Category: Cryptocurrency News

What to Know: Cardano’s $30M liquidity program highlights how L1s now treat stablecoins, market makers, and bridges as critical infrastructure ahead of 2026. As base-layer liquidity deepens, traders often feel more comfortable rotating into higher-risk sectors like experimental meme ecosystems and mine-to-earn models. PEPENODE’s virtual mining system aims to remove hardware and complexity, giving early users tiered node rewards and meme coin payouts via a mine-to-earn design. The broader shift toward gamified, non-hardware mining shows how projects are trying to keep users engaged beyond simple token speculation and a single hype cycle. Cardano just dropped a massive signal: a $30 million war chest dedicated to boosting liquidity by 2026. The proposal seeks approval to use 70M $ADA (approximately $30M) to bring on stablecoins, cross-chain bridges, and analytics. They aren’t just tweaking the edges; they are treating liquidity as essential plumbing. The goal? Make moving capital across the chain as smooth as sending an email, zero friction, zero slippage. Cardano already has united backing from Input Output, Intersect, and the Midnight Foundation, showing a strong will and desire for success. Why should you care? Because when base layers get their act together, it changes how we trade. When you aren’t worried about thin order books or getting wrecked by slippage on the exit, you feel a lot more comfortable moving out further on the risk curve. Deep liquidity turns ‘apeing in’ from a reckless gamble into a calculated play. And that stability is exactly what’s setting the stage for the next wave of crypto experiments: ecosystems that move beyond simple ‘pump and dump’ mechanics into something sustainable. Something that projects like PEPENODE ($PEPENODE) can offer. PEPENODE: Gamifying the Grind This shift toward deeper engagement is where PEPENODE ($PEPENODE) enters the chat. It’s positioning itself as the world’s first ‘mine-to-earn’ meme coin, and it’s solving a problem we all hate: mining is too hard for the average person. Let’s be real, nobody wants to buy racks of GPUs, deal with heat, or pay massive electric bills just to secure a network. PEPENODE is flipping that script with a virtual mining system. No Hardware Required: You aren’t building a rig; you’re managing miner nodes directly from a dashboard. It’s mining, but browser-based. Play to Win: This isn’t just passive staking where you lock tokens and forget them. You upgrade facilities and customize your setup using your $PEPENODE. It keeps you active and engaged long after the initial hype fades. Rewards You Actually Want: Instead of some obscure governance token, the payout structure is designed for degens, rewarding you in high-voltage assets like PEPE and Fartcoin. It’s effectively taking the complex world of liquidity mining and wrapping it in a UI that feels like a strategy game. Already want in? Check out our ‘How to Buy PEPENODE’ guide. Whale Signals and Presale Velocity If you follow the money, things get even more interesting. While the base layers are fighting over stablecoin dominance, smart money is looking for high-upside plays that utilize this new infrastructure. $PEPENODE fits that bill perfectly. The presale is moving fast, already hitting over $2.24M with tokens sitting at a cheap entry of $0.0011731. We’ve also seen some impressive whale buys of $94.1K and $18.2K. When whales start accumulating this early, it’s usually a signal worth watching, as it could indicate the best meme coins to buy. The system is designed to reward early movers; the earlier you get your nodes running, the better your return potential before the ecosystem gets crowded. Also, don’t forget to check out the impressive dynamic staking rewards, currently sitting at 578%. Our experts think $PEPENODE could go the distance, and give it a predicted end-of-2026 price of $0.0077. If you bought at today’s price, that could see you netting a potential ROI of over 556%. What are you waiting for? Get your $PEPENODE today and be ready for the mining revolution. Remember, this isn’t intended as financial advice, and you should always do your own research before investing. Authored by Aaron Walker, NewsBTC — https://www.newsbtc.com/news/cardano-deploys-30m-liquidity-as-meme-degens-eye-pepenode/

Grayscale said Bitcoin’s 2025 sell-off looks like a local bottom, not a new cycle peak, with Fed policy and US crypto bills key for 2026.

