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Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, the weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors and industry insiders. We reviewed the top news, stats, and reports in the digital asset ecosystem for our 290k weekly subscribers. This week, Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley sought an OCC charter to expand into digital asset custody, signaling stronger institutional adoption. At the state level, Indiana moved to include Bitcoin in its public retirement plans. Meanwhile, Tether froze $4.2 billion in USDT tied to illicit activity, intensifying compliance scrutiny across stablecoins. On the fundraising front, STS Digital secured $30M in a strategic round to scale its institutional trading platform, while JPYC Inc. raised $12M in Series B funding to accelerate adoption of its yen-backed stablecoin across domestic payments and remittances.

Price performance since we began writing Coinstack in January 2021

💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals

Here are all the crypto fundraises we heard about this week, ranked by size…

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🗞️ Crypto News Recap: The Top 5 Stories

Welcome back to This Week in Crypto… everything you need to know in one scannable format. Here are the top 5 stories of the week…

  1. 📜 Morgan Stanley Seeks OCC Charter for Crypto Custody: The global financial services company has filed an application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on February 18 for a de novo trust bank charter, called the “Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, National Association.” If approved, the new regulated crypto-native custodian will directly compete with industry-leading institutional crypto custodians like BitGo and Fidelity Digital Assets. The new full-service crypto platform plans to offer custody, trading, swaps, transfer, and fiduciary staking services under one roof. 

  2. 👴 Indiana Puts Bitcoin in its Public Retirement Plans: The Indiana state legislature has approved public retirement funds and savings to access digital assets and spot crypto ETFs in February. Governor Mike Braun is anticipated to sign HB1042 into law within the next few days.

  1. 🥶 Tether Freezes $4.2 Billion Over USDT Crime Links: The world’s largest stablecoin company has reportedly frozen over $4.2 billion in USDT linked to crypto-related crimes. Earlier this week, Tether said it has assisted the U.S. Department of Justice in freezing around $61 million in USDT connected to “pig-butchering,” a type of crypto investment fraud, bringing its cumulative total of frozen assets to over $4.2 billion.

  1. 🎯 AllUnity Launches Swiss Franc Stablecoin, CHFAU: Frankfurt-based and BaFin-regulated e-money stablecoin platform AllUnity has launched its first fully MiCAR-compliant and 100% reserved stablecoin, CHFAU. The e-money token is 1:1 pegged with Swiss Franc reserves and aims to deliver institutional-grade transparency and regulatory oversight.

  1. 🤖 OKX and Chainalysis Roll Out Alterya, an AI-Powered Fraud Prevention Platform: The big players announced a major partnership to integrate Chainalysis’s AI-powered fraud detection platform, Altreya. The new AI-driven threat intelligence will instantly identify and block scam patterns before funds are transferred from the exchange.

💬 Tweet of the Week

📊 Key Stats of the Week

Here are the most important and interesting stats in crypto this week...

1. One of the most telling signals in digital asset products right now isn't the outflows, it's the apathy and disengagement. 

We've now reached $4b in total outflows over five consecutive weeks of selling pressure, yet ETP weekly trading volume has collapsed to just $17B, the lowest level since July 2025. Notably, this comes just two weeks after volumes hit a record $63B.

Outflows can reverse quickly, but a volume collapse means no one is showing up. That’s a much stronger signal.

Selling pressure is no longer the dominant force. Investors aren’t simply rotating, they’re stepping aside. Liquidity, attention, and risk appetite are contracting simultaneously.

This backdrop helps explain why capital continues to gravitate toward RWAs, yield, collateral, and cash-like instruments, while speculative flows quietly dry up.

2. The worst Bitcoin pain is likely behind us.

We are close to a bottom but probably not there yet.

Case for more downside: 

- Bottoms take time and drift is possible.

- Equities rolling over could push prices lower

- Sentiment is weak with no clear catalysts

- Quantum computing fears continue to weigh on the market.

Source: @cryptorover

3. The interesting data isn’t that Hyperliquid led fees yesterday. They almost always do.

The signal is that outside the top 10 networks (3 of which are perp-specific), there is almost no meaningful daily economic activity in this down market.

Networks like Arbitrum, Sui, Monad, TON, and StarkNet generated less than $40k combined in daily fees.

Activity is concentrating now more than ever.

4. $SOL 

Imaginary lines held to the Dollar.

$68 will look MENTAL in 12 months.

