HS2: Investigation launched into two firms supplying construction workers
An investigation has been launched into “whistleblower allegations” about the practices of some “labour suppliers” to the company building the embattled HS2 rail line.
HS2 Ltd is investigating two companies that supply workers to build part of the London to Birmingham section of the line, which the i Paper, which first reported the story, says relates to the billing for the staff supplied.
The company, which is owned by the government, says it “treats all whistleblower allegations seriously” and launched an investigation earlier this year, while the Department for Transport adds that it will ensure any claims of wrongdoing are “thoroughly investigated”.
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The paper reports that the allegations relate to staff being misclassified, and therefore an inflated rate being charged to employ them.
It is understood the two firms under investigation were providing workers to one of HS2’s contractors on the West Midlands section of the line, Balfour Beatty Vinci (BBV), which is not accused of wrongdoing.
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Watch: Starmer declares war on policies leading to HS2’s £100m bat shed
A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd says BBV has “implemented additional monitoring and controls”.
It is understood that one contractor remains suspended from new contracts while the probe continues.
An HS2 spokesperson said: “HS2 Ltd treats all whistleblower allegations seriously and we are aware of the claims made in relation to labour suppliers on part of the route.
“An investigation was launched earlier this year into a number of different allegations and our contractor Balfour Beatty VINCI has implemented additional monitoring and controls.”
The public has protested the vast cost of HS2. Pic: PA
A Department for Transport spokesperson added: “The government and HS2 Ltd take all whistleblower allegations extremely seriously and have a zero-tolerance attitude towards fraud, bribery, and corruption. We will therefore ensure any claims of wrongdoing in HS2’s supply chain are thoroughly investigated.
“We have taken action to grip the delivery of HS2, tasking CEO Mark Wild to fundamentally reset the project and change the company’s culture and capability to deliver the line as cost effectively as possible.”
It is understood that there is currently no police or HMRC involvement.
BBV has been approached for comment.
The previous Tory government scrapped the second phase of HS2
What is HS2?
The HS2 rail line was announced in 2009 to boost capacity and cut the journey time between London and the north of England.
The initial plan was to build the first phase connecting London and Birmingham, followed by adding two branches to Manchester and Leeds – but the previous Conservative government decided to scrap the second phase due to spiralling costs and numerous setbacks, and the new Labour administration has said it will not reverse the decision.
Read more:
Sam Coates: PM declares war on £100m HS2 bat shed
Changes to HS2 explained
Government doesn’t know how much HS2 will cost
Sir Keir Starmer’s government has pledged to “get a grip” on the rising costs of the project that, according to a House of Commons research briefing, have been driven “by high inflation, as well as scope changes, worse ground conditions than expected and optimism bias”.
In 2012, it was estimated that HS2 Phase 1 would cost £20.5bn (in 2019 prices) to complete – but forecasts have since grown, with the most recent estimate in January 2024 estimating it would cost £49bn to £56.6bn (in 2019 prices).
Cryptocurrency markets have extended their decline despite much-awaited political developments taking place in the US.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed a funding bill to end the record 43-day US government shutdown, after the bill passed through the Senate on Monday and was approved by the House of Representatives on Wednesday.
The bill provides funding to the government until Jan. 30, 2026, and gives Democrats and Republicans more time to strike a deal on broader funding plans for the year ahead.
The end of the shutdown failed to lift demand among Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) buyers. Spot BTC ETFs saw a brief resurgence on Tuesday, attracting $524 million in inflows, but outflows quickly resumed, with a whopping $866 million in daily net outflows on Thursday, according to Farside Investors.
Bitcoin fell to a six-month low of $95,900 on Friday, a level last seen in May as its biggest demand drivers continued to lack momentum.
Investments from ETFs and Michael Saylor’s Strategy were the two main vehicles driving demand for Bitcoin’s price this year, according to Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of crypto analytics platform CryptoQuant.
Bitcoin ETF demand stalls as US shutdown optimism fails to lift sentiment
The lack of demand for spot Bitcoin ETFs is raising concerns about Bitcoin’s prospects for the rest of the year.
On Monday, the US Senate approved the funding bill and brought Congress a step closer to ending the shutdown. The legislation headed for a full vote in the House of Representatives, which occurred on Wednesday.
