US Stocks Soar at Open, Crypto-Related Stocks Rally, Circle Surpasses Earnings Expectations, Soars 22.4%

Feb. 26 — Bitcoin surpassed $68,000, up 6.2% over the past 24 hours, per HTX market data.

February 26: Prediction market Kalshi has issued its first insider trading enforcement action, fining a video editor for popular YouTuber MrBeast. Artem Kaptur, the editor, leveraged his role to access nonpublic information about MrBeast’s channel and trade related event contracts on the platform. He faces a 2-year ban from Kalshi and a $20,397.58 fine—including $5,397.58 in confiscated illegal profits and a $15,000 additional penalty.

February 26: Stripe co-founder and president John Collison said in a recent interview that as AI agents become independent economic entities over time, the global financial infrastructure will need a fundamental overhaul to meet "machine-to-machine (M2M)" payment demands. While this trend is widely discussed, large-scale transactions of this kind haven’t emerged yet—but that day is near. Stripe expects to see meaningful agent-to-agent transaction volume this year, and a top priority now is building systems tailored specifically for AI agent transactions. Collison added that Stripe’s heavy bet on USDC also ties into this trend. Stripe co-created the new blockchain Tempo with crypto investment firm Paradigm because the future requires an extremely scalable blockchain—existing chains fall short due to technical trade-offs. Tempo is built from scratch for high scalability. “This capability is critical for humans, but even more so for AI agents,” Collison noted. “Tempo is thus one of our

Feb 25th — Hyperliquid’s largest ETH long position holder added another 15,000 ETH to its position this morning, per EmberCN monitoring. The entity now holds a total of 120,000 ETH in long positions, with a combined value of $230 million. Its unrealized loss has narrowed to $10.35 million. Breakdown of the two addresses: - Address 1: Holds 70,000 ETH in long positions opened at $1991, with a liquidation price of $1362. - Address 2: Holds 50,000 ETH in long positions opened at $2012, with a liquidation price of $1350.

Feb. 25 — Per Whale Alert data, the USDC Treasury has minted an additional 2.5 billion USDC on the Solana blockchain.

On February 25, per on-chain analysis from @Route2FI: - A whale holds a $24 million long position in ARC on perpetual DEX Lighter, executing $360k hourly dollar-cost averaging via TWAP (Time-Weighted Average Price) to support the long side. - The whale has netted $5 million in profits. - Lighter’s ARC perpetual contract annualized funding rate has surged to 2100% (~5.7% daily for short sellers), drawing more shorts and escalating the long-short tug-of-war. Route2FI noted the whale’s moves mirror the 2025 JellyJelly manipulation case on Hyperliquid: - A Hyperliquid whale heavily shorted JELLY perps while inflating spot prices via alternative accounts and on-chain transactions, triggering short-side liquidations. - Hyperliquid’s HLP (liquidity pool) incurred losses post-settlement; the team urgently voted to delist JELLY and force settlements at a sharply reduced price. Route2FI added the whale’s current intent remains unclear. Unlike Hyperliquid’s HLP (which absorbs liqu