Florida lawmakers have approved Senate Bill 314, establishing a state-level regulatory framework for payment stablecoin issuers and awaiting Gov. Ron DeSantis' signature. The measure, aligned with the federal GENIUS Act, revises money laundering rules, sets consumer protection and financial stability requirements, and clarifies that certain payment stablecoins are not securities. A related bill, CS/CS/SB 1440, also passed to strengthen confidentiality protections for virtual currency and stablecoin businesses supervised by the Office of Financial Regulation.

Binance responded in an open letter on Friday to U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal's February inquiry into alleged Iran sanctions violations at the exchange. The company said it cut ties with Hong Kong partners Hexa Whale and Blessed Trust after finding only indirect exposure to Iran-linked wallets and argued that media reports underpinning the probe are factually wrong and defamatory. Binance also highlighted a reported 97% reduction in its exposure to wallets allegedly involved in illicit activity and to major Iranian crypto exchanges.

The Bank of Canada completed Project Samara, a pilot that used Hyperledger Fabric to issue and manage a single three‑month $100 million Canadian dollar‑denominated bond for a closed investor group. The experiment involved TD Bank, Export Development Canada and Royal Bank of Canada units, and reported operational efficiencies alongside challenges such as added system complexity and regulatory gaps.

Kraken is introducing xChange, an onchain trading engine that serves as a unified execution layer for xStocks tokenized equities operating 24/5 on Ethereum and Solana. The platform is set to support direct trading of more than 70 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, while xStocks has already recorded over $25 billion in lifetime volume across Ethereum, Solana and TON. The launch comes as institutions highlight the need to reduce fragmentation in tokenization markets and as tokenized equities and ETFs continue to expand despite a recent drop in activity metrics.

On Tuesday, Morgan Stanley submitted an amended S-1 to the SEC for its proposed bitcoin exchange-traded product, designating Coinbase Custody and Bank of New York Mellon as fund custodians. The filing also assigns BNY Mellon several administrative roles and appoints Coinbase as prime broker, as the trust aims to mirror the spot price of bitcoin.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump used Truth Social to claim that the GENIUS Act, a U.S. stablecoin framework, is being undermined by banks amid a dispute over stablecoin yields. He urged Congress to quickly pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, arguing that Americans should earn more on their money and that the crypto market structure bill must move forward.

A16z Crypto, the web3 division of Andreessen Horowitz, used a recent blog post to argue that many so-called zkVMs emphasize succinctness rather than genuine zero-knowledge privacy. On Tuesday, the team announced an upgrade to the open-source Jolt zkVM that integrates the NovaBlindFold folding scheme to generate blinded proofs, making the system suitable for privacy-focused applications. The blog added that this approach keeps the resulting ZK proof only about 3 KB larger than Jolt's earlier non-zero-knowledge version.

CME Group reported that with the launch of Cardano, Chainlink and Stellar token futures in February 2025, its crypto derivatives now reference more than 75% of total market capitalization. The firm said average daily open interest in its broader cryptocurrency suite, which also includes BTC, ETH, SOL and XRP contracts, was close to $25 billion in 2025, alongside a record average daily volume of 278,300 contracts worth about $12 billion notionally.

Kraken is launching round-the-clock trading in tokenized equity perpetual futures built on xStocks technology, initially covering gold, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 plus shares such as Apple, Nvidia, Google, Tesla, Robinhood, and crypto-focused companies. The fully collateralized contracts target eligible non-U.S. clients across more than 110 countries and are described by Kraken as using regulated benchmarks while it works to finalize the acquisition of xStocks and advances toward a potential public listing.