That includes a startup called OpenOrigins, which was founded in 2021, and combats fake media by using blockchain technology to verify the authenticity of photos, videos, and other digital content. On Thursday, the company announced it has raised $4.5 million in a seed investment led by Galaxy Interactive and is expanding globally.

The London-based company offers newsrooms the ability to verify the authenticity of digital media in real time and in retrospect. Its point-of-capture software can be installed on a camera or iPhone to establish that a photo or video was in fact taken by a human. It can also be used to comb through extensive archives and validate the originality of existing content. All of this information is then recorded onto the public and immutable blockchain based on Hyperledger Besu—an open-source, Ethereum-compatible framework provided by the Linux foundation. 

OpenOrigins CEO and founder Manny Ahmed developed one of the first deepfake detectors as a PhD student at Cambridge University. He soon realized, however, that people would use detectors to train AI tools to make more convincing deepfake generators. “And that’s exactly what happened,” he said.

Instead, he pivoted to develop an infrastructure that proves content is human-made. “What we try to do is not prove whether something is fake, but rather prove what is real,” Ahmed told Fortune. “We're not doing deepfake detection. We are using a lot of different data points to prove that a particular piece of photo or video is real.” 

The company works with one of the U.K.’s leading media production companies, ITN. With the new funding it is now expanding globally, starting with India and the United States. The company is also launching a marketplace to help these newsrooms effectively license their verified data for AI training.

“We're trying to secure the form of the internet that allows for evidentiary value,” OpenOrigins co-founder Ari Abelson told Fortune. “It's something that's really important in news, which is why we're focusing there but, this is broadly applicable to other industries.”

Abelson says that the technology could be applied to safeguarding insurance companies from fraud as well as verifying the authenticity of dating app profiles and Zoom calls.

Other companies use blockchain technology to certify the originality of digital content, like the Verify protocol, which was developed by the Fox Corps team in collaboration with Polygon Labs, but Ahmed says that his company solves a scalability issue that the competitors don’t.

“We're the only ones who are trying to do authentication of, not just live content gathered in real time, but also of historical content. As far as I'm aware, there isn't a unified solution for both,” he said. 

The founders said they will use the additional funding to expand their commercial team and hire within the United States. 

“The reason why we're so focused on securing archives at this point is because there is a limited time window where that is feasible.” Ahmed said. “Once we reach a point of sophistication where AI videos are functionally indistinguishable from non-AI ones, it's going to be really, really hard for us to retroactively trust those archives.”

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Glow operates a decentralized physical infrastructure network, or DePIN, of solar farms in the United States and India. To encourage the farms on its network to outperform “dirty” energy grids, the founders designed an entire economy based on an incentive model of subsidies and tokens.

“The way it works now is that Glow seeks out solar farms that are borderline viable and gives them just barely enough money to get them over the line for construction,” CEO and cofounder David Vorick said. “And then the financer, the one who's giving out that money, that person is the one who earns all the token rewards.” 

Glow helps struggling solar farms by covering the costs of getting them up and running with money from financiers, “either crypto or private equity investors that see a good case for returns,” Vorick said. He calls this a “recursive subsidy.” Then, the farm must contribute its electricity revenue to an incentive pool to be distributed to other solar farms. 

In order to reward these farms for their work, audits of each farm are performed periodically to assess and verify their output of electricity and Glow carbon credits—Vorick's spin on carbon credits, tax benefits awarded to traditional solar farms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which he says are inefficient.

Each week 175,000 tokens are distributed to the highest-performing farms. Owners of each farm receive the stablecoin USDC for the production of Glow carbon credits and GLW, the native token, for electricity production.  

Usually in solar farming, subsidies are allocated based on output rather than profitability, resulting in money being wasted on profitable solar farms without creating more energy, Vorick says.

“But this recursive subsidy solves that conundrum, and makes it so that any money you spend incentivizing the construction of solar is laser-focused on solar that is just barely able to exist without help, and that means that your subsidy is having a lot more real-world impact,” Vorick said. 

GLW is used to purchase carbon credits and then those tokens are pulled out of circulation, creating price pressure and bringing value to the Glow ecosystem, Vorick says. 

“The Glow economy and the Glow token is backed by the value of the solar assets that are being produced on the protocol,” he said. 

There are 63 operational solar farms on the Glow network, which have produced 365 megawatt-hours of electricity to date. The company plans to onboard a new four-megawatt solar farm in India soon.