Despite optimistic news from the US, spot Bitcoin ETF investments remained flat on Monday, with just $1.2 million of inflows, according to data from Farside Investors.
“Despite the US shutdown seemingly ending, and the S&P and Gold bouncing hard, Bitcoin ETFs saw NO bid yesterday,” said Capriole Investments founder, Charles Edwards, adding that this is not a dynamic we want to see continue.
“Risk assets usually see a strong bid in the weeks out of the Shutdown. Still time to turn this ship around, but it needs to turn,” Edwards wrote in a Tuesday X post.
Spot Bitcoin ETF inflows were the primary driver of Bitcoin’s momentum in 2025, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick, told Cointelegraph recently.
Bitwise exec says 2026 will be crypto’s real bull year; here’s why
Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan is more confident that crypto markets will boom in 2026, particularly as there hasn’t been a late 2025 rally.
Speaking to Cointelegraph at The Bridge conference in New York City on Wednesday, Hougan said a crypto market rally at the end of 2025 would have fit the four-year cycle thesis, meaning 2026 would mark the start of a bear market, similar to 2022 and 2018.
When asked to revise his prediction about whether the crypto market will boom in 2026, Hougan said: “I’m actually more confident in that quote. The biggest risk was [if] we ripped into the end of 2025 and then we got a pullback.”
Hougan said interest in the Bitcoin debasement trade, stablecoins and tokenization would continue to accelerate, while arguing that Uniswap’s fee switch proposal introduced on Monday would reinvigorate interest in decentralized finance protocols in the coming year.
“I think the underlying fundamentals are just so sound,” Hougan said. “I think these earlier forces, institutional investment, regulatory progress, stablecoins, tokenization, I just think those are too big to keep down. So I think 2026 will be a good year.”
Arthur Hayes tells Zcash holders to withdraw from CEXs and “shield” assets
The privacy coin sector returned to the spotlight after BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes urged Zcash holders to withdraw their assets from centralized exchanges (CEXs).
On Wednesday, Hayes told holders to “shield” their assets, a feature that enables private transactions within the Zcash network. “If you hold $ZEC on a CEX, withdraw it to a self-custodial wallet and shield it,” Hayes wrote on X.
The comments came as Zcash (ZEC) saw sharp price swings in the last few days. The token rallied to $723 on Saturday before dropping to $504 on Sunday. It then surged to a high of $677 on Monday, only to see another sharp decline. At the time of writing, ZEC was trading at about $450, marking a 37% decline from its Saturday high.
Analysts had warned that ZEC might undergo a sharp correction due to its relative strength index (RSI) reaching its highest reading after continuing to rally above its overbought zone.
Vitalik Buterin champions decentralization in “Trustless Manifesto”
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has authored and signed the new “Trustless Manifesto,” which seeks to uphold core values of decentralization and censorship resistance and push builders to refrain from adding intermediaries and checkpoints for the sake of adoption.
The Trustless Manifesto, also authored by Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, said crypto platforms sacrifice trustlessness from the first moment that they integrate a hosted node or centralized relayer, explaining that while it feels harmless, it becomes a habit, and with each passing checkpoint, the protocol becomes less and less permissionless.
“Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself,” the Ethereum Foundation members said in the manifesto published Wednesday. “Without it, everything else — efficiency, UX, scalability — is decoration on a fragile core.”
“When complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: every line of convenience code can become a choke point.”
While the manifesto wasn’t aimed at any particular person or company, some Ethereum layer 2s have been criticized for sacrificing decentralization to focus on scalability to speed up adoption.
Sonic Labs pivots from speed to survival with business-first strategy
Sonic Labs, the organization behind the Sonic layer-1 blockchain, announced a major strategic shift as it pivots from emphasizing transaction speed to building long-term business value and token sustainability.
After claiming industry-leading performance last year, Sonic Labs said its next chapter will focus on upgrades that deliver measurable financial outcomes, including new Ethereum and Sonic Improvement Proposals (EIPs and SIPs), token supply reductions and revamped rewards for network participants.
“Every decision we make moving forward will be guided by the principles of building real value, with price, growth, and sustainability always in focus,” said Mitchell Demeter, the new CEO of Sonic Labs.
