Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

24.10.2025 - 20:34

Update: 24.10.2025 - 20:34

Kadena (KDA) has made a remarkable closure in the history of cryptocurrencies as a project that set out with the goal of “enterprise-level blockchain infrastructure” but halted all its activities with a sudden decision by its team.

Founded in 2016 by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino, engineers who left JPMorgan, Kadena aimed to create a scalable and secure proof-of-work chain that traditional finance had failed to achieve. Dubbed “Chainweb,” the structure promised a capacity of 480,000 transactions per second through parallel mesh chains, while its smart contract language, called “Pact,” stood out for its secure and error-free transaction design.

The project gained significant momentum, particularly in 2021. The KDA token reached $27.64, surpassing a $3 billion market capitalization, and some analysts dubbed it the “Solana killer.” However, its success story was short-lived.

The bearish market sentiment that dominated the market in 2022, the rise of proof-of-stake networks, and disagreements with Kadena's decentralized exchange partner, Kaddex, completely sapped the project's momentum. Kadena launched a $100 million grant program that same year to revitalize its ecosystem and announced a new $50 million fund in mid-2025. Despite this, the majority of the announced grant commitments remained unused, with CurveBlock being the only publicly announced recipient.

October 2025 marked the project's de facto end. On October 10th, during the historic market crash triggered by Donald Trump's announcement of 100% tariffs on China, the KDA price lost 40% of its value in a single day, falling to $0.22. Four days later, Kadena's largest ecosystem partner, Kaddex, claimed that Kadena had blocked node access and announced that it would be shutting down all its services and migrating to Ethereum. Just a week after the crisis, on October 21st, Kadena announced on its official account that it was ceasing all operations immediately, citing “unfavorable market conditions.”

Following the announcement, the KDA token lost more than 60% of its value in two hours, falling below $0.09, wiping out $268 million in market capitalization and instantly increasing trading volume by over 1,200%. The community initially believed the account had been compromised, but the Kadena team confirmed the shutdown via Discord. The statement stated that the blockchain “does not belong” to the company and that “a transition to community management will be considered.”

Immediately after the shutdown, Kaddex accused Kadena employees of leveraging short positions on exchanges and issued statements saying they were “glad to contribute to Kadena’s collapse.” No concrete evidence has been provided for these allegations, and Kadena has not responded. Some community members have suggested that the project may have been operating on insider information leading up to its bankruptcy, but on-chain data has not confirmed this.

Experts attribute Kadena's collapse to poor financial planning and miscommunication rather than malice. The company's budget, bloated with grant commitments, became unsustainable as the token's value eroded. Management allegedly knew the funds would run out months before the closure, yet continued to promote “job growth” and “ecosystem growth.” This suggests the project was driven by a “reputation protection” reflex rather than a “community priority.”

Despite this, Kadena's technological foundation remains functional. The Chainweb network continues to produce blocks, and the 566 million KDA emission plan, which runs until 2139, is technically active. However, without leadership, community, and financial support, the structure has effectively become an empty shell. In the words of one community member, “Kadena isn't dead; it's abandoned.”

Ultimately, Kadena started with the confidence of its Wall Street background, but ended up with the bureaucracy, infighting, and miscommunication that came with that same corporate mindset.

*This is not investment advice.

Follow our Telegram and Twitter account now for exclusive news, analytics and on-chain data!

The investment strengthens FurGPT's cross-chain infrastructure and expands the utility of its AI companion ecosystem through Kadena's scalable blockchain framework.

Singapore, Singapore--(Newsfile Corp. - October 28, 2025) - FurGPT (FGPT), a decentralized AI companion platform pioneering lifelike emotional intelligence in digital interactions, announced its plan to invest $25 million in Kadena (KDA). The initiative includes adopting Kadena's Chainweb EVM, enhancing FurGPT's ability to deliver faster, more efficient, and interoperable AI-driven interactions across chains.

Building a smarter decentralized future through adaptive AI and strategic blockchain innovation.

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:
https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8833/272179_7eac0fd7040b3867_001full.jpg

The partnership marks a strategic step in FurGPT's expansion roadmap, positioning the platform to leverage Kadena's scalable proof-of-work design and energy-efficient infrastructure. By integrating Chainweb's parallelized multi-chain architecture, FurGPT aims to increase transaction speed, reduce latency, and expand the accessibility of its decentralized emotional AI network.

"Our investment in Kadena represents a commitment to sustainable scalability," said J. King Kasr, Chief Scientist at KaJ Labs. "FurGPT is not just building AI companions—it's constructing a foundation where emotional intelligence, decentralization, and efficiency converge for meaningful global adoption."

FurGPT's growing multi-chain strategy has already extended across Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain. The integration with Kadena enhances this vision by bringing stronger throughput, native smart contract support, and improved developer tooling to the FGPT ecosystem. The collaboration also enables FurGPT to explore hybrid applications that blend decentralized AI and scalable computation, creating new pathways for adaptive, emotion-aware user experiences in Web3 environments.

About FurGPT

FurGPT merges adaptive artificial intelligence with blockchain transparency to create emotionally aware, lifelike digital companions. Through behavioral learning, multimodal interaction, and decentralized governance, FurGPT empowers users to engage in more meaningful and personalized AI experiences across multiple chains.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/272179

Markets Insider and Business Insider Editorial Teams were not involved in the creation of this post.

Binance Will Support Withdrawals from Kadena (KDA) Community-Maintained Network

Ondo’s Oasis Pro Acquisition Expands US Reach and Sparks ONDO Breakout Hopes

Ondo Finance, a blockchain platform specializing in the tokenization of real-world assets such as U.S. Treasuries, stocks, and exchange-traded funds, has reported a series of updates that reflect ongoing adoption in the sector. 

These developments include the completion of an acquisition, new partnerships, product expansions, and participation in industry events, contributing to the platform's management of over $1.7 billion in assets across chains like Ethereum, Solana, and Stellar. 

With a total value locked of approximately $660 million for its USDY stablecoin alone and integrations with more than 100 partners, Ondo continues to facilitate onchain access to institutional finance.

Overview of Ondo Finance's OperationsThe blockchain protocol operates by tokenizing traditional financial instruments, allowing users to access yield-bearing assets on blockchain networks. Its core products include USDY, a stablecoin backed by U.S. Treasuries and bank deposits, and OUSG, which represents tokenized U.S. Treasuries. The platform is supported by investors including Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Coinbase Ventures. 

As of writing, Ondo's activities align with projections for the real-world asset tokenization market, estimated to reach $18 trillion by 2033. This period's updates build on earlier momentum, such as the September launch of Ondo Global Markets, which introduced over 100 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs on Ethereum. Below is a breakdown of the platform’s key updates:

Early October Developments: Recaps and Industry EngagementOn October 1, 2025, Ondo released a monthly spotlight recapping September's activities, noting the launch of Ondo Global Markets, the addition of WisdomTree to the Global Markets Alliance, and the deployment of USDY on the Stellar network. The company described these as steps toward an open economy, with emphasis on accessibility for users. 

1/ September marked Ondo's most significant month to date.

From the launch of Ondo Global Markets to WisdomTree joining the Global Markets Alliance and USDY now live on Stellar, Ondo is executing on its vision to build an open economy accessible to all.

More highlights👇 pic.twitter.com/aWE6AWOAY4

— Ondo Finance (@OndoFinance) October 1, 2025 That same day, Ian de Bode, Ondo's head of institutional product, participated in a panel at the Sibos conference, discussing the growth trajectory of tokenization. He projected $5 trillion in tokenized assets in the near term, alongside representatives from Boston Consulting Group, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale-Forge, and Euroclear. 

Ondo also announced expansions to its team, hiring personnel from Robinhood for security roles, Chainlink for marketing, and Revolut for design. These additions aim to support scaling operations. 

By October 3, Ondo introduced daily third-party verifications for reserves backing tokenized stocks and ETFs on Global Markets, confirming 1:1 asset backing to enhance transparency. The company also recapped events from Token2049, Sibos, and a Mastercard reception, observing a shift in industry conversations from conceptual discussions to practical implementation of tokenization.

Acquisitions and Regulatory AdvancesA significant update came on October 6, 2025, when Ondo completed its acquisition of Oasis Pro, securing U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission-registered licenses for a broker-dealer, alternative trading system, and transfer agent. This acquisition provides Ondo with the following

A comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets in the U.S.Enabling the operation of regulated markets for tokenized securitiesA tokenization engine for real-world assets, primary and secondary tradingCapital markets services such as underwriting and mergers and acquisitions. The move is expected to support expansion. Following the announcement, investor Arthur Hayes increased his holdings in ONDO tokens by $3.6 million, bringing his total to $41 million.

