The surge in BP token highlights the growing interest in tokenized equities, potentially reshaping how investors access and trade stocks.

The post Backpack’s BP token surges 27% after SpaceX stock debut on Solana appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Morocco's reliance on foreign-born players highlights a strategic shift in international football, impacting domestic talent development and global team dynamics.

The post Morocco fields first all-foreign-born starting XI in national team history appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Ant Group's AI advancements in Alipay could reshape mobile commerce dynamics, intensifying competition and influencing fintech innovation globally.

The post Ant Group tests AI agent interface for Alipay in user battle with WeChat appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Kon's World Cup focus may boost his market value, impacting Roma's financial strategy and intensifying transfer competition among clubs.

The post Manu Koné focuses on World Cup as Roma transfer saga looms in background appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

T1's victory over Gen.G highlights the critical role of objective control in esports, influencing team strategies and prediction markets alike.

The post T1 defeats Gen.G 2-1 in LCK 2026 as Baron control proves decisive 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. 

Subscribe to Bitcoin Magazine Pro on YouTube for more expert insights!

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.

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on June 11, raised $75 billion in the largest public offering in history, and opened on Nasdaq at $150 Friday morning.

By the time the stock reached $164, retail investors had gained “SpaceX exposure” through actual Nasdaq shares, Backpack Securities' redeemable token on Solana, xStocks tracker certificates on Kraken and Bybit, Binance Wallet's subscription campaign, and Hyperliquid's perpetual futures.

The convergence on a single name reflects a structural ambiguity in how crypto exchanges and tokenization platforms label equity-linked instruments, and the most anticipated IPO in years put that ambiguity under the brightest possible light.

Four products and four different claims

An actual Nasdaq share of SPCX conveys shareholder ownership routed through a traditional broker. Binance Stocks offers whole-share limit orders for SPCX executed through an introducing broker and cleared through Alpaca Securities, meaning real shares and real settlement, subject to Nasdaq's standard trading rules and halts.

Backpack Securities' SPCX token on Solana is backed 1:1 by a real SpaceX share purchased and held in custody by Backpack, a regulated US broker-dealer. Eligible holders can redeem those tokens for the underlying equity and transfer shares to any traditional brokerage via ACATS/DTCC rails.

Backpack CEO Armani Ferrante described the goal as making underlying securities “portable across financial systems.”

The Solana launch was timed to coincide with the Nasdaq debut, making it the first time a newly listed equity had a simultaneous on-chain market from day one. This model sits closest to direct share ownership because the redemption pathway runs through regulated brokerage infrastructure.

xStocks tokens are a distinct legal instrument, acting as tracker certificates where bearer debt instruments provide economic exposure to SpaceX's price without conferring shareholder rights, voting rights, or any legal claim to the underlying shares.

Kraken's own FAQ states xStocks “do not carry shareholder rights, voting rights, or any legal claim to the underlying company shares.”

Bybit's product terms state that the collateral backing xStocks “may not always consist of the underlying shares,” with cash or other assets potentially substituted, and Bybit acknowledges it does not independently verify the collateral. Both platforms exclude users from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

Hyperliquid's SPCX contracts are cash-settled derivatives that transition into equity-linked perpetual futures using the live Nasdaq price as an oracle once the stock lists, a position with no claim on the underlying company.

Hyperliquid's SPCX contracts do not represent SpaceX stock and do not become stock once it lists, transitioning into equity-linked perpetual futures using the live Nasdaq price as an oracle.

The allocation issue

The friction event that drew the most attention originated in the xStocks infrastructure, not in Backpack's custody model or Hyperliquid's derivatives engine.

Binance Wallet's SPCXx subscription campaign raised $557 million from 27,689 wallet addresses, making it one of the largest tokenized IPO campaigns ever. Bybit launched a parallel subscription through its new IPO Express platform.

Both ran on xStocks, priced tokens at 135 USDC, and carried explicit fine print stating that allocations were not guaranteed. Applicants could receive full, partial, or no tokens, with unallocated USDC automatically refunded.

According to Kraken's growth team, the xStocks provider received a smaller pre-IPO allocation of SpaceX shares than expected. Demand from users across Kraken, Bybit, Binance, and Bitget far exceeded the available supply.

Each allocated user received 4.2786 SPCX shares, a uniform figure that points to a pro rata cut across a fixed pool.

Binance's FAQ states the campaign “could be delayed, suspended, or canceled due to market, regulatory, or underwriting factors.” Bybit's announcement stated that listings “may also be adjusted, delayed, or canceled.”

Users who read “tokenized SpaceX IPO access” as a guarantee of ownership with a partial-fill outcome encountered exactly the ceiling described in the documentation.

The supply of the trackers is bound by what the issuer can source at the offering price. When demand outstrips available shares, allocation gets cut, and users get refunds.

Backpack's model avoids that ceiling because it purchases shares through its own brokerage infrastructure and issues tokens against custodied equity, so the token count corresponds directly to shares actually held.

What Hyperliquid was actually doing

Hyperliquid's SPCX contract, launched by Trade.xyz on May 18, generated $33 million in volume in its first 24 hours and peaked above $220 before settling near $203, implying a SpaceX valuation above $2.5 trillion before the company had priced a single share.

By IPO day, the perp had pulled back to around $176, still 30% above the $135 offering price, with over $322 million in 24-hour volume and $293 million in open interest.

The perp ran $12 to $26 above Nasdaq's actual first-day range of $150 to $168, a spread that illustrates what happens when a cash-settled derivative lacks a redemption mechanism to anchor it to spot.

Hyperliquid's order book set the price entirely by supply and demand until Nasdaq established a live feed. A three-week run from $220 down to $176, then back toward $183 on the morning of listing, shows how far that process can drift before equity markets open for real settlement.

Traders using the contract as a leveraged directional bet on IPO pricing got the product they subscribed to.

Traders who read the SPCX ticker and assumed it implied proximity to the underlying stock held a perpetual futures contract whose price converged with Nasdaq only through market mechanics with no custody mechanism enforcing alignment.

What gets tested next

SpaceX disclosed 18,712 BTC on its balance sheet, acquired in 2021 at a cost basis of approximately $661 million, and an actual SPCX share gives indirect exposure to that treasury. An xStocks certificate or a Hyperliquid perp tracks SpaceX's price action, not its balance sheet composition.

SpaceX pre-IPO perp volume reached $3.2 billion and $390 million in open interest across eight exchanges between May 17 and June 11. RWA.xyz shows tokenized stocks at $1.68 billion in distributed value, up 39% over 30 days, with $3.63 billion in monthly transfer volume.

Citi projects that tokenized real-world assets will climb from $17 billion today to $5.5 trillion by 2030. As that volume scales, more capital is at risk within structures whose rights differ sharply from their names.

SpaceX was the first mainstream test of multiple tokenized equity structures operating simultaneously on the same underlying asset.

Tracker certificates proved contingent on IPO allocation pipelines that retail demand can overwhelm. Perpetuals proved capable of sustained premiums because no arbitrage mechanism forces convergence with equity markets that close at 4 PM.

Redeemable tokens backed by brokerage custody proved the model that most closely replicates share ownership, though redemption eligibility, jurisdictional restrictions, and stress-scenario mechanics are unresolved for any issuer.

OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Stripe, and Databricks are all candidates for the next wave of blockbuster IPOs, and each will arrive with the same menu of exposure products under similar tickers.

Before subscribing to any of them, traders must determine the risk profile by assessing the type of tokenized stock they are acquiring and the bucket it belongs to.

The post SpaceX’s IPO exposes the first crack in tokenized stocks – fragmented ownership and allocation appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The following is a guest post and opinion from Vincent Maliepaard, VP of Marketing at Sentora.

On January 26, 2026, Kraken launched DeFi Earn. The announcement was straightforward: users could deposit stablecoins and receive up to 8% APY, directly within the exchange interface they already used for trading. No seed phrases. No gas management. No bridging. No new application to download.

Within months, the product had crossed 40,000 unique depositors.

For context, this is a crypto-native audience: people who already understand blockchain and have made deliberate choices to hold digital assets. They are not the mass market. But the speed of adoption signals something the industry has been circling for years: when DeFi yield is packaged correctly, demand materializes immediately.

The mechanics behind DeFi Earn are worth understanding because they reveal the architecture of what comes next. Kraken is the distribution layer, the trusted interface millions of users already interact with. Veda provides the vault infrastructure, programmable containers built on the ERC-4626 standard that hold and route user capital. Sentora operates as the risk management and strategy layer, deploying capital across established lending protocols including Aave, Morpho, and others. The borrowers on those protocols pay for access to liquidity, and those payments flow back to depositors as yield.

