Linera Launches Babbage Testnet

April 3rd (CoinDesk) — After firing Attorney General Pam Bondi, former President Trump appointed Todd Branch—his former personal lawyer and ex-Deputy Attorney General—as acting Attorney General. Branch previously disbanded the Department of Justice’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) during his tenure as Deputy Attorney General and signed a memo telling prosecutors to stop pursuing regulatory violation cases involving the cryptocurrency industry. That memo was cited by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in the case of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm, resulting in one charge being dismissed. Notably, Branch held between $159,000 and $485,000 in crypto assets (including BTC, ETH, SOL, ADA) when he signed the enforcement memo—sparking questions about potential violations of ethics rules and his prior pledge to divest such assets before handling crypto-related matters. Recent U.S. government ethics disclosure filings show Branch has tran

April 3rd — Per OnchainLens monitoring, a newly created crypto wallet received 488,599 HYPE tokens from FalconX, with the tokens valued at $17.18 million.

April 3rd, Coinbase announced a partnership with the Linux Foundation to launch the x402 Foundation—an initiative focused on governing the x402 Payment Standard through an open governance model. The standard enables websites and APIs to seamlessly request and accept payments via standard HTTP interactions, creating a native payment layer for the web. As the protocol’s original creators, Coinbase has contributed the underlying technology to the Linux Foundation to ensure neutral development, with Coinbase and Base retaining founding participant roles.

On April 3rd, Polymarket will distribute over $5 million in liquidity incentives for sports and esports markets throughout April 2026. The reward pool is split into Pre-Match and Live phases for each contest. Rewards are allocated proportionally to all eligible markets within each competition. Football match incentives cover the top five European leagues and other European football competitions, while esports incentives include CS:GO, DOTA 2, League of Legends, and more.

On April 3rd, The Information reports that Anthropic has acquired biotech startup Coefficient Bio for approximately $400 million.

On April 3, U.S.-listed Bitcoin mining firm MARA announced a roughly 15% layoff, cutting full-time staff across multiple departments and some contract workers. The move is part of its strategic shift from a pure Bitcoin mining company to an energy and digital infrastructure firm. Earlier this February, MARA completed the majority acquisition of Exaion — a subsidiary of French state-owned energy giant EDF — officially entering the AI and high-performance computing space. It also struck a deal with data center developer Starwood to repurpose ~1 GW of mining infrastructure for AI workloads. Recently, MARA sold over 15,133 BTC (roughly $1.1 billion) to repay $1 billion in convertible bonds. This led to a full-year net loss of $1.3 billion in 2025, with adjusted EBITDA at -$330.8 million. Per Bitget market data, MARA stock bucked the trend with an 8.33% gain, closing at $8.17.