm.

STS Digital supports OTC trading alongside advanced derivatives such as futures and bespoke structured solutions designed for sophisticated investors. The platform aims to deliver continuous market access with low-latency execution and institutional-grade risk management capabilities.

Sam Hallene, partner at CMT Digital, highlighted the firm’s approach to risk controls and platform design as key factors in the investment decision.

“They have already built a meaningful liquidity moat in crypto options, and our view is that liquidity is one of the most durable competitive advantages in financial markets,” Hallene said.

Arjun Sethi, chief executive of Payward, noted that the investment aligns with Kraken’s efforts to broaden its derivatives offerings.

“Derivatives are among the most powerful tools in crypto, giving market participants more ways to manage risk and navigate volatility,” Sethi said.

The latest development comes as institutional participants increasingly turn to options for hedging, yield generation, and volatility management rather than purely speculative trades.

Market observers have noted growing demand for counterparties with strong balance sheets and consistent execution capabilities, particularly following periods of heightened stress in digital asset markets.