In the cryptocurrency market, XRP continues to be a focal point. As relevant policies gradually take effect, price trends are showing signs of recovery, and market enthusiasm for XRP is steadily rising. However, many investors holding XRP often rely solely on price increases to generate profits, lacking stable and consistent passive income channels over the long term.

To address this situation, Siton Mining, a globally renowned cloud mining platform, has officially launched its XRP cloud mining app. This program combines XRP with Bitcoin mining. Instead of simply waiting for price fluctuations, users can directly use XRP to power BTC mining machines and receive daily Bitcoin rewards from computing power, creating a new model where “holding XRP can also earn money.”

Advantages and Security

1. Clear and Transparent Revenue Mechanism

Mining revenue is settled daily, and all revenue is backed by hashrate. Revenue data is available in real time, eliminating the need to wait.

2. Low Barrier and Flexibility

Participation requires 33 XRP, with a variety of contract options available, suitable for both novice and experienced investors with long-term investment opportunities.

3. Technical and Security Promises

All mining contracts are executed using blockchain smart contracts, assets are managed separately using cold wallets and hot wallets, and a multi-signature mechanism is used to provide fund security.

4. Data Encryption Protection

The platform utilizes world-leading quantum cryptography and EV SSL encryption technologies so that no user data is ever shared with any third party, providing users with reliable information security.

5. Compliance and Transparency

The platform actively responds to regulatory compliance in major markets and provides publicly verifiable hashrate and revenue reports.

6. Multi-Currency Expansion

In addition to XRP, we also support payments and contract initiation with mainstream crypto assets such as BTC, ETH, and USDT, meeting the needs of diverse investors.

How to Join: 3 Steps to Complete the Operation

1. Register an account

Visit the official website https://sitonmining.com or download the app and register with your email address to receive a random reward of $10-$100.

2. Select a contract:

Choose the appropriate hash rate contract and activate the BTC mining machine with one click using XRP.

3. Receive profits

Profits are settled daily and deposited into your personal account. You can withdraw or reinvest them to earn higher returns.

There’s no need to purchase and maintain physical mining machines or worry about electricity bills. You can start mining with a single click.

Industry Outlook

As hash rate competition intensifies following the Bitcoin halving, mining returns have become increasingly valuable. Siton Mining’s XRP cloud mining application not only lowers the barrier to entry but also opens up new avenues for cross-asset applications for XRP. For users, this means they can hold XRP to maintain its long-term value while also earning stable daily returns through Bitcoin mining, achieving dual asset appreciation.

As the market increasingly moves towards compliance and professionalism, Siton Mining’s innovation has undoubtedly injected new vitality into the crypto-financial ecosystem.

For more information, visit https://sitonmining.com.

Email: [email protected]

Canary Capital filed the first S-1 registration statement for a TRUMP memecoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) with the SEC on Aug. 26.

The “Canary Trump Coin ETF” filing marks a departure from earlier mutual fund approaches, utilizing Form S-1 under the 1933 Securities Act rather than the N-1A investment company registration form used by competitors Tuttle Capital and Rex Osprey.

Form S-1 registration statements enable corporations to register ETFs that track the spot prices of underlying assets, whereas N-1A forms apply to investment companies establishing mutual funds.

The distinction positions Canary’s product as a traditional ETF structure rather than an investment company vehicle. The corporate registration framework enables traditional ETF mechanics while ensuring regulatory compliance with established securities laws.

Rex Osprey filed initial N-1A statements for a TRUMP ETF in January, followed by Tuttle Capital’s proposals for leveraged funds featuring multiple memecoins, including TRUMP and MELANIA tokens. Tuttle amended its applications in July, targeting a potential launch date on July 16.

Latest ETF move

Canary incorporated the “Canary Trump Coin ETF” entity in Delaware on Aug. 13, according to state records, signaling preparation for the formal SEC filing two weeks later.

