Coindesk

When confronted by members of the Senate Banking Committee about concerns over the “debanking” trend plaguing the crypto industry, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said he’s also worried about it and is already tweaking internal supervision policies at the Fed.

“I too, am troubled by the quantity of these reports,” Powell said in routine testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. He offered that “one theory is that banks are just very risk averse” about money-laundering rules and aggressive supervision under which they’re unwilling to welcome customers that may stretch their compliance demands.

“We’re determined to take a fresh look at that,” said Powell, who added that he’d been “struck by the growing number of cases of what appears to be debanking.”

Republican lawmakers and the new financial watchdogs appointed by President Donald Trump have devoted special scrutiny to the so-called debanking they say was encouraged by the previous administration’s banking agencies, including the Fed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Powell also thanked crypto-advocate Senator Cynthia Lummis for raising in a recent debanking hearing that the Fed has a policy to direct greater supervisory scrutiny on bankers who engage in controversial speech or activity. He said that policy is being deleted from the internal manual it came from.

While crypto oversight wasn’t a central topic at Powell’s hearing on Tuesday, a few of the industry’s big issues were raised, including stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

Powell said the Fed supports new regulatory efforts around stablecoins — the tokens designed to maintain a steady value by being pegged to assets such as the U.S. dollar.

“Stablecoins may have a big future with consumers and businesses,” Powell said. “We can’t know that now, but it is important for the development of stablecoins — in a safe and sound manner that protects consumers and savers and all — that there be a regulatory framework.”

The chairman of the U.S. central bank also gave a clear answer to his intentions regarding CBDCs — a nebulous threat of a digital dollar that had long concerned U.S. crypto firms, though no U.S. proposal had ever really developed. When asked whether he’d agree to never launch a CBDC, Powell simply responded, “yes.”

The possibility of matching Chinese and European experiments with CBDCs had already grown more remote in the U.S. at the election of Trump and the congressional majorities who are loudly opposed to such an effort.

Powell will speak again at a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday. And crypto was set to be the featured topic later Tuesday afternoon at a hearing in the House Financial Services Committee.

Read More: Trump Issues Crypto Executive Order to Pave U.S. Digital Assets Path

Major action in crypto in 2024’s final three months is expected to show up in the results of trading app Robinhood (HOOD).

A surge in user activity leading up to and then following the election of Donald Trump in November has analysts expecting a 440% quarterly jump in HOOD’s cryptocurrency trading revenue to $345.5 million, according to FactSet.

Shares of HOOD have soared 350% over the past year as retail traders have returned to the app in anticipation of a more favorable macro environment for stocks and crypto and are higher by 37% in just the first six weeks of 2025.

Robinhood’s overall revenue in the fourth quarter is estimated to land at $934.9 million, up from $660.5 three months earlier, according to FactSet. Earnings-per-share are expected to be $0.41 versus $0.18 the previous quarter.

Robinhood’s trading data, which is disclosed regularly by the company, is often used by analysts to estimate Coinbase’s (COIN) trading volume, which historically has moved in correlation with HOOD.

According to analyst Benjamin Buddish at Barclays, the trading app saw very strong overall growth in reported crypto volumes with total volumes of roughly $69 billion through Dec. 27. This would be a five-fold increase quarter-over-quarter and a six-fold increase year-over-year, the bank noted.

As a result, Buddish sees Coinbase’s retail volume to land north of $108 billion, even assuming a lower “beta” for those retail volumes, he said.

Coinbase, which announces fourth quarter earnings on Thursday after the close, is estimated to report one of its strongest quarter in terms of trading volume to date leading to $1.8 billion in revenue, according to FactSet estimates. Earnings-per-share are estimated at $1.99 versus $0.41.

Shares of COIN will likely be affected by Robinhood’s earnings in anticipation of a similar positive report from the crypto exchange on Thursday. COIN is up 90% over the past year, currently trading at $269.88. HOOD, on the other hand, is up 370% over the same period, trading at $54.33 at press time.

The launch of Unichain, Uniswap’s long-awaited layer-2 network, has seen the price of the decentralized exchange’s governance token UNI rise by around 4.5% to around $9.7 and led to a significant increase in social activity and sentiment.

