Tether Treasury transferred 130,000,000 USDT, worth US$129,912,110, to Bitfinex.

Yemen's Houthi movement issued a statement saying it has joined the conflict involving Iran, according to OSINTtechnical.

28 March 2026 — Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen fired their first ballistic missile directly at southern Israel, in a move that sharply raises the stakes in the Iran&Israel confrontation. The Israel Defense Forces said the missile was successfully intercepted and that no casualties were reported. The launch came a day after Israeli strikes on Tehran, intensifying a conflict that has already spilled into global trade routes. Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping over recent years have pushed worldwide freight costs up about 30%. Source: BBC

Binance's OTC desk posted a sharp early-2026 pickup, with January–February trading volume reaching 25% of the platform's total for all of 2025. The mix shifted dramatically between the two months. Bitcoin's share of OTC activity surged to 45.81% in February from 4.91% in January. Stablecoin-to-crypto flows more than doubled month over month, lifting their share from 21.43% to 48.95%. A notable transaction involved a $105 million WBETH-to-ETH conversion completed in two hours with 50 basis points of slippage—about 75% better than what the order book implied. "The institutional demand for deep liquidity and trusted execution is stronger than ever," Binance CEO Richard Teng said in a post on X.

Spot crypto ETFs recorded net outflows, led by Bitcoin at $225M. Ethereum saw $48.5M in net redemptions, while Solana posted $7.8M in outflows. XRP ended the period unchanged at $0.

