infrastructure

Blockchain payment infrastructure company Utexo announced the completion of a $7.5 million seed round financing, led by Tether, Big Brain Holdings, and Portal Ventures, with over a dozen institutions including Franklin Templeton, Maven11 Capital, and Flow Traders participating.Utexo integrates Bitcoin, the Lightning Network, and the RGB protocol to provide payment operators with a single API access, enabling instant settlement of USDT on the Bitcoin native network, with fixed and predictable transaction fees, settlement times of less than 1 second, and fully encrypted private execution throughout the process. This move marks the official "return" of USDT to the Bitcoin network after more than a decade, and is expected to promote Bitcoin as the core settlement track for global dollar payments.

Stablecoin issuer Tether announced an investment in the fund management and settlement infrastructure Axiym, with the specific amount undisclosed. The aim is to build a globally distributed fund settlement infrastructure within a regulated payment ecosystem, thereby supporting embedded financial services, including post-paid settlement solutions such as Pay Now, Settle Later (PNSL), while also supporting the native integration of USD cash flow to expand the circulation of USD cash in a scalable, compliant manner that aligns with the actual operation of cross-border payments.

The digital asset trading platform Gate officially launched Gate for AI, introducing the industry's first unified AI entry point that integrates five major capabilities—CEX, DEX, wallets, real-time information, and on-chain data—under the same interface system.Gate for AI adopts a dual-layer capability structure. In this architecture, MCP provides standardized basic interfaces, covering functions such as market data, account information, trade execution, and on-chain data queries, enabling AI to quickly access and utilize platform capabilities; Skills encapsulates higher-level strategy modules based on this, such as market scanning, position range assessment, and risk analysis, helping AI make more complex trading decisions.In addition, Gate for AI supports multi-platform calls, lowering the usage threshold and catering to users with different needs. This release marks the upgrade of the exchange's capabilities from interface products to directly callable AI infrastructure, pushing digital asset trading into the era of Agent-native.

The CEO of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, Ashley Alder, delivered a keynote speech at the 2026 EU-Asia Financial Services Dialogue organized by the Asia Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. She stated that Hong Kong must thoroughly upgrade its market infrastructure, particularly in the areas of financial product segmentation, clearing, and settlement. Distributed ledger technology and the development of tokenization provide a way forward. The true value of tokenization lies in its programmable nature, which can support a wide range of investment products, including bonds, funds, and even gold. As the tokenization ecosystem continues to grow, it is essential to effectively integrate related innovative projects, seamlessly combining market confidence in traditional finance with the efficiency of decentralized finance, further unlocking liquidity.Alder revealed that the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission has co-led a working group under the Asia-Pacific Regional Committee with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission to combat online scams and has participated in the standard-setting and coordination work in areas such as digital assets by exchanging intelligence with global peers.

The CEO of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, Ashley Alder, delivered a keynote speech at the 2026 EU-Asia Financial Services Dialogue organized by the Asia Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. She stated that Hong Kong must thoroughly upgrade its market infrastructure, particularly in the areas of financial product segmentation, clearing, and settlement. Distributed ledger technology and the development of tokenization provide a way forward, with the true value of tokenization lying in its programmable nature, which can support a wide range of investment products, including bonds, funds, and even gold.As the tokenization ecosystem continues to grow, it is essential to effectively integrate related innovative projects, seamlessly combining market confidence in traditional finance with the efficiency of decentralized finance to further unlock liquidity.Alder also revealed that the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission has co-led a working group under the Asia-Pacific Regional Committee with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission to combat online scams, and has participated in the establishment and coordination of standards in areas such as digital assets through information exchange with global peers.

According to market news, the crypto infrastructure company Zerohash has submitted an application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) seeking to obtain a national trust bank charter.According to the application documents, the trust bank that Zerohash plans to establish aims to provide digital asset custody, fiat currency and other asset custody, staking custody and validation activities, transfer agency services, trade execution, stablecoin management, as well as settlement, clearing, and custody services.Obtaining this charter will not allow Zerohash to engage in traditional banking activities such as accepting deposits or making loans, but it will enable the company to operate under federal regulation, helping to attract more institutional clients.