UNI’s price benefitted from the launch of Unichain but failed to break through the $10 mark. It still outperformed bitcoin (BTC) in the short period since the launch of the layer-2 network, as the cryptocurrency is down around 0.3% in the past 24 hours.

Sentiment surrounding the token has remained positive since the launch, with the number of posts on X rising by roughly 30% to over 1,400 with roughly 41% of those being positive and 48% having a neutral tone, data from TheTie shows.

The rise is notable as social media posts surrounding the token were rising in the lead-up to Unichain’s launch. A Unichain block explorer shows the network already has 15,000 active wallets and has processed nearly 100,000 transactions hours into its first day.

One notable post came from Hayden Adams, CEO of Uniswap Labs, who pointed to a promising future in which the protocol will launch “many new improvements to accelerate blockchain scaling.”

These include reducing block times, allowing most maximal extractable value (MEV) to be returned to users, an additional layer of economic security, and seamless interoperability for Unichain.

“In other words, relentless shipping will continue until Ethereum scales and DeFi is bigger than tradfi+cefi combined. In just four months of testnet the network processed ~100M transactions. Now it’s live with 80+ projects already building on top (plus Uniswap + v2, v3, and v4 deployments already live),” Adams said on X.

When it comes to trading memecoins, time is money — and waiting on a centralized exchange (CEX) could cost you both. Take $TRUMP, for example. On Jan. 17, 2025, just before his inauguration, Donald Trump launched his memecoin on Solana, which surged past a $14.5 billion peak market cap on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Raydium and Orca within little more than 24 hours, making it the second largest memecoin behind Dogecoin at one point.

By the time the major CEXs listed $TRUMP a day or two later — having cleared the usual bureaucratic rigmarole — the action was over. As such, for speculators, DEXs aren’t just faster; they’re more liquid, more volatile and frankly, more fun. In a market where fortunes are made in minutes if not milliseconds, waiting for a CEX to catch up is a missed opportunity.

On the Monday morning following $TRUMP memecoin mania, I spoke with Bobby Ong, co-founder of CoinGecko, the independent crypto data aggregator that has long been my personal go-to for checking token prices — along with roughly 40 million other monthly visitors, according to HypeStat.com. Founded in 2014, CoinGecko has grown into one the most trusted sources for crypto market data.

Ong and I had actually scheduled the call before Christmas, so it was pure coincidence that Trump just happened to launch his memecoin a few days earlier. When we spoke, we both had the same reaction: What the hell just happened?

This series is brought to you by Consensus Hong Kong. Come and experience the most influential event in Web3 and Digital Assets, Feb.18-20. Register today and save 15% with the code CoinDesk15.

I’ve known Bobby for years—he’s a true OG, having first bought bitcoin in 2013, and is one of the sharpest observers of how trading habits evolve at the grassroots level. When he started CoinGecko, it was to solve his own problem — back then, crypto price tracking was rudimentary, and there wasn’t a way to analyze market depth, liquidity, developer activity or community engagement. He wanted better insights, so he and his co-founder built the tool themselves.

Ong is based in Malaysia, while I’m in the Philippines, so we’ve both spent years in Asia’s crypto scene, watching firsthand how the region has shaped — and been shaped by — crypto. With Consensus Hong Kong coming up and both of us slated to be speakers, we planned to discuss crypto adoption trends in Asia. But we ended up talking about the problems with CEX.

DEX appeal

For CEX users, waking up on Monday was a brutal realization: they’d already missed out on nearly 41,000% in potential gains. This was particularly gut wrenching since it wasn’t just another obscure memecoin popping off in some niche corner of the internet; it was a headline-dominating asset tied to the newly re-elected U.S. president, and still, CEXs couldn’t move fast enough.

Meanwhile, in just 72 hours, Solana’s DEX users recorded an unprecedented $28 billion in trading volume, largely driven by $TRUMP and the fast-following $MELANIA token. This level of DeFi engagement was unimaginable barely a few years ago, when DEXs were considered too complex for the average trader to use. But that’s no longer the case, which suggests that DeFi isn’t just an alternative to CEXs; it might just overtake them.