Author: Jae, PANews As Bitcoin wavered around the $70,000 mark, Wall Street saw a rapid-fire sequence of tokenization moves. Within 48 hours, Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and CME Group each unveiled upgrades aimed at modernizing how collateral, securities and cash move through markets. Nasdaq is building a tokenized collateral management capability, the NYSE is teaming up with Securitize to develop a tokenized securities platform, and CME is rolling out an institutional tokenized-cash settlement service. Together, the three exchanges are pushing blockchain deeper into market plumbing and reshaping how liquidity can circulate. Nasdaq targets $35 billion in idle collateral, moving from T+1 to near-instant mobilization Nasdaq estimates roughly $35 billion in high-quality collateral sits unused across the global financial system, constrained by settlement delays, time-zone frictions and traditional banking cutoffs. Liquid assets such as equities and U.S. Treasury ETFs often remain locked in custody accounts, limiting their effective deployment. On March 23, Nasdaq announced a strategic partnership with digital asset trading infrastructure provider Talos. The plan is to integrate Nasdaq's Calypso risk and collateral management platform with Talos's digital-asset front-end architecture, enabling collateral to be tokenized and transferred in real time. In periods of sharp volatility, institutions would be able to move tokenized assets within seconds to satisfy clearinghouse margin requirements, bypassing banking operating windows. For derivatives markets, Nasdaq frames this as a shift away from T+1-style frictions toward atomic settlement, improving capital efficiency. Tokenization also turns collateral into a flexible liquidity tool: the same asset could be posted as margin for U.S. equities during the day and redeployed for Asian exposures at night. Nasdaq said it is also extending its Trade Surveillance capabilities to Talos's client base, aiming to detect false trades, wash trading and cross-market manipulation, adding a compliance layer for digital-asset activity. The initiative follows Nasdaq's tokenized stock trading pilot, which received SEC approval on March 18. Early tokenized assets will be limited to Russell 1000 constituents and major ETFs tracking the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100, chosen for depth and liquidity. Nasdaq plans a dual-track model where tokenized securities and traditional shares share the same CUSIP and trading identifier, making them equivalent and interchangeable while giving regulators a clearer basis to compare settlement impacts. NYSE and Securitize pursue 'native' tokenized securities While Nasdaq focuses on optimizing institutional workflows, the NYSE's partnership with Securitize points to a broader redesign of the securities issuance and transfer model. On March 24, the two sides signed an MOU to develop a tokenized securities platform supporting instant settlement and stablecoin payments. Securitize is a major real-world-asset tokenization firm and previously supported BlackRock's issuance of BUIDL, the largest tokenized Treasury fund so far. Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo said the NYSE is targeting "native tokenization" rather than crypto-exchange-style wrappers. Under the proposed structure, Securitize would act as the NYSE's first designated digital transfer agent, with ownership records maintained directly on-chain. Tokens would represent direct legal ownership of the underlying security, including dividend rights, governance voting and liquidation priority. That differs from models where a third party holds the shares and issues tokenized receipts, which function as an economic mapping rather than an on-chain native security. The article also notes operational and pricing risks: errors by custodians or faulty oracle pricing outside U.S. market hours could cause token values to diverge from the underlying shares and potentially trigger on-chain liquidation cascades. CME introduces tokenized cash to reduce margin-call stress CME Group, the world's largest derivatives exchange, is approaching tokenization through cash settlement. On March 24, CME said it partnered with Bank of Montreal and Google Cloud to launch a tokenized-cash solution aimed at one of the hardest problems in tokenized markets: synchronizing cash movement. The system runs on Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL), a programmable distributed ledger designed for traditional financial institutions. CME positions GCUL as a permissioned network that retains real-time settlement features while providing transaction privacy and meeting regulatory KYC/AML expectations. Bank of Montreal, the first bank integrating the system, will enable institutional clients to convert U.S. dollar deposits into tokenized cash. The immediate use case is margin collateral for CME Clearing. CME argues the structure addresses a long-standing derivatives-market vulnerability: margin calls that arrive when banking rails are closed. As markets evolve toward near-24/7 trading, clearinghouses may issue more frequent intraday margin calls during volatility spikes. In the traditional model, if funds cannot be moved quickly, firms risk forced liquidation. CME Group CCO Suzanne Sprague said tokenized cash would allow margin to be posted in real time, freeing capital previously immobilized by bank holidays and reducing liquidity costs, while strengthening clearing resilience and lowering the risk of systemic liquidation cascades. The article cautions that integrating distributed ledger infrastructure with CME's clearing systems is complex. Network partition failures or smart-contract vulnerabilities could create severe risks in a 24/7 settlement environment. Taken together, the Nasdaq, NYSE and CME initiatives signal a more assertive push by incumbent market operators to adopt tokenization. From Nasdaq's effort to unlock $35 billion in dormant collateral, to the NYSE's exploration of native on-chain securities, and CME's tokenized-cash rail for settlement, Wall Street is laying out a blueprint for always-on value transfer across blockchain-based infrastructure.

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) said it has committed an additional $600 million to prediction-market platform Polymarket. ICE previously disclosed a $1 billion investment in October, taking its total backing of the platform to $1.6 billion.

Coinbase has partnered with mortgage lender Better Home & Finance to offer down-payment loans backed by Bitcoin or USDC held in a buyer's Coinbase account, Reuters reported. The down-payment loan is separate from the buyer's primary home mortgage, including loans backed by Fannie Mae. The structure allows buyers to avoid selling their crypto, potentially keeping exposure to future gains while deferring related tax bills. Better also said that as long as borrowers make payments on time, declines in the collateral's value will not trigger margin calls.

Odaily Planet Daily reports: Data from msx.com show U.S. stocks finished lower, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1.73%, the S&P 500 off 1.67%, and the Nasdaq Composite falling 2.15%. Crypto-related equities saw broad declines: SBET sank more than 7.5%, COIN dropped over 7%, ALTS fell over 6.8%, MARA slid over 6.5%, HOOD lost more than 6.15%, ABTC retreated over 5.83%, BMNR declined over 5.55%, MSTR fell over 5.19%, and CRCL dropped over 4.69%. MSX.com is a decentralized RWA trading platform that has listed hundreds of RWA tokens, including tokens backed by U.S. equities such as AAPL, AMZN, GOOGL, META, MSFT, NFLX and NVDA, as well as ETFs.