Largest Crypto Acquisition To Date

Good Morning & Happy Sunday!
U.S. stocks rose Thursday after President Trump announced a preliminary trade deal framework with the U.K., the first major agreement since the U.S. imposed global tariffs earlier this year. Though no formal deal was signed, Trump indicated that a 10% tariff on U.K. goods would remain, possibly lower than future deals with other countries.
Markets were further buoyed by optimism over upcoming U.S.-China trade talks this weekend in Switzerland and the Trump administration’s move to lift chip restrictions imposed during the Biden era, boosting tech stocks.
Bitcoin continues to hold strong over $100K while Ethereum finally pumped slightly over $2K - still a far cry from its $4K all time high. The rest of the markets saw a boost thanks to bitcoin as well as some of the positive news circulating the space, the first of which is a major acquisition by two massive crypto companies. Read more on that in the news section. And what is a 402 error and why on earth should you care? Finally, check out the latest gains in the BIR portfolio. Enjoy!

Crypto Acquisitions: Deribit & Coinbase

Coinbase has agreed to acquire Dubai-based crypto derivatives exchange Deribit for $2.9 billion, marking the largest deal in the crypto industry to date. The deal includes $700 million in cash and 11 million Coinbase shares, and is expected to close by year-end. This move aims to expand Coinbase's international presence and strengthen its position in the global crypto derivatives market, challenging major players like Binance. Deribit processed over $1 trillion in trading volume last year and currently has $30 billion in open interest.
Coinbase views the acquisition as a strategic step that diversifies revenue, boosts profitability, and supports international growth. Deribit, known for its profitability, will bring spot, futures, perpetuals, and options trading under the Coinbase brand. The deal also comes amid increasing M&A activity in the crypto sector, spurred by favorable U.S. regulatory momentum. Coinbase maintains strong financial flexibility, with $8.5 billion in cash, allowing room for further acquisitions.
As mentioned above, this is by far the largest crypto acquisition to date, with the top listed below.

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The Web’s Missing Money Layer Is Finally Here — Meet HTTP 402

The internet’s value exploded once common protocols enabled content to move seamlessly and instantly across the globe. The next great leap may come when payments can do the same. Just as HTTP unlocked seamless information sharing, a new standard: h402 which aims to do for payments what HTTP did for hypertext. If adopted widely, h402 could become the economic backbone of the web, enabling software agents to transact for compute, storage, data, and more with zero human intervention. Think of it as the difference between reading a web page and paying for it, automatically, in the same request.
h402 is the long-awaited answer to a void left in the early architecture of the web. Thirty-five years ago, the HTTP 402 status code “Payment Required” was reserved but never implemented. As cloud apps, APIs, and now autonomous agents took over, this missing monetary primitive became increasingly glaring. Developers cobbled together solutions like API keys, credit dashboards, prepaid tokens, and crypto gateways, each solving a local billing problem but failing to deliver a universal payment rail. h402 proposes a fix by building payment directly into the fabric of HTTP.
At its core, h402 is a header-based protocol that makes paying for digital services as seamless as calling them. Every HTTP request can now quote a price, authorize a transaction using a crypto wallet, and settle on-chain — all inside the same interaction. The protocol is chain-plural, supporting Bitcoin, Lightning, Ethereum, Solana, and any others that follow. It’s deterministic, so every step in the payment lifecycle is audit-ready. And it’s extensible, allowing for new pricing schemes like subscriptions or streaming payments as the ecosystem evolves.
Here’s how it works. When an agent, say, a trading bot or LLM assistant pings an endpoint, it receives a 402 Payment Required response. This response contains a signed quote with details like the amount, token, network, expiry, and pay-to address. The client then signs an authorization artifact using its wallet, rebroadcasts the request with that proof, and once verified and optionally confirmed on-chain, the server downgrades the status to 200 OK, delivering the content. By embedding payment capabilities directly into the HTTP protocol, h402 eliminates the need for traditional credit card systems and external payment platforms, facilitating seamless, machine-native transactions at the speed of the web.
This unlocks a sweeping new class of interactions. Agents can now rent compute by the millisecond or storage by the gigabyte-hour, without batching invoices or preloading credits. In AI, this enables LLM swarms to pay per inference across specialized models, optimizing both latency and cost. In DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure), drones and robots can pay per meter flown or per watt consumed. And in content, readers can pay by the paragraph or per document, replacing the blunt instrument of monthly subscriptions.
The infrastructure is lean enough to run at the edge. A basic gateway using the open-source h402 package can be implemented in under 100 lines of code. There’s no need for PCI compliance, OAuth flows, or complex user management. And because all steps emit hash-stable JSON artifacts, retries and audits require no persistent state, a vital feature for scaling across autonomous agents and stateless services.
Perhaps most significantly, h402 doesn’t require buying into a single blockchain or vendor. Unlike Coinbase’s x402, which assumes EIP-2612-compatible tokens like USDC, h402 supports a wider range of flows including Bitcoin’s PSBTs, Solana delegated spends, and Lightning invoices. It adds support for confirmation-based validation, fallback polling systems, and non-permit tokens like USDT, making it far more suitable for real-world applications.
If it succeeds, h402 won’t just be a better way to pay. It will be the foundation for a world in which software, not just people becomes an economic actor. A world where AI agents pay each other to run queries, pull data, and optimize decisions, all without waiting for credit approvals or invoicing cycles. Just like HTTP turned the internet into an open book, h402 could turn it into an open marketplace.

Portfolio

Crypto had a strong week with Bitcoin closing in on $100,000 and DeFi TVL moving back above $100 billion. In our portfolio, the standout performer was AAVE, which climbed 12.5%, a move supported by a wave of bullish news including a major uptick in total value locked, the rollout of a $50 million token buyback program, and its expansion to new Layer 1 ecosystems. This surge positioned AAVE as a clear leader in the DeFi rebound, signaling renewed institutional and developer interest in decentralized lending markets...