The user sees a savings rate. Everything beneath that is invisible to them.

This is what the industry has started calling CeDeFi, or, less formally, the DeFi mullet: centralized experience at the front, decentralized infrastructure at the back. Kraken's version of it is still crypto-native in its user base. The next iteration will not be.

The Commoditization of Vault Launch

Creating a vault is no longer a technical barrier. Vault-as-a-service providers have reduced what once required weeks of engineering into a standardized process. Any protocol, ecosystem, or institution can launch a vault relatively quickly.

This ease of creation changes the competitive dynamics of the vault economy. More vaults means more competition for deposits, which creates pressure on curators to offer higher returns. Higher returns require either better strategies or higher risk. The former requires genuine expertise. The latter, when it is not recognized as such, leads to the kinds of collateral failures that drove significant losses in 2025.

Infrastructure commoditization makes the curation layer more important, not less. As vault options multiply, the performance differential between well-managed and poorly managed vaults will become the primary signal allocators use to evaluate the field. Kraken's decision to partner with institutional risk managers rather than build vault strategy in-house reflects this reality. Distribution scale and capital volume require curation discipline that cannot be improvised.

Distribution: From Protocol Integrations to Consumer Applications

The Kraken launch is one data point in a broader structural shift. Consider what else has happened in the past twelve months.

Revolut, valued at $75 billion and holding over 50 million users, integrated Uniswap into its platform and is aggressively expanding its crypto infrastructure. Its crypto head of product described 2026 as the year the platform evolves from a buy-and-sell product into “financial infrastructure for how trillions of dollars will be traded, earned and moved.” Revolut applied for a full banking charter in March 2026, weeks after receiving its UK banking licence. Coinbase launched Morpho-powered Bitcoin loans. Robinhood began using Arbitrum for tokenized stock trading across Europe. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion and is preparing to launch its own blockchain. Klarna is testing a stablecoin. PayPal's PYUSD grew 600% in 2025 to $3.6 billion in circulation.

These are not crypto companies making tentative experiments. These are major financial platforms restructuring their product roadmaps around blockchain infrastructure.

The distribution model for DeFi yield is evolving through three distinct generations.

The first generation required direct participation. DeFi-native users connected wallets, navigated protocol interfaces, and managed positions independently. The addressable market was small and technical fluency was the entry requirement.

The current generation added institutional abstraction. Exchanges, custodians, and fund managers began accessing vault strategies through professional interfaces, with capital flowing into curated products managed by dedicated strategy teams. The Kraken model sits at the leading edge of this generation.

The next generation extends the abstraction further. Fintech platforms and neobanks, the Revoluts and the Robinhoods and the platforms that are still deciding whether to move, will offer DeFi-powered products within their existing consumer applications. A user will see a savings rate. They will deposit into what looks and behaves like a standard product. The capital will route through vault infrastructure managed by an institutional strategy team, generating returns through on-chain lending markets and structured positions.

The vault remains invisible. The risk management, the design decisions, the monitoring and rebalancing, all of it happens several layers below the interface the user interacts with.

This is how vaults will onboard the next significant wave of capital. Institutional participants are not going to navigate protocol interfaces. Retail savers are not going to manage DeFi positions. But both groups will use applications built by platforms they trust. When those platforms integrate vault infrastructure cleanly, the capital follows.

What Invisible DeFi Requires

As vault infrastructure becomes the hidden layer beneath consumer and institutional financial products, the standards applied to curation and strategy management must rise to match the expectations of the distribution channels built on top.

Kraken addressed this by selecting institutional risk managers and disclosing fees, risks, and protocol allocations to depositors before they commit capital. That is the right approach. It is also the minimum viable standard for the consumer distribution wave that follows.

A neobank offering a DeFi-powered savings rate to millions of users cannot tolerate opaque collateral choices or undisclosed strategy risks at the vault level. A regulated custodian routing institutional capital through vault infrastructure must demonstrate that the underlying risk management meets institutional standards. Revolut's evolution from a trading platform to “financial infrastructure” cannot be built on yield products that users cannot evaluate.

The transparency and discipline required at the vault layer are not optional features in this model. They are the foundation of the trust that makes distribution possible.

Standardized risk disclosures, robust monitoring, and automation infrastructure are the prerequisites for vault infrastructure to underpin products at scale.

The Question That Remains

Kraken's 40,000 depositors are a proof of concept, not a ceiling. The addressable market for DeFi-powered yield, distributed through trusted consumer interfaces, is orders of magnitude larger. The vault economy is becoming the infrastructure through which DeFi connects to the broader financial system.

As new CeDeFi solutions are launched, the question remains whether the current risk management, lending markets, and vault infrastructure will scale along effortlessly.

The mullet has been styled. The question is how far back it grows.

The post The future of vaults: neobanks and invisible DeFi appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The US government has issued an emergency export control directive forcing artificial intelligence pioneer Anthropic to abruptly suspend global access to its frontier models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

The sweeping mandate, which cites national security authorities, applies to all foreign nationals both inside and outside the United States, including Anthropic’s own international personnel.

The enforcement action marks the first time Washington has effectively recalled a widely deployed, commercial frontier AI model.

While Anthropic has complied by disabling the models for its entire global user base, the unprecedented intervention has triggered an immediate ideological and capital shift across the technology landscape.

Within hours of the announcement, digital asset markets responded aggressively, sending decentralized AI tokens up by double digits and re-centering the cryptocurrency industry around an explicit infrastructure mission: building censorship-resistant, verifiable intelligence layers independent of centralized state control.

Related Reading

AI model audits need a ‘trust, but verify’ approach to enhance reliability

Adopting a continuous 'trust, but verify' method fills reliability gaps in AI audits, empowering auditors with advanced monitoring and fault detection capabilities.

May 10, 2025 · Samuel Pearton

Anthropic defends Fable and Mythos

CryptoSlate previously reported that Anthropic's Mythos model could uncover exploitable flaws within the emerging industry, which could lead to billions of losses.

As a result, the AI model has become a prized tool for cybersecurity teams that are using that capability defensively, giving engineers a way to discover and fix flaws before attackers can exploit them.

Against that backdrop, the US government order stemmed from a perceived vulnerability that allows users to bypass the model’s core safety guardrails.

However, Anthropic leadership has openly broken ranks with federal regulators over the proportionality of the response.

The company confirmed it reviewed a technical demonstration of the narrow exploit, determining that it merely allowed the model to analyze specific codebases and identify minor, previously known software flaws.

Anthropic noted that the level of capability demonstrated is already widely available across competing commercial platforms, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, and represents a standard tool utilized daily by cybersecurity professionals defending enterprise infrastructure.

In a statement addressing the recall, Anthropic defended its engineering framework, arguing that absolute immunity to exploitation is a mathematical and practical impossibility for any frontier model developer:

“We suspect that perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider. Every safeguard used in the industry is vulnerable to non-universal jailbreaks. We aimed to make jailbreaks either narrow or very expensive to produce, and to combine this with thorough monitoring. We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people.”

Before the commercial launch of Fable 5, Anthropic spent thousands of hours red-teaming the model alongside the US government, the United Kingdom’s Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI), and independent defense contractors.

The company warned that if Washington applies a standard of zero-exploit tolerance across the private sector, it will effectively freeze all frontier model development and deployment throughout the domestic technology industry.

The company further critiqued the government's opaque enforcement actions, reiterating that state intervention must remain transparent, fair, clear, and strictly grounded in empirical, technical facts.

AI's centralized chokepoints hand crypto a concrete mandate

For the digital asset industry, which spent much of the early part of the decade navigating shifting regulatory frameworks and speculative asset cycles, the unilateral shutdown of a major commercial AI model has acted as an unprecedented institutional catalyst.

Industry analysts and venture capitalists view the intervention as definitive proof that centralized computational intelligence remains vulnerable to sudden, arbitrary political chokepoints.

Ansem, a widely followed crypto trader, said the move was the strongest marketing argument yet for open-source AI models that can be used without handing personal data to centralized platforms.

Chris Barret, an executive at Chainlink, said:

“When intelligence runs through centralized chokepoints, access can be changed overnight. The future needs decentralized AI models and the verifiable infrastructure to connect, secure, and coordinate them.”

The sentiment was echoed across the venture capital landscape, where the enforcement action is being interpreted as a watershed moment for decentralized infrastructure networks (DePIN).

Jake Brukhman, founder of venture capital firm CoinFund, noted that the friction between Anthropic and the US government is “setting up the rails for decentralized AI in real time.”

Prominent Silicon Valley figures also weighed in on the widening philosophical divide between state-aligned safety regimes and open-source networks.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen delivered a sharp critique of the expanding compliance framework, characterizing heavy-handed AI regulation as an institutional burden that risks crippling early-stage startups, diverting capital into endless audits, and converting frontier systems into restricted corporate gatekeepers.

