According to DB News, the DOJ is cleared to sell 69,370 $BTC($6.58B) confiscated from Silk Road.

On February 26, t54 Labs announced the close of a $5 million seed round, led by Anagram, PL Capital, and Franklin Templeton, with participation from Ripple and other institutional investors. The firm focuses on infrastructure for self-sovereign trading AI agents, including "know your agent" (KYA) identity verification, real-time risk control, compliance solutions, and settlement integration. It plans to offer credit limits to agents based on their identity and risk scores. Currently, the protocol is deployed on XRP Ledger, Solana, and Base. t54 Labs has also released x402-secure—an open-source component built on the x402 payment protocol, which was incubated by Coinbase. (Source: The Block)

On February 26, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake announced the organization’s "strawmap" roadmap, which outlines seven hard forks scheduled through the end of 2029. The roadmap includes five key milestones: - Fast Layer 1 (L1) finality - A "gigagas" L1 network capable of 10,000 TPS via zkEVM - A "teragas" Layer 2 (L2) network enabled by data availability sampling - Post-quantum cryptography integration - Native L1 privacy features for shielding ETH transfers This version aligns with U.S. English news conventions: concise, clear structure, and industry-standard terminology used naturally.

On February 26, crypto journalist Eleanor Terrett reported that a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon lunched with a Republican senator today, with the discussion centered on advancing cryptocurrency market structure legislation to strengthen the U.S.'s global leadership in crypto and AI.

February 26 — Bitget market data shows U.S. stocks closed higher Wednesday, with preliminary gains of 0.6% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 0.8% for the S&P 500 and 1.26% for the Nasdaq Composite. Tech stocks saw mixed but notable moves: Nvidia rose 1.4%, while Western Digital jumped 7.5%. Crypto-linked equities rallied sharply: Circle surged 35% after its earnings beat expectations, Strategy gained 8.86%, BitMine climbed 10.44% and Coinbase rose 13.58%.

February 26: Spot silver fell below $88 per ounce, down 1.68% intraday, per Bitget market data.

Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said Wednesday that rifts between the Federal Reserve and the White House have begun to erode public trust in the central bank’s apolitical standing — one of the most direct warnings to date from a top monetary policy official about the fallout from former President Trump’s hardline stance on the Fed. In a farewell essay ahead of his February-end retirement from the Atlanta Fed, Bostic noted his colleagues across the Fed system remain committed to separating their work from politics. “But visits over the past few months have made clear that legal and verbal sparring over the central bank has led people from all walks of life to question the Fed’s independence — a development that’s deeply concerning,” he wrote. Bostic isn’t the only Fed official this year to stress the importance of central bank independence, but no one has directly warned as he did Wednesday that the ongoing string of controversies could weaken public confidence in the instit