AstraZeneca scraps £450m vaccine plant in Liverpool after Labour funding cut
AstraZeneca has cancelled plans for a £450m vaccine manufacturing plant in Liverpool, blaming a cut in funding from government.
The investment, announced last year in the Tories’ spring budget, was dependent on a “mutual agreement” with the Treasury and third parties, it was said at the time.
It will no longer go ahead because Labour ministers have offered less funding than their predecessors, the pharmaceutical giant said.
An AstraZeneca spokesperson told Sky News: “Following discussions with the current government, we are no longer pursuing our planned investment at Speke.
“Several factors have influenced this decision including the timing and reduction of the final offer compared to the previous government’s proposal.”
The money would have expanded an existing site in Speke and was hailed at the time as a “vote of confidence” in Liverpool and the UK’s life science sector.
The AstraZeneca spokesperson said that the Speke site “will continue to produce and supply our flu vaccine, for patients in the UK and around the world”.
A government spokesperson said a “change in the make-up of the investment” proposed by AstraZeneca had “led to a reduced government grant offer being put forward”.
The spokesperson added: “All government grant funding has to demonstrate value for the taxpayer and unfortunately, despite extensive work from government officials, it has not been possible to achieve a solution.
“AstraZeneca remains closely engaged with the government’s work to develop our new industrial strategy, and more broadly we continue to have a thriving life sciences sector, worth £108 billion to the economy and providing over 300,000 highly skilled jobs across the country.”
The decision is a blow to Rachel Reeves’s renewed attempts to deliver economic growth.
In a speech earlier this week which named AstraZeneca, the chancellor said life sciences would be key to boosting the economy.
She announced plans to deliver an Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor, which she claimed would add up to £78bn to the public coffers.
Jeremy Hunt speaks to the media during a visit to the AstraZeneca Speke Factory. Pic: HM Treasury
Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, said: “There’s no vaccine for incompetence. In the same week they talked about growth, Labour seem to have fumbled a deal with AstraZeneca, one of the UK’s largest companies and central to the critical life sciences sector.”
The new plant at Speke was intended to enhance the UK’s pandemic preparedness.
Reports that it was under threat emerged shortly after Labour won the general election, when ministers warned of the need to make cuts to infrastructure projects to fill a £22bn “black hole” in the public finances.
The confirmation comes after former health secretary Matt Hancock said that the UK needed to improve its own vaccine manufacturing capability as a “critical” part of preparing for a future pandemic.
Mr Hancock told the COVID Inquiry earlier in January that Britain’s vaccine manufacturing capacity was “weak”.
He added: “Having that manufacture and fill and finish onshore, physically within the UK, is critical in the way that it simply isn’t in normal times.”
Blockchain gaming company Wemade is pushing for a Korean won-based stablecoin ecosystem, forming a Global Alliance for KRW Stablecoins (GAKS) with Chainalysis, CertiK and SentBe as founding partners.
Wemade announced that the alliance will support StableNet, a dedicated mainnet for Korean won-backed stablecoins, with publicly released code and a consortium model that aims to meet institutional and regulatory requirements.
Within the partnership, Chainalysis will integrate threat detection and real-time monitoring, while CertiK will handle node validation and security audits.
Money transfer company SentBe will contribute licensed remittance infrastructure across 174 countries. This allows the KRW stablecoin initiative to operate within South Korea’s regulated digital asset ecosystem.
The launch marks a coordinated effort from Wemade to reposition itself as a long-term infrastructure builder after years of setbacks, including token delistings and a bridge hack that undermined investor confidence.
Wemade’s rocky road and stablecoin pivot
Wemade’s push into stablecoin infrastructure follows a turbulent seven-year expansion from a traditional gaming studio into one of South Korea’s most ambitious blockchain builders.
The company launched its blockchain division in 2018 and expanded it from a four-employee team into a 200-person operation. Still, the rapid growth collided with the country’s evolving regulatory landscape, forcing the company to limit its play-to-earn (P2E) offerings to overseas markets.
Much of the pressure faced by Wemade centered on its native WEMIX token. In 2022, South Korean exchanges delisted the asset, citing discrepancies between its reported and actual supply. This resulted in a price drop of over 70% for the token.
The token suffered another major blow in 2024, when a bridge exploit resulted in 9 billion won (about $6 million) in losses. The company’s delayed disclosure attracted scrutiny and eroded further investor trust, leading to a second wave of token delistings.
The stablecoin pivot marks another attempt from Wemade to reset the narrative around the company and reposition its technology toward a more compliant and infrastructure-focused use case.
In a Korea Times report, the company said that it’s developing a KRW-focused stablecoin mainnet while avoiding becoming the stablecoin issuer itself. It’s positioning itself as a technology partner and consortium builder for other South Korean companies.
Related: Upbit hit with $36M Solana hot wallet breach day after $10B Naver deal
South Korea’s post-Terra regulatory landscape
The Terra collapse in 2022 continues to cast a shadow over South Korea’s digital asset policy, leaving lawmakers and regulators particularly sensitive to risks associated with stablecoins.
The Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Bank of Korea (BOK) have taken uncompromising stances since 2022, pushing for stricter liquidity, oversight and disclosure rules as they work on an upcoming stablecoin framework focused on risk-cointainment.
