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Fenasbac, which is the federation of Central Bank servers, is opening another round to accelerate business. The Next program (Batch 8) is looking at startups that deal with financial innovation, and applications are open until Sunday, the 15th.
The idea is to take projects that solve real market problems using cutting-edge technology: blockchain, artificial intelligence, and sustainable finance.
The highlight of this edition is a challenge related to the infrastructure of the capital markets on the XRPL (Ripple) network. The call seeks companies willing to create Decentralized Finance (DeFi) solutions at an institutional level. The goal is to develop tools for custody, settlement, and tokenization of real assets, attracting the big players in the market to the crypto world. But it has to be something secure and capable of scaling.

The Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) completed, on Thursday (12), the first official inspection regarding the progress of Drex, the digital currency that the Central Bank is developing. So far, the project has passed scrutiny: the management was approved.
But the TCU didn't let it go easily. They requested some fine adjustments and created mandatory checklists to ensure that the system is secure when the currency is launched.
Minister Jhonatan de Jesus's report emphasized that Drex is aligned with international governance rules for central bank digital currencies. However, despite the praise, the technical analysis pointed out some issues that still need to be resolved.

Oh, what a crazy thing! The director of Binance there in France, David Princay, almost fell victim to a robbery at home on Thursday (12). This case only increases the concern about violent crimes linked to cryptocurrencies in those parts of Europe.
According to the French radio station RTL, three masked and armed goats invaded a building in Val-de-Marne in the early morning, looking for the Binance executive. Since they couldn't find the man, they took two cell phones and ran away.
About two hours later, the same group tried to invade another house in Vaucresson, again looking for Princay, but got the address wrong. The police, quick to act, tracked the stolen cell phones and combined them with camera footage. They caught the suspects already on a train heading to Lyon. They were arrested by the French police's elite unit and were detained.

Remember the incident back in 2023 when Mixin suffered a hack and lost around two hundred million dollars? Well, now the wallet associated with that attack has decided to move again, after being inactive for almost two years. On Thursday night, the person controlling that wallet sent about 3.85 million dollars in Ethereum (ETH) – which is roughly 20 million reais – to another wallet. And that other wallet, without even warming up a bank, has already dispatched everything directly to Tornado Cash, which is a platform that mixes cryptocurrency to make tracking harder. They did this in twenty separate transactions, just to complicate things further.

The so-called Tether, which owns the largest stablecoin in dollars, USDT, made a strong entrance: it came in fourth place in a global artificial intelligence competition that deals with translating brain signals into text.
The team behind this endeavor was from Tether EVO, the company's boldest arm. They beat over 460 competitors in the 'Brain-to-Text ’25' challenge on Kaggle, demonstrating that their system for connecting the mind with a computer really works.
The coolest thing is that they managed to process complicated data without needing a big central server and without messing with anyone's privacy. The challenge was to transform 256 channels of raw neural activity into clear text, without needing to align everything at the right time.

Oh, what a crazy thing this cryptocurrency market is! Right at the beginning of 2026, with prices plummeting worldwide, a brokerage firm from the United States, called BlockFills, decided to pause services for clients. It was on Wednesday, the 11th, that they announced that no one could withdraw or deposit for the time being. They said it’s just a temporary thing, to protect both the investors and the company itself.
On their blog, they released this: “Due to market conditions and the financial situation, we have decided to temporarily suspend deposits and withdrawals.” But, oh, those who already had open positions could still trade in the spot market and in derivatives to close them. The problem is that this announcement came with a week's delay and without much explanation, right?

The one and only Charles Hoskinson, who is the head behind Cardano, appeared at the cryptocurrency event in Hong Kong on the 12th, dressed as a McDonald's employee. It was like a symbolic message, showing that the digital currency sector is going through a somewhat tight phase.
In his speech, he said that 'the industry is not healthy' and that the market mood is on the floor, it has never been so low. He also talked about the people on social media who are quite pessimistic and the difficulty of liquidity, meaning that money is not circulating easily in this space.

A promotion that was supposed to be simple turned into one of the biggest embarrassments in the cryptocurrency world. Bithumb, which is the second-largest brokerage in South Korea, is running around trying to recover a large sum of money after having accidentally sent 620,000 bitcoins to clients in a promotional action.
The mess happened because, instead of putting the prize in won (their currency), an employee ended up typing in bitcoin. The result: instead of distributing some small change, the system dumped billions of dollars in digital currency. To give you an idea, it was more bitcoin than the company had stored!

The Bitcoin thing took a breather this Thursday (12), it is being traded at around US$ 68,078.32. Converting to our currency, it is around R$ 352,645.69.
Yesterday, Wednesday, a strong employment report came out in the United States. This shows that their economy is growing steadily, but at the same time, it undermines hopes that their central bank, the Fed, will lower interest rates right away.
According to the Department of Labor, employers created 130,000 jobs in January, well above what economists expected (70,000). The unemployment rate dropped to 4.3%, a tiny bit below the forecast of 4.4%.

Bitcoin gained again the push from the so-called 'whales', those people who have a huge amount of coins stored and usually influence the market's direction. Just last week, a wallet with more than 1,000 BTC accumulated about 53,000 coins — the largest purchase since November — in a transaction that exceeds 4 billion dollars, according to the folks at Glassnode.
This amount of buying helped to stabilize the price after the sharp drop that caused Bitcoin to plummet nearly 50% since the peak in October. Last week it hit 60,000, but it has already reacted and is hovering around 70,000, quoted above 67,000 on the morning of this Wednesday (11).

