Seven major Bitcoin mining pools have joined the Stratum V2 working group to develop an open, industry-wide protocol for how pool operators communicate with individual miners. The group includes AntPool, Block Inc, F2Pool, Foundry, MARA Foundation, SpiderPool and DMND, with Stratum V2 saying a shared standard could help pools reduce the time needed to mine blocks successfully.

Consensys senior counsel Bill Hughes says passing the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 (CLARITY) could help shift more crypto industry activity back to the United States by setting clearer rules. He cited over $2.4 trillion in US-dollar on-ramp volume from July 2024 to June 2025, while noting most trading still occurs on non-US exchanges, including Binance at over 38% of centralized volume in December 2025.

A crypto attorney said Drift Protocol's $280 million exploit could be viewed as civil negligence if basic operational security was not followed. Drift's post-mortem said the attackers spent months building trust after first contacting the team at a major crypto conference in October 2025 and planned the operation for six months before executing it.

Polymarket's contract on the United States invading Iran this year rose to 63% on Sunday after a social media post by US President Donald Trump. The market had previously peaked at 68% on March 29, and the contract had about $3.74 million in volume at publication. Risk assets showed limited follow-through afterward, with Bitcoin hovering near $67,500 and Brent crude remaining above $109 per barrel.

Jimmy Song, co-founder of the nonprofit ProductionReady, said the Bitcoin network needs a "conservative" node client that avoids major code changes unless there is overwhelming community support. He added that ProductionReady expects to restore the 83-byte OP_Return limit to keep node storage costs low, which he linked to decentralization and resilience. Bitcoin Core 30 removed the OP_Return limit in October 2025 by raising it to 100,000 bytes, a move that coincided with growth in Bitcoin Knots usage to 4,746 nodes, or over 21.7% of the network.

Onchain investigator ZachXBT alleges Circle did not freeze or blacklist roughly $420 million in illicit USDC flows since 2022 across 15 hack-and-fraud cases. He says Circle sometimes had hours or days to act, including cited incidents tied to GMX, Cetus and Drift Protocol, but took limited action or acted after funds were swapped into ETH.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice filed separate lawsuits on Thursday against Illinois, Connecticut and Arizona, challenging state actions targeting prediction market platforms. The CFTC argues that event-contract prediction markets fall under its exclusive jurisdiction as federally regulated designated contract markets, after the states sent cease-and-desist letters in 2025 citing gambling and licensing rules.

Soluna Holdings said Thursday it completed a $53 million acquisition of the Briscoe Wind Farm in Briscoe County, Texas, to supply power for its planned Project Dorothy 3 AI data center campus. The company said the site can reach up to 300 MW of capacity and projected annualized revenue of $20 million to $24.4 million. Soluna shares rose about 7.6% after the announcement, trading around $0.76 at the time of writing.

Onchain investigator ZachXBT says Circle, the issuer of USDC, mistakenly froze 16 hot wallets while acting in connection with a US civil case. He alleges the addresses belonged to operating businesses such as crypto exchanges, online casinos and FX services, and argues basic transaction review would have shown they were not related.