The Delaware incorporation typically precedes the launch of ETFs, demonstrating institutional commitment to the product structure.

The TRUMP coin ETF filing marks the latest move in Canary Capital’s broader crypto ETF strategy.

The firm submitted plans for a Canary American-Made Crypto ETF on Aug. 25, targeting digital assets with domestic ties.

The proposed fund tracks the Made-in-America Blockchain Index, focusing on cryptocurrencies developed in the US, tokens minted domestically, and networks with US-based operations.

CoinGecko estimates that US-origin crypto assets represent a market value exceeding $520 billion, including projects such as XRP, Solana, Cardano, Chainlink, Stellar, Avalanche, Hedera, and Sui.

The American-Made ETF aims to generate additional income through network validation processes, including staking and transaction verification.

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Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake — The Merge — is near: devnets are being stood up, specifications are being finalized and community outreach has begun in earnest. The Merge is designed to have minimal impact on how Ethereum operates for end users, smart contracts and dapps. That said, there are some minor changes worth highlighting. Before we dive into them, here are a few links to provide context about the overall Merge architecture:

The rest of this post will assume the reader is familiar with the above. For those wanting to dig even deeper, the full specifications for The Merge are available here:

Block structure

After The Merge, proof of work blocks will no longer exist on the network. Instead, the former contents of proof of work blocks become a component of blocks created on the Beacon Chain. You can then think of the Beacon Chain as becoming the new proof of stake consensus layer of Ethereum, superseding the previous proof of work consensus layer. Beacon chain blocks will contain ExecutionPayloads, which are the post-merge equivalent of blocks on the current proof of work chain. The image below shows this relationship:

For end users and application developers, these ExecutionPayloads are where interactions with Ethereum happen. Transactions on this layer will still be processed by execution layer clients (Besu, Erigon, Geth, Nethermind, etc.). Fortunately, due to the stability of the execution layer, The Merge introduces only minimal breaking changes.

Mining & Ommer Block Fields

Post-merge, several fields previously contained in proof of work block headers become unused as they are irrelevant to proof of stake. In order to minimize disruption to tooling and infrastructure, these fields are set to 0, or their data structure’s equivalent, rather than being entirely removed from the data structure. The full changes to block fields can be found in EIP-3675.

Because proof of stake does not naturally produce ommers (a.k.a. uncle blocks) like proof of work, the list of these in each block (ommers) will be empty, and the hash of this list (ommersHash) will become the RLP-encoded hash of an empty list. Similarly, because difficulty and nonce are features of proof of work, these will be set to 0, while respecting their byte-size values.

mixHash, another mining-related field, won’t be set to 0 but will instead contain the beacon chain’s RANDAO value. More on this below.

BLOCKHASH & DIFFICULTY opcodes changes

Post-merge, the BLOCKHASH opcode will still be available for use, but given that it will no longer be forged through the proof of work hashing process, the pseudorandomness provided by this opcode will be much weaker.

Relatedly, the DIFFICULTY opcode (0x44) will be updated and renamed to PREVRANDAO. Post-merge, it will return the output of the randomness beacon provided by the beacon chain. This opcode will thus be a stronger, albeit still biasable, source of randomness for application developers to use than BLOCKHASH.

The value exposed by PREVRANDAO will be stored in the ExecutionPayload where mixHash, a value associated with proof of work computation, was stored. The payload’s mixHash field will also be renamed prevRandao.

Here is an illustration of how the DIFFICULTY & PREVRANDAO opcodes work pre and post-merge:

Pre-merge, we see the 0x44 opcode returns the difficulty field in the block header. Post-merge, the opcode, renamed to PREVRANDAO, points to the header field which previously contained mixHash and now stores the prevRandao value from the beacon chain state.

This change, formalized in EIP-4399, also provides on-chain applications a way to assess whether The Merge has happened. From the EIP:

Additionally, changes proposed by this EIP allow for smart contracts to determine whether the upgrade to the PoS has already happened. This can be done by analyzing the return value of the DIFFICULTY opcode. A value greater than 2**64 indicates that the transaction is being executed in the PoS block.

