Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team. Welcome back to your weekly briefing.
Here's where we are:
BTC is holding around $67K with the broader market steady near ~$2.3T. Polymarket odds for BTC reaching up $75K in February sit at 15%.
Institutions kept averaging into the drawdown: BitMine bought 45,759 ETH ($90M), while Strategy added 2,486 BTC ($168M).
Now, DeFi had an interesting week. Strong announcements (BlackRock x Uniswap, Apollo x Morpho), but the sector hasn’t seen a meaningful bid outside of MORPHO itself, which is up ~37% on the week. So we're looking at positive catalysts, but the market isn't rewarding the sector broadly yet. Keep that in mind.
Onchain infrastructure keeps growing regardless of price action. This is what I always tell people to watch. Hyperliquid is doing ~$5B in daily perp volume with ~$5B in open interest. More than Coinbase’s. Prediction markets are holding strong too: Polymarket and Kalshi combined for over $2.4B in weekly volume, with monthly notional staying above $13B even outside election cycles.
So the setup right now? Regulatory clarity advancing, protocols shipping, price sideways. That’s where we are.
Our highlights this week:
BVNK secures MiCA Licence in Malta [RELEASE]
SEC’s new rule is bullish for stablecoins
Apollo bets on on-chain lending via Morpho
Citi completes a tokenization PoC on Solana
Kraken Plugs Into Wall Street’s Chat Network
Let’s jump in 👇
🚀 A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings.
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Top Boardroom Reads
Everything is Market (Jesse Walden)
How treasury innovation drives better business outcomes (Adyen and BCG)
Stablecoins vs. Tokenized Deposits: The Narrow Banking Debate Revisited (FRB of NY)
Tokenised Money: Use Cases, Interoperability and Regulation (CCAF)
Stablecoins: The Bridge Between Traditional Finance and Digital Assets (KPMG)
Top Signals This Week
Regulatory progress
SEC staff dropped the net-capital haircut on payment stablecoins from 100% to just 2%, bringing them in line with money-market funds. That’s a big deal for broker-dealers — it removes a major barrier to actually holding stablecoins on their books. Commissioner Peirce called the old 100% charge “unnecessarily punitive.” [Peirce statement]
On top of that, the White House has set a March 1 deadline to break the stablecoin-yield impasse that’s stalling the CLARITY Act. A third closed-door session between banks and crypto reps went down Thursday — the White House signaled limited rewards will stay in the next draft, and banks are working on compromise language, but still no handshake. [CoinDesk coverage]
Bridge wins OCC approval for a national trust bank
On February 12, 2026, Stripe-owned stablecoin platform Bridge received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency(OCC) to establish a federally chartered national trust bank. If the charter is finalized, Bridge will be able to custody digital assets, issue stablecoins, and manage their reserves under direct federal oversight across all 50 United States. [RELEASE]
Why this matters: Stripe is the dominant global payments infrastructure provider processing $1.4 trillion in 2024 (roughly 1.3% of global GDP), embedded in over a million live businesses worldwide. It is now building Tempo, a purpose-built blockchain designed specifically for payments, and if Bridge secures full OCC approval, Stripe will have the federal license to issue its own stablecoin positioning it as a credible challenger to USDT ($184B market cap) and USDC ($73B market cap), backed not by a crypto-native startup but by the company already moving more money annually than most nations’ GDP.
🔒 PRO Insight:
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Citi completes a tokenization PoC on Solana
On February 13, 2026, Citigroup completed a proof of concept (PoC) tokenizing a bill of exchange on the Solana blockchain through its Trade and Working Capital Solutions division, working with PwC and the Solana Foundation. The pilot simulated the full lifecycle of the instrument using synthetic data: issuance, financing, distribution, and settlement. By converting the bill into a digital token, the bank embedded payment amounts, counterparties, and maturity dates directly into the asset’s code. [RELEASE]
Why this matters: Tokenization unlocks two structural shifts: fractionalization turns illiquid trade finance instruments into tradable tokens, opening a projected $24 trillion secondary market and letting banks optimize RWAs by offloading portions to non-bank investors; and atomic settlement on Solana kills the T+2 window entirely, eliminating counterparty risk and enabling just-in-time funding where cash moves at transaction completion, not days later.
