Get your daily, bite-sized digest of blockchain and crypto news today – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s news.

Crypto market is green today
The crypto market turned somewhat green today. Over the past 24 hours, the global?cryptocurrency market capitalization?has remained unchanged, currently standing at $3.36 trillion.

At the time of writing, the daily crypto trading volume is $114 billion.

The majority of the top 100 coins per market cap recorded price increases.

When it comes to the top 10 coins, only one fell over the past day.?BNB?is down 5.8% to the price of $666.

The rest of the list is up between?Bitcoin (BTC)’s?0.9% and?XRP’s?13.1%. BTC currently trades at $97,099, while XRP changes hands at $2.75

At the same time,?Ethereum (ETH)’s?price increased by 1.8%, currently trading at $2,703.

The rest of this list is up between 3% and 6%.

Peter Thiel-backed Plasma Raises $24M for Stablecoin-Focused Blockchain
Plasma, a blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin payments, secured $24 million in funding. The team raised $20 million in a Series A led by crypto-native venture capital firm?Framework Ventures.

According?to the press release, this Series A follows a $4 million investment from early backers including?Bitfinex, Paolo Ardoino, Peter Thiel, Cobie, and Zaheer Ebtikar. Other participants include?USD?0,?DRW,?Bybit,?Flow Traders,?6th Man Ventures,?IMC,?Nomura,?Karatage, and others.

The investment will be used for the development of the Plasma blockchain, including the launch of its testnet and mainnet, as well as for the expansion of its ecosystem to support payments, remittances, stablecoin DeFi, and personal financial solutions.

The project will introduce “a new approach to stablecoin payments by combining a scalable Bitcoin sidechain architecture with full EVM compatibility and zero-fee USDT transfers,” the announcement said.

Furthermore, Plasma will support additional stablecoin issuers and integrate with leading stablecoin applications and infrastructure players in the industry.

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Mining Hardware Giants Nearly Operating at a Loss
The Bitcoin mining sector is currently experiencing declining profitability, which is leading certain hardware models to nearly operating at a loss. Notably, this includes industry staples, according to the latest Miner Weekly report by BlocksBridge Consulting.

Bitcoin’s mining hashprice plunged after last week’s difficulty adjustment that set a new all-time high, as well as BTC’s drop below $96,000. However, a hashprice drop “raises concerns about the viability of older-generation mining equipment in an increasingly competitive market,” the report noted.

Notably,?Bitmain’s Antminer S19 Pro?series struggles to remain profitable in regions with above-average electricity or hosting costs. It is “quickly becoming a liability” for miners in regions with higher energy costs or aging infrastructure.

Furthermore, while Antminer S19XP is considered to be more efficient, it still suffers from this effect, seeing “a negligible gross profit.”

However, the report noted that the next difficulty, set for February 23, “could ease competition again, giving miners some much-needed breathing room.”

On-Chain AI Platform Theoriq Unveils Open Source Framework for Developers
Theoriq, a team working on AI-powered Decentralized Financial (AiFi) agents and swarms, announced the first public release of their AlphaSwarm Agent kit.

The press release shared with centralhash stated that the kit provides a foundation for building AI-powered DeFi agents (AiFi Agents). Per Ron Bodkin, Co-Founder and CEO of Theoriq, “by leveraging Theoriq’s agent swarm technology, we’re providing developers with everything they need to build and deploy AI-powered trading agents rapidly.”

It is a tool that allows for the collaborative creation of specialized AI agents and for developers to build agents that perform on-chain actions, particularly in DeFi, the team said. Developers can access a range of features that enhance users’ ability to build complex trading strategies and execute them in real-time.

This includes data API integrations, modular trading strategies, DEX integration, an alert and notification system, and extensible SDKs.

Furthermore, the agents are expected to evolve. They currently focus on collaborative trading analysis and execution, but the team expects to see “collaborative swarms of agents that will manage on-chain liquidity provisioning, peer-to-peer trading, and investment strategies across chains and applications.”

“AlphaSwarm lays the foundation for AiFi, a future where AI agents operate as autonomous financial actors within sophisticated swarms,” the announcement said.

AlphaSwarm is now available on GitHub for personal deployment and production-scale systems.