Block time

The Merge will impact the average block time on Ethereum. Currently under proof of work, blocks come in on average every ~13 seconds with a fair amount of variance in actual block times. Under proof of stake, blocks come in exactly each 12 seconds except when a slot is missed either because a validator is offline or because they do not submit a block in time. In practice, this currently happens in <1% of slots.

This implies a ~1 second reduction of average block times on the network. Smart contracts which assume a particular average block time in their calculations will need to take this into account.

Finalized Blocks & Safe Head

Under proof of work there is always the potential for reorgs. Applications usually wait for several blocks to be mined on top of a new head before treating it as unlikely to be removed from the canonical chain, or “confirmed”. After The Merge, we instead have the concepts of finalized blocks and safe head exposed on the execution layer. These blocks can be used more reliably than the “confirmed” proof of work blocks but require a shift in understanding to use correctly.

A finalized block is one which has been accepted as canonical by >2/3 of validators. To create a conflicting block, an attacker would have to burn at least 1/3 of the total staked ether. While stake amounts may vary, such an attack is always expected to cost the attacker millions of ETH.

A safe head block is one which has been justified by the Beacon Chain, meaning that >2/3 of validators have attested to it. Under normal network conditions, we expect it to be included in the canonical chain and eventually finalized. For this block to not be part of the canonical chain, a majority of validators would need to be colluding to attack the network, or the network would have to be experiencing extreme levels of latency in block propagation. Post-merge, execution layer APIs (e.g. JSON RPC) will expose the safe head using a safe tag.

Finalized blocks will also be exposed via JSON RPC, via a new finalized flag. These can then serve as a stronger substitute for proof of work confirmations. The table below summarizes this:

Note: the JSON RPC specification is still under active development. Naming changes should still be expected.

Next Steps

We hope this post helps application developers prepare for the much-anticipated transition to proof of stake. In the next few weeks, a long-lived testnet will be made available for testing by the broader community. There is also an upcoming Merge community call for infrastructure, tooling and application developers to ask questions and hear the latest technical updates about The Merge. See you there

Thank you to Mikhail Kalinin, Danny Ryan & Matt Garnett for reviewing drafts of this post.

Chicago Board Options Exchange (Cboe) filed on March 25 to trade a spot Solana (SOL) exchange-traded fund (ETF) issued by Fidelity through the registration of a 19b-4 form. The move comes four days after Fidelity registered a Solana fund in Delaware.

As of Dec. 31, Fidelity registered $5.9 trillion in assets under management, making it the third-largest asset manager in the world. 

The firm also registers the second-largest inflows from spot Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) ETFs traded in the US, amassing nearly $13 billion per Farside Investors’ data.

Notably, the move comes five days after the first SOL-related ETFs started trading in the US. Issuer Volatility Shares launched two products tracking the price of Solana futures contracts, one of which offers exposure with 2X leverage.

Solana ETF race

Fidelity joins the list of companies aiming to offer an SOL ETF in the US, along with 21shares, Canary Capital, Bitwise, VanEck, and Grayscale.

Comparing BTC and ETH exchange-traded products’ inflows to their market caps, JPMorgan estimated in January that SOL ETFs could see inflows between $3 billion and $6 billion.

Solana futures recently started trading in the US on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) on March 17, and initial volume indicates that traders have a decent appetite for SOL. 

K33 head of research Vetle Lunde pointed out that SOL futures traded $12.3 million on March 17, an underwhelming amount compared to BTC’s $102.7 million and ETH’s $31 million.

However, using the assets’ market caps to normalize the volumes, Lunde noted that the interest in Solana futures aligns with Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Competitive ETF landscape

Asset managers are testing regulatory boundaries in the US after President Donald Trump took the White House for a second term.

