Crypto
Saylor at CPAC
Michael Saylor looks blue (Dominic Gwinn/Getty Images)

Companies kept adding bitcoin to their piles, but now investors are starting to get worried

CEO Michael Saylor has grown Strategy’s pile to nearly half a million bitcoin and the stock is falling with most of the asset class.

It’s been quite a week for bitcoin, with President Trump’s executive order establishing a strategic bitcoin national reserve late last night, though it failed to boost the price of the coin, which has dropped to $86,000 as of 12:15 p.m. ET today. 

The details of the order specified only that the government would fund the reserve with previously seized cryptocurrencies, which seems to have hurt the overall cryptocurrency market as well as sentiment around Strategy, which is down more than 6% today.  

CEO Michael Saylor will be at today’s inaugural White House Crypto Summit and spoke on Fox Business about his ideas for how the reserve should be built, which included the US adding bitcoin slowly and strategically. 

Despite the executive order saying any bitcoin purchased will be done only through “budget-neutral strategies,” public companies around the globe are still steadily buying and stashing bitcoin.

This week, Japanese company Metaplanet added 156 bitcoin for $13.4 million. “As of 3/3/2025, we hold 2391 $BTC acquired for ~$196.3 million at ~82,100 per bitcoin,” CEO Simon Gerovich posted on X.

In Brazil, fintech company Méliuz said its board of directors has approved allocating 10% of the company’s cash reserves in bitcoin.

“The Company has made its first Bitcoin purchases, acquiring 45.72 Bitcoin for approximately $4.1 million at an average price of $90,296.11 per Bitcoin,” CEO Israel Salmen posted on X.

Meanwhile, stateside, publicly traded bitcoin platform Fold added 475 bitcoin to its reserve today — a 50% increase in the company’s bitcoin holdings, which now total 1,485 bitcoin, according to the release.

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Ripple launches treasury platform to manage cash and cryptocurrencies

Ripple, the firm closely tied to the fifth-largest cryptocurrency, XRP, introduced a new treasury platform for digital asset and traditional cash management for users like financial officers, treasurers, and accountants. 

Ripple’s move comes more than three months after it acquired treasury software provider GTreasury for $1 billion, one of several steps to grow the firm’s position in corporate finance.

Combining Ripple’s blockchain rails and GTreasury’s software, the new platforms goal is to simplify treasury operations. It eliminates settlement delays with payment times of three to five seconds and optimizes yield from working capital 24/7 through tokenized money market funds such as BlackRock’s BUIDL and overnight secure repo markets with RLUSD, according to a Tuesday blog post

Ripple Treasury also aims to provide “real-time cash positions, automated forecasting, and seamless reporting across traditional cash, digital assets, RLUSD, and XRP holdings,” the blog post stated.

Last year, Ripple filed its national banking license application with the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, while the firm’s subsidiary Standard Custody & Trust Company applied for a Federal Reserve master account, which would allow Ripple to hold RLUSD reserves directly with the Fed.

XRP has seen $2.4 billion in trading volume in the last 24 hours, increasing 1.8% in the period. The tokens all-time high was set in July 2025 at $3.65. Meanwhile, spot XRP ETFs had nearly $9.2 million worth of inflows on Tuesday, bringing cumulative inflows to $1.4 billion.

$82B

Crypto money laundering activity totaled more than $82 billion in 2025, more than 8x higher than 2020’s figure of $10 billion, according to a Tuesday report published by crypto analytics firm Chainalysis. Chinese-language networks dominated the ecosystem, accounting for roughly 20% of the illicit activity, or $16.1 billion, last year:

“Compared to other laundering endpoints, since 2020, inflows to identified CMLNs [Chinese-langugage money laundering networks] grew 7,325 times faster than those to centralized exchanges, 1,810 times faster than those to decentralized finance (DeFi), and 2,190 times faster than intra-illicit on-chain flows.”

Tom Keatinge, director at the Centre for Finance & Security at security think tank Royal United Services Institute, told Chainalysis that the rapid development of Chinese-language networks is an “an unforeseen consequence” of China’s imposition of capital controls.

“Wealthy individuals seeking to move money out of China and evade these controls provide the impetus and liquidity pool needed to service organized crime groups based in the West,” he noted.

Keatinge told Chainalysis, “The professional enablers of this capital flight provide the services necessary to match these two independent yet mutually beneficial needs.” 

Chinese-language networks offer six primary money movement techniques to clean dirty money, which include recruiting individuals to rent out their financial identities, selling illicit cryptocurrency at a discounted rate, and obscuring fund origins through multiple transactions. 

Overall, this Chinese ecosystem processed nearly $44 million per day last year. 

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Avalanche joins class of cryptocurrencies with at least one ETF

Investment management company VanEck on Monday introduced the first exchange-traded fund offering spot exposure to AVAX, the native token for the Avalanche blockchain and the latest cryptocurrency with an ETF. 

The new investment vehicle also aims to provide staking rewards for holders, according to the press release. AVAX, which has seen over $354 million in trading volume in the last 24 hours, is up slightly today. The token is trading at $11.70 as of 1:20 p.m. ET, a far cry from its all-time high of $144.96 in 2021. 

The nascent VanEck fund joins a group of its crypto-specific ETFs, including the firm’s bitcoin ETF, with $1.4 billion in total assets; its ethereum ETF, which holds $147.5 million; and its solana ETF, with assets totaling $27.9 million.

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