STS Digital Completes $30 Million Funding Round, Led by CMT Digital

Feb 26 – World Gold Council: Widespread market speculation could boost safe-haven demand, especially for gold. Elevated asset valuations and persistent macro risks warrant caution. (IG)

Feb. 26: Axiom responded to an accusation leveled at on-chain sleuth ZachXBT, which claimed some employees abused their permissions to track user wallets for insider trading. The company issued the following statement: “We were surprised and disappointed to learn a team member misused an internal customer support tool to query user wallets. We’ve since revoked access to these tools and will continue investigating, holding those responsible for this breach accountable. This behavior does not reflect our team—we’ve always been committed to user-first values. We’ll share further updates on our Twitter, so stay tuned.”

On February 26, ZachXBT posted an accusation alleging that Axiom employees engaged in insider trading.

On February 26, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) issued a notice on renminbi (RMB) cross-border interbank financing for banking financial institutions. The notice supports domestic banks in meeting market demand by conducting RMB cross-border interbank financing in compliance with laws and risk control principles. Domestic Chinese banks, foreign-owned banks, and Sino-foreign joint venture banks engaged in such business must be uniformly managed by their headquarters. Following the principle of substance over form, all RMB cross-border interbank financing transactions must be included in the management scope, with sound risk management and internal control mechanisms to be established. Source: Golden Finance

On February 26, Vetle Lunde, Head of Research at K33 Research, published an analysis showing that between January 2025 and February 2026, Bitcoin’s average minute-by-minute returns at 10:00 AM actually ranked in the top 25% of all minutes in a day. While negative returns did occur at 10:00 AM over the past four months, there are still 34 minutes throughout the day that performed worse. Lunde noted that Bitcoin’s volatility peaks cluster around U.S. macroeconomic data releases and the U.S. stock market’s opening/closing windows (9:31–9:37 AM). This stems from the market’s microstructure being tightly tied to the U.S. stock market—not targeted manipulation at specific times. When it comes to “price manipulation,” the performance of non-whole-hour minutes (like 10:12 AM and 9:41 AM) is more noteworthy. The widely debated “Jane Street 10 AM price manipulation” lacks data backing.

On February 26, U.S. initial jobless claims for the week ended February 21 came in at 212K, below the expected 215K; the prior reading was revised up to 208K from 206K (FX678)