Decentral Block Post

As more institutions explore blockchain-based finance, some industry leaders say tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) may surpass $30 trillion by the 2030s. Others are casting doubt on that projection.

In June 2024, Standard Chartered Bank and Synpulse predicted that RWAs may reach over $30 trillion by 2034. The narrative remained strong in the latter part of 2024, with some analysts expressing similar sentiments.

At Paris Blockchain Week 2025, a panel moderated by Cointelegraph’s managing editor, Gareth Jenkinson, brought together executives from across the tokenization ecosystem to discuss the future of RWAs. Participants included Charles Adkins of Hedera, Dotun Rominiyi from the London Stock Exchange, Shy Datika of INX, Steven Gaertner of Tiamonds and Securitize chief operating officer Michael Sonnenshein.

While the majority supported the $30 trillion estimate, Sonnenshein expressed skepticism.

The Truth Behind Tokenization and RWA panel. Source: Paris Blockchain Week

Swiss cryptocurrency fintech Taurus has launched an interbank network that is purpose-built for regulated institutions involved in digital asset operations.

On April 9, Taurus said in an announcement shared with Cointelegraph that it had launched Taurus-Network (TN), an interbank network designed to simplify and improve digital asset transactions between regulated financial institutions worldwide.

The network aims to improve collateral mobility, optimize settlement speed and reduce counterparty risk while benefiting capital and liquidity management in digital assets.

Among the key benefits of the network is the ability for participants to retain full sovereignty over assets, direct interaction with counterparties and automated compliance without third-party intervention, Taurus SA’s head of product infrastructure, Vassili Lavrov, told Cointelegraph.

Multiple banks already involved

The Taurus-Network launches with participation from several banks worldwide, including Arab Bank Switzerland, Capital Union Bank, Flowdesk, ISP Group, Misyon Bank and Swissquote.

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has partnered with Mastercard to issue crypto debit cards across the United Kingdom and Europe, the company announced on April 8.

The partnership will enable the crypto exchange to expand its payment offerings by launching physical crypto debit cards.

The partnership comes as Kraken continues to pursue a license under the European Union’s regulatory framework, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA).

The debit card will allow users to spend cryptocurrencies and stablecoins directly. Kraken said the rollout will begin in the coming weeks, with a waitlist now open to customers.

This partnership builds on Kraken Pay’s growth

Kraken said its partnership with Mastercard builds on the rapid growth of Kraken Pay, a new tool that enables customers to send money from their Kraken account.

The early days of the Trump administration saw a flurry of activity that could give the crypto industry an idea of forthcoming crypto regulations, namely that they may not be regulated as securities. 

Practitioners have decried a lack of concrete change in the form of new rules and guidance. The skeptics have their reasons. The formation of the crypto task force, President Donald Trump’s crypto executive order, crypto czar David Sacks’ lone press conference and the digital asset reserve have been criticized as mere theater.

The real work of regulating comes not in press conferences but in the guidance, enforcement and rulemaking that support the structure of rules-based systems.

A faithful account of all of the cryptocurrency decisions from the Trump administration reveals a new approach to enforcement and regulation that could meaningfully affect the rights of operators in the United States. 

Trump’s regulatory approach opens up banking to crypto

In the dog days of the Biden administration, a policy known as “Operation Chokepoint 2.0” became a major scandal in certain crypto media channels. The allegations were that, during the Obama administration, the Justice Department developed a program called Operation Choke Point that it used to surveil and curtail certain disfavored businesses like payday lenders and firearms dealers. 

Thailand is beefing up measures to combat online crimes involving digital assets by passing new amendments to several national laws.

Thailand’s cabinet on April 8 passed a resolution approving amendments to emergency decrees on digital asset businesses and on measures for cybercrime prevention, the Thai Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced.

As part of the new laws, Thai regulators aim to strengthen measures for combating digital asset mule accounts in banks, restrict foreign cryptocurrency peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms and introduce strict financial penalties of as much as $8,700 and imprisonment of up to three years.

