Anti-crypto sentiment is expected to surge in November, potentially impacting market dynamics and investor confidence.

The post Liquidity concerns at World Liberty Financial, flawed governance structures limit token effectiveness, and the impact of bad actors on crypto’s reputation | The Wolf Of All Streets appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Crypto funds pulled in $1.1 billion last week as Bitcoin led inflows, Ethereum rebounded, and softer US CPI lifted risk appetite.

The post Crypto investment products post $1.1B inflows in best week since January appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Transitioning from L2 to L1 architecture reduces costs and enhances user experience in blockchain development.

The post Torab: Binance’s market maker fund freeze impacts the crypto ecosystem, the importance of a transparent strategic reserve, and the shift from L2 to L1 architecture | Epicenter appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Tokenization could unify Europe's capital market, enhancing liquidity and efficiency, but requires robust infrastructure and regulatory alignment.

The post ECB sees tokenization as opportunity to build unified European capital market appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire says USDC freezes require legal orders, defending the firms response to criticism after the Drift exploit.

The post Circle CEO defends USDC freeze policy as criticism grows after Drift exploit appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Skyrockets 6% Near $75,000 as Short Liquidations Accelerate

Bitcoin price surged more than 5% in the evening of April 13, climbing near the $75,000 level and marking its strongest intraday move in a couple weeks as traders reacted to a mix of macro pressure and technical positioning.

The rally follows several days of choppy trading, with bitcoin price holding a tight range between roughly $68,000 support and $75,000 resistance amid geopolitical tension tied to U.S.–Iran developments over the last several weeks. 

Earlier in the week, the asset slipped toward $70,000 after the collapse of diplomatic talks and a U.S. naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, which drove oil prices higher and weighed on risk assets.

The move also comes as broader markets remain under strain. Oil prices have surged above $100 per barrel following escalating tensions in the Middle East, while expectations for near-term Federal Reserve rate cuts have diminished amid persistent inflation. Despite these headwinds, bitcoin has shown resilience, holding above $70,000 for most of the past week.

Bitcoin price and Strategy’s accumulation

Bitcoin price started the day trading near $70,000 and skyrocketed into Monday’s close. Analysts had flagged a large cluster of leveraged short positions above the $72,000–$73,500 range, creating conditions for a rapid upside move once resistance levels broke. As prices pushed higher through that band, liquidations accelerated the rally, sending bitcoin price toward the top of its multi-week range.

On top of this, Strategy’s STRC at-the-market (ATM) program reached a new milestone on April 13, 2026, as its preferred stock recorded over $1 billion in single-day trading volume, with all activity occurring above the $100 par value required to trigger share issuance. 

This enabled the company to run its ATM program at full capacity throughout the session.

Based on tracker estimates from Bitcoin for Corporations, the volume generated roughly $796 million in proceeds in a single day, funding the potential purchase of about 10,834 BTC at an average price near $73,400. 

That figure represents more than 24 times the daily Bitcoin mining supply following the most recent halving.

The surge follows a confirmed $1.001 billion in net ATM proceeds for the week of April 6–12, according to a recent SEC filing. 

During that period, Strategy acquired 13,927 BTC at an average price of $71,902. The firm’s capture rate — the share of eligible trading volume converted into proceeds — climbed to 81%, up from 45% in early March, reflecting more aggressive execution and strong market demand.

Recent weeks show a clear acceleration, with multiple billion-dollar periods and rising efficiency in capital deployment. Monday alone approached 80% of the prior week’s total proceeds, putting the current week on pace to become the largest in the program’s history.

Strategy now holds approximately 780,897 BTC, acquired at a total cost of about $59 billion. The STRC ATM program has generated more than $3.5 billion in proceeds to date, reinforcing the company’s position as the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin and signaling continued expansion of its accumulation strategy.

This post Bitcoin Price Skyrockets 6% Near $75,000 as Short Liquidations Accelerate first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy’s STRC ATM Just Did $1 Billion in a Single Day — And the Machine Is Only Accelerating

April 13, 2026 marked a milestone that even the most aggressive STRC bulls didn’t see coming this fast.

Strategy’s Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock — ticker STRC — just printed over $1 billion in single-day trading volume. Not over a week. Not a rolling average. One session.

And the kicker? 100% of that volume cleared above the $100 par threshold, meaning every single share that traded was eligible to trigger Strategy’s at-the-market offering. The ATM didn’t just run on Monday. It ran at full capacity.

We track this in real time with our STRC ATM Tracker, and even by the standards of what’s been an extraordinary stretch, today stands alone.

The Confirmed Numbers: Last Week’s 8-K Was Already Historic

Before we get to today, let’s anchor in what we already know — because the SEC filing that dropped this morning tells a story of its own.

For the week of April 6–12, Strategy’s 8-K filing confirmed:

That’s $1 billion in net ATM proceeds in a single week — the second time STRC has crossed that threshold. The first was the week of March 9–15, when the program generated $1.18B in proceeds and acquired 16,815 BTC at a $70,194 average.

But here’s what makes the April 6–12 week structurally different: the capture rate surged to 81%. For context, that rate was 64% the week prior (Mar 30–Apr 5), 61% the week before that, and just 45% in early March. The trend line is steep, and it tells you that Strategy’s execution desk is getting more aggressive in capturing eligible volume — or that market conditions are making it easier to do so. Likely both.

You can view the full confirmed weekly breakdown on the live STRC ATM Dashboard, where 8-K data is integrated the day it’s filed.

Today’s Session: The Billion-Dollar Monday

Now layer Monday on top of that. From the STRC ATM Tracker taken at 4:10 PM ET during after-hours trading:

• Volume: $1.06 billion
• % Above $100 Par: 100%
• Estimated ATM Proceeds: ~$796 million
• Estimated BTC Acquired: ~10,834 BTC
• BTC Price at Execution: ~$73,400

Let that number breathe for a moment. An estimated 10,834 BTC in a single day. The Bitcoin network mines approximately 450 BTC per day post-halving. That puts Monday’s estimated acquisition at 2,408% of daily mining supply.

Strategy didn’t just buy more Bitcoin than the network produced on Monday. It bought roughly 24 times more.

Here’s a full snapshot from today’s projections after market close:

Back-to-Back Billion-Dollar Weeks And the Third Is Loading

Zoom out and the pattern is unmistakable. Here’s how the last several confirmed weeks stack up:

Using the most recent confirmed capture rate as baseline.

The week of April 6–12 was a confirmed billion-dollar week. Today alone — a single Monday — is already tracking at roughly 80% of last week’s total proceeds. If STRC volume holds anything close to this pace through Friday, we could be looking at the largest single-week ATM execution in the program’s history.

We publish these numbers weekly. Sign up for the free STRC Weekly data report to get confirmed 8-K data, tracker estimates, and context delivered to your inbox every week.

Why 100% Above Par Matters

For anyone unfamiliar with the mechanics: STRC’s ATM program only activates when shares trade at or above the $100 par value. Below that, no new shares are issued, no proceeds are generated, and no Bitcoin is purchased. The percentage of volume above $100 is the gating metric for the entire machine.

On most active days, that number runs somewhere between 80% and 95%. On Monday, it was 100%. Every share that changed hands did so at par or better. There was no dead volume. The entire session was eligible for ATM execution.

For a stock with over $1 billion in daily turnover, that’s extraordinary market structure. It suggests consistent institutional demand at and above par — not retail-driven spikes that briefly touch $100 and retrace.

The STRC ATM Heatmap breaks this down in 15-minute intervals across the trading day. On days like Monday, the heatmap runs solid — no gaps, no dead zones.

The Cumulative Picture: 780,897 BTC and Growing

As of the latest confirmed data, Strategy holds approximately 780,897 BTC at an average cost basis of ~$75,577 per coin. Total cost: roughly $59 billion.

The STRC ATM program alone has generated over $3.5 billion in net proceeds across its ATM offerings since inception (separate from the $2.52B IPO), funding the acquisition of approximately 47,705 BTC through at-the-market sales.

And with the current week already on pace to potentially add another 10,000+ BTC from Monday alone, the gap between Strategy and every other corporate Bitcoin holder on the planet continues to widen.

What the Capture Rate Tells You

If there’s one metric that sophisticated STRC observers should be watching, it’s the capture rate — the percentage of eligible volume (above $100) that Strategy actually converts into ATM proceeds.

Here’s the recent trajectory:

• Early March: 45%
• Mid-March: 61%
• Late March / Early April: 64%
• Last Week (confirmed): 81%

This isn’t noise. It’s a deliberate, observable escalation. A higher capture rate means Strategy is issuing shares into a larger portion of the available above-par volume. The ceiling is 100% — you can’t sell more shares than the market is offering to buy — but 81% is already remarkably aggressive by ATM standards.

For the capital markets professionals reading this: that kind of capture rate on a $1B+ volume day implies deep, sustained liquidity at and above par. Strategy isn’t chasing price. The bid is coming to them.

What Comes Next

Nine consecutive trading days of ATM activity above $100 par. Back-to-back billion-dollar volume weeks confirmed by SEC filings. A single Monday that nearly matched all of last week’s proceeds. And a capture rate that has nearly doubled in six weeks.

The STRC ATM isn’t slowing down. If anything, the data suggests it’s reaching a new operating regime entirely — one where billion-dollar weeks may become the baseline rather than the exception.

We’ll be tracking every session, every 15-minute interval, every 8-K filing as it drops.

Track the STRC ATM live: https://bitcoinforcorporations.com/strc-atm-tracker/

Get the weekly data report in your inbox: https://bitcoinforcorporations.com/strc-report

Disclaimer: This content was prepared on behalf of Bitcoin For Corporations for informational purposes only. It reflects the author’s own analysis and opinion and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Nothing in this article constitutes an offer, invitation, or solicitation to purchase, sell, or subscribe for any security or financial product.

This post Strategy’s STRC ATM Just Did $1 Billion in a Single Day — And the Machine Is Only Accelerating first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nick Ward.

Bitcoin Magazine

Crypto Exchange Kraken Faces Extortion Attempt After Insider Access Incidents Involving Support Staff

Crypto exchange Kraken disclosed two insider-related security incidents involving support staff access to limited client data, followed by an extortion attempt by a criminal group, according to a company statement and comments from its chief security officer.

The firm said no systems were breached and no client funds were placed at risk in either case. Both incidents involved inappropriate access to internal support tools rather than core trading infrastructure, and access was revoked once identified.

Kraken’s Chief Security Officer Nick Percoco said the company is facing demands from attackers who claim to possess videos showing internal systems with client data. The group threatened to release the material unless Kraken complies.

“Our systems were never breached; funds were never at risk; we will not pay these criminals,” Percoco said in a public statement, adding that the company will not negotiate with the actors involved.

Kraken said about 2,000 client accounts were potentially viewed across both incidents, representing roughly 0.02% of its global user base. Affected users were notified, and the company said the exposed information was limited to support data rather than sensitive financial controls.

Multiple security breaches at Kraken 

The first incident dates to February 2025, when the company received a tip about a video circulating on a criminal forum. An internal investigation identified a member of the support team as the source of the access. Kraken said it revoked permissions, conducted a review, and implemented additional safeguards.

A second incident emerged later after another tip referenced similar material tied to a different individual. Kraken said it again identified the source, terminated access, and notified impacted users while tightening internal controls.

The situation escalated after the latest access was shut down, when the group behind the videos issued extortion demands. Kraken said the attackers threatened to distribute content to media outlets and social platforms.

The exchange said it is working with law enforcement across multiple jurisdictions and believes there is enough evidence to identify and pursue those responsible. The company also pointed to broader insider recruitment efforts targeting firms across crypto, gaming, and telecommunications.

Security experts have warned that insider threats remain a persistent risk in digital asset markets, where support roles often require visibility into user accounts for troubleshooting. While such access is restricted, it can become a target for coercion or exploitation.

Kraken said it continues to review internal processes, strengthen monitoring systems, and limit access privileges to reduce exposure. The firm emphasized that its core infrastructure remained secure throughout both incidents.

The case comes as the industry faces ongoing security challenges tied to both external attacks and internal vulnerabilities. The combination of high-value assets and global access has made crypto platforms a frequent target for coordinated campaigns.

In a separate disclosure, Galaxy Digital reported a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to an isolated development environment. The firm, founded by Mike Novogratz, said no client data or funds were affected.

Kraken said it will continue cooperating with investigators and industry partners as the case develops. The company framed the incidents as contained events while warning of a wider pattern of insider-focused threats facing technology firms.

This post Crypto Exchange Kraken Faces Extortion Attempt After Insider Access Incidents Involving Support Staff first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Capital B Buys More Bitcoin, Expands Treasury to 2,925 BTC After Debt Conversions and Equity Raise

Capital B has strengthened its profile as a listed Bitcoin Treasury Company after converting key debt instruments, raising fresh equity, and deploying part of the proceeds into additional bitcoin. 

The group now holds 2,925 BTC with an acquisition value of €269.4 million, at an average cost of €92,096 per bitcoin.

The company confirmed the purchase of 37 BTC for €2.3 million, at a reference price of €60,892 per coin, as part of its ongoing Bitcoin Treasury strategy. This lifted the year‑to‑date “BTC Yield” to 1.25%, with a “BTC Gain” of 35.3 BTC and a “BTC € Gain” of €2.2 million since the start of 2026. Quarter‑to‑date, BTC Yield stands at 0.53%, with a BTC Gain of 15.2 BTC and a euro gain of €0.9 million, according to a company press release. 

