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Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk stated that a cryptocurrency company linked to "Russian gangs and intelligence agencies" is funding political opponents and influencing domestic cryptocurrency regulatory legislation.During a parliamentary vote on Friday, Tusk pointed out that some Polish politicians obstructing cryptocurrency regulatory legislation are serving the interests of a company named Zondacrypto, which is accused of providing "financial support" to political figures and has ties to Russia. Tusk further claimed that the company sponsored the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) event held in Poland last year, during which former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem publicly supported President Karol Nawrocki's campaign. Tusk bluntly stated that the company's funding sources involve not only "money related to the Russian mafia (Bratva)" but may also be connected to Russian intelligence agencies.Meanwhile, President Nawrocki won the election in June last year, with support from former U.S. President Donald Trump. The president's office responded that it does not oppose cryptocurrency regulation itself but opposes the "flawed regulatory model" proposed by the government. This controversy arises amid the political tug-of-war in Poland over the cryptocurrency regulatory bill. The bill aims to align with the EU's MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) framework, but the president previously vetoed the related bill and blocked parliament from overturning the veto in December, hindering the regulatory process.

The enterprise-focused digital banking platform Slash announced the completion of a $100 million Series C financing round, led by Ribbit Capital, with Goodwater Capital and Khosla Ventures co-leading. The post-money valuation is approximately $1.4 billion, with total financing reaching $160 million.Slash claims to serve over 5,000 corporate clients, offering features such as corporate accounts, virtual accounts, stablecoin payments, expense management, accounting automation, and real-time payments. The company stated it will use the new funds to accelerate product iteration and promote its strategy of "bank accounts as the financial command center for businesses."

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken's parent company Payward announced that it will acquire 100% of the digital asset derivatives platform Bitnomial for up to $550 million (cash + stock). The transaction is expected to be completed in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory approval.Bitnomial is the first crypto-native platform to obtain all three U.S. derivatives licenses (designated contract market, derivatives clearing organization, and futures commission merchant). This acquisition will help Payward quickly gain a complete compliant derivatives infrastructure, significantly accelerating its expansion in the U.S. market. After the transaction is completed, Bitnomial's clearing and trading capabilities will be integrated with platforms such as Kraken and NinjaTrader, offering products like spot margin, perpetual contracts, and options to U.S. customers, and will be regulated by the CFTC.This acquisition will also expand Payward Services, allowing banks, fintech companies, and brokerages to access the U.S. compliant derivatives market through a single API. Industry insiders believe that with the market warming up and valuations recovering, merger and acquisition activities in the crypto industry are on the rise, as leading institutions are accelerating their transformation into comprehensive trading platforms for institutional clients by acquiring key capabilities such as compliance, custody, and derivatives.

The Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin mining company TeraWulf announced that it has completed the previously announced public offering of 54,510,000 shares of common stock, with an offering price of $19 per share, raising a total of $1,035,690,000. Morgan Stanley acted as the lead underwriter for this offering, while Bank of America Securities, Citigroup, TD Cowen, and Wells Fargo Securities served as co-managers.Citizens Capital Markets and Santander Bank acted as sub-underwriters, and Cantor Fitzgerald served as the equity capital markets advisor. TeraWulf plans to use the net proceeds from this offering to pay for a portion of the construction costs of its planned data center campus in Horse Cave, Kentucky, including the full repayment of outstanding amounts under its transitional credit facility, as well as for future site acquisitions and general corporate purposes.

Binance will hold a SOON trading competition from April 17, 2026, 21:00 to April 24, 2026, 21:00. Users can participate by trading SOON (SOON) through the Binance wallet (without private keys) or Binance Alpha, sharing a prize pool of 688,000 SOON. Rewards will be available for collection before May 8, 2026, 21:00, and eligible users must complete the collection within 14 days.

The decentralized AI economic protocol Mindra AI announced the completion of a new round of strategic financing, with participation from LandScape Capital, Harbor Digital Ventures, and Candaq Fintech Group.Mindra AI stated that the funds from this round will primarily be used to accelerate the development of its full-stack four-layer protocol, advancing the construction of the dynamic reasoning routing layer, Agent collaboration ecosystem, AI-Fi (computing power financialization), and the economic value flywheel, creating a decentralized "Intelligence Grid" to fundamentally address issues such as the centralized monopoly of AI reasoning infrastructure, algorithmic black boxes, and ecological fragility.It is reported that Mindra AI is a full-stack decentralized AI economic protocol that breaks the smart hegemony and reshapes AI production relations through dynamic reasoning routing, Agent cross-chain collaboration, and AI-Fi (computing power financialization).

