Bitcoin price rose to $74,000
On March 4, Bitcoin briefly rose above $74,000 for the first time in a month. The asset is currently trading around $72,090, up approximately 6% in 24 hours. Ethereum rose 7.5% to $2,113. The coin climbed above $2,200 but then corrected slightly. Among the top 50 cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin and Zcash saw the biggest gains: DOGE gained more than 8% and settled above $0.09, while ZEC rose 9% to $235, reversing its February decline.
Altcoins approached all-time lows
Around 38% of altcoins are nearing their all-time lows. The situation in the segment is even weaker than after the FTX exchange crash: investors are cutting risky positions, and capital is flowing from the crypto market to stocks and commodities. As a result, altcoins are bearing the brunt of the sell-off and losing market share.
The price decline is accompanied by a decline in interest in the sector. According to Santiment, the number of altcoin mentions on social media has dropped to a two-year low, and global Google search popularity has fallen to an annual low of 4 out of 100.
The native stablecoin USDsui was launched on the Sui network
The Sui L1 blockchain team announced the launch of the Sui Dollar (USDsui), a native stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. First announced in November 2025, the asset was issued through the Bridge platform, which is linked to the payment company Stripe. The coin has already appeared on several major trading platforms and wallets that support the Sui protocol.
Key metrics are not yet available on aggregators—market cap and trading volumes have not yet been disclosed. The developers stated that USDsui was created in compliance with the requirements of the US GENIUS Act. Revenues from the stablecoin will be used to develop the Sui ecosystem through grants and incentive programs.
Tether invests in Utexo to integrate USDT into the Bitcoin blockchain
The startup Utexo raised $7.5 million in a seed round led by Tether, Big Brain Holdings, and Portal Ventures. Franklin Templeton, Maven11 Capital, Fulgur Ventures, Alchemy VC, Ethereal Ventures, and other funds also participated.
The project is developing infrastructure for settlements in native USDT based on Bitcoin. The solution utilizes native channels on the Lightning Network, enabling stablecoin transactions with fixed fees.
According to the team, transfers are atomic and confidential, comply with Bitcoin's security model, and are completed in less than a second. Only encrypted transaction information is recorded on the blockchain, helping to obscure information about fund flows, counterparties, and addresses. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino noted that Utexo's technology has the potential to become a scalable infrastructure for payments with predictable costs, strengthening Bitcoin's role as a global settlement system.
Buterin: Ethereum requires two major reworks of the executive layer
Vitalik Buterin proposed two major changes to the Ethereum execution layer: a transition to a binary state tree and a gradual replacement of the EVM virtual machine. According to him, these components account for over 80% of the network's technical limitations and complicate the work of client solutions with cryptographic proofs.
The transition to a binary structure, described in EIP-7864, proposes abandoning the current Merkle-Patricia tree in favor of a more compact model with a new hash function. This architecture would reduce the number of Merkle branches by approximately four times and reduce the data volume for light clients. Using Blake3 or Poseidon could further speed up proof verification several times over, although the latter requires additional security auditing.
This idea builds on earlier discussions of Verkle Trees and has been revived due to concerns about the resistance of existing cryptography to quantum computing. In parallel, Buterin again proposed considering a transition from the EVM to the open RISC-V architecture, already used by most ZK provers.
Solana Mobile opened its platform to third-party developers
Solana Mobile has opened its Solana Mobile Stack software platform to third-party Android device manufacturers. Developers can now integrate native Web3 functionality directly into any smartphone. According to the company, implementing the toolkit does not interfere with Google Play services or affect security certification. The platform is compatible with MediaTek and Qualcomm chips.
Solana Mobile believes that SMS integration will create an additional monetization model for manufacturers: they will be able to receive a share of transaction fees and staking in the ecosystem. The SKR token is used for incentive distribution. The technology has already been tested on 200,000 Seeker devices. The ecosystem has over 85,000 active wallets per week, and the total transaction volume through these smartphones has exceeded $5 billion.