Alongside the treasury expansion, Capital B completed major conversions of its OCA B‑01 convertible bonds. Blockstream Capital Partners converted 17,897,600 OCA B‑01 into 32,900,000 ordinary shares, while UTXO Management converted 2,020,372 OCA B‑01 into 3,713,919 shares, at a unit conversion price of €0.544. In total, 36,613,919 new shares were issued through debt set‑off on these instruments.

Both Blockstream Capital Partners and UTXO Management also exercised their rights under legal adjustment measures linked to the free BSA 2025‑01 warrants granted in 2025. 

Blockstream subscribed to 4,700,000 new shares at €0.544 per share for €2.56 million, while UTXO Management took 530,559 shares for €0.29 million, bringing total cash raised under these adjustments to €2.85 million. The company further reported the exercise of 4,464,712 BSA 2025‑01 into 637,816 shares for €0.35 million, with the warrants expiring worthless at midnight on April 10, 2026.

In March, Capital B announced a €3 million capital raise alongside amendments to existing convertible bonds to accelerate its Bitcoin treasury strategy. 

The funding, backed by TOBAM and UTXO Management, could enable the company to acquire roughly 36 additional bitcoin, bringing its total holdings to about 2,880 BTC.

Capital B’s bitcoin is being held for operational needs

Following these transactions, Capital B’s issued share capital stands at 272,210,021 shares, while its fully diluted base reaches 397,622,899 shares when including remaining convertibles, warrants, and free‑share plans. On this basis, the group reports 730 satoshis of bitcoin per fully diluted share, a core metric in its strategy to grow BTC per share over time.

The company stated that an additional 60 BTC is held for operational needs, segregated from the reserve that underpins its Bitcoin Treasury KPIs. Capital B said it will continue to publish BTC Yield, BTC Gain, and BTC € Gain as supplemental indicators for investors who follow its equity‑financed bitcoin accumulation model

Disclaimer: Bitcoin Magazine is owned by Nakamoto Inc. (NASDAQ: NAKA). Nakamoto Inc. also owns UTXO Management.

This post Capital B Buys More Bitcoin, Expands Treasury to 2,925 BTC After Debt Conversions and Equity Raise first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bank Lobby Fires Back at White House, Saying Stablecoin Study Ignores Community Bank Threat

The American Bankers Association is warning that the White House’s latest stablecoin study is asking the wrong question and underestimating the threat to community banks.

On April 8, the Council of Economic Advisers released a 21‑page paper modeling what happens if payment stablecoin issuers are barred from paying yield. The analysis, tied to the 2025 GENIUS Act’s prohibition on interest for payment stablecoins, finds that banning yield would raise bank lending by only about 2.1 billion dollars, or roughly 0.02% of a 12 trillion dollar loan book. 

The report also estimates that consumers would forgo around 800 million dollars in returns, producing a cost‑benefit ratio of 6.6 in which lost yield outweighs gains from slightly lower borrowing costs. 

In short, White House economists concluded that stablecoin yield, under current conditions, is unlikely to trigger the sweeping deposit flight some academic studies had projected.

ABA: the real risk is yield‑paying coins at scale

The American Bankers Association fired back today, arguing the CEA framed “the wrong question” by focusing on the effect of a prohibition rather than the impact of allowing yield as the market grows. 

ABA chief economist Sayee Srinivasan and banking research VP Yikai Wang warned that yield‑paying payment stablecoins could accelerate deposit migration out of insured accounts, especially at community banks. 

Their analysis points to a future market of 1 to 2 trillion dollars in payment stablecoins, where competitive yields on tokens backed by Treasuries and other safe assets become a direct rival to local deposits. In that scenario, they say, even single states could see multi‑billion‑dollar contractions in bank lending as cheap funding drains away.

Deposit stablecoin reshuffling vs. community bank pressure

The White House paper stresses that when consumers move cash into stablecoins, issuers reinvest reserves into Treasury bills, repos, and money‑market funds, sending most of the money back into the banking system. 

That “reshuffling” means aggregate deposits stay largely flat, and, with banks currently holding over 1.1 trillion dollars in excess liquidity, the model finds little system‑wide constraint on lending. 

The ABA response counters that this misses what happens at individual institutions when deposits walk out the door, forcing community banks to replace funding with higher‑cost wholesale borrowing or by raising deposit rates. 

Those higher funding costs, they argue, translate into less local credit and higher loan rates for households, farmers, and small businesses that rely on relationship lenders.

The debate lands on top of the GENIUS Act, the 2025 law that created the first federal regime for payment stablecoins and hard‑coded a ban on issuers paying yield to holders. 

That ban does not extend to third‑party platforms, leaving room for arrangements such as Coinbase’s USDC rewards, which share reserve income with users at rates similar to high‑yield savings accounts. 

Some versions of the proposed CLARITY Act would close this channel by barring intermediaries from passing yield through, a move the CEA notes but does not fully evaluate. ABA’s authors say policymakers should treat a prohibition on yield as a “prudent safeguard” that keeps stablecoins in a payments role instead of letting them evolve into a high‑yield substitute for insured deposits.

Both sides touch on a deeper question: whether yield‑bearing stablecoins effectively create a form of narrow banking that siphons funds out of traditional credit intermediation. The CEA frames narrow‑bank‑like structures as potentially safer for payments, assuming reserves stay in Treasuries and other ultra‑safe assets, while downplaying near‑term lending losses. 

The ABA warns that pushing activity into such models without a plan to preserve community‑bank lending ignores Congress’s reluctance to endorse central bank digital currencies for similar reasons. 

With more than 80% of stablecoin activity already offshore and issuers holding Treasury portfolios larger than some sovereigns, the White House also flags global demand and U.S. borrowing costs as an underexplored part of the yield debate.

This post Bank Lobby Fires Back at White House, Saying Stablecoin Study Ignores Community Bank Threat first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

The market may be pricing XRP through an outdated lens.

Over the past several days, the most consequential development regarding XRP has come from outside the crypto space. On April 8, the Federal Reserve proposed allowing U.S. banks and credit unions to use intermediaries through the FedNow Service, a change the central bank said could support private-sector cross-border payment solutions.

In the Fed’s own proposal details, the logic is explicit. Banks could use an intermediary, such as a correspondent bank, for the international portion of a transaction and use FedNow for the domestic U.S. leg.

That is a narrow regulatory change on paper. In practice, it reaches directly into the operational space XRP has spent years trying to own, faster movement of money across borders with fewer delays, less friction, and lower dependence on idle pre-funded capital.

That is where the market tension starts. XRP still trades with a utility narrative attached. Ripple’s own description of XRP presents the asset as infrastructure for global payments, with settlement in three to five seconds and transaction costs measured in fractions of a cent. XRPL’s overview goes further, describing XRP as a currency bridge within the network’s decentralized exchange. Those points have supported the asset’s core pitch for years.

If cross-border payments remain slow, expensive, and operationally fragmented, the case for a neutral bridge asset retains intuitive force. Once major payment rails begin to solve more of that friction within the regulated banking stack, the question changes. The issue becomes less about whether XRP can do the job and more about whether the job is becoming less scarce.

That shift carries immediate force because it lands outside crypto-native circles. People who do not trade XRP still understand the pain point. They have waited for international transfers, absorbed opaque FX costs, dealt with cut-off times, or discovered that a simple cross-border payment can still carry an unpleasant amount of uncertainty.

XRP built a following by sitting directly in that frustration. The latest Fed move suggests the incumbents are working on the same problem with the advantages they already hold: bank relationships, regulatory standing, and direct access to domestic settlement infrastructure.

For XRP holders, that creates a far more uncomfortable frame than the familiar regulatory argument. A token can survive a long court fight and still face a harder competitive landscape when the legacy system upgrades the very function that made the token feel unique.

Swift and central bank rails are reducing the scarcity value of the XRP payments thesis

The Fed proposal would be important on its own. It becomes more significant when it sits next to what is already happening in global payment plumbing.

On March 5, Swift said more than 25 banks had committed to processing payments under its new framework by June, spanning corridors across Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, China, Germany, India, Pakistan, Spain, Thailand, the UK, and the US. Swift said recipients in five of the world’s ten largest remittance markets would be among the first to benefit.

The offer to customers is also easy to understand, certainty of cost, full-value delivery, the fastest possible speeds, including instant settlement where possible, and end-to-end traceability. Each of those features addresses a pain point long associated with the XRP pitch. Each of them also arrives through institutions that already dominate the movement of regulated fiat money.

The competitive implication here is sharper than the usual view that banks are borrowing crypto ideas. XRP drew attention because it sat in the gap between what finance needed and what finance’s existing rails were failing to deliver.

That gap is now narrowing. It is narrowing from the top down, through central bank policy changes and network-level reforms, and from the corridor level, where banks are promising more certainty on speed, value, and visibility. The user experience improvements do not need to be identical to XRP’s model to affect XRP’s premium. They only need to be good enough to reduce the urgency of switching to a bridge asset.

Recent settlement data from the Bank of England adds scale to that point. In March 2026, CHAPS processed 4.7 million payments worth £9.2 trillion over 22 settlement days, with an average daily value of £418 billion.

Those numbers describe an incumbent system that still moves enormous value every day and is modernizing while continuing to earn the trust of large financial institutions. The practical implication is easy to grasp.

The same institutions that once looked slow, layered, and expensive are investing real effort into becoming faster and more predictable. They are doing it inside regulated infrastructure, with existing customers, and at systemic scale.

That is where the angle around XRP becomes fresh again. The usual framing asks whether banks will ever use XRP more aggressively. A more revealing question asks what happens to XRP’s narrative if banks and central bank-connected rails can deliver a large share of the same customer outcome without needing XRP at all.

Utility in payments has never been an abstract concept. It is a solution to a workflow problem. Once that workflow begins to improve within the incumbent stack, investors have to consider moat compression. XRP can still have utility under that setup. It can still move value quickly. It can still serve specialized corridors and liquidity functions. The broader premium tied to rebuilding global payments becomes harder to defend when the present system is already starting to absorb that function.

XRP positioning still reflects belief, which leaves the market exposed to a thesis repricing

That is what makes the current market setup interesting. The competitive pressure is building in plain sight, yet derivatives positioning still suggests traders are willing to maintain substantial exposure.

According to CoinGlass XRP futures data, XRP was trading around $1.33 with roughly $2.43 billion in open interest and about $2.03 billion in 24-hour futures volume at the time of writing. Those are not the numbers of a market that has moved on. They point to a market that still cares, still carries leverage, and still sees enough optionality in the XRP trade to keep capital engaged.

Open interest by itself does not settle the argument. It does frame the risk. When participation remains elevated while the underlying narrative faces a structural challenge, the probability of a sharper repositioning rises. That does not require panic. It does not require a collapse. It requires a shift in how investors rank the asset’s main source of strategic value.

For years, the bullish case for XRP has rested on a broad assumption: cross-border finance is broken, and a purpose-built digital asset with fast settlement and bridge functionality has room to gain. The last several weeks have introduced a more uncomfortable variant. Cross-border finance remains imperfect, but the most powerful incumbents are now solving more of it within their own networks.

That leaves XRP in a more demanding spot. It has to prove that its role survives institutional modernization rather than assuming modernization validates the original thesis. That distinction is where many market participants can get caught leaning in the wrong direction. A central bank discussing cross-border functionality inside FedNow can sound superficially validating.

A Swift framework promising faster, more transparent, and more predictable retail payments can sound like confirmation that XRP identified the right problem years ago. Both interpretations contain a grain of truth. Neither answers the harder investment question. If the problem is becoming less acute through incumbent upgrades, what multiple should investors attach to the asset that built its identity around solving it?

Many participants still hear “XRP” and file it under crypto volatility, legal baggage, or periodic bursts of retail enthusiasm. Far fewer are watching the slow institutional encroachment on its home turf. That encroachment can reshape the asset’s upside without producing a dramatic one-day event.

It can narrow the room between XRP’s functional promise and the services customers can already access through banks. It can also push XRP toward a more selective role, one where corridor-specific liquidity and niche settlement efficiency carry the argument, instead of a sweeping claim about rebuilding global payments.

The next pressure point sits inside the thesis, not the token’s speed

The next test for XRP is therefore less about whether crypto markets remain interested and more about whether its strategic premium can survive a payments world that is starting to evolve in the same direction.

The market still appears willing to price belief into the asset.

The burden now sits with the thesis behind that belief. If incumbents keep compressing payment friction, traders may discover that the original XRP promise was strongest when the legacy system had not yet begun to learn the same lesson.

The post The Fed treads on XRP’s core payments use case with new FedNow banking system upgrade appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Private credit has crossed into a dangerous phase.

After rumblings last month, the pressure point is no longer confined to underwriting quality, isolated borrower stress, or a few awkward redemption notices buried in fund updates.

The market is now dealing with something more consequential: a live collision between illiquid assets, semi-liquid fund structures, and investors who want cash back at the same time. That shift is now visible across some of the industry’s largest platforms.

Barings Private Credit Corp. capped withdrawals after investors sought to redeem 11.3% of shares in the first quarter. Apollo Debt Solutions limited repurchases after requests reached 11.2%. Ares Strategic Income Fund hit the same wall after investors asked to pull 11.6%.

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Why a $3 trillion market shock could force funds to sell Bitcoin first

Bitcoin becomes the 24/7 pressure valve as the private credit market admits redemptions can’t clear.