Partnerships and IntegrationsOn October 9, 2025, Ondo outlined priorities from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission regarding spot crypto markets, pilot programs, and tokenized collateral. The company promoted tokenized versions of top-performing U.S. tech stocks from the past decade. Grayscale Investments added ONDO to its DeFi fund, replacing MKR, which indicates institutional interest in Ondo's token.

The following day, October 10, saw a partnership with STBL for the USST stablecoin, where USDY serves as primary collateral, providing $50 million in minting capacity. Ondo also integrated with LayerZero for cross-chain functionality of yield-bearing tokens, enhancing interoperability. Additionally, over 200 tokenized stocks and ETFs became available in Coinbase's Base app through Ondo, improving user access.

Before the integration with LayerZero, Ondo shared a weekly update on digital asset adoption, covering Tenev's comments, a partnership between Circle and Deutsche Börse, the SEC's plans for blockchain-based stock trading, Swift's blockchain initiatives with banks, and Bridge's stablecoin platform. 

ConclusionOndo Finance's recent updates demonstrate its capacity to expand tokenized asset offerings, secure regulatory approvals, and form partnerships that integrate blockchain with traditional finance. 

The acquisition of Oasis Pro stands out as a key enabler for regulated operations in the U.S., complemented by integrations like those with STBL and LayerZero, which support cross-chain functionality and stablecoin collateralization. These steps underscore Ondo's management of substantial assets and its collaborations across ecosystems.

Sources:

Ondo Finance TVL: https://defillama.com/protocol/tvl/ondo-finance 

Oasis Pro Acquisition: https://ondo.finance/blog/ondo-acquires-oasis-pro 

RWA Tokenization Market 2033 Estimate: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/04/07/ripple-bcg-project-usd18-9t-tokenized-asset-market-by-2033-but-obstacles-remain 

Why Blazpay Phase 4 Presale Could Be the Best Coin to Invest In Compared to Oasis (ROSE)

Oasis launches strategic investment arm with SemiLiquid's custody-native credit infrastructure as the first investment.

Dec 12, 2025

Dec 12, 2025

Oasis is excited to introduce a new initiative designed to make strategic seed investments. Leading the initiative will be Mark Kalin, who brings over 10 years of venture capital experience to the role. The move marks a shift from a traditional grants program toward longer-term capital deployment to support some of the best builders. 

Introducing SemiLiquidThe first investment will go to SemiLiquid, a custody-native credit infrastructure provider addressing a critical gap in real-world assets (RWAs). SemiLiquid just unveiled the Programmable Credit Protocol (PCP), which enables credit activation on tokenized assets without removing them from custody

What SemiLiquid does:

Activates credit on tokenized collateral without ever assets leaving custodyHandles collateral locking, automated margin calls, and liquidation triggersMaintains compliance standards and confidentiality throughout the processSemiLiquid solves key friction points that have kept institutions and traditional finance players cautious about decentralized finance. 

Implementation details SemiLiquid's platform is based on the Oasis confidential compute stack. It uses Liquefaction, a primitive developed by researchers at Cornell Tech on top of Sapphire, to manage its trade and information control system, which handles policy enforcement, breach monitoring, and programmable credit receipts. 

This architecture means sensitive financial data stays protected throughout the entire credit lifecycle while also remaining verifiable onchain. It's the kind of institutional-grade guarantees that custody and compliance frameworks actually require.

After a year of quietly building, SemiLiquid is putting its solution into action with a pilot involving Franklin Templeton, Zodia Custody, M11Credit, Avalanche, and Presto Labs.

The pilot demonstrates end-to-end credit activation using tokenized money-market fund shares as collateral. The entire workflow, from collateral lock to issuance to automated repayment, runs on Oasis infrastructure without exposing counterparty information or other sensitive data.

The bigger picture RWAs are among the fastest-growing sectors of the crypto industry, and with this investment, Oasis is making a clear bet in SemiLiquid and the idea that compliance-friendly confidentiality will be the foundation of institutional adoption. 

But the vision also goes much further. The investment arm targets teams building across the spectrum: asset tokenization, identity systems, institutional settlement layers, agentic protocols - any compute-intensive products that require confidential data or verifiability at scale. There’s much more to come, stay tuned.

Privacy-focused narratives gained traction across crypto markets amid intensifying debates around artificial intelligence and data regulation. That shift brought Oasis Network into focus, pushing its token sharply higher.

By mid-January, traders increasingly rotated toward privacy infrastructure with tangible utility rather than speculative momentum.

That raised a key question.

Was ROSE’s rally driven only by narrative strength, or did structural demand support it?

Why did Oasis’ privacy narrative lift ROSE? By the 20th of January, Oasis Network’s token, ROSE, had climbed more than 105% from mid-December lows. CoinMarketCap data showed rising interest in privacy technology amid tighter global data regulations.

Oasis Network’s confidential computing stack drew attention during that period. Its SemiLiquid staking design and AI-focused ROFL framework positioned the network as a privacy-first infrastructure layer.

That positioning helped reprice ROSE as an infrastructure asset rather than a short-term speculative play. Institutional participation appeared to outweigh retail-driven momentum during the move.

Rising Volume and Open Interest confirmed real bullish demand According to data from CoinGlass, Oasis [ROSE] Open Interest climbed to $26.23 million, its highest level since September 2025. That increase coincided with price appreciation, indicating fresh long positioning rather than short-covering activity.

Source: CoinGlass Meanwhile, trading volume surged on the 20th of January, reaching $334.6 million, the highest level since 2023. This drove positive price repricing, reinforcing that bulls, not bears, controlled market participation.

Source: CoinGlass ROSE neared resistance as momentum tested On the daily chart, ROSE’s rally approached the upper boundary of a descending channel pattern. Price tested descending resistance following a sharp rebound from recent lows.

Source: TradingView A confirmed breakout could open the $0.030 to $0.039 supply zone. Acceptance within that region would be necessary for continuation.

Even so, downside risks remained. ROSE needed to hold the $0.015 support level, despite the MACD remaining bullish during the move.

Final Thoughts ROSE’s January surge reflected more than shifting narratives. Positioning data suggested traders treated Oasis as infrastructure, not a fleeting theme. Whether that conviction holds may depend on how the price reacts near the overhead supply.

Most onchain activity is financial. Flashback Labs is building something entirely different - a platform where people talk to an AI about their lives, preserving memories before they fade or loved ones pass away. Every conversation generates encrypted files and onchain transactions. The result is 1,000+ users driving 700+ daily transactions on Oasis, all with essentially zero marketing spend.

What flashback doesFlashback is a conversational AI app. Users either pick a prompt, "I visited my grandparents", for example, or run stream of consciousness with a voice assistant. The chatbot asks follow-up questions and extracts structured data around the people, places, emotions, and timelines.

From that conversation, the AI generates a "flashback" - a short animated video combining photos, text, and voice narration that brings the memory to life. It also builds a graph of people mentioned across sessions (siblings, grandparents, friends), so the more someone uses it, the richer and more personal the experience becomes.

The main point is preservation. Details fade, people pass away, conditions like Alzheimer's accelerate the loss. Flashback captures what's in someone's head while it's still there.

How flashback leverages oasisThe Flashback app handles some of the most sensitive data imaginable: personal memories, family relationships, health conditions, grief, etc. Whether or not the app works, depends entirely on users trusting that this data is private and verifiable.

In this sense, Oasis provides the encryption layer. 

Since the storage networks Flashback integrates with (0G, BNB Greenfield) don't offer their own encryption mechanisms, Oasis’ confidential network fills this critical gap. Every file is encrypted within a confidential smart contract before being committed to storage. Users can verify onchain that their data is encrypted and accounted for.

TractionThe team has spent very little on marketing so far and there are no active token incentives. Yet the numbers are real:

1,000+ users~200 encrypted files created per day~700 onchain transactions generated per day29 new users on a single recent dayThe team is positioning Flashback as a privacy-first product for a mainstream audience. If adoption continues on this trajectory, transaction volumes will scale naturally with user growth.

What's next Flashback's near-term applications sit somewhat outside crypto. Currently, the team is orienting the product toward Alzheimer's care. There's also a partnership in development with notable bereavement nonprofits in the US who will offer the product to people processing the loss of a family member. Both efforts are already underway.

An agentic framework is also in development that will let the flashback AI proactively reach out to users across channels to collect memories, rather than waiting for them. The team is also exploring hardware integrations, including robotic companion devices running the AI for hospice and elder care settings.

Every one of these interactions feeds back into the same pipeline: AI analysis, file generation, encryption, and then onchain storage. As Flashback grows its user base into healthcare and grief support, Oasis grows with it.

Learn more about Flashback Labs here and follow them on X.

Building with AI means living with some tradeoffs. Switch models and your context drops. Start a new session and your agents reset. The platforms hosting your prompts aren't neutral infrastructure, they're learning from what you send, and they make leaving progressively more costly.

