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THE DAILY INDEX

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MARKETS & BUSINESS

TLDR Crypto

TETHER INVESTS IN EIGHT SLEEP, PLANS QVAC INTEGRATION

Tether has announced a strategic investment in Eight Sleep, a sleep fitness and health technology company, marking another step in the stablecoin issuer's ongoing diversification beyond its core USDT business. The partnership centers on integrating QVAC, Tether's edge AI platform designed for on-device, locally-run intelligence, into Eight Sleep's product suite and research pipeline. The collaboration positions QVAC as a commercializable layer for personalized health data processing, with Eight Sleep serving as a go-to-market vehicle for the platform's real-world applications in sleep tracking, recovery, and longevity monitoring.

VIRTUALS PROTOCOL DEBUTS FABRIC FOUNDATION'S $ROBO

Virtuals Protocol debuted its Titan launch mechanism – a new tier designed for projects with established scale entering deep public liquidity – through Fabric Foundation's $ROBO token generation event on Base Chain via Uniswap. Fabric, powered by OpenMind, is building a crypto-native payment, identity, and capital allocation layer for physical robots, applying onchain identity and programmable incentives to enable autonomous economic participation by robotic hardware. The protocol's Coordination Pools allow community participants to fund robot fleet deployment using stablecoins, with employers settling robotic labor costs in $ROBO, positioning the token as the network's primary settlement currency. The initial Uniswap V3 pool was seeded with $250K of $VIRTUAL paired against 0.1% of the total $ROBO supply, establishing baseline liquidity at launch.

HOW CIRCLE'S NANOPAYMENTS WORK

Circle's Nanopayments enables USDC transfers as small as $0.000001 by having buyers sign offchain EIP-3009 authorization messages routed through the Circle Gateway, which aggregates thousands of those signatures and settles them in a single periodic onchain batch transaction, reducing effective gas costs to near-zero. The buyer's initial deposit is the only onchain transaction, with subsequent payments locked against balance in the Gateway and fulfilled immediately upon signature verification, enabling real-time resource delivery via the x402 protocol. The Circle Gateway operates inside an AWS Nitro Enclave TEE, with batch signing keys protected by AWS KMS and inaccessible to Circle personnel, providing a verifiable trust boundary without requiring a decentralized sequencer.

SEC SUBMITS CRYPTO SECURITIES FRAMEWORK TO WHITE HOUSE

The SEC submitted commission-level interpretive guidance to the White House outlining how federal securities laws apply to crypto assets, currently undergoing interagency review at OIRA. The guidance likely focuses on establishing a "token taxonomy" to categorize which crypto assets qualify as securities, affecting how firms register, disclose, and operate. Unlike staff-level statements, commission-level guidance is considered more enforceable and does not require a commission vote. Separately, the CFTC submitted a prediction markets measure to OIRA, with Chairman Selig announcing plans for an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking to set clear standards for event contract markets amid state-federal jurisdictional disputes.

CRYPTO CARD SPEND UP AS ADOPTION EXPANDS BEYOND EMERGING MARKETS

Fireblocks' latest Stablecoin Signals highlights that monthly crypto card spend surpassed $115M in January 2025, up from roughly $25M a year earlier, with new players like Ether.fi gaining traction alongside established providers. The data challenges the narrative that crypto cards are confined to developing regions, showing accelerating adoption across EEA countries and rapid growth in Asia, Europe, and Latin America as providers like Gnosis Pay, RedotPay, and Avici Money scale programs.

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