However, he also argued that the risk of unaligned systems disrupting critical public infrastructure remains unacceptably high without rigorous federal oversight.

Decentralized AI tokens pump

The market reaction showed how quickly traders connected the Anthropic order to crypto’s decentralized AI thesis.

CryptoSlate data showed fresh demand for tokens tied to decentralized compute, open-source AI infrastructure, and model coordination. Bittensor’s TAO rose 13.4%, Venice Token gained 18%, and Internet Computer advanced 9.8%, making AI-linked assets one of the strongest pockets of the market after the directive became public.

Tao.com, a non-custodial wallet and infrastructure provider in the Bittensor ecosystem, said the rally reflected a broader concern over who controls access to artificial intelligence.

The firm stated:

“We are not building decentralized AI because it sounds better. We are building it because the off-switch cannot belong to one hand. If AI is going to run the economy, you cannot have it gated behind one API, one vendor, one jurisdiction, or one policy mood.”

The move added momentum to a sector that had already shown relative strength this year.

Earlier this year, Grayscale described AI-linked tokens as one of crypto’s most resilient themes during the first quarter. The category fell 14% during the March selloff, even as nearly 90% of digital assets posted double-digit losses.

The post US export order removes Anthropic Mythos model access fueling crypto bets on AI that is beyond government reach appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin was designed as a hedge against inflation, but every hot inflation report in the past year has knocked its price lower, and Thursday's data was no different. The Producer Price Index rose 1.1% in May, lifting the annual increase to 6.5%, the fastest pace since November 2022 and well above the 0.7% monthly gain economists had expected.

Energy did most of the damage, as final demand goods climbed 2.8%, the largest monthly increase since the series began in December 2009, with energy prices up 10.7% and gasoline surging 23.4% as the Iran conflict keeps oil supply at risk. Even after stripping out food, energy, and trade services, the index rose 0.8% on the month and 5.1% over the year, the steepest core reading since October 2022.

Most people couldn't tell you what PPI measures, because it tracks transactions consumers never see. The Producer Price Index measures the average change in prices that producers in the US receive for the goods, services, and construction they sell.

CPI captures inflation from the buyer's side of the register, while PPI captures it from the seller's side, which means PPI often picks up price pressure weeks or months before households feel it.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics builds the index from a confidential, probability-based sample of producers across the 50 states and Washington, DC, with near-complete coverage in mining and manufacturing and substantial coverage in services.

The reported figure is final-demand PPI, which covers everything sold for personal consumption, capital investment, government purchases, and exports, while a separate family of intermediate-demand indexes tracks the inputs businesses sell to each other.

PPI in 60 seconds

How does a wholesale price report end up in your grocery bill and your mortgage rate?

When producers receive higher prices, somebody eventually has to pay for it down the line. A company facing a 23.4% jump in gasoline costs and a 15.7% rise in diesel can either absorb the hit through thinner margins, pass it along to customers, or split the difference.

The first option pressures earnings, hiring, and stock prices. The second shows up later in shelf prices, delivery fees, airfares, and shipping surcharges. May's report indicates that the pass-through is already underway, as the pressure on prices extends well beyond fuel.

Prices for processed goods sold between businesses rose 13.3% over the past 12 months, the largest annual increase since August 2022, which means the costs feeding into future consumer prices are rising faster than the prices consumers currently pay.

The relationship between PPI and CPI isn't perfect. Taxes, import prices, retail margins, and corporate pricing strategy all sit between what a producer receives and what a shopper pays, so a hot PPI month guarantees nothing about next month's consumer print.

Research from the Richmond Fed shows producer prices flow into consumer prices with lags that vary widely by category. Energy moves fast, since refiners pass costs to pumps within weeks, while services move slowly because wage contracts and leases reset on annual cycles. Wednesday's May CPI report already showed gasoline up 40.5% year over year, and Thursday's producer data suggests that the pipeline still has plenty left to deliver.

Policy decisions depend on these numbers, even though no single report automatically triggers anything. The Federal Reserve targets the PCE price index, but several PPI components feed directly into PCE calculations, so economists use producer data to forecast the gauge the central bank actually watches.

April's PCE reading of 3.8% was already nearly double the Fed's 2% target before May's energy shock hit. Beyond monetary policy, PPI indexes get written into long-term supply contracts as escalation clauses, deployed by statisticians to separate real output growth from price increases, and wielded by politicians arguing over energy policy, tariffs, and spending. A 6.5% annual producer inflation rate gives everyone in Washington fresh ammunition.

Bitcoin holders watch PPI because liquidity (and the lack of it) sets the price

Wholesale inflation is connected to decentralized assets like Bitcoin through interest-rate expectations. High producer inflation makes the Fed less likely to cut rates; higher rates make Treasury bills and money-market funds more attractive; the dollar stays strong; and the pool of capital willing to chase volatile assets shrinks.

CryptoSlate has documented how tightly Bitcoin now tracks liquidity cycles, overtaking the halving as the dominant price driver. That's why a government statistic about diesel fuel and wholesale margins can move an asset that producers will never accept at the factory gate.

The Federal Open Market Committee meets on June 16 and 17, the first meeting chaired by Kevin Warsh since he took over from Jerome Powell in May, and prediction markets price a hold in the 3.50% to 3.75% range as a near certainty.

Hopes for cuts have been eroding all year, from January's services-inflation shock through March's repricing toward zero cut probability, and Bitcoin's slide from its October 2025 record toward the low $60,000s has tracked that deterioration alongside a record streak of ETF outflows worth roughly $3.45 billion.

There's an important nuance here, though, and it works in Bitcoin's favor over the longer term. Persistent inflation erodes the purchasing power of cash and bonds, which is what Bitcoin's fixed supply was essentially built to fix, and CryptoSlate has argued BTC is structured to thrive across a stagflationary decade. What we're seeing now is inflation helping the long-term thesis, while the policy response to inflation hurts the near-term price.

What comes next will decide which force wins. Watch whether June's CPI confirms the pass-through, whether the PCE release on June 25 moves the Fed's preferred gauge further from target, whether oil keeps climbing on Iran headlines, and how Warsh frames the energy spike at his first press conference.

One report never settles an inflation debate, but the asset marketed as inflation insurance just got hit by an inflation warning, and until the Fed can credibly promise easier money, that paradox is likely to keep defining Bitcoin's 2026.

The post Wholesale inflation is back in focus. Here’s what PPI means for your money and Bitcoin appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The Bitcoin network is poised to execute one of the largest downward adjustments to its mining difficulty in its 17-year history this weekend, a stark reflection of the severe margin compression forcing operators to take hardware offline.

The automated recalibration, scheduled to occur on June 13 at block height 953,568, is projected to slash the network’s difficulty by approximately 10.3%. This shift will drop the target metric from 138.96 trillion to roughly 124.25 trillion.

This would also be the second-largest drop this year, behind an 11.16% decline in February.

Additionally, the decline will mark the 11th-largest negative difficulty adjustment since the inception of the digital asset in 2009, signaling a significant retreat in the aggregate computational power securing the blockchain.

A year of compounding financial strain

The impending reduction highlights a remarkably brutal calendar year for digital asset infrastructure providers, characterized by collapsing revenue and shrinking network demand.

With this upcoming adjustment, the current year will account for three of the top 20 downward difficulty drops in Bitcoin history, placing it on par with the most volatile periods in the network's life cycle.

This rapid decompression is evident in the absolute scale of the network's retrenchment. Mining difficulty has reduced from near 150 trillion at the beginning of this year to the upcoming projected 126 trillion level, representing a 16% decline year-to-date.

Historically, only three calendar years have ever recorded three or more top-20 difficulty drops. The record is held by 2011, which saw four such appearances during an era of extreme early-stage asset volatility.

With the current year only hitting its midpoint, infrastructure analysts warn that further large-scale downward adjustments remain a distinct possibility if market conditions fail to materialize a meaningful recovery.

The primary catalyst for this systemic retrenchment is the relentless downward pressure on the asset's underlying spot price.

Data from CryptoSlate shows that Bitcoin has declined nearly 30% year-to-date, a macro downtrend capped most recently by a steep 15% drop in June that dragged the asset into a tight trading range of $62,000 to $63,000.

For mining operations running on narrow profit margins, particularly those employing older hardware configurations or navigating high-cost power purchasing agreements, this compounding price erosion has flipped businesses from marginally profitable to structurally unsustainable almost overnight.

BTC miners are operating at the breakeven threshold

These severe price struggles have brought the entire sector to a critical juncture where the average operator is fighting just to stay in the black.

