The potential alliance could significantly impact global AI infrastructure, enhancing efficiency and scalability in data center operations.

The post Schneider Electric and Foxconn form alliance to accelerate AI data center deployment appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Wolfsburg's investment in Reese highlights their commitment to immediate promotion and long-term squad stability, impacting 2. Bundesliga dynamics.

The post VfL Wolfsburg signs Fabian Reese from Hertha BSC for reported £9M appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The anticipated US-Iran agreement could stabilize global oil markets and reshape geopolitical alliances, despite unresolved nuclear issues.

The post Pakistan’s foreign minister anticipates US-Iran signing on June 19 as oil drops and crypto sanctions bite appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The integration of blockchain in sports is reshaping crypto markets, driving fan engagement and creating new investment opportunities.

The post FIFA World Cup Group F standings shake up crypto prediction markets and meme token volumes appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

France's absence of a fan token may limit crypto engagement opportunities, highlighting potential missed revenue and fan interaction avenues.

The post World Cup hype meets crypto fan tokens as France heads to 2026 tournament without one appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Standard Chartered Calls Crypto Bottom as Bitcoin Price Recovers From $59,000 Low

Standard Chartered’s head of digital asset research, Geoff Kendrick, declared Friday that the crypto market has seen its cycle low, with Bitcoin’s recent dip to approximately $59,000 marking the bottom of the latest downturn — a 53% drawdown from its October all-time high of $126,000.

 “Winter is over. Welcome back to crypto spring,” Kendrick wrote in a Friday note, adding, “I think we have now seen the low in crypto asset prices for the cycle.”

Bitcoin had recovered to around $64,000 at the time of Kendrick’s note, representing a roughly 5% gain over the prior week. The bank maintains a $100,000 price target for Bitcoin by year-end — projections it first issued in February.

SpaceX IPO drains crypto liquidity — then frees it

One of the two primary catalysts Kendrick cited is the historic Nasdaq debut of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which priced its $75 billion IPO at $135 per share under the ticker SPCX on June 12. 

Shares opened sharply above their IPO price, gaining roughly 20% on debut day. Kendrick argued that a significant portion of recent Bitcoin ETF outflows — totaling more than $5.72 billion since the second week of May, among the sharpest “since inception” — was driven by investors liquidating crypto positions to secure SpaceX allocations. With the IPO now live, that specific selling pressure may lift, he said.

The overlap between crypto and SpaceX demand was already playing out in real time. On Hyperliquid, perpetual contracts for SpaceX (SPCX) had accumulated over $240 million in open interest and $220 million in 24-hour volume ahead of the debut — ranking it as the eighth-largest asset on the platform.

Iran is a wildcard

The second catalyst involves geopolitics. A potential peace deal between the U.S. and Iran, timed ahead of next week’s G7 summit, could reduce pressure on global oil supplies that have remained tight since Middle East hostilities began. 

Lower oil prices would subsequently cool elevated U.S. Treasury yields — which have weighed on risk assets like crypto by making risk-free government debt more attractive.

West Texas Intermediate crude fell roughly 1.5% on Friday to around $85–$86 per barrel. However, the peace deal narrative remained fragile. 

President Trump stated Thursday that a breakthrough could come this weekend, only to later post on Truth Social that the deal made public was not what had been agreed, warning Iranian officials to “get their act together” — adding uncertainty to the macro outlook.

Three bitcoin price signals to watch

Kendrick outlined three confirmation signals that would validate his call. First, he is watching for Strategy to announce an additional Bitcoin purchase on Monday, as CEO Michael Saylor’s buying history has served as a reliable demand signal for institutional appetite. 

Second, he is expecting U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs to return to net-positive daily inflows on Friday. 

Third, he wants to see continued declines in global oil prices as the Iran diplomatic situation evolves.

If all three materialize, Kendrick’s crypto spring thesis gains its clearest validation yet — suggesting institutional and macro forces are finally aligning to push Bitcoin back toward the bank’s $100,000 year-end target.

This post Standard Chartered Calls Crypto Bottom as Bitcoin Price Recovers From $59,000 Low first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Blockworks Acquires Messari in Deal Highlighting Crypto’s Data Consolidation Race

Blockworks, the New York-based crypto data and investor relations platform, has acquired rival Messari in a deal that underscores the growing consolidation pressure reshaping the digital asset industry — and the steep valuation resets facing once high-flying crypto startups.

The acquisition brings together two of the industry’s largest crypto information businesses. Messari, founded in 2018, built a comprehensive data platform covering more than 40,000 digital assets, along with APIs, market intelligence, research tools, and AI-powered workflows used by funds, exchanges, regulators, and developers. 

Blockworks, also founded in 2018, has focused on the issuer side of crypto capital markets, offering standardized disclosures through its Token Transparency Framework and a full-stack investor relations platform for onchain assets.

Blockworks paid more than $10 million for Messari — a steep discount from Messari’s approximately $300 million valuation when it raised a $35 million Series B led by Brevan Howard’s crypto arm in 2022, with Point72 Ventures also among its backers, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

The markdown reflects both Messari’s recent difficulties — including the 2024 departure of co-founder and longtime CEO Ryan Selkis and subsequent staff reductions — and broader headwinds gripping the crypto sector.

“This acquisition connects the two sides of the market,” said Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks. “Issuers maintain a trusted record of their business, and investors, exchanges, and regulators consume that record through research, APIs, and automated workflows.”

Blockworks raise to consolidate fragmented crypto data market

The deal was funded in part through Blockworks’ recently closed Series A extension, which valued the company at $192 million. That round was co-led by ParaFi and Reciprocal Ventures and included participation from Coinbase Ventures, among others. 

Blockworks said it raised capital specifically to consolidate crypto’s fragmented data and information market, drawing comparisons to how Wall Street’s information layer eventually coalesced around dominant platforms like Bloomberg, FactSet, and S&P Global.

Messari CEO Diran Li, who took over following Selkis’s departure and had been repositioning the firm as an “AI-first company,” will join Blockworks as a senior leader under co-founders Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito.

The deal arrives as crypto M&A activity remains elevated despite challenging market conditions. Crypto companies have completed 144 deals totaling $11.8 billion in transaction value so far in 2026 — up roughly 3.5% from the same period last year — according to data from advisory firm Architect Partners. 

Still, Eric Risley, founder of Architect Partners, warned that sustained pressure on trading volumes and token prices could force more distressed sales. “We are in the midst of the creation of the haves and the have-nots,” Risley said, per WSJ. 

Both Blockworks and Messari executives said the combined platform would prioritize deeper data coverage, stronger APIs, enhanced compliance workflows, and AI-native research tools as digital assets increasingly migrate onchain.

This post Blockworks Acquires Messari in Deal Highlighting Crypto’s Data Consolidation Race first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

SpaceX Officially Joins Public Bitcoin Leaderboard as 8th Largest Holder With 18,712 BTC

Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched trading on the Nasdaq today under the ticker SPCX — and it didn’t arrive empty-handed. 

The company officially entered the public Bitcoin treasury leaderboard as the 8th largest holder with 18,712 BTC, a position that had been building for years before its historic IPO debut confirmed the full size of the stash.

SpaceX’s S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission first disclosed the 18,712 BTC position back in May, valued at approximately $1.29 billion at the time of filing. 

The total cost basis was reported at $661 million — an average acquisition price of roughly $35,324 per coin — suggesting the company began accumulating Bitcoin in late 2023 or earlier. At today’s prices near $63,000, the position is worth approximately $1.19 billion.

The disclosure somewhat surprised the market. Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence had previously tracked SpaceX’s holdings as low as 6,095 BTC, and the BitcoinTreasuries.net May 2026 Corporate Adoption Report noted that its pre-IPO private estimate stood at just 8,285 BTC. 

The actual confirmed figure — more than double those estimates — made SpaceX’s reveal the second-largest Bitcoin treasury disclosure of May, trailing only Strategy’s 25,404 BTC in monthly purchases and accounting for more than one-third of all public treasury growth before sales.

“We expect SpaceX to rank among the top ten publicly traded Bitcoin treasuries after its anticipated June 12 IPO,” BitcoinTreasuries.net wrote in its May report — a forecast that has now materialized. 

The live leaderboard, updated as of June 11, confirms SpaceX at rank #8, slotting in just behind Strive (19,032 BTC at #7) and just ahead of Coinbase Global (16,492 BTC at #9).

SpaceX shares debut higher than initial pricing

The IPO itself is historic, even without the Bitcoin angle. 

SpaceX priced its shares at $135 on June 11, raising roughly $75 billion and valuing the company at about $1.75 trillion. 

Reports now indicate the stock could debut at $171 per share with other reports saying $155 a share. At that price, SpaceX’s valuation would climb to approximately $2.2 trillion, potentially making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

The listing, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, ranks as one of the largest stock market debuts in U.S. history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion IPO in 2019.

The timing of SpaceX’s entry into the public crypto arena is notable given broader market headwinds. Bitcoin has shed more than 50% from its all-time high above $126,000, hovering around $64,000 in recent sessions, with spot Bitcoin ETFs bleeding $2.26 billion in outflows over two weeks. 

Still, SpaceX’s Bitcoin position appears to be a long-term balance-sheet allocation rather than a trading posture. The S-1 stated: “The Company has ownership of and control over its digital assets, which consist of Bitcoin, and utilizes, and expects to continue to utilize third-party custodians to hold its Bitcoin.” 

Analysts at Grayscale noted that SpaceX is poised to become the most valuable public company holding Bitcoin by market capitalization — even as Strategy remains the largest by coin count with over 843,000 BTC.

This post SpaceX Officially Joins Public Bitcoin Leaderboard as 8th Largest Holder With 18,712 BTC first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Sam Bankman-Fried Loses Appeal to Overturn FTX Fraud Conviction

One of Sam Bankman-Fried’s last credible paths to freedom closed Friday as a federal appeals court upheld his fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence, ruling that the case against him was, in the court’s own words, “conservatively stated, robust.”

A three-judge panel of the Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals handed down the 42-page opinion on June 12, rejecting every argument Sam Bankman-Fried’s legal team advanced to undo the November 2023 conviction that cemented one of the largest financial collapses in crypto history, according to Reuters.  

At the heart of the appeal was a claim that the U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan had stripped Sam Bankman-Fried of a fair defense by barring evidence that FTX held enough assets to cover customer withdrawals. 

Defense attorney Alexandra Shapiro told the appellate panel in November 2025 that “Mr. Bankman-Fried’s trial was fundamentally unfair because the jury only got to hear one side of the story.”

Prosecutors countered that Kaplan’s ruling was correct: fraud charges hinge on misappropriation, not on the possibility that assets could have covered liabilities under different circumstances. The appellate panel agreed, finding the trial court’s evidence rulings sound and the government’s case against Sam Bankman-Fried overwhelming.

How FTX Fell

The exchange, once valued at $32 billion, collapsed in November 2022 once it was exposed that the balance sheet of Alameda Research — Bankman-Fried’s affiliated hedge fund — was built on FTX’s own exchange token rather than independent assets. The disclosure triggered a customer run that ripped open an $8 billion hole in FTX’s accounts.

Three of Bankman-Fried’s former deputies — Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, FTX co-founder Gary Wang, and engineering head Nishad Singh — each pleaded guilty and testified against him. Ellison, the trial’s star witness, told jurors Bankman-Fried gave her the instruction to divert customer deposits to Alameda to repay loans from crypto lenders. “Sam directed me to commit these crimes,” she said from the stand.