Filings for altcoin-related ETFs range from major-cap cryptos such as Litecoin (LTC), XRP, Cardano (ADA), and Polkadot (DOT) to medium-cap assets such as Hedera (HBAR) and Axelar (AXL).

Recently, Canary Capital filed for the first ETF tracking the price of a non-fungible token (NFT) collection. The fund will be exposed to the PENGU token and Pudgy Penguins NFTs if approved.

Even memecoins are considered for ETFs. For example, Bitwise filed a Dogecoin (DOGE) ETF in January, expanding the ETF race to new assets.

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Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) has rejected Ethena Labs’ application to issue asset-referenced tokens under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR).

The regulator also raised concerns that the sUSDe may constitute an unlicensed security offering.

According to BaFin’s official notice, the application submitted by Ethena GmbH, a Frankfurt-based entity under Ethena Labs’ corporate structure, exhibited “significant deficiencies” in organizational practices and failed to meet MiCAR requirements concerning asset reserves and capital adequacy. 

BaFin immediately imposed enforceable supervisory measures, including prohibiting further public offerings of the USDe token within Germany, and ordered custodians to freeze the token’s reserve assets.

Notably, some stablecoin issuers have been facing difficulties under the MiCA regulation. Major European exchanges delisted Tether USD (USDT) because they were concerned that the token might be non-compliant. However, authorities have not yet deemed USDT non-compliant.

Ordered to stop USDe issuance

However, under a MiCAR transitional provision, Ethena GmbH continued issuing the token in Germany after applying for authorization on July 29, 2024.

Approximately 5.4 billion USDe tokens are currently circulating, most of which were issued before MiCAR’s effective enforcement and outside of Germany.

BaFin clarified that its actions do not affect USDe’s secondary market trading but temporarily restrict redemptions directly through Ethena GmbH. Since January 2025, Ethena BVI Limited, an affiliated entity based in the British Virgin Islands, has also facilitated the token’s issuance.

Moreover, the regulator appointed a special representative to monitor compliance and noted the potential for additional actions, including a ban on public offerings of associated securities.

Securities offering

Beyond operational shortcomings, BaFin expressed a “sufficiently substantiated suspicion” that the sUSDe token qualifies as a security under German law and has been offered publicly without an approved securities prospectus. 

The sUSDe is a yield-bearing stablecoin acquired by staking USDe. BaFin’s concern stems from the financial structure and alleged profit promise embedded in the sUSDe token, which may trigger regulatory classification as a security.

BaFin’s position introduces a regulatory challenge to hybrid instruments like sUSDe, which combine stablecoin mechanics with yield-generation features. The regulator is actively evaluating whether the public distribution of such instruments requires compliance with securities law, including disclosure and prospectus obligations. 

The outcome of this classification could set a precedent for similar crypto assets in the European Union.

Ethena Labs’ response

In response, Ethena Labs published a statement confirming that it had been informed of BaFin’s decision to reject Ethena GmbH’s MiCAR application.

The company acknowledged the decision in a public statement and said it is “evaluating alternative frameworks” for regulatory compliance.

Ethena added:

“Since its inception, Ethena has been exploring various options and jurisdictions when it comes to regulatory frameworks globally. A MiCAR authorization via Ethena GmbH was one of various options we have been pursuing.”

The firm emphasized that the decision does not impact USDe minting and redemption activities facilitated by Ethena BVI Limited, which services the “vast majority” of users.

The company also denied speculation of an asset freeze, asserting that all reserves remain available. It added that it plans to revise its terms of service in the coming week.

BaFin’s rejection reinforces the increasing scrutiny of stablecoins and synthetic yield instruments operating within or targeting European markets following the implementation of MiCA.

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VanEck has submitted an S-1 registration statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a proposed Avalanche exchange-traded fund (ETF), aiming to provide investors with direct exposure to AVAX.