Data compiled by Capriole Investments, a quantitative digital asset fund, indicates that Bitcoin is currently trading in line with its average aggregate production cost, which is approximately $62,650.

In an X post, Charles Edwards, founder of Capriole Investments, noted:

“Miners are now just breaking even on average.”

Edwards pointed out that historical long-term value windows for the asset typically materialize when the market price hovers between the total production cost and the bare electrical cost, the latter of which currently stands near $50,000.

Compounding the pressure of a lower spot price is a substantial contraction in organic network fees.

The annual transaction fees earned by miners, excluding the fixed software-issued block rewards, have dropped over a trailing 12-month period to levels not seen since 2019.

This multi-year low in transaction-throughput revenue, following successive block reward halving events, has driven a broader structural shift within the publicly traded digital asset infrastructure sector.

With transaction fee revenue under pressure and global demand for high-performance computing (HPC) in artificial intelligence expanding, multiple public mining firms are actively diversifying their data center capacities away from pure-play cryptocurrency mining and toward AI compute hosting.

Cheap rigs and efficiency plays mask miner pain

Despite the clear operational headwinds, the absolute network hashrate has remained deceptively resilient.

Industry data suggests this durability is driven by a stark divergence in hardware efficiency, as capitalized operators aggressively replace legacy machinery with next-generation units.

According to data from the Bitcoin mining platform Braiins, secondary-market prices for mining hardware have plunged by as much as 62% over the past year, reducing the capital expenditure required for premium fleet upgrades.

The efficiency gap between legacy and modern hardware explains why total network computational power has not fallen as dramatically as spot prices.

For instance, an older-generation Antminer S19j Pro generates 104 terahashes per second (TH/s) while consuming 3,068 watts on stock firmware, resulting in an efficiency rating of 29.5 joules per terahash (J/TH). In contrast, the newer Antminer S21 XP delivers 270 TH/s at 3,645 watts, achieving an efficiency of 13.5 J/TH.

When optimized with custom firmware, the newer unit can reach 298 TH/s at the same power draw, dropping its efficiency rating to 12.2 J/TH.

This represents a 59% reduction in energy consumption per terahash compared to the older model.

Consequently, well-capitalized enterprises are exploiting low-cost hardware markets to phase out obsolete rigs, keeping aggregate network hashrate elevated even as less efficient operations close.

Stress builds, but capitulation remains incomplete

While these efficiency upgrades have allowed well-capitalized firms to stay afloat, broader on-chain data suggests the industry at large remains under stress.

CryptoQuant analyst Axel Adler said several miner indicators have moved into stress levels similar to those seen after past halvings, though they have not yet reached the capitulation phases that marked the 2018 and 2022 market bottoms.

One of those gauges, the Puell Multiple, compares miners’ daily revenue with its one-year average. The indicator has been trending lower and stood near 0.74 on June 10, while the raw reading fell to 0.58.

Readings below 1 typically show that miner revenue is running below its annual average. Lower readings point to deeper financial pressure across the sector.

Adler said the current level is close to where the metric traded around the 2024 halving, when Bitcoin moved between roughly $55,000 and $68,000. Previous cycle lows were much more severe. The 30-day average fell to 0.45 near the 2022 market bottom and dropped to 0.33 in December 2018.

The difference is important for the current setup. Miner revenue is weakening, but the industry has not yet seen the broad shutdowns that usually define full capitulation.

Another metric, the price-to-miner-revenue multiple, also points to a cooler market. The gauge compares Bitcoin’s price with miners’ rolling annual revenue per coin. It recently stood near 80, down from peaks of about 160 in July 2025 and February 2021.

At the 2022 bottom, the metric fell to 33. That suggests the market premium over miner revenue has narrowed but has not disappeared. A deeper capitulation signal would likely require a move toward the 40 to 50 range or a longer stretch of depressed miner income.

A separate miner capitulation gauge, which tracks Bitcoin’s price change since the last difficulty bottom, has also moved into a pressure zone. It recently showed a drawdown of about 21%, compared with roughly 8% at the start of June.

The move shows that Bitcoin’s price has continued to fall even after the network adjusted its mining difficulty downward.

The indicator has crossed the 15% threshold that analysts often associate with heightened miner stress. In 2022, the worst reading reached roughly 39%.

A further decline in Bitcoin, without a recovery in price or mining difficulty, could deepen the stress signal and raise the risk of forced selling or additional miner shutdowns.

Bitcoin mining's next test comes after the reset

The sector's true durability will be tested immediately after the upcoming June 13 difficulty reduction.

The recalibration should provide some much-needed relief for the miners that manage to remain online, as lower difficulty means each unit of active hashrate has a better chance of earning block rewards.

In past cycles, difficulty drops have sometimes helped stabilize mining conditions, marking periods when weaker operators had already absorbed the worst of the pressure.

The challenge this time is that the relief arrives while several revenue lines remain historically weak.

As established, Bitcoin’s price is trading directly at production-cost estimates, hashprice is near breakeven for many firms, and fee revenue has fallen to multi-year lows. The halving has also reduced the baseline subsidy that miners rely on during periods of low transaction activity.

For traders, miner stress has historically been watched as a signal that Bitcoin may be approaching better long-term value zones.

When miners are forced to sell, shut down, or upgrade, the market often moves through one of the more painful parts of the cycle. But the current data suggests pressure is still developing rather than fully exhausted.

The next few weeks will show whether the difficulty cut is enough to slow the strain. A recovery in Bitcoin’s price above the production-cost zone, a rebound in transaction fees, or a stabilization in the Puell Multiple would suggest miner pressure is easing.

Conversely, another leg lower in Bitcoin would put the sector under a more severe test. If price weakness deepens while hashprice remains depressed, more older machines could be switched off, and miner reserves could come under renewed scrutiny.

The post Bitcoin faces one of its biggest mining difficulty drops as miner margins collapse appeared first on CryptoSlate.

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.

SpaceX did what a heavily oversubscribed mega-IPO is supposed to do — it popped, held most of the gain, and closed comfortably above its offer price. The more interesting story sits one layer down, in the tokenized and crypto-native products that launched alongside it. There, the day split cleanly into two outcomes: products that actually controlled the underlying shares worked, and the one model that relied on a middleman to find shares at the last minute did not. That divide, more than the stock's 19% gain, is what this debut will be remembered for.

How SPCX Actually Traded

The headline numbers were strong without being euphoric. Shares opened at $150, peaked at $176.52 intraday, and closed at $160.95 — up about 19% from the $135 offer price. That close translated to roughly a $2.1 trillion market cap, making SpaceX the seventh-largest public company in the world on its first day. The raise itself — about $75 billion on more than 555 million shares — locked in the record as the biggest IPO in history. 

What's worth reading into the shape of the day: the stock hit its high in the early afternoon and then gave back a chunk into the close. Shares pared gains heading into the closing bell but still finished up around 19%, and analysts framed the day as a success given the healthy gain, limited volatility, and record retail demand. A debut that opens high, spikes, and settles back is the textbook signature of strong-but-rational demand — not the kind of disorderly first-day mania that often unwinds painfully in week two.

The Gap Nobody's Talking About: Expectations vs. Reality

Here's a nuance most recaps gloss over. A 19% pop is excellent by historical IPO standards — but it landed below what speculative markets had been signaling for weeks. IPO researcher Jay Ritter called the open "disappointing relative to what betting markets had been predicting," while noting it was still clearly positive, and that if the price holds, the dollar value of early returns would exceed any IPO in history. 

That gap is the tell. In the run-up, pre-IPO perpetual futures had priced SpaceX as much as 60% above the offer at one point. By debut day, the Hyperliquid SPCX-USDC perpetual was trading around $176, roughly 30% above the IPO price, before easing toward $172. So the public market essentially met the floor of crypto's expectations but undercut its earlier highs. The speculative premium was real, and it compressed as the actual print arrived — a useful reminder that pre-IPO derivative prices are sentiment gauges, not forecasts.

And the valuation question the market shelved for a day hasn't gone away. SpaceX remains unprofitable, with $18.7 billion in revenue last year and an $8.7 billion loss between the start of 2025 and the end of March 2026. A $2 trillion price tag on those fundamentals is a bet on Starlink and Starship execution, not current earnings — which is exactly why the Monday open and the weeks after matter more than Friday's fireworks.

How the Crypto Market Reacted

The crypto angle here isn't incidental — for two weeks, SpaceX had been actively pulling money out of digital assets. Capital rotation into the listing compressed crypto liquidity for over two weeks, and analysts expected sidelined capital to gradually rotate back into risk assets once SPCX began trading. So when the overhang finally cleared on Friday, the majors caught a bid.