Ekai is building the infrastructure layer to fix this. Step one is already live.

Problem One: Access Control People share access to AI models all the time, between friends, colleagues, side projects, but nobody wants to hand over their actual credentials.

With Ekai's Control Plane, you store encrypted API keys onchain via Sapphire and grant delegated access with fine-grained controls: model restrictions, spending limits, instant revocation. Decryption happens inside the TEE only. Credentials are never visible to anyone outside.

Six providers are currently live: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, OpenRouter, and Groq. The gateway runs on ROFL. 

Problem Two: Agent ContextSharing model access is relatively easy. Sharing context is the next challenge.

When an AI agent works on a project for an hour, it accumulates code patterns, architectural decisions, debugging traces, file contents, tool outputs, and the reasoning connecting all of it. Today, that context lives in plaintext. It gets sent to whichever model you're using. It's lost when you switch providers. It's gone or hard to reference when you start a new session.

It degrades within a single session too. After 30 or 40 turns, the agent starts repeating itself, re-reading files it already checked, forgetting constraints from the beginning. Summarization helps, but it's lossy. Once a detail gets compressed away, the agent often can't recover it.

This is an infrastructure problem. And it gets worse as agents get more capable, because the context they accumulate gets more valuable over time.

What Ekai Is Building: ContextoContexto is a context layer for AI agents. 

It keeps the main thread clean by storing and indexing older work, retrieving the right context automatically when the agent needs it. It runs subtasks in isolation, spawning scoped workers that handle messy jobs (log review, document comparison, branch investigation) and return structured results. And it recovers anything on demand. Nothing gets thrown away.

A concrete example: your agent is investigating a production bug. Without Contexto, it greps files, reads logs, makes API calls, and by turn 20 it's forgotten the original error. With Contexto, a scoped worker handles the investigation, reads 12 files, and sends back one line: "Auth service returning 401 due to expired cert on node-3." The main thread stays small. The full trace is there if you need it.

Contexto is built as an OpenClaw plugin, so no migration is necessary.

Why This Needs OasisA credential lets you access a model. Context is what the model produced while working for you. As sessions get longer, the context layer becomes a complete record of your project. Today, all of that lives in plaintext inside whatever provider you're calling.

Oasis solves this the same way it solved credential sharing. ROFL runs the context layer inside a TEE. Context is stored, indexed, and retrieved without ever being visible in plaintext outside the enclave. Sapphire enforces policy onchain: scoped context per agent, restrictions on sharing, provider controls, spending limits, and instant revocation.

Contexto manages the context. Oasis keeps it private.

What's NextThe Control Plane is live on mainnet. The context layer is also live as an OpenClaw plugin, with the next step being to bring the context store into the ROFL enclave so persistent context is private by default.

Beyond that, the target is agent-to-agent context routing, where your agent collaborates with someone else's, sharing the right context with the right boundaries, without either side exposing more than they need to. Learn more and try Contexto here. 

TLDR: Table of Contents

TLDR:Ondo expands tokenized securities market accessRegulation and partnerships strengthen Ondo strategyGet 3 Free Stock Ebooks Ondo launched 100+ tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, boosting on-chain market access globally Firm secured SEC-registered licenses via Oasis Pro, enabling regulated tokenized securities in the U.S. EU approval allows Ondo to reach 500M+ investors with regulated tokenized equities and ETFs Partnerships with Fidelity, PayPal, and Mastercard expand institutional adoption of tokenized assets Ondo Finance tokenization moved deeper into traditional finance as the company expanded tokenized stocks, secured regulatory approvals, and strengthened partnerships with major Wall Street institutions.

Ondo Finance has outlined a strong year of expansion across tokenized securities and treasury products. The company’s latest update showed rising institutional interest in blockchain-based financial infrastructure.

In a recent X post, Ondo shared comments from executives at Fidelity, S&P Global, and DTCC. These leaders described tokenization as an opportunity that could eventually cover trillions in global assets.

How big is the tokenization opportunity?

Leaders from S&P Global, Fidelity, DTCC, and more all arrived at the same answer:

“The sky is the limit.”

“It's the size of the entire market.”

“The opportunity truly is in the trillions.”

“Over two-thirds of the world's assets will… pic.twitter.com/C2NJ9HT5aD

— Ondo Finance (@OndoFinance) May 1, 2026

Their comments reflect a wider shift in traditional finance. Large institutions are now exploring blockchain rails as a more efficient way to manage, transfer, and settle assets.

Ondo expands tokenized securities market access A major growth driver came from Ondo Global Markets, which launched on Ethereum during 2025. The platform introduced more than 100 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs for blockchain users.

These digital assets are fully backed 1:1 by underlying securities. They are also transferable across DeFi ecosystems while maintaining access to liquidity from Nasdaq and NYSE markets.

Ondo stated that its tokenized stock platform became the largest in the sector by market share. The company also reported $2 billion in total trading volume and $370 million in total value locked.

To improve accessibility, Ondo launched Ondo Bridge to connect tokenized securities between Ethereum and BNB Chain. This widened exposure for millions of additional blockchain users.

The company also confirmed plans to expand access to Solana in early 2026. This move could further increase distribution across major blockchain networks.

Regulation and partnerships strengthen Ondo strategy Ondo strengthened its regulatory infrastructure through the acquisition of Oasis Pro. This deal gave the company access to SEC-registered broker-dealer, transfer agent, and ATS licenses.

These approvals support Ondo’s push to develop compliant tokenized securities markets in the United States. The firm also secured authorization to distribute tokenized stocks and ETFs across the European Union and EEA.

Institutional partnerships remained another key growth pillar. Fidelity integrated Ondo’s OUSG product into its tokenized fund strategy, while J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys collaborated with Ondo and Chainlink on cross-chain settlement.

PayPal expanded its partnership through a $25 million facility linking PYUSD with OUSG. Mastercard also added Ondo to its Multi-Token Network, extending blockchain payment infrastructure into tokenized finance.

As institutional adoption of real-world assets continues rising, Ondo Finance tokenization is steadily becoming a larger force in digital capital markets.

Oasis is proud to be the official sponsor of the Slovenian Cycling Federation.

May 14, 2026

May 14, 2026

‍TLDR: Oasis is joining the Cycling Federation of Slovenia as official sponsor, backing the nation's cyclists as they compete for the biggest titles in the sport. The partnership spans all national teams, the National Road Cycling Championships, and the European Road Cycling Championships, putting Oasis in front of tens of millions of viewers world-wide.

The sponsorshipOasis is now the official sponsor of the Cycling Federation of Slovenia, supporting all national teams, the National Road Cycling Championships, and the European Road Cycling Championships taking place later this year. Combined, the events in this partnership will reach millions viewers globally, with coverage broadcast around the world.

Slovenian cycling has earned a global reputation for overperforming its size. Tadej Pogačar, Primož Roglič, Urška Žigart: world-class riders from a country of two million people, competing at the highest level of the sport. That kind of output is not an accident. It comes from discipline and a relentless focus on performance. It also comes from trust.

The Slovenian team's success is based on trust in the gear, the team, and ultimately trust in themselves. At the top level of sports there is no room for compromise. That's why we partner with the best. Oasis builds technology to the same standard: private, verifiable, trusted by design.

"We build technology that doesn't compromise on privacy or performance. The Slovenian cycling team doesn't compromise either. That's why this partnership is a natural fit" Jernej Kos, Co-Founder, Oasis

The campaignThis sponsorship is also a reflection of a new approach to growth. We're moving past old playbooks, meeting people where they are, and letting what we build speak for itself.

Oasis products will be a focal point across the campaign, starting with Privana, our recently announced private trading platform. The first activation for the campaign lands in June around the National Road Cycling Championships, building through the summer and culminating at the European Championships in October.

Along the way, expect exclusive content, events, rider access, challenges, cash prizes, giveaways, and bonus multipliers. Sign up to be first in line when it goes live here.

BeInCrypto 100 Institutional Awards Nomination: KuCoin for Best Trading Infrastructure

PANews reported on February 22 that the IoTeX team announced it has contained the recent security incident and has strengthened the IoTeX blockchain. Preliminary data indicates the attack caused approximately $2 million in damages, including USDC, USDT, IOTX, and WBTC.

Investigations reveal that this incident was a sophisticated, long-planned attack by professional hackers targeting multiple blockchains. The team is collaborating with exchanges and law enforcement to freeze the stolen funds and conduct investigations and fund recovery efforts. On-chain operations and deposit functionality are expected to be restored within 24-48 hours, and the team will continue to provide transparent updates.

According to previous reports, IoTex hackers have begun converting stolen funds into ETH and then swapping them for BTC via Thorchain .

PANews reported on February 23 that, according to official sources, South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit has added IoTeX (IOTX) to its trading alert list. Deposits and withdrawals are currently closed; only withdrawals will be restored later.