XRP’s largest holders are undergoing a sharp structural shift on the XRP Ledger: there are significantly fewer “whale and shark” wallets than two months ago, yet the remaining large accounts now custody more XRP than at any point in the past seven years, according to new data from on-chain analytics firm Santiment. XRP Whales Shrink, Holdings Hit 7-Year High In a post on X, Santiment described what it called “a fascinating trend” in the behavior of the network’s biggest holders. The firm wrote: “XRP Ledger is seeing a fascinating trend of whale & shark wallets shrinking in number, but continuing to grow in coins held. There are -20.6% less 100M+ $XRP wallets compared to 8 weeks ago, but they still own a 7-year high 48B coins collectively.” Related Reading: XRP Hit By Violent 59% Leverage Flush As Speculators Slam The Brakes The accompanying chart, taken from Santiment’s Sanbase analytics platform, tracks wallets holding at least 100 million XRP – the cohort the firm labels “whales and sharks.” The visual is split into two main panels, each overlaid with XRP’s price in weekly candlesticks. In the upper panel, a yellow line traces the number of 100M+ XRP wallets across roughly a one-year window. A highlighted callout notes that there are now “569 less 100M+ XRP wallets in past 8 weeks, -20.6% drop.” That is a steep contraction in a relatively short period for such a concentrated wealth bracket on a major network. The metric shows a pronounced decline toward the right edge of the chart, while the XRP price has also fallen sharply. Related Reading: What The Rapid XRP Outlfows From Crypto Exchanges Mean For The Price The lower panel focuses on the aggregate holdings of that same wallet cohort. Here, a blue line representing the combined balance of all 100M+ addresses climbs to a multi-year peak. The annotation on the chart states: “Over 48B XRP held by 100M+ wallets, 7-year high.” In other words, despite the double-digit percentage drop in the number of very large wallets, the total amount of XRP they control has continued to increase and now sits at its highest level since at least 2018, based on Santiment’s data window. Taken together, the two panels depict a clear concentration dynamic on the XRP Ledger: fewer very large wallets, but a larger stockpile of coins controlled by those that remain in the 100M+ bracket. Mathematically, if the count of wallets falls by more than one-fifth while the group’s combined balance rises to a seven-year high of 48 billion XRP, the average balance per wallet in this tier must have increased markedly over the eight-week period highlighted by Santiment. Santiment’s wording in the X post is strictly descriptive and stops short of giving any directional price view, limiting its characterization to a “fascinating trend” of shrinking wallet counts paired with growing balances. Meanwhile, the independent crypto sentiment index FOMOmeter (@FOMOmeterCrypto) account on X commented: “Whales are pulling XRP into fewer hands while the crowd treats it as background noise, a clean low conviction phase that FOMOmeter is built to quantify.” At press time, XRP traded at $2.01. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

Goldman Sachs announces acquisition of Innovator Capital Management, a pioneering ETF provider with $28 billion in assets, including bitcoin-linked defined outcome ETF strategies. Goldman Sachs has entered into an agreement to acquire Innovator Capital Management, a leader in defined outcome exchange-traded funds (ETFs), for approximately $2 billion. The transaction, expected to close in the second […]