The court ordered an $11 billion forfeiture and three years of supervised release following Bankman-Fried’s March 2024 sentencing. Ellison received two years and was released in January 2026 after serving 14 months.

The appeals court ruling lands just weeks after Bankman-Fried also filed a formal clemency petition with the DOJ’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, requesting a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. The application is listed as a “pardon after completion of sentence” — not a commutation — and Trump has said publicly he will not grant it.

Judge Kaplan denied a separate Rule 33 new trial motion in April 2026, calling Bankman-Fried’s claim that witnesses had been threatened by the government “wildly conspiratorial and entirely contradicted by the record.” Bankman-Fried withdrew an earlier version of that motion on April 22 without prejudice.

With the 2nd Circuit now closed, his legal options narrow to a habeas petition — a route with a lower success rate than direct appeals — or a Supreme Court petition.

What’s next for Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried remains at a low-security federal prison near Santa Barbara, California, and is not eligible for release until 2044. 

In a prison interview with Fox Business this month, he maintained his position: “I didn’t steal user funds.” He pointed to the FTX bankruptcy estate’s recovery of crypto assets, which have allowed the estate to pay creditors more than 100 cents on the dollar — a figure he frames as proof of FTX’s underlying solvency, though courts at every level have rejected that framing.

The Friday ruling closes the chapter on what federal prosecutors called a “fraud of epic proportions” — a case that shook institutional confidence in crypto markets, triggered congressional hearings, and forced exchanges across the industry to overhaul proof-of-reserves practices.

Back in January, President Donald Trump said he would not pardon former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, rejecting clemency for the convicted crypto executive.

This post Sam Bankman-Fried Loses Appeal to Overturn FTX Fraud Conviction first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy Stock MSTR Offers Bitcoin Exposure At 18% Discount

I’ve been vocal about accumulating Bitcoin aggressively at current levels. Now I’m starting to look seriously at Strategy too. The same kind of confluence that flagged Bitcoin as a sizeable accumulation opportunity is appearing on MSTR, and in some cases, the readings are even more extreme.

This week at a glance:

• The RSI has only been lower on a handful of occasions since Strategy adopted a Bitcoin standard.
• The Mayer Multiple for MSTR has just reached the lower percentiles.
• The BTC vs MSTR ratio is close to entering a zone that has historically preceded sustained MSTR outperformance.
• At the previous Bitcoin all-time high with a 1x net asset value premium, the fair value of MSTR shares would be over $300.

Discount

Strategy currently holds approximately 845,000 BTC with an Average Cost Basis in the mid-$70,000s. That means, at current Bitcoin prices, they’re sitting at a pretty massive loss on their holdings. 

Figure 1: Strategy’s Average BTC Cost Basis and other key metrics.

View Live Charts

This has coincided with the NAV dropping even deeper beneath 1.00x; with MSTR’s market cap currently sitting approximately 18% below the USD value of its Bitcoin holdings. In other words, buying MSTR at current prices is the equivalent of buying $1 of Bitcoin for $0.82.

Support

The 200-week moving average is usually pretty notable support for assets, especially those that typically trend to the upside. Strategy’s share price is currently sitting right on this level, the same level that has previously marked significant accumulation zones.

Figure 2: Strategy’s share price tests the 200-week moving average.

A sustained hold and reclaim of this level, combined with Bitcoin showing any upward momentum, historically sets up the conditions for meaningful MSTR recovery. The level is being tested. Whether it holds will be one of the key signals to watch over the coming weeks.

RSI

Since Strategy adopted a Bitcoin standard, the RSI for MSTR has only been lower on a handful of prior occasions, both during previous Bitcoin bear market cycle lows, when the share price was in the low teens. The current reading isn’t quite at those depths, but it’s approaching them, and the direction of travel is continuing downward.

Figure 3: MSTR’s RSI drops beneath 25. Historically, such levels have preceded price appreciation.

The Mayer Multiple, simply the ratio between MSTR’s closing price and its 200-day moving average, recently registered a reading where 99.2% of all prior data points were higher. That’s a historically extreme level of underperformance relative to its own moving average, and it’s occurred at broadly the same time as the RSI signal. Giving two independent momentum indicators, both flashing readings only seen at the most significant cycle lows in MSTR’s history.

MSTR Or BTC?

The ratio between Bitcoin’s price and MSTR’s share price is one of the cleaner ways to gauge whether exposure should be in Bitcoin directly or rotated toward the higher-beta proxy. When the ratio is in the green upper zone, MSTR has historically been positioned to outperform. When it’s in the red lower zone, Bitcoin tends to lead.

Figure 4: The BTCUSD/MSTR ratio is close to the green zone, a level that has previously preceded sustained MSTR outperformance.

The ratio is currently close to entering that green zone again. Previous instances of this were followed by extended periods of significant MSTR outperformance relative to Bitcoin. The ratio is also making lower highs on the long-term trend, indicating the general trajectory is shifting toward MSTR becoming increasingly favorable relative to direct Bitcoin exposure.

Fair Value

At the previous all-time high of around $126,000 and with no additional accumulation priced in, a 1x net asset value premium on MSTR would imply a share price of over $300. That’s roughly a 2.5x from current levels just to reach fair value at Bitcoin’s last peak.

Figure 5: MSTR price targets modeled across varying BTC holdings and NAV premium scenarios.

If MSTR continues accumulating toward the 900,000 BTC range and the NAV premium moves modestly higher toward 1.25x or 1.5x, well below the 3x+ levels seen in the previous cycle, the numbers become pretty enticing! Crucially, the MSTR dilution that drove bitcoin accumulation is increasingly being funded through STRC rather than common share issuance, reducing that particular headwind.

Where Are We?

I’ve been accumulating bitcoin aggressively. I’m now also looking to add more MSTR. The combination of extreme momentum readings, the 200-week moving average support, an implied discount to the underlying Bitcoin holdings, and the BTC vs MSTR ratio close to entering historically favorable territory makes this feel like a no-brainer for a short-term play to increase my own BTC stack.

That said, MSTR is a high-beta Bitcoin play. If Bitcoin continues to struggle, MSTR will struggle more. I’m not treating this as a replacement for Bitcoin exposure, but as an additional asymmetric position at a point where the data suggests the risk-reward is historically favorable.

For more data, charts, and insights into bitcoin price trends, visit BitcoinMagazinePro.com. 

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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Always do your own research before making any investment decisions.

This post Strategy Stock MSTR Offers Bitcoin Exposure At 18% Discount first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Matt Crosby.

One month after THYP launched on Nasdaq, the three US-traded spot HYPE ETFs have pulled in $161 million in net inflows.

June 5 was the only session to register an outflow, a $2.9 million redemption from BHYP, and every other trading day has closed in the green.

The clean flow record partly reflects access mechanics, as Hyperliquid restricts US users from its platform, leaving brokerage-listed ETFs as the only way American investors can hold HYPE without navigating a non-custodial wallet.

The more durable driver is the asset itself, a derivatives venue with auditable usage metrics, a fee-to-buyback tokenomics loop, and a platform already processing hundreds of billions in monthly volume.

The business behind the token

DefiLlama shows $240.5 billion in 30-day perp volume, $72.4 billion over seven days, and $9.4 billion over 24 hours, with cumulative perp volume standing at $4.663 trillion.

The open interest is currently $8.6 billion, with annualized fees exceeding $1 billion and annualized revenue near $886 million.

CoinGlass reported nearly $493 billion in derivatives volume for the first quarter, and DefiLlama's cumulative figure has moved to roughly $443 billion. 21Shares cited $4.22 trillion at the time of THYP's mid-May launch.

DefiLlama's fee methodology states that 99% of Hyperliquid perps fees go to the Assistance Fund for buying HYPE tokens, excluding builder fees. Bitwise, the issuer behind BHYP, frames this as “virtually all” of its trading revenue being recycled into open-market buybacks.

That structure lets ETF issuers pitch HYPE the way an equity analyst would pitch an exchange stock, focusing on how higher volume produces higher fees, higher fees fund more buybacks, and buybacks tighten the float.

BHYP's own page reports $93.53 million in AUM, 1.587 million HYPE held as of June 10, a 2.25% gross staking reward rate, a 1.18% net staking reward rate, and 70% of assets currently staked.

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan told CNBC the market is “1% penetrated its potential,” adding that most investors still do not know what Hyperliquid is.

Presto Research head of research Peter Chung observed that early data showed institutions piling into HYPE ETFs faster than they did into Bitcoin ETFs on a market-cap-adjusted basis.

HYPE itself hit an all-time high of $75.48 on June 2, is up roughly 160% year-to-date, and trades around $61 as of this writing, giving the protocol a fully diluted valuation approaching $69 billion.

Why this ETF story differs from the others

Solana ETFs are pitched on network activity and developer adoption, while XRP ETFs are pitched on payment utility and legal clarity.

HYPE ETFs offer an underlying asset that is a fractional stake in an exchange cash-flow engine with visible volume, open interest, fees, revenue, and a buyback mechanism tied directly to trading activity.

HIP-3, Hyperliquid's permissionless framework for launching perpetual futures on any asset with a price feed, has pulled crypto's share of total volume down from roughly 90% to around 65%.

On some days, five of the top ten assets by volume are now traditional markets: the S&P 500 via a licensed contract with S&P Dow Jones Indices, silver, Nasdaq-100, WTI, and Brent crude.

HIP-3 open interest reached $1.7 billion in mid-May, up more than 150% from February. Trade.xyz, the largest HIP-3 deployer and a product of Hyperliquid's own tokenization arm Hyperunit, accounts for $1.58 billion of that total and has processed over $100 billion in volume since October 2025.

That revenue diversification directly strengthens the bull case for an exchange capturing oil, equity index, and silver volume, as it can sustain its fee run rate.

How exchange-equity logic holds or fails

The bull case holds if Hyperliquid's 30-day perp volume stays above $200 billion, keeping annualized revenue near the current $885 million run rate or climbing toward $1.2 billion as 21Shares projects in its upside scenario.

ETF inflows become a durable third demand channel alongside organic staking and protocol buybacks, HIP-3 open interest pushes past $3 billion, and HYPE trades more like a high-growth exchange asset than a high-beta DeFi token.

The bear case opens with monthly volume collapsing below $150 billion, pulling annualized revenue into the $350-$450 million range that 21Shares models in its downside scenario, implying a token price in the $15-$19 zone.

Token unlocks could outpace buyback demand at lower revenue run rates. ETF outflows would then amplify downward price moves, given HYPE's concentrated float.

The only sustained outflow session on record so far produced no observable price damage, but that ratio would look very different at ten times the scale.

What the risks look like from inside the prospectus

Bitwise's BHYP documentation classifies the fund as outside the 1940 Act, noting that staking introduces slashing risk, reward-loss risk, and redemption-timing risk. 21Shares flags centralization and validator attack vector risks alongside regulatory uncertainty.

Both issuers frame HYPE as a speculative exposure to an early-stage venue, distinct from a regulated exchange.

The platform competes with centralized venues that have far deeper liquidity and compliance infrastructure, and depends on the continued willingness of builders to deploy HIP-3 markets at scale.

Hyperliquid became a 24/7 macro trading venue partly because the US-Iran conflict last summer sent traders scrambling for oil access on weekends, when traditional futures exchanges were closed.

That growth episode put the platform directly in front of commodity regulators who have historically been aggressive about jurisdiction.

An enforcement headline targeting commodity perps or tokenized equities on the platform would hit the revenue base that the ETF pitch depends on.

The next test is whether ETF inflows hold as HYPE's year-to-date outperformance matures and early buyers consider taking profit.

