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Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Margaux Nijkerk, the Ethereum protocol reporter on CoinDesk’s Tech team. In this issue: Vitalik Buterin Proposes Replacing …

Crypto criminals are taking increasing pains to evade detection, moving assets between a multitude of blockchain ecosystems in an effort to throw investigators off their trail. A full 20% of complex cross-chain investigations now span more than 10 …

Plume, a blockchain platform focused on real-world assets (RWAs), said on Tuesday it secured an investment from funds managed by private equity giant Apollo Küresel Management as it looks to scale up its infrastructure and bring more traditional …

In the beginning, there were only CPUs, then GPUs, for bitcoin mining. Then came the mighty ASIC in 2013, and with it, the “shoebox” form factor that has become emblematic of the bitcoin mining industry. What comes next? Will the shoebox design …

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), one of the leading Democrats supporting crypto legislation, warned the industry against pushing for a “watered-down” version of the long-awaited stablecoin legislation currently moving through the Senate …

Also: Avalanche Visa card launched; EF executive director leaving; hackers using fake GitHub to steal bitcoin.

Fundamental investors tracking XRP have more reason to cheer as a planned set of features aims to make the XRP Ledger, the network underpinning that token, even more appealing for institutional usage. XRP prices are up 2.2% in the past 24 hours …

Also: Lido goes modular; Uniswap finally launches Unichain

A “descending triangle” pattern in technical analysis points to bigger gains for the top-performing major token.

“We think, especially with the administration change, the approvals of those filings will accelerate,” Ripple president Monica Long said.