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xAI officially closed a massive $20 billion Series E round, valuing the company at $230 billion as it accelerates its "Colossus II" infrastructure to compete with OpenAI.

Rain secured a $250 million Series C led by ICONIQ, valuing the stablecoin-powered payment firm at $1.95 billion just months after its Series B.

BlackOpal attracted $200 million in financing anchored by Mars Capital to launch GemStone, a platform for tokenizing Brazilian credit card receivables on the Plume network.

Haven RWA successfully closed its $30 million seed round at a $300 million valuation to expand its on-chain fixed-income market for U.S. Treasury products.

Babylon secured $15 million from a16z crypto to advance its decentralized Bitcoin staking protocol and integrate with Aave by Q2 2026.

Coincheck Group reached a definitive agreement to acquire 3iQ Digital Asset Management, a pioneer in digital asset investment solutions, for approximately $111 million to bolster its institutional asset management capabilities.

Mobileye announced the acquisition of humanoid robotics startup Mee-go in a deal valued at $150 million, aiming to integrate advanced computer vision and mapping technology into general-purpose robotic platforms.

Tres Finance, a leader in Web3 financial data and accounting, was acquired by a strategic partner in a $130 million deal to scale its institutional-grade sub-ledger and automated audit-ready data aggregation services.

Octra successfully launched a $20 million public sale for its Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) focused Layer 1, aiming to fund the next phase of its privacy-preserving network buildout and ecosystem growth.

President Donald Trump officially directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) using their accumulated cash reserves to aggressively lower borrowing costs.

Mortgage rates responded immediately to the intervention, dropping below 6% for the first time in nearly three years, with the 30-year fixed-rate hitting 5.99% on Friday.

From the Feds themselves, check out the rate compression 👇

Jerome Powell confirmed on Sunday that the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, an unprecedented move characterized as a "pretext" for executive pressure on interest rate policy.

This escalation has introduced a "non-standard" governance crisis, forcing institutional investors to reclassify the Fed from a data-driven entity to a politically sensitive one.

Public Markets reacted with immediate volatility to the disclosure, with the Dow initially falling 400 points as investors priced in an "institutional risk premium".

While the S&P 500 and Dow managed to close at record high thanks in part to Alphabet, the underlying "Sell America" trade was visible in a flight to safety; Gold surged to an all-time high of $4,640 per ounce and the Swiss franc climbed as global managers hedged against a potential collapse in Fed independence.

The U.S. labor market continued to moderate in December as the economy added 145,000 jobs, a figure that fell short of economist expectations and signaled a cooling of the post-pandemic hiring surge.

Despite the slower pace of additions, the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%, offering a "Goldilocks" scenario that supports a path for continued, gradual interest rate reductions.

The ruble-pegged stablecoin SBR emerged as a surprise outlier in 2025, outperforming major market leaders with a 500% surge in circulating supply despite heavy international sanctions.