“The experience with decentralized exchanges is superior compared to centralized exchanges, and people gravitate to that — that’s what I’m seeing in the market right now,” Ong told me.

How times have changed

Back in 2020, CoinGecko’s Yearly Crypto Report showed that while combined CEX and DEX trading volumes surged by $403 billion to $534 billion, CEXs accounted for 93% of that growth. Fast-forward to 2024 and that same annual report revealed that the top 10 spot DEXs had done $1.76 trillion in volume all on their own. Additionally, in Q4 of 2024, Solana overtook Ethereum for the first time as the dominant chain, reaching $219.2 billion in DEX trading volume, or over 30% of all DEX trades, compared to Ethereum’s $184.3 billion.

Particularly with Solana, the ecosystem has been built with a strong emphasis on mobile applications. Wallets like Phantom and Jupiter are designed to be user-friendly for mobile trading, which is critical since most people today trade primarily through mobile apps. Ong noted that the user experience for mobile wallets has improved significantly, which in turn has enhanced the overall on-chain experience.

“Previously, we only had MetaMask on desktop, and while there was a MetaMask mobile wallet, it wasn’t very user-friendly,” he said. “But if you look at Ethereum now, you’re seeing a shift — Uniswap has its own mobile app, [non-custodial] Coinbase Wallet has improved and there are many others like Rainbow. The overall wallet experience has gotten much better compared to before, when MetaMask was one of the only options.”

Ong also noted the friction involved in getting new users on-chain, but pointed out that once onboarded, they learn the ropes, enabling them to navigate the ecosystem independently. This means that future projects don’t have to spend as much time and effort onboarding.

I recalled writing about Axie Infinity back in 2020 and how difficult it was for players to earn Axie’s in-game token, then sync and swap it to Ethereum and then trade it on Uniswap — it was an incredibly complicated, multi-step process. But once people overcame those initial hurdles, the next wave of projects could build on that foundation, benefiting from an already-educated user base. Over time, the challenge shifted from onboarding noobs to refining the experience and expanding what’s possible on-chain.

Caught between regulators and a hard place

As DeFi becomes more user friendly, and users get friendlier with DeFi, Ong told me he sees these developments as an existential threat to the CEX business. He likened the CEXs to a big supermarket with spot and futures, staking and all the things you could ever need all in one convenient place. But with all that being unbundled by DeFi, which can now be accessed via the main interface of a DEX in a user’s mobile wallet, the CEXs must figure out where they’re going to sit.

That’s especially the case for CEXs that operate in jurisdictions where they lack full regulatory approval, like Binance, OKX and ByBit, since they can neither onboard shitcoins instantly like a smart contract-based non-custodial DEX — where tokens become tradable as soon as liquidity is added — nor offer fiat on/off ramps like a licensed CEX.

This leaves them grasping at straws, desperate to maintain relevance. Ong gave an example: Binance has always allowed the trading of high-risk assets but its recent listing of speculative AI tokens such as ChainGPT (CGPT) and Cookie DAO (COOKIE), as well as emerging AI-driven projects such as aixbt by Virtuals (AIXBT), suggests a shift to cater to hype-driven, short-term trading. Some critics have called this out as a departure from Binance’s traditionally selective standards and a move to chase trading volume amid rising DEX competition.

“They sort of have no choice because if people are trading those tokens on their own wallets on Metamask, or Aerodrome on Base, then they are not trading on Binance,” said Ong.

Meanwhile, Binance’s regulatory troubles have been mounting. In mine and Bobby’s home region, countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia all have clear licensing requirements for crypto exchanges, with Vietnam expected to join them this year. Obviously, the level of regulation varies between these countries, with some being more relaxed and some more strict, but the point is, it’s no longer a gray area.

This leaves a jurisdictionally fluid CEX like Binance in the precarious position of operating in regulatory limbo, constantly facing restrictions, bans or forced exits from key markets. By contrast, DEXs have no central entity to regulate them. Without a company or headquarters to license or restrict, they exist purely as smart contracts on a blockchain, allowing them to facilitate trading without the same compliance burdens that weigh down CEXs.