Bitcoin ($BTC) held the line as the market's anchor. Bitcoin traded near $63,262, up about 0.4% on the day; it briefly retraced after a hot US Producer Price Index print of 6.5% year-over-year, but buyers defended the demand zone and BTC recovered. Ethereum ($ETH) was steadier than spectacular. Ether sat broadly flat at around $1,653.

The standouts were further down the cap table. XRP ($XRP) put in its best session in a week. XRP added about 2.39%, its strongest session in over a week, as improving legal clarity and institutional appetite returned to the asset. And Solana ($SOL) was the most directly tied to the SpaceX story, since it hosted the tokenized stock. Solana advanced about 2.84%, supported by the tokenized SPCX share launch and elevated FIFA World Cup fan-token volumes on its network.

The bigger read: the market shifted from two weeks of relentless selling to cautious optimism, helped by easing US-Iran tensions and the SpaceX IPO finally pricing. The relief was real, but worth keeping in perspective — the hot inflation print and the June 17 Fed meeting are the next macro tests, so Friday's green board is a tone shift, not an all-clear.

Where the Tokenized SpaceX Trade Split in Two

This is where the debut got genuinely instructive. Several tokenized versions of SPCX were built to go live the moment the stock did, letting non-US and crypto-native traders get exposure without a traditional brokerage. Most of them delivered. The products that issued tokens against shares they actually held — onchain or via a regulated broker-dealer — opened and traded as planned.

Then there was the route that didn't hold any shares of its own. Four platforms had to scrap their allocation campaigns outright. Binance, Bybit and Bitget canceled their tokenized SpaceX allocation campaigns and refunded subscribers in full after xStocks, the provider routing the deals, could not source the underlying shares — even as xStocks' own onchain token and rival protocols launched the same morning. MEXC was caught in the same shortfall.

*Investments carry risks. Trade responsibly.

The amount of money that got parked and then unwound is the part that should make exchanges think twice. Binance's campaign alone had taken in over $557 million in USDC before being cancelled for "circumstances outside of our control." Bybit told users that "due to xStocks' inability to deliver the underlying assets, no SpaceX allocations were received," and Bitget said it couldn't secure and distribute the tokens it had promised. The consolation packages tell you how much goodwill was at stake: Bybit added a 10% reward and Bitget offered fee refunds plus future whitelisting and a gas voucher, while Binance pledged $1 million in shares via its own bStocks product, with CZ posting "Protect users when things don't go as planned."

--> Check out here all the options to Trade SpaceX stocks 

Why This Is the Real Headline

Strip away the branding and the failure maps the architecture of tokenized equity perfectly. The deciding variable wasn't whether a product was onchain, decentralized, US-listed, or a perp — it was who controlled the shares. Everything backed by real, held inventory settled. The one design that outsourced share-sourcing to an intermediary at the last moment is the one that collapsed under demand.

That matters because the usual pitch for tokenized stocks is access and speed. As industry participants put it, the problem wasn't tokenization itself but getting the underlying asset — SpaceX's retail demand simply overwhelmed the shares available, leaving many orders unfilled. And the fine print had warned about exactly this: xStocks' own disclaimers stated its IPO tokens offered price exposure only, with no guaranteed allocation and no direct ownership. The lesson for the next blockbuster listing — Anthropic and OpenAI are both circling the public markets — is concrete: allocation-campaign tokens now carry a proven sourcing risk that platforms will either have to price honestly or stop offering.

What to Watch Next

Friday answered the easy question (does SpaceX pop?) and left the harder ones open. Three things worth tracking: whether SPCX holds above its $160 close once first-day euphoria fades, the index-inclusion buying wave that could hit as early as July as trackers are forced to add the stock, and whether the refunded crypto exchanges return for the next mega-IPO with a share-backed model instead of a promise to source. As one outlet put it, when markets reopen Monday, SPCX will be closely watched all over again

SpaceX has officially entered public markets, and its long-awaited IPO is already one of the biggest market events of 2026. After years of speculation around when Elon Musk’s space and satellite giant would finally go public, SpaceX shares began trading today under the ticker SPCX, immediately attracting massive investor attention.

The stock opened around $152, already well above its IPO price of $135, before climbing further during early trading. At the time of writing, SpaceX stock is trading around $172, marking a strong first-day jump and showing just how intense demand has become for one of the most anticipated listings in market history.

Why Is SpaceX Stock Surging Today?

The first-day rally is mainly being driven by a mix of hype, scarcity, and long-term growth expectations. SpaceX is not just viewed as a rocket company anymore. Investors are also pricing in the future of Starlink, satellite internet, space infrastructure, government contracts, possible AI-related expansion, and Elon Musk’s broader tech ecosystem.

The IPO has also created a strong fear of missing out among retail and institutional investors. With SpaceX now trading publicly, many investors who were previously unable to access the private company are rushing to gain exposure.

This strong demand helped push the stock from its IPO price of $135 to an opening level near $152, before the rally continued toward the $170 zone.

Is a SpaceX Crash Coming After the IPO Pump?

The big question now is whether SpaceX stock can continue climbing or whether the first-day excitement could quickly turn into a sharp correction.

A short-term pullback is definitely possible. IPO stocks often experience extreme volatility during their first trading sessions, especially when the opening price rises far above the original IPO price. Early investors may take profits, traders may exit after the initial hype, and valuation concerns could pressure the stock if momentum slows.

SpaceX is already trading at a massive valuation, which means expectations are extremely high. If the market starts questioning whether the company can justify that valuation through revenue growth, profitability, and future expansion, SPCX could face a strong correction.

In that scenario, the stock could fall back toward the $150 opening area, or even retest levels closer to the $135 IPO price if selling pressure increases.

*Investments carry risks. Trade responsibly.

Could SpaceX Stock Keep Going Higher?

On the other hand, SpaceX could continue moving higher if demand remains strong. The company has a rare position in the market, combining space exploration, satellite internet, defense contracts, and futuristic growth narratives. Few public companies offer the same level of exposure to the commercial space economy.

If buyers continue to dominate and the stock holds above the $170 level, the next psychological target could be the $180 to $200 range. A move above $200 would likely confirm that investors are willing to pay a significant premium for SpaceX’s long-term potential.

However, the higher SPCX climbs in the first days of trading, the greater the risk of a sharp correction if momentum fades.

What Should Investors Watch Next?

The most important levels to watch now are the $170 area, the $150 opening zone, and the $135 IPO price.

If SpaceX holds above $170 and continues gaining volume, bullish momentum could stay in control. But if the stock drops below $150, it may signal that the IPO hype is cooling down and that early buyers are starting to take profits.

Investors should also watch broader market sentiment. If tech stocks remain strong, SpaceX could benefit from continued risk appetite. But if the market turns cautious, highly valued IPO stocks like SPCX could be among the first to see heavy selling.

3 Ways to Buy SpaceX Stock

For investors looking to gain exposure to SpaceX after its IPO, there are several platforms to consider. Availability may depend on the user’s country, regulations, and the type of product offered.

1. Buy SpaceX Through XTB

XTB is one of the platforms investors can use to access major listed stocks and market opportunities. For those looking to trade or invest in SpaceX after its Nasdaq debut, XTB may offer a simple way to gain exposure to SPCX depending on regional availability.

-> Start with XTB here

2. Buy SpaceX Through Bitpanda

Bitpanda is another option for investors who want easy access to stocks, crypto, and other assets from one platform. If SpaceX trading is available in your region, Bitpanda may allow users to gain exposure to SPCX with a beginner-friendly interface.

-> Start with Bitpanda here

3. Buy SpaceX Through Coinbase

Coinbase has also been expanding beyond traditional crypto exposure, including pre-IPO and tokenized market products in some regions. For users looking for crypto-native access to SpaceX-related exposure, Coinbase may be another platform to watch.

-> Start with Coinbase here

SpaceX IPO Could Be Just Getting Started

SpaceX’s IPO is already making market history. With the stock opening near $152 and trading around $172, investors are clearly showing strong demand for Elon Musk’s space company.

Still, the next move remains uncertain. The stock could continue climbing if hype and demand remain strong, but a sharp correction is also possible if early investors start taking profits or if the valuation becomes too stretched.

For now, SpaceX remains one of the most important stocks to watch in 2026. Whether SPCX becomes the next mega-cap winner or faces a post-IPO crash will depend on how the stock performs after the initial excitement fades.

Anthropic pushed back against what it described as an overreach, saying the vulnerability cited is already widespread across the industry.

Google alleges a Chinese network weaponized its Gemini AI to create phishing sites that stole millions of credit card numbers and targeted crypto investors.

A hobbyist network handed an autonomous agent a masterclass in why you don't give AI a credit card and a deadline.

President Trump’s upcoming UFC fight will provide several crypto firms with an unprecedented opportunity for corporate branding.

