The Block
The nine newborn U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs, excluding Grayscale’s converted fund, now hold over 200,000 BTC in assets under management.BlackRock’s IBIT also traded more than Grayscale’s GBTC amid strong inflows on Thursday.
Quick Take Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade will introduce proto-danksharding to make Layer 2 solutions like zkSync cheaper to use. Boojum, a STARK-based proof system, will allow zkSync to publish more data to Ethereum, thereby improving performance.
Quick Take Optimism will pause ETH withdrawals for one hour on Feb. 15 to test an upgraded incident response system. The new system can pause ERC-20 tokens and NFTs on any Optimism-chain that opts in.
Quick Take Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is viewed as holding the purse strings for any future crypto legislation, asked Yellen about what updates the Treasury needs to go up against the alleged use of crypto by terrorist groups during Thursday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing
Quick Take Sens. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Katie Boyd Britt of Alabama, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and JD Vance of Ohio said the SEC’s mission of protecting investors and maintaining fair markets was “compromised” by its handling of the case in a letter penned to Gensler on Wednesday.
Quick Take Crypto payments firm Ramp is rolling out another initiative to make it easier for consumers to start buying and selling digital assets. The evolution in the company’s know-your-customer policy, initially only available in Brazil, will help users of all platforms Ramp has integrations with including MetaMask, TrustWallet, BitPay and Sorare, among others.
The largest bitcoin mining companies in the U.S. have continued to increase their bitcoin holdings, according to CryptoQuant.The price of bitcoin has rallied above the $45,000 mark over the last 24 hours.
Quick Take Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter unveiled three launchpad token candidates following the airdrop of its native JUP token last week. Liquid staking service Sanctum, NFT collateralization platform Sharky and cross-chain protocol deBridge were put forward as candidates.
Quick Take: Ethereum core developers have decided a deployment date for the Dencun upgrade. It is scheduled for activation at slot 8626176, estimated for March 13 at around 8:55 am ET.
Quick Take Starknet contributors Herodotus and StarkWare unveiled the Cairo Verifier. This system verifies proofs on Layer 2, bypassing the Ethereum mainnet. The Cairo Verifier aims to reduce verification costs and latency, facilitating the growth of Layer 3 chains on Starknet.
