HIVE Buys $58M Toronto AI Site, UK Targets 24/7 Settlement, Standard Chartered Takes Full Zodia Stake

Crypto News

HIVE Digital Technologies sent shares surging as much as 40% on Monday after disclosing a $58 million land purchase in Toronto earmarked for a large-scale AI data center. The acquisition, executed through its BUZZ High Performance Computing subsidiary, covers roughly 25 acres and is engineered to host about 320 megawatts of capacity and more than 100,000 GPUs once fully built out. The move follows a $115 million raise two weeks earlier and underscores how former Bitcoin miners are retooling power-rich infrastructure for AI workloads. HIVE now controls more than 850 megawatts globally, including 450 MW already operating across Canada, Sweden and Paraguay.

The Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority jointly outlined a roadmap that pushes UK wholesale markets toward tokenized finance and near-24/7 settlement. The BoE proposed extending Real-Time Gross Settlement and CHAPS operating windows beginning September 2027, with weekend and holiday processing layered in by 2029 and a 22-hour weekday cycle targeted no earlier than 2031. Regulators are accepting industry feedback through July 3 on how existing rules support or constrain tokenization built on blockchain rails. The Prudential Regulation Authority also clarified that tokenized instruments should receive the same prudential treatment as their traditional counterparts when economic risks align.

On-chain monitoring revealed three distinct whale archetypes positioning into Ethereum, Zcash and Hyperliquid as the third week of May opened. One wallet holding 131,000 ETH added another 5,001 ETH at $2,119, deploying roughly $10.6 million as price tested the lower band of an ascending channel anchored at the $2,144 Fibonacci level. A separate trader opened a 10x leveraged ZEC long worth $19.6 million near the $533 retracement, while an a16z-linked address continued accumulating HYPE. Orders were split across multiple settlements, a footprint consistent with measured accumulation rather than reactive dip-buying during a volatility expansion.

Standard Chartered moved to consolidate ownership of Zodia Custody, with the London bank's non-binding offer for the remaining shares accepted by minority holders including Northern Trust, Emirates NBD, National Australia Bank and SBI Holdings. Financial terms were not disclosed. Zodia's custody operations will be folded into Standard Chartered's in-house digital asset custody arm, while its institutional infrastructure platform will be carved out as Zodia Solutions under SC Ventures. The transaction signals deepening conviction among tier-one banks that direct ownership of crypto custody rails is now strategic rather than optional, particularly as institutional flows into altcoin and stablecoin products accelerate.

Phemex chief executive Federico Variola argued that trader behavior has migrated well beyond spot tokens, with prediction markets, tokenized real-world assets, pre-IPO perpetuals and AI-driven bots now driving meaningful volume on centralized venues. Variola described prediction markets as one of the strongest user-acquisition surfaces in crypto because they directly tie blockchain settlement to real-world outcomes. He also positioned AI tools as accelerants for strategy construction rather than replacements for trader judgment. The framing reflects a broader exchange-industry pivot, with platforms layering tokenized equities, commodities and structured products onto the same accounts that once served only DeFi-adjacent traders.

The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act by a bipartisan 15-9 vote, sending the market-structure bill to the Senate floor after a roughly two-and-a-half-hour markup hearing. Democrats Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks crossed the aisle to support advancement, and several additional Democrats signaled conditional willingness to back the legislation on the floor if specific amendments are adopted. The bill would clarify jurisdictional boundaries between the SEC and CFTC and establish formal rails for stablecoins, with at least seven Democratic votes needed for floor passage if all 43 Republicans support the measure.

Across these stories the dominant thread is institutional formalization: regulators in London are sequencing tokenization into core settlement plumbing, US lawmakers are inching market-structure rules toward statute, and a global bank is absorbing a crypto custodian outright. Mining-to-AI capital redeployment and exchange product expansion sit on the same arc, showing that compute, custody and clearing are the contested layers this cycle. Even whale flows into bull market survivors like ETH and ZEC fit the pattern, with large balance sheets positioning ahead of a regulatory pipeline that increasingly rewards scale, compliance posture and integrated infrastructure rather than speculative narrative rotation.