A new benchmark study found AI agents remain vulnerable to prompt injection attacks as companies increasingly roll out the technology to the public.

XRP exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are quietly capturing institutional capital, outpacing both Bitcoin and Ethereum for a fifth consecutive week.

The Bitcoin network recently underwent its 11th-largest downward difficulty adjustment in history, plunging 10.09% to 124.93T following a sharp decline in overall network hashrate.

'Rich Dad Poor Dad' Author Robert Kiyosaki Believes Gold, Silver, Bitcoin, and Ethereum win long term.

XRP has outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum in weekly ETF flows for the fifth time in a row, as institutional participation in XRP remains.

Shiba Inu burn rate fails to move as SHIB signals stay mixed.

TLDR:

• Litecoin has entered the lower Fibonacci Adjusted Market Mean Price band, a zone tied to past accumulation phases.
• Whale and shark wallets holding at least 10,000 LTC have grown by 7% over the past five months despite flat prices.
• LitVM is bringing smart contract functionality to Litecoin via a zkLTC wrapper, renewing social media interest in LTC.
• Santiment data ranked Litecoin as the top trending coin, with retail volume expected to recover on any price rally.

Litecoin is drawing renewed attention from analysts and on-chain data providers as price action revisits historically significant support levels.

Whale and shark wallet growth continues alongside fresh ecosystem interest from LitVM, a smart contract project building on the Litecoin network.

Together, these developments are placing LTC under the spotlight at a time when broader market conditions remain uncertain.

Litecoin Price Revisits Key Fibonacci Support Region

Litecoin’s price has moved into what analysts describe as a structurally meaningful zone. According to crypto analyst Alphractal, LTC has touched the first lower level of the Fibonacci Adjusted Market Mean Price model.

This metric uses the Market Mean Price as a base and builds proportional Fibonacci bands to map expansion, mean reversion, and accumulation areas.

Historically, Litecoin has found support within the blue and green bands of this model during periods of market stress.

The green band, representing the lowest level, has marked points of strongest selling pressure across previous cycles. The blue region, where LTC currently sits, has also served as a relevant value area in past market structures.

On a logarithmic scale, Alphractal notes that Litecoin is once again approaching zones that historically attracted long-term investor attention.

The upper bands of this model have typically aligned with overheated market conditions and distribution risk. Lower bands, by contrast, tend to reflect discounted pricing relative to the asset’s structural mean.

The analyst added that while Litecoin remains weak in the short term, periods of extreme weakness have also marked the early formation of longer-term value. That framing has resonated with investors monitoring LTC’s positioning within the broader crypto market cycle.

Whale Accumulation and LitVM Fuel On-Chain Interest

On-chain data from Santiment adds another layer to the current Litecoin narrative. The number of whale and shark wallets holding at least 10,000 LTC has climbed by 7% over the past five months, even as price performance has remained relatively flat.

Santiment noted that accumulation from large holders often precedes major trend shifts before retail participants take notice.

Transaction volume tied to these larger wallets has also remained active during this period. Santiment’s data shows that any price rally could quickly draw retail participants back into the market, which would likely support broader volume recovery for LTC.

Much of Litecoin’s current social media traction stems from LitVM, a project introducing smart contract functionality through a zkLTC wrapper.

The platform has sparked debate among traders about whether it can generate meaningful utility and demand for Litecoin going forward.

Santiment confirmed that LTC ranked as the top trending coin across social data at the time of the report. Whether LitVM delivers on its promise remains an open question, but the conversation itself has refreshed interest in an asset that had largely faded from active discussion.

The post LTC Hits Fibonacci Support as Whales Build: Can LitVM Spark the Next Rally? appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• The US government issued an export control directive ordering Anthropic to suspend all Fable 5 and Mythos 5 access globally.
• Anthropic reviewed the jailbreak report and found the capabilities were already available in models like OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.
• The reported jailbreak involved asking Fable 5 to read a codebase and flag software flaws, with no harmful result disclosed.
• Anthropic warned the recall standard, if applied industry-wide, would effectively halt all frontier AI model deployments.

Anthropic has disabled global access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 following a US government export control directive.

The order, received at 5:21pm ET, cites national security concerns tied to a reported jailbreak method. All other Anthropic models remain available.

The company says it is complying with the directive while disputing the technical basis for the decision.

Government Directive Targets Reported Jailbreak Method

The US government issued the directive without disclosing specific national security details in writing. Officials communicated verbally that they had learned of a method capable of bypassing Fable 5’s safeguards.

Anthropic reviewed a demonstration of this technique and found it exposed only minor, previously known vulnerabilities.

The company reviewed what it believes is the report behind the government’s decision. Anthropic stated that the level of capability displayed “is widely available from other models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.” That review found no Fable-specific uplift in the findings.

The reported jailbreak essentially involved asking the model to read a codebase and identify software flaws. Anthropic confirmed it “has not even received a disclosure of a concerning non-universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result.” The potential jailbreaks disclosed were either entirely benign or classified as minor findings.

The directive requires suspending access for all foreign nationals, including Anthropic employees with foreign national status, both inside and outside the United States. The company said compliance meant disabling the models for all customers to avoid any breach of the order.

Anthropic Disputes the Standard Applied to Commercial Models

Anthropic launched Fable 5 with a defense-in-depth strategy, combining narrow jailbreak resistance with real-time monitoring and mandatory 30-day data retention.

The company acknowledged during launch that “perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider.”

The 30-day data retention policy was a deliberate trade-off. It drew pushback from customers but allowed Anthropic to detect, study, and respond to jailbreak attempts quickly.

Anthropic described this as making jailbreaks “either narrow or very expensive to produce,” keeping risk levels comparable to other deployed models across the industry.

On the government’s authority to act, Anthropic said it “believes the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts.” The company argued this directive did not meet those standards.

Anthropic warned that applying this recall standard broadly “would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”

The company committed to releasing additional technical details within 24 hours and confirmed all other models in its lineup continue to operate without restriction.

The post Anthropic Suspends Fable 5 and Mythos 5 After US Government Issues Export Control Directive appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Strategy is raising over $130M daily in 2025, marking its highest-ever annual capital-raising pace. 
• Historical BTC data shows median 12-month forward returns of +133% from current price MA levels. 
• Even at a compressed 0.8x mNAV, covering preferred dividends would require only 6.6% dilution. 
• MSTR’s monthly trading volume of $54.79B dwarfs its $148M dividend bill, limiting dilution risk. 

MSTR, MicroStrategy’s stock ticker, has become the center of a heated debate as Bitcoin market stress tests the company’s financial structure.

Analysts tracking the firm’s capital-raising activity say Strategy is not just holding on through the current downturn, it is actively accumulating Bitcoin at an accelerated pace.

The numbers behind this argument are drawing significant attention from both bulls and bears in the market.

MSTR’s Balance Sheet Withstands Bitcoin Market Pressure

Strategy’s capital-raising pace in 2025 is on track to be the highest in the company’s history. The firm is averaging over $130 million raised per trading day this year. Even if that access were completely shut off, the math still favors the company’s position.

To illustrate the scale, analyst Adam Livingston scaled the balance sheet down by one million times. At that ratio, the company holds $53,400 in Bitcoin and owes $1,712 annually in preferred dividends. That works out to roughly $148 per month, a negligible obligation relative to the asset base.

Livingston also pulled Bitcoin’s weekly historical price data going back to July 2010. He filtered for periods where Bitcoin traded within ±5% of today’s four-year moving average multiple. That produced 34 historical weekly observations with full forward-return data.

The median forward Bitcoin returns from those comparable historical points are striking: +50% over six months, +133% over 12 months, +232% over 18 months, and +306% over 24 months. If history holds, Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings are positioned for a substantial recovery.

Stress-Testing the Nightmare Scenario for MSTR

Bears have pointed to preferred dividend obligations as a potential pressure point for Strategy. However, even under a severe stress test, the numbers suggest the concern is overstated. The analysis modeled a scenario where MSTR’s mNAV compresses from 1.3x to 0.8x.

At that compressed multiple, the stock would fall from roughly $123.97 to around $76. Market capitalization would drop from approximately $43.9 billion to $27 billion.

Even then, covering a full year of preferred dividends through common stock issuance would require only 6.6% dilution.

On a monthly basis, that comes to roughly 0.55% dilution per month. Meanwhile, monthly MSTR dollar trading volume runs approximately $54.79 billion.

The monthly dividend bill of $148.35 million represents only 0.27% of that volume, a fraction that the market can absorb without disruption.

Strategy’s trading volume alone provides a natural buffer against the preferred dividend risk. The company does not need extraordinary measures to meet its obligations, even in a depressed market environment.

