Markets

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.

The sixth-largest bitcoin miner by hash rate sold its entire active treasury across February and March, slashing mining costs by 19 per cent while securing $75 million in fresh capital to convert its global infrastructure to AI compute.

Druk Holding & Investments moved another 319.7 BTC on Wednesday, continuing a methodical liquidation that has cut the kingdom's holdings by more than 70% from their 13,000 BTC peak.

The bank's analysts estimate first-quarter flows ran at roughly one-third of last year's pace, with Strategy's bitcoin purchases and a handful of large VC rounds accounting for most of the capital that did arrive.

The White House regulatory review office has completed its assessment of a Department of Labor proposal that would reshape how 401(k) fiduciaries evaluate alternative assets including crypto — a rule classified as 'economically significant' given its potential impact on nearly $50 trillion in retirement savings.

The $1.5 trillion asset manager will run active crypto strategies under a new Franklin Crypto unit, with part of the acquisition settled in tokenised money-fund shares — a first for traditional finance M&A.

CME Group will list Avalanche and Sui futures on 4 May, extending its regulated crypto derivatives lineup to nine assets as the exchange prepares to move all digital asset products to round-the-clock trading later that month.

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.

CPI and PPI prints due this week could reshape Fed rate expectations, while Trump's Tuesday night ultimatum to Iran over the Strait of Hormuz injects binary geopolitical risk into a market already compressed between $62,000 and $75,000.

Addresses holding 1,000 to 10,000 BTC have flipped from accumulating 200,000 coins a year ago to offloading 188,000, while options dealers warn that a drop below $68,000 could trigger a self-reinforcing selloff toward $60,000.

A Google Quantum AI research paper citing Algorand's post-quantum cryptography has triggered ALGO's strongest monthly rally since 2021, pushing its market capitalisation back above $1 billion.

Weekly inflows to spot XRP exchange-traded funds have plummeted from over $200 million to under $1 million since late 2025, with Bloomberg Intelligence data revealing that 84 percent of assets come from retail investors rather than institutional allocators.

BlackRock's IBIT and Fidelity's FBTC account for $329 million of the day's total as spot Bitcoin ETF flows rebound from a sluggish March.

Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin Trust is expected to begin trading on NYSE Arca under the ticker MSBT as early as this week, with a 0.14 percent annual fee that undercuts BlackRock's market-leading fund and marks the first spot Bitcoin ETF issued directly by a major US bank.

Total crypto trading volume reached $20.5 trillion in the first quarter, with derivatives accounting for 90 per cent of activity and decentralised exchange Hyperliquid emerging as a major contender.

Stablecoin issuer Circle printed $3.25 billion of USDC on the Solana network in seven days, the largest weekly issuance of 2026, as institutional capital flows increasingly favour the high-throughput blockchain over Ethereum for settlement and DeFi activity.

The global stablecoin market reached a record $317 billion in total supply in early April 2026, while cumulative transaction volume in 2026 has surpassed $7.2 trillion — exceeding the annual throughput of the US Automated Clearing House system and cementing stablecoins as a systemic layer of digital finance.

ALGO has surged to its highest level since September 2025 after the SEC and CFTC jointly classified it as a digital commodity in March, while a Google Quantum AI paper cited its FALCON signature scheme as a model for post-quantum blockchain security.

A 3.4% surge on April 6 lifted Bitcoin to $69,233 after the Crypto Fear and Greed Index plunged to 8, a reading that has historically preceded meaningful recoveries in four of the last five instances.