A CKPool-connected solo miner just landed a $210,000 Bitcoin block reward, one of only 20 solo‑mined blocks in the past year, as listed miners sell BTC to stay afloat.

TomLee's Bitmine continues to stake large portions of its Ethereum holdings as the latest move brings its total Ethereum stakings to over $6.72 billion.

Polymarket partnered with Pyth Network to introduce equity, commodity, and stock-linked contracts.The new markets include daily up or down and closing price contracts that reset at the end of each trading session.Pyth Network is providing real-time price feeds from trading firms and market makers to serve as the resolution layer for the new contracts.

The reported acquisition talks come as South Korea is considering a 20% cap on major crypto exchange shareholders, which would force major platforms to restructure ownership.

Big Tech firms including Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services backed the launch of the x402 Foundation to standardize AI-driven payment infrastructure.The Linux Foundation introduced the initiative with Coinbase, placing the protocol under an open source and nonprofit structure.

Coinbase’s x402 payment protocol has joined the Linux Foundation to push an open, standardized infrastructure for AI-native, internet payments.A new x402 Foundation has been set up with Coinbase and Cloudflare as co-founders, and Stripe as a founding member, alongside planned participation from firms including Google, AWS, Visa and Mastercard.Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin and Google Cloud Web3 head James Tromans say the initiative will advance interoperable, AI-driven transaction standards under transparent, community governance.

Gnosis and Zisk’s Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) emerged directly from a GnosisDAO R&D mandate to explore turning Gnosis Chain into a natively integrated Ethereum layer‑2.The framework, co‑funded by the Ethereum Foundation and unveiled at EthCC 2026, aims to fix Ethereum’s “fragmentation problem” by enabling synchronous composability across L2s while keeping ETH as the core gas and settlement asset.The process marks a new phase in on‑chain governance, with DAOs effectively voting on the technical and economic destiny of entire chains, not just on parameter tweaks.

Stablecoins dominated crypto trading in Q1 as investors sought safety, while rising bot usage and declining retail flows pointed to shifting market dynamics, according to CEX.io.

Algorand jumped following its mention in a Google research paper, as post-quantum cryptography emerges as a new crypto narrative.

Fundrise’s Innovation Fund VCX will be tokenized into a new asset called VCXx in partnership with Kraken’s xStocks platform.VCXx will provide onchain exposure to late-stage private tech companies such as SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks through a single token.Eligible investors will be able to buy VCXx using USDG or U.S. dollars, with tokens designed to integrate into broader onchain trading, collateral, and DeFi strategies.

Jonathan, a nearly 200-year-old tortoise, was widely mourned Wednesday—but his purported demise was a hoax, and there's a crypto connection.

Monad still accounts for less than 0.4% of the approximately $91 billion total TVL tracked across all chains.The following is excerpted from The Block’s Data and Insights newsletter.