BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF has attracted a significant number of new investors to the ETF market, with about 75% of its holders being first-time ETF owners. This trend suggests a two-way street, bringing traditional investors into digital assets and vice versa.
Coinbase is now allowing US users to transfer existing stock and ETF portfolios onto its platform, aiming to become a full-service financial platform and compete with traditional brokerages. The move includes zero-commission trading and builds on earlier stock trading services.
The second part of the Fortune Crypto 100 2026 ranking highlights traditional finance (TradFi) institutions like Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan Chase, and Nasdaq entering the crypto market. Driven by client demand and the growth of tokenized assets and regulated products like Bitcoin ETFs, these giants are rapidly integrating digital assets into their services, signaling crypto's growing legitimacy.
CME Group has launched 24/7 trading for crypto futures and options, including Bitcoin Volatility Futures. This move aims to close the weekend gap in crypto markets and signals strong institutional interest in digital assets.
Korea Investment & Securities and OKX Ventures to invest $106M in South Korean crypto exchange Coinone for a 19.6% stake
XRP faces a divided market with institutional demand and ETF inflows contrasting with bearish derivatives positioning, as Ripple expands its prime brokerage and XRP Ledger upgrades show increased institutional activity.
Payward (Kraken) and Franklin Templeton collaborate to bring traditional financial products to blockchain, including tokenized equities, yield products, and money market funds, bridging Wall Street and crypto markets.
Anchorage’s new product enables AI agents to have compliant access to capital across traditional finance and crypto payment rails.
The industry's premier festival will host 20,000 attendees, merging heavy-hitting traditional finance integration with unmatched Miami nightlife.
At a conference, OKX Global's Chief Commercial Officer Lennix Lai predicted that blockchain interaction will change indefinitely. China Society for Finance and Banking's Fan Wenzhong forecast a "decentralised agent economy" but said AI's potential remains under a "glass cover" due to financial rails not being well suited to AI agents, while Web3 can operate automatically without authoritative intermediaries.
Mastercard announced a partnership with SoFi Technologies to integrate stablecoins into its payment settlement infrastructure, allowing SoFi Bank to settle Mastercard card transactions using SoFiUSD. The initiative targets the back-end settlement process between banks, not consumer-facing payments, with Mastercard's Multi-Token Network supporting stablecoins, tokenized deposits and digital fiat representations. The stablecoin market reached $314 billion as of March 2026, with monthly volumes projected to exceed $1 trillion by end of 2026.
