Coindesk

Canadian fintech companies raised $1.62 billion in the first half of 2025, with digital assets and artificial intelligence (AI) startups taking the lion's share of fresh funding, according to KPMG Canada’s Pulse of Fintech report.While fintech funding slowed globally, Canadian investors maintained steady support for ventures at the intersection of finance and emerging technology. The report singled out companies building blockchain-based infrastructure and AI-driven financial tools as leading growth areas."If we look at the first half of 2025, it's clear that digital assets have re-emerged as a magnet for investor interest, despite the broader contraction in venture investment values," said Edith Hitt, a partner at KPMG Canada.AI investments aren't surprising, given its monumental expansion in recent years. However, Canadian investors...

Eric Trump is deepening his role in digital assets with reported plans to attend a shareholder meeting in Tokyo, public predictions about bitcoin’s price, and new corporate ventures that extend the Trump family’s crypto push into Asia.Bloomberg reported Friday that Trump will join a Sept. 1 shareholder meeting of Metaplanet, a Japanese company following Michael Saylor’s Strategy (formerly, MicroStategy) playbook, citing people familiar with the matter. Trump was appointed as a strategic adviser in March. His Tokyo stop will apparently follow an appearance at the Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong on Aug. 28–29. A day earlier, Trump appeared at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium, where he described himself as a “bitcoin maxi” and said he now spends more than half...

News BackgroundXRP advanced sharply during the August 22–23 session, testing multi-month resistance near $3.10 after weeks of sideways trading. The move coincided with dovish commentary from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell at Jackson Hole, which reinforced expectations of a September rate cut and lifted risk sentiment across digital assets. On-chain settlement volumes on the XRP Ledger surged 500% earlier this week, adding to optimism around institutional adoption despite ongoing whale distribution.Price Action Summary• XRP gained 8.56% across the 23-hour session from August 22 at 11:00 to August 23 at 10:00, climbing from $2.83 to $3.03.• The token swung between $2.79 and $3.10, creating an 11% intraday range.• The breakout occurred at 14:00 UTC on August 22, with XRP surging from...

AAVE surged nearly 19% to $355 over the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk Data, leading the top 40 cryptocurrencies by percentage daily gain as investors responded to its recent Aptos expansion and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s dovish remarks.What Aave is and why it mattersAave is a decentralized finance protocol that lets users lend and borrow cryptocurrencies without intermediaries. Loans are managed by smart contracts, with borrowers required to post collateral valued above their loans.The AAVE token underpins this system. It can be staked to support security and earn rewards, used as collateral for borrowing and grants holders governance rights. In return, tokenholders gain voting power and fee benefits, making AAVE central to protocol operations.Aptos expansionOn Aug. 21, Aave...

Every era of economic transformation has begun the same way: with infrastructure that seems niche – until it isn’t.Early irrigation systems unlocked the first cities. Early railroad networks rewired entire economies. The internet’s core protocols, TCP/IP, turned slow and siloed information networks into a single, global system of communication. And the Cloud turned idle servers into the foundation of the digital economy.We don’t remember them for how they started. We remember them for how they scaled. Because in effect, what once looked like niche experiments became the backbone of global markets.Stablecoins are next. Welcome to the age of the stablecoin layer: an open, programmable foundation for global money movement.Just last year, stablecoins lacked clear regulation and were dismissed by much...