Tom Chen

Bitcoin bounced from a $74,192 low to $77,000 on May 23 after the US president said a memorandum of understanding with Tehran was close to signing and the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Short sellers caught the worst of the reversal.

Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist wants a new institution funded with at least $1 billion in ETH and sustained by staking revenue. He posted the proposal days after the EF confirmed its eighth senior departure of the year.

THORChain confirmed on May 15 that one of its six Asgard vaults was compromised for roughly $10.7 million via a GG20 threshold-signature key-leak; on May 18, Blockaid flagged an $11.58 million drain on the Verus-Ethereum bridge caused by the same class of source-destination value-binding gap that broke Wormhole and Nomad in 2022.

THYP, the first US spot ETF tracking Hyperliquid's HYPE token, has gathered $12.6 million in AUM through four sessions of consecutive net inflows since launching on Nasdaq on May 12, with issuer 21Shares now pitching the fund on 24-hour market exposure rather than the token itself.

Iran's new Hormuz Safe platform offers cryptographically verified insurance certificates against vessel inspection, detention and confiscation — payable in bitcoin. The revenue target is $10 billion a year. CoinDesk and Bloomberg cannot confirm that a single policy has actually been sold.

Tether reported $1.04 billion in net profit for the first quarter and excess reserves of $8.23 billion against $192 billion in assets — the strongest balance sheet the company has ever published, even as Senators Warren and Wyden launched a fresh investigation into its links to Cantor Fitzgerald and Howard Lutnick's family trust.

Coinbase Asset Management opened a stablecoin-linked institutional credit fund on Thursday, with investors able to hold their shares either through traditional channels or as tokens minted on Ethereum, Solana or Base via Superstate's FundOS platform.

Strategy added 3,273 BTC to its treasury for $255 million on April 27, lifting total holdings to 818,334 coins as bitcoin's spot price slipped below the company's average cost basis for the first time in five months.

The U.S. 30-year Treasury yield crossed 5% for the first time since July 2025 on Thursday morning, and bitcoin is already paying for it. BTC slid back under $76,000 as institutional capital rotates into yield-bearing dollars.

India's Reserve Bank has begun routing portions of the country's $80 billion welfare programme through the digital rupee in ten state-level pilots, while urging the federal government to put a BRICS-wide CBDC interoperability proposal on the agenda of the bloc's 2026 summit.

State Street said it will deliver tokenised fund servicing from Luxembourg by the end of 2026, extending administration, custody and transfer agency to digitally native funds and bringing the world's second-largest custodian into direct competition with BNY Mellon and JPMorgan on-chain.

A coordinated international operation led by Dubai Police has dismantled nine cryptocurrency investment scam centres and arrested at least 276 people, with three defendants now facing federal wire fraud and money laundering charges in the Southern District of California.

MegaETH's native token launches on Thursday, with 53.3 per cent of supply locked behind on-chain performance milestones rather than calendar dates. Pre-market perpetuals on Hyperliquid have been trading at an implied $1.5 to $2 billion fully diluted valuation.

Tempo's new Zones feature lets enterprises run permissioned parallel chains for confidential transactions like payroll and treasury management, but critics say the operator-controlled model amounts to a glorified database with a blockchain receipt.

The National Bank has approved bitcoin, ether, solana and 23 other digital assets for use by crypto banks that will offer deposits, loans, staking and token issuance under direct central bank supervision.

The Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio invests exclusively in cash, short-dated US Treasuries and overnight repos, targeting the 100 per cent reserve requirement that the GENIUS Act imposes on payment stablecoin issuers.

Robinhood added Zcash to its trading platform on Wednesday, making ZEC available in New York — where the BitLicense regime has historically shut out privacy-focused tokens — and sparking a 10 per cent price surge on volume that spiked 50 per cent.

Two AI agents based on co-founder Fred Ehrsam and former CTO Balaji Srinivasan are already fielding questions on Slack and email, as CEO Brian Armstrong signals a future where automated colleagues outnumber flesh-and-blood staff.

Crypto protocols have lost $606 million to exploits in the first 18 days of April, driven by two enormous bridge attacks attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group, making it the worst month for crypto security since the Bybit breach in February 2025.

Lido DAO transferred the first $1.81 million tranche of its $20 million LDO buyback programme on Wednesday, routing tokens through centralised exchanges in a bid to retire up to 8 per cent of the circulating supply at historically depressed prices.

The stablecoin issuer's new tether.wallet app supports USDT, bitcoin, and tokenised gold with human-readable addresses and no gas tokens — a consumer play aimed squarely at emerging markets.

