The Strategy (MSTR) bitcoin (BTC) acquisition machine continued to roll on last week.

The company added 22,048 BTC for $1.92 billion, or an average price of $86,969 each, per a Monday morning filing. Total holdings are now 528,185 bitcoin purchased for $35.63 billion, or an average price of $67,458 each.

At the current price around $82,000, those holdings are worth more than $43 billion.

This latest purchase appeared to be funded mostly by additional common share issuance, a total of $1.2 billion worth in the week ended March 30, according to the filing. Strategy also tapped its STRK preferred share ATM for $18.52 million during the week.

The company additionally closed on its STRF preferred share offering last week, raising $711.2 million.

MSTR is lower by 4% premarket alongside bitcoin’s roughly 3% decline in price since the Friday close of the stock market.

Darknet markets are increasingly returning to bitcoin (BTC) as their primary cryptocurrency because of rising liquidity and accessibility challenges associated with privacy-focused coins like monero (XMR), according to Eric Jardine, cybercrime research lead at Chainalysis.

«After major exchanges delisted XMR, we observed a significant increase in bitcoin inflows,» Jardine said in an interview with CoinDesk. «Reduced accessibility is steering users back toward bitcoin.»

Many Western markets on the darknet — a part of the internet hosted within an encrypted network and accessible only through specialized anonymity-providing tools — had either fully moved to monero or operated with it in parallel with bitcoin before the delistings. XMR dropped off after it was removed from major exchanges.

OKX removed XMR and other privacy-focused tokens including dash (DASH) and ZCash (ZCH) at the end of 2023. Binance announced in February 2024 that it planned to de-list monero.

«When a coin or token no longer meets this standard, or the industry changes, we conduct a more in-depth review and potentially delist it,» Binance said at the time.

On-chain data from BitInfoCharts shows that the daily number of monero transactions has halved from this time last year.

«In order to be an effective kind of medium of exchange, you need a certain amount of liquidity and a certain amount of accessibility,» Jardine said.

Jardine emphasized that illicit cryptocurrency transactions represent only a minor share of total crypto activity.

«Typically, illicit transactions constitute at or below 1% of total crypto activities. While addressing these issues is essential, broadly labeling crypto negatively is inaccurate and counterproductive.»

Chainalysis data shows that about 0.14% of all transactions in crypto, some $50 billion, involve illicit activity, with a rise in stablecoins as an illicit payment mechanism.

The stablecoin issuers are fighting back, with the Tron-led T3 Financial Crime Unit, a group comprising of Tron, USDT-issuer Tether and TRM Labs freezing over $100 million in illict funds.

Jardine also noted that law-enforcement agencies prioritize darknet markets primarily based on their scale and involvement in the fentanyl trade.

Its presence significantly escalates the likelihood of a darknet market attracting law enforcement attention, he said, because fighting the drug is a priority for international law enforcement.

«Markets have sort of varying levels of sensitivity to fentanyl-related sales,» he said. «Some claim they don’t do it, then don’t police vendors; some claim they don’t do it, but then they do. Some will be selling precursor products but not finished products.»

Indeed, one of the most recent darknet market busts was the Nemesis online market. The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) specifically cited the market’s role in the fentanyl trade as a reason for the bust.

And, as a result, OFAC sanctioned a number of crypto wallets tied to its operator, Behrouz Parsarad: 44 BTC addresses and 5 XMR wallets.

Archax, a U.K.-regulated crypto exchange and custodian focusing on tokenized assets, has acquired a U.S. broker-dealer in an effort to enter the booming institutional market in the country after recent positive changes on the regulatory environment.

Globacap Private Markets Inc, a broker-dealer and alternative trading system (ATS) regulated by FINRA and the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC), is being bought by Archax and being renamed to Archax Markets US.

The new entity will serve as the company’s foothold on American soil and serve the institutions and professional investors in the country, two Archax executives told CoinDesk.

Asset tokenization is a fast-growing sector in crypto as global banks, asset managers and digital asset firms are increasingly using blockchain rails to move traditional financial instruments. They do so to achieve operational efficiencies and speedier,around-the-clock settlements.

Just in the past weeks, asset manager Fidelity Investments filed to launch a tokenized money market fund and is reportedly working on issuing a stablecoin.

Derivatives exchange CME Group started tokenization tests with Google Cloud with plans to launch new services next year, while the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company partnered with Circle to explore services built on USDC stablecoin and tokenized fund USYC.

Archax specializes in the issuance, custody, and trading of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), including money market funds, corporate bonds, carbon credits and uranium. For example, Archax’s recently-issued tokenized Treasury fund on XRP Ledger with asset manager Abrdn saw $45 million in deposits to become a top 10 product by assets under management, rwa.xyz data shows.

Archax has been exploring entering the U.S. market over the past years, but stayed on the sideline due to regulatory uncertainty, Graham Rodford, CEO of Archax, said in an interview with CoinDesk.

«Under this new administration, which seems to be more crypto positive, we are getting more interest from the U.S. as well, which obviously we can’t easily serve from the UK, so it makes sense for us strategically to go there,» Rodford said.

Archax also plans to expand its offerings to tokenized U.S. equities and bonds, building on its existing partnerships across several blockchains including Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Hedera Hashgraph and XRP Ledger.

The firm’s U.S. entrance follows the recent purchase of a Spanish brokerage firm to expand services to the European Union, pending regulatory approvals.