Abu Dhabi-based Universal Digital has introduced USDU, a US dollar-backed stablecoin registered by the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates as a Foreign Payment Token under the Payment Token Services Regulation. The token is issued on Ethereum, fully backed by US dollar reserves held in UAE banks, and is intended for institutional and professional use within the country's regulated digital asset settlement framework.

KuCoin has appointed former London Stock Exchange Group executive Sabina Liu as managing director of KuCoin EU to drive its Markets in Crypto-Assets rollout from Vienna, following the exchange's crypto asset service provider license in Austria. The move signals a compliance-first strategy in Europe and leverages Liu's LSEG tenure and prior leadership of KuCoin's institutional business.

F/m Investments, a $18 billion asset manager, has asked the U.S. SEC for exemptive relief to tokenize shares of its F/m US Treasury 3 Month Bill ETF (TBIL). The filing, submitted Wednesday, would let roughly $6 billion in TBIL shares be recorded on a permissioned blockchain while the fund remains a standard 1940 Act ETF.

A Satoshi-era Bitcoin wallet that had been inactive for 13 years has transferred its entire 909.38 BTC balance, valued at roughly $84.6 million, to a new address. The coins were originally acquired in 2013 when Bitcoin traded below $7, underscoring the massive appreciation compared with traditional assets over the same period.

On Monday, Ethereum co‑founder Vitalik Buterin argued that most existing DAOs function only as token‑voting treasuries and need to be redesigned for critical infrastructure such as oracles and onchain dispute resolution. He suggested different DAO models for "convex" and "concave" governance problems, emphasized privacy tools like zero‑knowledge proofs and warned that DAO governance should use but not be controlled by AI. He added that teams building new oracles or governance layers should treat DAO design and communication as a core part of their work amid a DAO token market capitalization of at least $17.5 billion.

Christopher Wood of Jefferies removed a 10% Bitcoin allocation from his model portfolio and shifted the exposure into physical gold and gold miners, citing quantum computing risk. He first added BTC in late 2020 and now warns that compressed quantum timelines could erode Bitcoin’s store‑of‑value appeal for long‑horizon investors.

Visa selected UK-based BVNK to support Visa Direct pilots that enable some business customers to pre-fund cross-border payouts in stablecoins and send digital U.S. dollars to eligible wallets in select markets. The initiative extends prior onchain settlement tests with USDC on Ethereum and Solana and is aimed at enabling money movement outside traditional banking hours.

The Bank of Italy modeled an extreme Ether price shock to zero in a new study, examining how validator incentives, staking security and block production would react. It assesses potential spillovers to settlement and payment uses built on Ethereum and outlines policy options for supervisors, including either ruling out public chains or imposing robust risk‑mitigation measures.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has pushed back its decisions on the Canary Pudgy Penguins (PENGU) ETF and the T. Rowe Price Active Crypto ETF through extended 19b-4 review periods. At the same time, the regulator opened a public comment window on a proposal to list standardized options on the Grayscale CoinDesk Crypto 5 ETF, which tracks five large-cap digital assets.