This funding round includes $6.5 million of funding for the company and $23.5 million of solar investment. Vorick plans to use the money to scale the company from five megawatts of power to 600 megawatts within the next 18 months and expand into new countries. 

“So long as stakeholder interest in carbon neutrality continues, we think Glow could see massive adoption across multiple markets,” Michael Anderson, cofounder of Framework Ventures, said in a statement.

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This donation follows Ripple’s announcement last week that it had partnered with Miami-based crypto exchange MoonPay to donate $50,000 worth of Ripple’s new stablecoin RLUSD to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation through The Giving Block, “in support of the first responders on the frontlines of the California wildfires.” 

While Ripple has some remote employees in Southern California, the company said, none have been evacuated due to the wildfires.

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Digital asset banks operate much like traditional banks but instead of managing fiat-currencies like the U.S. dollar, they hold digital assets such Bitcoin on behalf of customers. Some traditional banks are beginning to add similar services in an effort to attract clients who are invested in crypto.

“We’re not a traditional bank coming from the fiat world. We are looking at the market from the digital asset space and then integrating it to traditional banking,” Sygnum cofounder and CEO Mathias Imbach told Fortune. “We've always said since the get-go, that we believe the future has heritage, and if you want to have broad adoption of this technology, we need to accept that.”

Sygnum, founded in 2017, focuses on institutional and accredited private investors, providing banking services including lending, brokerage, asset management, and tokenization.

Imbach said he believes this funding round attracted investors because of the traction the company has had over the last year. With the help of new crypto exchange-traded products, derivatives, and traditional securities, Sygnum says its revenue through the third quarter of 2024—mostly from client fees and interest—surpassed 2023's revenue for the entire year. The company did not disclose any additional details about its revenue.

The bank manages about $5 billion for over 1,700 clients in more than 60 countries, the bank said. The total number of trades with the bank increased over 1,000% last year, driven by its platform that lets other financial institutions offer crypto services to clients.

Imbach said the company puts a strong emphasis on maintaining regulatory compliance in all of the countries in which it operates, obtaining crypto licenses throughout Europe and Asia. However, it doesn’t have a license to operate in the United States. 

Imbach said Sygnum pitches itself as a sort of safe haven, with “stringent compliance checks.” Following the 2022 collapse of crypto exchange FTX due to mismanagement of funds, Sygnum says it tries to gain customer trust through balance sheet transparency.

“If your crypto assets are with us, they’re fully segregated from our balance sheet,” Imbach said. “So whatever happens to the bank, even in an unlikely scenario of a bankruptcy, these assets could never be part of, for example, in the US, the equivalent of a Chapter 11 proceeding.”

Competitors include global banking groups that offer crypto services like Revolut, Mercury, and Monzo. 

Sygnum will use the money raised in this round to expand its presence throughout Europe and open an office in Hong Kong. It will also use the funds to add new products and make acquisitions. 

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In an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, Ripple president Monica Long said customers “can expect to see more availability and more announcements coming soon.” Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins Jack Mcdonald confirmed that comment in an email to Fortune, saying, “In 2025, we are continuing to focus on global expansion by building additional partnerships with leading exchanges and integrations across new blockchains and decentralized applications.”

Ripple’s stablecoin RLUSD—a type of cryptocurrency whose value is designed to stay in line with the U.S. dollar—premiered on Dec. 17 on Uphold, Bitso, MoonPay, Archax, and CoinMENA, after receiving long-awaited regulatory approval from the New York Department of Financial Services. 

Listing RLUSD on larger exchanges like Coinbase or Binance would make the stablecoin accessible to a broader range of investors in the U.S. and abroad, accelerating the rate of adoption. 

"Since the launch of RLUSD, less than a month ago, we’ve seen incredible momentum,” McDonald said in the email without providing further details. 

On Wednesday, RLUSD was introduced on the oldest crypto exchange Bitstamp. While Bitstamp is smaller than Coinbase or Binance, CEO of Bitstamp US Bobby Zagotta, told Fortune that RLUSD has had a “fast start” on the exchange and had attracted “meaningful volume” within 24 hours of its launch. 

“It has all of the things that we would look for in a stablecoin project.… Ripple is all about moving value from one place to another, and this is another means to make that easy, cheap and fast,” Zagotta said. 

