Crypto equities began to look like digital assets themselves Thursday morning as stock prices soar on continued bitcoin ETF optimism.

MicroStrategy, Coinbase and Marathon Digital clocked double-digit rallies, with mining operation Marathon leading the pack after jumping more than 17% after the open. 

Competing bitcoin mining shop Riot Platforms wasn’t far behind, posting just under 10% gains at time of publication. Galaxy digital followed suit with a roughly 6% rally. 

Bitcoin continued its rally Thursday, although related stocks far outpaced the cryptocurrency itself. 

Bitcoin (BTC) rallied as much as 6.4% before paring gains to around 1.5% higher. Bitcoin remains up around 31%…

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DeFi depends on liquidity providers (LPs), but LPs can face an uphill battle in generating yield. Steer Protocol announced on Thursday that it is integrating its so-called Smart Pools on Sushi to try and make liquidity provision more attractive.

Steer’s Smart Pools take some data off-chain and automate aspects of liquidity management to increase efficiency for LPs. The Smart Pool integration comes as Sushi weighs an overhaul of its tokenomics and its native SUSHI token gets swept up in a market rally.

LPs put capital in pools that automated market makers (AMMs) like Sushi use to create order depth for DeFi assets. Providing capital as an LP can be inefficient because of…

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BlackRock has apparently registered an Ethereum trust in the state of Delaware, which is possibly a first step toward an Ether (ETH) spot exchange-traded fund (ETF). 

BlackRock registered an analogical Bitcoin (BTC) trust in June, shortly before filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a Bitcoin ETF. 

The entity has been registered by the state’s Division of Corporations with a formation date of Nov. 9. The agent registered is Daniel Schweiger at the address of BlackRock in Wilmington, DE. According to LinkedIn, Schwieger is a BlackRock managing director. 

Related: SEC’s first window to approve all 12 spot Bitcoin ETFs to begin today

ETH has risen…

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Laser Digital has introduced an Ethereum Adoption Fund aimed at institutional investors, the firm announced on Thursday. The company is a digital assets-focused affiliate of Japan-based investment bank Nomura.

This new product invests in long-only spot ether positions and deploys “a yield enhancement strategy” by staking ETH held by the fund.

The process “maintains daily liquidity in the fund whilst offering a staking facility which gives an approximate yield of 5.5%,” according to Fiona King, Laser Digital Asset Management’s head of distribution.

Demand for this product is coming from pension funds, family offices and asset managers — as well as from private banks offering…

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Binance launched its new Web3 wallet on Wednesday during the Binance Blockchain Week conference in Istanbul.

The Binance wallet is designed to simplify user interaction with DeFi applications by integrating multiple blockchains.

This launch puts Binance alongside other major centralized exchanges like Coinbase and OKX which have already established their presence in the Web3 wallet space, and newer players like Bitget. Coinbase, for instance, first introduced a mobile self-custodial wallet in 2017, and upgraded it significantly in 2022.

Binance’s effort is integrated within the Binance app and is described as keyless and seedless, while still being a self-custodial wallet that many…

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Professionals navigating the tech industry have seen more than their share of ups and downs recently. The employment environment has swung from talent shortages, with companies of all sizes scrambling to land and keep tech talent, to rounds of layoffs at industry giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Forward-looking developers may well decide it’s time to stop focusing on Web2 companies and products and start learning the ins and outs of the burgeoning Web3 world.

While crypto companies are eager to welcome the next generation of Web3 devs, the process isn’t as simple as updating and sending out a résumé. Web3 is a whole different ecosystem with new technology and fresh ideas,…

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For the past few years, a significant part of my job has been the translation of some of the largest crypto websites in the world. This hasn’t been a trivial task.

Cryptocurrency — a digital frontier shaped by its own set of rules — has not only challenged our understanding of finance and technology, but has also created an entirely new lexicon as nebulous as the blockchain networks it refers to. Innovation creates new machinery — and it also forges a fresh language, necessitated by the demands of novel concepts and ideas. 

And the lexicon of crypto, woven with its own abbreviations, acronyms and idiosyncratic phrases, poses a unique challenge to translators worldwide, a…

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Lightspeed Faction has raised $285 million in capital for investment in early-stage crypto projects, the Menlo Park-based fund announced Thursday. 

Faction has already inked twenty deals, most of which are yet to be made public, but around 80% of the $285 million remains uncommitted, the fund’s co-founder told Blockworks. 

Lightspeed Faction is a blockchain-focused joint venture with Lightspeed Venture Partners that first came to light in mid-2022. This is the firm’s first venture fund.

Faction co-founder Samuel Harrison said the fund is interested in projects at the infrastructure and protocol level, mentioning wallets and brokerages, developer tooling platforms, and remittance…

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