🔒 PRO Insight:
Apollo bets on on-chain lending via Morpho
On February 13, the Morpho Association announced a cooperation agreement with Apollo. The deal: Apollo may acquire up to 90 million MORPHO tokens — 9% of total supply over a 48-month window. This isn’t Apollo‘s first collaboration with Morpho. The firm already has exposure through ACRED. On Morpho, investors can already deposit ACRED as collateral and borrow USDC. The cooperation agreement formalizes what was already an indirect relationship and escalates it from user to governance stakeholder. [RELEASE]
Why this matters: Morpho coined the phrase: “fintech in the front, DeFi in the back”. This model already powers $1B+ in Coinbase and Crypto.com loans. Bitwise launched an institutional-grade USDC yield vault on Morpho. Apollo joined as a governance stakeholder when lending yields fell below 10% for the first time in three years, and 57% of sponsor-backed deals in Q3 2025 priced below a 500 bps spread. Meanwhile, the sACRED levered strategy on Morpho has delivered up to ~16% versus ACRED’s standard 8–9%. This suggests Apollo might be exploring ways to leverage Morpho for better yield.
Punchline: For years we were debating whether institutions would ever touch DeFi. In 2026, it’s clear that the convergence is coming. This was the first big step.
🔒 PRO Insight:
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Kraken plugs into Wall Street’s chat network
On Feb 17, Kraken announced it has integrated its OTC trading desk with ICE Chat. This messaging platform serves 120,000 institutional users, including banks, brokers, hedge funds, and trading desks. They use it for real-time negotiations and execution across equities, fixed income, commodities, and derivatives. Kraken is the first cryptocurrency platform to connect with ICE Chat. Now, institutional traders can communicate directly with Kraken’s OTC desk through ICE Chat to trade crypto. [RELEASE]
Why this matters: By meeting institutions where they already work — inside ICE Chat’s compliance-ready infrastructure — Kraken removes the workflow friction that has long slowed institutional crypto adoption. This reinforces the growing trend of blockchains and DeFi becoming the backend of traditional finance, as seen with recent moves by BlackRock and Apollo. In this case, rather than building a crypto trading arm leveraging its NYSE systems, ICE is taking a lighter approach by simply opening its communication infrastructure to Kraken.
BVNK secures MiCA licence in Malta
On February 16, 2026, BVNK secured a MiCA CASP (Crypto Asset Service Provider) licence from Malta’s MFSA (Malta Financial Services Authority), positioning BVNK as one of the only European platforms combining MiCA-regulated crypto-asset services, an EMI licence for euro payments, and direct SEPA access in a single stack. Granting it rights to offer regulated digital asset services across all 30 EEA member states under a single, unified regulatory framework. [RELEASE]
Why it matters: With euro stablecoins and tokenized RWAs collectively projected to become a multi-trillion-euro market by decade-end and European institutions from SocGen (Société Générale – FORGE) to Clearstream already moving bonds and settlement on-chain. BVNK‘s unique single-stack offering of MiCA-licensed crypto services, euro payments, and direct SEPA access makes it critical plumbing for the institutions building in stablecoins and tokenized RWAs and stocks.
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News Flash
Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala doubles Bitcoin ETF stake to $630M. Link
Harvard buys $86.8M in Ethereum ETF, trims Bitcoin position by 21%. Link
World Liberty Financial partners with Apex Group to pilot USD1 Stablecoin. Link
OpenAI launches a benchmarking system to secure crypto tokens. Link
Billionaire Peter Thiel fully exits Ethereum Treasury firm ETHZilla. Link
TON Foundation partners with Banxa to enable stablecoin payments. Link
Animoca brands secures Dubai crypto license for institutional services. Link
Ethereum protocol priorities for 2026. Link
Polymarket markets are now natively integrated with Substack. Link
That’s all for now, folks.
This quarter we've been deep in competitive intelligence for two top-10 asset managers. If your team needs similar support, please contact me at marc@fiftyone.xyz.
– Marc & Team
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