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper has asked the Financial Conduct Authority to investigate whether Nigel Farage's promotional video for Stack BTC amounts to market abuse, given his 6% equity stake in the company.

Kevin Warsh's ethics filing reveals stakes in DeFi protocols, Ethereum scaling networks, a Bitcoin Lightning startup, and prediction markets — all of which he must divest before taking the job.

The US Senate's most ambitious crypto market structure bill is stuck in a four-way deadlock between banking lobbyists, crypto firms, Democrats and Republicans. If it doesn't clear the Banking Committee this month, it may not get another chance before the midterms.

The USDC issuer has announced a wrapped bitcoin token backed one-to-one by native BTC with onchain-verifiable reserves, aimed at institutional counterparties including OTC desks, market makers, and lending protocols.

The ABA rejected a White House economic report dismissing stablecoin yield risks to bank deposits, arguing the Council of Economic Advisers studied the wrong question as the Clarity Act heads toward a make-or-break Senate markup.

Tether has released QVAC, an open-source software development kit that runs and fine-tunes AI models entirely on local hardware, as part of the stablecoin issuer's increasingly expensive push to become something more than a dollar-peg factory.

The Cantor Fitzgerald-led process is the first time Tether has opened its cap table meaningfully since founding. The asking price would make the stablecoin issuer worth more than every US bank except JPMorgan Chase — and investors have until late April to decide.

MoonPay has signed on to the stablecoin payment rail that WalletConnect and French terminal maker Ingenico began building earlier this year, giving the in-store crypto checkout experiment a branded fiat settlement layer for the first time.

Ethereum's proof-of-stake participation rate passed 30 percent of circulating supply this week, with roughly 37 million ETH now committed to validators and the cost of attacking the network pushed beyond $120 billion in collateral alone.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority handed its inaugural stablecoin issuer licences to HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial on Friday, selecting two winners from a field of 36 applicants and clearing the path for the city's first bank-issued HKD stablecoins within months.

The second-largest crypto exchange by volume says its internal controls caught a batch-transaction exploit modelled on the techniques that took down Mt. Gox, preventing what would have been one of the largest attempted thefts from a centralised venue.

The US Treasury will share the same cyber-threat intelligence it distributes to traditional banks with qualifying crypto exchanges, custodians and wallet providers, in an admission that digital assets are now inside the perimeter of core financial infrastructure.

The Treasury Secretary and Fed Chair convened an urgent meeting this week with the chiefs of Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs to warn that Anthropic's new Mythos model can identify and exploit software vulnerabilities at a speed and cost the current defensive stack was never designed to resist. For crypto, the implications are sharper still.

New CEO Stephen Gregory is steering the exchange beyond spot crypto trading into prediction markets and derivatives after its US market share collapsed from 20 per cent to almost nothing following a $4.3 billion federal penalty and years of regulatory turmoil.

A paper published by BTQ Technologies calculates that using quantum computers to mine bitcoin at current difficulty would demand roughly 10 to the power of 25 watts — approaching stellar energy output — and argues the real quantum threat lies in cryptographic signatures, not mining.

America's largest brokerage by client assets has opened a waitlist for direct bitcoin and ether trading through a new Schwab Crypto account, targeting a limited Q2 rollout before broader availability later in 2026.

The State Administration of Taxation and the National Financial Regulatory Administration jointly issued guidelines on 5 April that embed blockchain into the country's bank-tax data infrastructure, with a nationwide rollout targeted for 2029.

Since the outbreak of the Iran conflict on 28 February, bitcoin has gained more than 5 per cent while the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF has fallen over 2 per cent — the widest divergence since the two assets began tracking each other in late 2024.

The world's largest crypto exchange will restrict spot order executions outside dynamic price bands from 14 April, a direct response to the thin-liquidity dislocations that rattled markets last October.

The Giugliano upgrade at block 85,268,500 lets block producers announce blocks earlier in the pipeline and embeds fee parameters directly in headers, targeting the two-second finality gap that separates Polygon from card-rail settlement speeds.

The company behind the Balancer decentralised exchange is winding down months after a $128 million exploit, while the protocol's DAO approves a sweeping restructure that eliminates token inflation and redirects all fees to the treasury.

Anthropic's Project Glasswing deploys its most capable AI model to date across 12 launch partners including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft for defensive cybersecurity work, after internal research showed AI agents could autonomously exploit $4.6 million in smart contract vulnerabilities.

Five days after North Korean hackers drained $270 million from Drift Protocol using social engineering and durable nonces, the Solana Foundation has unveiled STRIDE and the Solana Incident Response Network to overhaul ecosystem security.