On February 10, Solana ETFs in the United States made a significant turnaround: it was the best result in almost a month, according to data from SoSoValue.
After two consecutive days of cash outflows, they received an inflow of $8.43 million — the highest volume since January 15, when they had pulled $8.94 million. This happened even with Solana experiencing a 4.6% drop in 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.
The one who pulled the line was BSOL from Bitwise, which alone received $7.7 million. The FSOL from Fidelity came right after, with just over $732,000. The other big names, like Grayscale, VanEck, and 21Shares, remained practically still.

The governance token of Uniswap, the so-called UNI, saw a good rise this Wednesday (11). This happened after the creator of the famous decentralized exchange announced a partnership with BUIDL, which is BlackRock's tokenized fund, that giant asset manager in the market.
BlackRock, which is the largest in the world in this field, has allowed the fund of more than 2 billion dollars to be traded within UniswapX. This system works like a market where professionals compete to offer the best price to users.

Wow, can you believe it? The Civil Police from the Federal District decided to kick down the door on Tuesday (10) and conducted one of those operations to take down a gang that was laundering money, around 15 million reais in the last two years.
The agents from the so-called Division of Counterfeiting and Fraud — which the people call Difraudes — went around three states and arrested people. They also seized some cryptocurrency storage devices that the gang used to hide the dirty money. However, in the statement they released, they didn't say whether these digital wallets had any stored value or if they managed to recover the keys to access them. They also didn't mention how many of these devices they found.

ZRO skyrockets and excites the market
Wow, the ZRO token from LayerZero is really doing well this Wednesday (11). In just the last 24 hours, it has increased by more than 34%, trading around US$ 2.33, according to data from CoinGecko. And that's not all: for the week, it has appreciated by more than 27%.
This rocket took off after two major announcements: Tether decided to invest in LayerZero and, in addition, giants of financial infrastructure like Citadel are supporting the creation of a new blockchain called 'Zero'.

Altcoins are taking a hit again this Wednesday (11). The selling pressure that started in February has only increased. Solana, XRP, BNB, and other important tokens fell between 4% and 6% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data.
Zcash was the hardest hit among the 30 largest altcoins, plummeting 6.7% in the same period. Right behind were BNB, Sui, Hyperliquid, and XRP, with losses of 5.8%, 5.5%, 4.3%, and 4.2%.
This downturn began after Bitcoin peaked in October and gained momentum in early February, leading to a lot of liquidation. Even with Bitcoin trying to hold above 60 thousand dollars, the altcoins are weak, reflecting investors' fear.

It seems that the European Union wants to completely cut off cryptocurrency transactions coming from Russia. According to the English newspaper Financial Times, the idea is to prevent Moscow from using these digital assets to evade the sanctions that the European bloc imposed after the invasion of Ukraine.
This initiative is part of a new package of measures, but it still needs all EU countries to give their 'yes' to take effect.
In the documents that the newspaper had access to, it is written that the proposal is to block companies and cryptocurrency platforms linked to Russia from operating in Europe. The European Commission believes that it is pointless to punish only some companies because others will soon appear in their place. Therefore, they want to expand the crackdown and block any cryptocurrency service that has ties to the country.

📈 Currency that rose
- Chainbase (C): that one shot up like a rocket, more than +275% in just one day.
- XRP (Ripple): gained a bit, about +0.91%.
- WETH (Wrapped Ethereum): rose just a little, +0.20%.
- Bitcoin (BTC): hardly moved, but remained in the green, +0.07%.
📉 Currency that dropped
- Ethereum (ETH): slipped -0.64%.
- Dogecoin (DOGE): lost a bit, -0.48%.
- BNB (Binance Coin): dropped slightly, -0.21%.
- Solana (SOL): almost stayed at zero, but dropped a little by -0.04%.

Oh, what a mess, this Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded FTX, is saying from behind bars that this brokerage was never broke, and that this bankruptcy that the new team imposed was staged to get their hands on the money. His words are coming out on X, but it's a guy who takes what he says from prison and posts it online.
He said this:
“FTX was never bankrupt. I never filed for bankruptcy for it. The lawyers took over the company and, four hours later, they already filed a fake bankruptcy just to be able to loot.”

A court there in the United States sentenced a guy to 20 years in prison for orchestrating a scam with cryptocurrencies. The scheme was heavy: fraud and money laundering that totaled about 73 million dollars (around 380 million reais). The detail is that the guy, Daren Li, fled after cutting off his electronic ankle bracelet and was convicted even without appearing at the trial.
This Daren Li has dual citizenship, from China and Saint Kitts and Nevis, and was caught for involvement in an international cryptocurrency fraud ring. According to prosecutors, he targeted American victims using social media, dating sites, and even a fake trading platform. The scam was that one called “pig slaughtering”: the accomplices gained people's trust with small talk and then pushed them to fake websites or pretended to be technical support to extract money.

Vitalik Buterin wants a different direction for artificial intelligence. Instead of this crazy rush after the so-called AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), he says that the path has to be different: decentralization, verification, and privacy, just like the way Ethereum operates.
According to him, just saying "to work on AGI" is already starting off wrong, because it seems like a directionless race, just to see who gets there first. It's as if someone said that Ethereum is just about "working with finance" or "computing", without considering the values and the right direction.