defi
Bitget listed Superform (UP) for spot trading this week, the same week SuperVaults v2 launched and Superform's US mobile app crossed early-access milestone. The pitch — DeFi as a single-tap on-chain neobank — is the cleanest example of where 'agentic yield' becomes a consumer product.
Exchanges
Bitget says its unified AI trading layer crossed 1 million users and $1.2B in agent-routed volume across 58 tools. The bigger story: exchanges found a user-acquisition loop that compounds — give traders an agent, and the agent keeps trading when the human sleeps.
Funding
Japan's second-largest telecom, KDDI, will spend $65M on 28.5M newly issued Coincheck Group shares at $2.28 each, plugging Japan's largest crypto exchange into 72M mobile subscribers and 39.67M au PAY wallets — and launching a joint-venture Web3 wallet by summer 2026.
Bitcoin
Charles Schwab, custodian of $11.77 trillion in client assets, began rolling out direct spot Bitcoin and Ethereum trading to its 39.1 million brokerage accounts on May 12 — the most consequential TradFi distribution unlock since the January 2024 spot ETF approvals.
News
Payward, Kraken's parent, filed May 8 for an OCC national trust charter that would create Payward National Trust Company — a federally regulated crypto custodian. Combined with its Fed master account and Wyoming SPDI, Kraken would hold the most complete banking stack of any crypto-native exchange.
Funding
Payward, Kraken's $20B parent, agreed to acquire Hong Kong stablecoin payments firm Reap Technologies for $600M — its first Asia infrastructure deal. Reap nearly tripled revenue in 2025 and spans HK, Singapore, Mexico, Africa. The move plants a regulated payments stack at the core of Kraken's pre...
Editor Pick
Q1 2026: $394M GAAP loss, transaction revenue -40% YoY despite an all-time-high 8.6% market share. Two stories live inside one earnings print — the slow death of the trading-fee model and the early-stage emergence of a stablecoin-and-agent-infrastructure business that could be worth far more.
Web3
Morgan Stanley is piloting crypto trading on its E*Trade platform with a 50-basis-point fee — — a move that signals Wall Street's largest wealth managers are finally building direct retail crypto rails, not just ETF wrappers, into their mass-market brokerage infrastructure.
Web3
A Coinbase engineer's viral argument holds that autonomous AI agents — which browse, buy, and decide without human eyeballs — could structurally dismantle the $600B+ global digital advertising industry, forcing Web3 and legacy platforms alike to rethink how the internet gets paid for.
Web3
OKX is rolling out perpetual futures contracts tied to OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic — giving crypto traders leveraged exposure to three of the world's most valuable private companies before any public listing. Here's why the move redraws the line between crypto derivatives and traditional pre-IP...
Stablecoins
Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks struck a bipartisan yield compromise, clearing the CLARITY Act for a Senate Banking Committee markup the week of May 11. Coinbase CEO Armstrong endorsed within hours. Passive interest prohibited; activity-based rewards explicitly protected.
Stablecoins
Coinbase Asset Management partnered with Superstate to launch CUSHY — a stablecoin credit fund whose tokenized share class will issue onchain via Superstate FundOS on Ethereum, Solana and Base, expected to go live in Q2 2026. Northern Trust handles fund administration.