Crypto analyst Willy Woo says recent investor selling in Bitcoin appears largely exhausted, allowing BTC to trade sideways and possibly retest the mid-$70,000 area before facing resistance. He expects the bearish phase to end around the fourth quarter, with other analysts warning of months of range-bound price action between $60,000 and $70,000 after a steep drawdown.

On Thursday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin detailed updates to the Protocol team's public "Strawmap", a four-year roadmap to speed block production and shrink confirmation times. He targets slot time falling from ~12 seconds to as low as 2 seconds and finality moving from ~16 minutes to between 6 and 16 seconds, with seven forks planned roughly every six months.

Bitcoin adoption accelerated in 2025 across institutions, banks, merchants, public companies, and nation-states, even as BTC remains 50% below its October peak. Institutions amassed 829,000 BTC, U.S. merchant acceptance tripled, global usage rose 74%, and Lightning payments jumped 300% with over $1.1 billion in monthly volume.

Stripe is in early discussions about acquiring all or parts of PayPal Holdings. The talks are preliminary and no deal is assured. Stripe said on Tuesday it was valued at $159 billion after a tender offer, up 74% year over year, while PayPal shares closed at $47.02 after rising 6.74%.

Shares of leading United States cybersecurity firms fell sharply after Anthropic launched its Claude Code Security vulnerability scanner on Feb. 20. Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike and Fortinet posted declines of up to 18% in the days following the debut of the AI-powered tool, which is built on Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model.

Stablecoin reserves on Binance have fallen from $50.9 billion in November to $41.4 billion, a decline of 18.6% that has taken balances back to October levels. The drop comes amid a broader crypto liquidity drought and expectations that U.S. interest rates will remain unchanged in March. Binance still holds about 64% of all exchange stablecoin reserves, but analysts say a renewed inflow of stablecoins may be needed to stabilize market liquidity.

Solana DeFi aggregator Step Finance, along with SolanaFloor and Remora Markets, is shutting down after a $27 million hack of its treasury wallets at the end of January. The team said it could not find a viable path forward and will halt operations immediately, while planning a buyback for STEP token holders and redemptions for Remora rToken holders.

Bitcoin slid more than $3,000 in under two hours on Monday, falling over 4% to around $64,300 and giving back its advance from Friday. The move pushed the Crypto Fear and Greed Index back down to a reading of 5 out of 100, while roughly 136,000 traders saw about $458 million in positions liquidated, mostly from leveraged longs. On-chain data also shows recent investors still realizing large daily losses, and Bitcoin's Sharpe Ratio has sunk to deeply negative territory that some analysts associate with prior accumulation phases.

On Thursday, Bitdeer Technologies Group's stock fell 17.38% to $7.94 after the Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure firm unveiled a $300 million convertible senior note offering with an additional $45 million purchase option. This is Bitdeer's second such issuance after a $150 million offering in April 2024, and its shares are now down 29% year-to-date and nearly 70% below the January 2025 all-time high of about $26.