Bitwise has committed 10% of BHYP management fees to purchase and stake HYPE on its own balance sheet, adding a structural demand floor tied to AUM.

Whether that, combined with the protocol's buyback engine, is enough to absorb future unlock-driven selling depends entirely on whether the volume numbers that underpin the thesis keep printing.

The post HYPE ETFs quietly pulled $161M in one month as Wall Street buys crypto’s on-chain exchange bet appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Everyone knows about the ETFs, but almost nobody knows about the dozens of obscure institutional products being built around Bitcoin while the funds soak up all the attention, from a $40 million insurance reserve in Barbados to an S&P-rated bond deal sold to Wall Street investors by Jefferies.

The ETFs answered only one question, which was how ordinary investors and institutions could own Bitcoin inside a regulated wrapper. The products in this article answer a different, and arguably bigger one: what can you actually do with Bitcoin once you own it?

The answer is: the same things finance has always done with US Treasuries and gold. You can pledge it to borrow money, post it as margin for trades, hold it as the reserve behind an insurance policy, or build a corporate balance sheet on top of it.

Assets that can do all of that at once are sometimes called financial primitives, which is a fancy way of saying building blocks: things so widely accepted and easy to value that the rest of the financial system stacks loans, bonds, and derivatives on top of them. Treasuries earned that status because everyone agrees on what they're worth and how to seize them if a deal goes wrong.

Bitcoin is now being tested for the same job, and the early results explain why some of the biggest players in this market really, truly don't care if the price goes up or down.

Insurance reserves, consumer credit, and the very first rated Bitcoin bond

In March 2025, Tabit Insurance, a Barbados-licensed carrier founded by former executives of the Bittrex exchange, capitalized a $40 million property and casualty insurance facility funded entirely in Bitcoin.

Essentially, people who hold Bitcoin hand it over to back real insurance policies that cover storm damage and lawsuits against company directors, and in exchange, earn a dollar yield that runs near 10%. The policies and premiums stay in US dollars, so customers never touch crypto, while Bitcoin sits in reserve as the money that pays claims if things go wrong.

Tabit holds a Class 2 license from the Barbados Financial Services Commission and is set up as a segregated cell company, meaning each investor pool is legally walled off from the others, so one cell's losses can't drain another's capital.

Regulators and auditors can also check reserves on the blockchain in real time, providing more transparency than traditional insurers offer in their quarterly filings. CEO Stephen Stonberg said that the entire global reinsurance industry runs on roughly $800 billion of capital, while Bitcoin is an asset class worth trillions, so even a sliver of that wealth flowing into underwriting would be felt across the industry.

While insurance reserves are certainly a pretty unexpected use case for Bitcoin, lending is where the money starts to get serious. A Bitcoin-backed loan works the way it sounds: you pledge your coins to a lender, you receive dollars, and you get the coins back when you repay.

Holders do this because selling would trigger a taxable gain and end their exposure to future price increases, while borrowing against the coins gives them cash without giving up either.

Volumes across platforms reached roughly $2 billion in 2025, and Toronto-based Ledn alone reports more than $9.5 billion in originations since 2018, with JPMorgan and other major banks now rolling out similar offerings to their own clients.

In February 2026, that lending business crossed into the mainstream bond market. Ledn closed a $188 million securitization, which means it bundled 5,441 of its loans into a pool and sold bonds whose interest payments come from the borrowers' repayments.

The bonds were sliced into two layers: $160 million of senior notes that get paid first, which S&P Global rated BBB-, an investment-grade stamp and the first ever given to a security backed by digital assets, and $28 million of riskier junior notes rated B- that absorb the first losses in exchange for a higher yield.

The numbers underneath were pretty conservative by crypto standards. The 2,914 US borrowers in the pool owed $199.1 million but had posted roughly 4,079 BTC worth $356.9 million, which works out to a loan-to-value ratio of 55.8%, meaning they pledged almost $2 of Bitcoin for every $1 they borrowed.

They paid a weighted-average interest rate of 11.8% on loans that come due in a single lump sum within a year. Investors demanded about 3.35 percentage points of extra yield over comparable conventional bonds to hold BTC as collateral, and even at that price, the deal was more than twice oversubscribed.

Ledn CEO Adam Reeds said the structure created a “direct pipeline between Bitcoin holders seeking liquidity and the world's deepest pools of institutional capital,” while Bitwise's European research head Andre Dragosch said the deal was evidence that traditional finance now treats Bitcoin as legitimate, even pristine, collateral.

The structure was stress-tested almost immediately, revealing both the strength and the fragility of the entire model. Bitcoin fell roughly 27% from mid-January into February 2026, which pushed loan-to-value ratios up across the pool and triggered margin calls, the automated demands that borrowers either add collateral or watch the lender sell it.

Ledn ended up liquidating about a quarter of the loans originally slated for the deal. The sale still closed, partly because those automatic liquidations did exactly what they were designed to do, and Ledn had never taken a loss when selling collateral for a breach.

The consequence to keep in mind runs the other way: when many lenders run the same triggers on the same volatile asset, a sharp price drop forces them all to sell at once, and that selling pushes the price down further, triggering more selling. The system passed its first real test, and it also revealed where it would break under enough pressure.

Collateral networks, carry trades, and corporate balance sheets

Underneath these products, the basic machinery of the market is being rebuilt to look more like the markets for currencies and bonds, where the company holding your assets, the platform where you trade, and the system that settles the trade are three separate things.

Anchorage Digital, which operates the only federally chartered crypto bank in the US, launched its Atlas settlement network in April 2024 so institutions could settle trades directly with each other without parking money in escrow or pre-funding accounts at an exchange.

By March 2026, Atlas had connected nearly 600 participants, four times as many as a year earlier, had processed tens of billions of dollars in settlements, and had expanded into managing collateral, meaning the bank now monitors loan positions, issues margin calls, and handles liquidations on behalf of lenders.

Cantor Fitzgerald picked Anchorage and Copper.co to play that role for its global Bitcoin financing business in March 2025, and Copper's ClearLoop system lets trading companies keep their coins locked at the custodian while still trading on multiple exchanges, so a repeat of the FTX collapse couldn't take client assets down with it.

All of this allows posting Bitcoin as margin to become as routine and as safe as posting Treasuries, which is the precondition for everything else mentioned we've mentioned in this article to scale.

Plenty of the institutional money flowing through that machinery has no opinion on Bitcoin at all. The basis trade, one of the most popular institutional strategies since the ETFs launched, exploits the fact that Bitcoin futures usually trade slightly above the spot price: a fund buys spot Bitcoin or ETF shares, simultaneously sells futures contracts at the higher price, and pockets the gap no matter what the price does next, since the gain on one leg offsets the loss on the other.

After the ETFs gave funds an easy way to hold the spot side, hedge funds built record short positions in CME futures, and open interest there climbed from roughly 30,000 contracts in early 2024 to a peak near 45,000 that November.

The trade grew large enough that its unwinding now moves the market on its own, with CME open interest falling below $10 billion in April 2026 as those paired positions closed and the mechanical selling weighed on prices regardless of anyone's mood.

CME keeps building for this crowd, adding 24/7 trading in May 2026 and launching Bitcoin Volatility Index futures in June, which let institutions bet on or hedge against how wildly the price swings rather than where it goes.

Corporate treasuries have pushed the idea furthest of all. Strategy held 843,738 BTC as of late May 2026. The company issued $6.7 billion in convertible notes, which are bonds that can turn into shares if the stock rises, plus $15.5 billion in preferred stock across five different instruments, securities that pay fixed dividends and sit between debt and common shares in the pecking order, to finance their insane BTC purchases.

It raised $25.3 billion in 2025 alone, making it the largest US equity issuer that year, accounting for roughly 8% of all issuance, and it markets the preferred securities as “Digital Credit,” an entire fixed-income product line whose dividends are ultimately serviced by a Bitcoin balance sheet.

Shareholders effectively get leveraged Bitcoin exposure through a stock; dividend investors get double-digit yields backed by the coins, and imitators from Tokyo-listed Metaplanet to Semler Scientific have copied Michael Saylor's risky playbook.

Private banks run a parallel assembly line for wealthy clients, packaging structured notes that cap the downside of Bitcoin exposure in exchange for giving up some upside, allowing conservative portfolios to hold an asset that would otherwise be too volatile for them.

Which brings the paradox that opened this piece full circle.

The ETFs answered how institutions could own Bitcoin, and the products described here answer what owning it is for. An asset that simultaneously capitalizes Caribbean reinsurers, backs investment-grade bonds, margins CME derivatives, and services preferred dividends has moved well past speculative adoption into the working machinery of finance.

Historians of this market may eventually treat the ETF as the visible first layer of institutionalization, while the durable change occurred in the financing and settlement systems, where Bitcoin came to do the job Treasuries and gold have done for generations: serving as the collateral everything else gets built on.

The risks are real, as February's liquidation cascade demonstrated, and they'll grow with the leverage. The direction, though, looks settled, and Bitcoin's most consequential institutional role may never show up in a fund flow chart, because it's becoming part of the machine itself.

The post From reinsurance to structured credit: The financial products you didn’t know Bitcoin was powering appeared first on CryptoSlate.

On July 1, 2026, the temporary permission that lets crypto companies keep operating in Europe while they wait for a proper MiCA license runs out, and it creates a huge problem that lands straight on ordinary users.

Europe's crypto law, known as MiCA, requires any exchange, broker, or wallet service that wants EU customers to hold an official license. Hogan Lovells counted only 194 licensed crypto firms across the EU as of May 2026, including banks, in a market that had more than 3,000 registered crypto companies back in 2024.

Around 75% of those older firms are expected to lose their right to operate once the grace period ends. Lawmakers insist that the law was written to protect consumers. But in the short term, it only protects them by cutting off access to any platform that didn't get a license in time.

There's less than three weeks until the permission runs out, which can make the deadline feel much less pressing than it really is. Getting a license takes months of review by a national regulator, so any company that doesn't already have one has effectively run out of time to get approved before the cutoff.

For those companies, the next few weeks are about closing down in an orderly way, handing their customers over to a licensed competitor, or pulling out of Europe altogether, and ESMA, the EU's markets watchdog, has said those shutdown plans were supposed to be ready to go well before July 1.

What the cutoff means for people holding crypto in Europe

What happens to users depends on which platform they use. If an exchange already holds a MiCA license or operates through a licensed European arm, its accounts should continue to work much as they do now.

If a platform is moving its customers to a licensed sister company, users might receive emails asking them to agree to new terms and re-verify their identities, since the EU expects licensed firms to bring existing customers across with full identity and AML checks before the deadline.

Platforms that haven't been licensed will start blocking new deposits if they haven't already and will push users to withdraw their funds to wallets or other licensed exchanges.

Both exchanges and users will feel the most pressure in France, where regulators are taking the cutoff data pretty seriously. The country's financial regulator, the AMF, told unlicensed firms they must stop operating from July 1 and warned that ignoring the rule is a criminal offense under French law, carrying up to two years in prison and a €30,000 fine.

The AMF can and probably will put unlicensed providers on a public blacklist, warn the public about them, and ask the courts to block their websites. At a press event in Paris on May 28, AMF president Marie-Anne Barbat-Layani told reporters that it had become urgent for companies to submit their applications, and Reuters reported her warning that companies still serving EU customers without a license could be taken to court.

Unlike exchanges, most users won't face any issues. They can check whether the platform they use holds its own MiCA license or operates through a licensed European company by checking in their national regulator's register or in the EU's central list of licensed companies.