For investors who hold a constructive long-term view on Bitcoin, the argument that Strategy’s structure is unsustainable becomes increasingly difficult to support.

The post MSTR Bears Crushed: Why Strategy’s Bitcoin Balance Sheet Is Built to Outlast Any Bear Market appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• TAO price surged over 24% on June 13, closing at $264 after opening near $212 in the session
• RSI bottomed in the low 30s, matching the same zone that marked the prior three swing lows on TAO
• Bittensor subnet activity had been accelerating quietly while the TAO price was trending lower
• The $280 to $320 zone is now the key resistance band TAO must reclaim to confirm the bullish trend

The TAO price recorded one of its largest single-day gains of 2025 on June 13, closing above $264 after opening near $212.

The move ended a seven-month downtrend that had pushed the asset from the $500 region into the low $200s. Multiple technical signals aligned ahead of the breakout.

Sentiment had turned deeply bearish in the weeks before the reversal candle printed.

Technical Signals Preceded the TAO Price Reversal

The TAO price had been compressing for months before Thursday’s session. Each rally attempt during the downtrend met fresh selling pressure near established resistance zones. Buyers were unable to hold any meaningful recovery, and many traders had written off the chart entirely.

However, momentum indicators were signaling a shift beneath the surface. The RSI had bottomed in the low 30s, the same region that marked the three prior swing lows on the chart.

Analyst account @2xnmore noted that oscillators were already curling higher before price confirmed the move.

The MACD histogram had also been compressing for several weeks heading into the reversal. That compression pointed to sellers losing steam rather than buyers gaining strength. It was a quiet warning sign that most traders overlooked during the grind lower.

Volume on the reversal candle removed any doubt about the session. It dwarfed anything seen across the prior two months of sideways action. That kind of participation on a single green candle separates genuine reversals from dead-cat bounces.

Bittensor Network Activity and the Road Ahead for TAO Price

While the TAO price was falling, Bittensor’s subnet activity was quietly accelerating. That divergence between price and network growth went largely unnoticed by retail participants. Institutional attention toward the network, however, had reportedly been building well before Thursday’s session.

The broader AI infrastructure narrative around Bittensor also remained intact throughout the drawdown. Discussions tied to co-founder Jacob Steeves and the network’s role in decentralized AI were still in early stages.

AI-related tokens have historically moved in cycles, with the first recovery candle rarely marking the full extent of a move.

The zone between $280 and $320 now becomes the critical area to monitor. That range previously acted as support before the breakdown and must be reclaimed on a closing basis. A sustained move through that band would add weight to the bullish case.

The 200-day moving average continues to serve as the long-term dividing line for TAO. Reclaiming major support after a multi-month downtrend is one of the stronger technical setups on any chart. Traders who were stopped out near the lows are now watching from the sidelines as price moves higher.

The post TAO Price Surges Over 24% in Single Session as Bittensor Reclaims Key Support appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Uniswap tokenized securities are now live on the web app, wallet, and API for eligible users.
• Over $9.1 billion has been swapped in real-world asset pools across 2.6 million transactions.
• Uniswap v4 hooks allow issuers to set KYC gates, allowlists, and dynamic fees at pool level.
• Builders using the Uniswap API need no extra configuration to expose tokenized assets to users. 

Uniswap tokenized securities are now accessible across the platform’s web app, wallet, and API. Users can trade tokenized versions of SpaceX, Apple, Tesla, and NVIDIA directly through Uniswap products.

Previously, these assets existed on the protocol but lacked integration into consumer-facing surfaces. That gap has now closed, opening regulated asset markets to a broader onchain audience.

Uniswap Opens Access to Real-World Asset Trading

The launch marks a notable expansion of Uniswap’s real-world asset coverage. To date, more than $9.1 billion has moved through real-world asset pools on the protocol.

Those transactions span over 2.6 million swaps across more than 140,000 wallets. As Uniswap noted on X, “The world’s value is moving onchain.”

Equity, fixed income, and yield-bearing instruments represent the bulk of global financial assets. These asset classes are gradually migrating to blockchain infrastructure as regulatory clarity improves.

Uniswap’s integration positions the protocol as an early access point for that transition. The timing aligns with growing institutional and retail interest in tokenized finance.

Eligible users can access tokenized securities through the Explore Page on the Uniswap Web App. The process mirrors any standard token swap on the platform.

Users connect a wallet, select the desired asset, and confirm the transaction. However, issuer-imposed KYC requirements, whitelists, and jurisdictional restrictions may apply.

Uniswap v4’s hook infrastructure also supports issuer-configured transfer restrictions and dynamic fee structures at the pool level. This gives issuers the ability to manage compliance without sacrificing liquidity access.

Geographic gates and allowlists can be embedded directly into pool logic. That level of configurability is central to supporting regulated asset markets onchain.

Protocol Infrastructure Powers Builders and Issuers

Builders can integrate tokenized stocks, bonds, and yield-bearing assets through the existing Uniswap API. No additional configuration is needed for developers to expose these assets to their users.

The same routing and liquidity infrastructure already in use for crypto assets now extends to securities. That continuity reduces friction for teams building on top of Uniswap.

Uniswap’s protocol has processed over $4.4 trillion in cumulative volume since launch. That liquidity depth makes it a practical backend for tokenized asset markets.

Onchain assets also trade outside traditional market hours, unlike their TradFi equivalents. That availability is a structural advantage as global adoption grows.

Assets settled onchain are composable across wallets, applications, and DeFi protocols. Any agent or interface with API access can tap into the same liquidity pools.

This composability supports the broader buildout of onchain financial infrastructure. It also reduces fragmentation across tokenized asset platforms.

UNI traded at $2.54 at the time of publication, up 0.43% in the prior 24 hours.

Source: Coingecko

Weekly gains stood at 4.84%, reflecting moderate market momentum around the announcement.

The post Uniswap Tokenized Securities Go Live, Bringing SpaceX, Apple, Tesla, and NVIDIA Onchain appeared first on Blockonomi.

Perhaps driven by some excitement from Trump’s promise for a deal, bitcoin’s price jumped to almost $64,800 over the past several hours for the first time since June 4.

Most larger-cap alts are slightly in the green today, with BNB going up to $610, and SOL nearing $70. TAO has rocketed by over 15%.

BTC Sees 10-Day High

The primary cryptocurrency plummeted at the start of the month, going from over $73,000 to a 19-month low of $59,100 in just four to five days. After losing $14,000 in less than a week, the bulls finally reemerged and didn’t allow another breakdown.

Bitcoin found some support there and quickly reclaimed the $60,000 level. It spent the following week sideways between $61,000 and $64,000 as it bounced toward each boundary following some of the latest developments on the war front between the US, Iran, and all other Middle Eastern countries involved in the conflict.

Most recently, Trump promised yesterday that a permanent deal with Iran is scheduled to be signed today, on June 14. The reaction so far from BTC has been rather muted, as it jumped to $64,800 but has declined by a few hundred dollars. However, the reports from Iran on the matter are the exact opposite, so a deal might not be announced today.

For now, BTC’s market cap has neared $1.3 trillion, while its dominance over the altcoins is up to 56.6%.

PI Shows Resilience

Ethereum continues to sit close to $1,700, Binance Coin has risen to $610, while XRP is close to $1.15. Solana has neared $70, while TRX and DOGE are with minor gains. HYPE has tapped $60 after a 2% increase, and ZEC has added 3% of value to $427.

TAO has rocketed the most from the larger caps, while BEAT has dumped by 20% daily. Humanity (H) has found itself in the top 100 alts by market cap after skyrocketing by well over 90% daily.

Pi Network’s native token has finally shown some signs of revival after its recent calamity. The token plummeted to an all-time low last week of under $0.12, but now sits well above $0.13, trading more than 10% above its bottom.

The total crypto market cap has added another $20 billion daily and is up to $2.280 trillion on CG.

The post Pi Network’s PI Finally Shows Some Strength, Bitcoin (BTC) Tapped 10-Day High: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap has displayed controversial price moves on micro- and macro-timeframes, as even when it managed to set a new ATH last year, it was barely above the previous one. However, the subsequent crash has driven it south hard, and its market share against BTC has dwindled.

Daan Crypto Trades published an X post today, trying to determine whether it’s finally time to accumulate ETH after the asset’s collapse from last week that pushed it to a 14-month low of $1,500.

Time to Buy?

Current data shows that ETH is “on track for its 2nd-worst first half of the year since 2022.” At the time, it dropped by 10.75% in Q1 and a whopping 67% in Q2. So far, it has dumped by 29% in Q1 and 21% in Q2, with a couple of weeks left until the latter ends.