Mar 6, 2026 · Gino Matos

The scale of the demand for exits is now large enough to change the frame. The Financial Times reported that investors sought to pull more than $20 billion from private credit funds in the first quarter. Then, the Wall Street Journal reported nearly $14 billion in requested withdrawals across a group of private-credit funds.

Capital is trying to leave, and managers are relying on quarterly caps, enlarged tenders, affiliated support, and fund mechanics to manage the gap between redemption demand and actual liquidity.

The next layer is where this starts to look less like a fund-specific issue and more like a market transition. Blue Owl disclosed that investors sought to redeem 21.9% of shares in Blue Owl Credit Income Corp. and 40.7% in Blue Owl Technology Income Corp., with both funds limiting repurchases to 5%.

Moody’s then shifted Blue Owl Credit Income’s outlook to negative and also moved its outlook on the broader BDC sector to negative. That sequence carries more weight than another gated-fund data point.

It brings flow stress, asset quality, financing costs, and confidence into the same frame. Once ratings agencies begin reacting to outflow pressure and maturity walls, the market has moved beyond temporary friction.

Liquidity pressure is turning private credit from a yield product into a structure test

Private credit spent years benefiting from a simple proposition. Investors were offered high income, smoother marks than public markets, and access to lending strategies that had once been reserved for institutions.

Wealth channels helped widen the buyer base, and the product increasingly reached investors who were drawn to stable reported values and steady quarterly distributions.

That model was always dependent on a critical assumption: capital would continue to come in fast enough, or at least remain patient enough, for the structure to avoid a real liquidity challenge. The current wave of withdrawal limits shows that the assumption is now under direct pressure.

This is why the shift should be viewed as a market transition rather than a passing fund-management issue. When redemptions rise across multiple managers at once, the market begins testing the difference between reported value and realizable value.

That distinction has been manageable for years because private credit portfolios are not repriced continuously in a public market. Manager marks, model inputs, and infrequent transactions have given the sector a calmer visual profile than public high-yield or leveraged loans.

Calm marks helped support the sales pitch. Once investors begin asking for cash in size, that profile comes under scrutiny.

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Mar 16, 2026 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

The challenge is already visible in the widening gap between public and private credit signals. The Wall Street Journal’s examination of private-credit valuations captured a growing question across the market, what are these funds actually worth when investors cannot freely exit and comparable public credit vehicles trade at discounts?

Mercer Capital noted that public BDC discounts are beginning to signal a disconnect between public pricing and private NAV assumptions. That gap is where the valuation debate will eventually concentrate. If public vehicles with similar exposures trade materially below stated NAV while private funds continue to report stable values close to par, investors will have an increasingly strong incentive to leave the private wrapper, accept liquidity, and re-enter exposure more cheaply in public form.

That process is already feeding a second development, the rise of dedicated secondary strategies aimed at private-credit portfolios.

The launch of a private-credit secondary strategy by Sycamore Tree is a useful signal because secondaries tend to expand when investors want out, portfolios need pricing discovery, and transactions become more urgent.

The emergence of a more active secondary market does not resolve the sector’s problems.

It introduces a market-based mechanism for forcing them into the open. Once secondary pricing starts influencing expectations, NAV stability becomes harder to defend through narrative alone.

The broad structure is easy to map. First came higher redemption requests. Then came gates and caps. Now comes a more explicit challenge to marks, ratings, and the durability of flows. That sequence shifts the market from a yield conversation into a structure conversation. It also changes the meaning of redemption limits.

Quarterly caps had long been presented as standard product design.

In the current environment, they function as the device preventing immediate price discovery across a less liquid asset base. Investors can see that. Distributors can see that. Ratings agencies can see that. The market has now started to price the structure alongside the loans.

The 2008 comparison sits in the structure, and in the sequence of stress now taking shape

Invoking 2008 has become common whenever a credit market shows strain, but the useful comparison here lies in structure rather than surface details.

Private credit is not a replica of pre-crisis subprime securitization. The borrower mix is different, the institutional plumbing is different, and the vehicles themselves are not identical to the pre-Lehman system.

Those distinctions are real. They do not remove the core concern. A market built on assets that do not trade frequently, funded through structures offering periodic liquidity, and distributed through channels that widened access deep into wealth management, is vulnerable to a confidence break once enough investors try to exit together.

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Jamie Dimon warned this week that private-credit losses may prove larger than expected because of weaker lending standards and optimistic assumptions, even as he stopped short of describing the sector as systemic on the scale of mortgages before the financial crisis.

That position is instructive. It shows that even establishment voices inside the banking system are now openly flagging loss recognition and opacity as live issues. Those are foundational fault lines in any credit cycle. They become more dangerous when combined with concentrated distribution and vehicles that promise periodic liquidity against less-liquid collateral.

The stronger allegation, and the one supported by more evidence right now, is that private credit has been carrying a significant liquidity illusion.

Investors were encouraged to treat a portfolio of largely illiquid loans as though it could deliver both yield enhancement and controlled access to cash under stress. That proposition holds while flows remain favorable and confidence remains intact.

It weakens rapidly when multiple large managers face redemption requests for fund shares in the low double digits within the same quarter. It weakens further when public comparables trade at visible discounts, when secondaries expand, and when ratings agencies respond to outflow pressure.

The current cycle still lacks some of the characteristics that would justify calling it a full systemic break. There has been no singular default cascade across the core of the industry. There has been no market-wide forced liquidation that resets marks overnight. There has been no evidence in the public record of a unified fraud architecture spanning the sector.

Evidence for sweeping claims of coordinated concealment remains mixed and uneven. Some borrower-level controversies and governance failures strengthen suspicion around underwriting discipline and monitoring. They support deeper scrutiny. They have not yet proved an industry-wide conspiracy.

What the public record does support is a more direct conclusion. The sector is now vulnerable to a self-reinforcing cycle in which withdrawal pressure drives gates, gates intensify valuation skepticism, valuation skepticism widens discounts and deepens secondary-market activity, and those pricing signals weaken fundraising and inflows.

Once inflows slow, managers lose the easiest buffer that has helped absorb redemptions without immediate asset sales or more visible financing strain. That is the pathway that deserves the 2008 comparison, a breakdown in confidence around funding certainty before the full repricing of assets has run its course.

The next phase could be slower, more political, and more consequential for Bitcoin

The next test for private credit sits in a narrow zone. If second-quarter redemptions ease, if the capped list stops expanding, and if ratings pressure remains contained, the market may absorb the first-quarter shock as a severe but manageable reset.

If outflows remain elevated into the next quarter, a more serious sequence begins to take shape. Managers would then face a harder set of choices, sell assets into a weaker transaction environment, lean more heavily on financing lines and affiliated support, or maintain withdrawal limits long enough to inflict reputational damage on the product itself.

Each path carries a different mix of price, funding, and confidence risk. None of them is benign.

This is also where the political layer becomes more important. Private credit has grown into a market large enough to matter beyond private funds and wealthy clients.

Distribution has broadened materially, and proposals to push private-market exposure deeper into retirement channels have remained active even as the sector is confronting withdrawal limits and valuation questions in real time. That sequence deserves far more attention.

A market discovering the hard edges of its own liquidity while it is still widening distribution creates an unstable policy mix. It raises the probability of future legal, regulatory, and reputational fallout once losses and lockups become more visible to a broader investor base.

Bitcoin enters this setup through macro behavior, funding confidence, and comparative transparency. That does not mean private-credit stress automatically produces a straight-line bid for Bitcoin.

Risk assets often sell together in the first phase of a credit shock, especially when liquidity is scarce, and investors need cash. The stronger case sits one step later. If private credit continues exposing the limits of opaque pricing, gated access, and manager-controlled valuation, capital may increasingly look for assets with continuous price discovery, visible collateral rules, and less dependence on private marks.

The implications for Bitcoin, therefore, run on two tracks. In an acute liquidity event, Bitcoin could face the same forced-selling pressure that hits many liquid assets first. In the subsequent repricing of trust, the asset stands to benefit from a contrast between markets that settle their stress in public and markets that defer it behind gates, models, and tender mechanics.

That is one reason this private-credit cycle deserves close attention from crypto investors. The issue extends well beyond one corner of Wall Street. It examines how capital ranks liquidity, transparency, and credibility when the credit cycle turns.

Where things stand now is clear enough. The evidence for worsening private-credit stress is strong. The evidence for a mounting valuation challenge is strengthening. The evidence for an imminent systemic break remains incomplete, but the path to one is clearer than it was a month ago because the market has begun to identify the exact points where confidence can fail.

Redemption waves across major managers, fresh gating at Barings, negative outlooks from Moody’s, and tens of billions in attempted withdrawals describe a market that has moved decisively out of the confidence phase.

What comes next depends on whether the industry can restore trust before liquidity pressure forces broader price discovery across the loans themselves.

The post New private credit crisis looms as $20B exit wave triggers fresh withdrawal limits threatening Bitcoin liquidity appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Hyperbridge, a decentralized bridge connecting the Polkadot ecosystem to the Ethereum network, suffered a major security breach that allowed an attacker to mint 1 billion unauthorized DOT tokens.

However, the hacker’s potential multimillion-dollar payday was drastically cut short to around $240,000 as there simply was not enough liquidity to cash out the fabricated assets.

While the direct financial losses from the exploit were relatively contained, the incident has sent shockwaves through the Polkadot ecosystem, driving the network's DOT native token toward its all-time low amid broader market anxieties regarding cross-chain security.

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Anatomy of the Hyperbridge exploit

Security experts explained that the vulnerability resided in how Hyperbridge’s contracts validated incoming cross-chain messages before passing them along to the token gateway.

Blockchain security firm BlockSec Phalcon identified the root cause as a “Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) proof replay vulnerability.” This is essentially a cryptographic blind spot that allowed the attacker to recycle old, valid security proofs and attach them to malicious, newly crafted requests.

At the core of the breach was a missing input validation within the system's `VerifyProof()` function. In standard cross-chain operations, a bridge must verify that a request originating on one blockchain is authentic before executing a corresponding action, such as minting tokens, on another.

In this instance, the Hyperbridge contract failed to properly bind the submitted request payload to the validated proof. The system merely checked that a request hash had not been used before, without verifying if the proof actually matched the message it was supposed to authenticate.

By manipulating the index parameters, the attacker bypassed the system's root computation entirely. This disconnect enabled the hacker to forge a valid cross-chain message, elevate their privileges to administrator status, and command the contract to mint 1 billion DOT tokens on Ethereum.

Meanwhile, the primary token minting was preceded by an initial, quieter attack. On-chain analyst Specter noted that roughly an hour before the massive DOT fabrication, an attacker exploited a related TokenGateway contract to siphon 245 ETH, worth approximately $537,000.

These funds were rapidly fragmented, distributed across 15 separate wallet addresses in increments of roughly 16.4 ETH, and laundered through the privacy protocol Tornado Cash.

How shallow market depth mitigated the damage

While the minting of 1 billion tokens usually signals a catastrophic, protocol-killing event, the attacker was thwarted by the very mechanics of decentralized finance: market depth.

When a hacker steals assets, they typically swap them into an automated market maker (AMM) liquidity pool for a more liquid, stable asset, such as Ethereum or a stablecoin. A liquidity pool prices assets based on the ratio of tokens held within it.

In this scenario, the bridged DOT pool on Ethereum was relatively shallow. When the attacker attempted to dump 1 billion forged tokens into the pool to extract ETH, the sheer volume of the sell order immediately overwhelmed the available liquidity.

As a result, the algorithm, rebalancing the ratio, drastically reduced the price of bridged DOT from $1.22 to tiny fractions of a cent within milliseconds.

Because the market could not absorb the massive order at stable prices, the attacker's profit was severely capped.

Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence reported that the hacker was only able to extract roughly $240,000 worth of ETH from the DOT liquidity pool.

Meanwhile, had the vulnerability been exploited in a deeper pool or with a higher-value bridged asset, the financial devastation would have been exponentially greater.

From April Fools’ prank to reality

Meanwhile, this recent breach carries a heavy dose of irony for the Hyperbridge development team, arriving less than two weeks after the project published an April Fools’ Day joke about suffering a catastrophic exploit.

On April 1, Hyperbridge’s official channels posted a fake incident report claiming a $37 million breach across its Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Base deployments.

The mock post blamed fictional North Korean Lazarus Group hackers, rogue artificial intelligence agents, and even quantum computing. The post went so far as to joke that external auditors had attempted to warn the team, but developers were offline, eating KitKat bars to celebrate an engineer becoming a father.

At the time, the project brushed off community criticism of the joke, publicly boasting that their core community knew the protocol was “un-hackable.”

That hubris has evaporated as of press time, as the protocol developers were forced to halt the platform in real time.

Parity Technologies, the primary development firm behind the Polkadot ecosystem, quickly stepped in to manage the fallout. The firm clarified that the exploit was strictly isolated to Hyperbridge's Ethereum gateway contract.

It added that Polkadot’s core network, its connected parachains, and native DOT tokens remained fully secure and untouched by the breach.

Contagion fears push Polkadot toward all-time lows

Even though the underlying Polkadot blockchain was never compromised, the psychological impact of its most dominant bridge being exploited has taken a heavy toll on its native currency.

Following the news of the breach, Data from CryptoSlate showed that Polkadot’s native DOT token fell 5% during early Asian trading hours on Monday, dropping to $1.14.

The decline pushes the asset perilously close to its all-time low of $1.13. The token has been locked in a brutal downward spiral, shedding roughly 70% of its value over the past year amid a broader crypto market downturn and waning retail interest in legacy alternative layer-one networks.