A working app and a polished website only tell you a company is still up and running, while the official register tells you whether it's actually allowed to serve you after the deadline.

MiCA will reshape Europe's crypto market

Meeting MiCA's rules is expensive, and the cost burden falls on banks, large exchanges, and well-funded platforms that can afford the lawyers, capital, and compliance staff the law demands. This essentially monopolizes the market, reducing it to a handful of licensed players.

Poland alone had more than 1,400 of those older registered firms, and the small, lightly regulated operators spread across Europe are the ones most likely to vanish first as their old registrations lapse.

The European crypto market that comes out the other side of July 1 will be smaller and built almost exclusively of and around licensed institutions. While that's exactly what raising the bar was meant to achieve, it's also the reason a good chunk of consumer choice disappears along with it.

That was the source of most of the political tension we've seen around MiCA in the past year or so. It was selling a single, cohesive European market, where one license earns a company the right to operate in all 27 EU countries, a pretty common regulatory setup called passporting.

However, those licenses are actually issued by 27 separate national regulators, and they haven't been working at the same speed or the same standard.

Malta, in particular, drew scrutiny from ESMA after questions about how such a small regulator could approve so many licenses so quickly, and Barbat-Layani said that France would be willing to reject licenses granted by countries it doesn't trust, calling it a “serious collective failure” it would rather avoid.

So the July 1 deadline will double as a test of whether MiCA really created one unified market, or a race in which companies just shop for the most lenient country and use its license to reach everyone else.

Stablecoins have already shown us how this plays out once the rules bite. Despite being the largest stablecoin in the world, Tether's USDT never met MiCA's requirements, which led Coinbase, Kraken, Crypto.com, and Binance to pull it from their European platforms, while compliant tokens like Circle's USDC and its euro version, EURC, kept their place in the market.

Tether's answer was to invest in compliant European issuers while leaving USDT as is, and the list of approved companies that built up through 2025 left some of the biggest names in crypto on the outside. The pressure that reshaped Europe's euro stablecoin market is now reaching the exchanges and brokers themselves.

The weeks around July 1 are worth watching for the signs of all this in practice: big exchanges announcing moves to new European arms, regulators publishing warnings or blacklists, platforms cutting off services in France, Spain, Italy, or Germany, any last-minute approvals, and the wave of emails to users about withdrawals and account transfers, each one a clue about where the market is settling.

The deadline meant to protect Europe's crypto users will spend its first days showing many of them whether their exchange is even allowed to serve them, and that's the contradiction MiCA now has to answer for.

The post Millions of EU crypto users face exchange cutoff as MiCA deadline hits in days appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Elon Musk has become the first person in modern history to amass a personal net worth exceeding $1 trillion, crossing the historic threshold on Friday following the record-breaking public market debut of SpaceX.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the technology executive’s total fortune now stands at $1.11 trillion.

To put the unprecedented scale of this capital into perspective, Musk’s net worth is now above that of the total market capitalization of the global cryptocurrency sector when excluding Bitcoin. When including the world’s largest digital asset, his wealth accounts for exactly half the value of the entire crypto industry.

The financial milestone immediately reignited global discourse regarding wealth concentration, as Musk’s financial footprint now eclipses the gross domestic product of several developed nations.

SpaceX's IPO shatters records

The immediate catalyst for the surge in Musk’s wealth was SpaceX’s highly anticipated listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

The rocket, telecommunications, and artificial intelligence company achieved a staggering $2.2 trillion valuation upon entering the public market.

Underwriters initially priced the offering at $135 per share, successfully raising $75 billion before the open.

However, immense investor appetite for the commercial space sector and Musk-affiliated ventures drove the opening trade to $150. Shares surged to an intraday peak of $176.50 before settling at a Friday close of $161.

Market observers pointed out that the stock debut generated unprecedented liquidity.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas noted that the stock logged $85 billion in trading volume on its first day. The figure sets an IPO record and ranks among the top 10 highest single-day trading volumes for any individual stock in market history, exceeding Apple's peak single-day volume over the last 40 years.

Meanwhile, Musk retains a 42% ownership stake in the Hawthorne, California-based company. This equity position grants him essentially unilateral voting control over the firm's operational and strategic decisions.

Musk's crypto ties

The comparison between Musk’s fortune and the digital asset market highlights a significant shift in capital allocation over the past year.

Musk’s $1.11 trillion paper fortune comfortably exceeds the estimated $880 billion market capitalization of all alternative cryptocurrencies tracked by TradingView’s TOTAL2 index.

Even under broader metrics from data provider CoinGecko, which values the total crypto market near $2.27 trillion and Bitcoin at $1.28 trillion, the remaining altcoin sector sits below the SpaceX CEO's personal net worth.

This divergence underscores how far the broader altcoin market has fallen from its prior cyclical valuations. TradingView data shows that the market capitalization of crypto assets excluding Bitcoin peaked above $1.7 trillion in October 2025.

It has since declined by roughly half, reflecting diminished liquidity in digital assets and a broader institutional rotation toward large-cap technology and artificial intelligence equities.

Despite his individual wealth dwarfing the altcoin economy, Musk remains structurally tied to digital asset networks through both personal portfolios and corporate balance sheets.

Musk has publicly confirmed personal holdings in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin. While his private balances remain undisclosed, outside of a legacy 2018 statement regarding a gift of 0.25 Bitcoin, his corporate entities carry an institutional footprint.

Post-IPO regulatory filings revealed that SpaceX maintains a corporate treasury reserve of 18,712 Bitcoin, an allocation valued at more than $1.3 billion. This strategy aligns with his electric vehicle manufacturer, Tesla, which continues to hold 11,509 Bitcoin as part of its liquid treasury reserves.

If the two firms were to merge, they would rank as the 5th largest public corporate holder of the top cryptocurrency.

Additionally, Musk has leveraged his $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform X to embed financial data tools directly into public discourse. The platform's “cashtags” feature provides real-time market pricing for traditional equities and digital assets.

While X corporate statements clarify that the platform acts strictly as a data utility rather than a direct brokerage or digital currency exchange, the integration serves to further link Musk's media and corporate ecosystem to the daily mechanics of the financial markets.

Ultimately, the scale of Musk’s fortune highlights the profound concentration of private wealth around founder-controlled technology monopolies, emphasizing that this historic net worth remains closely bound to equity market prices rather than liquid cash.

The post Elon Musk’s trillionaire status puts his net worth above crypto’s entire market cap outside Bitcoin appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The banks are finally buying the vaults. In May, BNY, the world's largest custodian with $59.4 trillion in assets under custody and administration, announced it would offer Bitcoin and Ethereum custody in Abu Dhabi. Weeks later, Standard Chartered confirmed it will fully acquire Zodia Custody, the digital asset custodian it incubated in 2020, with the deal expected to close by the end of August.

Once a back-office concern for crypto-native firms, custody has now become a strategic priority for the world's biggest banks.

However, the institutions best known for managing risk are buying into Bitcoin infrastructure just as the industry admits it has an unsolved cryptographic problem.

A new report from Taurus, the Swiss digital asset technology firm that counts Deutsche Bank among its backers, argues that every custodian on the market today remains exposed to a future quantum transition, and that one of the industry's most popular custody architectures may face structural limits when blockchains eventually migrate to quantum-resistant signatures.

To see why, it helps to understand what a crypto custodian actually does. Owning Bitcoin means controlling a private key, a long secret number that authorizes movement of the coins. Whoever knows that number can spend the assets, and anyone who loses it permanently loses the assets.

A custodian's entire job is to guard those keys and use them to produce digital signatures, the mathematical proofs that tell the network a transaction is genuine. Every spot Bitcoin ETF, every tokenized fund, and every corporate treasury position ultimately rests on how some custodian generates, stores, and uses these keys.

Two types of architecture dominate that business.

Multi-party computation, or MPC, splits a key into fragments held on separate machines, so the full number never exists in one place, and a thief would need to breach several systems at once.

Hardware security modules, or HSMs, take the opposite approach and lock the key inside a single piece of specialized, tamper-resistant hardware that destroys itself if anyone interferes.

The Taurus report contends that these two designs face very different futures once quantum computers enter the picture, and that the difference should concern any institution choosing its custody stack now.

The vault can be ready before the blockchain is

The signatures securing Bitcoin and Ethereum rely on elliptic curve cryptography, a branch of mathematics built on problems so hard that every computer on Earth working together couldn't reverse them.

A sufficiently large quantum computer running Shor's algorithm could solve those problems pretty quickly, meaning it could read a public key on the blockchain, derive the corresponding private key, and forge transactions.

But that machine is still hypothetical. Current quantum computers are research prototypes at roughly 100 qubits, far short of the hundreds of thousands needed, and Taurus's own view is that a cryptographically relevant machine before 2040 is pretty unlikely based on current evidence. CryptoSlate has repeatedly noted how headlines exaggerate the near-term danger.

The case for acting now rests on timelines rather than panic. The US standards agency NIST published its first post-quantum cryptographic standards in August 2024, providing the world with vetted replacement algorithms.

NIST IR 8547 deprecates today's signature schemes after 2030 and disallows them after 2035. Migrations of this scale take years, which is why Wall Street has already begun debating how Bitcoin should adapt.

The most valuable insight in the report concerns a constraint unique to blockchains. A bank can upgrade its own internal security this quarter, and many already serve quantum-safe web connections.

But Bitcoin sits outside any single institution's control. When a custodian signs a transaction and broadcasts it, thousands of independent computers around the world check that signature against the network's shared rules, and those rules currently recognize only the classical schemes.

A custodian that deployed post-quantum signing today would produce transactions that Bitcoin and Ethereum simply reject as invalid.

Changing the rules requires protocol upgrades, wallet updates, agreement among node operators, and the migration of millions of users, a process already underway in proposals like Bitcoin's BIP-360 and Ethereum's post-quantum research agenda.

This is why every provider, Taurus included, remains dependent on the chains themselves. The realistic objective, the report argues, is to make every layer a custodian controls quantum-ready, then migrate on-chain when the ecosystem gets there, which Taurus estimates could happen by 2029 or earlier.

The report also offers a counterintuitive observation it calls the quantum gravity principle: a computer capable of breaking Bitcoin would almost certainly be pointed at richer targets, such as state secrets and banking infrastructure, and the mere knowledge of its existence would crash crypto prices before any theft could pay off.

The nearer-term danger is the harvest-now-decrypt-later attack, in which adversaries record encrypted traffic today, store it cheaply, and decrypt everything once a capable machine arrives.

Why MPC has become the flashpoint for quantum security

The sharpest claim in the report concerns MPC, the architecture favored by many crypto-native custodians and fintechs. Taurus acknowledges that splitting keys across machines makes theft harder, since an attacker must compromise multiple systems rather than a single one.

The catch is that all those machines cooperate to produce an ordinary elliptic curve signature, the only kind the blockchain accepts, so the mathematics a quantum computer would attack stays identical, no matter how many parties share the work.

MPC systems also rely on their own cryptographic machinery to authenticate participants and secure the channels between them, and much of that machinery rests on the same vulnerable mathematical assumptions.

Then comes the structural argument. Top-tier HSMs from vendors like Thales already run post-quantum signature algorithms inside their hardware, subject to firmware versions, so supporting a new scheme mostly means installing it.

MPC faces a harder road, because each new signature family requires researchers to invent a fresh protocol for computing that signature across multiple machines without ever assembling the key. For lattice-based schemes such as ML-DSA, these protocols emerged only in 2025 and 2026 and remain unvalidated for production use.