The focus aims to bring “measurable, lasting value” for builders, validators and tokenholders, wrote Demeter in a Tuesday X post. “Our mission at Sonic is to move beyond hype and build a sustainable business model for a layer one, that creates, captures, and returns real value to tokenholders.”
The new fee monetization upgrade will include a tiered reward system for builders and fixed rewards for validators.
Sonic Labs will also increase the rate of programmatic Sonic (S) token burns, which means permanently removing tokens from circulation to tighten the supply.
Sonic claims to be the world’s fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chain, with a “true” finality of 720 milliseconds (ms) — the assurance that a transaction is irreversible, which occurs after it is added to a block on the blockchain ledger.
DeFi market overview
According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, most of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the red.
The privacy-preserving Dash (DASH) token fell 45% to stage the biggest decline in the top 100, followed by the Internet Computer (ICP) token, down over 27% on the weekly chart.
Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space.
The UK’s central bank, the Bank of England (BOE), has released a proposed regulatory regime for stablecoins. The consultation paper took into account the perspectives of the crypto industry, but some observers say it remains restrictive.
BOE released the document on Nov. 10 — some two years after it announced the initial discussion paper. The original offered a vision for crypto that many in the industry claimed would doom the UK’s digital asset space.
The BOE said that it received comments and feedback from a broad range of 46 different stakeholders, including “banks, non-bank payment service providers, payment system operators, trade associations, academia, and individuals.”
The UK’s central bank may have scrapped some more hardline requirements, but some in the industry believe that it isn’t enough. Tom Rhodes, chief legal officer at UK-based stablecoin issuer Agant, said the bank remains “disproportionately cautious and restrictive.”
Bank of England still cautious on stablecoins
The new iteration presents a number of improvements on the 2023 version, Rhodes told Cointelegraph.
“The latest proposals do include some innovative features, such as direct BOE liquidity lines and the ability to repo reserves for liquidity purposes.”
He said that, as it concerns the UK market, “these proposals can be further explored and potentially expanded to create a more competitive backing asset regime, without compromising on stability.”
But despite the “welcome progress in the BOE’s sentiment towards stablecoins,” it has been “unusually vocal about the perceived risks of stablecoins,” said Rhodes.
One of the more controversial restrictions in the paper was limits on what the BOE called a “systemic retail stablecoin.” In the paper, this is defined as a stablecoin that is “widely used by individuals to make everyday payments such as for shopping and receiving salaries.”
The central bank wants to see limits of 20,000 pounds for individuals and 10 million pounds for businesses that accept it as a form of payment. This is an increase from the initial proposal, but the idea of limits on how much crypto you can hold didn’t sit well with some.
Crypto influencer Aleksandra Huk wrote, “Bank of England wants to cap stablecoin holdings at £20,000. Who gave them the right to tell us what to buy, where to store our money and how much we can have? […] Honestly, this is the best advert ever for privacy coins and for leaving the UK.”
Related: UK crypto hopes stall, but ‘encouraging signs’ are there
There are a few caveats to the suggested rule. Geoff Richards, head of community at the Ontology Network, noted, “The proposal applies only to sterling-denominated stablecoins used in UK payment systems that could become ‘systemic.’ Not USDT, not USDC, not random DeFi tokens.”
Ian Taylor, board member of crypto industry advocacy group CryptoUK, told Cointelegraph that he understands the central bank’s more cautious approach, at least as it applies to the stablecoin limits:
“The Bank of England has a mandate to protect against financial stability. And that financial stability is connected to the banking system. So insofar as banks take deposits and they issue loans against those deposits […] creates credit, this is an economic benefit to any economy that we have.”
The BOE is rightfully worried that taking deposits out of banks would reduce their ability to lend, affecting financial stability. “So, that’s why they want to baby-step this.”
Rhodes said that the “vast majority” of UK stablecoins will not fall under the regime anyway, at least not as stated in the paper. He noted that Mastercard was only recognized as a systemically important payment system in 2021 and that non-systemic stablecoins will be regulated under the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) ruleset, “which is less restrictive.”
Still work to be done as UK opens up to crypto
Access to central bank liquidity and deposit accounts at the BOE was a welcome update for stablecoin issuers. But crypto industry representatives believe that there is still room for improvement in the central bank’s plan.