What to Know: Strategy’s reduced 2025 $BTC yield targets and its $1.44B cash reserve underscore the volatility of pure corporate Bitcoin exposure. Capital is rotating away from single-stock Bitcoin proxies and toward direct Bitcoin ecosystem plays, especially Layer-2 infrastructure with fee and activity capture. Bitcoin Hyper integrates Bitcoin’s security with SVM throughput to deliver sub-second smart contracts and low-fee DeFi, gaming, and payments. As Bitcoin Layer-2 competition heats up, networks offering strong tooling, low latency, and aligned economic incentives may outperform passive $BTC treasury strategies. Strategy’s move to slash its 2025 profit and $BTC yield targets to build a $1.44B cash reserve is a blunt reminder of how violent Bitcoin treasury cycles can be, even for professional managers. When a flagship listed proxy for $BTC suddenly prioritizes cash over coin, it forces you to reassess risk. For traders who’ve been using Strategy shares as a levered Bitcoin bet, that pivot underlines a structural problem: you’re still exposed to a single company’s capital-allocation decisions. Earnings calls, dilution, debt covenants and regulatory scrutiny can hit your Bitcoin play even if $BTC itself trades sideways or higher. That’s why more capital is quietly rotating from corporate treasuries and listed stocks toward infrastructure and ecosystem exposure. Instead of asking whether one boardroom will stay max long $BTC, investors are asking which rails will capture fees, users and activity as Bitcoin matures beyond digital gold. In that rotation, Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER) is emerging as one of the higher-beta ideas on the radar: a Bitcoin Layer 2 that integrates the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) to deliver sub-second execution and high-throughput smart contracts on top of Bitcoin’s settlement layer. For traders seeking upside without tying everything to a single stock, it’s a very different proposition from owning Strategy. Why Bitcoin Ecosystem Bets Are Replacing Single-Stock Proxies Strategy’s balance-sheet shift highlights a basic reality: listed companies are constrained by shareholders, auditors and macro cycles. They can’t run 100% Bitcoin exposure indefinitely without occasionally de-risking, even if their brand is built on being all in on $BTC. At the same time, Bitcoin itself still settles around 7 transactions per second on L1, with fees frequently spiking into several dollars during congestion. That bottleneck has kept most DeFi, gaming and NFT experimentation on chains like Ethereum, Solana and Base, while Bitcoin remains underused capital sitting in cold storage. Bitcoin Hyper attempts to unlock Bitcoin’s idle trillions, but with a very specific approach: pairing Bitcoin settlement with an SVM-powered execution layer. For investors moving away from corporate proxies, these kinds of rails are increasingly how they try to capture long-term ecosystem upside rather than quarterly treasury decisions. For a deeper dive into how this works in practice, see what Bitcoin Hyper is planning in our guide. Bitcoin Hyper’s SVM Layer 2 Pitch to Bitcoin Holders Where Bitcoin Hyper gets interesting is the architecture. It uses Bitcoin L1 purely as the settlement and security root, while a real-time SVM Layer 2 handles high-speed execution. Blocks finalize in sub-second intervals, with transactions costing a tiny fraction of a cent, targeting performance that the team claims can exceed Solana’s own throughput under load. That SVM integration matters because it imports Solana’s developer tooling and parallel execution model straight into the Bitcoin orbit. Rust-based smart contracts, SPL-compatible tokens adapted for this L2, and familiar SDKs give builders a fast path to port DeFi, NFT and gaming primitives without reinventing everything for a bespoke VM. On-chain, the system relies on a single trusted sequencer that batches transactions and periodically anchors state to Bitcoin. A decentralized canonical bridge manages $BTC transfers in and out of the Layer 2, allowing wrapped $BTC to move into high-speed environments for swaps, lending, staking and in-game economies, then settle back to L1 when needed. The market seems to be paying attention. The Bitcoin Hyper presale has raised $28.8M, with tokens at $0.013365, signaling early conviction that a Solana-grade execution layer attached to Bitcoin’s security could capture meaningful user and fee flow over time. Learn how to buy $HYPER before the chance is gone. Whale investors have invested heavily: $274K whale $HYPER purchase $379K whale $HYPER purchase $500K whale $HYPER purchase That interest comes in part due to $HYPER’s price potential: our $HYPER price prediction shows it could go from $0.013365 to $0.08625 by the end of 2026, delivering 545% potential gains to current investors. For yield hunters, $HYPER also bakes in staking, with rewards tied to community and governance participation and a 7-day vesting window for presale stakers. If Strategy’s cash hoard is a bet on surviving the next volatility wave, Bitcoin Hyper is a bet that the next wave drives more activity, not just more hoarding. Consider if $HYPER fits your thesis before joining the presale. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or trading advice; always do your own research. Authored by Aaron Walker for NewsBTC – https://www.newsbtc.com/strategy-bitcoin-cash-reserve-boosts-bitcoin-hyper-layer-2

Bitcoin treasury companies drove November inflows with $1.06 billion, with Ether seeing $37 million in outflows despite continued accumulation by BitMine.

Bitcoin liquidity cues received a clear signal from the Fed, as the end of QT sparked the second-largest overnight liquidity injection since the COVID-19 era.

Poland’s president vetoed a sweeping cryptocurrency bill over concerns it would stifle innovation and threaten freedoms, sparking a fierce political clash.

YPF, the Argentine oil company, has announced that it will implement a system allowing customers to pay for gas with crypto. With this move, YPF becomes one of the few companies adopting this payment strategy in Latam. YPF To Implement System Allowing Customers to Make Cryptocurrency Payments The Facts YPF, an oil and oil derivatives […]

Solana has quietly become the busiest chain for x402 payments, clocking an all-time high $380,000 in daily volume and a 750% weekly jump.