The new laws are expected to be enforced in the near future, and will take effect after being published in the Royal Thai Government Gazette, the announcement stated.

Key measures to combat mule accounts and money laundering

The new regulations include stringent measures for crypto asset service providers (CASPs), requiring them to collect and report information on transactions linked to online scams and suspend them.

The next generation of cryptocurrency projects must embrace a more collaborative approach to compete with major centralized tech companies entering the Web3 space, according to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson.

Speaking at Paris Blockchain Week 2025, Hoskinson said one of the main criticisms of the crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) space is its “circular economy,” which often means that the rally of a specific cryptocurrency is bolstered by funds exiting another token, limiting the growth of the industry.

Hoskinsin said that to have a chance against the centralized technology giants joining the Web3 industry, cryptocurrency projects need more collaborative tokenomics and market structure.

Charles Hoskinson. Source: Cointelegraph

“The problem right now, with the way we’ve done things in the cryptocurrency space, is the tokenomics and the market structure are intrinsically adversarial. It’s sum 0,” said Hoskinson. “Instead of picking a fight, what you have to do is you have to find tokenomics and market structure that allows you to be in a cooperative equilibrium.”

Lawmakers in Argentina’s Chamber of Deputies backed an investigation into President Javier Milei’s alleged involvement in the Libra (LIBRA) cryptocurrency scandal.

According to an April 8 report by local news outlet Buenos Aires Times, deputies in the lower house voted 128 to 93 in favor, with seven abstentions. The same proposal previously failed to move forward in the Senate.

The news follows Milei promoting the LIBRA memecoin on social media. With the Argentine president leveraging his credibility as a government official and his 3.8 million followers, the token quickly reached $5, briefly touching a market cap of $4 billion.

Milei has since faced accusations of wrongdoing, with critics claiming that LIBRA was a rug-pull scam and that he lured investors in. Lawyer Jonatan Baldiviezo, alongside Marcos Zelaya, engineer María Eva Koutsovitis and economist Claudio Lozano, a former head of Argentina’s central bank, filed a lawsuit against Milei, accusing him of fraud.

Related: KIP Protocol reveals involvement in Javier Milei-endorsed Libra rug pull

Opinion by: Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos, general counsel at StarkWare

As Washington takes a softer stance on crypto, regulators are counting down to even stricter regulations in the UK. The United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is working on plans for a new "gateway" authorization regime by 2026, targeting a broader spectrum of crypto activities. 

It is easy to disregard this if you aren't in the UK, but as frameworks are formed, regulators may look to other jurisdictions for lessons and inspiration. Crypto is global, and one of the challenges and opportunities is the need to pay careful attention to many jurisdictions at once.

Bigger net than Anti-Money Laundering

For some time, the FCA's crypto focus was primarily on Anti-Money Laundering (AML) checks. Even that was no walk in the park — only around 14% of firms seeking mandatory registration have made the cut since 2020.

The AML register was essentially a narrow lens; it was not a licensing or supervisory regime. Now, the FCA wants to go further. According to Matthew Long, the director of payments and digital assets at the FCA, by 2026, the regulator plans to regulate a broader range of crypto activities — possibly including stablecoin issuance, payment services, lending, exchanges, and more.

As the cryptocurrency market matures, advanced trading instruments like perpetual swap contracts are increasingly influencing the value of altcoins, according to BitMEX CEO Stephan Lutz.

Perpetual swap contracts are a type of crypto trading contract that lets traders bet on the price of a coin without actually owning it. The derivatives product functions similarly to a futures contract. However, it never expires, which means that traders can hold the position as long as they want.

Lutz told Cointelegraph that perpetual swap contacts are important to track because newly launched perpetual swaps allow traders to short the underlying altcoin for the first time. Lutz said this is where “true price discovery” begins:

Lutz said perpetual swaps allow for long and short positions, which helps traders hedge or speculate. “Tracking these positions can reveal directional bias,” he added. 

This means that tracking perpetual swap movements can also give traders a closer look at how the market determines an altcoin’s value. 

