TLDR Crypto 2025-03-28

Ethereum's Hoodi testnet successfully implemented the Pectra upgrade, finalizing approximately 30 minutes post-activation. This achievement brings Ethereum closer to deploying Pectra on the mainnet, aiming to improve usability and scalability by reducing data availability costs.

The House of Representatives has released its version of stablecoin oversight legislation, known as the STABLE Act, to regulate the issuance of dollar-denominated digital tokens. It requires coins to be backed by high-quality liquid assets, allows them to be issued by depository institutions or state-regulated entities, and imposes a moratorium on algorithmic stablecoins for two years. The bill is part of a larger legislative effort to bring more clarity to the crypto industry and overturn IRS regulations impacting DeFi brokers. Lawmakers at the DC Blockchain Summit have expressed optimism about finalizing these frameworks by August.

Sony (Soneium) is working with Animoca Brands to integrate anime culture into Web3 by introducing Anime ID, a decentralized identifier and reputation layer for anime and manga enthusiasts. This collaboration aims to increase user engagement by allowing fans to use their Anime IDs across various Dapps on the Soneium blockchain.

Ripple has partnered with African fintech Chipper Cash to enable faster, lower-cost, crypto-enabled cross-border payments into Africa using Ripple Payments infrastructure. This collaboration expands Ripple's presence on the continent and uses blockchain to improve financial inclusion and efficiency for Chipper Cash's 5 million users (across 9 countries).

The STABLE Act of 2025 introduces strict regulations for stablecoins, requiring issuers to be banks, credit unions, or approved nonbanks with 1:1 reserves in cash, T-bills, or other safe assets. It also bans algorithmic stablecoins for two years, allows states to set their own (but stricter) rules, and includes a two-year registration grace period.

Decentralized onchain AI models will introduce commoditized cognition, which will fundamentally reshape how AI is built, deployed, and monetized. Traditional pre-training has hit a plateau, which is driving a shift toward specialized fine-tuning, advanced inference-time compute, and memory innovations. Onchain AI models can unlock novel mechanisms like revenue-sharing and collateralized lending to attract institutional investment and community participation.

The Trump Family's DeFi protocol, World Liberty Financial, has announced a stablecoin, USD1, at the DC Blockchain Summit. Donald Trump Jr. endorsed its potential to improve financial systems. It is set to launch on Ethereum and BNB Chain. The new stablecoin comes as lawmakers continue to move toward sensible stablecoin regulation.

Grass Network utlilizes a decentralized web scraping system that incentivizes participants to contribute unused internet bandwidth to create structured, verifiable datasets for AI training. The platform tackles challenges in data quality and accessibility – like data poisoning and monopolized data – by using residential IPs and blockchain-based provenance tracking. It has expanded to 3 million users and billions of URLs indexed. Future upgrades promise a 10x boost in processing speeds and support for multimodal data.

Less than 20% of European banks offer crypto services, despite over 40% of business investors already holding digital assets and an additional 18% planning to invest soon.

Hyperliquid has integrated its HyperCore and HyperEVM systems on mainnet, enabling asset transfers across their orderbook DEX and Ethereum-compatible chain.

A Polymarket event on a Ukraine-Trump mineral deal was resolved incorrectly due to last-minute clarifications and a flawed dispute process.

Over 400 South Korean public officials have disclosed a total of ~$9.8M in crypto holdings (~$24k each).