“Do you know of any country that’s getting anywhere close to regulating DeFi?” I asked. “No,” said Bobby, mentally chalking up another win for DEXs.

Why DEXs are dominating in Asia now

Southeast Asia is home to a huge population of tech-savvy youngsters eager to explore new financial opportunities but (with the exception of Singapore) the region offers limited options for high-yield investments. Unlike in the U.S., where retail investors enjoyed 23%-plus returns in the S&P 500 in both 2023 and 2024, people in the East face significant barriers to accessing such markets — for context, we don’t have any local equivalent where retail investors can cheaply and easily trade stocks via platforms like Robinhood. Most equity trading platforms in Southeast Asian markets have high barriers to entry —steep fees, lack of fractional shares, strict regulations and limited access to global equities. Instead, crypto has filled the gap.

Where else can you see a token like $TRUMP explode from $7 to $75 in not much more than the space of a weekend? And while the crypto industry tries to shake its reputation for speculation, that speculative allure is exactly what keeps people coming in.

These markets matter to exchanges — CEXs, DEXs and everything in between — because countries with large populations like India, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines are prime hunting grounds for user acquisition. These regions offer immense scale, but the challenge lies in the spending power of these users.

GDP per capita is relatively low, and many individuals lack significant disposable income so they engage with crypto in mostly transactional ways, hunting airdrops for survival. Earning $50 to $100 from an airdrop isn’t a bonus for many people living in these countries — it can be rent, food or a full month’s wages. However, while this drives engagement, the participation is often temporary and driven by immediate financial needs rather than long-term investment or platform affinity.

“A lot of them are just there to make money. They’re not even interested in decentralization or the technology. It’s really just about the financial returns for many of them,” said Ong. And while CEXs serve this audience well for on/off ramps, for those seeking the highest rewards, DEXs are where the stakes — and the upside — are highest.

As such, today’s degens aren’t necessarily ideologically-driven like the early Bitcoiners who championed “don’t tread on me” ideals or the ethos of “be your own bank.” They are decentralized for one reason: the money.

And while poor financial literacy and FOMO often lead to losses, I personally don’t believe in shielding people from risk by making these markets inaccessible. High barriers essentially say “You’re poor and uneducated, so you can’t participate,” robbing people of the chance to learn—even if that means making mistakes. Traditional finance does the same thing by restricting startup investments to accredited investors, supposedly for protection, but in reality, just keeping the best opportunities for the wealthy. That, in my view — and in Ong’s too — is fundamentally unfair.

DEXs have the upper hand right now. They offer true, open, unrestricted access to financial opportunity at lightning speed, allowing anyone, anywhere to get in on the game. How long regulators will take to catch up is anyone’s guess, but for now, we make hay while the Crypto Spring sun shines.

And when the next mega memecoin kicks off, all you really need is a wallet, a DEX and the stamina to satisfy a never-ending cycle of checking, hoping and coping on CoinGecko.

The developers behind Lido, the largest staking service on Ethereum, have proposed revamping the staking platform with modular “vaults.”

The new framework would introduce stVaults, a customizable component designed to help Lido accommodate institutions and more complex staking strategies.

Lido currently allows investors to pool their ether (ETH) together and “stake” their crypto — locking up their tokens with the network, helping to secure it in exchange for interest.

Lido pioneered liquid staking: users get a receipt on their deposits called Lido staked ETH (stETH) that they can trade at any time. With liquid staking on Lido, entering and exiting staking positions became as simple as buying and selling stETH tokens.

Lido V3’s stVaults are “modular smart contracts designed to meet the diverse and evolving needs of Ethereum participants,” according to a press release shared with CoinDesk. The upgrade would enable staking setups beyond cut-and-dry liquid staking.

Specifically, stVaults will be able to help institutional stakers who want to personalize their staking setups, node operators who want to attract high-volume stakers, and asset managers who want to create new staking use cases.

The move reflects the growing institutional interest in Ethereum staking as financial firms explore ways to integrate yield-generating crypto products into their portfolios. The stVaults are supposed to accommodate that interest by introducing modular building blocks that cater to different staking needs.