For the Polkadot ecosystem, the Hyperbridge exploit is a worst-case scenario regarding market optics.

Even as developers emphasize the technical distinction between a vulnerable third-party Ethereum contract and the secure core Polkadot network, retail investors often view the brand as a monolith.

Until cross-chain infrastructure can achieve the same level of security as the underlying blockchains it connects to, these liquidity events will continue to drag down the broader market’s confidence.

Bridges remain Web3’s weakest link

Meanwhile, the Hyperbridge incident underlines a persistent and systemic vulnerability in decentralized finance: cross-chain bridges are inherently fragile.

In the Web3 ecosystem, bridges are essential infrastructure. They allow disparate, siloed blockchains to communicate, offering users greater flexibility, lower fees, and access to a wider array of decentralized applications.

However, to function, these bridges must hold massive reserves of locked assets on one side to issue corresponding “wrapped” assets on the other.

Because these protocols essentially act as massive honeypots governed by complex smart contracts, they represent the single most lucrative target for cybercriminals.

If a hacker can compromise the private keys of the bridge's validators or, as in the Hyperbridge case, exploit a vulnerability in the smart contract's code, they can seize administrative control and drain the underlying assets or print infinite supply.

Notably, the history of crypto is littered with devastating bridge exploits. In March 2022, the Ronin Network bridge, built for the Axie Infinity gaming ecosystem, was drained of over $600 million in one of the largest heists in crypto history.

Later that year, the BNB Chain’s cross-chain bridge suffered a code exploit, resulting in the unauthorized creation of 2 million BNB tokens worth roughly $566 million. Other catastrophic breaches include the $321 million Wormhole hack and the $190 million Nomad bridge exploit.

The post Polkadot Hyperbridge April Fools’ joke comes true as over 1 Billion fake DOT tokens were minted on Ethereum appeared first on CryptoSlate.

World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the decentralized finance platform backed by President Donald Trump, is navigating a deepening crisis as a precipitous drop in its token price collides with a bitter public dispute involving Tron founder Justin Sun.

The turbulence centers on two distinct but compounding controversies: accusations from Sun that the protocol's team used centralized “backdoor” mechanisms to freeze his eight-figure investment.

Additionally, the project is facing mounting market anxiety over a highly concentrated, nine-figure borrowing loop executed by the protocol’s team on a decentralized lending platform.

The confluence of these events has wiped out hundreds of millions in market value, dropping the WLFI token to an all-time low of $0.07714 and raising alarms about structural vulnerabilities within the project’s tokenomics.

The architecture of WLFI's freeze of Sun's wallet

The public feud reignited over the weekend, when Sun launched a blistering critique on the social media platform X.

In an April 12 post on X, Sun accused World Liberty Financial of embedding hidden smart contract functions to arbitrarily seize investor assets.

He further stated that the WLFI team was treating “the crypto community as a personal ATM” and was engaging in illegitimate actions that “were never authorized by any fair, transparent, or good-faith community governance process.”

Notably, Sun is not a fringe participant in the WLFI ecosystem. He was the project’s largest early external backer, pouring roughly $75 million into WLFI to support what was pitched as a democratized vision for decentralized finance.

However, his wallet was blacklisted by the protocol in September 2025, effectively freezing his assets. Due to the token's price fluctuations, Sun's unrealized losses tied to the frozen wallet now exceed $80 million.

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In recent statements, the Tron founder characterized the protocol’s governance as “theater,” alleging that the network's technical structure fundamentally contradicts its decentralized branding.

On April 12, Sun cited on-chain records demonstrating that a single Externally Owned Account (EOA, which also sits on the protocol’s 3-of-5 multisignature wallet) executed the blacklist.

On-chain analysts have largely corroborated Sun's structural claims.

Pseudonymous Yearn Finance developer Banteg noted that the original WLFI token deployed in September 2024 contained no blacklist functions. The restriction capabilities were introduced via a series of smart contract upgrades in late 2025, nearly a year after Sun’s initial investment.

That timeline is central to Sun’s case because it suggests the most controversial controls were added after early investors had already committed funds.

Banteg also said Sun was placed in a separate vesting category that did not apply to the rest of the investor base.

According to that analysis, WLFI’s multisig configured a 20% initial release for Sun’s allocation, after which he transferred a portion of those tokens out. A guardian then blacklisted his wallet.

In that structure, the power to freeze a holder rested with one address, while broader seizure actions required multiple signers.

WLFI makes legal threats

World Liberty Financial has forcefully pushed back against Sun’s narrative, characterizing his latest public campaign as a diversion to mask his contractual breaches.

On X, the project stated:

“Justin’s favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct. We have the contracts. We have the evidence. We have the truth. See you in court pal.”

While the protocol has not publicly detailed the exact nature of the alleged misconduct, independent crypto analysts have pieced together the likely catalyst for the September 2025 freeze.

Crypto analyst Quinten François alleged that Sun had transferred a substantial tranche of WLFI to his proprietary crypto exchange, HTX, after receiving his initial 20% token unlock.

The analyst further noted that Sun offered retail investors on HTX high-yield incentives to lock in their newly vested WLFI tokens. Simultaneously, he allegedly liquidated tokens on the exchange's backend, effectively cashing out his position while using retail deposits as a buffer.

The strategy would, in theory, allow Sun to front-run the market and backfill the exchange's reserves using his future token unlocks.

In response, World Liberty Financial flagged this activity as a severe breach of the early investor agreement and used the recently upgraded smart contract controls to halt the flow of funds.

A $150 million looping strategy

While legal threats fly between Sun and World Liberty's executives, everyday retail investors are wrestling with an entirely different existential threat: a massive, highly centralized borrowing scheme that has paralyzed protocol liquidity.

On-chain analytics firm Chaos Labs highlighted the massive concentration of WLFI collateral on Dolomite, an EVM-compatible decentralized lending protocol.

The integration has drawn intense scrutiny, in large part because Dolomite’s co-founder, Corey Caplan, concurrently serves as an advisor and Chief Technology Officer for World Liberty Financial.

According to blockchain data, the World Liberty team has deployed approximately 5 billion WLFI tokens, valued at roughly $400 million and representing nearly 98% of the asset's supply on Dolomite, across two multisignature wallets.

Against this illiquid collateral, the team has borrowed approximately $150 million in stablecoins, according to Arkham Intelligence data.

Chaos Labs explained that the borrowing utilizes a complex “looping” structure. One wallet borrowed over $40 million in USD1 against 3 billion WLFI. A second wallet borrowed $111 million in USD1 against a mix of WLFI and USDC, then used that USD1 as collateral to borrow an additional $89 million in USDC, cycling the assets to maximize leverage.

Notably, Banteg claimed that one of those wallets is “the same multisig is using 5 billion WLFI as collateral on dolomite to borrow $250 million in stablecoins.”

Meanwhile, the sheer size of the position has functionally monopolized Dolomite's liquidity pools. Utilization rates for USD1 and USDC skyrocketed to 83.4% and 90.19%, respectively, locking up the platform's capital and pushing borrowing rates into the 5% range.

Furthermore, the 5 billion WLFI posted as collateral is four times the token's entire tradable supply on major centralized exchanges, including Binance, the largest crypto exchange by trading volume.

WLFI is still seeing strong speculative interest despite the market fallout

The revelation of the Dolomite loans, coupled with the renewed spectacle of the Justin Sun dispute, has triggered a wave of risk-off behavior.

Data from CryptoSlate showed that the market panic has erased more than $700 million from World Liberty Financial’s market capitalization, dragging the valuation from $3.2 billion down to $2.5 billion in the last seven days.

During this period, the token's price plunged to an all-time low of $$0.07714 before stabilizing slightly at $0.07965 as of press time.

At the same time, the price action has been brutal for leveraged traders. CoinGlass data shows that the volatility has wiped out more than $4 million in derivative positions since April 10, with the vast majority of liquidations hitting bullish traders attempting to catch the falling knife.

Moreover, industry experts have expressed mounting concern that Dolomite could be saddled with massive bad debt if WLFI's price continues to slide. If the token drops another 75%, it would hit the liquidation threshold for the team's massive loans.

Given the token's thin secondary market liquidity, liquidating $400 million worth of WLFI to recoup $150 million in stablecoins would be mathematically impossible without driving the token price to zero.

Despite the headwinds, derivative metrics suggest speculative interest remains high.

Coinalyze data shows the token’s long-short ratio rising to 1.341, indicating that traders are actively betting on a rebound. Futures volume surged past $540 million over the weekend, marking the highest level of derivative activity since February.

At the same time, World Liberty Financial has also made efforts to quell the FUD by repaying $25 million of the stablecoin debt, thereby lowering utilization rates.

The firm also announced plans to introduce a governance proposal for a phased token unlock for early retail buyers.

Whether those assurances will be enough to calm a market spooked by opaque smart contracts and incestuous DeFi leverage remains to be seen, especially as the specter of a high-profile legal battle looms.

The post World Liberty Financial threatens top token holder with legal action as WLFI loses $700M amid token scandal appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Crypto backed Donald Trump for a reason. He gave the industry a simple political promise: less enforcement, friendlier rules, and a White House that would treat Bitcoin and digital assets as part of the American growth story instead of a threat to be contained.

That bargain helped Trump build real support inside crypto during the 2024 election cycle. It also helped bring a new type of voter into the coalition, people who saw crypto policy as part of a wider fight over innovation, markets, and state power.

The problem now is that the same community that once treated Trump as an asset is increasingly treating the Trump-branded crypto complex as a liability.

The great crypto divorce: Extraction, betrayal, and Trump’s token crisis

The shift has been building for months, then accelerated as WLFI slid toward its lows, as the economics of the Trump family’s token ecosystem came under sharper scrutiny, and as crypto-native reaction across X moved from rationalization to disgust.

The temperature change is hard to miss. After the 2024 election, pro-Trump sentiment on crypto timelines carried a triumphal tone.

Over the past several days, the language has turned prosecutorial. Traders, founders, and long-time market voices are now describing the Trump family’s crypto ventures as extraction, grift, and a stain on the industry’s legitimacy.

That shift has a market side and a political side. On the market side, Bitcoin has held up far better than the family’s branded ecosystem. Bitcoin remains the asset that institutions, public companies, and macro traders can still frame as scarce collateral, a sovereign hedge, or a reserve candidate.

WLFI sits in a very different bucket, a governance token wrapped in celebrity politics, concentrated economics, supply overhang, and widening distrust.

On the political side, the danger for Trump is broader. He used the crypto vote in 2024. If the industry starts to view Trump-linked tokens as a case study in how political power can be converted into private crypto wealth, the same constituency that helped him may become a source of blowback heading into the midterms.

The language inside crypto has changed from coalition politics to retail betrayal

The strongest evidence for a real break comes from the shift in language inside crypto itself. Participants tend to defend their own until losses can no longer be rationalized. Sharp practice, misaligned incentives, and personality-driven ecosystems persist longer than outsiders expect.

When that tolerance gives way, the tone flips quickly. The Trump conversation has reached that point.

“The president of the united states is the biggest crypto grifter in history. and he's done it in broad daylight.”

Chill Pill

“Trump never cared about Crypto. It’s time to admit that all of us were duped.”

Rodney

These reactions carry weight because they are not coming from Elizabeth Warren’s office or from anti-crypto academics. They are coming from market participants, founders, and long-time industry voices who, in another context, might have been expected to defend a pro-crypto president or at least keep the focus on policy gains.

The emotional center of this moment is retail betrayal. The charge running through community reaction is simple. Trump sold the cultural authority of his name and the political authority of his office into crypto products that looked open, populist, and aligned with decentralization, while the underlying economics favored insiders, controlled access, and family-linked revenue extraction.

CryptoSlate previously reported that Trump’s crypto empire had become the center of a new influence economy, and separately that WLFI was selling $5 million “Super Node” access while pitching finance for everyone. Those two threads now converge into a public perception problem that is larger than one token.

Price action sharpened that perception. The family’s branding machine once seemed capable of lifting anything it touched. That aura has faded. WLFI is far below its September peak and trading close to its April low.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has remained comparatively resilient. That divergence gives the backlash a clearer shape. The community has separated Bitcoin from Trump. It now also has to decide whether to separate pro-crypto policy from Trump-branded crypto products.

Those two separations are politically dangerous because they break the old package deal. Support for Bitcoin can survive while support for Trump’s crypto ventures collapses.

Several posts captured that rupture with unusual force. One widely shared line from TXMC said, “You know it’s bad when one of the biggest scammers of all time [in reference to Justin Sun] denounces the president’s business for being even bigger scammers.”

A post from Drew Austin called WLFI “quite possibly the worst and most blatant fraud” he had seen in 13 years in crypto. Hyperbole is common on X, though the direction of travel here is the point. These are not isolated sneers from outside the room. This is the room turning on the host.

Concentrated economics and control became harder to ignore as WLFI lost altitude

The market can reprice trust without a smoking gun. A structure that feels stacked, a chart that confirms it, and a series of disclosures or allegations can be enough to make participants ask whether they ever understood the deal in the first place. WLFI now checks several of those boxes at once.

The token launched into public trading with a multibillion-dollar headline valuation, with CryptoSlate reporting a $7.4 billion valuation on day one. Public excitement looked strong. The structural questions never went away.

CryptoSlate also noted that holders voted overwhelmingly to back public trading, and tracked rising anticipation even before transfer restrictions were lifted. That helped produce the launch frenzy. It also created the conditions for a harsher reset once public price discovery met concentrated ownership, thin effective liquidity, and mounting distrust over how the system actually works.

