Coindesk

SOL, Solana’s native token, hovered just below $200 early Wednesday after a surge of bullish developments — including a major corporate accumulation and bold analyst projections — renewed momentum in the sixth most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization.On Monday, consumer brand platform Upexi Inc. (UPXI) disclosed that it had acquired an additional 100,000 SOL, bringing its total holdings to 1,818,809 SOL worth approximately $331 million. The Nasdaq-listed company funded the purchase through a $200 million equity and convertible notes raise, marking its third successful capital round since launching its SOL treasury strategy in April.In a press release, Upexi said more than half of its tokens were purchased in locked form at a discount, resulting in a $58 million unrealized gain...

Need evidence of speculator fervor. Look no further than Coinglass' crypto derivatives leaderboard, which shows that fartcoin (FARTCOIN), the Solana-based memecoin, is now the 10th largest token based on derivatives open interest.As of writing, notional open interest in futures tied to fartcoin totaled over $1 billion, placing the joke cryptocurrency ahead of well-established coins, such as Litecoin (LTC), Chainlink's LINK (LINK), Avalanche's AVAX (AVAX), and several others. The other tokens play pivotal roles in decentralized finance (DeFi), blockchain oracles and payments. Notional open interest refers to the dollar value locked in the number of open or active derivative contracts at a given time. What's more alarming is that fartcoin's open interest now equals 65% of its market capitalization of $1.62...

CoinShares (CS) said it received a license under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation, the first crypto asset manager based in continental Europe to qualify.The approval allows the Saint Helier, Jersey-based firm to offer crypto portfolio management services across the 27-nation bloc under a single, harmonized regulatory framework. Operations are already passported to countries including Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and it may expand further, the company said.The license, granted by France’s Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), joins CoinShares’ existing permissions under the EU’s MiFID and AIFM directives. That, the company says, makes it the only major European asset manager to hold all three credentials.It's a step the firm says could help open the 33 trillion euro...

Have you heard of disguised unemployment? It refers to a situation where a portion of the workforce appears to be employed, but isn't contributing to the economy's output. Consider the massive capital expenditure loss from ghost cities, which represent unoccupied infrastructure.Something similar can be said for the top smart contract blockchains, which hosts hundreds of decentralized protocols. Of these, only a minority are generating revenue, while the rest produce no yield, loosely representing ghost digital cities and a form of disguised unemployment.According to DeFiLlama, Ethereum is the world's largest smart contract blockchain, hosting 1,271 protocols. Yet over the past 30 days, a staggering 88%, or 1,121 projects in total, generated no revenue.Ethereum's rival, Solana, has a much smaller ecosystem, hosting...

Demand for trading stocks on-chain is real.Switzerland-based Backed Finance's tokenized U.S. equities product, xStocks, has seen a cumulative trading volume of over $300 million less than a month since going live on Bybit, Kraken, and Solana decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.xStocks are 24/7 onchain tokens representing shares in publicly traded U.S. firms. Each token is fully backed 1:1 by the corresponding underlying stock held by a licensed custodian, allowing investors to take exposure to traditional assets while ensuring transparency and security.These tokens are issued by Backed Finance, which operates under the country's DLT regulatory framework. They are built using the Solana Program Liberty (SPL) token standard to facilitate high-speed transferability and on-chain compatibility with Web3 and decentralized applications."xStocks have crossed $300m...