For hash-based schemes such as SLH-DSA, the report claims a fundamental mathematical barrier: hash functions deliberately scramble any structure in their inputs, and it's the structure that multi-party protocols exploit to divide the signing work.

That finding stings because hash-based signatures are what most networks are choosing. Circle's post-quantum roadmap for Arc selects SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s for smart-account verification, Aptos has proposed the same scheme, and Ethereum researchers are weighing hash-based options too.

The claim deserves scrutiny rather than acceptance. Taurus builds custody technology with HSM roots and has a commercial interest in this comparison; the report discloses that it was prepared solely by Taurus, without independent verification.

SLH-DSA also carries practical baggage of its own, since its signatures run 7,856 bytes, compared to 64 for today's standard, an awkward fit for high-volume transaction signing under any architecture.

MPC vendors could plausibly adapt to lattice-based schemes if those win out instead, and whether hash-based signatures actually become the dominant blockchain choice remains open. Cryptographers outside Taurus should weigh in on whether the incompatibility holds as broadly as claimed.

Still, the tension underneath this data certainly survives the caveats. Banks, ETF custodians, and exchanges are concentrating billions of dollars of client assets within custody architecture chosen years before anyone knows which post-quantum schemes blockchains will adopt.

A migration, when it comes, could mean rotating wallets, generating new addresses, obtaining client approvals, and absorbing operational pauses across the entire institutional stack, with auditors, insurers, and regulators watching every step.

The bigger question raised by the BNY and Standard Chartered goes beyond whether banks should hold Bitcoin keys. It asks whether the vaults they're buying today can be rebuilt while the assets are still inside.

The post Banks are buying Bitcoin vaults, but a quantum problem may be waiting inside appeared first on CryptoSlate.

To be precise about a fast-moving story: a deal has not been signed yet, and the Strait of Hormuz is not confirmed open. What happened is that President Trump announced a signing is imminent. Trump said on Saturday that a deal with Iran to end the war "is scheduled to get signed tomorrow" and that "immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL."

Iran, however, has signaled caution on the timing. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said on June 13 that signing was unlikely that Sunday, that the agreement could still be signed in the coming days, but warned against predicting a timeline due to what he called "the hesitancy of the other side." As of now, mediation continues: Qatari negotiators traveled to Tehran in a bid to finalize the deal, even as Trump said it was scheduled for June 14 and Hormuz would reopen "to all" immediately afterward, despite conflicting signals from Tehran. In short: imminent and heavily negotiated, but not yet done.

What's Reportedly in the US-Iran Deal

The terms being reported are significant, both geopolitically and for markets. According to a senior Iranian official cited by Reuters, the draft stipulates that Iran would immediately open the Strait of Hormuz while the US lifts its naval blockade of Iranian ports, releases $25 billion of Iran's frozen assets, imposes no new sanctions until a final deal, and waives oil sanctions on Tehran. In return, Iran would agree not to produce or purchase nuclear weapons, enrich no new uranium until a final deal, and dilute its highly enriched uranium stockpile domestically.

On the waterway itself, the mechanics matter for oil. Per sources cited by NBC News, the memorandum would reopen the Strait of Hormuz immediately without tolls and restore prewar shipping within roughly 30 days, alongside lifting the US blockade of Iran's ports, with a 60-day extension of the current ceasefire.

Why This Matters for Crypto

Here's the connection that makes this a crypto story, not just a geopolitics one. The Iran conflict has been a direct source of the "risk-off" pressure weighing on $Bitcoin and the broader crypto market. In recent sessions, crypto's weakness was explicitly tied to the conflict: global equities fell and oil rose as US forces struck Iran and the prior ceasefire collapsed, dragging risk assets — including crypto — lower.

The Strait of Hormuz is the key transmission channel. For roughly three months, the Strait of Hormuz — which normally carries one-fifth of the world's oil — has been closed to most shipping traffic, drawing down global oil inventories at a rapid pace. That closure pushed oil prices up, which feeds inflation, which keeps central banks hawkish — and a hawkish, high-inflation backdrop is exactly what has been suppressing Bitcoin. A credible deal that reopens Hormuz would, in theory, ease oil prices, soften inflation pressure, and remove a major overhang on risk appetite. That's the bullish case crypto traders are watching.

The Catalyst Timing: Why This Week Is Pivotal

The deal headlines collide with the single most important macro event on the crypto calendar this week: the Federal Reserve meeting. Markets have been treating the June 16–17 FOMC as the decisive near-term catalyst for $BTC, with analysts framing the outcome as the difference between a bounce toward the high-$60Ks/low-$70Ks and a break below $60K. An Iran de-escalation landing in the same window could amplify whichever direction the Fed sets — easing geopolitical and oil-price fear right as rate expectations are reset.

The Risks: Why Not to Trade the Headline

A word of caution that the on-and-off history of this conflict fully justifies. Previous "imminent deal" moments have repeatedly failed to materialize, and the current framework still hinges on final sign-off from Tehran. Sources indicate the final sign-off from Iran's Supreme Leader is the last missing piece. The agreement is also fragile to outside events: the latest reporting notes fresh Israeli strikes in Lebanon that could threaten the deal. For crypto traders, that means an announced reopening of Hormuz can move markets fast in either direction — and an unsigned deal can unravel just as quickly.

Is Bitcoin Near a Bottom? The Short Answer

Bitcoin has entered a deep bear-market valuation zone, meaning several on-chain and sentiment metrics now sit at levels that historically appear near major market bottoms. But "bottom valuation zone" is not the same as a confirmed bottom. As of mid-June 2026, the evidence is genuinely two-sided: Bitcoin looks historically cheap by on-chain measures, yet analysts warn that the hardest phase — a slow, grinding sideways market — may still lie ahead. The near-term direction likely hinges on the June 16–17 Federal Reserve meeting.

Here is what the data actually shows, metric by metric.

Where Bitcoin's Price Stands in June 2026

$Bitcoin recently hit its lowest levels in roughly two years. Bitcoin briefly fell below $60,000 for the first time since 2024 before rebounding to around $62,623, up 1.9% on the day but still posting a weekly loss. The price is now resting on a long-term support line that technical analysts treat as a generational floor. Bitcoin is trading near its historically depressed 200-week average, a level typically seen late in bear markets, even after the hottest U.S. inflation reading in three years.

The key support and resistance levels to watch are clear. Immediate support sits at $62,000–63,000, then the $60,000 psychological line, with $55,000–58,000 as the deeper stress zone; resistance is the $70,000–74,000 band, and a weekly close on either side of $60,000 is the near-term tell.

What On-Chain Data Says About a Bitcoin Bottom

The strongest argument that Bitcoin is near a bottom comes from on-chain valuation, specifically the realized price — the average price at which all circulating Bitcoin last moved, which acts as the network's aggregate cost basis. Current on-chain data places Bitcoin's realized price near $54,000 and the average cost basis of long-term holders around $48,000 — levels that have historically served as critical support zones during previous market cycles.

This matters because of what trading below realized price signals. When Bitcoin trades below its realized price, the average holder is underwater, and prolonged trading below that level has been rare and often associated with major bear-market bottoms. Other valuation frameworks agree the discount is steep. Checkonchain places Bitcoin's current valuation in the bottom 10% of its historical range, a zone that has frequently appeared during the weakest phases of market cycles. Some analysts name a specific floor: CryptoQuant flags $53,600 as the structural bottom zone, with the 14-day RSI at 24, deep in oversold territory.

What Sentiment Data Reveals

Market sentiment has washed out to levels that typically accompany capitulation. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index sits at 21, deep in extreme fear, down from 50 last month — readings that usually appear when price-sensitive sellers have already done most of their selling. Historically, fear readings have clustered near local and cyclical lows, because they indicate that the holders most likely to panic-sell have largely already exited.

Why Bitcoin May Not Have Bottomed Yet

Here is the crucial counterpoint, and the reason a "bottom valuation zone" is not a green light. A market bottom is usually a process that unfolds over months, not a single dramatic low. As on-chain analyst Checkonchain explains, bear-market bottoms are a process, not an event: first price-sensitive investors capitulate, then comes the harder phase of months of sideways action that slowly wear down the conviction of those who remain.

In practical terms, Bitcoin can be at a historic valuation discount while the time dimension of the bottom has not yet played out. That is the trap for impatient buyers: being correct on value, yet enduring an extended grind before any durable recovery begins.

The Macro Factors That Could Decide Bitcoin's Next Move

Bitcoin is not falling in isolation, and the broader backdrop is pressuring all risk assets. Global equities fell to a more-than-one-month low as a technology-led selloff deepened and US forces struck multiple targets in Iran, collapsing the ceasefire that had held since April, while Brent crude rose toward $95 a barrel. Regulatory optimism has cooled too. Hopes for US regulatory clarity weakened again, with Polymarket odds of the Clarity Act passing in 2026 dropping from 62% to 48% in a week.

The single biggest near-term catalyst is the Federal Reserve. All eyes turn to the FOMC on June 16–17, with Wirex's head of trading saying Fed Chair Warsh's tone will be decisive in determining whether Bitcoin bounces toward $68–72K or breaks below $60K entirely.

So, Is Bitcoin Near a Bottom? The Bottom Line

By valuation, Bitcoin is in a zone that has historically rewarded patient buyers: realized price near $54,000, long-term holder cost basis around $48,000, sentiment at single-digit extreme fear, and price pinned to its 200-week average. By timing, the same analysts flagging that discount caution that bottoms are slow processes, and a months-long sideways grind is a more likely path than a clean V-shaped recovery. The honest answer is that Bitcoin is near a bottom valuation, but whether the price bottom is in depends heavily on macro conditions — with the June 16–17 Fed meeting and a weekly close around $60,000 as the immediate signals to watch.

The crypto market is showing a steady, broadly green session today, with the major assets posting modest daily gains and stronger weekly performance. The CoinMarketCap 20 Index (CMC20), which tracks the top 20 cryptocurrencies, sits at $129.08, up 0.96% on the day and 3.48% over the week — though still down 30.39% year-to-date, a reminder that the broader market remains well below where it started 2026.

Here's where the major coins stand right now.

Bitcoin ($BTC) Price Today

Bitcoin is trading at $64,278.22, up a slight 0.79% over the past 24 hours and 3.35% on the week. As the market's anchor, BTC's quiet daily move masks a more meaningful weekly recovery, but the year-to-date figure tells the harder story: Bitcoin is down 26.55% in 2026 so far. With a market cap of roughly $1.29 trillion, it remains by far the largest cryptocurrency and the reference point for the entire market's direction.

Ethereum ($ETH) Price Today

Ethereum is changing hands at $1,673.77, essentially flat on the day at +0.10% but up a solid 3.94% over the week. Notably, ETH is the standout on the year-to-date column among the majors, up 43.59% — a sharp contrast to Bitcoin's negative YTD and a sign that Ethereum has outperformed the market leader across 2026. Its market cap stands at around $202 billion, keeping it firmly in the number-two spot.

BNB ($BNB) Price Today

BNB is trading at $609.80, up 1.17% on the day — one of the stronger 24-hour moves among the top assets — and 3.56% on the week. Like most of the majors outside Ethereum, its year-to-date figure is negative at -29.36%. With a market cap near $82 billion, BNB holds its position as one of the largest exchange-linked tokens in the market.

XRP ($XRP) Price Today

XRP is priced at $1.14, up 0.25% on the day and 0.98% over the week — the most muted weekly gain among the majors. Its year-to-date performance sits at -37.85%, among the weaker YTD figures in the top ten. XRP's market cap is approximately $71 billion, placing it just behind BNB among the largest non-stablecoin assets.

