Nasdaq Files for Prediction Market Proposal

Find out our latest reports, listed below:

• Volatility Report: February 2026

• 2026 – the year of RWA perps?
  
  
• Bybit x Block Scholes: “2026: It's Different This Time?”

• Tokenised Markets on Bitget UEX: Unlocking Real-World Assets On-Chain for 24/7 Global Access

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Daily Updates:

• A sudden jump from $65K to $70K yesterday proved to be temporary, as BTC has since pared back most of that rally and is currently trading at $67K. 

• The main narrative across markets continues to be geopolitical tensions, particularly after Iran claimed that it had closed the Strait of Hormuz — a 24-mile wide shipping lane through which 1/5th of the world’s oil flow passes. 
• Brent crude oil prices have risen to $80 a barrel after a more than 7% spike on Monday, bringing the YTD price increase to over 30%, while West Texas Intermediate oil prices jumped more than 5% in the last 24 hours to $75. European natural gas prices surged as much as 45% yesterday after Qatar closed the world’s largest LNG export plant following an attack on its facilities.

• US treasuries plunged lower as markets began to price in the possibility of delayed Fed rate cuts over fears the disruption in energy prices could have on inflation in the US. Fed Fund futures now show traders pricing in the first rate cut for September. 
• Ten-year treasury yields saw their biggest jump since October 2025 (3.97% to 4.1%), while 2-year yields surged more than 10bps from 3.44% to 3.55%. 
• The US dollar continued its upward trend that began in late January this year, up nearly 2% in the last five days. 
• US equities opened yesterday’s session negatively, though ultimately ended the day almost flat — with the S&P 500 up 0.04%. 

• As US-Israeli strikes continued to take place against Iran, President Trump said at a White House event yesterday that the military offensive will continue for as long as needed — “We projected four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that. Whatever the time is, it's OK. Whatever it takes.”
• He confirmed his willingness to see the operation through to its finality also stating that “I don’t get bored. There’s nothing boring about this”.
• His Secretary of State Marco Rubio also claimed yesterday that “the hardest hits are yet to come from the US military.” 
• Rubio also told reporters yesterday that the Trump administration will reveal a plan today to combat the rise in oil prices triggered by the military strikes — “We knew that going in would be a factor. We talked about it last night again about this program, we talked this morning. And starting tomorrow you will see us rolling out those phases to try to mitigate against that.”

• The largest BTC and ETH digital asset treasuries, Strategy and BitMine respectively, are continuing to step in as sources of buyers. Michael Saylor’s Strategy Inc. purchased $204M worth of bitcoins last week, while BitMine acquired an additional 50,928 ETH last week (bringing its total holdings to 4,473,587 ETH, or 3.71% of the token's entire circulating supply). 
• We also saw demand from Spot ETF products yesterday. Spot Bitcoin ETFs purchased $458.2M worth of bitcoins, while Ethereum ETFs saw more modest inflows of $38.7M. 

• TradFi exchange Nasdaq Inc. has taken its first step into the prediction market space by submitting a proposed rule change to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission outlining plans to introduce binary options on its benchmark Nasdaq-100 Index and the Nasdaq-100 Micro Index. 
• According to the filing, the contracts would trade at prices ranging from $0.01 to $1.00, with the price representing the market-implied probability of a specified outcome occurring.

• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin continues to draw attention to Ethereum's roadmap, outlining several proposals aimed at reducing centralization and improving transaction fairness as part of the upcoming “Glamsterdam” upgrade, including ePBS, which allows block proposers to outsource block construction to a permissionless builder market without increasing staking centralization. 
• He introduced FOCIL as an in-protocol safeguard where 16 randomly selected attesters can force the inclusion of certain transactions to prevent censorship, with a more ambitious “Big FOCIL” concept potentially expanding this role and limiting builders primarily to MEV-related ordering and execution. 
• Buterin also highlighted longer-term efforts such as encrypted mempools to combat toxic MEV, stronger network-layer privacy protections, improvements to transaction routing and order matching, and research into more distributed block-building models that could scale Ethereum while preserving its shared-state design.

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• Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT) released their full-year 2025 earnings, reporting a revenue of $647.4M, up from $376.7M in 2024, driven largely by a $255.3M increase in Bitcoin Mining revenue to $576.3M, alongside record gross profit of $302M, as the company advances a strategic shift toward AI and high-performance computing infrastructure by leveraging its nearly two-gigawatt power portfolio for large-scale data centers. 
• The company produced 5,686 bitcoin in 2025 versus 4,828 in 2024, with average mining costs excluding depreciation rising to $49,645 per bitcoin from $32,216, primarily due to a 47% increase in global network hash rate.
• Riot ended the year with 18,005 bitcoin, plus $309.8M in cash, over $1.9B in total liquidity, and began generating revenue in January 2026 from the first phase of its data center lease with AI chipmaker AMD.

• Anthony Pompliano’s Bitcoin treasury company, ProCap Financial, Inc. (Nasdaq: BRR), announced it has acquired 450 Bitcoin, increasing its total holdings to 5,457 Bitcoin while lowering its average cost basis per coin. 
• Over the past 10 days, the company repurchased 782,408 common shares at a significant discount to Net Asset Value (NAV), and said it will continue buybacks as long as BRR trades materially below NAV, in an effort to reduce the share count at prices below the company’s underlying asset value, which in turn lifts NAV per share and helps close the discount.

This Week’s Calendar:

Charts of the Day:

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