Stablecoins have become what some in the industry call crypto’s “killer app”—or an indispensable part of the crypto economy. Stablecoins are often used to settle cross-border payments and as a store of value in countries where the local currency is vulnerable to inflation. Because of this, financial services companies are racing to develop their own version of the dollar-pegged asset, to collect transaction fees and interest. 

PayPal, one of the largest payment companies, launched its own stablecoin in 2023. However, PayPal and other stablecoin issuers face harsh odds. Tether and Circle, the two largest stablecoin companies, have dominated 90% of the market. While Tether’s USDT has attracted a market cap of $137 billion, PayPal’s PYUSD currently sits at just $500 million. 

While it is too soon to know the long-term success of RLUSD, Long said, “We see a really strong growth trajectory for our payment solution and with that, Ripple U.S. dollar will have a premium role.”

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"The cost of running a crypto business is an order of magnitude lower, because you get to leverage so much of the public infrastructure, and these public blockchains do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to settlement and transactions…There's a view of crypto as a technology layer that is going to be really accelerated once people understand that there is a huge efficiency advantage," Bitcoin, still lags far behind conventional websites when it comes to ease and convenience. Even as DeFi platforms have become relatively more user friendly, the barrier remains far too high for mass adoption. 

The good news is that a breakthrough is on the way. It will come with the help of fintech companies, which have long excelled at user-friendly design and are taking a growing interest in DeFi solutions.

How fintechs will drive onchain finance

Fintech companies have engineering and development cultures that align more closely with tech companies than traditional financial institutions. Their agility and openness to innovation make them ideal early adopters of DeFi solutions, which operate natively and transparently on decentralized networks. Many DeFi networks and services are open-source, giving development teams full visibility and access into the underlying code.

We’re already seeing the lines between traditional fintech and crypto blur. Centralized exchanges, like Coinbase and Binance, have offered debit cards while more fintech companies, like Revolut and Robinhood, are building or acquiring crypto onramps and exchanges. This convergence highlights fintechs’ unique ability to adapt quickly, positioning them as the ideal bridge to bring crypto closer to mainstream users.

Other examples of traditional fintech companies seeing the promise of crypto include Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge and PayPal’s $PyUSD, both of which demonstrate how stablecoins are enhancing payments and enabling tokenized deposit accounts. Very few people now doubt the outsized role stablecoins are expected to play in evolving payments infrastructure. Similarly, DeFi protocols are ready to serve as the backend for an ever-growing array of financial services that fintechs offer to users. By combining the consumer-focused expertise of fintech with DeFi’s transformative infrastructure, this convergence will unlock crypto’s next era of growth.

What Fintechs can gain from DeFi

Fintech companies rarely own the financial infrastructures that power their products. Instead, they plug into TradFi companies that own proprietary and closed-source financial infrastructures. This dependency limits their control and increases costs. DeFi offers an appealing alternative: open financial infrastructure that is publicly accessible, user-owned rather than privately owned, transparent, and cost-effective for businesses and users alike. 

But what is open financial infrastructure and how is it connected to DeFi? Most DeFi products and services operate autonomously on public blockchains with open, publicly-visible code, and transactions that occur transparently on public blockchains. They are often supported by open-source development communities that minimize redundant work and streamline integration processes through shared code and infrastructure. 

All of this offers fintech firms a competitive advantage against slower-moving incumbents. It can also make development cheaper, translating to lower costs and higher margins over time. Savings may even be passed on to customers in the form of lower fees.

Building products on open infrastructure also offers fintechs and their customers the ability to take advantage of network effects that come from plugging into larger networks. By tapping into existing international marketplaces via open infrastructure  Fintechs companies can offer their users cheaper, more efficient services. Whether you are talking about trading, borrowing, lending or other types of marketplaces, more buyers and sellers tend to lead to more accurate, and lower, prices for all participants. 

Perhaps most importantly, there are now DeFi products that give companies an unprecedented level of control over how they build on and interact with this open financial infrastructure. With the most flexible, customizable DeFi products, companies are able to manage their unique risk tolerance and meet all compliance requirements without having to build siloed, proprietary systems from scratch. Much of DeFi’s infrastructure is already designed to be a shared foundation for a variety of companies simultaneously, serving use cases including FX, yield-bearing accounts, lending, and more. 

Permissionless and immutable DeFi protocols will allow fintechs to own more of their financial tech stack–beyond distribution into “manufacturing”–in a tech-native way.