The Trump family's economics are a major part of that reset. WLFI closed a raise above its target and has become a serious capital machine, with a much larger influence on the economy around the project.

Outside crypto media, Forbes estimated Trump’s net worth at $6.5 billion in March 2026, up $1.4 billion from the prior year, while Reuters, reporting widely across secondary coverage, put the Trump family's crypto income above $800 million in the first half of 2025 alone.

Those figures establish scale. Once the scale becomes visible, the community starts asking how the value moved, who captured it, and whether the public side of the trade ever had a fair shot.

That is where the retail anger deepens. A post from Wealthy Anon framed WLFI as “a one-way door with a MAGA flag on it.” The complaint is that Trump-linked branding created social trust while token structure, liquidity conditions, governance control, and insider economics concentrated the payoff elsewhere.

Another post from gum claimed that among 4,898 verified WLFI-holding wallets on Solana with identifiable PnL data, 4,719 were at a loss and 74 were in profit.

The market is primed to believe a retail pain narrative because the broader structure already feels predatory to many participants.

Recent scrutiny of collateral use and leverage pushed that perception further. A breakdown from Chaos Labs described a looped-borrowing structure tied to WLFI exposure on Dolomite, with two primary addresses accounting for most of the activity, and WLFI collateral utilization pushed close to its cap.

Thus, a token associated with the president’s family has become intertwined with concentrated borrowing behavior, synthetic support mechanics, and an evolving debate about how much of the visible market reflects organic demand versus internal recycling. That has consequences for sentiment even before a regulator, court, or auditor reaches a conclusion.

A clash with Justin Sun has now fed the fire. Sun’s public allegation that WLFI embedded a blacklist function and froze his wallet gave the controversy a high-drama focal point, while WLFI replied that it had the contracts, the evidence, and the truth, and would see him in court.

Sun then fired back, asking, as the largest WLFI investor, for the person behind the WLFI social media account to reveal themselves.

The deeper issue is that the community’s trust is breaking because the Trump family’s crypto products are increasingly viewed as an extraction system wrapped in populist branding. Sun became a catalyst. He did not create the sentiment.

The midterm risk is becoming easier to see as the crypto vote turns from asset to vulnerability

Trump gained a real advantage from being the candidate who spoke crypto’s language in 2024. He understood that Bitcoin voters, builders, and donors wanted a president who would stop treating the industry as a permanent suspect class.

That support was instrumental, especially among people who viewed crypto as part of a wider argument about economic freedom, digital property rights, and America’s willingness to compete in frontier technology. The danger now is that Trump’s personal monetization of crypto may damage the same political channel that helped him.

That risk already showed up in policy coverage. CryptoSlate reported in 2025 that concerns about Trump’s conflict of interest were slowing broader progress on crypto policy.

Cardano's Charles Hoskinson has also argued that the TRUMP token cost crypto a much stronger Senate outcome and triggered a broader credibility crisis around the industry’s political agenda.

Whether one accepts Hoskinson’s framing in full, the direction of pressure is clear. Every Trump-linked token controversy gives opponents a simpler attack line; crypto policy became a channel for presidential self-enrichment.

The potential midterm impact follows directly from that pressure. On Polymarket, Democrats are priced at 56% to take the Senate and 86% to take the House. Prediction markets are not destiny, and they can move quickly, though those odds capture the market's live political instinct.

If Democrats gain one chamber, Trump faces heavier investigative pressure. If they gain both, the pressure escalates into a full-spectrum oversight environment, with subpoenas, hearings, document fights, and a much more aggressive public inquiry into the financial intersection of presidential power and family crypto ventures.

The constitutional mechanics still matter. House control could bring impeachment risk. Senate removal would still require a two-thirds vote, a much higher bar. Even without removal, a hostile Congress could turn the Trump crypto complex into a permanent scandal machine during the run-up to 2028.

The backlash now reaches beyond a reputational problem inside crypto. It is becoming a live electoral vulnerability. The same people who once saw Trump as crypto’s defender may now see him as the figure who turned their industry into a public punchline. Retail holders nursing losses are not a huge voting bloc on their own.

Cultural betrayal extends beyond wallet-level pain, especially when it ties into a broader accusation that power was used to privatize upside while distributing downside to loyalists and latecomers.

The market side remains fluid. CryptoSlate wrote in February that the post-election crypto rally had already completed an 18-month round trip, adding roughly $2 trillion in value and then erasing a similar amount.

From market snapshots, that separation is showing up across the broader “Made in USA” basket as well. Trump spent the past year promoting American-made crypto as a strategic category, though the current leaderboard shows that most of the biggest U.S.-linked names are trailing Bitcoin on every meaningful medium-term window.

Top Made in USA Crypto Assets by Market Cap

#	Coin	Price	24h %	MCap	24h Vol
1	XRP XRP	$1.36	+2.88%	$83.78B	$2.84B
2	USDC USDC	$1.00	+0.03%	$78.77B	$13.99B
3	Solana SOL	$85.67	+4.3%	$49.27B	$5.46B
4	Dogecoin DOGE	$0.09	+2.59%	$14.39B	$1.68B
5	Bitcoin Cash BCH	$435.49	+2.08%	$8.72B	$244.04M
6	Chainlink LINK	$9.23	+5.02%	$6.71B	$729.24M
7	Zcash ZEC	$359.57	-1.19%	$5.98B	$804M
8	Stellar XLM	$0.15	+3.06%	$5.13B	$98.92M
9	Litecoin LTC	$54.30	+1.11%	$4.18B	$294.92M
10	World Liberty Financial USD USD1	$1.00	-0.01%	$4.08B	$1.59B

Bitcoin is down 23.18% over 90 days in the ranking view, while XRP is down 35.67%, Solana is down 42.06%, Dogecoin is down 34.71%, Chainlink is down 33.96%, and Avalanche is down 34.17%. Even on the 30-day view, Bitcoin is slightly positive while most of the flagship U.S.-associated cohort remains negative.

That weakens one of the political selling points Trump leaned on most heavily, that backing American crypto projects would translate into stronger market leadership. Right now, the market is saying the opposite.

Bitcoin has held up better, and much of the “Made in USA” complex has looked more like a lagging trade than a national-champion theme.

That created the first crack in the idea that Trump automatically equals bullish crypto. WLFI and the wider Trump token complex widened the crack into something more serious. Bitcoin can still retain support as a macro asset, reserve candidate, and institutional collateral.

Trump-linked tokens can continue to erode trust at the same time. That split is the next test. If it deepens, Trump will discover that the crypto vote he used in 2024 now carries a reverse charge. Support built on policy can disappear when the community decides the family business got there first.

The post Made in USA cryptocurrencies fall as the crypto love affair with Trump family moves close to divorce appeared first on CryptoSlate.

There are many brokers trying to out-feature each other. Algobi takes a different approach; instead of cramming every tool imaginable into one interface, they've built a platform around TradingView's charting engine and kept everything else minimal.

We opened an account, tested the platform for several days, and dug into the trading conditions. Here's what we found in our Algobi review for 2026.

Who Runs Algobi?

Algobi is operated by DXA Seychelles Limited, a company registered in Seychelles under number 8438281-1. The broker holds a license (SD218) issued by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) of Seychelles. Its registered office is at Providence complex, Office A17 C, Providence, Mahe, Seychelles.

FSA-regulated brokers are required to comply with KYC and AML standards, and Algobi does reference its license number across its site. It's worth noting that FSA Seychelles is an offshore regulator — it doesn't carry the same weight as a tier-one authority like the FCA or CySEC, but the license is publicly listed and verifiable, which already puts Algobi ahead of some competitors that bury or omit this information entirely.

What Can You Trade on Algobi?

Algobi gives you access to over 300 CFD instruments across multiple asset classes:

• Forex (majors, minors, and exotics) 
• Indices (S&P 500, Nikkei 225, and more) 
• Commodities (oil, wheat, coffee) 
• Stocks (equities from tech, healthcare, finance sectors) 
• Metals (gold, silver, platinum) 
• Crypto (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple)

It's a well-rounded selection. You're not going to find the 10,000+ instrument catalogs that the mega-brokers offer, but for most retail traders, 300+ instruments across six asset classes covers everything you'd actually want to trade on a regular basis.

What we liked: TradingView is baked directly into the platform. That means you get access to over 100 technical indicators, drawing tools, and customizable chart layouts without needing to switch to a separate charting app. For anyone who's used TradingView before, this immediately feels familiar — and that's a real advantage over brokers who force you onto clunky proprietary charts.

Algobi Trading Platform in 2026

Algobi offers two ways to trade: a web-based platform (WebTrader) and a mobile app.

We spent most of our time on the WebTrader, which runs entirely in-browser with no downloads. The layout is clean — prices update in real time, order placement is fast, and switching between instruments doesn't lag or reload the page. It won't replace a full-blown desktop terminal for professional-level analysis, but for the kind of quick market scanning and trade execution that most retail traders actually do, it handles the job without friction.

The mobile app mirrors the WebTrader experience closely enough that you can monitor and manage positions on the go without missing anything critical.

Account Types on Algobi

Algobi structures its offering around three account tiers: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Each comes with progressively better trading conditions.

Silver Account

• Standard spreads (starting from ~1.9 pips)
• Leverage up to 1:200
• Minimum lot size: 0.01

Gold Account

• 50% spread discount vs. Silver
• 40% swap fee discount
• Leverage up to 1:200
• Minimum lot size: 0.01

Platinum Account

• 75% spread discount vs. Silver
• 60% swap fee discount
• Leverage up to 1:200
• Minimum lot size: 0.01

Algobi also offers Islamic (swap-free) accounts for traders who need Sharia-compliant conditions, and demo accounts for anyone who wants to test things out before committing real capital.

Deposits, Withdrawals, and Fees

Minimum deposit across all account types is $250. Algobi supports the following payment methods:

• Visa 
• Mastercard 
• Apple Pay 
• Google Pay 
• PayPal 
• Skrill 
• Neteller 
• AstroPay 
• Kuady2

Algobi states that they don't charge deposit fees, though withdrawal fees may vary depending on your payment provider. The range of options here is solid — particularly the inclusion of Apple Pay and Google Pay, which not every broker offers yet.

Customer Support

Algobi provides support through live chat, email (support@algobi.com), and phone, with regional numbers for the UK, UAE, and several Latin American countries. Support operates 24/5.

The platform itself is available in English and Arabic languages.

How to Open an Algobi Account in 2026

The process is straightforward. Register on the website, complete identity verification (government-issued ID and proof of address), fund your account, and you're in. We didn't hit any unexpected steps or unusual delays during the process.

Algobi Review 2026: Final Verdict

Algobi is a newer broker on the block, but what they do have is a clean, well-built platform powered by TradingView, a straightforward account structure, and enough instruments to cover most trading strategies.

The FSA Seychelles regulation is a good baseline, so if you're looking for a broker that prioritizes execution quality and a modern interface over feature bloat, Algobi in 2026 is worth testing with their demo account first.

As always, do your own due diligence. Read the terms, understand the risks of CFD trading, and never trade with money you can't afford to lose.

$RAVE, the native token of RaveDAO, surged by more than 4,000% over the last seven days. This move made the project reach the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. While the broader market remains in a consolidation phase, RAVE's vertical ascent highlights the growing interest in Web3-native entertainment and decentralized event governance.

What is RaveDAO (RAVE)?

RaveDAO is a Web3-native entertainment collective designed to bridge the gap between the global electronic dance music (EDM) community and blockchain technology. At its core, the project functions as a decentralized organizer for large-scale music events, utilizing Ethereum-based smart contracts to handle everything from NFT ticketing to community governance.

Unlike many speculative tokens, the RAVE token serves several utility functions within its ecosystem:

• Staking for Access: Event organizers and vendors must stake RAVE to license the brand or qualify for participation.
• Deflationary Mechanics: A portion of profits from live events is used to buy back and burn RAVE tokens.
• Governance: Token holders can influence future event locations and project directions.
• Philanthropy: Through its "Rave for Light" initiative, the DAO reportedly donates 20% of proceeds to fund sight-restoring surgeries.

Why is RAVE Price UP?

The current Bitcoin price often dictates market sentiment, but RAVE has completely decoupled from the benchmark. According to data from major exchanges like Bitget, the rally was initially fueled by a massive short squeeze.

With over 70% of traders originally positioned to short the token during its early breakout, a cascade of liquidations forced the price higher, pushing it from under $0.50 to recent highs above $10.00. However, investors should remain cautious; on-chain data shows that wallets linked to the project's deployers moved millions of tokens to exchanges just before the pump, leading some analysts to question the sustainability of the current crypto news cycle surrounding the coin.

How to Trade RAVE on Bitget: Step-by-Step Guide

Bitget is one of the primary liquidity hubs for RAVE. Whether you are looking to ride the momentum or hedge your position, here is how to get started.

Step 1: Create and Verify Your Account

Visit the Bitget registration page and sign up with your email or phone number. To unlock full trading limits and ensure the security of your funds, complete the KYC (Know Your Customer) verification by uploading a valid ID.

Step 2: Deposit Funds

To trade RAVE, you typically need USDC or USDT. You can deposit them from an external wallet or purchase it directly on Bitget using a credit card or P2P trading.

Step 3: Navigate to the RAVE/USDT Pair

In the "Trade" menu, select "Spot Trading." Search for "RAVE" in the search bar and select the RAVE/USDT pair. You will see the live price chart and the order book.