Solana ($SOL) Price Today

Solana is the clear weekly leader among the majors, trading at $68.08 with a 1.36% daily gain and a strong 4.97% rise over the past seven days — the best weekly performance of any major coin in this snapshot. It also leads on the year, up 45.30% YTD, narrowly edging out Ethereum for the strongest year-to-date showing among the top assets. Solana's market cap stands at around $39 billion.

Other Movers: TRON and Hyperliquid

Beyond the top five non-stablecoin assets, TRON ($TRX) trades at $0.3160, up 0.25% on the day but down 3.60% on the week, while standing out with a positive year-to-date of +11.20%. Hyperliquid ($HYPE) rounds out the list with a market cap of roughly $5.2 billion, reflecting the continued growth of newer DeFi-native tokens in the current cycle.

SIREN is a textbook 2026 cautionary tale: an AI-branded meme coin on BNB Chain with no shipped product, a supply almost entirely controlled by one entity, and a price chart that looks like a heart attack. It rocketed thousands of percent, collapsed in late March, staged another rally, and is now collapsing again — each leg down lining up neatly with the dominant holder selling into retail enthusiasm. If you want a single sentence: when one wallet cluster owns most of the float, the "market" is really just that holder's decision to sell.

What is Siren Crypto?

SIREN markets itself as an AI play. It's a BNB Chain token built around a dual-personality AI agent concept — the "Golden" and "Crimson" Sirens — with a planned AI-powered DEX and trading agent. The pitch leaned on the two hottest narratives in crypto at once: AI and meme-coin virality.

The problem is the gap between story and substance. The AI products were announced but never shipped; the DEX and AI trading agent remained "coming soon," while a single entity controlled the vast majority of supply. According to on-chain investigators, the project's origins were already shaky: Bubblemaps said SIREN launched in February 2025 as the "first on-chain AI agent analyst on BNB" but was "largely abandoned" soon after. In other words, the token caught fire long after the actual project had gone quiet.

The People Behind It — and the DWF Labs Allegation

This is where it gets murky, and worth stating carefully: the controlling entity has never been officially identified. What exists is on-chain analysis and an allegation from a prominent investigator.

Bubblemaps flagged on March 22 that a single cluster of more than 200 wallets held almost 50% of SIREN's circulating supply — worth roughly $1.5 billion at peak — warning "this only ends one way" hours before the crash began. The cluster's behavior fit a coordinated operation: the wallets accumulated tokens in 2025, then dispersed them across 47 addresses. As for who's behind it, ZachXBT linked the wallets to DWF Labs, noting connections to several obscure DWF-affiliated tokens including LADYS, RACA and TOMO — though the cluster's owner has not been officially confirmed. Treat that as a credible investigator's allegation, not an established fact.

The Website Tells You Everything

For a project whose entire pitch rests on shipping an AI-powered DEX and trading agent, the most damning detail might be the simplest one. As of writing, SIREN's official domain (sirenai.me) doesn't host a working website at all — it serves only a default, auto-generated server placeholder page, displayed in Chinese, reading "Congratulations, site created successfully! This is the default index.html, auto-generated by the system." It's the kind of page a hosting panel produces when a domain is pointed at a server but no actual site has ever been built on it. No product, no app, no roadmap — just an unconfigured default page. For a token marketed on cutting-edge AI infrastructure, a homepage that was never even set up is about as direct a tell as it gets.

How SIREN Coin Pumped to its All-Time High

The run-up was spectacular and, in hindsight, mechanically fragile. SIREN staged a roughly 6,800% pump before its collapse, soaring from $0.026 to an all-time high around $3.83. (Trackers differ slightly on the exact peak — CoinGecko data puts the ATH at $3.61 on March 22, 2026, versus the $3.83 intraday figure some outlets cite.) At the top, SIREN's market cap reached roughly $2.18 billion.

Crucially, the rally happened on thin conviction. The surge occurred during a period of low volume — a sign of weak underlying demand — which is exactly the setup that lets a concentrated holder move price violently in both directions.

The First Crash: Late March

The unwind was as fast as the climb. The very behavior that drove the pump reversed into distribution: during the March 20–23 explosion above $3, exchange netflow swung violently positive with inflows near $1 million — the signature of large holders depositing coins onto exchanges specifically to sell into peak liquidity.

Then it cratered. SIREN plunged 65.5% in a single day to around $1.04 on March 24, just 48 hours after its ATH, erasing about $1.43 billion in market cap and dropping the valuation from ~$2.18 billion to ~$754 million. Within about two weeks it had lost most of its value: by early April it traded near $0.26, down roughly 84% over seven days. The economics for the whale remained obscene either way: with an average buy price around $0.045, the controlling entity still sat on roughly 5.8x unrealized profit even after the crash.

The Second Crash: Mid-June

SIREN didn't die quietly. It bounced, drew in leveraged traders again, and is now in a fresh collapse — the one prompting this story. SIREN fell more than 70% in a single day to around $0.14, one of the sharpest unwinds in the current market, leaving it down roughly 96% from its year-to-date high. The leverage flush was textbook: open interest had climbed from about $25 million in late May to a peak of $98.7 million on June 8 — the same day the price topped — then collapsed back toward $33 million as long liquidations added fuel to the decline.

The latest readings show the bleeding continuing. SIREN dropped to around $0.196, an 88% weekly decline, with market cap down near $141 million and the token ranked around #207. Across the move, its market cap has fallen from $1.7 billion to roughly $102 million — a 96% drop from its year-to-date high.

Why This Keeps Happening

Every leg of this story rhymes because the structure never changed. Based on the on-chain footprint, the move looks like concentrated holder distribution rather than a reaction to any project-specific news — SIREN remains an asset whose price closely reflects the decisions of the few wallets that hold most of it, rather than a broad market.

That's the real lesson, and it's blunt: when most of the supply sits in one wallet cluster, you're not investing in a project — you're providing exit liquidity for a whale. An AI narrative with no shipped product gave the story a reason to spread; the concentrated supply gave one entity the power to cash that story out. The pump and the dumps are two sides of the same coin.

What Happened to Siren Crypto?

$SIREN pumped thousands of percent on an AI meme narrative, peaked above $3.6, and has now crashed ~90%+ twice — each time as its dominant holder distributed into retail demand. With one entity reportedly still controlling the overwhelming majority of supply at an average cost near $0.045, the asset's future direction depends less on any product roadmap than on whether that holder decides to keep selling. For everyone else, it's a clean illustration of why supply concentration is one of the first things to check before touching a low-float token.

When four crypto platforms cancelled their tokenized SpaceX allocations and refunded users, the failure had a single source — and it sat inside Kraken. xStocks, the tokenized-equity business Kraken acquired in December 2025, was the upstream supplier that Binance, Bybit, Bitget and MEXC all depended on to source actual SpaceX shares. When xStocks couldn't get the shares in the quantity demanded, those four exchanges received nothing and unwound their campaigns. Kraken wasn't a fellow victim of the shortfall — it was the company at the center of it.

How the Dependency Was Structured

The key fact most coverage understated: xStocks isn't a neutral third party. It's Kraken's own arm. So "xStocks failed to deliver" is, in plain terms, a failure originating inside Kraken's operation.

That matters because of how the other platforms were wired. Binance, Bybit, Bitget and MEXC weren't sourcing SpaceX shares themselves — they were reselling access to allocations that xStocks had promised to procure from the IPO pipeline. They were the only products that leaned on xStocks to obtain physical shares and pass them through. When that single supplier came up short, every platform hanging off it came up empty at the same moment.

Why xStocks Couldn't Deliver

The cause was structural: SpaceX was massively oversubscribed, and underwriters handed the crypto channel a tiny fraction of what it had taken orders for. An xStocks spokesperson said that "due to overwhelming demand, requests to buy IPO access to SpaceX were not able to be fully fulfilled," that client funds tied to unfilled orders had been returned, and that SpaceX was live on xStocks as SPCXx and tradable through the first weekend.

Critically, distribution scale gave Kraken no leverage where it counted. All the affected platforms route through xStocks, the framework issued by Backed Assets, which Kraken acquired in December 2025 and which had passed $25 billion in volume across more than 100 tokenized stocks by March — yet that scale bought no leverage with the underwriters. SpaceX was the debut listing for the program, and while the demand side passed, the supply side fell short.

What Each Platform Actually Got

The shortfall didn't hit everyone equally. The exchanges that depended entirely on xStocks for allocations got zero. Binance, Bybit and Bitget received no shares and canceled outright, while customers of Kraken and xStocks received only a fraction of the allocations they requested. MEXC was caught in the same way.

So Kraken's own customers fared slightly better than the exchanges it was supplying — partial fills rather than nothing — but that's the whole point: the platform sitting closest to the source still couldn't deliver in full, and everyone one step removed got nothing. And this wasn't purely a crypto problem either. Data compiled by Access IPOs showed some retail investors at traditional brokerages also received only a portion of the shares they sought.

Why It Matters

This was the first large-scale stress test of tokenized IPO access, and it exposed exactly where the weak point lives. The industry lesson was blunt: creating a token is easy; securing the real asset behind it is the crucial part — and what went wrong, as a Dinari spokesperson put it, was that demand significantly exceeded the available supply of underlying shares.

The fine print had always hedged this. xStocks' own disclaimers stated that its IPO tokens did not guarantee an allocation and provided price exposure only, not direct ownership. The takeaway for the next blockbuster listing is concrete: when you buy "IPO access" through a tokenized campaign, you're depending on whoever sits at the top of that chain actually securing shares — and if that supplier is one firm, its shortfall becomes everyone's shortfall at once.

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TLDR:

• Hyperscalers committed $725B in 2026 capex, up 77% from 2025’s record $410B set just a year prior.
• Non-USD bond issuance rose from zero in 2024 to 48% of hyperscaler funding by mid-2026.
• Alphabet set borrowing records in yen, CAD, CHF, and sterling within a single calendar year 2026.
• Global AI debt issuance is projected at $570B for 2026, nearly four times the 2022 total level.

Hyperscalers are reshaping global bond markets as their AI infrastructure spending reaches unprecedented levels. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta have committed $725 billion in capital expenditure for 2026 alone.

That figure is up 77% from the $410 billion record set in 2025. Goldman Sachs projects combined capex from 2026 through 2031 will reach $7.6 trillion. The scale of this spending has pushed tech giants into foreign currency debt markets at a record pace.

Non-Dollar Bond Issuance Surges Across Major Currencies

In 2024, hyperscalers issued zero bonds in non-USD currencies. By 2025, all new non-USD issuance was entirely fresh territory. Now, non-USD currencies account for 48% of hyperscaler bond funding in 2026.

The euro leads that slice at 52%, followed by the Japanese yen at 15%, the Canadian dollar at 14%, sterling at 12%, and the Swiss franc at 7%.

Bank of America confirmed that hyperscalers have doubled their non-dollar bond share to 30% of total issuance this year. As noted by Milk Road AI, this shift has moved so fast it has strained the American bond market’s capacity to absorb it. The U.S. market simply cannot accommodate the full volume of debt these companies now need to raise.

Individual deals reflect how quickly this trend has accelerated. In May, Alphabet issued ¥576.5 billion, roughly $3.6 billion, in yen-denominated bonds. That was the largest yen bond ever sold by a non-Japanese company, topping Berkshire Hathaway’s 2019 record.

