Markets

Aave saw its strongest single day of Ethereum wallet creation in nearly five years on Tuesday, adding 1,806 addresses even as bitcoin closed under $60,000 and the fear-and-greed index sat at 13. The trigger is a mix of the V4 rollout, Smart Value Recapture revenue, and a Standard Chartered price note that circulated for a week.

Citigroup's second downgrade of 2026 tells clients the ETF bid it had been counting on has now evaporated. The bank's bear case now sees $53,000 bitcoin and $1,094 ether.

The June exodus surpassed February 2025's previous low by nearly a billion dollars, ending seven consecutive days of redemptions and coinciding with the Fed's first hawkish pivot under Kevin Warsh.

Open Standard, an independent issuer backed by Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, Visa and Mastercard, will hand almost all reserve yield to the partners that distribute it — a direct assault on Circle's economics.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Schwab and Cboe will launch S&P 500-linked binary options for retail customers in the coming months. Schwab's 47 million accounts will sit one tab over from contracts Polymarket and Kalshi have spent three years building a category around.

Bitcoin difficulty dropped from 138.96T to 124.93T at block 953,568 on June 14, the second-largest negative adjustment of the year. Hashrate is down 12% in a month to 886 EH/s, and the marginal kilowatt is increasingly being sold to AI hyperscalers instead.

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.

Bumosarang, the country's seventh-largest prepaid funeral provider, has disclosed a $33 million unrealised loss on a $43 million position in the T-REX 2X Long BMNR Daily Target ETF — held inside the customer prepayment pool.

HYPE crossed $56 on May 21 and Hyperliquid's fully diluted valuation overtook Solana's, while Bitwise and 21Shares ETFs combined for a record $25.5 million in net inflows the day before.

SPCX-USDC launched on Hyperliquid at 5:16 AM UTC with a $150 reference price and a $1.78 trillion implied valuation. By the close it was trading at $202.89, implying a valuation well above any private-market mark SpaceX has cleared.

WETH borrowing parameters on Aave V3 returned to pre-incident values across Ethereum Core, Ethereum Prime, Arbitrum, Base, Mantle and Linea on Monday, after more than 95 per cent of the unbacked rsETH from April's exploit was clawed back through liquidations.

US spot bitcoin ETFs recorded $648.64 million in net outflows on May 18, the heaviest single-day redemption since January, as bitcoin slipped from $82,800 to just above $77,000 and BlackRock's IBIT absorbed its second-largest daily outflow of 2026.

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.

MARA Holdings disposed of nearly a third of its bitcoin treasury in Q1 to retire zero-coupon convertibles and fund a pivot toward AI infrastructure — and its 10-Q no longer describes the firm primarily as a miner.

NYSE Texas filed Rule 7.39 with the SEC on May 5 to allow tokenised versions of Russell 1000 stocks and major-index ETFs to trade alongside their traditional shares. The exchange used a procedural shortcut that made the rule effective on filing.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $532 million in net inflows on May 4, the third straight day of positive flows. BlackRock's IBIT alone pulled in $335 million; Fidelity's FBTC took $185 million. Everyone else split the remaining $12 million.

GameStop submitted a non-binding $55.5 billion offer for eBay, valuing the marketplace at $125 a share in a roughly even split of cash and stock. The funding mix — $9.4 billion of cash plus up to $20 billion of TD Securities-backed financing — leaves the company's 4,710 bitcoin treasury, worth around $368 million, on the table as a possible source of capital.

Coinbase will lay off roughly 660 employees and rebuild around AI-native pods, two days before reporting a quarter in which revenue fell 26 per cent and trading volume hit an 18-month low.

Bitcoin's first push above $80,000 since January lasted only hours. A report by Iran's Fars news agency that two Iranian missiles had hit a US patrol boat near the Strait of Hormuz reversed the move; CENTCOM denied any ship was hit, but the price still hasn't recovered.