Step 4: Execute Your Trade

• To Buy: Choose "Market Order" for an instant fill at the current price, or "Limit Order" to set a specific entry point.
• To Short: If you believe the price will drop, you can navigate to the "Futures" section to open a short position with leverage. Note: Shorting a parabolic asset like RAVE is extremely high-risk.

Step 5: Monitor your Trades

Given the 4,000% move, volatility is guaranteed over the short and medium terms. Keep an eye on important support areas breaks which might signal strong crashes. Since the price just moved to 11$, the 10$ price mark can be a strong support.

Is the RAVE Rally Sustainable?

From a technical standpoint, the RAVE/USD pair is currently in extreme overbought territory, with the RSI (Relative Strength Index) frequently hovering above 80. While the "Experience" and "Expertise" of the RaveDAO team in the EDM space provide a fundamental floor, the "Fully Diluted Valuation" (FDV) is significantly higher than the current market cap due to a large portion of the supply being locked.

Such supply dynamics often lead to significant price corrections when tokens are eventually unlocked. Traders should use strict stop-loss orders to protect their capital in this "high-risk, high-reward" environment.

As tensions in the Middle East reached a boiling point, risk assets—including $Bitcoin and major altcoins—faced a sharp "risk-off" liquidation. However, as diplomatic channels begin to signal a potential de-escalation, savvy investors are looking at the "blood in the streets" as a generational entry point.

Historically, markets overreact to geopolitical shocks. If a resolution is reached in early April, the pent-up liquidity currently sitting in stablecoins is expected to flood back into high-conviction projects that were unfairly hammered during the panic.

Is April a Good Time to Buy Crypto?

Potentially, as April 2026 is shaping up to be a prime recovery month. With many tokens trading at 20-30% discounts from their Q1 highs, the current "oversold" conditions on the RSI (Relative Strength Index) suggest a relief rally is imminent.

1. Ethereum (ETH): The Race Back to $3,000

$Ethereum remains the backbone of the decentralized economy. During the recent March turbulence, ETH slipped below its psychological support, but the fundamentals remain unshaken.

• Recovery Catalyst: The successful implementation of the "Prague" upgrade earlier this year has further reduced Layer-2 costs.
• Price Target: Analysts expect a swift recovery to the $3,000 mark as institutional ETH ETFs see renewed inflows once the global macro outlook stabilizes.

Investors should monitor the ETH price closely, as its recovery usually leads the broader altcoin market.

2. PEPE: The Volatility King

For those with a higher risk appetite, $PEPE remains the go-to memecoin for catching rapid bounces. Memecoins often act as high-beta plays on market sentiment; when the market turns green, PEPE tends to move twice as fast as the majors.

• Current State: PEPE lost significant ground in March but has maintained a strong community floor.
• Why Buy: Its extreme volatility makes it an ideal candidate for a "relief rally" play. As retail investors return to the market in April, the low-unit bias of PEPE often attracts massive speculative volume.

3. XRP: Regulatory Clarity Meets Institutional Adoption

$XRP has faced a double-whammy of geopolitical pressure and a temporary "capital flight" toward safer havens. However, its role in cross-border payments, especially in the Middle East, makes it a unique asset to watch as regional stability returns.

• Market Position: Having secured full regulatory clarity in late 2025, XRP is no longer a "gamble" but a utility-driven asset.
• Outlook: It has lost nearly 15% in the last month, making the XRP price highly attractive for those betting on the continued expansion of RippleNet.

4. Cardano (ADA): The "Deep Value" Opportunity

$Cardano is currently one of the most oversold "blue-chip" altcoins. While critics point to its slower price action, the network's resilience and growing DeFi TVL (Total Value Locked) suggest it is undervalued.

• The Dip: ADA has hit multi-month lows, hovering near critical demand zones.
• The Play: Historically, ADA performs well in the second stage of a market recovery.

5. Solana (SOL): The Ecosystem Powerhouse

No "Top 5" list for 2026 is complete without $Solana. Despite the market-wide dip, Solana continues to lead in retail transaction volume and NFT activity.

• Technical Outlook: SOL has shown incredible strength in bouncing off the $80-$100 support range.
• Why April: With the Firedancer upgrade nearing full optimization, Solana's throughput is unmatched. Any return of "risk-on" sentiment will likely see SOL outperform Bitcoin in percentage gains. You can compare Solana's performance against other majors on our exchange comparison page.

Top 5 Cryptos to Buy in April 2026

Polkadot Price Crash: $DOT Faces Sudden 5% Drop

In a high-intensity market event today, Polkadot ($DOT) experienced a sharp 5% price crash within a mere 5-minute window. The volatility resulted in the immediate wiping of $20 million in market capitalization and triggered the liquidation of over $728,000 in DOT long positions.

Early reports circulating on social media suggested a direct exploit of the Polkadot main chain. However, on-chain forensics quickly clarified that the vulnerability lies within Hyperbridge, a third-party interoperability protocol connecting Polkadot to Ethereum. The attacker successfully minted 1 billion "fake" wrapped DOT on Ethereum and dumped them into a Uniswap V4 pool, netting approximately 108.2 ETH ($237,000) in a single atomic transaction.

The Hyperbridge Vulnerability: What Happened to Polkadot?

The exploit was not a breach of Polkadot’s core security but a failure in the Hyperbridge architecture. Hyperbridge utilizes the Interoperable State Machine Protocol (ISMP) to facilitate asset transfers. The attack targeted the EthereumHost and HandlerV1 contracts on the Ethereum side of the bridge.

The Attack Execution

The attacker (address 0xC513...F8E7) executed the following sequence in one transaction:

• Forged Consensus: Exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the unverified consensus client on Ethereum to inject a forged Polkadot consensus proof.
• Zero Challenge Period: Because the bridge configuration had a challengePeriod = 0, the malicious state commitment was accepted and usable immediately, bypassing any "fisherman" or dispute window.
• Admin Hijack: The attacker used a forged ISMP message to trigger a ChangeAssetAdmin action, making their own contract the administrator of the wrapped DOT token.
• The Mint and Dump: Once in control, the attacker minted 1,000,000,000 fake DOT and swapped them for ETH, causing a massive price slippage that spooked the broader market.

The source check in the TokenGateway failed because the attacker controlled the MMR root. When you control the root, you control the proof—the security check becomes a tautology.

Impact on Polkadot Assets and Market Reaction

While the primary panic centered on $DOT, the scope of the exploit was broader. Multiple Hyperbridge-wrapped assets were targeted using the same vector:

• DOT: 1B minted (causing the 5% market dip).
• ARGN (Argon): ~999B minted.
• MANTA & CERE: Large quantities minted, though partially mitigated by MEV bots.

It is crucial for investors to understand that native DOT on the Polkadot Relay Chain remains secure. The "crash" was a result of market panic and automated trading bots reacting to the sudden liquidity pool imbalance on Ethereum. Users are encouraged to verify their holdings and check current rates on the Polkadot Ticker Page.

Technical Root Cause: The "Instant" Exploit

The catastrophe was made possible by two primary architectural weaknesses:

• Missing Dispute Window: The lack of a challenge period meant there was no time for external observers to flag the fraudulent state.
• Unverified Code: The consensus client contract lacked public source code, making it difficult for the community to audit the verifyConsensus() function prior to the attack.

The attacker appears to be a highly sophisticated actor, with wallet history showing preparation dating back over eight months, including the use of RAILGUN for fund obfuscation.

Tron (TRX) Records 13.5% YTD Gains Amidst Crypto Consolidation

While the broader digital asset market struggles to find its footing in 2026, Tron (TRX) has emerged as a beacon of resilience. Currently trading at $0.32, TRX has secured a 13.5% Year-to-Date (YTD) increase. This performance is particularly striking when compared to the total crypto market cap, which has retracted by an average of 22% in the same period.

As investors look for stability during high-volatility cycles, the $TRX price has decoupled from the downward trend of $Bitcoin and major altcoins. This article analyzes the fundamental drivers behind Tron’s growth and its role as a portfolio stabilizer.

What is Tron (TRX)? A Foundation for the Decentralized Web

Tron is a high-performance blockchain platform focused on decentralizing the internet through high throughput and low-cost transactions. Originally launched as an "Ethereum competitor," Tron has carved out a massive niche in the stablecoin and payment settlement sectors.

Core Features of the Tron Network:

• High Scalability: Capable of handling 2,000+ transactions per second (TPS).
• Unique Fee Model: Users "freeze" TRX to gain Energy and Bandwidth, allowing for feeless transactions.
• Stablecoin Dominance: Tron hosts a significant portion of the global USDT (Tether) supply, often surpassing Ethereum in daily active addresses.

Why is TRX Outperforming the 22% Market Crash?

The primary reason for Tron’s 13.5% YTD gain lies in its utility-driven demand. During market downturns, traders often rotate out of volatile speculative assets and into stablecoins. Because the Tron ecosystem is the primary highway for TRC-20 USDT transfers, the demand for TRX (to power these transactions) remains constant even when prices for other coins fall.

Furthermore, institutional adoption has seen a steady rise. Data from CoinMarketCap suggests that Tron’s deflationary mechanism—where a portion of TRX is burned daily to cover transaction costs—is putting upward pressure on the price as the circulating supply shrinks.

Low Volatility: Is TRX the New Crypto "Safe Haven"?

Volatility is often the biggest deterrent for traditional investors entering the crypto space. However, TRX has demonstrated a significantly lower beta compared to the rest of the market.

Why TRX Stability Matters:

• Staking Lock-ups: A large percentage of TRX is staked for governance and network resources, reducing the "liquid" supply available for panic selling on exchanges.
• Predictable Ecosystem: Unlike many DeFi-heavy chains that suffer during liquidations, Tron’s primary use case—payments—is evergreen.
• Risk Mitigation: Adding a low-volatility asset like TRX can lower the overall Sharpe ratio of a crypto portfolio, providing a buffer during 20%+ market drawdowns.

The crypto exchange will distribute a record $1 million Cronos (CRO) fighter bonus pool at the upcoming UFC fight at the White House.

SoftBank, Sony, Honda, and NEC have formed a new company to build physical AI for robots and machines, backed by $6.7 billion in government funding.

StarkWare co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson said the firm building on Ethereum slashed its headcount in a move to prioritize revenue.

MiniMax M2.7 rivals Claude Opus on key coding benchmarks, but the Chinese AI lab updated commercial terms shortly after releasing the weights on Hugging Face.

The SEC released a new, permissive policy on DeFi interfaces Monday that was immediately celebrated by crypto industry leaders.

Multiple assets are scratching the bottom of the market in hopes of attracting investors who are hungry for cheaper prices.

Major cryptocurrency exchange Kraken is facing an active extortion plot after criminal groups threatened to leak internal videos containing sensitive client data.

Bitcoin liquidations reached a 10,860% hourly imbalance as BTC touched $72,530 following the $100 oil price surge.

XRP derivatives market fails to show any major recovery since October 2025 amid the prolonged market downturn seen over the past six months.

Ripple USD continues to see significant activity, with over 29 million tokens removed from the Ethereum supply.

The SEC just set its CLARITY Act roundtable for April 16, and the crypto market news this week changed everything about how fast institutional money enters this space. CoinShares hit Nasdaq at $1.2 billion with $6 billion under management. Wall Street is not testing the water anymore, it is diving in.

While XRP and ADA wait for clarity to lift prices over months, Pepeto already attracted more than $8.9 million with a confirmed Binance listing, working tools, and a presale price that goes away permanently the moment trading opens and early holders start collecting what everyone else will spend the cycle chasing.

Crypto Market News Signals Shift as SEC Sets CLARITY Act Roundtable for April 16

The SEC officially announced a roundtable on April 16 to discuss the CLARITY Act, the bill that decides whether the SEC or CFTC oversees digital assets per CoinMarketCap.

CoinShares, managing $6 billion in digital assets, listed on Nasdaq at $1.2 billion per Investing News. When regulators invite the industry to the table and billion dollar funds go public on U.S.

exchanges, big money is not just interested anymore, it is lining up to make digital assets a permanent part of every portfolio on earth.

XRP at $1.33, ADA at $0.238, and Pepeto at $8.9M: Where Meme Energy Meets Real Products

Pepeto: The One Entry This Cycle Where Everything Is Already Built

While regulators write the rules and institutions file for access, one presale already has what every other project is still promising and hoping to deliver someday. Pepeto is the only entry that does not ask you to trust a roadmap or wait for a product launch. The exchange is live. The scanner works. The bridge runs. Everything is built, tested, and ready.

PepetoSwap processes every trade at zero fees, so your returns stay whole instead of getting cut by costs across dozens of trades. The contract checker reads every token before you buy, so the projects designed to steal never get anywhere near your wallet and your capital stays protected at all times.

A senior Binance builder leads the technical side, and SolidProof went through every contract with results on chain for anyone to check. More than $8.9 million came in during deep fear, and that number tells the real story louder than any headline: the smartest wallets in the market already made their move.

They are not waiting for the listing. They are waiting with their bags full, knowing exactly what comes next. Staking pays 185% APY, building your position bigger every single day the presale stays open.

At $0.000000186 per token, analysts project 100x to 300x once the Binance listing goes live. Here is what you need to understand clearly. The Pepe cofounder built a token that hit $11 billion with absolutely nothing behind it. No exchange. No scanner. No bridge. Nothing. And it still made thousands of early wallets wealthy beyond anything they imagined. Now he built an exchange with real tools, real protection, and a confirmed Binance listing backing the entire project.