Author: PA一线

This content is for market information only and is not investment advice.

Updated Feb 23, 2026, 11:23 p.m. Published Feb 23, 2026, 9:18 p.m.

4 min read

Nearly $400 million was lost to crypto exploits in January 2026 alone, according to industry estimates. (Photo by Joshua Michaels on Unsplash/Modified by CoinDesk)Summary

IoTeX is offering a 10% white-hat bounty, about $440,000, and a promise not to pursue legal action if hackers return roughly $4.4 million stolen from its ioTube cross-chain bridge within 48 hours.The Feb. 21 exploit stemmed from a compromised validator owner private key on the Ethereum side of the ioTube bridge, which IoTeX and outside experts describe as an operational security failure rather than a flaw in the Layer 1 blockchain or its smart contracts.IoTeX traced the stolen funds across chains, identified bitcoin addresses holding about 66.6 BTC, and is rolling out a mainnet upgrade with a default blacklist of malicious addresses, but experts warn that assets already swapped and bridged may be difficult or unlikely to recover.IoTeX, a blockchain project focused on Internet-of-Things devices, offered a 10% white-hat bounty to the hacker or hackers who exploited a private key on its cross-chain bridge ioTube, siphoning millions of dollars, in exchange for the voluntary return of funds within 48 hours.

With this move, IoTeX is offering the $440,000 if the malicious actor or actors return roughly $4.4 million they stole, according to an IoTeX X post, to which IoTeX co-founder and CEO Raullen Chai pointed “as a source of truth” on Monday.

A number of crypto projects have offered similar 10% bounties to hackers after being breached. Hackers sometime return funds in exchange for this bounty.

Chai told CoinDesk that the team sent an onchain message offering not to pursue legal action or share identifying information with law enforcement if the remaining funds are returned.

“This is regarding the ioTube bridge exploit on Feb. 21, 2026,” Chai said in the message. “All fund movements across Ethereum, IoTeX, and bitcoin have been fully traced.”

The message states that exchange deposits have been flagged and frozen and offers a 10% bounty for the return of remaining funds.

Chai also said IoTeX is rolling out a new chain version, Mainnet v2.3.4, requiring node operators to upgrade. The update includes a default blacklist of malicious externally owned account (EOA) addresses.

“This blacklist contains a list of malicious or problematic EOA addresses that will be filtered by the node,” Chai said.

The offer comes after a Feb. 21 exploit in which a compromised validator owner private key enabled unauthorized control over ioTube’s bridge contracts.

IoTeX said the incident is “under control,” saying that its Layer 1 blockchain was not affected and that the breach was isolated to the Ethereum-side infrastructure of the bridge.

The IOTX token fell roughly 22% following the exploit, dropping from $0.0054 to below $0.0042 before partially rebounding.

Cross-chain bridges have been one of crypto’s main failure points, with several high-profile exploits in recent years. According to industry reports, more than $3.2 billion has been lost due to cross-chain bridge hacks, making them a prime target for advanced threat actors.

Responsibility and key controlIoTeX framed the exploit as an operational issue specific to the bridge rather than a failure of its Layer 1 network.

“IoTube is IoTeX’s own cross-chain bridge built and maintained by their team,” Nick Motz, CEO of ORQO Group and CIO of Soil, told CoinDesk. “The breach came down to a compromised validator owner private key on the Ethereum side, which is fundamentally an operational security failure, not a smart contract vulnerability discovered by an outside actor.”

Motz agreed that IoTeX’s Layer 1 was not compromised but said user funds were entrusted specifically to the bridge.

“When you build and operate the bridge infrastructure and the key management is what fails, it’s difficult to separate yourself from that outcome,” he said.

Nanak Nihal Khalsa, co-founder of human.tech, said responsibility in crypto often comes down to key custody.

“Yes, whoever holds the private key is responsible for securing it,” Khalsa said. “Is that a reasonable responsibility? It’s hard to say. But that’s how the industry works right now.”

He added that liability norms remain unsettled compared to traditional finance and called for stronger wallet and multisig setups to reduce similar risks.

The estimates divergeOn-chain analysis by security firm PeckShield estimated more than $8 million worth of assets were affected, saying the attacker swapped funds into ether (ETH) and began bridging them to bitcoin BTC$61,650.42 via THORChain.

“The hacker has swapped the stolen funds to $ETH and has started bridging them to #BTC via #Thorchain,” the firm wrote.

Another onchain investigator, Specter, said on X that “the private key of @iotex_io may have been compromised,” resulting in an estimated $4.3 million loss.

“Once assets are routed through THORChain […] recovery becomes extremely difficult,” Motz said.

IoTeX said it has identified four bitcoin addresses holding 66.78 BTC worth roughly $4.3 million at current prices and that the addresses are being monitored in cooperation with exchanges.

A CoinDesk review of those addresses on Feb. 23 confirmed they held roughly 66.6 BTC.

IoTeX did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

“Containment is not the same as recovery,” he added. “The assets with actual market value were swapped and bridged. Those are, in my assessment, unlikely to be recovered.”

Khalsa similarly cautioned that recovery prospects are uncertain. “It’s hard to predict how much, if any, can be recovered,” he said.

IoTeX revised its figure upward to approximately $4.3 million, reflecting the direct asset drain but excluding minted tokens. Motz said broader estimates may better capture the severity of the breach.

“Private key compromise rather than smart contract bugs is emerging as a dominant attack vector,” Motz said, noting that such incidents target operational security rather than audited code.

Before offering the 10% bounty, IoTeX said a compensation plan would be in place within the next 48 hours.

UPDATE (Feb. 23, 2026, 23:21 UTC): Adds context on bounties offered after hacks.

Related Assets

12345678910

PANews reported on February 24th that, according to CoinDesk, the IoTeX public blockchain project's cross-chain bridge ioTube suffered a loss of approximately $4.4 million on February 21st due to a compromised Ethereum-side validator owner's private key . IoTeX sent an on-chain message to the attackers, promising a white-hat bounty of approximately 10% (about $440,000) for returning the funds within 48 hours, without pursuing legal action or providing their identity information to law enforcement. The project team stated that they have fully tracked the flow of funds, flagged and frozen the relevant exchange deposit addresses, identified four Bitcoin addresses holding approximately 66.6 BTC, and will introduce a malicious address blacklist through the mainnet v2.3.4 upgrade.

Author: PA一线

This content is for market information only and is not investment advice.

Jefferies: Samsung is likely to follow SK Hynix’s example to list in the US via ADRs.

Jeff Kim, Head of Research at Jefferies, said Samsung is likely to follow SK Hynix in listing on the U.S. market via American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), which will boost the share price of the South Korean chipmaker whose valuation lags behind Micron. "Chip stocks are at a turning point. ADRs will serve as an important catalyst to drive their valuations," he added.

5 minutes ago

UBS and TD Cowen sharply raise Arm’s target price, betting on a revaluation of Arm’s AI data center CPU value.

Arm’s stock price pulled back this week alongside the high-valuation AI sector, though some Wall Street analysts say the correction does not alter the company’s long-term standing in AI data centers. UBS sharply raised Arm’s price target from $260 to $470, retaining its Buy rating; TD Cowen lifted its target from $265 to $475, also keeping a Buy recommendation. Both firms share the view that as agentic AI evolves, CPUs could gain greater importance in data center architectures, rather than GPUs continuing to monopolize the investment narrative. TD Cowen believes that over the long term, CPUs could hold a more strategic position in certain AI workloads. UBS, meanwhile, emphasizes that the real debate in the market centers on the revenue potential of Arm’s self-developed or independent CPU business. The bank projects Arm’s CPU-related revenue could reach around $14 billion by 2030, though the company itself has stated this business will not have a material impact on its finances until fiscal 2028. Arm’s strengths lie in low latency and energy efficiency—metrics that major cloud providers are increasingly prioritizing as they expand AI infrastructure. Even with its stock pulling back from recent highs in the short term, analysts still view Arm as one of the key beneficiaries of the server CPU upgrade cycle.

5 minutes ago

Crypto whale who profited over $23.77 million from BAT ICO liquidates 27,586 ETH

According to monitoring by Yu Jing, a whale that earned $23.77 million from participating in the BAT ICO sold 15,000 ETH (valued at roughly $24.29 million) two hours ago. The whale has now fully liquidated all 27,586 ETH it received from selling 35 million BAT on-chain over the past day and a half, converting the proceeds into 44.836 million USDS at an average selling price of $1,625.

5 minutes ago

Sources: Iraqi officials once considered withdrawing from OPEC, but current plans are to remain a member and pursue a higher quota.