The central bank also advocated giving banks a leading role in stablecoin issuance, helping to mitigate risks to financial and foreign exchange stability.
The BOK warned that allowing non-banking institutions to take the lead in stablecoin issuance could undermine existing regulations.
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Major cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin is the latest company to secure a license under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) framework.
KuCoin’s European arm, KuCoin EU, secured a MiCA license from the Financial Market Authority of Austria, the company said in a statement shared with Cointelegraph on Friday.
The authorization allows KuCoin EU to offer crypto asset services across 29 countries in the European Economic Area (EEA), excluding Malta, according to the exchange’s representatives.
“Securing the MiCA license with our local entity in Austria is a defining milestone in KuCoin’s long-term trust and compliance strategy,” KuCoin CEO BC Wong said, adding that the regulatory framework is “one of the highest regulatory standards worldwide.”
Vienna as a strategic European crypto hub
KuCoin’s MiCA approval follows its license application filed in early 2025, arriving months after several crypto asset providers (CASPs), including Austria-based Bitpanda, had already secured MiCA authorization in other EU member states.
“The decision to choose Austria was primarily driven by the timely implementation of the MiCA accompanying laws, the stable and foreseeable regulatory environment as well as the huge talent pool,” the exchange said in a statement in February.
Alongside KuCoin, Austria’s FMA has issued MiCA licenses to five more CASPs: crypto-friendly Amina Bank, Bitpanda, Bybit, Cryptonow and FIOR Digital.
“This milestone strengthens KuCoin’s commitment to responsible global expansion,” KuCoin CEO Wong said, adding: “Compliance is not simply a regulatory obligation — it is the foundation of our long-term mission to deliver secure, innovative, and accessible digital asset services to users worldwide.”
Related: Blockrise wins Dutch MiCA license, brings Bitcoin-backed loans to EU businesses
Cointelegraph contacted KuCoin for comment regarding the Malta exception, but had not received a response by the time of publication.
As previously mentioned, Malta has issued multiple MiCA licenses to CASPs like Blockchain.com and the Winklevoss twins-owned Gemini exchange. Malta has also emerged as a major opponent of centralized MiCA supervision within the EU, contrary to the position of member states such as France.
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The IMF dropped an explanatory video on its X handle today exploring the new phenomenon of tokenized markets.
The international body responsible for ensuring the stability of the global monetary system recognized the advantages of tokenized markets in the video, but warned that they can be prone to flash crashes and are more volatile than traditional markets.
“Tokenization can make financial markets faster and cheaper, but efficiencies from new technologies often come with new risks,” the video said.
IMF lays out benefits of tokenized markets
The video frames tokenization as the next step in money’s evolution, explaining that tokenization can make it “faster and cheaper to buy, own, and sell assets” by cutting down the long chain of intermediaries.
Instead of relying on clearinghouses and registrars, a tokenized market can automate those functions in code.
According to the IMF, researchers studying early tokenized markets have already “found significant cost savings,” with programmability allowing near‑instant settlement and more efficient collateral use.
Related: Binance adds BlackRock’s BUIDL as off-exchange collateral for institutional traders
Warns of risks tokenization can bring
Still, the IMF stresses that those same efficiencies can amplify familiar dangers. Automated trading has “already led to sudden market plunges known as flash crashes,” and the IMF cautioned that tokenized markets, with instantly executed trading, “can be more volatile” than traditional venues.
In stressed conditions, complex chains of smart contracts “written on top of each other” may interact “like falling dominoes,” turning a local problem into a systemic shock.
The video also highlights the risk of fragmentation if many tokenized platforms emerge that “don’t speak to each other,” undermining liquidity and failing to deliver on the promise of faster, cheaper markets.
It also hinted at increased participation from governments. “Governments have rarely been content to stay on the sidelines during important evolutions of money.”
It added that, if history is any guide, they are likely to take “a more active role in the future of tokenization.”
Governments’ role in money shifts
History is littered with examples of global governments’ participation in monetary evolutions. In 1944, the Bretton Woods agreement saw governments actively redesign the global monetary system, fixing exchange rates to the United States dollar and tying the dollar itself to gold. It was a top‑down decision that shaped cross‑border finance for a generation.
When mounting fiscal costs and external imbalances made the gold peg unsustainable, the collapse of that framework in the early 1970s ushered in fiat currencies and floating exchange rates, alongside structurally larger public‑sector deficits in many advanced economies.
Related: Gold buying boom mirrors Bitcoin’s momentum: Deutsche Bank
IMF research meets a maturing tokenization market
This is not the IMF’s first foray into tokenization. The fund has spent years probing the tokenization market structure and digital money. Shifting that analysis into a public‑facing explainer video shows that tokenization is now seen as a mainstream policy issue, rather than a niche experiment.
Tokenized markets have grown into a multibillion-dollar industry with key players like BlackRock’s BUIDL fund quickly becoming the world’s largest tokenized Treasury fund, surpassing Franklin Templeton’s Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund while expanding through 2024 and 2025.
The IMF’s video posits that while tokenization may deliver faster, cheaper and more programmable markets, those markets will grow under close regulatory scrutiny and governments will be ready to intervene.
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