“What is important to understand with customizable infrastructure, is that you can in general build even more complex products,” said Konstantin Lomashuk, the founder of the Lido staking protocol.

The goal is “for Lido to be rebuilt as a foundation layer,” said Lomashuk.”It’s neutral infrastructure: everybody can use, stake their assets, utilize it, restake or leverage and have more liquidity.”

The developers vision for V3 is to evolve Lido into an “open staking marketplace,”user will be able to opt into whichever staking setup fits their objective and risk profile — a departure from Lido’s catch-all approach to staking, where all users stake the same way, through the same interface, in exchange for the same interest rate.

The shift brings Lido further in line with other modular decentralized finance (DeFi) products, like Morpho and Symbiotic, which employ vault mechanisms for lending and restaking, respectively. The upgrade also makes Lido more useful for restaking — where ETH is “restaked” to secure other protocols in addition to Ethereum. “You can restake your stVault,” explained Lomashuk. “Liquid restaking tokens can utilize this infrastructure to grow the APR.”

Lido V3 was formally presented by a group of core developers to the Lido DAO, the decentralized autonomous organization that governs the protocol, on Tuesday. If the DAO approves the proposal, V3 could go live on Ethereum’s mainnet as early as the third quarter of 2025.

“Now it’s a new phase,” Lomashuk told CoinDesk.

Read more: Lido Co-Founder Teases ‘Second Foundation’ for Ethereum Amid Community Backlash

Crypto ecosystem growth slowed in January, with total trading volume dropping 24%, Wall Street bank JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report Tuesday citing TradingView data.

Still, the activity is double the level before the U.S. election in November and the total market cap increased 8% to roughly $3.4 trillion, the report said. The market cap growth was concentrated in bitcoin (BTC), solana (SOL) and XRP, while “declines in average daily volume (ADV) were broad-based across the ecosystem,” the bank said.

“We think the election was a catalyst for sure, and activity and token price levels are finding their equilibrium in the post-election period,” analysts led by Kenneth Worthington wrote.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) fared worse on a monthly basis the report said, with a larger deterioration across a number of metrics.

There has been some progress on the regulatory front.

The new Trump administration established a new crypto taskforce and SAB 121, a controversial accounting rule, was rescinded, JPMorgan said.

Read more: Equities-Crypto Relationship Is Likely to Weaken in the Long Term, Citi Says

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 3237.73, up 0.8% (+26.27) since 4 p.m. ET on Monday.

Fifteen of 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: ADA (+13.6%) and LTC (+6.5%).

Laggards: APT (-3.5%) and AAVE (-1.1%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Uniswap Labs, the primary developer behind one of the largest decentralized exchanges (DEX), Uniswap, shared Tuesday that its long-awaited layer-2 network, Unichain, is now live.

Powered by Optimism’s OP stack, Unichain—like other layer-2s on Ethereum—offers faster and cheaper transactions compared to Ethereum’s mainnet. Developers can deploy apps onto the network, which has been optimized specifically for decentralized finance (DeFi) and aims to serve as “the home for liquidity across chains,” according to Uniswap Labs.

For Uniswap Labs, the benefit of launching a layer-2 is twofold: it will provide a better experience for users of Uniswap and similar platforms, and it will create a new revenue opportunity in the form of network fees. A representative for Uniswap Labs told CoinDesk that “around 20%” of the chain’s revenue will go directly to the company.

Unichain has been in testing since October 2024 and is classified by Uniswap Labs as a “stage-1” rollup, meaning it has elements of decentralization but retains some centrally-controlled safeguards at this early phase.

The network is built on the OP Stack, a modular framework that lets developers build interoperable layer-2 chains based on Optimism’s optimistic rollup technology. Several well-known teams have come out with their own OP Stack-based layer-2’s, including Coinbase’s ‘Base’, Kraken’s ‘Ink,’ World’s ‘World chain,’ and Sony’s ‘Soneium.’

What makes Unichain different?

