infrastructure

BlackRock has submitted a new application for a tokenized fund structure to the U.S. SEC and has once again chosen Securitize to provide on-chain infrastructure support. According to the disclosure documents, the new structure will integrate the ownership records of fund shares on the blockchain with regulated transfer agents and investor access systems, achieving a connection between on-chain and traditional financial compliance systems. Securitize stated that its Securitize Transfer Agent, LLC will be responsible for maintaining the official ownership records of fund shares on the public chain, meaning that on-chain holding data will directly enter the regulated fund registration system. Officials stated that this is "another step towards institutional-scale operation of regulated on-chain capital markets."This application is also seen as further expansion for BlackRock following the success of BUIDL. BUIDL is the first tokenized fund launched by BlackRock in collaboration with Securitize in 2024, and its asset size has grown to approximately $2.3 billion, becoming an important case of institutional adoption of tokenized finance. Securitize also disclosed that the global market size for tokenized real-world assets (RWA) has surpassed $30 billion, with the industry moving from early experimental stages to the construction phase of institutional-level infrastructure, interoperability, and compliant on-chain financial systems.

Movement announced that it has completed the acquisition of the on-chain Vault infrastructure project Canopy, further integrating key financial infrastructure within the Movement Network. Canopy has previously been an important part of the Movement ecosystem, primarily responsible for building the Vault layer on the Movement Network, with its smart contracts allowing users to allocate assets and strategize on-chain with independent strategy managers.After this acquisition, Canopy will collaborate more closely with the on-chain credit protocol MovePosition, and Movement is gradually building a complete on-chain financial infrastructure stack covering modules such as Vault, credit, and yield strategies. Movement stated that most public chain ecosystems still rely on third parties to provide core financial primitives, while Movement hopes to achieve deeper technical collaboration between Vault contracts and other components of the network through self-built and internally integrated methods.For developers, this means they can directly integrate core protocols that are continuously iterating; for partners, it means stronger consistency between the underlying infrastructure and the development team; for users, it is expected to provide a more unified on-chain financial product experience. The official also revealed that MovePosition and Canopy will gradually operate as a unified infrastructure, with more integration details to be announced in the coming weeks.

The stablecoin yield infrastructure project Osero announced the completion of a $13.5 million financing round, led by Sky Ecosystem (formerly MakerDAO), with Layer 1 blockchain developer Plasma co-leading. Other participants include RedStone, Maple co-founder Joe Flanagan, and USDT0 co-founder Lorenzo Romagnoli. The financing is structured as a SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens), with the round completed in March of this year.

According to Cointelegraph, Bakkt released its financial report for the first quarter of 2026, showing a net loss attributable to the company of $11.7 million, or a loss of $0.41 per share; compared to a net profit of $7.7 million in the same period last year.Due to a decline in cryptocurrency trading volume, Bakkt's cryptocurrency service revenue fell from $1.07 billion in the same period last year to $243.6 million, a year-on-year decrease of 77%, although most of this was offset by cryptocurrency costs and brokerage fees. The company held $82.6 million in cash at the end of the first quarter and has no long-term debt.Bakkt stated that it is transitioning from cryptocurrency trading infrastructure to stablecoin payments and AI financial infrastructure, and completed the acquisition of Distributed Technologies Research on April 30, gaining an AI-native payment engine and a stablecoin compliance technology stack.

On May 9 and 10, the Chainlink network recorded 282,170 and 264,090 unique active LINK addresses, respectively, the highest levels since September 2025. The surge in on-chain activity comes against the backdrop of several institutional-grade DeFi projects announcing their migration of cross-chain infrastructure to Chainlink CCIP. On May 7, Solv Protocol announced the completion of a security review following the April Kelp DAO vulnerability incident and decided to migrate over $700 million in tokenized Bitcoin assets (SolvBTC and xSolvBTC) from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP.Previously, Kelp DAO had also announced the migration of its rsETH infrastructure to Chainlink CCIP. These initiatives represent a significant shift of institutional-grade DeFi infrastructure from LayerZero to the Chainlink cross-chain ecosystem. Additionally, earlier this month, data showed that whale wallets holding between 100,000 and 10 million LINK increased their holdings by 32.93 million LINK within 30 days.