UniSat announces that it will complete a system upgrade around the latest version of Ordinals, covering the indexing layer, protocol support layer, product layer, and API layer. This upgrade is expected to be gradually completed in the coming weeks, aiming to enhance the standardization of the Ordinals ecosystem and the on-chain data expression capability.At the infrastructure level, UniSat is upgrading its Ordinals index to the latest version, providing a data foundation for supporting new features in the future while improving the stability and scalability of the index. After the upgrade, the index will support the Traits feature recently introduced by Ordinals, allowing for attribute-based filtering in transactions, enhancing the expression capability and composability of collection assets.The next version of UniSat Wallet will add support for the import process from other mainstream wallets. UniSat Marketplace will gradually implement multiple functional upgrades in the coming weeks, and UniSat Inscribe will support the new on-chain collection inscription, simplifying the existing inscription process. The updated UniSat API will also support the aforementioned new features, including querying new on-chain data such as Traits, minting on-chain collections, and enabling zero-fee transaction capabilities.

According to Fortune, stablecoin infrastructure company Cyclops announced the completion of an $8 million funding round, with the valuation undisclosed, with participation from Castle Island Ventures, F-Prime, and Shift4 Payments.Cyclops is dedicated to building a layer of infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of stablecoins. Cyclops co-CEO Alex Wilson stated, "Our vision and goal is to be the first platform that payment companies think of when building various stablecoin solutions."

According to official news, OKX OnchainOS has officially opened AI-related capabilities and is the first Web3 development platform built specifically for AI Agents to operate autonomously on-chain. OnchainOS runs on the same infrastructure as OKX Wallet, covering over 60 mainstream blockchain networks. Through AI Skills, MCP, and Open API, AI Agents can be built on top of OnchainOS, allowing them to autonomously execute transactions, gain market insights, perform address insights, and conduct on-chain payments.AI Agents can automatically execute operations without human confirmation, which may lead to asset fluctuations or losses. This service does not constitute investment advice, and users bear the associated risks.

Gate officially launches the TradFi trading API and simultaneously upgrades the leverage mechanism for TradFi products, further enhancing the maturity of the multi-asset trading ecosystem. The newly introduced TradFi trading API supports automated trading for metals, foreign exchange (FX), indices, commodities, and other mainstream global asset classes. Users can directly access the Gate TradFi trading system through the API.In terms of functionality, this API supports programmatic order submission and management, meeting the needs of algorithmic trading and systematic strategy execution; it also provides real-time market data and order book depth information, offering data support for quantitative analysis and strategy optimization. Additionally, account and position information can be called in real-time through the interface, including balance inquiries, position details, and historical order records, enhancing overall operational and risk control efficiency.In terms of product mechanisms, the Gate TradFi zone innovatively launches an adjustable leverage mechanism, adding multiple leverage options on top of the maximum 500x leverage to meet different strategy needs and enhance the flexibility of position and capital management. The multi-leverage structure continues to maintain the advantages of high-efficiency trading while providing a more flexible parameter space for diversified strategy execution.At the same time, the platform continues to adopt a unified account system, allowing users to trade digital assets and traditional financial products such as metals, foreign exchange, and indices under the same account, using USDT as the unified margin asset to achieve cross-market capital sharing and flexible allocation.The launch of the TradFi trading API creates a closer synergy between programmatic trading capabilities and the multi-leverage mechanism. The automated interface significantly enhances strategy execution efficiency and systematic management levels, while the multi-leverage structure provides more refined options for strategies with different risk preferences and trading cycles.Currently, Gate has established a multi-asset trading system covering digital asset spot, derivatives, and traditional financial products. With the launch of the TradFi API and the implementation of the multi-leverage mechanism, the platform's synergy capabilities in terms of unified accounts, unified margin, and trading tools have been further strengthened, providing more efficient cross-market solutions for institutions and professional users. Looking ahead, Gate will continue to improve interface capabilities and product structures, deepen multi-asset integration and technological upgrades, and accelerate the construction of an integrated intelligent trading infrastructure, expanding broader development space in the competitive landscape of global comprehensive trading platforms.

According to a report by Businesswire, decentralized enterprise cloud infrastructure company Akave has completed a $6.65 million funding round, with participation from Protocol Labs, No Limit Holdings, Blockchange, Lightshift, Blockchain Builders Fund, Big Brain Holdings, the Avalanche Foundation, and the Filecoin Foundation.Akave's decentralized cloud storage platform, Akave Cloud, is built on the Avalanche L1 blockchain and aims to provide S3-compatible decentralized storage solutions for AI applications. The platform supports on-chain verifiability and programmable access control, and does not charge data egress fees. Akave Cloud can integrate with platforms like Snowflake and Apache Iceberg, and offers options for long-term archiving to the Filecoin network.

