Stablecoins Rise, MiCA Countdown, Tokenized Treasuries Accelerate

Welcome to our Crypto news in 10, a daily podcast bringing you the latest news about crypto in under 10 minutes.

Here’s what’s moving crypto today — Monday, May 11, 2026.

Circle kicked off the morning with real momentum... revenue and reserve income are up, USDC in circulation is around 77 billion dollars, and the stock jumped nearly five percent in pre-market trading.

In Europe, regulators just put the industry on notice — about 60 days remain to secure MiCA authorization or lose access to the EU.

On-chain, Wall Street’s push into tokenized Treasuries keeps accelerating — Ethereum now hosts roughly 8 billion dollars of these products, doubling in just six months.

We’re also watching fallout from Friday’s AWS-linked outage that took Coinbase offline for hours... raising hard questions about crypto’s dependence on centralized cloud.

And finally, miners keep morphing into AI landlords — TeraWulf’s high-performance computing revenue just surpassed its bitcoin mining take for the first time.

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Let’s start with Circle.

The company reported higher quarterly revenue and reserve income. USDC circulation rose 28 percent year over year to about 77 billion dollars at the end of the first quarter, and shares were up nearly five percent ahead of the open.

The mix matters — when trading cools, stablecoin float and interest on reserves can carry the quarter. Today’s results underscore that theme. Reuters also noted a safety bid for USDC during choppier markets, a contrast with last week’s softer exchange volumes. Bottom line, stablecoin infrastructure looks like one of the sturdier cash-flow engines in crypto right now. Source: Reuters via The Star.

In Europe, the clock is officially ticking.

The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation — MiCA — moves from grace period to full enforcement on July 1. A policy brief this morning framed it as a 60-day sprint — if you’re serving EU clients without authorization after July 1, you’re in breach and must stop. ESMA’s April 17 statement set that line in stone, and today’s coverage is the reminder that the deadline is no longer theoretical.

For teams, that means finish authorization files, align Travel Rule processes for transfers, and be ready for scrutiny on asset listing, custody, and stablecoin issuance. Expect a late-June wave of we’re MiCA-ready announcements as firms race to keep passports active into the back half of the year. Sources: Deep Brief and ESMA.

On-chain finance keeps getting more institutional — fast.

Tokenized U.S. Treasuries on Ethereum have reached roughly 8 billion dollars in market value... about double since November. The growth reflects big names — BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, and Ondo — moving short-duration dollar yield onto programmable rails. The pitch to treasurers and funds is simple — Treasury bill exposure that settles near instantly, can be posted as DeFi collateral, and plugs into automated workflows.

If you’re a builder, watch two second-order effects — more composable collateral in lending and derivatives, and steadier base liquidity for stablecoin pairs. If you’re a regulator, watch custody, disclosure, and how these products interoperate with broker-dealer rules. Sources: SignalPlus, citing Token Terminal, and The Crypto Basic.

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Now, resilience.

Coinbase restored trading Friday after an Amazon Web Services incident knocked core exchange functions offline for more than five hours. AWS status updates and industry reports point to localized data center issues cascading into service disruption — Coinbase phased markets back up later in the day.

Why cover this on a Monday? Because it’s a sober reminder that even ‘always-on’ crypto markets often depend on a handful of centralized cloud providers... one hot aisle or network hiccup, and retail traders, market makers, and ETF arbitrage desks alike can get stuck. Expect renewed interest in multi-cloud redundancy, bare-metal colocation for matching engines, and failover drills that look more like traditional equities venues. Sources: Cointelegraph and ITPro.

And the mining-meets-AI story just hit another milestone.

TeraWulf reported that high-performance computing lease revenue reached 21 million dollars in the first quarter — overtaking digital-asset revenue of just under 13 million for the first time. The company says it’s targeting an additional 250 to 500 megawatts of contracted capacity as hyperscalers and AI labs scramble for power-dense sites. Shares dipped about one percent on the print, but the strategic shift is clear — former pure-play miners are repositioning as energy-plus-infrastructure providers to the AI economy, smoothing out the hash-price whiplash that used to dominate their profit and loss statements. For crypto, that could mean steadier public-miner balance sheets — and potentially less forced bitcoin selling during downcycles — as more revenue comes from long-dated compute leases. Source: The Block.

Quick takeaways as you head into the day.

First, Circle’s results reinforce that stablecoins are a core revenue pillar — USDC growth plus interest income is offsetting softer spot volumes elsewhere. Second, MiCA enforcement is imminent; if you operate in or touch the EU, the July 1 line is real and the compliance lift is non-optional. Third, tokenized Treasuries are no longer a pilot — they’re becoming a base layer of on-chain liquidity. Fourth, Friday’s outage should put cloud-dependency risk on every exchange CTO’s dashboard. And fifth, miners are steadily turning into AI infrastructure firms — watch power deals, not just petahash charts — because that shift could make bitcoin’s sell pressure during bear markets a little less... dramatic.

Sources: Reuters via The Star for Circle; Deep Brief and ESMA for the MiCA timeline; SignalPlus and Token Terminal for Ethereum’s tokenized Treasuries; Cointelegraph and ITPro for the Coinbase and AWS outage; and The Block for TeraWulf’s revenue mix.

Thanks for listening and see you tommorow!