A senior Iraqi oil ministry official said that if OPEC quotas are not significantly increased, Iraq will be forced to consider all available options. Sources said Iraqi officials had considered withdrawing from OPEC, but the current plan is to remain a member and push for higher quotas. (Jinshi)

5 minutes ago

Kepler Cheuvreux raises ASML’s European share price target from €1,460 to €1,830.

Kepler Cheuvreux has raised the target price for ASML’s European shares from €1,460 to €1,830.

5 minutes ago

Stifel: U.S. economy in "overheated expansion" as AI investment cycle outweighs consumer pressure

U.S. large diversified financial services holding company Stifel has raised its year-end S&P 500 target and rolled out a stock allocation framework for a "high-growth, high-inflation" environment. The firm lifted its year-end S&P 500 target to 7,800 points, noting the U.S. economy is entering a "running hot" state—where economic growth is strengthening alongside mounting inflationary pressure. Stifel’s models show U.S. growth momentum is picking up while inflation momentum is clearly overheating, a trend that will reshape the market’s leading sector structure in the second half of the year. Instead of traditional consumer sectors, Stifel’s top picks are investment-led cyclical industries, including banks, transportation, materials, energy, semiconductors, software and equipment. The firm adds that fixed-asset investment in AI remains on the rise: large tech firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Google are projected to combine for roughly $725 billion in total capital expenditures in 2026, some $100 billion higher than prior estimates. This means the AI investment chain is likely to continue outperforming the consumption chain squeezed by inflation. Stifel advises investors to reduce exposure to discretionary consumer, consumer staples, communication services and some financial services sectors, as these areas see weaker earnings revisions. Conversely, the firm favors cyclical value stocks and hedges with defensive value sectors such as insurance, autos, energy and banks.

5 minutes ago

On February 21, 2026, IoTeX, a Layer-1 blockchain designed to link Internet of Things devices with decentralized applications and real-world artificial intelligence, faced a targeted security breach involving a compromised private key. The incident affected the project’s cross-chain bridge system, known as ioTube, leading to unauthorized access and asset drainage estimated at approximately $2 million by the company’s leadership.

The exploit occurred early that Saturday, between roughly 7 and 9 a.m. UTC.

Attackers used a validator owner private key to seize control of two key Ethereum-side smart contracts: TokenSafe, which holds bridged assets, and MinterPool, responsible for token issuance across connected networks including Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Base.

This granted the perpetrator the ability to withdraw tokens directly from the vault and mint additional units without exploiting any code vulnerability in the contracts themselves.

Security researchers and on-chain analysts, including firms like PeckShield and investigator Specter, initially flagged much larger figures—up to $8.8 million—based on observed movements.

These estimates incorporated drained holdings of USDC, USDT, IOTX, WBTC, and other tokens, plus newly minted CIOTX (a cross-chain variant for DePIN liquidity) and CCS tokens.

However, IoTeX co-founder Raullen Chai quickly clarified the scope in statements to media and on social platforms.

He noted that the confirmed economic impact stands at around $2 million, primarily involving USDC, USDT, IOTX, and WBTC.

Many of the additional minted tokens, such as the deprecated CCS, carry negligible or zero market value, while CIOTX holdings were promptly frozen and slated for upgrades to prevent further movement.

Crucially, the core IoTeX Layer-1 blockchain, its consensus mechanism, and all native smart contracts stayed fully secure and operational in their primary environment.

The breach remained isolated to the bridge’s Ethereum-facing components, leaving user funds on the main IoTeX chain untouched. Chai emphasized this distinction, posting that “all funds are safe on the IoTeX chain.”

The team’s response was rapid and coordinated.

Within hours of detection, operators paused bridge functions to limit damage, conducted a complete on-chain trace of the stolen assets, and initiated widespread freezes.

Major exchanges collaborated to block deposits from identified attacker addresses, while law enforcement was engaged for tracing and potential recovery.

The main chain itself was temporarily suspended to roll out strengthened security protocols, with full resumption—including exchange deposits—projected within 24 to 48 hours.

Market reaction followed swiftly.

The native IOTX token dropped about 9 percent in the immediate aftermath, trading near $0.0049 with trading volume surging over 500 percent as uncertainty spread.

Analysts observed the attacker swapping drained assets for ETH on decentralized exchanges before bridging portions, including around 45 ETH, to Bitcoin via THORChain in an apparent laundering attempt.

Founded in 2017, IoTeX has built a reputation for advancing decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) and bridging blockchain with physical devices through partnerships with industry leaders.

🚨 Update on the recent security incident:

Our team has contained the situation and the IoTeX chain is being secured. Current data confirms the exploit impact is around $2M USD (including USDC, USDT, IOTX, and WBTC).

Investigations show this was a sophisticated, long-planned…

— IoTeX (@iotex_io) February 21, 2026

This incident highlights ongoing challenges in the sector, where private key compromises continue to represent a leading cause of losses in cross-chain systems.

Bridge exploits have accounted for a disproportionate share of crypto thefts in recent years, often stemming from key management oversights rather than smart-contract bugs.

Despite the setback, IoTeX leadership described the situation as contained and under control.

Recovery efforts focus on freezing the majority of traceable assets, and the project pledged continued transparency with regular community updates.

While the financial toll appears limited compared to early reports, the event serves as a reminder for blockchain projects to prioritize proper private key custody, multi-signature controls, and rapid incident response in an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape.

As operations prepare to restart, stakeholders will watch closely for full asset recovery details and any long-term security enhancements. For a network positioned at the intersection of IoT, AI, and decentralized finance, rebuilding confidence through decisive action remains paramount.

PANews reported on February 27th that, according to an IoTeX announcement, due to an attack on the ioTube cross-chain bridge on February 20th and the unauthorized issuance of CIOTX on the Ethereum side, IoTeX plans to immediately deprecate CIOTX on Ethereum/Base/Solana and permanently close the relevant bridges. The attacker's minting will not be recognized. Eligible holders must submit their transaction hashes through the claims portal; after verification, IOTX will be issued on the IoTeX chain at a 1:1 ratio. BSC/Polygon/IoTeX are unaffected by the issuance and will reopen the bridges after auditing for users to migrate back to IOTX independently, before permanently delisting them. IoTeX will also notify CEX/DEX/DeFi to completely delist or remove CIOTX integrations.

TLDR February recorded crypto security breaches totaling $26.5M to $35.7M, marking the lowest monthly figure since March 2025 A $10M oracle manipulation attack on YieldBlox’s Stellar-based lending platform represented the month’s largest single exploit Private key compromise led to approximately $8.9M in losses for IoTeX on February 21 Compared to January’s $86M in losses, February saw a dramatic 69%+ decline, and remained far below the $1.5B Bybit breach from February 2025 Phishing scams persisted as a major vulnerability, responsible for $8.5M in February theft February witnessed a dramatic downturn in cryptocurrency theft, with blockchain security experts reporting the lowest monthly losses in nearly a year. Leading security platforms PeckShield and CertiK documented total losses between $26.5 million and $35.7 million throughout the month.

#PeckShieldAlert In Feb. 2026, the crypto space saw 15 main hacks totaling $26.5M, representing a 98.2% YoY decrease compared to Feb. 2025 ($1.5B, including the $1.4B #Bybit drain) and a notable 69.2% MoM decrease from Jan. 2026 ($86.01M in losses).#Top5 Hacks :… pic.twitter.com/Svp7SZWp5w

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) March 1, 2026

This represents a significant improvement from January’s $86 million figure, marking a decline exceeding 69% in just one month. The contrast becomes even starker when compared to February 2025, when the massive $1.5 billion Bybit exchange compromise dominated the statistics.

While February recorded 15 separate security incidents, two major attacks drove the majority of financial damage. The most significant breach targeted YieldBlox, a decentralized autonomous organization operating a lending protocol on the Stellar blockchain, resulting in $10 million in stolen assets.

On February 22, an exploiter took advantage of low liquidity conditions within the USTRY/USDC trading pair. Through a strategically executed abnormal transaction, the attacker artificially pumped the token’s valuation by 100x, manipulating the system into permitting massive undercollateralized loan withdrawals.

The month’s second-largest security failure struck IoTeX, a blockchain platform focused on Internet-of-Things applications, on February 21. Unauthorized access to a compromised private key granted the attacker entry to the project’s token safe.

The perpetrator rapidly converted stolen tokens into ETH before moving funds through multiple cross-chain bridges toward Bitcoin. While CertiK’s analysis estimated damages near $9 million, IoTeX representatives contested this figure, claiming actual losses were closer to $2 million.

Foom.Cash, a privacy-focused protocol, suffered the third-largest attack with $2.2 million in losses. The exploit leveraged a cryptographic vulnerability to manufacture fraudulent zkSNARK proofs, generating fake authentication credentials that bypassed protocol security measures.