The path to towards fintech-driven mass adoption of DeFi is far from clear, of course. There are still challenges when it comes to regulation and ensuring users can embrace DeFi in a secure way. Meanwhile, legacy financial firms are likely to try and block DeFi adoption in order to protect their traditional business lines. 

But as fintechs begin to leverage DeFi for a growing number of services, its advantages will become too obvious to ignore. The long-term result is easy to anticipate: a transformed financial system that is more open, transparent, and efficient.

Paul Frambot is the CEO and co-founder of Morpho, a DeFi lending protocol with $6 billion in total value locked.The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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A federal judge denied a motion from Battle Born Investments, a Nevada-based venture capital firm, to prevent the government from selling $6.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, according to a court filing from the Northern District of California on Dec. 30. The VC firm had argued that they had the right to the assets. The news was originally reported by DB News. The Department of Justice declined to comment further.

The legal decision marks the end of the road for a years-long legal battle over 69,370 Bitcoins, seized in 2020 from an unidentified hacker referred to in court documents as “Individual X.” While the hacker’s identity remains unknown, federal agents were able to trace the Bitcoin in their digital wallet back to the Silk Road, an infamous darknet drug trafficking website that was taken down in 2013. 

Federal Bitcoin auctions 

While the December court decision doesn’t expressly direct the government to sell the Bitcoin, it has become customary for the U.S. Marshals Service to auction off cryptocurrency seized by federal agencies like the FBI and the IRS, as it does with any other asset like real estate, cars and even planes.

If the government chooses to sell the Bitcoin, it would be one of the largest government liquidations of crypto ever—and could trigger a significant backlash among investors, who worry that a liquidation of this size could flood the market and tank Bitcoin’s price. However, in the past, the government has purposefully staggered auctions to avoid doing just that. 

While it is unclear exactly how much Silk Road-related Bitcoin the government has seized over the years, the government has held multiple auctions to sell some of those tokens. Last month, blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence pointed out that crypto wallets known to be owned by the U.S. government moved $1.9 billion worth of Silk Road Bitcoin to crypto exchange Coinbase. The move frightened some investors who took it as a sign the government was preparing to sell. However, it could be a part of the government's contract with the exchange to manage their digital assets which was announced in July. 

A potential government sale of Bitcoin comes as the election of Donald Trump—a crypto booster—ignites calls for a strategic national Bitcoin reserve as a hedge against inflation. The president-elect has urged investors to “never sell your Bitcoin,” and has supported Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis’ legislation that would require the government to purchase one million Bitcoin over the course of five years. 

“I am announcing that if I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration… to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S. government currently holds or acquires into the future,” Trump said at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville, TN, last year. 

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Apple’s savings account is notable both for the rate, which is one of the highest around, and as another signal of how far the company is leaning into the financial services world. To pull this off, it has extended a tie-up with Goldman Sachs, which is also behind Apple’s credit card, in an arrangement that lets Apple become a big player in the world of personal finance while dodging most of the responsibilities that go with that.

“I think Apple can eke out the economics of the bank without actually becoming a bank. They can leverage with Goldman to power all of these financial services and be the conduit to the consumer for a lot of these things, brand it as Apple, take that high-margin cut, and offload all of this sort of underlying responsibility to Goldman,” the CEO of payments company Paddle told the Financial Times.

Nice work if you can get it. Apple is getting all the upside of being a bank without all the regulatory misery. Meanwhile, the company has found a new way to strengthen the golden handcuffs that keep people tied to its iPhones even as they grow frustrated with its monopolistic behavior.

All of this is ironic because Apple does little in the way of innovation these days. Its Apple Pay service is a good product but nothing groundbreaking, and the company has had no part in major efforts to reinvent the underlying technology of payments. Needless to say, it is actively hostile to crypto.

This has got to irk Coinbase, which has been testing all sorts of interesting consumer finance products and has for years jumped through regulators’ hoops in a bid to introduce them to market. But regulators have repeatedly slammed the door in its face—preferring to deal with giant incumbents like Apple and Goldman Sachs. This is understandable given the events of the past year, but it’s unlikely to benefit consumers in the long term.

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

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While many financial firms let customers buy and sell crypto, they typically do so through so-called hosted wallets, which are ultimately controlled by the firm. Noncustodial wallets, by contrast, give the wallet holder ultimate control over their crypto by means of a series of code words known as a seed phrase.