Regarding the stablecoin caps, “The systemic thresholds remain uncertain,” said Rhodes. He said it would be helpful to have clarification from His Majesty’s Treasury when an issuer has reached sufficient scale to “pose a risk to the UK economy as a whole, before they will recognize the issuer as systemic.”
Taylor also noted the difficulty of enforcing these stablecoin caps. If the government is licensing an issuer, then they’re the ones “responsible for monitoring each individual client or customer, whether wholesale, corporate or retail, as to how many stablecoins they’ve given them.”
The problem is that many people get their stablecoins on secondary markets or a “host of different sources.” People can receive stablecoins as compensation at work or on an exchange or peer-to-peer transaction. “So, the actual operational enforcement of that I question, and we’ve seen no detail in regards to that.”
Overall, “clarity and speed” will make the UK stablecoin ecosystem more competitive, said Arvin Abraham, partner at Goodwin Procter. He told Cointelegraph that regulators need to give issuers “a clean runway and predictable timelines” to navigate the approvals process.
Speed isn’t the government’s strong suit, however.
The British government has been working on crypto regulations since 2017, when it first adopted Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer requirements for crypto-related businesses like exchanges. Now, eight years later, the central bank is still developing its policies based on industry feedback.
The slow pace of progress presents a problem. According to Taylor, “We’ve been consulting on a wider framework to regulate stablecoins for almost five years, and we still haven’t gotten any actual license framework in place, which is problematic for a number of reasons,” he said.
“It doesn’t help businesses that want to launch stablecoins in the UK. They don’t have a clear roadmap of how to do that,” he said, “which in turn forces them to move offshore to jurisdictions where there are other regulatory frameworks already live.”
This is for a number of reasons, Taylor explained, including consecutive changes in government, as well as a lack of “real champions in any of our key stakeholders, be that the current government, be that Treasury, be that the FCA.”
Progress on crypto regulations may be slow in the UK — slower than many in the industry would like — but for Abraham, “The Bank is being pragmatic and fair. The overriding message is that innovation is welcome, but if you want your token to function like money, you need money-grade controls.”
Magazine: 2026 is the year of pragmatic privacy in crypto: Canton, Zcash and more
The debut of the Canary Capital XRP exchange-traded fund (ETF) is signaling renewed demand for altcoins, after the fund posted the strongest first-day performance of the more than 900 ETFs launched in 2025.
Canary Capital’s XRP (XRP) ETF closed its first day with $58 million in trading volume, marking the most successful ETF debut of 2025 among both crypto and traditional ETFs, said Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas in a Thursday X post.
The new fund garnered over $250 million in inflows during its first trading day, surpassing the recent inflows of all other crypto ETFs.
Part of the reason behind the successful launch was the ETF’s in-kind creation model, according to ETF analyst Nate Geraci.
“A few people asking how it’s possible to have ‘only’ $59mil trading volume, but nearly $250mil inflows… The answer? In-kind creations, which don’t show up in trading volume,” wrote Geraci in a Thursday X post.
The in-kind redemption model enables the creation and redemption of ETF shares through the underlying asset, as opposed to cash-only transaction models. In this case, Canary Capital’s ETF shares can be exchanged for XRP tokens.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved in-kind creation and redemption for cryptocurrency ETFs on July 29, Cointelegraph reported at the time.
Smart money traders rotate into XRP longs after ETF debut
The launch of the ETF inspired a bullish rotation among the industry’s most successful traders, as tracked by returns and labeled as “smart money” traders on the crypto intelligence platform Nansen.
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Smart money traders have added $44 million worth of net long XRP positions over the past 24 hours, signaling more upside expectations for the token.
The cohort was net long on the XRP token, with a cumulative $49 million, but remained net short on the Solana (SOL) token, with $55 million worth of cumulative short positions on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid.
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“XRP is holding near $2.30, showing relative stability but still feeling the effects of declining liquidity and cautious investor sentiment,” Ryan Lee, chief analyst at Bitget exchange, told Cointelegraph.
“For now, the setup looks like a healthy reset, not the end of the cycle, with both SOL and XRP well-positioned to lead the next wave once confidence snaps back.”
Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw $866 million worth of negative outflows on Thursday, their second-worst day on record, after the $1.14 billion daily outflows on Feb. 25, 2025, according to Farside Investors.
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