Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team. Welcome back to your weekly briefing.

Here's where we are:

* BTC is holding around $67K with the broader market steady near ~$2.3T. Polymarket odds for BTC reaching up $75K in February sit at 15%.

* Institutions kept averaging into the drawdown: BitMine bought 45,759 ETH ($90M), while Strategy added 2,486 BTC ($168M).

* Now, DeFi had an interesting week. Strong announcements (BlackRock x Uniswap, Apollo x Morpho), but the sector hasn’t seen a meaningful bid outside of MORPHO itself, which is up ~37% on the week. So we're looking at positive catalysts, but the market isn't rewarding the sector broadly yet. Keep that in mind.

* Onchain infrastructure keeps growing regardless of price action. This is what I always tell people to watch. Hyperliquid is doing ~$5B in daily perp volume with ~$5B in open interest. More than Coinbase’s. Prediction markets are holding strong too: Polymarket and Kalshi combined for over $2.4B in weekly volume, with monthly notional staying above $13B even outside election cycles.

So the setup right now? Regulatory clarity advancing, protocols shipping, price sideways. That’s where we are.

Our highlights this week:

* Stripe-owned Bridge secured conditional OCC [RELEASE]

* BVNK secures MiCA Licence in Malta [RELEASE]

* SEC’s new rule is bullish for stablecoins

* Apollo bets on on-chain lending via Morpho

* Citi completes a tokenization PoC on Solana

* Kraken Plugs Into Wall Street’s Chat Network

Let’s jump in 👇

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Top Boardroom Reads

* Crypto Asset Custody Basics for Retail Investors (U.S. SEC)

* Everything is Market (Jesse Walden)

* How treasury innovation drives better business outcomes (Adyen and BCG)

* Stablecoins vs. Tokenized Deposits: The Narrow Banking Debate Revisited (FRB of NY)

* Tokenised Money: Use Cases, Interoperability and Regulation (CCAF)

* Stablecoin Utility Report 2026 (BVNK)

* Stablecoins: The Bridge Between Traditional Finance and Digital Assets (KPMG)

Top Signals This Week

Regulatory progress

SEC staff dropped the net-capital haircut on payment stablecoins from 100% to just 2%, bringing them in line with money-market funds. That’s a big deal for broker-dealers — it removes a major barrier to actually holding stablecoins on their books. Commissioner Peirce called the old 100% charge “unnecessarily punitive.” [Peirce statement]

On top of that, the White House has set a March 1 deadline to break the stablecoin-yield impasse that’s stalling the CLARITY Act. A third closed-door session between banks and crypto reps went down Thursday — the White House signaled limited rewards will stay in the next draft, and banks are working on compromise language, but still no handshake. [CoinDesk coverage]

Bridge wins OCC approval for a national trust bank

On February 12, 2026, Stripe-owned stablecoin platform Bridge received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency(OCC) to establish a federally chartered national trust bank. If the charter is finalized, Bridge will be able to custody digital assets, issue stablecoins, and manage their reserves under direct federal oversight across all 50 United States. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Stripe is the dominant global payments infrastructure provider processing $1.4 trillion in 2024 (roughly 1.3% of global GDP), embedded in over a million live businesses worldwide. It is now building Tempo, a purpose-built blockchain designed specifically for payments, and if Bridge secures full OCC approval, Stripe will have the federal license to issue its own stablecoin positioning it as a credible challenger to USDT ($184B market cap) and USDC ($73B market cap), backed not by a crypto-native startup but by the company already moving more money annually than most nations’ GDP.

🔒 PRO Insight:

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Citi completes a tokenization PoC on Solana

On February 13, 2026, Citigroup completed a proof of concept (PoC) tokenizing a bill of exchange on the Solana blockchain through its Trade and Working Capital Solutions division, working with PwC and the Solana Foundation. The pilot simulated the full lifecycle of the instrument using synthetic data: issuance, financing, distribution, and settlement. By converting the bill into a digital token, the bank embedded payment amounts, counterparties, and maturity dates...

166: Apollo bought 9% of a DeFi protocol