The evolving relationship between Bitcoin and traditional financial markets is under renewed pressure as global investors flee risk assets amid intensifying US trade tensions.

US-listed spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) recorded their fourth consecutive day of outflows on April 8, with more than $326 million in net redemptions across products, according to data from Farside Investors.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) saw the largest sell-off of over $252 million, its biggest daily outflow since Feb. 26.

Bitcoin ETF flows, US dollars, millions. Source: Farside Investors

The selling pressure follows US President Donald Trump’s April 2 announcement of sweeping reciprocal import tariffs, which triggered a historic $5 trillion wipeout in the S&P 500 over two days.

The lingering fears triggered by US President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs have analysts increasingly convinced that Bitcoin is now more likely than ever to challenge the US dollar in the years ahead.

“Higher chance Bitcoin survives over the dollar in our lifetime after today,” Bitwise Invest head of alpha strategies Jeff Parks said in an April 9 X post.

Investors will be left with no other option but Bitcoin, says crypto exec

“First time the thought hit me and didn’t feel like theory but an actual truth to grapple with,” Parks added. 

Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley shared a similar view, noting that with trust in the US dollar waning and other foreign currencies seen as “even weaker,” investors are left with fewer choices. 

He argued that gold, typically seen as a safe harbor amid uncertainty, also has drawbacks around shipping and storage and implied that Bitcoin may be the only option left. “You wind up buying Bitcoin,” Horsley said.

An Ether whale who had held 10,000 Ether for the last 900 days has sold their entire stash and missed out on a peak profit of $27.6 million when the cryptocurrency was worth over $4,000. 

The whale initially bought a total of 10,000 Ether (ETH) across two transactions in October and November 2022 for $13 million at the time for an average price of $1,295 per token, blockchain analytics service Lookonchain said in an April 8 X post.

“He didn’t sell when Ether broke through $4,000. But today, he exited with a $2.75 million profit. The profit at the peak was $27.6 million,” Lookonchain said.

Source: Lookonchain 

The whale sold when Ether was around $1,578, according to Lookonchain. Within the period that the whale wallet was holding its stack, Ether hit a high of $4,015 on Dec. 9, CoinGecko data shows. 

Ethereum has only outperformed Bitcoin for 15% of all trading days since its launch almost a decade ago, according to analysts.

Since Ether (ETH) began trading in mid-2015, it has underperformed against Bitcoin (BTC) 85% of the time, analyst James Check said in an April 8 X post.

Data shared by Check shows that Ether significantly outperformed Bitcoin in its early years from mid-2015 to around mid-2017, and it had two short periods in late 2019 and early 2020 when the ETH to BTC ratio was in Ether’s favor.

However, Bitcoin has outperformed Ether for the past five years.

ETH/BTC profitable days. Source: James Check

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has warned that crypto will increasingly threaten traditional financial markets’ stability as the industry grows and becomes more entwined with traditional finance players.

“We cannot rule out that future sharp drops in crypto prices could have knock-on effects on our financial system,” ESMA’s executive director Natasha Cazenave said in an April 8 statement to the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee.

Cazenave noted, however, that crypto currently only accounts for 1% of global financial assets and is not yet significant enough to cause major “spillover effects” into traditional financial markets.

She warned that interconnections between crypto and traditional markets are rapidly growing — particularly in the more crypto-friendly US — and called for closer monitoring.

“Crypto-assets markets evolve quickly, in an often unpredictable manner, and we need to keep a close eye on these developments,” Cazenave said, adding:

The artificial intelligence agent creation and monetization platform Virtuals Protocol has seen its daily revenue plummet to just $500 as demand for crypto AI agents continues to wane.

“Probably one of the wildest crypto charts of the cycle,” Blockworks researcher Sharples said in an April 8 X post.

Steep decline in AI agent creation

Sharples said that it has “been about a week” since a new AI agent launched on Virtuals compared to late November when the platform was helping make over 1,000 new AI agents a day, according to Dune Analytics data.

On Jan. 2, when the Virtual Protocol (VIRTUALS) token hit an all-time high of $4.61, Blockworks data shows Virtuals’ daily revenue soared above $500,000. 

