The National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA), a non-profit organization focused on helping Americans better understand and use cryptocurrency, has released its 2026 State of Crypto Holders Report, revealing continued acceleration in crypto adoption across the United States.

According to the report, more than 67 million Americans now own cryptocurrency, representing an increase of 12 million holders compared to 2025. The study, conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll, surveyed 10,000 U.S. cryptocurrency holders between February 12 and March 3, 2026.

The comparison between Ostium and traditional CFD brokers becomes more interesting when you stop treating it as a simple “DeFi versus TradFi” contrast and instead look at what each system is actually doing under the hood. Ostium Labs, the developer of the Ostium Labs protocol, is essentially trying to rebuild the user experience of CFD trading while changing where risk is held, how execution is sourced, and who ultimately controls custody. Traditional CFD brokers, by contrast, remain centralized intermediaries that internalize a large part of the flow, manage exposure on their own balance sheets, and operate within a comparatively opaque execution and risk framework.

Andreessen Horowitz has closed its fifth dedicated crypto fund at $2.2 billion, bringing total capital raised across all five funds to approximately $9.8 billion. The figure is a significant step down from the firm’s record $4.5 billion Fund 4, closed in May 2022 at the peak of the last crypto cycle. Fund 5 is roughly half that size.

The compression is not a crisis — it is a correction. Fund 4 was raised at a moment of maximum institutional enthusiasm for digital assets, weeks before the market began its protracted collapse. A $2.2 billion raise in the current environment, with crypto markets having recovered but LP appetite for the asset class still recalibrated downward from 2021–2022 excess, represents a durable institutional commitment rather than cycle-driven exuberance. The fund is smaller because the ask was more credible.

Aerospace and defense is not an obvious home for blockchain. The sector runs on classified networks, legacy procurement systems, and multi-decade platform lifecycles. Yet the same properties that make distributed ledger technology attractive to finance and logistics—immutable records, decentralized verification, cryptographic auditability—map with unusual precision onto the hardest operational problems in A&D: parts provenance, contractor accountability, and multi-jurisdiction data sharing.

The market reflects growing institutional recognition of this fit. Defense procurement agencies and prime contractors have moved from exploratory pilots to funded programs, with blockchain embedded in supply chain management, maintenance records, and secure communications infrastructure.

At Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan on April 29, a policy discussion that might have once seemed fringe was given formal institutional visibility when Legislator Dr. Ko Ju-Chun presented a report advocating for the inclusion of Bitcoin in Taiwan’s national reserve strategy. The session took place during a formal interpellation and included direct engagement with Premier Cho Jung-tai and the governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of China (Taiwan), Yang Chin-long. The report, produced by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, was not simply tabled as an academic exercise but actively introduced into executive-level consideration, which is part of what made the moment feel unusually weighty in tone.

Blockchain.com has taken its high-net-worth wealth management program out of stealth, formally launching Blockchain Wealth as a full-service suite available to a select global user base. The offering is positioned as institutional-grade in execution but private-banking in orientation — personalized service, dedicated OTC desk access, competitive yield rates, and a forthcoming crypto-backed lending product designed to give clients liquidity without forcing divestment from core positions.

The timing tracks a real shift in institutional behavior. Hedge funds, corporations, and market makers are moving beyond BTC and ETH as passive stores and into active onchain capital deployment. Blockchain.com has had a front-row seat to this: institutional clients have held billions in BTC through multiple market cycles, reflecting conviction rather than opportunism. Blockchain Wealth is the company’s response to the next phase — clients who want to do more with that capital than simply hold it.

Squads has closed an $18 million strategic round led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, L1D, Collab+Currency, Electric Capital, Placeholder, Jump Crypto, and Robot Ventures. Total funding now stands at $42.9 million. The capital is directed at Altitude, a financial operating system built on stablecoin infrastructure.

The underlying thesis is structural, not speculative. For most of the last decade, building financial products for businesses meant building on top of banks — partnerships required to hold customer funds, access payment rails, and clear compliance in every new market. Blockchains changed the underlying layer. Stablecoins turned money into software, separating treasury and payments from the fractional reserve system for the first time. That separation created a new category of licensed Payment Service Providers capable of moving funds across both stablecoin and traditional banking rails simultaneously.

Visa has officially launched a validator node on the Tempo network, marking a significant step in the payments giant’s push into blockchain infrastructure. Tempo, a purpose-built Layer-1 blockchain designed for agentic commerce and real-time payments, now counts Visa, Stripe, and Zodia Custody by Standard Chartered among its first external validators.

The validator node was configured and managed entirely in-house by Visa following six months of joint engineering work with Tempo’s team. Rather than relying on third-party operators, Visa integrated its secure infrastructure directly into the Tempo network — positioning itself as an anchor validator during this initial phase of network growth.

Liquid, a trading platform targeting the convergence of crypto and traditional finance, has closed an $18 million Series Seed round co-led by Neo and Left Lane Capital. The round also drew participation from Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel, AntiFund, and Sunflower Capital, alongside existing backers Paradigm and General Catalyst — a heavyweight roster that signals serious institutional confidence in the platform’s thesis.

The core premise is straightforward: modern traders don’t stop when Wall Street closes, and their tools shouldn’t either. Liquid consolidates access to over 500 markets — spanning crypto, equities, commodities, FX, and pre-IPO assets — into a single interface available on iOS, Android, and desktop. Users can trade with up to 200x leverage without surrendering custody of their assets. The platform launched in August 2025 and has already processed over $3 billion in trading volume across 40,000 users.

Paystand, the blockchain-powered B2B payments network, has announced the launch of USDb, a stablecoin designed specifically for commercial-scale enterprise finance. The announcement was made on stage at Bitcoin Las Vegas.

Unlike Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) — which together control over 90% of the stablecoin market and were built for crypto-native use cases — USDb targets the accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll, and treasury workflows that underpin the global economy. It is backed 1:1 by USD reserves and natively deployed on Rootstock, Bitcoin’s leading smart contract sidechain.