On January 10, 2026, the global on-chain trading and clearing infrastructure platform AurumX announced the strategic acquisition of the verifiable data settlement protocol manadia. This acquisition aims to strengthen AurumX's layout in the Web3 × AI infrastructure and decentralized prediction market sectors.After the acquisition, manadia's technology will be deeply integrated with AurumX's on-chain settlement layer. manadia plans to launch its flagship decentralized prediction market product soon, leveraging its verifiable settlement technology to provide a transparent intelligence and prediction data pricing market.AurumX stated that this acquisition is a key step in building a compliant, intelligent next-generation financial infrastructure, which will help break down the barriers between traditional finance and the on-chain world. The manadia team noted that joining the AurumX ecosystem will provide broader global compliance resources and capital support.AurumX was established in 2021 and holds an MSB compliance license, with operations covering over 180 countries. manadia is a foundational layer protocol focused on verifiable data settlement and AI-driven collaboration.

According to the official announcement, Circle has launched a new infrastructure suite for the "Agentic Economy," called Circle Agent Stack, which includes products such as Circle CLI, Agent Wallets, Agent Marketplace, and Nanopayments based on Circle Gateway, supporting AI agents as autonomous economic entities for asset holding, service discovery, and on-chain payments.Among them, Nanopayments supports gas-free USDC transfers at a minimum level of $0.000001, aimed at high-frequency machine-to-machine payment scenarios; Agent Wallets allow AI agents to autonomously manage funds under preset permissions and risk control frameworks; Agent Marketplace provides an AI service directory, enabling agents to automatically discover and invoke services.Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire stated that traditional financial infrastructure is designed for "humans," while the future global economy will increasingly be driven by AI and agents. The Circle Agent Stack is the first complete product suite launched for "AI agents themselves" rather than developers.

According to official news, Tether has launched a developer grant program that will reward developers with USDT or Bitcoin for building localized AI and payment infrastructure. There is no total grant cap for this program, and rewards will be issued based on technical tasks and deliverables, with current individual bonuses ranging from $1,500 to $4,000.This funding focuses on Tether's open-source technology stack, including wallet infrastructure, browser extensions, e-commerce integration, and particularly supports its local AI platform QVAC. Tether stated that QVAC can run AI inference directly on the device locally, without relying on cloud servers, to reduce latency, costs, and data exposure risks.In addition, Tether will also promote the development of its Wallet Development Kit (WDK) ecosystem. This tool allows developers to directly embed self-custody wallets within applications, enabling local key generation, transaction signing, and asset transfers without relying on custodial services or third-party APIs.Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that a significant amount of infrastructure still forces developers to rely on centralized platforms and data business models, and Tether hopes to fund systems that can "run locally, hold value directly, and have no external dependencies" to enter the market.

The stablecoin payment infrastructure platform WasabiCard recently announced its official membership in the Circle Alliance Program, becoming a member of its global stablecoin ecosystem cooperation network.It is reported that WasabiCard mainly targets global business scenarios, building integrated products around global card issuance, payment, and fund distribution to help enterprises manage global funds. Currently, its products have been applied in business scenarios such as AI, SaaS, advertising spending, cross-border e-commerce, and global settlement.The official stated that in the future, WasabiCard will deepen collaboration with Circle and global ecosystem partners, aiming to promote the large-scale implementation of compliant stablecoins like USDC in real business scenarios.

According to CoinDesk, executives from PayPal and Google Cloud stated that future AI Agent-driven business activities will operate on a cryptocurrency payment track, as AI Agents cannot use traditional bank accounts like humans.Richard Widmann, Head of Google Cloud Web3 Strategy, mentioned that AI Agents cannot directly open bank accounts on both technical and regulatory levels, while cryptocurrencies provide an "excellent machine-readable payment interface." He revealed that Google has launched the open Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2) and donated it to the FIDO Foundation, with over 120 partners, including PayPal, already on board.May Zabaneh, Senior Vice President of PayPal's crypto business, stated that the company views AI Agents as the next generation of business entry points following offline, online, and mobile payments. She pointed out that PYUSD, as PayPal's stablecoin, provides a natural programmable payment layer for AI-native payments and global transactions.A PayPal survey showed that 95% of merchant websites currently have AI Agent traffic, but only about 20% of merchants have machine-readable product catalogs. Zabaneh believes that merchants need to adapt to the AI Agent era as soon as possible, or they will miss the next opportunity for upgrading their business infrastructure. Additionally, both parties discussed the security and accountability issues surrounding AI Agents.Widmann stated that multi-party custody will become an important solution for managing Agent funds, and AI Agents should not fully control private keys but only hold partial key fragments to reduce financial risks.

According to Jinshi Data, as the cost of memory chips rises and ByteDance accelerates its layout in artificial intelligence (AI), the company has increased its AI infrastructure spending plan for this year by 25% to 200 billion yuan.

