CZ: The memoir book title "Freedom of Money" is still a draft and may change

February 28 – Crypto startups raised a total of $883 million in February, despite a market downturn, marking a slight 13% drop from the same period last year. Among them, Flying Tulip (FT) – a new project from DeFi architect Andre Cronje that billed itself as “rug pull-proof” – secured $206 million in funding. However, shortly after launch, FT’s on-chain price fell below its listing price of $0.1, undermining its marketing claims of being “rug pull-proof” and offering principal protection. Social commerce platform Whop received a $200 million investment from Tether, pushing its valuation to $16 billion. Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered digital asset bank in the U.S., closed a $1 billion funding round, lifting its valuation to $4.2 billion. Stablecoins, artificial intelligence, and institutional tools have emerged as key investment hotspots for 2026.

On February 28, per Farside data, U.S. Ethereum spot ETFs posted a net outflow of $43 million yesterday—snapping a three-day streak of net inflows. Notably, BNY Mellon’s ETHA accounted for the entire $43 million outflow, with all other ETFs registering no net flows.

On February 28, per Farside monitoring data, U.S. Bitcoin spot ETFs saw a net outflow of $27.5 million yesterday, ending three straight days of net inflows. Of those, Belay IBIT recorded a net outflow of $32.7 million, while BTCO posted a net inflow of $3.3 million.

On February 28, 147-year-old Japanese firm Datong Limited announced it will purchase up to 1 billion yen (≈$6.4 million) in Bitcoin as an inflation and yen depreciation hedge.

February 28: Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) announced yesterday it will back a cryptocurrency anti-money laundering (AML) proof-of-concept experiment. Proposed by Hitachi, the initiative involves 13 firms—including GMO Coin, Chainalysis Japan, NEC, JPYC and BitBank—scheduled to run from March to May 2026. Its goal: verify the effectiveness of sharing suspicious wallet address data across multiple crypto exchanges and stablecoin issuers to build a more efficient industry-wide AML system.