UPDATE: Coinbase is in talks to invest in Bybit at a $25B valuation.
The world's 2nd-largest crypto derivatives exchange is entering the US market in a compliant way.
Global exchanges are choosing regulation over resistance.
UPDATE: NEXTBank launched RWA Alpha, which turns loyalty points into tradable blockchain assets in 30 minutes.
No code. No crypto team. Just plug-and-play.
Your coffee rewards could soon be worth real money.
Last week, Mastercard launched a Crypto Partner Program with 85+ companies.
Solana, Ripple, Binance, Circle, PayPal, Gemini - all in one room.
But the interesting part isn't who's in the room. It's what they're building:
Cross-border remittances
Business payouts
Settlement infrastructure
In 2019, Mastercard started quietly partnering with crypto startups. In 2023, credential pilots. In 2026, co-designing settlement rails with blockchain protocols.
Seven years from curiosity to infrastructure dependency.
Institutions don't adopt technology because it's exciting. They adopt when not adopting becomes more expensive than the change.
The teams that win this phase are already embedded in the workflows institutions need to run.
The decentralized identity market will hit $5 billion this year, growing at 70% annually.
Even the EU is rolling out sovereign digital wallets to every citizen.
But those are numbers. Here’s why they matter to me:
In 2019, Lebanon’s banks froze withdrawals.
Families with lifetimes of savings couldn’t access their own money. Not because they failed, but because the system decided they couldn’t participate anymore.
That experience didn’t make me “interested in decentralization.”
It made me certain: No system should have the power to make you invisible.
That’s not philosophy, that’s infrastructure design.
And it’s why every piece of what we build starts from that premise.
Accelerate ⋂
Your on-chain actions deserve a reward system that can’t be gamed.
Earn REP. Climb tiers. Unlock battle passes and badges.
Your reputation is tied to your wallet.
⋂exus beta rolling out soon 🔔
Jeff Bezos had a rule at Amazon: before building anything, write the press release first.
Not the code. The press release.
If you couldn’t explain why it mattered in plain language, you didn’t build it.
That discipline - the willingness to say “not yet” - is the hardest part of building.
And it’s the part that makes everything else possible.
Accelerate ⋂
Deepfake fraud attempts have increased 2,000% in the last three years.
Businesses are losing an average of $450,000 per incident. Crypto platforms saw fraud attempts hit 9.5% of all transactions.
But here's the number that should concern every builder in this space:
Humans can only correctly identify a high-quality deepfake video 24.5% of the time.
Worse than a coin flip.
Gartner now predicts that by 2026, 30% of enterprises will no longer consider standalone identity verification reliable on its own.
The old model - scan a face, check a document, approve - is breaking in real time. AI didn't just make identity harder to fake. It made the entire verification layer obsolete.
What replaces it isn't better detection.
It's identity that's cryptographically anchored, self-sovereign, and verifiable at the protocol level.
Not identity that checks you once at the door. Identity that's provable every time it's used.
That's the layer we've been engineering.
UPDATE: Mastercard just brought 85+ crypto firms and banks into one partner network.
No more parallel systems. Crypto and traditional payments are merging at the infrastructure level.
The world's second-largest payment network just chose a side.