However, that seemed to mark the start of a downtrend, signaling a potential top for the AI agent sector. The decline continued even after a Jan. 25 announcement that the project had expanded to Solana.

Former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal has been granted final court approval to settle a class-action lawsuit for $11 million with Astrals non-fungible token (NFT) buyers.

Florida federal court judge Federico Moreno granted approval of the settlement between O’Neal and the class group led by Daniel Harper in an April 1 order made available on April 8.

The deal created a fund of up to $11 million for eligible class members and awarded $2.9 million in attorney fees and costs. All those who purchased Astrals NFTs from May 2022 to Jan. 15 and those who purchased the project’s native GLXY tokens up until mid-January are eligible. 

“The fee sought by lead class counsel has been reviewed and approved as fair and reasonable by plaintiffs,” Moreno’s order read.

O’Neal was hit with the lawsuit in May 2023 over his founding and promotion of the Solana-based Astrals NFT project, which the suit claimed was an “offer and sale of unregistered securities.”

The team behind US first lady Melania Trump’s memecoin, Melania Meme (MELANIA), has moved $30 million worth of the token out of the project’s community funds and has begun selling them, says blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps.

Bubblemaps said in an April 7 X post that 50 million MELANIA tokens worth around $30 million “was moved from community funds — and is now being quietly sold, with no explanation from the team.”

It added the tokens were moved to a single wallet before being “split across multiple addresses.” From there, Bubblemaps said $3 million worth were transferred to exchanges, two new $6 million positions were opened, and $500,000 worth of MELANIA was sold.

Source: Bubblemaps

“No one from the MELANIA team has addressed this. Not the movements. Not the selling,” it added.

Malicious actors are attempting to steal crypto with malware embedded in fake Microsoft Office extensions uploaded to the software hosting site SourceForge, according to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.

One of the malicious listings, called “officepackage,” has real Microsoft Office add-ins but hides a malware called ClipBanker that replaces a copied crypto wallet address on a computer's clipboard with the attacker's address, Kaspersky’s Anti-Malware Research Team said in an April 8 report.

“Users of crypto wallets typically copy addresses instead of typing them. If the device is infected with ClipBanker, the victim’s money will end up somewhere entirely unexpected,” the team said.

The fake project’s page on SourceForge mimics a legitimate developer tool page, showing the office add-ins and download buttons and can also appear in search results.

Kaspersky said it found a crypto-stealing malware on the software hosting website SourceForge. Source: Kaspersky

The Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs could collapse US demand for Bitcoin mining rigs, which would benefit mining operations outside the country as manufacturers will look outside the US to sell their surplus inventory for cheaper, says Hashlabs Mining CEO Jaran Mellerud.

“As machine prices rise in the U.S., they could paradoxically decrease in the rest of the world,” Mellerud said in an April 8 report. “The demand for shipping machines to the U.S. is set to plummet, likely nearing zero.”

“Manufacturers will be left with excess stock originally intended for the US market. To offload this surplus, they’ll likely need to lower prices to attract buyers in other regions,” he added.

Falling mining rig prices could see non-US mining operations scale up and take a larger slice of Bitcoin’s total hashrate, Mellerud said.

Source: Jaran Mellerud

RedStone, a blockchain oracle provider, has introduced a push-based oracle on MegaETH to tackle latency issues that challenge the efficiency of onchain trading.

According to a spokesperson for RedStone, the new oracle can push new prices onchain every 2.4 milliseconds. Initially debuting on MegaETH, an Ethereum layer-2 network, the product may be rolled out to additional chains in the future.

RedStone said its oracle sources prices from centralized exchanges and delivers them directly to applications or smart contracts via nodes that operate natively on the MegaETH chain.

This “co-location” strategy minimizes latency by eliminating delays typically caused by the physical distance between servers. In the future, RedStone also plans to include price feeds from decentralized exchanges.

Oracles compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) are becoming more popular. According to Alchemy, there are currently 12 decentralized oracle networks operating on Ethereum.