Bitcoin mining company DMG Blockchain has established a new subsidiary, DMG Infrastructure, for future artificial intelligence/high-performance computing (AIHPC) business operations, and plans to drive its data centers towards AI/HPC business transformation.DMG Blockchain also disclosed that it mined a total of 21 BTC in April, down from 23 BTC in March. As of the end of April, it holds 389 BTC, a decrease of 9 BTC from the previous month, with a current hash rate of 1.54 EH/s, down from 1.63 EH/s in March.

Enterprise blockchain infrastructure Antier Solutions announced the completion of a $3 million financing round, led by GVFL. The new funds will be used to support the construction of secure transactions, verifiable workflows, and institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure, expand deployments in the government and financial institutions (BFSI) sector, and grow business in the United States, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific markets.

Bitcoin mining company TeraWulf announced its Q1 financial report, showing that its high-performance computing (HPC) business has for the first time surpassed Bitcoin mining revenue, marking a critical stage in the company's transformation towards AI and cloud computing infrastructure.The company's total revenue for Q1 was $34 million, roughly flat compared to the same period last year. Among this, HPC leasing revenue reached $21 million, surpassing the less than $13 million from digital asset mining for the first time, becoming the main source of income. The financial report also indicated that the company's net loss widened to $427.6 million, mainly due to the impact of non-cash warrant revaluation. However, CFO Patrick Fleury emphasized that the company is transitioning from "volatile mining revenue" to "stable long-term computing power contract revenue." Currently, TeraWulf has 60 MW of HPC capacity generating revenue at its Lake Mariner data center in New York and plans to continue expanding within the year. At the same time, the company is transforming part of its mining infrastructure into AI/HPC computing resources to support massive computing power demands. This trend is spreading throughout the industry, with Bitcoin mining companies like Riot Platforms also expanding their revenue structure through data centers and AI contracts, gradually transforming into "computing power infrastructure companies."

The sports AI intelligent infrastructure platform Sportix announced the completion of a $3.2 million financing round. This round of financing was participated in by institutions such as Coinvestor Ventures, Animoca Brands, Becker Ventures, X21 Digital, and Alpha Capital.It is reported that Sportix is an intelligent platform built around sports events and athletes, aiming to integrate real-time data, AI predictive models, and market infrastructure into a unified ecosystem, providing users with structured and actionable sports intelligence.The funds from this financing round will be directly used to deepen the research and development of its AI aggregation engine, enhance the accuracy of MIE and PIS, and expand the scale of B2B APIs to empower a broader sports data ecosystem.

According to The Information, OpenAI was unable to complete approximately $18 billion in financing from external lenders, which was originally planned to support the early deployment of its custom chip project developed in collaboration with Broadcom. This project plans to deploy OpenAI's self-developed chips with a computing power of 10 gigawatts, which is a core strategy for the company to reduce its reliance on Nvidia. The original agreement announced in October 2025 had a total hardware construction scale of approximately $500 billion.The background of the financing obstacles is that lenders are becoming increasingly cautious about AI infrastructure deals backed by OpenAI's expected revenue, compounded by recent reports that OpenAI has not met its internal growth targets, further heightening investor concerns. More broadly, capital expenditures for AI in large-scale enterprises are estimated to reach $600 billion to $720 billion by 2026, but Nvidia's accounts receivable have approached $33 billion, indicating that buyer settlement cycles are generally extended. OpenAI currently faces three paths: restructuring this round of financing, changing lenders, or scaling back the chip deployment.

This week, the cryptocurrency market has reached a critical turning point, with market sentiment significantly improving. BTC successfully broke through $82,000, reaching a nearly three-month high, and firmly established a key support level at $81,000.On May 5, the U.S. spot BTC ETF recorded a net inflow of $467 million, with BlackRock contributing $251 million; on May 6, the ETH ETF also saw inflows exceeding $170 million for three consecutive days. The continued strength in capital indicates that institutional allocation has shifted from "experimental attempts" to strategic "core asset allocation."Against this backdrop, Gate has continuously optimized its institutional-level service system. With the SuperLink architecture and excellent cross-platform capital scheduling capabilities, Gate provides high-performance matching and deep liquidity support for institutional investors. To address the core demands of professional investors for compliance, security, and asset diversification, the platform offers a one-stop custody solution covering crypto assets, CFD contracts, perpetual contracts, and spot tokens.At the same time, Gate has built a comprehensive derivatives matrix covering stocks, metals, indices, foreign exchange, and commodities, helping global institutions achieve efficient strategy execution and risk management in a structural bull market.