BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, continues to expand its crypto footprint. On 25 March 2025, the firm’s technology partner Securitize announced that BlackRock is adding its blockchain-based money market fund to Solana, the fast growing Ethereum challenger. The move comes a year after the finance giant launched the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Fund. BUIDL takes traditional money market funds—which serve as short-term places to park cash and earn yield—and combines it with the ledger and payment properties of blockchain.

Under the Payment Services Act (PSA), businesses offering cryptocurrency services (like exchanges) are regulated as Digital Payment Token (DPT) Service providers. They must comply with anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CFT) measures to ensure secure and transparent operations. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) requires businesses offering payment services to obtain licenses to operate legally. Licensing ensures consumer protection, financial stability, and adherence to regulations. For DPTs, this includes safeguarding customer funds and preventing illicit activities. Find all licensed businesses here.

Project Mandala explores the feasibility of encoding jurisdiction-specific policy and regulatory requirements into a common protocol for cross-border use cases such as foreign direct investment, borrowing and payments. Disparate policy and regulatory frameworks between different jurisdictions are among the chief obstacles to smooth and efficient cross-border payments. They contribute to the regulatory compliance burden across the payment chain, increase the time for cross-border transactions and introduce uncertainties among stakeholders. Project Mandala – a proof-of-concept run by BISIH Singapore Centre, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), the Bank of Korea (BOK), the Central Bank of Malaysia (BNM), and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), with the collaboration of financial institutions – seeks to ease the policy and regulatory compliance burden by automating compliance procedures, providing real-time transaction monitoring and increasing transparency and visibility around country-specific policies. In doing so, it aims to address key challenges identified during Project Dunbar, which developed an experimental multiple central bank digital currency (mCBDC) platform.

Crypto activity and usage hit all-time highs. Crypto has become a key political issue ahead of the U.S. election. Stablecoins have found product-market fit. Infrastructure improvements have increased capacity and drastically reduced transaction costs. DeFi remains popular — and it’s growing. Crypto could solve some of AI’s most pressing challenges. More scalable infrastructure has unlocked new onchain applications.

Firedancer is a new, fully independent validator client developed by the Firedancer team in the C programming language. Firedancer is built with reliability in mind due to its modular architecture, minimal dependencies, and extensive testing process. It proposes a major rewrite of the three functional components of the Solana Labs client: Networking, Runtime, and Consensus. Each level is optimized for maximum performance so the client will operate at a capacity only limited by the validator’s hardware. This differs from the performance limits validators currently face due to software inefficiencies. With Firedancer, Solana will scale with bandwidth and hardware.

As a proof-of-stake blockchain, Solana uses less energy than conventional proof-of-work networks. Less energy consumption means lower carbon emissions. Since the last Energy Use report in December 2023, the Solana network has reduced its carbon footprint by 69% through onchain purchase of carbon credits and innovative biodiversity credits. Users can observe the network’s energy performance directly through a real-time emissions dashboard, recently updated to comply with new Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulations. These efficiencies, coupled with the Solana Foundation’s dedication to sustainability and a burgeoning decentralized environmental sector, make Solana a popular solution for environmental projects.

Ethereum is already a powerful platform for global coordination, but it is still being improved. An ambitious set of improvements will upgrade Ethereum from its current form into a fully scaled, maximally resilient platform. These upgrades are laid out in the Ethereum roadmap. The Ethereum roadmap outlines the specific improvements that will be made to protocol in the future. Overall, the roadmap will bring the following benefits to Ethereum users: (1) Cheaper transaction, (2) Extra security, (3) Better user experience, and (4) Future proofing

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) today announced the expansion of initiatives to scale asset tokenisation for financial services. This includes partnering with global industry associations and financial institutions to drive common asset tokenisation standards in fixed income, foreign exchange (FX) and asset & wealth management. MAS, with international financial institutions, also announced the successful completion of the first phase of the Global Layer One (GL1) initiative and plans to develop standards, market practices and governing principles of foundational digital infrastructure for tokenised assets.

Airdrops involve distributing free tokens to the wallets of active community members or potential users and are a powerful tactic for boosting community engagement, participation, and development. Airdrops, the cornerstone of Web3 marketing strategies for crypto startups, are often deployed alongside liquidity-enhancing events: Token Generation Events (TGE) and Initial Coin Offerings (ICO).

Blockchain networks have long been proposed as new innovative payment rails. However, for many years they have struggled to scale to support secure, high throughput, low-cost transactions that payment companies require, and consumers expect. Over the past year, our team at Visa has been closely following the technical innovation behind blockchain scalability and are encouraged by the significant progress made with both new “layer 2” networks on top of Ethereum, as well as alternative blockchain networks built from the ground up. Our goal has been to deeply understand the technical properties of blockchain networks and experiment with how we can leverage them to help enhance our existing network as well as build new products for commerce and money movement.

Project Orchid is a multi-year, multi-phase exploratory project examining the various design and technical aspects pertinent to digital Singapore dollar, from its functionalities to its interaction with existing payment infrastructures. Though MAS has assessed that there is no urgent need for a retail CBDC in Singapore at this point in time, MAS seeks to facilitate ongoing learning and advance the financial infrastructure in Singapore.