Even IF we go lower, most will still not pull the trigger.

5. Slowly, but surely, after such a peak, the volatility starts to go down on Gold.

That's great. 

That's going to turn the lights slowly towards #Bitcoin as an opportunity. 

I don't think we'll start to see big new highs for Gold. Maybe a sweep, but this is it for this year.

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📝 Highlights from the Top Crypto Reports

Here are the top highlights from the best crypto research reports this week…

About the Author: Glassnode Insights offers in-depth data-driven reports, aims to help you understand crypto like never before by harnessing the power of DeFi market dynamics along with macro trends, on-chain data & analytics. This is an excerpt from the full article, which you can find here.

📝 By Chris Beamish, CryptoVizArt, Antoine Colpaert, Glassnode:

Executive Summary

Bitcoin remains range-bound between $60k–$70k at a 47% drawdown from ATH, a depth historically aligned with mid-to-late bear market phases.

Nearly 9.2M BTC are now held at a loss, yet accumulation remains weak, with the Accumulation Trend Score below 0.5, signaling limited conviction from larger entities.

The 90D Realized Profit/Loss Ratio has fallen below 1.0, confirming an excess loss regime and structurally impaired liquidity, keeping downside risk elevated.

Market breadth remains weak, as fewer assets sustain positioning above long-term trend baselines, confirming underlying structural softness.

Large entity accumulation remains constructive in structure but has slowed in pace, reducing a key source of marginal upside support.

Spot CVD has turned decisively negative across major venues, signaling active distribution. ETF flows remain in persistent outflow, confirming institutional demand is not providing a structural bid.

Perpetual funding rates have normalized toward neutral, indicating leverage has reset. However, the absence of sustained positive funding reflects muted speculative appetite rather than renewed bullish conviction.

Implied volatility has reacted to downside moves but failed to expand meaningfully, suggesting options markets are stabilizing rather than pricing systemic stress.

Dealer gamma positioning and skew dynamics point to fragile liquidity conditions, with price increasingly sensitive to incremental order flow in a lower-volatility regime.

On-Chain Insights

Time Becomes the Risk

Since rebounding from the $60k region in early February, Bitcoin has entered a sideways consolidation phase. As outlined in Week 06 – Structural Weakness, this fragile range reflects a temporary equilibrium between seller exhaustion and localized support from long-term holders who accumulated within the same price band during H1 2024.

From a broader cyclical perspective, the 7-day moving average drawdown from the ATH currently sits at 47.3%, comparable to the early May 2022 range-bound phase that preceded further downside expansion. Historical analogues suggest that, at similar drawdown depths, time typically acts as a headwind rather than a tailwind for bullish continuation. Prolonged compression at these levels increases the probability that leveraged or structurally weak entities face mounting balance sheet stress.

Absent a decisive reclaim of higher price levels (>$70k) in the coming weeks, the risk of renewed contraction remains elevated.

Deep into Bear Market Territory

Extending this assessment of structural pressure, supply-side pain provides an additional lens into bear market depth. Total Supply in Loss measures the volume of coins whose acquisition price exceeds the current spot price, serving as a proxy for how widespread unrealized losses have become.

The 7-day moving average of this metric has risen to approximately 9.2M BTC underwater, indicating that nearly half of the circulating supply is now held at a loss. This aligns with prior bear market environments where drawdowns approached the 50% threshold and broad investor cohorts were under pressure.

While downside risk has not fully dissipated, such elevated levels of supply in loss historically characterize the latter stages of bear cycles rather than their early phase. In structural terms, the market appears closer to a potential bottoming range than to the initial onset of contraction, even as volatility and fragility persist.

🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week

Here are the crypto podcasts that are worth listening to this week...

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📰 The Coinstack Newsletter:

Tracking the most important blockchain stories of the 2020s, including a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone. As always, published for informational purposes only. Please do your own research. Just our opinions. Not intended as financial advice as we are not financial advisors. We may own some of the digital assets we write about as we believe strongly in the sector. Please do your own research. 

Coinstack is a news and analysis newsletter for the digital asset industry. None of the information here is a recommendation to invest in any securities or other types of investments. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. AI usage disclosure: Some portions of this document may have been created with the assistance of AI tools. The content has been reviewed and edited by a human. As a result, our research/editorial may contain errors.  For more information on the extent and nature of AI usage, please contact the publisher. For personalized investment advice consult with a registered investment advisor.

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