On Monday, a report from Citrini Research was partly blamed for a sell-off in software and payments stocks, with IBM falling 13.1% to $223.35 and several tech and card networks also lower. The "Global Intelligence Crisis" report warned AI agents could upend the economy, threaten the $13 trillion US mortgage market, and create "Ghost GDP" that appears in national data but bypasses the real economy.

On Feb. 23, 2026, Backpack Exchange said users who stake its forthcoming token for at least one year will be able to swap those tokens for company equity equal to 20%. The firm detailed a 1 million‑token plan with 25% to unlock at TGE and another 37.5% before a potential U.S. IPO if milestones are achieved.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed using transaction simulations and related tools to better align onchain execution with user intent. In a recent post on X, he suggested that users first define the action they want to take and then approve or cancel after viewing a simulated outcome, supported by mechanisms like spending caps and multisig checks. He argued that while user intent is inherently complex and perfect security is unattainable, overlapping ways of expressing intent can make low-risk actions easier and high-risk actions more difficult.

Crypto and banking representatives met at the White House on Thursday for a third session in 16 days, following meetings on Feb. 2 and Feb. 10. Adviser Patrick Witt pushed a trade‑off to permit stablecoin rewards only on transaction activity, not balances. No agreement was reached, but Ripple and Coinbase executives described the talks as constructive.

On Feb. 12, three researchers linked to the U.S. Federal Reserve published a paper arguing that prediction market Kalshi can capture macroeconomic expectations in real time more effectively than traditional tools. The authors said Kalshi's intraday trading data could be used to derive risk-neutral probability distributions of Federal Open Market Committee rate decisions, although the paper is only intended to stimulate discussion rather than guide policy.

OpenAI launched EVMbench to benchmark how AI agents detect, patch, and exploit security issues in crypto smart contracts. On Wednesday, the firm published a paper with Paradigm and OtterSec covering 120 vulnerabilities, where Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 led with a $37,824 detect award, ahead of OC-GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro.

On February 17, 2026, Solana-based launchpad Pump.fun introduced a Trader Cashback option that lets token creators redirect rewards away from the 0.3% Creator Fees toward active traders, with the choice locked in at launch. Terminal said Cashback Coins accrue on every trade. The rollout follows a 75.6% slide in monthly fees to $31.8 million in January from $148.1 million in January 2025.

SocialFi platform Zora has launched an attention markets product on Solana, allowing users to trade on trending topics and memes, while charging 1 SOL to deploy new "Trends". Following the announcement, the ZORA token rose 6.2% to $0.022 over the last 24 hours, even as the broader crypto market slipped 1.2%.

Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov expects decentralized finance to tap into as much as $50 trillion in tokenized "abundance assets" such as solar energy by 2050, potentially creating a new collateral class for onchain lending. He argues that shifting from scarce assets like bonds and real estate toward tokenized infrastructure, including solar, batteries and robotics, could boost capital efficiency and returns, even as AAVE's token price remains far below its 2021 peak.