What’s even worse compared to the 2021/2022 performance is that Ethereum is on its way to close three consecutive quarters in the red, and all of the losses are by double digits since Q4 2025 ended with a 28% decline.

Daan noted that it has been “extremely bad 9 months” for the altcoin after it topped following Bitmine’s accumulation craze began. Recall that the Tom Lee-chaired company has accumulated billions worth of ETH, but it’s also billions in the red on its position given the asset’s price correction.

The analyst remains optimistic about Ethereum’s role in tokenization, DeFi, “and all,” and added that the current levels are “finally attractive again for longer-term accumulation (years).”

Nevertheless, he warned that bear markets can go for longer than most people anticipate, and it “never hurts to have some dry powder on the side for unforeseen circumstances.”

Out of Exchanges

Meanwhile, fellow analyst Ali Martinez noted that Ethereum investors have been withdrawing their funds from exchanges en masse lately. Citing data from Glassnode, he said that almost 500,000 ETH, valued at around $800 million at current prices, have been taken out of trading platforms in just a week.

The analyst noted that this could align with the aforementioned strategy for being an “early sign of accumulation.”

Nearly 500,000 Ethereum $ETH, worth roughly $800 million, have been withdrawn from trading platforms over the past week.

This could be an early sign of accumulation. https://t.co/LNkygeYlUV pic.twitter.com/afPADae2pP

— Ali Charts (@alicharts) June 13, 2026

In another post, though, Martinez warned that ETH’s actual price bottom could be more than 50% away from the current levels at around $700.

The post Time to Buy Ethereum as ETH Heads for Another Double-Digit Quarterly Loss? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Although BTC managed to recover some ground in the past week, June remains deep in the red so far, as its first week was particularly painful for the bulls.

One of the reasons behind the asset’s crash to a 19-month low was that large investors, typically referred to as whales, had decreased their holdings by a whopping amount.

Citing data from Glassnode, popular analyst Ali Martinez highlighted the decrease in whales’ holdings by more than 70,000 BTC in a single month. From a USD perspective, this fortune is worth over $4.5 billion even at current prices.

More than 70,000 Bitcoin $BTC have been distributed by whales over the last month, helping explain the recent downside momentum. https://t.co/22IPTSmSJ5 pic.twitter.com/o7FZ3stHdA

— Ali Charts (@alicharts) June 13, 2026

This intense selling pressure only added fuel to the fire that sent bitcoin tumbling to $59,100 on June 5 for the first time since late 2024. The other possible reasons stem from the massive ETF exodus, Strategy’s sale that led to substantial FUD online, and the broader market weakness due to the US-Iran war uncertainty.

While analysts continue to debate whether bitcoin has already bottomed or if there’s more pain ahead, Ali Martinez recently outlined his dollar-cost average targets in case the cryptocurrency keeps dropping to key support levels.

The first is actually close by, as the 200W SMA is located at $62,800. If it gives in, the next one (300W SMA) is at $55,000, followed by the 400W SMA at $42,500.

For now, bitcoin appears to have found solid support and has even reclaimed the $64,000 level over the past day. More volatility is expected today after Trump promised a deal with Iran, but reports from the Middle Eastern country are less hopeful.

The post Over 70,000 BTC Distributed by Whales Amid Bitcoin’s Price Crash: Data appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Public crypto token sales have raised just $58 million in Q2 2026, according to data published by CryptoRank on June 10, a drop of 85% from the previous quarter.

It means that the period is well on the way to becoming the weakest fundraising quarter for ICOs, IDOs, and IEOs in five years.

Public Fundraising Is Drying Up Across Crypto

CryptoRank’s data showed that Q1 2026 had already looked weak, with about $390 million raised across 105 sales, but things have deteriorated even further in the second quarter.

The severity of the situation is even clearer in the month-by-month breakdown: April saw just $15 million raised across 20 sales, while May brought in around $41 million from just 13 sales, marking the lowest monthly count since December 2020.

June, which is still in progress, has so far recorded just 4 sales that raised about $2 million. To put that in context, January 2025 alone saw $654 million raised, with that quarter serving as the cycle peak, as 429 sales raised just under $850 million. Since then, the market has shed more than 93% of its quarterly fundraising volume in dollar terms.

Still, CryptoRank’s dashboard shows that public token sales raised more than $4 billion between the first quarter of 2024 and the second of 2026.

In that time, IDOs were consistently the dominant format, accounting for nearly 75% of all public sales. IEOs and ICOs respectively made up 18% and 7% of activities. However, all three formats have contracted quite sharply this quarter.

Among launchpads, Coinlist is the largest by capital raised, having handled $1.37 billion. It is followed by Fjord Foundry with $975 million and Echo at $201 million, with Gate Launchpad and DAO Maker rounding off the top five.

Venture Capital Is Still Active

According to a May report by Galaxy Digital, crypto venture capital activity also slowed in Q1 2026. In that period, private investors put in some $4 billion in 355 deals, a 50% drop from the previous quarter, the report said.

Galaxy Digital noted that the decline was mainly due to a lack of huge late-stage rounds that had dominated late 2025, but there have still been a few large raises occurring recently. One such example is Digital Asset Holdings’ $355 million raise in a new round led by Andreessen Horowitz, which came just a month after it pulled in $300 million.

CryptoRank’s figures suggest that while capital is still available in crypto, it is increasingly concentrated in a smaller number of companies and private funding rounds rather than public token launches. Those hit their peak when sentiment was strongest, but they seem to have since tracked the broader market lows.

This can be seen from a previous report also published by CryptoRank that showed many of the projects that had been funded between April and June 2025, when the crypto market was enjoying a rebound, ended that year trading well below their fundraising valuations.

And that may explain why retail appetite for new launches has dried up so completely in 2026.

The post Crypto Public Token Sales on Track for 5-Year Lows in Q2 2026 appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Rug pulls made up over 54% of all newly detected crypto scams, according to the latest data from the on-chain security analysis platform Web3 Antivirus.

The findings suggest that while scam tactics are still evolving, many attackers continue to rely on token projects that appear legitimate at first before contract controls are used to trap investors or drain liquidity.

Rug Pulls Are the Biggest Threat

In a June 9 breakdown on X, Web3 Antivirus also noted that honeypots, a different but related trick, came in second at around 22%, followed by fake tokens at roughly 12% and scam airdrops at just under 12%.

The mechanics behind rug pulls are what make these schemes so effective. As the security firm reported, they are created in such a way that, in their initial phases, they resemble normal market activity with increasing prices, trade volumes, and high activity in online forums.

The risk only becomes visible when the contract owners exercise hidden permissions that either prevent users from selling, remove liquidity, or otherwise lock funds.

“A token can look alive with the chart moving up and the community getting louder, but one owner-side action can change everything in secs,” wrote Web3 Antivirus. “The same contract controls that were invisible during the pump can suddenly become the reason users cannot exit, liquidity disappears and the chart collapses.”

Honeypots work on the same basic principle. Bad actors create a fake token and push it to the public with convincing marketing as a big investment opportunity. They even artificially push up the token’s value by making transactions themselves to create an illusion of high demand to attract unwitting investors.

However, as soon as people buy in, often at inflated prices, the underlying contract prevents any sale, with the scammers withdrawing the profits and exiting. Web3 Antivirus’s latest Scam Pulse data shows more than 425,000 rug pulls detected alongside 172,000 honeypots and over 94,000 scam airdrops.

In addition, of more than 100 million contracts the platform has analyzed, it has flagged almost 4 million as scams, with at least 3.1 million of those appearing within the last 30 days alone.

There has also been an uptick in the impersonation of token contracts, as seen in the security firm’s weekly leaderboard showing Ethereum leading with 291 fake token detections. Tether followed close behind at 270, and USDC at 225, with activity up across nearly every tracked asset compared to the previous week.

Delivery Methods Are Getting Harder to Spot

Beyond the on-chain mechanics, Web3 Antivirus also pointed out that AI is changing how scams are reaching users in the first place. The technology, according to them, now makes phishing emails, fake support chats, and fraudulent social media posts look polished enough to pass a quick visual check.

Per their data, emails are the most common delivery channel at 53%, followed by SMS at 10%, social media at 9%, and online ads at 8%. And there are examples across the industry, including an incident in May, where a fake Uniswap website drained at least $400,000 from users before the alarm was raised.

That same month, Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz issued a warning to XRP investors about a fake airdrop and giveaway campaign targeting XRPL users.

And not long ago, Web3 Antivirus identified a phishing account posing as the Canton Network, complete with the project’s branding, that was using a supposedly official announcement post to redirect unsuspecting users to a scam URL.

The post Report: Rug Pulls Dominate Crypto Scams, Accounting for 54% of Threats appeared first on CryptoPotato.