A federal grand jury in Ohio indicted two Chinese pharmaceutical companies and six Chinese nationals over alleged fentanyl precursor trafficking and money laundering, after investigators said customers were told to pay through crypto wallets controlled by the defendants. The case, tied to the FBI's Operation Box Cutter, also includes charges against three defendants for allegedly seeking to provide material support to a Mexican cartel designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

Circle has reinstated the USDC balance for one of the 16 wallets it previously froze, according to onchain investigator ZachXBT. He said the wallet "0x61f…e543," linked to Goated.com, now holds 130,966 USDC and suggested more wallets could be unfrozen "in the near future."

Fidelity Investments urged the U.S. SEC to speed up rulemaking that would integrate crypto assets into existing market structures, with a focus on alternative trading systems. The firm said broker-dealers still need clearer guidance to offer, custody and trade crypto assets and to support crypto-security trading pairs. Fidelity also pressed for clearer standards for secondary trading of tokenized securities and for clarification on using blockchain for recordkeeping and on-chain settlement.

Gemini is facing a New York class-action that claims the company misled investors about its business strategy in documents tied to its September 2025 IPO and later disclosures. The complaint seeks damages for investors who bought shares from the IPO through mid-February 2026, as the stock fell from a $32 first-day close to $6.01 on Thursday. The case follows Gemini's "Gemini 2.0" pivot toward a prediction market product and workforce cuts disclosed in early February.

Bitcoin briefly fell to $69,969 on Thursday afternoon in Asia before moving back above $70,000, extending a 5.5% decline over the past 24 hours. Ethereum dropped 6.9% to $2,159 and the GMCI 30 index fell about 5.4%, as analysts pointed to inflation data, Fed hawkishness, and oil-price pressures weighing on risk assets.

Moody's said on Tuesday that it launched a network-agnostic Token Integration Engine to move its credit analysis onto blockchain infrastructure, initially by running a node on the Canton Network. The firm also released its finalized methodology for rating stablecoins, centered on the credit quality and composition of their reserve assets alongside market, liquidity, operational and technology risks.

Stablecoin payments infrastructure provider TransFi has raised $19.2 million, including $14.2 million in Series A equity and a $5 million committed liquidity facility. The company plans to use the capital to expand its stablecoin-based cross-border payments platform across Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa while deepening regulatory licensing and enterprise merchant onboarding.

An Australian Senate committee has recommended passing the Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025, which would require digital asset and tokenized custody platforms to obtain Australian Financial Services Licences. The bill, introduced by the Treasury in November 2025 and advanced by the House of Representatives in early February, aims to align crypto platforms with other financial service providers and strengthen consumer safeguards.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he does not expect the Clarity Act, a key crypto market structure bill, to pass out of the Senate Banking Committee before April. The legislation, which has already moved through the House, remains stalled amid disagreements over stablecoin yield, even as the Senate advances a housing bill with a CBDC ban and prioritizes President Donald Trump's SAVE America Act.