What Drove the Drop According to PeckShield’s analysis, February’s reduced numbers stem largely from the absence of any catastrophic “mega-hack” comparable to previous incidents like the Bybit breach. Additionally, a significant Bitcoin price downturn early in the month, with values falling beneath $70,000, redirected market focus away from protocol vulnerabilities.

Kronos Research’s Dominick John attributed the improvement to enhanced risk management protocols, elevated counterparty vetting standards, and superior real-time security monitoring deployed across major cryptocurrency platforms. He highlighted that artificial intelligence-powered code auditing tools and automated vulnerability detection systems are identifying weaknesses before exploitation occurs.

Phishing Still a Problem Despite encouraging overall trends, phishing schemes continue plaguing the crypto ecosystem. These social engineering attacks claimed $8.5 million during February.

The proliferation of “drainer-as-a-service” operations, including platforms like Angel Drainer and Inferno Drainer, has democratized sophisticated phishing campaigns. These services supply turnkey solutions including replica websites, counterfeit social media profiles, and pre-built malicious smart contracts, requiring only a revenue-sharing agreement with operators.

PeckShield recommended that both institutional players and high-value individual wallet holders implement multi-signature cold storage solutions while maintaining rigorous private key security protocols.

Notably, wallet drainer-related losses have shown substantial year-over-year improvement, declining from $494 million throughout 2024 to $83.85 million across 2025.

Every year, crypto projects publish roadmaps. Neat timelines. Color-coded phases. Quarterly milestones with checkmarks that nobody checks. We've done it too.

We're not doing it this year.

Not because we don't have a plan. We do. But because the honest thing to say is: we don't know what the world looks like in twelve months, and neither does anyone else.

AI is compressing decades of change into quarters. Models that didn't exist in January are obsolete by June. Entire product categories appear, get commoditized, and get replaced — in weeks. The rate of change itself is accelerating, and any roadmap precise enough to look credible is precise enough to be wrong.

So instead of pretending to be prophets, we're going to do something different. We're going to tell you the three challenges we need to address — and our current best thinking on how to approach them. Not a map, but a compass. Not predictions, but directions of search.

Challenge 1: How does IoTeX become AI's interface to the physical world — and make money doing it?This is the existential challenge.

In 2025, we laid important groundwork. Quicksilver gave AI agents a way to request and verify live machine data — at peak, over 3,000 daily AI agent queries. ioID crossed the path toward a million device identities. We demonstrated machine-to-machine payments with Coinbase's x402 protocol. We proved the concept: AI agents can interact with physical-world infrastructure through a blockchain protocol.

But proving a concept isn't proving a business. And in 2026, the question has shifted from "can we connect AI to physical devices" to something far more urgent: Who pays for this, and why? The obvious answer is humans. But humans won’t be the only customers. The physical internet has many users. Construction sites that need continuous monitoring. Retail chains that need real-time analytics. Factories that must enforce safety compliance. But the next customers won’t be people at all. They will be machines. AI agents optimizing logistics networks. Delivery systems routing fleets in real time. Autonomous operations managing warehouses, ports, and supply chains. Robotics will become constant consumers of physical intelligence. Warehouse robots navigating crowded environments. Traffic systems coordinating intersections. Drones monitoring infrastructure, agriculture, and energy grids. All of them need the same primitive. Perception. Verification. Automation. They need to see the world. They need to trust what they see. They need to act on it. That is what they will pay for. The customers of the physical internet are not only humans. They are machines. And the machine economy is just beginning.

AI is blind to the physical world. That's the opportunity. AI can read every webpage, parse every database, analyze every financial filing. The digital world is transparent to it. But ask a simple physical-world question — Is it raining in Shoreditch right now? How crowded is this intersection at 5pm? — and it's helpless. No eyes, no ears, no real-time perception.

This matters because AI agents are moving from answering questions to taking actions — booking, buying, routing, managing. An AI that can't perceive the physical world can only operate in half of reality. Our goal: make IoTeX the protocol through which AI sees, verifies, and acts on the physical world.

Vision first. We're starting with cameras. Over a billion deployed globally, hundreds of thousands streaming publicly — no new hardware needed. And vision AI just crossed the cost threshold: analyzing a frame is 100x cheaper than two years ago, making continuous monitoring viable for the first time. A single camera frame captures more than a hundred IoT readings — foot traffic, weather, commercial activity, crowd density — all at once.

To start, we're building products that turn any live video stream into AI-readable intelligence. Point it at a camera, ask a question in plain English — "Is the parking lot full?" "Are workers wearing hard hats?" — and get a structured, real-time answer. Not pre-trained object detection with fixed categories, but open-ended visual understanding in natural language (aka Visual Question Answering VQA).

Once vision is proven, we expand to other physical-world data. Quicksilver already demonstrated this in 2025 with weather, vehicle telemetry, and compute data. The architecture generalizes. Vision is the beachhead — hardest problem, richest data.

Adoption over narrative. We have hypotheses about where this is valuable — location intelligence, workplace safety, construction monitoring, retail analytics. But hypotheses aren't customers. We measure success by whether someone opens their wallet, not by TVL or partnerships announced. Many small experiments, fast iteration, kill what doesn't work. Product and protocol deliberately decoupled: if a product fails, the chain keeps getting stronger.

Challenge 2: How does IoTeX keep getting more decentralized and unconditionally trustless?Here's an uncomfortable truth most crypto projects avoid: almost every blockchain would stop evolving if its core team walked away tomorrow. Blocks would keep being produced. But upgrades? Security patches? Adaptation to new threats? Gone. IoTeX is no different today. That's a problem we intend to solve.

In 2025, the network processed nearly 200K daily transactions across 130+ applications, holding at 40% of supply, and institutional validators like Animoca joined the delegate set. But these measure activity, not resilience. The real question is harder: If the core team resigns tomorrow would IoTeX keep running, keep upgrading, and keep getting stronger? We think the answer needs to be yes, and we're working on several fronts:

Trustless bridging through math, not keys. Cross-chain bridges typically rely on multisig wallets — trusted parties holding private keys. Keys can be stolen, coerced, or lost. We're working on replacing this trust assumption with zero-knowledge proofs: a bridge that mathematically proves IoTeX consensus happened correctly, verified on Ethereum, with no trusted intermediaries. We're actively engaging with the Ethereum Foundation on this, particularly in the context of their Native Rollup work which shares technical building blocks with our approach.

AI-operated consensus delegates. Running a delegate node today requires human operators — expensive, scarce, and a centralizing force. What if AI agents could operate nodes at a fraction of the cost? What if one delegate could spawn multiple AI operators, each independently monitoring the chain and responding to incidents? This would break the equation where decentralization = f(token price). If nodes are cheap to run, decentralization stays robust even in bear markets.

A second client implementation. One codebase is a single point of failure. Ethereum learned this with the Geth supermajority problem. We need a protocol specification rigorous enough that an independent team can build a second client from scratch — so that no single piece of software is existential to the network.

Independent security and development structures. A security council that functions without the Foundation. A contributor guild that pays developers directly based on contribution, not employment. Bug bounties funded by the protocol itself.

None of these have neat quarterly deadlines. Some depend on governance votes. Some depend on external developments. That's precisely why a traditional roadmap would be dishonest. What we can commit to is the *direction*: every decision we make should move IoTeX closer to surviving — and thriving — without us.

Challenge 3: How does IoTeX fund itself sustainably, forever?Most blockchain projects treat "sustainability" as a tokenomics problem — adjust inflation, add a fee burn, hope the math works out. We think that's backwards. The best version of sustainability is the simplest one: build products that make money.

Think about how a successful public company works. It generates revenue, reinvests profits into R&D, and buys back shares to return value to shareholders when cash exceeds needs. Nobody asks Microsoft "what's your inflation schedule?" — the business funds itself. We think a blockchain protocol can work the same way. Not overnight, but as a north star.

In 2025, IoTeX protocol revenue reached $110K in Q3, up 16% QoQ. A start, but not self-sustaining. The question for 2026: can we build products that generate enough revenue to fund protocol development, security, and growth independently?

Product revenue first. If we find product-market fit for physical-world AI, revenue can directly fund core development, security, ecosystem grants — and eventually buy back and burn IOTX, returning value to holders the way a profitable company returns value to shareholders. This is the ideal path and the one we're working hardest toward.

Protocol mechanisms as complements, not crutches. Fee burns, treasury allocations, staking adjustments, inflation — these tools exist and other chains have used them with varying success. They may play a role. But we view them as complements to a real business, not substitutes. A fee burn without genuine transaction volume is theater. A treasury without real revenue is just inflation with extra steps.

Governance matters as much as economics. However the protocol funds itself, who decides how funds are spent matters just as much. Transparent on-chain spending, community oversight, progressive decentralization of control — no single entity, including us, should have unilateral say over the protocol's financial future.

