TRON DAO said on Monday it expanded its AI fund from $100 million to $1 billion to invest in or acquire early-stage startups building infrastructure for the agentic economy. The program targets four areas: agent identity, stablecoin payment rails, tokenized real-world assets and developer tooling for autonomous financial systems.

On March 16, hourly Bitcoin inflows to centralized exchanges surged to 6,100 BTC, the highest level since Feb. 20, while the asset’s price climbed toward resistance around $75,000. According to CryptoQuant’s Julio Moreno, large transfers made up 63% of total inflows, and such spikes in big deposits have previously coincided with stronger selling pressure.

Meta Platforms will discontinue virtual reality access to its Horizon Worlds metaverse on June 15, 2026, shifting the service to a mobile-only format. The VR-focused world, launched in late 2021 as part of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse strategy, has struggled to deliver profits while Reality Labs has accumulated nearly $80 billion in losses since 2020.

On Monday, blockchain data firm Messari confirmed a leadership change and new layoffs as it accelerates its AI-first strategy. Eric Turner stepped down as CEO and passed the role to long-time CTO Diran Li, while the company parted ways with an undisclosed number of employees after earlier cuts of about 15% in January 2025 and a similar reduction in February 2023. Li said Messari will focus on serving institutional clients with AI-driven research and products and recently opened its data layer to autonomous agents via the x402 protocol.

US President Donald Trump has renewed calls for the Federal Reserve, led by Jerome Powell, to convene a special meeting and cut interest rates immediately. He has argued for substantially lower rates to ease servicing of the $39 trillion US national debt and to support economic growth, housing, and the stock market. Futures markets, however, currently price in an overwhelmingly high probability that the Fed will hold rates steady in the 3.50% to 3.75% range at its March and April meetings.

Crypto trader Ran Neuner warned that Bitcoin could face security risks if miners keep shifting capacity to more profitable AI data centers, which he says can earn up to eight times more revenue per megawatt. Other industry figures, including Adam Back, Fred Krueger and Daniel Batten, argue that Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment and flexible energy use will rebalance mining incentives and keep the network secure.

A study first published in February and revised on March 12 by researchers at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance finds that 72% to 92% of inter-country subsea internet cables would need to fail before more than 10% of Bitcoin nodes disconnect. The researchers also show that targeted attacks on cable chokepoints can be far more effective, while Tor-based routing now hides around 64% of nodes and improves the network's resilience. Analysis of 68 verified cable fault events from 2014 to 2025 indicates minimal impact on node connectivity and an almost zero correlation with Bitcoin's price.

On March 12, a crypto trader attempted to swap $50.4 million USDT for Aave tokens via CoW Protocol and SushiSwap but ended up receiving only about $36,000 worth of AAVE. A MEV bot executed a sandwich attack using a $29 million flash loan and realized roughly $9.9 million in profit, while Aave and CoW DAO said the user had manually accepted warnings about extreme slippage. Both protocols pledged to refund collected fees but stressed that DeFi user experience and safeguards still need improvement.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Noah Levine reported that AI agents processed about $1.6 million in payments over the past month, far below earlier estimates of $24 million from other data sources. He attributed the lower figure to adjusted data from Allium Labs and highlighted that, while volumes are still small, major firms including Coinbase, Stripe, Cloudflare, Vercel and Google are building payment infrastructure such as the x402 standard and its new Polygon support.