Alphabet has now set borrowing records in yen, Canadian dollars, Swiss francs, and sterling within a single calendar year. That is a level of multi-currency debt activity rarely seen from any single corporate issuer at this pace.

AI Debt Issuance on Track to Quadruple 2022 Levels

Amazon entered Canada’s bond market in June with a C$14 billion issuance, the largest corporate bond ever sold in that market.

Investor orders reached nearly C$28 billion, almost double what was ultimately sold. That deal surpassed Alphabet’s own Canadian record of C$8.5 billion set just weeks earlier in May.

Morgan Stanley projects euro borrowing by hyperscalers will hit €50 billion in 2026. That would potentially make the United States the single largest source of corporate debt in the entire eurozone, ahead of France. The shift carries broad consequences for European fixed-income markets.

Global AI-related debt issuance is on track to reach $570 billion for the full year 2026, according to Morgan Stanley. That is more than double the pace recorded during the same period last year. It is also nearly four times the 2022 level.

Even companies holding over a trillion dollars in combined cash, including Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, have concluded that self-funding this buildout is not feasible.

The AI infrastructure race has grown too capital-intensive for even the world’s most cash-rich firms to finance independently.

The post Hyperscalers Break U.S. Bond Market With $725B AI Spending Spree, Go Global for Debt appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Zimbabwe’s Finance Minister has issued the country’s first dedicated regulations for virtual asset service providers.
• Crypto businesses must register annually with the FIU and pay a $500 fee or face criminal charges.
• Sub-Saharan Africa recorded over $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025.
• Zimbabwe joins South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Mauritius in formally regulating digital assets.

Zimbabwe’s government has introduced regulations requiring cryptocurrency businesses to register annually and pay fees, marking the country’s first formal legal framework for digital assets.

The Finance Minister issued the rules to bring an industry that has long operated underground under regulatory oversight.

Businesses involved in buying, selling, transferring, or safeguarding virtual assets must now register with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), an anti-money laundering body within the central bank.

Zimbabwe’s Crypto Market Comes Out of the Shadows

The new rules set a $500 annual registration fee for all virtual asset service providers operating in the country. Operating without registration is now a criminal offence under the regulations. The FIU, which sits within the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, will oversee compliance across the sector.

Zimbabwe banned financial institutions from trading cryptocurrency in 2018, pushing activity onto peer-to-peer platforms and social media channels.

The market has since grown largely informally, with traders navigating legal grey areas for years. These new rules represent the government’s first direct attempt to bring that activity into a regulated space.

Traders on the ground have responded positively to the announcement. Jeffrey Mutambiranwa, a Harare-based crypto trader who has operated through informal channels, shared his reaction with Reuters. “This is a welcome development… It’s also good for traders that they don’t have to operate underground,” he said.

The regulations come as part of a broader global push to oversee digital asset markets following high-profile exchange collapses, fraud cases, and growing concerns over money laundering risks worldwide.

Historical Currency Crises Drove Zimbabweans to Crypto

Zimbabwe’s relationship with digital currencies is deeply tied to its economic history. Hyperinflation in the late 2000s wiped out savings and pension funds across the country.

Repeated currency changes further eroded public trust in the formal banking system, pushing many residents toward Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as alternative stores of value.

Remittances have also played a major role in driving crypto adoption. Banks remain the most expensive channel for sending money into the country, according to the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide report. Crypto offered a cheaper, faster alternative for Zimbabweans receiving funds from abroad.

Sub-Saharan Africa recorded more than $205 billion in on-chain transaction value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% year-on-year increase, according to the Chainalysis 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index. That growth reflects how deeply digital assets have embedded themselves into regional financial activity.

Zimbabwe joins South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Mauritius among African nations that have moved to regulate digital assets.

As crypto use rises across the continent, more governments are choosing formal oversight over outright bans. Zimbabwe’s new framework signals a shift in that same direction.

The post Zimbabwe Requires Crypto Businesses to Register Annually Under New FIU Regulations appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Researchers say Ethereum users can secure accounts against quantum attacks today for as little as $0.07.
• SPHINCS- verifies post-quantum signatures on-chain at ~150,000 gas using Ethereum’s native KECCAK256 opcode.
• C11 and C12 variants support hardware wallet signing, tested at 390s and 47.5s on a Ledger secure element.
• Future leanSPHINCS variant targets STARK aggregation, cutting per-transaction verification to 3,000 gas.

Researchers say Ethereum users could add quantum-resistant account protection for as little as $0.07, without a hard fork.

A developer known as nicocsgy published SPHINCS-, a family of EVM-optimized post-quantum signature schemes derived from SPHINCS+.

The system verifies post-quantum signatures on-chain at around 150,000 gas using only existing Ethereum infrastructure. Formal proofs via Lean 4 with Verity are included, and additional audits are in progress.

Quantum Threat to Ethereum Accounts Is Closer Than Expected

Quantum computers capable of breaking ECDSA, the signature scheme securing Ethereum and Bitcoin, are no longer a distant concern. Recent resource estimates by Babbush et al. have brought attack timelines closer than previously projected.

This makes post-quantum alternatives at the execution layer increasingly urgent for wallet holders and institutions alike. SPHINCS- addresses that gap by enabling quantum-resistant verification on Ethereum today.

The researcher shared on X: “Ethereum can already start preparing accounts for a post-quantum world, without waiting for a hard fork. Today, it would be just $0.07.”

The core technical insight came from a conversation with Vitalik Buterin. Since SPHINCS+ is built entirely from hash functions, replacing the standard SHAKE256 with Ethereum’s native KECCAK256 opcode makes on-chain verification possible.

This substitution removes any dependency on new precompiles or protocol changes. Users and organizations can therefore deploy quantum-resistant account protection right now.

Parameter tuning drove the bulk of the gas optimization work. Extensive modeling under EIP-7623 and EIP-7976 floor pricing revealed that the Winternitz parameter w=8 produces the lowest real verification cost.

Short hash chains with more iterations proved cheaper than fewer but longer chains. That finding overturned assumptions from earlier calldata-only models.

Four Variants Cover Hardware Wallets to FIPS-Compliant Deployments

Researchers produced four main variants, each targeting a different signer profile and security requirement. The C13 variant uses WOTS+C and FORS+C compression, verifying at 127,000 gas with a 3,704-byte signature.

It suits laptop-class signers and requires around 4.3 million hash calls per signature. Organizations pursuing FIPS compliance can instead use SLH-DSA-SHA2-128-24, a standardized-style alternative.

C11 and C12 were tested on a Ledger Nano S+ ST33K1M5 secure element to assess hardware wallet viability. Signing times came in at 390 seconds and 47.5 seconds respectively, making hardware deployment realistic.

Both variants carry a reduced per-key signature budget compared to the NIST standard’s 2^64 limit. However, on-chain data shows the average active Ethereum address sends roughly 431 transactions per year, making smaller budgets sufficient.

The SLH-DSA Keccak twin cuts on-chain verification costs by around 34% against its FIPS-aligned counterpart. It trades bit-exact NIST compliance for meaningfully cheaper gas, which suits blockchain-native deployments.

Verifier contracts for all variants are publicly available on GitHub for audit and deployment. NIST is also developing smaller SLH-DSA parameter sets with a 2^24 signature budget, narrowing the gap further.

Future research targets ZK-friendly hash functions under the working name “leanSPHINCS.” That variant would support STARK-based aggregation, dropping verification to around 3,000 gas per transaction at the protocol level.

A companion post on JARDIN, expected soon, aims to cut hardware wallet signing time to three seconds. Together, these efforts position hash-based post-quantum signatures as a practical near-term path for Ethereum account security.

The post Ethereum Users Can Now Add Quantum-Resistant Account Protection for Just $0.07, Researchers Say appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Binance recorded a 7-day average of $83M daily USDT inflows on Ethereum over the past two weeks
• USDT outflows on Tron averaged $101M daily, while Binance total stablecoin reserves fell just 1.3%
• The deposit-via-ETH, withdraw-via-TRX pattern points to whale and institutional cross-chain activity
• Capital exiting via Tron rails is likely heading to OTC desks or cold storage, not crypto purchases

Stablecoin bridge activity on Binance has drawn attention over the past two weeks. Large-scale opposing flows between Ethereum and Tron networks are being recorded.

USDT inflows on Ethereum are running at a 7-day average of $83 million daily. Meanwhile, USDT outflows on Tron are averaging $101 million per day. Despite these movements, Binance’s total stablecoin reserves have declined by only 1.3%.

Binance Becomes a Cross-Chain Liquidity Corridor

Market observers are watching a clear pattern take shape on Binance. Capital is entering the exchange via Ethereum-based USDT and exiting through Tron-based rails. This opposing flow dynamic effectively turns Binance into a cross-chain bridge for large players.

The scale of these movements points to whale and institutional involvement. Retail traders rarely move capital in volumes that register at $83 million in daily averages. The consistency of the flows over two weeks further rules out isolated or accidental transactions.

On-chain analytics platform CryptoOnchain flagged the trend earlier this week. The platform noted that Binance’s reserves remaining flat despite opposing flows of this magnitude is itself a telling data point. It confirms that inflows and outflows are nearly perfectly offsetting each other.

Historically, heavy ERC-20 stablecoin deposits into centralized exchanges have marked moments when large players step back from DeFi. These actors tend to seek centralized order books either to reallocate holdings or prepare for exits.

Tron’s Low-Fee Rails Attract Outbound Institutional Capital

The withdrawal side of this equation tells its own story. Capital leaving Binance via TRC-20 USDT is not staying on the exchange to purchase crypto assets. Instead, it appears to be heading toward OTC desks, cold storage, or alternative settlement venues.

Tron has long been the preferred network for high-volume, low-cost stablecoin transfers. Its fee structure makes it practical for moving large sums without incurring the gas costs associated with Ethereum. Institutions and OTC operations favor this rail for exactly that reason.

This “deposit via ETH, withdraw via TRX” pattern has appeared before periods of reduced activity in Ethereum-based DeFi markets.

When purchasing power migrates away from Ethereum’s native layer, organic spot accumulation on that network tends to slow.

Total market liquidity, however, remains intact for now. The stablecoin supply itself has not shrunk — it has simply shifted settlement rails.

Markets will need to see these opposing flows neutralize before a clear resumption of Ethereum-based accumulation can be confirmed.

The post Stablecoin Flows Show Capital Rotating From Ethereum to Tron via Binance appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share, raising a record $75 billion on its first day of trading.
• SPCX closed nearly 19% higher at $161, pushing the company’s market valuation above $2 trillion
• Gate.io recorded over $100 million in SPCX trading volume on day one, far ahead of other tickers. 
• Vanda Research noted SPCX retail purchases surpassed Nvidia by more than 3.5 times on debut day.

SpaceX made its long-awaited Nasdaq debut on June 12, 2026, under the ticker SPCX. The company priced its IPO at $135 per share, raising a record $75 billion. Shares opened at $150 and closed nearly 19% higher at around $161.

The listing pushed SpaceX’s market valuation above $2 trillion on day one. Crypto markets responded just as strongly, with tokenized equity platforms recording notable trading volumes tied to the new stock.

Record Retail Demand Greets SPCX on Wall Street

SpaceX’s public debut drew immediate and widespread interest from retail investors. According to Vanda Research, SPCX became the most purchased stock among retail investors on its first trading day. Net retail purchases surpassed those of Nvidia by more than 3.5 times, a remarkable gap for any new listing.

More than 490 million shares changed hands during the session alone. That level of activity placed SPCX among the most actively traded stocks in recent memory.