The people who got in early on Pepe all say the exact same thing: I should have bought more. You are looking at that exact moment again, except this time there is a working product behind it and the listing is confirmed. The listing wipes this price out for good. Are you going to be inside when it happens, or are you going to watch it happen to someone else?

XRP (Ripple)

XRP trades near $1.33 with an $81 billion cap per CoinMarketCap. The SEC settlement gave Ripple clarity and payment deals keep growing.

But targets of $2 to $3 by year end deliver 45% to 117% from a cap needing tens of billions just to double.

ADA (Cardano)

ADA trades near $0.238 with a $8.6 billion cap per CoinGecko. The Voltaire era brought record on chain voting, but ADA needs years to get back to $1, while a presale to listing event catches that kind of return in one single move.

Conclusion

XRP holds the payment story and ADA builds the voting system for long term growth, but neither one of them can do what Pepeto is about to do. How often does meme energy plus real products show up in the same presale? Once per cycle, maybe. And that is exactly what is sitting at the Pepeto official website right now, waiting for the wallets smart enough to see it.

The $8.9 million already inside came from people who watched the original Pepe turn small entries into the kind of money that changes families, not just portfolios. Every single one of them says the same thing: I wish I had bought more. You are staring at that same setup right now, except this time there is a working exchange, a clean audit, and a confirmed Binance listing behind every dollar committed.

The crypto market news this week proves the window gets smaller every day. XRP gives you 45% to 117% over months. ADA needs a full cycle to see $1 again. Pepeto gives you 100x to 300x from one listing, and $1,000 at 100x becomes $100,000. That is not a forecast, that is the math of a presale to listing event with a working product and a confirmed exchange behind it.

You can wait and hope another chance like this comes around next cycle. Or you can move right now and be the wallet everyone asks about next month when the listing prints and the presale price becomes the most valuable entry this cycle ever produced.

Click To Visit Pepeto Website To Enter The Presale

FAQs

Why does the SEC CLARITY Act roundtable matter for the crypto market news right now?

When regulators decide which agency oversees digital assets, the crypto market news shifts to real rules, but Pepeto at presale pricing with a confirmed listing delivers returns before that clarity even arrives.

Is XRP or ADA a better hold than a presale right now?

Both deliver steady returns from large caps, but a presale to listing move from the Pepeto official website delivers gains XRP and ADA need years to match.

What makes Pepeto the strongest presale in the crypto market news this cycle?

Pepeto with a senior Binance builder, more than $8.9 million attracted, and a confirmed listing delivers returns large cap forecasts take cycles to reach.

The post The Crypto Market News Every Investor Need To Know – XRP, Cardano And One Early Opportunity appeared first on Blockonomi.

A two week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran wiped out $600 million in short positions and pushed BTC past $72,700 in hours. One headline erased weeks of fear in a single flash, and the new cryptocurrency conversation is no longer about which token might move, it is about which entry catches the wave first and turns it into real wealth.

While SOL and BNB grind higher from multi billion dollar caps, the wallets that spotted the clearest path to life changing returns are loading Pepeto because a working exchange, a confirmed Binance listing, and $8.9 million in committed capital make this the one setup nobody building a serious portfolio can afford to walk past.

New Cryptocurrency Capital Flows Jump After Ceasefire Triggers $600M in Forced Selling

BTC jumped to $72,700 after President Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran, triggering $600 million in forced crypto position closures with over $400 million from short sellers per CoinDesk.

Oil dropped more than 10% easing inflation fears per Bloomberg. When one headline wipes $600 million in bearish bets off the board, every fresh token with a confirmed catalyst catches the wave of capital that follows.

SOL at $82.16, BNB at $592, and Pepeto at $8.9M: Where the Real Move Starts

Pepeto: The Entry You Either Catch Today or Miss Forever

While the ceasefire sent capital flooding back into risk assets, the presale already holding more than $8.9 million stands to multiply that capital the fastest, and here is why: every other new cryptocurrency presale is selling you a promise and a timeline, but Pepeto is not asking you to imagine anything because the product is already live, already running, and already protecting the capital inside it.

The risk scanner catches every bad contract before you buy so projects built to steal get blocked before your money ever leaves your wallet, and PepetoSwap charges nothing on any trade so your gains stay whole instead of shrinking across dozens of positions.

The creator of the original Pepe coin, the meme token that hit $11 billion with zero products behind it, built Pepeto on the same 420 trillion supply with SolidProof going through every contract line by line. More than $8.9 million came in while fear dominated the entire market, and the wallets inside are not hoping for a lucky break.

They did the research, saw what was built, and moved with conviction while everyone else waited for clarity that never comes until it is too late. Staking pays 185% APY, growing your tokens daily while the listing gets closer and closer.

At $0.000000186 per token, analysts project 100x to 300x from the Binance listing alone. Picture what that means in real money you can hold: $2,000 today turns into $200,000 at the low end and $600,000 if the full target hits. This kind of setup does not come around twice in the same cycle, and it does not wait for the people who need another week to decide.

Today is the day that matters, not tomorrow, not next week, because the entry available right now will not exist in a few days. Every person who built real wealth from early crypto says the exact same thing: I moved today instead of coming back tomorrow, and that one choice made all the difference between watching and owning. The listing ends this price, and it does not come back.

SOL (Solana)

SOL trades near $82.16 with a $40 billion cap, 65% below its all time high per CoinMarketCap. The Alpenglow upgrade targets one second finality, but even a full recovery to $200 delivers 138%, returns that take the full year from a cap that limits rally speed.

BNB (Binance Coin)

BNB trades near $592 with a $80 billion cap per CoinMarketCap. The Binance ecosystem generates steady fee revenue and BNB burns cut supply.

But the strongest return sits at presale pricing, not at $80 billion needing massive inflows just to double.

Conclusion

SOL carries the speed upgrades and BNB holds the exchange revenue story, both are credible long term plays for patient money. But wealth in crypto has never come from patience with large caps. Wealth comes from one entry, at one moment, before the listing forces the entire market to pay what you already hold. That moment is Pepeto, right now.

The creator of the $11 billion Pepe token built a working exchange, SolidProof signed every contract, a Binance veteran runs the build, and $8.9 million from the most informed wallets in the market already filled this presale while retail sat on the sideline frozen by fear.

$2,000 inside Pepeto at 100x becomes $200,000. At 300x it becomes $600,000. SOL needs to triple just to get you 138%. BNB needs massive volume just to double from $80 billion. The math is not close, and the math is what builds wealth, not hope. The Pepeto official website is where you get in before the listing opens, and once it does, this price becomes the one thing every person who waited kicks themselves for missing.

You can watch SOL and BNB grind out gains over the next year, or you can be the person who caught the listing that changed everything. One of those stories ends with wealth. The other ends with regret.

Click To Visit Pepeto Website To Enter The Presale

FAQs

Why does the Iran ceasefire matter for the crypto market right now?

The ceasefire pushed BTC past $72,700, and the new cryptocurrency closest to listing catches that returning capital before large caps absorb it.

Is SOL or BNB a better hold than a presale entry?

Both deliver steady returns from large caps, but a presale to listing move from the Pepeto official website delivers gains SOL and BNB need years to match.

What makes Pepeto the strongest new cryptocurrency presale this cycle?

Pepeto built by the Pepe creator with SolidProof audits, more than $8.9 million raised, and a confirmed Binance listing delivers returns large cap entries take full cycles to produce.

The post Could This New Cryptocurrency Backed by the Pepe Creator Outrun SOL and BNB Before the Listing Opens appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• NEAR Protocol currently trades at a 28x P/S ratio, far below Ethereum’s 194x and Solana’s 40x multiples.

• The NEAR Intents fee buyback mechanism, live since February 2025, uses 100% of fees to buy NEAR directly.

• Daily Intents volume must reach $177M for NEAR to turn net deflationary, versus the current $77M average.

• A 40x P/S applied to projected fees of $150–180M annually puts NEAR’s price target between $4.65 and $5.60.

NEAR Protocol is drawing renewed attention from crypto analysts as its current price of $1.39 appears disconnected from its underlying fundamentals.

Crypto analyst Michaël van de Poppe recently outlined a detailed case for why the asset could reach $3–5 in the coming months.

The analysis covers token supply dynamics, staking rates, revenue generation, and the growing volume on NEAR Intents — a fee-buyback mechanism activated in February 2025.

Token Supply and Revenue Support a Repricing Case

NEAR Protocol has seen meaningful changes to its tokenomics following 2025 protocol updates. The network now issues approximately 32 million tokens annually at a 2.5% inflation rate.

That marks a 50% reduction from previous issuance levels. Combined with 99% of tokens already in circulation, there is minimal sell pressure from remaining unlocks.

Around 45.5% of the total supply is currently staked, further tightening available supply on the open market. On the revenue side, NEAR generates an estimated $50–60 million annually.

This figure is derived from the recent 90-day fee run rate. The base-layer gas fee model operates on a 70/30 split, where 70% of fees are permanently burned.

Van de Poppe noted in his post: “NEAR is about to break upwards to $3–4 and it fully deserves it. This is a prime example of an asset severely underpriced in current market conditions.”

Compared to Ethereum’s price-to-sales ratio of 194x and Solana’s 40x, NEAR currently trades at an Intents-adjusted P/S of just 28x. That gap points to a potential repricing as platform activity increases and volume metrics improve over time.

NEAR Intents Volume Drives the Deflationary Threshold Thesis

NEAR Intents forms the core of the protocol’s updated economic model. Launched in February 2025, it directs 100% of Intents fees toward direct NEAR token purchases. For the protocol to become net deflationary, daily Intents volume must reach approximately $177 million.

The current 90-day average sits at $77 million per day. That means volume needs to roughly double to cross the deflationary threshold.

Over the past 30 days, Intents recorded $2.1 billion in volume, which annualizes to approximately $25 billion. That trajectory has accelerated since the mechanism went live.

Van de Poppe applied a conservative 50–100% compound annual growth rate to project future performance. Under that model, daily volume could reach $100–150 million by end of 2026. By 2027, the figure could exceed $200–300 million, pushing NEAR firmly into net deflationary territory.

Applying a 40x P/S ratio to projected annual fees of $150–180 million places NEAR’s price target at $4.65–$5.60. At a higher growth scenario, the analyst sees a $7–10 valuation as achievable within 12 months, based strictly on current volume momentum and fee metrics.

The post NEAR Protocol Price Analysis: Why $1.39 Could Be a Launchpad Toward $5 and Beyond appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Lars Kooistra says XRP has shifted from accumulation to distribution on higher time frames.
• XRP price trades near $1.32 and remains below a key supply zone.
• Kooistra targets short positions near resistance with downside toward $1.10.
• ChartNerd warns of a possible drop to $0.70 if resistance holds.
• Other analysts remain divided, with some still forecasting new all-time highs.

XRP price trades near $1.32 as market analyst Lars Kooistra signals a structural shift toward distribution. He states that sellers may be regaining control after a brief upward phase. His latest update outlines potential short opportunities if resistance levels continue to hold.

XRP Price Structure Turns Bearish, Analyst Says

Kooistra reported that XRP previously followed a TCT accumulation model that lifted price levels. However, he said the structure has now shifted toward a higher time frame distribution phase. He explained that this change signals growing seller pressure and weaker upside momentum.

He stated, “The market has transitioned into distribution on a higher time frame.” He added that price compression often leads to a strong move, and he expects that move to be lower. Therefore, he now targets short positions near key supply zones with unfilled orders.

Earlier, on April 10, Kooistra observed an extended accumulation pattern. That move invalidated his earlier short position and forced him to close at breakeven. However, the structure later evolved, and he adjusted his outlook accordingly.

On April 7, he described a “go big or go home” short setup. He partially de-risked that trade after a 20% take-profit at the range low. He expected a deeper bearish move if support failed.

Key Resistance and Downside Targets in Focus

The XRP price currently trades below a supply zone in the mid-$1.30 range. Price briefly moved above $1.40 last week but failed to hold gains. It now hovers around $1.33 while facing resistance pressure.

Kooistra’s chart outlines a possible short-term bounce or consolidation phase. However, he projects a sharp decline if resistance levels remain intact. His downside targets extend toward the $1.20 and $1.10 regions on higher time frames.

He warned that XRP price may not revisit higher supply zones. He said the market could already be deep in distribution. Therefore, traders waiting for higher entries may not get another opportunity.

Other analysts also shared bearish projections. ChartNerd stated that XRP could fall toward $0.70 if it fails to break $1.80 and $2.00 resistance. He maintained this outlook while acknowledging that a breakout would invalidate his scenario.

Casi Trades echoed a similar stance on recent price action. She stated that the rebound has ended and warned of a possible drop toward $0.85. Meanwhile, Dark Defender and Javon Marks continue to predict a new all-time high cycle.

At press time, XRP price is near $1.32 with losses across daily, weekly, and monthly charts. Market participants now monitor whether resistance holds or price regains upward strength.

The post XRP Price Faces Bearish Structure as Trader Eyes Supply Zones appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Fellowship reported a $300,000 advertising expense for a Georgia congressional race.
• The PAC endorsed Republican candidates in five states through posts on X.
• Fellowship claims over $100 million from crypto-aligned backers.
• Jesse Spiro of Tether chairs the super PAC.
• The Senate Banking Committee has not scheduled a markup for the CLARITY Act.

Fellowship, a crypto-aligned super PAC, has started reporting spending and endorsements ahead of the 2026 US midterms. The group disclosed a $300,000 advertising expense and named several Republican candidates across five states. Its actions follow a filing with the Federal Election Commission and public posts on X.