The bond tokenization platform BlockInvest announced the completion of a €4 million strategic round of financing, with Italy's UniCredit participating and acquiring a 16% stake in the company.It is reported that BlockInvest will assist UniCredit in issuing Italy's first native digital mini-bond, as well as the first blockchain-based tokenized structured notes aimed at wealth management clients, and will build a system that combines digital ledger programmability with finance.

According to official news, the NFT public chain Mint Blockchain announced that the blockchain network officially ceased operations on April 17, 2026. To ensure the safety of user assets, the project team reminds all users to transfer their on-chain assets to the Ethereum mainnet as soon as possible, including assets such as ETH, WBTC, USDC, and USDT.The announcement states that users need to complete the asset migration through the extraction channel provided by the official team, with a deadline of October 20, 2026. Before this deadline, users can still perform asset extraction operations normally to ensure the safe transfer of funds to external networks. If users do not complete the extraction before the deadline, the related assets will no longer be processed or recoverable.

The cryptocurrency fintech company Superstate has launched a new fund operating system, FundOS. FundOS opens the underlying infrastructure used by Superstate's own funds to asset management companies, helping traditional private equity funds, public funds, and ETFs achieve on-chain deployment.Managers do not need to change the existing fund operation methods and can independently choose the supported chains, DeFi protocols, and whether to enable stablecoin subscriptions/redemptions. Currently, FundOS has provided technical support for USTB and USCC, with a total managed scale exceeding 1 billion dollars, and has been adopted by Invesco US.

According to The Information, OpenAI plans to invest over $20 billion in servers powered by Cerebras chips over the next three years. It is reported that as part of the agreement, OpenAI will also acquire equity in Cerebras.Cerebras is known to be an American company specializing in AI chips and computing systems, primarily providing hardware and infrastructure for AI training and AI inference scenarios.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted on the X platform: "The agent business has not yet been fully priced by the market. Machine-to-machine payments will drive demand for digital dollars beyond current expectations. The scale of the agent economy may surpass that of the human economy, and Coinbase is building infrastructure for both."

The live prediction market and meme coin issuance platform Pumpcade announced the completion of a $5 million seed round financing, with participation from Jump Crypto and Foundation Capital.According to reports, Pumpcade is built on Solana and supports one-click creation of prediction markets in live streaming scenarios, integrated into the Pump.fun chat system. Previously, Pump.fun participated in its $1 million pre-seed financing.

According to data from TheMinerMag, in the first quarter of 2026, publicly listed Bitcoin mining companies including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer collectively sold over 32,000 BTC, surpassing the total amount sold throughout last year and even exceeding the sell-off levels triggered by the Terra-Luna collapse in Q2 2022, setting a "new record for a single quarter."The backdrop of this sell-off is the key metric for measuring miner profitability, "hashprice," which has fallen to a historical low of below $35 per PH/s per day, with about 20% of miners already in the red. Asset management firm CoinShares stated in its report: "Unless the BTC price rebounds significantly, high-cost miners will further capitulate in the first half of 2026."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments from lawyers representing the prediction market platform Kalshi and Nevada authorities regarding Nevada's ban on the platform's event contracts. This appeal stems from a lower court ruling that prohibited Kalshi from offering certain event-based contracts in Nevada based on the claim that Kalshi requires a license.The appellate court judges responsible for Thursday's oral arguments and Kalshi's lawyers acknowledged that there have been several state-level enforcement actions against Kalshi and other prediction market platforms, including criminal charges filed in Arizona. However, a federal court last week blocked Arizona authorities from enforcing the state's gambling laws against Kalshi's event contracts."I believe existing case law does indicate that what we want to avoid here is state courts and federal courts simultaneously considering the exact same issue and potentially reaching different conclusions," said Colleen Sinzdak, representing Kalshi.The core argument of Kalshi's debate is that the platform's event contracts fall under "swap" transactions and should be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than state gambling regulators. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig supported this position in the case involving Crypto.com's prediction market and Nevada authorities.Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal predicted that this case may be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. "The questions in the oral arguments are not a reliable signal of the court's leanings; nonetheless, I stand by my long-standing prediction that the Supreme Court will rule on whether sports contracts on designated contract markets fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the CFTC as swap transactions."

The cryptocurrency futures exchange KieDex announced the completion of a $3.5 million financing round, led by Marqel Capital.The company stated that this round of funding will be used to build the KieDex platform, creating a next-generation cryptocurrency futures exchange focused on fast, secure, and incentive-driven trading experiences. Supporting partners include Hidden Street Capital, Caviar, CSP DAO, Solulu Club, Rocket, TPC, Devmons, TATATU, and others.