GM, Readers!

Trump hiked the global tariffs from 10% to 15% despite the Supreme Court’s ruling. The result? The market took the blow. Bitcoin dropped to the $63K zone on Tuesday, with around $616 million in crypto liquidations. Will the market rebound, or will a deeper slide be expected? Let’s wait and watch…

Not all is dark and gloomy…🥹

On the brighter side, here are the big institutional moves and stories you might want to check out.

Top Stories This Week:

Other Headlines:

Breaking: In a major regulatory move, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has slashed the broker-dealer stablecoin capital “haircut” from 100% to just 2%.

Under the SEA Rule 15c3-1 (Net Capital Rule), broker-dealers are required to maintain a minimum amount (as specified by law) for holding stablecoins.

This minimum amount is known as the “haircut,” or a hedge against potential risks applied to the asset’s value. This liquidity cushion protects customers if the firm faces financial trouble or bankruptcy.

The riskier the assets, the higher the haircut…

Previously, due to regulatory uncertainty and a general lack of trust for high-risk assets like stablecoins, many broker-dealers used to impose full value penalties or 100% haircuts on their stablecoins out of caution.

Meaning?

Suppose a firm holds $10 million in stablecoins, it will impose a 100% “haircut” and will be left with zero net capital, which is practically useless for institutional investments.

On February 19, the SEC issued new FAQ guidance under the Division of Trading and Markets.

The new guideline applies a 2% haircut instead of the hefty 100% on qualifying “payment stablecoins” while calculating the net capital value.

So, now if a firm is holding $10 million in payment stablecoins, it can only deduct $2,00,000 (2% of $10 million), and the remaining $9.8 million is usable capital.

What This Means: With the 2% haircut deal, the SEC has narrowed the gap, bringing stablecoins at par with traditional assets. The new regulatory development will lead to greater integration of stablecoins in traditional finance and real-world use cases. It removes the regulatory hurdle, implements trust, and will accelerate cheaper on-chain settlements and institutional adoption.

👉 Also Read: CFTC Rallies to Defend Prediction Markets From State Attacks.

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Memecoin Mayhem: President Trump’s memecoin, $TRUMP, and First Lady Melania Trump’s $MELANIA plunged 92% and 99%, respectively. Retail investors took the brunt, losing over $4.3 billion, while insiders locked in the gains.

The Trump family memecoins debuted last year, creating massive hype and social media buzz among retail investors.

However, the hype was short-lived. Both these memecoins dropped more than 90% within a year. $TRUMP dropped from its January all-time high of $75 to $3.55, and $MELANIA from $13 to just $0.11.

On-chain data shows that while everyday investors lost billions, insiders and early whale accumulators cashed out over $600 million.

According to crypto analyst Zach Humphries, the ratio is even worse. He says, “For every $1 insiders made, ordinary people lost $20.”

This is a classic example of a high-profile pump-and-dump scheme, where there is an initial hype followed by a sharp collapse and quick sell-offs, and retail investors lose billions.

The disparity between whales and small-time investors is huge:

Over 2 million retail investors who bought during the initial hype are still at a loss.
Big whale wallets have successfully extracted around $1.2 billion in gains.

Moreover, inside stories suggest that around $2.7 billion worth of insider tokens remains locked up until 2028.

👉 Also Read: Altcoin Market Cap Slides Below $1T as Trump’s 15% Global Tariff Threat Rattles Investors.

Imagine this. You open your phone to an alert. It says, “you spent $236,000,000 more this month than you did last month.”

If you were the top bidder at Sotheby’s fall auctions, it could be reality.

Sounds crazy, right? But when the ultra-wealthy spend staggering amounts on blue-chip art, it’s not just for decoration.

The scarcity of these treasured artworks has helped drive their prices, in exceptional cases, to thin-air heights, without moving in lockstep with other asset classes.

The contemporary and post war segments have even outpaced the S&P 500 overall since 1995.*

Now, over 70,000 people have invested $1.2 billion+ across 500 iconic artworks featuring Banksy, Basquiat, Picasso, and more.

How? You don’t need Medici money to invest in multimillion dollar artworks with Masterworks.

Thousands of members have gotten annualized net returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8% from 26 sales to date.

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_{*Based on Masterworks data. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd}

American residential mortgage company Rate just launched a new nationwide product called RateFi, which lets eligible borrowers use their verified cryptocurrencies to fulfill mortgage underwriting requirements without liquidating their assets.

Details:

👉 Read More At TradingView.

Wall Street giant BlackRock is bringing its $2.2 billion worth of tokenized U.S. Treasuries on-chain through Uniswap’s decentralized exchange (DEX) platform.

BlackRock will be one of the first big asset managers to integrate its tokenized U.S. Treasury Fund for on-chain trading.

On February 11, Uniswap announced its strategic integration with BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) shares, which are now available to trade through meta-aggregator UniswapX.

As part of the deal, BlackRock purchased an undisclosed amount of Uniswap’s UNI token.

“Our mission at Labs is simple: make exchanging value cheaper, faster and more accessible,” said Hayden Adams, Uniswap Labs Founder and CEO.

Currently, only eligible and whitelisted investors can access the peer-to-peer platform through Securitize and execute transactions.

Qualified investors can swap BUIDL through Securitize 24/7, 365 days.

BlackRock and Uniswap’s integration is a major milestone for traditional whitelisted firms that are now venturing into DeFi markets, fostering trust, adopting tokenized assets, and bringing regulatory clarity.

👉 Also Read: Uniswap Jumps 20% as BlackRock Brings BUIDL to Uniswap.

OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent, has imposed an outright ban on its Discord server. Open Claw founder Peter Steinberger said on X, “We have strict server rules that you accepted whe you entered the server. No crypto mention whatsoever is one of them.” The blanket ban is enforced on anyone who mentions anything about crypto, even Bitcoin. The ban was imposed after a January incident where scammers breached OpenClaw’s old accounts to promote a fake $CLAWD token that reached $16 million within hours before collapsing. 👉 Read More At CoinMarketCap.

Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network Base is transitioning from Optimism’s OP Stack, the open-source framework that supported the network for nearly three years. Base announced that it is developing its own “unified Base-operated stack,” and everything will be managed through Base’s own codebase. Base explains that the transition will enable frequent and faster upgrades, simplify the stack, and execute high-impact modifications via a unified system. 👉 Read More at Base Engineering Blog.

Based on CoinMarketCap data, February 25, 2026, 7:50 AM, ET.