Iran's New Supreme Leader: If War Continues, May Open Another Front

March 12 – Per Bitget data, BlackRock’s Ethereum Staking ETF (ETHB) has officially launched on Nasdaq. As of March 12, the fund trades at $26.31, with $4.6 million in total trading volume recorded since its debut. The fund holds spot Ethereum, with a portion of its assets allocated to on-chain staking. This structure lets investors earn staking rewards while gaining exposure to ETH’s price movements. ETHB is BlackRock’s third cryptocurrency ETF and its first product to integrate a staking mechanism. BlackRock noted that adding staking is intended to meet investors’ demand for yield alongside ETH price exposure, while preserving the ETF’s traditional financial advantages in custody, trading, and asset allocation.

March 12th — Decentralized exchange Grvt announced today that its $GRVT token generation event (TGE) is expected to launch shortly after the end of Q2 2026, with the quarter concluding on June 30, 2026. The total supply of $GRVT is fixed at 1 billion tokens. Of this, 28% will be allocated via a community airdrop at TGE (targeting platform users and ecosystem participants)—a 6 percentage point increase from the prior 22% plan. Within the airdrop segment, the Q2 allocation has been raised from 12% to 18% to further incentivize user participation in platform trading and ecosystem activities. As the Grvt ecosystem’s utility token, $GRVT unlocks multiple platform benefits for holders, including lower transaction fees, enhanced margin efficiency, priority access to the investment treasury, and more. Platform metrics since the start of Q2 show strong growth: Total Value Locked (TVL) has surged 847% to $1.071 billion; open interest has jumped 42x to $4.841 billion; cumulative unidirec

March 12 – U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul S. Atkins announced the Commission will vote on proposals related to equity tokenization. As I’ve noted before, I expect the SEC will soon consider a targeted innovation exemption to enable limited trading of specific tokenized securities—while working to build a long-term regulatory framework. I remain open to feedback on crafting this potential exemption, which would be time- and scope-limited but with a timeline long enough to let us develop more permanent rules that fully unlock the potential of these new technologies.

On March 12, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a Market Surveillance Advisory report on the listing of event contracts for trading. Amid rapid growth in prediction markets, the agency seeks to foster their development and innovation while reminding Designated Contract Markets (DCMs) to meet their regulatory obligations under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and CFTC rules.

The advisory highlights DCMs’ compliance obligations tied to CEA Section 5(d), Part 38, DCM Core Principle 3, Appendix C Guidelines, and product submission requirements. It also covers specifics relevant to sports event contracts.

The CFTC’s Market Surveillance Division notes that as front-line regulators, DCMs should take proactive steps to ensure their markets continue to satisfy CEA and CFTC requirements as they expand.

Binance Announces Launch of EWYUSDT Index Perpetual Contract on March 16, 2026 at 21:30 UTC+8, with Up to 10x Leverage

March 12, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted: “I recently attended Real World Crypto and its affiliated events, which helped me gain a clearer understanding of blockchain use cases. Where can Ethereum create the most value? Based on my experience at these events, the first answer isn’t what you’d expect. It’s neither smart contracts nor payments—instead, it’s what cryptographers call a ‘public bulletin board.’ “Ethereum has significant value. If you step back and look at it from first principles—purely as a technical tool: global shared memory—you can grasp its value. I think the main bottleneck holding this use case back is that the world hasn’t realized we’re no longer in the 2020-2022 era. Today, transaction fees are extremely low, and we have a robust scalability roadmap to ensure fees stay low even if usage surges sharply. The infrastructure is also more mature when it comes to shielding users from fee volatility. “Treating Ethereum’s blobs as a bulletin board, ETH