In the case of Cogni, customers set up the wallet where they can send and receive Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a handful of other cryptocurrencies as well as NFTs. They control the wallet via the seed phrase they receive, but can also use facial ID.

While the wallet is located within the Cogni app next to other services, it’s not connected to the customer’s bank account, and the app does not—for now—offer access to an exchange to buy crypto. In an interview, Cogni CEO Archie Ravishankar told Fortune that the company plans to tie the wallet to bank accounts in the future and to let customers buy and sell crypto.

Cogni launched in 2020 as a lifestyle brand that offered users discounted gift cards for companies like Adidas and Southwest Airlines. The company began leaning into crypto and Web3 earlier this year.

Cogni would not publicly disclose how many customers it has, and it is not a familiar name even among neobanks. But its announcement is significant in that it appears to be the first FDIC-insured bank to offer a noncustodial wallet, which could lead others to follow suit. (Fintech giants Robinhood and PayPal both offer noncustodial wallets but aren’t technically banks.)

Like other neobanks, Cogni relies on a “rent-a-charter” arrangement with an established bank, paying the bank to come under its regulatory umbrella, in this case, Community Federal Savings Bank in Queens, New York.

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A lot have lost money, too.

It makes identifying the next big trend for increasing the value of both your cryptocurrency holdings and your irl currency—aka hard cash—essential, if at least just to protect your assets. 

David Lawant, director of research at Bitwise Asset Management, has his eye on the next big thing: “For the industry as a whole, we expect staking to become a big business,” says Lawant, who co-authored the CFA Institute Research Foundation's book on crypto. His firm has $1.3 billion of assets under management.

Some crypto investors are already earning an annual percentage yield of over 1,000% by “staking,” and earning a huge amount of passive income along the way.

So what exactly is staking anyway, and why is Lawant so sure it will become a big deal? And what does it have to do with the much-anticipated Ethereum “merge” that is also coming down the pike?

What’s ‘staking’?

Staking gets its name because it can only be done with cryptocurrencies that run on proof-of-stake blockchains.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether currently run on the proof-of-work model, in which miners must complete complex puzzles to validate transactions and create new coins. This process requires a huge amount of computer power and is often criticized due to its environmental impact. 

The greener option is proof-of-stake, and Lawant is convinced staking is part of the wave of crypto’s future.

With proof-of-stake, users validate transactions according to how many coins they contribute, or stake. In return for staking more coins, users have a higher likelihood of being chosen to validate transactions on the network and earn a reward.

This reward can include an annual percentage yield, and the exact percentage depends on which blockchain is used.

For example, once Ethereum, the blockchain powering Ether, migrates to a proof-of-stake model due to an upgrade slated for this year, validators who want to stake Ether can earn yields in return for their support. That’s the “merge” that the Ether community is really excited about. The more Ether a validator stakes, the higher likelihood they’ll be picked for a reward.

Currently, Ethereum has both a proof-of-work and proof-of-stake chain running in parallel. While both chains have validators, only the proof-of-work chain currently processes users’ transactions. Once the merge is complete, Ethereum's blockchain will shift fully to the proof-of-stake chain, called the Beacon Chain, making proof-of-work mining obsolete.

The Beacon Chain already allows those who want to stake Ether to support the network and earn yields, “which today are at around 4% to 5%,” Lawant said. “Once the merge is implemented, these yields are expected to expand significantly because stakers will start receiving additional income.” 

Some predict staking rewards of 7% to 12% post-merge.

Other blockchains, like Solana and Cardano, are already running under proof-of-stake. One could earn an estimated reward of 5.8% per year to stake Solana’s SOL token, while doing so with Polygon’s MATIC could result in an estimated reward of 19.5%.

Each blockchain has different requirements to stake, along with different risks associated with doing so. 

This process essentially bets on the viability of the cryptocurrency being staked, which ties into the extreme amount of risk. As The Business of Business reported, “These rewards often come as tokens of the cryptocurrency itself, and if the underlying coin becomes worthless, your staking rewards become worthless too.”

Sometimes, there are restrictions on how soon you can take out your cryptocurrency after staking, certain penalties for not actively validating transactions, a minimum amount needed to stake, etc. 

Nonetheless, investors are still giving it a shot.

Some cryptocurrency exchanges have also cited income made from staking.

“You can already spot early glimpses of that in the earnings results of companies like Coinbase, which cites staking as one of its leading products aside from crypto trading,” Lawant said.

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