Project Progress

Visa announces an expansion of its partnership with Bridge, a subsidiary of Stripe, planning to promote stablecoin cards in over 100 countries by 2026 and to push for on-chain settlement. This initiative will facilitate mainstream adoption of stablecoins and enhance payment convenience. Bridge is also testing the efficiency of blockchain settlement, aiming to transform traditional financial processes. This move reflects how payment giants are accelerating integration with digital currencies.

Northern Trust launches tokenized share classes, marking its entry into the digital asset market. These shares are blockchain "mirror records" of short-term government debt instruments, initially available to investment clients of the New York bank.

PANews March 4 News, stablecoin issuer Circle announced that its ultra-micro payment service "Nanopayments" is now live on the testnet, supporting ultra-micro USDC transactions as low as $0.000001, with zero Gas fees and AI agent support.

Avalanche Foundation launches the $40 million Retro9000 initiative's "C-Chain Round" in March 2026, with scoring based on actual network usage and AVAX burned through transaction fees, offering rewards to the top 40 projects.

The total supply of PI tokens on the Pi Network mainnet has exceeded 9 billion, with a daily mapping speed of 50 million. There are 17.7 million KYC-verified users who have completed over 16 million migrations. The KYC verifier reward system is in final testing and is expected to go live by the end of March 2026. Some users remain cautious about the reward timeline; the actual application and ecosystem growth will influence the long-term prospects of Pi Network.

Key Takeaways: Enrique Lores officially begins taking charge of Chairman cum CEO of PayPal. He commits to tighten the execution and pay more strongly to focus in a severely competitive fintech market. The leadership change happens when Paypal is fostering its areas of payment, crypto and

Aave founder Stani Kulechov on X platform reviewed Marc Zeller's contributions to the Aave ecosystem over the past seven years, highlighting the impact of ACI on the incentive program and protocol growth. Kulechov confirmed that the protocol will continue to operate normally, and the incentive program will remain unaffected, stating that Aave Labs will collaborate with other DAO service providers to ensure a smooth transition for the community.

MARA Vice President of Investor Relations Robert Samuels clarified that the rumors about MARA selling most of its Bitcoin reserves are false, emphasizing that the company will expand its Bitcoin strategy to adapt to the market rather than liquidate its reserves.

A16z Crypto criticizes that most virtual machines named "ZK" do not actually provide true zero-knowledge privacy protection, and points out that the misuse of terminology has become an issue. They introduced Jolt zkVM's new solution NovaBlindFold, which achieves real zero-knowledge privacy through the creation of "blind proofs" without the need for expensive packaging processes, meeting market demand for privacy solutions.

MARA Holdings Vice President Robert Samuels recently clarified the rumors regarding the company's shift to a Bitcoin reduction strategy. He stated that the provisions mentioned in the 2026 10-K filing only authorize discretionary trading and are not a forced liquidation. MARA currently holds 53,822 Bitcoins and is diversifying its business through acquisitions like Exaion, but maintaining a long-term Bitcoin holding strategy remains its core focus.

Gate News Update, March 4th, according to CoinMarketCap data, as of press time, RIVER (River) is trading at $18.22, up 22.29% in the past 24 hours. The price reached a high of $19.32 and a low of $8.57. The 24-hour trading volume is $52.3 million. The current market capitalization is approximately $357 million, an increase of $65.1 million from yesterday. ## Recent Important News about RIVER: 1️⃣ **Multiple Strategic Financings Boost Market Confidence** River has recently received strategic support from several well-known investment institutions. Tron DAO Ventures injected $8 million to expand the Chain Abstraction infrastructure, and Maelstrom Fund (founded by Arthur Hayes) also made

PANews March 4 News, according to The Block, transportation trade finance provider TCS Blockchain announced the integration of PayPal USD (PYUSD) to offer same-day financing and on-chain settlement for freight invoices. Truck drivers can exchange invoices for TCS tokens, then convert them into PYUSD stablecoins, thereby avoiding the 30-180 day payment terms and over 30% revenue loss associated with traditional factoring companies. The company states that this solution can reduce costs by 90%, and it is expected that the annual transaction volume will exceed $1 billion by 2026.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Shanghai have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to advance the Project Ensemble initiative, aimed at integrating the trade finance market and enhancing digital applications. This collaboration leverages blockchain technology to address trade data interoperability and financial services, while promoting Hong Kong's role as an international financial center. At the same time, Hong Kong is pushing forward digital asset policies and stablecoin regulation, with the goal of strengthening its digital economy and attracting overseas investment, gradually moving toward the machine economy era of 2026.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of Near Protocol, predicts that AI agents will become the primary users of blockchain in the future, serving as the front end while blockchain acts as the invisible back end for online activities.

PANews March 4 News, according to Cointelegraph, 1inch Network has upgraded its platform to enhance user experience and accelerate Swap transaction speeds. This upgrade has reduced the median execution time for Swap transactions from 26 seconds to 14 seconds.

Ripple is expanding its enterprise blockchain platform with integrated stablecoin payments, custody, and global liquidity tools, positioning itself as a one-stop infrastructure provider as institutions accelerate adoption of regulated digital asset solutions worldwide. Ripple Announces Unified

SoFi Technologies and Mastercard have partnered to allow instant settlements using SoFiUSD, a fully cash-backed stablecoin. This integration enhances global payments and aims to expand stablecoin adoption through various use cases, including treasury apps and cross-border transactions.

A16z Crypto releases a technical update, pointing out the industry's misuse of the "zero-knowledge" concept and emphasizing that a true zkVM must possess zero-knowledge properties, not just simplicity. As privacy demands increase, mixing concepts becomes problematic. A16z enhances the privacy capabilities of Jolt zkVM by introducing the NovaBlindFold folding scheme.

_MARA Holdings has expanded its 2026 BTC treasury policy to allow potential Bitcoin reserve sales. The move follows a volatile year marked by losses and rising costs._ MARA Holdings, the largest public Bitcoin miner by BTC held,

Hidden Road’s NSCC listing links traditional clearing rails with XRPL-based institutional settlement. Ripple plans to migrate Hidden Road’s multi-trillion-dollar post-trade flows onto the XRP Ledger. XRPL expands institutional use cases while developers warn users about rising NFT and