Dozens of layer-2 chains have popped up over the last few years, and Uniswap co-founder Hayden Adams believes that most of them will ultimately be used for specific use cases rather than serve as general-purpose blockchains. “We are anticipating a world of many, many different use cases, of which trading is a small subset,” Adams told CoinDesk in an interview.

In collaboration with Ethereum research and development firm Flashbots, the Uniswap team said it has created a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on Unichain. The TEE is a secure area for more sensitive transactions and is meant to optimize the chain for DeFi by allowing for more advanced trades and faster transaction finality.

“Essentially, we want Unichain to be a chain that is good for liquidity creation, good for trading, good for applications that need to be co-located with them, and then good for applications that essentially want access to liquidity but should not be co-located,” Adams said.

Building on Optimism

As part of its integration with Optimism’s “Superchain” ecosystem, Uniswap Labs has agreed to give 2.5% of Unichain’s gross revenue—or 15% of Unichain’s net revenue, whichever is greater—to the Optimism Collective, a consortium of people and companies that steward Optimism’s rollup tech. Many of the chains in the Optimism Superchain ecosystem have agreed to similar setups, including Coinbase and Kraken.

In exchange for building on Optimism, both Coinbase and Kraken received grants of Optimism’s OP governance tokens from the Optimism Foundation, which controls a treasury of tokens earmarked to help grow the ecosystem. Coinbase agreed to receive up to 118 million OP tokens, while Kraken agreed to 25 million. Uniswap Labs declined to comment on whether it had its own deal with the Optimism Foundation.

Ahead of Unichain’s mainnet launch, Uniswap Labs announced that 65% of the chain’s net revenue will go to the Unichain Validation Network—a group of validators and stakers securing the blockchain.

UVN will act as “another layer of transparency and validation of the network,” Adams said.

“Part of the uniqueness about us as a project that has always been decentralized first, is that we are actually reducing the role and the power of sequencer relative to other things that are running more centralized sequencers,” Adams added.

Read more: Uniswap Developer Unveils Own Layer-2 Network, Unichain, Built on Optimism Tech

A new investment vehicle, the KvarnPortugal Fund, is set to allow investors a way to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency sector while also presenting a potential pathway to Portuguese residency or citizenship.

The fund is the result of a partnership between Fundbox, a Portuguese fund management company, and Kvarn X, aEuropean cryptocurrency investment platform.

The fund’s subscription period ends in Feb. 2027, according to its website, and features a 0.05% management fee, along with a one-off 2.5% subscription fee. On top of these, investors also have to cover a €1,250 ($1289) know-your-customer (KYC) fee.

The fund has an 80/20 profit share. For investors that aren’t after Portuguese residency, the minimum investment is €100,000.

The fund is set to allocate 80% of its portfolio to bitcoin (BTC), and the remaining 20% to the CoinDesk 20 Index, which offers exposure to a broad range of large-cap cryptocurrencies.

KvarnPortugal aligns “financial opportunity with real-world utility” by integrating the index into a fund facilitating residency-by-investment, said Alan Campbell, president of CoinDesk Indices. The CoinDesk 20 Index, he added, was “designed to serve as the industry’s most liquid benchmark.”

To use the fund to gain residency in Portugal through the country’s Golden Visa program, investors would have to commit a minimum of €500,000 and spend at least 35 days in the country over five years. The investment will have to be made via a Portuguese bank account to qualify, according to the fund’s website.

KULR Technology Group (KULR) has expanded its bitcoin (BTC) holdings to 610.3 BTC.

The firm increased its total bitcoin stash to approximately $60 million after buying an additional $10 million worth at an average price of $103,905 per bitcoin, according to the announcement.

This move aligns with the company’s bitcoin treasury strategy, announced in December 2024, where up to 90% of its surplus cash reserves are allocated to bitcoin.

The company reported a BTC Yield of 167.3% year-to-date, using surplus cash and its at-the-market (ATM) equity program to fund acquisitions. BTC Yield is a key performance indicator (KPI) used to measure the percentage change in KULR’s Bitcoin holdings relative to its fully diluted shares outstanding.

Shares of KULR were down nearly 2% in premarket trading, after jumping 28% on Monday.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.