Fellowship Reports $300,000 Ad Spend and Backs GOP Candidates

Fellowship reported spending $300,000 on advertising for Clay Fuller in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. The filing showed the disbursement occurred on Tuesday, about a month before the May 19 Republican primary. Fuller won a special election to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene after her resignation. The Federal Election Commission requires super PACs to disclose independent expenditures. The agency states that super PACs may “receive unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, labor unions and other PACs.”

The group also posted endorsements on X for Republican candidates in five states. It backed Alan Wilson for South Carolina governor and Blake Miguez for Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District. It supported Mike Collins for the US Senate in Georgia and Julia Letlow for the US Senate in Louisiana. It also endorsed Pete Ricketts for the US Senate in Nebraska and Nate Morris for the US Senate in Kentucky. These announcements marked the PAC’s first public endorsements since its 2025 statement of organization.

Crypto Funding Expands Political Activity Before 2026 Midterms

Fellowship announced its launch in September and claimed more than $100 million in funding. The group said undisclosed backers aligned with the crypto industry provided the funds. On April 1, it named Jesse Spiro, head of government affairs at Tether, as chair. The announcement signaled support for candidates with pro-crypto positions. However, the PAC has reported only one expenditure so far.

Crypto-backed political committees increased activity during recent election cycles. In 2024, Fairshake spent over $130 million on media buys in congressional races. Public records show the spending targeted competitive contests, including the US Senate race in Ohio. Federal filings indicate that super PACs operate independently from candidates and campaigns. They may raise and spend unlimited sums on independent political activity under federal rules.

Lawmakers continue to debate federal crypto legislation as PAC activity grows. The US House of Representatives passed the CLARITY Act in July. However, the Senate has delayed action on the bill and has not scheduled a floor vote. Reports indicated that the Senate Banking Committee planned a markup, yet the event did not appear on its calendar. The bill would address regulations affecting crypto markets and banking sectors.

The CLARITY Act has faced questions related to ethics standards and stablecoin yield provisions. Lawmakers have also raised issues concerning tokenized equities and other regulatory details. The Senate Banking Committee must review the bill before any full Senate vote. As of Monday, the committee had not confirmed a markup date.

The post Fellowship PAC Begins Backing GOP Ahead of 2026 Vote appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin’s price has risen to slightly below $75,000 today, reaching a level we haven’t seen since March 17th.

This nearly 1-month high comes amid renewed hopes of potential de-escalation of the war between the US, Israel, and Iran, as Vice President JD Vance teases progress in the negotiations.

We made significant progress in talks with Iran. Ball is now in Tehran’s court. We expect they will move toward opening the Strait of Hormuz. – Said Vance.

As CryptoPotato reported earlier today, the news sparked a rally across the broader crypto industry, adding around $100 billion to its total market capitalization. Some altcoins, such as ETH, outperformed BTC.

It’s also worth noting that the latest move could also be explained by the fact that it followed a period of prolonged, persistent negative sentiment. Such times have historically led to sharp price jumps for the primary cryptocurrency, which usually leads the market in both directions.

In fact, Real Vision’s Jamie Coutts called the period a state of “excessive pessimism,” adding that bitcoin’s 7-day moving average funding rate had fallen to the third percentile of all readings made since 2020 – both signals that a rally was overdue.

The post Bitcoin Price Soars Toward $75,000 Amid Potential US-Iran De-Escalation appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ether has outperformed its crypto brethren today, surging 8.1% over the past 24 hours to hit $2,380 in early trading in Asia on Tuesday morning.

It is the highest the asset has traded since February 2, just after it crashed from $3,000 in a couple of days.

Santiment reported on Tuesday morning that the number of Ethereum whale wallets holding at least 100,000 ETH has jumped 5.5% in the past week.

“You can expect a level of correlation with price when this number grows, and there is strong justification that the #2 market cap can continue its rise.”

The number of Ethereum wallets holding at least 100K $ETH has jumped from 54 to 57 in the past week. You can expect a level of correlation with price when this number grows, and there is strong justification that the #2 market cap can continue its rise. pic.twitter.com/bYYHoY4Y5M

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) April 13, 2026

Markets Rally on Iran Deal Hopium

According to Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, ETH is the best-performing asset since the start of the Iran conflict, gaining 17.4%, outperforming the S&P 500 by 1830 basis points, and gold by 2,743 basis points.

ETH is holding onto its gains at the time of writing, trading around $2,375, but it remains within a two-and-a-half-month-long rangebound channel and needs to break above $2,400 to see any serious gains.

Crypto investors are reacting to the latest news from the Middle East that President Trump has initiated a US military blockade of Iranian ports and threatened any Iranian ships that approach.

However, he also said on ‌Monday that Iran wants to make a deal.

US Vice President JD ⁠Vance said in ​an interview with ​Fox News that the US expects Iran ​to ​make ⁠progress on opening the Strait ​of Hormuz, adding the ‌ball ⁠was in Iran’s court.

Progress = good https://t.co/TSaBrkCY2S

— Thomas (Tom) Lee (not drummer) FundstratDirect.com (@fundstrat) April 14, 2026

Crypto Markets Add $100B

This big move has added around $100 billion to total market capitalization, which has hit a four-week high of $2.6 trillion.

Swissblock reported that its “Risk Index has now transitioned into low risk for the first time since mid-March. “That signals bulls are starting to gain ground over sellers.”

Ethereum was the best high-cap performer, but Bitcoin also added 4.7% on the day to reach $74,800, where it found resistance again. BTC also remains within its sideways channel and, without further impetus, is likely to be rejected here.

Altcoin moves were muted by comparison, but those see better daily gains included Solana, WhiteBIT Coin, Hyperliquid, Chainlink, and Sui.

The post Ethereum Surges to 10-Week High in $100B Crypto Market Rally appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The stablecoin issuer Circle has doubled down on its defense against criticism for failing to act during an exploit that led to roughly $280 million in losses from the Solana-based Drift Protocol.

This time, the company’s CEO, Jeremy Allaire, responded during a press conference in Seoul, South Korea, and cited a moral quandary. The chief executive insisted that Circle cannot decide which path is right or wrong and can only follow the rule of law when freezing wallets holding crypto assets. Because of the moral quandary, Circle could not quickly freeze the assets stolen from Drift Protocol.

The $280M Drift Exploit

It is no longer news that Drift Protocol lost millions of dollars earlier this month, as the exploit shook the industry. In a post-mortem analysis, the Drift team revealed that the incident was caused by a coordinated attack, not a smart contract flaw.

The attacker had gained unauthorized access to administrative permissions tied to the protocol’s security council through social engineering initiated about seven days before the incident. After securing 2 of 5 multisig approvals, introducing a malicious asset, and removing withdrawal limits, the exploiter was able to enable pre-signed transactions days later.

Market experts have linked the attack to the notorious North Korean hacking group Lazarus. While investigations are still ongoing, on-chain sleuths like ZachXBT believe the damage from the attack could have been reduced if Circle had frozen the stolen funds during the exploit window.

The attackers moved $230 million in USD Coin (USDC) from Solana to Ethereum via Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP). The transfer occurred across roughly 100 transactions. According to ZachXBT, Circle had the power to freeze the USDC, but chose to stay “asleep” instead, while the funds were moved over several hours without interruption.

A Moral Quandary For Circle

In defending Circle’s inaction during the exploit, Allaire said Circle only undertakes such actions in obligation under the law. He added that it would be a risky proposition to expect the stablecoin issuer to step away from what the law says to make its own decisions. While the company is working with regulators to provide clarity on taking preventive actions under extreme circumstances, the CEO insisted that Circle does not get to make such decisions.

Meanwhile, Circle is expanding its presence in Korea. The firm has signed memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with Upbit and Bithumb, South Korea’s largest exchanges, to increase the adoption of USDC in the local crypto market.

The post Circle CEO Blames ‘Moral Quandary’ for Not Acting on $280M Drift Exploit appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s derivatives market has reached what Real Vision’s Jamie Coutts is calling a state of “excessive pessimism” after his Derivative Risk Score hit 1. Furthermore, the analyst said BTC’s 7-day moving average funding rate has fallen to the third percentile of all readings made since 2020.

But according to him, in the past, similar sustained negative funding ultimately gave way to huge upsides, with median 90-day gains of more than 43%.

Derivatives Data Show Extreme Bearish Positioning

In a post on X on April 13, Coutts looked at 14 times since 2016 when the main cryptocurrency had negative funding for at least 20 days, and the data revealed that after these periods ended, the average return over the next 30 days was 20.8%, with 12 out of the 14 cases ending positively. At the 90-day mark, median returns reached 43.5%, and 11 of the 14 days finished positive.

According to Coutts, there are three close comparisons to the situation currently being experienced: one happening during the 2018-2019 crypto winter, another occurring in 2020 during the COVID crash, and a third that followed China’s banning of BTC mining in 2021.

Soon after all those instances, which involved no less than 48 days of sustained negative funding, there were some pretty big upticks for BTC, with the asset returning 73.4% after 90 days in 2018-2019, 43.5% after the COVID dip, and over 42% in the aftermath of the China Bitcoin mining ban.

The researcher noted that the negative funding stretch from February to March 2026 was the third longest, having gone on for 50 days, with only the run in 2018-19 and the one in 2021 going on longer than it at 83 days and 53 days, respectively.

If those past episodes are anything to go by, then that 50-day period of bearish derivatives positioning could be the setup for a similar recovery.

However, Coutts threw in a few caveats, saying that the 14 episodes he’d analyzed were a “thin dataset” and that there were two exceptions, both in early 2018, when the perp market was “very immature,” that produced losses of 38% and 32% at 30 and 90 days, respectively.

“The signal doesn’t distinguish between a bull market correction and a structural bear market,” he wrote.

Short Pressure Builds As Analysts Debate Market Direction

Coutts’ assessment has come at a time when Bitcoin is trying to find its footing, following jitters that hit the market after US Vice President JD Vance announced that negotiations between the United States and Iran had failed to produce an agreement that would have ended hostilities between the two.

At the time of writing, the asset was trading for about $71,000, which is more than 16% less than it was a year ago and almost 44% less than its all-time high of over $126,000 in October 2025.

Meanwhile, another market watcher, Darkfost, said that nearly $1 billion in sell volume had hit Binance derivatives just an hour after Vance’s statement. This pushed funding rates further into negative territory, with Coutts putting it at -1.73% since April 6, meaning the current episode is still developing.

On his part, Darkfost argued that when such a strong consensus forms on the short side, markets often move in the opposite direction. Still, he advised that any upside reaction could be limited if the broader trend stays weak.

The post Analysis: Rally on the Cards as Bitcoin Derivatives Flash Extreme Pessimism appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Tron founder Justin Sun, who also happens to be the single largest investor in the Trump family-linked World Liberty Financial (WLFI), has publicly demanded that the DeFi project disclose the identities behind a single anonymous wallet and a five-member group that he claims can freeze user funds.

The confrontation is centered on the control of World Liberty’s native WLFI tokens, with Sun arguing that the platform’s governance structure leaves investors exposed to unilateral decisions.

The On-Chain Evidence Sun Is Pointing To

Sun based his demand on an analysis of WLFI’s smart contract structure, which was corroborated by blockchain researcher banteg, whose post on X on April 12 laid out the on-chain timelines in detail. The analyst says that the first WLFI token that was released in September 2024 didn’t have a blacklist mechanism, even though it could be upgraded.

They also say that a blacklist feature was added to the second version on August 24, 2025, 11 months after Sun put money into the project and just a week before the tokens went on sale.

There was another upgrade in November 2025, which added what banteg called “batch reallocation,” which they said was, in essence, a seizure mechanism that World Liberty apparently justified at the time as a tool to recover funds for holders that fell victim to phishing scams.

Banteg also took a look at the vesting structure that had been specifically applied to Sun, where WLFI exclusively created a separate token category for the Tron founder, called category 3. Per their post, the other 519 World Liberty investors all sit in category 1.

The analyst added that minutes after Sun activated his wallet, WLFI’s 3-of-5 multisig set his category 3 to allow 20% of his 3 billion tokens to be freely transferred, with the crypto entrepreneur moving 55 million WLFI, only to have his wallet frozen by an outside address acting as both a guardian and a signer on the 3-of-5 multisig.

The billionaire businessman is now demanding to know who is behind that address.

“I’m calling on World Liberty Financial @worldlibertyfi to publicly disclose who controls the single guardian EOA and the 3/5 multisig that govern the WLFI smart contract,” he wrote in his post on X.

Legal Standoff Looms

According to Sun, whose involvement with WLFI started even before the project’s public launch after he bought $75 million in WLFI tokens to become the project’s largest backer, one individual has the unilateral power to freeze the assets of any token holder.

This is not what he envisioned when he put his money in the project, having said at the time that his support was rooted in WLFI’s stated mission of bringing decentralized finance to mainstream Americans. However, what he now says was never disclosed to him, or to any other investor, was the existence of a blacklisting function embedded in the smart contract, controlled by one person.

“Community governance and voting are meaningless,” he argued. “Every proposal, every vote, every claim of decentralized decision-making is theater.”

In his opinion, the real power sits with the unknown external address and the 3-of-5 multisig group, who are not answerable to anyone. But World Liberty has dismissed the accusations, writing on X:

“Justin’s favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct. We have the contracts. We have the evidence. We have the truth. See you in court pal.”

The post Justin Sun Calls Out Trump-Linked WLFI Over Hidden Wallet That Can Freeze Funds appeared first on CryptoPotato.