Hong Kong has not issued its first stablecoin licences by the previously expected end-of-March target, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority said the licensing work is still progressing and announcements will come in due course. The HKMA's public register continued to show no licensed stablecoin issuers at the time of writing.

Three crypto market-making executives extradited from Singapore appeared in federal court in Oakland on Monday, as US prosecutors expanded a wash-trading case to 10 foreign nationals tied to four firms. The US Justice Department said the matter traces conduct back to 2018 and alleges coordinated trading used to inflate token prices and volumes; the broader crackdown grew out of an undercover operation unsealed in October 2024.

Tether has reportedly hired KPMG to carry out its first full independent audit of USDT’s financial statements, with PwC assisting on internal system preparation. The report comes after Tether said Tuesday it had engaged a Big Four firm for an inaugural audit, and as USDT’s circulating supply sits at about $185 billion.

Resolv Labs said its collateral pool remained fully intact after a Sunday exploit disrupted USR’s issuance mechanism and knocked the stablecoin off its peg. The attacker minted 80 million unbacked USR, sending the price as low as $0.14 before it rebounded to $0.42 at the time of writing. Several DeFi protocols moved to limit exposure, while onchain tracking suggested most of the proceeds were swapped into ETH.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty fell about 7.7% on March 20, lowering the metric to 133.79 trillion at block 941,472 and easing conditions for miners that remain online. The reset followed slower block production over the prior 2,016 blocks, with average block times around 12 minutes 36 seconds. Listed miners are also increasingly shifting capacity toward AI and high-performance computing as competition for power and data-center resources grows.

Ethereum wallet thomasg.eth rebuilt a roughly $19.5 million ETH position over the past week, spanning spot ETH, WETH and Aave-deposited ETH, capped by a fresh $3 million buy on March 20. The buying coincided with three straight US spot Ether ETF net outflow days totaling $55.7 million (March 18), $136.4 million (March 19) and $42 million (March 20). Separately, Bitmine chair Tom Lee said this week he believes an ETH bottom is forming and pointed to ETH's realized price near $2,241.

On March 16, Australia's Senate Economics Legislation Committee recommended passing the Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025, which would bring digital asset and tokenized custody platforms under the Australian Financial Services Licence regime. The proposal would classify many centralized exchanges and tokenization custodians as financial products, impose ASIC custody, settlement and disclosure standards, and exempt only smaller providers and certain public blockchain infrastructure. Industry participants, including Ripple and Coinbase, have raised concerns over the scope of "factual control" and the risk of debanking while broadly welcoming the move toward clearer rules.

South Korea's Deputy Prime Minister Koo Yun-cheol ordered a cross-agency inspection of seized crypto asset management after the National Tax Service exposed a hardware wallet recovery phrase in a press release photo on Thursday. The leak led to the loss of roughly 4 million Pre-Retogeum (PRTG) tokens valued at about 6 billion won, and follows an earlier custody failure involving 22 BTC allegedly misplaced by Seoul's Gangnam police.

A U.S. federal judge in New York ruled on Thursday that Binance cannot compel U.S. customers to arbitrate claims tied to tokens purchased before Feb. 20, 2019. Judge Andrew Carter Jr. held that users lacked adequate notice of Binance.com's 2019 terms, keeping the Williams v. Binance class action in open court rather than private arbitration in Singapore.