More than 23% of traders now expect the Federal Open Market Committee to cut rates at its March 2026 meeting, up from 18.4% on the previous Friday. Expectations center on a 25-basis-point reduction as markets react to Kevin Warsh's nomination as the next Federal Reserve chair and weigh its impact on liquidity and risk assets.

According to the CFTC, it reissued a staff letter on Friday to broaden payment stablecoin issuer criteria to cover national trust banks, amending Staff Letter 25-40 issued on Dec 8, 2025. The move aligns with the GENIUS Act signed in July 2025 and follows the FDIC's December 2025 proposal outlining how banks could issue stablecoins via subsidiaries.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty declined by about 11.16% at block 935,429, marking the largest single adjustment drop since China’s crypto mining crackdown in 2021. Difficulty currently stands near 125.86 T and is projected to fall again on February 23 to around 112.7 T, alongside a hashrate pullback linked to a broad market downturn and weather-related shutdowns of U.S. miners.

On Thursday, crypto exchange Gemini said it will exit the United Kingdom, European Union and Australian markets while cutting its workforce by 25%. The firm plans to concentrate on expanding in the United States and scaling its Gemini Predictions platform, which has attracted over 10,000 users and $24 million in trading volume since launching in December 2025.

The Aster decentralized exchange and perpetual futures platform announced on Thursday that its new layer-1 blockchain testnet is open to all users, with a mainnet release targeted for Q1 2026. The project, which rebranded in March 2025 into a perpetual futures DEX and competes with Hyperliquid, plans to roll out fiat on-ramps, open-source its code and expand token utility as perp DEX volumes surged into the trillions of dollars in 2025.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Congress on Wednesday that the government will keep Bitcoin seized in asset cases but will not instruct private banks to buy BTC during a downturn. He said $500 million in retained BTC has grown to over $15 billion, and acquisitions must remain budget‑neutral under a March 2025 executive order.

Fireblocks said Wednesday it will integrate Stacks, a Bitcoin-aligned DeFi layer, to offer institutional lending and yield opportunities. Leveraging Stacks' roughly 29-second blocks helps bypass Bitcoin's ~10-minute interval while still settling to the BTC ledger for finality. Fireblocks expects the rollout in early 2026, without a specific launch date.

Foundry USA, operator of the world's largest Bitcoin mining pool, has reduced its hashrate by about 60% since Friday in response to winter storm Fern sweeping across the United States. The pool's computing power reportedly dropped by nearly 200 EH/s, slowing temporary block production to around 12 minutes while it still maintains about 23% of global Bitcoin mining pool hashrate. The storm has caused widespread power outages for over 1 million residents and prompted other US-based mining pools to curb energy use to ease pressure on the grid.

Michael Saylor, co-founder of Strategy, argued that "ambitious opportunists" pushing Bitcoin protocol changes represent the network's greatest risk. His remarks reignited disputes over non-monetary uses like NFTs, references to BIP-110, and readiness for quantum threats, as figures including Adam Back and Nic Carter voiced opposing views on post-quantum migration.