Northern Trust Asset Management has introduced a tokenized share class for its NIF Treasury Instruments Portfolio, entering the digital assets arena with a blockchain-based ownership mirror. The fund continues to invest in short-term US Treasurys and seeks to maintain a $1.00 per-share value, while nearly $11 billion in US Treasury debt is now represented on public blockchains. The new share class will initially be available via BNY's LiquidityDirect platform, which runs on Goldman Sachs' Digital Asset Platform.

CME Group reported that with the launch of Cardano, Chainlink and Stellar token futures in February 2025, its crypto derivatives now reference more than 75% of total market capitalization. The firm said average daily open interest in its broader cryptocurrency suite, which also includes BTC, ETH, SOL and XRP contracts, was close to $25 billion in 2025, alongside a record average daily volume of 278,300 contracts worth about $12 billion notionally.

On Monday, Nasdaq was reported to have asked the SEC to approve new yes-or-no binary options contracts tied to the Nasdaq 100 Index and its micro version. The proposed "Outcome Related Options" would trade between $0.01 and $1 in a structure similar to prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, and could bring event-style products directly into the listed equity index options market if approved.

ProCap Financial reported on Monday that it purchased 450 Bitcoin during the latest market pullback, raising its total holdings to 5,457 BTC while lowering its average cost per coin. Over the past 10 days, the Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin treasury firm also repurchased 782,408 shares at prices well below its net asset value in an effort to shrink the discount between market price and underlying assets.

On March 1, 2026, a fire triggered by external impacts at an Amazon Web Services data center in the Middle East led to a full power shutdown in ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1, disrupting services such as Claude, ChatGPT and AWS Bedrock. AWS reports that restoration will take many hours as teams await fire department clearance and assess potential storage damage, while investors react to regional military tensions with higher oil and gold prices and renewed gains in major cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Michael Selig has appointed former federal prosecutor and private sector litigator David Miller to lead the agency's enforcement division. Miller previously worked at Greenberg Traurig, Morgan Lewis and the U.S. Department of Justice, focusing on commodities, securities, digital assets and national security, and will oversee enforcement as the CFTC takes on a larger role in crypto and prediction markets. His arrival coincides with shifting enforcement priorities and staffing questions at both the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Major crypto exchanges including Binance, Bitget, Bybit and OKX have activated emergency and shelter-in-place plans for employees in the Middle East as regional conflict intensified in early March 2026. Firms with significant operations in the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are offering evacuation options, remote work and safety guidance while traditional markets in the UAE remain shut until at least March 3, 2026. Despite the turmoil, Bitcoin and Ethereum have stabilized above $66,000 and $1,900, and trading in tokenized gold products has surged into the billions of dollars in daily volume.

Rising military confrontation involving the USA, Israel, Iran and regional powers has sparked questions about which crypto assets could be most vulnerable in a World War III scenario. Four AI chatbots indicated that thin‑liquidity small‑cap altcoins and meme coins might crash by as much as 90%, while some argued that major stablecoins tied to the US dollar could also face severe stress. They broadly agreed that Bitcoin would likely sell off sharply at first but remain the most resilient asset in the sector over time.