According to Cryptopolitan, VTB Bank, Russia's second-largest bank, plans to allow investors to buy and sell cryptocurrencies through brokerage accounts. The bank currently offers cryptocurrency derivatives investment services and plans to offer direct investment in digital assets next year. Andrey Yatskov, head of VTB Bank's brokerage services department, announced at an investment conference in Moscow that clients will be able to directly buy, sell, and hold decentralized digital currencies such as Bitcoin in personal investment accounts or brokerage accounts. Currently, Russia only allows "highly qualified" investors to invest in cryptocurrencies under an experimental legal framework, requiring at least 100 million rubles in traditional investments and an annual income of 50 million rubles.

Huoxun Finance News, December 4th - According to Businesswire, TwentyOne Capital, Inc. and Cantor Equity Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEP) announced that at the CEP Extraordinary General Meeting held on December 3rd, CEP shareholders approved the previously announced proposed business merger and all other related proposals. Based on today's shareholder approval, and subject to the satisfaction or waiver of certain other closing conditions described in the CEP and TwentyOne final prospectuses, the business merger and related PIPE financing are expected to close around December 8, 2025. Upon completion of the transaction, the merged company will operate as TwentyOne Capital, Inc., and its Class A ordinary shares are expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "XXI" on December 9, 2025. Related reading: Masayoshi Son plans to join forces with stablecoin giant Tether to create a $3 billion crypto joint venture, is the Bitcoin hoarding strategy entering the 2.0 era?

Huoxun Finance reported on December 4th that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that PeerDAS in Fusaka is significant because it is essentially a sharding technology. This technology allows Ethereum to reach block consensus without requiring individual nodes to examine extremely small portions of data, and thanks to client-side probabilistic verification, it effectively resists 51% attacks, rather than relying on validator voting. Sharding technology has been a pursuit of Ethereum since 2015, and data availability sampling became a goal in 2017, which has now been achieved. However, the sharding technology in Fusaka still has three areas for improvement: First, the L2 network can handle O(c²) transactions (where c is the node's computing power), but the L1 network cannot. For L1 to benefit from scaling, a mature zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (ZK-EVMs) is needed; second, there is a proposer/builder bottleneck, as current builders need to obtain all data to construct the entire block, and distributed block construction urgently needs to be implemented; third, there is no sharded mempool yet, which is currently necessary. Even so, this is still a significant advancement in blockchain design. Over the next two years, the team will have time to refine the PeerDAS mechanism, cautiously scaling it while ensuring stability. It will be used to expand the L2 network, and once ZK-EVMs mature, it will be used for gas expansion on the L1 network. Previously, it was reported that the Ethereum mainnet successfully activated the Fusaka upgrade, significantly improving data processing capabilities.

Huoxun Finance News, December 4th - Binance announced on its X platform that users are ready to receive the Binance Alpha airdrop, which will begin today at 20:00 (UTC+8). Users with at least 250 Binance Alpha Credits can claim tokens on a first-come, first-served basis until the airdrop pool is exhausted or the airdrop event ends. More details will be announced soon.

According to a report by Cointelegraph on the X platform, Odaily Planet Daily, Citadel has sent a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) calling for stronger regulation of tokenized assets and DeFi.