In February, the total funding for crypto companies reached $883 million, but the number of transactions hit a 5.5-year low.

Gray Scale: In February, Solana on-chain stablecoin trading volume hit a new high of $650 billion, with increasing payment demand

In February, the trading volume of stablecoins on the Solana blockchain reached $650 billion, a record high and double that of last year. The surge in retail payment demand has driven the growth of stablecoin transactions, with Solana gradually shifting from Meme coins to stablecoin trading, indicating an increase in payment use cases. Although Ethereum still dominates the market, stablecoins could become a key pillar of the Solana network.

When AI starts paying for itself: a 34-year dormant code is triggering the machine economy

Author: Clow, Plain Language Blockchain An AI wrote a piece of code that requires data for verification. It sent an HTTP request, and the server returned a number: 402. Then, it paid $0.001 using USDC. Less than a second later, the data was back. This transaction involved no account, no password, no bank card, no KYC. The entire process involved no human participation. This is no longer science fiction. By the end of 2025, the x402 protocol will have processed over 100 million such transactions; in the first 30 days of this year alone, another 15 million. The "Payment Code" that slept for thirty years In 1990, when drafting the HTTP protocol, the creators specifically reserved a spot for status code 402: Payment Required. The meaning is straightforward—"Payment is required to proceed."

RippleX Head of Engineering Details How AI Will Help Strengthen XRP Ledger Security From Now On - U.Today

RippleX's J. Ayo Akinyele outlined post-bug measures for improving XRPL security, emphasizing AI integration in development processes to enhance protective mechanisms and audit standards, ensuring safer transaction handling and system resilience.

A16z Crypto criticizes the misuse of the ZK term, upgrades Jolt zkVM towards true ZK

A16z Crypto – the Web3 investment branch of the leading venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz – has criticized the widespread but inaccurate use of the term “ZK” within the developer community in a recent blog post introducing Jolt zkVM. According to the article, “most zkVMs in reality are not fully zero-knowledge and often rely on simplified assumptions or partial proofs, which can lead to misconceptions about their security and privacy guarantees.”

AI Agency Research: Bitcoin is the preferred store of value, and no models are willing to hold fiat currency.

Research by the Bitcoin Policy Research Institute shows that among 36 AI models, most AI agents prefer Bitcoin in economic activities, with 79.1% choosing Bitcoin in long-term value preservation scenarios, while fiat currencies are less favored. Stablecoins are more popular in real-time payment scenarios (53.2%). There are significant differences in Bitcoin preferences among different vendors, and the influence of training data on the results should be interpreted with caution.

The surge in Argentine tourism to Brazil unexpectedly boosted cryptocurrency usage, with stablecoin payments becoming a key driving force

The report shows that the adoption of cryptocurrencies in Latin America is accelerating, with Argentina emerging as a leading country, having the highest number of monthly active users in the Latin American market. The use of cryptocurrencies is related to changes in payment methods, with the importance of stablecoins in daily transactions gradually increasing. By 2025, the adoption of cryptocurrencies in Argentina and Peru is expected to further grow, driving the increase in digital asset penetration.