According to the filing, the VanEck Avalanche ETF will hold AVAX directly and value its shares based on the MarketVector Avalanche Benchmark Rate, which aggregates pricing data from the five largest trading platforms, as determined by CCData’s exchange benchmark report.

This filing follows VanEck’s recent registration of the Avalanche ETF in Delaware, signaling the firm’s intent to expand its lineup of crypto investment products.

VanEck has yet to disclose the ETF’s ticker symbol.

Altcoin ETFs gain momentum

The move comes as asset managers push for ETFs linked to cryptocurrencies beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Since the SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs in January and recently gave the green light to Ethereum-based products, firms have been exploring the potential for ETFs backed by alternative digital assets.

Bloomberg ETF analysts have provided approval odds for various altcoin-based ETFs, estimating a 90% chance for Litecoin, while XRP and Solana face lower probabilities.

Avalanche’s track record, including its use in financial innovations like Franklin Templeton’s tokenized fund, could support its case for approval.

Regulatory climate

The SEC has historically approached crypto ETFs with caution, citing concerns over market manipulation and investor protection.

However, shifting regulatory attitudes under President Donald Trump’s administration and the establishment of a Crypto Task Force have raised expectations for a more open stance toward digital asset products.

While the SEC’s response to VanEck’s Avalanche ETF remains uncertain, analysts view the firm’s application as a test case for broader adoption of altcoin ETFs.

If approved, it could open the door for additional blockchain-based investment vehicles and further integrate cryptocurrencies into traditional finance.

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Franklin Templeton, one of the world’s largest asset management firms, has submitted a proposal to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to issue a spot Solana ETF (exchange-traded fund). The asset manager joins several other applicants in the race to offer a SOL-based investment product to US investors.

Franklin Templeton To Offer Staking In Spot Solana ETF

On Friday, February 21, Franklin Templeton filed for an exchange-traded product that will track the spot price of the fifth-largest cryptocurrency Solana. Franklin Templeton’s Solana ETF will be listed on the Cboe BZX Exchange, with Coinbase Custody Trust Company, LLC serving as custodian.

The firm’s registration statement read:

The Franklin Solana Trust (the “Trust”) is organized as a Delaware statutory trust. The Franklin Solana ETF series of the Trust (the “Fund”) issues shares (“Shares”) representing fractional undivided beneficial interests in its net assets. The assets of the Fund consist primarily of Solana held by a custodian on behalf of the Fund. The Fund seeks to reflect generally the performance of the price of Solana. The Fund seeks to reflect such performance before payment of the Fund’s expenses.

In its filing with the SEC, Franklin Templeton revealed that it may occasionally stake a portion of the ETF’s assets through one or more trusted staking providers. According to the firm, the “Fund” would receive Solana tokens as rewards (which would also be treated as “income to the Fund”) for engaging in any staking activity.

Source: Sec.gov

This spot Solana ETF would join the Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds in Franklin Templeton’s growing list of crypto products in the United States. Earlier this week, the asset manager launched its combined ETH and BTC ETF after receiving SEC approval in December 2024.

Franklin Templeton’s proposal to offer the staking option in its spot Solana ETF is not exactly novel, as multiple issuers have considered this in other crypto products. For instance, the New York Stock Exchange filed for staking on Grayscale’s Ethereum ETFs, while Cboe BZX Exchange is looking to offer staking on 21Shares’ Ethereum fund.

With the digital asset regulatory landscape improving in the United States, it is no surprise to see more traditional firms file for new crypto-based financial products. The growing clarity in the US crypto space was spotlighted by the SEC’s decision to drop its case against Coinbase.

Solana Price Overview

The price of SOL barely reacted to the news of Franklin Templeton’s spot Solana ETF filing. As of this writing, the Solana price stands at around $170, reflecting a 2% decline in the past 24 hours.

The price of SOL on the daily timeframe | Source: SOLUSDT chart on TradingView

Featured image from Aivaras Sakurovas | Dreamstime.com, chart from TradingView