Web3 verifiable data and AI collaborative infrastructure manadia officially announced the completion of a $7 million seed round financing, with investors including OKX Ventures, Pillar VC, One Way Ventures, Quasar Holding Co., and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal also participating in this round of investment.The project is incubated by AurumX investment institution AUR Labs in collaboration with global top-tier institutions, focusing on low-trust dependency data settlement and AI collaboration underlying infrastructure. It provides core capabilities such as the VERITAS verifiable oracle, AI Agent collaboration, privacy-preserving settlement, and compliant payments, offering secure and trustworthy value exchange and cross-system collaboration support for finance, digital assets, and the AI ecosystem. manadia stated that it will continue to promote technology implementation and ecosystem expansion, aiming to make every digital collaboration safer, verifiable, and more efficient, becoming a key underlying support for the global finance and AI ecosystem.

UniSat officially stated on social media that the team has noticed recent changes in the Bitcoin ecosystem (Magic Eden will close its Bitcoin and EVM markets). However, for UniSat, it will continue to firmly support the development of the Bitcoin mainnet ecosystem and will keep investing in the infrastructure for Ordinals, Runes, and brc-20.The following phased adjustments and upgrades will be implemented in the future: UniSat Marketplace: gradually lowering the market participation threshold. Starting from March 1, 2026, UniSat Marketplace will implement a 90-day zero service fee policy across the platform. UniHexa: expanding the current invitation round. Next week, the early access invitation scope for UniHexa will be expanded. UniHexa is a unified on-chain exchange service for brc-20 and Runes. brc-20: a technical discussion on single-step transfers will soon begin. The team will soon share detailed technical discussions on implementing brc-20 single-step transfers on the Bitcoin mainnet. For developers: UniSat API upgrade. The UniSat API is expected to be upgraded to a fully functional MCP soon, capable of providing commercial-grade Bitcoin on-chain data. Long-term participation in the Fractal standard indexing service. UniSat will gradually purchase FB from the market to participate in the Fractal standard indexing service, which is planned to launch in Q2. The initial phase will purchase no less than 500,000 FB, and the first phase deployment will start and complete within 15 days. These FB will be used for long-term participation in index staking.

Gate announced that the Maltese company Gate Technology Ltd has officially obtained a Payment Institution (PI) license from the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) under the EU's Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2). This license makes Gate one of the few crypto-native companies in Europe to receive such regulatory approval, laying the groundwork for compliant stablecoin and payment services across the EU.Mr. Giovanni Cunti, CEO of Gate Technology Ltd., stated that this license will support the company's efforts to build a secure bridge between traditional finance and Web3, providing clear regulatory assurance for institutional and retail users. Previously, Gate had obtained a full MiCA license for exchange and custody services.With the PSD2 license, Gate is now expanding its payment service footprint across the EU based on the EU's common framework. This move reflects Gate's commitment to compliance and regulatory transparency, further driving its innovation and development in the European digital asset financial infrastructure sector.Gate has consistently been at the forefront of compliance efforts and investments in the industry, with multiple entities having obtained or completed relevant regulatory registrations, license applications, authorizations, or approvals in jurisdictions such as Malta, the Bahamas, Japan, Australia, and Dubai. Additionally, Gate US holds 33 state-level licenses in the United States, with its compliant operations covering 45 U.S. jurisdictions. The platform will continue to solidify the foundation for robust global development with a high-standard compliance system.

AI infrastructure company t54 Labs announced the completion of a $5 million seed round financing, led by Anagram, PL Capital, and Franklin Templeton, with participation from institutions such as Ripple.The project primarily provides infrastructure for autonomous trading AI agents, including identity verification, real-time risk control, compliance, and settlement integration, and plans to offer credit lines to agents based on identity and risk scores. Currently, the protocol has been deployed on XRP Ledger, Solana, and Base, and has launched the open-source component x402-secure built on the Coinbase incubated x402 payment protocol.

According to market news, the blockchain gaming infrastructure platform Power Protocol has received a $3 million investment from Bitkraft Ventures, bringing the total funding to $15.5 million.Power Protocol has built infrastructure for several partner studios, including Pixion Games, the developer of Fableborne. Its aim is to create scalable systems for multiple games, allowing game developers to adopt POWER token economics and share on-chain infrastructure, rather than launching isolated chains and tokens.

Circle announced that it has joined the Agent ic AI Foundation, planning to promote open standards and interoperable infrastructure for AI Agents. The Agent ic AI Foundation (AAIF) announced the addition of 18 Gold members and 79 Silver members, bringing the total membership to 146, and appointed AWS Director of Developer Experience David Nalley as the Chair of the Governance Committee.