The flywheel we're building toward: products generate revenue and transactions → revenue funds development and buybacks → transactions strengthen the network → a stronger network attracts more builders and products. It doesn't exist today. Building it starts with Challenge 1: making something people pay for.

The current model has a shelf life. We'd rather have this conversation openly than pretend the status quo is fine.

Why an Anti-Roadmap?This isn't the absence of a roadmap. It's a deliberate argument against them.

2025 proved why. Nobody predicted vision AI would get 100x cheaper, that AI agents would hit production, or that Coinbase would ship a machine payment protocol. Every shift changed what we should build. A rigid roadmap would have told us to keep executing last year's plan while the world moved on.

Roadmaps optimize for predictability — the appearance of control. The winning strategy in an AI-accelerated world is adaptability. Spot opportunities in weeks, not quarters. Kill plans that stopped making sense. Say "we were wrong, here's what we're doing instead."

What we can promise:

Transparency about what we don't know. We'd rather say "we're searching for product-market fit" than pretend we've found it.Speed of iteration. Ship fast, measure honestly, kill what doesn't work.Structural resilience. Designed for a world where any single thing can fail — including us — and the system keeps going.The three challenges — giving AI eyes on the physical world, building infrastructure that outlives its creators, funding itself forever — are compass bearings, not milestones. If these questions interest you, we want to hear from you. Not as spectators, but as builders.

The internet was built for humans. The next version will be built for machines. Machines that perceive the world. Machines that transact. Machines that act. If that future arrives, the infrastructure connecting AI to reality will matter. That is the question IoTeX is trying to answer.

If you don't want to read this article, I used AI to summarize for you. TL;DR version:

Challenge 1: Make IoTeX AI's interface to the physical world

Vision-first: turn live camera streams into AI-readable intelligence via VQA — no new hardware, 1B+ cameras already deployed, 100x cheaper vision AIExpand beyond vision: generalize Quicksilver architecture to all physical-world dataRevenue as the metric: paying customers over TVL or partnerships; fast experimentation, kill what doesn't workProduct and protocol deliberately decoupled — if a product fails, the chain keeps getting strongerChallenge 2: Make IoTeX unconditionally decentralized

ZK-bridging: replace multisig trust with zero-knowledge proofs; engaging with Ethereum Foundation / Native Rollup workAI-operated delegates: break the "decentralization = f(token price)" equationSecond client implementation: eliminate single-codebase riskIndependent structures: security council, contributor guild, protocol-funded bounties — all functioning without the FoundationChallenge 3: Fund IoTeX sustainably, forever

Product revenue first: fund development, security, grants, and IOTX buyback/burn from real business incomeProtocol mechanisms (fee burns, treasury, staking) as complements, not crutchesTransparent on-chain spending, community oversight, no unilateral controlThe flywheel: products → revenue & transactions → development & buybacks → stronger network → more buildersOur commitments: Transparency about unknowns. Speed of iteration. Structural resilience — survives any single point of failure, including us.

The IoTeX Team

Posted by the IoTeX Foundation

One month ago, on February 21, 2026, IoTeX faced an unprecedented challenge when our ioTube bridge was exploited. Today, we want to take a step back and review everything that happened, including IoTeX's recovery efforts this past month. We are committed to sharing the full picture with our community – you deserved transparency from day one, and you still do.

This is not just an incident post-mortem. It is a record of how the IoTeX Foundation, our Delegates, our exchange partners, and most importantly, our community came together under pressure and emerged stronger.

What HappenedIn the early hours of February 21, 2026, our team detected a security breach targeting the Ethereum-side of the ioTube bridge. A sophisticated attacker — later attributed by Chainalysis to the same group behind the $49M Infini exploit — had compromised an employee's machine through a suspected social engineering attack, enabling them to dwell for a prolonged duration within our infrastructure.

On February 21, 01:51 UTC, they initiated the attack by first upgrading an ioTube bridge Validator contract to a malicious version. This authorized the attacker to drain ~$4.4M in bridge reserve assets (WBTC, ETH, USDC, USDT, DAI, PAXG, UNI, BUSD, CCS) and mint 410M CIOTX tokens in an attempt to extract further value from the network.

It was a professional, patient, and carefully planned attack. What followed was our response.

Our team detected the incident at 8:01 AM UTC on February 21 — within hours of the exploit firing. Our first public community alert went out at 9:39 AM UTC, less than two hours after detection. By 10:03 AM UTC, our validator network had voluntarily suspended the IoTeX chain as a precautionary measure. By that evening, on-chain tracing of all stolen fund movements had been completed.

Let us be clear about something important: the IoTeX L1 chain itself was never compromised. The incident was isolated strictly to the Ethereum-side ioTube bridge contracts. Your IOTX on-chain and on exchanges was safe the entire time. The total supply and circulating supply of IOTX was never affected.

Within 72 hours of the attack:

29 attacker wallets had been identified and blacklistedMainnet v2.3.4 was developed, tested, and deployed — permanently freezing ~45M IOTX in attacker wallets at the network levelThe IoTeX chain was back online as of February 24, 06:06 AM UTCFormal reports had been filed with the FBI and global law enforcementOur team was actively coordinating with Binance and 20+ exchange partners on asset freezesWe want to specifically thank our IoTeX delegates — including iotexcore, binancenode, samsungnext, iosg, ankr, rockx, metanyx, fuzzland, smartstake, and many others — whose around-the-clock coordination made the chain halt and subsequent recovery possible in record time.

Transparent Communication, From the Very BeginningWe published our first full technical incident report within 24 hours. Over the weeks that followed, we published another three official updates that comprehensively covered root cause analysis, chain recovery status, impact clarification, asset tracing, compensation plan, and governance roadmap. We also hosted a live community Q&A on Discord. We published every key development publicly and transparently as it happened to the IoTeX community.

That commitment to transparency extended to our communications to exchanges as well. When DAXA — the Digital Asset Exchange Association representing Korea's major exchanges — issued an Investment Warning against IOTX and asked detailed technical questions, we responded with full forensic documentation, on-chain evidence, precise timelines, and a complete remediation roadmap, addressing every follow-up question in detail in the past whole month.

We believe our community and our regulatory partners deserve the same quality of information. That will never change.

100% Compensation for All Impacted UsersFrom the moment we published our first update, we made one unconditional promise: every affected user will receive 100% compensation, regardless of how much of the stolen funds are ultimately recovered. All compensation is funded entirely from the IoTeX Foundation Treasury in stablecoins and non-IOTX reserves, with zero IOTX liquidation on public markets.

We first executed upon that promise by launching the ioTube Claims Portal on March 2, nine days after the incident. The compensation structure is outlined below:

Tier 1 (≤ $10,000 affected): 100% immediate payout in stablecoins — covering over 90% of all affected walletsTier 2 (> $10,000 affected): $10,000 immediate payout + remaining balance in quarterly tranches over 12 months + a 10% Loyalty Bonus in 12-month staked IOTXAs of today, the compensation claim portal is live and payouts are commencing. If you were affected and have not yet submitted your claim, please visit iotube-claims.iotex.io to submit your claim.

Every cent recovered from the attacker will be directed exclusively to compensating affected users or reimbursing the Foundation Treasury. Any recovered funds will be held in a public multi-sig wallet, and we will continue to provide transparent updates on compensation and recovery on a regular basis.

All Major Exchanges Resume Operations Within One MonthImmediately following the incident, deposits and withdrawals were paused across major exchanges as a standard precaution. Our exchange relations team moved immediately, notifying 20+ partners and coordinating closely throughout the recovery. The results speak for themselves:

Within one week: Binance, Coinbase, Bitget, Gate.io, HashKey, KuCoin, MEXC, LBank and more had fully resumed IOTX deposits and withdrawals.

Within one month: a total of 11 exchange partners were fully operational with IOTX deposits and withdrawals re-opened.

IOTX trading itself was never halted on any major exchange throughout the entire incident. Your exchange-held IOTX was safe and tradeable at all times.

Korean Exchanges: Lifting the DAXA Investment WarningAmong the most challenging situations we faced was the Investment Warning issued against IOTX by three major Korean exchanges — Upbit, Bithumb, and Coinone — under DAXA oversight. This kind of warning can have serious implications for trading access and market perception.

We are proud to report that following our comprehensive formal responses to DAXA, the DAXA Investment Warning has been lifted and Korean exchanges have resumed normal deposits and withdrawals for IOTX. This was largely due to our responsiveness and transparency in addressing each and every question from DAXA in full – we provided on-chain evidence, a detailed incident timeline, our complete compensation plan, our security remediation roadmap, and proof of supply integrity.

To our knowledge, IoTeX is one of the only projects that has successfully navigated a DAXA Investment Warning review of this nature in this timeframe. This outcome reflects the quality of the work our team put into response, and the trust we have worked to build with exchanges over the years. We thank DAXA for their fair and thorough cooperation throughout the past month.

