🎆 Today's Web3 News 🎆 ✔️ Bitcoin is trading around $69K, and with growing expectations of an end to the US-Iran war, even as gold, silver, and US stock futures fell, Bitcoin actually rose. This trend seems to once again demonstrate its position as a geopolitical risk hedging asset. Furthermore, Ethereum is currently trading around $2K, and its fear and greed index is at 18, and the aftershocks of Vitalik Buterin's massive ETH sell-off still linger. ✔️ Today's big news is the Nasdaq x Kraken partnership. Nasdaq has partnered with Payward, Kraken's parent company, to build a tokenized stock trading infrastructure. Based on Kraken's xStocks framework, the plan is to create a gateway connecting the permissioned institutional market and the permissionless DeFi ecosystem. This will allow international investors, including those in Europe, to own blockchain-based stocks with real shareholder rights. The actual launch is scheduled for the first half of 2027. It's interesting that ICE and Coinbase also made similar moves in the same week! ✔️ Two FIFA-related issues have surfaced in the NFT space. Swiss Gespa has launched an investigation into the FIFA 2026 World Cup NFT, while FIFA is reportedly building a custom L1 blockchain with Avalanche for its own NFT platform, FIFA Collect. And the Nike vs. StockX NFT trademark lawsuit has finally settled after nearly three years, but the details of the settlement are still undisclosed, so we don't know what it is yet, lol. ✔️ There's some depressing news. NFT Paris and RWA Paris, two of Europe's largest Web3 conferences, have canceled their 2026 events. These events, which had been successful for four consecutive years, seem to have been hit hard by the prolonged crypto market downturn, and it's a bit disappointing because it seems to reflect the industry's sentiment. ㅠㅠ ✔️ There's also news of a DeFi hack. On March 2nd, a smart contract vulnerability was exploited in the decentralized lending protocol Foom Cash, leading to the loss of $2.3 million, but $1.8 million has already been recovered. The issue was that no audits were conducted after 2025, and this case once again reminds us of the importance of auditing. ✔️ Solana is quietly making tremendous progress in its payments infrastructure. According to a Messari report, total payment transaction volume (TPV) will surge 755% year-over-year by 2025, and Visa, Stripe, Worldpay, and Western Union have joined as settlement partners for Solana-based stablecoins. Furthermore, the Alpenglow upgrade, which will significantly improve the consensus mechanism, is scheduled for 2026, which is very exciting! The most impressive news today, personally, seems to be the Nasdaq-Kraken partnership! It feels like TradFi is no longer just a rumor or a distant future, but is becoming a reality. If this trend continues, the very notion of "crypto vs. traditional finance" will eventually become meaningless. In this context, the time for a choice seems to be approaching, where only chains and protocols with real utility will survive.