The strong opening reflected years of pent-up demand from investors who had tracked SpaceX as a private company.

The stock rose as high as $176.52 during intraday trading before paring some gains into the close. Even after the pullback, shares settled around $161, holding well above the IPO price. Post-market activity added further momentum, with shares rising another 3.5% after the closing bell.

SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell alongside company leadership at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square.

The ceremony also took place simultaneously at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas. The dual celebration reflected the scale of the occasion for the 24-year-old aerospace company.

Crypto Platforms Bridge the Gap Between Equities and Digital Assets

Crypto investors did not wait for traditional brokerage accounts to gain exposure to SPCX. Platforms offering tokenized equity products saw strong demand from the moment the stock went live. On Gate.io, SPCX trading volume crossed $100 million on its first day of listing.

That figure stood out sharply against other equity tickers on the same platform. Circle and Tesla recorded trading volumes of $4 million and $3.5 million respectively on the same day. The gap between SPCX and those assets reflects the level of retail enthusiasm surrounding the SpaceX listing.

Broader equity-related trading on Gate.io typically generates between $10 million and $25 million in daily volume across listed assets.

SPCX surpassed that range by a wide margin within hours of becoming available. That pace pointed to genuine demand from crypto-native investors seeking equity exposure.

Perpetual futures contracts tied to SPCX on Hyperliquid also recorded strong activity ahead of and during the IPO. The SPCX-USDC perpetual contract traded around $176, roughly 30% above the IPO price.

Over $233 million in volume changed hands in those contracts within 24 hours, with open interest climbing above $263 million.

The post SpaceX IPO Ignites Record Demand in Stocks and Crypto Markets on Nasdaq Debut appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin’s price is on the move on Sunday evening, jumping past $65,000 for the first time in approximately ten days.

The impressive price jump came after US President Donald Trump confirmed on his social media platform that the deal with Iran, as promised yesterday, “is now complete.”

Recall that the POTUS noted yesterday that Iran and the US had reached an agreement that would halt the former’s attempts to develop or purchase nuclear weapons.

However, reports from the Middle Eastern country put that promise in doubt. Moreover, today’s attacks from Israel against Lebanon intensified the speculation that there will be no deal announced on June 14.

Nevertheless, the POTUS published a triumphant statement on Truth Social minutes ago, clarifying that the two sides have reached an agreement.

“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll-free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

Bitcoin’s price had remained relatively calm after yesterday’s promise and today’s new attacks, trading between $63,500 and $64,800. It had dipped below $64,000 minutes before Trump’s announcement, but reacted with an immediate price uptick.

It jumped past $65,000 for the first time since June 4, showing a 2% increase in the past hour alone. Most altcoins followed suit, with ETH soaring past $1,700, SOL tapping $70, and HYPE rocketing by 4% in an hour.

The total value of wrecked short positions has jumped to $170 million in just the last hour, according to data from CoinGlass.

It’s worth noting that there’s still no confirmation from Iran on the deal, and history has shown that the two sides have often contradicted each other on what reaches mainstream media.

The post Bitcoin Price Jumps Above $65K as Trump Announces Official Deal With Iran appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Despite the current market downturn, Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise, said recent conversations with more than 40 financial advisors showed that interest in crypto remains strong.

But their focus has shifted beyond Bitcoin.

In a recent blog post, Hougan said he spoke with advisory teams, who collectively manage more than $175 trillion, and the discussions reflected a broader change in how traditional finance views digital assets and could shape the next phase of crypto market growth.

Beyond Bitcoin

According to the Bitwise CIO, previous crypto recoveries were driven by a combination of new technologies and new investor groups entering the market. He pointed to Ethereum and early retail participation following the 2014 bear market, decentralized finance and stimulus-driven investors after the 2018 downturn, and the rise of spot Bitcoin ETFs and hedge fund participation after the collapse of FTX in 2022.

Hougan said the next recovery may similarly depend on both expanding blockchain use cases and greater participation from financial advisors and institutional investors. He identified stablecoins, tokenization, perpetual futures, and other real-world blockchain applications as some of the most important areas gaining traction. Hougan explained that many institutional investors and advisory firms still face barriers to accessing crypto markets, which makes continued interest from those groups significant for the sector’s long-term outlook.

While Bitcoin has historically led crypto market recoveries because of its size and maturity, this might not be the case anymore. He said stablecoins and tokenization have become central topics across the financial industry as major firms and regulators increasingly discuss their potential. Comments from SEC Chair Paul Atkins, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink have all publicly discussed stablecoins and tokenization in recent months.

According to Hougan, that growing institutional attention is influencing how advisors evaluate crypto-related investment opportunities. He said potential capital flows in the next market cycle may move toward blockchain networks and crypto firms connected to tokenization and stablecoin infrastructure instead of focusing solely on Bitcoin.

Projects Drawing Advisor Interest

Assets including Ethereum, Solana, Chainlink, Avalanche, and Canton, alongside trading-focused projects such as Hyperliquid, have also gained attention. The exec even pointed to crypto-related companies including Figure, Circle, and Coinbase as examples of businesses tied to the expanding tokenization and stablecoin sector.

Hougan said the conversations demonstrated that financial advisors now have a broader and more detailed understanding of the crypto industry than they did several years ago.

“It might also be the thing that leads us into the next bull market.”

The post Financial Advisors Managing $175 Trillion Are Eyeing These Crypto Sectors Instead of Bitcoin appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Analysts at the crypto exchange Bybit have highlighted factors that contributed to bitcoin (BTC) recording its worst single-week percentage decline since the FTX collapse in November 2022. According to the report, the decline was not triggered by random panic from the market, but was a result of a structural breakdown that had been building for weeks.

As reported in the Bybit Options Weekly Review, multiple forces hit simultaneously: stronger U.S. jobs data, record outflows from spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and Strategy challenging its “never sell BTC” narrative.

BTC Decline Signals Technical Breakdown

During the week ending June 8, BTC fell from $73,760 to $59,130 for the first time since October 2024. Although a wave of dip-buying and short-covering quickly brought the asset’s price back above $61,000, the plunge signaled a technical breakdown that had been brewing beneath the surface.

Ether’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) fell to a reading of 12.78, which is the most extreme oversold reading in history. At the same time, bitcoin’s RSI also fell to 15.45 at the same time.

Combined, this is the most oversold signal this cycle has produced, indicating a market-wide capitulation event. Such moves indicate that investors are panic selling with no regard for prices. Although readings at these levels have historically preceded technical bounces, it does not confirm that the bottom is in.

No Bullish Reversal Confirmed

On the options market front, put options were delivered after a confirmed technical breakdown, and the Deribit Volatility Index (DVOL) spiked from historic lows near 35 to around 55. DVOL measures the 30-day annualized expected implied volatility for Bitcoin and Ethereum options. The metric provides real-time, forward-looking analysis of expected price swings, overall fear and greed, and market uncertainty.

The surge from 35 to 55 gave downside traders a double tailwind from both falling price and rising implied volatility. The metric is now pulling back from the spike and hovering around 48, indicating that the panic volume expansion is fading and the initial shock is absorbed.

On the macro front, stronger U.S. jobs data reignited rate hike fears. With the current labor market strength ruling out any near-term dovish pivot, analysts see every positive employment print as a negative for risk assets that are priced on rate cut expectations.

Moreover, Strategy sold 32 BTC for $2.5 million, breaking the “never sell” belief that gave holders their sense of structural security. Although the company has resumed buying, investors still appear concerned about the systemic signal behind the sale.

Bybit concluded by clarifying that although BTC and ETH are in extreme oversold conditions, the market has not confirmed a reversal. ETF outflows need to stabilize, and macro conditions need to be resolved before a positive outlook is assured.

The post Not Random Panic: Bybit Highlights Factors That Pulled BTC Below $60K appeared first on CryptoPotato.

In times when almost all exchange-traded funds tracking cryptocurrencies are deep in the red, the spot XRP funds have continuously managed to defy the trend by attracting new capital.

Meanwhile, the underlying asset continues to struggle below key support levels, but at least it has remained well above the psychological $1.00.

Ripple ETFs See New Inflows

Data from SoSoValue shows that the financial vehicles tracking XRP attracted $7.44 million on Tuesday, $1.19 million on Wednesday, and $2.04 million on Friday. Although Monday and Thursday were actually no-flow days, with zero reportable data on SoSoValue, the week still ended with more than $10 million in net inflows. Moreover, not a single day has been in the red; a streak that extends to June 3 (-$5.34 million at the time).

Consequently, the cumulative total net inflows for the spot Ripple ETFs have reached a new all-time high of over $1.44 billion. Obviously, these numbers are nowhere near the peak euphoria seen after the funds launched last November, but they are still in the green in very challenging times for all other ETFs.

CryptoPotato reported yesterday that the spot BTC ETFs extended their negative streak to five consecutive weeks in the red, with another $315 million taken out. The situation with the Ethereum funds was quite similar, as investors pulled out almost $15 million despite a strong Monday. Even the SOL ETFs were in the red for a second week in a row.

The spot HYPE funds continued their green streak, on the other hand, but even their $5.87 million in net inflows were below XRP’s numbers.

XRP Price Update

Ripple’s native cross-border token plunged to $1.05 on June 4/5 during the darkest hours of the most recent crash. Although it came inches away from dipping below $1.00 for the first time in almost two years, it managed to maintain that level and has climbed to $1.15 as of press time.

However, analysts are not convinced that the worst is behind it. In fact, Ali Martinez recently outlined the potential price bottoms for BTC, ETH, and XRP, indicating that Ripple’s asset could tank to a new low of somewhere between $0.70 and $0.90.

Nevertheless, such a potential dip could prove a solid buying opportunity, as Martinez and EGRAG CRYPTO envision a massive bounce toward new peaks of $7.00-$8.00 or even higher.

The post Ripple (XRP) Funds Continue to Defy Crypto ETF Downtrend With Fresh Inflows appeared first on CryptoPotato.

US President Donald Trump expressed serious criticism over Israel’s latest actions, which came on the day he had promised a permanent deal would be announced with Iran.

The Benjamin Netanyahu-led country carried out a new set of attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs earlier today, which could jeopardize the deal that was already far from secure.

“This morning’s attack on Beirut should not have happened, particularly on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal with Iran. Israel has the right to defend itself against threats, but the attack it was responding to was very small and meaningless, nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and should not disrupt this important process,” reads Trump’s message on Truth Social.

It’s worth noting that Lebanon’s civil defense capital claimed that there were at least three victims of the attacks and seven wounded, as reported by Al Jazeera.

Trump also doubled down on his promise from yesterday that the US and Iran were supposed to announce a deal later today, which has been questioned by some authorities of the Middle Eastern country.

In his latest post, he also urged that all sides stand down, including Israel and Hezbollah, which could lead to the “beginning of a long and beautiful peace.”

Some of the largest cryptocurrencies charted minor gains over the past day or so, perhaps driven by the hope and promise of a permanent peace deal as the Strait of Hormuz was also supposed to be opened. However, the new attacks by Israel and Trump’s subsequent message halted their progress.

BTC dipped below $64,000 minutes ago after peaking at $64,800 earlier today. ETH is down by over 1%, while XRP has dropped by 2% to $1.13 after another rejection at $1.15.

The day is far from over, and more volatility could be expected later today or, more likely, tomorrow morning, when futures and traditional markets open. Trump is also headed to France for a G7 meeting.

The post BTC, ETH, XRP Progress at Risk as Trump Condemns Israel’s Latest Attacks appeared first on CryptoPotato.