Securing the Future of IoTeX: Multiple IIPs, Systemic ReformThe most important thing we can do beyond making affected users whole is make sure this never happens again. We are not simply patching what broke, but replacing it with something fundamentally more secure.

IIP-56: Full Deprecation of CIOTX Across All Networks has passed. CIOTX has been permanently deprecated on Ethereum, Base, Solana, BSC, and Polygon. All exit channels are closed for the attacker-minted tokens and legitimate holders will be compensated through the Claims Portal.

IIP-57: Trustless ZK-Proof Bridge is in the community review phase. This is the future of cross-chain infrastructure on IoTeX: a bridge that mathematically proves IoTeX consensus happened correctly, verified on Ethereum, with zero intermediaries and zero private keys to steal. We are working with the Ethereum Foundation on this and when complete it will be the most secure bridge architecture in the industry.

Beyond the IIPs detailed above, we have completed a comprehensive infrastructure overhaul:

All bridge contracts transitioned to multi-signature governanceAll GCP and AWS credentials rotated and compromised service accounts decommissionedHardware Security Modules (HSMs) deployed for all sensitive keys, eliminating software-based key storage permanentlyReal-time transaction monitoring with automated alerts and on-chain circuit breakersOrganization-wide security hardening, including mandatory hardware 2FA, endpoint protection, social engineering awareness trainingIndependent third-party security audit of all bridge infrastructure currently underwayExpanded bug bounty program launchedThis was the hardest month in IoTeX's history. A sophisticated, well-funded, and patient adversary targeted us, executed their attack, and exploited weaknesses in our system. There is no minimizing that.

What we can say, with evidence, is this: we detected it fast, we moved decisively, we communicated openly, we protected the core network, we made every affected user whole, we handled every regulatory and exchange relationship with professionalism and transparency, and we used this moment to drive structural reforms that will make IoTeX significantly more secure than it was before.

The IoTeX L1 was never compromised. Our community never lost faith. Our exchange partners stepped up. Our delegates worked around the clock. And the IoTeX Foundation honored every commitment we made.

The fundamentals of IoTeX — our technology, our team, our community, our mission to empower Real-World AI — are intact and stronger than ever. The best days of IoTeX are still ahead. Thank you for standing with us.

— The IoTeX Foundation, March 2026

If you were affected by the ioTube bridge incident, please submit your compensation claim at iotube-claims.iotex.io.

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure

In his latest livestream titled “Cargo Cults and the Reality of Crypto,” Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson delivered an extensive monologue on what he perceives as the current state of digital assets, community behavior, and ongoing legal battles in the sector. The discussion delved into industry history, the fate of long-forgotten projects, and the sometimes-troubling culture that can arise around certain tokens.

Cardano Founder Speaks Out On HEX Broadcasting from Colorado, Hoskinson began by explaining his recent move back to his farm and expressing excitement about nearing completion of construction. He quickly shifted focus to a broader assessment of the crypto landscape, noting that tens of thousands of cryptocurrency projects exist and that new ones frequently emerge, while older ones fade or even reawaken.

“As many of you know, there are probably more than 30,000 cryptocurrency projects floating around,” Hoskinson said. “We pay attention to maybe 50 to 100 at any given time that are interesting in novel.” He categorized most projects into three buckets: Failed or fading projects (e.g., Peercoin, NXT, Feathercoin), projects that were outright scams (e.g., BitConnect, Celsius, and Luna) and the third bucket, projects that are “curiosities,” with unusual communities and nontraditional approaches to tokenomics, marketing, or culture.

From this framework, the Cardano founder homed in on how certain projects—what he labeled as the “third bucket”—tend to behave. He singled out Hex and PulseChain as an example, stressing that those communities have repeatedly demanded his input in Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions. “Every single AMA I have done for the last probably five years […] there’s been at least one person saying, ‘What do you think of Richard Heart? What do you think of PulseChain? What do you think of Hex?’”

He stated that, technically speaking, he remains largely uninterested: “Don’t know much about it […] outside of the fact that I know Richard Hart is an incredibly ostentatious and unusual person who buys lots of luxury goods […] and seems to have a popular YouTube channel.”

While not assigning guilt or innocence, Hoskinson highlighted that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought forward a personal case against Hart for alleged fraud and misappropriation of $12.1 million. He contrasted that situation with ongoing SEC cases against companies such as Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken, which focus on whether certain assets are securities:

“Cases like the one against Richard are different and those will persist,” he argued, further noting that the SEC complaint includes claims of personal misconduct and misuse of funds, rather than solely token classification questions.

Hoskinson also mentioned reports of an Interpol Red Notice tied to Hart, along with allegations related to tax evasion in Finland and an assault case. He cited this as evidence that the situation extends beyond civil disputes and may invite coordination from the IRS and US Department of Justice in criminal matters.

“There is an Interpol red notice […] that’s an undebatable, undeniable thing,” the Cardano founder asserted, though he acknowledged that some within these communities believe the charges to be fabricated.

After referencing these details, Hoskinson revealed that he has been bombarded with accusatory comments and tweets from certain PulseChain and Hex supporters. He said their aggressive approach ultimately discourages any possibility of collaboration: “You will achieve absolutely nothing by further harassment […] all you’ve achieved is whatever little interest I may have had of actually looking into your ecosystem is now over.”

He then drew parallels to other crypto founders or personalities who, in his view, foster contentious communities—specifically comparing the situation with Craig Wright and his Bitcoin SV (BSV) backers: “This is what happened in the BSV community with Craig. We all watched it [… ] and honestly, ask yourself, how many people are waking up today and saying, ‘Boy, I can’t wait to build my next project on BSV’?”

Hoskinson concluded with what he deemed “unsolicited advice,” urging these communities to evaluate the kind of ecosystems they want to become—independent of their founders—and whether the current approach will foster partnership or repel potential collaborators. “If you’re truly a cryptocurrency and you’re truly decentralized, you should be self-governing and you should be different from your founder,” he said. “If that’s the case, you have to ask yourself again what type of ecosystem do you want to be?”

Despite the harsh tone, Hoskinson wished the communities luck, emphasizing that Cardano itself intends to remain neutral and uninvolved: “I have nothing against anyone in the PulseChain community, the Hex community […] I don’t care about your ecosystem,” he stated, adding that he will not be engaging further on the issue.

At press time, Cardano traded at $0.95.

Cardano finds support at the 0.236 Fib, 4-hour chart | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView.com Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com

Editorial Process for bitcoinist is centered on delivering thoroughly researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We uphold strict sourcing standards, and each page undergoes diligent review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of our content for our readers.

A US judge ruled that the SEC lacked jurisdiction over Heart’s crypto activities. The SEC accused Heart of misappropriating $12.1 million for luxury purchases. A US judge has dismissed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) fraud lawsuit against Hex founder Richard Heart. The judge ruled that the US lacked jurisdiction over the case.

On February 28, US District Judge Carol Bagley Amon dismissed the SEC’s claims against Heart. The regulator accused him of raising over $1 billion through unregistered crypto offerings. It also alleged that he misappropriated $12.1 million to buy luxury items, including the world’s largest black diamond.

However, Amon ruled that the SEC failed to prove Heart’s activities targeted US investors. She stated that his alleged fraudulent actions occurred globally, not within US jurisdiction. The court also found no link between the misappropriated funds and the United States.

The SEC alleged that Heart spent investor funds on personal luxury purchases. These included McLaren and Ferrari sports cars, four Rolex watches, and a 555-carat black diamond called “The Enigma.” The regulator also claimed that his projects Hex, PulseChain, and PulseX were unregistered securities.

Despite these accusations, the judge ruled that the SEC could not prove the transactions occurred in the US. Heart’s promotions on YouTube and social media targeted a global audience. The court determined that this was not enough to establish US jurisdiction.

Heart Celebrates Legal Victory Heart responded positively to the ruling. He stated that winning a case against the SEC is rare. He also emphasized that Hex has operated flawlessly for over five years.

Following the court’s decision, PulseChain, PulseX, and HEX saw a sharp increase in value. HEX surged 78%, PulseX rose 67%, and PulseChain gained 36%. Heart credited the ruling for the price surge and expressed relief over the outcome.

Despite his legal win in the US, Heart still faces challenges in Finland. Authorities arrested him in September 2024 on tax fraud and assault allegations. However, he remains missing, and Interpol issued a Red Notice against him in December. Authorities managed to seize $2.6 million worth of watches believed to belong to Heart. Meanwhile, he continues promoting his cryptocurrencies on social media.

Highlighted Crypto News Today
Trump to Host First-Ever White House Crypto Summit Next Friday

Budding crypto writer with a keen interest in providing fresh insights and the latest updates in the crypto space. Enthusiastic about translating complex crypto concepts into clear, actionable information for readers.