Aave said it has exceeded $1 trillion in cumulative lending as CEO Stani Kulechov outlined plans to deepen bank and fintech integrations. The protocol secures over $27.2 billion in TVL and generated $83.3 million in fees in the past 30 days, while AAVE holders debate a package of up to $42.5 million in stablecoins and 75,000 AAVE for Aave Labs.

Prediction market platform Kalshi said on Wednesday it banned a former California gubernatorial candidate for five years and fined him $2,000 after he bet on his own race in violation of insider trading rules. The same platform also penalized a YouTube editor who traded about $4,000 on creator stream markets in 2025, issuing a two-year suspension and roughly $20,000 fine, while the CFTC has created a prediction markets advisory to pursue insider trading cases.

Payoneer said on Tuesday it applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a US national trust banking charter to create PAYO Digital Bank and issue its PAYO-USD stablecoin. The firm plans to use the GENIUS Act-compliant token as a wallet holding currency and to support cross-border payments for its nearly two million mainly small and medium-sized business customers.

Bitwise acquired staking provider Chorus One, a firm overseeing more than $2.2 billion in staked assets, and said on Tuesday that 50 Chorus One employees will join Bitwise Onchain Solutions. The deal expands Bitwise’s staking reach to over 30 proof-of-stake networks, including Solana, Hyperliquid, Monad, Avalanche and Sui; terms were not disclosed.

On Monday, a report from Citrini Research was partly blamed for a sell-off in software and payments stocks, with IBM falling 13.1% to $223.35 and several tech and card networks also lower. The "Global Intelligence Crisis" report warned AI agents could upend the economy, threaten the $13 trillion US mortgage market, and create "Ghost GDP" that appears in national data but bypasses the real economy.

On Feb. 23, 2026, Backpack Exchange said users who stake its forthcoming token for at least one year will be able to swap those tokens for company equity equal to 20%. The firm detailed a 1 million‑token plan with 25% to unlock at TGE and another 37.5% before a potential U.S. IPO if milestones are achieved.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed using transaction simulations and related tools to better align onchain execution with user intent. In a recent post on X, he suggested that users first define the action they want to take and then approve or cancel after viewing a simulated outcome, supported by mechanisms like spending caps and multisig checks. He argued that while user intent is inherently complex and perfect security is unattainable, overlapping ways of expressing intent can make low-risk actions easier and high-risk actions more difficult.

Crypto and banking representatives met at the White House on Thursday for a third session in 16 days, following meetings on Feb. 2 and Feb. 10. Adviser Patrick Witt pushed a trade‑off to permit stablecoin rewards only on transaction activity, not balances. No agreement was reached, but Ripple and Coinbase executives described the talks as constructive.

On Feb. 12, three researchers linked to the U.S. Federal Reserve published a paper arguing that prediction market Kalshi can capture macroeconomic expectations in real time more effectively than traditional tools. The authors said Kalshi's intraday trading data could be used to derive risk-neutral probability distributions of Federal Open Market Committee rate decisions, although the paper is only intended to stimulate discussion rather than guide policy.