US Stock Market Opens with Major Indexes Up, Crypto-Related Stocks Experience Mixed Performance

On March 17 (Tuesday), a senior Trump administration official warned that some smaller airports could be forced to close in the coming weeks due to a shortage of security personnel if the government funding shortfall persists. The partial government shutdown has already left 50,000 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport screeners working without pay for the past month, with 10% of the workforce absent on Sunday. “Over time, if this situation continues, we must take very seriously the possibility of extreme measures—up to and including total airport shutdowns, especially for smaller airports,” Adam Staltar, acting deputy administrator of TSA, told Fox News. (Golden Finance)

On March 17, Robinhood’s Robinhood Ventures Fund I announced it has invested roughly $35 million total in two tech companies: payment giant Stripe and AI audio firm ElevenLabs. Specifically, the fund acquired about $14.6 million worth of Stripe’s Class B common stock and put $20 million into ElevenLabs’ Series D preferred stock. Stripe is currently valued at approximately $159 billion and operates the stablecoin platform Bridge. Robinhood noted the fund is designed to let retail investors indirectly invest in private tech companies—previously accessible only to institutional investors—via fund products traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

**March 17 Update: XRP-holding Addresses Hit Record 7.7M+** On-chain data shows XRP-holding addresses topped 7.7 million for the first time Wednesday (March 17), marking a new all-time high—reflecting sustained growth in network usage and investor accumulation. Analytics firm Santiment notes the XRP Ledger’s daily active addresses rose to 46,767, a five-week high, while the count of non-zero XRP wallets hit 7.7 million. This signals ongoing accumulation amid the token’s recent pullback. As for price, XRP trades around $1.50 as of Wednesday, up ~3% over the past 24 hours. Analysts say a successful bullish break above $1.60 (turning the level into support) could push the token toward the $2 region.

March 17 – Aster has officially launched its mainnet, per lookonchain data. Its official website now hosts a block explorer for the network. Meanwhile, on decentralized derivatives exchange Hyperliquid, the largest ASTER long position holds 25.93 million ASTER tokens (≈$20.4 million), with an unrealized gain of roughly $3.9 million to date.

On March 17th, per OnchainLens monitoring, US-listed crypto fintech firm Antalpha deposited 1,700 XAUT into a Cobo wallet address—with the deposit valued at approximately $8.46 million at current market prices. Tether Gold (XAUT) is a tokenized gold asset issued by Tether, backed by physical gold.

March 17th — Aethir, a decentralized GPU computing infrastructure provider, officially rolled out its managed Kubernetes (K8s) service today—a key strategic expansion into the enterprise AI infrastructure market. Kubernetes, the "gold standard" for open-source container orchestration, automates large-scale server cluster management. Aethir’s move aims to give global AI teams a high-performance, plug-and-play development environment with no need to mess with underlying hardware. Core features of Aethir’s managed K8s service include: - Minute-scale deployment: Spin up GPU-enabled K8s clusters in minutes via a self-service API - High-end GPU support: Latest-gen GPUs including NVIDIA H100, H200, and B200 - Transparent pricing: Starts at $1.45/hour, no egress fees - Enterprise-grade security: Zero-trust access control, RBAC, full audit logs Aethir’s pricing is far cheaper than traditional centralized cloud providers like AWS and Azure. By cutting redundant markup and steep