Nasdaq said on Monday it will link its European trading venues to Boerse Stuttgart Group's Seturion platform, enabling blockchain-based settlement of tokenized securities and initially focusing on structured products. The partners aim to shorten settlement times, reduce post-trade fragmentation in European capital markets and operate within MiFID II and the DLT Pilot Regime, while gradually extending access to more issuers, brokers and financial institutions.

On 9 March 2026, stablecoin payments firm KAST disclosed it had raised $80 million in a Series A round, putting its valuation at $600 million after a prior $10 million seed. The company now reports more than 1 million users, nearly $5 billion in annualized transaction volume, and plans to push into North America, Latin America, and the Middle East while rolling out an enterprise cross-border payments product.

On 9 March 2026, cybersecurity researchers outlined how North Korean state-linked hackers abused a critical React front-end flaw, CVE-2025-55182, to infiltrate crypto exchanges, staking platforms, and software vendors’ cloud systems. The attackers allegedly used stolen AWS credentials to hunt for private keys, source code, and configuration secrets, contributing to an estimated $2.02 billion in stolen cryptocurrency during 2025.

Coinbase and Paxos have paid their insurance premiums to Aon using USDC and PYUSD stablecoins, in what is described as a first for a major global insurance broker. Aon processed Coinbase's payment in USDC on Ethereum and Paxos's payment in PYUSD on Solana as part of a proof-of-concept pilot informed by recent U.S. stablecoin legislation.

In the three months leading up to 9 March 2026, crypto fundraising saw capital raised slump 62%, deal count drop 38%, and average deal size fall to $21.89 million. While 2025 headline figures showed $50.6 billion raised, much of this came from $22.1 billion in M&A, with venture funding at $23.3 billion and deal numbers down 21% year-over-year. Capital is concentrating in large strategic rounds such as Tether's $200 million investment in Whop, as CeFi captures the biggest checks and DeFi faces smaller, compressed valuations.

Toobit, an international cryptocurrency exchange, has launched a 200,000 USDT campaign centered on its integrated TradFi futures and spot markets, running until March 30, 2026. The program features reduced maker and taker fees, a 50,000 USDT protection fund for initial trades, and multiple prize tiers for new, futures, and spot traders. It arrives as on-chain real-world assets exceed $25 billion in volume and tokenized commodities surpass $7.32 billion in market cap over the past year.

Stablecoin-focused banking startup Kast has reportedly closed an $80 million funding round that values the company at $600 million. The capital will be used to scale its payment infrastructure and products across North America, Latin America and the Middle East, while stablecoin transfer volume reached a record $1.8 trillion in February.

Nasdaq has entered a partnership with Kraken's parent company Payward to create an "equities transformation gateway" linking tokenized stocks on regulated markets with decentralized blockchain networks. The gateway will use Kraken's xStocks framework and is expected to support Nasdaq's tokenized equity design and distributed-ledger services starting in the first half of 2027.